CAA Affiliated Societies and CAA Professional Committee – Complete Session
Art History Fund for Travel to Special Exhibitions: Sharing Stories
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Art History Fund for Travel to Special Exhibitions
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will convene: On location
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Art History Fund for Travel to Special Exhibitions
The Art History Travel Fund, established to provide students with opportunities to gain first-hand knowledge of original works of art, grants instructors of qualifying undergraduate and graduate art history classes up to $10,000 to cover student and instructor travel, accommodations, and admission fees to special exhibitions in the US and around the world.
Instructors and students are invited annually to share their experiences visiting special exhibitions as a part of their course.
Instructors and students are invited annually to share their experiences visiting special exhibitions as a part of their course.
Eastern Europe and the Decolonization of Art History
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will convene: On location
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture
This panel brings together emerging scholarship that reconsiders Eastern Europe through the lens of decolonization, with a particular focus on Ukraine and the broader imperial entanglements of the region. Challenging dominant narratives that have long positioned Eastern Europe as peripheral, passive, or derivative, the four papers engage diverse media—from nineteenth-century academic painting and early photography to contemporary conceptual art and wartime visual culture. Together, they ask what it means to decolonize art history in and through Eastern Europe: to reframe inherited representations, reclaim marginal archives, and interrogate the geopolitical assumptions that underlie canonical narratives. Topics include the visual neutralization of gender in representations of war in contemporary Ukraine; the aestheticization of the Ukrainian steppe in the service of Polish and German imperial mythologies; the racial logic embedded in photographic portrayals of Siberia under Russian rule; and the site-specific conceptual practices of Odesa-based artists responding to the Black Sea as a lived and imagined geography. Grounded in original research and informed by critical methodologies, these papers demonstrate that Eastern Europe is not merely the object of imperial vision, but a generative site for rethinking the politics, geographies, and vocabularies of art history itself.
New Research in the History of Collecting
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will convene: On location
To mark our upcoming tenth anniversary, the Society will sponsor a session dedicated to new research in the field. Since its inception as an organization in 2016 and its first appearance as an Affiliate at CAA in 2020, the Society has sponsored a wide range of lectures, Early Career Researcher Workshops, online conferences, and, of course, sessions at academic conferences. Several books have been (Quodbach & Wertz, Eds., The Evolving House Museum, 2025) or are about to be (Brooks & Degen, Hand and Glove) published directly connected to those activities. Many more volumes have been published and exhibitions organized that take as their starting point a single collector or collection collections by period or material, city or country. It is an opportune moment to showcase papers that take varied approaches to interrogating how the ownership of a single object or collection impacts its meaning.
Materializing Sites of Ritual and Relation: Asian/Diasporic Bodies, Encounters, and Alterities
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Diasporic Asian Art Network
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will convene: On location
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Diasporic Asian Art Network
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Moving across performance, abstraction, conceptualism, and preservation activism, this session examines how Asian diasporic and transpacific artists mobilize the aesthetics of ritual, alternative epistemologies, and material entanglement to reanimate occluded histories and inhabit alternative modes of relation. Anibal Quijano identifies European colonial expansion as consolidating itself alongside the western epistemological models of modernity and rationality which in turn represses histories of violence and other modes of knowledge. The material and epistemological ramifications of colonization within Asia and the U.S. settler colonial state have prompted Asian and Asian diasporic artists to engage themes of spiritual knowledge and the supernatural.
This panel considers how embodied and material practices of marking, layering, and caretaking imagine contingent worlds forged in the aftermath of colonial violence, displacement, and erasure. How have Asian diasporic artists reconfigured ritual practices as a mode of historical encounter, not to reconcile historical violence but to remain in intimate relation with its ongoing reverberations? How have abstraction and conceptualism engendered perceptual reconfigurations of racial and geographic contingencies that intervene in western frameworks?
While Carlos Villa’s palimpsestic Tatu series, the caretaking of Chinese American heritage sites, and the scarification practices by Asian American sex workers trace how artists activate ritual and embodied knowledge, Leo Valledor’s spatial experiments and the haunted immaterialities of Matsuzawa Yutaka’s conceptualism center Buddhist and occult worldviews—imagining new solidarities, lineages, and futures. This panel opens conversations on ritual and relation as method and metaphor for remapping the epistemological terrain of transpacific history, material inheritance, and cultural memory.
Bridging the disciplines
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Leonardo Education and Art Forum
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will convene: On location
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Leonardo Education and Art Forum
New Horizons in Islamic Art History
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Historians of Islamic Art Association
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will convene: On location
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Historians of Islamic Art Association
Each year the Historians of Islamic Art Association (HIAA) organizes a Majlis -- an Arabic term meaning "gathering" -- bringing together up-and-coming scholars in the field of Islamic art to share the latest findings of their research. Presented as a sponsored panel during the College Art Association's annual conference, this year's symposium features presentations by Tuğrul Acar, Selin Aran, Xinyu Liang, and Sanja Savić on topics ranging from talismanic shirts to photographs from 19th-century Egypt.
Excavating Race in the Archive
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association for Critical Race Art History
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will convene: Remotely
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association for Critical Race Art History
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This panel brings together archivists and artists in conversation to consider the operations of the archives and their utility in scholarly and creative practices. Indisputably, archives are raced, i.e., constructed to advance the ideologies of racialized difference, particularity, or exceptionalism–variably marshalled to assert power or resist it. We consider both state institutions—from the Library of Congress to the Bibliothèque Nationale—and corrective collecting projects organized by those whose histories were not privileged in grand narratives. How do the institutional collections present their authority as centers of knowledge that hold incalculable cultural value? Archivists who care for and preserve vital documents and materials–letters, photographs, ephemera–that inform written histories of artistic movements and artists’ lives will discuss redress of racist legacies. Artists will speak to their critical interventions that challenge dominant, discriminatory ways of seeing, classifying, and organizing data and things. The panelists’ presentations–considered together–offer a view of the archive as a repository of accumulated power, albeit one that leaks. That is, archives invariably tell on themselves, collecting as they do the evidence of great achievement in ways that illuminate the fragility of subjectivity and anxiety about impermanence.
Filling the Gaps: Empowering Students as Knowledge Producers through Wikipedia Projects in the Art History Classroom
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Northern California Art Historians
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will convene: On location
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Northern California Art Historians
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Over the past decades, art historians have continued to diversify curricula, deconstructing the traditional Euro-centric canon and creating courses that allow students to learn about a diversity of artistic traditions. These scholars have spent much time and care in rethinking what students should be learning in the classroom. This panel, however, turns its attention to how students can learn about this global content, focusing on Wikipedia-editing projects in particular. The speakers on this panel explore how doing away with more traditional art history essays and giving agency to students as knowledge producers in the public sphere can work in concert with decolonizing the content of the course. The papers presented will cover Wikipedia-editing projects in courses on African art, the arts of Palestine, and global art circa 1500 to demonstrate how such assignments can empower and engage students, while also contributing knowledge to Wikipedia, one of the most used sources of information on the Internet. By filling these vital gaps on Wikipedia, students are able to make a far-reaching real-world impact.
Alchemical, Emblematic, and Philosophical Symbolism in the Arts
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association for Textual Scholarship in Art History
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will convene: Remotely
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association for Textual Scholarship in Art History
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This ATSAH session examines the impact of artistic and literary endeavors on the exploration of alchemical, emblematic, and philosophical studies within the field of art, which inspires the creativity of artists and promotes cultural innovations
Mission Critical: Tactics of Solidarity and Care in Arts Publications Today
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Publications Committee
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will convene: On location
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Publications Committee
Amid intensifying threats to academic freedom and critical discourse, how can CAA publications (Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Art Journal Open, and caa.reviews) maintain their missions? How might they shore up their missions through solidarity and caring relationships with each other, with other learned societies, institutions, and publications? How might they critically and creatively adapt their missions in the present moment with an eye to the future horizons of our fields?
This roundtable invites discussion on tactics of solidarity and care for arts publications today. Editors, editorial board members, and publishers from a broad spectrum of publishing endeavours will discuss strategies for maintaining and adapting their missions under present conditions. The session will consider how publications can support each other’s missions in order to ensure a functioning arts publishing ecosystem.
Engaging/Exhibiting/Creating (with) Archives
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Visual Resources Association (VRA)
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will convene: On location
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Visual Resources Association (VRA)
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This session hopes to facilitate a dialogue that focuses on the dynamic (and interconnected) relationships between archives, exhibition making, and institutional frameworks. We will address critical questions surrounding the role of archives in curatorial and pedagogical practices, the ways in which art archives are established and evolve within various institutional contexts, and innovative approaches to working with and exhibiting archival materials. What role do archives play in shaping curatorial and institutional strategies? How can we build and sustain art archives within (or beyond) the institution? The speakers will highlight highly collaborative or experimental archival projects, seeking to explore new, innovative, and creative methodologies for engaging, exhibiting, and creating (with) archives.
Return to "Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return"
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: US Latinx Art Forum
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will convene: On location
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: US Latinx Art Forum
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Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return (October 18, 2024-July 6, 2025) brought the work of the American artist born in Cuba into conversation with the collections of the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery and Archives of American Art. Through Gonzalez-Torres's experiments with portraiture and other works, and the context of Washington, D.C., the exhibition raised timely conversations about democratic participation, nationhood, and history. In this panel, the co-curators and scholars whose thinking impacted the exhibition will reflect on and further these conversations.
Voices from the Field: CAA-Getty International Alumni
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: CAA-Getty International Program
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will convene: On location
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: CAA-Getty International Program
The CAA-Getty International Program, supported by Getty, provides funding to art historians, museum curators, and other visual arts professionals from around the globe, enabling them to attend CAA Annual Conferences. The program was established to diversify CAA membership, increase international presence at CAA conferences, and foster greater cross-cultural understanding of different contexts and methodologies of art scholarship and practice. Rigorous dialogue between international scholars and their North American peers has yielded collaboration, community, and lasting connections: CAA-Getty alumni have worked together on publications, exhibitions, convenings, and many other projects. The program—now in its fifteenth year—has gathered 179 scholars from sixty-one countries and continues to have significant global impact on the field. Many participants become CAA ambassadors in their respective countries by sharing knowledge acquired during the program with their colleagues at home.
Placeholder title for Encuentro - please edit
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA)
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will convene: On location
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA)
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Supporting Art Historical Research in a Time of Institutional Uncertainty
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association of Research Institutes in Art History
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will convene: On location
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association of Research Institutes in Art History
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At the time of writing this abstract, scholars across disciplines are witnessing an unprecedented decline in funding opportunities and asking crucial questions about the future of advanced research in the United States. In this session, the Association for Research Institutes in Art History (ARIAH) convenes several member institutions to discuss ways in which they continue to support art historical research at a time of great change and uncertainty. Additionally, ARIAH will share data about the kinds of support that residential scholar programs have historically provided as a backdrop for our current moment.
Culturally Responsive Practices in Art and Art History
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Art Historians of Southern California
Abstract Submissions Closed
Session will convene: Remotely
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Art Historians of Southern California
The Art Historians of Southern California have focused on learning about active practices taking place within the studios, classrooms, museums, and other spaces of the art world that foster inclusion, focus on decolonization, and encourage social justice and restorative practices. This panel will showcase examples of culturally responsive practices within art and art history, building upon the panel presentations from recent conferences in an effort to better understand how art professionals, artists, and educators are bringing the theories and techniques of culturally responsive practices and pedagogy to their own work.