CAA Affiliated Societies and CAA Professional Committee – Sessions Soliciting Contributors
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: American Society for 18th Century Studies
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Italian Art Society
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Community College Professors of Art and Art History
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Design History Society
This panel addresses the adaptations, continuities, and slippages that occur in design activism across times, spaces, and cultures. How is the act of history-making politicised in these contexts, and how are its narratives represented? How are histories repeated, reconstructed, and reinvented to serve different political objectives? What methods can historians, archivists, and activists develop to facilitate the activation and reactivation of historical ideas for contemporary struggles, as well as those of the future? Papers may address, but are not limited to the following subject areas:
- Histories of design activism as providing patterning for the present and inspiring hope for the future.
- Craftivism as historically-informed political practice.
- Archiving visual, craft, graphic and material cultures as radical practice.
- Pedagogical tools and methods for teaching histories of design activism.
- Case studies of design activism as tools for decolonising and queering histories.
- Curatorial strategies for staging design activism.
- Limitations and tensions in methodologies of histories of design activism.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Foundations in Art: Theory and Education
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Design Studies Forum
Design allows consumers to express the wildest aspirations of their own identity, a longing for the forbidden, unattainable, and extravagant. While modernist notions of “good design” have emphasized simplicity and ideas about cleanliness and purity, which have become coded as expensive, there have always been alternative modes of expressing exclusivity and expense. Designers and consumers have always resisted these restraints, expressing appetites for forms that boldly embrace excess. We welcome papers that analyze designed objects contemporary or historical in the context of race, gender, queer theory, ecocriticism, or other methods adjacent to design practice.
We are looking for papers that explore the aesthetics of luxury, from materials to textures, bold typography, or opulent color palettes. Papers might consider packaging for “vice products” such as alcohol and perfume that entangle refinement with impropriety, blurring the line between elegance and excess. Papers on Maximalism might explore how design weaponizes extravagance or embraces excess with over-the-top production techniques. Papers exploring limited edition collectibles might analyze how design signals exclusivity and scarcity through these designs. This panel welcomes papers that deal with luxury design broadly defined.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: College Book Art Association
This call invites submissions that engage with artist books, exploring themes like art history, literary critique, production methods, exhibition practices, and accessibility. We are particularly interested in work examining cultural, racial, and gender dynamics, as well as how AI and technology are reshaping materiality and the artist book.
We encourage contributions that explore any of the following topics and more:
- Art Historical and Literary Analysis: How do artist books challenge traditional narratives?
- Materiality and Production: What does the materiality of artist books signify in a digital age?
- Theoretical Inquiries: What frameworks apply to contemporary book art?
- Exhibition Practices and Access: How do exhibitions address the challenges of artist books?
- Cultural, Racial, and Gender Dynamics: How do artist books engage with identity and power?
- AI and Digital Technologies: How are AI and digital tech transforming artist books?
We invite scholars, artists, curators, and practitioners to submit papers exploring the intersections of visual, textual, and critical practices in the artist book. Submissions can cover methodologies such as art history, literary studies, critical theory, cultural studies, and digital humanities, with a focus on both historical and contemporary innovations in book art.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: International Center of Medieval Art
This session aims to foster a productive discussion about the intricacies of art historical research and the position of archives therein. The 90-minute session will consist of five 10-minute presentations, followed by a round table discussion and Q&A. Presentations will reflect on: a single archival encounter, object, institution or methodological problem and will raise issues that will form the basis of a generative broader conversation between panellists and with the audience. Possible topics may include: discussion of working with unillustrated catalogues, the challenges of studying material that is still ‘active’ in a religious context, or the complexities which surround the creation of digital archives. We hope the session will touch upon medieval archives and objects from across periods and geographies and we define ‘archive’ in the broadest possible terms, to include both digital and physical collections.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: National Art Education Association
In the meaning-making process, we spark self-awareness and interconnectivity (Lucero, 2023) through exploration and understanding of communities as it relates to schools, higher education institutions, museums, and community agencies. In this session, presenters from NAEA Higher Education Division will highlight how they engage in the core values of creativity, interconnectivity, and inclusivity at the intersection of studio practices, instruction, and research. This session aims to answer the following questions: (1) How does your pedagogical practice transform studio, instructional, and research practices that interweave historical and visual narratives of the people and place within communities of practice? (2) As artists, educators, and researchers, how do creativity, interconnectivity, inclusivity, ingenuity, responsibility amplify connections with a range of communities (schools, institutions of higher education, museums, community centers)?
References:
National Art Education Association (2022). NAEA core value. https://www.arteducators.org/
Graham, M., & Goldsberry, C. (2023). Reimagining the Art Classroom. Intellect (UK).
Lucero, J. (2023). Conceptualist permissions for teacher posture. Center for visual art. Metropolitan State University of Denver.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: International Association of Word and Image Studies
Whether as seemingly innocuous captions, suggestive titles or full-blown art-historical/theoretical discourses, words next to/around/about/in the work frequently mediate, intensify or otherwise (co-)determine our encounter with images. This power, responsibility and opportunity to 'shape' images carries a significant ethical dimension. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- How do ethical understandings of the re-presentational nature of an artwork rely on written (con)texts?
- How do viewers’ ethical perceptions shift when they become readers of written (con)texts?
- How do we problematise the power dynamics of word-image ethics if the words are not the maker’s?
- How do understandings of word-image relations as symbiotic, antagonistic or neither affect an analysis of ethics?
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association of Print Scholars
This panel highlights print media’s role in the representation of urban and architectural transformations in large cities. We invite papers that bring forth the work of printmakers, and also institutional or personal projects, that analyze aspects related to the artistic change that engaged with the representation of the city, new perspectives in the representation of urban morphology, documentary or propagandistic intentions, and also questions around media and the issues that allow print scholars to establish a broad intercontinental conversation of urban representation in modern and contemporary culture.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Committee on Research and Scholarship
This panel seeks to explore how hybrid research practices foster methodologies for studying art and art history, broadening the scope of research and scholarship in the field. How do these innovative practices challenge conventional scholarship, reshaping the ways we produce, present, and circulate research? What innovative methodologies emerge when art research draws from interdisciplinary knowledge and hybrid professional roles? We invite papers that critically examine both the challenges and opportunities of interdisciplinary research, considering how expanded methodologies transform our understanding of art and its histories.
Perspectives and methods of interest include, but are not limited to: decolonial, feminist, trans and queer theory; disability studies; geographically situated and area studies; practice, studio-based and artistic knowledge production including curatorial practice; perspectives on hybrid professional roles in the field (e.g. artist-curator, scholar practitioner); digital humanities and quantitative approaches; critical knowledge organization; and interdisciplinary methods from the natural and social sciences.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture
We invite contributions that address how individuals and collectives responded to cross-cultural interactions, creatively adapting and transforming these influences into novel, hybrid forms. We welcome papers from diverse geographies that consider how decorative art and design functioned as crucial contact zones where local traditions were continuously reimagined through exchange as well as resistance. For example, Indian artisans adapted traditional cotton textile designs for European tastes, while European potters such as the Delft and Meissen factories experimented with new technologies to produce ceramics in competition with Chinese porcelain. Meanwhile, Colonoware pottery was produced by enslaved Africans in North America from a combination of African traditions, local resources and practical demands. Ultimately, this discussion will deepen scholarly understanding of the role played by the decorative arts in producing global visual and material cultures during the long eighteenth century.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Historians of British Art
What, if anything, enabled British art to transcend its base materiality? Should paintings ever be more than mimetic ‘pictures’ of the material world, and if so, what beliefs, ideas, or eternal propositions did they invoke? We have grown accustomed to thinking of British artists as post-Reformation iconoclasts who embraced an empirical view of the world. Painting is treated like a mode of critique in which artists contributed to the disenchantment of the modern world. This panel is interested in British art, in any medium and from any period, that refused to settle for mimetic realism. While altarpieces, funerary monuments, and the spiritual visions of William Blake immediately come to mind, papers could interrogate the ‘naturalism’ or ‘lifelikeness’ of J.M.W. Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites, Walter Sickert, and a great deal more.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Committee on Design
This panel is seeking representatives from all design disciplines – including, but not limited to, architecture, graphic design, industrial design, textile design, fashion design, interior design, product design and interaction design – to contribute to this conversation.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association of Historians of 19th-Century Art
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Pacific Art Association
Thomas defines creativity in the context of contact as reactive objectification, “a fundamental cultural process that proceeded in pre-colonial indigenous societies, facilitating mutual differentiation, but was transformed after those societies’ contact with Europeans and underwent further development as the character of colonial encounters changed” (1992:214). These processes continued in the post-colonial environment. Papers for this session will address how individuals, families, communities, or governments in the indigenous Pacific utilize art and architecture to express identity in today’s world. Questions to be considered might include: What are the choices being made and their motivations? What is the role of hybridity? What are the interactions between the various stakeholders? How have contemporary Pacific artists responded to the challenges of personal and cultural identity in the islands or in the diaspora? How have communities at home and abroad asserted both heritage and contemporary distinctiveness? What roles have governments played on the national and international stages? How have indigenous artists residing in traditional homelands in which they are now a minority responded to the post-colonial environment?
Thomas, Nicholas, 1992. The Inversion of Tradition. American Ethnologist, vol. 10. no. 2: 213 – 232
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association for Latin American Art
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Midwest Art History Society
Proposals are not restricted to MAHS members and are welcome from all scholars.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: William Morris Society in the United States
Papers focusing on any geographical region are welcome. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: the use of text by William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites in tapestries, stained glass, illuminated manuscripts, paintings, and/or frames; the impact of typeface design on the semantics of language and its relationship to illustrations; and the role of typography in artistic networks.
We invite contributions from art historians, artists, typographers, and other practitioners in the field. Interdisciplinary and collaborative proposals are encouraged. Proposals that explore new methodological approaches to the materiality of text are particularly welcome.
Note: Financial support may be available from the William Morris Society in the United States for a speaker without institutional funding. If you would like to be considered for funding, please notify the session chair when you submit your paper proposal.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art and Architecture
The session is broad in conception. We welcome proposals for papers addressing any topic in German, Scandinavian, or Central European art, architecture, design, media, or visual culture of any period; proposals for papers focusing on theory, criticism, or historiography are also welcome.
While those who submit are not expected to be current members of HGSCEA, we invite all to join at our student/emerging professionals rate. Members receive an invitation to our annual dinner held during the conference.
Format:
All contributors are expected to present in-person at the Chicago meeting in February 2026. Three to four 15-minute presentations will be followed by a round table discussion and Q&A.
Proposals must include:
- a proposal title;
- an abstract of 250 words;
- and a one to two-page CV listing graduate and post-graduate work, which may include
- works in progress (including dissertation or master’s thesis title);
- publications;
- presentations made while in graduate school and in the years since graduation,
- grants, fellowships, and awards;
- qualifying exam areas;
- work history (including TAships, assistantships, and instructor of record teaching);
- service history (to the discipline, to your university, and/or to your community).
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Education Committee
This panel invites papers from educators exploring strategies for “learning through discomfort.” How can we encourage students to tackle big, difficult ideas? How do we create classroom communities that cultivate a climate of open inquiry, where students participate in good faith and expect the same of their peers? How can we establish norms that guide educational spaces, allowing students to engage with art and their peers? Papers might address strategies for teaching difficult works of art, artists, or movements; methods to establish classroom communities; or ways of embracing collective, productive discomfort in the classroom.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Bibliographical Society of America
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Digital Art History Society
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Design Incubation
Submit an abstract of 300 words along with title, category (design research, design theory, design history, teaching, or service), keywords (5), citations, name and affiliation. Please use the Design Incubation abstract submission form found here:
https://designincubation.com/call-for-submissions/
Submissions are double-blind peer reviewed. Reviewers feedback will be returned.
Accepted presenters are required to create a short (6-minute) presentation video in advance of the session, which will be published online.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works
Artists and historians, conservators, scientists and researchers from allied fields have been exploring a smorgasbord of such materials across time, cultures, and mediums from different perspectives. We invite you to the table for a session in which we will consider the properties, histories, production, and myriad uses of food stuffs in art and art preservation. This may afford opportunities to reflect on the parallels between cooking and crafting; engage with social issues around food production, access, consumption, and sustainability; consider conservation issues arising from experimental uses of food in art; and possibly test (and taste?!) some recipes!
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Museum Committee
This session considers museum adaptability amid ongoing social, political, and economic crises. We invite papers addressing both recent events and more perpetual subjects, including but not limited to: implementing social justice in an anti-DEI climate; sharing institutional resources across museums and other educational and civic organizations as a means of countering diminished funding; the impact of funding and institutional stakeholders such as Boards of Trustees on mission statements, exhibitions, or educational programming; the ways in which academic museums and galleries can partner with campus faculty and students to address changing institutional policies and culture; and other topics. Given the ongoing development of federal actions, we welcome projects and initiatives that are incomplete or evolving. We also invite funding organizations to share their perspectives on adaptability and resilience in these uncertain times.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Society for Iberian Global Art
This panel seeks to learn from stories of architectural and infrastructural failure, innovation, and redesign, especially as it relates to practices of colonialism, from across the Iberian world. We invite papers that seek to complicate the narrative of architectural domination on the land and landscape and search for cases that focus on moments of disjunction and defeat in the face of environmental factors, and the struggle to respond.
Papers may examine the consequences of incomplete knowledge of landscapes, ecologies, and materials, and the cases under consideration may be architectural works that were unfinished, hypothetical, never realized, or rebuilt after confronting natural disasters and misunderstandings of ground conditions. We also welcome papers on artworks representing knowledge of materials and environments; moments of disaster, engineering, and rebuilding; or changes in understandings of nature and environment.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Society of Contemporary Art Historians
Papers from a range of professionals – historians, theorists, curators, artists, and community organizers – are invited to collaboratively investigate the intersections of diasporic and LGBTQ+ resistance. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Anti-imperial queer feminist methodologies
- Strategies for navigating tensions between arts activism and institutional strictures
- Critical approaches to issues of displacement and/or archival erasure/exclusion in art history
- Solidarity building and forms of mutual aid inside and outside of the university and museum
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: The International Art Market Studies Association
This panel invites scholars, curators, market professionals, and researchers to submit proposals that critically examine the dynamics shaping these contexts. Contributions are encouraged to explore how local actors are redefining strategies, forging new alliances, and proposing alternative notions of success, thereby contributing to a more inclusive and diversified global art ecosystem.
We particularly welcome submissions that:
- Present case studies of regional or local market adaptations;
- Analyze the impact of digitalization and online platforms;
- Reflect on emerging forms of patronage, collecting, and institutional support;
- Investigate artistic practices that engage with or resist economic and political crises;
- Offer theoretical reflections on the redefinition of value, visibility, and success beyond traditional Western-centric frameworks.
By bringing together diverse perspectives, this session seeks to deepen understanding of the innovative responses developed in peripheral markets and to propose new models for a more equitable global art system.
Proposals deadline for submission: 2025, August 29
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Women's Caucus for Art
This panel seeks presentations, both historical and contemporary, on how and why women have represented other women through portraiture and thus contributed to writing women’s histories in visual form. Papers might address an individual portrait or a series, trace a particular feminist legacy or situate portraiture within another social or political context, examine the artist-sitter relationship, analyze an exhibition of portraiture, or otherwise highlight how an aspect of portraiture contributes to writing a history about women picturing women.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: SECAC
This session explores how such geographically-tied references might be both a salve and a reminder of realities so critical to the identity of home — a home twisted in on itself but also expansively beautiful and narratively rich. What are the visual ties that bind us back to Appalachia? How might we use this enduring connection to assert a less oppositional relationship between the mountains and the cities, the devastation of rural industry and the consumption of urban life? Panelists may share topics or practices that speak to Appalachia, whether directly or in diasporic echoes.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: American Council for Southern Asian Art
Despite the profusion of monumental statues and structures erected throughout South Asia’s history—Ashoka’s pillars, Buddhist stupas, skyscraping temples, Shravanabelagola’s Gommateshwara, the Qutb Minar, Mughal mausolea, Brutalist buildings, and the Statue of Unity to name a few—the interpretive potential of monumentality remains underexplored. This panel probes the relationship between exaggerated dimensions of artworks and edifices, their intended functions, and their afterlives. What aesthetic, political, theological, technological, and financial considerations have motivated the establishment of colossal works? How have architects and artists manipulated scale to imbue their creations with new meanings? And how have notions of monumentality been articulated in textual sources prescribing or describing the height of buildings and images?
We contend that monumental constructions are larger than life not only in their proportions vis-à-vis the bodies of their makers and users, but equally in terms of the memorial, political, soteriological, or eschatological significance behind their sponsorship. We invite papers that examine the centrality of scale and monumentality in the conception, fabrication, and reception of South Asian art and architecture from any historical period.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: ARC Gallery
Over the last year, forces of mainstream populism, institutional cowardice, anti-intellectualism, and politics around the globe have mounted an overt game of chicken with art organizations, institutions, and galleries—young and old. Rather than accept this doom spiral as the future reality, how can this time period be leveraged as an opportunity to fix the unignorable widening cracks in how the art world routinely operates?
Artists have not changed. Deep and responsive artwork is made with the same tenacity as it always has been, despite ever-mounting challenges to the artist. Artists remain resilient, but what places make an overt effort to seek out and show their work? What spaces prioritize support for this work in the face of constant external pressure?
This session aims to showcase histories that can guide us, artwork that leads the way, and the physical spaces that bridge the gap between rhetorical ideals and the day-to-day labor involved in showing groundbreaking art.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Professional Practices Committee
Colleagues have already been coping with these challenges as they spread and intensified across the country in recent years. This session calls for proposals from teachers and academic administrators who have first-hand experience working in censorious environments and are willing to share their insights about how best to proceed among such impediments. We envision brief presentations by a few speakers followed by a moderated, round-table discussion that concludes with ample time for audience questions and comments.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Public Art Dialogue
Organizers of this session seek papers which analyze the role public statuary has played in past analogous commemorations of nation-state formation in any time and/or geographic region. Alternatively, papers may propose ideal (or unideal) contributions to the stated goals of Task Force 250 in light of present opportunities, challenges, and audiences for public art.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: The Feminist Art Project
For nearly twenty years, the Feminist Art Project has supported intersectional and intergenerational conversations regarding feminist, queer and trans activist art practices. Understanding the rich history of these collective tactics remains instrumental for continued organizing against political oppression and providing essential services to female-identifying individuals. For instance, in the 1970s, the arpilleristas produced embroidered narratives denouncing Chile’s totalitarian regime, while in the 1980s the Greenham Commons Women’s Peace Camp demanded an end to nuclear proliferation. In the 1990s, Chicago’s Sister Serpents engaged in guerrilla sticker and poster campaigns calling out misogyny and sexual violence and the Dyke Action Machine focused on lesbian agitprop in New York City. In 1999, the Dutch organization Women on Waves was founded to provide reproductive health services in regions where it is not safe or available, and in 2001, LaGender Inc. was established to support the trans health of women of color in the metro Atlanta area. As the voices of feminist, queer, and trans artists, activists, and scholars are being silenced in this political moment globally, this session seeks presentations by artists and scholars examining current or historical examples of activist art practices that offer models of protest and mutual aid, especially work overlooked in current art historical scholarship.
This session will solicit contributors for the 2026 panel.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: The Photography Network
These ideas continue to gain significance, with curator Veronica Passalacqua recently describing Native photography as a sovereign space where artists rematriate the medium with visions that sustain Indigenous relations. Diné photographer Will Wilson proposes that such relational use of photography Indigenizes the camera in keeping with Native oral traditions for transmitting knowledge, art, and literature. Meanwhile, scholars such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Glen Coulthard expand discourse on sovereignty by foregrounding practices of refusal and cultural resurgence rooted in Indigenous lifeways.
Thinking with these artists and scholars, this session invites papers that center photographic sovereignty as a culturally specific, land-based, and relationally grounded mode of image-making. We welcome work on how the medium sustains Native bonds to land, kinship, and futurity. We also invite proposals that place photographic sovereignty in dialogue with non-Indigenous visual practices of self-determination—particularly among diasporic or colonized communities with parallel commitments. What concepts—such as photographic refusal, more-than-human lensing, techno-kinship, photographic rematriation, and archival repatriation—help sharpen this discourse? Together, we seek to foreground photographic sovereignty as a vital analytic in photography studies and a critical site of decolonial practice.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Historians of Netherlandish Art
This transhistorical panel will take into consideration the Netherlandish histories of land reclamation, water management, and more broadly environmental engineering as a way to accommodate for growing populations. While landscapists Salomon and Jacob van Ruisdael, Esaias van de Velde, Meindert Hobbema, Jan van Goyen, and Aelbert Cuyp come to mind, papers need not be strictly focused on artwork from the Golden Age or restricted to painting. Presenters may also look to examples that correspond with more recent, even twentieth-century (or later) projects, such as the Zuiderzee Works of 1919, echoed in the work of De Stijl painters. Especially welcome are papers considering land interventions in the former colonial territories, from canals in Indonesia to sluices in Suriname. Seeking to engage a holistic picture of this history as the Low Countries are to enter a new phase, the papers in this panel should resonate with contemporary questions on the ravages of climate change.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Services to Historians of Visual Arts Committee
- In what ways does art history bridge gaps between disciplines rather than simply serve other disciplines?
- How does art history contribute to the broader humanities, and why is its preservation essential in higher education?
- What are the implications of diminishing/closing art history programs?
- In what ways can art history adapt to demonstrate its relevance in a rapidly changing educational landscape?
- What are the root causes of the devaluation of art history in higher education, and how can they be addressed?
- How can advocates/activists for art history better communicate its value to decision-makers in higher education?
- How might art history’s inherent interdisciplinarity and variety of scholarly approaches lend themselves to helping instructors better understand student learning, innovations in pedagogical practice, and the transformation of higher education?
We look forward to a diverse array of presentation formats and approaches, including but not limited to didactic performances, scholarly case studies, confessionals, PechaKucha, and interactive lectures.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association of Historians of American Art
the Americas. They appear as subjects of representation; their bodies are routinely used in art supplies;
and their lives and bodies are subject to endless human manipulation. Nonhuman animals are also makers;
they create, destroy, reshape and repurpose material things, and they continually contribute to expanded
aesthetic ecologies of sound, taste, touch, and smell. And nonhuman creatures—variously experienced as
relatives, companions, captives, collaborators and aggressors—also look back. If John Berger asked,
“Why Look at Animals?” a reciprocal question might go like this: what do animals see when they look at
our human-made visual and material world?
“Animal Americas” invites papers that consider at least one of the above roles played by animals play in
the art history of the Americas. Because nonhuman beings move through geographies and chronologies
that don’t neatly correspond to the maps and timelines of humans—much less to categories of national
identity or academic specialization—this panel offers an opportunity to challenge the Americanist
subfield’s original boundaries. Further, given its investment in animal posthumanisms, ecocriticism,
materiality, and nonoccular aesthetics, this session invites methodologies that facilitate conversations
across the allied fields of Asian American, Black diaspora and African American, Latin American, Latinx
and Chicanx, Native American, and U.S. histories of art and visual/material culture. Possible topics range
widely, and may include: hives, dams, dioramas, zoos, cartoons, kids’ books, birdsong, butchering,
cochineal, conservation, scrimshaw, featherwork, albumen prints, musk perfumes, or parlor aquariums.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Art Libraries Society of North America
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: The Queer Trans Caucus for Art
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Committee on Intellectual Property
This roundtable discussion invites proposals for brief contributions considering IP in art and intellectual production amidst the current chaotic legal, political, and media climate. We welcome examinations of IP cases currently at the bar, feedback from researchers with funding withdrawn or in limbo, and other examples of fallout from this moment of political and technological change. We also welcome long views on whether concepts like “fair use” and “intellectual property” have ever been secure and examples of precedents for our current crises in art, law, academia, and beyond. Together, we aim to foster a critical, collective conversation about how we understand, defend, and possibly redefine IP in a time of unprecedented uncertainty.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: National Committee for History of Art
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: National Council of Art Administrators
We are looking forward to discussions exploring how collaboration can strengthen institutions and amplify diverse voices in shaping cultural narratives. By sharing innovative practices and lived experiences, we aim to inspire participants to embrace collaboration to build a more equitable and sustainable future for the arts.
This panel seeks proposals that interpret this theme of Collective Futures broadly. You may wish to share your thoughts about an idea or project, experience, approach, etc. We are available to assist and support in developing a topic should anyone wish to reach out.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Committee on Women in the Arts
Emphasizing Indigenous connections to ancestral lands and protecting the Earth from harm are central components of most Indigenous worldviews, and Native feminisms further underscore the key roles played by women in these aspects of Indigenous epistemologies. As English, Ktunaxa, and Cree-Scottish Métis scholar Joyce Green asserts, “Indigenous feminism draws on core elements of Indigenous culture—in particular, the nearly universal connection to land, to territory, through relationships framed as a sacred responsibility” (Green, 2017, p. 4).
This session seeks studio art and art history projects that investigate relational intersections of Indigeneity, feminisms, and land in ways that counter the gendered violence of extractivism, historically and today.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art
We invite scholars, artists, critics, and curators to submit proposals examining artistic representations of neighborliness, inclusion, and exclusion in various religious and cultural traditions from the 20th century to the present. How have artists engaged with the themes of hospitality, belonging, and social responsibility? In what ways do contemporary artistic practices challenge, subvert, or reaffirm religious conceptions of community and care? How do religious iconographies and theological discourses shape contemporary responses to the ethical dilemmas of our time?
Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
- The role of religious art in shaping concepts of hospitality and neighborliness
- Artistic responses to migration, displacement, and borders in religious contexts
- Community-based and socially engaged artistic practices inspired by religious ethics
- Intersections of race, gender, class, and sexual identity in religiously inflected artistic representations of the "neighbor"
- Sacred spaces, public art, and the politics of accessibility
- The impact of interfaith artistic collaborations on contemporary understandings of community
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: International Committee
Participants are invited to consider how cultural institutions of varying scales respond to evolving conditions —such as changes in funding, shifting public expectations, and debates around restitution and ethical stewardship. How do these factors impact collection strategies, programming, and institutional values? What innovative approaches are emerging to navigate this complex new landscape, maintain cultural exchange, and support artistic freedom?
We particularly welcome case studies and reflections that examine:
• Institutional strategies in response to cultural or political constraints,
• Restitution and ethical considerations in heritage stewardship;
• Creative responses by artists and curators to resource limitations or global tensions;
• Historical precedents that offer insight into resilience, adaptability, and critical engagement through art.
This session invites scholars, artists, curators, and museum professionals to share research, practices, and perspectives illuminating how art and its institutions operate and evolve within an increasingly interconnected yet fragmented world.
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Committee on Diversity Practices