Complete Session
As these creative technologies become essential to artistic and conceptual practices, students must learn to engage with them critically through experimentation, not simply adopting them for novelty. How can design education cultivate critical thinking and conceptual depth alongside technical skills? How can these emerging tools be effectively integrated into current design curricula?
There is increasing emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration, especially in courses such as data visualization and computational design, as well as large-scale, grant-funded research initiatives. These experiences seek structural changes that promote both technical proficiency and broader system thinking. Design today is not just visually communicative, it is structural, experiential and systematic. Designers are now key collaborators in interdisciplinary research, shaping innovative, experience driven outcomes with societal impact. What new skills do designers need to thrive in these roles?
Through interdisciplinary collaborations, the development of a new design degree program, and student learning outcomes at our institutions, the panel offers critical insights into how design education can navigate this moving target. Rather than offering definitive answers, we invite dialogue on how to prepare the next generation of designers for an increasingly complex and technology-driven future.
As though working in reverse, this panel of artists and scholars favors the bold and brazen, using the profane as an entry point to explore the many intertwining aspects of sexuality, personal identity, and gender expression in contemporary art. Like in Mapplethorpe’s photographic retrospective, the role of the illicit plays only a small part of a greater whole.
Throughout the discussion, each panelist will use an intersectional lens to examine the role and significance of the taboo and the historically obscured in their work. Engaging with the unconventional and the edges of decency, this panel challenges traditional binaries, amplifying the diversity and fluidity of sex and gender in the arts and expanding the discourse on the interconnectedness of sex, gender, intimacy, and identity.
In this roundtable, we will present some strategies and techniques for spurring enthusiasm and interest before leading a discussion with the audience to brainstorm more ways to enhance student engagement. Round table participants will each give a brief 10-minute presentation, before it is opened up for general discussion.
This roundtable proposes to examine the complex and enduring intersections between art history and nationalism from the perspective of the so-called Second World. In countries long regarded as peripheral within broader historiographical narratives, nationalism often emerged as a dominant collective ideology. Rather than treating this history as a mere footnote, we seek to explore how these experiences can serve as critical resources for understanding — and contesting — contemporary articulations of nationalism in art history.
Panelists will present relevant case studies serving as a starting point for discussion. Magdalena Moskalewicz analyzes how different historical processes such as the Cold War or the Fall of Communism shaped nationalistic tendencies in Eastern Europe. Marta Zboralska critically engages with "Polish art" as a category through case studies of two exhibitions referencing émigré writer Witold Gombrowicz’s deconstruction of national identity. Agata Pietrasik examines strategies of marginalization of minority artists within the Polish art history. Daniel R. Quiles reconstructs key moments that led to the current anti-intellectual politics and defunding of the arts in Argentina, as well as strategies of survival and resistance.
Numerous design educators nationwide are advancing research and pedagogical practices that center on inclusion, access, and equity—yet such work often remains under recognized in mainstream discourse. Grounded in community engagement, accessibility advocacy, and curriculum reform, these projects expand graphic design inquiry and redefine its impact. They critically address design ethics, deconstruct imbalanced visual power structures, and integrate hidden narratives, challenging dominant notions of success and authorship.
This session positions inclusive and equitable approaches as fundamental to the future of design education and research. Reimagining design processes and pedagogical frameworks through this lens aligns the discipline with ethical, social, and educational responsibilities. Panelists will present case studies addressing accessibility, inclusive classroom management, power imbalances, and design practices that engage people with conditions such as epilepsy and dyslexia. Their approaches span human-centered design, creative research, and alternative methodologies.
By creating space for underexplored work and emphasizing care, collaboration, and equity, this session contributes to a more just and resilient vision for the discipline. These interventions reflect the complexity of real-world contexts and offer pathways toward more responsive and inclusive teaching, research, and design practices.
The four papers examine the complex interplay between forgeries and the formation of tastes, values, and art historical narratives in late imperial China. Both centering around the “Suzhou Fake Paintings,” Tongyun Yin analyzes the visual and textual strategies used in a 16th-century handscroll to create a dynamic space for nostalgic construction and deceptive fabrication, while Yutong Li examines workshop practices behind forged depictions of paintings of Tribute Bearers, challenging the notion of forgeries as mere deceptions and instead revealing them as dynamic participants in cultural production. Helena Chen-Abair discusses the rise of forged bronze inscriptions in 19th-century China and their impact on authentication practices and the scholar-collector community. Guo Jianping draws attention to the roles that annotations in painting catalogue—long overlooked materials—played in engaging with issues of forgery and authentication. Collectively, these papers propose a paradigmatic shift from an obsession with authenticity to a critical reevaluation of how forgeries inform or disrupt our perceptions of the past.
Gina Gwen Palacios presents To All Whom It May Concern, a research-based series investigating historical patents designed for farmworkers in Texas. These works critique techno-capitalism and racialized labor systems through the visual language of invention. Corinne McCormack-Whittemore explores the psychological and cultural complexities of closed adoption and borderland identity through Nuestra Lengua, evoking Anzaldúan nepantla as both theme and methodology. Paul Valadez’s performance-based work, Giving Away Mexican Food, documents a socially engaged act of cultural exchange, identity assertion, and humility through ephemeral drawings distributed at the The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture. Dr. Christen S. García presents Tortillando, a series of dyed tortillas burned and pressed into pedagogical and healing objects, informed by nepantla aesthetics, autohistoria-teoría, and curadora theory. Angel Cabrales introduces The Uncolonized: Axihuical, a speculative, multimedia reimagining of a decolonized Mesoamerican future, fusing sci-fi with indigenous histories and technological imagination.
Together, these artists illuminate the borderlands not as periphery but as center—sites of resistance, transformation, and radical vision. This panel invites dialogue on how art from la frontera challenges colonial legacies, reclaims silenced histories, and constructs empowering futures from the margins.
The interdisciplinary panel spans the fields of video art, music composition, and AI ethics, engaging with 360° virtual reality narratives, interactive lighting/visual systems for musical performance, and generative AI. We explore the role of metaphor in intermedia composition, expanded space in narrative frameworks, best practices for AI engagement, and the critical need for discipline-specific technological literacy. We will share strategies for facilitating a relationship to technology so that students can be responsive to its strengths and limitations in a changing context, prioritizing an ethical relationship to technology that can withstand time and support “long-term social, cultural, and environmental well-being” (Zaeri & Roozafzai, 2024). As we “debug” the digital arts, we are rewiring pedagogical models and creative strategies to foreground inquiry, critique, and care. While technology is inevitably changing, our aim is to “establish connections between virtual and real world artistic experiences” (Bedir Erişti, S. D., & Freedman, K., 2024), cultivating a socially conscious and creative dialogue.
Max Boersma’s paper troubles the feminist optimism associated with the abstract textile practice of modernist artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp by examining the potential coloniality of her use of ethnographic motifs and her outsourcing of the execution of her designs to others, setting the stage for papers considering women laboring within three different authoritarian systems of mass production: Anna Dumont’s account of the synthetic textile company SNIA Viscosa and women’s experience of its company town in fascist Italy; Smaranda Ciubotaro’s analysis of “the female imaginarium” in the Dacia Textile Enterprise in communist Bucharest, Romania; and Christina Kiaer’s examination of anonymity and collectivity amongst female colleagues at the Red Rose silk factory in later Soviet Moscow.
In this session, the panelists will discuss the impact of their collaborative approaches and artistic practices, specifically how they address shifting cultural perceptions toward environmental consciousness and stewardship. They employ various modalities and media—from incorporating plastics with organic materials, to the intersection of global tourist narratives with local oral histories, and to art historical references that prompt community storytelling. Through their creative installations and public art interventions, they hope to not only educate viewers but also mobilize communities to initiate creative pathways that point toward a more environmentally conscious, just, and sustainable future.
Facilitated by this renewed institutional access, this panel convenes four speakers who offer new research and curatorial perspectives on this visionary artist. Panelists explore questions: How might engaging with Bing’s work and archive complicate narratives of abstraction and identity? How can we move past reductive identity framings while acknowledging conditions of marginalization? And how might we ethically engage works, archives, and ephemera that have been historically neglected by institutions? This panel seeks to deepen and sustain critical engagement with Bing’s expansive career and reflect more broadly on the methodological and institutional stakes of studying historically marginalized artists.
Our papers parse the workshop’s contradictory roles: as sites of hierarchy or utopian skill-sharing, of individual expression or collaborative knowledge exchange. We also examine how twentieth-century workshops drew on nostalgic visions of pre-industrial labor models, even as they engaged with modern technologies and ideologies. Our presentations accordingly consider how the workshop both reinforces and resists modernist ideals. Crucially, this panel foregrounds the workshop as a gendered space. We consider the possibilities the workshop afforded women artists and artisans relative to other sites of creative production. We ask: to what extent did the workshop unsettle or transform gendered artistic hierarchies? Drawing on transnational and intermedial case studies, our papers approach the twentieth-century workshop as a generative yet contested space, at once shaped by and shaping material practices, spatial politics, and artistic identity.
Three papers focus on medieval Buddhist art to examine how religious communities grounded their practices in the natural terrain: the layering of Buddhist sites in the making of city axes, the carving of arhat caves into mountain formations, and the depiction of the nine-mountain-eight-seas cosmogram on pagoda bases. A fourth paper turns to 20th-century Jiangnan to examine how artists evoked regional geography through modern landscape painting, drawing on and transforming earlier aesthetic vocabularies. This juxtaposition invites a reassessment of the temporal framework of "modernity," and its potential relevance to studies of environments and artistic practices across time. By treating Jiangnan as a generative site where artists and patrons engaged with land, ritual, architecture, and text to inscribe meaning and negotiate place, these case studies aim to contribute new perspectives to broader art historical conversations on geo-aesthetics, material ecologies, and the spatial dimensions of artistic practice.
The entanglement of empire and mendicant orders remains largely underexplored in art history. In the Americas, the often-violent “spiritual conquest” in the hands of religious groups such as the Franciscans was supported by a Christian millenarian belief system that underpinned colonial endeavors. As Iberian powers expanded into the Americas, so, too, did the Word of God—delivered through the Franciscans, who were among the first to develop technologies of spiritual conversion tailored to imperial ambitions.
The Franciscans’ efforts in the Americas aimed not only to build their legacy through pastoral work among heterogenous Indigenous groups; but to secure their influence within the hegemonic colonial order. While they promoted spiritual education, artistic instruction, and pastoral care, these seemingly benevolent practices often concealed the maintenance and growth of empire. By fostering symbolic ties with Indigenized populations, the Franciscans obscured the realities of cultural erasure and conquest under the guise of innocence and poverty.
This panel explores critical approaches to Franciscan legacies and their intersections with Spanish imperialism. How have painting and print culture—engravings, maps, chronicles, hagiographies—contributed to the enduring image of the order’s innocence? More specifically, how has Franciscan art masked the order’s complicity in colonial violence? Spanning from South America to the U.S. Southwest, this panel expands the range of critical mission studies to propose new approaches to the study of mendicant viceregal art, urging a reevaluation of narratives that have long underplayed its role in colonial expansion.
This session explores stained glass and contemporaneous arts of the Early Modern to Modern era in Germany, Switzerland, the Low Countries, and the United States. The first paper by Virginia Raguin focuses on early print culture and images and texts shared in single sheets, emblem books, printed Bibles, and paintings. The second paper by Margot Steurbaut demonstrates how the visual language and Baroque monumentality of Peter Paul Rubens were successfully replicated in stained glass. The last paper, by Fatema Tasmia, addresses the influence of Louis Comfort Tiffany in shaping taste and building social identity.
This panel challenges the disciplinary and curatorial silos that have long separated artistic media. It invites a broader understanding of how art functions across media, spaces, and audiences, indeed a goal of many studies today. The session also aims to spark renewed interest in stained glass and foster conversations about its deep engagement with contemporaneous styles. As the case studies will show, stained glass was far from marginal—it played a vital role in shaping visual culture and civic identity, often in dialogue with more widely studied media.
Spanning Paik’s canonic video work to its regional aftermath, this panel addresses how media art practices in South Korea and Taiwan are shaped and contextualized. It offers three case studies examining how media art is locally invented, engaged with, or transformed through specific interventions. With a comparison of Paik’s TV Fish and Park Hyunki’s TV Fishbowl, a revisit to the transgressive strategies of Taiwanese avant-garde filmmakers under authoritarian regime, and an analysis of plasticity and animation in Liu Yu's video installation, this panel addresses themes of environmental art, fascism in Asia, and indigenous art—to speculate new political possibilities from “random access information.”
Art has long served as a vehicle for catharsis and public intervention, reframing cultural narratives and fostering empathy. Artistic practices such as printmaking, painting, and performance will be explored as tools for confronting stigma and reshaping societal views on mental health. As discourse around mental illness remains fraught with misunderstanding, this session considers how art functions not only as self-expression but also as a tool for transforming society's understanding of mental health.
This session will address the ethical complexities of depicting mental illness and addiction, exploring how artists navigate the fine line between raising awareness, fostering empathy, and avoiding exploitation. Presenters will highlight vulnerability and storytelling as forces for connection and examine how art serves as advocacy, challenging dominant narratives and advancing conversations in meaningful ways.
By elevating marginalized voices, this session emphasizes the transformative potential of creative practices to promote a more inclusive and compassionate approach to mental health.
Key Topics:
- The power of art as a tool for mental health advocacy
- Historical and contemporary portrayals of mental illness in art
- Ethical considerations in representing mental health and addiction
- Art’s role in breaking down stigma and fostering community dialogue
We often look to the past to examine how societies have disrupted the status quo in order to expose and critique power. Artists and intellectuals are often amongst the first to respond to socio-political issues and their methods have evolved with each new generation. While every generation faces societal upheavals, the challenges faced today are unprecedented and rapidly evolving within a globally interconnected population. Within the specific context of the United States and the current political landscape, this panel will feature a group of interdisciplinary art historians, scholars, and artists, each presenting how their research contributes to efforts of resistance and subversion ranging from radical pedagogy and visual language in arts practices, to bioart, material studies, and collective futurity.