Session Soliciting Contributors
Building on recent scholarship in Western art history, this panel seeks to extend these conversations into Asian visual contexts, both historical and modern, where depictions of transgressive or “dangerous” women appear across a wide range of media: from didactic and literary paintings to illustrated newspapers, tabloids, and consumer visual culture. These figures provoke key questions: Why were these images created? Who were they meant to be seen by? How does the gendered gaze shape their meaning, reception, or reinterpretation? Could a woman artist reclaim or reframe the “dangerous” woman through her own visual language?
We invite papers that explore the intersectional dimensions of female representation in Asian art, particularly where those images reflect cultural fears, fantasies, or desires around women who transgress religious, social, or moral boundaries.
Inspired by the studio casting experiments of Julius Schmidt and the pedagogical spread of iron pouring workshops, this session repositions cast iron not only as a sculptural tool but also as a critical site for examining gender, material culture, regionalism, and industrial memory. How does cast iron’s weight—literal and metaphorical—resonate within contemporary practices of ruin aesthetics, slow making, and ecological reckoning? Can rust serve as a political patina?
We welcome proposals from artists, scholars, and practitioners that reconsider cast iron in the context of postWWII and contemporary art. Papers engaging with labor, materiality, ritual, or global practices of iron casting are particularly encouraged.
This panel gathers critical perspectives on how the art world, contemporary art, and visual culture engage with systems of valuation under late capitalism. How do artists respond to the collapse of distinctions between aesthetic and economic value? What can we learn from historical and emerging forms of the artist-economist (Cras, 2019), entrepreneurial artist, or speculative practice? What happens to cultural institutions when assetization, datafication, and performance metrics shape funding, curating, and programming?
Grounded in historical research and contemporary critique, this session seeks to map how quantification and financial abstraction reshape both art and its histories
We invite papers that explore topics such as:
- The role of financial instruments and data in aesthetic production
- Artists who critically engage with money, speculation, or valuation
- Theoretical intersections of neoliberalism, aesthetics, and trust
- Metrics as curatorial or institutional strategy
- Transatlantic or global perspectives on art and economic imaginaries
Investigating photography from this set of examples, this panel asks: What kind of objects/processes have been called a photograph? Which features and technologies are used to define the medium? How can they reimagine the medium’s history and future? Contributions might explore the reception of objects as “photographs,” the aestheticization or mediation of alternative “photographic” methods, the use of photographic processes in science, or the circulation and transmission of photographs through other media. This panel seeks to bring together papers across geographies and time periods and encourages presentations that engage with interdisciplinary perspectives including scholars working on the definitions, devices, and debates surrounding photographic methods from the nineteenth century to the contemporary.
This panel will consider the various effects that HIV/AIDS has had on art history — not just in terms of subject matter, but also as a discipline — thinking beyond particular artists and interrogating notions of artistic community. How were gallerists, collectors, and curators affected? What about the art historians lost to AIDS? How did institutions — including universities, colleges, and museums — respond to the crisis?
Papers are invited that engage with and address, among other topics: curatorial and editorial responses to HIV/AIDS around the world, for example Nan Goldin’s 1989 exhibition, Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing; critical engagement with art historical scholarship, particularly critics and academics who were lost to AIDS, such as Craig Owens; and methodological innovations, akin to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of reparative reading. Moreover, what are the ethical considerations at play in revisiting the history of the HIV epidemic today?
This session asks presenters to deconstruct, reimagine, or critique the traditional lesson plans available through AHTR. We anticipate at least six presenters will participate in this Lightning Round, addressing a specific lesson plan from the site and introducing pedagogical interventions. To give the session focus and common ground, we will select three lesson plans to address in the session, based on the interest of participants. To explore varied approaches, each lesson plan will be reimagined by two different participants. For example, participants might address similar learning objectives in the introductory courses through a thematic or chronological approach. The remainder of the session will be open to brainstorming and creating deliverables that will be published on AHTR. Session attendees are also invited to bring and share ideas about a lesson plan to the session to discuss. Abstracts should address why the presenter would be interested in this pedagogical practice. All approaches are welcome.
Inspired by the recently published Aesthetic Noise: The Philosophy of Intentional Listening (Routledge) by the panel chairperson Mary Mazurek, this panel considers how noise can become a catalyst for profound artistic experiences and expression. Papers that examine noise through philosophical, critical, and practice-based lenses, including its applications in sound art, music, installation, performance, digital media, and experimental practices are welcome.
Possible topics include but are not limited to: noise and phenomenology; noise and the sublime; noise in the works of artists like John Cage, or contemporary experimentalists; noise and identity; sound as a political statement; and noise as a tool for disrupting traditional aesthetic hierarchies.
Inter and multi-disciplinary perspectives are encouraged with contributions that intersect with disciplines such as sound studies, philosophy, media studies, gender studies, and political theory. This panel aims to foster a rich dialogue on the radical potential of noise and the ways intentional listening reshapes our relationships with sound, self, and society.
In response, contemporary African artists confront these issues affecting their immediate communities, employing diverse vestiges of combative aesthetics. Their works articulate resistance, raise awareness, and provide critiques through conceptually charged installations, performances, sculptures, paintings, digital art, junk art, and community-based interventions. Many also address the growing phenomenon of “Chinafication,” wherein China’s ostensibly benevolent yet economically stifling presence in Africa provokes urgent questions around sovereignty, dependency, and willful submission to foreign subjugation.
This panel invites papers that explore the practices of artists who interrogate the impact of the global North’s waste dumping, economic exploitation, extractivism, political interference, gender-based violence, environmental injustice, degradation, corruption, unemployment epidemic, and broader neocolonial pressures on the continent. We welcome proposals from art historians, cultural theorists, artists, curators, critics, and African studies scholars whose research investigates contemporary African art as a critical site for confronting the continent’s social and political realities while highlighting artists' roles in catalyzing social, political, and environmental transformations.
Since the Enlightenment, architectural utopias have often shed their emancipatory potential, functioning instead as instruments of capitalist expansion, settler colonialism, and modernist abstraction–so Manfredo Tafuri and Anthony Vidler, among other architectural historians, have claimed. Yet beneath the failed promises of the architectural “avant-gardes” lie counter-histories of resilience—“rear-guard” efforts that challenged dominant spatial paradigms while restoring equity in their present. This panel invites a rethinking of architectural utopianism by turning attention to those who resisted, subverted, or reconfigured utopian ideals from the margins. What insights can be gained by examining utopia not as a formal project of radical innovation, but as a practice of community endurance and revolt?
We welcome papers that explore the spatial practices of feminist, decolonial, spiritual, and other collectivist movements challenging the exclusions embedded in dominant utopian narratives. These may include intentional communities, grassroots infrastructures, pedagogical experiments, or speculative practices grounded in marginalized worldviews. Submissions may address any historical period, but special attention will be given to work that situates premodern, early modern, or underrepresented geographic contexts within broader debates on utopianism. We also encourage contributions proposing alternative methodologies for teaching utopias in architecture—through archives, oral histories, literary or material culture.
By centering the “rear-guard” of architectural history—those whose visions have often been erased, or dismissed—we hope to reimagine utopia not as an unreachable blueprint, but as a lived and ongoing project of resistance.
This panel explores the subsoil and its relationship to discourses on land sovereignty and ownership, extraction, labor, and technique, geological and historical time, ecological decay, nature, and power. By examining the ways in which the subterranean has anchored claims of possession, dispossession, and discovery, we seek to explore how perceptions of––and access to––the underground have shaped concepts of architecture, infrastructure, landscape, and territory. Paper proposals may address these themes across historical periods and geographies. Potential inquiries include, but are not limited to: building materials, mining and quarrying, labor codes and legislation, treatises, drawings, survey reports, and maps.
Settler colonial powers rely on the elimination of the Native peoples and the denial of their historical ties to the land. Since its foundation, Israel has been systematically confiscating and destroying Palestinian archives, the most recent one occurring nowadays in Gaza, with its near total destruction of institutional archives.
Archives produced under colonial or settler colonial state power—whether maps, photographs, or administrative records—often serve projects of domination, yet they can also preserve suppressed fragments of indigenous knowledge. At the same time, activist and community-based archives challenge hegemonic narratives by centring subaltern histories that defy state violence, and hence practice ongoing resistance. From re-readings of colonial documents to visual acts of solidarity, these archives offer tools for reimagining space, memory, and collective struggle.
Focusing on the visual rhetoric produced in the archive, we ask, how does it challenge dominant historical narratives and perform resistance? How do aesthetic choices made during the archive’s production, preservation or circulation shape the archive’s political function?
Proposals from scholars, artists, activists, and curators engaged at the crossroads of visual culture, sound, architecture, cartography, archival studies, and decolonial practice are highly encouraged.
By addressing how the state regulation of chemicality can be linked to anxieties about innovation and social order, this panel aims to develop a shared, critical vocabulary for understanding the role of aesthetics and discourses of embodiment within the management of biocitizenship, and state surveillance. How has such regulation shaped the logics of empire and borders, moving from the hormonal and molecular to the planetary? How are artists, curators, and arts organizers part of this dialogue? We seek papers that push at the multiscalar and biomediated sites of governmentality, challenge notions of toxicity, and/or rethink the long, historical arc of biopower via aesthetic practices that theorize alternative forms of relation, worlding, and speculative timelines of embodiment.
This session invites papers exploring visual depictions of labor (broadly defined) across media and cultural contexts in the ancient Mediterranean world. Questions to consider include (but are not limited to): Who is depicted performing this labor/work? What kind of labor are they doing? How do we define work/labor in ancient art? Why depict images of laborers? What labor is not recorded in the visual record and why? How can we uncover invisible labor of unknown artists in the ancient world? What can depictions of labor in the ancient world teach us about representations of labor today?
Proposals exploring these ideas and more are welcomed, especially those that approach the material from a critical lens, such as postcolonial, feminist, and Marxist/materialist theory. By drawing attention to visible and invisible labor in the ancient world, this session aims to contribute to larger discussions of art, labor, and work in art history.
We seek presentations that reflect on the conceptual and practical relationships between studio work and performance—whether they are intimately connected or entirely distinct. How do these modes of making coexist within an artist’s identity and pedagogy? How does performance enter the classroom, consciously or unconsciously, through critique, demonstration, or presence? Is teaching itself a kind of performance, and how do artists reconcile or embrace this in relation to their studio practice?
This panel aims to create dialogue among educators and artists who work at the intersection of objects and actions, artifacts and events. We welcome contributions that explore embodiment, temporality, labor, and the expressive challenges of navigating between tangible forms and performative gestures—particularly within institutional contexts that privilege one over the other.
Beyond technological settings, presets encompass cultural defaults including gender normativity and Western privilege. These often invisible norms shape artistic production within today's technological networks, establishing constraints that artists variously adopt, modify, or subvert. We are asking: what kinds of agency exist within pre-coded environments? Can presets be thought beyond a poverty of expression to become sites of aesthetic and political experimentation?
We invite papers that address presets in any medium. Topics could include: the politics of AI-generated imagery; race, gender and accessibility in default design; musical or sonic sampling; exploitation of aesthetic defaults in photography and screen-based art; algorithmic technologies; and cultural trope remixing in performance and media art. Particularly welcome are investigations of how marginalized artists rework technological presets to circulate new meaning and expose latent power structures.
This panel asks: what does black femininity/gender bring to bear on postminimalism’s expressive, open, and sensuous forms? Like minimalists, black women artists paid particular attention to materiality, but they refused to shy away from metaphorical and metonymic associations to the social, the bodily, the re/productive. Further, black women’s expansion of form through postminimalist idioms brought in the historically excluded and illuminated the racialized and gendered underpinnings of modern notions of form itself. We welcome papers foregrounding black women’s engagement with postminimalist strategies from the 1960s to the present.
Perhaps bronze’s mixed status begins to explain its relatively marginal role in dominant narratives of contemporary art history. Bronze is arguably hard to see when you consider the dominance of steel or the prevalence of found and readymade forms. One could easily mistake that bronze saw the end of its art history in the late twentieth century.
This panel aims to reconsider the place of bronze in contemporary art. Our inquiry will read against the grain of bronze’s oversight, examining case studies that recover dormant histories of bronze work from approximately 1950 to the present. Contributions from all geographies are encouraged, as well as studies that speak to such overarching questions as: What new alloys and fabrication techniques have artists and their collaborators devised since 1950? And how have these changes in materiality and method reshaped the instrumentality of bronze? In what ways have artists since 1950 engaged with the cycle of fabrication, (partial) destruction, and reuse that defines bronze? What biographies of the contemporary bronze object can be derived from the material’s characteristic mutability? How does contemporary bronze work refigure the social and cultural resonances long associated with bronze?
Bureaucratic Realism describes a broad yet coherent set of practices that mimic, mirror, or disrupt bureaucratic norms: works that adopt the appearance of officialdom, invent fictional institutions, produce diagrams of abstract governance, file real or speculative paperwork, or subvert administrative rituals. This panel explores how such work navigates the bureaucratic real—the systems we are subject to—and gestures toward what might exist beyond: speculative institutions, symbolic resistance, and reimagined systems of accountability and care.
We seek presentations that address:
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Artistic uses of documents, diagrams, archives, policy, or legal frameworks
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The aesthetics and affects of administration: banality, opacity, absurdity, power
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Performance and role-play in institutional critique or social practice
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Diagramming, mapping, or fictionalizing bureaucratic realities
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The role of satire, sincerity, and system-fluency in contemporary art
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Intersectional critiques through race, class, gender, and decolonial theory
We welcome artists, scholars, and cultural workers negotiating institutional life through direct engagement or speculative transformation. What does it mean to make art with and against the systems we live through—and how might Bureaucratic Realism offer imaginative tools for disruption and change?
Caribbean artists, architects, and cultural practitioners have long developed spatial, visual, and pedagogical vocabularies that respond to histories of colonial extraction, plantation capitalism, and diasporic displacement. Their work reimagines archives, syllabi, and curatorial models while mobilizing decolonial, feminist, and participatory approaches. Glissant’s poetics of relation and opacity, Sylvia Wynter’s critique of the overrepresentation of “Man,” Suzanne Césaire’s concept of camouflage, Fanon’s radical analysis of colonial space and psychic rupture, and Maryse Condé’s reworking of memory and survival each offer profound insights into spatial thought and resistance.
This panel invites papers that engage the Caribbean as a method, geography, and conceptual framework to rethink art, architecture, and spatial practices. Submissions may examine specific projects or practices, address the politics of visibility and voice, or reflect on methodological shifts required to narrate from/with the Caribbean. By foregrounding the region’s entangled histories, ecological poetics, and insurgent creativity, this session seeks to amplify the transformative power of Caribbean counter-narratives.
Panelists will explore how visual culture and aesthetic preference were transformed in these cities through localized interpretations, responding to local materials, labor networks, and spiritual traditions. Religious architecture and devotional arts—especially those commissioned for monasteries, cathedrals, and mission churches—may serve as a lens to examine both the imposition and reinterpretation of colonial ideologies. The panel also considers the importance of artisan networks and the movement of artists, artworks, and raw materials across colonial territories, illuminating the transregional dynamics that shaped local production.
In tracing these developments, the panel foregrounds how artistic production in these cities negotiated colonial authority while fostering creole and Indigenous expressions of identity. By centering these often-overlooked locales, this panel seeks to expand the geographies of colonial art history and enrich our understanding of artistic agency in the Americas.
Sixty years ago, cartoonist Jack Kirby introduced the first superhero of color, The Black Panther, to the Marvel comic book lineup; two years later Charles Schulz created a black character named Franklin to diversify America’s most popular comic strip, Peanuts, much to the dismay of Southern newspaper editors and the executives of King Features Syndicate. In the 1970s underground cartoonists like Trina Robbins and Howard Cruse depicted gay and lesbian romances in graphic detail, and with Love and Rockets in 1980 the Hernandez brothers introduced Mexican American culture to the mostly white readers of alternative and avant-garde comics. The 9th art, as our European colleagues call the comics medium, has played a powerful role in promoting diversity, equity and inclusion within America’s popular visual culture. This session will celebrate the DEI activism of the 9th Art by inviting comics scholars and artists to present papers on the history and current achievements of comics creators who advocate racial, ethnic and gender diversity, and who have expanded our limited view of the world by giving face and voice to the marginalized among us.
The discourse of critical pedagogy has evolved significantly in recent decades and Gloria Ladson-Billings’s theorizing of “culturally-responsive pedagogy” has influenced teaching practices that support young people in connecting with their own cultural identities and analyzing the world around them. Likewise, contemporary art continues to change. How can evolving artists' practices—particularly those employing new technologies, social practice, and alternative knowledge systems—inform culturally-responsive pedagogies in today's classrooms?
This session asks how emerging contemporary artistic practices can strengthen and model new approaches to teaching – becoming more than simply the content for lessons – especially within the context of our shifting cultural and political landscape. It seeks papers addressing the intersections of contemporary art, education, and topics such as: expanding historical narratives, global perspectives in the classroom, critical engagement with technology, climate change, immigrant rights, new definitions of American identity, political division, and speech rights. This session will inform the development of a third publication to be produced by the New Museum on contemporary art and education.
We invite papers that analyze how artists use feminine aesthetics to ‘exist’ and ‘resist’ simultaneously (Duggan & McHugh, 1996). How, for instance, does the plastic excess in the work of artists like Juno Calypso challenge normative visual codes of femininity? In what ways do the hyperfeminine aesthetics of bimbocore navigate the space between subversion and commodification? As feminine aesthetics experience a revival in mainstream visual culture, it becomes crucial to interrogate the boundaries between deconstruction and the recirculation of normative archetypes, especially when they align with whiteness, hypersexualisation and neoliberal self-improvement (Gill, 2007; McRobbie, 2004).
This panel seeks to address a series of questions: What forms of resistance and visual reimagination do feminine and femme aesthetics make possible? Where do we locate the line between feminine performativity and its commodification? How do race, ability and class shape feminine and femme legibility?
Potential paper topics include:
- Femme drag and the subversion of gender norms
- Disidentification and queer-of-color critique
- Bimbocore, hyperfemininity and neoliberal agency
- Femme failure as resistance
- The politics of affect in feminine aesthetics
Questions animating this panel include: How do artists contend with the limitations of conventional genealogical research, such as its reliance on state records and its upholding of biological definitions of family? How do creative practices reconstruct fragmented familial histories amid the ongoing effects of colonialisms, transatlantic slavery, and diasporas? In what ways can artistic investigations of lineages, ancestries, and inheritances redefine notions of kinship and belonging? Ultimately, how might artists transform how kinship is lived and felt?
This panel seeks presentations from scholars, museum professionals, archivists, and creative practitioners whose work engages these topics and themes. We are especially interested in papers informed by Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, Latinx Studies, and LGBTQ+ Studies.
This session seeks wide-ranging papers that critically re-examine 1940s US art (1938-1952) and its relationship to the era’s entertainment industries. It asks how artists transformed and created images within these media networks. Dynamic cinematic images, the visual glut of periodicals, and highly personalized images while radio listening afford sites for reassessing the art, illustration, and propaganda posters of this pivotal decade. This session welcomes submissions exploring interchanges between art, image circulation, and entertainment, as creators addressed issues of censorship, social justice, and identity, echoing current struggles of war and media oversaturation.
Examining interactions between 1940s US art and entertainment, this session invites submissions from students, scholars, and curators focusing on, but not limited to, the following:
How did Hollywood cinema and radio broadcasting inform art-making?
How did artists shape Broadway and fashion industry networks?
What can 1940s periodical illustrations tell us about the multifaceted realisms that circulated throughout the era?
How did artists and media creators fight against oppression––fascism, internment, homophobia, sexism, racism?
How did entertainment and visual culture drive home-front knowledge of wartime technologies (conquering battlefield diseases, advances in communications, atomic warfare)?
While the forced removal of art from museum walls is largely unprecedented in the US, these active efforts to control and censor the display of art have roots in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when art institutions and funding bodies navigated the politicization of culture and morality-based pushback from audiences. Moreover, these recent incidents closely mimic events surrounding the initial exhibition of Mann’s artworks, as well as Robert Mapplethorpe’s among others. By 1989, everyone from New York Times critic Hilton Kramer to Anita Bryant’s American Family Association called for a reckoning of morality, decency, and the exhibition of art.
Looking to understand, question, and confront the history and current censorship in American art, this session invites submissions that address the following and related topics:
- The institutional, governmental, or public censorship of art
- The targeting, erasure, and/or banning of artists/artworks from public and private spaces
- Examples and/or threats of economic retribution against institutions that publicly display artwork
- Scandals connected to nudity, sexuality, and/or political ideology, in art museums
- The erasure of “controversial” themes and/or language in cultural spaces
Our panel centers on case studies drawn from East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia to explore how the contexts of design pedagogy changed from the interwar Bauhaus emphasis on the unity of art, crafts and technology to the anticipated impact of the “Scientific and Technological Revolution” in the 1960s and growing awareness of the global environmental threat in the 1970s. Among other questions we ask are the following:
- How did the roles of professional designers change during this period and how did design schools influence and react to this transformation?
- Which pedagogical models and strategies were employed during this period?
- To what extent did Cold War geopolitical divisions during these decades and across these regimes shape educational approaches and how did national contexts influence local design pedagogies?
Given recent political and cultural shifts in parts of former Eastern Europe, we see these questions as newly relevant and timely.
As long as art has existed, people have responded to it with the written word—with ekphrasis, from the Greek “to recount or describe.” How do we reconcile the ancient human impulse to describe the visual in words with the contemporary decline in art criticism? Has art criticism been replaced by a shift to other forms, such as poetry, in the broader cultural landscape? This panel examines ekphrasis, other forms of creative writing that respond to works of art. We welcome scholarly studies of ekphrastic texts (John Keats’ poem, Ode to a Grecian Urn, and W. H. Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts are two well-known examples), as well as informal talks and readings from practitioners of the genre, including poets, filmmakers, screenwriters, novelists, and others. We aim to explore the relationships between works of art and creative writing, evaluating the formal, representational, and expressive intersections that generate meaning and provoke emotion. We ask how ekphrastic practices add or subtract cultural, social, and political value to images and words—and whether the only response to art is, in fact, art.
Our panel proposes that the invaluable lessons of “elemental media” can be applied to the study of 19th-century visual culture. In this age of expanding industrialization and empire, engineers modernized urban infrastructures and scientists were solidifying the diverse fields of meteorology, botany, and geology—developments that produced their own visual culture, alongside artists who interrogated their relationship to the natural world. Tackling this interdisciplinary corpus helps us make transhistorical connections between then and now—historicizing contemporary art’s increasing attention to ambient ecological effects within our growing awareness of 19th-century ecological damage that kickstarted our Anthropocene.
Papers might examine ways that elemental media have been wrangled and managed including by lenses, pipes, or paper certificates. Some of these media might physically interact with the water/air/light/earth in question, while others might function as secondary-order representations that facilitate their movement and circulation. How does “elemental media” open up new objects of analysis for 19th-century art history? What role can the visual play in wider conversations of ecological management?
We seek to interrogate how representations of political leaders and leadership negotiate the tensions between authenticity and performance, visibility and myth, across different regimes. Relevant questions include, but are not limited to:
How is authority constructed through bodily posture, gendered and racialized aesthetics, symbolic motifs, and staged settings for spectatorship? How are crises of faith, civil rights, and social justice, particularly under late capitalism, registered visually through the storytelling and image-making of leaders? How does visual culture sustain hegemonic ideals of gender and national identity, or, conversely, expose their instability?
Papers engaging cross-cultural, comparative, and transhistorical approaches are especially welcome. We are interested in both historical studies, such as revolutionary portraiture or the visual politics of personality cults, as well as contemporary critiques of mediated leadership within the society of the spectacle and the hyperreal performance of presidentiality.
Foregrounding the visual as a critical terrain where authority is not given but perpetually negotiated, this panel seeks to explore the visual strategies, cultural anxieties, and symbolic economies that define the face of power.
This panel challenges the persistent dualism that has limited critical, curatorial, and academic engagement with fiber art, aiming to foster layered discourse on its artistic uses. This exploration will engage the aesthetic, conceptual, and contextual applications of such materials and modes of production to challenge the critical limitations imposed on the medium.
We welcome abstracts on fiber art from all periods, disciplines, and methodological perspectives that critically engage the following themes, among others:
- Fiber Futures: Sustainability and Innovation
- Textile as Archive/Cultural Transmission
- Fiber Art and Feminist Genealogies
- Transcultural and Postcolonial Textilities
- Domesticity as Disruption
- Material Agency in Fiber Practices
- Textiles and Spatial Politics
- Decentering the Fine Art/Craft Binary
- Soft Monumentality: Reimagining Scale and Presence
- Tactile Epistemologies: Knowing Through Making
This session invites contributions by art historians, artists, and theorists that engage with specific feminist curatorial strategies that envision diverse constellations of collectives striving for kinships.
We invite contributions that analyze topics such as:
- Photographs of non-Western artists in journals and magazines, and their participation in introducing new artists to local and international scenes.
- The representation of BIPOC artists as validation of and/or challenge to institutional spaces.
- The role of photographic representation in the contestation of gender-based categories by non-male artists
- Representations capturing the negotiations and challenges of non-Western artists in resisting their otherization in hegemonic spaces.
- The portrayal of collectives and associations of artists.
- Representations capturing the tensions faced by local artists in adopting international languages such as abstraction, assemblage, and pop art, as well as their interaction with local identities.
Potential topics include:
- Depictions of forced labor including slavery, serfdom, and indentured servitude
- Depictions of fugitives, maroons, revolutionaries, and diasporic communities
- Representations of individual and collective acts of resistance
- Mapping spaces/sites/locations of freedom, fugitivity, and revolt
- Objects made by forced laborers or those who achieved freedom
- Visual culture around rebellions and uprisings
- Artistic freedom and creativity
- Coded imagery and subversive aesthetics
- Absences in the archive and/as fugitivity
This panel examines the strange spaces where monuments gather—parks, gardens, and open-air museums filled with statues in (un)curated collectives. With President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order for a National Garden of American Heroes, we confront a new iteration of state-sponsored monumental space: not singular, but a landscape of ideological assertion.
In contrast stand post-totalitarian sites filled with statues of deposed regimes, functioning not as shrines but as uneasy archives. Both types of spaces, whether celebratory or critical, signal how national memory is performed spatially, how ideology is materialized in bulk.
What aesthetics emerge in these clustered constellations of power? How do they try to shape historical consciousness? Who curates, who protests, and who visits? Proposals might draw from memory studies, visual culture, museology, political theory, urban studies or artistic practice.
We are particularly interested in how gender shaped the adoption, perception, and at times subversion of artistic media: from traditionally “feminine” crafts like embroidery to “masculine” forms such as ink painting and oil painting. How did women artists assert agency through material practices often dismissed as trivial or domestic? How did male and queer artists challenge or reinforce gender norms through medium-specific or mixed-media experimentation? How did transnational exchanges—via art schools, colonial policies, or personal networks—reshape the gendered meanings of artistic labor? Furthermore, how might the complex mediations of artistic media offer aesthetic capacities that exceed and reconfigure gendered structures? This panel aims to foster cross-regional, cross-media dialogue and to rethink East Asian art history through the intertwined lenses of gender, material practice, and historiography.
Conflicting directions and influences were in play in American nation building toward the end of the nineteenth century, and those in power needed to convey a sense of control, security, and harmony due to white settler expansion, overhunting, and industrialization. One means of controlling the landscape was in removing free roaming animals from their natural habitats through means of captivity.
Similarly, animals were consequently removed as “subjects” in depictions of landscape, pastoral, and genre scenes. Paintings by Hudson River School artists such as Asher B. Durand and Thomas Cole demonstrate this finding through pictorial devices known as empty signifiers and absent referents. Moreover, many artists integrated domestic rather than free roaming animals into wildlife landscapes as a means of depicting orderliness. These sublime but calculated paintings concealed rather than revealed, the pervasive eradication and horrific captive practices during a period known as Manifest Destiny.
Moreover, painters such as William Sidney Mount and Georg Caleb Bingham, depicted explicit images of animal captivity more broadly in American pastoral and genre scenes as nostalgic nods to an imagined arcadian past. Captive animals used for human labor and as pet companions in many of these works became veiled commodities for food, labor, and costume. This panel explores the captivity of farm animals as well as free roaming animals such as deer, squirrels, and foxes as well as the seemingly harmless paintings of gold fish bowls and birdcages within the themes of absence/presence-captivity/freedom and resistance/agency.
As many of the institutions that support artist/educators face collapse, de-funding and/or authoritarian persecution, this panel considers the instrumentalization of the arts along with the threatened dematerialization of art institutions. Schools often encourage artists, musicians, and designers alike to fall into line with the institution’s research goals and methodologies. As a result, creative practitioners are burdened with defending their practices through esoteric debates that compare/contrast, for example, practice-led vs. practice-based research, or calculating the ways art can serve other disciplines. Often lacking is constructive argument for the intrinsic value of creative work, which in and of itself generates its own content for critical examination. Support for art in the academy has increasingly been based on assertions such as “the arts [should] contribute to the gross domestic product and are good for business.” This is shaky ground--such arguments do not articulate the fundamental humanity of art, nor the dangers of pitching to monied interests, something former president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Don Michael Randel warned “make[s] us seem cultured as we concentrate on material goals.” Current institutional structures are not the only option; the education of artists has taken different forms over time, from family workshops to guild apprenticeships to degree-granting programs. What forms would provide the most advantages to artist/educators and young artists in the midst of rapidly changing social and environmental conditions? This panel explores this question in concert with a range of historical, radical, and emergent propositions for art education.
This panel invites papers that analyze case studies to address these historiographic and methodological questions. Topics might include the role of museum collections in canon formation and critique, the function of a repeated list of key artists moving from east to west in museum exhibitions and books related to the American West, the role of race in these constructions, regional bias within the field of American art, and/or entwinements with histories of photography. Equally welcome are talks reinterpreting key figures in the “Western Art” canon; challenging regional borders that frequently frame constructions of the West; analyzing past or recent exhibitions that challenge inherited narratives like “The West as America” (1991), “Knowing the West” (2024) and “Many Wests: Artists Shape an American Idea” (2023); and exploring with methodological insights from art history, Native American Studies, or other related disciplines.
Bridging art history, material and visual culture, human geography, and environmental humanities, this session seeks to integrate phenomenological approaches (Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Casey), material and object-oriented ontology (Bennett, Harman), and geographical theory (Ingold) with close visual and historical analysis. We are particularly interested in how the materiality of land—its textures, substances, and transformations—was registered, abstracted, or resisted in the practices of representation across diverse geographies, media, and artistic traditions during this period.
Contributors might consider:
- The material construction of landscape images: grounds, supports, pigments, and surfaces
- Representing geological time, land use, or extraction industries
- Earth as medium: pigment, sediment, and organic matter in artistic practice
- Artistic responses to ecological degradation
- Indigenous and non-Western modes of representing land and territory
- The role of materiality in 19th-century cartography or land surveys
- The visual rhetorics of land ownership, enclosure, and displacement
- Intersections of land, labor, and class in visual culture
We welcome proposals engaging with both canonical and understudied works that rethink landscape through its material and representational operations.
At a fall 2025 workshop at Vanderbilt University, Positioning the Contemporary in University Historical Collections, curators from university museums and galleries in the US, UK, and Europe shared perspectives and strategies from the vantage point of our particular peer network. This panel extends the project by inviting case studies of integrations of contemporary artwork in historical galleries at any type of museum. We view “historical” and “contemporary” as relational and shifting, with respect to their definitions across geographies, subfields, and curatorial departments, and this panel will probe the use of these terms. Similarly, we position “museum” as irrespective of size, scope, location, or departmental composition, but seek to expand upon the project’s initiation in the context of academic institutions.
This panel explores how lighting conditions affect the sensory and aesthetic reception of artworks. It invites contributions that examine light not as a motif, but as an external, contextual and performative agent — one that may dialogue with, enhance, or disrupt the artwork’s visual and material presence. We encourage proposals engaging with aesthetic reception theory (e.g., Kemp 1998; Wilder 2020), historical lighting technologies (Underhill 2017, 2018), or approaches from sensory studies. How did the evolution of lighting techniques impact artistic practice and display? In what ways did they interact with historical theories on the physical, artistic or even spiritual dimension of light, which also could determine the viewer’s expectations and appreciation of the object? Can knowledge of historical lighting conditions be reintegrated into today’s curatorial strategies?
Read together, materiality and mapping have the potential to radically shape methodological and theoretical change across art practice, history, and critique. Building from interdisciplinary works by Katherine McKittrick, Sylvia Wynter, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, and Okwui Enwezor and Atreyee Gupta, this session seeks papers that address and expand the myriad methods for mapping deviant spaces/times; or places considered transgressive, outside the norm, or excessive. We place maps and materials in a state of flux to allow for generative theories that remake contested spaces across the Global South, greater Black Diaspora, and beyond.
The co-chairs of this session encourage submissions from all, especially students, artists, makers, curators, and those working outside the arts.
Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
- New methodologies or approaches for transgressing contested spaces or borderlands, such as the use of digital humanities tools; ways to read, access, and remix maps; shared experiences across time/space
- Collaborations or case studies from outside the arts
- Coproduction as a distinct art practice/research method
- Taking up/filling space with materials or methodologies
- The use of “unconventional” or transformational materials, or materials that require cultural knowledge (found objects, hair, plants, food)
- Challenges to the disciplines of art practice, history, and criticism by engaging with non-traditional spaces/theories
Buddhism rejects, doctrinally, the fixity of physical constants. Consequently, objects and images made in service to the faith often likewise refuse to adhere to traditionally understood material affordances. As Buddhism took root and developed in East Asia during the medieval period, artists began to explore how they might visualize Buddhist concepts like immateriality and impermanence, infinity and multiplicity – frameworks that not only challenged the conventions of ordinary representation but also stimulated new modes of artistic innovation. The resulting works reveal how early Buddhist communities in East Asia imagined stone as transparent, bronze as aqueous, wood as fleshy, and painted surfaces as permeable.
Through a selection of case studies from across East Asia, this panel aims to explore Buddhist theories of materiality and, in doing so, demonstrate how Buddhism functioned not merely as a religious basis for image-making, but as a generative force for the creation of new visualities through material and iconographic experimentation. We are particularly interested in how artists made visible the unstable and protean nature of matter, questioned the boundaries between form and formlessness, or used conventional materials in unexpected ways to produce effects of revelation, transcendence, or immanence.
Art historians have shown how surface motifs in cave shrines allowed devotees to see through stone, or how the surfaces of votive sculpture acted as traversable membranes through which Buddhas and bodhisattvas might manifest in the human world. We invite proposals that explore similar questions of transparency, permeability, and material reimagining across diverse media, sites, and regional contexts.
We invite contributions that investigate how experiences of historical trauma and loss were not only recorded but felt, and how extant objects carry such experiences into the present. How have diverse makers across the Americas wielded both quotidian and precious materials to grapple with loss? How have artworks not only addressed individual grief but also participated in collective reckonings with colonial and extractivist violence? How have varied communities mourned the decay, theft, or destruction of cultural heritage? And finally, how do intertwined contemporary crises of pandemic, war, disaster, and extinction condition our encounters with historical objects? We welcome submissions that engage with these and similar questions in relation to the art of the Americas from any period and in any medium.
Inspired by the ever-growing body of scholarship on photography’s role in identity discourse, this panel invites proposals that explore the shifting relationships between image-making, representation, and power across geographical and temporal localities. There are no regional or time-period limitations; in fact, we are especially interested in work that stretches, overlaps, or complicates those boundaries. We welcome contributions that examine photography as archive, practice, method, or social practice.
Ideally, papers will bring together diverse transdisciplinary approaches from art history and visual culture to Indigenous studies, Black studies, queer theory, critical disability studies, Latinx studies, or media archaeology. From this, we hope to open up new conversations around photography’s role in shaping and complicating subjectivity. As images continue to flood our everyday lives on proliferating fronts, this panel aims to gather a broad range of perspectives that can reveal the tensions and possibilities within photography towards decolonial praxis.
Possible topics include, among others: the business of commercial photo-processing, industrial labour at the photographic factory and related sites along the supply chain, as well as more informal arrangements of photographic labour, from the contributions of photographer's wives and daughters to the early history of photography to that the so-called "clickworkers" behind contemporary technologies of image generation. Papers that engage with histories of photographic labour from feminist, postcolonial, and materialist perspectives are especially welcome, as are those that reflect on the methodological challenges of tracing histories of photographic labour marked by archival absence and historiographic neglect.
-What can be revealed by tracing the trade routes along which pigments travelled?
-How did environmental or geological factors affect the raw materials of natural pigments? How were they harvested, processed, and made into paint?
-Who played a role in this process? What were the socio-economic or power dynamics at play?
-How did the use of pigments conform to or converge from art theory? How did artists experiment to achieve desired color, light, or textural effects?
-What can pigments tell us about the perceived value or purpose of a painting?
This panel invites papers covering topics that may include: property regimes, jurisdiction and jurisprudence, Indigenous legal frameworks, critiques of state or common law, racial capitalism, land use and rights.
While open to diverse paths of inquiry, this panel proposes two primary lines of inquiry. First, critical investigations of current activism practices in AR/VR-based activism. Second, imagining future potentials for AR/VR activism amidst the constraints of repressive sociopolitical environments. Drawing from critiques, such as Ann Thorpe’s call for redefining the realm of design activism, and insights from critical perspectives, such as “Digital Activism and Design” (Begüm Aylin Önder, 2024), the panel aims to interrogate both ethical frameworks and conceptual paradigms.
What ethical considerations must inform activist AR/VR productions to avoid reinforcing bias? How are artist using immersive media to resist marginalization and challenge hegemonic narratives? How do current socio-political conditions shape the reception and distribution of activist AR/VR? Can immersive AR/VR experiences foster long-term engagement with social issues, beyond fleeting emotional responses? How can producers and users navigate censorship and surveillance within virtual spaces? In what ways can AR/VR reimagine and expand on pivotal moments and historical uprisings to inform and inspire contemporary forms of activism?
This panel seeks a broad range of perspectives from diverse disciplines – including, but not limited to graphic design, humanities, interaction design, history.
This session seeks papers that explore why patrons and artists might have made certain choices for their final products, as opposed to how a final image was formally achieved for Roman women. What logistical and ideological choices might have factored into a woman’s representation and why? How might these visual choices reveal women’s agency in the absence of textual evidence for their voices? Submissions may focus on individuals or groups of women from a wide range of social classes–imperial, senatorial, business, freed; a range of cultural and geographic backgrounds– Britain to Syria, Romania to North Africa; and a broad chronological range from 7th c. BCE – 4th c CE.
By centering craft, this session provides an opportunity to recover and reframe these overlooked narratives, recognizing the contributions of marginalized communities—particularly women, Indigenous groups, and diasporic artists—whose work has shaped both historical and contemporary art. As Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson emphasized in her keynote at Rice University, "there are no self-taught artists; they are mother-taught artists." This poignant observation underscores the importance of craft as a generational, community-based knowledge that has shaped art outside formal academic structures.
This panel invites papers that explore the interplay between curatorial imagination and technological innovation, especially those that challenge linear narratives of progress. We welcome contributions that critically examine how museums use digital tools not simply to replicate or preserve, but to reframe histories, resurface silenced stories, or embody alternative futures. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Speculative design in museum practices
- Immersive or virtual experiences in museum
- Reconstructed period rooms as sites of technological and narrative layering
- Curatorial strategies inspired by fiction, fantasy, or “failed” historical models
- The ethics of technologically mediated curation
We particularly encourage interdisciplinary perspectives that draw from art history, media studies, architecture, digital humanities, human-computer-interaction, and museum studies. By revisiting old dreams with new tools, this panel seeks to open up space for experimental, reflexive, and imaginative curatorial futures.
Ritual implements consistently operated in spaces between conventional taxonomies. Altars were not merely surfaces for sacrifice; votive objects did more than just fulfill promises to gods; and baptismal fonts created multisensory environments beyond facilitating ritual acts involving water. Yet scholarly approaches have often privileged normative functions, overlooking the rich plurality of roles these objects fulfilled simultaneously.
This session invites papers exploring the active, plural functions of ritual implements across the Roman world from the Republic through Late Antiquity. Examples of welcome topics include but are not limited to: votive offerings functioning beyond gifts to become participants in religious communication; portable ritual objects creating shifting meanings through context and use; incense burners serving as sensory mediators and spatial organizers; inscribed objects communicating their ritual purposes through materiality and placement; and architectural elements incorporated into ritual spaces to become didactic tools in ceremonial performance.
We seek papers investigating how ritual objects' materiality, visuality, and spatial relationships shaped religious experiences beyond their conventional functions in both polytheistic and Christian contexts throughout Rome and its territories.
The proposed session “Seeing Cezanne Anew,” co-chaired by Gloria Groom, chair of Painting and Sculpture of Europe and David and Mary Winton Green Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) and Kathryn Kremnitzer, Paul Cezanne Society Member, will capitalize on the exciting momentum in the wake of Cezanne 2025 to reignite Cezanne studies, past, present, and future, into the modern digital age and beyond. The panel will introduce the AIC’s forthcoming online scholarly collection catalogue of paintings and works on paper by Cezanne–complete with new conservation images and information in addition to art historical essays–which will be available for free online by the time of the conference, as well as the new resources and ongoing research in Aix to maintain and expand the artist’s catalogue raisonne as a living repository, available for free online (www.cezannecatalogue.com). The session will invite contributions that engage with the artist and his work across disciplines, in depth, or in dialogue.
This panel seeks to explore the role contemporary art and visual culture play in problematizing/establishing citizenship. What is the future of socially engaged art that anchors spectatorship in civic duty? How do emerging technologies play into these questions? Papers are welcome that explore these and other questions related to global, cultural and legal citizenship across a variety of media.
This panel invites critical, speculative approaches leveraging interactive technologies that respond to users to reimagine how we sense, feel, and relate.
We welcome contributions across artistic and design practices, including wearable technologies, interactive web-based media, immersive media (VR/AR), speculative design, novel experiences through emerging technologies, installation art, creative coding, and AI‑driven systems. Whether through tangible artifacts, responsive environments, sensory interfaces, or virtual worlds, panelists will explore how technology can foster presence, empathy, and new forms of embodied relational experience.
Rather than positioning technology as a neutral tool of innovation, the works presented treat it as an active collaborator, fostering connection and deeper emotional engagement. These practices challenge dominant narratives of technological progress and propose alternative imaginaries where technology supports human vulnerability, creativity, and shared meaning.
By weaving together material exploration, artistic experimentation, and critical inquiry, this panel seeks to expand the discourse around sensory and embodied technologies, relational design, and future‑oriented practices at the convergence of art, design, artificial intelligence, and emerging media.
We invite artists and scholars working in this space to share their tactical work unraveling the segregationist logics of race and sex that structure what Maria Lugones described as “the coloniality of gender.” We are interested in practices which generate transversal lines of solidarity and/or open up new avenues for the feeling and expression of pleasure. We are interested in creative, archival, curatorial and theoretical projects. We are most interested in artists thinking with material and archives, and scholars thinking deeply with the practices of artists who do so.
Moderators: Sara E. Thom (Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art), Laura L. Watts Sommer (Temple University, 1999)
Strong artistic ties between Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resulted in flourishing artistic centers on both coasts of the Atlantic. But what about within the Atlantic? Disruptions from war, economic uncertainty, and a desire for new visual inspiration led many artists to explore alternative destinations. Some—including Winslow Homer, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and Albert Gleizes— found their way to sites within, rather than around, the Atlantic. The participants of “Suitcase Modernism,” gathered at the 2026 CAA Conference in Chicago, will review Intra-Atlantic artistic experience during this period to reconsider the history and parameters of Transatlantic exchange.
Island locales – for instance Bermuda, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and the Azores – drew artists to their shores with the promise of a low cost of living, temperate climates and, increasingly, modern amenities and infrastructure. The tropicality of these settings, as well as their liminality of travel, has arguably influenced existing scholarship, which often casts these periods of artistic production as exceptions or brief divergences from a consistent and intentional artistic path on the continents and in urban centers. “Suitcase Modernism” seeks papers addressing Intra-Atlantic production and the role artists’ sojourns played in their artistic development. The focus will be on decentering Modernist experimentation from New York and Paris and expanding the scope of early-twentieth-century art.
How did women’s experience and their work align with the romanticized vision? Carrington was hospitalized due to psychosis, Kahlo likely had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Oppenheim struggled with depression, and Sekula’s and Zürn’s schizophrenia affected their art and lives. Did these women—and others—see themselves reflected in the surrealist ideal of feminine madness? Did they find the masculine, surrealist dream of feminized, mad genius prohibitive—or productive? This panel explores how the work of women artists pushed surrealism far beyond the mere idealization of feminine madness—and how actual feminine mental illness may have expanded and deepened surrealist art. Papers might consider the surrealist fascination with feminine mental illness that frames this discussion. Others might explore the lives and work of surrealist women artists or themes that arise in multiple artists’ oeuvres. Papers might also reflect on women artists who were considered mad but were not; how did that appellation affect their careers? Still others might address the ethics of addressing mental illness in dead artists.
Building on recent works such as 1898: Visual Culture and U.S. Imperialism in the Caribbean and the Pacific and Painting US Empire, this session turns to architecture. Potential contributions might consider, for example, the architectural history of US state- and US capital-led development in overseas territories, the construction of industrial enclaves, the history of so-called civilizing and modernizing missions, and the architectural footprint of the US military. Narratives might center on urban plans, corporate headquarters, territorial infrastructures, workers’ housing, hotels, industrial works, diplomatic buildings, and international development programs. What does the study of architecture help us understand about the at times overt and at times covert project of US empire?
This session invites papers that examine artworks in which the question operates as more than mere rhetoric—where it becomes material, method, and message. We ask: How have Latin American artists used questions in their creative practices? What kinds of spectatorship do these works generate? Are these questions meant to be answered, or do they resist resolution? How do they function as tools of critique, knowledge production, or political engagement?
We are particularly interested in proposals that consider the interplay between visual art and other expressive forms—poetry, sound, performance, literature—where questioning becomes a transmedial strategy. Contributions may focus on artists based in Latin America or those working within diasporic and migratory contexts.
By foregrounding the question as a conceptual and formal element, this panel seeks to deepen our understanding of how Latin American artists mobilize uncertainty, provocation, and dialogue to imagine new aesthetic and political possibilities.
However, what happens behind and around the body? This facet of portraiture remains an open field. Our panel thus invites papers that examine the margins and backgrounds of portraits. These spaces vary from roundels or planes of color, to classicizing scenes or imaginary gardens, to draperies or architectural structures. As much as standardized formulas and techniques have developed for the face itself, the (back)ground has been curiously resistant to such strategies. This panel asks what do these diverse environments—a visualized “habitus,” to borrow from Bourdieu—contribute to the portrait? How might painterly surroundings trouble notions of identity and modernity? For group portraits and conversation pieces, how does setting provoke or dismiss relationality? Do specific display or exhibition contexts become extended backgrounds for portraits, especially with sculptures? Ultimately, how do the edges, however they might be defined, (re)frame our understanding of the key genre of portraiture? In addition to paying close attention to the borders and liminal spaces of portraiture as traditionally understood, we also welcome papers that trouble the definitions of portraiture itself through close attention to context.
This session welcomes presentations featuring art products from across the global 20th and 21st centuries, with the aim of identifying key conceptual issues in the two-fold challenge: to theorize art objects as consumer goods and/or consumer products as kinds of art. From questions of originality and authorship to the numerous politics of manufacturing and marketing things as “art,” the session convenes around the clear sense that, in consumerist terms, art is not (just a kind of) design—though it may be haunted by its modes of enterprise. The session welcomes case studies that show how this simple distinction leads systems of art to generate their own vast range of consumer goods—objects that, while rarely rendered precious, may reach the lives of many more people than “real” artworks ever will.
Is the artists’ approbation within a biased (e.g. racist, sexist, etc.) art world virtue signaling? Or does it amount to sustainably proportional representation? How can we respond to the increased visibility and recognition for historically marginalized contemporary artists? How might we use this opportunity to remake how contemporary art is interpreted, valued, and disseminated?
Possible paper topics include:
- Ways of restituting artists’ entire careers within art historical discourse when professional recognition comes late
- Newer definitions of “contemporary artist,” e.g. collaborative artists’ groups; artists with built-in creative relationships with community; artists who favor forms of remuneration other than money; art activism
- Acts of curatorial activism resulting in sustainable change
- Art history’s responses and responsibilities regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion, e.g. deconstructing/reconstructing canons
- Disruptive publications as counter-discourse to canonical journals or other publishing models
We call for papers that engage radical acts of making one’s body or work out of sync with capitalist productivity, nationalist modernization, and technological acceleration. This may look like nonproduction or withdrawal, lethargy or tang ping, abject failure, “aesthetics of disengagement,” and projects that disrupt the financial and legal timeline of art ownership. We take special note of how race, gender, class, and disability figure into performances of non-work. As Big Tech dreams of speeding into the posthuman era, what might we learn lingering on the body and materiality, on nonwestern/Indigenous technics, and on the lags and glitches that disrupt devices of war and policing? We also invite projects that grapple with the nonlinear time of change-making—including the unfinished projects of decolonization, reparation, and climate justice, and moments of friction and impasse in allyship- and community-building.
By foregrounding the politics of time, this panel asks how contemporary art histories might be told not through moments of breakthrough, but through inching forward or refusing to move at all. Transnational and diasporic perspectives that complicate Eurocentric readings of labor, futurity, and agency are encouraged.
Rather than focusing solely on anti-violence messages or activist art, this panel invites nuanced investigations into how guns are visualized—how their meanings shift across context, culture, and form. How do artists negotiate the line between critique and glorification, between documentation and fetish? What strategies—satirical, poetic, forensic, or visceral—have artists employed to confront the aesthetics and politics of armed violence? How do audiences respond to such images, and how do institutions frame them?
This session seeks interdisciplinary papers that examine artistic representations of guns in photography, film, painting, performance, installation, and digital media. Topics might include: the eroticization of weaponry; guns as national iconography; artworks responding to mass shootings; visual culture in armed protest; or the weapon as archive. In centering the ethical questions that emerge from this work, the session asks: What does it mean to look at a gun in art, and what kind of looking does such an image demand?
We distinguish the language of inclusive design—typically practiced by designers and engineers—from the interpretive frameworks of the humanities. While design discourse often focuses on functionality and legibility, humanities-based approaches examine how artworks and built objects function as sites of representation and negotiation. This panel draws on art history, disability theories, and bioethics to rethink the cultural life of coded objects: how they are made, circulated, and understood—not only as technologies, but as expressions of social values, power, and political imaginaries.
We invite proposals from scholars, artists, curators, and technologists investigating disability-centered approaches to art and design. We are particularly interested in how uncertainty—whether affective, infrastructural, or epistemic—can be embraced as part of the design process.
This session seeks to build a generative vocabulary for access that transcends disciplines. By approaching art as a form of technology and access as a cultural practice, we ask: What kind of tools and environments do we create when we design not just for bodies, but with them? And what does it mean to locate the work of access within ethics, imagination, and cultural production?
We invite papers that reconsider assessment in art history and architectural history at the university level. We welcome the results of classroom experiments and reflections, including but not limited to the alternative assessment methods mentioned above; new theoretical frameworks for teaching art history; experiments in student-centered approaches; historical perspectives on grading’s role in disciplining art historical knowledge; or collaborative redefinitions of assessment. Together, the panel asks: What is possible when our students approach art history not as a way to make the grade but as a tool to see the world anew?
We encourage contributions from art historians working on all historical periods, from ancient to contemporary.
In March 2025, Mary Miss’s Greenwood Pond: Double Site (1989-1996), a derelict pond reclaimed as a “demonstration wetland,” was demolished by the Des Moines Art Center after a legal battle. A federal judge opined that Miss’s environment was “not really a sculpture,” hence not protected under the Visual Artists Rights Act. Many other artist-designed landscapes have fallen into disrepair or are at risk of demolition. Fuller art historical understanding of these artworks is urgently needed to support their preservation and maintenance.
This panel seeks papers that situate this late twentieth century development within disciplines of art history, urban history, and environmental history, or address specific environments by Miss, Noguchi, Nancy Holt, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Jody Pinto, Elyn Zimmerman, and others. How do urban environments designed by artists engage social and environmental justice? Why have these projects been marginalized within art history, and how might their consideration expand our discipline in important ways?
While photography historians Andrés Zervigón and Sabine Kriebel have questioned the utility of the technique, asking “Is Photomontage Over?,” we read their question as an invitation as much as a provocation. Contemporary artists working with photography, like Giana De Dier and Joiri Minaya, are finding in photomontage and collage opportunities for historical redress— remediating archival absences, challenging gendered and racial stereotypes, and imagining utopian scenarios. Meanwhile, contemporary scholars are revisiting photomontages from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, proposing novel interpretations. We invite contributions that frame photomontage (and its peers, photo-collage, combination printing, and photographic assemblage) as techniques for emancipatory worldmaking and resistance. We especially welcome proposals that consider global perspectives and/or center artists from marginalized communities, including women, BIPOC, queer, and migrant individuals. By exploring how artists have strategically employed photomontage to take apart and reassemble the world around them, this panel reconceives photographic “reality” in favor of the fantastical, the liberatory, the humorous, the erotic, and the utopian.
Third in this multi-year series, Reflections on Blue invites global explorations into the material, semiotic, and environmental operations of bodies of water (oceans, rivers, deltas, mangroves, etc.) and their strategic spaces (dams, ports, ships, aquariums, etc.) on the production and circulation of art and material culture from prehistory to today. Inspired by the recent rise of the Blue Humanities and the “oceanic turn” in literature and media studies, this panel will highlight original engagements with how the “elementality” of blue matter is represented and inscribed to move away from positivistic rejection and primitivist acceptance of nonhuman agency. Potential themes include: engagements with the Circum-Pacific and Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, the Circumpolar Arctic, and diasporas across these liquid spaces; environmental art; Indigenous aesthetics and geontology; oceans in artistic exchange; resource extraction; art as a sensing technology; formalism; critiques of anthropocentrism.
This panel seeks to explore the generative, yet overlooked role of water in video art history, as well as the continued confluence of water and video. We invite papers that examine how water was not only the subject of the work of early video artists like Kubota, Steina, Joan Jonas, Bill Viola, and others, but also a formal and conceptual framework for video’s fluid, mutable, and connective characteristics. Papers may also consider how, as screens have become more expansive, contemporary artists like John Akomfrah, Isaac Julien, and Wu Tsang use immersive video to plumb historic traumas and more-than-human encounters within oceanic depths. We are especially interested in papers that take water as a lens through which to rethink both video art’s history (where video may be understood as a form of land–or water–art, for instance), and its future as a media art form with ecological significance and decolonial potential.
As Britain, France, and the United States moved to abolish slavery, unscrupulous ship captains and labor traders from these very nations removed hundreds of thousands Pacific Islanders and Asian people from their homelands. This practice, known as blackbirding, peaked during the second half of the 19th century and involved trading people to places such as Australia, Fiji, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, and even Peru, where they worked under conditions that sometimes closely resembled slavery.
While the history of blackbirding is relatively well known, less attention has been given to the visual and material culture that bears witness to the journeys and lived experiences of these indentured workers. Yet, as the growing scholarship on the material culture of transatlantic slavery has shown, such artifacts can deepen our understanding of the lives of those who left little written records and open new ways of connecting people, objects, and places across time and space.
This panel invites papers that contribute to the writing of this history, whether through the study of archival records, historical objects, photographs, and built environments, or through the lens of contemporary artists whose work engages with the history of blackbirding. In doing so, this panel aims to expand the historical record and bring renewed attention to the cultural, visual, and material legacies of those whose lives were shaped by these coercive practices.
There is a stubborn belief that feminist art focuses on the image of the body. Meanwhile, the core of feminist art is conceptual and social practice; art that is designed not just to be looked at, but also to be acted upon. Text- or language-based art—including what Hélène Cixous called écriture feminine—has been its crucial component as women probe their erasure from historical texts, objectification in law, the experience of speaking a language as racialized and sexualized subjects, or the male-centrism of language, including AI and the internet.
The session is the last in the series of three; part of broader research that seeks to fill a gap in literature about feminist language-based art by privileging transnational, multigenerational, and intersectional comparisons, globally. The first session in 2024 provided a comparative perspective on the Middle East and North Africa; part II—on Latin America and the Caribbean. Part III in 2026 features scholarly analyses and artists’ presentations with a focus on the Eastern and South-Eastern Asia and Asian diasporas. Presentations will discuss artworks where oral expression and poetry dominate the written, and those engaging with ancient traditions of calligraphy and secret languages of women; both sound-based and text-based projects.
This panel will expand definitions of motherhood by encompassing broader lived experiences of support, maintenance, disability, and survival through the voices of non-biological m/others and queer, trans/femme, lesbian, and nonbinary communities; by chronicling menopause; by tending to the ill or elderly; and by exploring care-work in roles as curators, collectors, and dealers. We invite scholars, artists, curators, and critics to submit papers that engage with these themes from historical, theoretical, and practice-based perspectives. Compelling presentations will reflect how care radically serves the creative lives of artists and cultural workers. By foregrounding mothering and caregiving as critical methodologies, our session aims to challenge dominant narratives of productivity and value in the art world and to elevate the creative capacities of women working at its margins.
Drawing and painting from nature have long been part of the art school tradition, yet in many classrooms, this practice is still taught in isolation from urgent ecological, cultural, and ethical questions. How can we encourage students to look more deeply—not just at, but into—the natural world? How can we help them move beyond representation to relationship?
This session invites artists and educators to share approaches that engage:
- Scientific perspectives on plant intelligence, communication, and ecological interdependence
- Indigenous knowledge systems that see land as animate and wise, and that prioritize listening and reciprocity
- Contemporary artistic practices that challenge the human-centered gaze and seek new ways of seeing and being with nature
We welcome examples from the classroom, field-based experiences, collaborative projects, and community-engaged art. The goal is to offer practical ideas and open up a conversation about how teaching landscape art can cultivate attention, humility, and care.
This panel solicits papers that explore practices exceeding the medium-specific lens, approaches that unsettle institutional art perspectives, and methodologies that allow for the complexity of video's role within the art world to come into view. Contributions focused on practices beyond the New York art world, experiments that took place in public schools or farming communities, events in which video brought artists working in radically different media together, or video exchanges that coalesced new social forms are particularly welcome. Given the expansive video archives that have become available over the last decade, what new perspectives can we coalesce around this now central medium of artistic production?
Themes may include (but are not limited to):
- Anthropomorphism and/or aniconism in representations of water deities and mythological narratives
- The iconography of water deities in specific regions and time periods
- Representations of water as an essential element of religious ritual.
- The relationship between water imagery, medium, and materiality
- The role of water in the production of sacred space and as an element of architectural design
- Conceptual approaches to the iconography of water within/across culturally specific image systems
We welcome papers that engage these topics from a broad spectrum of contemporary scholarly perspectives, including phenomenology, eco-criticism, and intermediality, among others. Comparative studies are particularly encouraged
Motivated by Sigmund Freud's famous essay "Civilization and its Discontents" on the irreconcilable clash between individual instincts and societal regulations, this panel aims to reread the garden into its concrete sociohistorical textures. Furthermore, drawing from the precise translation of the essay's original title, "The Discontent in Civilization," this panel approaches the garden as a contested site between ideologies, discourses, and sensibilities in which contradictions and antagonisms are inherently constitutive of its construction. From the Venetian terraferma to the Japanese bonsai, from the English picturesque to the American wilderness, the garden addresses specific questions of its times, and challenges its presumed harmony and unity: What are the discontents housed within the seemingly serene Elysium? What perceptual and conceptual tensions need to be identified, what hierarchies undone?
We welcome submissions on the discontents of/in the garden across cultures and histories. This "comparative-global" approach, we hope, would highlight in turn the cultural-specificity and social constructedness of the garden. Articulating these discontents, then, would offer valuable insights into the binaries of art-science, nature-culture, self-other urgent to today's ecologically conscious world.
We encourage abstracts that rethink the traditional methods of sculpture in art history in relation to gender, sexuality, race, class and/or disability. We invite proposals for contributions that stem from but are not limited to the following: fragmentation and decay; queer and trans perspectives; health and disability; age and representation; processes of othering; materiality; redefinitions/responses to normativity/the normative body; artists engaging in their work via lived experience or through materiality. We are looking at this issue transhistorically and globally, across a range of sculpture practices, from ancient to the contemporary, and the figurative to the abstract.
ancient peoples regularly theorized unique relationships between clay and flesh. In the ancient Greek epic
poem the Theogony, the craftsman god Hephaestus shaped Pandora “from earth.” That is, the first woman
was, essentially, a terracotta statue. In the K’iche’ Maya Popol Vuh, the Framer and the Shaper likewise
first attempt to make people out of mud and earth, but this creation is not successful. Why might clay be a
fitting material from which to consider rendering a human body? And how can thinking about the
affordances of clay provoke specific ways of understanding how the human body relates to the more-
than-human world?
This panel seeks to investigate how clay and objects made from it explore, interrogate, and redefine the
human body. Recent scholarship has approached both making and materiality as critical modes by which
knowledge about the cosmos and humanity’s place within it could be produced. How, therefore, do the
unique qualities of clay — from the site at which it is harvested to the transformative process of firing —
invite culturally specific understandings of the human body? From anthropogony to eschatology, how
could clay craft humanity? How did objects made of clay shape ancient ways of conceptualizing bodies
— and how do they provide evidence of those conceptions today? This panel invites considerations of the
relationship between clay and the human body from throughout the geo-temporal scope of the ancient
world.
Artists across diverse Asian contexts have drawn on a range of frameworks—some grounded in Indigenous cosmologies, others shaped by religious, vernacular, or philosophical traditions—to conceptualize nature and the human place within it. These frameworks are not only visible in the materials artists choose—such as earth, wood, or fiber—but are also embedded in process: in ways of making that emphasize time, labor, ritual, or ecological attunement.
This panel invites papers that examine how such practices have shaped the form, meaning, and function of artworks. How have artists mobilized local terms or processes to visualize the environment? What kinds of knowledge are embedded in their work? And how might these practices prompt a reconsideration of dominant ecological paradigms in art history?
This panel focuses specifically on traveling exhibitions as case studies for vital yet loaded issues facing the art world today. How can we afford to host touring shows, both economically and morally? How might organizers and venues sustain long-running exhibitions in times of great political divisiveness and uncertainty? What does true museum accessibility mean in nation plagued by increasingly ‘anti-woke’ political mandates?
Submitters are encouraged to focus on policies, advocacy groups, forthcoming exhibitions, or past shows that inform current thinking. Papers may, for example, address DEIA exhibition-making at federally-funded institutions, the viability of carbon offsets, the democratization and multilingual translation of didactic materials, or collaborative outreach initiatives with national and local social justice organizations. Comparison between standards among U.S. and international institutions is welcome.
Colonialism and imperialism, though experienced differently across East Asia in the twentieth century, are shared structures in which postwar artistic practices unfolded. At the same time, such practices were formed through local histories of development, mass political movements, and military conflicts. We invite submissions that explore this tension between locally specific and globally shared conditions, which are linked to thematic tensions in the study of art from this period: urbanization and rurality; collectivity and subjectivity; development and tradition to name a few. Moving beyond formal or conceptual comparisons often developed with models based on “contemporaneity” and “pseudo-morphology,” our panel explores how material changes and resonances between art in East Asia can be grounded more historically. Beyond remapping art practices in the region, this panel proposes a “communal history” that imagines new forms of global art history, which escape from the nation-state framework and the market logic, presentism, and institutional imperatives of globalism. Instead, we advocate for art historical narratives anchored in the layered entanglements that connect different regions.
An earthquake often provokes a strong impulse to represent devastation in visual culture. The ruined landscape may also serve as an empty ground for new artistic and architectural endeavors to emerge. The creative force of art-making also has the potential to envision a world free of disaster, offering ways to mitigate loss and instill hope for those who survived. More importantly, artistic and architectural responses to seismic and ecological upheavals also reflect and interrogate economic, political, and social relations.
We hope each paper in this panel will ground its analysis in the deep historical contexts of individual cases. Collectively, they will also provide a trans-historical, comparative perspective on how art represents, rethinks, and reimagines life in the aftermath of an earthquake.
This panel aims to explore the reception, manipulation, restoration, or destruction of ancient objects from the Renaissance through the end of the nineteenth century. We invite papers that investigate whether the specific materiality of ancient objects makes them more vulnerable or resistant to later intervention. Topics can include the exploration of the concept of in/completeness in relation to changing tastes and theoretical divisions between the fine and applied arts; in/completeness and restoration in relation to aesthetic and historical integrity; and the exploration of pastiches. We seek contributions that look closely at surviving objects to extrapolate new ways of thinking about the reception of ancient art.
Focusing on the period between 500 BCE and 500 CE, we seek papers that explore new approaches to the aesthetics of early Celtic art, its portable objects, transregional ties, and responses to encroaching Roman imperialism. We also invite presentations on new findings from recent excavations. Especially welcome are talks that offer solutions to incorporating ancient Celtic art into public debates about antiquities and their afterlives. The panel complements a Harvard Art Museums exhibit scheduled to open in early March 2026. “Celtic Art Across the Ages” will be the first major exhibition on this topic to take place in the United States, and our panel aims to seize this moment to forge new connections with colleagues and to develop new frameworks for interpreting art rarely seen outside of Europe.
We welcome papers that address how anarchist-inflected subterfuge operates through visual ambiguity, coded symbolism, performative intervention, or media strategies aimed at subverting institutional frameworks, authoritarian censorship, or societal norms. Contributions might also consider contemporary artists or collectives who continue this legacy by employing anarchist-informed tactics in response to current socio-political realities, exploring how subtlety and subversion intersect within visual and performance-based avant-garde arts. Papers engaging with interdisciplinary perspectives, particularly those incorporating cultural studies, political theory, media archaeology, and gender studies, are especially encouraged. Ultimately, this session seeks to illuminate the intricate ways anarchist strategies of subterfuge continue to inform and challenge our understanding of avant-garde art’s potential to incite meaningful social and political transformation. Selected participants and paper proposals will also be invited to contribute to an anthology currently in development on the same topic.
As session chair, I am a Canadian-born artist and university educator in Canada with an MFA from the United States. Despite historically stable diplomatic relations, I encountered difficulty crossing the US/Canada border when presenting projects. Today, tensions have deepened. The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) now advises against academic activity in the United States due to concerns over safety and political instability. Trade agreements like NAFTA and USMCA, framed as collaborative, were primarily shaped by politically conservative governments and have historically prioritized corporate and elite interests over those of artists and cultural producers.
This session welcomes interdisciplinary proposals exploring how border regimes and national policies shape or restrict cultural production, mobility, collaboration, and expression. Topics might include, but are not limited to, material, conceptual, and political borders between these nations; border-crossing as an artistic method; Indigenous sovereignty and transnational resistance; immigration and labour in the arts; and critiques of trade agreements through creative practice.
Proposals may address borders between or within any of the three countries. This panel aims to foreground underrepresented voices and expand discourse on how cultural workers confront and reimagine these boundaries.
Following Jennifer L. Roberts’ (2024) close investigations of the materiality of print processes, this session proposes further enquiry into the social and material groundings of the print workshop. Despite scholarly examinations of individual 'master printers' (Stanley William Hayter, Robert Blackburn, Kenneth Tyler, Stanley Jones); particular print workshop set-ups (Paul Laidler, 2011; Christina Weyl, 2019) and important collaborating printers’ accounts of working with artists (Craig Zammiello, Kathan Brown, Phil Sanders) this area remains seldom studied and undertheorized.
This session invites artists, art historians, curators, educators, printers and printmaking workshops to consider these often neglected ecologies from various perspectives, drawing on new-materialism and related interdisciplinary methodologies including decolonial, feminist, intersectional and eco-critical approaches. Taking account of print-making’s transitory states as well as its interrelationships with wider material, social, political, economic and institutional networks, we welcome proposals that delve into the dynamics of collaboration, tacit learning and embodied knowledge, and corresponding values in and beyond the print workshop, to elucidate these important and currently threatened infrastructures.
This panel invites a critical reassessment of ancient portraiture as both a category of artistic production and a culturally situated mode of representation. Traditionally viewed as a record of individual likeness or a barometer of stylistic development, ancient portraits—especially those of the Mediterranean world—have been interpreted through frameworks such as the Zeitgesicht and the realism/idealism binary. Yet these interpretive models often obscure the diverse functions and meanings of portraiture within ancient societies, from its roles in ritual and commemoration to its capacities for political expression and memory work. Rather than treating portraits as passive reflections of identity or period style, this panel foregrounds their active role in shaping notions of personhood, authority, and temporality. We seek to explore how ancient portraits negotiated the tensions between presence and absence, life and death, past and future, and how they mobilized visual strategies that resist linear or teleological art-historical narratives.
Focusing on the ancient Mediterranean in its broadest definition, this panel encourages contributions that challenge Eurocentric or modernist assumptions about likeness, individuality, and representation. In doing so, we aim to situate portraiture within a wider set of cultural practices and intellectual frameworks—those that defined what it meant to be seen, remembered, or idealized in antiquity. By rethinking ancient portraiture as a dynamic and contested form, this panel contributes to ongoing conversations about visual culture, identity, and the ethics of interpretation in the study of the ancient world.
Public institutions are under direct attack and regularly threatened with mass layoffs, and the funding structures that sustain many arts organizations have been significantly altered. These grant submission revisions deliberately exclude programs advancing diversity, equity, access, and inclusion.
This panel examines the first-year repercussions of Trump’s culture war orders, focusing on their impact on curating and exhibiting art in the United States.
We invite curators, art critics, museum administrators, artists, and designers to submit personal case stories. Our goal is to collect important cases of contemporary curatorial practices under this unprecedented attack—the most serious since the effective defunding of the National Endowment for the Arts.
We also seek practitioners who can help interpret policies and strategies for navigating these deliberately confusing bureaucratic challenges. We welcome case studies informed by global events and related contexts.
We aim to highlight strategies and lessons learned, giving the art and curatorial communities language to articulate their challenges and space to consider ways to continue presenting high-quality exhibitions in the U.S.