Materialities of Mourning: Art and Grief in the Americas

Fein, Katherine; Fein, Katherine

This panel foregrounds the role of visual and material culture in registering, mediating, and coping with experiences of grief in the context of the Americas. In recent years, art historians have increasingly attended to material histories of extraction and colonialism that implicate artworks in vast networks of violence. Concurrently, scholars have taken up the affective and embodied encounters that enliven the relational contexts within which artworks are created and circulate. This panel brings these two burgeoning inquiries together around the study of objects associated with grief. By centering affective readings of materiality, we aim to contribute to the growing discourse around the complex entanglements between the tangible and intangible qualities of art objects—entanglements that mourning practices, in particular, so often engender.

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.

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Materialities of Mourning: Art and Grief in the Americas