Enfilade

Call for Papers | CAA 2019, New York

Posted in Calls for Papers by Editor on July 9, 2018

In the following list, I’ve maintained CAA’s ordering of the panels, but please pay close attention to the HECAA session on ‘The Versatile Artist’, chaired by Daniella Berman and Jessica Lynn Fripp, and to the ASECS session on ‘Anonymity in the Eighteenth Century’, chaired by Kee Il Choi and Sonia Coman. Also note, that for whatever reason, CAA’s employment of alphabetical order doesn’t disregard definite or indefinite articles: ‘A Global History of Early Modern Bronze’ thus appears under ‘A’ rather than ‘G’, and ‘The Anti-Black Interior?’ is listed under ‘T’ rather than ‘A’. No matter: there are compelling possibilities for 2019. CH

From the CFP:

107th Annual Conference of the College Art Association
New York Hilton Midtown, 13–16 February 2019

Proposals due by 6 August 2018

CAA seeks paper and/or project proposals for the Sessions Seeking Contributors listed below. The Sessions were selected by the CAA Annual Conference Committee from submissions by members. These sessions represent only a portion of the full conference content and do not include Complete and Composed Sessions.

Sessions are listed alphabetically by title. Affiliated Societies and CAA Professional Committees that have sessions included in the Call for Participation will have the names of their organizations listed in between the title of the session and the Chair’s name. Chairs develop sessions according to topics and themes in their abstracts. We encourage chairs to consider alternate, engaging formats other than consecutive readings of papers. All conference sessions are ninety minutes in length. For a traditional four-person panel, we recommend that each presenter not exceed fifteen minutes in order to allow time for questions and discussion.

Submission details are available here»

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A Global History of Early Modern Bronze
Chair: Sofia Gans, srg2149@columbia.edu

Despite great geographic and temporal diversity, artisans have long approached the material of bronze in similar ways. For instance, the makers of bronzes during the Chola dynasty in India employed lost-wax casting techniques similar to those used in the Meuse River valley. And yet, technical and material studies of bronze and copper alloy objects often center around the works of a particular artist or geographic region. In the early modern period in particular, studies of the processes of making bronze sculpture have been largely limited to the innovations of the Italian peninsula (see Stone on Antico and Severo da Ravenna, Sturman on Giambologna, Cole on Cellini, or Bewer on de Vries). This panel seeks not only to look beyond traditional studies of individual workshops’ approaches to making in bronze, but also to compare early modern approaches beyond an Italo-centric or western European framework. How did knowledge about casting travel? How might we interrogate the traditional distinctions between direct and indirect casting technology? How did shared approaches to casting develop? How might we place disparate traditions into dialogue with one another? The session will invite papers from art historians and conservators working on comparative approaches to early modern bronze casting, hoping to convene a panel
that engages non-western and western, northern and southern approaches to the material of bronze on a continuous spectrum. By doing so, we hope to reveal new avenues for the study of early modern bronze casting as a global phenomenon.

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Ancient Sculpture in Context 2: Reception
Chairs: Anne Hrychuk Kontokosta (New York University), anne.hrychuk@nyu.edu and Peter D. De Staebler (Pratt Institute), pdd201@nyu.edu

Some of the most celebrated sculptures from antiquity, such as the infamous Fonseca Bust, come to us “ungrounded” (Marlow 2013), with no secure provenience and lacking meaningful parameters for interpretation beyond academic discussions of style, date, workmanship, or identification. Building on a thought-provoking discussion held at CAA in 2017 (“Ancient Sculpture in Context”), this session will continue to direct vital attention toward the analysis of Greek and Roman sculpture with known find-spots, investigating how a secure archaeological origin can influence modern interpretations. This year, we seek to expand the discourse to include a wider range of chronological periods and associated methods by focusing on the later reception of ancient sculpture. Through this, we endeavor to assess how contextualization can shift over time and how these realizations can illuminate and transform our understanding of the social, historical, and economic values of ancient sculpture. This session will strive to update and redefine how we employ the facts surrounding ancient sculpture in light of current and rapidly changing views on archaeological methods, looting, and connoisseurship. Our hope is that these topics will, in turn, influence the ways that we approach teaching, research, and publication. We solicit discussions of the reception of freestanding and architectural sculpture from both original and re-use display contexts. Proposals with inter- and multidisciplinary approaches are especially welcome, and we encourage topics that apply innovative theoretical perspectives to the interpretation of ancient sculpture and its antique and post-antique reception.

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Anonymity in the Eighteenth Century (American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies)
Chairs: Kee Il Choi, amiotscup@gmail.com and Sonia Coman (Columbia University), coman.sonia@gmail.com

The entry on ‘anonymous’ in the Encyclopédie begins by defining the term, etymologically, as that which has no name or whose name is not known. This definition alone highlights the semantic richness of the anonymous as ontological and epistemological category. In the early modern period, the notion of anonymity co-existed and overlapped with those of pseudonymy and of sociopolitical and/ or sociocultural visibility or lack thereof. Issues of intentionality and authenticity further complicated the early modern understandings of the anonymous and its constellation of norms and practices. The eighteenth century saw a creative tension between conservative self-effacement and an emerging authorial ambition, manifested in literature, the visual arts, and specific forms of cultural entrepreneurship such as the activities of artists’ workshops and of marchands-merciers. If we are to look at eighteenth-century visual and material culture broadly, we will quickly realize the extent to which anonymous artifacts, loosely defined, make up the fabric of it. And yet, art history privileges (re)known artists and works, relegating the un-named and those who had fallen into anonymity, as it were, to the periphery of research and intellectual inquiry. When we walk through our museums, we become aware that anonymous artists and artifacts drive featured narratives, while the majority of things we see on display are, in fact, anonymous. Against this backdrop, and given the resurgence of interest in material culture and the ‘decorative arts’, the eighteenth-century category of the anonymous warrants a fresh look.

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Art and Empathy
Chair: Shannon M. Lieberman, shannon.lieberman@gmail.com

In 2017, the Minneapolis Institute of Art opened the Center for Empathy and the Visual Arts, Devoted to exploring “how to spark and nurture empathy through the visual arts,” the center hopes that cultivating empathy through art will allow individuals and institutions to order to “contribute even more toward building a just and harmonious society.” This session seeks papers that consider how artists, curators, and art historians engender and elicit empathy in their work. Scholars are invited to submit papers addressing, but not limited to, the following questions: How might empathy engage with difference and function as a strategy that connects people in times of divisiveness? To what extent might empathy constitute a form of radical engagement and activism? What is the cost of such empathetic explorations, and what do they demand of artists, readers, writers, and viewers? How do we make, curate, and teach these works in the age of trigger warnings? What strategies are available for engendering empathetic responses to artwork from previous time periods, and what are the benefits and pitfalls of such an undertaking? Papers may address artwork, visual culture, exhibitions, and art historical writing and criticism in any medium and from any time period.

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Art and Financial Bubbles
Chair: Maggie M. Cao (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), mmcao@unc.edu

From the Tulipmania in seventeenth-century Holland to the very recent Bitcoin frenzy, bubbles have become a defining feature of modern economic life. This session seeks to explore the financial bubble as a window into the intersection of art and economics. Such events generated a wealth of visual and material culture that took critical, documentary, and mundane forms: satirical prints, genre paintings, and performance art as well as ticker tape, trade cards, and money itself. As well, bubbles and their attendant vocabulary engage questions of economic uncertainty using a notably visual rhetoric. Mania and delusion, phenomena long associated with such events, recall mainstay concerns of artistic practice: spectacle, Illusionism, and deception. Liquidity—often understood as the underlying cause of financial bubbles—metaphorically evokes material qualities and transformations that are central to many artistic processes. This session seeks papers that examine art and material culture that emerges out of bubble culture or engages with financial risks and failures. Since financial bubbles always have global reverberations despite local or national origins, papers exploring all geographic contexts are welcome.

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Art and Justice: New Pedagogical Approaches
Chairs: Courtney Skipton Long, long.courtney.s@gmail.com and Risa Puleo, risapuleo2022@u.northwestern.edu

Considering the intersections between visual culture and criminal justice, this panel seeks to address how scholars and artists can engage in questions of social justice and activism responsibly. As issues of policing, criminal justice, and mass incarceration reach unprecedented heights around the world, this panel foregrounds papers offering insights into how we as art historians, artists, critics, museum curators, and educators might intervene to affect change. What methodological and pedagogical shifts to our practices do we need to make in order to ensure that historical inequalities and prejudices are not replicated when engaging in issues of social justice and activism? How should we reflect on our positions within the academy, the museum, or the studio to dismantle internalized personal and disciplinary biases as a means to activate the frameworks of our disciplines to contribute different perspectives in the production of a new social landscape? What critical terms need to be established when art engages social justice? And, when do we fail in our attempts at activism? This interdisciplinary panel seeks to foster a conversation about visual culture and criminal justice to explore the various ways in which policing, prisons, prisoners, mass incarceration, and their visual and material culture have been represented, portrayed, studied, displayed, and collected. Papers presented by practitioners in all arenas of the arts will address how art historians, artists, critics, museum curators, and educators have consciously reframed their practices to encourage reflection, support dialogue, and respond to changes in judicial systems and social activism across time.

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Art and Materiality in the Age of Global Encounters, 1492–1800
Chairs: Maite Alvarez (J Paul Getty Museum), malvarez@getty.edu and Charlene Villaseñor Black, cvblack@humnet.ucla.edu

In a royal decree dated 1564, King Philip II of Spain ordered his viceroys in the Americas to “safely bring to the realms gold, silver and cochineal,” an order that heralded profound changes in the global economy and art world. These materials arrived via Spain’s far-reaching trade networks, which by the 1550s extended to Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Patagonia, the Yucatan Peninsula, and Chesapeake Bay, as well as throughout mainland Europe. The arrival of ships loaded with rich finds such as indigo, cochineal, brazilwood, silver, pearls, and emeralds into European ports presaged innovative artistic developments. New pigments, types of wood, and other unusual materials such as shells and feathers immediately and forever altered the landscape of European art, giving artists and patrons new and varied material choices. How did these finds, the result of European imperialism, impact global artistic developments? How does attention to materiality change understanding of aesthetics? What are the most useful frameworks for theorizing these developments, exchanges, and networks? While this panel investigates the prima materia, the very materiality of objects, it also moves beyond aesthetics to technical processes, trade and global exchange, as well as to the multiple societies where these works were created and collected. We welcome various approaches, from research inspired by conservation science or archival documentation to decolonial methodologies, material semiotics, Renaissance futurism, or thinking through the anthropocene.

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Artistic Biography in Early Modern Europe (Renaissance Society of America)
Chairs: Babette Bohn, B.BOHN@tcu.edu and Jeffrey Chipps Smith, chipps@austin.utexas.edu

Early biographies provide crucial primary sources for our knowledge of early modern artists throughout Europe. Inspired by Pliny the Elder, regional loyalties, gifted artists, influential patrons, and each other, biographers from the mid-sixteenth through the eighteenth century produced a staggering variety of biographical collections—varied in terms of their approaches, criteria, scope, and artistic interests. Such authors as Neudörfer, Vasari, Van Mander, Sandrart, Houbraken, Malvasia, Baldinucci, and Palomino, among many others, produced biographical compendia that have supplied modern scholars with first-hand information on thousands of artists. In recent years, a growing number of scholars have reexamined these texts, publishing edited and translated editions as well as critical studies. This session proposes to investigate some of the concerns that have arisen in these studies, including but not limited to: biographers’ differing methods and criteria; questions of reliability and intentional misrepresentation; the role and significance of anecdotes; the uses of ekphrasis; prejudices concerning women, foreigners, and specific artistic specializations; the reliance on primary sources; the influence of local literary and artistic traditions; and the narrative structure, critical vocabulary, and authorial goals employed. We welcome papers that deal with these broader issues about biographical practices and how these have shaped the study of early modern artists.

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Ceramics and the Global Turn
Chair: Meghen Jones (NYS College of Ceramics at Alfred University), jonesmm@alfred.edu

Ubiquitous across world cultures, the medium of ceramics is intrinsically global. Well documented is the movement of ceramic objects, materials, and styles that traversed the Silk Road since its inception over 2000 years ago. For centuries, consumers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa treasured Chinese porcelain for its beauty, status, and even poison detection. Later, Euro- American art potters found design inspiration in ceramics from a myriad of global sources. Contemporary ceramic art and design discourse is enmeshed in globalization, from individual potters’ cultural appropriation of value systems to industrial production outsourcing. At the same time, recent discourses of folk pottery and anachronistic studio pottery have tended to promote localism and insularity. What does the global turn mean for ceramic history and theory? How do interdisciplinary perspectives suggest new models for this medium-specific research? This session will consider ceramics and globalization from the early modern period to the present, focusing on ideologies, production systems, and networks of exchange. The study of the global flows of ceramics— as art, craft, and design—provides vivid access to currents of culture from the distant past to the present era of mass economic, social, and cultural globalization.

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Climate Change and British Art (Historians of British Art)
Chair: Jongwoo Jeremy Kim (University of Louisville), jongwoo.jeremy.kim@gmail.com

They say Britons obsess over the weather. Alexander Cozens, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner certainly ruined any prospect of ever dislodging British visual legacy from meteorology. Yet, this centuries-old visual history of grappling with humankind’s relationship with nature seems unprecedentedly urgent at a time when climate change denial has become a tremendous political force affecting national and local elections. In response to the current global environmental crisis, Britain’s 2005 Turner Prize winner Simon Starling rode an electric bicycle through the Spanish desert. His vehicle burned no fossil fuels and produced no smoke. Instead, the contraption collected water. With the water sourced from this punishing human labor, Starling made a watercolor of a cactus like a Regency botanist. Similarly, the Liberate Tate group’s protest performances against the oil giant BP’s corporate sponsorship of art institutions remind us that our historical consciousness must reflect recent developments in art- based environmental activism. Spurred by artists like Starling and works like License to Spill, 2010 (“a miniature oil spill at the Tate’s summer gala”), the Historians of British Art invites papers that examine the relationship between climate change, sustainability, the Anthropocene, and British art on a global scale. Papers that draw on critical debates about art and the politics of ecology, representations of ecological vulnerability and resilience, and contemporary visuality responding to climate change and the global economy are particularly welcome. ‘British Art’ is broadly defined to include works by artists who actively engage in decolonization in the former British colonies.

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Design History / Design Heritage
Chairs: Rebecca D. Houze (Northern Illinois University), rhouze@niu.edu and Grace Lees-Maffei (University of Hertfordshire), g.lees-maffei@herts.ac.uk

This panel invites papers that examine the relationship between design history and heritage studies. At their intersection are questions of ownership and identity. How are sites and artifacts of cultural heritage claimed, defined, or constructed and to whom do they belong? How do we study intangible heritage, which is not located in objects or places, but rather in a worldview or a way of life? Whether tangible or intangible, heritage denotes something we inherit, a birthright provided to us through our inclusion in a given group, be it familial, national, ethnic, or by another marker of identity, such as the shared ‘world’ heritage designated by UNESCO. Diverse, wide-ranging examples of designed heritage include maps, guidebooks, illustrated encyclopedias; archives, databanks, digital resources; museums and exhibitions; architecture and landscape; furnishings, dress, and other aspects of material culture; performances, pageants, and rituals. Related to these topics are also activities that address heritage, for example, through legislation and international charters; preservation and conservation; cultural appropriation, looting, and repatriation. Definitions of heritage are tied to different, and competing, political agenda and ideologies. While some approaches to heritage are influenced by an academic Marxist-inspired ‘history from below’, of public engagement, public history, and social and cultural history, others derive from the heritage ‘industry’, a sub-branch of the tourist industry. In examining the interfaces of design and heritage therefore, this panel welcomes studies of design heritage from diverse points of view, methodological approaches, time periods, and cultural contexts.

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Ecocritical Approaches to Colonial Art History, 1600–1900
Chair: Cameron Christopher McKee, cmckee@u.northwestern.edu

A great deal of recent art historical scholarship on the colonial world addresses the visual production of natural science and its relationship to ecology. Scholars have pinpointed botanical, entomological, natural historical, and ethnographical imagery as crucial to understanding and classifying the natural world, beginning with New World colonization and intensi ed maritime trade in the fourteenth century. Increasing contact with non-European cultures resulted in a flood of new plants, animals, minerals, and artefacts into Europe from across the globe. European exploration and settlement subordinated (often violently) autochthonous knowledge of the natural world developed by indigenous peoples, slaves, and their descendants—in the East and West Indies as well as the Middle East and Asia, cultures with which Europe had long fostered contact. Visual representations of colonial ecologies proved to be a foundational means by which Europeans understood their increasingly interconnected world and asserted dominance over people, land, and resources. This panel asks: In what ways do art historical approaches informed, for example, by ecocriticism and new materialism, open on to new ways of understanding visual byproducts of colonialism? In what ways can a more capacious attention to colonial ecologies contribute to our understanding and analysis of the visual production of the non-European world? How did these ecologies shape the representation of Europe in return? This panel seeks proposals that examine the roles of science, art, and/ or environmental policy in an ecological approach to colonial art history, garden history, and visual histories of science.

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Empires of Pleasure across Eighteenth-Century Cultures
Chairs: Dipti Khera (New York University), dipti.khera@nyu.edu and Meredith S. Martin (New York University), msm240@nyu.edu

Now one of art history’s most vibrant subfields, the eighteenth century has played a key role in the discipline’s global turn and in re-thinking conventional histories of art, empire and Orientalism. By tracing the increased circulation of people and objects in different parts of the world, scholars working on this period have highlighted new conceptions of knowledge, aesthetics, power and sociability. Furthermore, they have ensured that formerly devalued concepts tied to eighteenth-century practices and patrons—among them luxury, pleasure, leisure, femininity, sensuality, wonder, hybridity, and consumption—be taken seriously. Yet while the physical exchanges of eighteenth-century artworks, peoples, and things from around the globe has been the subject of recent scholarly inquiry, less attention has been paid to conceptual affinities—notably a mutual emphasis on pleasure and decline – that existed between disparate geographical and cultural locales. For instance, how might we enrich or complicate the story of eighteenth-century art and culture by putting Indian or Chinese paintings of palace gardens in dialogue with French fêtes galantes? Our contention is that these kinds of global comparisons will not only yield a richer formal and conceptual understanding of each type of artwork, but will also enable us to ask larger theoretical and methodological questions related to the common grounds they share. By examining how intertwined histories of pleasure and power were mediated across local, trans-regional, or intercultural contexts, we hope also to contribute to scholarly debates beyond art history and to encourage new research projects and teaching agendas.

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Facing Death in Global Modernity, 1600–1900
Chairs: Camille Mathieu (University of Exeter), csmathieu@gmail.com and Kristopher Kersey (University of Richmond), kkersey@richmond.edu

The specter, threat, and image of death were powerful agents in the coalescence of global modernity. How and to what ends did artists put a face on a topic and a process they knew nothing of? What does it mean to confront death, visually? How were images used to find commensurability between distinct notions of the afterlife? This session will examine in depth the imagery of death itself: as a concrete figure, inevitable reality, process, or outcome.
This panel seeks papers that will scrutinize the intercultural or anachronic dimensions of the visual culture of mortality. Topics may include familiar subjects, such as death masks, mortuary icons in Buddhism, and photographs of the deceased, as well as more violent and visceral topics such as revolutionary propaganda prints, colonial imagery describing the mortal consequences of attacking colonizers, the economy of relics, and the circulation of lynching photography in the American South. This session invites papers with both a multi-national and a local scope in order to address the visualization of death in a period of unprecedented global contact. We are especially interested in the role of new visual technologies (as well as appropriated and revived technologies) in effecting, documenting, or transcending the violence of death at the margins of early modernities.

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Frenemies: Unlikely Cultural Exchange in the Pre- and Early Modern World (International Committee)
Chairs: Noa Turel (University of Alabama at Birmingham), noaturel@gmail.com and Russell Kelty (Art Gallery of South Australia), kelty.rusty@artgallery.sa.gov.au

Cultural exchange is often hailed as a marker of modern tolerance. Historically, however, the movement of ideas, objects, and customs around the globe has rarely been correlated with a cultivation of cultural sensitivity or inclusivity. In the late Middle Ages, for instance, while the kings of France and England were devising plans to revive the crusades in an attempt to block the rapid expansion of the Islamic empires, their subjects were trading in prized ‘Saracen’ cushions and the most popular medical treatise was Avicenna’s Cannon of Medicine (al-Qānūn fī al-Ṭibb). Similarly, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the appeal of Europeans was heightened by the Tokugawa shogunates’ attempts to control their perceived seditious influence. Having replaced the Portuguese with the Dutch, who “brought their trade and left their gods at home,” the shogunate sequestered them on a small artificial island off limits to the vast majority of the Japanese population. Nonetheless, the Dutchmen’s knowledge, particularly in medicine, painting, and printing, became highly valued by artists and scholars in eighteenth-century Edo. This session seeks to excavate instances of cultural exchange, adaptation, and appropriation between societies the relationships of which were characterized by antipathy rather than mutual admiration. How and why did people cultivate appreciation for the culture of societies regarded as inferior, sinful, or menacing? We are particularly interested in papers focused on case studies of such unlikely exchange before ca. 1800 that shed light on the intricacies of adaptation and the shaping of diverse material cultures around the globe.

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Global Missions and Artistic Exchange in the Early Modern World
Chairs: Katherine M. McAllen (UTRGV), katherinemcallen@gmail.com and Cristina C. González (Oklahoma State University), allccg@gmail.com

The movement of missionaries in the Early Modern world played a key role in the circulation of art objects between (and within) the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe. While this session welcomes papers that document the spread of European art within a missionary context, we are also interested in the mission as a spiritual, architectural, and geographical space that allowed for the local interpretation, importation, and production of objects. Missions themselves sometimes became distribution centers in a global world. How did the interaction between European and non-European populations give rise to complex artistic relationships within the mission enterprise, and how can we understand missionary art and architecture both within a colonial and global history of art? Proposals that offer compelling case studies or emphasize unexplored geographies and circuits of exchange are encouraged, as are papers that theorize the study of art-and-mission and engage with the historiography and recent scholarship on the subject. While we especially welcome work on the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, papers exploring the visual culture of Dutch, French, and British missions will also be considered.

Clara Bargellini, a Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at UNAM in Mexico City and a preeminent scholar in the field of colonial Latin American art and mission art history, has agreed to serve as discussant for this session and include reflections related to the exhibition she curated, The Arts of the Missions of Northern New Spain, 1600–1821.

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Go Public, Young Scholar
Chair: Amy B. Werbel (SUNY, FIT), amy_werbel@tnyc.edu

Higher education, the humanities, and liberal arts are under attack in the United States, and many believe their survival will depend on scholars who can successfully reach outside ‘the ivory tower’ and demonstrate the relevance of historical subjects to understanding contemporary issues. “Go Public, Young Scholar” will highlight opportunities, obstacles, and strategies for crafting and promoting public scholarship in the history of art. Papers are requested from scholars (at any career stage) who have made the leap outside the gates of academia and engaged broad audiences to understand contemporary issues through the lens of art, architecture, decorative arts, etc. from any geographical region, prior to World War II.

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Historic Libraries and the Historiography of Art
Chair: Jeanne-Marie Musto (Hofstra University), musto.jeannemarie@gmail.com

Historic libraries offer underutilized resources for understanding art history. This session explores the potential of such collections—whether intended explicitly for the study of art or not—to deepen and broaden our understanding of art historiography and its relationship to social, intellectual and geo-political currents. Libraries significant for these purposes include those of Count Leopoldo Cicognara and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, which survive largely intact, and others that survive partially or in inventory form, such as those of John Ruskin or Stanisław Kostka Potocki. Count Cicognara’s library, for example, offers a view of the history and geography of art available to scholars at a key moment for shifting geopolitical conceptualizations of his country and Europe as a whole. President of the Venetian Academy of Art when Venice shifted from Napoleonic French to Habsburg Austrian control, Cicognara wished his library to contribute to Italy’s ability to compete with other nations for greatness through cultural eminence. For him, as for scholars throughout post- Napoleonic Europe, study of artistic heritage and shaping a future nation went hand in hand. But his collection, like others of its day, reflects more than patriotism. It underlines his effort to define an inchoate discipline through a wide spectrum of printed materials, including ephemera. It also demonstrates his active participation in art historical debates and connections with artists and arts administrators in Italy and beyond. Papers that examine any aspect of the historiography of art in relation to this or to other historic libraries will be welcomed.

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Japanese Material Culture in Ukiyo-E Art: Learning the Language of Objects
Chair: Elena Varshavskaya (Rhode Island School of Design), evarshav@risd.edu

For over two hundred years in the 17th–19th centuries, life of Japan’s city dwellers had been captured, in its entirety, in ukiyo-e images. The illustrated themes encompass all kinds of real-life experiences of townspeople as well as every aspect of their inner world—their cultural and political interests, attitudes and opinions. Not concerned with creating an illusion of reality in their compositions, ukiyo-e artists attached much importance to the precise rendering of objects specific for every situation. The artists’ expertise spanned all kinds of artifacts—fashionable attire of contemporary beauties and historic court garments, samurai arms and armor, ships, boats, and means of land transportation, architecture and interior decor, fans, smoking pipes, tobacco pouches, toys, and so on and so forth. At times, objects in ukiyo-e meant more than the eye met. Often, they were communication tools involved in the intellectual exchange, in mind games based on associations, hints and puns. The vastness of the thematic scope of ukiyo-e art, its verve, together with the remarkably wide-ranging knowledge base of ukiyo-e artists, make ukiyo-e legacy an inexhaustible visual source of information on early modern Japan. The current session invites papers that investigate any aspect of material culture present in ukiyo-e. Welcome are contributions focusing on objects related to distinct activities, seasonal celebrations, historic or legendary events, etc. Encouraged are specific examples helping a more nuanced understanding of Japan’s cultural codes across temporal and national borders.

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Linking Museum to Place
Chair: Alick M. McLean (Syracuse University In Italy), ammclean@me.com

The close viewing of objects that art museums provide runs the risk of disconnecting those same objects from their original contexts. We see the objects well, yet lose sight of the places and communities out of which and for which artists, workshops, and patrons brought them to life. Recent museums, particularly museums with holdings from their own communities and histories, have begun to address this challenge. The results, such as at Prato’s Museo Palazzo Pretorio, the Museo delle Terre Nuove at San Giovanni Valdarno, the Acropolis Museum in Athens, or the Gülhane Museum in Topkapı Palace, have shown how contextualizing brings new life to familiar objects, in turn attracting broader lay audiences to their museums, and thereby new, often unexpected supporters to art. Such diverse audiences are essential to sustain, even to enhance the voices of artists and scholars of art in the public sphere. This session seeks contributions from scholars, curators, museum administrators, museum architects, and gallery installation designers who have found ways to relink their objects to place, whether their original physical contexts, their historical communities, parallel contexts in the museum’s own locale, or otherwise. We welcome proposals documenting the localization practices of existing or projected museums.

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Looking East: Russian Orientalism in a Global Context (Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture)
Chairs: Maria Taroutina (Yale-NUS College), maria.taroutina@yale-nus.edu.sg and Allison Leigh (University of Louisiana at Lafayette), allison.leigh@louisiana.edu

Much like their Western contemporaries, Russian and East European artists were seduced by the exotic appeal of the ‘Orient’, especially the cultures of Central Asia and the Caucasus. However, Orientalist painting remained ambiguous in the Russian and East European context given their conflicted self-identification as neither fully European nor quintessentially Asian. Thus, the demarcations between ‘self’ and ‘other’ among these artists were much more porous than for their Western counterparts, resulting in an Orientalist mode that was prone to hybridity, syncretism, and even self-Orientalization. The present panel invites papers that reconsider the enduring relationship between Russia, Eastern Europe and their non-Western neighbors and the ways in which artists, architects, designers and performers engaged with this relationship throughout the centuries and into the present. What significance did Russia’s perception of its position on the periphery of the West and its simultaneous self-consciousness as a colonial power have on its artistic and cultural identity? In what ways did artists from a range of territories—spanning from Georgia and Armenia to Uzbekistan and Russia’s far east—interrogate, contest, and revise the seemingly stable categories of ‘East’ and ‘West’? To what extent did cultural practitioners participate in the discursive matrices that advanced Russia’s colonial machinery on the one hand and critiqued and challenged it on the other, especially in territories that were themselves on the fault lines between East and West? This panel invites papers from all historical periods and geographical contexts and welcomes investigations of a variety of different media.

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Material, Materiality, Materialism
Chairs: Deborah L. Krohn (Bard Graduate Center), deborah.krohn@bgc.bard.edu and Catherine L. Whalen (Bard Graduate Center), whalen@bgc.bard.edu

While the physical properties of matter have long been the domain of scientists, the words ‘material’ and its cognates ‘materiality’ and ‘materialisms’ have become ubiquitous in multiple elds across the humanities and social sciences, from history of art and design to literature and philosophy to anthropology and sociology. What does the ‘material turn’ mean for art and design historians? How do such discourses intersect with longstanding practices of object-centered studies, including archaeology, connoisseurship, and conservation? Building upon the session “Material Culture and Art History: A State of the Field(s) Panel Discussion” (sponsored by Association of Research Institutes in Art History) at last year’s conference in Los Angeles, we are interested in papers that consider, evaluate, and comment upon the ways in which the terms material, materiality and/or materialisms inform studies of art and design. Rather than case studies, we seek re ective perspectives.

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North American Landscapes and Counter-Histories
Chairs: Jocelyn Anderson, jocelynkristen@hotmail.com and Julia Lum, julia.lum@yale.edu

Histories of landscape art in North America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have often been dominated by European aesthetic and stylistic narratives. In this period, the ‘picturesque’, the ‘romantic’, and the ‘sublime’ were codified in Europe; yet they also proved to be extraordinarily flexible in their applicability to diverse regions and topographies. At the same time, these categories are sometimes incongruent with the historical conditions to which they’ve been applied, or were fundamentally altered by artists’ negotiations with locality and place. This panel invites papers which seek to offer radical alternative readings of landscapes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by prioritizing the relationship between artistic production and specific local and regional political, social, and environmental conditions. It invites papers with the potential to reorganize histories of landscape around hemispheric and transcultural approaches that illuminate the complex territorial, cultural and political developments of a period in which empires collided, nations took shape, and treaties were signed and broken. Papers addressing a range of media are welcome, and possible topics might include (but are not limited to) landscapes and counter- mapping, artistic negotiations with Indigenous sovereignties and stewardship, landscapes and the legal status of sites, the relationship between topographical landscapes and surveyors’ work, landscape views and military geographies, heritage and cultural memory, urban and rural economies of labor in art, and the circulation of landscape representations in personal and family circles.

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Not your Typical Residency: Artists and the Research Institute (Association of Research Institutes in Art History)
Chairs: Marie-Stephanie M. Delamaire (Winterthur Museum), sdelam@winterthur.org and Amelia A. Goerlitz (Smithsonian American Art Museum), goerlitza@si.edu

Research fellowships at museums, libraries, and academies are a standard offering for art historians who need access to primary materials and time for focused inquiry and writing. Artist residencies, on the other hand, usually provide studio or exhibition space and a stimulating environment where one can embark on a new creative project. What happens when these two models overlap? How and why have some research institutes chosen to support artistic investigation as well as academic scholarship? This panel invites contributions from artist-recipients and scholar-hosts who have participated in these unusual appointments. We welcome proposals for short presentations that consider the following questions: What is the role of artist-led research within what have traditionally been academically focused institutions? How can these institutions best respond to artists’ particular methods of investigation? How might artists help museums and libraries think afresh about their collections and art historical research? What can a library or museum offer a contemporary artist that a studio space cannot? What are the benefits and challenges of blending artists and scholars within a single program? What are the outcomes of such residency programs? By inviting artists into museums, libraries, and academies where they can delve into historical collections, access rare books and archives, and discuss their work with colleagues from various disciplines, are artists’ fellowships transforming academic research and/or artistic practice?

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Of Mutable Monuments and Changing Attitudes: Learning from the Long History of Altering, Appropriating, and Recontextualizing Italian Art
Chairs: Felicia M. Else (Gettysburg College), felse@gettysburg.edu and Roger Crum (Dayton University), rcrum1@udayton.edu

Conflicting sentiments have recently challenged the once seemingly inviolate nature of monuments in the public sphere. With this on-going debate in mind, the time is ripe to explore this topic within the longer tradition of Italian art. From ancient Rome to the present, Italian art has been shaped not just by its production but its recontextualization, appropriation, and care (or lack thereof), all acts that have arisen in response to changing historical, social, and political forces. This session seeks case studies in which Italian art becomes something other than what it once was or was intended to be, whether through intentional destruction, reworking, recontextualization, appropriation, restoration, or simply neglect to suit different, even conflicting purposes. Studies might address but are not limited to the transformations of viewing spaces, physical changes ranging from modest erasure to total elimination, or the dissemination of viewpoints, whether passing anecdotes or biting satires. Subjects from all chronological periods are welcome, and speakers are encouraged to consider not simply the motivations of historical actors involved but the opportunities, challenges, or obligations that contemporary scholars face in documenting and ‘fixing’ the various ‘histories’ of Italian art. Priority will be given to studies that present new approaches and strong historical evidence but also convey broader implications for the changing public conceptions of art and the problematics of ‘heritage’ in Italy and the world beyond.

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Open Session for Emerging Scholars of Latin American Art (Association for Latin American Art)
Chairs: Theresa Avila (California State University Channel Islands), sahibah@hotmail.com and Arden Decker, ardendecker@gmail.com

This session seeks to highlight the scholarship of advanced graduate and recent Ph.D. scholars. Papers may address any geographic region, theme, or temporal period (pre-Columbian, Colonial, Modern, and Contemporary) related to the study of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx art or art history.
The range of topics addressed may include, but is not limited to, the following:
1  Nation building and citizenship
2  Race, class or gender
3  Social justice and human rights
4  The visualization of revolution and war
5  The female body in visual culture
6  Artivism
7  Development and underdevelopment
8  The natural world and science
9  De ning and redefining public space
10  Politics of display in museums and galleries
Please note, Association for Latin American Art (ALAA) membership is not required at the time of paper proposal, but all speakers will be required to be active members at the time of the annual meeting.

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Painted Books of Pre-Hispanic Mexico: New Discoveries
Chair: Anne W. Cassidy (Carthage College), acassidy@carthage.edu

Painted books from Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past through the early colonial period constitute a rich body of art and an eloquent source for study of the interdependence of aesthetic, scientific,and philosophic activities in Mesoamerica. Recently there have been rapid advances on multiple fronts in understandings of the codices and their contexts. On the one hand, studies focusing on materiality are increasingly important, such as pigment analysis and changes in the surface from repainting or resurfacing. For example, work by Davide Domenici and his colleagues on the Mayan Codex Madrid, and work by Élodie Dupey Garcìa on central Mexican ritual calendars combine studies of the physical properties of the codices with archaeological and ethnohistoric data. On the other hand, interpretive studies that combine close iconographic analysis with astronomical and/or meterological and/ or historic events have also flourished in recent years, upending long accepted views of pre-Hispanic ritual calendars. Perhaps most importantly, scholars like Jansen and Pérez Jiménez have furthered interpretive work by examining “multiple intersections between cultural interpretive research and the still outstanding issues of decolonisation.” This session seeks studies of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican manuscripts and colonial manuscripts in the native tradition from all areas of Mesoamerica. Interdisciplinary approaches are especially welcome, in particular approaches that shed light on the pre-Hispanic histories of the manuscripts.

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Paragone Open Session: Topics on the Past and Present of Rivalry in the Arts (Society for Paragone Studies)
Chair: Sarah J. Lippert (University of Michigan-Flint), sarjorlip@gmail.com

Papers in this session explore the history of rivalry in the arts. Topics are invited for an open session on an era of art history and from any geographical area or medium. Examples of rivalry in the arts include competition between speci c artists, patrons, nations, artistic media, critics, theorists, institutions, etc. Rivalry may be related to theories of the sister arts, iconodules/iconophobes, iconoclasm, ekphrasis, ut pictura poesis, or other theoretical and practical traditions. It may also take the form of competition for resources or prestige in arts organizations. Presentations from practicing artists on how competition has impacted their work are also welcome.

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Portraits of Power: Legitimacy, Symbolism, and Ideology in the Public Portrait Gallery
Chairs: Craig Reynolds, craigreynoldsphd@gmail.com and Emily C. Gerhold, emilygerhold@msn.com

The compiling of portrait collections and galleries of exemplary individuals to act as models for the public has long been a practice within the artistic traditions of Europe and the Americas. From sculptural images of Roman emperors housed in temples and inscribed with their lineages, honors, and achievements, to the ‘Windsor Beauties,’ Sir Peter Lely’s portraits of the most celebrated English noblewomen of the 1660s, to public portrait memorials commissioned to romanticize the Confederacy’s Lost Cause myth and erected throughout the American South during the Jim Crow era, public galleries and portrait collections offer clear lessons about the values and traits that were commended at the times and in the places they were composed. Recently, the unveiling of the portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama has sparked a new conversation around the role of the public portrait collection and invited consideration of the way that portrait galleries signified—and continue to signify—national identity, power, status, and legitimacy. While the many variations of the portraitive mode are well studied, a scholarly examination of the broader act of creating, maintaining, propagating, and contextualizing portrait collections and galleries is critically missing from the discourse. We welcome submissions addressing any aspect of the public display and diffusion of portrait collections from the ancient world to the contemporary. Possible topics for exploration might include: the gendered nature of portrait galleries; public response to the likenesses themselves; the location of portrait collections and controlled access; and didactic narratives written to accompany portrait galleries.

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Queen: Centering the Black Woman as the Subject of Beauty
Chair: Sarah A. Clunis, saclunis@xula.edu

In art history’s multiple manifestations the Black woman’s body continues to be a gure of political agency that in the process of her representation embodies often paradoxical attributes. Often signified as sexualized or asexual, fetishized or peripheral, aggressive or subservient the representation of Black women, on a global level, encompasses a myriad of attributes. But basic beauty issues of hair texture, skin shade, and body shape often designate Black beauty ideals in a way that is increasingly enforced in depictions of the Black female body. “Queen: Centering the Black Woman as the Subject of Beauty” explores various global and historical portrayals of Black women in the arts with particular emphasis on works that center the Black woman as beautiful. The session will explore how Black women’s beauty has been celebrated through a variety of art forms and the relevant visual culture both traditional and contemporary that works to transform the Black woman from either a neglected or demarcated body into a body that exists within the realm of the beautiful. Negotiations of hair texture, skin color and body shape along with considerations of gender expression, sexuality, age, and disabilities are all possible aspects of this conversation. How are these considerations evident in art history and how do they act as agents of social control, within a greater network of images prescribing beauty, that regulate our discussions of visual arts, performance, and popular culture and how these genres focus on formal as well as conceptual concerns relative to this subject matter?

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Race in the History of Design: Objects, Identity, Methodologies (Design Studies Forum)
Chair: Kristina F. Wilson (Clark University), krwilson@clarku.edu

Gender and class have been productive critical tools for design historians, but an analysis of the role of race in the study of objects, their makers, and their consumers has appeared in scholarship only in recent years. This session explores how methodologies associated with race—critical race studies, post- colonial theory, identity studies, place-consciousness—can be productively brought into design history. The history of design in the U.S. and Europe is often presumed to be racially neutral, but this is a consequence of scholarly blind spots rather than a historically accurate representation. How can discussions of race be brought to bear on objects which are mass produced, or on objects dispersed globally, across wide domains of consumers? How can we understand the role of race in the history of an object made in the past but still used in the present? How does race intersect with a global approach to design history, with histories of colonialism and imperialism? This session invites papers that examine these questions and the following: What role does race play in understanding the designer of an object? What role does race play in production and fabrication, especially when it is divorced from the design of an object? Is race relevant to understanding the marketing and consumption of design objects? Is it possible to interrogate the form of an object through the lenses of race? This panel seeks papers that explore the role of race in design history through case studies and through theoretical and methodological discussions.

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State of the Art (History): Engaging Difficult Topics in and out of the Classroom
Chair: Parme P. Giuntini (Otis College of Art and Design), pgiuntini@otis.edu

From introductory surveys to upper division courses, Art History classes are increasingly sites for discussion of ‘difficult topics’. Controversies around the removal of Confederate Monuments and the popular activism inspired by movements like #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and #NeverAgain have called attention to inherent bias and systemic racism embedded within our cultural and academic institutions, and within our own disciplinary practices. Addressing these issues often involves projects and applied learning activities that encourage students to engage with the issues beyond the classroom, reinforcing the relevance of Art History to unpacking and critically analyzing the issues involved. Faculty teaching these topics must not only deal with the sensitivities and difficulties of raising controversial issues in the classroom, but also the pedagogical challenges that inevitably occur with a diversity of student positions and the need to be thoughtful and inclusive in order to foster authentic debate. We invite proposals for seven-minute lightning talks on courses, projects, pedagogies, and activities that offer strategies for engaging, fostering, and facilitating discussions on difficult topics at all levels of Art History instruction. The session will be facilitated by ArtHistoryTeachingResources.org (AHTR) in collaboration with Art History That.

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Teaching Art History in the Wake of #MeToo
Chairs: Cynthia S. Colburn (Pepperdine University), cynthia.colburn@pepperdine.edu and Ella Julian Gonzalez (Pepperdine University), ella.gonzalez@pepperdine.edu

College art history classes are often the first time students have exposure to a vast array of visual cultures through space and time. The canon of art historical works often covered in these classes is well trodden by professors, and includes many works that depict acts of violence against women including rape, abduction, and murder. The impressive formal qualities of such works are often highlighted in textbooks, and presumably by extension in some classrooms, often at the expense of in-depth discussion of the content and context of such works. This may have the effect of normalizing acts of violence against women in the eyes of our students, violence that, through the lens of art history, is seen to be global and span millennia. In the wake of the #MeToo movement with so many women coming forward about their experiences with sexual harassment and assault, it is crucial to reassess the way we teach and write about the art historically important works that portray violence against women and examine the role the discipline of art history may play in current social movements. This session welcomes papers from art historians who have been grappling with these issues in their writing and classrooms and have found ways to give voice to the women depicted in such works and open up the discussion of assault against women in these images in a meaningful way that empowers students.

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Textile Ecologies: Environmental Aesthetics and Transmaterial Dynamics of Cloth
Chairs: Sylvia Houghteling (Bryn Mawr College), sylvia.houghteling@gmail.com and Vera-Simone Schulz, vera-simone.schulz@khi.fi.it

Among the artifacts crafted by humankind, textiles have always held a uniquely interdependent relationship with the environment. Textiles derive from vegetal (linen, cotton), animal (wool, silk) and even mineral origins (as in the case of asbestos bers). The production of textiles has depended upon access to and the processing of raw materials, while cloth manufacturing has reshaped entire landscapes from the transplantation of mulberry trees for sericulture to the mounds of murex shells discarded after the extraction of purple dye. Textile patterns bloomed with imagery of flora and fauna, while fabrics pervaded myths and metaphors of the natural world, as when the translucency of a veil was likened to fog, and fields of flowers were said to evoke patterned carpets. Textiles have connected distant regions, but they have also been responsible for and complicit in the enslavement of human beings, the exploitation of agricultural, artisanal and industrial labor, and the despoliation of landscapes and water resources. Despite these historical ties, the ecological humanities have mostly neglected the textile realm. This panel welcomes papers that consider the relationship between textiles and the environment from any time period and geographic region and seeks scholars who grapple with the aesthetic dimensions and ecological conditions of cloth. We hope that our panel will aid in rethinking the notion of textility—the word for any phenomenon that has, at its root, the qualities of a textile—across media and materials, and throughout the natural, built and imagined world.

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The Anti-Black Interior? Enslavement and Refinement in Domestic Spaces
Chairs: Jennifer C. Van Horn (University of Delaware), jcv2a@virginia.edu and Maurie D. McInnis (University of Texas Austin), provost@utexas.edu

Traditional studies of eighteenth and nineteenth-century luxury goods ignore issues of race and enslavement. Yet, as many scholars have argued, the economic growth fueled by the sale of enslaved people and the labor they provided enabled Europeans and Americans to consume more objects of finer quality and thus to experience luxury. Whether the sugar that sweetened their tea, the cotton used in their clothing, or the mahogany furniture upon which they sat, upper and middle-class consumers benefited from slavery. More directly, many elites owned enslaved people and deployed their labor in domestic spaces. This panel traces enslavement’s penetration of the refined interior and the material and visual responses to slavery that could be found within bourgeois domestic environments. Whether portraits of enslaved attendants, ceramic representations of the four continents, wallpaper decorated with scenes of slavery, or andirons cast in the form of Africans, household objects made compelling arguments about racial identity. What strategies did elite and middling consumers in North America, Great Britain, Europe, and Latin America adopt to domesticate enslavement and how did these strategies manifest in artworks and objects? How did household artifacts negotiate tensions between refinement and brutality or bring these tensions to the fore? In what ways did abolitionists traffic in racialized imagery and artifacts to fight slavery? How might our understanding of eighteenth and nineteenth-century domestic art and objects shift if we bring anti-black concerns to the fore? Finally, what are the stakes for mobilizing these objects today, particularly in museums and historic sites?

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The Critical Voice in Art of the United States, 1776–1917
Chair: Janice Simon (University of Georgia), jsimon@uga.edu

The art of the United States found its identity shaped in part from the critical voices featured in newspapers, popular periodicals, specialty art magazines, and book length manuscripts addressing local and national exhibitions, the emergence of new artistic groups, the works of the individual artist, and the emerging history of a national art. The critical voice in American culture from the formation of the nation itself through the creation of national art academies like the National Academy of Design in 1825 through the development of the professional art critic at the turn of the twentieth century deserves reexamination for its contributions to American artistic production. Proposals are requested for examination of the role of critical discourse in the history of American art from the rise of a national consciousness to the year in which Camera Work ended publication. Papers may consider the role of a specific art periodical or critical reviews in popular magazines, or a specific authorial voice, or even a non-nationalistic point of view in the formation of key critical debates about the role, future, faults, and fears of art exhibited in the United States. Ideally, a full range of perspectives, artistic encounters, historical moments, and critical sources, whether professional or amateur, about a variety of art objects will compose the proposed session that addresses a period less examined than the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries for its contribution of a critical voice in American art.

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The Female Impact: Women and the Art Market in the Early Modern Era (Historians of Netherlandish Art)
Chairs: Judith Noorman, j.f.j.noorman@uva.nl and Frans Grijzenhout, f.grijzenhout@uva.nl

Gender studies in art history tend to focus on the role of the woman artist, on the representation of the female body, and the gendered reception of art, contemporary and historical. In this session, however, a different perspective is taken: what was the role of women in commissioning, buying and displaying art and architecture in the early modern era, particularly in the Netherlands? Was it always their husband, father, brother, or even son, who had a final say in the design of exterior and interior decoration, the selection of artists and subjects represented in commissioned works of art? This question is reasonably well explored in studies on early modern royal and princely mecenate, particularly unmarried or widowed princesses, like Amalia van Solms and Elisabeth of Bohemia. The same goes for that special branch of cultural production that is usually connected to the female sex: the luxurious dolls house, as owned by affluent women like Petronella Oortman. However, despite the fact that women from the urban middle class in the Northern and Southern Netherlands in this age are known to have been relatively independent and well cultured, we know very little about their position within the wider field of artistic production. Why not take a serious look at the commercial activities of Hendrickje who ran an art shop with Rembrandt’s son? We invite anyone working on the female impact on the artistic climate in the Early Modern era to contribute to this session, either by presenting a spoken contribution or poster.

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The Politics of Independence: European Neoclassicism and Latin American Identity
Chairs: Martina E. Meyer (Stanford University), me.meyer@alumni.utoronto.ca and Susan J. Douglas, sdouglas@uoguelph.ca

During the eighteenth-century, Europeans introduced the neoclassical style to their Latin American colonies through art schools, such as the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos in imitation of the Royal Academies of France and Spain. These institutions normalized the distinction between civilized and primitive perpetuating a hierarchy of cultural dominance that favoured European aesthetics. However, after the wars of independence this relationship became increasingly problematic. Neoclassicism continued to be favoured by government-run art academies, although the style was often used to render indigenous themes. For example, in 1851 the Catalan artist Manuel Vilar portrayed Tlahuicol in plaster, in a style reminiscent of the Hellenistic Greek Laocoön group. Visual culture acts not as a mirror that re ects national identity, but rather a complex venue for its interpretation—a site through which populations come into consciousness as members of particular and discrete communities. How did French neo-classicism become an instrument of Latin American identity and a means of nation building post- independence ca.1820? How was this style appropriated and adapted for nationalist ends and in which specific contexts? In what ways did the style offer a point of resistance and subversion for post-colonial narratives? This panel seeks papers exploring questions of race, ethnicity and social hierarchy in the arts with a particular emphasis on how newly independent South American regions adopted and adapted European visual culture in ways that asserted their cultural, political, and national maturity at a time when Neoclassicism was dominating the humanities in Europe and Latin America.

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The Spectacle in Art from the Panorama to the Infinity Room
Chairs: Jason Rosenfeld (Marymount Manhattan College), jrosenfeld@mmm.edu and Timothy J. Barringer (Yale University), timothy.barringer@yale.edu

This session seeks to explore the evolution of ‘Spectacle Art’ from the creation of a broad public for viewing art in a novel format in the Panorama, first conceived by Robert Barker in Britain in 1787, to the phenomenal success of contemporary artists such as James Turrell, Christian Marclay, Yayoi Kusama, Kara Walker, Olafur Eliasson, and Random International, and their creation of collective, sharable, often immersive experiences. The panel aims to interrogate the idea of ‘spectacle’, and connotations of visual conspicuousness, collective memory, and conceptual extravagance. It privileges the new and the communal, in multiple formats and scales, from the panorama viewing platform to the enveloping spaces of installation art. A related theme is the emergence of popular audiences for art. Immersive displays offer alternative narratives to complement Tom Crow’s classic account of salon exhibitions as sites for the formation of a modern viewing public. We sketch a parallel history wherein art-as-spectacle generates a mass audience. Papers may focus on strategies of the spectacular in all media. A fundamental text for our discussion is Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, a predictive illumination of the tentacular reach of malevolent capitalism through media, art, celebrity, and experiential aspects in our now-global culture. This panel asks how art history, rather than media studies or media archaeology, can examine large-scale installations. We welcome a broad spectrum of papers engaging with the politics and poetics of modern and contemporary visual arts, performance, and media strategies that surround the viewer to spectacular effect.

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The Studio as Market (International Art Market Studies)
Chair: Julie F. Codell (Arizona State University), julie.codell@asu.edu

Artists’ studios have been the site of workshops, collaboration, promotion, mystery, and myth, at times considered a hallowed space, at other times a disreputable one. They have also been the places of social, political, and economic transactions that shape aesthetic values. In the studio artists self-fashioned their social status and promoted their works. They invited critics, dealers, and patrons into their studios turning studios into sites that combined a presumed mysterious creative energy with economic exchange while purposely misapprehending economic considerations. This session will explore how artists from the eighteenth century on under dwindling church and aristocratic patronage strategically entered the ‘free’ market by using their studios to promote and sell works in conjunction with creating marketable public identities to engage buyers and generate symbolic capital for their name and their work. Topics can include the nature and function of the studio in the free market, artists’ strategies to both engage in economic activities and misrecognize economics in the studio, the studio as a site of conflicts over agency in overlapping aesthetic and economic transactions or as an exhibitionary site to display the creative process itself, the studio’s combined production and reception functions, among other topics.

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The Versatile Artist (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture)
Chairs: Daniella Berman (New York University IFA), daniella.berman@nyu.edu and Jessica Lynn Fripp (Texas Christian University), j.fripp@tcu.edu

From Pier Leone Ghezzi’s exploration of caricature, to Angelica Kauffman’s and John Flaxman’s collaborations with the Wedgwood manufactory, to Jacques-Louis David’s stylistic reactions to the uncertain politics of the French Revolution, artists throughout the long eighteenth century worked in a variety of media and across genres, regardless of established or perceived hierarchies. This panel proposes to explore the conditions—social, political, historical, economic—that inspired, rewarded, or demanded artistic versatility. We welcome papers that focus on individual artists or broader cultural movements in ways that bring to light the myriad forms of artistic versatility across the global eighteenth century (1680–1830) and interrogate the expectations surrounding artistic productivity and creativity. Paper topics might consider, but are not limited to, new constraints or opportunities created by:
• The changing conditions of the (art) market
• Historical/political contingency
• Social strictures and pressures
• Geographic displacements
• Religious transformations
• The role of intermediality

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The Visual Culture of Art History Teaching
Chair: Jean E. Robertson (Indiana University, Herron School of Art and Design), jerobert@iupui.edu

The teaching of art history has involved an evolving array of visual technologies over centuries, including drawings by people who could travel to see art in person, engraved reproductions of such drawings, black-and-white photographs, color photographs, lantern slides, 35mm slides, film and video documentation, digital slides, and the great array of computer-mediated tools available today. The nature of research and learning has been impacted by the ability to travel, access to illustrations and libraries of books and slides, and access to computer databases and sophisticated software. How do the media and databases used to teach art history condition methodologies, pedagogy, and curriculum? What is gained when the visual culture of art reproduction and illustration makes a substantial shift to new tools? What, if anything, is lost or lessened? What new or different questions and forms of interaction with art are enabled? How does a shift to new tools change how a ‘real’ experience of art connects to seeing it in reproduction? How is teaching keeping pace with changing mediums of making art? This session invites proposals for papers that reflect on any or all of these questions, considering technologies of art historical illustration from any period on any topic. Papers that draw on the presenter’s own experiences in teaching are welcome as long as the paper considers the social and cultural impact of various visual technologies, and/or addresses theories about the conditioning of art historical learning by the available visual culture.

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Transnationalism and Sculpture in the Long Nineteenth-Century, ca. 1785–1915 (Association of Historians of 19th-Century Art)
Chairs: Roberto C. Ferrari (Columbia University), rcf2123@columbia.edu and Tomas Macsotay (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), tomas.macsotay@gmail.com

The history of nineteenth-century art is frequently presented as the product of revolutions and socio-political changes. The Zeitgeist for nationalism and imperial expansion generated by these historic events inevitably fostered interest in national schools of art criticism and artistic practice. But rising interest in global studies has led to more and more evidence of the transnational as a major impact on artistic practice of the nineteenth century, speci cally in association with the creation and dissemination of narratives of national identity, and the interests of economic and colonial expansion. The transnational is defined as crossing national boundaries, but for this session transnationalism also refers to culturally blended nexuses of artistic creativity and engagement during the century. Evidence of this artistic practice is arguably best evident in the creation and display of sculpture, particularly public sculpture because it requires large studios with teams of workers to create, and it occupies spaces that force an encounter with the viewer. Examples of proposals for this session on transnationalism and sculpture in the long nineteenth century might include: sculptors’ studios in Rome dominated by Americans and Europeans, and their practiciens and pupils from other nation-states; monuments incorporating multi-cultural imagery; public statues of monarchs made by local artists in the colonies, potentially inscribed by the politics and hierarchies thereof; and the commingling of sculpture made by native and foreign artists at academies and international exhibitions. Papers on individual artists and works of art are welcome, but they should focus on the larger issue of transnationalism.

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Troubling Inheritances: Reworking Cultural Mythologies
Chairs: Letha C. Ch’ien (Sonoma State University), chienl@sonoma.edu and Jennifer L. Shaw (Sonoma State University), jennifer.shaw@sonoma.edu

We all find ourselves in possession of troubling inheritances. Conscious and unconscious thought structures, cultural stories, myth, religious beliefs, and history shape our understandings of the world. Mythic stories structure human experience, but myths themselves are not immutable or fixed. Embarking from Roland Barthes’s expansive definition of myth, this panel explores the ways artists and art historians trouble received ideas as they rework myth. Such reworking has taken on new urgency as mythologies about sexuality, gender, race and nation are troubled by #MeToo, LGBTQ movements, Black Lives Matter, Never Again, DACA, Refugees are Welcome Here, etc are debated and visualized. Images potently receive and create cultural mythologies, but simultaneously provide a site for active engagement and reworking. We are interested in how imagery of oppressive mythologies are radically reworked in the realm of visual arts. Examples of such profound reworkings include early modern representations of Judith and Holofernes, William Blake’s transformations of biblical, eddic and mythological stories in the Prophetic Books, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s queer reimaginings of classical Greece, or Carrie Mae Weems’s Framed by Modernism and Mandingo. We encourage the submission of papers, artwork, or performances that trouble dominant mythologies from all global traditions, historical or contemporary, hybrid, mainstream or marginal.

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Using OERs for Teaching and Research
Chairs: K. Andrea Rusnock (I.U.S.B.), krusnock@iusb.edu and Rebecca Jeffrey Easby, easbyr@trinitydc.edu

Sponsored by CAA’s Education Committee, this session will look at current issues in the development, integration, and ongoing debate on the use of OERs (Open Education Resources) in the teaching of studio art, design, and art history. As more institutions consider the move toward OERs, Zero (or Reduced) Textbook Cost course policies, and funding initiatives that encourage faculty to develop open access content, instructors must ask new questions about how reliance on these materials might affect both their teaching practice and student learning in their classes. We seek presentations that will provide a broad overview of this topic from diverse perspectives including administrators, content-providers, librarians, students, and faculty in art and art history who have experience with OERs. Questions might include: What are the advantages and concerns surrounding the use of OERs? What materials (online textbooks, MOOCs, archival resources) exist and are being used? How are they accessed or vetted for quality and academic rigour? How should faculty development of OERs be compensated and positioned alongside institutional expectations for scholarly activity and publication? What evidence exists about their effectiveness, and their promise of greater accessibility to meet students’ needs? How might their use require or suggest changes in pedagogies of art, art history, and other related subjects? How might changes in net neutrality impact use of OERs in higher education? Our goal for this session is to increase awareness, stimulate discussion, and explore the implications of the growing body of OERs available for teaching and research in visual arts education.

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Visions of Mexico and the Iberian Peninsula (American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies)
Chair: Jeffrey A. Schrader, jeffrey.schrader@ucdenver.edu

In the quincentennial of the meeting of Moctezuma II and Hernán Cortés in Tenochtitlan, this panel seeks to assess the entwined histories of Mexico and the Iberian Peninsula. From the outset, the encounter of the American and European civilizations unfolded around the experience of art and architecture. The initial Spanish amazement at the wonders of Mexico served as the foundation for endeavors on the spectrum of exchange and engagement. Papers may examine a range of themes at any time in Ibero-Mexican relations. Prospective topics include the early circulation of artworks, the Spanish importation and display of images from the New World, the development of a common visual culture, court art, artists who made the transatlantic journey, and the global reach of the network formed by representatives of peninsular Spain and of Mexico. The objective of the panel is to consider the distinctive art historical legacy of these civilizations at a time when globalization has led to increasing contact among far-flung lands.

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Visualizing Scientific Thinking and Religion in the Early Modern Iberian World
Chairs: Brendan C. McMahon, bcmcmaho@umich.edu and Emily Floyd, emilycfloyd@gmail.com

In recent years, the consideration of visual and material sources has greatly enriched the study of a wide range of scientific practices in the early modern period. As scholars have moved away from characterizing ‘art’ and ‘science’ as discrete categories, they have increasingly turned to paintings, prints, and other forms of artistic production as a means to explore how early modern actors came to understand their experiences of the natural world. While the vast majority of these studies focus on the visual and material culture of Protestant Northern Europe, a small but growing number investigate similar trends in Spain and the Spanish Americas. Yet even as scholars have turned to instances where visual thinking formed a central component of scientific practices in this region, they have been more tentative to consider how religion, and particularly Catholicism, shaped such practices in this context. This session seeks papers that consider the intersections of visual production, scientific thinking, and religion in the early modern Iberian world, investigating such themes as:
• Material culture, techne, and artisanal epistemologies
• The mobilization of indigenous American and creole systems
of natural knowledge
• The Catholic Enlightenment
• Healing, disease, and visual production
• Visual and material culture, theology, and natural
philosophical argument
• Epistemic images in the early modern Iberian world

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What is American? Exploring Iberian Contact Zones in the ‘New World’
Chairs: Naomi Hood Slipp (Auburn University at Montgomery), nslipp@bu.edu and Mark Anthony Castro, markcast@gmail.com

Increasing scholarship has focused attention on the ways in which Iberian colonialization and trade in Latin America, South America, and Asia shaped works of art and material culture, thereby establishing a Spanish and Portuguese syncretic or hybridized aesthetic. In addition, the influence of Catholicism produced unique visual objects that were both indigenous and Iberian. In contrast, less work has been done to consider how Iberian exploration and colonization of North America—specifically the territories of present-day Canada, the United States, and the Caribbean—effected the arts and culture of those regions. This panel identifies these spaces as “contact zones,” which Mary Louise Pratt defines as “Social Spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths” [Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession 34 (1991): 33–40]. We therefore seek papers on works of art, architecture, or material and visual culture, that will illuminate the histories of Spanish and Portuguese colonialization in these territories, chart encounters between Iberian explorers, settlers, and indigenous residents, or consider trade networks with other colonial powers. We are particularly interested in projects that highlight a multiplicity of cultural viewpoints, such as those that consider encounters between indigenous communities and multiple colonial powers within one region, or address understudied regions: the Portuguese influence in Labrador and Newfoundland, the Spanish influence in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and the Pacific Northwest, or contemporary work that grapples with these legacies.

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