Enfilade

The Art Institute of Chicago is launching a new digital journal, Art Institute Review:

Art Institute Review, Fall 2021: Instability
Issue edited by Delinda Collier and Robyn Farrell

Proposals due by 15 July  2020

Instability is the hallmark of our present moment—ways of living, working, and relating have been dramatically altered over the course of mere weeks. What if the current state of flux is but an expression of the mutable nature of reality? Encounters between cultures through colonization, migration, trade, and war have, through the instability they wrought, regularly propelled change. Technology in particular has a fraught relationship with instability, capable of exacerbating and ameliorating it simultaneously. How might we take this moment to understand instability and its effects, past and present, in radically different ways?

In the art world, instability is both catalyst and consequence. It is legible as a force that has shaped—and is actively reshaping—museum collections. It exists in the toppling of received art-historical hierarchies and the rewriting of dominant narratives, through means as diverse as academic scholarship and grassroots movements like Decolonize This Place. Artists of past centuries could not have foreseen that their work would be subject to the forces of instability, evolving over decades as its materials degrade. Conservators negotiate instability daily, paying attention to materials and environments in order to forecast and forestall deterioration. Some contemporary artists, meanwhile, deliberately flirt with instability as a creative force, experimenting with frailty, precariousness, organic materials, and viewer participation as ways of ceding control of their work.

The inaugural issue of the Art Institute Review invites you to interrogate instability in any of the multifarious ways it manifests in art objects, art history, and the art world. We seek proposals that critically engage instability in relation to technology, materiality, and making; narratives and identity; interpretive methodologies; museological concerns; and epistemologies of the field; and the intersection of these dimensions with social justice and equity. How has instability been not only a force to intervene against but also one that has fostered new, beneficial states or ways of being? In what ways is instability shaping new ways of practicing criticality, structuring our temporalities, or reframing our perceptions of conflict or compassion? Proposals may address art of any time or place. We especially welcome proposals focused on historically underrepresented objects or narratives and proposals from emerging scholars.

This issue is coedited by Delinda Collier, Associate Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Robyn Farrell, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, the Art Institute of Chicago.

To respond to the call for papers, please email a Word document to journal@artic.edu. Your proposal should contain the following:

• your name, email, and (if you wish) a link to your website
• which of the following formats your submission falls into: scholarly essay (4,000–6,000 words); conversation or dialogue (2,000–3,000 words); visual, textual, or sound art; other (please explain)
• working title
• a one- or two-sentence précis encapsulating the central idea of your contribution
• an abstract (no more than 250 words; see “What we’re looking for” at artic.edu/journal for more guidance)
• a brief description (no more than 100 words) of the ways, if any, in which your contribution will leverage the capabilities of digital presentation. Does your proposal require any features beyond text and individual static images?

Visit artic.edu/journal for further details on the journal and the submission process.