Enfilade

Noted below are several sessions at this year’s SECAC conference that might of be of interest to Enfilade readers; from the Call for Papers:

SECAC 2021
Hilton Lexington, Kentucky, 10–13 November 2021

Proposals due by 4 May 2021

The School of Art and Visual Studies at the University of Kentucky is pleased to be hosting the 77th annual meeting of SECAC (formerly the Southeastern College Art Conference) in Lexington, KY, November 10–13, 2021. As its theme, the conference will engage in conversations centered around the social responsibilities of artists, designers, and academics in higher education. We hope the conference addresses at many levels the struggle against racism. We want to promote scholarship and artistic practices that work toward a more just and ethical world. In addition to a return to what we hope will be a normal in-person conference, with panels, round-table sessions, exhibitions, and so on, conference attendees will be able to take advantage of the conference hotel’s central location in a vital downtown Lexington, which is also just a ten-minute walk from the UK campus.

All proposals and supporting documentation must be submitted through the secure submission platform. Proposals sent to session chairs directly will not be considered for inclusion in the conference program. You may submit up to two paper proposals, though please note that you may present only one paper. If two proposals from one applicant are selected, then the session chairs, in consultation with the Conference Director and his committee, will decide which proposal will be accepted and presented at the conference. You may chair one session in addition to giving one paper in your own session or in another session. All proposals must be submitted by 11:59 pm EDT on 4 May 2021. If selected to participate in the annual conference, current SECAC membership and conference registration are required for all presenters. Notifications will be made to applicants on or about 24 June 2021. Questions may be directed to 2021 Conference Director Rob Jensen (secac2021@uky.edu). For logistical assistance, contact SECAC Administrator Christine Tate (admin@secac.org).

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Gender and the Visual Arts in the Long Eighteenth Century
Chairs: Laura Winn (Jacksonville University) and Amanda Strasik (Eastern Kentucky University)

This session seeks papers that explore themes and issues related to the intersection of the visual arts and gender during the long eighteenth century (1688–1815) in an effort to support new approaches and scholarship in what remains an understudied field of art history and visual studies. The session is intended to offer a forum for papers that consider global perspectives, critical approaches to identity, patronage, and representation or occlusion to highlight the multifaceted relationships between gender, the visual arts, and systems of power during the Enlightenment.

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Plants, Gardens, and (Un)Natural Visions
Chairs: Alice Christ (University of Kentucky) and Judy Bullington (Watkins College of Art, Belmont University)

Gardens and the plants they sustain and display have served a wide range of cultural purposes in human civilization, rarely if ever limited to simple subsistence horticulture. People have collected, transplanted, represented, classified and actually genetically modified plants themselves in cultivation. Gardens too are a human manipulation of natural materials, perhaps intended as improvements on, escapes from, appropriations of, or substitutions for natural landscapes or ecosystems. Gardens and plants have been used, for example, to reproduce specific places, to construct utopias, or to manifest images of a supernatural world. Analysis of plants, gardens and their representations can illuminate ideologies of divine and human creation, uncultivated nature and civilization, the native and the exotic implicated, for example, in the colonial enterprise. This session presents studies of any aspect of historical manipulation and representation of plants or design of gardens as symbolic spaces or places revealing social, political or religious values of the cultures that produced them. We invite topics anywhere from ‘botanical decolonization’ in ‘native plants’ gardening today to Marie Antoinette’s potato flower hair ornaments to Zen gardens of stone; the milpa as cosmogram to the medieval closed garden; Persian paradise to Victorian plant prospecting, among a host of possibilities.

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Eighteenth-Century Art: Looking Ahead
Chair: Boris Zakić (Georgetown College)

This open session calls for papers on eighteenth-century art. From the latest newswire of the Dresden’s Green Vault heist of the eighteenth-century state treasures to the Hamilton-mania in the US to the premiere of the Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire in Cannes, France, the elements of the late baroque find their way into our cultural values (and politics) in innumerable ways. This session aims at reviving issues that may prove instructive to our moment.

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Undergraduate Art History Session
Chair: Amy Frederick (Centre College)

This session welcomes papers on any subject in the fine arts and art history by undergraduate students. The student’s proposal must be accompanied by a faculty member’s letter of support attesting to the validity of the research and also stating the faculty member’s willingness to assist the student in preparing the paper for presentation. Please email faculty support letter and résumé to amy.frederick@centre.edu.