Enfilade

Listed below is a selection of panels relevant (or potentially relevant) to the eighteenth century. Please pay particular attention to two items: the HECAA-affiliate session on “Eighteenth-Century Women Artists in Context,” chaired by Melissa Hyde and Paris Amanda Spies-Gans; and the ASECS-affiliate session on “Eighteenth-Century Dictionaries and Encyclopedias,” chaired by myself and Jennifer Germann. The full listing is available here (bear in mind that since some sessions have already been formed, this Call for Papers provides only a partial guide for what to expect in February and March). –Craig Hanson

110th Annual Conference of the College Art Association
In-Person, Hilton Chicago, 16–19 February 2022
Online, via Zoom, 3–5 March 202

Proposal due by 16 September 2021

CAA will deliver the 110th Annual Conference with in-person and virtual, live sessions in two components. In-person sessions will be held at the Hilton Chicago, February 16–19, and virtual, live sessions will be held on Zoom, March 3–5. All sessions will be 90 minutes long, organized at the discretion of each session chair. To submit a proposal, send a completed proposal form and a two-page CV to the chair(s) by 16 September 2021.

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Abolitionist Aesthetics (Virtual)
Chair: Eva McGraw, mcgraw.eva@gmail.com

The late eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of a burgeoning abolitionist visual culture as anti-slavery activists on both sides of the Atlantic seized upon images as a powerful weapon in their crusade against human bondage. With Britain’s withdrawal from the international slave trade in 1807 and the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, abolitionist images increasingly focused on domestic American slavery. Utilizing various media, black and white activists employed images as potent tools for moral suasion, illustrating the essential humanity of enslaved people and exposing the cruelty of the peculiar institution. While the most iconic abolitionist images—including that of the slave ship Brookes and the illustrations for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—have been frequently considered, scholars have yet to examine the full range of abolitionist imagery. This panel seeks new approaches to the study of anti-slavery imagery across national contexts from the eighteenth century to the present day. Submissions may address but are not limited to the following questions: What visual strategies did abolitionists use to further their cause, and how did the particularities of media impact their productions? How did abolitionist image-makers combat censorship? What sorts of patronage networks existed for the creation and dissemination of abolitionist art? How did the contributions of black abolitionists impact anti-slavery imagery? Finally, does the history of abolitionist aesthetics inform present-day efforts to memorialize abolitionists and/or resonate with renewed efforts to achieve racial justice in America, including Black Lives Matter and the Prison-abolition Movement?

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Appraising Your Research as Data: Managing, Visualizing, and Preserving Your Scholarship
Art Libraries Society of North America (In-Person)
Chair: Jill E. Luedke (Temple University), jluedke@temple.edu

The scholarship used and produced by art historians and visual artists is no longer limited to journal articles, research notes, and works of art. Today, new approaches to art historical research and visual arts practice utilize media-rich and technology-robust sources of data such as GIS coordinates, 3D scans and prints, video games, Twitter feeds, Instagram images, and virtual and augmented reality tools. Research data management, data visualization, and data preservation play increasingly important roles in the evolving landscape of scholarly endeavors; and, academic libraries are expanding their services, creating new spaces, and developing frameworks to support new fields of inquiry by art history practitioners. Moreover, academic administrations are establishing institutional repository standards for all disciplines, and grant-funding agencies are requiring data management plans. Innovative faculty and students partner with librarians and library specialists for guidance on the discovery, use, and maintenance of diverse data formats. This panel will address useful research management practices, skills and methods to visually represent research, and processes and tools to archive and preserve data in all phases of the research lifecycle.

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Archive, Object, Image: Reading Against the Grain in the Dutch and Spanish ‘Golden Ages’
Historians of Netherlandish Art (In-Person)
Chairs: Carrie J. Anderson (Middlebury College), carriea@middlebury.edu; and Marsely L. Kehoe, marselykehoe@gmail.com

The artistic flourishing of the so-called Dutch and Spanish ‘Golden Ages’ was built upon the labor and suffering of people across global empires, which extended from Europe to Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Not just vestiges of the past, these issues are indeed quite urgent, as they underpin contemporary dialogues around race, violence, and representation. As scholars of the early modern period, we have an opportunity and an obligation to center long-suppressed voices, redress historical imbalances, and challenge racist narratives that persist to this day. But how can we present a more balanced version of the past when we are dependent upon archives, texts, objects, and images that are both byproducts of and mechanisms for systemic oppression?

This panel seeks methodologically innovative projects that challenge or disrupt the narratives that attach to early modern Dutch, Hispano-Flemish, and Spanish archives, texts, objects, and images. Proposals may include, but are not limited to, the following: studies that prioritize voices and identities that are absent—or purposefully excluded—from the textual, archival, or pictorial record; research that recontextualizes and/or localizes the commodities of global trade; data-driven projects that challenge the semantic structures of the early modern archive; studies that decenter imperial narratives or examine productive failures in research, scholarship, and teaching.

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Constructing Art History in and through Eighteenth-Century Dictionaries and Encyclopedias
American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (In-Person)
Chairs: Jennifer Germann (Ithaca College), jgermann@ithaca.edu; and Craig Hanson (Calvin University), chanson@calvin.edu

Notwithstanding an impressive body of scholarship addressing eighteenth-century encyclopedias generally—particularly Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopedia and the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert—art history as a discipline has yet to produce anything like a comprehensive account of how various artistic discourses of the period were shaped by such reference works—either by ambitious universal dictionaries or by more focused, specialized volumes. In fact, however, the long eighteenth century saw the publication and often significant distribution of a wide range of art and architectural dictionaries, books like Filippo Baldinucci’s Vocabolario toscano dell’arte del disegno (1681), Neve’s The City and Country Purchaser’s and Builder’s Dictionary (1703), John Barrow’s Dictionarium Polygraphicum (1735), François Marie de Marsy’s Dictionnaire abrégé de peinture et d’architecture (1746), Joachim Christoph Gottsched’s Handlexicon, oder, kurzgefasstes Wörterbuch der schönen Wissenschaften und freyen Künste (1760), and Diego Antonio Rejon de Silva’s Diccionario de las nobles artes para instrucción de los aficionados, y uso de los profesores (1788).

This panel invites papers that explore how dictionaries and encyclopedias (broadly defined) mediated and shaped the emerging field of art history for both artistically sophisticated readers and a wider general audience. How were these texts used in the past (and by whom) and how might art historians engage them productively today? And what to make of how these texts have worked to legitimate some objects of art historical inquiry, even as the omissions have also profoundly shaped the field?

For all our twenty-first-century hopes of advancing a comprehensive, global scope, how effectively might any reference work, dependent upon existing scholarship, break from the biases and narratives that have dominated art history as an academic discipline? Should such works continue to be produced and, crucially, in what form? Narrowly focused papers are welcome so long as they also position their subjects within a larger framework. Contributions that reconsider well-known eighteenth-century publications (including universal dictionaries) as well as essays addressing underexplored reference books are encouraged.

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Britain in (and out of) Europe: Unity, Separation, and the Arts of Leave-Taking
Historians of British Art (Virtual)
Chairs: Marcia Pointon, m.r.pointon@manchester.ac.uk; and Keren Hammerschlag, Keren.Hammerschlag@anu.edu.au

The 2016 referendum and eventual withdrawal of Britain from the European Union in 2020 has brought about a protracted and painful repositioning of Britain in relation to the rest of Europe. As existing partnerships are dissolved and new partnerships sought, Brexit has also revived interest in the British Commonwealth, Britain’s alliance with America, and its role as a global middle-power. This panel will consider artistic and cultural responses to Brexit and the political, economic and social rupture it represents. It also seeks more generally to re-examine historical and contemporary artistic and material reflections on the relationship of Britain to Europe. For many, Brexit was experienced as an enforced separation—a one-sided divorce. From maritime subjects and migration imagery to genre paintings and deathbed scenes, Britain has long-standing pictorial traditions representing leave-taking of a variety of sorts. The arts of leave-taking, divorce and separation speak to the movement of people, goods and capital, and reflect on the passage of time and nature of death. This panel will consider all media from any period that grapples with these themes in British art, visual and material culture. (British art here includes art produced in and about the former British Empire.) Examinations of the visual cultures of mourning, migration, deportation and resistance to enforced separations, especially in the context of Brexit and other recent political crises, are encouraged. We welcome proposals that are broad and creative in their interpretation of the theme.

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Centering the Caribbean: The Long Eighteenth Century, Hemispheric Perspectives, and ‘American Art’ (In-Person)
Chairs: Marie-Stephanie M. Delamaire (Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library), sdelam@winterthur.org; and Katelyn D. Crawford (Birmingham Museum of Art), kcrawford@artsbma.org

How different does early American art look when viewed from the Caribbean? Histories of colonial and vice-royal American art, tend to privilege art produced in continental spaces as they came to be organized as nation states, overlooking the interrelatedness of early Caribbean and continental colonies. This interconnectedness had a profound impact on artistic creation in the early Americas. Artists like José Campeche, Peter Bentzon, John Greenwood, Josef Francisco Xavier de Salazar y Mendoza, and Agostino Brunias, worked outside and across borders; between social classes and races; and beyond sovereignties which historical narratives have organized for the eighteenth century.

This panel centers the Caribbean region—hub of colonial, revolutionary, and hemispheric activity—a pivot for eighteenth-century visual culture that offers avenues to address art making beyond national paradigms and the continental weight of North American and Latin American art histories. At a time when a synthetic view of ‘American’ art history seems no longer feasible nor desirable, the Caribbean region opens onto the importance of art making between American spaces. We seek papers that focus on works of art, artists, networks of exchange, patronage, collecting or destruction that emerged from or were driven by the Caribbean region. We welcome papers that address specific artists and works of art even if the visual record is missing or destroyed (such as José Antonio Aponte’s “libro de pinturas”), mis-catalogued (for instance the portrait formerly identified as Hercules Posey, the cook who George Washington enslaved), or displaced (such as John Smibert’s Bermuda Group).

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Dismantling the Patriarchal Canon: Foregrounding Women Artists and Patrons through Digital Art History
Digital Art History Society (Virtual)
Chairs: Tracy Chapman Hamilton, tracychamilton21@gmail.com; Dana Hogan (Duke University), dana.hogan@duke.edu; and Mariah Proctor-Tiffany (California State University, Long Beach), mariah.proctor@csulb.edu

As premodern feminist art historians we have found that the digital allows, inspires, and even requires us to reassess women’s contributions to history and, in so doing, challenge and disrupt the male-centered canon. Through examples like Gealt and Falcone’s A Space of Their Own, Barker and The Medici Archive Project’s Jane Fortune Research Program on Women Artists, and the Clara database, launched in 2008 by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, we have witnessed the impact digital tools—made even richer because of their collaborative nature—have had in the last decades on our ability to conduct research on women’s roles in advancing visual arts and culture globally. Digital Art History methods, such as data analysis, virtual and augmented reality, digital mapping and networking, and dynamic archive databases, have allowed us to dig deeply into the record; raise ethical questions of privilege, bias, accessibility, and audience; reckon with the limitations of representation to reveal the often unseen in our histories; and find new inspiring ways to visually interact with and contextualize people, place, and material. We aim to expand even further upon the work that has been done by soliciting papers on digital projects—or those holding theoretical or historical perspectives—that offer new methodological applications in the study of women as integral to the full breadth of our chronological and geographical past and present. Each project should refute the concept of a single patriarchal canon and illustrate how the digital makes this essential reassessment possible and unavoidable.

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Eighteenth-Century Women Artists in Context: Not Apart, but a Part
Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (In-Person)
Chairs: Melissa L. Hyde (University of Florida), mhyde@arts.ufl.edu; and Paris Amanda Spies-Gans (Harvard University Society of Fellows), pspiesgans@fas.harvard.edu

The history of women artists does not stand outside or even on the periphery of art history, but is integral to a full understanding of the history of art. That conviction is the starting point for this ASECS/CAA session. We invite papers that make a substantive case for women’s presence in aesthetic culture during the long eighteenth century, that consider the training and practices of women artists in dynamic interaction with the men who were their colleagues, collaborators, teachers, students, patrons and collectors, and sometimes also their fathers, brothers, and husbands. Thus, special consideration will be given to papers that trace the complex circumstances that conditioned women’s making of art, their careers and their lives. Papers might take up questions of how women artists appropriated, changed, or even subverted the dominant trends in art making, and how and why they affiliated themselves with certain traditions and not with others. Other topics to be addressed might include: in addition to women who worked as painters, those who practiced printmaking, or natural history illustration; interrogations of the categories of professional and non-professional (or ‘amateur’); ways in which women used the visual arts to claim agency and be recognized as individuals at a time when they had few sociopolitical rights; and women who traveled. In sum, we seek papers that advance knowledge about the significant role that women artists played in the overall production of visual culture during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.

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Imagined Geographies: (Trans)regional Visual Practices in South and Southeast Asia (Virtual)
Chairs: Katherine Bruhn, katiebruhn@gmail.com; and Shivani Sud (UC Berkeley), shivanisud05@gmail.com

How do artists in Indonesia claim the formation of a Nusantara Islamic identity through the transferral of linguistic and cultural constructs such as alam (universe), an Arabic term that can also be found in Mughal manuscripts? Or, how do regional court painters in India construct an imagined vision of firangistan (the west) in local visual practices? With a desire to rethink the ways in which geographies are constructed, studied, and defined in the context of South and Southeast Asia, we invite proposals that explore artistic practices which disrupt prescriptive geopolitical boundaries like the nation-state and region. From colonial histories to post-War regional categorizations, the regions of South and Southeast Asia have been defined and reinvented in accordance with geopolitical interests and cultural usages. In contrast, recent scholarship has demonstrated that vernacular social and cultural practices contributed to the formation of imagined geographies, shared communities, and coeval artistic practices beyond the political borders and territorial boundaries of these regions (Tajudeen, 2017). From the eighteenth century to the present, we aim to foreground the power and agency of artists and art in constructing new visions of the world in and across these regions. Our objective is to move beyond current geopolitically bounded framings of South and Southeast Asian art history to instead examine the ways in which the transregional circulation of people, ideas, and objects shaped notions of identity and belonging. In doing so, we hope to offer fresh possibilities for the study of non-Western art practices in and beyond these regions.

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New Age of Teaching the Art of the Islamic World
Museum Committee (In-Person)
Chair: Xenia Gazi (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), agazio@saic.edu

Scholars and museum educators interpreting and teaching the art of the Islamic world (MENASA’s art*) have an indisputably challenging role: they need to re-interpret the history of the region from textbooks steeped in colonial discourses while sheltering the art they study from negative portrayals by many Western media. The purpose of this panel is to ask museum educators to explain strategies and tactics they use to mitigate stereotypes about MENASA’s art and its context while also engaging the public. We especially welcome female educators and/or papers that explain how educators address stereotypes about the art of the Islamic world. We aim to spotlight innovative case studies that portray this groundbreaking work, revealing how art history and museum education can help bridge understanding and revitalize the discourse on MENASA’s art in museums and classrooms alike.

*Middle East-North Africa-South Asia

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Sacred Images in a Secular Age: Religious Art in 19th-Century Europe (In-Person)
Chairs: Aaron Wile (National Gallery of Art), aaron.m.wile@gmail.com; and Mary Morton (National Gallery of Art), m-morton@nga.gov

According to the standard accounts of nineteenth-century European art, modernity did away with the viability of sacred subjects. In an industrialized, urban society defined by science and progress, religion slid into obsolescence. In response, artists abandoned religious themes to focus on the social realities of modern life or the material possibilities and limitations of their medium.

In recent years, this narrative has come under strain. Religious art, art historians are recognizing, flourished in nearly every medium and movement in the nineteenth century—but not on the same terms it did during the Renaissance and Baroque. If religion did not necessarily decline in the nineteenth century, as the first theorists of secularization, such as Comte, Marx, and Durkheim, believed it would, its status changed. Scholars increasingly conceive of secularization as a reordering of the relationship between God and creation. In modernity, it became possible to understand nature, society, and the self without reference to a transcendent reality. Faith persisted, but in its own sphere.

This panel explores how artists navigated the shifting terrain of the sacred in modernity. To what extent was it possible to access the divine in a disenchanted age? How should sacred subjects be represented in a society that defined itself without religious referents? How did artists seek to reconcile religion with science, individualism, nationalism, urbanization, imperialism, and advanced capitalism? And how did religious painting and sculpture respond to the unprecedented proliferation of mass-media and other developments in visual culture in the period?

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The Interstices of Print
Association of Print Scholars (In-Person)
Chairs: Sarah Bane (University of California, Santa Barbara), sbane@umail.ucsb.edu; and Michelle Donnelly (Yale University), michelle.donnelly@yale.edu

This session will interrogate the interstices of printmaking across geographies and time periods. David Landau and Peter Parshall’s foundational text, The Renaissance Print, 1470–1550, suggests that “printmaking developed early on as a trade capable of eluding conventional practices and consequently attracting artisans with the initiative to work in the shadowy interstices that lay between the guilds and local governments” (12: 1994). From this early history of the medium to the present, printmaking has had an ability to produce and thrive within interstitial spaces both for working artists and in the art historical canon. Interstices are also essential to printmaking’s technical processes. For example, in aquatint, the interstices between resin grains that the acid etches into create the print’s design. Yet, scholars and collectors have tended to overlook interstitial objects that fall between the categorical boundaries of intaglio, relief, planographic, and stencil printing.

This session invites papers that examine printmaking and its interstices across a wide range of visual and material cultural practices. Examples of welcome topics include but are not limited to the following: gaps in canonical art historical narratives; liminal spaces of making, such as Mabel Dwight’s movement between her home and studio while creating lithographs; physical intervals between printed marks, such as cross-hatching used to depict the Black body in Phillis Wheatley’s engraved frontispiece to Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773); and hybrid works that push against conventional print taxonomies such as Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione’s seventeenth-century monotypes and Pati Hill’s xerographs from the 1970s–80s.