Enfilade

From UAAC/AAUC:

Universities Art Association of Canada / l’association d’art des universités du Canada
In person, University of Toronto, 27–29 October 2022, and online, 4 November 2022

Proposals due by 30 June 2022

Each fall, UAAC-AAUC hosts Canada’s professional conference for visual arts-based research by art historians, professors, artists, curators, and cultural workers. This year’s conference includes three days of in-person meetings at the University of Toronto and one day of online panels.

Submit proposals by using the Call for Papers Proposal Form. Proposals are sent directly to the chair(s) of the session. The deadline for submission is 30 June 2022.

A very limited selection of sessions potentially related to the eighteenth century, including the HECAA panel, is provided below. The full listing is available here.

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26  Made Up: An Art History of Cosmetics (in person)
Hana Nikcevic (University of Toronto) and Tara Allen-Flanagan (Independent scholar), hana.nikcevic@utoronto.ca and tara.allen-flanagan@mail.mcgill.ca

Art has been acknowledged for centuries as the business of deception and artifice—spanning trompe l’oeil to parafiction—but it shares this storied past with a less-celebrated, heavily-gendered counterpart: cosmetics. Fascination with feminine art/artifice underpins the corpus of toilette paintings, but in these portrayals as in later iterations—from Boucher’s Pompadour to Vogue Beauty Secrets—the face-painter’s agency has been, through analogy with the artist, variably recouped and contested. Cosmetics likewise represent the spoils and vectors of globalization and imperialism; if Queen Elizabeth I’s chalky visage, asserted through portraiture, already reflected and advanced England’s imperial efforts, Angela Rosenthal confirmed the eighteenth-century coalescence of racial theory and complexion. This session interrogates cosmetics’ aesthetics, asking after global and historical conflations of and disparities between art and make-up; cosmetics’ conflicting capacities to subjugate and subvert; the entwined histories of beauty, complexion, racialization, imperialism, and oppression; and, most broadly, the understudied visual and material cultures of cosmetics.

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27  Monuments and Their Futures in North America (in person)
Cody Barteet (Western University), cbarteet@uwo.ca

Recently, monuments have received significant attention. Whether connected to their removal, conservation, and construction, individuals and organizations have used monuments to promote varying ideological concepts. In Canada, most of this conversation has been limited to the removal and vandalism of monuments associated with the long colonial legacy and its impact on Indigenous peoples. However, this conversation changed radically in late January 2022 when the so-called Freedom Convoy descended upon Ottawa to protest existing COVID-19 policies. During the occupation, several of Ottawa’s monuments were vandalized including those to Terry Fox and to fallen Canadian soldiers. Unlike previous vandalisms in Canada, the backlash against their defacement was immediate and universal. Informed by this shifting context concerning monuments, this panels queries the future and purposes of monuments through diverse methodologies: nationalism, racism, environmentalism, etc. In so doing this panel analyzes the current “monument discourse” and queries the needs and purposes of monuments.

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28  ‘My Strength, My Comfort, My Intense Delight’: Women, Art, and Lifewriting in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (in person)
Charles Reeve (OCAD University), creeve@ocadu.ca

Like her contemporary Eugène Delacroix, British watercolourist Elizabeth Murray left the ‘West’ in the early 1800s for the ‘Orient’, recording her adventures in extensive writings and images. However, while Delacroix’s journals and notebooks became widely celebrated, Murray’s account slid into obscurity—even though Delacroix’s journey lasted only six months and generated two articles, while Murray’s time in the region prompted her two-volume autobiography Sixteen Years of an Artist’s Life in Morocco, Spain, and the Canary Islands. Moreover, accounts by other women from that century—Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun and Elizabeth Butler—similarly languished, creating the sense that this era’s female artists neither left home nor published autobiographies. This panel aims to explode this misapprehension by convening discussions of lifewriting by women artists of the 1800s and earlier. We welcome proposals regarding all lifewriting forms (e.g. diaries, letters), with particular interest in accounts originating outside normative ‘Western’ narratives, and/or regarding now-obscure autobiographies.

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54  HECAA Open Session (online)
Christina Smylitopoulos (University of Guelph), csmylito@uoguelph.ca

HECAA works to stimulate, foster, and disseminate knowledge of all aspects of eighteenth-century visual culture. This open session welcomes papers that examine any aspect of art and visual culture from the 1680s to the 1830s. Special consideration will be given to proposals that demonstrate innovation in theoretical and/or methodological approaches.

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63  Women and the Arts in the Early Modern Period (online)
Andrea Morgan (Independent scholar), 14acm5@queensu.ca

Women have long faced challenges in pursuit of their engagement with the visual arts. While upper-class and aristocratic early modern women were often encouraged to dabble in or have some familiarity with the arts to make them amiable and polite companions, they were rarely afforded the same opportunities as their male counterparts. Yet, women such as Artemisia Gentileschi and Angelica Kauffmann excelled in their professional practice; still others persisted but remain relegated to the realm of the ‘amateur’. This panel seeks papers that highlight the life and work of both professional female artists as well as those lesser known, including women who worked in media other than painting. This session also encourages explorations of alternative ways women engaged with the art world in the early modern period, whether that be through art collecting or curating, broadly defined, and women in the commercial world who worked as art dealers or suppliers.