Enfilade

The last event in the Belatedness and North American Art series, from The Courtauld:

Belatedness and Historiographies of North American Art
Courtauld Institute, Vernon Square Campus, London, 16–17 June 2023

Focused on historiographies of North American Art, the symposium asks, how has belatedness shaped the historiography of the arts of North America? How have projections of belatedness shaped the inclusion or exclusion of African American, Latinx, Caribbean, and Native American art in the canon of ‘American art’, as well as art from regions outside the Northeast? How have the arts of Canada and Mexico been framed in dialogue with the art of the United States? Has visual studies recentred these hierarchies? In the context of the United States, how has the discipline’s emergence in dialogue with the American Mind school of American studies continued to shape the sub-field’s relationships with the wider field and canons of the history of art? How have narratives of modernist progress in abstraction shaped critics’ constructions of belatedness around artists who retain figuration? How have artists operating outside geographic and cultural ‘centres’ of art production taken up, mimicked, or inverted expectations of cultural belatedness?

Abstracts and registration information can be found here»

F R I D A Y ,  1 6  J U N E  2 0 2 3

12.45  Registration

1.15  Welcome and Introductory Comments

1.30  Session 1 | Belatedness as Difference
• Emmanuel Ortega — From New Spain to Mexico, Belatedness as a Tool of Empire
• Alexis L. Boylan — Always Late to the Party: North American Art, Science, and Epistemological Anxiety in the Twentieth Century

2.45  Coffee Break

3.15  Session 2 | Belatedness as Positionality
• Jessica L. Horton — Tipi and Dome: Indigenous Futurism at Expo 70
• Leon Wainwright — Between the United States, Britain and the Caribbean: A Historiography of Belatedness

4.30  Reception

S A T U R D A Y ,  1 7  J U N E  2 0 2 3

10.00  Registration

10.30  Welcome and Introductory Comments

10.45  Session 3 | Belated Inclusions
• Elizabeth Hutchinson — When Did Indigenous Art Become ‘American’?
• Tanya Sheehan — American Art Historiography, Slavery, and Its Aftermath

12.00  Lunch Break

1.30  Session 4 | Belatedness and American Art Histories
• Juliet Sperling — The Late Jacob Lawrence
• Martha Langford — Belatedness, Near and Far
• Nicholas Robbins — ‘Yet-to-be-dismantled’: Elizabeth Bishop and Winslow Homer in 1974

3.15  Concluding Remarks