Enfilade

I’ve highlighted here a selection of panels related to the eighteenth century; but please consult the Call for Papers for additional possibilities. –CH

114th Annual Conference of the College Art Association

Hilton Chicago, 18–21 February 2026

Proposals due by 29 August 2025

Architectural Utopias Redux
Chair: Demetra Vogiatzaki (ETH Zurich)

Can utopia still be a meaningful framework for researching and teaching architecture in a time of ecological and political crisis? Since the Enlightenment, architectural utopias have often shed their emancipatory potential, functioning instead as instruments of capitalist expansion, settler colonialism, and modernist abstraction–so Manfredo Tafuri and Anthony Vidler, among other architectural historians, have claimed. Yet beneath the failed promises of the architectural ‘avant-gardes’ lie counter-histories of resilience—’rear-guard’ efforts that challenged dominant spatial paradigms while restoring equity in their present. This panel invites a rethinking of architectural utopianism by turning attention to those who resisted, subverted, or reconfigured utopian ideals from the margins. What insights can be gained by examining utopia not as a formal project of radical innovation, but as a practice of community endurance and revolt?

We welcome papers that explore the spatial practices of feminist, decolonial, spiritual, and other collectivist movements challenging the exclusions embedded in dominant utopian narratives. These may include intentional communities, grassroots infrastructures, pedagogical experiments, or speculative practices grounded in marginalized worldviews. Submissions may address any historical period, but special attention will be given to work that situates premodern, early modern, or underrepresented geographic contexts within broader debates on utopianism. We also encourage contributions proposing alternative methodologies for teaching utopias in architecture—through archives, oral histories, literary or material culture. By centering the ‘rear-guard’ of architectural history—those whose visions have often been erased, or dismissed—we hope to reimagine utopia not as an unreachable blueprint, but as a lived and ongoing project of resistance.

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Art and Architecture vs. Environment: Failure, Redesign, and Innovation in the Early Modern Iberian World (Society for Iberian Global Art)
Chairs: Rebecca Yuste (Columbia University) and Amy Chang (Harvard University)

The history of the early modern Iberian world is strewn with stories of architectural ambition and engineering innovation that seek to defy, overcome, or restructure extant environmental conditions. Land-reclaiming and flood-controlling projects represent a major thematic in this period, from Regi Lagni in Naples to the desagüe of Mexico City, as do seismic-responsive architectures such as the famous Earthquake Baroque in the Philippines and Guatemala, and as well as post-earthquake architectures in Sicily and Lisbon. Early modern architecture and engineering is often characterized by new boldness of ambition in responding to, attempting to overcome, or intending to change environmental conditions, it often yields cycles of loss, failure, and reiteration, until new technics are achieved.

This panel seeks to learn from stories of architectural and infrastructural failure, innovation, and redesign, especially as it relates to practices of colonialism, from across the Iberian world. We invite papers that seek to complicate the narrative of architectural domination on the land and landscape and search for cases that focus on moments of disjunction and defeat in the face of environmental factors, and the struggle to respond. Papers may examine the consequences of incomplete knowledge of landscapes, ecologies, and materials, and the cases under consideration may be architectural works that were unfinished, hypothetical, never realized, or rebuilt after confronting natural disasters and misunderstandings of ground conditions. We also welcome papers on artworks representing knowledge of materials and environments; moments of disaster, engineering, and rebuilding; or changes in understandings of nature and environment.

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Bad Government: Art and Politics in the Eighteenth Century (American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies)
Chair: Amy E. Freund (Southern Methodist University)

How did art, architecture, and visual and material culture in the long eighteenth century perpetuate or resist objectionable forms of government? This panel will consider how the arts were weaponized both by political leaders to shore up their regimes and by their critics to bring those regimes down. Potential topics include but are by no means limited to: the arts of the eighteenth century’s revolutions and counterrevolutions, the enlistment of the visual arts to justify, perpetuate, and resist colonialism, popular media and propaganda, the building and destruction of palaces, monuments, and other public-facing forms of art, artists as political actors, private and domestic forms of artistic control and contestation, portraits of rulers and political figures, sacred art in the service of secular struggles, and the mobilization of scientific illustration for political ends.

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Centering the Margins: Art and Identity beyond the Colonial American Metropoles
Chairs: JoAnna Reyes (Arizona State University) and Carlos Rivas (The Ohio State University)

This panel investigates the rich artistic traditions of colonial cities in the Americas that developed outside imperial capitals. While metropolitan centers such as Mexico City and Lima have long dominated narratives of colonial art, cities like Antigua (Guatemala), Ouro Preto (Brazil), Cuzco (Peru), and Popayán (Colombia) cultivated distinctive visual cultures that reflected complex interactions among European, Indigenous, African, and mestizo communities. These extra-metropolitan locales were not peripheral but central to the formation of regional artistic identities, often serving as hubs of innovation, adaptation, and resistance.

Panelists will explore how visual culture and aesthetic preference were transformed in these cities through localized interpretations, responding to local materials, labor networks, and spiritual traditions. Religious architecture and devotional arts—especially those commissioned for monasteries, cathedrals, and mission churches—may serve as a lens to examine both the imposition and reinterpretation of colonial ideologies. The panel also considers the importance of artisan networks and the movement of artists, artworks, and raw materials across colonial territories, illuminating the transregional dynamics that shaped local production.

In tracing these developments, the panel foregrounds how artistic production in these cities negotiated colonial authority while fostering creole and Indigenous expressions of identity. By centering these often-overlooked locales, this panel seeks to expand the geographies of colonial art history and enrich our understanding of artistic agency in the Americas.

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Freedom, Fugitivity, and Revolt in the Global Netherlandish World, 1500–1800
Chairs: Arianna Ray (Northwestern University) and Kathleen DiDomenico (Washington University in St. Louis)

This session explores the distinct but related notions of freedom, fugitivity, and revolt in art of the global Netherlandish world, ca. 1500–1800. Freedom, understood as the state of being unencumbered by restrictions, restraints, or oppression, is often seen as a defining feature of the early modern Netherlands, where political revolt, religious reform, economic endeavor, and artistic experimentation resulted in newfound freedoms for certain populations. But alongside these often precarious freedoms, there remained hierarchies of power that kept people locked in systems of repression, subjugation, and exploitation. In response, historical subjects turned to strategic practices of fugitivity and revolt, both overt and subtle, in an effort to resist domination and create alternative spaces of personal and collective liberty. This panel will examine concepts of freedom/unfreedom capaciously, as a labor status, an artistic practice, and a theoretical question. We build upon the insights of scholars within and beyond art history, including Saidiya Hartman, Neil Roberts, and Tina Campt, among others. We welcome interdisciplinary and methodologically innovative approaches, particularly those engaging with Black studies, Indigenous studies, gender and queer theory, and decolonial critique.

Potential topics include:
• Depictions of forced labor including slavery, serfdom, and indentured servitude
• Depictions of fugitives, maroons, revolutionaries, and diasporic communities
• Representations of individual and collective acts of resistance
• Mapping spaces/sites/locations of freedom, fugitivity, and revolt
• Objects made by forced laborers or those who achieved freedom
• Visual culture around rebellions and uprisings
• Artistic freedom and creativity
• Coded imagery and subversive aesthetics
• Absences in the archive and/as fugitivity

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Garden and its Discontents / Discontents in the Garden
Chairs: Xiaoyao Guo (Princeton University) and Chenchen Yan (Princeton University)

As locus amoenus and paradise lost, the garden has been a place of ambivalence since the start of human civilization. Positioned uneasily between landscape and architecture, it is also one of the most powerful topoi through which to tame, emulate, and (re)construct nature. This panel revisits the long and rich histories of the garden and investigates its ambivalence, here reformulated as “discontents,” through various cultural historical mediations.

Motivated by Sigmund Freud’s famous essay “Civilization and its Discontents” on the irreconcilable clash between individual instincts and societal regulations, this panel aims to reread the garden into its concrete sociohistorical textures. Furthermore, drawing from the precise translation of the essay’s original title, “The Discontent in Civilization,” this panel approaches the garden as a contested site between ideologies, discourses, and sensibilities in which contradictions and antagonisms are inherently constitutive of its construction. From the Venetian terraferma to the Japanese bonsai, from the English picturesque to the American wilderness, the garden addresses specific questions of its times, and challenges its presumed harmony and unity: What are the discontents housed within the seemingly serene Elysium? What perceptual and conceptual tensions need to be identified, what hierarchies undone? We welcome submissions on the discontents of/in the garden across cultures and histories. This “comparative-global” approach, we hope, would highlight in turn the cultural-specificity and social constructedness of the garden. Articulating these discontents, then, would offer valuable insights into the binaries of art-science, nature-culture, self-other urgent to today’s ecologically conscious world.

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Hybridity, Adaptability, and Exchange during the Long Eighteenth Century: Producing Global Aesthetics in Decorative Art and Design (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture)

Chairs: Zifeng Zhao (University of Cambridge) and Alisha Ma (London School of Economics and Political Science)

Over the long eighteenth century (c. 1689–1815), the decorative arts and design underwent profound change via global diffusion of objects, techniques, and knowledge. Although global artistic exchange has shaped cultural landscapes for centuries, this particular period saw the creation of new aesthetic paradigms and fostered cultural discourses regarding notions of cultural agency, identity, and authenticity. This session examines the making of global aesthetic traditions and practices in the long eighteenth century by closely interrogating the dynamics of cross-cultural hybridity, adaptability, and exchange along with their usefulness as art historical concepts. Furthermore, the session will illustrate how the evolution of artistic traditions shaped visual, material, sensorial, and political landscapes across the early modern world.

We invite contributions that address how individuals and collectives responded to cross-cultural interactions, creatively adapting and transforming these influences into novel, hybrid forms. We welcome papers from diverse geographies that consider how decorative art and design functioned as crucial contact zones where local traditions were continuously reimagined through exchange as well as resistance. For example, Indian artisans adapted traditional cotton textile designs for European tastes, while European potters such as the Delft and Meissen factories experimented with new technologies to produce ceramics in competition with Chinese porcelain. Meanwhile, Colonoware pottery was produced by enslaved Africans in North America from a combination of African traditions, local resources and practical demands. Ultimately, this discussion will deepen scholarly understanding of the role played by the decorative arts in producing global visual and material cultures during the long eighteenth century.

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Is There a Native American Art History Canon? Is It a Good Idea?
Chairs: Karen Kessel and Alicia Lynn Harris (University of Oklahoma)

While the framing of art history survey courses has gradually shifted from a core focus on Western Civilization emanating from Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean regions to a more global view, the North American continent remains marginalized. Some American art history texts now incorporate Native American works into their narrative, but do Native Americans identify with being part of the United States’ cultural history? Current textbooks for Native American art focus disproportionately on the post-contact era with minimal coverage of the millennia that came before. Why? Archaeologists, who do not generally prioritize artistic achievement in their research, have been the main contributors to studies of the pre-contact era in North America. Given recent contributions to the field from an increase in Native scholars working in museums and academic institutions, this panel seeks to understand and help define the current best practices for teaching Native American art history. We invite papers that assess what can and should be shared, when, and who has authority over cultural domains, along with consideration of what themes, ideas, artworks, and frameworks are currently considered best practices to enhance the appreciation and understanding of Native American art history.

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Landscape, Materiality, and Representation in the Long Nineteenth Century
Chair: Noam Gonnen (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)

This session invites contributions that investigate the entangled relationships between landscape, materiality, and representation in the long nineteenth century. While landscape has often been examined through symbolic, nationalistic, or pictorial frameworks, this panel foregrounds its material dimensions—both as subject and substance—and asks how they shaped artistic and cultural production during this transformative period. How did the physical qualities of land, earth, and environment inflect visual representation? What tensions emerged between landscape as material presence and landscape as mediated image?

Bridging art history, material and visual culture, human geography, and environmental humanities, this session seeks to integrate phenomenological approaches (Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Casey), material and object-oriented ontology (Bennett, Harman), and geographical theory (Ingold) with close visual and historical analysis. We are particularly interested in how the materiality of land—its textures, substances, and transformations—was registered, abstracted, or resisted in the practices of representation across diverse geographies, media, and artistic traditions during this period.

Contributors might consider:
• The material construction of landscape images: grounds, supports, pigments, and surfaces
• Representing geological time, land use, or extraction industries
• Earth as medium: pigment, sediment, and organic matter in artistic practice
• Artistic responses to ecological degradation
• Indigenous and non-Western modes of representing land and territory
• The role of materiality in 19th-century cartography or land surveys
• The visual rhetorics of land ownership, enclosure, and displacement
• Intersections of land, labor, and class in visual culture
We welcome proposals engaging with both canonical and understudied works that rethink landscape through its material and representational operations.

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Let’s Get Metaphysical: Rethinking the Empiricism of British Art (Historians of British Art)
Chair: Douglas R. Fordham (University of Virginia)

Histories of British art rarely ask metaphysical questions. More common are narratives in which the empiricism of Locke and Newton inspired artists to draw and paint the material world “after the life”. But how feasible was it for British artists to bracket metaphysical questions out of their work? As Eugene Thacker noted, “‘Life’ is a troubling and contradictory concept…. Every ontology of ‘life’ thinks of life in terms of something-other-than-life [which] is most often a metaphysical concept, such as time and temporality, form and causality, or spirit and immanence.”

What, if anything, enabled British art to transcend its base materiality? Should paintings ever be more than mimetic ‘pictures’ of the material world, and if so, what beliefs, ideas, or eternal propositions did they invoke? We have grown accustomed to thinking of British artists as post-Reformation iconoclasts who embraced an empirical view of the world. Painting is treated like a mode of critique in which artists contributed to the disenchantment of the modern world. This panel is interested in British art, in any medium and from any period, that refused to settle for mimetic realism. While altarpieces, funerary monuments, and the spiritual visions of William Blake immediately come to mind, papers could interrogate the ‘naturalism’ or ‘lifelikeness’ of J.M.W. Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites, Walter Sickert, and a great deal more.

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Materiality and the Reception of Ancient Objects
Chairs: Stephanie Rose Caruso (The Art Institute of Chicago) and Andrea Morgan (The Art Institute of Chicago)

Ancient Mediterranean objects typically survive in a fragmented state, and their reception, particularly sculpture, has shifted over time. Seventeenth-century artists worked to return fragmented ancient sculptures to a ‘whole’ or ‘complete’ state. Yet, in 1803, Antonio Canova refused Lord Elgin’s proposal to restore the Parthenon marbles, fearing it would damage their original condition. Thus, there was an eventual shift in the perception of the fragment—no longer ‘incomplete’, it possessed an “age value” as Alois Riegl later theorized. With the discovery of ancient textiles in Egypt in the second half of the nineteenth century an opposite approach to the fragment developed. Despite the fact that one might discover a ‘complete’ ancient textile, it was rarely retained; rather, it was cut into as many pieces as possible. Not perceived as fine art, their value instead stemmed from their ability to transmit patterns.

This panel aims to explore the reception, manipulation, restoration, or destruction of ancient objects from the Renaissance through the end of the nineteenth century. We invite papers that investigate whether the specific materiality of ancient objects makes them more vulnerable or resistant to later intervention. Topics can include the exploration of the concept of in/completeness in relation to changing tastes and theoretical divisions between the fine and applied arts; in/completeness and restoration in relation to aesthetic and historical integrity; and the exploration of pastiches. We seek contributions that look closely at surviving objects to extrapolate new ways of thinking about the reception of ancient art.

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Modes of Inscription
Chairs: Erica DiBenedetto (The Museum of Modern Art) and Charles Kang (Rijksmuseum)

Adding language to an object takes many forms and has a long history. It can be done, for example, by the maker of an object as an integral part of generating a work. It can be done by others–and often at a later date–as an addition, an intervention, or even an accident irrelevant to the work. While the modes of inscription might differ from case to case, the voice behind the inscription can bestow a sense of authority in the life of an object. It can also trouble its interpretation. Rather than framing the idea of inscription in terms of word/image relations, this CAA session understands the act of adding language to an object fundamentally as a mediation. Although found across many periods, geographies, and mediums, the practice of inscription has not received sufficient attention from a global and transhistorical perspective. Panelists are therefore invited to examine instances of inscription specific to their respective fields, using their expertise to offer new questions and theoretical considerations about the phenomenon. The common aim will be to consider how such mediations help us think differently about conceptions of authorship, meaning, and possession across time and space.

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Nature in Indigenous Arts of the Ancient and Colonial Americas
Chairs: James Cordova (University of Colorado Boulder) and Angélica J. Afanador-Pujol

The culture-nature divide inherent in European epistemologies and cosmologies contrasts sharply with Indigenous American perspectives, which emphasize interconnectedness over discordance between humans and the natural world. Before European colonization, Indigenous ontologies profoundly shaped the roles of the natural world in their artistic expressions. These beliefs are often evident in the materials chosen for creations, representations of plants, animals, deities, and other sentient beings, as well as the design and layout of cities. In addition to the colonial exploitation of Indigenous peoples and the natural world, the imposition of European epistemologies elicited diverse responses, ranging from outright resistance to selective appropriation, partial acceptance, and full assimilation. This session invites papers that examine the critical roles nature and the environment played in Indigenous creative expressions from ancient to colonial times (c. 1400 BCE – 1825 CE) across North America, Mesoamerica, the Caribbean, Amazonia, and the Andes.

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Pigments and Praxis in the Early Modern Period
Chairs: Annie Correll (New York University) and Gerrit Albertson (Art Institute of Chicago)

Early modern and contemporary sources alike have compared artists’ workshop practices with those of alchemists, as they ground and mixed their pigments with binding media, experimenting with additives and proportions to develop paints with particular viscosities and opacities. Technical studies have further proven the specialized attention that early modern artists paid to their pigments. Hendrick Avercamp used smalt between layers of lead white, diffracting and absorbing light to achieve icy, atmospheric skies in his winter scenes; Frans Hals experimented with indigo in the sashes of his 1627 Haarlem Civic Guard portraits despite contemporary concerns about its discoloration; and Rembrandt developed a signature lead-white paint, adjusting its rheological properties for use in his impasto. This panel seeks to bring together the technical and the art historical to consider pigments not just as agents for color, but for artistic experimentation and cultural significance. We especially welcome joint papers by early modern art historians and conservators or scientists.

Questions addressed may include:
• What can be revealed by tracing the trade routes along which pigments travelled?
• How did environmental or geological factors affect the raw materials of natural pigments? How were they harvested, processed, and made into paint?
• Who played a role in this process? What were the socio-economic or power dynamics at play?
• How did the use of pigments conform to or converge from art theory?
• How did artists experiment to achieve desired color, light, or textural effects?
• What can pigments tell us about the perceived value or purpose of a painting?

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The Margins and Backgrounds of Portraits
Chairs: Joseph Litts (Princeton University) and Michael Hartman (Dartmouth College – Hood Museum)

Portraiture studies have traditionally focused on faces, clothing, and accessories as sites of creating and stabilizing identity within art. Layers of oil paint, pastel dust, and engraved ink articulate race, gender, class, and kinship networks on a scale ranging from jewelry miniatures to life-size replicas. Scholars have demonstrated how these representations surrogated for distant power, how collections and exhibitions were political statements, and how portrait iconoclasm could be broadly ideological rather than personal.

However, what happens behind and around the body? This facet of portraiture remains an open field. Our panel thus invites papers that examine the margins and backgrounds of portraits. These spaces vary from roundels or planes of color, to classicizing scenes or imaginary gardens, to draperies or architectural structures. As much as standardized formulas and techniques have developed for the face itself, the (back)ground has been curiously resistant to such strategies. This panel asks what do these diverse environments—a visualized “habitus,” to borrow from Bourdieu—contribute to the portrait? How might painterly surroundings trouble notions of identity and modernity? For group portraits and conversation pieces, how does setting provoke or dismiss relationality? Do specific display or exhibition contexts become extended backgrounds for portraits, especially with sculptures? Ultimately, how do the edges, however they might be defined, (re)frame our understanding of the key genre of portraiture? In addition to paying close attention to the borders and liminal spaces of portraiture as traditionally understood, we also welcome papers that trouble the definitions of portraiture itself through close attention to context.

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Ungrading Art History
Chairs: Jessy L. Bell (Northwestern University) and Brian T. Leahy (Montana State University Billings)

The art history classroom has long been distinguished by harsh grading, steep learning curves, and high-stakes memorization. However, in the current era of generative AI and legislative attacks on the humanities, there is an urgent need for art history to reexamine its pedagogical foundations to better fulfill its most vital role: teaching critical thinking about images. Recent pedagogical movements variously called ungrading, contract grading, or de-grading, backed by research in the science of teaching and learning (Alfie Kohn, Susan D. Blum, Joshua R. Eyler, Jesse Stommel, and others) challenge the predominance of punitive strategies for evaluating student learning. Instead, these studies propose approaches that develop students’ intrinsic desires for learning through evaluative feedback, progress-based assessment, self-reflection, project-based learning, and other methods. This panel asks how art history might also reimagine its pedagogical and evaluative practices beyond grades—or conventional assessments more broadly—not only to deepen student engagement, but also to reclaim the radical potential of looking closely at images.

We invite papers that reconsider assessment in art history and architectural history at the university level. We welcome the results of classroom experiments and reflections, including but not limited to the alternative assessment methods mentioned above; new theoretical frameworks for teaching art history; experiments in student-centered approaches; historical perspectives on grading’s role in disciplining art historical knowledge; or collaborative redefinitions of assessment. Together, the panel asks: What is possible when our students approach art history not as a way to make the grade but as a tool to see the world anew?

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Note (added 18 August 2025) — The posting was updated to include the session on “Materiality and the Reception of Ancient Objects.”