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From ArtHist.net:

Sympoiesis: Temporal Ecologies in Art and Nature, ca. 1800

Sympoiesis: Zeit-Ökologien in Kunst und Natur um 1800

Erbacher Hof, Mainz, 30 September — 2 October 2026

Proposals due by 15 March 2026

Second annual conference of the Mini-Graduate College Die ästhetischen Erfindungen der Ökologie um 1800, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.

Between geological deep time and the fleetingness of a single breath, between the slow erosion of coastlines and the periodic return of day and night, between vegetative growth, heartbeat, pulse, and meter, concepts of the natural unfold as constellations of heterogeneous temporal horizons. In works of art, these heterogeneous temporalities can be synchronized: the artwork then becomes a site of sympoiesis (Donna Haraway). This delineates a becoming-with in which biological growth processes, cyclical repetitions, and linear processes of decay are not merely represented but amalgamated into a new aesthetic temporality of the artwork itself. Mary Delaney serves as one example here. In her Paper Mosaiks, she makes collages out of real plant parts put together with colored paper. She presents bud and fruiting body, which are distinct developmental stages, simultaneously, thus transgressing the natural temporal order and creating a synchronicity of diachronic events.

The conference seeks to explore how artworks around 1800 work as cross-sections through heterogeneous temporal layers of the natural. The guiding concept of sympoiesis marks a shift in perspective. It does not pitch nature against art, nor does it denote environments as mere background. Instead, it highlights the cooperative production of vitality across different forms of knowledge and practice. At the center is thus a making-with, in which matter and materials, media, bodies, discourses, and practices enter into relation with one another. The chosen timeframe of around 1800—during which the interplay of natural philosophy, early biology, geology, aesthetics, poetics, and new musical temporal orders is especially prominent—lends itself to discussions of how vitality is both understood in the context of ecological relations and conceived as a temporally structured process of becoming.

A range of disciplinary approaches is welcome, including:
• Temporal ecologies in poetics and aesthetics, descriptions of nature, history of metaphors; meter, rhythm, repetition; temporal semantics of growth, transformation, threshold, crisis.
• Image-time and material time; montage/collage, series, study; landscape as a medium of deep time; visualizations of cycles, change, erosion; practices of collecting and classification as temporal orders.
• Beat, pulse, period, tempo as models of the living; bodily and affective temporalities; rhythmization, synchronization, and their disruptions; form as a temporal ecology (recurrence, variation, transition).
More broadly, the conference invites reflections on:
• Aesthetics and orders of temporality
• Temporal concepts within individual disciplines
• Knowledge and history, tense and development
• Phenomenologies of movement and transformation: how can growth and metamorphosis be narrated or visualized without freezing them in static representation?
• Rhythm and meter: where does “striated time” (meter, beat, measured time) encounter the ‘smooth time’ of organic flow? How do heartbeat, pulse, and breath relate to the musical period or poetic meter around 1800?
• Cycles and thresholds: how do art, literature, and music stage the transition from day to night, the change of seasons, or the stages of life? Do these works assert a harmonious synchronicity of the natural, or do they instead make visible the asynchronies and fractures within the temporal fabric?

The workshop will take place from 30 September to 2 October 2026 at the Erbacher Hof in Mainz. We invite interested scholars to submit abstracts in either German or English (maximum 300 words) for a 30-minute presentation, along with a short CV, to gregor.wedekind@uni-mainz.de and ctheisin@uni-mainz.de by 15 March 2026.

b i b l i o g r a p h y

• Bender, Niklas und Gisèle Séginger (Hg.): Biological Time, Historical Time: Transfers and Transformations in 19th-Century Literature, Leiden: Brill | Rodopi, 2018 (Faux Titre, 431).
• Gamper, Michael und Helmut Hühn (Hg.): Zeit der Darstellung. Ästhetische Eigenzeiten in Kunst, Literatur und Wissenschaft, Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2014.
• Geulen, Eva: „Zur Idee eines ‚innern geistigen Rhythmus‘ bei A.W. Schlegel“, in: Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, Bd. 137, 2018, Sonderheft: August Wilhelm Schlegel und die Philologie, S. 211–224.
• Groves, Jason: »Goethe’s petrofiction. Reading the ›Wanderjahre‹ in the Anthropocene«, in: Goethe yearbook 22 (2015), p. 95–113.
• Gould, Stephen Jay: Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
• Haraway, Donna: Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
• Heringman, Noah: Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.
• Honold, Alexander: Hölderlins Kalender. Astronomie und Revolution um 1800, Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2005.
• Kisser, Thomas (Hg.): Bild und Zeit. Temporalität in Kunst und Kunsttheorie seit 1800, München: Fink, 2011.
• Kling, Alexander und Jana Schuster (Hg.): Zeiten der Materie. Verflechtungen temporaler Existenzweisen in Wissenschaft und Literatur, 1770–1900, Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2021.
• Kugler, Lena: Die (Tiefen-)Zeit der Tiere. Zur Biodiversität modernen Zeitwissens, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2021.
• Mitchell, Timothy F.: Art and Science in German Landscape Painting, 1770–1840, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993 (Clarendon Studies in the History of Art, 11)
• Naumann, Barbara: Musikalisches Ideen-Instrument. Das Musikalische in Poetik und Sprachtheorie der Frühromantik, Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990.
• Oesterle, Ingrid: „‚Es ist an der Zeit!‘. Zur kulturellen Konstruktionsveränderung von Zeit gegen 1800“, in: Goethe und das Zeitalter der Romantik, hg. von Walter Hinderer, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002, S. 91–119.
• Pause, Johannes und Tanja Prokić (Hg.): Zeiten der Natur: Konzeptionen der Tiefenzeit in der literarischen Moderne, Berlin und Heidelberg: Metzler, 2023.
• Ronzheimer, Elisa: Poetologien des Rhythmus um 1800. Metrum und Versform bei Klopstock, Hölderlin, Novalis, Tieck und Goethe, Berlin und Boston: De Gruyter, 2020.
• Rudwick, Martin J. S.: Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.
• Schnyder, Peter: Erdgeschichten: Literatur und Geologie im langen 19. Jahrhundert, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2020.
• Völker, Oliver: Langsame Katastrophen. Eine Poetik der Erdgeschichte. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2021.
• Voßkamp, Friederike: Im Wandel der Zeit. Die Darstellung der Vier Jahreszeiten in der Bildenden Kunst des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, München und Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2023.

From ArtHist.net:

(Re)alignment: Rethinking Familial Ties in the Visual Arts

National Gallery, London, 28 May 2026

Proposals due by 26 January 2026

Expanding our understanding of family, community, and what binds us together requires us to look beyond conventional definitions and documented histories. While official records like birth certificates offer us names, dates, and biological ties, they often fail to capture the emotional, cultural, and chosen connections that shape our identities and our sense of belonging. In a world where families are built not only by blood but by shared experience, mutual care, and collective memory, we must turn to other forms of expression to grasp the full picture.

Visual art—through painting, sculpture, photography, and other media— has long served as a powerful tool for representing and reimagining lineage and connection. These works can embody intimacy, inheritance, loss, and continuity in ways that resist formal categorisation. A family portrait may reveal who is physically present, but also who is emotionally central. A sculpture might abstractly represent generations, resilience, or migration. A photograph can capture unspoken dynamics: the touch of a hand, the distance between bodies, a gesture of affection or estrangement. Such representations invite us to ask: What does family look like when it isn’t constrained by official records? How do artists convey relationships rooted in mentorship, solidarity, or shared struggle? What visual metaphors such as threads, branches, shadows, echoes might they use to trace the invisible ties that bind?

Art can fill in the silences left by documentation. It allows us to see what a birth certificate cannot: the emotional textures of a relationship; the complexities of chosen family; and the legacies passed through gesture, tradition and story rather than DNA. By engaging with these visual representations, we expand our understanding of lineage not as a fixed biological chain, but as a living, evolving network of connection and meaning.

With this in mind, we welcome proposals for 20-minute papers from researchers, museum professionals, independent scholars, artist-practitioners, and postgraduate students. A potential outcome of the Colloquium will be the publication of selected papers in a special journal issue or edited volume. Papers may cover any period, geographic location, or medium of art.

Proposals will relate to the following themes:
• Ancestry: How are family lines and the dynamics of succession visually rendered in the arts? From large-scale family portraits to ornate illuminations of family trees, papers may focus on any one of the myriad ways in which ancestral ties have been made legible for public and private audiences. This may include shields, crests, trees and other symbols of family.
• Familial relationships: In what way are intimate family bonds portrayed in the visual arts? From siblings to parents, grandparents, and children, artists have long been drawn to depicting their own family members as well as undertaking commissions from patrons.
• Marriage: Portraits of betrothed or newly married couples may be a visual contract born of financial and social arrangements, romantic keepsake, or even a symbol of resistance. ‘Mystic marriages’ and mythical subjects further diversify the types of marriage we may see rendered in art.
• Inheritance and legacy: ‘Passing it on’ is a major part of family dynasties, particularly when it comes to hereditary titles and businesses. Visual art can be one means of not just establishing a line of inheritance but justifying and even fictionalising it.
• Blended and extended families: With the concept of a ‘nuclear’ family being a modern invention, family groups have long included members from outside the immediate or even blood related spheres. Step-relations, in-laws, wards, and charges have been integrated socially, legally, and visually into familial groups.
• Chosen family: Whether spiritual, such as in confraternities, convents, and other religious orders, or social, as is often found in the LGBTQ+ communities, depictions of chosen family might emphasise elements of support, belonging, or diversity.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words, along with a short biography (maximum 150 words), should be sent to maryanne.saunders@nationalgallery.org.uk by Monday, 26 January 2026. Please include your name, institutional affiliation (if applicable), preferred email, contact details, and any accessibility requirements. The conference organisers aim to let contributors know the outcome by mid-February. For further information, please view the colloquium website page.

From the Call for Papers:

The Artist’s Biography, 1400–Present

The Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art / Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (NKJ)

Volume 78 (2028)

Proposals due by 20 January 2026

In Rembrandt en de regels van de kunst (1961), Jan Emmens explored how, shortly after Rembrandt’s death, critics portrayed him as a Pictor vulgaris who preferred low-life company, fallen women, and ‘rough’ brushwork rather than classicism and fine painting. Such early criticism had a lasting impact on the Romantic idea of the artist as a misunderstood genius, influencing how Rembrandt and his artworks are perceived to this very day. Art historians also indulge in biographical manipulation, as Machiel Bosman shows in Rembrandts plan: De ware geschiedenis van zijn faillissement (2019). He scrutinizes archival material to expose the fragility of biographical claims built on incomplete or interpreted evidence while inviting reflection on how artist’s biographies are constructed, revised and contested. At the same time, new research on the artist, such as into Rembrandt’s relationship to the African community in Amsterdam (Ponte, 2020), has expanded our understanding of the artist as well as provided an entry into further understanding the Black experience in the Dutch Republic.

Biography, the containment and shaping of the unruly details of a human life into writing by another, has been central to art history since the appearance Vasari’s Lives of 1550. Authors of lives of Netherlandish artists, Karel van Mander, Joachim von Sandrart, Cornelis de Bie, Arnold Houbraken, Gerard de Lairesse, Filippo Baldinucci, Bainbrigg Buckeridge, Adriaan van der Willigen and Gerarda Hermina Marius, among others, all used biography to shape their accounts of art and included commentary on artists’ life choices alongside evaluations and descriptions of their art. Netherlandish art history from the start has thus been enmeshed with the personal identity of the artists who contributed to it, and biography, however problematic or challenging, has always been implicated in art theory and the analysis of art objects. As Nanette Salomon showed in “The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission” (1991), the selection of which artists’ lives to include and how they were written effectively shaped the canon of art history.

Of late, however, analysis of biographies has also served as an instrument to expand and critique the canon with particular significance for the study of Netherlandish art. Aspects neglected in biographies like artists’ gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and social class serve as a lens to ask new questions of familiar artworks or bring to the fore previously unknown or ignored artworks. Artists who did not appear in the standard biographies, especially women, are being rediscovered and given new ‘lives’. Additionally, biographical studies can also move into the direction of cancel culture. Comedian Hannah Gadsby, in her Netflix show Nanette (2017) and her exhibition, It’s Pablomatic (2023) at the Brooklyn Museum castigated Picasso’s misogyny. That same year, essayist Claire Dederer published Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma (2023), exploring the consequences of such feelings as described by Gadsby. What do we do with great art by bad people? How do we define what’s bad and how does this relate to the art?

NKJ 78 invites contributions exploring examples of entanglement between artwork and artist biography that will advance our understanding of the significance and theoretical implications of biographies of artists from the Low Countries (present-day Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands), 1400-present. We are also interested in papers that consider the definition of artists’ biographies and the potential value to art historical study for expanding it.

The call is open for studies on a range of matters related to artists’ biographies, including but not limited to:
• Historical attempts at separating artists from their art
• Identity as a driving artistic force
• Appropriation of an artist’s biography to political ends
• Biography in the quest for greater representation in scholarship and museum collections
• Biography in relation to notions of genius or greatness
• Relationship of artists’ biographies and the identity and status within culture
• Transgression/transgressive behavior as inherent artistic quality
• The relation between biography and cancel culture
• The power of time to change appreciation of artists’ conduct
• The relationship between individual artist’s identities and their broader societal contexts
• Differences in the form and function of artist biographies in northern and southern Europe
• Differences in the writing and perception of biographies between male and female artists
• How art theory shapes biography and vice versa
• Relating the life of the artist to the life of objects
• Portraits as a form of biography
• Artistic autobiography, including self portraits
• Expansion of the notion of biography
• Biography as a frame of cultural encounter, involving the locations, mobility and geographical affiliations of artists
• Biography and the development of art connoisseurship, including insights from technical and digital art history
• The literary tools of artists’ biographical writing: ekphrasis, anecdote, the moral exemplum

The NKJ is dedicated to a particular theme each year and promotes innovative scholarship and articles that employ a diversity of approaches to the study of Netherlandish art in its wider context. More information is available here. Contributions to the NKJ are limited to a maximum of 7500 words, excluding notes and bibliography. Following a peer review process and receipt of the complete text, the editorial board will make a final decision on the acceptance of a paper.

Please send a 500-word proposal and a short CV to all volume editors by 20 January 2026:
Lieke Wijnia, l.wijnia@rug.nl
Natasha Seaman, nseaman@ric.edu
Ingrid Vermeulen, i.r.vermeulen@vu.nl

Schedule
20 January 2026: Deadline for submission of abstracts
February 2026: Notifications about abstracts
1 November 2026: Submission of full articles for peer review
Early 2027: Decision on acceptance based on peer reviews
1 July 2027: Deadline revised articles
1 September 2027: Final articles, including illustrations & copyrights
Early 2028: Publication