Enfilade

HECAA events at this year’s CAA conference, with a full listing of panels available here. And please feel free to add additional talks and sessions in the comments section below. –CH

114th Annual Conference of the College Art Association

Hilton Chicago, 18–21 February 2026

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9:00–10:30am | Hilton Chicago—3rd Floor—Marquette Room
Hybridity, Adaptability, and Exchange during the Long Eighteenth Century: Producing Global Aesthetics in Decorative Art and Design (HECAA session)
Chaired by Zifeng Zhao and Alisha Ma
• From Senegal to Parisian Salons: The Shiny Invisibility of Gum Arabic — Carole Nataf (Courtauld Institute)
• Versailles in Beijing: French ‘Cabinet du Roi’ Prints in Late Seventeenth-Century Qing Court and Society — Niko Ruijia Ma (KU Leuven)
• Sugarcoating Colonial Violence: Material Culture and Courtly Displays of Sugar in Ancien Régime France, 1670–1730 — Loïc Derrien (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)
• Global Encounters: Imported Chintz in Early Modern Japan — Vidhita Raina (Colorado State University)

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Join HECAA members for lunch on Friday! Catch up with other HECAA members over a buy-your-own lunch at a nearby restaurant. The group will meet at the lobby of the Hilton Chicago between 12:45 and 1:00. Please be in touch with Sarah Lund (hecaa.emergingscholarsrep@gmail.com) so we can know how many people to expect.

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2:30–4:00pm | Hilton Chicago—3rd Floor—Waldorf Room
Bad Government: Art and Politics in the Eighteenth Century (ASECS session)
Chaired by Amy Freund
• Liberty and Death — David Ehrenpreis (James Madison University)
• Risky Business: Female Artists and High-Stakes Print during the French Revolution — Sarah Lund (Harvard University)
• Sketching Fragile Authority: Pierre Eugène du Simitière and Revolutionary Visual Culture — Megan Baker (University of Delaware)
• The Art of Revolutionary Colonialism: Drawing and the Orientalist Guillotine in French-Occupied Egypt — Thadeus Dowad (Northwestern University)

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Note (added 10 February 2026) — There are plenty of other talks and panels worth noting (and please feel free to add them below!), but I especially want to highlight this session sponsored by the Historians of British Art. –CH

Thursday, 19 February, 9:00–10:30am | Hilton Chicago—8th Floor— Lake Erie
Let’s Get Metaphysical: Rethinking the Empiricism of British Art (HBA session)
Chaired by Douglas Fordham
• C. Oliver O’Donnell (University of California, Berkeley) — Contingently Enigmatic Pictures and the Metaphysics of British Empiricism
• Meredith J. Gamer (Columbia University) — Taken from Life: Hunter, Rymsdyck, and the Anatomical Portrait
• Susie Beckham (Yale Center for British Art) — Illusion of Truth: The Im/materiality of Cayley Robinson’s The Close of the Day (1896)
• Clarissa Pereira de Almeida (USP Universidade de São Paulo) — Metaphysical Metaforms: Roy Ascott’s Love–Code–Cloud–Change

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Note (added 15 February 2026) — The original posting included a mistake the HECAA email address, I’m sorry about that, and it’s now been corrected above. –CH