Enfilade

Art and Architecture in the Long Eighteenth Century: HECAA at 25
Southern Methodist University, 1–4 November 2018

Please save the date for the first-ever Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art & Architecture conference, to be held November 1–4, 2018, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. The conference will present recent research on eighteenth-century visual culture, consider questions of historiography and pedagogy, and chart paths for the future of our field. Details and a CFP to follow! Questions or comments? Contact us at hecaa25@gmail.com.

Image: Francisca Efigenia Meléndez y Durazzo, Portrait of a a Seated Girl Holding Flowers, ca. 1795, tempera on ivory, 5 × 5 cm (Dallas: Meadows Museum, SMU, MM.08.01.20).

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From H-ArtHist:

34th Annual Boston University Graduate Symposium
in the History of Art and Architecture — Excess
Boston University, 2–3 March 2018

Proposals due by 1 December 2017

Excess conjures the idea of the extractable, left over, too much, or ‘extra’. Looking closely at perceptions of the extraneous reveals excess to be a historically constructed category that marks shifting notions of cultural values. Deemed peripheral, abject, deviant, and tertiary due to factors such as geographic relationships or conceptions of power at a particular moment, excess is the focal point of the 34th Annual Boston University Graduate Symposium in the History of Art and Architecture.

We invite submissions that explore themes of excess. Topics may include but are not limited to the following: opulence; decoration; the grotesque; the carnivalesque; caricature; exuberance; indulgence; exaggeration; extremes of religious or social practice and ritual; extravagant lifestyle; expressions and critiques of abundance; so-called ‘luxury arts’; the overbuilt.

Papers must be original and previously unpublished. Please send an abstract (300 words or less), a paper title, and a CV to bugraduatesymposiumhaa@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is 1 December 2017. Selected speakers will be notified by 23 December 2017 and are expected to accept or decline the offer within a week of notification. Papers should be 20 minutes in length and will be followed by a question and answer session.

The Symposium will be held Friday, 2 March – Saturday, 3 March 2018, with a keynote lecture (TBD) on Friday evening at the Boston University Art Gallery at the Stone Gallery and graduate presentations on Saturday at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

This event is generously sponsored by the Boston University Center for the Humanities; the Boston University Department of History of Art and Architecture; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Boston University Graduate Student History of Art and Architecture Association; and the Boston University Art Gallery at the Stone Gallery.

From H-ArtHist:

Wider Worlds: Art and Audience under the Spanish Crown
The Frick Collection, New York, 5 April 2018

Proposals due by 12 December 2017

The Frick Collection is pleased to invite submissions for Wider Worlds: Art and Audience under the Spanish Crown, a public symposium inspired by the special exhibition Zurbarán: Jacob and His Twelve Sons, Paintings from Auckland Castle (on view at The Frick from 31 January to 22 April 2018). Co-organized with the Meadows Museum, in Dallas, where the paintings are currently on view, this exhibition marks the first time that Francisco de Zurbarán’s set of thirteen monumental canvases depicting the family of the biblical prophet Jacob will be displayed in the Americas.

Zurbarán’s paintings were probably commissioned in the 1640s for a monastery in colonial Spanish Peru, where the popularity of this particular iconography drew on histories positing the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas as ‘lost descendants’ of the twelve tribes of Israel. The works traveled to England and, in 1756, entered the collection of the bishop Richard Trevor, an advocate for the rights of Jewish people. This history, as well as the apocryphal story of the paintings’ seizure by pirates, prompts us to think seriously about the afterlives of objects, anticipated versus accidental receptions, and art’s capacity for generating multivalent, sometimes competing, interpretations. For Jacob and His Twelve Sons, those interpretations range from justifying the enterprises of one colonial empire to serving as symbols of religious tolerance in another.

We welcome proposals for twenty-minute papers on the status of the art object and the circulation of objects and ideas in the early modern Hispanic world. Please send a CV and 250-word abstract by Tuesday, 12 December 2017, to academic@frick.org. Submissions from emerging scholars, including early career university and museum professionals and advanced doctoral students, are particularly encouraged. Possible lines of inquiry include:
• How artists, patrons, and audiences dealt with anxieties around distance, delay, and the conveyance of meaning in the diverse and multilingual early modern Hispanic world
• Re-signification and/or halted trajectories in the biographies of objects, especially in a global context
• The imaging of origin myths and master narratives
• How Iberia’s Jewish and Islamic pasts were interrogated and reinterpreted in Catholic image practices
• The issue of workshops, masters, and authorship and their relationship to global markets
• The global and material turns in art-historical scholarship

Wider Worlds: Art and Audience under the Spanish Crown is convened by Caitlin Henningsen (The Frick Collection) and Adam Jasienski (Southern Methodist University). Susan Grace Galassi (Senior Curator, The Frick Collection) will preside.

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Costume Society of America Book Series
Series Editor: Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell

The Costume Society of America book series has a new home at Kent State University Press. Inquiries and proposals for works on all subjects relating to the history and conservation of costume and adornment are welcome. Books chosen to be published range from scholarly to general interest and vary widely in format, from primarily textual to highly illustrated.

Although all titles must pass a rigorous review in terms of substance, not all must be scholarly. The Series also considers books that address or embrace a general readership. Titles in this category must be well written and focused on their specific subjects as well as carefully researched and substantiated, but they cannot become too deeply entrenched in theory or jargon for the average reader.

To request consideration of your proposed or completed manuscript, please send a query letter or brief prospectus to Series Editor Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell at kchrismancampbell@hotmail.com. Full details and a list of previous books in the series can be found here.

From H-ArtHist:

The Cultural Heritage of Europe @ 2018: Re-Assessing a Concept, Re-Defining Its Challenges
Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), Paris, 4–5 June 2018

Proposals due by 10 November 2017

Today’s globalized concept of cultural heritage is often understood as a product of European modernity with its 19th-century emergence of territorially fixed nation-states and collective identity constructions. Within the theoretical overlap of the disciplines of history (of art), archaeology and architecture cultural properties and built monuments were identified and embedded into gradually institutionalized protection systems. In the colonial context up to the mid-20th century this specific conception of cultural heritage was transferred to non-European contexts, internationalized in the following decades after the WWII and taken as universal.

Postcolonial, postmodern, and ethnically pluralistic viewpoints did rightly question the supposed prerogative of a European Leitkultur. Only rather recently did critical heritage studies engage with the conflicting implications of progressively globalized standards of cultural heritage being applied in very local, non-European and so-called ‘traditional’ contexts. However, in order to bridge what academia often tends to essentialize as a ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ divide of opposing heritage conceptions, a more balanced viewpoint is also needed in order to update the conceptual foundations of what ‘cultural heritage of/in Europe’ means today.

The European Cultural Heritage Year 2018 — A Campaign with Unquestioned Assumptions?

Right at the peak of an identity crisis of Europe with financial fiascos of whole nation states, military confrontations, and refortified state borders at its continental peripheries with inflows of refugees from the Near East and the Global South did the European Council and Parliament representatives reach a provisional agreement to establish a European Year of Cultural Heritage in 2018. With affirmative slogans such as “We Europeans” and “Our common European heritage”, the campaign intends to “raise awareness of European history and values, and strengthen a sense of European identity” (Press release of the European Council, 9 February 2017). However, with its unquestioned core assumption of the validity of Europe’s territorial status with simply interconnected borderlines of its affiliated member states and of a given collective ‘we’-identity within the European Union, this cultural-political campaign risks to miss the unique chance of a critical re-assessment of how a ‘European’ dimension of cultural heritage can be conceptualized in today’s globalized and inter-connected reality.

The ‘Cultural Heritage of Europe’ @ 2018 — Towards a Global and Transcultural Approach

The global and transcultural turn in the disciplines of art and architectural history and cultural heritage studies helps to question the supposed fixity of territorial, aesthetic, and artistic entity called Europe, more precisely the taxonomies, values and explanatory modes that have been built into the ‘European’ concept of cultural heritage and that have taken as universal.

By taking into consideration the recent processes of the accelerated exchange and global circulation of people, goods and ideas, the conference aims to reconstitute the old-fashioned units of analysis of what ‘European cultural heritage’ could be by locating the European and the non-European in a reciprocal relationship in order to evolve a non-hierarchical and broader conceptual framework. With a focus on cultural properties (artefacts), built cultural heritage (from single architectures, ensembles and sites to whole city- and cultural landscapes etc.), and their forms of heritagization (from archives, museums, collections to cultural reserves), case-studies for the conference can address the various forms of the ‘cultural’ within heritage: its ‘social’ level (actors, stakeholders, institutions etc.), its ‘mental’ level (concepts, terms, theories, norms, categories), and, most obviously, its ‘physical’ level with a view on manipulative strategies (such as transfer and translation, reuse and mimicry, replication and substitution etc.).

Grouped along four panels in two days, cases-studies should question the concept of cultural heritage with its supposedly ‘European’ connotations and dimensions within artefacts and monuments by destabilizing at least one of its four constitutive core dimensions:
1) Place and Space – from stable sites to multi-sited, transborder contact zones and ambivalent third spaces
2) Substance and Materiality – from the monumental, homogeneous and unique of the artefact and listed monument to the transient, multiple, visual, digital, commemorated etc.
3) Time and Temporality – from objects of permanence and stability to the temporal, ephemeral, fugitive, processual
4) Identity – from the collective and cohesive to the ambivalent, contested, plural, and/or partial and fragmentary

The Host and the Network, Dates, and Deadlines

This international two-day conference in French and English will take place on 4 and 5 June 2018 at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) and is embedded into the Laboratory of Excellence (LabEx) ‘Writing a New History of Europe—Ècrire une Histoire Nouvelle de l’Europe’ at Sorbonne University. One of its seven thematic axes—entitled ‘National Traditions, Circulation and Identities in European Art’—acts as the principle host of the event: with a special focus on geography, historiography and cultural heritage, it looks at art history in the Labex perspective of finding both elements of explanations and answers to the crisis Europe is currently going through. Is conducted by the Centre André Chastel (the Research Laboratory of Art History under the tutelage of the National Center for Scientific Research/CNRS, Sorbonne University and the Ministry of Culture) as the co-sponsor of the conference. Finally, the conference is situated within the new Observatoire des Patrimoines (OPUS) of the united Sorbonne Universities.

The conference is conceived by Michael Falser, Visiting Professor for Architectural History and Cultural Heritage Studies at Paris-Sorbonne (2018), in association with Dany Sandron, Professor of Art History at Sorbonne University/Centre Chastel and speaker of LabEx, axis 7.

Abstracts with name and affiliation of the speaker, title and 200 words abstract of the presentation are due with the deadline of 10 November. Candidates will be notified on 30 November 2017. The proposals for papers should be sent to patrimoine.europe2018@gmail.com.

Le Patrimoine Culturel de l’Europe @ 2018: Réexaminer un concept – redéfinir ses enjeux

From H-ArtHist:

Libri di Disegni e Album di Disegni nell’Età Moderna, 1550–1800:
Nuove prospettive metodologiche e di esegesi storico-critica
Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, Rome, 31 May — 1 June 2018

Proposals due by 9 December 2017

La netta distinzione tipologica e terminologica tra libri di disegni e album di disegni è stata dimostrata dalla storiografia artistica contemporanea sulla base di evidenze documentarie e letterarie italiane, cinque e seicentesche. Nell’Età moderna sono gli artisti stessi o i conoscitori del calibro di Filippo Baldinucci ad utilizzare l’espressione ‘libro de’ disegni’ per indicare le raccolte rilegate della produzione grafica di pittori, scultori o architetti, ben prima che i termini taccuino, carnet, skizzenbuch, note-book e simili, venissero introdotti più tardi dal collezionismo, dalla letteratura artistica e dalla storiografia.

Nella fase attuale, con l’espressione ‘libro di disegni’, drawing-book in inglese, si tende a indicare a book of original drawings in a bound volume (book, codex), consisting of one or more quires (gatherings), which are predominantly filled with drawings, irrespective of the age, intention and profession of a draughtsman … whether the structure has been consolidated before or after the drawing process, protected by a leather binding or a simple parchement or paper cover (Elen, 1995).

Mentre i libri di disegni, integri nella loro configurazione originaria, sono piuttosto rari o poco conosciuti e studiati (non ne esiste a oggi un censimento sistematico e ragionato), molto più numerosi sono gli album di disegni, monografici o collettanei, raccolti da eruditi, conoscitori, curatori e collezionisti nei secoli XVII–XIX, all’interno dei quali sono confluiti singoli fascicoli o singoli fogli provenienti da libri di disegni più antichi. La capillare presenza di libri di disegni e album di disegni, giunti in forme più o meno frammentarie e dopo molti passaggi proprietari nelle print rooms e nelle biblioteche di tutto il mondo, invitano oggi a indagarne e analizzarne compiutamente gli sviluppi storici delle forme, dei contenuti, delle funzioni, e a studiarli anche sotto gli aspetti della fortuna critica e materiale, della storia del gusto, del mercato dell’arte e del collezionismo.

Il Workshop Internazionale si propone di porre in evidenza, attraverso i contributi originali dei maggiori specialisti dell’argomento, l’imprescindibile circolarità esistente tra la conoscenza e lo studio analitico dei ‘libri de’ disegni’ di singoli artisti e la conoscenza e lo studio analitico degli album di disegni formatisi in epoche successive, al fine di avanzare nuove e non ancora esplorate prospettive di ricerca, individuazione, classificazione tipologica, analisi storica, storico-critica, collezionistica e materiale, che possano contribuire ad ampliare la nostra comprensione del fenomeno, delle teoriche e delle prassi operative, soprattutto ma non solo di bottega e di matrice accademica, degli artisti italiani dell’Età moderna, e dei percorsi, il più delle volte molto articolati e complessi, di creazione e di costituzione delle raccolte e delle collezioni internazionali di grafica, a partire dalla dispersione del ricco patrimonio di volumi rilegati di disegni lasciati in eredità dagli artisti del passato.

Per le proposte di intervento, sono indicate di seguito alcune delle possibili linee di approfondimento:
• Questioni terminologiche e tipologiche tra fonti documentarie, letteratura artistica, prassi collezionistiche, storia dell’arte, archeologia del libro, connoisseurship;
• Codex, libro, album: disegni originali, modelli e copie d’après;
• Libri di disegni e album di disegni: forme, funzioni, temi e soggetti;
• Analisi tipologica, strutturale, tecnica, materiale di uno o più libri e/o album di disegni, tra storia dell’arte e del disegno, archeologia del libro, scienza codicologica;
• Analisi funzionale, stilistica, iconografica di uno o più libri e/o album di disegni, tra storia dell’arte e del disegno, metodo del conoscitore, scienza dell’attribuzione;
• Le collezioni pubbliche e private di libri e album di disegni: gli allestimenti originali, le filiazioni, i percorsi di ricognizione e catalogazione, i progetti di digitalizzazione;
• Ipotesi di ricostituzione virtuale di libri di disegni italiani smembrati tra raccolte pubbliche e private;
• Libri di disegni e album di disegni come fonti visive per la teorica e la pratica del disegno degli artisti italiani, tra la seconda metà del Cinquecento e il primo Ottocento;
• Libri di disegni e album di disegni come fonti visive per l’insegnamento e l’apprendimento del disegno, e per la trasmissione dei modelli e dei repertori visivi, dentro le botteghe, le accademie, gli ateliers;
• Disegni rilegati in volume e autonomia del disegno: il processo creativo dell’artista tra ricerca-ideazione autofondata e verifica-progetto dell’opera d’arte finita;
• Il ruolo di eruditi, conoscitori, collezionisti, conservatori dei secoli XVII–XIX nella formazione delle raccolte e album di disegni, tra fortuna critica e fortuna materiale, dinamiche del gusto, del mercato dell’arte e del collezionismo pubblico e privato.

Gli studiosi sono invitati a far pervenire, entro e non oltre il 9 dicembre 2017, le proposte di intervento—un abstract di max 500 caratteri (spazi inclusi) in italiano o in inglese—al seguente indirizzo di posta elettronica: drawingsbook.abaroma2018@gmail.com. Entro il 20 dicembre 2017, a seguito della selezione svolta dal Comitato Scientifico, l’accettazione degli interventi prescelti sarà comunicata via email agli interessati.

Feminist Art History Conference
American University, Washington, D.C., 28–30 September 2018

Proposals due by 1 December 2017

This conference builds on the legacy of feminist art-historical scholarship and pedagogy initiated by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard at American University. With the goal of fostering a broad dialogue on feminist art-historical practice, the event will feature papers spanning a range of chronological, geographic, and intersectional topics.

Papers may address such topics as: artists, movements, and works of art and architecture; cultural institutions and critical discourses; practices of collecting, patronage, and display; the gendering of objects, spaces, and media; the reception of images; and issues of power, agency, gender, and sexuality within visual cultures. Submissions on under-represented art-historical fields, national traditions, and issues of race and ethnicity are encouraged. We welcome submissions from established and emerging scholars of art history as well as advanced graduate students.

To be considered for participation, please provide a single document in Microsoft Word. It should consist of a one-page, single-spaced proposal of unpublished work up to 500 words for a 20-minute presentation, followed by a curriculum vitae of no more than two pages. Please name the document “[last name]-proposal” and submit with the subject line “[last name]-proposal” to feminist.ahconference@gmail.com.

Invitations to participate will be sent by 1 February 2018.

Keynote Speaker
Amelia Jones, Robert A. Day Professor in Art and Design and Vice-Dean of Critical Studies at the Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California

Organizing Committee
Joanne Allen, Juliet Bellow, Norma Broude, Kim Butler Wingfield, Nika Elder, Mary D. Garrard, Helen Langa, Andrea Pearson, and Ying-chen Peng

Sponsored by the Art History Program and the Department of Art, College of Arts and Sciences, American University

From H-ArtHist:

Interior Design and Style Cohabitation from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century
Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris, 19 March 2018

Proposals due by 6 November 2017

This study day will question the adaptation in domestic spaces, as a common and pragmatic custom, of objects that originally were not destined to meet, playing despite or with their differences. This theme was recently addressed by the Galerie des Gobelins with the exhibition À table avec le mobilier national, where eighteenth-century paintings, paperboards, and wall hangings from the royal manufacture oversaw fifty years of furniture creation by the Atelier de Recherche et de Création (1964–2014).

While it is common in the field of art history to encounter examples of interiors where the decorative harmony was conceived according to the ideal of a ‘total work of art’, the opposite will be examined. The assortment in a common space of objects from different periods and the ensuing reflections brought up by these unexpected, sometimes surprising, convergences will be our object of interest. When, for example, was it intended for eighteenth-0century furniture to be associated and fit in with an Impressionist painting? Was this type of seemingly insignificant practice theorized ahead of time or retrospectively?

This subject is linked to the history of taste. While a few publications devoted to collectors’ arrangements of domestic spaces have pointed out some individuals who wished to harmonize old furniture to a modern art collection, on the contrary, examples of modern furniture confronted with old works of art could be discussed during this study day.

Far from the historically based mechanism, already well studied for the nineteenth century for example (Antiquity, neo-gothic or neo-Renaissance decor and furniture), the debate here will focus on the practical necessity for a collector, dealer, or individual to design an interior with modern paintings and old furniture—or inversely—that is elements apparently disparate by their age, forms, and uses.

This thematic raises questions relating to the flexibility of fine arts and decorative arts and confronts the values and/or practices associated with the work of art, considered as a decorative element, as well as a utilitarian object of art, equally appreciated for its plastic qualities.

While composing an interior can extend to the private space, the artist’s studio, or demonstrations of domestic spaces in art galleries and department stores, the study can even include how these spaces were spread to the public by images. We will aim to define what type of media participated in this transmission. The literature and the press play for example a significant role in the circulation of these interior views and the values to which they are linked.

The study day suggests—but is not limited to—several topics:
• Paintings’ or art objects’ adaptability, flexibility or modular nature
• Migration or confusion of values and contemplative behaviors and practices when faced with paintings and furniture
• Authorship and collectors’ and decorators’ creative and recreational motivations

Proposals that extend their analysis to other types of objects and collections, particularly to sculpture, will also be reviewed with the greatest interest. Please submit an individual proposal of no more than 500 words and a CV to barbara.jouves@univ-paris1.fr and hadrien.viraben@gmail.com by 30 November 2017.

Organization: Claire Hendren (Ph.D. candidate, Université Paris-Nanterre), Barbara Jouves (Ph.D. candidate, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), and Hadrien Viraben (Ph.D. candidate, Université de Rouen and Université Paris-Nanterre)

From SAH:

Society of Architectural Historians 72nd Annual Conference
Rhode Island Convention Center, Providence, 24–28 April 2019

Proposals due by 16 January 2019

Conference Chair: Victoria Young (University of St. Thomas)
Local Co-Chairs: Dietrich Neumann (Brown University) and Itohan Osayimwese (Brown University)

The Society of Architectural Historians will offer a total of 36 paper sessions at its 2019 Annual International Conference in Providence, Rhode Island. The Society invites its members, including graduate students and independent scholars, representatives of SAH chapters and partner organizations, to chair a session at the conference. As SAH membership is required to chair or present research at the annual conference, non-members who wish to chair a session will be required to join SAH next August 2018 when conference registration opens for Session Chairs and Speakers.

Since the principal purpose of the SAH annual conference is to inform attendees of the general state of research in architectural history and related disciplines, session proposals covering every time period and all aspects of the built environment, including landscape and urban history, are encouraged.

Sessions may be theoretical, methodological, thematic, interdisciplinary, pedagogical, revisionist or documentary in premise and ambition and have broadly conceived or more narrowly focused subjects. Sessions that embrace cross-cultural, transnational and/or non-Western topics are particularly welcome. In every case, the subject should be clearly defined in critical and historical terms. Proposals will be selected on the basis of merit and the need to create a well-balanced program. Topics exploring the architecture of the Providence and the greater region are encouraged.

Since late submissions cannot be considered, it is recommended that proposals be submitted well before the deadline. Last-minute submissions that fail posting in the online portal or are sent in error via email cannot be considered. Session proposals must be submitted online by 5:00pm CST, Tuesday, January 16, 2018. The submission portal will close automatically at this time, and no further proposals will be accepted. Proposals will be reviewed and selected by a committee chaired by SAH Conference Chair Victoria Young.

Additional information is available here»

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