The McNeil Center for Early American Studies
University of Pennsylvania
3355 Woodland Walk Philadelphia, PA 19104
Organized by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, History of Art, University of Pennsylvania.
In 1936 and 1943, the Uruguayan artist Joaquin Torres García made two related
drawings both of which depict the continent of South America from a southern
perspective. With the cardinal direction of “Polo S” written across the top of
the continent, the artist implored his modernist contemporaries in the Southern
Cone to reconsider their perspective on the geographic location of the
contemporary avant garde impulse. By invoking Torres García’s radical move,
this international and interdisciplinary conference takes as its mission an
exploration of the theoretical, regional, methodological, and subjective
problems encountered by scholars who are currently working on the “early”
visual and material culture of the southern United States, the Caribbean, and
South America. It is therefore an attempt to identify the shared challenges
that researching and writing about objects produced in these locations prior to
1850 might present in a moment of de-centered intellectual discourse, not unlike
the one that Torres García critiqued in the middle of the last century.
Schedule:
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Friday, April 13, McNeil Center for Early American Studies
3:30pm – 5:00pm
Keynote:
Marcus Wood, University of Sussex
5:00pm – 7:00pm, Reception, Arthur Ross Gallery, 34th Street, Inside the Fisher
Fine Arts Library.
***
Saturday, April 14, McNeil Center for Early American Studies
9:00am – 9:30am: COFFEE
9:30am – 11:00am: SESSION ONE
Dennis Carr, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
“Visualizing the Americas Upside Down and Inside Out: The Indigenous Subject as Agent”
11:00am – 11:15am: COFFEE
11:15am – 1:00pm: SESSION TWO
Regina Root, College of William & Mary
“Beautiful Fragments: Women, Space and Presence in Postcolonial Argentina”
1:00pm – 2:30pm: LUNCH
2:30pm – 4:30pm SESSION THREE
Maurie McInnis, University of Virginia
4:30pm – 6:00pm: RECEPTION
*****
The symposium is funded by grants from the University of Pennsylvania’s Mellon
Initiative for Cross-Cultural Contacts and the Terra Foundation for American
Art and is supported by the History of Art Department, Africana Studies, Latin
American and Latino Studies, and the Arthur Ross Gallery.
ACRAH 