Month: August 2021

Symposium: Association of Historians of American Art (Oct. 14-15, 2021)

Registration is now open for AHAA’s Sixth Biennial Symposium (October 14–15, 2021), a virtual event. Register now!

The Association of Historians of American Art, one of the oldest membership organizations devoted to studying American art, will hold its biennial symposium in fall 2021. Jointly organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the University of Maryland, this event will celebrate the fortieth anniversary of AHAA (2020) and the fiftieth anniversary of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s preeminent fellowship program.

The two-day symposium on Thursday, October 14 and Friday, October 15 will feature presentations of new research, roundtable discussions, and Q&A sessions. While the symposium itself will be virtual, the schedule has been planned to allow for maximum discussion and interaction amongst our members. An optional Saturday schedule will also include in-person tours of exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and David C. Driskell Center, University of Maryland, and a cocktail reception in downtown Washington D.C.

Registration Instructions
Registration for the symposium is free, but an active membership in AHAA is required to watch all pre-recorded presentations and attend all live virtual events. AHAA offers several levels of membership: Student/Basic ($35), Member ($50), Supporter ($200), Lifetime (one-time payment of $500), and Institutional ($500). To learn more about becoming a member, please visit AHAA Membership.

We apologize that our website does not offer the capability of joining or renewing your membership and registering for the symposium in a single transaction. Instead, you will have to join or renew your membership FIRST and then register for the symposium. Visit this link to join AHAA or renew your membership. Once you have verified your membership status, please click here to register for the symposium.

If you would like to watch ONLY the keynote lecture (through a pre-recorded presentation and a live Q&A on Friday, October 15, from 4:30–5:00), you are welcome to do so without becoming a member of AHAA. To register for this single event only, please click here.

Symposium Schedule
Please note that all recorded presentations will be available to registered attendees on Monday, October 4, 2021. Attendees are invited to watch these presentations in advance of the live discussions scheduled below. All times listed below are EST.

Thursday, October 14 (virtual)
9:30 – 10:15am: Session I: Lightning Round (LIVE Q&A)
Moderated by Joshua Shannon, University of Maryland

Katherine Fein, Columbia University
“Tusk, Breast, and Skin: The Intimate Ecologies of Ivory Miniatures”

Lucy Mounfield, University of Nottingham
“’Quiet Good for an Amateur!’: Vivian Maier, Amateurism, and the Photographic Periphery”

Danya Epstein, Southern Methodist University
“Back to the Future: Recursivity and Repertoire in the Work of Dennis Numkena”

Emma Silverman, National Park Service
“What a Doll: Queering the Body in Greer Lankton’s Photographs”

11:30am – 12:15pm: Session II: Health and the Body (LIVE Q&A)
Moderated by Tess Korobkin, University of Maryland

Caitlin Beach, Fordham University
“Edmonia Lewis and the Poetics of Plaster”

Kristin Nassif, University of Delaware
“Blinding Sight: Vision and Spectacles in John Haberle’s Trompe l’Oeil Paintings”

Janine DeFeo, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
“Body and Self: Adrian Piper’s Food for the Spirit and the Discourses of Anorexia Nervosa”

1:15 – 1:45pm: Session III: New Perspectives on Portraiture and Still Life (LIVE Q&A)
Moderated by Nika Elder, American University

Lea Stephenson, University of Delaware
“Tactile Gestures and Embodied Objects: Newport Portraiture and Landscapes of Slavery”

Stephen Mandravelis, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
“Towards a Reconsideration of Charles Bird King”

2:30 – 3:00pm: Session IV: Curatorial Landmarks (LIVE Q&A)
Moderated by Curlee R. Holton, David C. Driskell Center, University of Maryland

Maya Harakawa, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
“Romare Bearden’s Harlem Exhibition, 1966-1967”

Danielle O’Steen, Kreeger Museum
“Lou Stovall in Washington: On the Craft of Screenprinting”

4:15 – 5:00pm: Session V: Digital Epistemologies (LIVE Q&A)
Moderated by Melanee Harvey, Howard University

Kay Wells, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
“Inventing Digital Humanities through the Index of American Design”

Laura Smith, Michigan State University
“Relational Landscapes: Teaching Chaco Canyon with Immersive Technology”

Karen Mary Davalos, University of Minnesota
Constance Cortez, University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley
“Decolonizing American Art History through Digital Humanities”

Friday, October 15, 2021 (virtual)
9:30 – 10:15am: Session VI: Iconographies of Ethnicity (LIVE Q&A)
Moderated by Grace Yasumura, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Patricia Johnston, College of the Holy Cross
“‘I’ is for ‘Italian’: Francis W. Edmonds and the Image Peddler in Nineteenth-Century American Visual Culture”

Erika Pazian, University of Minnesota Duluth
“In the In-Between: Las Poblanas and the Gendered Occupation of Space in Nineteenth-Century North America”

Colleen Stockmann, Gustavus Adolphus College
“Weeds and Wildflowers: Drawing Plant Politics in New York, 1850-1870”

10:45 – 11:45pm: Session VII: Iconoclasm (LIVE ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION)
Co-Chairs: Wendy Bellion and Jennifer Van Horn, University of Delaware
Dana Byrd, Bowdoin College
Ellery Foutch, Middlebury College
Philippe Halbert, Yale University
J. M. Mancini, Maynooth University, Ireland
John Ott, Boston University/James Madison University

1:00 – 1:45pm: Session VIII: Imperialism (LIVE Q&A)
Moderated by Leslie Ureña, National Portrait Gallery

Maggie Cao, University of North Carolina
“Oceanography and Imperialism in Homer’s Gulf Stream”

Ellen Tani, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art
“Enmeshed: Senga Nengudi’s Performative Nylon Sculptures and Afro-Asian Ritual”

Mallory Nanny, Florida State University
“An-My Lê’s Small Wars: Re-enacting Memories of an Ongoing War”

2:45 – 3:30pm: Session IX: A Land Acknowledgement is Not Enough: Why Indigenous Art Must Guide a New American Art (LIVE ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION)
Mindy N. Besaw, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Session Co-Chair)
Ashley Holland (Cherokee Nation), Art Bridges Foundation (Session Co-Chair)
Wanda Nanibush (Anishinaabe-kwe), Art Gallery of Ontario
Georgiana Uhlyarik, Art Gallery of Ontario

4:30 – 5:00pm: Keynote (LIVE Q&A)
Moderated by Jordana Saggese, University of Maryland and Symposium Co-Chair

Jennifer A. González, University of California, Santa Cruz
“Speech and Silence”

5:15 – 6:15pm: Virtual Reception

CFP: “South and North American Positionalities: Representing the Other in the Interdisciplinary 19th century [CAA 2022]–proposals due by Sept. 16, 2021

“South and North American Positionalities: Representing the Other in the Interdisciplinary 19th century”

The representation of the Other has been prioritized through the study of the cross-Atlantic relationship between Europe and the Americas; examples of exhibitions and publications include, Ojos británicos: Formación de la imagen visual de Colombia en el siglo XIX (Museo Nacional de Colombia, 2003) and Ana Lucía Araujo´s book, Brazil through French Eyes: A Nineteenth-Century Artist in the Tropics (2015). Research on the long nineteenth-century has focused on the connections between North and South America through scholarship like Katherine Manthorne’s landmark study Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839-1879 (1989), Picturing the Americas: Landscape Painting From Tierra Del Fuego to the Arctic (2015) and Traveler artists: Landscapes of Latin America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (2015). These studies have focused mainly on landscape representation through the eyes of the traveler.

This panel seeks to build upon the representation of the Other through visual culture and through an interdisciplinary lens. Interdisciplinary fields may include visual and textual relations, print culture, photography, theater studies, science and art, and material culture. A key point of discussion around the South and North two-way relationship will be structures of power and inherent biases of positionality. The Other in this proposal is understood within the nineteenth-century context as “different.” In this specific history, difference can be viewed not only through geographical distance but also through ethnographic distance. Questions of positionality may also address contemporaneous and historiographic accounts of audience reception and ideological interpretation of representations of the Other across the South-North divide. 


Topics may include but are not restricted to:

Travel/travelogues

Race

Ethnicity

Indigeneity

Gender

Age

Class

Spirituality

Religion

Politics

Nature

Landscape

Animals

Submission of proposals should be sent to: v.uribe20@uniandes.edu.co. Proposals must include 250-word abstracts and shortened CV sent by September 16, 2021. 

CFP: Signs o’ the Times: Music and Politics in Contemporary Art (CAA Chicago, 2022)–proposals accepted through Sept. 16, 2021

Maria Elena Buszek (CU Denver) and Johanna Gosse are co-chairing an in-person session on contemporary art, music, and politics at the 2022 CAA conference in Chicago (February 16-19, 2022). Buszek and Gosse are very open to proposals that expand the conventional scope of “art history” and the panel might expand into two sessions.


To apply, send us a 250-word abstract, a shortened CV (under 2 pgs), and a completed proposal submission form to maria.buszek@ucdenver.edu and johannagosse@gmail.com by September 16. We will notify participants by September 23.

DESCRIPTION
Signs o’ the Times: Music and Politics in Contemporary Art


Scholar Bernard Gendron has compellingly argued that rock music took over the avant garde in the 1970s, holding “onto its ‘pop’ moorings while becoming ‘art.’” Visual artists like Laurie Anderson and William Pope L. started writing, performing, and recording music, and performers like Grace Jones, DEVO, and Die Tödliche Doris treated their music as performance art, blurring the lines between popular music and visual art in ways that have profoundly affected contemporary art ever since. This seemingly effortless crossing of the era’s art/music and high/low divides was in reality born of struggles that often sprang from the era’s civil rights and liberation movements, which in the ‘70s sought new ways to reach broader audiences and to critique the myopia or elitism of these movements’ earlier iterations. This tendency continues today in the work of contemporary artists who engage with popular music, not just as an index of contemporaneity, but as a rich archive of cultural and political significance, as well as formal and aesthetic inspiration and exchange.
This panel seeks to convene new approaches and perspectives on the intersection of art and popular music since the tail end of the sixties up to the present day. We’re particularly interested in work that examines cultural politics alongside formal concerns, while moving beyond the exhausted modernist preoccupation with policing the high/low divide.
For more information on the conference and how to submit your abstract see: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2022/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html 

Opportunity: Assistant Professor, Pre-Modern Art History, University of Chicago

Assistant Professor – Pre-Modern Art History

https://apply.interfolio.com/91489

Open Date

Aug 10, 2021

Deadline

Oct 14, 2021 at 11:59 PM Eastern Time

 

Description

The Department of Art History at the University of Chicago invites applications for an appointment at the rank of assistant professor with an expected start date of July 1, 2022, or as soon as possible thereafter.

The Department seeks applicants with innovative approaches to scholarship in art history, visual media or studies, and/or the built environment, an ambitious research agenda, and a commitment to developing pedagogical techniques for teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Scholars working in any pre-modern (before ca. 1850) period and any geographic area, with any theoretical or methodological focus are invited to apply. The position includes a normal teaching load of four courses per year, as well as commensurate advising and service responsibilities.

This search for an Assistant Professor is connected to a concurrent search for a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow (http://apply.interfolio.com/91491). We encourage all applicants to submit applications for both postings so that all available options may be considered for the selected candidate. 

Opportunity: Assistant Professor, Histories of African Art, African-American Art, and/or African Diaspora Arts and Visual Cultures, Department of Art History, UC-Berkeley

More info here:

https://aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF03107

CFP: Black Collage @ CAA2022

caa.confex.com/caa/2022/webprogrampreliminary/Session9195.html
caa.confex.com/caa/2022/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html

Black Collage
Session will present: Virtual

Julie L. McGee, University of Delaware
Email Address(s):mcgee@udel.edu

Black Collage, before and beyond Romare Bearden, respects the multivalent nature inherent to Black and Collage. How have and do artists and scholars participate in the un-doing of modernist tropes associated with a history of collage that displaced Black subjectivity and agency? Black collage may adhere to a practice of coller, in reference to the French verb which means to paste or glue, but in ways that don’t inherently bind this practice to European Modernism, Pablo Picasso or Georges Braque. Suppose coller hews more to adhesive than metaphor–that Black collage transcends pieces for compositional uniqueness, a symphony’s manuscript. Black American artists used collage before Bearden, yet there is no denying the centrality of his work to this conversation. Indeed, Bearden’s significance calls us to think deeply about the extended practice and importance of collage and Black artists. Among the many who have are Ralph Ellison, Kobena Mercer, Patricia Hills, James Smalls, Jacqueline Francis, Ruth Fine, and Brent Hayes Edwards. In early 1961, while living in Stockholm, Sam Middleton completed a treatise on collage that placed his own work in a direct line of inheritance from Picasso and Cubism to Surrealism and Dada—for its radical aesthetic refusals and nowness. Appropriating Shahn, Middleton wrote, “Art always has its ingredients of impudence, its rejection of established order so that it may substitute its own fresh and contemporary authority and its own enlightenment.” This session invites contributions related to Black collage, audacity and enlightenment. Considerations of history, theory, conservation, and artistic practice are welcome.

CFP: Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Conference

RADICALISM & REFORM
The 43rd Annual Conference
Nineteenth-Century Studies Association
Rochester, New York
March 16-19, 2022
Proposal Deadline: September 30, 2021

Conference Website: ncsaweb.net/conferences/2022-ncsa-conference-information/

Join NCSA’s mailing list: mailchi.mp/4b3379af336e/ncsamailinglist

Inspired by the history of radicalism and reform in Rochester, New York, the NCSA committee invites proposals exploring the radical possibilities of the nineteenth-century world. From the aftershocks of the French and American revolutions to mutinies and rebellion in colonies across the globe, the nineteenth century was a period of both unrest and possibility. Abolition, suffrage, and reform movements reshaped prisons, education, and housing, marking this century as a period of institutional making and unmaking: a reckoning with ills of the past that was also profoundly optimistic about a more just and prosperous future.

Radicalism is also a generative term for considering transitional moments or social tensions: “radical” is often used interchangeably with “extreme,” but its earliest definitions describe not what is new or unusual, but what is foundational or essential. “Radical” is used to describe literal and figurative roots: the roots of plants, roots of musical chords, and the roots of words. To be radical is to embody tensions between origins and possibilities: to be anchored in what is foundational while also holding the potential for paradigm-shifting change. We welcome papers that consider these tensions in nineteenth-century culture, as well as those that consider possibilities for reforming nineteenth-century studies or academic life. Topics on nineteenth-century literature, history, art, music, or other cultural forms might include political movements or divisions, activism, resistance, labor, collective and direct action, or mutinies and rebellion. We also encourage broader interpretations of the conference theme: outsiders and outcasts, visionaries, agents of change, utopias, breakthroughs, failed reforms, conformity, or stagnation.

Topics on the state of nineteenth-century studies might include politically engaged teaching and scholarship, academic labor practices, harassment or prejudice in the academy, or new approaches to humanities education.

For more information, visit: ncsaweb.net/conferences/2022-ncsa-conference-information/