Author: Camara Dia Holloway

I am the Project Manager for the Romare Bearden Digital Catalogue Raisonné at the Wildenstein Plattner Institute. I earned my PhD at Yale University in the History of Art Department and specialize in twentieth century American art with a particular focus on the history of photography, race and representation, and transatlantic modernist networks. I also serve as a Founding Co-Director of the Association for Critical Race Art History (ACRAH).

JOB: African Art and Visual Culture @ FIT

Open Rank (Assistant or Associate Professor)

https://fitnyc.interviewexchange.com/jobofferdetails.jsp?JOBID=148842

The History of Art Department seeks an historian of African Art and visual culture who will teach innovative historical surveys of ancient to contemporary African art, as well as develop more specialized courses.

The successful candidate will contribute to the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences minors, which include African American and Africana Studies and Middle East and North African Studies, and contribute to the department, School, and College and beyond the classroom through committee and college-wide service, engaging in scholarly activities through conference presentations and publications, and demonstrate professional accomplishments in the discipline. The successful candidate will demonstrate familiarity with best-teaching practices including pedagogical innovation, inclusive strategies, and teaching pedagogy that incorporates new technologies.

This faculty position will begin in Fall 2023. Review of applications will commence October 1, 2022 and continue until the position is filled. The salary and appointment rank will be based on education level and cumulative experience. Please note a background check is required for appointment to this position.

CFP: Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Conference 2023

Remaking the Past
44th Annual Conference
Nineteenth-Century Studies Association
Sacramento, California
March 30 – April 1, 2023

Sacramento, host city for NCSA’s 2023 conference, lends itself to exploring issues of revivals and re-creations of the past. Sacramento’s nineteenth-century history encompassed California’s Gold Rush, the genocide and displacement of Indigenous populations, the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, and the building of a capital city that became a stage for the reinventions–productive and problematic–of the past so central to the nineteenth century. Appropriately, Sacramento’s conference will explore the nineteenth century’s almost constant desire to re-envision and measure itself against the past, as well as our own responsibility as scholars to reassess the histories we tell about this era, using current critical approaches, concerns, and theories.

CALL FOR PAPERS

We seek perspectives into the wide range of nineteenth-century reinterpretations of the past and their consequences. We invite papers and panels covering and uncovering political history, social history, history of science, literature, visual and performing arts, and popular culture. We welcome interdisciplinary and inclusive approaches that revisit and broaden ways of looking at the nineteenth century, including those that interrogate constructions of gender, race, settler-colonialism, and ethnicity as seen in, or that were created about, that era. We also invite papers that examine communities, artifacts, or epistemologies that resist remaking the past, including those that explore cultures for which preserving the past unaltered was/is a form of survival and resistance.

In addition, we welcome papers that scrutinize historical consciousness during the nineteenth century. These could assess the varied tendencies to rewrite history, to revive or bury the past, and to appeal to the past as a legitimizing force, as a spur to the imagination, and as a field for questions and contradictions. Such papers could consider the past as a force in political discourses, in education and science, and in debates on the value of studying it at all.

Topics may include:

  • stylistic revivals in nineteenth-century art, architecture, and design
  • traumatic or “buried” histories of displacement, forced migration, genocide
  • recovering Indigenous and African-American nineteenth-century cultures of resistance
  • antiquarianism and issues of historical preservation and interpretation of nineteenth-century material culture
  • California history including Chinatowns, Spanish historical sites, settler-colonial sites of mourning, the preservation and interpretation of California’s Indigenous, Hispanic, and Asian communities
  • uses of historical fiction and revivals of past authors, playwrights, and composers
  • imagery of the past in nineteenth-century popular culture and advertising
  • Neo-Victorianism, adaptations (both book and film), and digital/data-driven re-imaginings of the nineteenth century
  • the use of real or imagined pasts in literature and the performing arts, the notion of revival as a trope, or of retrospection as a creative device
  • remaking or “differencing” 19th-century canons, critical pedagogy, and banned books
  • utopian golden ages of the past and future
  • invented pasts/invented traditions, fakes, lies, and forgeries

Please use this google form to send 250-word abstracts with one-page CVs bySeptember 30, 2022. Abstracts should include the author’s name, institutional affiliation, and paper title in the heading. We welcome individual proposals, panel proposals with four presenters and a moderator, or larger roundtable sessions. You are welcome to share calls for panels and roundtable discussions on our social media channels. You may post your call to our Facebook page and we will share it, or tag us on Twitter and we will gladly retweet.

Note that submission of a proposal constitutes a commitment to attend if accepted. Presenters will be notified in November 2022. We encourage submissions from graduate students, and those whose proposals have been accepted may submit complete papers to apply for a travel grant to help cover transportation and lodging expenses. For questions, please contact us at 2023ncsa@gmail.com.

JOB: Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in Brazil

 Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor 

Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, Brazil – in partnership with the University of Campinas (Unicamp), the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp), and the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.

Applications are invited for a Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professorship for the second semester of 2023 (August to November 2023) at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of Sao Paulo (MAC USP) to teach a seminar course on African American art in the Graduate Program in Aesthetics and Art History of the University of Sao Paulo (Master’s and Doctorate levels).

The Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP, http://www.mac.usp.br) is a research and education public university museum, with a collection of national and international importance of 20th and 21st centuries art. From the 1,691 works received from the former Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM SP), MAC USP has more recently reached the mark of 10,000 works in its collections. MAC USP’s mission is to promote the study and dissemination of the collection as well as its conservation, protection, restoration, expansion and recognition as a Brazilian artistic heritage in Brazil and abroad. In addition, the Museum seeks to develop teaching, research and extension in the fields of Museology, History, Art Theory and Criticism and Education and Art in Museums, encouraging scientific and cultural exchange with similar institutions in Brazil and abroad and promoting contemporary artistic practice. Its curatorial activities are developed from critical reflection grounded in interdisciplinary research in history, theory and criticism of modern and contemporary art, which also defines its collecting policies. Since 2000, MAC USP is the main University department engaged in the Graduate Program in Aesthetics and Art History (see: http://www.pgeha2.webhostusp.sti.usp.br/index.php/en/). The Program has the academic MA and the PhD diplomas for students who are interested in specializing in it, and has an average of one hundred students a year, under supervision and in its seminar courses.

The Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor is a project MAC USP has undertaken with three other major institutions in the state of São Paulo in Brazil: the University of Campinas (Unicamp) and its Graduate Program in History of Art and Culture; the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp) and its Department of Art History; and the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (the second largest collection of art of the state of São Paulo).

The successful candidate must hold a doctorate. She/he/they must have:extensive knowledge of African American art with an emphasis on the 20th and 21st centuries; a research background and/or research potential as an international authority within the specialty; and a level of international publication at a standard that will contribute to and enhance the profile national and international program of the Graduate Program in Aesthetics and Art History. It is necessary to give lectures, and classes at the graduate level.

The Seminar course is composed of 15 classes of 3 hours each, once a week, which will be taught between the months of August and November 2023. Once selected, the candidate will be asked to closely engage with scholars from the three universities involved who specialize in Brazilian and African diasporic art, and with local collections, to further discuss and develop the syllabus.

For application, send a curriculum vitae and a proposed syllabus on African American art with an emphasis on the 20th and 21st centuries [Abstract, topics to be developed and bibliography (10 items)].

The selected candidate will receive a monthly gross salary of $5,000 USD (period August to November 2023). Airfare, accommodation in Brazil and travel insurance will be covered with funds from the Terra Foundation for American Art.

The application starts on Monday, 16 May 2022 and the final deadline is midnight on Monday 15 August 2022. 

Contact Email: cursosmac@usp.br

In your application, please refer to Visiting Professor – Terra Foundation

CFP: “Playing Indian” at SECAC 2022

Please consider submitting to the session, Playing Indian: An American Visual Politic at SECAC’s 2022 annual conference, October 26-29 in Baltimore.

In his 1994 seminal book, Playing Indian, Philip Deloria describes the specifically American, primitivist phenomena of Indian Play. Beginning with national founding moments, such as colonists donning pseudo-Mohawk costumes to dump tea into the Boston harbor, Deloria describes how, “for the next two hundred years, white Americans molded similar narratives of national identity around the rejection of an older European consciousness and an almost mystical imperative to become new” (2).  Playing Indian, appearing in such diverse forms from the Boy Scouts to the New Age Movement, encapsulates the paradoxical desire to both glorify and become the “Indian” but also erase actual Indigenous peoples and cultures. Because of the desire to appear as native, Playing Indian is an overwhelmingly visual politic, however, Indian Play has received little art historical attention, outside the work of some Americanists studying the early 20th century, such as Elizabeth Hutchinson or John Ott. This panel seeks to begin to address this scholarly gap by featuring examples of Playing Indian from across American visual culture whether that be representations from popular culture such as sports mascots, accounts of artists and others, such as Jimmie Durham, erroneously claiming Indigenous identities, or responses to these histories from Indigenous artists.

The Call for Papers for SECAC 2022 in Baltimore is open through May 19 at https://secac.secure-platform.com/a/solicitations/16/home.

A list of sessions is available at https://secac.secure-platform.com/a/page/sessions.

JOB: Collegiate Assistant Professor of Architectural History @ UChicago

The Humanities Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago is now accepting applications from historians of architecture or the built environment for a four-year, non-renewable, postgraduate appointment as a Collegiate Assistant Professor, who will teach in the Department of Art History. Collegiate Assistant Professors are members of the College Faculty whose primary responsibility is to teach in the Core Curriculum, the College’s general education program.

The position is open to those who will have completed all requirements for their PhD degree no later than August 31, 2022. Candidates must demonstrate excellence in original scholarship as well as in teaching. An ability to incorporate studio teaching into their courses is desirable but not obligatory.

In most years, Collegiate Assistant Professors will teach two undergraduate courses in each of three quarters, distributed across several areas of the Art History Core curriculum. A minimum of two courses per year will be in the team-taught “Introduction to Art and Architecture” (ARTH 10100). The remaining, small seminar-style, courses may include multiple sections of an introductory survey in the Collegiate Assistant Professor’s own field; of an introductory design studio for liberal arts students; or of a thematic discussion-based “Art in Context” course, designed to introduce students to art-historical thinking through a focused examination of a particular set of materials. (For more information about the types of courses offered, see https://arthistory.uchicago.edu/undergraduate/courses)

The Fellow will be a member of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts (https://societyoffellows.uchicago.edu/). They will be eligible for one quarter of research leave, typically in the third year of residence, and may be eligible to apply for a second research leave in the Spring of the fourth and final year of appointment. The base salary will be determined according to the Collective Bargaining Agreement currently under renegotiation plus a benefits package and an annual professional development allowance of $5,000. For reference, the annual base salary for this rank in academic year 2020-21 was $72,307. Additional benefits, based on eligibility, include a publication allowance and a childcare allowance. The effective date for this appointment is September 1, 2022. This position is governed by a collective bargaining agreement.

Applicants must apply online at http://apply.interfolio.com/105661, and upload the following materials: a letter of application describing teaching and research interests and detailing progress towards the PhD, if not in hand; a current curriculum vitae; a description of the most recent major research project, preferably the dissertation, of not more than 2500 words; a proposal for an “Art in Context” course in the applicant’s field; and the names and contact information of three references whose recommendation letters may be solicited.

Application deadline is May 31, 2022. Only completed applications will be considered.

The position is contingent upon budgetary approval.

The position will be a member of the Service Employees International Union.

For more information about the Department of Art History, please visit arthistory.uchicago.edu. Please contact arthistory@uchicago.edu with any questions about the position.

We seek a diverse pool of applicants who wish to join an academic community that places the highest value on rigorous inquiry and encourages diverse perspectives, experiences, groups of individuals, and ideas to inform and stimulate intellectual challenge, engagement, and exchange. The University’s Statements on Diversity are
at https://provost.uchicago.edu/statements-diversity.

The University of Chicago is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity/Disabled/Veterans Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national or ethnic origin, age, status as an individual with a disability, protected veteran status, genetic information, or other protected classes under the law. For additional information please see the University’s Notice of Nondiscrimination.

Job seekers in need of a reasonable accommodation to complete the application process should call 773-702-1032 or email equalopportunity@uchicago.edu with their request.

JOB: Assistant/Associate Professor- African American History/ Africana Studies (Tenure Track) @ Rhode Island College

See https://employment.ric.edu/postings/5992 for more details.

CFP: African American Art History Symposium at Boston U

Boston University’s Department of the History of Art & Architecture is hosting a symposium featuring five late-stage doctoral candidates and recent postgraduates (within three years of defending) in the field of African American art history on November 11-12, 2022. The symposium will feature presentations on recent research, networking opportunities, and a concluding roundtable. This program is committed to advancing the connection and collaboration between diverse members of the Boston University community and emerging scholars of African American visual art, material culture, and architecture. The Present Coordinates: African American Art History symposium will provide honoraria and travel expenses for the panelists to travel to Boston.

Early-career scholars are invited to submit proposals for 45-minute research presentations on a topic of their choosing. Proposals may engage the current state of the field of African American art history; consider innovative and interdisciplinary methodologies; or investigate alternative frameworks and unstudied artists. Full details about proposals, which are due May 15, can be found here: https://www.bu.edu/haa/2022/03/31/call-for-papers-african-american-art-history-present-coordinates/

JOB: Research Specialist, Race and Daniel Chester French

Opportunity: National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Research Specialist

Date: May 2022

Division: Preservation

Department: Historic Sites

Office: Chesterwood

Project Manager: Executive Director

About the Organization

Chesterwood is the former summer home and studio of sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850-1931). Located in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Chesterwood is a historic site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, an organization that protects significant places representing our diverse cultural experiences. Today, Chesterwood preserves and interprets the work and legacies of French as a significant creator of monumental art.

The Research Specialist project is  funded in full by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Scope of Work

The Research Specialist will research and examine a selection of sculptures from French’s body of work through the perspectives of African Americans and/or Indigenous Americans. A list of over 40 of his works have been identified as complex, problematic and even racist. These works include depictions of individuals considered important to the dominant culture during French’s lifetime who were also enslavers, or politicians who wrote legislation that removed Native peoples from their homelands, for example. Alternatively with other sculptures it is the artist’s representation of Black or Indigenous persons which is problematic. The scholar will explore these pieces through critical frameworks and the Black and/or Indigenous gaze to provide nuance and fresh context for French’s work in contemporary society. This project will provide broadly applicable humanities-based models for examining historical/political monuments and memorials in the fuller contexts of their time.

The Research Specialist is invited to work remotely, but also encouraged to visit Chesterwood to review curatorial files and plaster studies of French’s public sculpture. In addition, the Research Specialist is encouraged to visit Chapin Library, Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, where Chesterwood’s archival and photographic files are located. The length of the project, from research to deliverables, is one year, anticipating the Research Specialist will be working part-time. 

A small, additional budget for a stipend is available if the Research Specialist chooses to conduct interviews, focus groups, workshops or do oral history research to support this project. 

Deliverables

The outcome of this scholarly and curatorial endeavor will be an online exhibition and catalogue of French’s more problematic public works through the National Trust’s Collections Portal; the research compiled will serve as an educational resource for Chesterwood’s interpretive staff; and lastly, the material will be shared with Chesterwood visitors, offering a full and honest accounting of these important works of sculptural art. Deliverables include:

o A detailed study on the outlined works of art. To be published online with the exhibit.

o Online exhibit introduction text.

o Appropriate “label copy” text, i.e., short synopsis of each work’s complexity and significance. 

Chesterwood staff will be available as a resource to the Research Specialist and handle the creation of the online collection itself. 

The Research Specialist is a NEH-grant funded position of $15,000 for the duration of the project, which is expected to be completed within the course of one calendar year. Dispersal of grant funds will be at predetermined installments by the Executive Director, with the final dispersal upon receipt of all deliverables. 

Qualifications

• Applicants who identify as African American/Black or Indigenous/Native American/American Indian are strongly encouraged to apply.  

• The position is open to independent scholars, tenured and non-tenured professors, and graduate students. 

• Experience researching, writing about, curating exhibitions on, or teachingIndigenous/Native American/American Indian and/or African American history or 

• Applicants should have a demonstrated area of expertise and interest in the areas of monumental sculpture, 19th century sculpture, or public art, and may include those with backgrounds in history, public history, art history, museum studies and curation. 

• A high degree of cultural competency is a necessity, especially when writing or speaking about Black and Indigenous people of color perspectives and when in conversations with members of the Black/African or Indigenous/Native American communities. 

• Must be conversant in topics and issues relevant to Indian Country or US based Black communities today.

• Attending or having a professional or alumni affiliation with a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) or Tribal Colleges and Universities is a plus.

Please send proposal with CV and background materials regarding skills and expertise to Donna Hassler, Executive Director, Chesterwood, at dhassler@chesterwood.org, outlining your interest in participating in this project.  Deadline to submit this information is May 15, 2022.

CFP: “Behind the Scenes of Object-Based Art Histories” Book

Book chapter proposals are invited for a forthcoming collection entitled “Behind the Scenes of Object-Based Art Histories,” edited by Carl Schmitz and Tracee Ng.

“I guess what I’m asking is this: are these the only kind of questions that art historians should be asking: Whodunnit? Or whatisit? Is there nothing else we can say?”                                                                                                                                                                                                                             —Michael Ann Holly

From the proposition that the ontological basis of art history remains a fertile ground for discovery, this project seeks perspectives on the relationships between the objects and subjects of study within the discipline. In conceiving of art historiography as an expanse of multifarious genealogies, what are the conditions of possibility for an art history oriented toward the art object? Are other ontologically dichotomous or even non-dichotomous art histories possible? How can the single artist catalogue raisonné—perhaps the ultimate expression of subject and object specificity—be recontextualized as part of a speculative art history? With these questions in mind, we invite our colleagues to explore the possibilities of object-based art historical research through related investigations.

In addition to art historical case studies, art histories that organically reveal their sources of inspiration (anywhere from art historiography to the personal) are also encouraged, as are scholars from outside of the discipline of art history whose work nevertheless revolves around the art object.

Proposals should include a short CV and/or biographical statement along with a 300-word abstract. All proposals should be sent to the editors (btsbook@catalogueraisonne.org) by June 15, 2022. 

Once accepted, we will ask you to consider the following publication details:

Deadline for full article: December 31, 2022

Length: 5,000-8,000 words

Submission: btsbook@catalogueraisonne.org

The concept for this forthcoming volume was based upon a session organized by the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association, and presented at the College Art Association annual conference in 2021. The four participating panelists will be adapting their conference papers for inclusion in this project. Further information on the panel is available on the CRSA website.

JOB: Intern for Romare Bearden Digital Catalogue Raisonné

The Wildenstein Plattner Institute (WPI) is seeking a research intern to support the Romare Bearden Digital Catalogue Raisonné project. The intern will assist primarily with the compilation of images related to the art and career of the artist Romare Bearden (1911-1988). This is a twelve-week paid summer internship with a time commitment of twenty-eight hours per week, starting June 6th, 2022. 

Responsibilities

The primary assignment will be the task of locating and obtaining high-resolution reproductions of works of art for internal use and future publication. The intern will be responsible for identifying and corresponding with relevant parties to secure permissions. The internship will be conducted as a hybrid of in-person meetings at the WPI office and remote work via Google Meet. Visits to NYC-area research libraries will also be required as necessary.

Qualifications

Graduate-level work in art history, museum studies, or a related field. 

Knowledge about African American art, with emphasis on provenance research and the art market.

Familiarity with Artstor and other primary-source image repositories.

Proficiency with Google Workspace. 

Proficiency with relational computer databases. Intern will be trained on a proprietary database.

Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Exceptionally detail oriented.

Ability to work independently.

For consideration, applicants should submit a resume with a cover letter and references by Friday, May 20, 2022 to camara.holloway@wpi-art.org.