Category: call for papers

PUB: Oxford Art Journal Essay Prize

Submissions are now open for the 2024 Oxford Art Journal Essay Prize. The submissions deadline is December 1, 2024.

The annual Oxford Art Journal Essay Prize for Early Career Researchers launched in 2018, to coincide with the journal’s fortieth year of publication, and seeks to further enhance Oxford Art Journal’s international reputation for publishing innovative scholarship. The Essay Prize for Early Career Researchers aims to encourage submissions from British and international doctoral students, as well as early career researchers who are within five years of gaining their PhD. The essay will be on any topic relevant to art history and should be between 6,000 and 10,000 words (normally including footnotes) in length. The editors will review all submissions to select the Prize winner and will work with the successful candidate to advise on revision of the manuscript for publication. The journal and Oxford University Press will advise the Prize winner on securing image permissions and may be able to make a contribution to image costs.

The winner will receive:
Publication of the winning essay in Oxford Art Journal
£500 worth of Oxford University Press books
A year’s free subscription to Oxford Art Journal

Other entries of sufficient quality may be invited to publish their submission in Oxford Art Journal.

Please see the following page for more information about submission and the prize: https://academic.oup.com/oaj/pages/essay_prize

CFP: 2024 Photography Network Symposium “In Relation: Photography’s Communities”

October 25–27, 2024
Tucson, Arizona + virtual (hybrid)
Proposal due date: May 15, 2024

Photography Network will convene its fourth annual symposium in the Sonoran Desert Borderlands city of Tucson, Arizona in partnership with the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. Grounded in the themes that arise in three CCP-organized exhibitions of Latinx photography that will be on view this fall (Louis Carlos Bernal: Retrospectiva, curated by Elizabeth Ferrer; Chicana Photographers LA, curated by Sybil Venegas; and Laura Aguilar: Nudes in Nature, curated by Sybil Venegas and Christopher Velasco), “In Relation” will consider how communities are made visible, defined, and constituted through photography. In her book Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History (2021), Elizabeth Ferrer writes: “As the photographer/subject relationship shifted from outsider/insider to insider/insider [in the late twentieth century], the photograph became less an ethnographic document than an autonomous and self-validating form of individual and community expression.” This shift highlights questions of agency, circulation, diaspora, and storytelling that are relevant to the practice and institutional interpretation of photography. Taking this idea as a point of departure, we invite proposals that broadly respond to the following questions and themes:

● How have artists, especially those from Latinx communities, used photography to probe issues of visibility, belonging, and representation? How do their artistic practices constitute forms of activism?
● Who has the right to tell stories for whom?
● How does the circulation of photographs create—or restrict—communities of subjects and viewers?
● How have borders—in the US and beyond—shaped histories of photography, and how has photography from borderlands challenged state-imposed divisions?
● What alternate models might exist for interpreting photographs and photographic practices that transcend simplistic binaries such as “insider” versus “outsider”?
● What do authentically relational, community-centered curatorial practices look like? How are methodologies such as community advisory councils rethinking the notion of curatorial voice and storytelling?

Submission Information

Photography Network invites proposals across disciplines and a broad range of subjects that reflect the geographic and thematic diversity of the field. Practitioners and scholars at any stage of their careers are welcome to submit their research. We also welcome international scholars but note that the conference will be in English.

The symposium organizers encourage a variety of presentational styles. In addition to proposals for individual, 20-minute papers relating to the themes outlined above, we also seek submissions for a workshop on the topic of community-centered exhibition development and for a roundtable featuring presentations from artist activists .
Please prepare for submission:
(1) a 250-word abstract with a clear indication of format, and
(2) a two-page resume or CV.

All files should be named “[LAST NAME]–CV” or “[LAST NAME]–ABSTRACT.”

Email completed materials by May 15 to the Photography Network Symposium organizing committee: Josie Johnson, Emilia Mickevicius, and Anne Cross at photographynetworksymposium@gmail.com. Notifications of accepted proposals will be emailed by mid-June. The schedule and registration information will be available by July 1 and the symposium will be held October 25–27, 2024.

Note: All are welcome to apply. Accepted presenters must be Photography Network members in good standing at the time of the symposium. We have a sliding scale membership: $20 (student/unaffiliated), $40 (affiliated), or $100 (sustaining). We also have free need-based memberships. Please visit the Photography Network’s membership page (www.photographynetwork.net/memberregistration) for more information on how to join.

CFP: “The Black Commonwealth” at CAA2024

The Black Commonwealth
Co-Chairs: julia elizabeth neal (University of Michigan), Janell Blackmon-Pryor (Bowie State University)
Submit:https://caa.confex.com/caa/2024/webprogrampreliminary/Session12517.html
Session will present: In Person

Investigations of place have prompted radical reconsiderations of social and artistic geographies of visual culture. It absorbs and reflects psychosocial views and cultural relationships between communities and sites. Place is discursive across the disciplines: Tim Creswell, an anthropogeographer, situates place as a “meaningful category,” whereas Lucy Lippard, a feminist curator, describes it as “the locus of desire,” and artist Renée Green discursively engages notions of place and site-specificity in “Peripatetic at ‘Home’.”

With the objective to contribute to increasing microhistories–local, transnational, and global–reframing art historical inquiry, this panel will convene around Pennsylvania and its role within Black art production. A colony, the second state to join the Union, and a commonwealth implicated by the myths of the nation, Pennsylvania is a microcosm of the United States. How does it shape histories of artists from Henry Ossawa Tanner and Meta Warrick Vaux Fuller to Raymond Saunders, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Benjamin Patterson, and more, from the past to now?

We invite submissions related to Pennyslvania’s role in the profiles, practices, networks, institutions, and histories, of artists of African descent from the 19th to 21st centuries. Graduate students, adjunct, tenure-track and tenured professors, curators and arts cultural workers are encouraged to present.

Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

* Placemaking
* Politics of Identity and Blackness
* Gender Politics
* Respectability Politics and Whiteness Studies
* Andrew Carnegie and Institutions
* Labor Histories and Art
* Philadelphia, Pittsburgh
* Deindustrialization
* Archives and Documentary Histories
* Museums, Galleries and Race

Deadline is August 31, 2023

CFP: Blackness, Race, and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Studies

Special Issue of Nineteenth Century Studies: 

Blackness, Race, and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Studies

deadline for submission: August 15, 2024

full name(s)/name of organization:

Wendy Castenell and A. Maggie Hazard co-editors/Nineteenth-Century Studies

contact email(s): wcastenell@wlu.edu; ahazar1@saic.edu

This special issue will explore how Blackness was constructed and problematized by a hegemonic global structure across national boundaries during the long nineteenth century. The issue will pay particular attention to emerging concepts of Black identities during this period.  Critically, majority narratives have driven these constructions, propagating mediated histories that subjugate Black people, yet the full impact of these narratives has not been thoroughly explored and needs additional interrogation. Essays might consider topics related to images, texts, other forms of media, and more. Possible topics could include expressions of Black autonomy in white supremacist cultures; colonialism/decolonization; trauma studies; slavery/emancipation; Black soldiers; Black artists/photographers/writers; the development and expression of stereotypes; the practice of lynching; the transatlantic migration and the Black diaspora; and other relevant subjects. Nineteenth Century Studies publishes studies of nineteenth-century world cultures in all humanistic fields, including literature, art history, history, musicology, and the history of science and the social sciences. It is an interdisciplinary journal issued annually by the Nineteenth Century Studies Association. One exciting aspect of Nineteenth Century Studies is that the journal encourages authors to enhance their contributions with pertinent artwork.

Please submit manuscripts for scholarly essays of 6,000-10,000 words, pedagogical essays of 2,000-4,000 words, or book reviews of 600-1000 words formatted in Chicago Manual Style to guest editors Wendy Castenell and A. Maggie Hazard at wcastenell@wlu.edu and ahazar1@saic.edu. Additionally, we welcome suggestions of books for review relevant to the theme of this special issue. Please send your suggestions to the editors. Early expressions of interest and proposals of topics are also welcome. The initial deadline for submission of full manuscripts will be August 15, 2024, but earlier submissions are encouraged.

CFP: “Blackness, White Liberalism, and Art” @ CAA2024

Call For Papers

Blackness, White Liberalism, and Art

College Art Association Annual Conference session

Chicago, February 14–17, 2024 

This panel will address the “soft racism” of white liberal artists who have inadequately tried to address white supremacy and anti-Black racism in their work. Whether in the guise of multiculturalism, color blindness, or particular strains of post-racialism, these artists have often perpetuated what cultural theorist Stuart Hall called “a kind of difference that doesn’t make a difference of any kind.” We seek papers that take up case studies of neo/liberal representations of race produced within the United States across media from the nineteenth century until today. 

Chairs: Bridget R. Cooks, University of California, Irvine, and John Ott, James Madison University.   

The session will convene in person in Chicago and the deadline for submissions is August 31, 2023. Submission Link: 

https://caa.confex.com/caa/2024/webprogrampreliminary/Session12755.html

CFP: “Critical Race Art History and the Archive” @ ACRAH/CAA2024

ACRAH will be at College Art Association Annual Conference in 2024.

We are having a virtual session, “Critical Race Art History and the Archive” that is soliciting papers.

Abstract:

In Subject to Display (2009), Jennifer A. González asserts that “the collection and display of bodies, images, and artifacts in museums and elsewhere is a primary means by which a nation tells the story of its past and locates the cultures of its citizens in the present.“ In this session, contemporary archivists’ discuss their approaches to telling the narratives of racial identification and racialization—past and present. What has been collected and how has that material been interpreted? What questions do they bring to institutional systems of classification? How do they create space and cede power so that marginalized communities can access resources that support their created and managed archives? In what ways have the concerns of the humanities—analysis, interpretation, argumentation—been mainstreamed into digital humanities practice in the scope of critical race art history?

Submit your proposal here: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2024/webprogrampreliminary/Session12882.html

Deadline: August 31, 2023

Check out the full CAA conference call for participation and guidelines to submit here: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2024/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html

CFP: Photography Network Virtual Symposium

Photography’s Frameworks
Photography Network Virtual Symposium
October 12–14, 2023

Photography Network’s third annual symposium will be held virtually and hosted jointly with the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. In honor of the UWC’s New Archival Visions Programme—an initiative to activate the university’s archival holdings through research, fellowships, and curatorial projects—this symposium considers the subject of frameworks in the study of photography.

In recent years, “framing” and “reframing” have become buzzwords for describing new approaches to the study of photography, including the 2018 volume Photography Reframed: New Visions in Photographic Culture, the ReFrame project at the Harvard Art Museums launched in 2021, and the ongoing archival initiative, “Framing the Field: Photography’s Histories in American Institutions.” Projects like the Art Institute of Chicago’s 2023 Field Guide to Photography and Media exhibition and catalogue and the recent Vision & Justice initiative encourage reflection on how histories of photography have been constructed and how certain interventions can be made to create a more equitable field moving forward. Such interventions might also draw on “reframing” projects from the global south that interrogate colonial and metropolitan categories and temporal schemas in the history of global photography, such as the 2020 Kronos special issue on “Other Lives of the Image” and the 2019 publication Ambivalent: Photography and Visibility in African History.

This symposium aims to gather these types of initiatives into one space for shared reflection and future collaboration. Using the construction of a “framework” in reference to both conceptual schema and physical structures, we ask how larger patterns of social, ideological, material, economic, and environmental forces have shaped and continue to shape photographs as objects in circulation and in archival repositories. How have past theoretical, methodological, and institutional frameworks structured, and in many instances limited, the field? What work have these frames performed in the creation and interpretation of photographs and their histories? Which frameworks have been overlooked, and what types of interventions can make the most impactful changes?

While papers should seek to address these questions, our definition of “framework” is capacious and inclusive. Proposals might therefore consider critical approaches to frameworks that include:

• Archival: private art collections, public collections (schools, universities, museums, government agencies), informal private holdings, artist collectives, and activist archives (including national liberation, anti-colonial and anti-apartheid collections)
• Colonial, postcolonial and decolonial: state-sponsored photography, anthropological studies, tourist photography, humanitarian photography, documentary discourses
• Cultural: linguistic, religious, or ethnic practices and beliefs
• Dysfunctional: decay or erasure of contexts, allowing for slippage, appropriation, and reinterpretation of photography
• Ethical: displaying, discussing, and teaching certain images; scientific, anthropological, and legal rationales

Submission Information

Photography Network invites proposals across disciplines and a broad range of subjects that reflect the geographic and thematic diversity of the field. Practitioners and scholars at any stage of their careers are welcome to submit their research. We also welcome international scholars but note that the conference will be in English.

The symposium organizers encourage a variety of presentational styles. In addition to proposals for individual, 20-minute papers, we also seek alternative-format presentations (e.g., workshops and roundtables). We will also host a Lightning Round for new research on any topic from students, curators, academics, and practitioners. Applicants may submit up to 2 proposals, provided that one is in an alternative format; you are welcome to apply only to the Lightning Round. Sessions will be organized around accepted submissions, rather than prescribed themes.

To be considered for a panel or alternative-format presentation, please prepare:
(1) a 250-word abstract with a clear indication of format, and
(2) a three-page resume or CV.

To be considered only for the Lightning Round, please prepare:
(1) a 100-word abstract clearly labeled as a Lightning Round proposal and
(2) a three-page resume or CV.

All files should be named “[LAST NAME]–CV” or “[LAST NAME]–ABSTRACT.”

Email completed materials by June 15 to the Photography Network Symposium organizing committee: Katherine Bussard, Patricia Hayes, Josie Johnson, Caroline Riley, and Jessica Stark at photographynetworksymposium@gmail.com.

Notifications of accepted proposals will be emailed by July 19. The schedule will be announced by August 1 and the symposium will be held October 12–14, 2023.

Note: All are welcome to apply. Accepted presenters must be Photography Network members in good standing at the time of the symposium. We have a sliding scale membership: $20 (student/unaffiliated), $40 (Affiliated), or $100 (Senior). We also have free need-based memberships. Please visit the Photography Network’s membership page (www.photographynetwork.net/memberregistration) for more information on how to join.

Call for Proposals: Race in Design History, An Anthology (deadline Mar. 15, 2023)

Race in Design History: An Anthology

edited by Kristina Wilson, Professor of Art History, Clark University and Michelle Joan Wilkinson, Curator of Architecture and Design, National Museum of African American History and Culture

How has race shaped the objects of our designed world? We invite contributors to submit to an edited volume that will focus on the ways design and design histories have engaged ideas about race, whether implicitly or explicitly. Race is a contested category with shifting meanings over time, and perceptions about race influence design history in multiple ways: how objects are designed; how designers imagine their ideal consumer; how designs are put into production and how those designs are marketed. Ultimately, race has an impact on the scope and structure of the residual design archive that historians are left sifting through. This edited volume welcomes contributions in the form of close readings of design objects as well as critical interrogations about design through the lenses of practice, pedagogy, curation, and historiography.

Recent work in design history has emphasized the importance of decolonizing the predominantly Western and Northern biases of the modernist canon. This anthology aims to contribute to that work, and embraces the goals of critical race studies of design, with an investigation of the role of race in all aspects of design history. It welcomes scholarship that looks at under-valued objects of design, scholarship that expands our understanding of what it means to have a career as a designer, and scholarship that illuminates design history in new contexts. We seek narratives of design history that interrogate our assumptions about what is knowable in the past.

We invite contributions on decorative objects, interiors, fashion, architecture, and graphic design, among others, 1800 to the present, global in scope. Proposals should be made for one or more of the following types of essays:

1) Scholarly essays of 3,500-4,000 words: these might be case studies that investigate a movement, a designer, a specific exhibition, or production materials and processes; should engage historical context and demonstrate methodological innovation.

2) Short essays of 1250-1500 words: close readings of objects, keywords, or terms that give the reader an immersive encounter; the style of writing in these essays could be more experimental, and these short pieces will complement the larger contextual discussions offered in the longer essays;

3) Questions of practice essays of 3,000 words: essays that address aspects of museum practice, teaching and pedagogical practice, designers’ practice.

Please send a 300-word proposal and a CV to:

KrWilson@clarku.edu and WilkinsonM@si.edu with “Race in Design History” in the subject line by the deadline of March 15, 2023. Contributors will be notified by mid-April, and drafts will be due September 15, 2023.

CFP: “Questionnaire: The Animacy of Objects” in American Art Journal

Call for Submissions: “Questionnaire: The Animacy of Objects”
Deadline: August 15, 2023
American Art, the peer-reviewed journal co-published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the University of Chicago Press, seeks to publish papers demonstrating cultural perspectives that recognize objects as animate beings. Authors are invited to submit brief essays in reply to this question, posed by co-organizer heather ahtone (Choctaw/Chickasaw Nation): How does acknowledging and engaging with objects as animate beings—recognizing them as relatives and respecting that they carry a form of peoplehood—expose the knowledge they hold and carry, knowledge that is otherwise invisible and unrecognized?
Contributors are encouraged to interrogate how the Western discipline of art history, and particularly the focus of this journal—the role played by art and related visual culture in the ongoing transnational and transcultural formation of “America” as a contested geography, identity, and idea—would benefit from these perspectives. Toward this goal, essays are welcome from scholars who are working both within and beyond North American topics, as well as those coming from other disciplines and fields, including artists, art historians, linguists, cultural specialists, and others working on philosophical questions related to the animacy of objects. Diverse orthographies are welcome and will be accommodated whenever possible. Please click here for more information.
The journal’s standard guidelines on originality, quality, and submission format apply; click here for details. Please submit manuscripts of 1,500–2,000 words (including notes) with 1–4 images, to AmericanArtJournal@si.edu by August 15, 2023. Selected articles will be workshopped with authors, rigorously edited and fact-checked, and published in American Art in 2024. Inquiries are welcome.

CFP: Full Bleed journal

www.full-bleed.org/submit

Full Bleed, an annual journal exploring the intersection of the visual and literary arts, seeks submissions for its sixth issue, forthcoming in Spring 2023.

We publish criticism, belle lettres, visual art, illustration, poetry, fiction, and graphic essays. We are always happy to feature collaborations between writers and artists; ekphrastic creations; and groundbreaking critical essays.

For Issue Six, we are especially interested in submissions on the theme of materials—their unique aesthetic qualities, social histories, means of production, environmental costs, and layered meanings. Send us work that contemplates the virtues, potential, or politics of ink, paper, oil paint, dye, textiles, charcoal, lead, soil, wood, etc.

This call is open to all with the exception of current students at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), which publishes Full Bleed.

All submissions should be sent between September 1, 2022 and January 15, 2023. Those interested in first sharing essay proposals may do so by November 15 (also through our Submittable page). Note that acceptance of proposals does not guarantee publication in the issue. Also, you need not have sent a proposal to submit completed work.

Final selections for the issue will be made by the journal’s editor and board members in close consultation with participants in Publishing Culture, an upper-level, spring-semester course at MICA. Each contributor will receive a modest honorarium and a complimentary copy of the issue.

For more details, please visit:
www.full-bleed.org/submit

We are excited to review your work and thank you in advance for sharing it with Full Bleed.