Category: call for participation

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.

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CFP: Toward Equity in Publishing/American Art

Call for Applications: Toward Equity in Publishing
Deadline: May 1, 2023

Toward Equity in Publishing is a professional development program provided by the peer-reviewed journal American Art, which is co-published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and University of Chicago Press. The program works toward ameliorating the inequitable conditions that precede and impede publication by providing developmental editing and workshops to demystify academic publishing. Eligibility is limited to untenured faculty, junior museum staff, independent scholars, and unpublished graduate students.

With the continued generosity of the Dedalus Foundation, who has just extended their support for an additional two years, all participants will now receive a $1,000 stipend to offset participation costs such as family care, missed wages, or research expenses.

For more information and application instructions, please visit americanart.si.edu/research/toward-equity-publishing.

CFA: The Tyson Scholars of American Art Program at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, NEW DEADLINE

The deadline to apply for the Tyson Scholars of American Art program for the 2023-2024 term has been extended! Applications now due December 2, 2022. Please see below for more details and direct any questions to TysonScholars@crystalbridges.org

The Tyson Scholars of American Art Program at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
The Tyson Scholars of American Art Program encourages and supports full-time, interdisciplinary scholarship that seeks to expand boundaries and traditional categories of investigation into American art and visual and material culture from the any time period. The program was established in 2012 through a $5 million commitment from the Tyson family and Tyson Foods, Inc. Since its inception, the Tyson Scholars Program has supported the work of 66 scholars, attracting academic professionals in a variety of disciplines nationally and internationally.

Crystal Bridges and the Tyson Scholars Program invites PhD candidates (or equivalent), post-doctoral researchers, and senior scholars from any field who are researching American art to apply. Scholars may be focused on architecture, craft, material culture, performance art, and new media. We also invite applications from scholars approaching US art transregionally and looking at the broader geographical context of the Americas, especially including Latinx and Indigenous art. Applications will be evaluated on the originality and quality of the proposed research project and its contribution to a more equitable and inclusive history of American art.

The Tyson Scholars Program looks for research projects that will intersect meaningfully with the museum’s collections, library resources, architecture, grounds, curatorial expertise, programs and exhibitions; and/or the University of Arkansas faculty broadly; and applicants should speak to why residence in Northwest Arkansas and the surrounding areas will advance their work. The applicant’s academic standing, scholarly qualifications, and experience will be considered, as it informs the ability of the applicant to complete the proposed project. Letters of support are strongest when they demonstrate the applicant’s excellence, promise, originality, track record, and productivity as a scholar, not when the letter contains a commentary on the project.

Crystal Bridges is dedicated to an equitable, inclusive, and diverse cohort of fellows. We seek applicants who bring a critical perspective and understanding of the experiences of groups historically underrepresented in American art, and welcome applications from qualified persons of color; who are Indigenous; with disabilities; who are LGBTQ+; first-generation college graduates; from low-income households; and who are veterans.

Fellowships are residential and support full-time writing and research for terms that range from six weeks to nine months. While in residence, Tyson Scholars have access to the art and library collections of Crystal Bridges as well as the library and archives at the University of Arkansas in nearby Fayetteville. Stipends vary depending on the duration of residency, position as senior scholar, post-doctoral scholar, or pre-doctoral scholar, and range from $17,000 to $34,000 per semester, plus provided housing. The residency includes $1,500 for relocation, and additional research funds upon application. Scholars are provided workspace in the curatorial wing of the Crystal Bridges Library. The workspace is an enclosed area shared with other Tyson Scholars. Scholars are provided with basic office supplies, desk space, an office chair, space on a bookshelf, and a locking cabinet with key for personal belongings and files. Housing is provided in a fully furnished, shared four-bedroom, four-bathroom apartment within walking distance of the museum. Each scholar will have their own bedroom and ensuite bathroom with shared living room and kitchen.

Further information about the Tyson Scholars Program, application instructions, and application portal can be found at https://crystalbridges.org/reports-and-research/tyson-scholars/.

Applications for the 2023-2024 academic year open September 15, 2022 and close December 2, 2022.

Call for Applications: APS Intaglio Printmaking Workshop for Early-Career Curators and Scholars (Minneapolis, July 24–28, 2023)

The Association of Print Scholars (APS) is currently accepting applications for the second of its two-part series of intensive hands-on printmaking workshops for emerging scholars and curators, which is generously funded by The Getty Foundation’s initiative, The Paper Project: Prints and Drawings Curatorship in the 21st Century. This five-day workshop will be dedicated to intaglio techniques (etching, drypoint, engraving) and will be hosted in Minneapolis, MN, in partnership with the Highpoint Center for Printmaking and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

A thorough comprehension of various printmaking methods is critical to producing scholarship and exhibitions on these media. Yet, many early-career print curators and scholars lack such practical experience as they embark on their careers due to competing professional and academic demands that make it difficult to enroll in a semester-long printmaking course. With the technical intricacies of printmaking difficult to grasp through text alone, an intensive workshop provides an invaluable technical and material knowledge of printmaking that will not only contribute to, but also enhance, a print curator and scholar’s understanding of a work’s content, intention, and aesthetic. The aim of this workshop is to further prepare participants to better communicate these complex techniques in an accessible language to a general museum audience and contribute new personal insight to the field.

Ten early-career curators and scholars will be selected to participate in the workshop, which will be held in Minneapolis, MN, between July 24 and July 28, 2023. The intensive program will include a visit to MIA’s Herschel V. Jones Print Study Room to examine a selection of intaglio prints from the museum’s collection. Participants will also engage in hands-on work in drypoint, engraving, and etching at the Highpoint Center studio as well as explore the Highpoint’s facilities, library, galleries, and print room. A day will be devoted to print identification, including a second visit to MIA’s Study Room to scrutinize variant intaglio techniques (aquatint, mezzotint, etc.). The workshop will conclude with Highpoint staff leading demonstrations of other intaglio techniques as informed by participant projects and a final seminar and reflection led by APS organizers.

Applications to the workshop are open to candidates who have a graduate degree (or equivalent experience), but must be within 10 years of receiving their terminal degree. Preference will be given to early-career curatorial professionals (curators, curatorial or research assistants/associates, postdoctoral fellows), although advanced graduate students and independent scholars with a long-held demonstrated interest in printmaking and curatorial practice will also be considered.

APS is committed to supporting the professional development of a diverse and inclusive community within the field of print scholarship and strongly encourages candidates from underrepresented groups to apply.

Travel, accommodation, and meal expenses will be covered.

To apply, please submit the following documents via an online application form (link), which requires:

  • A brief statement (500 words max.) describing your research and how it would be enriched by a workshop on intaglio techniques
  • A current CV or resume
  • One letter of reference (sent directly to workshops@printscholars.org)

Please note that for full consideration, all materials, including the reference letter, must be received by the workshop organizers no later than November 1, 2022.

Successful applicants will be notified by December 1, 2022.

The workshop will be organized and led by current APS President, Dr. Elisa Germán, and APS Workshop Coordinator, Dr. Sarah Bane.

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About the Association of Print Scholars

The Association of Print Scholars (APS) is a non-profit organization that encourages innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to the history and practice of printmaking. It aims to promote the dissemination of print scholarship and to facilitate dialogue and community among its members. It sponsors collaboration and publication grants, as well as article prizes for emerging scholars, and hosts public programs on printmaking throughout the year. APS hopes to bring together the diverse print community of curators, collectors, academics, artists, conservators, critics, independent scholars, dealers, and graduate students. Membership is open to anyone.

About the Getty Foundation

The Getty Foundation fulfills the philanthropic mission of the Getty Trust by supporting individuals and institutions committed to advancing the greater understanding and preservation of the visual arts in Los Angeles and throughout the world. Through strategic grants initiatives, it strengthens art history as a global discipline, promotes the interdisciplinary practice of conservation, increases access to museum and archival collections, and develops current and future leaders in the visual arts.  The Getty Foundation carries out its work in collaboration with the other Getty Programs to ensure that they individually and collectively achieve maximum effect.

These workshops are made possible with support from the Getty Foundation through its Paper Project initiative.

CFA: Toward Equity in Publishing

Call for Applications: Toward Equity in Publishing
Deadline: September 15, 2022

Toward Equity in Publishing is a professional development program provided by the peer-reviewed journal American Art, which is co-published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and University of Chicago Press. The program, supported by the Dedalus Foundation, will work toward ameliorating the inequitable conditions that precede and impede publication by providing developmental editing and workshops to demystify academic publishing. Eligibility is limited to, untenured faculty, junior museum staff, independent scholars, and unpublished graduate students.

For more information and application instructions, please visit americanart.si.edu/research/toward-equity-publishing.

Seeking Advisors
American Art seeks senior scholars for the Toward Equity in Publishing advisory committee. Please send letter of interest and CV to AmericanArtJournal@si.edu.

CFP: US Art and Critical Whiteness Studies at CAA 2023

U.S. Art and Critical Whiteness Studies: Looking Back, Looking Forward
Session will present: In-Person

James W. Denison
Email Address(s): jwden@umich.edu

More than fifteen years have passed since the publication of Martin Berger’s Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture, which was widely celebrated for bringing a promising new category of analysis, critical whiteness studies, into the discipline of U.S. art history. However, despite its potential to speak to issues of social stratification and power at the core of the history and historiography of U.S. art, critical whiteness studies has yet to become a regular component of the analytical toolbox employed by scholars of American art. Recent years have seen a spate of scholarship focused on white supremacism and eugenics in U.S. art, but incorporation of the insights of the broader field of whiteness studies, especially regarding more everyday forms of racial bias and self-understanding, remains infrequent and haphazard. How have American artists of various backgrounds visually articulated “whiteness”, and how can we historicize such articulations? How have artists propelled or stymied prejudice through their representations of “white” people? How has whiteness affected how artists represent racialized people, places, and objects? How has it intersected with other forms of identity, including ethnic, gender, and class identities? Finally, what has kept critical whiteness studies from entering the mainstream in art history, a field so long dominated by white artists and scholars? This session seeks to analyze and address these and related questions, inviting papers that examine the past and future of whiteness as a subject of analysis in American art studies and/or offer new directions for such investigation.

Potential topics for papers might include:
·         The history and future of critical race art history
·         Whiteness and nationalism in the history of American art history
·         Whiteness, the art world, and elitism/class concerns
·         Relationships between critical whiteness studies and other forms of critical race studies within art history
·         The invisibility of whiteness/the visualization of whiteness
·         Whiteness and ethnicity/historicizing whiteness
·         Whiteness and gender, including masculinity, femininity, and feminism

·         Whiteness and modernist primitivism

CFP: Histories of People of Color @ Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Conference

The Nineteenth-Century Studies Association is currently collecting papers for potential inclusion in their 2023 conference, to be held at the end of March in Sacramento, CA.  We are seeking papers to include in a panel proposal for the conference and would love to hear from those interested in participating. The working description for the panel is described below.  We welcome scholars from any discipline interested in participating in our panel to submit an abstract and one page CV no later than August 25th.  Abstracts and CVs can be emailed directly to  ahazar1@saic.edu andwcastenell@wlu.edu.  If the panel is chosen, panelists will need to be current members of NCSA by the time of the conference.

Working Panel Description:
Working Title: The Why of History: Rethinking Histories of People of Color Within Structures of Power in the Long 19th-Century US
The history of BIPOC people and other marginalized groups in the US is one that has been overlooked and continuously rewritten to preserve a narrative that privileges the majority population, and specifically those within structures of power.  These narratives have been put forward as the foundation of the history of many of the major events of the long 19th century, including the institution and effects of slavery, the Civil War, and westward expansion, among other histories. Throughout this history, the role and treatment of marginalized groups has been framed in a way that is at best heavily mediated, and is often inaccurate.  Although significant steps have been taken in recent years to rectify these oversights and reframe trends of history and culture that have formed our understanding of events and the mechanisms that surround them, it is still an area that requires investigation.  Doing this helps us to better understand how national narratives and histories have shaped the perception of past events and their impact on marginalized people by bringing to light new considerations that resituate these overlooked and misunderstood histories in the historical narrative.  This panel will interrogate the ways in which we have understood and continue to understand the history of BIPOC people and other marginalized groups in the US in the long 19th century, and the way that cultural artifacts including but not limited to images, literature, and other archival documents have mediated that understanding.

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.

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.

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/

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