Category: call for participation

CFP: Zones of Representation

Call for Papers:

“Zones of Representation: Photographing Contested Landscapes, Contemporary West Coast Perspectives on Photography and Photograph-Based Media,” a symposium organized by Makeda Best (California College of the Arts), Bridget Gilman (Santa Clara University), and Kathy Zarur (California College of the Arts), at SF Camerawork, San Francisco, CA, April 23, 2016
Contemporary global events and phenomena continue to shape visual interpretations of economic, social, environmental, and political geographies, and to disrupt conceptions of region, nation, citizenship, and community.

“Zones of Representation” will consider how photographers and time-based media artists have responded to transformations in the global landscape through new ideas about the function of photographic media, and the shifting roles of makers and audiences. We want to know: how can novel visual practices disrupt traditional narratives of spatial representation? In what unique ways do artists in time-based media acknowledge and respond to the historical contribution of their medium in defining, producing, and perpetuating these same narratives? What new connections do these practices demonstrate and reveal? And, in what ways do contemporary technologies, modes of distribution, and access impact interactions with the land?
We invite papers that address the expanded role of photography and time-based media in global landscape discourses and social fabrics.

Proposals on contemporary topics or new perspectives on historic materials are encouraged. Proposals from image makers are also welcome.

Please send a 300-word proposal, a one-paragraph biographical statement, and full contact information tozonesofrepresentation@gmail.com by January 8, 2016.
“Zones of Representation” aims to connect artists, historians, curators and arts professionals, and students in Northern California, facilitating a regional network for the latest art historical scholarship. The symposium is presented in collaboration with SF Camerawork and is co-sponsored by the Northern California Art Historians (NCAH), a College Art Association affiliated society.

 

 

CFP: Art, Race, and Christianity @ CAA 2016

Call for Papers: Art, Race, and Christianity
Affiliated Society: Association for Critical Race Art History
Phoebe Wolfskill, Indiana University, pwolfski@indiana.edu and James Romaine, Nyack College, drjamesromaine@gmail.com
College Art Association Annual Conference, February 3-6, 2016, Washington, DC

Session Description: Since its arrival in the Americas, Christianity has been inextricably linked to issues of racial identity. The religious foundations of the European immigrants who colonized the New World diverged from the practices of indigenous and uprooted African populations, often resulting in a conflict of spiritual identities, a struggle that frequently found its place in artistic expression. This panel seeks papers focusing on the relationship between race and faith in North American and Caribbean art created from the nineteenth century to the present. How does art function as a site in which intersecting racial and religious tensions have been expressed, debated, or potentially resolved? How does an artist (or community of artists) negotiate an identity that is situated between or within racial and religious identities? In what ways does racial identity or racial difference influence depictions of Christian subjects and themes? What specific contexts allowed for or required the negotiation of racial identity and Christian subjects? We welcome broad conceptions of race and a range of media for exploration.

Session participants must be a member of CAA.

Every proposal should include the following five items:
1. Completed session participation proposal form, located at the end of the pdf http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2016CallforParticipation.pdf or an email with this information.
2. Preliminary abstract of one to two double-spaced, typed pages.
3. Letter explaining speaker’s interest, expertise in the topic, and CAA membership status.
4. CV with home and office mailing addresses, email address, and phone and fax numbers. Include summer address and telephone number, if applicable.
5. Documentation of work when appropriate, especially for sessions in which artists might discuss their own work.

Please send proposals to:
Phoebe Wolfskill, Indiana University, pwolfski@indiana.edu and James Romaine, Nyack College, drjamesromaine@gmail.com

DEADLINE: May 8, 2015

CFP: AFROTOPES @ CAA 2016

*AFROTROPES*

*College Art Association 104th Annual Conference*

*Washington DC, February 3-6, 2016*

Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson, Northwestern University

*Submissions due to h-copeland@northwestern.edu and krista-thompson@northwestern.edu by **May 8, 2015. Visit **http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2016CallforParticipation.pdf * *for CAA submission guidelines, requirements, and forms*.

This conference session centers on the aesthetic, historical, and theoretical terrain opened up by the “afrotrope.” We coined this neologism as a way of referring to those recurrent visual forms that have emerged within and become central to the formation of African diasporic culture and identity in the modern era, from the slave ship icon produced in 1788 by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade to the “I *AM* A MAN” signs famously held up by striking Memphis sanitation workers in 1968.

As their rich afterlives make clear, afrotropes resonate widely long after their initial appearance. For instance, the “I *AM* A MAN” sign has served as the basis for a 1988 painting by Glenn Ligon, a sandwich board worn by Sharon Hayes during a 2005 New York street performance, and a poster wielded by protesters in Benghazi during the Arab Spring. Accordingly, our conceptualization of the afrotrope emphasizes how changes to cultural forms over time and space speak to the ways that touchstones of African diasporic history, subjectivity, and modes of resistance are produced and consumed globally by a range of actors for a variety of ends.

By homing in on the material transformation of specific afrotropes over several iterations, we hope to reframe approaches to the ways that modes of cultural exchange come to structure representational possibilities. While our theorization of the afrotrope is indebted to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s writing on black figurative turns, we also look toward the work of art historians such as T.J. Clark, George Kubler, and Christopher Wood in elaborating new models for thinking temporality, authorship, and transmission that the afrotrope at once instances and demands.

Indeed, we would argue that the afrotrope makes palpable how modern subjects have appropriated widely available representational means only to undo their formal contours and to break apart their significatory logic. At the same time, the concept enables a fresh consideration of what is repressed or absented within the visual archive. The afrotrope, in other words, offers a vital heuristic through which to understand how visual motifs take on flesh over time and to reckon with that which remains unknown or cast out of the visual field. Ultimately, the aim of our session is not only to identify key afrotropes—with an eye toward producing an edited user’s guide to these forms—but also to theorize how their transmission illuminates the visual technologies of modern cultural formation.

CFP for College Art Association session (2016, Washington, DC)- Due May 8, 2015

AFROTROPES

College Art Association 104th Annual Conference

Washington DC, February 3–6, 2016

Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson, Northwestern University

Submissions due to h-copeland@northwestern.edu and krista-thompson@northwestern.edu by May 8, 2015. Visit http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2016CallforParticipation.pdf for CAA submission guidelines, requirements, and forms.

This conference session centers on the aesthetic, historical, and theoretical terrain opened up by the “afrotrope.” We coined this neologism as a way of referring to those recurrent visual forms that have emerged within and become central to the formation of African diasporic culture and identity in the modern era, from the slave ship icon produced in 1788 by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade to the “I AM A MAN” signs famously held up by striking Memphis sanitation workers in 1968.

As their rich afterlives make clear, afrotropes resonate widely long after their initial appearance. For instance, the “IAM A MAN” sign has served as the basis for a 1988 painting by Glenn Ligon, a sandwich board worn by Sharon Hayes during a 2005 New York street performance, and a poster wielded by protesters in Benghazi during the Arab Spring. Accordingly, our conceptualization of the afrotrope emphasizes how changes to cultural forms over time and space speak to the ways that touchstones of African diasporic history, subjectivity, and modes of resistance are produced and consumed globally by a range of actors for a variety of ends.

By homing in on the material transformation of specific afrotropes over several iterations, we hope to reframe approaches to the ways that modes of cultural exchange come to structure representational possibilities. While our theorization of the afrotrope is indebted to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s writing on black figurative turns, we also look toward the work of art historians such as T.J. Clark, George Kubler, and Christopher Wood in elaborating new models for thinking temporality, authorship, and transmission that the afrotrope at once instances and demands.

Indeed, we would argue that the afrotrope makes palpable how modern subjects have appropriated widely available representational means only to undo their formal contours and to break apart their significatory logic. At the same time, the concept enables a fresh consideration of what is repressed or absented within the visual archive. The afrotrope, in other words, offers a vital heuristic through which to understand how visual motifs take on flesh over time and to reckon with that which remains unknown or cast out of the visual field. Ultimately, the aim of our session is not only to identify key afrotropes—with an eye toward producing an edited user’s guide to these forms—but also to theorize how their transmission illuminates the visual technologies of modern cultural formation.

American Material Culture: Nineteenth-Century New York | NEH Summer Institute @ Bard Graduate Center

American Material Culture: Nineteenth-Century New York
NEH Summer Institute for College and University Teachers
At the Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture, New York City, July 6-31, 2015.

Objects matter. Material culture scholars use artifactual evidence such as consumer goods, architecture, clothing, landscape, decorative arts, and many other types of material.

The Bard Graduate Center will host a four-week NEH Summer Institute on American Material Culture. The institute will focus on the material culture of the nineteenth century and use New York as its case study because of its role as a national center for fashioning cultural commodities and promoting consumer tastes. We will study significant texts in the scholarship of material culture together as well as in tandem with visiting some of the wonderful collections in and around New York City for our hands-on work with artifacts. The city will be our laboratory to explore some of the important issues of broad impact that go well beyond New York.

We welcome applications from college teachers and other scholars with some experience doing object-based work, as well as those who have never taught or studied material culture. Application materials and other information about content, qualifications, stipends, housing, etc. is available at http://www.bgc.bard.edu/neh-institute.

The application deadline is March 2, 2015.

David Jaffee, Project Director
Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture

For more information, please contact:
Zahava Friedman-Stadler
Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture
38 West 86th Street
New York, NY 10024
212.501.3026 / nehinstitute@bgc.bard.edu

CFP: “Black Arts United States: Institutions and Interventions” @ Northwestern University

“Black Arts United States: Institutions and Interventions”
June 4 -6, 2015
Northwestern University

Black expressive culture in the United States has a long and contested history whose boundaries are almost impossible to qualify and whose animating forces continue to evolve. Yet the African American arts—whether film, theater, dance, visual art, music, literature, or performance—necessarily tack between the pull of tradition and the push toward innovation, a dynamic often reflected in the processes through which artistic practices are codified as either conventional or transgressive at any given moment. Such designations both illuminate the historical conditions in which black art is produced and determine what practices come to be circulated, canonized, denigrated, or forgotten.

Bringing together artists, scholars, activists, administrators, and representatives of arts organizations, this cross-disciplinary conference aims to reconsider how
we understand what constitutes an intervention within the black arts, and how such interventions come into contact with mainstream and culturally specific
institutional frames. Given the vexed conditions in which black aesthetic practice now unfolds—thanks to a shrinking public sphere increasingly shaped by market forces rather than cultural expertise—these concerns seem particularly pressing today, but they are part and parcel of that much longer history of black subjects’ coming to voice within American culture.

Accordingly, the conference organizing committee welcomes proposals on the following themes:
• The relationship between tradition and innovation in the black arts
• The role of “mainstream” institutions in shaping black artistic histories
• The history of black arts institutions in the United States and the challenges facing them today
• The politics of institutionally funded artists versus independent artists
• The relationship between academic institutions and communities relative to black artistic production
• New understandings of cross-institutional collaborations
• Alternative networks for institutionalizing the black arts
• Interventions into, critiques of, and/or resistance to institutions
• The impact of criticism on the valuation of black art
• The impact of audience expectation on black artistic production in an age of new media
• Governmentality versus marketability of the black arts
• Spatial and temporal assumptions about black arts
• Non-urban spaces for black art production
• Black arts and the environment
• Black arts and/as activism
• Black arts as commodity
• Black arts and political economy
• Black arts as a site of resistance
• Black arts and the public sphere

Please submit a proposal (250 words or less) for individual papers of 15 – 20 minutes (approx. 8 – 10 double spaced pages in length) or visual presentations (short films, performances, videos), along with audio/video needs and a 2-page CV highlighting research and experience germane to the proposed presentation to bai@northwestern.edu by December 5, 2014.

Please include “BAI Conference Proposal” in the subject line. Participants will be notified of acceptance or rejection of the proposal by January 16, 2015.

The Black Arts Initiative (BAI) at Northwestern University cultivates an interdisciplinary approach to black arts. Launched in 2012, BAI seeks to engage myriad perspectives, strengthen Northwestern’s involvement in black arts, and connect with a broader community of scholars, practitioners and community members through research, pedagogy, practice, and civic & community engagement. You can learn more about us at our website: www.bai.northwestern.edu

CFP: “BUILDING A MULTIRACIAL AMERICAN PAST” @ CAA 2015

Chair: Susanna Gold, Tyler School of Art, Temple University, gold@temple.edu

The dynamics of mixed race heritage has long been a stable point of inquiry in historical American literature, music, theater, politics and speech, but this issue has been thought to emerge less often in visual culture.  There are very few examples of American art that follow the tradition of 18th-century Mexican and Peruvian casta paintings illustrating the practice and results of mestizaje, the mixing of distinct categories of peoples and the development of new peoples.  But are American images of multiracialism truly rare, or is the art historical scholarship limited because there lacks a clear academic understanding of which images can be understood to address mixed race heritage?  Is there a cultural tendency for scholars to classify figures in American art according to an overly determinate white/non white dichotomy, which avoids the relevance of a shared, divided, or indistinct racial ancestry?  This session invites papers that enlarge the art historical scholarship on race mixing, and provide new possibilities for recognizing and analyzing how complexities of a multiracial heritage affected identity construction and found expression in visual imagery.  Papers that address art practices in the art of the United States, 18th-20th centuries, are welcome.

Please send paper title, abstract (200-300 words), curriculum vitae, and letter of interest to Susanna Gold (gold@temple.edu) by May 9, 2014.
For more information about the 2015 conference, please see: http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2015CallforParticipation.pdf

CFP: “Solid as a Rock?: African American Sculptural Traditions and Practices” @ CAA 2015

Colleagues,
Please consider submitting a proposal for the CAA 2015 session, to take place in New York and that I will be chairing, titled “Solid As A Rock: African American Sculptural Traditions and Practices.” The official deadline is May 9 for proposals. Please send to smalls@umbc.edu.

Many thanks.

Here is my original call for proposals:

Solid as a Rock?: African American Sculptural Traditions and Practices

Sculpture has always been an intricate part of the history of African-American art and yet African American sculptural traditions and practices have not been sufficiently historicized or critically questioned. Venturing beyond focus on artist’s biographies, this panel sets out to investigate and deconstruct the multi-accentual critical, aesthetic, and thematic aspects of sculptural traditions and practices engaged in by African American artists. It seeks to interrogate not only the assumed, if not expected, operations of racial identities, but also those of gender, sexuality, and class. What are the conceptual/ideological gaps, cracks, and fissures that are provoked in thinking of African American sculptural traditions and practices exclusively in terms of race and racial identity? Is there anything singular about sculpture as a medium that is particularly relevant or critical for African American cultural expression? How might we reconcile sculpture’s inherent conservatism as a medium with African American progressive intent/content? What strategies of identity (re)negotiation do African American sculptors engage in in figurative, abstract, and conceptual modes of sculptural practice and how are these manifested given sculpture’s limitations as a medium? This panel embraces different methodological approaches and critical perspectives from any historical period relevant to the intersectional history, theory, and criticism of African American sculptural traditions and practices. As well, it welcomes thoughtful critique of the very terms “sculpture,” “traditions” and “practices” in relationship to African American visual art and culture.

Call for Submissions: Mirror of Race

Mirror of Race (http://mirrorofrace.org) is seeking submissions of artwork and essays for online publication.

The goal of MoR is to explore ideas about race in the United States through personal and critical reflections on early photography. The editorial board encourages submissions from artists, writers, educators, curators, and scholars that engage with the photographs in the MoR online exhibition, that situate images within their historical contexts, and that can inspire visitors to the website to reexamine their own ways of seeing race. MoR aims to address the general public as well as instructors and students at all educational levels.

Submissions to MoR are peer reviewed by members of the editorial board and external readers. A list of suggested formats and topics can be found on the MoR website. Essays should adhere to the standards of excellence in the author’s field, but they should be written in accessible language for the MoR’s broad audience. They may address any aspect of race, including contemporary topics, but must engage in some way with the images in the MoR online exhibition. Artwork may include original photographs, paintings, poetry, storytelling, and other creative forms that can be exhibited online. Artists should provide a narrative explaining the relationship between their work and the images and themes featured on the MoR website.

For more information please contact Gregory Fried, Mirror of Race Project Director, gfried@suffolk.edu

 

CFP: Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA)

The Association of Historians of American Art is pleased to invite submissions for feature-length articles to appear in the organization’s new peer-reviewed electronic journal of American art, entitled Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art.  The biannual journal, which will debut in fall 2014, will be the first peer-reviewed electronic publication dedicated to American art and visual culture (broadly defined) from the colonial period to the present day. Panorama is intended to provide a high-caliber international forum for disseminating original research and scholarship and for sustaining a lively engagement with the intellectual developments and methodological debates on current practices in art history, visual and material cultural studies, and curatorial work.  It encourages a broad range of perspectives and approaches within an interdisciplinary framework encompassing both local and global contexts. Panorama welcomes submissions that utilize the insights of both traditional and new historical and interpretive approaches to American art.

The e-journal will be accessible and free to all. Panorama will be published twice a year, in the spring and the fall. It will have its own web address, and also will be accessible via a link from the AHAA website ( http://www.ahaaonline.org).  Back issues will be archived on the journal website.  The editors are committed to preserving access to past issues in a variety of electronic venues, including scholarly indices and research databases.

In addition to peer-reviewed scholarly articles, Panorama will include several other regular features. Taking advantage of the speed of online delivery, timely Book Reviews and Exhibition Reviews will offer critical and historiographic perspectives on recent publications and exhibitions. Discoveries/Research Notes will bring the nascent stages of scholarly inquiry (both academic and curatorial) to the attention of readers in short form.

At this time, we seek manuscripts of 7,000–10,000 words (excluding captions and footnotes) to appear in the Fall 2014 number and future issues. Authors should submit their manuscripts electronically to:

Ross Barrett, Executive Editor

journalpanorama@gmail.com 

Manuscripts submitted before December 2013 will be considered for inclusion in the inaugural issue of Panorama. Submissions for future issues will thereafter be accepted throughout the year.