Category: conferences & symposia

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.

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SAVE THE DATE: James A. Porter Colloquium, 04/13-15/2023

Colloquium Registration and Gala Ticket sales will begin March 27, 2023 at: https://art.howard.edu/porter-colloquium

ACRAH will be at CAA2023!

The ACRAH/CAA2023 session will be “Harlem-on-Thames: NY/LON, 1919-1939.” The panel will be held on Zoom, February 16, 2023 at 9:00am EST.

https://caa.confex.com/caa/2023/meetingapp.cgi/Session/10984

Harlem, in the interwar era, was a space of avant-gardism. Groundbreaking forms of visual art, music, fashion, and popular dance, produced by Black artists, were received as racialized forms of modernism. Among those who recognized Harlem’s novelty and power and traveled there to experience it were white British artists who positioned themselves as iconoclasts: for them, Harlem was a realized site of modernity, where there were few social restraints upon expression. Simultaneously, enterprising Blacks from the United States and colonized countries in the Caribbean and Africa traveled to London, pursuing greater freedoms and career opportunities. There, they were part of interracial collaborations in concert dance, film, and musical productions; they mingled in liberal, social circles and pursued relationships across class, sexual, and racial lines. The Black presence in London was visible and remarked upon, welcomed by some and rejected by others. Both progressive ideas and fetishistic notions shaped the early twentieth-century trope of Blackness. What David Levering Lewis rightly termed the vogue for Harlem neither dispelled nor disrupted longstanding patterns of white privilege and racism within these interlocking, interwar trans-Atlantic modernisms. In the years leading up to the impending World War, many of these romantic liaisons and professional partnerships dissolved. In this session, we consider the understudied impact of the Harlem-London axis and raise questions about its legacy upon American and British cultural landscapes, undeniably shaped by Black modernisms.

Check out the papers descriptions here: CAA2023

Register for CAA: https://www.collegeart.org/programs/conference/conference2023/registration

The session will be recorded and available to conference registrants until April 17, 2023.

SYMP: Present Coordinates @ Boston University

Boston University’s Department of the History of Art & Architecture is pleased to invite the Boston-area community to African American Art History: Present Coordinates, a symposium of research conducted by emerging scholars in the field of African American art history and architecture. Five advanced doctoral students from across the nation will present their research on BU’s Charles River Campus, on November 11th and 12th, 2022. Dr. Melanee C. Harvey (GRS ’17), Associate Professor of Art History, Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts, Howard University, will give the keynote lecture on Friday, November 11th. More information about this event can be found on the official webpage: https://www.bu.edu/haa/news-events/present-coordinates2022/

SYMP: IMU UR2: Art, Aesthetics, and Asian America @ Stanford University

Dear Friends and Colleagues, 

Please join us for IMU UR2: Art, Aesthetics, and Asian America, which will be held at Stanford on 10/28-29. Along with three exhibitions at the Cantor Arts Center, the event serves as the public launch of Stanford’s Asian American Art Initiative as well as the Martin Wong Catalogue Raisonné.  

The event also includes a keynote reading and conversation between Cathy Park Hong, Jen Liu, and Marci Kwon that will touch upon their time at Oberlin, the aftermath of multiculturalism, and Asian American femme friendship among other topics.  All events are free and open to the public and will also be streamed.  

All my best, 

Marci 

Marci Kwon (she/her)
Assistant Professor, Art & Art History

Co-Director, Asian American Art Initiative, Cantor Arts Center mskwon1@stanford.edu

Enchantments: Joseph Cornell and American Modernism (Princeton University Press, 2021)

Intersecting Photographies — Symposium at Howard University, Oct. 13-15, 2022

Register now!

The symposium, “Intersecting Photographies,” will be held at Howard University in Washington, DC, from October 13-15, 2022. Among the presentations and conversations that will be fostered there are an artist conversation between LaToya Ruby Frazier and Leslie Ureña, a keynote lecture by Tina Campt, a pecha kucha featuring lightning talks, and six panels presenting more in-depth research questions. To view the complete schedule online, which also includes an awards ceremony, receptions, and Saturday workshops hosted at DC-area institutions by local experts, please view our Symposium page. 

You must be a Photography Network Member to register for the symposium, with annual dues beginning as low as $20. Click on the registration button and follow the instructions to register for the In-Person ($50) or Online ($20) experience. We apologize that our website does not offer the capability of joining or renewing your membership and registering for the symposium in a single transaction. 

Photography Network is a 501(C)3 and College Art Association Affiliated Society whose purpose is to foster discussion, research, and new approaches to the study and practice of photography in its relation to art, culture, society, and history. Through a range of programming, Photography Network (PN) cultivates a spirit of community and exchange with the aim of advancing innovation in the field.

We encourage you to register early for the symposium. We do not have a registration cap, but availability is limited at the three DC-area hotels with whom we have made arrangements for discounted rates. Additionally, three of the four optional Saturday workshops will be collections-focused at area institutions including the Library of Congress, National Gallery of Art, and National Museum of American History, where space is necessarily limited; the fourth, with the National Museum of the American Indian, will be held over Zoom to accommodate those participating in the symposium remotely. 

If you encounter any problems during the registration process, please reach out to us at photographynetworksymposium@gmail.com. We thank the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation for their generous support of this program.

SYMP: Intersecting Photographies @ Howard University

Registration is now open for Photography Network’s Second Annual Symposium (October 13-15, 2022) in Washington, DC. Register now!

(With apologies for cross-posting)

“Intersecting Photographies,” will be held at Howard University in Washington, DC, from October 13-15. We hope that many of you will take an interest in the presentations and conversations that will be fostered there, from an artist conversation between LaToya Ruby Frazier and Leslie Ureña to a keynote by Tina Campt, a pecha kucha featuring lightning talks to six panels presenting more in-depth research questions. To view the complete schedule online, which also includes an awards ceremony, receptions, and Saturday workshops hosted at DC-area institutions by local experts, please view our Symposium page.

You must be a Photography Network Member to register for the symposium, with annual dues beginning as low as $20. Click on the registration button and follow the instructions to register for the In-Person ($50) or Online ($20) experience. We apologize that our website does not offer the capability of joining or renewing your membership and registering for the symposium in a single transaction.

Photography Network is a 501(C)3 and College Art Association Affiliated Society whose purpose is to foster discussion, research, and new approaches to the study and practice of photography in its relation to art, culture, society, and history. Through a range of programming, Photography Network (PN) cultivates a spirit of community and exchange with the aim of advancing innovation in the field.

We encourage you to register early for the symposium. We do not have a registration cap, but availability is limited at the three DC-area hotels with whom we have made arrangements for discounted rates. Additionally, three of the four optional Saturday workshops will be collections-focused at area institutions including the Library of Congress, National Gallery of Art, and National Museum of American History, where space is necessarily limited; the fourth, with the National Museum of the American Indian, will be held over Zoom to accommodate those participating in the symposium remotely.

If you encounter any problems during the registration process, please reach out to us at photographynetworksymposium@gmail.com. We thank the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation for their generous support of this program.

Best,
Monica Bravo and Caroline Riley
Photography Network Co-Chairs

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.

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