Symposium, Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
Category: conferences & symposia
CONF: CAA 2016 Session: “Race, Remembrance, and Reconciliation: International Dialogue in National Museums”
Race, Remembrance, and Reconciliation: International Dialogue in National Museums
Chair: Julie L. McGee, University of Delaware
The year 2016 marks the opening of the Smithsonian Institution’s newest museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C.: The National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Framed as constructive and palliative, for remembrance, race dialogue, reconciliation, and healing, the NMAAHC seeks to foreground African American history and culture in a broader global context inclusive of freedom struggles.
In this open format session, scholars, curators, artists, and educators embrace the complexity and contradictions embedded in visions of museology and arts and heritage management as agents of emancipation and social repair. Of concern is the performative nature of museums in the twenty-first century vis-à-vis race, remembrance, and reconciliation—potentially ambiguous yet on-going engagements. What roles do objects, history, or cultural heritage perform under such curatorial and museological mandates and visions? How do changing sociopolitical and cultural landscapes and challenges to representational politics shape museum practices? Deep spatial memory, in the USA and South Africa, and Black centered cultural institutions and programming are considered. Designed as a forum led by thought-provoking contributors, this session offers an open conversation on the intersection of race, remembrance, and reconciliation in cultural institutions.
Speakers:
NMAAHC and the Deep Memory of Black Spaces
Mabel O. Wilson, Columbia University
Remembrance: An African American Museum Dialogue
David C. Driskell, University of Maryland, College Park
Museums and Reconciliation during the Civil Rights Movement: The Case of the Studio Museum in Harlem
Susan E. Cahan, Yale University
Museums for ALL: Toward a Critical Approach to the Re-conceptualization of Museums
Wayne Alexander, Iziko Museums of South Africa, Cape Town
Thursday, Feb. 4, 9:30 AM—12:00 PM
Location: Salon 3, Lobby Level
Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel
CONF: Black Portraiture Revisited II – Feb. 19-20, 2016 @NYU
The Art of Change: Conversations with Ford Foundation Fellows–Live Webcast, Fri., Jan. 15, 2016, 9am-5pm Eastern Time
Please join us for a live webcast of “The Artists of Change,” a daylong forum with our Art of Change Fellows—13 creative visionaries working at the forefront of art and social change. Over the course of the year, the Fellows have pursued independent projects on critical issues such as surveillance, climate change, drug policy and capitalism, soft power, diversity in the arts, social networks, and the power of technology. Tune in as they share their work and spark lively conversation—with the audience and each other—around the ideas they are exploring.
To watch the live webcast, visit artofchange.is.
Join the conversation: #ArtofChange
See The Art of Change Webcam 2016
Join the conversation with Eungie Joo, Thelma Golden, Carrie Mae Weems, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, and others.
ACRAH at CAA 2016/Washington DC
See you next month at the College Art Association annual conference in Washington, D.C, to be held at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel for ACRAH’s session:
“Beyond the Veil: An Inside Look at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture”
Saturday, February 6, 2016, 12:30-2 PM
See: Beyond the Veil session info
The session will be held in WASHINGTON 1 (EXHIBITION LEVEL) of the CAA Conference Hotel:
Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel
2660 Woodley Road NW, Washington, DC, 20008
Tel. 202 302-2000
Travel to the CAA Conference Hotel
CAA 2016 Conference Registration Info at: Attending ACRAH Session at CAA 2016/Washington DC
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.
Live: Conversations about Race at Stanford
Tomorrow (Nov. 19, 2015) starts at 12:30 PM Pacific
The first half of the symposium will feature a conversation from 12:30 to 2 pm PST about Policing, Mass Incarceration & Racial Justice with Mychal Denzel Smith (The Nation), Rinku Sen (Colorlines), Isabel Garcia (Derechos Humanos) and Reverend Osagyefo Sekou (Fellowship of Reconciliation & King Research and Education Institute). Moderated by H. Samy Alim.
The second half of the symposium will feature a conversation from 2:30 to 4 pm PST about The Arts, Racial Justice & Cultural Equity with Favianna Rodriguez (CultureStr/ke), Jasiri X (1Hood), Jonathan Calm (Stanford Department of Art & Art History), Deborah Cullinan (Yerba Buena Center for The Arts), and Rita Gonzalez (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). Moderated by Jeff Chang.
Here’s the URL again:
NEWS: Recap of Race & Aesthetics Conference @ Leeds Art Gallery, UK, May 2015
Race & Aesthetics: A British Society of Aesthetics Connections Conference ran the 19th and 20th of May, at the Leeds Art Gallery. Fourteen speakers and several dozen more participants gathered to share thoughts on any of the points of intersection between the philosophies of race and aesthetics. Topics ranged from sexual attraction to humour to Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B. In what follows, I’ll try to present short but effective summaries of each of the conference talks.
http://www.aestheticsforbirds.com/2015/06/race-aesthetics-2015-retrospective.html
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 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.
ACRAH 