Category: conferences & symposia

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.

Design/Race 3.31.15

Design-Race poster Final

Flyer Design by Doug Akagi, CCA Professor Emeritus and Design Department Advisor

This panel discussion will take place at the California College of the Arts, 101 Carolina Street, San Francisco, CA, on Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 8:30-10 AM. It is free and open to the public.

Designers will talk about how identity influences their work and the importance of building community both at CCA and beyond. Moderated by Lionel Ramazzini (BFA Industrial Design 2014), panelists will include a mix of alumni and other leaders in design with an opportunity for Q&A. Panelists will include Agelio Batle (MFA 1993) of Batle Studio, Maricarmen Sierra (DMBA 2013) of Metapattern, Mateo Hao (BFA Furniture 2013), and others.

Breakfast provided, networking encouraged.

RSVP by March 25, 2015 at alumni@cca.edu

https://www.cca.edu/calendar/2015/designrace-conversation

Sponsored by the CCA Alumni Association and the CCA President’s Diversity Steering Group, with support from the CCA Faculty of Color Research Alliance

ACRAH at CAA NY/2015

Please join us for ACRAH’s session at The College Art Association Conference in New York:

Time: 02/11/2015, 12:30 PM—2:00 PM
Location: Hilton New York, 2nd Floor, Sutton Parlor Center

Chair: Susanna Gold, New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

The Drop Sinister: Harry Watrous’s Visualization of the ‘One Drop Rule’
Mey-Yen Moriuchi, La Salle University

You Are What You Eat: Racial Transformation and Miscegenation in Nineteenth-Century Representations of Food
Shana Klein, University of New Mexico

‘Half-Breed’: Picturing Native American Identity in the Early Nineteenth Century
Elizabeth W. Hutchinson, Barnard College, Columbia University

NOTE: ACRAH will not hold a business meeting on Sat., Feb. 14, 2015. But feel free to contact ACRAH co-chairs with question or concerns via email. Thank you.

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.

CONF: Collecting Art History Symposium @ UT Austin, February 22, 2014

Collecting Art History Symposium flyer 11-21-13

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/caaas/events/29497

SYMP: Midcentury Modernism Coference – (SeSAH) Annual Meeting @ UNC-Charlotte

Registration for SESAH 2013 is now open.

Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SeSAH) Annual Meeting
School of Architecture, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Charlotte, NC, September 25-28, 2013
 
Conference Theme: Midcentury Modernism
In recent years, architectural historians have begun to reconsider midcentury modernism with new eyes. These inquiries have ranged from an interrogation of the positive and negative consequences of CIAM modernism in Third World colonial territories, to local and regional histories of urban renewal and alternative modernisms that anticipated the shift toward postmodern heterogeneity. This reexamination has not only helped us to expand our knowledge of the legacies of midcentury modernism, but they also help us to contextualize the built environments that often mark cities that expanded during the postwar boom years. There are many cities in the Southeast that fit this latter description.
Charlotte is a paradigmatic New South City. It has continuously transformed its physical environment to emphasize the present – few older buildings survive in the Center City, and since the 1950s the architectural and urban focus has been distinctly modern. In recent years Charlotte has become increasingly aware of the importance of its mid-century heritage. The architecture of this era has become a critical topic of discussion among Preservationists in Charlotte and other cities, while at the same time the era of “Mad Men” has recaptured the imagination of the American public.
The SeSAH 2013 conference in Charlotte offers its participants a chance to engage in the critical exploration of the architecture and urbanism of the 1950s and 1960s as well as their historiographies.

CFP: “Colour Me Queer” Session @ AAH Conference, London

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: Colour Me Queer

Association of Art Historians (AAH) 40th Annual Conference
Royal College of Art, London
​April 10-​12, 2014

While art history as a discipline has adopted a queer postcolonial gaze to trouble the canon, most ground-breaking scholarship on art and visual culture from queer racialized perspectives has been accomplished outside its borders—albeit with some notable exceptions, such as work by Kobena Mercer and Amelia Jones.

This session specifically aims to explore how art history might develop a vocabulary and methodology that speaks to better understand transnational, diasporic, indigenous and decolonial bodies alongside their gendered and sexualized lived experiences. Colo u​r Me Queer does not signify fixed/specific otherness, but rather functions as a politics that interrogates epistemological limits of race, gender and sexuality.

If art history has been largely resistant to exploring queer racialized visualities, what are the tools necessary to dismantle the conventions of knowledge production around art? How can a queer racialized gaze affect the relationship between visual analysis and knowledge production? Do newer forms of art such as performance, film, video, and installation (rather than older forms more burdened by western art history like painting and sculpture) lend themselves more easily to queer racialized visualities?

Overall, this session considers the stakes involved in queer racialized methodologies in visual analysis as well as the opportunity to interrogate canonical formation. Papers will not only assess what a queer racialized lens affords art history but correspondingly, what visual analysis provides queer racialized lived experiences.  What tropes and themes are incited when queer racialized visualities come to the fore? And finally, what might a queer racialized lens still occlude from critical analysis?

By November 11, please email a 250 word abstract of a proposed paper of 30 minutes, including your name and affiliation, to co-chairs:

  • Natasha Bissonauth, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, nb337@cornell.edu
  • Alpesh Kantilal Patel, Florida International University, Miami, alpesh.patel@fiu.edu.

 

SYMP: “American Art in Dialogue with Africa and its Diaspora” @ Smithsonian American Art Museum, Oct. 4 & 5, 2013

“American Art in Dialogue with Africa and its Diaspora”
Smithsonian American Art Museum, 8th and G Streets NW, McEvoy Auditorium, Washington, D.C.

Friday, October 4, 9:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.
Saturday, October 5, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.

This two-day symposium examines the role of Africa and its diaspora in the development of art of the United States, from nineteenth-century portraiture to American modernism; from the Harlem Renaissance to the contemporary art world. Speakers include Chika Okeke-Agulu of Princeton University, Krista Thompson of Northwestern University, Jeffrey Stewart of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Celeste-Marie Bernier of the University of Nottingham, James Smalls of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and artist and distinguished scholar David C. Driskell.

The full schedule is available at AmericanArt.si.edu/research/symposia/2013/terra.

Register at www.America-Africa.eventbrite.com.

This is the fourth of five Terra Symposia on American Art in a Global Context, which are supported by a generous grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art.