Tag: Association for Critical Race Art History

CFP: ACRAH/CAA2027

ACRAH will be at CAA2027. The topic of next year’s session will be The Materials of Race. We are welcoming submissions and look forward to you joining us in person at CAA in New York in February.

The deadline to submit for CAA is August 31, 2026.

Abstract:

Race is a powerful ideology, one advanced in images and objects that are the outcomes of artists’ manipulation of chosen materials. What is the significance of materials in critical race art history? Scholars working in this area might consider the perception of materials which play a part in historical and contemporary racialization of places, experiences, objects, and living beings. In what ways are characteristics and descriptions of texture, density, strength, malleability, reflectivity, and weight associated with racial quality and/or personality (or both)? If a material like paper is considered “a carrier of memory and process” (Frederick, Donnelly, and Kenney 2026), how do materials contribute to racialization as an historical and ongoing preoccupation? As other social historians do, critical race art historians might analyze the circulation and value of materials in local networks and global markets to map the connections to agential action and the exercise of power. Because the most recent material turn has been driven by a revived appreciation for craft and simultaneously threatened by the lightning fast adoption of generative AI-created art and design, interrogations of liberal claims that digitization lowers barriers to access (while distancing us from material engagements) are also relevant. This panel seeks varied perspectives from scholars, curators, artists, and/or archivists to contribute to this panel discussion.

The full CFP for CAA2027 can be found here.

ACRAH will be at CAA2026!

The ACRAH/CAA2026 panel will be Excavating Race in the Archive

This session will remote/hybrid on Thursday, February 19, 2026 at 11:00am – 12:30pm local Chicago time. If you are in Chicago you can attend in person at the Hilton Chicago – 3rd Floor – Williford B.

Check out the full session description here: CAA2026

The ACRAH Business Meeting will be held in the same room on Thursday, February 19, 2026 from 1:00pm-2:00pm local Chicago time.

ACRAH will be at CAA2025!

The ACRAH/CAA2025 panel will be Critical Race Art History Roundtable: Doing the Work

The session will be in-person at the New York Hilton Midtown – 2nd Floor – Nassau West on February 14, 2025 at 2:30pm EST.

The ACRAH Business Meeting will also be held in the same room February 14, 2025 at 1:00pm EST.

Session Abstract:

What does it mean to do critical race art history? This session brings together scholars in a conversation about how a critical race art history approach can manifest in our work. Having proposed this line of inquiry twenty-five years ago, we want to reflect on the nature of the concept and how the field has evolved. What are the goals of critical race art history, and what are its methodologies and theoretical grounds? What are the conceptual parameters of this lens on art history–what does it mean to center an understanding that race structures how we see and shapes our reception of art? What tools and methods do we employ to make the operations of race visible? How do we move from American identity politics –that emphasizes a white/non-white binary and focuses on the identification of negative racial tropes and artistic rebuttals to the harm of such imagery–to a comprehensive unpacking of the systemic racialization in art? What do we gain when we foreground how race informs the construction of the visual cultures that we inhabit? How do the insights of critical race art history become integrated into art history at large?

Participants:

Kymberly Pinder, Yale University

Pinder is Professor of Art and History of Art and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean of the Yale School of Art. She is the editor of Race-ing Art History: Critical Reading in Race and Art History (Routledge, 2002).

Tatiana Flores, University of Virginia

Flores is the Edgar Shannon Jefferson Scholars Foundation Distinguished Professor in Art History at the University of Virginia. She is an editor of The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History (2023).

Elizabeth Hutchinson, Barnard University

Hutchison is the Tow Associate Professor of Art History at Barnard College. She is the author of The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890-1915 (Duke University Press, 2009).

Lily Cho, York University

Cho is Associate Professor of English at York University. She is the author of Mass Capture: Chinese Head Tax and the Making of Non-Citizens (McGill-Queens University Press, 2021).