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
ACRAH 