Tag: race

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

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JOB: Research Specialist, Race and Daniel Chester French

Opportunity: National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Research Specialist

Date: May 2022

Division: Preservation

Department: Historic Sites

Office: Chesterwood

Project Manager: Executive Director

About the Organization

Chesterwood is the former summer home and studio of sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850-1931). Located in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Chesterwood is a historic site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, an organization that protects significant places representing our diverse cultural experiences. Today, Chesterwood preserves and interprets the work and legacies of French as a significant creator of monumental art.

The Research Specialist project is  funded in full by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Scope of Work

The Research Specialist will research and examine a selection of sculptures from French’s body of work through the perspectives of African Americans and/or Indigenous Americans. A list of over 40 of his works have been identified as complex, problematic and even racist. These works include depictions of individuals considered important to the dominant culture during French’s lifetime who were also enslavers, or politicians who wrote legislation that removed Native peoples from their homelands, for example. Alternatively with other sculptures it is the artist’s representation of Black or Indigenous persons which is problematic. The scholar will explore these pieces through critical frameworks and the Black and/or Indigenous gaze to provide nuance and fresh context for French’s work in contemporary society. This project will provide broadly applicable humanities-based models for examining historical/political monuments and memorials in the fuller contexts of their time.

The Research Specialist is invited to work remotely, but also encouraged to visit Chesterwood to review curatorial files and plaster studies of French’s public sculpture. In addition, the Research Specialist is encouraged to visit Chapin Library, Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, where Chesterwood’s archival and photographic files are located. The length of the project, from research to deliverables, is one year, anticipating the Research Specialist will be working part-time. 

A small, additional budget for a stipend is available if the Research Specialist chooses to conduct interviews, focus groups, workshops or do oral history research to support this project. 

Deliverables

The outcome of this scholarly and curatorial endeavor will be an online exhibition and catalogue of French’s more problematic public works through the National Trust’s Collections Portal; the research compiled will serve as an educational resource for Chesterwood’s interpretive staff; and lastly, the material will be shared with Chesterwood visitors, offering a full and honest accounting of these important works of sculptural art. Deliverables include:

o A detailed study on the outlined works of art. To be published online with the exhibit.

o Online exhibit introduction text.

o Appropriate “label copy” text, i.e., short synopsis of each work’s complexity and significance. 

Chesterwood staff will be available as a resource to the Research Specialist and handle the creation of the online collection itself. 

The Research Specialist is a NEH-grant funded position of $15,000 for the duration of the project, which is expected to be completed within the course of one calendar year. Dispersal of grant funds will be at predetermined installments by the Executive Director, with the final dispersal upon receipt of all deliverables. 

Qualifications

• Applicants who identify as African American/Black or Indigenous/Native American/American Indian are strongly encouraged to apply.  

• The position is open to independent scholars, tenured and non-tenured professors, and graduate students. 

• Experience researching, writing about, curating exhibitions on, or teachingIndigenous/Native American/American Indian and/or African American history or 

• Applicants should have a demonstrated area of expertise and interest in the areas of monumental sculpture, 19th century sculpture, or public art, and may include those with backgrounds in history, public history, art history, museum studies and curation. 

• A high degree of cultural competency is a necessity, especially when writing or speaking about Black and Indigenous people of color perspectives and when in conversations with members of the Black/African or Indigenous/Native American communities. 

• Must be conversant in topics and issues relevant to Indian Country or US based Black communities today.

• Attending or having a professional or alumni affiliation with a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) or Tribal Colleges and Universities is a plus.

Please send proposal with CV and background materials regarding skills and expertise to Donna Hassler, Executive Director, Chesterwood, at dhassler@chesterwood.org, outlining your interest in participating in this project.  Deadline to submit this information is May 15, 2022.

JOB: Curator/Director @ Univ. of Connecticut

The University of Connecticut has opened a search for a Curator and Director of the Contemporary Art Galleries, who would also serve as an Assistant Professor in Residence in the Department of Art + Art History. We are especially interested in candidates whose curatorial activities, research, and teaching actively confront the dehumanizing legacies of racism and colonialism in relation to the arts and visual culture.

https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/21031

Inquiries can be directed to Emily Larned (Search Chair, emily.larned@uconn.edu), or Charlene Haukom (Department Administrator, charlene.haukom@uconn.edu). 

Assistant Professor/Associate Professor, Tenure-track in Department of Architecture, University of Buffalo (State University of New York). Applications due by Sept. 30, 2021

Info here.

CFP: “South and North American Positionalities: Representing the Other in the Interdisciplinary 19th century [CAA 2022]–proposals due by Sept. 16, 2021

“South and North American Positionalities: Representing the Other in the Interdisciplinary 19th century”

The representation of the Other has been prioritized through the study of the cross-Atlantic relationship between Europe and the Americas; examples of exhibitions and publications include, Ojos británicos: Formación de la imagen visual de Colombia en el siglo XIX (Museo Nacional de Colombia, 2003) and Ana Lucía Araujo´s book, Brazil through French Eyes: A Nineteenth-Century Artist in the Tropics (2015). Research on the long nineteenth-century has focused on the connections between North and South America through scholarship like Katherine Manthorne’s landmark study Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839-1879 (1989), Picturing the Americas: Landscape Painting From Tierra Del Fuego to the Arctic (2015) and Traveler artists: Landscapes of Latin America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (2015). These studies have focused mainly on landscape representation through the eyes of the traveler.

This panel seeks to build upon the representation of the Other through visual culture and through an interdisciplinary lens. Interdisciplinary fields may include visual and textual relations, print culture, photography, theater studies, science and art, and material culture. A key point of discussion around the South and North two-way relationship will be structures of power and inherent biases of positionality. The Other in this proposal is understood within the nineteenth-century context as “different.” In this specific history, difference can be viewed not only through geographical distance but also through ethnographic distance. Questions of positionality may also address contemporaneous and historiographic accounts of audience reception and ideological interpretation of representations of the Other across the South-North divide. 


Topics may include but are not restricted to:

Travel/travelogues

Race

Ethnicity

Indigeneity

Gender

Age

Class

Spirituality

Religion

Politics

Nature

Landscape

Animals

Submission of proposals should be sent to: v.uribe20@uniandes.edu.co. Proposals must include 250-word abstracts and shortened CV sent by September 16, 2021. 

CFP” “Dark Amusements: Turn-of-the-Century American Spectacles and Race” @ SECAC 2021

Please consider submitting a proposal to the SECAC 2021 panel, “Dark Amusements: Turn-of-the-Century American Spectacles and Race”

The U.S. at the turn-of-the-century marked a period of profound technological and societal transformations. This session will examine the growth of spectacles in response to these sweeping changes. This marked a turning point in the U.S., where people’s interests shifted, as David Nye points out, from a fetishization of the “natural sublime” to the “technological sublime.” This change, spurred by the myriad inventions and innovations flooding the consumer market, led to new ways of seeing, and new forms of entertainment. These new forms of entertainment often took the shape of public spectacles and popular amusements. This session will examine how the burgeoning American spectacle culture celebrated American ingenuity, on the one hand, while simultaneously re-inscribing and reinforcing racial hierarchies. In the post-Reconstruction era, when white anxiety about the status of people of color within American society was at its zenith, spectacles were used to circulate and naturalize racist ideologies about white superiority. The repercussions of this expression of hegemonic power by European Americans will likewise be examined. Potential paper topics may include, but are not limited to, panoramas, world’s fairs, early cinema, vaudeville, minstrelsy, amusement parks, Wild West shows, or the perverse spectacles of lynching postcards and before and after photographs from Indigenous boarding schools.

SECAC 2021 in Lexington, KY – November 10-13
Abstracts due May 4. 2021
Conference and submission details can be found by following this link: secacart.org/page/Lexington

JOB: Associate Professor, American Art @ Spelman College

The Department of Art & Visual Culture at Spelman College invites applications for a full-time associate professor position in American art history/curatorial studies with specialization in African American art. We especially welcome applicants whose research addresses contemporary practice, race, gender and technology.

We seek scholars who are able to teach survey and advanced level courses while pursuing an active research/curatorial projects agenda. An ideal candidate will demonstrate a strong commitment to teaching and student advising, as well as scholarship and service on committees within and beyond the department.

 

The successful candidate will join the College’s efforts in fashioning a curatorial studies concentration and positioning curatorial studies as a specialized focus of art history. The Department of Art & Visual Culture in collaboration with the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art currently prepares the next generation of African American art historians with a specialized knowledge of curatorial studies.

The application deadline is midnight (EST) on February 28, 2018. Applicant must hold a PhD and have a strong publication profile. The successful candidate must be able to demonstrate interdisciplinary and creative approaches to teaching.

To apply, candidates must submit a cover letter of interest, curriculum vitae, two writing
samples, a sample syllabus, and contact information for three references to: Recruiter, Office of Human Resources, Spelman College.

Link: https://spelman.peopleadmin.com/postings/1418

ARTS@Spelman, which includes the departments of Art & Visual Culture, Theater and Performance, Dance Performance & Choreography, Music, the Digital Moving Image Salon, the Museum of Fine Art and the Innovation Lab, are currently in the process of re-conceptualizing the academic curriculum to best meet the needs of a 21st century liberal arts institution. Likewise, the College is planning a new arts and innovation center, which will be an interdisciplinary environment that supports and advances experimentation, collaboration, active play, research, and the imaginative use of digital technologies.

Founded in 1881, Spelman College is a private four-year liberal arts college located in Atlanta, GA. Spelman College is a global leader in the education of women of African descent.

Accredited by the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, Spelman College is a member of the Atlanta University Center Consortium and the Atlanta

JOB: Asst/Assoc Prof, American Art @ University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The School of Art + Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign invites applications for an art historian with an emphasis in American art. This is a full-time, tenure-track or tenured faculty position, at the rank of Assistant or Associate Professor in the history of American Art, including the history of architecture and/or design in any period from the colonial era to the present. We especially welcome applicants whose research addresses issues of race, indigeneity, ecology, (post)colonialism, and visual culture in the Atlantic world.

Responsibilities
The successful candidate will teach a 2/2 teaching load (two courses each in the fall and spring semesters) that includes courses in American Art and/or Architecture, as well as existing introductory courses with large enrollment such as the Introduction to Art and Visual Culture. The candidate will play an active role in curricular efforts in art history, developing and delivering curriculum for both undergraduate and graduate students. Successful candidates are expected to teach effectively at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, establish and maintain an active and independent research program, and provide service to the Art History program, the School, the College and the University.

Context
The Art History Program consists of seven full-time tenured/tenure-track faculty members, plus adjuncts and many affiliated faculty. Degrees offered include the BA and BFA, as well as the M.A. and Ph.D. Art History graduate courses also support graduate minors in Museum Studies and Medieval Studies. Additional information about the program and faculty areas can be found at www.art.illinois.edu/content/graduate/programs/art-history-phd.

The school offers undergraduate and/or graduate degrees in Art Education, Art History, Crafts, Graphic Design, Industrial Design, New Media, Painting, Photography, and Sculpture. The future of design at Illinois also includes a new facility intended for outreach, education, and experimentation in design for students in fields within and outside the arts.

About the University of Illinois
The School of Art + Design is part of the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois, an internationally recognized research and educational institution. The University supports faculty as active researchers in the humanities, arts, sciences, engineering, and design through opportunities for funding and vital cross-disciplinary exchange in the campus’ many institutes, centers, and initiatives. These include the Campus Research Board, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, the Center for Advanced Study, the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and numerous other more specialized centers.

The arts also play a vital and recognized role in the university’s service mission as a state university, as evidenced by the historic examples of the Spurlock Museum of World Cultures, Krannert Art Museum, and the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, each a respected international hub for innovative scholarship and public engagement.

The University actively pursues a commitment to diversity through growing support for its numerous area and ethnic studies programs. Faculty and students in the arts routinely collaborate with these areas in their research and programming; such efforts enjoy support for activities on campus and around the world.

Supported by the nation’s third largest research library and abundant technological resources, the University of Illinois provides a rich environment for collaboration and experimental ventures. Champaign-Urbana is located in East Central Illinois, within a short driving distance to Chicago, Indianapolis, and St. Louis. For more information, please visit www.illinois.edu for the university, www.faa.illinois.edu for the college, and www.art.illinois.edu for the school.
Qualifications
The successful candidate will bring an active research agenda and evidence of innovative teaching. The ability to collaborate with faculty outside of our department, including those from Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and the new campus-wide Design Center is highly desirable. Applicants must have a terminal degree in art history (Ph.D.) at the time of appointment. Assistant Professor applicants must show clear promise of developing distinguished records of independent research and teaching. Associate Professor applicants should have evidence of a distinguished record of academic scholarship, and teaching at undergraduate and graduate levels that meets the qualifications for the ranks of Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The anticipated start date is August 16, 2018.

Salary is commensurate with experience.

To ensure full consideration, applications must be received by December 4, 2017. Please create your candidate profile at jobs.illinois.edu and upload the following:

1. A letter of application
2. Curriculum vitae
3. Scholarly writing sample
4. List of three professional references – online application will require names and contact information for three references.

Please submit items 1-4 combined into a single multi-page (letter size) PDF (NOT an Acrobat “PDF portfolio”). Use the naming convention of “lastname_firstname_docs.pdf”.

The committee may begin reviewing applications before then but no decision will be made until after the close date. All requested information must be submitted for your application to be considered. The University of Illinois conducts criminal background checks on all job candidates upon acceptance of a contingent offer.

Please direct any inquiries to:
Associate Professor Terri Weissman,
School of Art + Design, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
408 East Peabody Drive, Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-0855 / tweissma@illinois.edu

The University of Illinois is an Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action employer. Minorities, women, veterans and individuals with disabilities are encouraged to apply. For more information, visit go.illinois.edu/EEO. To learn more about the University’s commitment to diversity, please visit www.inclusiveillinois.illinois.edu.

JOB: Assistant Professor/Provost Fellow- Black Atlantic Art and Architecture @ UChicago

The Department of Art History at the University of Chicago seeks (an) art or architectural historian(s) of the Black Atlantic, specializing in any pertinent historical period and in any territory of Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, Iberia, and/or the more ramified Atlantic world. We are also interested in art or architectural historians working more broadly on race, (post)colonialism, and visual culture in the Atlantic world. The ability to work across fields and subfields is highly desirable, as we expect the successful candidate to collaborate with faculty within and beyond our department.

The Department of Art History values diversity. A goal of the search is to increase the diversity of the faculty in the Department of Art History and across the Humanities Division, and we therefore welcome applicants from groups historically underrepresented in academia, such as black/African American, Hispanic/Latino, American Indian or Alaskan Native.

Successful candidates will be appointed either as a tenure-track Assistant Professor, or as a Provost Fellow at the rank of Instructor with an initial two-year faculty appointment. This initial period is intended to serve in lieu of a postdoctoral appointment. Provost Fellows will teach one class/year, receive research support, and participate in programming designed to help support them in their transition to Assistant Professor. Provost Fellows will ordinarily be promoted to Assistant Professor at the end of their 2-year term. Candidates for Provost Fellow appointment must have no more than two years of postdoctoral experience. All candidates must have the Ph.D. in hand by the start of the appointment, 1 July 2018.

Complete application materials include cover letter (including discussion of research and teaching interests), CV, two scholarly writing samples, names and contact information for three professional references, and a statement describing the applicant’s prior and potential contributions to diversity in the context of academic research, teaching, and service. Applicants should send all materials in electronic format (MS Word or PDF) to Caroline Altekruse at caltekruse@uchicago.edu with subject heading “Black Atlantic Art and Architecture Search.” In addition, applicants must upload the CV and cover letter to the Academic Career Opportunities website at http://tinyurl.com/ya6e3sek. No applications received after 20 September 2017 will be accepted. University positions are contingent upon budgetary approval.

The University of Chicago is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity/Disabled/Veterans Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national or ethnic origin, age, status as an individual with a disability, protected veteran status, genetic information, or other protected classes under the law. For additional information please see the University’s Notice of Nondiscrimination at http://www.uchicago.edu/about/non_discrimination_statement/. Job seekers in need of a reasonable accommodation to complete the application process should call 773-702-0287 or email ACOppAdministrator@uchicago.edu with their request.

REF: Race and Norman Rockwell

On the 6th of March 1943, iconic painter and illustrator of American culture Norman Rockwell, published Freedom from Want or The Thanksgiving Picture in The Saturday Evening Post, one of over 300 covers he produced for the Indianapolis publication during his lifetime. It was the third of four oil paintings known as the Four Freedoms inspired by […]

via White on White: Hidden Race in Rockwell’s ‘Freedom from Want’ — A R T L▼R K

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