For its first issue, Apricota is soliciting long- and short-form writing that addresses the theme of FIGHTS.

A fight is an event, a culmination of ill-feeling, however small, however large. Fights range from the verbal spat to the gloves-off brawl. They are irruptive, not continuous; decisive, but not conclusive. Fights describe the meeting of two opposing forces — one fist to another chin, one torrent of invective to another — but the recollection of fights is almost always disjunctive: a distance, sometimes unbridgeable, remains after the passions have cooled. Fights are, in other words, convergences that produce divisions into instigators and injured parties; over time, however, those seemingly discrete categories can be blurred or upended. Although fights conclude, their conclusions are not always, or even often, satisfying or permanent. Fights are anecdotal and microhistorical, but they may catalyze broader historical struggles.

Often dismissed as petty or macho episodes, fights have managed to elude many broader discussions of conflict in the development of art and its history. Yet recent scholarship, such as the exploration of negative emotions in affect theory, the incorporation of local as well as national disputes in the growing field of conflict studies, and the expanding canon of minor histories in art history have suggested new means for interpreting fights and analyzing their consequences. Apricota seeks contributions that take these developments as a point of departure to probe the terms and visual representations of fights.

Contributions may consider:

- Visual representations or documents of fights
- Clashes over critical or art historical terms
- Disagreements over artists’ rights and literal or figurative property
- Aftermaths of and resolutions to fights that have taken visual form
- Intersections of physical and ideological conflict in artworks
- Unique or eclectic temporalities of fights in art and art history

Submissions for consideration by the editorial committee should be emailed to:
editorsapricota.org by December 15, 2016.

Apricota welcomes both experimental and conventional forms of art and art historical writing. The journal is soliciting contributions in the form of: long-form essays (4,000 – 5,000 words); short-form writing or interviews (750 – 1,500 words); exhibition and book reviews (700 – 1,000 words). All long-form essays will be submitted for peer-review.

All submissions must conform to the style guidelines as outlined in The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th or newer edition.
In order to ensure blind readings from the Editorial Committee, authors must remove any identifying information from the content of the submission.
Please submit a separate document with the author’s name, title of paper/review, institutional affiliation and email address.

About the Journal

Apricota is a journal of modern and contemporary art history published by Secretary Press. Like the color it names, Apricota stands for identities and positions that exist on a spectrum, and are no less specific for being intermediary. Through a combination of peer-reviewed articles, short-form writing, and extended artists' contributions, it aims to cultivate dialogues between historians, artists, and critics based in their shared contemporary concerns, and to promote slantwise approaches to the writing of art criticism and art history.#

Editors:
Joanna Fiduccia,
doctoral candidate at UCLA's Department of Art History and a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Fellow

Andrianna Campbell,
doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and the Chester Dale Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts at the National Gallery

Editorial committe (amongst others):
Suzy Newberry (Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
Michael Ned Holte (Professor and Director of the Art Program, CalArts)
Ellen Tani (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Bowdoin)
Lori Cole (Assistant Professor, NYU Draper)