Border Control: On the Edges of American Art
Thursday 25 and Friday 26 May 2017
Tate Liverpool, Albert Dock, Liverpool Waterfront, Liverpool L3 4BB, UK

Conference convened by Julia Bailey (Tate Research) and Alex Taylor (University of Pittsburgh)
Supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art

Reserve your place now for this major international conference. Led by Tate Research, the two-day event brings together historians of art and visual culture, to share new scholarship exploring the crossed boundaries and expanded limits of art from the United States.

Recent histories of American art have strived to uncover the varied acts of traversal and attempts at containment that have shaped its development. As migration and expatriatism have come to be understood among its defining characteristics, once carefully delineated edges between the national and the foreign seem increasingly porous. This shift corresponds with the dissolution of other kinds of borders. Artists have long transgressed the limits of artistic movement, medium specificity and other imposed restrictions, sometimes sneaking well outside the bounds of art itself. Historians of American art have also begun to more actively cross the disciplinary limits that once constrained the field.

Led by keynote speakers Philip Ursprung (Professor of the History of Art and Architecture, ETH Zurich) and Cécile Whiting (Chancellor’s Professor, University of California, Irvine), ‘Border Control: On the Edges of American Art’ will embrace scholarship that attends to the boundaries of American art in the broadest visual, historical and conceptual terms.

This conference is presented as the culmination of the three-year Tate Research project ‘Refiguring American Art’, and coincides with a related display at Tate Liverpool.

FREE BUT TICKETED
As space is limited, attendees must RSVP to julia.baileytate.org.uk by 5 May 2017
Places will be allocated on a first come, first served basis

SCHEDULE

Thursday 25 May

14.00 Arrival and coffee

14.30 Welcome
Caroline Collier (Director, Partnerships and Programmes, Tate)
John Davis (Executive Director for Europe and Global Academic Programs, Terra Foundation for American Art)

14.50 Introductory Remarks | Julia Bailey and Alex Taylor

15.00 Keynote
Philip Ursprung
Professor of the History of Art and Architecture, ETH Zurich
‘Most humans, it seems, still put up fences around their acts and thoughts’: The Legacy of Allan Kaprow

15.40 Break

16.00 Session 1: Performing the Political
Monica Steinberg
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Southern California
Political Re-presentation: Artist-Candidates and the Boundaries of the Electoral Process

Catherine Spencer
Lecturer, University of St Andrews
Simultaneous Experience: Performance Art and the Psychology of the Border Zone

John A. Tyson
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, National Gallery of Art
‘On Sale at the Fondation Maeght’: Hans Haacke’s Un-American Art

Faye Gleisser
Assistant Professor, Indiana University
Artist Residency as Cultural Conduit: Sarabhai Patronage and the Stakes of Sponsorship

17.20 Discussion, chaired by Julia Bailey

18.00
Drinks reception and private view of the display Constellations: Highlights from the Nation’s Collection of Modern Art. Bernard Perlin, Orthodox Boys 1948

20.00 End

Friday 26 May

09.30 Arrival and coffee

10.00 Welcome | Alex Taylor and Julia Bailey

10.20 Session 2: Entering the Common Culture
Anthony Grudin
Associate Professor, University of Vermont
Policing Art’s Borders: Pop Art and Vulgarity in the 1960s

Marina Moskowitz
Reader, University of Glasgow and Edwin Pickstone, Lecturer, Glasgow School of Art
Interdisciplinary: A Conversation about Rudolph Ruzicka

Suzanne Hudson
Associate Professor, University of Southern California
‘Toward a Happier and More Successful Life,’ or When Veterans Made Art in the Modern Museum

Sarah Rich
Associate Professor, Penn State
Ellsworth Kelly’s Abstraction

11.40 Discussion, chaired by Alex Taylor

12.20 Lunch

13.20 Keynote
Cécile Whiting
Chancellor’s Professor, University of California, Irvine
The Panorama and the Globe: Expanding the American Landscape in World War II

14.00 Session 3: Traversing Space, Transcending Place

Fiona Curran
Senior Tutor, Royal College of Art
Between the Earth and the Sky: Planetary Borders in Vija Celmins’ ‘Untitled (Desert/Galaxy)’

Matthew Holman
PhD Candidate, University College London
‘Borders Meandering But Determined’: Becoming an ‘Apatride’ with Joan Mitchell and John Ashbery (1959–65)

Elizabeth Buhe
PhD Candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU
Sam Francis’s Polycentric Abstraction

15.00 Discussion, chaired by Moran Sheleg, PhD Candidate, UCL

15.40 Response
Jo Applin, Lecturer, Courtauld Institute of Art

16.00 End

Further details and full schedule are available at
http://www.tate.org.uk/about/projects/refiguring-american-art/event-may-2017-border-control