[1] Travel, Diplomacy, and Networks of Global Exchange in the Early Modern Period

From: Justina Spencer <justinahspencergmail.com>
Date: 03.07.2017

Early modern artists were known to travel alongside ambassadors on diplomatic missions, in accompaniment of explorers, or as entrepreneurial merchants on solo expeditions. Works of art likewise toured en route with artists, were produced amid voyages, or at times illustrated the arrival of foreigners in new lands. This panel seeks to explore the role visual culture played vis-à-vis travel, trade, diplomacy, and transcultural encounters in the early modern period. In what ways did the movement of artists contribute to the construction of aesthetic hybridism and early cosmopolitanism? If art forms such as Japanese Namban screens and Ottoman costume albums divulge a cultural encounter, do they presuppose a burgeoning “global public”? Taking into account that global art history is not, to use the words of Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “the reverse side of Western art history,” but instead contrary to national art and its incumbent limitations, this panel seeks contributions from scholars interested in a horizontal approach to artistic exchange where emphasis is placed on the interconnectedness of visual cultures, styles, and techniques. Contributors to this panel may deal with any aspect of global travel and exchange in the early modern period (1450–1800). Papers might address the visual manifestations of political diplomacy, art as foreign reportage, the adaption of foreign artistic techniques, or the role of the court as a contact zone for cross-cultural exchange. Topics may include a discussion of an individual work of art or artist, or can consist of more theoretical discussions of travel in the early modern world.

Please send your proposal to Justina Spencer, Carleton University: justinahspencergmail.com

Submissions should follow the general guidelines for participants as detailed in the 2018 CAA Call for Participation: http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/call-for-participation.pdf

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[2] Material Processes of Medieval Art and Architecture

From: Kristine Tanton <kristantongmail.com>
Date: 03.07.2017

This session will explore the material processes of medieval objects and monuments. Art and architectural historians focus most often on the finished product, but there is much to be gained by considering the processes of making as a site of constant negotiation and conflict. Amendments to objects and structures present distinct moments that may be defined beyond Marxist approaches. For example, what are the phenomenological experiences related to making? How do the inherent temporalities in artistic production shed light on decisions and workflow, as well as temporary, transitory, and intermediate solutions? How do changes in materials, such as the addition of gold leaf to manuscripts or gems to a reliquary, serve as signs of problem solving or problem making? New technologies such as digital reconstructions, laser scans, X-ray fluorescence, and Raman spectroscopies provide us with the opportunity to understand the conceptual processes of art making in the Middle Ages as never before through reverse engineering. We invite presenters to analyze medieval objects and structures in relation to the inherent temporalities in working procedures involving ephemerality, instantaneity, or memory to explore what it means to make in the Middle Ages.

Chairs: Kristine Tanton (kristantongmail.com) and Meredith Cohen (mcohenhumnet.ucla.edu)

DEADLINE FOR PAPER PROPOSALS: August 14, 2017
Proposals of 250 words should be sent directly to the session chairs. Each proposal should include the following items:
1. Completed session participation proposal form (located at the end of the 2018 Call for Participation, which is available for download at http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/call-for-participation.pdf)
o Make sure your name appears exactly as you would like it listed in the conference program and conference website.
o Make sure your affiliation appears as the official, recognized name of your institution (do not list multiple affiliations)
o Make sure to include an active CAA Member ID (all participants must be current members through February 24, 2018; inactive or lapsed members will be pulled from participation on August 28, 2017.
2. Paper/project abstract: maximum 250 works, in the form of a single paragraph.
3. Email or letter explaining your interest in the session, expertise in the topic, and availability during the conference.
4. A shortened CV

PLEASE DIRECT INQUIRIES/SUBMISSIONS TO THE SESSION CHAIRS:
Kristine Tanton: kristantongmail.com.
Meredith Cohen: mcohenhumnet.ucla.edu

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[3] French North Africa and the Architecture of Counterinsurgency

From: Samia Henni <archsamiahenni.com>
Date: 04.07.2017

Chairs: Ralph Ghoche, Barnard College (rghochebarnard.edu); Samia Henni, ETH Zurich (archsamiahenni.com)

The French invasion of the Regency of Algiers in 1830 marked the onset of a long era of colonization of North Africa. In French Algeria, and the French protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia, French troops were met with widespread rebellions, counteroffensives, and popular uprisings. To combat these resistances, and to control and pacify the masses, the colonial regimes introduced spatial reforms that aimed to divide and conquer. In the nineteenth century these interventions took the form of military camps, new urban plans, penitentiary complexes, protective agricultural settlements, and large infrastructural projects (ports, roads, rail, water). During the Algerian Revolution (1954–62), tensions between colonists and the native population came to a head, leading to new forms of oppression and the establishment of an unprecedented number of counterinsurgency mechanisms: the demarcation of forbidden zones, the construction of fortified camps, the clearance of slums, and the building of mass housing across French Algeria in an effort to impede revolt. The session examines the buildings, territorial interventions, and infrastructures that ensured France’s effective hold over North Africa from the start of France’s colonization of Algeria in 1830 to Algerian independence in 1962. We seek papers that critically discuss and disclose the involvement of specific actors in spatial counterinsurgency endeavors in Algeria, Morocco, or Tunisia under colonial rule. The objective is to investigate the role of architecture and planning in obstructing and dominating insurrections and to scrutinize the roots of spatial counterinsurgency procedures and their impacts on the consolidation of a colonial order.

Instructions for submissions:
250-word proposals should be sent to the session chairs by 14th August 2017: Ralph Ghoche <rghochebarnard.edu> and Samia Henni <archsamiahenni.com>

Submissions should include:
1. Completed session participation proposal form, located at the end of the CAA CFP brochure (http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/call-for-participation.pdf).
a. Make sure your name appears exactly as you would like it listed in the conference program and conference website.
b. Make sure your affiliation appears as the official, recognized name of your institution (you may not list multiple affiliations).
c. Make sure to include an active CAA Member ID (all participants must be current members through February 24, 2018; inactive or lapsed members will be pulled from participation on August 28, 2017).
2. Paper/project abstract: maximum 250 words, in the form of a single paragraph. Make sure your title and abstract appear exactly as you would like them published in the conference program, Abstracts 2018, and the CAA website.
3. Email or letter explaining your interest in the session, expertise in the topic, and availability during the conference.
4. A shortened CV.

Chairs determine the speakers for their session and reply to all applicants by 28th August 2017.

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[4] Rethinking regionalism: the Midwest in American art history

From: Lucy Bradnock <Lucy.Bradnocknottingham.ac.uk>
Date: 04.07.2017

Chair(s):
Lucy Bradnock, University of Nottingham, Lucy.Bradnocknottingham.ac.uk;
Mark Rawlinson, University of Nottingham, Mark.Rawlinsonnottingham.ac.uk

This session interrogates the role that the American Midwest has played in narratives of American art history, as a place, a space, and an idea. It aims to move beyond art histories that focus on the United States’ peripheral centers (New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco) or that stage the cultural production of the Midwest exclusively as the history of Regionalist painting. In order to nuance these histories, the session proposes that narratives of American avant-gardism, modernism, conceptualism, and postmodernism are underpinned by the deployment of the Midwest as an ideologically-loaded discursive site against which normative positions are articulated. The session seeks to address the following questions: What is the place of the Midwest in the American cultural imaginary, and what role has it therefore played in American art histories? How have institutions and exhibitions reinforced the occlusion of the Midwest from dominant art historical narratives? How does regional identity operate as a mobile phenomenon, via a Midwest diaspora, according to which artists left behind their Midwestern roots to participate in peripheral/coastal scenes? We welcome proposals that draw on theories and histories of space, place, and region; socio-spatial politics and diaspora studies; cultural and institutional histories; historiography and histories of art criticism; and hegemony and power structures in cultural histories. Our goal is to interrogate the ways in which American cultural and social history is widely invested in the deployment of regional clichés, whilst largely failing to acknowledge the ideas on which those are based.

Please submit proposals by 14 August via the CAA participation proposal form included in the CAA Call for Participation.

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[5] Decolonizing Art Histories: the Intersections of Diaspora and World Studies

From: Andrew Gayed <gayedayorku.ca>
Date: 04.07.2017

Current theorizations of modern art reveal the dominance of colonial and imperial epistemological structures: the exclusion of multiple sites of modernity and the entrenchment of binaries that relegate non-Western aesthetic languages as offshoots to dominant Western art movements. While studies of globalization and diaspora have challenged the authority of nation-state identities and rigid cultural categorization, art histories are still written through center-periphery models that maintain Euro-American exceptionalism. How then can world art histories productively be written in order to dismantle the center-periphery binary that maintains such colonial structures?

To problematize these framings, this panel is informed by the approaches of comparative transnationalisms, notions of ?worlding?, and the limits of current art-historical models. It will address the following concerns: What does decolonizing the study and writing of art history look like? How can anti-colonial research be centred, rather than existing as peripheral engagements with dominant modes of representation and discourse? Understanding that knowledge production is one of the major sites in which imperialism operates and exercises its power, how can we decolonize the structural limits that currently condition knowledge production? And finally, how can the theorization of diaspora and diasporic artists shift our assumptions about World Art History? Panelists may examine these issues through contemporary case studies, curatorial and artistic interventions, and institutional practices. We encourage proposals that suggest possible methodologies for studying World Art History through minor transnationalisms or comparative transnationalisms.

250-word proposals should be sent with a short bio and academic CV to Andrew Gayed (gayedayorku.ca) and Victoria Nolte (victoria.noltecarleton.ca) by 14th August 2017.

Proposals should include:
1. Completed session participation proposal form, located at the end of the CAA CFP brochure
(http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/call-for-participation.pdf).
2. Make sure to include an active CAA Member ID (all participants must be current members
3. Paper/project abstract: maximum 250 words
4. Short bio and academic CV

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[6] Art, Agency, and the Making of Identities at a Global Level, 1600-2000

From: Biro Yaëlle, and Etienne, Noémi <yaelle.birometmuseum.org>
Date: 04.07.2017

Co-Chairs: Yaëlle Biro, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Noémie Etienne, Bern University, Switzerland

Circulation and imitation of cultural products are key factors in shaping the material world – as well as imagined identities. Many objects or techniques that came to be seen as local, authentic and typical are in fact entangled in complex transnational narratives tied to a history of appropriation, imperialism, and the commercial phenomenon of supply and demand. In the 17th century, artists and craftspeople in Europe appropriated foreign techniques such as porcelain, textiles, or lacquers that eventually shaped local European identities. During the 19th century, Western consumers looked for genuine goods produced outside of industry, and the demand of Bourgeois tourism created a new market of authentic souvenirs and forgeries alike. Furthermore, the 19th and 20th centuries saw the (re)-emergence of local "Schools" of art and crafts as responses to political changes, anthropological research, and/or tourist demand.

This panel will explore how technical knowledge, immaterial desires, and political agendas impacted the production and consumption of visual and material culture in different times and places. A new scrutiny of this back and forth between demanders and suppliers will allow us to map anew a multidirectional market for cultural goods in which the source countries could be positioned at the center. Papers could investigate transnational imitation and the definition of national identities; tourist art; the role of foreign investment in solidifying local identities; reproduction and authenticity in a commercial or institutional context; local responses to transnational demand; as well as the central role of the makers’ agency from the 17th to 20th centuries.

250-word proposals should be sent with a short academic CV to Noémie Etienne (noemie.etienneikg.unibe.ch) and Yaëlle Biro (yaelle.birometmuseum.org) by 14th August 2017.

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[7] Design and Neoliberalism: The Economics and Politics of “Total Design” across the Disciplines

From: Sami Siegelbaum <samisiegelbaumgmail.com>
Date: 04.07.2017

Chairs: Arden Stern, ArtCenter College of Design; Sami Siegelbaum, University of California, Los Angeles

Neoliberalism has emerged as a totalizing conceptual apparatus for understanding an array of contemporary phenomena. Whether viewed politically as a system of governance that submits all functions to the authority of market directives, economically as the financialization of capitalism, or socially as the erosion of collective institutions, neoliberalism has impacted cultural production in myriad ways. Design, when analyzed critically, has often been portrayed as complicit with these processes. As Guy Julier has observed, “Design takes advantage of and normalizes the transformations that neoliberalism provokes” (Julier 2014). That is to say, contemporary design practices are not only organized according to neoliberal goals and systems but also promote neoliberal values. Hal Foster has argued that “the world of total design” imagined by modernist avant-gardes such as the Bauhaus has been achieved by neoliberalism’s “pan-capitalist” subsumption of all aspects of life (Foster 2002). Much scholarship on neoliberalism and design focuses on the fields of architecture and urbanism, as well as humanitarian design and activism. What other connections between design and neoliberalism remain unexplored? How have neoliberal economic policies shaped and constrained design and how has design contributed to the financialization of previously uncommodified sectors of life? This session examines the ways in which conditions of neoliberalism have both expanded and constricted the purview of design and seeks to engage global perspectives on these questions across a wide variety of design and design-related fields, including (but not limited to) product design, interaction design, graphic design, advertising, branding, fashion, multimedia, UX, etc.

Proposal submissions due to session chairs by August 14, 2017.
To submit, please see CAA's full CFP document for instructions.

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[8] All in the Family: Northern European Artistic Dynasties, ca. 1350-1750

From: Catharine Ingersoll <ingersollccvmi.edu>
Date: 05.07.2017

In early modern northern Europe, many artists followed fathers, uncles, brothers, sisters, and spouses into the family business of art-making. From the Netherlandish brothers Herman, Pol, and Jean de Limbourg, to the Vischer family of sculptors in Nuremberg, to the Teniers dynasty of Flemish painters, artists all over the north learned from and collaborated with family members over the course of their careers. For a young artist, family associations helped ease entry into the profession and art market and provided a built-in network of contacts and commissions. However, these connections could also constrict innovation when artists were expected to conform to models set by preceding generations.
This session welcomes proposals for papers that deal with questions of northern European artists’ familial relationships, in all their rich variety of forms. Some issues that may be explored in the panel include: Did artists seek to differentiate themselves from their pasts, or integrate themselves into a dynastic narrative? What kinds of dynamics were at play when family members collaborated on projects or commissions? How did familial ateliers organize themselves? In what ways were family traditions valued in the marketplace? To what extent did working in a family “style” (evident for example in the work of Pieter Brueghel the Younger) benefit or hinder artists? Where in specific artworks do we see artistic debts to previous generations or deliberate breaks with the past?

The deadline for abstracts is August 14, 2017. For more information and instructions for submitting a proposal, please visit CAA’s 2018 Call for Participation website: http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/call-for-participation.pdf. Questions may be directed to the session chair, Catharine Ingersoll (ingersollccvmi.edu).

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[9] Late-Medieval Drawing in Law, Literature and Diplomacy

From: Caroline Fowler <caroline.fowleryale.edu>
Date: 05.07.2017

Late-medieval drawing is invariably read in relationship to the workshop, the copy, and its function, as a model, as an under-drawing, as a contract. In turn, works such as the drawings of Hieronymus Bosch or Jan van Eyck’s Saint Barbara panel are often debated about in regards to the ambiguity of their function, and are written about in terms of teleologies towards drawing’s emergence as an autonomous medium free from its previous functional role as model, structural device or vidimus. This panel seeks an interdisciplinary study of late-medieval (ca. 1250-1500) drawing beyond the artist’s workshop. Instead, drawing will be examined in relationship to diplomacy, law and literature. In particular, this panel seeks to bridge the innovative research on infrared reflectography and under-drawing with more theoretical concerns, considering what this hovering, ghost-like presence of drawing in artistic practice can tell scholars and conservators about the theorization of drawing as site of erasure, presence or metaphysical imprint. Drawing played a pivotal and theoretical role in both the literary and the diplomatic culture of the fifteenth-century Franco-Flemish territories, and was frequently used as a metaphor in the poetry of late-medieval poets, such as Jean Froissart, Guillaume de Machaut and Christine de Pisan. It was also central to the culture of the eyewitness and diplomacy, as testified by the frequent comments by travelers and diplomats about the importance of draftsmanship to provide evidence. Moreover, obscure and profane drawings often appear in unexpected places such as notarial documents, notary’s signatures and the dissemination of the watermark. This panel seeks to uncover, discuss and bring to attention the importance of an interdisciplinary study of late-medieval drawing in order to better grapple with the emergence of ‘autonomous drawing’ and its ‘functional’ counterpart.

Proposals should include:
1. CAA session participation proposal form (available on CAA website)
2. 250-word abstract
3. Short CV
4. Letter of interest
Please submit by August 14th, to Caroline Fowler: caroline.fowleryale.edu

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[10] The Elements and Elementality in Art of the Premodern World

From: Megan C. McNamee <m-mcnameenga.gov>
Date: 05.07.2017

Few truths had broader currency in the premodern world than the compound nature of the cosmos and its contents. Plato, writing c. 360 BCE, popularized a harmonic system of matter comprising four elements: fire, air, water, and earth. A separate tradition matured in the Han dynasty (201 BCE–220 CE) of China, in which cyclic transformations of five elemental phases—wood, fire, earth, metal, and water—governed all phenomena. Across traditions, whatever their number or identity, the elements formed the very fabric of rationality and reality. Paradigmatic, they were bound up with ideas of order, form, composition, and perceptibility. The abstraction and simplicity of the Greek and Chinese systems made them engines of natural philosophy, readily adapted to local exigencies across Europe, Africa, and Asia. Whereas comparing these two elemental traditions has interested historians and philosophers for centuries, their visual dimensions remain largely unexamined. This panel explores the elements and elementality in and among the art of premodern cultures, from any part of the world. We define the elements broadly, as narrative subjects, schematic principles, objects of empirical inquiry, agents of transformation, matter and media, factors affecting viewership, etc. By taking a synoptic view, we presume a degree of incommensurability, which, we believe, can yield novel analytics. Our aim is twofold: first, to develop more precise comparative vocabulary in order to lay the groundwork for further intercultural conversation; and second, to analyze the many ways that knowledge of the elements was manifest in visual and material form.

Chairs: Michelle M. McCoy, University of California, Berkeley (mickimccoyberkeley.edu)
Megan C. McNamee, CASVA, National Gallery of Art (m-mcnameenga.gov)

Proposals including a CV and 250-word abstract should be emailed to session chairs by August 14, 2017. (See http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/call-for-participation.pdf for details.) Applicants will be contacted regarding the status of their submissions by August 28, 2017.