SECAC 2018 - Birmingham, Alabama,
http://www.secacart.org/conference

Session Title: Pattern between Decorative and Abstract
Session Chair: Roja Najafi, Oklahoma City Museum of Art

This panel will explore how pattern functions in both decorative and abstract fields. Pattern is a constructive structure that simultaneously organizes surfaces and forms spaces. Whether as a decorative element or a result of abstraction, pattern complicates the modernist aesthetic by undertaking a multifaceted role between abstraction and decoration. If it is left to serve nothing but itself, it becomes abstraction and if it is a form of surface attractiveness, it becomes decoration. This panel invites explorations in the nature of the scholarly battle between the hierarchies of art and craft, abstraction and decoration, with regard to the role of pattern in the modernist aesthetic. From the opening years of the twentieth-century with the anti-decorative position of painters Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger evident in their co-authored text, On Cubism (1912), as well as the Neo-Plastic theory of Piet Mondrian, to Clement Greenberg’s extensive use of the "decorative" in his criticism between 1940 and 1967, the complex function of pattern has been overlooked in art historical scholarship.

This panel seeks presentations investigating pattern in modern and contemporary art and invites contributions from both artists and art historians.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
Pattern and its relationship to decorative and abstract;
fine arts and design;
pattern and materiality of a surface in pre and post American Abstract Expressionism;
pattern in Pop Art;
pattern and perception in Op art.

Full Call for Papers: http://www.secacart.org/assets/SECAC%202018%20Sessions.pdf
Call for Papers Deadline: April 20, 11:59 pm EDT