[1] All-Women Art Exhibitions before the 1970s

From: Catherine Dossin <cdossinpurdue.edu>
Date: 15 March 2018

Session Chair: Catherine Dossin, Purdue University

Long before the feminist revolution of the 1970s, all-women art exhibitions had been organized through the various societies of women artists that emerged in the late 1800s or in the context of World Exhibitions such as the Woman’s Building at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Yet, the history of these exhibitions remained mostly uncharted, beyond some isolated studies on specific societies or events.

To tackle what we see as a new and promising research field, we call on colleagues to help us build a descriptive and analytical catalogue of all-women exhibitions since the 19th century, and to engage in a collective reflection on their specific history, especially on the evolution of the social, cultural, and institutional conditions that permitted or made them necessary, and on the various levels of mediation and organization at work in these events.

This panel thus seeks to highlight, through case studies or larger analyses, the history of all-women art exhibitions prior to the 1970s. We are particularly interested in questions of professionalization, circles of sociability, and female patronage, but also in the commercial and critical receptions of these exhibitions, and their positions (or lack thereof) within the history of modern art and historiography.

For more information and to submit a proposal, go to: http://www.secacart.org/conference
Contact information: cdossinpurdue.edu

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[2] Avant-Garde Echoes: Modernist Reverberations in Contemporary Art

From: Jennifer M. Kruglinski <jkruglinskigmail.com>
Date: 15 March 2018

Session Chairs:
Travis English, Frostburg State University, Maryland
Jennifer Kruglinski, Salisbury University, Maryland

From the process-oriented abstraction of much contemporary painting to the critical utopianism of participatory art, contemporary artists working in the wake of postmodernism have looked increasingly to a diverse range of aesthetic devices and strategies developed by their twentieth-century modernist forebears. Likewise, critics, theorists, and historians have reengaged with notions of aesthetic autonomy, affect, formalism, and universality, among other ideas previously considered the purview of a foreclosed modernity.

Are these modernist reverberations a form of reactionary retrenchment in the face of uncertainty and cynicism, a return to the last moment when visions of the future were bound up with thoughts of progress and the exhilaration of the new? Or do they represent an engagement with modernist art and its histories that is no longer defined by the ruptures between modernism and postmodernism, sincerity and irony, originality and pastiche?

Already in the 1930s, philosopher Ernst Bloch theorized that the recycling of aesthetic forms was hardly their ideological reinstatement, and that historical forms, having been released from the contexts that had previously given them an internal coherence, could be refunctioned for new purposes and invested with contemporary contents. In the spirit of this thought, this panel seeks to examine the modernist turn in contemporary art and its discourses not as a naïve return to a previous moment, but rather as an exploration of what Viktor Shklovsky once called “the dissimilarity of the similar.”

Graduate students are encouraged to apply. Travel awards are possible.
See conference website at www.secacart.org.

Proposals must be submitted at conference website:
https://secac.secure-platform.com/a/account/login

Please send queries to me at jkruglinskigmail.com