Session at the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC), University of Alabama at Birmingham, United States

"Art from Across the Oceans: Connections between the Americas, Europe, and Asia"

Chairs:
Bradley Cavallo, PhD (Bcavallo1marian.edu)
Travis Nygard, PhD (nygardtripon.edu)

The scholar Ricardo Padrón recently argued that Spanish galleons trading between Manila and Acapulco imagined the Pacific Ocean using real objects, creating what Homi K. Bhabha might call a Third Space that connects two cultures while creating a new one. In this session we take this idea seriously, interrogating examples of art that crossed the oceans. Was a single culture understood to dominate the network of places where ships stopped to exchange art, other goods, and ideas, or was a multi-polar system understood to exist? How did paintings, sculptures, and decorative objects make these realities understandable? What do archives reveal about the availability of material goods from foreign markets? In at least one instance a sherd from a Chinese porcelain vessel was knapped in the Americas to become an arrow point. Are there other instances of foreign works of art used in un-traditional ways?

By answering such questions we hope to understand how objects became meaningful in the hybrid, in-between, spaces of global oceanic trade, and ultimately enrich our knowledge about the global exchange of artistic techniques, styles, motifs, and ideas. Presentations may address any time period from the sixteenth century to today.

Proposed presentation abstracts of no more than 200 words (excluding title) should be submitted via the SECAC 2018 conference website ¹ along with a PDF version of your CV by April 20, 11:59 pm EDT.