CFP 27.06.2019

6 Sessions at CAA (Chicago, 12-15 Feb 20)

College Art Association CAA2020 annual conference, Chicago, 12.–15.02.2020

ArtHist Redaktion

[1] Sounding to Power: Resistance and Identity in Contemporary Sound Art
[2] Radical women: the construction of Latin American women artists through exhibitions
[3] The Longest March: Feminism, Institutions, and Art
[4] The Marketplace of the Flesh”: Coordinates for an Art History of Black Women’s Labor
[5] African Diasporic Art from Latin America in the Twentieth Century
[6] Fast Fashion / Slow Art

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[1] Sounding to Power: Resistance and Identity in Contemporary Sound Art

From: Melissa Warak <mcwarakutep.edu>
Date: June 24, 2019

Session Chair: Dr. Melissa Warak, University of Texas at El Paso
mcwarakutep.edu

In recent years, more and more contemporary sound artists have merged aesthetic concerns with politicized content to use sound, music, or silence as vehicles for nuanced takes on issues of identity, representation, and geo-political realities. As one example, Jefferson Pinder’s 2006 video installation "Juke" explores assumptions of identity by filming African American performers lip-syncing to popular songs often associated with white culture. Viewers would not know the songs being performed until putting on the headphones associated with each video, and thus the element of surprise helps produce a reaction. More recently, Ragnar Kjartansson’s 2018 long-duration performance "Romantic Songs of the Patriarchy" featured thirty-one women musicians performing pared-down arrangements of well-loved pop songs throughout the Women’s Building in San Francisco in order to highlight the misogyny of the songs’ lyrics. In both of these cases, beauty melds with trauma to incite audience reactions.

This session seeks papers that examine ways that sound and music in contemporary art invites and distorts concepts of political resistance. Papers may additionally look to the methods with which artists use sound to pressure concepts of identity; how the use of or presentation of the body enhances the use of sound in politicized art; and how artists use technology as an aid in exploring identity and resistance with sound. Papers may present individual case studies, reflect on artists’ own practices, or theorize how artists engage with particular issues of both local and global scope.

Submission requirements: abstract and submission form (available on http://collegeart.org on June 25) and shortened two-page C.V.

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[2] Radical women: the construction of Latin American women artists through exhibitions

From: Elize Mazadiego <emazadiegoucsd.edu>
Date: June 25, 2019

In 2017, the exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 opened at the Hammer Museum, UCLA as part of Getty’s Pacific Standard Time initiative: LA/LA. The exhibition presented works by 120 women artists active in Latin America and the United States, claiming to be the “first survey of radical and feminist art practices in Latin America and among Latina artists in the United States.”

Working back from this exhibition, this session seeks to examine the representation and construction of “Latin America”, “Latin American art” and more specifically “Latin American women” through a survey of exhibition histories and strategies of display. In the case of Radical Women, curators Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta focused on the heterogeneity of postwar feminist artistic practices, adding specificity to the topic of global feminisms in art while countering the dominant narrative of Western and of particularly U.S. feminism.

This panel invites discussion on how the framework of feminism can help explore, counter, complicate and (re)construct Latin American identities and art histories. What particular gaps in knowledge and access to it do shows that focus on women artists aim to fill, and how do they upset canonical readings of (Western) art history? What nuances arise from using the framework of feminism, and what alternative frames of reference and readings of Latin American women have become available? Since new perspectives should ideally avoid the pitfalls of the past, how can exhibitions negotiate and resist the objectification of genders and identities? If art exhibitions can generate critical dialogue, how is this achieved and reflected in exhibition design and public engagement, and how does curatorial research inform scholarship?

To submit a paper proposal, please use CAA’s proposal form found at: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2020/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html.
Proposals should be 250 words max, and accompanied by a 2-page CV.
Please send your proposals directly to session chairs Elize Mazadiego (emazadiegoucsd.edu) and Eve Kalyva (e.m.kalyvagmail.com) by 23 July 2019.
Conference presenters must be CAA members. Notifications for selection will be sent out by 22 August 2019.

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[3] The Longest March: Feminism, Institutions, and Art

From: Hilary Robinson <h.robinsonlboro.ac.uk>
Date: June 25, 2019

This panel’s title riffs on two phrases from the late 1960s: Juliet Mitchell’s ‘Women: The Longest Revolution’ (1966) and Rudi Dutschke’s phrase ‘the long march through the institutions’. Mitchell engaged Marxist theory, challenging the left with its omission of women; Dutschke, drawing upon Maoism, proposed entering institutions to enact revolutionary work from within and thereby utterly change them. Fifty years after the women’s movement in art began, it’s obvious that asking for equality (50% women) is not enough; and that ‘add women and stir’ will not bring political and cultural change in museums, galleries, and Universities. At this time of hardening differences, defunding and attacks upon many cultural and educational institutions, we invite papers that address feminist resistance as a strategy for change from within institutions.

Papers may address, inter alia: What has been achieved – or not – by the political, social and economic goals of feminism entering the institution? Is Dutschke’s strategy useful in the current socio-political climate in arts institutions? Who can actually ‘get inside’ institutions? How do we reconcile strategies of resistance from within with the heavy facts of institutional violence experienced by women, people of colour, queer and disabled people and others in white patriarchal institutions? Can ‘revolutionary work’ be done within the arts and its institutions, and how? How can feminism resist being co-opted into capitalist gestures of ‘inclusiveness’? What other strategies might ensure institutional change? Is rejecting institutions an option? What institutional initiatives have been tested – to what effect?

Please submit proposals to the two chairs by July 23rd:
Elspeth Mitchell, Loughborough University - e.mitchell2lboro.ac.uk
Hilary Robinson, Loughborough University - h.robinsonlboro.ac.uk
The full conference website can be found here: https://www.collegeart.org/programs/conference

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[4] The Marketplace of the Flesh”: Coordinates for an Art History of Black Women’s Labor

From: Natalia Angeles Vieyra <nataliavieyratemple.edu>
Date: June 25, 2019

C.C. McKee, Bryn Mawr College and Natalia Angeles Vieyra, Temple University
Email Address(s):cmckee1brynmawr.edu, nataliavieyratemple.edu

Theorist Hortense Spillers contends that black women’s enslavement “relegated them to the market place of the flesh, an act of commodification so thoroughgoing that the daughters labor even now under the outcome.” For Spillers, black femininity is an ontological position that constitutes “the principal point of passage between the human and non-human world.” Moreover, this commodification of the flesh did not end with emancipation, its vestiges live on in black women’s labor in the present.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, artists working in the Atlantic World mobilized the picturesque to obfuscate the realities of chattel slavery and the work of black women in particular. The fungibility that conditioned black femininity under slavery and in its wake has all-too-often been elided in art historical scholarship. Taking Spillers’s provocation as our starting point, this panel asks: Where can black women’s labor be located in the visual record? How do black women’s artistic practices continue to interrogate the visual and material histories of labor at the violent nexus of the human and non-human?

We welcome proposals that take up the visual and material conditions of black labor and women’s work in the Atlantic World. This includes, but is by no means limited to: the intersecting histories of gender and race as they relate to the representation of labor or its objects; contemporary artistic, visual and material cultural treatments of black women’s labor; and capacious approaches to black femininity and labor untethered to binary gender, encompassing trans* and queer identities.

Deadline: 15 August 2019

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[5] African Diasporic Art from Latin America in the Twentieth Century

From: Abigail Lapin Dardashti <ael319nyu.edu>
Date: June 25, 2019

Abigail Lapin Dardashti, CUNY Graduate Center

Twentieth-century Latin American art history has grown significantly over the last four decades, expanding on diverse themes such as the avant-garde, indigenism, identity politics, and modernism. However, artists of African descent have largely been written out of this narrative, which privileges artwork made by elite, white artists. The few existing studies focusing on African diasporic art in Latin America prior to the 1990s take primarily a formal approach, detaching artworks and their makers from the region’s broad range of artistic production and specific socio-political environments.

This panel aims to position artists of African descent and/or works depicting African heritage in relationship to mainstream histories of Latin American art during the twentieth century. We hope to showcase the importance of black art in the region and rethink the ways in which we have constructed the field’s conventional narratives. Contextualizing art and artists through a diasporic lens, we seek papers that investigate issues such as the impact of politics on racial identities; mobilization and resistance; racism and the erasure of blackness; and blackness and modernism, abstraction, performance, or the neo-baroque. We welcome papers examining case studies that consider either a single geographical area or transnational exchanges with other diasporic communities. As Caribbean art history has uniquely addressed racial and identity politics while remaining sidelined from the broader field, we are also interested in studies that position art from this region in relationship to the rest of the continent.

Deadline: 23 July 2019

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[6] Fast Fashion / Slow Art

From: Bibiana Obler <boblergwu.edu >
Date: June 26, 2019

Art historians have studied the art of high fashion clothing, but with the well-known exceptions of Degas’ paintings and drawings of milliners, seamstresses, and the New Orleans cotton trade, and Lewis Hine’s depictions of child labor in American cotton mills, they have seldom considered the work of artists who have addressed the history and contemporary reality of textile and clothing manufacture. This is a striking omission. In his magisterial study, Empire of Cotton (2014), Sven Beckert argues that cotton has been central in “the making and remaking of global capitalism, and with it of the modern world.” One could make similar if less all-embracing arguments when it comes to the history of linen, wool, silk, and synthetic fibers.

We seek papers that deal with representations in any medium of the work and workers associated with textile and clothing manufacture. Possible subjects include, but are not limited to, the Lawrence Textile Strike (1912) (associated with the slogan “Bread and Roses”), The Patterson Silk Strike and strikers’ Pageant (1913), the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (1911), the Tazreen Factory Fire in Dhaka (2012), Philip Evergood’s Through the Mill (1940), etc. We encourage scholarly papers as well as talks by artists—scholarly or otherwise.

Please see the CAA website for further submission details, including submission form.
Please email proposals and/or direct questions to Alan Wallach (axwallwm.edu) and Bibiana Obler (boblergwu.edu).

Deadline: 23 July 2019

Quellennachweis:
CFP: 6 Sessions at CAA (Chicago, 12-15 Feb 20). In: ArtHist.net, 27.06.2019. Letzter Zugriff 28.03.2024. <https://arthist.net/archive/21181>.

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