[1] Market Data: Beyond Prices and Provenance

From: Diana Greenwald
Date: 1 July 19

Co-chairs:
Diana Seave Greenwald, National Gallery of Art (d-greenwaldnga.gov) and Kim Oosterlinck, Université Libre de Bruxelles (koosterlulb.ac.be)

Session sponsored by The International Art Market Studies Association

When studying the art market or provenance, scholars consult numerous data sources: auction catalogues, historic exhibition catalogues, museum inventories, etc. Often, the end-goal of this consultation is to trace a single artwork’s history or track price movements for a given group of works. This session will feature the work of scholars who use these same data sources in order to answer questions beyond determining prices or provenance. Data culled from the same catalogs and inventories can also be used to examine art historical trends over the long run. For example, can we trace the mix of genres shown in different exhibition venues during the nineteenth century? Is it possible to graph museums’ accession and deaccession patterns or measure the number of women artists or artists of color in public collections? Ultimately, the aim of this session is to demonstrate that the data integral to the study of price patterns or provenance can also provide useful quantitative insights into a wide range of research questions in the history of art.

Your proposed abstract (250 words) must be submitted to the Chairs by the deadline of July 23, 2019. Selected panelists will be notified by August 22, 2019.

Please also include a CV and completed CAA proposal form, available for download here: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2020/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html

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[2] Beyond the Tropics: Art and Visual Culture to and from the Caribbean

From: Vanesa Rodriguez-Galindo
Date: 1 July 19

Co-chairs:
Maite Barragán, Albright College, maitebarragangmail.com
Vanesa Rodríguez-Galindo, Florida International University, vanesa.rodriguezgalindosasalumni.net

Since the fifteenth century, the Caribbean has been a site of confluence, exchange and circulation. As debates regarding the independence of Spanish, French, British, and Dutch territories spread throughout the nineteenth century, it became increasingly important for locals to consider the ways in which the autochthonous and new national cultures contested, assimilated, or related to that of the metropole. Fine art and exhibitions, along with mass media including magazines, photographs, cinema, and other printed images were central to the formation of divergent definitions of the nascent independent and regional identities.

This panel seeks papers that examine the visual culture of the Caribbean as a nexus point within transnational networks of communication during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We are especially interested in papers that address the role of images in the intersections between the global and local, or ‘glocal,’ and that explore the new ways of looking generated at the juncture of metropole and Caribbean. We welcome presentations that respond to an array of questions, including: How did images represent the local and transnational Caribbean identities or contest ideas of national boundaries, of both colonial and of recently created nations? How did the visual culture challenge or renegotiate the dichotomies of colonized/colonizer, resistance/assimilation, periphery/center? How were notions of the local, national, and cosmopolitan renegotiated in light of the mass-produced image? What meanings did reproduced images from capitals or from the peripheries acquire in local contexts, unofficial networks, or private spaces?

Please send your proposals to the session chairs.
Deadline: July 23, 2019

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[3] ASSEMBLING A MEXICAN PAST

From: Barbara E. Mundy
Date: 1 July 19

Co-chairs:
Delia A. Cosentino, DePaul University
Barbara E. Mundy, Fordham University

More than any other nation in the Americas, Mexico has confronted the enduring artistic legacy of past eras--be they Zapotec sculptures unearthed in Oaxaca, sorrowing Virgins in side chapels of Baroque churches, or Porfirian-era public monuments--and from this has built narratives about the past. The selection and sequence takes on particular pressure during anniversaries--favored opportunities to think about the shape of time past. Given that the year 2020 marks a set of Mexican anniversaries-- the years 1520 (Spanish-Aztec War), 1820 (Independence), and 1920 (Revolution), we invite papers that examine how Greater Mexico's past has been configured and reconfigured over time through specific assemblages of and/or within objects and artworks. In seeking papers that address a diversity of subject matters and moments across time, we invite reflection on these questions: How do choices of such assemblages by artists, scholars, leaders, and/or patrons reflect and reshape the politics of a given moment? What is the relation between archeological assemblage and art historical narrative? What is the role of the context [or frame]--be it tomb, church, home, or museum--on Mexico's assembled past?

Please email your paper proposal, CV & CAA proposal form by July 23, 2019 to dcosent1depaul.edu and mundyfordham.edu

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[4] Freezes and Thaws in the Socialist Bloc

From: Yelena Kalinsky
Date: 1 July 19

Co-chairs:
Yelena Kalinsky, Michigan State University, yelena.kalinskygmail.com
Adrian Barr, Winona State University, ABarrwinona.edu

The twentieth century was marked by unprecedented change and political contestation. Revolutions were followed by retreats. Cultural efflorescences gave way to periods of cruel repression. In many national and regional contexts where freezes were followed by thaws, societies were faced with the task of exhuming and grappling with the past, or dancing with bones that were never fully buried. This session will consider artworks from any region of Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia that tried to recuperate, revivify, or re-engage cultural formations that had previously been rejected or suppressed. This could include, but is not limited to, the recuperation of historic avant-garde strategies in the 1960s–70s, post-1989 ‘ostalgia’, or the return of Cosmism and other forms of utopian thinking in the 2000s.

Can we conceptualize such returns via the model, advanced by Hal Foster, of traumatic nachtraglichkeit, or deferred action? Or does the pervasive erasure of the past and the archaeological task of recovery demand new methodological frameworks sensitive to the specificities of the region’s political and cultural histories? How do we conceive an artistic chronology that is alternately marked by forced curtailment and belated, necessarily partial revivification? Does the revival of a past present a tool for political praxis, or does that past’s original excision render it inert, a museum piece for contemplation or nostalgia? We seek theoretically grounded papers that offer concrete examples of cultural freezes and thaws from the region that address these or other questions related to displacement, erasure, and return.

Affiliated Society: Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA)

Deadline to submit: July 23, 2019

Please note that all accepted panel participants must be individual members of both CAA and SHERA, the Society for Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture.

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[5] Un-making Architecture

From: Jason Nguyen
Date: 2 July 19

Co-chairs:
Dr. Elizabeth J. Petcu, epetcued.ac.uk
Dr. Jason Nguyen, jason.e.nguyengmail.com

Architecture is enduringly conceived as an additive, building-oriented phenomenon. Nevertheless, the prelude to construction—as well as architecture’s emergence and aftermath—nearly always involve elements of destruction. The razing of built and natural landscapes, planned obsolescence, cycles of dismantling, iconoclasm, spoliation, and other forms of un-making condition architectural cultures across time and geographies. Destruction, in other words, undergirds architecture’s creative processes.

This session seeks papers that investigate ways of un-making in architecture across any period or region. It asks how acts of destruction, whether deliberate, accidental, or caused by natural forces, produce architectural knowledge and inform the built environment in theory and practice. Although recent scholarship has privileged the making process, the acts of “un-making” that inform most architectural projects work in profound but often overlooked ways. These include the demolition of monuments and heritage sites, the flattening of settlements ensuing human displacement, the obliteration of natural and built landscapes due to environmental disaster, and the dismantling of buildings for renewal and restoration. Processes of architectural un-making also operate in architectural theory, as in Piranesi’s sublime depictions of ruination, or, more recently, Forensic Architecture’s analyses of urban and environmental devastation.

How have acts, events, and theories of destruction altered our conceptions of architecture? What productive consequences have emerged from the rubble of architecture’s un-making? And how has the physical and theoretical disassembling of architecture prompted shifts in artistic thought and practice? We welcome histories of architecture that confront the materials, conditions, environments, things, and ideas that building practice and architectural theory un-make.

In order to submit, please gather the following and send via email to the chair(s) before July 23, 2019.

- Completed proposal form (please follow link to download) https://caa.confex.com/caa/f/tnxbicijhcpp
- A shortened CV (close to 2 pages).
- (Optional) Documentation of work when appropriate, limit to five images as a single PDF, especially for sessions in which artists might discuss their own practice.

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[6] WHO’S IN AND WHO’S OUT OF FASHION (STUDIES)?

From: Ann Marguerite Tartsinis
Date: 2 July 19

Co-chairs:
Sarah Scaturro, Metropolitan Museum of Art, sarah.scaturrometmuseum.org
Ann Marguerite Tartsinis, Stanford University, atartsinstanford.edu

Is there a correct or wrong way to do fashion studies? The field has rapidly grown ever since the 1998 issue of Fashion Theory surveyed the methodological status of its emergence. The major concern then was identifying and reconciling what dress historian Lou Taylor termed “the great divide” between practice-based (museum-oriented) and theoretical-based (academia-oriented) approaches to the study of fashion. Since then, approaches using fashion as a lens to engage and explore our material and visual world have exploded, uniting scholars from disparate academic disciplines—from art and design history to anthropology, among others—under what we now call “fashion studies.”

Fashion deeply resonates as a scholarly subject for those concerned with debates on gender, modernity, and globalization as well as other sites of critical inquiry. The question remains: where does fashion studies begin and end? Is fashion studies research permitted to travel across or exist between disciplinary borders? Might we frame fashion studies as fundamentally interdisciplinary, multi-disciplinary and/or cross-disciplinary? There remains much anxiety around policing the boundaries of scholarly discourse, leading to questions of legitimacy and membership (Who is allowed to do this? What are the requisite credentials?) What is the state of the field and how might we advance the understanding of fashion studies as a central node in a dynamic constellation of research areas across the humanities and sciences?

This panel seeks papers that challenge the received assumptions about the field and those that aim to reposition it in relation to its attendant disciplines through case studies.

Submission Deadline: July 23, 2019
Please email submissions to panel chairs
Detailed instructions and proposal form can be found at:
https://www.collegeart.org/programs/conference

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[7] The Negotiated Spaces of Zoning

From: Christopher Ketcham
Date: 2 July 19

Co-chairs:
Deepa Ramaswamy, deepa.ramaswamyme.com
Christopher Ketcham, cketcham5gmail.com

Zoning is an administrative apparatus that controls the use of urban space. Since its enactment in early 20th century New York and subsequent global spread, zoning law has served as a potent bureaucratic structure through which public and private space is delimited, the social and economic identity of the city is codified, and the body politics of race and gender are managed. Zoning has had an instrumental impact on modern architecture and, since the 1960s, has increasingly served as a framework for artists who engage urban space and its underlying networks of control. Yet zoning barely registers in histories of modern architecture and art.

The space of zoning is a negotiated space of art, architecture, and municipal power. Zoning laws have been adopted, revised, and manipulated to consolidate urban authority and harden the boundaries of social and racial stratification. Architectural and aesthetic programming promotes new meanings, uses, and publics, and, in turn, defines and excludes those that do not conform to the authorized image of the city. This programming ranges from percent-for-art policies to counter-hegemonic practices that resist official mechanisms of control. How do communities marginalized by zoning oppose its bureaucratic authority? In what ways has postwar zoning promoted an abstraction of labor from urban space and reconfigured the city as a site of global economy? We seek papers that assess zoning’s global impact on the social, material, and economic life of the city, with particular attention to ways that art and architecture have both solidified and contested spatial authority.

Proposals must be submitted by the deadline of July 23, 2019. Selected panelists will be notified by August 22, 2019. Please send a completed CAA proposal form and CV to the panel chairs. Detailed instructions and proposal form can be found at:
https://www.collegeart.org/programs/conference

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[8] BETWEEN TRUTH AND PERSUASION: IMAGES AND HISTORICAL NARRATION FROM THE SIXTEENTH TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

From: Federica Soletta
Date: 2 July 19

Co-Chairs:
Alessandra Di Croce, ad2516columbia.edu
Federica Soletta, fsolettaprinceton.edu

While images have often been used in Western art as effective storytelling tools, from religious paintings to photographic portfolios, their documentary value has always been far more ambiguous. On the one hand, images have been recognized as reliable historical evidence - along with material documents - since at least the middle of the sixteenth century. Additionally, the detailed vividness of a visual description was often perceived as more effective than a text. On the other hand, however, images could be simply dismissed as undecipherable records, relics of the past completely useless if not paired with written words. Moreover, images could be easily manipulated, through the use of specific visual and rhetorical strategies, and become instrumental in constructing and negotiating ideas of truth, ultimately shaping people’s beliefs. The uncanny power of images to create a tangible truth, or a convincing history has been always widely recognized - whether with fear (iconoclasm) or admiration (as in Plutarch’s admission that “the most effective historian is he who (…) makes his narration like a painting”).

With the religious controversy and political disputations of the sixteenth century, the question of images as both historical evidence and powerful tool of narrative persuasions became intimately related with broader questions of historical method and historical narrative.

This session welcomes papers that explore the agency of images and engage with the notions of truth, fiction and persuasion in the construction of historical narration and visual history (or histories), from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.

Please send proposal to the session chairs. Include in your proposal: paper title, abstract (max 300 words), and a brief CV (2 pages max) by July 23, 2019.

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[9] Archive Unsettled: Indigenous Materials as Travellers, Ancestors and Cultural Belongings

From: Gloria Bell
Date: 3 July 19

Drawing inspiration from Seneca historian Arthur Parker who described First Nations wampum as an “ancient archive” for Indigenous peoples in 1916, this session invites historical and theoretical papers investigating Indigenous materiality and archival relations, beyond the colonial settler frame. Shifting from the margins of the art historical discipline, this panel will center Indigenous art and visual culture. How does engaging with Indigenous materials as ancestors as beyond-human kin, as travellers and cultural belongings, as mobile and sentient things, reframe our relationship with Indigenous artworks in colonial archives? For Indigenous and allied scholars, writing archival experiences into scholarship helps unsettle the expectations of colonial institutions and encourages respectful engagement with material things for Indigenous and settler communities. This session welcomes papers from a variety of disciplines with an engagement in Indigenous arts, Indigenous histories and archival dynamics.

Keywords: Indigenous materialities, wampum, tufting, beadwork, quillwork, sashes, travelers, ancestors, cultural belongings, indigenous-settler relations, colonial institutions, archival methods, material culture studies

To submit a paper proposal, please email the following (with subject: “Archive Unsettled: CAA 2020 submission”) to Dr. Gloria Bell (gloria.bellmcgill.ca) before July 23, 2019:
- Completed proposal form (https://caa.confex.com/caa/2020/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html).
- A shortened CV (one page)

All session participants must be CAA members. Please note that a paper that has been published previously or presented at another scholarly conference may not be delivered at the CAA Annual Conference.

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[10] Landscape through a Sociopolitical Lens: Representing the Environment in Northern Europe, ca. 1430-1785

From: Sarah Mallory
Date: 3 July 19

Co-chairs:
Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, Harvard Art Museums, joannaseidenstein.com
Sarah Walsh Mallory, Harvard University, sarahmalloryg.harvard.edu

HNA-sponsored session
Scarcely a news cycle passes without discussion of national borders, climate change, natural disasters, and globalization. This discourse has prompted new questions about the visual representation of the physical environment, making this an apt moment to reassess the extraordinary production and consumption of painted, drawn, and printed landscapes in Northern Europe in the early modern period. This session seeks to complicate existing understandings of this material by focusing on its intrinsic but diverse sociopolitical content. How, for example, did pictorial tactics and conventions function as inscriptions of power, control, identity, and otherness? What was the role of these images in shaping contemporary conversations about social ecologies, about land ownership and labor? How has the vision of nature provided by Northern artists informed or shifted understandings of “space,” “nature,” and “environment?” Can we understand historiographical models—the advent of global art history, for example—as a product of the study of Northern landscape? How can we think of landscapes as agents that actively shaped the way in which individuals viewed and lived in the world? This session hopes to attend to the concept of “world,” integrating considerations of “the Northern landscape” with those of the landscape imagery produced by artists working in overseas territories, like the Dutch East Indies. We seek papers on all forms of landscape, including cityscapes, marine views, backgrounds of religious paintings, garden design, and city planning, produced in, or in connection with, the Northern Netherlands, Southern Netherlands, or Germany between the 15th and 18th centuries.
Proposals, due via email to the session chairs no later than July 23, 2019, must include CAA’s proposal form (which asks for a brief statement and a 250-word abstract) and a short-form CV. For the proposal form and complete submission instructions, see https://caa.confex.com/caa/2020/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html

Please note that all speakers must be current members of both CAA and HNA.