[1] The Changing Same: New Diaspora Aesthetics in the Americas

From: Allison K. Young
Date: 11 July 19

Co-Chairs:
Joseph Lamar Underwood, Kent State University, jlunderwood12gmail.com
Allison K. Young, Louisiana State University, akyoung87gmail.com

Deadline: July 23, 2019

Amiri Baraka coins the phrase “the changing same” in his 1963 book Blues People: Negro Music in White America to describe the loose connections between contemporary jazz and African music. Teasing out the ramifications of a people being relocated, experiencing acculturation, or fighting appropriation, Baraka positions Black art and music as vehicles for safeguarding memory and combatting universalism.
Following these concerns, this panel asks how today’s artists navigate phenomena of (im)migration, acculturation, and appropriation in the United States of post-1980. Of particular interest are changing artistic and visual cultures of cities along the Great Lakes, Mississippi River, and Gulf Coast as our nation looks to the ‘heart of America’ (a region that is supposedly misunderstood and misrepresented by coastal populations) - moving beyond cities like New York or Los Angeles that are already celebrated as sites of intra/inter-national cultural mixing.

Through the lens of contemporary artistic practices, we aim to reassess these spaces - typically perceived as local, parochial, or regional - as integral nodes within emergent global networks: from Detroit’s expanding Muslim population and the growth of Vietnamese communities in the Gulf South, to Central American immigration to New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina.

What are the impacts of Diaspora aesthetics for indigenous, majority, and/or other minority populations? How have exchanges, movements and displacements wrought by recent waves of (im)migration to these cities impacted “American” aesthetics and cultural production in new ways since 1980? What are contemporary artists’ strategies in addressing “the changing same” as these populations navigate past and present conditions that attend being Diasporic?

Please submit CAA proposal form and CV by email

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[2] A Foreign Eye: Photography, Women, and Global Encounters in the Twentieth Century

From: James van Dyke
Date: 12 July 19

Jordan Troeller (Humboldt Universität, Berlin; Freie Universität, Berlin)
Hyewon Yoon (University of New Hampshire)

In the decades after the First World War, shaped by changing conceptions of gender and by the institutions and discourses of interwar photography, women such as Lotte Errell, Anne Fischer, Lucia Moholy, and Annemarie Schwarzenbach traveled and worked around the world, producing travel reportages for illustrated magazines, experiencing emigration and exile, and responding to political upheavals. This session seeks papers that employ the methods of feminism and critical race studies to examine how the subject position of these and other remarkable German and Central European women shaped their work outside Europe, as their careers in journalism, publishing, advertising, and studio photography unfolded in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Papers might address techniques of picturing difference, the relationship between representations of race and ethnicity abroad and struggles with discrimination and marginalization at home, the move beyond the exoticism of travel reportages and tourist photography, and the capacity of the visual languages of the New Objectivity and the New Vision to speak to the possibilities and problems of the new global era after the Second World War. In considering such questions, we wish to extend the history of modern European photography geographically and to illuminate its role in shaping discourses of race, ethnicity, gender, and cultural difference.

The deadline for paper proposals is July 23, 2019. For instructions on how to submit a proposal: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2020/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html

To submit a proposal or ask a question, contact Jordan Troeller and Hyewon Yoon at:
jordantroellergmail.com
hyewon.hyewongmail.com

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[3] Artist-Made Objects of Indeterminate Status and the Cataloque Raisonné

From: Susan J. Cooke
Date: 14 July 19

Is every object made by an artist a work of art? Should we, and if so according to what criteria, include in an artist's catalogue raisonné works that exist in a seemingly provisional, unfinished, experimental, or fragmentary state? Or that may have served as designs, models, or studies for works subsequently (or not) realized in a "final" form? Is every doodle a "drawing"? Are unexposed negatives part of a photographer's oeuvre? Is an object artfully made to serve a utilitarian purpose a sculpture or a tool? How are newer media–time-based, digital, or otherwise–changing our understanding of the bounds of a catalogue raisonné? How do scholars identify, categorize, and represent oeuvres that defy easy definitions?
And are these kinds of questions and distinctions even relevant to the work of compiling complete catalogues of historical or contemporary artists' bodies of work? If so, why? Is it possible to formulate a set of "best practices" for how catalogues raisonnés distinguish between art/non-art works made by artists? Prospective panelists are invited to investigate these questions from a practical or a philosophical point of view, and to discuss them in relation to works created by artists in any media or time period.

Please email proposals to Susan Cooke, CRSA Director of Programming at <susancooke135gmail.com> by August 15, 2019.

Each CAA session is 90 minutes long. The session format is flexible: individual presenters reading 15-minute papers; longer conversations/debates between two or more presenters; or any other innovative and interactive structure. The goal is to engage, inform, and inspire the audience by offering fresh perspectives on the practices and presumptions of catalogues raisonnés. N.B. Speakers must be members of College Art Association.