American Art of the Sixties: Visual and Material Forms in a Transnational Context

The two-day symposium, taking place on March 26 & 27 at Texas A&M University, aims to shed new light on American art of the long Sixties by furthering research that places artworks, artists, and art production within a transnational context. Scholars from across the globe examine how visual and material forms generate meanings within different geographical and cultural contexts, drawing on social art-historical, poststructural, and formal methodologies, thus bridging what Joshua Shannon, Jason Weems, and Jennifer Roberts have discussed as the “Americanist-Modernist divide.” Recuperating various transnational contexts that provide new interpretations of Sixties art, the symposium explores why some of these meanings have become dominant while others were lost as the artworks traveled through time and space.

For more information see: https://www.aa60s.org/

Day 1: Thursday, March 26

1.00-1.30
Jorge Vanegas and Susanneh Bieber (Texas A&M University) // Welcome and Introduction

1.30-3.00
Session One: Bodies in Crisis
Chair: Liz Kim, Texas Woman’s Univeristy (tbc)

Beyond “Bad Girls”: Facing the White and Brown Maids of Pop
Kalliopi Minioudaki, Independent Scholar, New York, NY, and Athens, Greece

Trans/Formation: Lucas Samaras’ Matters
Antje Krause-Wahl, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main

3.00-3.15 Coffee and Tea

3.15-4.45
Session Two: Sculpture in Environment
Chair: Sabrina Carletti, Texas A&M University

Monumental Objects as Counter-Architecture in Non-Western Contexts: East European and Latin American Artists in Dialogue with Claes Oldenburg
Katarzyna Cytlak, National University of San Martín, Buenos Aires

Cinetismo and Sistemas: Situating the Work of Hans Haacke within Advanced Art Exchanges in the Americas
John Tyson, University of Massachusetts Boston

4.45-5.15 Refreshments

5.15-6.30
Keynote Lecture
The Future is a Rectangle: Modernist University Architecture and the Human Being
Joshua Shannon, University of Maryland

6.30-7.30 Reception

Day 2: Friday, March 27

9.00-9.15
Tim McLaughhlin and Robert Warden (Texas A&M University) // Welcome

9.15-10.45
Session Three: Systems of Circulation
Chair: Natilee Harren, University of Houston

Visions of a Decolonizing World: Donald Evans’s Stamp Catalog
Sophie Cras, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

Disordering Circuits and Borders: Open Systems, Politics, and the Origins of Institutional Critique in 1960s Argentina
Christine Filippone, Millersville University of Pennsylvania

10.45-11.00 Coffee and Tea

11.00-12.30
Session Four: Alternative Spaces
Chair: George Flaherty, University of Texas at Austin

Audience and Discourse: Cross-Atlantic Exchanges in the Context of the IAUS in New York City, or Inventing New Eurocentric Architecture Institutions in the 1970s
Marcelo López-Dinardi, Texas A&M University

Future Cities: Conceptual Art as Radical Architecture
Kirsten Swenson, University of Massachusetts, Lowell

12.30-2.00 Lunch Break

2.00-3.30
Session Five: Transcultural Pop
Chair: Daniil Leiderman, Texas A&M University

Diaspora Pop: Roger Shimomura’s Minidoka Series and Incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII
Hiroko Ikegami, Graduate School of Intercultural Studies, Kobe University

Michael Ray Charles Takes On Pop
Cherise Smith, University of Texas at Austin

3.30-3.45 Coffee and tea

3.45-4.45
Interdisciplinary Roundtable
Chair: Stefanie Harries, International Studies, Texas A&M University

Emily Brady, Philosophy, Texas A&M University
Roger Malina, Physics, Leonardo and University of Texas at Dallas
Vanita Reddy, Department of English, Texas A&M University
Joshua Shannon, Art History, University of Maryland

4.45-5.00
Susanneh Bieber (Texas A&M University) // Closing Remarks

The event is free and open to the public.
Please RSVP on the website: https://www.aa60s.org/contact.html

Credit
With generous support from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, the Institute for Applied Creativity, the Departments of Visualization and Architecture, and in-kind support from the College of Engineering, Texas A&M University