[1] Farm to Canvas: Ecocritical Approaches to Art of Commodity Extraction and Exchange
SECAC 2020, October 21-24, 2020

From: michaela.rifemail.utoronto.ca
Date: 3 Mar 2020

Session Chairs: Caroline Gillaspie and Michaela Rife
 
In response to increasing anxieties surrounding climate change and the environmental impacts of agribusiness, this session will explore artistic representations of cultivated landscapes and the processes of commodity extraction and exchange in the Americas. Art has long been employed to obscure exploitative systems and extractive regimes, but it has also been a tool to envision resistance and change. For instance, colonial and nineteenth-century plantation images often featured sanitized views of the agricultural landscape and naturalized depictions of forced labor. In contrast, more recent activists like the United Farmworkers Union instrumentalized art to protest the brutal labor conditions of industrial agribusiness. This session seeks ecocritical analyses of artworks that engage with various forms of resource extraction, land cultivation, and commodity exchange. Paper topics might address artworks that obscure the devastating consequences of resource extraction and exploitative agriculture; representations of deforestation and land clearing; images of waterways over which commodities traveled; intersections between art, Indigenous knowledge, and resource extraction; materiality and the environment; or visualizations of agricultural and environmental justice. This session primarily seeks papers centered on historical material; however, scholarship on more recent art production will also be considered.

All proposals must be submitted by 11:59 pm EDT on April 1, 2020. 
Please submit abstracts of no more than 200 words through the submissions portal: https://secac.secure-platform.com/a

For more information about SECAC 2020 visit: https://secacart.org/page/Richmond

Please contact the session chairs with questions or ideas: Caroline Gillaspie (cgillaspiegradcenter.cuny.edu) and Michaela Rife ( michaela.rifemail.utoronto.ca)

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[2] Motivating Forces: Women in Arts Education

From: edj3bkvirginia.edu
Date: 4 Mar 2020

Historically, many women have participated in arts education efforts out of a desire to improve their communities. Exemplified by Adele Clark’s activism in Richmond in the twentieth century, women have often led the charge to utilize artistic activity to engage their fellow citizens, provide new forms of education, and offer unforeseen opportunities to earn an income. These well-intended endeavors occasionally have caused conflicts, not only with those opposed to their proposed changes, but also with the groups that they are meant to serve. This session will critically probe women’s roles in promoting and shaping arts education in their locales, including the ways in which assumptions about these communities may have informed or misguided their actions. It questions the relationship of these endeavors to local cultures and artistic traditions, as well as how these roles have changed over time. To promote an expansive discussion, the term “arts education” will be considered broadly, and papers from all geographical areas and historical periods are encouraged. Possible topics include: individual educational figures, within and outside of academies; social circles of artistic activity; patronage or formation of arts organizations; gendered distinctions between amateurism and professionalism; apprenticeship systems or industries; craft traditions and their “revivals”; and religious communities and spiritual and cultural practices.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 200 words by 11:59 pm EDT on April 1, 2020 through the submissions portal at: https://secac.secure-platform.com/a



For more information about SECAC 2020, please visit the conference page at: https://secacart.org/page/Richmond

For questions or more information about the panel, please contact Elyse Gerstenecker (edj3bkvirginia.edu)

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[3] Accessing TV: The Social and Aesthetic Possibilities of Public Access Television

From: Kara Carmack, kcarmackmisericordia.edu
Date: 5 Mar 2020

Chair: Kara Carmack, Misericordia University

The advent of public access television in the late 1960s and early 1970s across the United States meant unprecedented access to the airwaves at a time that was particularly charged with political and social upheavals. These channels offered a new means of communication beyond the hegemony of corporate directors, sponsors, and producers who regulated network television’s programming, as well as galleries and museums that controlled the available venues of the art world. For the first time, people were easily able to access the airwaves and make not just videos but television. Artists' embrace of public access television remains overlooked in art historical discourse, and this panel encourages the study of the vital transformative possibilities of the production, consumption, and distribution of artists' work. Given the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of many public access endeavors, artists, broadly defined, may include fine artists, poets, fashion designers, and writers. Studies that explore public access television projects in cities across the United States from the 1970s through today are welcome. Topics may address specific television shows and/or broad themes such as publics, access, media critique, parody, alternative distribution, social networks, performance, and connections to video art.

For more information about SECAC 2020, please visit the conference page at: https://secacart.org/page/Richmond

Please submit abstracts of no more than 200 words until 1 April 2020 through the submissions portal at: https://secac.secure-platform.com/a

Direct any questions to: Kara Carmack (kcarmackmisericordia.edu)