Modernism, Art, Therapy
Coedited by Suzanne Hudson (Associate Professor, University of Southern California) and Tanya Sheehan (William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art, Colby College)

Histories of modern art have had little to say about art therapy, despite its widespread practice in the United States and Europe, where it emerged out of psychology and progressive education in the early twentieth century. Indeed, creative art making and viewing came to be commonplace in hospitals, clinics, community centers, and prisons, fueled by a belief in the transformational power of art for psychological diagnosis and healing.

Modernism, Art, Therapy will be the first book to explore the rich conversations between the therapies associated with these extra-artistic spaces and the modernisms that visual arts developed in the Americas and Europe across the twentieth century. As coeditors of the volume, we seek essays that offer critical perspectives grounded in art history and engage with interdisciplinary questions informed by medical and health humanities, disability studies, critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, or related fields. Essays are expected to foreground innovative questions and methods that resonate beyond a single case study, even when they are grounded thusly. Authors may wish to address the visual language, concepts, and theories shared by art therapy and modernist practices; conceptions of modernism as therapeutic in popular and fine-artistic discourses; modernist artists’ own encounters with art therapy in clinical settings; or art therapy’s entry into the spaces of modernism, including the art museum and gallery.

We invite interested contributors to propose original essays of 5000-6000 words (including endnotes) by submitting all of the following to Dr. Suzanne Hudson (sphudsonusc.edu) and Dr. Tanya Sheehan (tsheehancolby.edu) by September 15, 2021:
- essay title and abstract (not to exceed 250 words)
- a brief statement indicating how the proposed essay related to your current research projects
- current CV
- a short professional bio (not to exceed 150 words)

Selected contributors will then be asked to submit their essays to the coeditors for review by September 1, 2022. We anticipate final publication of the volume by an academic press in 2023.