[1] Sculpture, Site, and Space: Objects and Environments in Germany, Scandinavia, and Central Europe
From: James van Dyke, vandykejmissouri.edu
Date: September 6, 2021
Deadline: September 16, 2021

Sponsored Session of the Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art and Architecture

Chair: Jacqueline Jung (Yale University)

From the ancient Jupiter Columns marking divine presence in Roman provincial settlements, to statues of notable men that glorified the military and political exploits of the past, to abstract memorials to the victims of modern mass atrocities, sculptural objects have long shaped people’s experience of public space, social relationships, historical consciousness, and sacred/mythical time across German-speaking lands, Scandinavia, and Central Europe. This session examines the manifold ways in which sculptural objects have harnessed meaning from, activated, and transformed the spaces around them, whether primarily through their formal aspects, their representational content, or their material presence.

The session casts a wide geographic and temporal view: topics might include large-scale, free-standing public works in urban settings or rural landscapes; works of immoveable architectural sculpture; objects made for distinct interior spaces, such as tomb effigies or altarpieces; or works in museums whose very dislocation, far from their point of origin, calls attention to the power of objects to both collapse spatial-temporal distances and reaffirm them.

The deadline for paper proposals is September 16, 2021. For instructions on how to submit a proposal, see: https://www.collegeart.org/programs/conference/proposals

To submit a proposal or ask a question, contact Jacqueline Jung at: jacqueline.jungyale.edu

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[2] Dissident Embodiments: Undoing Gender Binaries in Modern and Contemporary Art of the Americas
From: Gillian Sneed, gilliansneedgmail.com
Date: September 7, 2021
Deadline: September 16, 2021

Exploring the intersections between gender and coloniality, María Lugones has argued that a critique of modernity is incomplete without examining the relationship between gender, violence, and resistance. Artists have also marshalled the non-heteronormative body as a force for resisting what Kira Xonorika has described as the “necropolitical ‘cistem’,” or the ways that those who are marginalized within cis-gendered hegemonies are most precarious and vulnerable to violence. Building on these ideas, this panel aims to examine how modern and contemporary artists in the Americas who may identify, or who stand in solidarity with identities such as queer/cuir, gender fluid, nonbinary, pangender, two spirit, butch/femme, transgender, and more, have reflected on gender in the context of modern coloniality. Organized against the current backdrop of ongoing widespread oppression of trans and non-binary people across the Americas, including the rise in new legislative bills targeting transgender youth in the US and Latin America’s position as the epicenter of anti-trans violence, this panel seeks papers critiquing gender hegemonies in the Americas. It also welcomes papers proposing alternative possibilities within intersectional dissident embodiments, including those that speak to experiences of Indigeneity, the African Diaspora, and disability. Proposals could address artists working in traditional media, or other media like performance or participatory art, as well as the practices of writers, critics, and curators that address these themes. They might also engage discourse around our current colonial, capitalist present in relation to theories on, but not limited to, masculinities/femininities, “travesti” subjectivities, abjection, Tropicamp, disidentification, and queer futurities.

Send proposals directly to session Chairs via the emails listed below (CAA membership required for participation).

Chairs:
Gillian Sneed, San Diego State University - gilliansneedgmail.com
Florencia San Martin, California State University, San Bernardino florenciasanmartinriutortgmail.com

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[3] (inappropriate) digital intimacies
From: Francesca Balboni, fbalboniutexas.edu
Date: September 7, 2021
Deadline: September 16, 2021

This session takes its title and ethos from Barbara Browning’s 2017 metafictional novel, The Gift (Or, Techniques of the Body). The narrator/protagonist Barbara revels in seizing “inappropriate intimacies:” replying to junk email with heartfelt sincerity, spamming strangers with cover songs on ukulele, developing an intense relationship with a man online, of whose veracity she can never be sure. Browning’s character and this friend collaborate on dance videos, her hands moving to music and voicemail that he had created—“digital intimacies,” twice-over. The reader engages these through description and black and white screen-captures, but is also invited to view them on Vimeo. In this way, Browning redoubles her effort for radical forms of stranger intimacy online and the possibility of virtual touch, with gifts that disrupt logics of capital and heteronormative patriarchy, as well as the bounds between “reality” and “fiction.”

In the pandemic, causal and erotically-charged interactions with strangers IRL stuttered and shifted. More of social life occurs online, and it is likely to remain that way to some degree. This panel invites case studies and theoretical meditations that address the risky potential of “digital intimacies” with strangers, intentional or inadvertent, realized or imagined. Topics might include: dispersed forms of social practice, apps and sites like Tik Tok, OnlyFans, and Chatroulette, the roles of humor and play in addressing strangers, and embodied interactions through “virtual” technologies. Artists are invited to present their work. We encourage intersectional and/or global approaches, as well as non-traditional presentations.

Please send CAA's official proposal form, along with a CV and documentation of work, if appropriate, to fbalboniutexas.edu by Thursday, September 16, 2021.

Decisions will be sent on Thursday, September 23.

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[4] New Perspectives in Art, Design, and Art History: Supporting and Showcasing Emerging Voices from Marginalized Communities
From: Stefanie Snider
Date: September 8, 2021
Deadline: September 16, 2021

Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Committee on Diversity Practices

Panel co-chairs: Stefanie Snider, Kendall College of Art and Design and Rachel Lynn de Cuba, Clemson University
Email Address(s): snider.stefaniegmail.com, rdecubaclemson.edu

In considering ways to support and develop students and emerging scholars and practitioners from marginalized communities, the CAA Committee on Diversity Practices panel for 2022 seeks contributions from undergraduate students, graduate students, and early career artists/ designers/ scholars on a wide range of creative and research topics. We hope to uplift and showcase innovative work created by Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and Pacific Islander, and additional People of Color, disabled/ chronically ill/ neurodiverse people, LGBTQIA+ and gender non-conforming people, people from the Global South, and others whose backgrounds have historically been absented, neglected, and/or overlooked in the academic and arts professions. For this committee, diversity denotes the recognition and embrace of human difference, both individually and socially. Equity focuses on fairness, justice, and the creation of opportunities for all people to excel in their chosen paths. Inclusion centers and prioritizes historically marginalized community members in the arts professions.
Presentation topics can be on any aspect of art, design, and/or art/design history; work that incorporates the positionality of the presenter is welcomed. For those undergraduate or graduate students seeking mentorship in the process of organizing a CAA presentation, Committee on Diversity Practices members are happy to volunteer their time to work together toward your goals for this 2022 CAA panel; please indicate if this is desired in your abstract submission. Undergraduate students, graduate students, and early career artists/ designers/ scholars who have never presented and/or attended CAA are especially encouraged to apply.

The process to submit a proposal is described here: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2022/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html?fbclid=IwAR3RZ71HFvDR8CAaHRyxaATDLXAX3DSUDl3V8yrBL8wTzwGX9uNgp1Zehm0

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[5] Move Along! Prefabrication, Placemaking and Precarious Housing
From: Adrian Anagnost, aanagnostulane.edu
Date: September 8, 2021
Deadline: September 16, 2021

Chairs:
Adrian Anagnost, Tulane University
Jesse Lockard, University of Chicago and Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz

Email Address(s):
aanagnostulane.edu
jesse.lockardkhi.fi.it
Link: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2022/webprogrampreliminary/Session9146.html

Histories of architectural prefabrication highlight two primary trajectories. Techno-enthusiasts promote the potential for flat-packed designer dwellings to revolutionize modern life. Historians focused on market forces highlight the role of factory-built houses in providing affordable, permanent homes for millions. This panel addresses a third, lesser-told history of prefabrication, imbricated in material realities of war, colonial campaigns, environmental transformation, and housing insecurity. We examine structures made to be moved from factory to site but designed to allow movement to continue. Ease of assembly and reassembly, mobility, de-mountability, and swift construction by low-skilled laborers, were—and remain—characteristics of built environments such as military encampments, colonizing outposts, disaster response zones, and temporary agricultural settlements. Often, the refugees, soldiers, or migrant workers who inhabit these structures are expected to remain on the move, to avoid making a site their home. This panel explores the politics and poetics of prefabricated placemaking. We ask: how does this lens make visible understudied populations and historical events? How can studying the impermanent presence of structures in a landscape foreground the aesthetics of site for architectural history? How has the inherent dislocation of movable architecture challenged historiography, theory and canon, beyond agitations of celebrated vanguardists? We solicit papers mining this critical vein of architectural history from any methodological angle. In recognition of the objects’ inherent movability, as well as the transnational character of the violence and crises in which these design practices are enmeshed, we set no geographical or chronological bounds on research.

Key Dates:
By September 16, send proposals directly to session Chair(s) via the email(s) listed with the selected session abstract.
By September 23, Chairs will finalize their sessions, inform participants via email invitation, and add accepted presenters to their session entry.
Upon acceptance, presenters must join and or keep CAA memberships current through March 5 (you may apply with a non-member ID). Only members can be added to a Session.

To submit, gather the following and send via email to the chair(s) listed before September 16, 2021.
Completed proposal form (click to download).
A shortened CV (close to 2 pages).

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[6] Beyond Transfer and Revival: Narrative Creativity in Medieval Italian Mural Decoration (11th–13th c.)
From: Armin Bergmeier, armin.bergmeieruni-leipzig.de
Date: September 9, 2021
Deadline: September 19, 2021

The period 1000–1250 saw vibrant artistic and intellectual creativity in medieval Italian wall paintings and mosaics. Large-format narrative sequences were deployed in new ways to elevate viewers spiritually, perform exegesis, shape communal identity, teach history and theology, and display power. Authors and artists offered sophisticated theorizations of the aesthetic, affective, and communicative capacities of images. While some sequences drew on existing models, notably the paintings and mosaics that accrued to Old St. Peter’s, many more were ad hoc creations, mixing old and new motifs, styles, and artistic strategies to generate distinctive compositions intended for specific spaces, sites, and purposes. The historical and conceptual weight of Rome (then as now) and the natural coherence of pictorial recensions versus the heterogeneity of unaffiliated narrative sequences has resulted in a historiographical privileging of passive transfers and revivals over discrete acts of artistic and patronal creative agency. This panel seeks to reset that balance.
Narrative creativity played out in the development of new iconographies, narrative structures, and framing systems, and in the reimagining and repurposing of old ones. New pictorial strategies were generated for new architectural forms and spatio-liturgical arrangements; Byzantine decorative practices were integrated with Latin architecture and vice versa. Collective analyses generally cluster by iconography, region, or artisans; we seek instead to bring together papers underscoring how creativity manifested itself in discrete monuments, whether well-known, like Santa Maria in Cosmedin or Sant’Angelo in Formis, or deserving of greater fame, like San Tommaso ad Acquanegra sul Chiese or San Calocero in Civate.

Please send proposals for presentations of 15–20 minutes to alison.perchukcsuci.edu and armin.bergmeieruni-leipzig.de. A complete proposal comprises an abstract of 200–250 words and a CV. Those whose proposals are accepted will need to become members of the Italian Art Society and the College Art Association, and will need to register for the conference. The conference will be held online on Zoom. The language of the conference is English.