Beyond Boundaries: Seeing Art History from the Caribbean.

What yield is there for art history to engage with the Caribbean—a region that has remained peripheral to the field yet has always existed beyond its disciplinary boundaries? It is the polyvalent and polyphonic nature of the Caribbean, from the nation state to political economy and to artistic production itself that sustains its long history of intellectual production, and its challenge against Western conceptions of modernity.
The development of Caribbean intellectual thought instructs us from the plantation to anti-slavery discourse and decolonization, from transculturation to creolization to the very concept of what constitutes the human. Why has art history—a discipline often defined by its relationship with shifting terrains of theoretical critique and analysis—been slow to engage with Caribbean writers and thinkers, to take seriously their multidisciplinary, multi-theoretical, and multi-lingual voices?

This conference asks what a deep engagement with the nuances of Caribbean intellectual thought could mean for art history. When informed by new, interpretive methodologies that actively build and sustain the promise and possibilities of freedom and alternative forms of value, what could this offer to the field of art history? How might the discipline at this critical juncture, sustained by the interpretive possibilities of relationality and the poetics of form, not simply respond to these voices, but change tactics? How can this help us to rethink the configurations and contradictions that form within art history? How can it compel a refashioning of the field?

PROGRAM:

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2022,
MANTON AUDITORIUM, CLARK ART INSTITUTE

9:00 am WELCOME
Caroline Fowler, Research and Academic Program, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

9:10 am INTRODUCTION
Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
Wayne Modest, National Museum of World Cultures, Wereldmuseum, Rotterdam

ON SEEING WITH AND THROUGH THE CARIBBEAN
9:45 am SESSION 1
Tessa Mars, Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, the Netherlands in conversation with Marcel Pinas, Paramaribo, Suriname

10:45 am DISCUSSION
11:15 am COFFEE BREAK at MANTON READING ROOM

11:30 am SESSION 2
“200 Loas, 200 Nations, and the Haitian Revolution: Towards an Art/Historical Biography of Andre Pierre”
Anthony Bogues, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

“Of Art and Spirit: Sacred Practice in Caribbean Contemporary Art”
Yanique Hume, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados

12:30 pm DISCUSSION
1:00 pm LUNCH BREAK
(Café 7 on the lower level of the Clark Center is open 10:00 am–3:00 pm)

(ART) HISTORIES
2:00 pm SESSION 3
“Beyond Vodou Iconography: Luce Turnier, a Feminist Modernist in Haiti”
Jerry Philogene, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania

“The Aesthetic Theory of the Postcolonial Nation: Barrington Watson’s Visual Modernism”
David Scott, Columbia University, New York City, New York

Watch interview with patricia kaersenhout in preparation for this panel

3:00 pm DISCUSSION
3:30 pm COFFEE BREAK at MANTON READING ROOM

4:00 PM SESSION 4
“A Caribbean Cannibalist under the Floridian Sun”
María Elena Ortiz, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas

“Heroic Sculpture in Contemporary Caribbean Practice”
Petrina Dacres, Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts, Kingston, Jamaica

“Criticism as Creation: The Political Aesthetics of Black Ecstasy in Multimodal Caribbean Art”
Erica Moiah James, University of Miami Florida, Coral Gables, Florida

5:30 pm DISCUSSION
6:30 pm PUBLIC RECEPTION at MANTON READING ROOM

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2022
MANTON AUDITORIUM, CLARK ART INSTITUTE

9:00 am WELCOME
Caroline Fowler, Research and Academic Program, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

CARIBBEAN AS CRITIQUE
9:05 am SESSION 5
“Artist Talk”
Charl Landvreugd, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

“Queer-ing Art Methods and Practices: Caribbean Potentialities”
Andil Gosine, University of York, Toronto, Canada

10:05 am DISCUSSION
10:30 am COFFEE BREAK at MANTON READING ROOM

11:00 am SESSION 6
“‘What loveliness escapes the schools’: Carifesta’s Epistemological Critique”
Adrienne Rooney, Rice University, Houston, Texas

“Some Strategies for Rethinking Caribbean Art Histories”
Veerle Poupeye, Kingston, Jamaica

12:00 pm DISCUSSION
12:30 pm LUNCH BREAK
(Café 7 on the lower level of the Clark Center is open 10:00 am–3:00 pm)

1:30 pm SESSION 7
T.B.D.
Paul Goodwin, University of the Arts, London, UK

“John Dunkley’s Photographic Eye: A Close Look at Banana Plantation”
Nicole Smythe-Johnson, University of Texas at Austin

“The Archipelagic Method: A Model for Complexifying Latinx & Photography Art History”
Aldeide Delgado, Women Photographers International Archive, Miami, Florida

3:00 pm DISCUSSION
3:30 pm COFFEE BREAK at MANTON READING ROOM

4:00 pm SESSION 8
“Intertidal Imaginaries: The Resistant Geographies of the Shore(coast) in the Aftermath of Saltwater(storm) Surges”
Deborah Jack, New Jersey City University, Jersey City, New Jersey

“From the Forest to the Concrete to the Ocean: Mapping a Poetics of Eco-Criticism in Caribbean and Diasporic Visual Art Practices”
Daniella Rose King, Hyundai Tate Research Center: Transnational, London, UK

View interview with Andrea Chung in preparation for this panel.

5:00 pm CLOSING DISCUSSION
6:00 pm PUBLIC RECEPTION at MANTON READING ROOM