---
[1] Reframing Fashion Photography: Between the Magazine Page and the Gallery Wall.

From: Sasha Whittaker, whittakerprinceton.edu.
Date: July 23, 2024.

Fashion photography, a genre often relegated to the margins of photographic history, has played a central role in cultural and economic systems since it began replacing drawn illustration in the late nineteenth century. In recent years it has occupied a prominent place in museums, and its growing visibility on gallery walls heightens the need for new scholarship on the genre. While Nancy Hall-Duncan’s The History of Fashion Photography (1978) remains a touchstone, more recent surveys have expanded Duncan’s account (Martineau, ed., Icons of Style, 2018; Aletti, Issues, 2019) and highlighted the work that remains to be done, including research into individual photographers and broader methodological reflections. This panel will question how we define “fashion photography,” taking an expansive view of what fashion photographs achieve. While commonly defined in terms of its purpose to sell clothes, fashion photography advertises aspirational lifestyles, proclaims what it means for people or things to be desirable, and reifies conceptions of gender. This session invites contributions from any period or region to examine fashion photography's roles within photographic history, fashion history, and the history of modern art.

Topics may include:
• Fashion photography’s many formats, including exhibition prints and illustrated periodicals
• The reception of historic fashion photographs
• Gender, desire, and queer theory in fashion photography
• Fashion photography’s construction of racial identities
• Rethinking authorship and researching collaborative practices
• Global, transnational, or decolonial histories of fashion photography
• The impact of current media platforms and image-making technology upon contemporary fashion photography.

Submission: Please submit abstracts (250 words max) and a brief CV (2 pages) through CAA’s site: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2025/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html.

You are required to have a CAA account in order to submit a paper proposal, but you are not required to purchase CAA membership at this stage.

This session will be held on location at CAA in New York City. Please feel free to contact Sasha Whittaker (whittakerprinceton.edu) and Kaitlin Booher (kaitlin_boohermoma.org) with any questions.

---
[2] Indigenous Art Exhibitions In and Out of the Americas. Are We Learning to Listen?

From: Camilla Querin, cquerinowu.edu.
Date: July 23, 2024.

In 2006, Indigenous peoples occupied Rio de Janeiro’s abandoned Antigo Museu do Indio (Old Museum of the Indian) to turn it into an “aldeia” (village) where they could transmit their living cultures. In 2016, their efforts of expanding the notion of the museum resulted in eviction. Today, Indigenous artists are receiving unprecedented visibility in scholarly publications and mainstream international exhibitions, such as recent iterations of the Bienal de São Paulo, the Venice Biennale, and Whitney Biennial. The Pinacoteca de São Paulo and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, among others, have also featured the work of Indigenous artists and appointed Indigenous curators in temporary and permanent positions. This panel aims to collectively assess the impact of these Indigenous-focused projects in the practice of historians of art of the Americas. We invite proposals on current and historical exhibition and collection practices that feature Indigenous art, and on Indigenous-centered museological practices. Papers in this panel should ultimately address the questions: Are these exhibitions iterations of a fashion that surfaces periodically and is destined to fade in a couple of years? Are we finally learning to listen to the anti-colonial and decolonial practices that Indigenous artists engage with in their works? How can we contextualize and trace the trajectory of this current?

Proposed topics may include, but are not limited to:

- Exhibitions and collections of Indigenous art
- Indigenous perspectives on museum, exhibition, and collection practices
- Labeling of Indigenous art (e.g. popular, folk)
- Pre-colonial art
- Indigenismo
- Commercial galleries
- Global Indigenous art

Submission: Please submit your presentation title and abstract (250 words), and your CV through the CAA submission portal: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2025/webprogrampreliminary/Session14946.html.

Contact information:
Camilla Querin (cquerinowu.edu)
Paulina Pardo (paulina.pardocsulb.edu)

---
[3] Transgresoras: Mail Art and Messages.

From: Elena Shtromberg, e.shtrombergutah.edu.
Date: July 23, 2024.

This session focuses on Latinx and Latin American women-identifying artists who use the postal system to transgress a varied set of restrictions, ranging from gender expectations to authoritarian regimes and censorship. As a mode of artistic production that relies on the postal service for the circulation and exchange of artworks, a practice that reached its height in Latin America during the 1970s and 80s, mail art allowed artists in repressive societies to evade strict censorship measures and provided a platform for circulating their work and for political protest. While the male artists in the international Mail Art network are increasingly well-documented, the roles of women artists in this forum are often absent from existing accounts. This session therefore aims to explore the complexities and stakes of gender in mail art communiqués as well as other ways in which women artists constructed and critique mediated messages and systems of circulation and communication. For this session, we are looking for papers that address a broad range of topics related not only to Mail Art but the ways in which it influenced and is in dialogue with contemporary art. Of particular interest are artists who communicate messages through alternative networks of exchange.Topics to be explored may include artworks that engage: censorship and state control of communications media; authoritarian violence; gender constructions, feminisms and maternity; interconnectedness and community at a distance; art world and state bureaucracies; migration and family separation; the formation of queer communities; and decolonial ecological strategies.

Chairs: Zanna Gilbert and Elena Shtromberg.

Submission: Please submit your abstract here:
https://caa.confex.com/caa/2025/generalcontr/extra/index.cgi?username=14413&password=193392&EntryType=Session.

For questions about the panel please contact either Zanna Gilbert, ZGilbertgetty.edu, or Elena Shtromberg, e.shtrombergutah.edu.

---
[4] The Visual Culture of Festivals in Germany, Scandinavia, and Central Europe.

From: Michelle Oing, mkoingaya.yale.edu.
Date: July 22, 2024.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s foundational work on carnival has inspired countless studies on festivals around the world, and the idea of the world turned upside down. Though Bakhtin’s focus was on literature, much subsequent work on festivals has been produced by anthropologists, social historians, and theater historians, for whom the inversion of carnival provides a useful framework to consider myriad themes (social hierarchy, humor, reform, etc.).

But what makes a festival a festival? What is often most striking is their rich visual culture. In this panel we are interested in the idea of the festival broadly defined: gatherings religious or secular, parades, protests, organized events and spontaneous celebrations or revolts. From the elaborate ephemeral architecture of early modern royal entries, to Midsummer celebrations involving maypoles and bonfires, and the Krampusnacht parades of Austria and Central Europe, these festivals make full use of the visual impact of masks, puppets, floats, costumes, automata, and the manipulation of architectural and/or natural spaces. Ephemeral live events, records of festivals also often survive only in visual form, whether in photography, painting, engraving, or other forms of visual record-keeping. This panel seeks papers that consider the highly visual and spatial aspects of the festival in Germany, Scandinavia, and Central Europe through an art historical lens.

We welcome submissions that blend art historical and other theoretical approaches in order to explore what the tools of art history can bring to the study of the festivals from this region, from antiquity to the present. This session is sponsored by the HGSCEA (Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art).

Submission: Please send proposals (title and 250-word maximum abstract) and your CV to:
Michelle Oing (Yale Institute of Sacred Music): mkoingaya.yale.edu.

If you are a current CAA member, please include your CAA member number with your proposal.

---
[5] Gender, Sexuality, and Non-Pristine Nature in Northern European Art and Material Culture, ca. 1350 -1750.

From: Anna-Claire Powell Stinebring and Sarah Mallory, smallorythemorgan.org.
Date: July 22, 2024.

How might waste studies (or discard studies), as an emerging strain within eco-critical methodologies, be put into productive conversation with (eco)feminist and queer theory? Such a question is apt in the context of early modern northern European art and material culture, born from an age in which the adage “cleanliness is next to godliness” had a particular resonance: close observation of nature was for artists a spiritual practice, which in turn spurred them to explore new methods for depicting their world, including mundane or unseemly details. This panel will examine notions of gender, sexuality, and non-pristine nature to shed new light on the construction—or playfully subversive deconstruction—of normative social hierarchies in early modern Northern European art and material culture. We build on the work of Mary Douglas, Donna Haraway, Carolyn Merchant and on recent scholarship, including: Francesca Borgo and Ruth Ezra (Wastework conference and edited volume); Emma Capron (The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance); Lauren Jacobi and Daniel Zolli (Contamination and Purity in Early Modern Art and Architecture); and Vittoria Di Palma (Wastelands: A History). Relevant topics include: gender in depictions of purity and contamination; wastelands; urban or domestic environments; purity in the colonial context; and contemporary curatorial responses. We welcome papers on all artforms and material culture produced in, or in connection with, the Northern Netherlands, Southern Netherlands, or Germany between the l4th and 18th centuries.

Submission: Please send a proposal and CV to Sarah Mallory (smallorythemorgan.org) and Anna-Claire Stinebring (Anna-Claire.Stinebringmetmuseum.org) by August 29th.

---
[6] Trajectivity in Art: Toward a Horizontal Art History of Styles.

From: Julie Codell, julie.codellasu.edu.
Date: July 22, 2024.

We call styles grouped by artists “movements,” but where do styles go? Art historians constrict movements to “centers” (e.g., Paris, New York) and time periods. Considering styles’ movements in a horizontal art history, we can discover how styles’ canonicity, materiality, their artists’ reputations and their market values are transformed across borders, oceans and continents. “Trajectivity” can mean orientation toward (Paul Virilio): artists often orient their styles toward permanence, popularity, universality and transcendence. It may mean deraciné, ungroundedness (John Rajchman). In a horizontal art history challenging the center-periphery binary and provincializing “centers,” “peripheral” artists can transmute, de-and re-territorialize and re-invent styles through their local conventions; peripheries are not passive recipients of styles but recreate them, denying the essentialism and universality ascribed to European styles presumably grounded in centers (Piotr Piotrowski): The Metropolitan Museum’s “Surrealism Beyond Borders” (2021-22) covering 45 countries and 80 years exhibited Surrealisms that absorbed local visual idioms beyond Europe. Possible questions for this panel are (but not limited to):

1. How do styles’ meanings, or market values, or histories, or significations or authority change when styles cross borders?
2. What art events (exhibitions, biennales) stimulate styles’ mobility?
3. When centers are provincialized, what happens to “universality” and “transcendence” ascribed to centers’ styles?
4. Do new traits from places they traverse adhere to styles?
5. Do reputations of artists associated with centers change when styles migrate?
6. What agency do artworks have to transform styles when introduced into "centers" or “peripheries”?
7. How can critical museums display and exhibit styles’ cultural exchange transformations?
8. Do political events—colonialism, war, emigration—affect styles’ transmissions and transformations?

Keywords:
1. Geographica Area: Western and Central Europe.
1. Geographica Area: Asia.
1. Geographica Area: Latin America.
Time Period: Eighteenth Century to Present.
Topics: Global.

Submission: Submit 250-word abstract and 2-page CV by Aug 29, 2024 to CAA website submission form https://caa.confex.com/caa/2025/webprogrampreliminary/Session14196.html.

---
[7] How do you throw a brick through the window...: Expanding Publics and Embodiments.

From: Laurel McLaughlin, laurel.mclaughlintufts.edu.
Date: July 22, 2024.

“How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?” is a radical yet non-rhetorical question posed by writer, artist, astrologer, and disabled non-binary Korean-American activist Johanna Hedva. Hedva’s 2016 essay continues, questioning Hannah Arendt’s assumption of the public street as the de-facto site for civic action and able-bodied action as the singular mode of protest. Writing from their bed, Hedva demands recognition of disabled advocacy from the margins of society—a state enforced under the U.S. capitalist medical industrial complex.
A current research initiative, occurring from 2024–2026, How do you throw a brick through the window... comprises a symposium, artist-led workshops, and exhibitions, co-organized by Tufts University Art Galleries and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center exploring forms of embodiment within sculpture, installation, new media, and performance informed by disabled, cripped, sick, mad, and healing frameworks. These methodologies consider expanded notions of public space and embodiment.
Building upon this research premise, this session calls arts workers, artists, archivists, organizers, curators, and academics to offer papers engaging disabled forms of protest within grass-roots Internet-based projects; circulating publishing initiatives; and care-giving collective work. “How do you throw a brick through the window... : Expanding Publics and Embodiments” ultimately posits questions such as: what public spaces remain unconsidered and how might reconsideration open new avenues of advocacy and protest? How might innovation or technological advancement help or hinder the development of cooperative and accessible space? How do disabled communities provide models for collective world-building?

Submission: Please send proposals (title, 250-word maximum abstract, optional images (up to 5), and CAA number) and your 2-page CV to: Laurel V. McLaughlin (laurel.mclaughlintufts.edu) and Tanya Gayer (tgayerjmkac.org).

To submit visit: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2025/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html. Chairs will notify applications directly of their decision by September 16, 2024.

---
[8] Presenting Contemporary Art in Museums, ca. 1880-1930: Temporary Exhibitions, Institutional Networks and Collecting.

From: Ulrike Müller, ulrike.mulleruantwerpen.be.
Date: July 22, 2024.

In recent historical narratives of the market for and collecting of modern and contemporary art, little attention has been given to the proliferation of temporary–often travelling–exhibitions held in museums since the late nineteenth century. These exhibitions include shows organized by institutions labelling themselves as “museums” but lacking collections, thus functioning more as “kunsthalle” (like the “Museum of French Art” in New York, established in 1911), or public galleries later rebranded as “museums” (such as the Buffalo AKG Art Museum).
This session seeks to investigate the phenomenon of temporary exhibitions of contemporary art held in museums in Europe and the Americas between approximately 1880 and 1930:
- What role did museum exhibitions play in stimulating demand for contemporary art? What was the relationship between collecting patterns and these exhibitions?
- How did civic and other types of public support for the arts and commercial interests interrelate (or even compete) in these initiatives?
- Which types of artworks, genres, styles, and artists were featured in these exhibitions, and what were their intended audiences (and did they attract)?
- What national and international networks were cultivated and developed by these practices and institutional actors? How did these museum-based initiatives compare to exhibitions and networks tied to commercial galleries, artists’ associations, etc.?
We particularly encourage case studies that reflect on the ways in which these exhibitions shaped the profiles, collections, and future development of the museums – as well as institutional relationships to this past.

Chairs: Ulrike Müller (University of Antwerp/Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels) and Anne Helmreich (Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). Session sponsored by the Society for the History of Collecting.

Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words and a brief CV via the CAA session page https://caa.confex.com/caa/2025/webprogrampreliminary/Session14251.html by August 29, 2024.

---
[9] The Form of the Thing: Word and Image and the Scholar.

From: Tilo Reifenstein, t.reifensteinyorksj.ac.uk.
Date: July 22, 2024.

The complexities and contingent nature of the word-and-image relations of artistic and literary practices are frequent subjects of (inter)disciplinary inquiry. Yet, the scholarship responding to such works rarely explores and investigates its own potential as and participation in verbo-visual productions. On the contrary, it asserts a classificatory difference between scholarly and creative ‘uses’ of words and pictures. The formality of scholarship submits, at least tacitly, to a formless neutrality of language and images whose workings may be contained. Yet, the proximity or overlap of the work of artists and scholars is not only integral to the forty-year history of artistic research within art schools, but has also been explored theoretically within different disciplinary settings. Hence, Hayden White lamented the historian’s ‘lack of linguistic self-consciousness’ (1978) if they failed to acknowledge the similarity between their work and the poet’s. Jaś Elsner, similarly, planted art-historical practice firmly in the purview of poetry, literature or fiction, though be it ‘fiction with footnotes’ (2010). More broadly, Saidiya Hartman (2008) calls for ‘critical fabulation’ to write against the limitations of existing histories.

The session seeks to explore scholarly work as a word-image practice that necessarily needs to negotiate the boundaries of visual and verbal production rather than, by default, appeal to formal conventions. Through case studies—perhaps of scholarship disguised as artist’s books, literary essays, experimental writing or conventional examples—or theoretical approaches, the imbrications of the form of scholarly practice with its content, as well as its methodological and ethical implications will come into focus.

Affiliated Society: International Association of Word and Image Studies.

Submission and key dates: 29 August: Deadline to submit your presentation title, 250-word proposal, 2-page CV (max) to the session using the “Submit an Abstract to this Session” button at https://caa.confex.com/caa/2025/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html.

Note that you’re required to have a CAA account, though membership is not required at this step. Please see the useful submission information offered at the above link.

16 September: Deadline for session chair to finalize session and inform submitters of decisions via email. Accepted submitters will receive an email to access their own SC after 25 September.

Please don’t hesitate to direct any queries to Tilo at: t.reifensteinyorksj.ac.uk.

---
[10] Artists and their Objects: The Material World of the Early Modern Artist.

From: Jesse Locker, lockerpdx.edu.
Date: July 22, 2024.

Inventories and testaments of early modern artists’ homes and visual representations of their studios show artists as surrounded by objects – not only tools for artistic creation but also luxury items, kitchen wares, clothing, and furniture. Art historians have tended to ignore these objects–even going so far as to edit them out of modern publications of inventories. But what do these objects signify about the artists who owned them, and what role did they play in artistic production? In paintings by Johannes Vermeer or Juan van der Hamen, for example, we can trace a single object, such as a bowl, a dress, candlestick, or a painting that the artist owned. Additionally, artists often possessed and traded objects such as plaster casts, birds’ wings, mannequins, wax figurines, costumes, and books. Artemisia Gentileschi, on the other hand, needed gilt leather hangings and high-quality furniture and dresses to make a “brilliant impression” upon her move to Rome. Claude Lorrain owned a harpsichord and had an unusually well stocked kitchen, with copper pots and fine majolica dishes. What are ways we can utilize inventories and testaments of artists as interpretive tools? What inside can we gain into the physical process of creating artworks in the early modern period? What can be gathered about the physical spaces in which artists lived and worked?

Topics might include (but are not limited to):
Artists as collectors and consumers
Artists’ materials
Artists’ homes/studios
Artists’ inventories
Paintings as records of artists’ possessions
Food/Consumption
Objects as a form of payment

Submission: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2025/webprogrampreliminary/Session14273.html.

---
[11] Women and Letters.

From: Isabel Mehl, isabel.mehlfu-berlin.de.
Date: July 22, 2024.

Women reading letters is a widespread motif in art history. In the 17th century, the motif was ubiquitous in Dutch painting, became erotically charged in the French Rococo period, and was taken up again in the 19th and 20th century by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri Matisse. Research has mainly focused on male artists depicting female (letter) readers whereas paintings by women artists depicting the same motif have not yet been researched (comparatively). This is surprising since women painters have employed the motif of the letter since the 19th century – prominent examples being Mary Cassatt’s "The Letter" (1890/1), Harriet Backers "Evening, Interior" (1896) or Charlotte Berend-Corinths "Self-portrait" (1941). In addition, the epistolary form as such has regained prominence in works by contemporary women artists working in different mediums, for instance, Sophie Calles installation "Prenez-soin de vous" (2007), Moyra Davey’s chromogenic prints "Subway Writers" (2011) or Nicole Tyson’s book "Dead Letter Men" (2015).

This session seeks to bring together scholars whose work addresses the epistolary as motif or form in works by women artists. Artists are also invited to contribute their perspective on this topic. We will discuss issues of class, gender and race in relation to these works. In bringing together current research from different geographical contexts and historical periods this session aims at uncovering the yet untold stories of woman and letters in the visual arts.

Submission: To submit visit: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2025/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html

Chairs will notify submitters directly of their decision by September 16, 2024

---
[12] Artists' Sanctuaries: Engaging with House Museums.

From: Carolyn Loeb, loebmsu.edu.
Date: July 22, 2024.

We welcome reflections on personal encounters as well as scholarly analyses of single artist house museums, which have proliferated in recent years within the landscape of museology. Both conversions of the artist’s own space and new, purpose-built structures at a site that may have been meaningful for that artist attract many different audiences, from the general public to scholars studying the artist’s archived works and documents. This session seeks to explore the complex interface between the potential intimacy of their settings, the impact of their architectural and design forms, and the social and cultural roles these institutions perform.

Among many other questions, we are interested in how these projects balance tensions among aims that might include preservation (of the building and its interior, as well as works of art), pilgrimage, place-making, tourism, scholarship, and cultural education regarding artworks, the artist’s life course, and context. What disposes a design installation to manifest the interiority of the artist, in contrast to one that more centrally contextualizes the artist and the site historically? Have recent re-thinkings of an artist’s works or career enabled new installation strategies? How in general have museological approaches to such sites changed over time? How are the potentially conflicting goals of maintaining the integrity of the historical, architectural character of a structure versus creating contemporary exhibition spaces resolved?

Contributions addressing these and related questions, including international and cross-cultural perspectives, by art and architectural historians, artists, architects, visual culture critics, and those working in other relevant fields are welcome.

Submission: Please send title, 250-word abstract, and 2-page CV to Carolyn Loeb (loebmsu.edu) and Andreas Luescher (alueschbgsu.edu). Chairs will notify submitters of their decision by September 16, 2024.