Past Events
2024
A Guide to Academic Publishing in American Art and other Peer-Reviewed Journals
Robin Veder, Executive Editor of American ArtMonday, May 20, 2024 • 12:30–2 PM ET • Zoom
When you want to share your scholarship, it’s important to think about where to publish. Led by Robin Veder, Executive Editor of American Art, this workshop is about how to select the best journal for your work so that your article is a good fit for the venue and so you can reach the audiences that are important to you.
Topics may include developing a first draft, searching for appropriate publications, and working on revisions following peer review, among other things. The workshop will include time for attendees to ask questions on specific topics of interest.
Robin Veder is the Executive Editor of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s peer-reviewed journal for art history scholarship. She has published extensively on transatlantic art history, visual culture, history of the body and landscape studies. Her book, The Living Line: Modern Art and the Economy of Energy (2015), illuminates connections among the histories of modern art, body cultures and physiological aesthetics in early-20th-century American culture. Before joining the museum’s staff, Veder was a tenured associate professor of humanities, art history and visual culture (2010–2016) and assistant professor (2004–2010) at Penn State University, Harrisburg. She received her bachelor’s degree from San Francisco State University (1991), and her master’s degree (1995) and doctorate (2000) in American studies from the College of William and Mary.
Fugitive Ecologies in Contemporary Art
2024 College Art Association Annual Conference
Chair: Allison K. Young, Louisiana State University
Saturday, February 17, 2024 • 3–5 PM
Hilton Chicago • 8th Floor – Lake Ontario
For historian Sarah L. Lincoln, the term “fugitive ecology” describes a range of subaltern relationships to the land, soil, and planet enacted in response to conditions of alienation and dispossession. As she indicates, fugitivity not only suggests “modes of being, knowing, and acting on the run, perpetually mobile, lacking a legal or official relationship to place” but also “oppositionality to a system predicated on the ‘fixing’ of bodies.” Yet even under the duress caused by the tangible spatial violence of enslavement, apartheid, colonization, reservations, prisons or plantations, such transgressive practices of tending the earth have persisted as strategies of both resilience and care.
This panel asks how “fugitive ecologies” have been proposed or theorized by contemporary artists, particularly in the wake of climate catastrophe. It considers the many resonances of the “wake” offered by Christina Sharpe – as visible disturbance, as a view towards the past, as openness of mind, or care in mourning – which are made manifest amidst present ecological breakdown.
Responding to environmental crises of industrial, nuclear, and colonial origin, artists have served as documentarians and activists, gardeners and radical botanists, and community archivists. What possibilities for decolonizing our relationship to nature are envisioned or demonstrated in contemporary art? How have artists drawn from alternative, Indigenous and subaltern onto-epistemologies when engaging with natural materials or landscape representations? How have artists responded to the collapse of world systems in the wake of the pandemic - alongside calls to action on the fronts of climate change and social justice?
Papers
Invasive Species: Nonbelonging and Utopia in Flaka Haliti’s ‘Maybe I Ate It?’ • Andrew Hennlich, Western Michigan University
Distance and Risk: Chim↑Pom & Finger Pointing Worker • Jason Waite, University of Oxford
Shadow Worlds: Plotting Alternative Futures for the Earth • Kate Keohane, University of Oxford
How to Improve the World Through Vulnerable Listening • Brianne Cohen, University of Colorado at Boulder
2023
Generative Pedagogies: Art, Activist, and Curatorial Practices
SCAH RoundtableIzabel Galliera and Noni Brynjolson with Erin McCutcheon and Szabolcs KissPal
Friday, December 1, 2023 • 2–3:30 pm ET • Zoom
Focusing on intersections between art, activism, and pedagogy, this roundtable is intended to spark conversation around an in-progress edited book project titled Generative Pedagogies. Since the 1960s and 1970s, pedagogical approaches have been increasingly adopted by a number of contemporary practitioners operating at the intersections of art, activism, art history, education, and the socio-political realm, with the goal of producing, disseminating, and activating critical and transformative forms of knowledge. Examples include Joseph Beuys’s Free International University for Creative and Interdisciplinary Research (FIU) in the 1970s; the work of the Guerrilla Girls and The Yes Men since the 1980s; and Tania Bruguera and Mel Chin in the 2000s. Academic attention, scholarship, and critical writing on this topic continues to grow, and the book aims to complement and expand upon this conversation.
Co-editors Izabel Galliera and Noni Brynjolson will speak with contributing authors Erin McCutcheon and Szabolcs KissPal about the historical, philosophical, and theoretical legacies of pedagogical art in activist movement and institutional practices. This roundtable is an opportunity to share research and develop ideas together. Attendees are invited to offer feedback and their own experiences in merging art, activism, and pedagogy.
Global Solidarities: Contemporary Art and Internationalism
2023 College Art Association Annual ConferenceChair: Aaron Katzeman, University of California Irvine
In 2021, a number of artists, curators, and cultural workers drafted the Art of Internationalism platform for Progressive International—a global coalition of left-wing activists and organizations reengaging internationalism for the 21st century —calling for artists to participate in "the craft of organizing transnational, planetary solidarities." While the manifesto is meant to influence future creative work, there is also an established internationalist inclination in contemporary art. From OSPAAAL's mass distribution of Third World solidarity posters, the 1974 Venice Biennale's united focus on Chile, the collaborative efforts initiated by Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America, and Decolonize This Place's recent action-oriented movements to Globalize the Intifada, artists have long played a vital role in imagining, producing, and enacting an anti-imperialist internationalist politics of decolonial liberation. Revisiting October's "Questionnaire on 'The Contemporary'" (2009) with the spirit of Art of Internationalism's revolutionary optimism, this roundtable invites contributions that consider contemporary practices engaging a politico-aesthetic internationalism, with particular attention to how place-based work speaks with and embraces similar movements elsewhere. Proposals from cultural workers outside or at the margins of the hegemonic art system are especially welcome. How can an internationalist focus trouble the consensus that contemporary art only went "global" in 1989, a designation often depoliticized in its function as explanatory timeframe? If such periodization too easily capitulates to economic globalization and liberal multiculturalism, might a return to internationalism rupture our most fundamental understandings of what constitutes and delineates the "global-ness" of contemporary art
Papers
Echos of Solidarity: Petar Lubarda’s “Industrialization” (1961), Vladimir Nikolić’s “The Communist Painting in The Age of Digital Reproduction” (2017), and Yugoslav Non-Alignment • Jessy L. Bell, Northwestern University
Artists Call, Solidarity, and the Problem of Critique in Contemporary Art • Erina Duganne, Texas State University—San Marcos
Biennial Solidarities: Internationalisms, Globalisms, Localisms, et al. • Paloma Checa-Gismero
Encounters in Video Art in Latin America
SCAH Members-Only EventHosted by Vuk Vuković, with Elena Shtomberg and Glenn Phillips
Tuesday, March 7, 2023 • 3–4:30 PM ET • Zoom
Focusing on their practice of curating and writing on video art from Latin America, Elena Shtomberg, associate professor of art history at the University of Utah, and Glenn Phillips, senior curator of modern and contemporary collections and head of exhibitions at the Getty Research Institute, will discuss their recent co-edited volume, Encounters in Video Art in Latin America. This volume approaches the subject thematically in a sequence of essays and interviews, presenting video art from different periods and regions of Latin America. In addition, Vuković will speak with Shtomberg and Phillips about their robust research ranging from visits with artists, curators, and scholars in Latin America, to organizing several groundbreaking events since 2013, like Video Art in Latin America at LAXART (September 16–December 16, 2017) as part of Getty’s city-wide art initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA.
This event followed the presenentation of Encounters in Video Art in Latin America at the 2023 College Art Association Annual Conference.
2022
Semi-peripheries of Contemporary Art: Sarah-Neel Smith and Jacob Stewart-Halevy in Conversation
SCAH ProgramApril 1, 2022
A dual book talk and conversation between Jacob Stewart-Halevy (Tufts University, author of Slant Steps: On the Art World’s Semi-Periphery, 2020) and Sarah-Neel Smith (Maryland Institute College of Art, author of Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey, 2022), moderated by Natilee Harren (University of Houston). The authors will introduce their new books and discuss methodological parallels between their two projects, centered on divergent geographies but drawing from similar sociological and economic discourses of semi-peripheral development in the twentieth century. Their respective projects offer new pathways for charting the emergent terrain of global contemporary art.
Curating Video Art: Past, Present, and Future
SCAH Program
Hosted by Vuk Vuković and Ellen TaniNovember 2022 • Zoom
A conversation with Barbara London, founder of the video exhibition and collection programs at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and Glenn Phillips, senior curator of modern and contemporary collections and head of exhibitions at the Getty Research Institute, on their practices of curating video art since the emergence of video art in 1960s to current practices of organizing internationally acclaimed exhibitions of video art.
The discussion centered on London’s work as a curator of video during the medium’s infancy at MoMA, and Phillips’s current work on video, in particular his upcoming publication, Encounters in Video Art in Latin America, which is set for release in February 2023. In addition, the program addressed questions related to the acquisition, display, and conservation of time-based media, its reception by different generations, and its ties to ongoing technological developments.
Un-CAA Panel: Fighting Back to Reclaim Institutions
2022 College Art Association Annual Conference • Free Public Conversation
Organized by John Tyson and Anna Mecugni, with panelists Nic Aziz, Tatiana Flores, Pablo Helguera, and Christine Y. KimThursday, March 3, 2022 • 3:15 PM ET • Zoom
Over the past decade, layers of capitalist exploitation have continued to shape the ethos of the contemporary art-industrial complex, perpetuating its economic and racial inequities; nonetheless, artists and other art workers have been fighting back with increasing coordination and success. Key moments in these struggles have been the founding of Black Lives Matter and Decolonize this Place; more recently, the coronavirus pandemic outbreak and the viral video of George Floyd’s murder have further precipitated the urgent need to effect more ethical, sustainable communities. While institutional leaders’ responses to financial uncertainty and social unrest have been mixed, often prioritizing profit over equity in academia, museums, and other art organizations, art workers have mobilized in remarkable ways, comparable to the civil rights era. For instance, recent years have seen important revisions and a rethinking of museums’ purpose as well as a heightened sense of accountability to diverse publics. Thus, there have been calls for the resignation of leadership and board members, staff unionization, discrimination lawsuits, and artists removing their works from display in acts of solidarity.
The Society of Contemporary Art Historians’ un-CAA panel brings together Nic Aziz, Tatiana Flores, Pablo Helguera, and Christine Y. Kim to reflect on recent dynamics and share their experiences navigating our present neoliberal waters through different channels, in order to explore the field’s systemic crises alongside viable, collectivist modes of resistance, such as distributed self-organizing, resource sharing, and mutual-aid networks.
This panel is organized by Anna Mecugni, University of New Orleans, and John A. Tyson, University of Massachusetts - Boston.
Panelists
Nic Aziz, New Orleans Museum of Art
Tatiana Flores, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
Pablo Helguera, New School; formerly Museum of Modern Art, NY
Christine Y. Kim, Tate Modern
Curating Biennials: The Politics of Mediation
SCAH ProgramOrganized by Paloma Checa-Gismero, featuring Elia Alba, Lauren Mackler, and Renata Cervetto
February 1, 2022
2020
Toward an Anti-Racist Contemporary Art History
SCAH ProgramOctober 6, 2020
Meriem Bennani & Orian Barki in Conversation with Marisa Olson: Art In and About a Pandemic
SCAH Members-Only ProgramJune 12, 2020
This discussion followed a screening of episodes 1 and 3 of the “2 Lizards” series.
Kirsten Swenson and Rebecca Uchill on Nancy Holt’s Dark Star Park (1984)
SCAH Members-Only ProgramApril 3, 2020