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Fostering strong scholarship and promoting collegiality within the vital field of contemporary art history.
Past Events
Highlights from SCAH’s past events, showcasing dynamic discussions, topical scholarship, and opportunities for connection within the contemporary art history community.
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.
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The Society of Contemporary Art Historians aims to foster strong scholarship and promote collegiality within the vital field of contemporary art history.
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