Fostering strong scholarship and promoting collegiality within the vital field of contemporary art history.
About
Join or Renew
Google Group
Annual Panel at CAA
Propose a Program
Resources
Governance
︎ ︎ ︎
Fostering strong scholarship and promoting collegiality within the vital field of contemporary art history.
SCAH at CAA
The SCAH-sponsored panel at CAA highlights topical research and fosters dialogue among scholars of contemporary art through panels, roundtables, and networking events.
As an affiliate society of the College Art Association (CAA), SCAH actively contributes to the Annual Conference through its standing panel, which highlights topical research and fosters dialogue among scholars of contemporary art. SCAH also holds its annual business meeting during the conference and occasionally organizes workshops and other networking opportunitiees.
In 2022, SCAH’s Executive Board made the decision to withdraw our panel from the official proceedings of the 110th CAA conference after our request to make the session free and open to the public was denied. Despite this, we continued to uphold our commitment to accessibility and inclusivity by hosting an alternative un-CAA panel, detailed in our Open Letter to CAA.
Selection Process
Members are encouraged to submit proposals for the session chair and topic for the SCAH-sponsored panel. Proposals may be sent to the President via email or presented at the annual business meeting held during the CAA conference. The final selection is initiated by the President and determined through an anonymous vote by members of the Executive Committee.
To learn more about joining our community or renewing your membership, visit our Membership page.
SCAH at CAA 2027
What is contemporary? Re-viewing, Re-making, and Reinventing the Past in the Present
SCAH-sponsored panel at 2027 College Art Assocation Annual ConferenceChairs: Emily Ruth Capper, University of Minnesota, and Megan Metcalf, New Mexico State University
TBC February 3–6, 2027 ET
New York Hilton Midtown
environments, such as artists’ studios—is by now so common that viewers may not even notice
(or care). This is particularly true of artworks conceived after 1960 that destabilized the object
and introduced change, ephemerality, embodiment into the canon of contemporary art, and which
demand an active role in their exhibition and care. But such efforts have a curious relationship to
history and authenticity—and a curious relationship to the “contemporary.”
This panel defamiliarizes routine institutional operations and attitudes in order to examine the
practical and theoretical implications of re-making artworks in the present. We seek contributions
from a broad range of perspectives: artists, curators and conservators, art historians, and others
who can shed light on how these returns work and what they might mean for artworks in many
mediums and from diverse contexts.
Hal Foster has written that reconstructions introduce a “zombie time” into institutions: they are
neither present nor past, neither alive nor dead.1 By contrast, dance scholar André Lepecki has
suggested that re-making can “unlock, release, and actualize a work’s many (virtual) comand incompossibilities, which the originating instantiation of the work kept in reserve.”2 In our
fraught contemporary moment, can the re-appearances of works from the past help us solve
historical problems? Or does revisiting them reveal how we are stuck in an endless loop?
Papers
TBC
Previous SCAH CAA Panels
2026 Dissent Nearby: Diasporic & LGBTQ+ Resistance, Jocelyn E. Marshall, Deirdre Price, Jess Westbrook
2025 Narratives of Exile, Movement, and Migration in Contemporary Art, Sarah Kleinman, Nicole F. Scalissi, Serda Yalkin, Olivia Murphy, Paloma Checa-Gismero, Peter M. Chametzky
2024 Fugitive Ecologies in Contemporary Art, Allison Young, Andrew Hennlich, Jason Waite, Kate Keohane, Brianne Cohen
2023 Global Solidarities: Contemporary Art and Internationalism, Aaron Katzeman, Jessy Bell, Erina Duganne, Paloma Checa-Gismero
2022* un-CAA panel: Fighting Back to Reclaim Institutions, Nic Aziz, Tatiana Flores, Pablo Helguera, Christine Y. Kim
* SCAH’s Executive Board decided to retract our panel from the official proceedings of 110th annual CAA conference after our request to offer it free and open to the public was denied. See our Open Letter to CAA and the details about our un-CAA panel.
2021 Agitators and Aggregators: New Cycles of Contemporary Art History, Rose G. Salseda, Andy Campbell, Johanna Gosse, Jacqueline Francis
2020 The Status and Stakes of Contemporary Art History Publishing Today, Susan Bielstein, Dushko Petrovich, Rebecca Uchill, Anuradha Vikram, Benjamin Tiven
2019 What is Contemporary Art History, Now? 10 Years of SCAH, Pamela M. Lee, Tobias Wofford, Daniel Quiles, Suzanne Hudson, Alexander Dumbadze
2018 Sites of Micro-Community, Roberto Tejada, Jennifer Doyle, Saloni Mathur, Susanna Newbury
2017 Contemporary Art History: Temporal Frames and Geographic Terrains, Steven Nelson, David Joselit, Irene V. Small, Anneka Lenssen
2016 Exhibition History as Contemporary Art History, Lynne Cooke, Glenn Phillips, Julian Myers-Szupinska
2015 Histories and Economies of Contemporary Art, Rhea Anastas, Katy Siegel, Howard Singerman, Nato Thompson
2014 Identity Politics: Then and Now, Hamza Walker, Gregg Bordowitz, Joan Kee, Dieter Roelstraete
2013 The Social, the Relational, and the Participatory: A Reevaluation, Martha Rosler, Anton Vidokle, Shannon Jackson, Julia Robinson
2012 Digging Where You Stand, Kellie Jones, Michelle Kuo, Frank Smigiel
2011 Critical Histories, Barbara Rose, Diedrich Diedrichsen, Thomas Crow
2010 Contemporary Art History in 2020, Hannah Feldman, Amelia Jones, Robert Storr
2009 What is Contemporary Art History? Grant Kester, Pam Lee, Richard Meyer, Miwon Kwon
ABOUT
The Society of Contemporary Art Historians aims to foster strong scholarship and promote collegiality within the vital field of contemporary art history.
© 2025 Society of Contemporary Art Historians.