Symposium panels
Friday, April 23, 2021 via Zoom (9:00 a.m. - 5:15 p.m. Central Time)
Click on a button below to learn more about the symposium panels for Friday April 23 :
Panel 1: The Art of Protest and Activism (9:00 – 10:15 a.m. CT)
Chair: Emily Coats
Abstract: The so-called refugee crisis that Europe has been experiencing since 2000, has become an important subject for many contemporary artists working on social and political issues. The paper discusses two art projects in which the demand for social justice and ethical treatment of others is at the very heart of all actions: The dead are coming (2015), created by the German collective Center for Political Beauty, and "Polish people! Refugee and citizen" Interventions (2016), by the Anonymous Stateless Immigrants Collective. Both these collectives use radical forms of aesthetic expression and share the same goal, i.e., to disturb the existing political order in Europe and force politicians to take meaningful action in favor of refugees. By invoking the work of Jacques Derrida on unconditional hospitality as well as his concept of justice-to-come, I will investigate the way these projects operate in social space and gain agency capable of engaging communities.
Ewelina Chwiejda
École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris
The challenge of unconditional hospitality: Socially-engaged artists responding to the “European refugee crisis”
​
Margaux Van Uytvanck, Université Libre de Bruxelles
Follow the money. Artists fighting for a more ethical art world
​
​
Eduardo De Maio, University of York
“Not Art for Art’s sake, but art for the people”: the impact of British social(ist) culture on Italian art at the turn of the twentieth century (1890-1914)
​
Abstract: This paper analyzes and compares the actions of two artist-led activist groups who, fifty years apart, challenge the art institutions in pursuit of a more ethical art world. The Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG), founded in New York in 1969 by Jon Hendricks and Jean Toche, organized performances in major art institutions like the Museum of Modern Art. They denounced, among other things, the art institutions’ ties to the military-industrial complex during the Vietnam war. Fifty years after the group’s disruptive actions, their critique of the art world seems more topical than ever. In December 2017, the American artist Nan Goldin founded Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (PAIN) and started organizing actions to denounce the financial links between major art institutions and the Sackler family, whose pharmaceutical company, Purdue Pharma, is widely seen today as a key player in the ongoing opioid crisis in the USA.
Abstract: The upheavals that occurred in Italy between 1890 and 1910s left deep wounds on the local social, political and cultural contexts. In those decades, some Italian artistic currents expressed lower classes' desire for social redemption. Deeply influenced by British culture, especially by William Morris, artists such as Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo and Duilio Cambellotti responded to people’s need for rights and social fulfilment through their paintings and social activities, and by involving the lower classes directly.
This paper analyses this phenomenon through Pellizza’s emblematic painting The Fourth Estate (1898-1901) and Cambellotti’s establishment of Arts&Crafts Schools in Agro Romano, aimed to instruct the illiterate peasants of the Roman rural countryside. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of British social culture on Italian artists of the late-19th century and on their social commitment to speak to, represent and redeem the lower classes which were seeking a voice.
Panel 2: Representations of Race in Art (10:30 – 11:45 a.m. CT)
Chair: Bethany Jensen
Abstract: The political art of the Black Panthers is linked to Emory Douglas (b. 1943), who was “Revolutionary Artist” and Minister of Culture of the BPP from 1967 until the 1980s. Douglas broadcast his art through the party organ The Black Panther, but he also designed posters, postcards and event fliers. Douglas is an example of how an activist can mix art and political propaganda. I will concentrate on the role of violence and racial pride in Douglas’ art. Douglas’ drawings became famous and feared because of their outspoken, brutal, violent content. For example, American racist policemen or “pigs” were portrayed as anthropomorphic pigs, and were shot, hanged, or stabbed by proud, angry Afro-Americans. I will interpret Douglas’ work using Fanon’s concepts of cleansing violence and anti-racist racism. Portraying blacks actively resisting white oppression, Douglas fostered black racial pride.
Marco Gabbas, Milan State University
Violence and Racial Pride in the Art of Emory Douglas
​
​
​
Abstract: This paper compares the representations of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the art of African American painter Norman Lewis (1909-1979) and Jewish Canadian American painter Philip Guston (1913-1980). I argue that both artists used these images, typically associated with white supremacy and terrorism, to express ideas about power, agency, and individual and collective action, encouraging the viewer to contemplate questions of racial and social justice. My presentation focuses on two works from Lewis’s “Civil Rights” series, American Totem (1960), and Untitled (Alabama- 1967), in conjunction with two of Guston’s best known paintings, Dawn (1970) and The Studio (1969). I further argue that the inclusion of Klansmen in the work of both artists reflects their personal experiences, such as family trauma, brushes with white supremacy and racism and their commitment to political and social activism.
Joette James, Lindenwood University
Ku Klux Klan Imagery in the Art of Norman Lewis and Philip Guston: Meaning in Context
​
Blake Oetting, New York University, Institute of Fine Arts
Black Girl’s Window and Los Angeles: A Spatial Entanglement
​
Abstract: While much attention has been paid to the materials with which Betye Saar constructs her intricate assemblages - found photographs, family heirlooms, figurines, etc. - this paper concerns the window frame itself as an essential component of their conceptual logic. Reflecting on Eric Avila's study of racial segregation in Los Angeles and the kitchenette apartment as an emblem of these nefarious practices but also bell hooks's understanding of homeplace as a site of resistance and the exhibitionary complex that black artists created in houses around the city, I show how Black Girl's Window (1969) engages the political complexities of city and domestic space that defined Saar's immediate environment. In doing so, the paper sheds new light on the importance of Saar's frames to her assemblage practice at large and proposes a new vantage point from which we can understand Saar’s political rhetoric.
Panel 3: Representations of Gender in Art (1:00 – 2:15 p.m. CT)
Chair: Chandler Tait
Abstract: In this talk I will discuss how feminicide photojournalism in Mexico has interacted with assorted issues of gender and gendered violence from 1994 until the present. To further offer critical insights about the functions that photographs perform within the social context in which they circulate, I will engage with feminist performances that take photographs of feminicide as their point of departure, and deploy hyperbolic forms of re-enactment as a means to immanently unsettle and destabilize the spectacle of feminicide. These performances will be interpreted as attempts to contest the modes of spectatorship habitually associated with images of feminicide and to foster more ethical and politicized ways of looking at them. Thus, I will show how feminicide photographs are at once instruments of necropolitical violence as well as sites for social exchange and political mobilization against feminicide.
Aline Hernández, Utrecht University
Images that Leap in the Dark. Feminicide Photography and Necropolitics of Gender in Contemporary Mexico.
​
​
Abstract: The interdisciplinary work of artists Ana Mendieta and Senga Nengudi continues to grab the imagination through the application of abjection, seen in their performances, installations and subsequent photographic documentation. It is through these intriguing displays that the door is opened for their messages to be heard. While Kristeva’s theory of abjection has recently been applied to the work of Ana Mendieta by author Leticia Alvarado, it has yet to be applied to the work of Mendieta’s contemporary Senga Nengudi. Alvarado argues that Mendieta’s use of the abject aimed to collapse boundaries imposed on women of color in the art world, perpetuated by second-wave feminism. It is through drawing connections between Mendieta and Nengudi that we can analyze how the abject persistently addresses these same issues in our modern-day culture.
Danielle Paswaters, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Abjecting Intersectionality: The Early Interdisciplinary Work of Ana Mendieta and Senga Nengudi
​
​
Michelle Fikrig, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
A Black Feminine Lens: Nydia Blas’s use of family photographs
​
​
Abstract: This paper examines the work of Nydia Blas (American, b. 1981). I will explore how Blas cultivates a Black feminine lens in her series, The trouble with being a mama. Through the incorporation and manipulation of her own family photos, Blas complicates notions of both femininity and of motherhood, forcing the viewer to confront normative identities that are reproduced by the genre. This paper draws on the work of Audre Lorde and her conception of the erotic as encompassing, yet transcending, physical boundaries to allow for a deeper sharing of joy and power. Applying this lens to family and portrait photography, I argue that Blas uses the concept of the erotic as theorized by Lorde to flip the performative scripts inherent to the genre by inserting mismatching cultural cues.
Panel 4: Countering Colonialist and Capitalist Histories (2:30 – 3:45 p.m. CT)
Chair: Neecole Gregory
Abstract: This research reexamines interpretations of non-European objects’ ‘artistic profile’ accompanied by the desire for the ‘untamed,’ which was derived from a myth of civilization and the melancholy of modernity. Modernization in art history is commonly embodied as an unseparated part of the colonization, tangling with an imagined hierarchical structure defining civilizing processes of an unfamiliar culture. Within this context, aboriginal cultures were often represented as a crystallized essence of human nature through formalistic simplicity rather than manifestations of cultural complexity. Demonstrating the aestheticized ‘others,’ this study reveals the cultural dominance behind the celebration of non-western objects’ ‘artistic quality’ linking to the antithesis of modern progressivism.
Louise Yu-jui Yang, University of York
The Aestheticized Other in Cultural Assimilation: Images of Aborigine Under the Desire of the Untamed
​
​
​
Abstract: The First Nations of North America represent a rich, diverse mosaic of cultures. Yet for the general public a superficial view of Plains culture is the “default” picture of “Indian” culture. Looking into what cast Plains culture as the monolithic Native culture, three basic causes emerge: wild west shows, stories and illustrations in the popular press, and a prevailing view that Western tribes were the last “real Indians.” Understanding the origin of the stereotypes is an important step in respecting the diversity of First Nations culture.
Jana Hallford, Lindenwood University
How Did Plains Culture Become the Default Image of First Nations Culture?
​
​
Avery Glassman, University of Colorado Boulder
Alternative Ecologies: Socially Engaged Art and Rural America
​
​
Abstract: The U.S. Census Bureau defines “rural” as “any population, housing, or territory NOT in an urban area.” At the most basic level, then, the rural is defined by what it is not. The definition comes with real consequences for rural places in the U.S., which receive disproportionately less government and philanthropic aid despite the extent to which their natural resources (primarily oil, gas, coal, and water) power the American economy. Yet much socially engaged art in rural parts of the United States rejects an extractive mindset, challenges universalist climate narratives, and counters myths of rural America. Instead, these projects work to build alternative, more ethical socioecological relations that critically foreground extractive histories of land use and draw on experiential, place-based knowledge.
Panel 5: The Museum Space in Times of Crisis (4:00 – 5:15 p.m. CT)
Chair: Adriana Dunn
Abstract: Since the 16th century, many continents have experienced multiple waves of Western imperialism, allowing these predominantly European colonial empires to amass a considerable collection of art. Even today, these objects are still scattered in many museums and private collections in Europe. In September 2020, a few weeks before its reopening, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford decided to remove one hundred and twenty objects containing human remains from their exhibition. This ethical approach from the Pitt Rivers Museum, as well as others throughout the continent, is a response to new cultural policies as well as epistemological and museographic considerations. This decentralization has been taking shape since the 1990s, particularly with regards to non-Western and indigenous voices that today must be heard.
Anaïs Clara, University of Toulouse II Jean Jaurès
Remains and Restitutions: Human Bones and Cultural Objects in Ethnographic Museums in Europe
​
​
Abstract: My research explores how Lebanese artist, Saloua Raouda Choucair, was portrayed in her self-titled retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern in 2013. I aim to consider the standings of Arab art within the art market and Western museums in order to contextualize Choucair, as well as modern Arab art at this time, in order to analyze if there are implications of Orientalizing or tokenizing. This paper will take a critical look at the current context in which modern and contemporary Arab art is utilized, displayed, and consumed in the West. This analysis is vital as we see more museums inserting minorities into the canon of modern art without adequate contextualization. While most outlets praise this type of diversity, there needs to be more consideration into the benefits of doing so by Western museums.
Emma Ahmad, University of North Texas
Consuming Arab Art: Contextualizing Saloua Raouda Choucair’s Retrospective at the Tate Modern
​
​
Abstract: I am investigating Asian and Asian American feminism within the exhibition Circles and Circuits: Chinese Caribbean Art that showcased at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, CA, and the Chinese American Museum, Los Angeles, CA, from September 15, 2017 - February 25, 2018. Circles and Circuits: Chinese Caribbean Art focuses on artists within the Afro-Caribbean Chinese diaspora. While several artists within this community solely practice art within the Caribbean, I will be focusing on the artists who moved to the United States as they are individuals included within the Chinese-American diaspora. Through liminality, Asian and Asian American women within Circles and Circuits: Chinese Caribbean Art push back the societal perceptions of what it means to be an Asian woman.
Philana Li, University of
Texas, Austin
Racial Ambiguity within the Afro-Caribbean Chinese Community: Through the Lens of Intersectionality and Liminality
​