Contact: A Symposium of Latin American Art
February 3, 2011
CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY
Deadline: December 20, 2011
Submissions are invited from students in the Interuniversity Doctoral Consortial schools as well as CUNY graduate programs.
Scholars have traditionally explored a narrow definition of contact when it comes to art in and of the Americas. For some scholars, it has been those few decades or centuries when the Spanish first arrived in the Americas. For others, it has meant the influence of European art and practical techniques on colonial-period indigenous or mestizo artists and their resulting masterpieces. Still others have considered the impact of pre-Columbian art and cultures on Modern and contemporary art and artists.
This symposium seeks to broaden the definition of contact in Latin American art beyond these pre-defined boundaries. Whether across time periods, or cultures, or oceans, we seek unique viewpoints on contact between peoples, time, objects, geographies, and even museum spaces. Possible topics might include (but are not limited to) contact between
- Museum objects, museum-goers, and curators
- Pre-Columbian peoples of different regions, time periods, and cultures
- Art, architecture, and furnishings of Latin American and European, Asian, or African public, religious, and domestic spaces
- Border issues and circuits of transnational exchange
- Scholars and the sites they visit
- Artists, writers, chroniclers, and works of art in the Old and New Worlds
Accepted papers will be circulated in advance of the conference. Each roundtable will include ten-minute presentations by each author, followed by a moderated discussion of the major themes and relationships between the papers.
Abstract Submission
Please submit the following as a single Microsoft Word or PDF document to laa.contact.symposium@gmail.com by December 20, 2011.
- 250-word abstract that includes the title of your paper, your name, and your institutional affiliation in the header
- One-page CV
Accepted presenters will be notified by January 5, 2011 and will be asked to submit their paper to circulate by January 30, 2012.
This conference is supported by a grant from the John Rewald Endowment of the Ph.D. Program in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center.
