What, when & where
8th Annual Art History Graduate Student Conference
The University of California, Riverside
May 25th, 2019
Deadline: March 8th, 2019
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Charlene Villaseñor Black, Professor in the Department of Art History at UCLA
The goal of this year’s conference is to promote an interdisciplinary dialogue through visual and material culture by questioning imposed gendered hierarchies and identities, in order to facilitate inclusive understanding of gendered roles in myth throughout history. This year’s theme concerns re-vision–revising, re-conceptualizing, and seeing differently –as the act of “looking back” to forge new critical directions and critique androcentric world views and traditions. Concepts of gender within oral histories, literary traditions, cosmologies, and visual arts –and the relevance of gender’s constant fluidity –helps to shape our understanding of the world. This understanding becomes a cultural mythology that affects our contemporary memory. Though these mythic stories shape human experience (by informing cultural identity, world views, social structure, self-image), they themselves are not fixed. Continuing in the tradition of rewriting and challenging the historical canon, the reclamation of the distorted-self (distorted by fixed, limiting, and systematized gender concepts) is necessary for the troubling of myth and legend within the visual arts. Questioning conventions, perceptions, and conceptions of gender in art is necessary to recover the agency that mythic images of identity evoke. This conference will explore the ways in which concepts and representations of gender in myth are revised through art and art history. Such re-visioning takes on urgency when images themselves act as sites of active engagement –a dialogue between viewer and viewed –which will therefore serve to restructure human experience, history, culture, belief and understanding. We are interested in the re-evaluation of androcentric mythological imagery, the functionality of gender (theoretically and iconographically), and how gender has been radically reworked within visual culture, which thereby constructs a contemporary memory. Additionally, it will consider how myth and contemporary memory are now being shaped through movements such as the #metoo movement, Black Lives Matter, the LGBTQ+ community, immigration issues, spirituality, modern witchcraft, and more. It will look at new critical directions and assertions in cultural history and how visual culture is reworked through time, across global traditions –historical to contemporary, mainstream to margin
Deadline & how to apply
We invite abstracts of no more than 300 words for 20-minute paper presentations. The conference is open to all graduate students, as well as the public; there is no registration fee. This event is entirely student-generated and organized by UCR’s Art History graduate students.
Please email an abstract and a CV to ahgsa.ucr@gmail.com by Friday, March 8, 2019.
_____________
see more job opportunities.
Photo by Thomas Kinto on Unsplash