CONFERENCE PANEL ORGANIZED & REFEREED:

“A Reckoning With the Recent Future of Art Historical Knowledge Production”

College Art Association Annual Conference, 2019

ALPESH KANTILAL PATEL & YASMEEN SIDDIQUI, CO-CHAIRS

From the call for papers:

This session of short position papers followed by a roundtable discussion challenges prevailing ideas about how art history as knowledge comes into being. For sure, a diverse array of practitioners is involved in generating the information that is used to build art historical methods and narratives. However, there has not been deep reflection on how the wide-ranging material produced by them coalesces into “knowledge” that is fed back into the classroom.

For this reason, we are bringing together five esteemed scholars working in institutions and independently in the fields of art history, critical craft studies, curatorial studies, studio art, and critical archival studies. We are committed to examining the often fraught interdependence of these fields in service to building a community of intellectually and scholarly responsible practitioners. To that end, we will encourage dynamic audience participation, too.

During the roundtable discussion, we will reckon with exponentially increasing bodies of knowledge in the form of scholarly monographs and refereed articles, exhibition catalogs/brochures and museum-produced scholarly anthologies, online journals, and blogs, and recorded podcasts/lectures and other ephemera. We focus not on the recent art historical past but the “recent future” of art history--a future yet to be written but tethered to the recent past. Moreover, this panel foregrounds the slowness (the production of the recent future) of art historical knowledge production as a virtue.

Speakers will include Allan deSouza, Josh T. Franco, Candice Hopkins, Marsha Meskimmon, and Namita Wiggers.