Panels & Lectures

Conference Panels Organized & Refereed:

“Futures of ‘Activist’ Scholarship”

College Art Association Annual Conference, 2021

Alpesh Kantilal Patel & Yasmeen Siddiqui, co-Chairs

From the call for papers:

Our forthcoming anthology Storytellers of Art Histories (2021, Intellect) is built on the premise that the writing of contemporary art history (where contemporary is provisionally defined as the post-1989 period) along the lines of gender, sexuality, and the transnational is being shaped by art-making, archival practices, teaching, and curating. This panel brings together individuals who draw on these approaches (usually more than one) to shake up how art history is consolidated as knowledge--often through bold and courageous moves.

Panelists include: artist Shahzia Sikander, who consistently exposes the insufficiency of dominant nationalist art histories in her animations, paintings, and drawings; art historian and curator Alexandra Chang, who co-organized an exhibition on Chinese Caribbean diasporic art and is co-organizer of the archival project East Coast Asian American art project (ECAAAP); and art historian Jenni Sorkin, who co-organized a ground-breaking exhibition on abstract sculpture by women and writes frequently about craft. Overall, these panelists alongside the chairs—who will bring queer of color approaches into the conversation of writing art histories as well as the role of speculative writing and independent publishing—will discuss what the future of activist scholarship can mean and might look like.