Guidelines for submitting proposals

AHAA's Call for CAA Session Proposals

AHAA at CAA: Los Angeles, February 25-28, 2009

Call for papers:

Agents of Civilization: Civic Art and the National Body at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

During the Progressive Era in the United States, roughly 1880 to 1920, civic art participated in a broad cultural construction of social cohesion and national identity and acted as an analgesic for neutralizing the striking heterogeneity that characterized America at the turn of the twentieth century. As if to counteract the centrifugal forces of a radically diverse population and to diminish the impact of dislocations and transformations brought about by vigorous immigration, industrialization, the rise of corporate capitalism, shifting roles of women, economic instability, urbanization, and labor disputes, among other things, civic art articulated an idealized view and was designed to give tangible form to such vaguely defined but profoundly resonant concepts as citizenship, patriotism, democracy, progress, nationalism, and unity. Paralleling the Progressive Era’s mandate for social reform, optimistic belief in change through democratic cooperation, and the often soaring rhetoric of idealism, civic artworks from the period functioned as “agents of civilization,” as playwright and pageant organizer Percy MacKaye noted in 1912.

Although marked by profound and defining transformations, the Progressive Era embraced the notion of what Benedict Anderson has called an “imagined community” in which racial, cultural, religious, ideological, among other, differences were neutralized and reconstructed as the very fabric in which American identity was woven. On a cultural level, the assumption of an imagined community called for the construction of public memory that would diminish discordant interests of diverse social groups and unite them into a conceptually cohesive body politic. Emphasizing national consolidation and social cohesion over pluralism and competing vernacular interests, civic art of all kinds—from international exhibitions to pageants to mural cycles to the construction of public libraries—was staged during the Progressive Era in which the topography of public memory and the national body was inscribed and debated and the rituals of civilization were enacted.

Topics to be addressed might include: the relationship of allegory to emergent modernism in civic art; pageantry as visual allegory, popular amusement, and political vehicle; the role of the library as a civilizing agent and site of transformation; mural painting and the role of the public artist; and citizenship rituals.

Per CAA guidelines, proposals for papers are due May 9, 2008 and applicants will be notified no later than June 2, 2008.

Please send proposals to:
Sarah J. Moore
Associate Professor of Art History
School of Art, University of Arizona
Box 210002
Tucson, AZ 85721-0002

Crosstalk: The Pedagogy of the Object in the Academy and in the Museum

Art history has one thing we all share in our pedagogy which is unexamined but essential--the object. We all agree this is unique and important, and the scholarly conversation addresses the object from an epistemological standpoint. But, we rarely discuss the object pedagogically. When we address pedagogy we almost always center these discussions on writing assignments, but the pedagogical properties of the object are essentially unexamined and need exploring. The traditional model for looking at pedagogy uses texts instead of objects. At a minimum we need to think about differences between object- and text-based pedagogies. What is unique? What is similar? How do we exploit these differences and similarities? Oddly, art history is behind the curve in this area: there here is a large developed pedagogy in science education which may be helpful because it is object-based in ways that composition and education are usually not. Likewise, museums may be ahead of the academy due to theorizing around object-based-learning. Museums and the academy need different pedagogical techniques because of their dissimilar audiences: this creates disparate starting points and structures of control. The kind of learning sought differs between the academy and the museum as do the kinds of pedagogical tools that can be deployed in each situation. However, the museum and the classroom are not so different that they cannot help each other; there are some goals in common as well as the object as a primary target of inquiry.

The study of American art has a history of fruitful scholarly exchanges between the museum and the academy. We should extend this conversation to another area vital to the mission of both institutions: pedagogy. How can we learn from each other as teaching scholars? How does thinking about teaching and learning vary between the academy and the museum? What techniques, methods, and strategies have we developed in isolation from each other that we can share? How do we assess their effectiveness? This session invites 20-minute papers from the professoriate as well as museum professionals that address such questions.

Per CAA guidelines, proposals for papers are due May 9, 2008 and applicants will be notified no later than June 2, 2008.

Please send proposals to:
Andrea Pappas
Department of Art and Art History
Santa Clara University
500 El Camino Real
Santa Clara, CA 95053-0264

apappas@scu.edu