The 112th annual conference of the College Art Association is scheduled to take place in Chicago, IL, February 14–17, 2024
HBA Affiliate Panel:
Contested Art Histories and the Archive in Britain and the British Empire
Session will present: In-Person
Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Historians of British Art
Chaired by:
Yuthika Sharma (Northwestern University
Holly Shaffer (Brown University)
Saturday, February 17, 2024, 3:30-5:00pm CST
Hilton Chicago – 3rd Floor – Joliet Room
https://caa.confex.com/caa/2024/meetingapp.cgi/Session/12893
Panel Abstract:
Art histories are shaped by the archives on which they are based; this panel asks us to question the history of British Art as a field as well as how the stories within it are told through or against archives. It asks for new methodologies and approaches that engage with and destabilize British archival histories to recover the agency of non-dominant artistic forms and ideas in shaping notions of British art. Are there subjugated art historical knowledges that emerged in relation to or in contestation with dominant archival narratives of individuals and institutions in Britain and the British colonial world, such as in relation to enslavement, class, ethnicity, gender, religion, materials, environments? How might they reveal the importance of ritualistic, performative, multilingual, multi-sensorial, and non-textual ways of archival thinking that informed perceptions of British art? At the same time as the panel seeks papers that reveal varied types of archival histories from diverse regions, the panel also calls for problematizing the archive’s canonical art histories that privileged a particular view of art over subaltern ways of knowing and creating art. We encourage participants to engage with new ways of thinking and conceptualizing the art historical archive as both material and imagined history that can question and reconfigure notions of British art during the age of empire.
Panelists and Papers:
“The Portrait as Counter-Inventory: Maharani Jind Kaur by George Richmond”
Adam Eaker, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
“Emerging from the Shadows: Enslavement and Art’s Histories”
Sarah Thomas, Birkbeck, University of London
“Faces without Names: Sitters of Color and Archival Silences”
Jessie Park, Yale University Art Gallery and Catherine Roach, Viriginia Commonwealth University
“The Art and Insignia of Chief Nanna Olomu”
Graham Stopa
“‘I Am a Prince at Best, a Thief, a Stable Boy More Often Than Not’ – Michelle Williams Gamaker’s Affective and Fictional Re-Figuring of Sabu’s Cinematic Archive”
Elisabetta Garletti, University of Cambridge
“Collecting with the (Cultural) Cannibals: Andrea Carlson’s Examination of British Imperialism in ‘Vaster Empire'”
Olivia Murphy, University of Oklahoma