The 110th annual conference of the College Art Association will take place in person, February 16-19, 2022, in Chicago, IL. There will also be a virtual segment of the conference taking place from March 3-5, 2022. HBA will be represented in this virtual part of the conference by a panel chaired by Keren Hammerschlag and Marcia Pointon. This panel will take place on March 3, 9 – 10:30 am CST. The HBA Business Meeting will take place March 4, 1 – 2 pm CST. Please contact HBA President Jeremy Melius for more information about how to join the Business Meeting
HBA Affiliate Panel:
Britain in (and out of) Europe: Unity, Separation and the Arts of Leave-Taking
Chairs: Marcia Pointon and Keren Hammerschlag
Panel Abstract: The 2016 referendum and eventual withdrawal of Britain from the European Union in 2020 has brought about a protracted and painful repositioning of Britain in relation to the rest of Europe. As existing partnerships are dissolved and new partnerships sought, Brexit has also revived interest in the British Commonwealth, Britain’s alliance with America, and its role as a global middle-power. This panel will consider artistic and cultural responses to Brexit and the political, economic, and social rupture it represents. It also seeks more generally to re-examine historical and contemporary artistic and material reflections on the relationship of Britain to Europe. For many, Brexit was experienced as an enforced separation – a once-sided divorce. From maritime subjects and migration imagery to genre paintings and deathbed scenes, Britain has long-standing pictorial traditions representing leave-taking of a variety of sorts. The arts of leave-taking, divorce, and separation speak to the movement of people, goods, and capital, and reflect on the passage of time and nature of death. This panel will consider all media from any period that grapples with these themes in British art, visual and material culture. (British art here includes art produced in and about the former British Empire.) Examinations of the visual cultures of mourning, migration, deportation, and resistance to enforced separations, especially in the context of Brexit and other recent political crises, are encouraged.
Panelists and Papers:
Marsha McCoy: “Britain, Brexit, Berlin: Kasia Fudakowski and the Art of Separation”
Judith Stapleton: “Ireland’s Leave-Taking and the Aesthetics of Disunion: William Orpen’s Western Wedding (1914)”
Ariel Kline: “Turner’s Napoleon: Nation and Exile in the British Empire”