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20th Annual Yale University American Art Graduate Symposium

Type: Calls For Papers [View all]
Posted by: Yale University
Deadline: Fri, January 31st, 2025

Call for Papers: The Twentieth Annual Yale University American Art Graduate Symposium
Theme: Underground
Date: April 5, 2025
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Steven Nelson, Dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art

What does it mean to evoke the underground? The term—much like the concepts, movements, and spaces it describes—simultaneously conjures the subterranean and the covert and their converse, the extracted and exposed. The underground describes spaces and resources located beneath the earth’s surface—from Spanish silver mines at Potosí, bauxite harvesting sites in Jamaica, and uranium mines on Navajo land. Additionally, man-made structures—like bunkers, pipelines, and transportation networks—proliferate underground as contested spaces of regimentation, surveillance, and control. Yet, the underground also refuses surveillance. As a site of concealment, the underground physically fosters and metaphorically signifies subversive art and acts of resistance. The nineteenth-century history of the Underground Railroad—an amorphous network of safe people and hidden spaces, or “stops,” that enabled Black self-liberation—and twentieth-century underground house-ballroom culture—in which riotous, Queer performances were staged ephemerally beyond the policing gaze of the white, cis heterosexual world—epitomizes the term’s fungibility. In art history, bringing “underground” artists, artworks, and objects “into the light” challenges the contours of the field while simultaneously raising urgent ethical considerations. For instance, how do institutions contend with collections of violently unearthed objects—including looted artifacts, archival material from resistance movements, and the bodies of Black and Indigenous ancestors—and which are often housed in storage spaces that are themselves underground?
 
With these considerations in mind, the Twentieth Annual Yale University American Art Graduate Symposium asks: what possibilities might the underground offer to art history? Featuring Dr. Steven Nelson as our keynote speaker, this symposium seeks to mine the term underground, opening new ways of knowing, making, and being that challenge our disciplinary assumptions.

We welcome submissions exploring art, architecture, performance, and visual and material culture across the Americas, including the Caribbean, North, Central, and South America. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Underground spaces, structures, and their representations Art making and performances that occur “underground” Underground artistic movements, organizations, and individuals The possibilities of vision underground and the wider underground sensorium Pigment, clay, and other underground materials Histories and representations of resource extraction and scientific excavations The significance, histories, and ethics of burial objects and ancestors Considerations of entombment, internment, decomposition, and decay The underground and the institution

 
Interested participants are invited to submit an abstract of no more than 350 words, along with a CV, to americanist.symposium@gmail.com by January 31, 2025. Accepted participants will be notified in mid-February. “Underground” will take the form of a day-long, in-person symposium, with food and hotel accommodations provided for all speakers.

Posted on Mon, November 4th, 2024
Expires on Fri, January 31st, 2025

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