The annual conference of the Association of Art Historians will meet at the Tate Gallery this year from 2 to 4 April. This year’s conference title is “Identity and Display: artistic, national and sexual identities and aesthetic, anthropological and other notions of display”. The convenors are Richard Humphreys of the Tate Gallery and David Bindman of University College, London. The session titles will be as follows: “Art in Bourgeois Society c. 1790-1850”; “Authorship and Anonymity”; “Conservation and its Consequences”; “Conservation and its Discontents. The Restoration of Historic Buildings in Europe”; “Displays of Identity. Museums and the making of Histories”; “Documenting the Face? The Portrait as Historical Artefact”; “Englishness and English Art; Genealogy of Beauty”; “Issues of Medieval Decorum; Metaphor of Power”; “Mythologies of the Artist”; “Representing Human Rights”; “Visualising Masculinities. Interrogating the Codlings of the ‘Masculine’“; and “When is Art History?” Coinciding with the conference is the annual Book Fair. There will also be visits, panel discussions, gallery sessions, performance, film, video and other events on Sunday 4 April.
Meeting between 4 and 6 February will be the College Art Association of the United States, whose annual conference takes place at the Washington State Convention and Trade Centre, Pacific Northwest, Seattle. Around 5,000 art historians, museum curators, critics and other visual arts professionals are expected to attend. This year’s keynote speaker is Robert Venturi, who designed the recently opened Seattle Art Museum. The art history programme has taken as its theme “What has art history become as a cultural practice, and how?” The studio programme will be “The Artist as world citizen”. Topics will include “Connoisseurship and the idea of quality”; “Legends about art in the Middle Ages”; “The Renaissance as a historical concept”; “Classicism and Anticlassicism in Latin American art history”; “Recent documentary photography and photojournalism”; “The artist in technoculture”; “Homosexuality and the practice of art history”; “The new Soviet and East European art worlds”; “The artist’s role in a collapsing society”; “Art and the environment”; “Artists working in the community”; “Native American and Pacific Island art history”; “Art history and publishing”; “Print media in the twenty-first century”; “Fluxus”; “Half a century of women in art history”. For further information: Conference Program, College Art Association; 275 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001.
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as 'Worrying about identity and display'
