Art in the 21st Century
Whilst Wakanda/Imagining the Margins: How Speculative Narrative Explores Marginalized and Exiled African Identities
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Keenan Norris
This presentation will explore how speculative narratives often dubbed "Afro-futurist" are particularly important in this historical moment. As equatorial lands in Africa become increasingly uninhabitable due to climate change, spurring massive population migrations, and inner-city spaces in America are rapidly gentrified, the fate of the exiled is either ignored entirely or is typically portrayed in mainstream media as nothing more than a pawn in the global political competition between globalist and nationalist/fascist forces. Speculative narratives such as those crafted by Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson and Muthoni Kiarie and the Cuban artists profiled in Rachel Price's "Planet/Cuba" present important revisions to this mainstream narrative. Valuing the future of displaced black populations in both hemispheres and in urban and rural spaces, these narratives imagine the margins. The presenter himself is completing a novel the plot of which turns on one boy's star-crossed confrontation with the environmental dirty secrets of the San Fransisco Bay Area.
Games as Artistic and Social Medium: Exhibitions about Critical Games in the 21st Century
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alba García Martínez
Games and art have crossed, at least since the beginning of the 20th century, as we can see in the use of the Exquisite Corpse of the Surrealists, in Duchamp's obsession with chess and in the Fluxus games boxes. During the last twenty years, the separation between games and art has dissipated as much for the artists as for the creators of games. The field in which games and art have converged, superimposed, collided, found and, above all, interacted has not yet been widely explored. This research is about finding new ways of thinking about games, new ways to use games to think about the rest of the world. How games can contribute as an artistic medium and how art can subvert games order of the power.
Teaching Art Across Modalities and Spaces: A Reinvented Model
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maia Toteva
In its various forms and permutations, Art Appreciation is one of the most ubiquitous art courses for non-majors taught at post-secondary art schools and college art departments. From a historical perspective, there is a long-standing relationship between the subject of Art Appreciation and the mission of university and college art department (Jones, 1974). The process of familiarizing non-majors with the basic tenets of art has also been linked with the aesthetic tradition of Renaissance humanism that taught students to appreciate the beauty of ancient literature, drama, and architecture (Efland, 1990). In the context of today’s changing demographics and instructional technologies, the model of Art Appreciation faces new challenges and possibilities: from thematic approaches and electronic platforms, to multicultural paradigms and interdisciplinary methodologies. This paper discusses the transformational agenda and pedagogical considerations of a large Art Appreciation program that serves a variety of majors and fulfills the multicultural and creative core requirements of the university. The discussion examines the educators’ efforts to promote student engagement and active learning as the program embarks on a plan for a theme-based restructuring. The transformative vision of the new structure is seen as an effort to integrate the teaching of art into the dynamic interdisciplinary, global, and technological frameworks of the 21st century.
Counter-images of the Female Body in the Work of Contemporary Latin American Photographers
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maria Jose Bello
Counter-images of the Female Body in the Work of Contemporary Latin American Photographers. An Analysis of the Exhibition “Gentleman, this is a breast.” Can a photographic perspective decolonize the representations of the female body? How do the limits of nude stereotypes, promoted through art history, change in this photographic exhibition? What new ways of thinking about and doing contemporary Latin American art have been influenced by recent feminist movements? Based on the theories presented in Encounters in the Online Feminist Museum by Griselda Pollock, this paper explores some of the complex relations between femininity, post-modernity, and self-representation in the images of nine female Latin American Photographers.
