A large number of graduate students and faculty of the Tyler School of Art and Architecture's Art History Department presented papers, chaired sessions and were panelists at the annual College Art Association of America (CAA) conference (February 10–13, 2021). As the principal organization in the United States for professionals in the arts, CAA is the most important professional conference to for advocacy in the arts and intellectual engagement with cutting-edge theory with its broad and diverse membership. Meeting together only once a year, this is where makers and interpreters of art exchange ideas and foster understanding of the arts.

The conference, virtual this year, brought together over 4,500 art historians, artists, designers, and visual arts professionals in all stages of their careers, from all over the world, for programs and presentations that provided the value of shared scholarship, research and practice. Tyler students and faculty who presented showed the broad range of work being done in Art History Program, in the eras studied, geographies as well as theoretical approaches. The departmental focus on the early modern era in Italy was highlighted by one speaker; strengths in modern/contemporary art history was very much on display in the rest of the papers, with themes ranging from post-war art to today and focusing on artists from the United States, Cuba, Argentina and China. The theoretical approaches also testify to the varied fields of inquiry, including queer theory, institutional critique and ecocriticism.

Wednesday, February 10 

Maria Marino, “Tania Bruguera’s INSTAR and the dynamic for cultural and political change in Cuba”

Lily Scott, “Archive of Inverts: Romaine Brooks and the Chronicling of Female Masculinity”

Erin Riley-Lopez, “Queering the Museum: Nayland Blake’s Curatorial Practice”
 

Thursday, February 11

Elizabeth Duntemann, “’Piscina Probatica’ and the Visual Rhetoric of Healing in Early Modern Venice”

Leah Modigliani, “Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road, 1995, Guangzhou: Lin Yilin’s Moving Wall as Site-Responsive Adaptation”

Noah Randolph, “Continued Entanglements: Between Equestrian Oba and Rumors of War”
Noah Randolph, Panelist: “COVID-19 Relief MFA Program debrief”
 

Friday, February 12

Noah Randolph, Chair: “Publishing”

Will Schwaller, “Argentina Intermedios: A two-night show and a fitting descriptor of Buenos Aires at the turn of the 1970s”

Sarina Miller, Chair, “Designed by Quarantine: Space and Place in the Current Global Crisis”