Feminism Now: Symposium for New Feminist Art Scholarship

Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art

Brooklyn Museum

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Deadline for submissions: December 5, 2008

The Brooklyn Museum invites submissions of papers for Feminism Now, a symposium that will provide a platform for graduate and post-graduate students of art history and related disciplines to present new scholarship that reflects feminist approaches to cultural research and analysis. The symposium will give increased visibility to scholarship on contemporary and emerging feminist artists and increase awareness of these artists’ work in the broader arts community. As the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art demonstrated with its inaugural exhibition, Global Feminisms, feminism is not a historical moment or a single philosophy, but an ongoing attempt to consider the impact of gender and sexuality at any given intersection of time and space. The debates that feminist criticism has engendered continue to have profound and ongoing effects on contemporary art and its accompanying scholarship as the nature of those critiques have continued to evolve in response to the changing culture. Nevertheless, the public perception of feminism as limited to a set of works or texts produced in the 1960s and 1970s has often kept the focus narrow and the impact situated in the past.

For the 2009 Feminism Now symposium, the Brooklyn Museum invites students and young scholars of art history and related disciplines to submit papers that engage with feminism as a central part of their thesis. Scholars of culture studies, visual studies, media studies, performance studies, and artist-practitioners are encouraged to submit.

Topic areas include, but are not limited to:

* Contemporary artists of any gender who are read as feminist, seen as responding to feminism, or are subject to a critique from a feminist theoretical perspective

* Trends in the art world or theoretical models that have not been fully considered from a feminist perspective

* New feminist approaches to working in fields related to arts, cultural production, and cultural institutions or definitions of feminism in relation to cultural production and critique

* New critiques of previous feminist analyses of artists, works, artistic trends, or theoretical models

* New research into artists from historical periods that are either identified as feminist or read in a feminist way. While papers can be on commonly acknowledged feminist artists from the 1960s and 1970s, the panel will be looking for scholarship that adds something new to this consideration.

* How art interacts with feminism in other fields such as politics, economics, science, etc.

* Calls to action and arguments for or against feminism in art in the 21st century

Presentations will be between 15 and 20 minutes; applicants should submit abstracts of approximately 300 words, a brief writing sample (8–10 pages), and a C.V. or brief bio including their institution and contact information by December 5, 2008. Submissions should be in Microsoft Word or Rich Text format and should be submitted via e-mail to: academic.programs@brooklynmuseum.org.