Friday, December 9, 2011

Call for Proposals on Visual Arts of the American West

Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Association
February 8-11, 2012 Albuquerque, New Mexico
Hyatt Regency Hotel & Conference Center
http://www.swtxpca.org
Proposal submission deadline: December 15, 2011
Conference Theme: Foods and Culture(s) in Global Context

This area seeks papers that explore any aspect of the visual arts in or about the West and its borderlands, including photography, painting, drawing, graphic media, sculpture, mixed media works and installations, video, digital media, architecture, urban planning and design, indigenous art, museum studies, special collections, online collections, public arts, and more. The West is defined very broadly to include everything west of the Mississippi River in the United States.


In keeping with this year’s conference theme, papers on topics related to the visual depiction of foods, or comparative papers discussing Western art in a global context are encouraged.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

  • topographical landscape illustration produced during early explorations
  • classic painters of the West–Catlin, Moran, Remington, Russell
  • California Impressionism
  • the Taos artists colonies and early painters in New Mexico
  • Regionalist painting of the 1930s in the Southwest, California, and Texas
  • New Deal art in the West
  • painting in the Pacific Northwest; the Northwest School, Asian and Asian-American influence
  • printmaking and lithography
  • painting in Alaska and Western Canada
  • architecture and urban design of indigenous peoples and colonial settlers in the West
  • early modernist and postmodern architecture and urbanism in the West
  • perceptions and attitudes toward the West / the uniqueness of the West
  • Manifest Destiny and the West / politics and art of the West
  • depictions of women, Native Americans, Mexican-Americans, or other minorities in Western art
  • issues of the "other" in Western art
  • depictions of frontier life
  • women artists, Native American artists, and Mexican-American artists from the West
  • depictions of the West by artists from the Eastern U.S. and foreign artists
  • ecology and environmentalism in Western art and architecture
  • portraiture in the West / depictions of famous Westerners
  • early modernists who painted the Western landscape
  • modernist, abstract art, and Surrealism in the West
  • depictions of the urbanized and suburbanized West
  • Earth Art
  • public art and memorials in and about the West

Information about our areas of study, graduate student awards, conference travel, lodging, and the organization can be found at http://www.swtxpca.org.

Please submit a 250-word abstract for individual papers or a 500-word abstract for panels at http://conference2012.swtxpac.org.

Feel free to contact Area Chair Victoria Grieve with questions: victoria.grieve@usu.edu.