Northern

California

Art

Historians

Introduction:

The Northern California Art Historians (NCAH) is a College Art Association (CAA) affiliated society. As an NCAH member, you will be able to:

Connect with other Northern California art historians and arts professionals;
Participate in NCAH salons;
Receive e-mail notices of local and regional events of interest to art historians;
Attend events organized exclusively for NCAH members; and
Vote for officers, plan events, select CAA session panel topics at the NCAH annual meeting.

Our members represent a wide range of specialties within the field of Art History. We are actively recruiting members from the rich Northern California pool of university and community college faculty and instructors, curators and museum professionals, recent Masters and Ph.D. graduates, and members of the community at large who have a passion for the arts. Membership is open to all Northern California residents with an interest in the history of art, and members are encouraged to hold CAA memberships for full participation in NCAH activities.

Membership:

Membership dues are $10 per year.

NCAH bylaws

NCAH special session, “The Unwritten, Ill-Begotten Art History of the 1960s and 70s.”
College Art Association 99th Annual Conference, February 9-12, 2011
Friday, February 11 from 5.30 to 7.00pm in Sutton Parlor North, 2d floor

Beginning in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, innovative notions of craft, politics, and identity merged and entered the lexicon of art, thereby altering what goes on in the studio, gallery and museum. This inauguration of fresh approaches was often violent and always contentious, leading to a new set of interdisciplinary approaches to practice. Today, the impulses that led to these changes in the art world have become codified and contained, resulting in a well-worn set of phrases and terms. Simultaneously, a number of contemporary scholars and artists have begun to challenge these terms while preserving the histories to which they are attached. For example, Jacques Rancière interrogates the terms that anchor performance and spectatorship, and recent works by Sharon Hayes investigate the history of queer protest as it has been understood and assimilated from the Stonewall period in gay and lesbian history. This session seeks to encourage this opening of Pandora’s box by exploring the ways that issues based upon 1960s-70s art practices (with regard to gender, sexuality, materials, processes, etc.) have re-emerged to challenge the assumptions of our current critical and theoretical models. By extension, we feel that in rethinking and reworking the received wisdom from the past scholars can alter what counts as art today.

Panel Presenters:
Darby English, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago
“Nowhere to Run”

Jennifer Doyle, Associate Professor of English at the Univ of California at Riverside
“Jack Smith's Concrete Jungle”

Elissa Auther, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs
“Modernist Art History and the Contemporary Return of Craft”

Panel Respondent:
Dr. Whitney Chadwick

Panel Chair:
Dr. Dore Bowen,
Associate Professor of Art History & Visual Culture, San José State University