Appel à communication : Artist as Community; Santa Barbara (EU), 27-28 avril 2012

Artist as Community
University of California, Santa Barbara, April 27 – 28, 2012
Deadline: Jan 15, 2012

The graduate students in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara invite abstracts for papers to be presented at our 37th Annual Graduate Student Symposium, April 27-28, 2012.
« Artist as Community »

Keynote Speaker: Lisa Bitel, Professor of History and Religion, University of Southern California

This graduate symposium will explore the ways in which community is defined through the production and reception of visual art.
Considering that it is often difficult to separate production and reception as sole agents in the formation of group identity, there are multiple ways in which the term « community » as a concept has been and continues to be redefined through visual means.   From mural projects designed to develop a community around the collective production of a work of art, to political appropriation and reutilization of art work to foster civic or national identities, art can both form and divide communities.   How can art shape, create, or dissolve communities?
What sort of « new » communities have been formed around or through visual arts?
We welcome submissions that creatively explore the variety of circumstances in which production and reception are intertwined in community development and definition through the visual.

Topics include, but are not limited to:
The effects of group productions of art within social systems within the community itself.
How art shapes local culture and its attachment to place.
Works of art and architecture that affect the planning and structuring of community environments.
How images and art forge or restructure corporate, regional, national or ethnic ties.
The appropriation of art by communities
The definition or redefinition of community through the visual.

Please send an abstract of 300 words or less and a brief CV to Margaret Bell (mfbell@umail.ucsb.edu) by January 15, 2012.  Address all questions to Deborah Spivak (despivak@umail.ucsb.edu).
37th Annual Graduate Student Symposium
Department of the History of Art and Architecture
University of California, Santa Barbara
April 27-28, 2012.

Reference http://arthist.net/archive/2226>.