Call for Panel Participation: College Art Association 2018

Call for Panel Participation, CAA 2018 in Los Angeles (Feb. 21-24)
Deadline to apply: August 14, 2017

Please email me with your interest in the panel topic below, and I can send you the full application info. 250-word abstracts are due by August 14. All formats welcome, including duo/trio presentations and performances. Please share.

Intercontinental: Native American and First Nations Artists on the Contemporary Art Stage, Chair(s): Michelle J. Lanteri, The University of Oklahoma, lanteri.michelle@gmail.com

Contemporary artists from Native American and First Nations cultures fuse a complex amalgam of the local and the global in their practices, a concept clearly discussed by scholar Dr. Jolene K. Rickard (Tuscarora) in her 2006 essay titled "The Local and the Global." But too often, the international relevance of these artworks is overlooked by curators in favor of preserving cleanly defined exhibition themes that cordon off indigenous artists of the Americas from the majority of contemporary artists at large. These localized, not globalized, exhibitions form conflicted spaces where diversity is acknowledged, but in contexts separate from the rest of the contemporary art world. Despite this predicament, exhibitions and biennials that include Native American and First Nations artists within the international art stage are taking place, most notably with the participation of Postcommodity (Raven Chacon [Navajo], Cristobal Martinez [Mestizo/Xicano], and Kade L. Twist [Cherokee Nation]) in documenta 14. As well, Dartmouth's Hood Museum mounted an inclusive contemporary art exhibition in 2015, titled "About Face: Self Portraiture in Contemporary Art," which featured works by Cindy Sherman, Chuck Close, Nikki S. Lee, Wendy Red Star (Apsaalooke [Crow]), and others. Thus, this panel considers the multiplicity and overlapping of local and global influences in artworks by Native American and First Nations practitioners, while identifying the local and global reach of particular objects and non-objects via diverse exhibitions, biennials, catalogues, monographs, and the like. Papers presented will also address the problematics of curators' exclusions of Native American and First Nations artists from mainstream contemporary exhibitions.