ANNOUNCEMENT & CALL FOR PAPERS
Modernisms, Inside & Out
The 4th conference of the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative, PART 2
2nd VENUE ADDED:
Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 15-16 January 2021
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS TO THE QUEBEC CITY CONFERENCE:
10 March 2020
The Canadian Women Artists' History Initiative is delighted to announce the addition of second venue and a new partner for Modernisms, Inside and Out. From January 15-16, 2021, part two of the conference will be hosted by the Musée national des beaux-art du Québec. The Toronto conference (20-22 August 2020) continues as a collaboration between Concordia University, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and Ryerson University's Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre.
In the summer of 2020 the McMichael Canadian Art Collection will launch Uninvited, a major exhibition on women and art in the 1920s and 30s, and the Art Gallery of Ontario will highlight work by female artists in the decades before the First World War. In the fall of 2020, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec will welcome the McMichael exhibition under the title Emily Carr et ses contemporaines. Together, the exhibitions offer an important opportunity to reassess women's visual and material engagements with the modern as a cultural force in Canada. The social changes effected by modernization brought significant advances for many women: full legal personhood, new careers, the vote, and increasing opportunities for public and artistic leadership. For others, however, modernity brought exclusion and repression. As racialized rhetoric intensified, immigration policy tightened and settlers sought to eliminate Indigenous cultural expression or confine it to the past. Economic transformation endangered pre-industrial ways of life and their attendant cultural forms, but also stimulated new kinds of artistic production.
How did the visual and material cultures of Canadian and Quebec women position them inside and out of the modern? And how does the art that women made turn modernism itself inside-out?
A rich history of scholarly investigation exists to support this inquiry. In the 1980s and 90s, feminist scholars of European and American art critiqued modernism and the cultural apparatus that supported it, arguing that women had effectively been constituted as modernism's excluded other. Since then, investigations of anti-modernism as a cultural force in Canada have called attention to the political, linguistic, and economic tensions that led many to search for alternatives. Most recently, studies of multiple modernities and global modernisms have asked us to rethink the boundaries and priorities of a field of study too-long defined by Euro-American exemplars. What new insights emerge when we bring the focalizing lens of Canadian and Quebec women's experiences to these discussions?
The deadline for proposing a paper for the Quebec City conference is 10 March 2020. Presentations are welcome in French or English. Simultaneous translation will be provided. Please email a title, a 150-word abstract and a 2-page cv to cwahi.conference@gmail.com. Graduate students should also forward a letter of support from their supervisor. Selections will be made by 30 March 2020. Inquiries may be directed to kristina.huneault@concordia.ca or to anne-marie.bouchard@mnbaq.qc.org.
Major support for the conference has been provided by the Gail and Steven A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art.
