CFP’s: CAA 2026
The CAA Annual Conference is the largest convening of art historians, artists, designers, curators, and visual arts professionals. Each year we offer sessions submitted by our members, committees, and affiliated societies that deliver a wide range of program content. Read more about the history of the program here.
The CAA 114th Annual Conference will take place at the Hilton Chicago, February 18–21, 2026. The conference will be held in person with a selection of hybrid sessions and events. CAA leadership, in collaboration with the Annual Conference Committee, is reviewing participant and attendee feedback from the 113th Annual Conference to determine any format adjustments needed for the 2026 program.
Below you will find our highlights from the recently published CFP list that will be of interest to those working in the field of Nineteenth Century French Art.
ANARCHIST MODES OF SUBTERFUGE IN MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY AVANT-GARDE ART
This session seeks papers exploring anarchist strategies of subterfuge within modern and contemporary avant-garde artistic practices. Historically, anarchist and avant-garde artists have employed diverse methods of subtle resistance, embedding covert messages, disruptive aesthetics, and tactical provocations within their works to challenge prevailing political and cultural hegemonies. Drawing from a broad geographical and historical spectrum—including but not limited to Courbet’s radical realism in nineteenth-century France, the subversive provocations of New York Dada anarchists, the disruptive visual and performative experiments of MAVO in interwar Japan, and the subterfuge of Korean anarchist avant-garde artists under authoritarian regimes—this session aims to articulate and contextualize anarchist and avant-garde approaches to art as vehicles of hidden or overt critique.
We welcome papers that address how anarchist-inflected subterfuge operates through visual ambiguity, coded symbolism, performative intervention, or media strategies aimed at subverting institutional frameworks, authoritarian censorship, or societal norms. Contributions might also consider contemporary artists or collectives who continue this legacy by employing anarchist-informed tactics in response to current socio-political realities, exploring how subtlety and subversion intersect within visual and performance-based avant-garde arts. Papers engaging with interdisciplinary perspectives, particularly those incorporating cultural studies, political theory, media archaeology, and gender studies, are especially encouraged. Ultimately, this session seeks to illuminate the intricate ways anarchist strategies of subterfuge continue to inform and challenge our understanding of avant-garde art’s potential to incite meaningful social and political transformation. Selected participants and paper proposals will also be invited to contribute to an anthology currently in development on the same topic.
ELEMENTAL INFRASTRUCTURES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY VISUAL CULTURE
In the light of climate crisis, many artists and scholars are seeking new methodologies for engaging with the environment, including theorizing new definitions of landscape and focusing on the entanglement of material and political infrastructures. An elemental turn has recently expanded the scope of media studies (John Durham Peters, Melody Jue) to tackle new objects like air conditioning and seawater, and is influencing art historians of the contemporary (Giuliana Bruno, Brian Jacobson) to look more closely at the atmospheric relationships of buildings, spectators, infrastructures, and nature.
Our panel proposes that the invaluable lessons of “elemental media” can be applied to the study of 19th-century visual culture. In this age of expanding industrialization and empire, engineers modernized urban infrastructures and scientists were solidifying the diverse fields of meteorology, botany, and geology—developments that produced their own visual culture, alongside artists who interrogated their relationship to the natural world. Tackling this interdisciplinary corpus helps us make transhistorical connections between then and now—historicizing contemporary art’s increasing attention to ambient ecological effects within our growing awareness of 19th-century ecological damage that kickstarted our Anthropocene.
Papers might examine ways that elemental media have been wrangled and managed including by lenses, pipes, or paper certificates. Some of these media might physically interact with the water/air/light/earth in question, while others might function as secondary-order representations that facilitate their movement and circulation. How does “elemental media” open up new objects of analysis for 19th-century art history? What role can the visual play in wider conversations of ecological management?
LANDSCAPE, MATERIALITY, AND REPRESENTATION IN THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY
This session invites contributions that investigate the entangled relationships between landscape, materiality, and representation in the long nineteenth century. While landscape has often been examined through symbolic, nationalistic, or pictorial frameworks, this panel foregrounds its material dimensions—both as subject and substance—and asks how they shaped artistic and cultural production during this transformative period. How did the physical qualities of land, earth, and environment inflect visual representation? What tensions emerged between landscape as material presence and landscape as mediated image?
Bridging art history, material and visual culture, human geography, and environmental humanities, this session seeks to integrate phenomenological approaches (Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Casey), material and object-oriented ontology (Bennett, Harman), and geographical theory (Ingold) with close visual and historical analysis. We are particularly interested in how the materiality of land—its textures, substances, and transformations—was registered, abstracted, or resisted in the practices of representation across diverse geographies, media, and artistic traditions during this period.
Contributors might consider:
The material construction of landscape images: grounds, supports, pigments, and surfaces
Representing geological time, land use, or extraction industries
Earth as medium: pigment, sediment, and organic matter in artistic practice
Artistic responses to ecological degradation
Indigenous and non-Western modes of representing land and territory
The role of materiality in 19th-century cartography or land surveys
The visual rhetorics of land ownership, enclosure, and displacement
Intersections of land, labor, and class in visual culture
We welcome proposals engaging with both canonical and understudied works that rethink landscape through its material and representational operations.
MOTHERS, MAKERS, AND MATRONS: CREATIVE LABOR AND CAREGIVING AT THE MARGINS OF ART
Woman’s Art Journal welcomes proposals for our second annual conference session, dedicated to our late co-founding editor, Elsa Honig Fine, that interrogate acts of matronage (patronage), artmaking, and caregiving through the lens of women’s creative labor. Moving beyond biological and reproductive definitions, we consider “motherhood” a framework for examining how caretaking—emotional, practical, and artistic—shapes, supports, and sometimes stymies creative practices across professional and personal life stages. We seek contributions that address caregiving as a vital, historically undervalued labor within artmaking, art history, curating, and community-building. How do artists and art writers navigate the demands of caregiving—from motherhood through menopause, for self and others, and in queer/trans/femme kinship structures? How do these experiences inform aesthetic materials, subjects, working conditions, and modes of visibility?
This panel will expand definitions of motherhood by encompassing broader lived experiences of support, maintenance, disability, and survival through the voices of non-biological m/others and queer, trans/femme, lesbian, and nonbinary communities; by chronicling menopause; by tending to the ill or elderly; and by exploring care-work in roles as curators, collectors, and dealers. We invite scholars, artists, curators, and critics to submit papers that engage with these themes from historical, theoretical, and practice-based perspectives. Compelling presentations will reflect how care radically serves the creative lives of artists and cultural workers. By foregrounding mothering and caregiving as critical methodologies, our session aims to challenge dominant narratives of productivity and value in the art world and to elevate the creative capacities of women working at its margins.
PHOTOGRAPHIC SUBJECTIVITIES: SEEING, BEING SEEN, REFUSING THE FRAME
What does photography make possible for those rendered invisible, hypervisible, or misrepresented in dominant visual cultures? In an era of globalization on an unprecedented scale, what continuities might emerge across culturally and politically grounded photographic practices?
Inspired by the ever-growing body of scholarship on photography’s role in identity discourse, this panel invites proposals that explore the shifting relationships between image-making, representation, and power across geographical and temporal localities. There are no regional or time-period limitations; in fact, we are especially interested in work that stretches, overlaps, or complicates those boundaries. We welcome contributions that examine photography as archive, practice, method, or social practice.
Ideally, papers will bring together diverse transdisciplinary approaches from art history and visual culture to Indigenous studies, Black studies, queer theory, critical disability studies, Latinx studies, or media archaeology. From this, we hope to open up new conversations around photography’s role in shaping and complicating subjectivity. As images continue to flood our everyday lives on proliferating fronts, this panel aims to gather a broad range of perspectives that can reveal the tensions and possibilities within photography towards decolonial praxis.
SCULPTURE AND THE NON-NORMATIVE BODY
The normative body has been the traditional subject of sculpture since antiquity. Its ubiquity, however, has led to the invisibility of the diversity of bodies in the history of art: from the Old Drunkard female seated sculpture and disabled body of Aesop from the Hellenistic Era, and the ‘hermaphrodite’ from antiquity to the ‘grotesque’ or ‘monstrous’ from the Renaissance garden to the polychrome ‘ethnographic’ portrait busts from the nineteenth century. We want to question these categories and address bodies that have been under-represented in sculpture, either through representational strategies, materials that reflect on lived experience, and/or sculptural practice itself.
We encourage abstracts that rethink the traditional methods of sculpture in art history in relation to gender, sexuality, race, class and/or disability. We invite proposals for contributions that stem from but are not limited to the following: fragmentation and decay; queer and trans perspectives; health and disability; age and representation; processes of othering; materiality; redefinitions/responses to normativity/the normative body; artists engaging in their work via lived experience or through materiality. We are looking at this issue transhistorically and globally, across a range of sculpture practices, from ancient to the contemporary, and the figurative to the abstract.
This panel is organized by the editors of the Sculpture Journal, as part of their ongoing commitment to foster current discourses on sculpture in a broad sense.
The city of Aix-en-Provence is celebrating Cezanne 2025–a year-long initiative organized around the Musée Granet’s forthcoming exhibition, Cezanne au Jas de Bouffan , the renovation and public opening of the Jas de Bouffan, the artist’s family estate, the creation of the Center for Cezanne Research and Documentation (CCRD), and the reopening of the Atelier des Lauves, the artist’s final studio from 1901 until his death in 1906.
The proposed session “Seeing Cezanne Anew,” co-chaired by Gloria Groom, chair of Painting and Sculpture of Europe and David and Mary Winton Green Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) and Kathryn Kremnitzer, Paul Cezanne Society Member, will capitalize on the exciting momentum in the wake of Cezanne 2025 to reignite Cezanne studies, past, present, and future, into the modern digital age and beyond. The panel will introduce the AIC’s forthcoming online scholarly collection catalogue of paintings and works on paper by Cezanne–complete with new conservation images and information in addition to art historical essays–which will be available for free online by the time of the conference, as well as the new resources and ongoing research in Aix to maintain and expand the artist’s catalogue raisonne as a living repository, available for free online (www.cezannecatalogue.com). The session will invite contributions that engage with the artist and his work across disciplines, in depth, or in dialogue.
WHO'S AFRAID OF DECORATIVE ART?
In the history of global nineteenth-century art, decorative is often treated like a pejorative term. Even as scholars increasingly resist boundaries between ‘fine art’ and visual culture, the decorative arts are largely neglected or expressly avoided. Why maintain the exclusion of decorative objects, whose production, circulation, and reception are inextricable from the history of art? The exclusion of decorative art stems from its supposed inferiority within the hierarchy of visual media; its frequent elusiveness with respect to attribution; and its entanglements with industry, consumerism, and domesticity. Perhaps most importantly, the exclusion appears rooted in assumptions that decorative art is apolitical. Yet decorative objects—from porcelain to wallpaper to clocks—were a function of the artistic, social, and political developments of the nineteenth century. We invite submissions that explore how decorative arts offer a critical lens into the period’s complex sociopolitical currents, including (but not limited to) imperialism, slavery, technology, extraction, commerce, and collecting. As markers of status, wealth, luxury, taste, and style, how did objects and images considered decorative contribute to the formation of personal and collective identities? What kinds of intersectional issues were embedded in decorative objects? How did these objects shape conceptions of what constituted modernity in—and beyond—the Euro-American context? How did the decorative not only reflect but also influenceglobal geopolitics?
(METHODOLOGICAL) BLACK HOLES IN PHOTOGRAPHY
In 2019 newspapers excitedly reported that astronomers had finally “photographed” the black hole M87*. This famous image does not fit our usual definitions of photography as it used complex computer algorithms to fashion an image from collected data. Why and how is this image described as a “photograph?” This panel looks to examine objects that are named, described, titled, situated, or conventionally understood as “photographs” despite not using a camera, not recording light waves, or using other mechanical or digital methods to produce an image. Rather than being a novel phenomenon or problem, artists and scientists have struggled to define and name photography since the inception of the medium. From nineteenth-century photomechanical processes and photo-sculptures to AI image-making and astronomical visualizations, such objects are often subsumed into the category of “photography.”
Investigating photography from this set of examples, this panel asks: What kind of objects/processes have been called a photograph? Which features and technologies are used to define the medium? How can they reimagine the medium’s history and future? Contributions might explore the reception of objects as “photographs,” the aestheticization or mediation of alternative “photographic” methods, the use of photographic processes in science, or the circulation and transmission of photographs through other media. This panel seeks to bring together papers across geographies and time periods and encourages presentations that engage with interdisciplinary perspectives including scholars working on the definitions, devices, and debates surrounding photographic methods from the nineteenth century to the contemporary.
ARTIFACTS AND ACTIONS: NAVIGATING STUDIO PRACTICE AND PERFORMANCE
This session invites proposals from artists who teach in traditional studio disciplines such as printmaking, painting, ceramics, or sculpture, and whose practices also include performance. Many of these artists work across the spectrum of object-creation and experience-making, producing physical works while also engaging in live, time-based, or embodied actions. Yet performance is often perceived as supplemental or secondary to more materially grounded forms of making.
We seek presentations that reflect on the conceptual and practical relationships between studio work and performance—whether they are intimately connected or entirely distinct. How do these modes of making coexist within an artist’s identity and pedagogy? How does performance enter the classroom, consciously or unconsciously, through critique, demonstration, or presence? Is teaching itself a kind of performance, and how do artists reconcile or embrace this in relation to their studio practice?
This panel aims to create dialogue among educators and artists who work at the intersection of objects and actions, artifacts and events. We welcome contributions that explore embodiment, temporality, labor, and the expressive challenges of navigating between tangible forms and performative gestures—particularly within institutional contexts that privilege one over the other.
ARTISTS' PERSONAL LIBRARIES AS SITES OF ART HISTORICAL INQUIRY
Artists' personal libraries are an important, yet underacknowledged, resource for art historical research. Often known through inventories, institutions have increasingly turned toward preserving such collections as sites of knowledge as in the cases of Donald Judd, Isamu Noguchi, Allan Sekula, Georgia O’Keeffe, Romare Bearden, and Auguste Rodin among others. With relatively few exceptions, such as the libraries of Robert Smithson and Marcel Duchamp, and the research of Ségolène Le Men, artists’ libraries are often overlooked or limited to mention within footnotes. This has occurred as the broader use of archival resources has flourished as an established and prominent practice. Yet, the books, magazines, and records owned by artists, along with the personal inscriptions and marginalia they may contain, provide unique insight and information not available elsewhere.Understood as invaluable resources for art historical inquiry, the personal libraries of artists offer opportunities to examine the creative practices, personal lives, and ideas that underpin artist’s work. This session seeks to explore new and diverse forms ofscholarship based upon the use of artists’ personal libraries.
BAD GOVERNMENT: ART AND POLITICS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
How did art, architecture, and visual and material culture in the long eighteenth century perpetuate or resist objectionable forms of government? This panel will consider how the arts were weaponized both by political leaders to shore up their regimes and by their critics to bring those regimes down. Potential topics include but are by no means limited to: the arts of the eighteenth century’s revolutions and counterrevolutions, the enlistment of the visual arts to justify, perpetuate, and resist colonialism, popular media and propaganda, the building and destruction of palaces, monuments, and other public-facing forms of art, artists as political actors, private and domestic forms of artistic control and contestation, portraits of rulers and political figures, sacred art in the service of secular struggles, and the mobilization of scientific illustration for political ends
Over the long eighteenth century (c.1689-1815), the decorative arts and design underwent profound change via global diffusion of objects, techniques, and knowledge. Although global artistic exchange has shaped cultural landscapes for centuries, this particular period saw the creation of new aesthetic paradigms and fostered cultural discourses regarding notions of cultural agency, identity, and authenticity. This session examines the making of global aesthetic traditions and practices in the long eighteenth century by closely interrogating the dynamics of cross-cultural hybridity, adaptability, and exchange along with their usefulness as art historical concepts. Furthermore, the session will illustrate how the evolution of artistic traditions shaped visual, material, sensorial, and political landscapes across the early modern world.
We invite contributions that address how individuals and collectives responded to cross-cultural interactions, creatively adapting and transforming these influences into novel, hybrid forms. We welcome papers from diverse geographies that consider how decorative art and design functioned as crucial contact zones where local traditions were continuously reimagined through exchange as well as resistance. For example, Indian artisans adapted traditional cotton textile designs for European tastes, while European potters such as the Delft and Meissen factories experimented with new technologies to produce ceramics in competition with Chinese porcelain. Meanwhile, Colonoware pottery was produced by enslaved Africans in North America from a combination of African traditions, local resources and practical demands. Ultimately, this discussion will deepen scholarly understanding of the role played by the decorative arts in producing global visual and material cultures during the long eighteenth century.
MATERIALITY AND THE RECEPTION OF ANCIENT OBJECTS
Ancient Mediterranean objects typically survive in a fragmented state, and their reception, particularly sculpture, has shifted over time. Seventeenth-century artists worked to return fragmented ancient sculptures to a “whole” or “complete” state. Yet, in 1803, Antonio Canova refused Lord Elgin’s proposal to restore the Parthenon marbles, fearing it would damage their original condition. Thus, there was an eventual shift in the perception of the fragment–no longer “incomplete," it possessed an “age value” as Alois Riegl later theorized. With the discovery of ancient textiles in Egypt in the second half of the nineteenth century an opposite approach to the fragment developed. Despite the fact that one might discover a “complete” ancient textile, it was rarely retained; rather, it was cut into as many pieces as possible. Not perceived as fine art, their value instead stemmed from their ability to transmit patterns.
This panel aims to explore the reception, manipulation, restoration, or destruction of ancient objects from the Renaissance through the end of the nineteenth century. We invite papers that investigate whether the specific materiality of ancient objects makes them more vulnerable or resistant to later intervention. Topics can include the exploration of the concept of in/completeness in relation to changing tastes and theoretical divisions between the fine and applied arts; in/completeness and restoration in relation to aesthetic and historical integrity; and the exploration of pastiches. We seek contributions that look closely at surviving objects to extrapolate new ways of thinking about the reception of ancient art.
OBSCENE BEAUTY: DESIGN’S AFFAIR WITH LUXURY
This panel will explore the relationships between decadence, excess, and monstrosity as manifested in designed objects. Through case studies in fashion, graphic, product design, and other areas, the panel will examine how design pushes the boundaries of impropriety. From bespoke commissions to small-scale coveted collections, quiet minimalism to lush and saturated visuals, design has been a means of manufacturing desire and constructing value beyond a product’s inherent offerings.
Design allows consumers to express the wildest aspirations of their own identity, a longing for the forbidden, unattainable, and extravagant. While modernist notions of “good design” have emphasized simplicity and ideas about cleanliness and purity, which have become coded as expensive, there have always been alternative modes of expressing exclusivity and expense. Designers and consumers have always resisted these restraints, expressing appetites for forms that boldly embrace excess. We welcome papers that analyze designed objects contemporary or historical in the context of race, gender, queer theory, ecocriticism, or other methods adjacent to design practice.
We are looking for papers that explore the aesthetics of luxury, from materials to textures, bold typography, or opulent color palettes. Papers might consider packaging for “vice products” such as alcohol and perfume that entangle refinement with impropriety, blurring the line between elegance and excess. Papers on Maximalism might explore how design weaponizes extravagance or embraces excess with over-the-top production techniques. Papers exploring limited edition collectibles might analyze how design signals exclusivity and scarcity through these designs. This panel welcomes papers that deal with luxury design broadly defined.
This session highlights the integral role of craft and material culture in global art history, urging a reevaluation of craft as a fundamental component of artistic practice. Historically, craft has been central to art production across cultures, yet its significance has often been overlooked within mainstream art historical narratives. From the rich traditions of Chinese art, where calligraphy, ceramics, and silk weaving have long been revered as high art, to the vibrant artistic practices within LatinX communities, where craft and everyday objects have served as expressions of cultural identity and resistance, craft has always been deeply embedded in the fabric of art history.
By centering craft, this session provides an opportunity to recover and reframe these overlooked narratives, recognizing the contributions of marginalized communities—particularly women, Indigenous groups, and diasporic artists—whose work has shaped both historical and contemporary art. As Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson emphasized in her keynote at Rice University, "there are no self-taught artists; they are mother-taught artists." This poignant observation underscores the importance of craft as a generational, community-based knowledge that has shaped art outside formal academic structures.
SUITCASE MODERNISM: TRANSATLANTIC EXCHANGE RECONSIDERED
Strong artistic ties between Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resulted in flourishing artistic centers on both coasts of the Atlantic. But what about within the Atlantic? Disruptions from war, economic uncertainty, and a desire for new visual inspiration led many artists to explore alternative destinations. Some—including Winslow Homer, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and Albert Gleizes— found their way to sites within, rather than around, the Atlantic. The participants of “Suitcase Modernism,” gathered at the 2026 CAA Conference in Chicago, will review Intra-Atlantic artistic experience during this period to reconsider the history and parameters of Transatlantic exchange.
Island locales – for instance Bermuda, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and the Azores – drew artists to their shores with the promise of a low cost of living, temperate climates and, increasingly, modern amenities and infrastructure. The tropicality of these settings, as well as their liminality of travel, has arguably influenced existing scholarship, which often casts these periods of artistic production as exceptions or brief divergences from a consistent and intentional artistic path on the continents and in urban centers. “Suitcase Modernism” seeks papers addressing Intra-Atlantic production and the role artists’ sojourns played in their artistic development. The focus will be on decentering Modernist experimentation from New York and Paris and expanding the scope of early-twentieth-century art.
THE MARGINS AND BACKGROUNDS OF PORTRAITS
Portraiture studies have traditionally focused on faces, clothing, and accessories as sites of creating and stabilizing identity within art. Layers of oil paint, pastel dust, and engraved ink articulate race, gender, class, and kinship networks on a scale ranging from jewelry miniatures to life-size replicas. Scholars have demonstrated how these representations surrogated for distant power, how collections and exhibitions were political statements, and how portrait iconoclasm could be broadly ideological rather than personal.
However, what happens behind and around the body? This facet of portraiture remains an open field. Our panel thus invites papers that examine the margins and backgrounds of portraits. These spaces vary from roundels or planes of color, to classicizing scenes or imaginary gardens, to draperies or architectural structures. As much as standardized formulas and techniques have developed for the face itself, the (back)ground has been curiously resistant to such strategies. This panel asks what do these diverse environments—a visualized “habitus,” to borrow from Bourdieu—contribute to the portrait? How might painterly surroundings trouble notions of identity and modernity? For group portraits and conversation pieces, how does setting provoke or dismiss relationality? Do specific display or exhibition contexts become extended backgrounds for portraits, especially with sculptures? Ultimately, how do the edges, however they might be defined, (re)frame our understanding of the key genre of portraiture? In addition to paying close attention to the borders and liminal spaces of portraiture as traditionally understood, we also welcome papers that trouble the definitions of portraiture itself through close attention to context.
THE MATERIALITY OF TEXT IN HISTORIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY ART
In recent years there has been a growing interest in the use of written text in visual art. This session investigates how artists explored the aesthetics of text in a wide range of media during the nineteenth century. It invites proposals for historical, material, technical, and theoretical analyses of text in the period.
Papers focusing on any geographical region are welcome. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: the use of text by William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites in tapestries, stained glass, illuminated manuscripts, paintings, and/or frames; the impact of typeface design on the semantics of language and its relationship to illustrations; and the role of typography in artistic networks.
We invite contributions from art historians, artists, typographers, and other practitioners in the field. Interdisciplinary and collaborative proposals are encouraged. Proposals that explore new methodological approaches to the materiality of text are particularly welcome.
Note: Financial support may be available from the William Morris Society in the United States for a speaker without institutional funding. If you would like to be considered for funding, please notify the session chair when you submit your paper proposal.