TFAP@CAA 2020 Day of Panels: Transnational Feminisms

TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISMS
The Feminist Art Project Day of Panels at the College Art Association Conference 2020
Saturday, February 15, 2020
Hilton Chicago, Continental Ballroom C
8:30am – 5:30pm
Free and open to the public

This full-day symposium on Transnational Feminisms explores women’s art practice around the world from a decolonial perspective, rejecting the notions of both “woman” and “nation” as fixed subjects and stable categories and challenging an understanding of feminism as a unified and singular entity. Acknowledging the porosity of borders, we define globalization as the interconnected movement of capital and peoples that characterizes the modern era. Paying attention to locality, we consider how feminism in art practice took multiple and specific forms contingent on temporal events and local conditions. In many places and throughout history, feminist art related not only to gender issues, but was also inseparable from struggles against military dictatorships and state violence, colonialism, socioeconomic disparities, racism, repression, and censorship.

Transnational Feminisms examines women’s movements and artistic practice through intersectional lenses, taking into account gender identity, race, ethnicity, nationality, class, sexuality, religion, ability, age, and others. It will discuss issues related to representation, inclusion, diversity, and multiplicity and underline differences and common concerns across cultures. It will ask crucial questions about the reception of feminism outside Western Europe and the United States and the impact of diasporic experiences. It will also consider the power of social media in the digital era—its role in blurring borders and bringing together women’s causes around the globe, but also obfuscating the boundaries between private and public domains.

Symposium Chairs:
Claudia Calirman (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY) and Tatiana Flores (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey)

Transnational Feminisms, Part 1: Enacting Activism
8:30 – 10:00 AM
Opening with welcome and introductory remarks, this panel focuses on social activism as a transnational emancipatory practice for transformation.

Ana María Reyes, Boston University
Activating Vulnerability: On Artivism and Infrastructure

Anonda Bell, Rutgers-Newark
Terra Nullius: Australian Perspectives

Maria Gaspar, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Jack this House

Transnational Feminisms, Part 2: Performing Resistance
10:30 AM – 12:00 PM
This panel explores performance as a tool of transgression of colonial and heteronormative narratives.

Laura Anderson Barbata, FONCA-CONACULTA, Mexico and University of Wisconsin, Madison
Performance: Julia Pastrana and the Eye of the Beholder

Amelia Jones, University of Southern California
Keynote: Transnational Feminisms and/in “Queer” Performance in New Zealand / Aotearoa

Transnational Feminisms, Part 3: Trespassing Borders
12:30 – 2:00 PM
This panel addresses diasporic experiences between geopolitical borders and cultures and alternative ways of thinking through space and place.

Jeffreen Hayes, bridge/arts, inc. and Threewalls
Faded to the Back: Black Women in Arts Leadership

Susette Min, University of California, Davis
Art and the Making of Formal Justice

Edra Soto, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Agents and Supermodels

Melissa Potter, Columbia College Chicago
Border Crossings: Feminist Collaboration in Traditional Societies

Transnational Feminisms, Part 4: Expanding Constructs
2:00 – 3:30 PM
This panel focuses on new methodologies for transnational feminist art histories.

Mechtild Widrich, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Second World, Second Sex: How Applicable was Western Feminism in Eastern Europe

Giulia Lamoni, Instituto de Historia da Arte, Universidade Nova de Lisboa / FCT
Portuguese Pop: A Feminist Reading

Jenni Sorkin, University of California, Santa Barbara
Motherhood, Representation and the California 1960s

Agata Jakubowska, Adam Mickiewicz University
Globalizing History of Feminist Art

Transnational Feminisms, Part 5: Decentering Discourse
4:00 – 5:30 PM
This panel brings together artists and scholars whose works address the intersectionality of politics and aesthetics outside hegemonic discourses.

Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, University of Rhode Island
The Multiplicity of Re/Presentation

Laura Kina, DePaul University
Decolonizing Memory: Drawing Indigenous Okinawan Hajichi Tattoos

Wanda Raimundi Ortiz, University of Central Florida
Performance: Chuleta la Profe Discusses Las Reinas de Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz: Confronting the Pain Body through Performance

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Symposium Chair Bios

Claudia Calirman is Associate Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, in the Department of Art and Music. Her areas of study are Latin American, modern, and contemporary art. She is the author of Brazilian Art under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles (Duke University Press, 2012), which analyses the intersection of politics and the visual arts during the most repressive years of Brazil’s military regime, from 1968 until 1975. The book received the 2013 Arvey Award by the Association for Latin American Art. Calirman is a 2013 recipient of the Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation and was the 2008-2009 Jorge Paulo Lemann Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. She is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). Calirman has curated several exhibitions in New York, including Berna Reale: While You Laugh (Nara Roesler Gallery, NY, 2019); Basta!Art and Violence in Latin America (John Jay College, 2016); and Antonio Manuel: I Want to Act, not Represent! (Americas Society, 2011).

Tatiana Flores is Associate Professor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, with a joint appointment in the Department of Art History. A specialist in modern and contemporary Latin American art, she is the author of Mexico’s Revolutionary Avant-Gardes: From Estridentismo to ¡30-30! (Yale University Press, 2013). A revisionist and interdisciplinary account of Mexican modern art as seen through two avant-garde movements, the book was awarded the 2014 Humanities Book Prize by the Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association. A 2017-18 Getty Scholar, Flores received the 2016 Arts Writers book prize from the Andy Warhol Foundation and was the 2007-2008 Cisneros Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. She is Vice President of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP), chair of the editorial board of Art Journal, and also serves on the boards of ASAP/Journal and Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture. Professor Flores is active as an independent curator. She was an invited expert for the launch of the Getty Foundation’s initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. As part of this program, she curated the critically acclaimed exhibition Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago for the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in Long Beach, CA and was also an adviser for the Skirball Cultural Center exhibition Another Promised Land: Anita Brenner’s Mexico.

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Presenter Bios and Abstracts

Transnational Feminisms, Part 1: Enacting Activism

Ana María Reyes is an Assistant Professor in Latin American art history at Boston University, Associate Researcher at Harvard University, and founding member of the Symbolic Reparations Research Project (SRRP). Her research focuses on issues of victim commemoration, cultural production as activism, and social discrimination as representational violence in Latin American art. Her book The Politics of Taste: Beatriz González and Cold War Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2019) studies symbolic violence in the context of Cold War aesthetic and modernization discourses. She co-edited with Maureen Shanahan Simón Bolívar: Travels and Transformations of a Cultural Icon (University Press of Florida, 2016) on cultural bolivarianisms as a case for the arts and humanities in democratic practices. With the SRRP, she is currently working on implementations for symbolic reparations with the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (IACHR) and the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL).

• Activating Vulnerability: On Artivism and Infrastructure: One of the main objectives of symbolic reparations in cases of gross human rights violations is the reparation of moral reciprocal relations between the State and a violated community. In doing so, the state and affected communities accept their relation of mutual constitution, that is, their vulnerability and contingency on each other. Judith Butler reasons that vulnerability is a valuable condition of political resistance and can be “a form of activism, or as that which is in some sense mobilized in forms of resistance.” Following Butler, Reyes proposes that processes of symbolic reparations can capitalize on this vulnerability in order to construct sites of commemoration, conflict resolution, and the very infrastructure that addresses the conditions necessary to resist future violations. The success of artistic interventions and architectural structures as means of symbolic reparations depends on their form and the process as well as the need for infrastructure that ensures continuing processes directed towards guarantees of non-repetition.

Anonda Bell is an Australian born, USA based, artist and curator. She is the Director and Chief Curator of the Paul Robeson Galleries at Rutgers-Newark. The PRG operates a network of exhibition venues in dedicated and interstitial spaces across the campus, including the Robeson Campus Center and Express Newark. Prior to working at Rutgers, Bell has worked in various not for profit arts organizations in the including the Everhart Museum in Pennsylvania and Snug Harbor Cultural Center in New York. In Australia she worked at the National Gallery of Victoria and Bendigo Art Gallery. Her artwork has been shown at various venues in the USA and Australia. In 2016 she was the recipient of a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship as a practicing artist.

• Terra Nullius: Australian Perspectives: Terra nullius is a legal term to describe ‘nobody’s’ land’, a term used by white settlers when they arrived in the continent now known as Australia.  The thought was that the county was devoid of culture upon arrival, a tabula rasa onto which narratives could be inscribed. In fact, some of the earliest examples of humans lived in this continent and the continent of Africa.  This presentation will explore the work of artists (specifically those who are female identified), of Australia who’s socially engaged work explores issues related to history, anthropology, technology, feminism and the environment.

Maria Gaspar is an interdisciplinary artist whose work addresses issues of spatial justice in order to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. Through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance, Gaspar’s practice situates itself within historically marginalized sites and spans multiple formats, scales, and durations to produce liberatory actions. Gaspar’s projects have been supported by the Art for Justice Fund, the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, the Creative Capital Award, the Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, and the Art Matters Foundation. Maria has received the Sor Juana Women of Achievement Award in Art and Activism from the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Chamberlain Award for Social Practice from the Headlands Center for the Arts. Gaspar has lectured and exhibited extensively at venues including the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; the African American Museum, Philadelphia, PA; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, holds an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.

• Jack this House: Gaspar traces the arc of her artistic practice interrogating the psychosocial impact of the Cook County Jail, the largest single-site jail in the country, on those living on either side of its walls. Using movement, touch, sound, and the body as strategies against confinement, Gaspar will discuss how her recent work is created amidst the tension between restlessness and freedom.

Transnational Feminisms, Part 2: Performing Resistance

Laura Anderson Barbata is an Artist, author, performer. Transdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn and Mexico City, born in Mexico. Since 1992 she has worked primarily in the social realm, and has initiated projects in the Venezuelan Amazon, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Norway, and the United States. In 2005 she campaigned for the repatriation of Julia Pastrana, which resulted in the removal of Pastrana’s body from the Schreiner Collection in Oslo and its successful repatriation and burial in Sinaloa, Mexico, Pastrana’s birth state. The project continues with upcoming publications, exhibitions and performances.  Her work is in various private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; el Museo de Arte Moderno, México D.F.; Landesbank Baden-Württemberg Gallery, Stuttgart, Germany; Fundación Cisneros, American Express Co., México; Museo Carrillo Gil, México; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California; Museo Jaureguía, Navarra, Spain and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary.  Recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman 2016 Award; Defense of Human Rights Award 2017, Instituto de Administración Pública de Tabasco, México; honorary fellow of LACIS (the Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies Program), University of Wisconsin, Madison; fellow of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary TBA21 The Current program. Miembro del Sistema Nacional de Creadores, México (2014-2017) and professor at Escuela Nacional de Escultura, Pintura y Grabado La Esmeralda of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (2010-2015). www.lauraandersonbarbata.com

• Performance: Julia Pastrana and the Eye of the Beholder: Victorian Mexican Indigenous mezzo soprano Julia Pastrana was billed as ¨The Ugliest Woman in the World¨. A title given to her by her manager-husband Theodore Lent, she was exhibited by him and others in the United States and Europe during her life and after her death for 150 years. Chronicling Laura Anderson Barbata´s 10 years of work to have Pastrana’s body repatriated to Mexico for burial, the audience is conducted through a series of stories, exercises and thought experiments towards an experience of radical empathy and a re-examination of the value of a human life.

Amelia Jones is the Robert A. Day Professor and Vice Dean of Research at the Roski School of Art and Design at University of Southern California. A feminist curator and a theorist and historian of art and performance, her recent publications include Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (2012), Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History (2012), co-edited with Adrian Heathfield, the edited volume Sexuality (2014), and, co-edited with Erin Silver, Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (2016). Her exhibition Material Traces: Time and the Gesture in Contemporary Art took place in 2013 in Montreal and she programmed the events Trans-Montréal (2015) in that city, followed by a related publication “On Trans/Performance,” a special issue of Performance Research (2016). Her Live Artists Live performance and conference program took place at USC in 2016. Jones is currently working on a retrospective of the work of Ron Athey (Queer Communion: Ron Athey) and a book entitled In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance is forthcoming.

• Keynote: Transnational Feminisms and/in “Queer” Performance in New Zealand / Aotearoa: This paper begins by explaining my trajectory from my early career in the 1990s researching and writing as a feminist with a focus primarily on the work of North American woman artists (from Carolee Schneemann to Renée Cox) to studying and writing about queer feminist work of artists such as Laura Aguilar and Cathy Opie. In the 2000s, while living in the UK, I became more aware of transnational feminism in a British context and of the limited nature of North American models (looking at the work of transnational British artists such as Sutapa Biswas and George Chakravarthy); and, while teaching in Montréal, I began to see the importance of feminism in a francophone frame, and of taking on the self-manifestations, theories, and political concerns of queer and trans artists who are feminists, such as Johnny Forever, 2Fik, and Kama La Makerel. Attention to such work expands what feminism is, and needs to be. And, landing in Aotearoa/New Zealand for a semester in 2018 to complete a book on queer performance, I studied the work of Fafswag and other local performers North Americans would call queer or trans. How and why I insist that such perspectives thinking across borders and “genders” are crucial to feminism today and what they offer our understanding of a 2020s feminist politics will be the final questions posed by this paper.

Transnational Feminisms, Part 3: Trespassing Borders

Jeffreen Hayes, Ph.D. merges her administrative, curatorial and academic practices into her cultural leadership of supporting artists and community development. As an advocate for racial inclusion, equity and access, Jeffreen develops adaptable approaches for community participation, particularly those in underrepresented groups. She has extensive curatorial experience and some of her projects include SILOS, Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman, AFRICOBRA: Messages to the People, and most recently AFRICOBRA: Nation Time which is an official collateral event for the 2019 Venice Biennial, the oldest art exhibition in the world.  Jeffreen also speaks and writes about art history, Black art, and arts activism. She is a TEDx speaker and recently spoke about “Arts Activism in Simple Steps.” Her writing can be found in several independent online and print publications dedicated to art criticism. Due to her work in advancing an equitable art world, Jeffreen was named as a ROOT 100 honoree.  As the executive director of Threewalls, a position she has held since 2015, Jeffreen provides strategic vision for the artistic direction and impact of the organization in Chicago. Under her leadership, Threewalls intentionally develops artistic platforms with artists to help manifest the organization’s vision of art connecting segregated communities, people and experiences together.

• Faded to the Back: Black Women in Arts Leadership: Black women in the arts continue to provide a vision for shattering the “business as usual” in the art world in an effort to create a more equitable art world. When they do the mission and value work asked of them from the institution, the institution finds ways to erase, undermine and undo the work of Black women. This calling out and calling in addresses this pervasive violence in the world.

Susette Min is an Associate Professor at the University of California Davis.  She teaches Asian American Studies and Art History.  She is also an independent curator.  Prior to arriving at Davis, she was a curator of contemporary art at The Drawing Center. Recent exhibitions that she has curated include Off the Grid and Welcome? at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum. Her publications include Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art (NYU Press, 2018) and articles in Social Text, American Quarterly, and The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature. Her current projects include a book that focuses on art and immigration and exhibitions on “the good life,” entropy, and the micro-sublime.

• Art and the Making of Formal Justice: This paper will explore how select works of art by Carey Young and Bouchra Khalili mobilize language and the law as a means to interrogate and critique multi-lateral transnational agreements that limit the right of belonging and possession. Their works refuse to place the figure of the immigrant as an object of the law, while simultaneously, complicating legal remedies of specific performance, and guarantees that uphold the principles of freedom, free expression, and assembly.

Edra Soto is an interdisciplinary artist, who was born in Puerto Rico, and is now the co-director of the outdoor project space THE FRANKLIN.  Recent venus presenting Soto’s work include the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago (IL), Pérez Art Museum Miami (FL), The Arts Club of Chicago (IL), Smart Museum (IL) and Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (PR) among others. Soto has attended residency programs at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (ME), Beta-Local (PR), the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency (FL), Headlands Center for the Arts (CA) Project Row Houses (TX) and Art Omi (MY) among others. Soto was awarded the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship (2017), the Illinois Arts Council Grant (2019) and the inaugural Founwork Artist Prize (2019), among others. She recently completed a two year commissioned public art project titled Screenhouse on exhibition at Millennium Park’s Boeing Gallery North (IL).  In 2018, she was invited to the Creative Chicago: An Interview Marathon, lead by Hans Ulrich Obrist at EXPO Chicago (publication by University of Chicago Press, launched in 2019).   Soto’s work has been included in three exhibitions supported by the MacArthur Foundation’s International Connections Fund: A Chicago / Puerto Rico exhibition titled Repatriation at Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico; a Chicago / Cuba exhibition titled Cross Currents/ Intercambio Cultural at the Smart Museum (IL) and a Chicago/Brazil exchange titled  Close to There < > Perto de Lá, to take place in Salvador, Brazil in 2020.  Soto holds a BFA degree from Escuela de Artes Plastics de Puerto Rico. She is a lecturer for the Contemporary Practices Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, from which she received an MFA.

• Agents and Supermodels: Creatives often subscribe to various conceptual models in order to generate or present their ideas. But what happens when existing models of being an artist or creative person does not suit us? Edra Soto’s artistic practice questions constructed social hierarchies, culture-historic archaeology and vernacular languages, which situates engaging and contemplative contexts. She aim to challenge the boundaries between audience, artist and the work itself, prompting viewers to reconsider the nature of urban space, cross-cultural dynamics, the legacy of colonialism, and personal responsibility. Her recent projects, which are motivated by civic and social actions, focus on fostering relationships with a wide range of communities.

Melissa Hilliard Potter is a feminist interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose work has been exhibited in venues including White Columns, Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Reeling International LGBT Film Festival. Potter has been the recipient of three Fulbright Scholar grants, as well as funding from CEC ArtsLink, Trust for Mutual Understanding, and Soros Fund for Arts and Culture, all of which enabled her to build two papermaking studios at university art departments in Serbia and Bosnia & Hercegovina. In addition, she collaborated with women felt artisans and activists from Georgia through her project, “Craft Power,” with Miriam Schaer. She developed research, documentary and advocacy projects with ethnographers and intangible heritage experts to protect, interpret, and archive endangered women’s handicrafts and social customs. As a curator, Potter’s exhibitions include “Social Paper: Hand Papermaking in the Context of Socially Engaged Art” with Jessica Cochran and “Revolution at Point Zero: Feminist Social Practice” with Neysa Page Lieberman. Her curatorial and recent hand papermaking projects, including “Seeds InService” with Maggie Puckett, have been funded by the Crafts Research Fund, Clinton Hill Foundation, The Nathan Cummings Foundation & Jane M. Saks, and the MAKER Grant. Her critical essays have been printed in BOMB, Art Papers, Flash Art, Metropolis M, Hand Papermaking, and AfterImage among others. Potter is an Associate Professor at Columbia College Chicago in the Art & Art History program.

• Border Crossings: Feminist Collaboration in Traditional Societies: In Border Crossings: Feminist Collaboration in Traditional Societies, Potter discusses the complexities and ethical challenges in cross-cultural collaboration with women in traditional society. In this lecture, she focuses on her work with rape survivors and refugee women in Bosnia i Hercegovina; Montenegro’s “virgina”—a woman living as a man to inherit family property; and collectives of women felt artisans in the Republic of Georgia. Through these experiences, she discusses the impacts of war, sexual violence, capitalism, and social oppression in these collaborations, and the critical role of intersectional, interdisciplinary engagements to encourage mutual and responsible outcomes.

Transnational Feminisms, Part 4: Expanding Constructs

Mechtild Widrich is an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, researching at the intersection of art and architecture, performance and public space, with one particular focus on Central Europe’s histories and social contexts. Her texts can be found on academia.edu.

• Second World, Second Sex: How Applicable was Western Feminism in Eastern Europe: The feminist discourse in postwar Eastern Europe, to the extent that it existed and was embodied in policy, theory and art practice, was complicated by the official equality and parity of men and women under socialism. In the People’s Communist Republic of Romania, it was further complicated by a tradition of authoritarian women: Ana Pauker, a deposed member of the triumvirate who led Romania in the Stalinist era, and the spouse of general secretary Nicolae Ceaușescu, Elena, who exercised wide agency in matters related to the sciences. I will look at projects in art and architecture as well as theoretical texts in light of this complex heritage of female power, but also at the reception in Western Europe during and after the fall of the regime in 1989.

Giulia Lamoni (Italy/ Portugal) is a FCT Researcher at the Instituto de História de Arte at Nova University in Lisbon (Portugal). Between 2016 and 2018 she was Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History of the same university.  She holds a PhD in Aesthetics / Arts and Sciences of Art from the University of Paris I / Panthéon Sorbonne.  Her research activity explores the articulations between art and feminisms in Portugal and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, the relations between contemporary art and migratory processes and the shaping of transnational artistic networks, heterogeneous forms of collaboration and dialogue from the 1960s to the present. Her research is financed by FCT Portugal.  Her texts have appeared in journals like Third Text, n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal and Manifesta Journal: Around Curatorial Practices, and in exhibition catalogues and books of museums like Centro de Arte Moderno / Gulbenkian Foundation, Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern.  As a researcher and a teacher, she is interested in collaborative forms of curating that explore the boundaries between academic work and curatorial practices and imagine challenging forms of cross-pollination. She co-curated, with Margarida Brito Alves and Filomena Serra, the exhibition Co-Habitar at Casa da América Latina in Lisbon (October 2016- January 2017) and curated a solo exhibition of artist Eugénia Mussa at Galeria Quadrum in Lisbon in 2017. In 2017, she was a Brooks International Fellow at Delfina Foundation and Tate Modern in London.  She coordinates the research project “Artists and Radical Education in Latin America: 1960s-1970s” (2018-19), as Principal Researcher, co-coordinates the research line “Cultural Transfers in a Global Perspective” at the Instituto de História de Arte at Nova University in Lisbon (Portugal)  and is a member of the project “Decentralized Modernities: Art, politics and counterculture in the transatlantic axis during the Cold War” MODE(S) (HAR2017-82755-P).

• Portuguese Pop: A Feminist Reading: In the late 1960s, while the war of liberation against Portuguese colonial rule was still ongoing in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau, the new government of Marcelo Caetano in Portugal inaugurated a phase of relative opening in the context of the dictatorial regime, thus fostering hope in the possibility of political change. These expectations were deceived, and the revolution that finally disrupted the long lasting regime only took place in 1974. Nevertheless, the period preceding this pivotal break was marked by students´ protest movements and by attempts to open spaces of freedom and resistance in a context of enduring political oppression, in dialogue with international events such as May 1968 and the affirmation of counterculture among the youth. In this context, the artistic scene in Portugal was characterized by both a feeling of cultural isolation and by the weaving of transnational connections, as in those years many artists travelled or migrated to European cultural centres like London and Paris, especially thanks to scholarships granted by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Developing in and out of this specific political and cultural frame, rich in transnational dialogues, pop languages in Portugal took very singular and diverse turns. Envisioning pop as an “amazingly hospitable category”, in the words of art historian Geeta Kapur (2007), this intervention proposes to explore a feminist understanding of pop in Portugal as expanding from the late 1960s to the post-revolutionary years. In particular, by looking at a set of works by artists Teresa Magalhães (b. 1944), Maria Beatriz (b. 1940) – who studied printmaking at Atelier 17 in Paris – and Emilia Nadal (b. 1938), it seeks to problematize pop´s contribution to a social and political critique that significantly included pre and post-revolutionary struggles for women´s liberation. Considering the complex relations between artists and feminism in Portugal in the 1960s and 1970s – and the challenges taken by recent art historical narratives articulating these alliances and misalliances -, this intervention proposes to critically look at these relations through the prism of pop while also discussing their links with other, interconnected, struggles.

Jenni Sorkin is an Associate Professor of History of Art & Architecture at University of California, Santa Barbara. She writes on the intersections between gender, material culture, and contemporary art, working primarily on women artists and underrepresented media. She is the author of Live Form: Women, Ceramics and Community (University of Chicago Press, 2016), which examines the confluence of gender, artistic labor, and the history of post-war ceramics. She received her PhD in the History of Art from Yale University in 2010 and is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Modern Craft. She is the recipient of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (2014-15), the Center for Craft (2012), the Getty Research Institute (2010-11), and the ACLS/Luce Fellowship in American Art (2008). In November 2019, she gave the 23^rd annual Peter Dormer Lecture at the Royal College of Art in London, Britain’s most distinguished lecture series in the applied arts.

• Motherhood, Representation and the California 1960s: This talk puts forth an analysis of self-determination and proto-feminist self-representation through images of pregnancy made by Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976) in collaboration with her colleague and friend, the jeweler, Merry Renk (1921-2012), in the Bay Area in the early 1960s, an era when pregnancy was still shielded from public view.

Agata Jakubowska is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Art History at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. She is the author of On the Margins of the Mirror: The Female Body in Polish Women Artists’ Works (in Polish, 2004) and Multiple Portrait of Alina Szapocznikow’s Oeuvre (in Polish, 2008); the editor of Alina Szapocznikow. Awkward Objects (2011) and Zofia Kulik: Methodology, My Love (2019); and the co-editor (with Katy Deepwell) of All-Women Art Spaces in Europe in the Long 1970s (2018). Over the last few years she has been working on a project devoted to the history of women-only exhibitions in Poland (www.wystawykobiet.amu.edu.pl). She is currently concentrating on a book devoted to the Polish sculptor Maria Pinińska-Bereś and running a travelling research seminar on Gender Politics and the Art of European Socialist States (2019/2020, in the frame of the Getty Foundation Connecting Art Histories initiative).

• Globalizing History of Feminist Art: In my presentation I will concentrate on consideration of how to best write global history of feminist art in such a way as to connect feminist art practices from different parts of the world without losing their specificities. My starting point will be a conversation between Claudia Calirman and me on Natalia LL’s Consumer Art (1972-75) and  Pape’s Eat me (1975) that was published in Natalia LL. „Consumer Art” and Beyond [ed. Agata Jakubowska, Warszawa: CSW Zamek Ujazdowski, 2016]. It will serve as a case study for an idea of dialogical feminist art history.

Transnational Feminisms, Part 5: Decentering Discourse

Annu Palakunnathu Matthew is a Professor of Art at the University of Rhode Island.  Annu Palakunnathu Matthew’s photo-based artwork is a striking blend of still and moving imagery and draws on archival photographs as a source of inspiration to re-examine historical narratives. Her recent solo exhibitions include the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada, Nuit Blanche Toronto, and sepiaEYE, nyc. Matthew has also exhibited her work at the RISD Museum, Newark Art Museum, MFA Boston, San Jose Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts (TX), Victoria & Albert Museum (London), 2018 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 2018 Fotofest Biennial, 2009 Guangzhou Photo Biennial as well as at the Smithsonian. Grants and fellowships that have supported her work include a MacColl Johnson, John Guttman, two Fulbright Fellowships and grants from the Rhode Island State Council of the Arts.  She was also the Director of the Center for the Humanities from 2014-2019 and the 2015-17 Silvia Chandley Professor in Peace Studies and Non-violence.  Matthew is represented by sepiaEYE, NYC.  www.annumatthew.com

• The Multiplicity of Re/Presentation: Art is too often boxed into nationalities based on the artist or the audience. As a result, transnational art (the prefix “trans” in transnational art is derived from its Latin origins meaning “art that goes beyond national boundaries,”) has long been relegated to the edges of mainstream discourse. Today, transnational artwork, like my own, coupled with relooking at previously established narratives allows for unexpected perspectives and insights. In my presentation “The Multiplicity of Re/Presentation,” I will connect my visual arts projects that combine art and historical re-readings to address the intersectionality of politics and aesthetics outside the formerly hegemonic and narrowly defined discourses.

Laura Kina is a mixed-race Okinawan American artist-scholar based in Chicago. Kina is Professor Art, Media, & Design and Director Critical Ethnic Studies at DePaul University. A 2019 Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist-in-Residence awardee, Kina has exhibited at India Habitat Centre and India International Centre, Nehuru Art Centre, Okinawa Prefectural Art Museum, Chicago Cultural Center, Spertus Museum, the Japanese American National Museum, the Rose Art Museum, and the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, amongst others. Kina is co-editor of Queering Contemporary Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, 2017) and War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, 2013). She serves as reviews editor for the Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (Brill), event editor for American Quarterly, and series editor for Critical Ethnic Studies and Visual Culture (forthcoming University of Washington Press). In 2019, Bess Press published her trilingual (Pidgin/Japanese/Uchinaaguchi) illustrated children’s book Okinawan Princess: Da Legend of Hajichi Tattoos  written by Lee A. Tonouchi. Kina’s latest paintings in her solo show “Holding On” (FLXST Contemporary Oct 18-Nov 23, 2019) feature sacred, WWII memorial, and present-day military occupied sites in Okinawa, Japan and explores memory and affect through the genre of landscape painting. For more info visit www.laurakina.com or on Instagram at @laura.kina and Twitter @laurakina

• Decolonizing Memory: Drawing Indigenous Okinawan Hajichi Tattoos: In this artist presentation, Kina will share her efforts to decolonize memory through her “Holding On” series of paintings featuring sacred, WWII memorial, and present-day military occupied sites in Okinawa, Japan and her research on hajichi hand tattoos in her illustrated children’s book Okinawan Princess: Da Legend of Hajichi Tattoos (Bess Press, 2019). Okinawan Princess is written in Pidgin English (Hawai‘i Creole) by Lee A. Tonouchi and translated by Dr. Masashi Sakihara into Japanese and an Okinawan language called Uchinaaguchi. This trilingual feminist fairy tale is set in contemporary and Territorial era Hawai‘i and Ryukyu Kingdom era Okinawa to illuminate an indigenous Okinawan tattoo tradition that pushes back against white and Japanese normative standards of beauty.

Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz is an internationally recognized interdisciplinary visual artist.  Recognitions include: 2019 Anonymous was A Woman nominee, 2018 UCF Women of Distinction, 2017 UCF Luminary Award, 2016 Franklin Furnace award, 2016 USA Fellowship nominee, among others, MFA 2008 Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of Art Ralph Bunche Fellow, 2002 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture alum;  Selected exhibitions: Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s IDENTIFY: Performance as Portraiture series, Project 35: Last Call, Garage Museum, Russia, The Florida Prize in Contemporary Art, Orlando, FL 2015, Manifesta 8, Spain 2010, American Chambers, Gyeongnam Art Museum, South Korea, Performa 05 biennial, Artist Space, NY; The S Files 05, Artist in the Marketplace 25, Bronx Museum of the Arts; The L Factor, Exit Art, New York.  She is an associate professor of studio art at the University of Central Florida.

• Performance: Chuleta la Profe Discusses Las Reinas de Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz: Confronting the Pain Body through Performance: Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz’s alter ego CHULETA will present a performance lecture focused on the employment of the body in performance art as catharsis in Caribbean art as only she can.