Panel at Conference HECAA@30: Environments, Materials, and Futures in the Eighteenth Century

Our panel aims to explore the built environments, social practices, and distinctive personalities of eighteenth-century cities as these are reflected in and instantiated by the work of Chinese artists and craftspeople. What is the impact of urban space on an artist’s sense of self and society? How does a city find form in an artist’s work? 

Addressing both the urbane and the urban, papers might consider relationships between a refinement of manner (or artistic style), and the quotidian commerce of city life. Although we welcome proposals addressing eighteenth-century cities that are a more common focus of scholarship – Beijing, Suzhou, Canton, etc. – we also encourage papers that explore cities populated by artists who are seen as part of the “Chinese diaspora,” including Malacca, Cirebon, Mexico City, and Manila. We seek papers that are focused on both named artists, whose personhood was closely linked to their artistic practice and urban home, as well as artists and craftspeople who worked collaboratively and whose names have been lost to the historical record. Papers that address underdiscussed media, including paintings on glass, clay sculpture, and scientific illustration, are also welcome. We seek papers that aim to revise our understanding of “the global” by embracing both the particularity of the “Chinese world” and the mutability of “Chinese identity” within these cosmopolitan spaces.   

Chairs: Michele Matteini, New York University ([email protected]) and Dawn Odell Lewis & Clark College ([email protected])

About the Conference: On the land of the Massachusett and neighboring Wampanoag and Nipmuc peoples, Boston developed in the eighteenth century as a major colonized and colonizing site. Its status today as a cultural and intellectual hub is shaped by that context, making it a critical location to trace the cultural legacies of racism and social injustice between the eighteenth century and today. For whom is “eighteenth-century art and architecture” a useful category? What eighteenth-century materials, spaces, and images offer tools or concepts for shaping our collective futures? 

In considering these questions, the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA) aim to be deliberate about expanding the group's traditional focus on Western European art and architecture and specifically encourage proposals from scholars working on Asia, Africa and the African diaspora, Indigenous cultures, and the Islamic world. This conference marks our 30th year as a scholarly society dedicated to facilitating communication and collaboration among scholars of eighteenth-century art to expand and promote knowledge of all aspects of the period’s visual culture. 

We welcome applications from scholars pursuing research in art, architecture, visual and material culture of roughly 1700-1800 in any geographic region. Scholars in all careers and career stages are welcome.

To apply to present on a panel, roundtable, gallery session, or to act as a workshop moderator, please submit a proposal of no more than 250 words and a CV to the session chair(s) by April 1, 2023. Successful applicants will be asked to join HECAA if they are not already members. You are welcome to apply to participate in more than one role, but we aim for nobody to have more than one speaking role at the conference. Please disclose to the chair(s) in your application if you have applied to more than one session.

HECAA@30 is generously supported by the Paul H. Tucker Endowment at UMass Boston; MIT's History, Theory + Criticism of Architecture and Art and Art Culture and Technology programs, and Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, with in-kind support from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.