Call For Papers: Tools for Making/Tools for Thinking
13th Annual Art History Graduate Student Association Conference,
University of California, Riverside | May 18, 2024
CFP Deadline: March 1, 2024 – *Extended to Friday, March 15th at 11:59pm PT*

The University of California, Riverside’s Art History Graduate Student Association is pleased to announce its 13th Annual Conference, Tools for Making/Tools for Thinking. We are honored to host Dr. Nina Horisaki-Christens, who is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute, as this year’s keynote speaker.

Is a history of painting ever not a history of the brush, the knife, the finger? Could inquiries into sculpture start not from the statue but from the chisel and rasp? Where should investigations into the tools that have shaped visual culture stop? At the hand of the artist holding the pencil? In the workshop, with the sketchbook, the easel? With the click of the camera? Or elsewhere, with the trees that become paper, the equations that underpin a line, the notations that suggest a dance? Can we hope to understand anything without first considering the instruments that made it possible? 

Sometimes, tools are all we have left: points of ivory and fine stones are all that remain of the prehistoric Paleoamerican Clovis culture. Sometimes, tools are epoch-making. From the development of the brush pen during the Han dynasty to the inception of photography, previously unthinkable instruments have triggered artistic sea-changes. 

Tools mark transformations in labor and power. By destroying power looms, Luddites attacked the structure of labor embodied in the tool’s wood and metal skeleton. Tools are, of course, not limited to concrete machines: from linear perspective to games of chance, art historians have long paid attention to how abstract methods have transformed how one sees, works, makes, and thinks. It is in this pairing of the concrete and the conceptual that shifting the focus to tools appears more generative—and more unsettling—than one might suspect. Looking at the role they play in producing objects and knowledge puts things as disparate as photogrammetry equipment and structural analysis on the same table. 

As they structure production yet live so close to the body, tools have enabled artists to investigate the gendered and racialized character of labor, from Lee Lozano’s comically sexualized hammers to Jacob Lawrence’s brightly colored construction tools rendered as symbols of exertion. Tools blur the line between artistic production and labor, between inside and outside, between what makes and what is made, and between the fruits of one’s labor and what one becomes through them.

This conference champions an expansive conception of the tools which produce culture as we aim to better inquire into the nature of the relationship between production—artistic or intellectual—and its auxiliary artifacts. From the first stylus to AI image generators, we call for papers that seek to investigate the materiality and function of tools that allow one to imagine, make, and perceive.

 Please submit your abstract and CV to ahgsa.ucr@gmail.com by March 1, 2024 at 11:59pm PT. We invite abstracts of no more than 300 words for in-person 10-12-minute paper presentations. Proposals from graduate students and independent scholars across the humanities will be considered, including Art, Art History, Anthropology, Literature, Dance Studies, Ethnic Studies, Global Studies, History, Media and Cultural Studies, Music, Religious Studies, Philosophy, among others. Contact us at ahgsa.ucr@gmail.com with any questions. Selected speakers will be notified in March 2023.

The conference will be held in person on Saturday, May 18, 2023 at UCR ARTS in downtown Riverside [3834 Main Street, Riverside, CA 92501]. The conference is free and open to the public. Please visit our website for more information: ahgsaconference.ucr.edu/.

 

The UCR ARTS complex serves the vibrant and diverse UCR community as well as Riverside and the larger Inland Empire. Trained service animals are welcome. The entrances, galleries, theater, screening room, and restrooms are wheelchair accessible. The Culver Center Screening Room, within which the conference will be held, includes wheelchair locations and companion seats and has a vertical platform lift as an alternative entrance into the screening room. Elevators are located throughout the building. If you have any questions or need assistance, please contact UCR ARTS Visitor Services at (951) 827-3755 or ucrarts@ucr.edu.

We at UCR would like to respectfully acknowledge and recognize our responsibility to the original and current caretakers of this land, water, and air: the Cahuilla, Tongva, Luiseño, and Serrano peoples as well as their ancestors and descendants, past, present, and future. Today, this meeting place is home to many Indigenous peoples from all over the world, including UCR faculty, students, and staff, and we are grateful to have the opportunity to live and work on these homelands.