All Nominations Due May 20, 2024

The ACASA Board of Directors has five open Member-at-Large positions:

Vice President/President-Elect, Secretary, Newsletter Editor, Social Media Editor, and Treasurer

Term Length: ACASA Triennial 2024 – Triennial 2027

All nominees must be members in good standing of ACASA (must have an active membership). In addition to their assigned position, each Board member serves on committees during their 3-year term and participates in regular board meetings. Please note that nominees do not apply to a specific board position. Following the general election, the Board will hold an internal election to designate one new member as Vice President/Future President, as indicated in the bylaws, and assign the remaining board positions accordingly. All elected nominees must be willing and ready to serve as ACASA Vice President/President-Elect.

All nominations are due May 20, 2024. Submit your nominations here

The ACASA Board Elections Committee will email all nominees once the nomination portal is closed. Those who accept their nomination must submit a short statement of intent and a 4-page (max) CV by June 3, 2024.

Members may nominate another ACASA member or themself for one of these positions.

If you have any questions, please email Caroline Bastian Retcher, ACASA Admin, at bastian@acasaonline.org

We invite proposals for individual papers for open panels and roundtables at this time (January 19, 2024- March 1, 2024). Please see the list of open panels and roundtables at the bottom of this page. The full list of accepted panel proposals can be viewed here.

Recently the field of African arts has shifted from object-centered approaches to ones that are human-, community-, and artist-centered. Who is speaking? How can we listen to each other and invite more diverse and globally-entangled voices? Some strategies for human-centered approaches include collaboration, wellness, healing, pluralities of knowledge, the sustaining and building of relationships, fostering new generations, thinking generously and inclusively and active listening in lieu of, or in addition to, object-centered approaches. We welcome contributions on themes such as: 

• Diversifying the field of African arts
• Tangible and intangible knowledges and scholarly approaches
• Networking and broadening voices
• Community and artist-centered approaches
• Artist, museum, and/or community approaches or responses to wellness and healing
• Pluralizing knowledges, expertise, and the production of knowledges and expertise
• Developing and sustaining individual, museum, and institutional relationships and partnerships, especially international ones
• Fostering the next generation of artists, scholars, and communities
• Personhood and people-centered approaches and/or their relationship to tangible artworks
• Empathy, radical listening, thinking generously and inclusively
• Mentorship, exchanges, collaborations
• Transparency in museum and institutional practices
• Decoloniality and decolonial approaches to the arts of Africa

Regular panels will be 120 minutes long with either a) four 20-minute papers and a discussant or b) five 20-minute papers. 90-minute roundtables or alternative discussion-based formats (such as lightning talks or poster presentations) are welcome–creativity encouraged.

Participants may only present one paper but may serve as a discussant on another panel or as a presenter on a roundtable.

Individual paper proposals must include the following:

• Title of Paper
• Name, Professional Title, Affiliation of Proposer
• A proposal not to exceed 500 words describing the theme and scope
• Contact information, including phone and e-mail (this information is for internal use only and will not be publicized)
• Please include the title of the panel/roundtable so the application can be shared with the correct chair. 

The submission deadline for paper proposals is March 1, 2024.

Please submit via the submission portal here 

Proposals may be submitted by anyone, but an active ACASA membership is required to take part in the symposium. Visit https://www.acasaonline.org/join-acasa/ to find information on ACASA membership and to join. 

For any questions or concerns, please email Caroline Bastian Retcher, ACASA Admin, at bastian@acasaonline.org.

 

Open Panels & Roundtables:

Decolonization of African Art in Museums, Covid-19, and Curating Art in Digital Space

Towards a dynamic and distributed future: interdisciplinary methods of engaging with African Art & Cultural Heritage Materials

Reimagining Creative Ways of Speaking Truth to Power in a Time of Heightened Repression

Knowledge Creation and Co-Curation in Museums and Public Spaces: Contestations and Advances

Public Art, African Histories: Asserting and Subverting Colonial Power

Photographic Transversals: Mobility, Intermediality, and Temporality in African Photography

Sea Matters: New Art Histories from Africa’s Islands and Archipelagos

“The Art that Guides Our Students: Southern University at New Orleans and the Traditional African Art Collections”

Towards a dynamic and distributed future: interdisciplinary methods of engaging with African Art & Cultural Heritage Materials

New Directions in Provenance Research

“Beautiful Space Others Make” On Care, Justice, & Creative Imagination

RE-ENGAGING THE GEARS OF CONSERVATION IN THE TRANSMISSION OF CULTURE IN MODERN BENIN

Jamaican Textile and the Stories of Decolonization

Audacious Art Histories: Intimacies and Interventions

Around the Object: New Directions in Museum and Curatorial Education in Africa

Ìyá: Our Mothers Who Art In Exile

Decolonization of African Art in Museums, Covid-19, and Curating Art in Digital Space

Online Visual Imaginations of the Nation

(De)Constructing Authenticity: New Methods and Case Studies

Periodizing the 1990s

THE CHALLENGES OF VISUAL ARTS ENTERPRISE FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN NIGERIA

From Belief to Heritage: Rethinking the museum.

Women & Non-Binary South African Artists: Revisioning Histories

African continuities and change in the Caribbean, through contemporary Caribbean art

Traditions and practices of profanation at Western Museums

Raising Voices: Climate Change and Environmental Degradation

Museums in Africa and their Search for Relevance as Source and Agent of Social Wellness

Fight of the Century: The Rumble in the Jungle 50 years on

Queer Hybrids in Contemporary African Art

“Collaborating Across Continents: Developing a Contemporary Masquerade Exhibition for North American and African Audiences”

For what is Just: Social Practice Art, Solidarity and Civic Imagination in Africa

Interventions in the Colonial Photographic Archive

Nigerian Contemporary Ceramic in Retrospective View

Power: remaking selves, archives, environments

‘women’s work as creative practice’ – 4 contemporary South African artist-women/artist-mothers

The Promise and the Peril of Placing African artists in Global Narratives

#JustAndEquitableNow: Reimagining Arts and Humanities in Our Universities

Gender and Artistic Production from the Maghrib

OBJECTS REFUSE TO BE CANCELLED (#babybathwater)

The Modern in an Expanded Field?

No Comment! Explorations along the borderline of seeing, talking, and thought.

Unveiling African Arts: Reclaiming Narratives, Fostering Dialogue, and Embracing Healing

Photography in the First-Person: The Interview as Source

Critical Inquiry in Design, Media and Material Culture of Sub-Saharan Africa

Collaboration, Collections, and Restitution Best Practices for North American Museums Holding African Objects

Questions of Objecthood and Value

Ghana 1957: Collaborative Curation

The creation and development of museums in Senegal: origin, evolution and perspectives.

Restitutions and feedback

What is a Map? A Question Investigated through African and African Diasporic Arts and Architecture

Local museums and international collaborations: The “other side” of the story

New Dimensions of Contemporary Art Studies and Practice in Nigeria and Ghana Since 2020

Artist-Centered Approaches to African Restitution

EXPLORING VISUAL CULTURE: PLURALIZING KNOWLEDGES, EXPERTISE, AND THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGES AND EXPERTISE

Art-Making as Rituals and Rites: Exploring the Transformative Power of Creative Expression

Gender and Human Centeredness in Southern African art

Spiritual Repair: Post-Secular Black Atlantic Arts

Past/Predecessors: Modern and Contemporary African Art Between Generations

Making and Representing West African Textiles and Fashions

A Ghanaian-United States Nexus in Art Pedagogy and Practice

Reimagining Public Art: Community Engagement, Sustainability, and Urban Transformation

African Art: Traditions, Transitions and Decolonisation

VISUAL LITERACY AGAINST OPPRESSION

Digitalization, Youth Economy, and the Future of Popular Arts in Africa

Pivoting with African Art: Alt-Academic Careers Roundtable