Tag: Engaged Art History

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Engaged Art History Convening: April 2027

Building a Sustainable Road Map for Engaged Scholarship in Art History
April 8-9, 2027 | Washington, DC

How might art historians bridge the perceived divide between the concerns of art historical scholarship and the most pressing questions facing humanity today?

This convening will bring together 20-30 scholars and practitioners from universities, museums, and public humanities initiatives to develop strategies and priorities for advancing engaged research in art history. Together, we will build a plan to make engaged art history more rigorous, more visible, and more impactful in academic and community contexts and in society more broadly.

Organizers:
Erin Benay, Case Western University
Caitlin Berry, Johns Hopkins University
Katherine Brion, New College of Florida
Laura M. Holzman, Indiana University Indianapolis
Jennifer Kingsley, Johns Hopkins University
Jennifer Stager, Johns Hopkins University 

Building a Sustainable Roadmap for Engaged Art History is supported by a grant from the Johns Hopkins University Nexus Awards Program.

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Engaged Art History talk in Berlin

An abstracted mouth opens and shouts "Engagierte Kunstgeschichte." Text elsewhere in the image identifies the dates and other details about the Engaged Art History symposium, 15-16 January 2026.

In January I gave a keynote talk at a symposium on Engaged Art History in A Time of Multiple Crises (Engagierte Kunstgeschichte: Verantwortung, Handlungsspielräume und Relevanz eines Fachs in Zeiten multipler Krisen) at Technische Universität Berlin. It was a meaningful and thought-provoking event organized by Isabelle Dolezalek and Bénédicte Savoy.

My talk addressed “The Democratizing Potential of Engaged Art History.” The recording is now available.

Learn more about the event and watch several of the other presentations here.

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2023 National Humanities Conference

I’m speaking in two sessions at the 2023 National Humanities Conference:

Access and Inclusion Through University-Community Public Humanities Collaborations
Friday, October 27
Laura Holzman, Kris Johnson, Elizabeth Kryder-Reid, Lois Silverman

This roundtable explores how public humanities can support inclusive practices and diverse partnerships, particularly through university-community collaborations, using examples from the IUPUI Museum Studies Program. The conversation includes Museum Studies faculty, graduate students, and community partners sharing the experiences and lessons from public humanities projects, including exhibits, public programs, and professional development initiatives, many of which received funding from Indiana Humanities. Participants will share their successes, as well as the challenges and lessons learned from failure, in mobilizing public humanities to include underrepresented audiences, address social justice issues, work across diverse organizations and stakeholders, and democratize knowledge.

Curating for a Different Future: Public Humanities and Collaborative Practice
Saturday, October 28
Erin Benay, Laura Holzman and Kavita Mahoney, Keri Watson

How can the humanities be harnessed in collaborative, community-based curatorial interventions that shape future paths for organizations, communities, and individuals? Panelists in this session will discuss the ethical and logistical implications of curatorial strategies and interventions that increasingly seek to diversify the types of voices commonly heard in museum, academic, and community spaces alike. This panel explores how community partnerships, transdisciplinary practices, and applied learning are employed as curatorial interventions to build more just and equitable encounters in and beyond conventional exhibition contexts.

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A Constellation of Partners: The Museum of Broken Relationships Indianapolis

Engaged Art History Event Series
December 5, 2022
12-1:30pm Eastern

This informal talk will address the process of developing and leading a project-based course involving multiple types of partners. In fall 2022 the Museum Studies Program at Indiana University IUPUI launched a collaboration with the Museum of Broken Relationships to develop The Museum of Broken Relationships Indianapolis, a crowd-sourced exhibit about love, loss, and growth that will open at the Herron Galleries at IUPUI and sites around Indianapolis in February 2023. Blurring the ostensible boundaries between research, teaching, and service, the project involves multiple courses, each of which includes a constellation of partners within and beyond the university. Focusing on my fall 2022 Curatorial Practices course, one part of the larger project, I will identify the types of partners, explain how the work and relationships developed, show how they connect with student learning activities, and reflect on the products and processes of the layered collaborations. There will be ample time for discussion.

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Monumental Changes at Garfield Park Arts Center

An invitation to the Monumental Changes exhibit and opening events. It includes a photo of a portion of the Confederate monument that was removed from Garfield Park in 2020.

Students in my fall 2021 course on Public Art and Power are partnering with the Garfield Park Arts Center to develop an exhibit that’s part of this year’s Spirit & Place Festival. We’re inviting audiences to reflect on the park’s history as former site of a Confederate monument and collectively envision a future for public art in the park.

Monumental Changes: History and Power in Public Art
Garfield Park Arts Center
November 5-17, 2021

November 5 events:
6pm: opening reception
7pm: panel discussion with Jordan Ryan, Paul Mullins, and Danicia Monet.
Registration info and more details here.

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New Essays on Public Scholarship in Art History

The fall 2019 issue of Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art includes a series of essays that I guest edited about public scholarship in art history. There are contributions from Sarah Beetham, Renée Ater, Theresa Leininger-Miller, Amy Werbel and La Tanya Autry and Mike Murawski.

As I state in the framing essay, “we need to be more consistently explicit about the value and role of public scholarship within our discipline.”

Read more: “Isn’t It Time for Art History to Go Public?”