Artistic Exchange between Postwar Socialist Nations–cfp

Building an Alternative Modernity: Artistic Exchange between Postwar Socialist Nations
College Art Association, Washington DC, 3-6 Feb. 2016
Call for Papers

In the 1950s artists from Romania, North Korea, East Germany, and Mongolia were being sent to Leningrad to learn Russian Socialist Realism. In the same decade art exhibitions from the Soviet Union, Hungary and Poland were opening in Beijing. This panel seeks papers that explore such institutional circulations of art professionals and exhibitions as well as writings and commissions within the socialist sphere in the postwar era, especially during the period from the late 1940s with the establishment of the All Soviet Art Academy to the early 1960s at the peak of de-Stalinization. This decade long project endeavored to create an alternative modernity that at times mirrored and at other times opposed the Euro-American model. How can we historicize the socialist world’s cross-cultural art exchange? What information infrastructure and channels were utilized? What values and forms were created, shared, or flattened within this transnational system? How did these state supported exchanges mobilize artists, administrators, and the public and what are the artistic and institutional legacies of these cultural flows?

Please send an abstract (1-2 pages, double spaced) and CV to the chair, Vivian Li, University of Michigan, vli@umich.edu. All participants must become members of CAA. For more information: http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2016CallforParticipation.pdf

Vivian Li <vli@umich.edu>

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