Art_work
Attending to art’s alternate histories
What kind of stories could emerge when Jan Wade’s Yes, a settler
colonial whaleship painting, a neoclassical marble sculpture, and part of a Warli painting are put in the same room – what
might these works say to each other?
Canonical western art history tells stories of artworks as discrete
objects, often separating them from the messy, entangled relationships of their production, study, and display in order to
fit them into the linear timeline of western progress. Through an “attentive” approach, this workshop identifies and critiques
the languages and tools of art history that discipline artworks in that way, offering art_work as an alternative methodology
for the study of art objects.
This workshop invites artists, students,
teachers and researchers of art and art history, university instructors, and anyone interested in alternative pedagogies and
art histories to join us in exploring the unruly, disordered, and contradictory relationships that illuminate art’s alternate
histories.
Workshop Facilitators
Sue Shon, Ph.D. is a scholar-teacher of race and visual
culture and Assistant Professor of Critical + Cultural Studies at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Her research on the
co-development of aesthetic culture, liberal humanism, and biopolitical visual order has been published in Media-N, American
Literature, and other venues.
Jo O’Brien is an artist-researcher and Social Science and Humanities
Research Council Doctoral Fellow at the Zentrum Fokus Forschung at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Their artistic research
and pedagogical projects explore “confusion” as a queer-crip framework for social and aesthetic practices.
