The Figurative Art Convention & Expo (FACE), along with the Representational Art Conference, has put out a call for ideas and scholarship. Think you fit the mold? Details here.

Via Michael Pearce (The Representational Art Conference):

Join our distinguished speakers Donald Kuspit and Stephen Hicks in sharing important ideas about the present and future of representational art.

Submit a paper to the Representational Art Conference at the Figurative Art Convention & Expo.

For details and to submit an abstract, please visit our website; second wave abstract submissions due August 12, 2017.

TRAC2017 is specifically interested in papers about the human figure in 21st-century representational art. What does it say about our current condition? What ideals of the self does it seek to express? How does it relate to the history of figurative art? What does it tell us about our current social reality? Does the artist have a new role? What cross-cultural themes will dominate 21st-century figurative art?

We invite paper proposals from academic writers and working artists.

Paper topics might include, but are not limited to:

  • New 21st-century figurative sculpture, painting, drawing
  • Idealization of the masculine and feminine in 21st-century figurative art
  • Magical realism in new American art
  • How does the 21st-century figure differ from that of previous centuries?
  • Why the figure? Why now?
  • Figure to ground — the human figure in the landscape in 21st-century art
  • Bo Bartlett
  • Antonio López García
  • Gottfried Helnwein
  • 21st-century figurative art in museum collections
  • Exploitation versus celebration of the erotic in 21st-century representational art
  • Emotional rescue — the therapeutic role of figurative art
  • What is the future of the kitsch figure?
  • The meta-narrative of the 21st-century figure
  • The discombobulated figure — when is a figure not a figure?
  • Interpreting the Crystal Bridges collection
  • George Lucas and the Museum of Narrative Art
  • Graphic novels as fine art?
  • Selfies, portraits, and self-knowledge — the self in 21st-century figurative art
  • Censoring the 21st-century figure

The Representational Art Conference provides a platform for discussion. It does not aspire to establish a single monolithic aesthetic for representational art, but to identify commonalities, to help to understand its unique possibilities, and perhaps provide some illumination about future directions. The conference is planned as a focused but non-doctrinaire event of serious academic standards. Papers of high quality on a variety of topics in the aesthetics of contemporary representational art are invited and welcomed.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.


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Andrew Webster
Andrew Webster is the former Editor of Fine Art Today and worked as an editorial and creative marketing assistant for Streamline Publishing. Andrew graduated from The University of North Carolina at Asheville with a B.A. in Art History and Ceramics. He then moved on to the University of Oregon, where he completed an M.A. in Art History. Studying under scholar Kathleen Nicholson, he completed a thesis project that investigated the peculiar practice of embedded self-portraiture within Christian imagery during the 15th and early 16th centuries in Italy.

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