The Artist Herself (2015)
The 3rd CWAHI conference
8 - 9 May 2015
Queen's University and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston
In honour of the 40th anniversary of From Women's Eyes: Women Painters in Canada, the third conference of the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative was co-hosted in Kingston, Ontario, by Queen's University and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Coinciding with the exhibition The Artist Herself, the conference invited participants to reconsider ideas around women's self-portraiture and, more particularly, to broaden our understandings of what 'counts' as self-representation.
Subjectivity and identity have long been central concerns for feminist art history and theory. How does this scholarship enable us to rethink the boundaries of portraiture and the self? Papers were solicited that considered the category of women's self-representation through the wider frames of community, environment, and experience. How do objects reveal their creators? And can posthumanist and materialist challenges to decenter the subject be productively united with our understandings of the work of self-portraiture and autobiography? Analyses of women's creative productions across all visual media were welcome, from scholars, curators, archivists and conservators. In keeping with the historical mandate of CWAHI, the conference focused on the period prior to 1967. We also invited submissions that reflected on and carried forward the project of Dorothy Farr and Natalie Luckyj's groundbreaking 1975 exhibition.
