The College of Architecture + The Arts’ Dr. Alpesh Kantilal Patel, Assistant Professor and Director of the Master of Fine Arts Program convened an academic session at the Association of Art Historians 2014 Conference at the Royal College of Art in Kensington, London. The academic session was entitled “Colour Me Queer,” and was co-chaired by both Dr. Patel and Natasha Bissonauth, Cornell University Graduate Student.
The academic session focused on race, gender, and sexuality and their place in art history. The following description for “Colour Me Queer” is provided on the Association of Art Historians website.
Art history has adopted a queer postcolonial gaze that has challenged canon formation. And yet, with some notable exceptions such as Kobena Mercer and Amelia Jones, most ground-breaking scholarship on art and visual culture, which unpack queer racialized perspectives, has been achieved outside the confines of the discipline. Thus, as an assemblage of academics across disciplines, this session aims to develop a shared vocabulary and methodology around art and visual culture that speaks to transnational, diasporic, indigenous and decolonial bodies alongside their gendered and sexualized realities. Beyond representing identity politics of difference or generating visibility for marginalized art forms, [Colour Me Queer] visually interrogates the epistemological limits of categories such as race, gender and sexuality, and most critically, visually interrogates the limits of their intersections as well. Papers will not only assess how queer racialized methodologies broaden art history but correspondingly, how visual analysis informs queer racialized realms as well. Through various themes and tropes like circulation, affect, neologisms, materiality and popular culture, panelists will map out renewed encounters with their objects of analyses. Ultimately, Colour Me Queer considers the stakes involved in inciting a transdisciplinary conversation around queer of colour visualities.
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