Home Subjects

Jon Rafman, from the “Brand New Paint Job” series, 2013.

Two recent opportunities have landed in the Home Subjects inbox, and they will be of interest to readers.  The deadlines for both are in October: Interior Provocations: Appropriate(d) Interiors is October 1, and The Ambient Interior is October 26.  By the way, this artwork by Jon Rafman, who digitally combines images of interiors from Google with paintings such as Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, came up first when Home Subjects googled “art in appropriated interior.” The next two results were collages by Richard Hamilton.  Not bad, Google.

 Interior Provocations, a symposium founded by Pratt Institute Faculty in the History of Art and Design and Interior Design Departments, provides a public forum for critical thinking about the design, theory and history of the interior. Comprised of provocative and boundary-expanding presentations by design practitioners, historians and theorists, the symposium is dedicated to furthering the scholarship of the expanding fields of Interior Design and Interior Design History through the collaboration of these disciplines.

The third annual Pratt Interior Provocations symposium, Appropriate(d) Interiors, explores the way interiors participate explicitly and implicitly in embedded cultural values. Interiors, past and present, play critical roles even when they are not recognized as such. What are the standards, assumptions, codes and/or conventions that we need to dismantle? How can we expand our understanding of the history, theory and practice of interior design to challenge the status quo? What then is “appropriate” and what is “inappropriate”?

Call for Papers for a Workshop: The Ambient Interior in the United States During the Long Nineteenth Century sponsored by Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide

 Saturday, February 16, 2019, 1-6PM

School of Visual Arts, New York

In preparation for a summer 2020 special issue of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, the journal’s editors are organizing a workshop that explores the content and context of actual and represented interiors in the United States during the long nineteenth century. Emphasizing environmental and sensorial interpretations over exclusively visual analyses, we invite papers that address how ambiance, atmosphere, and spatial conditions affect meaning and enframe reception. Paper topics might concentrate on public or private interiors, including artists’ studios, domestic spaces, religious sites, social clubs, or workplaces. How do interiors act as multisensory environments, unifying the visual, the auditory, the haptic, or the olfactory? In what ways do interiors elicit emotion, evoking feelings from comfort to confusion? How do relationships between objects within an interior create meaning? How does moving an object, a collection, or an entire room to a new location alter the understanding of the interior and its contents? Ultimately, this workshop will generate new scholarship on the understudied topic of the nineteenth-century interior in the United States.

Each selected presenter will give a 25-minute paper followed by 15 minutes of group discussion. The papers from the workshop will be revised for publication in a summer 2020 special issue of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide funded in part by a grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. Selected participants will be encouraged (and assisted as needed by journal editors and technologists) to create presentations with audio and moving image components, thereby directly capturing the multisensory qualities of the interiors.

Deadline for proposals: Friday, October 26, 2018.

Please submit as PDFs: a 500-word proposal with ideas for digital components and a short, 2-page CV for all authors and contributors to Isabel Taube, Executive Editor, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, taubeisa[at]gmail.com.