TFAP@CAA

Since 2007, the TFAP@CAA Day of Panels have brought together exceptional groups of artists, art historians, curators, and critics for a free and open to the public day of dialogue during the annual College Art Association (CAA) Conferences. CAA has been a founding program partner of The Feminist Art Project since its inception in 2005. TFAP became an Affiliated Society of CAA in 2016. We are grateful for CAA’s generosity in providing meeting rooms, publicity, technical support, and assistance that gives greater visibility throughout the conference week to women artists, feminist concerns, and supports the mission of TFAP. Additionally, TFAP collaborates with CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts.

TFAP@CAA Affiliated Society Session
CAA 112th Annual Conference
Friday, February 16, 2024, 2:30pm – 4pm
Chicago Hilton | 8th Floor – Lake Erie
Conference Registration required for this event!

CHOICE TACTICS: Art, Abortion, and Bodily Autonomy Today

Chairs: Miriam Kienle (University of Kentucky) and Connie Tell (The Feminist Art Project)

How do contemporary feminist artists, art historians, critics, and curators address current legal restrictions to abortion access? How do they draw from or push against historical precedents for art about reproductive choice and bodily autonomy? Although acknowledging the tremendous historical harm done, much present-day art about abortion draws on old visual tropes of clothes hangers and irrevocably marred bodies that has little resonance to the risks posed by the criminalization of abortion today. This imagery not only ignores how ending pregnancy is far safer than it was 50 years ago due to widely accessible medications for menstrual management after abortion became legal, but it also inadvertently echoes anti-choice propaganda that emphasizes self-harm as integral to abortion. Therefore, one must ask: How do feminist artists today visualize bodily autonomy, self-managed menstruation, and abortion in ways that refuse inaccurate, outdated, and punishing representations in favor of ones that are accurate, informative, and supportive (perhaps even playful, joyous, frustrated, outraged, or irreverent)? How might they forge intergenerational solidarities by re-activating historical modes of resistance that avoid nostalgia? How do they educate both menstruating and non-menstruating publics to transform political discourse on abortion? How can they help empower abortion seekers to have their physical, emotional, spiritual, financial, and/or legal needs met? This panel seeks presentations that investigate the visual and material tactics of feminist art that tackles abortion, particularly those that attend to the complex gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, geographic, historical, medical, legal, and/or economic implications of abortion today.

Panelists:
Beau Green (Artist + Full Spectrum Careworker)
breadbox: promoting access to high quality abortion care throughpeer-to-peer education and art

Basia Sliwinska (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
My body (but not) my choice: feminist arts activism towards bodily autonomy

Erin L. McCutcheon (University of Rhode Island)
Performing the Politics of Voluntary Motherhood in Mexico City

Louisa Lee (Buckinghamshire New University)
‘What you want to do is make people look’: Visibility, or lack of visibility, for reproductive rights

TFAP@CAA Day of Panels
CAA 112th Annual Conference
Saturday, February 17, 2024, 9am – 3pm
Chicago Hilton | 3rd Floor – Waldorf
Free and Open to the Public!

A NEW ERA: Art, Activism, and Abortion in Post Roe America

Symposium Chair: Luciana McClure, Southern Connecticut State University

In 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson overturned the right to abortion in the U. S., undermining bodily autonomy and privacy. The Feminist Art Project (TFAP) looks at the way praxis as a feminist pedagogical project has changed and been transformed post Roe V. Wade. Artists have returned to the question of the role of feminist art and practice in times of crisis and violence, particularly around issues of bodily autonomy. As a result, we have seen a rise of collective solidarity between cis, queer and trans women artists and collectives leading to the surge of a new wave of feminism.

TFAP@CAA Day of Panels looks at feminist collective projects that remind us that the personal is political and that feminism is intersectional. TFAP will look critically at how artists, scholars and organizers respond to this attack on human rights and the patriarchal rhetoric about abortion and its relationship to bodily autonomy.

9:00am – 9:30am

Welcome
Connie Tell, Chair, Feminist Art Project Caucus/National Committee

Introduction
Luciana McClure (Southern Connecticut State University)

9:30am – 10:30am

Keynote
Whitney Bradshaw (Independent Artist)

11:00am – 12:00pm

Advocacy to Action: The Power of Activism, Abortion and Community Engagement
Panelists: Lydia Nobles (Independent Artist) and Michele Pred (Independent Artist)

12:00pm – 12:30pm

Lunch

12:30pm – 1:30pm

The Politics of Identity & the Body as Medium in Feminist Practice
Panelists: Corey Loftus (The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU), Martha Poggioli (Colorado College), Sarah Beth Woods (Independent Artist)

2:00pm – 3:00pm

Closing Keynote and Call to Action
Christen Clifford