10. Art in the Age of Air-Travel
This session invites paper proposals that consider what air travel has meant for art and art history. The phenomenon of human flight has generated profound transformations in our social and cultural landscape. It has altered the way we see and interpret the environments in which we live, igniting new imaginative geographies. Artists have been inspired by the experience of flight and the visual effects that it produces; they have considered the power and potential of technologies of flight to both forge and destroy. Air travel has also redefined the scope of our movements – the places we may go and the networks we may form. FESMAN was made possible by jet technology, which enabled the large scale ‘returns’ of diasporic artists to the African continent and facilitated a new discourse of global Blackness (Wofford 2018). At the same time, jets bearing the Stars and Stripes carried American art and culture around the world in unprecedented volumes, augmenting the nation’s global influence.
Air travel is, in many ways, responsible for our modern condition and imagination, and recent disruptions in global airspace have only served as powerful reminders of this. This prompts a re-evaluation of the underexplored relationship between art and air travel. This session asks, for example: How have developments in flight technologies reshaped the experience of art and artmaking? What kinds of spaces and subjectivities are made or ruptured by air travel? How has air travel functioned as a site of colonial/postcolonial/anticolonial creativity? How has air travel altered the way we understand and write about art?
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Themes: Aviation, Air Mobility, Air Space
Additional format comment: This session will follow the usual format of four 20-minute research papers, each followed by 5 minutes for questions.
Lead Convenor: Weerada Muangsook, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom
To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.