80. Sanctuary as Practice: Art, Social Activism, and the Architecture of Conscience

Sacred and contemplative spaces have re-emerged as significant sites of political urgency (Madoff, 2019). From the Rothko Chapel’s founding mission to support civil and human rights to recent activist gatherings staged inside museums, galleries, and places of worship, artists, curators, and communities increasingly treat the gallery or sanctuary not as a retreat from the world, but as a staging ground for it. This session interrogates what it means for an artwork, or an institution built around one, to hold both contemplative and activist functions at once, and if this dual mandate is a tension to be managed or model from which to learn.

Scholarship on socially engaged art has tended to separate the relational and participatory (Bishop 2004, Bourriaud 1998, 2002) from the devotional and contemplative (Rosenblum’s Abstract Sublime on Rothko and Newman, 1961). This session brings these literatures into conversation, asking how spaces designed for stillness can become spaces for organizing, mourning, and dissent.

We welcome papers addressing histories of chapels, memorials, and meditative spaces founded explicitly to support human rights or social justice work; artists whose practice moves between abstraction and activism; the role of light, scale, and silence in activist and devotional spaces; institutional case studies of museums or foundations navigating political advocacy; and non-Western traditions of sacred space as civic action.

Themes: social activism, contemplation, modern/contemporary art

Additional format comment: Four 20-minute papers, each with a 5-minute Q&A, followed by a 25-minute roundtable discussion among all panelists (rather than a single respondent), which reflects Rothko Chapel’s practice of convening multiple voices in dialogue rather than centring a single authority.

Lead Convenor:  Carolyn King, Director of Research & Education, Rothko Chapel, United States

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.