Art Histories of the Urban

Cities offer paradigmatic spaces for artists to make and exhibit their works and to make and sustain their careers. From Europe to the Americas and Africa to Asia, artists represent, document, interpret, and intervene in the cities where they work and live. Not only do cities provide both subject and context for artistic propositions, they also create the conditions for art institutions and communities to thrive. Bringing together approaches and themes from art history and interdisciplinary urban studies, this session examines the relationship among artists, art production and exhibition, art institutions, art scenes and communities, and the urban environment. While previous studies address aspects of these topics, this session takes a comparative and comprehensive look at the mutual constitution of art and the urban—with its unique spatial proximities and juxtapositions.

We invite papers that consider from historical and contemporary vantage points how the urban environment’s visual, material, spatial, and social resources are vital to artistic production. In what ways do artists engage with formal and informal structures to create their work and communities? How do art institutions such as schools, museums, and biennales emerge from cities, shaping opportunities for artists? How has the urban context catalyzed experimental approaches to making? Contributing to efforts to de-colonize the discipline, we ask how artists grapple with urban structures to explore power, identity, and the creation of just and sustainable futures. Finally, who is included or excluded from art histories of the urban? What are the possibilities and limits of this analytic approach?

Session Convenors:

Lee Ann Custer, Vanderbilt University

Joanna Grabski, Arizona State University

Speakers:

Éva Lovra, University of Debrecen

The Role of Architecture and Visual Art in Urban Transformation: A Case Study of Miskolc (HU)

After the First World War, Miskolc (Hungary) adopted a new position. The American Speyer Loan led to the construction of new streets and built environment, resulting in the disappearance of the original urban landscape. During the development of the modern city, visual artists engaged in a form of ‘value preservation’ through townscape paintings of the built environment, while architects, working primarily in the late 1920s and 1930s, shaped a new urban landscape. The architectural drawings from this period were artistic creations, suggesting that architects were also involved in visual art. The aim of this research is to evaluate the works of the painters and architects and to provide a comprehensive view of the urban development of Miskolc between the two world wars, allowing the transformation of the townscape to be traced through the activities of architects and visual artists.

The research is based on four pillars: paintings, archival sources, contemporary press, and on-site investigations. Although the study attempts to reconstruct urban transformation through architectural designs and visual materials (paintings and drawings), this is only partially possible due to fragmented archival sources. Contemporary press articles and on-site research are used to complement traditional archival research, offering a more complete understanding of the city’s transformation.

Chandrika Acharya, Heidelberg University

City of Displacement, City for Art: Modernist Formations in Post-Partition Delhi

In 1947, with the Indian subcontinent’s independence and partition, Delhi absorbed nearly half a million refugees, including artists from Lahore, which was now part of Pakistan. Lahore’s artistic community were among the early professional artists who were no longer supported by defunct Mughal ateliers and instead sought the public’s engagement through exhibitions and sales. Along with patronage, the art itself had undergone historical changes. Contact with European naturalism, through colonial art policies, expanded the local artist’s resources, engendering early Modernist experimentations.

With a violent partition and large-scale dispossessions, what possibilities for arts were enabled by the newly-formed capital city? What spaces did artists produce for creation, display, and valuation of works which were new and unfamiliar to the viewing public? The collective, Delhi Shilpa Chakra, took the city as an exhibition ground, turning former colonial districts, new refugee colonies, mills, restaurants, universities into sites of public demonstration and debates. Parallelly, dealers and collectors emerged who assembled an art world for Delhi’s early modernists. Dhoomimal Gallery, instituted by Ram Babu, a proprietor of stationary supplies and publications, evolved as an accidental gallerist through his friendship with DSC artists. The resources he provided—through art materials and printing monographs, as well as, by representing works to local elites, diplomats, and foreign entrepreneurs—cultivated a community of art appreciation and commerce.

This paper considers why artistic productions emerge in certain spaces over others. Taking the city as context, it delineates friendships, networks, and public interventions that shaped the infrastructure for modernism in Delhi.

Lilianna Quiroa-Crowell, The Graduate Center, CUNY (City University of New York)

The Invisible Exposition: Urban Indigenous and Campesino Women in Puerto Barrios, Guatemala and the (Un)Making of Urban Space through Art

This paper examines the disruptive impact of an art exhibition in the public library of the port city of Puerto Barrios, Guatemala that featured art created and cultivated by Indigenous and campesino women. The 2-week long exhibition consisted of 40 photographs and hand-drawn maps that represented their communities and experience as women residing in “invisible” neighborhoods that are completely missing from the official city map and narrated as dangerous, ‘savage’ or simply empty areas by other city residents and government officials. Not only did this event attract attention as the first art exhibition to be displayed in the library, it was also a jarring spatial collapse of the urban fabric of Puerto Barrios, as the invisible became visible, both in spaces depicted on the walls and by the presence of these women artists in a city-space typically highly policed along racial-ethnic and class lines.

Drawing on McKittrick’s concept of the “ungeographic” (2006), I examine the larger city history and ongoing urban dynamics that have produced these women and their neighborhoods as invisible spaces. I place this in conversation with the diverse reactions by city residents and officials who visited the exhibition in order to identify the dominant geographical narratives and implicit spatialized racial-gender hierarchies that structure these women’s lives and the city’s past/present modern development plans. Finally, I analyze how these women’s artistic representations of their city space became both a platform for empowerment and briefly offered an alternative perspective on urban space and justice.

Amy Melia, PLACED

‘Criticality from Within’ – Can Critical Approaches to the Urban Environment Develop within Art Institutions?

Can art institutions be dynamic sites of urban activism and critical approaches to urbanism? Can the political power of art institutions function as a ‘trojan horse’ of sorts – a vehicle for ‘smuggling in’ criticality into the art world and urban environment alike? Rather, is any activity that emerges from within the physical and ideological bounds of the art institution naturally subject to capture and co-optation, destined to become a tool for gentrification and top-down urban development processes? From the Situationist International to Banksy, in urban art history, art institutions and critical urbanism have largely been viewed as diametrically opposed and incompatible. This paper will contest this long-held perspective, highlighting how contemporary art institutions are increasingly engaging with the urban environment and its social urgencies. Employing urban Marxist and decolonial approaches, in this paper I will speculate whether critical approaches to the urban environment can develop within art institutions. The dialectical exploration of this paper will emerge through the discussion of three micro-examples – The Serpentine Gallery’s Edgeware Road, Tania Bruguera and Queen’s Museums Immigrant Movement International, and Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona’s Las Agencias. I will discuss these examples as instances of ‘experimental institutionalism’ – a field of curatorial practice, institutional reform and critical debate concerned with the self-reflexive transformation of art institutions into socially responsible agents. I will argue that the shift towards experimental institutionalism has also seen an increase in art institutions delivering exhibitions, ‘satellite projects’ and public programming in urban sites that critically address social urgencies and engage communities.

Kelly Rappleye, Glasgow School of Art

Mnemonic Topographies: Watery Poetics of Glasgow in Contemporary Artists’ Moving Images

This paper considers how watery poetics in artists’ moving images trace mnemonic topographies within Glasgow’s urban fabric, evoking submerged histories of colonialism, displacement, and migration. Known as the ‘Second City of Empire,’ Glasgow was shaped by the Atlantic Slave Trade, with the River Clyde dredged to channel global flows of capital and goods through its hydrocolonial infrastructures. The urban topography—reshaped over time by flows of labor, capital, migration, deindustrial decline, and urban regeneration—holds the residues of fragmented subjectivities in what Karen Till (2012) describes as ‘wounded cities.’ Drawing on Anita Bakshi’s (2017) ‘topographies of memory,’ this paper explores how contemporary artists use watery poetics of visual indeterminacy, fluidity, and spectrality to evoke multiple pasts and contested histories within Glasgow’s landscape.

Through works by Alberta Whittle, Alia Syed, Joanne Lee, Anne-Marie Copstake, and Sulaiman Majali, water’s ambivalence—its power to reveal and obscure—emerges as a metaphor for repressed memory, unsettling linear cultural narratives of Glasgow. These artists’ poetics of drip, steam, and flow engage with what Struan Gray (2022) terms ‘liquid landscapes of memory,’ where water’s ephemeral presence evokes diasporic and exilic geographies. From mapping Barbadian coasts in Glasgow’s canals to tracing South Asian presences in industrial ports and charting migratory paths through demolished housing estates, these works propose solidarities across geographies and histories, forging ‘affective infrastructures’ (Knox, 2017) of watery connectivity and wet resilience in the city.

Pfunzo Sidogi, Tshwane University of Technology

The Village-based City: Backyard Sculptural Installations of South Africa’s Urban Modernity

In this paper, I examine how artists based in so-called rural communities reimagine and redesign South Africa’s urban landscape in their site-specific visualisations of selected urban infrastructure. Amongst other examples, I specifically review the work of Mulalo Negondeni and Dzulani Sidogi, two artists who unsettle the rural-urban binary by creating miniature sculptural models of iconic architectural structures found in the cities of Johannesburg and Durban, respectively. In 2019, Negondeni and Sidogi created mini-cities in the backyards of their village-based homes in the Limpopo Province, a predominantly rural region of South Africa. By remaking the most iconic constructions of South Africa’s urban modernity in their backyards, these rural-based artists have reclaimed and domesticated the modern African city. I position these and other artistic renderings of city-based modernity as examples of how African artists are taming the so-called Afropolis within their village contexts, thereby transcending the conceptual and physical barriers that continue to divide the rural and urban domains in the Global South. The bespoke sculptural installations spotlighted in this paper confirm that rural-based artists are designing visionary urbanisms of the South that undo the colonial-inspired rural-urban boundaries and segregations that still dominate the spatial order of South Africa’s urban geography.

Goh Wei Hao, King’s College London

Transforming the Streets of 1980s Singapore in Art Commandos (1988): Redistributing the Sensible of the Urban Spaces in Singapore

Art Commandos (1988) was a month-long event that took performance art to the streets of Singapore, transforming them into dynamic stages. This presentation looks at how Art Commandos created a sphere of appearance where performance art and artists can be visible in ways that were denied to them in 1980s Singapore — specifically, how it transformed the perception of performance artwork from a ‘foreign’ art form into one that is part of the urban spaces of Singapore. The focus of this paper is on the moments of improvisation, looking at how Art Commandos navigated and challenged the structures within the urban spaces in Singapore that sought to render the performance art forms and artists marginal. I chose to focus on improvisational strategies as I will demonstrate that they are effective, but overlooked strategies, to redistribute the sensible.

I chose to study Art Commandos as it is one of the earliest performance artworks to be performed on the streets of Singapore. Before Art Commandos, performance art in Singapore was primarily created in private spaces for a closed audience of practitioners and friends. During the late 1980s, performance art was a relatively new and seemingly ‘non-local’ art form. More importantly, Art Commandos can be considered one of the last public performances in Singapore during a time when there were relatively few regulations for public performances; in the following decade, the art form became much more regulated due to several controversial performance artworks.

Martyna Ewa Majewska, The University of Manchester

Caminhando/Perambulating: Pope.L’s Urban Interventions

Conceived as a reflection on the life and practice of the late multidisciplinary artist Pope.L (1955–2023), this paper examines his performance-based interventions into urban spaces across the United States. Pope.L is best known for crawling down the streets of New York City – a career-long project he expanded to various urban locations around the world – but he also collaborated with communities in other US cities to address specific socioeconomic and environmental issues they were facing. These collaborations resulted in: Blink, a video ‘memory bank’ whose city-wide presence in New Orleans in 2011 was facilitated by a volunteer performance; Pull!, a durational community performance organised in Cleveland in 2013; and Flint Water (2017), a multipart project that addressed the water crisis in Flint.

Against the backdrop of those endeavours, the second part of the paper explores Reenactor, a relatively little-known film which Pope.L realised in Nashville between 2009 and 2010 with local residents and performers recruited at Tennessee State University. The study of Reenactor is based on field research conducted in the city and interviews with Pope.L’s collaborators. Inspired by Lygia Clark’s Caminhando, Reenactor ruminates on the enduring presence of Confederate iconography and Lost Cause mythology in Nashville, incorporating images of local mansions, monuments and historical markers. While analysing the grotesque imagery and convoluted text of the film, this paper traces the dialogue between the artist as an outsider in Nashville, the local urban and memorial landscapes, and the people engaged in the making of the film.