Call for Papers- Art/Work: The History & Future of Art & Labor
- Region: International
- Type: Conference
- Cost: Free
UIC’s 3rd annual art history symposium invites papers on the theme of labor. Artistic creation both thematizes and reproduces questions of labor, presenting conflicts between the individual and the collective, the innovative and the necessity, and what it means to be grounded in social and physical processes in a world becoming increasingly alienated and digitally oriented. As Samuel Raybone writes, “artistic work is always a working with and a working for: working with contextual circumstances, material and techniques, styles and ideas… while simultaneously working for patrons and audiences, who each impose their culturally-conditioned expectations.” Just as the industrialization of the 19th century prompted artists and thinkers to consider the rapid transformation of urban and rural life– such as Marx’s notion of cooperation and alienation under capitalism– recent advancements in algorithmic technology and the uncertainty of the future of labor call for revisiting this topic.
In pre-modern art and visual culture, labor is often rendered invisible in favor of tales of patronage. We encourage papers that seek to upset this standard through various kinds of archival, formal, and aesthetic analyses. Mughal miniature painting, for example, was tied to a longstanding tradition of artistic training called to action at the behest of a patron, but what kinds of freedom or agency may be discernible in their labor? As in Andrew Hamilton’s description of the Royal Inca tunic, the hands of multiple skilled artisans created works sometimes enjoyed on only one occasion. What is the nature of the relationship between these multiple artists, their singular patron, and society at large?
There are many kinds of labor, but what gets classified as specialized, meaningful, or artistic? What do these investigations reveal about changing class anxieties? The artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles coined the term “maintenance art” to draw attention to the invisible processes that build structures like families, museums, and historical achievements. She draws on care, a term also relevant to the work of Cambodian artist Sopheap Pich, whose process of creating enormous sculptures out of treated rattan harkens back to the weavers and fishermen of his homeland forever changed by the impacts of war. Taking up an artform imparted to him by his father, Pich’s work resembles how materials expose a labor of knowledge and skill preservation, care, and subsistence.
Acts of labor beget a kind of repetitiveness. The practice of creating, renewing, or repairing the same items repeatedly provokes a kind of boredom, or oppression, as in the endurance performances of Taiwanese-American artist Tehching Hsieh, but in other contexts, repetition bears a spiritual or transcendental quality akin to freedom. The highly burnished Comala ceramics of ancient West Mexico were only made spiritually vital through the reflection of the sun imparted by the meticulous, trancelike practice of polishing their surfaces.
What kinds of histories and knowledge are exposed through artistic labor? Can exposing the processes behind a product reclaim the agency of artistic labor left out of historical canons? What is the relationship between labor and gender and how is it made manifest in works of art? How do artists and scholars reconcile creative labor and class position? What is the artist’s class position compared to that of their audiences? What does the future of labor look like in an age of artificial toil through algorithmic means?
These are just a few questions prompting our exploration of labor. We invite papers engaging this theme across all periods, geographies, and media. We welcome diverse methodological approaches, such as:
Performance studies
Dialectical materialism
Labor history
Memory studies
Post/de-colonial studies
Disability studies
Religion
Ecological studies
Material culture studies
Museum studies
Film and media theory
Literature and comparative studies
In an age of austerity wherein funding for humanities has been reallocated towards building an artificial workforce, this symposium proceeds with the goal to clarify our own roles as artists, art historians, academics, and humans. We hope to stimulate discussion that, in addition to important critique of the past and current moment, sheds light on the future of the relationship between art and labor.
Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to uicarthistorysymposium@gmail.com by 11:59pm on November 15th, 2026.