One of only 30 symposia in the country and the oldest of its kind, the 35th annual Art History Symposium will be held Friday, March 27, at the School of Art building (Room 312) from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Organized by the School of Art’s Art History Graduate Student Association (AHGSA), the 2026 event — “Interstices” — seeks to explore interstitial periods of history and significant shifts in art.
What do we make of art that challenges our traditional typologies? Art is constantly emerging and changing, transforming and shifting. Moments of stylistic flux, cultural exchange, and innovation can resist, defy, and transform the material culture of a time and place. These transitional and intervening moments in art history, where styles, periods, and cultures are reconfigured, can challenge historical boundaries, rewrite narratives, and speak to the power of human connection and the creativity born of change.
Dr. George Flaherty, an associate professor in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, is the keynote speaker. Flaherty is also co-director of the Center for Latin American Visual Studies at UT-Austin. His research and teaching focus primarily on modern and contemporary visual and spatial cultures in Mexico, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and their diasporas in the United States.
Interstices Schedule: March 27
9:00 am – Welcome and Opening Remarks; ART, Room 312
Panel One – Negotiations; ART, Room 312
9:25 am – Aurora Levy, University of Arizona – “Mulattas in Eighteenth Century Casta Paintings: The Hierarchy of Race, Sex, and Class in Colonial New Spain”
9:45 am- Lee Purvey, UC Irvine – “La cabaña primitiva: Abstractions and Afterlives of the Traditional Maya Home in Revolutionary Yucatán”
10:10 am – Nichola Adade, Louisiana State University – “Adinkra in the In-Between: Cultural Hybridization in Kwesi Owusu Ankomah’s Contemporary Ghanaian Art”
10:30 am – Panel One Q&A
10:55 am – Break
Panel Two – Transformations; ART, Room 312
11:10 am – Jacob Waits, Northwestern University – “Towards an Embodied Conceptualism: Petr Štembera’s Correspondence Activities at the New Reform Gallery”
11:30 am – Mila Tomizuka, University of Arizona – “Towards a Humanist Materialism: Lina Bo Bardi’s Modernism, Revisited”
11:55 am – Chloe Henderson, University of Arizona – “Wire to Air: Transformation of Material in Ruth Asawa’s Artwork”
12:05 pm – Panel Two Q&A
12:30 pm – Break
Panel Three – Reconsiderations; ART, Room 312
1:45 pm – Hanna Katulski, University of Arizona – “Reconsidering Hellenization of Etruscan Art”
2:05 pm – Tori Stevenson, University of Oregon – “Haitian Painter Hector Hyppolite: The Aesthetic Convergence of Vodou, Négritude, and Surrealism”
2:30 pm – Faye Dowling, University of Arizona – “Trace, place, belonging: Rethinking archival practice in our 21st century hinterlands”
2:50 pm – Panel Three Q&A
3:15 pm – Break
Keynote – Center for Creative Photography, Room 108
4:00 pm – Dr. George Flaherty, University of Texas at Austin – “Muralism and Mutual Aid: Charles Alston and Diego Rivera in Depression-era New York”
4:40 pm – Keynote Q&A
5:00 pm – Closing Remarks
