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 University of Arizona Museum of Art’s Retablo Gallery 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.
