AMCA at CAA Annual Conference 2020
AMCA Idea Exchange
Friday, February 14, 2020: 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM, Hilton Chicago, Lower Level – Salon C – Red Table
Art and Revolution Again: Iraq, Iran, Lebanon and Egypt
Nada Shabout, University of North Texas (Host)
Civil unrest and demonstrations around the Arab world, Iran and Turkey regularly instigate discussions around the role of art in the region. Do revolutions bring renewal in art? Do artists have a responsibility to serve revolutions? How should art historians and curators approach the art of protest in the streets?
AMCA-Sponsored Panel
Saturday, February 15, 2020: 8:30 AM – 10:00 AM, Hilton Chicago, Lake Ontario
Modern Architecture, Handicraft Design, and Twentieth-Century Tourism
Daniel E. Coslett, Western Washington University Jessica Gerschultz, University of Kansas
The development of mass tourism during the twentieth century brought increasingly large numbers of travelers into contact with distant locales. Tensions between demonstrating modernity, offering expected levels of comfort, and representing host locations and peoples, produced mixed built environments charged with complex objectives. While references to “local” identities were at times achieved through regionalist approaches to modernism that incorporated elements of the vernacular, the decorative application of “traditional” handicrafts to structures, interiors, and furnishing was a popular means for such representation. Levels of theorization, authenticity, and inclusion regarding the use of handicrafts varied in different contexts and time periods, opening compelling questions regarding the definition, value, and purpose of handicraft in built environments as well as the gendering of roles and concepts designated as architectural or artisanal. Questions one might ask include the following: What elements of handicraft were deployed by modern architects in tourism settings, and why? How were crafts transformed, theorized, and modernized in the process of that deployment, and in what ways were they feminized? How did the use of handicraft shape narratives of identity that privileged specific histories, identities, mythologies, and marginalized others?
Members of this panel address intersections between modernist architecture and “locally” inspired handicraft from twentieth-century sites of tourism in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and North America. In its totality the panel considers gender, power dynamics, colonialism, and collaborations between artisan and architect, as well as the current state of these sites.
Presentations
“The Holy Land Offers You Its Products”: The Transformation of Palestinian Handicrafts During the British Mandate
Nisa Ari, University of Houston
Tourism and Artisanry in Italian Colonial Libya in the 1930s
Brian L. McLaren, University of Washington
An Appalachian Pleasure Garden: Tourism and the Reshaping and Exploitation of the American Hinterland
Lizabeth Wardzinski, North Carolina State University
Helena Perheentupa and the Labor of Crafts at Jawaja, India
Vishal Khandelwal, University of Michigan
“Anatolian Humanism”: A Critical Analysis of Decorative Arts in Tourist Spaces of Turkey, 1960–1990
Ozge Sade Mete, Bellevue College