Modern and Contemporary Art: Topical Abstraction in Contemporary Sculpture
A special issue of Arts (ISSN 2076-0752). This special issue belongs to the section "Visual Arts".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 January 2024) | Viewed by 8489
Special Issue Editors
Interests: modern and contemporary art; contemporary sculpture and installation; gender studies
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Since at least the 1960s, artists have leveraged abstraction to address topical issues without ceding to the classical framework of sculptural figuration. Examples include Melvin Edwards’ use of materials and symbols to allude to racism and political unrest, Barbara Chase-Riboud’s experimental processes that drew on her personal life experiences and global travels, and Kazuko Miyamoto’s minimalist exploration of the body politics of labor and display. Increasingly, contemporary artists such as Igshaan Adams, Tomás Díaz Cedeño, Kevin Beasley, Jeneen Frei Njootli, and Simone Leigh have pushed the matter all the more, adopting and adapting materials and processes to inventive and experimental ends that compellingly engage with social, historical, environmental, and aesthetic formations. At once allusive and open, such practices draw together disparate frameworks ranging from the vernacular and ethnographic to the phenomenological and commemorative. The overt conceptualizations that ensue cultivate trenchant conversations that foreground the critical terrain that making and materials occupy.
This Special Issue on contemporary sculpture—broadly conceived—seeks scholarship that explores the terms, origins, and outcomes that have emerged globally to engage with political, ecological, and intersectional questions. How might we understand such topical abstractions and the expanded terrain they explore? How do they pressure the limitations of abstraction to take up social or political considerations? In what ways might they invite new audiences, engender new relational positions to the viewer, or establish new possibilities for aesthetics?
Dr. Elyse Speaks
Dr. Susan Richmond
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- contemporary sculpture
- politics and art
- abstraction
- process and materials
- aesthetics
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