Abstract Art and Colonial Systems

Session co-organized with Dr. Max Boersma (Freie Universität Berlin), CAA Annual Conference, February 2025.

Recent years have witnessed a scholarly recalibration of canonical narratives of abstract art, particularly with respect to its sociopolitical implications. Among these, major studies have mapped abstraction’s transcultural networks of exchange, expanded its definitions to non-figurative traditions that preceded any alleged European “invention,” and examined its particular potentials and limitations as a mode of activism for social and racial justice. Building on these conversations, this panel seeks papers that interrogate the relationship between abstract art and the sociopolitical systems that undergirded Euro-American colonialism. How might strategies of visual abstraction relate to the economic, epistemic, pedagogical, and scientific systems that structured colonial relations? How did these strategies index, negotiate, disrupt, or obscure these processes? How do local invocations of abstraction by Indigenous artists across the world address global effects of colonial modernity? Non-specific and capacious, how might abstraction be uniquely positioned as a tool of connection and solidarity? By considering abstraction as a process, we seek papers that investigate it as a historical strategy and an analytic device for performing, assessing, and interrupting colonial structures that persist into the present. 

Presenters:

Katia Denysova, University of Tübingen “Universal and Vernacular, Abstract and Decorative: Alexandra Exter’s Colour Dynamics (1916–18)”

Amin Alsaden, Independent Scholar “Between Abstraction and Tradition: Debating Arabic Calligraphy in Modern Baghdad”

Ihnmi Jon, School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University “Exchanging ‘the Common Love of the Beautiful’: Abstract Art and Minnesota Project (1954-1960)”

Jessica Horton, University of Delaware “Arch, Mound, Basket: Mission Abstraction and Indigenous Ecological Forms”