Pattern-Thinking: Object, Theory, Method

"Pattern-Thinking: Object, Theory, Method" was a scholarly workshop, co-organized  with Dr. Robert Gordon-Fogelson, that took place at the AHAA Symposium in Fall 2022.

Presenters: Katie Anania, Aleisha Barton, Gabriella Moreno, Hadley Newton, Julia Silverman, Hampton Smith

The “pattern” is a multifaceted concept. As objects, patterns like stencils, blueprints, prototypes, and manuals graph how visual information moves between cultures, studios, hands, or media. As theories, patterns serve as critical frameworks for conceptualizing visual, historical, or social relations. They have informed artistic practices ranging from Hopi-Tewa potter Nampeyo’s self-conscious reuse of ancient motifs to American adoptions of “systems of world ornament” to the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s and 1980s. As method, pattern-thinking is evident in the work of the discipline’s founding figures—such as Heinrich Wölfflin and Aby Warburg, who used formal analysis to discern collective patterns of vision, perception, and experience—as well as in more recent data-driven approaches to art history that seek to uncover scales of information allegedly unobservable at the level of form, object, archive, or case study.

This workshop examines the “pattern” as a concept for interrogating the mobility of images and ideas in the arts of the Americas. Unfinished and expansive by nature, patterns offer critical insight into how ideas and images travel in ways that elude observation in finished objects. Thinking with and about patterns allows us to broach a host of topics critical to current debates in American art history, such as: the protection or exploitation of intellectual property and cultural heritage; the gendered nature of artistic processes; or systems of institutionalized power that regulate access to the arts. More broadly, this workshop seeks to foster meaningful connections across patterns as object, theory, and method: how might patterns’ material forms yield insight for art historical methods and vice versa?