Abstracts for the Annual SECAC Conference Host Institution: Virginia Commonwealth University Convened Virtually November 30th - December 11th, 2020 Conference Chair: Carly Phinizy, Virginia Commonwealth University Hallie Abelman, University of Iowa The Home Lives of Animal Objects Ducks give pause to the DeafBlind poet John Lee Clark, who encounters them in rubber, stone, and wood while scanning aisles of gift shops and flea markets. Always perplexed by their flat bottoms, Clark notes how this perplexing design decision maintains visual (over tactile) privilege. The portal opened by this reflection exemplifies the precise intersection of animals, material culture, and disability driving Abelman’s performance-lecture at SECAC2020. Abelman treats each animal object she encounters as a prop and every mundane interaction with it as a performance, so Abelman demonstrates how the performativity of these obJects can elicit necessary humor, irony, and satire often missing from mainstream environmentalist narratives. Be they tchotchkes, souvenirs, commodities, or toys, each of these obJects has a culturally specific relationship to the species it portrays, a unique material makeup, and a history of being touched by human hands. Attending to the social construction of these realities aids an essential reconciliation between commodified animals and real animal livelihoods. Overall, the audience gains a better sense of how animal obJects can not only misrepresent a species but also contribute to that very species’s demise, be instrumentalized for the perpetuation of racist ideologies, and mobilize ableist fears. Rachel Allen, University of Delaware Nocturnes without Sky (World): FreDeric Remington Pushes Indigenous Cosmologies Out of the Frame This paper examines Frederic Remington’s (American, 1861–1909) The Gossips (1909) and the impact of his final paintings on Indigenous people and our cosmologies. A prolific illustrator and author, Remington began to paint night scenes in 1899 and this new body of work received critical acclaim. Though lauded for its beauty and authenticity, The Gossips contains important subtext. The horse legs fade into the tall grass, as if the land is reclaiming each horse and rider. Tipis melt into the ground. The sun is setting on the scene, and perhaps on the era of Indigenous people in America. As his characters recede into the land to make way for American settlement, the air, sky, and atmosphere are also expelled. The Gossips’s horizon line appears very high on the picture plane, privileging land over sky in nighttime scenes. Indigenous people recognize that air and sky have agency and history. Allen argues that these early representations contribute to an American ideology that strips Native American people of their cosmologies and knowledge of the sky world. This disconnection extends into the present as Native nations gain visibility in their fights for clean air, airspace, and spectrum rights. Matías AllenDe ContaDor, Universidad de Chile Monuments for Current Political Conflicts: Reorganizing Networks in Front the Voracity of the State After the social outbreak in Chile, the streets have been occupied as the predominant place of protest. One example is the taking over of monuments located in the city, tainting, amputating them, corrupting their original meaning, and making them operate from a different place. This anti-colonial practice responds to the founding ethos of the Latin American states, republics that were founded from patriarchal and Eurocentric canons. Without underestimating these gestures of appropriation, what would the monuments for this new critical stage be? Two significant examples, both from 2018, are the works of regional artists thinking about the history of the colonial and republican installation. This presentation deals on one hand with the work Fragmentos, by Doris Salcedo (Bogotá, 1958), part of the Peace Accords in Colombia. On the other hand, the Venezuelan-Chilean artist Jessica Briceño (Caracas, 1988), with her work Guapondelig, offers a reflection on the layers of conquest that exist in a city like Cuenca (Ecuador). She studied different cultures through their public fountains, thus retracing history as a gesture of subversion before official state discourses. These proposals shed light on new monuments of the present while simultaneously collecting a story of profound discord. Aaron Ambroso, UNC–Chapel Hill FreD Wilson’s Mixed Metaphors: The Politics of Museums in the Late 20th Century Against the background of tensions animating museum discourse of the early 1990s, Fred Wilson’s Mixed Metaphors (1993) challenged both art and artifact methods of display and discourses of authenticity. As part of an invitation by the Seattle Museum of Art to reimagine the display of its permanent collection galleries, Wilson altered and made additions to the African and Northwest Coast galleries, addressing issues of colonialism and power through techniques of Juxtaposition and substitution. Instead of lamenting changes in indigenous societies, or rearticulating narratives of the redemption and preservation of indigenous culture from immanent destruction or contamination, Mixed Metaphors pushed the Seattle Museum of Art to further articulate its values of global, cross-cultural, and future-oriented indigenous presents. Mixed Metaphors formed a continuation of the practices and approaches already in use at the museum, challenging characterizations of artist versus museum binaries. Through his intervention, Wilson opened the galleries up to meanings outside of the art and artifact paradigms of classification, interpretation, and display. Ultimately, the installations participated in questioning some of the organizing principles of the museum’s role as collectors and preservers of art and culture. 2 Jose Santos ArDivilla, Texas Tech University Plastic Nation: Filipino Contemporary Artists Utilize Plastic to Envisage the Plasticity of Identity This presentation delves into the notion of plastic as focus on both materiality and of identity, as recast by Filipino contemporary artists. The malleability of the plastic material is reflected on the shifting assertions of place, of ritual, and of extension or conflation of body, time, and place. These artists give “a new life” to what is generally considered a material of ecological deterioration. The lowly disposable plastic bag, much more akin to waste, becomes an instrument for exploration of pressing issues of national, ecological, and global iterations of displacement and consumption. Three contemporary Filipino artists—Marcelino Bugaoan, Renan Ortiz, and Leeroy New—mine through plastic material to investigate narratives from below. These three contemporary Filipino artists have used plastic material as indices for conflation and complication of violence of the cycles of poverty, resource mismanagement in rapacious capitalism, and waste as the essential by-product of globalization bracketed in nations. By repurposing and recasting plastic materials in art practice, contemporary art addresses issues of sustainability, climate change, and rapacious neoliberal capitalist consumerist cultures—rendering the plastic not as the main scourge but a symptom of a prevailing disease of resource abuse, global inequity, and waste mismanagement. Olivia ArmanDroff, Winterthur Program in American Material Culture A Woman’s Voice: Leila Mechlin and Art Criticism in the Early 20th Century As the leading art critic of her time in Washington, DC, Leila Mechlin played an essential role in shaping the art world at the turn of the 20th century. Born in 1874, she was raised in an artistic family, her grandfather, Jacob Hyatt, being a founder and engraver of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and her mother, Cornelia Stout Hyatt Mechlin, working as a genre and portrait painter. Although Mechlin received an artistic training at the Corcoran, she immediately embarked on a professional career as a commentator, not practitioner, and from 1900 to 1946 she served as The Evening Star’s art critic. This period saw the creation and development of Washington’s key art museums. In addition to her prolific output in ephemeral newspapers, Mechlin published on the subject in her 1914 book, Works of Art in Washington. Her expertise earned her an array of influential positions, such as the secretary of the American Federation of the Arts. This paper reflects a careful review of Mechlin’s writings, taking into account contemporaneous art-world trends to contextualize the role she played in transforming Washington into a cultural capital and addressing how a woman came to occupy such a powerful position. Meg Aubrey, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi Laura Monahan, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi The Intersection between Art and Nursing In 2016 Texas A&M University—Corpus Christi’s College of Nursing and Health Science was awarded a $2.7M Health Resource and Services Administration grant to develop a nursing curriculum incorporating the visual arts into an accelerated BSN course of study. Nursing is frequently defined as both an art and a science. This innovative program uses art education to enhance observation, critical thinking, and fine motor skills. This first-of-its-kind program 3 incorporates arts into each week of the fifteen-month-long accelerated BSN program. The program is Jointly taught by an art and a nursing professor and is designed to enhance visual observation skills, communication, collaboration, comfort with ambiguity, and the reduction of bias. Lectures,