CONF: Artists’ colonies in the world / The world in artists’ colonies (Online / The University of Melbourne, 28-30 Nov 2022)

Models for writing art history range between globalised studies, national, regional or local histories, and the enduring individual monograph. None of these fully accommodate the artists’ colony. Colonies historically attract artists from elsewhere, of differing nationalities, brought together in a single geo-spatial frame, they may cohere owing to the appeal of a particular ‘master’, or location renowned for natural beauty, they may arise from the invitation of a wealthy patron, or established on a lineage within creative villages.

This 3-day conference gathers over 30 papers from academics working in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, the UK and USA. The Keynote lecture will be presented by Dr Nina Lübbren (Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge), whose paper considers how artist colonies based on place, space, and mobility provide a new perspective for analysing world art histories.

Program: Day 1
28 November 2022, 9:30–18:30 (Australian Eastern Standard Time)

9:30 – 10:00
Welcome and Acknowledgment of Country
Ian McLean – The University of Melbourne

10:00 – 11:30 Session 1  | Chair: Rex Butler

10:00 – 10:30
Emily C. Burns – University of Oklahoma
Whose Grainstacks? The Mobile Transnational Colony at Giverny, 1890-1900

10:30 – 11:00
Catherine Speck – University of Adelaide
The turn-of-the century French artists’ colony as a vector for rewriting art history

11:00 – 11:30
Jasmin Grande – Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
The Kalltalgemeinschaft

11:30 – 1:00    Session 2  | Chair: Jane Eckett

11:30 – 12:00
Rex Butler & Andrew Donaldson – Monash University, Melbourne, & the National Art School, Sydney
Australian artists in the colonies, or, The artist colony as a model for art history

12:00 – 12:30
Mary Kisler – Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki
Brief Encounters — The Peripatetic Life of Artist Frances Hodgkins

12:30 – 1:00
Rebecca Edwards – National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
From Moly-Sabata to the maître: Anne Dangar, Albert Gleizes and an artist colony

2:00 – 3:30 Session 3  |  Chair: Victoria Perin

2:00 – 2:30
Jane Clark – MONA, Hobart
‘Charterisville’ in the 1890s: camps, colonies, schools and Schools

2:30 – 3:00
Harriet Parsons & Matt Coller – Currency House & Temporal Earth, Melbourne
Reconstructing the creative community who documented Captain Cook’s Endeavour voyage

3:00 – 3:30
Miguel Angel Gaete – University of York
Carl Alexander Simon and the German Colony in Southern Chile

3:30 – 5:00    Session 4   | Chair: Ian McLean

3:30 – 4:00
Frances Fowle – University of Edinburgh and the National Galleries of Scotland
James Guthrie and the Glasgow Boys at Cockburnspath

4:00 – 4:30
Ellen Oredsson – The National Archives (UK)
Beyond Brøndums: The social organisation of the Skagen artists’ colony

4:30 – 5:00
Jan D. Cox – University of Oxford ContEd
The Gaihede Family at Skagen – A Case Study

KEYNOTE LECTURE, Supported by the Macgeorge Bequest
5:30 – 6:30
Nina Lübbren – Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK, Macgeorge Visiting Speaker
Rural artists’ colonies and the geographies of art history

Program: Day 2
29 November 2022, 10:00–17:00 (Australian Eastern Standard Time)

10:00 – 11:30    Session 5  | Chair: Ian McLean

10:00 – 10:30
Terry Smith – University of Pittsburgh
Colonies of Colonials Inside the Centres? New York 1960s and 1970s

10:30 – 11:00
Gloria Sutton – Northeastern University, Boston & MIT
Gate Hill Coop and the Afterlives of Black Mountain College

11:00 – 11:30
Iñaki Estella Noriega – Universidad Complutense, Madrid
Maciunas, Fluxus Tourism and the Impossible Artist Colony

11:30 – 1:00    Session 6  | Chair: Victoria Perin

11:30 – 12:00    
Anna Dempsey – University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
The Provincetown Art Colony:  A Queer “Idyllic” Place and the Provincetown Printers

12:00 – 12:30
David L. Witt – Seton Legacy Project, Santa Fe, New Mexico
A story of the improbable: the Taos artists’ colony

12:30 – 1:00
Carl Schmitz – Independent
American Artists’ Colonies in the Era of Abstract Expressionism: Mapping an Archipelago of Modernism

2:00 – 3:30    Session 7 | Chair: Jane Eckett

2:00 – 2:30
Mengfei Pan – Kokugakuin University, Tokyo
The Birth of “Mura” (Villages) of Artists in Modern Japan: Towards a Socio-Geographic Theorizing of Art

2:30 – 3:00
Shatavisha Mustafi – Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Dehli
A Comparative Approach to Studio Produced Crafts: Exploring the Cholamandal and Andretta Artists’ Villages in India

3:00 – 3:30
Adrian Tan Peng Chai – Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
The Artists Village: An ‘Experimental Colony’ that ‘Performed’ the Museum

3:30 – 5:00    Session 8 | Chair: Rex Butler

3:30 – 4:00
Roger Benjamin – The University of Sydney
Tangier as artists’ colony?

4:00 – 4:30
Darren Jorgensen – University of Western Australia, Perth
Diaspora, Exile and the Artist Colonists of the Great Sandy Desert

4:30 – 5:00
Pfunzo Sidogi – Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria
Black artists’ colonies in South Africa pre-1994

Program: Day 3
30 November 2022, 10:00–17:00 (Australian Eastern Standard Time)

10:00 – 11:30    Session 9  | Chair: Victoria Perin

10:00 – 10:30
Wylie Schwartz – State University of New York, Cortlandsburgh
Radical Subjectivity in the Scandinavian Situationist Bauhaus

10:30 – 11:00
Kiko del Rosario – Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
La talleridad: Splintering Philippine and Mexican muralismo

11:00 – 11:30
Rachel Weinberg – University of Melbourne
Reconsidering the end of modernism: 1965–1974

11:30 – 1:00    Session 10  | Chair: Jane Eckett

11:30 – 12:00    
Gillian Forwood – Independent
Darebin Bridge House as a model for an artists’ colony

12:00 – 12:30
Andrew Montana – Australian National University, Canberra
Merioola and its artists, Sydney, 1945–1949

12:30 – 1:00
Debbie Robinson – University of Melbourne
Clifton Pugh at Dunmoochin: An Expression of Embedded Nativism

2:00 – 3:30    Session 11 | Chair: Simon Pierse

2:00 – 2:30
Sheridan Palmer – University of Melbourne
The Abbey Art Centre, postwar utopianism and postnational modernism

2:30 – 3:00
Maria C. Tornatore-Loong – The University of Sydney
The ‘Australia Felix’ at Chez Haefliger: The ‘Unwritten’ Chapter of the Australian Expatriate Artist Colony in Majorca, Spain, 1958–1966

3:00 – 3:30
Angela Connor – Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne
Robert Owen, the dynamics of Hydra Greece and artistic collaboration between 1963–1966

3:30 – 5:00    Session 12 | Chair: Rex Butler

3:30 – 4:00
Jean-Claude Lesage – Independent
Australian and American painters at Pas-de-Calais: the colony of Étaples

4:00 – 5:00
Panel discussion:
Roger Benjamin – University of Sydney
Jane Clark – MONA, Hobart
Rebecca Edwards – National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Carl Schmitz – Independent
Pfunzo Sidogi – Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria
Catherine Speck – University of Adelaide

Registration free but essential through the conference website: https://arts.unimelb.edu.au/e/artists-colonies-in-the-world.