APS and print-related panels at CAA 2025

APS is sponsoring a session at the CAA Annual Convention 2025 in New York from February 12–15, 2025.
Check out our session as well as other print-related papers and panels (edited list forthcoming).
Visit this link for the full conference program.

APS-SPONSORED SESSION:

Haptic Histories: The Politics of Paper & Its Industrial Entanglements
New York Hilton Midtown – 2nd Floor – Bryant Suite
Friday February 14, 2025. 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM EST
Chairs: Aleisha Elizabeth Barton (University of Minnesota) and Shane Morrissy (Duke University)
Discussant: Christina Michelon (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Papers:

Liliya Dashevski (Yale University)
Didactic Tools or Harbingers of Chaos: Konstantin Gribanov’s “Geographical Cards of Russia.”

In 1830, the artist Konstantin Gribanov (1797-?) published his first card deck titled “Geographical Cards of Russia… For the Benefit of its Youth.” This deck, designed for children at boarding schools, features representations of all regional administrative units of the Russian Empire. Each card is divided into four squares: the upper left square represents the region’s coat of arms, the upper right is devoted to the playing card’s suit and figure, the bottom left shows a list of the region’s largest cities, and the lower right features a figure in the region’s “native dress.” On the verso of every card, a miniature map of the governorate is painted, along with a caption specifying its distance from the empire’s centers, Moscow and St. Petersburg.

In the preface to his deck, Gribanov marketed the cards as a didactic geographical game. Yet, the design of the cards makes them ill-suited for gameplay. This raises questions about the cards’ functionality: How could children interact with them, and what meanings could they generate? Another set of questions deals with the imperial messages embedded in these cards. How did these cards participate in indoctrinating imperial ideas into children’s minds, and what views of the empire did these cards generate?

This paper argues that Gribanov’s geographical cards functioned as “double agents.” Their content inculcates imperial ideas in children’s minds, but their medial ephemerality, especially when handled by children, underscores the empire’s assemblage nature, perpetually under threat of disintegration.

Emily Cadger (The University of British Columbia)
Promises and Pictures: How Victorian socialists used print ephemera to engage children in political action

Victorian socialists were masters of printed propaganda. From William Morris’ multiple Arts and Crafts endeavours to Edward Carpenter’s writings the different factions of the British socialist movement relied heavily on printed words and images to share their vision of the future. This paper examines two case studies – illustrated socialist fairy tales for the nursery and children’s educational columns in periodicals like the Labour Leader – which demonstrate how interacting with works on paper allowed for the integration of socialist ideals into the domestic space of the Victorian home.

Both the illustrated book and the popular press pushed for readers to interact with larger sociopolitical elements of the outside world through the materiality of the object itself. Flipping through the illustrated book allowed readers to push story narratives along and to be the active change in the imagined society that mirrored their own, while articles in periodicals advocated for engaging with the outside world through metaphoric counterpoints or anecdotes. In order to demonstrate this larger haptic trend in socialist engagement with printed ephemera, this paper looks specifically at original works penned and pictured by artist Walter Crane in the 1890s, coupled with articles published in the Labour Leader and Labour Prophet of the same decade. By examining a combination of printed objects aimed at different social spaces and classes, I aim to demonstrate how socialist activists interlaced their beliefs into the popular press in order to sway consumers into creating a socialist utopia through their haptic interactions with printed pages.

Erika Piola (Library Company of Philadelphia)
Only Between Times: Gender, Satire, and the Postcard of the Early 20th-Century

Contemporary conceptions of early postcard art of the early 1900s do not typically conjure up images of a photo-collaged picture of a woman swimming in a sea of bobbing babies, a “comically” drawn scene showing “The Wurst Girl” and her sausage, or a fabric pennant for a women’s college pasted beside a view of two of its students embraced in a kiss “only between times.” Described by scholars as the social network of their era, personal and nostalgic objects, and provocative and vernacular artifacts evidencing the sociopolitics of their period of production and reception, satiric, commercial postcards embody multitudes of underexplored cultural and sensory readings.

This paper will examine the multi-layered and subversive innuendos represented in comic and fantasy postcards portraying Progressive-era women in traditional and unconventional gender roles and relationships. The cards communicate a confluence of poignant and amorphous rhetoric from the interplay between their small-scale images, captions, and personal inscriptions (and the latter’s absence) produced during the early period of the Comstock Act which barred the mailing of obscene matter.

The mass-handled, multivalent graphic materials foster reevaluation of the complex gender identity and power dynamics of the early 1900s through their modern and regressive visual narratives sent as mail. Original as well as repurposed, recycled, and reimagined visual tropes used in previous popular media, such as 3-D stereographs, infuse, defuse, activate, and empower the graphics and texts that evoke questions about the authentic and deceptive moments of the everyday lives of women of the early 1900s.

Print-related sessions and papers (forthcoming)

* If we missed a session or a paper, please email info@printscholars.org and we will add it to the list.

Wednesday, February 12:

2:30 PM – 4:00 PM: Identities at Play: Branding, Politics, and Ecology in 20th-Century Visual Culture and Contemporary Art, 3rd Floor – Petit Trianon

Yasemin Gencer, “Visibility, Visuality, and Branding in Early 20th-Century Ottoman Turkish Periodicals”

4:30 PM – 6:00 PM: Cultural Mediations: Identity, Politics, and Representation in Works on Paper, 2nd Floor – Nassau West

Wei Wu, “Shaping a Pre-Shaped Public: The Modern Prints Society’s Outreach Effort via Kuomintang Institutions, 1934–1936”

Thursday, February 13:

11:00 AM – 12:30 PM: On Other Media in 19th-Century French Art, 3rd Floor – Petit Trianon

Laurel Garber and Ashley Dunn, “Printmaking at the Forefront of 19th-Century France”
Jillian Kruse, “Collective Labors: Collaboration as Motif and Method in Pissarro’s Prints”

2:30 PM – 4:00 PM: Everyday and the Expression of Modernity: 19th-Century Architecture and Urbanism in the Islamic World, 2nd Floor – Sutton Center

Fatemeh Tashakori, “Visual Convergence: European Prints and Everyday Modernity in 19th-Century Qajar Architecture”

2:30 PM – 4:00 PM: Women Artists in Modern Movements, 2nd Floor – Gramercy East

Cora Chalaby, “Free Wheeling: Women Artists and the American Print Renaissance”

Friday, February 14:

11:00 AM – 12:30 PM: Haptic Histories: The Politics of Paper and its Industrial Entanglements, 2nd Floor – Bryant Suite

11:00 AM – 12:30 PM: Troubling the Archive: Reassessing Women’s Artistic Production in the Long Nineteenth Century, 3rd Floor–Petit Trianon

2:30 PM – 4:00 PM: Dialogue and Artistry: Exploring the History, the Canon, and Critical Reception of Artist Books, 3rd Floor – Mercury Ballroom

James McCabe, “Julie Looks at Laure and Laure Looks Back: The Issue of Reproducing Édouard Manet’s Olympia in Julie Manet-Rouart’s Copies”

4:30 PM – 6:00 PM: The “Work” of Art in American Culture from the New Deal to Now, 2nd Floor – Murray Hill East

Joanna Platt, “Printmaking as Labor: Images of Industry from the WPA-Sponsored Fine Print Workshop in Philadelphia”

4:30 PM – 6:00 PM: Art History’s Graphic Intelligence, 2nd Floor – Bryant Suite

Christine Olson, “Ornament and the Epistemologies of Victorian Graphic Design”

Saturday, February 15: