Disruptions in the Present: Art Historians on Biennials, Ecology, and Ableism
Join us at Printed Matter for a conversation on art history’s assessment of itself in the present moment with writers Katie Anania, Amanda Cachia, and Paloma Checa-Gismero.
Art’s relationship to different publics—whether through biennial exhibitions that consolidate national and regional identities, by using materials to create new planetary relationships, or even the basic questions of who has access to art exhibitions—has created mounting tensions in how to do and see art history today. Together, Anania, Cachia, and Checa-Gismero will address different disturbances in how we organize and display artwork to make it intelligible for others. What alternatives might exist beyond models of “global” art that are beholden to collectors and markets? What is art history’s relationship to climate politics and colonial extraction? And how can art history and art museums collaborate on more accessible models for viewing and experiencing artworks? This conversation will highlight the artists and activists who have helped bring these notoriously conservative fields into the politics of the present.
Preorder Amanda Cachia’s The Agency of Access
Preorder Paloma Checa-Gismero’s Biennial Boom
Katie Anania is a historian of modern and contemporary art who specializes in queer and hemispheric ways of knowing, particularly in makers’ relationships with their materials. She currently works as an assistant professor of art history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she directs Art, Data, and Environment/s (ADE/s), an interdisciplinary consortium that uses art and design history to consider colonial histories of water use and resource extraction.
Paloma Checa-Gismero is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Swarthmore College. Her scholarship and criticism on art biennials, craft, and socially engaged art has been published in Third Text, The Journal of Modern Craft, FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism, and Afterall, among others. She is translator to Spanish of Lucy Lippard’s I See / You Mean(1975). As an artist her work was featured in Manifesta 8, Archivo de Creadores de Madrid, and the experimental artist-run space RAMPA (Madrid).
Amanda Cachia has an established career profile as a curator, consultant, writer and art historian who specializes in disability art activism across intersectional axes of difference, including gender, race, and sexuality. She is the tenure-track Assistant Professor and Assistant Director of the Masters of Arts in Arts Leadership Graduate Program at the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts at the University of Houston, where she also serves as Coordinator of the Graduate Certificate in Museum and Gallery Management, and the Graduate Certificate in Arts and Health. Cachia is the author of The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique (2024) and the editor of Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation (2022), which includes over 40 international contributors. She is the 2024 recipient of the $50,000 National Arts and Disability Award (Established) issued by Creative Australia (formerly Australia Council for the Arts). She is also a 2023 grantee of the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and received the 2024 Millard Meiss Publication Grant from the College Art Association to support the publication of her second monograph, Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism, forthcoming with Manchester University Press in September 2025. Her writing has been translated into Spanish, German, and Italian. She has a PhD in Art History, Theory & Criticism from the University of California San Diego. Cachia has curated approximately 50 exhibitions, many of which have traveled to cities across the USA, England, Australia and Canada. Cachia previously taught art history, visual culture, and curatorial and exhibition studies at Otis College of Art and Design, California Institute of the Arts, California State University Long Beach, California State University San Marcos and San Diego State University.