his image features the text "Art History 2060" in white against a gradient color transition from purple to blue. The text is arranged in three lines, with "Art" on the first line, "History" on the second line, and "2060" on the third line. To the right of the text, there is a large, stylized arrow pointing upwards and to the right. The arrow has a gradient color transition from blue to purple, giving it a dynamic and modern look. The overall design conveys a futuristic and progressive vision for art history, aiming towards the year 2060.

Art History 2060:

Imagining our Futures to Rethink our Pasts

A C3 New Scholars Symposium at Davidson College

March 22, 2022

Keynote Speaker:

Dr. Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Associate Professor of Classics, Princeton University 

This image shows the interior of a large, modern atrium with a glass ceiling made up of a grid of metal beams. The ceiling allows a clear view of the blue sky, with sunlight casting geometric shadows on the floor and walls. In the center, a large, curved abstract sculpture is prominently featured. The bottom left corner of the image displays a small logo with the text "AH 2060" and a stylized arrow in gradient blue and purple. The overall composition highlights the intersection of contemporary architecture and art, suggesting a forward-looking vision towards the year 2060.

Katherine and Tom Belk Visual Arts Center at Davidson College. Illus.: Miguel Donado

Overview

How will the discipline of art history be practiced in the year 2060 C.E.? This C3 New Scholars Symposium asks emerging scholars in art history, visual studies, and proximate fields to imagine the methods we will use in 40 years to historicize art, architecture, and visual culture. The prompt for this symposium offers the field’s newest scholars a platform to envision how their imminent academic careers will transform the discipline. How will we pursue fundamental questions of art history and visual studies when our current understandings of politics, identity, and globalization will have shifted substantially? How will tomorrow’s global scholars expand the geographical and chronological scope of art history, which as of now largely remains tethered to European colonial epistemologies? How will our tools in a rapidly evolving digital world change the analysis of the past? We seek submissions that will fundamentally reimagine our discipline and how art historians (if we remain such) participate in broader discussions of art, futurity, and the cultural and environmental preservation of heritage sites. We particularly encourage historians of premodern and preindustrial art, architecture, and visual culture to think about how their subfields of study will contribute to hitherto unimagined methodologies and contexts.