This thesis explores the historiography of the images of Antinoös, drawing the most evidence from the Delphi Antinoös, which shows the youth in the guise of Apollo. Building upon the discourse of Hadrian's "Greekness" and sexuality in connection to the amount of images of Antinoös he had commissioned, this paper instead argues that the images of Antinoös were created in order to further a public and religious programme by Hadrian. I found support in both Mary Boatwright and Paul Zanker as they proposed those images for a public, civic, and religious audience as opposed to private patrons more inclined to luxury. The Delphi Antinoös is a well-documented example of numerous portraits of the youth, and it is this paper's intention to depict the Pheidian inspiration sought after in the second century CE, at the time of Hadrian's reign and Antinoös's death, which illustrate the purpose of the images of Antinoös as religious and not as sexy. Hadrian's public and religious policies, his tours across the empire, and the far-reaching distribution of images of Antinoös also

This thesis explores the historiography of the images of Antinoös, drawing the most evidence from the Delphi Antinoös, which shows the youth in the guise of Apollo. Building upon the discourse of Hadrian's "Greekness" and sexuality in connection to the amount of images of Antinoös he had commissioned, this paper instead argues that the images of Antinoös were created in order to further a public and religious programme by Hadrian. I found support in both Mary Boatwright and Paul Zanker as they proposed those images for a public, civic, and religious audience as opposed to private patrons more inclined to luxury. The Delphi Antinoös is a well-documented example of numerous portraits of the youth, and it is this paper's intention to depict the Pheidian inspiration sought after in the second century CE, at the time of Hadrian's reign and Antinoös's death, which illustrate the purpose of the images of Antinoös as religious and not as sexy. Hadrian's public and religious policies, his tours across the empire, and the far-reaching distribution of images of Antinoös also

In 1970, as the US  Post Office became  a site of unprecedented public protest, the artist Ray Johnson (1927-1995) organized the first major exhibition of “mail art” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Utilizing the postal system as an alternative site for the distribution of art, Johnson sent recipients an item in the post, asked them to add to or subtract from it, and then mail it onward to another participant or back to Johnson. Through this process Johnson not only challenged conventional modes of artistic production, distribution, and reception, but he also initiated  a “queer” form of conceptual art that investigated the social function of communication itself. Examining the entry of mail art into the museum,  I argue that Johnson utilized the postal system—characterized by anonymous, decentralized, and materially heterogeneous communications—to challenge the museological frame.

With the revision of canonical accounts of art history and the rise of digital humanities over the past two decades, networks have emerged as useful tools for visualizing the redistribution of dominant art historical narratives. Networks, however, represent nodes and edges, at times obscuring the social realities in between, and art historical scholarship on them has been critiqued for its lack of attention to art objects themselves. This session therefore asks: How can the concepts of network science be applied to art historical research? What new questions might be drawn from an exploration of social networks of the past? And how might artistic production itself be an instrumental component of, or even a vehicle for, networked action? We aim to consider the ways and means that network science might be used as a methodological tool of inquiry within the discipline of art history, and as a space to consider how networks have been understood historically both by artists and art historians. This session calls for short paper presentations, to be followed by a productive discussion/debate amongst presenters and attendees about the ramifications of social network science within art historical discourse. All disciplines, periods, and perspectives are encouraged to submit proposals.

Session Chairs: Miriam Kienle, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Claire Kovacs, Canisius College; Lauren Applebaum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

This article examines a number of prominent network analysis projects in the field of art history and explores the unique promises and problems that this increasingly significant mode of analysis presents to the discipline. By bringing together projects that conceptualize art historical networks in different ways, it demonstrates how established theories and methods of art history—such as feminist and postcolonial theory—may be productively used in conjunction with quantitative/computational approaches to art historical analysis. It argues that quantitative analysis of art and its networks can expand the qualitative approaches that have traditionally defined the field, particularly if theorizing is not positioned as something to be overcome by quantifiable data, but rather regarded as a fundamental means of understanding how data is structured, examined, and visualized. Although network analysis has a great potential to reveal the significance of actors marginalized by canonical narratives of art history and track unforeseen transnational and intercommunal histories of artistic exchange, it may also paradoxically silence social hierarchies and mechanisms of marginalization, as well as historical disruptions to them, if the principles underlying the data are not interrogated from the outset. Ultimately, the article proposes much can be gained when art historians work with and through digital technologies, using critical visual analysis to examine the epistemologies which structure the network visualizations that they produce.

Johanna Drucker and Miriam Posner were two of the organizers of the Getty/UCLA Summer Institute in Digital Art History "Beyond the Digitized Slide Library" that took place in the summers of 2014 and 2015. With their extensive expertise in the field, they developed a program that challenged participants to think about the broad theoretical implications of their respective projects and to gain practical tools in digital art history. In this interview, they will describe some of their thinking behind the institute and the state of the field of digital art history, including a discussion of the impact of network visualizations on the discipline.

This panel seeks papers that investigate the relationship between queer work and queer archives. Although "queering the archive" has become a key conceptual framework in art and art history, actual archival research is often engaged in a cursory or broadly theoretical manner. This panel, on the other hand, examines how sustained, creative engagement with archival material can recuperate queer spaces and practices. Historically, queer practices circumvented dominant institutions and experimented with materials and media not sanctioned by museums. Scholars concerned with queer practices must therefore devise new methods and strategies to scour archives for the ephemeral objects and documents that constitute much of this overlooked work. This panel provides a forum for scholars and artists who conduct research at the intersection of sexuality, social engagement, and art history, and for whom archival work is central to their practice. As theorist J. Halberstam writes, "the archive is not simply a repository; it is also a theory of cultural relevance, a construction of collective memory, and a complex record of queer activity. In order for the archive to function, it requires users, interpreters, and cultural historians to wade through the material and piece together the jigsaw puzzle of queer history in the making." This panel seeks papers that embrace the queer labor of wading through material and piecing together fragments. The papers chosen will present case studies that address the theoretical stakes and methodological challenges of doing queer archival work. We especially welcome papers that attend closely to intersections of queerness and race, class, dis/ability, and/or nationality.

Much recent scholarship has stressed the critical potential of craft, frequently utilizing feminist and queer methodologies to address the ways in which craft engages issues of gender. This symposium explores how the politics of craft are framed, preserved, deconstructed, revised, and reimagined today, and how artists deploy the unique properties of their chosen materials to resist gender binaries and hierarchies.