Welcome to the Art, Architecture, & Design community! We’re so happy you’re here and we want you take full advantage of the opportunities our new platform provides. Please read over the code of conduct so we can continue to ensure a safe and supportive space for all. Thank you for your dedication to the Popular Culture Association!

 

Art and Design Culture and Popular Art, Architecture, and Design have merged: into Art, Architecture, and Design Culture

 

CALL FOR PAPERS

 

The Art, Architecture, and Design Culture area examines and engages our shared visual world as it is constructed by visual artists, architects, and other designers interacting with the popular and professional domains in which they live and work. We welcome proposals from art, architecture and design historians, cultural critics, practicing artists, architects, and designers, curators and museum educators and others for whom the aesthetic and cultural implications of art, design, and the built environment play an important role. This area asks the question that W.J.T. Mitchell poses as the title of his 2005 volume: “What do Pictures Want?” which interrogates “The Lives and Loves of Images,” because, as Gerhard Richter notes, “Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense.” (Mitchell 1, xv) and as Herbert Simon remarked “to design is to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”

 

The newly merged Art, Architecture, and Design Culture area serves as a forum for theoretically informed approaches to the visual and built world at PCA/ACA. The area focuses on the exploration of the interaction and exchange between self-consciously created art and design and the popular, and on the interrogation of the resulting visual objects and situations as cultural constructs.

 

As the name suggests this area is larger than a consideration of works of art, architecture, or design as discrete objects, and seeks to examine the networks of culture in which these objects play a part. This reflects the influence of Material Culture Studies and Visual and Cultural Studies on Art, Architecture, and Design History. Engagement with the idea of design culture, as proposed by Guy Julier in The Culture of Design, opens up areas beyond the visual for examination: “design culture requires its observers to move beyond visual and material attributes to consider the multivarious and multilocational networks of its creation and manifestation.” This area serves as a forum for sharing research that may reach beyond the traditional bounds of art, architecture, and design history to examine works of art and design in various contexts, from galleries and museums to the pages of magazines and living rooms, to the built world we live in and share through various forms of sensory perception, and through the lenses of various methodological and cultural frameworks.

 

We are soliciting papers for the upcoming PCA/ACA conference that may consider but are not limited to:

●Art broadly defined: painting, sculpture, installation, sound, photography, film, video, digital media, etc.

●Design broadly defined: interior design, graphic design, industrial/product design, digital design, the built environment, landscape architecture, etc.

●The meaning of looking and being looked at

●Spectacle and surveillance

●Networks of vision

●Visual transcultures

●Networks through which design and art are circulated

●Art and design as networks of cultural exchange

●The politics of display and exhibition

●Theoretical issues related to art and design

●Spectacle

●Identity

●Cultural Hybridity or Syncretism

At previous conferences the topics have included, but were certainly not limited to, the following:

●World Fairs

●Stephen Colbert Teaching Contemporary Art

●Ceramic Work of Brendan Tang and Sing-ying Ho

●Egyptian Branding and Marketing

●Respecting Difficult Histories in museum exhibitions

●Integrated learning in museums

●Architecture of Tadao Ando

●Disneyland

●Punk Rock and Fine Art

●Edward Durell Stone

●Sandy Skoglund and Gregory Crewdson’s visions of suburbia

●Portrait miniatures

●Kara Walker’s silhouettes

●Shōjo

●Augmented Realities

●Superman and Art Deco

●Fashion of Craig Green in Alien Covenant

●Art of Howard Finster

●Art Environments

●Place-Inspired Activism

●Elizabeth Catlett

●Norman Rockwell’s lost drawings

●Cold War American Suburban Imaginary

●Nineteenth-Century Ephemera: Scrapbooks and Trompe l’Oeil Painting

●Art Nouveau’s Revival in 1960’s Popular Culture

●Wendy Red Star

●Restoration of Charles Lindbergh’s House

●European Typography and Asian Scripts

●Kitchen Design in Glass Houses

●Allan Sekula

●American painter William Scharf

●Artificial Intelligence Aesthetics

●Architecture After the 1898 Spanish-American War

●Modern Architecture in Alabama

 

Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words of your proposed paper and a short 50-word bio with contact information at pcaaca.org/  Instructions for logging in and submitting proposals appear on the home screen of the site.

 

If you have questions, please contact the area chairs:

 

Gretchen Gasterland-Gustafsson, gretchen_gasterland-gustafson@mcad.edu

Samantha Russell, samantharussellfineart@gmail.com

Jennifer Streb, STREB@juniata.edu

 

 

Important Dates to Remember:

 

• Database opens for Submissions - Sept. 1, 2025
• Early Bird Registration Begins - Sept. 1, 2025
• Deadline for Paper Proposals - Nov. 30, 2025
• Travel Grant Applications Due - Dec. 15, 2025
• Early Bird Registration Ends for Presenters - Dec. 31, 2025
• Regular Registration Begins for Presenters - Jan. 1, 2026 
• Travel Grant Decisions / Notifications - Jan. 31, 2026
• Regular Registration Ends for Presenters - Jan. 31, 2026
• Late Registration Starts for Presenters - Feb. 1, 2026
• Preliminary Program draft available - Feb. 6, 2026

 

Those Presenters Not Registered by Feb. 15 Will be Dropped from the Program

 

CONFERENCE IN ATLANTA, GA - April 8-11, 2026