Call For Papers
Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas | Volume XVIII | Spring 2027
Contested Exhibitions: Curating the Local and Reframing the Margins
Exhibitions are the gateway to artistic visibility and are among the more typical conditions for wider public promotion and engagement. They can often mediate between institutional power and artistic authorship, as well as operate as pipelines to the national and global circuits of the art market. As public-facing structures, exhibitions have historically been regarded as representing and reinforcing institutional authority given how they underscore (or in some cases challenge) accepted categories of value and the cultural hierarchies that sustain dominant ideas and practices. Considering the broader potential of exhibitions to engage with and/or question dominant ideas and structures, from the DIY and activist exhibition practices of the civil rights era countering exclusionary practices, to the community-focused, visitor-centered, socially engaged, and decolonial curating strategies of today, we can see how exhibitions serve as sites of knowledge production and as agents for dialogue and change.
Proposing we focus on regional exhibition histories as essential tools to, both, challenge dominant frameworks and recover broader or alternate curatorial practices, we can ask: How might we write exhibition historiography to account for the art world's biases and highlight overlooked geographic and cultural centers of production? How can we understand art history differently when we approach exhibitions as assemblages of local knowledge sites, documentation, activism, community, and critique? What is the significance of curatorial activism and how should or has it been effectively employed?
Latinx, Indigenous, Black, and queer exhibition practices have long interwoven curatorial practice with activist community structures and political agendas. Landmark exhibitions, such as Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation (CARA) (1990–1993) emerged through a national committee, and more recent exhibition case studies, such as no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria (2022–2023), signal a continued recalibration of community voices through advisory structures and the inclusion of local accounts. Both case studies, models for ethical interpretive display, were produced, in part, in response to the critiques of earlier survey exhibitions. More recent exhibitions, such as Virgil Ortiz’s Revolt 1680/2180: Runners + Gliders (2023–2024) further challenge the way we think about objects and conceptions of time within exhibition display by centering Native epistemologies and material understandings.
The revisiting of the controversial exhibition, Synthesis and Subversion: A Latino Direction in San Antonio Art (1996), 30 years after the original exhibition, through Synthesis and Subversion Redux (2025–2026) drew on an earlier curatorial framework to trace the development of local Latino art, highlighting how exhibition remakes may either critically reactivate regional histories or invoke earlier exhibitions as points of reference for contemporary curatorial projects.
For Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas, Volume XVIII, we seek submissions that examine understudied exhibition histories, ethical curatorial practices, and artistic interventions to museum displays and their relations to marginalized artists, communities, and under-documented geographies across the Americas from any historical period. We are particularly interested in exhibition histories that foreground local and regional contexts, engage in historiographic revision, center tribal/community-centered practices, and treat the exhibition as a contested site of knowledge production. Papers and projects that critically engage with how exhibitions have shaped our understanding of and/or challenged dominant narratives of the art of the Americas are highly encouraged.
Topics may include but are not limited to the following:
- Contested, boycotted, reconstructed, or landmark exhibitions
- Exhibition histories and historiographic revision
- Curatorial activism and institutional critique
- Survey exhibitions/retrospective models
- Visibility, exclusion, and the politics of display
- Community-based, participatory, and collective curation
- Alternative exhibition spaces/Artist-as-Curator
- Mobile and non-institutional exhibition models
- Regional and local exhibition histories
- Local responses to major traveling exhibitions
- Exhibitions and archival practices
- Tribal, Indigenous, and decolonial curatorial methodologies
- Feminist, queer, and diasporic interventions to curatorial practice
- Curatorial ethics and institutional power structures
- Exhibition reviews and interviews with relevant scholarly curators
Guidelines for Submission:
- Completed works by graduate students currently enrolled in academic programs in and outside of the U.S., including works by recent graduates (one to two years post-graduation) will be considered.
- Submission formats include scholarly essays (15–30 pages in length); book, exhibition, or performance reviews (5–10 pages in length); and/or interviews (5–10 pages in length).
- Submissions may be written in English, Spanish, and/or Portuguese
- Submissions must be emailed to Hemisphere by August 31, 2026 at:
- Each submission must be accompanied by a cover letter that prominently notes the title of the essay, the field of study to which it pertains, as well as an updated complete CV that includes the author’s status (e.g. M.A., Ph.D. Student, or Ph.D. Candidate), department, and institution name and location. Authors will be notified by September 18, 2026 of the status of their submission.
- For formatting guidelines, see: http://art.unm.edu/hemisphere/
- Authors of essays published in Hemisphere will be invited to present their work at a symposium to be scheduled in Spring 2027.
- To view past volumes of Hemisphere, please visit UNM Digital Repository at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hemisphere/
Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas is an annual publication produced by graduate students affiliated with the Department of Art at the University of New Mexico.
Chief Editor: Alana Coates, Doctoral Candidate in Art History