This year’s Symposium, Recentering the Periphery: An Inclusive Future of Art History, focuses on art history outside the scope of the traditionally defined curriculum, or that reevaluates the understanding of the canon and its role in art history. Amid calls for the field of art history to dismantle and decolonize the established canon, a simultaneous movement has arisen to make the discipline more engaged in the community and in the pursuit of social justice. Now is the time to reevaluate and redefine the scope of art history, incorporating lost or previously silenced narratives and voices to build a more equitable future for the discipline. Scholars, museums, and arts and culture communities can reshape these narratives and recenter subjects long treated as peripheral. This year’s symposium is generously supported through a Co-Sponsorship Grant from the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, Nancy and Joseph Keithley, and Friends of Art.

For the first time, The Cleveland Symposium will be partnering with FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art (July 16-October 2, 2022) to offer a unique two-day event for scholars and community members alike to participate in these conversations. Assembly for the Arts joins FRONT to make the event an opportunity to bring Northeast Ohio museums and communities together.

Saturday, Sept. 17: Samson Pavilion, Health Education Campus of Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland Clinic

10:00am Opening Remarks – Jeremy Johnson (President and CEO of the Assembly for the Arts)

10:30am Arts Leaders Panel Discussion: Led by Jennifer Coleman, Program Director, Creative Culture and Art for the George Gund Foundation

12:00pm Box Lunch in Courtyard

1:15pm Community Conversations

3:00pm Closing Keynote Speaker

Recentering the Periphery: A Virtual Exhibition

Leading up to this year’s Cleveland Symposium, Case Western Reserve Art History students will curate a virtual exhibition using objects in the Cleveland Museum of Art in order to further our event’s mission to reorient the art historical canon toward understudied materials, methods, and regions of the world.

Students will post works of art and a “recentering” object label to our Facebook and Instagram pages at least once a week starting July 15th. Be sure to follow our social media to read about how future scholars of art history at CWRU hope to transform the discipline to include previously underappreciated voices.

Instagram and Facebook: @clevelandsymposium
#clevelandsymposium2022 #CWRUArtHistoryandArt #FRONTart2022
#ClevelandMuseumofArt