Do What You Love: Pleasure, Precarity, and Profit in Histories of Artistic Labour

The Department of Art History and the Graduate Union of Students of Art cordially invite you to Do What You Love, the 12th Annual Wollesen Memorial Graduate Symposium. This event is being held on October 3-4, in Room 100 of Jackman Humanities Institute.

Do What You Love, explores the complex and evolving relationship between labour, work, and art across all periods, geographies, and media. It delves into issues surrounding authorship and hierarchies of value and their gendered, classed, and racialized dimensions, particularly in view of labour as the basis of the creative process. The symposium offers a platform for interdisciplinary dialogue on how artistic work has been represented, erased, or mythologized across vast geographies and periods. By interrogating labour through diverse theoretical lenses and methodologies, “Do What You Love” aims to enrich our understanding of the relationship between notions of creative labour and systems of value and power. In this way, this symposium aligns with scholarly efforts to reinterpret and expand art history’s purview on what creative labour entails and whose labour matters, thereby challenging the discipline’s historical emphasis on the intellectual effort involved in making art.

We are welcoming seventeen guest presenters from a number of Canadian and international institutions, who will be speaking on art historical and related topics concerning film, photography, architecture, curation practice, archaeology, artistic methodologies, and creative process. Our Keynote Speaker, Assistant Professor Katja Praznik, is joining us from University at Buffalo, for a talk entitled From Artwork to Art Work: A Double Entendre of Love, Labor, and Value.

Further information can be found through our website. Inquiries can be directed to symposium Co-Chairs Virginia Martos Armenteros and Su Yen Chong and organizer Madalyn Shaw at gusta.symposium@gmail.com.