PAD Newsletter: Fall 2025
PAD Newsletter
October 10, 2025
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to Fall from PAD’s officers, who are eager to keep our conversation about public art alive at this historic and tumultuous time. Please note the following upcoming and ongoing events and opportunities:
Nominations are welcome for the PAD Founder’s Award. Deadline is November 28th
This annual award honors individuals, collectives, and organizations that demonstrate longstanding commitments to cross-disciplinary and cross-community dialogue that inspired PAD's founding more than a decade ago. Awardees are chosen from nominations made by PAD members. Please submit your nomination using this google form by November 28th, 2025.
New York Launches Design Contest for Ruth Bader Ginsburg Memorial at Brooklyn Bridge Park
The deadline is February 2, 2026, and the details are here.
New Co-Chair
PAD has a new co-chair. Please welcome Amy Werbel, Professor of the History of Art at the State University of New York-Fashion Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on freedom of artistic expression in historical and contemporary contexts, and in physical and virtual settings. Karen Shelby continues as Co-Chair.
New Social Media Intern
We are pleased to welcome Johanna Vincente as our social media intern. Johanna will be spreading PAD news and updates on our new website, Instagram, Facebook and X pages.
Johanna (she/her) is an undergraduate student at Baruch College studying psychology, creative expression, and community building. She is an industrial psychology major, lover of paintings and live performances. She believes that accessibility fuels art as a connection tool.
Please follow, hashtag, and share our posts, and send us your news so that we can amplify your voice and work. What are you working on? Share a few lines of current research or projects. Is there a conference or an exhibition that we all should be aware of?
Join or Renew your Membership
Membership in PAD, which includes a subscription to Public Art Dialogue, is available at various levels, including a discounted student rate. Donations to PAD are also gladly accepted. Details are here.
Please join us if you can for upcoming PAD conference sessions:
Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC): Temporality in Public Art
Cincinnati, October 22-25, 2025
Recent years have demonstrated that the notion of permanence in public art is deeply flawed. Profound alterations in historic examples of public art across the globe have occurred due to neglect, vandalism, planned removals or relocations, revised interpretation, and the addition of new commissions aimed at countering original intent. At the same time, commissions for new public art design and redesign processes increasingly expect temporality – either change over time or planned obsolescence. This session will include papers by Karen Frostig, Annie Dell’Aria, and Howard Skrill.
College Art Association (CAA): The Elephant in the Statuary Garden: Celebrating the 250th Birthday of the United States
Chicago, February 18-21, 2026
President Trump appointed himself Chair of Task Force 250, which is responsible for organizing an “extraordinary celebration of the 250th Anniversary of American Independence.” The order specifies construction of a National Garden of American Heroes. This session will include papers by Ellery Foutch, Emily Burns, Karlee Bergendorf and Alan Wallach which analyze the role public statuary has played in past analogous commemorations of nation-state formation, as well as the stated goals of Task Force 250 in light of present opportunities, challenges, and audiences for public art.
Public Art Dialogue Journal call for submissions for special issue “Colonial Afterlives: Public Art and the Trans-Pacific World”
Editors: Nicholas Parkinson (Lecturer of Art History & Fine Arts, American University of Paris) & Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández (Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Nevada at Reno)
Abstract Deadline: December 1, 2025
This special issue of Public Art Dialogue invites scholarly contributions (research articles, short essays, and artists’ projects) that examine the enduring visual, spatial, and ideological legacies of colonialism in public spaces across the Pacific world. It seeks to explore how imperial legacies forged transoceanic connections that continue to shape the public sphere through means including but not limited to monuments, architecture, civic rituals, theater, dance, street art, and performative acts.
Recent scholarship on the effects of the Spanish Empire in Latin America and Southeast Asia, particularly in engendering political and cultural exchange, provides an important starting point for a broader exploration of colonial legacies across the Pacific. In his classic 2005 text The Age of Globalization: Anarchists and the Anti-Colonial Imagination, Benedict Anderson demonstrated the key importance that globalization had on spreading resistance to the Spanish Empire across Asia and the Americas. Since then, a significant number of scholarly texts have further fleshed out how local resistance to European imperialism shaped connections in, around, and across spheres of Iberian colonial influence, illustrated by Koichi Hagimoto’s concept of intercolonial alliance, Pearlie Rose S. Baluyut’s triangular study of ‘visual histories of occupation’, and Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz’s articulation of peripheral internationalism. From an alternative perspective, Kristin L. Hoganson and Jay Sexton have likewise demonstrated the entangling force of globalization through their study of transimperial connections across colonial powers.
While these studies have made vital contributions to the global history of art, politics, and cultural resistance, the material connections that helped shape the trans-Pacific world remain under-explored, as does the role of public art in mediating the legacy of imperialism. This special issue seeks to fill that gap by foregrounding public art—broadly defined to include architecture, monuments, landscape design, performance, civic spectacle, commemorative practice, and video installations or interventions—as a central site where colonial transpacific power was embodied, contested, and reimagined in the Americas and Southeast Asia. We aim to extend the conversation beyond bilateral or national frameworks and encourage submissions that reveal the complex visual entanglements between these two regions across time, from early colonial encounters to contemporary postcolonial interventions.
For a description of what constitutes public art, please see Public Art Dialogue’s journal page: Journal — Public Art Dialogue
We welcome papers that engage, but are not limited to, the following topics:
• Comparative studies of public monuments, urban design, and commemorative spaces shaped by imperial aesthetics in the Americas and Southeast Asia;
• Artistic and architectural forms emerging from or responding to trans-Pacific colonial circuits (e.g., the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade);
• Religious iconography and spatial practices as vehicles of colonial and postcolonial public expression;
• Contemporary interventions, removals, or reinterpretations of colonial-era public art and their political implications;
• The performance of nationalism and anticolonial resistance through public performance, pageantry, and ritual;
• Inter-Asian and inter-American artistic solidarities and circulations across the Pacific;
• Museological and curatorial politics of colonial heritage in global cities;
• Transimperial transformations of colonial legacies under concurrent or later regimes of foreign influence (e.g., Dutch, U.S., Japanese, etc.);
• Connections with other geographies of Iberian imperial influence, including Africa and South Asia;
• Philosophical or political essays;
• Presentations of, and reflections on, projects for artworks in public space.
We invite submissions from a wide range of disciplines, including art history, architecture, anthropology, religious studies, political theory, cultural studies, performance studies, and history.
Submission Instructions and Publication Timeline:
Please submit one 400-word abstract and a brief CV with the subject line “Public Art Dialogue Special Issue” to contact@globalperiphies.com by December 1, 2025. Complete articles (6,000 - 8,000 words, including abstract, notes, and references), essays (2000-3000 words) and Artists’ Projects (at least 1000 words) will be due September 1, 2026, when they will undergo peer review. Articles selected for publication will appear in Public Art Dialogue in July 2027. We plan to hold a private and virtual colloquium in May 2026 with the selected proposals to enrich our reflections and research before the summer begins. A second and public colloquium will be held when the issue is published. Our aim is to build a research group and to potentiate the Global Peripheries Network.
Wishing you a productive and healthy fall filled with inspiring public art, Karen and Amy
