“Friendship: Writing Art Histories in Relation”: ARTMargins Workshop at UC Berkeley

“Friendship: Writing Art Histories in Relation”: ARTMargins Workshop at UC Berkeley, November 7, 2025

This ARTMargins Workshop focuses on the notion and practice of “friendship” and related questions about elective affinity and difference in contexts of anti-colonial struggle, decolonization, and ambivalent participation in global circulation. To invoke “friends” in a global art history can be to emphasize the intersubjective dependencies of artists, to trace art worlds of material and immaterial support. It may also identify peer-to-peer connections and practices of mutual aid, as in Cold War histories of friendship societies and artist exchanges between nations—proto-political relations operating outside official state interests. To attend to friendship may further involve entering “underground” spaces, or working with ephemeral sources. Equally, it compels us to confront a series of methodological problems that intensify at the margins of not only place but also language, race, class, and sexuality: how we read correspondence, how a “network” should be assessed, how to think of communities of reception without invoking publics, what value to place on “likeness” at all. Papers exploring any (or many) of these problems of relation—whether in depictions of friendship, theories of friendship, practices of friendship, methodological challenges, or other—are welcomed. The symposium aligns with multiple engagements by ARTMargins editors with questions related to solidarity and friendship, and participants are invited to engage with these past and/or ongoing projects.