The Big Peach. The ATL. The Dogwood City. Atlanta is a city always reimagining itself. The city’s history parallels America's own complicated and continuing story. This spirit of TRANSFORMATION—the theme of CEA 2024—is captured in the city's seal featuring a phoenix rising from the ashes. The image captures Atlanta's resilience as a city in how it emerged from the devastation of the Civil War to become a modern industrial metropolis, the center of the movement for Civil Rights, and what the New York Times describes as “hip-hop’s center of gravity.” 

During a roundtable discussion (now published in Journal18), scholars pointed out that visual culture emerged as a distinct methodology. Visual culture aims to problematize the Eurocentric, colonialist, racist, heteronormative, and patriarchal assumptions that enforced and continue to enforce the art historical discipline. This panel continues and expands these crucial conversations by exploring the relationship between art history and visual culture during the long eighteenth-century.