{"id":19943,"date":"2026-10-29T17:14:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-29T17:14:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=19943"},"modified":"2026-10-29T17:14:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T17:14:08","slug":"trans-form-a-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=19943","title":{"rendered":"Trans-form, A Conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"

The contents of the Summer 2026 special issue of Art Journal<\/em> are dedicated to the capaciousness of trans- as a subject, comprising a signal moment in the field of art history. This is because the guest editors and contributors insist upon trans- (and its many permutations, additions, and emendations in the constellation of interrelated keywords) as necessarily attentive to subject positions (plural) and as methodological troubling. <\/span><\/p>\n

Here the botanical process of dehiscence, in which certain plants shed seeds or pollen from a seam or point of weakness (think of a peanut or a poppy), is perhaps most apt, as the issue’s guest editors\u2014Jane Chin Davidson, Rachael Grew, Marsha Meskimmon, and Alpesh Kantilal Patel\u2014are careful to think overtly with eco-critical and geontological implications of trans- scholarship of all kinds: postcolonial and\/or decolonial and\/or transnational and\/or transgender and\/or queer and\/or feminist (just to name a few). <\/span><\/p>\n

The seam in this metaphor might be any particularly narrow or overly broad understanding of minoritized positions or models of how art and art\u2019s histories might be done and undone. The editors\u2019 efforts should be seen as a collective encouragement for more people to take up trans- approaches and methods. In honor of this work, we will be republishing and reformatting the artist\u2019s projects featured in the issue alongside our typical reprint of an article and review from the issue. As a complement to these items Art Journal Open<\/em> gathered the editors together for a conversation via Zoom in June 2026. Generative growth, intergenerational connection, and coalitional possibilities are all part of the conversation that follows.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Andy Campbell, AJO<\/em> Editor-in-Chief<\/span><\/p>\n

This conversation has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity by the editor of AJO and the participants.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Andy Campbell: <\/strong>Thank you all for joining me for this conversation that I hope will shed some light on the work that you all have done for this issue, including how it came to be and to meditate on the stakes of writing about trans and transness in all of its forms at this particular moment. You write in the introduction to the issue that you all met at the Transitions Festival during a particularly precarious time. Things had just opened up after the first round of COVID restrictions. Could each of you describe where you were at that particular moment in your life and work, and describe how you came together?<\/span><\/p>\n

Jane Chin Davidson: <\/strong>Marsha and I convened a CAA panel in March of 2022, which was going to actually be in-person. COVID resurged, and then they called off the in-person conference, moving it all online. Am I recalling that right, Marsha?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Marsha Meskimmon: <\/strong>Yeah, yeah.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

JCD: <\/strong>Our panel was called \u201cTransnational, Transcultural, Transversal: On the Decolonial Discourse of Art<\/a>,\u201d and it was a closed session. We knew all the participants, and we held it online. Then it wasn’t until a couple months later that we met in May, for the Transitions Festival<\/a> [through the Institute for Advanced Studies at Loughborough University], and trans was all over the place for me. At the time, I was working with some other folks who were focused on similar ideas along biological ideals for gender, transness, and transitionality at the Venice Biennale for this Personal Structures<\/a> show (<\/a>Transitions and Transformations: The Constant Flux af our Personal Structures<\/a>)<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong> that I was participating in. It was like: why are we not thinking along the terms of trans as an alternative from the norm of language, the normative everything, right? Especially because nobody felt normal. Everyone felt COVID. And it was like a springboard, thinking along that intersectional term, of how trans could work across all these ideals for ourselves\u2014our visual ideals, our work as researchers. Marsha, I don’t know how you felt about it?<\/p>\n

MM: <\/strong>Maybe I could go next, actually, because I wrote some things down [as prep for this panel]: there’s a complex and much more interesting genealogy, I think, to this project and our meeting up at the Transitions Festival. Part of it was definitely the \u201cTransnational, Transcultural, Transversal . . .\u201d CAA panel. And then the Transitions Festival was being held at the Institute of Advanced Studies, of which I was director at the time. This term [Transitions] had a number of different things happening underneath it. Part of it was very strongly about green transition\u2014taking ecological crisis seriously and how that crisis is born of a conception of nature that is a really rigid categorical and extractive understanding of the planet. And then it had powerful trans lives strands, including about trans athletes, because there’s a lot of incredible research at Loughborough around that;\u00a0 and about legal definitions of gender, which were, and of course still are, remarkably vexed in the UK and elsewhere. As part of the Transitions Festival we also had a whole project\u2014local and national\u2014around trans lives and art. And this is where Rachael, who was on the Transitions Festival team, and her work on transmaterialities and transcorporeality, was of particular importance. We also knew Alpesh and his work on questions around trans and art and film. Alpesh and Rachael began to talk about hosting and developing a sort of a small film festival for the Transitions Festival. So it seemed absolutely ideal to be able to invite Jane to pick up those short-circuited conversations on the transnational, transcultural, transversal from earlier in the year. So that’s how we all ended up in the same space.<\/p>\n

But we kept coming back to an understanding that our work was so much bigger and so much more intersectional, so ultimately flexible as well, that we didn’t want to gatekeep in any way. It just seemed natural to do something that would enable a bigger conversation.<\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rachael Grew: <\/strong>After the Transitions Festival had finished, I just remember the four of us getting together and doing some great mind-mapping and \u201cblue sky\u201d thinking. The idea to propose a special issue that expanded our ideas even further was appealing because, you know, we were four people in a room, and we all had our own interests and our own specialisms, and things that we wanted to do and take away from it. But we kept coming back to an understanding that our work was so much bigger and so much more intersectional, so ultimately flexible as well, that we didn’t want to gatekeep in any way. It just seemed natural to do something that would enable a bigger conversation.<\/p>\n

Alpesh Kantilal Patel: <\/strong>All of us had been dealing with the prefix trans- in various ways in our work already. Rachael, you were looking at the transhuman for instance, and transecology. Marsha was looking at the transhemispheric. Jane and I have been looking at the transnational. And so that was already in the air, and we had known each other. I\u2019ve known everyone in this group, including you, Andy, for a while now\u2014over a decade. So it seemed like this was sort of simmering for a long time, too, in the background with our research individually. And here was this opportunity where we just happened to be together. Where we could kind of sit in a room, which was, of course, so rare at that moment to even have that chance to be in person. I think we were just so excited about that aspect as well. Another plot point I wanted to mention was that Art Journal Open<\/em> published the David Getsy and Che Gossett syllabus for Transgender and Nonbinary Methods for Art and Art History<\/a>, which originally came out in print in Art Journal<\/em> in 2021. At the time I had just moved to Philadelphia from Miami and was very interested in teaching a class called \u201cTransgender Studies Meets Arts History\u201d in fall 2022. So that was sort of on my mind, and Getsy and Gossett\u2019s work was encouraging me to think more about the idea of trans. At the same time, I was given this opportunity to be a curator-at-large<\/a> at UrbanGlass<\/a> in Brooklyn, New York. So much of the conversations that we’d have as a group filtered into what I did with that, which was in 2023, where I was looking at glass as a material, and how it connects metaphorically to this idea of trans.<\/p>\n

AC: <\/strong>One of the things that strikes me as you each kind of build on each other\u2019s narrative is that if this is the way you all worked together as editors, this must have been a pleasurable experience, as it seems each of you has given the others the space for different ideas around trans concepts. There’s a way in which what you’re modeling is not just about an open line of inquiry, but an openness to each other and each other’s ideas. I’m wondering if you’ll reflect a little bit on the relational mode between you all as editors, and how that comes forward in the issue? I find it to be very touching and moving, but I don’t know if those would be words that you would use to describe it, because I know projects are gnarly in all kinds of ways.<\/p>\n

MM:<\/strong> Mmhmm!<\/p>\n

RG: <\/strong>I mean, I had a great time.<\/p>\n

AKP: <\/strong>It’s funny, Andy, when you mention that, it doesn’t seem logical that it worked out because we’re also in different time zones.<\/p>\n

MM: <\/strong>Yep\u2014very!<\/p>\n

AKP: <\/strong>But somehow it very organically came together and I really looked forward to our check-ins that we would have over time. It seemed improbable but that was really wonderful to do.<\/p>\n

AC: <\/strong>Because why, Alpesh? Because of the difference in time? But also because of the difference in your interests? Does the fact that the work seemed improbable or impossible tell us something about what it’s usually like to make this kind of work?<\/p>\n

We thought of our essays and our artists as being our collaborators in a way. They were interlocutors. So it wasn’t really just the four of us. <\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

AKP: <\/strong>Yeah, I guess I’m thinking also how, at least within the Academy, there’s still this focus on the singular author. In terms of if you’re going up for promotion or that kind of thing, it’s all about the singular author. And so there’s not a lot of emphasis on collaboration. And in fact, what we did together will count very little for me, for instance, in a promotion file. So there’s not a lot of incentive on that level to do it . . .<\/p>\n

MM: <\/strong>Nope.<\/p>\n

AKP: <\/strong>But it was gratifying to bounce off of each other, and we kept with it. It just got stronger, the impulse to continue to engage.<\/p>\n

JCD: <\/strong>I feel like Alpesh and I just kind of tried to conquer the world with trans at a certain point.<\/p>\n

AKP: <\/strong>Literally.<\/p>\n

JCD: <\/strong>I mean, it’s been a while, Alpesh, but I remember we were somewhere, and we said outloud, \u201cwe’re gonna take Trans on!\u201d and then we co-edited the special issue of <\/a>ASAP\/Journal<\/a> on Trans-Asia<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

AKP: <\/strong>It was very exciting to think proactively in that way, and feel energized by each other.<\/p>\n

We weren’t just doing something academic, we were doing something really meaningful around our own feminist or anti-racist, anti-colonial contexts that we were all working from.<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

MM: <\/strong>Yeah, I was going to say a couple of things about the working together part. One of them is that this project took a long time to get off the ground. Partly because we took our time and we refused to feel that kind of [institutional] pressure [to rush towards a \u2018product\u2019]. We thought we should try to do something that is thoughtful and that might take longer, and to do that we might need to approach different things and different people. We thought of our essays and our artists as being our collaborators in a way. They were interlocutors. So it wasn’t really just the four of us.<\/p>\n

But the thing I’d also want to say is, with a project that takes a long time to gestate the timing was tough. Because things happened in this period, serious, life-threatening diseases, or war. We had moments where Tal Dekel [author of one of the articles in the issue] was online with us and sirens would be going off. She’d have to leave to go to a shelter in the middle of the discussion we were having. There was a real sense of urgency around trying to keep that momentum going, even against the odds. And so while it was\u2014and I agree with everybody\u2014super pleasurable when we had moments to meet up, it was also really necessary, because otherwise the momentum would have died out. So while I think it is rather beautiful and touching, and so forth, it also has a deadly, serious side to it; it’s hard sometimes to maintain the hope and the heart in those things.<\/p>\n

RG: <\/strong>Sometimes things changed as the shape of the project changed. We had our original plans, but the final thing became something a little bit different. Part of that re-inspiration that would happen in the meetings was also driven by the shifting nature of the project and feeling like it was a living, quite dynamic thing that was always responding to whatever was happening, whatever challenges were coming up as we were going through the process of putting the issue together.<\/p>\n

JCD: <\/strong>It really was about that political urgency from the very beginning. We weren’t just doing something academic, we were doing something really meaningful around our own feminist or antiracist, anticolonial contexts that we were all working from. It really wasn’t about just putting out an issue, right? It was always around deeply impassioned subjects and ideals that we had for ourselves as researchers.<\/p>\n

MM:<\/strong> Yep.<\/p>\n

AC: <\/strong>One of the things that I wanted to acknowledge is not only did COVID really change the way that the world operates, but also contributed to the feeling and fact of increasing restrictiveness, creeping authoritarianism and fascism in various quadrants; acceptance of ideas that seemed beyond the pale, maybe even only five years ago. They’ve always been there\u2014I want to acknowledge that these things are not new, but their efflorescence might be novel to this moment. So I see there’s a political project at the heart of expanding all the different ways that trans-, as a kind of prefix, can be mobilized in our work. How you balance wanting to be thoughtful about all the different discursive histories of the terms you mobilize (transgender, transhumanist, etc.) while also wanting to put them together to open out the world. In other words, I’m wondering if the kind of open-handedness\u2014what I see as the generosity of the myriad ways in which trans- is used in your issue\u2014has political dimension for you all as editors?<\/p>\n

RG: <\/strong>I feel like things are becoming very compartmentalized. It’s either this or that. And if you\u2019re not this, then you must be that. And so therefore, if you’re not one of us, you’re against us\u2014that kind of thing. Life is so much more complex. There’s an awful lot of shades in between. And so thinking about trans terms, and how they work together and play off each other, intersect, expand, and how they grow branches into other things, I think our work speaks to that. Yeah, there is a political dimension, but I think it’s more about how we approach things on a bigger scale beyond the stuff even that we’re talking about in this issue.<\/p>\n

AC: <\/strong>Mmhmm, so the open-handedness like extends outward in this kind of vision? You use the trans- prefix over one hundred times in your editorial introduction: transspecies, transcorporeal, transmedial, transatlantic, transness, transgress, transgender, transcultural, transtemporal, transhistorical, transversive, transversal, transformative, transition, transphobia, transpositionality, transtraditional, transmaterial, transgenerational. So is that what’s going on there?<\/p>\n

The students were really great and very open, and we had a lot of great conversations about the importance of thinking about transgender as an identity, but also about the bigger idea of trans as something that’s constantly shifting and changing and how that can be so empowering. Can’t we have both at the same time? Instead of either\/or? <\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

MM: <\/strong>Well, it’s on purpose, I should say! We had a lot of conversations about that, and we have a few core quotes in there from slightly different angles about this term. What about this prefixual trans? What does it do? So that was that was always sort of there. Rachael’s touched on that this is not meant to be a discourse of purity. This is not meant to be about categorical separation. This is meant to be something else. It’s meant not to play to that kind of canonical, universalizing, limiting, you know, singular discourse that says, I’m the master of the universe, and here’s my singular way of knowing the world. It’s like, no, I’m sorry. You just can’t have that. You can’t have that space. We’re going to float these, and we’re going to connect them up. But having said that, I think it was really important\u2014and Jane was very strong with this and with us\u2014that it’s not a universal panacea. There are trans words that are used to do a lot of damage as well, and there’s a lot of care you have to take with it. And I also think that we were always trying to be careful about acknowledging the seriousness around trans lives and and transgender issues as a very particular kind of instance and case study, because in many instances, those communities pay with their lives, that sheer allostatic load is carried by individuals who dare risk themselves in this way. So this idea of acknowledging that, but at the same time not making trans become this identitarian, fixed thing was really important. How to get that dynamic right\u2014who knows if we have?<\/p>\n

AKP: <\/strong>I mentioned earlier that I was planning on teaching this class on transgender studies and art\u2019s histories. So pedagogy was important to me in all of this, in terms of teaching my students and what they needed and wanted. That was a great class, and we talked a lot about not only my identity and who gets to teach a class like this, but who can take a class like this, for instance? The students were really great and very open, and we had a lot of great conversations about the importance of thinking about transgender as an identity, but also about the bigger idea of trans as something that’s constantly shifting and changing and how that can be so empowering. Can’t we have both at the same time? Instead of either\/or? I hope that the special issue is attempting to do that, to be both\/and rather than either\/or. But it is a risk for sure that it’s very expansive, and as you’re listing all the different terms it’s so easy for everything to get flattened out, and there ends up being no difference. I think that’s where the . . . you know, the individual essays are really going to help anchor, and define particular aspects of this prefix. And then the artist projects, which we haven’t talked so much about, are super important as well in terms of opening up the dialogue beyond written language.<\/p>\n

AC: <\/strong>Let’s actually spend a little bit of time there. Can you talk a little bit about how that process worked? Did the artist you edited into the issue provide any challenge or rewiring of the way that you were thinking as an editorial group about what these terms could do?<\/p>\n

AKP: <\/strong>I’d already been working with Tsohil Bhatia for many years on various different projects, and so I proposed this as a potential possibility, both to them and the group, and we all really felt it just made a lot of sense. What Tsohil was doing was looking at domesticity and the idea of home, using the metaphor of fire and different locations from South Asia to the US. What’s so great about Art Journal<\/em>, is that they always have an artist page component, and we’re really grateful that we were able to have three artists in our particular issue. We got to have our cake and eat it too. I think we were very ambitious, and this is a testament to Derek Conrad-Murray, the Editor-in-Chief of Art Journal<\/em>, as well as Eddie Chambers, who preceded him. They really embraced the complexity of what we were trying to do. And on the Art Journal Open<\/em> side there has been Grace Aneiza Ali, who preceded you, Andy.<\/p>\n

RG: <\/strong>As part of the planning we were brainstorming artists as well and exploring, I suppose, interconnections between them, as well as interconnections with the essays. Again, how can the artist projects and articles fold together, and also how do they shoot off into different directions? We’ve really lucked out having a series of multimedia artists who are working in very different ways, with very different materials, focusing on quite different things. This helps to demonstrate that transformative, metamorphic, bigger and more flexible conception of trans that lies under everything.<\/p>\n

MM: <\/strong>From the start we had this idea that it would be text and image-based, that it would not be all texts. We always had the thought that hopefully Art Journal Open<\/em> and Art Journal<\/em> would work together, and that it would take two platforms. The idea was that if we’re saying this is about how you honor these practices, then, in a way, we had to demonstrate that kind of multiplatform, multiscale, multisensorial dialogue or it just wasn’t doing what we said.<\/p>\n

JCD: <\/strong>Yeah, I think that’s the whole decolonizing aspect of it\u2014bringing in all sorts of media from different places and thinking through the artists rather than the texts. Now, looking back at all of it together, I just feel like it’s amazing how different this volume is; the kind of contexts, frameworks, and ideas that everyone has brought together from artists to authors. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it in one volume.<\/p>\n

AC: <\/strong>The other prefix thing that shows up in the editor’s introduction is the prefix of re-, a sign of again: resistance, regeneration, reinscription. If trans- is the modality, is re- the effect? I don\u2019t know how you would put it? There seems to be a kind of relation between these two.<\/p>\n

MM: <\/strong>I think you picked out resistance, regeneration, reinscription, which I think are really kind of core ones. And then this wider sort of thing about the recursive as well, and return. Much like the question of the connective sense of the trans-, that it crosses disciplines, fields, generations, that it crosses times and spaces and makes connections between them that maybe we hadn’t been able to see. The kinds of things that we’re facing in a wider kind of context, the notion of a polycrisis, which I think is a very good phrase for the moment we’re in, they are not soluble from one space or one discipline. If we do not start breaking down those things and making those connections, we have an issue. These voices have been here, absolutely, and I get so tired of that idea of the new, that I’m the first person to ever say this word or whatever. No, no, no. We need to find those voices, amplify them, rethink them, work with them again, use them as material, and not always throw the baby out with the bathwater. So part of this for me is that sort of reinvestment into what was there that maybe didn’t become the mainstream or maybe didn’t win the argument. So where are the plurals in the past? And those returns, I think, are really fabulous and really important. A neoliberal logic doesn’t like them because obviously it doesn’t make everything sound new and exciting, now make everyone marketable for their neologism. You basically have to say I’m not such a big deal. I’m just one voice, but I’m hearing all these other voices and I’m listening with them and I’m wanting to do something with them. So it\u2019s a bit like the point Alpesh made earlier on, you do collaborative work and it will not matter as much in your academic portfolio as your own work, so to speak. But the kinds of things we’re facing now require us to talk to each other. And to return to things that maybe we lost too quickly.<\/p>\n

AKP: <\/strong>You really hit the nail on the head for me, Marsha, when you mentioned that we’re not reinventing the wheel. I think the re- can maybe speak to returning and recursivity, it’s not only looking at the trans- idea of across. I think the re- adds a very interesting angle or traction to that.<\/p>\n

RG: <\/strong>When you posed that question, I was thinking it through, or trying to think it through methodologically and I initially thought: okay, well, the trans- is maybe a vehicle or a catalyst for achieving the re-. But then I also thought if you do the re-, then are you not getting to the trans-?<\/p>\n

MM: <\/strong>Oh.<\/p>\n

RG: <\/strong>Ultimately, they intertwine really effectively, and again, it enhances the sort of polyphonic, interdisciplinary nature of what we’re trying to do. I really do think that interdisciplinarity and that kind of polyphonic exploration is the way forward and potentially then marrying the trans- and the re- is another is another pathway of doing that. So yeah, that’s really exciting.<\/p>\n

JCD: <\/strong>And it’s really a planetary term, Andy, because you’re talking about regeneration and representation, restoration and renewal.<\/p>\n

AC: <\/strong>Totally.<\/p>\n

MM: <\/strong>Mmhmm.<\/p>\n

JCD: <\/strong>I mean, this whole problem that we have is really about industrialization and this tendency towards the modern and the progressive, which says you got to throw out everything old, never reuse stuff, including our cosmologies, including our soul. My whole essay is about Buddhism and Taoism and it’s so often that I have had to tamp that down. So I think that to think in regenerative terms is really the way forward. And it’s a coalitional term too, right? Because I think it\u2019s easy to think that we’re all in this boat together, that we’ve been on this boat together for a long time, but it’s not true. A lot of people aren’t. So we have to think in terms of how to bring coalitional politics back together, be allies with each other, which trans- was a form of trying to do that. But I think re- is the eternal return to each other again, you know, in a way that doesn’t exclude. And how do we do that? So I’m being very idealistic. I’m always too idealistic, probably among all you guys.<\/p>\n

AKP: <\/strong>Don’t . . .<\/p>\n

JCD: <\/strong>But you know, I’ve really feel in my old age: what are we gonna do with our planet? What are we leaving our generations? And I know you all feel this, too. That’s why I’m able to say this.<\/p>\n

AC: <\/strong>I think the way that each of you riffed on that is indicative to me of the work that you’ve been doing together for a long time. And it also gives me a lot of energy and hope. I mean, the idealism is great, I think, you know, that this work is meaningful beyond the kind of metrics that we’re told should be meaningful. Rachael, when you were just responding, since we\u2019re prefixtural right now, I was thinking about all the inter- words that you were using. And this is what it gets to. We are reliant upon one another, and have been for a long time, and it’s really incumbent upon us to map out some of the stakes of that, and to insist upon that in every part and piece of our working lives together. Thank you all for the conversation.<\/p>\n

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Jane Chin Davidson<\/strong><\/a> is an art historian and curator of contemporary art in the global context, focusing on activism through performances of eco-feminism, environmentalism, global expositions, anti-racism, and diasporic Asian identities. Her recent books include the compendium, Contemporary Art in a Global Framework, <\/em>co-edited with Amelia Jones (Wiley, 2024); the monograph Staging Art and Chineseness: Politics of Trans\/Nationalism and Global Expositions <\/em>(University of Manchester Press, 2022); and the co-edited Global and World Art in the Practice of the University Museum <\/em>(Routledge, 2018), among many book chapters, journal articles, and exhibitions. She is Professor of Art History\/Global Cultures at California State University, San Bernardino. Please join her at the CAA115 panel: Feminist-Activist-Art in Impossible Times\u2014Coalition and Intervention Today for the Committee on Women in the Arts.<\/p>\n

Rachael Grew<\/strong> is a Senior Lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture at Loughborough University. Her research focuses on embodied manifestations of multispecies hybridity and posthumanism, fluid identities, and notions of “monstrosity” in modernist and contemporary visual culture. For over a decade, Rachael has been researching and writing about the artist, designer, and writer Leonor Fini, who deeply engages with hybrid bodies and fluid identities. She has published widely on Fini’s scenographic works and is currently working on a monograph exploring the entirety of Fini\u2019s oeuvre through the concepts of body, matter, and space. Rachael’s more recent interests are leading her into the realm of the witch and other monstrous female figures, exploring their potential for undoing hegemonic norms and boundaries, especially between species and ways of being and knowing.<\/p>\n

Marsha Meskimmon <\/strong>is Professor Emerita of Transnational Art and Feminisms\u00a0at Loughborough University. Her publications include:\u202fWomen Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics<\/em>\u202f(2003) and\u202fContemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination<\/em>\u202f(2010), co-edited anthologies:\u202fHome\/Land: Women, Citizenship, Photographies<\/em>\u202f(with M. Arnold, 2016),\u202f Art, Borders and Belonging: On Home and Migration<\/em>\u202f(with M. Photiou, 2021), and a special issue of the\u202fJournal of Pacifism and Nonviolence\u202f<\/em>(with A. R. Petersen, forthcoming, 2027).<\/em>\u202fMeskimmon is completing a trilogy on transnational feminisms and the arts, two volumes of which have been published. The final volume,\u202fTransnational Feminisms, Planetary Aesthetics and Nonviolence: Resonance and Riffing<\/em>, will be published by Routledge in 2027. Meskimmon has held Visiting Professorships at the Australian National University and the Universities of Copenhagen, Gothenburg and Cape Town, and a Fellowship at the National Gallery (CASVA) in Washington. In 2023, she was the recipient of the College Art Association\u2019s Distinguished Feminist Scholar award.<\/p>\n

Alpesh Kantilal Patel<\/strong><\/a> is an art historian, curator, and critic whose work develops queer and transcultural approaches to contemporary art and the writing of art history. Their books include\u202fMultiple and One: Writing Queer Global Art Histories<\/em>\u202f(Manchester University Press, 2027), recipient of a 2026 Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, and\u202fProductive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational South Asian Art Histories<\/em>\u202f(Manchester University Press, 2017). Their criticism has appeared in\u202fArtforum<\/em>,\u202f Art in America<\/em>,\u202ffrieze<\/em>,\u202fHyperallergic<\/em>,\u202fBOMB<\/em>, and\u202fThe Brooklyn Rail<\/em>. Recent curatorial work includes\u202fForever Becoming: Decolonization, Materiality, and Trans*<\/em>\u202fSubjectivity at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn. Patel is Associate Professor of Global Contemporary Art at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, and\u202fco-editor\u202fof Manchester University Press\u2019s\u202fRethinking Art\u2019s Histories<\/em>\u202fseries.<\/p>\n

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Header image: Tsohil Bhatia,<\/strong> Fruits of passing (remains from home)<\/i>, 2022\u201324<\/b>, banana flower, ginger, potato, rambutan, onion, okra, eggplant, carrot, cucumber, strawberries, melon celery leaf, celery root, endive, lemon, lime, mandarin, navel orange, blood orange, garlic, pomegranate, cabbage, apple, watermelon, bottle gourd, bitter gourd, mermaid\u2019s purse, banana, mamey, lichi, driftwood, wheat flour cat, breadfruit, cauliflower, dried bougainvillea leaf, horseshoe crab skeleton, mango, mango pit, apricot, black grapes, brussel sprout, jackfruit, baby eggplant, buddha\u2019s hand, papaya, mamey pit, banana peel, turnip, orange peel, avocado skin, mangosteen, dragonfruit, quenepas, dried rose, tamarind spine, wheat dumpling, and pomegranate skin, 48 x 48 x 5 (121.9 x 121.9 x 12.7\u2009cm); photograph by Leo Ng, provided by CUE Art Foundation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The guest editors of Art Journal’s special summer issue, “What Can Trans Do?,”are joined by AJO’s editor-in chief for a conversation around the capaciousness of trans- as a subject<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":19960,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kia_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1676,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conversaciones","category-from-art-journal",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19943"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19964,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19943\/revisions\/19964"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}