The Art Studies Journal is the official journal of the Department of Art Studies, College of Arts and Letters, University of the Philippines Diliman. It is envisioned to foster discursive and scholarly engagements on Philippine art, in conversation with the regional and the global, through deploying the lenses of art history, art theory and aesthetics, art criticism, curatorship, and arts management. Taking the Philippines as a geographical, historical, and theoretical starting point, it aligns with the department’s commitment to a humanistic and interdisciplinary approach and to the decolonization of art, which have been its response to dominant Euro-American epistemologies and practices in the discipline.

  • Call for Submissions: vol. 3, no. 2

    The Art Studies Journal welcomes additional submissions on art and the broad concept of modernity for the second issue of its third volume. Stemming primarily from discourses in sociology and other related disciplines, modernity has been reconceptualized as plural. This shift emboldens the specificity of experiences among post colonies to take space in the theoretical, methodological, and praxiological domains—which is a means to trouble inherited notions of utopia, progress, and development from the West. This opens the concept of modernity to also include nation-building amid traces of the colonial, spirituality through cultural convergences, the reconceptualization of the museum, among wide-ranging topics. With this, the third volume highlights, but may also reconsider, the relationship between modernity as a social process and modern/modernism as a cultural and artistic movement. The experimentation with new forms, materials, and techniques may not simply be seen as a mirror to societal/industrial development, but also as an overdetermined latticework of relations and interactions between various localities and streams of creative expressions. The experience of the postcolony hence may provide new insights into the notions relevant to modernity and the modern: folk, pop, contemporary, ecology, and the like.

    This volume on art and modernities complements the themes of Art Studies Journal’s previous issues on folk art and popular art and culture, and various external efforts that dwell on the contemporary, by prompting discussions on the tensions and entanglements between persistence and change, convergences and remediation, publics and agency, among many.

    Topics that contributors might consider submitting on include (but are not limited to):

    • Conceptual positionings (definitions, locations) of the modern alongside the contemporary, the folk, traditional art, popular culture, and other concepts
    • Challenges to related conceptual binaries (e.g., nature-culture, myth-reason/science, individual-community, metropolis-periphery, local-global, and Global North-Global South)
    • Material and social relational dimensions of the modern
    • The modern situated within local moral, aesthetic, and affective worlds (e.g cosmology, spirituality, suffering, and sufferance)
    • Gendered assumptions in discourses on modernity and the modern
    • The modern as conflicted heritage
    • Art and nation-building or the questioning of this relationship
    • Ethnographic cataloging of cultures toward an archive
    • Cultural heritage and its representations
    • Art of living traditions in the midst of global flows
    • Art amid dynamisms between varying localities (e.g., region, solidarities, geopolitics, and worlding)
    • Art, nature, and ecology within the context of modernity
    • Museums as modern institutions 
    • Local discursive and curatorial practices on the modern
    • Art with other modernist projects (e.g. democracy, civil society, gender equality, and secularism)

    The journal accepts the following submission formats, all of which will undergo a blind review process from members of the editorial team:

    • Research articles (3,000-5,000 words and maximum of 2,000 words for endnotes and works cited)
    • Reviews of publications, art exhibitions, and other media texts (1,000-2,000 words)
    • Research notes (1,000-2,000 words)
    • Artist notes (1,000-2,000 words)
    • Class syllabus (1,000-2,000 words)
    • Artistic productions (with accompanying 500-1,000 word artist statement)
    • Other formats or lengths upon discussion with the editors (discussion should be before the set deadline of email submissions)

    Please refer to the guidelines on submission here.

    The journal does not accept previously published material. Undergraduate papers are welcome. For detailed submission guidelines, please check the Guidelines page in this website.
    Deadline for submissions is on 31 May 2024.

  • Art Studies Journal vol. 3, no. 1 is out!

    In the 1990s the faculty of the Department of Art Studies cobbled together a makeshift publication called the Art Studies Journal (ASJ). We wrote and contributed our essays, not because we have something to say with much certainty but to question those very certainties – to go against the grain, to write and speak out of turn, as we considered our positions as educators and scholars amidst the urgencies of the times. With the first volume published in 1992 and the latest issue in 1994, the journal has had an almost three decade hiatus.

    The ASJ returns with the same reflexive questioning that animated the first volumes, but this time with a new set of challenges. What does it mean to write and speak out of turn in an increasingly market-driven and ranking obsessed academic environment? What do we do when we do art studies in our everyday lives amidst pressures to conform to the demands of an increasingly corporatized and managerial ecology of higher education?

    We welcome the revival issue of the ASJ, which can be accessed in the Current Issue page of this website.