Erasures: Excision and Indelibility in the Art of the Americas considered the risks, rewards, and knowledge that arise when absence confronts socio-political realities. Beyond physical and spatial considerations, speakers also examined history and the void that is left by historical silence, highlighting the unsaid, the unspoken, and the invisible. How might art recreate lost narratives, recover displaced genealogies, and relitigate destructive colonial legacies? Throughout the symposium, the notion of absence materialized into a series of irreconcilable yet generative tensions such as permanence and invisibility, archival vulnerability and embodied memory, and the aesthetics of disaster.