CAA News Today

In honor of its yearlong Centennial celebration, CAA has initiated a project to collect, catalogue, and make accessible many written, photographic, and electronic documents relating to its past. This effort will complement the history chronicled in The Eye, the Hand, the Mind: 100 Years of the College Art Association, edited by Susan Ball. This summer and fall, CAA plans to post dozens of text-searchable PDFs of CAA News from 1976 to 2001 and full conference programs since the late 1930s, among other publications, on its website.

Particularly in its early years but even in recent times, CAA did not preserve every document that it produced. Materials not collected or saved include: conference programs prior to 1937; catalogues from CAA’s traveling-exhibition program, active from 1929 to 1937; documentation of member surveys; Placement Bureau listings before 1968; and membership brochures, forms, and related materials predating 1990. CAA hopes that members may have copies of these, along with personal photographs and other visual or textual ephemera from meetings and events in decades past.

If you possess materials that might help fill gaps in CAA’s historical archive and are willing to donate or have CAA scan them, send a brief description of the items to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs and archivist. Please do not mail anything to the CAA office until she discusses your materials with you.

Image: Louise Nevelson addresses the audience at a “rowdy” and “tumultuous” conference session called “Women Artists Speak Out,” while Martha Edelheit (left) and Patricia Mainardi (center) look on. Read about the panel in the Spring 1973 Art Journal (photograph by Nina Howell Starr)