CAA News Today
CAA’s Response to the Closing of the Visual Arts Department at Emory University
posted by Christopher Howard — September 29, 2012
As a 14,000 member professional organization which promotes excellence in scholarship, teaching, and the practice of art history, criticism and studio art, CAA regrets Emory University’s decision to close its department of Visual Arts and re-locate the tenured Visual Arts faculty members in other departments.
However, Emory’s administration has done so with the input of appointees from the College of Arts and Sciences’ Faculty Governance Committee, and as part of a responsible and careful look at its entire academic offerings. CAA understands that the university has decided to close the departments of Visual Arts, Educational Studies and Physical Education, and the program in Journalism in order to put its resources into building upon its strengths, as part of a long-term plan developed over several more than four years.
Emory University has an accredited art history department that offers ancient through contemporary art history and archeology courses through a doctoral level. CAA looks forward to hearing more about the developments at Emory and how visual arts education will be addressed in the future.
Receive Career Advice and Feedback on Your Art
posted by Lauren Stark — September 20, 2012
As a CAA member, you have access to a diverse range of mentors at Career Services during the 101st Annual Conference, taking place February 13–16, 2013, in New York. All emerging, midcareer, and even advanced art professionals can benefit from one-on-one discussions with dedicated mentors about artists’ portfolios, career-management skills, and professional strategies.
You may enroll in either the Artists’ Portfolio Review or Career Development Mentoring—please choose one. Participants are chosen by a lottery of applications received by the deadline; all applicants are notified of their scheduled date and time slot by email in early 2013. Both sessions are offered free of charge. Conference registration, while encouraged, is not necessary to participate. All applicants must be current CAA members.
Artists’ Portfolio Review
The Artists’ Portfolio Review offers CAA members the opportunity to have digital images or DVDs of their work reviewed by artists, critics, curators, and educators in personal twenty-minute consultations. Whenever possible, CAA matches artists and mentors based on medium or discipline. You may bring battery-powered laptops; wireless internet, however, is not available in the room. Sessions are filled by appointment only and are scheduled for Thursday, February 14, and Friday, February 15, 2013, 8:00 AM–NOON and 1:00–5:00 PM each day.
To apply, download and complete the Career Development Enrollment Form or fill out the paper form in the 2013 Conference Information and Registration booklet, which will be mailed to all individual and institutional CAA members in October 2012. Send the completed form by email to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs; by fax to 212-627-2381; or by mail to: Artists’ Portfolio Review, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004. Deadline extended: January 18, 2013.
Career Development Mentoring
Artists, art historians, art educators, and museum professionals at all stages of their careers may apply for one-on-one consultations with veterans in their fields. Through personal twenty-minute consultations, Career Development Mentoring offers a unique opportunity for participants to receive candid advice on how to conduct a thorough job search; present cover letters, CVs, and digital images; and prepare for interviews. Whenever possible, CAA matches participants and mentors based on medium or discipline. Sessions are filled by appointment only and are scheduled for Thursday, February 14, and Friday, February 15, 2013, 8:00 AM–NOON and 1:00–5:00 PM each day.
To apply, download and complete the Career Development Enrollment Form or fill out the paper form in the 2013 Conference Information and Registration booklet, which will be mailed to all individual and institutional CAA members in October 2012. Send the completed form by email to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs; by fax to 212-627-2381; or by mail to: Career Development Mentoring, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004. Deadline extended: January 18, 2013.
Image: A mentoring session at the CAA Annual Conference (photograph by James Rexroad)
Serve on a CAA Committee
posted by Vanessa Jalet — September 19, 2012
Get involved in an issue that you care about! CAA invites members to apply for service on one of its nine Professional Interests, Practices, and Standards Committees. These committees address critical issues in the visual arts in an attempt to deal with, and respond to, the pressing concerns of CAA’s members.
Communicating via listserv throughout the year, each committee takes on the objectives it has set for itself, which include: programming ARTspace at the Annual Conference; establishing best practices, standards, and guidelines; sharing and examining pedagogical practices; examining new and developing technologies; addressing issues critical to emerging professionals as well as concerns of diversity and gender; extending the reach of CAA internationally; and clarifying and debating matters of fair use, copyright, and open access. This vigorous exchange of information reveals common goals and leads to solutions that will help CAA members to weather their changing professional landscape.
Committees are active at the Annual Conference in February, where each presents one or two sessions on a subject of its choosing. These sessions, sometimes collaborations between committees and sometimes dealing with workforce issues, are meant to be of immediate value to CAA members. Also at the conference, the committees hold face-to-face business meetings and discuss the past year’s accomplishments while targeting ideas for future projects. Participation on a committee is an excellent and fruitful way to network with other CAA members, and for some individuals it is a stepping-stone to service on the organization’s Board of Directors.
The public face of several CAA committees appears most visibly at the conference. The Services to Artists Committee, for example, conceives nearly all content and programming for ARTspace, ARTexchange, and the Media Lounge, while the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee organizes events on professional-development issues that take place in the Student and Emerging Professionals Lounge.
Online, the Committee on Women in the Arts publishes the monthly CWA Picks of exhibitions and events related to feminist art and scholarship, among other activities. Last year, the Museum Committee conducted a survey of museum-based members; it also advocates greater access to museum image collections. After conducting a survey of its own, the International Committee warmly welcomed and hosted twenty travel-grant recipients who attended the Los Angeles conference from around the world.
The Professional Practices Committee continues to study, develop, and revise CAA’s Standards and Guidelines, so that these documents, once approved by the CAA board, become authoritative, comprehensive documents for art-related disciplines. The Committee on Diversity Practices is compiling syllabi that consider diversity and inclusiveness in curricula and the classroom. The Committee on Intellectual Property completely updated all intellectual-property information on CAA’s website and continues to monitor the tricky terrain of copyright and fair use, which dramatically affects the work lives of artists and scholars.
Committee members serve three-year terms (2013–16), with at least one new member rotating onto a committee each year. Candidates must be current CAA members and possess expertise appropriate to the committee’s work. Members of all committees volunteer their services without compensation. Committee work is not for the faint of heart; it is expected that once appointed to a committee, a member will involve himself or herself in an active and serious way.
The following vacancies are open for terms beginning in February 2013:
- Committee on Diversity Practices: 2 members
- Committee on Intellectual Property: 5–6 members
- Committee on Women in the Arts: 2 members
- Education Committee: 5 members
- International Committee: 2 members
- Museum Committee: 3 members
- Professional Practices Committee: 3 members
- Services to Artists Committee: 4 members
- Student and Emerging Professionals Committee: 2 members
CAA’s president, vice president for committees, and executive director review all candidates in early November and make appointments in December, prior to the Annual Conference. New members are introduced to their committees during their respective business meetings at the conference.
Nominations and self-nominations should include a brief statement (no more than 150 words) describing your qualifications and experience and an abbreviated CV (no more than 2–3 pages). Please send all materials to Vanessa Jalet, CAA executive liaison. Deadline: October 12, 2012.
Image: The Student and Emerging Professionals Committee hosted a breakfast at the American Folk Art Museum during the 2011 Annual Conference (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — September 17, 2012
In its monthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, curators, designers, photographers, filmmakers, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. This month was marked by the loss of the art historian Natalie Boymel Kampen, Magnum photographer Martine Franck, and the young Egyptian artist Amal Kenawy. CAA has published a special obituary for Kampen.
- Lee Wick Dennison, a long-time financial officer for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), passed away on August 31, 2012. She was 60 years old. Dennison joined the NEA in 1975 and campaigned for funding for arts organizations across the country through her various roles as grants officer, assistant director of the challenge and advancement programs, and director of organizational capacity. She received the Distinguished Service Award from the NEA twice, in 1988 and 1999
- Martine Franck, a versatile documentary photographer in the humanist tradition who was among the first women accepted into the elite Magnum photography agency, died on August 16, 2012, at the age of 74. Franck’s images ranged from formal portraits of artists, such as Balthus, to intimate street scenes. She was married to the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson
- Hans Josephsohn, a Swiss figurative sculptor, passed away on August 21, 2012, at the age of 92. His primitive-looking sculptures of reclining figures, heads, and busts on plinths suggest a marriage of classical art and expressionist fervor. He worked primarily in plaster, a material that for him was “a cross between modeling and working with stone”
- Natalie Boymel Kampen, a pioneering feminist scholar and professor of Roman art history and gender studies, died on August 12, 2012. She was 68 years old. Kampen was the author of Image and Status: Roman Working Women in Ostia and Family Fictions in Roman Art and served as chair of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board from 2009 to 2010. CAA has published a special obituary for Kampen
- Amal Kenawy, an Egyptian artist who showed her video, performance, and installation work in Cairo galleries and in many international biennials, died on August 19, 2012. She was 38. Her diverse artworks dealt with the subject of communication and translation, often to controversial and awe-inspiring effect. The performance Silence of the Sheep, staged at the Cairo Biennial in 2011, featured the artist as a shepherd leading a flock of artists and workers on their hands and knees through the city’s streets
- Joe Kubert, a Polish-born comic-book artist, died on August 12, 2012, at the age of 85. Kubert created many memorable cartoon heroes for DC Comics in the 1940s and 50s, including Sgt. Rock, Hawkman, and Tor, the first 3D comic book. He passed on his passion for drawing and invention at the Kubert School in Dover, New Jersey, founded in 1976 and still going strong today
- Helen Scott Lidgett, a lively British publicist, passed away on July 31, 2012, at the age of 63. Lidgett wore many hats during her varied career: she ran a popular vintage-clothing stall in Camden Town, wrote art criticism for London’s Time Out, and was the famously flamboyant head of publicity for the art-book publishers Thames and Hudson. In later years Lidgett was a champion for arts funding and served as a cultural advisor to Prime Minister Gordon Brown
- William Moggridge, a British designer and educator, died on September 8, 2012, at the age of 69. Moggridge’s invention of the clamshell design of the first laptop computer in 1979 was a revolutionary step for digital technology. He cofounded the product-design firm IDEO and worked on a range of products, from heart defibrillators to Palm Pilots. In 2010 he was named the director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York
- Dmitri Plavinsky, a Russian artist associated with the Nonconformist Art movement, passed away on September 1, 2012, at the age of 76. His paintings and etchings explored imagery that flew in the face of officially sanctioned Soviet Realism. Plavinsky was one of a select group of artists to be shown in museums in the United States and in Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Jan Sawka, a Polish-born artist, illustrator, and sculptor known to many outside the art world for his luminous stage sets for Grateful Dead concerts, died on August 9, 2012, at the age of 65. Sawka began his art career working as an underground graphic artist in Krakow, Poland. He has shown his work in museums throughout the United States and in Europe
- Lee Sherry, a New York–based abstract artist, passed away in August 2012 at the age of 65. Sherry attended Reed College with her fellow painter David Reed in the 1960s; she was also close to many writers in the Language school of poetry. Sherry designed the typography for several covers of the experimental poetry journal Roof and showed her work at Susan Caldwell Gallery in New York in the 1970s
- Michael Seward Snow, a British abstract painter who was associated with the St Ives artist colony in the 1950s, passed away on July 15, 2012, at the age of 82. His compatriot artists were Ben Nicholson, Terry Frost, and the poet W. S. Graham. Snow was a professor of art from 1965 to 1985 at Exeter College of Art in Devon, England
- Steve M. Street, a champion for the rights of adjunct faculty members, died on August 17, 2012, at the age of 56. Street had been a non-tenure-track professor of writing at the State University of New York at Buffalo since 1980. He was a frequent contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education on the subject of adjunct benefits and most recently wrote about his own struggle with cancer in light of his adjunct position
Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries, or your completed texts, to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the September list.
Natalie Boymel Kampen: In Memoriam
posted by CAA — September 17, 2012
Natalie (Tally) Boymel Kampen, a pioneering feminist scholar and professor of Roman art history and gender studies, died on August 12, 2012, at her home in Wakefield, Rhode Island. She was 68 years old. Kampen taught graduate courses on the ancient world at Columbia University and undergraduate courses in feminist theory and gender studies at Barnard College, where she was the first faculty member to hold the endowed Barbara Novak chair in Art History and Women’s Studies, and became professor emerita in 2010. She was most recently a visiting professor of Roman art and architecture at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University and helped to administrate a Getty Foundation grant sponsoring international study of the art and architecture of the Roman provinces. She was one of the world’s most notable experts on the history of the Roman provinces.
An internationally recognized teacher and scholar, Kampen was a research fellow at Oxford University in 2000, received the 2004 Felix Neubergh Medal at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, and was a visiting professor of art history at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India, in 2010. As a senior scholar she was interested not only in promoting the careers of her Columbia students but also mentored graduate students from Eastern Europe, South Asia, and the Middle East. Kampen’s books include Image and Status: Roman Working Women in Ostia (Berlin: Mann, 1981) and Family Fictions in Roman Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). She was the editor of Sexuality in Ancient Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and the author of numerous articles and chapters in scholarly journals, encyclopedias, and books, including Art Journal, American Journal of Archaeology, The Art Bulletin, and The Art of Citizens, Soldiers, and Freedmen in the Roman World (Oxford: British Archeological Reports, 2006), edited by Guy P. R. Métraux and Eve D’Ambra. Kampen served as chair of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board from 2009 to 2010. To mark the occasion of CAA’s Centennial in 2011, she helped compile the anthology of essays published in the journal from 1913 to the present; her informative introductory essay traces the inclusion of writers who were women and people of color as the century progressed.
Kampen was born on February 1, 1944, in Philadelphia, the daughter of Jules and Pauline (Friedman) Boymel. She was an enthusiastic supporter of left-wing causes from the 1950s to the present and played a key role in the struggle for women’s rights, in academia and beyond. As a dedicated scholar and pioneer in the field of women’s studies she raised several generations of women’s consciousness. Kampen received her BA and MA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1965 and 1967 and her PhD from Brown University in 1976. She taught art history at the University of Rhode Island from 1969 to 1988, where she helped to found one of the first women’s studies programs in New England and became a lifelong patron of the Hera Gallery, a feminist artists’ collective in Wakefield, Rhode Island.
Kampen was an avid horseback rider and a lifelong owner of Labrador dogs. She was married to Michael Kampen from 1965 to 1969 and to John Dunnigan from 1978 to 1989. In all her pursuits, scholarly and otherwise, her generosity was extraordinary. She was famous as a beloved friend and colleague who nurtured lifelong friendships, forged groups of strangers into friends, and could change a person’s perspective on life after only an hour’s acquaintance in an airport. Even after the onset of her final illness, Kampen led a group of younger scholars to Greece, determined to work with them while she was still able to.
Natalie Boymel Kampen is survived by her sister, Susan Boymel Udin; her brother-in-law David; and her niece and nephew, Rachel and Michael Udin. Contributions can be made in Kampen’s name to Rhode Island Community Food Bank, 200 Niantic Avenue, Providence, RI 02907.
Call for Mentors for New York
posted by Lauren Stark — September 14, 2012
For the 101st Annual Conference, taking place February 13–16, 2013, in New York, CAA seeks established professionals in the visual arts to volunteer as mentors for two Career Services programs: the Artists’ Portfolio Review and Career Development Mentoring. Participating as a mentor is an excellent way to serve the field and to assist the professional growth of the next generation of artists and scholars.
Art historians and studio artists must be tenured; critics, museum educators, and curators must have five years’ experience. Curators and educators must be currently employed by a museum or university gallery.
Artists’ Portfolio Review
CAA seeks artists, critics, curators, and educators to serve in the Artists’ Portfolio Review. In this program, mentors review and provide feedback on digital images or DVDs of work by artist members in personal twenty-minute consultations. Whenever possible, CAA matches artists and mentors based on medium or discipline. Mentors provide an important service to artists, enabling them to receive professional criticism of their work.
Interested candidates must be current CAA members and prepared to give five successive twenty-minute critiques in a two-hour period on one of the two days of the review: Thursday, February 14, and Friday, February 15, 2013, 8:00 AM–NOON and 1:00–5:00 PM each day. Conference registration, while encouraged, is not required to be a mentor. Please send your CV and a brief letter of interest to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs. Deadline: December 14, 2012.
Career Development Mentoring
CAA seeks mentors from all areas of studio art, art history, art education, film and video, graphic design, the museum professions, and other related fields to serve in Career Development Mentoring. In this program, mentors give valuable advice to emerging and midcareer professionals, reviewing cover letters, CVs, digital images, and other pertinent job-search materials in personal twenty-minute consultations. Whenever possible, CAA matches participants and mentors based on medium or discipline.
Interested candidates must be current CAA members and prepared to give five successive twenty-minute critiques in a two-hour period on one of the two days of the review: Thursday, February 14, and Friday, February 15, 2013, 8:00 AM–NOON and 1:00–5:00 PM each day. Conference registration, while encouraged, is not required to be a mentor. Please send your CV and a brief letter of interest to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs. Deadline: December 14, 2012.
Career Development Mentoring is not intended as a screening process by institutions seeking new hires. CAA does not accept applications from individuals whose departments are conducting a faculty search in the field in which they are mentoring. Mentors should not be attending the conference as candidates for positions in the same field in which mentees may be applying.
Projectionists and Room Monitors at the New York Conference
posted by Lauren Stark — September 13, 2012
Working as a projectionist or room monitor at the 101st Annual Conference, taking place February 13–16, 2013, in New York, is a great way to save on conference expenses. All candidates must be US citizens or permanent US residents. CAA encourages students and emerging professionals—especially those in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut—to apply for service.
Projectionists
CAA seeks applications for projectionists for conference program sessions. Successful applicants are paid $12 per hour and receive complimentary conference registration. Projectionists are required to work a minimum of four 2½-hour program sessions, from Wednesday, February 13 to Saturday, February 16; they must also attend a training meeting on Wednesday morning at 7:30 AM. Projectionists must be familiar with digital projectors. Please send a brief letter of interest to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs. Deadline: December 14, 2012.
Room Monitors
CAA needs room monitors for two Career Services mentoring programs (the Artists’ Portfolio Review and Career Development Mentoring), several offsite sessions, and other conference events, to be held from Wednesday, February 13 to Saturday, February 16; they must also attend a training meeting on Thursday morning at 7:30 AM. Successful candidates are paid $12 per hour and receive complimentary conference registration. Room monitors are required to work a minimum of eight hours, checking in participants and facilitating the work of the mentors. Please send a brief letter of interest to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs. Deadline: December 14, 2012.
September 2012 Issue of The Art Bulletin
posted by Christopher Howard — September 10, 2012
The September 2012 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, presents the third installment of its new feature series that will continue for two more volume years. In Regarding Art and Art History, Richard Shiff analyzes the role of interpretation in writing about art through the prism of Meyer Schapiro and Clement Greenberg’s different approaches to the topic. The subject of this issue’s Notes from the Field is contingency, with texts by eleven artists, scholars, professors, and philosophers: Linda Connor, Giovanna Borradori, Marcia Brennan, Mary Ann Doane, Angus Fletcher, Peter Geimer, Gloria Kury, Mark Ledbury, C. Brian Rose, Frances Spalding, and Chris Spring. A photograph based on Connor’s 2010 film Fireworks for the Virgin, shot in Peru, appears on the cover.
In the issue’s Interview, James Ackerman converses with Cammy Brothers about how recent trips to Turkey, Egypt, and India have affected his outlook on teaching architectural history. Ackerman, editor of The Art Bulletin from 1956 to 1959, also describes his formative years as a student at Yale University and his teaching career at Harvard University.
The September issue also features four essays that cover a wide range of art-historical topics and time periods. Jaś Elsner explores a transformative moment in the eighth century, when the icon was considered entirely as representation, and analyzes the debates that precipitated this moment among Christians, Jews, Muslims, and pagans. In her essay “Francesco Rosselli’s Lost View of Rome: An Urban Icon and Its Progeny,” Jessica Maier reconstructs Rosselli’s monumental engraving of Rome and analyzes the work as a marker of high innovation in Renaissance print culture. Elizabeth Kindall discusses how the seventeenth-century Chinese artist Huang Xiangjian moved to an experiential reading of the handscroll format and how this shift from a traditional, linear reading culminated in a panoramic “grand view.” In his essay “Architecture and Crime: Adolf Loos and the Culture of the ‘Case,’” Frederic J. Schwartz takes a close look at two widely publicized trials involving the modern Viennese architect Adolf Loos, demonstrating the implications of these encounters with criminality for Loos’s architecture practice and theory and their importance in the wider public sphere.
The books under review in this issue represent a broad cross-section of art-historical scholarship. Philippe Morel assesses Alessandro Nova’s The Book of the Wind: The Representation of the Invisible, and Carl Brandon Strehlke reviews eight books published within the last seven years on the Italian Renaissance painter Giotto. Ariella Azoulay looks at Martin A. Berger’s Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography. Finally, Matthew Simms reviews two new volumes on Willem de Kooning, Richard Shiff’s Between Sense and de Kooning and the catalogue for the Museum of Modern Art’s 2011 retrospective of the artist, edited by John Elderfield, the exhibition’s curator.
CAA sends The Art Bulletin to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the journal as a benefit of their membership. The next issue of The Art Bulletin, to be published in December 2012, will feature Rebecca Zorach’s reflections on politics and teaching in Regarding Art and Art History, the texts collected in Notes from the Field will be on the topic of detail, and the Interview will feature a conversation between the German art historian Horst Bredekamp and Christopher Wood. The long-form essays include a new interpretation of the Judgment of Paris myth as it is depicted in Roman wall paintings; a close reading of the Italian Renaissance sculptor Filarete’s Hilaritas, a bronze relief on the doors of Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican; a consideration of Caravaggio’s signature in Beheading of Saint John the Baptist; an analysis of a Central American painting from the mid-1680s; and an exploration of the unpublished papers of the nineteenth-century English connoisseur George Scharf. The Reviews section will include analyses of books on Islamic museum installation, Inka stonework, Andean architecture, European painterly virtuosity, Rajput painting, and a new American museum.
Affiliated Society News for September 2012
posted by CAA — September 09, 2012
Art Libraries Society of North America
Windows on the War: Soviet Tass Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941–1945, edited by Peter Kort Zegers and Douglas W. Druick, won the 2011 George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award
The 2012 George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award Committee of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) welcomes submissions of notable art books published in North America during 2012. This prestigious award is presented annually to publications demonstrating excellence in art publishing. Established by ARLIS/NA in 1980, the award honors the memory of George Wittenborn (1905–1974), a premier New York art-book dealer and publisher who was a strong supporter of ARLIS/NA in its formative years. Each year, eligible titles are evaluated for excellence in standards of content, documentation, layout, and format. From these titles, one exemplary publication will be chosen to receive the George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award. Titles eligible for consideration include books (print and electronic), exhibition catalogues, and new periodical titles in any language, published in 2012 and originating from a North American publisher. Publications submitted by foreign publishers with North American offices must have been authored or edited in North America. The book-selection guidelines, entry form, and application address can all be found online. The deadline for consideration is December 31, 2012; the presentation of the awards will take place in April 2013 during the ARLIS/NA forty-first annual conference in Pasadena, California.
Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey
The Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) held its second annual conference, “The Longevity of Rupture: 1967 in Art and Its Histories,” at the American University in Beirut. Lebanon, on June 1–2, 2012.
AMCA is currently accepting submissions for the Rhonda A. Saad Prize for Best Graduate Paper in Modern Arab Art, 2012. In its second year, the award aims to recognize and promote excellence in the field of modern and contemporary Arab art. The prize is offered to a graduate student working in any discipline whose paper is judged to provide the most significant contribution to Middle Eastern studies and art history. Submissions must have been produced between June 2011 and September 2012, must not exceed thirty-five pages (excluding notes and bibliography), and must not have been previously published or be currently under consideration for publication. Submissions are due by September 30, 2012, and should be emailed to info@amcainternational.org. The winner will be announced during the AMCA members meeting, held at the Middle East Studies Association annual meeting in Denver, Colorado, in November 2012.
Association of Historians of American Art
Join the Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA) on October 11 to 13, 2012, for its second symposium, “American Art: The Academy, Museums, and the Market,” in Boston, Massachusetts. The keynote speaker is Holland Cotter, art critic for the New York Times. The Boston Athenaeum and Boston University will host the sessions; additional events include a special viewing of the newly installed Art of the Americas wing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a reception at the Boston University Art Gallery. The full symposium schedule of speakers and registration information can be found at the conference website. Hurry! Registration is only open until September 15, 2012, and there are a limited number of spaces available. For more information, please contact the symposium cochairs, David Dearinger and Melissa Renn.
Historians of British Art
The Historians of British Art (HBA) has moved up the application deadline of its annual travel grant in order to give the successful applicant more lead-up time to plan his or her travel in calendar year 2013. This grant of $750 is intended to help offset travel costs incurred by a graduate-student member of HBA who will be presenting a paper on British visual culture at an academic conference. To apply, please send a letter of request, a copy of the letter of acceptance from the organizer of the conference session, an abstract of the paper to be presented, a budget of estimated expenses (noting what items may be covered by other resources), and a CV to Renate Dohmen, grant committee chair. The deadline for the 2013 application is September 15, 2012, with notification to the winner by October 15, 2012. An annual student membership in HBA is only $15; consider joining today.
Historians of Netherlandish Art
The next formal deadline for submitting manuscripts to the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, the peer-reviewed, open-access ejournal published by the Historians of Netherlandish Art (HNA), is March 1, 2013. In addition to longer articles, the journal now welcomes shorter notes on archival discoveries, iconographical issues, technical studies, and rediscovered works. Please review the submission guidelines or contact the journal’s editor-in-chief, Alison Kettering, for more information.
Historians of Islamic Art Association
The Historians of Islamic Art Association (HIAA) would like to remind fellow CAA affiliates and members that registration for our third biennial symposium, “Looking Widely, Looking Closely,” hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, October 18–20, 2012, remains open. HIAA is pleased to offer a reduced rate for student members ($35). For more information about the symposium program, and about travel accommodations in New York, please visit the HIAA website.
International Sculpture Center
The International Sculpture Center (ISC) is accepting nominations for the 2013 Outstanding Educator Award, which recognizes individual artist-educators who have excelled at teaching sculpture in institutions of higher learning. Candidates for this award are master sculptors who have devoted their careers to the education of the next generation and to the advancement of the sculpture field as a whole. Nominations for the award will be accepted from September 3 through October 26, 2012. Anyone can nominate a qualified educator: submissions are not limited to United States participants, and international submissions are welcomed and encouraged. Award recipients receive benefits such as a featured article in Sculpture, a lifetime ISC professional-level membership, and an award ceremony to be held at their academic institution. Educational institutions of awardees also receive benefits, including recognition in Sculpture and a one-year ISC university-level membership.
Leonardo Education and Art Forum
The Leonardo Education and Art Forum (LEAF) has welcomed David Familian as its new chair-elect. Familian, an artist and educator, has served as the artistic director of the Beall Center for Art and Technology at the University of California, Irvine, since 2005. He has curated one-person exhibitions of Shih Chieh Huang, Golan Levin, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Chico MacMurtrie, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Nam June Paik, and Victoria Vesna.
LEAF seeks contributions to a scholarly project that examines interdisciplinary curricula that span the art, science, and humanities fields. Interested participants should send examples of courses and curricula in areas such art and biology, music and mathematics, art and chemistry, dance and environmental sciences, and similar pairings. The project, a relaunch of a similar call issued in 2009, is spearheaded by Roger Malina, Leonardo executive editor, and Kathryn Evans, a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Dallas. Please address all questions and syllabi or curricula information to Kathryn Evans.
Jill Scott of Z-Node and Ellen K. Levy, former chair of LEAF and an advisor for the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, are cochairs of a panel for the eighteenth International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), taking place September 19–24, 2012, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Their panel, “Synaptic Scenarios for Ecological Environments,” will addresses cognitive issues in relation to ecology with the goal of gaining a greater embodied sense of place within the ecological environment. Another ISEA panel is “Eco-Art + the Evolving Landscape of Social and Situated Practices,” moderated by Patricia Olynyk, an artist and LEAF chair. The panel will focus on education and the complex triad of ecoart, situated practices, and project-based public work that embrace various democratic processes and inspire progressive social, cultural, and environmental change. “Breaking Tradition: Rethinking the Economy of Learning,” an education workshop for ISEA 2012 convened by Nina Czegledy, former chair of LEAF, will discuss the latest developments of educational policy investigations and evaluate the role of educational research and existing educational business strategies, financial modeling, and risk management. Olynyk and Adrienne Klein, incoming LEAF cochair, will moderate the panel “Art and Medicine: Reciprocal Influence” at the 2013 CAA Annual Conference in New York, taking place February 13–16, 2013. Their panel will explore the impact of medicine on artistic practice, of creative process on medical research, and of the idea of the artist’s body as subject matter. Joseph Lewis III of the University of California, Irvine, will moderate a second panel at the CAA conference, called “Re/Search: Art, Science, and Information Technology (ASIT): What Would Leonardo da Vinci Have Thought?”.
Mid-America College Art Association
Save the date for the Mid-America College Art Association (MACAA) biannual conference, taking place October 3–6, 2012, in Detroit, Michigan. The James Pearson Duffy Department of Art and Art History at Wayne State University will host the conference in downtown Detroit. Programming will include three featured speakers; panel presentations in art, design, art history, and visual resources; and studio workshops, MACAA member exhibitions, and museum visits. The conference will have two content areas, “Meaning and Making” and “Community and Collaboration.” Visit the conference website to learn more about the event, to check travel and hotel information, and to become an MACAA member.
National Council of Arts Administrators
From November 7 to 10, 2012, Ohio State University and Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio will host “Granting Permission“ the fortieth annual conference of the National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA). The event will focus on a reexamination of the importance of arts and art education as professionals face “occasions piled high with difficulty.” The conference will also spotlight current trends in arts administration; offer forums, speakers, and workshops; and create opportunities to network within a diverse community of higher-education arts professionals. You can expect top-notch speakers, timely and forward-looking sessions, an engaging administrator’s workshop, and much more. NCAA enthusiastically welcomes new members and any interested parties to its events.
Northern California Art Historians
The Northern California Art Historians (NCAH) has inaugurated an annual travel award for promising emerging scholars. Cheyanne Cortez, a master’s degree candidate at San José State University in California, received the award in recognition of her paper, “The Ladies’ American Girl: Delineating an Age through the Ladies Home Journal,” presented at the Women in Magazines conference held at Kingston University in London, June 22–23, 2012. The NCAH gives its sincere thanks to the anonymous donor who generously contributed $300 for this year’s award.
Public Art Dialogue
Public Art Dialogue (PAD) has announced Penny Balkin Bach as the 2013 recipient of the PAD award in recognition of her longstanding and continuing contributions to the field of public art. Join the dialogue with PAD’s newest awardee at the 2013 CAA Annual Conference in New York. More information will be available soon.
Public Art Dialogue is now accepting submissions for its upcoming special issue, “Memorials: The Culture of Remembrance.” This issue seeks to explore memorials in regard to their range of subjects, various formal and conceptual strategies, and critical issues pertaining to their study. PAD welcomes submissions that address related topics (except war or peace, covered in the previous issue) from any time period or place. Please see the journal website for guidelines. The submission deadline is September 15, 2012.
Society for Photographic Education
The Society for Photographic Education (SPE) seeks curators, professors, gallerists, art historians, and scholars to review student and/or professional member portfolios at SPE’s fiftieth annual conference, taking place March 7–10, 2013, in Chicago, Illinois. Portfolio reviewers receive a discounted admission to the four-day event in exchange for their participation. For more information on the conference offerings and to express interest in serving as a portfolio reviewer, please contact SPE. The deadline for portfolio review is November 15, 2012; the deadline for conference registration is February 22, 2013.
Society of North American Goldsmiths
The Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG) will hold their forty-second annual conference on May 15–18, 2013, in Toronto, Canada. Titled “Meta-Mosaic,” the event will celebrate the multiple industries within jewelry and metal-smithing in the twenty-first century. Toronto is a mosaic of peoples and cultures as well as the center of Canada’s jewelry industry. This conference will examine a fluid identity within art, craft, and design and inspire attendees to embrace our collective mosaic. Join SNAG for presentations and panels featuring industry luminaries from across the globe, rapid-fire presentations by international designers and artists, and over twenty exhibitions.
Southeastern College Art Conference
The sixty-eighth annual meeting of the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC), hosted by Meredith College, will be held in historic Durham, North Carolina, from October 17 to 20, 2012. SECAC membership is required to attend and to participate in the conference; registration opened on August 1, 2012. Please visit the website for registration fees, travel and accommodation details, and local information on Durham. Questions? Please contact Beth Mulvaney, conference chair for SECAC 2012.
Women’s Caucus for Art
The Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) will present “Honoring Women’s Rights,” a conference and exhibition in celebration of WCA’s fortieth anniversary, taking place September 7–9, 2012, at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California. The conference will feature a celebrated roster of speakers and panelists, including Malissa Feruzzi Shriver, California Arts Council chair, as well as Louise Bernikow, Sandra Fluke, Judy Baca, Flo Oy Wong, Kim Abeles, Ani Zonneveld, Emelia Fuentes Grant, Enid Blader, Geri Montano, Jane Schonberger, Laurie Frank, Linda Bynoe, Marta Donayre, Martha Richards, Melanie Cervantes, Pia Guerrero, and Thea Iberall. The speakers will cover a wide range of topics related to art, activism, and women’s rights. Works of art were juried by Ruth Weisberg, Joyce Aiken, and Patricia Rodriguez and will remain on view through November 25, 2012.
NEW ART JOURNAL REVIEWS EDITOR
posted by Christopher Howard — September 04, 2012
Michael Corris (2013–16)
Michael Corris, incoming Art Journal reviews editor
Michael Corris, professor of art and chair of the Division of Art in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, has been appointed reviews editor of Art Journal. He will serve one year as reviews editor designate, taking over from Howard Singerman of the University of Virginia in July 2013.
As both an artist and an author of many works on postwar and contemporary art and theory, Corris is looking forward to bringing new voices and perspectives into the conversation that surrounds the literature of art. For Corris this means a thorough investigation into myriad ways in which scholars and artists are reading art history today, both inside the classroom and in the larger art world. He writes, “I’d like to know what artists are reading and why; what goes into the construction of a bibliography for students at all levels; and how technology and social media alter the way we reflect critically on art and culture. In short, how the dialogue on art is authorized, shaped, and sustained through all sorts of textual means.” The social reality of art making and writing about art has always been present in Corris’s work. In his new role as reviews editor he is committed to seeking out non-Western art practices and those that merge with political activism.
With a comparative perspective on studio-art and art-history programs from his substantial teaching record in the United States and England, Corris sees both countries as “facing a crisis in higher education” and laments the fact that programs in art education and art history “are constantly under threat to justify their existence in purely economic terms.” However, the academic intensity of art schools in England holds a great appeal for Corris: “The British higher-education system places great emphasis on individual and small-group tutorials; it also demands a great deal more of students in terms of written output. Studio-art undergraduates are generally required to produce a research paper of up to 10,000 words; master’s level students may have to produce a research paper of up to 20,000 words. This is all in addition to their artwork.”
As a visual artist who slips easily into the role of critic, and as a critic who is equally at home in academia, Corris is long familiar with the fluidity of all three roles. He also recognizes the importance of a playful attitude as a way to explore new spaces of thought production. “It’s no longer surprising to find an artist who writes, a writer who draws, or a studio-art professor who curates art. The challenge here is to find ways to destabilize all these terms: visual artist, editor, writer, and educator. I turned my office at Southern Methodist University into the Free Museum of Dallas to offset the drudgery and power of academic bureaucracy. I’m constantly seeking ways to collectivize the various activities that I engage in or fall into. When it comes to my role as educator, my current concern is trying to figure out the precise shape of this Faustian bargain called tenure and my limits of tolerance to the trend to subject the arts and humanities to a corporate logic. My great joy is that the students remain engaged and delightfully open.”
Concurrent with his position at Art Journal, Corris will remain an editor at Transmission Annual, a peer-reviewed journal of contemporary art and culture, cofounded in 2008 with Sharon Kivland and Jaspar Joseph-Lester, both professors at Sheffield Hallam University in England. “We came up with the idea to publish an annual collection of essays, structured correspondence, and artist’s projects that revisited the themes of the school’s weekly artist and theorist lecture series, while allowing academics the luxury to experiment with forms of exposition. Our first issue was based on the theme of hospitality, the second on the theme of provocation, and the third on the theme of catastrophe. We anticipate a fourth issue on the theme of agency, so you see there is a glimmer of reality amongst the poetry.” Corris hopes his Transmission Annual experience will inspire new formats for Art Journal devoted to the critical review of literature on art.
Corris received a BA from Brooklyn College, City University of New York, in 1970. Two years later he earned an MFA in painting and media from the Hoffberger School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, and later was awarded a scholarship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. In 1971 he began participating in the Conceptual-art collective Art & Language (whose transatlantic members included Terry Atkinson, Joseph Kosuth, Mel Ramsden, and Charles Harrison) and contributed to the group’s journal, Art-Language. As a member of the collective, and as a solo artist, Corris has exhibited his artwork in galleries and museums across the United States and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Michael Corris, ed., Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
The relationship of writing and language to the visual arts has been a paramount concern of Corris’s throughout his career. His editorial experience began with cofounding the artist-run journals The Fox in 1975 and Red-Herring in 1977. The move from art making into publishing was a natural extension of his essayistic art practice. For Corris, and for the other Art & Language artists, these journals served as “sites of artistic production and were intentionally set in opposition to the values and institutions that sustained a managerial culture of art.” His early essays, such as “The Organization of Culture under Monopoly Capitalism,” published in The Fox in 1976, and “Frameworks and Phantoms,” written with Mel Ramsden for Art-Language in 1973, reflect this radical ethos. Since then Corris has written essays and reviews for Artforum, Art History, and Art Monthly that cover a wide spectrum of artists working today, from Jeff Koons to Alfredo Jaar and Tracey Emin.
Corris’s PhD dissertation, completed in 1996 at University College London, formed the basis for a monograph, Ad Reinhardt, published by Reaktion Books in 2008. A 2006 winner of the first CAA Publication Grant, the book recontextualizes an overlooked aspect of Reinhardt’s art practice: the political cartoons and illustrations that were published in the 1930s through the 1950s in New Masses and Soviet Russia Today. Corris’s lifelong commitment to the intersection of art and politics is evident in Ad Reinhardt, as well as in two forthcoming books: The Artist Out of Work: Selected Writings on Art (Les Presses du Reel/JRP Ringier) and What Do Artists Know? Art’s Encounter with Philosophy (Reaktion). Corris is also the author of a volume on the painter David Diao, published by TimeZone8 Books in 2005, and coauthor, with John Dixon Hunt and David Lomas, of Art, Word, and Image: 2,000 Years of Visual/Textual Interaction, published by Reaktion in 2010.
A selection of Corris’s academic appointments include visiting lecturer in history of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London (1999–2001); head of the Department of Art and Photography at the University of Wales, Newport (2003–7); visiting professor of art theory at the Bergen National Academy of Art in Norway (2005–7); and professor of fine art at Art and Design Research Center, Sheffield Hallam University (2007–9).