CAA News Today

Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Long Hidden, Vatican Painting Linked to Native Americans

For close to four hundred years, the painting was closed off to the world. For the past 124 years, millions of visitors walked by without noticing an intriguing scene covered with centuries of grime. Only now, the Vatican says a detail in a newly cleaned fifteenth-century fresco shows what may be one of the first European depictions of Native Americans. The fresco, The Resurrection, was painted by the Renaissance master Pinturicchio in 1494—just two years after Christopher Columbus first set foot in what came to be called the New World. (Read more from National Public Radio.)

Ten Tips to Earn Tenure

I had complained to my colleague that after the intellectually, emotionally, and physically grueling experience of completing graduate school while teaching full-time, I would really look forward to “just” being a professor. She replied, “I hate to tell you this, but you’ll still be working sixty- and seventy-hour weeks to earn tenure and promotion because you’ll have all kinds of other responsibilities besides teaching that you don’t have now.” Over twelve years, three moves, and two blood pressure medicines later, I see how right she was that day. Here are my ten tips for earning tenure and promotion without becoming the nutty professor. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)

As Works Flood In, Nation’s Library Treads Water

The Sea Creatures, who recently sent their recording Naked in the Rain to the Library of Congress, probably did not ponder the impact of sequestration on their music’s journey from dream to copyright. Just as military contractors, air-traffic controllers, and federal workers are coping with the grim results of a partisan impasse over the federal deficit, the Library of Congress, whose services range from copyrighting written works to the collection, preservation, and digitalization of millions of books, photographs, maps, and other materials, faces deep cuts that threaten its historic mission. (Read more in the New York Times.)

Q&A with Denise Scott Brown

Denise Scott Brown, the cofounder of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates (now VSBA), talks to Architect about a petition to put her name on the 1991 Pritzer Architecture Prize, about her career in design. and about the ways she has been treated as a woman architect in a profession that she has described as a “nineteenth-century upper-middle-class men’s club.” (Read more in Architect.)

Smithsonian Sequestration Closures Could Get Worse

The Smithsonian Institution has announced that parts of three museums—the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Museum of African Art, and the Smithsonian Castle—will close through September 30 because of mandatory budget cuts, but the true effect of sequestration on the museum group is far wider. A Smithsonian spokeswoman says that in addition to these closures, sections of other museums will go dark this year as exhibitions come to their scheduled ends. (Read more in the DCist.)

English Teachers Reject Use of Robots to Grade Student Writing

Critics of standardized tests argue that the written portion of those assessments can short-circuit the process of developing ideas in writing. Using machines to grade those tests further magnifies their negative effects, according to a statement adopted last month by the National Council of Teachers of English. As high-school students prepare for college, the statement reads, they “are ill served when their writing experience has been dictated by tests that ignore the evermore complex and varied types and uses of writing found in higher education.” (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)