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ARTexchange in Chicago

posted by November 18, 2013

CAA’s Services to Artists Committee invites artist members to participate in ARTexchange, an open forum for sharing work at the 2014 Annual Conference in Chicago. Free and open to the public, ARTexchange will be held on Friday, February 14, 5:30–7:30 PM, in a central location at the Hilton Chicago. A cash bar will be available.

ARTexchange is an annual event showcasing the art of CAA members, who can exhibit their paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculptures, and digital works using the space on, above, and beneath a six-foot folding table. Artists may also construct temporary mini-installations and conduct performance, sound, and spoken-word pieces in their space. In the past, many ARTexchange participants found the event to be their favorite part of the conference, with the table parameter sparking creative displays.

To be considered for ARTexchange in Chicago, please send your full name, your CAA member number, a brief description of the work you want to exhibit (no more than 150 words), and a link to your website to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs. Artists presenting performance or sound art, spoken word, or technology-based work, including laptop presentations, must add a few sentences about their plans. Such performance pieces must significantly limit volume and action so as not to disrupt the other ARTexchange participants. Accepted participants will receive an email confirmation. Because ARTexchange is a popular venue with limited space, early applicants will be given preference. Deadline: December 13, 2013.

Participants are responsible for their work; CAA is not liable for losses or damages. Sale of work is not permitted. Participants may not hang artworks on walls or run power cords from laptops or other electronic devices to outlets—bring fully charged batteries.

Image Caption

The artists Jeff Schmuki and Wendy DesChene, founders of PlantBot Genetics, demonstrate their products during ARTexchange at the 2012 Annual Conference in Los Angeles (photograph by Bradley Marks).

CAA is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2014 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award. The winners of both prizes, along with the recipients of ten other Awards for Distinction, will be announced in January and presented during Convocation in Chicago, in conjunction with the 102nd Annual Conference.

Charles Rufus Morey Book Award

The Charles Rufus Morey Book Award honors an especially distinguished book in the history of art, published in any language between September 1, 2012, and August 31, 2013. The four finalists are:

Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award

The Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for museum scholarship is presented to the author(s) of an especially distinguished catalogue in the history of art, published between September 1, 2012, and August 31, 2013, under the auspices of a museum, library, or collection. The two finalists for this year are:

Second Barr Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, or Collections

The Barr jury has shortlisted a second Barr Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, or Collections. The two finalists are:

The presentation of the Awards for Distinction will take place on Wednesday evening, February 12, 2014, 5:30–7:00 PM, at the Hilton Chicago. The event is free and open to the public. For more information about CAA’s Awards for Distinction, please contact Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs and archivist.

Filed under: Awards, Books

The International Foundation for Art Research will host its next IFAR Evenings event, “Artists Resale Rights in the US: Overdue or Shouldn’t Do?” in New York on Monday, November 25, 2013, from 6:00 to 8:30 PM. A Q&A session and a reception will follow the presentations.

Unlike many countries, the United States does not provide for resale royalties for visual artists (also known as droit de suite) by statute. A California royalty right, enacted in 1976, was recently ruled unconstitutional, a decision currently on appeal. In December 2011, Congressman Jerrold Nadler sponsored H.R. 3688, the Equity for Visual Artists Act, recommending a federal resale royalty. While the Judiciary Committee failed to act on the bill in the 112th Congress, a new version of the bill is expected to be reintroduced in this Congress. On Nadler’s request, the US Copyright Office has been reviewing the implications of enacting a federal resale royalty law. Its report is expected soon.

Please join the following distinguished speakers as they discuss this important and often divisive issue:

  • Karyn Temple Claggett, Associate Register of Copyrights and Director of Policy and International Affairs, US Copyright Office
  • Sandra L. Cobden, General Counsel, Dispute Resolution and Legal Public Affairs, Christie’s
  • Theodore H. Feder, Founder and President, Artists Rights Society
  • Philippa S. Loengard, Assistant Director and Lecturer in Law, Kernochan Center, Columbia Law School
  • Jerrold L. Nadler, Congressman, Tenth Congressional District, New York

Space is limited; advance reservations with payment are essential. The program is free to IFAR members and supporters, with a reduced rate for IFAR Journal subscribers and full-time students with ID. Tickets are $25 each for the general public.

About IFAR

Established in 1969, the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR) is a nonprofit educational and research organization dedicated to integrity in the visual arts. It works at the intersection of art scholarship, art law, and the public interest. IFAR has hosted IFAR Evenings since 1981. These are informal lectures and panels on topics related to IFAR’s core areas, including art attribution and authenticity, ownership, theft, looting, and other legal, ethical and scholarly issues concerning art objects. Several IFAR Evenings are usually scheduled each year. IFAR also organizes conferences and symposia; publishes the award-winning IFAR Journal, offers an Art Authentication Research Service and provenance research services; serves as an information resource; and has recently launched an expanded website with several new research tools, including the Art Law & Cultural Property Database and the Catalogue Raisonné Database.

Filed under: Advocacy — Tags:

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.

Two Founders of Dia Sue to Stop Art Auction

Two founders of the Dia Art Foundation have taken the unusual step of going to court to try to stop the art organization from auctioning off as much as $20 million in works from its world-class holdings at Sotheby’s. The foundation has come under fire from many parts of the art world over its decision to sell the works and has defended itself by saying that it needed the money to continue to grow and to buy new artworks. (Read more from the New York Times.)

New Council to Develop Standards, Best Practices for Online Learning

Carnegie Mellon University is convening a high-powered consortium of educators, researchers, and technology-company executives that will spearhead efforts to develop standards and promote best practices in online education. The Global Learning Council—to be led by Carnegie Mellon’s president Subra Suresh—will also look for ways to leverage education-technology resources and disseminate data in an education landscape that some think is being turned on its head. (Read more from Wired Campus.)

The Twenty Most Powerless People in the Art World: 2013 Edition

Art Review recently published its art-world power list that starts with a Qatari royal and includes an artist who “doesn’t make a thing.” Hyperallergic has highlighted people, places, and things that it think deserves more attention than the rich, powerful, and well connected for its annual Powerless 20 list. (Read more from Hyperallergic.)

Families and Museums Demand List of Nazi-Looted Art

Jewish heirs are fighting to find out if an uncovered Nazi treasure trove contains art stolen from their families during the Holocaust. Families and museums are now demanding that German authorities publish a complete list of the $1.35 billion worth of art found hidden in a Munich storage closet so they can find out if their heirlooms have been recovered. But despite international pressure, German prosecutors are refusing to publish a full inventory of the works. (Read more from USA Today.)

Who Were the Mystery Men behind Germany’s Nazi-Looted Art Haul?

It was the art discovery that stunned the world: more than 1,400 works of art, many of them masterpieces, hidden away for over seventy years, unearthed not in a high-security vault or long-forgotten museum basement, but an anonymous apartment in an upscale German neighborhood. A vast stash of paintings by the likes of Picasso, Matisse, and Chagall, some previously unknown, others that had been presumed lost forever. (Read more from CNN.)

You Need a Website

When you first hear about a fellow academic or receive an email from a person you do not know, what do you do? How do you try to find out basic information about such a person? There is a good chance that you do an online search. Then, you likely click on one of the top results returned by the search engine. You look for information that will give you details about the person’s background, interests, education, papers, and conference presentations, or at minimum their affiliation and the focus of their work. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

The Wedge Driving Academe’s Two Families Apart

More than one scientist friend at the University of California, Berkeley, has complained to me recently that the stuff coming out of English departments seems pretty wacky. My friends in the English department accuse those in the STEM fields of doing anything corporations want so long as it keeps their labs going. (Read more from the Chronicle Review.)

The Art of Emoji

Digital communication, once confined to letters, numbers, and punctuation, has become a cartoonish full-color landscape littered with pictographs designed to help express emotions and ideas. But as emoji design has developed to include a growing number of icons, the pictographs have become more than as a visual aid for verbal communication, evolving into a vehicle for expression in their own right. (Read more from Slate.)

Filed under: CAA News

In its new issue, the quarterly Art Journal features an eighty-page forum, “Conversations on Queer Affect and Queer Archives.” The forum, which includes works of art, conversations, and explorations by artists, art historians, curators, and other scholars, promises to be a milestone in the art and art history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. It will serve as a critical resource for artists, activists, and scholars alike.

“Conversations on Queer Affect and Queer Archives” is organized by Art Journal’s editor-in-chief, Lane Relyea, in collaboration with Tirza True Latimer, chair of the graduate program in Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. “Artists, scholars, and activists have been rethinking the politics of what archives preserve, demonstrating that the piecing together of cultural memory is not a neutral pursuit,” Latimer writes in her introduction. “These questions resonate with particular poignancy in outlaw cultures and communities…. Queer archival practices are not only propelled by strong feelings, they may also reanimate suppressed histories of sentiment.”

The forum documents the preservation of the material effects of LGBT people in archives as diverse as the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles, the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, New York University’s Fales Library and Special Collections, and the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, among many other archives. The issue includes a list of thirty-seven archives worldwide, with detailed contract information. It also explores the innovative ways in which artists, curators, and scholars are drawing on and showcasing these legacy materials.

Astonishing stories emerge from these archives:

  • The artist Tina Takemoto becomes obsessed with the archival legacy of a gay male Japanese immigrant who arrived in San Francisco in the 1920s and spent WWII in an internment camp in Utah. Takemoto then creates artworks based on the man and the eighty-year span of his life in the United States
  • Barbara McBane discovers the papers of a father of two who transitions to become Veronica Marie Friedman. McBane, a professional film editor and scholar, pieces together Friedman’s frame of mind during the metamorphosis, through casual writings such as journal entries, datebook pages, a timeline, and poems written on napkins
  • E. G. Crichton, artist-in-residence at San Francisco’s GLBT Historical Society, plays matchmaker with artists such as Takemoto and McBane on the one hand, and the archival materials of specific individuals on the other. From the artworks that result, Crichton organizes exhibitions that travel the world. In her text, she details the amazingly widespread network of international archives she has discovered
  • Ann Cvetkovich, the author of the book An Archive of Feelings, converses with the artist Tammy Rae Carland, who has photographed ephemeral aspects of lesbian life and dozens of hand-decorated mix tapes given her over the years, as well as behind-the-scenes events at the legendary Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival
  • Zackary Drucker contributes “Bring Your Own Body,” the script and images from a 2012 performance work that recounts the transformation of Lynn Edward Harris from Miss Costa Mesa 1968 to a bearded guest on a 1983 television talk show.
  • The artist Henrik Olesen uses an intuitive system of classification close to the one elaborated by the art historian Aby Warburg in his unfinished “Mnemosyne Atlas” to organize archival images and artworks into a homoaffirmative historical counternarrative called Some Faggy Gestures (2007)

This issue of Art Journal also includes an essay by Alexandra Kokoli on the British artist Susan Hiller and an exploration by Kirsten Olds of the visual culture of 1970s glam rock in Los Angeles, as exemplified in the work of Les Petites Bonbons.

About Art Journal

Art Journal is published four times a year by CAA for its membership of fourteen thousand. A peer-reviewed journal devoted to twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, it is one of the most vital, intellectually compelling, and visually engaging periodicals in the field. Art Journal features scholarly articles, conversations, portfolios, and other contributions by leading art historians, artists, curators, and critics.

Nonmembers may purchase single copies by writing to rlawson@collegeart.org or by calling 212-392-4404.

Filed under: Art Journal, Publications

SHERYL REISS INTERVIEW

posted by November 12, 2013

Fifteenth Anniversary for caa.reviews

This fall caa.reviews celebrates its fifteenth year of publication. Founded in the fall of 1998, the online journal has published thousands of reviews of books, exhibitions, and more. The journal averages approximately 150 reviews annually.

The journal’s editor-in-chief, Sheryl Reiss, has been involved with caa.reviews since the beginning, first as field editor for books on early modern Southern European art and then as an editorial-board member. In 2010 she returned as editor designate, taking the reins from Lucy Oakley of New York University’s Grey Art Gallery in July 2011. CAA News spoke with Reiss in October via email.

How does caa.reviews fit in with established online journals such as Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, as well as with newer digital publications and reviews journals (Triple Canopy, Cassone, Art Book Review)?

The journal distinguishes itself from these and other online publications in several ways. Founded in 2002, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide focuses exclusively on the “long” nineteenth century in a global context and publishes scholarly articles along with reviews of exhibitions and books. In contrast, caa.reviews covers materials from all periods and cultures, and while we seek to expand the number of essays we publish, our primary focus is on reviews of books, exhibitions, conferences, and recently, digital media. In this sense we also differ from the website of the Historians of Netherlandish Art, which includes a vibrant selection of book reviews. Our audience, currently CAA members, consists primarily of art historians, artists, museum professionals, and others with academic affiliations or interests. When the journal becomes open access next year, we anticipate significant expansion of our readership. The newer review journals you mention serve a broader public with greater emphasis on contemporary art and exhibitions in commercial galleries. Cassone, which focuses primarily on art in the United Kingdom, features interviews and editorial commentary, which could be fruitful paths for our journal to follow.

Have you noticed any subject trends in caa.reviews over the last year or two? If so, have they matched other trends in the academic and museum worlds?

Our coverage is so broad, and the interests of our more than thirty field editors—the group of scholars that commissions the book and exhibition reviews—so varied, that it is difficult to isolate just a few specific trends. That said, I would say that across the board I have noticed interest in materiality as a focus of books under review.  Another major trend—in both academia and museums—is tremendous interest in global themes and cross-cultural interchange. In my view, one of the greatest strong points of caa.reviews is the extraordinary range of topics and approaches covered in our reviews.

Field editors will soon write subject pieces of their own, called “Re-views,” which I understand will be somewhat similar to the recent “State of the Field” essays in The Art Bulletin. What would you like to achieve with these contributions?

For some time, members of the caa.reviews Editorial Board have expressed their desire to increase the number of essays we publish. Indeed, this was a goal of the founding editors of the journal. At the CAA Publications Committee session I organized and chaired at the Annual Conference in February of this year, titled “Book Reviews and Beyond: caa.reviews at 15,” the panel (consisting of past editors of the journal and former editorial-board members) considered the scope and object of the reviewing enterprise—not only of books and exhibitions, but also in a more comprehensive sense. The participants and audience members agreed that expanding our efforts to publish thematic essays would be one way to broaden the journal’s mission and appeal. While somewhat similar to our sister journal’s “State of the Field” essays, the “Re-views” series will provide a locus for our field editors to reflect upon their respective fields as seen through the lens of the reviews they have commissioned. We envision publishing one or two of these essays each year, in which the field editors will consider the topics, methodologies, and debates current in publications and exhibitions in their respective areas. Our first essay in the series, by Tanya Sheehan (field editor for photography and an editorial-board member), is titled “Reflections on Photography” and was published in early October. It is our hope that this series will see anew—or re-view—the many fields covered by caa.reviews in the context of reviews the journal has published.

What were some of the challenges and highlights when initiating, working on, and completing the Scalar project on the exhibition Bernini: Sculpting in Clay?

Perhaps the greatest challenge was learning to use the Scalar digital platform, which is very powerful, but also quite daunting. Some of the work was using HTML code, which I had not done for many years. Thankfully, the staff at the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture (which provided a generous grant for the project) was always there to help. One of the great highlights was making the video walkthrough last February at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. The project not only permits users to visit the exhibition virtually, it also includes an introductory essay, links to other educational videos and to reviews by a scholar and an artist, a bibliography of further reading, and an interview with one of the curators. I should add that it was a joy to work with two of the exhibition’s curators, C. D. Dickerson III of the Kimbell and Tony Sigel of the Harvard Art Museums. I was fortunate to attend the study days associated with the show both in New York and Fort Worth, which greatly enriched my understanding of Bernini’s terra-cotta models. Finally, I have been really thrilled by the positive response to the project, particularly for classroom use.

How has the road to open access been for the journal? How can the journal encourage more commentary and interaction?

This is a very exciting time for caa.reviews. The path to open access for the journal has been long and steep, with a number of roadblocks along the way. For many years, it has been the desire of past editors and editorial-board members to reinstate the journal’s initial open status. The topic has been discussed at every meeting of the editorial board since I rejoined the journal in 2010, and it is a source of much gratification that in 2014, with the advent of CAA copublishing its journals with Taylor & Francis, the journal will once again be open to all interested readers worldwide. This is a great accomplishment! The editorial board is exploring new ways of presenting review content as the journal’s audience continues to expand. These include implementing moderated commentary and increasing the use of multimedia platforms, as in the recently completed Scalar Bernini project.

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags:

New and Updated Standards and Guidelines

posted by November 11, 2013

In line with CAA’s practice to update regularly its Standards and Guidelines for professional practices in the visual arts, the Board of Directors approved one new and four revised guidelines at its meeting on October 27, 2013. The Professional Practices Committee, chaired by Jim Hopfensperger of Western Michigan University, worked with subcommittees over the past several years to revise these guidelines. DeWitt Godfrey, CAA vice president for committees and president-elect of CAA, presented the documents to the CAA Board of Directors for approval.

Guidelines for CAA Interviews

Guidelines for CAA Interviews, an updated version of Etiquette for CAA Interviewers, was developed by the Ad Hoc Committee on Guidelines for CAA Interviews, chaired by Jim Hopfensperger. It was formulated to protect the interests of applicants and of hiring institutions and to provide both with an awareness of their separate responsibilities during the interview process.

Guidelines for Part-Time Professional Employment

The intent of Guidelines for Part-Time Professional Employment is to encourage the fair and equitable treatment of all part-time employees in the visual arts, to advocate for those who may be very modestly compensated for their work, and to ensure that part-time employees are not hired to replace and/or diminish the number of full-time employees at an institution. Thomas Berding of Michigan State University and John Richardson of Wayne State University co-chaired the ad hoc committee that developed these guidelines.

Guidelines for Presenting Works in Digital Format

A new document, Guidelines for Presenting Works in Digital Format, was developed to assist visual-arts professionals with the presentation and review of artistic works using digital technologies. These guidelines aim to provide individuals and institutions with recommendations for formatting, handling, screening, and exhibiting time-based works and still images using digital technology. Dana Clancy of Boston University chaired the task force to create these new guidelines.

Statement Concerning the Deaccession of Works of Art

Developed by the Museum Committee, chaired by N. Elizabeth Schlatter of the University of Richmond, the Statement Concerning the Deaccession of Works of Art addresses the deaccession of artworks of from the collections of museums or other institutions or entities that function as public trusts and suggests best practices for these public trusts when they consider removing works from their collections.

Standards for Professional Placement

Standards for Professional Placement, last updated in 2012, was developed to protect the interests of both applicants and hiring institutions during the placement process and to allow both to know their separate responsibilities. Jim Hopfensperger chaired the ad hoc committee that updated these standards.

Filed under: Standards and Guidelines

Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.

November 2013

Wangechi Mutu, still from The End of eating Everything, 2013, animated video with color and sound, 8 min. Commissioned by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (artwork © Wangechi Mutu)

Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Wangechi Mutu scrutinizes globalization by combining found materials, magazine cutouts, sculpture, and painted imagery. Sampling such diverse sources as African traditions, international politics, the fashion industry, pornography, and science fiction, her work explores gender, race, war, colonialism, global consumption, and the exoticization of the black female body. Mutu is best known for spectacular and provocative collages depicting female figures—part human, animal, plant, and machine—in fantastical landscapes that are simultaneously unnerving and alluring, defying easy categorization and identification. Bringing her interconnected ecosystems to life for this exhibition through sculptural installations and videos, Mutu encourages audiences to consider these mythical worlds as places for cultural, psychological, and sociopolitical exploration and transformation.

Organized by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University by Trevor Schoonmaker, chief curator and Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Curator of Contemporary Art and coordinated by Saisha Grayson, assistant curator at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, for its Brooklyn Museum version, Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey is the first survey in the United States of this internationally renowned, Brooklyn-based artist. Spanning from the mid-1990s to the present, the exhibition unites more than fifty pieces, including Mutu’s signature large-scale collages as well as video works, never-before-seen sketchbook drawings, a site-specific wall drawing, and sculptural installations.

Sarah Lucas
SITUATION Absolute Beach Man Rubble
Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX England
October 2–December 15, 2013

The photographer, installation artist, and sculptor Sarah Lucas is one of the most important figures of the YBA generation that emerged in London in 1988 through Freeze and gained prominence in the early 1990s with her first two solo shows, The Whole Joke and Penis Nailed to a Board. Uniting works that span two decades, Situation Absolute Beach Man Rubble surveys Lucas’s multifaceted and multimedia take on the body—“the bawdy euphemisms, repressed truths, erotic delights, and sculptural possibilities of the sexual body” that lie at the heart of her work’s exploration of the erotic and abject, mediated and repressed body—and ranges from the angry sensationalism that underpins the gendered and classed criticality of her installations from the early 1990s to the masterful pseudomaturity of the hybrid sex contours of her latest, soft, or metal sculptures.

The show takes the viewer from Lucas’s early forays “into the salacious perversities of British tabloid journalism to the London premiere of her sinuous, light-reflecting bronze where intertwined limbs, breasts, and phalli transform the abject into a dazzling celebration of polymorphous sexuality,” while reviewers agree that it pays fair attention to the intellectual rigor, visual strikingness, and complex art-historical references of Lucas’s work, without compromising the uneasy thrill of its revelations. Deemed “not recommended for children” for its sexually explicit material, Lucas’s uncanny and humorous defamiliarization of the body perhaps pose more problems for adults than for children, as wittingly put in a review of the show in the Guardian.

Lucas’s early iconic works, in which cloths, furniture, food, and language are used as stand-ins for the body, and her found objects, such as the ubiquitous toilet, echo the Duchampian readymade in their Rabelaisian sourcing of urban experience are featured in the lower galleries of the Whitechapel Gallery. The upper galleries present two environments: a color-saturated chamber featuring acephalous male nudes against a red backdrop, where masculinity is mocked through a sequence of edible phallic stand-in, despite its totemic scale; and a sculptural landscape of shiny bronze or polymorphous conglomerations of soft limbs or breasts and genitalia. Also running through this exhibition is a new series of “plinths” made from crushed cars; as well as screens and benches made from breeze blocks framed within. The artist’s face reappears throughout the exhibition “as an all-seeing presence, frankly returning the viewer’s stare, or lost in existential reflection.” The space behind Gallery 1 presents monochrome portraits of Lucas by the artist Julian Simmons, taken from the couple’s recent publication TITTIPUSSIDAD, and portraits of Lucas at her base in Suffolk taken by the artist Juergen Teller.

Installation view of Anita of New York at Suzanne Geiss Company (photograph by Adam Reich)

Anita Steckel
Anita of New York
Suzanne Geiss Company
6 Grand Street, New York, NY 10013
November 2–December 7, 2013

Anita of New York celebrates the work of the recently deceased and largely understudied feminist New York artist Anita Steckel (1930–2012). Bringing together a selection of works from two series, The Giant Woman (1970–73) and New York Landscape (1970–80), the exhibition not only illustrates the changing montage principles of her feminist art practice but also captures the centrality of New York in her feminist critique of patriarchy. Allowing Steckel to idiosyncratically juxtapose references to art and politics “with a mix of sexuality, violence, and humor”—to paraphrase the curator of the show Rachel Middleman from a recent article on Steckel in Woman’s Art Journal—montage became Steckel’s key means “to push the boundaries of acceptable imagery and decorum in art” and to speak radically about art, race, gender, and sexuality.

Steckel first became known for her photomontage series Mom art, which mocked Pop art by comprising historic photographs and reproductions of famous works of art on which painted additions turned the found images into social critiques of racism, war, and sexual inequality. In the early 1970s she joined the feminist movement and in 1973, in response to an attempted censorship of her solo exhibition The Feminist Art of Sexual Politics at Rockland Community College’s art gallery, she founded (along with artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Hannah Wilke) the Fight Censorship Group, which protested censorship and advocated the acceptance of women’s erotic art into museums. “We believe sexual subject matter should be removed from the ‘closet’ of the fine arts,” Steckel wrote when the members of the Group came first together. “We believe sexual subject matter includes many things: political statements, humor, erotica, sociological and psychological, statements—as well as purely sensual or esthetic art concerns—and of course—the primitive, mysterious reasons none of us know.” In fact, the exhibition at Suzanne Geiss Company includes many of the “obscene” objects that a Rockland County legislator had attempted to censor, fueling Steckel’s defense of women’s right to represent the sexual body, both for critical and pleasurable ends, further shaping her work and leading to the founding of the Fight Censorship Group.

As described in the press release: Steckel’s large-scale series New York Landscape consist[s] of collage paintings that fuse imagery inspired by the human, art-historical, and urban bodies. Supine female figures, erect phalluses, dollar bills, the Mona Lisa, and other massive cultural symbols are inserted into the skyline. They sit on skyscrapers, make love, even battle in a humorous take on the city’s fraught, psychosexual sense of identity.” Superimposing her own face onto gigantic female nudes that subversively colonize New York, The Giant Woman series makes more palpable how Steckel raised the personal into political and its quasi-Surrealist empowering poetics.

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz / Her Noise Archive
Patriarchal Poetry / Slow Runner: Her Noise Archive II
Badischer Kunstverein
Waldstraße 3, 76133 Karlsruhe, Germany
September 27–November 24, 2013

Curated by Anja Casser and Nadjia Quante and titled after a Gertrude Stein quote that highlights the association of revolutionizing queer politics and aesthetics, Patriarchal Poetry is the first institutional solo exhibition of Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz in Germany. Combining the debut of their film To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation (2013) with the film installations Toxic (2012) and Salomania (2009), the show explores how the two artists investigate the emergence of photography and film against the backdrop of colonial history and the invention of body norms, the diverse ways in which their work challenge filmic illusion, and how their new film pushes boundaries, asking “whether and how changing structures engenders queer relations, whether musical and filmic forms can become revolutionary?” For Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe is based on the eponymous 1970 score of the avant-garde composer Pauline Oliveros, which itself influenced by Solanas’s radical feminist SCUM Manifesto affords the musicians an equal role, rejecting the hierarchical structures of traditional music.

Patriarchal Poetry is accompanied by a concurrent exhibition, Slow Runner: Her Noise Archive II, that brings together new and existing content from the Her Noise Archive and interlaces references to Boudry and Renate’s Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe and the pioneering composer Pauline Oliveros’s eponymous 1970 score. During the 1970s Oliveros’s feminist philosophies of music not only radically challenged the patriarchal Western musical canon, but also paralleled “women’s music” of the feminist movement by interrogating the notion of “performer,” “audience,” and the very meanings and forms of music itself. These rich tensions are explored through a series of contemporaneous works on display from Barbara Hammer, Lis Rhodes, Robert Ashley, and others, while a new series of posters by the New York–based artist Emma Hedditch creates a spatial manifestation of fragments from these histories and the wider archive.

This display of works is accompanied by a selection from the Her Noise Archive, a multiannual research project and study collection initially founded in 2001 by Lina Dzuverovic and Anne Hilde Neset, which includes records, CDs, tapes, moving image, books, catalogues, magazines, fanzines, and exclusive interview material by artists who work with sound and experimental music such as Kim Gordon, Christina Kubisch, and Kevin Blechdom. The archive—accessible for the public at CRiSAP, London College of Communication—is a physical manifestation of the desire to draw lines of affinity between different moments of the avant-garde, from the radical contemporary composition of Oliveros to No Wave, Riot Grrrl, and other more contemporary experimentations in sound and feminism.

The museum will host an artist’s talk with Boudry and Lorenz on Saturday, November 23, at 7:00 PM, followed by performances by Antonia Baehr and William Wheeler (Scores for Laughter and Without You I’m Nothing) at 8:30 PM.

Rembrandt van Rijn, A Lady and Gentleman in Black, 1633, oil on canvas, 131.6 x 109 cm (artwork in the public domain)

Sophie Calle: Last Seen
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
280 The Fenway, Boston, MA 02115
October 24, 2013–March 3, 2014

Sophie Calle: Last Seen brings together fourteen photographic and text-based works from the series Last Seen (1991) and its recent pendant What Do You See? (2012). The exhibition is a potent contemplation on absence, memory, and the effect of art, typical of Calle’s scripto-visual outsourcing of it, inspired by the famous theft of thirteen works from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

In 1990, during an exhibition of Calle’s work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the artist was interviewed for a Parkett magazine article in front of Jan Vermeer’s The Concert (1658–60), one of her favorite paintings. Later that March, the painting became one of the thirteen works stolen from the museum. The half-joking suggestion that Calle might have been responsible for the theft inspired her to create Last Seen. Standing in front of the empty spaces on the museum walls on which works were once hung, Calle asked curators, guards, conservators, and other museum staff members what they remembered of the missing pieces. With the text from the interviews and the photographic images she eventually created a visual meditation on absence and memory, as well as a reflection on the emotional power works of art hold over their viewers.

In 2012, Calle revisited Last Seen on the museum’s invitation. In What Do You See? Calle once again questioned people in the museum’s Dutch room, yet in front of the empty frames that once held the absent works that had been reinstalled in the galleries, literally framing the emptiness. But this time she did not mention the missing paintings but asked each viewer to respond to what they saw before them.

Ana Mendieta: Traces
Hayward Gallery
Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX, England, United Kingdom
September 24–December 15, 2013

Ana Mendieta: Traces is the first retrospective survey in the United Kingdom of the work of a Cuban American artist best known for her intimate, ephemeral, performance-based Siluetas, in which her body merges with the natural world, often engaging elemental materials such as earth, water, fire, and blood, evoking goddess archetypes and exploring a mythic relationship with nature while performing cathartic rituals that evoking both Afro-Cuban and Catholic traditions helped her perform a reliving exorcism of the trauma of her early exile from Cuba. Chronologically arranged films, sculptures, photographs, drawings, personal writings, and notebooks that span Mendieta’s entire career reveal different, often neglected, facets of her practice while highlighting her work’s radical contribution to feminist and Land art. An extensive research room with hundreds of photographic slides that were not developed during Mendieta’s short life provides unique access to her signature “earth-body” actions, her Siluetas, while archival material sheds new light on the way the artist worked and documented her artistic practice.

Amy Sillman: one lump or two
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
100 Northern Avenue, Boston, MA 02210
October 3, 2013–January 5, 2014

Featuring more than ninety works, including drawings, paintings, zines, and recent forays into animated film, one lump or two is the first museum retrospective of work by Amy Sillman, a painter whose self-proclaimed “skeptical” devotion to painting and whose fine interlacing of abstraction and figuration has contributed to painting’s renewed vitality in the New York scene since the 1990s. The exhibition unites early works that, characterized by cartoon lines and pastel or acid hues, “move effortlessly from figure to landscape, playfully and often humorously exploring problems of physical and emotional scale with observations that are both wry and revealing,” with her mid-2000s series couples—which were drawn from life in pencil, ink, and gouache and translated into paintings from memory with bold brushstrokes and abstract blocks of color—that have been claimed as reinvigorating forms of twenty-first-century Abstract Expressionism, as put in the press release. Also included are works that seem to question the role of painting in the age of reproduction and mass media quite idiosyncratically, whether employing the diagram or resorting to iPhone drawing, then turned into movies that “bring back the neurotic figures of her early images while delving further into the current roles of abstraction, color, and the diagram.”

Dayanita Singh: Go Away Closer
Hayward Gallery
Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX, England, United Kingdom
October 8–December 15, 2013

Go Away Closer is the first major retrospective in the United Kingdom of work by Dayanita Singh, one of today’s foremost photographers who nonetheless uses photography as a starting point rather than an end. The exhibition presents examples from the past twenty-five years as well as her portable museums, a major new body of work that has developed from her experiments in book making. These large wooden structures, which the artist calls “photo-architectures,” can be placed and opened in various configurations, each holding 70 to 140 photographs. Allowing images to be endlessly displayed, sequenced, edited, and archived within the structures, as well as stories to be fashioned in different ways, these objects expand photography into the realm of not only sculpture and architecture but also of fiction and poetry. The show also includes a recent video titled Mona and Myself, Singh’s first “moving still.”

Dear Art
Calvert 22 Gallery
22 Calvert Avenue, London E2 7JP, England, United Kingdom
September 29–December 8, 2013

Calvert 22 presents Dear Art, a new project by What, How & for Whom (WHW) that is titled after Mladen Stilinovic’s 1999 letter to art, provocatively questions the standing of art in the contemporary world, its reception and distribution value. WHW is a critically acclaimed yet radical all-women curatorial collective from Zagreb, Croatia, with a decade of international curatorial practice behind them, including the curatorship of the 2009 Istanbul Biennial. Dear Art is the group’s first exhibition in the United Kingdom.

Dorothea Rockburne
Drawing Which Makes Itself
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019
September 21, 2013–January 20, 2014

Drawing Which Makes Itself is a great opportunity to familiarize oneself with Dorothea Rockburne’s drawing practice—her mathematical and structural precision as well as the material sensibility of her process—and a sad reminder that this female survivor of the Black Mountain College remains unduly understudied and invisible, while still in life. Focusing on the artist’s groundbreaking project Drawing Which Makes Itself (1972–73), the exhibition foregrounds the question that shapes her practice (How drawing could be of itself and not about something else?) and highlights the ideas that Rockburne has pursued throughout her career.

This includes the “terrific importance” of paper for her as a metaphysical object, as an active material whose inherent qualities determine the form of the artwork, as manifested with Scalar (1971)—with its planed chipboard and paper stained with crude oil—and in various carbon-paper drawings, some of which are exhibited for the first time. Her Golden Section Paintings and the works on paper that followed refer to the mathematical ratio used by artists and architects since antiquity to produce shapes of harmonious proportions, while echoing the teachings of the mathematician Max Dehn, whose decipherment of the underlying geometries in nature and art affected her profoundly. The exhibition includes examples of Rockburne’s later work, including recent watercolors, that continue her exploration of these principles in nature and specifically in the motion of planets.

Margaret Murphy, Tell Your Son to Behave, 2013, acrylic and ink on fabric mounted on wood, 14 x 14 in. (artwork © Margaret Murphy)

Margaret Murphy
Toile News Project

Gallery Aferro
73 Market Street, Newark, NJ 07102
November 16–December 14, 2013

Gallery Aferro presents new work by Margaret Murphy that includes individual paintings, a wallpaper installation, and a dress. Murphy is known for figurative paintings whose protagonists are painted after figurines against decorative backgrounds that often interlace the opacity of enamel with the transparency of watercolor in colorful and sentimental compositions that cast timely commentaries on feminine experience and consumerism. In her new paintings, Murphy departs from her resort to figurines, turning instead on the inevitable and often violent news-image blitz of Facebook and Google, substituting sections of toile fabric designs with found images of violent or silly actualities drawn with acrylic or silkscreen. While her new work makes a comment about the latest forms of digital-image colonization of our private lives and imaginary, reminiscent of historic Pop’s commentaries, a continuity of material and thematic concerns is witnessed in Murphy’s reinvented practice that often juxtaposes historic sentimentalized views of life with current images of local or global issues, such as women’s rights protests from around the world or the Boston Marathon bombing event, as well as decorative abstraction and figuration.

Mary Beth Edelson
Collaborative 1971–1993
Accola Griefen Gallery
547 West 27th Street, No. 634, New York NY 10001
October 19–November 23, 2013

This exhibition is the first to address the more than twenty-five collaborative performance rituals and community-based workshops produced by Mary Beth Edelson starting as early as 1969. These pioneering participatory works were presented at the Corcoran Gallery, A.I.R. Gallery, the Albright-Knox Gallery, the Malmö Konstmuseum, and Franklin Furnace, as well as at universities across the United States and abroad. In planning and presenting these programs Edelson collaborated with organizations such as A.I.R Gallery, with the utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana, and with artists from the Women’s Building in Los Angeles.

The collaborations are represented by drawings and a chronology of photo documentation as well as a study area with scriptbooks, texts by and about the artist, and other documents. Collaborative also includes two Story Gathering Boxes, works that Edelson has created since 1972 and constitute an archive of participants’ personal thoughts. The box Gender Parity asks “What did your mother teach you about women?” and “What did your mother teachyou about men?” Participants may view previous handwritten responses and respond to new questions posed by the artist.

Filed under: CWA Picks, Uncategorized — Tags:

Affiliated Society News for November 2013

posted by November 09, 2013

Appraisers Association of America

The Appraisers Association of America (AAA) has published Appraising Art: The Definitive Guide to Appraising the Fine and Decorative Arts, a 450-page, color-illustrated book that covers all aspects of appraising the fine and decorative arts, including connoisseurship, the marketplace, legal considerations, and more. Edited by the late Wendell Garret along with Helaine W. Fendelman, David A. Gallager, and Jane C. H. Jacob, Appraising Art will serve as an excellent resource for professionals in the arts, legal, insurance, and financial communities, as well as for private and corporate collectors. The book addresses nearly ninety topics, such as: the Appraisal Procedure; Comparables; The Effect of Regional Concerns on Value; Conservation Issues; Due Diligence and Authenticity; Appraising Works of Art for Tax Purposes; and Resolving Art Disputes. Among the fifty connoisseurship topics are: Old Master Paintings; American Paintings and Drawings; Contemporary Art; Photography; Arts and Crafts Furniture; Pottery and Porcelain; Gems and Jewelry; Historic Documents; and Entertainment Memorabilia. Appraising Art was designed by Patrick Seymour with Elena Penny and Tsang Seymour. The consulting editor was Margaret L.Kaplan, editor-at-large for Abrams Books. The Avery Group at Shapco Printing of Minneapolis, Minnesota, produced the book.

Art Historians of Southern California

In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the Art Historians of Southern California (AHSC) held its 2013 annual symposium at the museum on October 19, 2013. Longstanding partnerships with the schools of anthropology, humanities, and especially art history were integral to the Fowler’s dynamic collection of world art. This partnership provided a context for discussion considering the much-pondered valuation of the humanities. The Fowler’s development exemplified the expansion of art history in Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago’s Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (2004). A panel discussion, “The Art Academy: The Museum, Art History, and the Art Association,” addressed the classification of cultural objects within “world art” genres and asked the question “Can a humanities perspective be differentiated from scientific models?” The panel, chaired by Jane Chin Davidson of California State University, San Bernardino, and Sandra Esslinger of Mt. San Antonio College, included the following participants: Donald Preziosi, UCLA; Claire Farago, University of Colorado, Boulder; Selma Holo, University of Southern California; Lothar Von Falkenhausen, UCLA; and Gemma Rodrigues, Fowler Museum.

Association of Academic Museum and Galleries

The Association of Academic Museum and Galleries (AAMG) invites you to attend the AAMG/Kellogg Academic Museum and Gallery Leadership Seminar Northwestern University’s Kellogg School Center for Nonprofit Management from Sunday evening, June 22, through Friday afternoon, June 27, 2014. Piloted in 2012, the seminar has two main goals: to have an impact on the professional lives of the participating museum professionals and, though them, on the field as a whole. Dynamic, engaging, highly interactive by design and interspersed with team and individual problem-solving exercises in leadership and management, this intensive five-day certificate program will allow attendees to learn from one another and be guided and inspired by nationally recognized scholars drawn principally from Kellogg’s renowned faculty. Email your expression of interest to leadershipseminar@aamg-us.org to receive updated information about the program.

AAMG is excited to welcome our new Western regional representative: Meg Linton, director of galleries and exhibitions of the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California.

Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art

The Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) will sponsor two sessions, hold its annual business meeting, and conduct a special offsite visit at the CAA Annual Conference in Chicago in February 2014. Please visit AHNCA website and look under “AHNCA at CAA 2014” for the program details.

Peter Trippi, president of AHNCA, has organized a truly unique offsite visit for Friday, February 14, 2014. Both National Historic Landmarks, the American Arts and Crafts Second Presbyterian Church and the Glessner House Museum, designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, are located within two miles of the conference hotel (the Hilton Chicago). The total cost is $14 per person, payable on the day of the visits. If you would like to participate in this outing, please email Trippi before January 15, 2014, to confirm.

Foundations in Art: Theory and Education

Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE) will host two events this year at the CAA Annual Conference in Chicago. The affiliated-society session is “A Hybrid Practice: Getting Rid of Digital Media Courses,” and FATE will use its business meeting to host a regional conference, “Project Share.” The projects that are presented specifically use digital tools in the classroom and will be related to the affiliated-society session topic.

The presenters on “A Hybrid Practice” are: Elissa Armstrong, assistant professor and director of art foundation at Virginia Commonwealth University; Jenna Frye, coordinator of electronic media and culture at Maryland Institute College of Art; Mark Schatz, assistant professor and foundations coordinator at Kent State University; and Chris Yates, associate professor and director of foundation studies at Columbus College of Art and Design.

The “Project Share” presenters are: Heather Deyling, professor of foundation studies at the Savannah College of Art and Design; David Fobes, instructor in foundations at San Diego State University; Deborah Hall, associate professor in studio art at Skidmore College; Norberto Gomez, artist and independent scholar; and Harry St.Ours, professor of communication arts at Montgomery College.

Historians of Netherlandish Art

The next formal deadline for submitting manuscripts to Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, the peer-reviewed, open-access ejournal published by the Historians of Netherlandish Art (HNA), is March 1, 2014. In addition to longer articles, the journal now welcomes shorter notes on archival discoveries, iconographical issues, technical studies, and rediscovered works. For submission guidelines, see www.jhna.org or contact Alison Kettering (aketteri@jhna.org), senior editor, for more information.

HNA will hold its next conference June 5–7, 2014, in Boston, Massachusetts. The event will be held in cooperation with the American Association for Netherlandic Studies (AANS) and involve sessions and workshops with focus on Netherlandish art from 1350 to 1750. For submissions on art from 1750 to the present, please contact Henry Luttikhuizen, president of AANS. For the call for papers and more information, visit http://www.hnanews.org/hna/conferences/Call-for-Papers-Boston-2014.pdf.

International Sculpture Center

International Sculpture Center (ISC) has launched Search Feature for Web Special. Since April 2007, a new article not featured in Sculpture magazine has been posted in Web Special in the Online Member Area each month. Topics are aimed at assisting artists and include resource links, when applicable. With the new search feature, members can now find articles posted in Web Special by keywords, tags, or authors. Take a look at the comprehensive information and perspectives offered in Web Special today!

Each year ISC presents an award competition to its member colleges and universities as a means of supporting, encouraging, and recognizing the work of young sculptors and their supporting schools’ faculty and art program. The student-award winners participate in an exhibition at Grounds for Sculpture and in a traveling exhibition hosted by arts organizations across the country. Their work is also featured in Sculpture. Each winner receives a one-year ISC membership; all winners are eligible to apply for a fully sponsored residency to study in Switzerland. To nominate students for this competition, the nominees’ university must first be an ISC university-level member. University memberships cost $200 for institutions in the United States, Canada, and Mexico ($220 for international universities) and include a number of benefits. Students who are interested should talk to their professors about getting involved. To find out more about the program, please visit www.sculpture.org/StudentAwards/2014 or email studentawards@sculpture.org. Nomination deadline: January 1, 2014; University membership form due: March 17, 2014; online student nomination form deadline: March 24, 2014; online student submission form due: April 14, 2014.

Italian Art Society

The Italian Art Society (IAS) seeks proposals for papers for the annual IAS/Kress Lecture Series in Italy, which will take place in Pisa on May 29 or June 16, 2014 (deadline: January 4, 2014). The distinguished scholar selected will speak on a topic related to art of any period from Pisa or Tuscany and will receive an honorarium and lecture allowance.

At the 2014 CAA Annual Conference, IAS invites members to attend its breakfast business meeting at 7:30 AM on February 14, 2014, as well as its sessions on the same day: “Periodization Anxiety in Italian Art: Renaissance, Baroque, or Early Modern” at 9:30 AM and “‘Futuro Anteriore’: Cultural Self-Appropriation as Catalyst in the Art of Italy” at 12:30 PM.

The Program Committee is looking for submissions for IAS-sponsored sessions at the Society for Architectural Historians (Chicago, April 2015; deadline to IAS: December 1, 2014); and the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (New Orleans, October 2014; deadline to IAS: March 2014). Like IAS on Facebook, visit the website and popular Italian art blog, and follow the IAS at Academia.edu and on Twitter. All who are interested in Italian art history are welcomed to join IAS.

National Council of Arts Administrators

The forty-first annual meeting of the National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA) convened September 25–28, 2013, in Richmond, Virginia. The organization owes a debt of gratitude to Richard Roth, Joe Seipel, and Kelly Kerr of VCUarts for organizing a first-rate affair. Speakers included Adam Gopnik, essayist and staff writer for the New Yorker; Jessica Stockholder, sculptor and installation artist; Ben Katchor, cartoonist and MacArthur fellow; and Richard Shiff, Director, director of the Center for the Study of Modernism at the University of Texas at Austin.

Three new board members were elected at the meeting: Leslie Bellavance (Alfred University), Tom Berding (Michigan State University), and Nan Goggin (University of Illinois). They join returning directors Steve Bliss (Savannah College of Art and Design), Cora Lynn Deibler (University of Connecticut ), Andrea Eis (Oakland University, Treasurer), Amy Hauft (University of Texas at Austin, president), Jim Hopfensperger (Western Michigan University, past president), Sergio Soave (Ohio State University), Lydia Thompson (Texas Tech University), and Mel Ziegler (Vanderbilt University).

Activities at CAA’s 2014 Annual Conference in Chicago will include the annual NCAA reception (Thursday, February 13, 5:00–8:00 PM); an affiliated-society session, “Hot Problems/Cool Solutions in Arts Leadership”; and a fast-paced series of five-minute presentations on leadership (Friday, February 14, 5:30–7:00 PM). NCAA enthusiastically welcomes new members, current members, and all interested parties to attend its events.

Public Art Dialogue

Public Art Dialogue (PAD) has several special thematic issues of its scholarly journal, Public Art Dialogue, in progress. “Perspectives on Relational Art,” guest edited by Eli Robb, is in production. The call for submissions for “The Mural Issue,” which will be guest edited by Sally Webster and Sarah Schrank, just closed. There are two current calls for submission. The first is for an “Open Issue” (Fall 2014), to be coedited by Cher Krause Knight and Harriet F. Senie; the submission deadline is March 1, 2014. The second will be on “Digital Art” and guest edited by John Craig Freeman and Mimi Sheller; the submission deadline is September 15, 2014. PAD is published by Taylor and Francis, and for more information, consult the journal’s homepage, which provides detailed descriptions of the forthcoming journal and instructions for submissions. The fall 2013 PAD Newsletter features an interview with Senie and an article on Banksy.

Society for Photographic Education

Registration is now open for the fifty-first national conference of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE), titled “Collaborative Exchanges: Photography in Dialogue” and taking place March 6–9, 2014, in Baltimore, Maryland. Join 1,600 artists, educators, and photographic professionals for programming and dialogue that will fuel your creativity. Explore an exhibits fair featuring over seventy vendors showing the latest equipment, processes, publications, and schools with photo-related programs. Participate in one-on-one portfolio critiques and informal portfolio sharing and take advantage of student volunteer opportunities for reduced admission. Other conference highlights include a print raffle, silent auction, film screenings, exhibitions, tours, receptions, and a dance party. Preview the conference schedule and register online.

Society of Architectural Historians

The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) seeks session proposals for the sixty-eighth annual conference, taking place April 15–19, 2015, in Chicago, Illinois. Celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of its founding, SAH will offer six concurrent paper sessions, in six modules over two days, for a total of thirty-six paper sessions. The society invites both members and nonmembers to chair a session. Since the principal purpose of the conference is to inform attendees of the general state of research in architectural history and related disciplines, session proposals covering every period in the history of architecture and all aspects of the built environment, including landscape and urban history, are encouraged. Session proposals are to be submitted via email by January 15, 2014, to Ken Tadashi Oshima, general chair of the SAH sixty-eighth annual conference, with a cc to Kathy Sturm, SAH director of programs.

Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture

The Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) has planned an active schedule at the annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), to be held November 21–24, 2013, in Boston, Massachusetts. The society will host nine sessions ranging from the imperial era to the present day, including panels that focus on textiles, performance art, artist associations, and collectives, as well as sessions devoted to Russia in the 1890s and Prague in the 1920s. Please join SHERA for its business meeting, scheduled for Friday, November 22, 3:00–4:45 PM.

Since the launch of its website in August 2013, SHERA’s membership has nearly doubled. Members can contribute items to the news blog by sending them to SHERA.artarchitecture@gmail.com. SHERA is pleased to welcome the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as a new institutional member.

Filed under: Affiliated Societies

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.

Nazi-Looted Art “Found in Munich”

A collection of 1,500 artworks confiscated by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s has been found in the German city of Munich. The trove is believed to include works by Matisse, Picasso, and Chagall, the news magazine Focus reports. Some of the works were declared as degenerate by the Nazis, while others were stolen from or forcibly sold for a pittance by Jewish art collectors. If confirmed, it would be one of the largest recoveries of looted art. (Read more from BBC News.)

Painting Thought to Be by Delacroix Discovered in Santa Barbara

Eik Kahng, curator at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, believes she has identified a previously unknown painting by Eugène Delacroix. Given the stature of the French Romantic innovator, that’s no small thing. The painting turned up in a local private collection—the Van Asch van Wyck Trust—and Kahng has now included it in her newly opened exhibition, Delacroix and the Matter of Finish. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)

So Many Stories to Tell for Met’s Digital Chief

After teaching a generation of journalists at Columbia University about how technology was changing journalism and how they needed to change along with it, Sree Sreenivasan became the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first chief digital officer in August. He was in a similar role at Columbia for more than a year before moving to the Met, where he will oversee seventy people working across multiple departments. (Read more from the New York Times.)

Hurricane Sandy, One Year Later

The predictable chaos and lack of information are the outcome of any disaster, but one year after Sandy (which killed 150 people and damaged or destroyed some 650,000 houses), officials, charities, and disaster experts are concluding that much can be done to smooth the recovery process—and that there’s more for architects to do other than drive-by damage assessments and holding empty “ideas” competitions. Now architects are working in neighborhoods to link people to the resources they need. (Read more from the Architectural Record.)

Who Are You, Really?

Employment-related screening tools were the focus of conversation in the human-resources class I teach. As I expected, there were plenty of questions about how employers use internet searches to make decisions about applicant suitability and a fair amount of outrage about how completely unfair employers are when it comes to using digital content to make hiring decisions. (Read more from On Hiring at the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Understanding Cover Letters

Recently, on a listserv in my field known for being welcoming to outsiders and newcomers but also for being rife with discussions that quickly turn ridiculous, a thread on cover letters followed the usual pattern: a new grad student asks what seems to be an innocuous question, a few professors offer semihelpful responses without getting too sucked in, the rogue academic contributes some tongue-in-cheek humor, a few more grad students take the jokes seriously and panic, and the list erupts in false information and rumors. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Gay Student to Lose His Virginity in Live Sex Performance for Art

A gay student plans to lose his virginity live onstage—all in the name of art. Clayton Pettet, a 19-year-old art student at Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design in London, plans to have gay sex in front of a crowd of between fifty and one hundred people in London on January 25, 2014, for a project called Art School Stole My Virginity. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)

As Street Art Grows More Popular, Is It Losing Its Edge?

New York City is a mecca for art, but the latest exhibition drawing crowds isn’t located in a museum—this show is taking place on the streets of the five boroughs, in places you wouldn’t expect art to hang. This particular work, called Waiting in Vain at the Door of the Club, is a piece by a man who goes by the name Banksy, an English-born street artist, and who prefers to remain incognito. (Read more from PBS.)

 

Filed under: CAA News