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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.

December 2013

Installation view of Harmony Hammond’s work at Alexander Gray Associates (artworks © Harmony Hammond)

Harmony Hammond
Alexander Gray Associates
508 West 26th Street, No. 215, New York, NY 10001
October 23–December 7, 2013

The first one-person exhibition of work by Harmony Hammond in New York since the 1990s at Alexander Gray Associates is a must-see minisurvey and a reminder that a retrospective of this feminist- and queer-art pioneer, activist, writer, and cofounder of A.I.R. Gallery and Heresies in the city where she began her career in the late 1960s, before moving to New Mexico in the 1980s, is still overdue.

In one of her statements Hammond reminisces that: “the post-modern focus on representation, contributed to an inaccurate reading of the creative climate in New York during the late 1960s and ’70s, a period of interdisciplinary experimentation that resulted in work both conceptual and abstract. Artists moved between the disciplines ignoring, crossing, dissolving boundaries. Abstract painting, especially that coming out of post-minimal concerns of materials and process, was central to the experimentation…. Feminism brought a gendered content to this way of working. I moved to New York’s Lower East Side, and then to the corner of Spring and West Broadway in early fall 1969. It was a period of civil rights and antiwar activism, the gay liberation movement, the second wave feminist movement, and the birth of feminist art. I was influenced by and contributed to early feminist art projects. I painted on blankets, curtains, and bedspreads recycled from women friends, literally putting my life in my art. Rag strips dipped in paint and attached to the painting surface hung down like three-dimensional brushstrokes, their weight altering the painting rectangle. Eventually the rags took over and activated the painting field…. This led to the series Bags, and the slightly larger than life-size Presences. These new pieces could be touched, retouched, repaired, and, like women’s lives, reconfigured. In 1973, I created a series of six floor paintings made out of knit fabric my daughter and I picked from dumpsters. Strips of fabric were braided according to traditional braided rug techniques, but slightly larger and thicker in scale, coiled, stitched to a heavy cloth backing, and partially painted with acrylic paint—the ‘braided rug’ literally and metaphorically becoming ‘the support’ for the painting. The Floorpieces occupied and negotiated a space between painting (off the wall) and sculpture (nearly flat). Placed directly on the floor they called into question assumptions about the ‘place’ of painting.”

Focusing on her longstanding commitment to process-based abstraction, the exhibition includes paintings and works on paper from the past five decades, with a focus on recent paintings and sculptures, allowing a fresh consideration of the way activist concerns and queer identity is inscribed in her work.

Martha Wilson: Staging the Self
Mary H. Dana Women Artist Series at the Douglass Library Galleries
Rutgers University, 8 Chapel Drive, New Brunswick, NJ 08901
October 21, 2013–January 31, 2014

Named the 2013–14 Estelle Lebowitz Visiting Artist in Residence for the Mary H. Dana Women Artist Series, Martha Wilson is the honorary subject of the exhibition Martha Wilson: Staging the Self, organized by the founding directors of the Institute for Women and Art at Rutgers University, Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin, and featuring primarily early work, namely Wilson’s famed photo-text series A portfolio of models.

Born in 1947, Wilson is a pioneering feminist artist and gallery director, belatedly recognized for her innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through roleplaying, costume transformations, “invasions” of other people’s personae and the “camera’s presence.” She began making these works in the early 1970s while in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and further developed her practice after moving to New York in 1974. Two years later Wilson founded and continues to direct Franklin Furnace, an artist-run space that champions the exploration, promotion, and preservation of artist’s books, video, and installation, online, and performance art, “challenging institutional norms, the roles artists play within society, and expectations about what constitutes acceptable art mediums.” As a performance artist she founded and collaborated with Disband, the all-girl conceptual punk band of women artists who couldn’t play any instruments; she also impersonated political figures such as Alexander M. Haig Jr., Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, and Tipper Gore.

Wilson has been described by the New York Times critic Holland Cotter as one of “the half-dozen most important people for art in downtown Manhattan in the 1970s” and was championed early in her career by pioneering critics such Lucy R. Lippard. Yet while prefiguring notions of gender performativity as theorized by Judith Butler and explored by Cindy Sherman, Wilson’s prefeminist strategies of masquerade were marginalized, and her use of her own body often caused her to be written out of the history of Conceptual art, an area in which she radically intervened during the 1970s from the perspective of a woman. Tellingly, Wilson had her first solo exhibition in New York at Mitchell Algus Gallery, Martha Wilson: Photo/Text Works, 1971–74, only in 2008.

Isa Genzken. Disco Soon (Ground Zero), 2008, synthetic polymer paint on plastic, cardboard, mirror, spray paint, metal, fabric, hose lights, mirror foil, printed sticker, wood blocks, fiberboard, and casters, 86 1/4 x 80 11/16 x 64 15/16 in. Carlos and Rosa de la Cruz Collection (artwork © Isa Genzken; photograph provided by the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin)

Isa Genzken: Retrospective
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019
November 23, 2013–March 10, 2014

Isa Genzken: Retrospective is the first comprehensive retrospective of the German multimedia artist in an American museum and the largest survey of her work to date. Surprisingly embraced by MoMA, Genzken has been both a controversial and an influential figure in German art of the past thirty years, appreciated mostly outside her country and known as much for her work as for her marriage with Gerhardt Richter, her Nazi family background, and her self-destructive lifestyle (due to mental illness and alcoholism). Capitalizing idiosyncratically on found objects and collage, this exhibition features Genzken’s small- and installation- scale works that have helped to redefine contemporary assemblage. The artist, however, has worked in many media over the past forty years, including painting, photography, collage, drawing, artist’s books, film, and public sculpture. She begun in the 1970s with geometric curved sculptures from wood whose often-ellipsoid shape could reference the theosophic investigations of her grandfather. The cement sculptures she initiated in the 1980s remain an incredibly powerful chapter of her work and interweave her constant interest in architecture with the “metaphors of vulnerability” that play a central role in her art making, according to the Der Spiegel critic Ulrike Knöfel. Bringing almost 150 objects shown in the United States for the first time, this retrospective offers a thorough introduction to the artist’s work, as well as to the role of “minimalism and trash, neon and despair” in it, as the same critic observes. After its run at MoMA, the show will travel to museums in Dallas and Chicago.

KIMSOOJA: Unfolding
Vancouver Art Gallery
750 Hornby Street, Vancouver, British Columbia,
Canada V6Z 2H7
October 11, 2013–January 26, 2014

Constantly addressing issues of the displaced self and conditions of humanity, Kimsooja “experiments with various media through immobility and non-doing that inverts the notion of the artist as the predominant actor and maker.”

Born in Daegu, Korea, Kimsooja is based in New York, Paris, and Seoul and came to international fame in the 1990s following a P.S.1 residency in New York. This period paved the way for some of her most signature pieces: Bottari, Cities on the Move—2727km Bottari Truck, and A Needle Woman, shown in numerous exhibitions and biennales around the world. Bottari Truck consisted of a truck loaded with bottari, the Korean word for bundle, which traveled throughout Korea for eleven days. Replaced by bags in modern society, as the artist has recently said, “Bottari is the most flexible container in which we carry the minimized valuable things and its use is universal through history. We keep precious things, mostly in dangerous zones of our life, such as war, migration, exile, separation or a move where urgency take places. Anyone can make Bottari…. however, I’ve been intentionally wrapping it with used or abandoned Korean bedcovers that were made for newly married couples with symbols and embroideries and mostly wrapping used clothing inside—that has significant meanings and questions on life. In other words, the Bottari I wrap is an object that contains husks of our body wrapped with a fabric that is the place of birth, love, dream, suffering and death—a frame of life. While Bottari wraps bodies and souls, containing past, present, and future, a Bottari truck is rather a process than a product, or rather oscillating between the process and the object that is a social sculpture. It represents an abstraction of personage, an abstraction of society and history, and that of time and memory. It is a loaded self, a loaded others, a loaded history, a loaded in-between. Bottari Truck is a processing object throughout space and time, locating and dislocating ourselves to the place where we came from, and where we are going. I find Bottari as a womb and a tomb, globe and universe, and Bottari Truck is a bundle of bundle of bundle folding and unfolding our mind and geography, time and space.”

Following the Bottari Truck project, Kimsooja started a video performance called A Needle Woman, showing the artist from the back standing in the middle of main thoroughfares in various cities throughout the world. This work further developed the concept of sewing toward abstraction, bringing together people, nature, cultures, and civilizations.

As a broad survey that includes early textile-based pieces from the 1980s to large site-specific installations as Bottari Truck and videos, this exhibition highlights works that address notions of time, memory, and displacement in the face of change and social flux, and of the relationship between the human body and the material world.

Filed under: CWA Picks, Uncategorized — Tags:

CAA Offers Access to JSTOR for Members

posted by December 10, 2013

JPASS, a new JSTOR access plan for individuals, is ideal for CAA members who want individual access to JSTOR’s rich archival collections. It is especially valuable for individuals without institutional access; faculty members at institutions with limited access to JSTOR; and adjuncts with irregular access to library resources. Regardless of your professional affiliation, JPASS serves as your personal library card to the expansive selection of journals on JSTOR.

As part of your CAA membership, you may purchase a one-year JPASS access plan for $99—a 50 percent discount on the listed rate!

JPASS includes unlimited reading and up to 120 article downloads—not only to The Art Bulletin and Art Journal but also to more than 1,500 humanities, social science, and science journals in the JSTOR archival collections, including the Burlington Magazine, Design Issues, Gesta, the Journal of African Cultural Studies, Muqarnas, and October.

CAA invites you to review the JPASS collections at http://jpass.jstor.org/collections, where you can view all the journal titles and date ranges that are available to JPASS subscribers, as well as filter titles by subject to help you discover publications of interest to you.

Dedicated support personnel for JPASS are available Monday–Friday, 8:30 AM–5:30 PM EDT. You can also get real-time support via Twitter: @JSTORSupport. Here are other ways to learn more:

To use your member discount to sign up for JPASS, log into your CAA account and click the Member Benefits link on the left and then refer to the JPASS instructions which includes the JSTOR custom link.  This will admit you to the JPASS purchase website for CAA members.

JSTOR provides access to the complete back runs of CAA’s journals and preserves them in a long-term archive. Users may search, browse, view, and print full-text, high-resolution PDFs of articles from The Art Bulletin (published since 1913) and Art Journal (published since 1929). Coverage in JSTOR includes the journals’ previous titles from their first issues through 2010. Because of a moving wall that changes annually, the most recent three years (2011–13) are not yet available.

The Art Bulletin and Art Journal are available through JSTOR’s Arts & Sciences III Collection. Users at participating institutions can gain access to these two journals through their institutions—contact your librarian to find out if you are eligible and, if so, how to access the journals. In a separate benefit, CAA offers online access to back issues of its two print publications for CAA members unaffiliated with an institution for $20 a year through a special arrangement with JSTOR. Please contact CAA’s Member Services if you have questions about this benefit.

You can review the tables of contents for The Art Bulletin (1996–present) on the CAA website and for Art Journal (1998–present) on its own website.

CWA Picks for December 2013

posted by December 05, 2013

Each month CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts produces a curated list, called CWA Picks, of recommended exhibitions and events related to feminist art and scholarship in North America and around the world.

The CWA Picks for December 2013 consist of four important survey exhibitions of work by Isa Genzken at the Museum of Modern Art and Harmony Hammond at Alexander Gray Associates in New York, by Martha Wilson at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and by Kimsooja in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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.

Image Caption

Isa Genzken in her studio, 1982 (photograph provided by the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin).

Filed under: Committees, Exhibitions

Anne Collins Goodyear, president of CAA’s Board of Directors, and Linda Downs, the organization’s executive director, signed the following letter.

Letter Urging Secretary John Kerry to Restore Funding for Title VIII by December 6

December 4, 2013
The Honorable John Kerry
Secretary of State
United States Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520

Dear Secretary Kerry:

The undersigned individuals and organizations share with the Department of State the fundamental goal of creating a peaceful, secure, and prosperous global future. To achieve such an end in an increasingly complex world, the U.S. needs accurate analyses by well-trained specialists both in and outside the government.

For the region of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, the Department of State has for thirty years trained future leaders and scholars through the Research and Training for Eastern Europe and the New Independent States of the Former Soviet Union Act (PL 90-164, Title VIII). Title VIII has played a significant part in the education of many prominent American policymakers and specialists in the region, including former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice, and US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul. We are writing to you today to urge you to restore funding for the Title VIII program and to include funding for the Title VIII program as part of your fiscal year 2015 budget request.

Title VIII programs in fiscal year 2012 were administrated by the Bureau of Intelligence and Research and supported by the Department of State at a level of $3.5 million. Despite its low cost, Title VIII is a program that continues to have a significant impact on the analytic and diplomatic capacities of the Department of State and on the research base in the academic sector.

At stake are programs that support policy-relevant research, advanced language training, and a specialized information clearing house and reference service related to countries in Central Asia and the Caucasus, Russia and Eastern Europe. A remarkably high percentage of US university faculty who teach about Eastern Europe and Eurasia, State Department specialists on the region, and think tank analysts who advise policymakers have conducted their field work and research and obtained advanced language proficiency thanks to programs funded by Title VIII.

Although the Department of State solicited applications for a fiscal year 2013 Title VIII program, the Department in September announced the cancellation of the program for fiscal year 2013. We believe the discontinuation of this program is short-sighted and not in the national interest. We urge you to use existing authority to continue to fund this program under the administration of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at least at the current funding level of $3.5 million for fiscal years 2013 and 2014. We also ask that you include at least that level of funding within the fiscal year 2015 budget request for the Title VIII program.

Title VIII is a small but impactful program that has directly supported several generations of policymakers, diplomats and scholars and indirectly supported their thousands of students and the people who depend on their analyses to make the right business, humanitarian, and foreign policy decisions about a crucial region of the world.

We respectfully draw your attention to this issue and strongly urge that the Department of State immediately take steps to restore funding for the Title VIII program.

Sincerely,

Diane Koenker
President, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Professor of History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Stephen Hanson
Vice President, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Vice Provost of International Affairs, College of William and Mary

Judith Deutsch Kornblatt
Immediate Past President, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Professor Emerita of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Wisconsin

Lynda Park
Executive Director, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

Dan Davidson
President, American Councils of International Education

William Rivers
Executive Director, National Council for Languages and International Studies

Laura Adams
Director of the Program on Central Asia and Caucasus, Harvard University

Anne Collins Goodyear
President, College Art Association
Codirector, Bowdoin College Museum of Art

Linda Downs
Executive Director, College Art Association

In an effort to promote greater interaction and exchange between American and international art historians and artists, CAA offers twenty International Travel Grants to bring colleagues from around the world to its Annual Conference, to be held next year in Chicago from February 12 to 15, 2014. This is the third year of the program, which has been generously funded by the Getty Foundation since its inception. CAA is pleased to announce this year’s recipients—professors of art history, curators, and artists who teach art history—who were selected by a jury of CAA members from a highly competitive group of applicants. Their biographies are listed below.

In addition to covering travel expenses, hotel accommodations, and per diems, the CAA International Travel Grants include conference registration and a one-year CAA membership. At the conference, the twenty recipients will be paired with hosts, who will introduce them to CAA and to specific colleagues who share their interests. Members of CAA’s International Committee have agreed to serve as hosts, along with representatives from the National Committee for the History of Art (NCHA). CAA is grateful to NCHA for renewing its generous underwriting of the hosts’ expenses. The program will begin on February 11 with an introductory preconference for grant recipients and their hosts.

Grant recipients from previous years have found the experience enormously beneficial. Didier Houenoude, a 2012 grantee from Benin, reflected that “Meeting different colleagues from all over the world was a great experience…. I learned how possible and great it is to work with others although we have different research fields. I am convinced that it is very important to work in collaboration with other researchers.” Marina Vicelja-Matijašić, a 2013 grantee from Croatia, stated: “The possibility to talk about ‘general problems and issues’ such as global art history or crisis in art history in an international audience and sharing ideas from different perspectives was of great value.” Musarrat Hasan, a 2013 grantee from Pakistan, described the personal impact of the program, saying: “A whole new range and scope of possibilities have entered my horizon…. On a personal and human level it was a great gathering for creating global understanding.”

CAA hopes that the travel-grant program will not only increase international participation in the organization’s activities, but also expand international networking and the exchange of ideas both during and after the conference. The Getty-funded International Travel Grant Program supplements CAA’s regular program of Annual Conference Travel Grants for graduate students and international artists and scholars. We look forward to welcoming the grant recipients in Chicago at the next Annual Conference. To learn more about the CAA International Travel Grant Program, visit www.collegeart.org/travelgrants/gettyor contact project director Janet Landay at jlanday@collegeart.org.

Rael Artel

Rael Artel

Rael Artel is a curator of contemporary art and, since April 2013, director of the Tartu Art Museum in Estonia. She graduated from the Institute of Art History at the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2003 and participated in the De Appel Curatorial Training Programme in Amsterdam in 2004–5. Since 2000 she has curated projects in Estonia, Warsaw, Lisbon, Amsterdam, and New York. Artel is the artistic director of the festival of contemporary art in Tartu called ART IST KUKU NU UT. She is also the initiator and moderator of Public Preparation, an international platform for network-based communication and collective research.

Recent exhibitions include Let’s Talk about Nationalism! Between Ideology and Identity (Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia, 2010); Lost in Transition (Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn, 2011); Art Must Be Beautiful: Selected Works by Marina Abramović (Tartu Art Museum, 2011); Life in the Forest (Arsenal Gallery, Bialystok, Poland, 2011); After Socialist Statues, KIM? (Contemporary Art Centre, Riga, Latvia, 2011); Explosion in Pärnu (Kumu Art Museum, 2012); and Marge Monko: How to Wear Red? (Tartu Art Museum, 2013).

Eric Appau Asante

Eric Appau Asante

Eric Appau Asante is a senior member and lecturer of art history at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana. He earned a PhD in art history (African art and culture) from the same university, where he currently teaches courses in the history of African art and culture, philosophy of African art and culture, research methodology, and history of global art.

For the past seven years Asante has concentrated his efforts on research and teaching people about history and symbolism in African art as well as art and memorial culture. In addition to these subjects he is interested in gender and art production, philosophies and educational connotations of African art, and wood culture and art production. In January 2013 he became Ghana’s coordinator for the International Wood Culture Society.

 

Cezar Bartholomeu

Cezar Bartholomeu

Cezar Bartholomeu is a photographer and professor of art history at the School of Fine Arts, Department of Art History, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), in Brazil. He received a PhD in Visual Languages from both the UFRJ and the École de Hautes Études in Paris. Since 2010 he has been the editor-in-chief of Arte & Ensaios, one of Brazil’s major art journals. His areas of research include photography as art, photography’s history and theory, and contemporary art and photography in Brazil and worldwide.

As a photographer, Bartholomeu exhibits widely in Brazil and Europe. His publications include “Três pequenos instantâneos: Benjamin, Barthes, Derrida” in Artefoto (Rio de Janeiro: CCBB, 2002), Celebrações/Negociações – Fotografia Africana na coleção Gilberto Chateaubriand (African Photography in the Gilberto Chateaubriand Collection, Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, 2011), and “Emanation/Abjection” in Laboratório Público de Históra da Arte Mundial (Public World Art History Lab, Rio de Janeiro: UERJ, to be published in 2014).

Laris Borić

Laris Borić

Laris Borić studied art history at the University of Zadar (MA) and Zagreb (MSc) before receiving his PhD from the University of Zadar in 2010. His thesis, “Renaissance Sculpture and Architectural Decoration in Zadar,” indicates his ongoing interest in artistic and architectural production in Adriatic rim cultures between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is especially interested in problems related to the permeation of heterogeneous influences in art (particularly sculpture and architecture) of towns in the northern part of the Adriatic (Venice, Veneto, Istria, Dalmatia, and Marche) and particularly the dominant role of Venice and Padua, and to a lesser degree, Marche, Lombardy, and Tuscany.

Borić is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Zadar, where he teaches courses in European and Croatian Renaissance and Baroque art. In October 2013 he became chair of the department.

 

Eddie Butindo-Mbaalya

Eddie Butindo-Mbaalya

Eddie Butindo-Mbaalya teaches art history, theory, criticism, and education in the Department of Art and Industrial Design at Kyambogo University in Kampala, Uganda. With degrees in art history, art education, and fine arts, he is currently completing his PhD at Makerere University with a dissertation on contemporary public art in Uganda. Butindo-Mbaalya is especially interested in the complexity behind commemorative monuments and the debate about their role in constructing national collective memories.

As an artist, Butindo-Mbaalya is represented in the collection of the Weltkulturen Museum (World Cultures Museum) in Frankfurt, Germany. He has written about the art and architecture of recreational facilities in Uganda and also designed a logo for his country’s National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS) as a World Bank–funded project.

 

Josefina de la Maza Chevesich

Josefina de la Maza Chevesich

Josefina de la Maza Chevesich studied art history and theory at Universidad de Chile before receiving her PhD in art history and criticism from Stony Brook University (New York) in 2013. Her academic interests revolve around the development of Chilean and Latin American art of the long nineteenth century, the definition of pictorial genres, the emergence of fine-art academies and museums, and the impact of authoritarian regimes on art history.

De la Maza’s dissertation, “Contesting Nationalism: Mamarrachos, Slave-Pieces, and ‘Masterpieces’ in Chilean Nineteenth-Century Painting,” explores the development of Chilean painting in the 1880s. Using the notion of mamarracho (bad or passé art) her work explores the emergence of official and unofficial discourses organized around Chilean painting in the midst of the War of the Pacific (1879–83), the constitution of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, and the official actions developed to preserve and promote “national art” in Europe. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Art at Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Santiago, Chile.

Katerina Gadjeva

Katerina Gadjeva

Katerina Gadjeva received a PhD in art history from the National Academy of Arts in Sofia, Bulgaria. She studies the history and theory of photography, in particular, the concept of “visual propaganda” and the role of photography in Socialist ideology in the USSR and Bulgaria. In 2012, she published a monograph on the subject, entitled Between Desire and Reality: Photographic Illustrations in Bulgarian Periodicals 1948–1956.

Gadjeva is an assistant professor in the Institute of Art Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Science, Sofia, and a lecturer in the New Bulgarian University and St. Kliment Ohridski University, Sofia. She also works with young Bulgarian artists who are interested in alternative photographic processes.

 

 

Heba Nayel Barakat Hassanein

Heba Nayel Barakat Hassanein

Heba Nayel Barakat Hassanein is the head of the Curatorial Affairs Department at the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia (IAMM). A graduate of the American University in Cairo, she is a specialist in Islamic art and architecture. She holds an MA in the history of architecture from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, and a PhD from the Oriental Institute in Moscow, Russia. As project manager at the Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage in Cairo, Egypt, she researched and documented Cairo’s nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century presidential palaces.

Hassanein has also documented the early Islamic papyrus collection and the Persian illuminated manuscript collection at the Egyptian National Library in Dar el-Kotob, Egypt, and worked on the pigment analysis of early miniatures. Currently she is overseeing the refurbishment of IAMM’s permanent galleries, researching artifacts, and supervising exhibitions and accompanying catalogues for the museum’s special-exhibition galleries.

Lilianne Lugo Herrera

Lilianne Lugo Herrera

Lilianne Lugo Herrera holds a degree in theater arts with a specialization in playwriting from the Universidad de las Artes in Havana, Cuba. Since 2010 she has been a professor at that university and vice dean of research and postgraduate studies at its Faculty of Theater.

Herrera is also the editor of Tablas, a magazine of Cuban theater. Herrera researches the relationships between the history of art and the history of theater and their interrelationships in the contemporary practice of art and the performing arts. Three of her plays have been published, one of them in the United States, and she has won several awards in playwriting. Herrera is an active participant in festivals, conferences, and residencies both in Cuba and internationally.

Hugues Heumen Tchana

Hugues Heumen Tchana

Hugues Heumen Tchana is a junior lecturer in the Department of Fine Arts and Heritage Sciences at the Higher Institute of the Sahel, University of Maroua, Cameroon. He is currently completing his PhD in museology with a dissertation on “Museums in the Cultural Sphere of the Grassfields of Cameroon: History, Management, and Current Stake.” The Higher Institute of the Sahel opened in 2010.

Heumen Tchana teaches courses on cultural heritage and museum management and supervises student internships in a number of museums in Cameroon. In 2007, he was awarded the international competitive examination scholarship for a master’s degree (2007–9) from the University of Senghor in Alexandria, Egypt. In 2009, Heumen Tchana completed an MA in development specializing in the management of cultural heritage, also from the University of Senghor.

Kanwal Khalid

Kanwal Khalid

Kanwal Khalid holds a BFA and MFA in graphic design, an MPhil in art history, and a PhD in fine arts, all from Punjab University in Lahore, Pakistan. She specializes in the history of South Asian art and design, with a particular focus on miniature painting in nineteenth-century Lahore. A practicing miniaturist, she is currently an assistant professor at the Institute of Design and Visual Arts, Lahore College for Women University. Previously she was the curator of paintings at the Lahore Museum.

Khalid serves on the editorial board of the Trust for History, Art and Architecture of Pakistan (THAAP), a forum for publications and research journal. She is also a board member of several organizations, including the Rotary Club Lahore Mozang and the Delaware Lahore Delhi Partnership for Peace, a nonprofit NGO of private citizens in the United States, Pakistan, and India dedicated to the creation of mutual understanding and goodwill.

Mahmuda Khnam

Mahmuda Khnam

Mahmuda Khnam is an assistant professor in the Department of Islamic History and Culture, Jagannath University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. She has been teaching and researching Islamic art, especially that of the Indian subcontinent, for more than a decade. Before joining the newly established university in 2012, she taught at Eden College in Dhaka.

Having earned her MPhil with a dissertation on Mughal architecture in the Comilla region of Bangladesh, Khnam is currently completing her PhD, researching the development of painting in Bengal during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In addition to a monograph based on her MPhil thesis, Khnam has published a number of articles on Islamic art and the art of Bengal, mostly in her native language, Bangla.

 

Daria Kostina

Daria Kostina

Daria Kostina is an assistant professor in the Department of Art History and Cultural Studies at the Ural Federal University in Yekaterinburg, Russia. She is also a curator at the B.U.Kashkin Museum, an experimental exhibition space and collection of underground and alternative art, housed within the same department and university. In addition to Yekaterinburg, Kostina has curated exhibitions in Saint Petersburg and New York.

Kostina studies Russian émigré art of the 1920s and 1930s, in particular artists who lived in the Czech Republic, and regional Russian underground and alternative art from the 1960 to the 1980s. Her PhD dissertation (in progress) is devoted to the work of Grigory Musatov, a Russian artist who emigrated to Prague in 1920. She is also interested in urban studies and in 2012 organized interdisciplinary workshop for emerging scholars, Contemporary Art as a Humanization Instrument for Public Spaces (Yekaterinburg).

Portia Malatjie

Portia Malatjie

Portia Malatjie is a South African curator and art historian based in Grahamstown and Johannesburg. She completed an MA in the history of art at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2011, following a fine-art degree at the same institution in 2008. She has curated numerous exhibitions of contemporary art, including CityTales and CountryScapes at Museum Africa (2011), Transference at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (2012), and the 2012 MTN New Contemporaries Award, an exhibition held at the historic Castle of Goodhope’s B Block in Cape Town. She has published widely in the Mail & Guardian, Artthrob, and Third Text and in numerous exhibition catalogues.

In 2011, Malatjie participated in the 24 Hour Suburban Residency at the Sober and Lonely Institute for Contemporary Art, where she organized a one-day workshop for emerging curators. A lecturer at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, she is currently researching the subject of black feminism in the context of South African art history and contemporary curatorial practices in her country and in other parts of Africa.

Fernando Martínez Nespral

Fernando Martínez Nespral

Fernando Martínez Nespral was trained as an architect at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina and holds a PhD in history from Torcuato Di Tella University in Buenos Aires. He studies connections between the Islamic world and Hispanic American culture in the fields of architecture and art history. Approaching this subject from diverse starting points—a dictionary of Spanish words with Arabic origins, foreign accounts of domestic architecture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, transcultural use of Spanish tiles—he is currently working on Islamic mashrabiya (balconies closed with lattice) and their frequent use in Latin American countries, especially Peru.

Martínez Nespral teaches courses on the history of architecture and is also a main researcher at the American Art and Aesthetics Research Institute, both positions at the School of Architecture, Design and Urbanism at the University of Buenos Aires.

 

 

Susana S. Martins

Susana S. Martins

Susana S. Martins is currently an FCT-Portugal Research Fellow both at the Institute for Art History, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, and at the Institute for Cultural Studies, Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. Initially trained as an art historian in Lisbon, she was awarded a PhD in photography and cultural studies from the arts faculty of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, with the work “Portugal as Seen through Foreign Eyes: Photography and Visual Culture in the 1950s.

Martins studies the history and theory of photography, with a particular focus on travel books, tourism, exhibitions, cinema, visual arts, surveillance, national identities, and postcolonial studies. She is interested in the different roles photography has played in international and universal exhibitions since the nineteenth century and also studies contemporary art, film, and politics. Since 2008 Martins has served as an art-history professor in the fields of photography, visual arts, communication semiotics, Impressionism, and modernity.

Magdalena Anna Nowak

Magdalena Anna Nowak

Magdalena Anna Nowak is an assistant curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Museum in Warsaw. She received an MA from the Institute of Art History at the University of Warsaw in 2010, having spent the previous year at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris in the Department of Theories et Pratiques du Langage et des Arts. Her research then concentrated mainly on contemporary video art. In her current position she is in charge of the film and new-media collections at the museum and also curates temporary exhibitions.

Nowak is currently writing a PhD dissertation on repetition and reenactment of old-master paintings in video art. Her research concerns the interactions between old and contemporary art, the empathy theory, Aby Warburg’s legacy, the representation of emotions in art, and viewers’ reactions toward depicted passions and neuro art history. She is also interested in Polish art from the 1970s.

Freeborn Odiboh

Freeborn Odiboh

Freeborn Odiboh is a Nigerian artist, art historian, and critic. He holds a BFA in sculpture from the University of Benin, Benin City (1984), an MA in African visual arts history from the University of Ibadan (1987), and a PhD in art history from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (2004). He is an associate professor of art history and art criticism, Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Benin. Odiboh has received a number of international awards, including the Leventis postdoctoral fellowship at the University of London (2006) and a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies’ African Humanities Postdoctoral Program (2010–11).

In addition to publishing over twenty-seven articles in international and national journals, Odiboh published his first book, entitled Creative Reformation of Existing African tradition: The Abayomi Barber Art School and Modern Nigerian Art, in 2012. He is currently writing his second book, Africanizing a Modern African Art History Curriculum from Nigerian Experience. Odiboh’s art has been presented in several solo and group exhibitions in his country.

Adriana Oprea

Adriana Oprea

Adriana Oprea is a Romanian critic and art historian. She received her MA in art history at the National University of Arts in Bucharest with a study of feminism in recent Romanian art. She is currently pursuing a PhD, focusing on the discourse of art criticism and the status of the art critic during and after the Communist regime in Romania. Since 2006, Oprea has been a researcher and archivist at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest, where she organizes data regarding the activity of Romanian artists.

Oprea frequently collaborates with art spaces and writes essays for exhibition catalogues and reviews for Romanian magazines. She is associate editor for ARTA magazine, the main Romanian art publication during the Communist era and one of the few concerned with the present state of Romanian art. She sometimes curates exhibitions and on rare occasions poses as an artist. Oprea lives and works in Bucharest.

Ahmed Wahby

Ahmed Wahby

Ahmed Wahby is an Egyptian architect, art historian, and lover of Islamic art and architecture. Born in Nigeria, he grew up in the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates and moved to Cairo in the late 1980s. As a child, due to his many travels with his parents, he developed an interest in different cultures. While pursuing an MA in Islamic art from the American University in Cairo, he traveled to eastern China to explore historical Chinese mosques.

Wahby further developed his understanding of Islamic art, architecture, and culture by completing a PhD in the Oriental Department of the Otto-Friedrich University, School of Human Sciences, Art and Culture, in Bamberg, Germany. His dissertation research investigated the influences of Arab merchants on the shrines and mosques of the Indonesian island of Java in the fifteen and sixteenth centuries. Wahby is currently an assistant professor of design theory in the Faculty of Applied Sciences and Arts at the German University in Cairo.

Support

Major support for CAA’s International Travel Grant Program has been provided by: Getty Foundation

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CAA invites you to help shape the future of the organization by serving on the 2014–15 Nominating Committee. Each year, this committee nominates and interviews potential candidates for the CAA Board of Directors and selects the final slate for the membership’s vote. The candidates for the 2014–18 board election were announced on November 26, 2013.

The Board of Directors and the Nominating Committee strive to find the best candidates that represent the broad subdisciplines and practitioners represented in the membership. The current Nominating Committee will choose the new members of its own committee at its business meeting, to be held at the 2014 Annual Conference in Chicago in February. Once selected, all committee members must propose, in the spring, a minimum of five and a maximum of ten people for the board. Service on the committee also involves conducting telephone interviews with candidates during the summer and meeting in fall 2014 to select the final board slate. Finally, all Nominating Committee members attend their business meeting, at the New York conference in 2015, to select the next committee.

Nominations and self-nominations should include a brief statement of interest and a 2–3 page CV. Please email a statement and your CV as Word attachments to the attention of DeWitt Godfrey, CAA vice president for committees, care of Vanessa Jalet, CAA executive liaison. Deadline: January 3, 2014.

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.

Detroit Bankruptcy Creditors Ask Judge to Take Steps toward Sale of DIA Treasures

A coalition of the largest creditors in Detroit’s bankruptcy is taking the first legal step toward pressuring the city to sell art at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Three bond insurers, the city’s largest employee union, and several European banks filed a motion in federal court last week asking Judge Steven Rhodes to appoint a committee to oversee an independent evaluation of the market value of the multibillion-dollar city-owned collection at the DIA. (Read more from the Detroit Free Press.)

Debating an MFA? The Lowdown on Art School Risks and Returns

For aspiring artists, December is the cruelest month, when thoughts of pursuing an MFA must turn to action or be cast to the winds. It’s grad-school application time—and what a time it is to undertake such a commitment! Given the skyrocketing cost of tuition, mounting student debt, high interest rates on loans, and a tough job market, you’d be crazy not to measure your education’s value against the risk involved in paying for it, especially if you are considering a master’s degree in art or design. (Read more from Modern Painters.)

When Do Great Artists Hit Peak Creativity?

The question of when highly accomplished people reach their peak level of creativity has long fascinated researchers. Some make huge breakthroughs relatively early in life: think of Igor Stravinsky, who composed the groundbreaking ballet The Rite of Spring at age 31. Others go through an extensive period of trial and error before finding their unique voice. A 2011 study found modern-day physicists make their most innovative discoveries at age 48. (Read more from Pacific Standard.)

Are Arts Donors Also Arts Leaders?

If a wealthy person writes a large check to a worthy cultural organization, does that constitute an act of leadership? It’s an interesting question. You’d think it must, since that increasingly has become the descriptive word of choice, along with “vision,” in the speeches of thanks from grateful recipients, preferably coupled with adjectives on the level of “extraordinary” or “stunning.” (Read more from the Chicago Tribune.)

Wrapping Up: Asking Students to Reflect and Evaluate

We’re nearly at the end of the semester, and I’m currently writing the latest iteration of my students’ final (nontest) assignment for the semester, the portfolio and self-evaluation. The instructions for the assignment are fairly straightforward: to create their portfolio, students are asked to gather all of their work completed during the semester and then, based on provided questions or prompts, write two to three pages reflecting on their work for the semester. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)

The Art of Art Dealing

Do you want to know how to sell art? Do you have one foot in the past? Do you have your other foot in the future? Do you consider yourself someone with a point of view and something to say? If you answered yes to these questions, then this article is for you. (Read more from the Gallerist.)

Employed, but…

A new study looking at large cohorts of PhD recipients in history is quick to point out that the doctorate in the field almost always seems to result in employment—and not of the barista variety. Further, the study finds that many new doctorates are finding their way to the tenure track—and that such positions still exist for those starting their careers. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

California Using $2 Million Arts Grant Windfall for New Programs

The California Arts Council, the agency behind state government’s arts grants, is putting down most of its chips from a one-time, $2 million funding windfall on several new bets involving arts education and community improvement through the arts. Arts council leaders are hoping that quick payoffs in the form of early success stories from the new programs will improve the long-neglected agency’s chances of replenishing its depleted funding. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)

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