CAA News Today

Vivian Woo is CAA marketing and development manager.

The Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) held its 2015 meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—the first time ever in a city north of the Mason-Dixon line. This expansion may reflect “the continual growing membership of the organization beyond the traditional confines of the south,” as Kurt Pitluga, an art historian at Slippery Rock University and director of this year’s SECAC, put it in the conference program.

From October 21 to 24, 2015, the industrial city was descended upon by students, educators, and administrators from universities, colleges, community colleges, art schools, and museums, as well as by independent artists and scholars. The four-day event at the Wyndham Grand Hotel in downtown Pittsburgh offered a rich variety of sessions that encouraged conversation and facilitated cooperation about pertinent creative, scholarly, and educational issues among professionals in higher education.

Representing CAA at SECAC this year were Anna Cline, development and marketing assistant, and myself. CAA’s participation as an exhibitor at the conference—alongside the fine-art paper producer Canson, the publisher Thames and Hudson, and the book distributor Scholar’s Choice—was a great opportunity to connect face to face with current CAA members and to meet prospective members. Our table displayed the latest editions of the graduate-program directories, membership brochures, and free copies of the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts—a publication that was especially warmly received. Most important, our presence reminded SECAC attendees of CAA’s own Annual Conference next year in Washington, DC, taking place February 3–6, 2016.

SECAC’s 2015 theme—“confluence”—alluded to Pittsburgh’s geographic location on the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, which form the Ohio River, and likened it to the conceptual convergence and fluidity of borders related to art, architecture, design, education, and pedagogy today. Highlights of the conference included sessions on various topics in art and design, including “Visual Art and the Aesthetics of Cuteness,” which examined Japanese culture and the power of cuteness in the arts, and “Is Graphic Design Fine Art? Does It Matter?,” where graphic designers and fine artists drew contrasts and comparisons to each other while also exploring the rise of the “meme” and the role of art and design in the internet age. The keynote address by Terry Smith, an art historian and theorist at the University of Pittsburgh, examined the two concepts in the title of his talk, “Defining Contemporaneity; Imagining Planetarity,” in an effort to finding productive connections between them.

Conference attendees were treated to perfect sunny fall weather in a city that offered plenty of art and culture outside the doors of the conference hotel. Gallery crawls were scheduled to visit the gallery Future Tenant, the Society for Contemporary Craft, and the Andy Warhol Museum. Paying tribute to the artist in his hometown, the Warhol Museum treated attendees to seven whole floors of gallery and exhibition space with an art collection that includes approximately nine hundred paintings, one hundred sculptures, and thousands of works on paper, prints, and photographs—a must see for any art lover visiting Pittsburgh. In addition, buses were arranged for attendees to visit the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, and the University Art Gallery at the University of Pittsburgh, among others.

Thank you, SECAC for allowing CAA to connect with familiar and new faces. We will see you again next year!