CAA News Today

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

Where Are the Minority Professors?

On average, seventy-five out of every one hundred full-time faculty members at four-year colleges are white. Five are black, and even fewer are Hispanic. But that’s not the whole story. Among the higher ranks and at certain types of institutions, the faculty is even less diverse. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Seven Tips from the Top: Essential Job Advice from US Museum Directors

How do you become a museum director? That’s the question behind a new book of interviews—Eleven Museums, Eleven Directors: Conversations on Art and Leadership—by Michael Shapiro, the former director of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

How Do You Make a Living, Midcareer Artist?

Hank Willis Thomas is midway through the long, slow climb to success as an artist. It’s the type of career that’s seen interest but doesn’t feel solidly sustainable. He talked about the value of an MFA, the problems and advantages of living in New York as an artist, and what banking and art have in common. (Read more from Pacific Standard.)

Syllabus Adjunct Clause

Here is a sample adjunct clause that can be inserted into any syllabus for courses taught by temporary faculty. Please keep in mind that since situations differ from school to school—and even from department to department—the following may not be universally applicable as written. Therefore, if you decide to use it,  make the necessary changes to accurately reflect your own situation. (Read more from School of Doubt.)

Maintaining the Artist Within

Don’t lose sight of that which you love. More important, don’t let life knock your source of creativity out of tune. An artist’s mind never rests, for everything they see, experience, and taste pours over into their vision. Whether you are a painter, writer, architect, chef, dancer, musician, or actor, the fuel for creativity and passion comes from every interaction you have in life. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)

Why Use a Paintbrush When You Can Make Mind-Bending Art with Code?

Computer code underpins many aspects of our lives. Usually we know exactly what we want that code to do—but what if we didn’t? This is the question posed by the Los Angeles software artist Casey Reas, who employs code to form abstract, bewildering, and literally unexpected creations. (Read more from Wired.)

Social Practice Degrees Take Art to a Communal Level

The first academic concentration in social-practice art dates to just 2005, at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Since then, at least ten other institutions have established graduate-level degree programs in the field, which is sometimes called community engagement, contextual practice, or socially engaged art making. (Read more from the New York Times.)

Ten Questions Gallerists Should Be Asking Themselves Now

Art Basel director Marc Spiegler gave a lecture at the Talking Galleries conference in Barcelona at the end of last year, at a starkly transitional moment within the art world, and posed ten questions that every gallerist should be considering seriously because the answers they find will define their future. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)