CAA News Today

American Council of Southern Asian Art

The fiftieth anniversary of the American Council of Southern Asian Art (ACSAA) was marked at the ACSAA Symposium XVII, which convened October 15–17, 2015, at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Deepali Dewan, senior curator for the Royal Ontario Museum and ACSAA president, was the symposium’s host. The event consisted of opening and closing keynote lectures by Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Michael Willis, respectively, and two full days of riveting panels, special presentations, and visits to the Royal Ontario Museum and the Aga Khan Museum. Participants included senior scholars, graduate students, museum curators, and artists from the United States, Canada, Europe, India, and the Middle East. The strong international constituency was fitting for the first ACSAA symposium held outside the United States.

American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works

To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Florence floods, the theme for the joint annual meeting of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC) and the Canadian Association for Conservation is “Emergency! Preparing for Disasters and Confronting the Unexpected in Conservation.” The event will be held May 13–17, 2016, at the Palais des Congrès in Montreal, Canada. Colleagues will address, in a broad-based way, the impact of past, present, and future disasters on the protection of cultural property. In addition, papers that address confronting the unexpected in conservation, whether it occurs during the treatment of an artifact or during a natural disaster, are requested. The scope of the theme will include immediate reactions, such as the application of crowd-mapping technology to aid response efforts, as well as longer term developments stemming from disasters, such as the adoption of simple strategies: effective risk-assessment methodologies, the rapid transformation of damaged artifacts into objects of veneration, and the repercussions of instantaneous visibility of destruction. Learn more and register at online.

American Society for Aesthetics

The American Society for Aesthetics (ASA) is sponsoring five meetings in 2016. Please visit the ASA website for the most up-to-date calls for papers for ASA events and for meetings organized by other schools and organizations.

Association of Print Scholars

The Association of Print Scholars (APS) hosted its inaugural lecture, “Why Study Prints Now?” by Peter Parshall, in September 2015. The group also held a scholarly conference in November 2015, with sections devoted to five-minute presentations by doctoral students on their dissertation topics and an afternoon session on “Method, Material, and Meaning: Technical Art History and the Study of Prints.”​

APS invites applications for two major opportunities directed at early-career scholars. A printmak​ing workshop, scheduled for May 20–21, 2016, in Providence, Rhode Island, ​is intended to provide advanced graduate students and early-career professionals with the opportunity to learn about prints in a hands-on way through presentations and instruction by practitioners including Andrew Raftery and Brian Shure. Some funding is available, by application, to offset the costs of travel. The Schulman and Bullard Article Prize ($2,000) is given annually to an article published by an early-career scholar that features compelling and innovative research on prints or printmaking, across any geographic region and all chronological periods. Nomination (and self-nomination) criteria and instructions are available on the APS website.

Foundations in Art: Theory and Education

Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE) will soon accept session proposals. The group will also have a series of new membership benefits this year. Members old and new can take advantage of the prorated membership period. Benefits of membership include all enewsletters and the annual FATE in Review journal. Please remember that membership is required to attend the 2017 FATE biennial conference, hosted by the Kansas City Art Institute.

FATE now offers a retiree faculty individual membership rate at $30 for the 2016–17 membership periods. Also, please consider an institutional sponsorship this year at the regular, gold, or silver levels. Annual regular sponsorship at $100 includes one individual membership, five copies of FATE in Review, and your institution’s name on FATE’s website and enewsletters.

FATE is offering further membership benefits for silver and gold institutional sponsorship levels this year. Support your institution’s instructional team through these group memberships. For $250, the silver institutional sponsorship offers four annual memberships and ten copies of FATE in Review. At $500, the gold sponsorship supports ten annual memberships and fifteen copies of FATE in Review.

Renew or sign up on the FATE website. Contact the vice president of FATE membership, Colleen Merrill, with any questions. FATE’s CAA affiliate representative is Naomi J. Falk.

Historians of British Art

The Historians of British Art have announced the winners of its book awards for publications from 2014. The winners were chosen from a nominating list of over eighty books from more than twenty different presses. Awards are granted in three categories. For pre-1800, the recipients are Paul Binski, Gothic Wonder: Art, Artifice, and the Decorated Style, 1290–1350 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); and Mark Hallett, Reynolds: Portraiture in Action (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). For post-1800 books, the winner is John Potvin, Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). In the multiauthor category, the award went to Catherine Jolivette, ed., British Art in the Nuclear Age (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014).

International Association of Art Critics

The United States chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA-USA) will hold its next annual meeting on May 3, 2016, at the Jewish Museum in New York. Please join members of the organization at noon for the press preview of the Roberto Burle-Marx exhibition, followed by the AICA business meeting at 1:00 PM and a workshop, “How Do Art Critics Use Social Media?”

Italian Art Society

The Italian Art Society (IAS) has announced that Megan Holmes of the University of Michigan will deliver the seventh annual IAS/Kress Lecture, in Florence at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, on June 1, 2016. Her lecture is titled “New Perspectives on the Reception of Florentine Panel Painting: Interpreting Scratch Marks.”

The recipient of the first IAS Dissertation Grant is Kelly Whitford, a PhD candidate at Brown University, whose project is “Embodying Belief: Crossing the Ponte Sant’Angelo with Bernini’s Angels.” The inaugural Fogliano/Lester Dissertation Research Grant has been awarded to Krisztina Ilko, a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge, for her project “Artistic Patronage of the Augustinian Hermits in Central Italy in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries.” The recipient of the IAS Research and Publication Grant is Amy Neff of the University of Tennessee, whose project is titled “A Soul’s Journey into God: Art, Theology, and Devotion in the Supplicationes variae (Blibliteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut.25.3).” Finally, the 2016 Fogliano/Lester Research Grant goes to Ioanna Christoforaki from the Research Centre for Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Art at the Academy of Athens for her project, “From Rags to Riches: Importing Cloth and Exporting Fashion between Venice and Cyprus.”

Society of Architectural Historians

The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) has received a $123,000 grant from the Alphawood Foundation to hire Harboe Architects to develop a conservation-management plan for the Charnley-Persky House, which serves as the headquarters of SAH. Designed by the firm Adler and Sullivan in 1891–92 when Frank Lloyd Wright was an apprentice in its office, the Charnley-Persky House will celebrate the 125th anniversary of its design in 2016 with a new conservation-management plan that will assess the current physical state of the structure, identify potential problem areas, and establish conservation priorities for the continued health of the building.

SAH will hold its annual international conference in Pasadena and Los Angeles from April 6 to 10, 2016. The conference will include forty-two paper sessions, roundtable discussions, awards ceremony, and more. Public events include architecture tours and a Saturday seminar on SurveyLA, the Los Angeles Historic Resources Survey. Register online.

SAH is accepting applications for the SAH/Mellon Author Awards, designed to provide financial relief to scholars who are publishing their first monograph on the history of the built environment and who are responsible for paying for image rights and permissions. Deadline: May 15, 2016.

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

At this year’s CAA Annual Conference in Washington DC, the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) sponsored two sessions: “Collecting, Curating, Canonizing, Critiquing: The Institutionalization of Eastern European Art,” chaired by Ksenia Nouril; and a double session led by Alison Hilton, “Exploring Native Traditions in the Arts of Eastern Europe and Russia.” The second part of Hilton’s session took place at the Hillwood Museum and Gardens, which also served as the location for the SHERA membership meeting.

Also at the conference, Margaret Samu served as a host to attendees from Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, and Russia, who were part of the CAA-Getty International Program. Samu arranged meetings with specialists in the visitors’ expertise and facilitated their participation in a full-day preconference program organized by CAA’s International Committee about international issues in art history, as well as in other events connected to the conference.

Visual Resources Association

Places are still available for the Summer Educational Institute (SEI) for Visual Resources and Image Management, to be held June 7–10, 2016, at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. This intensive workshop, organized by the Visual Resources Association (VRA), features a curriculum that will address the latest requirements for professionals in the visual arts charged with the responsibility of image management. Expert instructors will cover: intellectual-property rights; developing and delivering digital content; metadata for cultural-heritage materials; digital preservation; and bringing it all together (projects, people, and budgets). Founded over ten years ago, SEI is a joint project of the Art Libraries Society of North America (also a CAA affiliate) and the Visual Resources Association Foundation. SEI provides the information and experience needed to stay current in a rapidly changing field; the workshop also offers significant networking opportunities. Past participants have included current and recent graduate students, museum professionals, image-rights managers, and art historians. Please feel free to contact the SEI cochairs, Greta Bahnemann or Jesse Henderson, with any questions.