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.

The Secret History of US Women Painters

Maurine St. Gaudens is an art conservator and the author of Emerging from the Shadows: A Survey of Women Artists Working in California, 1860–1960, a massive full-color, four-volume labor of love and scholarship. She and Joseph Morsman have compiled narratives of 320 female artists working in California in a century underscored with turmoil and change, from the Gilded Age to the world wars to the Great Depression. (Read more from the Philadelphia Inquirer.)

Eleven Artists Who Helped Pave the Way to Marriage Equality

Last year the US Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right—a victory representing long-sought political recognition and validation of identities that have been largely marginalized and stigmatized. To mark this political milestone, Artsy has highlighted eleven artists whose work demonstrates the power visual culture has to explore, share, and make relatable queer narratives. (Read more from Artsy.)

Does “African” Architecture Exist? This Rwandan Architect Thinks So

There aren’t that many African architects out there—Christian Benimana is one of the few. He completed his bachelor degree in 2008 at Tongji University in Shanghai before returning home to Rwanda to forge his career. Awut Atak spoke to Benimana about where Africa’s cities are heading—and what “African” architecture actually is. (Read more from True Africa.)

It’s an Art Gallery. No, a Living Room. OK, Both.

Since the 2008 economic downturn, temporary do-it-yourself art galleries have proliferated in apartments, storefronts, and other spaces all over the country. Call it a response to an art world in which dealer representation is increasingly hard to come by; exhibitions are costly; and formerly affordable areas have priced out artists, forcing them to seek out scrappier locations in which to show their work. (Read more from the New York Times.)

The Digital in the Humanities: An Interview with David Golumbia

The term “digital humanities” has captured the imagination and ire of scholars across America. Supporters of the field, which melds computer science with hermeneutics, champion it as the much-needed means to shake up and expand methods of traditional literary interpretation; for critics, it is a new fad that symbolizes the neoliberal bean counting that is destroying higher education. (Read more from the Los Angeles Review of Books.)

The Improbable History of NYC’s Revolutionary Art School, the Art Students League

If the humble five-story building of the Art Students League on Fifty-Seventh Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue was always easy to overlook, now the massive construction site makes it almost impossible to find. Yet behind the scaffolding, the doors of this 140-year-old art school are still open, with a legacy of the most famous artists in America, such as Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, and Ai Weiwei. (Read more from the Gothamist.)

Art Demystified: What Determines an Artwork’s Value?

What determines an artwork’s value? And why are some works so expensive? To art-world outsiders, the distinctions in price can be confusing. What makes one artwork sell for $10,000 and another for $10 million—or even $100 million? (Read more from Artnet News.)

On Academic Envy

Recently I logged into Facebook and there, right at the top of my news feed, was a link to a colleague’s third published piece in the New Yorker. The same afternoon, two other colleagues were approached by a literary agent about writing a popular nonfiction book. (Read more from Vitae.)