CAA News Today
CAA Local College Tour
posted by CAA — September 30, 2016
Students are crucial to CAA and the work we do. Support and interest from student members allows us to provide fellowships, professional development, mentorships, and job placement services to those very same students. In the coming months, CAA is visiting several local New York colleges and universities in order to connect with our youngest and one of our most vital constituencies. Below is our upcoming schedule. We hope to see you there.
Monday Oct. 10, 10AM-12PM at Parsons Fine Arts
Tuesday Nov. 1st at Pratt Institute (Time TBD)
Wednesday Nov. 2nd at Pratt Institute (Time TBD)
Friday Nov. 18th, 12PM-4PM at School of Visual Arts
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — September 30, 2016
Alessia Frassani reviews The Lienzo of Tlapiltepec: A Painted History from the Northern Mixteca, a collection of multidisciplinary studies edited by Arni Brownstone. Focusing on lienzos, “large painted cloths produced after the Spanish invasion of Mexico,” the book makes “a difficult but important aspect of indigenous Mexican history and culture available to a wide audience.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Jennifer W. Olmsted discusses Delacroix and the Matter of Finish, an exhibition catalogue edited by curator Eik Kahng for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. The painting The Last Words of Marcus Aurelius was the impetus for the show and publication, which “build a case” for the attribution of the artwork to Delacroix while addressing issues of “authorship, pedagogy, and inheritance.” Read the full reviews at caa.reviews.
John A. Tyson examines Krista A. Thompson’s Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice. The “multifaceted,” “generally excellent” volume “explores the ways in which bling aesthetics and shining can be forms of resistance,” and “shows that non-elite culture holds up to serious academic scrutiny.”
John Szostak reads Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 by Gennifer Weisenfeld. A “comprehensive, fascinating, and informative” contribution to the subject of “disaster culture,” the book examines a “historic catastrophe through the visual-culture lens of image production and consumption.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Caa.reviews publishes over 150 reviews each year. Founded in 1998, the site publishes timely scholarly and critical reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by the College Art Association. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate. Read more reviews at caa.reviews.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — September 28, 2016
Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Zero Correlation between Evaluations and Learning
A number of studies suggest that student evaluations of teaching are unreliable due to various biases against instructors. Yet conventional wisdom remains that students learn best from highly rated instructors. What if the data backing up conventional wisdom were off? A new study suggests that past analyses linking student achievement to high student teaching evaluation ratings are flawed. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
How Colleges Should Adapt in a Networked Age
Perhaps you’ve stood in the front of a classroom, looked out on the room full of students distractedly checking email or Facebook, and thought: they’re just not that into this. When you were younger, students were more respectful of the professor at the podium. The change may indicate a bigger shift in attitudes toward college and authority figures in general. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Autocorrect: The Politics of Museum Collection Re-Hangs
In the past year, three major New York museums—the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Brooklyn Museum—as well as a host of others around the world, have reinstalled their collection galleries in ways that privilege the alternative historical trajectory or new discovery over the transcendent masterpiece. (Read more from ARTnews.)
Back to Nature
By 2016 it is obvious that midcentury modernism is the defining design influence of the decade, with slim, sculpted furniture and thin, minimalist lines now ubiquitous. But a parallel trend has developed that revives a different aspect of the modernist aesthetic, just in time to address newer anxieties about our looming environmental apocalypse: the use of plants as design elements. (Read more from Curbed.)
How to Create Gender Equality in the Arts
Last week at the New School in New York, four female museum directors gazed up at an image of a woman sporting the all-caps slogan “The Future Is Female.” They were gathered to discuss the dearth of women in art-world leadership roles—and what it takes to get there. (Read more from Artsy.)
Self-Made Supermodels
In early 2015, near the end of her MFA in fine arts at Parsons, Leah Schrager set out on a project to create a celebrity by 2020—entirely via the internet—as an art practice. The celebrity she began to create was a hyper-sexy, cyber-savvy female rock star named Ona. (Read more from Rhizome.)
MoMA Will Make Thousands of Exhibition Images Available Online
After years of planning and digitizing, hundreds of thousands of documents and photographs in the Museum of Modern Art’s archives will now be available online. The digital-archive project will include almost 33,000 exhibition installation photographs, along with the pages of 800 out-of-print catalogs and more than 1,000 exhibition checklists, documents related to more than 3,500 exhibitions from 1929 through 1989. (Read more from the New York Times.)
How to Be a Better Networker
Your network starts locally with the people know from your lab or office, the floor you are on, your department, the journal club you attend, the lunchroom, and the like. Then, what do you do outside your training? Do you play a sport in a student league? Are you involved in a religious organization? Do you have kids and meet other parents through their care or activities? (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
CAA Seeks Mock Interviewers
posted by CAA — September 26, 2016
Participants in the Interview Hall at the 2016 Annual Conference (photograph by Bradley Marks)CAA’s Student and Emerging Professionals Committee seeks established professionals to volunteer as practice job interviewers for the Mock Interview Sessions at the 2017 Annual Conference in New York. Participating as an interviewer is an excellent way to serve the field and to assist with the professional development of the next generation of artists and scholars.
In these sessions, interviewers pose as a prospective employer, speaking with individuals in a scenario similar to the Interview Hall at the conference. Each session comprises approximately 10–15 minutes of interview questions and a quick review of the application packet, followed by 5–10 minutes of candid feedback. Whenever possible, the committee matches interviewers and interviewees based on medium or discipline.
Interested candidates must be current CAA members and prepared to give six successive twenty-minute interviews with feedback in a two-hour period during one of the following times:
Thursday, February 16: 11:30AM–1:30 PM
Thursday, February 16: 3:00–5:00 PM
Friday, February 17: 9:00–11:00 AM
Friday, February 17: 2:00–4:00 PM
Interviewers should be art historians, art educators, designers, museum-studies professionals, critics, curators, and studio artists with significant experience in their fields or experience on a search committee.
You may volunteer for one, two, three, or all four Mock Interview Sessions. All sessions occur in the SEPC Lounge. Please send your name, affiliation, position, contact information, and the days and times that you are available to Megan Koza Mitchell, chair of the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee. Deadline: January 31, 2017.
The Mock Interview Sessions are not intended as a screening process by institutions seeking new hires.
Fall CAA Meet and Greets
posted by CAA — September 23, 2016
This fall, CAA will visit local New York colleges and universities and host a number of wine and cheese receptions throughout the country, connecting professionals in the visual arts within their communities. Taking place at many art institutions in major U.S. cities, these meet-and-greets are a great opportunity to join arts scholars and art makers in your area. Whether you are an existing or former CAA member, work in some capacity in the arts, or are just curious about what we do, we hope you will be able to join us.
CAA’s new executive director, Hunter O’Hanian, will attend many of the receptions and will discuss his ideas and vision for the future of CAA. Come meet new CAA members and reconnect with fellow members.
Upcoming Receptions and Meet and Greets
Brunswick, ME Sept. 24, 3:30PM Bowdoin College Museum of Art
Please RSVP to the Brunswick, ME event here.
Boston, MA Sept 26, 5:30PM Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Paine & Bakalar Galleries
Please RSVP to the Boston, MA event here.
Nashville, TN Sept. 26, 6:30PM Vanderbilt University, Sarratt Center Gallery
Please RSVP to the Nashville, TN event here.
Portland, OR Oct. 5, 6:00PM Yale Union
Please RSVP to the Portland, OR event here.
2017 Annual Conference Registration is Now Open!
posted by CAA — September 23, 2016
 Artwork by Julia Oldham, The Loneliest Place, 2015. Art Journal Spring 2016. Our very busy September at CAA rolls on. Earlier this month we launched CAA Connect, our new digital discussion and resource library platform. This week, we open registration for the 2017 Annual Conference in New York, February 15–18, 2017 at the New York Hilton Midtown. With the opening of registration we also launch myCAA, a new campaign aimed at making CAA the best organization for its members. MyCAA is designed to encourage participation in and ownership of CAA. You will hear more about myCAA in the coming months, but contributing to the myCAA discussion community on CAA Connect is a great start! There is also an Annual Conference discussion community that will help us build a better conference with your feedback. For the 2017 Annual Conference we kept registration rates the same as the 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. and we managed to secure the lowest hotel rates for New York City since 2011. This is all part of our effort to create an Annual Conference our members will return to year after year. Single session tickets are also now at the lowest rate since 2001. Early and online registration is available through December 19, 2016.
The 2017 Annual Conference will have more sessions than ever, an astounding 270-plus, due to the changes we made to the conference structure last year. We are thrilled to welcome two leading scholars as our Convocation Speaker and our Distinguished Scholar for 2017. Convocation Keynote Speaker Mary Miller, Sterling Professor of History of Art, and recently appointed the senior director of the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage at Yale University Distinguished Scholar Kaja Silverman, Katherine Stein Sachs CW’69 and Keith L. Sachs W’67 Professor of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania Also new for the 2017 Annual Conference:
For more information on travel discounts, car rentals, and booking your hotel room, visit the conference website, email CAA Member Services at membership@collegeart.org, or call 212-691-1051, ext. 1. We look forward to seeing you in New York! |
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — September 23, 2016
Alison C. Fleming reads Federico Barocci and the Oratorians: Corporate Patronage and Style in the Counter-Reformation by Ian F. Verstegen. The book “efficiently tackles the subject” of “the interior decoration of the Chiesa Nuova in Rome,” with a focus on Federico Barocci “and how his style corresponded so well to the tenets of the Oratorians that they repeatedly sought his paintings.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Claudia Swan reviews Benjamin Schmidt’s Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World. Merging historical and art-historical elements, this “formidable study” examines artworks and luxury goods “produced in Dutch ateliers between 1670 and 1730 under the rubric of ‘exotic geography,’” which the author views as “a new rhetorical and artistic mode.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Carol Damian discusses two books centered on the questions of what is a Latino and what is Latino art: Thirteen Way of Looking at Latino Art, by Ilan Stavans and Jorge J. E. Gracia, and Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, an exhibition catalogue from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Both books evidence how “the entire Latino issue is a construct, complicated, and imperfect” and “make valuable contributions to this ongoing discussion.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Caa.reviews publishes over 150 reviews each year. Founded in 1998, the site publishes timely scholarly and critical reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by the College Art Association. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate. Read more reviews at caa.reviews.
Practice Your Interviewing Technique at the New York Conference
posted by CAA — September 22, 2016
In a competitive job market, everyone could use the opportunity to get feedback on interviewing and presentation. Take advantage of this opportunity to have a twenty-minute interview/mentoring session from a seasoned professional.
Students and emerging professionals have the opportunity to sign up for a twenty-minute practice interview at the 2017 Annual Conference in New York. Organized by the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee, the Mock Interview Sessions give participants the chance to practice their interview skills one on one with a seasoned professional, improve their effectiveness during interviews, and hone their elevator speech. Interviewers also provide candid feedback on application packets. Mock Interview Sessions are offered free of charge, but you must be a CAA member to participate. Sessions are filled by appointment only and scheduled within the SEPC Lounge for the following times:
Thursday, February 16: 11:30 AM–1:30 PM
Thursday, February 16: 3:00–5:00 PM
Friday, February 17: 9:00–11:00 AM
Friday, February 17: 2:00–4:00 PM
Conference registration, while encouraged, is not necessary to participate. To apply, fill out the Google Registration Form. You may enroll in one twenty-minute session. The deadline to register is February 6, 2017. You will be notified of your appointment day and time by email. Please bring your application packet, including cover letter, CV, and other materials related to jobs in your field. The Student and Emerging Professionals Committee will make every effort to accommodate all applicants; however, space is limited. There will be VERY limited registration onsite. If you have any questions, please email the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — September 21, 2016
Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Chicago Professors Fire Back
Last week more than 150 faculty members at the University of Chicago published an open letter to freshmen in which they take a strikingly different approach from the official communication sent by a Chicago dean. Safe spaces and trigger warnings, the letter said, are legitimate topics for discussion and reflect the real needs of many students. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
On Art-Making after Tragedy
Public figures and Facebook users post responses, visual or verbal, immediately after tragedies and disasters occur. These easily created and intrinsically shareable responses raise important questions: Is this art created for social media? Is it created so quickly that its quality suffers? Is there something disingenuous about art making under such forced and mediated circumstances? (Read more from the Creators Project.)
Bill to Shield International Art Loans Gains in Senate
Legislation to safeguard international art loans will be taken up by the full Senate after years of criticism and complaints that the bill amounts to protection for plundered works. Last week the Senate Judiciary Committee, with bipartisan support, approved the Foreign Cultural Exchange Jurisdictional Immunity Clarification Act, which would extend added protections to shield works from seizure while on loan for exhibitions in the United States. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Public Opinion on Higher Education Is Waning
Americans are increasingly uncertain about the necessity of college for success in the workforce, according to Public Agenda’s recent survey, funded by the Kresge Foundation. For example, just 42 percent of Americans say college is necessary for workforce success, a 13 percent drop from 2009. (Read more from Public Agenda.)
Strategies to Maintain Focus while Writing Your Dissertation
Today, the internet and Google and social media are flashier and more distracting than ever before. Our professional and personal lives are strewn with interruptions as smart phones enable us to take our distractions with us wherever we go. This makes it incredibly challenging to maintain enough focus to write a book-length dissertation. (Read more from GradHacker.)
Is the Future of Fine Art in Hollywood’s Hands?
We might consider both Wes Anderson and Rashid Johnson to be artists, but traditionally the business dealings of a Hollywood director are handled by a mélange of agents, whereas the career of a fine artist is often managed by gallerists, dealers, and collectors. Josh Roth of United Talent Agency, however, wants to shake up any boundaries between Hollywood and the white cube. (Read more from Vice.)
On Not Reading
The activity of nonreading is something that scholars rarely discuss. When they—or others whose identities are bound up with books—do so, the discussions tend to have a shamefaced quality. Blame “cultural capital”—the sense of superiority associated with laying claim to books that mark one’s high social status. (Read more from the Chronicle Review.)
Is More Recognition the Key to Peer-Review Success?
Two contrasting concepts for peer reviewers are recognition and credit. Credit implies that a benefit is being given. Recognition may lead to a benefit but only passively. The importance of recognition is that others see the effort, and any benefit is happenstance. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
Receive Career Advice or Feedback on Your Art
posted by CAA — September 20, 2016
An interview at the 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC (photograph by Bradley Marks)CAA is committed to supporting and advancing the careers of professionals in the visual arts. As a CAA member, you have free access to a diverse range of mentors at Career Services during the 105th Annual Conference, taking place February 15–18, 2017, in New York.
All emerging, midcareer, and even advanced art professionals can benefit from one-on-one discussions with dedicated mentors about artists’ portfolios, career-management skills, and professional strategies. You may enroll in either the Artists’ Portfolio Review or Career Development Mentoring. Participants are chosen by a lottery of applications received by the deadline; all applicants are notified of their scheduled date and time slot via email in January 2017. Conference registration, while encouraged, is not necessary to participate; appointments are offered free of charge. Deadline: December 16, 2016.
Artists’ Portfolio Review
The Artists’ Portfolio Review offers CAA members the opportunity to have images of their work reviewed by artists, critics, curators, and educators in personal twenty-minute consultations. Whenever possible, CAA matches artists and mentors based on medium or discipline. You must bring a charged battery-powered laptop or hard copy of your portfolio to review your work. Sessions are filled by appointment only and scheduled for 8:30 AM–noon and 1:30–5:00 PM each day.
To apply, complete and submit the Artists’ Portfolio Review Enrollment Form. Contact Katie Apsey, CAA manager of programs, if you have any questions. Deadline: December 16, 2016.
Career Development Mentoring
Artists, art historians, art educators, and museum professionals at all stages of their careers may apply for one-on-one consultations with veterans in their fields. Through personal twenty-minute consultations, Career Development Mentoring offers a unique opportunity for participants to receive candid advice on how to conduct a thorough job search; present cover letters, CVs, and digital images; and prepare for interviews. Whenever possible, CAA matches participants and mentors based on their career area or discipline. You must bring your résumé or CV, your other job-search materials, and your specific career goals to discuss during these appointments. Sessions are filled by appointment only and scheduled for 8:30 AM–noon and 1:30–5:00 PM each day.
To apply, complete and submit the Career Development Mentoring Enrollment Form. Contact Katie Apsey, CAA manager of programs, if you have any questions. Deadline: December 16, 2016.