CAA News Today
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — September 16, 2016
Annie Borneuf reviews Kurt Schwitters: Space, Image, and Exile by Megan R. Luke. This “compelling study” of the German artist’s “largely neglected works of the 1930s and 1940s” draws on unpublished archival material to demonstrate how the artist arrived “at a new sculptural theory of space that pivots on the interchange between work and beholder.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Trevor Stark discusses the Museum of Modern Art’s first digital-only publication, Picasso: The Making of Cubism, 1912–1914. The volume focuses on “the artist’s use of unorthodox materials and his development of new and still little-understood techniques for manipulating them,” and the “interactive hyperlink architecture” within the book opens up new possibilities for encountering Picasso’s work. Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Amy R. Bloch reads Stefanie Solum’s Women, Patronage, and Salvation in Renaissance Florence: Lucrezia Tornabuoni and the Chapel of the Medici Palace. In this “stimulating book,” the author asks “whether or not laywomen commissioned significant paintings, sculptures, or buildings in the city during the fifteenth century” by focusing on a Fra Filippo Lippi altarpiece possibly commissioned by Lucrezia Tornabuoni. 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.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for September 2016
posted by CAA — September 16, 2016
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
September 2016
Simone Leigh: Hammer Projects
Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA
September 17, 2016–January 1, 2017
In her first solo museum exhibition in Los Angeles, the award-winning artist Simone Leigh presents a selection of recent ceramics and a site-specific installation. Organized by the Hammer Museum’s assistant curator Jamillah James, the exhibition includes public programming related to Leigh’s ongoing research and work in public engagement.
“Working across ceramics, sculpture, video, installation, and social practice, Simone Leigh examines the construction of black female subjectivity and economies of self-preservation and exchange.” Her research-based methods include ethnography, feminist discourse, folklore, and histories of political resistance. In her ceramics the “vessels, cowrie shells, and busts are reoccurring forms, each making symbolic reference to the black body,” as well as referencing the vernacular visual traditions from the Caribbean, the American South, the African continent, and the black diaspora experience.
Leigh’s social practice includes work inspired by the outreach work of the Black Panther Party. In The Free People’s Medical Clinic (2014) and The Waiting Room (2016), Leigh locates her practice within institutions that are geared toward underserved communities, focusing on the rights of women of color as a central concern. “These free workshops empower visitors to take back the care of their bodies from agents of capitalism.”
Southern Accents: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art
Nasher Museum of Art
Duke University, 2001 Campus Drive, Durham, NC
September 1, 2016–January 8, 2017
This September, the Nasher Museum of Art opens its newest exhibition, Southern Accents: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art, which investigates “the complex and contested space of the American South.” The show will feature the work of sixty artists, including several celebrated and emerging female artists. “The art reflects upon and pulls apart the dynamic nature of the South’s social, political and cultural landscape.”
On exhibition is work by Catherine Opie from her Domestic series, which was a journey to photograph lesbian couples. Through two photographs taken with an 8 x 10 inch camera, Melissa & Lake, Durham, North Carolina (1998) and Tammy Rae & Kaia, Durham North Carolina (1998), Opie “documents the many different iterations of family, making visible an often underrepresented and misrepresented sector of society.”
Belle (2010), by Stacey Lynn Waddell, depicts a portrait of a southern belle, a term often used to refer to a wealthy, white Southern woman, with her head obscured by a replication of the bell from the British trade ship Henrietta Marie, known to transport both slaves and goods between Africa, the West Indies, and England. “By placing the ship’s bell, a symbol of the slave trade, upon the southern belle’s head, Waddell implicates her in the South’s slave-owning past. Leaving a disfigured portrait to be contemplated.”
Artists include: Kara Walker, Sally Mann, Deborah Luster, Xaviera Simmons, Amy Sherald, Ebony G. Patterson, Tameka Norris, Jessica Ingram, Deborah Grant, Minnie Jones Evans, Sonya Clark, Rachel Boillot, Jing Niu, Beverly Buchanan, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others.
Women of Abstract Expressionism
Denver Art Museum
100 West 14th Avenue Parkway, Denver, CO
June 12–September 25, 2016
Women of Abstract Expressionism at the Denver Art Museum features more than fifty major paintings by female artists from the mid-twentieth-century art movement. Featured are works by Mary Abbott, Jay DeFeo, Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Sonia Gechtoff, Judith Godwin, Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Deborah Remington, and Ethel Schwabacher.
The exhibition “focuses on the expressive freedom of direct gesture and process at the core of abstract expressionism, while revealing inward reverie and painterly expression in these works by individuals responding to particular places, memories, and life experiences.” The twelve female artists, from the East and West Coasts during the 1940s and 1950s, contended with gender politics in relationship to their work, as well as issues affecting women at the time. A video accompaning the exhibition explores these creative and political narratives in the artists’ lives.
In October 2016 Women of Abstract Expressionism will travel to the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, and then to the Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Springs, California, in February 2017.
Bharti Kher: Matter
Vancouver Art Gallery
750 Hornby Street, Vancouver, BC V6Z 2H7, Canada
July 9–October 10, 2016
Matter is the first survey of Bharti Kher’s work in North America. As the title of exhibition presented at Vancouver Art Gallery implies, her diverse practice is represented here throughout a variety of material, sensibility, and subject matter that explores human relationships, spirituality, the animal world, and gender merging as a whole experience.
Born and educated in London, Kher moved in the early 1990s to New Delhi, where she has lived until today. Her iconic bindi paintings unveil a personal language that speaks movingly about ritual and repetition. During the last two decades, the artist investigated ideas of hybridity through photography and sculpture by creating images that merge “classical” stereotypes of beauty with contemporary domesticity and female empowerment.
Based on everyday objects such as saris and domestic furniture, the absence of the body becomes notable in her sculptures. Kher comments on the complexities of personal and societal norms with particular emphasis in identity and gender that touches both local and global discourses. Though in Six Women (2013–15), her most recent project included in this survey, the physical returns through the artist confrontation of perceptions about the aging female body.
She: International Women Artists Exhibition
Long Museum
Xuhui District, 3398 Longteng Avenue, Shanghai, China
July 23–October 30, 2016
The Long Museum presents She, the first exhibition in China that features women artists from such a vast region and extensive history. Throughout the display of artworks by 105 artists from thirteen countries and that spans over ten centuries, the exhibition narrates the rise of women from a macro perspective. Divided into four chapters—self-annihilation, self-liberation, self-introspection and self-expression—this exhibition is a reminder to the visitor: learn what “she” has achieved, care about what “she” is pursuing, and support what “she” is longing for.
“The Annihilation of Self” evokes the anonymous talent and lives of women artists gone with the current of history in a male-dominated art system. “The Liberation of Self” touches on the discourse of women liberated from oppression and discrimination during early twentieth century. Under the influence of Western culture, a new generation of women advanced from household to society and actively participated in political and cultural events. “The Introspection of Self” presents the work of women artists who began to explore their own mode of expression from personal experience. “The Expression of Self” focuses on open discussions of “self” that, based on feminist discourses, will deepen our understanding of it. These expressions of “self” will eventually connect everyone.
Virginia Maksymowicz: Architectural Overlays
SACI Gallery in Florence
Palazzo dei Cartelloni, Via Sant’Antonino, 11, 50123, Florence, Italy
September 5–October 16, 2016
SACI Gallery in Florence presents Architectural Overlays, an exhibition by the Philadelphia-based sculptor Virginia Maksymowicz (b. 1952, New York). The project explores the link between the human body and architecture through a variety of media: photography, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. Over the past two decades, Maksymowicz has created site-sensitive work for very particular architectural spaces such as gallery corners, small rooms, and parlors with fireplaces. Informed by architectural theories of Vitruvius, Jacques-François Blondel, and Joseph Rykwert, the artist attempts to connect them visually in metaphorical and narrative contexts.
These conceptual and aesthetical explorations have led Maksymowicz to follow a complex visual trail of architecture and figurative elements. Her work considers the metaphorical implications of the female body, especially when tied to place—buildings, fountains, and other structures. The Erechtheion caryatids and the cult of Demeter, with their legacy in architectural ornamentation that extends into contemporary times, continue to symbolically undergird the material and social character of human society.
Maksymowicz has been a member of the Women’s Caucus for Art for nearly thirty years and was a writer for Women Artists News and New Directions for Women. Read more about the artist from the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Her work was included in Reconstructing the Feminist Past: Art World Critique, 1960 to Now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Affiliated Society News for September 2016
posted by CAA — September 15, 2016
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries
You’ve probably heard the rumors, but now it’s official: the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) will hold its annual conference in Eugene, Oregon, June 22–26, 2017. “Why Museums Matter: The Teaching Museum Today” will be hosted by the University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. The program will begin at 5:30 PM on Thursday, June 22, and offer tracks for: professional development (emerging and seasoned professionals); governance, best practices, and administration; curricular connections and new teaching and training models; relevance, diversity, and engagement; renovations and new facilities; and more. AAMG will post a call for proposals in early September, along with registration and hotel information.
American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works
The Weissman Preservation Center at Harvard Library and the Foundation for the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (FAIC) will present a multidisciplinary, two-day symposium called “Salted Paper Prints: Process and Purpose.” The program will focus on the preservation, characterization, use, and interpretation of the salt print process, now over 175 years old. Scholarly presentations will include the technical history of the salt print process (both positive and negative images), historical applications of the process for copying and disseminating information, and innovative materials analysis. While many salt prints have survived as beautifully preserved images with rich tonal ranges, they can also be prone to fading and color shifts. New conservation research has assisted our understanding of these fragile items, and renewed interest in the historical and artistic aspects of salt prints has paralleled this preservation research.
Papers are currently being accepted to present at the symposium. Applicants are encouraged to submit abstracts or drafts of three hundred words or less, along with a brief bio or CV. The symposium will include individual presentations of no more than twenty minutes in length and panel discussions on an applicable topic—submissions for both formats are welcome. Preference will be given to recent collaborative research that uses scientific and art-historical evidence to shed light on the preservation of salt prints, their technical evolution and identification, and the cultural impact of this seminal photographic process. Visit the call for papers page on the AIC website for more details. Abstracts must be submitted by December 16, 2016. The symposium will take place September 14–15, 2017, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Association of Historians of American Art
The Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA) invites you to attend its fourth biennial symposium, to be held October 6–8, 2016, in Fort Worth, Texas. Online registration is now open. To learn more about the schedule, obtain hotel information, and register, visit www.ahaaonline.org/?page=2016Symposium. The registration fee is $40, and the event is only open to current AHAA members. If you are not yet a member, please consider joining this scholarly community. Membership rates start at $35.
AHAA is also proud to announce a third issue of its online journal, Panorama, which includes a roundtable devoted to pedagogical approaches (featuring the work of Jules Prown), a special section on “Art and Invention,” an article on Kara Walker, new Research Notes, book and exhibition reviews, and responses to the question “Is American art history conservative?” AHAA is grateful for the efforts of Panorama staff, editors, and contributors, and for the support of our readers. As always, the association invites your input and contributions.
AHAA looks forward to gathering in New York for the 2017 CAA Annual Conference. The annual business meeting will take place noon–1:30 PM on Friday, February 17. The AHAA-sponsored scholarly session will be “The Gustatory Turn in American Art” (date/time TBA).
In the coming year, several board terms will expire. AHAA wishes to thank board members who have served the organization and to welcome nominations and self-nominations for the open positions, each with three-year terms. These include three appointed positions (membership coordinator, secretary, and web coordinator) and two elected positions (treasurer and cochair). The cochair alternates annually between academic and museum professionals; this year we invite candidates from the academy. Please contact AHAA at info@ahaaonline.org or chair@ahaaonline.org if you are interested in the position or wish to nominate a colleague.
Foundation in Art: Theory and Education
Celebrating its fiftieth year of first principles educational leadership, the KCAI’s Foundation Department will host FATE’s sixteenth biennial conference, “To the Core and Beyond,” to take place April 5–8, 2017, in Kansas City, Missouri. Registration for the conference is now open. Leading voices in fundamental art and design instruction will gather at the InterContinental Kansas City at the Plaza. Early-bird registration is open until September 30, 2016. Conference registration includes breakfast and lunch (April 6–8). For conference registration and more information, please visit http://www.foundations-art.org/conferences.
FATE has improved Silver and Gold Institutional Sponsorship levels this year and now offers a new biennial Retiree Faculty Individual Membership! See http://www.foundations-art.org/membership for more information. Also coming up is the FATE regional conference, “Technology Integration into Design Foundations Tech Swap,” which meets on Saturday, November 5, 2016, 10:00 AM–3:00 PM at the University of North Texas. The $20 cost includes coffee, muffins, and lunch (vegetarian option available). For more details, send an email to the event’s coordinator, Deanna Ooley, or visit http://www.foundations-art.org/regional.
FATE’s affiliated-society session at CAA’s 2017 Annual Conference, titled “Using the F-Word for Good, Not Evil: Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better,” meets on Thursday, February 16, 10:30 AM–noon in the Madison Suite, Second Floor, New York Hilton Midtown. How do we, as teachers, ignite courage and curiosity in students to explore and jump past their fears of failing? Discoveries occur when we allow tinkering, investigation, and getting things “wrong”—colossal failures hold surprising connections, connotations, and fruitful risks. That’s where the good stuff lives. “Don’t give up!” (see Miranda July). “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better” (see Samuel Beckett). This FATE session will proactively frame failure (pep talks), continue inquiries (experiments), and describe what to do when things go off the rails (glean the good). Speakers will present discussions starters, brainstorming, projects, ways of critiquing, pedagogy, and practice.
Italian Art Society
Last month the Italian Art Society sponsored two sessions at the annual meeting of the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (SCSC) in Bruges, Belgium. “Co-petition: Testing the Boundaries of Cooperation and Competition” was organized by Alexis Culotta (American Academy of Art, Chicago), and “The Holy Republic of Venice,” was organized by Allison Sherman (Queen’s University) and Eveline Baseggio Omiccioli (Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York). Along with the Historians of Netherlandish Art and the Flemish Research Centre for the Arts in the Burgundian Netherlands, IAS sponsored a special event at the Groeningemuseum in Bruges. Anne Van Oosterwijk, assistant curator of old master paintings at the museum, lectured on sixteenth-century painters’ workshops and practices in Bruges; the lecture was followed by a gala reception.
IAS has announced the upcoming deadlines for two travel awards: the IAS Conference Travel Grant for Modern Topics (deadline: October 1, 2016) provides a minimum of $500 to subsidize transoceanic travel to present in an IAS-sponsored session on the art or architecture of Italy from the early nineteenth century to the present. The deadline for the IAS Travel Grant for Graduate Students and Emerging Scholars, which funds travel to any conference at which IAS has a presence, is November 1, 2016.
IAS is pleased to announce that Karen Lloyd (Stony Brook University) has joined the executive board as acting vice president for program coordination.
Society of Architectural Historians
An SAH Study Day “Louis Kahn in San Diego and La Jolla,” organized by the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), will take place on November 4, 2016. William Whitaker, curator and collections manager of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, and Jochen Eisenbrand, chief curator of the Vitra Design Museum, will lead a special preview tour of their exhibition Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture at the San Diego Museum of Art, the first retrospective of Louis Kahn’s work in two decades. After lunch, participants will get a behind-the-scenes tour of Kahn’s renowned Salk Institute for Biological Studies with Whitaker, Tim Ball, director of facilities at the Salk Institute, and Claire Grezemkovsky, associate director of foundation relations. Sara Lardinois of the Getty Conservation Institute will be on hand to discuss Kahn’s designs of the teak window walls, which are currently under conservation by the Getty. A Study Program Fellowship will be available for a graduate student or emerging professional to participate in this Study Day. Registration opens on September 13.
SAH will present its 2016 Awards for Architectural Excellence at its seventh annual awards gala on Friday, November 4, 2016, at the Racquet Club of Chicago. Honorees include the philanthropist Richard H. Driehaus (for architectural stewardship); Sarah Herda, director of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and coartistic director of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (for public engagement with the built environment); and Peter Landon, founder and principal of Landon Bone Baker Architects (for design, planning, and sustainability). The awards represent a unique gathering of architectural practice and academic study, honoring the contributions of individual projects to the built environment. Gala proceeds benefit the society’s educational mission and the ongoing restoration of SAH’s headquarters, the Landmark Charnley-Persky House. Tickets are available at sah.org/gala.
Work at the 2017 Conference
posted by CAA — September 15, 2016
CAA members work with CAA staff in the registration booths at the 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC (photograph by Bradley Marks)Working as a room monitor at CAA’s 105th Annual Conference, taking place February 15–18, 2017, in New York, is a great way to save on conference expenses. CAA encourages students, emerging professionals, and any interested members—especially those in the New York City area—to apply for service.
Session Room Monitors
CAA seeks members to work as room monitors for all session rooms, Career Services rooms, and various conference events between Wednesday, February 15, 2017, and Saturday, February 18, 2017. Room monitors are responsible for monitoring conference badge and ticket adherence at the doors of session rooms, recording session attendance and collecting tickets, monitoring the capacity of session rooms, aiding the communication between session chairs and the onsite audiovisual specialists, checking in conference attendees with mentoring or portfolio-review appointments, and/or facilitating the work of the career-development mentors.
Successful applicants will be friendly, familiar with digital projectors and both Mac and PC laptops, communicative, and able to problem-solve quickly in the hectic conference environment. To apply, please send the following three items to Katie Apsey, CAA manager of programs, by December 16, 2016[DEADLINE EXTENDED!] JANUARY 9, 2017:
- One-page résumé
- Brief letter of interest including your CAA Member ID# and preferred days for scheduling
- An application form
Chosen applicants will be paid $12 per hour and receive full complimentary registration to the conference. Selected room monitors will be required to work a minimum of twenty hours over the four days of the conference, but may work up to thirty-two hours. All people hired for the conference must also attend a one-hour (paid) training meeting on Tuesday night, February 14, 2017.
All candidates must be US citizens or permanent US residents and able to fill out a W-9 employment form.
CAA membership is encouraged but not required. Students should check to see if their schools and universities are CAA institutional members, because institutional membership now includes the benefit of specially discounted student memberships for individuals.
Please contact Katie Apsey, CAA manager of programs, at kapsey@collegeart.org or 212-392-4405 with any questions.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — September 14, 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.
The Most Relevant Art Today Is Taking Place outside the Art World
The central claim in Michael J. Lewis’s essay on the demise of art-as-culture is that “while the fine arts can survive a hostile or ignorant public, or even a fanatically prudish one, they cannot long survive an indifferent one.” The argument, however, ignores both the artists who have been historically marginalized from galleries and museums and the artists who are taking their practices outside those places. (Read more from Artsy.)
Art Demystified: The Gallery Breakdown
The art gallery remains one of the most important pillars of the art world today. It is where artists are first introduced and their careers are launched, and where the discourse is started. But what goes on behind the heavy doors of these often secretive empires? And what are the roles of those who work there? (Read more from Artnet News.)
President Obama’s Arts Focus Was National, Not Local
It should come as no surprise that where the arts were concerned, the Obamas didn’t just ignore the Pennsylvania Avenue playbook—they wrote their own script. They established dynamic programs and raised considerable money for arts initiatives. They also sometimes drifted away from the traditions of the past, which could leave locals frustrated and impatient. (Read more from the Chicago Tribune.)
Balancing the Books at Yale University Press in London
A letter signed by over 290 academics, curators, and writers expressed a “sense of shock at the restructuring of Yale University Press in London, particularly as it affects the renowned art books department.” Having learned that two commissioning editors were to be made redundant, the signatories asked for reassurance about Yale’s commitment to scholarly art publishing and for the rationale for the changes. (Read more from Apollo.)
Publish or Be Damned
The London office of Yale University Press has been a leading publisher of art history in the English language. When we heard of a new book planned by a leading scholar in the field, we expected to learn that Yale had pledged to publish it. When a bright graduate finished his or her dissertation, we hoped that Yale would publish it. (Read more from the Burlington Magazine.)
How Much Does Publishing Cost?
Whenever someone talks about the cost of publishing, the conversation seems to take place in a vacuum. Step inside a publishing company and ask this question: Where is the greatest amount of energy expended? The answer is in finding the best authors. Publishing, in other words, is about the relentless pursuit of the best content for a particular program. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
Why the Hammer Museum’s New Free Digital Archives Are a Game Changer
Museum archives are historically places that draw only the most dedicated researchers to poke through boxes of files, trays of objects, and piles of ephemera generated by exhibitions. But the Hammer Museum is aiming to change the way museum archives are accessed and organized. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)
Valuing Intellectual Property in an AIA World
Whether one celebrates or decries the fifth anniversary of the America Invents Act, this much is clear: the law has had a dramatic impact on the value of US patents and, in turn, the broader US economy. A cloud of uncertainty hanging over patents has depressed their value and may have broader ramifications that are yet to be seen. (Read more from IP Watchdog.)
Become a Mentor or Reviewer for the 2017 Conference
posted by CAA — September 13, 2016
An interview at the 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC (photograph by Bradley Marks)For the 2017 Annual Conference in New York, CAA seeks established professionals in the visual arts to volunteer as mentors for two Career Services programs: Artists’ Portfolio Review and Career Development Mentoring. Participating as a mentor is an excellent way to serve the field and to assist the professional growth of the next generation of artists and scholars. Art historians, studio artists, critics, museum educators, and curators are especially requested by mentees. All mentors and reviewers must demonstrate significant experience in their fields.
Artists’ Portfolio Reviewers
CAA seeks artists, critics, curators, and educators to serve as reviewers for the Artists’ Portfolio Review. In this program, mentors review and provide feedback on digital images of work by artist members in personal twenty-minute consultations. Whenever possible, CAA matches artists and mentors based on medium or discipline. Mentors provide an important service to artists, enabling them to receive professional criticism of their work.
Interested candidates must be current CAA members with experience mentoring or advising and be prepared to give between four and nine successive twenty-minute critiques in a three-hour period. Reviewing shifts may occur between Wednesday, February 15, and Saturday, February 18, 2017, from 8:30 AM to noon and from 1:30 to 5:00 PM each day. Conference registration, while encouraged, is not required to be a reviewer. Preference will be given to reviewers who can serve multiple shifts or multiple days
Please send your CV and a brief letter of interest (outlining your specialty or field and your scheduling availability during the conference) to Katie Apsey, CAA manager of programs. Deadline: December 2, 2016.
Career Development Mentors
CAA seeks mentors from all areas of studio art, art history, art education, film and video, graphic design, the museum professions, and other related fields to serve as mentors for Career Development Mentoring. In this program, mentors give valuable advice to emerging and midcareer professionals, reviewing cover letters, CVs, digital images, and other pertinent job-search materials in personal twenty-minute consultations. Whenever possible, CAA matches participants and mentors based on medium or discipline.
Interested candidates must be current CAA members with experience mentoring or advising and be prepared to give between four and nine successive twenty-minute critiques in a three-hour period. Reviewing shifts may occur between Wednesday, February 15, and Saturday, February 18, 2017, from 8:30 AM to noon and from 1:30 to 5:00 PM each day. Conference registration, while encouraged, is not required to be a mentor. Preference will be given to mentors able to serve multiple shifts or multiple days.
Please send your CV and a brief letter of interest (outlining your specialty or field and your scheduling availability during the conference) to Katie Apsey, CAA manager of programs. Deadline: December 2, 2016.
Career Development Mentoring is not intended as a screening process by institutions seeking new hires. CAA does not accept applications from individuals whose departments are conducting a faculty search in the field in which they are mentoring. Mentors should not be attending the conference as candidates for positions in the same field in which mentees may be applying.
New and Forthcoming in CAA’s Journals
posted by CAA — September 12, 2016
caa.reviews
Boris Charmatz’s If Tate Modern Was Musée de la Danse? (May 15–16, 2015) is the focus of a new multimedia review on the Scalar platform, If caa.reviews were performance.reviews?. Organized by Juliet Bellow, the project includes an introduction by Bellow, and three reviews of the performances at the Tate Modern by Arabella Stanger, Nicole Zee, and Tamara Tomic-Vajagic. The review presents the complexities of Charmatz’s transformation of the Tate Modern into a museum of dance for two days and features an interactive map showing where the performances occurred in the Tate Modern, in addition to videos and still images. Charmatz’s project challenges conceptions of museums as institutional spaces and incorporates audience participation and “unauthorized” performances. This review is part of a new caa.reviews initiative to review time-based media works.
Art Journal Open
Art Journal Open this summer launched a new cluster of conversations featuring artist residencies, with artists who have participated in residencies interviewed by those who organize these programs. Through the conversations, Art Journal Open examines how residencies operate logistically and conceptually, and how they contribute to creative production. Conversations published in the series include Caitlin Masley-Chalet of Guttenberg Arts (Guttenberg, NJ) with artist Diana Shpungin, Vanessa Kauffman of Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA) with artist Patricia Fernández Carcedo, and Amy Cancelmo of Root Division (San Francisco, CA) with artist Kija Lucas.
Earlier this summer, Art Journal Open published the third of a three-part series on appropriation as an artistic strategy: “Knight’s Heritage: Karl Haendel and the Legacy of Appropriation, Episode Three, 2013” by Natilee Harren, with a response by Nate Harrison. Recent features also include a review of Wetware: Art, Agency, Animation (Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine, February 6–May 7, 2016) by Charissa Terranova, and “Humans Have Been Human for So Long,” a dialogue between artist Shana Lutker and curator Mika Yoshitake on Lutker’s exhibition Shana Lutker: Le “NEW” Monocle, Chapters 1–3 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC (October 27, 2015–February 16, 2016).
Art Journal
The forthcoming Fall 2016 Art Journal features a project by the artist Penelope Vlassopoulou, whose source material is the phrases and drawings carved in underground cells by detainees during the Nazi occupation of Greece. In other feature articles, Mario Merz’s fascination with the Fibonacci series is the cruz of Elizabeth Mangini’s examination of works created within the intellectual and political ferment of 1960s Italy, and Emily Hage rethinks Romare Bearden’s historical and political position in relation to the dense collages he made for the covers of Time and Fortune. The Reviews section includes Eve Meltzer’s account of the film Eva Hesse and reviews of books by Thomas Crow, Claire Robins, and Joan Kee. An annotated bibliography by Roger F. Malina, the astrophysicist who also serves as executive editor of Leonardo Publications/MIT Press, explores the highly productive intersections of art and science.
Recently published in the Summer 2016 Art Journal is a project by the renowned artist Harmony Hammond. The covers of the journal were given a waxy coating to convey the nature of her intensely tactile paintings and prints, featured in a twenty-page portfolio. In the features, Amanda Jane Graham takes a close look at the interweaving of domestic and performing spaces in Trisha Brown’s 1975 dance Locus; Mechtild Widrich investigates the effects on the urban fabric of the new/old National Gallery of Singapore, created from a colonial-era court building; and Dan Adler traces the idea of an all-pervasive Apparatus in 1980s and 1990s works by the German photographer Thomas Ruff. The Reviews section begins with Chris Taylor’s examination of the film Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art. Other reviews examine a new book by Chika Okeke-Agulu and the exhibition and catalogue Hippie Modernism. An annotated bibliography by Audra Wolowiec explores the poetics of sound and language.
The Art Bulletin
The cover of the September 2016 issue of The Art Bulletin depicts Buddhist monks evoking ghosts in a nocturnal ceremony; the large detail from a polychrome silk scroll accompanies Phillip E. Bloom’s essay on twelfth-century Chinese paintings of Buddhist rituals. In other essays featured in the September issue, Judy Sund reconsiders nineteenth-century perceptions of Watteau’s Pierrot character as forlorn, Christine I. Ho contextualizes a brush-and-ink painting created by a collective in the early People’s Republic of China, and James Nisbet surveys intersections of global politics and imaging in the site-specific art of Walter De Maria. In his “Whither Art History?” essay, Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz explores Kongo visual and cultural practices in contemporary art.
The Reviews section, with a theme of “Urban Images, Memories, and Fragments,” includes four reviews of recent books on the cultures of fifth-century BCE Athens, seven Dutch cities from 1200 to 1700, early modern Rome, and Mexico City in light of Aztec civilization.
Taylor & Francis Online
In addition to their print subscription(s), CAA members receive online access to current and back issues of Art Journal and The Art Bulletin. Taylor & Francis, CAA’s publishing partner, also provides complimentary online access to Word and Image, Digital Creativity, and Public Art Dialogue for CAA members. To access these journals, please log into your account at collegeart.org and click the link to the CAA Online Publications Platform on Taylor & Francis Online.
CAA Connect is Live
posted by CAA — September 12, 2016
We are pleased to announce the launch of CAA Connect, our new digital discussion platform and resource library. CAA Connect is a user-friendly social hub offering discussion communities with topic threads, the ability to post and share many forms of media, and the opportunity for collaboration across disciplines. We hope that many of the cross-disciplinary and scholarly conversations that occur at the Annual Conference each year continue on CAA Connect. Registration will open next week for the 105th Annual Conference in New York, February 15-18, 2017.
We are launching CAA Connect with a series of starter communities that address important issues for visual arts professionals. Below is a list of the starter communities that are accessible for all CAA members and the names of those who have offered to facilitate discussion in the communities.
To contribute to community discussions, please log in to CAA Connect (click “Log In” in upper right of home page) using your existing CAA Account credentials. If this is your first time logging in to CAA Connect, you will be prompted to accept CAA Connect’s Community Guidelines before continuing. Please review the CAA Connect tutorials for a quick overview of the platform. Once you have signed in to CAA Connect or your CAA account, you will automatically be logged in to both sites and you will be able to switch back and forth without logging in again. The CAA member directory will now reside on CAA Connect. By default all members are included in the searchable directory. To learn more about how to be excluded from the directory, read the “Logging in and Profile Setup” tutorial in the Welcome to CAA Connect community.
Starter Communities
Museums
Anuradha Vikram, Director of Residency Programs at 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, California
Anne Goodyear, Co-Director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art
CAA Annual Conference
Tiffany Dugan, Director of Programs at College Art Association
Judith Rodenbeck, Annual Conference Program Chair and Associate Professor at University of California at Riverside
Fair Use
Patricia Aufderheide, University Professor, School of Communication, American University and Co-Principal Investigator on the CAA Fair Use Initiative
Peter Jaszi, Professor of Law, Washington College of Law, American University, and Co-Principal Investigator on the CAA Fair Use Initiative
Janet Landay, Program Manager, Fair Use Initiative and Project Director, CAA-Getty International Program
Latin American Art
Michele Greet, Associate Professor of Art History at George Mason University
Elisa Mandell, Associate Professor of Art History at California State University, Fullerton
Most importantly, we want CAA Connect to grow with our members, to be influenced by the work and focus of our members. Look for a survey in early October asking you what communities and types of content you’d like to see on CAA Connect. We can only build the right kind of platform to push forward the visual arts with your help.
Please contact us if you have any questions at all.
We look forward to the discussions!
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — September 09, 2016
Boris Charmatz’s If Tate Modern Was Musée de la Danse? (May 15–16, 2015) is the focus of a new multimedia review on the Scalar platform, If caa.reviews were performance.reviews. Organized by Juliet Bellow, the project includes an introduction by Bellow, and three reviews of the performances at the Tate Modern by Arabella Stanger, Nicole Zee, and Tamara Tomic-Vajagic. The review presents the complexities of Charmatz’s transformation of the Tate Modern into a museum of dance for two days and features an interactive map showing where the performances occurred in the Tate Modern, in addition to videos and still images. Charmatz’s project challenges conceptions of museums as institutional spaces and incorporates audience participation and “unauthorized” performances. This review is part of a new caa.reviews initiative to review time-based media works.
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.
A New Look for Your CAA Account
posted by CAA — September 09, 2016
September is a busy month for CAA and its members. Classes start again. Campuses buzz with activity. Registration opens for the 2017 Annual Conference in New York, February 15-18, 2017, and we will launch CAA Connect (stay tuned for that announcement). Before these announcements, we wanted to let you know we have updated and streamlined your CAA account experience.
Effective immediately, the web pages for your CAA Account will look and navigate a little differently. In addition to a more contemporary look, the pages are designed to work with devices of any screen size (smart phone, tablet, desktop/laptop) and use familiar web page techniques on smaller devices that you may see elsewhere.
Please take a moment to log in to your CAA Account and familiarize yourself with where to find content including:
- Contact information
- Membership status
- Member benefits with specific codes for redemption
- Payment receipts, printable as PDF files
- Communication preferences
You may log in using your user ID# or primary email address and your password. If you do not remember your password, you may reset it using your primary email address. If you have any comments or questions regarding the new CAA Account web pages, please contact Member Services.