CAA News Today

Association of Academic Museums and Galleries

The Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) welcomes a new board member, Jamaal B. Sheats. Sheats is the director and curator of the Fisk University Galleries and assistant professor in the Fisk University Art Department. He has simultaneously maintained a strong and consistent exhibition record for nearly fifteen years in galleries across the nation and abroad. Most recently, Sheats curated Carl Van Vechten: Depth of Field; Selections from the Fisk University Galleries and the John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library Collection and Origins of Influence: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Modern Art at the Carl Van Vechten Art Gallery at Fisk University. He also completed a commission for the National Museum of African American Music. In 2015, Sheats organized the exhibition Topography at Tinney Contemporary Art Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee.

Sheats was commissioned to create Eight Octives for Music City Center in 2013. In addition to his appointments at Fisk, active art-making, exhibitions, and curatorial projects, he is the owner of Sheats Repoussé and the Charlotte Art Project. He continues to receive accolades for his work. In 2016 his exhibitions Origins of Influence and Topography were voted by the editors of the Nashville Scene as “Best Art Comeback” and “Best Group Exhibit,” respectively. Sheats has also been featured in the Boston Globe, the New York Times, Numbers, and Nashville Arts Magazine, as well as several other arts journals, newspapers, and magazines.

To support his commitment to the arts and art education, Sheats is active in the arts community and holds positions on the Frist Center for the Arts Education Council, the “To Share a Legacy” HBCU Alliance, the Nashville Conference on African-American History Culture planning committee, and the “Plan to Play” Steering Committee for the Metro Parks and Recreation. He is a board member of the Arts and Business Council also.

Sheats obtained his BA degree in art from Fisk University and an MFA degree with a concentration in studio art from the School of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, and Tufts University, where he also completed a postgraduate teaching fellowship. Sheat was a teaching artist-in-residence at the Nashville Public Library.

View the complete list of AAMG board members.

Association of Art Historians

The Association of Art Historians’ (AAH) 2017 annual conference and art-book fair will take place April 6–8, 2017, at Loughborough University. The keynote speakers are: Amelia Jones, Robert A. Day Professor in Art and Design and Vice Dean of Critical Studies at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who will speak on “Intimate Relations: Queer Performance in Art History”; and Mark Hallett, director of studies at the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art, who will address “Interactive Landscapes: From Thomas Gainsborough to George Shaw.”

The conference will celebrate the expansive spectrum of histories, theories, and practices that characterize art-historical research today. Internationally, the field of art history is eclectic and inclusive, reaching across geopolitical, cultural, and disciplinary divides to extend an understanding of the visual and material culture of many diverse periods and places. Loughborough University is engaged with art history, contemporary practice, and visual culture, linking arts-based research with advances in design, technology, media, and communication, centered on the development of more sustainable and equitable global communities. Full details and register information can be found on the AAH website.

New Media Caucus

The New Media Caucus (NMC) will be sponsoring a series of programs during CAA’s upcoming 2017 Annual Conference. Programs include panels, the annual showcase, and a membership business meeting where important news about NMC will be announced. More information can be found online.

The annual NMC business meeting will take place on Thursday, February 16, 1:30–3:00 PM. All members are invited. We will gather to discuss new developments and initiatives for the growth of our organization. Next is NMC’s panel, “Other Media: Decolonizing Practices and Cyborg Ontologies,” to be held 3:30–5:00 PM. The session will be followed at 7:00 PM with the NMC showcase in the Lang Auditorium at Hunter College, Main Campus, 695 Park Ave at 68th Street, New York, NY 10065. The showcase is a highlight of NMC’s events at CAA and will feature presentations by twenty new media artists who will talk about their current research. The showcase is followed by a public reception. On Friday, February 17, NMC has scheduled three events in the CAA Media Lounge: “Roundtable: New Media Futures” at 10:30 AM; “Game Studies at 20” at 1:30 PM; and “Between Biology and Art” at 3:30 PM.

Renaissance Society of America

The Renaissance Society of America (RSA) will hold its sixty-third annual meeting at the Palmer House Hilton Hotel in Chicago from March 30 to April 1, 2017. Some two hundred art-history sessions are featured in the program, as well as a plenary lecture by Paul Hills, professor emeritus at the Courtauld Institute of Art, taking place on Saturday, April 1, at noon. The conference program is available online, as well as information about fees and other practicalities.

Meanwhile, the society is sponsoring a session on “Early Modern Senses and Spaces” at the CAA Annual Conference in New York, scheduled for Wednesday, February 15, at 10:30 AM in Sutton Parlor South, 2nd Floor. RSA’s executive director plans to attend and hopes to see many RSA and CAA members there.

RSA offers numerous fellowships for art historians, including Samuel H. Kress Research Library Fellowships, Samuel H. Kress Mid-Career Research and Publication Fellowships in Renaissance Art History, the RSA-Kress Carlo Pedretti Fellowship in Leonardo da Vinci Studies, and our own RSA Fellowships. The next deadline for applications will be in fall 2017.

The winter 2016 issue of Renaissance Quarterly (vol. 69, no. 4) includes an article on “Vicenzo Danti’s Deceits,” coauthored by Michael Cole and Diletta Gamberini.

RSA is pleased to announce that James Shulman, senior fellow at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and former president of Artstor, has joined RSA’s executive board in July 2016 as a counselor.

Society for Photographic Education

Registration is open for the Society for Photographic Education’s (SPE) fifty-fourth national conference, “Family Values,” taking place March 9–12, 2017, in Orlando, Florida. Connect with artists, educators, and photographers from around the world for programming that will fuel your creativity—four days of presentations, industry seminars, and critiques to engage you! Explore an exhibits fair featuring the latest equipment, processes, publications, and photography/media schools. Participate in one-on-one portfolio critiques and informal portfolio sharing, and take advantage of student volunteer opportunities to receive a full rebate on admission. Other highlights include a print raffle, a silent auction, mentoring sessions, film screenings, exhibitions, receptions, a dance party, and more! The guest speakers are Renee Cox, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Jerry Uelsmann. Preview the conference schedule and register online. Preregistration ends on February 17, 2017. Don’t wait, register today!

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

Members of the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) took an active part in the forty-eighth convention of the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Washington, DC, organizing several panels and roundtable discussions. At the membership meeting held during the convention, matters of importance to the life of the organization were discussed, such as the upcoming conference in Venice in October 2017; possible replacement of a listserv communication platform with a network-based one; reelection of officers; and distribution of prizes and awards.

At CAA’s Annual Conference in February 2017, SHERA will sponsor the following double session: “Emerging Scholars: Politics and the Collective in East European and Russian Art: Part I,” taking place on Wednesday, February 15, 2017, at 10:30 AM in West Ballroom, 3rd Floor; and “Emerging Scholars: Russian Artists and International Communities: Part II,” to be held on Friday, February 17, 2017, at 8:30 AM in Sutton Parlor South, 2nd Floor. Both sessions will be chaired by Alice Isabella Sullivan, a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Visual Resources Association

The Visual Resources Association (VRA) has opened registration for its thirty-fourth annual conference, to be held March 28–April 1, 2017, in Louisville, Kentucky. Early-bird rates are good through February 28. Registration will continue online at the full rate until March 17, then continue onsite the week of the conference. Current members will be prompted to log in with MemberClicks ID-password through the registration form, while nonmembers will have the opportunity to join or register through the same single form. The payment structure for workshops is new: one workshop is included in the registration fee, and any additional workshops are $15 each. You can submit multiple conference registration forms. This may be helpful if using multiple forms of payment (institutional credit card for registration and personal card for tours, for example).

Check the conference schedule for event details and updates. Workshops and tours fill up fast and are on a first-come, first-served basis. Once the enrollment limits are reached, registration for them closes. If there is something you are really interested in, it is best to act early. Contact VRA’s secretary, Jasmine Burns, with any questions or registration changes. The conference website includes information about rates and date ranges for registration, the welcome letter from VRA president Jen Green, tips for travel to and from Louisville and the Marriott Hotel, and more.