CAA News Today

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.

On Hiring and Diversity This Week

Many colleges and universities want to attract a more diverse workforce and foster greater inclusivity in their faculty and administrative ranks, but don’t know how. The Chronicle of Higher Education is helping by sharing stories, news, and data aimed at helping hiring managers and recruiters make better, more informed decisions about diversity hiring at their institutions and across higher education generally. (Read more from Vitae.)

How to Fix the Met: Connect Art to Life

With the precipitous decrease in art and history education in schools, much of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s encyclopedic collection now means little to younger viewers. It feels foreign and remote and unsociable in a way that contemporary art, with its familiar references, does not. (Read more from the New York Times.)

Russian and Syrian Forces Retake Palmyra from ISIL

Syrian government troops have retaken Palmyra from Islamic State forces, with help from Russian air support, the Syrian army said last week. Politicians in Russian welcomed the news as a triumph, as widely reported by the state’s media, but few details have emerged about the condition of the ancient site, where ISIL has previously wreaked large-scale destruction. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

The Earthquake in Amatrice, Norcia, and the Marche: A Cultural Emergency

This area of Italy—the Valnerina, the Appennine Marches, the Teramo region of the Abruzzo, and a segment of Lazio—has a distinguished cultural patrimony. There may be no large museums or significant art galleries, but in most cases the works of art are still in the buildings for which they were conceived, whether churches, convents, or tiny chapels in the mountains. (Read more from the Burlington Magazine.)

Very Serious Play: A Conversation with Jess Benjamin

The Nebraska-born sculptor Jess Benjamin creates work with an austere sen­sibility and eloquent narrative that is inextricably tied to the land—more specifically to the water—of her home state. The daughter of a rancher, she earned her BFA in ceramics from Hastings College before working as a studio assistant for Jun Kaneko, and then earning an MFA at Bowling Green State University. (Read more from Sculpture.)

SUPERFLEX’s Hospital Equipment: Context Is Everything

“Sometimes context is everything,” SUPERFLEX’s Jakob Fenger wrote, as he Instagrammed a photo of the latest installation of Hospital Equipment in a gallery in Switzerland. The Danish collaborative calls Hospital Equipment a “readymade upside down” because it pulls objects into an art context, only to send them on their way to a new context, as functional objects. (Read more from Greg.org.)

A Question of Resources

We hear regularly from arts funders and opinion formers about the need to diversify funding streams within the arts to protect future sustainability. And this is absolutely true. Any arts organization that finds itself over-reliant on government or statutory sources, or one single income stream that then dries up, can find itself in trouble. (Read more from Arts Professional.)

Identifying Quality in Scholarly Publishing: Not a Black-and-White Issue

Like every industry, publishing is open to scamming and deceptive behavior in many forms, and there are various influencing factors at play—including the pressure to publish that academics face. An abundance of unfamiliar new publications makes it difficult to know which can be trusted, and the merits of blacklisting or whitelisting publishers are being widely discussed. (Read more from the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.)