CAA News Today

Association for Latin American Art

At ALAA’s annual business meeting held at CAA in New York, a new slate of officers was elected: Michele Greet, President; Ananda Cohen-Aponte, Vice President; and Helen Ellis, Secretary-Treasurer. ALAA presented its 17th Annual Arvey Book Award to George Flaherty for Hotel Mexico: Dwelling on the ’68 Movement (University of California Press, 2015). Alessandra Russo, Gerhard Wolf, and Diana Fane, eds., received honorable mention for their book, Images Take Flight: Feather Art in Mexico and Europe 1400–1700 (Kunsthistorisches Institut-Max-Planck Institut and the Museo Nacional de Arte, 2015).

The prize for the best dissertation in Latin American Art History was given to Sara Ryu for “Calendar, Column, Crucifix: Material Reuse in the Early Modern Transatlantic World” (Yale University). ALAA’s sponsored session for 2017 was “The Evolving Canon: Collecting and Displaying Spanish Colonial Art” chaired by Ilona Katzew and Ellen Dooley. Elisa C. Mandell, Georgina G. Gluzman, and Ana Mannarino chaired the “Open Session for Emerging Scholars of Latin American Art.” ALAA currently has 460 members (up from 377 last year) from universities, museums, and foundations in the United States, Canada, Costa Rica, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Spain. Members conduct research in all major time periods and geographic regions of Latin America, as well as on Latino/a art of the United States.

FATE (Foundations in Art: Theory and Education)

Thank you to all who attended the 16th Biennial FATE Conference, “To the Core and Beyond” in Kansas City in April! We had an excellent turn out! And, please welcome the new and returning board members elected during the conference.

In Episode 9 of Positive Space, FATE’s monthly podcast, Valerie Powell has a thoughtful conversation with FATE’s 2017 keynote speaker, artist and author Enrique Martinez, about the artistic process and the ongoing choice to live a creative life.

More info here and listen to episodes on our Apple iTunes page.

In addition, FATE in Review seeks thoughtful articles relating to all areas of foundations education, including expanding the practicum, flexing the core, and re-visioning visual culture. Conference papers and/or presentations, as well as papers written solely for publication, may be submitted throughout the year. We are also interested in reviews of newer books that inform foundations discussion and curriculum. Contact FATE in Review Editor, Michael Marks.

Upcoming for CAA 2018: FATE’s CAA Affiliate representative, Naomi J. Falk, is looking for panelists for FATE’s affiliate conference session, entitled, “Let’s Dance, But Don’t Call Me Baby: Dialogue, Empathy, and Inclusion in the Classroom and Beyond.” Feeling welcome, acknowledged, and heard encourages learning. Fostering inclusiveness and empathy on behalf of minority students legitimizes perspectives. How do we build trust and empathy between faculty, students, peers, and others in our classrooms and communities? How do we create a welcoming and inclusive environment? What has worked? What has gone terribly wrong? Where do we go from here? Examples of readings, projects, tools, and exercises for building inclusive, encouraging, and productive dialogues are all of interest. More info? Please contact: Naomi J. Falk.

The Feminist Art Project

The Feminist Art Project is pleased to announce that the second issue of Rejoinder is now available. The theme of the issue is Borders, Bodies, Homes. Contributors explore how these concepts shape our understandings of selfhood and exile in an environment marked by migratory population flows, resurgent nationalisms, and state-sanctioned violence. Rejoinder features essays, fiction, and artwork by Joshua G. Adair, Connie Freid, Yishay Garbasz, Uddipana Gosswami, Leigh Johnson, Elinor Meeks, Vukasin Nedeljkovic, Jeffrey Shandler, Rachida Yassine, and Helena Zeweri. Sarah Tobias is the editor.

Rejoinder is an online journal published by the Institute for Research on Women in partnership with The Feminist Art Project, both at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Please subscribe in order not to miss out on future issues!

Historians of Netherlandish Art

The Historians of Netherlandish Art are pleased to announce their new officers for the term 2017–2021: President: Paul Crenshaw; Vice-President: Louisa Wood Ruby; immediate past president: Amy Golahny. Please visit our website for more information.

The current issue of the Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art (JHNA vol. 9:1, Winter 2017) is dedicated to Walter Liedtke and includes seventeen articles that reference works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art under his care. The formal deadline for submissions to the Winter 2018 and Summer 2018 issues is August 1, 2017, although the editors accept submissions throughout the year.

From Thursday 24 May to Saturday 26 May 2018, the three-day conference of the Historians of Netherlandish art will take place at Het Pand in Ghent (BE). The call for sessions and workshops can be found here.

For further information, visit: www.hnanews.org.

The International Center of Medieval Art

Newly-elected officers Helen Evans (President), Nina Rowe (Vice President), and Anne Rudloff Stanton (Secretary), and several other new board members, have begun their three-year terms.

The ICMA invites submissions for their annual Book Prize, to be awarded to the best single-authored book on any topic in medieval art published in 2016 (deadline May 31). Through the generosity of the Samuel H. Kress foundation, they also award Research and Publication Grants (deadline August 31) as well as Travel Grants supporting the travel of speakers in ICMA-sponsored sessions (rolling deadlines).

Recent print and digital publications include the organization’s peer-reviewed journal Gesta (volume 56, number 1, Spring 2017). The ICMA’s newest digital initiative to go public is Lordship and Commune: A Collaboratory, an interactive digital website about the cathedrals of Reims and Amiens in their medieval and modern contexts. This project is an innovative way to invite conversation and collaboration around the major unfinished study on these two cathedrals by the late Barbara Abou-El-Haj, and is intended to be accessible as a teaching and research resource.

Society of Architectural Historians (SAH)

The Society of Architectural Historians is now accepting abstracts for its 71st Annual International Conference in Saint Paul, MN, April 18–22, 2018. Please submit an abstract no later than 5:00 p.m. CDT on June 15, 2017, to one of the 45 thematic sessions, the Graduate Student Lightning Talks or the open sessions. SAH encourages submissions from architectural, landscape, and urban historians; museum curators; preservationists; independent scholars; architects; scholars in related fields; and members of SAH chapters and partner organizations. View the call for papers.

SAH is partnering with the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative to offer Research-to-Teaching Grants and Field Seminar Travel Grants. These new grants are part of the GAHTC’s nearly $500,000 in funding to build new content for its free, digital platform of teaching materials.

SAH seeks partners to organize tours of the built environment for our youth-oriented American Architecture and Landscape Field Trip program. Created to provide opportunities for underserved students from the third grade through high school, SAH offers grants to not-for-profits to organize tours for young people on the history of architecture, parks, gardens, and town/city planning. Application details here.

Registration is open for the SAH Field Seminar to China led by Chinese architectural historian Nancy Steinhardt. This twelve-day trip (December 26, 2017–January 7, 2018) will offer an in-depth view of South China’s cities, buildings, and sites through the course of two millennia. In addition to the buildings and museums on every tourist itinerary, we will visit UNESCO and World Heritage sites, a second-century BCE tomb, a glass pagoda, churches, a mosque, a rare example of “beamless” construction, memorials to Sun Yat-sen, sixteenth-century merchant residences, nineteenth-century European residences, and a Dong drum tower, and we will meet practicing architect-architectural historians. Fellowship deadline is August 31.

The Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA)

SHERA moved to H-SHERA network and is now live in the H-Net Commons. Anyone can browse the site, but you’ll need to log in to post.

SHERA also voiced protest against the close down of the Central European University in Budapest.

The U.S. Latinx Art Forum (USLAF)

USLAF is a new CAA affiliated society. We held our first business meeting at the 2017 Annual Conference and also hosted a plenary session on the state of U.S. Latinx art. The plenary was structured as a two-part discussion beginning with Adriana Zavala (USLAF and Associate Professor, Tufts University) in conversation with Roberto Tejada (secretary, CAA Board of Directors; Professor, University of Houston) and Hunter O’Hanian (executive director, CAA) about the representation of Latinx art history within academia and arts organizations. Curators Rocío Aranda-Alvarado (El Museo del Barrio), Tey Marianna Nunn (National Hispanic Cultural Center) and David Breslin (Whitney Museum of American Art) followed with a discussion on structural barriers impacting the exhibition and acquisition of Latinx art. The session concluded with a roundtable and important interventions from the audience.

For the 2018 Annual Conference, USLAF’s affiliated session will be “Chican@ Art History: Interdisciplinary Foundations and New Directions,” co-chaired by Karen Mary Davalos and Mary Thomas. The session’s CFP will go out in June 2017.

USLAF was founded in 2015 to create a network of artists and scholars committed to expanding and enhancing the visibility of U.S. Latinx art within academia, exhibition spaces, and private and institutional collections. We now boast over 220 members and hope that all CAA members interested in expanding the discipline and/or learning more about US Latinx art will join. To become a member, please visit our website or send an email to info@uslaf.org.

USLAF’s founding Executive Committee is: Adriana Zavala (Director), Rose Salseda (Associate Director), Josh T Franco (Secretary and Membership Coordinator), Sonja Gandert (Social Media), and Sam Romero (Creative Director and Web Developer).

Visual Resources Association (VRA)

The Visual Resources Association (VRA) honored the recipients of the organization’s awards at a Members & Awards lunch on Friday, March 31, 2017, during its 35th annual conference in Louisville, Kentucky. The 2017 Nancy DeLaurier Award was presented to Anne M. Young, Manager of Rights and Reproductions at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. She was honored for the publication, Rights and Reproductions: The Handbook for Cultural Institutions (Indianapolis Museum of Art and American Alliance of Museums, 2015) that she compiled and edited.

For his many years of remarkable dedication, leadership, and service to the VRA and to the visual resources and library professions, the 2017 Distinguished Service Award was presented to Allan T. Kohl, Visual Resources Librarian at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. As one nomination letter stated, “Allan embodies the professionalism for which we as visual resources professionals strive.” Allan achieved this high honor through his ten consecutive years serving on the VRA Board as president-elect, president, past president, and treasurer. He was a founding director of the VRA Foundation and has chaired and served on many committees and task forces throughout his years as a VRA member. Allan continues to be a leader on VRA’s Intellectual Property Rights Committee, contributing pragmatic tools such as the Digital Rights Computator (DIRC). He generously developed and maintains Art Images for College Teaching (AICT) as an open website populated with his superb photographs depicting world monuments. Allan is a regular presenter and leader in various capacities at VRA conferences. Allan’s “what can I do to help” perspective is a true representation of the VRA community. The recipients and donors of the twelve 2017 Travel Awards were also recognized during the event.