CAA News Today
Affiliated Society News for September 2018
posted by CAA — September 11, 2018
Affiliated Society News shares the new and exciting things CAA’s affiliated organizations are working on including activities, awards, publications, conferences, and exhibitions.
We’re seeking new organizations to join CAA’s Affiliated Societies. Click here to learn more.
Mid-America College Art Association (MACAA)
Upcoming MACAA Conference: Oct 4—6, 2018: Techne Expanding New / Tensions New / Terrains New / Tools @ The University of Nebraska-Lincoln
The 2018 MACAA Conference will explore wide-ranging interpretations of technology and its use and impact on the teaching, making, and performing art as well as the broader human experience. Recognizing that technology has art and craft at its root (techne) and isn’t limited just to bigger, better, or faster tools and products, we will examine how we embrace or resist technology, how we celebrate or critique it, and consider its promise as well as its limits.
Reserve your room for the conference at the Embassy Suites by Hilton Lincoln. Tickets for the conference can be purchased through Eventbrite. Inquiries about the conference can be sent to Sandra Williams, Associate Professor and Conference Chair, swilliams2@unl.edu.
Get your MACAA membership registration here.
Upcoming MACAA Members’ Exhibition will be held at the Eisentrager-Howard Gallery at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, October 3-19, 2018.
Upcoming for CAA 2019: MACAA’s CAA Affiliate Session
“Respond and Adapt: A Fuse of Art and the Other”
Co-chairs: Julie Marcelle Abijanac, Columbus College of Art & Design; Chung-Fan Chang, Stockton University
Wed, February 13, 2:00—3:30 PM, Room: Concourse G
A2RU
a2ru Circuits Webinar: Navigating Your Educational Path Toward an Interdisciplinary Career
Thursday, October 4, 2018
2:00-3:00pm ET
Register HERE
What might be needed to create an interdisciplinary career guide or toolkit for students who are looking toward a modern work life? This webinar will include alum from the a2ru Emerging Creatives Student Summits discussing both their interdisciplinary paths and experiences and what they would like to have known or had in support of their educational goals as an undergraduate student.
a2ru Annual National Conference: Arts Environments: Design, Resilience, and Sustainability
November 1-3, 2018
Hosted by University of Georgia (Athens, GA)
Registration now open!
The 2018 theme, Arts Environments: Design, Resilience, and Sustainability, is an invitation to explore the relationship between creativity and diverse cultural locations, by framing discussions about design, resilience, and sustainability in the context of interdisciplinary artistic and environmental practice. The theme offers an opportunity to think broadly about the ecology of the arts and their environments, in terms of performance, design, and engineering. A land and sea grant institution inextricable from the town of Athens and the broader ecologies of Georgia and the Southeast, the University of Georgia will provide a rich context for thinking creatively about Arts Environments globally. The 2018 conference will also include exhibits, installations, performances, and events throughout.
Historians of Islamic Art Association
The Historians of Islamic Art Association is delighted to annoucene that it’s sixth biennial symposium, “Border Crossing,” will be held at Yale University from October 25-27, 2018. Professor Zainab Bahrani will deliver the keynote lecture,“Ascent of Images: Mapping Time at the Amadiya Akropolis.” The symposium will bring together an international group of established and emerging scholars of Islamic art and architecture to present new research on the theme of “Border Crossing.” Very often the field has been defined as one centered on select regions of the Middle East, South Asia, and Central Asia, and focusing on traditional media and categories, such as the decorative arts, manuscript studies, and architecture. Less attention has been paid to regions on the so-called peripheries, including, for example, Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, or to disciplines that are not often associated with the field, such as film and anthropology.
“Border Crossing” will rethink the field of Islamic art and architecture by interrogating the ideas of translation, transmission, and transgression. Among the questions that will be asked are: How can this lens help us rethink works that form the “canon” of Islamic art? What is at stake in crossing disciplinary borders? What is lost and what is gained in abandoning traditional academic parameters? What may be learned through literal border crossings, whether they are by conservation authorities or refugees? As the works of several contemporary artists show, border crossings are ultimately ethical positions taken to evince the human condition itself. They thus provide potential to rethink the arts and cultures of the Islamic world, as well as the ways in which we study them today.
For more information, and to register, visit: hiaa2018.yale.edu
Association for Textual Scholarship of Art History (ATSAH)
William R. Levin (Centre College, emeritus) authored “The Bigallo Triptych: A Document of Confraternal Charity in Fourteenth-Century Florence” in Confraternitas, vol. 29, no. 1 (Spring 2018), pp. 55-101, with eight reproductions. The article considers the style, form, content, commission, and purpose of a long-recognized masterpiece of early Italian painting within the theological climate of its time, and is also available online at https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/confrat/article/view/29895. The journal is published by the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies on behalf of the Society for Confraternity Studies, both headquartered at the University of Toronto.
Liana De Girolami Cheney (UMASS Lowell emerita), Visiting Researcher in Art History at SIELAE, Universidad de Coruña, Spain and Universittà di Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy
“Lavinia Fontana’s Cleopatra the Alchemist,” Journal of Literature and Art Studies (August 2018), Vol. 8. No. 8, pp. 1-22.
AICA-USA
AICA-USA is excited to participate in a members-only viewing of Shimon Attie’s public installation Night Watch. More Art, in collaboration with organizational partner, Immigration Equality, will host a VIP cocktail reception for AICA-USA members on the evening of Monday, September 24. This exclusive reception will include a walk as a group to the waterfront to view the work as well as the opportunity to meet with the artist, project participants, and More Art organizers. AICA-USA thanks More Art, Immigration Equality, and Shimon Attie for this special opportunity.
SECAC
The 74th Annual SECAC Conference, hosted by the University of Alabama at Birmingham, will be held October 17 through 20, 2018. More than 450 papers—on studio art, art history, art education, and graphic design—will be presented in 120 sessions. Offsite events include a keynote address by Andrew Freear of Auburn University’s Rural Studio and a reception to view the exhibition Third Space/Shifting Conversations about Contemporary Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art. The annual SECAC Artist’s Fellowship and Juried Exhibitions’ reception at will be held at UAB’s Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts. More information and conference registration are available at https://www.secacart.org.
Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA)
Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) is pleased to announce the SHERA-sponsored session Looking East: Russian Orientalism in a Global Context, chaired by Dr. Maria Taroutina (Yale-NUS College) and Dr. Allison Leigh (University of Louisiana at Lafayette) at the College Art Association 2019 Annual Conference in New York City, New York Hilton Midtown, February 13-16, 2019. SHERA Business Meeting at the CAA Conference will take place on February 15, Madison Suite 12:30 to 1:30 pm, New York Hilton Midtown.
SHERA Business Meeting at the ASEEES 50th Annual Convention, 6-9 December, Boston, MA 2018, is scheduled on December 7, 8:00 to 9:30pm, 3 Brandeis, Boston Marriott Copley Place. The SHERA Travel Grant to the ASEEES Convention, in the amount of $ 1,500 made possible by a generous anonymous donation, has been awarded to Denis Stolyarov, a PhD student at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London UK, presenting his paper “Contested Spaces: Radical Potential in the Post-Soviet Art Gallery.”
Midwest Art History Society
The Midwest Art History Society (MAHS) Fall Board Meeting will take place October 12 and 13, 2018 in Chicago. Plans are well underway for the 2019 annual conference which will be held in Cincinnati. Look for the conference call for papers to be distributed in the member’s newsletter appearing soon. In the meantime, you can check for updates, find membership information, and locate documentation of previous conferences at our website www.mahsonline.org.
At MAHS’s recent conference in Indianapolis (April 5-7, 2018) Lauren DeLand, Assistant Professor Art History, Indiana University Northwest, received the MAHS Emerging Scholar Distinguished Presentation Award for her paper “A Fig Leaf for Jeff Koons: Pornography, Privacy, and Made in Heaven.” The award is granted to an outstanding paper presented at the MAHS annual conference by an art historian who received his or her PhD within the last five years.
Pacific Arts Association (PAA)
Pacific Arts Association XIII International Symposium, RESILIENCE: sustaining, re-activating and connecting culutre. March 25-28, 2019, Brisbane, Australia. Call for Full Sessions and Curated Panels, Demonstrations, Activations, Performances and Workshops. Hosted by Queensland Museum, State Library of Queensland, Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern ARt and Queensland Performing Arts Centre. For more information see: www.pacificarts.org
Curatorial Research Fellowship at MARKK, Museum am Rothenbaum World Cultures and Arts. Applications due September 30th 2018 – Fellowship should start in January 2019. The application materials should be written in English and sent in a single pdf file. They should include a research proposal specifying the thematic focus (max. 3000 words), a bibliography, a curriculum vitae, 3 references, and a cover letter explaining the motivation for the application. Please address inquiries to Johanna Wild Museum am Rothenbaum
Phone: +49 (40) 428 879 -635
Email: johanna.wild@markk-hamburg.de
A new Scholarship in Oceanic Studies has been launched. The Anthony JP Meyer Fellowship is intended for students and non-statutory researchers, with proven competence in the processing and analysis of non-Western art or with significant experience in the fields of history, art, ethnography or archeology. The successful applicant will undertake a study in the collections of the Quai Branly Museum or in anoth French museum on objects of art and ethnography of Oceania. Further information: http://www.meyeroceanic.art/
Association of Art Museum Curators Foundation
The AAMC Foundation Engagement Program for International Curators, made possible by major support from the Terra Foundation for American Art, will open its application portal on Tuesday, September 11. Through fostering international relationships between curators, AAMC aims to not only provide opportunities for professional development and exchange, but also expand and strengthen the international curatorial community and amplify the curatorial voice in the global dialogue between museum professionals.
The 12-month Program provides a framework for two curator pairings to interact regularly, reflecting on and developing their self-identified areas of advancement with each other. The Program includes travel funding for International Awardees, a participant stipend for US Liaisons, networking, and more, which are outlined in greater detail in the Program Components area of the application.
At the core of this Program is a year-long partnership between a non-US based curator (International Awardee) and a US-based curator (US Liaison) dedicated to professional development and exchange in areas including but not limited to research, project management, leadership development, cross-border exhibitions, loans, fundraising, marketing, dealer and donor relationships.
All applicants must be art curators working on or having worked within exhibitions and projects that explore historic American Art (c. 1500-1980), including painting; sculpture; works on paper, including prints, drawing and photography; decorative arts; and excluding architecture; design; and performance. Additional requirements include a minimum of 50% of the time for/with non-profit organizations will be considered. Please note that curators working in four-wall collecting and non-collecting, community based, and non-four wall organizations, at any location in the globe are eligible.
Visit the Program page to learn more about the Program’s components: https://www.artcurators.org/page/GrantsTerra
The online application for International Awardees and US Liaisons opens on Tuesday, September 11, 2018, and are due by Monday, November 5, 2018 at 12pm ET.
Association of Print Scholars
The Association of Print Scholars is pleased to announce the scholars and papers selected for inclusion in its affiliated society panel at the College Art Association conference taking place February 13-16, 2019 in New York.
Chaired by Christina Michelon (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities), the APS panel Coloring Print: Reproducing Race Through Material, Process, and Language investigates the racialized dimensions of print and printmaking. The medium has played a central role in the ideological founding of “race” and its hierarchies through visual representation. However, print’s materials, processes, and the language we use to describe them interface with conceptions of race in ways that require further study. For example, the term “stereotype” originated in the printing trade but has since evolved to mean an oversimplified general idea, often with pejorative racial connotations; the invention of chromolithography in the nineteenth century offered a more nuanced way of representing skin tones but simultaneously enabled the increased circulation of racist imagery; the rabid appreciation and collection of Japanese prints in the West altered artistic production globally while idealizing Eastern cultures; anthropological sketches and watercolor studies of native peoples were routinely translated to print, widely reproduced, and used as tools of imperialism and colonialism.
Coloring Print examines global printmaking traditions that advance our understanding of the role of the medium in the social construction of race. The papers chosen include “Red Ink: Ethnographic Prints and the Colonization of Dakota Homelands” by Annika Johnson (University of Pittsburgh); “Sites of Contest and Commemoration: The Printed Life of Richard Allen, America’s Early Race Leader” by Melanee C. Harvey (Howard University); “A Franco-Indian Album: Firmin Didot’s Indian Paintings and Le Costume Historique’s Chromolithography (1888)” by Holly Shaffer (Brown University); and “The White Native Body in Asia: Woodcut Engraving and the Creation of Ainu Stereotypes” by Christina M. Spiker (St. Catherine University).
Save the date: APS will be holding a members’ meeting and reception at C.G. Boerner Gallery, 526 West 26th Street, Rm 304, New York, on Friday, October 26, 2018 from 5:30-7 PM, with a tour of their new exhibition featuring the work of the early 20th century French printmaker J.E. Laboureur. Please feel free to join us if you are a current member of APS, or are interested in learning more about the organization!
Visual Resources Association (VRA)
The Visual Resources Association is a multidisciplinary organization dedicated to furthering research and education in the field of image management within the educational, cultural heritage, and commercial environments that has been affiliated with CAA for many years (http://vraweb.org/).
The next VRA international conference for image media professionals will take place at the Doubletree Hotel in the Little Tokyo area of downtown Los Angeles on March 26-29, 2019. We welcome CAA members as well as any intensive image users and like-minded information professionals to join in on what will be an exciting schedule of workshops, sessions, meetings, tours, and social events in Southern California.
At the LA conference, the organization’s highest awards will be conferred and a call for nominations for both the Distinguished Service Award and the Nancy DeLaurier Award–is now open with a deadline of November 2, 2018. The Distinguished Service Award honors an individual who has made an outstanding career contribution to the field of visual resources and image management. The Nancy DeLaurier Award, named for one of the pioneers of the visual resources profession, honors either a single individual or a group of visual resources professionals for distinguished achievement in the field. “Achievement” is measured by immediate impact, and may take the form of published work, oral presentation, project management, software development, technology application, web site creation, or other outstanding effort or project. Although nominations for the awards are initiated by Visual Resources Association members, the nominees need not be members of the Association. (http://vraweb.org/call-for-2019-nominations-distinguished-service-award-nancy-delaurier-award/)
For more information about the important work and professional development activities sponsored by the Visual Resources Association or the VRA Foundation, please contact Maureen Burns, VRA’s CAA Affiliate Representative at moaburns@gmail.com or 310-489-3792.
Design Incubation
Portfolio Success: Strategies for Professional Development
Saturday, September 22, 2018.
2pm–5pm.
Type Directors Club
347 W 36th St., #603,
New York, NY 10018
Join industry professionals and design educators for a panel discussion on creating effective design portfolios. We will explore the role portfolios play in a successful design career now and in the future and will ask, are traditional portfolios still relevant? If so, what does a successful portfolio look like and what kind of projects should be included? Panelist will discuss what clients and employers want to see and which abilities industry leaders consider most important? You are invited to join the discussion as we look at new ways of teaching and explore emerging trends in effective portfolio development.
PANELISTS
Christina Black
Vice President, Creative Director
Showtime Networks Inc.
Michael McCaughley
Lead Designer at OCD
Holly Tienken
Assistant Professor
Communication Design
Kutztown University of Pennsylvania
Peter Lusch
Assistant Professor
Dept of Art, Architecture & Design
Lehigh University
Event details: https://designincubation.com/design-events/portfolio-success-strategies-for-professional-development/
Event Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/portfolio-success-strategies-for-professional-development-tickets-48564564921
Society of Architectural Historians (SAH)
The Society of Architectural Historians has announced the recipients of the 2018 SAH/Mellon Author Awards. These awards are granted to scholars publishing their first monograph on the history of the built environment and help defray the expenses of image licensing, reproduction, and creation of original drawings and maps. SAH awarded a total of $17,498 to the following forthcoming book projects: Irit Katz, The Common Camp: Instruments of Power and Resistance on the Edge of Architecture (University of Minnesota Press), Conrad Kickert, Dream City: Creation, Destruction and Reinvention in Downtown Detroit (The MIT Press), Mariana Mogilevich, The Invention of Public Space: Design and Politics in Lindsay’s New York (University of Minnesota Press), and Ünver Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Princeton University Press).
SAH is accepting applications for the H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship, which allows a recent graduate or emerging scholar to study by travel for one year. The fellowship is designed to provide an opportunity for a recent graduate with an advanced degree or an emerging scholar to see and experience architecture and landscapes firsthand, think about their profession deeply, and acquire knowledge useful for their future work. The application deadline is September 30, 2018.
SAH has announced the recipients of the 2018 SAH Awards for Architectural Excellence. Established in 2010, these awards recognize individuals for outstanding achievements in architectural practice and academic study. The 2018 winners include architects Cynthia Weese, FAIA, Robert A.M. Stern, FAIA, Harry Hunderman, FAIA, and Deborah Slaton. The recipients will be recognized at the 9th annual SAH Awards Gala on Friday, November 2, 2018, at The Arts Club of Chicago. Tickets are on sale now.
Community College Professors of Art and Art History
The Community College Professors of Art and Art History is looking for submissions for our panel at the upcoming FATE (Foundations in Art Theory and Education) Conference in April 2019. Our session, Professional Practice/Professional Foundations will be accepting submissions until September 25 on the Fate website (we are session number 42). We look forward to seeing everyone at our session and business meeting at the CAA Conference in February 2019 in New York. Need more information? Questions? Contact: Susan Altman saltman@middlesexcc.edu
Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE)
Deadline: September 25: Submit your paper proposals for panels and workshops! FATE’s 17th Biennial Conference, “Foundations in Flux,” will be hosted by Columbus College of Art & Design in Columbus, Ohio on April 4th-6th, 2019. http://www.foundations-art.org/conferences
Submissions: https://www.foundations-art.org/conference-registration
Join us September 14-15, 2018, for a Regional FATE Conference at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida for a symposium to share your new and developing pedagogical approaches, curriculum, and projects. This will provide the unique opportunity to hear fellow art colleagues share their experiments, successes, and failures and how they will continue to change in the future. https://www.foundations-art.org/regional-events
September 22: FATE Regional Forum: FREE: Creating the right foundations program sometimes feels like a moving target based on changing technology and theory in upper level programs. Stevenson University will host this regional forum and it will include a presentation and discussion by Catherine Behrent on the recent overhaul of MICA’s foundation program. Lori Rubeling, from Stevenson, will be discussing strategies for introducing practice-led research in foundations. To attend, please RSVP by Monday, September 10th. Please contact Lori Rubeling, LRubeling@stevenson.edu or Heidi Neff, hneff@harford.edu to RSVP.
CWA Picks for September 2018
posted by CAA — September 10, 2018
From the exhibition She – A Cathedral, Moderna Museet, 1966 Photo: Hans Hammarskiöld / Moderna Museet © Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Per Olof Ultvedt / Bildupphovsrätt 2018
CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship to share with CAA members on a monthly basis. See the picks for September below.
THE UN-HEROIC ACT: Representations of Rape in Contemporary Women’s Art in the US
September 4 – November 2, 2018
Shiva Gallery (New York)
The representation of women’s rape by women artists in the US is the theme of this groundbreaking exhibition curated by independent curator Monika Fabijanska. The exhibition’s title, THE UN-HEROIC ACT, is an ironic evocation of Susan Brownmiller’s characterization of the rape scenes underpinning historic masterpieces by male artists as “heroic acts.” The exhibition puts the subject under a different feminist art-historical lens, while its subtitle redresses the lasting avoidance of the word rape in favor of all kinds of euphemisms, the most prominent being “sexual abuse.”
Fabijanska claims rape as an understudied but central theme in women’s art. With this exhibition she seems to only begin sharing the results of her extensive research by illustrating and analyzing its rich iconography in light of works by a select roster of three generations of artists: Yoko Ono, Ana Mendieta, Senga Nengudi, Suzanne Lacy, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Carolee Thea, Guerrilla Girls, Jenny Holzer, Kathleen Gilje, Angela Fraleigh, Natalie Frank, Jennifer Karady, Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Andrea Bowers, Ada Trillo, Kara Walker, Roya Amigh, Naima Ramos-Chapman, Bang Geul Han, and Guerrilla Girls Broadband.
What makes women’s works radically different, says the curator, is the focus not on the action but on the lasting psychological devastation of the victim: her suffering, silence, shame, loneliness, as well as regaining control over the victim’s sexuality and psyche, thereby reclaiming the cultural narrative manifested in the most recent works. The exhibition presents subjects specific to American culture, rather than the artists’ countries of origin, and explores key themes underpinning their representation of rape, such as fairy tales, art history, war, military culture, slavery, gendered violence in Indian reservations, trafficking, college rape culture, domestic violence, criminal trials, the role of social media, etc. While its focus is on iconography, THE UN-HEROIC ACT showcases the variety of media and visual languages employed by artists addressing rape and their different effects. Redressing an art historical gap, it also timely advances a much-needed conversation about one of the most detrimental threats and traumas of women’s lives across time and space.
For details on the upcoming symposium scheduled on October 3, and other educational events see the exhibition’s website.
Hayv Kahraman: Silence is Gold
September 8 – October 27, 2018
Susanne Vielmetter Gallery (Los Angeles)
In 1991, in response to a sequence of uprisings by Kurdish nationalists within Iraq, Saddam Hussein began a brutal bombing and chemical weapons campaign of majority Kurdish towns and settlements within his country. Almost a year after the atrocities began, Human Rights Watch issued a report that reported the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, “as security forces crushed the most serious internal threat of Saddam’s 12-year rule, and thousands more subsequently perished during one of the largest and most precipitous flights of refugees in modern times.” Hayv Kahraman was one of those refugees.
In Kahraman’s large canvases she grapples with the profoundly counterproductive ways in which rape and sexual violence survivorship is scripted into international appeals for asylum-seekers. What they reveal are the continuing violences of white colonial narratives concerning saving brown women from brown men (as per Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and miriam cooke) and the need for verifiable, “reliable” data so central to NGO human rights operations. The paintings in Silence is Gold deliver a scathing critique of such do-gooderism that nevertheless reinscribes these fundamental inequalities.
As Dr. Miriam Ticktin writes of Kahraman’s work: “Is there a way to represent suffering respectfully, to call people into solidarity with those in need on the basis of equality? The United States government clearly does not think so, as they refuse to allow their soldiers to be photographed dead or dying: there is no dignity in this. To me, Kahraman’s haunting work confirms this; she suggests that humanitarian imagery requires commodification, sexualization, hierarchy. But thanks to her, we can see this directly, stare it in the face; she exposes humanitarianism as both compelling and corrupt, beautiful in theory and dependent on racialized, non-innocent desires. But in so doing, she creates an opening, giving us a chance to take a different type of responsibility.”
Sondra Perry: Typhoon coming on
July 13 – November 4, 2018
Miami Institute of Contemporary Art
Sondra Perry (b. 1986, Perth Amboy, New Jersey) is an interdisciplinary artist who works with video, computer-based media, and performance. Her innovative work foregrounds the tools of digital production to critically reflect on new technologies of representation and remobilize their potential. She is known for multifaceted narratives that explore the imagining and imaging of blackness, black femininity, and African American experience as well as the ways in which technology and identities are entangled. “I’m interested in thinking about how blackness shifts, morphs, and embodies technology to combat oppression and surveillance throughout the diaspora. Blackness is agile,” as put by the artist.
All the above surface in this exhibition—the first solo Museum exhibition of the artist in the US—initially installed at the Serpentine Gallery in London. The title work Typhoon coming on, 2018, is an immersive large-scale video and sound installation visually referencing the J. M. W. Turner painting The Slave Ship, 1840, which depicts the drowning of 133 slaves by the captain of the British slave ship, Zong, to claim compensation for these ‘goods’ under the salvage clause of the ship’s insurance policy. The exhibition also includes great examples of Perry’s idiosyncratic approach to sculpture, such as Graft and Ash for a Three-Monitor Workstation (2016), an interactive exercise machine mounted with monitors displaying renderings of the artist’s 3-D avatar as she questions the current productivity and efficiency culture. The video installation TK (Suspicious Glorious Absence), 2018, features Perry’s iconic Chroma key blue walls along a large video projection of an extreme close-up of the artist’s skin. Found footage of the artist’s family, protests, and body cams mingle in the accompanying video, interlacing the artists’ sources and concerns.
Remembering “She—A Cathedral”
June 3, 2018 – February 3, 2019
Moderna Museet (Stockholm)
In 1966 Niki de Saint Phalle, along with her collaborators Jean Tinguely, P.O. Ultvedt, and Pontus Hultén (the director of the still-young Moderna Museet), installed a colossal, architecturally-scaled sculpture of a reclining female figure. Viewers were invited to enter the body of the woman through her vagina—collapsing reproductive birth and recreational penetration. Inside viewers could watch a Greta Garbo movie, sidle up to a bar, view a small exhibition of paintings, and enjoy a panoramic view from the top of the figure’s pregnant belly. Hon–Kathedraal (trans. “She—a Cathedral”) remains an icon of de Saint Phalle’s output, and an enduring touchstone for the institution that showed it. Now, a little over fifty years after its original installation, the Moderna Museet dedicates an exhibition to the archival materials related to the installation’s making and reception.
All that remains of Hon is her head, and this is the exhibition’s point of departure, which explores collaboration, experience, and labor. Models, artifacts, film footage, and original works are brought to bear on one another to evince a critical-visual history of an iconic work.
Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Sunset, Sunrise
August 10 – November 25, 2018
Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin)
Titled after the eponymous first and last work of the show, Sunset, 2015 and Sunrise, 2015—in a poetic curatorial evocation of the sky that conjoins and separates West and East, the two cultures bridged through the artist’s life and career—this is the first major retrospective of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian in Ireland. Bringing together great examples of the nonagenarian artist’s practice ranging from painting, sculpture, jewelry, and embroidery to collages and works on paper, some previously unseen, it tracks a multifaceted multi-decade course punctuated by volunteer and forced exile in the US and several returns to Iran, including the loss of many of her works confiscated and destroyed during the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. It is presided over by Farmanfarmaian’s signature mirror-mosaic pieces that best encapsulate the idiosyncratic merging of traditional Persian techniques with Western geometric abstraction that characterizes her work, eloquently contextualized and framed by the diverse sources that have inspired her practice in the show and accompanying catalogue. While her early involvement with graphic design and experimental modern abstraction in New York City gave way to a period of intense research into traditional craftsmanship and folk art in Iran’s more remote regions, Western avant-garde principles were maintained when she delved into Persian mysticism, the socio-political Islamic landscape and the signature geometry of Iran’s artistic and architectural heritage.
Farmanfarmaian was born in Qazvin, Iran in 1924. One of the first Iranians to study in the US after the Second World War, she went to Cornel University and Parsons School of Design, joined the Art Students League of New York and befriended artists including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol whom she met during her early career as a fashion illustrator. In 1957 she returned to Iran, only to be forced leave during the 1979 revolution. While one of the most important living artists today in Iran, where she returned in 2004, acknowledged with a museum dedicated to her in Tehran last year, Farmanfarmaian has remained an understudied female pioneer and contributor to global modernism, and only in 2015 she had her first US museum exhibition at the Guggenheim.
Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System
August 25, 2018 – January 6, 2019
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
Evincing its title from the sage words of author and activist Angela Davis—“walls turned sideways are bridges”—the work in this wide-ranging exhibition addresses the justice system and its support and continuance of racist and classist ideologies. The artists included in the exhibition leverage strategies of institutional critique and social practice to illuminate, critique, and offer alternatives to a judicial system that inscribes those it contains as inhuman and unworthy. As guest curator Risa Puleo puts it, “Walls Turned Sideways asks if the museum is the repository for all that society values, how is the prison the repository for all society seeks to disown?”
Artists included: Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, Josh Begley, Zach Blas, Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun, Luis Camnitzer, Jamal Cyrus, James Drake, The Estate of Chris Burden, The Estate of Martin Wong, Tirtza Even, Andrea Fraser, Maria Gaspar, Danny Giles, Sam Gould, Michelle Handelman, Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia, Suzanne Lacy with Julio Morales and Unique Holland, Alexa Hoyer, Ashley Hunt, Improvers, Richard Kamler, Titus Kaphar, Kapwani Kiwanga, Autumn Knight, Deana Lawson, Shaun Leonardo, Glenn Ligon, Sarah Ross and Damon Locks, Lucky Pierre, Mark Menjivar, Trevor Paglen, Anthony Papa, Mary Patten, Jenny Polak, Carl Pope, Jr., Laurie Jo Reynolds, Sherrill Roland, Gregory Sale, Dread Scott, Sable Elyse Smith, and Rodrigo Valenzuela.
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — September 07, 2018
Lauren Kroiz reviews Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American by John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier. Read the full review at caa.reviews.
André Dombrowski writes about Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art by Laura Anne Kalba. Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Eva McGraw discusses Paper Promises: Early American Photography by Mazie M. Harris. Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Seeking New Organizations for CAA’s Affiliated Societies
posted by CAA — September 06, 2018
CAA has operated its Affiliated Societies program since the 1970s. Affiliated Societies are learned societies focused on particular areas of art history, art making, or design. We presently have 77 societies who are active members of the program. A complete list of current members appears here.
Affiliated Societies enhance CAA by creating Annual Conference sessions on their specific areas of expertise within the larger domains of art history, design, and the visual arts. For our upcoming annual conference in New York City in February 2019, 77% of the Affiliated Societies will be presenting sessions.
In exchange for a modest annual membership fee, Affiliated Societies receive the following benefits:
• listing in CAA’s Online Directory of Affiliated Societies
• a guaranteed session at the Annual Conference
• a room in which to conduct a business meeting at the Annual Conference
• promotional opportunities in the Affiliated Society section of CAA News
• use of the CAA-administered listserv for outreach to their other societies
• use of a Humanities Commons Group for social networking
We are looking to grow the program and add other societies.
If you would like to learn more about the program you can click here to see if your organization is eligible. The Executive Committee of the Board of Directors will be reviewing new applications at its meeting in February 2019. If you want to be considered for to be part of the program, your materials would need to be completed by December 22, 2018.
If you have any questions, please reach out directly to our executive director Hunter O’Hanian: hohanian@collegeart.org
CAA Opposes the Cuban Government’s Decree 349 and Its Impact on Artists
posted by CAA — September 05, 2018
Cuban artists and activists organizing in opposition to the decree. Image: Courtesy Yanelyz Nuñez Leyva via Hyperallergic
In July 2018, the Cuban government issued Decree 349, aimed at the artists’ community on the island nation. The decree is slated to go into effect on December 1, 2018.
The law will criminalize independent artists who do not have authorization from the Ministry of Culture, and it will empower a new cadre of state agents to shut down events, confiscate artists’ equipment and property, impose heavy fines, and make arrests. Cuban artists were not consulted in the development of the decree and will have no recourse to independent arbiters in the event of a dispute. In particular this legislation will affect artists who are black and poor, as well as independent artists.
Amnesty International recently issued a statement about Decree 349:
“Amnesty International is concerned that the recent arbitrary detentions of Cuban artists protesting Decree 349, as reported by Cuban independent media, are an ominous sign of things to come. We stand in solidarity with all independent artists in Cuba that are challenging the legitimacy of the decree and standing up for a space in which they can work freely without fear of reprisals.”
CAA supports the work of Cuban artists and activists inside and outside of Cuba in their campaign to urge the Cuban government to reconsider the law and agree to a public debate with the artistic community. We support the artists’ Open Letter urging the Cuban government to refrain from imposing these harsh restrictions on its artists.
Related: As Criminalization of the Arts Intensifies in Cuba, Activists Organize (Hyperallergic)
Tania Bruguera and Other Artists Are Protesting a New Cuban Law That Requires Government Approval of Creative Production (artnet News)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by CAA — September 05, 2018
After completing murals for the Los Angeles Public Library, Oaxacan collective Tlacolulokos members Cosijoesa Cernas and Dario Canul were subsequently barred from re-entry to the United States. Photo: Jeff McClane/LAPL via LA Taco
Brazil Museum Fire: ‘Incalculable’ Loss as 200-Year-Old Rio Institution Gutted
Brazil’s oldest and most important historical and scientific museum was consumed by fire, and much of its archive of 20 million items is believed to have been destroyed. (The Guardian)
Is This the Future of Catalogues Raisonnés?
A new online database of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings offers a template for a more up-to-date—and perhaps richer—resource. (The Art Newspaper)
A Symbol for ‘Nobody’ That’s Really for Everybody
Read CAA Committee on Design member Elizabeth Guffey’s tribute to the International Access Symbol on its 50th birthday. (New York Times)
These Oaxacan Muralists Brought Indigenous Flavor to The Central Library; Now They Are Deported
After completing a monumental mural project on indigenous empowerment at the Los Angeles Public Library, Oaxacan collective Tlacolulokos were subsequently barred from re-entry to the United States. (LA Taco)
Why I Did Not See the Picasso Show at the Tate Modern
“It was with a certain incredibility that I discovered the museum was hosting a major Picasso exhibition titled Love, Fame, Tragedy. Nevertheless, I wanted to see the show for myself.” (Hyperallergic)
It Takes a Village: Are You Getting These Six Perspectives for Your Exhibition?
Rarely are the folks on the front line heavily involved in the decisions they’re going to have to live with. (American Alliance of Museums)
Hunter O’Hanian in Conversation with Eric Segal, Director of Education and Curator of Academic Programs at the Harn Museum
posted by CAA — September 04, 2018
CAA’s executive director, Hunter O’Hanian, recently visited the Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida to speak with Eric Segal, the museum’s director of education and curator of academic programs, about the role of academic art museums and Resources for Academic Art Museum Professionals (RAAMP).
A project of CAA supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, RAAMP aims to strengthen the educational mission of academic museums and their parent organizations by providing a publicly accessible repository of resources, online forums, and relevant news and information.
Watch and read the interview below.
Hunter O’Hanian: Hello everybody. My name’s Hunter O’Hanian and I’m the director of the College Art Association. I’m very pleased today to be with Eric Segal, who is the director of education and curator of academic programs here at the Harn Museum in Gainesville, Florida. Hello, Eric. How are you?
Eric Segal: Hunter, I’m doing well. It’s great to have you here in Gainesville.
HO: Well, it’s absolutely beautiful. It’s been great to be spending time here and to go through the museum. Before we start, tell us a little bit about your background. I know you’ve been a CAA member since you were in graduate school, but tell us a little bit about your professional background.
ES: Sure. CAA since 1993.
HO: Yay.
ES: I actually started my college career as a computer engineering major. So, it was a big change when my sister made me take an art history class and that led me into art history, and I studied American art subsequently at UCLA, Masters.
HO: And, I think you won a Terra award, too.
ES: I was really fortunate to have a Terra award in 1999.
HO: Great.
ES: And that was very exciting for me and helped me in my studies. Following the completion of my doctoral dissertation, I took an assistant professor position here at University of Florida. So, I was in the art history department teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in American art, African American art, illustration and even occasionally about museum theory. Later, in 2010, a position opened up in the museum where I was able to take on museum practice a bit more. That position was the academic programs position, which had just been created as the museum realized it was important to draw closer to the university. At that time, before the position opened up, there were perhaps a few dozen courses using the museum, because there was no one doing the outreach to work with faculty across campus.
Since that time, about 10 years, we’ve maybe increased that tenfold. The number of courses, the number of faculty, the number of disciplines and students using the museum—we’ve been really delighted to expand that quite a bit.
HO: That’s great. So, [the] University of Florida here in Gainesville, about 50,000 students here on campus.
ES: Yes.
HO: You have an art history department here. And do you have a studio arts department as well?
ES: It’s a combined school of art and art history and they’re both very robust. There’s a faculty of about seven in art history and the tens, twenties in art and they’re all great colleagues. In fact, in 2019 we will have the studio art faculty show here at the museum, which comes [around] every five years.
HO: Wonderful. So, the Harn Museum has been around since 1990. Roughly, how big is it? How many square feet is the facility?
ES: The museum is about 26,000 square feet.
HO: That’s big for an academic art museum.
ES: It is. We have all of our storage onsite. We have great galleries devoted to five collecting areas. We collect in African [art], in Asian [art], in photography, in modern and contemporary art. And we have a curator in each area. So, we’re very lucky. Many academic museums don’t have such a robust curatorial staff. And we also have classrooms where we can do teaching, where we can bring objects out from storage in order to connect with academic classes on campus if we have a theme we want to try to address, say, “urban imagery.” It may be better just with works that are in storage, rather than those that happen to be on view at a given time.
HO: And 11,000 objects in the collection?
ES: That’s right.
HO: Wow. And so how do you go about procuring objects for the collection?
ES: Right. So our curators are very active along with our development officer and our director in building relationships. So, we do have an endowment for acquisitions, but many of our acquisitions do come through gifts from donors, and that would be in all areas.
HO: I noticed too in going through the museum with you that you also have a fair number of Florida artists in your collection. Can you speak about some of them?
ES: We have Florida artists from the 19th century through the present. Some of them are former faculty at UF with international and national reputations, and some include folk artists who work locally and are widely collected and whose work reveals unexpected and inspiring perspectives on our own community. So, we have both highly-trained professional artists and amateur or untrained artists.
HO: It seems to me also that you’ve done a lot of work in your role as far as inviting members of the local Gainesville community, people who are not part of the academic campus on or into the museum through different programs. Can you talk generally about how you’ve been programming in trying to bring the local Gainesville community into the museum?
ES: Sure. So, as curator of academic programs, I obviously personally focus a lot on the academic community, but I’m also director of education as you mentioned, and I have a staff with whom I work to engage the community. I also consider that my responsibility as well. We have public programs that I think of as creating layers of access. There’s programs that are traditional museum programs of lectures and educational docent tours, which have immediate appeal to people who are familiar with museums and have a museum-going experience and know they might want to learn something about an exhibition, but we also have our whole range of activities that invite the community in perhaps for a first time. We’re creating museum goers out of our local citizenry.
So, those might be experiences that sound more fun and social, but include informal learning opportunities. We have a museum nights event once a month which is open in the evenings. So, lots of programs such as that, but we also think it’s really important to reach audiences that aren’t even looking at the museum as a possible venue for leisure or art experiences and we find it’s really effective to work with the local public schools. All children go to schools and we’re able to work with them to provide transportation and rich tour experiences and programs that engage children and parents as well. Creating the opportunity to connect with families that might not be thinking of the museum, but may learn from the children that it’s a really welcoming, relevant, and meaningful space.
HO: Overall for the whole museum, how big is the staff here?
ES: The staff, including security and frontline staff, is about fifty.
HO: Wow. Great.
ES: So, it’s pretty robust.
HO: And for academic programs and education, how big is that?
ES: In education, we have six full-time staff and a number of part-time staff who support programs and activities. So, we’re also very lucky. There are smaller museums that are working on a narrower range of staff resources.
HO: What challenges do you see for the education programs here at the Harn Museum going forward?
ES: Well, you did ask about our connecting with community audiences and our challenge is to continue to grow that and be relevant and to let audiences know that we are welcoming. We want to reach audiences that have not seen themselves in museums. So, diversity in our audiences is something we’ve done a lot to improve with by partnering with local groups, with activists, with people in different communities. We’ve done a lot to improve our diversity of audiences, but we’re still expanding there. In staff, that’s another area where we really need to work hard and we have focused part of our strategic plan extension into 2019 to focus on developing new ways to build diverse staff members across the museum, including in senior staff, which as we know in museums in the United States is a real problem.
HO: If you were speaking to someone else in your position, maybe in a more rural location or a smaller facility, and they wanted to engage the community more, what advice would you give them?
ES: That’s a great question. I think that it’s really important to let audiences know that they’re welcome and to my mind, the best way to get that message out there is by being out in the community, attending community fora on relevant topics, being part of discussions of education and educational resources, being part of discussions on how universities are trying to engage—the local university or college may be trying to engage the community, both on campus and in the community. Being a face in the community makes you somewhat approachable and starts to build the relationship that’s hard to build with an advertisement in the paper that says, “Everyone’s welcome. Admission is free”. Hopefully.
So, that would be one of the first steps that I think I would try in that position is to really be part of the community and to make contact with community leaders who already have authentic connections to different members of different areas of the community.
HO: We’re going to be recording some video practicum about different areas in the museum and we’ll get into some more of those details later, but it also seems as if you’ve developed good relationships with different departments within the college itself. Can you speak a little bit about doing that and how you go about being successful there?
ES: Some of our failures in doing that have been—not that I wouldn’t continue to do it—you know, I go and give a talk to the faculty senate and I send a letter to all faculty and I get a lot of emails back, if I’m lucky, that say, you know, I saw your email but I didn’t read it last year because you sent it to everyone. So, the hard work is making individual contacts either by email but also being out there again on campus. I try to serve on committees, be it in the international center or on undergraduate curriculum, wherever it might be useful, seeing that the museum could be a resource that can be built into emerging programs and projects. So, being at the table is important. And then building the individual connections to faculty. One faculty member in a language and literature department can be your ambassador to other faculty members.
HO: And, of course you’re familiar with RAAMP resources for academic art museum professionals, and the Harn has been one of the original stakeholders, and this has been a great project that CAA has worked on with the Mellon Foundation.
ES: Yes.
HO: We’ve been very happy with the success. As a resource out there, how have you been able to use RAAMP and also were there any changes you’d like to see to it or more things you’d like to see us add to it?
ES: Yes. RAAMP is a great resource. It’s been wonderful to see it grow and the website has, for anyone who hasn’t visited it recently, really been improved in the last year, making it searchable in a way that it wasn’t before. So, it’s a resource where you can actually find the materials that are there pretty easily now and that makes it especially useful. So, for me, it’s been great as a source of inspiration when I come up against a problem such as “How do I…?” I haven’t found this one yet, but one of my problems is how do I connect with low temperature physics? I’ve never solved that problem, but when someone posts that to RAMP, that’s where I’m going find it.
HO: Great. So, for any of you out there who have an answer to that quick question as to how to deal with low temperature physics, please post it on RAAMP now.
ES: That’s right. But, it’s really a great source of inspiration [for] problem solving and models that exist out there. It’s also I think increasingly going to continue to serve the role of [a] point for conversations, which is something that I’m really looking forward to, because sometimes someone hasn’t posted on low temperature physics, but they may have already done it. And so it’s a chance to get feedback and ideas. I’m also really looking forward to in the future ideas about building diversity, as we discussed earlier. How it’s being pursued at other museums, both in terms of audiences but also in terms of staff. I think as a community academic program officers in museums need to come together to build the pipeline of museum professionals. That includes recruiting students when they’re young. I’ve been working with high school students in the past week to just tell them that museums are a career and that’s important.
It includes supporting internships. I think that discussion can happen in RAAMP about how we can sort of strategically create a pool that we’re all going draw on to diversify our staff. I’m also looking forward to learning from RAAMP more about ideas for academic programs working with development offices.
HO: Interesting. The fundraising piece.
ES: Yes. The fundraising piece. We’re all challenged in our budgets. In the past year, we’ve developed a program on early learning that we built with the college of education, and we built a really robust project, and someone said: “You need to do a video for this.” And that video has been helpful for us in developing private funds to continue to pursue this program that provides education for headstart students.
HO: Which is great, because it gives potential funders the opportunity to see what the programs are really about and be able to see that.
ES: It is. And that’s the kind of thing I’d love to share on RAAMP and also learn from others their strategies for taking our programs and having them be tools for building our funding.
HO: Yes. I’ve been recently reviewing the session proposals for the upcoming CAA conference in New York in February of 2019 and there are a lot of sessions that are coming up for professionals in academic art museums, because I do think it’s a growing field that a lot of PhD students or PhD holders and Masters will be going into it in the future. So, there will be a lot at this year’s conference in February.
ES: That’s really great to hear. And I hope that non-museum professionals, hope that artists and art historians will attend those as well, because their voices are really useful to be part of those conversations that art museum professionals are having. I was thinking about the sort of professionalization that another area of RAAMP is going help us connect on is going to be evaluation. Museums are always challenged in terms of evaluation. We know it’s important to prove that what we do is effective. Evaluation is time-consuming or expensive or both, and sharing expertise and ideas in that area I think is going to be something that’s going to really help us to build our case in the future.
HO: Yes, I mean, ultimately all museums are educational institutions, and we have to be able to quantify how that happened.
ES: I think that is the case.
HO: Eric, thank you so much for your time here. It’s been great to tour the museum and I really have appreciated it. And so good luck with all your work going forward.
ES: Thank you, Hunter, for sharing your interest of the museum with our RAAMP audiences.