CAA News Today
Stephanie Schwartz and Jorge Ribalta–Walker Evans: No Politics
posted by CAA — March 29, 2021
In this conversation, the pair discuss Schwartz’s new book Walker Evans: No Politics. The first book to take seriously Evans’s refusal to act or work politically, Walker Evans offers a sweeping reassessment of American documentary and its histories. Opening with a discussion of Evans’s place in the canon as well as Schwartz’s efforts to problematise canonical histories of documentary, the podcast covers a range of topics, from the publication of Evans’s short, but punchy, review of photographic books, his 1931 essay “The Reappearance of Photography,” to the 1971 retrospective exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art. At the centre of this conversation is a debate about Evans’s legacy, about how and why it needs to be reimagined today.
Stephanie Schwartz is an Associate Professor of the History of Art at University College, London.
Jorge Ribalta is an independent curator and photographer living and working in Barcelona.
CAA signs on to ACLS Statement in solidarity with Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders
posted by CAA — March 29, 2021
CAA joins 36 member societies in solidarity with Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in signing a statement by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) condemning the appalling acts of racism, violence, and discrimination committed against these communities.
That statement asserts, “We find ourselves in a moment where, for good reason, we and many other Americans have been and continue to be focused intently on anti-Black racism. But we are reminded by the horrific events in Georgia this week and increased acts of violence over this past year linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, of the deep prejudices affecting Asians in this country. These and other attacks against the Asian-American community represent the latest chapter in our history of xenophobia, which tends to flare during times of crisis.” (ACLS American Council of Learned Societies)
Julie Hollenbach and Carla Taunton–Decolonization, Settler Responsibility, and Treaty Principles
posted by Allison Walters — March 14, 2021
The CAA Conversations Podcast continues the vibrant discussions initiated at our Annual Conference. Listen in as educators explore arts and pedagogy, tackling everything from the day-to-day grind to the big, universal questions of the field.
CAA podcasts are on iTunes. Click here to subscribe.
This podcast explores key concepts of decolonization, settler responsibility, and treaty principles. Join Dr. Julie Hollenbach in conversation with Dr. Carla Taunton in a dynamic dialogue that considers key ideas and concepts of decolonization. Hollenbach and Taunton discuss the potential roles and responsibilities of white-settler scholars in decolonizing and unsettling initiatives within museums, academia, and the classroom to include the movement towards decolonial accomplice focused methodologies.
Dr. Carla Taunton, a white-settler scholar, is an Associate Professor in the Division of Art History and Contemporary Culture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the department of Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. She is the Special Advisor to the VP Academic and Research, Social Justice and Decolonization. Her research contributes to arts-based critiques of settler colonialism, Indigenous arts and methodologies, contemporary Canadian art and activism, museum and curatorial studies, as well as theories of decolonization, anti-colonialism and settler responsibility. Her recent publications include, “Unsettling Canadian Heritage: Decolonial Aesthetics in Canadian Video and Performance Art,” with Sarah E.K Smith in Journal Canadian Studies (2018), “Embodying Sovereignty: Indigenous Women’s Performance Art in Canada,” in Narratives Unfolding (2017), and “Performing Sovereignty: Forces to be Reckoned With” in More Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women (2016). She co-edited PUBLIC 54: Indigenous Art, the first special issue on global Indigenous new media and digital arts, and RACAR: Continuities Between Eras: Indigenous Arts (2017). She is an independent curator and was a curatorial team member for Abadakone at the National Gallery of Canada (2019). Taunton’s recent collaborative research projects include: The GLAM Collective, The Pilimmaksarniq/Pijariuqsarniq Project: Inuit Futures in Arts Leadership (2017), and The Archive/Counter-Archive: Activating Canada’s Moving Image Heritage (2017).
Julie Hollenbach is a queer white-settler scholar also at NSCAD University where she is an Assistant Professor of Craft History and Material Culture. Her work addresses craft practices and craft cultures at the intersections of history and location, tradition and ritual, contact and connection, meaning and use. Julie’s curatorial and academic research is influenced by queer, feminist, anti-racist and decolonial methodologies. If you’d like to learn more about her work, check out an article she published online with Studio magazine entitled, “Moving Beyond a Modern Craft: Thoughts on White Entitlement and Cultural Appropriation in Professional Craft in Canada,” or check out her recent curatorial project Unpacking the Living Room at Mount St. Vincent University Art Gallery. A website chronicling and documenting the exhibition can be found at: www.unpackingthelivingroommsvu.ca.
CWA Picks February-March 2021
posted by Allison Walters — March 12, 2021
February and March Picks from the Committee on Women in the Arts celebrate a selection of events, exhibitions, and calls for work and participation featuring feminist and womxn artists and address issues about social justice and ethics in intersectional and transnational perspectives.
Dancer Christ Walker in his portrayal of Laura Anderson Barbata’s Rolling Calf in Intervention: Indigo, part of the exhibition Laura Anderson Barbata: Transcommunality, Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University. Photo by Rene Cervantes.
Laura Anderson Barbata: Transcommunality
January 16–October 2, 2021
Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University, New Orleans, LA
Laura Anderson Barbata’s (b. 1958) socially engaged, activist, and environmentally sustainable practice is on view in a dynamic exhibition curated by Laura Blereau at the Newcomb Art Museum. Transcommunality enriches bold concepts of global collaboration and cultural exchange, civil and indigenous rights, and human connection and belonging across geographical borders. Anderson Barbata was born in Mexico City, Mexico, and works between Mexico and the United States. This exhibition unites five projects and series across the Americas, showcasing a wide swath of media and community-based approaches such as street theater, arts education, printmaking and book making, textiles, wearable sculpture, photographs, and stilt dancing. Among the works on display are paper making techniques and workshops utilizing Ye’Kuana Amazon wood printing blocks for body printing and printmaking in Venezuela (Amazonian moriche palm fiber); fabric costumes worn by stilt dancers and carnival performers, including Moko Jumbies in Trinidad and Tobago and the Brooklyn Jumbies of New York, West Africa, and the Caribbean, as well as the significant artisan culture of los Zancudos de Zaachila from Oaxaca, Mexico. Transcommunality also documents Anderson Barbata’s extraordinary intervention and efforts to repatriate the body of Julia Pastrana, a nineteenth-century Mexican woman grotesquely exploited for her physical disabilities. As Anderson Barbata avers, reciprocity fundamentally underscores her artistic work and approach.
Mildred Thompson: Throughlines, Assemblages and Works on Paper from the 1960s to the 1990s
February 18–March 27, 2021
Galerie LeLong & Co., New York
A selected survey of Mildred Thompson’s (1936–2003) mature practice into the 1990s, Throughlines explores the African American artist’s dynamic experimentation in found and manipulated wood, free-standing assemblages and sculptures, and dynamic utilisation of abstraction in works on paper and prints.
February 6–March 9, 2021
Leslie–Lohman Museum of Art, New York
The first comprehensive retrospective on Chicana artist Laura Aguilar (1959–2018), Show and Tell presents more than 70 photographs and videos spanning three decades. The development of Aguilar’s performative, feminist, and queer genres encompass candid portrayals of LGBTQ+ and Latinx communities; nude self-portraits serve as powerful investigations on the complicated colonial histories of racial and sexual injustice and personal expressions on vulnerability and beauty.
January 21–May 8, 2021
Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, Kansas
This exhibition explores Renée Stout’s (b. 1958) print portfolio from 2012 titled Ghosts, currently in the collection of the Ulrich Museum of Art, and in dialogue with six Yoruba objects from present-day Nigeria in the Wichita State University’s Lowell D. Homes Museum of Anthropology. Stout’s seminal artistic research into the histories of African American heritage and the African diaspora are demonstrated in Ghosts, haunting monotypes that touch upon syncretic belief systems and visual narratives of Haitian Voudou and American Voodoo and Hoodoo, especially as these religions are expressed in marginalized Black communities.
February 25–April 17, 2021
Nara Roesler, New York
The inaugural solo exhibition in the US of Brazilian multidisciplinary artist Amelia Toledo (1926–2017), the artist is best known for her constructive investigations that traverse the material boundaries of the natural world and landscape, and offer new definitions of ecological concretism through the technical and physical examination of shells, stones, and wood. Toledo’s later Penetrables, on view, explore inhabitable space through hanging color fields as raw canvas and organic pigments. Although associated in her career with many of the foremost postwar neo-concrete Brazilian artists, including Mira Schendel, Tomie Ohtake, Hélio Oiticica, and Lygia Pape, Toledo maintained a separate identity. On her hands-on and observational approach to her practice, Toledo offered: “It’s not even just a question of difference processes; each material constructs itself, proposes itself in the form of certain consequences.”
Les Femmes Folles Presents: Feminists Connect
Launching March 2021
This curated online exhibition includes work by 40 international artists, artist statement and bios received in response to a call inviting participants to reflect on the theme Feminist Connect and the possibilities for the arts and feminist enquiry. Driven by feminist ethics of care, the curators of this online art exhibit, Sally Brown and Leslie C. Sotomayor, became actively invested in selecting artworks that engage through lived experiences and embodiments into conversations on larger social issues such as love, grief or invisibility. The curatorial process was dialogic and centered on co-creation of knowledge with care.
The Vagina Museum’s ‘Cliterature’ book club – Feminism, Interrupted
Thursday 22nd April 2021, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM UK Time
Zoom
Cliterature, the Vagina Museum’s book club, welcomes everyone to engage in readings and discussions of fiction, non-fiction, essays and poetry. The April event focuses on a non-fiction book Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power by Lola Olufemi, which calls to reclaim feminism from its neoliberal appropriations as a radical tool for fighting back against structural violence and injustices, including, among others, reproductive justice, transmisogyny and gendered Islamophobia.
February 1st – June 6th 2021
Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Poland
Rhizopolis, a set design and an artistic installation, is not a phantasy. It welcomes us to a world of hypothetical future after an ecological catastrophe that is inevitable in the Antropocene. Imagining an underground city underneath a forest inhabited by refugees from the surface of Earth, Rajkowska calls into question our faith in continuous progress and civilizational development and expansion. In the context of the pandemic, Rhizopolis offers an opportunity to revisit survival scenarios and techniques and invites us to consider radical dependence and interconnectedness in which nature makes our lives possible.