CAA News Today

American Society for Aesthetics

The American Society for Aesthetics (ASA), an association for aesthetics, criticism, and theory of the arts, will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the ASA Feminist Caucus Committee with a full day of workshop discussions, followed by a celebratory reception, on Saturday, November 14, 2015. The Feminist Caucus Committee anniversary is part of the annual ASA conference, to be held from November 11–14 at the Desoto Hilton Hotel in Savannah, Georgia. Noted scholars will discuss the evolution and contributions of feminist scholarship within philosophical aesthetics, focusing on three main topics: “History, Feminism, and the American Society for Aesthetics”; “Feminist Scholarship Today OR the Impact—Hidden or Otherwise—of Feminist Scholarship”; and “Feminist Pedagogy and Curricula in Aesthetics.” For more information, please visit www.aesthetics-online.org/feminist or contact Peg Brand.

Arts Council of the African Studies Association

The Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) is pleased to announce the large number of association members who will be participating in the upcoming European Conference on African Studies (Paris, July 8–10, 2015). The increased participation of ACASA members in events taking place outside the United States is evidence of the organization’s growing presence on a global scale. It also reflects concerted efforts to create synergies with international partners.

ACASA is currently inviting nominations and self-nominations for service on its board. New board members will begin service at the African Studies Association (ASA) meeting on November 19, 2015. Applicants must be members of ACASA to participate in the nomination and election process. The deadline for nominations is September 20, 2015.

Asian American Women Artists Association

The board president of the Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA), Cynthia Tom, is one of three recipients of the Commons Curatorial Residency at SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco for A Place of Her Own, on view November 19–December 11, 2015. The Commons, entering its sixth year, is a competitive, yearlong incubator for exhibition research, planning, installation, and realization. The Commons supports risk taking, intercultural learning, and awareness of social issues by providing space and support for exhibitions that instigate accessible, multifaceted participation in the arts. A Place of Her Own excavates the vital dreams and hopes of women and features more than thirty found object art works and large-scale installations by women artists. Each piece is a courageous visual answer to the question, “If you had a place of your own, what would it be?” Exhibited artworks, marked by a saturation of color, imaginative use of materials, and visual storytelling, highlight the personal yet universal journey to seek out and claim a place without external rules or expectations. Events and an interactive installation, Community House, invite the audience to join the journey.

Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey

The Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) has launched the H-AMCA reviews program with six new reviews. The organization is thrilled to have partnered with the H-Net editorial team. Readers may access the reviews through the H-Net reviews page. This announcement marks an exciting transition for the established AMCA reviews program that was originally accessible through the AMCA website. The website’s “reviews” section will now act as a supplement to the full reviews published through H-Net.

The AMCA editorial committee that will oversee the new reviews program is: Tiffany Floyd, H-AMCA commons editor and PhD student at Columbia University; Jessica Gerschultz, assistant professor at the University of Kansas and AMCA board member (secretary); Berin Golonu, doctoral candidate at the University of Rochester; Sarah-Neel Smith, assistant professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art (fall 2015); and Saima Akhtar, postdoctoral fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. If you have questions about the new H-AMCA reviews program or are interested in reviewing books or events, please contact Tiffany Floyd or Jessica Gerschultz.

Association of Historians of American Art

The board of the Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA) thanks two outgoing members—Sarah Kelly Oehler, chair emerita; and Katherine Smith, sessions coordinator—for their service. The board welcomes incoming cochair Ellery Foutch and sessions coordinator Elizabeth Lee.

AHAA hosted its successful third biennial symposium in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, this past October with 139 members in attendance. At its CAA business meeting on February 13, 2015, AHAA chair Anna Marley proposed a vote to add a new symposium liaison position to the board. The symposium liaison will serve a term of three years and, in consultation with the cochairs, facilitate the coordination of the biennial symposium and act as a liaison between the AHAA board and the local symposium steering committee. AHAA solicited candidates for this position this spring and have named the first symposium liaison: Sarah Kelly Oehler.

The next biannual AHAA symposium will to be held in Dallas–Fort Worth, Texas, in fall 2016. The symposium will be chaired by Maggie Adler and Shirley Reece-Hughes of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art and Mark Thistlethwaite of Texas Christian University.

Also in 2015, the active AHAA membership grew from 180 to 350, and the AHAA journal was launched.

AHAA looks forward to its sponsored sessions at the 2016 CAA Annual Conference in Washington, DC: a professional session, “Claiming the Unknown, the Forgotten, the Fallen, the Lost, and the Dispossessed,” chaired by Robert Cozzolino; and a scholarly session, “Art and Invention in the US,” led by Ellery Foutch and Hélène Valance.

Association of Print Scholars

The Association of Print Scholars (APS) has grown to almost three hundred members since its official launch in October 2014. In May 2015, APS shared its new website, which allows members to create profiles, share scholarship, and learn about upcoming events.

Offline, APS held receptions for members during the CAA Annual Conference in New York, the Renaissance Society of America conference in Berlin, and the Salon de l’estampe in Paris. APS also announced the establishment of the Schulman and Bullard Article Prize, which will be given yearly to recognize an outstanding article by an emerging scholar in the field.

In the coming year, Peter Parshall, former curator of old master prints at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, will give the APS inaugural lecture, entitled “Why Study Prints Now?” on September 25, 2015, in New York. During the 2016 CAA Annual Conference in Washington, DC, Freyda Spira of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Elizabeth Rudy of Harvard Art Museums will chair the session “The Art of Collecting.”

Coalition of Women in the Arts Organization

At the 2015 CAA Annual Conference in New York, the Coalition of Women in the Arts Organization (CWAO) presented a panel on “Women Artists and Installation Art,” which discussed numerous and innovative approaches that women artists use to present the concepts and issues of their concerns. For CAA’s 2016 meeting in Washington, DC, the organization is preparing a panel on “Technology and Women Artists.” The panel is currently open for proposals, which may include artists who use technology or incorporate it into either traditional or new mediums in order to convey their concepts and their social concerns. Art historians may apply, if presenting a paper about one or more women that use technology in their papers. The panel chair is Kyra Belan, Broward College, PO Box 275, Matlacha, FL 33993.

International Association of Word and Image Studies

The International Association of Word and Image Studies (IAWIS) has announced the latest in its book series, Interactions. The Imaginary: Word and Image/L’Imaginaire: texte et image, edited by Claus Clüver, Matthijs Engelberts, and Véronique Plesch, has just been published by Brill. The imaginary as a critical concept originated in the twentieth century and has been theorized in diverse ways. It can be understood as a register of thought; the way we interpret the world; the universe of images, signs, texts, and objects of thought. In this volume, the imaginary is explored as it manifests itself in encounters between the verbal and the visual. A number of the essays brought together here explore the transposition of the imaginary in illustrations of texts and verbal renditions of images, as well as in comic books based on paintings or on verbal narratives. Others analyze ways in which books deal with film or television and investigate the imaginary in digital media. Special attention is paid to the imaginary of places and the relationship of the imaginary with memory. Written in English and French, these contributions by European and American scholars demonstrate the various concerns and approaches characteristic of contemporary scholarship in word and image studies.

Italian Art Society

The Italian Art Society (IAS) has been awarded a grant of $8400 from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation to continue the IAS/Kress lecture series in Italy for another three years. The 2016 lecture will take place in Florence. IAS announces a one-time, extra IAS Research and Publication Grant of up to $1,000 to fund or subsidize a research trip or publication (deadline: July 15, 2015) and a new grant of up to $1,000 that will support transoceanic conference travel for scholars holding the PhD presenting a paper on Italian art and architecture from the early nineteenth century to the present (deadline: October 1, 2015). Please visit the IAS website for further information and application guidelines.

IAS is currently accepting proposals for its sponsored long (2½ hours) and short (1½ hours) sessions at the 2017 CAA Annual Conference in New York (deadline: August 15, 2015). Visit the IAS website for further information and submission guidelines. IAS secretary Sean Roberts now serves as the society’s executive vice president; the organization will appoint an acting secretary this summer. Please consider writing for the IASblog on any topic related to Italian art and architecture from prehistory to the present!

National Art Education Association

The National Art Education Association (NAEA), the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum invite you to participate in SummerStudio: Design Thinking for Art Educators, taking place July 13–17, 2015, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri.

NAEA has published two new practical curriculum resources and texts for your classes: Curriculum Inquiry and Design for School- and Community-Based Art Educationand Design Standards for School Art Facilities.

Pacific Arts Association

The Pacific Arts Association-Europe conference will be held July 2–4, 2015, at the Museo de América in Madrid, Spain. The theme of the conference is “Recent Research in Pacific Arts.” For more information, please contact adama@adamaamerica.com.

Pacific Arts Association-Pacific seeks interest in its 2015 conference on “Trading Traditions: The Role of Art in the Pacific’s Expansive Exchange Networks,” to be held at the Fa’onelua Conference Centre in Nuku’alofa, Tonga, from September 30 to October 4, 2015. For further information, contact Karen Stevenson.

A three-day international conference entitled “Pacifique(S)” will take place at the University of Le Havre in France from November 4 to 6, 2015. The organizers of this interdisciplinary conference seek papers addressing the following broad thematic concerns: Oceans, Histories, and Diaspora. If you wish to participate, please send an abstract of up to 250 words to Jacqueline Charles-Rault.

The Pacific Arts Association – North America looks forward to you attending the session “Photography in and of the Pacific: Collecting the Past, Visualizing the Future” at the 2016 CAA Annual Conference in Washington DC. This session will be of interest to those studying historic and contemporary photography. Look for a detailed description in CAA’s Conference Program.

The twelfth Pacific Arts Association International Symposium 2016, to be hosted by Auckland Museum in New Zealand, promises to be a dynamic and engaging symposium that will take place between two iconic Pacific events in Auckland: Pasifika Festival (March 11–12) and Polyfest (most likely to occur March 18–20).

Society for Photographic Education

The Society for Photographic Education (SPE) seeks curators, professors, gallerists, art historians, and scholars to review student and/or professional member portfolios at SPE’s fifty-third national conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. The conference will take place March 10–13, 2016; portfolio reviewers will receive discounted admission to the four-day event in exchange for their participation. For more information on the conference offerings, visit the SPE website. To express interest in serving as a portfolio reviewer, please contact info@spenational.org.

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

As of April 1, 2015, the Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) has become incorporated as a nonprofit charitable organization in the State of New York. As a CAA affiliate society, SHERA will sponsor a 1½-hour session at the 2016 CAA Annual Conference in Washington DC, entitled “Collecting, Curating, Canonizing, Critiquing: The Institutionalization of Eastern European Art” and organized by Ksenia Nouril. SHERA is successfully implementing its visiting scholar program with the Russian State University of Humanities in Moscow (RGGU) and the Art Department of the European University in St. Petersburg. Applications need to be submitted six weeks in advance of the planned trip for RGGU and ten weeks for the European University. Inquiries about the process should be submitted to shera.artarchitecture@gmail.com.

Visual Resources Association

The Visual Resources Association (VRA) held its annual conference in Denver, Colorado, from March 11–14, 2015. With fourteen sessions, six workshops, nine posters, and numerous other events, the program covered digital humanities, visual literacy, mapping and geospatial projects, image rights and reproductions, usability testing, digital asset management, crowdsourcing, metadata, sharing collections, archives, research data management, visualization, and more. The two plenary speakers shared thought-provoking perspectives from museums and digital libraries. The opening speaker, Aaron Straup Cope, head of engineering for the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, addressed experiences as design objects. Can a design museum collect objects that convey the full experience of, say, Virgin America as service design? Extending the concept of collecting to museum visitors, Cope described the New Cooper Hewitt Experience and new interactive pen that allows visitors to “collect” and “save” objects to customized webpages. The closing speaker, Emily Gore, director for content for the Digital Public Library of America, discussed content and collections workflows, including the DPLA Hubs program. DPLA is currently focused on sustainable collaborations, building community, data quality, and use/reuse. Gore is working to establish new Service Hubs and a framework for rights statements for cultural-heritage materials in partnership with experts in the United States and Europe.

Women’s Caucus for Art

The Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) has announced the recipients for the 2016 WCA Lifetime Achievement Awards: Tomie Arai, Helene Aylon, Sheila Levrant de’ Bretteville, and Juana Guzman. The recipient for the 2016 President’s Art and Activism Award is Stephanie Sherman. The WCA Lifetime Achievement (LTA) Awards were first presented in 1979 in President Jimmy Carter’s Oval Office to Isabel Bishop, Selma Burke, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, and Georgia O’Keeffe. The LTA awards were the first awards recognizing the contribution of women to the arts and their profound effect on society. Today the WCA’s Lifetime Achievement Awards continue to honor women and their work, vision, and commitment. Past honorees have represented the full range of distinguished achievement in the visual arts. This year’s awardees are no exception, with considerable accomplishment, achievement, and contributions to the arts. Join us for the celebration! The LTA awards will be held at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, on Thursday February 4, 2016. The event will include a ticketed cocktail reception (6:00–7:30 PM) and the LTA ceremony (8:00–9:30 PM), which is free and open to the public. More information will be available online beginning August 1, 2015.