CAA News Today

 

American Council for Southern Asian Art

The American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA), along with the University of Michigan History of Art Visual Resources Collections and the Center for Art and Archaeology (CA&A) of the American Institute of Indian Studies in Gurgaon, India, is pleased to announce that over 12,000 low-resolution images (suitable for PowerPoint presentations), known collectively as the ACSAA Digital Images, are now newly available for free direct downloading for noncommercial, educational, and scholarly purposes through the Virtual Museum of Images and Sounds (VMIS). Funded by India’s Ministry of Culture, VMIS was recently created by using the image and sound archives of the CA&A and the Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology (ARCE)—the two centers of the AIIS.

The ACSAA Digital Images were first distributed under the aegis of the ACSAA Color Slide Project, a nonprofit initiative administered through the former Asian Art Archives of the University of Michigan that from 1974 through 2006 provided high-quality original and duplicate 35mm color slides of the art and architecture of India and greater South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Indonesia, as well as the Himalayan regions, to individuals and institutions around the world for teaching and research purposes. With this new iteration, the original project’s educational intentions have not only been maintained, but have now been expanded to make the images available on an even wider scale and without fee. The user simply needs to register (free of charge) on the VMIS website before the images can be downloaded (free of charge).

Arts Council of the African Studies Association

News from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) includes a call for nominations for the new ACASA Curatorial Awards, coming soon. The spring 2016 Newsletter has been published (available to subscribers only).

ACASA is also sponsoring two panels at the upcoming annual meetings of the African Studies Association and the College Art Association. At the African Studies Association annual meeting, to be held December 1–3, 2016, in Washington, DC, the group will present “Shattering Single Stories in the Labeling and Presentation of Historical Arts of Africa.” The cochairs are Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi of Emory University and Yaëlle Biro from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. The participants are: Silvia Forni, Royal Ontario Museum; Kathryn Gunsch, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Nanina Guyer, Hans Himmelheber Photographic Archives, Museum Rietberg Zurich; and Matthew Francis Rarey, Oberlin College. The discussant is Karen E. Milbourne from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art.

The deadline for the call for submissions to the ACASA-sponsored panel at CAA’s next Annual Conference, taking place February 15–18, 2017, in New York, is August 30, 2016. Titled “Flesh,” the session will be chaired by Shannen Hill of the Baltimore Museum of Art.
The call for submissions and the full panel description will be listed on CAA website on July 1. By August 30, interested parties should send a CV and abstract of no more than 500 words to Shannen Hill. All parties will be notified of the outcome by September 15.

Foundations in Art: Theory and Education

Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE) has announced that the call for papers for its 2017 biennial conference, “To the Core and Beyond,” is now open.

Italian Art Society

In May, the Italian Art Society (IAS) sponsored two sessions titled “New Perspectives on Medieval Rome” at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Marius Hauknes (Johns Hopkins University) and Alison Locke Perchuk (California State University, Channel Islands) organized the panels. In August, IAS will sponsor two sessions at the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (SCSC) meeting in Bruges, Belgium: “Co-petition: Testing the Boundaries of Cooperation and Competition,” organized by Alexis Culotta (American Academy of Art, Chicago); and “The Holy Republic of Venice,” organized by Allison Sherman (Queen’s University) and Eveline Baseggio Omiccioli (Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York). An IAS Conference Travel Grant for Emerging Scholars has been awarded to Tenley Bick (doctoral candidate, University of California, Los Angeles) to support travel to the recent meeting of the American Association for Italian Studies in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. IAS/Kress International Conference Travel Grants have been awarded to Alexis Culotta and Giada Damen (Morgan Library and Museum) to support travel to SCSC in Bruges. The seventh annual IAS/Kress Lecture took place on June 1 at the Villa I Tatti in Florence. An audience of nearly eighty listened raptly to the paper presented by Megan Holmes (University of Michigan), “New Perspectives on the Reception of Florentine Panel Painting: Interpreting Scratch Marks.”

National Council of Arts Administrators

The forty-fourth National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA) annual gathering, “The Great Untapped: Unlocking Assets through Alliances,” will convene September 28–October 1, 2016, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Please join NCAA at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art for a discussion considering how institutions are now challenged to reconcile their own particular histories with the development of experiential curricula that connect students to an infinitely expanding world. How does one honor deep institutional history while cultivating alliances with other scholarly and cultural traditions? How can we foster alliances with outside communities as equal partners, and move away from an aesthetics of display to an ethics of care and deep understanding? We invite current and aspiring art department chairs, directors, and deans to attend. Visit the website to learn more about the conference and to join NCAA

Public Art Dialogue

Public Art Dialogue (PAD) has news. The winter 2016 issue of the Public Art Dialogue Newsletter features an interview by Jennifer K. Favorite with Kirk Savage, the recipient of the 2016 PAD award for achievement in public art. Marissa Lerer contributed an essay, “Built and Open Walls,” on public art in Washington, DC. There are several forthcoming special issues of PAD: Public Art Dialogue. The first is “Higher Ed: College Campuses and Public Art,” which will be edited by Monika Burczyk (submission deadline: September 1, 2016). Cher Krause Knight and Harriet F. Senie are serving as coeditors for an open issue (submission deadline: March 1, 2017). A third issue will feature guest editors Silvia Bottinelli and Margherita d’Ayala Valva; the theme will be “Food as Activism in Contemporary Public Art” (submission deadline: June 1, 2017). For more information, see http://publicartdialogue.org/journal/submissions.

SECAC

SECAC’s annual meeting will be held October 19–22, 2016, in Roanoke, Virginia, with Virginia Tech serving as host. Kevin Concannon, director of the School of Visual Arts and professor of art history at Virginia Tech, will serve as conference director. Sessions will take place at the official conference hotel, the Hotel Roanoke and Conference Center. The Hotel Roanoke, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1996, is in the heart of the city’s vibrant downtown and within easy walking distance of the Taubman Museum of Art, the Harrison Museum of African American Culture, and the O. Winston Link Museum, as well as many restaurants and bars. The conference schedule will be posted in early July on the SECAC website.

Excursions to Virginia Tech and Hollins University on Thursday and Friday evening include the 2015 Artist’s Fellowship exhibition opening, the 2016 SECAC Juried Exhibition, and the keynote speaker Lynn Hershman Leeson, who will present in the Moss Arts Center’s spectacular Snohetta-designed theater at Virginia Tech.

The last issue of the Southeastern College Art Conference Review has been published. The 2016 edition will be renamed Art Inquiries.

The deadline for the $5,000 SECAC 2016 Artist’s Fellowship is August 1, 2016. For application details, visit www.secacart.org/artists-fellowship.

Visual Resources Association

The Visual Resources Association (VRA) held its third joint conference with Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) in Seattle, Washington, this past March. The event offered an engaging and diverse program from ninety-five submitted paper or session proposals, resulting in thirty-nine sessions; fifteen submitted workshop proposals, resulting in six workshops; fifty-five submitted poster proposals, resulting in forty posters, and eleven SIG/SUG meetings. Topics included digital humanities, visual literacy, geospatial and visualization projects, image rights and reproductions, new technologies, museum education, environmental design, makerspaces, ebook publishing, materials education and research, diversity, RDF and LOD, crowdsourcing, cataloging, archives, visualization, and open access.

Key officers at the conference included VRA vice president for conference program, Chris Strasbaugh, as coordinator of the program and schedule in collaboration with Program Committee cochairs Dan McClure (ARLIS/NA), Denise Hattwig (ARLIS/NA), and Mar González Palacios (AASL, ARLIS/NA); VRA Education Committee cochairs Beth Wodnick Haas, Ryan Brubacher, and Marsha Taichman, who contributed toward programming; and the many presenters, instructors, and moderators who offered such timely, relevant, and forward-thinking content. The collaborative perspectives and working relationships of these individuals and many others set the tone for all conference planning and arrangements.

VRA honored Ann Whiteside with its Distinguished Service Award (she was also the recipient of the same award from ARLIS/NA) and conferred its Nancy DeLaurier Award to VRA Core 4.0 cocreators Kevin Esmé Cowles, Janice Eklund, Benjamin Kessler, and Trish Rose-Sandler. Sarah Bergmann, a design thinker and the founder of the Pollinator Pathway, spoke during convocation and shared perspectives on how the plight of the honey bee inspired her to consider symbiotic relationships and the importance of building pathways to support these relationships. While Bergmann’s consideration of bees inspired her to connect city dwellers to existing green spaces, her work inspired attendees to think about the benefits that might be realized when building connections across disciplines and professional organizations.