CAA News Today

The Winter 2008 issue of Art Journal has just been published. The table of contents is posted on the CAA website, and your printed copy will arrive in the mail this month.

In the Forum, Suzanne Hudson and Anne Byrd collected papers first presented at their cochaired CAA session from the 2008 Annual Conference in Dallas–Fort Worth. Entitled “I’ll Be Your Mirror, or Why and How Do We Work on Living Artists,” the section presents essays and responses from Hudson, Byrd, Ágnes Berecz, Huey Copeland, Phyllis Tuchman, and Johanna Burton. Richard Meyer’s essay here “ ‘Artists sometimes have feelings,’ ” won CAA’s 2009 Art Journal Award, to be awarded at the upcoming conference in Los Angeles.

Features include “Toward an Aesthetic Marine Biology,” a deep-sea investigation by J. Malcolm Shick, a professor of zoology and oceanography, of underwater imagery in historical and contemporary art and its use in his classroom. Two other texts on pedagogy round out the section: Julia Morrisroe and Craig Roland consider “A Collaborative Approach to Preparing MFA Art Students to Teach at the University Level,” and Harrell Fletcher leads a conversation with his students on the MFA in social practice that he developed at Portland State University.

In Reviews, Lisa Frye Ashe examines the exhibition Morris Louis Now: An American Master and its catalogue, published to accompany a show that originated at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2006 and traveled to San Diego and Washington, DC. In related art-historical areas, Harry Cooper reviews Mark Godfrey’s book Abstraction and the Holocaust, and Gail Levin looks at the exhibitions Action Painting (on view in Basel, Switzerland in 2008) and Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976 (opening on February 13 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, after stops in New York and St. Louis), while also reviewing their catalogues.