CAA News Today
110th Annual Conference Designs
posted by CAA — December 13, 2021
This year, CAA partnered with The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s (SAIC) College Arts Access Program (CAAP), which held a design competition for CAA’s upcoming Annual Conference. This three-year college bridge program provides Chicago Public Schools students who are dedicated to studying art and design with the skills and preparation needed for admission to and success at SAIC, art and design schools, or post-secondary institutions. Eight CAAP students participated in a graphic design workshop to produce designs for the CAA Annual Conference. Led by SAIC Alum Jenna Russo, students designed work based on the prompt “Chicago: City in a Garden.”
We are excited to share the winning design for the conference’s tote bag by Betty Leisen. It will be available at the Annual Conference, made possible by SAIC.
This second design was created by Ethan Rodriguez and will be presented at the conference digitally.
In Memoriam: Robert Farris Thompson
posted by CAA — December 10, 2021
Robert Farris Thompson, an eminent art historian recognized for his field-leading research and writing on the art, history, culture, dance, and music of Africa and the Afro-Atlantic world, and who was the longest serving head of college in Yale’s history, died on Nov. 29. He was 88.
Thompson was professor emeritus of African American studies and the former Colonel John Trumbull Professor of the History of Art at Yale. For more than a half-century on Yale’s faculty, and during his 32 years as “Master T” at the helm of Timothy Dwight College, he secured his place in the pantheon of beloved professors and university leaders.
In recognizing Thompson with its inaugural Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art in 2003, the College Art Association described him as a “towering figure in the history of art, whose voice for diversity and cultural openness has made him a public intellectual of resounding importance.” In May 2021 he was honored with an honorary degree from Yale celebrating his lifetime of academic achievement.
Above excerpts and image from, “Robert Farris Thompson, pioneer in study of African and Afro-Atlantic art,” YaleNews (December 1, 2021). Please click this link to read the full article.
Craig Houser, author of Chapter 5: “The Changing Face of Scholarly Publishing: CAA’s Publication Program.”
posted by CAA — December 09, 2021
As part of CAA’s 10-year anniversary celebration of its publication The Eye, the Hand, the Mind: 100 Years of the College Art Association, chapter authors reflect on their contributions and how their impressions of the field have changed. Our second video in the series features Craig Houser, who wrote Chapter 5, “The Changing Face of Scholarly Publishing: CAA’s Publication Program.”
Craig Houser is the director of the MA in Art History and its concentration in Art Museum Studies at the City College of New York. His scholarship has addressed institutional politics related to studio art and art history, as well as issues in gender and sexuality in modern and contemporary art.
Vote for CAA’s 2022 Board of Directors!
posted by CAA — December 06, 2021
As a CAA member, voting is one of the best ways to shape the future of your professional organization. Thank you for taking the time to vote! Scroll down to meet this year’s candidates and submit your online voting form.
2021 CAA Board of Directors candidates, from left to right, top to bottom: Ashanté Kindle, Adity Saxena, Tiffany Lin, Alex Bostic, Gregory Gilbert, Karen J. Leader, Nazar Kozak, and Victoria McCraven.
2022 CAA BOARD OF DIRECTORS ELECTION
The CAA Board of Directors is comprised of professionals in the visual arts who are elected annually by the membership to serve four-year terms (or, in the case of the Emerging Professional Board members, two-year terms). The Board is charged with CAA’s long-term financial stability and strategic direction; it is also the Association’s governing body. The board sets policy regarding all aspects of CAA’s activities, including publishing, the Annual Conference, awards and fellowships, advocacy, and committee procedures. For more information, please read the CAA By-laws on Nominations, Elections, and Appointments.
MEET THE CANDIDATES
The 2021–22 Nominating Committee has selected the following candidates for election to the CAA Board of Directors. Click the names of the candidates below to read their statements and resumes before casting your vote.
BOARD OF DIRECTOR CANDIDATES (FOUR-YEAR TERM, 2022-2026)
Associate Professor of Painting, Department of Art
Mississippi State University (Starkville, MS)
Director of Art History Program
Knox College (Galesburg, IL)
Senior Research Scholar, Department of Art History, Ethnology Institute
National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
Associate Professor of Art History
Florida Atlantic University (Boca Raton, FL)
Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Art & Design
University of Nevada (Las Vegas)
Dean, School of Arts & Design
Woxsen University (India)
EMERGING PROFESSIONALS BOARD OF DIRECTOR CANDIDATES (TWO-YEAR TERM, 2022-2024)
MFA Candidate in Art
University of Connecticut (Storrs)
Programs Manager, NXTHVN
CAA members must cast their votes for board members online using the link below; no paper ballots will be mailed. The deadline for voting is 6 p.m. EST on February 17, 2022.
The elected individuals will be announced at CAA’s Annual Business Meeting to be held from 1–2 p.m. (Central) on Friday, February 18, 2022.
Questions? Contact Maeghan Donohue, Manager, Strategic Planning, Diversity & Governance, at mdonohue@collegeart.org.
In Conversation: Coffee talk on the Annual Conference, Part II
posted by CAA — December 06, 2021
Our series of coffee talk conversations continues with a follow up chat between Meme Omogbai, our executive director and CEO, and Theresa Avila, the Program Chair of the 110th Annual Conference. In this video, they address questions from international participants, safety protocols and more details. Check it out and send us your thoughts for the next installment! Please send us your questions: programs@collegeart.org .
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES
Theresa Avila is a curator and an Assistant Professor of non-Western Art History at California State University, Channel Islands. She earned a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of New Mexico with a focus on Modern Latin American and Latin@x art. As a scholar and curator her work focuses on the intersections between the visual and political, as she interrogates historiography, empire and nation building, and systems of differentiation. Published works include “Echoing the Call for Revolution: Emiliano Zapata in Chican@x Art” for the exhibition catalogue Emiliano Zapata despues de Zapata (2019), the book Making and Being Made: Contemporary Citizenship, Art, and Visual Culture (2017), as well as the forthcoming “The History of the Barrio Mobile Art Studio, a vehicle for creative transformations” for the fifty-year anthology of Self Help Graphics (2023) and the project “Dialogos: on Landscapes of the Americas” for Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture Journal. (2023). As the Director of the Broome Library Gallery at CSUCI she curated Magnetic Currents: Art charged by the U.S. and Mexico Border (2020); Colecion de Lucha, Desde Santa Paula a las Americas: The Personal Archive of Luzma Espinosa (2019); and Tracing History: Mapping California (2018). Dr. Avila firmly believes we must activate art in meaningful and engage art as a tool for change.
Meme Omogbai, CAA Executive Director and CEO: Before joining CAA, Meme Omogbai served as a member and past board chair of the New Jersey Historic Trust, one of four landmark entities dedicated to preservation of the state’s historic and cultural heritage, and Montclair State University’s Advisory Board. Named one of 25 Influential Black Women in Business by The Network Journal, Meme has over twenty-five years of experience in corporate, government, higher education, and museum sectors. As the first American of African descent to chair the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), Omogbai led an initiative to rebrand the AAM as a global, inclusive alliance. While COO and trustee, she spearheaded a major transformation in operating performance at the Newark Museum. During her time as deputy assistant chancellor of New Jersey’s Department of Higher Education, Omogbai received legislative acknowledgment and was recognized with the New Jersey Meritorious Service award for her work on college affordability initiatives for families. Omogbai received her MBA from Rutgers University and holds a CPA. She did postgraduate work at Harvard University’s executive management program and has earned the designation of Chartered Global Management Accountant. She studied global museum executive leadership at the J. Paul Getty Trust Museum Leadership Institute, where she also served on the faculty.
CAA 2021: A look back on the past year’s programming, publications, and opportunities
posted by CAA — November 30, 2021
CAA has produced this reel with a compilation of events, scholarship, programs, and initiatives CAA from the last year. See below for a full list of each item (in order of appearance in the video) with links to learn more.
Programming:
CAA’s first virtual Annual Conference
Mariam Ghani in conversation with Laura Anderson Barbata
In Conversation with Dr. Nancy Odegaard
Theresa Avila, Annual Conference Program Chair in conversation with Meme Omogbai
An Inaugural Evening with CAA Distinguished Awardees and Artists
CAA Then & Now: Reflections on the Centennial Book and the Next Century
Karen Leader, author of Chapter 12: Advocacy
Opportunities:
Publication, travel, and support grants
Publications and Publications Programming:
Artist Project, Elana Mann for Art Journal Open
Roundtable discussion for Art Journal Open, Holding Space…
Art Journal and The Art Bulletin
caa.reviews book and exhibition reviews
caa.reviews’s dissertation roster, 2020
Global Programs
CAA-Getty International Program
CAA-Getty 10-Year International Program online publication
Podcasts
CAA Conversations by CAA’s Education Committee
CAA’s 110th Annual Conference will take place in Chicago from February 17-19, followed by virtual live sessions to be held in Zoom from March 3-5. For more information and to register go to this link.
Ellen Levy, Author of Chapter 8: Art in an Academic Setting
posted by CAA — November 29, 2021
As part of CAA’s 10-year anniversary celebration of its publication The Eye, the Hand, the Mind: 100 Years of the College Art Association, chapter authors reflect on their contributions and how their impressions of the field have changed. Our second video in the series features Ellen Levy, who wrote Chapter 8, “Art in an Academic Setting: Contemporary CAA Exhibitions.”
Ellen K. Levy, PhD, is a multimedia artist and writer known for exploring art, science and technology interrelationships since the mid-1980s. Levy highlights their importance through exhibitions, educational programs, publications and curatorial opportunities. Her graduate studies were at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston following a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College in Zoology. She was President of the College Art Association (2004-2006) before earning her doctorate (2012) from the University of Plymouth (UK) on the art and neuroscience of attention. She then was Special Advisor on the Arts and Sciences at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. She was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Arts and Sciences at Skidmore College (1999) and taught many transdisciplinary classes and workshops (e.g., the New School, Cooper Union, Brooklyn College, Banff). She was recipient of an AICA award and an arts commission from NASA following a solo exhibition at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) (1985).
She has exhibited her art internationally and in such landmark exhibitions as Weather Report (Boulder Museum, cur Lucy Lippard) and Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics (Field Museum, Chicago, adv. Martin Kemp). Levy has published widely on art and complex systems. With Berta Sichel, she guest edited and contributed to CAA’s special issue of Art Journal (spring 1996), likely the first widely distributed academic publication on contemporary art and the genetic code. With Charissa Terranova, she is co-editor of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s Generative Influences in Art, Design: From Forces to Forms (2021, Bloomsbury Press). Levy has also curated a related exhibition for Pratt Manhattan’s gallery. Levy and Barbara Larson co-edit the “art and science since 1750” book series of Routledge Press. Levy and Patricia Olynyk co-direct the NY LASER program, a central initiative of Leonardo/ISAST. She was twice an invited participant in Watermill’s Art and Consciousness Workshop, led by stage director and playwright, Robert Wilson.
Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) Picks: November
posted by CAA — November 29, 2021
The November “Picks” from the Committee on Women in the Arts explore spaces between the human figure and its psychic figurations. Each artist featured in the exhibitions traces the vacillations between interior perceptions and the objective contours of an external world eroded by alienation and violence. Whether they draw from traditional genres or experiment with new media, these artists destabilize the grammar of recognizable forms to reveal the vulnerability of human subjectivity and test the possibilities for repair.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Condor and the Mole, 2011, Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London © Courtesy of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly in the League with the Night
October 16, 2021-February 13, 2022
Kunstammlung Nordheim Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye paints portraits to evoke the psychic depths of Black subjects while gently keeping them from the demand for full exposure. The fields of rich colors and soft, slightly loose brush strokes in which Yiadom-Boakye holds her sitters allow her paintings to pulsate with an elegance that is tangible but difficult to pinpoint, though it seems to emerge from the value the artist attributes to seeing as a private act. One painting featured in this exhibition, Condor and Mole (2011), seems to illustrate the mysterious camaraderie indicated by the title of the exhibition and links it to the veils of privacy Yiadom-Boakye brings to the painted image . Condor and Mole portrays two Black girls on a beach punctuated with dark rocks; the tide pulls their shadows into tan and blue-grey sheens that continue into the horizon line. The girls are turned to each other as they look down into a dark crevice in the sand. Viewers do not see what they are looking at, and Yiadom-Boakye portrays the playful attunement of their collaboration, expressed through the correspondence of their body language, without providing full access to their shared vision.
Ana Torfs, Dark Spaces Where Things Cannot Be Put
January 10, 2021-February 27, 2022
Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo
México City, México
Ana Torfs is an artist based in Belgium and Dark Spaces Where Things Cannot Be Put is her first solo exhibition in the Americas. Working with an idiosyncratic array of materials and sources, Tors makes her subject the contingency of visual perception and the unstable connections among images, words, and knowledge. How do words determine what becomes visible to us? For Tors, this is an aesthetic, historical, ethical question that takes her work into contexts of great consequence. The installation The Parrot and the Nightingale, a Phantasmagoria (2014) exemplifies her interest in language, translation, and power. In it, Tors draws from Christopher Columbus’ travel diaries to provoke reflections on linguistic alienation, curiosity, order, and repression. In dialogue with 81 black-and-white images of tropical nature, Tors presents a female interpreter translating an English version of Columbus’ diary into American Sign Language and then three male interpreters bring the text back to a spoken English fractured with error. The “original” diary and its exploratory record recedes further from vision and the connection to the photographs becomes even more unstable, but Tors suggests that the damage imperial encounters remain. The female translator in The Parrot and the Nightingale, a Phantasmagoria points to the stealth feminism running through Tors’ artwork and her attention to the long histories of depriving women access to the voice of authority. The installation Echo’s Bones/Were Turned to Stone (2020), a carpet overlaid with a recording of a woman speaking in an endless chain of associations, suggests that this gendered displacement into irrationality forces women to carry the deaths embedded in and covered over by sensible, rational language.
November 25, 2021-July 3, 2022
Tate Britain, London
The winner of the 2017 Turner Prize, Lubaina Himid is well-known for her impact on the Black British art movement and her innovative depictions of everyday life in the Black diaspora. This Tate exhibition features Himid’s recent work as well as selected highlights from her influential oeuvre, focusing in particular on her interest and training in the theatre. With vivid colors that appear within slightly unsettling arrangements of geometric forms, Himid stages mise-en-scènes that reflect on diasporic imagining, building, and making. These qualities are evident in Six Tailors (2019), a painting in which Himid has arranged six men of African descent around a table covered in bright turquoise blue. The fabric, scissors, and spools thread with which they work materialize the colored and textured worlds they are in the process of making, which sharply contrasts the painting behind them that depicts the sky and sea as flat gray horizontal lines. Himid’s work as a painter is figured into this meditation on making and registers the losses that compose it.
Pipilotti Rist: Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor
September 12, 2021-June 6, 2022
Geffen Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
The first West Coast survey of Pipilotti Rist’s work reveals how much her Pop-friendliness fits with Los Angeles. The playful eroticism, love of sparkle and shine, and hyper femininity that are the Swiss artist’s stylistic signatures all resonate with the city’s central place in the fantasy of making dreams come true. Of course, a dark cruelty lurks within this fantasy, and it therefore makes sense that despite the generosity alluded to in the exhibition’s title, Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor also reveals the artist’s affinity with figures such as Lynn Hershman Leeson and David Lynch. Surveying more than thirty years of her work, this exhibition highlights Rist’s talent for stretching video to its extremes with scale, color, and sound. For her, video is a threshold into a rich and elastic imaginary that lets interiors and exteriors flow into each other and announces the desire for big-hearted connections.
October 1, 2021-July 10, 2022
Brooklyn Museum of Art, Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art
Baseera Khan recently received the UOVO Prize for an emerging Brooklyn artist, and with an aesthetics of distortion pushed to theatrical extremes, they make their body a site for realizing spaces of disjuncture between Muslim and American identities. All of Khan’s artworks collage together a struggle with the archive of commodified objects, images, and materials through which Muslim Americans are perceived. Khan’s I Arrive in a Place with a High Level of Psychic Distress (Blue) (2021) encapsulates this struggle and crystallizes the meaning of the kaleidoscopic layers that are a predominant feature of their work. In this photograph, brown hands and legs adorned with silver chains, bracelets, and rings emerge from behind the broken fragments of painted floor tiles. It is a beautiful and violent fight to “arrive in a place,” but also a challenge to the conditions of raced and gendered visibility that materialize on the terrain of the image.
Yoko Ono: Mend Piece for London
August 25, 2021-January 2, 2022
Whitechapel Gallery, London
Yoko Ono’s Mend Piece for London consists of two plain white tables upon which she has placed broken cups and saucers as well as instruments of repair: scissors, glue, twine, and tape. In her instructions she states, “Mend carefully/ think of mending the world/ at the same time.” A gentle reassertion of her central place in the Fluxus tradition and its continued pertinence, Ono also draws from the Japanese tradition of Kintsugi, in which broken pottery is repaired with lacquer mixed with precious metals and silver. Mend Piece for London also exemplifies Ono’s irrepressible commitment to reaching people with her aesthetics of repair and inspiring them to create and hold an image of a peaceful world in their minds so as to thoughtfully cohere all its broken pieces.
Jennifer Packer: The Eye is Not Satisfied with Seeing
October 30, 2021-April 17, 2022
Whitney Museum of Art, New York
The Eye is Not Satisfied with Seeing features 30 artworks Jennifer Packer has produced over the last decade. Emerging from a historical period in which visual media testifies to the state-sanctioned murder of Black people, Packer explores the psychic states and experiences that exceed visual evidence with a lyrical and melancholic vision. Layered with swaths of bright color, discordant fragments, blank spaces, and the weeping lines of vertical drips, Packer’s paintings and drawings are both heavy and light, private and revelatory, understandable and illegible. It seems that for Packer, traditional genres are tools for containing chaotic feelings, giving them form, but also evoking what has yet to be expressed. The still life Say Her Name (2017) is Packer’s response to the 2015 murder of Sandra Bland. The flowers, leaves, and stems of this painted funerary bouquet, loosely suspended before an unstable background of yellow and black, becomes a scrim that evokes the intimacy of identification and the reality of death’s irrevocable distance.
CAA signs AHA statement on Censorship and Prosecution by Chinese Authorities
posted by CAA — November 29, 2021
CAA has signed onto a statement released by the AHA that expresses alarm in response to the escalation of censorship and prosecution by Chinese authorities on Chinese citizens who deviate from the Communist Party line of hero worship. It asserts, “Such efforts strike at the very heart of historical scholarship, which depends on open-ended inquiry and a free exchange of ideas, wherever that inquiry leads, and whether or not those ideas cast aspersions on historical actors…. The AHA stands firmly against national laws and policies that in effect criminalize the historical enterprise.” Read the entire statement here.
Meet the 2021 Wyeth Award Winners!
posted by CAA — November 18, 2021
Howardena Pindell, Night Flight, 2015-16, mixed media on canvas, 75 X 63 in. (190.5 X 160 cm) (artwork © Howardena Pindell; photograph provided by Garth Freenan Gallery, New York)
MEET THE GRANTEES
Since 2005, the Wyeth Foundation for American Art has supported the publication of books on American art through the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, administered by CAA. The 2021 grantees are:
- Emilie Boone, A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography, Duke University Press
- Sarah Cowan, Howardena Pindell: Reclaiming Abstraction, Yale University Press
- Elizabeth Hamilton, Charting the Afrofuturist Imaginary in African American Art: The Black Female Fantastic, Taylor & Francis
- Jacqueline Taylor, Amaza Lee Meredith Imagines Herself Modern: Architecture and the Black American Middle Class, The MIT Press
Read a list of all recipients of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant from 2005 to the present.
BACKGROUND
For the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, “American art” is defined as art created in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Eligible for the grant are book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art, visual studies, and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy. The deadline for the receipt of applications is September 15 of each year.
Guidelines
Process, Materials, and Checklist
CONTACT
Questions? Please contact Cali Buckley, Content Manager, Education and Intellectual Property, at cbuckley@collegeart.org.