CAA News Today
CWA Picks: Fall 2024
posted by CAA — September 23, 2024
Cheryl Pagurek, Winter Garden interactive digital collage, 2023
The exhibitions and other events selected for the Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) Fall Picks highlight the multitude of technologies–old and new–that artists have used to bring attention to overlooked communities including fellow creatives: groups sidelined for reasons of race, region, gender, sexuality, and other marginalizing factors and non-human entities with whom we share space.
UNITED STATES
Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit
September 28–February 9
SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA
Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit presents the first West Coast retrospective on the work of this critical yet overlooked figure in the history of modern photography. Over the course of six decades, Kanaga championed the artistic value of photography and documented urgent social issues, from urban poverty and labor rights to racial terror and inequality. Her work remains as relevant today as it was during her own lifetime. Organized from the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, this exhibition charts the artist’s vision, which spans pathbreaking photojournalism, modernist still lifes, and celebrated portraits of Black Americans.
Dissident Sisters: Bev Grant and Feminist Activism, 1968-72
Through December 1
The Block Museum, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
In 2023, the Block Museum acquired a group of photographs by folk musician and photographer Bev Grant. In the late 1960s and early 70s, Grant participated in and photographed left-wing and radical protests in and around New York City. She was a member of the group New York Radical Women and documented events associated with the group, as well as the Moratorium on the Vietnam War and other anti-war protests, pro-abortion rallies, and the Miss America Pageant protest. Her work presents a view of events reflecting broad political engagement and social justice demonstrations that defined the late 1960s and 70s in the US.
Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies
Through January 19
Brooklyn Museum, NYC
Prolific Black social realist printmaker, sculptor, and painter Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012), who was born in Washington, DC, but worked primarily in Mexico, devoted her oeuvre and activism to uplifting the Black and Mexican women and other working-class individuals who so often formed her subjects. The Brooklyn Museum show includes more than 150 works by Catlett.
Ja’Tovia Gary: The Giverny Suite
Through December 7
The Block Museum, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
Ja’Tovia Gary uses documentary film and experimental video to address representation, race, gender, sexuality, and violence. Gary was at the Terra Foundation for American Art’s residency program in Giverny, France during the summer of 2016 when several widely-publicized police-involved killings of African Americans took place in the United States. An immersive, three-channel film installation, The Giverny Suite, (2019) centers the voices and bodies of Black women in an experimental film essay that is a meditation on the interconnected themes of insecurity/safety, isolation/respite, autonomy, and love. Gary presents a complicated and nuanced portrait of the diversity and complexity of Black women’s relationship to physical and emotional security.
Jasmine Gregory: Who Wants to Die for Glamour
October 10–Spring 2025
MoMA PS1, NYC
The monumental mixed-media figural and abstract canvases of Zurich-based American artist Jasmine Gregory (b. 1987) draw from art history and popular culture to critique commodification, consumerism, and the systems of cultural patrimony, including the racism and misogyny that dwell therein.
Kandy G Lopez: (In)visible Threads
Through March 2
Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA
Kandy G Lopez, a multidisciplinary Afro-Caribbean American artist, critically engages with the complexities of identity and marginalization. Lopez’s fiber-based artworks serve as a powerful medium to navigate the intricacies of ancestry, race, class, and gender. As an artist, Lopez is driven by a desire to represent marginalized individuals who inspire and move her, constantly seeking challenges both materialistically and metaphorically. Her works are born from a deep-seated need to learn about her people and culture, fostering a dialogue between the artwork and the viewer. This exhibition features her large-scale fiber works – portraits “painted” with yarn.
Laura Aguilar: Nudes in Nature
Through January 5
Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ
Laura Aguilar: Nudes in Nature celebrates the work of photographer Laura Aguilar (1959-2018) and her series of intimate portraits of nude, large-bodied women in natural settings. Nudes in Nature brings together nearly 60 photographic works from the most recognized of Aguilar’s series. Featured works depict the Southwestern region of the United States and highlight the inherent connections between nature and the female form. Exhibited in conversation, they encourage reflection on the ways female bodies are perceived within the natural world in comparison to how they are viewed in social and cultural spaces.
Through October 13
Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME
November 16–May 18, 2025
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT
When she worked in her New York studio, said painter Martha Diamond (1944–2023), she was “thinking of infinity: to the time of religion, of history, … using shapes that have been significant to people for thousands of years.” A selection of Diamond’s drawings and monotypes appears in this exhibition alongside examples of her better-known large-scale abstracted city views and full abstractions in oil on canvas, all engaging with the notions of cyclicality and disruption that are central to the geological and anthropological theories of deep time.
Ming Smith: Wind Chime
Through January 5
The Wexner Center, Columbus, OH
Ming Smith: Wind Chime explores spirituality, movement, and feminism in a solo exhibition pairing recent work by the Columbus-raised artist Ming Smith with the photographic series that started her career in 1972. The centerpiece of the exhibit, a multimedia commission that animates a series of photographs using projection, marks an entirely new direction in her practice. Also on view are recent collages and color photographs—all set to an ambient soundscape created by Smith’s son, Mingus Murray. The exhibition also includes nearly 30 black-and-white photographs from Smith’s Africa series, taken during her travels to Senegal, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, and Egypt over the span of three decades.
Nicole Eisenman: Fixed Crane for Madison Square Park
October 24–March 9
Madison Square Park Conservancy, NYC
Nicole Eisenman, best known for incisive works that capture the human experience in unexpected, grim, and humorous scenes, continues her innovation through sculpture with a new commission that destabilizes familiar heroic objects associated with exploration and advancement. On view in the park’s Oval Lawn, Eisenman offers visitors the opportunity to explore and engage with a toppled 100-foot-long industrial crane embellished with roughhewn sculptural “barnacles.” The artist draws inspiration from art history—referencing Duchamp’s readymades, Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, and Rodin’s figures. Eisenman’s project lends humanity and humor to these references, challenging our notions of progress and achievement.
Rosalie D. Gagné: A Contemporary Alchemist
Through December 22
Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY
Combining organic materials like glass, clay, and live plants with inorganic matter like plastics and computers, Montreal-based artist Rosalie D. Gagné produces large-scale sculptural installations that examine our perceptions of nature and technology and the interactions of organic systems with human-built ones, including simulation in the form of biomimicry. The Neuberger retrospective will include a re-creation of Gagné’s 2020 Artificial Kingdom IV comprising forty-five suspended, tentacled polyethylene forms that respond to viewer movements.
Steina: Playback
October 25–January 12
MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA
In fall 2024, the List Visual Arts Center will present the first solo exhibition in over a decade of Steina, the pathbreaking media artist whose work traverses video, music, and technology through a commitment to spontaneity and play. Steina’s nearly five decades of video work queries the possibilities of sound-image exchange, machine vision, and electronic abstraction. This exhibition will trace Steina’s creative practice from early collaborative works with Woody Vasulka to her independent explorations of optics, machine vision, and a liberated, non-anthropocentric subjectivity. The show seeks to both bring renewed recognition to the artist’s innovative vision and argue for her influence and relevance today as a younger generation of artists consider modes of art-making that resist easy commodification and question the place of technology and the human in relation to larger ecological and planetary concerns.
Suchitra Mattai: Myth from Matter
Through January 12
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.
Combining richly colored textiles, found objects, beads, and more, multidisciplinary artist Suchitra Mattai (b. 1973, Georgetown, Guyana) explores themes of history, identity, and belonging. The forces that lead certain stories to be remembered, or forgotten, are central to her art. Drawing on her Indo-Caribbean roots, Mattai weaves together personal narratives, collective mythologies, and colonial history. Suchitra Mattai: Myth from Matter is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Washington, DC. Large-scale textile installations, sculptures, collages, and paintings by Mattai are presented with a selection of related historical artworks from Europe and Southeast Asia.
MEXICO
Ana Gallardo: Tembló acá un delirio
Through December 15
Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City
Since the end of the 90s, a time when globalization instrumentalized precarity and the feminization of labor beyond the scope of care and the domestic, the work of Ana Gallardo has problematized the privatization of feelings and social relationships through a perspective that centers the open wound of violence against women.
¡Hija de su madre! Una exposición de Mónica Mayer
Through September
Galería de Arte Contemporáneo de Xalapa, Mexico
The exhibition Her Mother’s Daughter! An exhibition of Mónica Mayer traces a fascinating journey through the artist’s different creative stages, encompassing more than one hundred historical and recent pieces created over the last five decades around themes such as family, motherhood, and gender. Since the 1970s, Mónica Mayer (Mexico, 1954) has held two central convictions: that the personal is political and that art is inseparable from life itself. In her works, she uses irony and performance to examine the evolution of family structures and question the persistence of exploitation and sexist norms affecting women.
Myra Landau: Sensitive Geometry
Through February 23
Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City
Although Myra Landau’s work is substantial to the development of geometric abstraction in the second half of the twentieth century, her work is little known. This retrospective responds to the urgency to not only investigate and give visibility to female artists who have been left out of the hegemonic historiographic discourse, but also to understand their contributions to the history of geometric abstraction, particularly sensitive geometry, an approach that has been excluded by the art canon in Mexico.
CANADA
Cheryl Pagurek: Winter Garden
Through December 8
Surrey Art Gallery, Surrey, BC
Using machine learning software, Winter Garden mirrors the presence and movement of viewers via a webcam, creating an ever-changing collage composed of motifs of lively indoor plants against a desolate winter landscape. The concept began from a series of still-life photographs depicting a small oasis of indoor plants that the artist tended to during the lockdown in the winter of 2021. As a woman in the cross-over area of art and tech, Pagurek aims to broaden approaches and themes presented in the field.
Lucy Qinnuayuak
Opening October 9
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON
One of the first artists to ever begin creating works at the print studio in Kinngait, Nunavut in the 1960s, Lucy Qinnuayuak’s colorful depictions of birds and scenes of domestic life bring to life the world as she saw it. In this exhibition of 20 works on paper, the viewer is invited to explore the evolution of Qinnuayuak’s style, from her concept drawings to stonecut prints, many of which include her much-loved owls.
SOUTH AMERICA
Cronotopías: Silvia Rivas
Through October 6
Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia
Cronotopías is the first solo exhibition in Colombia dedicated to the work of Argentine artist Silvia Rivas. The exhibition explores the relationship between time and space through video installations, animations, and liminal environments. Rivas has developed extensive work in this field since the late 1990s and her work has been internationally recognized for its ability to create immersive and emotionally resonant experiences.
Desde la ventana: Ana Mercedes Hoyos. Una retrospective
Through October 6
Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia
Through the Window: Ana Mercedes Hoyos. A Retrospective is the fourth exhibition of the artist at MAMBO, her second retrospective, and the most comprehensive to date, showcasing the entirety of Hoyos’ work (1942–2014), particularly the period between 1968 and 1984. This period constitutes one of the most important contributions of the artist to contemporary Colombian and Latin American art, during which she developed her unique form of pop, landscape, and abstraction.
Musa. Perspectivas femeninas en las Colecciones del MAMM y MAC Panamá
Through May 4
Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Colombia
This exhibition brings together works from the collections of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellin and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Panama and seeks to make visible the works of female artists who historically have had less prominence than their male counterparts.
EUROPE & UK
Against All Odds: Historical Women and New Algorithms
Through December 8
Statens Museum for Kunsts, Copenhagen, Denmark
During the years 1870–1910, a number of Nordic female artists achieved success against all odds. However, despite their success, they were later forgotten and quietly disappeared from history. What happened? We investigate this question, bring the artists back into the spotlight and explore how artificial intelligence can be used to understand and communicate history in new ways. All 24 artists in the exhibition have one thing in common: they left their Nordic home countries to pursue their artistic ambitions abroad in places such as Germany, Italy, France and Greece. There, they met other women in the same situation, forming networks across national borders. In the exhibition, you will encounter both spectacular artworks by the 24 artists and digital installations based on artificial intelligence. These installations use the women’s artworks, biographies and research to tell their collective story.
Gabriele Münter: the Great Expressionist Woman Painter
November 12–February 9
Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid, Spain
Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) was one of the founders of The Blue Rider [Der Blaue Reiter], the legendary group of Expressionist artists based in Munich. The exhibition, which includes more than one hundred paintings, drawings, prints and photographs, aims to reveal an artist who rebelled against the limits imposed on women of her day and who succeeded in becoming one of the most notable figures of German Expressionism in the early 20th century.
Hilary Heron: A Retrospective
Through October 28
Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland
Presenting the work of pioneering Dublin-born, modernist sculptor Hilary Heron (1923 – 1977), this is the first major retrospective exhibition of Heron’s work since 1964. Bringing together work from national and international collections, the exhibit includes Heron’s carvings, welding and castings. A master welder, Heron’s practice was highly unusual for an Irish artist, let alone a woman in the 1950s. Her work tactfully and skillfully broaches themes of gender, relationships, deep histories and religion through impressive, varied mediums including stone, lead, steel and wood. Hilary Heron: A Retrospective seeks to correct the ways that her work has been overlooked in Irish and international histories of modern sculpture.
Zanele Muholi
Through January 26
Tate Modern, London, UK
Zanele Muholi is one of the most acclaimed photographers working today, and their work has been exhibited all over the world. With over 260 photographs, this major exhibition presents the full breadth of their career to date. Muholi describes themself as a visual activist. From the early 2000s, they have documented and celebrated the lives of South Africa’s Black lesbian, gay, trans, queer and intersex communities.
ASIA
Tosh Basco: No Sky
Through October 15
Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China
The Filipino-American performance artist Tosh Basco (b. 1988), a nonbinary trans artist who for years has performed under the drag persona boychild, receives her first survey exhibition in No Sky. Her movement-based practice–informed by research into a wide range of experimental and improvisational performance styles, from Japanese Butoh to shamanism–finds expression in paintings created by impressing her body on the canvas after coating it with theatrical materials like clown paint, as well as in paintings and works on paper.
Akutagawa Saori: 100th Anniversary of Her Birth
Through October 20
Yokosuka Museum of Art, Yokosuka, Japan
Avant-garde painter and dye artist Akutagawa (Madokoro) Saori (1924–1966) exhibited extensively in her native Japan starting in 1954, when she won the Newcomer Award at the 4th Modern Art Association Exhibition in Tokyo, and twice while living in Los Angeles and New York in 1958–62. Akutagawa deployed bold forms and a vivid palette in abstractions and in works evoking expressive female figures (Woman series), monsters, and deities (Myths/FolkTales series). Her oeuvre reflects influences as varied as her travels in the Soviet Union and the 1955 Mexican Art Exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum. The Yokosuka Museum show, held in the centennial year of the artist’s birth, features works from the institution’s permanent collection.
MIDDLE EAST & NORTH AFRICA
Alia Ahmad: Aspects [مظاهر]
Through October 22
Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai, UAE
Alia Ahmad is a Saudi Arabian painter (b.1996). Her color palette is influenced by an upbringing in Riyadh’s industrial/desert landscape. She seeks, in Aspects to peel back layers, exposing her personal vocabulary. Ahmad’s point of departure – the rapidly changing environment of her home city, Riyadh, where traditional ways of life exist alongside industrialization and modernization, where native plant life and cultural art forms thrive within one of the world’s fastest-growing urban settings. Ahmad’s segmented compositions, with their tonal contrasts, modulated colors, sinewy brushwork, and gestural forms provide a sense of constant growth.
Mouza Al Hamrani: Homepage
Through October 24
Tashkeel, Dubai, UAE
Mouza Al Hamrani is an Emirate illustrator and multimedia artist whose work is rooted in the pop culture of the GCC region. Her work explores the intricate and often exhausting reality of contemporary life, delving into themes of cultural inheritance and the human condition. Homepage reinterprets early “Khaleeji” cyberspace’s digital ephemera into a tangible, immersive experience. This exhibition bridges the virtual and physical worlds, capturing the impact of Khaleeji cyberspace as it entered modern culture. By bringing these digital relics into the real world, Al Hamrani celebrates the online anonymity afforded during a time when the GCC was wary of the World Wide Web. The exhibition explores questions such as: How did this foreign technology affect a conservative culture? What does it signify when digital artifacts are removed from their original context? How does viewing them outside their intended space change their meaning? How did people express themselves while remaining anonymous?
Zainab: The Weight of Snow on Her Chest
Through December 6
Gulf Photos Plus, Dubai, UAE
Zainab (b. 1998, Srinagar, Kashmir) is a visual artist based in Kashmir, India. Her engagements with photography are mostly personal, reflecting her experiences of surviving in a militarized region. The Weight of Snow on Her Chest renders a portrait of a home in Kashmir—moving through the constant sieges enforced in the region. Zainab’s photographs carry the everyday feelings of suffocation and anxiety in a place where both identity and existence are threatened by a colonizing power. The photographs are accompanied by verses that draw upon her role as a photojournalist documenting property destructions and encounters in other Kashmiri homes. The combination of image and text within this work skillfully recasts photographs as metaphors.
OCEANIA
Julie Rrap: Past Continuous
Through February 16
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, Australia
A major figure in Australian contemporary art for over 40 years, Julie Rrap (b. 1950, Widjabul Wia-bal Country/Lismore) works across photography, video, performance, sculpture, and drawing to examine representations of the body in art and popular culture. Julie Rrap: Past Continuous features the artist’s landmark installation Disclosures: A Photographic Construct (1982), as well as newer works using the artist’s body 42 years later. Rrap uses the camera as a powerful feminist tool to give agency to the model (often herself) as both the object and subject of her works. In recent years, Rrap has reflected on the invisibility of the aging female body and how we look or look away when confronted by certain bodies.
Apply for the Michael Aurbach Fellowship for Excellence in Visual Art!
posted by CAA — August 15, 2024
Michael Aurbach, The Confessional (1994), Mixed Media 10.5’ x 12’ x 36’
Established in 2022, the Michael Aurbach Fellowship for Excellence in Visual Art recognizes and honors CAA members who have obtained an MFA or equivalent in studio art and are currently teaching studio classes full-time or part-time. The purpose is to support these artist members as they fulfill their goals as visual arts professionals.
On an annual basis, CAA grants a $7,500 award and registration to the CAA Annual Conference to a qualified artist member teaching at an American or international university/community college. A jury of artists will adjudicate the fellowship and a proposal will not be required; the recipient will be selected solely based on their work.
Learn more about fellowship application requirements here.
Deadline: November 1
Funds for Travel to Special Exhibitions Available Twice Per Year!
posted by CAA — August 14, 2024
The Art History Travel Fund, established in 2018 to provide students with opportunities to gain first-hand knowledge of original works of art by supporting travel to special exhibitions in the US and around the world, will now have two application windows per year for qualified faculty!
This fund awards up to $10,000 to eligible undergraduate and graduate art history classes to cover travel, accommodations, and admission fees for students and instructors to attend museum exhibitions. Learn more and apply!
Deadlines:
October 15 for Spring 2025 exhibitions
April 15 for Fall 2025 exhibitions
Call for Submissions: CAA113 SAC Photography Exhibition
posted by CAA — August 04, 2024
The CAA Services to Artists Committee (SAC) is now accepting submissions for Vantage Point, a photography exhibition during the CAA 113th Annual Conference.
At the most basic level, a photograph is a moment captured from a specific vantage point–a representation, not simply re-presenting ‘the real’ but, especially in contemporary culture, creating our sense of reality. As Susan Sontag writes, “Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality.” Vantage Point seeks to highlight artists who push the boundaries of what an image is, who confront anticipated vantage points and in turn challenge viewers to consider the complexities of perception and representation. Both emerging and established artists working in any photo-based or screen-based medium—including digital, film, video, or alternative photo processing—are welcome to apply.
Application Requirements
Please combine into one pdf:
- Artist statement (200 words maximum)
- Biography (150 words maximum)
- CV
- Website (if applicable)
- Corresponding image list (image number, title, medium, dimension, date)
- Handling, framing, and hanging descriptions
- Technology/equipment requirements
- Accessibility requirements
Portfolio of 10–15 images:
- Each image must be sized to 1 MB
- Title format: 01_Last name_Title_Medium_Dimensions_Date
Please Note: Entry is free, but all accepted artists must join CAA as an individual member to show their work. If a submission is selected, artists are responsible for arranging timely delivery and pickup of artwork in NYC at their own expense. All work must be ready to be hung and framing of the work needs to be agreed upon in conversation with the curator.
Submit now via e-mail to SAC!
Deadline: November 15
Member Spotlight: Meet New Editor-in-Chief of Art Journal, Derek Conrad Murray!
posted by CAA — August 01, 2024
Can you tell our members about your current academic post, research interests, and larger scholarly motivations?
I am currently Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz. My research is in late modern and contemporary art and visual culture. I’m an interdisciplinary theorist who utilizes methodologies and critical approaches from various disciplines and fields. Much of my research focuses on the conjunction between ideology and visuality, and I often explore the interrelations between identities and cultural identifications (gender, sexuality, race, and disability) and contemplate the complexities of their envisioning.
In recent years, I’ve been exploring the broader multidisciplinary landscape of visually based research. The increasing expansiveness of arts-related and visual culture scholarship across disciplines and fields has inspired me to consider the necessity of multidisciplinary collaboration. As society has become inundated with images—many of which are intended to spread propaganda, disinformation, insidious forms of social engineering, and nefarious capitalist agendas—there’s an ever-growing multidisciplinary urgency to critically contend with the visual. In response to this complex visual landscape, there is a need for arts writing to embrace a broader range of methodological and critical frameworks. My approach has always been to maintain an openness to embracing emerging ideas that hold the potential to transform how we envision the social role of artistic production, art history, theory and criticism, and visual culture.
I’m also motivated by the failures of empathy and decency that plague our world, not to mention within many of the institutions we operate in. My work thus far is a reflection of my ethical commitment to inclusivity and an expansive interest in culture. I have always had a strong impulse not to look away and a resistance to disidentifying with the humanity and social struggles of others. I have committed myself to always fostering empathy and mutuality to the extent that I can—while maintaining a parallel dedication to disciplinary and methodological expansiveness. My commitment to inclusivity and multidisciplinary is a priority and has encouraged me to bring together diverse artists, scholars, and cultural producers from various backgrounds into critical conversation.
What is your vision for Art Journal during your term as Editor-in-Chief?
My vision is rooted in a commitment to supporting pathbreaking creative and intellectual work—and modeling an editorial approach invested in the transnational exchange of ideas. I am inspired by new critical approaches that may break from scholarly trends, ideological fixities, and expected modes of thought. To achieve this aim, I acknowledge that resisting the abusive forms of social control, division, and marginalization that plague our world necessitates embracing often unexpected perspectives. Doing so, I believe, will significantly expand the journal’s reader base. However, technology has also presented challenges to the traditional means by which intellectual ideas are circulated and valued in our discipline and its related fields. The rise of Internet-based, public-facing art discourses occurring in online journals has created new readerships and a broader expansion of emergent ideas. I truly believe that Art Journal can be at the forefront of expanding how we envision the social role of the arts.
I also look forward to locating and supporting impactful artmaking that may be adrift from representational and conceptual trends and the often overbearing dictates of market forces. Building strong relationships with artists is a personal priority, but I endeavor to acknowledge how new technologies have led to an ever-expanding understanding (or reimagining) of what an art object is formally and aesthetically. And I have always been critical of the binary-based dividing lines so often drawn between aesthetic formalism and the concerns of identity and representation. I am committed to breaking free of these non-productive delineations—while maintaining a commitment to openness and mutuality that necessitates listening to, respecting, and supporting a broad range of cultural producers.
What motivated you to become E-I-C of AJ? How does your research and public scholarship dovetail with your vision for the journal?
Art Journal has been a fixture in my life from my undergraduate and graduate school years to my professional career. I’ve always been an avid reader of the journal. It had a huge impact on me intellectually as an undergraduate art student, and during those years, I started to become more interested in the histories and critical ideas around art than its making. However, at the time, I had no idea what to do with that interest. In 2004, a year before I completed my doctoral degree at Cornell, I published my first feature-length article in Art Journal: “Hip-Hop vs. High Art: Notes on Race as Spectacle.” That publication was pivotal to my burgeoning career as a scholar. At the time, I had simultaneously begun publishing in NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, which, during those years, was published at Cornell by editors Salah Hassan (my advisor) and the curator and critic Okwui Enwezor. Because of their commitments to greater inclusivity and internationalism in art scholarship, NKA, and Art Journal were personally the most impactful art publications during my formative years. Both gave me recognition and a strong sense of professional possibility. In the following years, I published in Art Journal on several more occasions, eventually leading to serving on the AJ Editorial Board from 2016 to 2020.
Throughout my career, Art Journal has been a leading forum for progressive arts scholarship, and it has profoundly informed how I approach my own work. The journal has been particularly impactful for underrecognized scholars, artists, and arts professionals, so I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to continue and expand upon the exemplary editorial work of my predecessors. The values and commitments that drive my scholarship have always been intertwined with Art Journal. Few art publications are as open as AJ, so it’s a natural home for me intellectually and situates me within a milieu where I can engage in productive and enriching conversations with a diverse group of cultural producers. I endeavor to break from the conventional thinking of my discipline, so I seek out artists and intellectuals with similar commitments, especially those who are compelled to make a measurable difference in the lives of others and, by extension, are committed to the well-being of society. In keeping with Cornell’s founding principle, “. . . any person . . . any study,” I am a strong advocate for nurturing and protecting the unfettered intellectual possibilities of scholars within my discipline and its related fields. Regardless of their identities, scholars should feel their intellectual and scholarly endeavors are supported and cultivated. And who they are perceived to be should not hinder the perception of their expertise. At root, my vision is about fostering inclusivity, new ideas, and intellectual freedom.
And finally, what are you reading/viewing these days? What is inspiring you?
Lately, I’ve been listening to Helga Davis’s podcast, HELGA, which has some terrific—and often very personal and reflective—interviews with artists and other impactful creatives and thought leaders. I’m currently fascinated by several films: Showing Up (dir. Kelly Reichardt, 2022) and Civil War (dir. Alex Garland, 2024). While completely divergent narratively and visually, both films engage with the often-fraught condition of being a producer of images and aesthetic objects. Showing Up envisions the contemplative quietude of creative practice, art school, and the subtle forms of competition, insecurity, and isolation of being a gallery artist—while Civil War is a disturbing exploration of the ethical quandaries and psychic traumas of being a war photographer. I’ve been thinking about these films because they wrestle with the role of art and artists in a time where the visual matters more than ever. I recently re-watched Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre (1981), and I started thinking about how much—because of the COVID-19 pandemic—I missed having lengthy in-person conversations with others. I think we’re all coming out of that isolation and attempting to relearn how to interact again. And that interaction is necessary for empathy, reciprocity, and human connection.
Writer and director Cord Jefferson’s 2023 film American Fiction has also dominated my thinking lately. Among many intersecting themes, the film satirizes how perilous Black representation can be—and the particular quandary of the Black cultural producer negotiating a desire for individual expression in the face of a culture industry that often demands ethnic caricatures, trauma narratives, and Black stereotypes.
In terms of books, I’ve been reading Jack Whitten: Notes from the Woodshed (2018), edited by Kate Siegel; Craig Owens’s Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (1992); Percival Everett’s novel Erasure (2001); To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes (eds. Ilisa Barbash, Molly Rogers, and Deborah Willis; Sara Ahmed’s On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012); Göran Therborn’s The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (1980), Zahi Zalloua’s Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future (2020); and Norman Mailer’s selected essays Mind of an Outlaw (2014).
Call for Applications: CAA-Getty International Program 2025
posted by CAA — July 10, 2024
CAA is currently accepting applications for the CAA-Getty International Program! Thanks to generous support from Getty, the program—now in its thirteenth year—will enable scholars from all over the world to travel to New York to participate in the CAA 113th Annual Conference, February 12–15, 2025. The program features a preconference colloquium on international issues in art history, followed by a week of sessions, workshops, events, museum visits, and professional development opportunities.
The CAA-Getty International Program was established to diversify CAA membership, increase international presence at CAA conferences, and foster greater cross-cultural understanding of different contexts and methodologies of art scholarship and practice. Rigorous dialogue between international scholars and their North American peers has yielded collaboration, community, and lasting connections: CAA-Getty alumni have worked together on publications, exhibitions, convenings, and many other projects. To date, the program has gathered over 150 scholars from sixty countries and continues to have significant global impact on the field. Many participants become CAA ambassadors in their respective countries by sharing knowledge acquired during the program with their colleagues at home.
The individuals selected for the 2025 program will receive a one-year CAA membership, conference registration, travel expenses, hotel accommodations, and per diems for meals and incidentals. International art historians, curators, and other visual arts professionals are encouraged to apply.
Visit our website for detailed guidelines and to apply.
Deadline: August 15
This program is made possible with support from Getty.
Member Spotlight: Hilary Robinson
posted by CAA — July 08, 2024
For over forty years, Dr. Hilary Robinson, CAA’s recipient of the 2024 Distinguished Feminist Award, has been devoted to advancing feminist art history, feminist art education, feminist art theory, and feminist art criticism. Trained as a painter, she received a BA in Fine Art from the Newcastle University. She went on to earn an MA in Cultural Theory from the Royal College of Art in London, where her research resulted in a thesis entitled “The Subtle Abyss: Body-Image and Sexuality in Contemporary Feminist Art.” Robinson’s groundbreaking doctoral dissertation, “Becoming Beauty: The Implications of the Writings of Luce Irigaray for Feminist Art Practices,” teased out the aesthetic theory embedded in the work of the Belgian feminist philosopher. “Becoming Beauty” offers highly original readings of selected artworks by Louise Bourgeois as well as contemporary British artists. Her doctoral thesis was subsequently published as the well-regarded monograph, Reading Art, Reading Irigaray: The Politics of Art by Women (2006).
As an exemplary scholar and feminist thinker who is also a committed activist, Robinson realized early the critical importance of documenting to not only revolutionize feminist art history but also to institutionalize it, which contributes to the establishment of its value within academia. Through meticulous archival research, she has played an instrumental role in the collation and editing of a range of groundbreaking and accessible anthologies that have become required reading in university courses while also reaching a wider readership, thus contributing to feminist art history’s public and global impact. Visibly Female: Feminist Art Today (1987) focused primarily on documents from the 1980s. It was followed in 2001 by the first edition of Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology 1968–2000, which gathered a much more comprehensive range of ninety-nine previously published texts. Robinson radically revised the second edition in 2015 and demonstrated her commitment to representing feminist art’s diversity.
In 2019, with her co-editor Dr. Maria Elena Buszek, Robinson published the invaluable Companion to Feminist Art, which collected scholarly essays by thirty contributors whom Robinson and Buszek warmly referred to as companionistas. The volume also included Robinson’s own essay on feminism, art, and activism. The collection offered an overview of contemporary feminist art’s multiple ways of making and thinking across the globe. Companion to Feminist Art demonstrates feminist scholarship and international collaboration at their finest.
A highly prolific scholar, curator, and editor, Robinson’s multifaceted work advocating for an expansive view of feminist art practices and feminist art education was internationally and formally recognized when in 2005 she was appointed Dean of the College of Fine Arts and Professor of Art Theory and Criticism at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. She returned to England in 2012 to become the Dean of the School of Art and Design and Professor of Visual Culture at Middlesex University. In 2017, Professor Robinson joined Loughborough University’s School of Arts, English, and Drama as Professor of Feminism, Art, and Theory. In 2018, Professor Robinson established the Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT): Feminism, Sexual Politics, and Visual Culture at Loughborough.
Currently, Robinson is the UK Principal Investigator for Feminist Art Making Histories (FAMH, 2021–24). This three-year-long oral history and digital humanities project, funded by the Irish Research Council and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), aims to unearth hidden stories of feminist art since the 1970s. As a collaboration between Loughborough and the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dún Laoghaire, the project involves recording, curating, and archiving fifty years’ worth of oral histories and digitized records of feminist artists in the UK and Ireland.
Dr. Robinson’s service to the field has been nothing short of extraordinary. An active participant in College Art Association conferences, she was a member of CAA’s Committee for Women in the Arts from 2000 to 2005 and a member of the CAA’s jury of the Distinguished Feminist Award from 2015 to 2017. She served on the editorial boards of Art Journal (2012–16) and, critically, throughout its history, of n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal—a biannual academic journal published in the UK from 1996–2017.
With her groundbreaking research, outstanding record of publication, unwavering dedication to inclusive feminist art activism, education, administration, and professional service, Robinson has not only enriched our understanding of art’s relationship with gender and power but has also championed the voices of marginalized artists and expanded conventional narratives of art history.
This special member spotlight was written by CAA Committee on Women in the Arts members Kimberly Lamm and Tanya Augsburg.
CWA Picks: Summer 2024
posted by CAA — June 11, 2024
Paula Modersohn-Becker, Kneeling Mother with Child at Her Breast, 1906
(image ©Paula-Modersohn-Becker-Stiftung; provided by Bremen/Nationalgalerie, Berlin)
The CAA Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) curates a seasonal list of must-see exhibitions, screenings, projects, and talks. The CWA Summer 2024 picks highlight individual artists’ observant and expressive art practices that reveal personal and collective stories about the earth, the environment, communities, and members of lesser known, historically marginalized groups.
UNITED STATES
ACCESS: An Ordinary Notion
June 15–July 13
Arc Gallery, San Francisco
ACCESS: An Ordinary Notion, a national juried exhibition, is proud to present artworks that tell individual stories and advocate for social justice and human rights. Inspired by Alice Paul, who introduced the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923, this collection showcases art in all media that illuminate the ongoing conversation around race, women’s and LGBTQIA+ rights, reproductive rights, disparities in global wealth, power, access to food, water, shelter, education, health services, disability access, child and elder care, along with immigration issues, climate change, and criminal (in)justice.
Beate Kuhn: Turn
June 29–December 1
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Beate Kuhn (1927–2015) was a German sculptor known for her rhythmic ensembles of deconstructed, ceramic forms such as discs, cylinders, cones, and spheres. She also channeled beautiful and sublime aspects of nature with formal allusions to succulents, seeds, mushrooms, and invertebrate animals. Like the atonal music she favored, Kuhn’s sculptures were both alluring and disquieting.
Calida Rawles: Away with the Tides
June 27–February 23, 2025
Perez Art Museum Miami
Calida Rawles envisions water as a space for Black healing. Merging hyperrealism, poetic abstraction, and the symbolism of water, Rawles creates unique portraits of Black bodies submerged in and interacting with bodies of water. Water functions as an element that signifies both physical and spiritual healing, as well as historical trauma and racial exclusion. Rawles delves into the particular experience of Black people in Overtown, a Miami neighborhood that went from a cultural and commercial hub for Black people to a subject of gentrification, systemic racism, and mass displacement. Rawles photographs some of her subjects in natural waters at Virginia Key Beach, which was once racially segregated. Rawles probes the Atlantic’s history as the site of the transatlantic slave trade. The work critically engages with Miami’s water-entwined climate and mines Overton’s history of beauty, oppression, and resilience.
Jen Liu: GHOST__WORLD
Through August 24
/ (Slash), San Francisco
Jen Liu: GHOST__WORLD features new videos, augmented reality, paintings, and glass sculptures. GHOST__WORLD originates in Liu’s long-term engagement with labor activism and women electronics workers in South China. This project takes up last year’s social media phenomenon of “frog mothers,” unlicensed street vendors in China wearing inflatable frog costumes and selling frog-shaped balloons.
Jennifer Rochlin: Paintings on Clay
Through July 12
Hauser & Wirth, New York City
Rochlin’s three-dimensional compositions coalesce largely without planning. Sketched in advance, the shapes of her vessels ultimately depart from classical form and symmetry through a laborious hand-building process that encourages distortion. The vessels’ physicality prompts viewers to trace their curves and walk around them to follow the sequence of vignettes that travel their circumferences.
LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity
Through September 7
MoMA, New York
LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity highlights the artist’s role as a social advocate and connector of the cultural and working classes in the twenty-first century. For this exhibition, Frazier has reimagined her diverse bodies of work as a sequence of original installations that she calls “monuments for workers’ thoughts,” which address the harmful effects of industrialization and deindustrialization, the healthcare inequities facing Black working-class communities in the Rust Belt, the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and the impact of the closure of a General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio. Monuments of Solidarity celebrates the expressions of creativity, mutual support, and intergenerational collaboration that persist in light of these denials of labor, human, and civil rights. As a form of Black feminist world-building, these nontraditional “monuments” demand recognition of how women and people of color have contributed and continue to contribute to histories of labor and the working class.
Leilah Babirye: We Have a History
June 22–June 22, 2025
de Young Museum, San Francisco
Leilah Babirye is known for her ambiguously gendered sculptures in ceramic, wood, and discarded objects. Reclaiming ceramic and wood-carving traditions from western and central Africa, she creates her ceramics by hand, firing them with glazes, while she whittles, scorches, and burnishes her wood sculptures. She then adorns them with wire, bicycle chains, inner tubes, and other found materials. The sculptures, which range in scale from towering totemic forms to busts, talismans, and masks, are portraits of her LGBTQ+ community. Babirye’s work speaks to the power of reclaiming personal and cultural identity through artistic practices, historical narratives, and cultural traditions.
Nampeyo and the Sikyátki Revival
Through September 15
de Young Museum, San Francisco
During her lifetime, Nampeyo (ca. 1860–1942) was, and remains today, perhaps the most renowned potter from the American Southwest. The single-gallery exhibition highlights Nampeyo’s work, juxtaposed with examples of Hopi pottery from her time. Exquisite ceramics made by ancestral Hopi artists demonstrate Nampeyo’s sources of inspiration, and artworks by four generations of her descendants attest to the master potter’s enduring legacy.
Nina Chanel Abney: LIE DOGGO
Through October 5
The School | Jack Shainman Gallery, Kinderhook, NY
LIE DOGGO spans Nina Chanel Abney’s creative practice, uniting a new series of paintings with collages, site-specific murals, an immersive digital art installation, and the debut of a new body of sculpture. Paying homage to the sophisticated color theories of Matisse, continuing the legacy of cubists, and connecting with the sensibilities of Harlem Renaissance greats Douglas and Lawrence, Abney brings these historical movements into contemporary pertinence. The exhibition’s title, LIE DOGGO, a phrase meaning to remain inconspicuously in wait, suggests a strategic invisibility and biding one’s time, reflecting on when to observe and when best to act. Abney challenges the viewer to explore the vast expanse that lies between what is said and what remains silent.
Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich Bin Ich / I Am Me
June 6–September 9
Neue Galerie, New York City
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October 12–January 12, 2025
The Art Institute of Chicago
Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) is a major figure in the history of German Expressionism. In the course of her brief career – which was cut short at the young age of 31 because of a postpartum embolism – Modersohn-Becker produced more than 700 paintings and over 1,000 drawings. She created many self-portraits, including the first nude self-portraits known to have been made by a woman. Many of these works focused on her pregnancy, another first among Western women artists. The artist first became known in part through her letters and diaries, including correspondence with her close friend, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. The exhibition is the first collaboration between Neue Galerie New York and the Art Institute of Chicago, to which the exhibition will travel following its debut at the Neue Galerie.
Simone Leigh
Through January 20, 2025
LACMA and the California African American Museum, Los Angeles
This exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of Leigh’s work. Twenty years of the artist’s production across ceramics, bronze, video, and installation are displayed in a show organized by the ICA Boston and co-presented by LACMA and the California African American Museum. Leigh’s practice, which regularly explores the interiority of Black femme life, can be seen in all its iterations at this latest exhibition, including pieces from the artist’s 2022 Venice Biennale presentation.
Samia Halaby: Eye Witness
June 29–December 15
Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing
Samia Halaby: Eye Witness follows Samia Halaby’s creative journey to experiment with how painting conveys her experiences and reflects how she sees the world around her. Halaby’s paintings, which range from miniature to monumental, 2D to 3D, and monochrome to multicolor, are notably shaped by her experiences and shift accordingly throughout her itinerant career across the Midwest, the East coast, and the Arab world. Halaby also explores how technology can enhance and transform painting. Halaby’s paintings reflect the life of a witness, one we are invited to take part in by looking slowly and closely at the artist’s work.
Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other
Through September 22
Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), New York City
Highlighting thirty years of artmaking dedicated to the Black experience in America, Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other is the first comprehensive survey of the communal art projects that form the heart of the artist’s pioneering creative practice. Accompanied by a selection of Clark’s photographs, prints, and sculptures, the exhibition features five of Clark’s large-scale, collaborative projects, including her barrier-breaking The Hair Craft Project (2014) and the ongoing performance, Unraveling.
Tanya Lukin Linklater: Inner blades of grass (soft) inner blades of grass (cured) inner blades of grass (bruised by the weather)
Through August 21
Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus
Lukin Linklater’s perception of time and place comes across in her sculpture, installation, rehearsals, video, works on paper, and writing. Her practice is inspired by her upbringing in the Kodiak archipelago of Alaska. The exhibition’s title is informed by an interview with the late Sugpiaq cultural worker Eunice von Scheele Neseth and a poem by Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Solider. Describing grass in different states references the procedures that women of Kodiak Island follow when harvesting and processing plant material used to weave baskets. The imagery evoked by the words also asks viewers to consider observation and touch in the acts of restoration and repair.
Tolia Astakhishvili: between father and mother
Through August 12
Sculpture Center, Long Island City, New York
For more than two decades, Tolia Astakhishvili has worked across sculpture, drawing, painting, sound, and video. At scales that both augment and seemingly disappear into gallery spaces, Tolia’s environments posit architecture as an unfixed and transforming entity shaped by those who live through it. At the same time, her sculpture attends to disavowed space and the overlapping markers of use, authorship, and social position that produce different settings of decay.
Lynn Hershman Leeson: Moving-Image Innovator
Film series
Through June 20
MoMA, New York
Over five decades, Lynn Hershman Leeson has produced work that probes and plays with the complex relationship between humans, technology, and social structures. Her videos navigate the fluid space between perception and truth, exposing our collective and individual biases. The immediacy and urgency of video allowed her to assume an artist-as-activist stance, portraying the lives of women who were barely visible in the moving-image art scene of the time. This retrospective features Hershman Leeson’s complete, four-part “Cyborg Series,” including Cyborgian Rhapsody – Immortality (2023), which was written, performed, and designed by an artificial intelligence chatbot. A special conversation on June 8 brings together Lynn Hershman Leeson, Eugenia Kuyda, founder of the Replika AI app, and the chatbot named Echo.
- June 7, 7:00 p.m.: !Women Art Revolution (2010)
- June 8, 4:30 p.m.: Cyborgian Rhapsody – Followed by a discussion
- June 8, 7:00 p.m.: Conceiving Ada (1997) – Introduced by Lynn Hershman Leeson
- June 11, 7:00 p.m.: Teknolust (2002)
- June 12, 7:00 p.m.: Strange Culture (2007)
- June 13, 7:00 p.m.: Tania Libre (2017)
- June 14, 7:30 p.m.: The Complete Electronic Diaries (1984–2019)
- June 15, 7:00 p.m.: Vertighost (2017); Longshot (1999)
- June 17, 6:30 p.m.: No Words (2023); Seeing is Believing
MEXICO
Ursula Biemann, Becoming Earth
Through October 13
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City
Swiss artist Ursula Biemann proposes to rethink the epistemic roots of our relationship with the Earth. In her field research, she explores the ecologies of forests and oil as well as the consequences of extractivist projects on global ecosystems and the climate. The artist interweaves vast cinematographic landscapes in her multilayered videos with documentary images, sci-fi poetry, and academic findings.
CANADA
Rooted Knots/Blended Threads
Through July 6
Sur Gallery, Toronto
Mestiza hybrid identities, as Gloria Anzaldúa argues, are multilayered. They stretch in all directions, from past to present, vertically and horizontally, chronologically, and spatially. The artists in this exhibition use textiles and threads symbolically and metaphorically referencing ties to ancestral traditions while highlighting transformation as diasporic subjects. This exhibition aims to explore parallel frameworks between the art produced by these women textile artists and the mestiza female body that endures the complexity of racial and patriarchal oppression, forms of invisibility and exclusion, and an imposed coloniality, which shapes their position and condition in Canada. The common thread that ties the artists Claudia Gutiérrez, Ruth Mora Izturriaga, Ixchel Suarez, and Sarabeth Triviño together is their ability to transmit meaning behind the slow-paced methodology of working with textiles as a space for personal meditation, sharing of traditional knowledge, and the experience of collective healing.
SOUTH AMERICA
Ebecho Muslimova: Rumors
Through August 10
Mendes Wood, São Paulo
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Ebecho Muslimova: Whispers
June 7–July 26
Bernheim, Zurich
Rumors and Whispers is a two-part presentation of Ebecho Muslimova’s recent series of paintings across Mendes Wood DM’s São Paulo gallery and Bernheim Gallery in Zürich. A transatlantic game of telephone, the exhibition first opens in Brazil with Muslimova’s Rumors suite, followed two weeks later by Whispers in Switzerland, each painting a response to one at the previous opening. Like the children’s game telephone, this body of work tracks the shifting persona of Muslimova’s signature character Fatebe. An unabashedly liberated personality, Fatebe appears across the paintings in different forms, mischievously bursting into some frames and, in some instances, physically embodying a portal between them, translating or responding to a previous painting.
Tania Candiani. Ofrenda
Through September 1
Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellin, Colombia
This is Mexican artist Tania Candiani’s first large-scale exhibition in Colombia and brings together a series of works based on sound, artisanal processes, and rivers, which speak of different latitudes but also, above all, of Medellin. Some of her works lead through paths that merge the Earth with its human and non-human inhabitants, bringing them closer and questioning the meaning each one gives to their brief passage through this planet. Vaguely structured around Preludio cuántico, a two-channel octophonic video that connects mystical, scientific, and aesthetic visions of the universe, Ofrenda poses -from sound and matter- a series of reflections on that which is primordial, both audible and palpable.
ASIA
Rei Naito: come and live – go and live
June 25–September 23
Tokyo National Museum
Rei Naito has been creating works based on the question, “Is our existence on the Earth a blessing in itself?” Her newest exhibition “come and live – go and live” was created through her encounters with the Tokyo National Museum’s collection and architecture. In her work, life and death are explored as something inseparable. The exhibition spaces are illuminated by natural light and transformed by weather and time.
EUROPE & UK
Anne Imhof: Wish You Were Gay
June 8–September 22
Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, Austria
Wish You Were Gay is simultaneously a personal survey and an all-new body of work that reflects on and further develops some core elements constituting Imhof’s repertoire of artistic expression. Wish You Were Gay includes bas-reliefs, large-scale oil paintings, sculptures, stage elements, stadium lighting, and new video works made of archival footage from her origins as an artist coming of age in underground subcultures. Imhof explores notions of finitude, reality and artifice, chance and fate, as well as absence and presence set against a backdrop of post-apocalyptic isolation.
The Deep West Assembly Cauleen Smith
June 14–September 15
Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway
Astrup Fearnley Museet presents a solo exhibition of work by multidisciplinary American artist and filmmaker Cauleen Smith. In producing her films, videos, live-feed projections, and slide projections, Smith deploys original research and techniques of improvisation, arrangement, and live performance and narration, creating works that share affinities with theater and visual art. Smith merges film with music and poetry, longstanding forms of Black expression. Smith’s most recent film The Deep West Assembly delves into the concepts of geological time and Blackness as camouflaged in images, songs, and words by Black and Brown creators (after thinkers such as Suzanne Césaire). Incorporating images of geological formations such as lava caves, calderas, and salt domes, as well as human-made landforms such as ancient Choctaw burial mounds, The Deep West Assembly paints a view of the American South as a horizontal “Deep West” (a term borrowed from poet Wanda Coleman).
Giantesses (Bożenna Biskupska, Urszula Broll, Ewa Ciepielewska, Katarzyna Rotkiewicz-Szumska, Ewa Zarzycka)
Through September 8
BWA Wrocław Główny Gallery, Wrocław, Poland
Giantesses is an exhibition featuring five artists connected in various ways to Lower Silesia. Although they use different media – from painting, large-scale sculpture, photography, and video to performance art and more ephemeral works – the artists have many things in common. Their biographies share a life-creating ethos: dedication to collective work, creation of art spaces, and development of artistic communities. The title of the exhibition refers to a rock formation called the Giantesses in the Ślęża massif, which is a crucial mountain in Lower Silesia due to its location, the beauty of its landscape, and its history, which dates to pre-Slavic times when it was a place of spiritual practices and sun worship.
Mari Chordà: Mari Chordà . . . And Many Other Things
July 5–January 12, 2025
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Mari Chordà uses image, language, and social action as materials in her work. An active feminist observer, her multidisciplinary art practices emerged as a response to the oppressive context of the Franco regime but have remained throughout time in a society that still has to restore the visibility and recognition of women’s work. As a pioneer of her generation to express free feminine sexuality, Chordà addressed pleasure, maternity, and lesbian relationships in her painting and her poetry. As a student in 1964, she painted her first vaginal painting. She paints the body fluids, secretions, sexual organs, or coitus with forms and colors akin to the sensibility of pop art.
Martha Jungwirth
June 7–September 22
Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain
This exhibition presents seventy works, starting with Jungwirth’s earliest drawings that explore the boundary between representation and abstraction, and concludes with her recent series inspired by Francisco de Goya and Édouard Manet. Organized thematically, it features drawings, watercolors, oil paintings, and artist books on various substrates, including handmade paper, accounting books, cardboard, and more. These unconventional materials introduce unpredictability into Jungwirth’s creative process, enhancing the spontaneity and dynamism of her work. This artistic spectrum ranges from paintings filled with dense strokes to those marked by spare brushwork, exploring the tension between abstraction and the physical world.
Maya Minder: Mountains O’Things
June 21–July 20
Gallerie Glaab, Bern, Switzerland
“This is how cooking transforms us” is a framework that Maya Minder weaves like a thread through her work. Cooking serves as a metaphor for human transformation from raw nature to cooked culture, and she connects it with the evolutionary ideas of a symbiotic coexistence between plants, animals, and humans. She creates interrelations between human objects of use and the animism of nature. A table of diversity that still needs to be digested. Following the biohacker, maker, and thirdspace movements, she uses grassroots ideas, safe zones, and citizen science in her field to enable collective storytelling through food and cooking.
Paula Rego: Manifesto
Through October 6
Luís I Foundation, Cascais Cultural Center, Cascais, Portugal
Between the 1960s and 1970s, Paula Rego’s experimental figurative approach served the need to express her emotions, reflecting feelings of anxiety, fear, and anguish shared by all Portuguese who aspired to political change. The plurimaterial technique that she then developed, using heterogeneous materials—paints, paper cut and glued onto the canvas—and the themes addressed, which suggest a critical and challenging position concerning authority, manifest an attitude of political resistance through creative practice. Her 1965 first solo exhibition created a space for dissension, confrontation, and freedom. Paula Rego: Manifesto continues the critical revisitation, through the artist’s particular perspective, of striking themes from the recent history of Portugal.
Selma Selman: Flowers of Life
June 20–September 15
Shirn Kunstshalle, Frankfurt
Selma Selman describes herself as “the world’s most dangerous artist.” Together with her family, she cannibalizes former status symbols, such as Mercedes-Benz cars, to acquire the few precious metals that are still usable. The spoken performances by this artist with a Romani background are usually loud, giving angry expressions to her urge to reverse power relationships. Selman’s art describes through a variety of media autobiographical experiences of discrimination, violence, patriarchy, and sexism. With the poetic title Flowers of Life, an installation consisting of orange peel, Selman refers to her family’s means of livelihood since they collect and sell scrap metal. The video Crossing the Blue Bridge (2024) is based on memories of Selman’s mother, who had to cross a bridge in Bosnia with her daughter in 1994 during the Bosnian War. Selman takes these experiences as a starting point to situate herself as a feminist activist artist who campaigns internationally for her community.
SPLASH: eco + hydrosexuals unite! | Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens, Justyna Górowska, Ewelina Jarosz
June 15–September 14
lokal_30, Warsaw
The exhibition explores one of humanity’s most significant and challenging relationships: the bond between us and the environment. It proposes a dialogue between the ecosexual and hydrosexual movements, creating transcultural connections crucial for caring about diverse, multispecies futures. The exhibition is the first comprehensive presentation of Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens’s achievements in Poland in collaboration with the artistic-research duo cyber_nymphs, also known as Justyna Górowska and Ewelina Jarosz.
Tapta: Flexible Forms
July 20–November 3
Muzeum Susch, Susch, Switzerland
Tapta (pseudonym of Maria Wierusz-Kowalska) was born in Poland in 1926 and came to Belgium as a political refugee with her husband after participating in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. They moved to the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), where they lived from 1950 to 1960. After returning to Belgium, Tapta swiftly established herself as an important member of a new generation of artists who sought to redefine sculpture by using textiles and other flexible materials as sculptural elements. In the 1980s, she changed her materials from woven textiles and cords to neoprene. With this industrially produced rubber, she created large black installations that still represent her idea of “flexible sculpture.” Tapta: Flexible Forms is the first large-scale retrospective dedicated to the artist outside of Belgium. The title of the exhibition, Flexible Forms, refers to the central concept of her oeuvre: the creation of sculptures that interact with the exhibition space and the viewer through their flexible forms.
Toyin Ojih Odutola: Ilé Oriaku
June 7–September 1
Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland
For her first institutional solo exhibition in Switzerland, Nigerian-born artist Toyin Ojih Odutola presents a captivating body of newly drawn work. These impressive artworks explore the effects and various forms of language. In those moments when words seem insufficient, other forms of expression emerge.
FEMIGRAPHIC: Irena Keckes, Martyna Rzepecka, Ana Vivoda, Katarzyna Zimna
June 6–September 1
Galeria Willa, Lodz, Poland
Femigraphic is an exhibition of an international collective of artists working in printmaking, which oscillates between direct experience and its “reproduction,” touch and distance, repetition and change. The exhibition shows printmaking as a thoroughly contemporary medium of play with tradition, free from the compulsion to reproduce – free from the “tyranny of edition.” The theme of the female body and the presence of the body in the graphic process also appear directly. The show attempts to break out of the pattern of close-circle, academic hermetic relationships on which Polish graphics are based. Graphics are still masculinized, hence the idea of spotlighting activities carried out by women and representatives of various artistic centers (Poland, Croatia, and Guam/USA).
MIDDLE EAST
Ahaad ALamoudi: Moving Mountains
Through October 26
Hayy Jameel, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Ahaad Alamoudi is a Saudi artist whose work addresses history, ethnography, and representation. The show brings together works from the last eight years, with a new commission, Moving Mountains, as its centerpiece. This ambitious new work continues Alamoudi’s expansive exploration of rapidly changing social and cultural environments, situating Saudi’s natural and urban landscapes as sites of possibility where both individual and collective attempts to do the seemingly impossible are imbued with humor, absurdity and, at times, hopefulness. Through video, performance, and installation, Alamoudi negotiates her ambitions and forces beyond her control to explore how effort is inspired, transmitted, embodied, enacted, and ultimately navigated.
OCEANIA
mudunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri: Judy Watson
Through August 11
Queensland Art Gallery, South Brisbane, Australia
For more than four decades, Judy Watson has created powerful, ethereal works of art channeling the stories of her family’s Waanyi Country in northwest Queensland. mudunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri: Judy Watson is a comprehensive survey of the renowned Queensland artist’s incisive meditations on colonial, social, and ecological concerns. The exhibition includes 130 works, across painting, prints, sculpture, installation, and video, from an artistic practice centered on truth-telling around the environment, historical government policy affecting Indigenous Australians, and institutions that collect First Nations’ cultural material and remains.
Apply for CAA Committee Service!
posted by CAA — June 10, 2024
Join one of CAA’s twelve Professional Committees, the Annual Conference Committee, or the Publications Committee as an at-large member! Each committee works from a charge established by the Board of Directors. For many CAA members, committee service fosters professional relationships, community, and facilitates impactful contributions to pressing issues in the visual arts and higher education.
Important Committee Service Information:
- Committee members serve a three-year term. Service for this committee cycle begins in February 2025 at the CAA 113th Annual Conference and concludes in February 2028 at the 116th Annual Conference.
- All applications are reviewed by current committee members as well as CAA leadership.
- Appointments will be announced by November 1, 2024. New members will be introduced to their committees during their respective business meetings at the 113th Annual Conference in New York City (February 12–15, 2025).
- If appointed, applicants are expected to attend committee meetings, participate actively in the work of the committee, and contribute expertise to defining the current and future work of the committee.
- Appointees must be current CAA members before the start of their committee service, but do not need to be CAA members to apply.
- All committee members volunteer their service without compensation.
Visit our website using the links below to review the mission of each committee as well as the current roster of committee leadership and members.
CAA ANNUAL CONFERENCE COMMITTEE
The Annual Conference Committee is responsible for shaping the program of the Annual Conference, ensuring that the program reflects CAA’s goals: to make the conference an effective place for intellectual, aesthetic, and professional learning and exchange, to reflect the diverse interests of the membership, and to provide opportunities for participation that are fair, equal, and balanced.
CAA PROFESSIONAL COMMITTEES
CAA’s twelve Professional Committees represent the constituent interests of the organization by addressing standards, practices, and guidelines in the professions of our individual and institutional members.
- Committee on Design
- Committee on Diversity Practices
- Committee on Intellectual Property
- Committee on Research and Scholarship
- Committee on Women in the Arts
- Education Committee
- International Committee
- Museum Committee
- Professional Practices Committee
- Services to Artists Committee
- Services to Historians of the Visual Arts Committee
- Student and Emerging Professionals Committee
CAA PUBLICATIONS COMMITTEE
The Publications Committee oversees CAA’s publishing activities and supervises the editorial boards of The Art Bulletin, Art Journal/AJO, and caa.reviews.
Please Note: At-large members of the Publications Committee represent the voice of our membership, and perform the role of committee secretary, taking minutes at three Publications Committee meetings per year in February, May, and October.
If you are interested in applying to serve on a CAA committee, please click the APPLY TO SERVE button below to fill out the application form and upload your CV as well as a brief personal statement describing your interest and experience. If you are applying to more than one committee, please submit a separate personal statement tailored to each of the committees to which you are applying, noting why you’d like to serve on that specific committee.
Contact Maeghan Donohue, CAA Chief of Staff and Director of Strategic Planning, Diversity & Governance with any questions.
Deadline: August 8, 2024
Register for CAA Summer Publishing Webinars!
posted by CAA — June 10, 2024
This summer, CAA will hold webinars in response to an influx of requests for guidance on and advice about academic publishing. Organized and moderated by Christy Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin and professor of the History of Architecture at University of Toronto, a panel of publishing experts will discuss and answer audience questions on the topics of turning longer research into an article and responding to readers reports and revisions. Our aim is to help demystify the academic publishing process, expand access to publishing education and professional development, and ultimately increase diversity in publishing.
July 31, 2–4 p.m. ET
In Print: From the Archive to the Essay
Getting Your Research Into Print
Shaping a large amount of research into a powerful essay can be more difficult than writing a book. A successful article needs a strong argument, clear organization, and effective use of images. In this workshop we will discuss some guidelines on developing an essay for The Art Bulletin or other journals. Join Christy Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin and other scholars for a roundtable discussion with time for your questions.
August 7, 2–4 p.m. ET
Contending with Critique: How to Effectively Respond to Readers’ Reports
Each essay in The Art Bulletin has been through multiple revisions in response to comments from readers and the editor. If you are asked to ‘revise and resubmit’ how do you respond to readers’ reports? This workshop will demystify the peer review process and help you to incorporate the best of the advice into your writing.
Publishing webinars are free for CAA members and students.
Non-member registration is $15 per webinar or $20 to register for both.
Not currently a member of CAA? Join for $8 per month to attend both summer publishing webinars for free and receive discounted CAA Annual Conference registration!
Publishing webinars sponsored in part by:
