CAA News Today
CAA Celebrates Its Fifty-Year Members
posted by Christopher Howard — February 08, 2013
CAA warmly thanks the many contributions of the following dedicated members who joined CAA in 1963 or earlier. This year, the annually published list welcomes seventeen artists, scholars, and curators whose distinguished exhibitions, publications, and teaching practices have shaped the direction and history of art over the last fifty years.
1963: Lilian Armstrong; Richard Brilliant; Eric G. Carlson; Dean Carter; Vivian L. Ebersman; Lois M. Fink; Françoise Forster-Hahn; Walter S. Gibson; Caroline M. Houser; Susan Koslow; Osmund Overby; E. Solomon; Lauren Soth; Richard E. Spear; Virginia Stotz; Roxanna A. Sway; and Roger A. Welchans.
1962: Jo Anne Bernstein; Phyllis Braff; Jacquelyn C. Clinton; Shirley S. Crosman; Frances D. Fergusson; Gloria K. Fiero; Jaroslav Folda; Ben F. Freedman; Rosalind R. Grippi; Harlan H. Holladay; Seymour Howard; Alfonz Lengyel; Mary L. Maughelli; David Merrill; Francis V. O’Connor; John T. Paoletti; Thomas L. Sloan; Allen Staley; Elisabeth Stevens; Anne Betty J. Weinshenker; and William D. Wixom.
1961: Matthew Baigell; Margaret Diane David; W. Bowdoin Davis Jr.; David Farmer; J. D. Forbes; Isabelle Hyman; Henry A. Millon; Clifton C. Olds; Marion E. Roberts; David Rosand; and Conrad H. Ross.
1960: Shirley N. Blum; Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt; Mojmir S. Frinta; Dan F. Howard; W. Eugene Kleinbauer; Edward W. Navone; Linda Nochlin; J. J. Pollitt; and Claire Sherman.
1959: Adele M. Ernstrom; Geraldine Fowle; Carol H. Krinsky; James F. O’Gorman; Charles S. Rhyne; and Ann K. Warren.
1958: William D. Badgett; Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr.; Naomi Miller; Damie Stillman; and Clare Vincent.
1957: Marcel M. Franciscono; Bruce Glaser; E. Haverkamp-Begemann; and John F. Omelia.
1956: Svetlana L. Alpers; Norman W. Canedy; John Goelet; Joel Isaacson; John M. Schnorrenberg; and Jack J. Spector.
1955: Lola B. Gellman; Irving Lavin; Marilyn A. Lavin; and Suzanne Lewis.
1954: Franklin Hamilton Hazlehurst; Patricia C. Loud; Thomas J. McCormick; Jules D. Prown; Jane E. Rosenthal; Irving Sandler; Lucy Freeman Sandler; Harold Edwin Spencer; and A. Richard Turner.
1953: Dorathea K. Beard; Margaret McCormick; Seymour Slive; and Jack Wasserman.
1951: Wen C. Fong; and Carl N. Schmalz Jr.
1950: Alan M. Fern; and Marilyn J. Stokstad.
1949: Dario A. Covi; and Ann-Sofi Lindsten.
1948: William S. Dale; and Peter H. Selz.
1947: Dericksen M. Brinkerhoff; David G. Carter; Ellen P. Conant; Ilene H. Forsyth; and J. Edward Kidder Jr.
1945: James Ackerman.
Workshop Participants Needed to Script a Panel Discussion
posted by Christopher Howard — February 07, 2013
Pablo Helguera seeks participants for a preliminary workshop to help script his 2013 Annual Conference session, “A General Theory of Last Night: A Constructed Panel Discussion.” The workshop will take place on Thursday, February 14, 4:00–7:00 PM; registration is required. The session, scheduled for February 15, 9:30 AM–12 NOON, is free and open to the public.
“A General Theory of Last Night” is a scripted panel written collaboratively in the context of CAA’s conference. On the day before the panel, a group of twenty participants will gather to draft a document that will identify and address issues being discussed at the conference and articulate those positions in a clear and concise manner. The objective of the workshop is to provide a vehicle for immediate reflection and the chance to respond in an op-ed approach to current concerns. Participants will be joined by professional actors, who will deliver the scripted content the following morning.
To participate in the collaborative workshop session, please send an email to Helguera with your CV, information about your background, and the reason(s) for your interest in this session. Keep in mind that space for the workshop is very limited.
Pablo Helguera is an artist and the director of adult and academic programs in the Education Department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The author of Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011) and Art Scenes: The Social Scripts of the Art World (2012), he has presented and performed his work in many biennials and museums worldwide.
2013 Regional MFA Exhibition at NYCAMS
posted by Christopher Howard — February 07, 2013
The New York Center for Art and Media Studies (NYCAMS) will host the annual CAA Regional MFA exhibition, on view February 12–27, 2013. Coinciding with the 101st Annual Conference, this exhibition, called Make It Work, will bring together a selection of artists from some of the New York area’s brightest art programs. The opening reception will take place on Friday evening, February 15, 6:00–9:00 PM.
The guest curator, Barbara Pollack, is an artist and critic whose writings have been published in Vanity Fair, the New York Times, ARTnews, and Time Out New York. Her essay for the exhibition appears below.
The artists come from seven area schools: Brooklyn College, City University of New York; New Jersey City University; the New York Academy of Art; Parsons the New School for Design; Pratt Institute; Stonybrook University, State University of New York; and the School of Art and Design at Purchase College, State University of New York.
Gallery hours are Monday–Friday, 10:00 AM–5:00 PM or by appointment. NYCAMS is located at 44 West 28th Street, Seventh Floor, New York, NY 10001. Contact the gallery at 212-213-8052.
Make It Work
Art making is a long and difficult journey, with practitioners balancing the need for mastering a range of techniques against the desire to achieve unique expression. Nowhere is this tension felt more acutely than in art school, where the individual is often pitted against the group and, indeed, against authorities figures, on their way to making work that truly is self-expressive. I watch my own students struggle between the need for approval—am I doing this right?—and the courage to embark on their own path, between perfecting skill and defying convention.
The artists in this exhibition are still enrolled in graduate school—Brooklyn College, New Jersey City University, the New York Academy of Art, Parsons, Pratt, Stony Brook, and Purchase—all esteemed programs that have produced many of New York’s leading artists. But even though they are students, these individuals have already become full-fledged artists, experimenting and creating as all artists do on their way to realizing fully formed concepts and productions. Using a variety of media—sculpture, painting, photography, video, and digital printmaking—they manage not only to “make work,” but also to make work that challenges ideas about what work is.
In this exhibition you find diverse practices even within a single academic program. John Ros from Brooklyn College creates a landscape of drywall and fluorescent lights, laid out on the floor, while his classmate Kate McGraw combines abstraction and folk art in her brightly patterned drawings. Sergio Villamizar from New Jersey City University takes inspiration from comic-book depictions of superheroes as his colleague Darren Fisher constructs a hostile, aggressive contraption in a work called Surface Tension. The contributions of two students from the New York Academy of Art, Elizabeth Glaessner and Robert Fundis, make a strong case for the vitality of realist painting. But check out Spidey by Ezra Thompson from Stony Brook, a hauntingly suggestive canvas of a boy trick-or-treating.
There are captivating videos on view: Christine Howard Sandoval (Parsons) films a walk along the city’s waterfront, and Judith Shimer (Pratt) is hysterically funny in her Ugly Video. In One Act Video in Several Scenes, Samantha Harmon (Purchase) dissects the moving-images aspect of video by depicting a sequence of still photographs of tiny maquettes of buildings. Sculpture also is particularly strong: Jonathan Stanish (Pratt) displays an assemblage, titled Leisure, comprising a mannequin and silkscreen print; Elianna Mesaikos (Purchase) presents Filthy Gorgeous, made on the spot in the gallery with melted sugar; and Ryann Slauson (Purchase) offers Portrait, a witty replica of a construction site, made from cardboard, plastic, wood, and clay. Slauson is one artist who directly examines the meaning of “work,” but you can discern a similar inquiry in the jagged line of photographs, unframed and tacked to the wall, in Artifacts, an installation by Nicholas Warndorf (Stony Brook), and in the way traditional sculpture is challenged through photographs by the duo Kaitlynn Redell and Sara Jimenez (Parsons).
Make It Work is, of course, the encouraging admonition of Tim Gunn on the television series Project Runway. And I share with him the sense of wanting everyone to do well, everyone to do his or her best. But this exhibition is not a competition, not a Work of Art, the name of another television show that turns contemporary art into a contest. The sixteen participants here are not contestants who approach art making as a competition. In fact, by bringing the artists together in one exhibition, I find an interesting dialogue among them, a shared inquiry into the necessary tools, processes, and attitudes that go into making an artwork—especially one that challenges traditional notions of what an artwork should be. That takes real work, and for that, each participant in this show should be congratulated.
Beauty Is Embarrassing Film Screening and Director Q&A
posted by Christopher Howard — February 06, 2013
CAA invites you to attend a special Annual Conference screening of the film Beauty Is Embarrassing and a Q&A session with its director, Neil Berkeley, on Friday evening, February 15, 7:30–10:00 PM. Released in 2012, Beauty Is Embarrassing chronicles the life and times of the Tennessee-born Wayne White, a cartoonist, cocreator of Pee-wee’s Playhouse, and maker of humorous word paintings on found canvases. The film will be screened in the Sutton Parlor Center, Second Floor, Hilton New York. Admission is free.
Called a “funny, enormously entertaining film” by the film critic Leonard Malten, Beauty Is Embarrassing portrays the vaulted highs and the crushing lows of a commercial artist struggling to find peace and balance between his work and his art. Acting as his own narrator, White guides us through his life using moments from his latest creation: a hilarious, biographical one-man show, drawn from performances at venues in Tennessee, New York, and Los Angeles, including the famous Roseland Ballroom and the Largo Theater.
Whether he’s parading a twenty-foot-tall puppet through the Tennessee hillside, romping through the Hollywood Hills dressed in his Lyndon Baines Johnson puppet suit, relaxing in his studio pickin’ his banjo, or watching his children grow up much too soon, White always seems to have a youthful grin and a desperate drive to create art and objects. It is an infectious quality that will inspire everyone to find his or her pleasure in life and pursue it at all costs.
Elina Shatkin of Los Angeles magazine writes, “This movie ought to be required viewing, not just for Oscar voters but for every aspiring artist wondering how to build a life doing what they love. Beauty is Embarrassing isn’t simply a testament to the talents of Wayne White; it’s a snapshot of the ways in which creativity and the business of daily living can be inseparably fused.”
The film’s director, Neil Berkeley, has worked in movies and television for more than ten years, developing content and packaging for Project Runway, Top Chef, Work of Art, and America’s Next Great Restaurant, among others. He has also been design producer for several feature-length documentaries, including The Cool School, Johnny Cash’s America, Air Guitar Nation, and Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story.
Top image: Wayne White and his paintings, in a still from Beauty Is Embarrassing.
Bottom image: Neil Berkeley, director of Beauty Is Embarrassing.
New Members of CAA Committees
posted by Christopher Howard — February 06, 2013
CAA’s nine Professional Interests, Practices, and Standards Committees welcome their newly appointed members, who will serve three-year terms (2013–16). In addition, five new chairs will take over committee leadership, and several members of the CAA Board of Directors assume liaison posts. New committee members, chairs, and board liaisons will begin their terms at the 101st Annual Conference, to be held February 13–16, 2013, in New York. CAA warmly thanks all outgoing committee members for their years of service to the organization.
A call for nominations for these committees appears annually from July to September in CAA News and on the CAA website. CAA’s president, vice president for committees, and executive director review all nominations in November and make appointments that take effect the following February. CAA’s vice president for committees, DeWitt Godfrey of Colgate University, is an ex officio member of all nine groups.
New Committee Members, Chairs, and Board Liaisons
Committee on Diversity Practices: Julie L. McGee, University of Delaware; and Staci Scheiwiller, California State University, Stanislaus. The new board liaison is Leslie Bellavance of Alfred University, and the new committee chair is Susan D. Zurbrigg from James Madison University, replacing Kevin Concannon of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
Committee on Intellectual Property: Kenneth Cavalier, University of British Columbia; Anne Norcross, Ferris State University; and Cynthia Underwood, United States Patent and Trademark Office. A new board liaison to the committee is Suzanne Preston Blier of Harvard University.
Committee on Women in the Arts: Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, El Museo del Barrio; Jonathan D. Katz, University at Buffalo, State University of New York; and Neysa Page-Lieberman, Columbia College Chicago. The new chair is Claudia Sbrissa of St. John’s University, taking over from Maria Elena Buszek of the University of Colorado in Denver.
Education Committee: Kirsten Ataoguz, Indiana University–Purdue University, Fort Wayne; Leda Cempellin, South Dakota State University; and Bertha Gutman, Delaware County Community College. After serving three years as committee chair, Rosanne Gibel of the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale will be succeeded by Julia A. Sienkewicz of Duquesne University.
International Committee: Francesca Fiorani, University of Virginia; Federico Freschi, University of Johannesburg; Annelise Jarvis-Hansen, independent artist, Copenhagen; and Valérie Rousseau, American Folk Art Museum. Gail Feigenbaum of the Getty Research Institute joins the committee as board liaison.
Museum Committee: Jeffrey Abt, Wayne State University; Joseph Becherer, Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park; Makeda Best, University of Vermont; and Tracy Fitzpatrick, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York. The new committee chair is N. Elizabeth Schlatter of the University of Richmond Museums, who takes over from Karol A. Lawson of Sweet Briar College.
Professional Practices Committee: Thomas Berding, Michigan State University; Virginia Maksymowicz, Franklin and Marshall College; and Jonathan F. Walz, Rollins College.
Services to Artists Committee: Michelle Grabner, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Jenny Marketou, independent artist, New York; Martha Schwendener, critic, Brooklyn; and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, artist, Chicago.
Student and Emerging Professionals Committee: Jacquelyn N. Coutré, Adelphi University; Lauren Grace Kilroy, Brooklyn College, City University of New York; Carolyn Jean Martin, San Francisco Art Institute; and John Douglas Powers, University of Alabama, Birmingham. Megan Koza Mitchell-Young of the Dishman Art Museum at Lamar University succeeds Jennifer Stoneking-Stewart of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, as chair.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — February 06, 2013
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Classroom Meets Gallery
At the Yale University Art Gallery, a sunny new fourth-floor gallery was filled recently with a collection of artworks highly unlikely ever to meet in such proximity again. What thread could possibly unite these works? Not a purely curatorial one, of course, but a thread that wends its way through the often wonderfully murky territory where art appreciation meets education. The room, the Levin Study Gallery, is given over to professors—from art history but also from African American studies, South Asian studies, and gender and sexuality studies, among others—who choose pieces from Yale’s vast collection to serve as teaching tools. (Read more in the New York Times.)
Draft Document on Open Review Practices and Possibilities
In April 2011, MediaCommons and New York University Press jointly received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support a yearlong study of open review practices and possibilities. The document that follows is a draft of the white paper that will serve as the grant’s primary outcome. (Read more at MediaCommons Press.)
Publishers and Library Groups Spar in Appeal to Ruling on Electronic Course Reserves
Fair use and electronic course reserves are back in court. A keenly watched copyright case that pitted three academic publishers against Georgia State University has entered the appeals phase, with a flurry of filings and motions this week and more expected soon. One surprise motion came from the United States Department of Justice, which requested more time to consider filing an amicus brief either in support of the publishers or in support of neither party. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
An Art Installation Made of the Cable News Crawl
We’re constantly inundated with news. Just look at your Twitter feed. We hop from North Korea to Top Chef to productivity tips without a second’s thought. But it’s strange, if you really think about it, that we process the world’s news as indiscriminately as sticking our fingers into every dish on a buffet. And That’s the Way It Is explores this idea of media inundation. By Ben Rubin, it’s a media installation at the University of Texas that scans closed-captioned chirons during the nightly news and projects those hot topics onto a building. (Read more at Fast Company.)
Major Art Museum Group Bolsters Rules for Acquiring Ancient Art
The ethics for adding ancient works to American art museum collections became substantially more stringent five years ago when the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) decided to set the bar higher—prompted by complaints from Italy, Greece, and other ancient lands that museums had long turned a blind eye to evidence that pieces they owned had been looted from archaeological sites. Last month, the group announced a few more subtle tweaks to those guidelines, including requiring a public explanation on the AAMD’s website if a museum decides to acquire a piece despite gaps in its ownership record going back to fall 1970. (Read more in the Los Angeles Times.)
A Bronx Post Office, Home to Ben Shahn Murals, Could Be Sold
A landmark post office in the Bronx that contains thirteen Depression-era murals by the famed New Jersey artist Ben Shahn could be put up for sale. The proposal to sell the Bronx General Post Office on the Grand Concourse was outlined in a letter from the postal service to the Bronx borough president, Ruben Diaz Jr. (Read more at NJ.com.)
A New Way Forward
While some American art museums receive some government support, most depend on three main sources of money: (1) earned income from admissions, retail, restaurants, and the like; (2) revenue drawn from their endowments; and (3) annual contributions, which too often provide the largest part. In lean times, those donations tend to drop or level off—forcing cuts in staff, programming, and other costs or, sometimes, an increase in debt—and if Washington ever caps the tax deductibility of charitable donations, as many politicians want, it will make matters worse. (Read more in the Wall Street Journal.)
Curator, Tear Down These Walls
A modest proposal for this country’s great repositories of pre–twentieth-century American art: why don’t you, as Diana Vreeland might have asked, mix folk art in with the more realistic, academically correct kind that has so dominated museums since the nineteenth century? Despite rising interest in and scholarship about folk art—and even after the wholesale rethinking of several major American wings on the East Coast—the isolation of folk from academic is still the norm. (Read more in the New York Times.)
Download the Conference Abstracts and Directory of Attendees
posted by Christopher Howard — February 05, 2013
Registrants for the 2013 Annual Conference in New York can now download the Abstracts and Directory of Attendees. These publications, available as PDFs, summarize the contents of hundreds of papers and talks that will be presented in program sessions and list the names and contact information for those attendees who registered by both the early and advance deadlines.
Reading the abstracts in advance can help you plan your daily schedule at the conference. Program sessions are alphabetized by the chair’s last name and appear in the contents pages (4–10). An index in the back of the publication names all the speakers. Alternatively, use your Adobe Reader to conduct a keyword search for terms relevant to your interests. Similarly, the Directory of Attendees helps with networking during and communication after the conference.
To download the two publications, registrants can log into their CAA account, click the “Conference Registrant Information” image, and then click the Abstracts and/or Directory of Attendees icon to download a PDF. The Abstracts and Directory of Attendees are part of the registration package; there is no added cost to paid or complimentary registrants for access to these publications.
Conference attendees who purchase single-time slot tickets, or those who want the Abstracts but are not coming to New York, may attain the document for a charge: $30 for CAA members and $35 for nonmembers. The Abstracts and Directory of Attendees will remain on the CAA website for download or sale through July 31, 2013.
Beginning with the 2010 conference in Chicago, CAA offers its Abstracts exclusively as a PDF download. Past issues of the printed publication from 1999 to 2009 are also available. The cost per copy is $30 for CAA members and $35 for nonmembers. For more information and to order, please contact Roberta Lawson, CAA office coordinator.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — January 30, 2013
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
The Case for Naming a US Secretary of Culture
Along with adding the finishing touches to his inaugural address on Monday, President Barack Obama has plenty on his plate. He is consumed by the responsibilities of selecting new Cabinet members and preparing strategies to get them confirmed. He already had his fair share of critics, and the last thing he needs is a music critic telling him how to run the country. So I’m sorry to have to be the one to remind you, Mr. President, that you’ve left someone out: Secretary of Culture. (Read more in the Los Angeles Times.)
As Art Values Rise, So Do Concerns about Market’s Oversight
When some of the world’s richest people gather for the glittering New York auction season this spring, they will spend hundreds of millions of dollars in an art market that allows opaque transactions and has few outside monitors. At major auctions the first bids announced for a piece are typically fictional—numbers pulled from the air by the auctioneer to jump-start bidding. (Read more in the New York Times.)
Displaying Prices in Art Galleries
In the context of an article exploring the need for more regulation of the art market, with a list of examples of questionable practices in the current system, the New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kevin Flynn raise again the issue of galleries not posting prices of the work for sale in their spaces. I don’t see why this is really a newsworthy “problem.” In the ten-plus years I’ve been in the art business, I have never once heard anyone complain unprompted about the lack of prices being posted other than journalists. (Read more at Edward Winkleman.)
Secret Painting in Rembrandt Masterpiece Coming into View
Scientists may be one step closer to revealing a hidden portrait behind a 380-year-old Rembrandt painting, Old Man in Military Costume, which resides at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Scientists had noticed the painting bears faint traces of another portrait beneath its surface. Researchers had previously probed the painting with infrared, neutron, and conventional X-ray methods but could not see the behind the top coat, largely because Rembrandt used the same paint (with the same chemical composition) for the underpainting and the final version. (Read more in LiveScience.)
Thirty-Hour Work Week Is a Critical Threshold for More Than Just Health Care
The way colleges count adjuncts’ workloads is important not only for determining whether they are eligible for health insurance under the new health-care law, but also for their participation in some other federal programs. A federal student-loan-forgiveness program uses the same thirty-hour benchmark as the health-care law for determining full-time employment, a key requirement for eligibility. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Report Finds Fundamental Flaws in Many Nonprofits’ Fundraising
A new national survey of nonprofit executives suggests it isn’t just the uncertain economy that’s making it hard for charities—including arts and culture groups—to meet their fundraising goals. The research says there’s something fundamentally amiss with the way many of them go about courting donors. “This study reveals that many nonprofit organizations are stuck in a vicious cycle that threatens their ability to raise the resources they need to succeed,” begins the thirty-six-page report. (Read more in the Los Angeles Times.)
The Never Before Told Story of the World’s First Computer Art (It’s a Sexy Dame)
During a time when computing power was so scarce that it required a government defense budget to finance it, a young man used a $238 million military computer, the largest such machine ever built, to render an image of a curvy woman on a glowing cathode ray tube screen. The year was 1956, and the creation was a landmark moment in computer graphics and cultural history that has gone unnoticed until now. (Read more in the Atlantic.)
Will 3D-Printed Houses Stand Up as Architecture?
Three-dimensional printing may have been used for a long time in the world of architecture, allowing visionaries to conjure ever more elaborate and unbuildable forms from the ether. But the technology has never been used to build anything bigger than a prototype model. This could all be set to change, now that the Dutch architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars has unveiled designs for the world’s first 3D-printed house. (Read more in the Guardian.)
Free Wi-Fi at the Conference
posted by Christopher Howard — January 29, 2013
For the first time, CAA will offer free wireless internet at the Hilton New York to all 2013 Annual Conference attendees from Tuesday, February 12, to Sunday, February 17. Service will be available in all session rooms, the Interview Hall, the Book and Trade Fair, and Career Services, including the Student and Emerging Professionals Lounge.
Officially, coverage will encompass the entire Concourse Level, Second Floor, Third Floor, and the Americas Halls 1 and 2. The Hilton’s lobby, restaurants, and bar, however, may not be covered. To connect, use your laptop or mobile device to find the wireless network called CAA WiFi and enter the password “arts2013” (without quotes) into the WPA2 encryption key. The password is case sensitive and must be in lowercase.
Connecting to the internet at the conference is essential, whether you are searching for a job, contacting friends and colleagues in New York, or communicating with your school or institution back home. The following information below may be subject to change but should be reliable.
Hilton New York
The Hilton New York offers two tiers of wireless internet service in rooms to its guests and thus has two prices: $14.99 and $18.99 per twenty-four hours. The hotel, though, was not able to confirm the exact download speed for each. For full details in advance, please contact the Hilton, not CAA. While onsite, ask a hotel representative from the concierge or check-in desk for more information.
Sheraton New York
The Sheraton New York is generously offering free high-speed internet access in rooms to all guests who are attending the conference (a value of $14.95 per day). When you check in, tell the hotel representative that you are here for CAA and ask for the log-in information. The Sheraton also provides free Wi-Fi inside the hotel lobby to anyone—you need not be a guest. To gain access, simply request the password from the concierge or check-in desk, as you cannot automatically connect just by opening a browser. For more information in advance, please contact the Sheraton, not CAA. While onsite, ask a hotel representative for more information.
Park Central Hotel
The Park Central Hotel, the conference hotel for students, charges $14.10 for twenty-four-hour access to its wireless connection, which can be used by guests throughout the building. For full details in advance, please contact the Park Central, not CAA. While onsite, ask a hotel representative at the concierge or check-in desk for more information. A Starbucks with free Wi-Fi is located next door to the Park Central, and sometimes its internet bleeds into the hotel lobby.
Candidate Center
As part of the conference’s Career Services, the Candidate Center—located in Concourse A, Concourse Level, Hilton New York—houses a bank of computers that CAA members may use only for the Online Career Center. No other internet use is allowed on these computers. Hours are Wednesday, February 13–Friday, February 15, 9:00 AM–7:00 PM. You must have a CAA membership card to enter the Candidate Center.
Starbucks
Bottoms up, coffee drinkers! A smallish Starbucks—located directly across the street from the Hilton, at the northeast corner of Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue) and West Fifty-Third Street—offers free wireless internet to its guests. No special password is needed—just connect when you open a browser. This location is usually open from 6:00 AM to 9:00 PM during the week, and from 9:00 AM to 7:00 PM on Saturday and Sunday, according to the company.
A handful of other Starbucks are within a few blocks of the conference. Use OpenWiFiSpots (below) or download the free Starbucks smart-phone app for Apple or Android devices for the locations.
Other Area Hot Spots
OpenWiFiSpots, which calls itself a comprehensive directory of free wireless hot spots, lists sixty-four free sources near the Hilton in midtown Manhattan, including hotels, cafés, and restaurants. This list, however, may not be completely up to date.
Mellon Foundation Helps CAA Initiate a Publishing Award for Emerging Scholars
posted by Christopher Howard — January 23, 2013
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the College Art Association (CAA) a one-year grant of $60,000 to administer the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award. The award is a temporary measure to provide financial relief to early-career scholars in art history and visual studies who are responsible for paying for rights and permissions for images in their publications. The Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award will provide grants directly to emerging scholars to offset the high costs of image acquisition. Recipients will be selected on the basis of the quality and financial need of their project, and awards will be made twice during the year (in the spring and fall) in conjunction with CAA’s Millard Meiss Publication Fund awards to publishers. CAA anticipates awarding between eight and ten Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Awards in 2013.
The Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award supports image rights and reproduction costs for books on topics in art history and visual studies. The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) also received one year of funding from the Andrew Mellon Foundation and will award grants to emerging scholars who are publishing monographs on the built environment. Both the CAA and SAH awards will provide leading authors in the early stages of their careers with the financial resources to acquire images for scholarly publications. For information about the SAH award, visit www.sah.org or contact Beth Eifrig at info@sah.org.
Applications for the first round of the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award are now being accepted. The deadline for submission is March 15, 2013, with a second round of applications due on September 15, 2013. CAA will administer the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award according to guidelines developed for the Millard Meiss Publication Fund grant, an award established in 1975 by a generous bequest from the late Professor Millard Meiss. The jury for the award, comprising distinguished, mid-career or senior scholars whose specializations cover a broad range of art scholarship, has discretion over the number of and size of the awards. For further information about the award and to apply, please visit www.collegeart.org/meissmellon.
CAA seeks to alleviate high reproductions rights costs related to publishing in the arts. With funding from a separate grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, CAA recently initiated a project to explore the overall impact of copyright on the arts and how different understandings of copyright affect creative and scholarly choices in the visual arts. Over a four-year period, from 2013–2016, CAA will produce an issues report and a code of best practices for fair use in the creation and curation of artworks and scholarly publishing in the visual arts.
For further information please contact Virginia Reinhart, CAA marketing and communications associate, at vreinhart@collegeart.org or 212-392-4426. For information on applying to the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award, please contact Alex Gershuny, CAA editorial associate, at agershuny@collegeart.org or 212-392-4424.