CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — January 23, 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.
Erwin Panofsky’s Newly Discovered Thesis on Michelangelo and Raphael Will Be Published
Next year De Gruyter will publish a previously unknown thesis by the influential art historian Erwin Panofsky, titled “The Creative Principles of Michelangelo, particularly in relation to those of Raphael.” The document was discovered in the archives of Munich’s Central Institute for Art History last June. (Read more at Blouin Artinfo).
Hundreds of Lost William Blake Etchings Discovered at a Manchester Library
Researchers at the University of Manchester’s John Rylands Library have stumbled upon a treasure trove of works by the poet and artist William Blake. After two years of work, a group students, overseen by the art historian Colin Trodd, found about 350 engraved plates designed by Blake in the collection. (Read more at the Independent).
How Art Can Bridge the Digital “Divide”
Like writers embracing digital platforms, musicians embracing digital music, or photographers embracing digital photography, art based on new media often just did—and still does—old things in new ways. The art critic Claire Bishop also made this observation on the “digital divide” in art, further noting that: “While many artists use digital technology, how many really confront the question of what it means to think, see, and filter affect through the digital? (Read more at Wired).
Brooklyn Museum Finds Some Problematic Gifts Can’t Be Returned
The Brooklyn Museum seemed to have garnered a bonanza in 1932 when it received a large bequest from the estate of Col. Michael Friedsam, president of the elegant retail emporium B. Altman. But eight decades later that cache of Dutch and Renaissance paintings, Chinese porcelains, jewelry, and furniture has become something of a burden. A quarter of the 926 works have turned out to be fakes, misattributions, or of poor quality, and the museum potentially faces a hefty bill to store the 229 pieces it no longer wants. (Read more at the New York Times).
From Palate to Palette: Can Food Be Art?
Last night, I cooked broccoli rabe with caramelized onions and vegan fennel sausage, along with a creamy parmesan polenta and a crusty whole wheat rosemary bread made from the Camaldoli sourdough culture that I feed flour to each day. Like many artists I know, I love to cook and often spend between one and two hours making dinner each night. I once felt guilty about this—worried that my time would be better spent in my studio drawing or printing or otherwise making art—but then I came to see that making food—combining textures, flavors, scents, and colors—is also creative. (Read more at Createquity).
Social Media Play Fresh Role in the Arts
The profound effect of social-media use on the arts community is becoming clear, with a recent study providing a first view of how arts organizations large and small are using online platforms. In the Sacramento region, some small organizations, such as the fledgling Classical Revolution, rely completely on social-media sites, while larger presenters, like the Mondavi Center, are using them as a tool to attract new and younger audiences. (Read more at the Sacramento Bee).
Copyright Suit Pits Fair Use against Unlicensed Distribution
Digital civil-rights groups asked a federal court in New York to reject what they call an attempt by the Associated Press to restrict fair use of content on the internet. “If adopted by this or any other court, this view would sharply curtail the essential role fair use plays in facilitating online innovation and expression, restricting the use and development of services that allow users to find, organize, and share public information, services that depend on making intermediate copies, and even personal consumer uses such as time-shifting,” argues an amicus brief filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, and the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society. (Read more at PC World).
Multinational MOOCs
The rapid expansion of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has left many in international higher education asking how they can compete. With elite American universities dominating the emerging market, will foreign institutions be left behind? (Read more at Inside Higher Ed).
Last Chance to Buy Advance Tickets to Guggenheim Reception
posted by Christopher Howard — January 22, 2013
CAA is selling advance tickets to the opening reception of the 101st Annual Conference through Wednesday, January 23, 2013, at 5:00 PM EST. Admission to the event—which will take place at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on Wednesday evening, February 13, 7:00–9:00 PM—is $40 for CAA members and $55 for nonmembers.
Please contact CAA’s Member Services at membership@collegeart.org or 212-691-1051, ext. 1, to purchase your ticket today. In New York, tickets will be sold at Registration at the Hilton New York but not at the museum. Avoid the rush for tickets at the Hilton by purchasing yours in advance.
At the museum, attendees may preview Gutai: Splendid Playground, the first North American exhibition devoted to Gutai, the influential artistic collective in postwar Japan and one of the most important avant-garde movements of the 1950s and 1960s.
The Guggenheim is located at 1071 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. To get there from the conference hotels, take the 4, 5, or 6 train to 86th Street. Walk west on 86th Street, turn right at Fifth Avenue, and proceed north to 88th Street. To reach the museum by bus, take the uptown M1, M2, M3, or M4 bus on Madison Avenue.
Image: Murakami Saburō, Passing Through, 1956, performance view at the 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition, Ohara Kaikan, Tokyo, ca. October 11–17, 1956 (photograph © Makiko Murakami and the former members of the Gutai Art Association and provided by the Museum of Osaka University)
Register for 2013 Advocacy Days
posted by Christopher Howard — January 22, 2013
CAA encourages you to register and take part in three upcoming events this winter and spring in Washington, DC: Arts Advocacy Day, Humanities Advocacy Day, and Museums Advocacy Day. At each, participants meet their senators and representatives in person to advocate increased federal support of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services.
Previous lobbying experience isn’t necessary. Training sessions and practice talks take place the day before the main events—that’s why, for example, Arts Advocacy Day is actually two days, not one. Participants are also prepped on the critical issues and the range of funding requested of Congress to support these federal agencies. It is at these training sessions where you meet—and network with—other advocates from your states. The main sponsoring organization for each event makes congressional appointments for you.
You may have mailed a letter or sent a prewritten email to your congressperson or senator before, but legislators have an algorithm of interest for pressing issues, in which a personal visit tops all other forms of communication. As citizen lobbyists, it’s also important to have a few specific examples about how arts funding has affected you: don’t be afraid to name-drop major cultural institutions—such as your city’s best-known museum or nonprofit art center—in your examples of why the visual arts matter in your state.
If you cannot attend the three advocacy days in person, please send an email or fax to your representatives expressing your concern about continued and increased funding for the visual arts. If you don’t know your representative or senators, you can look them up at www.congress.org.
Museums Advocacy Day
Join fellow advocates in Washington, DC, for Museums Advocacy Day, taking place February 25–26, 2013, and help make the case that museums are essential—as education providers and economic drivers—in every community. If museums are not at the table, they could be on the table. Registration is open through January 25.
Humanities Advocacy Day
Registration for the annual meeting of the National Humanities Alliance (March 18) and Humanities Advocacy Day (March 19) will help you to connect with a growing network of humanities leaders, to communicate the value of the humanities to members of Congress, and to become a year-round advocate for the humanities. The advance deadline for registration is January 31, 2013.
Arts Advocacy Day
The 2012 election made a dramatic impact on Congress, with more than eighty new members taking office this month. The House and Senate will renew the focus on reducing the federal deficit and creating jobs, and it is imperative that arts advocates work together to craft a policy agenda that supports the nonprofit arts sector and arts education. CAA encourages you to register for Arts Advocacy Day, which takes place April 8–9, 2013, in Washington, DC, to help the cause. Register by the advance deadline to participate: March 25, 2013.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — January 16, 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.
Digital Art History Symposium at the Institute of Fine Arts
Under the heading “Mellon Research Initiative: Digital Art History,” the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University has posted video recordings from its recent conference on digital art history, which took place November 30–December 1, 2012. (Read more at THATCamp CAA.)
Help Desk: Ready for Representation?
When is an artist ready to approach galleries? I’ve been exhibiting my art for about five years, with a couple decent solo shows and a few big sales. It’s not an extensive track record, but I’m dedicated and need to increase sales if I want to keep making art. I keep thinking I’m “almost” ready and don’t want to waste my time or the gallerist’s—or risk making a poor first impression with him or her by jumping the gun. I’ve read different advice in books but still feel unsure about this important step. (Read more at Daily Serving.)
As the Battle for the Online Art World Sharpens, How the Players Are Adapting
Over the last five years, investors have funneled tens of millions of dollars into fledgling websites that help users buy, sell, borrow, and learn about art online. Backers range from flush art-world figures like Dasha Zhukova to successful venture capitalists such as Jack Dorsey, a founder of Twitter, and Peter Thiel, a former PayPal executive. But can a cultural sector that typically relies on exclusivity, personal contact, and (often) opacity make an effective transition to the web? (Read more at Art and Auction.
Labor Mural Gets a New Home in Augusta
The controversial labor mural that once hung in the lobby of the Maine Department of Labor in Augusta—and became the subject of a lawsuit when Governor Paul LePage ordered it removed—has found a new home. The mural will reside for at least the next three years in the Cultural Building atrium that serves as the entryway to the Maine State Museum in Augusta. (Read more at the Morning Sentinel.)
Adjunct Project Reveals Wide Range in Pay
Over the past year, adjuncts across the nation have been turning to the Adjunct Project, a crowdsourcing effort that started last February when Joshua A. Boldt, a writing instructor in Georgia, put online a publicly editable spreadsheet. Nearly two thousand entries have already been made on adjuncts’ pay and working conditions, and a clearer national picture is emerging. Now, to increase participation and collect ever-more-comprehensive information, Boldt and the Chronicle are expanding the project. (Read more at the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Making the Case for Adjuncts
By now, it’s hard to imagine that many people in academe haven’t heard about how most adjuncts work for years at low pay and under conditions that hinder their efforts to help students. So why hasn’t the issue received more attention on a wider scale, and what will it take to achieve real change? Adjunct advocates and higher-education experts are counting on a new, targeted focus on students and educational value, and gathering of more data about their employment, to force reform. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)
Opportunity Costs: The True Price of Internships
Every summer, thousands of interns descend on New York City in order to work for nothing. They flow into empty dorm rooms or onto friends’ sofas to sleep, burrow unnoticed into illegal sublets, and surf couches longterm. At work, they occupy desks and offices recently vacated by laid-offs. They file papers, get coffee, and try to make themselves noticed, but not too much so. No one knows how many of these interns there are, partly because much of their unsalaried work is illegal and therefore covert. (Read more at Dissent.)
Court Decision Shows Why Copyright Assignments Should Be Precisely Worded
The parties in a recent case engaged in expensive litigation they could have avoided if the language governing transfer of copyright had been more precise. The decision serves to remind how good drafting in development agreements—whether for software, content, or, as in this case, t-shirt designs—can enhance business efficiencies. (Read more at Information Law Group.)
Conservators to Present a Conference Session on Preparing for the Next Sandy
posted by Christopher Howard — January 15, 2013
The American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC) will present a session, called “Facing the Unthinkable: Preparing for the Next Sandy,” at CAA’s 101st Annual Conference in New York on Saturday, February 16, 2013. It will take place from 1:00 to 3:30 PM at the Hilton New York, Concourse C, Concourse Level. This session—which is free and open to the public—is aimed particularly at artists and small-gallery managers and will focus on concrete steps they can take to mitigate the impact of emergencies through planning and preparing for forecasted events, such as storms, and on first steps to take following an emergency. In addition, important health and safety procedures will be outlined, and lists of resources and contact information for assistance will be distributed.
When Superstorm Sandy struck the Northeast at the end of October 2012, individual artists and small galleries were especially vulnerable—especially those concentrated in low-lying areas that were eventually inundated with floodwaters. Many prepared as they had for Hurricane Irene a year previously, but the height and power of the water was far beyond what Irene had brought. Lessons learned from this disaster will be covered in the workshop, including the experiences of AIC’s Collections Emergency Response Team (AIC-CERT) and the current work at the Cultural Recovery Center in Brooklyn.
Speakers will include members of AIC-CERT and volunteers from the Cultural Recovery Center: Cynthia M. Albertson, Assistant Conservator, Museum of Modern Art; Lisa Elkin, Chief Registrar and Director of Conservation, American Museum of Natural History; David Goist, Conservator in Private Practice, Raleigh, North Carolina; and Caitlin O’Grady, Department of Art Conservation, University of Delaware.
AIC, which advances the practice and promotes the importance of preservation of cultural property through publications, research, and the exchange of knowledge, is a CAA affiliated society.
Updated on January 28, 2013.
CAA Receives Major Mellon Grant
posted by Christopher Howard — January 14, 2013
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the College Art Association (CAA) a major grant of $630,000 to develop, publish, and disseminate a code of best practices for fair use in the creation and curation of artworks and scholarly publishing in the visual arts. The initiative will examine the intersection of copyright understandings and creative practices of the visual arts community in art production, art scholarship, museum curation, and editing of work on art. The project will be completed over four years, from January 2013 through December 2016. During this period, CAA will produce an issues report documenting the effects of copyright understandings on creative choices and write a code of best practices in fair use for the communities of practice represented by its members.
In noting the importance of this work, Anne Collins Goodyear, CAA board president, observed: “The challenges and uncertainties faced by artists and art historians today in securing rights to reproduce works of art in hardcopy and electronically—and the difficulties in knowing when the law might require securing such rights—have serious adverse consequences for creative practice. Both scholarly and artistic projects are often compromised or even abandoned because of the arduous and expensive process of clearing permissions. An improved understanding of the scope of fair use and a field-wide agreement on its application will be invaluable to all practitioners in the visual arts.”
By undertaking this critical and timely project, CAA aims to provide much-needed clarification of best practices in the use of third-party copyrighted material, and establish a practicable code of conduct for members of the visual-arts community. In order to create a code that functions across all areas of the visual arts, CAA’s fair use project will involve participants from the fields of art history, studio art, print and online publishing, art museums, and related areas.
Linda Downs, executive director and CEO of the College Art Association emphasized the association’s capacity to lead this effort: “As the premier association in the visual arts, CAA is uniquely positioned to address these challenges. CAA’s membership represents a broad range of stakeholders—including artists, art historians, photographers, curators, writers, and educators, as well as museums, editors, and colleges and universities—who will benefit from the issues report and code of best practices. The organization has a strong record of advocacy on a variety of issues involving intellectual property. Moreover, as a scholarly publisher in the visual arts, CAA is familiar with the challenges associated with the uncertainty surrounding the application of fair use.”
The efforts funded by the Mellon grant will be overseen by a Task Force on Fair Use established by the CAA board in May of last year. The cochairs of the task force are: Jeffrey P. Cunard, long-standing CAA counsel and a managing partner in the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton LLP; and Gretchen Wagner, a member of CAA’s Committee on Intellectual Property and general counsel of ARTstor. In addition to the cochairs, task force members include: Anne Collins Goodyear, CAA board president and associate curator of prints and drawings at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Linda Downs, CAA executive director and chief executive officer; Randall C. Griffin, CAA vice president for publications and a professor in the department of art history at Southern Methodist University; and other CAA members with professional experience in studio art, art history, curatorial work, and copyright law.
CAA has engaged two principal investigators to lead the four-year project: Patricia Aufderheide, university professor in the School of Communication and co-director of its Center for Social Media; and Peter Jaszi, professor of law and faculty director of the Washington College of Law’s Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Clinic. Aufderheide and Jaszi, who have significant expertise in successfully developing fair use codes for documentary filmmakers, dance archivists, research librarians, and journalists, will be responsible for conducting the investigatory work that will inform the report and code. Aufderheide and Jaszi will also work with a Community Practices Advisory Committee to review the report and a Legal Advisory Committee to review the code. Two project advisors—Virginia Rutledge, an art advisor, art historian, and lawyer who practices in the areas of both copyright and art law, and Maureen Whalen, associate general counsel for the J. Paul Getty Trust—will contribute expertise during all phases of the project. The task force cochairs, Cunard and Wagner, together with Goodyear, Downs, Aufderheide, and Jaszi will also serve as principal investigators.
CAA approaches this project with an established history of engagement on the issues of copyright and fair use, and gratefully acknowledges the work done in this area by allied scholarly societies including the Visual Resources Association, the Association of Research Libraries, and the New York City Bar Association Art Law Committee (ALC). With the assistance of a start-up grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, awarded in September 2012, CAA recently completed a preparatory phase of the fair use project that will inform the activities now funded by the Mellon Foundation. During this preparatory phase, the task force met with Aufderheide, Jaszi, and CAA’s board of directors to discuss the research methodology and select thought leaders to be interviewed about copyright and fair use practices. Additionally, Aufderheide and Jaszi conducted twenty-five exploratory interviews with some of these thought leaders to help identify the key topics that the issues report and code should address. With this work completed, the task force and principal investigators are in a strong position to move forward with the formal investigative phase of the project.
For more information about the fair use project, please contact Janet Landay, project manager, at jlanday@collegeart.org (212-392-4420) or Virginia Reinhart, CAA marketing and communications associate, at vreinhart@collegeart.org (212-392-4426).
Recipients of the 2013 Awards for Distinction
posted by Christopher Howard — January 09, 2013
CAA has announced the recipients of the 2013 Awards for Distinction, which honor the outstanding achievements and accomplishments of individual artists, art historians, authors, conservators, curators, and critics whose efforts transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.
CAA will formally recognize the honorees at a special awards ceremony during Convocation at the 101st Annual Conference in New York, on Wednesday evening, February 13, 2013, 5:30–7:00 PM, at the Hilton New York. Led by Anne Collins Goodyear, president of the CAA Board of Directors, the awards ceremony will take place in East Ballroom, Third Floor. Convocation and the awards ceremony are free and open to the public. The Hilton New York is located in midtown Manhattan, at 1335 Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue), New York, NY 10010.
The 2013 Annual Conference—presenting scholarly sessions, panel discussions, career-development workshops, art exhibitions, a Book and Trade Fair, and more—is the largest gathering of artists, art historians, students, and arts professionals in the United States.
Ellsworth Kelly, Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
For over seventy years, Ellsworth Kelly has forged an independent and influential career as a draftsman, painter, sculptor, photographer, and printmaker. Born in 1923, Kelly entered the United States Army after early studies at Pratt Institute. After serving in the 603rd Engineers Camouflage Battalion from 1943 to 1945, he entered the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1946. It was during his time in Paris, from 1948 to 1954, that Kelly experimented with chance compositions, surreal forms, and bold colors and in doing so built the foundation for his lifelong investigation of abstraction in art. In 1956, Betty Parsons Gallery hosted the first solo exhibition of his work in New York, and inclusion in key exhibitions followed: Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art (1959), Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum (1966), and Serial Imagery at the Pasadena Art Museum (1968). The Museum of Modern Art in New York staged his first retrospective in 1973, with additional surveys taking place at the Stedelijk Museum (1979), the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume (1992), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1996), Haus der Kunst, Munich (2011), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2012). For the artist and jury member Roy Dowell, Kelly’s “deceptively simple paintings and drawings have been a symbol of that elusive and inexplicable quality of rightness and accuracy of vision that I value in art. The sustained intelligence and rigor of his practice is most admirable as he offers to his audience an example of unwavering conviction and elegance.”
Elaine Sturtevant, Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work
For over four decades, the American-born, Parisian-based artist Elaine Sturtevant has been creating blindingly original works. Because her work calls into question our deep ties with authorship as the defining quality of any artwork, it has perplexed both the art world and the general public, as demonstrated by her recent solo exhibition, Rock & Rap /c Simulacra at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York (May 4–June 23, 2012), her first in the United States in seven years. From the 1960s to the 1990s, Sturtevant based her appropriation-based work only on cultural iconography that was tied to specific artists, be that Andy Warhol or Joseph Beuys. In 2004, she started looking at commercial television imagery as a readymade and found—in its brain-numbing repetition—a recognizable source that was less revered than her art-historical precedents but upon which she could perform the same revelatory operation. While Sturtevant’s multiscreen installations are now widely exhibited and celebrated, their existence has helped clarify the type of critical discourse she had hoped to instigate in 1965, when she first showed her paintings.
T. J. Clark, Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
CAA recognizes T. J. Clark, professor emeritus of the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, as an influential, prolific, and inspired art historian and cultural critic. For over forty years he has written scholarly books, journal articles, exhibition reviews, and essays on the history of European and American art from the Renaissance to the present. Since the early 1970s, with the publication of two seminal books on French nineteenth-century realism—The Absolute Bourgeois and The Image of the People—his voice has been consistently recognized for its articulate, committed advocacy of the social and political significance of art. An enormously influential essay from that time called for “a new art history,” one founded on the responsibility of the historian or critic for situating aesthetic objects and approaches within the larger frame of cultural critique. From these early books and articles, with their Marxist and theoretical orientation, through subsequent studies of Impressionism and Édouard Manet (1980s), Abstract Expressionism (1990s), and Nicolas Poussin and Pablo Picasso (2000s), Clark has engaged the foundations and outcomes of the phenomenon of modernity in art. Over many years of writing on art, culture, and politics for the London Review of Books and the New Left Review, as well as his contributions to the collective Retort, he has provided us with a large body of work that addresses the significance of the expanded field of the visual arts in the world today.
Hal Foster and Claire Bishop, Frank Jewett Mather Award
For over thirty years Hal Foster has been an extraordinarily prolific and influential critic and theorist of modern and contemporary art whose writing is theoretically sophisticated yet lucidly readable. In The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), he demonstrates how these artists instantiated their generation’s ambivalent, distressed, but not despairing relationship to the image world they inhabited and remade. A second book, The Art-Architectural Complex (London: Verso, 2011), takes off from Pop’s image skepticism and adds to it concepts from Minimalism, site- and medium-specific art, and the political economy in an aesthetically and ideologically grounded critique of the “banal cosmopolitanism” of much contemporary, global, corporate, and institutional architecture.
In Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), the art critic, art historian, and curator Claire Bishop has articulated an important historical overview of the global emergence of participatory art, also called social practice, as a series of aesthetic, ethical, and political projects that have dynamically engaged audiences in order to promote emancipatory social relations. Sheaddresses key examples and their interaction with audiences since the early twentieth century, thus richly grounding her study in art history and aesthetic theory. Her controversial and thought-provoking conclusions courageously trouble our assumptions about the effectiveness of political artworks, questioning their oppositional quality, their effects on the audiences they reach, and their relation to the institutions that promote them. Artificial Hells is noteworthy for its inclusive character, considering artists and collectives active in Eastern and Western Europe, Latin America, and the United States.
Harmony Hammond and Martha Rosler, Distinguished Feminist Award
CAA recognizes Harmony Hammond for her outstanding contributions to feminist and queer culture through art, writing, curating, teaching, and activism. Since the 1960s, she has created muscular, tactile paintings and sculptures that have redefined abstraction in contemporary art. Once at the forefront of the feminist reclamation of craft-based processes throughout the 1970s, Hammond has continued to innovate brilliantly with materials. Her most recent monochromes persistently grapple with the physical properties of paint and are intricately related to a feminist and queer politics of spectatorship. A founding member of A.I.R. Gallery and the Heresies Collective, Hammond has organized many exhibitions featuring women artists throughout her career. She has also been the leading light for promoting, documenting, and historicizing lesbian artists in the United States. Based in New Mexico, Hammond remains an active art critic and advocate for local art production and is a brilliant, generous teacher who energetically mentors students in their study of art making, art history, and aikido, a Japanese martial art.
For over forty years, Martha Rosler’s pioneering work as an artist, activist, and educator has consistently put her at the leading edge of contemporary art. Since her groundbreaking Body Beautiful and Bringing the War Home collages of the late 1960s, she has been acknowledged as an incisive analyst of the myths and realities of contemporary culture and is recognized among the most influential artists of her generation. Rosler’s prolific, boundary-shattering practice—including work in video, photo-text, performance, and installation—has taken on questions of public space, systems of transportation, issues of war, surveillance, and information, and women’s voices and experience regarding all of the above. She has also covered these subjects with her students at Rutgers University, where she taught for thirty years, in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and most recently at the dozens of international lectures and workshops that have increasingly intersected with her often-collaborative studio practice. Rosler’s critical writing is also recognized for the same, lucid perspectives on the ongoing, ever-evolving connections among consumerism, technology, politics, sexism, class divisions, and violence that are reflected in her artwork.
Buzz Spector, Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
Buzz Spector has influenced students at the important institutions where he has worked since 1978, including Washington University in Saint Louis, Cornell University, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His guidance goes beyond those he has directly taught, as his writings, artworks, installations, and conceptual theories have challenged artists everywhere. Spector has examined our body of knowledge, its means of dissemination through the trusted authority of the published book, and the ephemeral act of reading. His students and colleagues spoke of his engagement as a teacher, how he conveys a flow of energy, information, and concepts to them, describing him as “profound,” “inspiring,” and “a strong advocate” who is “personally committed to his students.” His personal style is “extremely astute, honest, and humorous in his approach” with “insightful, encouraging critique.” Spector can “begin a discussion with an essential question and then spend the hours it takes to tease out literary and scientific references, contemporary art themes, and personal poignancies.” Most of all, he “imparts knowledge as a way to expand how one thinks about one’s own possibility and potential.”
June Hargrove, Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
June Hargrove, a professor of nineteenth-century art in the Department of Art and Archaeology at the University of Maryland in College Park, has maintained her enthusiasm for teaching and scholarship through her keen ability to nurture and educate generations of students. While maintaining high standards for her students, Hargrove gives freely of her own time beyond the classroom so that students discover in her a compassionate and thoughtful mentor. Striking a careful balance, Hargrove has found the time to create new courses that embrace the interests of students while widening the breadth of her own knowledge. She has been able to distill large, complex ideas in survey courses, expanding further on issues of race, sexuality, or gender, going beyond what textbooks might cover. Hargrove has also helped connect younger scholars to established art historians and museum curators beyond their own immediate environment. From all of these achievements, she has revealed a fundamental passion for teaching, for making ideas come alive, to generations of undergraduate students first at Cleveland State University and then for decades at the University of Maryland.
Mary K. Coffey, Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
In How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), Mary K. Coffey contends that the work of Mexican muralists in the early twentieth century was co-opted by governmental and cultural institutions to serve an ideology often directly at odds with the artists’ original aims. Furthermore, she expands traditional narratives that cast the works of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and others as uncomplicated monuments to social equality and lays bare the ways in which the Mexican muralists often reinscribed restrictive gender norms and promoted myths about mestizo identity. Beautifully illustrated and designed, How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture offers not only exciting revelations about Mexican modernism but also presents a highly original way to consider the connections between the avant-garde and the state. Coffey’s meticulously researched and vigorously argued account offers a paradigm of art-historical scholarship at its finest.
Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon, Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
The exhibition catalogue for Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2012) presents a stimulating, long-overdue scholarly assessment of this international phenomenon. Wresting the history of Land art from its ossified foundations and courageously bringing an unruly topic into clear focus, the curator Philipp Kaiser and the scholar Miwon Kwon join forces to produce this appropriately expansive, decidedly revelatory, and eminently readable publication. Through scholarly essays, interviews, a checklist, and photodocumentation, Ends of the Earth remaps the geography of the movement, proposing that sites international and urban were as critical to Earthworks as the desert landscapes of the American Southwest, leaving as a trace of its labors a sturdy, earthy catalogue that serves as a further “non-site” for the resolutely uncontainable projects that redefined aesthetic practice in the 1960s and 1970s and that resonate anew in our ecologically challenged times.
Joanne Pillsbury, Miriam Doutriaux, Reiko Ishihara-Brito, and Alexandre Tokovinine, Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions
Edited by Joanne Pillsbury, Miriam Doutriaux, Reiko Ishihara-Brito, and Alexandre Tokovinine, Ancient Maya Art at Dumbarton Oaks (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2012) represents a substantial and long-lasting scholarly and publishing achievement. It is also a highly readable reference work, offering insight into the traditions of sculpture, ceramics, jade, and painting of the Maya cultures of ancient America. The volume, one in a series documenting Precolumbian art at Dumbarton Oaks, meticulously catalogues nearly one hundred works and features scholarly essays addressing the formation of the collection by Robert Woods Bliss and providing background to Maya civilization and the role of ritual objects in its politics, religion, and society. With contributions by nineteen specialists, Ancient Maya Art at Dumbarton Oaks is a model of scholarly collaboration in which different voices echo the variety of objects and ensure the most recent knowledge, particularly regarding advances in epigraphy and subsequent reinterpretations. That the roster of scholars includes not only American curators, professors, and archeologists, but also experts from Guatemala and Mexico, reflects a new level of international cooperation in this sometimes-contentious territory.
Yukio Lippit, Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Yukio Lippit’s essay “Of Modes and Manners in Japanese Ink Painting: Sesshū’s Splashed Ink Landscape of 1495,” published in the March 2012 issue of The Art Bulletin, is a new look at a master work of medieval Japanese ink painting that has commonly been studied biographically and interpreted as a pictorialization of Zen Buddhism. Lippit’s evenhanded approach builds upon earlier interpretations but makes artistic intentions only one facet of his considerations. He elucidates the scroll in its entirety, focusing on the work’s splashed ink landscape and prose preface, painted and written by Sesshū Tōyō himself, as well as the poetic inscriptions added to the work by six leading Zen monks after the artist gifted the scroll to his student, Josui Soen. Lippit broadens his engagement by looking at it through the lens of a semiotician and a social and cultural historian. Elegantly constructing his argument, the author writes in clear and compelling terms, making his case for the specialist and nonspecialist alike.
Lance Mayer and Gay Myers, CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
Lance Mayer and Gay Myers have carved a unique position within the field of art-historical preservation. Their fine book American Painters on Technique: The Colonial Period to 1860 (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011) brings together two lifetimes’ worth of research, insight, and dedication, forming a testament to their authority in an engaging text that will have a profound impact on the way historians think, and on the way conservators make treatment decisions. Since the late 1970s, Mayer and Myers have worked as consultant conservators to the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in Connecticut and as independent advisers to numerous collectors and leading institutions. They have studied and treated many of the finest American paintings, such as Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), Samuel F. B. Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre (1831–33), and Rembrandt Peale’s George Washington (Patriae Pater) (1824). Mayer and Myers have also mentored budding conservators, and their résumés detail a stream of excellent publications and presentations ranging from scholarly articles to university courses, public lectures, and treatments.
Art Journal Award
The recipient of the 2013 Art Journal Award is Julia Bryan-Wilson for “Invisible Products,” published in the Summer 2012 issue.
Morey and Barr Award Finalists
CAA recognizes the 2013 finalists for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for their distinctive achievements:
The Morey award finalists for 2013 are:
- Esra Akcan, Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012)
- Cynthia Hahn, Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400–circa 1204 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012)
- J. P. Park, Art by the Book: Painting Manuals and the Leisure Life in Late Ming China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012)
The finalist for the 2013 Barr award is:
- Luke Syson with Larry Keith, Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan (London: National Gallery, 2011)
The finalist for the 2013 Barr Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions is:
- Anne T. Woollett, Yvonne Szafran, and Alan Phenix, Drama and Devotion: Heemskerck’s “Ecce Homo” Altarpiece from Warsaw (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2012)
Contact
For more information on the 2013 Awards for Distinction, please contact Emmanuel Lemakis, CAA director of programs. Visit the Awards section of the CAA website to read about past recipients.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — January 09, 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 MLA’s Big (Digital) Tent
In recent years, big conversations at and about the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association have been driven by two major and ongoing forces of change: the increasingly bleak economic realities of the profession (and particularly the shift of jobs away from the tenure track) and the ways that new technologies are transforming scholarly work in the humanities—and scholarly communications in general. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)
What If the Adjuncts Shrugged
Michael Bérubé’s address at this year’s Modern Language Association convention was one of a handful of times that I felt some real solidarity in the profession against the exploitation of the majority of our students and colleagues. (Read more at the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Arts Organizations and Digital Technologies
The Pew Research Center designed a survey to understand how arts organizations are using the internet, social media, and other digital technologies to connect with the public. Most participating organizations strongly or somewhat agree with the statements that technology and social media have made art a more participatory experience, and that they have helped make art audiences more diverse. Yet the majority of respondents also say that technology contributes to an expectation that “all digital content should be free.” (Read more at the Pew Internet and American Life Project.)
Creative Aging: The Emergence of Artistic Talents
I always wished I had true musical or artistic talent. There being none, I became a physician. Five years ago, I starting taking guitar lessons and hoped that I would be amazed by some “hidden” talent that would reveal itself to me and the rest of the world. Although I continue to practice every day and enjoy my musical adventure, the talent part remains elusive, if not totally hidden. But this is not the case for everyone. There are people who start to paint or play a musical instrument later in life and become very accomplished—often only when their brain begins to deteriorate. (Read more at the Atlantic.)
Students Rush to Web Classes, but Profits May Be Much Later
In August, four months after Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng started the online education company Coursera, its free college courses had drawn in a million users, a faster launching than either Facebook or Twitter. The cofounders, computer-science professors at Stanford University, watched with amazement as enrollment passed two million last month, with 70,000 new students a week signing up for over 200 courses taught by faculty members at the company’s partners, 33 elite universities. (Read more at the New York Times.)
What Is the Role of Art in the Wake of Tragedy?
The Economist gave the United States a whole weekend to mourn the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre before telling the entire nation to suck it up. “Those of us who view the events remotely … unless we start to evince a newfound appetite for gun-control measures to prevent future mass slayings, are doing little more than displaying and enjoying our own exalted strickenness,” writes one M. S. “This is an activity at which we, as a culture, excel.” (Read more at Washington City Paper.)
Authenticating Picasso
Pablo Picasso could be capricious when it came to authenticating his own work. On one occasion, he refused to sign a canvas he knew he had painted, saying, “I can paint false Picassos just as well as anybody.” On another, he refused to sign an authentic painting, explaining to the woman who had brought it to him, “If I sign it now, I’ll be putting my 1943 signature on a canvas painted in 1922. No, I cannot sign it, madam, I’m sorry.” Even today, forty years after the artist’s death, the question of how his heirs exercise their right under French law to authenticate his work is a knotty one. (Read more at ARTnews.)
What Enters the Public Domain in 2013 as Defined by Copyright Laws?
Although commonly used in copyright parlance, the phrase “public domain” is often misunderstood. Public domain is commonly used to refer to content that is not protected by copyright law. Determining if a work is in the public domain in the United States is fairly complicated due to various factors such as different durations for different works and amendments in US copyright laws. (Read more at Copyrightlaws.com.)
December 2012–January 2013 Picks from CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — January 03, 2013
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts produces a curated list, called CWA Picks, of recommended exhibitions and events related to feminist art and scholarship in North America and around the world.
The CWA Picks for December 2012–January 2013 include several important exhibitions in the United States, England, and Sweden. In New York, Lehman Maupin Gallery is hosting a two-part presentation of new work by Mickalene Thomas, whose traveling survey at the Brooklyn Museum was a November pick. Other events in the city include a temporary performance and installation work by Ann Hamilton at the Park Avenue Armory and sculpture, painting, and drawing by Caroline Burton at Accola Griefen Gallery.
Midcareer retrospectives are trending: the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh is offering a look at painting by Deborah Kass in relation to the Pope of Pop, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York is showcasing Rosemarie Trockel’s mixed-media work. Across the Atlantic, Kate Davis has produced work in dialogue with Jo Spence at Drawing Room in London, and Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm is highlighting the full painting and film career of Marie-Louise Ekman.
Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
Image: Deborah Kass, Before and Happily Ever After, 1991, oil and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 in. (artwork © Deborah Kass)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — January 02, 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.
Art Insurance Losses from Hurricane Sandy May Reach $500 Million
Two months after Hurricane Sandy caused severe flooding in many Chelsea galleries, the bill for the art world’s recovery is shaping up to be hefty. By mid-November, AXA Art Insurance, one of the largest art insurers, estimated that it would be paying out $40 million, and a recent Reuters report quoted industry estimates suggesting that insurance losses for flooded galleries and ruined art may come to as much as $500 million—or the rough equivalent of what the art insurance business takes in each year. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Sistine Chapel Tourists to Be Vacuumed and Cooled to Protect Frescoes
The five million tourists who visit the Sistine Chapel every year are to be vacuum cleaned and cooled down before entry in an effort to reduce the pollution damaging Michelangelo’s frescoes, the director of the Vatican museums said. Visitors who traipse sweat, dust, skin flakes, and hair into the sixteenth-century chapel will be “dusted, cleaned, and chilled,” Antonio Paolucci told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. The heat and dirt generated by twenty thousand tourists pouring into the chapel every day has been blamed for the layers of grime accumulating on the paintings, which include Michelangelo’s depiction of God giving life to Adam. (Read more from the Guardian.)
Wondrous Horrors
Almost exactly a century ago, tens of thousands of New Yorkers converged on the 69th Regiment Armory at Lexington Avenue at 25th Street, eager to experience a dose of shock and loathing. Many more lapped up eyewitness accounts of grotesque paintings and sculpture shipped over from Europe, an art bursting with “eccentricities, whimsicalities, distortions, crudities, puerilities, and madness,” in one critic’s gleeful description. “The exploitation of a theory of discords, puzzles, ugliness, and clinical details, is to art what anarchy is to society.” (Read more from the Financial Times.)
Learning from Others’ CVs
While much of academe can be a black box (Why did a particular person get that prestigious fellowship? Why did the search committee decide to interview certain candidates? What explains an applicant’s successful outcome?), there is some information available for viewing about others’ career trajectories that is usually there for easy consulting. It is the curriculum vitae, a document that is now often readily accessible through an online search. Even if a traditional CV is not available for a particular person of interest, bits and pieces of information from here and there can help develop a sense of a person’s career path. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
What Search Committees Wish You Knew
While faculty search committees tend to be fairly homogenous, made up of academics in the same field as the new hire, administrative search committees are often an odd amalgam of people with varied expertise and often-competing views. Understanding the dynamics at play within search committees and the constraints under which they exist can help candidates navigate the hiring process more effectively. Having served on my fair share of committees inside and outside academe, I thought I would let you in on their inner workings and share a few things that search committees wish you knew, but will never actually reveal. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Geneva’s Art Storage Boom in Uncertain Times
It may contain a treasure trove of Picassos, but few have ever explored the riches in the Geneva free port art storage site. In difficult economic times, investors are turning to more unusual commodities to protect their money. Gold may be a tried and tested safe haven, but in recent years fine art has been attracting increasing amounts of cash. Last year global sales of art were estimated at more than $64 billion, and traders watching the market say art has consistently outperformed equities in the years between 2001 and 2011. (Read more from BBC News.)
Modern Art Notes’ 2012 Top Ten List
Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes offers his list of top ten exhibitions for 2012, which includes Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300–1350 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Zoe Strauss: Ten Years at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and A Strange Magic: Gustave Moreau’s “Salome” at the Hammer Museum. (Read more from Modern Art Notes.)
From Etta James to Ravi Shankar: Notable Arts Deaths of 2012
The art world has been rocked by a series of high profile deaths this year. From Whitney and Etta to Maeve, Gore, and Ravi, the shocks kept coming. Here we round up the obituaries of some of the most-celebrated and greatly missed artists, musicians, writers, and filmmakers who died in 2012. (Read more from the Independent.)