CAA News Today
Interviews with Mira Schor and Janine Antoni at the 2013 Annual Conference
posted by Christopher Howard — October 03, 2012
The painter and writer Mira Schor and the sculptor and multimedia artist Janine Antoni will participate in the Annual Artists’ Interviews, taking place in ARTspace during the 2013 Annual Conference in New York. This session will be the thirteenth installment of the popular series, which features two major practicing artists in back-to-back interviews. The talks will be held on Friday, February 15, 2013, from 2:30 to 5:00 PM at the Hilton in New York. Stuart Horodner, artistic director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in Georgia, will interview Schor. Klaus Ottmann, director of the Center for the Study of Modern Art and curator at large at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, will interview Antoni.
Mira Schor is a painter, writer, and educator who was born in 1950 into a family of artists in Manhattan. Entering her fifth decade as an artist, she has used the medium of painting to address a wide range of issues: language, corporal materiality, feminist politics, art history, and critical theory. She has also worked in artist’s books and sculpture and has a longstanding engagement with works on paper.
As an art writer and editor, Schor works in the belletristic tradition of John Berger and Virginia Woolf, with her essays combining the candor of a village storyteller with the rigor of a critical approach and maverick fearlessness. Her latest book is A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life (2009), and she writes regularly about the intersection of art and life for her blog A Year of Positive Thinking.
Schor is based in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts. Read CAA’s full profile of the artist, which includes more images of her work.
Janine Antoni’s work is an amalgam of shamanistic ritual, quotidian task, and daredevil action. Her performances include using her dye-soaked hair to mop a gallery floor; sleeping in a bed set up in a gallery and then weaving a blanket based on the pattern of her rapid eye movements; and walking across a tightrope of hand-plied hemp that she made herself, suspended eight feet above the ground. The arduous process of the performance is often combined into installations with sculpture, photography, and video. It is Antoni’s desire that her artwork be understood as a felt experience, one that combines emotional content and intellectual engagement. In each piece, no matter the medium or image, a conveyed physicality speaks directly to the viewer’s body.
In a conversation published in 2011 in the Brooklyn Rail, she elaborates on the importance of this imagined relationship with her work’s audience: “When I’m making work I spend a lot of time fantasizing about what the viewer will do and think; I enter their body, and imagine them walking up to my sculpture. My work is a way for me to feel connected and to feel present in the world. I try to make work that elicits empathy. I’ve been known for chewing 600 pounds of chocolate, being dumped in tubs of lard, and mopping the floor with my hair. I do these extreme acts because I feel like it puts the viewer in a very emphatic relationship to my sculpture.”
Antoni lives and works in New York. She participated in the 2011 Annual Conference, speaking on the popular Centennial session “Parallel Practices: When the Mind Isn’t Focused on Art.” Read CAA’s full profile of the artist, with several photographs of her work.
Images
Top: Mira Schor, The Dreams of All of Us, 2012, ink, rabbit skin glue, oil, and gesso on linen, 24 x 28 in. (artwork © Mira Schor; photograph provided by the artist)
Bottom: Janine Antoni, Lick and Lather, 1993, two self-portrait busts: one chocolate and one soap, 24 x 16 x 13 in. (artwork © Janine Antoni; photograph provided by the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York)
MIRA SCHOR AT THE 2013 ANNUAL ARTISTS’ INTERVIEWS
posted by Christopher Howard — October 03, 2012
Mira Schor, a painter and writer based in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts, will participate in CAA’s next Annual Artists’ Interviews, hosted by ARTspace during the 2013 Annual Conference in New York. This session will be the thirteenth installment of the popular series, which features two major practicing artists in back-to-back interviews. The other artist who will be interviewed is Janine Antoni. The talks will be held on Friday, February 15, 2013, from 2:30 to 5:00 PM at the Hilton in New York. Stuart Horodner, artistic director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, will interview Schor.
Mira Schor
Mira Schor (photograph © 2012 Mary Jones)
Mira Schor is a painter, writer, and educator who was born in 1950 into a family of artists in Manhattan. Entering her fifth decade as an artist, she has used the medium of painting to address a wide range of issues: language, corporal materiality, feminist politics, art history, and critical theory. She has also worked in artist’s books and sculpture and has a longstanding engagement with works on paper.
As an art writer and editor, Schor works in the belletristic tradition of John Berger and Virginia Woolf, with her essays combining the candor of a village storyteller with the rigor of a critical approach and maverick fearlessness. Schor’s first decade of writing on contemporary art and culture is collected in Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). Composed during the Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s, the book addresses the work of David Salle, Ida Applebroog, Mary Kelly, and the Guerrilla Girls. In the often-cited essay “Figure/Ground,” Schor’s distinctly feminist voice, seeped in the history of modernism, discusses the perseverance of painting in light of contemporary aesthetic debates. Her latest book is A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), and she writes regularly about the intersection of art and life for her blog A Year of Positive Thinking, for which she received support from the Arts Writers Grant Program in 2009. Entries include “You Put a Spell on Me,” about the relationship of African art and Renaissance portraiture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; “Youthfulness in Old Age,” about the late paintings of Joan Mitchell and Roberto Matta; and “Books Are Like People,” an exegesis on the life and destruction of the free library at Occupy Wall Street.
Schor maintains a dialectical understanding of the relationship between politics and aesthetics. In a 2011 conversation with Bradley Rubenstein for Culture Catch, she explained, “I speak of two ‘politics,’ what is happening in the world, and art politics, examining which definitions of art are hosts for different types of power. My identity as a painter has always been caught, in a generative way, between the traditions of painting and the proclamations of the death of painting, of the object, of the individual artist, of private studio practice—everything that has become the doxa of contemporary art.”
Mira Schor, Silence….speech, noise, 2010, ink, oil, and gesso on linen, 18 x 30 in. (artwork © Mira Schor; photograph provided by the artist)
Her most recent solo exhibition, Voice and Speech, was held at Marvelli Gallery in New York in spring 2012. A recurring motif in the show was a pensive, schematically sketched figure, what Schor has called an “avatar of self.” In each painting, handwriting, sometimes contained in thought-balloon rectangles, conveys a sense of cartoonish yet poetic immediacy. In a review of the show, the New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote, “Mira Schor’s small, sharp, quirky paintings have been thorns in the side of the medium for more than three decades now…. Abjuring largeness and portentous brushwork as before, these works tackle more directly the immense subject of creativity itself and diagram it in ways both pointedly humorous and expansive.” The paintings, all modestly scaled, convey a sense of private urgency, like torn-out pages from a notebook. In a 2002 interview with the painter Joan Waltemath, published in the Brooklyn Rail, Schor discusses the specificity of painted language, and how her visual art relates to her writing: “the direction of my painting and writing are intimately linked in a constant interplay between practice and theory—I find it hard to place one before the other as I speak: I paint writing and in some cases I paint the (critical/theoretical) writing that I’m writing. I certainly never gave up on visual pleasure. On the contrary I am interested in embedding verbal writing as image into the rich materiality of painting so that the two cannot be disentwined.”
Mira Schor, Slit of Paint, 1994, oil on canvas, 12 x 16 in. (artwork © Mira Schor; photograph provided by the artist)
Schor earned an MFA in 1973 from the newly formed California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. At CalArts she came into contact with Fluxus art tactics from artist professors such as Alison Knowles and the poet Emmett Williams. Schor was actively involved in the Feminist Art Program, one of the first of its kind in the country, started by Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro. Schor fondly recalls the “goofy spirit” of the school, comparing it to the television show created by her fellow student, Paul Reubens’s Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. The atmosphere was “subversive but in a sweet, slightly anarchic rather than nihilistic manner.”
Teaching studio art and art history to several generations of artists has been an important component of Schor’s life as an artist. She has been an associate teaching professor of fine art at New York’s Parsons the New School for Design since 1989. Recently, she has served as a guest lecturer at the School of Visual Art’s MFA in art criticism program and a resident artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Over the years she has taught at many schools, including the Rhode Island School of Design—where Janine Antoni, the second CAA interviewee, was her student—Sarah Lawrence College, Vermont College, and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
Schor’s solo exhibitions include Painting in the Space Where Painting Used to Be at Some Walls in Oakland in 2011, Mira Schor: Paintings from the Nineties to Now at CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles in 2010, and Suddenly: New Paintings by Mira Schor at Momenta Art in Brooklyn in 2009. With Susan Bee, she founded and led the art journal M/E/A/N/I/N/G/, which was active in print between 1986 and 1996; it continues as an online publication (a twenty-fifth anniversary edition was published in late 2011). A collection of texts from this publication, titled M/E/A/N/I/N/G/: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism, was published in 2000. Schor is also the editor of The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
Schor has received awards in painting from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. In 1999, CAA recognized her writing with its Frank Jewett Mather Award. She is currently represented by CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles and by Marvelli Gallery in New York.
Stuart Horodner
Stuart Horodner is artistic director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in Georgia. He has held positions as visual arts curator at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Oregon and director of the Bucknell University Art Gallery in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He was also a coowner of the Horodner Romley Gallery in New York. Horodner has curated numerous solo and group exhibitions and has worked with artists including Leon Golub, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Judy Linn, Melanie Manchot, William Pope.L, Kay Rosen, Joe Sola, Jessica Stockholder, and Jack Whitten.
His criticism has appeared in journals and magazines, including Art Issues, Art Lies, Art on Paper, Bomb Magazine, and Sculpture. Horodner’s new book, The Art Life: On Creativity and Career (Atlanta: Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, 2012), collects statements and texts by visual artists, writers, filmmakers, and performers that address the Sisyphean task of sustaining a lifelong career in the arts. (Read an interview with Horodner about The Art Life in ArtsATL, published in March 2012.) He has served in an advisory capacity to organizations, including Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue, Creative Capital, the Ford Family Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony.
JANINE ANTONI AT THE 2013 ANNUAL ARTISTS’ INTERVIEWS
posted by Christopher Howard — October 03, 2012
Janine Antoni, an artist based in New York, will participate in CAA’s next Annual Artists’ Interviews, hosted by ARTspace during the 2013 Annual Conference in New York. This session will be the thirteenth installment of the popular series, which features two major practicing artists in back-to-back interviews. The other artist who will be interviewed is the painter and writer Mira Schor. The talks will be held on Friday, February 15, 2013, from 2:30 to 5:00 PM at the Hilton in New York. Klaus Ottmann, director of the Center for the Study of Modern Art and a curator at large at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, will interview Antoni.
Janine Antoni
Janine Antoni, Loving Care, 1992, performance with Loving Care hair dye Natural Black, dimensions variable (artwork © Janine Antoni; photograph provided by the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York, and taken by Prudence Cumming Associates at Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, 1993)
Janine Antoni’s work is an amalgam of shamanistic ritual, quotidian task, and daredevil action. Her performances include using her dye-soaked hair to mop a gallery floor; sleeping in a bed set up in a gallery and then weaving a blanket based on the pattern of her rapid eye movements; and walking across a tightrope of hand-plied hemp that she made herself, suspended eight feet above the ground. The arduous process of the performance is often combined into installations with sculpture, photography, and video. It is Antoni’s desire that her artwork be understood as a felt experience, one that combines emotional content and intellectual engagement. In each piece, no matter the medium or image, a conveyed physicality speaks directly to the viewer’s body.
In a conversation published in 2011 in the Brooklyn Rail, she elaborates on the importance of this imagined relationship with her work’s audience: “When I’m making work I spend a lot of time fantasizing about what the viewer will do and think; I enter their body, and imagine them walking up to my sculpture. My work is a way for me to feel connected and to feel present in the world. I try to make work that elicits empathy. I’ve been known for chewing 600 pounds of chocolate, being dumped in tubs of lard, and mopping the floor with my hair. I do these extreme acts because I feel like it puts the viewer in a very emphatic relationship to my sculpture.”
In Antoni’s work, a charged relationship between the symbolic nature of her preferred materials (chocolate, lard, soap, hemp) and the artist’s given task to transform raw material, results in a highly personal, metaphysical evocation. For the installation Gnaw (1992), Antoni wanted to use her own body as a tool to redefine what a figurative sculpture could be. She chewed on a block of chocolate and a block of lard, spitting out pieces of each to be melted down and respectively repackaged as heart-shaped chocolates and lipstick. In Lick & Lather (1993), she sculpted two self-portrait busts out of chocolate and soap, generating a nearly tangible sensation of taste and touch.
Janine Antoni, Gnaw, 1992, 600 lbs. of chocolate, gnawed by the artist, 24 x 24 x 24 in.; 600 lbs. of lard, gnawed by the artist, 24 x 24 x 24 in.; 45 heart-shaped packages for chocolate made from chewed chocolate removed from the chocolate cube; 400 lipsticks made with pigment, beeswax, and chewed lard removed from the lard cube displayed in glass case (artwork © Janine Antoni; photograph provided by the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York)
Another recurring theme in Antoni’s art is the lasting enigma of the family. She has staged photographs of her parents dressed in drag as each other, which results in a comical yet strangely moving portrait of a couple. In 2008 she photographed her toddler daughter attempting to feed her mother through her bellybutton. The doublings and life cycles in both series transcend mere performance or enactment to become lasting meditations on human relationships. In a 2009 interview in Art in America, she states, “My work occupies the territory between object, performance and relic. For each piece, I ask myself what the piece needs, how much I should tell and how much I should leave to the viewer’s imagination. With earlier projects, I spoke through the work in a very direct way, and I thought that was a generous gesture. Now, I’m more interested in leaving a space for the viewer’s imagination.” This new, more open-ended approach to her practice is evident in Tear (2008), an installation that pairs a video projection of a close-up of Antoni’s eye blinking in unison to a thudding sound. The video is screened in a room which contains a visibly scarred, lead wrecking ball that had been used in the demolition of a building. The artwork implies a triangulated relationship among all three components; tension and mystery are built from the unseen elements in the narrative.
Antoni was born in 1964 in Freeport, Bahamas. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 1986 and an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1989. Mira Schor was an influential professor for Antoni in graduate school, introducing the younger woman to the work of three feminist artists from the 1970s whose physical bodies were integral to their art practice: Ana Mendieta, Hannah Wilke, and Carolee Schneeman.
Janine Antoni, Slumber, 1993, performance with loom, yarn, bed, nightgown, PSG machine, and artist’s REM reading, dimensions variable (artwork © Janine Antoni; photograph provided by the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York)
Antoni has shown her work in more than twenty-five solo exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Her most recent was Touch (2011) at the Museum Kunst der Westküste in Alkersum/Föhr, Germany. She has participated in international biennials in Venice, Johannesburg, Istanbul, and Kwangju and domestically in the Whitney Biennial in New York, SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico, and Prospect.1 in New Orleans. The artist has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Larry Aldrich Foundation Award, a Joan Mitchell Painting and Sculpture Award, a Creative Capital Grant, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. She is represented by Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York.
Antoni lives and works in New York. She participated in the 2011 Annual Conference, speaking on the popular Centennial session “Parallel Practices: When the Mind Isn’t Focused on Art.”
Klaus Ottmann
Klaus Ottmann is director of the Center for the Study of Modern Art and curator at large at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. He is the author of Yves Klein by Himself: His Life and Thought (Paris: Éditions Dilecta, 2010), The Genius Decision: The Extraordinary and the Postmodern Condition (New York: Spring Publications, 2004), and The Essential Mark Rothko (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003). In 2006 he translated and edited Yves Klein’s complete writings for the book Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, published by Spring Publications.
Ottmann has curated more than forty international exhibitions, including Per Kirkeby: Paintings and Sculpture; Still Points of the Turning World: SITE Santa Fe’s Sixth International Biennial; Life, Love, and Death: The Work of James Lee Byars; Wolfgang Laib: A Retrospective; Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings, 1972–2008; and Fairfield Porter Raw: The Creative Process of an American Master.
Help Spread the Word about CAA Travel Grants
posted by Christopher Howard — October 02, 2012
Many of you began your CAA membership as students, so you know how important the Annual Conference is for young artists and scholars breaking into the field. From networking to interviewing to attending panels, the conference enables them to get more involved in the visual-arts community and fosters their professional aspirations. Every year, students apply for CAA’s travel grant to help them cover the costs of getting to the conference. In the past three years, though, CAA has only assisted about 30 percent of those who apply. Please help CAA’s student members to reap the benefits of the Annual Conference by increasing our travel-grant fund through Indiegogo, a crowd-funding website! Make a contribution yourself or share our campaign via Facebook, Twitter, or other social media by reposting this link: http://igg.me/p/230278?a=1266837. Every share increases the chance that we’ll meet our goal of raising $4,000!
We at CAA greatly appreciate your membership and commitment.
CAA’s Response to the Closing of the Visual Arts Department at Emory University
posted by Christopher Howard — September 29, 2012
As a 14,000 member professional organization which promotes excellence in scholarship, teaching, and the practice of art history, criticism and studio art, CAA regrets Emory University’s decision to close its department of Visual Arts and re-locate the tenured Visual Arts faculty members in other departments.
However, Emory’s administration has done so with the input of appointees from the College of Arts and Sciences’ Faculty Governance Committee, and as part of a responsible and careful look at its entire academic offerings. CAA understands that the university has decided to close the departments of Visual Arts, Educational Studies and Physical Education, and the program in Journalism in order to put its resources into building upon its strengths, as part of a long-term plan developed over several more than four years.
Emory University has an accredited art history department that offers ancient through contemporary art history and archeology courses through a doctoral level. CAA looks forward to hearing more about the developments at Emory and how visual arts education will be addressed in the future.
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — September 17, 2012
In its monthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, curators, designers, photographers, filmmakers, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. This month was marked by the loss of the art historian Natalie Boymel Kampen, Magnum photographer Martine Franck, and the young Egyptian artist Amal Kenawy. CAA has published a special obituary for Kampen.
- Lee Wick Dennison, a long-time financial officer for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), passed away on August 31, 2012. She was 60 years old. Dennison joined the NEA in 1975 and campaigned for funding for arts organizations across the country through her various roles as grants officer, assistant director of the challenge and advancement programs, and director of organizational capacity. She received the Distinguished Service Award from the NEA twice, in 1988 and 1999
- Martine Franck, a versatile documentary photographer in the humanist tradition who was among the first women accepted into the elite Magnum photography agency, died on August 16, 2012, at the age of 74. Franck’s images ranged from formal portraits of artists, such as Balthus, to intimate street scenes. She was married to the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson
- Hans Josephsohn, a Swiss figurative sculptor, passed away on August 21, 2012, at the age of 92. His primitive-looking sculptures of reclining figures, heads, and busts on plinths suggest a marriage of classical art and expressionist fervor. He worked primarily in plaster, a material that for him was “a cross between modeling and working with stone”
- Natalie Boymel Kampen, a pioneering feminist scholar and professor of Roman art history and gender studies, died on August 12, 2012. She was 68 years old. Kampen was the author of Image and Status: Roman Working Women in Ostia and Family Fictions in Roman Art and served as chair of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board from 2009 to 2010. CAA has published a special obituary for Kampen
- Amal Kenawy, an Egyptian artist who showed her video, performance, and installation work in Cairo galleries and in many international biennials, died on August 19, 2012. She was 38. Her diverse artworks dealt with the subject of communication and translation, often to controversial and awe-inspiring effect. The performance Silence of the Sheep, staged at the Cairo Biennial in 2011, featured the artist as a shepherd leading a flock of artists and workers on their hands and knees through the city’s streets
- Joe Kubert, a Polish-born comic-book artist, died on August 12, 2012, at the age of 85. Kubert created many memorable cartoon heroes for DC Comics in the 1940s and 50s, including Sgt. Rock, Hawkman, and Tor, the first 3D comic book. He passed on his passion for drawing and invention at the Kubert School in Dover, New Jersey, founded in 1976 and still going strong today
- Helen Scott Lidgett, a lively British publicist, passed away on July 31, 2012, at the age of 63. Lidgett wore many hats during her varied career: she ran a popular vintage-clothing stall in Camden Town, wrote art criticism for London’s Time Out, and was the famously flamboyant head of publicity for the art-book publishers Thames and Hudson. In later years Lidgett was a champion for arts funding and served as a cultural advisor to Prime Minister Gordon Brown
- William Moggridge, a British designer and educator, died on September 8, 2012, at the age of 69. Moggridge’s invention of the clamshell design of the first laptop computer in 1979 was a revolutionary step for digital technology. He cofounded the product-design firm IDEO and worked on a range of products, from heart defibrillators to Palm Pilots. In 2010 he was named the director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York
- Dmitri Plavinsky, a Russian artist associated with the Nonconformist Art movement, passed away on September 1, 2012, at the age of 76. His paintings and etchings explored imagery that flew in the face of officially sanctioned Soviet Realism. Plavinsky was one of a select group of artists to be shown in museums in the United States and in Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Jan Sawka, a Polish-born artist, illustrator, and sculptor known to many outside the art world for his luminous stage sets for Grateful Dead concerts, died on August 9, 2012, at the age of 65. Sawka began his art career working as an underground graphic artist in Krakow, Poland. He has shown his work in museums throughout the United States and in Europe
- Lee Sherry, a New York–based abstract artist, passed away in August 2012 at the age of 65. Sherry attended Reed College with her fellow painter David Reed in the 1960s; she was also close to many writers in the Language school of poetry. Sherry designed the typography for several covers of the experimental poetry journal Roof and showed her work at Susan Caldwell Gallery in New York in the 1970s
- Michael Seward Snow, a British abstract painter who was associated with the St Ives artist colony in the 1950s, passed away on July 15, 2012, at the age of 82. His compatriot artists were Ben Nicholson, Terry Frost, and the poet W. S. Graham. Snow was a professor of art from 1965 to 1985 at Exeter College of Art in Devon, England
- Steve M. Street, a champion for the rights of adjunct faculty members, died on August 17, 2012, at the age of 56. Street had been a non-tenure-track professor of writing at the State University of New York at Buffalo since 1980. He was a frequent contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education on the subject of adjunct benefits and most recently wrote about his own struggle with cancer in light of his adjunct position
Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries, or your completed texts, to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the September list.
September 2012 Issue of The Art Bulletin
posted by Christopher Howard — September 10, 2012
The September 2012 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, presents the third installment of its new feature series that will continue for two more volume years. In Regarding Art and Art History, Richard Shiff analyzes the role of interpretation in writing about art through the prism of Meyer Schapiro and Clement Greenberg’s different approaches to the topic. The subject of this issue’s Notes from the Field is contingency, with texts by eleven artists, scholars, professors, and philosophers: Linda Connor, Giovanna Borradori, Marcia Brennan, Mary Ann Doane, Angus Fletcher, Peter Geimer, Gloria Kury, Mark Ledbury, C. Brian Rose, Frances Spalding, and Chris Spring. A photograph based on Connor’s 2010 film Fireworks for the Virgin, shot in Peru, appears on the cover.
In the issue’s Interview, James Ackerman converses with Cammy Brothers about how recent trips to Turkey, Egypt, and India have affected his outlook on teaching architectural history. Ackerman, editor of The Art Bulletin from 1956 to 1959, also describes his formative years as a student at Yale University and his teaching career at Harvard University.
The September issue also features four essays that cover a wide range of art-historical topics and time periods. Jaś Elsner explores a transformative moment in the eighth century, when the icon was considered entirely as representation, and analyzes the debates that precipitated this moment among Christians, Jews, Muslims, and pagans. In her essay “Francesco Rosselli’s Lost View of Rome: An Urban Icon and Its Progeny,” Jessica Maier reconstructs Rosselli’s monumental engraving of Rome and analyzes the work as a marker of high innovation in Renaissance print culture. Elizabeth Kindall discusses how the seventeenth-century Chinese artist Huang Xiangjian moved to an experiential reading of the handscroll format and how this shift from a traditional, linear reading culminated in a panoramic “grand view.” In his essay “Architecture and Crime: Adolf Loos and the Culture of the ‘Case,’” Frederic J. Schwartz takes a close look at two widely publicized trials involving the modern Viennese architect Adolf Loos, demonstrating the implications of these encounters with criminality for Loos’s architecture practice and theory and their importance in the wider public sphere.
The books under review in this issue represent a broad cross-section of art-historical scholarship. Philippe Morel assesses Alessandro Nova’s The Book of the Wind: The Representation of the Invisible, and Carl Brandon Strehlke reviews eight books published within the last seven years on the Italian Renaissance painter Giotto. Ariella Azoulay looks at Martin A. Berger’s Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography. Finally, Matthew Simms reviews two new volumes on Willem de Kooning, Richard Shiff’s Between Sense and de Kooning and the catalogue for the Museum of Modern Art’s 2011 retrospective of the artist, edited by John Elderfield, the exhibition’s curator.
CAA sends The Art Bulletin to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the journal as a benefit of their membership. The next issue of The Art Bulletin, to be published in December 2012, will feature Rebecca Zorach’s reflections on politics and teaching in Regarding Art and Art History, the texts collected in Notes from the Field will be on the topic of detail, and the Interview will feature a conversation between the German art historian Horst Bredekamp and Christopher Wood. The long-form essays include a new interpretation of the Judgment of Paris myth as it is depicted in Roman wall paintings; a close reading of the Italian Renaissance sculptor Filarete’s Hilaritas, a bronze relief on the doors of Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican; a consideration of Caravaggio’s signature in Beheading of Saint John the Baptist; an analysis of a Central American painting from the mid-1680s; and an exploration of the unpublished papers of the nineteenth-century English connoisseur George Scharf. The Reviews section will include analyses of books on Islamic museum installation, Inka stonework, Andean architecture, European painterly virtuosity, Rajput painting, and a new American museum.
NEW ART JOURNAL REVIEWS EDITOR
posted by Christopher Howard — September 04, 2012
Michael Corris (2013–16)
Michael Corris, incoming Art Journal reviews editor
Michael Corris, professor of art and chair of the Division of Art in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, has been appointed reviews editor of Art Journal. He will serve one year as reviews editor designate, taking over from Howard Singerman of the University of Virginia in July 2013.
As both an artist and an author of many works on postwar and contemporary art and theory, Corris is looking forward to bringing new voices and perspectives into the conversation that surrounds the literature of art. For Corris this means a thorough investigation into myriad ways in which scholars and artists are reading art history today, both inside the classroom and in the larger art world. He writes, “I’d like to know what artists are reading and why; what goes into the construction of a bibliography for students at all levels; and how technology and social media alter the way we reflect critically on art and culture. In short, how the dialogue on art is authorized, shaped, and sustained through all sorts of textual means.” The social reality of art making and writing about art has always been present in Corris’s work. In his new role as reviews editor he is committed to seeking out non-Western art practices and those that merge with political activism.
With a comparative perspective on studio-art and art-history programs from his substantial teaching record in the United States and England, Corris sees both countries as “facing a crisis in higher education” and laments the fact that programs in art education and art history “are constantly under threat to justify their existence in purely economic terms.” However, the academic intensity of art schools in England holds a great appeal for Corris: “The British higher-education system places great emphasis on individual and small-group tutorials; it also demands a great deal more of students in terms of written output. Studio-art undergraduates are generally required to produce a research paper of up to 10,000 words; master’s level students may have to produce a research paper of up to 20,000 words. This is all in addition to their artwork.”
As a visual artist who slips easily into the role of critic, and as a critic who is equally at home in academia, Corris is long familiar with the fluidity of all three roles. He also recognizes the importance of a playful attitude as a way to explore new spaces of thought production. “It’s no longer surprising to find an artist who writes, a writer who draws, or a studio-art professor who curates art. The challenge here is to find ways to destabilize all these terms: visual artist, editor, writer, and educator. I turned my office at Southern Methodist University into the Free Museum of Dallas to offset the drudgery and power of academic bureaucracy. I’m constantly seeking ways to collectivize the various activities that I engage in or fall into. When it comes to my role as educator, my current concern is trying to figure out the precise shape of this Faustian bargain called tenure and my limits of tolerance to the trend to subject the arts and humanities to a corporate logic. My great joy is that the students remain engaged and delightfully open.”
Concurrent with his position at Art Journal, Corris will remain an editor at Transmission Annual, a peer-reviewed journal of contemporary art and culture, cofounded in 2008 with Sharon Kivland and Jaspar Joseph-Lester, both professors at Sheffield Hallam University in England. “We came up with the idea to publish an annual collection of essays, structured correspondence, and artist’s projects that revisited the themes of the school’s weekly artist and theorist lecture series, while allowing academics the luxury to experiment with forms of exposition. Our first issue was based on the theme of hospitality, the second on the theme of provocation, and the third on the theme of catastrophe. We anticipate a fourth issue on the theme of agency, so you see there is a glimmer of reality amongst the poetry.” Corris hopes his Transmission Annual experience will inspire new formats for Art Journal devoted to the critical review of literature on art.
Corris received a BA from Brooklyn College, City University of New York, in 1970. Two years later he earned an MFA in painting and media from the Hoffberger School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, and later was awarded a scholarship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. In 1971 he began participating in the Conceptual-art collective Art & Language (whose transatlantic members included Terry Atkinson, Joseph Kosuth, Mel Ramsden, and Charles Harrison) and contributed to the group’s journal, Art-Language. As a member of the collective, and as a solo artist, Corris has exhibited his artwork in galleries and museums across the United States and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Michael Corris, ed., Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
The relationship of writing and language to the visual arts has been a paramount concern of Corris’s throughout his career. His editorial experience began with cofounding the artist-run journals The Fox in 1975 and Red-Herring in 1977. The move from art making into publishing was a natural extension of his essayistic art practice. For Corris, and for the other Art & Language artists, these journals served as “sites of artistic production and were intentionally set in opposition to the values and institutions that sustained a managerial culture of art.” His early essays, such as “The Organization of Culture under Monopoly Capitalism,” published in The Fox in 1976, and “Frameworks and Phantoms,” written with Mel Ramsden for Art-Language in 1973, reflect this radical ethos. Since then Corris has written essays and reviews for Artforum, Art History, and Art Monthly that cover a wide spectrum of artists working today, from Jeff Koons to Alfredo Jaar and Tracey Emin.
Corris’s PhD dissertation, completed in 1996 at University College London, formed the basis for a monograph, Ad Reinhardt, published by Reaktion Books in 2008. A 2006 winner of the first CAA Publication Grant, the book recontextualizes an overlooked aspect of Reinhardt’s art practice: the political cartoons and illustrations that were published in the 1930s through the 1950s in New Masses and Soviet Russia Today. Corris’s lifelong commitment to the intersection of art and politics is evident in Ad Reinhardt, as well as in two forthcoming books: The Artist Out of Work: Selected Writings on Art (Les Presses du Reel/JRP Ringier) and What Do Artists Know? Art’s Encounter with Philosophy (Reaktion). Corris is also the author of a volume on the painter David Diao, published by TimeZone8 Books in 2005, and coauthor, with John Dixon Hunt and David Lomas, of Art, Word, and Image: 2,000 Years of Visual/Textual Interaction, published by Reaktion in 2010.
A selection of Corris’s academic appointments include visiting lecturer in history of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London (1999–2001); head of the Department of Art and Photography at the University of Wales, Newport (2003–7); visiting professor of art theory at the Bergen National Academy of Art in Norway (2005–7); and professor of fine art at Art and Design Research Center, Sheffield Hallam University (2007–9).
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — August 14, 2012
In its monthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, curators, designers, photographers, filmmakers, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. This month was marked by the loss of the larger-than-life art critic Robert Hughes, the French filmmaker Chris Marker, the beloved collector Herbert Vogel, the New York painter and professor Denyse Thomasos, and the Austrian sculptor Franz West.
- Jane Barbour, a British researcher of African artifacts and textiles, died on June 14, 2012, at the age of 89. Barbour and her husband, a geographer, lived in different parts of Africa from the 1950s to the 1980s. She edited the volumes Adire Cloth in Nigeria (1971) and Kenyan Pots and Potters (1989)
- Karl Benjamin, a prominent member of the West Coast art scene in the 1950s and 1960s, died on July 26, 2012. He was 86 years old. Benjamin painted in an ordered geometric pattern, dubbed Abstract Classicism by his painting cohort as a response to New York’s Abstract Expressionism. His methodology was informed by many decades as an elementary school art teacher in southern California
- Bram Bogart, a Dutch-born artist who lived in France and Belgium and was known for his heavily layered pigment-and-cement paintings, died on May 2, 2012. He was 90 years old. Associated with the CoBrA art movement in Europe, Bogart exhibited with Jean Dubuffet, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Pierre Soulages, and Karel Appel
- Horacio Coppola, an Argentine photographer active in the avant-garde art scene of Buenos Aires, died on June 18, 2012, at the age of 105. Coppola worked in two modes of black-and-white photography: Surrealist-tinged nocturnal shots of city streets, and stark abstract portraits of objects reminiscent of Bauhaus experiments with the medium
- Stephen Dwoskin, an experimental filmmaker and teacher originally from New York and based in London for over forty years, passed away on June 28, 2012, at age 73. In 1966 he cofounded the London Film-Makers’ Co-op with his fellow filmmaker Jeff Keen (who died in June) and the poet Bob Cobbing. Dwoskin’s films include Chinese Checkers (1964) and Trixi (1969); retrospectives of his work have been held at the British Film Institute in 2009 and at the Arsenal in Berlin in 2010
- Eugene F. Farrell, formerly senior conservation scientist at the Harvard Art Museums’ Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, passed away on March 19, 2012. He was 78 years old. Farrell’s colleague Francesca G. Bewer has written a special obituary for CAA
- Mary Fedden, a British painter of modernist-inflected still lifes, passed away on June 22, 2012, at the age of 96. Her subject matter was domestic life, but her work also made reference to the choices of Cubist painters and Henri Matisse: flattened tabletops, vases, bottles, and flowers. Fedden was the first woman to teach at the Royal College of Art in London, a position she held from 1956 to 1964
- Chris Honey, a British architect and humanitarian, died on June 20, 2012, at the age of 52. Honey’s most significant assignment was the design of the Sanctuary Lakes Resort in Melbourne, Australia. He and his wife Rebecca were supporters of the Oxford-based charity Lifelines that works to abolish the death penalty in the United States
- Marilyn Houlberg, an artist and a scholar of the arts of Haiti and Western Africa, died on June 30, 2012. She was 72 years old. Houlberg was a professor emeritus of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She cocurated the traveling exhibition Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (1995) and contributed essays to the publications Fragments of Bone: Neo-African Religions in a New World (2005) and Vodou: Visions and Voices of Haiti (1998)
- Robert Hughes, the Australian-born art critic, died on August 6, 2012, at the age of 74. Hughes began writing for Time in 1970, and in 1980 his book and BBC television series The Shock of the New brought his theory of modern art and culture to a wider audience. Hughes was known for his elegant yet fiery critical voice that rattled the genteel art worlds of New York and London
- Georgina Hunt, a British artist known for her luminous, gradient-color paintings, passed away on April 16, 2012. She was 89. Hunt was transformed by her time spent in New York in the early 1970s, where she furthered developed her minimalist approach to painting. Another early influence on her technique was Carl Jung’s theory of the integrated personality
- Sunil Janah, a photojournalist who captured India as it fought against colonial rule to become an independent state in 1947, died on June 21, 2012. He was 96 years old. Working with a rudimentary camera—a Kodak Box Brownie—he photographed Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, as well as moments of ordinary life and mass demonstrations
- Wael Issa Kaston, a Syrian sculptor who worked in wood and mud, has reportedly been killed in Homs under torture by the Syrian government. He was 46 years old, and the news of his death was first announced on July 24, 2012. Kaston’s figurative work dealt with the “freedom of women,” and he described his choice of materials as connected to the elemental life force of the human body
- Bill Komodore, a painter and professor of art at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, died on August 3, 2012, at the age of 80. Born in Athens, Greece, Komodore made expressive, lyrical work that engaged the subjects of myth, war, and love. His 2010 exhibition Arcadia: The Recent Paintings was held at the Decorazon Gallery in Dallas
- Chris Marker, the renowned French filmmaker who invented the essay-film and took the medium to new heights of poetry and political force, passed away on July 30, 2012. He was 91. Marker’s best-known films, La Jetée (1962) and Sans Soleil (1982), deal with memory, time travel, and human longing. He also worked in photography, video installations, and new media: his last exhibition was a portrait series of anonymous Paris métro riders, called Passengers (2011) at Peter Blum in New York
- Helen Messenger, one half of a flamboyantly bohemian artist couple (her husband was the artist Tony Messenger), died on April 11, 2012, at the age of 77. The Messengers met as students at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London and established an informal salon for new ideas in fashion, art, and lifestyle, in their Notting Hill home in London. Helen was later involved in costume design in the 1960s and 1970s, working for Ossie Clark, Laura Ashley, and, most famously, David Bowie
- Dewey Mosby, a specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French art and director emeritus of the Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, died on August 1, 2012, at the age of 70. Mosby was the first African American to receive a PhD in art history from Harvard University and also the first African American curator of European art at a major art museum (Detroit Institute of Arts)
- Alvin Nickel, a fabric artist and professor emeritus of art and art history at the University of Texas at Austin, died on August 27, 2011. He was 85 years old. Prior to joining the university in 1960, he worked as a craft director for the United States government in Germany. Nickel created large-scale painterly wall hangings using the dyeing process of batik
- Walter Pichler, a visionary Austrian architect and artist, passed away on July 16, 2012, at the age of 75. Pichler called his architectural plans “dream drawings” and was invested in the narrative possibilities of architecture and design. In later years he moved even further in the direction of fine art with a series of drawings and installations based on his farm in rural Austria
- Jacinto Quirarte, professor emeritus and former dean of the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Texas at San Antonio, died on July 20, 2012. He was 81 years old. Quirarte specialized in Precolumbian art, Latin American art, and Latino art history. From 1982 to 1987 he chaired the National Task Force on Hispanic Art of the National Endowment for the Arts. His books include The Art and Architecture of the Texas Missions (2002), Izapan-Style Art: A Study of Its Form and Meaning, and Mexican American Artists (both 1973)
- Mary Louise Milligan Rasmuson, a patron of the arts in Alaska, died on July 30, 2012, at the age of 101. She was married to Elmer Rasmuson, chairman of the National Bank of Alaska, and through the Rasmuson Foundation the couple helped to found Alaska’s Anchorage Museum of History and Art in 1968. During World War II and after, she was an ardent campaigner for women’s rights in the military and was named fifth commandment of the Women’s Army Corp in 1957 by President Dwight Eisenhower
- Denise René, a Parisian gallery director and an art collector whose stable of abstract artists included Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, and Piet Mondrian, passed away on July 9, 2012. She was 99. A 1938 meeting with the artist Victor Vasarely in the Café de Flore in Paris ignited her career in dealing art. In 2001 the Pompidou Center in Paris held an exhibition in homage to her cultural impact as a gallerist
- Wayne Roberts, a Bronx-based graffiti artist known by the street moniker Stay High 149, died on June 11, 2012, at the age of 61. Roberts’s heyday was in the 1970s; his work was featured in Norman Mailer’s book The Faith of Graffiti (1973), and he was respected by graffiti aficionados for his easily identifiably tag of a joint-smoking haloed stick figure
- Martin E. Segal, a patron of the arts and a long-time supporter of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York, passed away on August 5, 2012. He was 96 years old. Segal was instrumental in setting up the Film Society of Lincoln Center, where he served as chief executive from 1968 to 1978. In his last years he remained a spritely figure in the philanthropic world, always wearing a rose in his lapel at social functions around the city
- Roy Shaw, formerly secretary-general of the Arts Council of Great Britain, died on May 15, 2012, at the age of 93. During his tenure, Shaw sought to make the arts more accessible to the public without consenting to vulgarization and commercialism. He was knighted in 1979 and authored the volume The Arts and the People (1987)
- Jack Simcock, a British painter, died on May 13, 2012, at the age of 82. Simcock’s signature paintings were rich, dark-toned images of the village of Mow Cop in North West England, where he lived and worked from 1958 until his death. He exhibited his work at the Piccadilly Gallery in London and also published an autobiography and a collection of poems
- Jonathan Speirs, an architect who specialized in creatively lighting monumental buildings around the world, passed away on June 18, 2012, at the age of 54. In 1993 Speirs founded the architectural lighting firm Speirs + Major, with Mark Major, and the projects the team worked on include Terminal 5 at the Madrid Barajas International Airport, the Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi, and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s tallest building
- Denyse Thomasos, a painter who created large-scale expressionistic work that referenced urban space, maps, and travel, died on July 19, 2012, at the age of 47. Thomasos was a beloved professor to many art students at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where she taught from 1995 to the present day. Her work is represented by Lennon Weinberg in New York and Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto
- Herbert Vogel, one half of a legendary contemporary art collecting couple, died on July 22, 2012, at the age of 89. Vogel worked as a postal clerk in New York for decades and, with his wife Dorothy, came to collecting from a genuine love of art. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC—the institution that first ignited the couple’s fascination with modern art during a 1962 honeymoon visit—was bequeathed a significant portion of their collection. CAA plans to publish a tribute to Herbert Vogel
- Franz West, the Austrian sculptor of ebullient abstract forms, passed away on July 25, 2012, at the age of 65. West was invested in the functionality of an artwork, bridging the darker currents of the European avant-garde with the lightness and accessibility of Pop art. Recent installations include an outdoor sculpture in New York’s Central Park, called The Ego and the Id (2009)
- George Wyllie, a Scottish sculptor who called himself a “scul?tor” to emphasize the social aspect of his practice, died on May 15, 2012, at the age of 90. Wyllie specialized in outdoor artwork that commented on the decline of industry in his native Glasgow. His best-known pieces are two temporary works, Straw Locomotive, a full-scale reproduction of a train made from straw and chicken wire, and Paper Boat, a vessel that caused a stir when it docked at the harbor of New York’s World Financial Center in 1990
Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries, or your completed texts, to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the September list.
EDITORS OF THE ART BULLETIN
posted by Christopher Howard — August 06, 2012
Nora Griffin is an artist and CAA assistant editor.
Kirk Ambrose (2013–16)
Kirk Ambrose
Kirk Ambrose, associate professor of medieval art history and chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado in Boulder, will become editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin. His three-year term begins on July 1, 2013, after he concludes a year as editor designate. Ambrose will succeed Karen Lang of the University of Warwick in England, who has led the journal since 2010.
As incoming editor, Ambrose plans to build on the legacies of two previous Art Bulletin editors, Karen Lang and Nancy Troy, and to develop alternative forums for debate within the journal, such as the recently inaugurated special features “Regarding Art and Art History” and “Notes from the Field.” Like Lang, he is also inspired by the journal’s approaching centennial, in 2013, and sees The Art Bulletin’s current moment as intellectually parallel to the “speculative and creative” art history that was being practiced in its pages in the early twentieth century. The recent decision of the German government to fund “clusters of excellence” has resulted in new structures at universities and has spurred Ambrose into dialogue with a group of international scholars from Brazil, France, India, and Turkey, to better understand the nuances of how “art-historical research and pedagogy is now conceived.” This international perspective on art history will be thoroughly addressed in a new series of short essays for The Art Bulletin, tentatively titled “Whither History?” in which invited scholars will “reflect upon how trends toward globalization in the humanities have had an impact on the ways we conceive art history.”
In 1999, Ambrose earned his PhD in the history of art from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with a dissertation on “Romanesque Vézelay: the Art of Monastic Contemplation,” completed under the guidance of Ilene Forsyth and Elizabeth Sears. Ambrose’s education also includes a BA from Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1990 and additional study at the Goethe Institut in Düsseldorf, Germany, and McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
A faculty member at the University of Colorado since 1999, Ambrose has taught a range of courses on topics of medieval art history and methodology at the undergraduate and graduate level and has served as an MA and PhD thesis advisor for many students. A specialist in Romanesque sculpture, Ambrose is dedicated to the idea of art history as a global discipline and to this end has worked to diversify his department at Colorado. He recently worked with the administration to create a tenure-track position for an art historian specializing in colonial Latin America.
Within Ambrose’s own field of interest, he has consistently chosen topics and methodologies of inquiry that enlarge the scope of medieval studies. His book Monsters in Twelfth-Century European Sculpture, is forthcoming from Boydell and Brewer, and he received a Samuel H. Kress Foundation grant for the volume The Nave Sculpture of Vézelay: The Art of Monastic Viewing (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2006). Recent book chapters include “Male Nudes and Embodied Spirituality in Romanesque Sculpture,” published in Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), edited by Sherry Lindquist. A 2011 essay, “Viollet-le-Duc’s Judith at Vézelay: Romanesque Sculpture Restoration as (National) Art,” published in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, discusses the restoration of a medieval monument in nineteenth-century France as it relates to the country’s republican politics. He recently contributed to The Art Bulletin a review of Friedrich Kittler’s Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, translated by Anthony Enns, that was published in the March 2011 issue, and a short piece on appropriation and medieval art in the multiauthored section “Notes from the Field” in June 2012.
Ambrose’s practice of a socially and culturally mindful art history has led to opportunities beyond the classroom. With colleagues Davide Stimilli and Lisa Tamiris-Becker, he is currently planning a 2014 exhibition at the University of Colorado Art Museum, tentatively titled Aby Warburg and the Beginning of Cultural Studies in the American Southwest. Ambrose states, “Warburg’s 1895–86 expedition to the Southwest is well known, but this journey looks very different when viewed from an American, rather than European, perspective. Much of Warburg’s vision appears indebted to a network of mostly Jewish merchants across the Southwest, who sold photographs of Indian rituals as well as ceramics and other objects that Warburg collected.” For Ambrose the exhibition is a means to explore the multifariousness of art-historical vision, and how “art practices can serve as vehicles of knowledge” for scholars at the turn of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.