CAA News Today
August 2012 Picks from CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — August 01, 2012
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 Americn and around the world.
The CWA Picks for August 2012 include several important exhibitions in New York and a handful on view this month in Europe. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is hosting a survey of work by the Dutch photographer and video artist Rineke Dijkstra; the Whitney Museum of American Art has given over its third floor to Sharon Hayes, who is incorporating performance into her exhibition of photography and video; and the Brooklyn Museum is presenting a collaborative project led by Ulrike Müller in its Raw/Cooked series, which features artists who live and work in the borough.
Across the Atlantic, MUSAC in León, Spain, has staged Feminist Genealogies in Spanish Art: 1960–2010, organized by Juan Vicente Aliaga and Patricia Mayayo, which investigates the underrecognized role that feminist activism and theory has played in Spanish art since the 1960s. Elsewhere, the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos has created an installation of large-scale sculptures in the Palace of Versailles, and Goldsmiths in London has spread work by Su Richardson across two venues in London.
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: Rineke Dijkstra, The Krazyhouse (Megan, Simon, Nicky, Philip, Dee), Liverpool, UK, 2009, four-channel HD video projection with sound, 32 min., looped (artwork © Rineke Dijkstra; photograph provided by the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum)
Art Journal Publishes Special Issue on Pacific Standard Time
posted by Christopher Howard — July 18, 2012
Pacific Standard Time, the massive project on art in southern California that concluded in June, is the topic of a special issue of Art Journal that has just been published. An unprecedented collaboration of some sixty southern Californian cultural institutions brought together by the Getty, the Pacific Standard Time exhibitions and events offered a near-encyclopedic view of the work artists created in the region from 1945 to 1980.
At the center of the journal’s coverage is a conversation with Andrew Perchuk, deputy director of the Getty Research Institute (GRI), and Thomas Crow, former director of the GRI and now a professor at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University; they speak with the art historian Howard Singerman, reviews editor of Art Journal.
The issue features a commissioned artist’s project by Allen Ruppersberg, PST: Before and After, which appears on the covers of the issue and every interior page. In her introduction to the issue, the editor-in-chief Katy Siegel notes that Ruppersberg “is often seen as the classic Los Angeles artist.” His project draws on press treatment of art in southern California during the years covered by Pacific Standard Time.
In addition, many of the Pacific Standard Time exhibitions are reviewed or discussed in extended essays by historians, curators, and artists: Connie Butler, Jan Tumlir, Lucia Sanromán, Malik Gaines, Michael Ned Holte, and Ken Gonzales-Day. An essay by Lucy Bradnock considers the Angeleno curator Walter Hopps, and Maria Elena Buszek interviews the artists Suzanne Lacy and Andrea Bowers about their joint projects.
This special issue of Art Journal is the leading edge of the flood of scholarship on postwar art in southern California that Pacific Standard Time is expected to engender.
New Leaders for CAA’s Publications
posted by Christopher Howard — July 10, 2012
The president of the CAA Board of Directors, Anne Collins Goodyear, has confirmed new appointments to the editorial boards of CAA’s three scholarly journals and to the Publications Committee, in consultation with the vice president for publications, Randall C. Griffin. The appointments took effect on July 1, 2012.
The Art Bulletin
The Art Bulletin has announced its next editor-in-chief: Kirk Ambrose, associate professor and chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado in Boulder. In addition to numerous essays and book chapters, he is the author of The Nave Sculpture of Vézelay: The Art of Monastic Viewing (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2006) and the coeditor, with Robert A. Maxwell, of Current Directions in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Romanesque Sculpture Studies (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2010). His book Monsters in Twelfth-Century European Sculpture is forthcoming from Boydell and Brewer. Other future projects include a volume on Portuguese Romanesque sculpture and an exhibition at the University of Colorado Art Museum, tentatively entitled Aby Warburg and the Beginning of Cultural Studies in the American Southwest and scheduled for 2014. Ambrose will succeed Karen Lang of the University of Warwick in England, beginning his three-year term as editor-in-chief on July 1, 2013, with the preceding year as editor designate.
David J. Getsy, the Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has joined the Art Bulletin Editorial Board for a four-year term. His work focuses on modern and contemporary art in Europe and America from the 1870s to the present day. Among his books are Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905 (New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale University Press, 2004) and Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Getsy is currently editing the critical writings of the American postminimalist artist Scott Burton, for publication later this year by Soberscove Press.
Rachael DeLue, associate professor of art history at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, has begun a three-year term as the reviews editor of The Art Bulletin, succeeding Michael Cole of Columbia University in New York. Her first section will appear in the March 2013 issue. Thelma K. Thomas, associate professor of fine arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, has now entered the second year of her two-year service as the chair of the editorial board of the journal.
Art Journal
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, was appointed Art Journal reviews editor. He will serve one year as reviews editor designate, taking over from Howard Singerman of the University of Virginia in July 2013. Corris is both an artist and an author of many works on postwar and contemporary art and theory. The Peacock Gallery in London and the Reading Room in Dallas hosted his most recent solo shows; he has also exhibited widely as a member of the collaborative group Art & Language. Among Corris’s many publications are monographs on Ad Reinhardt (London: Reaktion Books, 2008) and David Diao (Beijing: Timezone 8, 2005). Two books forthcoming in 2013 are The Artist Out of Work: Selected Writings on Art (Les Presses du réel and JRP | Ringier) and What Do Artists Know? The Response to Deskilling in Art (Reaktion Books). Corris is a cofounder and editor of Transmission Annual, a collaborative project of Sheffield Hallam University in England and the Meadows School of the Arts.
Joining the Art Journal Editorial Board for four-year terms are Catherine Lord and Hilary Robinson. Lord is a writer, artist, and curator whose work addresses issues of feminism, cultural politics, and colonialism. She is a professor of studio art and women’s studies at the University of California, Irvine. Recent solo exhibitions were held at ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives and Jancar Gallery, both in Los Angeles. Lord is the author of the text-image experimental narrative The Summer of Her Baldness: A Cancer Improvisation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), and her forthcoming book project coedited with Richard Meyer, to be published by Phaidon, is called Art and Queer Culture, 1885–2005. Robinson is a professor of art theory and criticism in the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The focus of her scholarship is the history and theory of feminist art. Her books include Reading Art, Reading Irigaray: The Politics of Art by Women (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006) and Feminism-Art-Theory: A History, forthcoming from Blackwell. She is the editor of Visibly Female: Feminism and Art: An Anthology (London: Camden, 1987) and Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology 1968–2000 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001).
Lane Relyea, an art critic and associate professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has finished his year as editor designate of Art Journal and now assumes the position of editor-in-chief, succeeding Katy Siegel of Hunter College, City University of New York. His first edited issue will appear in spring 2013. Rachel Weiss, a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago whose work focuses on the art of Cuba, is the new chair of the journal’s editorial board. Weiss recently published To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
caa.reviews
The caa.reviews Editorial Board welcomes a new member, Tanya Sheehan, assistant professor in the Department of Art History at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, who will serve for four years. Currently the journal’s field editor for books on photography, she is the author of Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America, published by Pennsylvania State University Press in 2011.
Six new field editors for books and exhibitions have recently been chosen by the editorial board to serve three-year terms. Gloria Williams will commission reviews of exhibitions of pre-1800 art on the West Coast; Eve Straussman-Pflanzer will oversee reviews of exhibitions in the Midwest; and Jennifer Kingsley will commission reviews of exhibitions in the Southeast. Kirsten Swenson will assign books on contemporary art for review, and Megan O’Neil will commission reviews of books and related media on Precolumbian art. Michael Schreffler will handle reviews of books on early modern Iberian and colonial Latin American art.
Publications Committee
S. Hollis Clayson, Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities and professor of art history at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, was appointed to the Publications Committee as member-at-large. Clayson specializes in nineteenth-century modern European art, particularly French art; her most recent book is Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege (1870–71) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). She is the recipient of numerous research and teaching awards and, as director of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern, promotes discussion and projects focusing on humanities in the digital era. A former chair and member of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board, Clayson has served on CAA’s Annual Conference Committee and on the juries for three CAA awards: the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art, the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize, and the Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award.
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — July 09, 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 Pop art dealer Ivan Karp, the film scholar Andrew Sarris, and the feminist art historian Paula Hays Harper.
- Carl F. Barnes Jr., a former president of the International Center of Medieval Art, died on May 25, 2012, at the age of 77. Barnes was a professor emeritus of art history at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, where he had taught from 1971 to 2001. A specialist in European medieval art, he wrote extensively on the thirteenth-century French artist Villard de Honnecourt
- Barton Lidice Benes, a sculptor and collector, died on May 30, 2012, at the age of 69. Benes made art from the raw materials of everyday life, drawing support and controversy for using medical equipment associated with AIDS/HIV treatment and the cremated remains of friends who perished from the disease. His object and art-filled apartment is now being meticulously re-created as an installation at the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks
- Willard Bond, an artist known for his vibrant paintings of yachts and seascapes, died on May 19, 2012. He was 85 years old. Bond was a versatile artist, influenced in equal parts by the teaching of Buckminster Fuller and by his own experience as a pier master at New York’s South Street Seaport. Admirers claim that his paintings embody the ineffable experience of being on a boat at sea
- Frederick J. Brown, a figurative painter deeply inspired by jazz music and the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, passed away on May 5, 2012. He was 67 years old. Brown created colorful, highly expressionistic portraits of people whom he admired, such as the avant-garde composer Anthony Braxton and the painter Willem de Kooning. His artworks were exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, and the New Orleans Museum of Art
- Paula Hays Harper, an art historian who challenged the discipline with her feminist perspective, died on June 3, 2012, at the age of 81. In the 1970s, Harper was instrumental in establishing the feminist art program at California Institute of the Arts and for three decades was a professor at the University of Miami in Florida. She also coauthored a biography of the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro
- Paul Jenkins, an American abstract painter known for his poured-paint technique, died on June 9, 2012, at the age of 88. In the 1950s Jenkins spent extensive time working and showing in Europe, a factor that made him less visible in the New York art scene than his aesthetic peers, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, and Morris Louis. Jenkins’s art, though, was wildly popular, and the artist had many prominent patrons and museum exhibitions throughout the United States, France, and Great Britain. On a side note to his career arc, Jenkins’s paintings were featured in the 1978 film, An Unmarried Woman
- Gerhard Kallmann, an architect known for his controversial modernist design for Boston City Hall, died on June 19, 2012, at the age of 97. Built in 1968, the Brutalist building was criticized and praised, sometimes at the same time. Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture critic for the New York Times, wrote that Boston now had “one of the handsomest buildings around, and thus far, one of the least understood”
- Ivan Karp, an art dealer and gallery owner who championed Pop art in its early days, passed away on June 28, 2012. He was 86 years old. Karp served as codirector of the Leo Castelli Gallery and in 1969 opened his own space, OK Harris, in SoHo, which established the fledgling artist neighborhood as the new gallery mecca in Manhattan. Artists whom Karp promoted include Andy Warhol, John Chamberlain, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg
- Jeff Keen, a British experimental filmmaker, visual artist, and poet, passed away on June 21, 2012. He was 88 years old. In his late 30s Keen hit his stride as an artist with a series of short, surrealistic films that combined collage techniques and innovative sound tracks. Keen was a founding member of the London Film-Makers Co-op in 1966 and actively participated in the counterculture movement
- Mary Katharine MacGregor, a former curator of prints and drawings at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, died on May 16, 2012, at the age of 89. MacGregor was affiliated with several New York art museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, before she returned to her native Iowa to pursue a curatorial position at the Print and Drawing Study Room at the University of Iowa’s Museum of Art
- Georges Mathieu, a French abstract painter, passed away on June 10, 2012. He was 91 years old. In the 1940s and 1950s Mathieu worked in the mode of Lyrical Abstraction, a French counterpart to Abstract Expressionism in the United States. He often performed his paintings in front of a live audience as a demonstration of his dramatic, freeform technique
- LeRoy Neiman, an artist and illustrator of the good life, died on June 20, 2012, at the age of 91. Like a contemporary Norman Rockwell, Neiman worked in a space between the fine-art and magazine worlds. He painted illustrations of sporting events for Playboy in the 1950s and taught for many years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
- Justine Price, a professor of art history at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, died on October 24, 2011, at the age of 42. A faculty member of Canisius College since 2005, she had recently received tenure and been named the director of the college’s art-history program. Her scholarly interests extended from American Pop art to contemporary Polish photography
- Michael Rabe, a scholar of South Asian art and a professor at Xavier University in Chicago, died in late March 2012. Rabe’s colleague Andrew Cohen has written a special obituary for CAA
- Andrew Sarris, a film critic and scholar who wrote for the Village Voice for many years, passed away on June 20, 2012, at the age of 83. A champion of auteur theory, Sarris wrote a seminal book on the subject, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968 (1968). He had taught at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and was an inspirational figure to several generations of film critics and historians
- A. Richard Turner, an expert on Italian Renaissance art, particularly the legacy of Leonardo da Vinci, died on September 9, 2011. He was 79 years old. Turner was the author of Inventing Leonardo (1993), a book that analyzed five centuries of critical dialogue on the artist. Turner had a long teaching career that included stints at the University of Michigan, Princeton University, and Middlebury College before he became the director of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in 1979
- Jeff West, a champion of the arts in Dallas, Texas, died on May 22, 2012, at the age of 54. The executive director of the Shakespeare Festival of Dallas, West had helped bring film culture to the city with the AFI Dallas International Film Festival. He also worked for eleven years as executive director of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, an institution that preserves the memory of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination
Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the August list.
CAA Joins JSTOR Register & Read Program
posted by Christopher Howard — July 02, 2012
CAA has joined JSTOR’s new Register & Read program, which offers free, read-online access to a wide-range of academic journals to independent scholars and researchers. The service is designed to make scholarship available to those not affiliated with a subscribing institution by allowing them to register for a MyJSTOR account.
CAA is pleased to contribute the full back run of The Art Bulletin and Art Journal, through 2008, to an expanding, eclectic list that includes BOMB Magazine, Film Quarterly, Modern Law Review, and American Journal of Sociology. All articles from The Art Bulletin and Art Journal during this time will be available for individuals to read and, in some instances, to download and purchase as a PDF file.
Since JSTOR launched Register & Read in January 2012, approximately forty publishers have contributed material from seventy-seven journals to the beta site. The user-friendly program mimics the experience of a library by allowing visitors to store up to three articles on a virtual shelf for two weeks before exchanging items. Feedback is key to improving the borrowing service that Register & Read provides. JSTOR plans to perfect the functionality of the program and enlarge its scope to meet the unique research needs of the scholarly community.
Intellectual Property and the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — June 25, 2012
The Committee on Intellectual Property (CIP) is pleased to announce the posting of the revised and expanded Intellectual Property and the Arts pages on CAA’s website. CIP monitors and interprets copyright legislation for the benefit of CAA’s various constituencies. In so doing, it seeks to offer educational programs and opportunities for discussion and debate in response to copyright legislation affecting educators, scholars, museum professionals, and artists.
The section is divided into the following eight categories: US Copyright: Fundamentals & Documents; Visual Art/Visual Artists; Publishing in the Visual Arts; Libraries, Archives, and Museums; Image Sources and Rights Clearance Agencies; Fair Use Guidelines, Practices, and Policies; Copyright Outside the United States; and Legal Assistance.
Education is essential for informed communication. The committee hopes that the resources presented in the updated pages will answer your questions about intellectual property and inform your discussions and debates.
Survey Results on Contingent Faculty in Higher Education
posted by Christopher Howard — June 20, 2012
The results of a 2010 survey of contingent faculty members and instructors in American higher education, published today by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce (CAW), have confirmed much of what has been reported anecdotally: part-time faculty members demonstrate a dedicated level of commitment to teaching and to the institutions that employ them, but this commitment is not reciprocated by those institutions through compensation or other professional support. The findings also describe larger course loads for teachers, imbalances in compensation in relation to not only professional credentials but also gender and race, and minimal participation in academic decision-making. Further, contingent faculty face longer durations of provisional employment and slim prospects for career advancement, with schools failing to meet their preference for full-time status.
According to a 2009 government study, 75.5 percent of all faculty members at colleges and universities in the United States are contingent: that is, they hold part-time or adjunct positions, have full-time non-tenure-track jobs, or serve as graduate-student teaching assistants. Part-timers alone make up nearly half the total professoriate. The US Department of Education, however, has not kept statistics on contingent-faculty salaries since 2003, when it last carried out its National Study of Postsecondary Faculty. CAW’s comprehensive survey, administered in fall 2010, was conducted in an effort to provide meaningful data for this rapidly growing concern. Of the nearly 30,000 survey respondents, 1,102 were CAA members: 591 in studio art and design, 362 in art history, and 149 in art education. The CAW report focuses on the largest group of contingent faculty: part-timers.
CAA is a founding member (1997) of CAW, which is a group of higher-education associations, disciplinary associations, and faculty organizations committed to addressing issues associated with deteriorating faculty working conditions and their effect on college and university students in the United States. Specifically, CAW’s purpose is to: collect and disseminate information on the use and treatment of full- and part-time faculty members serving off the tenure track and the implications for students, parents, other faculty members, and institutions; articulate and clarify differences in the extent and consequences of changes in the faculty within and among the various academic disciplines and fields of study; evaluate the short-term and long-term consequences of changes in the academic workforce for society and the public good; identify and promote strategies for solving the problems created by inappropriate use and exploitation of part-time, adjunct, and similar faculty appointments; promote conditions by which all faculty members, including full- and part-time non-tenure-track faculty members, can strengthen their teaching and scholarship, better serve their students, and advance their professional careers.
Andrew Delbanco, the author of College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (2012), stated that, in 1975, 60 percent of college professors were full-time faculty with tenure. The reasons for the accelerated shift toward contingent labor since that time are many. Decreases in state funding, capital expansion without commensurate revenue, increases in specialized knowledge requiring thousands of course offerings, and swelling student enrollment all have had a detrimental effect on faculty budgets, more so than on any other area of expenditures in higher education. Jane Wellman, who led the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability, affirmed these observations in a recent New York Times interview:
What the evidence shows is that we’ve done more to cut costs in the faculty area than elsewhere in the budget, and we’ve done it by bringing in more adjuncts and part-timers. So there’s a handful of professors with tenure, who don’t teach very much, and then there’s [a] lot of people who have no benefits who do more of the teaching. I think it’s probably hurting academic quality, especially at institutions where the students are not well prepared. The attrition [of students] is mostly in the first two years, and that’s mostly where the adjuncts are.
While no hard evidence has determined that an increase of adjuncts has diminished the quality of teaching in higher education, the CAW survey results clearly demonstrate pressure on part-time faculty due to not only expanding workloads and larger classes—especially for part-time faculty teaching at multiple institutions—but also expectations to be involved in academic decision-making without additional compensation.
Professors of studio art and art history are acutely aware of all these issues. Enrollment has risen persistently for art-history and studio courses for years, while tenured positions have diminished. The survey results do bring some slightly positive news: median pay for contingent faculty in studio art and design and in art history is $3,000 per three-credit course (the nationwide median is approximately $2,700). In addition, workers at campuses with a union presence earn more than those at nonunion schools. Compensation is lower, however, for survey respondents who identified themselves as black, although the number of African Americans who participated in the survey was low. Please visit the CAW website for details on these issues and more.
The CAW report will provide important data for discussions taking place in several of CAA’s Professional Interests, Practices, and Standards Committees. The Student and Emerging Professionals Committee will be addressing contingent-faculty issues at a panel at the 2013 Annual Conference in New York, which will include Michael Bérubé, president of the Modern Language Association and director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University, who will present an overview of the Academic Workforce Data Center, a compilation of historical data of the growth of contingent faculty by universities. Bérubé will also discuss the need to nationalize the academic-job market. Jeanne Brody, an adjunct professor at Villanova University and Saint Joseph’s University, will summarize the ways in which adjunct faculty members are effectively organizing and advocating better treatment within the university system. Victoria H. F. Scott of Emory University will discuss the establishment of an Art History Society of the Americas, which would explore abolishing adjunct position types, raising salaries, collecting statistics, and setting policies to improve and monitor working conditions.
The Committee on Women in the Arts, which focuses on women’s issues in the workplace and beyond, will respond to survey results on gender. Although women make up two-thirds of all CAA members, they tend to occupy the lowest rungs of academia, while men continue filling the higher-ranking and higher-paid positions. To continue the discussion, the committee will present a panel at the 2013 conference, chaired by the artist and professor Claudia Sbrissa, on how the “feminization” of art history may have contributed to lower salaries and prestige for women.
Similarly, the Committee on Diversity Practices will discuss issues related to retention of faculty members of color during its panel at the 2013 conference.
CAA would like to thank the individuals who generously volunteered their time and expertise to develop and tabulate CAW’s survey: John Curtis, director of research and public policy, American Association of University Professors; David Laurence, director of research, Modern Language Association; Kathleen Terry-Sharp, director of academic relations and practicing and applied programs, American Anthropological Society; Craig Smith, director of higher education, American Federation of Teachers; and Robert B. Townsend, deputy director, American Historical Association.
Survey Results on Contingent Faculty in Higher Education
posted by Christopher Howard — June 20, 2012
The results of a 2010 survey of contingent faculty members and instructors in American higher education, published today by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce (CAW), have confirmed much of what has been reported anecdotally: part-time faculty members demonstrate a dedicated level of commitment to teaching and to the institutions that employ them, but this commitment is not reciprocated by those institutions through compensation or other professional support. The findings also describe larger course loads for teachers, imbalances in compensation in relation to not only professional credentials but also gender and race, and minimal participation in academic decision-making. Further, contingent faculty face longer durations of provisional employment and slim prospects for career advancement, with schools failing to meet their preference for full-time status.
According to a 2009 government study, 75.5 percent of all faculty members at colleges and universities in the United States are contingent: that is, they hold part-time or adjunct positions, have full-time non-tenure-track jobs, or serve as graduate-student teaching assistants. Part-timers alone make up nearly half the total professoriate. The US Department of Education, however, has not kept statistics on contingent-faculty salaries since 2003, when it last carried out its National Study of Postsecondary Faculty. CAW’s comprehensive survey, administered in fall 2010, was conducted in an effort to provide meaningful data for this rapidly growing concern. Of the nearly 30,000 survey respondents, 1,102 were CAA members: 591 in studio art and design, 362 in art history, and 149 in art education. The CAW report focuses on the largest group of contingent faculty: part-timers.
CAA is a founding member (1997) of CAW, which is a group of higher-education associations, disciplinary associations, and faculty organizations committed to addressing issues associated with deteriorating faculty working conditions and their effect on college and university students in the United States. Specifically, CAW’s purpose is to: collect and disseminate information on the use and treatment of full- and part-time faculty members serving off the tenure track and the implications for students, parents, other faculty members, and institutions; articulate and clarify differences in the extent and consequences of changes in the faculty within and among the various academic disciplines and fields of study; evaluate the short-term and long-term consequences of changes in the academic workforce for society and the public good; identify and promote strategies for solving the problems created by inappropriate use and exploitation of part-time, adjunct, and similar faculty appointments; promote conditions by which all faculty members, including full- and part-time non-tenure-track faculty members, can strengthen their teaching and scholarship, better serve their students, and advance their professional careers.
Andrew Delbanco, the author of College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (2012), stated that, in 1975, 60 percent of college professors were full-time faculty with tenure. The reasons for the accelerated shift toward contingent labor since that time are many. Decreases in state funding, capital expansion without commensurate revenue, increases in specialized knowledge requiring thousands of course offerings, and swelling student enrollment all have had a detrimental effect on faculty budgets, more so than on any other area of expenditures in higher education. Jane Wellman, who led the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability, affirmed these observations in a recent New York Times interview:
What the evidence shows is that we’ve done more to cut costs in the faculty area than elsewhere in the budget, and we’ve done it by bringing in more adjuncts and part-timers. So there’s a handful of professors with tenure, who don’t teach very much, and then there’s [a] lot of people who have no benefits who do more of the teaching. I think it’s probably hurting academic quality, especially at institutions where the students are not well prepared. The attrition [of students] is mostly in the first two years, and that’s mostly where the adjuncts are.
While no hard evidence has determined that an increase of adjuncts has diminished the quality of teaching in higher education, the CAW survey results clearly demonstrate pressure on part-time faculty due to not only expanding workloads and larger classes—especially for part-time faculty teaching at multiple institutions—but also expectations to be involved in academic decision-making without additional compensation.
Professors of studio art and art history are acutely aware of all these issues. Enrollment has risen persistently for art-history and studio courses for years, while tenured positions have diminished. The survey results do bring some slightly positive news: median pay for contingent faculty in studio art and design and in art history is $3,000 per three-credit course (the nationwide median is approximately $2,700). In addition, workers at campuses with a union presence earn more than those at nonunion schools. Compensation is lower, however, for survey respondents who identified themselves as black, although the number of African Americans who participated in the survey was low. Please visit the CAW website for details on these issues and more.
The CAW report will provide important data for discussions taking place in several of CAA’s Professional Interests, Practices, and Standards Committees. The Student and Emerging Professionals Committee will be addressing contingent-faculty issues at a panel at the 2013 Annual Conference in New York, which will include Michael Bérubé, president of the Modern Language Association and director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University, who will present an overview of the Academic Workforce Data Center, a compilation of historical data of the growth of contingent faculty by universities. Bérubé will also discuss the need to nationalize the academic-job market. Jeanne Brody, an adjunct professor at Villanova University and Saint Joseph’s University, will summarize the ways in which adjunct faculty members are effectively organizing and advocating better treatment within the university system. Victoria H. F. Scott of Emory University will discuss the establishment of an Art History Society of the Americas, which would explore abolishing adjunct position types, raising salaries, collecting statistics, and setting policies to improve and monitor working conditions.
The Committee on Women in the Arts, which focuses on women’s issues in the workplace and beyond, will respond to survey results on gender. Although women make up two-thirds of all CAA members, they tend to occupy the lowest rungs of academia, while men continue filling the higher-ranking and higher-paid positions. To continue the discussion, the committee will present a panel at the 2013 conference, chaired by the artist and professor Claudia Sbrissa, on how the “feminization” of art history may have contributed to lower salaries and prestige for women.
Similarly, the Committee on Diversity Practices will discuss issues related to retention of faculty members of color during its panel at the 2013 conference.
CAA would like to thank the individuals who generously volunteered their time and expertise to develop and tabulate CAW’s survey: John Curtis, director of research and public policy, American Association of University Professors; David Laurence, director of research, Modern Language Association; Kathleen Terry-Sharp, director of academic relations and practicing and applied programs, American Anthropological Society; Craig Smith, director of higher education, American Federation of Teachers; and Robert B. Townsend, deputy director, American Historical Association.
Recent CAA Advocacy
posted by Christopher Howard — June 18, 2012
CAA’s advocacy efforts this year addressed a wide range of issues of critical importance to the visual arts, from the necessity of artists to have affordable health-insurance options, to the ethical treatment of animals in works of art, to the ins and outs of copyright law and museum practices. Below is a summary of eleven issues to which CAA has been committed during the past twelve months.
In June 2011, CAA filed an amicus brief in the case of Golan v. Holder, which the United States Supreme Court began hearing in October. The issue raised in Golan v. Holder is whether Congress, after enacting the Uruguay Round Agreements Act of 1994, could legally remove tens of thousands—if not millions—of foreign works from the public domain and bring them back into copyright. Consistent with the First Amendment, the brief argued that those works should remain freely available. On January 18, 2012, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court’s previous decision, 6–2. In short, foreign works formerly in the public domain in the US can have their copyrighted status reinstated.
In December 2011, CAA signed onto a statement from the Association of Art Museum Directors that opposed the pending sale of a fifty percent stake in the Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Modern American and European Art at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Since 2005 the school had been attempting to sell the collection, donated by Georgia O’Keeffe (who specified that it never be sold or broken up). “Such an action,” stated the letter, “would violate a core professional standard of AAMD and of the museum field, which prohibit[s] the use of funds from the sale of works of art for purposes other than building an institution’s collection.” Nevertheless, the Tennessee Supreme court did not block the sale to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, on April 25, 2012. The university and museum will share the collection on a three-year rotating basis, with the museum helping to conserve the collection.
CAA board and staff members represented the organization at two events this spring in Washington, DC: Anne Collins Goodyear, then-incoming board president, and Linda Downs, CAA executive director and chief executive officer, attended Humanities Advocacy Day in March; and Judith Thorpe, an outgoing board member, and Helen Bayer, CAA marketing and communications associate, went to Arts Advocacy Day in April. The goal of both days was to support continued federal funding through the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, and to articulate to Congress the vital importance of the humanities and the arts in higher education. The National Humanities Alliance’s annual meeting coincided with Humanities Advocacy Day. Goodyear and Downs have offered a summary of this important event.
At the request of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), CAA investigated the use of homing pigeons in Jon Rubin’s interactive artwork, Thinking about Flying (2012), on view this year at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Colorado. The piece invites museum visitors to take home a bird, placed in a cardboard box, for a day before releasing it, so that it may fly back to the museum. CAA confirmed the humanitarian treatment of the birds by the artist and museum and notified PETA of the findings.
In April, CAA investigated the complaint raised by several artists who lent work to the 2010 World Festival of Black Artists and Cultures in Senegal that was not returned due to a dispute with an art shipper in Dakar. CAA determined that the situation did not need the organization’s assistance.
Michael Fahlund, CAA deputy director, testified on behalf of the organization at an oversight hearing convened by New York City’s Committee on Cultural Affairs, Libraries, and International Intergroup Relations on January 25, 2012, regarding increasing access to affordable health insurance for artists. Even though CAA is an international organization, its office is in the state of New York; presently the healthcare industry is regulated state by state. Fahlund proposed that CAA be given “employer status” in relation to its members living in New York State in order to provide health-insurance options for them. The committee’s discussions are ongoing.
CAA monitored a federal bill, the Research Works Act (H.R. 3699), that was introduced in the US House of Representatives on December 16, 2011, by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and cosponsored by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY)— chairman and member, respectively, of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The legislation would prohibit federal agencies from mandating free access to scholarly articles submitted to a scientific or scholarly publication without the consent of the publisher. This act primarily addresses science and technology publications but, if enacted, could affect art and humanities publications as well. Many learned societies who are publishers oppose the legislation, and CAA board members have begun discussing the issue and are paying close attention to the legislation’s development.
Representing CAA, Fahlund contributed his expertise to a National Coalition Against Censorship committee that developed Museum Best Practices for Managing Controversy, published in May. The document offers guidance for institutions to turn controversial situations into learning experiences for their public. The committee comprised representatives from the American Association of Museums, the Association of Art Museum Directors, the Association of Art Museum Curators, Columbia University, Arizona State University, the University of Washington, and the New School. CAA’s Museum Committee is reviewing the guideline and will present it for adoption at the CAA board meeting on October 28, 2012.
Fahlund also worked with a liability insurance broker, Herbert L. Jamison and Co. LLC, and Philadelphia Insurance Companies, and with two CAA members, Barbara Buhler Lynes and Nancy Mowll Mathews, to establish comprehensive, affordable liability insurance for art historians and artists who authenticate works of art. Such insurance would help defend against a damaging financial loss that could occur from alleged mistakes or negligence. CAA does not administer the insurance but acts as a referral to the insurance company; in a brief article from this past January, Fahlund offers helpful loss-prevention tips for the art professional to avoid potential workplace liabilities.
Last month CAA signed onto a letter from the Association of Art Museum Directors sent to Congress, urging legislators to pass the Foreign Cultural Exchange Jurisdictional Immunity Clarification Act (S. 2212), a proposed law that would shield a loaned work of art from a non-US collection from being seized by anyone with a claim to legal ownership while the art is on display in the country. According to the letter, the US has “long provided the crucial legal protection that helps make loans from foreign museums possible” through the Department of State, until a 2004–8 lawsuit involving heirs of Kasimir Malevich and the City of Amsterdam weakened those protections. The House passed the bill (H.R. 4086), which the Senate is now debating.
As a member of the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, a group that addresses workforce issues in higher education, CAA helped to prepare and administer a 2010 survey on contingent-faculty issues. The results have been tabulated and will be distributed soon. More than one thousand CAA members filled out the survey. [June 20 update: the survey results have been published.]
Founded as an advocate for the visual arts in higher education, CAA actively engages matters of public policy, litigation, and activism at the local, state, federal, and international levels. For further information, visit the Advocacy section of the website. If you have questions or have advocacy issues you would like to bring to the attention of the CAA board, please contact Anne Collins Goodyear, CAA president, and Linda Downs, CAA executive director and chief executive officer, at info@collegeart.org.
June 2012 Issue of The Art Bulletin
posted by Christopher Howard — June 13, 2012
The cover image of the June 2012 issue of The Art Bulletin shows the unmistakable signature style of the contemporary artist Georg Baselitz, who has also written the lead text for the issue’s Notes from the Field. In this section, nine scholars from divergent fields—among them Kirk Ambrose, Elizabeth Edwards, Cordula Grewe, Daniel Heller-Roazen, and Ian McLean—join the artist in writing on the theme of appropriation. The June issue presents the second installment of new features in The Art Bulletin, sections that will continue for several years in the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship. In Regarding Art and Art History, Andrew Hemingway revisits his early fascination with a John Constable painting, Chain Pier, Brighton (1826–27), and describes how the work has shaped his methodological approach to writing art history. Finally, in a wide-ranging interview with Dan Karlholm, the art historian Linda Nochlin discusses her five-decade career.
The June Art Bulletin features four essays that cover a wide range of topics and time periods in the history of art. Sonya S. Lee examines the role of patronage and appropriation in tenth-century Dunhuang through her analysis of the pictorial program of Cave 61 at Mogao in northwestern China. Kishwar Rizvi’s article explores the dynamic relationship between image and text in the 1605 manuscript Shahnama (Book of Kings) and how the folio’s paintings can be viewed as a surrogate portrait of the charismatic king, Shah ‘Abbas. Next, Katherine M. Kuenzli explores the “total work of art” that is Henry van de Velde’s 1914 Werkbund Theater Building and its role in shaping German modernism and national identity before and after World War I. In “Picasso’s First Constructed Sculpture: A Tale of Two Guitars,” Christine Poggi analyzes the artist’s 1912 paper Guitar as a modernist masterpiece unto itself, and not merely as the model for subsequent versions made from sheet metal; Poggi’s essay also features unusual new photographs of several paper sculptures that she discusses.
In the Reviews section, Cammy Brothers assesses Marvin Trachtenberg’s book, Building-in-Time: From Giotto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion, and Diane H. Bodart reviews two books, Joanna Woodall’s Anthonis Mor: Art and Authority and Laura R. Bass’s The Drama of the Portrait: Theatre and Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain. Then, Victor I. Stoichita looks at Michael Fried’s The Moment of Caravaggio, and Jonathan Hay discusses Craig Clunas’s approach to Chinese art history through a reading of five of his recent books on the subject. Finally, Barbara Wittmann reviews two catalogues—The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) and Reconsidering Gérôme—that accompanied a 2011 exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
Please see the full table of contents for June to learn more. 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 September 2012, will feature the art historian Richard Shiff on the concept of interpretation in Regarding Art and Art History, “contingency” as the topic in Notes from the Field, and an interview with the architectural historian James S. Ackerman. The long-form essays will examine iconoclasm and the image as representation in the eighth century, Francesco Rosselli’s engravings and the development of print culture in Renaissance Italy, seventeenth-century Chinese handscroll painting, and the trials of the modern Viennese architect Adolf Loos. The Reviews section will include analyses of books on Giotto, Willem de Kooning, civil rights, photography, and the image of the wind.