CAA News Today
Spring 2012 Recipients of the Millard Meiss Publication Fund
posted by Christopher Howard — June 04, 2012
This spring, CAA awarded grants to the publishers of six books in art history and visual culture through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to the generous bequest of the late professor Millard Meiss, CAA gives these grants to support the publication of scholarly books in art history and related fields.
The six grantees for spring 2012 are:
- Todd Cronan, Matisse, Bergson, and the Philosophical Temper of Modernism, University of Minnesota Press
- John J. Curley, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Cold War Visuality: A Conspiracy of Images, Yale University Press
- Laurinda Dixon, The Dark Side of Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art, ca. 1500–1700, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Dorothy Habel, “When All of Rome Was under Construction”: The Building Process in Baroque Rome, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Mary Ellen Miller and Claudia Lozoff Brittenham, The Spectacle of the Late Maya Court: Reflections on the Paintings of Bonampak, University of Texas Press
- Diane Radycki, Paula Modersohn-Becker: The First Modern Woman Artist, Yale University Press
Books eligible for Meiss grants must already be under contract with a publisher and on a subject in the visual arts or art history. Authors must be current CAA members. Please review the application guidelines for more information. The deadline for the fall 2012 grant cycle is October 1, 2012.
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — May 30, 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 avant-garde film historian and exhibitor Amos Vogel and the Swiss artist David Weiss.
- Anne Burkhardt, a professor of philosophy at Bennington College in Vermont and a long-time associate of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Darwin Correspondence Project, passed away on March 11, 2012. She was 96 years old. Burkhardt was married to Frederick Burkhardt, ACLS president emeritus, who first established the Darwin project in 1974 as a means to collect all letters by and to Charles Darwin
- Royal Cloyd, the founding director of the Boston Center for the Arts, passed away on February 23, 2012, at the age of 86. In the 1960s Cloyd saw immense potential in the industrial neighborhood of Boston’s South End, defying popular opinion that the area was unsafe by persuading the city to purchase and renovate a series of buildings, including the landmark Cyclorama
- David Hillman Curtis, a pioneer of web design, a filmmaker, and a former rock-and-roll musician, died on April 18, 2012, at age 51. In the mid-1990s in San Francisco, Curtis mastered the new Flash technology, which enabled websites to display high-quality animation. He became a technology guru for many and wrote a best-selling book on media design. Curtis’s latest project was a feature-length documentary film on the musician David Byrne, called Ride, Rise, Roar
- Judy Egerton, an Australian-born scholar and curator of eighteenth-century British art, died on March 21, 2012, at the age of 83. In 1974 Egerton became the assistant keeper in the Historic British Department at Tate Gallery in London, where she organized the exhibition George Stubbs: Anatomist and Animal Painter (1976). She put together many popular shows at her museum, wrote catalogue essays, and completed a new edition of the catalogue for the National Gallery in London
- Denise Gray, a photographer who captured the people and events of Atlanta, Georgia, died on April 22, 2012. She was 54 years old. Gray was a high-spirited individual who worked hard to make her passion for photography into a career. She didn’t have a permanent studio, instead preferring to work on location
- Al Hurwitz, chair and graduate director of art education at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, passed away on March 24, 2012, at the age of 91. Hurwitz had also served as president of the National Art Education Association and frequently lectured on art education across the United States and abroad
- Jean Laplanche, a French psychoanalyst, theorist, and translator of works by Sigmund Freud, died on May 6, 2012, at the age of 87. Laplanche studied under Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the École Normale Supérieure and later cofounded the Psychoanalytic Association of France in 1964. His best-known work, a revision of Freud’s seduction theory, was published in 1987
- Louis le Brocquy, an Irish painter and tapestry designer who created his own place within the modernist idiom of Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti, died on April 25, 2012, at the age of 95. Le Brocquy painted portraits of Irish literati such as Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, and Samuel Beckett. The artist described his working process as: “I try to paint the head image from the ‘inside out’ as it were, working in layers or planes, implying a certain flickering transparency“
- Herbert C. Lee, a prominent Boston arts patron and philanthropist, died on April 4, 2012. He was 97 years old. Lee and his wife Micki were long-time supporters of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Harvard Art Museums, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, and the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts
- Margaret Cassidy Manship, a sculptor, art teacher, and archivist passed away on February 13, 2012, at age 91. The free-spirited daughter of an artist mother, Manship won a scholarship to Italy that led to an apprenticeship working for the master sculptor Antonio Berti in the Vatican. Manship and her husband, the artist John Manship, had lived and worked in Maine, Vermont, and New York
- Jackie McAllister, a Scottish curator, artist, and writer living in New York, died on April 28, 2012. He was 49 years old. In the early 1990s McAllister was vice president of the cutting-edge SoHo gallery American Fine Arts, which put him at the forefront of the city’s art scene. In 2011 McAllister created an artwork comprising Lego pieces for the exhibition An Exchange with Sol LeWitt at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
- Norman Richard “Rick“ Pope, a ceramist and professor of art for thirty years in the School of Art at Montana State University, died on March 19, 2012. He was 70 years old. Born in Oklahoma, Pope has seen his work collected by the Archie Bray Foundation and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow
- Robert Raymond, a photographer and videographer who worked as a television broadcast engineer, passed away on February 27, 2012, at age 59. Raymond was an assistant director for the Boston Film/Video Foundation and worked with his wife in the Mobius Artists Group
- Amos Vogel, the last “lion of cinema” according to Werner Herzog, passed away on April 24, 2012, at the age of 91. A Viennese refugee, Vogel came to New York in 1938 and established an avant-garde film society, Cinema 16, with his wife Marcia. Based on the European model of a ciné-club, Cinema 16 debuted the work of Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage. Vogel also helped found the New York Film Festival and wrote Film as Subversive Art (1974)
- David Weiss, a Swiss artist and half of the Fischli and Weiss partnership, passed away on April 27, 2012, at the age of 66. Weiss was living a nomadic, free-spirited life in Europe before meeting the artist Peter Fischli in the late 1970s. The duo captured the imagination of the art world and beyond with the film The Way Things Go (1987), an ode to the joy of art production, and with Visible World (1987–2001), a table display of images of the sacred, profane, and everything in between
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 June list.
Getty Foundation to Fund a Second Year of CAA’s International Travel Grant Program
posted by Christopher Howard — May 23, 2012
For the second year in a row, the Getty Foundation has awarded a major grant to CAA that will enable twenty international professionals to attend the 101st Annual Conference, taking place February 13–16, 2013, in New York. With the Getty grant, CAA will continue its International Travel Grant Program, providing funds to art historians, artists who teach art history, and museum curators for travel expenses, hotel accommodations, per diems, conference registrations, and one-year CAA memberships.
The goal of the project is to increase international participation in CAA and to diversify the organization’s membership (presently seventy-two countries are represented). CAA also wishes to familiarize international participants with the submission process for conference sessions and to expand their professional network in the visual arts. As they did last year, members of CAA’s International Committee and the National Committee for the History of Art have agreed to host the participants.
For the program’s second year, CAA will offer preconference meetings on February 11 and 12 for grant recipients to present and discuss their common professional interests and issues.
The application process for 2013 grants will open shortly. Professionals from developing countries or from nations underrepresented in CAA’s membership are especially encouraged to apply. A jury assembled by CAA will select the twenty grant recipients. The deadline for applications will be August 15, 2012.
New Members and Officers at the May Board Meeting
posted by Christopher Howard — April 30, 2012
Newly elected members and officers of the CAA Board of Directors will join the governing body at its spring meeting, to be held on Sunday, May 6, 2012. Charged with CAA’s long-term financial stability and strategic direction, the board sets policy regarding all aspects of the organization’s activities, including publishing, the Annual Conference, awards and fellowships, advocacy, and committee procedures.
New Directors
The board welcomes four new members, who will serve from 2012 to 2016:
- Suzanne Preston Blier, professor in History of Art and Architecture and the African and African American Studies Departments at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts
- Stephanie D’Alessandro, curator of modern art at the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois
- Gail Feigenbaum, associate director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California
- Charles A. Wright, artist and chair of the Department of Art at Western Illinois University in Macomb
New President
Anne Collins Goodyear, assistant curator of prints and drawings at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington DC, will serve as the organization’s next president for a two-year term, beginning May 2012.
New Officers
At its February 2012 meeting, the board elected new officers—four vice presidents and a secretary—from among its members to serve one-year terms, from May 2012 to April 2013.
- Patricia McDonnell, director of the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University in Kansas, has been reelected for a second term as vice president for external affairs
- DeWitt Godfrey, an artist and associate professor of art and art history at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, was elected vice president for committees. Last year he served as board secretary
- Jacqueline Francis, professor of art history at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, has been named vice president for Annual Conference
- Randall C. Griffin, professor of art history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, has been reelected vice president for publications to serve a second term
- Maria Ann Conelli, dean of the School of Visual, Media, and Performing Arts at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, has been elected secretary. She had spent the previous year as vice president for committees
CAA will publish a report on the spring board meeting later this month.
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — April 24, 2012
In its regular roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, designers, architects, photographers, curators, dealers, 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 sculptor Elizabeth Catlett, the divisive art critic Hilton Kramer, the scholar and curator John Golding, and the art dealer Donald Young.
- Cris Alexander, a portrait photographer and actor who landed a starring role in the 1944 Broadway musical On the Town, died on March 7, 2012, at the age of 92. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Alexander arrived in New York in the late 1930s with dreams of stardom. He photographed Martha Graham, collaborated on satirical novels about Hollywood, and worked for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine
- Rex Babin, an editorial cartoonist for the northern Californian newspaper the Sacramento Bee since 1999, died on March 30, 2012, age 49. Babin was known for cartoons that tackled current events with whimsy, humor, and pathos
- Toni Beauchamp, a Texan patron of the arts, passed away on March 9, 2012, at the age of 66. Beauchamp was an assistant director of Houston’s Blaffer Gallery in the 1970s and 1980s and was a proponent of the burgeoning art scene around Houston and the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. A collection of essays about Marfa’s cultural community will be released posthumously
- Eliy Belyutin, a Russian art historian and art teacher, died on February 29, 2012, at the age of 87. Belyutin attended the Moscow Art Institute, and in 1954 he founded a painting school called the New Reality that encouraged an individualistic approach to art-making
- Eleanor Callahan, a striking muse for her photographer husband, Harry Callahan, died on February 28, 2012. She was 95 years old. Eleanor Callahan was photographed throughout her sixty-three years of marriage, an arc that traced the couple’s early courtship to their family life with their daughter, Barbara. The stark, black-and-white portraits drew comparisons to Alfred Stieglitz’s famous photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe
- Elizabeth Catlett, a figurative sculptor whose art practice was rooted in social reality, passed away on April 12, 2012, at the age of 96. Catlett drew from her own experience as an African American woman and expressed a desire to make art that would empower the lives of other African Americans and appeal to a broad sweep of humanity. She moved to Mexico in the late 1940s, where she was the first woman to head the art department at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City
- John S. Chase, a prominent modern architect and the first African American to serve on the United States Commission of Fine Art in 1980, died on March 29, 2012. He was 87 years old. Chase’s notable projects include the United States embassy in Tunis, Tunisia. During his tenure on the commission, he oversaw the creation of the Vietnam War Memorial
- Sid Couchey, a comic-book artist who was a principle illustrator for the 1950s Harvey Comics characters of Richie Rich, Little Lotta, and Little Dot, died on March 11, 2012, at the age of 92. Couchey also created cartoon mascots for national drug-prevention campaigns and for the 1980 Winter Olympics on Lake Placid
- David Lee Craven, distinguished professor of art history at the University of New Mexico, died on February 11, 2012, at the age of 60. He was an expert in twentieth-century Latin American art, postwar American art, and the methodology of art history and visual culture
- Bruno Giacometti, a Swiss architect and the younger brother of the artist Alberto Giacometti, died at the age of 104 on March 21, 2012. The youngest of four children, Bruno Giacometti remembered posing as a child for his older brother’s first attempts at sculpture. In 1930 he joined the Zurich architectural firm of Karl Egender, but it was after World War II that he completed his most important works as a freelance architect, including the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1952
- Jean Giraud, the French comic-book artist known as Moebius, died on March 10, 2012, at age 73. Giraud was something of a national treasure in France, beloved by artists and the general public alike. An early success was the Wild West–themed comic book, Les Adventures de Blueberry (1963). Giraud’s fantasy visions led to work in cinema: he contributed drawings to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unfinished film Dune and to Ridley Scott’s Alien
- John Golding, a British art historian of twentieth-century art with a focus on Cubism, died on April 9, 2012, at the age of 82. Golding taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, from which he also graduated, and was the head of the painting school at the Royal College of Art. He curated two seminal exhibitions for Tate Modern, Picasso: Sculptor/Painter (1994) and Matisse/Picasso (2002), and in his later years focused on his own abstract painting
- John Griffiths, a British illustrator who designed a series of covers for Penguin paperbacks in the 1950s and 1960s, passed away on March 13, 2012. He was 85 years old. Trained as a painter and printmaker, Griffiths applied his technique to darkly outlined, hand-drawn covers that were beloved by readers as a companion to the text inside
- Bernard Otto Gruenke, a stained-glass artist who created one of the first faceted glass windows in America, passed away on March 21, 2012. He was 99. Gruenke attended the Corcoran Art School in Washington, DC, and created stained-glass windows for churches, synagogues, and theaters throughout the country. For many years he served as the vice president of the Stained Glass Association of America
- Albert Hadley, an interior decorator for high society on the East Coast, died on March 30, 2012, at the age of 91. Hadley and the socialite-decorator Sister Parish founded their company, Parish-Hadley, in 1962. Important commissions for the pair included the library at Brooke Astor’s Park Avenue home and the breakfast room of the Kennedy White House
- Francis Hewlett, a British sculptor and painter who was head of painting at the Falmouth School of Art in Cornwall, died on March 19, 2012. He was 81 years old. Hewlett studied at the Slade School of Art in London and in the 1960s was inspired by Pop art to make large-scale ceramic sculptures of hands and other body parts
- Robert Hoozee, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium, and a scholar of nineteenth-century British art, died on February 21, 2012, at the age of 62. Hoozee’s last exhibition at the museum was the critically acclaimed British Vision (2007), which offered a radical take on the history of British art, with an emphasis on underrepresented artists such as Stanley Spencer
- Thomas Kinkade, a populist artist and the self-proclaimed “painter of light,” died on April 6, 2012, at age 54. His early influences were Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney. Kinkade believed that his artistic ambition was one that he shared with Disney: to inspire happiness through the dissemination of rosy-toned images of a bucolic American past
- Hilton Kramer, the controversial art critic who championed his particular definition of modernism, died on March 27, 2012. He was 84 years old. Kramer’s career was kick-started by his impassioned rebuttal to Harold Rosenberg’s psychoanalytic theory of Abstract Expressionism. Kramer began writing regularly for Arts Digest (later renamed Arts) and was chief art critic for the New York Times before founding the decidedly more conservative New Criterion in 1982
- Sergio Larrain, a Chilean photographer and member of the Magnum Photos agency, passed away on February 7, 2012, at the age of 80. Larrain often captured his subjects in a “state of grace”: children playing in the street, a portrait of poet Pablo Neruda’s house, and a series of accidental photographs of a couple outside the Notre Dame Cathedral that became the inspiration for Julio Cortozar’s short story “Blow-Up”
- Mauricio Lasansky, an Argentine printmaker and draftsman remembered for his series The Nazi Drawings, died on April 2, 2012, at the age of 97. Lasansky established the printmaking department at the University of Iowa and bolstered the school’s reputation as a center for graphic arts. His attention to simple art materials (pencil, paper, water washes) and weighty subject matter singled him out as an innovator in his field
- Simon Marsden, a British photographer noted for his Romantic subject matter and an attraction to the spectral dimensions of architecture and landscapes, died on January 22, 2012, at the age of 63., A keen critic of consumer culture and other ills of modernity, Marsden published twelve books of photography and inspired album-cover art by the rock band U2
- Ralph McQuarrie, a conceptual designer who worked on the Star Wars trilogy as a primary illustrator and set designer, died on March 3, 2012, at the age of 82. McQuarrie’s rich sense of science fiction and fantasy aided him in subsequent work on the Battlestar Galactica television series and on the films E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Cocoon, for which he won an Academy Award
- Brett Miller, the general counsel for the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, died on April 14, 2012, aged 47. After joining the Barnes in 2009, Miller played a key role in the foundation’s move from Merion, Pennsylvania, to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia. His background as a curator made him a strong candidate for the high-profile position at the foundation
- Jackson L. Narcomey, a Native American painter and printmaker and a member of the Muskogee Creek tribe, passed away on March 22, 2012, at the age of 70. Born in Oklahoma, Narcomey came to prominence in his community during the late 1960s for his oil paintings of tribal legends
- Christopher Powell, a British architectural historian noted for his work on the architecture of Wales, passed away on March 9, 2012, at age 70. In addition to his work as a professor at the Welsh School of Architecture, Powell established the Construction History Society and served as editor of the society’s academic journal
- Kenneth Price, an artist who helped bridge the gap between ceramics and sculpture with his shockingly vibrant clay vessels, died at his home in Taos, New Mexico, on February 24, 2012. He was 77 years old. A native of Los Angeles, Price had several high profile shows in the 1960s at the Ferus Gallery, famed for its stable of Pop artists. A retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is scheduled to open in fall 2012
- Leonard Rosoman, a British painter, graphic artist, and longtime professor at the Royal College of Art in London, died on February 21, 2012, at the age of 98. During World War II he was appointed official war artist, an assignment that dispatched him to dangerous scenes of conflict to record what he saw. Rosoman’s work as a visual artist extended to exhibition design, most notably working on the Sergei Diaghilev exhibition in London in 1954
- Al Ross, a cartoonist at the New Yorker for over sixty years, passed away on March 25, 2012. He was 100 years old. Born in Romania, Ross began his career in the 1930s working alongside his four brothers at the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s before joining the New Yorker in 1937. His arch sensibility and educated silliness were illustrated by sketchy line drawings of arguing couples, animals, therapists, and other denizens of the magazine’s cartoon universe.
- Paul Rudall, a British artist, teacher, and illustrator, died on February 10, 2012, at the age of 91. Rudall served as the head art teacher at Chiswick Grammar School and Dudley Grammar School, where he influenced several generations of students. Since retiring from teaching in 1980, he lived in Bath, England and exhibited his oil paintings across the United Kingdom and in Germany
- Charlie Stagg, an eccentric Texan artist, died on February 20, 2012, at the age of 72. Stagg attended Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia but chose to live and work as an outsider artist in the A. V. Stagg Art Studio and Wildlife Preserve, a “folk-art style, glass bottle and cement home,” where visitors were always welcome
- Anita Steckel, a painter and feminist activist who worked under the radar for many decades, died on March 16, 2012, at the age of 82. Steckel was a self-proclaimed enemy of “good taste in art” who fought for the rights of women artists. She faced criticism and censorship for a series of erotic paintings that she exhibited in 1973
- Eduard Steinberg, a Paris-based, Russian avant-garde painter who created mystical, geometric abstractions, died on March 28, 2012, at the age of 75. His childhood home in Tarus, a town near Moscow, was a meeting ground for artists and poets who were persecuted during Stalin’s regime. Steinberg saw his work as a synthesis of Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism, Russian icon painting, and personal religious belief
- Barry Walker, a former curator of prints and drawings at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, died on April 18, 2012, at the age of 67. Walker joined the museum in 1991 and was instrumental in establishing the print and drawing department and boosting the museum’s modern and contemporary art collection. Popular shows he organized at the museum include Alice Neel: Painted Truths (2010) and Singular Multiples: The Peter Blum Edition Archive, 1980–1994 (2006)
- Eric Watson, a British rock-and-roll photographer with an artful eye, noted for his work with the Pet Shop Boys, died on March 18, 2012, at the age of 56. In the 1970s and 1980s Watson’s images were published in the magazine Smash Hits, and he also directed music videos influenced by art photography, such as Robert Mapplethorpe’s. Watson’s work, transcending its original pop origins, is now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, both in London
- Isabel Brown Wilson, a Texan philanthropist who was a prominent figure in Houston’s art scene, died on March 27, 2012, at the age of 80. Wilson was a life trustee and chairman of the board of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Through her family’s charitable trust, the Brown Foundation, she helped to raise the museum’s endowment, to enlarge the collection, and to ensure the institution’s future stability
- Donald Young, a noted Chicagoan art dealer, passed away on April 16, 2012, at the age of 69. Born in England, Young lived in Paris and New York before opening the Young-Hoffman Gallery, with Rhona Hoffman, in Chicago in 1976. Their gallery championed Conceptual and Minimal art; when it was later renamed the Donald Young Gallery, he showed video art by Bruce Nauman, Bill Viola, and Rodney Graham
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 May listing.
Revised Procedures for Task Forces
posted by Christopher Howard — April 23, 2012
At its February meeting, the CAA Board of Directors approved a revised statement on the formation of task forces. The Revised Procedures for Task Forces (2012) added the step of the Executive Committee’s review and prioritization of all task-force proposals prior to their presentation to the board for discussion and approval. The revision will ensure the streamlining of the task-force approval process.
The board periodically establishes task forces to gather information and provide recommendations concerning areas of importance to the organization. Any CAA member may suggest the formation of a task force by sending a request to develop a proposal to the board president or to the chair of a standing committee. Once the board adopts a resolution establishing the task force, the task-force chair will work with the executive director to determine staff involvement, frequency of meetings, and division of responsibilities for the team. The task force will prepare a report based on its research to the board and may also recommend additional work to be undertaken to complete its task.
New CAA Standards and Guidelines on the Fair Use of Images
posted by Christopher Howard — April 17, 2012
In accordance with CAA’s practice to regularly update its Standards and Guidelines in the fields of art and art history, the Board of Directors adopted two documents at its meeting on February 26, 2012, that address fair use of visual resources in teaching, scholarship, and libraries.
Christine Sundt, editor of the journal Visual Resources and cochair of CAA’s Committee on Intellectual Property, presented the Statement on the Fair Use of Images for Teaching, Research, and Study, authored and published by the Visual Resources Association (VRA) in 2011, and the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries, produced by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) in 2012.
Fair Use of Images for Teaching, Research, and Study
Visual Resources Association: Statement on the Fair Use of Images for Teaching, Research, and Study is a helpful tool for educators and scholars who rely on images for teaching, research, publishing, and other academic work. The statement describes the six uses of images that fall within the doctrine of fair use according to United States copyright law: the use of images for the purpose of teaching; the preservation and transferring of images from one format to another; the creation of online image resources for students; the use of images by students in the context of the classroom; the sharing of images among cultural or educational institutions; and the inclusion of images in theses and dissertations.
The statement is intended to instill confidence in the scholarly community by clarifying the many educational and academic contexts to which fair use can be applied. The statement, reviewed by a committee of legal experts and copyright scholars who have determined the accuracy of each example of fair use, is by no means exhaustive on the subject of fair use, and it only addresses copyright laws within the United States.
Fair Use of Images for Academic and Research Libraries
The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries (2012) describes eight examples of common library practices that are affected by the rules of copyright and fair use. Because the prevalence of digital technologies in higher education has changed the way in which students and faculty use libraries and offer access to academic coursework, the code urges institutions to clarify and update research database systems and to transfer archive material deemed as “at risk items” into a digital format. The code also discusses the need to reproduce library material for disabled students and faculty without bias.
Like the VRA statement, the ARL code does not claim to cover the topic of fair use exhaustively. Rather, its objective is to expand understanding and engagement with copyright laws for librarians and library users. The code was created through the process of interviewing sixty-five librarians across the United States who represented a wide spectrum of academic and research libraries.
April 2012 Picks from CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — April 16, 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 April 2012 include exhibitions from all over the United States and Europe. Kate Gilmore shows new videos at David Castillo Gallery in Miami, the city in which the German-born artist Dara Friedman filmed her most recent work, Dancer, which makes its debut at CAM Raleigh in North Carolina. Other April picks include exhibitions of new work by Sturtevant in Stockholm, Sarah Braman in Los Angeles, and Jacqueline Humphries in New York, as well as a retrospective of paintings and works on paper by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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: Kate Gilmore, Rock, Hard, Place, 2012, high-definition color video with sound, 11:15 min. (artwork © Kate Gilmore; photograph provided by David Castillo Gallery)
Strengthening Partnerships with CAA’s Affiliated Societies
posted by Christopher Howard — April 09, 2012
The following report was written by Barbara Nesin, president of the CAA Board of Directors, and Judith Thorpe, also a board member.
The third annual meeting of CAA’s affiliated societies was held during the 100th Annual Conference in Los Angeles on Saturday, February 25, 2012. Twenty representatives from the affiliates joined the CAA president, Barbara Nesin, and members of the Board of Directors to review the accomplishments of the past year and to discuss future directions.
Nesin took this opportunity to announce the formation of a Task Force on Affiliated Societies, approved by the board at its October 2011 meeting. Starting in May 2012, the task force will develop recommendations about the best means of working together to achieve common goals and objectives. She thanked Judith Thorpe, a CAA board member, for leading that effort and for assembling a team of committed board members to serve on the task force. Thorpe reviewed the highlights of CAA’s 2010–2015 Strategic Plan that specifically call for affiliated-society engagement, especially through enhanced communications, advocacy, and membership. Nesin also thanked Jean Miller, another CAA board member, for her preliminary research on which the task force can build. The task force will likely conduct a membership survey before making its recommendations.
Nesin also noted the contributions of the affiliates to the Los Angeles conference. There were twenty-three major affiliate-sponsored sessions reviewed and selected by the Annual Conference Committee, in addition to over seventy special sessions and business meetings providing many opportunities for all CAA members to become familiar with the work of the affiliate organizations.
Nesin encouraged greater collaboration between CAA and the affiliates in the future to include activities beyond the conference, currently the center of affiliate activities. With this in mind, a spreadsheet of all affiliated-society conferences and meetings throughout the year was distributed so that CAA board members could plan to attend more of these events. This year CAA participated in the Southeastern College Art Conference, the annual meeting for the Mid-America College Art Association, and the Society for Photographic Education national conference. CAA staff has also increased communications with affiliated-society representatives by making use of the affiliate listserv and by inviting input on a variety of topics. By the same token, Nesin encouraged the affiliates to nominate their members for service on CAA’s committees and board. Those in attendance had the opportunity to ask questions and to share suggestions.
The homepage for the main CAA website was enhanced with an Affiliated Societies tab on the horizontal navigation bar that links directly to the Directory of Affiliated Societies. Each affiliated-society listing contains a link to its own website. Nesin pointed out the importance of keeping the contact information for each organization up to date to be sure that information goes to the right person, who is in turn responsible for sharing information with the leadership and/or members of his or her organization. To keep the directory current, CAA annually seeks updates and solicits announcements and news from the groups every two months; these items appear in the Affiliated Society News section of the CAA website, which is promoted through CAA News.
CAA’s seventy-five affiliated societies, covering a wide range of disciplines, are essential partners in the fulfillment of the organization’s mission to promote the visual arts and their understanding through committed practice and intellectual engagement.
Audio Recordings from the 2012 Annual Conference
posted by Christopher Howard — April 02, 2012
The 2012 Annual Conference in Los Angeles boasted an incredibly diverse array of sessions. Audio recordings for eighty-three of the panels—including “Picturing Urban Space in Central Europe since 1839,” “Oleg Grabar’s Impact on the Practice and History of Art,” and the two-part “Mobile Art: The Aesthetics of Mobile Network Culture in Place Making”—are now available for sale.
A set of MP3 audio recordings from the Los Angeles conference is available for $199.95 as a DVD-ROM. Individual sessions, available only as downloads, are $24.95 each. Please visit Conference Media to view the list of sessions and to order.
The full range of art history is represented in sessions such as “Exceeding the Limits of Ancient Rome,” “Narrative in Gothic Art,” and “The Interconnected Tenth Century.” Several sessions focus on art and design in the conference city, including “Finish Fetish Sculpture from Los Angeles 1960s–70s: Conservation Dilemmas” and “Pacific Standard Time and Chicano Art: A New Los Angeles Art History.” Topics about contemporary art range from “Flagging: Aesthetic Tactics and Queer Signification” and “Momentum: Women/Art/Technology” to “Conceptual Art as Comedic Practice” and “Toward a Rock and Roll History of Contemporary Art.”
CAA also recorded two popular Centennial sessions: “Seeing Is Doing, Doing Is Teaching,” chaired by Michael Ned Holte, and “‘Reclaiming’ the Studio as a Site of Production,” led by Patty Wickman. Both curators and museum educators will be especially interested in “Live Forever: Performance Art in the Changing Museum Culture” and “‘Your Labels Make Me Feel Stupid’: Museum Labels as Art-Historical Practice.”
Whether you took part in, attended, or missed a particular conference session, these recordings are a must-have for your library, research, or teaching. Listen to them while walking across campus, while driving in your car or using public transportation, or while relaxing in your home.
In addition to the Los Angeles sessions, you can also purchase recordings from the past six conferences: New York (2011), Chicago (2010), Los Angeles (2009), Dallas–Fort Worth (2008), New York (2007), and Boston (2006). See CAA’s Conference Audio section or visit Conference Media for details.