CAA News Today
CAA Names the Recipients of the Getty-Funded International Travel Grants
posted by Christopher Howard — January 23, 2012
CAA has awarded travel grants to twenty art historians and artists from around the world who will convene in Los Angeles to attend and participate in the 100th Annual Conference, taking place February 22–25, 2012. The CAA International Travel Grant Program was made possible by a generous grant from the Getty Foundation.
At the conference, the twenty recipients will participate in mentoring activities and other events planned in connection with the grant. Members of CAA’s International Committee have agreed to host the participants, and the National Committee for the History of Art will also lend support to the program.
This travel-grant program is intended to familiarize international professionals with the Annual Conference program, including the session participation process. CAA accepted applications from art historians, artists who teach art history, and art historians who are museum curators; those from developing countries or from nations not well represented in CAA’s membership were especially encouraged to apply. In late 2011, a jury of CAA members selected the final twenty awardees, whose names, home institutions, and primary areas of scholarly and professional interest are as follows:
- Salam Atta Sabri, Director, National Museum of Modern Art, Baghdad, Iraq. Atta Sabri conducts research on missing works of art from Iraq and is also a ceramic artist
- Parul Pandya Dhar, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Delhi, Delhi, India. Dhar focuses on the history of Indian art and architecture to 1300 CE, cultural interactions in South and Southeast Asia, the visual arts and visual archives as sources of history, performing arts, and the historiography of Indian art
- Federico Freschi, Associate Professor, History of Art, Wits School of Arts, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Freschi’s work explores South African modern art and architecture and postcolonial identity politics
- Rosa Gabriella de Castro Gonçalves, Professor of Art Theory and Aesthetics, Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador, Brazil. Gonçalves is interested in the role of modernism in recent debates in art theory
- Angela Harutyunyan, Assistant Professor, Department of Fine Arts and Art History, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon. Harutyunyan is interested in methodologies of reading and historicizing contemporary art and studies the political aesthetics of the Armenian avant-garde
- Gyöngyvér Horváth, Assistant Professor of Art History, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest, Hungary. Horváth studies the historiography of narrative painting
- Didier Houenoude, Assistant Professor, Université d’Abomey-Calavi, Cotonou, Benin. Houenoude teaches art history and drawing and closely follows contemporary art in Benin
- Nadhra Shahbaz Naeem Khan, Visiting Faculty, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan. Khan’s work focuses on Sikh art and architecture
- Irena Kossowska, Professor of Art History, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland. Kossowska works on national identity in Central Europe as reflected in the visual arts and also researches nineteenth- and twentieth-century European art
- Jean Celestin Ky, Professor of Art History, University of Ouagadougou, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Celestin researches African art and works with the National Museum of Burkina Faso in conserving and promoting contemporary art
- Pavlína Morganová, Researcher and Professor, Academy of Fine Arts, Prague, Czech Republic. Morganová works on contemporary art
- Cristian Nae, PhD Lecturer, Department of Art History and Theory, Faculty of Fine Arts, George Enescu University of Arts, Iaşi, Romania. Nae examines post–World War II art history, critical theory, hermeneutics, and cultural studies
- Judy Peter, Lecturer, Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture, and Head, Department of Jewellery Design and Manufacture, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa. Peter works in art history, theory, cultural and postcolonial studies, the history of jewellery. She is also interested in curriculum development in the context of a neoliberal South Africa
- Daniel Premerl, Research Associate, Institute of Art History, Zagreb, Croatia. Premerl is interested in Renaissance and Baroque art and art-historical methodology
- Malvina Rousseva, Professor, Institute of Art Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria. Rousseva pursues research in archaeology, Thracian tombs and temples, interdisciplinary studies, architectural history, cultural and visual studies, and philosophy
- Ganna Rudyk, Deputy Director General of Research, Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko Museum of Arts, Kyiv, Ukraine. Rudyk is a specialist in Islamic art who presents Islamic and generally non-Western art to broad publics
- Dóra Sallay, Curator of Italian Painting, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, Hungary. Sallay works with thirteenth- to sixteenth-century Italian art, in particular Sienese painting, the history of collecting and museums, and the history of the reception of Gothic and Renaissance painting
- Olabisi Silva, Director, Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, Nigeria. Silva is working on the first roaming African art academy, placing equal emphasis on artistic practice, art history, critical thinking, and curatorial practice
- Shao-Chien Tseng, Associate Professor of Art History, Graduate Institute of Art Studies, National Central University, Jhongli City, Taiwan. A specialist in nineteenth-century French art, Tseng is interested in modern art and natural history, landscape painting and photography, and postcolonialism and Taiwanese art
- Jagath Weerasinghe, Director and Professor, Postgraduate Institute of Archaeology, Colombo, Sri Lanka. Trained in fine arts, archeology, and conservation, Weerasinghe recently established his country’s first graduate program in art history, which will offer postgraduate diplomas and master of arts degrees in art history, focusing primarily on Asian art
CAA hopes that this travel grant will not only increase international participation in the organization’s activities, but will also expand international networking and the exchange of ideas. The Getty Foundation grant allows CAA to expand greatly the participation of international colleagues beyond its regular program of Annual Conference Travel Grants for graduate students and international artists and scholars.
Registration Deadline Extended for CAA’s 100th Annual Conference
posted by Christopher Howard — January 23, 2012
Advance registration for CAA’s 100th Annual Conference, taking place February 22–25, 2012, at the Los Angeles Convention Center, has been extended to Monday, January 30, 2012. This is also your last chance to purchase advance tickets for special events and workshops.
Registration
Advance registration ends on Monday, January 30, 2012.
- Members: $235
- Student and retired members: $135
- Nonmembers: $365
Special Events
Join us for a variety of special events including CAA’s Centennial Reception at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Tours to the Getty Villa and the Getty Center, An Evening at UCLA, as well as the Santa Monica and Venice Art Tour!
Workshops
Looking to advance your career? This year’s conference will include a bevy of professional-development workshops designed specifically for artists, art historians, and professionals in the visual arts. Workshops address topics such securing tenure, job hunting, and much more! Workshop space is limited, so book your place today! Each workshop costs $45.
Hotel Discounts
Have you booked your accommodation yet? Conference attendees can also take advantage of substantial discounts on rooms at the JW Marriott Los Angeles LA Live, just steps away from the Los Angeles Convention Center. The Westin Bonaventure, the Millennium Biltmore, and the Figueroa Hotel also offer discounts to conference attendees.
Recipients of the 2012 Awards for Distinction
posted by Christopher Howard — January 18, 2012
CAA has announced the recipients of the 2012 Awards for Distinction, which honor the outstanding achievements and accomplishments of individual artists, art historians, authors, conservators, curators, and critics whose efforts transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.
CAA will formally recognize the recipients at a special awards ceremony during the 100th Annual Conference in Los Angeles, on Thursday afternoon, February 23, 2012, 12:30–2:00 PM, at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Led by Barbara Nesin, president of the CAA Board of Directors, the awards ceremony will take place in West Hall Meeting Room 502AB, Level 2; it is free and open to the public. The Los Angeles Convention Center is located downtown, at 1201 South Figueroa Street adjacent to the Staples Center.
The 2012 Annual Conference—presenting scholarly sessions, panel discussions, professional-development workshops, a Book and Trade Fair, and more—is the largest gathering of artists, art historians, students, and arts professionals in the United States.
David Hammons, Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
The innovative, far-ranging work of David Hammons is central to the history of postwar art in all its complexities. For the past five decades, Hammons has ingeniously blurred boundaries separating sculpture, Conceptual art, performance, and installation. Through a restless hybridization of practices, he has explored many timely and urgent contemporary issues, commenting on the civil rights movement, racial stereotyping, institutional exclusion, and the commodification of artistic identity. Hammons is not only one of the great political artists of our time, but also a crafter of careful assemblage and canny composition, creating irreverent, sometimes scathing works that are as formally riveting as they are incisive.
Adrian Piper, Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work
Since the late 1960s, the provocative and often challenging work of Adrian Piper has profoundly influenced the language and form of Conceptual art. Her 2010 exhibition Past Time: Selected Works 1973–1995, presented at Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York, showcased several bodies of work that dealt with dissent in varying forms and represented a period of time widely considered as her most influential. Piper’s artistic practice flirts with the syntax of Minimalism and infuses it with explicitly political content, addressing issues of race, gender, and identity politics. Additionally, her work has been shaped by studies in philosophy, a subject on which she has lectured since earning a doctorate in the discipline thirty years ago. A keen interlocutor of mass culture, Piper has produced art and writing that makes us question our constantly shifting contemporary social landscape.
Lucy R. Lippard, Distinguished Feminist Award
For more than five decades, the critic, activist, and curator Lucy R. Lippard has been a consistent, passionate, and influential advocate of feminist art. A prolific author first honored by CAA in 1975 with the Frank Jewett Mather Award, she is known for her concise, accessible, and lucid prose that brings feminist perspectives to bear on a wide scope of art and activism—from Eva Hesse (1976) to The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art (1995). Lippard’s curatorial efforts—such as c. 7,500 (1973), the groundbreaking all-woman exhibition of Conceptual art—have also been vital to the feminist art movement and offered some of the earliest considerations of global feminisms. Throughout her life, she has modeled a complex, ever-changing point of view as it intersects with progressive notions of art and politics.
Allan Sekula, Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Allan Sekula has devoted his life as an artist to writing, photography, installation, and film. While his multidisciplinary approach to problems of representation and politics has earned him accolades as an artist, his writings have helped students, scholars, and the public to think critically about interventions in the political and social realities of our world. The essays collected in his first book, Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–83 (1984), significantly altered the way in which the documentary function of photography was conceptualized. His more recent volumes—such as Fish Story (1995), Titanic’s Wake (2003), and Performance under Working Conditions (2003)—mobilize us through his vision and words to carefully consider the effects of capitalism, globalization, information formats, and the dematerialization of image and word.
David Antin, Frank Jewett Mather Award
David Antin has been a singular, combative voice in art criticism since the mid 1960s. His Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature 1966 to 2005 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) demonstrates his sustained critical commitment, constant formal experimentation, and a style of thought and expression that is unique to both the visual arts and poetry. The essays and “talking poems” in Radical Coherency display a no-nonsense, skeptical intelligence squaring off firsthand with the work of artists—many of them his contemporaries—who were bent on radically transforming art, from Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol to the artists of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 1971 exhibition Art and Technology.
Alexander Nagel, Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Alexander Nagel’s The Controversy of Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) is a compelling reexamination of the key paradoxes that define this era and the works associated with it. Guided in part by sixteenth-century religious history and the writings of historians of that era, Nagel positions sixteenth-century art making in the realm of the experimental, a vantage also in concert with the efforts of the religious reformers concerned with ritual and devotional practices usually associated with the Middle Ages. A breakthrough volume that makes significant contributions to scholarship on sixteenth-century Italian art, Nagel’s book compels art historians more generally to reconsider “standard” interpretations of many canonical monuments of the periods in which they are working.
Maryan W. Ainsworth, Stijn Alsteens, and Nadine M. Orenstein, Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2010) is a “summa” of Maryan Ainsworth’s decades-long exploration of the artistic legacy of this place and time. Using a variety of methods—technical analysis, connoisseurship, archival research, biography, iconography, and sustained attention to each object—she and the other authors place Gossart at the center of a rich world of intertwined relationships. Together they reveal the artist’s groundbreaking engagement with Rome and antiquity, his intent study of architecture and sculpture, his carefully crafted experimentation in a variety of media, and his amazing versatility as a painter of religious scenes, mythological subjects, and innovative portraits over a long career. The book is also significant for the insightful way in which it situates Gossart among his contemporaries, including the painters Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach, the sculptor Conrad Meit, and the patron and connoisseur Philip of Burgundy.
Roy Flukinger, Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions
With The Gernsheim Collection (Austin: Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas Press, 2010), Roy Flukinger has crafted an exceptional catalogue of the Helmut and Alison Gernsheim Collection, one of the earliest and most comprehensive collections of photography in the world. One hundred and twenty-six items are beautifully illustrated and analyzed in readable, absorbing prose that traces the story of the couple’s achievements as sleuths, gatherers, connoisseurs, photographers, devotees, and champions, while at the same time recognizing and examining their (sometimes controversial) role as architects of the study of photography. Contributions by Alison Nordstrom and Mark Haworth-Booth illuminate the role this collection has played in the history of photography as well as the Gernsheims’ commitment to the medium as a form of fine art. In this way, the book considers the process (in addition to the underlying principles, assumptions, and implications) of canon formulation in an emerging discipline.
Jacki Apple, Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
For the past twenty-eight years, Jacki Apple has provided students at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, with a dynamic, inspiring, and evolving model of the possibilities and rewards of an interdisciplinary practice. An artist, writer, and producer, she has produced work in multiple modes—performance, installation, drawing, book art, photography, film, radio, text, and audio—and presciently engages the opportunities afforded by new technologies. Praised by students and colleagues alike for her intelligence, generosity, enthusiasm, and critical discernment, Apple adeptly bridges various disciplines using a wide scope of knowledge about contemporary culture and technology and a depth of understanding about the history and practice of the visual and performing arts. A gifted communicator, Apple is exceptionally effective in encouraging students to think for themselves.
Gabriel P. Weisberg, Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
Gabriel P. Weisberg’s distinguished teaching record—which includes faculty positions at the University of New Mexico, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Pittsburgh, Case Western Reserve University, and the University of Minnesota, where he is currently a professor in the Department of Art History—spans nearly half a century. His students, both graduate and undergraduate, praise his presentation of art as a dynamic interplay among culture, aesthetics, and human experience, revealed through direct examination of works of art in the context of primary historical documentation. Weisberg’s varied and distinguished background as a historian, curator, and administrator seamlessly integrates academic and museum realms, and his scholarship has shaped the discipline of nineteenth-century art history in a profound way.
Francesca G. Bewer, CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
Francesca G. Bewer, research curator in the Harvard Art Museums’ Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, is an exemplary technical art historian. An expert in the materials and techniques of European Renaissance and Baroque bronze sculpture, she trained as both an art historian, at University College London, and as a conservator, at Palazzo Spinelli in Florence. A highly valued teacher and lecturer, Bewer has published a steady stream of superb texts in conservation and art-historical journals, exhibition catalogues, and monographs. She also recently authored a book on the history of conservation, A Laboratory for Art: Harvard’s Fogg Museum and the Emergence of Conservation in America, 1900–1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museum; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
Rebecca Molholt, Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Rebecca Molholt’s article “Roman Labyrinth Mosaics and the Experience of Motion,” published in the September 2011 issue of The Art Bulletin, is an imaginative study of seven North African mosaics that were once floors in Roman bathhouses. She introduces a fresh methodology for their assessment, building on a distinction that Walter Benjamin drew between “vertical and horizontal forms of viewing.” Moholt argues that mosaics have long been read as if they were vertical easel paintings rather than understood as “materials underfoot,” which are experienced while kinetically moving over their horizontal surfaces. She uncovers a metaphoric reading of these mosaics that relates the labyrinths, their subject matter, and architectural context—the Roman bath—to athleticism and heroism.
Art Journal Award
An article by the online journal Triple Canopy, authored primarily by Colby Chamberlain of Columbia University, has won the 2012 Art Journal Award. The text, called “The Binder and the Server,” appears in the Winter 2011 issue.
Contact
For more information on the 2012 Awards for Distinction, please contact Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs. Visit the Awards section of the CAA website to read about all past recipients.
CAA announced the shortlists for the 2012 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the two Alfred H. Barr Jr. Awards on December 2, 2011.
January Picks from CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — January 11, 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 America and around the world.
The CWA Picks for January 2012 include five solo shows of women artists at museums and galleries across the United States. The Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, presents Jenny Saville, and the Tufts University Art Gallery in Medford, Massachusetts, will exhibit the work of Nancy Holt. Cathy Wilkes is on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the Harold B. Lemmerman Gallery of New Jersey City University in Jersey City has organized a survey of Margaret Murphy’s work. Last, Zoe Strauss receives a midcareer retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania.
In California, the performance artists Andrea Fraser and Vaginal Davis will stage one-day events for Pacific Standard Time’s Performance and Public Art Festival, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is presenting an exhibition of work created between 1931 and 1968 by female Surrealist artists living in the United States and 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: Jenny Saville, Stare, 2004–5, oil on canvas, 120⅛ x 98½ in. Collection of the Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica (artwork © Jenny Saville)
Art Journal Publishes New Issue
posted by Christopher Howard — January 10, 2012
The Fall 2011 issue of Art Journal, CAA’s quarterly of modern and contemporary art, was published and mailed in late December. A benefit of CAA membership, the journal is sent to those individual members who elect to receive it and to all institutional members.
The issue opens with a state-of-the-field essay by Krista Thompson, “A Sidelong Glance: The Practice of African Diaspora Art History in the United States.” The third of four Centennial essays commissioned with funds from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Thompson’s study offers an extraordinary range of reference and comprehensive citations that suggest it will be highly useful to historians, students, and artists alike. The art historian Amelia Jones organized a forum for the issue, “Performance, Live or Dead,” with texts by the artists Ron Athey, Sharon Hayes, and William Pope.L, the historians Sven Lütticken and Branislav Jakovljević, and the curators Sophia Yadong Hao and Helena Reckitt. Each writer considers the phenomenon of reenactment, which has been prominent in the performance art of recent years.
The cover essay, Miwako Tezuka’s “Experimentation and Tradition: The Avant-Garde Play Pierrot Lunaire by Jikken Kōbō and Takechi Tetsuji,” examines the 1955 collaboration of vanguard visual and performing artists in Tokyo on a staging of Arnold Schoenberg’s song cycle Pierrot Lunaire. Tezuka sees the production, little known in the West until now, as a major catalyst in the reinvigoration of new arts following destitution and stagnation in postwar Japan.
A final feature considers broadcast radio as a medium for public art. Sarah Kanouse’s “Take It to the Air: Radio as Public Art” explores works by Jon Brumit, Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga, and the collective LIGNA to emphasize the surprising ways in which they treat radio as a participatory, two-way medium. The Art Journal website includes audio and video documentation that complements the printed piece.
The Reviews section includes Lisa Florman’s assessment of the Guggenheim exhibition catalogue Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–36; Jaleh Mansoor on Rosalyn Deutsch’s Hiroshima after Iraq: Three Studies in Art and War; and Lara Weibgen’s analysis of Boris Groys’s History Becomes Firm: Moscow Conceptualism. Available both in print and online is Robert Slifkin’s review of two recent books and an exhibition on the artist Paul Thek.
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — December 19, 2011
In its regular roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, curators, collectors, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. Of special note is a text on Nancy Shelby Schuller, a curator of visual resources, published on the CAA website.
- Jerry W. Bates, a photographer who managed the Graphics Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University for thirty years, passed away on September 9, 2011. He was 63
- Adrian Berg, a British landscape painter and member of the Royal Academy who was inspired by Claude Monet, died on October 22, 2011, at the age of 82. The Serpentine Gallery in London hosted a survey of his work in 1986
- Peter Campbell, a writer, editor, illustrator, and book designer who served as the resident art critic and designer for the London Review of Books for more than thirty years, died on October 25, 2011. He was 74 years old
- Manon Cleary, a realist painter and influential professor of art based in Washington, DC, known primarily for her frankly autobiographical subject matter, passed away on November 26, 2011, at age 69. The Washington Arts Museum hosted a retrospective of her work in 2006
- Benjamin “Ben” Day, who taught graphic design and visual communications at Louisiana Tech University, Missouri State University, Boston University, and Virginia Commonwealth University, died on July 14, 2011. He was 68
- Vittorio de Seta, an Italian filmmaker and screenwriter whose work was celebrated in a 2006 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, died on November 29, 2011. He was 88
- Norton T. Dodge, a professor of Soviet economics at the University of Maryland and St. Mary’s College of Maryland and the owner of the world’s largest collection of Soviet dissident art, now housed at Rutgers University, died on November 5, 2011. He was 84
- Alan Haydon, an arts administrator who served on Arts Council England and the London Arts Board, died on October 9, 2011, at age 61. He also directed the De La Warr Pavillion, a contemporary art center in East Sussex, from 1999 to 2011
- Mary Hunt Kahlenberg, an authority on antique and ethnographic textiles and a former curator and head of the Department of Costume and Textiles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, died on October 27, 2011. She was 71 years old
- Keo Kinal, a Cambodian archaeologist at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, died on November 13, 2011. Born in 1973, he had taught the history of art and architecture after finishing a master’s degree at the Tokyo National University of the Arts
- Gerald Laing, an English Pop artist active in New York who depicted current events and celebrities such as Kate Moss and Amy Winehouse in large-scale painting and sculpture, passed away on November 23, 2011. He was 75
- Jon Lovelace, a financier, philanthropist, and a founding board member of the California Institute of the Arts, died on November 16, 2011. He was 84 years old
- Cargill MacMillan Jr., an heir to the Cargill family’s agricultural business and a benefactor who gifted many works to the Palm Springs Arts Museum in California, died on November 14, 2011, at the age of 84
- William McKeown, an Irish painter of ethereal abstractions who represented Northern Ireland in the 2005 Venice Biennale, died on October 25, 2011. He was 49
- Pat Passlof, an artist of the New York School, the wife of the painter Milton Resnick, and a longtime faculty member of the College of Staten Island, died on November 13, 2011. She was 83
- Nancy Shelby Schuller, who spent thirty-four years as curator of the Visual Resources Collection at the University of Texas at Austin, died on November 8, 2011, at age 71. CAA has published a special text on her
- Dugald Stermer, an illustrator, designer, and teacher who served as art director for the left-wing magazine Ramparts in the 1960s and later as chairman of the Department of Illustration at California College of the Arts, died on December 2, 2011. He was 74
- Bruno Weber, a Swiss architect and sculptor known for his multimedia sculpture park in Dietikon, Switzerland, died on October 24, 2011. He was 80 years old
- George Whitman, the New Jersey–born founder and owner of Shakespeare & Company, a celebrated bookstore in Paris, died on December 14, 2011, at the age of 98
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 January listing.
April Greiman Will Speak at the Annual Members’ Business Meeting
posted by Christopher Howard — December 13, 2011
April Greiman, an innovative designer whose work with digital technology freed graphic design and typography from its reliance on the modernist grid, helping push an analogue profession into the digital realm, will speak at CAA’s upcoming Annual Members’ Business Meeting.
Born and raised in New York, Greiman attended the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri. She completed graduate studies with the designers Armin Hoffman and Wolfgang Weingart at the Allgemeine Kunstgewerbeschule (General Arts Trade School) in Basel, Switzerland, an early 1970s hotbed for the emerging “new wave” aesthetic. Greiman’s early visual identity and publication projects—especially her experimental issue of Design Quarterly in 1986—were notable for their pioneering use of early Apple Macintosh computers and software, and for their radical combination of video and print technologies.
As head of the design studio Made in Space, Greiman consults in transmedia identity and architectural branding, and with color, surfaces, and materials. In the academic sphere, she has taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and the California Institute of the Arts, where she led the design program in the 1980s and served as chair of Visual Communications in the 1990s. She is the author of several books on design, including Hybrid Imagery: The Fusion of Technology and Graphic Design (1990) and Something from Nothing: Design Process (2001).
As a practicing fine artist, Greiman has produced work encompassing digital photography, video, installation design, and architecture. Her public projects in Los Angeles, where she has lived since 1976, include Poet’s Walk for Citicorp Plaza and the seven-story mural Hand Holding a Bowl of Rice at the entrance to the Wilshire Vermont Metro Station in Koreatown. Greiman’s digital photography and transmedia work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Pasadena Museum of California Art. Most recently, her work was included in the exhibition elles@centrepompidou at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Greiman has received numerous local, state, and national design awards, including a Hall Chair Fellowship from the Hallmark Corporation, a Gold Medal from the American Institute of Graphic Arts, a Chrysler Award for Innovation from the Chrysler Corporation, an AIGA Fellowship, and an American Institute of Architects Award.
CAA’s Annual Members’ Business Meeting will take place during the 100th Annual Conference on Friday, February 24, 2012, from 5:30 to 7:00 PM at Los Angeles Convention Center.
December Picks from CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — December 12, 2011
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts produces a curated list, called CWA Picks, of recommended exhibitions and events related to feminist art and scholarship in North America and around the world.
Leading off the CWA Picks for December 2011 is an exhibition at the Gibbes Museum of Art in South Carolina covering three hundred years of work by women artists such as Henrietta de Beaulieu Dering Johnston, who is considered the first female professional artist in America. Three solo shows in New York are also worth checking out: new photographs by Nan Goldin, sculptural installations from Sarah Sze, and a Sanja Iverković survey.
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: Henrietta de Beaulieu Dering Johnston, Henriette Charlotte Chastaigner (Mrs. Nathaniel Broughton), 1711, pastel on paper, 14 2/5 x 11 3/5 in. Gibbes Museum of Art, Gift of Victor A. Morawetz (artwork in the public domain)
Practice Your Interviewing Technique at the Los Angeles Conference
posted by Christopher Howard — December 09, 2011
Students and emerging professionals have the opportunity to sign up for a twenty-minute practice interview with a professional at the 2012 Annual Conference in Los Angeles. Organized by the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee, the Mock Interview Sessions give participants the chance to practice their interview skills one on one with a seasoned professional, improve their effectiveness during interviews, and hone their elevator speech. Interviewers also provide candid feedback on application packets.
Mock Interview Sessions are offered free of charge. Sessions are filled by appointment only and scheduled for Thursday, February 23, 10:00 AM–NOON and 4:00–6:00 PM; and Friday, February 24, 10:00 AM–NOON. Conference registration, while encouraged, is not necessary to participate.
To apply, download, complete, and send the Mock Interview Sessions form to Jennifer Stoneking-Stewart, chair of the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee. You may enroll in one twenty-minute session. Limited onsite enrollment is available for Thursday afternoon only. Onsite reservation starts on Wednesday afternoon, February 22, for spaces on Thursday, February 23, between 4:00 and 6:00 PM. Deadline: February 1, 2012.
You will be notified of your appointment day and time by email. Please bring your application packet, including cover letter, CV, and other materials related to jobs in your field. The Student and Emerging Professionals Committee will make every effort to accommodate all applicants; however, space is limited.
CAA Seeks Interviewers for the Mock Interview Sessions
posted by Christopher Howard — December 09, 2011
For the 2012 Annual Conference in Los Angeles, the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee seeks established professionals to volunteer as practice interviewers for the Mock Interview Sessions. Participating as an interviewer is an excellent way to serve the field and to assist with the professional development of the next generation of artists and scholars.
In these sessions, interviewers pose as a prospective employer, speaking with individuals in a scenario similar to the Interview Hall at the conference. Each session is composed of approximately 10–15 minutes of interview questions and a quick review of the application packet, followed by 5–10 minutes of candid feedback. Whenever possible, the committee matches interviewers and interviewees based on medium, discipline, or institution type (school, museum, nonprofit, etc.).
Interested candidates must prepared to give six successive twenty-minute interviews with feedback in a two-hour period on one or both of these days: Thursday, February 23, 10:00 AM–NOON and 4:00–6:00 PM; and Friday, February 24, 10:00 AM–NOON. Conference registration, while encouraged, is not required to be a mock interviewer. Art historians and studio artists should be tenured; critics, museum educators, and curators should have five years’ experience. You may volunteer for one, two, or all three Mock Interview Sessions.
Please send a brief letter of interest, your CV, and the days and times that you are available to Jennifer Stoneking-Stewart, chair of the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee. Deadline: January 18, 2012.
The Mock Interview Sessions are not intended as a screening process by institutions seeking new hires.