CAA News Today
The Women’s Caucus for Art Announces 2011 Lifetime Achievement Awards
posted by Christopher Howard — October 18, 2010
The Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA), a CAA affiliated society, has announced the 2011 recipients of its Lifetime Achievement Award: Beverly Buchanan, Diane Burko, Ofelia Garcia, Joan Marter, Carolee Schneemann, and Sylvia Sleigh. In addition, WCA has given the 2011 President’s Art and Activism Award to Maria Torres.
The awards ceremony will be held on Saturday, February 12, 2011, during the annual WCA and CAA conferences in New York. The awards ceremony, free and open to the public, will take place from 6:00 to 7:30 PM in the Beekman/Sutton rooms at the Hilton New York, followed by a ticketed gala from 8:00 to 10:00 PM at the nearby American Folk Art Museum. Called LIVE SPACE, the gala will include a walk-around gourmet dinner with three food stations and an open bar, as well as the opportunity to meet the award recipients, network with attendees, and tour the museum.
Ticket prices for LIVE SPACE are $75 for WCA members and $135 for nonmembers (Prices will increase after January 12). CAA members receive a special price of $120. All tickets include reserved seating at the awards presentation. For more information or to purchase tickets, please visit the WCA website.
Beverly Buchanan
Born in 1940, Beverly Buchanan began creating art at an early age. She received a bachelor’s degree in medical technology from Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, and then earned a master’s of science in parasitology and a master’s of public health degree, both from Columbia University. Rather than pursuing a degree in medicine, she decided to focus on making art. Buchanan studied at the Art Students League before moving to Georgia, where she still lives, dividing her time between there and Michigan. Her early sculptures were poured concrete and stone, and she has since worked in a variety of media, focusing on southern vernacular architecture. Buchanan is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award, and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. In addition, she was a Georgia Visual Arts honoree and a recipient of an Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and was honored with a Recognition Award by CAA’s Committee for Women in the Arts in 2005.
Diane Burko
A painter and photographer who resides in Philadelphia and Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Diane Burko has been involved in the feminist movement since the early 1970s. She is a founding member of WCA who also founded and organized the first multivenue feminist citywide art festival in Philadelphia, called “Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts, Past and Present,” also known as “Focus.” After that event, Burko continued her feminist commitment to the present day, serving on the WCA and CAA boards and on the Philadelphia Art Commission. She is now the chair of CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts. Burko has been recognized with fellowships from the Bellagio Center, the Terra Summer Residency in Giverny, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among many other honors. One of the first movers and shakers in the feminist art movement, Burko has not yet been fully recognized for her important contributions.
Ofelia Garcia
Ofelia Garcia is professor of art at William Paterson University, where she was dean of the College of the Arts and Communication for a decade. She earned her BA at Manhattanville College and her MFA at Tufts University, and was a Kent fellow at Duke University. Garcia has been on the art faculty at Boston College, a critic at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, director of the Print Center in Philadelphia, and president of the Atlanta College of Art and Rosemont College. Also a former president of WCA, Garcia has served on numerous boards, including those of CAA, the American Council on Education, and Haverford College; she was most recently board chair of the Jersey City Museum. Garcia now serves as vice chair of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, on the Hudson County Art Commission, and on the boards of the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions and Catholics for Choice.
Joan Marter
Joan Marter is distinguished professor of art history at Rutgers University. She received her PhD from the University of Delaware and has lectured and published widely. She is currently editor-in-chief of The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, a five-volume reference set forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2010. Marter serves as editor of Woman’s Art Journal, in print continuously for thirty-one years. She has published monographs on artists such as Alexander Calder and has written extensively about Abstract Expressionism and women artists. In 2004, she was inducted into the Alumni Wall of Fame at the University of Delaware. A former member of the CAA Board of Directors, Marter is currently president of the Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Carolee Schneemann
Carolee Schneemann is a multidisciplinary artist whose radical works in performance art, installation, film, and video are widely influential. The history of her imagery is characterized by research into archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos, and the body of the artist in dynamic relationship with the social body. Her involvement in collaborative groups includes the Judson Dance Theater, Experiments in Art and Technology, and many feminist organizations. Schneemann has exhibited her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and in New York at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Internationally, she has shown at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the Centre George Pompidou in Paris. Her recent multichannel video installation Precarious was presented at Tate Liverpool in September 2009. The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York in New Paltz presented a major retrospective in summer 2010.
Sylvia Sleigh
Born in 1916 in Wales, Sylvia Sleigh paints portraits in a realist style, informed by sources ranging from the Pre-Raphaelites to famous portraits throughout history. Her first solo exhibition was held in 1953 at the Kensington Art Gallery; her most recent, at I-20 Gallery in New York, closed in January 2010. She married the art critic Lawrence Alloway in 1954, with whom she became part of the London avant-garde. They later moved to the United States, where she continued painting and showing her work. In 1970, Sleigh became actively involved in feminism and started painting life-size nudes in her precise, realist style. She was active in many of the first women-artist-run galleries, including A.I.R. Gallery and Soho 20. Her work can be found in numerous major public and private collections. Sleigh was honored with CAA’s Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2008.
Maria Torres
Winner of the 2011 Presidents Art and Activism Award is Maria Torres, president and chief operations officer of the Point Community Development Corporation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to youth development and the cultural and economic revitalization of the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx in New York. The Point’s mission is to encourage the arts, local enterprise, responsible ecology, and “self-investment” in a community traditionally defined in terms of its poverty, crime rate, poor schools, and substandard housing. In 1993, Torres received a BS from Cornell University. That same year, she launched the Neighborhood Internship Bank for at-risk youth, the first employment service of its kind in the South Bronx, and established La Marqueta, an outdoor community market aimed at lowering the barriers to the marketplace for neighborhood entrepreneurs. In 1994, Torres worked with Paul Lipson, Mildred Ruiz, and Steven Sapp to found the Point. Recipient of Union Square Award in 1998, she served on the Board of the Bronx Charter School for the Arts from 2002 to 2009.
About the Awards
The WCA Lifetime Achievement Awards were first presented in 1979 in President Jimmy Carter’s Oval Office to Isabel Bishop, Selma Burke, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Past honorees have represented the full range of distinguished achievement in the visual arts, and this year’s awardees are no exception, with considerable accomplishments and contributions represented by their professional efforts.
Affiliated Society News for October 2010
posted by CAA — October 09, 2010
American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies
The American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies (ASHAHS) has partnered with ARTES, a group based in the United Kingdom and Ireland dedicated to Iberian and Latin American art, to produce an annual issue of Hispanic Research Journal on the visual arts. To be released in December 2010, the issue will feature studies on Spanish and Latin American topics by Hilary Macartney, Jesusa Vega, Mercedes Cerón, and Rosemarie Mulcahy, plus a tribute to Nigel Glendinning by Marjorie Trusted.
Arts Council of the African Studies Association
The Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) is currently seeking three new board members. If interested, please contact Karen Milbourne. Current issues of the new ACASA newsletter will now only be available to members; past issues are archived online. Please visit the website for more information on the upcoming 2011 triennial conference in Los Angeles.
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries
The University of Houston will host the 2011 AAMG annual conference. Clockwise from top left: the Blaffer Art Museum, the Moores Opera House, and the Roy G. Cullen Building (photographs provided by the University of Houston)
The Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) will hold its next annual conference, “Who’s Muse? Challenges to the Curatorial Profession in Academic Museums,” on May 21, 2011, at the University of Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum in Texas. Curatorial practices in academic museums and galleries are sometimes highly experimental. Faculty members from a wide variety of fields and with limited curatorial experience periodically recommend and help lead exhibition projects. The organization of exhibitions likewise engages both graduate and undergraduate students, museum-education professionals, librarians, and even area school classes in project leadership roles. Exhibitions thus generated offer unorthodox approaches to curatorial planning and execution. Appropriate to our scholarly mission, they can stretch disciplinary boundaries, cross-fertilize disciplinary methodologies, and generate wholly new paradigms for knowledge. Our academic museums and galleries thus become vital centers of original research, interdisciplinary dialogue, and participatory learning. While this democratic and laboratory approach to curatorial practice contributes in significant ways to the groundbreaking research and all-important teaching missions of our universities and colleges, it can also challenge conventional standards of the curatorial profession. Through the presentation of outstanding case studies and lively roundtable discussions, the 2011 conference will explore the pros and cons of the broad curatorial approaches found in academic museums and galleries. This year, AAMG will include a late-morning, lunch-period session, called HOT TOPICS, on current issues in academic museums and galleries. Submit your ideas for this session with your conference registration, vote, and select a HOT TOPICS table for lunchtime conversation.
Association of Historians of American Art
The Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA) is offering a travel grant to cover CAA Annual Conference expenses up to $500 for an ABD student of historical art of the United States who will travel to the 2011 meeting in New York to participate in the program. The successful recipient must be enrolled in a graduate program and an AHAA member. Deadline: February 1, 2011.
AHAA is seeking to sponsor a 1½-hour professional session at the CAA Annual Conference in Los Angeles in 2012. Submission guidelines for session proposals are located online. Deadline: March 1, 2011.
Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art
Starting in September 2010, the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) will send its membership directory electronically as a searchable PDF. Members who do not have email will continue to receive a hardcopy by mail.
At the CAA Annual Conference in New York in 2011, AHNCA members are invited to a free, private visit to the New York Public Library Prints and Photographs Study Room on Wednesday, February 9, 2011, 11:00 AM–12:30 PM. Curators Stephen Pinson and David Christie will introduce members to highlights and rarely exhibited holdings in the library’s extensive collection of prints and photographs. There is no cost for AHNCA members, but space is limited. Please contact Elizabeth Mansfield before January 15, 2011, to reserve your place.
Historians of Islamic Art Association
The Historians of Islamic Art Association (HIAA) will hold its second biennial symposium on the theme of “Objects, Collections and Cultures” at the Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington, DC. Taking place October 21–23, 2010, the program features an opening address by Julian Raby, director of the Freer and Sackler; thematic sessions with formal presentations; seminar-style workshops on art objects in the museums’ collections; and a roundtable discussion on the arts of the object in Islamic art history today. The complete program and registration information are available online.
International Sculpture Center
The International Sculpture Center (ISC) is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York on October 22, 2010. The evening’s festivities will include a cocktail reception, entertainment, and an art sale featuring works by Fletcher Benton, Chakaia Booker, Mark di Suvero, John Clement, Carole Feuerman, John Henry, Jun Kaneko, Donald Lipski, Jesús Moroles, Manuel Neri, Tom Otterness, Albert Paley, Joel Perlman, Judy Pfaff, Kenneth Snelson, Stretch, James Surls, Boaz Vaadia, and Mia Westerlund, among others to be announced. Also taking place are a raffle—with top prize being a one-week vacation in Saint Martin—and a Chinese auction with fabulous prizes. Honorary hosts for the evening include di Suvero, Snelson, and Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz. Space is limited. Tickets are $350 per person, and tables are available for $3,000 and $5,000. Cocktails start at 6:00 PM with dinner at 7:30 PM. For questions or more information, please write to events@sculpture.org.
Japan Art History Forum
The Japan Art History Forum (JAHF) has awarded its the eight annual Chino Kaori Memorial Book Prize, which honors excellence in graduate-student scholarship in Japanese art history, to Christina Striker, a student in the PhD Program in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Striker’s winning essay is titled “Creating an Origin, Preserving a Past: Arnold Genthe’s 1908 Ainu Photography.”
Pacific Arts Association
The Pacific Arts Association (PAA) will present its affiliated-society session at the CAA Annual Conference in February 2011. Called “Documenting Oceania after the Twentieth Century,” the session focuses on how artists and scholars document Pacific identities in the first decade of the twenty-first century through expressive forms such as social documentary film, the internet, the museum, and poetry. The panel redefines the form and purpose of the “documentary” as a point of reference for current and future scholarship about Oceanic art. Chaired by Bernida Anne Webb-Binder, PhD candidate in the history of art and visual studies at Cornell University, the session includes presentations from: Ursula-Ann Aneriueta Siataga, MA candidate in social documentation, University of California, Santa Cruz; Julie Risser, director and curator at the American Museum of Asmat Art, University of St. Thomas; Luseane Nina Kinahoi Tonga, PhD candidate in art history, University of Auckland; and Craig Santos Perez, PhD candidate in comparative ethnic studies, University of California, Berkeley.
Radical Art Caucus
The Radical Art Caucus (RAC) is gearing up to celebrate its tenth birthday at the upcoming CAA Annual Conference in New York. Benj Gerdes and Nate Harrison are cochairing the 2½-hour session, “Video Art as Mass Medium,” and Travis Nygard is organizing the 1½-hour panel, “Environmental Sustainability in Art History, Theory, and Practice.” Plan now to join us for a birthday toast on Friday, February 11, 5:30–7:00 PM; see the Conference Program for location in the Hilton New York. Contact Joanna Gardner-Huggett, RAC secretary, if you have additional questions or news to share.
Society for Photographic Education
Student members of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE) can apply online for scholarships to offset the cost of attending the 2011 national conference in Atlanta, Georgia, to be held March 10–13, 2011. Ten SPE Student Awards and the SPE Award for Innovations in Imaging in Honor of Jeannie Pearce feature a $500 travel stipend to attend the conference, one-year SPE memberships, and complimentary 2011 national conference passes. The Freestyle Crystal Apple Award for Outstanding Achievement in Black and White Photography offers a $5,000 cash prize, a one-year membership to SPE, and complimentary 2011 national conference pass. Download the form for complete rules and regulations. Direct questions to membership@spenational.org. Deadline: November 1, 2010.
Society of North American Goldsmiths
The Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG) and Hoover and Strong have joined to create the Harmony Jewelry Design Competition, named after Harmony Metals, the environmentally sustainable metals from Hoover and Strong. Professional jewelry makers and students will compete in separate categories. The top-winning piece will be manufactured and distributed nationally by Hoover and Strong, with profits from sales benefiting the Nature Conservancy. Student winners will receive scholarships, and winners will receive a national award and have their names publicized nationwide; they will also be a part of a remarkable shift to environmentally sustainable materials in the industry. Visit the SNAG website or call 541-345-5689 for more information. Deadline: January 15, 2011.
The 2011 SNAG conference takes place May 26–29, 2011, in Seattle, Washington. Hosted by the Seattle Metals Guild and sponsored by Rio Grande, the exciting program of twelve speakers, exhibitions, and special events will address the theme of “FLUX.” Internationally recognized participants include: the keynote speaker Glenn Adamson; Valeria Vallarta Siemelink, cofounder of Otro Diseño Foundation for Cultural Cooperation and Development; the artist and sculptor John Grade; and Damian Skinner, an art historian, curator, and editor. Rising stars in the field—David Clemons, Masako Onodera, Miel-Margarita Paredes, Sarah Troper, and Stacey Lee Webber—will give talks on their work. Registration opens in mid-January 2011, and student and educator registration grants and discounts are available. For more information, please write to conference@snagmetalsmith.org.
SNAG seeks submissions of work for exhibitions held in conjunction with the Seattle conference. The Art Jewelry Forum will produce an exhibition onsite at the SNAG 2011 conference hotel in Seattle, curated by Susan Cummins and Mike Holmes. Additional exhibitions include Dual at Traver Gallery in Seattle and Co:Operation Tableware, an exhibition featuring work by pairs of artists who cooperatively create a set of tableware (functional or nonfunctional).
Southeastern College Art Conference
From November 9 to 12, 2011, the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) will hold its sixty-seventh annual meeting, hosted by the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Georgia. The conference headquarters will be the DeSoto Hilton Hotel, located in the heart of historic Savannah. Featuring extensive panels and sessions for the exchange of ideas and concerns relevant to the practice and study of art, the conference will include the annual awards luncheon and the fourteenth annual members’ exhibition, as well as a rich array of tours, workshops, and evening events. The curator Dan Cameron will jury the SECAC members’ exhibition, to be held at one of SCAD’s premier venues, and present the plenary address. For more information, contact secac@secollegeart.org or secac2011@scad.edu.
Affiliated Society News for September 2010
posted by CAA — September 09, 2010
American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works
The American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC) has partnered with the Smithsonian Institution and the US Committee of the Blue Shield to help recover cultural and historic artifacts damaged by the earthquake in Haiti on January 12, 2010. Since April, volunteer AIC conservators, initially only members of the AIC Collections Emergency Response Team, have been working at the Haiti Cultural Recovery Center (maintained by the Smithsonian) in Port-au-Prince and onsite on wall murals, such as those at the Cathedral of Sainte Trinité. In addition to helping set up conservation labs at the center, conservators have performed assessments and treatments ranging from basic stabilization to more complete aesthetic reintegration. In addition to travel costs for the volunteers, grant support has, to date, enabled the purchase of over $8,000 in supplies and tools. AIC response is made possible through the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and AIC’s foundation.
Appraisers Association of American
The Appraisers Association of America (AAA) has launched its new website. New features include online registration and payment for courses and programs and an improved “Find an Appraiser” tool. Fall programs for fall 2010, which include study days, lectures, events, and the national conference, have also been announced. To register, AAA members will need to sign in and create a username and password.
Arts Council of the African Studies Association
The fifteenth triennial symposium of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) will be held at the University of California, Los Angeles, March 23–26, 2011. Proposals for papers, panels, and roundtables addressing the theme, “Africa and Its Diasporas in the Marketplace: Cultural Resources and the Global Economy,” are invited. Please read the triennial theme announcement for submission guidelines and information on travel support and stipends.
Association for Latin American Art
The second triennial conference of the Association for Latin American Art (ALAA), called “Origins of State/Origins of Identity,” will be held November 13–14, 2010, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California. The event coincides with the museum’s exhibition, Olmec: Colossal Masterworks from Ancient Mexico, and with Obsidian Mirror-Travels: Refracting Ancient Mexican Art and Archaeology at the Getty Research Institute. Responding to the idea of discovery, the conference is divided into three panels reflecting the main areas of research undertaken by the association’s members: pre-Columbian art and architecture, viceregal and colonial art and architecture, and modern and contemporary Latin American and Latino art and architecture. A PDF of the conference program is available for download.
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries
The Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) acknowledges that students are one of the prime constituencies of all our institutions as well as our future colleagues and leaders. AAMG values the student voice and student participation, and to kick off this academic year it is offering free one-year student memberships from August 15 to October 15, 2010. To become a member, please send the required information via an online form, along with a digital copy (Word or PDF) of your unofficial transcript or student ID, to Emily Forsgren. Or, mail the application and copy of your student ID or transcript to: AAMG Membership, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, 40 Arts Circle, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208-2410.
Association of Historians of American Art
The Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA) is offering a travel grant to cover CAA Annual Conference expenses up to $500 for an ABD student of historical art of the United States who will travel to the 2011 meeting in New York to participate in the program. The successful recipient must be enrolled in a graduate program and an AHAA member. Deadline: February 1, 2011.
AHAA is hosting a symposium, called “Current Research in American Art,” to be held at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York, October 7–9, 2010. The event is free but attendees must preregister and be AHAA members.
To sustain AHAA’s mission of supporting scholarship, the organization has introduced a new lifetime membership. Dues are $750, of which $730 is tax deductible.
Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art
The Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) has announced that new and standing members may now pay electronically for their annual membership using Google Checkout.
Foundations in Art: Theory and Education
Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE) is hosting its biannual conference, “ON STREAM,” in partnership with the Mid-America College Art Association, another CAA affiliated society. Held in St. Louis, Missouri, the event will take place March 30–April 2, 2011, at the Ball Park Hilton. The conference will explore connections and question the status quo of how “creativity” is being developed and fostered as we enter the second decade of the third millennium. For more details, please contact Jeff Boshart, conference coordinator.
Historians of British Art
The Historians of British Art (HBA) welcomes Peter Trippi as its new first vice president. Currently editor of Fine Art Connoisseur, he will serve a one-year term before assuming the post of HBA president.
HBA is accepting papers for an upcoming minisession of work by emerging scholars to be held during the HBA business meeting at the CAA Annual Conference in New York, February 9–12, 2011. Current or recent graduate students are invited to submit proposals for consideration. (If an applicant is a PhD recipient, his or her degree must have been earned within the past three years.) Papers may address any topic related to British art, architecture, and visual culture. Presentations or “works in progress” should be limited to fifteen minutes to allow for ample discussion. This minisession is an opportunity for informal presentations of new or ongoing research followed by open discussion. To submit a paper for consideration, send the following items to Colette Crossman, HBA second vice president: (1) a one-page abstract; (2) a CV (limited to two pages); and (3) a brief cover letter explaining interest in the field. Upon selection, presenters are requested to join HBA if they are not current members. Deadline: October 1, 2010; decisions made by November 1.
Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture
The Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA) has announced the recipient of the Mary Vidal Travel Award: Iris Moon, a PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. She will conduct research on the French architects Charles Percier and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine.
Historians of Islamic Art Association
The Historians of Islamic Art Association (HIAA) will hold its second biennial symposium on the theme of “Objects, Collections and Cultures” at the Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington, DC. Taking place October 21–23, 2010, the program features an opening address by Julian Raby, director of the Freer and Sackler; thematic sessions with formal presentations; seminar-style workshops on art objects in the museums’ collections; and a roundtable discussion on the arts of the object in Islamic art history today. The complete program and registration information are available online.
HIAA is pleased to welcome Stephennie Mulder as the new editor of its listserv, H-Islamart, and to thank the outgoing editor Christiane Gruber for her years of exemplary service.
Historians of Netherlandish Art
The Historians of Netherlandish Art (HNA) has announced the submission deadline—March 1, 2011—for the Summer 2011 issue of the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art: Please consult the journal’s submission guidelines for more information about the process. An open-access, peer-reviewed journal published twice per year, JHNA features articles that focus on art produced in the Netherlands (north and south) during the early modern period (ca. 1400–ca.1750) and in other countries and later periods as they relate to this earlier art. These include studies of painting, sculpture, graphic arts, tapestry, architecture, and decoration, from the perspectives of art history, art conservation, museum studies, historiography, technical studies, and collecting history. Book and exhibition reviews, however, will continue to be published in the HNA Newsletter.
International Association of Art Critics
The United States section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA USA) launched a new website in mid-August. Designed to be more interactive and more attractive visually, the website will be an active tool for information about members’ professional achievements, such as new books, exhibitions, awards, participations in major conferences, and the like. In addition, AICA USA will publish cyclical reports on important issues related to art criticism.
AICA USA has elected a new president, Marek Bartelik, to serve from May 2010 to May 2012. Bartelik teaches modern and contemporary art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York and is a graduate critic-in-residence at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.
International Association of Word and Image Studies
The International Association of Word and Image Studies (IAWIS) seeks submissions for the Max Nänny Prize for the best article in word and image studies. First awarded in 2008, the prize—named in honor of the late Max Nänny, a former IAWIS president—is presented every three years on the occasion of the organization’s triennial conference. Both members and nonmembers may submit already published articles, dated no earlier than three years before the submission deadline. Deadline: October 31, 2010.
IAWIS seeks proposals for papers for its ninth international conference, on the theme of “L’imaginaire/The Imaginary.” The meeting will take place in Montreal, Quebec, August 22–26, 2011. Descriptions of all sessions can be found online. Deadline: October 1, 2010.
International Sculpture Center
The International Sculpture Center (ISC) is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York on October 22, 2010. The evening’s festivities will include a cocktail reception, entertainment, and an art sale featuring works by Fletcher Benton, Chakaia Booker, Mark di Suvero, John Clement, Carole Feuerman, John Henry, Jun Kaneko, Donald Lipski, Jesús Moroles, Manuel Neri, Tom Otterness, Albert Paley, Joel Perlman, Judy Pfaff, Kenneth Snelson, Stretch, James Surls, Boaz Vaadia, and Mia Westerlund, among others to be announced. Also taking place are a raffle—with top prize being a one-week vacation in Saint Martin—and a Chinese auction with fabulous prizes. Honorary hosts for the evening include di Suvero, Snelson, and Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz. Space is limited. Tickets are $350 per person, and tables are available for $3,000 and $5,000. Cocktails start at 6:00 PM with dinner at 7:30 PM. For questions or more information, please write to events@sculpture.org.
Italian Art Society
The Italian Art Society (IAS) invites proposals for the 2011 Italian Art Society/Kress Foundation Lecture in Italy. The lecture series seeks to promote intellectual exchanges among art historians of North America and the international community of scholars living or working in Italy. The lecture will be held in Florence in late May or early June 2011. The proposed lecture may address any period in Italian art but must relate to the city of Florence or the region of Tuscany; it also may not have been previously published or presented at another conference or venue. Application details are published online. Deadline: January 1, 2011.
Leonardo Education and Art Forum
The Leonardo Education and Art Forum (LEAF), a part of Leonardo/The International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology, hosted a two-part panel on “Grand Challenges in Education” at the Los Angeles ACM SIGGRAPH on July 28, 2010. The participants addressed issues in education in light of new opportunities for participatory and collaborative learning in society. Speakers also responded to a white paper issued by the MacArthur Foundation called “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age.” Panelists were: David T. Goldberg, Rebecca Allen, Pamela Jennings, Sarah Cunningham, Glenn Entis, and Marc Barr. Discussants were Donna Cox, James Foley, Andy van Dam, and Ellen K. Levy, with remarks by Roger Malina.
LEAF sponsored a meeting and workshop, called “Art-Science – Curricular Models and Best Practices,” at the 2010 International Symposium on Electronic Art on August 27, 2010. Leaders of the workshop, which was coordinated by Edward Shanken, were Jennifer Kanary Nikolov, Jill Scott, and Paul Thomas.
Fran Ilich was selected as the winner of the Media Art Histories (MAH) Leonardo Scholarship for notable contributions to the field. MAH is a collaborative project between Leonardo and the Department for Image Science at Danube University Krems in Austria.
LEAF is sponsoring workshops at the Ars Electronica Festival, taking place September 2–11, 2010, in Linz, Austria.
Pacific Arts Association
The Pacific Arts Association (PAA) convened its tenth international symposium, “Pacific Art in the 21st Century: Museums, New Global Communities, and Future Trends,” from August 9 to 11, 2010, in Rarotonga, Cook Islands. PAA hosted over eighty-three presenters and seventy-five presentations, highlighting issues surrounding the creation, dispersal, possession, repatriation, stewardship, and interpretation of Pacific art in the twenty-first century. The symposium welcomed three keynote speakers: Michelle Hippolite of Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand; Jean-Marc Pambrun of the Museum of Tahiti and Her Islands; and Jonathan Mane-Wheoki of Auckland University. Special exhibitions, artist presentations, and events included Janet Lilo’s TOP16, curated by Ron Brownson; a craft exhibition; Nanette Lela’ulu’s In the House of My Heart; Wrapping the Cook Islands: Tivaivai; and the launch of Art Monthly Australia’s special Pacific issue. Visit the symposium website for a complete list of presenters, abstracts, and schedule of events.
Society for Architectural Historians
The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) invites CAA members to gather at the Four Seasons in midtown Manhattan next month for conversation about the restaurant’s historical developments. This free event takes place on Saturday, September 25, 2010, at 9:00 PM. The gathering concludes a tour day in which SAH members will have spent studying the work of Richard Kelly, who was responsible for the interior and exterior lighting of the Seagram Building and the Four Seasons. Joining the group will be Belmont Freeman, the restaurant’s current restoration architect, and Dietrich Neumann, the tour leader, past SAH president, and editor of the forthcoming book, The Structure of Light: Richard Kelly and the Illumination of Modern Architecture.
Society for Photographic Education
The Society for Photographic Education (SPE) offers student scholarships to offset the cost of attending its 2011 national conference, titled “Science, Poetry, and the Photographic Image,” to be held March 10–13 in Atlanta, Georgia. A conference fee waiver and a one-year SPE membership are provided in addition to the cash awards.
Ten SPE Awards and the SPE Award for Innovations in Imaging in Honor of Jeannie Pearce feature a $500 travel stipend. The Freestyle Crystal Apple Award for Outstanding Achievement in Black and White Photography is generously sponsored by Freestyle Photographic Supplies and offers a $5,000 cash prize and recognition for the sponsoring faculty member.
Applicants must be SPE student members and current full-time students enrolled at a postsecondary institution as an undergraduate or graduate majoring or concentrating in photography but not graduating before the end of academic year 2010–11. Deadline: November 1, 2010.
Southeastern College Art Conference
From November 9 to 12, 2011, the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) will hold its sixty-seventh annual meeting, hosted by the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Georgia. The conference headquarters will be the DeSoto Hilton Hotel, located in the heart of historic Savannah. Featuring extensive panels and sessions for the exchange of ideas and concerns relevant to the practice and study of art, the conference will include the annual awards luncheon and the fourteenth annual members’ exhibition, as well as a rich array of tours, workshops, and evening events. The curator Dan Cameron will jury the SECAC members’ exhibition, to be held at one of SCAD’s premier venues. For more information, contact secac@secollegeart.org or secac2011@scad.edu.
Visual Resources Association
The Visual Resources Association (VRA) 2010 Nancy DeLaurier Award, honoring distinguished achievement in the field of image management, has been given to Murtha Baca and Patricia Harpring for their work on the Getty Vocabulary Program. The program is instrumental to standardizing image cataloging across the cultural-heritage community. Professionals in visual-resources collections, libraries, museums, and archives regularly use three important sources: the Art and Architecture Thesaurus, the Union List of Artist Names, and the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names—all developed, sustained, and nurtured, primarily by these two individuals, under the auspices of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Attesting to their ongoing vision of the future is their promotion of a new Cultural Objects Name Authority. The Getty Vocabulary Program not only provides uniform terminology to describe works of art, architecture, material culture, and other associated materials for metadata creation, but it also enhances access to online resources and the knowledge bases on which researchers rely.
Society of Architectural Historians and CAA at the Four Seasons in New York
posted by Christopher Howard — August 20, 2010
The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) invites CAA members to gather at the Four Seasons in midtown Manhattan next month for conversation about the restaurant’s historical developments. This free event takes place on Saturday, September 25, 2010, at 9:00 PM.
The gathering concludes a tour day in which SAH members will have spent studying the work of Richard Kelly, who was responsible for the interior and exterior lighting of the Seagram Building and the Four Seasons. Joining the group will be Belmont Freeman, the restaurant’s current restoration architect, and Dietrich Neumann, the tour leader, past SAH president, and editor of the forthcoming book, The Structure of Light: Richard Kelly and the Illumination of Modern Architecture. (The tour is sold out.)
The Four Seasons opened in 1959 to breathless headlines about the “world’s costliest restaurant,” which took an unprecedented $4.5 million to build. Occupying a monumental space on the first floor of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, the restaurant was designed by Philip Johnson in collaboration with a stellar cast of artists, including Kelly, William Pahlman (interior designer to Restaurant Associates), Karl Linn (landscape architect), and Garth Huxtable (industrial designer). In addition, Kelly created the sculptures that hover over the Bar Room, Marie Nichols made the shimmering aluminum chain window shades, and Treitel-Gratz fabricated the Mies-designed Brno and Barcelona chairs (this being before Knoll put them into production.) Blue-chip art, including a stage backdrop painted by Pablo Picasso, adorned the walls.
During his lifetime Johnson kept close control over the maintenance, alteration, and periodic refurbishment of the restaurant, which the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission named an interior landmark in 1989 and which recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Four years after Johnson’s death in 2005, the owners decided that the Four Seasons needed a new house architect to design and direct urgently needed restorations and, as Phyllis Lambert phrased it in her brief in support of the work, to “monitor and safeguard the architectural and artistic patrimony” of the establishment. Freeman was selected for this role. Since December 2008, Belmont Freeman Architects (BFA) and a team of consultants have been immersed in researching the history, design, and construction of the restaurant, and in designing and managing its phased restoration.
The Four Seasons is not a museum but a busy working restaurant. As such, its renovation is subject to particular functional, logistical, and economic exigencies. Since the restaurant cannot close for renovation, work is planned as a series of surgical interventions that can be performed off hours. After completing an assessment of existing conditions, BFA compiled and ranked discrete restoration subprojects by priority. While the main dining rooms have been admirably maintained over the years, ancillary spaces—entrance, lobby, restrooms, coat check, stairs, bar—have suffered fifty years of abuse and are in urgent need of renovation. Another important object of attention is the lighting: the historical importance of Kelly’s pioneering lighting design is equal to—and inseparable from—that of the architecture. BFA is working with lighting designer WALD Studio and with Edison Price, manufacturers of the original fixtures, on this restoration program.
There is no charge to attend this cash-bar event. On entering the Four Seasons, say you are with the Society of Architectural Historians group. Have questions or need additional information? Please contact Kathy Sturm, SAH director of programs, at 312-543-7243.
Academic Museum and Gallery Organization Changes Its Name
posted by Christopher Howard — June 01, 2010
The Association of College and University Museums and Galleries (ACUMG), a CAA affiliated society, has changed its name to the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG). The organization has also strengthened its mission to better reflect its role as the leading educational and professional organization for museums and galleries affiliated with academic institutions.
The formal name change, which more closely links AAMG to its affiliate organization, the American Association of Museums (AAM), took place at AAMG’s annual business meeting in Los Angeles on May 24, 2010. At the same meeting AAMG revised its by-laws and invigorated its mission as a resource for college and university museums of all disciplines, including art, history, anthropology, natural history, and science.
Organized in 1980, the association has a growing membership of more than four hundred of the nation’s estimated 1,150 academic museums and galleries. AAMG addresses such issues as governance, ethics, collections management, educational outreach, exhibitions, strategic planning, and financial management. Along with CAA, it has been in the forefront of the movement to safeguard college and university collections, advocating against the sale of donated artworks and the closure of art museums by institutions of higher education.
AAMG sponsors national conferences at prominent academic museums in conjunction with annual AAM meetings. Its May 22 conference took place at the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Society for Architectural Historians Invites CAA Members to Take a Study Tour of Mexico
posted by Christopher Howard — May 10, 2010
The Society for Architectural Historians (SAH) invites CAA members to take a study tour of Mexico City. The tour’s focus will be modern and contemporary architecture, but because some knowledge of older styles, contemporary issues across the arts, and the growth of the city itself are critical to understanding Mexican modern architecture, the tour will include pre-twentieth-century buildings and works of art and urban planning that inform the development of Mexican architectural modernism in essential ways.
The study program is designed to include famous, “must-see” sites in Mexico City as well as buildings that participants may not know and that they might find difficult to visit. Download a detailed brochure and register online to reserve a space on the tour. CAA members need not be members of SAH but will pay a $25 administration fee to attend, in addition to the tour-package cost. Space is limited, so please make your reservations today!
Image: The Basilica of Guadalupe on top of Tepeyac hill, north of Mexico City, was built between 1974 and 1976 by the Mexican architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez (photograph provided by Kathryn O’Rourke and the Society of Architectural Historians)
Two Art Organizations Join CAA’s Affiliated Societies
posted by Emmanuel Lemakis — March 05, 2010
At its February meeting in Chicago, the Board of Directors approved the applications of two groups to join CAA’s affiliated societies. The first new affiliate, the Appraisers Association of America, is a professional organization, while the second, the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey, is an area-studies organization.
The Appraisers Association of America (AAA) began in 1949; it currently has 650 members. Its purpose is to establish the highest standards of ethical conduct and promote the profession of appraising as a service to the national economy. An admissions committee insures that its members have met the standards of the profession. AAA advances the field though educational seminars, conferences, publications, and other activities. It publishes All About Appraising: The Definitive Appraisal Handbook and a biannual newsletter, and it offers classes in collaboration with New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. CAA recently partnered with AAA to host a symposium on art authentication in January 2010.
An affiliate of the Middle East Studies Association, the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) was established in 2007, and it currently has fifty-seven members. This newly formed academic organization aims to advance the study of this emerging field through the creation of an international network of interested scholars and organizations. AMCA facilitates communications by sponsoring conferences, meetings, a website, and a newsletter. It will be launching peer-reviewed exhibition and catalogue reviews on its website.
CAA’s Directory of Affiliated Societies is currently accepting updates. If you are an officer or the official CAA contact for an organization, please send an updated text, in the same format as your current listing, to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs, by March 31, either as a Word attachment or pasted into the body of an email.
Panel Discussion on Art Authentication Held in New York
posted by Michael Fahlund — February 18, 2010
“Authenticating Art: Current Problems and Proposed Solutions” was the topic for a panel presentation and discussion sponsored by CAA and the Appraisers Association of America. Held on January 20, 2010, the event was hosted by and took place in the auditorium of the Levin Institute in Manhattan for its 120 guests.
The panelists were: John Cahill of the New York–based law firm Lynn and Cahill; Jane Jacob from Jacob Fine Art, an art consultancy in Chicago; James Martin of Orion Analytical, a materials analysis and consultancy firm based in Williamstown, Massachusetts; and Jane Levine from the auction house Sotheby’s New York. Michele Marincola, a professor of conservation at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, served as moderator for the discussion.
CAA’s new best practices on Authentications and Attributions, approved in October 2009, played an important referential role among myriad opinions offered by legal experts, conservators, gallery owners, and material analysts—to say nothing of the various aspects of law that may apply to collectors, buyers and sellers, appraisers, and auction houses. Indeed, the guidelines were praised by panelists and audience members for their “reasoned and thoughtful advice” and recommended repeatedly as an essential resource on the subject.
Panel presentations cited specific circumstances surrounding well-known art forgeries by Greek and Roman sculptors from as far back as two millennia, to more recent master forgerers, including Elmyr de Hory, Eric Hebborn, John Myatt, and Leo Nardus. One of the most famous forgeries by Han van Meegeren, of Johannes Vemeer’s Supper at Emmaus, was completed in 1937 and sold for what today would be well over $2.5 million. Some forgerers also borrowed authentic works of art from collectors, copied the work, returned the undetected copy to the owner, and then sold the original to a third party. Historical and modern-day problems with attribution, revelations during conservation procedures, and new analytical techniques and forensic equipment were also presented. Similarly, matters of law such as breach of contract, false certificates of authenticity, and false (but not criminal) representation or court testimony were highlighted.
The evening was informative, provocative, and timely but lacked one critical professional perspective: namely, that of the art historian, art-museum curator, or art connoisseur. Indeed, art-historical documentation, stylistic connoisseurship, and scientific analysis are the three aspects of authentication that create a “consensus of evidence” as recommended in the CAA guidelines. Were it not for this shortcoming, the event would have enlightened even further the practice, if not the controversy, of art authentication.
For interested members who will attend CAA’s centennial Annual Conference in New York in 2011, the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association (a CAA affiliated society) will present a panel on authentication that addresses issues confronted by art historians and curators who authenticate.
New CAA Affiliated Societies
posted by Emmanuel Lemakis — August 26, 2009
CAA welcomes two art organizations into its family of affiliated societies: the European Architectural History Network and Public Art Dialogue. Affiliated societies are groups of art professionals and other organizations whose goals are generally consonant with those of CAA, with a view toward facilitating intercommunication and mutual enrichment.
The European Architectural History Network (EAHN) supports research and education by providing a public forum for the dissemination of knowledge about the histories of architecture. Based in Europe, it serves architectural historians and scholars in allied fields without restriction on their areas of study. The network seeks to overcome limitations imposed by national boundaries and institutional conventions through increasing the visibility of the discipline among scholars and the public; promoting scholarly excellence and innovation; fostering inclusive, transnational, interdisciplinary, and multicultural approaches to the history of the built environment; encouraging communication among the disciplines that study space; facilitating the open exchange of research results; and providing a clearinghouse for information related to the discipline.
Public Art Dialogue (PAD), cochaired by Harriet F. Senie and Cher Krause Knight, is an organization devoted to public art. Its membership includes art historians, artists, curators, administrators, architects, landscape architects, and others engaged with the wide arc that encompasses public art. PAD’s goal is to provide platforms for dialogue among public-art professionals and students across disciplines.
For more information on CAA’s affiliated societies, please write to Emmanuel Lemakis, CAA director of programs.
Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Awards
posted by Christopher Howard — August 27, 2008
The Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) has selected five recipients for its 2009 Lifetime Achievement Awards:
- Maren Hassinger, director of the Rinehart School of Graduate Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art
- Ester Hernandez, a San Francisco–based artist who was a pioneer in the Chicana/Chicano civil rights art movement
- Joyce Kozloff, a political and feminist artist who was a founding member of the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s
- Margo Machida, a renowned authority on contemporary Asian American art and visual culture and associate professor at the University of Connecticut
- Ruth Weisberg, an artist and dean of fine arts at the University of Southern California
The awards ceremony will be held at the Wilshire Grand Hotel in Los Angeles on Saturday, February 28, 2009, in conjunction with the CAA Annual Conference. This ceremony, which is free and open to the public, will be the thirtieth anniversary of the awards. As in past years, the awards ceremony will include an accompanying catalogue, outlining the awardees’ accomplishments in greater detail. Please check the WCA website for more details about the ceremony (free), the awards dinner (tickets are $90 before December 1, 2008, and $105 after), and other planned events.