CAA News Today

Wendy Red Star (photograph by John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation) and Martha Rosler (photograph by Tina Barney)

CAA is thrilled to share that artists Wendy Red Star and Martha Rosler will be the featured guests of the CAA 113th Annual Conference Annual Artist Interviews! Red Star will be interviewed by Josh T Franco, head of collecting, Archives of American Art, and Charlotte Ickes, curator of time-based media art and special projects, National Portrait Gallery. Columbia University professor of art history and archaeology Julia Bryan-Wilson will speak with Rosler.

Wendy Red Star 

Wendy Red Star is an Apsáalooke artist based in Portland, OR, whose multidisciplinary practice explores intersections of Apsáalooke history and colonial narratives through conceptual art and pop culture. Raised in Apsáalooke traditions, she uses her work to reframe historical narratives and amplify Apsáalooke perspectives.   

Red Star’s work has been exhibited at major institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Broad, Fondation Cartier, and the Seattle Art Museum. Her monumental sculpture, The Soil You See . . ., debuted on the National Mall in Washington, DC, in 2023, and was later acquired by Tippet Rise Art Center.   

Her work is in over eighty public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the British Museum. A 2024 MacArthur Fellow, Red Star’s artist’s books include Delegation (2022) and Bíilukaa (2023). She holds an MFA from UCLA and has lectured internationally, including at Yale University and the Banff Centre. 

Martha Rosler  

Martha Rosler’s work centers on the public sphere and everyday life, particularly with respect to women. Recurring themes include food in its many roles and guises, urbanism and spaces of transit, and war and national security. She has initiated a number of events in the US and Europe that bridge diverse publics, including garage sales, pop-up libraries, and a long-standing collaborative project that explores homelessness, housing, and the built environment. Through her varied artistic practice, writing, and activism, she challenges the mechanisms of power and their normalization within imagery, narrative, and discourse. 

She has received numerous honors, including the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, the College Art Association Distinguished Feminist Award, the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award, the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, the Spectrum International Prize in Photography, the Guggenheim Museum Lifetime Achievement Award, the Asher B. Durand Award, the Lichtwark Prize, and four doctorates Honoris Causa.

Rosler lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, whose decades of gentrification have often figured in her work.

The CAA113 Annual Artist Interviews will be held on Friday, February 14, 4:30–7:00 p.m. ET at the New York Hilton Midtown. This event will also be livestreamed via YouTube.      

Register now for the CAA 113th Annual Conference, February 12–15, 2025 in New York City!    

The Distinguished Scholar Session at the CAA 113th Annual Conference will honor the career of Dr. Jack Flam, explore the broad range of Dr. Flam’s scholarly interests, and celebrate his ongoing legacy of support and amplification of innovative voices in the field. 

Dr. Flam is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art and Art History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where he taught from 1975–2010. Dr. Flam was also President of the Dedalus Foundation from 2002–24.   

His career in education took hold at Rutgers University and the University of Florida, and he subsequently taught a wide range of courses at CUNY, where he was mentor to many students, both undergraduate and graduate, in studio art as well as art history. In addition to serving as a dissertation and thesis advisor, he continues to steadfastly support the professional lives of his former students.  

Dr. Flam is the author of several books, articles, and exhibition catalogs on various aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, and on African art. He is a leading authority on Henri Matisse, and his influential book Matisse on Art has been in print since its publication in 1973. His Matisse: The Man and His Art, 1869–1918 received CAA’s Charles Rufus Morey Award in 1988. Dr. Flam’s other books include Motherwell (1991); Richard Diebenkorn: Ocean Park (1992); Matisse: The Dance (1993); Western Artists/African Art (1994); Matisse and Picasso: The Story of Their Rivalry and Friendship (2003); Manet: Un bar aux Folies-Bergère ou l’abysse du mirror (2005). He has written extensively on postwar American art, especially on Robert Motherwell. He is coauthor of Robert Motherwell Paintings and Collages: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1941–1991 (2012) and of Robert Motherwell: 100 Years (2015). 

He is the series editor of the Documents of Twentieth-Century Art (currently published by the University of California Press) and in addition to Matisse on Art, has edited two volumes for it: Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (1996) and Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art (2003). He has served on a number of juries, committees, and boards focused on supporting artists and art historians, including the advisory board of Source: Notes in the History of Art and the board of directors of the United States section of the International Association of Art Critics. Dr. Flam was also the art critic of the Wall Street Journal from 1984–92.  

He has been the recipient of several awards and honors, including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He won the Art World Manufacturers Hanover Prize for Distinguished Newspaper Criticism in 1987.  

His articles and reviews have appeared widely, including in African Arts, American Heritage, Apollo, The Art Bulletin, Artforum, Art in America, Art International, Art Journal, ARTnews, Connaissance des Arts, Arts Magazine, Connoisseur, Journal of African Studies, Journal de la Société des Africanistes, Leonardo, New York Review of Books, Storia dell’Arte, The Sciences, Source, and the Times Literary Supplement. 

Dr. Flam’s career and his impact on the field will be celebrated with presentations and a dialogue with scholars and colleagues: 

Session Chair:  

Lisa Farrington, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York 

Session Participants:  

Deborah Cullen-Morales, Mellon Foundation 

Jennifer Farrell, Metropolitan Museum of Art 

Julie Reiss, Columbia University 

Linda Serrone Rolon, Artist

John Yau,  Rutgers University 

Register now for the CAA 113th Annual Conference, February 12–15, 2025, in New York City!  

The CAA113 Distinguished Scholar Session will be held on Thursday, February 13, 4:30–6:30 p.m. ET at the New York Hilton Midtown. This event will also be livestreamed via YouTube.  

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Mariët Westermann, Director and CEO of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, will deliver the Convocation keynote address at the CAA 113th Annual Conference! 

As Director and CEO of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, Dr. Westermann directs the Guggenheim’s flagship in New York and oversees the Guggenheim sites in Venice, Bilbao, and Abu Dhabi.  Previously, Dr. Westermann was founding Provost at NYU Abu Dhabi, and later Vice Chancellor and Chief Executive. She has also served as Executive Vice President of the Mellon Foundation and Director of NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts.  

A historian of art of the Netherlands, Dr. Westermann has authored numerous books, articles, and exhibition essays on Dutch art and artists, museums, and the state and future of higher education. On behalf of the Mellon Foundation, Dr. Westermann commissioned and published (with Roger Schonfeld and Liam Sweeney) two critical research studies on staff diversity in the museum sector.  

Dr. Westermann was the lead curator and catalogue author of the exhibition Art and Home: Dutch Interiors in the Age of Rembrandt, shown at the Denver Art Museum and The Newark Museum (1997–2001). She served as curatorial consultant, researcher, and essayist for the National Gallery’s presentation of Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller (1994–96), in partnership with the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 

In 2020, Dr. Westermann co-convened Reframing Museums, a major international conference on the future of museums, organized with NYU Abu Dhabi and Louvre Abu Dhabi. In 2010, on behalf of the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute, she co-hosted Art Museums Here and Now, a conference with Philippe de Montebello on what it means to build art museums in countries that have not had them or reinvent traditional art museums to stay connected to their changing societies. 

Dr. Westermann is a trustee of ALIPH and the Rijksmuseum and chairs the IIE Scholar Rescue Fund.  

Join us for the CAA 113th Annual Conference, February 12–15, at the New York Hilton Midtown! Convocation will be held on February 12, 6:00–8:30 p.m. ET and will also be livestreamed via YouTube. Register now!