CAA News Today
Annual Conference Committee Seeks Members
posted by CAA — March 08, 2016
CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for at-large members of the Annual Conference Committee to serve a three-year term, beginning May 1, 2016. Working with the Programs Department staff, this committee selects the sessions and shapes the program of the Annual Conference. The committee ensures that the program will reflect the goals of the association and of the Annual Conference, namely, to make the conference an effective place for intellectual, aesthetic, and professional learning and exchange, and to provide opportunities for participation that are fair, equal, and balanced.
The Annual Conference Committee meets at least two times a year at the call of the vice president for Annual Conference and the committee’s chair. Members must be available throughout May and June to review and select 2017 conference content from the submitted proposals. Please send a 150-word letter of interest and a CV to Katie Apsey, CAA manager of programs. Deadline: April 15, 2016.
Meeting Linda Nochlin at the CAA Annual Conference in Washington, DC
posted by CAA — March 07, 2016
The following article was written by Marisa Baldassare, Associate Professor, Universidad Nacional de San Martin, Buenos Aires, and 2016 CAA-Getty International Program participant.
On the last day of the CAA Annual Conference, after an intense week of activities, I decided to end the experience by attending the session Linda Nochlin: Passionate Scholar.
After several days I still had problems finding the proper rooms for talks and meetings, but I arrived at Salon 2 on the Lobby Level and saw my colleague Georgina Gluzman, who was already seated in the auditorium. I greeted her with a cheek kiss—as you may know, we Argentineans are fond of kissing hello—and asked her straight up, “Where is Linda?” She answered, “There she is, seated in the front row.” We stared at each other with knowing smiles. Without saying anything, we realized that this was our moment to get to know Linda Nochlin.
We approached the front row and stood beside someone who was finalizing details with Linda. She immediately realized we were there and eager to talk to her. She made eye contact with us and gave us a friendly smile. We were thrilled to meet the person who has been such a strong influence on our art-historical studies and perspectives, as both Georgina and I are nineteenth-century scholars. We chatted with her and were even more amazed to discover that she is such a friendly and keen person. We talked about what her work means to us and the large scope of her legacy. She kindly accepted our request to pose for a selfie. In the photo, Linda is smiling—with that terrific modern haircut—and flanked by Georgina and me. We couldn’t hide our emotions.
During the session, we experienced a rollercoaster of sensations. We listened to Linda’s colleagues, friends, students, and family members speak about her. They not only honored her intellectual accomplishments, but also showed how kind and funny Linda is as a human being. Some insights were repeated in every story: she is always attentive to newcomers and makes them feel comfortable; she finds joy in being surrounded by young people (and vice versa); she is a great host, creating spaces for talking, eating, and laughing wherever she lives. As they all made clear, these characteristics are not just a side of her amazing personality but the fuel that feeds her vital, unprejudiced look at art, a look that has often moved beyond the seriousness of the art history canon and traditions. Disciples and friends recalled how Linda empowered them to practice a free and loving way of looking, toward both art and themselves.
The feminist art historian Moira Roth encouraged us to read aloud a poem Linda had sent her when she couldn’t attend her birthday party. After a detailed recollection of images of misery from Jean-François Millet to Gustave Courbet and Victor Hugo, Linda concluded in a very sardonic way: “I know misery, and I can say it’s not nice.” The poem was clever proof of her sense of irony and the passionate way, deprived of formalism, in which she has faced art-historical themes. It is this freedom that allowed her to understand impressionism as a “special inclination of realism,” as Molly Nesbit recalled from her notes of Linda’s classes at Vassar in the 1970s. This idea, which proved central in the reconsideration of nineteenth-century modernities and the questioning of the uniqueness of the impressionist movement, has been fruitful for Latin American art history. It has allowed scholars to examine the supposed delay of Latin American painters and their particular approach to the so-called nineteenth-century avant-gardes. As I already mentioned, Nochlin’s legacy reaches far beyond the subjects and places covered by her influential texts.
It was deeply moving to listen to Aruna D’Souza recount how Linda’s perspective on painted bodies contributed to the acceptance and love of her own physical imperfections. The audience burst into laughter when Linda’s charming granddaughter, Julia Trotta, recalled how her grandmother’s book on Andy Warhol’s nudes was an unusual object of desire in her early teen years. The story proved to her, once and for all, that hers was not an “ordinary granny.”
These are some of my recollections of what was a memorable experience at the CAA Annual Conference. If Nochlin’s oeuvre has—since the beginning of my career—modeled me as an art historian, I can now say that meeting her and her circle has changed me as a person.
Image caption: Georgina Gluzman (2015 CAA-Getty International Program participant), Linda Nochlin, and Marisa Baldasarre (2016 CAA-Getty International Program participant)
Thanks to 2016 Career Services Mentors and Workshop Leaders
posted by CAA — March 03, 2016
CAA wishes to thank the many artists, scholars, curators, critics, educators, and other professionals in the visual arts who generously served as Career Services mentors—for the Artists’ Portfolio Review, Career Development Mentoring, the Mock Interviews, and the Professional Development Roundtable Discussions—during the 2016 Annual Conference in Washington DC. CAA also appreciates the work of the leaders of the Professional Development Workshops and the speakers at Orientation.
Orientation
Susan Altman, Middlesex County College; Michael Aurbach, Vanderbilt University; and Terri Weissman, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Artists’ Portfolio Review
Susan Canning, College of New Rochelle; Jill Conner, Independent Critic and Curator; Brian Curtis, University of Miami; Peter Kaniaris, Anderson University; Suzanne Lemakis, Citigroup (retired); Craig Lloyd, Mt. St. Joseph University; Judith Pratt, Judith Pratt Studio; and David Voros, University of South Carolina.
Career Development Mentoring
Susan Altman, Middlesex County College; Michael Aurbach, Vanderbilt University; Leda Cempellin, South Dakota State University; James Farmer, Virginia Commonwealth University; Toni Guglielmo, Getty Leadership Institute, Claremont Graduate University; Dennis Ichiyama, Purdue University; Mark O’Grady, Pratt Institute; Christopher Olszewski, Savannah College of Art and Design; Doralynn Pines, Metropolitan Museum of Art (retired); Judith Pratt, Judith Pratt Studio; Florence Quideau, Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York; Andrew Jay Svedlow, University of Northern Colorado; Ann Tsubota, Raritan Valley Community College; Philip Van Keuren, Southern Methodist University; and Chad Wesley Airhart, Carson-Newman University.
Professional Development Roundtable Discussions
Michael Aurbach, Vanderbilt University; Peter Kaniaris, Anderson University; Brian Curtis, University of Miami; Suzanne Lemakis, Citigroup (retired); and Leo Morrissey, Georgian Court University.
Mock Interview Sessions
Susan Altman, Middlesex County College; Maria Ann Conelli, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, Brooklyn; Erin C. Devine, Northern Virginia Community College; Carole Garmon, University of Mary Washington; Christian J. Gerstheimer, El Paso Museum of Art; Terence Hannum, Stevenson University; Kim Hartswick, City University of New York; David Howarth, Zayed University; Dennis Ichiyama , Purdue University; Matt King, Virginia Commonwealth University; Andrea Kirsh, Independent Scholar and Rutgers University; Jason Lahr, University of Notre Dame; David LaPalombara, Ohio University; Jo-Ann Morgan, Western Illinois University; Mark O’Grady, Pratt Institute; Arthur Blake Pierce, Valdosta State University; Thomas Post, Kendall College of Art and Design, Ferris State University; Patricia Joan Sarro, Youngstown State University; Mattie M. Schloetzer, National Gallery of Art; and Megan Koza Young, Prospect New Orleans.
Brown Bag Lunches and Sessions
Leda Cempellin, South Dakota State University; Rachel P. Kreiter, Spelman College; Sooyoun Lee, Cornell University; Brittany Lockard, Wichita State University; Tamryn McDermott, George Mason University and Northern Virginia Community College; Lauren Puzier, Sotheby’s Institute of Art; Annie Storr, Montserrat College of Art; Jenny Tang, Yale University; and Amanda S. Wright, University of South Carolina; and Megan Koza Young, Prospect New Orleans.
Professional Development Workshops
Susan Altman, Middlesex County College; Barbara Bernstein, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and University of Virginia; Steven Bleicher, Coastal Carolina University; Mika Cho, California State University, Los Angeles; Chris Coleman, University of Denver; Curtis Fletcher, University of Southern California; Ronda Grizzle, Scholars’ Lab, University of Virginia Library; Sharon Leon, George Mason University; Lisa Reilly, University of Virginia; Gigi Rosenberg, Author and Artist; David Sokol, University of Illinois, Chicago (emeritus); and Blaise Tobia, Drexel University.
Propose a Poster Session for the 2017 Annual Conference
posted by tiffany — March 03, 2016
The deadline to propose a Poster Session is Thursday, September 15, 2016.
CAA invites individual members to submit abstracts for Poster Sessions at the 105th Annual Conference, taking place February 15–18, 2017, in New York. Poster Sessions—presentations displayed on bulletin boards by an individual for small groups—usually include a brief narrative paper mixed with illustrations, tables, graphs, and similar presentation formats. The poster display can intelligently and concisely communicate the essence of the presenter’s research, synthesizing its main ideas and directions. Colorado State University has published useful general information on Poster Sessions.
Poster Sessions offer excellent opportunities for extended informal discussion and conversation focused on topics of scholarly or pedagogical research. Posters are displayed for the duration of the conference, so that interested persons can view the work even when the presenters are not physically present. Poster Sessions take place in a high-traffic area, in close proximity to the Book and Trade Fair and conference rooms.
Proposals for Poster Sessions must include the following:
- Title of Poster Session
- Summary of project, not to exceed 250 words
- Name of presenter(s), affiliation(s), and CAA member number(s)
- A two-page CV of presenter
- Complete mailing address and telephone number
- Email address
Proposals are due by Thursday, September 15, 2016. Send all materials to Katie Apsey, CAA manager of programs. A working group of the Annual Conference Committee selects Poster Sessions based on individual merit and space availability at the conference. (Approximately ten posters may be accepted.) Accepted presenters must maintain their membership status through the conference.
Displays must be assembled by 10:00 AM on Thursday, February 16, and cleared by 2:00 PM on Saturday, February 18. Live presentations last ninety minutes and are scheduled during the lunch breaks on Thursday and Friday, 12:00–1:30 PM. During this time, presenters stand by their poster displays while others view the presentation and interact with the presenters.
CAA assigns presenters one freestanding bulletin board (about 4 x 8 feet of display space) onto which they can affix their poster display and other materials, as well as a table to place materials such as handouts or a sign-up sheet to record the names and addresses of attendees who want to receive more information. CAA also provides pushpins or thumbtacks to attach components to the bulletin board on the day of installation.
Printed materials must be easily read at a distance of four feet. Each display should include the title of the presentation (104-point size) and the name of the presenter(s) and his or her affiliation(s) (72-point size). CAA recommends a point size of 16–18 or larger for body text. No electrical support is available in the Poster Session area; you must have your own source of power if using a laptop or other forms of electronics.
Contact
For more information about proposals of Poster Sessions for the 2017 Annual Conference, please contact Katie Apsey, CAA manager of programs, at 212-392-4405.
2016 Annual Conference Highlights
posted by Nia Page — February 26, 2016
CAA hosted its 104th Annual Conference from February 3 to 6, 2016, at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park in Washington, DC. This year’s program included four days of presentations and panel discussions on art history and visual culture, Career Services for professionals at all stages of their careers, a Book and Trade Fair, and a host of special events throughout the region.
Attendance
Close to 4,000 people from throughout the United States and abroad—including artists, art historians, students, educators, curators, critics, collectors, and museum staff—attended the conference. Visual-arts professionals from over 49 countries were represented.
Sessions
Conference sessions featured presentations by artists, scholars, designers, graduate students, and curators who addressed a range of topics in art history and the visual arts. In total, the conference offered over 200 sessions, developed by CAA members, affiliated societies, and committees. Over 750 individuals presented their work.
Career Services and Professional Development
Career Services included four days of job interviews with colleges, universities, and other art institutions while Professional Development offerings included career mentoring and portfolio-review sessions, professional-development workshops, professional development roundtables and a variety of Student and Emerging Professional Committee programming such as Brown Bag discussions and Mock Interviews. During the professional development programming, approximately 30 professionals served as mentors to 120 young professionals, 5 established professionals led free professional roundtable discussions, and 13 Visual Arts specialists conducted development workshops throughout the conference. During the week of the Annual Conference, there were over 189 active jobs posted on the Online Career Center and more than 24 employers participating onsite.
Book and Trade Fair
This year’s Book and Trade Fair presented 98 exhibitors—including participants from the United States, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Singapore, Canda, Mexico, United Kingdom and Ukraine—that displayed new publications, materials for artists, digital resources, and other innovative products of interest to artists, scholars, and arts enthusiasts. The Book and Trade Fair also featured book signings, lectures, and demonstrations, as well as three exhibitor-sponsored program sessions on art materials and publishing. The conference had generous sponsorship support from the exhibitors Artforum/Bookforum, Art in America, Blick Art Materials, Bloomsbury, Frieze, Laurence King Publishers, Pearson, Prestel, Richmond-The American International University in London, Routledge and Yale University Press.
ARTspace
ARTspace, a “conference within the conference” tailored to the needs and interests of practicing artists, presented programming that was free and open to the public, including this year’s Annual Distinguished Artists’ Interviews with Joyce Scott who spoke with George Ciscle, Maryland Institute College of Art and Rick Lowe, who conversed with LaToya Ruby Frazier, Independent Artist and The School of the Art Institute, Chicago. The latter was presented as a partnership with the MacArthur Foundation to celebrate 35 years of its Fellowship program. Both Lowe and Frazier received MacArthur Fellowships in 2014 and 2015, respectively.
Watch the Annual Distinguished Artists’ Interviews
Over 150 people attended this lively event.
ARTspace also featured four days of panel discussions devoted to visual-arts practice, opportunities for professional development, and screenings of film and video.
ARTexchange, an open-portfolio event in which CAA artist members displayed drawings, prints, photographs, small paintings, and works on laptop computers, took place on Friday, February 5. Nearly 35 artists participated in ARTexchange this year.
The Media Lounge, a space for innovative new-media programming in conjunction with ARTspace. This year, the Media Lounge brought together academics, new media artists, artist collectives, alternative communities, guest speakers, filmmakers, and performers to lead workshops, present work, and generate productive discussions and crowd sourcing under the conceptual framework VISIBLE/INVISIBLE, Art & Politics.
The theme, VISIBLE/INVISIBLE, Art & Politics explored the legacy of identity and representation politics, considered in the context of our present culture where individuals, organizations and ideas can be easily captured, tracked, exposed, appropriated from the circulation of digital material which simultaneously feeds capitalist media assembly lines and alternative economies. The aim of the Media Lounge programming was to foster a dialog centered on emerging artistic sensibilities that mix art and a politics of representation amid a transforming sociopolitical landscape. The setting of CAA 2016, Washington DC and an election year, offered a unique opportunity to engage in these discussions.
ARTspace was made possible in part by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Student and Emerging Professionals Lounge
The Student and Emerging Professionals Lounge served as a hub for networking, information sharing, collaboration, professional development, and much more. The Student and Emerging Professionals Committee hosted an incredibly informative session on “Mentoring in the 21st Century” to a packed audience; a breakfast meet-and-greet with 200 attendees; five Brown Bag Sessions with attendance ranging from 45 to 160; a successful social night; and three days of Mock Interviews at full capacity.
Distinguished Scholar Session
Richard Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History and Dean of Humanities, Duke University was CAA’s 2016 Distinguished Scholar.
A panel including Kobena Mercer, Professor, History of Art and African American Studies at Yale University; Gwen Everett, Associate Dean of the Division of Fine Arts at Howard University; Kellie Jones, Associate Professor of Art History at Columbia University; and Suzanne Preston Blier, Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University joined in exploring and celebrating Powell’s many contributions.
Watch the Distinguished Scholar Session honoring Richard Powell.
Convocation and Awards
More than 1,000 people attended CAA’s Convocation and presentation of the annual 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. Tania Bruguera, the Cuban performance artist, delivered the keynote address.
Watch the CAA Convocation and Keynote Talk by Tania Bruguera.
The title of Bruguera’s talk was “Aest-ethics: Art with Consequences.” Bruguera’s work on issues of free speech and immigration and her fearlessness to speak out against forces of oppression—many of which she has experienced firsthand in Cuban prisons—is important and undeniably relevant to not just the art and academic worlds, but also the world at large.
The recipients of the 2016 Awards for Distinction were:
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Krista Thompson
Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice
Duke University Press
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann
New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic 1919–1933
Los Angeles County Museum of Art and DelMonico Books
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions
Myroslava M. Mudrak and Tetiana Rudenko
Staging the Ukrainian Avant-Garde of the 1910s and 1920s
Ukrainian Museum
Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Matthew C. Hunter
“Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Nice Chymistry’: Action and Accident in the 1770s”
The Art Bulletin, March 2015
Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism
Chika Okeke-Agulu
Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria
Duke University Press
Art Journal Award
Abigail Satinsky
“Movement Building for Beginners”
Art Journal, Fall 2015
Distinguished Feminist Award
Carrie Mae Weems
Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
Sabina Ott
Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
Patricia Berger
Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work
Arlene Shechet
Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Carmen Herrera
CAA/American Institute for Conservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
Debra Hess Norris
Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Rosalind E. Krauss
Morey and Barr Award Finalists
CAA recognizes the 2016 finalists for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Awards for their distinctive achievements:
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award Finalists
- Paul Binski, Gothic Wonder: Art, Artifice, and the Decorated Style, 1290–1350, Yale University Press, for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
- Elina Gertsman, Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Adam Herring, Art and Vision in the Inca Empire: Andeans and Europeans at Cajamarca, Cambridge University Press
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award Finalist
- Jens M. Daehner and Kenneth Lapatin, eds., Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World, J. Paul Getty Museum
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions Finalist
- Timothy Verdon and Daniel M. Zolli, eds., Sculpture in the Age of Donatello: Renaissance Masterpieces from Florence Cathedral, Museum of Biblical Art, in association with D. Giles
Special Events
Following Convocation, the Katzen Arts Center at American University was host to CAA’s Opening Reception on Wednesday evening, February 3. Over 250 attendees gathered to celebrate the conference while enjoying a stroll through the museum’s permanent collections.
CAA Travel Grant in Memory of Archibald Cason Edwards, Senior, and Sarah Stanley Gordon Edwards
Established by Mary D. Edwards with the help of others, the CAA Travel Grant in Memory of Archibald Cason Edwards, Senior, and Sarah Stanley Gordon Edwards will support women who are emerging scholars at either an advanced stage of pursuing a doctoral degree (ABD) or who have received their PhD within the two years prior to the submission of the application. Diana Seave Greenwald of the University of Oxford delivered her paper “Within the grade of certain obvious criteria of merit:” Sample Bias in Art History and Earl Shinn’s The Art Treasures of America in the “Very Generally Ignorant, Flippant: Art Criticism and Mass Media in the Nineteenth Century” session and Imogen Wiltshire of the University of Birmingham presented her paper Process and Function at the New Bauhaus in Chicago: Concepts of Modernism and the Development of Therapeutic Art Practices as part of the “Modernism and Medicine” 2-part session.
CAA-Getty International Travel Grant Program
In an effort to promote greater interaction and exchange between American and international art historians, CAA brought 15 scholars from around the world to participate in the Annual Conference. This is the fifth year of the program, which has been generously funded by grants from the Getty Foundation since its inception.
The CAA-Getty International Program participants’ activities began with a one-day preconference colloquium on international issues in art history, during which they met with North American–based CAA members to discuss common interests and challenges. The participants were assisted throughout the conference by CAA member hosts, who recommended relevant panel sessions and introduced them to colleagues who share their interests.
Representatives from several CAA affiliated societies served as hosts, including the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, the Association for Latin American Art, the Society of Contemporary Art Historians, and the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasia, and Russian Art and Architecture. More information about the group’s activities will appear in upcoming articles in CAA News and on the International Desk of the CAA website.
To date, this program has brought 90 scholars from 41 different countries to participate in CAA’s Annual Conference and expanded international networking and the exchange of ideas both during and after the conference.
The 2016 recipients were: Sarena Abdullah, Senior Lecturer, School of the Arts, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang; Abiodun Akande, Principal Lecturer, Department of Fine and Applied Arts, Emmanuel Alayande College of Education, Oyo State, Nigeria; María Isabel Baldasarre, Associate Professor, Universidad Nacional de San Martin, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Danielle Becker, Lecturer in Art History and Visual Studies, University of Cape Town and Stellenbosch University, South Africa; Heloisa Espada, Postdoctoral Researcher, Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of Saõ Paulo, Brazil; Ildikó Fehér, Associate Professor, Art History Department, University of Fine Arts of Hungary, Budapest, Hungary; Peyvand Firouzeh, Post-doctoral Fellow, Museum fur Islamische Kunst, Berlin, Germany; Lev Maciel, Associate Professor, National Research University, Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia; Bui Thi Thanh Mai, Lecturer of Art History, Head of Department of Academic Research Management and International relations, Vietnam University of Fine Arts, Ha Noi, Vietnam; Emmanuel Moutafov, Associate Professor, Director, Institute of Art Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria; Ceren Ozpinar, Lecturer, Isik University and Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey; Horacio Ramos, Associate Professor, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú; Olaya Sanfuentes, Professor, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Paulo Silveira, Professor, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil; Sandra Uskokovic, Assistant Professor, University of Dubrovnik, Arts & Restoration Department, Croatia.
CAA 2015 Professional-Development Fellowships
CAA awarded four 2015 Professional-Development Fellowships—two in the visual arts and two in art history—to graduate students in MFA and PhD programs across the United States. In addition, CAA has named two honorable mentions in art history and four in the visual arts. The fellows and honorable mentions also receive a complimentary one-year CAA membership and free registration for the 2016 Annual Conference where they were honored at Convocation and at a private reception.
Recipients of the fellowships in the visual arts were:
- Delano Dunn, School of Visual Arts, $10,000
- Derrick Woods-Morrow, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, $4,000 (gift of the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation)
Recipients of the fellowship in art history were:
- Marin Sarvé-Tarr, University of Chicago, $10,000
- Emilie Boone, Northwestern University, $2,500 (gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Museum Educational Trust)
The honorable mentions for art history were awarded to: Adrian Anagnost, University of Chicago; and Monica Bravo, Brown University. For the visual arts, honorable mentions are bestowed upon: Zhiwan Cheung, Carnegie Mellon University; Sarah Hewitt, Purchase College, State University of New York; Victoria Maidhof, San Francisco Art Institute; and Kaiya Rainbolt, San Diego State University.
Board of Directors Update
Results of the Board of Directors election were announced on February 3, 2016, during the Annual Members’ Business Meeting. The new directors are: appear below.
- Carma Gorman Associate Professor & Assistant Chair, Department of Art and Art History, University of Texas at Austin
- Elizabeth Schlatter Deputy Director and Curator of Exhibitions, University of Richmond Museums, Richmond
- Andrew Schulz Associate Dean for Research & Associate Professor, College of Arts and Architecture, Pennsylvania State University
- Anuradha Vikram Lecturer, Graduate Public Practice, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles
They will take office at the next board meeting in May 2016.
New board officers were elected:
- Doralynn Pines, Vice President for External Affairs
- Jim Hopfensberger, Vice President for Committees
Affiliated Societies
CAA would like to welcome two new affiliated societies:
Thank You
Members of CAA’s Board of Directors and staff would like to extend their gratitude to all conference funders and sponsors, attendees, volunteers, and participants; the organization’s committees and award juries; the Washington Marriott Wardman Park staff; the museums and galleries that opened their doors to conference attendees free of charge; and everyone else involved in helping to make the 104th Annual Conference such a tremendous success!
A warm thanks to the following for their generous support of CAA:
- Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
- Artforum/Bookforum
- Art in America
- Blick Art Materials
- Bloomsbury
- Frieze
- Getty Foundation
- Katzen Arts Center
- Laurence King Publishing
- National Endowment for the Arts
- Pearson
- Prestel
- Richmond, The American International University in London
- Routledge
- Samuel H. Kress Foundation
- Terra Foundation for American Art
- Wyeth Foundation for American Art
- Yale University Press
Save the Date
CAA’s 105th Annual Conference will be held in New York, February 15–18, 2017.
About CAA
The College Art Association is dedicated to providing professional services and resources for artists, art historians, and students in the visual arts. CAA serves as an advocate and a resource for individuals and institutions nationally and internationally by offering forums to discuss the latest developments in the visual arts and art history through its Annual Conference, publications, exhibitions, websites, and other events. CAA focuses on a wide range of issues, including education in the arts, freedom of expression, intellectual-property rights, cultural heritage and preservation, workforce topics in universities and museums, and access to networked information technologies. Representing its members’ professional needs since 1911, CAA is committed to the highest professional and ethical standards of scholarship, creativity, criticism, and teaching.
Image Captions
Conference attendees gather for a Professional Development Roundtable (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Conference attendees meet vendors in the Book and Trade Fair (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Rick Lowe and LaToya Ruby Frazier in conversation in ARTspace (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Mentoring activities in the SEP Lounge (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Tania Bruguera speaks at Convocation (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Friends gather at the Opening Reception at the Katzen Art Center (photograph by Bradley Marks)
The 2016 participants in the CAA-Getty International Program (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Fellowship recipients and honorable mentions in art history (photograph by Bradley Marks)
CAA Celebrates National Fair Use Week
posted by Janet Landay, Program Manager, Fair Use Initiative — February 22, 2016
The College Art Association is proud to participate in the 2016 National Fair Use Week. This event is held annually during the last week of February, this year from Monday, February 22, through Friday, February 26. It celebrates the important doctrines of fair use in the United States and fair dealing in Canada and other jurisdictions. In honor of National Fair Use Week, CAA presents the following article about ways its fair use code has been embraced in the year since it was first released.
It’s been exactly one year since CAA published its Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts. A session at this year’s Annual Conference took stock of the progress made during the past twelve months, and panelists recounted remarkable progress in applying fair use to the visual arts. Chaired by Judy Metro, editor-in-chief at the National Gallery of Art and chair of CAA’s Committee on Intellectual Property, five CAA members described how they or their institutions modified their approach to using copyrighted materials because of CAA’s new Code.
Leading the way was the College Art Association itself, which overturned its copyright policies for authors. As Betty Leigh Hutcheson, CAA’s director of publications, explained, instead of demanding that authors get permissions for all images and indemnify the press, CAA’s contracts now ask authors to read the Code and apply it to their uses. Indemnification is no longer required when asserting fair use.
Other publishers of artwork also told of changing policy. Patricia Fidler, art publisher at Yale University Press, described how, inspired by the Code, the press has now created its own fair use guidelines specific to scholarly publishing. Just as important for Fidler is the fact that other parts of Yale University, including its museums, are now considering expanding their access to fair use. “It’s a big step,” she said, “to give authors the last word on their fair use. And we are proud that it says at the top of our new author guidelines, ‘Yale University Press supports the fair use of art images in scholarly monographs.’”
Joseph Newland, head of publications at the Menil Collection in Houston, announced new policies at his museum. Thanks to the Code, the Menil has expanded access to fair use throughout the institution by adapting CAA’s policy for internal criteria. He said improvements are already apparent: “It’s really helped work flow, especially at the press office, which often needs to respond to the news cycle in a timely way.”
Sometimes progress includes learning from frustration. Susan Higman Larsen, head of publications at the Detroit Institute of Arts, talked about having to publish a work in a scholarly catalogue without a relevant image, because of intolerable attempts at controlling content by an estate. “We misunderstood fair use,” she explained. “We didn’t understand that some commercial uses are just as eligible for fair use as non-commercial ones.” The Code helped clear that up, she said, and now the DIA is publishing a new book, in which the author wants to reproduce an image by the same artist. “This time, we’ll claim fair use,” she said. Furthermore, the DIA is considering changing its institutional policies about fair use.
The last success story of the session was from an artist, Rebekah Modrak, who teaches at the University of Michigan. She recounted the challenges she encountered after creating a work of art that incorporated copyrighted material. She made a video introducing an imaginary company, Re Made Co., that spoofed the overexemplifying hipster-Brooklyn site Best Made Co. After receiving a cease-and-desist letter, she turned for advice to CAA, which steered her to good legal advice at the University of Michigan. Her university’s lawyers welcomed the opportunity to support her fair uses and endorsed her intention to keep her video online. Modrak then published an account of her experience for a Routledge publication, Consumption Markets & Culture. When the editors there initially asked her to get permission to reproduce images from her video, she relied on CAA’s Code to persuade them that fair use would apply.
Another way CAA is measuring the impact of the Code is through annual surveys that provide longitudinal data on how CAA members are relying on fair use. At the conference session, Patricia Aufderheide shared early results from a recent 2,500-person CAA survey, showing broad awareness of the Code. More than two thirds of respondents indicated they knew about the Code, and a third of that group had already shared their knowledge, usually with more than one kind of interlocutor—for example, students, colleagues, and association members. Many of those aware of the Code had already put it to use. Indeed, 11% of all respondents had begun to employ fair use only after the appearance of the Code last year, a big leap and a demonstration of the power of understanding community values and best practice.
Peter Jaszi concluded the session by discussing next steps in CAA’s fair use efforts. Over the coming year he and Aufderheide will work to educate in-house legal counsel about the importance of mission-oriented fair use, resulting in expanded employment of fair use by museums. They will continue to give presentations about the Code to groups of arts professionals around the country, with a special focus on publishing and museum activities. And Jaszi encouraged CAA members to avail themselves of the many resources—FAQs, explainers, infographics, background documents, slideshows and more—available both on the CAA website and at the Center for Media & Social Impact.
CAA will be posting updates about fair use on its website, including the success stories described above. We would like to hear from any of you whose practices have changed because of the Code, whether you have a success story or a challenge to share. Both types of information will support the field’s efforts to make appropriate reliance on fair use the norm. If you have fair use news to share, please contact me at jlanday@collegeart.org.
Find out more about National Fair Use Week here: http://fairuseweek.org/
Below are links to some of the events taking place around the country:
https://blog.library.gsu.edu/2015/02/23/fair-use-week/
http://www.udel.edu/udaily/2016/feb/fair-use-week-021716.html
A comprehensive collection of fair use codes, articles, videos and teaching materials can be found at the Center for Media and Social Impact, http://www.cmsimpact.org/fair-use
And don’t forget to look at the materials available on CAA’s website, which focus on our fair use code. There you will find Frequently Asked Questions, explanatory videos, infographics, and a five-part webinar, along with the Code itself.
Image Captions
Betty Leigh Hutcheson (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Patricia Fidler (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Joseph Newland, Peter Jaszi, and Susan Higman Larsen (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Rebekah Modrak (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Rebekah Modrak, Fair Use Badge of Honor
A Call to Action
posted by DeWitt Godfrey — February 16, 2016
DeWitt Godfrey, President of the CAA Board of Directors
A Call to Action
That there are many things wrong in and around our current cultural, educational, and political institutions goes almost without saying. But students of color and their allies at my university and across the country are saying and naming many of the endemic failings of our institutions, refusing to remain silent in the face of systemic racism, inequalities, and oppression. These protests demand redress, unquestionably deserved and long overdue, refusing to let the status quo resettle into old and harmful patterns. There is much anger, much emotion, and sometimes even much empathy. In the pursuit of new paradigms and patterns, territories are marked out, language crafted seeking discourse that ideally cannot support or makes impossible the reification of old injustices.
In the quest for these new spaces, in the specificity we believe will prevent and dismantle these systems of oppression and in their focused intention to redescribe and reframe the terms and debate around the responsibility of institutions and individuals, there also exists the possibility of curtailing and preventing the very conversations that might productively contribute to a process of recognition, acknowledgment, and critique of these pernicious systems of privilege and inequality. In the face of these very real grievances, in a climate of anxiety and fear, all around us the collective is at risk of fracture, dispersing into self-referential self-reinforcing pockets that create false senses of common purpose, aligned against a shared enemy composed of those who refuse or who are excluded by the preconditions of inclusion. In the final irony, this fracturing of the collective along clannish lines most suits those who opportunistically exploit the fears of those who fear losing their spaces of privilege, in a zero sum game predicated on the notion that to gain someone has to lose. We are weaker divided, and the institutional spaces, such as those enshrined at the heart of the university, a collective under which many disparate forms of knowledge production can find common purpose and support, grow also weaker, creating conditions under which the entire enterprise of higher education comes under attack as irrelevant, disconnected, and even antagonistic to the ideologically oriented common good.
Rather than arguing and debating ideas we are reduced to defending positions, constructs that by design resist and reject critique in conditions that neuter dialogue. While these constructs are created out of real conditions—real pain, suffering, and oppression—we should not counter by discounting or mediating the raw feelings at the center this experience. But we might be careful not to fall into a trap of our own design, in which debate and conversation can only occur with those in our likeminded cohort.
What does this have to do with CAA? Over the past decade the largest learned societies such as CAA and MLA have experienced steady and sometimes rapid declines in membership, while smaller discipline-specific societies’ memberships have grown.
From a peak in 2010 of 13,000 members, our current individual enrollment has fallen to 9,000. Conference attendance in New York, historically the highest and most consistent, was down 25 percent from 2013 to 2015. There are many substantive reasons for this downward trend: some are demographic (research shows that millennials are not joiners), so we restructured our membership categories when we launched our copublishing agreement with Taylor & Francis. The great recession of 2009 sharply reduced institutional support for research and conference travel and transformed hiring practices—a lot less of you are here interviewing candidates or seeking jobs than in years past. But beyond that, the fact remains that for many of our former and even current members, CAA is no longer relevant. For many the answer is to gather with like-minded individuals in narrowly defined subgroups. This has tangible consequences for CAA, but I also believe this current trend of atomization is a threat to the difficult cross-disciplinary, cross-identity, and cross-cultural conversations that must be supported and preserved that are less likely to be taken up by insular groups.
So what do productive and viable institutions make possible? What can large institutions provide that small ones can’t? Specifically, CAA carves out spaces of debate and conversation, opportunities to talk across difference, to bring focus and attention to issues that cross disciplines and fields. Our Mellon-funded task force produced guidelines for the fair use of third-party images in teaching, publishing, and creative work could not have been undertaken without the broad reach, constituency and intellectual reputation that we have at CAA. In the past five years our partnership with the Getty Foundation has gathered ninety art historians from over forty-five countries in every conceivable area of art and art-historical inquiry for a one-day preconference. The plurality and heterogeneity of our membership should be seen as our greatest asset, how a diverse spectrum of practitioners and scholars gather at the annual conference, through our publications and programs from across the range of arts, artists, art historians, museum and arts professionals, designers, and educators.
What I have offered above is a frank appeal for your support and advocacy for CAA, an appeal for an association that has been, in particular for our academic members, at the front lines for over a century, for an organization that has played a critical role in the integration of art history and studio practice into a frequently resistant academy. Times have changed, battles have been fought and won, and while there are standards to be defended, CAA must face a future where many—even most—of our colleagues no longer have access to the institutional resources which were once the norm, to advocate for the fair and equitable treatment of part-time and contingent faculty, to lead the debate around how education will be delivered, to keep education affordable, to protect and preserve a higher-education system that despite its flaws remains the envy of the world. We must also imagine a CAA that reaches further beyond the academy than we already do, as relevant to the unaffiliated artist, designer, and even art historian, as we are to those of us who hold academic positions. Our task force on design, design theory, design education, and design history has uncovered exciting potential for greater advocacy for our design colleagues and how to reimagine our structures and programs to strengthen and expand our association, acknowledging the growing stature of design in our culture and in our institutions. Artists without a permanent or sometime itinerant academic connection have long been, despite specific outreach attempts, on the periphery of our association because we have yet to clearly articulate what the benefits of membership are. CAA will need to clear new spaces for such new contributors and membership
Change is frightening and nearly everyone despises ambiguity—conversely conditions in which art and artists thrive. In the midst of an election cycle that has upended assumptions on both the left and right, now more than ever art matters. And I mean matters more than instrumentally—not merely as an economic driver and not as an adjunct practice that increases student’s math scores or that it is somehow “good for us.” Art matters because artists work and thrive in the interstitial spaces between disciplines, around institutions, who assume the permission to ask questions that cannot be formulated from inside the confines of a particular, single point of view or perspective.
This speech was first delivered as opening remarks at the CAA Annual Conference Convocation Ceremony on February 3, 2016. A Keynote talk by artist Tania Bruguera followed (Watch on YouTube).
Free Sessions and Events at the 2016 Annual Conference
posted by Emmanuel Lemakis — January 25, 2016
The following sessions and events at CAA’s 104th Annual Conference, taking place February 3–6, 2016, in Washington, DC, are free and open to the public. Everything takes place at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel.
Media Lounge, all events and screenings
Wednesday, February 3–Saturday, February 6
Thurgood Marshall Ballroom West, Mezzanine Level
Looking Ahead: Changes to the CAA Annual Conference
Wednesday, February 3, 12:30–2:00 PM
Wilson B, Mezzanine Level
CAA Convocation, Awards Presentation, and Keynote Address by Tania Bruguera
Wednesday, February 3, 5:30–7:00 PM
Salon 2, Lobby Level
The NEA and NEH at 50: NEA Chair Jane Chu and NEH Chair William “Bro” Adams in Conversation
Thursday, February 4, 12:30–2:00 PM
Salon 3, Lobby Level
The Power of Storytelling: Finding and Engaging New Audiences with Jarl Mohn, President and CEO, National Public Radio
Thursday, February 4, 5:30–7:00 PM
Salon 2, Lobby Level
Past, Present, and Future: NEH at 50
Friday, February 5, 2:30–5:00 PM
Salon 2, Lobby Level
ARTexchange
Friday, February 5, 5:30–7:00 PM
Atrium, Exhibition Level
Changes to the Annual Conference
posted by CAA — January 22, 2016
In 2017, CAA will change the format of our Annual Conference as we look to liven up the experience of all our members. The changes highlighted below are the result of a critical look at the event by the organization’s Annual Conference Committee.
- Proposal submission process for 2017 will open on March 1 and close on April 18
- New conference submission software: Submittable
- New time grid: all sessions will be ninety minutes in length, allowing for more sessions during the conference’s four days
- Individuals may participate in consecutive years, if their proposals are accepted
- More types of submissions and therefore more ways to participate, such as: complete session proposals, with speakers chosen in advance; proposals to chairs, who will solicit speakers through a call for papers; and independent proposals of papers
You can download and read the full report of recommendations by CAA’s Task Force on the Annual Conference.
The CAA 2016 App Is Live!
posted by CAA — January 20, 2016
If you are attending CAA 2016, you’ll want to have the official conference app on your mobile device. The app helps you navigate the conference schedule and allows you to create your own customized schedule within the app. In addition, you can follow the app activity feed to see posts from other attendees and follow conference news. The app allows for posting to social media accounts and connecting directly with other conference attendees. Check the conference maps in the app and bookmark items and sessions of interest.
The CAA 2016 app works on most mobile platforms, including iPhones and iPads, Android devices, and Blackberries.
Instructions for Downloading:
App Information Page and Download Instructions
CAA’s conference app is available through the Google Play store and the Apple App Store. To download the app onto your mobile device, search for “CAA 2016” in the Apple or Google app stores and download the app, allowing for permissions requested by the app. The HTML5 web-based version of the app is available for attendees who have Windows or Blackberry phones or do not have a smartphone.