CAA News Today
Sign Up for Childcare at the 2020 Annual Conference
posted by CAA — October 16, 2019
Please note: Due to low enrollment, onsite childcare for the 2020 Annual Conference has been canceled. To better meet members’ childcare needs, we are now offering Childcare Grants of up to $250 per family. Learn more and apply here.
For the second year in a row, we’re pleased to partner with Kiddie Corp to offer onsite childcare at the Annual Conference.
Care will be available for ages 6 months to 12 years of age, at a rate of $12 an hour, on Thursday, February 12 and Friday, February 13, 2020, from 8 AM – 8 PM.
Kiddie Corp programs feature arts and crafts, group games, music and movement, board games, story time, dramatic play, and many more engaging activities. Kiddie Corp is in its 33rd year of providing childcare services at conferences and trade shows and has a longstanding partnership with the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Conference attendees in need of childcare during the conference should pre-register for care. A minimum number of children must register for the service by December 3rd in order to allow CAA to offer onsite childcare in the Hilton Chicago. Please note: If we do not have enough enrollment, onsite childcare will be canceled.
Sign up deadline: December 3, 2019
Deadline Extended! Participate in ARTexchange at CAA 2020
posted by CAA — October 04, 2019
ARTexchange at the 2019 Annual Conference in New York. Photo: Ben Fractenberg
Originally formatted as a pop-up exhibition and meet-up event for artists and curators, ARTexchange provides an opportunity for artists to share their work and build affinities with other artists, historians, curators, and cultural producers at the Annual Conference.
This year, instead of a one-time event, ARTexchange invites artists to lead participatory projects and/or workshops over the duration of the conference with a culminating public reception on Friday, February 14, from 7-8:30 pm.
CAA’s Services to Artists Committee, in collaboration with the Hokin Project, a gallery management practicum course at Columbia College Chicago, seeks proposals from artists to lead participatory projects and/or workshops for ARTexchange.
ARTexchange projects and/or workshops will take place at the Columbia College Hokin Gallery, from February 12-15, 2020. The gallery is located a half block north of the Hilton Chicago conference hotel at 623 South Wabash. The work created will remain on exhibit through February 24, 2020. Proposals that include community engagement and meaningful interaction with CAA, Columbia College, and Chicago communities will be prioritized.
In collaboration with the Committee on Women in the Arts, CAA offers 50 percent of the 2020 conference’s content in celebration of the Centennial of Women’s Suffrage in the United States, while also acknowledging the discriminatory practices that limited voting rights for Indigenous women and women of color, even after the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920. The Services to Artists Committee encourages applicants to embrace the spirit of the 2020 conference by engaging issues of inclusivity and intersectional discourses in the arts.
Artists will have access to found objects or recycled materials donated and sourced that might include such things as office supplies, paper, fabric, paint, or drawing materials. A risograph with at least eight ink drums is at hand as a possible resource as well. Please consider that activities will take place in a public, open, non-studio environment and should not include toxic materials or processes.
Artists whose proposals are accepted must become CAA members. Complete information on CAA membership is available here.
The Hokin Project is a Gallery Management Practicum course of the Business and Entrepreneurship Department. Graduate and undergraduate students manage all aspects of the gallery to present multi-disciplinary work of the broader Columbia College Chicago community and beyond through programs, events, and exhibitions.
Please email any questions to hokingallery@gmail.com and artexchange2020@gmail.com. Include “CAA ARTexchange” in the subject line.
Deadline to submit (extended): November 8, 2019
- Contact information
- A short narrative bio (150 words or less)
- A short artist statement (150 words or less)
- Website URL (optional)
- A PDF (one file maximum 10 MB) of your proposal detailing your project, including materials requests, technical needs, and how you will engage the community (Chicago, CAA, and Columbia College Chicago) and/or consider inclusivity through the proposal. Please refer to the gallery plan, and if a particular space is preferable for the activity, make a note (please note that space will be shared amongst the accepted projects). If your project might take place over consecutive days, please note below in the Availability section. (up to 500 words)
- Work samples (5–10 images and/or links to 1–2 video/audio files)
- An image description list detailing the title, year completed, medium, and dimensions of each work. You may also include a short description describing how the work relates to the proposed project.
- Availability: your availability during different time slots during the conference and any other information related to scheduling.
Announcing Notable Speakers for 2020 Annual Conference in Chicago
posted by CAA — October 01, 2019
We’re delighted to announce the following guests will be presenting at the 108th CAA Annual Conference, taking place February 12-15, 2020, at the Hilton Chicago.
Keynote Speaker
Amanda Williams. Photo: David Kasnic Photography
The Keynote Speaker for the 108th CAA Annual Conference will be Amanda Williams. A visual artist who trained as an architect, Williams’s creative practice navigates the space between art and architecture, through works that employ color as a way to highlight the political complexities of race, place and value in cities. Williams has received critical acclaim including being named a USA Ford Fellow and a Joan Mitchell Foundation grantee. Her works have been exhibited widely and are included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She lives and works on the South Side of Chicago.
CAA Convocation featuring Amanda Williams’s keynote will take place Wednesday, February 12, 2020, from 6-7:30 PM at the Hilton Chicago, Grand Ballroom. Free and open to the public.
Distinguished Scholar
The Distinguished Scholar for the 108th CAA Annual Conference will be Dr. Kellie Jones, professor in Art History and Archaeology and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. Her research interests include African American and African Diaspora artists, Latinx and Latin American Artists, and issues in contemporary art and museum theory.
Dr. Kellie Jones. Photo: Rod McGaha
Dr. Jones, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has also received awards for her work from the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University and Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation. In 2016 she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.
Dr. Jones’s writings have appeared in a multitude of exhibition catalogues and journals. She is the author of two books published by Duke University Press, EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (2011), and South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (2017), which received the Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award from the American Book Award in 2018 and was named a Best Art Book of 2017 in The New York Times and a Best Book of 2017 in Artforum.
Dr. Jones has also worked as a curator for over three decades and has numerous major national and international exhibitions to her credit. Her exhibition “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980,” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, was named one of the best exhibitions of 2011 and 2012 by Artforum, and best thematic show nationally by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). She was co-curator of “Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the 1960s” (Brooklyn Museum), named one the best exhibitions of 2014 by Artforum. Read our interview with Kellie Jones.
The Distinguished Scholar Session will take place Thursday, February 13, 2020, from 4-5:30 PM at the Hilton Chicago, Grand Ballroom.
Distinguished Artist Interviews
The Distinguished Artist Interviews will feature artist Sheila Pepe interviewed by John Corso Esquivel, and artist Arnold J. Kemp interviewed by Huey Copeland.
Sheila Pepe. Photo: Rachel Stern
Sheila Pepe is a cross-disciplinary artist employing conceptualism, surrealism, and craft to address feminist and class issues. Hot Mess Formalism, Pepe’s most recent solo exhibition organized by the Phoenix Art Museum, traveled to the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, Nebraska; and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts between 2017 and 2019. A catalogue for the exhibition featured essays by by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Elizabeth Dunbar, Lia Gangitano, and curator Gilbert Vicario.
Other texts, all published in 2019, feature Pepe’s work: Vitamin T: Threads, and Textiles in Contemporary Art, the revised Art and Queer Culture by Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer, both published by Phaidon, and Feminist Subjectivities in Fiber Art and Craft: Shadows of Affect by John Corso Esquivel.
Venues for Pepe’s many other solo exhibitions include the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts, and the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina. Her work has been included in important group exhibitions, most recently Fiber: Sculpture 1960- Present, curated by Janelle Porter, organized by the ICA Boston; Queer Abstraction, curated by Jared Ladesema, organized by the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa and Even Thread Has Speech, curated by Shannon Stratton for the John Michael Kohler Art Center, Wisconsin.
John Corso Esquivel is the Doris and Paul Travis Associate Professor of Art History at Oakland University.
Arnold J. Kemp. Photo: Todd Rosenberg for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Arnold J. Kemp is an interdisciplinary artist living in Chicago. The recurrent theme in his drawings, photographs, sculptures and writing is the permeability of the border between self and the materials of one’s reality. Kemp’s works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, The Portland Art Museum, The Schneider Museum of Art, and the Tacoma Art Museum. He has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. His work has been exhibited recently in Chicago, Mexico City, New York, San Francisco and Portland. His work was also shown in Tag: Proposals On Queer Play and the Ways Forward at the ICA Philadelphia. Kemp was a founding curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from 1993-2003 and is currently the Dean of Graduate Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Read our interview with Arnold J. Kemp.
Huey Copeland is Arthur Andersen Teaching and Research Professor, Interim Director of the Black Arts Initiative (2019-2020), Associate Professor of Art History, and affiliated faculty in the Critical Theory Cluster, the Department of African American Studies, the Department of Art Theory & Practice, the Department of Performance Studies, and the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Northwestern University.
The Distinguished Artist Interviews will take place Friday, February 14, 2019, from 4-6:30 PM at the Hilton Chicago, Grand Ballroom. Free and open to the public.
Registration Now Open for the 2020 CAA Annual Conference
posted by CAA — October 01, 2019
Frederick Weston speaking at the 2019 CAA Annual Conference. Photo: Ben Fractenberg
2020 CAA ANNUAL CONFERENCE
Hilton Chicago
FEBRUARY 12-15, 2020
Four days for everyone in the arts with over 300 sessions and panels, dozens of receptions and parties, professional development workshops, lightning talks, and exhibitors. #CAA2020
For the first time since 2014, the CAA Annual Conference returns to Chicago in February. We welcome all those in the visual arts to attend over 300 sessions and professional development workshops, as well as dozens of receptions, parties, and special tours at local museums and cultural institutions. The Book and Trade Fair, with over one hundred booths showcasing the latest products, programs, and books, will be on the lower level of the Hilton Chicago. Our partners offering free or discounted admission and special tours this year include Art Institute of Chicago, the Field Museum, the Design Museum of Chicago, and many others.
The 108th CAA Annual Conference content will address the full breadth of the field of visual arts and design and will examine a range of cultures, histories, and scholarship. We anticipate more than 5,000 professionals in the arts to attend the conference in Chicago. In collaboration with the Committee on Women in the Arts, we offer 50 percent of the conference’s content in celebration of the Centennial of Women’s Suffrage in the United States, while also acknowledging the discriminatory practices that limited voting rights for Indigenous women and women of color, even after the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920.
We are excited to announce that several renowned artists, designers, and scholars will be speaking at the conference. On Wednesday, February 12, Chicago-based visual artist Amanda Williams will be delivering the keynote address at Convocation. On Friday, February 14, our Artist Interviews will feature Sheila Pepe and Arnold J. Kemp, and this year’s Distinguished Scholar Session, held on February 13, will honor Kellie Jones.
Learn More about our Notable Speakers
Once again, CAA will offer travel grants and scholarships to individuals looking to attend the Annual Conference. With the generous support of Blick Art Materials and Routledge, Taylor & Francis, CAA will provide eight student member registrants with $250 each to attend the conference.
We look forward to seeing you in Chicago!
Please contact Member Services at membership@collegeart.org or at 212-691-1051, ext. 1 with any questions.
Submit a Proposal for Idea Exchange at CAA 2020
posted by CAA — September 16, 2019
Idea Exchange at the 2018 CAA Annual Conference. Photo: Rafael Cardenas
We launched Idea Exchange at the 2018 Annual Conference in Los Angeles in response to members who expressed an interest in holding informal roundtable discussions on topics ranging from fellowship applications and gallery representation to student engagement in the classroom and preserving women artists’ legacies. See a list of previous discussion topics here.
We’re offering Idea Exchange again in 2020 and we’re looking for CAA members to serve as discussion leaders.
Propose a topic that you would like to discuss with your colleagues for a sixty-minute roundtable at the conference. It can relate to professional development, teaching, or current events, such as the debate surrounding Confederate monuments or the #MeToo movement in the arts. Be creative. The conversations are meant to be lively and engaging. Please submit your Idea Exchange proposals by November 1, 2019.
In order to submit an Idea Exchange topic, you will need to have your member ID and password ready. If you do not have an individual ID number and password or you do not know it, please contact member services by email at membership@collegeart.org or by phone at 212-691-1051, ext. 1.
Idea Exchange will be held in the Hilton Chicago, Lower Level, Salon B, during the following times:
Wednesday, February 12: 10:30 AM; 12:30 PM; 2:00 PM; 4:00 PM
Thursday, February 13: 10:30 AM; 12:30 PM; 2:00 PM; 4:00 PM
Friday, February 14: 10:30 AM; 12:30 PM; 2:00 PM; 4:00 PM
Saturday, February 15: 10:30 AM; 12:30 PM
For more information on Idea Exchange, contact Mira Friedlaender, manager of the Annual Conference, at mfriedlaender@collegeart.org or by phone at (212) 392-4405.
Call for Participation: CAA 2020 Poster Session Highlighting Undergraduate Research in Art and Art History
posted by CAA — September 05, 2019
Poster sessions at the 2018 CAA Annual Conference in Los Angeles. Photo: Rafael Cardenas
We’re excited to announce a Call for Participation for a special poster session dedicated to undergraduate research for the 2020 Annual Conference in Chicago, February 12-15.
Organized by Alexa Sand, Chair of the Division of Arts and Humanities for the Council on Undergraduate Research, and Professor of Art History and Director of Undergraduate Research at Utah State University, this session is one of several events planned for CAA 2020 to provide more opportunities for undergraduate participation.
Submissions should be sent via this google form by October 31, 2019.
Selected presenters will be notified by December 1 and will need to join CAA at the student membership rate prior to participation in the conference. Participants will also be required to register for the conference.
Undergraduate research—whether part of a faculty-directed project, class-based, or an individual pursuit on the part of a student—is an ideal example of active and engaged learning. Students in art history identify questions, evaluate source material, test ideas and theories, and produce reports in some form, usually including a significant written component. In the studio art and design fields, research can take a different form, with creative practice being one way outcomes of a project can be delivered.
This poster session will be dedicated to presenting outstanding examples of undergraduate research. Submissions are invited from students conducting research such as object and/or medium studies, text-based analysis, experimental archaeology, thesis research, and/or creative inquiry. Students may choose to present findings from ongoing research or from recently completed projects.
We also encourage submissions from faculty and museum professionals who have experience with mentoring undergraduate research in Art History, Studio Art, Graphic Design, Visual Communication, and other creative fields. Faculty posters may address specific projects or case studies of student research projects, assessment of undergraduate research, characteristics of successful programs, or other approaches that addresses the challenges and benefits to students of undergraduate research.
This project proposal is part of CAA’s Undergraduate Outreach Initiative organized collaboratively by CAA’s Education Committee, Committee on Diversity Practices, Students and Emerging Professionals Committee, and the Division of Arts and Humanities, Council on Undergraduate Research.
Please contact Alexa Sand directly at alexa.sand@usu.edu with any questions.
The Getty Foundation to Fund the CAA-Getty International Program for a Ninth Year
posted by CAA — June 12, 2019
CAA-Getty Scholars at the 2019 Annual Conference in New York. Photo: Ben Fractenberg
The Getty Foundation has awarded CAA a grant to fund the CAA-Getty International Program for a ninth consecutive year. The Foundation’s support will enable CAA to bring twenty international visual-arts professionals to the 108th Annual Conference, taking place February 12-15, 2020 in Chicago. Fifteen individuals will be first-time participants in the program and five will be alumni, returning to present papers during the conference. The CAA-Getty International Program provides funds for travel expenses, hotel accommodations, per diems, conference registrations, and one-year CAA memberships to art historians, artists who teach art history, and museum curators.
The application portal is now open. Grant guidelines and the 2020 application can be found here.
“The Getty Foundation is proud to continue its commitment to the CAA-Getty International Program and offer support that brings together diverse scholars from around the world,” says Joan Weinstein, acting director of the Getty Foundation. “CAA’s dedication to this joint program strengthens the annual conference and builds the field of art history as a global discipline.”
Since the CAA-Getty International Program’s inception in 2012, it has brought over 120 first-time attendees from 46 countries to CAA’s Annual Conference. Historically, the majority of international registrants at the conference have come from North America, the United Kingdom, and Western European countries. The CAA-Getty International Program has greatly diversified attendance, adding scholars from Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, Africa, Asia, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and South America. The majority of the participants teach art history, visual studies, art theory, or architectural history at the university level; others are museum curators or researchers.
One measure of the program’s success is the remarkable number of international collaborations that have ensued, including an ongoing study of similarities and differences in the history of art among Eastern European countries and South Africa, attendance at other international conferences, publications in international journals, and participation in panels and sessions at subsequent CAA Annual Conferences. Former grant recipients have become ambassadors of CAA in their countries, sharing knowledge gained at the Annual Conference with their colleagues at home. The value of attending a CAA Annual Conference as a participant in the CAA-Getty International Program was succinctly summarized by alumnus Nazar Kozak, Senior Researcher, Department of Art Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine “To put it simply, I understood that I can become part of a global scholarly community. I felt like I belong here.”
Read our Member Spotlight with Nazar Kozak.
About the Getty Foundation
The Getty Foundation fulfills the philanthropic mission of the Getty Trust by supporting individuals and institutions committed to advancing the greater understanding and preservation of the visual arts in Los Angeles and throughout the world. Through strategic grant initiatives, it strengthens art history as a global discipline, promotes the interdisciplinary practice of conservation, increases access to museum and archival collections, and develops current and future leaders in the visual arts. It carries out its work in collaboration with the other Getty Programs to ensure that they individually and collectively achieve maximum effect.
CAA Assembles Working Group Against Harassment and Assault
posted by CAA — May 23, 2019
Motivated by an Idea Exchange roundtable held at the 2019 Annual Conference in New York, CAA announces the formation of a Working Group Against Harassment and Assault, aimed at addressing issues related to sexual harassment and power dynamics at the Annual Conference.
The working group is made up of CAA members from around the country, many of whom have experience effecting change at their own institutions in this arena. The working group members are:
Sonia De Laforcade, Princeton University
Claire Kovacs, Binghamton University Art Museum
Karen Leader, Florida Atlantic University
Daniel Quiles, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Leanne Zalewski, Central Connecticut State University
The working group will meet several times over the summer of 2019 to formulate suggestions to the Board of Directors. These recommendations are intended to aid CAA in addressing the systemic and structural dynamic of power and privilege that makes space for predatory behavior at the Annual Conference.
See the Results of the 2019 CAA Annual Conference Survey
posted by CAA — April 02, 2019
Registration at the 2019 CAA Annual Conference in New York. Photo: Ben Fractenberg
Thank you to everyone who participated in our 2019 Annual Conference survey! Each year we work to make the Annual Conference better than the year before. It’s a large effort that takes the time of many people. We only do it once year but we need to have it perfect from that first hour registration is open, and your direct feedback helps us make that happen.
Here is what you told us about your experience this year:
- Up from last year, 79% of you were satisfied with the Annual Conference
- 75% liked the content of the sessions but only half of you thought the sessions represented a balance of time periods
- 75% liked your online experience with CAA
- 74% liked the Book and Trade Fair
- 67% thought that the conference was welcoming and inclusive
Here’s what you liked about the conference:
- Professional development offerings and workshops
- Networking opportunities
- Diverse sessions, good variety, good from a scholarly point
- Staff—easy to find someone to help
- Very smooth check-in process
- Pay-as-you-Wish Day Pass
- Conference in one building (as opposed to LA)
- New York is a good destination – museums and galleries
- Length of the sessions, committees’ lunch, opportunity to participate on a panel
- Mentoring
- Welcoming and stimulating, not the “high-brow” style of years’ past; friendly, collegial spirit
- More inclusion of design
- Many people got to participate
- Planning features on website
- Childcare
- Book and Trade Fair
- Convocation
- Open sessions on diversity and other topics
- Tables where people could sit and talk
Here is what you want to think about for next year’s conference:
- Conference was too long, and conference fatigue was inevitable
- Need more offerings for mentoring and interviewing
- Bring back the free paper schedule program
- 90-minute sessions are too short for 5 presenters; 8:30 is too early for some sessions
- Too many things are scheduled at the same time
- Too much for art historians rather than artists
- Not enough for art historians
- New York is always a problem with weather and too expensive ($13 for a glass of wine?)
- Could never find the soul to the conference —leaves me feeling sad about our field
- Very few senior scholars or mid-career attended, making it feel like a graduate student mentoring event
- Too many sessions on the same topics and at the same time
- Needs more transparency on how sessions are selected and put together
- There was a lack of diverse topics
- Way too large and overwhelming—no one had a chance to network—conference is no longer an academic one
- Abstracts should be available online
- The website is very confusing
- Too many presenters read from their papers, looking down
- Nothing to attract scholars or historians
- Why are there almost no artists outside of academia at CAA
Here is what you told us about you:
- About 67% of you are art historians; 24% are practicing artists
- 77% of you are associated with a college or university and nearly half of you are either full-time faculty or department chairs
- 75% of you pay for your membership fees yourself; about half of you are fortunate to have your employer to pay for it
Planning to submit a proposal for CAA 2020? The submissions portal for next year’s Annual Conference in Chicago closes April 30. We invite proposals for sessions, lightning rounds, poster sessions, and workshops from visual arts professionals working across the field in all disciplines.
Rejoin CAA in April and Get 25% Off Your Membership
posted by CAA — April 01, 2019
There is strength in numbers. Every day, CAA is working on behalf of professionals in the visual arts to create resources, build networks, and encourage scholarship at the highest levels. The louder our voice, the more we can do.
Rejoin CAA during the month of April and get 25% off any Tiered membership level.
Plan on participating in the 2020 Annual Conference in Chicago, February 12-15, 2020? Submissions are due April 30, 2019.
Join your colleagues and fellow professionals in creating the programming for the largest gathering of art historians, artists, designers, curators, arts administrators, museum professionals, and others in the visual arts.
Now is the perfect time to rejoin and save.
Offer valid from April 1–April 30, 2019, 11:59 PM EST, to individual lapsed members for a one-year membership. Discount applies only to those whose membership has lapsed between January 1, 2012 and January 1, 2018. Log in to your CAA account to view the discount code.
Questions? Contact Member Services at 212-691-1051, ext. 1.