CAA News Today

CAA invites you to help shape the future of the organization by serving on the 2018-2019 Nominating Committee. Each year, this committee nominates and interviews potential candidates for the CAA Board of Directors and selects the final slate for the membership’s vote. The candidates for the 2018 Board of Directors’ election were announced on Thursday, November 9, 2017.

The Board of Directors and the Nominating Committee strive to find the best candidates that represent the broad sub-disciplines and practitioners represented in CAA’s membership. The 2017-2018 Nominating Committee will select new members of the 2018-2019 committee at its business meeting, to be held at the 2018 Annual Conference in Los Angeles in February. Once selected to serve on the 2018-2019 Nominating Committee, each member, in the spring of 2018, proposes 5 or more people to run for the board. Service on the Nominating Committee involves conducting telephone interviews with candidates during the summer and meeting with the Committee in the fall to determine a final slate for the 2019 Board of Directors’ election.  Nominating Committee members attend their own business meeting at the 2019 Annual Conference in New York to select the new members who will replace them on the next year’s Nominating Committee.

Nominations and self-nominations should include a brief statement of interest and a 3–4 page condensed CV. Please email a statement and your CV as Word attachments, with the subject line “2018-2019 Nominating Committee,” care of Vanessa Jalet, CAA executive liaison. Deadline: Friday, December 1, 2017  

CAA board members at the 105th Annual Conference in New York, 2017. Photo: Ben Fractenberg

This has been a busy time for the CAA Board of Directors. In the end of October, they attended a two-day meeting and retreat, addressing a variety of issues facing the organization and the field.

Under the leadership of President Suzanne Preston Blier, the Board looked at potential changes to the governance structure, updates on finances and membership enrollment, the impact of the Annual Conference, the recent staff reorganization and progress on our 2015-2020 strategic plan.

In addition to hearing detailed reports from the various committees, the Board spent time on the process to rebrand and rename the Association. We have narrowed down the choices and members will be asked for their input in the coming weeks. Many thanks to the 800 members who responded to the survey this summer. That survey feedback was valuable in directing our thinking. We are hopeful that a new name and identity will be launched at the 106th Annual Conference in Los Angeles in February 2018.

The board also elected new officers: Jim Hopfensberger was elected to succeed Suzanne Blier. She finishes her term as president in Spring 2018. Melissa Potter was elected secretary and Peter Lukehart was elected treasurer.

Roberto Tejada was elected to serve in the newly created office of vice president of Diversity and Inclusion.

CAA’s Nominating Committee met in early October 2017 to review the candidates who have applied to run in CAA’s Board of Directors election for the term 2018-2022. The Nominating Committee selected the following six candidates, four of whom will be elected to Board service. In the coming weeks, CAA will post their full biographies for consideration by the CAA membership.

Laura Anderson Barbata is a practicing, trans-disciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn and Mexico City. Her work is intended to connect various cultures through the platform of contemporary art. Her art engages creative practices that promote dignity, shared values, diversity, and collaboration through reciprocal exchange of knowledge.  Among many unique projects, she has worked with the Yanomami of the Venezuela Amazon to document their oral history, overseen collaborative work with stilt dancing groups from Trinidad and Tobago, Brooklyn and Oaxaca and directed a 10-year effort to repatriate the remains of a Mexican Opera Singer. Ms. Barbata has extensive business expertise, as director of image and concept designer for a chain of 50 restaurants throughout Mexico. She was Vice President of the company and worked to protect the interests of the shareholders until the business was sold. Ms. Barbata feels she offers a unique perspective – having international business experience as well as maintaining a career as an artist.

Audrey G. Bennett is a full professor in the Department of Communication and Media, and director of the interdisciplinary graduate program in Communication and Rhetoric at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  She was a 1996 recipient of a CAA Professional Development Fellowship and is currently a member of CAA’s Inaugural Committee on Design. From 2002-2010 she was a member of the Board of the Upstate New York chapter of the AIGA, the professional association for design where she served in a number of leadership roles. She is a former 2015 Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Scholar, University of Pretoria, South Africa. Prof. Bennett secured funding for and founded the Global Interaction in Design Education (GLIDE), a biennial, virtual design conference. She would like to assist CAA in diversifying its membership culturally and intellectually.

Dahlia Elsayed is an Associate Professor of Fine Arts in the Humanities Dept. at CUNY-LaGuardia Community College. She is a practicing artist who combines text and imagery to create visually narrative paintings that document internal and external geographies. Her work is influenced by conceptual art, comics and landscape painting and cartography.  She is particularly interested in attracting and welcoming the vital constituency of community college faculty and students to CAA.  Furthermore she sees opportunities to facilitate interactions between community colleges, senior colleges and graduate programs to strengthen best practices and continuity.

Alice Ming Wai Jim is Associate Professor in Contemporary Art and Concordia University Research Chair in Ethnocultural Art Histories at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She is the founding co-editor of the international scholarly journal, “Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas.” Alice is an art historian, curator and cultural organizer in the fields of diasporic and global art histories, media arts and curatorial studies. Focusing on Asian Canadian and African Canadian artists, she has curated exhibitions of over fifty artists of color and Indigenous artists and organized major scholarly events within academic settings and for the broader arts community in Canada and internationally. She is also involved in a leadership capacity in several formal partnerships involving international networking and community building initiatives, with a strong commitment to research and social justice. Alice would like to work toward increasing the visibility of members from diverse cultural communities, strengthening international exchanges, and expanding critical capacities for art historical scholarship and critical visual culture studies on and by ethnic minority and Indigenous peoples across the Americas and internationally.

Richard Lubben is Dean of the Arts Division at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon.  He is a painter, whose recent work consists of a series of large format abstract oil paintings examining visual transitions of landscapes through seasonal changes, memories of nature and delicate ecosystems. He was awarded a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Human Rights and Social Justice at the University of Ottawa in 2013. He has served on CAA’s Task Force on Advocacy, been on panels at CAA’s Annual Conference and is currently the Chair of CAA’s Education Committee.  Lubben urges the inclusion of representatives from community colleges on CAA’s board but even more importantly attracting to CAA the thousands of 2-year institutional members, and potential individual members, associated with the nearly 1500 community colleges across the United States.

Walter Meyer, Professor of Art History at Santa Monica College, a 2-year community college  in California.  His degree is early 20^th century art, specializing in Eastern Europe and Russia.  He has taken on a number of leadership positions at SMC including co-chairing the Technology Planning Committee . He is President of the Art Historians of Southern California, and former board member of the Craft & Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles. Currently, he serves on CAA’s Professional Practices Committee. Meyer believes in the mission of the community college system and its ability to help art and art history programs close the equity gap with under-represented populations on college campuses.