CAA News Today
caa.reviews Seeks Field Editors for Books and Exhibitions
posted by Christopher Howard — October 31, 2016
caa.reviews invites nominations and self-nominations for individuals to join its Council of Field Editors, which commissions reviews within an area of expertise or geographic region, for a term ending June 30, 2019. An online journal, caa.reviews is devoted to the peer review of books, museum exhibitions, and projects relevant to art history, visual studies, and the arts.
The journal seeks field editors to commission reviews of books in museum studies and of exhibitions on the West Coast, in the Midwest, and in Europe. Candidates may be artists, art or design historians, critics, curators, or other professionals in the visual arts; institutional affiliation is not required.
Field editors select content to be reviewed, commissions reviewers, and reviews manuscripts for publication, working with the journal’s editor-in-chief, editorial board, and CAA staff editor as necessary. Field editors for books are expected to keep abreast of newly published and important books and related media in their fields of expertise, and field editors for exhibitions should be aware of current and upcoming exhibitions (and other related projects) in their geographic regions. The Council of Field Editors meets annually at the CAA Annual Conference.
Candidates must be current CAA members and should not serve concurrently on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please send a statement describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and your contact information to: caa.reviews Editorial Board, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004; or email the documents to Deidre Thompson, CAA publications assistant. Deadline: January 15, 2017.
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — October 28, 2016
Hollis Clayson reads The Work of Art: Plein-air Painting and Artistic Identity in Nineteenth-Century France by Anthea Callen. The “impressive book, chockablock with technical information,” views “the visible painted mark” as not only an “index of an artist’s working methods and tools, but also the inescapable sign of the painter’s aesthetic, social, and institutional allegiances.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Claire Grace discusses Taryn Simon: Paperwork and the Will of Capital, an exhibition hosted at Gagosian Gallery, New York. Grace focuses on twelve sculptures that feature plant specimens yet spring “from the world of geopolitics and trade.” Although sculpture “is a departure for Simon,” the series “extends the research-driven, post-documentary axis of her photography-based practice.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
James Housefield reviews Ruth E. Iskin’s The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s–1900s. This “engaging and readable book” “rethinks the role of print media in the creation and transformations of modern art.” Arguing “persuasively for renewed examination of posters” in visual culture, the volume “contributes to the history of modern art, writ large.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Jessica N. Richardson examines From Giotto to Botticelli: The Artistic Patronage of the Humiliati in Florence by Julia I. Miller and Laurie Taylor-Mitchell. “A long-awaited study,” the book “traces the entire span of Humiliati art at a single location.” It “provides another model for breaking down period boundaries and envisaging images and objects as communicating through the centuries.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Caa.reviews publishes over 150 reviews each year. Founded in 1998, the site publishes timely scholarly and critical reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by the College Art Association. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate. Read more reviews at caa.reviews.
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — October 21, 2016
Melanee C. Harvey reviews The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary Artists, an exhibition catalogue edited by Mara Ambrožič and Simon Njami. The volume expands on three exhibitions—each dedicated to a realm of the afterlife—and illuminates “the potential aesthetic and conceptual configurations in contemporary art that undermine parochial notions of African art.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Danielle Carrabino reads Faith, Gender and the Senses in Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art: Interpreting the Noli me tangere and Doubting Thomas by Erin E. Benay and Lisa M. Rafanelli. Comparing the two religious narratives, the authors combine “feminist theory and notions of reception” to argue that gender dictates the way Mary Magdalene and Thomas “experience the resurrected body.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Allison Myers discusses International Pop, a traveling exhibition organized by the Walker Art Center. The “ambitious show” aims to “overturn the idea of Pop as a primarily American and British movement by redefining it as a fluid sensibility with international reach.” At the Dallas Museum of Art, the layout “underscores the exhibition’s stakes in the conversation on global art history.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Caa.reviews publishes over 150 reviews each year. Founded in 1998, the site publishes timely scholarly and critical reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by the College Art Association. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate. Read more reviews at caa.reviews.
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — October 14, 2016
Laura Weigert discusses Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker: Work/Travail/Arbeid, an exhibition and site-specific work at the Centre Pompidou. Each of the nine hour-long segments features “a different combination of dancers and musicians.” According to Weigert, “the concept of work” is central to the project, along with the question of “what might dance achieve in a museum.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Yumi Park Huntington reviews the exhibition catalogue Chavín: Peru’s Enigmatic Temple in the Andes. Edited by Peter Fux, the essays “present new archeological excavations and new interpretations of material objects.” Using “rich and abundant data,” the contributors illustrate “the importance of analyzing a culture within its network of interactions and exchanges with contemporaneous societies.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Heather Diack visits This Place, a traveling exhibition initiated by Frédéric Brenner and curated Charlotte Cotton. Featuring twelve internationally acclaimed photographers, the show “claims to grapple with ‘the complexity of Israel and the Westbank, as place and metaphor,’” but ultimately “does not bring the viewer any closer to understanding the realities of this highly charged terrain.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Brian Madigan reads Art and Rhetoric in Roman Culture, edited by Jaś Elsner and Michel Meyer. The volume “makes a case for a prescriptive approach to the understanding of Roman visual culture” based on “Aristotle’s tripartite division of rhetoric.” While the “nature of workings” of this visual rhetoric “are still vitally debated,” the book will surely benefit “advanced scholars of Roman art.” Read the full review at caa.reviews
Caa.reviews publishes over 150 reviews each year. Founded in 1998, the site publishes timely scholarly and critical reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by the College Art Association. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate. Read more reviews at caa.reviews.
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — October 07, 2016
Gina McDaniel Tarver reviews the exhibition and catalogue Moderno: Design for Living in Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela, 1940–1978. The “rich multivocal production” occasionally fails “to tackle some of the complex issues it raises,” but “provides valuable insights into modern impulses and contradictions that manifested in compelling ways in Brazilian, Mexican, and Venezuelan design.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Anne Collins Goodyear examines the Getty Foundation’s Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI), which led to the creation of several digital catalogues by eight museums. Discussing “the implications of the project as a whole,” Goodyear finds the “undertaking represents but a first step,” yet “lays a significant foundation for the future of scholarship in the museum, and beyond.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Patricia Emerson discusses Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns, an exhibition catalogue examining the history of metalpoint in Europe and the United States over the course of six centuries. By “studying a medium across stylistic boundaries,” the book “helps us to recognize the versatility of a medium that might have been thought, repeatedly, to be obsolete.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Caa.reviews publishes over 150 reviews each year. Founded in 1998, the site publishes timely scholarly and critical reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by the College Art Association. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate. Read more reviews at caa.reviews.
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — September 30, 2016
Alessia Frassani reviews The Lienzo of Tlapiltepec: A Painted History from the Northern Mixteca, a collection of multidisciplinary studies edited by Arni Brownstone. Focusing on lienzos, “large painted cloths produced after the Spanish invasion of Mexico,” the book makes “a difficult but important aspect of indigenous Mexican history and culture available to a wide audience.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Jennifer W. Olmsted discusses Delacroix and the Matter of Finish, an exhibition catalogue edited by curator Eik Kahng for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. The painting The Last Words of Marcus Aurelius was the impetus for the show and publication, which “build a case” for the attribution of the artwork to Delacroix while addressing issues of “authorship, pedagogy, and inheritance.” Read the full reviews at caa.reviews.
John A. Tyson examines Krista A. Thompson’s Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice. The “multifaceted,” “generally excellent” volume “explores the ways in which bling aesthetics and shining can be forms of resistance,” and “shows that non-elite culture holds up to serious academic scrutiny.”
John Szostak reads Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 by Gennifer Weisenfeld. A “comprehensive, fascinating, and informative” contribution to the subject of “disaster culture,” the book examines a “historic catastrophe through the visual-culture lens of image production and consumption.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Caa.reviews publishes over 150 reviews each year. Founded in 1998, the site publishes timely scholarly and critical reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by the College Art Association. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate. Read more reviews at caa.reviews.
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — September 23, 2016
Alison C. Fleming reads Federico Barocci and the Oratorians: Corporate Patronage and Style in the Counter-Reformation by Ian F. Verstegen. The book “efficiently tackles the subject” of “the interior decoration of the Chiesa Nuova in Rome,” with a focus on Federico Barocci “and how his style corresponded so well to the tenets of the Oratorians that they repeatedly sought his paintings.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Claudia Swan reviews Benjamin Schmidt’s Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World. Merging historical and art-historical elements, this “formidable study” examines artworks and luxury goods “produced in Dutch ateliers between 1670 and 1730 under the rubric of ‘exotic geography,’” which the author views as “a new rhetorical and artistic mode.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Carol Damian discusses two books centered on the questions of what is a Latino and what is Latino art: Thirteen Way of Looking at Latino Art, by Ilan Stavans and Jorge J. E. Gracia, and Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, an exhibition catalogue from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Both books evidence how “the entire Latino issue is a construct, complicated, and imperfect” and “make valuable contributions to this ongoing discussion.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Caa.reviews publishes over 150 reviews each year. Founded in 1998, the site publishes timely scholarly and critical reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by the College Art Association. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate. Read more reviews at caa.reviews.
New and Forthcoming in CAA’s Journals
posted by CAA — September 12, 2016
caa.reviews
Boris Charmatz’s If Tate Modern Was Musée de la Danse? (May 15–16, 2015) is the focus of a new multimedia review on the Scalar platform, If caa.reviews were performance.reviews?. Organized by Juliet Bellow, the project includes an introduction by Bellow, and three reviews of the performances at the Tate Modern by Arabella Stanger, Nicole Zee, and Tamara Tomic-Vajagic. The review presents the complexities of Charmatz’s transformation of the Tate Modern into a museum of dance for two days and features an interactive map showing where the performances occurred in the Tate Modern, in addition to videos and still images. Charmatz’s project challenges conceptions of museums as institutional spaces and incorporates audience participation and “unauthorized” performances. This review is part of a new caa.reviews initiative to review time-based media works.
Art Journal Open
Art Journal Open this summer launched a new cluster of conversations featuring artist residencies, with artists who have participated in residencies interviewed by those who organize these programs. Through the conversations, Art Journal Open examines how residencies operate logistically and conceptually, and how they contribute to creative production. Conversations published in the series include Caitlin Masley-Chalet of Guttenberg Arts (Guttenberg, NJ) with artist Diana Shpungin, Vanessa Kauffman of Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA) with artist Patricia Fernández Carcedo, and Amy Cancelmo of Root Division (San Francisco, CA) with artist Kija Lucas.
Earlier this summer, Art Journal Open published the third of a three-part series on appropriation as an artistic strategy: “Knight’s Heritage: Karl Haendel and the Legacy of Appropriation, Episode Three, 2013” by Natilee Harren, with a response by Nate Harrison. Recent features also include a review of Wetware: Art, Agency, Animation (Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine, February 6–May 7, 2016) by Charissa Terranova, and “Humans Have Been Human for So Long,” a dialogue between artist Shana Lutker and curator Mika Yoshitake on Lutker’s exhibition Shana Lutker: Le “NEW” Monocle, Chapters 1–3 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC (October 27, 2015–February 16, 2016).
Art Journal
The forthcoming Fall 2016 Art Journal features a project by the artist Penelope Vlassopoulou, whose source material is the phrases and drawings carved in underground cells by detainees during the Nazi occupation of Greece. In other feature articles, Mario Merz’s fascination with the Fibonacci series is the cruz of Elizabeth Mangini’s examination of works created within the intellectual and political ferment of 1960s Italy, and Emily Hage rethinks Romare Bearden’s historical and political position in relation to the dense collages he made for the covers of Time and Fortune. The Reviews section includes Eve Meltzer’s account of the film Eva Hesse and reviews of books by Thomas Crow, Claire Robins, and Joan Kee. An annotated bibliography by Roger F. Malina, the astrophysicist who also serves as executive editor of Leonardo Publications/MIT Press, explores the highly productive intersections of art and science.
Recently published in the Summer 2016 Art Journal is a project by the renowned artist Harmony Hammond. The covers of the journal were given a waxy coating to convey the nature of her intensely tactile paintings and prints, featured in a twenty-page portfolio. In the features, Amanda Jane Graham takes a close look at the interweaving of domestic and performing spaces in Trisha Brown’s 1975 dance Locus; Mechtild Widrich investigates the effects on the urban fabric of the new/old National Gallery of Singapore, created from a colonial-era court building; and Dan Adler traces the idea of an all-pervasive Apparatus in 1980s and 1990s works by the German photographer Thomas Ruff. The Reviews section begins with Chris Taylor’s examination of the film Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art. Other reviews examine a new book by Chika Okeke-Agulu and the exhibition and catalogue Hippie Modernism. An annotated bibliography by Audra Wolowiec explores the poetics of sound and language.
The Art Bulletin
The cover of the September 2016 issue of The Art Bulletin depicts Buddhist monks evoking ghosts in a nocturnal ceremony; the large detail from a polychrome silk scroll accompanies Phillip E. Bloom’s essay on twelfth-century Chinese paintings of Buddhist rituals. In other essays featured in the September issue, Judy Sund reconsiders nineteenth-century perceptions of Watteau’s Pierrot character as forlorn, Christine I. Ho contextualizes a brush-and-ink painting created by a collective in the early People’s Republic of China, and James Nisbet surveys intersections of global politics and imaging in the site-specific art of Walter De Maria. In his “Whither Art History?” essay, Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz explores Kongo visual and cultural practices in contemporary art.
The Reviews section, with a theme of “Urban Images, Memories, and Fragments,” includes four reviews of recent books on the cultures of fifth-century BCE Athens, seven Dutch cities from 1200 to 1700, early modern Rome, and Mexico City in light of Aztec civilization.
Taylor & Francis Online
In addition to their print subscription(s), CAA members receive online access to current and back issues of Art Journal and The Art Bulletin. Taylor & Francis, CAA’s publishing partner, also provides complimentary online access to Word and Image, Digital Creativity, and Public Art Dialogue for CAA members. To access these journals, please log into your account at collegeart.org and click the link to the CAA Online Publications Platform on Taylor & Francis Online.
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — September 09, 2016
Boris Charmatz’s If Tate Modern Was Musée de la Danse? (May 15–16, 2015) is the focus of a new multimedia review on the Scalar platform, If caa.reviews were performance.reviews. Organized by Juliet Bellow, the project includes an introduction by Bellow, and three reviews of the performances at the Tate Modern by Arabella Stanger, Nicole Zee, and Tamara Tomic-Vajagic. The review presents the complexities of Charmatz’s transformation of the Tate Modern into a museum of dance for two days and features an interactive map showing where the performances occurred in the Tate Modern, in addition to videos and still images. Charmatz’s project challenges conceptions of museums as institutional spaces and incorporates audience participation and “unauthorized” performances. This review is part of a new caa.reviews initiative to review time-based media works.
caa.reviews publishes over 150 reviews each year. Founded in 1998, the site publishes timely scholarly and critical reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by the College Art Association. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate. Read more reviews at caa.reviews.
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — September 02, 2016
Mickey Abel and Karlyn Griffith discuss The Crusader Bible: A Gothic Masterpiece at the Blanton Museum of Art. Devoted to a single manuscript, the exhibition “represents an extraordinary opportunity to see a significant treasure of the Middle Ages.” Through “historical didactics, innovative technology, and the spatial layout,” the curator demonstrates the “contemporary relevancy of cross-cultural exchange.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
David B. Brownlee reviews Michael Hall’s George Frederick Bodley and the Later Gothic Revival in Britain and America, an “enormous and enormously rich biography of one of the greatest High Victorians.” Although the immense volume “slightly exasperates even an avid reader,” “it is worth persisting” to read this “compelling account of his multifaceted and path-breaking creativity.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Robert E. Harrist Jr. reviews The Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court by Foong Ping. “Brimming with new findings,” the book provides “original interpretations of the role ink landscape painting played at the Northern Song imperial court” and “the most extensive account in a Western language” of the artist Guo Xi’s career. Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Caa.reviews publishes over 150 reviews each year. Founded in 1998, the site publishes timely scholarly and critical reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by the College Art Association. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate. Read more reviews at caa.reviews.