CAA News Today
Support CAA with a Donation to the Centennial Campaign
posted by Nia Page — April 12, 2011
The year 2011 marks the College Art Association’s one-hundredth anniversary, a celebratory occasion for any organization but particularly so given CAA’s dynamic influence in shaping the study and practice of the visual arts over the past century. Without dedicated members like you, CAA would not be where it is today. Show your support with a donation to the 2011 Centennial Campaign.
The Centennial Campaign is an opportunity for you to help CAA support the field and give back to its members. Your contributions allow us to provide fellowships to MFA students, keep conference rates affordable, and subsidize the memberships of student, retired, and low-income members. Donations also help publish an information-packed website, which features calls for entries and papers and listings for grants and fellowships in the Opportunities section, as well as job classifieds in the Online Career Center. Additionally, your donations support advocacy at a time when art is, once again, under political attack.
Contributions at every level are appreciated and will be acknowledged publicly; they are also 100 percent tax deductible. Your generous gift will both sustain the organization now and guarantee its leadership role over the next one hundred years.
CAA Seeks Nominations for the 2012 Awards for Distinction
posted by Lauren Stark — March 31, 2011
To close the Centennial year, CAA encourages you to nominate colleagues for the twelve Awards for Distinction for 2012, to be awarded next February at the 100th Annual Conference in Los Angeles, California. The different perspectives and anecdotes from multiple personal letters of recommendation provide award juries with a clearer picture of the qualities and attributes of the nominees.
In the letter, state who you are; how you know (of) the nominee; how the nominee and/or his or her work or publication has affected your practice or studies and the pursuit of your career; and why you think this person (or, in a collaboration, these people) deserves to be recognized. You should also contact up to five colleagues, students, peers, collaborators, and/or coworkers of the nominee to write letters.
All submissions must include a completed nomination form and one copy of the nominee’s CV (limit: two pages); book awards do not require a CV. Nominations for book and exhibition awards should be for the authors of books published or works exhibited or staged between September 1, 2010, and August 31, 2011. No more than five letters per candidate are considered.
Please read the descriptions of the twelve awards, the names of all past recipients, and the full instructions for nominations. You may also write to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs, for more information. Deadline: July 31, 2011, for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award; August 31, 2011, for all others.
Propose a Poster Session for the 2012 Annual Conference
posted by Lauren Stark — March 23, 2011
CAA invites individual members to submit abstracts for Poster Sessions at the 100th Annual Conference in Los Angeles, taking place February 22–25, 2012. 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 three days during the conference, so that attendees can view the work even when the authors 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
- Complete mailing address and telephone number
- Email address
Proposals are due May 2, 2011—the same deadline as the regular call for papers for the 2012 conference. Send all materials to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs. A working group of the Annual Conference Committee selects Poster Sessions based on individual merit and space availability. Accepted presenters must maintain their memberships through the conference.
Displays must be assembled by 10:00 AM on Thursday, February 23, and cleared by 2:00 PM on Saturday, February 25. Live presentations last ninety minutes and are scheduled during the lunch breaks on Thursday and Friday, 12:30–2:00 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 (e.g., a battery).
CAA Salutes Donors in the Acknowledgments Section
posted by Nia Page — March 14, 2011
Membership fees cover less than half of CAA’s operating costs; thus voluntary contributions from members significantly help to make possible the wide range of programs and services that the organization offers. In a new website section called Acknowledgments, CAA recognizes the distinguished contributors for each of the following:
- The Centennial Campaign celebrates CAA’s one hundredth anniversary, a celebratory landmark for any organization but particularly so given the organization’s dynamic influence in shaping the study and practice of the visual arts
- The Annual Campaign helps CAA maintain affordable membership dues and Annual Conference fees, implement its myriad programs and publications, and serve the international community of professionals in the visual arts
- The Donors Circle of Patron, Sponsoring, and Sustaining Members includes individuals who contribute to CAA above and beyond their regular dues
- Life Members are individuals who make one-time payments of $5,000 and remain active CAA members for life
- The Art Bulletin Publication Fund supports the production of CAA’s preeminent scholarly journal covering all areas and periods of art history
- The Art Journal Publication Fund supports the production of CAA’s cutting-edge quarterly of contemporary art and ideas
- The caa.reviews Publication Fund supports the production of CAA’s online journal devoted to critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies
- The Annual Conference Travel Grants help cover expenses for graduate students in art history and studio art, and for international artists and scholars, who attend the CAA Annual Conference
CAA offers additional ways to contribute to the organization. Through Planned Giving, you can include CAA in your will. You can also purchase Benefit Prints by the artists Willie Cole and Buzz Spector or a collection of Art Journal Artists’ Projects by Barbara Bloom, Clifton Meador, Mary Lum, and William Pope.L. For general inquiries on CAA’s campaigns and funds, please contact Sara Hines, CAA development and marketing manager, at 212-691-1051, ext. 216.
CAA Gives Four Centennial Awards at the 2011 Annual Conference
posted by Christopher Howard — March 09, 2011
The CAA Board of Directors has selected five extraordinary individuals as the distinguished recipients of CAA’s four Centennial Awards in recognition of the extraordinary time and expertise they have contributed to the visual arts in New York and across the nation. The honorees are:
- Philippe de Montebello, Centennial Award for Leadership
- Agnes Gund, Centennial Award for Service to the Field
- Dorothy and Herbert Vogel, Centennial Award for Patronage
- Stuart E. Eizenstat, Centennial Award for Protecting Art as a Cultural Product
Special guests presenters gave the Centennial Awards during Convocation at the 99th Annual Conference and Centennial Kickoff at the Hilton New York on Wednesday evening, February 9, 2011.
2011 Annual Conference Summary
posted by Nia Page — March 02, 2011
The College Art Association recently held its 99th Annual Conference and Centennial Kickoff at the Hilton New York in midtown Manhattan. Taking place February 9–12, 2011, the conference began the organization’s yearlong celebration of its one hundredth anniversary. The program comprised four days of presentations and discussions on art, art history, and visual culture; career-development workshops, mentoring programs, and job interviews with colleges and universities; a Book and Trade Fair featuring publishers of art books and journals, manufacturers of artists’ materials, and providers of various services for artists and academics; and a host of special events throughout the New York area.
Attendance
The New York conference was not only the largest CAA has produced, it was also the best attended. More than seven thousand art professionals from across the United States and around the world—including artists, art historians, students, educators, curators, critics, collectors, and museum staff—came the event.
Sessions
The conference offered more than two hundred sessions, panels, and talks—all developed by CAA’s members, affiliated societies, and committees. These sessions, which featured presentations from participants and institutions across the country and internationally, addressed a wide range of topics. With papers and presentations as manifold as “The Aesthetics of Sonic Spaces,” “Gender and Sexuality in the Art Museum,” and “Civic Performance and the Genesis of the Roman Social Cityscape,” the 2011 conference was highly diverse.
CAA also organized seven special Centennial Sessions in which invited panelists from different corners of the visual arts—among them Mark Tribe, Griselda Pollock, and James Elkins—came together to debate core concepts, such as diversity, experience, feminism, globalization, medium, technology, and tradition.
Career Services
Career Services included three days of mentoring and portfolio-review sessions, workshops and roundtables on professional-development issues, and job interviews. Approximately one hundred schools, academic departments, and institutions conducted interviews at the conference. Workshops addressed such topics as planning for retirement, advice for new instructors, securing a job in the arts, and self-marketing for artists.
Book and Trade Fair
The Book and Trade Fair presented 149 exhibitors, including participants from the United States, Turkey, Spain, England, Scotland, France, Germany, Italy, and Belgium, displaying new publications, artists’ materials, digital resources, and innovative products of interest to artists and scholars. The Book and Trade Fair also featured book signings, lectures, and demonstrations, as well as three exhibitor sessions on artists’ materials and publishing.
ARTspace and ARTexchange
ARTspace, a “conference within the conference” tailored to the needs and interests of practicing artists, presented the Annual Artists’ Interviews with Krzysztof Wodiczko and Mel Chin, as well as wealth of presentations and programming by and for artists. ARTexchange, an open-portfolio event in which artist members displayed their small paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and work on laptops, hosted over fifty artists this year.
Convocation and Centennial Awards
More than six hundred people attended Convocation and the Centennial Awards Presentation, held at the Hilton New York on Wednesday, February 9. Jim Leach, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, spoke about the importance of the humanities, and eco-art pioneers Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison delivered a lively keynote address.
On the occasion of CAA’s centennial year, the Board of Directors presented four awards to living individuals who have contributed significantly to the advancement of the visual arts in the United States. The recipients of CAA’s four Centennial Awards are:
- Stuart E. Eizenstat, attorney and former US ambassador, Centennial Award for Protecting Art as a Cultural Product, presented by Paul Jaskot of DePaul University
- Agnes Gund, arts advocate and philanthropist, Centennial Award for Service to the Field, presented by Ann Temkin of the Museum of Modern Art
- Philippe de Montebello, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Centennial Award for Leadership, presented by Linda Downs, CAA executive director
- Dorothy and Herbert Vogel, collectors of contemporary art, Centennial Award for Patronage, presented by Anne Goodyear of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Awards for Distinction
Each year CAA recognizes the 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. More than four hundred people attended the presentation of the 2011 Awards for Distinction in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Thursday, February 10.
The recipients of CAA’s 2011 Awards for Distinction are:
- Lynda Benglis, Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
- John Baldessari, Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work
- Mieke Bal, Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
- Luis Camnitzer, Frank Jewett Mather Award
- Faith Ringgold, Distinguished Feminist Award
- William Itter, Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
- Patricia Hills, Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
- Molly Emma Aitken, Charles Rufus Morey Book Award for The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting
- Darielle Mason, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for Kantha: The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal
- Yasufumi Nakamori, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions for Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture
- Ross Barrett, Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize for “Rioting Refigured: George Henry Hall and the Picturing of American Political Violence”
- Kirsten Swenson, Janet Kraynak, Paul Monty Paret, and Emily Eliza Scott, Art Journal Award for “Land Use in Contemporary Art”
- Joyce Hill Stoner, CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
Centennial Book
CAA introduced The Eye, the Hand, the Mind: 100 Years of the College Art Association, a new book that surveys the impressive history of the organization from 1911 to the present. Susan Ball, executive director emerita, edited the 330-page hardcover book, which was published jointly by CAA and Rutgers University Press.
Special Events
The Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted CAA’s Centennial Reception in the Great Hall and the Temple of Dendur. Hunter College offered its expansive galleries for the CAA Regional MFA Exhibition, which surveyed work by artists from twenty institutions within one hundred miles of New York. The New York Center for Art and Media Studies (NYCAMS) hosted the CAA Regional BFA Exhibition, which featured seventeen undergraduate student artists from seven area BFA programs. Sold-out tours explored the riches of New York’s cultural attractions, from a Chelsea Gallery District excursion to a preview tour of the Museum for African Art.
Save the Date
CAA will conclude its Centennial Celebration at the 100th Annual Conference, to be held February 22–25, 2012, in Los Angeles, California.
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, offering forums to discuss the developments in art and art history through its Annual Conference, publications, exhibitions, website, and other avenues. CAA focuses on a wide range of issues, including education in the arts, freedom of expression, intellectual-property rights, cultural heritage and preservation, and workforce topics in universities and museums. Representing its members’ professional needs since 1911, CAA is committed to the highest professional and ethical standards of scholarship, creativity, criticism, and teaching.
Propose a Paper or Presentation for the 2012 Annual Conference in Los Angeles
posted by Emmanuel Lemakis — February 28, 2011
The 100th Annual Conference in Los Angeles—which concludes CAA’s Centennial year—takes place February 22–25, 2012. Listing more than one hundred sessions, the 2012 Call for Participation will arrive in the mailboxes of all individual and institutional members in March; you can also download a PDF of the twenty-four-page document from the CAA website immediately.
The 2012 Call for Participation describes many of next year’s panels and presentations. CAA and session chairs invite your participation: please follow the instructions in the booklet to submit a proposal for a paper. This publication also includes a call for Poster Session proposals and describes the eleven Open Forms sessions.
The deadline for proposals of papers and presentations for the Los Angeles conference is Monday, May 2, 2011.
In addition to dozens of wide-ranging panels on art history, studio art, contemporary issues, and professional and educational practices, CAA conference attendees can expect participation from many area schools, museums, galleries, and other institutions. The Los Angeles Convention Center is the conference headquarters, holding most sessions and panels, Career Services and the Book and Trade Fair, receptions and special events, and more.
Thanks to Conference Sponsors and the Annual Conference Committee
posted by CAA — February 15, 2011
Support for the 99th Annual Conference and Centennial Kickoff, which took place February 9–12, 2011, in New York, was provided by: American Airlines; the American Folk Art Museum; the Art Institute of Atlanta; ARTstor; Blick Art Materials; Columbia University, Department of Art History and Archaeology; the Courtauld Institute of Art; D.A.P. Distributed Art Publishers; Design Technology and Industry; the Graduate Center, City University of New York; Hunter College, City University of New York; the Samuel H. Kress Foundation; McVicker and Higginbotham; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York Center for Art and Media Studies, Bethel University; Pearson Higher Education; Prestel; the School of Visual Arts; Troy University; and the University of North Texas.
The organization is deeply grateful to Thomas P. Campbell, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for hosting the Centennial Reception.
CAA also extends special thanks to the Annual Conference Committee, whose members were responsible for the 2011 program: Sue Gollifer, University of Brighton, chair and vice president for Annual Conference; Sharon Matt Atkins, Brooklyn Museum; Brian Bishop, Framingham State University; Connie Cortez, Texas Tech University; Ken Gonzales-Day, Scripps College and CAA board; Randall Griffin, Southern Methodist University and CAA board; Norie Sato, independent artist, Seattle; Judith Thorpe, University of Connecticut and CAA board; and William Wallace, Washington University in St. Louis and CAA board. Regional representatives for the committee were: Nicola M. Courtright, Amherst College; and Sheila Pepe, Pratt Institute.
CAA also thanks all volunteers and staff members who made the conference possible. Additional acknowledgments for those serving as mentors in Conference Mentoring Sessions, as well as participants in other programs and events, are forthcoming.
Art Journal Unveils Website
posted by Joe Hannan — February 09, 2011
CAA has introduced a new website for Art Journal, its quarterly publication of modern and contemporary art. The launch coincides with the start of CAA’s Centennial year.
Katy Siegel, editor-in-chief of Art Journal, writes that the website “both acknowledges current material conditions of art and publishing, and honors the journal’s unique nature…. Rather than attempting to be another rapidly changing aggregator of information, the site will make visible and maintain the dense artistic and scholarly content of Art Journal in print, hopefully serving a need in the international arts community.”
The debut site features free selections from the print journal as well as content created specifically for the site. An essay by the painter David Reed, “Soul-Beating,” relates his first encounters with his mentor and friend Philip Guston and explores their shared fascination with the work of Piero della Francesca. Also from the print edition, a review by the writer and critic Lauren O’Neill-Butler examines the recently published notebooks of the artist Lee Lozano.
The initial web-only offerings are an essay by Howard Singerman, the journal’s reviews editor, on the history and shifting identity of Art Journal, and selected features from its extensive archive, each with a short introduction by a member of the journal’s editorial board. In coming months, the Art Journal site will grow to include time-based art discussed in articles, online artists’ projects, and more conversational modes of scholarship and discourse.
The Art Journal site was generously funded by a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Katherine Behar, an artist and assistant professor of new media at Baruch College, will oversee the site. Lauren Cornell of Rhizome advised the organizers, and Brendan Dugan of Supervision Art Service designed the site.
Centennial Projects for The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and caa.reviews
posted by Christopher Howard — February 08, 2011
The CAA three journals have launched special projects to coincide with the yearlong celebration of CAA’s Centennial. Each publication—The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and caa.reviews—has created an online anthology of articles from its back archive. The editorial boards of the journals determined the shape, structure, and content of the anthologies, and the three projects are fascinating in their distinct approaches. All are available to the wider web-browsing public.
The Art Bulletin
The Art Bulletin Editorial Board chose to feature thirty-eight essays and reviews from the journal, which has been in print since 1913, for its Centennial anthology. As Natalie Kampen notes in her introduction to the project, the articles are “the ones that made a difference to us as art historians and as people.” The articles are listed chronologically, with author, title, and a link to a PDF of the full text. Among the authors are Meyer Schapiro, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Linda Nochlin, James S. Ackerman, and Griselda Pollock.
Art Journal
Art Journal’s project is in two parts. The first is an extended essay by Howard Singerman that traces the history and shifting identities of the journal and its predecessor titles, Parnassus and College Art Journal. The author of Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University, Singerman is current reviews editor of Art Journal. To complement the essay, members of the editorial board selected texts and artists’ projects from past issues and wrote brief introductory texts to them. As editor-in-chief Katy Siegel writes, “Some feature familiar names attached to much-cited touchstones, while others, we hope, will come as a surprise.” Both projects can be seen at the journal’s new website.
caa.reviews
The editorial board of caa.reviews took a different tack, one that reflects the journal’s born-digital nature. Current and past editors of the journal penned texts to introduce statistically relevant reviews. For each of the dozen years of publication, the Centennial anthology includes the one review that was read the most over a three-year period. Though statistics were not available for the journal’s infancy, some early reviews had the largest overall readership. The topics of the reviews in the anthology vary from installation art to Islamic architecture and reflect the diverse range of expertise of the journal’s numerous commissioning editors.