CAA News Today
Meet the Michael Aurbach Fellowship for Excellence in Visual Art Inaugural Recipient and Honorable Mentions
posted by CAA — March 07, 2023
CAA is pleased to announce the first ever recipient of the first Michael Aurbach Fellowship for Excellence in Visual Art: Lauren Sandler.
Lauren Sandler is a ceramic artist and educator whose work deconstructs mythologies and investigates narratives of power and perspective. Sandler exhibits nationally, and gives talks, workshops, and publishes work concerning contemporary and historic issues in ceramics. She holds an MFA in Ceramics from Penn State University, and undergraduate degrees in Anthropology and Ceramics from Ithaca College and SUNY New Paltz. She served on the Board of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts as Director at Large from 2019–22 and is currently Associate Professor and Program Head of Ceramics at Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Ellen Wetmore, University of Massachusetts Lowell
Ellen Wetmore is a Professor of Art and Chair of the Department of Art and Design at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan (BFA, BA in Art History) and Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), and joined UMass Lowell in 2007. She is a participant of CAA, UFVA, Cultivamos Cultura, and past member of the Boston Sculptors Gallery. Her awards include a 2017 Berkshire Taconic ART Fellowship and a 2017 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship. Her social concerns include neuro-atypical disabilities, race and teaching, money and art. Wetmore’s current artistic practice reinterprets history, art history, and investigates visual thinking. Wetmore’s projects have been featured at the Boston Cyberarts Art on the Marquee, the Indianapolis Art Center, the Sandwell Arts Trust, Ciné Lumière, London, CologneOff, Germany, the InShadow Festival, Lisbon, and Videoholica in Bulgaria. She is a 2012 School of the Museum of Fine Arts Traveling Fellow and a summer 2015 visiting artist at the American Academy of Rome. Her most recent solo exhibition was a drawing study of the collection at the Fitchburg Art Museum. Her current science collaborations explore printed, fabric-based video displays, text and memory in fat cells, and the characterization of high fire ceramic glazes in a Cambodian wood fired kiln. Her first graphic novel, Dante’s Inferno, is a fictional account of race and the academic hiring process.
Allison Wiese, University of San Diego
Allison Wiese is an interdisciplinary artist who makes sculptures, installations, sound works, performances, and architectural interventions. Her work is often created for public spaces at the boundaries of or outside institutions, and has been exhibited at, among other venues, Machine Project, Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego and Socrates Sculpture Park, New York. She is the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and has received grants from Art Matters, Creative Capital, the Cultural Arts Council of Houston, and the City of San Diego’s Commission for Arts and Culture. A fellow of MacDowell and an alumna of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Wiese was a Core Fellow of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, received her MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and a BA from Brown University. Wiese is an Associate Professor at the University of San Diego.
Ziui Vance, Temple University
Ziui explores the semiotics of bodies, their chaotic signals, and spatiality. She makes the paintings, objects, and installations inside the disputed realm between affection and dominance, rules and reality. Characterized by a play-like process, Ziui describes a variety of body configurations with an intricate intensity that reflected on gender, ethnicity, and perceptions: an infinite tapestry of imagery associated with her exoneration from the polar complexities of being Chinese in the United States.
ABOUT THE FELLOWSHIP
The Michael Aurbach Fellowship for Excellence in Visual Art recognizes and honors CAA members who have obtained an MFA or equivalent in studio art and are currently teaching studio classes full-time or part-time. The purpose is to support these artist members as they fulfill their goals as visual arts professionals. On an annual basis, CAA will grant a $7,500 award and registration to the CAA Annual Conference to a qualified artist member teaching at an American or international university or community college. A jury of artists will adjudicate the fellowship and a proposal will not be required; the recipient will be selected solely based on their work. Learn more.
Meet the 2022 Professional Development Fellows
posted by CAA — February 07, 2023
CAA is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2022 Professional Development Fellowships. The recipient of the $10,000 fellowship in art history is Mechella Yezernitskaya, Bryn Mawr College, and the recipient of the $10,000 fellowship in visual art is Boone Nguyen, California State University, Los Angeles.
The honorable mentions in art history were awarded to Jack Crawford, City University of New York, and Astrid Tvetenstrand, Boston University. The honorable mentions in visual art are awarded to Jenna Carlie, California Institute of the Arts, and Alberto Lozano Ruvalcaba, Mendocino College.
2022 PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWSHIP IN ART HISTORY
Mechella Yezernitskaya, Bryn Mawr College
Mechella Yezernitskaya is a Ukrainian American art historian, writer, and curator. She is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College where she specializes in modern and contemporary art. Mechella received her M.A. from Bryn Mawr College and B.A. with honors in Art History from Fordham University. Her dissertation examines representations of temporal rupturing in the wartime visual, literary, and film culture of the avant-gardes of the late Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union. She examines war-related imagery in the work of artists of Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian origin across media including illustrated books, poetry, collage painting, performance, and film. By drawing upon theories from trauma and disability studies, Mechella explores the roles of the civilian and combatant, the temporal boundaries of wartime and peacetime, the consequences of imperialism, the rise of nationalism, and the affective experiences of war.
Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Association of University Women, the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), the Pittsburgh Foundation, the Malevich Society, the New York Public Library, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Bryn Mawr College. She has published in ARTMargins Online, Baltic Worlds, post: notes on art in a global context, Slavic & East European Information Resources, and in the edited volume Artistic Expressions and the Great War, A Hundred Years On (Peter Lang Publishing, 2020). She has presented her research at Södertörn University, Stockholm; Karazin University, Kharkiv; Hofstra University, New York; Temple University, Philadelphia; The Museum of Russian Art, Minneapolis; and ASEEES. She has also held guest curatorial positions and fellowships at The Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Brooklyn Museum.
HONORABLE MENTIONS IN ART HISTORY
Jack Crawford, City University of New York
Jack Crawford is a teaching artist and art historian. She is currently a Lecturer at Vanderbilt University and University of Tennessee, Knoxville and has previously taught at the New York City College of Technology. She holds a BA from Barnard College and is currently completing her PhD in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research, for which she received a 2021–2022 ACLS/Luce Dissertation Fellowship in American Art and a dissertation award from the CUNY Committee on Globalization and Social Change, focuses on appropriation and aesthetics of abundance in queer performance in the postwar period.
Astrid Tvetenstrand, Boston University
Astrid studies the history of American painting, decorative arts, and architecture. She explores these fields through practices of collection, economic development, and the consumption of American property. Her dissertation traces the connections between American art patronage, second homeownership, and landscape painting at the end of the nineteenth century. She argues that the process of collecting art and land was an effort made by affluent Americans to “buy a view.” By recognizing landscape paintings as investments and monetary goods, Astrid sheds new light on Gilded Age consumerism, aesthetics, and taste. She also localizes art market exchanges within a larger conversation about the privatization of public space.
Astrid’s work is encouraged by positions and fellowships held at the New York Public Library, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts Historical Society, Nichols House Museum, Bundy Museum of History and Art, Peabody Essex Museum, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Decorative Arts Trust, and Winter Antiques Show.
2022 PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWSHIP IN VISUAL ARTS
Boone Nguyen, California State University, Los Angeles
Boone Nguyen is an artist of the Southeast Asian diaspora. When he was a child, his family left Saigon and resettled as refugees in South Philadelphia. His experience as a refugee in the metropole informs his work through the themes of displacement and place-building, landscape and historical memory, leaving and returning, loss and transformation. His immersive moving image installations are thus fueled by a continuing search for a distant yet familiar homeplace, where the intimacies of life and death and the dialectic of subjection and resistance serve as a living archive of critical memory that is both personal and collective. He has exhibited his work in Philadelphia, Honolulu, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Tokyo.
Boone Nguyen has served in curatorial and management positions in community arts organizations, including Asian Arts Initiative, Frameline, and Scribe Video Center. He holds a BA in American Studies (minor in Asian American Studies) from Yale University. As a Cota-Robles Fellow, he earned an MA in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He was a recipient of a 2018/19 MCAD–Jerome Foundation Fellowships for Early Career Artists, administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and funded by the Jerome Foundation. Nguyen is currently in his final semester of the MFA program at California State University, Los Angeles where he also lectures in the Asian and Asian American Studies Department.
Jenna Carlie, California Institute of the Arts
Jenna studied photography at Speos Institute of Photography in Paris, France and went on to study at Rhode Island School of Design. During the time at RISD, Jenna worked under Annie Leibovitz, Mark Katzman, and Dusty Kessler. In 2016, Jenna graduated with a BFA in photography from Rhode Island School of Design. Jenna moved to Los Angeles and in 2017 worked for Lauren Greenfield, in 2018 worked for Alexa Meade, and by the end of 2018 Jenna Carlie Photography and Design was opened for business. Between 2018 and 2020 Jenna worked on various photographic series for different private collections in the Midwest. In 2020, the Saint Louis Art Museum hired Jenna as their travel contract photographer and later as their in-house photographer, where Jenna is still employed. Jenna is currently getting an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and is expected to graduate in 2024.
Alberto Lozano Ruvalcaba, Mendocino College
I was born in Tijuana, Baja California in 1993. My family lived in Rosarito next to the beach on a street called Niño Artillero (artillery child). My school was named after Emiliano Zapata, a leader of the Mexican revolution. My parents moved us to the USA when I was eight years old. We left everything behind except for each other and the memories that persist of our home and of the natural landscape around it. They brought us to this country for my siblings and I to have a better future than what was available back home. Thanks to my parents and siblings and my own perseverance, I am now the first person in my family to pursue a master’s degree from a university. I am now a permanent resident of the USA and a candidate for an MFA degree.
ABOUT THE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWSHIP
CAA’s Professional Development Fellowship program supports promising artists and art historians who are enrolled in MFA and PhD programs nationwide. Awards are intended to help them with various aspects of their work, whether for job-search expenses or purchasing materials for the studio. CAA believes a grant of this kind, without contingencies, can best facilitate the transition between graduate studies and professional careers. The program is open to all eligible graduate students in the visual arts and art history. Learn more.
Meet the 2021 Professional Development Fellows
posted by CAA — February 18, 2022
CAA is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2021 Professional Development Fellowships. The recipient of the $10,000 fellowship in visual arts is Christine Lee, California Institute of the Arts and the recipient of the $10,000 fellowship in art history is Jenny Tang, Yale University. An honorable mention in visual arts goes to Malene Barnett, Temple University and an honorable mention in art history goes to Maia Nichols, University of California, San Diego. All fellows and honorable mentions receive a complimentary one-year CAA membership and registration for the 2022 Annual Conference.
2021 PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWSHIP IN VISUAL ARTS
Christine Lee, California Institute of the Arts
Christine Yerie Lee is a visual artist primarily working in video, installation and sculpture. Raised in the American South by immigrant parents from South Korea, her practice explores performativity and identity-formation, often using the body to articulate ideas concerning resistance to hegemonic power structures in hopes to create a future yet to be imagined or narrativized. By engaging with folklore, history, and pop culture, her work addresses personal and collective memory, hybridity, and authenticity. Her material explorations reflect the poetics informed by these notions and are often activated in her digital works. Through intersectional inquiry and worldbuilding, she aims to illuminate the distinct and parallel threads of the human experience to provide pathways for connection. Lee received a BFA in Apparel Design from Rhode Island School of Design in 2010 and worked as a fashion designer for a decade prior to graduate school. She currently resides in Los Angeles and will complete her MFA in Art at California Institute of the Arts in May 2021.
HONORABLE MENTION IN VISUAL ARTS
Malene Barnett, Temple University
Malene Barnett is a multi-disciplinary artist, entrepreneur, and authority on the cultural traditions and practices of art in the African diaspora and how it translates into her vision of the modern black experience. From her sculptural ceramic tiles and vessels to mixed media paintings to handwoven rugs, Barnett continues to evolve her craft and share her African heritage with a global audience. Using archival materials like glass, fiber and clay, she uncovers a deeper language of her legacy and an authentic understanding of her cultural identity. A passionate connector and expert ambassador, her mission is to use art as a tool to create community impact and open doors for the next generation of black artists and expand the conversation around marginalization in the arts and create greater opportunities for inclusion.
As the founder of the Black Artists + Designers Guild, a global platform and curated collective of independent black makers, she constantly seeks new ways to define the Black narrative and experience for a new generation while bringing awareness to inequality. Her work has been praised in Interior Design Magazine, New York Magazine, Traditional Home, Elle Decor, HGTV Magazine, Luxe + Design Magazine, and House Beautiful. She was also on the cover of Brownstoner Magazine and Wendy Goodman’s Designer Lives video series with New York Magazine’s The Cut. Her entrepreneurial spirit was captured in the NY Times bestselling book “In the Company of Women ” and Home by Hygge & West. She has appeared as a guest speaker on Morning Joe, MSNBC Your Business, and TEDx. Malene’s works have been exhibited at Museum of Science and Industry, Dallas African American Museum, Jane Hartsook Gallery, Mindy Solomon Gallery, Baltimore Clayworks, DAAP Galleries, and The Clay Studio.
2021 PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWSHIP IN ART HISTORY
Jenny Tang is a doctoral candidate in History of Art and Film & Media Studies at Yale University, where she specializes in modern and contemporary art, media, and visual culture of the Atlantic world. Tang’s dissertation combines original archival research and a feminist postcolonial perspective to show how layered twentieth-century regimes of race and citizenship in the United States shaped modernist imaginations of the body across the Atlantic. From photomontage and abstraction to security and confinement, this work recasts the history of modernism through the lens of Asian American and African American racial formation. In addition to her scholarly practice, Tang writes criticism on the cultural politics of art, film, and music. She has also contributed to exhibitions and programs at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Museum of Modern Art, where she was a 2020-21 Mellon-Marron Research Fellow in the Department of Painting and Sculpture. At Yale, she co-organized the group exhibition New Genealogies with photographer John Edmonds at the Yale School of Art. Tang currently teaches foundational topics in art history in the Department of Art History and the Rose Hill Honors Program at Fordham University.
HONORABLE MENTION IN ART HISTORY
Maia Nichols, University of California, San Diego
Maia Nichols is a Lebanese American-Canadian doctoral candidate in art history, criticism and theory at University of California San Diego specializing in 20th century French and North African visual and material culture, postcolonial theory, and the history of social psychiatry. She holds degrees in psychology and visual art from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and a masters in aesthetics and politics from the California Institute of the Arts. She additionally engages in art practice and has taught studio art drawing at UC San Diego. Her work has been exhibited internationally. Her art criticism has been published in venues such as Flash Art International, Hyperallergic, and Diagram. Her dissertation, researched in France with support from a four-year Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship, engages art historical visual and material culture methods and theories to consider the institutional history of French colonial North Africa’s progression to independence during the social psychiatry movement, drawing on a range of archival evidence of material culture and experience.
ABOUT THE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWSHIP
CAA’s Professional Development Fellowship program supports promising artists and art historians who are enrolled in MFA and PhD programs nationwide. Awards are intended to help them with various aspects of their work, whether for job-search expenses or purchasing materials for the studio. CAA believes a grant of this kind, without contingencies, can best facilitate the transition between graduate studies and professional careers. The program is open to all eligible graduate students in the visual arts and art history. Applications for the 2022 fellowship cycle will be due December 15, 2022. Learn more.
Meet the 2020 Professional Development Fellows
posted by CAA — April 19, 2021
CAA is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2020 Professional Development Fellowships. The recipient of the $10,000 fellowship in visual art is Ana Maria Farina, SUNY New Paltz. A fellowship in art history was not awarded this year.
The honorable mention in visual art is awarded to Sabrina Pastard, Columbia College Chicago. All fellows and honorable mentions receive a complimentary one-year CAA membership and registration for the 2022 Annual Conference in Chicago.
2020 PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWSHIP IN VISUAL ARTS
Ana Maria Farina, SUNY New Paltz
Ana Maria Farina paints using a gun––a tufting gun––along with needles, hooks, and knots. Repurposing a phallic signifier of violence, she conjures vibrant objects of comfort that inhabit a mystical pictorial space between abstraction and representation.
Ana Maria was born and raised in Brazil and is now based in the Hudson Valley, New York. She received her masters degree in Art and Art Education from Columbia University in 2016, and in 2018 she was awarded a fellowship to the New York Foundation for the Arts Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program. In 2019, she received a scholarship to attend the MFA program at SUNY New Paltz, where she also served as the Visiting Artist Director and Instructor of Record. Ana’s work has been featured in many spaces throughout New York and she has upcoming exhibitions at the Wassaic Project, the Garrison Art Center, the Dorsky Museum, among others.
HONORABLE MENTION IN VISUAL ART
Sabrina Pastard, Columbia College Chicago
Sabrina Pastard is a visual artist who works with the poetics in the meta of the mundane. Often balancing her visuals on the borderline of familiarity and the abject, safety and crisis. Her multidisciplinary practice ranges in medium from ready-made sculptures and abstract prints to conceptual writings and poetry. Each new work invites an intellectual intimacy from the viewer as it inquires to the status of our assumed lives and societal taboos. Pastard was raised in St. Louis, MO and received her B.A. in studio art from George Fox University. She currently resides in Chicago and will complete her MFA at Columbia College Chicago in May 2021.
ABOUT THE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWSHIP
CAA’s Professional Development Fellowship program supports promising artists and art historians who are enrolled in MFA and PhD programs nationwide. Awards are intended to help them with various aspects of their work, whether for job-search expenses or purchasing materials for the studio. CAA believes a grant of this kind, without contingencies, can best facilitate the transition between graduate studies and professional careers. The program is open to all eligible graduate students in the visual arts and art history. Applications for the 2021 fellowship cycle will be due December 15, 2021. Learn more.
Meet the 2019 Professional Development Fellows
posted by CAA — February 14, 2020
CAA is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2019 Professional Development Fellowships. The recipient of the $10,000 fellowship in art history is Ace Lehner, University of California, Santa Cruz. The recipient of the $10,000 fellowship in visual art is Leah Schretenthaler, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
The honorable mention for art history goes to Anne Marie Butler, Kalamazoo College, and the honorable mention in visual art is awarded to Madelaine Corbin, Cranbrook Academy of Art. All fellows and honorable mentions receive a complimentary one-year CAA membership and registration for the 2020 Annual Conference in Chicago.
2019 Professional Development Fellowship in Art History
Ace Lehner, University of California, Santa Cruz
Ace Lehner is an interdisciplinary scholar and artist specializing in critical engagement with identity and representation; history, theory, and criticism of contemporary art; photography theory; and queer and trans theory. Lehner’s artistic practice often embraces collaboration and primarily utilizes photography and video to mine the complex relation between representations and the constitution of identities. Lehner was recently a Presidents’ Dissertation-Year Fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where they are completing their dissertation, ”Trans Representations: Contemporary Art Photography and Non-Binary Visual Theory,” and earning their PhD.
Lehner has chaired panels on trans representations at the College Art Association conference has spoken about their research and artistic practice at the International Center of Photography (New York, NY) and has been published in Art Journal, REFRACT, The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, The Journal on Images and Culture, and elsewhere. Lehner’s artwork has been exhibited internationally and will be featured in a solo exhibition at Practice Gallery in Philadelphia in June 2020. Lehner currently serves as the editor of the forthcoming book From Self-Portrait to Selfie: Contemporary Art and Self-Representation in the Social Media Age published by MDPI Books and works in the Education Department at the Dia Foundation and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, NY, where they are currently piloting the museums’ first-ever queer tour programs. Lehner holds an MFA/MA in Fine Art/Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts. Lehner is based in Brooklyn, New York.
Honorable Mention in Art History
Anne Marie Butler, Kalamazoo College
Anne Marie Butler is Assistant Professor of Art History and Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo, MI. Her research areas are global contemporary art, Middle East North Africa studies, gender and sexuality studies, and queer theory. Her scholarship considers issues of gender, sexuality, and queerness within the parameters of the nation-state, and the imbrication of state authority within social constructs. She is currently working on a book project about surrealism in Tunisia, in which she considers emerging and ongoing questions about how Tunisian artists critique embedded systems of power by examining surrealism as a methodology by which Tunisian women artists negotiate the discordant demands of the state apparatus and social norms. Additional scholarship in progress on contemporary Tunisian visual art addresses the overlap of surrealism and queerness, sexuality in surrealism, contemporary performance art, and negotiations of repression. She is also an activist who has worked in migrant justice and local LGBTQ history. In 2018, she founded the Middle East Studies Association Queer Studies Interest Group.
Dr. Butler received her MA from New York University and her PhD from the University at Buffalo. Her dissertation, “Unintelligible Bodies: Surrealism and Queerness in Contemporary Tunisian Women’s Art” (2019), revealed that many Tunisian women artists imagine queer bodies, bodily configurations, and bodily relationships that rebuke normative conceptualizations of the body, and argued that surrealism and queerness are strategies by which Tunisian women artists launch critiques of repressive systems that remain embedded within the Tunisian state and society.
2019 Professional Development Fellowship in the Visual Arts
Leah Schretenthaler, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Leah Schretenthaler was born and raised in Hawaii. After relocating to the mainland, Hawaii continues to be a point of reference for her research and studio practice. Her work uses traditional photography, laser etching, and metal casting to create images. Through her art practice, her research presents a connection between land, material, and performance. Her ongoing series, The Invasive Species of the Built Environment, focuses on the controversial builds of her home state.
Schretenthaler completed her BFA degree from the University of South Dakota and holds a master’s degree in art education from Boston University. She is currently an MFA candidate. Recently she has been named one of LensCulture’s Emerging Talents of 2018 and was awarded second place in the Sony World Photography Awards. In 2019, she was awarded the Rhonda Wilson Award through FRESH2019 at the Klompching Gallery. In the of fall 2019 she received the Film Photo Award. Her work has been displayed nationally and internationally including Kahilu Theater (Waimea, HI), Washington Pavilion (Sioux Falls, SD), Manifest (Cincinnati, OH), The Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts (Providence, RI), Center for Fine Art Photography (Fort Collins, CO), and SOHO Gallery (New York, NY), as well as the Somerset House (London).
Honorable Mention in Visual Art
Madelaine Corbin, Cranbrook Academy of Art
Madelaine Corbin is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Detroit, Michigan. She received her BFA from Oregon State University where she was an artist-in-residence in the departments of Inorganic Chemistry and Microbiology. Recent awards include the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts Stuart Thompson Fellowship, the President’s Award in Sustainability bestowed by Cranbrook Academy of Art, and the Sponenburgh Travel Award granted by Oregon State University.
Corbin’s practice is an archaeological journey to unearth the space between home and land, human and non-human, wild and managed landscapes, and the connection to one another through geographic distance. A fleck of ash, drop of blue, grain of salt, speck of dust, and particle of soil—a constellation of meaning is composed from these elements. Corbin’s practice earnestly endeavors to listen to, translate, and contextualize the conversation between the vibrancy of matter sensed by our fingertips and the expansive questions cultivated by the equally vast universe around. Spaces that invite wonder and interdisciplinary research coalesce to question the quotidian materials accepted as ‘normal’ when few things are actually so. Dirt, salt, and dust are not so simple. Interminable investigations into subterranean histories, values, politics, sciences, fictions, and natural phenomena re-evaluate the inherent meanings embedded in matter. Using her own relationship to ecology rooted in a valley town in Oregon as a starting point, Corbin articulates the complexity and range of relationships to the land beneath our feet, that which once was, and that which will never be.
About the Professional Development Fellowship
CAA’s Professional Development Fellowship program supports promising artists and art historians who are enrolled in MFA and PhD programs nationwide. Awards are intended to help them with various aspects of their work, whether for job-search expenses or purchasing materials for the studio. CAA believes a grant of this kind, without contingencies, can best facilitate the transition between graduate studies and professional careers. The program is open to all eligible graduate students in the visual arts and art history. Applications for the 2021 fellowship cycle will open in the late spring. Learn more.
Sign Up for Mock Interviews at CAA 2020
posted by CAA — January 06, 2020
Interview booths at the 2018 Annual Conference in Los Angeles. Photo: Rafael Cardenas
Each year at CAA, the Students and Emerging Professionals Committee (SEPC) offers 30-minute mock interviews for those looking to develop and refine interviewing skills, including job-seekers. Participants practice one-on-one with a seasoned interviewer and receive candid feedback.
SEPC makes every effort to accommodate all applicants, however, space is limited. Interviews are available by appointment via the pre-conference Google Registration Form. Registration is Monday, January 6 to Friday, January 31. Participants will be notified of their slot by e-mail. With confirmation, we’ll request a CV and cover letter for your interviewer. On-site registration will be available at the conference, but pre-registering is strongly recommended for those whose conference plans are confirmed to get more tailored training and feedback.
Free of charge, CAA members only. Sign up via the pre-conference Google Registration Form.
CAA Internship Program
posted by CAA — September 12, 2019
Starting in September 2018, CAA introduced a new internship program in its New York office for undergraduate and graduate students and recent graduates. Specifically, the program is designed for those who wish to gain experience and develop skills in the following areas:
- Events and Conference Programming
- Publications and Digital Publications
- Marketing & Communications
- Membership Development
Each intern will be assigned a discrete, clearly defined project (or projects) to be completed during the internship period.
The number of hours will depend on the preference of the CAA department, but will generally expected to work 20-30 hours per week in CAA’s New York office sometime between the hours of 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM, Monday to Friday. All internships require a commitment of eight consecutive weeks. Interns are expected to be commit three days per week
Eligibility
- Candidates must have successfully completed their junior year at an undergraduate college in any field of study.
- Candidates must have secure housing in the New York area which will allow them to complete the entire internship period.
- Candidates should have had some office experience and should be generally familiar with Microsoft Office, especially Word and Excel. Familiarity with Microsoft Office 365 preferable.
Internship sessions
- Fall 2019 – 8 weeks (September 15 through December 15)
- Spring 2020 – 8 weeks (January 15 through May 15)
- Summer 2020 – 8 weeks (June 1 through August 15)
There will be two interns per session.
Compensation
Each intern will receive a stipend of $500 per month paid bimonthly along with CAA’s regular payroll. Interns will be viewed as independent contractors and no deductions will be made, however a 1099 will be issued and interns are expected to pay all taxes as required under law.
Course credit
CAA will make every effort to assist successful candidates to obtain college credit, if applicable. Please coordinate with your institution’s administrator for semester credit. CAA can provide letters of confirmation and/or complete necessary forms.
To apply
Please submit a cover letter indicating your departmental interests (please rank two preferred departments), and CV to Daniel Tsai, CAA Programs and Publications Administrator: dtsai@collegeart.org. Please also list two professional references and the means to contact them via telephone or email. No phone calls please.
Applications will be accepted until positions are filled.
Events and Conference Programming Internship Tasks:
Assists with Annual Conference Special Events/Special Projects
- pre-conference workshops
- Key Conversation Panels
- events for students and emerging professionals
- Museum visits and tours
Assists with the research and facilitation of the Network Hall programming.
Assists with the research and development and implementation of workshops and programs throughout the year.
Publications and Digital Publications Internship Tasks:
- Assisting with checking layouts and copyediting
- Proofreading the reviewsadmin site to ensure uniformity of titles, format
- Checking all the links on Art Journal Opensite to make sure they work
Marketing & Communications Internship Tasks:
- Editing and proofreading
- Visual design and layout assistance
- Social media
- Assembling press files
- Website review and content review
- Assembling press hits files
- Assembling digital metrics files
- General communications and strategy research
Membership Development Internship Tasks:
- Database cleanup
- Assist with membership growth strategy
- Renewal address file clean up
- Membership card file address clean up, folding cards, post office delivery
- Updating IP addresses indiv/org claims for missing issues
- Returned publications for indiv/orgs
- Adding/updating primary contacts for organizations
- Possible outreach to lapsed organizational members
The CAA is an equal opportunity employer and considers all candidates for employment regardless of race, color, sex, age, national origin, creed, disability, marital status, sexual orientation, gender expression, or political affiliation.
Apply to be a CAA Campus Ambassador
posted by CAA — May 02, 2019
CAA 2018 Annual Conference attendees. Photo: Rafael Cardenas
CAA is seeking Ambassadors in the New York, Boston, and Chicago areas to represent CAA and give short talks about the organization to their fellow classmates and students in nearby schools.
The selected Ambassadors will be compensated for each talk and given a complimentary CAA Annual Conference registration and one-year CAA membership at the student level. Ambassadors will collect feedback at their talks and have check-ins with CAA staff leading the project.
To be considered for the CAA Ambassador role, applicants must be currently enrolled in a visual arts-focused program at a university or college in the New York, Boston, or Chicago area. Applicants should be in their junior year or higher. Master’s degree, Master of Fine Arts, and PhD candidates are encouraged to apply. Familiarity with CAA and its programs is necessary for this role. Candidates should feel enthusiastic about spreading the word about CAA and feel comfortable speaking in front of groups. The Ambassador role is a two-semester commitment (fall and spring) with a maximum of five talks given on campuses each semester.
To be considered for the CAA Ambassador Program, please submit your resume or CV, cover letter expressing your interest, and one reference to Alison Chang at achang@collegeart.org.
Applications will be accepted until the positions are filled.
Pay-as-you-Wish Is Back for CAA 2019
posted by CAA — February 05, 2019
The Pay-as-you-Wish Day Pass is back for the CAA 2019 Annual Conference in New York City, February 13-16! For the third year in a row we are happy to offer the pass as a way for students, adjunct faculty, or anyone not able to afford a full conference registration to attend any part of the conference for a full day.
Pay-as-you-Wish is available onsite only at the New York Hilton Midtown. It is open to everyone, CAA members and non-members alike, with no advance registration needed. Pay-as-you-Wish purchases can be made with any registration staff or the Pay-as-you-Wish helpers in the registration area.
Suggested Pay-as-you-Wish Day Pass price: $25
The Pay-as-you-Wish Day Pass allows for full, one-day access to the conference, and if you want to return the next day, a full day pass must be purchased.
The Annual Conference will feature over 300 sessions, a bustling Book and Trade Fair, and the free and open to the public Academic and Cultural Network Hall with professional development workshops, Idea Exchange, and booths of leading cultural non-profits and educational institutions.
Browse the Full Conference Schedule
The Keynote Speaker for 2019 will be Joyce J. Scott, sculptor, craftsperson, and 2016 MacArthur Fellow. The Distinguished Artist Interviews will feature Julie Mehretu interviewed by Julia Bryan-Wilson and Guadalupe Maravilla interviewed by Sheila Maldonado. The Distinguished Scholar for the 107th CAA Annual Conference is Dr. Elizabeth Boone, the Martha and Donald Robertson Chair in Latin American Studies at Tulane University.
Meet the 2018 Professional Development Fellows
posted by CAA — January 28, 2019
CAA has awarded two 2018 Professional Development Fellowships—one in art history and one in visual art—to graduate students in MFA and PhD programs. In addition, CAA has named one honorable mention in art history and two in visual art. The fellows and honorable mentions both receive a complimentary one-year CAA membership and registration for the 2019 Annual Conference in New York City.
The recipient of the $10,000 fellowship in art history is C.C. McKee, a dual PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. Accepting the $10,000 fellowship in visual art is Camila Labarca Linaweaver, a MFA candidate in Printmaking at the University of Oklahoma.
The honorable mention for art history goes to Julia Vázquez, a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History & Archaeology at Columbia University. The honorable mentions in visual art are awarded to Kira Dominguez Hultgren, who is earning a MFA/MA in Fine Arts and Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts, and Rowan Renee, who is currently pursuing their MFA at the University of Michigan.
The two fellows and three honorable mentions will be formally recognized at the 107th Annual Conference during Convocation on Wednesday, February 13, 2019.
CAA’s fellowship program supports promising artists and art historians who are enrolled in MFA and PhD programs nationwide. Awards are intended to help them with various aspects of their work, whether for job-search expenses or purchasing materials for the studio. CAA believes a grant of this kind, without contingencies, can best facilitate the transition between graduate studies and professional careers. The program is open to all eligible graduate students in the visual arts and art history. Applications for the 2019 fellowship cycle will open in the late spring.
FELLOW IN ART HISTORY
C.C. McKee
C.C. McKee is a dual doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University (advised by Huey Copeland) and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris (advised by Anne Lafont). McKee received his BA from the University of California, Berkeley as a double major with honors in the history of art and highest honors in history.
McKee’s current dissertation project takes up art and visual culture from the francophone Caribbean during the long nineteenth century, arguing that, on the one hand, painting could bolster imperial authority by eliding the coeval inhumane violence and ecological brutality of colonialism. On the other, these artworks are inadvertent repositories for parallel ecologies opening onto embodied African diasporic knowledge of the Caribbean landscape.
This project represents one facet of McKee’s broader investment in the transhistorical relationship between colonialism (particularly during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries) and its continued effects in the present. These interests include, art of the Atlantic World, contemporary African and African diasporic art, and queer aesthetic practices; all of which are indebted to black feminist, ecocritical, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic theories. McKee has developed these perspectives in various pieces of art criticism; with exhibitions at the Block Museum, Iceberg Projects (Chicago, IL), and the Ghetto Biennale (Port-au-Prince, Haiti); as well as in a forthcoming article for Art Journal. Moving forward, McKee will pursue a scholarly and curatorial practice that challenges the boundaries between the university classroom and the museum, between academic publication and exposing a broad public to the rich artistic traditions of the Caribbean.
FELLOW IN VISUAL ART
Camila Labarca Linaweaver
Camila Labarca Linaweaver was born in Santiago, Chile and immigrated to the United States at the age of 7. She lived and studied in Texas and holds a BFA from The University of Houston Clear Lake. She is a first-generation college graduate and is currently an MFA Printmaking candidate at The University of Oklahoma. While pursuing her graduate studies she has taught undergraduate courses in Printmaking and Drawing. Linaweavers focus within the printmaking medium is almost exclusively on singular and experimental prints. Using the landscape as a metaphor, she crafts narratives of immigrant displacement, loss, and alienation. Recently she has delved into time-based work, subjecting monotypes to various stop motion processes. Her unique approach to confronting her personal history as an immigrant results in highly nuanced imagery that aims to bridge opposing sides and create positive discourse within the context of global immigration issues.
As an emerging artist, Linaweaver has exhibited extensively throughout the US and has chosen to pursue a career in academia. In the future she aspires to participate in residencies and exhibitions that focus on community engagement and the intersection of landscape, identity, and culture.
HONORABLE MENTION IN ART HISTORY
Julia Vázquez
Julia Vázquez is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History & Archaeology at Columbia University, where she is currently completing a dissertation titled “The Artist as Curator: Diego Velázquez, 1623-1660.” Her dissertation reconsiders the curatorial career of Diego Velázquez at the court of King Philip IV of Spain. It examines the major redecoration projects that Velázquez executed for galleries in the Spanish royal palace, considering the ways that his ambitions and interests as a painter found a new expression in this medium. It also analyzes significant paintings that Velázquez made in response to the royal art collection, considering the impact on his painting practice not only of its contents, but also of its display. Her research therefore proposes the career of Diego Velázquez at the Hapsburg court as a major episode in the history of the artist-curator, ultimately arguing that Velázquez’s simultaneous creative identities as painter to the king and curator of his art collection were mutually transformative.
Previously, Julia has held internships and fellowships at the Musée du Louvre, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Meadows Museum, the Museo Nacional del Prado, and the National Gallery of Art. While at the Meadows, she curated two exhibitions: “Picasso’s Dream and Lie of Franco: The Spanish Civil War in Print” (summer 2017) and “Murillo at the Meadows: A 400th-Anniversary Celebration” (2017-2018). She is currently the Hilla Rebay International Fellow at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, and the Collezione Peggy Guggenheim.
HONORABLE MENTIONS IN VISUAL ART
Kira Dominguez Hultgren
Kira Dominguez Hultgren (b. 1980) is a California-, Utah-, and Minnesota-based textile artist. She studied French postcolonial theory and literature at Princeton University (BA Comparative Literature, 2003), and performance and fine arts in Río Negro, Argentina from 2010-2012. While in Patagonia, she apprenticed with master weaver Mary Coronado, where Dominguez Hultgren studied the process and history of indigenous warp-faced weaving of Mallín Ahogado on a Mapuche vertical post loom.
Today, Dominguez Hultgren combines her interests in postcolonial theory and weaving in both her art and writing-research practice. In her third year at California College of the Arts, Dominguez Hultgren is earning a dual-degree MFA/MA in Fine Arts and Visual and Critical Studies. Her research interests include material and embodied rhetorics, loom technologies, decolonizing material culture, and analyzing textiles as a performative critique against the visual. She has won numerous awards including California College of the Art’s All College Honors Graduate Fine Art Award, the Edwin Anthony and Adalaine Boudreaux Cadogan Scholarship, and the Lenore Tawney Fiber and Material Studies Scholarship. Dominguez Hultgren is represented by Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco, where she had her first solo show, Wingspan, in 2018.
Rowan Renee
Rowan Renee is a genderqueer artist who uses photography to interrogate how sexual bodies are gendered, victimized, policed and punished. Through photographic, printmaking and sculptural techniques, they produce and appropriate images that intervene on issues of authorship, the representation of queer and feminine bodies within the art-historical canon, and the intersection of homophobia and misogyny in sex law and copyright law. The disjunctures of pleasure and abjection, felt through jouissance, informs their manipulation of images. Through artistic labor, they see a means to construct transformative meaning from experiences of violence, persecution and erasure that threaten queer and feminine subjects.
Currently pursuing their MFA at the University of Michigan, Renee works between Ann Arbor, Michigan and Brooklyn, NY. Their career began in 2006, when they joined The Miss Rockaway Armada, a collaborative flotilla of thirty people who floated down the Mississippi river on junk rafts built from NYC construction waste. Recently, they have received awards from the Aaron Siskind Foundation, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation and the Anchorage Museum of Art, as well as fellowships from the Jerome Foundation and the McColl Center for Visual Art. In 2018 they were named an Elsie Choy Lee Scholar by the University of Michigan. Their solo exhibitions include Z at Pioneer Works (2015), Bodies of Wood at The Aperture Foundation (2017), and No Honor No Heart at the Center for Visual Arts Toledo (2019). Their work has been profiled on NPR, in The New York Times, VICE, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, American Photo Magazine and Guernica, among many other publications.