Donate Now
Join Now      Sign In
 

CAA News Today

Caption: Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Rape of Proserpina, 1661–1662, Burkhard Mücke via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0

Twice a year, CAA awards grants through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund to support book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of art, visual studies, and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits, but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy.

Thanks to the generous bequest of the late Prof. Millard Meiss, CAA began awarding these publishing grants in 1975. 


Spring 2023 Grantees

Doris Sung, Women of Chinese Modern Art Gender and Reforming Traditions in National and Global Spheres, 1900s–1930s, De Gruyter 

Kristopher Kersey, Facing Images: Problems of Modernity in Japanese Art, Penn State University Press 

Andrew Gayed, Queer World Making: Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art, University of Washington Press 

Lee Sessions, Urgent Necessities: Science and White Identity in Colonial Cuba, Yale University Press  

Saul Nelson, Never Ending: Modernisms Past and Future, Yale University Press  

Ellen C. Caldwell, Cynthia S. Colburn, and Ella J. Gonzalez, eds., Gender Violence, Art, and the Viewer: An Intervention, Penn State University Press 

Hye-shim Yi, Art by Literati: Calligraphic Carving in Middle Qing China, Cambria Press 

  

Read a list of all recipients of the Millard Meiss Publication Fund since 1975.  

 

Filed under: Grants and Fellowships

Recognizing the value of the exchange of ideas and experience among art historians, the Kress Foundation is offering support for scholars participating as speakers at the 2023 CAA Annual Conference. The scholarly focus of the papers must be European art before 1830. 

Samuel H. Kress Foundation CAA Annual Conference Travel Fellows 2023 

 

Presentation: “Ordering the Ground: Ornamental Parterres and the Emergence of Academic Botany” 

Session: Making Green Worlds (ca. 1450–1700) 

Lauren Cannady, University of Maryland, College Park 

 

Rather than the depiction of scholarly work taking place in Sébastien Leclerc’s engraved headpiece for Denis Dodart’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle des plantes (1676), it is a scene of the direct observation of nature glimpsed through a window that is most striking. Three men stand in an arabesque-patterned parterre to more closely examine the individual plants that compose the garden. One uses his walking cane to point out a specimen—literally embedded in the undulating scrollwork of the parterre—to his companions. This ornamental plantation—or manner of “ordering of the ground” as Francis Bacon lamented in his essay “Of Gardens” (1625)—reflects the dominant style of contemporary aristocratic pleasure and academic botanic gardens across northern Europe. Such impositions of formal, physical order on the natural world, however, belie the acknowledged chaos of seventeenth-century natural history. Bacon, among others, contended that empirical observation could best be used to make sense of the “many things in nature [that] have been laid open and discovered,” including organic material from around the world collected by Europeans in the name of colonialism. The renewed emphasis on empiricism did little, however, to rectify linguistic confusion and imprecise nomenclature, particularly pressing issues for the emerging field of botany. As a repository for nonnative flora and living laboratory for the production of naturalist knowledge, the patterned garden proved a visibly reliable way to order the natural world in early modern Europe.  

 

 

Presentation: “’ A “New World” for Profit: Christopher Columbus’s Search for Gold on Genoese Silver” 

Session: Making Green Worlds (ca. 1450–1700) 

Jillian Laceste, Boston University 

A seventeenth-century silver vase made by the Flemish silversmith Gio Aelbosca Belga for Agostino Pallavicino, the future doge of Genoa, depicts a moment of encounter between Christopher Columbus and Indigenous Americans. The vessel emphasizes a one-sided transaction by showing Indigenous figures greeting the explorer with gifts at the shore of the Atlantic. While painted Columbian artworks created in early modern Genoa treat the explorer’s arrival as a heroic maritime feat or moment of introduction of Christianity into the Americas, silver vessels such as Aelbosca’s differ because they depict Columbus’s journey for Cipangu—a land rich with gold—on the surface of silver, a precious metal crucial to Spanish colonization of the Americas. This paper will analyze the subject matter and material to address the presentation of Europe’s fertile “New World” contained within Aelbosca’s vessel. By connecting it to the history of the Americas—in particular Columbus’s failed search for gold but eventual outpouring of silver—I argue that this vase offers a view of the Americas that emphasizes not only its novelty and foreignness but also its utility for mining and profit.  

 

 

Presentation: “Architectural Drawing, Information Management, and Early Modern Science: Wendel Dietterlin Drafts the Architectura (1593–98)” 

Session: Drawing (New) Stories 

Elizabeth Petcu, University of Edinburgh  

This paper surveys the massive corpus of drawings associated with Wendel Dietterlin’s 1593–98 Architectura treatise to establish how architectural drawing in sixteenth-century Europe came to model practices for managing visual information in scientific research. To craft the Architectura drawings, Dietterlin and his assistants wielded tactics of annotation, bricolage, folding, and copying that had long aided architects in stimulating creativity, exposing problems, saving materials, enhancing productivity, facilitating communication, and documenting progress. I compare the 164 known Architectura drawings—among the largest surviving bodies of Renaissance architectural treatise drawings—to botanical and geological drawings in the collections of physician Felix Platter and natural historians Conrad Gessner and Ulisse Aldrovandi to show that natural philosophers (i.e. early modern scientists) came to derive similar benefits from such drawing techniques. I argue that Dietterlin’s tactics for orchestrating his Architectura’s wealth of visual information attests that, by 1600, techniques of visual research originating in architectural drawing circulated freely between makers of architectural drawings and natural philosophers. I thereby expose how makers of architectural drawings and natural philosophers in Europe began to exchange and codevelop parallel, empirical methods for forming knowledge.  

 

 

Presentation: “Problematising the Notion of ‘Eastern European Art’: Two Case Studies of a Multiplicity” 

Session: What is Eastern European Art? 

Marta Zboralska, University of Oxford 

Radek Przedpełski, Trinity College Dublin  

This presentation aims to challenge the ontological assumption of there being a monolithic ontological entity such as “Eastern European art,” dialectically elaborated in its opposition to “Western art,” which then needs to be put on the map in an IRWIN-like gesture. We propose two case studies that problematize such an assumption, arguing instead that starting on the ground and unfolding an analysis from there might offer a more fruitful art-historical path of inquiry. We shall demonstrate that the model of a case study enfolds multiple frameworks of reference cutting across the East/West dichotomy, such as the immediately local or the regional on the one hand, or the long durée of the Anthropocene on the other.  

The first case study will outline a media archaeology of Tatar timber mosques/minarets on the territories of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, showing how these under-researched media blend aniconism with local contexts and engage a continuum of artefacts and practices including muhir tableaux, hramotka (talismans), siufkanie (sorcery), and fał (divination). This case study argues that these architectural artworks explode the concept of “Eastern Europe(an art).” Instead, they open up a liminal space conjoining Islamicate architecture, Turkic animism, the “Long Baroque” of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as well as the vernacular regional traditions of timber building construction and ornamentation.  

The second case study will zoom in on the ideas of Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz to consider the issue of regional artistic identity. As noted by literary scholar Anita Starosta, Gombrowicz refused the binary choice of either affirming Polishness or aspiring to Europeanness. Instead, it was within the periphery’s “not quite-ness” that the writer located the potential to “reveal Europe’s immaturity.” Looking at Diary by the American appropriation artist Sherrie Levine, a 2019 work inspired by Gombrowicz, this case study will argue for embracing the incompleteness of “Eastern Europe” as an area of art-historical enquiry.  

 

 

Presentation: “‘Narrating’ the Landscape: Pictorial and Aesthetical Inventiveness to Portray the Essence of Nature” 

Session: Eighteenth-Century Atmospheres: Science, Politics, Aesthetics 

Marie Beaulieu Orna, France  

Leaving the port of Naples for Sicily in 1777, the connoisseur Richard Payne Knight (1750–1824) wrote in his travel diary: “The infinite variety of tints were all harmonized together by that pearly hue, which is particular to that climate. (This tint very particularly marks Claude Lorraine’s Coloring). As we advanced into the open sea, the colours and forms seemed to sink into the Atmosphere and grow gradually indistinct, till at last the Sun withdrew its rays and left all in darkness.” Disclosing the term “atmosphere” in its literal meaning, Knight’s remark paradoxically reveals the fundamental role of optical theories and their interpretation in artistic practice in giving rise to the figurative essence of this same word, or to “spreading the tone” as Coleridge expressed it in Biographica Literaria (1817). Following Knight’s example, certain late eighteenth-century British landscapists aimed at conveying their personal impression felt upon observing the natural scenery, especially by handling color in travel sketches. Their Grand Tour became an artistic and aesthetical laboratory, into which they experimented with materials and processes in order to depict exotic landscapes with sensibility, intended for “polite” amateurs. The specific training these artists as well as these amateurs shared contributed to relate their mutual perception of nature and to develop this specific sense of “atmosphere.” This paper intends to demonstrate this artistic and aesthetical pivotal turn, embedded in the British contemporary scientific and philosophical context. 

 

 

Presentation: “Imperial Materials: Extracting White Marble during the 18th and 19th Centuries” 

Session: The Extractive Nineteenth Century 

Amalie Skovmøller, University of Copenhagen 

Since antiquity, white marble has been extracted from quarries centered in the Mediterranean, and transported to workshops to be crafted into sculpture and architectural decoration. While marble extracting activities declined following the collapse of the Roman Empire, they resumed with new intensity during the eighteenth century, peaking in nineteenth as quarries were sought out throughout Europe, Scandinavia, and in the US. Intertwined with Imperial policies, ideas about aesthetics and nation building, white marble assumed the role as prime material for high art and monumental embellishment. Traditionally studied as an omnipresent, abstract material with little regard to the complex infrastructures framing its extraction, the role of white marble consumption in relation to histories of colonialism remains peripherally explored. This paper centers on the intense marble extraction initiated by the Danish king Frederik V (1723–1766), when the Danish Empire included all of Norway. The king initiated expeditions into Norwegian territories to locate new sources of white marble, and the quarries established at Fauske, near Oslo, and in Hordaland secured the desired stones, which were extracted in thousands of blocks and shipped to Copenhagen. This paper explores the sculptures and architectural decoration in Copenhagen, deriving from the intense exploitation of Norwegian resources, as representing the Imperial ideologies, extractive capitalism, and colonial expansion politics of the Danish Empire during the latter eighteenth century. In doing so, the paper also touches upon the global economics and ideologies of marble extraction and circulation taking place throughout Europe and the US during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  

 

 

Presentation: “Byzantine Embroideries and the Entangled Visual Traditions of Eastern Europe” 

Session: What is Eastern European Art? 

Catherine Volmensky, The University of British Columbia 

A late-Byzantine liturgical veil shows the recumbent figure of the dead Christ. Referred to as the aër-epitaphios of John of Skopje, this red silk textile is lavishly embroidered with gold, metallic, and silk threads. Similar types of embroidered veils were found in monasteries and churches throughout the Byzantine empire and its religious sphere. Drawing on a theory of line, this paper discusses the entangled artistic, religious, and economic networks of workshops and patrons shared between Thessaloniki, Mount Athos, and the regions of the Balkan Peninsula. Through this methodology, this paper traces the movement of images across spaces and media and provides a new approach to late and post-Byzantine textiles to demonstrate the vibrant and multifaceted connectivity between the regions of Eastern and Southern Europe. The role of the patron is also questioned in the context of the economic value of silk and gold-figure embroidery during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, emphasizing the position of elite women patrons in the Balkans, and how they have been examined or overlooked in previous scholarship. Since the intersection of lines create networks, this methodology also emphasizes a nonhierarchical approach to works created within Byzantium’s religious sphere. The emphasis on communication and interconnected structures offers a grounded methodology with which to examine gold-figure embroidery created and used in religious spaces of the Balkan Peninsula, Thessaloniki, and Mount Athos.  

 

 

Presentation: “Begarelli, Model for Algardi? Renaissance Clay Modelling as a Precedent of Baroque Marble Sculpting” 

Session: The Essence of Things? Limits and Limitlessness in Early Modern Sculpture 

Lucia Simonato, Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy 

In her monograph on Alessandro Algardi, Jennifer Montagu intuited the influence of Antonio Begarelli’s model on the works of art by the Bolognese Baroque sculptor. Yet, a systematic study of this possible relationship has not followed this intelligent opening. Begarelli was a sculptor who until his death in 1565 made monumental statues in Emilia and in Lombardy, using almost exclusively white-painted terracotta—a choice, according to Vasari, criticized by Michelangelo, who would have said in front of his works: “If this clay were to become marble, woe to the ancient statues!” Reassessing Begarelli as a model for Algardi poses not only an issue of intermediality in the transmission of formal solutions, but also a question on matter’s expressive possibilities. To what extent did the Renaissance terracotta, with its easier naturalistic adhesion and its dynamic spatial conception, offer a model to Baroque marble figuration? How did the dialogue with Begarelli shape Algardi’s use of terracotta modelling within his artistic process as compared, for example, to Bernini’s? This paper will focus on these issues.  

 

In addition, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation has provided funds for alumni of the program to return and take part in our vast network of both international and North American scholars: 

  • Iro Katsaridou, Greece, 2022  
  • Tomasz Grusiecki, Canada, 2015  
  • Halyna Kohut, Ukraine, 2020  
  • Angeliki Pollali, Greece, 2014 

Meet this year’s grant recipients and find information about their presentations at the conference and their corresponding session below. Dozens of other support grants were given to CAA members through the Presidents Council of CAA and the “Pay it Forward” initiative. 

CAA TRAVEL GRANT IN MEMORY OF ARCHIBALD CASON EDWARDS, SENIOR, AND SARAH STANLEY GORDON EDWARDS 

The CAA Support Grant in Memory of Archibald Cason Edwards, Senior, and Sarah Stanley Gordon Edwards was made possible by Mary D. Edwards. The grant supports women who are emerging scholars at either an advanced stage of pursuing a doctoral degree or who have received their PhD within the two years prior to the submission of the application. 

 

Amanda Gutierrez, Concordia University
Presentation: “Walking away from the Western Flâneuse, moving forward to perspectives from the Global South
Session: The Art of Walking 

This presentation frames a critique to the concept of the Flâneuse, which reduces the walking experience of all women into a hegemonic Western perspective, not considering the ontologies of violence that women and LGBGT+2 bodies from the Global South experience every day. Women’s safety cannot exist where gender violence, war, political conflicts, and economic crises are present. Therefore, reflecting on the privilege and political conditions needed to walk safely and with freedom is essential. Considering the colonial implications of industrialized countries holding infrastructural and economic power is also critical, as is reflection on the creation of safe public spaces for citizens. We also need to consider that racialized immigrants living in Western countries hold additional risks in confronting racist bias experiences in the public spaces due to their race, ethnicity, gender, and citizenship status. Understanding these political dimensions, these questions arise:

Are we aware of these political implications when romanticizing the Flâneuse as a universal agent of walking freedoms in public space? Is this figure of agency excluding many women and non-conforming bodies who cannot experience these freedoms under political crises? Can we think of other subaltern figures besides the Flâneuse to consider the walking experiences of women and LGBGT+2 in the Global South? 

This paper will reflect on these questoins while looking at examples of collectives from India, such as Blank Noise and Women Walk at Midnight as well as the artistic practices of BIPOC feminist artists approaching walking as a form of resistance and enunciation. 

 

Sila Ulug, The University of Chicago
Presentation: “The Blind Man(et): On the Aesthetics of the Blind Man after European Painting” Session: The Art of the Periodical 

The Blind Man (1917) is a two-issue magazine published by Henri-Pierre Roché; Marcel Duchamp; and Beatrice Wood in coordination with the First Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York. The Blind Man introduced Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) to the public as a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, shortly after it was physically disappeared. My presentation examines The Blind Man against a history of rejected, Modernist painting. I demonstrate that The Blind Man distinguishes itself from contemporaneous magazines affiliated with the New York avant-garde in three notable respects: (1) its multiple levels of self-referentiality; (2) its direct address of the reader in multiple figurative roles; and (3) its concomitant incorporation and rejection of the reader as part of its dramatic world. I suggest that the incongruence of The Blind Man’s representational scheme can be resolved when examined against the work of Édouard Manet, especially as its reception aesthetics take after those of Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas (1656). Positioning The Blind Man alongside critical terms associated with the reception of work by Manet and others who exhibited in the 1863 Salon des Refusés suggests that The Blind Man may have aspired to the condition of tableau, while remaining a morceau to the public. 

 

 

 

Depiction of eryngoes, De materia medica, MS M 652, f. 57r., The Morgan Library & Museum (relates to Griebeler, Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean)

MEET THE GRANTEES 

Twice a year, CAA awards grants through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund to support book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of art, visual studies, and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits, but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy. 

Thanks to the generous bequest of the late Prof. Millard Meiss, CAA began awarding these publishing grants in 1975. 

SPRING 2022 GRANTEES 

Claudia Calirman, Dissident Bodies: Brazilian Women Artists, (1960s-2020s), Duke University Press 

Karen Mary Davalos and Tatiana Reinoza, Self Help Graphics at Fifty: A Cornerstone of Latinx Art and Collaborative Artmaking, University of California Press 

Andrew Griebeler, Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean, University of Chicago Press  

Joan Kee, The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art beyond Solidarity, University of California Press  

Miriam Kienle, Queer Connections: Ray Johnson’s Correspondence Art Network, University of Minnesota Press  

Murad Mumtaz, Faces of God: Images of Muslim Devotion in Indian Painting, Brill 

 

We’re delighted to announce that twenty-four scholars have been awarded Terra Foundation for American Art Research Travel Grants in 2022.

These grants provide support to doctoral, postdoctoral, and senior scholars from both the US and outside the US for research topics dedicated to the art and visual culture of the United States prior to 1980.

The Terra Foundation prioritizes projects that interrogate and broaden definitions of American art and lends support for projects engaged in transforming or complicating how the story of American art is told. To expand histories of American art, we encourage projects that reflect a commitment to inclusive and equitable research and museum practice; generate new scholarship and interpretive frameworks; employ critical methodologies and innovative models; and/or engage diverse partners and audiences.

 

INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH TRAVEL GRANTS FOR US-BASED SCHOLARS

Doctoral Scholars

Manon Gaudet, Yale University, “Beyond Landscape: Property and the Contested Ground of North American Visual Culture, 1900-1945”

Michaela Haffner, Yale University, “The Visual Culture of Naturopathic Cures & the Fashioning of White Wellness”

Annie Ochmanek, Columbia University, “Conceptualism and the Connexionist World: The Art of Eduardo Costa, Hannah Weiner, Christine Kozlov, and Stanley Brouwn”

Constanza Robles, Boston University, “Visualizing Alliances through Art and Architecture: Pan Americanism, Hispanismo and Latin Americanism in World Fairs, 1901-1929”

Lea Stephenson, University of Delaware, “’Wonderful Things’: Egyptomania, Empire, and the Senses, 1870-1922”

Postdoctoral & Senior Scholars

Maria Elena Buszek, University of Colorado, Denver, “Art of Noise: Feminist Art and Popular Music

John J. Curley, Wake Forest University, “Critical Distance: Black American Artists in Europe 1957-1968”

Emily Voelker & Erin Hyde Nolan, UNC Greensboro and Maine College of Art, “Reading Native American Portraits in Ottoman: Global Economies of Nineteenth-century Survey Photograph”

 

INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH TRAVEL GRANTS TO THE UNITED STATES

Doctoral Scholars

Marion Belouard, University of Limoges, “Painting nature, exchanging knowledge. John James Audubon (1785-1851), a rare bird in Atlantic history?”

Cora Chalaby, University College London, “Control Systems: Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Alma Thomas, and Howardena Pindell’s Orderly Abstractions”

Clara Johanna Lauffer, Central Institute for Art History, Munich, “Rewriting the ‘pictures generation’: the production of white masculinity in appropriation art”

Mylène Palluel, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, “The ‘Longue durée’ paradigm in 1960s American art and social sciences. Case studies in Minimal Art, Conceptual Art and Land Art”

Mona Schubert, University of Cologne, “Photographic Media at documenta in the 1970s and the US-American Art Scene”

Clara Royer, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, “Slow-Scan: the (geo)political turn of media arts (1960-1990)”

Yana Shtilman, Université de Paris, “Public image, private lives: Creating the image of the “New Negro” woman in the Harlem Renaissance (1920-1943)”

Achang Su, China Academy of Art, “The Identity Issues and Abstract Transformation in the works of Modern Chinese-American Artist George Chann from 1950s to 1960s”

Postdoctoral & Senior Scholars

Alice Butler, Courtauld Institute of Art, “The Perversions of Textile in Feminist Art”

Anne-Claire Faucquez, Université Paris 8, “The narrativization of colonial slavery in American museums: arts and representations” (collaborating with Androula Michael)

Roula Matar, École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Versailles, “James Johnson Sweeney’s Contribution to a Critical and Didactical Approach to Exhibition Installation”

Androula Michael, Université de Picardie Jules Verne – UFR des arts, “The narrativization of colonial slavery in American museums: arts and representations” (collaborating with Anne-Claire Faucquez)

Yvonne Schweizer, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, “Linking Mediatization and Mediation. Art Institutions as Media Producers since 1970”

Harry Weeks, Newcastle University, “The Artist’s Second Shift”

Andrew Witt, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, “Exile Modernism: Photography c. 1940”

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE TERRA FOUNDATION RESEARCH TRAVEL GRANTS

Filed under: Grants and Fellowships — Tags:

Grantee Rachel Stephens with her students from the University of Alabama at the Birmingham Museum of Art for the exhibition “Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now” on on June 12, 2019.

CAA’s Art History Fund for Travel to Special Exhibitions is designed to award instructors of qualifying undergraduate and graduate art history classes funds to cover the costs (travel, accommodations, and admission fees) associated with students and instructors attending museum special exhibitions throughout the United States and worldwide.

The awardees for 2022 are:

Terri Geis, New York University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Course: “International Surrealisms”
Exhibition: Surrealism Beyond Borders, Tate London

Christopher Heuer, University of Rochester, NY
Course: “Pilgrimage/Exhibition/Biennale”
Exhibition: 59th Annual Venice Biennale, 2022, Theme: “The Milk of Dreams”

Allison Stagg, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany
Course: “19th Century American and German Landscape Painting: Gendered Connections”
Exhibition: Women, Art, and Land: Reframing the Hudson River School at the Thomas Cole Historic Site, Catskill, NY

 

Applications for the next round of grants will be accepted by CAA beginning in fall 2022.

CAA is pleased to announce the 2022 recipients of the Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant. 

The Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant supports book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art, visual studies, and related subjects that are under contract with a publisher. The Terra Foundation supports projects that share expansive narratives of American art. Projects should focus primarily on visual art made before 1980. 

The six grantees for 2022 are: 

Isabelle Bonnet and Sophie Hacket, Casa Susanna, Editions Textuel 

Betsy Boone, Spanish Element in Our Nationality: Spain and America at the World’s Fairs and Centennial Celebrations, 1876-1915, Centro de Estudios Europa Hispanica 

Julia Bryan-Wilson, Louise Nevelson: Drag, Color, Join, Face, Yale University Press 

Josh T. Franco, Marfa, Marfa: Minimalism, Rasquachismo, and Questioning Decolonial Aesthetics in Far West Texas, Duke University Press 

Sophie Lynford, Painting Dissent: Art, Ethics, and the American Pre-Raphaelites, Princeton University Press 

Andrew Witt, California in Catastrophe, MIT Press 

Filed under: Grants and Fellowships

Meet the 2021 Professional Development Fellows

posted by 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.

CAA offers Annual Conference support grants to graduate students in art history and to international artists and scholars. Meet this year’s recipients of our named support grants and find information about their presentations at the conference and their corresponding session below. Dozens of other support grants were given to CAA members through the Presidents Council of CAA and the “Pay it Forward” initiative.


CAA TRAVEL GRANT IN MEMORY OF ARCHIBALD CASON EDWARDS, SENIOR, AND SARAH STANLEY GORDON EDWARDS

The CAA Support Grant in Memory of Archibald Cason Edwards, Senior, and Sarah Stanley Gordon Edwards was made possible by Mary D. Edwards. The grant supports women who are emerging scholars at either an advanced stage of pursuing a doctoral degree or who have received their PhD within the two years prior to the submission of the application.

 

Kristan Hanson, Dumbarton Oaks
Presentation at the Annual Conference: “Nurturing Growth: Eva Gonzalès’s La Plante favorite and Berthe Morisot’s Fillette aux jacinthes”
Session: Enchanted by Nature: Picturing Gendered Plants and Female Agency in Europe and China (17th – 19th Century)

Kristan M. Hanson is an art historian and plant humanist. Her research examines the historical significance of individual plants and botanical forms in art to deepen understandings of human/plant interactions and anthropogenic environmental change. She currently holds a consultancy as Managing Digital Editor for the Plant Humanities Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks, prior to which she was a 2020–2021 academic year fellow. Hanson has also received fellowships and awards to support her research from the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, HASTAC Scholars program, Hall Center for the Humanities, and Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities.

 

Cynthia Kok, Yale University
Presentation at the Annual Conference: “’Een bloempoth van parlemoer’: Painting Life in Dirck van Rijswijck’s Mother-of-Pearl Floral Panels”
Session: Analogous Matter: Skeuomorphism as Method

Cynthia Kok is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University. Her dissertation focuses on sensorial engagement in making and craft experiments with mother-of-pearl in the early modern Dutch world. Cynthia received her MA from Bard Graduate Center and her BA from the University of California, Berkeley. She has held curatorial internships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, the Frick Collection, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum and she is the 2021-2023 Kress History of Art Institutional Fellow at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS).

 

Honorable Mention:

Shoghig Halajian, University of California San Diego
Presentation at the Annual Conference: “Destroying the Form: On the Spatial Politics of Rafa Esparza’s bust: A Mediation on Freedom”
Session: Monumentality in Art: Memory, History, and Impermanence in Diaspora

Shoghig Halajian is a curator and art historian, who serves on the Board of Directors at Human Resources LA and was previously Assistant Director at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions). She is co-editor of the online journal Georgia, in collaboration with Anthony Carfello and Suzy Halajian, which is supported by a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She has presented projects at the Hammer Museum and the ONE Archives at USC Libraries in Los Angeles; Le Magasin–National Center for Contemporary Art in Grenoble; Al Ma’mal Foundation for Art in Jerusalem, UKS in Oslo, among others. She was a 2021 Research Fellow at Ocean Space–TBA 21 in Venice. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History, Theory and Criticism with a Critical Gender Studies emphasis at University of California, San Diego, where her research explores contemporary queer aesthetics and performance through a critical race lens, focusing on artistic experiments with collaboration.


SAMUEL H. KRESS FOUNDATION CAA CONFERENCE SUPPORT FELLOWSHIP FOR INTERNATIONAL SCHOLARS

Recognizing the value of the international exchange of ideas and experience among art historians, the Kress Foundation is offering support for international scholars participating as speakers at the 2022 CAA Annual Conference. The scholarly focus of the papers must be European art before 1830.

 

Lorenzo Vigotti, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz
Presentation at the Annual Conference: “Diplomatic Exchanges and Architectural Inventions along the Silk Road: The Case of Soltaniyeh and Santa Maria del Fiore”
Session:  Beyond the Silk Road

Lorenzo is a trained architect with a M. Arch. from the University of Florence, Italy, and a Ph.D. in architectural history from Columbia University with a dissertation on the origin of the Renaissance palace. He is currently a post-doc at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, where he studies the shift in spatial organization in domestic residences between the 14th and the 15th century, with an emphasis on early collecting practices and the birth of the studiolo as a manifestation of power by the urban oligarchy. Together with Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, Iran, Lorenzo is exploring the circulation of architectural knowledge between medieval Persia and Italy, specifically the materiality and the problems of preservation of brick dome structures. Finally, he oversees the virtual reconstruction of the now lost Florentine ghetto at the Medici Archive Project.

 

Ana Cristina Howie, University of Cambridge
Presentation at the Annual Conference: “’Favoured Black Attendants’ in ‘Splendid State Portraits’? Genoese merchants, Flemish painters, and the Spanish Atlantic Slave Trade”
Session:  Archive, Object, Image: Reading Against the Grain in the Dutch and Spanish “Golden Ages”

Ana is originally from New Zealand and completed her bachelor’s degree in the History of Art and French at the University of Auckland. She continued her studies at the Université Paris-Sorbonne, then earned her MA in the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute in London, specializing in early modern Netherlandish artistic production. She began her PhD under the supervision of Professor Ulinka Rublack at the University of Cambridge in 2019, funded by the Prince of Wales International Scholarship. Her doctoral research investigates the relationships between women, dress, and portraiture in seventeenth-century Genoa, with a focus on the oeuvres of Flemish painters Peter Paul Rubens and Antony van Dyck. She is the recipient of the inaugural Society for Renaissance Studies/British School in Rome Residential Doctoral Research Scholarship for 2021/22. Her work and projects have been supported by the Royal Historical Society, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Magdalene College, Cambridge, and the Cambridge Trust.

 

Iro Katsaridou, Museum of Byzantine Culture, Thessaloniki, Greece
Presentation at the Annual Conference: “Through Foreign Eyes: Curating the 1821 Greek War of Independence”
Session: Instrumentalizing Memory and the Politics of Commemoration

Iro Katsaridou was recently (2021) appointed Director of the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, Greece. Previously, she has worked as curator of modern and contemporary art at the Museum of Byzantine Culture in Thessaloniki. She studied art history at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the Université Paris I-Sorbonne, and also pursued museum studies at the City University of New York. Her doctoral dissertation (Aristotle University, 2010) focused on contemporary Greek photography. Iro has researched photography and art in wartime (World War I and II), curated exhibitions and edited related catalogues in this particular field. More recently (2021) she has curated an exhibition at the Museum of Byzantine Culture on the aspects of Philhellenic movements in art and the Greek War of Independence. She has taught as adjunct faculty at several Greek universities. She has co-edited two books on photography during the Nazi Occupation of Greece (1941-1944), one on the art of World War I in Greece, and written articles and book chapters on photography, museum policies, as well as the relationship between contemporary Greek art and politics. She has presented her research in international conferences, while in 2019 and 2020 she participated in the CAA-Getty International Program.

 

Jana Kantoříková, Sorbonne University/CNRS
Presentation at the Annual Conference: “Crucified Women: The Way of the Cross in the Symbolist Movement”
Session: Women in Art in the second part of the 19th century-early part of the 20th

Jana Kantoříková is an associated researcher at the Center of Interdisciplinary Research on Central, Eastern and Balkanic Europe at Sorbonne University/CNRS. She received her PhD in Slavic Philology, History of Czech Literature and Literary Theory at the Charles University in Prague and the University of Regensburg (2018). She taught at the University of Passau (Germany) and the Sorbonne University. Her research focuses on European modernisms and cultural transfers between France, Germany and the Czech lands, for example “Horror Fragmenti in Czech Symbolism” in Angst, Anxiety, Anguish in Fin de Siècle Art and Literature (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020) or “Le Cycle de la volupté et de la mort : ‘livre empoisonné’ et ornementation du péché” in L’art (décoratif) du livre fin-de-siècle: éloge du parergon (Éditions Otrante, 2021). She is currently working on projects related to the reception of Friedrich Nietzsche in Central Europe and the blackness imagery in the Czech lands in the 19th century.

 

Judith Noorman, University of Amsterdam
Presentation: “The Invisibility Myth. Women, Art and Household Consumption in the Dutch Republic”
Session at the Annual Conference: Archive, Object, Image: Reading Against the Grain in the Dutch and Spanish “Golden Ages”

Judith Noorman is Assistant Professor of Art History in the Early Modern Period and Director of the Amsterdam Centre for Studies in Early Modernity (both at the University of Amsterdam). As of September 2021, she is leading a governmentally funded NWO VIDI project: The Female Impact. Women, Art and Household Consumption in the Dutch Republic, 1580-1720. She earned her PhD at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University and has conducted postdoctoral research at the Drawing Institute, Morgan Library & Museum. At the 110th CAA Annual Conference, she is presenting a paper on The Invisibility Myth. Women, Art and Household Consumption in the Dutch Republic, as part of the HNA-sponsored session Archive, Object, Image: Reading Against the Grain in the Dutch and Spanish “Golden Ages”, which is chaired by Carrie J. Anderson and Marsely Kehoe.


CAA-GETTY INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM

Every year since 2012, the CAA-Getty International Program has enabled art historians, museum curators, and artists who teach art history to attend CAA’s Annual Conference. This program is funded on an annual basis by the Getty Foundation. Meet the CAA-Getty International Program participants here.

Feathered Tabard, 15th–16th century Peru, Chimú, cotton and feathers, Dimensions: H. 30 × W. 25 in. (76.2 × 63.5 cm), Fletcher Fund, 1959, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

MEET THE GRANTEES

Twice a year, CAA awards grants through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund to support book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of art, visual studies, and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits, but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy.

Thanks to the generous bequest of the late Prof. Millard Meiss, CAA began awarding these publishing grants in 1975.

 

The Millard Meiss Publication Fund grantees for Fall 2021 are: 

Monica Amor, Gego: Weaving the Space In-Between. Art, Architecture, Design, and Craft at the Edge of Modernity, Yale University Press 

Sampada Aranke, Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power, Duke University Press  

Shulamith Behr, Women Artists in Expressionism: From Empire to Emancipation, Princeton University Press  

Suzaan Boettger, The Passions of Robert Smithson, University of Minnesota Press 

Claudia Brittenham, Unseen Art: Memory, Vision, and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica, University of Texas Press  

Kai jun Chen, China Made: Technocratic Culture in the Qing Imperial Porcelain Industry, 1680–1750, University of Washington Press  

Stephanie Porras, The First Viral Images: Maerten de Vos, Antwerp Print, and the Early Modern Globe, Penn State University Press  

Frederic Schwartz, The Culture of the Case: Madness, Crime, and Justice in Modern German Art, The MIT Press 

Briana Smith, Free Berlin: Art, Urban Politics, and Everyday Life, The MIT Press 

Karin Zitzewitz, Infrastructure and Form: The Global Networks of Indian Contemporary Art, 1991–2008, University of California Press  

 

View a list of all recipients of the Millard Meiss Publication Fund from 1975 to the present. The list is alphabetized by author’s last name and includes book titles and publishers.

BACKGROUND

Books eligible for a Meiss grant must currently be under contract with a publisher and be on a subject in the arts or art history. The deadlines for the receipt of applications are March 15 and September 15 of each year. Please review the Application Guidelines and the Application Process, Schedule, and Checklist for complete instructions.

CONTACT

Questions? Please contact Cali Buckley, Content Manager for Education and Intellectual Property, at cbuckley@collegeart.org.

Filed under: Grants and Fellowships