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Dear colleagues,

It is with great pleasure that I announce the keynote speakers for Convocation at CAA’s Centennial Conference in New York: the artists Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison. This event, free and open to the public, will take place in February 2011.

The Harrisons are interdisciplinary, collaborative, multimedia, environmental, educational, activist, visionary, ethical, and humane. They exemplify many aspects of contemporary artistic practice and speak to numerous concerns of the CAA membership.

I first met Newton in the early 1990s: he was a visiting artist when I was a graduate student in Indiana. (I also met Helen years later at a gallery reception in Colorado.) He left a tremendous impression on me as someone with a truly perceptive mind, possessing the foresight, talent, and determination to create visually compelling art on a scale that makes a positive difference in life on our planet. The Harrisons have been doing this for over forty years. His and Helen’s concept of the individual contributing to the elevation of a collective “conversational drift” resonates today more than ever.

For more information on the Harrisons and their work, please visit their website. Other great sources include the New York Art World, Ronald Feldman Gallery, which represents the artists, Left Matrix, and the Community Arts Network, which republishes an essay on the artists by Arlene Raven.

I’d like to thank Sue Gollifer, CAA vice president for Annual Conference, for her thoughtful consultation with me about potential speakers, and Emmanuel Lemakis, CAA director of programs, for his assistance with confirming and making arrangements for our honored guests.

Please join me in welcoming the Harrisons and spreading the word about our good fortune to have them address CAA as keynote speakers for our 2011 Convocation.

Sincerely,

Barbara Nesin, MFA
President, College Art Association
Department Chair of Art Foundations, Art Institute of Atlanta
Batya Tamar Studio at the Arts Exchange

June Obituaries in the Arts

posted by June 15, 2010

CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, photographers, critics, collectors, museum directors, and other important figures in the visual arts. Of particular interest is a text on the artist and teacher Marvin Lowe, written especially for CAA by Wendy Calman.

  • Arakawa, an artist born in Japan but based in New York who with his wife strove to halt aging with paintings and installations, died on May 18, 2010. He was 73
  • Louise Bourgeois, an internationally acclaimed artist who created psychologically charged work in sculpture and on paper that has inspired countless artists, died on May 31, 2010, at the age of 98. CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts is preparing a tribute to Bourgeois, to appear on the CAA website later this month
  • David Dillon, a longtime architecture critic for the Dallas Morning News and the author of a dozen books, died on June 3, 2010, at the age of 68
  • Brian Duffy, a fashion and portrait photographer known for his fiery temper as much as his work in swinging London as part of the Black Trinity, died on May 31, 2010. He was 76
  • Teshome H. Gabriel, a cinema scholar in the School of Theater, Film, and Television at the University of California, Los Angeles, died on June 14, 2010
  • Dennis Hopper, a maverick yet revered Hollywood actor who was also a photographer and a collector of modern art, died on May 29, 2010. He was 74
  • Lester Frederick Johnson, an American figurative painter who was a member of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, died on May 30, 2010. He was 91
  • Donald Krieger, an artist and performer based in Los Angeles who also taught graphic design and began curating, died on May 3, 2010. He was 57
  • Marvin Lowe, an artist, musician, and longtime professor of printmaking at Indiana University, died on April 28, 2010, at the age of 87. Read Wendy Calman’s special obituary on him
  • Sigmar Polke, a highly influential German painter who in the 1960s helped found Capitalist Realism with Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg, died on June 10, 2010. He was 69
  • Stephen Smarr, a master glass artist based in Bloomsbury, New Jersey, died on May 28, 2010, at the age of 53
  • Michael Wojas, the owner of and bartender at London’s infamous Colony Room Club who served Francis Bacon, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, and Tracey Emin, died on June 6, 2010. He was 53
  • Tobias Wong, a New York–based conceptual designer and artist who was included in exhibitions at the Cooper-Hewitt and Museum of Modern Art, died on May 30, 2010. He was 35
  • James N. Wood, president of the J. Paul Getty Foundation and the director of the Art Institute of Chicago for twenty-four years, died on June 11, 2010. He was 69

Read all past obituaries in the arts on the CAA website.

Filed under: Obituaries, People in the News

May Obituaries in the Arts

posted by May 19, 2010

CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, curators, teachers, architects, collectors, administrators, and other important figures in the visual arts.

  • Callie Angel, a specialist on the films of Andy Warhol who worked with the Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art, died on May 5, 2010. She was 62
  • Avigdor Arikha, a Paris-based painter of both abstract and figurative art, a graphic designer, and a Holocaust survivor, died on April 29, 2010, at the age of 81
  • Jose Bernal, a Cuban artist and teacher who fled Castro’s regime for Chicago, died on April 19, 2010, at the age of 85
  • David Bolduc, a Canadian artist and illustrator celebrated for his colorful abstractions, died on April 8, 2010. He was 65
  • James “Jack” Boynton, a Texan artist and teacher who helped found the art department at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, died on April 5, 2010. He was 82
  • Oliver Cox, an English architect of housing and schools, died on April 24, 2010, at the age of 90
  • Bruce Craig, director of research and planning at the Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies, died on March 9, 2010. He was 53
  • Frank Frazetta, a painter and illustrator of fantasy scenes whose work adorned the covers of books and albums as well as movie posters, died on May 10, 2010. He was 82
  • Jonathan Gams, publisher of the poetry and art magazine Lingo and a cofounder of Hard Press Editions, died on November 9, 2009, at the age of 57
  • Michael Godfrey, a curator at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in North Carolina, died on April 6, 2010. He was 56
  • Bobby Gore, an art historian and adviser on pictures to the UK’s National Trust, died on April 23, 2010, at the age of 89
  • Craig Kauffman, a sculptor associated with the Los Angeles scene in the 1950s and 1960s, died on May 9, 2010, at the age of 78
  • Neil E. Matthew, an artist and a professor emeritus at the Herron School of Art and Design, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, died on January 5, 2010. He was 84
  • Malcolm McLaren, an artist, fashion designer, cultural provocateur, and manager of the punk band the Sex Pistols, died on April 8, 2010. He was 64
  • Robert Natkin, an abstract artist who lived and worked in Chicago, New York, and Redding, Connecticut, died on April 20, 2010. He was 79
  • Norman Neasom, a painter and longtime teacher at the Redditch School of Art in Worcestershire, England, died on February 22, 2010, at the age of 94
  • Max Palevsky, a philanthropist who made his fortune in computers in the 1960s and a collector of art and furniture, died on May 5, 2010, at the age of 85
  • Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, an Italian businessman and a major collector of postwar American art who donated works to the emerging Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, died on April 23, 2010. He was 87
  • Victor Pesce, a former plumber and a painter of still lifes who lived and worked in New York, died on March 28, 2010, at age 71
  • Deborah Remington, an abstract painter who showed at Bykert Gallery in the 1960s and 1970s, died on April 21, 2010, at the age of 79
  • Werner Schroeter, a German film director who was a contemporary of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, and Werner Herzog, died on April 12, 2010, at the age of 65
  • Dustin Shuler, a sculptor based in California whose best-known work, Spindle, impales eight cars on a large stake, died on May 4, 2010, at the age of 61
  • Yvonne Skargon, an English artist and teacher who specialized in wood engravings, died on March 16, 2010. She was 78
  • Jan van der Marck, a Dutch curator who worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Detroit Institute of Arts, died on April 28, 2010, at the age of 80
  • John Carl Warnecke, the official architect of the Kennedy administration who designed that president’s grave site, died on April 17, 2010, at the age of 91
  • Purvis Young, a self-taught artist who lived and worked in south Florida, died on April 20, 2010. He was 67

Read all past obituaries in the arts on the CAA website.

Filed under: Obituaries, People in the News

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced on April 14, 2010, that Jason Schupbach will join the endowment as director of design at the end of May.

Schupbach brings to the NEA an impressive background of support for the creative economy and the design field, along with experience working with local, state, and federal agencies. He currently serves as the creative economy industry director for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where one of his primary focuses is the growth and support of all types of design businesses. Schupbach has also worked as capital projects manager for the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and director of Boston’s ArtistLink, an organization that creates a stable environment for Massachusetts artists as they seek workspace and housing.

Schupbach will manage the NEA’s grantmaking for design and its design initiatives, such as the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, as well as the proposed Our Town, which is part of the NEA fiscal year 2011 budget request and would provide funding in recognition of the role that the arts can play in economic revitalization and in creating livable, sustainable communities.

After receiving his BS in public health from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Schupbach earned his master’s degree in city planning with an urban-design certificate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Read more about him on the NEA website. Judith H. Dobrzynski of the ArtsJournal blog Real Clear Arts worries that his appointment is leading toward a more commercialized NEA.

Spring Obituaries in the Arts

posted by April 05, 2010

CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, architects, scholars, teachers, philanthropists, and other important figures in the visual arts.

  • Diane Bergheim, an arts advocate based in Alexandria, Virginia, died on March 27, 2010, at the age of 84
  • George Ehrlich, a professor emeritus of art and architectural history at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, died on November 28, 2009. He was 84
  • Werner Forman, a photographer of art objects who chronicled ancient, Asian, and other non-Western art, died on February 13, 2010, at age 89
  • Peter Foster, an architect and the surveyor of Westminster Abbey from 1973 to 1988, died on March 6, 2010. He was 90
  • Bruce Graham, the architect of the Sears Tower and John Hancock Center in Chicago, died on March 6, 2010, at the age of 84
  • Denys Hinton, a British architect who brought modernism to church architecture, died on February 10, 2010, at age 88
  • Terry Rossi Kirk, a scholar of architecture who taught at American University in Rome and authored The Architecture of Modern Italy, died on October 17, 2009. He was 48
  • Lionel Lambourne, a curator and scholar at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, died on February 12, 2010, at age 76
  • Lesley Lewis, an author and a historian of art and architecture who was one of the first four students at the Courtauld Institute of Art, died on January 29, 2010, at the age of 100
  • Rhoda “Dodie” Helen Masterman, an artist and teacher who drew illustrations for novels by Tolstoy, Joyce, Balzac, and more, died on December 17, 2009. She was 91
  • Robert McCall, an artist known for his depictions of outer space and for a six-story mural at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, died on February 26, 2010. He was 90
  • John Walker McCoubrey, who taught the history of American, English, and French art of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries at the University of Pennsylvania for more than thirty years, died on February 9, 2010, at the age of 86
  • Alexander McQueen, a celebrated, innovative, and rebellious London fashion designer, died on February 11, 2010. He was 40
  • Charles Moore, a photographer of the civil rights movement whose work reached millions in Life, died on March 11, 2010, at the age of 79
  • Edmund “Ted” Pillsbury, who transformed the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, during his eighteen years as director, died on March 25, 2010. He was 66
  • Natalie Rothstein, a curator and textiles scholar who spent her entire career at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, died on February 18, 2010, at the age of 79
  • Charles Ryskamp, a former director of both the Frick Collection and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York who also taught literature at Princeton University, died on March 26, 2010. He was 81
  • Mortimer D. Sackler, a psychiatrist and co-owner of a pharmaceutical company who generously donated to the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Gallery, and the Jewish Museum in Berlin, among others, died on March 24, 2010. He was 93
  • Norman Schureman, an artist and professor at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, died on March 20, 2010. He was 50
  • Der Scutt, a modernist architect with several building in New York, including Trump Tower, died on March 14, 2010, at age 75
  • John Sergeant, a British artist known for his stunning chiaroscuro in his charcoal drawings, died on January 7, 2010. He was 72
  • David Slivka, a sculptor and painter from the New York School of Abstract Expressionism who helped create a death mask for the poet Dylan Thomas, died on March 28, 2010, at the age of 95
  • Frank Williams, an architect of high-end hotels and condominiums in New York who mixed modern and traditional styles, died on February 25, 2010. He was 73

Read all past obituaries in the arts on the CAA website.

Filed under: Obituaries, People in the News

Recent Deaths in the Arts

posted by March 08, 2010

CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, architects, curators, teachers, dealers, collectors, philanthropists, and other important figures in the visual arts who have recently died.

  • Raymond Abraham, a radical Austrian architect and a professor at Pratt Institute and Cooper Union, died on March 4, 2010. He was 77
  • Earl A. Barthé, a New Orleans–based architectural plasterer who created cornices, friezes, and ceiling medallions, died on January 11, 2010, at the age of 87
  • Ernst Beyeler, a Swiss art dealer and collector who sold works by Monet, Cézanne, Picasso, Kandinsky, Giacometti, and more, died on February 25, 2010. He was 88
  • Michael Buhler, a British artist and a teacher at the Colchester School of Art, died on October 30, 2009, at the age of 69
  • Michael Cooper, a collage artist who showed his work in New York, died on January 23, 2010, at the age of 60
  • Evelyn Haas, an arts philanthropist who supported the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, died on February 3, 2010. She was 92
  • Zygmund Jankowski, a New England–based painter of colorful, expressionist works, died on December 31, 2009, at age 84
  • Paul R. Jones, a collector of African American art who gifted hundreds of works to the University of Delaware and thousands to the University of Alabama, died on January 26, 2010, at the age of 81
  • Ruth Kligman, an abstract painter and the sole survivor of Jackson Pollock’s 1956 car crash, died on March 1, 2010. She was 80
  • Edward Linde, a real-estate developer and arts philanthropist who supported the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, died on January 10, 2010. He was 68
  • Fritz Lohman, cofounder of the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation in Manhattan’s SoHo, died on December 31, 2009. He was 87
  • Raymond Mason, a British sculptor who worked in a narrative, realist style, died on February 14, 2010, in Paris. He was 87
  • Neil E. Matthew, an artist and professor emeritus at the Herron School of Art and Design, died on January 5, 2010. He was 84
  • Ursula Mommens, a British potter who worked for more than eight decades, died on January 30, 2010. She was 101
  • Anita V. Mozley, a curator of photography at the Stanford Museum of Art and an expert on the work of Eadweard Muybridge, died on January 23, 2010. She was 81
  • Bob Noorda, a graphic designer best known for his signs for the New York City Transit Authority, died on January 11, 2010, at age 82
  • Judith Taylor, a photographer, professor, and department chair at Arcadia University, died on January 26, 2010. She was 56
  • Clare Weiss, a curator of public art for the New York City Parks Department, died on January 11, 2010, at the age of 43

Read all past obituaries in the arts on the CAA website.

Filed under: Obituaries, People in the News

CAA members have elected four new directors to the CAA board for a four-year term, 2010–14:

The winners were announced by Paul B. Jaskot, CAA president, at the conclusion of the Annual Members’ Business Meeting, held on late Friday afternoon, February 12, at the CAA Annual Conference in Chicago. The above four will join the board at its next meeting, in May 2010.

The following individuals have been appointed to serve on CAA’s nine Professional Interests, Practices, and Standards Committees for 2010–13. New committee members begin their terms this week at the 2010 Annual Conference in Chicago.

Committee on Diversity Practices: Kevin Concannon, University of Akron; and Zoya Kocur, New York University. Renée Ater of the University of Maryland, College Park, was appointed chair, taking over Jacqueline Francis’s term.

Committee on Intellectual Property: Scott Contreras-Koterbay, East Tennessee State University; Karen Kelly, Dia Art Foundation; Doralynn Pines, Metropolitan Museum of Art (retired); Caitlin Shey, lawyer and consultant, New York; and Christine Sundt, University of Oregon. Kenneth Cavalier, a lawyer based in British Columbia, becomes committee chair.

Committee on Women in the Arts: Richard Meyer, University of Southern California; and Maura Reilly, independent curator, New York.

Education Committee: Teresa Lenihan, Loyola Marymount University; Cindy Maguire, Adelphi University; and Brian Seymour, Community College of Philadelphia.

International Committee: Richmond Ackam, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology; and Beth Steffel, California State University, San Bernadino.

Museum Committee: Janet Marstine, Seton Hall University; and Nancy Mowll Mathews, Williams College Museum of Art.

Professional Practices Committee: James Hopfensperger, Western Michigan University; Morgan T. Paine, Florida Gulf Coast University; and Susan Waller, University of Missouri, St. Louis. Charles Wright of Western Illinois University has been appointed committee chair.

Services to Artists Committee: Sharon Louden, artist; Vesna Pavlovic, Vanderbilt University; and Cindy Smith, artist and independent scholar. Brian Bishop of Framingham State College has accepted a one-year extension as committee chair.

Student and Emerging Professionals Committee: Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Vanderbilt University.

A call for nominations to serve on these committees appears annually in the July and September issues of CAA News and on the CAA website. CAA’s president, vice president for committees, and executive director review nominations in December and make appointments that take effect the following February.

For more information about the Professional Interests, Practices, and Standards Committees, please write to Vanessa Jalet, CAA executive assistant.

Filed under: Committees, People in the News

January Obituaries in the Arts

posted by January 29, 2010

CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, architects, scholars, teachers, collectors, filmmakers, authors, critics, philanthropists, and other important figures in the visual arts who have recently died. Of special note is William A. Peniston’s text on the art historian Karl Lunde, who passed away in late December.

  • Paul Ahyi, a painter and sculptor based in Togo, Africa, who designed his country’s flag, died on January 4, 2010. He was 80
  • Craigie Aitchison, a Scottish painter of dogs, still lifes, and religious scenes, died on December 21, 2009, at age 83
  • Peggy Amsterdam, an arts advocate based in Philadelphia, died on December 26, 2009, at the age of 60. She was a founding member of the Cultural Data Project, which is establishing a national standard for reporting and tracking data on arts and cultural groups
  • Donald S. Baker, Sr., a Chicago-based artist and teacher who explored African-American history in his wooded pieces, died on December 23, 2009. He was 72
  • Bill Brooks, an auctioneer who founded Christie’s South Kensington auction house in London, died on December 9, 2009. He was 85
  • Gertrude Whitney Conner, an artist and the granddaughter of the founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art, died on December 13, 2009
  • George Dannatt, an English abstract artist and former music critic, died on November 17, 2009, at the age of 94
  • Harry Diamond, a London photographer who snapped images of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and others in bohemian Soho of the 1960s and 1970s, died on December 3, 2009. He was 85
  • Esther Gordon Dotson, an art historian and Michelangelo specialist who taught at Cornell University, died on October 28, 2009, at age 91. She received CAA’s Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award in 1986
  • Michael Dwyer, a highly influential film critic for the Irish Times, died on January 1, 2010, at the age of 58
  • Susan Einzing, a British illustrator known for her work on the children’s book Tom’s Midnight Garden, died on December 25, 2009, at the age of 87. She had taught for more than thirty years at the Chelsea School of Art
  • Elizabeth Fallaize, a professor of French and women’s studies at St. John’s College and Oxford University, died on December 9, 2009, at age 59. She was a renowned authority on the books of Simone de Beauvoir
  • William Gambini, an artist from the New York School of Abstract Expressionism who had settled in San Diego, died on January 3, 2010. He was 91
  • Lydia Gasman, an inspiring art historian at the University of Virginia and an authority on the work of Pablo Picasso, died on January 15, 2010. She was 84
  • Rupprecht Geiger, a German abstract painter who is credited with inventing the shaped canvas, died on December 6, 2009, at the age of 101
  • Jennifer Jones, an Academy Award–winning actress who married the art collector and museum founder Norton Simon and later headed his foundation, died on December 17, 2009. She was 90
  • Robert Kaufman, an artist and former chair of illustration at the Art Institute of Boston, died on January 8, 2010. He was 58
  • Vivien Knight, curator of the Guildhall Art Gallery in London and a scholar of British painters of the Victorian era, died on December 18, 2009, at age 56
  • Karl Lunde, an art historian who taught for many years at William Paterson University, died on December 27, 2009, at age 78. He also directed a gallery, the Contemporaries, in New York from 1956 to 1965
  • Flo McGarrell, an artist and director of FOSAJ, a nonprofit art center in Jacmel, Haiti, died in the earthquake on January 11, 2010. He was 35. The Village Voice has also published a remembrance piece on the artist
  • Yiannis Moralis, a Greek painter who was part of the “Generation of the ‘30s,” died on December 20, 2009. He was 93
  • Kenneth Noland, an American artist who was a pioneer of Color Field painting, died on January 5, 2010, at the age of 85
  • Laughlin Phillips, a former director of the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, the museum founded by his father, died on January 24, 2010. He was 85
  • Antonio Pineda, an internationally exhibited silversmith from Taxco, Mexico, died on December 14, 2009, at the age of 90
  • Éric Rohmer, a film critic and filmmaker of the French New Wave best known for My Night at Maud’s, died on January 11, 2010, at the age of 89
  • James Rossant, an American architect, professor, and city planner who helped design Battery Park City in Manhattan, died on December 15, 2009. He was 81
  • David Sarkisyan, the former director of the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture in Moscow, died on January 7, 2010, at the age of 62
  • Robert H. Smith, a real-estate developer and art collector who was a former president of the National Gallery of Art’s board of trustees, died on December 29, 2009, at the age of 81. The museum has also published on Smith’s work there
  • Dennis Stock, a photographer of jazz musicians and actors, who took an iconic image of James Dean, died on January 11, 2010. He was 81
  • Norval White, coauthor of the AIA Guide to New York City, a guide to American architecture first published in 1968, died on December 26, 2009. He was 83
  • Jack Wolgin, a Philadelphian developer, banker, and philanthropist of art, died on January 26, 2010. He was 93
  • Robin Wood, a film critic who wrote about Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Author Penn, and Ingrid Bergman, died on December 18, 2009. He was 78

Read all past obituaries in the arts on the CAA website.

Filed under: Obituaries, People in the News

CAA announces today the recipients of its 2010 Awards for Distinction. These annual awards honor outstanding achievements in the visual arts and reaffirm CAA’s mission to encourage the highest standards of scholarship, practice, and teaching.

CAA President Paul B. Jaskot will formally recognize the honorees and present the awards at Convocation, to be held during CAA’s 98th Annual Conference on Wednesday evening, February 10, 2010, 5:30–7:00 PM, at the Hyatt Regency Chicago. The Annual Conference—hosting scholarly sessions, panel discussions, career-development workshops, art exhibitions, a book and trade fair, and more—is the largest gathering of artists, art historians, students, and arts professionals in the United States.

With these awards, CAA honors the accomplishments of individual artists, art historians, authors, conservators, curators, and critics whose efforts transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.

Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Suzanne Lacy

The continuum of Suzanne Lacy’s career mirrors the history of contemporary art: performance, installation, activism, social practice, and public engagement. An internationally regarded artist whose work includes installations, video, and performance, Lacy has addressed issues of sexual violence, aging, incarceration, illness, poverty, and a range of social-justice issues for almost four decades. Beginning in the early 1970s as a student at University of California, Fresno, and then in the Feminist Art Program at California Institute for the Arts, she was an integral and pioneering member of the Women’s Studio Workshop, Woman’s Building, and other important landmarks of feminist art. Since then, Lacy has maintained a career resolute in its commitment to feminism and social change.

Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work
Emory Douglas and Barkley L. Hendricks

Emory Douglas and Barkley L. Hendricks have long challenged the art world’s boundaries and received definitions in different but historically important ways. While working on opposite coasts and in different mediums, they transformed how African Americans saw themselves, and how they were seen. Emerging during the mid-1960s at a time of intense social upheaval, the two made work that was confrontational and incendiary, subversive and sly. While Douglas worked outside the confines of the art world as the Black Panther Party’s minister of culture, contributing to the Black Panther newspaper, Hendricks worked inside it without succumbing to the pressures and proscriptions against painting, particularly observational painting, and, to go one step further, portraiture.

Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Holland Cotter

As a staff art critic at the New York Times for more than ten years, Holland Cotter has been remarkable for his unwavering attention to the work of those less recognized—including women artists, artists of color, and artists from all five boroughs of New York—giving important visibility to work of all kinds. His subjects have ranged from Italian Renaissance painting to street-based communal work by artist collectives. Writing widely about non-Western art and culture as well, Cotter has introduced readers to a broad range of contemporary Chinese art and helped bring contemporary art from India to wider critical notice.

Frank Jewett Mather Award
Terry Smith

Terry Smith is that rare art and social historian able to write criticism at once alert to the forces that contextualize art and sensitive to the elements and qualities that inhere to the works of art themselves. His most recent book, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), contains a series of interrelated essays that unpack a vast range of topics and issues and take the reader on a theoretical tour through some of the world’s most influential art museums, laying bare their conflicted missions and studying the heightening distinction, and dispute, between modern and contemporary art.

Distinguished Feminist Award
Griselda Pollock

Griselda Pollock has earned a reputation not only as an influential scholar of modern and contemporary art and cultural studies, but also as a pioneer of feminist art, scholarship, and criticism. Her writings—including her groundbreaking 1980 monograph on Mary Cassatt and the pioneering volume Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), coauthored with Rozsika Parker—have had a major influence on feminist theory, feminist art history, and gender studies. Teaching at Leeds University since 1977, she was appointed chair in social and critical histories of art in 1990 and has served as director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory, and History.

Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
Dean Nimmer

Dean Nimmer, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts College of Art, has had a distinguished, dynamic, and astonishing career as an educator, empowering generations of artists through his enthusiasm and unbridled creativity. After thirty-four years of teaching painting, drawing, and printmaking in Boston, Nimmer thwarted all expectations for a retired professor by embarking on a second career as community arts educator, author, and provocateur. His recently published book, Art from Intuition: Overcoming Your Fears and Obstacles to Making Art (New York: Watson-Guptill, 2008), is a vehicle for him to share his wisdom with a new generation of artists and educators.

Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
Richard Shiff

The impact of Richard Shiff, who holds the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art and directs the Center for the Study of Modernism at the University of Texas at Austin, on the teaching of art history comes not only through his many scholarly contributions to the field, but also through his extraordinary forty years of active teaching and mentorship. Students and colleagues alike praise his long and influential career, describing how he teaches art history within many contexts, weaving together elements of formal analysis, connoisseurship, and theory within the larger web of human history and experience. Shiff’s talent for merging the sometimes-uncomfortable process of learning with playfulness and adventure instills a love of discovery and thought in all who have experienced his charisma, no matter their chosen life path.

Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Cammy Brothers

When one considers the vast bibliography on Michelangelo, it is a tribute to Cammy Brothers that her book is such a readable and masterful work of new scholarship and substantial insight into both the artist’s working methods and his modes of thinking. Remarkably erudite, Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) marshals compelling visual evidence along with literary, historical, and philosophical support on behalf of a fresh and persuasive argument.

See the shortlist for the Morey award.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award
Debra Diamond, Catherine Glynn, and Karni Singh Jasol, Gardens and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur

Gardens and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur (Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2008) documents an exhibition that dramatically debuted to wide audiences a body of nineteenth-century Jodhpur painting little known even to experts in the field. The authors Debra Diamond, Catherine Glynn, and Karni Singh Jasol, with their fellow contributors Jason Freitag and Rahul Jain, are to be commended for this publication, which makes a major contribution to the study of the art of Southeast Asia through the production of breathtaking color plates and a text that impressively grounds the work in the context of Jodhpur history and the Nath religious sect.

See the shortlist for the Barr award.

Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Michael Schreffler, “‘Their Cortés and Our Cortés’: Spanish Colonialism and Aztec Representation”

In his methodologically sophisticated and skillfully argued article, published in the December 2009 issue of The Art Bulletin, Michael Schreffler examines a key moment of cultural exchange and the misunderstandings to which it gave rise. Bravely departing from the consensus that Spanish conquistadors’ accounts of Aztec painting they saw at Antigua in 1519 constitute objective primary evidence about Aztec art, he offers instead a complex, nuanced, yet always clear explanation of what the accounts reveal about the colonizers and their subjective attitudes toward Aztec culture.

Art Journal Award
Joanna Grabski, “Urban Claims and Visual Sources in the Making of Dakar’s Art World City”

Joanna Grabski’s fascinating and ambitious essay, published in Art Journal in Spring 2009, is rich in first-hand information from her years of experience with the artists and institutions that make up this West African metropolis. Understanding the Senegalese capital as both site for innovative art practices, research, and international exchange, the author effectively demonstrates that in the hands of the city’s artists found objects have produced artworks and environments that meld their histories with languages of local form that reverberate with each other to piercing levels of impact.

CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
David Bomford

David Bomford, currently associate director for collections at the J. Paul Getty Museum, is celebrated for more than forty years of scholarship, practical application, and leadership in the field of paintings conservation. Beginning in 1968 as an assistant restorer at the National Gallery in London, he assumed the role of senior restorer by 1974, a position he held until 2005. In the course of his work, Bomford has advanced the study of art conservation to new levels by combining science, art history, and practical conservation knowledge in his extraordinary list of publications, and by spearheading the influential interdisciplinary study of technical art history. He wrote the single-most useful book for introducing both students and the public to the profession of paintings conservation, Conservation of Paintings (London: National Gallery Publications, 1997), which has become a standard reference guide for the discipline.

Contact

For more information on the 2010 Awards for Distinction, please contact Emmanuel Lemakis, CAA director of programs. Visit the Awards section of the CAA website to read about past awards recipients.