CAA News Today
Contribute to the Art Bulletin Publication Fund
posted by Christopher Howard — June 25, 2013
As you may already know, 2013 marks the one hundredth anniversary of The Art Bulletin, CAA’s first print publication and a preeminent scholarly journal for the history of art and visual studies. The Art Bulletin covers the full range of art history in essays by some of the world’s most acclaimed scholars of art. Essays from The Art Bulletin have been staples in art-history courses at colleges and universities for decades, and the journal continues to support exemplary scholarship in all areas of art history.
In honor of this important anniversary, CAA invites you to make a contribution to the Art Bulletin Publication Fund. Contributions of $50 or more made before July 1, 2013, will be acknowledged with a special thank you in the September issue, and contributions of $250 or more will be acknowledged in four consecutive issues and on the CAA website for twelve months.
Please join CAA in celebrating The Art Bulletin’s longstanding excellence as a leader in art-historical scholarship. We look forward to many years to come.
Call to Action by the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences
posted by CAA — June 20, 2013
At the end of a day-long presentation on June 21st, a group of 200 academic corporate and government leaders gathered in the Capitol Atrium to hear “The Heart of the Matter,” a new report created by members of the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences and supported by members of Congress about their personal and professional views on the value of the humanities. The three major goals of the report are to increase the literacy and knowledge of history for all Americans to help build better citizens; to invest in research and teaching; and to expand international cultural knowledge and awareness through the study of languages and international study.
The report addresses the hardest hit disciplines of language and literature as well as the drastically underfunded Fulbright Fellowship programs. Actor John Lithgow cited Senator Fulbright, a champion of the international education program that has benefitted thousands of students and enriched the country in incalculable ways, for a relatively small government investment. The report also calls for greater interactivity and communication between academics and the public and for open access to research. John W. Rowe, cochair of the Commission and retired Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Exelon Corporation, urged everyone in the humanities to get out in their communities, cities, and states to advocate the value of the humanities. David Brooks, New York Times reporter and PBS commentator, addressed the communication gap between academia and the public. He stated his belief that in the past the humanities’ importance and relevance in society suffered amid the turn toward political, gender, and race issues that severed dialogue between academia and the public, and turned attention away from the core value of the humanities.
The Commissioners, who are leaders in the corporate, academic, legal, governmental, and philanthropic communities, focused on the value, need for support, and societal applications of the humanities and social sciences. The two recurring themes in the presentations extolled the wisdom of America’s founders who, as Senator Lamar Alexander quoted from the writer David McCullough, were “marinated in the humanities.” And almost every presenter recalled the transformative experience of their own college humanities courses. Pauline Yu, President of the American Council of Learned Societies stated that the country flourishes when it follows the example of its founders. Senator Karl Eikenberry, former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan and retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General, cited the need for more informed historians to warn the government against overreaching internationally. He characterized the humanities and social sciences as a wellspring of soft power.
Richard Broadhead, President of Duke University and cochair of the Commission, believes that the major issue facing the country today is how to bring the greatest number of people to reach their fullest abilities. He sees the current discussions about education as narrowing the issues to pragmatic concerns; parents, for example, might say that they do not want their children to study the humanities instead of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM disciplines). Broadhead pointed out that the humanities and STEM disciplines are not at opposition but are interrelated and integrated. This concept was, in fact, graphically presented in a promotional film made by Ken Burns and George Lucas which used the image of a stem (read STEM) of a flower (read the humanities).
The report calls for support for the humanities from all sectors of the country, and the program provided many strong arguments to use, value, and nurture them. The hope is that this dialogue will continue on Capitol Hill to restore funding, and that it will provide greater exchange between the academy and the public for greater understanding of the importance of the humanities. Lithgow said he sensed a fresh breeze of bipartisanship that wafted through the Capitol yesterday with the focus on the humanities.
The report does not specifically address the visual arts, but it does address a greater focus on research and teaching in higher education. In the last four years there has been greater national emphasis on K-12 education and this report may assist in bringing the national dialogue around to higher education federal funding. The concept of a Culture Corps similar to AmeriCorps could serve to bring greater public access to the humanities and greater public-academic interchange. And, it could also provide the bridge between graduate school and the career path for students in the humanities. The report is a good catalyst for discussion and change. Let’s hope that the “fresh breeze” continues.
Report Warns against Declining Emphasis on Humanities and Social Sciences
posted by Christopher Howard — June 19, 2013
Democratic and Republican lawmakers in Washington, DC, turned a spotlight on the urgent need to refocus the country on maintaining national excellence in the humanities and social sciences—and how failure to do so will have consequences at home and abroad for the future of American education, security, and competitiveness.
Senators Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Mark Warner (D-VA) and Representatives Tom Petri (R-WI) and David Price (D-NC) came together on Capitol Hill this morning to accept a report, prepared at their request, by the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Today’s release of the report, titled The Heart of the Matter, launches a national conversation about the importance of the humanities and social sciences to America’s future. Presented by the commission’s cochairs—Richard H. Brodhead, president of Duke University, and John Rowe, retired chairman and chief executive officer of Exelon Corporation—the report looks at the vital role of the humanities and social sciences in preparing and sustaining Americans for the responsibility of productive citizenship in the United States and the world.
The Heart of the Matter focuses on five areas of concern: K–12 education; two- and four-year colleges; research; cultural institutions and lifelong learning; and international security and competitiveness. It also makes recommendations to achieve three goals:
1. Educate Americans in the knowledge, skills, and understanding needed to thrive in a twenty-first-century democracy:
- Invest in the preparation of citizens with a thorough grounding in history, civics, and social studies
- Increase access to online resources, including teaching materials
2. Foster an innovative, competitive, and strong society:
- To ensure the vibrancy of humanities and social-science programs at all levels, philanthropists, states, and the federal government should significantly increase funding designated for these purposes
- Create a Humanities Master Teacher Corps to complement the STEM Master Teacher Corps recently proposed by the White House
3. Equip the nation for leadership in an interconnected world:
- Develop a “Culture Corps” that would match interested adults (retirees, veterans, artists, library and museum personnel) with schools, community centers, and other organizations to transmit humanistic and social-scientific expertise from one generation to the next
- Expand education in international affairs and transnational studies
“The American character is defined not by ethnicity—Americans come from many countries, races, religions, and cultures—but by a common set of ideals and principles that unite us as a country,” said Senator Alexander. “Those ideals and principles have always been shared and learned through the study of history, philosophy, and literature, but today their study is at risk. This report is a first step to highlighting the importance of, and ensuring a future for, our nation’s humanities education—and our unique American character as well.”
Senator Warner added, “I commend all the members of the commission for their hard work on The Heart of the Matter. Having a strong knowledge of civics, comprehensive reading and writing skills, and an appreciation of history are important for a well-rounded member of the twenty-first-century world. We must use this report as a foundation to continue to engage with the public on how best to keep our humanities and social sciences robust.”
Congressman Petri noted, “Knowledge and promotion of the humanities and social sciences are absolutely important so that citizens have a firm understanding of our nation’s unique history, culture, and heritage. I hope the recommendations in this report will be seriously considered to improve the teaching and understanding of the humanities and social sciences.”
“The humanities and social sciences help us understand where we’ve come from and who we are as a people, and that understanding points us toward the endeavors we must undertake to help every person reach their full potential,” said Representative Price. “Studies in these areas are critically important to a well-rounded education and the future of our country. This report comes at a crucial moment, and I hope it will help raise the profile of the humanities, provide a better understanding of their value, and spur a national conversation about how the humanities and social sciences keep our nation strong and competitive.”
“Today’s leaders in business, government, the military, and diplomacy must be able to analyze, interpret, communicate, and understand other cultures,” said Brodhead, cochair of the commission. “This report will remind Americans that a broad-based and balanced education, integrating the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences, is the best way to equip our citizens to approach the complex problems of our rapidly changing world.”
“The humanities and social sciences comprise many of the things that give life meaning,” said commission cochair Rowe, “both at the highest level and in our day-to-day activities. They need more public and private support and compared to other things a little money goes a long way.”
A short companion film, The Heart of the Matter, from the Emmy Award–winning Ewers Brothers Productions was also released today. Appearing in the film are the producer, screenwriter, and director George Lucas, the actor John Lithgow, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a steadfast supporter of the humanities and arts in this country, provided primary funding for the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences. The Carnegie Corporation of New York also provided important funding.
The views expressed in the report are those of the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences and not necessarily those of the officers and fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
June 2013 Issue of The Art Bulletin
posted by Christopher Howard — June 11, 2013
The June 2013 Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, is the second issue of the journal’s centennial year. In “Regarding Art and Art History,” Cecelia F. Klein ponders Precolumbian art and the canon. “Notes from the Field” offers short essays on the subject of mimesis by Dexter Dalwood, Suzanne Preston Blier, Daniela Bohde, Helen C. Evans, Sarah E. Fraser, Thomas Habinek, Tom Huhn, Jeanette Kohl, Niklaus Largier, Peter Mack, and Alex Potts. The June interviewee is Timon Screech, who discusses fantasies and foreign contact in the art history of Japan with Yukio Lippit.
In their essay “An Émigré Art Historian and America: H. W. Janson,” Elizabeth Sears and Charlotte Schoell-Glass explore institutional art history in the mid-twentieth century through the lens of the American career of the German-born author of the classic survey text, History of Art. Emine Fetvaci’s “From Print to Trace” considers why the Ottoman creators of a 1579 book of imperial portraits may have consulted European models, raising questions about the understanding of the portrait as a visual document and the concepts that underpinned it.
Analyzing the intricate iconography of an illustrated thesis print on the system of natural philosophy by the seventeenth-century Franciscan professor Martin Meurisse, Susanna Berger demonstrates the complex uses of imagery in philosophy education in early modern France. Viccy Coltman studies a group of portraits of the Frasers of Reeling, a Scottish Highland family, by the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Scottish artist Henry Raeburn to reveal an understanding of portrait likeness as present and prescient in the global British Empire. Finally, in “The Cultural Politics of the Brushstroke” Martin Powers examines the debates between and among European, American, and Chinese intellectuals over some four centuries in order to deconstruct the seductive rhetoric of the brushstroke as employed in both “East” and “West.”
In the Reviews section, Charles Palermo considers three books on fin-de-siècle culture in Europe: Dario Gamboni’s The Brush and the Pen: Odilon Redon and Literature, Linda Goddard’s Aesthetic Rivalries: Word and Image in France, 1880–1926, and Anna Sigrídur Arnar’s The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, the Artist’s Book, and the Transformation of Print Culture. Next, Bridget Alsdorf reviews Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner’s edited volume, The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists, and Bolaji Campbell assesses David T. Doris’s Vigilant Things: On Thieves, Yoruba Anti-Aesthetics, and the Fates of Ordinary Objects in Nigeria.
CAA sends The Art Bulletin to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the journal as a benefit of their membership. The next issue of the quarterly publication, to appear in September 2013, will feature essays on, among other topics, Albrecht Dürer, Horace Walpole, Tanaka Atsuko, and public fountains in nineteenth-century Havana.
Inaugural Recipients of the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award
posted by Christopher Howard — June 05, 2013
CAA is pleased to announce the five inaugural recipients of the new Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award. Thanks to a one-year grant of $60,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, CAA will provide funds to emerging authors who are publishing monographs on the history of art and related subjects. The purpose of the subventions is to reduce the financial burden that authors carry when acquiring images for publication, including licensing and reproduction fees for both print and online publications.
The winning books for spring 2013 are:
- Claudia Brittenham, The Cacaxtla Paintings: How Art Shaped the Identity of an Ancient Central Mexican City, University of Texas Press
- Chelsea Foxwell, In Search of Images: Kano Hogai and the Making of Modern Japanese-Style Painting, University of Chicago Press
- Jesse Locker, “The Hands of Aurora”: Artemisia Gentileschi and Her Contemporaries, Yale University Press
- Megan R. Luke, Kurt Schwitters: Space, Image, Exile, University of Chicago Press
- Karl Whittington, Body-Worlds: Opicinus de Canistris and the Medieval Cartographic Imagination, Press of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies
Successful applicants are emerging scholars who are under contract with a publisher for a manuscript on art history or visual studies. For full details on the grant, please review the Application Guidelines and the Application Process, Schedule, and Checklist. Fall deadline: September 15, 2013.
Spring 2013 Meiss Winners
posted by Christopher Howard — May 28, 2013
This spring, CAA awarded grants to the publishers of six books in art history and visual culture through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to the generous bequest of the late Prof. Millard Meiss, CAA gives these grants twice a year to support the publication of scholarly books in art history and related fields.
The grantees for spring 2013 are:
- Claudia Brown, Great Qing: Painting in China, 1644–1911, University of Washington Press
- James M. Cordova, The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico: Crowned-Nun Portraits and Reform in the Convents, University of Texas Press
- Elina Gertsman, Fragments, Ruptures, Imprints, Play: The Shrine Madonna in the Late Middle Ages, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Jeanette F. Peterson, Visualizing Guadalupe: From the Black Madonna to the Queen of the Americas, University of Texas Press
- Victoria L. Rovine, African Fashion, Global Style, Indiana University Press
- Karl Whittington, Body-Worlds: Opicinus de Canistris and the Medieval Cartographic Imagination, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies
Books eligible for Meiss grants must already be under contract with a publisher and on a subject in the visual arts or art history. Authors must be current CAA members. Please review the application guidelines for more information. Deadline for fall applications: September 15, 2013.
Rethinking Humanities Graduate Education with Digital Humanities Centers
posted by Linda Downs — April 08, 2013
Flying over the Grand Canyon after a meeting at the University of Washington with digital humanities faculty and marveling at the fractal-like patterns that moving water has sculpted out of solid rock, made me think of the slow but steady impact digital humanities centers and institutes are having on academic structure of research and evaluation. Project by project new research tools, interdisciplinary and collaborative research and new approaches to problems at these centers are altering the once rock-solid academic structures of research, peer review and evaluation.
The Scholarly Communications Institute (SCI) http://uvasci.org/ called a meeting on March 11 and 12 in partnership with the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) http://chcinetwork.org/ and centerNet http://digitalhumanities.org/centernet/ an international organization of digital humanities centers with a focus on the topic of “Rethinking Humanities Graduate Education.” The meeting focused on developing pilot projects that would leverage the specific strengths of CHCI and center Net. Possible consortial courses and cross-institutional cohorts of scholars were two of the many ideas presented. Individuals from 15 universities and the American Association of Museum Directors, the New York Council for the Humanities and College Art Association. (For a summary of the meetings and a participants list see: http://uvasci.org/)
Digital humanities centers, institutes and computing centers have been an important presence at universities since the 1990’s first as resources to provide technical assistance to students and faculty and now as strong academic centers of intellectual activity unto themselves offering courses, research products, developing frameworks and digital tools, fellowships, and public programs. Each center has a different disciplinary and technological focus depending on their original mission and purpose. Many of the centers grew out of language, literature and history disciplines. Now the commonality is in method and approach rather than specific disciplinary content or theory. Visual arts projects are being developed in DH centers by graduate students and faculty who have been working on cross-disciplinary research projects.
Computing centers such as the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Center offer digital tools, one-on-one assistance in developing a project and introductory courses on organizing collaborative digitalinitiatives. The University of Virginia’s Scholar’s Lab http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/scholarslab/ offers students technical assistance on digital research to advanced students and faculty, graduate fellowships, workshops, and the opportunity to work on collaborative digital projects. The programs at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University are targeted to teachers and faculty of history with a huge number of online resources as well as sponsoring dozens of digital history projects as well as free tools such as Zotero, a research tool to help gather, organize and analyze data and images. The concept for THAT Camp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) held at the College Art Association Annual Conference in New York which focused on digital tools, data bases and collaborative projects in art history this past February, originated with Columbia University Libraries and Smarthistory at Khan Academy. Plans are to offer THAT Camps at the CAA Annual Conference again in Chicago next February 2014. The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture grew out of film and media studies. Their multimedia research and publishing platform, Scalar has been utilized for the anniversary projects of CAA’s The Art Bulletin (“Publishing The Art Bulletin: http://scalar.usc.edu/anvc/the-art-bulletin/index developed by Thelma Thomas at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University and of caa.reviews by Sheryl Reiss at the University of Southern California.
Other well established digital humanities centers offer digital resources, publications, programs and tools. The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities http://mith.umd.edu/, as their website indicates, “ is jointly supported by the University of Maryland College of Arts and Humanities and the University of Maryland Libraries, MITH engages in collaborative, interdisciplinary work at the intersection of technology and humanistic inquiry. MITH specializes in text and image analytics for cultural heritage collections, data curation, digital preservation, linked data applications, and data publishing.” (While I was attending the SCI Anne Collins Goodyear, CAA President was presenting at MITH on her digital curatorial work at the National Portrait Gallery.)
The wide-ranging discussions touched upon collaborating on introductory courses for first year graduate students; changing standards to assist in evaluating collaborative digital projects and dissertations and promotion and tenure; how DH can contribute to lowering the time-to-degree; interdisciplinary collaboration; developing shared meaning between humanities researchers and technologists unfamiliar with the humanities; teaching basic skills required for digital research and analysis in either keystone or capstone courses; and assessing the role that DH centers provide to graduate students who are considering non-faculty career alternatives. Ideas came forward on how the academy can introduce non-faculty career options to graduate students from shadowing professionals to internships at museum and non-profit public service institutions where they can apply the knowledge gained in graduate school.
There was general agreement on offering keystone courses on basic programming, how to approach a collaborative digital research project, and database organization and analysis. The University of Victoria Computing Center offers introductory courses in utilizing digital tools to entry level graduate students and to students who sign up for summer courses, or 5 day courses at learned society conferences.
The new standards mentioned at the meeting for evaluation of digital scholarship included the Modern Language Association’s Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media http://www.mla.org/guidelines_evaluation_digital and the digital dissertation guidelines at George Mason University http://historyarthistory.gmu.edu/graduate/rules-guidelines that were established in 2000. Tara McPherson, Associate Professor, School of Cinematic Arts at USC indicated that her graduate students are submitting digital dissertations but still feel compelled to provide approximately 120 pages of written and printed documentation on the process of building the digital tools that they used for research and analysis to the dissertation review committees. Tara also emphasized that her students, enter her program highly skilled in the use of digital technology and are able to devote greater effort in content study.
According to the Humanities Indicators statistics on time-to-degree for tertiary degrees in the humanities in the US is 10.93 years. The United States is ranked fifth internationally (behind Germany at 17 years, Japan, Hungary and Korea) http://www.humanitiesindicators.org/content/hrcoIIB.aspx#topII14 . Todd Presner, Professor of Germanic Languages, Comparative Literature, and Jewish Studies and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies and Chair of the Digital Humanities Program at UCLA floated a concept which became shortened throughout the day and a half meeting as “the twenty-year dissertation.” The idea is not to lengthen the time-to-degree average but to develop one collaborative digital project that several graduate students would work on in part. Each student could develop facets of a major problem that could encompass several disciplines and they could also contribute to enhancing the digital tools that could expand research, analysis and construction of databases.
The time-to-degree issue also raised the question of what is expected of DH graduate students. Are faculty expecting new knowledge or is the expectation that graduate students master problem solving, project organization and leadership qualities to prepare them for faculty positions or for non-academic positions where they can apply their academic knowledge on a daily basis? The reality check was the question as to how many current dissertations actually produce new knowledge.
Kevin Franklin, Executive Director, Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has developed cross-disciplinary projects where shared meaning is developed between programmers and framework and platform builders who are coming from STEM and humanities disciplines. I-CHASS is also reaching out to governmental policy makers in the Americas to provide collaborative projects that address major global challenges related to the environment, educations and cultural preservation where STEM and humanities researchers are collaborating with international government entities. Two projects that involve image recognition will be presented at future CAA Annual Conferences.
CAA will be seeking opportunities to bring DH courses, workshops and presentations of new digital tools and visual arts research projects to future annual conferences. We hope to find support for more open access publications such as The Art Bulletin and caa.reviews digital projects on the Scalar open access publishing platform. In the meantime, for those who are unfamiliar with the offerings of DH centers, I would recommend visiting the DH centers at your colleges and universities or reading up on DH in the latest issue of Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation (29:1-2) and Debates in the Digital Humanities, Ed. Matthew Gold, University of Minnesota Press, 2012 (and check out the review of this book by Paul Jaskot also in the latest issue of Visual Resources).
March 2013 Issue of The Art Bulletin Published
posted by Christopher Howard — April 04, 2013
The March 2013 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, launches the celebration of its centennial year. Gracing the cover is a photograph by the artist Martha Rosler that depicts the installation of her traveling library at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris in 2007. Karen Lang, the journal’s editor-in-chief, writes of this image: “These days … it remains unclear whether a ‘library user’ would hunker down with a book or nestle in for a session on a laptop…. Rosler invites us to consider how we interact with books. Her artwork makes us conscious of this activity and of the status of the book itself.”
In a brief essay, Craig Clunas ponders the conditions of seeing and description in “Regarding Art and Art History.” This issue’s “Notes from the Field” features short essays on the topic of materiality by Rosler, Caroline Walker Bynum, Natasha Eaton, Michael Ann Holly, Amelia Jones, Michael Kelly, Robin Kelsey, Alisa LaGamma, Monika Wagner, Oliver Watson, and Tristan Weddigen. The March interview brings Svetlana Alpers, professor emerita of history of art at the University of California, Berkeley, into conversation with her fellow scholar Stephen Melville.
In the opening essay, “Meaningful Spectacles: Gothic Ivories Staging the Divine,” Sarah M. Guérin uncovers the strategic use of microarchitectural frames in sacred ivory carvings of thirteenth-century Western Europe. Next, in the evocatively titled “Ingres’s Shadows,” Sarah Betzer demonstrates how the nineteenth-century French artist’s depictions of ancient sculpture for the publication Museé français relate to philosophical considerations of sensory experience, revealing the distinctly modern terms of its allure for the artist.
Paul Smith examines the perspectival distortions in Paul Cézanne’s paintings and the political implications of his repudiation of perspective, that is, the rejection of spectacle as the normative form of visual experience in modern life. Yi Gu’s essay “What’s in a Name?” studies the appellations of photography that circulated in China between 1840 and 1911 to trace the emergence of a new understanding of visual truth in Chinese art. Finally, Leora Maltz-Leca explores relations between William Kentridge’s ambulatory animation process and local imagery of striding figures as allegories of political regime change in South Africa.
The books under review in this issue represent a broad cross-section of art-historical scholarship. Robert H. Sharf examines Secrets of the Sacred: Empowering Buddhist Images in Clear, in Code, and in Cache, a collection of lectures delivered by the late scholar Helmut Brinker at the Spencer Museum of Art. An-Yi Pan assesses The Night Banquet: A Chinese Scroll through Time by De-nin D. Lee, the first book-length study on a well-known handscroll, and Leo G. Mazow evaluates Elizabeth Hutchinson’s The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturalism in American Art, 1890–1915. John Ott’s review considers three recent books on race and art: Kirsten Pai Buick’s Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject; Renée Ater’s Remaking Race and History: The Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller; and Jacqueline Francis’s Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America.
CAA sends The Art Bulletin to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the journal as a benefit of their membership. The next issue of the quarterly publication, to appear in June 2013, will feature essays on, among other topics, institutional art history in the mid-twentieth century through the lens of H. W. Janson’s classic survey text History of Art.
Recent Art Journal Features Lygia Pape Cover
posted by Christopher Howard — March 11, 2013
The most recent issue of Art Journal features an unusual wraparound cover. The front-and-back image is an interior spread from The Book of Creation Re-Created, a 1983 artist’s book by the influential Brazilian artist Lygia Pape (1927–2004). The spread, from an essay on Pape by Adele Nelson, is essentially turned inside out for the cover.
The cover encloses a remarkably diverse issue, which also features essays by Chris Balaschak on the photographer Garry Winogrand, by Pamela N. Corey on the the Vietnamese American artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen, by Bill Anthes on Edgar Heap of Birds, by Melissa Sue Ragain on early ecological art, and by Adward A. Vazquez on the work of Fred Sandback. Reviews of four important books in the arts, including one on Agnes Martin, appear as well. The Art Journal website features free selected content from the issue.
“Publishing The Art Bulletin” Launches
posted by Christopher Howard — February 13, 2013
This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of the first issue of The Art Bulletin, CAA’s flagship journal of art-historical scholarship. “Publishing The Art Bulletin: Past, Present, and Future,” an ambitious online project, has just launched to celebrate the occasion. The project employs a deep exploration of the journal’s hundred-year archive to stimulate thinking about the forms that a future Art Bulletin might take.
Three outstanding essays—by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1939), Mehmet Aga-Oglu (1945), and Suzanne Preston Blier (1993)—stand at the heart of the project, which also features an array of features possible only in a digital format. Thelma K. Thomas, an associate professor in the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and chair of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board, created the website in collaboration with the Scalar project of the Alliance for the Networking of Visual Culture and the University of Southern California, which helped fund the project.