CAA News Today
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.
Download the Conference Abstracts and Directory of Attendees
posted by Christopher Howard — February 05, 2013
Registrants for the 2013 Annual Conference in New York can now download the Abstracts and Directory of Attendees. These publications, available as PDFs, summarize the contents of hundreds of papers and talks that will be presented in program sessions and list the names and contact information for those attendees who registered by both the early and advance deadlines.
Reading the abstracts in advance can help you plan your daily schedule at the conference. Program sessions are alphabetized by the chair’s last name and appear in the contents pages (4–10). An index in the back of the publication names all the speakers. Alternatively, use your Adobe Reader to conduct a keyword search for terms relevant to your interests. Similarly, the Directory of Attendees helps with networking during and communication after the conference.
To download the two publications, registrants can log into their CAA account, click the “Conference Registrant Information” image, and then click the Abstracts and/or Directory of Attendees icon to download a PDF. The Abstracts and Directory of Attendees are part of the registration package; there is no added cost to paid or complimentary registrants for access to these publications.
Conference attendees who purchase single-time slot tickets, or those who want the Abstracts but are not coming to New York, may attain the document for a charge: $30 for CAA members and $35 for nonmembers. The Abstracts and Directory of Attendees will remain on the CAA website for download or sale through July 31, 2013.
Beginning with the 2010 conference in Chicago, CAA offers its Abstracts exclusively as a PDF download. Past issues of the printed publication from 1999 to 2009 are also available. The cost per copy is $30 for CAA members and $35 for nonmembers. For more information and to order, please contact Roberta Lawson, CAA office coordinator.
caa.reviews Seeks Editor-in-Chief
posted by Betty Leigh Hutcheson — January 28, 2013
The caa.reviews Editorial Board invites nominations and self-nominations for the position of editor-in-chief for a three-year term, July 1, 2014–June 30, 2017. This term is preceded by one year of service on the editorial board as editor designate, July 1, 2013–June 30, 2014, and followed immediately by one year of service as past editor. Candidates should have published substantially in the field and may be academic, museum-based, or independent scholars; institutional affiliation is not required. An online journal, caa.reviews is devoted to the peer review of new books, museum exhibitions, and projects relevant to the fields of art history, visual studies, and the arts.
Working with the editorial board, the editor-in-chief is responsible for the content and character of the journal. He or she supervises the journal’s Council of Field Editors, assisting them to identify and solicit reviewers, articles, and other content for the journal; develops projects; and makes final decisions regarding content.
The editor-in-chief attends the caa.reviews Editorial Board’s three meetings each year—held twice in New York in the spring and fall and once at the Annual Conference in February—and submits an annual report to CAA’s Board of Directors. CAA reimburses the editor-in-chief for travel and lodging expenses for the two New York meetings in accordance with its travel policy, but he or she pays these expenses to attend the conference. The editor-in-chief also works closely with the CAA staff in New York and receives an annual honorarium of $4,000.
Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please send a statement describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, at least one letter of recommendation, and your contact information to: Codirectors of Publications, caa.reviews Editor-in-Chief Search, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY, 10004; or email the documents to Betty Leigh Hutcheson, CAA codirector of publications. Deadline: April 15, 2013; finalists will be interviewed in early May.
Art Journal Editorial Board Seeks One Member
posted by Alyssa Pavley — January 28, 2013
CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for one individual to serve on the Art Journal Editorial Board for a four-year term: July 1, 2013–June 30, 2017. Candidates may be artists, art historians, critics, curators, educators, or other professionals in the visual arts; institutional affiliation is not required. Art Journal, published quarterly by CAA, is devoted to twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and visual culture.
The editorial board advises the Art Journal editor-in-chief and assists him or her to seek authors, articles, artist’s projects, and other content for the journal; guides its editorial program and may propose new initiatives for it; performs peer review and recommends peer reviewers; and may support fundraising efforts on the journal’s behalf. Members also assist the editor-in-chief to keep abreast of trends and issues in the field by attending and reporting on sessions at the CAA Annual Conference and other academic conferences, symposia, and events in their fields.
The Art Journal Editorial Board meets three times a year: twice in New York in the spring and fall and once at the CAA Annual Conference in February. CAA reimburses members for travel and lodging expenses for the two New York meetings in accordance with its travel policy, but members pay these expenses to attend the conference. Members of all editorial boards volunteer their services to CAA without compensation.
Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Members may not publish their own work in the journal during the term of service. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please send a statement describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and your contact information to: Chair, Art Journal Editorial Board, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004; or email the documents to Alyssa Pavley, CAA editorial assistant. Deadline: April 15, 2013.
Art Bulletin Editorial Board Seeks Three Members
posted by Alyssa Pavley — January 28, 2013
CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for three individuals to serve on the Art Bulletin Editorial Board for a four-year term, July 1, 2013–June 30, 2017. The ideal candidate has published substantially in the field and may be an academic, museum-based, or independent scholar; institutional affiliation is not required. The Art Bulletin features leading scholarship in the English language in all aspects of art history as practiced in the academy, museums, and other institutions.
The editorial board advises the Art Bulletin editor-in-chief and assists him or her to seek authors, articles, and other content for the journal; guides its editorial program and may propose new initiatives for it; performs peer review and recommends peer reviewers; and may support fundraising efforts on the journal’s behalf. Members also assist the editor-in-chief to keep abreast of trends and issues in the field by attending and reporting on sessions at the CAA Annual Conference and other academic conferences, symposia, and events in their fields.
The Art Bulletin Editorial Board meets three times a year: twice in New York in the spring and fall and once at the CAA Annual Conference in February. CAA reimburses members for travel and lodging expenses for the two New York meetings in accordance with its travel policy, but members pay these expenses to attend the conference. Members of all editorial boards volunteer their services to CAA without compensation.
Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Members may not publish their own work in the journal during the term of service. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please send a statement describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and your contact information to: Chair, Art Bulletin Editorial Board, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004; or email the documents to Alyssa Pavley, CAA editorial assistant. Deadline: April 15, 2013.
caa.reviews Editorial Board Seeks One Member
posted by Alyssa Pavley — January 28, 2013
CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for one individual to serve on the caa.reviews Editorial Board for a four-year term, July 1, 2013–June 30, 2017. Candidates may be artists, art historians, critics, curators, educators, or other professionals in the visual arts with stature in the field and experience in writing or editing book and/or exhibition reviews; institutional affiliation is not required. The journal also seeks candidates with a strong record of scholarship and at least one published book or the equivalent who are committed to the imaginative development of caa.reviews. An online journal, caa.reviews is devoted to the peer review of new books, museum exhibitions, and projects relevant to art history, visual studies, and the arts.
The editorial board advises the editor-in-chief of and field editors for caa.reviews and helps them to identify books and exhibitions for review and to solicit reviewers, articles, and other content for the journal; guides its editorial program and may propose new initiatives for it; and may support fundraising efforts on the journal’s behalf. Members also assist the editor-in-chief to keep abreast of trends and issues in the field by attending and reporting on sessions at the CAA Annual Conference and other academic conferences, symposia, and events in their fields.
The caa.reviews Editorial Board meets three times a year: twice in New York in the spring and fall and once at the CAA Annual Conference in February. CAA reimburses members for travel and lodging expenses for the two New York meetings in accordance with its travel policy, but members pay these expenses to attend the conference. Members of all editorial boards volunteer their services to CAA without compensation.
Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please send a statement describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and your contact information to: caa.reviews Editorial Board, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004; or email the documents to Alyssa Pavley, CAA editorial assistant. Deadline: April 15, 2013.
