CAA News Today
September Issue of The Art Bulletin Features Essays on Michelangelo and John Sloan
posted by Christopher Howard — August 17, 2011
The September 2011 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, features an essay on Michelangelo’s drawings, in particular his cartoon for The Battle of Cascina (1504), and an article on urban scenes by the twentieth-century American painter John Sloan. Two additional contributions explore women and portraiture in postrevolutionary France and Roman mosaic labyrinths in North Africa. Book reviews on the art of Byzantium and imperial China, Mamluk culture, and the impact of modernist primitivism round out the issue.
In “Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Subject of Art,” Joost Keizer uncovers Michelangelo’s zeal for disegno, evasion of iconography, and emphasis on educational models for pupils—all of which contribute to art history via visual commentary on historical moments. In his study, Michael Lobel examines the significant body of work generated by John Sloan in 1907 that experiments with spatial orientation and pigment while challenging the artist’s identity as a painter, illuminated by meditations on New York as a shifting metropolis and his background in illustration.
Amy Freund’s cover essay for The Art Bulletin elucidates the importance of portraiture in France after 1789 in which female portraits, like that of Thérésia Cabarrus by Jean-Louis Laneuville in 1796, incorporated women into the French Revolution’s political presence and momentum toward engaged citizenship in the new republic. In “Roman Labyrinth Mosaics and the Experience of Motion,” Rebecca Molholt explores the effects of a transitory viewing experience within Roman baths in North Africa and the intermingling of architecture, myth, and the spectator.
The Reviews section has a particular emphasis on ancient cultures, starting with Jessica Rawson’s discussion of ancient commercial artists in China and Anthony J. Barbieri-Low’s book, Artisans in Early Imperial China. Charles Barber highlights the complexities of the Byzantine icon through the lens of innovations in fifteenth-century Cretan painting, as well as the sensory experience in Byzantium as described by Clemena Antonova in Space, Time, and Presence in the Icon and Bissera V. Pentcheva’s The Sensual Icon. Several books on the history of the Mamluk period, where military slaves became soldiers and eventually rulers of an empire across Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, and greater Syria, are reviewed by Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, including Cairo of the Mamluks by Doris Behrens-Abouseif. The final review is an analysis of the tension between African art and Western modernism by Elizabeth Harney, in which she sites Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens by Wendy A. Grossman and Picasso’s Collection of African and Oceanic Art by Peter Stepan as the newest sources to investigate the legacy of primitivism.
Please see the full table of contents for September to learn more. 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 Art Bulletin, to be published in December 2011, will feature essays on the portraiture of nuns in colonial Mexico, on the sociological context of Hokusai’s famous print Under the Wave off Kanagawa, and on Federico Zuccari’s painting The Encounter of Christ and Veronica on the Way to Calvary, among other articles and reviews.
Exhibitor and Advertiser Prospectus for the 2012 Annual Conference
posted by CAA — August 11, 2011
The Exhibitor and Advertiser Prospectus for the 2012 Annual Conference in Los Angeles, California, is now available for download. Featuring essential details for participation in the Book and Trade Fair, the booklet also contains options for sponsorship opportunities and advertisements in conference publications and on the conference website.
The Exhibitor and Advertiser Prospectus will help you reach a core audience of artists, art historians, educators, students, and administrators, who will converge in Los Angeles for CAA’s 100th Annual Conference and Centennial Celebration, taking place February 22–25, 2012. With three days of exhibit time, the Book and Trade Fair will be centrally located in the Los Angeles Convention Center, where most programs sessions and special events take place. CAA offers several options for booths and tables that can help you to connect in person with conference attendees.
In addition, sponsorship packages will allow you to maintain a high profile throughout the conference. Companies, organizations, and publishers may choose one of three packages, sponsor specific areas and events such as Convocation, ARTspace, and the Distinguished Scholar Session, or work with CAA staff to design a custom visibility package. Advertising possibilities include the Conference Program, distributed to over five thousand registrants, and the conference website, seen by thousands more.
The priority deadline for Book and Trade Fair applications is Friday, October 28, 2011; the final deadline for all applications and full payments, and for sponsorships and advertisements in the Conference Program, is Friday, December 9, 2011.
Questions about the 2012 Book and Trade Fair? Please contact Paul Skiff, CAA assistant director for Annual Conference, at 212-392-4412. For sponsorship and advertising queries, speak to Helen Bayer, CAA marketing and communications associate, at 212-392-4426.
New Appointments to CAA’s Journals
posted by Christopher Howard — July 05, 2011
Earlier this spring, the president of the CAA Board of Directors, Barbara Nesin, has confirmed new appointments to the editorial boards of CAA’s three scholarly journals, in consultation with then–vice president for publications, Anne Collins Goodyear. The appointments took effect on July 1, 2011.
Art Journal
Art Journal has announced its next editor-in-chief: Lane Relyea, an art critic and associate professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Since the 1990s Relyea has contributed to Artforum, Parkett, Frieze, and Afterall, among other publications. His book D.I.Y. Culture Industry: Signifying Practices, Social Networks, and Other Instrumentalizations of Everyday Art is forthcoming from MIT Press. Relyea will succeed Katy Siegel of Hunter College, City University of New York, and begin his three-year term on July 1, 2012, with the preceding year as editor designate.
Joining the Art Journal Editorial Board for four-year terms are Doryun Chong, associate curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Saloni Mathur, associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Chong is a contributing editor at Art Asia Pacific and worked as associate curator of visual arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, from 2003 to 2009. His recent exhibitions include Bruce Nauman: Days (2010) and Haegue Yang: Integrity of the Insider (2009–10). Mathur, a specialist in the art of South Asia, wrote India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Her recently compiled volume, The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora, is forthcoming from Yale University Press.
The Art Bulletin
Rachael DeLue, assistant professor at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, has been named the next reviews editor of The Art Bulletin, succeeding Michael Cole of Columbia University in New York. A specialist in American art, DeLue focuses on visual language in culture as it pertains to race, stereotypes, and beauty, and her most recent publication, Landscape Theory (New York: Routledge, 2008), coedited with James Elkins, considers its titular subject from an interdisciplinary perspective. DeLue will serve one year as reviews editor designate before beginning her three-year term on July 1, 2012.
In addition, two CAA members have joined the the Art Bulletin Editorial Board for four-year terms: Dana Leibsohn, Priscilla Paine Van der Poel Professor of Art at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts; and Steven Ostrow, professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and chair of its Department of Art History. Leibsohn concentrates on visual culture in colonial Latin America, highlighting the relevance of maps and modes of literacy in particular. A recent grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities is supporting her collaborative multimedia project, “Vistas: Colonial Latin American Visual Culture 1520–1820.” Ostrow has extensive knowledge of early Italian visual culture and has published on a variety of subjects, including sculpture and illuminated manuscripts, with an emphasis on patronage, iconography, and artistic practice. Most recently he contributed an essay to Rome Italy Renaissance: Essays in Art History Honoring Irving Lavin on His Sixtieth Birthday (New York: Italica, 2009).
The Art Bulletin Editorial Board also has a new chair, appointed from within its ranks: Thelma Thomas, associate professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, will serve for two years. Thomas specializes in Byzantine and Eastern Christian art and architecture, leading seminars such as “Material Culture in Late Antiquity: Textiles,” and “Byzantine Art and Architecture: 9th–15th Century.”
caa.reviews
The caa.reviews Editorial Board welcomes a new member, Tomoko Sakomura, assistant professor at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, who will serve for four years. Currently the journal’s field editor for books on Japanese art, she is working on a book project called Poetry as Image: The Visual Culture of Waka Poetry in Late Medieval Japan.
Five new field editors for books and exhibitions have recently been chosen by the editorial board to serve three-year terms. Joseph Alchermes of Connecticut College in New London will commission reviews of exhibitions of pre-1800 art in New York and the Northeast, and Kirsten Swenson of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is field editor for exhibitions in the Southwest. Aida Wong of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, will assign reviews of books on Chinese and Korean art; Pamela Jones of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, will do the same for books on early modern and southern European art; and Juliet Bellow of American University in Washington, DC, will cover books on nineteenth-century art.
Sheryl Reiss, lecturer at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, began her three-year term as editor-in-chief of caa.reviews on July 1, 2011, succeeding Lucy Oakley, head of education and programs at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University. CAA will publish an interview with Reiss, who served on the journal’s editorial board from 2001 to 2005, later this summer.
June Issue of The Art Bulletin Publishes Essays on Bruegel, Guston, Degas, and Fragonard
posted by Christopher Howard — June 20, 2011
Essays in the June 2011 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, examine a range of topics that include works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Philip Guston, Edgar Degas, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. A fifth essay on aesthetics and a collection of important book reviews round out the issue, which has been mailed to all individual CAA members who elect to receive the journal, and to all institutional members. The issue is dedicated to the memory of the late Anne L. Schroder, an expert on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art; one of her final essays appears in it.
Leading off the issue is Margaret A. Sullivan’s article that uncovers the beginnings of genre in Bruegel’s debt to stoicism, ancient satire, and the art of Pieter Aertsen. Next, Schroder explores Fragonard’s later career through two revived projects, his illustrations for La Fontaine’s Contes et nouvelles (1788–1809) and his unfinished painting series, the Progress of Love. For “Hegel’s Contested Legacy,” Jason Gaiger reexamines the Hegelian inheritance in art history in light of newly published transcripts of the lectures on aesthetics and, in doing so, raises broader questions about the concourse between art history and philosophy.
Looking at French art in the nineteenth century, André Dombrowski reveals layered political and historical significations embedded in Degas’s Place de la Concorde (ca. 1875), an urban genre portrait of Viscount Lepic and his daughters. For his contribution, Robert Slifkin finds that Guston’s unsettling return to figuration in the 1960s, which partook in a larger “1930s renaissance,” used the disjunction between two moments to comment on the present.
The June 2011 issue includes reviews of two books on humor in Greek vase painting and Roman visual culture, two on Chinese painting, one on medieval Buddhist sculpture, and one on forgery in premodern German art, as well as an exhibition review of Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures, which appeared in Los Angeles, Nuremberg, and Berlin in 2009–10.
Please see the full table of contents for June for more details. The next issue, to be published in September 2011, will feature essays on Roman mosaic floors, an emblematic Michelangelo cartoon for a fresco, portraiture in France after 1789, and the American painter John Sloan.
Spring Art Journal Features Artist’s Project by Paul Sietsema and Centennial Essay by Richard Shiff
posted by Christopher Howard — June 15, 2011
CAA recently published the Spring 2011 issue of Art Journal, which includes a Centennial essay by the noted scholar Richard Shiff and, on the front and back covers, a project by the Los Angeles–based artist Paul Sietsema.
The issue acknowledges CAA’s Centennial year with Shiff’s text, “Every Shiny Object Wants an Infant Who Will Love It,” a state-of-the-field essay on contemporary art. Beginning with the unfigured sensory experience of a Donald Judd installation in Marfa, Texas, the text examines the human impulse to organize and categorize the elements of aesthetic experience.
Paul Sietsema created two news works for the issue: Untitled Composition for the front cover and Painter’s Mussel for the back. Both are based on found photographs and slyly pun on the interplay between language and the working life of artists today.
The Spring issue also publishes an essay by Saloni Mathur that details the postcolonial context in which the American designers Charles and Ray Eames explored the traditional arts of India—and helped configure the industrial-design program of the newly emergent nation. Next, Christopher Bedford, chief curator of the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio, invited seven artists and curators to join him in pondering the peculiarities the art-speak word “project” (as used in the first paragraph of this news item). While some see it as a useful term, others find darker implications in its widespread use.
An essay by Karen Kurczynski called “Drawing Is the New Painting” suggests that the pressures of the contemporary marketplace can jeopardize drawing’s characteristics of expression and immediacy. In a monographic study titled “City of Degenerate Angels,” Ken D. Allan traces the art and publishing efforts of Wallace Berman in the context of the 1950s Los Angeles jazz scene in which the artist came of age. Additional audio evidence for Allan’s argument appears on the Art Journal website.
The Reviews section of the issue, edited by Howard Singerman, contains Michael Corris’s analysis of Julia Bryan-Wilson’s book, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era, and Alzo David-West’s assessment of two publications about art and visual culture in North Korea.
Apply for a Meiss or Wyeth Publishing Grant
posted by CAA — June 13, 2011
CAA is offering two publishing-grant opportunities this fall—through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant—that support new books in art history and related subjects. The publisher must submit the application to either grant or to both funds, though only one award can be given per title. Awards are made at the discretion of each jury and vary according to merit, need, and number of applications. Both programs have a deadline of October 1, 2011. CAA will announce the recipients of the Meiss and Wyeth grants in late November or early December 2011.
Millard Meiss Publication Fund
CAA awards grants from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund to support book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of art and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy. For complete guidelines, application forms, and a grant description, please visit www.collegeart.org/meiss or write to nyoffice@collegeart.org. Deadline: October 1, 2011.
Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant
Thanks to generous funding from the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, CAA awards a publication grant to support book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art and related subjects. For purposes of this program, “American art” is defined as art created in the United States, Canada, and Mexico prior to 1970. Books eligible for the Wyeth Grant have been accepted by a publisher on their merits but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy. For complete guidelines, application forms, and a grant description, please visit www.collegeart.org/wyeth or write to nyoffice@collegeart.org. Deadline: October 1, 2011.
Spring Grant Recipients of the Millard Meiss Publication Fund
posted by Christopher Howard — June 01, 2011
This spring, CAA awarded grants to the publishers of five books in art history and visual culture through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to the generous bequest of the late Prof. Millard Meiss, the grants are given to support the publication of scholarly books in art history and related fields.
The five grantees for spring 2011 are:
- Elizabeth Childs, Vanishing Paradise: Art and Exoticism in Colonial Tahiti, 1800–1901, University of California Press
- Shih-shan Susan Huang, Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Medieval China, Harvard University Asia Center
- Patricia Leighten, A Politics of Form: Art, Anarchism, and Audience in Avant-Guerre Paris, University of Chicago Press
- Pamela Patton, Art of Estrangement: Redefining the Jews in Reconquest Spain, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Richard Taws, The Politics of the Provisional: Visual Culture in Revolutionary France, Pennsylvania State University Press
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. The deadline for the fall 2011 grant cycle is October 1, 2011.
Report from the Task Force on Editorial Safeguards
posted by Christopher Howard — May 17, 2011
CAA and other learned societies are increasingly aware of the complex demands and responsibilities entailed by scholarly publishing today. In an era of globalization and digitization, organizations must revisit long-standing assumptions and carefully reconsider the process of developing and reviewing publications. Among the critical issues are copyright, competing political and cultural sensitivities, and even differing international legal standards for what may and may not appear in print or online. In the fall of 2009, Paul Jaskot, then CAA president and in conjunction with the Board of Directors, formed a task force to study the organization’s editorial procedures and safeguards.
The seven-person Task Force on Editorial Safeguards included representation from CAA’s three editorial boards and the Publications Department staff. Meeting monthly by telephone from March to October 2010, and with continued consultation through January 2011, the group carefully documented and studied editorial procedures for each journal. It also gathered information about practices at similar academic periodicals—including those published commercially and by other scholarly associations. Ultimately, the task force was pleased to find that CAA’s editorial safeguards were already among the most through and progressive, though it recognized that they could be strengthened further. Based on its research, the task force made a series of recommendations, which the CAA board adopted at its February 2011 meeting.
The task force’s recommendations focused on three primary areas: identifying conflict of interest, establishing transition protocols, and enhancing training for editors. The group also instituted a clear protocol for responding to editorial concerns. Revised author packets will further clarify the responsibilities for those writing for CAA’s journals. Fact checking, for example, remains the province of the contributor, although peer reviewers and other editors will raise questions when warranted. The guidelines also established the retention of documents by editors, in consultation with the Publications Committee.
At its May 2011 meeting, the board added a further safeguard to those approved at its previous meeting. CAA now requires all new editors, editorial-board members, and committees members, including the board itself, to certify their adherence to the newly revised Statement on Conflict of Interest and Confidentiality.
The Task Force on Editorial Safeguards, led by then CAA vice president for publications, Anne Collins Goodyear of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, comprised the following: Laura Auricchio, Parsons the New School for Design; Ikem Okoye, University of Delaware; Judith Rodenbeck, Sarah Lawrence College; and Rachel Weiss, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. CAA’s codirectors of publications, Betty Leigh Hutcheson and Joe Hannan, served as ex-officio members. The editors-in-chief and reviews editors of CAA’s three journals provided invaluable assistance to the task force, as did members of the Publications Committee. Alan Gilbert, CAA editor, also provided critical input.
Liz Magic Laser and Paul Chan on Art Journal Website
posted by Christopher Howard — May 05, 2011
Art Journal has just published timely new features by two artists on its recently launched website.
Liz Magic Laser’s InterAct is an interview-performance hybrid. For Act I, the artist and her crew took part in a conversation with Christopher Y. Lew, a curator at MoMA PS1, at the East River Park Amphitheater in New York. The group then transcribed the discussion and staged it in the same outdoor space several weeks later, as Act II. Art Journal’s website features the full script along with photographs of the event and other works by Laser. This Friday and Saturday in New York (May 6–7), the Times Square Alliance is presenting Laser’s Flight (2010), a compilation of reenacted scenes on staircases from two dozen classic films, including Battleship Potemkin and American Psycho.
For his quizzically titled “X jxm vlr rpb pelria ilpb vlr,” Paul Chan discusses five conceptual maps from his 2007 project Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, staged on the post-Katrina streets of that city. The Art Journal piece coincides with the publication this week of Chan’s e-book, Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field Guide (Badlands Unlimited and Creative Time Books). The artist’s images and text open a window onto his process in creating this major work.
Image: Performers for Liz Magic Laser’s Flight in Times Square (photograph by Ka-Man Tse for the Times Square Alliance)
Contribute to the 2011 Publications Fund
posted by Nia Page — May 03, 2011
The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and caa.reviews have provided important platforms for the open discussion of scholarly, theoretical, and practical issues in the visual arts. With the Centennial year in mind, CAA hopes that you will support the three journals with a generous gift to the 2011 Publications Fund.
Published respectively since 1913 and 1929, The Art Bulletin and Art Journal have grown from their original roots in pedagogy to become authoritative voices in the history and practice of art. Even now, after ninety-eight years in publication, The Art Bulletin continues to evolve and cultivate new interest: the journal witnessed, for example, a 35 percent increase in manuscript submissions during the past year. Upcoming features include interviews with senior scholars and short-form explorations that address the motivations of art historians working today.
Art Journal recently launched a dynamic website, which not only provides free access to select articles from each print issue but also publishes exclusive web-only features. In addition to presenting time-based art online, the journal commissions artists to create special projects—such as Dailies, Kerry James Marshall’s year-long project for the magazine’s inside covers—to underscore a commitment to producing visual art as well as scholarship on it.
Founded in 1998 as one of the first born-digital art journals, caa.reviews recently reached its long-held goal of publishing over 150 reviews a year. With timely, insightful criticism on books, exhibitions, articles, conferences, and an expanding array of other works, caa.reviews also presents the titles of dissertations, both completed and in progress, from PhD students in graduate programs across the United States and Canada. The list for calendar year 2010 is forthcoming later this spring.
At the threshold of its next century of activity, CAA remains committed to the superb quality and ongoing development of these highly regarded journals, which are enjoyed by thousands of readers annually and which remain essential resources for students, educators, and practitioners in all areas of the visual arts. Your contribution not only helps to maintain an invaluable platform for the presentation of new research and interpretation, but it also supports the groundbreaking work of emerging and future scholars.
Contributors of $250 and higher are prominently acknowledged in four issues of the printed publication that they support, or on the donor page of caa.reviews; they are also recognized in the Acknowledgments and through CAA News. CAA hopes that you will take your place on any or all of these growing lists of esteemed donors.