CAA News Today
caa.reviews Seeks Field Editors for Books and Exhibitions
posted by Christopher Howard — October 31, 2016
caa.reviews invites nominations and self-nominations for individuals to join its Council of Field Editors, which commissions reviews within an area of expertise or geographic region, for a term ending June 30, 2019. An online journal, caa.reviews is devoted to the peer review of books, museum exhibitions, and projects relevant to art history, visual studies, and the arts.
The journal seeks field editors to commission reviews of books in museum studies and of exhibitions on the West Coast, in the Midwest, and in Europe. Candidates may be artists, art or design historians, critics, curators, or other professionals in the visual arts; institutional affiliation is not required.
Field editors select content to be reviewed, commissions reviewers, and reviews manuscripts for publication, working with the journal’s editor-in-chief, editorial board, and CAA staff editor as necessary. Field editors for books are expected to keep abreast of newly published and important books and related media in their fields of expertise, and field editors for exhibitions should be aware of current and upcoming exhibitions (and other related projects) in their geographic regions. The Council of Field Editors meets annually at the CAA Annual Conference.
Candidates must be current CAA members and should not serve concurrently 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 Deidre Thompson, CAA publications assistant. Deadline: January 15, 2017.
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — October 28, 2016
Hollis Clayson reads The Work of Art: Plein-air Painting and Artistic Identity in Nineteenth-Century France by Anthea Callen. The “impressive book, chockablock with technical information,” views “the visible painted mark” as not only an “index of an artist’s working methods and tools, but also the inescapable sign of the painter’s aesthetic, social, and institutional allegiances.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Claire Grace discusses Taryn Simon: Paperwork and the Will of Capital, an exhibition hosted at Gagosian Gallery, New York. Grace focuses on twelve sculptures that feature plant specimens yet spring “from the world of geopolitics and trade.” Although sculpture “is a departure for Simon,” the series “extends the research-driven, post-documentary axis of her photography-based practice.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
James Housefield reviews Ruth E. Iskin’s The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s–1900s. This “engaging and readable book” “rethinks the role of print media in the creation and transformations of modern art.” Arguing “persuasively for renewed examination of posters” in visual culture, the volume “contributes to the history of modern art, writ large.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Jessica N. Richardson examines From Giotto to Botticelli: The Artistic Patronage of the Humiliati in Florence by Julia I. Miller and Laurie Taylor-Mitchell. “A long-awaited study,” the book “traces the entire span of Humiliati art at a single location.” It “provides another model for breaking down period boundaries and envisaging images and objects as communicating through the centuries.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Caa.reviews publishes over 150 reviews each year. Founded in 1998, the site publishes timely scholarly and critical reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by the College Art Association. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate. Read more reviews at caa.reviews.
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — September 30, 2016
Alessia Frassani reviews The Lienzo of Tlapiltepec: A Painted History from the Northern Mixteca, a collection of multidisciplinary studies edited by Arni Brownstone. Focusing on lienzos, “large painted cloths produced after the Spanish invasion of Mexico,” the book makes “a difficult but important aspect of indigenous Mexican history and culture available to a wide audience.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Jennifer W. Olmsted discusses Delacroix and the Matter of Finish, an exhibition catalogue edited by curator Eik Kahng for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. The painting The Last Words of Marcus Aurelius was the impetus for the show and publication, which “build a case” for the attribution of the artwork to Delacroix while addressing issues of “authorship, pedagogy, and inheritance.” Read the full reviews at caa.reviews.
John A. Tyson examines Krista A. Thompson’s Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice. The “multifaceted,” “generally excellent” volume “explores the ways in which bling aesthetics and shining can be forms of resistance,” and “shows that non-elite culture holds up to serious academic scrutiny.”
John Szostak reads Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 by Gennifer Weisenfeld. A “comprehensive, fascinating, and informative” contribution to the subject of “disaster culture,” the book examines a “historic catastrophe through the visual-culture lens of image production and consumption.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Caa.reviews publishes over 150 reviews each year. Founded in 1998, the site publishes timely scholarly and critical reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by the College Art Association. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate. Read more reviews at caa.reviews.
New and Forthcoming in CAA’s Journals
posted by CAA — September 12, 2016
caa.reviews
Boris Charmatz’s If Tate Modern Was Musée de la Danse? (May 15–16, 2015) is the focus of a new multimedia review on the Scalar platform, If caa.reviews were performance.reviews?. Organized by Juliet Bellow, the project includes an introduction by Bellow, and three reviews of the performances at the Tate Modern by Arabella Stanger, Nicole Zee, and Tamara Tomic-Vajagic. The review presents the complexities of Charmatz’s transformation of the Tate Modern into a museum of dance for two days and features an interactive map showing where the performances occurred in the Tate Modern, in addition to videos and still images. Charmatz’s project challenges conceptions of museums as institutional spaces and incorporates audience participation and “unauthorized” performances. This review is part of a new caa.reviews initiative to review time-based media works.
Art Journal Open
Art Journal Open this summer launched a new cluster of conversations featuring artist residencies, with artists who have participated in residencies interviewed by those who organize these programs. Through the conversations, Art Journal Open examines how residencies operate logistically and conceptually, and how they contribute to creative production. Conversations published in the series include Caitlin Masley-Chalet of Guttenberg Arts (Guttenberg, NJ) with artist Diana Shpungin, Vanessa Kauffman of Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA) with artist Patricia Fernández Carcedo, and Amy Cancelmo of Root Division (San Francisco, CA) with artist Kija Lucas.
Earlier this summer, Art Journal Open published the third of a three-part series on appropriation as an artistic strategy: “Knight’s Heritage: Karl Haendel and the Legacy of Appropriation, Episode Three, 2013” by Natilee Harren, with a response by Nate Harrison. Recent features also include a review of Wetware: Art, Agency, Animation (Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine, February 6–May 7, 2016) by Charissa Terranova, and “Humans Have Been Human for So Long,” a dialogue between artist Shana Lutker and curator Mika Yoshitake on Lutker’s exhibition Shana Lutker: Le “NEW” Monocle, Chapters 1–3 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC (October 27, 2015–February 16, 2016).
Art Journal
The forthcoming Fall 2016 Art Journal features a project by the artist Penelope Vlassopoulou, whose source material is the phrases and drawings carved in underground cells by detainees during the Nazi occupation of Greece. In other feature articles, Mario Merz’s fascination with the Fibonacci series is the cruz of Elizabeth Mangini’s examination of works created within the intellectual and political ferment of 1960s Italy, and Emily Hage rethinks Romare Bearden’s historical and political position in relation to the dense collages he made for the covers of Time and Fortune. The Reviews section includes Eve Meltzer’s account of the film Eva Hesse and reviews of books by Thomas Crow, Claire Robins, and Joan Kee. An annotated bibliography by Roger F. Malina, the astrophysicist who also serves as executive editor of Leonardo Publications/MIT Press, explores the highly productive intersections of art and science.
Recently published in the Summer 2016 Art Journal is a project by the renowned artist Harmony Hammond. The covers of the journal were given a waxy coating to convey the nature of her intensely tactile paintings and prints, featured in a twenty-page portfolio. In the features, Amanda Jane Graham takes a close look at the interweaving of domestic and performing spaces in Trisha Brown’s 1975 dance Locus; Mechtild Widrich investigates the effects on the urban fabric of the new/old National Gallery of Singapore, created from a colonial-era court building; and Dan Adler traces the idea of an all-pervasive Apparatus in 1980s and 1990s works by the German photographer Thomas Ruff. The Reviews section begins with Chris Taylor’s examination of the film Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art. Other reviews examine a new book by Chika Okeke-Agulu and the exhibition and catalogue Hippie Modernism. An annotated bibliography by Audra Wolowiec explores the poetics of sound and language.
The Art Bulletin
The cover of the September 2016 issue of The Art Bulletin depicts Buddhist monks evoking ghosts in a nocturnal ceremony; the large detail from a polychrome silk scroll accompanies Phillip E. Bloom’s essay on twelfth-century Chinese paintings of Buddhist rituals. In other essays featured in the September issue, Judy Sund reconsiders nineteenth-century perceptions of Watteau’s Pierrot character as forlorn, Christine I. Ho contextualizes a brush-and-ink painting created by a collective in the early People’s Republic of China, and James Nisbet surveys intersections of global politics and imaging in the site-specific art of Walter De Maria. In his “Whither Art History?” essay, Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz explores Kongo visual and cultural practices in contemporary art.
The Reviews section, with a theme of “Urban Images, Memories, and Fragments,” includes four reviews of recent books on the cultures of fifth-century BCE Athens, seven Dutch cities from 1200 to 1700, early modern Rome, and Mexico City in light of Aztec civilization.
Taylor & Francis Online
In addition to their print subscription(s), CAA members receive online access to current and back issues of Art Journal and The Art Bulletin. Taylor & Francis, CAA’s publishing partner, also provides complimentary online access to Word and Image, Digital Creativity, and Public Art Dialogue for CAA members. To access these journals, please log into your account at collegeart.org and click the link to the CAA Online Publications Platform on Taylor & Francis Online.
Apply for a 2016 Wyeth Foundation Publishing Grant
posted by Christopher Howard — July 14, 2016
CAA is accepting applications for the 2016 Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant program. Thanks to generous funding from the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, CAA awards publishing grants once a year 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. 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.
The publisher, not the author, must submit the application. Awards are made at the discretion of the jury and vary according to merit, need, and number of applications. Awardees are announced six to eight weeks after the deadline. For complete guidelines, application forms, and a grant description, please visit the Wyeth section of the CAA website. Deadline: September 15, 2016.
In the June 2016 Art Bulletin
posted by Christopher Howard — July 12, 2016
A grotesquely anthropomorphic hound standing on powerful back legs and blowing a stylized trumpet graces the cover of the June 2016 issue of The Art Bulletin. The etching is one of two dozen similar works by the early seventeenth-century artist Christopher Jamnitzer that Madeleine C. Viljoen explores in relation to early modern cosmography. The June issue also presents the first publication of an extraordinary eleventh-century enamel cup from a nomad’s grave in Ukraine, which Warren T. Woodfin examines in the context of other Middle Byzantine works with secular imagery. In addition, the issue features essays by David Young Kim on the multiple functions served by the carpets in Lorenzo Lotto’s paintings, and by Jean H. Duffy on issues of genre and perception in Jean Dubuffet’s mixed-genre spectacle Coucou Bazar. Shao Yiyang’s “Whither Art History?” essay reflects on the flourishing of art history in contemporary China.
The reviews section, with a theme of “Cosmopolitan Art Worlds,” includes six reviews of recent books on art in Renaissance Italy, late nineteenth-century Shanghai, turn-of-the-century Paris, modern India, contemporary Brazil and Japan, and twentieth-century Nigeria.
CAA sends print copies of The Art Bulletin to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the journal as a benefit of membership. The digital version at Taylor & Francis Online is currently available to all CAA individual members regardless of their subscription choice.
In the next issue of the quarterly journal, to be published in September, essays will consider Kongo visual and cultural practices in contemporary art, twelfth-century Chinese paintings of Buddhist rituals, the nineteenth-century perception of Watteau’s Pierrot character as forlorn, a brush-and-ink painting collectively created in the early People’s Republic of China, and intersections of global politics and imaging in the site-specific art of Walter De Maria. Four reviews will be presented under the rubric “Urban Images, Memories, and Fragments.”
Apply for a Fall 2016 Meiss Grant
posted by Christopher Howard — July 11, 2016
CAA is accepting applications for fall 2016 grants through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to a generous bequest by the late art historian Millard Meiss, the twice-yearly program supports book-length scholarly manuscripts in any period of the history of art, visual studies, and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy.
The publisher, rather than the author, must submit the application to CAA. Awards are made at the discretion of the jury and vary according to merit, need, and number of applications. Awardees are announced six to eight weeks after the deadline. For the complete guidelines, application forms, and a grant description, please visit the Meiss section of the CAA website. Deadline: September 15, 2016.
New Essays in Art Journal Open
posted by CAA — July 05, 2016
Art Journal Open is pleased to announce the publication of “Knight’s Heritage: Karl Haendel and the Legacy of Appropriation: Episode Three, 2013,” by Natilee Harren, and a response to the essay by Nate Harrison. Harren’s three-part essay examines appropriation as an artistic strategy that pressures both the legal and conceptual definitions of authorship through a case study of three specific episodes in the artist Karl Haendel’s practice of recirculating images. Harrison responds to each of Harren’s essays, offering a critical reminder of the historical specificity of postmodernism and appropriation.
New Faces for CAA’s Publications
posted by CAA — June 15, 2016
The president of the CAA Board of Directors, Suzanne Preston Blier, has confirmed new appointments to the editorial boards of CAA’s three scholarly journals and to the Publications Committee, in consultation with the vice president for publications, Gail Feigenbaum.
The Art Bulletin
A new member-at-large has joined the Art Bulletin Editorial Board. Laura Weigert is an associate professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, whose area of specialization is Northern European art of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Her term on the editorial board runs through June 2020.
Art Journal
Three new at-large members have joined the Art Journal Editorial Board. Tatiana E. Flores, associate professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, with a joint appointment in the Department of Art History and the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies, specializes in Latin American and contemporary art. She is also active as an independent curator. Amelia G. Jones, a historian and theorist of contemporary art and performance studies, is Robert A. Day Professor of Art and Design and vice dean of critical studies at the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art and Design in California. Derek Conrad Murray, associate professor of contemporary art and visual culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, focuses on the junctures of African American and African diasporic art, postblack art and aesthetics, cultural theory, and identity and representation. The term for each new editorial-board member goes through June 2020.
In addition, Tirza T. Latimer, chair of the graduate program in visual and critical studies at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and a member of the Art Journal Editorial Board since 2014, will now serve as its chair. Her term extends through June 2018.
caa.reviews
The caa.reviews Editorial Board welcomes Juliet Bellow, associate professor of art history at American University in Washington, DC, as editor designate for the journal. She will begin a three-year term as editor-in-chief on July 1, 2017. Bellow has been a field editor for books on nineteenth-century art and served on the journal’s editorial board for the past four years. Andrei Pop, associate professor for the Department of Art History and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in Illinois, has joined the caa.reviews Editorial Board after serving as field editor for books on theory and historiography.
caa.reviews recently added design history as a subject area, and Karen Carter, an associate professor from the Kendall College of Art and Design at Ferris State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, will be the first editor to commission books on the subject. In addition, Iris Moon, visiting assistant professor of architecture at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, has joined the journal’s Council of Field Editors to commission reviews for books on eighteenth-century art. Alpesh Kantilal Patel, assistant professor and director of the MFA program in visual arts at Florida International University in Miami, currently serves as field editor for books on contemporary art.
Publications Committee
Emily Shapiro has joined CAA’s Publications Committee as member-at-large for a term of three years. Shapiro is managing editor of the Archives of American Art Journal, after serving as executive editor for American Art.
This Week in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — June 10, 2016
James M. Córdova on sixteenth-century murals in Mexico: Penny Morrill, The Casa del Deán: New World Imagery in a Sixteenth-Century Mexican Mural Cycle.
Lynne Ellsworth Larsen on the relationship between art and language in Yoruba art: Rowland Abiodun, Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art.
Terri Weissman reviews the inaugural exhibition at the new Whitney Museum of American Art, America Is Hard to See.
James Merle Thomas on collaborations between artists and corporations at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: From the Archives: Art and Technology at LACMA, 1967–1971.