CAA News Today
US News and World Report Publishes Rankings of MFA Programs
posted by Christopher Howard — April 16, 2010
The magazine US News and World Report has just published its rankings of graduate programs in the visual arts, among other fields. The MFA rankings, completed in 2008 but only released this week, are tallied from a “peer assessment survey” of deans and high-ranking academics (two per school) administered in fall 2007. Two hundred twenty programs were analyzed on “academic quality” on a scale of one to five, one being marginal and five being outstanding. (Read more about the methodology.) US News and World Report received a 39 percent response rate from the art schools and programs it surveyed.
The top-ten schools ranked the best overall are:
1. Rhode Island School of Design
2. Yale University
3. School of the Art Institute of Chicago
4. Cranbook Academy of Art
4. Maryland Institute College of Art
4. Virginia Commonwealth University
7. California Institute of the Arts
7. Carnegie Mellon University
7. University of California, Los Angeles
10. Alfred University, New York State College of Ceramics
Read the complete list of the top twenty-five graduate schools in the visual arts and beyond.
Survey results also break down schools and programs into twelve specialties by medium, based on up to ten nominations per institution from administrators and top academics. (It is suggested but not entirely clear if lower-level educators gave the nominated schools a numerical rating for specialties.)
Here are the top-ranking schools for each specialty. Click on the specialty name to see the full ranking for that category:
- Ceramics: Alfred University, New York State College of Ceramics
- Fiber Arts: Cranbrook Academy of Art
- Glass: Rhode Island School of Design
- Graphic Design: Rhode Island School of Design
- Industrial Design: Art Center College of Design
- Interior Design: Pratt Institute
- Metals/Jewelry: State University of New York, New Paltz
- Multimedia/Visual Communications: Carnegie Mellon University
- Painting/Drawing: Yale University
- Photography: Yale University
- Printmaking: University of Wisconsin, Madison
- Sculpture: Virginia Commonwealth University
Since the survey was taken in fall 2007 and compiled the next year, one wonders why it took so long to publish the results. Also, the survey’s criterion of “academic quality” is not defined in the methodology. Further, the impact of the current global economic crisis on higher education (through enrollment, teaching loads for professors, and other issues) seems not to have been considered. Have prospective MFA students, for example, been favoring public institutions over expensive private schools? The survey does not say.
In addition, US News and World Report failed to include graduate programs in art history in its section on social sciences and the humanities—a grievous, unfortunate oversight.
CAA recommends that interested people consult its two directories, Graduate Programs in the Visual Arts and Graduate Programs in Art History, both of which are available for purchase today.
Take a Center for Curatorial Leadership Survey on “the Two Art Histories”
posted by Christopher Howard — April 13, 2010
The Center for Curatorial Leadership is conducting a research project that seeks basic information on the educational and career choices made by art historians working in the United States who enter the museum and academic professions.
While sometimes regarded as “the two art histories,” museum and academic careers share a common starting point in college and graduate studies. In order to understand how the Center for Curatorial Leadership might mentor young art historians and form bonds between disciplines more effectively, it has assembled a brief survey. Comments and any suggestions are welcome as well.
The survey should take approximately ten minutes to complete. Deadline: Monday, April 19, 2010.
Getty Task Force on Art Bibliography Will Hold Public Meeting on April 20
posted by Christopher Howard — April 06, 2010
The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California, has received a grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation to convene an international task force of art librarians, scholars, and information specialists from Europe and the United States to discuss the future of art bibliography. Recent events, including discussions of art-library closures, scant funding resources for ongoing support of art libraries and projects internationally, and the cessation of the Getty’s support for the continuation of the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) provide the catalyst to review current practices, take stock of changes, and seriously consider developing more sustainable and collaborative ways of supporting the bibliography of art history in the future.
The organizers of the task force—Kathleen Salomon of the Getty Research Institute; Rüdiger Hoyer from the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich; and Jan Simane of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz and chair of the Art Libraries Section of International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA)—invite the art-historical community to participate in a discussion to be held on Tuesday, April 20, 2010, in New York. The meeting will take place 1:00–5:30 PM at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (courtesy of Kenneth Soehner). Two panels presenting “thoughts from the field” will be followed by an open discussion.
The issues that come forward in the meeting will help lay the groundwork for the subsequent meeting of the smaller task force that will address what is and is not feasible for art bibliography in the future. The outcomes of the meeting and next steps will be posted and shared with the wider art-historical community.
Seating for the meeting is limited and must be reserved ahead of time: please RSVP to Diane Lazar by April 12. If you are unable to attend, there will be a recap and discussion session at the annual conference of the Art Libraries Society of North America in Boston, Massachusetts, on Sunday, April 25, 2:30–3:30 PM, as well as at the Art Libraries Section meeting of IFLA‘s general conference and assembly, to be held in August in Gothenburg, Sweden.
The Getty Saves BHA and Will Provide Free Online Access to It
posted by Christopher Howard — April 01, 2010
The J. Paul Getty Trust released a statement this morning that tells us “as of April 1, 2010, the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) will be available free of charge on the Getty website.” The move, which comes a day after the important research database was to be shut down permanently, is a welcomed one. While free access to BHA for individuals and institutions is good for everyone especially those “institutions in developing countries and independent scholars worldwide” who were unable to afford a subscription. The Getty, however, has remained silent about further updates to the database, which ceased last year. [UPDATE: the Getty will not be adding new records to the database but hopes another organization will do so.]
From the Getty press release:
Since ending its collaboration with the Institut de l’Information Scientifique et Technique (INIST)–CNRS in December 2007, the Getty has been searching for partners to continue the production and distribution of BHA. This process has been complicated, and with no suitable arrangement immediately available, the Getty decided to act on its commitment to the scholarly community by providing access to BHA directly from its own Web site.
The relaunched BHA includes the International Bibliography of Art (IBA), covering the years 2008 and part of 2009, as well as the Répertoire de la litterature de l’art (RILA), a predecessor of BHA that was maintained by CAA for many years. RILA records from 1975 to 1989 will be online by May 1, 2010.
NEA Announces Research on Informal Arts Participation in Rural and Urban Areas
posted by Christopher Howard — March 26, 2010
Any serious reckoning of how Americans participate in arts and cultural activities must account for demographic and geographic diversity. Prior National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) publications, including the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, already have examined the age, race and ethnicity, gender, and education and income status of arts-goers.
Another way to understand arts participation is by asking where it takes place. Come as You Are: Informal Arts Participation in Urban and Rural Communities is the NEA’s first research publication in several years to examine the “informal arts”—such as playing a musical instrument, attending an art event at a place of worship, or visiting a craft fair. This finding is part of new research from the NEA, announced earlier this during a visit by NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman to Chelsea, Michigan, as part of the NEA’s Art Works Tour. The publication provides an analysis of arts participation in rural and urban areas.
Come as You Are: Informal Arts Participation in Urban and Rural Communities is available in print and pdf on the NEA website.
Getty Closing the Bibliography of the History of Art at the End of March
posted by Christopher Howard — March 25, 2010
CAA learned last week, through the Art History Newsletter, that the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles is withdrawing the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) from distribution on March 31, 2010. With the closing, hundreds of thousands of records and abstracts in the database will soon be unavailable to scholars worldwide—indefinitely.
Subscribers to BHA, which include many academic libraries and research institutions, received notice about the shutdown from the Getty earlier this month. While there are some alternatives—among them Art Index, Avery Index, and ARTbibliographies Modern—the loss of this invaluable resource is immense and will be deeply felt throughout the international art-history community. Indeed, BHA’s “coverage has not been duplicated in any single database available to us,” writes Jill E. Luedke, a librarian and art-subject specialist at Temple University.
Since June CAA has made numerous communiqués by phone and email to the Getty regarding the demise of BHA, receiving only one inconclusive response. From what CAA can gather from other sources, the closure appears to be strictly a budgetary decision. The Getty attempted to find an organization that would purchase the database and software program that they had developed, but found none. CAA was not privy to the negotiations to find a buyer.
As the world’s most comprehensive bibliographic database of publications in art history, BHA covers the visual arts in Europe and America from late antiquity to the present. Copublished with the Institut de l’Information Scientifique et Technique in France, BHA originated in part as the International Repertory of the Literature of Art (RILA), created in 1972 under the auspices of CAA and supported by grants from public endowments and private foundations. The Getty’s bibliography includes RILA records from 1972 to 1989 and those from the Repertory of Art and Archaeology (RAA) from 1973 to 1989, and had been growing ever since.
Michael Rinehart, formerly editor in chief of RILA and BHA for nearly thirty years, wrote in 2009: “It is highly unlikely that any commercial vendor will want to maintain it. It is equally clear that the Getty intends to end BHA with or without a plan for its continuation…. Whatever the original understanding between the CAA and the Getty may have been, it is self-evident that the CAA entrusted RILA to the Getty in the expectation that it would continue.”
Art historians and researchers were first alerted to the possible closure in June 2009, and CAA published a response at that time. The Getty released a statement in the same month, but negotiations with other organizations, as noted above, failed to produce a solution to keep BHA alive.
Survey Demonstrates Strong Student Demand for the Humanities but Declining Conditions for Faculty
posted by Christopher Howard — March 09, 2010
Despite the humanities playing a core role in higher education with strong student interest, four-year colleges and universities are increasingly relying on a part-time, untenured workforce to meet the demand. These facts, common knowledge to many professors, have been confirmed in the recently released results of the Humanities Departmental Survey, conducted by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a consortium of disciplinary associations, including CAA.
The survey includes data collected from departments of art history, English, foreign languages, history, the history of science, linguistics, and religion at approximately 1,400 colleges and universities. It is the first comprehensive survey to provide general cross-disciplinary data on humanities departments. The results are available on the academy’s Humanities Resource Center Online.
According to the Humanities Departmental Survey:
- Across the humanities, but especially in English and combined English and foreign-language departments, professors at four-year colleges and universities are evolving into a part-time workforce. During the 2006–7 academic year, only 38 percent of faculty members in these departments were tenured. English departments had the greatest proportion of non-tenure-track faculty (49 percent)
- When minors are included, undergraduate participation in humanities programs is about 82 percent greater than counting majors alone would suggest. For the 2006–7 academic year, 122,100 students completed bachelor’s degrees and 100,310 completed minor degrees in the three largest humanities disciplines: English, foreign languages, and history
- Reflecting the demands of a global economy, student interest in foreign language is strong: during the 2006–7 academic year, foreign-language departments awarded 28,710 baccalaureate degrees and had the largest number of students completing minors (51,670). Yet investment in a stable professoriate to teach and study foreign languages and literatures appears to be declining, with a significant reduction in recruitment of full-time faculty members (39 percent fewer recruitments for full-time positions in 2008–9 than hires for 2007–8) and fewer total graduate students than faculty members, the only surveyed discipline for which this was the case
- Turnover rates among humanities faculty were low—only 2.5 percent of humanities faculty left the profession through departure, retirement, or death during the two academic years preceding the survey. Combined with recently instituted hiring freezes on many campuses, career opportunities for the next generation of scholars (there were approximately 84,000 graduate students in the surveyed fields during the 2006–7 academic year) are limited
- Approximately 87 percent of humanities departments reported that their subject was part of the core distribution requirements at their institution
The survey results provide a snapshot of US humanities departments at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The survey covers a broad range of topics, including numbers of departments and faculty members, faculty distributions by discipline, courses taught, tenure activity, undergraduate majors and minors, and graduate students. The data provide new information about each of the disciplines; they also allow comparisons across disciplines. These data are especially important because the US Department of Education has indefinitely suspended the only nationally representative survey providing information about humanities faculty, the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty.
Several national learned societies collaborated with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to develop, field, and interpret data gathered by the Humanities Departmental Survey: the American Academy of Religion; the American Historical Association; the College Art Association; the History of Science Society; the Linguistic Society of America; and the Modern Language Association. The American Council of Learned Societies and the American Political Science Association also provided important assistance. The survey was administered by the Statistical Research Center of the American Institute of Physics, which also performed the basic data analysis.
Even though the humanities disciplines represent an essential core of the liberal-arts curriculum, they have long been data deprived. The empirical data now available in the survey, along with the rich collection of information already found in the Humanities Indicators, begin to fill that gap and to establish baselines that will allow stakeholders to track trends in the future. The academy hopes that the Humanities Departmental Survey can be expanded to include additional disciplines and updated regularly, producing trend data that could be incorporated into the Humanities Indicators.
Launched in 2009, Humanities Indicators include data covering humanities education from primary school through the graduate level; the humanities workforce; humanities funding and research; and the humanities in civic life. Modeled after the National Science Board’s Science and Engineering Indicators, the Humanities Indicators serve as a resource to help scholars, policymakers, and the public assess the current state of the humanities. The academy continues to update and expand the Humanities Indicators.
The academy looks forward to working with the National Endowment for the Humanities to advance this critical work. The Teagle Foundation provided support for the Humanities Departmental Survey project, and grants from the William and Flora Hewlett, Andrew W. Mellon, and Rockefeller Foundations have advanced the academy’s overall humanities data initiative.
Those who wish to receive announcements of new data and research on the humanities can subscribe to an email alert system at the Humanities Resource Center Online.
Responses
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has posted PDFs of two response papers, from David Laurence and Robert Townsend, on its website for download.
For journalistic analyses of the project, please read Scott Jaschik’s “State of Humanities Departments” at Inside Higher Ed and Jennifer Howard’s “Humanities Remain Popular Among Students Even as Tenure-Track Jobs Diminish” at the Chronicle of Higher Education.
JSTOR Creating Database for Auction Catalogues
posted by Christopher Howard — March 02, 2010
JSTOR is collaborating with two New York museums—the Frick Collection and the Metropolitan Museum of Art—in a pilot project designed to understand how auction catalogues can be best preserved for the long term and made most easily accessible for scholarly use. Vital for provenance research, auction catalogues are used for the study of art markets and the history of collecting.
Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, JSTOR’s prototype site is open to the public through June 2010. If you are interested in this content and its importance to art research, please explore the site and take the brief survey. In June, JSTOR will evaluate use of the content and feedback it has received in order to help determine the future of the resource.
The Frick Art Reference Library Opens Two New Online Databases
posted by Christopher Howard — February 23, 2010
The Frick Art Reference Library in New York has launched two new online resources that are available to scholars free of charge. The first, called the Archives Directory, is a directory that helps those researching the history of collecting art in the United States. The second, the Montias Database, is a collection of inventories from the Dutch Golden Age.
Inge Reist, director for the Frick’s Center for the History of Collecting in America, says, “Such a consolidated and easily searched online source as the new Archives Directory will prove invaluable to this deepening field of study and will ensure that researchers can locate primary documents such as letters, bills of sale, and other transaction records that are so essential to reliable scholarship. Indeed, users will more readily find their way to all manner of repositories, from those that are well-known to utterly unexpected caches, which in turn may lead to new discoveries and inspire fresh perspectives.”
Archives Directory
The center’s Archives Directory, the first online database of its kind, consolidates a wealth of information about the location and nature of documents and archives available on American collectors. Until now, scholars have had to comb through multiple websites and, if permitted, sift through analogue data held at library, museum, and university archives to construct their own plans for research—a time-consuming and imprecise process. The new directory is, by contrast, accessible around the clock via the institution’s website. Its use will help scholars worldwide as they approach research projects, guiding them beyond existing publications and standard paths to overlooked repositories, including primary source materials.
The Archives Directory guides researchers to more than 5,000 collections held in more than 300 repositories worldwide, which together have bearing on the lives and activities of more than 1,500 American collectors. Information in the Archives Directory was culled from various online and printed materials ranging from federated and individual online library catalogues to Google Books to published literature in the field.
Contributions of additional information for the directory are welcomed by scholars and researchers, so that it will continue to grow and become an increasingly valued resource.
Montias Database of 17th Century Dutch Art Inventories
The complete Montias Database, cosponsored by the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, offers an unprecedented look at ownership of art in Holland during the seventeenth century. It is a trove of searchable information about buyers, sellers, and prices, including comprehensive information on over 50,000 objects (paintings, prints, sculpture, furniture, and so forth) listed in nearly 1,300 Amsterdam city inventories. Approximately half was created in preparation for auctions, almost an equal portion was notarial death inventories for estate purposes, and the remaining documents relate to bankruptcy cases. Although the database, which specifically addresses records from 1597 through 1681, is not a complete record of all inventories made in Amsterdam, it contains a vast amount of information that can elucidate patterns of buying, selling, inventorying, and collecting art.
An eminent economist at Yale University, John Michael Montias began recording details of ownership of works of art from inventories held in the Amsterdam municipal archive, or Geementearchief (now known as the Stadsarchief), in the early 1980s as part of his own work on the prices of Dutch paintings at seventeenth-century auctions.
Free Webinar on the National Arts Index
posted by Christopher Howard — January 25, 2010
This week Americans for the Arts will present a free webinar on the findings of the first annual National Arts Index, a measure of the health and vitality of arts in the United States between 1998 and 2008.
Randy Cohen, vice president of local arts advancement at Americans for the Arts and index coauthor, will host the webinar on Wednesday, January 27, 2010, at 2:00 PM EST. Outlining the findings of the study, the webinar is free and available exclusively to professional members of Americans for the Arts and Half-Century Summit registrants. Registration is required.
How sustainable are arts and culture in our dynamic society? Are the economic resources and potentials sufficient for their future vitality? Join us in a lively discussion about the health and vitality of the arts sector through the lens of the National Arts Index. It’s illuminating and often provocative. Findings include trends in organizational capacity, changes in personal participation and creation, nonprofit vs. for-profit, funding, education, and more. Learn how the index can be used to spur conversations, shape strategies, and educate decision makers, and improve the state of the arts in America.
This webinar will introduce content that will also be covered in more depth at the Americans for the Arts Half-Century Summit.