CAA News Today
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — October 07, 2016
Gina McDaniel Tarver reviews the exhibition and catalogue Moderno: Design for Living in Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela, 1940–1978. The “rich multivocal production” occasionally fails “to tackle some of the complex issues it raises,” but “provides valuable insights into modern impulses and contradictions that manifested in compelling ways in Brazilian, Mexican, and Venezuelan design.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Anne Collins Goodyear examines the Getty Foundation’s Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI), which led to the creation of several digital catalogues by eight museums. Discussing “the implications of the project as a whole,” Goodyear finds the “undertaking represents but a first step,” yet “lays a significant foundation for the future of scholarship in the museum, and beyond.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Patricia Emerson discusses Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns, an exhibition catalogue examining the history of metalpoint in Europe and the United States over the course of six centuries. By “studying a medium across stylistic boundaries,” the book “helps us to recognize the versatility of a medium that might have been thought, repeatedly, to be obsolete.” 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.
RAAMP—A Digital Resource for Academic Museum Professionals
posted by CAA — October 06, 2016
Guy Laramée, The Grand Library, 2004. Altered book, pigment, metal stand, 96 x 21 x 44 inches. Courtesy of the artist and JHB Gallery. Courtesy of University of Richmond Museums, Virginia. Photo: Gordon Schmidt/University of Richmond Communications.RAAMP (Resources for Academic Art Museum Professionals) is an online repository and forum that collects, stores, and shares resources to promote scholarship, advocacy, and discussion related to the role of academic art museums and their contribution to the educational mission of their parent institutions. RAAMP aims to strengthen the educational mission of academic museums and their parent organizations, and is oriented toward colleagues at academic art museums as well as university and other museum colleagues. RAAMP is a project of CAA made possible with a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The principal investigators for RAAMP are N. Elizabeth Schlatter, deputy director and curator of exhibitions at the University of Richmond Museums in Virginia and an officer of CAA’s Board of Directors; and Celka Straughn, Andrew W. Mellon Director of Academic Programs at the University of Kansas’s Spencer Museum of Art and a member of CAA’s Museum Committee. Schlatter says, “Art museums at colleges and universities today are creating some of the most dynamic connections to their academic communities. RAAMP creates a virtual place to share these accomplishments and gain inspiration from colleagues. Academic museums can use examples created by their peers and posted on RAAMP to enhance their offerings to faculty and students.”
Straughn adds, “They can find curricular materials utilizing museum resources to emphasize critical thinking skills or sample reports that demonstrate and quantify how a campus museum contributes to its parent institution. RAAMP is also a place to promote professional development activities, to find research related to academic museums, and to engage in discussions with fellow professionals.”
RAAMP was created in response to a 2013 CAA Annual Conference session organized by the organization’s Museum Committee. Attendees at the session expressed a need to have a digital space where they could easily share information and strategies for communicating how their academic museums contribute to the educational mission of their parent institutions.
RAAMP would not be possible without the help of its partner organizations: Association of American Museum Curators (AAMC), Association of American Museum Director (AAMD), and Association of Academic Museums & Galleries (AAMG), and representatives from the following US-based academic museum stakeholders:
The Art Galleries at Lafayette College, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, The Fowler Museum at the UCLA, Galleries of Contemporary Art at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs; The Hood Museum at Dartmouth University, Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami, Neuberger Museum at SUNY Purchase College, Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida, Schnitzer Museum at the University of Oregon, Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, Spelman College Museum of Art, Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, University of Iowa Museum of Art, University of Richmond Museums
Visit the RAAMP website to learn more.
Visit the RAAMP submissions page to submit materials.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — October 05, 2016
Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Burning Questions: How Can I Promote My Exhibition?
I’ve got an exhibition coming up at a small artist-run gallery space. They don’t have any real budget for promotion or anything like that. So I’m wondering something: What are the best low-cost (preferably free) ways to promote my exhibition? (Read more from Burnaway.)
Islamic Extremist Sentenced to Nine Years in Prison for Destroying Timbuktu Mausoleums
In an unprecedented move, Ahmad Al-Faqi Al-Mahdi pleaded guilty to war crimes for ordering the razing of nine mausoleums and the fifteenth-century Sidi Yahia mosque in the ancient city of Timbuktu in northern Mali. The historic verdict marks the first time the international criminal court in The Hague has heard a case about the demolition of cultural heritage. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
What Is the Real Impact of Public Art Programs?
The production and introduction of artworks into the public domain started to be regulated and organized by national programs in the 1930s. Although state-sponsored institutions—such as the US Federal Art Project, the USSR’s Ministry of Culture, and the Chinese Communist Party’s art-related efforts—primarily pursued propaganda goals, this laid the foundation for public art programs worldwide. (Read more from Artnet News.)
Racially Charged St. Louis Contemporary Art Museum Show Sparks Outrage
Racially charged works at a Contemporary Art Museum in Saint Louis exhibition have some calling for boycotts and the resignation of the museum’s chief curator. The museum has opted to build walls around the controversial pieces of art. The show will remain up and visitors will have access to all of the work. (Read more from Fox 2 News.)
Gallery Defends Kelley Walker, Artist under Fire in St. Louis Exhibit
The New York City–based gallery representing the artist Kelley Walker has responded to the controversy surrounding a racially charged exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum in Saint Louis, but with a statement that raises more questions than it answers. (Read more from the Riverfront Times.)
Black Arts Community Expresses Outrage with Kelley Walker
“This is a mess, and I’m uncomfortable,” said Kat Reynolds as she spoke before the capacity crowd at the Contemporary Art Museum on September 22. The panel of artists and educators—who spoke during the Critical Conversations talk presented by Critical Mass for the Visual Arts—didn’t hold back from voicing their disdain about the art that hung in the very space where the discussion was taking place. (Read more from the St. Louis American.)
Who Gets the Credit for Collaboration?
The most important part of your tenure package at a research university is—shockingly!—your research. The tricky part of scholarly evaluation is collaboration. In a tenure case, the external letter writers will be asked to evaluate your contribution to the field, which includes evaluating how much you contributed to the collaborative projects listed on your CV. (Read more from Vitae.)
How to Systemize Your Workflow
Graduate students will argue that because our tasks are so varied and diverse, because research is so unpredictable, because the very nature of good scholarly work is its novelty, nothing we do can actually be systemized effectively. But I would argue that this is exactly where we need to systemize, so that we can spend minimal time on the rote things and spend the majority of our energy and cognitive cycles on the issues that actually matter. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
CAA Local College Tour
posted by CAA — September 30, 2016
Students are crucial to CAA and the work we do. Support and interest from student members allows us to provide fellowships, professional development, mentorships, and job placement services to those very same students. In the coming months, CAA is visiting several local New York colleges and universities in order to connect with our youngest and one of our most vital constituencies. Below is our upcoming schedule. We hope to see you there.
Monday Oct. 10, 10AM-12PM at Parsons Fine Arts
Tuesday Nov. 1st at Pratt Institute (Time TBD)
Wednesday Nov. 2nd at Pratt Institute (Time TBD)
Friday Nov. 18th, 12PM-4PM at School of Visual Arts
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.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — September 28, 2016
Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Zero Correlation between Evaluations and Learning
A number of studies suggest that student evaluations of teaching are unreliable due to various biases against instructors. Yet conventional wisdom remains that students learn best from highly rated instructors. What if the data backing up conventional wisdom were off? A new study suggests that past analyses linking student achievement to high student teaching evaluation ratings are flawed. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
How Colleges Should Adapt in a Networked Age
Perhaps you’ve stood in the front of a classroom, looked out on the room full of students distractedly checking email or Facebook, and thought: they’re just not that into this. When you were younger, students were more respectful of the professor at the podium. The change may indicate a bigger shift in attitudes toward college and authority figures in general. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Autocorrect: The Politics of Museum Collection Re-Hangs
In the past year, three major New York museums—the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Brooklyn Museum—as well as a host of others around the world, have reinstalled their collection galleries in ways that privilege the alternative historical trajectory or new discovery over the transcendent masterpiece. (Read more from ARTnews.)
Back to Nature
By 2016 it is obvious that midcentury modernism is the defining design influence of the decade, with slim, sculpted furniture and thin, minimalist lines now ubiquitous. But a parallel trend has developed that revives a different aspect of the modernist aesthetic, just in time to address newer anxieties about our looming environmental apocalypse: the use of plants as design elements. (Read more from Curbed.)
How to Create Gender Equality in the Arts
Last week at the New School in New York, four female museum directors gazed up at an image of a woman sporting the all-caps slogan “The Future Is Female.” They were gathered to discuss the dearth of women in art-world leadership roles—and what it takes to get there. (Read more from Artsy.)
Self-Made Supermodels
In early 2015, near the end of her MFA in fine arts at Parsons, Leah Schrager set out on a project to create a celebrity by 2020—entirely via the internet—as an art practice. The celebrity she began to create was a hyper-sexy, cyber-savvy female rock star named Ona. (Read more from Rhizome.)
MoMA Will Make Thousands of Exhibition Images Available Online
After years of planning and digitizing, hundreds of thousands of documents and photographs in the Museum of Modern Art’s archives will now be available online. The digital-archive project will include almost 33,000 exhibition installation photographs, along with the pages of 800 out-of-print catalogs and more than 1,000 exhibition checklists, documents related to more than 3,500 exhibitions from 1929 through 1989. (Read more from the New York Times.)
How to Be a Better Networker
Your network starts locally with the people know from your lab or office, the floor you are on, your department, the journal club you attend, the lunchroom, and the like. Then, what do you do outside your training? Do you play a sport in a student league? Are you involved in a religious organization? Do you have kids and meet other parents through their care or activities? (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
CAA Seeks Mock Interviewers
posted by CAA — September 26, 2016
Participants in the Interview Hall at the 2016 Annual Conference (photograph by Bradley Marks)CAA’s Student and Emerging Professionals Committee seeks established professionals to volunteer as practice job interviewers for the Mock Interview Sessions at the 2017 Annual Conference in New York. Participating as an interviewer is an excellent way to serve the field and to assist with the professional development of the next generation of artists and scholars.
In these sessions, interviewers pose as a prospective employer, speaking with individuals in a scenario similar to the Interview Hall at the conference. Each session comprises approximately 10–15 minutes of interview questions and a quick review of the application packet, followed by 5–10 minutes of candid feedback. Whenever possible, the committee matches interviewers and interviewees based on medium or discipline.
Interested candidates must be current CAA members and prepared to give six successive twenty-minute interviews with feedback in a two-hour period during one of the following times:
Thursday, February 16: 11:30AM–1:30 PM
Thursday, February 16: 3:00–5:00 PM
Friday, February 17: 9:00–11:00 AM
Friday, February 17: 2:00–4:00 PM
Interviewers should be art historians, art educators, designers, museum-studies professionals, critics, curators, and studio artists with significant experience in their fields or experience on a search committee.
You may volunteer for one, two, three, or all four Mock Interview Sessions. All sessions occur in the SEPC Lounge. Please send your name, affiliation, position, contact information, and the days and times that you are available to Megan Koza Mitchell, chair of the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee. Deadline: January 31, 2017.
The Mock Interview Sessions are not intended as a screening process by institutions seeking new hires.
Fall CAA Meet and Greets
posted by CAA — September 23, 2016
This fall, CAA will visit local New York colleges and universities and host a number of wine and cheese receptions throughout the country, connecting professionals in the visual arts within their communities. Taking place at many art institutions in major U.S. cities, these meet-and-greets are a great opportunity to join arts scholars and art makers in your area. Whether you are an existing or former CAA member, work in some capacity in the arts, or are just curious about what we do, we hope you will be able to join us.
CAA’s new executive director, Hunter O’Hanian, will attend many of the receptions and will discuss his ideas and vision for the future of CAA. Come meet new CAA members and reconnect with fellow members.
Upcoming Receptions and Meet and Greets
Brunswick, ME Sept. 24, 3:30PM Bowdoin College Museum of Art
Please RSVP to the Brunswick, ME event here.
Boston, MA Sept 26, 5:30PM Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Paine & Bakalar Galleries
Please RSVP to the Boston, MA event here.
Nashville, TN Sept. 26, 6:30PM Vanderbilt University, Sarratt Center Gallery
Please RSVP to the Nashville, TN event here.
Portland, OR Oct. 5, 6:00PM Yale Union
Please RSVP to the Portland, OR event here.
2017 Annual Conference Registration is Now Open!
posted by CAA — September 23, 2016
 Artwork by Julia Oldham, The Loneliest Place, 2015. Art Journal Spring 2016. Our very busy September at CAA rolls on. Earlier this month we launched CAA Connect, our new digital discussion and resource library platform. This week, we open registration for the 2017 Annual Conference in New York, February 15–18, 2017 at the New York Hilton Midtown. With the opening of registration we also launch myCAA, a new campaign aimed at making CAA the best organization for its members. MyCAA is designed to encourage participation in and ownership of CAA. You will hear more about myCAA in the coming months, but contributing to the myCAA discussion community on CAA Connect is a great start! There is also an Annual Conference discussion community that will help us build a better conference with your feedback. For the 2017 Annual Conference we kept registration rates the same as the 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. and we managed to secure the lowest hotel rates for New York City since 2011. This is all part of our effort to create an Annual Conference our members will return to year after year. Single session tickets are also now at the lowest rate since 2001. Early and online registration is available through December 19, 2016.
The 2017 Annual Conference will have more sessions than ever, an astounding 270-plus, due to the changes we made to the conference structure last year. We are thrilled to welcome two leading scholars as our Convocation Speaker and our Distinguished Scholar for 2017. Convocation Keynote Speaker Mary Miller, Sterling Professor of History of Art, and recently appointed the senior director of the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage at Yale University Distinguished Scholar Kaja Silverman, Katherine Stein Sachs CW’69 and Keith L. Sachs W’67 Professor of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania Also new for the 2017 Annual Conference:
For more information on travel discounts, car rentals, and booking your hotel room, visit the conference website, email CAA Member Services at membership@collegeart.org, or call 212-691-1051, ext. 1. We look forward to seeing you in New York! |
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — September 23, 2016
Alison C. Fleming reads Federico Barocci and the Oratorians: Corporate Patronage and Style in the Counter-Reformation by Ian F. Verstegen. The book “efficiently tackles the subject” of “the interior decoration of the Chiesa Nuova in Rome,” with a focus on Federico Barocci “and how his style corresponded so well to the tenets of the Oratorians that they repeatedly sought his paintings.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Claudia Swan reviews Benjamin Schmidt’s Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World. Merging historical and art-historical elements, this “formidable study” examines artworks and luxury goods “produced in Dutch ateliers between 1670 and 1730 under the rubric of ‘exotic geography,’” which the author views as “a new rhetorical and artistic mode.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Carol Damian discusses two books centered on the questions of what is a Latino and what is Latino art: Thirteen Way of Looking at Latino Art, by Ilan Stavans and Jorge J. E. Gracia, and Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, an exhibition catalogue from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Both books evidence how “the entire Latino issue is a construct, complicated, and imperfect” and “make valuable contributions to this ongoing discussion.” 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.