CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — May 18, 2016
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
How to Become a Curator
Start out as an artist instead. In school, you’re always saddled with organizing the group shows, buying the beer, placating fellow artists’ fears, making the invitations, composing the checklist, finding the funding, contacting the press, inviting the audience. Your entire art practice becomes a smudgy line between curating and art, and you grow to feel strange and unnecessary. (Read more from Momus.)
Journalism and Art: Complementary and Collaborative Storytelling
The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism project is one example of how journalists are employing the arts to get important issues off the page and screen and into people’s lives. At the same time, artists are using reporting techniques, interviews, public records, documentary footage, and photo captions to create work addressing social, economic, and political topics that usually fall within the purview of journalism. (Read more from Nieman Storyboard.)
Google Launches Tilt Brush App for Virtual-Reality Sketching
Google’s virtual-reality painting app, Tilt Brush, could allow architects and designers to walk through their sketches in three dimensions as they draw them. Available on the HTC Vive headset device, Tilt Brush allows users to create 3D imagery using a simple controller that mimics the gestures of painting. (Read more from De Zeen.)
Diversity in Academe: Who Sets a College’s Diversity Agenda?
True diversity remains a struggle for many colleges. A special report from the Chronicle of Higher Education looks at who actually sets a college’s diversity agenda, and what makes that agenda flourish or flop. These questions have taken on a special urgency as race-related protests have erupted on many campuses and as the nation’s population grows more diverse. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
How Cities Can Revitalize Their Public Spaces
A city is much more than a collection of tall buildings on the skyline. What makes a city a great place to live and visit, says James Corner, are the shared spaces—sidewalks, plazas, parks, waterfronts. Corner is part of a new wave of muscular landscape architects who argue that their work is about more than planting trees and grass: it is about reshaping the identity of a place and how the people who live there see themselves. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)
We’re All Failures
Academics are wired to achieve, and their CVs are designed to showcase their every accomplishment. While rejection is a fact of academic life, most faculty don’t share the gory details. Every successful scholar has tanked job interviews; been turned down for fellowships, postdocs, and grants; and had publications that flopped. So it’s been inspiring to see scholars go public with “CVs of Failure” that list their numerous brushes with defeat in glorious detail. (Read more from Vitae.)
The Job-Search Buddy System
The academic enterprise values individual contributions, even though scholarly achievements require a communal effort. While metrics that weigh heavily on the number of papers, books, seminars, and discoveries that individuals produce are an essential part of scholarly training, the environment this creates may condition scholars to pursue all of their career goals without assistance from others. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Why Is Scholarly-Communication Reform So Hard to Talk About, and Where Are the Authors?
Readers of any number of professional listservs, magazines, and journals may have noticed that questions about scholarly-communication reform tend to be vexed and controversial. Having participated in these conversations for over twenty years, and having recently gotten home from a conference that dealt specifically with such questions, I’ve been thinking about why feelings run so high when we talk about them. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
The College Art Association and Terra Foundation for American Art Invite Applications for 2017 Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant
posted by CAA — May 17, 2016
The College Art Association (CAA) and Terra Foundation for American Art invite applications for the 2017 Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant. The grant provides financial support for the publication of book-length scholarly manuscripts on the history of American art from circa 1500 to 1980 in the current-day geographic United States. The deadline for applications is September 15, 2016.
“Now in its sixth year, this international grant program helps to ensure that the field of American art history includes a wide range of culturally and geographically diverse voices,” stated Terra Foundation Publication Program Director Francesca Rose. “For example, Vardan Azatyan’s Armenian translation of Erika Doss’s book Twentieth-Century American Art increases awareness of the historical art of the United States by making important scholarship available to a broader audience and fostering international collaboration.”
Awards of up to $15,000 will be made in three distinct categories:
Grants to US publishers for manuscripts considering American art in an international context
Grants to non-US publishers for manuscripts on topics in American art
Grants for the translation of books on topics in American art to or from English.
“The generous support by the Terra Foundation for American Art to help finance book publications in the field of art history will benefit not only the recipients of the grant, but also teachers, students, and the art book reading public more generally,” says Suzanne Blier, president of CAA.
For more information on submission process, guidelines, and eligibility, please visit the CAA website.
The 2016 Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant winners were announced in February after the CAA Annual Conference in Washington, DC.
2016 TERRA FOUNDATION FOR AMERICAN ART INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATION GRANT WINNERS
- Jean-Pierre Criqui and Céline Flécheux, eds., Robert Smithson. Mémoire et entropie, Les presses du réel
- Erika Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art, translated into Armenian by Vardan Azatyan, Eiva Arts Foundation
- Eva Ehninger and Antje Krause-Wahl, eds., In Terms of Painting, Revolver Publishing
- Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal, translated into French by Karine Douplitzky, Éditions des archives contemporaines
- Rockwell Kent, Voyaging Southward from the Strait of Magellan, translated into Spanish and edited by Fielding D. Dupuy, Amarí Peliowski, and Catalina Valdés, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Chile) and Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado
- Will Norman, Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile and Culture in Midcentury America, Johns Hopkins University Press
- Annika Öhrner, ed., Art in Transfer—Curatorial Practices and Transnational Strategies in the Era of Pop, Södertörn University
- Joshua Shannon, The Recording Machine: Art and the Culture of Fact, Yale University Press
- Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties, translated into French by Anne Lemoine, C & F Éditions
Two non-US authors of top-ranked books were also awarded travel funds and complimentary registration for CAA’s 2017 Annual Conference in New York from February 15 to 18; they also received one-year CAA memberships.
The two author awardees for 2016 are:
- Will Norman
- Annika Öhrner
Image caption: Winslow Homer, Three Boys on the Shore, 1873, gouache and watercolor on paper mounted on board, 8⅝ x 13⅝ in. (image); 14⅜ x 19½ in. (mat). Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.75 (artwork in the public domain)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — May 11, 2016
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
The Digital Age of Data Art
Many artists use raw data produced by our societies as material, seeking innovative means of display or transforming it into a work of art. By blurring boundaries between art and information, data art dispels the myth of the romantic artist while offering a fundamental artistic act in a critical commentary of the digital age in which we live. (Read more from TechCrunch.)
Help Desk: Getting Paid for Curatorial Work
I’m a professional curator with over a decade of experience, mostly as a salaried professional. I’d like to do more freelance work, but curators seem to get paid nothing, absurdly little, or astronomical sums. How can I actually get paid for the work I do? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
Creating Value around Women Artists
Helen Molesworth, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, discusses why gender imbalance in museums persists, why we must expand our definition of “genius,” and what hard choices institutions must make in order to create a truly balanced program. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Beyond Cool?
I once confessed to having volunteered on a political campaign. My friend reacted with surprise: “But, nobody actually does that, do they?” With that roundabout question, he accused me of two crimes: one political, the other aesthetic. (Read more from the Point.)
Van Gogh Museum Wants to Share Its Expertise, for a Price
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has started a program to offer its professional services to private collectors, corporations, and other institutions. It says the move could create a new revenue stream as a hedge against declining government financing and global events like terror attacks that could have an effect on visitor numbers. (Read more from the New York Times.)
This Art Historian Teaches FBI Agents and Surgeons How to See
Amy Herman teaches people how to see. Her tools of choice are famous artworks from major art institutions all over the world. Her typical pupils? Cops, FBI officers, medical students, and first responders. Herman teaches a class that helps people fine-tune their observational skills—which often prove critical in solving a crime or conducting open-heart surgery. (Read more from Fast Company.)
Technology Can Make Art-History Lessons Come to Life
It’s one thing to study the elegance, beauty, and sophistication of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, but what if virtual reality or mobile technology could actually transport you there to experience the marvel itself, rather than just reading about it? A handful of organizations and technologies are tinkering in this space to make art education something that leaps out of the textbooks and engages students on a richer sensory level. (Read more from EdTech.)
Accessing Publisher Resources via a Mobile Device
Step 1: Google search on intermittent stem-cell cycling to look for article mentioned by a colleague. Step 2: Land on article at publisher website. Look at author list. Skim abstract. Yup, this is the one. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
Join a CAA Awards for Distinction Jury!
posted by CAA — May 10, 2016
CAA Needs You to Serve on a Jury!
As we start preparing for the Annual Conference, CAA is seeking members to join its Awards for Distinction Juries. Jury members must be current CAA members.
We have extended the deadline to May 20, 2016. Those selected will be acknowledged on the CAA conference website and in the Annual Convocation program, and will receive a complimentary ticket to the 2017 Annual Conference Opening Reception.
CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for individuals to serve on eight of the twelve juries for the annual Awards for Distinction for three years (2016–19). Terms begin in May 2016; award years are 2017–19. CAA’s twelve awards honor artists, art historians, authors, curators, critics, and teachers whose accomplishments transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.
Candidates must possess expertise appropriate to the jury’s work and be current CAA members. They should not hold a position on a CAA committee or editorial board beyond May 31, 2016. CAA’s president and vice president for committees appoint jury members for service.
The following juries have vacancies:
- Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award: three members
- Art Journal Award: two members
- Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize: two members
- CAA/AIC Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation: two members
- Charles Rufus Morey Book Award: three members
- Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art: two members
- Distinguished Teaching of Art Award: one member
- Frank Jewett Mather Award: one member
Nominations and self-nominations should include a brief statement (no more than 150 words) outlining the individual’s qualifications and experience and an abbreviated CV (no more than two pages). Please send all materials by email to Katie Apsey, CAA manager of programs; submissions must be sent as Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF attachments. For questions about jury service and responsibilities, contact Tiffany Dugan, CAA director of programs.
Extended Deadline: May 20, 2016.
Thank you.
NEA to Support ARTspace for 2017!
posted by CAA — May 10, 2016
National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Jane Chu has approved more than $82 million to fund local arts projects and partnerships in the NEA’s second major funding announcement for fiscal year 2016. Included in this announcement is an Art Works award of $15,000 to the College Art Association (CAA) for ARTspace, part of the CAA Annual Conference. This is the eighth consecutive year the NEA has supported ARTspace. The Art Works category supports the creation of work and presentation of both new and existing work, lifelong learning in the arts, and public engagement with the arts through 13 arts disciplines or fields.
“The arts are all around us, enhancing our lives in ways both subtle and obvious, expected and unexpected,” said NEA Chairman Jane Chu. “Supporting projects like the one from CAA offers more opportunities to engage in the arts every day.”
ARTspace is a conference within the conference tailored to the interests and needs of artists and open to all attendees. Organized by CAA’s Services to Artists Committee, it includes a large-audience session space and a media lounge. ARTspace is the site of the Annual Artists’ Interviews held on Friday afternoon. Each morning begins with coffee and tea. The 2016 Annual Conference Artists’ Interviews featured conversations between Rick Lowe and LaToya Ruby Frazier and Joyce Scott with George Ciscle.
Save the date for the 2017 Annual Conference, February 15-18 in New York City.
To join the Twitter conversation about this announcement, please use #NEASpring16. For more information on projects included in the NEA grant announcement, go to arts.gov
Smarthistory Call for Essays
posted by CAA — May 09, 2016
Smarthistory seeks to bring the expertise of individual scholars and curators to a new global audience. Smarthistory is now an independent not-for-profit organization and a leading resource for teaching and learning art history (Smarthistory received 13.5 million pageviews from more than 190 countries in 2015 alone). All content on Smarthistory is available for free and without advertising. Thanks in part to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in the last 15 months Smarthistory published 230 essays and videos with an emphasis on global content including the art of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Read more about Smarthistory here.
If you are interested in sharing your expertise in the form of short introductory essays, Smarthistory could really use your help. The website’s founders, Steven Zucker and Beth Harris, seek art historians, archaeologists, and conservators in many areas of study; they have a particular need for specialists in African, Asian, Native American, and Oceanic art.
Smarthistory uses Trello, an interactive list of essay topics chosen to support introductory art history courses. If you are interested in contributing, send an email to Zucker and Harris and please include your CV (beth@smarthistory.org and steven@smarthistory.org). If everything is in order, you will be added to the Trello Board, so that you can claim a topic in your area of specialization. If there is a topic that you feel should be added to Trello, please let Zucker and Harris know.
Spring 2016 Art Journal: Astrophysics to Arctic
posted by Christopher Howard — May 05, 2016
An astrophysical dog who travels to and escapes from a black hole is the protagonist of Julia Oldham’s The Loneliest Place, an artist’s project featured in the Spring 2016 issue of Art Journal.
The issue, the first in the editorship of Rebecca M. Brown of Johns Hopkins University, also features Emma Chubb’s essay on small-boat Mediterranean migration in the work of Isaac Julien; Natilee Harren’s exploration of Fluxboxes, the confounding commodities produced by Fluxus artists in the 1960s; and a seven-author forum on diversity and difference, moderated by Jordana Moore Saggese.
The Reviews section examines books by Gil Z. Hochberg, Jay Murphy, and Anthony Gardner; an annotated bibliography by James Walsh takes a sidelong look at the arctic plants of New York City.
New Members to the CAA Board
posted by CAA — May 04, 2016
CAA welcomes new members to the Board of Directors, Roberto Tejada of the University of Houston and Dina Bangdel of Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, who have filled vacant positions left by two resigning directors. The board also selected two directors to serve one-year officer terms: Tejada is secretary and N. Elizabeth Schlatter is vice president for Annual Conference. Four other new board members were elected in February 2016.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — May 04, 2016
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
How Identity Politics Captured the Art World
The background radiation is still there, two decades later, from the infamous 1993 Whitney Biennial—the so-called multicultural, identity-politics, political, or just bad biennial. Establishment art history at the time was a broken model, built on white men and Western civilization and certain ossified ideas about “greatness” and “genius.” New artists looking for new ways to speak to new audiences couldn’t get their voices heard or work seen. (Read more from New York.)
When the Art Gallery Closes
Although I am sad about the closing of Mixed Greens, the way the gallery presented its departure from the contemporary art scene in Chelsea feels more like a hopeful new beginning than an ending. This positive and inclusive attitude and a devotion to transparency set Mixed Greens apart from many other New York galleries. (Read more from Bmore Art.)
A Call to Replace Adjuncts with Tenure-Track Faculty Members
In his ten months as the University of Oregon’s president, Michael H. Schill has been a stalwart proponent of raising the academic profile of an institution that trails its peers in important areas, including graduation rates and research dollars. To reverse that trend, Schill says, the university needs to raise $2 billion, replace adjunct professors with tenure-track faculty members, and focus its marketing more on academics and less on athletics. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Catalogue of Internet Surf Clubs
The term “surf club,” which originated from the Nasty Nets group blog tagline “Internet Surfing Club,” is often used to describe group artist blogs where the prevailing subject is internet culture and aesthetics and where the roles of artist, curator, and archivist are blurred. Art club or online art club describes similar artist group blogs that explore digital illustration and collage or use a group blog to explore connections between works of noninternet art. (Read more from Rhizome.)
How Drawing Focuses the Mind
Sketching something close up and looking at it from afar are approached in quite different ways by the brain. When you see something familiar, the higher-order parts of the visual system quickly piece together information from the eyes to help you to understand what you’re looking at, whether it’s a whalebone corset or a designer lingerie set. (Read more from the Guardian.)
Help Desk: Quid Pro Quo
Until recently, I have only accepted offers to attend press previews at large-scale institutions when I knew I was going to write about the exhibition. Increasingly, I can’t predict whether I will want to write about a show until I see it. Is it okay—ethically, journalistically—to accept these invitations, attend press previews, and not write about the exhibition? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities
Advocates position the digital humanities as a corrective to the “traditional” and outmoded approaches to literary study. Like much Silicon Valley rhetoric, this discourse sees technological innovation as an end in itself and equates disruptive business models with political progress. Yet despite the aggressive promotion of the digital humanities as radical insurgency, its institutional success has largely involved displacing politically progressive humanities scholarship and activism in favor of manufacturing digital tools and archives. (Read more from the Los Angeles Review of Books.)
Learning from My Teaching Mistakes
As a professional failed academic, I get asked if my decisions in graduate school were to blame for my failures. The answer is, of course, yes and no. Similar to anyone else with a PhD who isn’t delusional or lying, my relationship with my doctorate contains multitudes of defeats. And now, six years after I finished, I’ve got some perspective on both what I screwed up and what I didn’t. (Read more from Vitae.)
Help Us Develop a Fair Use Curriculum!
posted by CAA — May 03, 2016
In 2015, the College Art Association published a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts that established policies on the fair use of copyrighted materials for professionals in the visual arts field. The Code outlines the principles and limitations for applying the doctrine of fair use in five areas: critical writing, teaching, making art, museum uses, and online access to archives and special collections. It is available online, along with supplementary information, at the Fair Use web page.
With the input of our members, CAA is now developing curriculum materials to help teachers educate their students about fair use so that people entering the field will start out with a basic understanding of this important doctrine. Please help us develop useful materials by completing the following short survey, which is being administered by American University, CAA’s partner on the fair use initiative.
Please complete no later than May 20.
There are only six questions that should take less than five minutes to complete.
Thank you for your help!