CAA News Today
2016 Recipients of CAA’s Professional Development Fellowships
posted by Christopher Howard — January 23, 2017
CAA has awarded two 2016 Professional-Development Fellowships—one in visual art and one in art history—to graduate students in MFA and PhD programs across the United States. In addition, CAA has named one honorable mention in art history and two in visual art. The fellows and honorable mentions also receive a complimentary one-year CAA membership and free registration for the 2017 Annual Conference in New York.
Accepting the $10,000 fellowship in visual art is Daniel Seth Krauss, an MFA student in photography in the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The recipient of the $10,000 fellowship in art history is Sara Blaylock, a doctoral candidate in visual studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The honorable mention for art history goes to Lex Lancaster, a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The two honorable mentions in visual art are Allison Rose Craver, an MFA candidate at Ohio State University in Columbus, and Andrew Jilka, an MFA student at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Suzanne Preston Blier, president of the CAA Board of Directors, will formally recognize the two fellows and three honorable mentions at the 105th Annual Conference during Convocation, taking place on Wednesday, February 15, 2017, at the New York Hilton Midtown.
CAA’s fellowship program supports promising artists and art historians who are enrolled in MFA and PhD programs nationwide. Awards are intended to help them with various aspects of their work, whether for job-search expenses or purchasing materials for the studio. CAA believes a grant of this kind, without contingencies, can best facilitate the transition between graduate studies and professional careers. The program is open to all eligible graduate students in the visual arts and art history. Applications for the 2017 fellowship cycle will open in the late spring.
FELLOW IN VISUAL ART
Daniel Seth Kraus
Daniel Seth Kraus‘s work blends historical research with photographic practice to deepen our understanding of people and places. Currently his research investigates faith and work in the American South. Kraus’s work has been featured in numerous print and online publications, including Fraction Magazine, SeeSaw Magazine, Oxford American, and Aint Bad Magazine. His photographs have been exhibited in national and international juried exhibitions, including one at the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia. He earned a BFA in photography and a BA in history from the University of North Florida in Jacksonville and is pursuing a MFA in photography at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
FELLOW IN ART HISTORY
Sara Blaylock
Sara Blaylock will complete her PhD in visual studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in spring 2017. To date, the bulk of her research has concerned the experimental film, art, and visual culture of the German Democratic Republic during the 1980s. Her dissertation, “Magnitudes of Dissent: Art from the East German Margins,” focuses on how photography and film, body-based practices, print media, and galleries addressed issues of representation, performativity, and collectivity. It argues that experimental practice in a 1980s GDR was not only an antidote for but also an interpretation of a weakening state—a foil and a mirror to official culture.
Blaylock’s dissertation research has been supported by the German Academic Exchange Service and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, as well as by numerous grants from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has published in numerous academic forums. Most recently, an article appeared in Gradhiva, a French-language journal of art history and anthropology, and Blaylock contributed an essay in both German and English to the catalogue for the exhibition Gegenstimmen. Kunst in der DDR 1976–1989 [Voices of Dissent: Art in the GDR 1976–1989], held at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. Another article, “Bringing the War Home to the United States and East Germany: In the Year of the Pig and Pilots in Pajamas,” will appear in Cinema Journal later this year.
Blaylock was recently invited to codirect the International Association for Visual Culture, a scholarly organization that encourages inquiry and debate within the field and that advocates the critical and theoretical expansion of visual-culture studies in academic and artistic venues. She looks forward to helping to advance and strengthen the association’s vision.
HONORABLE MENTIONS IN VISUAL ART AND ART HISTORY
Allison Rose Craver
Allison Rose Craver will complete her MFA, with a concentration in ceramics, at Ohio State University in in Columbus in May 2017. Craver grew up in East Aurora, New York, and earned a BFA in 2010 from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in Alfred. A year later she studied as a special student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Craver has shown her work nationally, including exhibitions at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Helena, Montana, and the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. In 2014 she was invited to demonstrate in the Process Room at the annual National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts conference in Milwaukee. Craver’s work is process driven, using ceramics materials in conjunction with fiber and found objects to explore the nature of care and work.
Andrew Jilka
Andrew Jilka was born in in 1986 to a working-class home in Salina, Kansas. The son of a bus driver and a lunch lady, Jilka has been employed as a fast-food worker, a cigarette warehouse stocker, a furniture deliveryman, a Hewlett-Packard call-center representative, a bartender, and later an assistant to the artist Tom Sachs. After selling his Camaro, he enrolled at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, where he received a BFA in printmaking in 2009, as well as a scholarship to study printmaking at Hongik University in Seoul, Korea. Jilka’s work is greatly influenced by the instabilities and anxieties of his Midwestern upbringing. His painting is an attempt to reconcile the “high” of the history and lineage of contemporary painting with the Walmart culture he was raised in. Jilka approaches painting with both the deference of Brahms and the irreverence of the Ramones—and perhaps a touch of Taylor Swift. His work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions in Kansas City, Atlanta, New York, and Seoul. He is currently an MFA candidate at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Lex Lancaster
Lex Morgan Lancaster is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where they will complete their degree in May 2017. Lancaster’s dissertation, “Dragging Away: Queer Abstraction in Contemporary Art,” investigates abstraction as a tactic of queering in the work of contemporary artists who deploy nonrepresentational form for political ends. Their related article, “Feeling the Grid: Lorna Simpson’s Concrete Abstraction,” was published in ASAP/Journal (2017), and “The Wipe: Sadie Benning’s Queer Abstraction” is forthcoming in Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture. Lancaster is chairing the session on “New Materialisms in Contemporary Art” at CAA’s 2017 Annual Conference in New York.
Lancaster received their BA in art history from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. They have assisted with exhibitions and public programs at the Cleveland Museum of Art as coordinator of teen programs and intern to the curator of contemporary art, and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, as a paid summer intern in the Department of Photographs. At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Lancaster curated the exhibition Our House! Unsettling the Domestic, Queering the Spaces of Home at the Chazen Museum of Art.
myCAA Post-it Wall
posted by CAA — January 20, 2017
The myCAA Post-it Wall, located near registration on the Hilton’s second floor, is where attendees can post their notes, scribbles, messages, heartfelt missives, and anything else they feel like sharing on a myCAA Post-it. The myCAA Post-it pads will be easy to find and pick up around the conference. Get yours at CAA’s booth in the Book and Trade Fair, in the registration booth, or at the hospitality booth.
New in caa.reviews
posted by admin — January 20, 2017
Amanda Cachia visits Electronic Superhighway (2016–1966) at Whitechapel Gallery in London. The “ambitious exhibition” covers “fifty years of digital culture” and considers “how the world’s ceaseless flow of electronic information and unrelenting proliferation of images have come to impact contemporary art.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Lauran Whitworth reviews Art AIDS America, organized by the Tacoma Museum of Art and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Aiming “to be the most comprehensive exploration of the impact of AIDS on the course of American art,” the “powerful” show is “haunted by loss and erasure but simultaneously teeming with verve and resistance.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Elizabeth M. Molacek discusses the Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World exhibition, curated by Jens Daehner and Kenneth Lapatin of the Getty Villa. “A feast for the eyes,” the exhibition provided “an unprecedented opportunity” to see nearly fifty objects and “succeeded in demonstrating the significance of bronze and defining the trajectory of monumental sculpture in the Hellenistic period.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Anna Blume reads Images Take Flight: Feather Art in Mexico and Europe, 1400–1700, edited by Alessandra Russo, Gerhard Wolf, and Diana Fane. The “scholarly and magnificent book” features thirty-three essays “that reveal how feathers, birds, and images of flight became defining signifiers within art, thinking, and history during the geographical expansion of Europe into the Americas.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Hospitality Booth
posted by CAA — January 19, 2017
At the New York conference you will find a hospitality booth, where CAA staff and conference help will be stationed to answer questions about sessions and the Book and Trade Fair, or for directions to the restrooms, the lactation room, or the quiet room. Located on the second floor of the Hilton near the registration area, the hospitality booth is intended to make CAA members feel welcome at the conference. The CAA team will also be filming interviews with members at the hospitality booth.
J20 Art Strike Closure
posted by admin — January 19, 2017
CAA is taking part in the J20 Art Strike, an Act of Noncompliance on Inauguration Day. We apologize if this has caused you any inconvenience, but we consider this action important to take. This call concerns more than the art field. It is made in solidarity with the nation-wide demand that on January 20 and beyond, business should not proceed as usual.
For more information on the J20 Art Strike, including the long list of art critics, artists, curators, and institutions taking part please visit the J20 Art Strike website.
Online registration for the Annual Conference, February 15-18 in New York, will remain open.
We will be back in the office on January 23, 2017.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — January 18, 2017
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.
Controversial Capitol Painting by Former St. Louis Student Taken Down
The painting by a former St. Louis high school student was removed over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend. Rep. Dave Reichert, who petitioned its removal, said it would be taken down by the Architect of the Capitol’s office, which ultimately determines the art that hangs on the walls of the congressional art competition. On Tuesday morning, not only was the painting gone, but the placard describing it was removed, too. (Read more from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)
What’s Missing in the Teaching of Islam
In high school history books, there is little mention of the intertwined histories of Europe, Asia, and Africa in the middle ages and the Renaissance. There is even less mention of the flowering of art, literature, and architecture during this time. (Read more from the Conversation.)
Keeping God Out of the Gallery
“My work has proven to be difficult to place in commercial art galleries,” said the painter Edward Knippers. Well, we’ve heard that before. Plenty of artists say the problem isn’t the quality of their work but the gallery owner’s narrow-mindedness or something to that effect. But Knippers, a figurative painter of biblical subjects, said the real problem is what he chooses to paint: religious figures. (Read more from the Observer.)
Learning from Decolonize This Place
“You can’t talk about indigenous struggle without indigenous people involved,” said the artist, activist, and MTL+ cofounder Amin Husain. He was explaining a core principle of Decolonize This Place, a three-month residency that brought together multiple movements at the New York nonprofit Artists Space for art making, organizing, and activism, all based around direct actions targeting five issues: Free Palestine, Indigenous Struggle, Black Liberation, Global Wage Workers, and de-gentrification. (Read more from Hyperallergic.)
Citizenship, the Body, and the Ethics of Exposure
We live in a society that relishes exposure—see nude photo leaks, the Kardashians, and diaries and private correspondence cloaked with the pretense of literary or political interest—and that does not value privacy equally for all. On top of the inequity, unmediated exposure does not exist. There is always an implicit or explicit narrative being constructed in the act of baring. (Read more from Art Practical.)
Art Museums by the Numbers 2016
First released in 2014, Art Museums by the Numbers is based on aggregated data drawn from AAMD’s member survey and tracks changes over time. Comparisons between 2014, 2015, and 2016 data show little fluctuation, indicating continued stability in the field of art museums. (Read more from the Association of Art Museum Directors.)
Why Art History Might Be the Most Important Subject You Could Study Today
We Americans tend to think of the British as infinitely more refined and cultivated than we are, but England almost eliminated art history as a field of study for high school students. But after much protest from the liberal intellectual establishment, art history was “saved” and will stay on British curricula. If the cultured British nearly did away with art history, then what hope have we Americans? (Read more from Salon.)
The Problem of Predatory Journals: Fake Academia Joins Fake News
We’ve heard all about fakes this year: fake scandals, fake food, fake news. Now fraud emerges from an unexpected corner: academia—or rather, its counterfeit. Fraudulent academic groups have been soliciting papers from researchers for conferences and journals, but do not adhere to publication standards like peer review; instead, they accept papers unquestioningly and charge authors enormous fees. (Read more from Nonprofit Quarterly.)
New in caa.reviews
posted by admin — January 13, 2017
Michael Yonan visits Wordplay: Matthias Buchinger’s Drawings from the Collection of Ricky Jay at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The artist “was born without legs or hands” and created micrography, “a technique whereby minutely drawn words create an image.” The “small but excellent” exhibition managed to “illuminate the life of a little-known historical figure” and “examine a historically significant art form.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Margit Thøfner reviews Art and Antiquity in the Netherlands and Britain: The Vernacular Arcadia of Franciscus Junius (1591–1677) by Thijs Weststeijn. This “well-researched, thoughtful, and timely” book argues “for the seminal role” played by Junius’s The Painting of the Ancients in Three Books “within the history of early modern Netherlandish art theory and also in the broader European tradition.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Jeffrey Fraiman reviews Clare Robertson’s Rome 1600: The City and the Visual Arts under Clement VIII. It is a “comprehensive study of the plenitude of projects commissioned by various patrons” in the “tumultuous and transforming” time during the reign of Clement VIII. The publication “transports readers to Rome circa 1600” and “will surely inspire valuable new directions in research.” 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.
Pearson at the CAA Conference
posted by admin — January 12, 2017
The Pearson Art team is excited to be a part of the upcoming CAA Conference in New York City!
Come Visit Us at the Booth!
Stop by Pearson’s booth #505/507 to take part in our student-lead Revel demonstrations. All demo participants will be entered into a raffle to win the grand prize of an iPad mini! While at the booth you will also be able to see the new 6th edition of Stokstad & Cothren’s Art History.
Please join us in honoring the memory of Art History’s lead author, Marilyn Stokstad, at our booth reception at 3:00 pm on Friday, February 17th. We will also be hosting a Manhattan’s for Marilyn reception following the Marilyn Stokstad: A Memorial Roundtable session at 5:30 pm later that same day. All are welcome to attend.
In addition, Pearson is proud to announce the Marilyn Stokstad Graduate Student Scholarship which has been created to help pass on Marilyn’s legacy to the next generation of Art History teachers. We will have more details on this opportunity for your students available at the booth.
Participate in a Focus Group
On Thursday, February 16th & Friday, February 17th, we will be hosting a series of focus groups. We’re looking to connect with faculty members who specifically teach Art History survey courses. Each session is 90 minutes and participants will receive a $100 honorarium. Light snacks and refreshments will be served.
Interested in signing up? Please complete this brief survey to RSVP.
Space is limited so please reply right away if you are able to attend. We will try to accommodate as many respondents as possible.
Thank you and we are looking forward to seeing you in New York City!
Sincerely,
The Pearson Art Team
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — January 11, 2017
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.
How to Start a Gallery in Your Apartment
As commercial real estate balloons in cities like New York and London, and art galleries professionalize, limiting the freedoms artists are given within their spaces, artists, art professionals, and collectors have begun to make use of living space—be it an entire apartment, a guest bedroom, or even a walk-in closet—to put on the shows they want to see. (Read more from Artsy.)
Bad Times Make Great Art: Worry Less about the Art and More about the Artists
On election night a murmur started just as the last gasp faded, “Well at least we can expect some great art.” It didn’t take long for the fatalistic statement to acquire a predictive tone, eventually a waft of desperation was detectable and, ultimately, shrill fiat. The art of protest is provocative, no question. It’s often brave, usually fierce, sometimes compelling, and occasionally inspirational. (Read more from Salon.)
In the Aftermath of Oakland’s Tragedy, How Museums Can Better Serve Local Arts and DIY Venues
Museums and art institutions have largely remained distant from the Ghost Ship incident in Oakland. This perpetuates the assumption that warehouse spaces are fringe—and even irrelevant—to the formal art world. In fact, the reality is quite the opposite. (Read more from Smithsonian Magazine.)
The Ten Technologies Defining Art Right Now
Ways of making and seeing, both new and old, have defined the art in 2016 every bit as much as the hot topics under exploration. Artnet News looks back at a year of exhibitions, biennials, and art fairs to identify the ten practices that stood out as significant in helping expand the definition of what art can be, as well as dying technologies that are revisited before becoming obsolete. (Read more from Artnet News.)
Layering and Mixing with Iridescent and Interference Acrylic Paints
We’ve all seen iridescent and interference effects when viewing soap bubbles, oil slicks, flower petals, bird feathers, and more. They are common in the natural world. If they are somewhat less common in artwork, it might simply be that they still represent new and unexplored possibilities for most people, even after being part of the artists’ palette for many decades at this point. (Read more from Just Paint.)
How Can We Minimize Grade Changes?
One of the most consequential lessons I learned last semester happened after it was over. Five days after the semester ended, the emails started coming in. I’m sure you get them too: the earnest and pleading requests (sometimes polite, sometimes not) for better grades. I responded with my general policy (I only change grades if I’ve made a mistake; I round to the nearest whole number), and that seemed to satisfy most students. But one student was a tougher nut to crack. (Read more from Vitae.)
An Idiosyncratic Timeline of “Attempts to Fix the Art World”
The term “the artworld” itself seems to date only to 1964, but this timeline goes all the way back to 1793, when the revolutionary regime in France turned a certain royal palace in Paris into a public museum. The history here is selective, to be sure, but half the fun of these things is working up righteous high dudgeon over what’s been included and excluded. (Read more from ARTnews.)
How Do We Make American Museums Multilingual?
Which languages should institutions prioritize? Should choices be based on current patrons or on visitors they’d like to reach? How fully should the selected languages be incorporated into the museum: Wall text? Audio? Catalogues? Tours? Ancillary programming? Outreach? (Read more from Hyperallergic.)
2017 Recipients of CAA’s Awards for Distinction
posted by admin — January 09, 2017
CAA announces the recipients of the 2017 Awards for Distinction, which honor the outstanding achievements and accomplishments of individual artists, art historians, authors, conservators, curators, and critics whose efforts transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.
CAA will formally recognize the honorees at a special awards ceremony to be held during Convocation at the 105th Annual Conference in New York, on Wednesday, February 15, 2017, at 5:30 PM. See the conference website for full details.
Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (policeman), 2015, acrylic on PVC panel, 60 x 60 inches, 60 9/16 x 60 1/2 x 2 3/4 inches (framed) © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
Among the winners this year is Kerry James Marshall, recipient of the 2017 CAA Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work. In his 35-year career painting and making art, Marshall has depicted the African American experience through a medium that has often overlooked the lives of black Americans. His current retrospective at the Met Breuer, titled “Kerry James Marshall: Mastry” (October 25, 2016–January 29, 2017), brings together nearly 80 works by Marshall. Holland Cotter in The New York Times wrote of the show glowingly: “Mr. Marshall has absorbed enough personal history, American history, African-American history and art history to become one of the great history painters of our time.”
Kerry James Marshall biography
Faith Ringgold, the winner of the 2017 CAA Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement, is widely considered one of the most influential living African American artists. Born in Harlem in 1930, she is an artist, feminist, activist, and educator who makes use of a variety of media, including painting, quilts, sculpture, performance, and children’s books. Civil Rights, racial justice, feminism, and art history are consistent themes. Ringgold earned BS and MA degrees in art from the City College, the City University of New York, and taught in the NYC public school system for almost twenty years. Since the 1970s Ringgold has been an activist and cofounder of several feminist and antiracist organizations, along with artist Poppy Johnson, art critic Lucy Lippard, and her daughter Michelle Wallace, among others.
Full list of 2017 CAA Awards for Distinction recipients
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Kishwar Rizvi
The Transnational Mosque: Architecture and Historical Memory in the Contemporary Middle East
University of North Carolina Press
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
Ruth Fine, ed.
Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in association with the University of California Press
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions
Carmella Padilla and Barbara Anderson, eds.
A Red Like No Other: How Cochineal Colored the World
Skira Rizzoli, in association with the Museum of International Folk Art
Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Christine I. Ho
“The People Eat for Free and the Art of Collective Production in Maoist China”
The Art Bulletin, September 2016
Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism
Laura U. Marks
Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image
MIT Press
Distinguished Feminist Award
Joan Marter
Art Journal Award
Amy A. DaPonte
“Candida Höfer’s Türken in Deutschland as ‘Counter-publicity’”
Art Journal, Winter 2016
Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
Virginia Derryberry
Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
Patricia Mainardi
Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Looking Man), 2016, acrylic on PVC panel, 30 1/2 x 24 1/2 inches, © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work
Kerry James Marshall
Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Faith Ringgold
CAA/American Institute for Conservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
Tom J. S. Learner
Morey and Barr Award Finalists
CAA recognizes the 2017 finalists for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Awards for their distinctive achievements:
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award Finalists
- Niall Atkinson, The Noisy Renaissance: Sound, Architecture, and Florentine Urban Life, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Elizabeth Kindall, Geo-Narratives of a Filial Son: The Paintings and Travel Diaries of Huang Xiangjian (1609–1673), Harvard University Asia Center
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award Finalists
- Helen Molesworth, ed., Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Skira Rizzoli (honorable mention)
- Barbara Haskell and Harry Cooper, Stuart Davis: In Full Swing, National Gallery of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and DelMonico Books
- Alisa LaGamma, Kongo: Power and Majesty, Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Adrian Sudhalter, Dadaglobe Reconstructed, Kunsthaus Zürich and Scheidegger & Spiess
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions Finalists
- Andreas Marks, ed., Tōkaidō Texts and Tales: Tōkaidō “gojūsan tsui” by Kuniyoshi, Hiroshige, and Kunisada, University Press of Florida (honorable mention)
- Zdenka Badovinac, Eda Čufer, and Anthony Gardner, eds., NSK from “Kapital” to Capital: Neue Slowenische Kunst—An Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia, Moderna galerija and MIT Press
- Geoffrey Batchen, Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and DelMonico Books
- Valérie Rousseau, Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet, American Folk Art Museum
Contact
For more information on the 2017 Awards for Distinction, please contact Tiffany Dugan, CAA director of programs. Visit the Awards section of the CAA website to read about past recipients.