CAA News Today
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.
New in caa.reviews
posted by admin — January 06, 2017
Peter Gena reads Records Ruins the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording by David Grubbs. In this “excellent and meticulously researched book,” Grubbs examines “several early recordings along with a number of post-Cagian minimalists and free improvisers.” The volume is “highly recommended and a must-read for anyone probing new music and recordings.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Eloise Quiñones Keber reviews Alessandra Russo’s The Untranslatable Image: A Mestizo History of the Arts in New Spain, 1500–1600. The author “extends and deepens her excursions into the creative and cultural dynamics of the art forms of early colonial New Spain” while advocating “their necessary place in contemporaneous Renaissance and early modern art history” in this “learned, insightful, and challenging” study. Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Sonja Drimmer examines Postcards on Parchment: The Social Lives of Medieval Books by Kathryn M. Rudy. Over the course of “three hundred riveting pages,” Rudy establishes “a new category of late medieval object, which she terms ‘parchment painting.’” The book is full of “intrepid flights of scholarship” and “like the manuscripts that it revives,” it “is prodigious with riches.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Gennifer Weisenfeld discusses Christine Guth’s Hokusai’s Great Wave: Biography of a Global Icon. “A landmark in multidisciplinary scholarly sophistication,” the volume “examines the long and storied history of one Japanese artwork as it has circulated around the world being imagined, reimagined, and reimaged, thereby fusing the local and global across time.” 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.
Saturday Symposia Sessions
posted by Christopher Howard — December 29, 2016
A day-long series of panels on subjects of importance to the membership and the wider visual-arts community, called Saturday Symposia Sessions, will take place at the 2017 Annual Conference in New York on February 18. The four topics in this special programming are: “Museums,” “The Design Field,” “International Art History,” and “Interventions in the Future of Art History.”
The “Museums” rubric opens with a session called “Cultural Preservation and Its Publics.” Next, the Design History Society, one of CAA’s eighty affiliated societies, will facilitate a discussion on “Beyond Boundaries: Art and Design Exhibitions as Transnational Exchange from 1945.” Laura Flusche, executive director of the Museum of Design Atlanta, has found three artists—Sheryl Oring, Patricia Cronin, and Susan Stockwell—to explore “Museums, Artists, and Social Change.” Ending the track is “Preservation by Other Means,” a session lead by Chad Elias and Mary K. Coffey, both of Dartmouth College, that will examine contemporary art and the destruction of cultural heritage.
For “The Design Field,” the 2017 conference will feature “Making Objects Speak: Speculative Design, Critical Making, and the Internet of Things,” led by Gwyan Rhabyt of California State University, East Bay. Following that will be “Design and Science: Catalyzing Collaborations,” chaired by Leslie Atzmon of Eastern Michigan University. Wrapping up the track is a session put together by Andrew DeRosa of Queens College, City University of New York, and Laura Scherling from Columbia University’s Teachers College, called “Ethics in Design.”
Several sessions will address “International Art History.” Nazar Kozak of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine will chair “Holy Images on the Move.” Next, Ittai Weinryb of the Bard Graduate Center will lead a conversation with eight panelists about “Future of the Research Institute.” Shortly after that is “Global Conversations IV” chaired by David J. Roxburgh of Harvard University. This talk about “Transnational Collaborations and Interdisciplinary”, is the fourth and final session in a series taking place throughout the conference to celebrate five years of the CAA-Getty International Program. The last session for “International Art History” is titled “Figures and Formations of Civic Space”; four speakers are scheduled to give presentations.
For conference attendees wishing to make “Interventions in the Future of Art History,” CAA recommends following this symposium track. Karen J. Leader of Florida Atlantic University and Amy K. Hamlin of St. Catherine University will chair four sessions: “The Pragmatism in the History of Art,” “Art History Plays with Food,” “Art History as Table, Not Tower: A Practical Conversation about Diversity,” and “What Have You Done for Art History Lately? 2017 Edition.” The fifth session in the “Interventions” rubric—with the timely topic of “Defining and Exploring Socially Engaged Art History”—will be led by Cindy Persinger from California University of Pennsylvania and Azar M. Rejaie from the University of Houston, Downtown.
For full descriptions of the Saturday Symposia Sessions and lists of all speakers and the titles of their presentations, please visit the conference website.