CAA News Today

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)

Filed under: Books, Grants and Fellowships, Publications, Uncategorized —

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.)

Filed under: CAA News, Uncategorized —

Case Studies and Examples for Evaluating Digital Scholarship

posted by michelle — Feb 23, 2016

Strong case studies of digital humanities scholarship exist, and compelling resources continue to proliferate. Scholarly societies, including the American Historical Association (AHA), Modern Language Association (MLA), and more recently the College Art Association (CAA), and Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) have developed guidelines for use by institutions and individuals. Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, CAA and SAH formed a joint task force that explored existing guidelines and literature, surveyed faculty and administrators, and developed Guidelines for the Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in Art and Architectural History. Adopted by the boards of both societies, the guidelines are available for download on the SAH and CAA websites and we encourage their adoption and use. The task force reviewed many resources in the course of eighteen months. Some of these are described below to provide a context for current digital evaluation in addition to the recently published CAA/SAH guidelines.

Sources such as the Journal of Interactive Pedagogy and Pedagogy and Manifold Scholarship, and sites such as Mapping Gothic France, HyperCities, and ArtHistoryTeachingResources.org are places where digital scholarship is being practiced, peer reviewed, and successfully included in promotion and tenure portfolios. Benchmark portals such as the NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) NEH Summer Institutes (Storify of the proceedings can be found here) offer useful white papers: “Digital Humanities Scholarship: Recommendations for Chairs in Language and Literature Departments“; “Guidelines for Promotion and Tenure Committees in Judging Digital Work”; and “Statement on Authorship.” Kristine M. Bartanen’s excellent “Digital Scholarship and the Tenure and Promotion Process“ contains valuable guidance. Published to Academic Commons in July 2014, Bartenan provides a comprehensive literature review and resource portal for the evaluation of digital scholarship. The review contains both model guidelines for promotion and tenure and appendices for a range of resources, literature, and organizations pertinent to understanding and developing evaluation methods.

In the fall of 2012 the Journal of Digital Humanities published their fourth issue, which centered on the “importance of assessment and the scholarly vetting process around digital scholarship.”[1] (The full journal issue can be accessed here.) The issue addresses the need for guidelines and dialogue for assessing digital scholarship in the humanities, offers case studies and examples, and reflects on the successes, issues, and failures of the methods employed. Though much of the content is not art or architectural history-specific, it is still relevant to CAA’s and SAH’s memberships. A broad overview of the contents of this journal issue is provided below so that readers can zero in on the material most germane to their own needs. Readers are encouraged to make use of the excellent bibliographies attached to each of the issue’s essays.

The issue is divided into four major sections: “The Problem Stated,” “Approaches,” “Institutional Guidelines,” and “Resources.” In the introductory section of “Living in a Digital World: Rethinking Peer Review, Collaboration, and Open Access,” Sheila Cavanagh highlights the importance of retraining processes and expectations of evaluation around digital scholarship, including “encouraging faculty who hire, tenure, and mentor junior scholars to acknowledge the complicated factors in the world of digital scholarship . . . for example, faculty often have difficulty identifying appropriate experts to participate in more traditional peer review processes.”[2] In “Evaluating Collaborative Digital Scholarship (or, Where Credit is Due),” Bethany Nowviskie highlights the inability of many humanities evaluative committees to adequately understand and appropriately review and reward the type of collaborative work that digital scholarship is often predicated upon. She contends that “the T&P [tenure and promotion] process is a poor fit to good assessment (or even, really, to acknowledgement) of collaborative work, because it has evolved to focus too much on a particular fiction. That fiction is one of ‘final outputs’ in digital scholarship.”[3]

The “Student Collaborators’ Bill of Rights“ from UCLA’s Digital Humanities program provides important guidance about how to understand, review, and reward collaborative digital humanities scholarship, especially in light of hierarchies of power experienced by student and “alt-ac” collaborators.[4] Nowviskie hails certain aspects of the AHA Guidelines for Evaluation of Digital Scholarship, particularly their underscoring of collaborative digital work as a type of perpetual peer review. At a National Endowment for the Humanities “Off the Tracks” workshop in 2011, Nowviskie, Matt Kirschenbaum, Doug Reside, and Tom Scheinfeldt collaborated on a provocative “Bill of Rights” for collaborators that might serve as a guidepost for promotion and tenure committees to consider. In Nowviskie’s words, “We drew on our experience administering MITH [Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities], the Scholars’ Lab, and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media—three centers that are sites for a great deal of collaboration among people who may have similar backgrounds as scholars and technologists, but whose formal institutional status may vary a great deal. We drafted something we called a ‘Collaborators’ Bill of Rights,’ which was later endorsed by the full workshop assembly and posted for public comment. Basically, it’s an appeal for fair, honest, legible, portable (this is important!), and prominently displayed crediting mechanisms. It also offers a dense expression of underlying requirements for healthy collaboration and adequate assessment from the point of view of practicing digital humanists, with special attention to the vulnerabilities of early-career scholars and staff or non-tenure-track faculty.” Their recommendations are as follows:

Committees must consider not only the products of digital work but the processes by which the work was (and perhaps continues to be) co-created;
Scholars (even while they ask to have their critical agency as individuals taken seriously in tenure and promotion cases) are obligated to make the most generous and inclusive statements possible about the contributions of others;
Credit should be expressed richly and descriptively, but also in increasingly standardized forms, legible within a variety of disciplines and communities of practice;
We must negotiate expressions of shared credit at the outset of projects and continually, as projects evolve;
We must promote fair institutional policies and practices in support of shared assertion of credit, such as those which make collective and individual ownership over intellectual property meaningful and actionable;
And, finally, we must accept that collaborators themselves, regardless of rank or status, have the ultimate authority and responsibility for expressing their contributions and the nature of their roles.

Other relevant literature includes Todd Presner’s essay “How to Evaluate Digital Scholarship,” directed at the audiences within the art and architectural history-specific community: “The document is aimed, foremost, at Academic Review Committees, Chairs, Deans, and Provosts who want to know how to assess and evaluate digital scholarship in the hiring, tenure, and promotion process. Secondarily, the document is intended to inform the development of university-wide policies for supporting and evaluating such scholarship.”[5] Presner offers a succinct and clear checklist for promotion and tenure boards, engaging them in dialogue around initial review, crediting, intellectual rigor, impact, peer review, and experimentation, among other topics.

Geoffrey Rockwell’s “Short Guide to Evaluation of Digital Work” deepens and extends Presner’s checklist in compelling and practicable ways, and Laura Mandell’s essay “Promotion and Tenure for Digital Scholarship” offers a useful and clear coda full of concrete examples such as the HyperCities project and Voyant, a software text analysis tool. It is not overstating the importance of these three essays alone to suggest that every promotion and tenure board member might be asked to read them to educate themselves on the shifting boundaries of their discipline, and the ways in which their analysis of promotion and tenure portfolios must change and adapt. In addition, in the third section of the journal issue, the MLA’s Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media is similarly designed to “help departments and faculty members implement effective evaluation procedures for hiring, reappointment, tenure, and promotion. They apply to scholars working with digital media as their subject matter and to those who use digital methods or whose work takes digital form.”[6]

James Smithies’s essay “Evaluating Scholarly Digital Outputs: The Six Layers Approach” offers a different style of checklist, a bird’s-eye view of the different types of digital scholarship output, but one that is most useful if the reader—part of a promotion and tenure board or otherwise—is already informed about and open to considering digital scholarship on par with analog modes. Katherine D. Harris’s “Explaining Digital Humanities in Promotion Documents” is a comprehensive and fruitful overview of her foray into learning “how best to sell Digital Humanities, scholarly editing, and Digital Pedagogy to my colleagues.”[7] Harris, associate professor of English literature at San Jose State University, shares her statement for promotion and her approach to the practical question of formatting and outlining her digital scholarship as part of her promotion and tenure binder. With few models to consult, she crowdsourced her questions via Twitter and other channels in order to produce her promotion and tenure document, finally settling on a narrative-based approach that outlines her own collaborative and individual contributions to the field, and includes examples of her concrete research and pedagogy projects in progress and completed, publications, conferences, and supporting quotations from the Digital Humanities Community Wiki and Digital Humanities Now.

While every essay in the fall 2012 Journal of Digital Humanities issue is well worth consultation, the final resource to flag is the MLA’s “Evaluation Wiki of the Committee on Information Technology.” This report takes the form of a checklist of documents that digital scholars should amass as part of preparation for promotion and tenure, and it might be used in tandem with Harris’s model statement.

Both CAA and SAH leadership teams encourage the wide dissemination and adoption of the newly published guidelines, as well as a CAA 2017 panel or forum models that facilitate questions, feedback, and discussion around the issues raised.

Michelle Millar Fisher is a doctoral candidate in Architectural History at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art.

[1] Daniel J. Cohen and Joan Fragaszy Troyano, “Closing the Evaluation Gap,” Journal of Digital Humanities vol. 1, no. 4 (Fall 2012): i. They continued: “As digital humanities continues to grow and as more scholars and disciplines become invested in its methods and results, institutions and scholars increasingly have been debating how to maintain academic rigor while accepting new genres and the openness that the web promotes.”

[2] Ibid, 9.

[3] Ibid, 17.

[4] Authored by Haley Di Pressi, Stephanie Gorman, Miriam Posner, Raphael Sasayama, and Tori Schmitt, with contributions from Roderic Crooks, Megan Driscoll, Amy Earhart, Spencer Keralis, Tiffany Naiman, and Todd Presner, this document endorses the Collaborators Bill of Rights, developed during the workshop “Off the Tracks—Laying New Lines for Digital Humanities Scholars” held at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), January 20–21, 2011, and described below. The UCLA document adds principles to safeguard students when working on projects with scholars who are senior to them.

[5] Ibid, 36.

[6] Ibid, 91–94.

[7] Ibid, 71.

Filed under: Digital Issues, Standards and Guidelines, Uncategorized —

CAA and SAH Release Guidelines for the Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in Art and Architectural History

posted by Christopher Howard — Feb 23, 2016

The College Art Association (CAA), working jointly with the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), has released its Guidelines for the Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in Art and Architectural History for Promotion and Tenure. The guidelines are the result of a Task Force convened by the two associations of ten members from the academic community with experience in digital research, publication, and/or scholarly communications and administration. Established by the Board of Directors in October 2014 and supported by funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, this joint task force of CAA and SAH was co-chaired by DeWitt Godfrey, president, CAA and professor of art and art history, Colgate University; and Kenneth Breisch, SAH president and assistant professor, School of Architecture, University of Southern California.

See the SAH announcement.

The project methodology was developed through a collaborative process involving the Task Force, consultant, researcher, and representatives from CAA and SAH. Research components included results from surveys of CAA and SAH members and department chairs, a similar questionnaire for graduate students, interviews with scholars and administrators, research on existing disciplinary and institutional evaluation guidelines, and a review of relevant literature. Alice Lynn McMichael, PhD candidate in Byzantine art history and digital fellow at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, and Raym Crow, principal at Chain Bridge Group served as researcher and consultant.

In addition to a review of current guidelines and current literature on the topic, the researcher was charged with balancing broad survey data with more in-depth discussions of topics that resonate with evaluators of digital work. To this end, interviews were conducted with constituents from sixteen institutions across the United States that produce digital work regularly in art and/or architectural history. Institutions were either public and private and research-intensive or teaching-focused. Interviewees at those institutions had varying academic ranks and included department members, librarians, provosts, deans, chairs, and directors of humanities centers or similar.

Highlights from surveys from CAA and SAH members and interviews include the following:

Most CAA respondents, across all professional ranks, have never used data gathering and imaging tools (83%), data analysis and visualization tools (80%), three-dimensional modeling (75%), digital storage and preservation tools (73%), and geospatial analysis tools (65%).
Many characteristics of digital resources were generally valued as important, with the highest importance placed on permanent archiving, documentation of the resource, and ease of use; and relatively less importance on the availability of underlying data, financial sustainability, and permanent citation.
Graduate students report the highest confidence in evaluating digital scholarship.
Less than 4 percent of total respondents knew of existing evaluative criteria for digital scholarship in their departments.
The largest barrier to digital scholarship is lack of access to training.

Read the full Guidelines here. An essay, “Case Studies and Examples for Evaluating Digital Scholarship” by Michelle Millar Fisher, a task force member, provides background information on evaluating digital resources and can be found on the College Art Association website.

Members of the Task Force included:

Suzanne Preston Blier, Allen Whitehall Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
Kenneth Breisch, SAH President, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, University of Southern California, and Cochair of Task Force
Linda Downs (ex officio), Executive Director, College Art Association
Gabrielle Esperdy, Associate Professor, School of Architecture, New Jersey Institute of Technology, and Editor of SAH Archipedia
Michelle Miller Fisher, PhD Candidate, Art History, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, and Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, Museum of Modern Art
Pamela M. Fletcher, Professor of Art History, Chair of Art Department, and Codirector of Digital and Computational Studies Initiative, Bowdoin College
DeWitt Godfrey, CAA President, Professor of Art and Art History, Colgate University, and Cochair of Task Force
Anne Collins Goodyear, Codirector, Bowdoin College Museum of Art
Paul Jaskot, Professor, History of Art and Architecture, DePaul University, and Andrew W. Mellon Professor, CASVA
Bruce M. Mackh, Director, Arts and Cultural Management Program, Michigan State University
Tara McPherson, Associate Professor, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California
Abby Smith Rumsey, Former Director, Scholarly Communication Institute, University of Virginia
Pauline Saliga (ex officio), Executive Director, Society of Architectural Historians
Ann Whiteside, Librarian and Assistant Dean of Information Services, Harvard University

About CAA

The College Art Association is dedicated to providing professional services and resources for artists, art historians, and students in the visual arts. CAA serves as an advocate and a resource for individuals and institutions nationally and internationally by offering forums to discuss the latest developments in the visual arts and art history through its Annual Conference, publications, exhibitions, website, and other programs, services, and events. CAA focuses on a wide range of issues, including education in the arts, freedom of expression, intellectual-property rights, cultural heritage, preservation, workforce topics in universities and museums, and access to networked information technologies. Representing its members’ professional needs since 1911, CAA is committed to the highest professional and ethical standards of scholarship, creativity, criticism, and teaching. Learn more at collegeart.org.

About SAH

Founded in 1940, the Society of Architectural Historians is a nonprofit membership organization that promotes the study, interpretation and conservation of architecture, design, landscapes and urbanism worldwide. SAH serves a network of local, national and international institutions and individuals who, by vocation or avocation, focus on the built environment and its role in shaping contemporary life. SAH promotes meaningful public engagement with the history of the built environment through advocacy efforts, print and online publications, and local, national and international programs. Learn more at sah.org.

Filed under: Digital Issues, Standards and Guidelines, Task Force, Uncategorized —

2016 Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant Winners

posted by Christopher Howard — Feb 18, 2016

CAA is pleased to announce the 2016 recipients of the Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant. This program, which provides financial support for the publication of book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art, is made possible by a generous grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. For this grant, “American art” is defined as art (circa 1500–1980) of what is now the geographic United States.

The nine Terra Foundation grantees for 2016 are:

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 have also been awarded travel funds and complimentary registration for CAA’s 2017 Annual Conference in New York; they also received one-year CAA memberships.

The two author awardees for 2016 are:

Will Norman
Annika Öhrner

Filed under: Books, Grants and Fellowships, People in the News, Uncategorized —

Grants, Awards, and Honors

posted by CAA — Feb 15, 2016

CAA recognizes its members for their professional achievements, be it a grant, fellowship, residency, book prize, honorary degree, or related award.

Grants, Awards, and Honors is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.

February 2016

Jay A. Clarke, Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has been named a 2016 curatorial fellow by the Center for Curatorial Leadership.

Lily Cox-Richard, an artist based in Houston, Texas, has received a 2015 Houston Artadia Award, which comes with an unrestricted grant of $12,000.

Claire Daigle, associate professor and chair of the MA program in the history and theory of contemporary art at the San Francisco Art Institute in California, has won a 2015 award from the Arts Writers Grant Program, administered by Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, for her blog, Figuring Fiction.

Susan Fisher, executive director and chief curator at the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation in New York, has been chosen by the Center for Curatorial Leadership to join its 2016 class of curatorial fellows.

Johanna Gosse, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in New York, has accepted a 2015 award from the Arts Writers Grant Program, overseen by Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. She will work on her book, On Site: Ray Johnson’s New York.

Valerie Hillings, curator and manager of curatorial affairs for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s Abu Dhabi Project in the United Arab Emirates, has been selected as a 2016 curatorial fellow by the Center for Curatorial Leadership.

Elise Kirk, an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, has accepted a Working Artist Photography Award. Kirk was selected for the month of September 2015.

Courtney Martin, assistant professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, has won a 2015 award from the Arts Writers Grant Program, steered by Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. She will work on her book, A Critical Language: Lawrence Alloway’s Words to the Art World.

Theresa Papanikolas, curator of European and American art at the Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawai‘i, has been named a 2016 curatorial fellow by the Center for Curatorial Leadership.

Melissa Ragain, assistant professor of art history at Montana State University in Bozeman, has received a 2015 award from the Arts Writers Grant Program, administered by Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. She will use the funds to work on her article, “Environmental Aesthetics in the Postwar University.”

Daniel Schulman, director of visual art for the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events in Illinois, has been chosen to be a 2016 curatorial fellow by the Center for Curatorial Leadership.

Martha Schwendener, an art critic for the New York Times and a PhD candidate in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, has received a 2015 award in short-form writing from the Arts Writers Grant Program, administered by Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Deborah Stratman, an artist and filmmaker based in Chicago, Illinois, has been named a USA Collins Fellow for 2015 in the media category by United States Artists. The award comes with an unrestricted grant of $50,000.

Deborah Willis, a photographer, curator, author, historian, and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, has received an honorary degree from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: Grants Awards Honors, Member News, Member Spotlight —

Launch of New caa.reviews Website

posted by Christopher Howard — Jan 28, 2016

CAA and Routledge are pleased to announce the launch of a new website for caa.reviews, an online, open-access journal of book and exhibition reviews in the visual arts. The new site has a cleaner look, is easier to navigate, and has faster and smarter search tools. New filters based on geography, time period, and genre or specialization allow readers to narrow and focus search results, making it easier to find specific articles. An important addition for caa.reviews is a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-ND), making reviews available for redistribution if the content is unaltered and appropriate credit is given.

DeWitt Godfrey, president of the CAA Board of Directors, writes: “For over seventeen years, caa.reviews has been the only scholarly journal solely dedicated to the review of books and exhibitions. The journal would not exist without the dedication and hard work of the Council of Field Editors and caa.reviews Editorial Board, past and present, who produce 150 substantial reviews each year. CAA is grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for its original support of the journal and to Taylor & Francis for making the new version of the journal possible.”

caa.reviews, founded in 1998, 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 CAA. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate. In reviewing and publishing recent texts and projects, caa.reviews fosters timely, worldwide access to the intellectual and creative materials and issues of art-historical, critical, curatorial, and studio practice; the journal also promotes the highest standards of discourse in the disciplines of art and art history. Explore the new site today.

Filed under: caa.reviews, Publications —

Launch of New caa.reviews Website

posted by CAA — Jan 28, 2016

Filed under: caa.reviews, Publications, Uncategorized —

Recipients of the 2015 Professional Development Fellowships

posted by Christopher Howard — Jan 22, 2016

CAA has awarded four 2015 Professional-Development Fellowships—two in the visual arts and two in art history—to graduate students in MFA and PhD programs across the United States. In addition, CAA has named two honorable mentions in art history and four in the visual arts. The fellows and honorable mentions also receive a complimentary one-year CAA membership and free registration for the 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC.

Receiving fellowships in the visual arts are:

Delano Dunn, School of Visual Arts, $10,000
Derrick Woods-Morrow, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, $4,000 (gift of the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation)

The two recipients of the fellowship in art history are:

Marin Sarvé-Tarr, University of Chicago, $10,000
Emilie Boone, Northwestern University, $2,500 (gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Museum Educational Trust)

The honorable mentions for art history go to: Adrian Anagnost, University of Chicago; and Monica Bravo, Brown University. For the visual arts, honorable mentions are bestowed upon: Zhiwan Cheung, Carnegie Mellon University; Sarah Hewitt, Purchase College, State University of New York; Victoria Maidhof, San Francisco Art Institute; and Kaiya Rainbolt, San Diego State University.

DeWitt Godfrey, president of the CAA Board of Directors, will formally recognize the fellows and honorable mentions at the 104th Annual Conference during Convocation, taking place on Wednesday evening, February 3, 2016, at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel.

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 2016 fellowship cycle will open in late spring.

Fellows in the Visual Arts

Delano Dunn

Born in Los Angeles, California, Delano Dunn currently lives and works in New York. Through painting, mixed media, and collage, he explores questions of racial identity and perception through various contexts, ranging from the personal to the political and drawing from his experience growing up in South Central LA.

Dunn has had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, and Buffalo and is currently completing an MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He holds a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo show at the 2016 Affordable Art Fair and a group show at Artspace in New Haven, Connecticut. His work is also on view at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts in Wilmington until March 4.

View images of Dunn’s work: Example 1, Example 2, Example 3.

Derrick Woods-Morrow

Derrick Woods-Morrow was born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina. He is an MFA student in the Photography Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in Illinois. He holds a BA from Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and earned a postbaccalaureate certificate from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt) in Boston. Woods-Morrow’s work has been shown at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, Randolph’s Maier Museum of Art, the President’s Gallery at MassArt, the Sullivan Galleries at SAIC, and the ACRE residency, where he was a Terry Plumming Scholar. He has received the Carol Becker Merit Scholarship at SAIC.

Woods-Morrow’s work explores the problematic ideals of masculinity embedded in systems that constructs gay pornography, where intimacy is frail and domination and disregard are desired traits; where oppressive force is the norm; where the African American does not exist except as fetishized commodity; and where a prevailing use of heterosexual vocabulary continues to establish masculine credibility within queer imagery.

View images of Woods-Morrow’s work: Example 1, Example 2.

Fellows in Art History

Marin Sarvé-Tarr

Marin Sarvé-Tarr will complete a PhD in art history at the University of Chicago in Illinois in summer 2016. Her dissertation, “Seizing the Everyday: Lettrist Film and the French Postwar Avant-Garde, 1946–1954,” examines the films produced by members of Lettrism, Nouveau Réalisme, and the Situationist International; it also identifies informal networks between later rivals forged in cafés and ciné-clubs in 1950s Paris. Her project shows how artists’ collaborative films and public demonstrations impacted the agendas of publishers, cinemas, and museums that patronized artists, molded public reception of the arts, and figured social progress in reconstruction France. With support from the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte, the Getty Research Institute, and the Georges Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust, Marin presented on religion and the avant-garde at CAA’s 2014 Annual Conference. She is also publishing a chapter on Lettrist cinema in a forthcoming volume from the European Postwar and Contemporary Art Forum, to be published later this year.

Marin earned a BA in 2008 from Scripps College in Claremont, California, where she curated The Politics of Satire: La Caricature in Post-Revolutionary France at the Clark Humanities Museum. She contributed to exhibitions and programs at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, and the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Marin helped to organize Interiors and Exteriors: Avant-Garde Itineraries in Postwar France (2013–14) at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art. As a 2015–16 Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Research Fellow for the Chicago Object Study Initiative at the Art Institute of Chicago, Marin is currently preparing object-based research and publications on Surrealism.

Emilie Boone

Emilie Boone is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She focuses on the history of photography, the art of the African diaspora, and American art. Her dissertation, “Visions of Harlem: Reconsidering the Studio Photography of James Van Der Zee,” demonstrates the intrinsic role of Van Der Zee’s images in constructing multivalent narratives of Harlem. Boone has written for History of Photography and African Arts and for Columbia College Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography and Washington University’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in Saint Louis, Missouri. Most recently, she has contributed to an exhibition catalogue, From Within and Without: The History of Haitian Photography, for the NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale in Florida. She also has an essay in the forthcoming anthology, Towards an African-Canadian Art History: Art, Memory, and Resistance.

Boone’s honors include a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Portrait Gallery, a Fulbright fellowship at the Notman Photographic Archives, a Terra Foundation Residency in Giverny, France, and an Eliza Dangler Curatorial Fellowship at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2011, 2013, and 2015, she was an invited participant of the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. A critical-studies residency at the Center for Photography at Woodstock led to her recent role as a selection panelist for the Woodstock Artist-in-Residency Program for artists working in the photographic arts. As a postdoctoral Mellon curatorial fellow, Boone looks forward to advancing her research, teaching, and curatorial engagement at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Honorable Mentions in Visual Art and Art History

Adrian Anagnost

Adrian Anagnost is a historian of modern and contemporary art whose scholarship investigates the intersections of urban space, political economy, and aesthetic practice. She earned a PhD from the University of Chicago in Illinois in December 2015. Her dissertation, titled “Contested Spaces: Art and Urbanism in Brazil, 1928–1969,” considers how the artists and architects Flávio de Carvalho, Lúcio Costa, Lina Bo Maria Bardi, Waldemar Cordeiro, Lygia Clark, and Hélio Oiticica engaged with the built environment as a concretization of social relations in Brazil.

Before coming to Chicago, Anagnost completed an MA in modern art from Columbia University in New York, with a thesis on the contemporary photographer James Welling. She also worked in the archive and registration departments of David Zwirner in New York. Anagnost’s writings on Waldemar Cordeiro, Carol Bove, Oswald de Andrade, and Pedro Almodóvar have appeared in the Chicago Art Journal, Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas, and ArtUS. Her upcoming publications include an article on the Polish Constructivist Teresa Żarnower for the Woman’s Art Journal and an essay on the work of the contemporary artist Theaster Gates.

Monica Bravo

Monica Bravo is an ABD doctoral candidate specializing in American art in a global context and the history of photography at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She received her BA in studio art from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 2004, and an MA in art history and criticism from Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York, in 2009. Bravo’s dissertation examines exchanges between modernist photographers in the United States and modern Mexican artists working in painting, poetry, music, and photography, resulting in the development of a greater American modernism in the interwar period.

Bravo has been a fellow at the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography, the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is currently a Wyeth predoctoral fellow at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, DC.

Zhiwan Cheung

They say that geography defines a person. Born in America and raised by Chinese immigrants, Zhiwan Cheung lives in a sort of permanent in-between state of being neither fully American nor Chinese. As a journey toward a home that does not exist, a rite of passage with no destination, he uses his work to search for a critical understanding of an impossible homecoming. Cheung’s practice focuses on the meaning and space between identities, examining the feeling of a liminal displacement through sculpture, film, and performance. In approaching this journey, he probes the intersection of national identity and the personal psyche with an open-ended, multimedia approach.

Performativity gets closer to the heart of all identity. It is no coincidence that many great actors continue to employ their characters long after the camera stopped running. For the best performances, the blurring between fake and real becomes so powerful that we cease to see the actor or the character: one is constantly subsumed by the other, leaving the residue of the actual and the imaginary to shift and ebb between various in-between-states. This sacrificing of the self and the fabrication of a persona speak to the destruction of the self for art. Or is it perhaps the other way around? James Luna, a Native American performance artist, once said, “How do you talk about things like intercultural identity[?] Do you talk about it in third person? If you sacrifice yourself, so to speak, then it becomes much more dynamic.” The sacrificing of the true self and the fabricated persona speaks to the destruction of the soul for art, or perhaps it is the other way around. Life is art. Art is life.

The intersection of national identity and the personal psyche is complex, not always clear nor fixed. As an artist, Cheung probes the paths and how and where they join and diverge. This personal odyssey explores the permanent liminal through diverse strategies and processes. It is a journey guided by an allusive visual language, with a mix of pop-cultural, art-historical, and aesthetic choices that also guide audiences into finding their own rites of passage.

View images of Cheung’s work: Example 1, Example 2, Example 3.

Sarah Hewitt

She vows
To make plastic art
Redefine plastic art
To make you love plastic art
To challenge and bewitch you with what you think is formal or plastic
To make you bow to her craft\
Redefine craft
To weave
To weave your mind
To weave your mind into confusion
To drag you into the sacred without your consent

Let the work be deep, dark, and dirty—gritty. It comes from a place of authenticity. Sarah Hewitt is not looking to create a spectacle for fun or frivolity. This is serious business for her. She is crafting a new fabric in a manner that is complicated—as complicated and fragile as our contemporary moments.

Hewitt’s works are exhibited around the country and have garnered many awards, grants, and residencies, including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and a fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center. This spring she will receive her MFA in visual art from Purchase College, State University of New York.

View images of Hewitt’s work: Example 1, Example 2, Example 3.

Victoria Maidhof

Victoria Maidhof has been fascinated by unconventional people for as long as she can remember. She was raised in a middle-class suburban neighborhood where her family stood out as eccentrics. They were the only secular family on the block, and her parents encouraged their children to run wild, play hard, and reject authority. Maidhof’s father told captivating stories about his unusual upbringing, many of which revolved around his mother, a paranoid schizophrenic, and his father, a merchant marine with severe posttraumatic stress disorder.

As Maidhof got older, she became curious about other people that lived unorthodox lifestyles. Having seen the work of Mary Ellen Mark and Diane Arbus, she knew that the camera could grant permission into the lives of complete strangers. In 2003, Maidhof moved to San Francisco to study photography at the San Francisco Art Institute in California. After completing her BFA, she returned to her home town, San Diego, with her now-husband Tahan in tow. They currently reside in La Mesa, where she works full time as a photographer. Maidhof is finishing her MFA through the San Francisco Art Institute’s low-residency program.

View images of Maidhof’s work: Example 1, Example 2, Example 3.

Kaiya Rainbolt

Kaiya Rainbolt earned her BA in English literature at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, and studied studio art at City College of San Francisco in California, with a focus in metalwork. She currently attends the MFA program in jewelry and metalwork at San Diego State University. Rainbolt has participated in several national juried exhibitions and has been recognized with numerous scholarships and awards.

Though trained as a metalsmith, Rainbolt currently uses a wide variety of materials in her work, including fabrics, clothing, steel, lead, and animal hide. She is focused on creating work that has the potential to elicit a visceral response from the viewer in order to promote engagement in a way that makes it easier to participate in dialogue about socially sensitive issues. Rainbolt believes that an art object, as a representation of a particular human struggle, has the potential to span differences in experience, background, and culture in a way that creates connection, generates empathy, and fosters understanding.

View images of Rainbolt’s work: Example 1, Example 2.

Filed under: Emerging Professionals, Graduate Programs, Grants and Fellowships, People in the News, Students —

News from the Art and Academic Worlds

posted by Christopher Howard — Jan 20, 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.

Here Are the Guerrilla Girls on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

The anonymous feminist art collective Guerrilla Girls appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last week and talked about gender inequality in the art world. The collective is known for wearing gorilla masks and using the names of deceased female artists as monikers. Kathe, Zubeida, and Frida were the members that spoke with Colbert. (Read more from ARTnews.)

How Advocates of African American Art Are Advancing Racial Equality in the Art World

Only a small group of African Americans occupy curatorial positions at mainstream museums, relatively few African American artists have been given major solo museum shows, and works by nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American artists are undervalued by the art market relative to those by white artists of equal standing. Change doesn’t come organically, however. It takes individuals. (Read more from Artsy.)

New York Dealers Cannot Afford to Represent Emerging Artists

For visitors to New York art galleries who want to know why the prices are so high—or for artists who want to exhibit their work in those galleries—part of the blame may lie with the landlord, or with the real-estate market as a whole. Rents are high, averaging $100 to $200 per square foot in Chelsea and $80 to $120 on the Lower East Side. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)

Help Desk: Self-Promotion

I’m an artist who just got a solo show at a little gallery but have no idea how to promote it. I didn’t go to art school and don’t have a huge group of people to invite. I’m lost on how to market the show. Where do I start? (Read more from Daily Serving.)

320 Hours: Slow Looking and Visitor Engagement with El Greco

By the time the painting returned to its home in Cleveland, El Greco’s Holy Family with Saint Mary Magdalene and I had spent 320 hours and four months together. As an interpretation assistant for the Portland Art Museum, I was in the gallery four days a week, interacting with visitors, experimenting with interpretive strategies, and reflecting on this four-hundred-year-old painting. This experience gave me room to experiment with visitor engagement, changed how I approach the act of looking, and influenced my teaching outside the museum. (Read more from Art Museum Teaching.)

How to Explain Pictures to a Difficult Date

We live in an age when “kitsch” almost defies definition but is tossed around with great abandon: If Jeff Koons can turn tacky garden sculptures and gift-shop figurines into gazillion-dollar collectibles, lauded by a fair number of critics, what then becomes of kitsch? (Read more from Vasari21.)

Getting Your Citations in Order

Failure to acknowledge is not as big a sin as outright plagiarism, but there is something disconcerting about it. Two related problems necessarily task academics. One confronts those who enter a new field: how to make sure to build on already existing developments and avoid unnecessary wheel reinvention. The answer—as all research students are told—is to do the desk research first. (Read more from Times Higher Education.)

Facing an Impossible Choice

Maybe the problem with academics is that we take too much pride in our jobs. No doubt that sounds counterintuitive: How can pride in our work be a bad thing? It can when it inspires far too many PhDs to labor willingly for far too long in contingent positions. (Read more from Vitae.)

Filed under: CAA News —