CAA News Today

CAA announces the 2022 recipients of Awards for Distinction. By honoring outstanding member achievements, CAA reaffirms its mission to encourage the highest standards of scholarship, practice, connoisseurship, and teaching in the arts. With these annual awards, CAA seeks to honor individual artists, art historians, authors, museum professionals, and critics whose accomplishments transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.

Among the awards, the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement is presented to Betye Saar who has not only forged a singular practice for six decades but has also influenced generations of artists, makers, and thinkers. Calling upon the legacies of artists like Joseph Cornell, her symbolic and potent assemblages, of which she’s best known, reflect on the lives, experiences, and identities of African Americans, spirituality, and cultural connectivity.

The Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art is presented to Wu Hung. Perpetually interested in the shape of time, in relation to the time of the world, he has authored many books, essays, and exhibition catalogues that bring Chinese visual culture into different orders of focus, taking into account the changing conditions of tombs, screens, performances, and protests. The scope of his work has an epic quality, allowing arguments to unfold across centuries without losing sight of the very human presence of artists and audiences.

Art Journal Award  

David J. Getsy and Che Gossett, “A Syllabus on Transgender and Nonbinary Methods for Art and Art History,” Art Journal, vol. 80, no. 4 (Winter 2021): 101-115.

Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award  

Robert Cozzolino, ed. Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art, University of Chicago Press, 2021.

Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions  

Sarah M. Miller, Documentary in Dispute: The Original Manuscript of Changing New York by Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland, Ryerson Image Centre/MIT Press, 2020. 

Frank Jewett Mather Award  

Kaira M. Cabañas, Immanent Vitalities: Meaning and Materiality in Modern and Contemporary Art. University of California Press, 2021. 

Charles Rufus Morey Book Award  

Elina Gertsman, The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books, Penn State University Press, 2021.

Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize  

Marius B. Hauknes, “Painting against Time: Spectatorship and Visual Entanglement in the Anagni Crypt,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 103, no.1 (February 2021): 7-36.

Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work  

Kent Monkman   

CAA/AIC Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation  

Zahira Véliz 

Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement  

Betye Saar 

Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art  

Wu Hung 

Distinguished Feminist Award – Artist  

In lieu of the Distinguished Feminist awards, we will recognize leaders in the field of feminist art and art history in our 2022 programming highlighting the 50th Year Anniversary of feminism at CAA. 

Distinguished Feminist Award – Scholar  

In lieu of the Distinguished Feminist awards, we will recognize leaders in the field of feminist art and art history in our 2022 programming highlighting the 50th Year Anniversary of feminism at CAA. 

Distinguished Teaching of Art Award  

Fred Hagstrom 

Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award  

Terry Smith 

Excellence in Diversity Award  

Citations:  

Art Journal Award  

David J. Getsy and Che Gossett, “A Syllabus on Transgender and Nonbinary Methods for Art and Art History,” Art Journal, vol. 80, no. 4 (Winter 2021): 101-115.

In organizing a course of study predicated on the ontological challenge to discourses of art offered by trans and nonbinary positions, David J. Getsy and Che Gossett have generously identified a major lacuna in the field and provided a toolkit for its amelioration. The jury unanimously selected their “A Syllabus on Transgender and Nonbinary Methods for Art and Art History” as the most distinguished contribution to the Art Journal in 2021. The syllabus not only identifies, positions, and summarizes critical scholarship in the field of transgender and nonbinary studies, it also demonstrates the fruitful integration of pedagogy and emerging research methodologies. Noting the relative dearth of art historical scholarship that has taken up trans methods and histories, the authors suggest the ways in which key themes and terms from art might be critically reevaluated in light of transgender studies. An introduction to each section’s bibliography synthesizes complex debates and individual arguments with remarkable clarity. Sensitive to the necessary intersections of trans analytics with critical approaches to race, ability, and class, the authors highlight readings from Black feminist thought and abolition optics, among other transversal concerns, that elucidate points of fracture within and strategies of resistance to the regulatory gender binary. At once rigorous and accessible, Getsy and Gossett’s contribution offers an adaptable blueprint for researchers and educators. 

Committee: 
Omar Kholeif, Sharjah Art Foundation 
Tilo Riefenstein, School of the Arts, York St John University 
Phil Taylor, George Eastman Museum (Chair) 

Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award  

Robert Cozzolino, ed. Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art, University of Chicago Press, 2021.

America is haunted. Genocidal policies unleashed on Native Americans; the horror of the transatlantic slave trade; war, racism, and social injustice; dark passages in community and individual histories – these traumas and more have left behind a trail of spirits. Taking as its topic the paranormal in American art, Supernatural America reveals the myriad ways in which citizens and artists have sought to see, understand, or come to terms with the ghosts of the past. Lavishly illustrated, with many images never seen before, Supernatural America breaks new ground in presenting the paranormal as a historical subject of wide-ranging importance. Incisive essays by scholars and artists cover painting and sculpture from the late 18th century to the present, spirit photography, art channeled through mediums, spiritualist paraphernalia, folk and outsider art, UFO-inspired materials, video and installation from a range of perspectives. This revealing, thought-provoking investigation into an emerging scholarly field gives proof to William Faulkner’s well-known line: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’. 

Committee: 
Susan Aberth, Bard College 
Benjamin Anderson, Cornell 
Karen Lang, University of Arizona 
Andrew Saluti, Syracuse University (Chair) 
Joyce Tsai, Clyfford Still Museum 

Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions  

Sarah M. Miller, Documentary in Dispute: The Original Manuscript of Changing New York by Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland, Ryerson Image Centre/MIT Press, 2020. 

In 2015 the Ryerson Image Centre acquired the archives of Berenice Abbott, including more than 6000 photographs and 7000 negatives, her papers, correspondences, and manuscripts. One of the key figures in the history of documentary photography, Abbott is now known as an archivist as well as an artist. It was Abbott who preserved Eugene Atget’s archives at the end of the twenties and published his work.  Her own photographs, taken while working for the WPA, consolidated her reputation as a documentary photographer.  What exactly is that reputation? In order to answer that question, Documentary in Dispute meticulously reconstructs the manuscript of the book Changing New York, first published in 1939 by Dutton & Co, with photographs by Berenice Abbott and text by renowned art critic Elizabeth McCausland. In a tour de force of archival research and scholarly presentation, Sarah M. Miller reveals how the project was altered to obscure the aesthetic, political and ethical values of photographer and author. Miller’s beautifully written, highly focused essay on Abbott and McCausland situates them in an international avant-garde which recognized the potential of image and text to transform, even to break, our habits of seeing and being.  Miller’s overall approach recalls Walter Benjamin’s own in the 1930s.  Not coincidentally, Benjamin was inspired by Abbott’s archival and photographic achievements.  

Committee: 
Susan Aberth, Bard College 
Benjamin Anderson, Cornell 
Karen Lang, University of Arizona 
Andrew Saluti, Syracuse University (Chair) 
Joyce Tsai, Clyfford Still Museum 

Frank Jewett Mather Award  

Kaira M. Cabañas, Immanent Vitalities: Meaning and Materiality in Modern and Contemporary Art. University of California Press, 2021. 

The jury has unanimously selected Kaira M. Cabañas’ Immanent Vitalities: Meaning and Materiality in Modern and Contemporary Art. Cabañas has written a highly readable volume addressing the material relations between objects and subjects as well as addressing the limiting institutional conventions of academic art history. Her work draws upon theories of new materialism, an animating force that, when attended to, requires rethinking binary categories such as living and inert or life and matter. Cabañas’ volume traverses histories and hemispheres: from the perceptual doubts engendered by the force of color in Alejandro Otero’s paintings to the enmeshed material contingencies of Gego’s metal sculptures, from the sensorial therapeutic propositions of Lygia Clark’s relational objects to the curatorial entanglements of Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck’s challenges to the grid, and from the affective agencies Mario Pedrosa located in the paintings of Djanira da Motta e Silva to the documented rituals of care obfuscating boundaries between the organic and the inorganic in Matheus Rocha Pitta’s Polaroids. Cabañas proposes an alternative to the kind of nation-bounded analyses that often burden studies of modern and contemporary art of Latin America. She addresses academic art history’s tendency to isolate along geographic lines, marginalizing practices and scholarship. Cabañas’ text thus models a critical strategy for assessing not just artworks but the field itself. 

Committee: 
Julia Bryan-Wilson, University of California, Berkeley 
Kim Theriault, Dominican University 
Andrew Wasserman, Dominican University (Chair) 

Charles Rufus Morey Book Award 

Elina Gertsman, The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books, Penn State University Press, 2021.

Countering the customary interpretation of late medieval art as relentlessly profuse and exuberant, Elina Gertsman’s The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books, explores different constructions of emptiness ranging from the presentation of voids in illustrations to represent the unrepresentable to the deliberate inclusion of physical holes in manuscript pages designed to reveal portions of other pages. Gertsman’s investigation of the “fecundity of emptiness” is a generative and compelling topic for scholars of art history/visual studies across areas, both within and outside Medieval Studies. She argues and demonstrates that, between 1200s and 1500s, the broad circulation of scientific thought and its engagement with theology and formal and literary discourses on emptiness, absence, and negation account for visual, cognitive, and material expressions on the pages of medieval books. Cross-disciplinary in its approach, Gertsman’s book simultaneously draws attention to the visual and material aspects of the manuscripts, phenomenological experience, and philosophical, religious, and scientific theories of the period. In doing so she uncovers an unexpected kinship between the medieval artists and the modernist avant-garde, where the void is regarded as the locus of the sublime and of boundless possibility. Her erudite writing and compelling approach to the subject poses questions throughout that magnify the relevance of her study and stimulate personal inquiry—as a reader reflects on other areas of consideration across time called out in the text. The book is lavishly illustrated and artfully designed with a shape and size complementary to the subject of study.  

Committee: 
John Cunnally, Iowa State University 
Christina Hellmich, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco 
Laura Anne Kalba, University of Minnesota
Lisa D. Schrenk, University of Arizona 
Dorothy Wong, University of Virginia (Chair) 

Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize  

Marius B. Hauknes, “Painting against Time: Spectatorship and Visual Entanglement in the Anagni Crypt,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 103, no.1 (February 2021): 7-36.

Marius Hauknes offers a riveting and multi-layered interpretation of the role of spectatorship in the production of meaning in the 13th-century crypt of the Anagni Cathedral. Rather than consider a viewer as a passive onlooker, he devotes attention to multiple aspects of embodied spectatorship: movement, (shifting) angles/perspectives, (in)visibility, temporality, and knowledge. These offer a powerful vantage point from which to consider the intersection of the painting program with the body itself. Drawing attention to contemporary concerns and interests in the body’s health, its cognitive capacities (and limits), and its place in the universe, Hauknes places the paintings into conversation with medicine and astrology. The images emerge as intellectual acts in a religious and political setting that grappled with problems of temporality and being. Hauknes evinces deep and extensive scholarly research, and is able to draw precise and appropriate insights from contemporary cultural and historical contexts, without losing focus on the artwork itself. While offering compelling readings of specific scenes — showing how they could connect, overlap, or echo with one another — Hauknes posits that comprehensive spectatorship was not possible. Instead, human comprehension and temporality contrasts with the divine, creating a space for reflection on the need for medicine and astrology. 

Committee: 
Nathan T. Arrington, Princeton University (Chair) 
Susanna Berger, University of Southern California 
Rachel Miller, California State University, Sacramento 

Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work  

Kent Monkman   

There is a long-standing history in the visual arts of artists bearing witness to atrocities: Goya’s painting “The Third of May,” Picasso’s “Guernica,” to name but two. Toronto-based Cree artist Kent Monkman’s exhibition “Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience” follows this tradition, with a few notable updates. On the occasion of Canada’s 150th anniversary in 2017, Monkman’s paintings featured in a cross-country touring exhibit that culminated at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology, August 6, 2020 – January 3, 2021, provides a searing critique of Canada’s colonial policies past and present, including, in the artist’s accounting: “the signing of the numbered treaties, the reserve system, genocidal policies of the residential schools, mass incarceration and urban squalor.” This is a body of work that, though tackling a grim subject matter, is often a blend of subversive humor, fantasy, and homoeroticism. And, although appropriating the form of Western history painting, Monkman’s artwork breaks from tradition by subverting and de-centering the Western gaze and re-presenting a perspective of history from the vantage point of the Indigenous peoples. Albeit, a history filtered through the particular lens of an artist who identifies as both queer and two-spirit, and through his trickster alter-ego, Miss Chief Share Eagle Testickle, the protagonist within much of Monkman’s paintings and performances. Through his use of history painting, Monkman’s project is one that reminds us of the potency of images, and the potential of the artist to provoke and challenge history and its representations.   

Committee: 
Stephen Fakiyesi, Independent Artist, Toronto 
Jessica Hong, Hood Museum, Toledo Art Museum 
Beauvais Lyons, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, (Chair) 

CAA/AIC Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation 

Zahira Véliz 

Zahria (Soni) Véliz has enhanced our understanding of art through her numerous, scholarly publications to the fields of art history and paintings conservation. Dr. Véliz has strengthened the methodological approaches of scholars who work on Spanish artists and Franz Kline through her publication record as well as her generosity as a colleague. 

Through the translation and dissemination of Spanish texts, Dr. Véliz’s has made contemporaneous information about early modern painting accessible to researchers who do not read Spanish. Artists Techniques in Golden Age Spain (1987) is often cited in technical studies of Spanish paintings. More recently, Dr. Véliz edited a translation of Jusepe Martínez’s 1673-75 Practical Discourses on the Most Noble Art of Painting (2017). These publications, along with others by Dr. Véliz on subjects including blue pigments, wooden panels, and drawing practice, have been foundational to the study of Spanish art in the United States. 

Dr. Véliz’s PhD dissertation on Alonso Cano served as a foundation for many publications on the artist. In addition, Dr. Véliz’s knowledge and skills of connoisseurship regarding Spanish drawing enriched her drawings catalogues for the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and the Museo de Bellas Artes in Asturias. As Senior Paintings Conservator for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Dr. Véliz published her research into a newly attributed painting to Diego Velázquez as well as technical and art historical research on Franz Kline’s paintings that are models of collaborative research.  

Committee Members: 
Jim Coddington, American Institute of Conservation  
Tiarna Doherty, University of Delaware, (Chair)  
Fernanda Valverde, Amon Carter Museum 

Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement  

Betye Saar  

Betye Saar (b. 1926, Los Angeles, CA) has not only forged a singular practice for six decades but has also influenced generations of artists, makers, and thinkers. Calling upon the legacies of artists like Joseph Cornell, her symbolic and potent assemblages, of which she’s best known, reflect on the lives, experiences, and identities of African Americans, spirituality, and cultural connectivity. Part of the broader Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, Saar also confronted issues of racism and sexism in groundbreaking and radical works like The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972). Saar contends the continual thread in her work is her “curiosity about the mystical.” As she wrote in 1998, “I am intrigued with combining the remnant of memories, fragments of relics and ordinary objects, with the components of technology. It’s a way of delving into the past and reaching into the future simultaneously. The art itself becomes the bridge. Curiosity about the unknown has no boundaries. Symbols, images, place and cultures merge. Time slips away. The stars, the cards, the mystic vigil may hold the answers. By shifting the point of view an inner spirit is released. Free to create.” By foregrounding the mystical, Saar sees people, cultures, contexts, temporalities as part of a larger, interconnected spiritual fabric, an understanding that is needed in a time of extreme ideological polarization, inequities, and geopolitical strife. Saar and her practice continue to resonate and inspire current generations and those to come.  

Committee: 
Stephen Fakiyesi, Independent Artist, Toronto 
Jessica Hong, Hood Museum, Toledo Art Museum 
Beauvais Lyons, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, (Chair) 

Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art  

Wu Hung  

Trained in both China and the United States, Wu Hung’s writing brings perspectives native to both cultures to bear on aesthetics, art history, and archaeology.  His arguments ground the cultures of China, from the earliest ancient survivals to the interventions of our own time in structures of mind that defy the progress narratives of the West.  He has received countless awards for work that has transformed the study of East Asian art and drawn attention to the relationship between images and the spaces within which they are observed, from the Dunhuang caves to the double screens to Zhu Jinshi’s Fangzhen: A Cubic Meter of Canvas in Berlin.  

Overall, his writings explore the many, restless transitions across time and space.  Perpetually interested in the shape of time, in relation to the time of the world, he has authored many books, essays, and exhibition catalogues that bring Chinese visual culture into different orders of focus, taking into account the changing conditions of tombs, screens, performances, and protests.  The scope of his work has an epic quality, allowing arguments to unfold across centuries without losing sight of the very human presence of artists and audiences.  He works in the discipline of art history as a poet-scholar who knows the brushstroke from the inside out, crafting prose of great clarity and nuance that opens the field to specialists and new readers alike. 

Distinguished Feminist Award – Artist  

In lieu of the Distinguished Feminist awards, we will recognize leaders in the field of feminist art and art history in our 2022 programming highlighting the 50th Year Anniversary of feminism at CAA. 

Committee: 
Robin Cass, Rochester Institute of Technology (Chair) 
Delinda J. Collier, School of the Art Institute of Chicago 
Midori Yoshimoto, New Jersey City University 

Distinguished Feminist Award – Scholar  

In lieu of the Distinguished Feminist awards, we will recognize leaders in the field of feminist art and art history in our 2022 programming highlighting the 50th Year Anniversary of feminism at CAA. 

Committee: 
Robin Cass, Rochester Institute of Technology (Chair) 
Delinda J. Collier, School of the Art Institute of Chicago 
Midori Yoshimoto, New Jersey City University 

Distinguished Teaching of Art Award  

Fred Hagstrom 

Fred Hagstrom, a member of the Carleton College faculty since 1984, is the 2022 recipient of the CAA Distinguished Teaching of Art Award. Hagstrom’s nomination included endorsements from former students and colleagues, including a listing of 341 former students who have taken his printmaking, book arts, and drawing classes. Hagstrom also directed a bi-annual study abroad 10-week trip for students to Australia, New Zealand, and the Cook Islands twelve times over twenty years, where students learned about South Pacific and Maori art and culture. Based on this experience, Dylan Yvonne Welch (BA, ‘08) recalls “Each trip, he candidly and humbly facilitates conversations about colonial history, racism and art. As a student, this was a breath of fresh air as I had found that many other professors seemed uncomfortable or simply avoided discussing those topics.” Eleanor Jensen (BA, ’01) credit him with teaching her to both see and draw, while also observing that “Fred is deeply sensitive to his students and is always ready to stand up for somebody who has been harmed or overlooked.” Students observed that Hagstrom’s classes were interdisciplinary, challenging them to connect their studies in other disciplines as well as their life stories to their studio work. Jade Hoyer credits Professor Hagstrom with being a mentor long after she graduated in 2007. Fred Hagstrom has profoundly impacted his students, many of whom have pursued careers as artists and educators.  We are pleased to recognize Fred Hagstrom’s more than three decades of teaching with this award.  

Committee: 
Stephen Fakiyesi, Independent Artist, Toronto 
Jessica Hong, Hood Museum, Toledo Art Museum 
Beauvais Lyons, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, (Chair) 

Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award  

Terry Smith 

Terry Smith has long written, curated and taught across borders, in the beginning coming from Australia to study and work in New York as both a scholar and an active member of Art & Language. He has been expanding his sights ever since. He has long advocated for the study of indigenous art. For the past twenty years, starting with projects such as Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s -1980s at the Queens Museum, he was the trusted collaborator of Okwui Enwezor. He has always insisted that the past and the present be given their due consideration and global perspectives. 

All of this came to his teaching. Students have understood the breadth of his expertise and curiosity; they have used them as inspiration for their own paths; they have appreciated his warmth, his encouragement and the gift of his time. The example he has set as an art historian and a curator has had visible effects in the ranks of university professors and museum curators in the United States and abroad. They do not conform to a single, theoretical way. His students repeatedly speak of his belief in the independent existence of the art object and at the same time his insistence that it be grounded and imbricated in its own real time social relations. Art is allowed its scale, its interior place in our minds, and its exterior place in our world. 

Committee: 
Shirin Fozi, University of Pittsburgh (Chair) 
Joseph Masheck, Hofstra University 
Molly Nesbit, Vassar College 

Excellence in Diversity Award  

Committee: 
Carmelita Higgenbotham, Virginia Commonwealth University 
Kelly Murdoch-Kitt, University of Michigan 
Sohl Lee, Stony Brook University