CAA News Today

Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for June 2015

posted by CAA — Aug 10, 2015

Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.

August 2015

Beverly Semmes: Feminist Responsibility Project (FRP)
Weatherspoon Art Museum
Bob and Lissa Shelley McDowell Gallery, University of North Carolina, 500 Tate Street, Greensboro, NC 27413
May 24–September 6, 2015

The Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro presents the Feminist Responsibility Project (FRP) by the New York artist Beverly Semmes. The exhibition features drawings, ceramics, suspended and illuminated glass sculpture, and video work.

“The metaphors and imagery of Beverly Semmes’s art typically flow in this direction: from the female body and out into the landscape,” Ingrid Schaffner wrote in the 2011 exhibition catalogue from Rowan University Art Gallery. This is noticeably experienced through the large fabric sculpture, Buried Treasure, on view at the Weatherspoon. Buried Treasure, made of black crushed velvet, has one arm of the dress snaking its way off the wall and across the floor of the gallery, enveloping the active space. Continuing to connect mediums in space, her video, Kick, depicts Semmes kicking a reddish-pink potato across icy terrain, the color reflective of the pot sculptures dotting the gallery landscape.

“Her totemic and abstract works create alternative lenses from which to see the body in relationship to domestic or natural landscapes,” says the Weatherspoon exhibition description. In her works on paper, Semmes manipulates photographs in vintage “gentlemen” magazines, as she calls them, covering various parts of the depicted female bodies in ink to perform “a personal act of feminist censorship, blotting out the literal to leave behind abstract, nuanced images that speak in a different voice.”

Semmes will be at the Weatherspoon on Thursday, September 3, 2015, at 6:00 PM for an artist’s talk.

Linda Nochlin: Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader
Edited by Maura Reilly
Recent book release

In addition to two new essays in this recently released volume, Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader, readers are treated to twenty-nine of Nochlin’s essays over her career, including “Women Artists after the French Revolution” and “Starting from Scratch: The Beginnings of Feminist Art History.”

The new anthology includes the provocative essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”—a continuing relevant question. In May of this year, ARTnews revisited Nochlin’s groundbreaking 1971 essay (originally published in ARTnews), exploring women in the arts today, and including eight contemporary artists replies to Nochlin’s essay. In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, the journalist Chris Kraus acclaims, “Nochlin writes with a dazzling mix of erudition and candor, but what’s most remarkable about her work is that it’s driven by an exhaustive investigation as to why and how certain artworks have been meaningful to her.”

Presenting artist monographs alongside the essays, the volume collects Nochlin’s writings on artists such as Mary Cassatt, Louise Bourgeois, Cecily Brown, Kiki Smith, Miwa Yanagi, and Sophie Calle, written in a voice that feels as contemporary as when they first appeared. Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader is published by Thames and Hudson and edited by Maura Reilly, founding curator of the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

A. L. Steiner: Come & Go
Blum and Poe
2727 South La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90034
July 2–August 22, 2015

The press release from Blum and Poe presents the new exhibition Come & Go by the artist A. L. Steiner in dramatic fashion: “Between the interlude of state-sanctioned exploitation and violence, the Amerikkkin project of mass incarceration and slavery, the uncertain future of California’s viability, and planetary implosion, A. L. Steiner presents an overview of her photo archive from 1995–2015.”

Despite the chance of planetary implosion, the exhibition by Steiner is a constructed “relaxing space” dedicated to the viewing of print work. Sparsely covered white walls are adorned only with a limited number of photographs and collages, while attention in the gallery is focused on a wooden desk and file system. Through the installation, and with an archivist on hand daily, the audience is encouraged to explore twenty years of Steiner’s work.

“A. L. Steiner utilizes constructions of photography, video, installation, collage, collaboration, performance, writing and curatorial work as seductive tropes channeled through the sensibility of a skeptical queer eco-feminist androgyne,” her website bio states.

In addition to the exhibition, Steiner has collaborated with a “revolving cast of subversives and interlocutors,” including a collaboration with Shinichiro Okuda/WAKA WAKA and additional live performances by Brave Accepter, Jibade-Khalil Huffman on August 15, and YACHT on August 22; and an archivist to guide viewers daily, 10:00 AM–1:00 PM and 2:00–6:00 PM.

Women Make Movies: 2015 Catalogue
Online and Print Resource

This thirty-two-page special-edition catalogue is the first in ten years released by Women Make Movies. Focused on their collection, the catalogue includes briefs and data on classics that focus on feminism and gender studies as well as films from diverse regions from across the globe. Highlighted are Academy Award winners such as Saving Face, “a harshly realistic view of violence against women in South Asia,” and new releases, Regarding Susan Sontag and Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth—illuminating portraits of the literary giants.

The catalogue is meant to facilitate rental or purchasing access to the Women Make Movies holdings. Established in 1972, Women Make Movies is a “multicultural, multiracial, non-profit media arts organization, which facilitates the production, promotion, distribution and exhibition of independent films and videotapes by and about women.” They provide distribution services and production assistance programs, while facilitating feminist media, including a special emphasis to support work by women of color.

Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019-5497
May 17–September 7, 2015

The Museum of Modern Art presents the first One Woman exhibition dedicated to the work of Yoko Ono. This retrospective is a survey of the decisive decade that led up to Ono’s unauthorized exhibition (One Woman Show, Museum of Modern [F] art, 1971), revalorizing one of the most misunderstood artists of the last sixty years.

Featuring Ono’s most celebrated pieces between 1960 and 1971, the exhibition brings together approximately 125 of Ono’s early objects, works on paper, installations, performances, audio recordings, and films, alongside rarely seen archival materials. During these years, Ono (born in Tokyo, 1933) moved between New York, Tokyo, and London. A pioneer in the international development of Conceptual art, experimental film, and performance art, Ono was then creating artworks that could exist as mere instructions, meant to be executed once, multiple times, or none. Since her early projects are often based on verbal or written instructions, the exhibited pieces focus in the participation on viewers, where the artist generously opens up to their diverse responses to “complete” her pieces, or perhaps towards a sense beyond a One-Woman proposal, but rather an invitation to a collaborative creativity.

Among the exhibited pieces to be highlighted are Grapefruit (1964), Ono’s influential book of instructions; the typescript for which is displayed here page by page—consisted of nothing but terse, open-ended instructions for readers to follow—and Half-A-Room (1967), an installation of bisected, incomplete, white-painted domestic objects. The film Cut Piece (1964), documentation of one of Ono’s seminal performances, is also on view. Here, Ono confronted issues of gender, class, and cultural identity by asking viewers to cut away pieces of her clothing as she sat quietly on stage. Cut Piece remains one of the most disturbing works of performance art of the 1960s, that stands as a foundation of feminist and body-centered art.

A Feminist Fiber Art Exhibition
Traveling Exhibition and Call for participation
First venue opens August 14, 2015

Organized by Iris Nectar Studio, this DIY feminist art exhibition will feature female artists from around the world whose practice focus on fiber art. The project will take the form of an art crawl throughout the Boston area, with an opening on August 14. The project was inspired by the “Guerrilla Girls’ statistics” of women underrepresented in the art world. Originally envisioned as a little exhibit to take place in a single venue for a few weeks, the initiative was transformed into a traveling exhibition using alternative art spaces all across the greater Boston area because of overwhelming response and support. The exhibition will evolve slightly, with a different lineup of artists in each new space.

The Feminist Fiber Art Exhibition will feature artwork created by artists that identify as female. The constantly growing collection include the witty—knitting from the Icelandic artist Ýrúrarí, the historic and esoterically influenced—as well as work with strong female characters embroided by Alaina Varrone (New Haven, Connecticut), “pubism” pieces by Sally Hewitt (England), and “retex” (recycled textile) sculptures from the London-based German artist Jess de Wahls. The project online also features a zine, a blog, and a call for participation.

Michelle Stuart: Topographies: Drawings & Photographic Works 1968–2015
Marc Selwyn Fine Art
9953 South Santa Monica Boulevard, Beverly Hills, CA 90212
July 18–September 5, 2015

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to announce Topographies: Drawings & Photographic Works 1968–2015, an exhibition by the New York–based artist Michelle Stuart. Stuart (b. Los Angeles, 1933) is a multidisciplinary artist best known for a rich and diverse practice, including site-specific earth works, intimate drawings, multimedia installations, paintings, sculpture, and photographs, all centered on a lifelong interest in the natural world and the cosmos. Her work questions conventional notions of drawing as it merges performative rubbing and frottage gestures with elements of the landscape itself. Stuart brings forth imagery by both adding natural materials and revealing the texture of the earth, combining the fundamentals of both drawing and photography.

Each work is a unique meditation on the nature of memory, digitally printed on sheets of archival paper. The individual panels feature untouched and altered elements, including appropriated vintage images and her own photographs, combined in a filmic manner. These dreamlike recollections of her past not only continue her life-long artistic engagement with specific locations, but also affirm the significance of place as a unique source of memory.

The exhibition highlights include #9 Zen, an iconic scroll that will be accompanied by a selection of works on paper, ranging from early collages such as Traces to more recent indexical works in which earth and seeds are pressed and merged onto her paper supports. The second gallery features a selection of her cinematic photographs, including the walk-about narratives of The Beginning, Islas Encantadas,and Past Shadows, Orkney.

Call for Applicants to PIPS Committees

posted by Vanessa Jalet — Aug 04, 2015

The Professional Interests, Practices and Standards (PIPS) committees address critical concerns of CAA’s members set out in the goals of CAA’s Strategic Plan. CAA invites members to apply for service on one of these PIPS working groups.

Committee on Diversity Practices

http://www.collegeart.org/committees/diversity

The Committee on Diversity Practices supports the development of global perspectives on art and visual culture. The committee promotes artistic, curatorial, scholarly and institutional practices that deepen appreciation of political and cultural heterogeneity, as educational and professional values. To that end, the committee assesses and evaluates the development and implementation of curricular innovation, new research methods, curatorial and pedagogical strategies, and hiring practices that contribute to the realization of these goals.

Committee on Intellectual Property

http://www.collegeart.org/committees/ip

The Committee on Intellectual Property monitors and interprets copyright legislation for the benefit of CAA’s various constituencies. In so doing, it seeks to offer educational programs and opportunities for discussion and debate in response to copyright legislation that affects educators, scholars, museum professionals, and artists.

Committee on Women in the Arts

http://www.collegeart.org/committees/women

The Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) promotes the scholarly study and recognition of women’s contributions to the visual arts and to critical and art-historical studies; advocates for feminist scholarship and activism in art; develops partnerships with organizations with compatible missions; monitors the status of women in the visual-arts professions; provides historical and current resources on feminist issues; and supports emerging artists and scholars in their careers.

Education Committee

http://www.collegeart.org/committees/education

The Education Committee promotes the visual arts as essential human activity; as a creative Endeavor and subject of cultural and historical inquiry and critical appreciative activity, and encourages excellence in teaching at all levels. Its focus is on pedagogy at the higher education level in art history, visual culture, studio, aesthetics, and art criticism, and on the interface between arts teaching and learning research and practice.

International Committee

http://www.collegeart.org/committees/international

The International Committee seeks to foster an international community of artists, scholars and critics within CAA; to provide forums in which to exchange ideas and make connections; to encourage engagement with the international student community; to develop relationships between CAA and organizations outside the United States with comparable goals and activities; and to assist the CAA Board of Directors by identifying and recommending advocacy issues that involve CAA and cross national borders.

Museum Committee

http://www.collegeart.org/committees/museum

The Museum Committee provides a bridge between scholars and arts professionals in the academic and museum fields. It offers a forum for the discussion of issues of mutual interest and promotes museum advocacy issues within CAA. The committee lends support and mentorship for both seasoned and emerging professionals to protect and interpret the arts within museums.

Professional Practices Committee

http://www.collegeart.org/committees/professional

The Professional Practices Committee responds to specific concerns of the membership in relation to areas such as job placement and recruitment, tenure and promotion procedures, scholarly standards and ethics, studio health and safety, and artists’ practices. The Professional Practices Committee also oversees CAA’s Standards and Guidelines.

Services to Artists Committee

http://www.collegeart.org/committees/services

The Services to Artists Committee (SAC) was formed by the CAA Board of Directors to seek broader participation by artists and designers in the organization and the Annual Conference. SAC identifies and addresses concerns facing artists and designers; creates and implements programs and events at the conference and beyond; explores ways to encourage greater participation and leadership in CAA; and identifies ways to establish closer ties with other arts professionals and institutions. To this end, committee members are responsible for the programming of ARTspace and its related events.

Student and Emerging Professionals Committee

http://www.collegeart.org/committees/student

Established in February 1998, the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee is comprised of CAA members who are students, recent graduates, and experienced arts professionals with the intention of better representing students and emerging professionals within the larger CAA and academic framework.

In the past year the Committee on Diversity has addressed how CAA as an association can positively address diversity awareness, training and implementation and developed a site for resources on diversity practices: http://www.collegeart.org/diversity/; the Committee on Intellectual Property has organized conference sessions on the new Fair Use Code and maintains a resource cite on intellectual property: http://www.collegeart.org/ip/; the Committee on Women in the Arts provides CWA Picks: http://www.collegeart.org/committees/picks and supports scholarship on women in the arts; the Education Committee has organized conference panels on issues in education; the International Committee promotes interactions between scholars on a global basis and has supported the CAA/Getty International Travel program that brings international scholars to the annual conference; the Museum Committee focuses on the history and theory of art museums and academia and has initiated a new project—Resources for Academic Art Museum Professionals that has support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Professional Practices Committee updates and develops guidelines for the profession; Services to Artists Committee plans and organizes ArtSpace at the annual conference that presents prominent artists and designers, discussions on artist/designer concerns from safety in the workplace to professional development; the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee organizes panels related to emerging professionals and holds mentoring and mock job interviews at the conference. All committees are seeking new members with expertise in these areas.

This year the Board of Directors has established a Task Force on Committees to strengthen and streamline the important work of CAA’s nine Professional Interest, Practices and Standards committees. The nine PIPS committees are working with the Task Force to determine the future focus and structure of the committees with the goal of better serving the visual arts field.

At the Annual Conference in February each committee presents one or two sessions on a subject related to their committee charge.

Committee members serve three-year terms (2016–2019), with at least one new member rotating onto a committee each year. Candidates must be current CAA members and possess expertise appropriate to the committee’s work. Members of all committees volunteer their services without compensation. Committee work is not for the faint of heart; it is expected that once appointed to a committee, a member will involve himself or herself in an active and serious way.

The following vacancies are open for terms beginning in February 2016:

Committee on Diversity Practices: 2–3 members
Committee on Intellectual Property: 4 members
Committee on Women in the Arts: 3 members
Education Committee: 6 members
International Committee: 5 members
Museum Committee: 0 members
Professional Practices Committee: 3 members
Services to Artists Committee: 5 members
Student and Emerging Professionals Committee: 2–3 members

CAA’s president, vice president for committees, and executive director review all candidates in the fall and make appointments in December, prior to the Annual Conference. New members are introduced to their committees during their respective business meetings at the conference.

Nominations and self-nominations should include a brief statement (no more than 150 words) describing your qualifications and experience and an abbreviated CV (no more than 2–3 pages). Please send all materials to Vanessa Jalet, CAA executive liaison at vjalet@collegeart.org. Deadline: October 16, 2015.). Kindly enter subject line in email: 2016 PIPS Applicant.

Filed under: Committees, Service —

Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for June 2015

posted by CAA — Jul 10, 2015

July 2015

Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell: I’m Not Myself At All
Agnes Etherington Art Centre
Queen’s University, 36 University Avenue, Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6
May 2–August 9, 2015

In I’m Not Myself At All, the artists Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell present an “exuberant revision of sexual identity and domesticity.” The multimedia body of work on exhibit at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University contains a multitude of forms and mediums, such as soft-sculpture dolls, wallpaper, crochet spider webs, needlepoint drawings, and papier–mâché.

Referring to the dolls in the exhibition catalogue, the theorist Heather Love writes, “the female body will not be cleaned up in this queer future—it will arrive trailing its effluvia: bodily fluids, odours, patches of fur, cellulite, granny panties, shag, that sucking sound.”

The artists present an oversized self-representation through amplification of the dolls genitalia, blown-up needlepoint patterned wallpaper, and a gigantic papier–mâché pink highlighter against a backdrop of feminist texts, “raising what curator Sarah E. K. Smith identifies as ‘potentiality, belonging and representation,’” via discarded feminist pasts.

Mitchell and Logue run the Feminist Art Gallery (FAG) in Toronto, which Mitchell describes on her website as “a response, a process, a site, a protest, an outcry, an exhibition, a performance, an economy, a conceptual framework, a place and an opportunity.”

Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
5216 Montrose Boulevard, Houston, TX 77006
April 18–August 2, 2015

Marilyn Minter’s exhibition Pretty/Dirty at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston “vividly manifest[s] our culture’s complex and contradictory emotions around the feminine body and beauty.” The exhibition spans Minter’s career from earlier works such as Coral Ridge Towers, of her “drug-addled mother,” to her 2014 video Smash, with “large female feet in bejeweled high-heeled shoes … dancing, sliding across the floor and smashing glass—all in Minter’s signature silver liquid.”

As a painter, photographer, and video artist, Minter offers a counterdialogue to the fashion industry, whose hypersearch for perfection and beauty are revealed in the artist’s own search for the all too human physical imperfections. “It is way too easy to criticize the fashion industry,” Minter said in her artist talk.

“Minter offers a smart woman’s critical look at issues that are otherwise presented by men for female consumption,” states the exhibition press release. “Minter shows the dual nature and slight imperfections of herself and her fellow woman, finding that true allure comes from the sensuality of imperfections.” But while Minter’s work sometimes calls attention to imperfection, there is a “pleasure rubric” in the exhibition, as Bill Arning calls his discussion with Minter. “I know pleasure exists,” Minter says, “I have it too when I look at these images.”

On view through August 2, 2015, are over twenty-five paintings from 1976 through 2013, three video works, and photographs exploring her development as an artist. The exhibition was organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. An artist’s talk with Minter, along with Arning, Elissa Auther, and Linda Yablonsky, is available online.

Installation view of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s exhibition Verses After Dusk at the Serpentine Gallery (June 2–September 13, 2015) in London (artwork © Lynette Yiadom-Boakye; photograph © readsreads.info)

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Verses After Dusk
Serpentine Galleries
Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA
June 2–September 13, 2015

The Serpentine Galleries present Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Verses After Dusk, the first major solo exhibition by the London-born artist. Yiadom-Boakye, born in 1977 from Ghanaian parents, was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2013. Her paintings explore figures that appear to exist outside a specific time and place. These subjects are all fictitious and drawn from memory or scrapbooks. The artist presents her “suggestions of people,” as she once put it, absent of background, or landscapes, or objects, freeing them from the restrictions of definite time, location, age, and even gender. Her characters may be presented in absence of context, but they are accompanied with enigmatic titles that encourages viewers to construct their own narratives and search a dialogue with the artist’s “poetic secrecy.”

Verses After Dusk is a survey of the artist’ recent work, presenting a comprehensive range of painterly techniques in a series that raises timeless questions of identity as well as representation in art, bringing awareness to the failings of such matters throughout art history. While the artist plays with the influence and references to eighteenth and nineteenth century masters such as Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, and Éduoard Manet, she deconstructs them and reconstructs the meaning, challenging the representation of black portraiture in the canon of art history. The display features exclusively black figures, pointing out the absence of references in the representation of black history in the canon of Western art.

Between the works on display, Yes Officer, No Officer (2008) unravels Manet’s famous avant-garde painting Olympia (1863). But in this case, Yiadom-Boakye substitutes the reclining nude female prostitute with a black man and completely deletes the black female servant from the background. Along an impressive collection of expressive paintings, the exhibition includes ten new etchings and introduces the artist’s less-known writings, published in occasion of the exhibition.

Zanele Muholi: Isibonelo / Evidence
Brooklyn Museum
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Fourth Floor, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238-6052
May 1–November 1, 2015

Hosted at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the Brooklyn Museum presents Zanele Muholi: Isibonelo / Evidence. The exhibition is the most comprehensive museum presentation by the artist to date, in which the artist interlocks photography, video, and installation with human-rights activism.

Isibonelo/Evidence features several of the artist’s ongoing projects about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) communities, both in her home country of South Africa and abroad. The display includes eighty-seven works created between 2006 and 2014, including Muholi’s celebrated Faces and Phases portrait series, which uses firsthand accounts to speak to the experience of living in a country that constitutionally protects the rights of LGBTI people but often fails to defend them from targeted violence. In this series, and in an attempt to archive an “invisible” community, Muholi photographed around three hundred South African lesbians against plain or patterned backgrounds. Her compelling and undeniably powerful black-and-white portraits have infinite depth that allows the translation of haunting stories through a single look. The exhibition also includes the new series Weddings and the video Being Scene, which focus on love, intimacy, and daily life within the artist’s own community.

Muholi, born in 1972 in Durban at the height of apartheid, has developed for more than a decade a visual record of black lesbians in her home country, bringing visibility to communities who, although same-sex marriage has been legalized in 2006, continue to undergo hate crimes, stigma, and remain victims of “curative rape.” Through a work that claims her full citizenship as a South African female photographer who identifies as black, and also as a lesbian, the artist express her search of the deserved recognition, respect, and validation that mark and trace our existence.

Cover the issue 8 of Shotgun Seamstress

Osa Atoe: Shotgun Seamstress
Online and Print Zine

“I’m a punk and a feminist,” Osa Atoe declares on Shotgun Seamstress, her blog and fanzine the tagline describes as “old maximum rocknroll columns + new black punk rock thoughts.” In her blog post of March 24, 2015, “I Will Resist With Every Inch and Every Breath: Punk and the Art of Feminism” (which was also the name of a panel Atoe was invited to speak on at the Elizabeth A. Sackler for Feminist Art on March 12, 2015), she explains her roots in feminism and punk as well as the birth of Shotgun Seamstress in 2006. “I had a head full of feminist theory that I had acquired on my own, through my community and from school—including the very useful concept of intersecting identities … and I felt that any art I made should also be political.”

“The intersection of punk and radical politics felt natural to me,” Atoe says. Inspired by Riot Grrrl, Cometbus, and especially the zine Evolution of a Race Riot, Atoe says she set out to celebrate black punk identity within a predominantly white punk scene “that was constantly, but awkwardly attempting to address its own racism.” Atoe’s zine is not about critique, however. As she explains of her first issue, “I didn’t really talk about feminism so much, it just was feminist in its approach” (emphasis by Atoe).

You can see the full panel discussion “I Will Resist With Every Inch and Every Breath: Punk and the Art of Feminism” with Atoe and other panelists online. Printed copies of Shotgun Seamstress are available from Mend My Dress Press.

Agnes Gund: Fame, Fortune, and the Female Artist
Five Points Gallery, 33 Main Street, Torrington, CT
July 10 at 7:00 PM

Five Points Gallery is pleased to announce an upcoming lecture by Agnes Gund, a renowned philanthropist, civic leader, and devoted supporter of women’s issues. Gund, a president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art and chair of its International Council, will speak on “Fame, Fortune, and the Female Artist.” The talk will be free and open to the public on a first-come first-served basis. Five Points Gallery is a nonprofit fine art gallery showcasing professional regional and national visual artists in order to foster an understanding and appreciation of contemporary art in the community.

House, Work, Artwork: Feminism and Art History’s New Domesticities
University of Birmingham, UK
July 3–4, 2015

This conference is motivated by the premise that it is appropriate for feminist art history to revisit and newly configure theoretical, methodological, and political debate around modernist, postmodernist, and contemporary artistic practice in relation to the domestic. The debate is particularly timely in the light of art and art history’s “new” domesticities. These include queer art history’s turn toward the domestic as a site for imagining, making, and inhabiting space within or without the heteronormative, and recent art-historical and curatorial projects focusing on modern and contemporary art practice and the home—but in which the question of feminism is downplayed in favor of more generalized concepts of subversion, labor, and belonging. The keynote speakers are: Mignon Nixon from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and Julia Bryan-Wilson of the University of California, Berkeley. For further information, contact Francesca Berry, Department of Art History, Film, and Visual Studies, University of Birmingham; and Jo Applin, Department of History of Art, University of York.

Filed under: CWA Picks, Uncategorized — Tags: CWA Picks —

Affiliated Society News for July 2015

posted by CAA — Jul 09, 2015

American Society for Aesthetics

The American Society for Aesthetics (ASA), an association for aesthetics, criticism, and theory of the arts, will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the ASA Feminist Caucus Committee with a full day of workshop discussions, followed by a celebratory reception, on Saturday, November 14, 2015. The Feminist Caucus Committee anniversary is part of the annual ASA conference, to be held from November 11–14 at the Desoto Hilton Hotel in Savannah, Georgia. Noted scholars will discuss the evolution and contributions of feminist scholarship within philosophical aesthetics, focusing on three main topics: “History, Feminism, and the American Society for Aesthetics”; “Feminist Scholarship Today OR the Impact—Hidden or Otherwise—of Feminist Scholarship”; and “Feminist Pedagogy and Curricula in Aesthetics.” For more information, please visit www.aesthetics-online.org/feminist or contact Peg Brand.

Arts Council of the African Studies Association

The Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) is pleased to announce the large number of association members who will be participating in the upcoming European Conference on African Studies (Paris, July 8–10, 2015). The increased participation of ACASA members in events taking place outside the United States is evidence of the organization’s growing presence on a global scale. It also reflects concerted efforts to create synergies with international partners.

ACASA is currently inviting nominations and self-nominations for service on its board. New board members will begin service at the African Studies Association (ASA) meeting on November 19, 2015. Applicants must be members of ACASA to participate in the nomination and election process. The deadline for nominations is September 20, 2015.

Asian American Women Artists Association

The board president of the Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA), Cynthia Tom, is one of three recipients of the Commons Curatorial Residency at SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco for A Place of Her Own, on view November 19–December 11, 2015. The Commons, entering its sixth year, is a competitive, yearlong incubator for exhibition research, planning, installation, and realization. The Commons supports risk taking, intercultural learning, and awareness of social issues by providing space and support for exhibitions that instigate accessible, multifaceted participation in the arts. A Place of Her Own excavates the vital dreams and hopes of women and features more than thirty found object art works and large-scale installations by women artists. Each piece is a courageous visual answer to the question, “If you had a place of your own, what would it be?” Exhibited artworks, marked by a saturation of color, imaginative use of materials, and visual storytelling, highlight the personal yet universal journey to seek out and claim a place without external rules or expectations. Events and an interactive installation, Community House, invite the audience to join the journey.

Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey

The Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) has launched the H-AMCA reviews program with six new reviews. The organization is thrilled to have partnered with the H-Net editorial team. Readers may access the reviews through the H-Net reviews page. This announcement marks an exciting transition for the established AMCA reviews program that was originally accessible through the AMCA website. The website’s “reviews” section will now act as a supplement to the full reviews published through H-Net.

The AMCA editorial committee that will oversee the new reviews program is: Tiffany Floyd, H-AMCA commons editor and PhD student at Columbia University; Jessica Gerschultz, assistant professor at the University of Kansas and AMCA board member (secretary); Berin Golonu, doctoral candidate at the University of Rochester; Sarah-Neel Smith, assistant professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art (fall 2015); and Saima Akhtar, postdoctoral fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. If you have questions about the new H-AMCA reviews program or are interested in reviewing books or events, please contact Tiffany Floyd or Jessica Gerschultz.

Association of Historians of American Art

The board of the Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA) thanks two outgoing members—Sarah Kelly Oehler, chair emerita; and Katherine Smith, sessions coordinator—for their service. The board welcomes incoming cochair Ellery Foutch and sessions coordinator Elizabeth Lee.

AHAA hosted its successful third biennial symposium in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, this past October with 139 members in attendance. At its CAA business meeting on February 13, 2015, AHAA chair Anna Marley proposed a vote to add a new symposium liaison position to the board. The symposium liaison will serve a term of three years and, in consultation with the cochairs, facilitate the coordination of the biennial symposium and act as a liaison between the AHAA board and the local symposium steering committee. AHAA solicited candidates for this position this spring and have named the first symposium liaison: Sarah Kelly Oehler.

The next biannual AHAA symposium will to be held in Dallas–Fort Worth, Texas, in fall 2016. The symposium will be chaired by Maggie Adler and Shirley Reece-Hughes of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art and Mark Thistlethwaite of Texas Christian University.

Also in 2015, the active AHAA membership grew from 180 to 350, and the AHAA journal was launched.

AHAA looks forward to its sponsored sessions at the 2016 CAA Annual Conference in Washington, DC: a professional session, “Claiming the Unknown, the Forgotten, the Fallen, the Lost, and the Dispossessed,” chaired by Robert Cozzolino; and a scholarly session, “Art and Invention in the US,” led by Ellery Foutch and Hélène Valance.

Association of Print Scholars

The Association of Print Scholars (APS) has grown to almost three hundred members since its official launch in October 2014. In May 2015, APS shared its new website, which allows members to create profiles, share scholarship, and learn about upcoming events.

Offline, APS held receptions for members during the CAA Annual Conference in New York, the Renaissance Society of America conference in Berlin, and the Salon de l’estampe in Paris. APS also announced the establishment of the Schulman and Bullard Article Prize, which will be given yearly to recognize an outstanding article by an emerging scholar in the field.

In the coming year, Peter Parshall, former curator of old master prints at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, will give the APS inaugural lecture, entitled “Why Study Prints Now?” on September 25, 2015, in New York. During the 2016 CAA Annual Conference in Washington, DC, Freyda Spira of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Elizabeth Rudy of Harvard Art Museums will chair the session “The Art of Collecting.”

Coalition of Women in the Arts Organization

At the 2015 CAA Annual Conference in New York, the Coalition of Women in the Arts Organization (CWAO) presented a panel on “Women Artists and Installation Art,” which discussed numerous and innovative approaches that women artists use to present the concepts and issues of their concerns. For CAA’s 2016 meeting in Washington, DC, the organization is preparing a panel on “Technology and Women Artists.” The panel is currently open for proposals, which may include artists who use technology or incorporate it into either traditional or new mediums in order to convey their concepts and their social concerns. Art historians may apply, if presenting a paper about one or more women that use technology in their papers. The panel chair is Kyra Belan, Broward College, PO Box 275, Matlacha, FL 33993.

International Association of Word and Image Studies

The International Association of Word and Image Studies (IAWIS) has announced the latest in its book series, Interactions. The Imaginary: Word and Image/L’Imaginaire: texte et image, edited by Claus Clüver, Matthijs Engelberts, and Véronique Plesch, has just been published by Brill. The imaginary as a critical concept originated in the twentieth century and has been theorized in diverse ways. It can be understood as a register of thought; the way we interpret the world; the universe of images, signs, texts, and objects of thought. In this volume, the imaginary is explored as it manifests itself in encounters between the verbal and the visual. A number of the essays brought together here explore the transposition of the imaginary in illustrations of texts and verbal renditions of images, as well as in comic books based on paintings or on verbal narratives. Others analyze ways in which books deal with film or television and investigate the imaginary in digital media. Special attention is paid to the imaginary of places and the relationship of the imaginary with memory. Written in English and French, these contributions by European and American scholars demonstrate the various concerns and approaches characteristic of contemporary scholarship in word and image studies.

Italian Art Society

The Italian Art Society (IAS) has been awarded a grant of $8400 from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation to continue the IAS/Kress lecture series in Italy for another three years. The 2016 lecture will take place in Florence. IAS announces a one-time, extra IAS Research and Publication Grant of up to $1,000 to fund or subsidize a research trip or publication (deadline: July 15, 2015) and a new grant of up to $1,000 that will support transoceanic conference travel for scholars holding the PhD presenting a paper on Italian art and architecture from the early nineteenth century to the present (deadline: October 1, 2015). Please visit the IAS website for further information and application guidelines.

IAS is currently accepting proposals for its sponsored long (2½ hours) and short (1½ hours) sessions at the 2017 CAA Annual Conference in New York (deadline: August 15, 2015). Visit the IAS website for further information and submission guidelines. IAS secretary Sean Roberts now serves as the society’s executive vice president; the organization will appoint an acting secretary this summer. Please consider writing for the IASblog on any topic related to Italian art and architecture from prehistory to the present!

National Art Education Association

The National Art Education Association (NAEA), the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum invite you to participate in SummerStudio: Design Thinking for Art Educators, taking place July 13–17, 2015, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri.

NAEA has published two new practical curriculum resources and texts for your classes: Curriculum Inquiry and Design for School- and Community-Based Art Educationand Design Standards for School Art Facilities.

Pacific Arts Association

The Pacific Arts Association-Europe conference will be held July 2–4, 2015, at the Museo de América in Madrid, Spain. The theme of the conference is “Recent Research in Pacific Arts.” For more information, please contact adama@adamaamerica.com.

Pacific Arts Association-Pacific seeks interest in its 2015 conference on “Trading Traditions: The Role of Art in the Pacific’s Expansive Exchange Networks,” to be held at the Fa’onelua Conference Centre in Nuku’alofa, Tonga, from September 30 to October 4, 2015. For further information, contact Karen Stevenson.

A three-day international conference entitled “Pacifique(S)” will take place at the University of Le Havre in France from November 4 to 6, 2015. The organizers of this interdisciplinary conference seek papers addressing the following broad thematic concerns: Oceans, Histories, and Diaspora. If you wish to participate, please send an abstract of up to 250 words to Jacqueline Charles-Rault.

The Pacific Arts Association – North America looks forward to you attending the session “Photography in and of the Pacific: Collecting the Past, Visualizing the Future” at the 2016 CAA Annual Conference in Washington DC. This session will be of interest to those studying historic and contemporary photography. Look for a detailed description in CAA’s Conference Program.

The twelfth Pacific Arts Association International Symposium 2016, to be hosted by Auckland Museum in New Zealand, promises to be a dynamic and engaging symposium that will take place between two iconic Pacific events in Auckland: Pasifika Festival (March 11–12) and Polyfest (most likely to occur March 18–20).

Society for Photographic Education

The Society for Photographic Education (SPE) seeks curators, professors, gallerists, art historians, and scholars to review student and/or professional member portfolios at SPE’s fifty-third national conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. The conference will take place March 10–13, 2016; portfolio reviewers will receive discounted admission to the four-day event in exchange for their participation. For more information on the conference offerings, visit the SPE website. To express interest in serving as a portfolio reviewer, please contact info@spenational.org.

Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture

As of April 1, 2015, the Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) has become incorporated as a nonprofit charitable organization in the State of New York. As a CAA affiliate society, SHERA will sponsor a 1½-hour session at the 2016 CAA Annual Conference in Washington DC, entitled “Collecting, Curating, Canonizing, Critiquing: The Institutionalization of Eastern European Art” and organized by Ksenia Nouril. SHERA is successfully implementing its visiting scholar program with the Russian State University of Humanities in Moscow (RGGU) and the Art Department of the European University in St. Petersburg. Applications need to be submitted six weeks in advance of the planned trip for RGGU and ten weeks for the European University. Inquiries about the process should be submitted to shera.artarchitecture@gmail.com.

Visual Resources Association

The Visual Resources Association (VRA) held its annual conference in Denver, Colorado, from March 11–14, 2015. With fourteen sessions, six workshops, nine posters, and numerous other events, the program covered digital humanities, visual literacy, mapping and geospatial projects, image rights and reproductions, usability testing, digital asset management, crowdsourcing, metadata, sharing collections, archives, research data management, visualization, and more. The two plenary speakers shared thought-provoking perspectives from museums and digital libraries. The opening speaker, Aaron Straup Cope, head of engineering for the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, addressed experiences as design objects. Can a design museum collect objects that convey the full experience of, say, Virgin America as service design? Extending the concept of collecting to museum visitors, Cope described the New Cooper Hewitt Experience and new interactive pen that allows visitors to “collect” and “save” objects to customized webpages. The closing speaker, Emily Gore, director for content for the Digital Public Library of America, discussed content and collections workflows, including the DPLA Hubs program. DPLA is currently focused on sustainable collaborations, building community, data quality, and use/reuse. Gore is working to establish new Service Hubs and a framework for rights statements for cultural-heritage materials in partnership with experts in the United States and Europe.

Women’s Caucus for Art

The Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) has announced the recipients for the 2016 WCA Lifetime Achievement Awards: Tomie Arai, Helene Aylon, Sheila Levrant de’ Bretteville, and Juana Guzman. The recipient for the 2016 President’s Art and Activism Award is Stephanie Sherman. The WCA Lifetime Achievement (LTA) Awards were first presented in 1979 in President Jimmy Carter’s Oval Office to Isabel Bishop, Selma Burke, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, and Georgia O’Keeffe. The LTA awards were the first awards recognizing the contribution of women to the arts and their profound effect on society. Today the WCA’s Lifetime Achievement Awards continue to honor women and their work, vision, and commitment. Past honorees have represented the full range of distinguished achievement in the visual arts. This year’s awardees are no exception, with considerable accomplishment, achievement, and contributions to the arts. Join us for the celebration! The LTA awards will be held at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, on Thursday February 4, 2016. The event will include a ticketed cocktail reception (6:00–7:30 PM) and the LTA ceremony (8:00–9:30 PM), which is free and open to the public. More information will be available online beginning August 1, 2015.

Filed under: Affiliated Societies —

News from the Art and Academic Worlds

posted by Christopher Howard — Jun 17, 2015

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.

Why Should Collectors Get All the Breaks?

Many of America’s major museums have benefitted from laws that afford collectors tax breaks when donating works to institutions or charities, and now artists and their advocates are seeking similar compensation for works they gift. While collectors can write off the fair market value of works they donate to museums, artists can only claim for the costs of the materials they used to produce the work. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

After the Riots, Baltimore’s Best Shot at Redemption May Be Its Arts Community

On the April day when Freddie Gray died from injuries he suffered in police custody and a week before rioters took to the streets in protest, Karen Brooks Hopkins, president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, gave a presentation to a small group of Baltimoreans about the future of their city. The symposium, in a state-of-the-art auditorium little more than a mile down North Avenue from the blighted block where Gray was arrested, centered on a question that has sparked revitalization efforts from Detroit to Dublin and from Miami to Marseille: whether arts can turn a city around. (Read more from the Washington Post.)

Dear Liberal Professor, Students Aren’t The Problem

In a recent Vox essay, a self-described “liberal professor,” writing under a pseudonym, explained how students had changed over his nine years in the college classroom. His liberal students now “terrify” him, he wrote, with their identity politics and imagined grievances. Here we go, I thought, another lament of the loss of white-male privilege, this time set at the university. What I quickly realized, however, was that the essay might be better characterized as a jeremiad, a cautionary tale that exaggerates current woes to elicit social change. (Read more from Vitae.)

The Art of Having Difficult Conversations

The ability to have difficult conversations is important for career success, productivity, and relationships in almost every field, and higher education is no exception. However, despite the need to have these conversations, the idea of addressing sensitive issues can be scary. This article provides strategies for having difficult conversations and gives example scripts. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Ford Shifts Grant Making to Focus Entirely on Inequality

The fight against inequality will take center stage at the Ford Foundation under a sweeping overhaul announced today by the nation’s second biggest philanthropy. Not only will Ford direct all of its money and influence to curbing financial, racial, gender, and other inequities, but it will give lots more money in a way grantees have been clamoring for: It hopes to double the total it gives in the form of unrestricted grants for operating support. (Read more from the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)

MoMA.org Turns 20: Archiving Two Decades of Exhibition Sites

It’s hard to believe that MoMA’s website, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in May, is older than Google. It began with two relatively simple (by today’s standards) HTML exhibition sites for the Mutant Materials and Video Spaces exhibitions in 1995. Since then, over two hundred exhibition sites have been created, documenting not only the museum’s evolving curatorial interests, but also huge changes in web coding and design. This collection of exhibition sites almost serves as its own online museum of the internet. (Read more from Inside/Out.)

Dying of Exposure

At some point, two years ago, maybe, I stopped doing things for free: no free writing, no free talks, no free critiques with artists or art students, nothing. I didn’t make the decision out of avarice; I made it as a matter of survival. I used to accept all kinds of invitations to do such things, paid or not, when I was a tenured professor. I used to feel that it was sort of crass to think about my economic needs when there were important intellectual ideas to discuss. But, of course, the privilege of not having to think about my intellectual labor in those terms was predicated on the very fact that I was being paid, by my university, if not by the publishers, colleges, students, or artists who hosted the events to which I was invited. (Read more from Art Practical.)

How to Tailor Your Online Image

You should have a curated Internet presence for the job market. The fact is, you will be Googled. That is not usually because search committees are trying to dig up dirt on you, or derail your candidacy. Rather, they just want to know more about you, and get a sense of your intellectual communities, of where and how you are active, and of your “style” of communication (lively, reserved, direct, blunt, tactful, supportive, combative, and so on). (Read more from Vitae.)

Filed under: CAA News —

People in the News

posted by CAA — Jun 17, 2015

People in the News lists new hires, positions, and promotions in three sections: Academe, Museums and Galleries, and Organizations and Publications.

The section 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.

June/August 2015

Academe

Bridget Alsdorf has been promoted to associate professor, with continuing tenure, at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey.

Abigail Krasner Balbale

Abigail Krasner Balbale has joined the faculty at the Bard Graduate Center in New York as assistant professor of Islamic art and material culture.

Brandon Bauer , assistant professor of art at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin, has received tenure.

S. Hollis Clayson, Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has been named Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

David J. Getsy has been appointed interim dean of graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois.

Jennifer A. Greenhill

Jennifer A. Greenhill has left the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign to become associate professor of art history at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Jennifer Dorothy Lee has joined the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois as assistant professor.

Kent Minturn, director of the master’s degree program in modern art at Columbia University in New York, has joined New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts as visiting assistant professor.

Museums and Galleries

William J. Chiego, director of the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas, since 1991, has announced his resignation, effective September 30, 2016.

Erin B. Coe has been appointed director of the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, New York.

Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1977 to 2008, has been named chair of the Hispanic Society Museum in New York.

Katherine de Vos Devine (photograph by Jared Lazarus/Duke Photography)

Katherine de Vos Devine has been chosen to lead the Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center in Asheville, North Carolina, as director.

John Jacob has joined the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, as McEvoy Family Curator for Photography.

Claire L. Kovacs, assistant professor of art history at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, has become director of the Augustana Teaching Museum of Art at Augstana College in Rock Island, Illinois.

Sarah Montross, formerly Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral curatorial fellow at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine, has become the new associate curator for the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

Maura Reilly, formerly adjunct professor at the Sydney College of the Arts in Australia, has been appointed chief curator of the National Academy Museum in New York.

Timothy Rodgers, formerly director of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona, has been named director of the Wolfsonian–Florida International University in Miami Beach, Florida.

Michael R. Taylor

Michael R. Taylor, formerly director of Dartmouth University’s Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, New Hampshire, has joined the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond as chief curator and deputy director for art and education.

Alison Weaver has become executive director of the Moody Center for the Arts in Houston, Texas. The center is scheduled to open in September 2016.

Jan Wurm (photograph by Lin Hsieh)

Jan Wurm has been appointed director of exhibitions at the Richmond Art Center in Richmond, California.

Organizations and Publications

Christopher P. Heuer, Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, has become associate director of research and academic programs at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Tony White, associate chief librarian for reader services at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, has joined the board of directors of the Center for Book Arts, also in New York.

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: Member News, Member Spotlight, People in the News —

Grants, Awards, and Honors

posted by CAA — Jun 15, 2015

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.

June/August 2015

Natalie Adamson, senior lecturer in the School of Art History at the University of St Andrews in St Andrews, Scotland, has been named a 2015–16 Getty Scholar by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Her research project is called “What Counts as Painting: Pierre Soulages and the Materiality of Postwar Art in France.”

Hannah Baader, academic program director and senior research scholar at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut, Italy, has been appointed a 2015–16 Guest Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. She will work on “Aesthetics and Materiality of Water, Fifteenth to Nineteenth Century.”

Susan Bean has received a spring 2015 research support grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art for her project, “Modeling Cosmos and Colony: India’s Clay Sculpture in the Nineteenth Century.”

Christian Berger, research fellow and lecturer in the Department of Art History at the Institut für Kunstgeschichte und Musikwissenschaft at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität in Mainz, Germany, has been appointed Volkswagen Foundation Fellow by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. His project is entitled “The Materials of Conceptual Art.”

Gregory Charles Bryda, a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has won a 2015–16 Predoctoral Fellowship from the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. His project is titled “The Spiritual Wood of Late Gothic Germany.”

Amy Bryzgel

Amy Bryzgel, lecturer in history of art at the University of Aberdeen in Aberdeen, Scotland, has been awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council Early Career Fellowship for 2015–16 to support the finalization, publication, and dissemination of her research project, “Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960.”

Karen L. Carter (photograph by Matt Gubancsik and provided by Kendall College of Art and Design of Ferris State University)

Karen L. Carter, associate professor in the art-history program of Kendall College of Art and Design of Ferris State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, will participate in the 2015 NEH Summer Institute, “Teaching the History of Modern Design: Beyond the Canon.”

Henry Colburn, a curatorial fellow in ancient art at the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has received a 2015–16 Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. At the Getty Villa, he will work on “Archaeology of Empire in Achaemenid Egypt.”

Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts and associate provost for the arts at New York University, delivered the sixty-fourth annual Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, in March and April 2015.

Susan Dackerman, consultative curator at the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been named a 2015–16 Getty Scholar by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Her project is called “Early Modern Print Culture and the Islamic World.”

Vidya Dehejia, Barbara Stoler Miller Professor of Indian and South Asian Art at Columbia University in New York, has been chosen to deliver the sixty-fifth annual Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts next spring at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

Nathan S. Dennis of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, has won a 2015 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome in the category of ancient studies.

Ljerka Dulibić has been appointed Craig Hugh Smyth Fellow for 2015–16 at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Studies in Florence. She is researching “Italian Renaissance Paintings in the Strossmayer Gallery, Zagreb, Croatia.”

Nina Ergin, associate professor in the Department of Archaeology and History of Art at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey, has been appointed a 2015–16 Getty Fellow by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. She will work on “Heavenly Fragrance from Earthly Censers: Conveying the Immaterial through the Sensory Experience of Material Objects.”

Noémie Etienne, a recent graduate of the Department of Art History at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and the University of Paris 1 Sorbonne in France, has accepted a 2015–16 Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. She will research “A Material Art History? Paintings Restoration and the Writing of Art History.”

Andrew Finegold has been appointed a 2015–16 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Holly Flora has been selected to be a fellow for 2015–16 at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Studies in Florence. She will work on “Cimabue, the Franciscans, and Artistic Change at the Dawn of the Renaissance.”

Caroline O. Fowler has been appointed A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, DC, by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. She will work on “Absence Made Present: An Early-Modern History of Drawing and the Senses.”

Thomas W. Gaehtgens

Thomas W. Gaehtgens, director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California, has been awarded the prestigious Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca 2015. The prize, given by the Simone et Cino del Duca Foundation, is awarded each year by the Foundations of the Institut de France.

Katharine McKenney Johnson of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, has won a 2015 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome in the category of modern Italian studies.

Sonal Khullar has won a spring 2015 research support grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art for her project, “Fertile Grounds: Art, Primitivism, and Postcoloniality in Twentieth-Century India and Great Britain.”

Christian K. Kleinbub has received a 2015–16 fellowship at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Studies in Florence. He will research “Michelangelo’s Inner Anatomies.”

Marci Kwon, a doctoral student at the Institute of Fine Arts, has received a scholarship from New York University’s Graduate School of Arts and Science to attend the 2015 Summer School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University.

Brett Lazer, a PhD student at the Institute of Fine Arts, has won a 2015–16 Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship from New York University’s Graduate School of Arts and Science.

Barbara London, an independent scholar and curator based in New York and an adjunct professor in the School of Art at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has been appointed a 2015–16 Getty Fellow by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Her research project concerns “Video Art: From Fringe to the Forefront.”

C. Matthew Luther, an artist based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has earned a 2015 residency at the Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions, better known as ACRE.

Monika Malewska has won a 2015 Working Artist Grant/Art Purchase Award for $1,000 for her watercolor, Bacon Wreath No. 4 (2009).

Leo Mazow, associate professor of art history in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, has been awarded a Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellowship by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, DC.

Susanna McFadden, assistant professor at Fordham University in New York, has been appointed a 2015–16 Getty Scholar by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. She will work on “Tales of a Lost Art: Megalographic Wall Paintings and the World of Late Antiquity” at the Getty Villa.

Amy F. Ogata, professor of art history at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has become a 2015–16 Getty Scholar. While at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, she will explore on “Metallurgy: Metal and the Making of Modern France.”

Laurel O. Peterson of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has earned a spring 2015 fellowship from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art to conduct research in the United Kingdom for her doctoral dissertation, “The Decorated Interior: Artistic Production in the British Country House, 1688–1745.”

John Pollini, professor of classical art and archaeology in the Department of Art History at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has been appointed a 2015–16 Getty Villa Scholar. At the Getty Research Institute, he will work on ”From Polytheism to Christianity in Late Antique Egypt.”

Joanna Sheers, a doctoral student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, will be the 2015–17 Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellow at the Frick Collection in New York.

Caitlin Silberman

Caitlin Silberman, a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, has been selected as a 2015 Committee on Institutional Cooperation–Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow. She will research her doctoral project, “Thinking with Birds in British Art and Visual Culture, 1840–1900,” at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.

Laura Splan, an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, has earned a 2015 residency at the Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions, better known as ACRE.

Anatole Tchikine has accepted a Craig Hugh Smyth Fellowship for 2015–16 at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Studies in Florence. His project is “Water and Form: Reinventing the Fountain in Renaissance and Baroque Italy.”

Ruth Weisberg

Ruth Weisberg, an artist and educator, has received the 2015 SGC International Printmaker Emeritus Award.

Bert Winther-Tamaki, a professor of art history at the University of California, Irvine, has been named Consortium Professor with his 2015–16 Getty Fellowship. While at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, he will focuses on “Wood, Ink, Clay, Stone: Bringing Natural Materials to Life for Modern Japan.”

Katharine J. Wright, a PhD candidate at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, has accepted an Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Research Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Allison Young of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, has earned a spring 2015 fellowship from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art to conduct research in the United Kingdom for her doctoral dissertation, “‘Torn and Most Whole’: Zarina Bhimji and the ‘Culture Wars’ in Britain, 1970–2002.”

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

News from the Art and Academic Worlds

posted by Christopher Howard — May 13, 2015

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.

Court Rejects Royalties for Artists in Out-of-State Sales

California owners of fine art will not be required to pay artists a share of the profits when the work is resold out of state, a federal appeals court decided last week. In an 8–3 decision, the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a provision of a 1976 state law that required Californians to pay 5 percent royalties to the artist if the sale occurred in California or if the owner was a Californian who sold the work out of state. The law is the only one of its kind in the US, though similar requirements exist in some other countries. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)

Asking Students to Bare It All

Art instruction—which has long featured nude models—is not the same as instruction in other subjects. But a complaint from the parent of a student at the University of California at San Diego has drawn attention to the pedagogy behind a course in which all students (and the professor) are naked for a class session. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

What’s the Point of a Professor?

In the coming weeks, two million Americans will earn a bachelor’s degree and either join the work force or head to graduate school. They will be joyous that day, and they will remember fondly the schools they attended. But as this unique chapter of life closes and they reflect on campus events, one primary part of higher education will fall low on the ladder of meaningful contacts: the professors. (Read more from the New York Times.)

Re: Your Recent Email to Your Professor

In the age of social media, many students approach emailing similar to texting and other forms of digital communication, where the crucial conventions are brevity and informality. But most college teachers consider emails closer to letters than to text messages. This style of writing calls for more formality, more thoroughness, and more faithful adherence to the conventions of Edited Standard Written English—that is, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and syntax. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

How Collectors Use Instagram to Buy Art

According to a recent survey of collectors on Instagram, an incredible 51½ percent have purchased works from artists they originally discovered through Instagram. More important, this discovery led to an average of five purchased works by artists originally found on the app. Although respondents are all active on Instagram, and nearly half have collections of one hundred plus works, these are significant findings. Is Facebook’s image-sharing platform the next big sales channel for fine art? (Read more from Artsy.)

Help Desk: The Vanishing Curator

I’m a new MFA grad and I’m trying to break into the gallery system. Recently I had a great studio visit with a well-known curator. We talked for a long while about the work and he seemed very interested, but since then he hasn’t been in touch. What should I do? (Read more from Daily Serving.)

Stop Worrying about Job Security

I hear two common concerns from graduate students and postdocs who are considering a nonacademic career path: Will the work be intellectually stimulating? And will my job be secure? I can easily allay their concerns on the first point, as my work in industry has always been intellectually stimulating. The second concern is harder to dismiss because it is founded in truth. For everyone but tenured faculty professors, job security is mostly a thing of the past. (Read more from Vitae.)

Onwards and Upwards

More than a third of American art-museum directors are of retirement age. The impending influx of new blood at the top may offer museums an opportunity to rethink the job and question many of the assumptions that underlie traditional museum operations: the emphasis on splendid buildings, the primacy of curatorial authority, and the balance between rich donors, for whom museums are often personal vanity projects, and the public, who see museums as shared common goods. (Read more from the Economist.)

Filed under: CAA News —

People in the News

posted by CAA — Apr 17, 2015

People in the News lists new hires, positions, and promotions in three sections: Academe, Museums and Galleries, and Organizations and Publications.