CAA News Today
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — Oct 27, 2009
CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, curators, photographers, collectors, architects, museum directors, and other professionals and important figures in the visual arts.
- Maurice Agis, a London-born sculptor and creator of Dreamspace, an inflatable, interactive sculpture that explores color, form, movement, light and sound, died on October 12, 2009, at the age of 77
- Maryanne Amacher, a composer of site-specific sound installations that explore psychoacoustic properties, died on October 22, 2009. She was 66
- Ruth Duckworth, a modernist sculptor of abstract ceramic forms, a muralist, and a ceramics teacher at the University of Chicago, died on October 18, 2009, at the age of 90
- Amos Ferguson, a Bahamian folk artist known for his depictions of biblical scenes and of the landscape and culture of his country, died on October 19, 2009. He was 89.
- Gerald Ferguson, an artist who established the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where he taught for thirty-eight years, as a major international center of conceptual art, died on October 8, 2009, at the age of 72
- Suzanne Fiol, the founder of Issue Project Room, an art and performance space in Brooklyn, died on October 5, 2009. She was 49
- Nat Finkelstein, the house photographer for Andy Warhol’s Factory for three years in the mid-1960s, died on October 2, 2009. He was 76
- Donald Fisher, a cofounder of the Gap who collected modern art and supported the arts and civic culture in San Francisco, died on September 27, 2009, at the age of 81
- Anne Friedberg, an art historian, theorist, and teacher whose work combined media and film studies, art history, and architecture, died on October 9, 2009, at the age of 57
- Bernard Leo Fuchs, an illustrator whose works for Cosmopolitan, Sports Illustrated, and TV Guide combined realism with avant-garde techniques, died on September 17, 2009. He was 76
- Lawrence Halprin, a landscape architect whose best-known works include the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, DC, and Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco, died on October 25, 2009 at the age of 93
- Jenelsie Walden Holloway, an artist, advocate for African American art, and a teacher at Spelman College for thirty-eight years, died on October 15, 2009, at the age of 89
- Henry T. Hopkins, former director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hammer Museum, founder of the Huysman Gallery in Los Angeles, and professor and chair of the Department of Art at UCLA, died on September 27, 2009, at the age of 81
- Barry Horn, executive director of the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art in Brownsville, Texas, died on October 24, 2009. He was 59
- Michael Komechak, a teacher of English and art and a curator at Benedictine University in Illinois, where he helped to acquire over 3,700 works of art from around the world, died on August 19, 2009. He was 77
- Barbara Morris, a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum who was one of the first scholars to treat the study of Victorian art and design as an academic discipline, died on July 15, 2009, at the age of 90
- Robert M. Murdock, an independent curator and scholar of modern and contemporary art who was also a museum director and curator, died on October 8, 2009, at the age of 67
- Emile Norman, an artist and sculptor whose best-known works are the glass mosaic window and sculptural reliefs created for a Masonic temple in San Francisco, died on September 24, 2009. He was 91
- Irving Penn, a fashion photographer whose elegant, minimal works appeared in the pages of Vogue and on the walls of museums, died on October 7, 2009, at the age of 92
- Monica Pidgeon, an editor at Architectural Design who promoted the work of major modernist architects, died on September 17, 2009. She was 95
- Don Ivan Punchatz, an illustrator of novels, magazines, and the first Star Wars film poster, died on October 22, 2009, at the age of 73
- Richard Robbins, a painter, etcher, and sculptor who was the head of fine art at Middlesex University in London, died on July 28, 2009, at the age of 82
- George Sample, an architect who founded the nonprofit Chicago Architectural Assistance Center, which provided design and construction support to inner-city neighborhoods, died on October 4, 2009. He was 90
- Harry Sefarbi, a painter and teacher at the Barnes Foundation whose colorful paintings can be found in many museum collections, died on September 28, 2009. He was 92
- Charles Seliger, an Abstract Expressionist painter whose small works of imaginary forms were influenced by Surrealism and automatism, died on October 1, 2009, at the age of 83
- Nancy Spero, an artist and feminist who combined drawing, painting, collage, and printmaking to create politicized work, died on October 18, 2009 at the age of 83. She was a member of Women Artists in Revolution and a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery, which promotes women’s art
- Alfred Brockie Stevenson, an American realist painter known for his nostalgic images of American life, died on September 1, 2009. He was 89
- Dietrich von Bothmer, curator emeritus of Greek and Roman antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a professor at the Institute of Fine Art at New York University, died on October 12, 2009, at the age of 91. He helped to develop the museum’s collection of Greek vases into one of the largest in the world
Read all past obituaries in the arts on the CAA website.
Online Database Links Three Major Art Research Libraries
posted by Christopher Howard — Mar 19, 2009
Whether you’re researching ancient Egyptian art, provenance in Renaissance Italy, modern Latin American art, or contemporary artist’s books, three major New York–based institutions—the Museum of Modern Art, the Frick Collection, and the Brooklyn Museum—have joined forces to help you. The libraries and archives of these three museums recently launched Arcade, an online database that allows researchers worldwide to search their combined resources through a single interface.
Searches may be limited not only by library location—the MoMA library, for example, has two research sites in the city—but also by format specifications, including auction catalogues, artist’s books, primary-source and archival materials, and digital resources. For older users of these collections, Arcade provides specific searching using Dadabase (MoMA’s catalogue), FRESCO (Frick Research Catalog Online), and Brookmuse (the Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives catalogue).
Other features include relevancy ranking of results, a searchable table-of-contents in thousands of records, book-jacket images, icons that identify categories of results, and links to Google Books files. RSS feeds provide up-to-date headlines of news in the art world. Featured lists present the collections in new ways. Links to recent acquisitions, finding aids, bibliographies, new digital collections, and library blogs are also offered in Arcade.
Mildred Constantine: In Memoriam
posted by CAA — Jan 13, 2009
Linda Downs is CAA executive director.
Until her death on December 10, 2008, at age 95, Mildred “Connie” Cohen Constantine Bettelheim was the oldest College Art Association member and the oldest CAA employee. At the age of sixteen, she was hired by Audrey McMahon, corresponding secretary at CAA, in 1929 as a stenographer when the CAA offices were located at 220 West Fifty-eighth Street. She kept up the list of New York exhibitions for Parnassus (the precursor of Art Journal), eventually editing articles, assisting at Annual Conferences, and attending to correspondence.
I interviewed Connie last May in her art-filled home in Nyack, New York. She talked about the seminal experience that CAA’s employment and subsequent membership meant to her in her professional life. It opened up the creative and intellectual world to her at a time when CAA was in its formative years, and she was able to contribute to its development. Through her position at CAA she came in contact with artists like David Smith (when he applied for Works Progress Administration status through CAA; they immediately became life-long friends) and with art historians and future museum directors such as Francis Henry Taylor.
CAA also taught her the realities of the art world, from organizing demonstrations in support of artists’ rights to being requested to change her name. A prominent CAA member lobbied the Board of Directors to protest the appearance of a Jewish name on CAA correspondence. So Connie, as she was known by her friends, found a new name that she liked and permanently changed her last name from Cohen to Constantine.
She worked at CAA until 1937, when she returned to college to earn her BA and MA at New York University and attend graduate school at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In 1940 Constantine worked at the Office of Inter-American Affairs at the Library of Congress, and in 1948 was hired by the Museum of Modern Art’s Architecture and Design Department. She became an associate curator and curatorial consultant at MoMA through 1970, where she pioneered an interest in art outside the mainstream, from posters to graphic design. Constantine wrote over a dozen books and exhibition catalogues, including Tina Modotti: A Fragile Life (1975), Revolutionary Soviet Film Posters (1974) with Alan Fern, and Whole Cloth (1997) with Laurel Reuter. She also became an expert on fiber arts, coauthoring Beyond Craft: The Art Fabric (1973) with the fiber artist Jack Lenor Larson. At her death, she was researching for a major international study of thread.
Constantine was both a great supporter and a great critic of CAA. She was a lifetime member and enjoyed the articles in The Art Bulletin, but believed that Art Journal was too limited in scope and did not fully address contemporary international art, as it once did. She also wanted to see a greater focus on international artists at Annual Conferences.
I first met Connie in 1980 when we were organizing a Diego Rivera retrospective at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Because of her familiarity with Mexican collections and because of her research and book on Tina Modotti, she was recommended to me by Alan Fern, who was then director of the National Portrait Gallery, for the photography section of the larger exhibition. Over several years we worked together as she curated one of the most important collections of photographs that captured the life of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo by artists such as Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Edward Weston, and Tina Modotti. She was an intrepid curator with a wonderful eye for quality and for the quirky.
Connie’s pioneering work and gregarious personality touched the lives of so many artists, art historians, curators, and collectors. She helped to shape the College Art Association in its first few decades and forged a path that has been followed by many subsequent students of art and art history.
Fall Publication Grants Announced
posted by Christopher Howard — Dec 03, 2008
CAA has announced the recipients of its two book-grant programs, the Millard Meiss Publication Fund and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant.
Fall Meiss Grant Winners
CAA has awarded six Millard Meiss Publication Grants for fall 2008. Thanks to the generous bequest of the late Prof. Millard Meiss, these grants are given twice annually to publishers to support the publication of scholarly books in art history and related fields.
The grantees are:
- Mehmet-Ali Atac, The Mythology of Kingship in Neo-Assyrian Art (Cambridge University Press)
- Daniel Connolly, The Maps of Matthew Paris: Medieval Journeys through Space, Time, and Liturgy (Boydell and Brewer)
- Joyce de Vries, Caterina Sforza and the Art of Appearances: Gender, Art, and Culture in Early Modern Italy (Ashgate)
- Finbarr Barry Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Hindu-Muslim Encounter (Permanent Black)
- Victoria George, Whitewash (Pindar Press)
- Roslyn Hammers, Art, Technology, and Labor in Early Modern China (Hong Kong University Press)
Books eligible for a Meiss grant must already be under contract with a publisher and be on a subject in the arts or art history. Authors must be current CAA members. Application criteria and guidelines are available from the CAA Publications Department. Deadlines: March 15 and October 1 of every year.
Wyeth Publication Grant Winners
CAA is pleased to announce five recipients of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant for 2008. Thanks to a second generous three-year grant from the Wyeth Foundation, these awards are given annually to publishers to support the publication of one or more book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art, visual studies, and related subjects.
The books receiving a grant are:
- Carol Clark, Charles Deas and 1840s America (University of Oklahoma Press)
- William Innes Homer, The Paris Letters by Thomas Eakins (Princeton University Press)
- Anna Indych-López, Muralism without Walls: Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United States, 1927–1940 (University of Pittsburgh Press)
- Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (University of California Press)
- Kristina Wilson, The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of the Exhibition, 1925–1935 (Yale University Press)
Books eligible for the Wyeth Grant have been accepted by a publisher on their merits but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy. The topic must be in American art; authors must be current CAA members. Application criteria and guidelines are available from the CAA Publications Department. Deadline: October 1, 2009.