CAA News Today

Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for the 2015 Annual Conference

posted by CAA — Feb 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.

2015 Annual Conference in New York

The CWA Picks for the New York conference are dedicated to Kalliopi Minioudaki for her tremendous efforts in working on the Picks during her tenure on the CWA (2012–15). You will be missed!

Cover of the catalogue for Judith Scott: Bound and Unbound

Judith Scott: Bound and Unbound
Brooklyn Museum
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Fourth Floor, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238
October 24, 2014–March 29, 2015

Bringing together sculptures and works on paper that span the eighteen years of her career, this much awaited exhibition is the first survey of Judith Scott’s work that Matthew Higgs has described as “one of the most important bodies of work—‘insider’ or ‘outsider’—produced anywhere and under any circumstances in the past twenty years.”

Judith and her twin sister Joyce were born in Columbus, Ohio. Judith was diagnosed with Down syndrome, and considered retarded due to learning difficulties caused from undiagnosed deafness. At the age of eight she was tragically separated from her sister and spent the next thirty-five years of her life as ward in Dickensian institutions for the disabled and the discarded. Her art production begun after Joyce decided to become Judith’s legal guardian and introduced her to a visionary studio art program, the Creative Growth Art Center.

Judith Scott developed a unique and idiosyncratic method to produce a body of work of remarkable originality and visual complexity. Often working for weeks or months on individual pieces, she begun by pilfering and assembling together all sorts of objects; she then enveloped and intertwined them with miscellaneous threads, twines, strings, ropes, fibers, somewhat protecting and concealing their core. As the art historian Lucienne Peiry says, her unconventional textile sculptures “are endowed with an intens

e power of expression: they resemble giant multicolored cocoons and … are evocative of magical fetishes” holding a special connection to life and death. Moreover, although it does not appear that her work was directed by intention “these sculptures conceal a secret that their author always took great care to hide…. There is no doubt but that the sculptures themselves play an essential role in embodying the physical presence—that of ‘the other twin’—throughout the feverish act of creation. Judith Scott’s approach thus involved a process that may seem paradoxical because, on one hand, it consisted of dissimulating and concealing, and on the other hand, of growing and shaping…The emotional and physical reunion with her sister led Judith Scott to recover an identity, and then to develop an intimate experience at a fantasy level where she sublimated the tearing apart of which she was a victim.”

Cover of the catalogue for Sturtevant: Double Trouble

Sturtevant: Double Trouble 
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10009
November 9, 2014–February 22, 2015

Elaine Sturtevant (American, 1924–2014) began “repeating” the works of her contemporaries in 1964, using some of the most iconic artworks of her generation as a source and catalyst for the exploration of originality, authorship, and the interior structures of art and image culture. Beginning with her versions of works by Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, she initially turned the visual logic of Pop art back on itself, probing uncomfortably at the workings of art history in real time. Yet her chameleonlike embrace of other artists’ art has also resulted in her being largely overlooked in the history of postwar American art. As a woman making versions of the work of better-known male artists, she has passed almost unnoticed through the hierarchies of midcentury modernism and postmodernism, at once absent from these histories while nevertheless articulating their structures.

Far more than copies, her versions, for instance, of Johns’s flags, Warhol’s flowers, and Joseph Beuys’s fat chairs are studies in the action of art that expose aspects of its making, circulation, and canonization. Working primarily in video since 2000, the artist remained deeply engaged with the politics of image production and reception, using stock footage from Hollywood films, television, and advertising to point to the exhaustion built into much of postwar cultural production.

This exhibition is the first comprehensive survey in America of Sturtevant’s fifty-year career and the only institutional presentation of her work organized in the United States since her solo show at the Everson Museum of Art in 1973. Rather than taking the form of a traditional retrospective, the exhibition offers a historical overview of her work from a contemporary vantage point, interspersing more recent video pieces among key artworks from all periods of her career.

Marisol: Self-Portrait Looking at The Last Supper
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Lila Acheson Wallace Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art, Design, and Architecture, Gallery 909, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028
October 8, 2014–April 5, 2015

For the first time in nearly thirty years, Marisol’s monumental sculptural assemblage, Self-Portrait Looking at The Last Supper, has been on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, complementing the retrospective celebration of the renowned yet understudied sculptor by her recent retrospective that travelled to El Museo del Barrio this fall.

Inspired by Leonardo’s monumental fresco, Marisol (Maria Sol Escobar, b. 1930) faithfully rendered the painting’s composition into three dimensions to create this 30-foot-long installation. The biblical scene depicts Christ and his Apostles at the Passover meal, with each disciple reacting to the announcement by Jesus that one of them would betray him. The work is primarily carved from wood, with a rough, sketchy technique that includes painted and drawn elements. Marisol is particularly skillful at joining seemingly incompatible components. In fact, the seated figures are neither fully rounded nor consistently flat, oscillating between two and three dimensions. The artist chiseled the central figure of Christ from a block of salvaged New York City brownstone. Christ’s physical solidity and ashen, serene appearance contrast with the blackened, twisted figure of Judas to provide the composition’s emotional tension. In Marisol’s sculptural version of the Last Supper, a novel figure is added opposite the tableau. It portrays the artist contemplating the scene and with a hieratic presence that shares visual affinities with the stocky, solemn figures of Precolumbian sculpture.

Plastic Age: IN/OUT: Banners and Sculptures by Barbara Madsen
New York Public Library
Mid-Manhattan Library, Corner Room, 455 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016
February 3–May 21, 2015

Barbara Madsen’s work is a hybrid practice between photography, print, and sculpture. Her banners, a series of photographs of inanimate plastic objects occupy the windows of the Corner Room on Fifth Avenue and 40th Street. Madsen’s sculptures facing Fifth Avenue are architectural plywood structures, jutting walls, boxed, minimal, acute—stacked on top of each other. The angled surfaces are covered with photographs of objects that have been consumed and discarded. Vibrant color plays a central tenant in her cast of objects: the child’s crimson fireman’s ladder; a lime-colored dome from a hair drier; and cobalt, yellow, scarlet plastic remnants of toys. Within the complex shadows and highlights of the images, dust and flaws are naked—the invisible becomes visible. Madsen is an artist and associate professor in the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University known for her work in photography, prints, sculpture, and installation.

E. E. Smith: The Ballad of Delia
Kim Foster Gallery
529 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011
January 8–February 14, 2015

The Ballad of Delia is an installation of new photo-based oil prints by E. E. Smith. This piece is part of a series in which Smith uses song forms as the point of departure for her work. The Ballad of Delia consists of ten panels of varying sizes that tell the story of Delia Greene’s murder, an account best known from covers by Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. Like the singers, and especially the now-forgotten songwriters, Smith takes liberties with the telling of the tale, presenting various details and asking the viewer to fill in the story.

Each panel represents a clue to this murder mystery, yet stylistically they differ. The lush landscape harkens back to the evocative paintings of Albert Pinkham Ryder, drawing us into the location of the crime. Other images are shockingly explicit: the menacing axe and thick footprints allude to police photographic evidence, while the male silhouette suggests a mug shot. And the hand holding a teacup (the victim perhaps?) makes reference to film stills.

In contrast to the songs—and most likely any contemporaneous news accounts—Smith deliberately dispenses with a time-dependent linear narrative, opting instead to display several moments simultaneously. The effect is not so much “the truth” about a murder but “a truth” told without words. The trope of the murder-mystery in American culture is ubiquitous, and Smith’s iteration in The Ballad of Delia makes a compelling episode.

Louise Nevelson: Collage and Assemblage
Pace Gallery
534 West 25th Street, New York, NY 1001
January 24–February 28, 2015

Pace Gallery presents an exhibition of Louise Nevelson’s rarely seen collages, accompanied by a catalogue by Germano Celant. Nevelson began producing collages in the mid-1950s, inspired by her longstanding interest in Cubism and a correspondence with Jean Arp. Prompting her remark “the way I think is collage,” collage signifies an important aspect of her work.

The exhibition features the artist’s earliest collages, produced along her monochromatic black, gold, and white sculptures, by using scraps of wood and metal collected from the streets outside of her Little Italy studio. The show also includes examples of her later unpainted assemblages that manifest a departure from her monochromatic work, while continuing to prove the centrality of collage in her practice. Among the last works of her life, two large-scale, black wall reliefs, including Spring Street (1984), which was installed in Nevelson’s home from its completion until her death, are also part of this exhibition.

Nevelson (b. 1899 Kiev; d. 1988, New York) emigrated from czarist Russia as a child and grew up in Rockland, Maine. As an adult she returned to Europe, where she studied with Hans Hoffmann. Upon her return to the United States, she served as Diego Rivera’s assistant and later as an art instructor in the Works Progress Administration. In 1941, Nevelson had her first solo exhibition and, in 1946, was included for the first time in the Whitney Annual exhibition, which she would participate in eleven more times. The artist exhibited her first all-black sculptures in the mid-1950s. Although she worked in white and gold and later with painted steel, her developments in the 1950s sustained her work throughout the rest of her life. Considered today as one of America’s most significant artists, Nevelson has been the subject of one-artist exhibitions and retrospectives at numerous institutions in the US, and her work is found in many prominent museums and public collections worldwide.

Yael Bartana
Petzel Gallery
456 West 18th Street, New York, NY 10011
January 8–February 14, 2015

Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce a new exhibition by the Israeli artist Yael Bartana (b. 1970, Kfar-Yehezkel, Israel) that debuts her latest two films: Inferno and True Finn. This will be the gallery’s second solo show with the artist.

Bartana studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, the School of Visual Arts in New York, and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. She has had several solo exhibitions held at various international venues and in New York. Bartana was Poland’s choice for the 2011 Venice Biennale, where she was the first non-Polish citizen to represent the country. Bartana’s photography, film, and sound works investigate society, spirituality, and politics. Her films, film installations, and photographs challenge the national consciousness that is propagated by her native country of Israel. Homeland, return, and belonging are the central questions that she explores. Her investigation includes ceremonies, public rituals and social diversions that are intended to reaffirm the collective identity of countries. Working outside the country, Bartana observes it from a critical distance. Her early films were primarily registrations in which aesthetic interventions, including soundtracks, slowing the image, and specific camera perspectives, played a role.

In Inferno, Bartana films the inauguration of a grand temple, the destruction of it, and the worship of its debris. The starting point is the construction of a replica of Solomon’s Temple in São Paulo by an evangelical neo-Pentecostal church called the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG). The temple is built with stones imported from Israel, as UCKG intends to bring part of the Holy Land to São Paulo, thus inverting the traditional path taken by pilgrims who would leave Brazil for the Holy Land. The film’s conflation of place, history, and belief allows Bartana to weave connections between the complex realities of São Paulo and Jerusalem. Shot and edited with stylistic references to Hollywood action epics, her film employs what she refers to as “historical pre-enactment,” a methodology that commingles fact and fiction, and prophesies and histories. Using this powerful cinematic language, Inferno combines histories of antiquity in the Middle East with Brazil’s contemporary hybrid culture.

True Finn is a documentary-style film asking eight people from Finland one simple question: who is a true Finn? Bartana’s objective with True Finn, produced in connection of Finland’s Pro Arte Foundation, was to create and record a utopian moment that would yield an answer to this question. As a result of an open call, eight Finnish residents of different ethnic, religious, and political background came to live together for seven days in a house in the countryside. Life, discussions, and specifically designed assignments were filmed, with the edited material forming the core of the artwork and allowing True Finn to probe questions about identity, nationhood, and belonging.

Diana Thater: Science, Fiction
David Zwirner
533 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011
January 8–February 21, 2015

David Zwirner presents new work by Diana Thater in the form of a new type of installation that involves an enclosed video projection, ceiling screen, and light, as well as two new video walls. Thater is one of the most important video artists working today. Since the early 1990s, she has created a wide range of film, video, and installation-based works whose sculptural forms engage spatial perception in physical and conceptual terms. Her work pushes the boundaries of how new-media art is displayed. Through a combination of the temporal qualities of video and the architectural dimension of its installation, Thater’s work explores the artifice of its own production and its capacity to construct perception about the world through its image. Natural diversity, wildlife, and conservation have been persistent themes in the artist’s work. While her in-depth studies of ecosystems and animal behavior propose observation as a kind of understanding in itself, her ethical position is implicit in the work, providing subtly political views of the sublime.

In Science, Fiction, Thater focuses on the dung beetle and the intricate navigation system it deploys in disposing balls of animal excrement, its main source of nutrition. Recent studies have revealed that the species uses the Milky Way to orientate itself at night, currently the only insect known to do so. Thater’s video projection appears at once abstract and particular, juxtaposing the sophistication of the small insects’ navigation systems with the close-up views of their earthy setting in a meditative fusion of macro and micro realms. Deploying a new type of installation, Thater presents the footage on a screen attached to the ceiling, projected from within a closed-off, freestanding box. Mirroring the setup of the scientific experiment with the dung beetles, the white square further references the Light and Space movement in California in the 1960s. The exhibition is illuminated by soft blue lights, creating an environment that mimics the evening sky, while the walls of the box themselves are lit from below, which offers the illusion of levitation. Also on view are two video walls showing the Milky Way, respectively titled Sidereus Nuncius and The Starry Messenger.

Born in 1962 in San Francisco, Thater lives and works in Los Angeles. She studied art history at New York University before receiving her MFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Over the past decade, her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide, and she is the recipient of many awards. In fall 2015, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will host a midcareer survey of her work, which will coincide with an installation at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado.

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook
SculptureCenter
44-19 Purves Street, Long Island City, NY 11101
January 25–March 30, 2015

SculptureCenter presents Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, the Thai artist’s first retrospective in the United States. The exhibition, which brings together over twenty artworks spanning over a decade of the artist’s career, includes video, sculpture, and photography, presenting significant highlights as well as works that have rarely been viewed in the US. As such the show features The Class and Conversation series, for which Rasdjarmrearnsook conducts discussions with corpses, and the video Village and Elsewhere: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes; Jeff Koons’ Untitled, and Thai Villagers (2011), in which a Buddhist monk leads a comical conversation about these two Western paintings in a temple. A more recent group of works featured focuses on the status of dogs in Thai culture and beyond. SculptureCenter will also include works produced specifically for this exhibition.

Rasdjarmrearnsook is one of the leading visual artists working in Southeast Asia. She is based in the northern city of Chiang Mai in Thailand, where she teaches in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Chiang Mai University. Rasdjarmrearnsook is internationally known for videos and installations that profoundly explore aspects of human experience and understanding, often touching on taboo topics such as death and insanity. In 2005 she represented Thailand in the Venice Biennale. Working with psychologically rich materials, she considers a wide range of subjects that have existed in marginal spaces, including women, the deceased, the insane, and animals. She creates complex narratives that confront societal structures of power and pedagogy. Concerned with systems of language and communication, Rasdjarmrearnsook attempts to converse with subjects who don’t speak in languages that are comprehended by or even acknowledged by mainstream society.

Looking Back: The 9th White Columns Annual
White Columns
320 West 13th Street, New York, NY 10014
January 13–February 21, 2015

Not an exhibition of women artists, this year’s White Columns Annual is curated by an all women’s curatorial collective, Cleopatra’s. Founded in 2008, Cleopatra’s works collaboratively with artists and cultural producers to create projects that forge new networks and dialogues among individuals, art practices, and institutions. These projects are realized in their flagship noncommercial storefront in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. From 2011 to 2012 the collective also operated a satellite art space in Berlin, Germany. Further investigations also occur in the form of offsite public programs, events, and printed publications, encompassing various fields and locales. The aim of Cleopatra’s is to present work and advance ideas informed by both individual and collective perspectives, and to disseminate that work and those ideas among a broad and diverse audience. Current and founding members of the Cleopatra’s are Erin Somerville, Colleen Grennan, Bridget Finn, and Bridget Donahue.

Samara Golden: The Flat Side of the Knife
MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, NY 11101
October 26, 2014–August 30, 2015

MoMA PS1 presents Samara Golden’s first solo museum exhibition and her largest installation to date: The Flat Side of the Knife. The Los Angeles–based Golden (American, b. 1973) creates immersive installations that explore what the artist calls the “sixth dimension,” where a multiple pasts, presents, and futures coexist. Golden’s multilayered installation fills the double-height of MoMA PS1’s Duplex Gallery with staircases, beds, couches, lamps, musical instruments, video, and sound. The Flat Side of the Knife combines physical with illusory spaces. Some appear only in mirrors, reflecting what the artist refers to as “layers of consciousness,” akin to psychological and hallucinatory spaces in the mind. Her use of mirrors in conjunction with sculptural elements made from a silvery insulation board allows the illusion of space to expand in multiple directions, suggesting imaginary spaces, such as adjacent rooms that do not exist in reality.

Golden received her MFA from Columbia University and has exhibited her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; SculptureCenter in New York; Night Gallery in Los Angeles; CANADA in New York; Cardi Black Box in Milan; Loyal Gallery in Stockholm; and Galerie Crevecoeur in Paris. Most recently, her work was featured in the Hammer Museum’s biennial, Made in L.A., in 2014.

Anne Imhof: DEAL
MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, NY 11101
January 31–March 9, 2015

MoMA PS1 presents DEAL, Anne Imhof’s inaugural solo project in the United States, which consists of a two-day performance followed by an exhibition. The project, conceived specifically for the museum, revolves around the structures of illegal street transactions that are underpinned by strict rules and codes while functioning beyond words and juridical regulations. Along the opening performances, nine performers will enact highly complex and abstract movements, evoking power relations, secret codes, and unspoken rules that underlie daily human interactions. Here, tasks and patterns are unceasingly repeated over an entire day and progressively shift as they push toward a point of collapse. The exhibition expands on the same formal interrogations and ideas through diverse media such as drawing, video, sculpture, painting, and a variation of the initial performance, SOTSB for DEAL, which repeats every Sunday during museum hours.

Imhof (German, b. 1978) was trained as a visual artist and considers the different media as integral to the process for creating images that gradually emerge in time. Live events, their documentation, objects, and props—Imhof believes that each component in a body of work is interrelated and of equal relevance, contributing to the creation of a visual image that is perpetually in process, highly precarious, and in a constant verge of dissolution.

Chitra Ganesh: Eyes of Time
Brooklyn Museum
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Herstory Gallery, Fourth Floor, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238
December 12, 2014–July 12, 2015

The Herstory Gallery at the Brooklyn Museum is hosting Eyes of Time, an exhibition by the Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh that explores ideas of femininity, empowerment, and multiplicity. Her drawing, installation, text-based work, and collaborations suggest and excavate buried narratives typically absent from official canons of history, literature, and art. For more than a decade, Ganesh has used the iconography of mythology, literature, and popular culture to bring to light feminist and queer narratives.

For Eyes of Time, the artist draws inspiration from the museum’s encyclopedic collection to create a site-specific multimedia installation at the gallery. Eyes of Time focus on the portrayal of female power and plurality based on Kali—the Hindu goddess of destruction and rebirth—as well as other figures from Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party as point of departure. Tales of Amnesia (2002)—a zine inspired by Indian comic books acquired by the museum—is also on view.

As stated about her creative practice, “by layering disparate materials and visual languages, Ganesh asks her viewers to ‘seek and consider new narratives of sexuality and power.’ In this process the body becomes a site of transgression and transformation, both social and psychic, doubled, dismembered and continually exceeding its limits.”

TENDREL – Interconnections
Tibet House
22 West 15th Street, New York, NY 10011
January 2–March 2, 2015

TENDREL – Interconnections is an exhibition by artists who are linked to and inspired by the life work of Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, the first Western woman to become a Buddhist nun. Diverse yet interconnected, the themes investigated by the artists include Tibet and its culture, Buddhism, women, spiritual life, meditation, and activism. Works consist of photographs of nomads and nunneries in Tibet that provide profound insight and stark contrast to the social cultural changes of the Tibetan community, and art based on Buddhist and meditative iconography that explores the practice of visualization in painting, sculpture, drawing, and detailed stained-glass artistry. Among those presenting works are these artists: Diane Barker, Caterina De Re, Mary DeVincentis, Maxine Henryson, Heather Kessinger, Chrysanne Stathacos, Tsunma Jamyang Donma/Yulokod Studios, and Kate Temple.

Art in the First Person Lecture Series
School of Visual Arts
Various Locations in Manhattan
February 3–17, 2015

The School of Visual Arts presents the spring 2015 lineup of its Art in the First Person lecture series, jointly presented by the following departments: MA Curatorial Practice, MPS Digital Photography, BFA Fine Arts, MFA Fine Arts and BFA Visual and Critical Studies. All events are free and open to the public. The lecture series includes:

Amy Smith-Stewart, independent curator and art advisor, on Tuesday, February 3, 6:00 PM
Lumi Tan, curator at the Kitchen, on Tuesday, February 10, 6:00 PM
Kira Pollack, director of photography at Time, on Tuesday, February 10, 7:00 PM
Judith Page, artist, on Tuesday, February 17, 6:00 PM

Collective Creativity: Collaboration and Collectives in Feminist Art Practice
Feminist Art Project
Museum of Arts and Design, 2 Columbus Circle, New York, NY 10019
February 14, 2015

Janet Kaplan: In Memoriam

posted by CAA — Dec 19, 2014

The following obituary for Janet Kaplan was published by the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on December 15, 2014. CAA will follow up with its own text in the new year.

It is with deepest sorrow that we share with you the news that on Friday, December 12, Art History Faculty Professor and Curatorial Studies Director, Dr. Janet Kaplan passed away.

We will honor Professor Kaplan by hosting a remembrance to honor her here at Moore in the spring semester at a date to be determined. Dr. Kaplan was beloved and respected by many artists and scholars in the Philadelphia community and beyond. She will be deeply missed by the students and those who teach and work at Moore.

Dr. Kaplan had a long and fruitful career at Moore College of Art & Design. She began teaching at Moore in 1980 as an Assistant Professor, promoted to Associate Professor in 1987 and to full Professor in 1993. Dr. Kaplan received tenure in 1987 and served as the Chair of Liberal Arts from 1989 to 2003. Professor Kaplan served as the Executive Editor of the Art Journal for the College Art Association in New York City from 1995 to 2002. The Art Journal was the winner of the Utne Award for Independent Magazine Publishing in 2002. Dr. Kaplan was instrumental in the planning and development for the Curatorial Studies major, working in collaboration with Dr. Maureen Pelta, Chair of the Liberal Arts department, the Liberal Arts faculty and Academic Dean to develop curriculum for the nation’s first undergraduate Curatorial Studies program that successfully launched in fall 2006.

Throughout her teaching career Dr. Kaplan also taught at NYU, Institute of Fine Arts as a Visiting Professor and Graduate Colloquium; Vermont College as a graduate faculty in the MFA in Visual Arts program; and at the University of New Hampshire. She served as a moderator, panelist and speaker at regional, national and international conferences and symposia on a wide range of topics related to art criticism, artist responses to social issues, women and surrealism, media spectacle and the politics of representation. She was a leader in generating dialogue about women in the arts, organizing symposia including a 2000 symposium at The National Museum of Women in the Arts and 3 Curatorial Conversations here at Moore including “Curating and Activism: An International Panel and Conversation” in 2009. These Curatorial Conversations were supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and through the support from Frances and Bayard Storey. Dr. Kaplan published widely on modern and contemporary art. Her essays and interviews have been published in numerous national and international art journals. She frequently wrote book reviews for art journals including one on Whitney Chadwick’s book on Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. She is the author of Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys, an important internationally known scholarly work, published in multiple languages.

In 2001, Dr. Kaplan received a Fellowship in Arts Criticism from the Pennsylvania Council for Humanities and in 2003 she received a Special Opportunities Stipend from the Pennsylvania Council for Humanities. Professor Kaplan served on the advisory board, consultant and/or review panelist for numerous organizations and institutions including the School of Art at Carnegie-Mellon University; the Arts Advisory Board of the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority; the Rosenbach Museum and Library; NEA grants panel in 2001 for Visual Arts Creativity and Organizational Capacity; review panelist for the Philadelphia Cultural Fund in 1998; the Advisory Board for the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, 1997–99; and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum – Varian Fry Project. In 2012, she co-curated an exhibition fo the work of artist Ashley Hune in Sinop, Turkey.

Dr. Kaplan gave back to the Moore community through her extensive service to the College and to the community. In addition to the institutions and organizations where she served in an ongoing capacity, she frequently participated in citywide and College organized events. She moderated panels organized by The Galleries at Moore in conjunction with the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program and served as a panelist at the Free Library of Philadelphia for one film/one book events. Recently, Dr. Kaplan had an essay published in 70 x 7 The Meal, act XXXIV, Lucy + Jorge Orta, City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, 2013. Moore College of Art & Design is proud to have had the honor of Dr. Kaplan’s service, teaching and scholarship; she will be missed by her colleagues, her students and the staff at Moore.

Filed under: Obituaries —

People in the News

posted by CAA — Dec 17, 2014

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.

December 2014

Academe

Edith Balas has retired after thirty-five years of teaching art history at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Jeff Bellantoni (photograph by Peter Tannenbaum)

Jeff Bellantoni, formerly chairperson and professor of the Graduate Communications Design Department at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, has been appointed vice president for academic affairs at Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida.

Lori Cole, formerly the Charlotte Zysman Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities and Lecturer in Fine Arts at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, has become assistant professor and faculty fellow at the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in Humanities and Social Thought at New York University.

Ryan Hoover has been appointed a 2014–15 full-time faculty member in the Interdisciplinary Sculpture Department at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.

Christian Luczanits, senior curator at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, has been named David L. Snellgrove Senior Lecturer in Tibetan and Buddhist Art at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies in England.

Kiel Mutschelknaus has joined Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore as a full-time faculty member in graphic design for the 2014–15 academic year.

David Raskin

David Raskin has been named Mohn Family Professor of Contemporary Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, thanks to a recent $2.5 million gift from the Mohn Family Foundation.

Daniel Tucker has been appointed graduate-program manager in social and studio practice at the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Museums and Galleries

Carol Damian has stepped down as director and chief curator of the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University in Miami. She will serve as a professor in the school’s Art and Art History Department.

Tracy Fitzpatrick, chief curator of the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College, State University of New York, has been appointed director of the museum.

Meredith Fluke has been appointed Kemper Curator of Academic Programs at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

Aimeé E. Froom, an independent scholar based in Paris, France, has become curator of Islamic art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in Texas.

Erika Holmquist-Wall

Erika Holmquist-Wall, formerly of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minnesota, has been hired by the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, as curator of European and American painting and sculpture.

Monica Obniski, formerly assistant curator of American decorative arts at the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, has been hired by the Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin as curator of design and decorative arts.

Amy L. Powell, previously a Cynthia Woods Mitchell Curatorial Fellow at the University of Houston’s in Texas, has become curator of modern and contemporary art at the Krannert Art Museum, part of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Namita Gupta Wiggers

Namita Gupta Wiggers has resigned from being director and chief curator for the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon. She will continue working with the museum as an adjunct curator and with Pacific Northwest College of Art as an adjunct instructor in the MFA Applied Craft and Design Program.

Scott Wilcox, chief curator of art collections and senior curator of prints and drawings at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, has been promoted to deputy director for collections.

Organizations and Publications

Richard Brettell has been chosen to lead the newly created Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History in Dallas, Texas, as director and Edith O’Donnell Distinguished Chair.

Paul Catanese, associate professor and director of the Interdisciplinary Arts and Media MFA Program at Columbia College Chicago in Illinois, has joined the ISEA International Foundation Board.

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

Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for December 2014

posted by CAA — Dec 10, 2014

December 2014

Suzanne Lacy: Gender Agendas
Museo Pecci Milano
Ripa di Porta Ticinese 113, Milan, Italy
November 14, 2014–January 6, 2015

The Milan Pecci Museum is presenting a Suzanne Lacy’s Gender Agendas. This retrospective exhibition launches a whole new line of investigation at the the Centre for Contemporary Art Luigi Pecci that has been dedicated to the pioneering work in the arts developed internationally in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Born in California in 1945 and based in Los Angeles, Lacy is an influential artist, educator, and writer. She is known as one of the pioneer artists blending Conceptual and Performance art with social commitment in the early seventies in Los Angeles. Her approach to researching and making follows her questioning the relationship of “service” to “activism,” and of both to “art practice.” Her diverse approach to this investigation stretches from explorations of the body and intimate reflections to the production of large and lengthy public demonstrations involving dozens of artists and thousands of spectators.

Gender Agendas presents, for the first time in Europe, a large series of Lacy’s projects that follow a constant of her artistic development: the investigation of the female condition. From a more intimately approach to a strong political and civic one, Lacy explores the power of art as a useful and effective tool for social struggle and for the promotion of progressive ideas, digging in this way into the meanings of the hundreds of anonymous female and working-class performers who would have no access to the communication systems otherwise. Sexual exploitation, violence, media representation of the aging woman, and social issues ranging from racism to the conditions of labor and class may have been provocative and avant-garde in the seventies and eighties, but are still deeply relevant today.

Through the curatorial approach of Lacy’s retrospective exhibition, Fabio Cavallucci and Megan Steinman, propose a readaptation of some of her most important works, including Prostitution Notes (1974); Three Weeks in May (1977); In Mourning and In Rage (1977); The Crystal Quilt (1985–87); and Full Circle (1994); as well as one of her most recent projects, Storying Rape (2012), a discussion among significant personalities in the media, activists, and politicians in an attempt to find a new cultural narrative that describes sexual violence.

Birgit Jurgenssen
Fergus McCaffrey
514 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
November 6–December 20 2014

For the second exhibition of Birgit Jurgenssen, Fergus McCaffrey brings together a large group of her photographic works in combination with a number of sculptures in order to underscore the variety and complexity of her work.

Highly experimental, Jurgenssen’s photographic work is exemplified by her Stoff-arbeiten (Fabric Works), which were created from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. The “fabric works” consist of photographic prints mounted on canvases that have been screwed to iron frames made by the artist, giving a highly sculptural character to their combinations. Thin, translucent fabrics such as gauze are stretched over the surface, veiling and slightly obscuring the images. The photographs themselves are created through a range of processes, including photograms, solarization, and multiple exposures. The juxtaposition of hard-welded iron frames and delicate textile emphasizes their materiality and draws a direct relationship to Jürgenssen’s sculptural works.

The exhibition also includes works that Jurgenssen referred to as “painted” photography. These large format photograms were created by manipulating sheets of photo paper in developer and fixing baths and by pouring photo chemicals directly over the paper. The resulting marbled and dripped images were then exposed to light and fixed, after which the surfaces were scratched, creating gestural drawings over the “painted” photographic surfaces.

Born and educated in Vienna, Jürgenssen (1949–2003) died prematurely at the age of 54. Her studio practice encompassed drawing, performance, photography, and sculpture, through which she compellingly combined classically refined draftsmanship, mixed media, and experimental photo techniques. She is best known for her connection to the Austrian feminist movement of the 1970s. Equally important is her engagement with Surrealism and her concern for materials and processes.

Cover of the catalogue for Sturtevant: Double Trouble

Sturtevant: Double Trouble
Museum of Modern Art
Special Exhibitions Gallery, Third Floor; and Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Painting and Sculpture Gallery, Gallery 5, Fifth Floor, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10009
November 9, 2014–February 22, 2015

Michelle Stuart: Silent Movies
Leslie Tonkonow: Art Works and Projects
535 West 22nd Street, Sixth Floor, New York, NY 10011
November 1–December 20, 2014

Michelle Stuart (American, b. 1933) became internationally known in the 1970s for innovative works that synthesize Land art, drawing, and sculpture, as well as her pioneering use of natural materials in sculpture, painting, and drawing. Since 2011 photography has been her primary medium, although present in her work both literally and conceptually since the 1970s. Devising a highly personal and original method of photographic manipulation, Stuart conveys the impression of deeply felt images seen through time and layers of consciousness. It is “a combination of fact and fiction, truth and lies—and lies that tell the truth,” as put by the artist.

The exhibition at Leslie Tonkonow comprises photographs drawn from Stuart’s vast archive of analogue and digital photographs taken for almost half a century. Stuart activates their aesthetic and storytelling potential by arranging them in gridlike groups or occasionally altering them. Each work is composed of between seven and seventy separate images, digitally printed on 8½ x 11 inch sheets of archival paper. Both painterly and cinematic in their rhythmic visual arrangement, the works in this exhibition amount to meditations on the nature of memory.

As dreamlike recollections of her past, these works continue her lifelong artistic engagement with specific locations, while affirming the significance of place as a unique source of memory. “Memories are silent until we either articulate them in words on paper or depict them visually,” as put by the artist herself. Two years ago, in Palimpsests, her first solo show of exclusively photographic works, Stuart expressed thoughts on war, the cosmos, the passing of time, and on form itself. The compositions in Silent Movies, all created since then, present universal themes with deeply personal associations that contain keys to momentous events and evoke times and places in a manner that is both specific and archetypical. With abundant literary, cinematic, and historical references, these works do not merely address memories, but, as put in the press release, the very process of recall itself.

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

News from the Art and Academic Worlds

posted by Christopher Howard — Dec 10, 2014

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.

What’s a “Work for Hire” and Why Should You Care?

A provost learns to his dismay that the university shares copyright ownership of a popular MOOC with the professor who created it. A professor finds to her surprise that students who helped produce an animation to illustrate a lecture are co-owners of the copyright. Yet another professor, who wrote and put together a video for his course, is shocked to learn that the university that employs him and the company that produced the video share copyright ownership of it—without him. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Artists Call the Shots

When Gustave Courbet organized an exhibition of his work in 1855, it was a radical act—but now artist-curators are everywhere. That raises some questions: Do the restrictions faced by institutional curators lead to more historically accurate exhibitions? Does the pluralist attitude that fosters artist-curated shows open the door to curatorial misconceptions? Are artists simply more likely to get it wrong than academic curators? (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

Help Desk: Participatory Project

I’m an artist working with a poor family on a participatory project at a local museum. The family is Latino, and the project is about the members’ perceptions on art. Who might I talk to or where might I look for similar projects, or even guidance on working with this population? I’m neither Latino nor poor. (Read more from Daily Serving.)

Are Museums The Best Place to Appreciate Art?

Philippe de Montebello, the longest-serving director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in its history, discusses how and why we look at art. In his new book, Rendez-vous with Art, he reflects on the importance of museums but wonders if they might be the worst possible places to look at art. (Read more from WNYC.)

Where the Time Goes

New data about time to degree in PhD programs from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences complicate some current reform efforts to help students get through graduate school faster. At the same time, the data suggest that real time to degree is shorter than many people think it is, and that it’s decreasing in some disciplines—albeit slowly. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

War Can Both Inspire and Inhibit Artistic Creativity

War can inhibit creativity. Societies engaged in conflict have fewer resources to spend on art; they also often restrict the freedom artists require. On the other hand, war can inspire creativity. Patriotic creators might feel an impulse—or receive an order—to create works intended to unite and galvanize the citizenry. Given those cross-currents, no wonder researchers have found an “ambiguous and counterintuitive relationship between war and the arts,” in the words of Karol Jan Borowiecki of the University of Southern Denmark. (Read more from Pacific Standard.)

Are There Banner Works of Art on Instagram?

For me, Instagram is a land of the midnight sun, a wide-open place that’s always lit up, bristling with visions, pictures, strangers, shooting stars, screwballs, and well-known artists posting images from everywhere, together creating this immense abstract missive or amazing rebus that seems to speak just to me, the curious curator of my own lit-up Instagramland. (Read more from Vulture.)

Learning to Love the Conference

In 2012, I was all set for the most important conference of my life. All three major branches of musicology would be there: theorists, musicologists, and ethnomusicologists. It was going to be my last real year on the academic job market, and, despite my rapidly aging degree, I was well positioned. I had conference interviews. I had meetings scheduled with publishers. I was going to put everything into that conference. (Read more from Vitae.)

Filed under: CAA News —

CAA NAMES RECIPIENTS FOR 2015 CAA-GETTY INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM

posted by Janet Landay, Program Manager, Fair Use Initiative — Dec 01, 2014

CAA is pleased to announce this year’s recipients of travel support through the CAA-Getty International Program. In an effort to promote greater interaction and exchange between American and international art historians, CAA will bring scholars from around the world to participate in the 2015 program, held during the association’s Annual Conference in New York City from February 11–14, 2015. This is the fourth year of the program, which has been generously funded by grants from the Getty Foundation since its inception. The participants—professors of art history, curators, and artists who teach art history—were selected by a jury of CAA members from a highly competitive group of applicants. In addition to covering travel expenses, hotel accommodations, and per diems, the CAA-Getty International Program includes support for conference registration and a one-year CAA membership.

The CAA-Getty International Program participants’ activities begin with a one-day preconference colloquium on international issues in art history, during which they meet with North-American-based CAA members to discuss common interests and challenges. The participants are assisted throughout the conference by CAA member hosts, who recommend relevant panel sessions and introduce them to colleagues who share their interests. Members of CAA’s International Committee have agreed to serve as hosts, along with representatives from several Affiliated Societies of CAA, including the American Council for Southern Asian Art, the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, the Association for Latin American Art, the Society of Contemporary Art Historians, and the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasia, and Russian Art and Architecture.

This program has increased international participation in the association’s activities, and expanded international networking and the exchange of ideas both during and after the conference. The CAA-Getty International Program supplements CAA’s regular program of Annual Conference Travel Grants for graduate students and international artists and scholars. We look forward to welcoming the recipients at the Annual Conference in New York City this February.

2015 CAA-Getty International Program Participants

Mokammal H. Bhuiyan

Mokammal H. Bhuiyan

Mokammal H. Bhuiyan is chairman of the Department of Archaeology at Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. With a BA (honors), MA, MPhil, and PhD in archaeology, he has developed scholarly interests that also include art history, iconography, and heritage studies and management of Eastern India and Bangladesh. The author of a 2003 book, Terracotta Art of Ancient Bengal, Bhuiyan has written numerous scholarly articles on art, iconography, archaeology, and heritage, both nationally and internationally, as well as newspaper articles on current issues in Bangladesh. He edited Studies in South Asian Heritage, featuring contributions by leading international scholars, as well as Pratnatattva, Vols. 17 and 18. He was a member of the editorial board of the Jahangirnagar Review Part-C, Vol. XXIII, 2011–2012 and serves on the Board of Advanced Studies and Academic Council of Jahangirnagar University. A participant in conferences and seminars around the world, Bhuiyan is a research fellow of the SAARC Cultural Centre and was a research fellow of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh. As a member of Object Identification Committee, Department of Archaeology, Government of Bangladesh, he has been actively involved in researching the vernacular architecture of Narsingdi, Bangladesh, and conducting a comparative study between Buddhist stone sculptures found in Mainamati, Bangladesh, and those in Tripura, India.

Dafne Cruz Porchini

Dafne Cruz Porchini

Dafne Cruz Porchini is a curator at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes (Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts) in Mexico City. From 2007 to 2011 she was the deputy director of the Museo Nacional de Arte (National Museum of Art), Mexico City. Cruz studied at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), where she received a PhD in art history in 2014. Her main research interests include the history of modern exhibitions and transcultural artistic exchanges, topics she has tried to link with her curatorial practice. Her most recent publication is a critical catalogue of twentieth-century modern Mexican painting, Catálogo comentado de pintura del siglo XX (Museo Nacional de Arte-Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 2013), for which she served as the academic coordinator. She is currently organizing the exhibition Mexican Modernisms,which will open at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in fall 2016.

Boureima Tiékoroni Diamitani

Boureima Tiékoroni Diamitani

Since 2001, Boureima Tiékoroni Diamitani has been the executive director of the West African Museums Programme (WAMP), based in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. From 1989 to 1993, he served as the director of cultural heritage and museums of Burkina Faso and then as a consultant to the World Bank. Diamitani received his PhD in art history from the University of Iowa in Iowa City and is a specialist in the art of the Senufo people. He also holds a master’s degree in architecture and town planning from the African Crafts School of Architecture and Urbanism in Lomé, Togo. Diamitani was a predoctoral fellow at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, and a Coleman fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Among the many exhibitions he has organized is Deux Roues (Two Wheels: History of Bicycles and Motorcycles in Burkina), National Museum of Burkina Faso, April 1990.

Ljerka Dulibić

Ljerka Dulibić

Ljerka Dulibić is senior research associate and curator of Italian paintings at the Strossmayer Gallery of Old Masters of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She received her PhD in the history of art from Zagreb University in 2007 with a thesis on Tuscan fifteenth-century paintings from the Strossmayer Gallery collection. Since 2008 she has taught courses on art history and iconography at the Catholic Faculty of Theology, Zagreb University. Dulibić has received several awards and scholarships, including a grant from the Attingham Trust, England (2008). She has published papers in international conference proceedings and scholarly articles in international journals, as well as several books on the painting collection at the Strossmayer Gallery. Dulibić’s main research interests are focused on Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting, the history of art collecting and collections, provenance research of works of art in Croatian collections, and the history of the European art market in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Georgina Gluzman

Georgina Gluzman

Georgina Gluzman is an assistant professor of art history at the Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She graduated with honors from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, where she is currently completing her PhD. Gluzman’s research focuses on the work of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Argentine women artists. She has published articles and book chapters concerning women artists in Buenos Aires, the iconography of the women of the 1810 revolution, and the role of women artists in early Argentine art-history surveys. In 2014 she cocurated Desbordando los géneros (Undoing Genders: Women Artists from the Ateneo) at the Museo de Arte de Tigre. This exhibition, based on the dissertation she is currently working on, showcased the work of three women artists active between 1880 and 1920.

Angelo Kakande

Angelo Kakande

Angelo Kakande is a senior lecturer and head of the Department of Industrial Arts and Applied Design, College of Engineering Design, Art, and Technology, Makerere University in Uganda. He holds degrees in fine arts (painting and ceramics), art history (MA and PhD), and law (bachelor of law). This combination of interests and training has altered the path of his studio practice and approach to art history and turned him into an activist-scholar. Kakande’s research now lies in the nexus of popular culture, art, art history, law, and the injustices and inequities afflicting many African citizens. Currently, he is exploring the ways in which widespread breaches in human rights form the character of Uganda’s art and art history. He has pursued this subject through two postdoctoral research projects. The first, called “Surviving as Entrepreneurs: Contemporary Ugandan Art and the Era of Neoliberal Reform”(2013), explores the ways in which artists have responded to the Structural Adjustment Programme in Uganda since the 1980s. The second project, “Kampala’s Public Monuments and Allegories of Exclusion: Perspectives on Governance, Human Rights, and Development (2014–16),” questions the ways in which Uganda’s national monuments function as agents of exclusion.

Nazar Kozak

Nazar Kozak

Nazar Kozak is a senior researcher in the Department of Art Historical Studies in the Ethnology Institute at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. After receiving his PhD from the Lviv Academy of Arts in Ukraine, he spent a year at the University of Athens under the auspices of the State Scholarships Foundation. A recipient of research and publication grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, Kozak also earned a fellowship to conduct research at the University of Vienna. Between 2001 and 2013, he taught art history at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv (Ukraine). Kozak’s research focuses on political and religious iconography. He has published a monograph about the portraits of rulers in the art of Kyivan Rus’ as well as articles dealing with Byzantine and post-Byzantine murals preserved in Ukraine. His current studies are concerned with the iconography of the Akathistos Hymn in post-Byzantine art of the sixteenth century.

Savita Kumari

Savita Kumari

Savita Kumari is currently an assistant professor in the Department of History of Art at the National Museum Institute of History of Art, Conservation, and Museology, New Delhi, India. She holds a PhD from the same institute and specializes in medieval and premodern Indian art history. Engaged in research and teaching for the past eight years, Kumari is currently working on an international research project called “Cham Sculptures from Vietnam and Their Interface with Indian Art,” in collaboration with the Da Nang Museum of Cham Sculpture, Vietnam. She published a book entitled Tombs of Delhi: Sultanate Period in 2006 and coauthored a book entitled Heritage of Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan: Art and Architecture in 2012. Kumari has been awarded fellowships from the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), Charles Wallace India Trust Grants for Research and Visit (CWIT), and a UK Travel Award from Nehru Trust for Indian Collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum (NTICVA).

Nomusa Makhubu

Nomusa Makhubu

Nomusa Makhubu holds a PhD in art history and visual culture from Rhodes University, South Africa, and lectures in art history at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. She is also a practicing artist who received the ABSA L’Atelier Gerard Sekoto Awardin 2006 and the Rhodes Amnesty International Woman of the Year Award(Art). Since then Makhubu has exhibited her work in South Africa, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Swaziland, China, and Reunion Island. In 2008 she was nominated as the presenting artist for the Business Day: Business and Art South Africa (BASA) Awardsand received the Purvis Prize for Academic Achievement in Fine Art, Rhodes University. Makhubu has presented research papers nationally and internationally. In 2010, she completed her fellowship with the Omooba Yemisi Adedoyin Shyllon Art Foundation (OYASAF) in Nigeria. Her current research focuses on African popular culture and photography. She has worked as a Cue reviewer for the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown (2007, 2010, 2012) and was appointed to the National Arts Festival committee in 2011. Makhubu is a member of the Friends of the Michaelis Collection Committee at the Iziko South African National Gallery.

Ana Mannarino

Ana Mannarino

Ana Mannarino is an art-history professor at Rio de Janeiro Federal University in Brazil, where she teaches courses for students working on bachelor’s degrees in art history, as well as for other art degrees at the same institution. She is also an art historian and researcher. Mannarino received a PhD in art history from the Rio de Janeiro Federal University (PPGAV–UFRJ, Brazil) and participated in a year-long collaborative study program at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. Her doctoral thesis, “Word in Brazilian Art: Mira Schendel and Waltercio Caldas,” focused on the relationship between text and image in Brazilian contemporary art, especially in the work of these two artists. Her research also considers the connections between art and poetry in Brazil, Concrete and Neoconcrete art, and the production of artist’s books.

Márton Orosz

Márton Orosz

After receiving an MA in art history and in graphic design ten years ago, Márton Orosz defended his PhD in the Institute of Art History at the University of Eötvös Loránd in Budapest, Hungary, in 2014. Since 2005 he has been working at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Budapest. There, as part of the Department of Art after 1800, he established the collection of photography and media art. In 2014 he became the director of the Victor Vasarely Museum, which is affiliated with the MFA. He now works as a curator in both institutions. Orosz’s research focuses on media art of the twentieth century such as photography, animated film and motion picture, as well as the art of the classical avant-garde, including architecture, design, and collectorship. Orosz has been a Terra Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; an ESKAS Fellow at University of Berne in Switzerland; a Baden-Württemberg Research Fellow at Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) in Karlsruhe, Germany; and he was awarded a Gyorgy Kepes Fellowship for Advanced Studies and Transdisciplinary Research in Art, Culture and Technology at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is now working on the first monograph of the Hungarian–American visual artist, Gyorgy Kepes.

Andrey Shabanov

Andrey Shabanov

Andrey Shabanov received an MA in art history from the European University at Saint Petersburg, Russia (EUSPB) in 2004. In 2013 he completed his PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, with a thesis entitled “Re-Presenting the Peredvizhniki: a Partnership of Artists in Late Nineteenth-Century Imperial Russia.” A monograph based on the thesis and translated into Russian will be published by EUSP Press in early 2015. It will be followed in due course by a monograph in English. Shabanov is an associate research fellow in the Department of Art History of EUSPB, where he teaches graduate courses called “Russia and Europe: Emergence and Modernisation of Art Institutions and Practices in XVIII–XX Centuries” and “From Descriptive to Critical, Problem-Based Art Historical Research: Some Aspects of Academic Writing.” Inspired and informed by his work at the Courtauld, these courses aim to meaningfully link the present Russian art-historical scholarship practice with modern Western academic research standards and knowledge on the subject. Shabanov’s broader research interests are Russian and Western art of the second half of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century, contemporary art, the social history of art, the sociology of art, modern institutional art history, and the history of art exhibitions in Europe.

Shao Yiyang

Shao Yiyang

Shao Yiyang is a professor of art history and theory and the head of Western art studies at the Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing. She is also a member of the Chinese executive committee of the Committée Internationale d’Histoire d’Art (CIHA). Shao received her PhD in art history and theory in 2003 from the University of Sydney, and her MA degree at the University of Western Sydney. Her teaching and research focuses on Western art history, theory, and Chinese modern and contemporary art. She has published widely on contemporary art and theory in Chinese including two books, Art after Postmodern (Hou xian dai zhi hou) and Beyond Postmodern (Chuanyue hou xiandai). Shao presented papers on Chinese modern art at the thirty-second CIHa congress in Melbourne (2008), the thirty-third CIHA congress in Nuremburg (2012), and the twenty-ninth art-history conference organized by Verband deutscher Kunsthistoriker (Association of German Art Historians) in Regensburg in 2007.

Lize van Robbroeck

Lize van Robbroeck

Lize van Robbroeck completed her honors degree in the history of art at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Her MA, from the same university, dealt with the ideology and practice of community arts in South Africa. Van Robbroeck completed her PhD at the University of Stellenbosch, studying the discursive reception of modern black art in white South African writing. Her subsequent publications focused on postcoloniality and nationalism in South African visual arts. As a council member of the South African Visual Arts Historian’s Association (SAVAH), van Robbroeck organized the association’s 2008 annual conference. She is one of the editors and writers of Visual Century: South African Art in Context: 1907–2007, a four volume revisionist history of South African art in the twentieth century. Recently her research interests have expanded to include psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity, which she is applying to postcolonial visual culture. She is currently associate professor in the Department of Visual Arts at Stellenbosch University, where she coordinates the visual-studies courses.

Nóra Veszprémi

Nóra Veszprém

Nóra Veszprémi is a lecturer at the Institute of Art History, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. She studied art history and Hungarian literature at the same university, where she completed her PhD in art history in 2012. In 2011, Veszprémi was a visiting research student in art history at University College London, and in 2013 she received a research fellowship from the Cantemir Institute, University of Oxford. Until 2014, she was a curator at the Hungarian National Gallery, where she cocurated a retrospective of the nineteenth-century Hungarian painter József Borsos (2009) and a major exhibition on art and national identity in nineteenth-century Hungary (2010). Veszprémi’s research focuses on nineteenth-century Hungarian and Austrian visual culture. Her PhD thesis, which will soon be published as a book, provided a critical investigation of the concept of “national Romanticism.” She has presented papers at conferences in Hungary and abroad and has published essays on topics including the representation of gypsies in nineteenth-century Hungarian painting and literature, gothic imagery in Hungarian Romanticism, and the artists Miklós Barabás, József Borsos, and Viktor Madarász. Her article on the Rococo revival in mid-nineteenth-century Hungarian and Austrian painting will be published in The Art Bulletin in December 2014.

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: Features —

Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for November 2014

posted by CAA — Nov 10, 2014

November 2014

Ciara Phillips: Turner Prize Nominee
Tate Britain
Millbank, London SW1P 4RG, United Kingdom
September 30, 2014–January 4, 2015

Ciara Phillips has been nominated for the Turner Prize 2014. The nomination was based on her solo exhibition presented at the Showroom, London. Workshop was an installation made up of multiple screen prints on newsprint and large-scale works on cotton set as a two-month temporary print studio within the gallery space over the course of the exhibition. Along this project, Phillips collaborated with invited artists, designers, and local women’s groups to produce new screen prints. Guests contributed to Workshop their diverse knowledge and experiences of working collectively. These collaborations initiated conversations and actions that aren’t contained within specific disciplines of art, community action, design, or activism, leaving the workshop/exhibition structure open for development as the project progresses.

By making prints in these new collaborative groupings, Phillips explores the potential of “making together” as a way of negotiating ideas and generating discussions around experimental and wider uses of print. Her long-term commitment to collaborative production underpins her expansive printing practice that makes use of screen printing, wall drawing, and photography to create context-specific installations.

Phillips (born in Canada, 1976) lives and works in Glasgow. She acknowledges having been inspired by Corita Kent in her collaborative approach to art practice. Corita Kent (a.k.a. Sister Mary Corita, 1918–1986) was a pioneering artist, educator, and activist who reinterpreted the advertising slogans and imagery of 1960s consumer culture.

A piece to be highlighted from the exhibition is New Things to Be Discussed (2014), a circular booth installation including screen prints on paper and audio recording based on her conversations with fellow artists and with Justice for Domestic Workers, a self-organized group of migrant domestic workers who work in private houses in the United Kingdom. Engagements and discussions among J4DW, artists, curators, and curatorial projects have sought to address making domestic work visible in British society and the employment of artistic and aesthetic strategies to this end.

Someday Is Now: The Art of Corita Kent
Artis—Naples, Baker Museum
5833 Pelican Bay Boulevard, Naples, FL 34108
September 27, 2014–January 4, 2015

The Baker Museum presents Someday Is Now: The Art of Corita Kent. Corita Kent (Iowa, 1918–Boston, 1986), also known as Sister Mary Corita, was a pioneering Los Angeles–based artist, designer, educator, and activist. She has experimented in printmaking, producing a groundbreaking body of work that combines faith, activism, and teaching with messages of acceptance and hope. Through vibrant, Pop-inspired prints, Corita posed philosophical questions about racism, war, poverty, and religion through work that has been described as saucy, funny, and yet deeply devotional.

Mixing street signs, scripture, poetry, philosophy, advertising, and pop-song lyrics, Corita developed her own version of Pop art. Exploring printmaking as a collaborative and popular medium to communicate with the world, her bright and bold imagery, along provocative texts drawn from a range of secular and religious sources, were widely disseminated as billboards, book jackets, illustrations, and posters.

As a Sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Corita taught at the Art Department at Immaculate Heart College from 1947 through 1968. She lectured extensively and appeared on television and radio talk shows across the country and on the cover of Newsweek in 1967. As an educator, Corita inspired her students and international artists for many generations (See Ciara Phillips at Turner Prize 2014) to discover new ways of experiencing the world and search for revelations in the everyday. Sister Mary Corita left her order in 1968 and was thereafter known as Corita Kent. She continued to make art, producing prints and carrying out many commissions. In 1985 Kent designed the celebrated Love stamp for the US Postal Service.

Her passionate creative practice made us aware that she walked a bumpy road after the Vatican criticized her work has been infected by “radical feminism.” Corita believed that “women’s liberation is the liberation of the feminine in the man and the masculine in the woman.”

22 Women: A Project by Alfredo Jaar
SKMU Sørlandets Kunstmuseum
Skippergata 24B, Kristiansand, Norway
October 10, 2014–February 15, 2015

SKMU Sørlandets Kunstmuseum presents 22 Women, a project by Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956, Santiago de Chile) that casts light on brave activists women who, despite being active in the world today, remain unknown to the wider public.

Jaar is an international artist, architect, and filmmaker whose work explores art’s possibilities for conveying perceptions and interpretations of real historical events and situations. His uncompromising, innovative, and captivating large installations explore and discuss themes such as war, corruption, social injustice, and imbalances in global power structures. Reacting to specific events in real life, Jaar examines and reflects on the position that art can and should have in a global social debate for sharing opinions in ways that mass media and politics cannot.

Jaar’s 22 Women follows Three Women (2010), a project that cast light on Graça Machel, Ela Bhatt, and Aung San Suu Kyi. The new installation means the first iteration of Jaar’s ongoing project that aims to shine light on the life and work of at least one hundred remarkable women. Here, twenty-two minuscule portraits are illuminated by a multitude of light projectors. Spotlighting on the portraits of 22 Women, Jaar acknowledge their invisibility, while their stories are told in a separate booklet accompanying the exhibition. Amira Hass (Israel/Palestine), Bertha Oliva (Honduras), Camila Vallejo (Chile), Hawa Abdi (Somalia), Jenni Williams (Zimbabwe), Kalpona Akhter (Bangladesh), Lina Ben Mhenni (Tunisia), Lydia Cacho (Mexico), Mahnaz Mohammadi (Iran), Malalai Joya (Afghanistan), Mathilde Muhindo (Democratic Republic of the Congo), Nawal El Saadawi (Egypt), Ni Yulan (China), Olayinka Koso-Thomas (Nigeria/Sierra Leone), Razan Zaitouneh (Syria), Sandra Gomes Melo (Brazil), Susan Burton (United States), Svetlana Gannushkina (Russia), Ta Phong Tan (Vietnam), Tetyana Chornovol (Ukraine), Vandana Shiva (India), and Zainab Alkhawaja (Bahrain) are outstandingly achieved women whose crucial work is underrecognized, suppressed, or ignored. Jaar’s project aims to pay homage to these women who are models of resistance that fight human-rights violations, sexual violence, censorship, ethnic persecution, and social injustice.

Jaar’s 22 Women is following up on a series of exhibitions at SKMU that focus on women, equality, and women rights, looking critically at the museum collection and how it represents women.

Judith Lauand: Brazilian Modernist, 1950s–2000s
Driscoll Babcock Galleries
525 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001
October 23–December 20, 2014

Judith Lauand:Brazilian Modernist, 1950s–2000s is the first New York solo exhibition of one of the most celebrated—and yet overlooked in North America—Brazilian artists of the postwar era. Lauand developed her formative career in São Paulo, alongside prolific debates and investigations into the critical definitions of the planar surface and abstraction, and is justifiably known as the “first lady of Concretism.” Seeking to illuminate and establish Lauand’s critical significance as a pioneer of modernism and qualifying as a mini survey, this exhibition brings together over thirty works that span the critical periods of Lauand’s career from the 1950s to 2007; it is accompanied a fully illustrated book by the curator of the show, the art historian Aliza Edelman, that investigates the artist’s prolific achievements in postwar abstraction, geometry, and feminism.

As put by Edelman, Lauand’s “modernist geometric abstractions actively unhinge the rational and seemingly impersonal grid of Concretism. Her objective, mathematical, and precise constructions—primary components of Arte Concreta—introduced new geometries aligned with contemporary ideas on space, time, and matter. Lauand was the only female artist invited to join Grupo Ruptura, an artist group initially formed in São Paulo in 1952, and her successful demonstration of postwar Concretism led in the following decades to further experimentations, with figural and popular representation, assemblage, and optical color contrasts. Thus, Lauand successfully negotiated the development of Brazilian avant-garde tendencies after World War II—including the influence and reception of Pop art and New Figuration in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the political disruption initiated during the military dictatorship—continually buttressing Concretism’s critical ideas while formulating her own meaningful intersections with notions of rupture.”

Works from her early groundbreaking work in the exhibition include Concreto 88, Acervo 186 (1957), a gouache on paper that evokes the photographically inspired architectural façades in Geraldo de Barros’s Fotoformas (Photoforms) and exemplifies the way in which “horizontal bands across shifting chains that link positive and negative space rupture the Concrete grid with rhythmic motion and the perception of subtle contradictions.” Conversely, Sem título (Untitled) (2007) illustrates the diverse ways in which Lauand continues exploring her geometric systems of the 1960s by reworking her principle set of shapes and networks and using color to expand her vision of infinite constructions and her exploration of the endless permutations of structure.
Lauand had her first solo exhibition after being a gallery monitor in the second Bienal de São Paulo in 1953–54. She has participated in significant group shows, including the III Bienal de São Paulo in 1955; the I Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta (First National Exhibition of Concrete Art) in 1956; and the international retrospective on Concretism, Konkrete Kunst: 50 Jahre Entwicklung (Concrete Art: 50 Years of Development), organized by Max Bill in Zurich in 1960. A recipient of multiple prestigious awards and an exhibitor in numerous editions of the Bienal de São Paulo, as well as the Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna, Lauand was the subject of a major retrospective, Judith Lauand: Experiências (Judith Lauand: Experiences), at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo in 2011.

Aikaterini Gegisian: Is This Why I Cannot Tell Lies?
Tintype
107 Essex Road, London N1 2SL United Kingdom
November 19–December 13, 2014

Is This Why I Cannot Tell Lies? is the first solo exhibition in London of work by the multimedia Greek Armenian artist Aikaterini Gegisian. Although she is better known for her films, including the recent Pink City (2014), filmed in Yerevan and exploring gendered divisions in the experience of the city, this exhibition brings together new samples of her extensive collage practice along with photographs and a sound installation based on a dream diary and a textbook on how to become a male escort.

Gegisian’s work is largely concerned with challenging received notions of cultural and sexual identity, as manifested in her multifaceted and ongoing investigation of the identity of Ottoman Woman. Formally structured around the idea of movement and the cinematic device of the jump cut, the collages featured in this show are assembled from heterogeneous material, such as Soviet and Western photo albums and magazines, and feature incongruous images, such as female gymnasts and space missions, scientific illustrations of Eisenstein’s theory of relativity, flower patterns, and home interiors. As such, the works reflect upon female sexuality by referencing a set of spaces in which ideological and gender conflicts are played out, from the outer space to the female body, from the natural world to the space of dream. Repossessing photographic representations of female gymnasts that foreground the highly disciplined form of their activity, and juxtaposing them with photographs of space rockets, scientific illustrations, botanical imagery, and pornographic material, Gegisian conjurs the radical potential of the jump cut in order to suggest the possibility of transformation. She negotiates contrasting ideologies that have restricted female imagination to ignite release from conventional narratives and eventually questions how women are positioned—literally and symbolically—in the space of the future by deconstructing and articulating female sexuality.

Represented byKalfayan Galleriesin Greece, Gegisianstudied at the University of Brighton and Chelsea College of Art and Design and holds a PhD from the University of Westminster in London (2014). She is currently visiting research scholar-artist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She has participated in numerous group shows—the most recent include Re-Tracing the Land at NARS Foundation in Brooklyn (2014); Visualising the Ottoman City at Peltz Gallery at Birkbeck College in London (2014); and Sensible Action at Vladikafkaz Fine Arts Museum in North Ossetia, Russia (2013)—and in international residencies in Russia, Armenia, Egypt, and Turkey. Gegesian’s films have been screened in several film festivals around the world, and her work is represented in public collections, such as the National Centre of Contemporary Art (North Ossetia), the State Museum of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki), and the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as in many private collections in Greece.

Sonia Delaunay: Les Couleurs de l’Abstraction
Musée d’art de la ville de Paris
11 avenue du Président Wilson, 75116 Paris, France
October 17 2014–February 22 2015

Highlighting the agelessness of Sonia Delaunay’s work that, while always of its time, remains fresh and relevant in its formal explorations and quest for a synthesis of the arts even today, this touring survey (curated by Anne Montfort et Cécile Godefroy) is surprisingly the first major retrospective of the artist in Paris since 1967. Bringing together three re-created environments and over four hundred works that include paintings, wall decorations, gouaches, prints, fashion items, and textiles, Les Couleurs de l’Abstraction traces the artist’s evolution since the beginning of the twentieth century to the late 1970s.

As aptly put in the press release, while her husband Robert Delaunay was busy conceptualizing abstraction as a universal language, Sonia was testing it out in painting, posters, garments, bookbinding, and household items, and collaborating with the poet Blaise Cendrars on the artist’s book Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France. Her Spanish and Portuguese years during the First World War saw her first ventures into theater and commercial fashion design in Madrid before her return to Paris in the 1920s. The following decade brought a pared-down abstraction in the International Style that harmonized with the architecture of the time, as in the big mural decorations for the Air Transport Pavilion at the International Exhibition of Art and Technology in Modern Life, on view here for the first time since 1937. Her role as a “go-between” for the pioneers of abstraction and the postwar generation is pointed out through her contributions to the Salons des Réalités Nouvelles, her involvement in various architecture projects, and her exhibitions at the Denise René Gallery in Paris. After the war her painting underwent a profound renewal, culminating in the late 1960s in an intensely poetic form of abstraction. Her formal and technical gifts found expression in monumental paintings, mosaics, carpets, and tapestries, and her late work was marked by the albums of etchings she produced for Editions Artcurial.

It is by exploring her work in the applied arts, her distinctive place in Europe’s avant-garde movements, and her idiosyncratic approach to color (which relates to her childhood in Russia and art study in Germany) that this exhibition promises to effect a rigorous and lasting reassessment of Delaunay’s major and pioneering role as an abstractionist.

Women in Visual Arts 1960–1980: Their Contribution to the Greek Avant-Garde
ISET
9a Valaoritou Street, 106 71 Athens, Greece
October 16, 2014–January 10, 2015

The contemporary Greek art institute ISET presents the exhibition Women in Visual Arts 1960–1980: Their Contribution to the Greek Avant-Garde. Assessing the contributions of female artists in the formation of various avant-garde manifestations in Greece, this exhibition is remarkable for its focus on female artists in a country where gender and feminism have not yet played an important role in the discourse of art.

Curated by Charis Canelopoulou and accompanied by an in-depth catalogue, the exhibition claims the marginalized importance of female artists in various avant-garde experimentations that took place in Greece during the military junta and the tumultuous period that followed it. While castigating the secondary place female artists have played in the historiography of Greek art as “women artists,” it sheds new light on the work of a great assortment of artists whose diverse practices—which range from feminist performance to political Pop, Minimalism to multimedia and conceptual practices—variously contributed to the formation of a multifaceted postwar Greek avant-garde scene and its politics.

The included artists are: Celeste Polycroniadi, Eleni Zerva, Nausica Pastra, Sosso Houtopoulou-Kontaratou, Alex Mylona, Ioanna Spiteris-Veropoulou, Chrysa Romanos, Bia Davou, Niki Kanagini, Aspa Stassinopoulou, Celia Daskopoulou, Rena Papaspyrou, Maria Karavela, Vasso Kyriaki, Opy Zouni, Diohandi, and Leda Papaconstantinou.

A nonprofit civil company, ISET was founded in February 2009 by the senior partners of Nees Morfes Art Gallery, in collaboration with art professionals and consultants (such as artists and art historians). ISET’s main objective is to collect and preserve a comprehensive archive of contemporary Greek art (1945 to the present). It’s archival database was originally based on the archives of the Nees Morfes and Desmos art galleries and is being complemented and enriched continuously with archival material generously donated by public and private institutions, artists, art historians, and individuals.

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

Committee on Diversity Practices highlights for November/December 2014

posted by CAA — Nov 09, 2014

The CAA Committee on Diversity Practices highlights exhibitions, events, and activities that support the development of global perspectives on art and visual culture and deepen our appreciation of political and cultural heterogeneity as educational and professional values. Current highlights are listed below; browse past highlights through links at the bottom of this page.

November/December 2014

Esterio Segura
Museum of Latin American Art
Long Beach, California
November 22, 2014–February 15, 2015

“MOLAA is proud to present the first solo U.S. museum exhibition of pioneering contemporary artist Esterio Segura. Based in Cuba, Segura creates work that addresses topics of commercialization, migration, censorship and cultural isolation viewed from a contemporary Cuban perspective. Utilizing a variety of media; from drawing and painting to sculpture, photography and installation, he reflects upon contemporary Cuban anxieties. Segura delivers his social critique with humor and satire, at times evoking controversy. Embracing pop culture, Afro-Cuban influences, religious iconography and eroticism, he celebrates the beauty and ingenuity of the island while challenging the absurdity of the barriers that isolate and separate its people.

Esterio Segura studied at the prestigious Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) of Cuba where he also taught professionally. He has had solo exhibitions in Havana, Berlin, London and New York, and has participated in group exhibitions in Argentina, Canada, Costa Rica, Ecuador, France, London, Mexico and Spain. His works can be found in numerous museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Arizona State University Art Museum, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Cuba, Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York, the Latin American Art Museum of the University of Essex, and the Museum of Latin American Art.” (http://www.molaa.org/Art/Exhibitions/upcoming-exhibitions/Esterio-Segura.aspx)

More information: http://www.molaa.org

Prospect.3: New Orleans
Numerous venues
New Orleans, Louisiana
October 25, 2014–January 25, 2015

“In Walker Percy’s 1961 novel The Moviegoer, the protagonist Binx Bolling is consumed by “the search” in the week leading up to his thirtieth birthday. Pointedly, the birthday falls on Ash Wednesday—the day after the most important holiday in New Orleans, Mardi Gras. Though Binx’s attendance at the carnival is peripheral, there’s much to be learned from his vantage point at the margins of the crowd. Bolling, a solitary moviegoer, lives his life on the margin, slowly creeping closer to the center as he embraces “the search.” He begins the book in the isolated suburbs of New Orleans, comfortably away, and apart from other people’s lives, but finds solace in the contested city by its end. The novel, set in a time of heightened social awareness in the first half of the decade’s movement for civil rights in America, delves into the depths of existentialism in a world where people were legally segregated from each other, making it impossible to celebrate the individual. “The peculiar institution” of slavery and immigration during the 18th century created a city that, even in 1961, was a complex social arrangement, one that remains palpable today. The third Prospect biennial (P.3) is invested in and will explore ‘the search’ to find the self and the necessity of the other as part of that quest.
It is New Orleans’ distinct history that makes it an illuminating source of philosophical inquiry for the present. Percy, a student of Soren Kierkegaard and acolyte of Jean-Paul Sartre, was attempting to “explore the dislocation of man in the modern age,” and certainly the physical and psychological violence we do to each other is one of the continuing facets of our species’ ‘dislocation.’ The “search” in Prospect.3 (P.3) also aims to further explore a philosophical inquiry on humanity, an effort to interrogate human feelings and human relationships. Recognizing the position of P.3 as a biennial-type exhibition for the United States—passionately committed to being international in scope and weary of geographic location as something that is increasingly interchangeable in today’s world of contemporary art—Prospect.3 is, in the mode of past Prospect projects, vitally committed to the city of New Orleans. Placed at the foot of the Mississippi River on the Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans’ influx of people has been remarkable in its diversity, and unlike any other American city. As a node for thinking through global issues, New Orleans offers an example that is revelatory, generative and frictional.” (http://www.prospectneworleans.org/exhibition-description/)

Past Forward
Artspace 111
Fort Worth, Texas
October 17–November 29, 2014

“Artspace111 looks forward to exhibiting the first major tour of Emirati artwork—which features over 50 paintings, photographs, sculptures, video installations, and other media by 25 Emirati artists—will showcase the creativity radiating throughout the Emirati art scene and highlight the development and history of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).The overarching theme of the exhibition highlights the balance between the UAE’s rapid development while maintaining its ties to its heritage and past and honoring traditional values. The exhibition features core elements of Emirati life and represents all seven emirates while emphasizing the importance of kinship and home, nature and landscape, as well as technology and innovation to Emirati culture. Artspace111 has partnered with the UAE Embassy to share the UAE’s compelling narrative and rich cultural heritage through this groundbreaking cultural diplomacy art initiative, which will be a powerful tool for finding common ground, building lasting relationships, and fostering respect. Past Forward will provide an opportunity for peer-to-peer exchanges of ideas, information, and experiential learning, as well as a framework for Americans and Emiratis to better understand one another through first-hand insight into life and culture in the UAE through these works of art. The exhibition will travel across the United States over the next 18 months, including stops in Texas, California, and Washington.” (http://www.artspace111.com/past-forward/ )
More information: http://www.artspace111.com

Rising Up: Hale Woodruff’s Murals at Talladega College
National Museum of African American History and Culture
Washington, DC
November 7, 2014–March 1, 2015

“Talladega College in Alabama commissioned prominent African American artist Hale Woodruff to paint a series of murals for its newly built Savery Library in 1938. Woodruff painted six murals portraying significant events in the journey of African Americans from slavery to freedom. On Nov. 7, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture will present “Rising Up: Hale Woodruff’s Murals at Talladega College,” an exhibition of murals and other significant works by the artist. The exhibition will be on view in the NMAAHC Gallery at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History through March 1, 2015.

This will be the first time the murals have been exhibited in the Washington metro area. The murals were removed from Talladega College for a five-year collaborative restoration project organized by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, which also organized a multicity tour of the works. The murals are six monumental canvases arranged in two cycles of three, portraying heroic efforts of resistance to slavery and moments in the history of Talladega College, which opened in 1867 to serve the educational needs of a new population of freed slaves. The first cycle includes the murals “The Mutiny on the Amistad,” which depicts the uprising on the slave ship La Amistad; “The Trial of the Amistad Captives,” depicting the court proceedings that followed the mutiny; and “The Repatriation of the Freed Captives,” portraying the subsequent freedom and return to Africa of the Amistad captives.

The companion murals “The Underground Railroad,” “The Building of Savery Library” and “Opening Day at Talladega College” show themes of the Underground Railroad, the construction of Savery Library at Talladega College and the early days of the college campus, for which the murals were commissioned, respectively.

“Rising Up: Hale Woodruff’s Murals at Talladega College” is presented by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and is organized by the High Museum of Art in collaboration with Talladega College. The exhibition is co-curated by Jacquelyn Serwer, chief curator at NMAAHC, and Rhea Combs, museum curator. A full-color, 155-page catalog, published by the High Museum of Art, will be on sale in the National Museum of American History’s store during the exhibition.” (http://americanhistory.si.edu/exhibitions/rising-up)
More information: http://nmaahc.si.edu

Classical Nudes and the Making of Queer History
Leslie + Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art
New York, NY
October 17, 2014–January 4, 2015

“Classical Nudes and the Making of Queer History, curated by scholar Jonathan David Katz, investigates the continued centrality of the classical nude over centuries of art making. This exhibition explores how images of the classical past have acted as recurring touchstones in the historical development of same-sex representation, and as such, constitute a sensitive barometer of the shifting constructions of what we today call gay and lesbian or queer culture. The classical past is thus gay culture’s central origin myth, and its representation offers far more information about the culture that appropriates the classical past then it does about that past itself. In tracing this trajectory of the classical nude across history, this show concentrates on four major periods: Antiquity, the Renaissance, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the modern/contemporary periods.” (https://www.leslielohman.org/exhibitions/current.html)
More information: https://www.leslielohman.org

V. S. Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
New York, NY
October 24, 2014–February 11, 2015

“An artist of singular stature, modernist painter Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde (1924–2001) was known to fellow artists and intellectuals, as well as to later generations of students and admirers, as a man of uncompromising integrity of spirit and purpose. Born in Nagpur, India in 1924, Gaitonde was briefly affiliated with avant-garde collectives such as the Progressive Artists’ Group and the Bombay Group in the early ’50s. Nonetheless, he remained independent throughout most of his career. This exhibition draws an arc from Gaitonde’s early, figurative, mixed-medium compositions and watercolors inspired by Paul Klee, through his major bodies of signature canvases from the 1960s and ’70s, to his late works from the 1980s and ’90s. Departing from Klee, Gaitonde’s practice began in the late 1950s in a nonrepresentational mode—or, as he preferred to call it, a nonobjective style. This turn towards abstraction is in accordance with the artistic principles first espoused by Vasily Kandinsky, as is embodied by the Guggenheim’s origins as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, and also dovetails with Gaitonde’s lifelong interest in Zen Buddhism.

Short, stocky, self-critical, and confident, Gaitonde scorned sentimentality in his biography and his artistic practice. As fellow painter Krishen Khanna has stated, “There’s a very strong correlation I see between the way Gaitonde thought, the way he lived, and the way he painted.” Alongside art, he was an avid admirer of Indian and Western poetry, cinema, literature, theater, and classical music. Stressing the importance of the present moment, the completeness and joy of the creative process, and the intimate relationship between painter and painting, “Gai,” as he was popularly known among peers, was an intrepid and influential artist whose career remains unequaled in the history of South Asian modern art. Yet Gaitonde remains sorely understudied in the genealogies of twentieth-century world art.

As current scholarship revisits non-Western traditions of mid-twentieth-century modern art, this seminal retrospective exhibition presents an unparalleled opportunity to explore the context of Indian modern art as it played out in the metropolitan centers of Bombay (now Mumbai) and New Delhi from the late 1940s through the end of the twentieth century. It comprises forty-five major paintings and works on paper drawn from thirty leading public institutions and private collections, forming the most comprehensive overview of Gaitonde’s work to date. Including many pieces that have never been seen by the public, the exhibition reveals Gaitonde’s extraordinary use of color, line, form, and texture, as well as symbolic elements and calligraphy, in works that seem to glow with an inner light.

A transnational set of references and influences provides an art historical context for Gaitonde’s work and defines this exhibition. Gaitonde’s work spans the traditions of nonobjective painting and Zen Buddhism as well as Indian miniatures and East Asian hanging scrolls and ink paintings. When looking at Gaitonde’s oeuvre within the wider related context of international postwar art, one can also draw parallels to artists working within the contemporary School of Paris, as well as movements such as Art Informel, Tachisme, and Abstract Expressionism. Yet Gaitonde’s output continues to be defined by the particular ethos of India, where the artist lived and worked his entire life.

A scholarly catalogue and series of public programs accompanies the exhibition, which is organized by Sandhini Poddar, Adjunct Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, with Amara Antilla, Curatorial Assistant, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.” (http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view/v-s-gaitonde-painting-as-process-painting-as-life)

More information: http://www.guggenheim.org

Filed under: CDP Highlights —

2014 Editions of CAA’s Directories of Graduate Programs

posted by Betty Leigh Hutcheson — Oct 24, 2014

CAA’s 2014 editions of Graduate Programs in the Visual Arts and Graduate Programs in Art History are comprehensive resources that feature updated information about 630 programs in 400 schools in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, and beyond (see sample entries).

The directories provide prospective graduate students with the information they need to begin the application process. The directories are also key professional references for career-services representatives, department chairs, graduate and undergraduate advisors, librarians, professional-practices educators, and professors interested in helping emerging generations of artists and scholars find success.

Entries from the following program types are available: History of Art and Architecture; Studio Art and Design; Curatorial and Museum Studies; Arts Administration; Art Education; Library Science; Film Production; and Conservation and Historic Preservation.

New this year, CAA is offering PDF files of individual programs (updated in 2014) free of charge with the option of free customized PDF files, created on demand, based on the user’s preferred search criteria. Anyone can search the directories online by program type, faculty specialization, awarded degrees, country, region, state, availability of health insurance, and whether or not part-time students are admitted, or browse the directories by institution and download individual institutional records as PDF files. Search results include the program type, its location, and the program name and description, while the PDF file gives an in-depth profile of each program.

Print volumes offer several delivery options; e-books (as PDF or ePub files) can be downloaded twice and are compatible with your personal computer and most smart phones and ereaders (excluding Kindles). Please note that the individual, program-specific print volumes were last updated in 2013 and are available at a discounted rate.

Individuals can order through CAA’s website. If you are ordering for a school, institution, or department within a college or university, please download the order form and return the completed version with payment to Roberta Lawson, CAA office coordinator. We are unable to process Institutional orders online. Your order will be processed within three to five business days.

For more details, visit the CAA website. For questions about purchasing, please contact Roberta Lawson, CAA office coordinator, at 212-392-4404.

Filed under: Books, Education, Graduate Programs, Publications, Students —

People in the News

posted by CAA — Oct 17, 2014

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

October 2014

Academe

Amy Freund, previously an assistant professor at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, has become assistant professor and Kleinheinz Family Endowed Chair in Art History in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Adriene Jenik, director of the Herberger Institute School for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University in Tempe, has taken a year’s leave, which began on August 1, 2014.

Stephanie Langin-Hooper has left Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, to begin a new position as assistant professor and Karl Kilinski II Endowed Chair of Hellenic Visual Culture in the Department of Art History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

Aleca Le Blanc has left her position as managing editor of the Getty Research Journal at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California, to become assistant professor of Latin American art in the Department of the History of Art at the University of California, Riverside.

Kathryn Maxwell has been appointed acting director of the Herberger Institute School for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University in Tempe.

Judith Rodenbeck, professor of modern and contemporary art at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, has accepted a position on the faculty of the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside, for the 2014–15 academic year.

Ashley Thompson, formerly senior lecturer in the School of Fine Art at Leeds University in England, has become professor and Hiram W. Woodward Chair in Southeast Asian Art in the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

Museums and Galleries

Esther Bell, formerly curator of European paintings, drawings, and sculpture at the Cincinnati Art Museum in Ohio, has become the new curator in charge of European paintings at the Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco, California.

Kate Ezra has left her position as Nolen Curator of Education and Academic Affairs at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut.

Erika Holmquist-Wall, formerly assistant curator of paintings at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minnestoa, has been named Mary and Barry Bingham Sr. Curator of European and American Painting and Sculpture at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky.

Ted Mann, formerly assistant curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, has become a San Francisco–based consulting curator for the museum’s Panza Collection.

Virginia Reynolds, curatorial assistant for the Detroit Institute of Arts in Michigan, has left her position at the museum.

Kailin Weng has left her position at Chinese art project manager at the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington, DC. She is now a graduate student at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Organizations and Publications

Roger Thorp, formerly publishing director for Tate Publishing in London, England, has been appointed editorial director for art and children’s books at Thames and Hudson, also in London.

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

CAA News Today

Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for the 2015 Annual Conference

2015 Annual Conference in New York

Janet Kaplan: In Memoriam

People in the News

December 2014

Academe

Museums and Galleries

Organizations and Publications

Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for December 2014

December 2014

News from the Art and Academic Worlds

What’s a “Work for Hire” and Why Should You Care?

Artists Call the Shots

Help Desk: Participatory Project

Are Museums The Best Place to Appreciate Art?

Where the Time Goes

War Can Both Inspire and Inhibit Artistic Creativity

Are There Banner Works of Art on Instagram?

Learning to Love the Conference

CAA NAMES RECIPIENTS FOR 2015 CAA-GETTY INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM

Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for November 2014

November 2014

Committee on Diversity Practices highlights for November/December 2014

November/December 2014

2014 Editions of CAA’s Directories of Graduate Programs

People in the News

October 2014

Academe

Museums and Galleries

Organizations and Publications

CAA News

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