CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted May 25, 2016
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
What Happens When a Museum Closes?
Four recently dissolved cultural institutions—the Museum of Biblical Art in New York, the Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art and Science in California, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the Higgins Armory Museum in Massachusetts—each offer a lesson in how to weather the complex process of closing a museum. (Read more from Artsy.)
Help Desk: Underrepresentation
I have been with my gallery for a long time and received press and write-ups, but no collectors. How do I motivate my dealer to show and sell my work? I’ve been hustling and struggling a long time, and I’m kind of over it. (Read more from Daily Serving.)
Oiling Out and the Cause of Dead Spots in Oil Paintings
It’s been a problem for a very long time: blotchiness, sinking in, dead spots. For oil painters these are well-known terms, conjuring up images of skin disease as much as painted surfaces, but whatever words are used the implication is clear—it’s an undesirable nuisance, a loathsome interloper in the creative process. (Read more from Just Paint.)
Getting beyond the Anecdote: Research and Art-History Pedagogy
Pedagogical innovations abound in art-history classrooms. National and regional conferences increasingly feature panels of inspirational examples and case studies. These sessions are well attended by instructors eager for new, proven ideas to improve their teaching. The speakers assure this audience of improved student engagement and efficacy at achieving learning outcomes with this or that innovation. But how can they prove it? (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)
An Editor’s View of Digital Publishing
The Getty was relatively quick to embrace digital publishing, but for our early ebooks, the editorial workflow remained much the same; only the end product was different. For our two new online collection catalogues, Ancient Terracottas from South Italy and Sicily and Roman Mosaics, however, we thought differently from the outset. (Read more from the Getty Iris.)
Diversity as a Tenure Requirement
Pomona College’s faculty has voted to change the criteria for tenure to specifically require candidates to be “attentive to diversity in the student body.” While many colleges and universities encourage faculty members to support diversity efforts, and a few have encouraged tenure candidates to reference such work, Pomona’s requirement may go further because it applies to all who come up for tenure. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
What Obama’s Overtime Rule Could Mean for Colleges
The Obama administration has released a rule that will extend overtime pay to millions more American workers, including hundreds of thousands of lower-level salaried employees on college campuses. Much attention has focused on the impact on postdoctoral fellows, the overworked, underpaid backbone of the academic research enterprise. But it’s not just postdocs who will benefit from the rule. Many entry- and midlevel professionals will qualify, too. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
How Long Will Your Class Remain Yours?
Administrative interference with faculty prerogatives across many different kinds of technology has enabled an attack on workers’ control in academia. Universities willing to interfere with electronic communications, social media, and even the faculty’s control over standards for individual courses will likely seek to oversee the way that all courses are taught at their schools. (Read more from Digital Pedagogy Lab.)
Support the Visual Arts Community: Give to CAA’s Annual Fund
posted May 24, 2016
Thank you for being a member of the College Art Association, the world’s leading professional association for the visual arts. As a dedicated member of CAA, you know firsthand about the important work that CAA does to serve and enhance the visual-arts community. We could not do this without your support.
Today, I ask that you join me in celebrating all that CAA does with a gift to the Annual Fund.
Beyond CAA’s ongoing advocacy efforts; vital professional documents like CAA’s Standards and Guidelines; critical projects like the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts; prestigious publishing grants for book manuscripts; career-development resources including the Online Career Center; Professional-Development Fellowships in support of promising artists, designers, craftspersons, historians, curators, and critics; important new writing and scholarship published in The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and caa.reviews; and CAA’s central forum for exchange of creative work and scholarly research at the Annual Conference—CAA does a great deal more to support its members, the lifeblood of the association.
CAA subsidizes over half of its members through discounted membership and registration fees for students, retirees, part-time faculty, and independent artists and scholars. CAA has made part-time faculty issues a priority, recommending that tenured faculty and administrators in the visual arts implement its Guidelines for Part-Time Professional Employment and also providing a resources section on its website for part-time faculty. At the conference, CAA offers Professional-Development Workshops and mentoring opportunities for artists, art historians, designers, and students. CAA is also dedicated to strengthening its support of its international members. Recently CAA launched a section on its website devoted to international topics, the International Desk, which includes reports from around the world and listings of international grants, conferences, and residencies.
In fall 2016, CAA will also launch CAA Connect, the digital social community where CAA members can discuss the latest in visual arts news and practices and collaborate on projects. CAA Connect will boast a number of private and public communities, each with its own discussion threads and resource libraries for multimedia content. We see it as an important tool in bringing together our members and the wider visual arts and humanities fields. Look for CAA Connect to launch in the fall of 2016.
Voluntary support from CAA members is critical to our collective advancement and your contribution to the Annual Fund will enable CAA to continue providing invaluable resources to its members.
On behalf of CAA’s diverse community of artists, art historians, curators, critics, collectors, designers, educators, and other arts professionals, I thank you for your commitment to CAA. Please give generously!
Sincerely,
Doralynn Pines
Vice President for External Affairs
Support CAA’s Publications Fund
posted May 20, 2016
CAA’s journals continue to deliver the world’s leading scholarship in the visual arts. This year, we welcome many new additions and changes to the publications while maintaining our commitment to bringing readers the most vital, intellectually compelling, and visually engaging scholarly journals in art and art history.
We encourage you to support our mission of advancing the highest standards of intellectual engagement in the arts with a gift to the Publications Fund today. As always, your contribution is tax-deductible, so please give generously!
Beginning July 1, 2016, CAA welcomes Nina Athanasoglou-Kallmyer, Professor Emerita at the University of Delaware, as The Art Bulletin’s next editor-in-chief. Rebecca Brown, Art Journal’s editor-in-chief and Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University, published her first issue in Spring 2016. CAA’s exclusively online publication, caa.reviews recently launched a new website, and Art Journal Open, CAA’s accessible online venue for contemporary works, takes on appropriation as an artistic strategy in a three-part series.
Here are some recent highlights from CAA publications:
In The Art Bulletin:
- Recent articles include Erik Inglis on revelations in the 1534 inventory of the St-Denis treasury; Paola Demattè on cross-cultural factors in eighteenth-century Parisian prints of Chinese subjects; Richard Taws on the imposter dauphins in the wake of the French Revolution and the issue of truth in nineteenth-century discourse; and the tensions between the individual and the collective in postwar German art groups, in an analysis by Jacopo Galimberti
- In the “Whither Art History?” series, Youngna Kim explores the relation of Korean art history to global developments in the discipline; Shao Yiyang reflects on the state of art history in China
- Reviews of books range from art in Byzantine diplomatic encounters to transcontinental and transoceanic image networks in early America, and from Chinoiserie in eighteenth-century Britain to the circulation of artworks in late Ottoman Istanbul
In Art Journal:
- Artists’ projects by Jason Simon, Amy Adler, and Julia Oldham, the last an astrophysical exploration of loss, love, and canine connection
- Essays by Emma Chubb, examining Isaac Julien’s images of traumatic crossings of the Mediterranean by present-day migrants; Natilee Harren on the means by which materials and fragments of the urban fabric found their way into the confounding commodities of Fluxus artists in the 1960s; Cynthia Chris and Jason Simon on the economic elements of video art as it nears the half-century mark; and Daniel Rosenberg on the presentation of complex data about war and disaster in large photographic works by the Dutch artist Gert Jan Kocken
- A seven-author forum organized by Jordana Moore Saggese that sheds new light on diversity and difference from perspectives including queer failure, craft, diasporic studies, critical race history, and disability
- Reviews of books artists on William Kentridge, Isa Genzken, and Antonin Artaud; on decolonization in postwar France; and on art emerging from postsocialist nations
- In Art Journal Open, “Knight’s Heritage: Karl Haendel and the Legacy of Appropriation” by Natilee Harren. Harren’s three-part essay examines appropriation as an artistic strategy that pressures both the legal and conceptual definitions of authorship through a case study of three specific episodes in artist Karl Haendel’s practice of circulating existing images. Nate Harrison responds, offering a critical reminder of the historical specificity of postmodernism and appropriation. Haendel’s contribution Oral Sadism & the Vegetarian Personality (Approximately) is an animated representation of the artist’s extensive archival collection of some ten thousand found images and photographs, used as source material for his drawings. Other recent pieces are a report on Art + Feminism’s Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at the Museum of Modern Art by Chelsea Spengemann, and a conversation between curator Mia Locks and artist Math Bass.
In caa.reviews (Now fully open access!):
- caa.reviews continues to expand the number and type of reviews published each year. In 2015, the journal published 159 reviews on exhibitions and books in all areas of the visual arts. In 2016, an addition to the Re:Views series—an essay by Eddie Chambers, University of Texas Austin, on his role in commissioning reviews on African and African Diaspora art—discusses the division of subject categories within US academic communities and the lack of scholarship published on these topics. Forthcoming by caa.reviews Editor Designate, Juliet Bellow, is a multimedia project using the Scalar platform reviewing a two-day performance at the Tate Modern, If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse? by choreographer Boris Charmatz, which will be accompanied by an interactive floor plan and additional texts and images.
These highly regarded journals reach tens of thousands of readers around the world and serve as essential resources to those working in the visual arts—none of which would be possible without your support. Contributors who give at a level of $250 or higher are prominently acknowledged in the publication they support for four consecutive issues, as well as on the publication’s website for one year, through CAA News, and in the Annual Conference’s convocation booklet. On behalf of the scholars, critics, and artists who publish in the journals, we thank you for your continued commitment to maintaining a strong and spirited forum for the visual arts community.
With best regards,
Gail Feigenbaum
Vice President for Publications
College Art Association Announces Hunter O’Hanian as Executive Director
posted May 18, 2016
The College Art Association (CAA) is pleased to announce Hunter O’Hanian as its next executive director. He will start at CAA on July 1, 2016. O’Hanian succeeds Linda Downs, who served as CAA executive director from 2006 to 2016. O’Hanian comes to CAA at a moment of expansion and opportunity in the organization. In January 2016, CAA announced comprehensive changes to its Annual Conference that will increase the number of sessions and chances for participation. In response to the changes, CAA received over 850 session proposals for its 2017 conference in New York, February 15–18.
“I am very excited to welcome Hunter O’Hanian to CAA as executive director,” says Suzanne Preston Blier, president of CAA. “He brings not only unique administrative experience but also striking energy and vision at this key moment in the Association’s history.”
As executive director, O’Hanian is an employee of the CAA Board of Directors and serves as the Association’s chief executive officer. In this role, he will work with board members, committees, and task forces to develop the Association’s strategic plans. O’Hanian’s experience in fundraising, law, and the arts will greatly benefit the membership and the larger visual arts, design, education, and cultural communities with whom CAA works. O’Hanian will oversee a wide variety of initiatives, including the CAA Annual Conference, an advocacy program, member services activities, the career center, fellowships, grants and opportunities offered by CAA, and the publications program, which includes The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Art Journal Open, and caa.reviews.
“I have long been an admirer of the work CAA has done. They have helped so many artists, art historians, and curators in the pursuit of their professional goals,” says O’Hanian. “I am pleased to be part of this exciting team and look forward to playing a role in growing its membership, bolstering the conferences, and helping the organization thrive on every level.”
O’Hanian is currently the director of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York’s Soho neighborhood. The Leslie-Lohman Museum is the only art museum devoted exclusively to artwork that speaks to the LGBTQ experience.
Prior to joining Leslie-Lohman, Hunter was the vice president of institutional advancement and executive director of the Foundation for Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. Previous to that, he led two renowned artists’ residencies programs, having served as the president of Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, outside of Aspen, Colorado, and executive director of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which is the largest residency program for emerging artists and writers in the United States. The Fine Arts Work Center recently permanently endowed a fellowship in his name.
O’Hanian has a long career of non-profit board and community involvement. He is the past board chair of the Alliance of Artists Communities, the national membership organization for artists’ residency programs. He studied painting at Boston College and received his bachelor of laws degree from Suffolk University in Boston. O’Hanian has an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the Art Institute of Boston.
Photo credit: Johnathan M. Lewis
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted May 18, 2016
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
How to Become a Curator
Start out as an artist instead. In school, you’re always saddled with organizing the group shows, buying the beer, placating fellow artists’ fears, making the invitations, composing the checklist, finding the funding, contacting the press, inviting the audience. Your entire art practice becomes a smudgy line between curating and art, and you grow to feel strange and unnecessary. (Read more from Momus.)
Journalism and Art: Complementary and Collaborative Storytelling
The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism project is one example of how journalists are employing the arts to get important issues off the page and screen and into people’s lives. At the same time, artists are using reporting techniques, interviews, public records, documentary footage, and photo captions to create work addressing social, economic, and political topics that usually fall within the purview of journalism. (Read more from Nieman Storyboard.)
Google Launches Tilt Brush App for Virtual-Reality Sketching
Google’s virtual-reality painting app, Tilt Brush, could allow architects and designers to walk through their sketches in three dimensions as they draw them. Available on the HTC Vive headset device, Tilt Brush allows users to create 3D imagery using a simple controller that mimics the gestures of painting. (Read more from De Zeen.)
Diversity in Academe: Who Sets a College’s Diversity Agenda?
True diversity remains a struggle for many colleges. A special report from the Chronicle of Higher Education looks at who actually sets a college’s diversity agenda, and what makes that agenda flourish or flop. These questions have taken on a special urgency as race-related protests have erupted on many campuses and as the nation’s population grows more diverse. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
How Cities Can Revitalize Their Public Spaces
A city is much more than a collection of tall buildings on the skyline. What makes a city a great place to live and visit, says James Corner, are the shared spaces—sidewalks, plazas, parks, waterfronts. Corner is part of a new wave of muscular landscape architects who argue that their work is about more than planting trees and grass: it is about reshaping the identity of a place and how the people who live there see themselves. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)
We’re All Failures
Academics are wired to achieve, and their CVs are designed to showcase their every accomplishment. While rejection is a fact of academic life, most faculty don’t share the gory details. Every successful scholar has tanked job interviews; been turned down for fellowships, postdocs, and grants; and had publications that flopped. So it’s been inspiring to see scholars go public with “CVs of Failure” that list their numerous brushes with defeat in glorious detail. (Read more from Vitae.)
The Job-Search Buddy System
The academic enterprise values individual contributions, even though scholarly achievements require a communal effort. While metrics that weigh heavily on the number of papers, books, seminars, and discoveries that individuals produce are an essential part of scholarly training, the environment this creates may condition scholars to pursue all of their career goals without assistance from others. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Why Is Scholarly-Communication Reform So Hard to Talk About, and Where Are the Authors?
Readers of any number of professional listservs, magazines, and journals may have noticed that questions about scholarly-communication reform tend to be vexed and controversial. Having participated in these conversations for over twenty years, and having recently gotten home from a conference that dealt specifically with such questions, I’ve been thinking about why feelings run so high when we talk about them. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
The College Art Association and Terra Foundation for American Art Invite Applications for 2017 Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant
posted May 17, 2016
The College Art Association (CAA) and Terra Foundation for American Art invite applications for the 2017 Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant. The grant provides financial support for the publication of book-length scholarly manuscripts on the history of American art from circa 1500 to 1980 in the current-day geographic United States. The deadline for applications is September 15, 2016.
“Now in its sixth year, this international grant program helps to ensure that the field of American art history includes a wide range of culturally and geographically diverse voices,” stated Terra Foundation Publication Program Director Francesca Rose. “For example, Vardan Azatyan’s Armenian translation of Erika Doss’s book Twentieth-Century American Art increases awareness of the historical art of the United States by making important scholarship available to a broader audience and fostering international collaboration.”
Awards of up to $15,000 will be made in three distinct categories:
Grants to US publishers for manuscripts considering American art in an international context
Grants to non-US publishers for manuscripts on topics in American art
Grants for the translation of books on topics in American art to or from English.
“The generous support by the Terra Foundation for American Art to help finance book publications in the field of art history will benefit not only the recipients of the grant, but also teachers, students, and the art book reading public more generally,” says Suzanne Blier, president of CAA.
For more information on submission process, guidelines, and eligibility, please visit the CAA website.
The 2016 Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant winners were announced in February after the CAA Annual Conference in Washington, DC.
2016 TERRA FOUNDATION FOR AMERICAN ART INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATION GRANT WINNERS
- Jean-Pierre Criqui and Céline Flécheux, eds., Robert Smithson. Mémoire et entropie, Les presses du réel
- Erika Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art, translated into Armenian by Vardan Azatyan, Eiva Arts Foundation
- Eva Ehninger and Antje Krause-Wahl, eds., In Terms of Painting, Revolver Publishing
- Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal, translated into French by Karine Douplitzky, Éditions des archives contemporaines
- Rockwell Kent, Voyaging Southward from the Strait of Magellan, translated into Spanish and edited by Fielding D. Dupuy, Amarí Peliowski, and Catalina Valdés, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Chile) and Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado
- Will Norman, Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile and Culture in Midcentury America, Johns Hopkins University Press
- Annika Öhrner, ed., Art in Transfer—Curatorial Practices and Transnational Strategies in the Era of Pop, Södertörn University
- Joshua Shannon, The Recording Machine: Art and the Culture of Fact, Yale University Press
- Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties, translated into French by Anne Lemoine, C & F Éditions
Two non-US authors of top-ranked books were also awarded travel funds and complimentary registration for CAA’s 2017 Annual Conference in New York from February 15 to 18; they also received one-year CAA memberships.
The two author awardees for 2016 are:
- Will Norman
- Annika Öhrner
Image caption: Winslow Homer, Three Boys on the Shore, 1873, gouache and watercolor on paper mounted on board, 8⅝ x 13⅝ in. (image); 14⅜ x 19½ in. (mat). Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.75 (artwork in the public domain)
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for May 2016
posted May 16, 2016
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.
May 2016
Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–2016
Hauser Wirth & Schimmel
901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles, CA
March 13–September 4, 2016
Hauser Wirth & Schimmel opens its inaugural exhibition at its new Los Angeles space with Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–2016. On view is one hundred works made by thirty-four artists over the past seventy years. The show traces how women have “changed the course of art by deftly transforming the language of sculpture since the post war period.”
“Works on view reveal their makers inventing radically new forms and processes that privilege solo studio practice, tactility, and the idiosyncrasies of the artist’s own hand.” The exhibition explores a variety of artistic approaches such as stacking, hanging, and intertwining, examining the role of this work within current practices and expanded definitions of sculpture.
In addition to known artists from the prewar era to today, the exhibition contains commissioned works by a new generation of sculptors, including Phyllida Barlow, Karla Black, Abigail DeVille, Sonia Gomes, Rachel Khedoori, Laura Schnitger, Shinique Smith, Jessica Stockholder, and Kaari Upson.
“Perhaps most significant of all, the discreet human body—a central preoccupation of women abstract sculptors in earlier decades—has now disappeared. In its place, the artists in the final section of ‘Revolution in the Making’ offer an empty space for the viewer’s own body. Moving through, under, around, and within these new sculptures, the visitor becomes partner and participant in the continuing quest to articulate the female experience through art.”
The Sister Chapel: An Essential Feminist Collaboration
Rowan University Art Gallery at Westby Hall
201 Mullica Hill Road, Glassboro, New Jersey
March 28–June 30, 2016
Rowan University Art Gallery presents The Sister Chapel, a series of paintings celebrating a “nonhierarchical, secular commemoration of female role models from a female perspective.” Originally conceived by Ilise Greenstein in 1974, The Sister Chapel, which takes its name from Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, was last show in 1980 before the pieces drifted into different collections.
The exhibition is presented for the first time in the initially conceived, twelve-sided fabric structure that was designed by the artist Maureen Conner and that includes work by twelve other women. Greenstein’s eighteen-foot abstract ceiling is suspended above a circular arrangement of eleven nine-foot canvases, each depicting a figure of a heroic women. The subjects of these portraits were determined by the individual artist: Bella Abzug – the Candidate, a portrait of the American Congresswoman and social reformer, painted by Alice Neel; Betty Friedan as the Prophet, a portrayal of the influential author of The Feminine Mystique, by June Blum; Marianne Moore, the American poet, by Betty Holliday; Frida Kahlo, the celebrated Mexican artist, by Shirley Gorelick; Artemisia Gentileschi, the seventeenth-century Italian Baroque artist, by May Stevens; Joan of Arc, the sainted fifteenth-century French military heroine, by Elsa M. Goldsmith; Lilith, the rebellious first wife of Adam, by Sylvia Sleigh; God, a female manifestation of the creator of the universe, by Cynthia Mailman; Durga, the powerful Hindu goddess, by Diana Kurz; Womanhero, a conceptual embodiment of female strength and power, by Martha Edelheit; and Self-Portrait as Superwoman (Woman as Culture Hero) by Sharon Wybrants.
The exhibition at Rowan is only the third time the individual components of this work has been shown together.
A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s–1980s
Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art
Northwestern University, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, IL
January 16–July 17, 2016
“This exhibition replaces the indelible image of Charlotte Moorman (1933–1991)—playing the cello topless save for a pair of strapped-on miniature television sets—with a more complex but equally powerful portrait of the girl from Little Rock, Arkansas, who metamorphosed into a seminal and barrier-breaking figure in performance art and an impresario of the postwar avant-garde.”
The Block Museum of Art transforms its two-story building, with its ground-floor gallery transformed into a double viewing room for screenings of videos, including rare footage from the Charlotte Moorman Archive. With loans from private collections, including that of Yoko Ono, the exhibition presents Moorman’s commitment to taking the avant-garde to the streets. Through an assortment of artworks, film clips, music scores, audio recordings, documentary photographs, snapshots, performance props and costumes, ephemera, and correspondence, Moorman’s career takes shape in full form.
“I have asked myself why Charlotte Moorman is largely missing from the narratives of 20th-century art,” says Lisa Corrin, the Block Museum’s Ellen Philips Katz Director and curator of modern and contemporary art. “She is mainly remembered as a muse to Nam June Paik, but she was much more. In light of her influence on contemporary performance and her role as an unequaled popularizer of the avant-garde it is long overdue for her to be appreciated as a seminal figure in her own right.”
The companion exhibition Don’t Throw Anything Out, the scope of the Charlotte Moorman Archive at Northwestern University is explored with selection of objects and media ranging from Moorman’s double-barreled, heavily notated Rolodex to audio recordings of greetings and voice messages saved from her telephone message machine.
A Feast of Astonishments will travel in fall 2016 to New York University’s Grey Art Gallery in Manhattan and to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg in Austria in spring 2017.
Teresa Jaynes: Common Touch: The Art of the Senses in the History of the Blind
Library Company of Philadephia
1314 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107
April 4–October 21, 2016
The Library Company’s Louise Lux-Sions and Harry Sions Gallery presents Common Touch: The Art of the Senses in the History of the Blind, a multimedia exhibition of new works by the Philadelphia-based artist-in-residence Teresa Jaynes. Common Touch explores the nature, foundations, and limits of perception through the juxtaposition of Jaynes’s multisensory artwork—in which sight does not dominate—with historical materials documenting the education of visually impaired people in the nineteenth century. At its heart, Common Touch is the story of an artisan, a mathematician, a composer, and a surveyor. Drawing on their accomplishments, the artist developed “first person constructions” for each, infused with the geometric and abstract forms that were fundamental to the education of the blind in the nineteenth century. These forms were tools used to navigate and perceive the physical world—a radical approach years before the beginnings of modernism.
For more than twenty-five years, Jaynes has created installations and artist’s books based on extensive research in special collections and libraries, including the Rosenbach Museum and Library, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and the Newberry Library. Common Touch follows The Moon Reader, Jaynes’s interactive art installation that invites participants to learn through touch a raised-letter writing system for the blind invented by the blind educator William Moon in 1845. Designed as a primer, the book begins with an exercise for learning Moon that is then followed by “lessons” related to geometry, geography, botany, and astronomy. The stories and diagrams are taken from the Michael Zinman Collection of Printing for the Blind at the Library Company of Philadelphia.
As in previous Jaynes’s research-based projects, through art and artifact, Common Touch examines transformations in our understanding of sight while exploring the nature and limits of perception. The experience as a whole is intended to expand the “readers” understanding of historical and contemporary connotations of sight through curiosity, humor, and empathy.
Claudia DeMonte, Sarah Hinckley, Hayv Kahraman, Toyin Odutola, Lisa Ruyter, and Laurie Simmons: Making her Mark
Mattatuck Museum
144 West Main Street, Waterbury, CT 06702
April 17–June 5, 2016
The Mattatuck Museum presents Making Her Mark, a multimedia exhibition of work by six female contemporary artists curated by Lauren P. Della Monica. The artists featured in the exhibition—Claudia DeMonte, Sarah Hinckley, Hayv Kahraman, Toyin Odutola, Lisa Ruyter, and Laurie Simmons—range from emerging talent to renowned international artists. Such diversity bears witness to their experiences as female artists over the past few decades in an art world often criticized for undervaluing the contributions of deserving women artists. Their professional successes are testament to their talents and are especially compelling at a time of heightened interest in women’s roles in the arts and their presence on the walls of museums.
This show includes a range of diverse work from abstract and representational paintings to drawings, sculpture, and photography created by artists at various stages of their careers, each of whom is making a significant contribution to the overall cannon of contemporary art, all making their marks as leaders in the field. These artists address their personal experiences and backgrounds through their work, drawing upon an array of geographic and cultural influences—such as DeMonte’s Italian American heritage, Odutola’s African and African American upbringing, Kahraman’s childhood in Iraq, or Hinckley’s New England roots—and presenting these influences with an understanding of their continuing impact on their work. Ruyter and Simmons document popular culture’s influence by transforming pop-culture images into works of fine art. Viewing this spectrum of work collectively allows the audience to form a broader view of the contemporary social context as the works themselves also address global issues such as feminism, cultural identity, and universalism.
The exhibition is sponsored in part by the Connecticut Community Foundation with promotional partnership from Saint Mary’s Hospital’s Spirit of Women program.
Janine Antoni, Anna Halprin, Stephen Petronio: Ally
Fabric Workshop and Museum
1214 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107
April 21–July 31, 2016
The Fabric Workshop and Museum is presenting Ally, a series of works combining sculpture, installation, film, and performance created through the Artist-in-Residence Program. The art and dance project conceived and performed by Janine Antoni was initiated by herself in collaboration with the choreographer, theater, and community artist Anna Halprin and the pioneering choreographer Stephen Petronio.
In Ally, Antoni pursues her interest in bodily presence, touch, and movement through a series of unique collaborations in which the trio investigates the translation of ideas across forms and the vast potential that lies in their relations. The encounter between these artists from diverse practices and generations becomes a means of unearthing unknown affinities and historical entwinements, forging a new visual language and tactile experiences within processes of transformation.
Conceived by Antoni “as a kind of retrospective of my art making told through dance,” the project has evolved into a truly collaborative creation that allows the three artists to find a way to continue making new work while reflecting in their previous practices. The exhibition comprises four projects: Rope Dance, Swallow, The Courtesan and the Crone,and Paper Dance. Once a week for fourteen weeks Antoni will perform Paper Dance, an improvised movement performance that draws on images and concerns which have long preoccupied her as an artist. Antoni (born in the Bahamas, 1964) uses rolls of brown paper originally employed by Halprin (born in Winnetka, Illinois, 1920) in her seminal work Parades and Changes (1965). These performances take place within an installed arena of many wooden packing crates containing artworks by Antoni. Each iteration calls for Antoni to begin by unpacking one of her earlier works from a crate, whether it be a sculpture made of chocolate and soap like Lick and Lather (1993) or a photographic image like Mortar and Pestle (1999). Throughout the series of performances, a “retrospective” of Antoni’s previous works slowly emerges, remaining for a week, then disappearing as they are repacked into the installed crates.
Ally, in Petronio’s words, means a project “fundamentally about connection. And part of that is three distinct artistic languages coming together to meet in the gap between art and dance.”
Affiliated Society News for May 2016
posted May 15, 2016
Art Council of the African Studies Association
In the past year, the Art Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) sponsored a panel and a well-attended members’ meeting at the African Studies Association (ASA) annual meeting and hosted a session at the CAA Annual Conference. The council also distributed three extensive newsletters and is finalizing plans for a triennial conference, to be held in Ghana in 2017. To build support for the Ghana event, ACASA has undertaken a fundraising campaign with a five-member committee that meets every three weeks.
ACASA has also implemented a new online system for member payments and had a sizable presence at the European Conference on African Studies (ECAS) in Paris in July 2015. ACASA financially sponsored one artist’s performance at ECAS in a series Dominique Malaquais organized that was devoted to the arts. Finally, ACASA held elections to replace most of the organization’s board members.
Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture
The Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA) has elected new officers. The new president is Amelia Rauser of Franklin and Marshall College. She is a specialist in eighteenth-century British art and the author of numerous scholarly studies, including Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008). Christina Lindeman from the University of South Alabama is the new treasurer. She is the author of articles on art and gender in eighteenth-century Germany, with a special emphasis on the court of Anna Amalia of Weimar. Her book Representing Anna Amalia’s Bildung: Visual Metamorphosis from Personal to Political in Eighteenth-Century Germany, is forthcoming from Routledge.
HECAA also maintains a wonderful serial newsletter.
Midwest Art History Society
The Midwest Art History Society (MAHS) held its “Icons of the Midwest” session at CAA’s 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC. The meeting was meant to highlight important and museum-related art and art history from America’s vital middle region. This year’s topic was the Chicago Jazz Age painter Archibald Motley (1891–1981). The session’s cochairs were MAHS members Amy M. Mooney (Columbia College) and Mark Pohlad (DePaul University); the speakers were Jerma A. Jackson (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Phoebe E. Wolfskill (University of Indiana), and Romi Crawford (School of the Art Institute of Chicago). A highlight of this lively session was the remarks of the renowned Motley scholar, Richard J. Powell.
The forty-third MAHS annual conference took place in Chicago from April 7 to 9, 2016. Approximately two hundred participants and registrants convened at DePaul University’s Loop Campus to hear more than thirty academic sessions devoted to a wide range of art history. The keynote address, held at the nearby Art Institute of Chicago, was delivered by Gloria Groom, chair of European painting and sculpture and David and Mary Winton Green Curator in the Department of European Painting and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, who was involved the concurrent Van Gogh’s Bedrooms exhibition. Other conference highlights included a reception at Columbia College’s Museum of Contemporary Photography, a session on “Recent Acquisitions in Midwest Collections” (held at the Art Institute and chaired by the curator Judith W. Mann), and two sessions comprised of undergraduate scholars. For more information and to read conference proceedings and paper abstracts, visit the conference page of the MAHS website.
MAHS will hold its forty-fourth annual conference in Cleveland, Ohio, from April 6 to 8, 2017. The event will be hosted by the Cleveland Museum of Art, Case Western Reserve University, and Cleveland State University. To open the conference, a distinguished keynote panel will speak on Raphael’s School of Athens Cartoon, currently undergoing restoration in Milan. The panel will include: Don Alberto Rocca, director of the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan; Maurizio Michelozzi, a Florentine paper conservator who is undertaking the restoration; and Carmen Bambach, curator of drawings and prints for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Funding for the panel has been provided by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Chicago, the Italian Art Society, the University of Notre Dame, and MAHS.
New Media Caucus
The New Media Caucus (NMS) has elected new officers and members to its board of directors in February 2016. Mat Rappaport is president elect, Rachel Clarke is secretary, and Kevin Hamilton is chair of the caucus’s journal, Media-N. The new board members are Victoria Bradbury, Darren Douglas-Floyd, Mina Cheon, Abigail Susik, and Doreen Maloney. For more information on the organization’s structure, visit the New Media Caucus website.
Public Art Dialogue
At the CAA Annual Conference in February, Public Art Dialogue (PAD) hosted a roundtable chaired by Kirk Savage, professor of the history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. Also participating were Thomas Luebke, secretary of the United States Commission of Fine Arts, and Lucy Kempf, a member of the National Capital Planning Commission.
The 2016 PAD award recipient was Kirk Savage, who has contributed extensively to our understanding of American memorials, particularly those dedicated to Civil War soldiers. He is the author of two award winning books: Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (1997) and Monument Wars: Washington DC, the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (2009). Savage has also edited The Civil War in Art and Memory (2016). In presenting the award, PAD cochair Cameron Cartiere observed that one of the most compelling aspects of Savage’s scholarship is that it helps us “to look back into our history of memorialization as a means of understanding the ramifications of the political, social, and cultural decisions we make in developing contemporary memorials that mark the present, acknowledge our tumultuous past, and help us to embrace our uncharted future.”
Renaissance Society of America
The Program Committee for the sixty-third annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America invites submissions for individual papers or sessions on any aspect of Renaissance studies or the era 1300–1700. Because RSA is a multidisciplinary society, we especially welcome submissions that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries, as well as those that spotlight scholarship that is discipline specific. Sessions sponsored by our Associate Organizations and Discipline Representatives will make up part of the program. The rest will consist of sessions and individual papers proposed by RSA members and selected by the Program Committee.
Because the RSA Annual Meeting is a large conference—with as many as fifty sessions meeting concurrently—we have developed guidelines over the years that greatly facilitate the work of the Program Committee and help to ensure an audience for every session. Please note that proposing a session or a paper indicates your commitment to attend. The committee will not be able to accept every submission; good papers will have to be turned away. To take a slot and then later withdraw is discourteous to colleagues who would have liked to present a paper. Once the rooms are scheduled and the AV equipment is ordered, no substitutions are possible.
Organizers may propose a series of linked sessions, up to a limit of five. However, the Program Committee prefers that series be limited to three, to facilitate scheduling them in a row. Sessions organized in honor or in memory of an individual scholar are limited to no more than two. Proposals for roundtables are also welcome, but the committee asks that roundtables be stand-alone sessions in terms of their content. Roundtables that merely involve recapping the content of a series of sessions take up valuable space in the program that could be used to present other research; proposals for them are not likely to be accepted.
The committee welcomes sessions that present the scholarship of members at various stages of their careers. Each session must include at least one speaker who has received a PhD or other terminal degree. Graduate-student speakers should be in candidacy or the equivalent for their program; that is, they must be advanced students who have completed coursework, examinations, and much of their dissertation research. They are invited to speak on topics directly related to their dissertation research, rather than presenting term papers.
Please visit the RSA website for more details. The submission site will open in May, with a submission deadline in early June (TBA). You do not need to be a member to submit a proposal, but if your proposal is accepted you will need to be an RSA member for the year of the conference.
Society for Photographic Education
The Society for Photographic Education (SPE) welcomes conference proposals from photographers, writers, educators, curators, historians, and professionals from other fields for “Family Values,” the fifty-fourth SPE national conference, to be held March 9–12, 2017, in Orlando, Florida. Topics are not required to be theme based; they may include but are not limited to: imagemaking, history, contemporary theory and criticism, multidisciplinary approaches, new technologies, effects of media and culture, educational issues, funding, and presentations of work in photography, film, video, performance, and installation.
The presentation formats are:
- Graduate Student: short presentation of your own artistic work and a brief introduction to your graduate program (must be enrolled in graduate program at time of submission)
- Imagemaker: presentation of your own artistic work (photography, film, video, performance, installation, multidisciplinary approaches)
- Lecture: presentation on historical topic, theory, or another artist’s work
- Panel Discussion: active discussion among panelists (maximum of three), a moderator, and the audience on a chosen topic
- Teaching and Learning: presentations, workshops, and demos that addresses educational issues, including teaching resources and strategies (syllabi, videos, assignments, readings, class preparation and setup, and PowerPoint presentations); curricula to serve diverse artists and changing student populations; seeking promotion and tenure; avoiding burnout; and professional exchange
Current SPE membership is required of all participants with accepted proposals. Please visit the SPE website for full proposal guidelines and special award details.
Society of Architectural Historians
The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) is accepting abstracts for its 2017 annual international conference in Glasgow, Scotland (June 7–11). Abstracts may be submitted for one of the thirty-six paper sessions, for the Graduate Student Lightning Talks, or for open sessions. SAH encourages submissions from architectural, landscape, and urban historians; museum curators; preservationists; independent scholars; architects; and members of SAH chapters and partner organizations. Deadline: June 6, 2016.
Applications are open for the SAH/Mellon Author Awards, which are designed to provide financial relief to scholars who are publishing their first monograph on the history of the built environment and who are responsible for paying for rights and permissions for images or for commissioning maps, charts, or line drawings in their publications. Deadline: May 15, 2016.
SAH invites nominations and self-nominations for the next editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH) to serve a three-year term: January 1, 2018–December 31, 2020. JSAH is a quarterly, blind-peer-reviewed international journal devoted to all aspects of the history of the global built environment and spatial practice, including architecture, landscape architecture, urbanism, and city planning. Published since 1941, JSAH has defined the field of architectural history and is a pioneer in digital publication. Articles published in JSAH are historically rigorous, conceptually sophisticated, and theoretically innovative. Deadline: June 15, 2016.
Registration is open for the SAH Field Seminar, “Architectural Layers of a Southeast Asian Region,” to take place December 1–13, 2016. The program will explore the fascinating architectural landscape of Vietnam, focusing in particular on the modern era from the nineteenth century to today. Participants will also visit the spectacular Angkor complex in Cambodia, capital of the Khmer empire from the ninth to fifteenth century. The SAH Study Program Fellowship deadline is August 11, 2016.
Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture
In February and March 2016, the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) conducted an election for its board of directors. As a result, a SHERA–Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) liaison was created, with Anna P. Sokolina as an officer. This new position will be open for reelection every three years. In addition, Hanna Chuchvaha, Natalia Kolodzei, and Andrei Shabanov were designated members at large, and Nicholas Iljine was reelected a member at large for another two-year term.
SHERA has launched a call for papers for its sponsored session for emerging scholars for CAA’s 2017 Annual Conference, chaired by Alice Sullivan.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted May 11, 2016
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
The Digital Age of Data Art
Many artists use raw data produced by our societies as material, seeking innovative means of display or transforming it into a work of art. By blurring boundaries between art and information, data art dispels the myth of the romantic artist while offering a fundamental artistic act in a critical commentary of the digital age in which we live. (Read more from TechCrunch.)
Help Desk: Getting Paid for Curatorial Work
I’m a professional curator with over a decade of experience, mostly as a salaried professional. I’d like to do more freelance work, but curators seem to get paid nothing, absurdly little, or astronomical sums. How can I actually get paid for the work I do? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
Creating Value around Women Artists
Helen Molesworth, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, discusses why gender imbalance in museums persists, why we must expand our definition of “genius,” and what hard choices institutions must make in order to create a truly balanced program. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Beyond Cool?
I once confessed to having volunteered on a political campaign. My friend reacted with surprise: “But, nobody actually does that, do they?” With that roundabout question, he accused me of two crimes: one political, the other aesthetic. (Read more from the Point.)
Van Gogh Museum Wants to Share Its Expertise, for a Price
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has started a program to offer its professional services to private collectors, corporations, and other institutions. It says the move could create a new revenue stream as a hedge against declining government financing and global events like terror attacks that could have an effect on visitor numbers. (Read more from the New York Times.)
This Art Historian Teaches FBI Agents and Surgeons How to See
Amy Herman teaches people how to see. Her tools of choice are famous artworks from major art institutions all over the world. Her typical pupils? Cops, FBI officers, medical students, and first responders. Herman teaches a class that helps people fine-tune their observational skills—which often prove critical in solving a crime or conducting open-heart surgery. (Read more from Fast Company.)
Technology Can Make Art-History Lessons Come to Life
It’s one thing to study the elegance, beauty, and sophistication of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, but what if virtual reality or mobile technology could actually transport you there to experience the marvel itself, rather than just reading about it? A handful of organizations and technologies are tinkering in this space to make art education something that leaps out of the textbooks and engages students on a richer sensory level. (Read more from EdTech.)
Accessing Publisher Resources via a Mobile Device
Step 1: Google search on intermittent stem-cell cycling to look for article mentioned by a colleague. Step 2: Land on article at publisher website. Look at author list. Skim abstract. Yup, this is the one. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
Join a CAA Awards for Distinction Jury!
posted May 10, 2016
CAA Needs You to Serve on a Jury!
As we start preparing for the Annual Conference, CAA is seeking members to join its Awards for Distinction Juries. Jury members must be current CAA members.
We have extended the deadline to May 20, 2016. Those selected will be acknowledged on the CAA conference website and in the Annual Convocation program, and will receive a complimentary ticket to the 2017 Annual Conference Opening Reception.
CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for individuals to serve on eight of the twelve juries for the annual Awards for Distinction for three years (2016–19). Terms begin in May 2016; award years are 2017–19. CAA’s twelve awards honor artists, art historians, authors, curators, critics, and teachers whose accomplishments transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.
Candidates must possess expertise appropriate to the jury’s work and be current CAA members. They should not hold a position on a CAA committee or editorial board beyond May 31, 2016. CAA’s president and vice president for committees appoint jury members for service.
The following juries have vacancies:
- Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award: three members
- Art Journal Award: two members
- Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize: two members
- CAA/AIC Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation: two members
- Charles Rufus Morey Book Award: three members
- Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art: two members
- Distinguished Teaching of Art Award: one member
- Frank Jewett Mather Award: one member
Nominations and self-nominations should include a brief statement (no more than 150 words) outlining the individual’s qualifications and experience and an abbreviated CV (no more than two pages). Please send all materials by email to Katie Apsey, CAA manager of programs; submissions must be sent as Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF attachments. For questions about jury service and responsibilities, contact Tiffany Dugan, CAA director of programs.
Extended Deadline: May 20, 2016.
Thank you.