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News from the Art and Academic Worlds

posted by Christopher Howard — Apr 02, 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.

The Most Expensive Colleges in the Country Are Art Schools, not Ivies

I recently stumbled across this handy tool from the Department of Education, which generates lists of colleges by cost. The schools that usually get dinged for high tuition (and as a result, scare off low-income applicants) are the elite colleges. But many of those schools are quite rich and distribute a lot of financial aid. (Read more from the Washington Post.)

Sure, I Do Creative Work, but I’m No Artist

Who, exactly, is an artist? Many claim the title, with little to back up their assertion. We’ve all met people who define themselves as artists but have yet to actually produce any actual art. A new study finds that, surprisingly, the reverse is also true. It identifies a large group of Americans who have every right to call themselves professional artists but for some reason avoid doing so. (Read more from Pacific Standard.)

You’re Sure of a Big Surprise

Museums across the United States are hiring staff under the “public engagement” rubric, often as part of their education departments. The Henry Art Gallery in Seattle is seeking “a director of education and public engagement,” and in January the Whitney Museum in New York hired a “director of public programs and public engagement.” Both are new positions. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

Without Tenure or a Home

In the classroom, Mary-Faith Cerasoli, an adjunct professor of Romance languages, usually tries to get her message across in lyrical Italian or Spanish. But during spring break, she used stencils and ink and abbreviated English to write her current message—“Homeless Prof.”—on a white ski vest she planned to wear on a solo trip to Albany two days later to protest working conditions for adjunct college professors. (Read more from the New York Times.)

Russian Oligarchs and Brazilian Millionaires Interested in DIA? Orr Was Speaking Metaphorically

OK, let’s clear up any misunderstanding: Russian oligarchs and Brazilian millionaires are not amassed in front of the Detroit Institute of Arts in the hopes of being first in line should the treasures inside go up for sale. But that doesn’t mean they, or someone like them, aren’t intensely interested. While giving a speech at the University of Michigan, Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr said that many Russian oligarchs—meaning super-wealthy Russian businessmen—and Brazilian millionaires were “calling and inquiring” about the art. However, Orr’s spokesman Bill Nowling clarified that the emergency manager spoke metaphorically. (Read more from the Detroit Free Press.)

United We Stand: How Galleries Are Working Together

From the Renaissance bottega to the art factories of Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, artists have long recognized that they get by better with a little help from their friends. Institutions have been slower to catch on. As public funding dwindles, the scramble for sponsorship gets ever more rivalrous as museums vie to woo patrons with the glossiest gala dinner and most highbrow curatorial outing. (Read more from the Financial Times.)

Protesters Rain Down Thousands of Bills in Guggenheim Rotunda

At 6:45 PM on March 29, a handheld bell sounded in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, signaling the second protest action in as many months from the Global Ultra Luxury Faction (or GULF). The ringing was followed by the release of nine thousand “1%” bills of parodic currency, which fluttered downward as patrons rushed to the inner edge of Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral ramp. (Read more from Hyperallergic.)

Vatican Library Goes Digital

The Vatican Apostolic Library has announced a €18 million deal with a Japanese IT company to digitize 3,000 ancient manuscripts over the next four years. In a press conference last week, the library’s prefect, Monsignor Cesare Pasini, said the partnership with NTT Data Corporation continues “a task we have been undertaking for years” to digitize the Vatican’s entire collection of 82,000 manuscripts, an estimated 40 million pages. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

Filed under: CAA News

Lilianne Lugo: 2014 International Travel Grant Recipient

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

After last month’s Annual Conference, recipients of CAA’s 2014 International Travel Grants were invited to contribute short articles reflecting on their experiences in Chicago. What follows is a personal reminiscence from Lilianne Lugo, an educator, administrator, and playwright based in Havana, Cuba. Lugo studies the relationship between the history of art and the history of theater, as well as the intersections of contemporary art practice and the performing arts. She is professor and vice dean of research and postgraduate studies at the Universidad de las Artes in Havana, Cuba.

Saudade

The persistence of melancholy. The persistence of the friends I have released to oblivion. The persistence of the memories of other cities, other people that I miss. I walk in an unknown city. I can barely breathe, it’s so cold. My best friend wrote me an email. “What are you doing?” he asks. “I miss you….” But when I wrote him back I can only send him a picture of my foot on the snow … it’s my way of embracing the spirit of life, my way of saying that I am seizing and enjoying the opportunities that suddenly emerge in our lives and change it forever. Just a few moments in life can be counted like that, and this is one of them.

First time in the snow. From the plane I can see the frozen ground. Behind I have left the unbearable heat of Havana and the noise of its streets. First time in Chicago. First time in the United States. First time at CAA’s conference. So many impressions, so many new people. I can write only in first person singular. I can’t speak for the others. I can’t talk about what I haven’t seen before.

For a couple of days the Hilton Chicago is invaded by hordes of art historians, artists, professors, and recruiters. It’s a huge event, and the whole city seems to inhale a whirlwind of art. Exhibitions, talks, panels, and informal gatherings that interrupt the rhythm of daily routines and establish a different understanding of reality. In a world of white ground, how to conjure the fire of masterpieces? How can we understand and explain (if that’s possible) from a warm and carpeted hotel the always ungraspable world of art and art history?

For twenty people each year, the College Art Association and the Getty Foundation make it possible to attend this conference. That means twenty people in the world receive a gift to come to the States and share and learn what we know about the art in our countries with colleagues from all over the US. This time the group is composed of people from Egypt, Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, South Africa, Portugal, Poland, Cuba, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uganda, Ghana, Cameroon, Estonia, Pakistan, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Croatia.

Some images of those days come to my mind: the day of the preconference, in which each of us presented a paper about our research, and the discussion afterward about so many different topics. Art Shay’s exhibition My Florence at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago that we, as a group, visited together. In the library of the college we saw the photographs and the artist himself. It was the story of his life, the little moments he shared with his wife and family, and it was so impressive to see him, with the energy and look that only years can bring. Or the exhibition at the DePaul Art Museum, The Sochi Project: An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus, about the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia, and the environment of that particular area that, in the former days of Communism, was the recreational spot for Joseph Stalin. And then we walked with our graduate-student host to see the Lakeview neighborhood nearby. Or the meetings with so many bright and marvelous people….

Then, when the conference ended, another trip was waiting for us, to the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts. From the plane’s window we could see Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty; at LaGuardia airport we said goodbye to our fellow travel-grant recipient Mahmuda Khnam, who was feeling sick and couldn’t travel to Williamstown. We talked on the drive north and shared our opinions, we talked about everything: Brazilian soap operas, LGBT rights, curatorial practices, communism, incomes, outcomes, food, and snow. Then, a warm welcome at the Clark, a very special place in a beautiful setting where studying takes place in real luxury. Outside it snowed all day long, but inside the Clark was joyful and cozy, as we were received in that sanctuary of knowledge like kings and queens.

Now, in the sun again, I remember with joy the city of Chicago, the museums, the extraordinary collection of the Art Institute, the people of CAA, my fellow grant recipients, and, of course, all that I have learned about not only specific issues related to my research, but also the methodologies and approaches that many colleagues are currently using. I learned, too, about how things work in the professional world of art and art history in the United States.

I began this essay talking about melancholy. It’s the feeling I get when I think about those moments during CAA’s conference. Portuguese had a beautiful word to describe it: saudade. And that would be the best word, because even in Spanish nostalgia or melancolía are not the same. I cherish those moments. While I am thinking about what lies ahead, I am eager to come back and share with my new colleagues the fruits of another year of work.

Image Caption

Lilianne Lugo.

Filed under: Annual Conference, International

AAMD Provenance Workshops

posted by CAA — Feb 25, 2014

The Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) will cosponsor two provenance workshops this spring: one in Seattle, Washington, and another in Washington, DC.

Seattle

This workshop will be held on May 18, 2014, in conjunction with the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries’s annual conference in Seattle. The workshop will review best practices for conducting provenance research in art museums, with a focus on Nazi-era provenance, as well as issues pertaining to antiquities and cultural property. The session is geared to all levels of experience and can serve as a how-to and a refresher. The workshop leaders will discuss due diligence and the acquisition process, online research tools, and the handling of restitution claims. The workshop is limited to fifty participants; ample time will be allotted for Q&A.

Victoria Reed, curator for provenance at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Nancy H. Yeide, head of the Department of Curatorial Records at the National Gallery of Art, will conduct the half-day workshop, which will be held at the Hotel Deca in Seattle. Each participant will receive a copy of Yeide’s book Beyond the Dreams of Avarice: The Hermann Goering Collection (2009), which is the first biography to focus on Hermann Goering’s personal collection and provides the first opportunity since the war to look at the collection as a whole and evaluate its place within art collecting and politics. This carefully documented volume is critical to the clarification of provenances of the objects featured and brings to light pictures whose histories and whereabouts have been hidden for decades.

Registration is available at www.aamg-us.org/registration; scroll down to “Sunday Morning Workshops.”

Washington, DC

In cooperation with the National Archives and Records Administration, the Smithsonian Institution, and the American Alliance of Museums, AAMD will sponsor a workshop for advanced researchers following the success of a two-day, Nazi-era provenance seminar that was held in 2011. Taking place at the National Archives on June 17, 2014, this workshop is limited to thirty participants who are experienced researchers working in museums. The event will provide a hands-on workshop on using new and updated online provenance research resources. Registration will include a copy of Holocaust-Era Assets, a Finding Aid to Records at the National Archives at College Park.

Nancy H. Yeide, head of the Department of Curatorial Records at the National Gallery of Art, and Chris Naylor, director of textual records for the National Archives, will lead the one-day workshop, which will be accompanied by an introduction to new materials at the Archives of American Art led by Marisa Bourgoin, chief of reference services for the Archives of American Art, and Laurie Stein, senior provenance advisor for the Smithsonian Provenance Research Initiative.

The cosponsors for the DC seminar express grateful appreciation to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for support to defray expenses for workshop participants.

To apply for registration go and to learn more about Kress grants, visit the AAMD website.

Filed under: Workshops — Tags:

People in the News

posted by CAA — Feb 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.

February 2014

Museums and Galleries

Kathleen Bickford Berzock, previously curator of African art at the Art Institute of Chicago, has been appointed associate director of curatorial affairs for the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

Michael Brown, a researcher, lecturer, and formerly Mayer Curatorial Fellow for Spanish Colonial Art at the Denver Art Museum in Colorado, has become an associate curator of European art at the San Diego Museum of Art in California.

Elizabeth Kozlowski, formerly Windgate Curatorial Fellow at the Arizona State University Museum in Tempe, has become a new curator for the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft in Texas.

Institutional News

posted by CAA — Feb 17, 2014

Read about the latest news from institutional members.

Institutional News 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.

February 2014

The Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Frick Collection, whose institutional libraries formed the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC), have been awarded a $340,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to initiate a program of web archiving for specialist art-historical resources. The two-year program will follow a 2012 pilot study, Reframing Collections for the Digital Age, also funded by the Mellon Foundation.

The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville has accepted a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support an upcoming exhibition, Joseph Cornell and Surrealism, organized by the museum and the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, France.

The J. Paul Getty Trust, based in Los Angeles, California, and the British Museum in London, England, have announce a three-year collaboration with the National Cultural Fund and the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), under the aegis of the Indian government’s Ministry of Culture, to build the capacities of ASI’s site-museum and site-management professionals. Nearly one hundred ASI professionals—among them archaeologists, site-museum professionals, site managers, directors, and caretakers—will participate in workshops, trainings, conferences, and working-group meetings in India, Los Angeles, London, and other Asian sites to help reimagine Indian site-museums with enhanced narratives, better collection management, and conservation.

The Herron School of Art and Design, part of Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, has received a $2 million gift from Cindy Simon Skjodt, a philanthropist and advocate for mental health, to endow a chair for the school’s program in art therapy.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania has met the goal of a major five-year initiative, the Lenfest Challenge, having raised a total of $54 million to endow twenty-nine staff positions in its curatorial, conservation, library, archive, education, publishing, and digital-technology departments. H. F. (Gerry) Lenfest, chairman emeritus of the museum’s board of trustees, and his wife, Marguerite, offered a $27 million grant in September 2008, challenging donors to match this gift on a one-to-one basis to endow and name these positions.

The University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles and the Pacific Asia Museum of Pasadena, one of the few American museums dedicated to the arts and culture of Asia and the Pacific Islands, have announced a new partnership that will preserve the museum’s 1924 Chinese Qing Dynasty–inspired mansion in downtown Pasadena as an art museum. The partnership will also enhance the scholarship of the creative faculty and students at USC’s six arts schools and those in the departments of art history, East Asian language and cultures, religion, and archaeology. In addition, the alliance will provide a foundation for a renewed museum-studies and curatorial-training program at USC.

The University of Texas at Dallas has announced the new home for the Arts and Technology (ATEC) program: the Edith O’Donnell Arts and Technology Building. This new 155,000-square-foot facility will host programs and promote advancements in visual art, emerging media technology, and multimedia communications.

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, has received a $9.6 million bequest from the estate of Charles H. Schwartz to establish an endowment to expand and enhance the museum’s collection of English and European works of art from the eighteenth century.

caa.reviews Now Publishing as an Open-Access Journal

posted by Christopher Howard — Jan 16, 2014

CAA and Routledge are pleased to announce that caa.reviews, an online journal of book and exhibition reviews in the visual arts, is now open access. Born digital in 1998, caa.reviews fosters intellectual and creative engagement with critical issues in art history, museum scholarship, curatorial studies, and studio practice. Published on a continual basis, the content of caa.reviews—assessing scholarly books and catalogues, art exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world, academic conference and symposia, thematic essays, and more—is now freely available to all interested readers worldwide.

Becoming an open-access journal greatly enhances the reach and impact of caa.reviews, which averages approximately 150 texts a year covering all areas and periods of art history and visual studies. Readers will also be able to access several thousand reviews published since the journal’s inception. caa.reviews also publishes a list of recently published books in the arts and a compilation of dissertation titles—both completed and in progress—from graduate programs in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.

“By offering an open-access caa.reviews, CAA can now share the expertise of its authors across a broad international spectrum of readers. Because the publication provides critical analyses of recent scholarly publications and exhibitions, caa.reviews can introduce the world to a broad range of scholarly, artistic, and curatorial projects,” said Anne Collins Goodyear, president of the CAA Board of Directors.

Earlier this year, Routledge and CAA began a new copublishing partnership. Routledge will now publish and distribute CAA’s journals, The Art Bulletin and Art Journal—both in print and online—and provide a platform for the online journal, caa.reviews. Start exploring caa.reviews today by visiting www.caareviews.org.

About Taylor & Francis Group

Taylor & Francis Group partners with researchers, scholarly societies, universities, and libraries worldwide to bring knowledge to life. As one of the world’s leading publishers of scholarly journals, books, ebooks, and reference works, Taylor & Francis offers content that spans all areas of Humanities, Social Sciences, Behavioural Sciences, Science, Technology, and Medicine.

From a network of offices in Oxford, New York, Philadelphia, Boca Raton, Boston, Melbourne, Singapore, Beijing, Tokyo, Stockholm, New Delhi, and Johannesburg, Taylor & Francis staff members provide local expertise and support to our editors, societies and authors and tailored, efficient customer service to our library colleagues.

For more information, please contact Tara Golebiewski, journals marketing associate for Taylor & Francis Group.

News from the Art and Academic Worlds

posted by Christopher Howard — Jan 08, 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.

Conventional Wisdom

Thousands of literature scholars will emerge from their research cocoons, don their finest black duds, and descend upon Chicago for this year’s convention of the Modern Language Association. They’ll all be there: muckety-mucks whose rings ache for kissing; frazzled early-career professors angling for tenure; and, of course, hordes of desperate graduate students and barely employed PhDs, hoping to break into what everyone actually calls “the profession.” (Read more from Slate.)

How the Humanities Compute in the Classroom

Computer-assisted scholarship in the humanities dates back decades. In the past five years, though, the kinds of work collectively known as the digital humanities have taken on fresh luster. Observers have called this technology-inflected research “the next big thing.” Beyond the headlines and hoopla, digital scholarship has begun to work its way into the academic ecosystem. In the following collection of articles, read more about how the digital humanities play now in the undergraduate classroom, whether they pay off in tenure and promotion, and what it takes to create a work of digital scholarship that will last. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Garage Sale Renoir Painting Sparks Legal Battle with Museum

A one-of-a-kind Renoir painting the size of a napkin is at the center of an intense legal battle between a museum that claims it was stolen and a Virginia woman who claims she bought it for $7. The tiny work of art is an 1879 landscape by the Impressionist painter titled Paysage Bords de Seine. In court papers filed this week, the Baltimore Museum of Art claims the painting was stolen in 1951. As evidence, the museum provided a sixty-year-old police report, old museum catalogues, and a receipt showing that a patron bequeathed the painting to the museum. (Read more from ABC News.)

Conserving Priceless Chinese Paintings Is an Art All Its Own

Outside China and Taiwan, American museums hold the world’s best collection of Chinese paintings. It’s worth billions of dollars, but it’s also fragile: over time, these paintings fall apart. In the US, only four master conservators know how to take care of them, and they’re all approaching retirement. The Freer and Sackler Galleries—one of the huge, stone Smithsonian buildings on the National Mall in Washington, DC—employ one of those masters. (Read more from National Public Radio.)

Technology in Museums: Less Is More!

The experience of going to a museum often feels a little engineered. A heavy curatorial hand leads you through an exhibition, making it hard to resist reading the panels of information contextualizing and explaining the art or artifacts on display rather than come to your own appreciation of them. Audio guides offer to fill in gaps in your knowledge and give you expert insights. Sometimes glistening screens nearby beckon you to see more. (Read more from Spiked.)

Let’s Change the World for Art Students in 2014

Funding cuts and a move to banish art lessons from schools made 2013 a sad year for creative education. But art students and their staff are regrouping for a fight they believe is there to be won. The number of students applying to study creative arts in British universities is on the decline. According to the latest available data from UCAS, the number of applications fell 17 percent from 2011 to 2012. (Read more from the Guardian.)

Mock, Phone, Video Interviews

Participating in a mock interview my first time on the job market was the most embarrassing moment of my academic career. I dressed in as close to a suit as I owned at the time and walked into the large classroom we had scheduled, where the seven faculty members sat in a semicircle. They were all specialists in their fields, so their questions probed my ability to be conversant in each field, whereas my specialty was about combining the fields. Yet I wasn’t able to articulate how or why I did that. Realizing that I really couldn’t answer their questions was incredibly humbling. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Ten Tips for Tweeting at Conferences

Tweeting at conferences is a great way to share what you’re learning in a session with your followers and the wider world. It’s also a great way to be in two places at once, as you can read tweets from other sessions that you weren’t able to attend. You can read those tweets as they come in or—if you’d rather not fracture your attention—read them after the fact using a Twitter search. (Read more from ProfHacker.)

Filed under: CAA News

People in the News

posted by CAA — Dec 17, 2013

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 2013

Academe

Anna Collette has been appointed assistant professor in photography by the Department of Art and Art History in the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

Luba Freedman, a specialist of Italian Renaissance art and professor in history of art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, has been named Jack Cotton Professor in Architecture and Fine Arts at her school.

Carma Gorman has joined the Department of Art and Art History in the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin as associate professor in design.

LaToya M. Hobbs has been appointed to teach foundations at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.

Museums and Galleries

Cathleen Chaffee, assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, has joined the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, as curator.

Amy Galpin, an associate curator for the San Diego Museum of Art in California, has become the new curator for the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.

Mazie McKenna Harris, a doctoral candidate in the history of photography at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, has been named Linda Wyatt Gruber ’66 Curatorial Fellow in Photography by the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

Ronda Kasl, formerly senior curator of painting and sculpture before 1800 at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indiana, has become a curator of colonial Latin American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Karl Kusserow, curator of American art at the Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey, has been named the inaugural John Wilmerding Curator of American Art at his institution.

Michael W. Maizels, most recently a research assistant and predoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, has been appointed Mellon New Media Curator and Lecturer by the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

Joanne Pillsbury, an associate director of the Getty Research Institute, has been named Andrall E. Pearson Curator in the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Kelly Taxter, a cofounder of Taxter and Spengeman Gallery in New York and a curatorial consultant for the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, has joined the Jewish Museum in New York as assistant curator.

Mary M. Tinti, formerly a curatorial fellow for the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, has been appointed associate curator of the Fitchburg Art Museum in Fitchburg, Massachusetts.

In an effort to promote greater interaction and exchange between American and international art historians and artists, CAA offers twenty International Travel Grants to bring colleagues from around the world to its Annual Conference, to be held next year in Chicago from February 12 to 15, 2014. This is the third year of the program, which has been generously funded by the Getty Foundation since its inception. CAA is pleased to announce this year’s recipients—professors of art history, curators, and artists who teach art history—who were selected by a jury of CAA members from a highly competitive group of applicants. Their biographies are listed below.

In addition to covering travel expenses, hotel accommodations, and per diems, the CAA International Travel Grants include conference registration and a one-year CAA membership. At the conference, the twenty recipients will be paired with hosts, who will introduce them to CAA and to specific colleagues who share their interests. Members of CAA’s International Committee have agreed to serve as hosts, along with representatives from the National Committee for the History of Art (NCHA). CAA is grateful to NCHA for renewing its generous underwriting of the hosts’ expenses. The program will begin on February 11 with an introductory preconference for grant recipients and their hosts.

Grant recipients from previous years have found the experience enormously beneficial. Didier Houenoude, a 2012 grantee from Benin, reflected that “Meeting different colleagues from all over the world was a great experience…. I learned how possible and great it is to work with others although we have different research fields. I am convinced that it is very important to work in collaboration with other researchers.” Marina Vicelja-Matijašić, a 2013 grantee from Croatia, stated: “The possibility to talk about ‘general problems and issues’ such as global art history or crisis in art history in an international audience and sharing ideas from different perspectives was of great value.” Musarrat Hasan, a 2013 grantee from Pakistan, described the personal impact of the program, saying: “A whole new range and scope of possibilities have entered my horizon…. On a personal and human level it was a great gathering for creating global understanding.”

CAA hopes that the travel-grant program will not only increase international participation in the organization’s activities, but also expand international networking and the exchange of ideas both during and after the conference. The Getty-funded International Travel Grant 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 grant recipients in Chicago at the next Annual Conference. To learn more about the CAA International Travel Grant Program, visit www.collegeart.org/travelgrants/gettyor contact project director Janet Landay at jlanday@collegeart.org.

Rael Artel

Rael Artel

Rael Artel is a curator of contemporary art and, since April 2013, director of the Tartu Art Museum in Estonia. She graduated from the Institute of Art History at the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2003 and participated in the De Appel Curatorial Training Programme in Amsterdam in 2004–5. Since 2000 she has curated projects in Estonia, Warsaw, Lisbon, Amsterdam, and New York. Artel is the artistic director of the festival of contemporary art in Tartu called ART IST KUKU NU UT. She is also the initiator and moderator of Public Preparation, an international platform for network-based communication and collective research.

Recent exhibitions include Let’s Talk about Nationalism! Between Ideology and Identity (Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia, 2010); Lost in Transition (Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn, 2011); Art Must Be Beautiful: Selected Works by Marina Abramović (Tartu Art Museum, 2011); Life in the Forest (Arsenal Gallery, Bialystok, Poland, 2011); After Socialist Statues, KIM? (Contemporary Art Centre, Riga, Latvia, 2011); Explosion in Pärnu (Kumu Art Museum, 2012); and Marge Monko: How to Wear Red? (Tartu Art Museum, 2013).

Eric Appau Asante

Eric Appau Asante

Eric Appau Asante is a senior member and lecturer of art history at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana. He earned a PhD in art history (African art and culture) from the same university, where he currently teaches courses in the history of African art and culture, philosophy of African art and culture, research methodology, and history of global art.

For the past seven years Asante has concentrated his efforts on research and teaching people about history and symbolism in African art as well as art and memorial culture. In addition to these subjects he is interested in gender and art production, philosophies and educational connotations of African art, and wood culture and art production. In January 2013 he became Ghana’s coordinator for the International Wood Culture Society.

 

Cezar Bartholomeu

Cezar Bartholomeu

Cezar Bartholomeu is a photographer and professor of art history at the School of Fine Arts, Department of Art History, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), in Brazil. He received a PhD in Visual Languages from both the UFRJ and the École de Hautes Études in Paris. Since 2010 he has been the editor-in-chief of Arte & Ensaios, one of Brazil’s major art journals. His areas of research include photography as art, photography’s history and theory, and contemporary art and photography in Brazil and worldwide.

As a photographer, Bartholomeu exhibits widely in Brazil and Europe. His publications include “Três pequenos instantâneos: Benjamin, Barthes, Derrida” in Artefoto (Rio de Janeiro: CCBB, 2002), Celebrações/Negociações – Fotografia Africana na coleção Gilberto Chateaubriand (African Photography in the Gilberto Chateaubriand Collection, Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, 2011), and “Emanation/Abjection” in Laboratório Público de Históra da Arte Mundial (Public World Art History Lab, Rio de Janeiro: UERJ, to be published in 2014).

Laris Borić

Laris Borić

Laris Borić studied art history at the University of Zadar (MA) and Zagreb (MSc) before receiving his PhD from the University of Zadar in 2010. His thesis, “Renaissance Sculpture and Architectural Decoration in Zadar,” indicates his ongoing interest in artistic and architectural production in Adriatic rim cultures between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is especially interested in problems related to the permeation of heterogeneous influences in art (particularly sculpture and architecture) of towns in the northern part of the Adriatic (Venice, Veneto, Istria, Dalmatia, and Marche) and particularly the dominant role of Venice and Padua, and to a lesser degree, Marche, Lombardy, and Tuscany.

Borić is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Zadar, where he teaches courses in European and Croatian Renaissance and Baroque art. In October 2013 he became chair of the department.

 

Eddie Butindo-Mbaalya

Eddie Butindo-Mbaalya

Eddie Butindo-Mbaalya teaches art history, theory, criticism, and education in the Department of Art and Industrial Design at Kyambogo University in Kampala, Uganda. With degrees in art history, art education, and fine arts, he is currently completing his PhD at Makerere University with a dissertation on contemporary public art in Uganda. Butindo-Mbaalya is especially interested in the complexity behind commemorative monuments and the debate about their role in constructing national collective memories.

As an artist, Butindo-Mbaalya is represented in the collection of the Weltkulturen Museum (World Cultures Museum) in Frankfurt, Germany. He has written about the art and architecture of recreational facilities in Uganda and also designed a logo for his country’s National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS) as a World Bank–funded project.

 

Josefina de la Maza Chevesich

Josefina de la Maza Chevesich

Josefina de la Maza Chevesich studied art history and theory at Universidad de Chile before receiving her PhD in art history and criticism from Stony Brook University (New York) in 2013. Her academic interests revolve around the development of Chilean and Latin American art of the long nineteenth century, the definition of pictorial genres, the emergence of fine-art academies and museums, and the impact of authoritarian regimes on art history.

De la Maza’s dissertation, “Contesting Nationalism: Mamarrachos, Slave-Pieces, and ‘Masterpieces’ in Chilean Nineteenth-Century Painting,” explores the development of Chilean painting in the 1880s. Using the notion of mamarracho (bad or passé art) her work explores the emergence of official and unofficial discourses organized around Chilean painting in the midst of the War of the Pacific (1879–83), the constitution of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, and the official actions developed to preserve and promote “national art” in Europe. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Art at Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Santiago, Chile.

Katerina Gadjeva

Katerina Gadjeva

Katerina Gadjeva received a PhD in art history from the National Academy of Arts in Sofia, Bulgaria. She studies the history and theory of photography, in particular, the concept of “visual propaganda” and the role of photography in Socialist ideology in the USSR and Bulgaria. In 2012, she published a monograph on the subject, entitled Between Desire and Reality: Photographic Illustrations in Bulgarian Periodicals 1948–1956.

Gadjeva is an assistant professor in the Institute of Art Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Science, Sofia, and a lecturer in the New Bulgarian University and St. Kliment Ohridski University, Sofia. She also works with young Bulgarian artists who are interested in alternative photographic processes.

 

 

Heba Nayel Barakat Hassanein

Heba Nayel Barakat Hassanein

Heba Nayel Barakat Hassanein is the head of the Curatorial Affairs Department at the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia (IAMM). A graduate of the American University in Cairo, she is a specialist in Islamic art and architecture. She holds an MA in the history of architecture from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, and a PhD from the Oriental Institute in Moscow, Russia. As project manager at the Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage in Cairo, Egypt, she researched and documented Cairo’s nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century presidential palaces.

Hassanein has also documented the early Islamic papyrus collection and the Persian illuminated manuscript collection at the Egyptian National Library in Dar el-Kotob, Egypt, and worked on the pigment analysis of early miniatures. Currently she is overseeing the refurbishment of IAMM’s permanent galleries, researching artifacts, and supervising exhibitions and accompanying catalogues for the museum’s special-exhibition galleries.

Lilianne Lugo Herrera

Lilianne Lugo Herrera

Lilianne Lugo Herrera holds a degree in theater arts with a specialization in playwriting from the Universidad de las Artes in Havana, Cuba. Since 2010 she has been a professor at that university and vice dean of research and postgraduate studies at its Faculty of Theater.

Herrera is also the editor of Tablas, a magazine of Cuban theater. Herrera researches the relationships between the history of art and the history of theater and their interrelationships in the contemporary practice of art and the performing arts. Three of her plays have been published, one of them in the United States, and she has won several awards in playwriting. Herrera is an active participant in festivals, conferences, and residencies both in Cuba and internationally.

Hugues Heumen Tchana

Hugues Heumen Tchana

Hugues Heumen Tchana is a junior lecturer in the Department of Fine Arts and Heritage Sciences at the Higher Institute of the Sahel, University of Maroua, Cameroon. He is currently completing his PhD in museology with a dissertation on “Museums in the Cultural Sphere of the Grassfields of Cameroon: History, Management, and Current Stake.” The Higher Institute of the Sahel opened in 2010.

Heumen Tchana teaches courses on cultural heritage and museum management and supervises student internships in a number of museums in Cameroon. In 2007, he was awarded the international competitive examination scholarship for a master’s degree (2007–9) from the University of Senghor in Alexandria, Egypt. In 2009, Heumen Tchana completed an MA in development specializing in the management of cultural heritage, also from the University of Senghor.

Kanwal Khalid

Kanwal Khalid

Kanwal Khalid holds a BFA and MFA in graphic design, an MPhil in art history, and a PhD in fine arts, all from Punjab University in Lahore, Pakistan. She specializes in the history of South Asian art and design, with a particular focus on miniature painting in nineteenth-century Lahore. A practicing miniaturist, she is currently an assistant professor at the Institute of Design and Visual Arts, Lahore College for Women University. Previously she was the curator of paintings at the Lahore Museum.

Khalid serves on the editorial board of the Trust for History, Art and Architecture of Pakistan (THAAP), a forum for publications and research journal. She is also a board member of several organizations, including the Rotary Club Lahore Mozang and the Delaware Lahore Delhi Partnership for Peace, a nonprofit NGO of private citizens in the United States, Pakistan, and India dedicated to the creation of mutual understanding and goodwill.

Mahmuda Khnam

Mahmuda Khnam

Mahmuda Khnam is an assistant professor in the Department of Islamic History and Culture, Jagannath University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. She has been teaching and researching Islamic art, especially that of the Indian subcontinent, for more than a decade. Before joining the newly established university in 2012, she taught at Eden College in Dhaka.

Having earned her MPhil with a dissertation on Mughal architecture in the Comilla region of Bangladesh, Khnam is currently completing her PhD, researching the development of painting in Bengal during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In addition to a monograph based on her MPhil thesis, Khnam has published a number of articles on Islamic art and the art of Bengal, mostly in her native language, Bangla.

 

Daria Kostina

Daria Kostina

Daria Kostina is an assistant professor in the Department of Art History and Cultural Studies at the Ural Federal University in Yekaterinburg, Russia. She is also a curator at the B.U.Kashkin Museum, an experimental exhibition space and collection of underground and alternative art, housed within the same department and university. In addition to Yekaterinburg, Kostina has curated exhibitions in Saint Petersburg and New York.

Kostina studies Russian émigré art of the 1920s and 1930s, in particular artists who lived in the Czech Republic, and regional Russian underground and alternative art from the 1960 to the 1980s. Her PhD dissertation (in progress) is devoted to the work of Grigory Musatov, a Russian artist who emigrated to Prague in 1920. She is also interested in urban studies and in 2012 organized interdisciplinary workshop for emerging scholars, Contemporary Art as a Humanization Instrument for Public Spaces (Yekaterinburg).

Portia Malatjie

Portia Malatjie

Portia Malatjie is a South African curator and art historian based in Grahamstown and Johannesburg. She completed an MA in the history of art at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2011, following a fine-art degree at the same institution in 2008. She has curated numerous exhibitions of contemporary art, including CityTales and CountryScapes at Museum Africa (2011), Transference at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (2012), and the 2012 MTN New Contemporaries Award, an exhibition held at the historic Castle of Goodhope’s B Block in Cape Town. She has published widely in the Mail & Guardian, Artthrob, and Third Text and in numerous exhibition catalogues.

In 2011, Malatjie participated in the 24 Hour Suburban Residency at the Sober and Lonely Institute for Contemporary Art, where she organized a one-day workshop for emerging curators. A lecturer at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, she is currently researching the subject of black feminism in the context of South African art history and contemporary curatorial practices in her country and in other parts of Africa.

Fernando Martínez Nespral

Fernando Martínez Nespral

Fernando Martínez Nespral was trained as an architect at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina and holds a PhD in history from Torcuato Di Tella University in Buenos Aires. He studies connections between the Islamic world and Hispanic American culture in the fields of architecture and art history. Approaching this subject from diverse starting points—a dictionary of Spanish words with Arabic origins, foreign accounts of domestic architecture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, transcultural use of Spanish tiles—he is currently working on Islamic mashrabiya (balconies closed with lattice) and their frequent use in Latin American countries, especially Peru.

Martínez Nespral teaches courses on the history of architecture and is also a main researcher at the American Art and Aesthetics Research Institute, both positions at the School of Architecture, Design and Urbanism at the University of Buenos Aires.

 

 

Susana S. Martins

Susana S. Martins

Susana S. Martins is currently an FCT-Portugal Research Fellow both at the Institute for Art History, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, and at the Institute for Cultural Studies, Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. Initially trained as an art historian in Lisbon, she was awarded a PhD in photography and cultural studies from the arts faculty of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, with the work “Portugal as Seen through Foreign Eyes: Photography and Visual Culture in the 1950s.

Martins studies the history and theory of photography, with a particular focus on travel books, tourism, exhibitions, cinema, visual arts, surveillance, national identities, and postcolonial studies. She is interested in the different roles photography has played in international and universal exhibitions since the nineteenth century and also studies contemporary art, film, and politics. Since 2008 Martins has served as an art-history professor in the fields of photography, visual arts, communication semiotics, Impressionism, and modernity.

Magdalena Anna Nowak

Magdalena Anna Nowak

Magdalena Anna Nowak is an assistant curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Museum in Warsaw. She received an MA from the Institute of Art History at the University of Warsaw in 2010, having spent the previous year at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris in the Department of Theories et Pratiques du Langage et des Arts. Her research then concentrated mainly on contemporary video art. In her current position she is in charge of the film and new-media collections at the museum and also curates temporary exhibitions.

Nowak is currently writing a PhD dissertation on repetition and reenactment of old-master paintings in video art. Her research concerns the interactions between old and contemporary art, the empathy theory, Aby Warburg’s legacy, the representation of emotions in art, and viewers’ reactions toward depicted passions and neuro art history. She is also interested in Polish art from the 1970s.

Freeborn Odiboh

Freeborn Odiboh

Freeborn Odiboh is a Nigerian artist, art historian, and critic. He holds a BFA in sculpture from the University of Benin, Benin City (1984), an MA in African visual arts history from the University of Ibadan (1987), and a PhD in art history from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (2004). He is an associate professor of art history and art criticism, Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Benin. Odiboh has received a number of international awards, including the Leventis postdoctoral fellowship at the University of London (2006) and a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies’ African Humanities Postdoctoral Program (2010–11).

In addition to publishing over twenty-seven articles in international and national journals, Odiboh published his first book, entitled Creative Reformation of Existing African tradition: The Abayomi Barber Art School and Modern Nigerian Art, in 2012. He is currently writing his second book, Africanizing a Modern African Art History Curriculum from Nigerian Experience. Odiboh’s art has been presented in several solo and group exhibitions in his country.

Adriana Oprea

Adriana Oprea

Adriana Oprea is a Romanian critic and art historian. She received her MA in art history at the National University of Arts in Bucharest with a study of feminism in recent Romanian art. She is currently pursuing a PhD, focusing on the discourse of art criticism and the status of the art critic during and after the Communist regime in Romania. Since 2006, Oprea has been a researcher and archivist at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest, where she organizes data regarding the activity of Romanian artists.

Oprea frequently collaborates with art spaces and writes essays for exhibition catalogues and reviews for Romanian magazines. She is associate editor for ARTA magazine, the main Romanian art publication during the Communist era and one of the few concerned with the present state of Romanian art. She sometimes curates exhibitions and on rare occasions poses as an artist. Oprea lives and works in Bucharest.

Ahmed Wahby

Ahmed Wahby

Ahmed Wahby is an Egyptian architect, art historian, and lover of Islamic art and architecture. Born in Nigeria, he grew up in the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates and moved to Cairo in the late 1980s. As a child, due to his many travels with his parents, he developed an interest in different cultures. While pursuing an MA in Islamic art from the American University in Cairo, he traveled to eastern China to explore historical Chinese mosques.

Wahby further developed his understanding of Islamic art, architecture, and culture by completing a PhD in the Oriental Department of the Otto-Friedrich University, School of Human Sciences, Art and Culture, in Bamberg, Germany. His dissertation research investigated the influences of Arab merchants on the shrines and mosques of the Indonesian island of Java in the fifteen and sixteenth centuries. Wahby is currently an assistant professor of design theory in the Faculty of Applied Sciences and Arts at the German University in Cairo.

Support

Major support for CAA’s International Travel Grant Program has been provided by: Getty Foundation

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November 2013 Picks from CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts

posted by Christopher Howard — Nov 21, 2013

Each month CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts produces a curated list, called CWA Picks, of recommended exhibitions and events related to feminist art and scholarship in North America and around the world.

The CWA Picks for November 2013 include solo exhibitions of work by Sarah Lucas, Ana Mendieta, and Dayanita Singh in London; Anita Steckel, Dorothea Rockburne, Mary Beth Edelson, and Wangechi Mutu in New York; and Amy Sillman and Sophie Calle in Boston. In addition, the committee selected Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz’s show Patriarchal Poetry in Germany and Dear Art, the first appearance in the United Kingdom for the curatorial collective What, How & for Whom.

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.

Image Caption

Wangechi Mutu, Riding Death in My Sleep, 2002, ink and collage on paper, 60 x 44 in. Collection of Peter Norton, New York (artwork © Wangechi Mutu).

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