CAA News Today
Grants, Awards, and Honors
posted by CAA — Oct 15, 2011
CAA recognizes its members for their professional achievements, be it a grant, fellowship, residency, book prize, honorary degree, or related award.
Grants, Awards, and Honors is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
October 2011
Michael Beitz, an artist based in Attica, New York, has received a 2011 fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in the crafts and sculpture category.
Sinclair BellSinclair Bell, assistant professor of art history in the School of Art at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, has been awarded a research fellowship from the German Archaeological Institute (Deutsches Archäologisches Institut) and the Archaeological Institute of America. He will conduct research in Berlin this fall.
Rachel Federman of New York University has received a $1,500 library research grant from the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles.
Seth Alexander Feman of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, has earned a $1,500 library research grant from the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles.
Aglaya Glebova of the University of California, Berkeley, has won the Dedalus Foundation’s 2011 Dissertation Fellowship Award, given annually to a PhD candidate at an American university who is working on a dissertation related to modern art and modernism. The $20,000 award will help support Glebova’s work on her dissertation, “Wilderness and Construction: Three Case Studies of Russian Landscape Representation,” which investigates representations of Russia’s Northern wilderness from the mid-nineteenth century to present.
Wendy Ann Grossman of the University of Maryland in University Park has received a $1,500 library research grant from the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles.
Sonali Gulati, a faculty member teaching photography and film in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, has been awarded the Mary Lyon Award from her alma mater, Mount Holyoke College. The award honors a young alumna (no more than fifteen years after graduation) who demonstrates promise or sustained achievement in her life, profession, or community.
Matthew Jesse Jackson has won the Dedalus Foundation’s tenth annual Robert Motherwell Book Award for his The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). The award, which carries a $20,000 prize, honors an outstanding publication in the history and criticism of modernism in the arts. The Experimental Group documents the life and work of the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov and, through him, the milieu of the Moscow Conceptualists: the “unofficial artists” who worked without state sanction in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union.
Sue Johnson, Birds without Feathers, 2010, watercolor and pencil on paper, 30 x 22 in. (artwork © Sue Johnson)Sue Johnson, professor of art at Saint Mary’s College of Maryland in Saint Mary’s City, has been awarded a residency at the Centre d’Art Marnay Art Centre in Marnay-sur-Seine, France. Her residency also includes a grant from the Tenot Fondation. In addition, Johnson was selected as a visiting artist by the American Academy in Rome for June 2011. In 2010–11 she has been a visiting scholar in residence at the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Oxford, England.
Holger A. Klein, associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in New York, has been honored with the fiftieth annual Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching, which honors a Columbia professor for commitment to undergraduate instruction and for humanity, devotion to truth, and inspiring leadership. The recipient of the award is selected by the student members of the Academic Awards Subcommittee of the Columbia College Student Council, with administrative support and guidance from the Academic Affairs staff of the college.
JC Lenochan, an artist based in Orange, New Jersey, has received a $6,000 grant from the 2011–12 Franklin Furnace Fund for Decolonizing the Mind, an installation and performance with public interaction that addresses how pedagogy relates to issues of sex, race, and class stratification. For the gallery-based work, Lenochan will hang chalkboards with text and images opposite blank chalkboards for the public’s response. Simultaneously, four high school students will pile of old school desks in the middle of the space and also play sound and audio from Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s book, Decolonizing the Mind.
Margaret Lindauer, an art historian at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, has been recently honored twice, receiving a VCUarts Faculty Achievement Award for 2010–11 and a VCUarts Faculty Award for Distinguished Achievement in Teaching.
Christina Lindholm, associate dean of undergraduate studies in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, has earned a 2011 Spirit of Martha Award, which recognizes University of Missouri women who have distinguished themselves in their chosen profession and exemplify the spirit of leadership, particularly in the furtherance of women.
China Marks, an artist based in Long Island City, New York, has been named a Gregory Millard Fellow by the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has also received a 2011 grant in the category for printmaking, drawing, and book arts.
Saloni Mathur, associate professor in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, has received a $44,000 residential grant from the Getty Foundation. As a Getty Scholar, she will work on “Divided Objects: Indian Partition and the Politics of Display.”
Jennifer Ann McComas of Indiana University in Bloomington has accepted a $1,500 library research grant from the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles.
Kristine Nielsen of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has received a $661 library research grant from the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles.
Kristina Berrill Paulsen of Ohio State University in Columbus has received a $1,000 library research grant from the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles.
Scott William Perkins of the Bard Graduate Center in New York has received a $1,500 library research grant from the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles.
Corey Piper, curatorial assistant for the Mellon Collections at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, has received a 2011–12 John H. Daniels Fellowship from the National Sporting Library and Museum. She will work on “The Cast and Characters of the British Sporting Ring,” a scholarly essay for the catalogue of an upcoming exhibition, Catching Sight: The World of the British Sporting Print, at her museum.
Anne J. Regan, an artist who earned her MFA last year at the University of Houston in Texas, has become a resident artist at the Lawndale at Center in Houston. The residency comes with nine months of studio space, $1,500 for materials, and a $500 per month stipend; it will also culminate in an exhibition with two other resident artists in May 2012.
Barbara Smith, an artist based in Rosendale, New York, has received a 2011 fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in the crafts and sculpture category.
Jaune Quick-to-See SmithJaune Quick-to-See Smith, a highly acclaimed American Indian artist based in New Mexico, has been honored with a 2011 Visionary Woman Award by Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for her outstanding contributions to the arts. Elaborating on her heritage and worldview, Smith’s richly layered juxtapositions of text and image in large-scale prints and canvases address today’s tribal politics, human rights, and environmental issues with a sophisticated combination of humor and wit.
Juana Valdes, an artist based in New York, has received a 2011 fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in the crafts and sculpture category.
James Alan Van Dyke of the University of Missouri in Columbia has accepted a $1,500 library research grant from the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles.
P. Gregory WardenP. Gregory Warden, University Distinguished Professor of Art History and associate dean for academic affairs in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, has received a $200,000 grant from National Endowment for the Humanities to work with the Community College Humanities Organization on a 2012 NEH Summer Institute, called “The Legacy of Ancient Italy: The Etruscan and Early Roman City.” As project director, Warden will lead a group of community college teachers in Italy in June of next year.
Corina Alexandra Weidinger of the University of Delaware in Newark has earned a $1,500 library research grant from the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles.
Deborah Wing-Sproul, an interdisciplinary artist and a faculty member at Maine College of Art in Portland, has been named a Maine Arts Commission Media and Performing Arts Fellow for 2011. The recognition comes with a $13,000 grant award.
Brian Scott Winkenweder of Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, has received a $1,000 library research grant from the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles.
Sandy Winters, an artist based in New York, has received a 2011 fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in the printmaking, drawing, and book arts category.
Reva Wolf, professor of art history at the State University of New York at New Paltz, has received a 2010–11 State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, which recognizes consistently superior teaching and sound scholarship.
Karla Wozniak, an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, has received a 2011 fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in the category for printmaking, drawing, and book arts.
New Directories of Graduate Programs Coming
posted by Betty Leigh Hutcheson — Sep 29, 2011
The information on this page has been updated. Please visit the main directories page for the most up-to-date information.
This fall CAA will publish new editions of Graduate Programs in Art History and Graduate Programs in the Visual Arts. As comprehensive resources of schools across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, the guides list over 650 programs in fine art and design, art and architectural history, curatorial studies, arts administration, and more.
Prospective graduate students will find everything they need to know before beginning the application process. The directories are also key professional references for career-services representatives, department chairs, graduate and undergraduate advisors, librarians, professional-practices educators, and professors interested in helping emerging generations of artists and scholars find success.
Graduate Programs in Art History covers four disciplines: Art History, Curatorial and Museum Studies, Arts Administration, and Library Science. This directory integrates programs in visual studies and architectural history into Art History. Similarly, Graduate Programs in the Visual Arts comprises four areas: Studio Art and Design, Art Education, Film Production, and Conservation and Historic Preservation. Studio Art and Design combines programs in fine art with those in graphic, industrial, and object design.
Organized alphabetically by school name within each discipline noted above, entries describe curricula, class size, faculty specializations, admission and degree requirements, library and studio facilities, opportunities for fellowships and assistantships, and more. Readers can draw important conclusions from these facts, such as the competitiveness of a program based on the amount of applications received and accepted. Need health insurance or housing while in school? Many programs provide details about what they offer.
The directories are available in multiple print and digital formats, as books, ebooks, and downloadable PDFs. The complete volumes of each directory are only available in print.
The complete Graduate Programs in Art History and Graduate Programs in the Visual Arts cost $41 each for CAA members and $51 for nonmembers, plus shipping and handling.
You can also order all entries within five of the eight disciplines as discrete perfect-bound, soft-cover books. The prices below do not include shipping and handling:
Art History: $22
Art Education: $18
Curatorial and Museums Studies: $16
Film Production: $15
The three remaining disciplines—Arts Administration, Library Science, and Conservation and Historic Preservation—are available only as ebooks and cannot be ordered as discipline-specific books.
Individuals can order both directories and the discipline-specific books through the CAA website (link forthcoming). If you are ordering for a school, institution, or department within a college or university, please download the PDF form (forthcoming) and return the completed version with payment to Roberta Lawson, CAA office coordinator, who will ship the directories to you within two business days of your purchase.
Ebooks
All entries within a particular discipline may be ordered as single ebooks. After placing your order on the CAA website, you will receive an email with a link(s) to the ebook(s). Each ebook can be downloaded a limited number of times and will be compatible with your personal computer and most smart phones and ereaders (excluding Kindles).
You can also order all entries within five of the eight disciplines as ebooks:
Art History: $22
Art Education: $18
Curatorial and Museums Studies: $16
Film Production: $15
Studio Art and Design: $26
Ebooks of all entries in Arts Administration, Library Science, and Conservation and Historic Preservation are priced as follows:
Arts Administration: $14
Conservation and Historic Preservation: $14
Library Science: $12
Ebooks can only be ordered through the CAA website (link forthcoming).
Sets of Entries
Individuals can search the directories by discipline, faculty specialization, country, region, state, degree type, and availability of health insurance via the CAA website and download PDFs of entries from either or both directories for $2 per entry (up to twenty entries). Upon ordering the entries, you will receive an email with a link to a single PDF containing the entries you have selected.
Contact
Questions about ordering? Please contact Roberta Lawson, CAA office coordinator, at 212-392-4404.
2012 Distinguished Scholar Session Honors Rosalind Krauss
posted by Christopher Howard — Aug 23, 2011
The 2012 Distinguished Scholar Session, taking place at the 100th Annual Conference in Los Angeles, will honor Rosalind Krauss, University Professor at Columbia University in New York. Yve-Alain Bois of the Institute for Advanced Studies will chair a session, called “The Theoretical Turn,” in which five to six participants—among them Harry Cooper, Jonathan Crary, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and Hal Foster—will explore and celebrate Krauss’s many contributions to the history of art. The Distinguished Scholar Session will be held in Room 515B at the Los Angeles Convention Center on Thursday, February 23, 2:30–5:00 PM.
Krauss’s acute observation of twentieth-century art began at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she received her undergraduate degree in 1962. She began writing criticism in 1966, mostly for Artforum, while working on her PhD at Harvard University, which she earned in 1969. MIT Press published an expanded version of her dissertation as Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith in 1971.1
Krauss continued writing criticism and generating art-historical essays that challenged steadfast analyses of Auguste Rodin, the Surrealists, and Jackson Pollock, to name a few topics. She joined the Artforum editorial board in the late 1960s and appeared on the masthead as assistant editor from 1971 to 1974. Krauss and her colleague Annette Michelson left the magazine in 1975 to establish the scholarly October, which strove to forge a relationship between contemporary concerns and scholarship, with particular emphases on the history of modernism, its fundamental premises, and the ability of writing to reinvigorate the era. For Krauss and others, October was an opportunity to integrate artists such as Richard Serra and Sol LeWitt into their theoretical convictions and investigative criticism.
Krauss collected her essays into several influential books, including Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977), The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985), and Bachelors (1999). She has also written monographs on David Smith and Cindy Sherman, among others, as well as shorter books such as The Optical Unconscious (1993) and A Voyage on the North Sea (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000). Her curatorial work—which includes Joan Miro: Magnetic Fields (1971) and Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem (1994) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Richard Serra/Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in 1986—has resulted in significant advances in art history while relaying her amorous relationship with the provocations of Minimalism and the tactility of sculptural mediums. Most recently, she organized L’Informe: Mode d’emploi with Bois at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1996.
For the last decade, Krauss has battled what she calls the “post-medium condition”—the claim that a momentous shift from a singular artistic medium (such as canvas, plaster wall, or metal armature) to work that amalgamates various materials has only advanced ambiguity in art. In contrast, she suggests that the specificity of the aesthetic medium vitalizes modernism’s strengths, and that contemporary work that integrates text and technology has the capacity to triumph in similar terms. Perpetual Inventory (2011) is Krauss’s most recent publication intent on restoring logic and scrutinizing specificity in the history of art. A personal meditation on the relationships between aesthetics and memory, called Under Blue Cup, is forthcoming.
The integration of literary and philosophical references in her writing, combined with an enthusiasm for ravaging stagnant theories, has made Krauss a tenacious teacher and mentor. She joined Hunter College in New York in 1974, rising to Distinguished Professor both there and at the Graduate Center. In 1995 she transitioned to the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia, where she became Meyer Shapiro Professor of Modern Art and History and then, ten years later, University Professor. Krauss’s experiences as a scholar and educator culminated in the textbook Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004), a didactic yet vital interpretation of modern art that was coauthored by Bois, Buchloh, and Foster. (A revised edition is expected soon.) As a further testament to her academic success, Krauss was an honorary degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2008 and another from Harvard University in 2011.
CAA inaugurated its Distinguished Scholar Session in 2001, first honoring James S. Ackerman of Harvard University. Since then, the organization has recognized the most illustrious writers, teachers, and curators, including Leo Steinberg (2002), John Szarkowski (2006), Linda Nochlin (2007), Svetlana Alpers (2009), and Jonathan Brown (2011).
1. MIT Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has published Krauss’s books mentioned in this article, unless indicated otherwise.
Institutional News
posted by CAA — Aug 17, 2011
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.
August 2011
The American Academy in Rome has upgraded their website to include images of the community at a higher resolution and dedicated sections for News, Events, Publications, and Society of Fellows. The site is compatible with mobile devices and will soon offer the content in Italian.
South view of the Michigan Avenue façade of the Art Institute of Chicago (photograph provided by the Art Institute of Chicago)The Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois has received a $40,000 Access to Artistic Excellence grant from the National Endowment for the Arts on behalf of School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The reward will go toward the Teacher Institute of Contemporary Art, a professional-development program that will facilitate workshops and lectures on new media and visual arts for 120 high school teachers across the United States.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Lucie Berard (Child in White), 1883, oil on canvas, 24¼ x 19¾ in. Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection, 1933.1172 (artwork in the public domain)The Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois has also been awarded $400,000 from the Getty Foundation to help the Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative produce an online publication of forty-nine paintings and twenty-three drawings by Claude Monet and Pierre-August Renoir. The catalogue will be fully interactive and include features such as contemporary research, pigment analysis, access to underdrawings or infrared filters, a glossary of technical terms, and “sticky notes” for a user’s own observations.
The Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland has been granted an $80,000 award from the National Endowment for the Arts through the Access to Artistic Excellence program to aid the reinstallation of the West Wing for Contemporary Art, a collection that extends from Abstract Expressionism to the present. New lighting and technology systems will allow the museum to display light-sensitive objects and new media.
Julian Alden Weir, Portrait of John F. Weir, 1890, drypoint, 7 x 6 in. Brigham Young University Museum of Art (artwork in the public domain)Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, has received a $60,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts’ Access to Artistic Excellence program to support the touring exhibition, The Weir Family, 1820–1920: Expanding the Traditions of American Art, which originated at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art.The funds will facilitate an accompanying catalogue and educational programs to investigate the contributions of John Weir and his two sons, Julian Alden Weir and John Ferguson Weir.
Frederic S. Remington, A Dash for the Timber, 1889, oil on canvas, 48¼ by 84⅛ in. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas. 1961.381 (artwork in the public domain)The Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, has received a $75,000 Picturing America School Collaboration Project Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the second year in a row. The grant will predominantly fund the 2011 Picturing America Teaching Institute, in which Texan educators in public, private, and home-schooling environments to learn about American art and its relevance to the classroom. The program also provides classroom resources, online curricula, student fieldt rips, and interactive video conferences.
The Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, has been awarded a $45,000 grant by the National Endowment for the Arts through the Access to Artistic Excellence program. The museum will publish a catalogue on its permanent collection of glass, logging each item and providing previously unpublished scholarly analyses.
The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has received two 2011 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the category of fine arts: Picasso Looks at Degas by Elizabeth Cowling and Richard Kendell won a silver medal, and Eye to Eye: European Portraits 1450–1850 by Richard Rand and Kathleen M. Morris earned a bronze. The awards recognize original content, design, and production among independent, self-published, and university-press publications, as well as their impact on the community.
Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, has received $60,000 from the Access to Artistic Excellence program hosted by the National Endowment for the Arts. The fund will aid the reinstallation of the European and American works in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art’s collection, with an emphasis on flexibility and variety and a reinvigorated engagement with the public.
Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits, 1849, oil on canvas, 44 x 36 in. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas (artwork in the public domain)The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, scheduled to open in Bentonville, Arkansas, in November 2011, has received an $800 million contribution on behalf of the Walton Family Foundation. The funds are allocated for operating needs, general endowment, and future capital needs.
The Dallas Museum of Art in Texas has been awarded an $85,000 grant by the National Endowment for the Arts’ Access to Artistic Excellence program to create the Archival Exhibition Resources Online interface, which will enable the public to access digital content created for and during an exhibition, including images, video, audio, and other documents.
The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles has acquired Harald Szeemann’s extensive archive including correspondence with artists, proposals and brainstorms for exhibitions, documentary photographs of exhibitions, and other rare ephemera from his vibrant, international career as a curator. The Getty also attained Szeemann’s library, containing 28,000 volumes of monographs, artists’ books, and limited-edition publications.
The International Center of Photography in New York has been granted $100,000 through the Access the Artistic Excellence program of the National Endowment for the Arts to organize Roman Vishniac’s collection of more than 20,000 items from the early twentieth century. The collection encompasses many iconic photographs of Jewish life in Europe between the World Wars.
The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri, has received approximately $33,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to conduct a survey of 435 sculptural objects, ranging from antiques to contemporary work, and determine long-term plans for care and treatment. This conservation effort will support research and educational advancement; it will also increase access to the museum’s sculpture by facilitating public display and loans to institutions.
The John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, has been awarded $75,000 by the National Endowment for the Arts’ Access to Artistic Excellence program to support an artist-in-residence program. In collaboration with the Plymouth School District, the Kohler will support eight visual artists during the 2011–12 school year for two weeks at a time.
Students from Maryland Institute College of Art teach art to Baltimore-area children in a recent festival in the Community Arts Partnerships program (photograph provided by Maryland Institute College of Art)Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore has been honored by the Corporation for National and Community Service for programs that allow their students and staff members to participate in volunteer efforts and generous civic engagement. The school has thus been admitted to the 2010 President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll.
The New York State Historical Association has received $16,000 from the Access to Artistic Excellence program funded by the National Endowment for the Arts to support the conservation of seventy-three folk, Native American, and academic works of art housed in the Fenimore Art Museum. The award will animate the institution’s conservation priorities and treatment recommendations and facilitate a storage plan.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania has received a $250,000 exhibition grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage to fund a midcareer retrospective of Zoe Strauss, a photographer and native Philadelphian who highlights blue-collar experiences and marginalized people and places. The show—comprising more than 125 prints placed between the photography galleries and the lobby—will also host an interactive kiosk designed by publishing and curatorial collective Megawords, a slide show of Strauss’s work projected on the museum’s façade, and select photographs appearing on billboards throughout the city.
Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey,has been awarded $65,000 through the Access to Artistic Excellence program on behalf of the National Endowment for the Arts to support public programs related to Momentum: Women/Art/Technology. This exhibition, organized by Rutgers’ Institute for Women and Art with the Mason Gross School of the Arts, will be accompanied by lectures and symposia, educational workshops, interactive web activities, and a film and video festival highlighting the work of established and contemporary female artists who manipulate technology.
The San Diego Museum of Art in California has received a $60,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts’ Access to Artistic Excellence program to reinstall their permanent collection of East Asian art. Approximately four hundred works from Japan, Korea, and China from 1000 BCE to the present will be on display.
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois has accepted a $5 million donation from Leroy Neiman, an artist and alumni, to build the Leroy Neiman Center, a two-story student hub opening in spring 2012. The architecture firm Valerio Dewalt Train Associates will fabricate the interior design of the space, which will house a café, lounge, art gallery, and more.
The University of Maryland in College Park has been honored with a $60,000 grant from the Access to Artistic Excellence program, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts to support the conservation of the permanent collection at the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora. The award will facilitate the documentation of roughly 1,000 works, the addition of a full-time registrar, and further development of the collection’s management policies and procedures.
The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has received a $25,000 grant via the National Endowment for the Arts’ Access to Artistic Excellence program to publish a catalogue documenting the Ackland Museum of Art’s collection of Mediterranean art. The publication will cite 225 objects in the collection hailing from Egyptian, Grecian, Etruscan, and Roman origins between the third and first millennia.
The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York has announced an eight-year collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art to begin in 2015 at the Whitney’s landmark building, designed by Marcel Breuer. The Metropolitan will generate exhibitions and educational programming at the Breuer building with a global emphasis while supporting dialogue between the two distinct collections, publications, and educational initiatives. The Whitney will maintain a small space in the building for storage and permanent site-specific works.
The Yale Center for British Arts in New Haven, Connecticut, has launched a new online catalogue of their extensive collection and is offering free high-resolution images of all objects in the public domain. An exhibition, called Connections, will be on display through September 11, 2011, to emphasize the value of the vivacious holdings.
The Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, has been awarded $125,000 by the Access to Artistic Excellence grant program, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, to support the renovation of its ancient Mediterranean collection. The grant will initiate the construction of a new gallery to house the treasures from the university’s excavations in Dura-Europos in the 1930s and refurbish the existing exhibition space with another 13,000 objects from Egypt, Etruria, Greece, the Near East, and Rome.
Propose a Session for the 2013 Annual Conference in New York
posted by Lauren Stark — Jun 07, 2011
CAA invites individual members to propose a session for the 101st Annual Conference, taking place February 13–16, 2013, in New York. Proposals should cover the breadth of current thought and research in visual art, art and architectural history, theory and criticism, pedagogical issues, museum and curatorial practice, conservation, and developments in technology.
The submission process will open on Monday, June 27, 2011. For full details on the submission process for the conference, please review the information published on the Chair a 2013 Annual Conference Session webpage.
The Annual Conference Committee welcomes session proposals from established artists and scholars, along with those from younger scholars, emerging and midcareer artists, and graduate students. Particularly welcome are proposals that highlight interdisciplinary work. Artists are especially encouraged to propose sessions appropriate to dialogue and information exchange relevant to artists.
You will complete and submit your session proposal online; paper forms and postal mailings are not required. To set up an account in CAA’s content-management system, please email Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs, who will register your email address and provide you with a password. Deadline: September 1, 2011; no late applications are accepted.
NEA Awards $25,000 Grant to CAA for ARTspace
posted by Nia Page — May 23, 2011
CAA has received a $25,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to support the next ARTspace, taking place during the 100th Annual Conference and Centennial Celebration in Los Angeles, February 22–25, 2012.
Designed to engage CAA’s artist members and the general public, ARTspace offers program sessions free of charge and includes diverse activities such the Annual Artists’ Interviews, screenings of film, video, and multimedia, performances, and presentations that facilitate a conversational yet professional exchange of ideas and practices. Held at each conference since 2001, ARTspace is intended to reflect the current state of the visual arts and arts education.
The grant, which is the NEA’s third consecutive award to CAA for ARTspace programming, will help fund, among other things, ARTexchange, a popular open-portfolio event for artists, as well as [Meta] Mentors programming, which has covered topics such as do-it-yourself curatorial and exhibition practices, international networks for artists, and assistance with grants, taxes, and promotion.
Image: ARTexchange participants at the 2011 Annual Conference in New York (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Affiliated Society News for May 2011
posted by CAA — May 09, 2011
American Society of Hispanic Art Historical Studies
Janice Mann’s Romanesque Architecture and Its Sculptural Decoration in Christian Spain, 1000–1120 won the 2011 Eleanor Tufts Award
The American Society of Hispanic Art Historical Studies (ASHAHS) has announced the recipients of two annual awards, with one honorable mention, at a business meeting held during the CAA Annual Conference in February 2011. The Eleanor Tufts Award, which recognizes an outstanding English-language publication in Spanish or Portuguese art history, went to Janice Mann for Romanesque Architecture and Its Sculptural Decoration in Christian Spain, 1000–1120: Exploring Frontiers and Defining Identities (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). In addition, the jurors selected Giles Knox’s The Late Paintings of Velázquez: Theorizing Painterly Performance (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009) as an honorable mention. The winner of the ASHAHS Photographs Grant is Kelly Watt of the University of Louisville, who is conducting research for her dissertation, “Medieval Churches on the Spanish Frontier: How Elite Emulation in Architecture Contributed to the Transformation of a Territorial Expansion into Reconquista.”
Art Libraries Society of North America
The Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) has awarded its 2010 George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award to Five Centuries of Indonesian Textiles: The Mary Hunt Kahlenberg Collection (New York: DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2010). Edited by Ruth Barnes and Mary Hunt Kahlenberg, this large, beautifully produced catalogue includes stunning, detailed photographs of many rare and unique textiles and essays by expert art historians and anthropologists that seamlessly connect the history and cultural significance of these aesthetically beautiful weavings for the reader. Aimée Brown Price’s Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) received the honorable mention. Her exceptional two-volume set includes a scholarly monograph on the artist and a catalogue raisonné of his painted works. ARLIS/NA presented the two awards at a joint conference with the Visual Resources Association, another CAA affiliated society, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on March 25, 2011.
Association for Latin American Art
The Association for Latin American Art (ALAA) announces the election results for its executive committee: Margaret A. Jackson of the University of New Mexico holds the office of president; Elisa Mandell of California State University, Fullerton, is the new vice president; and Paul Niell of the University of North Texas becomes secretary-treasurer. As advocates for all areas and periods of Latin American art, committee members hold office for a three-year term (2011–13).
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries
The Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) will hold its next annual conference, “Who’s Muse? Challenges to the Curatorial Profession in Academic Museums,” on May 21, 2011, at the University of Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum in Texas. Curatorial practices in academic museums and galleries are sometimes highly experimental. Faculty members from a wide variety of fields and with limited curatorial experience periodically recommend and help lead exhibition projects. The organization of exhibitions likewise engages both graduate and undergraduate students, museum-education professionals, librarians, and even area school classes in project leadership roles. Exhibitions thus generated offer unorthodox approaches to curatorial planning and execution. Appropriate to a scholarly mission, they can stretch disciplinary boundaries, cross-fertilize disciplinary methodologies, and generate wholly new paradigms for knowledge. Academic museums and galleries thus become vital centers of original research, interdisciplinary dialogue, and participatory learning. While this democratic and laboratory approach to curatorial practice contributes in significant ways to the groundbreaking research and all-important teaching missions of universities and colleges, it can also challenge conventional standards of the curatorial profession. Through the presentation of outstanding case studies and lively roundtable discussions, the 2011 conference will explore the pros and cons of the broad curatorial approaches found in academic museums and galleries.
Association of Art Historians
Art History, the flagship journal of the Association of Art Historians (AAH), has just published a special issue on “Creative Writing and Art History.” Guest edited by Patricia Rubin of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and Catherine Grant of the Courtauld Institute of Art and Goldsmiths, University of London), this collection of articles and projects considers the ways in which the writing of art history intersects with creative writing, from the creative writing of art history to dialogues between modes of creative and art-historical writing. Essays range from the analysis of historical examples of scholarship that have a creative element to presentations of contemporary modes of creative writing about art.
Association of Historians of American Art
The Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA) has announced the names of new board members: Peter John (P. J.) Brownlee of the Terra Foundation of American Art is chair (2011–12); Jenny Carson of Maryland Institute College of Art is cochair (2011–12); Elizabeth Kuebler-Wolf of the University of Saint Francis is web coordinator (2011–14); and Melissa Renn of the Harvard University Art Museums is membership coordinator (2011–14).
AHAA has named the winner of the $500 AHAA Travel Grant: Maggie Cao, a graduate student at Harvard University and a predoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She delivered a paper, “Invisible Color: Abbott Handerson Thayer and Camouflage,” in the AHAA-sponsored scholarly session, “Color and Nineteenth-Century American Painting,” at the recent CAA Annual Conference in New York.
Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art
Édouard Manet, Summer or the Amazon, ca. 1882, oil on canvas, 73 x 52 cm. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (artwork in the public domain)
The Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) held its eighth annual graduate-student symposium in nineteenth-century art at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, on March 4, 2011. Speakers included ten doctoral candidates from the United States, France, Spain, and Switzerland. AHNCA will also hold a special event for its members this summer in conjunction with the current exhibition, Manet, the Man Who Invented Modernity, at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
Association of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey
Created in honor of a dear friend and colleague, Rhonda A. Saad (1979–2010) and sponsored by donations from numerous generous individuals, the Association of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) has established the Rhonda A. Saad Prize for Best Graduate Paper in Modern Arab Art. The award, which aims to recognize and promote excellence in scholarship on modern and contemporary art, is offered annually to a graduate student (defined as predissertation) working in any discipline whose paper is judged to provide the most significant contribution to Middle Eastern studies and art history. Papers will be evaluated according to the originality of research and methodological approach, cogency of argument, and clarity of writing. The submission must be written in English by a single author. AMCA will award $500 to the winner at the Middle East Studies Association annual meeting in December 2011. The paper must have been produced between June 2010 and June 2011; must not exceed thirty-five pages, excluding notes and bibliography; and must not be or have ever been submitted for publication. Applicants should send their entry for the inaugural prize to info@amcainternational.org by June 30, 2011.
Historians of British Art
Marcia Pointon won an HBA prize for post-1800, single-author book for Brilliant Effects: A Cultural History of Gem Stones and Jewellery
The Historians of British Art (HBA) recently announced the winners of its 2011 Book Prizes for publications on British art. Kevin Sharpe received the award for pre-1800, single-author book for Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Marcia Pointon won the prize for post-1800, single-author book for Brilliant Effects: A Cultural History of Gem Stones and Jewellery (New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2010); and Elizabeth Prettejohn, Peter Trippi, Robert Upstone, and Patty Wageman received the multiauthor publication honor for J. W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2009).
The HBA awarded its Publication Grant to Leon Wainwright for Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean, forthcoming from Manchester University Press in 2011. Lyrica Taylor received the HBA Travel Grant to present a paper, “Winifred Knights and Interwar Artists at the British School at Rome, 1920–1925,” at the Association of Art Historians’s 2011 conference, held at the University of Warwick, March 31–April 2, 2011.
Historians of Islamic Art Association
At its 2011 annual business meeting, the Historians of Islamic Art Association (HIAA) recognized the visionary leadership of Renata Holod as president (2008–10) and welcomed Shreve Simpson as her successor (2010–12). Members chose Sheila Canby as president-elect (to follow Simpson), and Lara Tohme became the new webmaster. HIAA also decided to separate the secretary-treasurer position, currently held by Glaire Anderson. Anderson will continue serving as treasurer, and Ladan Akbarnia will be acting secretary for 2011.
HIAA also announced the winner of its 2011 Margaret B. Sevcenko Prize in Islamic Art and Culture for the best unpublished article written by a young scholar: Silvia Armando of the Università della Tuscia in Viterbo, Italy, for her paper on “Ugo Monneret de Villard (1881–1954) and the Establishment of Islamic Art Studies in Italy.” The organization then described several new initiatives, including the establishment of the Oleg Grabar Memorial Fund and the Richard Ettinghausen Achievement Award. The venue and dates for the third biennial symposium were given: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, October 18–20, 2012. Finally, HIAA announced plans to organize a memorial service for Grabar with the Aga Khan Program in Islamic Architecture, which took place at Harvard University on April 23, 2011, at 2:00 PM.
International Center of Medieval Art
At its annual meeting for 2011, the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA) announced the election of new officers and a new group of directors, all to serve three-year terms. Lawrence Nees is president, Nancy Sevcenko became vice president, and Gerry Guest is secretary. Rebecca Corrie continues as treasurer. The new directors elected by the membership are Eva Hoffman, Melanie Holcomb, Charles McClendon, Elizabeth Morrison, Kirsten Noreen, Elizabeth Teviotdale, Benjamin Withers.
At the CAA Annual Conference, ICMA sponsored a well-attended and stimulating interdisciplinary session, “Medicine and Science in Medieval Visual Culture.” Organized and chaired by Jennifer Borland, the panel features papers from Megan McNamee, Kathleen Crowther, Jean Givens, Talia Avisar, and Jack Hartnell. ICMA thanks the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for a generous grant that underwrote some of the travel costs for speakers.
ICMA seeks proposals for the 2011–12 Harvey Stahl Lectureship. Named in memory of a longtime professor of medieval art at the University of California, Berkeley, the fund supports talks by distinguished scholars in any field of medieval art history, to be held at one or more locations. The precise number of venues depends on the availability of funds and the readiness of local host institutions to provide hospitality. While lectures may take place anywhere in North America, proposals that involve a venue in the Southwest (particularly New Mexico) are given priority, with the goal of having at least one event in that region every three years. Due to the current financial climate, ICMA cannot fund speakers who must travel from outside North America. Applications for the 2011–12 Stahl Lectureship should consist of a completed application form (available on the ICMA website) and CV(s) of the host(s). Please direct all lectureship proposals and inquiries to: Kirk Ambrose, Department of Art and Art History, 318 UCB, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0318. Deadline: May 15, 2011.
Italian Art Society
The Italian Art Society (IAS) has elected its new officers for 2011–13 terms: Kirstin Noreen of Loyola Marymount University is president, and Cathleen Fleck of Saint Louis University is vice president. The society also welcomes new committee members: Niall Atkinson, Jennie Hirsh, Martina Bagnoli, Sara Kozlowski, Catherine Hess, and Ian Verstegen. David Boffa, Rebekah Perry, Gilbert Jones, and Lisa Tom are members of a newly formed Graduate Student Committee. Jasmine Cloud of Temple University and Rebekah Perry of the University of Pittsburgh received 2011 Graduate Student Travel Grants to give papers, respectively, at the Renaissance Society of America’s annual meeting in Montreal, Quebec, and the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
IAS has selected Alison Luchs, curator of early European sculpture at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, to present the 2011 Italian Art Society–Kress Foundation Lecture. Her talk, entitled “The Wake of Desiderio: His Impact on Sculpture of the Late Quattrocento,” will take place at the historic Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence at 4:00 PM on June 8, 2011.
Japanese Art History Forum
The new officers of the Japanese Art History Forum (JAHF) are: John Carpenter, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, president; Monika Dix, Saginaw Valley State University, vice president; John Szostak, University of Hawai‘i, Manoa, treasurer; Alicia Volk, University of Maryland, College Park, secretary; and Asato Ikeda, University of British Columbia, graduate-student representative.
Leonardo Education and Art Forum
Leonardo Education and Art Forum (LEAF) thanks those members who organized events, panels, and meetings at the 2011 CAA Annual Conference in New York. Special thanks goes to Ellen K. Levy, who, after making significant contributions on behalf of LEAF, has rotated off as former chair. Levy and Victoria Vesna hosted a LEAF event, called “ART SCI Salon,” at the former’s studio in New York on April 9, 2011. The salon theme was “Art and Neuroscience,” and attendees participated in a Pecha Kucha–style presentation of their work.
Midwest Art History Society
The Midwest Art History Society (MAHS) recently hosted its thirty-eighth annual conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Held April 14–16, 2011, the conference was hosted jointly by Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, with additional support from the Grand Rapids Art Museum and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts. The event offered twenty scholarly sessions, including special topics on the body in art, conservation, gardens as art, and public sculpture. Several featured events included an evening dialogue with the iconic American artist Jim Dine, who joined the conference at the Meijer Gardens on April 14, and a presentation by Rebecca Zorach, author of the acclaimed book Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
National Council of Arts Administrators
Three National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA) members, Cora Lynn Diebler, Kim Russo, and Andrea Eis, presented a highly successful CAA Annual Conference session on the uses of social media.
The next NCAA annual meeting, entitled “Push: The Artistic Engine of Innovation,” will take place November 2–5, 2011, at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. The NCAA board seeks proposals for presentations, sessions, and/or panels for the annual Arts Administrators Workshops, scheduled for Wednesday, November 2. Initial proposals should be no more than 350 words. Topics may include but are not limited to: leadership and management; promotion and tenure; interpersonal communication; succeeding with external constituencies; budget management; personnel evaluation; personal growth; career paths; and case studies (in any area related to arts administration). Please send proposals and inquiries to Sergio Soave by May 16, 2011. Selected entries will be asked to submit a 1,000-word abstract by June 20.
Radical Art Caucus
The Radical Art Caucus (RAC) had a strong presence at the CAA Annual Conference this year. Many thanks to Benj Gerdes and Nate Harrison for chairing “Video Art as Mass Medium” and to RAC copresident Travis Nygard for organizing “Environmental Sustainability in Art History, Theory, and Practice.” RAC especially is grateful to Dan S. Wang for his hard work on the beautifully designed RAC newsletter, reaching hundreds of participants at CAA. At the annual reception, the group held a compelling discussion on academic organizing, thanks to Nayla Wren. Please help RAC continue its important discussions by joining as a member or contributing to dialogues on Facebook or the listserv. For more information, please contact Joanna Gardner-Huggett, RAC secretary.
Society for Photographic Education
The Society for Photographic Education (SPE) seeks proposals for its forty-ninth national conference, called “Intimacy and Voyeurism: The Public/Private Divide in Photography” and taking place March 22–25, 2012, in San Francisco, California. Topics, which need not be theme based, may include but are not limited to: image making, history, contemporary theory and criticism, new technologies, effects of media and culture, educational issues, and funding. The conference offers six presentation formats: (1) Lecture: presentation on historical topic, theory, or another artist’s work; (2) Imagemaker: presentation on your own artistic work (photography, film, video, performance and installation, multidisciplinary approaches); (3) Panel: a moderator-led group discussing a chosen topic; (4) Demonstration: a how-to presentation; (5) Graduate Student: short presentation of your own artistic work and a brief introduction to your graduate program (you must be enrolled in a graduate program at the time of submission); and (6) Academic Practicum Workshop: lectures and panels that address educational issues. SPE membership is required to submit; proposals are peer reviewed. Visit the SPE website for information on membership and to read the full proposal guidelines. Deadline: June 1, 2011.
Society of Architectural Historians
The sixty-fourth annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) was held April 13–17, 2011, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Thirty thematic paper sessions presented the latest research in the history of architecture, landscapes, and urbanism. In addition, the meeting featured more than twenty-five architectural tours to the Garden District, the Lower Ninth Ward, the Make it Right Foundation neighborhood, and other notable sites and landscapes throughout the city.
SAH currently seeks abstracts of papers for the sixty-fifth annual meeting, to be held April 18–22, 2012, in Detroit, Michigan. Visit the SAH website to view the full list of sessions and to read instructions on how to submit your abstract online. A PDF describing all session is also available. Deadline: June 1, 2011.
Visual Resources Association
The Visual Resources Association (VRA) republished its Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) webpage in a new format in January 2011, after the IPR Committee completed its reorganization project. Called Resources Providing Guidance on Academic Use of Images, the section is arranged into eight sections of information about copyright and fair use that are important to the educational community. Maintenance and workability of current information and the incorporation of new resources guided this revision, and the contents have been more efficiently laid out and are easier to navigate. In other news, VRA has developed fair-use guidelines regarding the use of images in educational settings, and the IPR Committee has begun publishing a monthly news blog, called IPR in the News.
FIELD REPORT
posted by Christopher Howard — Apr 26, 2011
Svetlana Mintcheva is director of programs at the National Coalition Against Censorship. She is also the editor, with Robert Atkins, of Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression (New York: New Press, 2006) and the curator of Filth, Treason, Blasphemy? Museums and Censorship, shown at the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum in Chicago, Illinois, in 2007.
Hide/Seek: Museums, Ethics, and the Press: A Symposium Report
Hide/Seek may be remembered as the censorship controversy that launched a hundred discussion panels. There were public statements and street protests, of course, letters to the Smithsonian Board of Regents and articles in the press, but most of all, there were the conferences. Starting with a gathering at the Jewish Community Center in Washington, DC, spreading to the West Coast, and featuring major public events at the Corcoran and the New Museum, these discussions responded to an apparently endless desire to analyze and assign blame, to blow off steam and extract lessons, and to place what happened within the history of Culture Wars in America.
An April 9 symposium, “Hide/Seek: Museum, Ethics, and the Press,” organized by the Institute of Museum Ethics at Seton Hall University and the Institute for Ethical Leadership at Rutgers Business School, had the goal of framing the issues surrounding the Hide/Seek controversy as ethical ones. Daniel Okrent, former chairman of the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), opened the event by posing several key questions: Is choosing to do a controversial show an ethical decision? Should a show ever be changed after opening? What happens after a controversy in terms of institutional definition and future planning? A diverse group of participants from such disciplines as art history, law, political science, and philosophy, as well as Smithsonian representatives and one journalist, attempted to grapple with these issues and more.
Mounting a show on a controversial topic was, indeed, a decision requiring courage and commitment to the concept of the museum as a space where important cultural conversations should happen. Over forty-five other arts institutions had rejected the idea of a canonical show of queer art before the NPG took it up. With the curators Jonathan Katz and David Ward, the museum went forward with Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture even though it expected—and was prepared to respond to—controversy and homophobic reactions. Unfortunately the NPG was not as capable of resisting the internal hierarchy of Smithsonian decision-making.
The attacks on the show came a full month after its opening, just as the museum was ready to declare the Culture Wars over. Detractors latched onto a few seconds of video portraying a plastic crucifix, taking the position of the offended victim of hate speech, rather than that of the intolerant bully, which would have happened if they had focused on what really annoyed them: the queer content of the exhibition. The rest of the story is familiar: the NPG’s preparedness to face public complaints was never tested as Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough unilaterally—and within a single day—ordered the removal of David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly, with its eleven seconds of ants crawling over a crucifix. Clough’s ill-conceived effort to appease Republicans in Congress backfired, and the censorship controversy hit the headlines.
Clough’s decision appears to have pitched the pragmatic, that is, protecting funding for the Smithsonian from congressional assault, against the ethical: protecting the integrity of the institution and free-speech principles against partisan pressure. As Abe Zakhem, a philosophy professor at Seton Hall, commented: when normative ethics and practical considerations are in conflict, the need for courage arises. Courage and, perhaps, some political sense: it is far from certain that oppositional bluster in Congress would have succeeded in cutting the budget for the venerable Smithsonian. Worse, it is almost guaranteed that the artwork’s removal will only encourage future interference with the Smithsonian’s curatorial independence.
Failing to demonstrate either courage or political sense, Clough comes out as the villain in the story. Even his supporters on the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents criticized his decision as rash. What about the other actors in this drama? Symposium panelists discussed the role of Penny Starr, whose outrageously titled article—“Smithsonian Christmas-Season Exhibit Features Ant-Covered Jesus, Naked Brothers Kissing, Genitalia, and Ellen DeGeneres Grabbing Her Breasts”—published on November 29, 2010, for the Cyber News Service (formerly the Conservative News Service) appears to have started it all.1 Starr was the first to isolate the eleven seconds of A Fire in My Belly; she also described and photographed other pieces from Hide/Seek and, in an email, goaded Republican Representatives Eric Cantor and John Boehner, among other congressional leaders, with questions about the offensiveness of these images.2
The panelists agreed that the press was indisputably the instigator of crisis in this case, as it has been in many others.3 No matter how detestable and biased one may find Starr’s cultural “intervention,” the press has the right, even the obligation, to direct the public’s attention to matters of importance, including the curatorial politics of the Smithsonian. As the cultural journalist and blogger Lee Rosenbaum noted, Starr was practicing “Journalism 101” when she contacted stakeholders to elicit a response in a potentially controversial case.
The actions of politicians who, alerted by Starr, threatened to cut funds to the Smithsonian remained virtually unquestioned—perhaps because Republican congressmen were so clearly in the wrong, or perhaps because such actions have become politics as usual. Nevertheless, if we have learned anything from the Hide/Seek controversy, it is that museum leaders do not make their ethical decisions in a vacuum but must negotiate a path spiked with the demands of politicians, the eyes of the press, and the campaigns of special-interest groups. Could things have gone differently? Should Martin Sullivan, director of the National Portrait Gallery (and symposium participant), have resigned in protest? Should the Smithsonian’s secretary have attempted to persuade the detractors in Congress—some of whom admitted they never even saw the show—to temper their threats? The possibilities are many, but none present a magic-bullet solution. The Smithsonian has bent under political and interest-group pressure before, and neither the resignation of a museum director nor attempts to appease critics by exhibition script revisions has won any victories.
There is reason to believe that something moderately positive may come from the situation. Sullivan welcomed the new policy adopted by the Smithsonian Board of Regents, which states “in the absence of actual error, changes to exhibitions should not be made once an exhibition opens without meaningful consultation with the curator, director, Secretary, and the leadership of the Board of Regents.” The regents have also decided that the director of the specific museum should make the call regarding the fate of an exhibition, not the Smithsonian secretary, whose decisions are heavily influenced by the risk-averse Office of Congressional Relations.
Another new Smithsonian policy is much more ambiguous, if not ominous. Criticized as “curating via crowdsourcing,” the policy requires solicitation of public input during the exhibition-planning process.4 In previous instances, including the Enola Gay exhibition at the Air and Space Museum (1995–98) and the show of photographs from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge at the National Museum of Natural History (2003–4), preexhibition input has had dire consequences for curatorial freedom.5 One can easily imagine the effect of public input in which the Catholic League or a similar professional “offense hound” attacks a show in the vulnerable period of its gestation.
In his memoir about the attacks and subsequent cancellation of the Enola Gay exhibition, Martin Harwit, who resigned as director of the Air and Space Museum in protest, writes that “our nation has begun to settle important issues … not through substantive debate, but through partisan campaigns aimed at victory by any means.”6 Apparently little has changed since.
Nevertheless, it was encouraging to hear Rachelle V. Browne, associate general council at the Smithsonian, clearly state that the First Amendment protects museums from having to choose between government funds and self-censorship. She also formulated the most unequivocal ethical message of the day: that concerns about financial sustainability do not override the museum’s obligation to sustain integrity and free speech.
Notes
1. Penny Starr, “Smithsonian Christmas-Season Exhibit Features Ant-Covered Jesus, Naked Brothers Kissing, Genitalia, and Ellen DeGeneres Grabbing Her Breasts,” CNS News, November 29, 2010, http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/smithsonian-christmas-season-exhibit-fea.
2. In an email obtained by Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo, Starr wrote to House and Senate leaders from both parties asking for feedback on her story. The email reads: “The federally funded National Portrait Gallery, which is part of the Smithsonian, is running an exhibition through the Christmas season that features an ant-covered Jesus and what the Smithsonian itself calls ‘homoerotic’ art. Should this exhibition continue or be cancelled?” Boehner and Cantor responded by immediately asking that the exhibition be pulled. See Brian Beutler, “Ant Jesus: An Anatomy of the Latest War on Christmas Scandal,” On Capitol Hill (blog), Talking Points Memo, December 1, 2010, http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/author_blogs/2010/12/ant-jesus-an-anatomy-of-the-latest-war-on-christmas-scandal.php.
3. Recent examples include the leadership role taken by the New York Daily News in the efforts to boot the Drawing Center from a proposed new space at Ground Zero in 2005 (which succeeded) and to close the Brooklyn Museum’s Sensation show in 1999 (which did not).
4. Bob Duggan, “Mob Rule: Curating via Crowdsourcing,” Picture This (blog), Big Think, April 7, 2011, http://bigthink.com/ideas/37784.
5. For a fascinating story of the workings of the Smithsonian’s politics, see Martin Harwit, An Exhibit Denied: Lobbying the History of “Enola Gay” (New York: Copernicus, 1996).
6. Harwit, vii.
Institutional News
posted by CAA — Apr 17, 2011
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.
April 2011
Théodore Rousseau, Farm in Les Landes, 1844–67, oil on canvas, 25½ x 39 in. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. 2009.8 (artwork in the public domain)The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has received two gifts that will endow a pair of critical jobs at the museum. Robert and Martha Berman Lipp gave $2.5 million to fund the senior curator position, and Sylvia and Leonard Marx donated $2 million for the director of collections and exhibitions.
Howard Pyle, The Mermaid, 1910, oil on canvas, 57⅞ x 40⅛ in. Delaware Art Museum, Gift of the children of Howard Pyle in memory of their mother Anne Poole Pyle, 1940 (artwork in the public domain)The Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington has received four grants to assist with exhibitions, publications, research, and development. The Henry Luce Foundation contributed $100,000 from its Luce Fund in American Art to support work on the exhibition Howard Pyle: American Master Rediscovered, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts gave $11,000 for curatorial research on the photographer Scott Heiser. A $10,000 gift from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation will sustain the exhibition and publicity of the recently acquired M. G. Sawyer Collection of Decorative Bindings, and $50,000 from the Jessie Ball duPont Fund will help launch a 1:1 matching fundraising challenge.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, The Little White Sofa, ca. 1883–84, oil on wood panel, 4½ x 7 3/16 in.; framed: 4⅛ x 5 3/16 x 11/16 in. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, 1943.169 (artwork in the public domain)The Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have received $75,000 in a 2010 Access to Artistic Excellence Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The funds will support an education program called “Engaging New Americans: Explorations in Art, Self, and Our Democratic Heritage.”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has accepted a $10 million donation to support the creation of a major exhibition space, to be called the Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch Gallery, within the Costume Institute. Earlier this year, the museum launched a series of online videos called Connections, which highlight the perspectives and insights on art from the collection by curators and other staff members.
View of the Rodin Court at the North Carolina Museum of Art (photograph provided by the North Carolina Museum of Art)The North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh has been awarded a 2011 American Institute of Architects Honor Award for its new building, designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners. The award is the institute’s highest recognition for building design.
The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded more than $1.6 million in grants to support artist communities, colonies, and residency programs. Among the recipients are these CAA institutional members: the American Academy in Rome, New York ($75,000); Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, Colorado ($15,000); and Bates College, Lewiston, Maine ($30,000).
Grants, Awards, and Honors
posted by CAA — Apr 15, 2011
Grants, Awards, and Honors
CAA recognizes its members for their professional achievements, be it a grant, fellowship, residency, book prize, honorary degree, or related award.
Grants, Awards, and Honors is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
April 2011
Screen shot of the Backbone Metals websiteBenjamin Carpenter, an artist based in San Francisco, California, has received a $1,500 alumni grant from the Maine College of Art’s Belvedere Fund for Professional Development to purchase a new welder for Backbone Metals, his metal-smithing and fabrication business.
Henry John Drewal, the Evjue-Bascom Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, has won the 2011 Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association for his edited volume, Sacred Waters: Arts for Mami Wata and other Divinities in Africa and the Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).
Rebecca Hackemann, an artist based in New York, has received a 2011 grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Manhattan Community Arts Fund for her project Visionary Sightseeing Binoculars, consisting of eight altered sightseeing binoculars containing stereoscopic images of the past and future of that site to be installed in unlikely places that have traditionally been underserved by public art.
Thomas DaCosta KaufmannThomas DaCosta Kaufmann, the Frederick Marquand Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, has been awarded an honorary doctorate (Doctor Philosophiae Honoris Causae) by Technische Universität Dresden in Germany on the basis of the quality of his research and because of his service to international art historical exchange.
Karen Lang (photograph by Flora Lang)Karen Lang, associate professor of art history at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin, has been awarded a prestigious Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at the University of Warwick in England. Lang delivered four Leverhulme Lectures in February and March 2011.
Heather Hyde Minor, assistant professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, has won the 2010 Helen and Howard Marraro Prize in Italian History for her book, The Culture of Architecture in Enlightenment Rome (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010). The Marraro Prize is conferred annually by the Society for Italian Historical Studies.
Lili White, an artist based in New York, has received a 2011 grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Manhattan Community Arts Fund to hold a screening of women’s experimental films that feature underrepresented themes and issues distinct to women and girls.
Nancy L. WickerNancy L. Wicker, professor of art history the University of Mississippi in Oxford, has been invited to participate in a Getty Foundation Seminar on “The Arts of Rome’s Provinces.” The seminar comprises two intensive two-week sessions: first in Great Britain in May 2011 and second in Greece in January 2012.
ArtTable, a national organization for professional women in the visual arts celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, has recognized the achievements of thirty women whose contributions have transformed the field. Among the honorees are the following CAA members: Elizabeth Easton, cofounder and director, Center for Curatorial Leadership; Ann Sutherland Harris, professor of art history, Frick Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh; Mary Jane Jacob, professor and executive director of exhibitions and exhibition studies, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Margo Machida, associate professor, Department of Art and Art History, University of Connecticut; and Susan Fisher Sterling, director, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC.
The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, based in New York, has awarded grants to artists for 2009–10. The list includes to the following CAA members: Francis Cape, Russell Floersch, Cynthia Knott, Matthew Kolodziej, Eve Laramee, G. Daniel Massad, Shona McDonald, Natalie Moore, Margaret Murphy, Stephen Nguyen, Diana Puntar, James Stroud, and June Wayne.