CAA News Today
New Online Editions of Graduate-Program Directories Coming in Fall 2011
posted by CAA — Aug 17, 2010
The next editions of CAA’s two directories of graduate programs in the arts will be published in an online format in fall 2011. First printed in December 2008 and January 2009 and still available for purchase, the CAA directories are the most comprehensive source books for graduate education for artists and art scholars, with program information for hundreds of schools, departments, and programs in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and elsewhere worldwide. Colleges, universities, and independent art schools are all included.
The pricing structure for the 2011 online editions has not yet been determined. Each current volume costs $49.95—$39.95 for CAA members—plus shipping and handling. You may order them online.
Graduate Programs in Art History includes programs in art history and visual studies, museum studies, curatorial studies, arts administration, library science, and related areas. Graduate Programs in the Visual Arts describes programs in studio art, graphic design, digital media, art education, conservation, historic preservation, film production, and more.
For more information, please send an email to directories@collegeart.org.
New Faces for CAA Journals
posted by Christopher Howard — Aug 03, 2010
New appointments have been made to the editorial boards of two of CAA’s three scholarly journals.
Sheryl Reiss, lecturer in art history at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has been appointed the next editor-in-chief of caa.reviews, succeeding Lucy Oakley of the Grey Art Gallery at New York University. Reiss will begin her three-year term on July 1, 2011, with the preceding year as editor designate. Reiss had previously served on the caa.reviews Editorial Board from 2001 to 2005, and was also a field editor for books on early modern art in southern Europe.
Joining the caa.reviews Editorial Board for the next four years is Conrad Rudolph of the University of California, Riverside. In addition, five new field editors for books and related media have been chosen this year: Christopher Heuer of Princeton University in New Jersey will assign reviews in northern European art, and Tomoko Sakomura of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania will do likewise for Japanese art. Marika Sardar of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is field editor for books on Islamic art, Yekaterina Barbash of the Brooklyn Museum in New York will commission reviews on Egyptian and ancient Near Eastern art, and Christina Kiaer is in charge of books on twentieth-century art. Field editors work with caa.reviews for three years.
At Art Journal, Jenni Sorkin has joined the editorial board for a four-year term. Formerly a faculty member at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, she recently received her PhD from Yale University. In 2010–11 Sorkin will be a postdoctoral residential fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. The editorial board also has a new chair, appointed from within its ranks: Karin Higa, director of the Curatorial and Exhibitions Department and senior curator of art at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, will serve for two years.
All editors and editorial-board members are chosen from an open call for nominations and self-nominations, published in at least two issues of CAA News (usually January and March) and on the CAA website.
Propose a Session for the 2012 Annual Conference in Los Angeles
posted by Lauren Stark — Jun 30, 2010
CAA invites individual members to propose a session for the 2012 Annual Conference, taking place February 22–25, 2012, in Los Angeles. Proposals should cover the breadth of current thought and research in art, art and architectural history, theory and criticism, pedagogical issues, museum and curatorial practice, conservation, and developments in technology. The Los Angeles conference closes CAA’s Centennial year, which will begin at the New York meeting in February 2011.
The Annual Conference Committee welcomes session proposals from established artists and scholars, along with younger scholars, emerging and midcareer artists, and graduate students. Particularly welcome are those proposals that highlight interdisciplinary work. Artists are especially encouraged to propose sessions appropriate to dialogue and information exchange relevant to artists.
Proposals are only accepted 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. For full details on the submission process, please visit Chair a Conference Session. Deadline: September 1, 2010; no late applications are accepted.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for June 2010
posted by CAA — Jun 10, 2010
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts singles out the best in feminist art and scholarship from North America and around the world. CWA Picks may include exhibitions, conferences, symposia, panels, lectures, and other events. The following selections should not be missed.
June 2010
Maude Kerns, Composition #85 (In and Out of Space), 1951, oil on canvas, 28 × 22 in. Gift of the Estate of Maude I. Kerns, collection of Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene (1969:8.7). (photograph provided by the Whatcom Museum)
Show of Hands: Northwest Women Artists 1880–2010
Whatcom Museum
121 Prospect Street, Bellingham, WA 98225
April 24–August 8, 2010
The exhibition coincides with centennial of women’s suffrage in Washington State. Featuring more than ninety works of art by sixty-three women artists from Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia, Show of Hands celebrates women’s contributions to the legacy of Northwestern art and examines the myriad talents women of the Northwest have displayed since 1880 through painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, video, and installation.
Lil Picard and Counterculture New York
Grey Art Gallery
New York University, 100 Washington Square East, New York, NY 10003
April 20–July 10, 2010
Lil Picard and Counterculture New York features over seventy works by a pioneering feminist artist who played varied and acknowledged roles in the New York art world from the 1950s through the 1970s. This first comprehensive exhibition presents paintings, sculptures, drawings, collages, and several landmark installations and performances, as well as photographs, writings, and films. All works are drawn from the collections of the University of Iowa Museum of Art, which organized the show, and from the University of Iowa Libraries, which houses the artist’s extensive papers.
Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019
May 7, 2010–March 21, 2011
Women have expanded the roles of photography during its 170-year history by experimenting with every aspect of the medium. Organized by Roxana Marcoci and Eva Respini, Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography presents a selection of outstanding photographs by women artists, charting the medium’s history from the dawn of the modern period to the present day. Including more than two hundred works, the exhibition features celebrated masterworks and new acquisitions by Diane Arbus, Berenice Abbott, Claude Cahun, Imogen Cunningham, Rineke Dijkstra, Florence Henri, Roni Horn, Nan Goldin, Helen Levitt, Lisette Model, Lucia Moholy, Tina Modotti, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems, among many others. The exhibition also highlights works drawn from a variety of curatorial departments, including Bottoms, a large-scale Fluxus wallpaper by Yoko Ono.
In Praise of America: Selections from the Sellars Collection of Art by American Women
Huntsville Museum of Art
300 Church Street South, Huntsville, AL 35801
June 13–August 29, 2010
Selected from the museum’s recent acquisition of over four hundred nineteenth- and twentieth-century works of art by American women, this exhibition presents accomplished landscapes, portraits, and genre scenes that celebrate the dramatic scenery, diverse people, and distinctive spirit of our great nation. Bringing a previously unseen facet of art history to life, the Sellars Collection offers a unique opportunity to discover contributions of women artists forged during a period of struggle and little recognition. The largest public collection of its kind, many of the artists represented in the collection studied at major academies, received accolades and awards, and pioneered the way for those who would follow. In Praise of America features approximately forty paintings, sculptures, and works on paper and includes engaging florals, still lifes, portraits, genre scenes, and landscapes reflecting different regions of the United States.
Ayumi Shigematsu, Circuit Tree, 2006, stoneware (artwork © Ayumi Shigematsu; photograph © Hideya Amemiya and provided by International Arts and Artists)
Soaring Voices: Recent Ceramics by Women from Japan
American University Museum
Katzen Arts Center at American University, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20016
June 15–August 15, 2010
Through eighty-six works by twenty-five women artists, this exhibition, organized by International Art and Artists, showcases contemporary interpretations of a traditional art form through a range of motifs inspired from the natural world: plants, shells, mountains, rivers, and the play of light and shadow. Other sources of inspiration for these ceramic vessels can be found in the Noh Theater and kimono patterns of the Edo Period.
New CAA Standards and Guidelines
posted by Mary-Ann Milford-Lutzker — Dec 07, 2009
Mary-Ann Milford-Lutzker is CAA’s vice president for committees. She is also professor of Asian art history, Carver Chair in East Asian Studies, and provost and dean of the faculty at Mills College in Oakland, California.
In line with CAA’s practice to update $500 payday loans online same day regularly its Standards and Guidelines for professional practices in the fields of art and art history, the Board of Directors approved three revised guidelines for art historians and a new one for academic art administrators at its meeting on October 25, 2009. This work was carried out by four task forces, established by CAA’s president Paul B. Jaskot and executive director Linda Downs, that were overseen by the Professional Practices Committee.
Professional Practices for Art Historians
Authentications and Attributions (2009): The task force appointed by President Jaskot established the need for a stand-alone and separate document for art historians regarding authentications and attributions of works of art. It was determined that no other issue is more urgent for, and its consequences so specific to, the welfare of the profession than dealing with inauthenticity and false attributions. Not only is the integrity of artists and collections at stake, but the economic well-being of art historians who engage in trying to separate the false from the true is also endangered.
Information about authentications and attributions formerly appeared in A Code of Ethics for Art Historians and Guidelines for the Professional Practice of Art History.
Guidelines for Curatorial-Studies Programs (2009): A growing number of colleges and universities across the country have instituted programs in curatorial studies. The revisions for the document, first published in 2004, are intended to help art departments and administrators organizing curricula and to aid faculty advisors and students determining which curatorial-studies programs are appropriate for an individual’s specific interests, abilities, and career goals.
Standards for Retention and Tenure of Art Historians (2009): This guideline, last revised in 2005, has been amended to embrace community and two-year colleges. Inclusion of community colleges into these standards will make this document relevant for art-history faculty who attempt to achieve the highest stands of professional practices in such institutions. It will also help to validate the objectives of professionals who have few peers to support them in their efforts to improve the practice of art history at their institutions.
Professional Practices for Academic Art Administrators
Standards and Guidelines for Academic Art Administrators (2009): This document will serve as a resource for emerging, new, and current academic art administrators, as well as benefiting other CAA members seeking guidance regarding the role of academic art administrators operating in a visual-arts context. The task force was made up of administrators from diverse geographical regions and varied professional experiences that included program directors, chairs and division heads, directors of schools of art, associate deans, deans, and vice presidents http://loans-cash.net/how-it-works.php .
Acknowledgments
I want to thank all the members of the four task forces (listed respectively on the webpages of their Standards and Guidelines), who worked together to revise and create these Standards and Guidelines. In particular I want to acknowledge the work of Maxine Payne, chair of the Professional Practices Committee, who so diligently worked on all this material and encouraged each task force along the way.
Fall 2009 Art Journal Published
posted by Christopher Howard — Oct 21, 2009
In her editor’s introduction to the Fall 2009 issue of Art Journal, Judith Rodenbeck discusses a text by Erwin Panofsky that she relates to the current interest in reenactment. Making a further connection to the four essays and the roundtable discussion in the current issue, she suggests that “Panofsky’s insistence on the detailed and intertwined study of form, content, and context here bears reconsideration, albeit under the revised skies of our own time.”
In “Imperious Griffonage,” Hajime Nakatani explores the role of the Chinese written character in the work of the artist Xu Bing and several of his contemporaries, finding that both the standard script characters and Xu’s inventive pseudocharacters show curious signs of a life of their own. In an essay that contextualizes Jo Baer’s paintings and writing of the late 1960s, Patricia Kelly accentuates the artist’s innovative exhibition strategies, intended to engage the viewer in a participatory manner.
Jane McFadden writes about the art of Walter de Maria in “Earthquakes, Photoworks, and Oz,” focusing first on his photoworks of the 1960s and then on his best-known work, The Lighting Field, and its mediation through photography. In her essay on the reception of Louise Bourgeois’s 1964 Stable Gallery exhibition, Elyse Speaks examines the consistency of the artist’s treatment of themes of the body and the home.
Art Journal assembled an expert panel of scholars for a critical discussion of the promises and pitfalls of transcultural exchange in The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989, a 2009 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum. Alexandra Munroe, the chief curator of the exhibition, responds.
In the Reviews section of this issue, Clark Buckner considers three recent books on curatorial and exhibition practice, Marc James Léger examines two books about art and activism, and Soraya Murray evaluates two books on new-media art.
Women’s Caucus for Art Announces 2010 Lifetime Achievement Awards
posted by Christopher Howard — Oct 05, 2009
The Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) has announced the recipients of the 2010 Lifetime Achievement Awards: Tritobia Hayes Benjamin, an educator and art historian from Washington, DC; Mary Jane Jacob, a curator and educator in Chicago; Senga Nengudi, an artist based in Colorado Springs; Joyce J. Scott, a visual and performance artist from Baltimore; and New York’s Spiderwoman Theater, comprising Lisa Mayo, Gloria Miguel, and Muriel Miguel.
These awards were first awarded in 1979 to Isabel Bishop, Selma Burke, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, and Georgia O’Keeffe in a ceremony at President Jimmy Carter’s Oval Office. Past honorees have represented the full range of distinguished achievement in the visual arts, and this year’s awardees are no exception, with considerable accomplishment, achievement, and contributions represented by their professional efforts.
Tritobia Hayes Benjamin
Tritobia Hayes Benjamin is professor of art history and director of the Gallery of Art at Howard University in Washington, DC, where she is also associate dean of the Division of Fine Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences. After receiving her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art history from Howard, she earned a PhD in the same subject from the University of Maryland. On the faculty of Howard since 1970, Benjamin has written and lectured widely on African American art and artists, including the 1994 publication, The Life and Art of Lois Mailou Jones.
Mary Jane Jacob
Mary Jane Jacob is a curator, educator, and author noted for her work on the national and international art scene. She currently serves as professor in the Department of Sculpture and executive of exhibitions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She began her curatorial career at the Detroit Institute of Arts in the late 1970s before becoming chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In the public realm, Jacobs has organized multiyear installations and commissioned outdoor sculptures in urban and park settings. She has also published numerous books and exhibition catalogues on contemporary art.
Senga Nengudi
Senga Nengudi is strongly committed to both creating art and arts education. Currently a lecturer at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs in the Visual Arts and Performing Arts Department, she has always been involved with bringing arts programs emphasizing diversity to the communities in which she resides. Presently Nengudi’s sculptures are taking the form of installations of increasing size. She has been a featured performance artist, dancer, and installation artists in numerous exhibitions at major museums.
Joyce J. Scott
A native of Baltimore, Joyce J. Scott is a highly internationally regarded artist whose work incorporates various artistic media, including sculpture, jewelry, glass, printmaking, installation, and performance art. Her pieces draw strong influence from a wide range of sources: African and Native American experiences, comic books, television, popular American culture, and the culture of the streets of her urban Baltimore neighborhood. The use of beads is a central element throughout Scott’s work, helping turn her works into bold statements about such issues as racism, sexism, violence, and other forms of social injustice.
Spiderwoman Theater (Lisa Mayo, Gloria Miguel, and Muriel Miguel)
Spiderwoman Theater was founded in 1976 when Muriel Miguel gathered a diverse company of women of varying ages, races, sexual orientations, and worldviews, which included her two sisters. As the oldest women’s theater company in North America and originally emerging from the feminist movement, Spiderwoman continues moving toward its goal of creating an artistic environment where indigenous arts and culture—the three are from the Kuna and Rappahannock nations—thrive as an integrated and vital part of the larger arts community. Taking its name from the Hopi creation goddess Spiderwoman, who taught the people to weave, the theater calls its technique of creating their theatrical pieces “story weaving,” in which performers write and present personal and traditional stories that are layered with movement, text, sound, music, and visual images.
Award Ceremony in Chicago
The Lifetime Achievement Awards will be held at the Chicago Cultural Center, 77 East Randolph Street, on Saturday, February 13, 2010, in conjunction with the WCA and CAA annual conferences (WCA is a CAA affiliated society). A dinner will be held from 6:30 to 7:30 PM in the center’s G.A.R. Hall. The awards ceremony will follow at 7:30 PM in the Cassidy Theater. Tickets for the dinner—$90 before January 1, 2010, and $100 after—will be available for purchase from the WCA website. Reserved seating tickets for the awards ceremony will also be available for $10; limited general-audience seating for the awards ceremony is free and available on a first-come, first-served basis—please arrive early. For more information about WCA, please contact Karin Luner, national administrator.
CAA Joins Task Force on University Galleries and Museums
posted by Christopher Howard — Sep 01, 2009
In response to troubling trends in university museums and galleries—including the sale of Maier Art Museum paintings by Randolph College, the closure of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, and the threat of sale of important modernist works at Fisk University—a task force was formed that includes CAA, the American Association of Museums, the Association of Art Museum Directors, the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries, and the Kress Foundation to address ways to educate university trustees about the educational value of university museums and to explore protective avenues. A petition was circulated to various associations and also set up online, which received several thousand signatures—including many from CAA members. The petition will be published in the Chronicle of Higher Education later this fall. Quiet conversations are continuing with Brandeis trustees, and several university accreditation commissions have been apprised of the concerns of the task force and the visual-arts field.
On the same topic, caa.reviews recently published an essay entitled “Curricular Connections: The College/University Art Museum as Site for Teaching and Learning.” The author, Laurel Bradley, who is director of exhibitions and curator of the College Art Collection at Carleton College, provides a brief history of university museums and galleries since the mid-twentieth century before exploring several recent initiatives—some funded by the Mellon Foundation’s College and University Art Museum Program—that combine academic and curatorial teaching and education in novel, and often successful, ways.
Submit a Session Proposal for the 2011 Annual Conference
posted by Emmanuel Lemakis — Jul 01, 2009
Individual CAA members may submit a session proposal for the centennial Annual Conference, taking place February 9–12, 2011, in New York. Proposals should cover the breadth of current thought and research in art, art and architectural history, theory and criticism, pedagogical issues, museum and curatorial practice, conservation, and developments in technology.
The Annual Conference Committee welcomes session proposals that include the work of established artists and scholars, along with that of younger scholars, emerging and midcareer artists, and graduate students. Particularly welcome are those sessions that highlight interdisciplinary work. Artists are especially encouraged to propose sessions appropriate to dialogue and information exchange relevant to artists.
Session proposals are only accepted online; paper forms and postal mailings are not required. To set up an account, please email Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs, who will register your email address and provide you with a password. For full details on the submission process, please visit Chair a Conference Session. Deadline: September 1, 2009; no late applications are accepted.
Read the 2009 Annual Conference Blog
posted by Christopher Howard — Feb 23, 2009
Once again, CAA is publishing an official Annual Conference blog in order to chronicle the event’s diverse experiences, points of view, and opinions. Six bloggers, selected from among the CAA membership, will be writing daily—even hourly—on Los Angeles conference events. Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, will moderate and post images.
The 2009 bloggers are: Katie Anania, a graduate student in art history at the University of Texas at Austin; Beth Harris, director of digital learning at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Micol Hebron, a California-based video and performance artist and an assistant professor of art at Chapman University; Benjamin Lima, a doctoral student at Yale University; Ed Schad, a Los Angeles–based writer and a curatorial associate for the Broad Art Foundation; and Steven Zucker, dean of the School of Graduate Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York. Read their full biographies on the blog.
Regular sessions and ARTspace happenings, Career Services and the Book and Trade Fair, exhibition openings and special events—anything and everything is game for the CAA conference blog!