CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Aug 03, 2016
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
A Prized Stettheimer Painting, Sold under the Radar by a University
When Fisk University, the historically black school in Nashville, tried to sell two paintings several years ago from its storied Alfred Stieglitz art collection, a firestorm erupted. A drawn-out legal challenge ended in a compromise that allowed the school to share its collection with Crystal Bridges. What was not revealed at the time—and has only recently come to light—is that before the agreement was completed, the university’s president quietly sold two other paintings owned by Fisk. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Artiquette: Ten Mistakes Not to Make While Promoting Your Art
How do you make it in the art world? It’s a magical formula that involves, talent, drive, grit, and the ability to promote oneself. Unfortunately, talking up your own artwork, projects, and ideas can be a delicate balancing act. To help you walk that line, Artnet News has rounded up a list of mistakes to avoid in self-promotion. (Read more from Artnet News.)
Sharon Louden: Consultants, Careers, and Community
I frequently get pitches from art consultants who offer help securing exhibitions, grants, and publicity. I often wonder if their services are helpful, or whether the consultants are taking advantage of vulnerable underrecognized artists, so I contacted my friend and colleague Sharon Louden, a successful artist who gives professional-development webinars and lectures about sustaining a creative life. (Read more from Two Coats of Paint.)
Talking Art and Tech in Bay Area Living Rooms
The all-purpose status of the living room made it the ideal site for a series of events initiated two years ago by the artists Liat Berdugo and Elia Vargas. The duo used the living rooms of Bay Area artists and cultural producers to host monthly public conversations—on new media, digital art, creative works in progress, and artistic practices—that were attended by friends and strangers. (Read more from Rhizome.)
The Syllabus as a Contract
Whatever the professor’s intention, when students see a due date on the syllabus, they often assume that the assignment is due via online submission by midnight on that date. Technology has forced professors to be extremely specific on these details or else face inevitable challenges from students. It’s precisely when such challenges arise that professors and students look to the syllabus as a contract. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Are Acrylics as Durable as Oils?
If oil paint had to sell itself to the marketplace as a new medium, it would have a difficult time—especially because its list of problems would include yellowing, cracking, wrinkling, flaking, embrittlement, hydrolysis, fatty-acid crystallization, and protuberances and delamination caused by metallic soaps. This is not to say acrylics do not have their own challenges as well! (Read more from Just Paint.)
Why Books Are the Perfect Way to Spread Art to the Masses
Art is expensive, often ludicrously so. For many art lovers, books are the most viable means of supporting artists and beginning an art collection of their own. Carolyn Schoerner is the mind behind Books For All Press, a nonprofit publisher working with artists living with mental illness and developmental disabilities. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)
For Scholarly Communications, Double-Dipping Is Double the Fun
Since commerce is inherently evil—and commerce connected to the academy even more so—it must be an exceedingly dastardly deed for a publisher to engage in double-dipping, in which the same content finds one audience in institutions and another among the authors who create it, sometimes in violation of an author’s contract. So how does double-dipping work? (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks July 2016
posted by CAA — Jul 16, 2016
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
July 2016
Rebecca Warren: The Main Feeling
Dallas Museum of Art
Hoffman Galleries, 1717 North Harwood, Dallas, TX
March 13–July 17, 2016 (and on permanent display in the Eagle Family Plaza)
The Dallas Museum of Art presents the British artist Rebecca Warren’s sculpture exhibition, The Main Feeling, featuring work from a pivotal phase in the artist’s practice with her shift to increasingly abstract forms. The display of works from 2003 to today shows Warren’s transition in materials from clay, to steel, and then to bronze. In conjunction with the exhibition, the museum unveiled Warren’s newly commissioned sculpture, Pas de Deux (Plaza Monument) (2016), which is installed in the museum’s Eagle Family Plaza, a new space for contemporary art and outdoor programming.
“The title Pas de Deux refers to the dynamic, fluctuating relationship between art history’s most persistent binaries: male/female, high/low, old/new, Dionysus/Apollo, classic/grotesque.” The sculpture consists of two bronze biomorphic forms, each more than fourteen feet tall and hand painted by the artist. “Warren is known for challenging Western sculptural traditions through her distinctive female nudes. She uses an earthy, unfinished look, and her figures often have exaggerated physical characteristics, such as very large breasts or buttocks. Warren’s figures challenge our ideas about what sculptures should be or look like, and they provide a wry commentary on the ways that so many male artists have distorted women’s bodies.”
This exhibition marks Warren as among one of the first living female artists to have commissioned work permanently installed at an entrance of an American museum.
Randy 2010–2013
Anthology release
Online
The new publication by Capricious Press, Randy 2010–2013, collects three-hundred-plus pages of this queer/feminist zine into one anthology. The undertaking includes over one hundred interviews, conversations, and works that were featured in Randy from 2010 to 2013. Begun by the artist A. K. Burns and the publisher Sophie Morner, the experimental zine is described by Burns as “an intentionally irregular trans-feminist project celebrating the politics of art, sexuality and aesthetics.”
The zine brings together underrepresented voices in an intergenerational dialogue “as a means to examine multiple perspectives on queer identity and gender.” The anthology includes an extensive list of voices, including these artists: niv Acosta, Jess Arndt, Meriem= Bennani, Sadie Benning, Elizabeth Bethea, Ramdasha Bikceem, Cass Bird, Dana Bishop-Root, Pauline Boudry, boychild, Kathe Burkhart, Nao Bustamante, Jibz Cameron, Silvia Casalino, Christelle de Castro, Leidy Churchman, Jon Davies, Hayden Dunham, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Nicole Eisenman, Edie Fake, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Daphne Fitzpatrick, Shannon Funchess, Mariah Garnett, Luke Gilford, Julia Gillard, Jules Gimbrone, Reina Gossett, Goodyn Green, Gordon Hall, Harmony Hammond, Onya Hogan-Finlay, Emily Hope, Katherine Hubbard, Amber Ibarreche, Mariana Juliano, Stanya Kahn, Sarah Forbes Keough, Pozsi B Kolor, Adam Krause, Lisa Lenarz, Katerina Llanes, Amos Mac, Lee Maida, India Salvor Menuez, Lessa Millet, MPA, Ulrike Müller, Sheila Pepe, Litia Perta, Cassie Peterson, Isaac Preiss, R.H Quaytman, Jen Rosenblit, Colin Self, Mel Shimkovitz, Amy Sillman, Tuesday Smillie, Jazmin Venus Soto, Matthew Stone, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Lanka Tattersall, Wu Tsang, Scott Valentine, Leilah Weinraub, Hanna Wilde, Martha Wilson, Io Tillett Wright, Geo Wyeth, and Yes! Association/Föreningen Ja!
Boushra Almutawakel, Untitled, from the series The Hijab, 2001, chromogenic print, 47¼ x 39⅜ in. (artwork © Boushra Almutawakel)
She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World
National Museum of Women in the Arts
1250 New York Ave NW, Washington, DC
April 8–July 31, 2016
Gallery Talk: July 27, 2016, 12:00–12:30 PM
The National Museum of Women in the Arts presents She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World. The landmark exhibition contains more than eighty photographs and video installations of the people, landscapes, and cultures of Iran and the Arab world as seen through the lens of female photographers. The title, derived from the Arabic word rawiya, is also the name of a photography collective of women, based in the Middle East and founded in 2009.
The exhibition “refutes the conventional idea that Arab and Iranian women are oppressed or powerless, illuminating the fact that women are creating some of the most significant photographic work in the region today.” It features artists working in a range of genres from portraiture to documentary to staged narratives. “Each artist in She Who Tells a Story offers a vision of the world as she has witnessed. The photographers’ images invite viewers to reconsider their own preconceptions about the nature of politics, family, and personal identity in the Middle East.”
In conjunction with the exhibition, the museum will host a gallery talk with the chief curator Kathyn Wat, focused on selected works on display. The event will take place on July 27, 2016.
Mona Hatoum
TATE Modern
Millbank, London SW1P 4RG, UK
May 4–August 21, 2016
TATE Modern presents a comprehensive exploration into thirty-five years of Mona Hatoum’s work in Britain. Born into a Palestinian family in Beirut in 1952, Hatoum has lived and worked in London since 1975. From her early performance and video works to her sculpture and large-scale installation, this artist creates a challenging vision of our world, exposing its contradictions and complexities. Juxtaposition of opposites, her work engages us in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination.
From her intimate traveling notebooks to large installations such as Homebound, Interior/Exterior Landscape, Hatoum’s survey takes visitors on a journey from her early drawings and documentation of performances to her most recent project throughout a series of encounters with the body and the world, confrontations that are at once intimate and global, personal and political. Through little drawings incorporating nail-pairings, sewing, and urine stains, and through records of performances that were self-exposing and abject, the artist balance the disjunctions between the grand statement and the whisper.
Throughout her distinguished career, Hatoum has questioned and explored themes of themes of home, displacement, and self, provoking strong psychological and emotional responses. In celebration of her internationally acclaimed work, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has recently honored Hatoum with the Medal Award for her commitment to a work that challenges us to rethink a world fractured by conflict and imagine new forms of connections.
Bouchra Khalili: The Mapping Journey Project
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019
April 9–October 10, 2016
The Museum of Modern Art is presenting the Mapping Journey Project (2008–11), a video installation by the Moroccan-French artist Bouchra Khalili. Eight individual screens are installed throughout the museum’s Marron Atrium, exposing the stories of individuals who have been forced to travel illegally by political and economic circumstances and whose journeys have taken them throughout the Mediterranean uncertain path.
Khalili (b. 1975) has encountered her subjects accidentally, in transit hubs across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Following an initial meeting, the artist invited each person to narrate his or her journey and trace it in thick permanent marker on a geopolitical map of the region. While their faces remain unseen, the videos feature each subject’ voice and hands sketching of their singular trajectory across the map. The formal elements chosen by the artists to narrate the stories are pared to necessities: a paper map of the world; a hand holding a marker, drawing lines on the map across oceans and borders; a voice of a man or a woman telling, voices in a first-person from the experience of illegal immigrants from the Middle East or Africa to Europe in search of a better life.
Witnessing the path of each subject, a complex portraiture of the network of migration emerges. Shown together, the videos function as an alternative geopolitical map defined by the precarious lives of stateless people. Khalili’s work takes on the challenge of developing critical and ethical approaches to questions of citizenship, community, and political agency. The Mapping Journey Project was acquired by MoMA, and the exhibition was possible by the Modern Women’s Fund.
Anohni: Hopelessness
Album launch and Performance tour
Hopelessness is the new album by the singer, songwriter, visual artist, and activist Anohni. Formerly known as Antony Hegarty (from Antony and the Johnsons), she decided a few years ago to utterly transform the sound and message of her music. She not only renamed herself with what she calls her “spirit name,” but also embarked on a new artistic course. “Subjugation of women and of the Earth are one and the same,” “Kill the mother and appropriate her power.” Anohni expressed as talking about the foundations of Hopelessness. This relentlessly political album and utterly emotional performance is a testimony of her process.
Here, Anohni’s voice is as beautiful and deep as ever bringing drone warfare, environmental catastrophe, government surveillance and capital punishment, the personal is political, as radical feminists used to say. The album includes “Four Degrees,” a single released to coincide with the Paris climate conference, and is a stunning meditation on our complicity in global warming. During the performance, twenty women artists and activists such as Shirin Neshat, Lorraine O’Grady, and Nola Ngalangka Taylor joined her in spirit throughout the performance. Their projected moving lip synching portraits seem to embrace Anohni’s voice on stage.
In 2013, Anohni spent ten days living with the Martu of Parnngurr in the Western Australian Desert, and she has since campaigned against a proposed uranium mine on their ancestral land. In early June, she joined her Martu friends Nola and Curtis Taylor on a 180-kilometer protest walk from their remote community to the site of Mitsubishi and Cameco’s proposed open-cart uranium mine in the Western Australian Desert.
Hopelessness was launched at Park Avenue Armory in New York on May 18 and 19, followed by an international tour.
Affiliated Society News for July 2016
posted by CAA — Jul 15, 2016
American Council for Southern Asian Art
The American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA), along with the University of Michigan History of Art Visual Resources Collections and the Center for Art and Archaeology (CA&A) of the American Institute of Indian Studies in Gurgaon, India, is pleased to announce that over 12,000 low-resolution images (suitable for PowerPoint presentations), known collectively as the ACSAA Digital Images, are now newly available for free direct downloading for noncommercial, educational, and scholarly purposes through the Virtual Museum of Images and Sounds (VMIS). Funded by India’s Ministry of Culture, VMIS was recently created by using the image and sound archives of the CA&A and the Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology (ARCE)—the two centers of the AIIS.
The ACSAA Digital Images were first distributed under the aegis of the ACSAA Color Slide Project, a nonprofit initiative administered through the former Asian Art Archives of the University of Michigan that from 1974 through 2006 provided high-quality original and duplicate 35mm color slides of the art and architecture of India and greater South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Indonesia, as well as the Himalayan regions, to individuals and institutions around the world for teaching and research purposes. With this new iteration, the original project’s educational intentions have not only been maintained, but have now been expanded to make the images available on an even wider scale and without fee. The user simply needs to register (free of charge) on the VMIS website before the images can be downloaded (free of charge).
Arts Council of the African Studies Association
News from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) includes a call for nominations for the new ACASA Curatorial Awards, coming soon. The spring 2016 Newsletter has been published (available to subscribers only).
ACASA is also sponsoring two panels at the upcoming annual meetings of the African Studies Association and the College Art Association. At the African Studies Association annual meeting, to be held December 1–3, 2016, in Washington, DC, the group will present “Shattering Single Stories in the Labeling and Presentation of Historical Arts of Africa.” The cochairs are Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi of Emory University and Yaëlle Biro from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. The participants are: Silvia Forni, Royal Ontario Museum; Kathryn Gunsch, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Nanina Guyer, Hans Himmelheber Photographic Archives, Museum Rietberg Zurich; and Matthew Francis Rarey, Oberlin College. The discussant is Karen E. Milbourne from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art.
The deadline for the call for submissions to the ACASA-sponsored panel at CAA’s next Annual Conference, taking place February 15–18, 2017, in New York, is August 30, 2016. Titled “Flesh,” the session will be chaired by Shannen Hill of the Baltimore Museum of Art.
The call for submissions and the full panel description will be listed on CAA website on July 1. By August 30, interested parties should send a CV and abstract of no more than 500 words to Shannen Hill. All parties will be notified of the outcome by September 15.
Foundations in Art: Theory and Education
Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE) has announced that the call for papers for its 2017 biennial conference, “To the Core and Beyond,” is now open.
Italian Art Society
In May, the Italian Art Society (IAS) sponsored two sessions titled “New Perspectives on Medieval Rome” at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Marius Hauknes (Johns Hopkins University) and Alison Locke Perchuk (California State University, Channel Islands) organized the panels. In August, IAS will sponsor two sessions at the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (SCSC) meeting in Bruges, Belgium: “Co-petition: Testing the Boundaries of Cooperation and Competition,” organized by Alexis Culotta (American Academy of Art, Chicago); and “The Holy Republic of Venice,” organized by Allison Sherman (Queen’s University) and Eveline Baseggio Omiccioli (Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York). An IAS Conference Travel Grant for Emerging Scholars has been awarded to Tenley Bick (doctoral candidate, University of California, Los Angeles) to support travel to the recent meeting of the American Association for Italian Studies in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. IAS/Kress International Conference Travel Grants have been awarded to Alexis Culotta and Giada Damen (Morgan Library and Museum) to support travel to SCSC in Bruges. The seventh annual IAS/Kress Lecture took place on June 1 at the Villa I Tatti in Florence. An audience of nearly eighty listened raptly to the paper presented by Megan Holmes (University of Michigan), “New Perspectives on the Reception of Florentine Panel Painting: Interpreting Scratch Marks.”
National Council of Arts Administrators
The forty-fourth National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA) annual gathering, “The Great Untapped: Unlocking Assets through Alliances,” will convene September 28–October 1, 2016, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Please join NCAA at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art for a discussion considering how institutions are now challenged to reconcile their own particular histories with the development of experiential curricula that connect students to an infinitely expanding world. How does one honor deep institutional history while cultivating alliances with other scholarly and cultural traditions? How can we foster alliances with outside communities as equal partners, and move away from an aesthetics of display to an ethics of care and deep understanding? We invite current and aspiring art department chairs, directors, and deans to attend. Visit the website to learn more about the conference and to join NCAA
Public Art Dialogue
Public Art Dialogue (PAD) has news. The winter 2016 issue of the Public Art Dialogue Newsletter features an interview by Jennifer K. Favorite with Kirk Savage, the recipient of the 2016 PAD award for achievement in public art. Marissa Lerer contributed an essay, “Built and Open Walls,” on public art in Washington, DC. There are several forthcoming special issues of PAD: Public Art Dialogue. The first is “Higher Ed: College Campuses and Public Art,” which will be edited by Monika Burczyk (submission deadline: September 1, 2016). Cher Krause Knight and Harriet F. Senie are serving as coeditors for an open issue (submission deadline: March 1, 2017). A third issue will feature guest editors Silvia Bottinelli and Margherita d’Ayala Valva; the theme will be “Food as Activism in Contemporary Public Art” (submission deadline: June 1, 2017). For more information, see http://publicartdialogue.org/journal/submissions.
SECAC
SECAC’s annual meeting will be held October 19–22, 2016, in Roanoke, Virginia, with Virginia Tech serving as host. Kevin Concannon, director of the School of Visual Arts and professor of art history at Virginia Tech, will serve as conference director. Sessions will take place at the official conference hotel, the Hotel Roanoke and Conference Center. The Hotel Roanoke, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1996, is in the heart of the city’s vibrant downtown and within easy walking distance of the Taubman Museum of Art, the Harrison Museum of African American Culture, and the O. Winston Link Museum, as well as many restaurants and bars. The conference schedule will be posted in early July on the SECAC website.
Excursions to Virginia Tech and Hollins University on Thursday and Friday evening include the 2015 Artist’s Fellowship exhibition opening, the 2016 SECAC Juried Exhibition, and the keynote speaker Lynn Hershman Leeson, who will present in the Moss Arts Center’s spectacular Snohetta-designed theater at Virginia Tech.
The last issue of the Southeastern College Art Conference Review has been published. The 2016 edition will be renamed Art Inquiries.
The deadline for the $5,000 SECAC 2016 Artist’s Fellowship is August 1, 2016. For application details, visit www.secacart.org/artists-fellowship.
Visual Resources Association
The Visual Resources Association (VRA) held its third joint conference with Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) in Seattle, Washington, this past March. The event offered an engaging and diverse program from ninety-five submitted paper or session proposals, resulting in thirty-nine sessions; fifteen submitted workshop proposals, resulting in six workshops; fifty-five submitted poster proposals, resulting in forty posters, and eleven SIG/SUG meetings. Topics included digital humanities, visual literacy, geospatial and visualization projects, image rights and reproductions, new technologies, museum education, environmental design, makerspaces, ebook publishing, materials education and research, diversity, RDF and LOD, crowdsourcing, cataloging, archives, visualization, and open access.
Key officers at the conference included VRA vice president for conference program, Chris Strasbaugh, as coordinator of the program and schedule in collaboration with Program Committee cochairs Dan McClure (ARLIS/NA), Denise Hattwig (ARLIS/NA), and Mar González Palacios (AASL, ARLIS/NA); VRA Education Committee cochairs Beth Wodnick Haas, Ryan Brubacher, and Marsha Taichman, who contributed toward programming; and the many presenters, instructors, and moderators who offered such timely, relevant, and forward-thinking content. The collaborative perspectives and working relationships of these individuals and many others set the tone for all conference planning and arrangements.
VRA honored Ann Whiteside with its Distinguished Service Award (she was also the recipient of the same award from ARLIS/NA) and conferred its Nancy DeLaurier Award to VRA Core 4.0 cocreators Kevin Esmé Cowles, Janice Eklund, Benjamin Kessler, and Trish Rose-Sandler. Sarah Bergmann, a design thinker and the founder of the Pollinator Pathway, spoke during convocation and shared perspectives on how the plight of the honey bee inspired her to consider symbiotic relationships and the importance of building pathways to support these relationships. While Bergmann’s consideration of bees inspired her to connect city dwellers to existing green spaces, her work inspired attendees to think about the benefits that might be realized when building connections across disciplines and professional organizations.
Apply for a 2016 Wyeth Foundation Publishing Grant
posted by Christopher Howard — Jul 14, 2016
CAA is accepting applications for the 2016 Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant program. Thanks to generous funding from the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, CAA awards publishing grants once a year to support book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art and related subjects. For purposes of this program, “American art” is defined as art created in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Books eligible for the Wyeth Grant have been accepted by a publisher on their merits but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy.
The publisher, not the author, must submit the application. Awards are made at the discretion of the jury and vary according to merit, need, and number of applications. Awardees are announced six to eight weeks after the deadline. For complete guidelines, application forms, and a grant description, please visit the Wyeth section of the CAA website. Deadline: September 15, 2016.
Apply for a Fall 2016 Meiss Grant
posted by Christopher Howard — Jul 11, 2016
CAA is accepting applications for fall 2016 grants through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to a generous bequest by the late art historian Millard Meiss, the twice-yearly program supports book-length scholarly manuscripts in any period of the history of art, visual studies, and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy.
The publisher, rather than the author, must submit the application to CAA. Awards are made at the discretion of the jury and vary according to merit, need, and number of applications. Awardees are announced six to eight weeks after the deadline. For the complete guidelines, application forms, and a grant description, please visit the Meiss section of the CAA website. Deadline: September 15, 2016.
Professional-Development Fellowships for Graduate Students
posted by CAA — Jul 06, 2016
About the Program
CAA’s Professional-Development Fellowships program supports promising artists, designers, craftspersons, historians, curators, and critics who are enrolled in MFA, PhD, and other terminal-degree programs nationwide. Fellows are honored with $10,000 grants to help them with various aspects of their work, whether it be for job-search expenses or purchasing materials for the studio. CAA believes a grant of this kind, without contingencies, can best facilitate the transition between graduate studies and professional careers.
One award will be presented to a practitioner—an artist, designer, and/or craftsperson—and one award will be presented to an art, architecture, and/or design historian, curator, or critic. Fellows also receive a free one-year CAA membership and complimentary registration to the Annual Conference. Honorable mentions, given at the discretion of the jury, also earn a free one-year CAA membership and complimentary conference registration.
CAA initiated its fellowship program in 1993 to help student artists and art historians bridge the gap between their graduate studies and professional careers.
Are You Eligible?
CAA seeks applications from students who are current members; are citizens or permanent residents of the United States; will receive their MFA or PhD degree in the calendar year following the year of application (2017 for the next fellowship cycle); and have outstanding capabilities and demonstrate distinction in approach, technique, or perspective in their contribution to art history and the visual arts. A jury of artists, curators, and other professionals will review all applications in fall 2016 and announce the recipients in January 2017.
How to Apply
Please visit collegeartassociation.slideroom.com to submit applications to the 2016 MFA and PhD Professional-Development Fellowship programs. The deadline for applications for the PhD fellowships is Monday, October 3, 2016, and Friday, November 11, 2016, for the MFA fellowships. CAA will send notifications in January 2017.
Contact
For more information about the CAA fellowship program, please contact Roberta Lawson, CAA fellowships coordinator, at 212-392-4404.
Photograph: Derrick Woods-Morrow
The Getty Foundation to Fund a Reunion for the College Art Association-Getty International Program
posted by CAA — Jun 28, 2016
The Getty Foundation has awarded the College Art Association (CAA) a major grant to fund the CAA-Getty International Program for the sixth consecutive year. Having completed five successful years of programming, CAA will use the grant to underwrite the cost of bringing twenty alumni to the 2017 Annual Conference for a reunion program. The Foundation’s support will enable CAA to bring these international visual arts professionals to the conference, taking place February 15-18, 2017, in New York City. Funds will support all travel expenses, hotel accommodations, per diems, conference registrations, and one-year CAA memberships.
The reunion will focus on common themes and interests in global art history, its greatest challenges, and what can be done to overcome them. Relying on the geographic and scholarly diversity of the twenty alumni, the reunion program will explore multiple points of view related to the state of the field, including interdisciplinary and transnational approaches to art history, the nature of cross-cultural collaborations, and future directions of the discipline. The 2017 attendees, together with leading art historians from the United States, will participate in several sessions devoted to these topics throughout the conference.
Since the CAA-Getty International Program began in 2012, ninety scholars have participated in CAA’s Annual Conference. Historically, the majority of international registrants at the Annual Conference have come from North America, the United Kingdom, and Western European countries. The CAA-Getty International Program has diversified the Annual Conference, adding scholars from Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, Africa, Asia, Southeast Asia, Caribbean countries, and South America. The majority of the alumni teach art history (or visual studies, art theory, or architectural history) at the university level; others are museum curators or researchers. Prior to participating in this program, none of the alumni had attended a CAA Annual Conference.
A remarkable number of international collaborations have ensued, including an ongoing study of similarities and differences in the history of art among Eastern European countries and South Africa, attendance at other international conferences, publications in international journals, and participation in panels and sessions at subsequent CAA Annual Conferences. Former grant recipients have become ambassadors of CAA in their countries, sharing knowledge gained at the Annual Conference with their colleagues at home.
Building on the evident success of the program, alumni at the 2017 reunion will provide input on how to further strengthen the program. How can CAA better serve international members? How can it cultivate future collaborations among CAA-Getty participants and CAA members? Are there ways to broaden the reach of the program to include artists, designers, and other types of arts professionals? The views and suggestions gathered at this convening will provide valuable insights as CAA works to enlarge its international activities.
For more information on the CAA-Getty International Program and other CAA travel opportunities, visit CAA Travel Grants.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for June 2016
posted by CAA — Jun 16, 2016
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
June 2016
In this online database, the curated compilation Facing the Self: Program 2 bring together artists working with the female form, particularly the face. “Using at times elaborate, but more often very limited, visual means and divergent visual and theatrical strategies, each tape explores, asserts, withholds and/or claims power over the representations of the artist’s body, its appearance and experiences.”
Facing the Self is part of the Video Data Bank, founded at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1976. Included in this compilation of early video works are: Hermine Freed, Two Faces (1972); Lynda Benglis, Now (1973); Steina Vasulka, Let it Be (1972); Linda Montano, Mitchell’s Death (1977); Susan Mogul, Take Off (1974); and Eleanor Antin, The Adventures of a Nurse (1976).
“I was writing an essay at the time comparing male artists’ representations of their sexuality with female artists,’” Mogul explains of Take Off. In response to Vito Acconci’s work Undertone, where the artist was supposed to be masturbating while seated at a table, the video that Mogul created posits the artist at the end of a table, directly confronting the viewer and “with a good deal of ironic humor, she transforms the ‘girl’ into a woman and an artist, who positions herself not under the table (as in Acconci’s Undertone) but directly across from the viewer’ alternately discussing the ‘history’ of her vibrator and occasionally using it.”
Louise Fishman: Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock
Institute of Contemporary Art
University of Pennsylvania, 118 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA
April 29–August 14, 2016
Conceived as a studio visit, Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia presents a selection of sketchbooks, miniature paintings, and small sculptures by Louise Fishman, known for her abstract paintings “with an athletic reach of scale and gesture.”
Miniature canvases, as small as two by three inches, accompany sculptures made from found objects, and cast in bronze from plaster models, along with books whose mark making “burst with narrative drive like Amazonian comics rendered abstract.”
Fishman describes her formative years in the 1960s New York scene: “Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning were big for me—Joan Mitchell too. Then Minimalism came along and I was looking at Sol LeWitt and making hard-edge grid paintings. My group encouraged me to see that everything I was doing as a painter—even using stretched canvas and a paintbrush—was male, and this was problematic.”
Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock concentrates on the intimate and potent concerns of the artist: her Philadelphia roots, her feminist and queer politics, her Jewish identity, her friendships with Agnes Martin and Eva Hesse, and her meditations on the grid.
Sama Alshaibi: Silsila
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art
7374 East Second Street, Scottsdale, AZ
June 4–September 18, 2016
Named for the Arabic word silsila, or “link,” the exhibition at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art by the Iraqi-born artist Sama Alshaibi represents the joining of individuals to one another, humans with the natural works, and the self to the divine.
Inspired by the fourteenth century explorer and scholar Ibn Batutah, Alshaibi retraced his path through the Middle East, North Africa, and the Maldives. Her large-scale photographs and videos “provoke contemporary questions about borders, migration, and environmental demise in relation to the human body.”
Working in predominantly Muslim countries since 2009, Alshaibi presents the feminine form as a “metaphor for humanity and the natural world, using jewel-like colors, geometric patterning, mirroring and symmetry to reference the formal qualities of Islamic art traditions.”
No play_Feminist Training Camp
neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK)
Oranienstraße 25, 10999 Berlin, Germany
May 21–June 24, 2016
In 2013, the nGbK group investigated the pronoun “we” with the project WIR SPIELEN (WE PLAY). Their practice is informed by the idea that the structure of HOW we come together strongly influences WHAT we can do together. Following the group statement and an urgent need to “revive old as well as to develop new feminist and anti-fascist strategies of resistance, survival, and collective action,”nGbK has turned into a Feminist Training Camp: No play, a proposal toward a new social structure seeking to spatially and thematically integrate the space of art as space for action.
This site for activity and exchange is organized in training units developed by international actors from the fields of art, literature, performance, activism, martial arts, health, and film, and includes formats dealing with language as a weapon in political resistance, employing both creative strategies and practice-oriented workshops such as self-defense courses and a feminist repair café. Knowledge exchange from lived experiences is the key. A radio broadcasting system is set up that will allow the recapitulation of the conversations going on in the training camp as form of dissemination.
Based on a queer understanding of feminism, whose issues go far beyond women’s equality, the Feminist Training Camp is structured by zones of different means of production, such as documentary and archival sound and video recordings, a work table, sports mats, and artistic installations. Works and materials are made available in the exhibition space during the course of the training camp and form an infrastructure for planning and training.
At the end of the year a publication of the outcome of the Feminist Training Camp will be released. No Play aims to be developed as a poetic-political manual compiling the strategies, discussions, and experiences of the project.
Michèle Lemieux: The Whole and Its Parts: From Drawings to Animated Films
Canadian Cultural Centre
5, rue de Constantine, Paris, 75007 France
April 15–September 2, 2016
The Canadian Cultural Center in Paris presents The Whole and Its Parts: From Drawings to Animated Films, an exhibition of work by Michèle Lemieux, an illustrator of children’s books, an animated filmmaker, and an educator. The project proposes a reflection on the representation of reality, time, and the human condition.
The Whole and Its Parts: From Drawings to Animated Films invites the viewer to discover the visual experimentations, working methods, and aesthetic of an exceptional artist, the director of films, the latest of which, Here and the Great Elsewhere, was produced at the National Film Board of Canada between 2010 and 2012 with a remarkable instrument—the pinscreen—that was invented in France by the filmmakers Alexandre Alexeïeff and Claire Parker during the 1930s.
Born in Quebec in 1955, Lemieux is a world expert in the technique of pinscreen and will share process and devices in the show. Ephemeral images of the pins and shadows are projected onto a white surface. A fixed camera photographs each drawing and then transmits it to a computer, which records the successive images produced by the tiny changes made to the support. The pinscreen naturally lends itself to morphing one image into another but within the confines of a fixed frame.
This exhibition is both a reflection on Lemieux’s practice and an introduction to her creative process, aiming to open a wider debate beyond the use of drawing in art making, and in film animation in particular, addressing the implications of the use of an archaic tool in contemporary art and design.
Andra Ursuţa: Alps
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002
April 27–June 16, 2016
The New Museum presents Alps, the first museum exhibition in New York of Andra Ursuţa.
Born in Romania in 1979, Ursuţa immigrated to the United States in the late 1990s, and yet many of the narrative facets of her upbringing, such as folk traditions and nationalist propaganda, remain evident throughout her work. Since her early practice, Ursuţa has used a fatalistic dark humor to expose power dynamics that inquire the vulnerability of the human body and examine modes of desire.
For her exhibition at the New Museum, Ursuţa debuts a new sculptural installation, Alps (2016), presented in dialogue with the artist’s recent sculptures, including her series Commerce Exterieur Mondial Sentimental (2012) and Whites (2015), which will have their American premiere in this show.
Alps evokes a specific geographical feature, Europe’s major natural barrier that has taken on a new significance in light of current efforts by migrants to cross into Western Europe. The installation seen alongside Whites—a squadron of forlorn obelisks patrolling the premises like ghosts of bygone imperialist ambitions—suggests a commentary on the impulse to guard and fortify borders.
Commerce Exterieur Mondial Sentimental (2012) includes life-sized marble figures adorned with coins glare. Informed by a socialist-realist aesthetic and inspired by a news image of a Roma woman being deported from France, these sculptures evoke lifeless women trapped in an economy in which the value of both human beings and commodities is determined by foreign powers.
Art History Pedagogy and Practice Now Live on Digital Commons
posted by michelle — Jun 13, 2016
Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR), in partnership with the Office of Library Services at the City University of New York (CUNY), is excited to announce the launch of Art History Pedagogy and Practice (AHPP) on Academic Works’ Digital Commons platform. Published by AHTR, a practitioner-led, open-educational resource for educators who address art history, visual culture, and material culture, AHPP is the first academic journal dedicated to the scholarship of teaching and learning in art history (SoTL-AH). The result of a two-year initiative, AHPP responds to a long-standing need to advance, collect, disseminate, and demonstrate pedagogical research specific to the discipline. The call for papers for the inaugural issue, forthcoming in fall 2016, is available on the AHTR website.
SoTL in Art History
AHPP results from a two-year initiative that sought to examine the ways in which art historians devote time, effort, and energy to classroom teaching, curriculum development, and student engagement. Generously funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, AHTR began preliminary research in 2015, which included a field-wide survey conducted by Randi Korn and Associates and a literature review assessing existing pedagogical scholarship in art history. These findings were synthesized in a white paper that demonstrated the need for SoTL-AH to be acknowledged as a legitimate area of intellectual inquiry by the institutions and communities encompassing academic art history. As a peer-reviewed journal devoted to SoTL-AH, AHPP will facilitate this process by providing scholars a forum to share research on pedagogical topics and by encouraging further academic investigation and discourse around teaching and learning in art history.
Art History Teaching Resources
AHPP builds on the success of AHTR as a platform to exchange ideas related to pedagogy in art history. Founded on dual goals to raise the value of the academic labor of teaching and to provide peer support across ranks of tenured, tenure-track, and contingent instructors, AHTR began as a collaboration between Michelle Millar Fisher at the Graduate Center and Karen Shelby at Baruch College in 2011. Fisher, then a graduate teaching fellow with a background in museum education, and Shelby, then assistant professor of art history, organized meetings where colleagues shared teaching materials and experiences. These gatherings suggested potential for a digital forum to connect a wider community of practitioners and gave rise to the arthistoryteachingresources.org website, which launched publicly in 2013.
Since that time, the site has had more than 400,000 hits from over 91,000 educators in K-12, postsecondary institutions, and art museums, and from academic support staff including reference librarians and curriculum designers. AHTR’s administration has similarly expanded to a leadership collective of art historians, ranging in experience from early career scholars to those well established in the field, and an advisory network, assembled for expertise and leadership in art history, museum education, and digital humanities and united by their interest in advancing pedagogical research. The unique relationship between AHPP and AHTR will give scholars access to diverse resources about teaching and learning—including lesson plans and the AHTR Weekly on the OER—as well as peer-reviewed articles published in the journal.
AHPP in Digital Commons
In choosing the Digital Commons platform, AHPP is enthusiastic to extend the relationship with CUNY that was first established when AHTR was born in the Graduate Center’s New Media Lab with support from Baruch Learning and Technology Grants. In keeping with the site’s origins, AHTR also contracted CHIPS, a New York web-development studio known for innovative work with cultural institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History and 82nd and Fifth. CHIPS also redesigned the AHTR website in 2014 and created the AHPP logo.
The editors, editorial collective, and advisory board of AHPP are excited to join CUNY’s Office of Library Services in the broader open-access movement and look forward to the ways in which journal contributions will be used in the fields of SoTL, art history, and beyond. AHPP worked closely with librarians at the Office of Library Services to develop editorial policies and guidelines that are transparent to authors and readers.
AHTR and CAA
Members of the AHTR advisory board have recently collaborated with CAA’s Education Committee. At the 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC, Renee McGarry spoke on “Crowdsourcing the Art History Survey: How Communities and Conversations Might Help Shape the Global Survey 3.0” in a session cochaired by Anne R. Norcross, an Education Committee member. In addition, AHTR advisory-board member Kelly Donahue Wallace has been collaborating with the committee’s Denise Baxter, including leading a workshop on SoTL initiatives at next year’s conference in New York.
Spring 2016 Recipients of the Millard Meiss Publication Fund
posted by Christopher Howard — Jun 01, 2016
This spring, CAA awarded grants to the publishers of six books in art history and visual culture through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to the generous bequest of the late Prof. Millard Meiss, CAA gives these grants to support the publication of scholarly books in art history and related fields.
The six Meiss grantees for spring 2016 are:
- Joanna Grabski, Art World City: The Creative Economy of Artists and Urban Life in Dakar, Indiana University Press
- Shelley Drake Hawks, Painting by Candlelight: The Art of Resistance in Mao’s China, University of Washington Press
- Miya Mizuta Lippit, Aesthetic Life: The Artistic Discourse of Beauty in Modern Japan, Harvard University Press
- Leora Maltz-Leca, William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor and Other Doubtful Enterprises, University of California Press
- Heather McPherson, Art and Celebrity in the Age of Reynolds and Siddons, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Amanda Wunder, Sacred Art and Society in Seventeenth-Century Seville, Pennsylvania State University Press
Books eligible for Meiss grants must already be under contract with a publisher and on a subject in the visual arts or art history. Authors and presses must be current CAA members. Please review the application guidelines for more information.