CAA News Today
2018 CAA-Getty International Program Participants Selected
posted by CAA — Oct 10, 2017
CAA is pleased to announce this year’s participants in the CAA-Getty International Program. Now in its seventh year, the international program will bring fifteen new participants and five alumni to the 2018 Annual Conference in Los Angeles, February 21-24. The participants—professors of art history, curators, and artists who teach art history—hail from countries throughout the world, expanding CAA’s growing international membership and contributing to an increasingly diverse community of scholars and ideas. Selected by a jury of CAA members from a highly competitive group of applicants, the grant recipients will receive funding for travel expenses, hotel accommodations, conference registration, CAA membership, and per diems for out-of-pocket expenditures.
At a one-day preconference colloquium, to be held this year at the Getty Center, the fifteen new participants will discuss key issues in the international study of art history together with five CAA-Getty alumni and several CAA members from the United States, who also serve as hosts throughout the conference. The preconference program will delve deeper into subjects discussed during the past year’s CAA-Getty reunion, held at the 2017 Annual Conference, in which twenty alumni presented a series of conference sessions titled “Global Conversations.” Topics include such issues as postcolonial and Eurocentric legacies, interdisciplinary and transnational methodologies, and global trends in museum research and exhibitions.
The inclusion of five alumni is an added feature of this year’s CAA-Getty program. They will provide intellectual links between previous convenings of the international group and this year’s program and also serve as ombudsmen between CAA and the growing community of CAA-Getty alumni. In addition to contributing to the preconference colloquium, the five participating alumni will present a new Global Conversation during the 2018 conference titled Border Crossings: The Migration of Art, People, and Ideas.
The goal of the CAA-Getty International Program is to increase international participation in the organization’s activities, thereby expanding international networks and the exchange of ideas both during and after the conference. CAA currently includes members from 70 countries around the world. The CAA-Getty International Program is made possible with a generous grant from The Getty Foundation.
2018 Participants in the CAA-Getty International Program
John Agberia, Professor, Department of Fine Arts & Design, University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria
Felipe Chaimovich, Chief Curator and Professor, Museo de Arte Moderna de São Paulo Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado, Brazil
Chen Liu, Associate Professor, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Thanavi Chotpradit, Lecturer, Silpakorn University, Bangkok, Thailand
Katarzyna Cytlak, postdoctoral researcher, Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Anna Guseva, Associate Professor, Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia
Marketa Hanova, Director of the Collection of Asian Art, The National Gallery in Prague, Czech Republic
Alison Kearney, Lecturer, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, South Africa
Natalia Keller, Researcher of the Collection Department, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile
Hsin-tien Liao, Dean of College of Humanities, National Taiwan University of Arts, New Taipei City, Taiwan
Natalia Moussienko, Leading Research Fellow, Modern Art Research Institute, National Academy of Arts, Kiev, Ukraine
Sandra Krizic Roban, Senior Research Advisor, Institute of Art History, Zagreb, Croatia
Simon Soon, Senior Lecturer, University of Malaya /Malaysia Design Archive, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Romuald Tchibozo, Senior Lecturer, University of Abomey-Calavi, Benin
Sarah Umer, PhD Coordinator/ Assistant Professor, Lahore College for Women University, Pakistan
Participating Alumni
Cezar Bartholomeu, Assistant Professor, School of Fine Arts, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Parul Pandya Dhar, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Delhi, India
Ildikó Fehér, Associate Professor, Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest, Hungary
Peju Layiwola, Professor of Art History, Department of Creative Arts University of Lagos, Nigeria
Nomusa Makhubu, Senior Lecturer, Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, South Africa
CWA Picks for October 2017
posted by CAA — Oct 05, 2017
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship.
Her Paris: Women Artists in the Age of Impressionism
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Tatiana Parcero, Cartografia Interior #43 , 1996. Lambda print and acetate. 43 x 31 in. Scripps College. Photo credit: jdc Fine Art.
October 22, 2017–January 14, 2018
Denver Art Museum
100 W 14th Avenue Pkwy
Denver, CO
Her Paris: Women Artists in the Age of Impressionism features works created by women in Paris from 1850 to 1900, including well-known artists Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and Rosa Bonheur, to lesser-known painters such as Anna Ancher and Paula Modersohn-Becker.
At a time of great cultural change, women were barred from attending the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and it was socially unacceptable for a woman to be unaccompanied in public spaces. The exhibition at the Denver Art Museum traces “how, despite societal challenges women embraced their artistic aspirations and helped create an alternative system that included attending private academies, exhibiting independently, and forming their own organizations, such as the influential Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs.”
Her Paris is organized by the American Federation of Arts, curated by Laurence Madeline, independent curator and formerly chief curator of Fine Arts at the Musée d’art et d’histoire in Geneva, and curated locally by Angelica Daneo, curator of painting and sculpture at the DAM. Following its run at the DAM, it will travel to The Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky (February 17–May 13, 2018), and to its final destination at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts (June 6–September 3, 2018).
Sobey Art Award Exhibition
October 24–December 9, 2017
Art Museum at the University of Toronto
University of Toronto Art Center
15 King’s College Circle
Toronto, Ontario
The winner and four finalists for the prestigious Sobey Art Award will be on exhibit at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto from October 9 through December 9, 2017. The 2017 finalists for the award, promoting Canadian contemporary art, are Ursula Johnson, Jacynthe Carrier, Bridget Moser, Divya Mehra, and Raymond Boisjoky. The shortlisted artists question and challenge preconceived notions of diversity and identity and performance.
Installation and performance artist Ursula Johnson, of Mi’kmaw First Nation ancestry, often deploys a collaborative process in her place-based performances. “At this time when Canadians are celebrating and challenging the memory of nationhood, Johnson’s work embodies a considered, critical, yet generous lens through which multiple histories and communities may be considered,” juror Sarah Filmore writes.
Finalist Jacynthe Carrier uses photography and video to explore “the different relationships the body has with the environment and ways of conceptualizing and appropriating the land.” Bodies and objects are assembled as intervention in the landscape.
Bridget Moser, selected for the William and Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Artists, hits “all the bewildering emotional registers of internet culture,” writes juror Sarah Robayo Sheridan. “Moser’s singular voice joins a sentinel species of millennial artists alerting audiences to the new paradoxes of commodity culture gone wild, and offers tragicomic remedy in excess of even the most bombastic late night infomercial.”
“Divya Mehra’s work is an astute example of how art can destabilize our collective and individual perceptions about race and gender,” Jenifer Paparo writes. Mehra explores diasporic identities, racialization, otherness and the construct of ‘diversity’ through a variety of mediums, addressing the effects of colonization and institutional racism re-contextualizing references found in hip hop, literature and current affairs.
The fifth finalist, Indigenous artist of Haida descent, Raymond Boisjoly’s practice “concerns the deployment of images, objects and materials, in and as, Indigenous art, using a reflexive approach to foreground the discourses that frame and delimit the work produced by Indigenous artists.” Boisjoly works in various media, from photography to installation, murals and video.
Revolution and Ritual: The Photographs of Sara Castrejón, Graciela Iturbide, and Tatiana Parcero
August 26, 2017–January 7, 2018
Scripps College
Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery
251 E. Eleventh Street
Claremont, CA
Celebrating three Mexican woman photographers, Revolution and Ritual features work by Sarah Castrejón, Graciela Iturbide, and Tatiana Pacero. Through the work of the three women, the exhibit explores notions of Mexican identity and considers how photography has been transformed over the past century in Mexico and “responds to the artists’ interest in representing present and past, self and other.”
From documentary photography to more poetic photography, the women in the exhibition explore themes of war, indigenous culture, body and self. Castrejón’s images portray people under the intense pressure of war during the Mexican revolution, while Iturbide’s images reflect the daily life of Mexican Indigenous cultures, and Pacero places herself within the frame through self portraits that “incorporate spliced images of her body with cosmological maps and Aztec codices.
The exhibit is accompanied by a catalog with essays Latin American photography scholars John Mraz, Marta Dahó, and Esther Gabara. Revolution and Ritual is a part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, exploring Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles.
Roots of “The Dinner Party”: History in the Making
October 20, 2017–March 4, 2018
Brooklyn Museum of Art
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, NY
Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party has been a touchstone for feminist thinking about representation, research, and the politics of identity in art history (and history, broadly conceived). Ten years ago the Elizabeth A Sackler Center for Feminist Art opened in the Brooklyn Museum; a triangular gallery, its centerpiece was, and remains, The Dinner Party. This has no doubt been a challenge for the Center’s curator, Catherine Morris—to know that any exhibition will alaways be read in dialogue with Chicago’s monumental work. Yet for an exhibition like this, the gallery’s organization is a boon. This exhibition plumbs Chicago’s process and the processes of her collaborators. Test plates, notebooks, preperatory drawings, and research documents that will be on display attest to the staggering amount of research and prototyping that went into creating The Dinner Party, a work that does its political work– visiblizing women’s contributions to art, science, myth, and all the rest.
Roots of “The Dinner Party”: History in the Making is part of A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum, a yearlong series of exhibitions celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.
Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell
September 16, 2017–February 10, 2018
Vincent Price Art Museum
1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez
Los Angeles, CA
This exhibition provides the first opportunity to view a diverse sampling from photographer Laura Aguilar’s complex and rich oeuvre. Raised in the San Gabriel Valley, where her family traces its roots back generations, Aguilar was dogged in using her camera to render herself and her various communities visible. You see this in the touching portraits of the women who populated the Plush Pony, a working-class Chicana/Latina lesbian bar. Or in the series “Latina Lesbians” series, wherein Aguilar’s subjects have added their own handwritten words to their portraits. Throughout the show one can follow the various ways Aguilar deploys her own body in her photographs—as bounded to national and ethnic lines of identification, as the repository for the unruly affects of depression, as something solid like a boulder. In one self portrait Aguilar stand between two small table-top displays of toys and catholic ephemera. A Pee-Wee Herman doll shares space with the Virgen de Guadalupe. These heterogenous objects, bespeaking both spirituality and pop culture, are emblematic of just a couple of the many thematics that can be drawn out from this remarkable retrospective.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog that is equally impressive, containing essays by: Mei Valenzuela, Christopher A. Velasco, Deborah Cullen, Amelia Jones, James Estrella, Tracy M. Zuniga, Stefanie Snider, Macarena Gómez-Barris, and Sybil Venegas, the curator of Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell and Aguilar’s former mentor.
Art Journal Open Call for Essays and Artist Projects
posted by CAA — Oct 03, 2017
Submit to Art Journal Open
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Recently in Art Journal Open, art historians Margo Machida and Jaimey Hamilton Faris spoke with artists Lynne Yamamoto and Sean Connelly about their sculptural works on view at the Honolulu Biennial. [image: Sean Connelly, Thatch Assembly with Rocks (2060s), 2017 and Lynne Yamamoto, Borrowed Time, 2017, installation view at Foster Gardens (artwork © Sean Connelly; artwork © Lynne Yamamoto; photograph © Lucretia Knapp)]
CAA invites submissions and proposals of artists’ projects, essays, conversations, and more to Art Journal Open, an open-access, independently edited, peer reviewed web journal that provides an agile counterpart to the quarterly Art Journal. Art Journal Open publishes original content by artists, scholars, teachers, archivists, curators, critics, and other cultural producers and commentators, with the commitment to foster new intellectual exchanges. Contributions focus on post-1945 material with an emphasis on the contemporary, although topics from throughout the twentieth-century may be considered. As an online publication, Art Journal Open prioritizes material that makes meaningful use of the web, such as multimedia formats and techniques. Rebecca K. Uchill serves as web editor of Art Journal Open, which publishes on a rolling basis.
Please send your submission to Uchill at art.journal.open@collegeart.org. Articles should be accompanied by images or time-based media elements that are to be published with the text; artists’ projects should also include the visual or multimedia material intended for publication. For proposals, please include a one-page written description and sample images. Full submission instructions can be found on Art Journal Open.
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — Sep 29, 2017
Megan Driscoll discusses SoulStirrers: Black Art and the Neo-Ancestral Impulse by H. Ike Okafor-Newsum (Horace Newsum). Read the full review on caa.reviews.
Andrew James Hamilton reviews Design for Eternity: Architectural Models from the Ancient Americas by Joanne Pillsbury, Patricia Joan Sarro, James Doyle, and Juliet Wiersema. Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Andy Campbell visits Come as You Are: Art of the 1990s, on view at the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin from February 21–May 15, 2016. Read the full review on caa.reviews.
Victoria Reed reviews Irrational Judgments: Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and 1960s New York by Kirsten Swenson. Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Matthijs Ilsink reads Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life by Joseph Leo Koerner. Read the full review on caa.reviews.
Affiliated Society News for September 2017
posted by CAA — Sep 27, 2017
Leading subject association for art history in the UK announces new identity
Since July 2017, the leading subject association for art history in the United Kingdom, the Association of Art Historians, has been known as the Association for Art History. The change of name and new identity mark the beginning of a new era for the Association, following a review of its role in shaping the future for art history.
The Association’s mission since its foundation in 1974 has been to champion art history for all. Working in partnership with London-based agency Spencer du Bois to build upon this original ethos, the new identity restates their role as advocates for art history.
The new graphic identity feeds into their wider campaigning and audience development work to increase awareness, understanding, and engagement with art history, particularly in education. Highlights from their education campaign and 2018 program will be announced this autumn. Their ambition is to encourage people across the UK to recognize the ways in which learning about art history offers a unique insight into the world: to encourage people to think differently; to see differently.
Pontus Rosén, CEO of the Association for Art History, states, “Our strength as the national subject association for art history relies on how we express ourselves to new and existing audiences. The name change and rebrand demonstrates our commitment to be more visible and vocal for the subject.”
Christine Riding, Chair of the Association, said, “In 1974 we were radical in our approach. We wanted to change the way people perceived art history, we dared to do things differently. For over 40 years we have championed a broad and inclusive art history for the many not the few. Our ethos has always been one of inclusivity and our new identity reinforces that inclusivity.”
More details can be found on the new website.
Alliance for Arts in Research Universities (A2ru)
The Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru) is pleased to announce the 2017 a2ru National Conference, hosted by Northeastern University with additional conference events throughout hosted by Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Tufts University, November 1-4, 2017.
Arts in the Public Sphere: Civility, Advocacy, and Engagement will use the city of Boston as a starting point for discussion and engagement. As a 21st century global city, Boston embodies many of the issues that drive diverse contemporary cultural contexts. It supports a rich and continually evolving sense of civic realms, and is home to leading arts, educational, medical, industrial and corporate entities invested in innovative modes of research, practice and civic participation. There is also clear recognition that the ‘public sphere’ is not confined to large metropolitan regions. Creating dynamic communities that engage and extend beyond traditional boundaries—in both virtual and material ways—remains a growing challenge and the work before us.
The 2017 conference will include working groups, panels, and presentations from representatives from over 50 institutions across the world. Keynotes and conversations will feature thought leaders including Jamie Bennett (ArtPlace America), Jeremy Liu (PolicyLink), Peter Galison (Harvard University), Rick Lowe (Project Row Houses and the University of Houston), and Maria Rosario Jackson (The Kresge Foundation). Plenary panels addressing issues related to funding, higher education, and arts as research will include Kent Devereaux (New Hampshire Institute of Art), Jason Schupbach (Arizona State University), Steven Tepper (Arizona State University), Elizabeth Hudson (Northeastern University), and Julia Smith (Association of American Universities), and E. San San Wong (Barr Foundation).
Registration is open now through October 25. To register and for more information, please visit the conference website.
Society for Photographic Education
Society for Photographic Education’s 55th Annual Conference, Uncertain Times: Borders, Refuge, Community, Nationhood, will take place March 14, 2018, in Philadelphia, PA. Connect with 1,600 artists, educators, and photographers from around the world for programming that will fuel your creativity – four days of presentations, industry seminars, and critiques to engage you! Explore an exhibits fair featuring the latest equipment, processes, publications, and photography/media schools. Participate in one-on-one portfolio critiques, and informal portfolio sharing. Other highlights include a print raffle, silent auction, mentoring sessions,
film screenings, exhibitions, receptions, a dance party, and more!
Registration will open on November 1, 2017.
The most recent number of SECAC’s annual journal, Art Inquiries (formerly the SECAC Review), has been published. The current issue includes book and exhibition reviews, feature articles on Gustave Caillebotte, Andy Warhol, Robert Irwin, and Greek vase painting, and an interview with sculptor Duane Paxson whose work is featured on the cover.
The 73rd Annual SECAC Conference, hosted by the Columbus College of Art & Design, will be held in Columbus, Ohio, October 25 through 28, 2017. Keynote speakers are Heidelberg Project founder Tyree Guyton and the project’s Executive Director Jenenne Whitfield. Off-site events during the conference will include a Thursday evening Open House at CCAD featuring the SECAC 2017 Juried Exhibition, a Friday evening reception at the Pizzuti Collection, and extended hours at the newly renovated Columbus Museum of Art.
TIAMSA – The International Art Market Studies Association
After a fantastic response to our call for papers, TIAMSA’s first international conference on ‘Art Fairs’ united 28 speakers from countries worldwide who explored this year’s theme in six sessions. Held at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London on July 13-15, 2017, the conference featured two keynotes, one by Sophie Raux (Université Lumière – Lyon 2), who provided fascinating insights into the early history of art fairs in the 16th and 17th centuries, the other by Noah Horowitz (Director Americas / Member of the Executive Committee, Art Basel), who responded to questions from Olav Velthuis and the audience. The conference featured six sessions addressing subjects such as “Standards of Quality and Vetting,“ “Historical and Geographic Contexts” or “Biennales and Nascent Fairs.” Carried by many excellent papers, the event not only showed that the subject of the art fair still offers many facets that deserves further exploration; the conference was also marked by enthusiasm, lively debate, and intensive networking!
The conference was preceded by three memorable events open to TIAMSA members, namely an exploration of the Agnew’s Archive at the National Gallery, London with Alan Crookham (Head of NG Research Centre); a guided tour with Highlights of the National Gallery’s Collection History with Susanna Avery-Quash (Curator at the NG); and an inside tour of Thaddaeus Ropac’s new London gallery, with Polly Gaer, Gallery Director.
We were also happy that many of our members attended our second Annual General Meeting, held just before our conference. We looked back on our first year, fine-tuned our ‘modus operandi’, and elected and cordially welcomed four new board members: Kim Oosterlinck (University of Bruxelles), Iain Robertson (Sotheby’s Institute), Olav Velthuis (University of Amsterdam) and Filip Vermeylen (University of Rotterdam), and also made plans for next year’s conference.
The American Society for Aesthetics
The American Society for Aesthetics is pleased to announce several ASA meetings and co-sponsored conferences in 2018:
ASA MEETINGS:
ASA Pacific Meeting, Asilomar Conference Center, Pacific Grove, CA, April 4-6, 2018
DEADLINE: November 1, 2017
Travel support: The Division will have $1000 from the Irene H. Chayes Travel Fund to support persons with no other access to travel funds.
ASA Eastern Meeting, Philadelphia, April 20-21, 2018
DEADLINE: January 15, 2018
Travel support: The Division will have $1000 from the Irene H. Chayes Travel Fund to support persons with no other access to travel funds.
ASA Rocky Mountain Division Meeting, Santa Fe, NM, July 6-8, 2018
DEADLINE: March 1, 2018
Travel support: The Division will have $1000 from the Irene H. Chayes Travel Fund to support persons with no other access to travel funds.
ASA 76th Annual Meeting, Toronto, ON, Canada, October 10-13, 2018
DEADLINE: January 15, 2018
Travel support:
- All full-time students with papers or panel presentations accepted for the program receive a travel grant to attend the meeting.
- Three (3) Irene H. Chayes Travel Grants will be available for this meeting for presenters with no other access to travel funds.
ASA CO-SPONSORED CONFERENCES:
The Philosophy of Portraits, University of Maryland, April13-14, 2018
DEADLINE: November 30, 2017
Travel support: Two awards of $500 each for ASA student members with accepted papers
Summer Seminar: Beauty and Why It Matters, University of British Columbia, July 9-27, 2018
DEADLINE: January 2018 – CFP TBA
Travel support: $2700 stipend
For the most up-to-date information on all ASA meetings and co-sponsored conferences, look at the bottom of any page on our website and look for “Meetings.” Click “more” to see the complete list. There you will find schedules, CFPs, on-line registration, and other information.
PAD invites submissions for the Fall 2018 issue of the journal, Public Art Dialogue. The issue’s theme will be “Public Art as Political Action,” and the deadline for submissions is March 1, 2018. Though a resurgence in political art and protest brings contemporary art to the forefront, this issue also hopes to look at historic precedents for contemporary public protest art by revisiting the ephemera, public actions, and protest art of the past. Public Art Dialogue welcomes submissions from art historians, critics, artists, architects, landscape architects, curators, administrators, and other public art scholars and professionals, including those who are emerging as well as already established in the field. See the call for papers.
Public Art Dialogue hopes to see many CAA members at the Annual Conference in February. PAD’s sponsored session will be on the topic of “Teachable Monuments,” chaired by Sierra Rooney and Harriet Senie.
Association of Art Museum Curators & AAMC Foundation
AAMC & AAMC Foundation is pleased to announce new programming.
The Networked Curator workshop, held February 7 – 9, 2018 at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, is open for applications. Organized by the AAMC Foundation and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University, this three-day workshop provides participants with an expanded digital vocabulary, and assists in cultivating resources available for organizing, sharing, and publishing research.
Applications are now open for the AAMC Foundation Engagement Program for International Curators for the 2017-2019 class. The Program awards three non-US based curators for a two-year period, paired with three US Liaisons for the first year, in an effort to foster international relationships among curators. Both International Awardees and US Liaisons are offered numerous benefits throughout the Program.
The Samuel H. Kress Foundation and AAMC Foundation Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome is now open for 2018-2019 applications. The Fellowship provides one curator with essential funding to further develop projects requiring research in Italy. The Awardee will receive travel funding for a four-week stay at the American Academy in Rome during the one-year Fellowship.
Save the Date: AAMC & AAMC Foundation Annual Conference & Meeting, May 5 – 8, 2018 in Montréal, Canada.
Society of Architectural Historians (SAH)
The Society of Architectural Historians will present the SAH Awards for Architectural Excellence at its 8th Annual Awards Gala on Friday, November 17, at The Racquet Club of Chicago. SAH will honor architect Ralph Johnson, FAIA, Perkins + Will, with the Award for Design, Planning and Sustainability, architects Sharon Johnston, FAIA and Mark Lee, Johnston Marklee, with the Award for Public Engagement with the Built Environment, and Col. Jennifer N. Pritzker, IL ARNG (Ret), TAWANI Foundation, with the Award for Architectural Stewardship. Purchase tickets.
SAH seeks partners to organize tours of the built environment for our youth-oriented American Architecture and Landscape Field Trip Program. Created to provide opportunities for underserved students from the third grade through high school, SAH offers grants to not-for-profits to organize tours for young people on the history of architecture, parks, gardens, and town/city planning.
SAH is accepting applications for the H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship. This award will allow a recent graduate or emerging scholar to study by travel for one year. The fellowship is not for the purpose of doing research for an advanced academic degree, but instead is intended for study by travel and contemplation while observing, reading, writing, or sketching. The deadline to apply is October 1, 2017.
Applications for the SAH Membership Grant for Emerging Professionals are open. This award provides emerging scholars with a one-year SAH membership and is intended for entry-level college and university professors and other new professionals engaged in the study of the built environment. The deadline to apply is October 1, 2017.
The Society is accepting applications from junior and senior scholars for the Edilia and François-Auguste de Montêquin Fellowship. This award provides support for travel related to research on Spanish, Portuguese, or Ibero-American architecture. The deadline to apply is October 1, 2017.
Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA)
AHAA invites you to save the date for its biennial symposium, October 4-6, 2018, to be held in Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN, and sponsored by the University of Minnesota, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Minnesota Museum of American Art. Sessions and collaborations will be announced soon. To learn more about past symposia, please see the Symposia Archive under the Programs tab at ahaaonline.org.
Amidst the ongoing and very robust conversation on the American Art listserv (AmArt-L) regarding the public controversy surrounding monument and memorial culture, AHAA seeks to clarify its relationship to the listserv and its archives, given their shared constituencies. AHAA is not affiliated with the AmArt-L, which is moderated by Karen Bearor and the Florida State University (FSU) and is archived and searchable to subscribers. Please note that the AHAA refrains from making public statements on behalf of its membership, just as the viewpoints expressed on AmArt-L pertain to the individuals posting to the list.
The Midwest Art History Society is pleased to announce its new officers: President Heidi Hornik, Baylor University; Secretary Paula Wisotzki, Loyola University Chicago; Treasurer Valerie Hedquist, University of Montana; and Past President Henry Luttikhuizen, Calvin College.
The Society reports its 2017 Graduate Student Presentation Award went to Katherine Brunk Harnish, Ph.D. candidate, Washington University, St Louis, for her paper “Painting Ephemera in the Age of Mass-Production: American Trompe l’Oeil Painting and Visual Culture in the Late Nineteenth Century.”
And Rory O’Dea, Assistant Professor, Parsons School of Design, The New School University, received MAHS’s 2017 Emerging Scholar Distinguished Presentation Award for her paper, “Documentary Fictions: Robert Smithson and Pierre Huyghe’s Voyages into the Unknown.”
The MAHS 2018 Annual Conference will take place April 5-7, 2018 in Indianapolis, Indiana, hosted by the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art.
Art Historians of Southern California
Teaching and Writing the Art Histories of Latin American Los Angeles, October 6, 2017 at the Getty Center 10:00AM-3:00PM.
Inspired by the Getty’s region-wide art initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, this symposium considers the abundance of new knowledge generated by the PST LA/LA exhibitions, and how it will impact curricula, pedagogy, and future scholarship
Charlene Villaseñor Black, UCLA, Keynote Speaker
“Decolonizing Art History: Institutional Challenges and the Histories of Latinx and Latin American Art”
Erin Aldana, University of San Diego
Using the exhibition “Xerografia: Copyart in Brazil, 1970-1990” as a case study
Elizabeth Cerejido, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL
Félix González-Torres as a (Post)Latino Artist
Karen Mary Davalos, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Chicana/o Remix: Rethinking Art Histories and Endgames
Carolyn J. Schutten, University of California Riverside
“Voids of the Aggregate: Materializing Ethnic Mexicans in Mission Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival Architecture in Southern California”
Catherine Spencer, University of St Andrews, Scotland
Networked Histories: Systems Art in ‘Latin America’Teaching and Writing the Art Histories of Latin American Los Angeles
Gina McDaniel Tarver, School of Art & Design, Texas State University
Recollecting and Connecting Overlooked Art of Cali/Cali: Alicia Barney and Women Environmental Artists of California
Report on the 11th International IAWIS/IAERTI Conference in Lausanne, Switzerland (UNIL), 10-14 July 2017
After Amsterdam, Zurich, Ottawa, Dublin, Claremont, Hambourg, Philadelphia Paris, Montréal and Dundee, the Eleventh Triennial Conference on Word and Image Studies took place by the Leman Lake at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland in early July. Three hundred delegates convened to Lausanne for a very successful week devoted to the theme of Reproductions/reproducibility in Word and Image studies and in the humanities at large.
The conference was beautifully organized by Executive Board Member Philippe Kaenel and his local team and met with great success. Aside from parallel sessions and stimulating plenary lectures (by Bernard Vouilloux and Véronique Plesch), three exhibitions and one film showing (with an introductory speech by Alain Boillat) were coordinated by the host university. Following the IAWIS conference tradition, various excursions were proposed to the delegates half-way through the week allowing the delegates a full day’s rest and cultural exchanges.
IAWIS/IAERTI 30th Birthday
The conference in Lausanne was also the opportunity to celebrate the Association’s thirty years of existence and pay homage to its founding members as well as to its former and current presidents and vice-presidents. The general Assembly meeting and Banquet dinner were an opportunity to pay tribute to the achievement of eminent Word and Image scholars, Véronique Plesch (President), Professor of Art History at Colby College (Waterville, Maine, USA), and Catriona Macleod (vice-president), Professor in Germanic Studies, (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia) as they were both stepping down from their post after having dutifully and successfully served the association for nine years. Their commitment to the advancement of word and image studies and the development of the Association was highly praised by everyone present. No doubt their leadership will be sorely missed but they will remain actively involved in the association as members of the advisory board.
Announcement of new Board Members
The general Assembly Meeting in Lausanne allowed the attending members to elect a new president and a new vice-president/secretary for IAWIS, Liliane Louvel, Professor Emerita at the University of Poitiers (France) and Laurence Rousssillon-Constanty, Professor at the University of Pau et des Pays de l’Adour (France).
Professor Liliane Louvel is an outstanding scholar in Word and Image Studies and has widely contributed to the development of the field of Word and Image studies in France. Her most popular book, L’Oeil du Texte, published in 1998 (Toulouse, PUM) has for many years become standard reading for Word and Image scholars in France and the book has recently been published in English. She has extensively published on modern Literature and painting and edited many books. She has also served in several associations for the development of English Studies in France (SAES) and Europe (ESSE).
Professor Laurence Roussillon-Constanty works on the relation between text and image in the Victorian period and has published a monograph on Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting and poetry (2008). She has been a IAWIS enthusiast for many years and has chaired several sessions in previous IAWIS conferences. Her interest is interdisciplinary and her latest research focuses on science and art relations in John Ruskin’s writing.
Forthcoming Publication:
Riddles of Form: Exploration and Discovery in Word and Image, edited by Keith Williams, Sophies Aymes-Stokes, Jan Baetens, and Chris Murray (forthcoming at Brill, 2017)
This publication celebrates actual mutually enriching dialogues between science, literature, and art. The essays in this volume are based on papers presented at the Tenth Triennial Conference on Word and Image Studies, “Riddles of Form: Exploration and Discovery in Word and Image”, which was held from 11-15 August 2014 at the University of Dundee, Scotland, hosted by the Scottish Word and Image Group (SWIG).
Call for Proposals for Hosting the next triennial Conference
The IAWIS/AIERTI Executive Board is soliciting proposals from potential hosts for the 2020 and the 2023 versions of our international triennial conference.
Please submit a 1-page description of the conference theme, along with a few paragraphs providing information on the venue and its facilities for hosting ~250 participants, your organizing team, your strategy for maintaining English-French bilingualism, possible excursions, and possible sources of funding. Deadline: December 1 2017.
Email: Liliane Louvel liliane.louvel@wanadoo.fr and Laurence Roussillon-Constanty laurence.roussillon-constanty@univ-pau.fr
FATE (Foundations in Art: Theory and Education)
Episode 13 and 14 of Positive Space, FATE’s monthly podcast are now available.
[7.12.17] Victoria Hoyt, Instructor at Metropolitan Community College & FATE Shout Out Award Winner, discusses practical take aways from the FATE conference, strategies for encouraging the habit of observation, self reflection, the value of mid-term evaluations & responding to a wide range of diverse backgrounds in the community college classroom.
[8.09.17] Amy Reidel, faculty member at both St. Louis Community College and Saint Louis University & FATE Shout Out Award Winner, discusses happiness, community engagement, privilege & practical tips for projects that encourage critical thinking.
Upcoming for CAA 2018: An Inclusion and Empathy Roundtable discussion and podcasting session will be hosted during FATE’s Business Meeting at the conference: Feb 22, 12:30 – 1:30p, Rm 402A, LA Convention Center.
FATE’s CAA Affiliate representative, Naomi J. Falk, along with Richard Moninski, will co-chair FATE’s Affiliated Society session, entitled, “Let’s Dance, But Don’t Call Me Baby: Dialogue, Empathy, and Inclusion in the Classroom and Beyond.” Feeling welcome, acknowledged, and heard encourages learning. Fostering inclusiveness and empathy on behalf of minority students legitimizes perspectives. How do we build trust and empathy between faculty, students, peers, and others in our classrooms and communities? How do we create a welcoming and inclusive environment? What has worked? What has gone terribly wrong? Where do we go from here? Examples of readings, projects, tools, and exercises for building inclusive, encouraging, and productive dialogues are all of interest. More info? Please contact: Naomi J. Falk, naomijfalk@gmail.com
Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA)
SHERA is sponsoring a panel at the upcoming 49th Annual ASEEES Convention that will take place at Chicago Marriott Downtown Magnificent Mile on 9-12 November 2017. SHERA Membership meeting is scheduled for November 11, 12-1:30 pm, 4th, Armitage Room, followed by Membership dinner at 8 pm. SHERA is pleased to announce a call for submissions for the newly-established SHERA Emerging Scholar Prize. The award, to be bestowed at the SHERA meeting during ASEEES Convention, aims to recognize and encourage original and innovative scholarship in the field. For the 2017 prize, articles published between September 30, 2016 and September 30, 2017 would be eligible. Applicants must have published an article in a scholarly print or online journal or museum print or online publication within the preceding twelve-month period.
For the 2017 prize, articles published between September 30, 2016 and September 30, 2017 would be eligible. Additionally, applicants are required to have received his or her PhD within the last 5 years (2012 or thereafter for the 2017 prize) and be a member of SHERA in good standing at the time that the application is submitted. The winner will be awarded $500 and republication (where copyright allows) or citation of the article on H-SHERA. Applications should include a CV including contact information (email, mailing address, and telephone) and a copy of the English-language article with header/colophon of the journal or catalogue together with a brief abstract. Applications should be sent to shera.prizes@gmail.com no later than October 15, 2017.
A Seminar Introduces a New Design Program in Bangkok
posted by CAA — Sep 26, 2017
Since 2015, CAA’s International Committee has put out a call for papers on international topics in the visual arts to be published by CAA. Brian Curtain, an art historian and curator based in Bangkok, submitted the following article to Pearlie Rose S. Baluyut, a member of the International Committee. www.briancurtinbangkok.com
![](https://www.collegeart.org/news/wp-content//Piyatat-Hemmatat-from-the-series-3rd-Eye-Trilogy-The-New-Dawn-2013-AP-C-Print-dimensions-variable-Photograph-courtesy-of-artist-copy-298x300.jpg)
Piyatat Hemmatat, from the series 3rd Eye Trilogy: The New Dawn, 2013, C-print, artist proof, dimensions variable (artwork © Piyatat Hemmatat; photograph provided by the artist)
The Department of Communication Design (CommDe) of the Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, will inaugurate a new MA program (CommMa) in 2018, to be led by Dr. Juthamas Tangsantikul, the current Deputy Director of CommDe. CommMa will be a practice-based research program with a focus on Southeast Asia. An introductory seminar and hands-on workshop, The Ghost in the Machine, was held on July 13, 2017, to present the program’s core methods and interests: the study of regional visual and material cultures as a means to explore questions of indigeneity and the critical potential of comparisons with other contexts. The seminar title evokes the relationship of animism and modernity—indeed, a colonial distinction. Participants conjured the local legacies of this relationship and also considered the metanarratives of politics, representation, and the fictive.
![](https://www.collegeart.org/news/wp-content//Participants-works-from-Ghost-in-the-Machine-workshop-Photogaph-by-MA-Trusler-copy-225x300.jpg)
Participants’ works from Ghost in the Machine workshop (photograph by M. A. Trusler)
The featured speakers at the seminar, Dr. Clare Veal, MA Asian Art Histories lecturer at LaSalle College of the Arts in Singapore, and Thai photographer Piyatat Hemmatat share an interest in Walter Benjamin’s understanding of photography as an “optical unconscious,” which can capture and shape what can be thought but is normally beyond perception. Veal’s research on photographic histories and Hemmatat’s ethereal visions quite literally slow down our consumption of photography, the former by tracing varieties of meaning in what can be framed and the latter by providing expanses of detail.
Veal’s lecture moved beyond the paradigmatic examples of the infamous “Cottingley Fairies” photographs—early twentieth-century works displaying images of fairies that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle contended proved the existence of the supernatural—to an account of how desires and ideologies haunt colonial-era photography, including both landscape and figural representations. The context of Siam/Thailand allows for particular consideration of the performative aspects of photography. Photography was introduced in Siam by King Mongkut Rama IV (1851–1868), who thereby broke a longstanding taboo on visual representation of royalty outside idealized and conventionalized mural types. Veal deftly noted an exchange between the indexical and iconic with this introduction: in a word, a representation of something comes to stand for something. Here, the locating of a “Thai” tradition of cultural beliefs proves less compelling than the noting of shifting regulations of representation, ones that have become exceptionally aggressive in the recent years of military rule.
![](https://www.collegeart.org/news/wp-content//Participants-works-Photogaph-by-MA-Trusler-1-300x225.jpg)
Participants’ works from Ghost in the Machine workshop (photograph by M. A. Trusler)
Participants’ works from Ghost in the Machine workshop (photograph by M. A. Trusler)
Hemmatat’s alchemical understanding of photography was complementary to Veal’s insights. His practice explores the deceptively illusionistic image in abstraction and representation as well as the suggestion that systems are at work within nature. While allowing for the captivating, seductive qualities of photography, his images are rooted in both the artist’s eye and experimental photographic techniques. The diversity of Hemmatat’s oeuvre suggests a restless inquisitiveness. He is currently making sculptures inspired by Hindu and Christian icons, dovetailing three-dimensional works with his longstanding engagement with photographs-as-objects.
Hemmatat presented objects for a mysterious cabinet of curiosities without telling the participants what they were: such things as volcanic Mayan glass, a camera lucida, and washi paper, a Japanese paper purported to last thousands of years. Inspired by the seemingly esoteric implications of these objects and Veal’s sharp critical guidance, participants then set out to take photographs in the immediate vicinity of the seminar. Images of graffiti, air vents, and architectural details were shaped with enigmatic auras, and subsequent group discussion debated the vagaries of perception and the relationship between the recognizable and the illegible as well as the concrete and the abstract.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by CAA — Sep 20, 2017
![](https://www.collegeart.org/news/wp-content//HalprinWEB-1.jpg)
Anna Halprin, detail of installation, documenta Halle, Kassel, documenta 14. Photo: Mathias Völzke
Each week CAA News summarizes articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
University of California Sues Trump over DACA
Has your college taken a stand on DACA?
(Read more from The Chronicle of Higher Education.)
A New Museum Opens Every Year in LA
This February the CAA conference will be in LA. There are so many great museums that it seems that one in opening virtually every year.
(Read more from Hyperallergic.)
Teaching Ph.D.s How to Teach
There are so many options in training the next generation in of talented faculty.
(Read more from The Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Do You Withhold Your Opinions?
Some say that art historians and critics withheld their opinions because it can earn them enemies. Do you agree?
(Read more from e-flux.)
Plenty to See Here
The NYTimes offers its amazing showcase of exhibitions to watch this fall.
(Read more from The New York Times.)
NH Institute Sets Up Fellowship and Expands Photo Collection
Amazing gift of more than 500 prints by significant 20th Century artists: Harry Callahan, Paul Caponigro, Imogen Cunningham, Lee Friedlander, Kenneth Josephson, Andre Kertesz, Sally Mann, Elliot Porter, Man Ray, Edward Steichen, Jock Sturges, Brett Weston, Edward Weston, and Minor White.
(Read more from The Association of Independent Colleges of Art & Design.)
Taking Down Statues and Public Art? Here’s What our Members Think
posted by CAA — Sep 12, 2017
Public art, statues, and monuments have seldom been in the news more than in the past few weeks. Figures from Christopher Columbus to Robert E. Lee, from Peter Stuyvesant to Stonewall Jackson have been topics for debate. Regardless of one’s political or cultural point of view, nearly everyone seems to have an opinion.
We asked our members what they think about preserving or removing statues and public works of art. This is what they said:
“I do not believe these monuments should be destroyed, though finding appropriate housing and creating proper and instructional context for them will pose many challenges. Erasing history and art history is not the answer to this situation. I believe each monument’s fate should be determined at the local level in a case-by-case basis and only with the help of art historians. This is not something we should leave to politicians or the general public without our help since it is only our training that can help situate these artworks within a broader context. Some of these monuments are indeed closely tied to the actions of the historical figures they represent, but this is not always the case. There is no “”one size fits all”” solution to this problem and this problem is not limited to monuments showcasing figures from the Confederacy.” — Tiffany Elena Washington
“This premise seems to take for granted assumptions about what criteria is for evaluating public art, especially monuments or statues in public settings. They were not created apart from a very specific political structure and embedded with social and cultural codes about what kinds of historical narratives are valued, erased, or repressed. Naming them works of art, a term already loaded with hierarchies and judgments, does not mean they should be treated as apart from these same issues today. In fact, if anything, we should be even more willing to challenge the inclination. It would be a privilege to do otherwise, and not understand or be aware of the particular ways this privilege of separating art from the maker, its history, and its employment of these very terms from the real impact that systemic oppression enforces. Steven Lubar has an interesting proposal for what to do with removed statues (please see his most recent Medium post on the subject), as well as Aleia Brown, who discusses in an article in Slate Magazine why simply moving such objects into museum settings (keeping in mind the ritual- or treasured-like tone of exhibitionary spaces) is actually very far from simple.” — Anni Pullagura
“Confederate monuments need to be removed. I think it’s a stretch to consider them “art” and if there is a desire to study them it can be done in another venue other than public space.” — Lynn Clement
“I believe all historical art should be saved, not destroyed. But they must be placed in the context of their time by installing in an art gallery or a park dedicated to such monuments with accompanying didactic material that offers the complex and sometimes nuanced meaning the work has to different constituents. Southerners who retain an allegiance to the Confederacy might be quoted alongside with those opposed to it. Curators, however, must feel free to insert the work within the larger historical context down to our own days.” — Anita Moskowitz
“I read with interest the Daily News article written by my Stony Brook colleague Michele Bogart.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/defense-racist-monuments-article-1.3436672
Although I agree that one need not be “pro-Trump, pro-Confederacy or insensitive to the horrors of slavery and its legacy” in advocating against the removal of confederate statues, I disagree with her conflation of “removal and destruction” in the discussion of these monuments.”
It is my impression that most scholars and thinking individuals advocate displacing (not destroying) the monuments to a museum or designated park with contextual didactic information (difficult and often impossible to place at their present sites). On a recent spring break my husband and I took our California grandson, a freshman at Davidson college in North Carolina, on a trip to South Carolina and visited a slave holder’s mansion in Charleston, a former plantation, and the Confederate Relic Museum in Columbia, all of which had insightful and fair didactic information about living quarters, the treatment of slaves, and the meaning of various symbols. It was a truly educational experience for all of us, but especially for our 19-year old grandson.
In the public spheres that Confederate monuments now occupy, it is not possible to offer context; this can be done only in a more neutral and accessible location. General Lee himself was opposed to the erection of such statues precisely because of the divisive impact they would have on the country. Indeed, most of the confederate statues were installed beginning in the 1890s, considerably after the end of the Civil War. Their message would seem to have been to reaffirm Jim Crow and intimidate its opponents; and that is not acceptable.
On the other hand, each statue or symbol should be given serious review by a committee of art historians, historians, and (in the case of NYC) the Public Design Commission (formerly the City Arts Commission) or other civic body, and/or other informed spokespeople, and in no case should a statue be destroyed. Photographs of the original site and other didactic material should be displayed alongside each work, and controversial and diverse opinions should be included. We must respect the artistic and historical value of the monuments and, at the same time, recognize the pain such images inflicted and continue to inflict on the people who were not part of those “regional civic groups” that worked for their installation.
Most people, including art historians and museum personnel, are used to seeing works of art out of context (think Parthenon Museum, Pergamon Altar, Nike in the Louvre, etc., etc., not to mention sacred images and relics in museums). It is the job of art historians and museum curators to contextualize and analyze the original function and meaning of the monuments and symbols both for scholars and the public at large.” — Anita Moskowitz
“Public works of art should not be destroyed, but they should be removed from places where no critical discourse surrounds their presence. Unless critical discourse is put in place around them, such monuments should be removed and re-situated in places and in exhibitions where they can be critiqued and contextualized. In this way, the public will be engaged and will produce questions of their own about histories and their construction.” — Anonymous
“I believe these monuments are works of art that are part of an important moment and particular community in American culture. They are not representative of all of American culture. Their significance has changed over time. I agree that they should be removed from the public squares and parks, but should not be destroyed or defaced. They were created by late 19th- and early 20th-c sculptors working in the academic tradition, many of whom are little known today. We have few large-scale works by these artists. Destroying these works is destroying part of our nation’s artistic heritage. Still, because of the ideology that the sculptures represent, I believe they should not be out in public squares. They should be moved to local art museums, history museums, or park preserves that can do a better job of contextualizing them for visitors. Public places should be maintained for monuments that speak to the entire community, not just a small segment of it.” — New York City Art Historian
“Many art historians see important statues while people of color see perpetrators of continuing oppression and white supremacy. And at the end of the day I’m not sure how much it matters what art historians think about it. I’ve seen the argument from art historians that we need to take this process slowly, and my question is: why are art historians just thinking about this now, when they’ve had the opportunity to determine this process for over 100 years? Again, it demonstrates the overwhelming whiteness of a field that has allowed itself to be complicit in the continuing oppression of Black people *through these monuments* (and in 100 other ways but you’re only asking about the monuments.) Art historians should consider whether their opinions really matter here, because they all seem to think they do, and they almost entirely counter the experiences of Black people on a daily basis in the US. Black people are saying these monuments represent the persistence of slavery, Jim Crow, and mass genocide. For Black Americans these monuments do not represent an intellectual exercise; they are not objects to discuss dispassionately. It depresses me how many art historians and other academics want to act as if the monuments exist in a vacuum, rather than in the context of mass incarceration, violent policing, voter suppression, and generalized, violent discrimination that Black people face on a daily basis. Well-known art historians, such as Michelle Bogart, argue that moving these monuments destroys their context. I wish that simply moving monuments could destroy the context of white supremacy and systemic oppression of Black people in the United States. I doubt that will be the case.” — Renee McGarry
“These outrageous acts of cultural iconoclasm in 2017: targeting monuments that mark the our civic memory are nothing less than censorship and vandalism perpetrated by hysterical mobs who display the very fascistic mentality they claim to oppose. Significantly this type of violence is a form of public terror without any due process or rational discussion and is also typical of radical Islam that seeks to obliterate everything that opposes its narrow ideology. Conflating every vestige and symbol of the Confederate States with an endorsement of slavery is idiotic and historically inaccurate.” — Professor James Langley, SCAD
“They should be removed, and ideally placed in a separate park or museum designed to PROPERLY contextualize them. That means an unflinching look both at the cruelty of the institutions these figures supported, AND at the actual circumstances in which the statues were raised (and their intended impact on people of color).” — Eva
“I believe public works of art that inspire negativity or harmful attitudes, should be removed. The fact that confederate monuments are still standing today promotes the idea that it is okay to support the antiquated and prejudiced views of these historical figures. If these monuments promote views that exclude systematically oppressed groups, then they should be taken down. Public art is wonderful, and it is important to remember history, and not erase it; however, there is a difference between remembering history and celebrating it.” — Maylen
“These works (except for Stone Mountain’s bas-relief, which is too large) need to be removed and preserved in museums that contextualize their role in Jim Crow America, anti-semitism, and the history of slavery and white supremacy movements. As someone born and raised in the South, who grew up in the Civil Rights era, I know from experience that these monuments give off the wrong message for our contemporary multi-cultural society.” — Gail Levin
“Iconoclasm is deeply problematic in so many ways, but if the objects are conserved, then they do not get erased. I think the monuments should be kept in museums as a way to preserve them as historical objects. While I disagree with pretty much everything the president has to say, I worry, like him, that public monuments of all kinds will become the targets of such destruction and erasure. If we do not have reminders to teach us not to repeat history, then we will continue to do things all over again, as we are seeing presently.
The Tretyakov Gallery and other locales in the former Soviet Union have done it correctly, in so many ways. The toppled statues of Lenin and Stalin have been turned into broken statues encased in the sculpture garden. This, I believe, is a very effective way to undo their power, but also to say that Russia has a history that cannot be forgotten. Similarly, the many collections of fascist and socialist realism have not been destroyed as it is important to be able to study the paintings and sculptures, but they have been relegated to store rooms and special galleries so that they do not become places of pilgrimage.” — Anonymous
“I think we need to ask first if the monuments are meant to honor someone for an activity which we would not honor today, if someone was honored especially for his actions in the slave trade for example. In this case it seems clear, that we could not let this continue. But for the majority of monuments the persons will be honored for something else, for livelong actions that are correct etc. In this case we need to ask if we will find someone without false. Does we need to ban everyone who did not work for women emancipation? From the beginning of history until the 19th century we would need to remove lots of monuments. This could not be the solution. And do we want to erase this part of our history? Wouldn’t it be better to add an information or a second monument to explain the context? We need to have more monuments for our multicultural history. But it would not be a good beginning to remove everything else…. and when would we stop to remove…. What is about fortresses and castles as monuments of monarchy etc…. Lets give a context to history and not erase it.” — Philippa Sissis
“Public art should be balanced with community identity. When a community no longer feels that the art represents its values, that community is justified in removing the art, preferably to a new space that allows visibility to those who still seek the object. History is tied to all objects, and while there is always danger in forgetting history, there is no shame when a community decides that it does not want to be publicly associated with a particular chapter in history. In regards to statues of war figures, those are fundamentally about the figures’ actions of war and personal traits that led the figures to participate in one side of a war. Again, if a community does not support the actions, values, and traits as represented in a war figure, then that community should not feel obligated to support art that commemorates that figure. Public art that does not align with the current profile of the community should be removed as a community identifier–though not destroyed.” — Loretta Ramirez
“I honestly think that most commemorative statuary is uninspired, and, in general, the persons being commemorated are exemplary of colonialism, Anglo-European hegemony, and serve to reify ideas about dominance and conquest that have proven detrimental to a better social vision. I wouldn’t mind seeing them all come down. They could take photographs of them to archive, melt them down, and make something more useful (or more artful, if that’s what’s desired) out of the materials. These kinds of monuments commemorate more ways of thinking than actual individuals. It’s not like the person depicted will know the difference, so it’s obviously a symbol more than a portrait. This is why works like Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial carry more power, since they involve the viewer, and do not reproduce relations of domination and oppression.” — Laura Crary
“Watching the statue of the Confederate soldier taken down with ropes in front of the Court House in Durham, North Carolina one cannot help remembering the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein and the removal of the Lenin statues in Soviet bloc states. These gestures may seem violent, unplanned acts of vandalism, but they are in fact just the opposite. They are expressions of consensus that these monuments have outlived their usefulness as public monuments. Their dismantling marks a shift or turn in a nation’s history, a rupture with the past, and a new understanding of what now shapes the civic realm. The idea of using the public sphere as a metaphor of rejuvenation is a practice that started in the Roman Forums. As Gregor Kalas argued in his book, The Restoration of the Roman Forum in Late Antiquity, the Romans of Late Antiquity used, reused and sometimes removed statues as a physical strategy to form a consensus over whom should be remembered and thus whom should continue to have influence. This attitude toward civic memorials is at work today and when the call for the removal or destruction of Confederate leaders comes forward it should be read not as wanting to erase history but of making space in the civic sphere for all to inhabit it without fear of history reviving itself.
Monuments like that of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee in New Orleans and Charlottesville or the statue of the armed Confederate soldier in Durham North Carolina, when seen as involved in creating a civic consensus about who we are as Americans, are not just markers of historical facts, but also exist in the present moment shaping and ordering our nation’s social space. This strategic function of such physical monuments needs to be part of the larger public discourse on monuments and how making and breaking them are acts that guarantee or remove the sense of shared public space. From this perspective the monuments to the leaders and soldiers of the Confederacy can be seen as damaging symbols that have continued to haunt public space and the consciousness of African American citizens, leading many to feel a sense of estrangement rather than enfranchisement.
Therefore, when local governments working with the blessings of white citizens choose to clear the public sphere of these ghosts of history they should be seen as gesturing toward making this space open to all. These acts of removal, whether sanctioned by city hall or a sudden reaction to the violence of white supremacy, must be judged as a show of a concern and care for giving African-American citizens, a willingness to make space and come to a common consensus of what it means to live free and be an American.” — Santhi Kavuri-Bauer
“It would be good to know how the monument came to be erected in the first place. Who advocated for them? What were their justifications. Who paid for them? Monuments have a history and an intention. Yale university made a good decision to rename Calhoun college (Calhoun an advocate of slavery…) Students do not need to be reminded of dark history in their daily living environment. Public works of art that promote racism, sexism, agism, homophobia, etc. should be removed. Hate crimes are too prevalent today; monuments that are complicit in hate of any kind are not the values we should promote with public art.” — Martha Gorzycki
“I was present at the tearing down of the Durham statue. I was proud to have taken part, even in my limited role as a member of the crowd, and I would do it again and take an even more active role if welcomed by the organizers to do so. We know there are more than enough of these monuments that if we wish to preserve some in a historically appropriate way (as in, drawing sharper or total focus to their role as racist fearmongering), that we have more than enough to fill that capacity and still destroy the bulk of them. I also like the idea of marking them as destroyed monuments–for example, tearing them down but leaving the torn down parts at the site, or constructing a new anti-racist monument from the parts and putting it at the site. A friend suggested creating one museum that was just a large airplane hangar with all of them in it, with the historical framing done by some of our many great POC museum and historical experts. After what I’ve seen in this country and in North Carolina over the last 20 years, I feel strongly that keeping the statues as is, even with a new plaque, is white supremacy and delusion in action.” — Kirstin Ringelberg
“We should proceed with extreme caution when removing public artworks. There are circumstances when no other solution proves adequate, but often providing a new context for an existing work may meet everyone’s needs better than removal. I clearly understand that a society cannot continue to honor unambiguously in bronze people whose actions have caused their reputations to alter. Monuments to Confederate leaders, for example, must change. But removing monuments entirely further erodes our sense of history, which already is in short supply. If as historians we believe that understanding the past helps us to make sense of the present, then surely we do not want to encourage deliberate erasure of reminders of that past. I would prefer monuments remain in place as stimulants to discussion. That discussion can take many forms, for example commissioning other artworks that challenge existing monuments and/or problematize their honorific function. Recent events in Charlottesville suggest the discourse sometimes may require enforced moderation. Perhaps artworks that become too controversial could be removed to semi-public spaces. But in general, our nation does not suffer from a surfeit of public art or an excess of historical self-understanding. What monuments we do have should be brought into a relevant dialogue to stimulate public awareness of our difficult national story.” — William Ambler
“This is an important and timely subject and one that CAA should make space for in the 2018 annual meeting. I discussed the importance of public monuments in my recent book, American Faces: A Cultural History of Portraiture and Identity [ http://www.upne.com/1611688924.html] and strongly urge the program committee to make space for it in the upcoming meeting. It is a wonderful example of why art and history matter.” — Richard Saunders, Director, Middlebury College Museum of Art; Professor, History of Art and Architecture
“Many monuments belong in museums, not on public squares. The actions that a person undertook (or committed) during their lifetimes should be considered, as well as the major thing(s) for which s/he is known. Robert E. Lee wouldn’t be remembered today if he hadn’t led the Confederate army. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson did hold slaves, but they are also remembered for helping establish the US as a country: there is an actual contribution that we can discuss and weigh against questions of whether they fully supported what we now think of as American ideals.” — E. Evans
“I think the works should not be destroyed but moved to historical museums where they can be studied in historical context. As a society it is important to continue to learn from our history. Many monuments were erected 40-60 years after the war to ease tension. These artifacts can teach society much like the Egyptian and Greek statues.” — Sabre Esler
“Put civil war monuments in a historical museum or park dedicated to history.” — Margaret Herke
“They should not be destroyed. Removing them from view will not change the past or current social injustices that they celebrate and reinforce, but will further create the mistaken impression that racism, misogyny and bigotry are dead. History, the history of he people who erected the monuments in the not so distant past and who embraced the hatred that they embody, needs to be remembered. However, we need to creatively subvert the power of the monuments to empower their hateful messages. This might be through artistic and/or explanatory additions, or removal to museum settings.” — Rachel Zimmerman
“This is a very difficult and complicated issue. Generally, I favor providing context where possible for monuments that were commissioned works (not mass-produced by foundries and ordered from a catalogue). The context should address how and why the work was commissioned. In many instances, white women, particularly members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, organized memorial or monument associations, raised funds for the monument, selected the artist, and organized the dedication ceremony—-all at a time when women were discouraged from participating in the civic sphere. Those organizational skills extended beyond monument-making to advocacy for better working conditions, suffrage, and education. White women were the primary proponents of the myth of the Lost Cause, but veterans, north and south, also bought into the romantic notion of a “band of brothers.”
Further, commissioned works represent a significant output by American sculptors who operated within a tradition of heroic sculptural works. Further, the context should provide, wherever possible, the voices of dissent that were raised when the monuments were being commissioned and installed to reinforce that dissent and debate are always present. That would lead, hopefully, to a civil discussion about the concept of power, who wields it, etc.” — Barbara C. Batson
“Though often ignored, public monuments are, like all works of art, living and evolving objects, yet they are embedded in the matrix of urban life, politics, historiography, and morality in a way that few other artworks are. We should not be surprised that opinions about them should change and at times violently erupt into public consciousness, nor that those opinions should be contested. I do not, therefore, believe that public monuments are permanent immovable objects. Their removal can be, and historically has been, a powerful symbolic action that condenses and represents otherwise amorphous public sentiment. Yet even in cases when removal seems to be collective catharsis, there are opposing parties, and that should not come as a surprise to anyone. Removal should not be taken lightly, it should be fully debated and precisely justified in each community that undertakes it (as actually seems to have been the case in Charlottesville). That said, there are few historical figures whose opinions, personal lives, and actions would stand up to contemporary values, even if the contributions to society for which their monuments were raised in the first place continue to be considered valuable decades or centuries later—something that is not the case with leaders of the Confederacy. In more ambiguous cases, like Christopher Columbus, historical contextualization is key and possibly an alternative to removal. I believe that acknowledging the hypocrisy and violence of history in a text or counter monument can be just as powerful as toppling the offending object. It can, moreover, bring the complexity and cost of history to light rather than erasing it’s offending aspects altogether.” — Marina Kliger
“I believe that the Confederate statues depicting military leaders should be removed from places of honor and put in other locations, museums, etc. where they can be interpreted revealing the historical context of their making. I think ones that simply honor the Confederate dead should remain in place. As a fervent objector to the Vietnam War, I was unable to reconcile myself average soldiers until the Vietnam Memorial was put up. That memorial made it possible for me to honor the war dead without honoring the war or its leaders. Seeing this monument was very important for me and my attitudes to my country and the military. Plaques that explain that many of the monuments honoring the Civil War dead were put up in the 20th-century could explain the previous use of these monuments as a means of strengthening Jim Crow could be attached to these monuments, but they do still have meaning as marking the deaths of the average soldier. I realize that there are a lot of monuments that will need to be moved. I suggest that duplicates could be destroyed. Since a lot of these are in bronze, I’m assuming that there were multiple casts. A panel of art historians could decide, which is the finest cast among the many and save those. I think these monuments represent a teachable moment for our nation, plus many of them do have artistic merit. Thus I do not think they should be destroyed.” — Julie R. Meyers, Ph.D
“After careful review by the community, offending monuments should be removed from places of prominence, where they take on a social imprimatur, and preserved and contextualized elsewhere.” — Christine Filippone
“I’m Jewish and I’d have trouble living in the shadow of monuments and commemorations to the people and ideas that wanted to kill me, enslave me, and terrorize me. That’d be perpetually traumatizing. Jewish education on the Holocaust focuses on the premise to never forget. We can and should continue to fulfill the mission of remembrance and vigilance while removing public declarations of racism, hate, and violence to locations more conducive to pedagogical methods for social betterment.” — Sara Picard
“The destruction of a work of art should never be taken lightly. Yet the preservation of art should never take precedence over the preservation of life. These monuments are not only artifacts of the past; they speak strongly to – indeed, provide ammunition for – the economic, social, psychological and indeed bodily violence that so many Americans of color are subject to every day. For that reason, their status as works of art is not a good enough reason for them to remain public monuments, which are symbols of America’s most deeply-held values. If to remove a public statue from its original site is to destroy it, I think that destruction is warranted in this case.
That said, these monuments are not all the same. Some of them are copies, and can be destroyed without significant artistic loss. Some of them are great works of art, or historically significant ones, which should be moved to a less public site: perhaps a sculpture park reserved for this purpose. Some of these works are even by minority artists. Those monuments, particularly those by black artists and architects, seem to me the best candidates for the compromise of “contextualization”: leaving the original in place, while significantly changing its meaning. A flat bronze plaque on the horrors of slavery is insufficient for this; new works, new stories, will have to be added, so that the original cannot function in its original messaging. History is not simple. Why should our public sculpture be?
As an art historian speaking to other art historians, I am sure I do not even need to state that I am dedicated to the preservation of art and cultural heritage. But it seems to me hypocritical to worry more about injustice against art than against human beings.” — Julia Pelta Feldman
“There’s no “one size fits all” solution in the matter. Confederate monuments must be evaluated on a case by case basis, and in many cases, they should be removed and relocated to less prominent positions within their communities or to specially designated parks or museums that can properly contextualize them. Should every single Confederate memorial plaque and monument come down? Not necessarily. Questions that should be asked about each memorial relate to location (cemetery or front lawn of the town hall?), date of the commission and dedication, and role in the community. While many are ignored and forgotten, some monuments evolve to play new roles in their communities, perhaps in some cases even among the ancestors of those whom they were originally intended to oppress. Has new signage already been added? Do locals find the new interpretation of the monument useful in teaching the history of racism or needless fuel for the white supremacist fire? Can contemporary artists reinterpret the monuments? Once removed, can the pedestals be used for rotating public art exhibits? Other sculptures of historic figures may be different. Dr. Marion Sims was honored by a sculpture on 5th Avenue for his role in the development of modern gynecology. Perhaps the sculpture should stay in place but new signs and didactics should be added that explain how he performed experimental surgery on slaves without anesthesia. Most of our heroes from earlier eras would not deserve pedestals today. We can’t remove them all just as we can’t repatriate every piece of art in the Met and the Getty that was removed from its place of origin due to imperialism and colonialism. History can not be fixed by removing monuments, instead the problematic histories embodied by the statues should be confronted and questioned and taught in local curricula.” — Anonymous
“Public art takes a range of forms and finds its way into the public through a variety of processes. I believe that communities should have the right to a discussion of the value and function of a work of art and that such discussions should be informed by evidence about how and why a work came to be erected and, if important, the subsequent use of that work to promote or oppose a political position. These discussions should also include information about what other communities have done to move, alter, contextualize and/or destroy controversial works of public art. Ideally, art historians and historians will be involved in contributing to and helping to shape these discussions. If communities choose to move or destroy works rather than contextualize them, I would endorse the replacement of the work with a small plaque that offers some information about the work and why it was removed; it is essential that we keep history in view, especially historical political positions grounded in the unequal distribution of power and rights, to help ensure our progress toward a more-democratic society.” — Elizabeth Hutchinson
“Removal, not destruction, is important. Ideally, a museum repository would house these offensive past historical figures. A museum setting would provide the context for each of the works. Art history should be contextualized, not erased. What were the circumstances surrounding these commissions? Who paid for the monument? What was the public’s reception of the unveiling? Were there protests? How many people attended? Who were they? Where did they come from? How were the artists chosen? Who were the artists? Did their viewpoints clash with those of their subjects? etc., etc. Statues and public monuments have gone up and been pulled down or defaced or destroyed for millennia. Each work reveals so much information about the time in which it was created and erected or placed in a public square, park, or building. A single work examined from its commission to today (or until the day it was destroyed) reveals a great deal about changing ideals.” — Dr. Leanne Zalewski
“I favor “re-contextualizing” confederate monuments in a different setting, such as a museum, historical society, or sculpture garden. Leaving them in a public place keeps the confederate leaders “on a pedestal.” This isn’t a one-size-fits-all recommendation, however. Gettysburg, for example, isn’t going to take every confederate monument down – nor should they. Some common sense must be used, and each community needs to discuss this together.” — Anonymous
“I’m skeptical that art professionals have some sort of different or special stake in this debate by dint of their disciplinary sensitivity to a statue’s status as art. It sounds like the urge to preserve these statues as ~art~ means affording them a dubious sense of aesthetic autonomy, one that allows them to stand outside their social/political/historical function. I don’t think a statue’s existence as art ever separates it from the fact it is designed and erected to instil a particular historical/political/ideological order, a function that goes well beyond the object’s institutional/cultural/disciplinary boundaries. The aesthetic and political questions are one in the same. I’m very much in favour of devaluing the legitimacy of racist figures by undoing their canonization as statue-worthy. I think their removal demonstrates a necessary intervention in the construction of public and social space, affirming art’s agency in doing so. I think there’s a big difference between removing statues and erasing them: rather than wipe away historical artefacts which testify to a troubling history (to put it vulgarly, “censoring” them), the visible removal of a statue can exhibit that intervention in effective ways.” — Edward B.
“As a student of German art history, the Germans have, after a generation following World War II, dealt admirably with their difficult history. Following both the defeat of the Nazi regime and the fall of the GDR (communist East Germany), street names were changes, statues dedicated to problematic leaders were generally relegated to museums, though some were destroyed. The monuments of the Nazi past were dealt with more harshly, and rightfully so, than monuments dedicated to Marx, Engels, and Honecker. The Germans prohibit the publication of Mein Kampf (though an authorized and heavily annotated edition was published by historians recently). Monuments to the Holocaust have replaced Nazi monuments and they serve a didactic purpose as well as an aesthetic one. Obviously, the destruction of monuments does not prevent racist and anti-semitic violence and ideologies from emerging. And putting discredited leaders’ statues in museums for context (like the Monuments Park in Budapest) can serve as a good teaching tool.” — Marion Deshmukh
“I feel that removing the Confederate monuments is the right thing to do, no matter how divisive the far right might consider removal. In consideration of the fact that most of the monuments were put up in the 20th century, rather than in the immediate aftermath of the war, and that Lee himself didn’t want to be memorialized thus, I believe that it’s clear that these monuments were an expression of WASP hegemony during the Jim Crow era. I think that it’s important to continually remind our public of Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephen’s remarks that secession was indeed about preserving slavery. We should encourage the use of real facts in studying the war and its aftermath, rather than allowing the perspective to be clouded by spin minimizing the culpability of the Confederacy and their apologists. I look to Germany as setting the example of the right thing to do, both in terms of monuments and educating their citizens.” — Bethanie Weber Rayburn
“I’m definitely conflicted here. I certainly see how some of the statues are offensive to certain groups of people. On the other hand, we cannot erase or ignore or rewrite history. Where do we stop when removing them? Some statues, such as those along Monument Ave. in Richmond are an integral part of an urban plan. Emotions are so rame now that I think we need to back off and take time to reflect. Knee-jerk responses seldom result in the best solutions . Furthermore the real problem isn’t the statues themselves but ideology for which they stand. If we can make headway on the more productive issues of overcoming hatred, bigotry, misogyny, and racism those statues wouldn’t have as much emotional charge.” — Sara James
“Are any of these statues works of art? The intention of these statues is clearly to honor the person represented. A work of art, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in WDC, can present a more complex history. Replace statues with works of art.” — Janna Eggebeen
“I immediately think of the actions of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Isis in Syria. Were their actions justified?” — Richard Woodfield
“These statues were all erected before civil rights. They are the works of an oppressive government that insisted on telling their hegemonic version of history. There is a possibility of having some input from our diverse population and we need to respect all our races, not just the European — especially since the white population is going to be a minority soon.” — J. Quick-to-See Smith
“1. It seems crucial for Art historians to help tease out which of these public cultural objects are “art” and which are not. While originality is not determinate of “art”, the fact that many of these objects are identical, “factory-produced” suggests that they really ought to be viewed as a set rather than in isolation. That is, to challenge your prompt: many of the objects at stake right now are not related to specific historical figures and make no substantial claims for their depiction of specific people (only of generic ideas, like, problematically, “heroism”).
2. It seems crucial for Art historians to more firmly establish the context in which so many of these objects were commissioned, made, erected, and celebrated – so often these truths do not match public perceptions. That so many Confederate monuments post-date the war by SO many decades, and that they coincide with a cultural campaign to recuperate the “lost cause” of the Confederacy and reassert white supremacy in the Jim Crow era, should be more clearly articulated. Not teaching about the history of these kitsch objects (on grounds that they lack aesthetic value, perhaps?) has allowed for mythologies of their historical value to circulate amongst white publics.
3. These objects often APPEAR to be monuments to individuals (or groups of individuals), but so many of these are actually more like flags – generic symbols of collective hate. They may wear the white costumes of a Beaux-Arts aesthetic, but these statues form a perpetual and stationary KKK march through our public lands. It is a particular cruelty that they are in state-sponsored spaces. The state, in a rather patronizing interpretation of First Amendment “freedom”, thus sanctions these hate-objects (in the same way that hate-speech is sanctioned); because that which appears to be “speech” or “expression” (even if it is instead violence, and regardless of the context of its speech-power) is protected from government censoring, those who are within the public space of that speech or expression are forcibly compelled by the state to hear or see (or leave the space of the public, removing themselves from the public).
4. It is IMPERATIVE that we all listen when people of color say that they are harmed by the presence of these objects in public spaces. What imagination of “public” do we have for the 21st century if it excludes the feelings of so many Americans? Not listening to people of color is how white people perpetuate white supremacy (even if unknowingly). Those of us who wish to disavow white supremacy must TAKE ACTION to stop it. Whenever possible, we must follow POC-led movements in THEIR proposed solutions for dismantling white supremacy.
5. Given the manner of the production (and attendant aesthetic value) of these cultural objects AND the circumstances of their commissions or original reception as “commemorative monuments” AND the present performativity of these monuments (as ongoing glorification of white supremacy), many of the Confederate monuments should come down. Most (if not all) of these marble and bronze white supremacist flags should be destroyed. History is, we know, not lost by the destruction of any single object (and that destruction would itself be an historical event anyway!). Our public spaces and the objects we place therein must strive to help us reconcile with our violent and hateful past. We need to do this urgently. We need to do it with some speed (not overnight, but certainly not in a slow, gradual way). Our capacity to give this nation over to our young people as a thing they can possess, rather than an institution that reminds them constantly of their oppression, is at stake. To that end, I am in favor of some manner of truth and reconciliation commission with wide-reaching jurisdiction to reevaluate all of the monuments (and so-called monuments) in our public spaces, beginning with those related to the Confederacy and any other public cultural objects commemorating colonization, subjugation, and the violence of oppressors.” — Jessica Santone
“The monuments should not be destroyed, nor should they necessarily be removed from view. Their historical specificity and frequently painful meanings will come to light and perform important educational work if a process of re-signage, re-contextualization and if possible in certain cases a move to a new location is engaged. The collection of relocated problematic monuments in Budapest is an impressive model. As colleagues have noted, it was dispiriting to see very few art historians consulted on this topic by the major media during the immediate post-Charlottesville emergency period.” — S. Hollis Clayson
“The scholarly community has long recognized the fraught politics of these monuments, but it is divided over their fate. Some of the monuments have garnered copious academic analysis, others only recently attracted attention, and yet others are entirely absent from scholarly literature. Some of these statues bear aesthetic value and facilitate our understanding of the trajectory of the American monumental landscape; they also often represent significant moments in an artist’s career. The art historical community might be surprised at the broad participation of northern artists and sculptors, particularly in the 20th century, who served as jurors in these monumental competitions, or who submitted designs for Confederate monuments. Well-known artists in the 20th century, such as Paul Manship, and lesser known-ones, among them women, such as Laura Fraser, participated actively and enthusiastically in the creation of the monumental landscape of the Confederacy, although they did not necessarily share in their ideological implications. For some artists and the architects who created the pedestals upon which the monuments stand, these were professional opportunities that allowed them to showcase their artistic skills. Having researched and published on the monuments, I appreciate their value in allowing us insights into the time and the setting for which they were created and their political utility at the time of their creation. A blanket agenda has been thrown over their creation, although in reality the motivations for individual monuments was quite complex. Some of the monuments were decades in the making, but they were eliminated from public view overnight. Detailed photographic records of most of these monuments, that are instrumental in discussing their iconography are often lacking. Art historians have not been invited to the decision-making processes, to archiving recent debates, or to recording the removal of the monuments. Their removal compromises our ability to continue to engage with their discursive function on the sites for which they were created and to tell the complete story of their impact throughout their existence. Once, removed from public, their fate lies with bureaucratic agencies who are not committed to their preservation or their contextualization, although again there are some who have suggested that neither their preservation, nor their contextualization is necessary . Getting information about their ultimate fate is now impossible. Their relocation is equally problematic as their eventual accommodation in cemeteries, federal battlefields, and museums is yet to be decided. These monuments present serious financial challenges to their prospective recipients as to their proper display, and raise serious ideological concerns for museum curators and boards who will have to negotiate their contextualization. As art historians we have capitalized on the experiential value of visiting these monuments in situ prompting meaningful, transformative conversations among our students. Their removal addresses our most urgent social concerns but does not rectify them; these are only signifiers of deeper social and racial divisions that we are called to address at the local and national level. And herein lies the problem of their displacement; their presence became a thorn on the side of the body politic; let’s hope that its removal is not going to give us a false sense of gratification that we have successfully denounced the divisive ideals that occasioned their establishment.” — Evie Terrono
“My wish would be for every community that has one of these to organize a ‘truth and reconciliation’ style grappling with its past and present, in order to build buy-in for a de-polarized future. Removing oppressive expression has never managed to change hearts, minds, and realities. Only MORE (much) better speech can do that.” — Amy Werbel
“Public monuments show pride for a historical figure’s accomplishments. Therefore, no figure that is not honorable to the general public should have this prestige. However, destroying any historical documentation, whether literature or art, is doing humanity a large disservice by censoring history.” — Alyssa Hardy
“Confederate monuments are artworks created to appear as beautiful war memorials while doing more treacherous work: interjecting an ideology of white supremacy into the public sphere. The United Daughters of the Confederacy and others commissioned artists to make their monuments look beautiful and somber to sugar-coat the terrifying ideology of white supremacy and the reality of a racist social order. That so many of these monuments resemble memorials to Union soldiers further obfuscates the ideology they represent with a cloak of national unity. Therefore, it is important that we recognize Confederate monuments for the propaganda they are. We take pride in public art that represents our ideals, whether by celebrating great achievements, mourning our losses, or reckoning with our mistakes. Confederate monuments celebrate the victory of white supremacy over the black citizens of the South whom it disenfranchised. Confederate monuments mourn the soldiers who fought a war to defend slavery, a cause most Americans have long recognized was wrong. Confederate monuments obscure our mistakes by refusing to acknowledge that slavery, the terrorism of lynching and the Klan, unconstitutional Jim Crow laws and practices that disenfranchised black citizens are wrong. It is therefore right that we remove them from public spaces. Perhaps they should be housed in museums so that we can study the use of art for propaganda. Repurpose the bases and spaces freed up by their removal for art that more accurately and honestly represents us.” — John P. Bowles
Deadlines are Approaching for 2017 CAA Professional-Development Fellowships
posted by CAA — Aug 30, 2017
![](https://www.collegeart.org/news/wp-content//Kraus6.jpg)
Photography by Daniel Seth Kraus, 2016 Professional-Development Fellowship Awardee
October 2 (PhD candidates) and November 10 (MFA candidates) are the deadlines for the CAA Professional-Development Fellowships. The program supports promising artists, designers, craftspeople, historians, curators, and critics who are enrolled in MFA, PhD, and other terminal-degree programs nationwide.
Fellows are honored with $10,000 grants to support their work, whether it be for job-search expenses or purchasing materials for the studio.
“I remember sitting in my graduate school studio applying for the award. I was day-dreaming about how it could help me be a self-sustaining artist and maybe start my career in teaching. A few months later I received notification of the award and I’m happy to say the grant has helped me enormously with both of my day-dreams, artistic and academic. CAA’s Professional-Development Fellowship for Visual Artists has stabilized a shaky phase of my career and life, continuing an artistic practice after graduate school. The award funds helped me to kick-start my studio space, travel for photography research, and secure teaching positions right out of graduate school. CAA’s support of developing visual artists is certainly outstanding and to an even greater extent, appreciated. I’m happy to now be a CAA member and encourage others to apply for the fellowship without hesitation.” —Daniel Kraus, 2016 Professional-Development Fellowship Recipient
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 2018 Annual Conference in Los Angeles, February 21-24. 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.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by CAA — Aug 23, 2017
Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Humanities for All
The Publicly Engaged Humanities project will document the full range of publicly engaged humanities work that college and university faculty and students have carried out over the past decade. Over two years, we will collect examples of this work and build a visually rich website that features representative project profiles and synthetic claims about the state of the field. (Read more from the National Humanities Alliance.)
This New Bootcamp Is Grooming Artists to Run for Office
Even for the most politically engaged artist, it’s a big step from making politically charged artworks to entering the fray as a candidate. While some artists have the skills and knowledge to work in politics, the road from being in a biennial to appearing on a ballot is not easy to navigate. Enter the Artist Campaign School. (Read more from Artsy.)
Instead of Focusing on Yesterday’s Monuments, Artists Are Building Tomorrow’s
Five years before Charlottesville, curators Paul Farber and Ken Lum led a course at the University of Pennsylvania called Memory, Monuments, and Urban Space. Together, the professors and students in attendance discussed the meaning of monuments in this contemporary age. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)
Why the White House’s Arts and Humanities Committee Decided to Resign All at Once
On Friday morning, the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities made the startling decision to resign from Donald Trump’s committee all at once. In a joint statement, its members explained in specific terms why they no longer felt comfortable serving the president in the wake of his inflammatory remarks about the Charlottesville tragedy. (Read more from Vanity Fair.)
Read Kara Walker’s Furious Letter to America’s Navel-Gazing Art World
Famous for her black paper cut-outs depicting simultaneously whimsical and grotesque scenes of slavery and human depravity, Kara Walker is one of the biggest stars in contemporary American art. But in our current political turmoil, the African American artist is getting sick of her vaunted position. (Read more from Quartz.)
Should Protesters Be Allowed to Have Guns?
The question is also posing dilemmas for mayors and university presidents, who fear the violence will come to their towns and schools. Their best option may be to ban the carrying of guns to these events, but their legal position is tenuous. In many states, they’ll need to convince a court that it’s only by banning weapons that the First Amendment rights of all demonstrators can be honored. (Read more from Politico.)
#fyi: On Slack and Surf Clubs
I love Slack. The jury is still out on whether or not this sort of inspired link-sharing is conducive to my at-work productivity, but it has led me to consider the link between the respective practice of the recreational Slack team and the mid-2000s internet artist surfing club. (Read more from Rhizome.)
What Is Dark Yellowing?
Dark yellowing is the reversible, temporary yellowing that dried oil paint undergoes when stored in the dark or subdued lighting. While noted in many historical writings, most painters remain unaware of it and become surprised or concerned when they discover it happening to their own works. (Read more from Just Paint.)