CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Jun 01, 2016
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Surface, Image, Reception: Painting in a Digital Age
Painting has always existed in relation to technology, when the term is understood in its broad definition as the practical application of specialized knowledge: brush, compass, camera obscura, photography, or inkjet printer. Yet it is only now that, through a physical presence and a shared role as content-delivery system, painting is so closely affiliated with the technologies it engages. (Read more from Rhizome.)
The Rise of Pirate Libraries
All around the world, shadow libraries keep growing, filled with banned materials. But no actual papers trade hands: everything is digital, and the internet-accessible content is not banned for shocking content so much as that modern crime, copyright infringement. But for the people who run the world’s pirate libraries, their goals are no less ambitious for their work’s illicit nature. (Read more from Slate.)
Raid the Database 2 with Nafis White
Raid the Database 2 with Nafis White is the second artist-curated digital project inspired by the RISD Museum’s historic exhibition Raid the Icebox 1 with Andy Warhol (1969–70). Each project in the series takes shape as the artist works closely with museum staff to gather materials, navigate the museum’s database and website, and delve into the original show. (Read more from Manual.)
Academic Publishing: Toward a New Model
Academic publishing is one area on which the web’s impact has been modest at best. Though a few open-access journals exist and many academics maintain blogs, journal costs have soared. Our writings remain less accessible, locked behind paywalls while libraries forgo buying print versions. While we understand why this has happened, a solution to it has been elusive. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
How Does a Museum Sponsorship Deal Really Work?
Museums have needed to diversify revenue streams, and forging deeper ties with corporate sponsors has become widely seen as imperative. These pressures come at a time when there is an increased awareness of contemporary art in culture—allowing museums to offer a certain kind of cred, or cool, even, in addition to the obvious exposure to their moneyed audiences. (Read more from Artspace Magazine.)
Six Things to Keep in Mind When Applying for Art Grants
With governments cutting funding for the arts, it is getting harder for artists and art institutions to obtain art grants, fellowships, or scholarships. The professional grant writer Ethan Haymovitz has put together a list of things to keep in mind when writing your application. (Read more from Art Report.)
Recap of SAH’s 2016 Annual Conference
Seven hundred thirty-eight members participated in the Society of Architectural Historians’ sixty-ninth annual international conference, which took place April 6–10, 2016, in Pasadena, California. Attendees hailed from thirty-six countries and forty-two states. A brief recap of the conference’s events follows. (Read more from the Society of Architectural Historians.)
The Real Threat to Free Expression
The threat to free speech on college campuses has become a crisis, although not the one commonly posited in public debate. How young people armed with smartphones became so skeptical of expression and what to do about it is a fundamental challenge for higher education. The answer will be to change the discourse from what to allow to what to listen to. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Support the Visual Arts Community: Give to CAA’s Annual Fund
posted by CAA — May 24, 2016
Thank you for being a member of the College Art Association, the world’s leading professional association for the visual arts. As a dedicated member of CAA, you know firsthand about the important work that CAA does to serve and enhance the visual-arts community. We could not do this without your support.
Today, I ask that you join me in celebrating all that CAA does with a gift to the Annual Fund.
Beyond CAA’s ongoing advocacy efforts; vital professional documents like CAA’s Standards and Guidelines; critical projects like the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts; prestigious publishing grants for book manuscripts; career-development resources including the Online Career Center; Professional-Development Fellowships in support of promising artists, designers, craftspersons, historians, curators, and critics; important new writing and scholarship published in The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and caa.reviews; and CAA’s central forum for exchange of creative work and scholarly research at the Annual Conference—CAA does a great deal more to support its members, the lifeblood of the association.
CAA subsidizes over half of its members through discounted membership and registration fees for students, retirees, part-time faculty, and independent artists and scholars. CAA has made part-time faculty issues a priority, recommending that tenured faculty and administrators in the visual arts implement its Guidelines for Part-Time Professional Employment and also providing a resources section on its website for part-time faculty. At the conference, CAA offers Professional-Development Workshops and mentoring opportunities for artists, art historians, designers, and students. CAA is also dedicated to strengthening its support of its international members. Recently CAA launched a section on its website devoted to international topics, the International Desk, which includes reports from around the world and listings of international grants, conferences, and residencies.
In fall 2016, CAA will also launch CAA Connect, the digital social community where CAA members can discuss the latest in visual arts news and practices and collaborate on projects. CAA Connect will boast a number of private and public communities, each with its own discussion threads and resource libraries for multimedia content. We see it as an important tool in bringing together our members and the wider visual arts and humanities fields. Look for CAA Connect to launch in the fall of 2016.
Voluntary support from CAA members is critical to our collective advancement and your contribution to the Annual Fund will enable CAA to continue providing invaluable resources to its members.
On behalf of CAA’s diverse community of artists, art historians, curators, critics, collectors, designers, educators, and other arts professionals, I thank you for your commitment to CAA. Please give generously!
Sincerely,
Doralynn Pines
Vice President for External Affairs
Support CAA’s Publications Fund
posted by CAA — May 20, 2016
CAA’s journals continue to deliver the world’s leading scholarship in the visual arts. This year, we welcome many new additions and changes to the publications while maintaining our commitment to bringing readers the most vital, intellectually compelling, and visually engaging scholarly journals in art and art history.
We encourage you to support our mission of advancing the highest standards of intellectual engagement in the arts with a gift to the Publications Fund today. As always, your contribution is tax-deductible, so please give generously!
Beginning July 1, 2016, CAA welcomes Nina Athanasoglou-Kallmyer, Professor Emerita at the University of Delaware, as The Art Bulletin’s next editor-in-chief. Rebecca Brown, Art Journal’s editor-in-chief and Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University, published her first issue in Spring 2016. CAA’s exclusively online publication, caa.reviews recently launched a new website, and Art Journal Open, CAA’s accessible online venue for contemporary works, takes on appropriation as an artistic strategy in a three-part series.
Here are some recent highlights from CAA publications:
In The Art Bulletin:
- Recent articles include Erik Inglis on revelations in the 1534 inventory of the St-Denis treasury; Paola Demattè on cross-cultural factors in eighteenth-century Parisian prints of Chinese subjects; Richard Taws on the imposter dauphins in the wake of the French Revolution and the issue of truth in nineteenth-century discourse; and the tensions between the individual and the collective in postwar German art groups, in an analysis by Jacopo Galimberti
- In the “Whither Art History?” series, Youngna Kim explores the relation of Korean art history to global developments in the discipline; Shao Yiyang reflects on the state of art history in China
- Reviews of books range from art in Byzantine diplomatic encounters to transcontinental and transoceanic image networks in early America, and from Chinoiserie in eighteenth-century Britain to the circulation of artworks in late Ottoman Istanbul
In Art Journal:
- Artists’ projects by Jason Simon, Amy Adler, and Julia Oldham, the last an astrophysical exploration of loss, love, and canine connection
- Essays by Emma Chubb, examining Isaac Julien’s images of traumatic crossings of the Mediterranean by present-day migrants; Natilee Harren on the means by which materials and fragments of the urban fabric found their way into the confounding commodities of Fluxus artists in the 1960s; Cynthia Chris and Jason Simon on the economic elements of video art as it nears the half-century mark; and Daniel Rosenberg on the presentation of complex data about war and disaster in large photographic works by the Dutch artist Gert Jan Kocken
- A seven-author forum organized by Jordana Moore Saggese that sheds new light on diversity and difference from perspectives including queer failure, craft, diasporic studies, critical race history, and disability
- Reviews of books artists on William Kentridge, Isa Genzken, and Antonin Artaud; on decolonization in postwar France; and on art emerging from postsocialist nations
- In Art Journal Open, “Knight’s Heritage: Karl Haendel and the Legacy of Appropriation” by Natilee Harren. Harren’s three-part essay examines appropriation as an artistic strategy that pressures both the legal and conceptual definitions of authorship through a case study of three specific episodes in artist Karl Haendel’s practice of circulating existing images. Nate Harrison responds, offering a critical reminder of the historical specificity of postmodernism and appropriation. Haendel’s contribution Oral Sadism & the Vegetarian Personality (Approximately) is an animated representation of the artist’s extensive archival collection of some ten thousand found images and photographs, used as source material for his drawings. Other recent pieces are a report on Art + Feminism’s Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at the Museum of Modern Art by Chelsea Spengemann, and a conversation between curator Mia Locks and artist Math Bass.
In caa.reviews (Now fully open access!):
- caa.reviews continues to expand the number and type of reviews published each year. In 2015, the journal published 159 reviews on exhibitions and books in all areas of the visual arts. In 2016, an addition to the Re:Views series—an essay by Eddie Chambers, University of Texas Austin, on his role in commissioning reviews on African and African Diaspora art—discusses the division of subject categories within US academic communities and the lack of scholarship published on these topics. Forthcoming by caa.reviews Editor Designate, Juliet Bellow, is a multimedia project using the Scalar platform reviewing a two-day performance at the Tate Modern, If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse? by choreographer Boris Charmatz, which will be accompanied by an interactive floor plan and additional texts and images.
These highly regarded journals reach tens of thousands of readers around the world and serve as essential resources to those working in the visual arts—none of which would be possible without your support. Contributors who give at a level of $250 or higher are prominently acknowledged in the publication they support for four consecutive issues, as well as on the publication’s website for one year, through CAA News, and in the Annual Conference’s convocation booklet. On behalf of the scholars, critics, and artists who publish in the journals, we thank you for your continued commitment to maintaining a strong and spirited forum for the visual arts community.
With best regards,
Gail Feigenbaum
Vice President for Publications
College Art Association Announces Hunter O’Hanian as Executive Director
posted by CAA — May 18, 2016
The College Art Association (CAA) is pleased to announce Hunter O’Hanian as its next executive director. He will start at CAA on July 1, 2016. O’Hanian succeeds Linda Downs, who served as CAA executive director from 2006 to 2016. O’Hanian comes to CAA at a moment of expansion and opportunity in the organization. In January 2016, CAA announced comprehensive changes to its Annual Conference that will increase the number of sessions and chances for participation. In response to the changes, CAA received over 850 session proposals for its 2017 conference in New York, February 15–18.
“I am very excited to welcome Hunter O’Hanian to CAA as executive director,” says Suzanne Preston Blier, president of CAA. “He brings not only unique administrative experience but also striking energy and vision at this key moment in the Association’s history.”
As executive director, O’Hanian is an employee of the CAA Board of Directors and serves as the Association’s chief executive officer. In this role, he will work with board members, committees, and task forces to develop the Association’s strategic plans. O’Hanian’s experience in fundraising, law, and the arts will greatly benefit the membership and the larger visual arts, design, education, and cultural communities with whom CAA works. O’Hanian will oversee a wide variety of initiatives, including the CAA Annual Conference, an advocacy program, member services activities, the career center, fellowships, grants and opportunities offered by CAA, and the publications program, which includes The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Art Journal Open, and caa.reviews.
“I have long been an admirer of the work CAA has done. They have helped so many artists, art historians, and curators in the pursuit of their professional goals,” says O’Hanian. “I am pleased to be part of this exciting team and look forward to playing a role in growing its membership, bolstering the conferences, and helping the organization thrive on every level.”
O’Hanian is currently the director of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York’s Soho neighborhood. The Leslie-Lohman Museum is the only art museum devoted exclusively to artwork that speaks to the LGBTQ experience.
Prior to joining Leslie-Lohman, Hunter was the vice president of institutional advancement and executive director of the Foundation for Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. Previous to that, he led two renowned artists’ residencies programs, having served as the president of Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, outside of Aspen, Colorado, and executive director of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which is the largest residency program for emerging artists and writers in the United States. The Fine Arts Work Center recently permanently endowed a fellowship in his name.
O’Hanian has a long career of non-profit board and community involvement. He is the past board chair of the Alliance of Artists Communities, the national membership organization for artists’ residency programs. He studied painting at Boston College and received his bachelor of laws degree from Suffolk University in Boston. O’Hanian has an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the Art Institute of Boston.
Photo credit: Johnathan M. Lewis
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — May 18, 2016
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
How to Become a Curator
Start out as an artist instead. In school, you’re always saddled with organizing the group shows, buying the beer, placating fellow artists’ fears, making the invitations, composing the checklist, finding the funding, contacting the press, inviting the audience. Your entire art practice becomes a smudgy line between curating and art, and you grow to feel strange and unnecessary. (Read more from Momus.)
Journalism and Art: Complementary and Collaborative Storytelling
The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism project is one example of how journalists are employing the arts to get important issues off the page and screen and into people’s lives. At the same time, artists are using reporting techniques, interviews, public records, documentary footage, and photo captions to create work addressing social, economic, and political topics that usually fall within the purview of journalism. (Read more from Nieman Storyboard.)
Google Launches Tilt Brush App for Virtual-Reality Sketching
Google’s virtual-reality painting app, Tilt Brush, could allow architects and designers to walk through their sketches in three dimensions as they draw them. Available on the HTC Vive headset device, Tilt Brush allows users to create 3D imagery using a simple controller that mimics the gestures of painting. (Read more from De Zeen.)
Diversity in Academe: Who Sets a College’s Diversity Agenda?
True diversity remains a struggle for many colleges. A special report from the Chronicle of Higher Education looks at who actually sets a college’s diversity agenda, and what makes that agenda flourish or flop. These questions have taken on a special urgency as race-related protests have erupted on many campuses and as the nation’s population grows more diverse. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
How Cities Can Revitalize Their Public Spaces
A city is much more than a collection of tall buildings on the skyline. What makes a city a great place to live and visit, says James Corner, are the shared spaces—sidewalks, plazas, parks, waterfronts. Corner is part of a new wave of muscular landscape architects who argue that their work is about more than planting trees and grass: it is about reshaping the identity of a place and how the people who live there see themselves. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)
We’re All Failures
Academics are wired to achieve, and their CVs are designed to showcase their every accomplishment. While rejection is a fact of academic life, most faculty don’t share the gory details. Every successful scholar has tanked job interviews; been turned down for fellowships, postdocs, and grants; and had publications that flopped. So it’s been inspiring to see scholars go public with “CVs of Failure” that list their numerous brushes with defeat in glorious detail. (Read more from Vitae.)
The Job-Search Buddy System
The academic enterprise values individual contributions, even though scholarly achievements require a communal effort. While metrics that weigh heavily on the number of papers, books, seminars, and discoveries that individuals produce are an essential part of scholarly training, the environment this creates may condition scholars to pursue all of their career goals without assistance from others. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Why Is Scholarly-Communication Reform So Hard to Talk About, and Where Are the Authors?
Readers of any number of professional listservs, magazines, and journals may have noticed that questions about scholarly-communication reform tend to be vexed and controversial. Having participated in these conversations for over twenty years, and having recently gotten home from a conference that dealt specifically with such questions, I’ve been thinking about why feelings run so high when we talk about them. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
The College Art Association and Terra Foundation for American Art Invite Applications for 2017 Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant
posted by CAA — May 17, 2016
The College Art Association (CAA) and Terra Foundation for American Art invite applications for the 2017 Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant. The grant provides financial support for the publication of book-length scholarly manuscripts on the history of American art from circa 1500 to 1980 in the current-day geographic United States. The deadline for applications is September 15, 2016.
“Now in its sixth year, this international grant program helps to ensure that the field of American art history includes a wide range of culturally and geographically diverse voices,” stated Terra Foundation Publication Program Director Francesca Rose. “For example, Vardan Azatyan’s Armenian translation of Erika Doss’s book Twentieth-Century American Art increases awareness of the historical art of the United States by making important scholarship available to a broader audience and fostering international collaboration.”
Awards of up to $15,000 will be made in three distinct categories:
Grants to US publishers for manuscripts considering American art in an international context
Grants to non-US publishers for manuscripts on topics in American art
Grants for the translation of books on topics in American art to or from English.
“The generous support by the Terra Foundation for American Art to help finance book publications in the field of art history will benefit not only the recipients of the grant, but also teachers, students, and the art book reading public more generally,” says Suzanne Blier, president of CAA.
For more information on submission process, guidelines, and eligibility, please visit the CAA website.
The 2016 Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant winners were announced in February after the CAA Annual Conference in Washington, DC.
2016 TERRA FOUNDATION FOR AMERICAN ART INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATION GRANT WINNERS
- Jean-Pierre Criqui and Céline Flécheux, eds., Robert Smithson. Mémoire et entropie, Les presses du réel
- Erika Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art, translated into Armenian by Vardan Azatyan, Eiva Arts Foundation
- Eva Ehninger and Antje Krause-Wahl, eds., In Terms of Painting, Revolver Publishing
- Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal, translated into French by Karine Douplitzky, Éditions des archives contemporaines
- Rockwell Kent, Voyaging Southward from the Strait of Magellan, translated into Spanish and edited by Fielding D. Dupuy, Amarí Peliowski, and Catalina Valdés, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Chile) and Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado
- Will Norman, Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile and Culture in Midcentury America, Johns Hopkins University Press
- Annika Öhrner, ed., Art in Transfer—Curatorial Practices and Transnational Strategies in the Era of Pop, Södertörn University
- Joshua Shannon, The Recording Machine: Art and the Culture of Fact, Yale University Press
- Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties, translated into French by Anne Lemoine, C & F Éditions
Two non-US authors of top-ranked books were also awarded travel funds and complimentary registration for CAA’s 2017 Annual Conference in New York from February 15 to 18; they also received one-year CAA memberships.
The two author awardees for 2016 are:
- Will Norman
- Annika Öhrner
Image caption: Winslow Homer, Three Boys on the Shore, 1873, gouache and watercolor on paper mounted on board, 8⅝ x 13⅝ in. (image); 14⅜ x 19½ in. (mat). Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.75 (artwork in the public domain)
Affiliated Society News for May 2016
posted by CAA — May 15, 2016
Art Council of the African Studies Association
In the past year, the Art Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) sponsored a panel and a well-attended members’ meeting at the African Studies Association (ASA) annual meeting and hosted a session at the CAA Annual Conference. The council also distributed three extensive newsletters and is finalizing plans for a triennial conference, to be held in Ghana in 2017. To build support for the Ghana event, ACASA has undertaken a fundraising campaign with a five-member committee that meets every three weeks.
ACASA has also implemented a new online system for member payments and had a sizable presence at the European Conference on African Studies (ECAS) in Paris in July 2015. ACASA financially sponsored one artist’s performance at ECAS in a series Dominique Malaquais organized that was devoted to the arts. Finally, ACASA held elections to replace most of the organization’s board members.
Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture
The Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA) has elected new officers. The new president is Amelia Rauser of Franklin and Marshall College. She is a specialist in eighteenth-century British art and the author of numerous scholarly studies, including Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008). Christina Lindeman from the University of South Alabama is the new treasurer. She is the author of articles on art and gender in eighteenth-century Germany, with a special emphasis on the court of Anna Amalia of Weimar. Her book Representing Anna Amalia’s Bildung: Visual Metamorphosis from Personal to Political in Eighteenth-Century Germany, is forthcoming from Routledge.
HECAA also maintains a wonderful serial newsletter.
Midwest Art History Society
The Midwest Art History Society (MAHS) held its “Icons of the Midwest” session at CAA’s 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC. The meeting was meant to highlight important and museum-related art and art history from America’s vital middle region. This year’s topic was the Chicago Jazz Age painter Archibald Motley (1891–1981). The session’s cochairs were MAHS members Amy M. Mooney (Columbia College) and Mark Pohlad (DePaul University); the speakers were Jerma A. Jackson (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Phoebe E. Wolfskill (University of Indiana), and Romi Crawford (School of the Art Institute of Chicago). A highlight of this lively session was the remarks of the renowned Motley scholar, Richard J. Powell.
The forty-third MAHS annual conference took place in Chicago from April 7 to 9, 2016. Approximately two hundred participants and registrants convened at DePaul University’s Loop Campus to hear more than thirty academic sessions devoted to a wide range of art history. The keynote address, held at the nearby Art Institute of Chicago, was delivered by Gloria Groom, chair of European painting and sculpture and David and Mary Winton Green Curator in the Department of European Painting and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, who was involved the concurrent Van Gogh’s Bedrooms exhibition. Other conference highlights included a reception at Columbia College’s Museum of Contemporary Photography, a session on “Recent Acquisitions in Midwest Collections” (held at the Art Institute and chaired by the curator Judith W. Mann), and two sessions comprised of undergraduate scholars. For more information and to read conference proceedings and paper abstracts, visit the conference page of the MAHS website.
MAHS will hold its forty-fourth annual conference in Cleveland, Ohio, from April 6 to 8, 2017. The event will be hosted by the Cleveland Museum of Art, Case Western Reserve University, and Cleveland State University. To open the conference, a distinguished keynote panel will speak on Raphael’s School of Athens Cartoon, currently undergoing restoration in Milan. The panel will include: Don Alberto Rocca, director of the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan; Maurizio Michelozzi, a Florentine paper conservator who is undertaking the restoration; and Carmen Bambach, curator of drawings and prints for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Funding for the panel has been provided by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Chicago, the Italian Art Society, the University of Notre Dame, and MAHS.
New Media Caucus
The New Media Caucus (NMS) has elected new officers and members to its board of directors in February 2016. Mat Rappaport is president elect, Rachel Clarke is secretary, and Kevin Hamilton is chair of the caucus’s journal, Media-N. The new board members are Victoria Bradbury, Darren Douglas-Floyd, Mina Cheon, Abigail Susik, and Doreen Maloney. For more information on the organization’s structure, visit the New Media Caucus website.
Public Art Dialogue
At the CAA Annual Conference in February, Public Art Dialogue (PAD) hosted a roundtable chaired by Kirk Savage, professor of the history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. Also participating were Thomas Luebke, secretary of the United States Commission of Fine Arts, and Lucy Kempf, a member of the National Capital Planning Commission.
The 2016 PAD award recipient was Kirk Savage, who has contributed extensively to our understanding of American memorials, particularly those dedicated to Civil War soldiers. He is the author of two award winning books: Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (1997) and Monument Wars: Washington DC, the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (2009). Savage has also edited The Civil War in Art and Memory (2016). In presenting the award, PAD cochair Cameron Cartiere observed that one of the most compelling aspects of Savage’s scholarship is that it helps us “to look back into our history of memorialization as a means of understanding the ramifications of the political, social, and cultural decisions we make in developing contemporary memorials that mark the present, acknowledge our tumultuous past, and help us to embrace our uncharted future.”
Renaissance Society of America
The Program Committee for the sixty-third annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America invites submissions for individual papers or sessions on any aspect of Renaissance studies or the era 1300–1700. Because RSA is a multidisciplinary society, we especially welcome submissions that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries, as well as those that spotlight scholarship that is discipline specific. Sessions sponsored by our Associate Organizations and Discipline Representatives will make up part of the program. The rest will consist of sessions and individual papers proposed by RSA members and selected by the Program Committee.
Because the RSA Annual Meeting is a large conference—with as many as fifty sessions meeting concurrently—we have developed guidelines over the years that greatly facilitate the work of the Program Committee and help to ensure an audience for every session. Please note that proposing a session or a paper indicates your commitment to attend. The committee will not be able to accept every submission; good papers will have to be turned away. To take a slot and then later withdraw is discourteous to colleagues who would have liked to present a paper. Once the rooms are scheduled and the AV equipment is ordered, no substitutions are possible.
Organizers may propose a series of linked sessions, up to a limit of five. However, the Program Committee prefers that series be limited to three, to facilitate scheduling them in a row. Sessions organized in honor or in memory of an individual scholar are limited to no more than two. Proposals for roundtables are also welcome, but the committee asks that roundtables be stand-alone sessions in terms of their content. Roundtables that merely involve recapping the content of a series of sessions take up valuable space in the program that could be used to present other research; proposals for them are not likely to be accepted.
The committee welcomes sessions that present the scholarship of members at various stages of their careers. Each session must include at least one speaker who has received a PhD or other terminal degree. Graduate-student speakers should be in candidacy or the equivalent for their program; that is, they must be advanced students who have completed coursework, examinations, and much of their dissertation research. They are invited to speak on topics directly related to their dissertation research, rather than presenting term papers.
Please visit the RSA website for more details. The submission site will open in May, with a submission deadline in early June (TBA). You do not need to be a member to submit a proposal, but if your proposal is accepted you will need to be an RSA member for the year of the conference.
Society for Photographic Education
The Society for Photographic Education (SPE) welcomes conference proposals from photographers, writers, educators, curators, historians, and professionals from other fields for “Family Values,” the fifty-fourth SPE national conference, to be held March 9–12, 2017, in Orlando, Florida. Topics are not required to be theme based; they may include but are not limited to: imagemaking, history, contemporary theory and criticism, multidisciplinary approaches, new technologies, effects of media and culture, educational issues, funding, and presentations of work in photography, film, video, performance, and installation.
The presentation formats are:
- Graduate Student: short presentation of your own artistic work and a brief introduction to your graduate program (must be enrolled in graduate program at time of submission)
- Imagemaker: presentation of your own artistic work (photography, film, video, performance, installation, multidisciplinary approaches)
- Lecture: presentation on historical topic, theory, or another artist’s work
- Panel Discussion: active discussion among panelists (maximum of three), a moderator, and the audience on a chosen topic
- Teaching and Learning: presentations, workshops, and demos that addresses educational issues, including teaching resources and strategies (syllabi, videos, assignments, readings, class preparation and setup, and PowerPoint presentations); curricula to serve diverse artists and changing student populations; seeking promotion and tenure; avoiding burnout; and professional exchange
Current SPE membership is required of all participants with accepted proposals. Please visit the SPE website for full proposal guidelines and special award details.
Society of Architectural Historians
The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) is accepting abstracts for its 2017 annual international conference in Glasgow, Scotland (June 7–11). Abstracts may be submitted for one of the thirty-six paper sessions, for the Graduate Student Lightning Talks, or for open sessions. SAH encourages submissions from architectural, landscape, and urban historians; museum curators; preservationists; independent scholars; architects; and members of SAH chapters and partner organizations. Deadline: June 6, 2016.
Applications are open for the SAH/Mellon Author Awards, which are designed to provide financial relief to scholars who are publishing their first monograph on the history of the built environment and who are responsible for paying for rights and permissions for images or for commissioning maps, charts, or line drawings in their publications. Deadline: May 15, 2016.
SAH invites nominations and self-nominations for the next editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH) to serve a three-year term: January 1, 2018–December 31, 2020. JSAH is a quarterly, blind-peer-reviewed international journal devoted to all aspects of the history of the global built environment and spatial practice, including architecture, landscape architecture, urbanism, and city planning. Published since 1941, JSAH has defined the field of architectural history and is a pioneer in digital publication. Articles published in JSAH are historically rigorous, conceptually sophisticated, and theoretically innovative. Deadline: June 15, 2016.
Registration is open for the SAH Field Seminar, “Architectural Layers of a Southeast Asian Region,” to take place December 1–13, 2016. The program will explore the fascinating architectural landscape of Vietnam, focusing in particular on the modern era from the nineteenth century to today. Participants will also visit the spectacular Angkor complex in Cambodia, capital of the Khmer empire from the ninth to fifteenth century. The SAH Study Program Fellowship deadline is August 11, 2016.
Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture
In February and March 2016, the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) conducted an election for its board of directors. As a result, a SHERA–Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) liaison was created, with Anna P. Sokolina as an officer. This new position will be open for reelection every three years. In addition, Hanna Chuchvaha, Natalia Kolodzei, and Andrei Shabanov were designated members at large, and Nicholas Iljine was reelected a member at large for another two-year term.
SHERA has launched a call for papers for its sponsored session for emerging scholars for CAA’s 2017 Annual Conference, chaired by Alice Sullivan.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Apr 13, 2016
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Wikimedia Art Database Breaks Copyright Law
Sweden’s highest court has found Wikimedia Sweden guilty of violating copyright laws by providing free access to its database of photographs of artworks without the artists’ consent. Wikimedia, part of the nonprofit foundation that oversees Wikipedia, among other online resources, has a database of royalty-free photographs that can be used by the public for educational purposes or the tourism industry. (Read more from Art Daily.)
How Creative Capital Replaced the NEA and Taught Artists to Be Ambitious
Creative Capital is such a big deal in the art world that it even affects the lives of artists who don’t receive its awards. This grant-making organization, based in New York but serving artists nationally, was created in 1999 to counter the economic loss to artists when the NEA killed the majority of its individual artist grants. (Read more from the Stranger.)
How Do I Handle a Backlash against My Art Review?
I wrote a negative review about a show on my blog and received a considerable backlash to it. I eventually took the post down and feel like my entire art scene has blacklisted me. How do I write negative criticism in a small, intimate art community without upsetting everyone? (Read more from Burnaway.)
When Your Art Bleeds You Dry
Art should be ennobling or give us pleasure or, in Picasso’s words, wash “the dust of daily life off our souls.” But sometimes art makes people nervous and worried. Not necessarily because of the content but because it needs to be protected, conserved, and insured—and all those things cost money. (Read more from the New York Observer.)
Art in the New Plutocracy
In 2010, a cadre of muckraking activists started a project called Artigarchy. Its aim was to investigate the relationship between rising inequality and rising art prices, not merely to identify key individuals but to expose institutional relationships, for example, between banks and museums. How do the institutions of the art world shape and actually harm society? (Read more from the Chronicle Review.)
Will the Monograph Experience a Transition to E-Only?
The scholarly literature incorporates a number of different material types. Reference publishing and collections have perhaps been transformed more than any other content type. Why should a database be issued in print format at all? (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
Does It Count for Tenure?
I am starting a new tenure-track job in the fall. I have a journal article from this past year and another one coming out this spring. Will they count toward my tenure case at the new job? (Read more from Vitae.)
An App That Pushes Aside the Art-World Curtain
The process of buying and selling art has a reputation for opacity, but a new mobile app that promises to instantly provide price data could help open the market. The free app, called Magnus, uses digital-recognition technology similar to that of Shazam, which “hears” music to provide song titles, and Vivino, which reads wine labels and reveals ratings and restaurant markups. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Suzanne Preston Blier Is the New CAA President
posted by Christopher Howard — Apr 04, 2016
Suzanne Preston Blier, a historian of African art and architecture at Harvard University, has been elected president of CAA for a two-year term, beginning in May 2016. A member of the board since 2012, Blier has served as vice president for publications (2013–15) and vice president of Annual Conference (2015–16), and has served on task forces related to the development of CAA’s Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts and Guidelines for the Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in Art and Art History. She will succeed DeWitt Godfrey, professor of art and art history at Colgate University.
In her statement for candidacy, Blier wrote, “My priorities as president will focus on increasing membership in part through changes to the Annual Conference and enhancing CAA’s place in the community of discourse nationally and internationally through more effective social media engagement and the use of digital technologies. I hope also to broaden our engagement not only at the local and national levels but also internationally.”
Blier earned a BA from the University of Vermont in 1973 and completed a PhD in art history from Columbia University. Blier taught at Northwestern University for two years (1981–83) and returned to Columbia (1983–93) before landing at Harvard, where she is currently Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and Professor of African and African American Studies.
In 2008, Blier helped found an on-line GIS-enhanced database and mapping project supported by the Center for Geographic Analysis at her school that in 2011 was relaunched as Worldmap.
Blier’s involvement in CAA spans several decades. She originally served on the board from 1989 to 1994. She was a member of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board from 2003 to 2007, serving one year as chair, and participated on the juries for CAA’s Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art (2004–6) and Charles Rufus Morey Book Award (2009–11). Blier also helped to shape CAA’s Strategic Plan 2015–2020 and, in her role as vice president, chaired both the Annual Conference Committee and the 2016 task force that brought significant changes to the Annual Conference organization and structure.
“In my own academic work,” Blier continued in her statement, “I have come to understand firsthand the importance of engaging broad and diverse communities of participants; my work initiating an open source website focused on an array of mapping projects, has offered me opportunities to see the imprint that new technologies can have in the lives of both faculty and students.”
Blier’s most recent book is Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba: Ife History, Power, and Identity, c. 1300 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), which won the 2016 PROSE Award for Art History and Criticism. She also wrote several other books of note: African Royal Art: The Majesty of Form (London: Calmann and King, 1998); African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), which received CAA’s Morey Book Award in 1997; and The Anatomy of Architecture: Ontology and Metaphor in Batammaliba Architectural Expression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), which won the inaugural Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association. The production of both African Vodun and The Anatomy of Architecture were supported by grants from CAA’s Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Blier’s books have been translated into Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and Korean. A publication edited with David Bindman, called The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.
Her scholarship has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including African Arts, Journal of African History, American Journal of Semiotics, Anthropology and Art, and Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. A short essay “Art, Mimesis, and Tigritude” can be found in the June 2013 issue of The Art Bulletin as part of the series Notes from the Field: Mimesis. Other essays in CAA’s flagship journal are “Kings, Crowns, and Rights of Succession: Obalufon Arts at Ife and Other Yoruba Centers” (September 1985) and “Imaging Otherness in Ivory: African Portrayals of the Portuguese ca. 1492” (September 1993). Both articles were selected by members of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board for the Centennial Anthology of the Art Bulletin’s “greatest hits,” designating important articles and reviews since the journal’s 1913 founding to mark CAA¹s Centennial in 2011.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Mar 16, 2016
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Announcing NEH-Mellon Fellowships for Digital Publication
The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the two largest funders of humanities research in the United States, have announced a new joint fellowship opportunity to support high-quality, born-digital research in the humanities. (Read more from the National Endowment for the Humanities.)
Go Pro: The Hyper-Professionalization of the Emerging Artist
I can understand the widespread notion among curators and critics that the role of the emerging artist has changed dramatically during the past few years. The shift toward professionalization is further encouraged by the growing involvement of wealthy individuals in the art market who first made their capital by investing in financial markets, real estate, or related industries. (Read more from ARTnews.)
Ten Upcoming Shows by Groundbreaking Female Artists
March is Women’s History Month, so there’s no better time to outline a few upcoming shows by female artists admired by Artnet News. From Hong Kong to Los Angeles, 2016 is brimming with exhibitions by awesome artists, who range in age from twentysomethings to one very impressive centenarian. (Read more from Artnet News.)
Winning Strategies for Journal Publishers
“The Inexorable Path of the Professional Society Publisher” takes the view of the underdog—the small or midsized professional society publisher—that struggles to remain competitive in an environment in which administrative costs explode, budgets of customers are flat or declining, and libraries invite consolidation among vendors in order to reduce administrative costs. While few journals truly lose out entirely, some publishers win bigger than others. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
Should All Research Papers Be Free?
Drawing comparisons to Edward Snowden, a graduate student from Kazakhstan named Alexandra Elbakyan is believed to be hiding out in Russia after illegally leaking millions of documents. While she didn’t reveal state secrets, she took a stand for the public’s right to know by providing free online access to just about every scientific paper ever published, on topics ranging from acoustics to zymology. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Job-Market Challenges for Tenure-Track Academics
Often in life our personal experience is limited, and thus we fail to understand the total, complex reality. That is certainly true of the academic job market. Many of us participate in that market only a handful of times as a candidate, and even if we serve on search committees regularly, that experience tends to be limited to certain fields and to our own institutions. (Read more from Vitae.)
Why They Stay and Why They Go
Whether the separation is voluntary or not, losing a tenure-line or otherwise full-time faculty member is always a costly to an institution. The departing professor will take any external research grants with him or her, not to mention the sunk costs of hiring and training. Then there are additional costs that are harder to quantify, such as those to morale, mentorship, service, and leadership. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
What’s the Value of a Liberal-Arts Education in Our Twenty-First Century Digital Economy?
Achieving goals associated with liberal-arts education would require business schools to move into territory more traditionally related to the liberal arts: multidisciplinary approaches, an understanding of global and historical context, a greater focus on leadership and social responsibility, and learning to think critically. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)