CAA News Today
Affiliated Society News for March 2017
posted by CAA — Mar 10, 2017
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG)
Registration and program information for the 2017 AAMG Annual Conference in Eugene, OR is now available. Please click here to access the schedule of presentations, workshops, receptions, and much more.
Online registration, as well as hotel and travel information, is also now online. Please note: AAMG institutional and individual members will need to login with their username and password to be eligible for the $250 early bird rate. The special member rate is available through April 15. If you have difficulty with logging in to your account, click here to reset your password or contact membership@aamg-us.org.
We hope to see you in Eugene this summer for what will be our biggest and best AAMG Annual Conference to date!
Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA)
The Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA) was happy to see many members at CAA for its Annual Meeting and its sponsored session, “The Gustatory Turn in American Art.” February 2017 also marked a changing of the guard of sorts, as we welcome several new board members to our ranks. We wish to express our gratitude to outgoing Board members Anna Marley (Chair Emerita), Monica Jovanovich-Kelley (Treasurer), Jillian Russo (Secretary), Melissa Renn (Membership Coordinator), and Annelise Madsen (Web Coordinator). We are grateful for their years of service to the organization!
We welcome the following incoming board members: Miguel de Baca (Co-Chair), Diana Seave Greenwald (Treasurer), Naomi Slipp (Secretary), Jonathan Walz (Membership Coordinator), and Jeff Richmond-Moll and Andrea Truitt (Web Co-Coordinators). Additionally, the Executive Editors of our online journal Panorama will be joining the board, and so we are pleased to work even more closely with Betsy Boone, Sarah Burns, and Jennifer Jane Marshall.
AHAA is also delighted to announce the venue for our October 2018 Symposium: Minneapolis, Minnesota! We look forward to sharing more information in the coming months as our colleagues at the University of Minnesota, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Minnesota Museum of American Art develop their plans.
As always, we welcome hearing your news and views. You can learn more about AHAA or share your news by visiting our website at ahaaonline.org or emailing info@ahaaonline.org. We also welcome submissions, pitches, and proposals for our online journal; please visit journalpanorama.org.
Community College Professors of Art and Art History
CCPAAH wants to thank all of the presenters and participants at our Affiliated Society session at the 2017 CAA Annual Conference in New York. The panel Reinventing the Familiar: Updated Approaches in Art History and the Studio, was chaired by Susan Altman, Middlesex County College and included the following presentations: Taking Art History Beyond the Classroom by Maya Jiménez, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY and Cheryl Hogue Smith, Kingsborough Community College, CUNY; Crowd-sourcing Global Art: Wikis and the Non-Western Canon by Jill Foltz, Collin College; Gaming the Critique: Providing Framework and Fun to the Group Critique by Tyrus Clutter, College of Central Florida; and Waging Art: When Fine Arts meets Workplace Development by Kathleen M. Dlugos, Westmoreland College. The successful Project Share at our early morning business meeting gave everyone lots of new ideas to bring back to our studio and art history classrooms.
CCPAAH will be sponsoring a session: Draw and Repeat: Reconsidering the Sketchbook at this year’s FATE Conference in Kansas City in April. Interested in presenting? The call for papers for next year’s CCPAAH Affiliated Session at the 2018 CAA Annual Conference will be posted is open through April 15, 2017. Submission site here.
Please follow us on Facebook: Community College Professors of Art and Art History and Instagram: @ccpaah. Interested in getting more involved? Contact Susan Altman at: ccpaah@gmail.com
FATE (Foundations in Art: Theory and Education)
Thank you to all who came to the FATE Affiliate Society session, “Using the F-word for Good, Not Evil: Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better,” at CAA this year. We had an excellent turn out!
Coming up, KCAI’s Foundation Department will host To the Core and Beyond, FATE’s 16th Biennial Conference from April 6th – 8th, 2017 at the Intercontinental at the Plaza in Kansas City. There, FATE members will gather as leading voices in fundamental art and design instruction and examine place, geography, introspective and reflexive actions, pedagogical values, and the potency of origins across the world. Influences from inside and outside the studio drive the development of Foundation programs and their students. In response to the conference theme, a broad spectrum of artists and academics will examine our reach as educators, and question how we instill world values through Foundation instruction and diverse programmatic structures. Enrique Martínez Celaya will be the 2017 FATE Conference Keynote Speaker.
More information about FATE’s 2017 conference.
In other news, FATE’s Positive Space: Episode 6 podcast is now live. In Episode 6, Jessica Burke (JB), Georgia Southern University & Emily Sullivan Smith, University of Dayton thoughtfully discuss the role of a Foundations Coordinator, balancing administrative roles with teaching & the pros/cons of a unified foundations curriculum.
More info? Please contact: Naomi J. Falk, naomijfalk@gmail.com
International Sculpture Center
Call for Panels now open for 27th International Sculpture Conference: Intersections + Identities. The ISC is seeking a diverse and comprehensive program, covering topics relevant to sculpture today. Apply online now! The call is open through March 13, 2017.
2017 Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Awards. Faculty, nominate your sculpture students today! Rules and details. Deadline: March 29, 2017. Email: studentawards@sculpture.org Phone: 609-689-1051 ext. 312
Japan Art History Forum (JAHF)
In recent elections, JAHF members elected: Julie Nelson Davis (University of Pennsylvania) to a 3-year term as President, Namiko Kunimoto (Ohio State University) to a 3-year term as Vice President, and Holly Rubalcava (University of Wisconsin-Madison) to a 2-year term as Graduate Representative.
The winner of the 2016 Chino Kaori Memorial Essay Prize for outstanding scholarship by a graduate student was Elizabeth Self, a PhD candidate in the Dept. of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh, for her paper titled “A Mausoleum Fit for a Shogun’s Wife: The Two Seventeenth-Century Mausolea for Sūgen-In.” The Chino Kaori Memorial Essay Competition is generously supported by the Japanese Art Society of America (JASA) and by University of Hawai’i Press. More information on the Chino Kaori Memorial Essay Prize.
The 2016 Clark Center Graduate Travel Grant was awarded to Ja Won Lee of the University of California, Los Angeles, who will be visiting the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to examine Japanese artworks from the collection in the context of her research on the collecting of Chinese antiques and its impact on visual and material culture in 19th and early twentieth-century Japan and Korea. More information on the Clark Center Graduate Travel Grant.
SECAC
SECAC was represented at CAA 2017 on the following session panels and with the following speakers: “In the Studio,” chaired by Elizabeth Heuer, University of North Florida; “Shared Space: The Home-Studio of Thomas Moran & Mary Nimmo Moran,” with Shannon Vittoria, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; “Dueling Studios: The Public and Private Images of Chaim Gross. Dueling Studios: The Public and Private Images of Chaim Gross,” with Sasha Davis, The Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation; “Free Markets, Free People: Discourse and Behavior in Lynda Benglis’ Lost Studio Tapes,” with Katie Anania, The University of Texas at Austin; and “The Studio as Model: From André Breton’s Wall to Fischli & Weiss’s Polyurethane Object Installations and Piero Giolio’s Studio,” with Susan Power, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
SECAC 2017 Call for Papers deadline is April 20, 2017, midnight, EDT. Membership in SECAC is due at the time of paper acceptance, and registration fees are required of all. Columbus College of Art & Design (CCAD) looks forward to hosting “Microscopes and Megaphones,” the 73rd annual SECAC Conference, October 25-28, 2017. Eleanor Fuchs, Associate Provost at CCAD, will serve as conference director. Find more information here.
Society of Architectural Historians (SAH)
The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) will host its 70th Annual International Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, from June 7–11, 2017. This is the first time that SAH has met outside North America in over 40 years! Meeting in Scotland’s largest city, world renowned for its outstanding architectural heritage, reflects the increasingly international scope of the Society and its conference. Architectural historians, art historians, architects, museum professionals and preservationists from around the world will convene to share new research on the history of the built environment. The Glasgow conference will include 36 paper sessions, eight roundtables, an introductory address and plenary talk, architecture tours, the SAH Glasgow Seminar, and more. Early registration ends March 14, 2017. Tours-only registration opens to the public on March 15, 2017.
The call for papers for the SAH 2018 Annual International Conference in St. Paul, MN, will open on March 31, 2017.
SAH is seeking educators to produce K-12 lesson plans for SAH Archipedia, an authoritative online encyclopedia of the built world published jointly by the Society of Architectural Historians and the University of Virginia Press. Interested educators should submit a proposal that includes a 500-word abstract outlining the topic of the lesson plan and include a preliminary list of the SAH Archipedia content the project would incorporate. Read the submission instructions here. Proposals are due by March 31, 2017.
SAH is accepting applications for the SAH/Mellon Author Awards through June 1, 2017. These awards 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.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for March 2017
posted by CAA — Mar 10, 2017
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
March 2017
From the Collection: Sister(s) In the Struggle: Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver
Ryerson Image Centre
33 Gould Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Photographs of Angela Davis on view: January 18–March 5, 2017
Photographs of Kathleen Cleaver on view: March 7–April 9, 2017
Curated by Julie Crooks, Sister(s) In the Struggle: Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver features photographs of two leading female figures of the Black Panther Party taken from the Black Star Collection at the Ryerson Image Centre. “They were photographed excessively,” Crooks said in an interview with Flare, “and their images were ubiquitous. They were in newspapers, they were in journals, they were on posters and their representations, or likenesses, were all over the place and that created this kind of cult presence…. At times the photographs could be detrimental to one’s image, especially someone like Angela Davis, but I think they also fed into this kind of iconic status.”
In choosing to pull photographs from the Black Star Collection from the civil rights area, Crooks explained that she wanted to humanize the representation of Davis and Cleaver, selecting images that offered a previously unexplored way of looking at them. The exhibition creates comparisons to many other women behind the scenes—those who are not remembered. “I wanted to highlight these photographs because the Black Power statement was, ‘black is beautiful’ and that was kind of a relentless message: that we are beautiful, despite hundreds of years of representation that told us otherwise, Crooks told Flare.
This exhibition is part of a collaboration between the Ryerson Image Centre and Black Artists’ Networks Dialogue, called Power to the People: Photography and Video of Repression and Black Protest, which will run until April 9.
Amy Jorgensen: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue
Elizabeth Houston Gallery
190 Orchard Street, New York, NY
February 8–March 12, 2017
Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue by Amy Jorgensen is a series of delicate handkerchiefs emblazoned with historic images of suffragettes. In fact, displayed on each piece of linen is the surveillance images of eighteen women taken from the 1913 Criminal Records Office of Scotland Yard.
“Recognizing in this episode a peculiar confluence of gazes, Jorgensen re-contextualizes and re-situates these images into the wider question of how women’s identities are constructed, and how they are obstructed…. The gift of the handkerchief is a matrimonial tradition passed from mother to daughter, woman to woman. This work investigates the search for, or the making of, identity that draws upon the plurality and fraction of the self, and the span of influence that is made from generation to generation.”
These discrete portraits of women suffragettes were taken and cataloged by Scotland Yard after a series of acts of civil disobedience, including arson, window breaking, and other public disturbances, which in turn created a national scandal. Jorgensen, who transferred the photographs to the handkerchief using cyanotype, an early-nineteenth-century photographic process pioneered by a woman, first discovered the images while researching Edna Berg, her great aunt and an impassioned suffragette from New York.
“The juxtaposition of these two histories—that of the matrimonial ceremony and that of the women of the suffragette movement—provides a jarring collision point for the examination of patriarchal structures both in history and contemporary culture.”
Jennifer Brea: Unrest
Film
SXSW, Austin, Texas
March 10–19, 2017
After making its debut at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, Unrest by the director Jennifer Brea travels to SXSW in Austin, Texas, this March. The film focuses on the life of Brea, who was diagnosed with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, commonly referred to as chronic fatigue syndrome. Brea, a PhD student at Harvard University, found that she could not sign a check at a restaurant, becoming progressively worse in the months before her wedding. When doctors told her it was “all in her head,” Brea turned her camera on herself, filming from the confines of her bed.
Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) is a systemic neuroimmune condition characterized by post-exertional malaise—a severe worsening of symptoms after even minimal exertion. The root causes and physical effects are not fully understood, especially in women. As Brea described in a TED Talk, her neurologist diagnosed her with conversion disorder and said her physical symptoms were the result of some distance emotional trauma. “It is a perfect custom prison,” Brea observed. “How can a disease this devastating be forgotten by medicine?”
“As I got sick, I found myself as part of cohort of women in their late 20s whose bodies were falling apart,” Brea explained, “and how hard it was to be taken seriously.” Her film explores her own diagnosis but also seeks to address the millions of others with the same condition.
As SXSW nears, screening days and times for Unrest will be posted on the schedule page. The full TED Talk with Brea can be found online.
Suor Plautilla Nelli, Lamentation with Saints (1550)
The Art of Suor Plautilla Nelli
Uffizi Gallery
Piazzale degli Uffizi, 6, Florence, Italy
March 8–April 30, 2017
In the first of an open-ended, annual series of exhibitions dedicated to women artists—what the Italian press is calling “pink exhibitions”—the Uffizi Gallery will showcase the work of Suor Plautilla Nelli (1523–1587), an artist nun who was Florence’s first known female Renaissance artist. Works culled from her Domenican convent, as well as from churches and museums across central Italy, will go on display on March 8 to coincide with International Women’s Day; they will remain on view until April 30. The Florence-based organization Advancing Women Artists Foundation, which has been instrumental in facilitating the restoration of Nelli’s works, published the exhibition catalogue. Eike Schmidt, the Uffizi’s current director, was motivated to pursue this initiative after a conversation with the Guerrilla Girls.
Leila Alaoui: No Pasara
Musée des Beaux-Arts
1380, rue Sherbrooke O, Montreal, Canada
Through April 30, 2017
On January 18, 2016, a young French-Moroccan photographer named Leila Alaoui was killed in an attack in Burkina Faso. Alaoui, who had been in the West African nation on assignment for a report on women’s rights for Amnesty International, used her photography to highlight issues related to migration, displacement, and cultural identity. The twenty-four images of No Pasara, which means “no entry,” depict young Moroccans who dream of a better life on the other side of the Mediterranean. The series was commissioned by the European Union in 2008.
In a review of her work last year, a critic for the Economist wrote: “Alaoui’s photojournalism drove the reasons for the movement of humans—before and beyond today’s crises—home, by turning a lens on those who have been and continue to remain unseen between world crises. Economic migrants in the regions she captured, including young Moroccans, Lebanese and Sub-Saharan Africans willing to make perilous crossings for a life in Europe were the consistent thread through her projects.” Alaoui’s hauntingly beautiful images offer a trenchant and poignant vantage point from which to consider the global immigration crisis.
Walled Garden in an Insane Eden
Sara Zanin Gallery
Via della Vetrina, 2, Rome, Italy
February 9–March 25, 2017
“Is it only the external landscape which is altering? How often recently most of us have had the feeling of déjà vu, of having seen all this before, in fact of remembering these swamps and lagoons all too well. However selective the conscious mind may be, most biological memories are unpleasant ones, echoes of danger and terror. Nothing endures for so long as fear.”
—J. G. Ballard from The Drowned World (1962)
Borrowing its title from J. G. Ballard’s science-fiction novel and one of its dystopic tales, this exhibition brings together a contingency of London-based artists whose work engages with the political uncertainties introduced into the European landscape in 2016. Their responses, which include drawings, paintings, sculptures, textiles, and performance, range from skeptical to hopeful. Organized by Marcelle Joseph, the exhibition features mostly women artists, including Rebecca Ackroyd, Gabriella Boyd, Kira Freije, Marie Jacotey, Florence Peake, and Zadie Xa.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Mar 08, 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.
On Hiring and Diversity This Week
Many colleges and universities want to attract a more diverse workforce and foster greater inclusivity in their faculty and administrative ranks, but don’t know how. The Chronicle of Higher Education is helping by sharing stories, news, and data aimed at helping hiring managers and recruiters make better, more informed decisions about diversity hiring at their institutions and across higher education generally. (Read more from Vitae.)
How to Fix the Met: Connect Art to Life
With the precipitous decrease in art and history education in schools, much of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s encyclopedic collection now means little to younger viewers. It feels foreign and remote and unsociable in a way that contemporary art, with its familiar references, does not. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Russian and Syrian Forces Retake Palmyra from ISIL
Syrian government troops have retaken Palmyra from Islamic State forces, with help from Russian air support, the Syrian army said last week. Politicians in Russian welcomed the news as a triumph, as widely reported by the state’s media, but few details have emerged about the condition of the ancient site, where ISIL has previously wreaked large-scale destruction. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
The Earthquake in Amatrice, Norcia, and the Marche: A Cultural Emergency
This area of Italy—the Valnerina, the Appennine Marches, the Teramo region of the Abruzzo, and a segment of Lazio—has a distinguished cultural patrimony. There may be no large museums or significant art galleries, but in most cases the works of art are still in the buildings for which they were conceived, whether churches, convents, or tiny chapels in the mountains. (Read more from the Burlington Magazine.)
Very Serious Play: A Conversation with Jess Benjamin
The Nebraska-born sculptor Jess Benjamin creates work with an austere sensibility and eloquent narrative that is inextricably tied to the land—more specifically to the water—of her home state. The daughter of a rancher, she earned her BFA in ceramics from Hastings College before working as a studio assistant for Jun Kaneko, and then earning an MFA at Bowling Green State University. (Read more from Sculpture.)
SUPERFLEX’s Hospital Equipment: Context Is Everything
“Sometimes context is everything,” SUPERFLEX’s Jakob Fenger wrote, as he Instagrammed a photo of the latest installation of Hospital Equipment in a gallery in Switzerland. The Danish collaborative calls Hospital Equipment a “readymade upside down” because it pulls objects into an art context, only to send them on their way to a new context, as functional objects. (Read more from Greg.org.)
A Question of Resources
We hear regularly from arts funders and opinion formers about the need to diversify funding streams within the arts to protect future sustainability. And this is absolutely true. Any arts organization that finds itself over-reliant on government or statutory sources, or one single income stream that then dries up, can find itself in trouble. (Read more from Arts Professional.)
Identifying Quality in Scholarly Publishing: Not a Black-and-White Issue
Like every industry, publishing is open to scamming and deceptive behavior in many forms, and there are various influencing factors at play—including the pressure to publish that academics face. An abundance of unfamiliar new publications makes it difficult to know which can be trusted, and the merits of blacklisting or whitelisting publishers are being widely discussed. (Read more from the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.)
CAA 2017 Convocation, President’s Address: “Art Matters”
posted by Suzanne Preston Blier, President, the College Art Associatio — Feb 24, 2017
Art Matters. Art has always mattered. Whether we are art scholars or artists, critics or designers, gallery goers or museum professionals, art matters to all of us a great deal. Equally importantly, art matters – critically – to the societies in which we live and work. Fifty years ago this week (February 14,1967) as Aretha Franklin recorded her soon to become hit song, Respect, and Martin Luther King, Jr. prepared to denounce the Vietnam War in an April 4th New York city religious service, Faith Ringgold was creating her celebrated Black Light series, addressing the impact of race riots and other issues of the era. More recently, in 1990 when South African Apartheid finally ended, and Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners were released from incarceration, the important work of South African artists – black and white, men and women –in bringing inequality and racism into public view began to be broadly acknowledged. Within the last few weeks, the Museum of Modern Art began a project to rehang works by artists from majority-Muslim nations facing travel bans to this country. Art matters.
As the one hundred and fifth College Art Association’s Annual Conference gets underway, it is imperative that we reflect on these and related art issues, on the close connections between art making and activism and the vital roles that artists, art scholars and other professionals play in tackling critical issues of the day, whether it be war, racism, sexism, or other forms of discrimination and ethical derogation. Art Matters. It serves as a vital site not only of engagement and resistance, advocacy and education, problem solving and invention, but also as a vital means of opening up and re-envisioning the world around us. Art matters to us both as individuals and as part of the societies in which we live and work. In an era of increasing attacks not only on the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, but also on the arts, the importance of CAA as the leading organization that brings together practitioners and scholars within the same broad umbrella is all the more important. CAA offers a unique platform to reengage at the local, national, and international level. The so-called STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math) are important, but they do not overshadow the arts and humanities. Indeed, throughout history, each has often enhanced the other.
Arts Matter. Yet I have a confession: there was a key moment in my life when I did not feel this. It was the summer after my Freshman year in college at the University of Vermont. I was working in the Senate when one bleak morning I found myself in tears standing in Dupont Circle watching as Bobby Kennedy’s body arrived here in the hearse after his assassination. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot a few months earlier. I returned to college that Fall but concluded soon after that art history and studio art were simply not enough. I quit college at the end of that year to join the Peace Corps. It was here, in Africa, where I first realized politics and art were integrally co-joined. Every book I read on African art was worse than the last. The field needed a correction, art history needed a correction, and after my two-year term ended, I returned home to finish my degree and make plans to attend graduate school with a focus on African art.
CAA then, as today, was a big deal. Elation and genuine fear were my initial emotions when my first CAA paper proposal was accepted– on a politically fraught panel addressing Semiotics and Art chaired by Henri Zerner. Much later we would become colleagues. These kinds of connections are part of what makes CAA so important. For me, a timely Art Bulletin article no doubt helped with tenure. But well before then I felt it was important to engage more formally with CAA – as much for African Art as anything else. It was for that reason that I ran for the CAA Board of Directors – and years later ran a second time. When I was a graduate student, many still believed that Africa had no arts outside of Egypt, and Egypt itself was part of a strange exo-African nether world somewhere between Mesopotamia and Greece. African art, if it was considered art at all, was assumed to be primitive. CAA for me was where the real political work began, through CAA board connections, I and others persuaded the editor at Abrams to drop the “Primitive Art” chapter from Janson’s best-selling History of Art textbook. In due course, African and African diaspora arts, and those who made and studied them, began reshaping not only art departments around the country, but also exhibitions, major journals, book publications and key prizes within CAA and other organizations. It was CAA that played a central and ongoing role in this.
What had begun for me at CAA as an engagement about my field, soon blossomed into other issues – open access to museum collections in publishing for example. When I was a board member initially, one of our group began to work with the Metropolitan Museum to make their art photographs accessible on the web. This effort continued and on February 7th, one week ago, the Metropolitan announced that all images of public-domain works in the Met collection will now be available under Creative Commons. This is a huge step forward that will benefit us all. So too has been CAA’s path-forging efforts on Fair Use one of our most important and indeed revolutionary undertakings, for which I and others already are seeing considerable savings in terms of finances and time.
Art Matters. CAA members working together have achieved important ends. But we can and must do more. Art access inequality is not the only issue to attend to. Access to quality higher education is a vital concern for both us and our students, as are questions of student loan fees and affordability, along with the ability of professionals in our field to gain a viable living and secure employment in educational and art-linked institutions. I benefitted from my undergraduate training at a then inexpensive public university; my graduate school education would not have been possible without affordable student loans. I could not have written my Ph.D. without a government funded Fulbright fellowship. For me and many others, book projects would not have been completed without an NEH grant or others at tax supported institutions such as CASVA, the Clark, and the Getty. Museum exhibitions funded by both NEA and NEH are critical to what we do, and these same museums bring in billions of dollars in revenue to local cities and towns.
Art matters. And this is where CAA is critical as an organization, focusing with a new sense of urgency not only on the longstanding programs where we have excelled but also speaking out on core issues that are important to all of us – such as diversity, equal access, and sustainability. Social Activism is a key part of CAA’s Strategic Plan now. As we move forward, changes in CAA that are already underway and will become more evident shortly will help make our organization even stronger and more engaged – from the reenergized annual conference, to a far more dynamic web presence, from larger roles for our affiliated societies, to added benefits that will help members in their professional and personal loves. Art Matters. It matters to us. It matters to the communities and broader societies in which we live and work.
Suzanne Preston Blier
People in the News
posted by CAA — Feb 15, 2017
People in the News lists new hires, positions, and promotions in three sections: Academe, Museums and Galleries, and Organizations and Publications.
The section is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
February 2017
Academe
Deborah BrightDeborah Bright has retired from her position as chair of the Department of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, to pursue her art practice. Bright previously served as interim dean of fine arts at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, where she also chaired the Photography Department and was a tenured professor.
Museums and Galleries
Camille Ann BrewerCamille Ann Brewer, formerly executive director of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium at the University of Chicago in Illinois, has been appointed curator of contemporary textile art at the George Washington University Museum and the Textile Museum, both in Washington, DC.
Heather Campbell CoyleHeather Campbell Coyle, curator of American art for the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington, has been promoted to chief curator at her institution.
Betsy Fahlman has become adjunct curator of American art at the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona. She will divide her time between the museum and Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts in Tempe, where she has served as a professor of art history for more than twenty-eight years.
Organizations and Publications
Robin VederRobin Veder, formerly associate professor of humanities, art history, and visual culture at Pennsylvania State University in Harrisburg, has been appointed executive editor of American Art, the journal of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC.
Institutional News
posted by CAA — Feb 15, 2017
Read about the latest news from institutional members.
Institutional News is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
February 2017
The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California, has acquired the archive of the artist, writer, curator, and scholar Harmony Hammond. The donation includes correspondence, photographs, original source material for her art, professional papers, publication drafts, editioned prints, original artwork, files, and a slide registry devoted to lesbian artists.
The Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have been awarded a $506,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to establish a new Summer Institute for Technical Studies in Art. The program, designed for graduate students from art-history programs across North America who are interested in broadening their experience with object-focused technical inquiry, methodologies, and instruction, will begin in June 2017.
The Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have received a $1 million gift from a Harvard Business School alumnus, Ken Hakuta, to establish the Hakuta Family Endowment Fund, enabling the creation of the Nam June Paik Fellowship at the Harvard Art Museums. Hakuta is the nephew of the pioneering artist Nam June Paik.
John Cabot University in Rome, Italy, has inaugurated a new MA program in art history to begin in fall 2017. Accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, the degree is the first US-accredited master’s degree in the history of art based entirely in Rome. The program can be completed in approximately fifteen months of full-time study.
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia has received a generous $500,000 gift from Julie Jensen Bryan and Robert Bryan to name the PAFA Printmaking Shop. This transformative commitment ensures that printmaking will remain one of the school’s core artistic disciplines.
The Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey, has posted to its website more than five thousand images and related photographic material by the seminal American modernist Minor White. The two-year digitization and cataloging project, funded in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, provides online access for the first time to the most significant photographic content of the Minor White Archive, which includes finished prints, artist’s proof cards, and bibliographic history.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, has surpassed its campaign goals for both financial gifts and significant art gifts, amassing a combined total of $105 million with more than one year remaining in the campaign. The $65 million cash goal was exceeded by $3 million, funds supporting the Renwick Gallery renovation, an education center for the museum’s National Historic Landmark building, and the museum’s endowments. The campaign will continue through 2017 with a focus on additional artworks and endowments to support curatorial, technology, and education initiatives.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Feb 15, 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.
Art under Threat in 2016: Presenting the Figures
Freemuse registered 1,028 attacks on artists and violations of their rights in 2016 across 78 countries, continuing a worrying trend of artistic freedom increasingly coming under threat. The number of cases registered in 2016 more than doubled the amount in 2015, increasing by 119 percent, rising from 469 attacks. (Read more from Freemuse.)
What You Need to Know about Hate Speech and Free Speech
Is there any way to curb speech if it discriminates against people’s identity, like race? And when does speech become punishable under the law? Here’s what you need to know about the freedom of speech and dealing with hate speech in the current political climate. (Read more from Teen Vogue.)
We Don’t Pay Visual Artists Properly—That Needs to Change
Jane is a typical artist trying to build and maintain her career. She has had reasonable success with her art thus far but needs to subsidize her income by taking on work as a graphic designer. Now she has decided to return to art school to get university qualifications and commit fully to her professional artistic practice. (Read more from the Guardian.)
Reports of the Death of Religious Art Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
When written in the same sentence, the terms “religion” and “art” tend to turn the contemporary secularized gaze back in time to Renaissance imagery. Those old, redolent, often pious pictures of Christ Child and Madonna are pleasing to look at, but these days their principal function is to confirm how religious art existed in ages past. Present-day artists can’t possibly be interested in that anymore. (Read more from the Los Angeles Review of Books.)
The Prestige Gap
Women earn 60 percent of baccalaureate degrees and 46 percent of doctoral degrees, excluding professional programs, according to 2015 data from the National Science Foundation, yet they’re still underrepresented in many disciplines. Why? A new study points to segregation by gender based on field of study and what it calls program prestige. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
The Importance of Female Friendship in Graduate School
Sometime in high school, when I was sixteen, living in the suburbs, and hopelessly devoted with the latest music, I was asked whether I prefer male or female singers. As I was answering—something about how men sang more interesting songs—it dawned on me: How many female-led bands had I heard? When was the last time a radio station played a song from an all-female band? (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Metropolitan Museum Puts 375,000 Public-Domain Images in Creative Commons
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has placed 375,000 images of public-domain works in the Creative Commons. This major move by one of the world’s most important museums means that users can now access pictures of many of the Met’s holdings on Wikimedia, and that these images are now subject to free use, with no copyright restrictions. (Read more from ARTnews.)
The Value of Copyright: A Publisher’s Perspective
There is no one view of copyright that fits all publishers. The publisher of a poetry magazine will likely feel differently about aspects of copyright when compared to, say, the publisher of your local phone book. Indeed, even within scholarly publishing there is a range of attitudes toward copyright. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
The Art Bulletin Seeks Reviews Editor
posted by admin — Feb 14, 2017
The Art Bulletin Editorial Board invites nominations and self-nominations for the position of reviews editor for the term July 1, 2018–June 30, 2021 (with service as incoming reviews editor designate 2017–18). The Art Bulletin, published quarterly by CAA, features leading scholarship in the English language in all aspects of art history as practiced in the academy, museums, and other institutions.
Candidates should be art scholars with stature in the field and experience in editing book and/or exhibition reviews; institutional affiliation is not required. Candidates should be published authors of at least one book.
The reviews editor is responsible for commissioning all book and exhibition reviews in The Art Bulletin. He or she selects books and exhibitions for review, commissions reviewers, and determines the appropriate length and character of reviews. The reviews editor also works with authors and CAA’s editorial director in the development and preparation of review manuscripts for publication. He or she is expected to keep abreast of newly published and important books and recent exhibitions in the fields of art history, criticism, theory, visual studies, and museum publishing. This is a three-year term, which includes membership on the Art Bulletin Editorial Board.
The reviews editor attends the three annual meetings of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board—held in the spring and fall by teleconference or in New York, and in February at the CAA Annual Conference—and submits an annual report to CAA’s Board of Directors. CAA may reimburse the reviews editor for travel and lodging expenses for the meetings in New York in accordance with its travel policy, but he or she pays these expenses to attend the annual conference.
Candidates must be current CAA members in good standing and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. CAA encourages applications from colleagues who will contribute to the diversity of perspectives on the Art Bulletin Editorial Board and who will engage actively with conversations about the discipline’s engagements with differences of culture, religion, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, and access. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please send a statement describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, CV, and at least one letter of recommendation to: Art Bulletin Reviews Editor Search, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004; or email the documents or inquiries to Joe Hannan, CAA editorial director. Deadline: Monday, April 3, 2017. Finalists will be interviewed on the afternoon of Friday, May 5, in New York.
Art Bulletin Editorial Board Seeks New Members
posted by admin — Feb 14, 2017
CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for three individuals to serve on the Art Bulletin Editorial Board for a four-year term, July 1, 2017–June 30, 2021. The ideal candidate has published substantially in the field and may be an academic, museum-based, or independent scholar; institutional affiliation is not required. The Art Bulletin features leading scholarship in the English language in all aspects of art history as practiced in the academy, museums, and other institutions.
The editorial board advises the Art Bulletin editor-in-chief and assists her or him in seeking authors, articles, and other content for the journal; performs peer review and recommends peer reviewers; may propose new initiatives for the journal; and may support fundraising efforts on the journal’s behalf. Members also assist the editor-in-chief to keep abreast of trends and issues in the field by attending and reporting on sessions at the CAA Annual Conference and other academic conferences, symposia, and events in their fields.
The Art Bulletin Editorial Board meets three times a year, with meetings in the spring and fall plus one at the CAA Annual Conference in February. The spring and fall meetings are currently held by teleconference, but at a later date CAA may reimburse members for travel and lodging expenses for New York meetings in accordance with its travel policy. Members pay travel and lodging expenses to attend the conference in February. Members of all editorial boards volunteer their services to CAA without compensation.
Candidates must be current CAA members in good standing and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Members may not publish their own work in the journal during the term of service. CAA encourages applications from colleagues who will contribute to the diversity of perspectives on the Art Bulletin Editorial Board and who will engage actively with conversations about the discipline’s engagements with differences of culture, religion, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, and access. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please send a letter describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and your contact information to: Chair, Art Bulletin Editorial Board, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004; or email the documents or inquiries to Joe Hannan, CAA editorial director. Deadline: April 17, 2017.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Feb 08, 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.
MoMA Installs Works by Artists from Countries Targeted by Trump’s Travel Ban
In response to President Trump’s executive order temporarily banning immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries, the Museum of Modern Art has replaced works in its permanent-collection galleries with eight by artists from the targeted nations. The rehang was instigated and executed by staff who wanted to react to unsettling political circumstances. (Read more from Hyperallergic.)
The Battle to Save America’s Arts Endowment from Trump’s Cuts
The day before Donald Trump was installed as president, details of his administration’s plans for cuts to government spending came to light. Seemingly drawn from a blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation, the plans feature deep cuts to many vital federal programs, including the elimination of the NEA. (Read more from Apollo.)
What We Can Learn from the Brief Period When the Government Employed Artists
That the arts would be funded significantly by the federal government may raise an eyebrow today. But working under a subdivision of the Works Progress Administration known as the Federal Art Project, artists such as Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner helped the country recover from the Great Depression, as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. (Read more from Artsy.)
State Spending on Higher Ed Continues Upward Trend
For the fourth year in a row, state spending on higher education is up nationwide. The annual “Grapevine” survey, conducted by the State Higher Education Executive Officers and the Center for the Study of Education Policy at Illinois State University, shows a 3.4-percent average nationwide increase in spending over the 2016 fiscal year, although that figure could be changed by legislation pending in Illinois. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
The Met: A Great Museum in Decline?
The bad news had been building for months at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Even as crowds poured into shows on Hellenistic kingdoms and high-tech fashion, the museum’s deficit was approaching $40 million and had forced the buyout or layoff of some ninety employees. An expansion into a satellite building cost millions of dollars more than expected. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Museums Celebrate the Decriminalization of Homosexuality
Museums across the UK are preparing exhibitions to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act, the legislation that partially decriminalized male homosexuality in England and Wales in 1967. In London, the National Portrait Gallery will present a special display on the city’s gay scene in the 1980s, while the first major exhibition dedicated to queer British art will open at Tate Britain. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Nobody Is Normal
While medical researchers might miss such fine points, philosophers of medicine have been parsing the nuances and striving to define “normal” for years. One thought experiment asks us to consider variations on the ends of the spectrum that we would not consider pathological: having green eyes, being color-blind, being extremely tall or short, having photographic memory, or being a supertaster. (Read more from Aeon.)
Brad Troemel, the Troll of Internet Art
Brad Troemel’s art plays with a central paradox of the internet: the technology that was supposed to liberate us from the dreary real world has inspired a whole new set of anxieties. For the growing number of artists who use the internet to distribute their work, a key problem has become how to stand out amid a torrent of information. (Read more from the New Yorker.)