CAA News Today
2015 Fellowships for MFA and PhD Students
posted by CAA — Jun 19, 2015
CAA has begun accepting applications from MFA and PhD students for its Professional-Development Fellowships in the Visual Arts and Art History. For the current cycle, CAA will award grants of $10,000 each to outstanding students who will receive their terminal degrees in the calendar year 2016. One award will be presented to a practitioner—an artist, designer, and/or craftsperson—and one award will be presented to an art, architecture, and/or design historian, curator, or critic.
Fellows also receive a free one-year CAA membership and complimentary registration to the 104th Annual Conference in Washington, DC, taking place February 3–6, 2016. Honorable mentions, given at the discretion of the jury, earn a free one-year CAA membership and complimentary conference registration.
CAA’s fellowship program supports promising artists, designers, craftspersons, historians, curators, and critics who are enrolled in MFA, PhD, and other terminal degree programs nationwide.. Awards are intended to help the students with various aspects of their work, whether it be for job-search expenses or purchasing materials for art/design practice. CAA believes a grant of this kind, without contingencies, can best facilitate the transition between graduate studies and professional careers.
Please visit collegeartassociation.slideroom.com to submit applications to the Professional-Development Fellowship programs. The deadline for applications for the PhD fellowships is Friday, October 2, 2015, and Monday, November 16, 2015, for the MFA fellowships. Awardees will be announced in January 2016.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Jun 17, 2015
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.
Why Should Collectors Get All the Breaks?
Many of America’s major museums have benefitted from laws that afford collectors tax breaks when donating works to institutions or charities, and now artists and their advocates are seeking similar compensation for works they gift. While collectors can write off the fair market value of works they donate to museums, artists can only claim for the costs of the materials they used to produce the work. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
After the Riots, Baltimore’s Best Shot at Redemption May Be Its Arts Community
On the April day when Freddie Gray died from injuries he suffered in police custody and a week before rioters took to the streets in protest, Karen Brooks Hopkins, president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, gave a presentation to a small group of Baltimoreans about the future of their city. The symposium, in a state-of-the-art auditorium little more than a mile down North Avenue from the blighted block where Gray was arrested, centered on a question that has sparked revitalization efforts from Detroit to Dublin and from Miami to Marseille: whether arts can turn a city around. (Read more from the Washington Post.)
Dear Liberal Professor, Students Aren’t The Problem
In a recent Vox essay, a self-described “liberal professor,” writing under a pseudonym, explained how students had changed over his nine years in the college classroom. His liberal students now “terrify” him, he wrote, with their identity politics and imagined grievances. Here we go, I thought, another lament of the loss of white-male privilege, this time set at the university. What I quickly realized, however, was that the essay might be better characterized as a jeremiad, a cautionary tale that exaggerates current woes to elicit social change. (Read more from Vitae.)
The Art of Having Difficult Conversations
The ability to have difficult conversations is important for career success, productivity, and relationships in almost every field, and higher education is no exception. However, despite the need to have these conversations, the idea of addressing sensitive issues can be scary. This article provides strategies for having difficult conversations and gives example scripts. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Ford Shifts Grant Making to Focus Entirely on Inequality
The fight against inequality will take center stage at the Ford Foundation under a sweeping overhaul announced today by the nation’s second biggest philanthropy. Not only will Ford direct all of its money and influence to curbing financial, racial, gender, and other inequities, but it will give lots more money in a way grantees have been clamoring for: It hopes to double the total it gives in the form of unrestricted grants for operating support. (Read more from the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)
MoMA.org Turns 20: Archiving Two Decades of Exhibition Sites
It’s hard to believe that MoMA’s website, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in May, is older than Google. It began with two relatively simple (by today’s standards) HTML exhibition sites for the Mutant Materials and Video Spaces exhibitions in 1995. Since then, over two hundred exhibition sites have been created, documenting not only the museum’s evolving curatorial interests, but also huge changes in web coding and design. This collection of exhibition sites almost serves as its own online museum of the internet. (Read more from Inside/Out.)
Dying of Exposure
At some point, two years ago, maybe, I stopped doing things for free: no free writing, no free talks, no free critiques with artists or art students, nothing. I didn’t make the decision out of avarice; I made it as a matter of survival. I used to accept all kinds of invitations to do such things, paid or not, when I was a tenured professor. I used to feel that it was sort of crass to think about my economic needs when there were important intellectual ideas to discuss. But, of course, the privilege of not having to think about my intellectual labor in those terms was predicated on the very fact that I was being paid, by my university, if not by the publishers, colleges, students, or artists who hosted the events to which I was invited. (Read more from Art Practical.)
How to Tailor Your Online Image
You should have a curated Internet presence for the job market. The fact is, you will be Googled. That is not usually because search committees are trying to dig up dirt on you, or derail your candidacy. Rather, they just want to know more about you, and get a sense of your intellectual communities, of where and how you are active, and of your “style” of communication (lively, reserved, direct, blunt, tactful, supportive, combative, and so on). (Read more from Vitae.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Jun 03, 2015
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.
IIE Launches Program to Assist Threatened Artists
The Institute of International Education will soon launch a program to save the lives and work of artists who face persecution in their home countries. The new Artist Protection Fund, a three-year pilot program supported by a $2.79 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will make life-saving fellowship grants to threatened artists from any field of artistic endeavor and place them at host universities and arts centers in countries where they can safely continue their work and plan for their future. (Read more from the Institute of International Education.)
Protecting Priceless Art from Natural Disasters
The reviews of the new design of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York have been glowing. But the most intriguing feature might be one that’s gone largely unnoticed: its custom flood-mitigation system, which was designed halfway through the museum’s construction, in the aftermath of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, when more than five million gallons of water flooded the site. (Read more from the Atlantic.)
Taking the Measure of Sexism: Facts, Figures, and Fixes
Despite encouraging signs of women’s improved status and visibility in the art world, there are still major systemic problems. Do not misunderstand me: women artists are in a far better position today than they were forty-five years ago, when Linda Nochlin wrote her landmark essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Access to “high art” education, to which women have historically been denied, is now possible for many with financial means. Moreover, the institutional power structures that Nochlin argued made it “impossible for women to achieve artistic excellence, or success, on the same footing as men, no matter what the potency of their so-called talent, or genius,” have been shifting. (Read more from ARTnews.)
62 Women Share Their Secrets to Art World Success: Part One
What are the secrets to a successful career in the art world? Artnet News asked sixty-two women in the upper echelons of museums, galleries, art public-relations firms, and art nonprofits to tell us what they’ve learned over the course of their careers, and to offer their advice for women looking to break into the business. (Read more from Artnet News.)
62 Women Share Their Secrets to Art World Success: Part Two
What are the secrets to a successful career in the art world? Artnet News asked sixty-two women in the upper echelons of museums, galleries, art public-relations firms, and art nonprofits to tell us what they’ve learned over the course of their careers, and to offer their advice for women looking to break into the business. (Read more from Artnet News.)
The Rise of the Private Art “Museum”
In the heart of Berlin stands a windowless concrete bunker so awesomely ugly that, when you see it, you instinctively avert your gaze. It is heavy, gray, and shrapnel-pocked, and has no signage to explain its protean history. Designed by the Nazi architect Karl Bonatz, the bunker was built in 1942 as an air-raid shelter for Germans. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the building was appropriated for use first as an avant-garde performance space and later as a techno club. In 2003, Christian and Karen Boros bought the building to display a portion of their sizable collection of contemporary art. (Read more from the New Yorker.)
Looking for Creativity in Brains Will Take More Creativity
About a decade and a half ago, the neuroscience world got super stoked about a sexy new way to look at living brains: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Now, fMRI is still a great tool—just as long as you’re applying it to questions that it can actually answer. The problem is, many questions that can be answered simply with fMRI data have, by virtue of being simple, already been answered. That means any successive studies done with fMRI have to meet a much, much higher bar. (Read more from Wired.)
Digitally Divided
There’s nothing like being without the internet for a few days to realize how much I don’t miss it, at least occasionally. But it also makes me realize how much I assume when I have regular access. I’ve been vacationing in parts of the country where our cell phones can’t reach a signal. It’s a good time to relax, listen to the wind in the trees, take long walks with no particular destination in mind, but you can’t pick up the latest news, keep your email clutter cut down to size, or check tomorrow’s weather, all things that I take for granted normally. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Spring 2015 Recipients of the Millard Meiss Publication Fund
posted by Christopher Howard — Jun 01, 2015
This spring, CAA awarded grants to the publishers of ten books in art history and visual culture through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to the generous bequest of the late Prof. Millard Meiss, CAA gives these grants to support the publication of scholarly books in art history and related fields.
The ten Meiss grantees for spring 2015 are:
- Marisa Anne Bass, Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity, Princeton University Press
- George Bent, Public Painting and Visual Culture in Early Republican Florence, Cambridge University Press
- Sarah Gordon, Indecent Exposures: Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion Nudes, Yale University Press
- Anne Helmreich, Art and Science: The Quest for Truth to Nature in British Photography and Painting, 1839–1914, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Jeehee Hong, Theater of the Dead: A Social Turn in Chinese Funerary Art, 1000–1400, University of Hawai‘i Press
- Dorothy Ko, The Social Life of Inkstones: Craftsmen and Scholars in Early Qing China, University of Washington Press
- Catha Paquette, At the Crossroads: Patronage and Censorship of Diego Rivera in the 1930s, University of Texas Press
- Eric Ramírez-Weaver, Saving Science: Capturing the Heavens in Carolingian Manuscripts, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Oscar E. Vázquez, The End Again: Degeneration and Visual Culture in Modern Spain, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Robert Williams, Raphael and the Modernity of Italian Renaissance Art, Cambridge University Press
Books eligible for Meiss grants must already be under contract with a publisher and on a subject in the visual arts or art history. Authors must be current CAA members. Please review the application guidelines for more information.
Affiliated Society News for May 2015
posted by CAA — May 09, 2015
American Society for Aesthetics
The American Society for Aesthetics (ASA), an association for aesthetics, criticism, and theory of the arts, will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the ASA Feminist Caucus Committee with a full day of workshop discussions, followed by a celebratory reception, on Saturday, November 14, 2015. The Feminist Caucus Committee anniversary is part of the annual ASA conference, to be held November 11–14 at the Desoto Hilton in Savannah, Georgia. Noted scholars will discuss the evolution and contributions of feminist scholarship within philosophical aesthetics and the history of the ASA and its publication, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Topics will include: “Forty Years of Feminist Scholarship in Aesthetics,” “The Influence—Hidden or Otherwise—of Feminist Scholarship in Aesthetics,” and “Feminist Pedagogy and Curricula in Aesthetics.” For more information, please visit http://www.aesthetics-online.org/feminist/ or contact Peg Brand.
American Society of Hispanic Art Historical Studies
The American Society of Hispanic Art Historical Studies (ASHAHS) announced an award at its business meeting at the CAA Annual Conference in February 2015. The Eleanor Tufts Book Award, which recognizes an outstanding English-language publication in the area of Spanish or Portuguese art history, went to Glaire D. Anderson for The Islamic Villa in Early Medieval Iberia: Architecture and Court Culture in Umayyad Córdoba (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013).
Art Libraries Society of North America
The Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS) met in Fort Worth, Texas, from March 19 through 23, 2015, for its forty-third annual conference. The conference’s theme, “New Frontiers on the Old Frontier,” allowed members to explore current and emergent interests in the art and visual-information profession. The society awarded the George M. Wittenborn Memorial Book Award to Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. of the National Gallery of Art for Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century. The ARLIS/NA Distinguished Service Award was given to Daniel A. Starr, deputy chief librarian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Read about incoming members of the executive board.
Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey
The Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) has awarded the 2015 Rhonda A. Saad Prize for Best Graduate Paper in Modern and Contemporary Arab Art to Christopher Barrie for “Myth and Mythology on the Nile: The Surrealism of Georges Henein and ‘Abd al-Hadi al-Gazar.” Barrie is a master’s degree student in Middle East politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. His paper analyzes the treatment of myth in the poetry of Henein and the visual art of al-Gazzar. The paper challenges understandings of al-Gazzar’s “Contemporary Art Group” as the first example of a purportedly authentic national Egyptian art and instead looks to analyze the dialogical interpenetration of the cosmopolitan and the local in al-Gazzar’s work.
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries
Save the date for next annual conference of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) in Washington, DC: the weekend of May 20, 2016.
AAMG is in the process of compiling standards and documentation for Best Practices for University Museums and Collections. Once compiled, this can serve as a companion guide for accreditation as well as a resource for working within a parent institution. Please contact Barbara Rothermel, director of the Daura Gallery and assistant professor of museum studies at Lynchburg College, directly with documents, suggestions, or comments about practices with which you are most concerned.
Information about the AAMG Summer Leadership Seminar 2016 (rolling deadlines) is coming soon. Questions about the leadership seminar can be directed to David Robertson.
Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art
During its 2015 Annual Conference, CAA presented Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, past president of the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA), board member at large, and managing editor of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, with its 2015 Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award. Chu also received a certificate of appreciation from AHNCA’s membership for her organizational leadership and for the establishment of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide. Also at the CAA conference, AHNCA sponsored a two-part session entitled “What Is Realism?”and a shorter session on “Future Directions in Nineteenth-Century Art”; both were well attended. AHNCA’s major session for CAA’s 2016 conference will be “Between the Covers: The Question of Albums in the Nineteenth Century.”
During the AHNCA business meeting, Yvonne Weisberg extended her term as treasurer, but her successor must be in place by February 2016. Thus the organization now seeks nominations for the position; please send these via email to Peter Trippi, AHNCA president. Caterina Pierre also agreed to continue as newsletter editor.
AHNCA’s recent and upcoming activities include attending a Mellon lecture by Penelope Curtis, director of Tate Britain, at the Yale Center for British Art (April 23); a tour of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts exhibition about artists’ gardens, with the curator Anna O. Marley (April 25); a tour of Sotheby’s nineteenth-century European art sale, with the expert Seth Armitage (May 1); and a visit to the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami with the museum’s director, Jill Deupi (May 12).
Historians of Islamic Art Association
The Historians of Islamic Art Association (HIAA) has announced the winners of its recent grant and essay competitions. Anna McSweeney, a senior teaching fellow in Islamic art and archaeology at SOAS, received a Grabar Fellowship to complete the research for her book, The Alhambra Cupola at the Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin.Natalia Di Pietrantonio, a doctoral candidate at Cornell University, was awarded a Grabar Travel Grant to deliver a paper at the 2015 Association of Art Historians conference at the University of East Anglia. Sugata Ray, assistant professor of art history at the University of California, Berkeley, received the 2014 Margaret B. Ševčenko Prize for his essay, “Shangri La: The Archive-Museum and the Spatial Topologies of Islamic Art History.” The Grabar Grants and Fellowships Program, which supports the scholarly activity and professional development of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in Islamic art, was established in memory of Professor Oleg Grabar. The Ševčenko Prize, awarded annually for the best unpublished article written by a young scholar on any aspect of Islamic visual culture, honors the memory of Margaret Ševčenko, the longtime managing editor of Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Cultures of the Islamic World.
International Center of Medieval Art
The International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA) will present sessions and receptions at the fiftieth International Congress on Medieval Studies, to be held May 14–17, 2015, at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. Sessions presented by the organization include the “Cross in Medieval Art,” “Moving Women, Moving Objects,” and “Super Medieval! Visual Representations of ‘Medieval Superheroes.’” This last session is sponsored by the organization’s student committee. Two receptions are planned, one for all members and another for students.
International Sculpture Center
The International Sculpture Center will host the twenty-fifth International Sculpture Conference, “New Frontiers in Sculpture,” to be held November 4–7, 2015, in Phoenix, Arizona. The conference will feature panel discussions at Phoenix Art Museum and Arizona State University; special programming at Bollinger Atelier; optional trips to James Turrell’s Skyspaces and Cosanti, among others; gallery hops, the annual ISC members’ littleSCULPTURE show; and much more. Registration opens in June. For more information and to join the mailing list for updates, please visit www.sculpture.org/az2015.
Italian Art Society
The Italian Art Society (IAS) has announced information regarding the sixth annual IAS/Kress Lecture in Italy: Nino Zchomelidse of Johns Hopkins University will present her paper “Scena Sacra Scena–Tribuna Civica: Il ruolo dell’ambone nella Campania medievale” on May 20, 2015. The lecture will take place in the Dipartimento degli studi umanistici of the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II. The Emerging Scholars Committee of IAS has inaugurated a new mentoring program that will match established scholars with graduate students and junior scholars with similar interests.
On May 15, IAS will host three linked sessions on the topic “Civic Foundation Legends in Italian Art” at the 2015 International Congress on Medieval Studies, to be held at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. IAS will also sponsor a long session titled “Beyond Texts and Academies: Rethinking the Education of the Early Modern Italian Artist” at the next CAA Annual Conference, taking place February 3–6, 2016, in Washington, DC.
The deadline for IAS/KRESS travel grants for scholars undertaking transoceanic travel to the annual meeting of the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference in Vancouver is May 20, 2015. Please consider writing for the IASblog on any topic related to Italian art from prehistory to the present.
IAS has announced its new executive board: Sheryl E. Reiss, president; Anne Leader, executive vice president; Frances Gage, vice president for program coordination; Martha Dunkelman, treasurer and membership coordinator; and Sean Roberts, secretary.
Mid-America College Art Association
The School of Art in the College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning (DAAP) at the University of Cincinnati will host the biennial conference of the Mid-America College Art Association (MACAA), October 26–28, 2016. This follows the 2014 conference, “Mash Up,” which was hosted by the University of Texas at San Antonio. Jeffrey Adams, current MACAA president, and Kate Bonansinga, director of DAAP’s School of Art and site coordinator, are working with the MACAA board and DAAP faculty to develop ideas for sessions for the conference and a potential theme. Since the 1930s MACAA has provided a forum for artists/teachers of America to discuss and debate the issues of our profession, to share ideas and information of mutual benefit, and to affirm the friendships and collegiality that bind us together. The College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning at the University of Cincinnati has as its primary mission the creation of a better visual and design environment. Through excellence in educational programs, research, creative works, and service to the community, the faculty, the students, and administrative officers of DAAP are dedicated to achieve this mission.
National Art Education Association
The National Art Education Association (NAEA) invites you to participate in Summer Vision, joining a professional learning community and spending four days in America’s heartland or the nation’s capital exploring art, architecture, nature, and the museum as a work of art!
New Media Caucus
The New Media Caucus (NMC) has reported the results of its recent elections. The new board members are: Nadav Assor, assistant professor, Connecticut College; Rachel Clarke, associate professor, California State University, Sacramento; Renate Ferro, visiting assistant professor of art, Cornell University; Meredith Hoy, assistant professor, Arizona State University; Patrick Lichty, assistant professor, Columbia College Chicago; Jessye McDowell, assistant professor of art and exhibitions and lectures coordinator, Auburn University; Carlos Rosas, associate professor, Pennsylvania State University; Daniel Temkin, independent artist; and Stephanie Tripp, associate professor of communication, University of Tampa.
The newly elected officers are: Jim Jeffers, treasurer, assistant professor, Indian River State College; A. Bill Miller, chair, Communication Committee, assistant professor, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater; and Joyce Rudinsky, chair, Events Committee, associate professor, University of North Carolina.
These artists and scholars will be joining the following: Vagner Whitehead, president, associate professor, Oakland University; Mat Rappaport, secretary, associate professor, Columbia College Chicago; Pat Badani, editor-in-chief of Media-N Journal, independent artist and scholar; Victoria Bradbury, researcher at CRUMB, Sunderland, United Kingdom; Mina Cheon, interdisciplinary professor, Maryland Institute College of Art; Kevin Hamilton, associate professor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Barbara Rauch, associate professor, Ontario College of Art and Design University, Toronto; Josua Selman, president, Artist Organized Art; and Jessica Westbrook, assistant professor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Pacific Arts Association
The Pacific Arts Association-Europe conference will be held July 2–4, 2015, at the Museo de América in Madrid, Spain. The presentation of papers is open to any topic within the theme of “Recent Research in Pacific Arts.” Presentations can be either thirty minutes (twenty to twenty-five minutes of talk, five to ten minutes of discussion) or ten-minute reports on current exhibition projects or work in progress in museums or galleries. For more information, please contact adama@adamaamerica.com.
Pacific Arts Association-Pacific is calling for interest in its 2015 conference on “Trading Traditions: The Role of Art in the Pacific’s Expansive Exchange Networks,” to be held at the Fa’onelua Conference Centre in Nuku’alofa, Tonga, September 30–October 4, 2015. The conference theme examines the role art has played in the exchange of objects, peoples, technologies, and ideologies in the prehistoric, historic, or modern Pacific. It is not limited to “physical” exchanges but also addresses complex social, economic, and political arrangements and interactions among interconnected systems, structures, and peoples. For further information, please write to Karen Stevenson.
Public Art Dialogue
Public Art Dialogue (PAD) sponsored two sessions at CAA’s 2015 Annual Conference in New York. “Museums and Public Art: Coexistence or Collaboration,” chaired by Harriet Senie and Cher Krause Knight, featured papers by Kasia Ozga (“False Advertising? Public Art and Monographic Exhibitions”),Glenn Wallace (“‘Western Exposure’: The Contemporary Art Museum, Public Art, and the Global City”),Andrew Wasserman (“Sites of Counter Culture: Navigating a Future Bowery”), and Carole Anne Meehan(“Raising Expectations for the Public Sphere”). The artist Norie Sato chaired a second session, “Student Debt, Real Estate, and the Arts”; participating in the panel were Tom Finkelpearl, commissioner of New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs and the artists Caroline Woolard and Paul Ramirez Jonas. Finkelpearl received the 2015 PAD award for achievement in the field of public art. This award recognizes an individual whose contributions have influenced public art practice.
Society for Photographic Education
Each spring, the Society for Photographic Education (SPE) hosts a forum for the presentation of artistic work and research to a community of peers. SPE has announced the call for proposals for “Constructed Realities,” the fifty-third national conference, to be held March 10–13, 2016, in Las Vegas, Nevada. SPE is accepting proposals for the 2016 conference with a submission deadline of June 1, 2015. Topics are not required to be theme-based and may include but are not limited to: image-making, history, contemporary theory and criticism, new technologies, effects of media and culture, educational issues, and funding. SPE membership is required to submit, and proposals are peer reviewed.
The presentation formats are:
- Graduate Student: short presentation of your own artistic work and a brief introduction to your graduate program
- Imagemaker: presentation of your own artistic work (photography, film, video, performance, installation, multidisciplinary approaches)
- Lecture: presentation of a historical topic, theory, or another artist’s work
- Panel: group led by a moderator to discuss a chosen topic
- Teaching: presentations, workshops, demos that address educational issues, including teaching resources and strategies; curricula to serve diverse artists and changing student populations; seeking promotion and tenure; avoiding burnout; and professional exchange
Please www.spenational.org for information on SPE membership and full proposal guidelines.
Society for the Study of Early Modern Women
The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (SSEMW) has announced the following awards for 2014 at its annual meeting, held during the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, last October:
- Best Book: Melinda S. Zook, Protestantism, Politics, and Women in Britain, 1660–1714 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
- Honorable Mention: George McClure, Parlour Games and the Public Life of Women in Renaissance Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2013)
- Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition: Barbara Torelli Benedetti, Partenia, a Pastoral Play, ed. and trans. Lisa Sampson and Barbara Burgess-Van Aken (Toronto, 2013)
- Best article: Diane Wolfthal, “Household Help: Early Modern Portraits of Female Servants,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 8 (2013): 5–52
- Best collaborative project: Noelia S. Cirnigliaro and John Beusterien, eds., Touching the Ground: Women’s Footwear in the Early Modern Hispanic World 14.2 (2013). Special issue of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies
- Honorable Mention: Anne J. Cruz and Maria Galli Stampino, eds., Early Modern Habsburg Women: Transnational Contexts, Cultural Conflicts, Dynastic Continuities (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013)
- Best Translation: Pere Torrellas and Juan de Flores, Three Spanish Querelle Texts: “Grisel and Mirabella,” “The Slander against Women,” and “The Defense of Ladies against Slanderers,” ed. and trans. Emily Francomano (Toronto, 2013)
- Best Teaching Edition: Valerie Worth-Stylianou, ed. and trans., Pregnancy and Birth in Early Modern France: Treatises by Caring Physicians and Surgeons (1581–1625) (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2013)
- Best Digital Scholarship, New Media, and Art Project: Caroline Bowden, principal investigator, 2012–13; James Kelly, project manager, 2012–13; along with Jan Broadway, David Horne, Katherine Keats-Rohan, and Michael Questier, coinvestigator and principal investigator, 2008–11), Who were the Nuns: A Prosopographical study of the English convents in exile 1600–1800
Society of Architectural Historians
The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) is accepting abstracts for its sixty-ninth annual international conference in Pasadena and Los Angeles, California, April 6–10, 2016. Please submit abstracts by June 9, 2015, for one of the thirty-eight thematic sessions, the Graduate Student Lightning Talks, or the open sessions. The thematic sessions have been selected to cover topics across all time periods and architectural styles. SAH encourages submissions from architectural, landscape, and urban historians; museum curators; preservationists; independent scholars; architects; and members of SAH chapters and partner organizations.
SAH is accepting applications for the 2015 H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship. The prestigious $50,000 fellowship allows a recent graduate or emerging scholar to study by travel for one year. The deadline to apply is October 1, 2015.
Registration is open for the 2015 SAH Field Seminar, “Architecture in the Rio de la Plata Basin: Between Tradition and Cosmopolitanism.” The seminar features a customized itinerary and includes visits to sites not open to the general public, supplemental lectures, and a significant educational component designed to enhance your experience of the region’s built environment.
Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian and Russian Art and Architecture
The Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) seeks proposals of papers for its sponsored 2½-hour session, “Exploring Native Traditions in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia,” at CAA’s 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC. Within a broad historical and geographical framework of the region, which assimilated and reacted to a succession of cultures from Greek, Roman, and Byzantine to Mongol, Ottoman, and Soviet, the session seeks to balance the significance of international contacts and the experiences of artists who worked primarily in their native land. Artists expressed regional identities through distinctive themes and motifs in every art form; some made use of traditional techniques and designs, or represented provincial spaces, distinct ethnicities, and social customs. Papers may focus on individual artists or on broader institutional contexts that affected evolving concepts of regionalism and nationalism. The discussions might also address contemporary tensions surrounding regional and national identity. Interested contributors should see CAA’s 2016 Call for Participation and send proposals with other required materials to the session’s chair, Alison Hilton. The deadline for proposals is May 8, 2015.
Southeastern College Art Conference
The application for the 2015 Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) Artist’s Fellowship, which carries a $5,000 award, is August 1, 2015.
New directors to the Board of Directors were elected in February:
- Alabama: Wendy Deschene, Auburn University
- Kentucky: Boris Zakic, Georgetown College
- Louisiana: Jill Chancey, Nicholls State University
- North Carolina: Lawrence Jenkens, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
The new issue of the Southeastern College Art Conference Review (vol. 16, no. 4, 2014) is now available.
The next four conferences will take place:
- October 21–24, 2015: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
- October 19–22, 2016: Virginia Tech with Hollins University, in Roanoke, Virginia
- October 25–28, 2017: Columbus College of Art and Design, in Columbus, Ohio
- October 17–20, 2018: University of Alabama in Birmingham
Visual Resources Association
The Visual Resources Association (VRA) honored the recipients of the organization’s highest honors at a members and awards dinner on March 12, 2015, during the VRA’s thirty-third annual conference in Denver, Colorado. Maureen Burns of IMAGinED Consulting received the Distinguished Service Award for her contributions to visual resources and image management. Comments from Burns’s nominators and a description of her engagement with visual-resources advocacy, service to the profession, and long-term involvement with VRA and the VRA Foundation throughout her career can be found online. VRA presented the Nancy DeLaurier Award for distinguished achievement to the editors of Cataloging Cultural Objects (Chicago: American Library Association, 2006). The editors are: Murtha Baca, head of the Getty Digital Art History Access Program; Patricia Harpring, managing editor of the Getty Vocabulary Program; Eliza Lanzi, director of digital strategies and services at Smith College; Linda McRae, retired director of the Visual Resources Library at the University of South Florida; and Ann Baird Whiteside, librarian and assistant dean for information resources for the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. The Nancy DeLaurier Award nomination and acceptance remarks by Patricia Harpring are available online. VRA publishes images and information about the awards presentation on its website.
NEA Awards Seventh Consecutive Grant for ARTspace
posted by Nia Page — May 08, 2015
CAA has been awarded a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to support the next installment of ARTspace, taking place during the 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC. Spearheaded by CAA’s Services to Artists Committee, ARTspace is a forum for programming designed by artists for artists that is among the most vital and exciting aspects of the conference. Held at each Annual Conference since 2001, ARTspace is intended to reflect the current state of the visual arts and arts education.
ARTspace offers free program sessions and includes diverse activities such as the Annual Distinguished Artists’ Interviews (most recently with William Pope.L and Ursula von Rydingsvard in New York in February 2015); screenings of film, video, and multimedia works; live performances; and papers and presentations that facilitate a conversational yet professional exchange of ideas and practices designed to engage CAA’s artist members as well as the general public.
The grant, which is the NEA’s seventh consecutive award to CAA for ARTspace, will help fund programs such as ARTexchange, the popular open-portfolio exhibition for artists; the Distinguished Artists’ Interviews; and the Media Lounge, a space dedicated to curated programs of film, video, and multimedia work. ARTspace programming at the 2015 conference in New York included panels that explored the shifting landscape of the field, from “Surveillance as Art Practice” and “Art Collectives and the Contemporary World” to “Balancing Act: Art, Family, and Other Distractions” and “Imagining an Alternative School of Art.” You can explore all of the 2015 ARTspace programming on the conference website.
CAA’s 104th Annual Conference will take place February 3–6, 2016, in Washington, DC. Through grants to thousands of nonprofits each year, the NEA promotes opportunities for people in communities across America to experience the arts and exercise their creativity.
Image Caption
Jenny Schlenzka of MoMA PS 1 interviews the artist William Pope.L during ARTspace at the 2015 Annual Conference in New York (photograph by Bradley Marks)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Apr 29, 2015
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.
Next Practices in Digital
Next Practices in Digital and Technology comprises forty-one examples of recent and ongoing digital initiatives designed by AAMD member museums. From social media and mobile apps, to in-gallery interpretation and behind-the-scenes collections management, Next Practices in Digital and Technology explores the ways museums are using technology to advance accessibility, scholarship, education, and audience engagement. (Read more from the Association of Art Museum Directors.)
Dear Artists, Stop Turning in Bad Grant Applications (Part 1)
Show of hands—how many of you who’ve applied for a grant or fellowship have turned in your application on the deadline day, right before the post office closed or the website shut down, after dashing off an unspellchecked artist’s statement and recruiting friends to write your reference letters the night before? (Read more from GrantSpace.)
Dear Artists, Stop Turning in Bad Grant Applications (Part 2)
When panelists are reading through the material, this is the only impression we have of you. Often, the judging is blind and sourced from out of town. If not, and a panelist has a conflict of interest, they have to state that up front and inform the organization and withdraw themselves from the conversation about your work. So, typically your work will be reviewed and assessed by strangers. (Read more from GrantSpace.)
Time to Change the Rules of Negotiation
It is job-offer season, and lately I’ve received an inordinate number of inquiries related to “negotiating while female.” In addition to the normal jitters that come with going back and forth on an offer, it seems lots of women have heard about the Nazareth College case and read the research that suggests they must play into gender stereotypes in order to secure competitive deals. For example, they have been told that they should make requests on behalf of others rather than themselves so as not to seem pushy or aggressive. (Read more from Vitae.)
Should Art Respond to Science? On This Evidence, the Answer Is Simple: No Way
Physics—it really does your head in. That seems to be the less-than-enlightening message the Japanese visual artist and composer Ryoji Ikeda took from a residency at CERN in Geneva. Ikeda’s installation Supersymmetry, staged in the darkened uppermost level of a multistory car park, is apparently what you get when you introduce an artist to the world’s most advanced particle research institute and its renowned Large Hadron Collider: a lot of sound and light, signifying nothing. (Read more from the Guardian.)
Competing or Complementing: Art Loss Databases Proliferate
Stolen art seems to be ubiquitous and difficult to track. It is relatively easy to ship and sell around the world, and can remain easily hidden for decades. The owner faces the conflict of wanting to publicize the loss widely, while also keeping their personal lives private. The development of databases to record losses was first preceded by newsletter alerts of stolen art that proliferated in the arts community to halt sales with questionable provenance. (Read more from the Center for Art Law.)
Three Quarters of New Collectors Buy Art Online for Investment, Study Finds
Collectors who buy art online are increasingly doing it for investment, according to a report released by the fine-art insurance company Hiscox. As many as 63 percent are driven by the value potential of works of art, with 75 percent of new buyers saying they buy art for investment. However, 93 percent of respondents say they collect for passion. Robert Read, the head of fine art at Hiscox, says rapid growth in the contemporary art market, coupled with a lack of options in other markets, is enticing people to “get on the art ladder.” (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Tax Break Used by Investors in Flipping Art Faces Scrutiny
Introduced in the 1920s to ease the tax burden of farmers who wanted to swap property, it soon became a tool for real-estate investors flipping, say, office buildings for shopping malls. Now, this little-known provision in the tax code, known as a like-kind exchange, has become a popular tactic for a new niche of investors: buyers of high-end art who want to put off—and sometimes completely avoid—federal taxes when upgrading their Diebenkorns for Rothkos. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Support CAA’s Annual Fund
posted by Nia Page — Apr 27, 2015
Since 1911, the College Art Association has served the individuals and institutions that make up the world’s largest professional association in the visual arts. As you know, CAA supports and enhances the community in the visual arts through 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; 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.
What you may not realize is that CAA does a great deal behind the scenes to support its members. The organization subsidizes more than half of its members through discounted memberships for students, retirees, part-time faculty, and independent artists and scholars, and it provides reduced conference registration fees for student and retired members. CAA’s Strategic Plan (2015–2020) has made part-time faculty issues a priority, and the organization recently asked tenured faculty and administrators in the visual arts to implement its Guidelines for Part-Time Professional Employment. CAA has even devoted an entire website section providing resources for part-time faculty. At the conference, CAA offers Professional-Development Workshops and mentoring opportunities to artists, art historians, designers, and students at the Annual Conference. It also presents ARTspace, an annual forum of programming designed by artists for artists that is free and open to the public.
Today, I ask that you support all that CAA does with a gift to the Annual Fund.
Your contribution to the Annual Fund will enable CAA to continue providing invaluable resources to its members. Voluntary support from CAA members is critical to our collective advancement, and your contribution to the Annual Fund makes this important work possible.
On behalf of the artists, art historians, curators, critics, collectors, designers, educators, and other professionals who make up CAA, I thank you for your dedication. Please give generously!
Sincerely,
John J. Richardson
Vice President for External Affairs
Mellon Foundation Helps CAA Continue Publishing Award for Emerging Scholars
posted by Christopher Howard — Apr 21, 2015
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a second grant of $60,000 to the College Art Association (CAA) to administer the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award for one year. The award was first given to CAA in 2013 as a temporary measure to provide financial relief to early-career scholars in art history and visual studies who are responsible for paying for rights and permissions for images in their publications. The Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award will provide grants directly to emerging scholars to offset the costs of securing images for their first books. Recipients will be selected on the basis of the quality and financial need of their project, and awards will be made twice during the year (in the summer and fall). CAA anticipates awarding between ten and twelve Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Awards in 2015.
Scholars may submit applications for the summer round of the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award before the June 12, 2015 deadline. The fall deadline is September 15, 2015. CAA will administer the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award according to guidelines developed for the Millard Meiss Publication Fund grant, an award established in 1975 by a generous bequest from the late Professor Millard Meiss. The jury for the award, comprising distinguished, mid-career or senior scholars whose specializations cover a broad range of art scholarship, has discretion over the number of and size of the awards. For further information about the award and to apply, please visit www.collegeart.org/meissmellon.
CAA seeks to alleviate high reproductions rights costs related to publishing in the arts. With funding from a separate, generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a start-up grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, CAA recently published its Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts. Part of a multi-year effort led by Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, the Code presents a set of principles addressing best practices in the fair use of copyrighted materials based on a consensus of opinion developed through discussions with visual-arts professionals.
For specific questions about applying to the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award, please contact Sarah Zabrodski, CAA editorial manager, at szabrodski@collegeart.org or 212-392-4424.
People in the News
posted by CAA — Apr 17, 2015
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.
April 2015
Academe
Raymond AllenRaymond Allen, a painter, professor, and longtime vice president of academic affairs and provost at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, will retire in June 2015.
Leslie Bellavance, currently dean, director of graduate programs, and professor in the School of Art and Design at Alfred University’s New York State College of Ceramics, has been named president of Kendall College of Art and Design at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. Her appointment begins on July 1, 2015.
Susan Best has become convenor of fine art and art theory in the Queensland College of Art at Griffith University in South Brisbane, Australia.
David Bogen, currently vice president academic and provost at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, British Columbia, has been appointed provost and vice president of academic affairs at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, effective August 2015.
Tanya SheehanTanya Sheehan, associate professor of art at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, has earned tenure at her school.
Museums and Galleries
Margaret C. Conrads, formerly deputy director of art and research at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, has been appointed director of curatorial affairs at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Anne Hawley, director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachussetts, has announced her retirement after twenty-five years of service. She will step down at the end of 2015.
Katherine Jentleson, a doctoral candidate in art history at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, has been appointed the inaugural Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia.
David Joselit, distinguished professor of art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, has joined the board of directors of Artists Space in Manhattan.
Narayan Khandekar (photograph provided by Harvard Art MuseumsNarayan Khandekar, senior conservation scientist in the Harvard Art Museums’ Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has become the center’s director.
Thomas KrenThomas Kren, associate director for collections at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California, will retire from his position in October 2015.
Kate Kunau, a doctoral candidate in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, has become associate curator at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Jeongho Park, formerly Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellow at the Frick Collection in New York, has become curatorial research associate for the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Blanton Museum of Art, part of the University of Texas at Austin.
Lowery Stokes Sims, chief curator of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, has retired from the museum.
David Stark, previously director of administration for museum education at the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, has been appointed chief curator of the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio.
Michael Taylor has left his position as director of Dartmouth University’s Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Daniel H. Weiss, an art historian and president of Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania, has been named president of the board of trustees at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Chris Yates, formerly director of CORE Studio and associate professor of art at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio, has become assistant director of Gund Gallery at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.
Organizations and Publications
Michael Conforti, director of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has announced his retirement. He will leave the institute in summer 2015.
Joni Doherty, formerly director of the New England Center for Civic Life at Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, New Hampshire, has accepted a position as program officer for the Kettering Foundation in Dayton, Ohio.