CAA News Today
Art History Teaching Resources Seeks Thematic Lesson Plans
posted by Christopher Howard — Apr 02, 2015
Do you have a great thematic lesson plan you want to take some time to codify and share? Funded by a Samuel H. Kress Foundation grant for digital resources, Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR), a peer-populated platform for instructors and a collectively authored online repository of art-history teaching content, seeks contributors for specific thematic subject areas in the art-history survey. This is the third and final call for participation (the first two went out in 2014).
AHTR is particularly interested thematic content, for publication in fall 2015. The following areas are suggestions—ideas for other thematic lesson plans are welcomed and you can see examples of existing lesson plans that engage thematically with, for example, “Race and Identity” and “Globalism and Transnationalism.” Please propose a thematic plan germane to the survey-level class.
Possible themes include but are in no way limited to: Art and Labor, “High” vs. “Low,” Violence, Nature, Manufacture and Industrialization, Queer Art, Globalization, Beyond Europe, Death, Power, Materials, Age, Art Markets, Sex, the Gaze
For each content area, AHTR seeks lecture and lesson plans similar to those developed for its thematic section on Feminism and Art. Full template guidelines will be given for the sections to be included in each plan; writers will be expected to review and amend their plan (if necessary), once edited by AHTR. These plans, which will be posted to the AHTR website in fall 2015, are supported by $250 writing grants made possible by the Kress award.
AHTR is looking for contributors who:
- Have strong experience teaching the art-history survey and strong interest in developing thoughtful, clear, and detailed lesson plans in particular thematic areas
- Are committed to delivering lecture content (plan, PowerPoint, resources, activities) for one to two (a maximum of two) thematic content areas in a timely manner. Each content area will be supported by a $250 Kress writing grant
- Are able to make a September deadline for submission and an early October deadline for any edits
- Want to engage with a community of peers in conversations about issues in teaching the art-history survey
AHTR’s intention is to offer monetary support for the often-unrewarded task of developing thoughtful lesson plans, to make this work freely accessible (and thus scalable), and to encourage feedback on them so that the website’s content can constantly evolve in tandem with the innovations and best practices in the field. In this way, AHTR wants to encourage new collaborators to the site—both emerging and experienced instructors in art history—who will enhance and expand teaching content. The website also wishes to honor the production of pedagogical content at the university level by offering modest fellowships to support digital means of collaboration among art historians.
Please submit a short, teaching-centered CV and a brief statement of interest that describes which thematic subject area(s) you wish to tackle to teachingarthistorysurvey@gmail.com by April 15, 2015. These initial texts should be delivered to AHTR in June or July 2015.
Report from Arts Advocacy Day 2015
posted by admin — Mar 31, 2015
Hillary Bliss is CAA development and marketing manager.
Last week CAA sent two representatives to participate in the twenty-eighth annual Arts Advocacy Day in Washington, DC. Anna Cline, CAA development and marketing assistant, and I joined 550 grassroots advocates representing forty-eight states to lobby for strong public policies and increased funding for the arts. CAA also supported the event, which is organized by Americans for the Arts, as a national cosponsor.
Monday, March 23
Cline and I attended a full day of training that included legislative and political updates, in-depth briefings on our three primary “asks” (more on those later), and facts and figures to make a compelling case for the arts. We also heard an inspiring keynote address by Jane Chu, the recently appointed chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). A role-play demonstration for congressional visits was incredibly helpful in illustrating how advocacy teams can manage the varying personalities and political agendas of senators, representatives, and their staffs to communicate clear messages and secure commitments of support in the form of caucus enrollment or letters addressing particular funding levels or policy positions. The most important takeaway was to strategically couple facts and figures—whether they be economic impact reports, matching-fund statistics, or art education’s effect on drop-out rates and SAT scores—with personal stories to create memorable and meaningful visits with legislators.
The three primary issues for Arts Advocacy Day were:
NEA Funding: We sought support for a $155 million budget for the NEA in the fiscal year 2016 Interior Appropriations bill. The broad reach and impact of the NEA can not be overstated: the agency awards approximately 2,300 grants per year to organizations in every US congressional district, reaches more than 38 million people through live art events, and helps to leverage roughly $600 million in matching funds from other state, local, and private sources. Closer to home, CAA has received support from the NEA every year since 2010 for ARTspace, a free and open component of the Annual Conference.
Arts in Education: We urged Congress to support $30 million for the Arts In Education (AIE) programs in the fiscal year 2016 Labor-Heath and Human Services-Education appropriations bill and retain it as a distinct grant competition for programs that strengthen the arts as a core academic subject of learning. Consolidation into an appropriations bill would risk compromising the program. We also sought support for retaining the arts in the definition of core academic subjects and for strengthening equitable access to the arts in the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).
Tax Reform: Since many arts organizations operate as nonprofit entities, tax reform regarding charitable giving is a critical issue. We asked Congress to preserve incentives for donations by protecting full value tax deductions for all forms of charitable gifts; we also advised against the adoption of “caps” or “floors” for deductions. We also urged Congress to make the IRA charitable rollover permanent so that donors can achieve the greatest impact with their planned giving. We also asked representatives to support the Artist-Museum Partnership Act, which would allow artists to take an income tax deduction for the fair market value of their work when they donate it to charitable collecting institutions.
There was no shortage of issues this year: advocates addressed arts in health, net neutrality, protection of wireless technology for the arts and media, and visa processes for foreign guest artists in short training sessions throughout the day. You can download American’s for the Arts’ 2015 Congressional Arts Handbook for facts and figures on all of these issues.
Closing the prelude to Arts Advocacy Day was the Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy, this year given by the television writer and producer Norman Lear at the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. You can view Lear’s moving lecture, introduced by the hip-hop recording artist Common, on YouTube.
Tuesday, March 24
The packed Congressional Arts Kick-Off on Tuesday marked the official start of Arts Advocacy Day on Capitol Hill and featured speakers such as Representative Louise Slaughter (D-NY) and Representative Leonard Lance (R-NJ), cochairs of the Congressional Arts Caucus. Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico received the Congressional Arts Leadership Award in recognition of his distinguished service on behalf of the arts.
Cline and I were on separate advocacy teams representing the New York City area that included undergraduate and graduate students and representatives from arts organizations such as Actors’ Equity Association, Fractured Atlas, POV, and others. We met with the offices of Representatives Carolyn Maloney (NY-12), Grace Meng (NY-6), Jerrold Nadler (NY-10), Lee Zeldin (NY-1), Peter T. King (NY-2), Steve Israel (NY-3), Kathleen Rice (NY-4), Gregory W. Meeks (NY-5), and Hakeem Jeffries (NY-8). Overall the meetings went extremely well. Our groups were able to address the key public policy and funding issues mentioned above, as well as to communicate the work of CAA and its members.
In a visit with Nadler’s office, Cline thanked the congressman for his vigorous efforts to pass the American Royalties Too (ART) Act, which would ensure that visual artists are compensated when their original artwork is resold; she also offered CAA’s continued support for this legislation. Though a meeting was originally scheduled with a member of his staff, Rep. Israel met with my team to discuss the NEA budget. As a member of the House Committee on Appropriations—and more specifically, the Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, which covers the NEA budget—Israel spoke about the budget process and stated that its current proposal includes $155 million for the NEA. Time will tell what the final approved NEA budget will be.
Visiting the congressional office buildings reinforces the fact that senators and representatives work for you. I noticed a marked difference in visits to representatives for whom we had a constituent on our team. Multiple staffers told us that they needed more vocal support for the arts to pass the legislation and public-funding increases we were requesting, so I encourage you to contact your legislators and express your support. Americans for the Arts has a useful site that includes not only information on issues and supporting materials like facts and figures, but also links to tools for finding and contacting your legislator.
Images
The US Capitol Building in Washington, DC (photograph by Hillary Bliss)
Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico accepting his Congressional Arts Leadership Award at the Congressional Arts Kick-Off event (photograph by Hillary Bliss)
My advocacy team after meeting with Representative Steve Israel. From left to right: Lawrence Lorchack, Actors’ Equity Association; Lynn Koos, New York University; Representative Steve Israel; Alison Ribellino, Towson University; Mary An, POV; and Linni Deihl, Andrew Anzel, and Haven G. Mitchell-Rose, New York University (photograph by Hillary Bliss)
Affiliated Society News for March 2015
posted by CAA — Mar 09, 2015
American Council for Southern Asian Art
As approved by a vote of the membership, the American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA) membership dues will be increasing. In addition, there are new membership categories and, as per request of the membership, multiyear options. ACSAA membership dues have not changed in more than ten years. Since then the organization has grown and thus taken on more expenses, such as the creation and regular maintenance of a website. The new dues structure brings ACSAA into alignment with other similar organizations.
The new membership dues structure is as follows:
- Students, Retired Members, Independent Scholars, and Scholars in South and Southeast Asia: $20 and $40 (two years)
- Regular Member: $50 and $100 (two years)
- Contributing Member: $100 and $200 (two years)
- Institutional Member: $100
- Sustaining Member: $250 minimum
- Lifetime Patron: $3,000
To join or renew as an ACSAA member, go to http://www.acsaa.us/membership.
ACSAA is also pleased to announce that the 2015 symposium, which celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the organization’s founding, will be held in Toronto, Ontario, this coming October. Additional details will soon be available on the website.
American Institute for Conservation
Please join the American Institute for Conservation (AIC) at its forty-third annual meeting in Miami, Florida, from May 13 to 15, 2015. The theme is “Practical Philosophy, or Making Conservation Work.” All aspects of conservation, from preventive care to inpainting, include both theory and practice. In most cases, theory supports practice. Nonetheless, conservation professionals are sometimes challenged in their efforts to smoothly meld the two. Many factors, ranging from available resources to questions of public access and politics, can thwart even the best treatments plans and noblest intentions. The transition from what is initially envisioned as ideal to what is eventually acknowledged as realistic often requires compromise. But, are less than satisfactory outcomes inevitable? Or, can better solutions evolve from necessity? Attend AIC’s annual meeting to learn how philosophical principles can be successfully translated into workable—even superior—practice. In addition, as UNESCO has proclaimed 2015 the International Year of Light, presentations on practical solutions that take advantage of optical technology to examine and preserve cultural heritage are being highlighted. Learn more and register at www.conservation-us.org/meetings.
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, 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 Appraisers
The Personal Property Committee of the American Society of Appraisers invites you to its annual spring conference, “Current Issues in Determining Authenticity in Visual Art and Objects, the Catalogue Raisonné, Art Scholarship, and Value in the Marketplace,” to be held March 25–27, 2015, at the Yale Club in New York. This scholarly conference will bring together highly regarded and noted experts in their fields. Speakers and topics to be addressed will include numerous aspects of the problems appraisers, art-industry professionals, and collectors must continually consider. An optional field trip to the Princeton University Art Museum, Sculpture Collection, and Libraries will take place on Saturday, March 28. Accommodations have been reserved at the Yale Club and the Roosevelt Hotel for this event. This will be a not-to-miss conference! Register now to save your spot. Limited spaces are available for the conference, which is expected to sell out. Go to www.appraisers.org or call 800-272-8258.
Arts Council of the African Studies Association
The Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) continues to have a sustained presence at national and international conferences in the first part of 2015. Numerous member-developed panels and individual papers have been accepted at the sixth European Conference on African Studies (ECAS 6), which will be held at the Sorbonne in Paris, France. The principal theme of ECAS 6 is “Collective Mobilizations in Africa: Contestation, Resistance, Revolt,” and ACASA panels will engage with topics ranging from the circulation of African art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to censorship and politically engaged artists to the consumption of African art in the electronic age. In addition, Jordan Fenton chaired the ACASA-sponsored panel “African Art and Economics in Urban Spaces,” at the 2015 CAA Annual Conference. Finally, plans for the seventeenth ACASA Triennial Symposium on African Art continue to make positive advancements. The symposium, which will take place at the University of Ghana in Legon in August 2017, will be ACASA’s first meeting on the African continent, marking the association’s longstanding commitment toward promoting greater understanding of African expressive culture from a global perspective.
ArtTable
This summer, ArtTable is expanding its Summer Mentored Internship for Diversity in the Visual Arts Professions program, one of the longest standing internship programs supporting diversity in the visual arts in the country. ArtTable’sprogram places women graduate students from cultural/ethnic backgrounds underrepresented in the field with ArtTable mentors at institutions around the country, providing them with a one-on-one mentoring relationship, valuable professional experience, and a stipend. Through the support of private donors, the Sam Francis Foundation, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the program will expand to provide internships to six young women this summer.
ArtTable and the arts community suffered a great loss with the passing of Lea K. Green this year. Lea was a long-standing ArtTable member, a vice president and client strategy director at Christie’s, a recent member of ArtTable’s board of directors, and an active and passionate member of the arts community. In collaboration with Lea K. Green’s family, ArtTable has established a fund to support its Diversity Internship Program and host a Lea K. Green summer intern. To make a contribution in Lea’s name, please contact info@arttable.org.
Association of Art Museum Curators
The Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) has announced the keynote speaker and hosts for its fourteenth annual conference and meeting, taking place May 9–12, 2015. The keynote speaker will be Tom Finkelpearl, commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. His experience and perspective on the powerful and mutually rewarding relationship that can exist between a museum and its immediate community and the ways in which to engage a culturally diverse region will resonate with and inspire the conference attendees. Conference sessions and events will be held at several New York area cultural institutions, including the Newark Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. “The historically adventurous characteristics of these institutions and the ways in which they have met the challenges of the twenty-first-century art museum will make for thought-provoking and insightful case studies for our AAMC members,” said Emily Ballew Neff, AAMC president. “The AAMC looks forward to learning more about the challenge and success of each museum in connecting effectively with its communities, and we are honored to be so warmly welcomed by each venue for the conference.”
Community College Professors of Art and Art History
The Community College Professors of Art and Art History (CCPAAH) had a successful session at this year’s CAA Annual Conference. “Foundations Flipped? Active Learning in Art History and the Studio” was the topic of the 2015 session. Thanks to Monica Anke Hahn (chair) and Lauren Patterson of the Community College of Philadelphia and Richard Thompson and Susan Altman of Middlesex County College for presenting, and also to all the attendees for their lively discussion. CCPAAH would also like to thank the twenty-five-plus faculty members who shared their “best practices” and project ideas at the business meeting. Everyone left with new ideas to take back to their classrooms. Join CCPAAH for “Beyond Good, Bad, and ‘I Like It’: A New Take on Critique,” to be presented at this year’s Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE) conference in Indianapolis, Indiana. Please email the group at ccpaah@gmail.com if you are interested in learning more or if you have questions. You can also like CCPAAH’s Facebook page.
Historians of British Art
The board of the Historians of British Art welcomes two new members: Julie Codell, professor of art history at Arizona State University; and Melinda McCurdy, associate curator of British art for the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. We would also like to welcome Douglas Fordham, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Virginia, as the incoming Book Prize Committee chair. Hyeyun Chin of Binghamton University, State University of New York, has been awarded HBA’s Travel Grant to support the presentation of a paper at CAA’s 2015 Annual Conference. For more information on HBA, including our prizes and membership, visit the website or find HBA on Facebook.
International Association of Art Critics
The International Association of Art Critics (AICA-USA) is pleased to announce that Martha Schwendener, art critic for The New York Times, has joined the organization’s board.
The panel “Art Critics’ Websites: Options and Rationales” has been rescheduled for Monday, March 16, 2015, 6:15–7:45 PM, at Artists Space, 55 Walker Street. Judith Stein will chair the panel, and four panelists will speak. Please RSVP to info@aicausa.org. Seating is limited to eighty people and available on a first-come, first-served basis.
International Center of Medieval Art
The International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA) is pleased to announce a new initiative. Drawing upon its own resources, the organization plans to make available a number of small grants to graduate students; these grants are designed to underwrite a month or so of travel to sites, collections, or libraries abroad. The awards will most likely be offered to graduate student members in the first stages of dissertation research. For more information, contact icma@medievalart.org.
International Sculpture Center
You’re invited to join International Sculpture Center (ISC) to celebrate International Sculpture Day, or IS Day for short. This event is an annual celebration held worldwide on April 24 to further the ISC’s mission of advancing the creation and understating of sculpture and its unique, vital contribution to society. IS Day is free and open to anyone or organization with an interest in sculpture; it will include a wide range of events, openings, and educational and promotional activities around the world. Visit www.sculpture.org/isday to learn how you can participate and to view events in your area. Visit ISC on Facebook and Twitter to join the conversation.
ISC will hold the twenty-fifth International Sculpture Conference, on “New Frontiers in Sculpture,” from November 4 to 7, 2015 in Phoenix, Arizona. Over three hundred sculpture enthusiasts from around the world will gather for engaging panel discussions, exciting cultural events, and peer networking surrounding topics in contemporary sculpture. Conference registration will open summer 2015. For more information, visit www.sculpture.org/az2015.
National Art Education Association
Don’t miss the largest gathering of art educators in the world! Register now for the 2015 National Art Education Association (NAEA) national convention. Focusing on “The Art of Design: Form, Function, and the Future of Visual Arts Education,” the event will take place March 26–28, 2015, in New Orleans, Louisiana. New NAEA publications that will at the convention are: Connecting Creativity Research and Practice in Art Education: Foundations, Pedagogies, and Contemporary Issues (2015), edited by Flávia Bastos and Enid Zimmerman; and Curriculum Inquiry and Design for School- and Community-Based Art Education (2015) by Lynn Beudert and Marissa McClure.
National Council of Arts Administrators
The forty-third National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA) annual meeting, “Changing Lanes: Adapting, Reacting, Navigating,” convenes September 23–25, 2015, in Boston, Massachuhsetts. Please join NCAA at Boston University for a conversation about the road(s) to best practices in our changing educational climate. We all know that the very structure of universities is shifting beneath our feet. How do and will art programs and administrators not only accommodate but also harness these changes? We invite current and aspiring art department chairs, directors, and deans to attend. The keynote speaker will be the architect and artist Maya Lin. Visit the website to learn more about the conference and to join NCAA.
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 30 minutes (20–25 minutes talk, 5–10 minutes discussion) or 10-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, from September 30 to 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, contact Karen Stevenson.
Public Art Dialogue
Harriet F. Senie and Kelly Pajek are stepping down as cochairs of Public Art Dialogue (PAD), and Juilee Decker is stepping down as membership coordinator. (PAD officers are limited to two three-year terms according to its bylaws.) In addition, Natasha Khandekar departs from her role as newsletter editor and web-content editor. PAD’s new cochairs are Cameron Cartiere and Jennifer Wingate. PAD’s membership coordinator is Anna Heineman. Marisa Lerer will serve as newsletter and web-content editor in addition to serving as PAD’s public relations coordinator.
Society for Photographic Education
The Society for Photographic Education (SPE) is accepting proposals for its fifty-third conference, “Constructed Realities,” to be held from March 10–13, 2016, in Las Vegas, Nevada. 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
Visit www.spenational.org for information on SPE membership and full proposal guidelines.
Society of Architectural Historians
Registration is open for the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) sixty-eighth annual international conference in Chicago, Illinois, taking place April 15–19, 2015. The conference features over 180 speakers presenting new research on built environment topics from antiquity to the critical present. Public programming includes the SAH Chicago Seminar and over thirty architectural tours. The seminar includes a keynote address by Harvard University professor Charles Waldheim and two panels of local speakers addressing the transformation of Chicago waterways and neighborhoods.
Registration is open for two Study Programs: SAH Study Day at the Museum of Modern Art and the United Nations Headquarters (New York, March 27, 2015); and Architectures in the Rio de la Plata Basin: Between Tradition and Cosmopolitanism (Uruguay and Argentina, September 1–12, 2015).
SAH is accepting applications for the SAH/Mellon Author Awards, which provide financial relief to scholars who are publishing their first monograph on the history of the built environment and who are responsible for paying for rights and permissions for images or for commissioning maps, charts, or line drawings in their publications. Deadline: June 1, 2015. The call for papers for the SAH sixty-ninth annual international conference will open on April 1, 2015. The H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship will open on April 1, 2015.
Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture
Following elections in January 2015, the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) has elected Eva Forgacs as its new vice president/president elect. Ksenya Gurshtein, the web news editor, was running unopposed. Margaret Samu stepped down as SHERA’s president after the end of her two-year term, and Natasha Kurchanova assumed the duties of this position.
At CAA’s Annual Conference in New York, Margaret Samu served as host to visitors from Hungary, Russia, and Ukraine who were part of the CAA-Getty International Program. Samu arranged meetings with specialists in the visitors’ expertise and facilitated their participation in a full-day preconference program organized by the CAA International Committee about international issues in art history, as well as in other events organized connected to the conference.
SHERA sponsored three sessions at CAA this year: a session on teaching methods, “Infiltrating the Pedagogical Canon”; and a double session, “Reconsidering Art and Politics: Towards New Narratives in Russian and East European Art.” During CAA, the society held its membership meeting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Watson Library. After the meeting, Jared Ash, SHERA member and the museum’s librarian, hosted a reception at which he showed the attendees rare books and materials related to Russian, East European, and Eurasian art and architecture from the library’s collection.
Southeastern College Art Conference
The next meeting of the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) will take place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 21–24, 2015. The deadline for the call for entries in the annual juried exhibition is April 1. The deadline for the call for papers is April 20. For more information, please visit www.secollegeart.org/conference.
New officers were elected at the members meeting on October 11, 2014, which took place at the seventieth annual meeting of SECAC, held in Sarasota, Florida: Jason Guynes of the University of South Alabama is president; Sandra Reed of Marshall University is first vice president; and Kevin Concannon of Virginia Tech is second vice president. The new board members are: Heather Deyling of Savannah College of Art and Design (appointed to fill vacated seat for Georgia); Ute Wachsmann-Linnan of Columbia College (South Carolina); and Heather Stark, Marshall University (West Virginia).
The new issue of the Southeastern College Art Conference Review (vol. XVI, no. 4) is now available. Rachel Stephens of the University of Alabama is the new editor. The name of the journal will change to Art Inquiries with volume XVII.
The future conference locations for SECAC will be:
- 2016 Roanoke, Virginia (hosted by Virginia Tech with Hollins University)
- 2017 Columbus, Ohio (hosted by Columbus College of Art and Design)
- 2018 Birmingham, Alabama (hosted by the University of Alabama at Birmingham)
The $5,000 Artist’s Fellowship award has a deadline of August 1, 2015. Membership is required for applications For details, visit http://www.secollegeart.org/artists-fellowship.
Visual Resources Association
The Visual Resources Association (VRA) has opened registration for the 2015 Summer Educational Institute for Visual Resources and Image Management (SEI), a joint project of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) and the Visual Resources Association Foundation (VRAF). SEI seeks to provide information professionals with a substantive educational and professional-development opportunity focused on digital imaging, the information and experience needed to stay current in a rapidly changing field, and the opportunity to create a network of supportive colleagues. This intensive three-and-a-half-day workshop will feature a curriculum that specifically addresses the requirements of today’s visual-resources and image management professionals. Expert instructors will cover: intellectual property rights, digital imaging and digital preservation, metadata and cataloging, project management, and professional growth and development. SEI 2015 will be held at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, June 9–12, 2015. SEI is a residential learning workshop for library-school students, new graduates, and midcareer professionals interested in learning more about digital collections, including metadata, project management, and professional best practices. For more information, please go to the SEI website.
2015 Annual Conference Highlights
posted by CAA — Mar 03, 2015
CAA hosted its 103rd Annual Conference from February 11 to 14, 2015, at the New York Hilton Midtown in New York City. This year’s program included four days of presentations and panel discussions on art history and visual culture, Career Services for professionals at all stages of their careers, a Book and Trade Fair, and a host of special events throughout the region. Preceding the Annual Conference was CAA’s third THATCamp, an “unconference” on digital art and art history.
Attendance
Over 5,000 people from throughout the United States and abroad—including artists, art historians, students, educators, curators, critics, collectors, and museum staff—attended the conference. Visual-arts professionals from over 54 countries were represented.
Sessions
Conference sessions featured presentations by artists, scholars, graduate students, and curators who addressed a range of topics in art history and the visual arts. In total, the conference offered over 200 sessions, developed by CAA members, affiliated societies, and committees. Approximately 800 individuals presented their work.
Career Services
Career Services included four days of mentoring and portfolio-review sessions, professional-development workshops, and job interviews with colleges, universities, and other art institutions. Approximately 200 interviewees and 50 mentors participated in Career Services. During the week of the Annual Conference, there were over 150 active jobs posted on the Online Career Center and more than 50 employers participating onsite.
Book and Trade Fair
This year’s Book and Trade Fair presented 155 exhibitors—including participants from the United States, France, Turkey, China, Canada, Italy, Russia, and Ukraine—that displayed new publications, materials for artists, digital resources, and other innovative products of interest to artists, scholars, and arts enthusiasts. The Book and Trade Fair also featured book signings, lectures, and demonstrations, as well as three exhibitor-sponsored program sessions on art materials and publishing.
ARTspace
ARTspace, a “conference within the conference” tailored to the needs and interests of practicing artists, presented programming that was free and open to the public, including this year’s Annual Distinguished Artist Interviews with William Pope.L, who spoke to Jenny Schlenzka of MoMA PS1, and Ursula von Rydingsvard, who conversed with Mark Stevens. Over 200 people attended this lively event.
ARTspace also featured four days of panel discussions devoted to visual-arts practice, opportunities for professional development, and screenings of film and video.
ARTexchange, an open-portfolio event in which CAA artist members displayed drawings, prints, photographs, small paintings, and works on laptop computers, took place on Friday, February 13. Nearly 40 artists participated in ARTexchange this year.
The Media Lounge, a space for innovative new-media programming in conjunction with ARTspace, focused on the theme of “alternative economies.” These programs are considered models of social, cultural, and technological economies that transform changing conditions for critical discourse and art making. “Alternative economies” aimed to create a platform that brought together artists, art collectives, new-media practitioners, video artists, film curators, academics, creative thinkers, economists, writers, and activists, with the aspiration to create a space to reflect on intersections of art, culture, and new-media technologies.
Programmed by CAA’s Services to Artists Committee, ARTspace was made possible in part by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Student and Emerging Professionals Lounge
The Student and Emerging Professionals Lounge served as a hub for networking, information-sharing, collaboration, professional development, and much more. The Student and Emerging Professionals Committee hosted an incredibly informative session on “Teaching Professional Practices in the Arts” to a packed audience; five Brown Bag Sessions with attendance ranging from 25 to 80; a successful social night; and two days of Mock Interviews at full capacity.
Distinguished Scholar Session
Robert Farris Thompson, professor of the history of art at Yale University, was CAA’s 2015 Distinguished Scholar. Grey Gundaker of the College of William and Mary chaired the session, and five additional participants—Charles Daniel Dawson, Wyatt MacGaffey, Rowland Abiodun, Leslie King-Hammond, and Lowery Stokes Sims—joined her in exploring and celebrating Thompson’s many contributions.
Convocation and Awards
More than 500 people attended CAA’s Convocation and presentation of the annual Awards for Distinction, which honor the outstanding achievements and accomplishments of individual artists, art historians, authors, conservators, curators, and critics whose efforts transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large. Tom Finkelpearl, commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, opened Convocation with a short talk, and Dave Hickey delivered the keynote address.
The recipients of the 2015 awards were:
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Megan Holmes
The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence
Yale University Press, 2013
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
Susan Weber, ed.
William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain
Bard Graduate Center and Yale University Press, 2013
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions
Lynn Boland, et al.
Cercle et Carré and the International Spirit of Abstract Art
Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, 2013
Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Douglas Brine
“Jan van Eyck, Canon Joris van der Paele, and the Art of Commemoration”
The Art Bulletin, September 2014
Art Journal Award
Anna Chave
Art Journal, Winter 2014
Distinguished Feminist Award
Amelia Jones
University of Southern California
Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
Richard Brown
Massachusetts College of Art and Design
Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu
Seton Hall University
Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work
Charles Gaines
Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974–1989
Studio Museum in Harlem
Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Keith Sonnier
CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
Melanie Gifford
National Gallery of Art
Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Lucy R. Lippard
Morey and Barr Award Finalists
CAA recognizes the 2015 finalists for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for their distinctive achievements:
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Matthew C. Hunter, Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)
Karl Whittington, Body-Worlds: Opicinus de Canistris and the Medieval Cartographic Imagination (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2014)
Catherine Zuromskis, Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013)
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
Kimberly A. Jones, et al., Degas/Cassatt (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art and DelMonico Books, 2014)
Special Events
Following Convocation, the Museum of Modern Art hosted CAA’s Opening Reception on Wednesday evening, February 11. Over 500 attendees gathered to celebrate the conference while enjoying a stroll through the museum’s permanent collections.
CAA Travel Grant in Memory of Archibald Cason Edwards, Senior, and Sarah Stanley Gordon Edwards
Established by Mary D. Edwards with the help of others, the CAA Travel Grant in Memory of Archibald Cason Edwards, Senior, and Sarah Stanley Gordon Edwards will support women who are emerging scholars at either an advanced stage of pursuing a doctoral degree (ABD) or who have received their PhD within the two years prior to the submission of the application. Julia Louise Langbein of Oxford University delivered her paper “Caricature and Comic Spectacle at the Paris Salon (1857–1880)” in the “Comic Modern” session. and Kristine Tanton of the University of California, Los Angeles, participated in a panel on “Biblical Archetypes in the Middle Ages,” presenting a talk called “Looking onto Galilee: The Narthex Tribune at Vézelay.”
CAA-Getty International Travel Grant Program
In an effort to promote greater interaction and exchange between American and international art historians, CAA brought 15 scholars from around the world to participate in the Annual Conference. This is the fourth year of the program, which has been generously funded by grants from the Getty Foundation since its inception.
The CAA-Getty International Program participants’ activities began with a one-day preconference colloquium on international issues in art history, during which they met with North American–based CAA members to discuss common interests and challenges. The participants were assisted throughout the conference by CAA member hosts, who recommended relevant panel sessions and introduced them to colleagues who share their interests. Members of CAA’s International Committee served as hosts, along with representatives from several CAA affiliated societies, including the American Council for Southern Asian Art, the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, the Association for Latin American Art, the Society of Contemporary Art Historians, and the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasia, and Russian Art and Architecture.
This program has increased international participation in CAA’s activities and expanded international networking and the exchange of ideas both during and after the conference.
The recipients were: Mokammal H. Bhuiyan, Dafne Cruz Porchini, Boureima Tiékoroni Diamitani, Ljerka Dulibić, Georgina Gluzman, Angelo Kakande, Nazar Kozak, Savita Kumari, Nomusa Makhubu, Ana Mannarino, Márton Orosz, Andrey Shabanov, Shao Yiyang, Lize van Robbroeck, and Nóra Veszprémi.
Other Exciting Highlights
CAA published the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with additional funding from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. This Code of Best Practices provides visual-arts professionals with a set of principles addressing the fair use of copyrighted materials. It describes how fair use can be invoked and implemented when using copyrighted materials in scholarship, teaching, museums, and archives and in the creation of art. The Code’s authors, Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi of American University, presented the document to conference attendees as part of a panel discussion organized by CAA’s Committee on Intellectual Property.
Board of Directors Update
Results of the Board of Directors election were announced on February 13, 2015, during the Annual Members’ Business Meeting. The new directors are:
- Jawshing Arthur Liou, professor of digital art and the director of the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts at Indiana University, Bloomington
- Chika Okeke-Agulu, associate professor of art history in the Department of Art and Archaeology and Center for African American Studies, Princeton University
- Rachel Weiss, professor of arts administration and policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
- Andrés Mario Zervigón, associate professor of the history of photography and acting chair of the Art History Department at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
They will take office at the next board meeting in May 2015.
Jim Hopfensperger of Western Michigan University was voted onto the board for a one-year term.
The CAA board also approved:
- New guidelines developed by the Professional Practices Committee on Fine Art Print Publications for Artists
- A Task Force on Advocacy, which will be chaired by Jacqueline Francis, associate professor at California College of the Arts, to address part-time faculty, diversity, and the interaction of artists and art historians in the public sphere
- A Task Force on the Annual Conference, to be led by Suzanne Blier, Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Art at Harvard University, to develop recommendations for changes that will adapt to the changing needs of the field
- The three-year reviews of the Services to Artists Committee, the International Committee, and the Committee on Women in the Arts
New board officers were elected:
- John Richardson, Vice President for External Affairs
- Charles Wright, Vice President for Committees
- Suzanne Blier, Vice President for Annual Conference
- Gail Feigenbaum, Vice President for Publications
- Doralynn Pines, Secretary
Affiliated Societies
CAA would like to welcome two new affiliated societies:
Thank You
Members of CAA’s Board of Directors and staff would like to extend their gratitude to all conference funders and sponsors, attendees, volunteers, and participants; the organization’s committees and award juries; the New York Hilton Midtown staff; the museums and galleries that opened their doors to conference attendees free of charge; and everyone else involved in helping to make the 103rd Annual Conference such a tremendous success!
A warm thanks to the following for their generous support of CAA:
- Alberta College of Art and Design
- Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
- Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
- Art in America
- Artstor
- Blick Art Materials
- Bloomsbury
- Getty Foundation
- Institute for Doctoral Studies in Visual Arts
- Knoll
- Laurence King Publishing
- McVicker and Higginbotham
- Museum of Modern Art
- National Committee for the History of Art
- National Endowment for the Arts
- Pearson
- Prestel
- Richmond University
- Samuel H. Kress Foundation
- Terra Foundation for American Art
- Wyeth Foundation for American Art
- Yale University Press
Save the Date
CAA’s 104th Annual Conference will be held in Washington, DC, February 3–6, 2016.
About CAA
The College Art Association is dedicated to providing professional services and resources for artists, art historians, and students in the visual arts. CAA serves as an advocate and a resource for individuals and institutions nationally and internationally by offering forums to discuss the latest developments in the visual arts and art history through its Annual Conference, publications, exhibitions, websites, and other events. CAA focuses on a wide range of issues, including education in the arts, freedom of expression, intellectual-property rights, cultural heritage and preservation, workforce topics in universities and museums, and access to networked information technologies. Representing its members’ professional needs since 1911, CAA is committed to the highest professional and ethical standards of scholarship, creativity, criticism, and teaching.
Millard Meiss Publication Fund Seeks Three Jury Members
posted by Betty Leigh Hutcheson — Feb 24, 2015
CAA seeks nominations and self-nominations to fill three positions on the jury for the Millard Meiss Publication Fund for a four-year term, July 1, 2015–June 30, 2019. Candidates must be actively publishing scholars with demonstrated seniority and achievement; institutional affiliation is not required.
The Meiss jury awards grants twice a year to support the publication of book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of art, visual studies, and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy. CAA reimburses jury members for travel and lodging expenses in accordance with its travel policy.
Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on another CAA editorial board or committee. Jury members may not themselves apply for a grant in this program during their term of service. 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 contact information to: Millard Meiss Publication Fund Jury, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004; or send all materials as email attachments to Sarah Zabrodski, CAA editorial manager. Deadline: May 1, 2015.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Feb 11, 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.
President Proposes Funding Increases for Cultural Agencies and Institutions
President Barack Obama has released his administration’s fiscal year 2016 budget request to Congress. In the budget, the president recommended a range of increases in federal funding for the majority of national arts and cultural agencies, programs, and institutions. Specifically, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities are being recommended for a $2 million increase. (Read more from Americans for the Arts.)
Obama Requests $147.9 Million for NEH in 2016
The Obama administration today released a budget request of $147,942,000 for the National Endowment for the Humanities for fiscal year 2016. The NEH, the independent federal agency that will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary this year, awards grants supporting research, education, and public programs in history, philosophy, literature, and other areas of the humanities. (Read more from the National Endowment for the Humanities.)
Smithsonian American Art Museum Launches Effort to Create National Art Database
The Smithsonian American Art Museum is leading a group of fourteen institutions from around the country in an effort to build a shared—and searchable—online database that could spur research and scholarship about American art. One of the first in the nation to make its entire collection available through Linked Open Data, the museum received a grant from the Andrew M. Mellon Foundation to create the American Art Collective to expand the project to other museums. (Read more from the Washington Post.)
Dangers of Art (Students)
The beginning was innocent enough: a class assignment to photograph the rising and setting of the sun. Yet instead of tracking sunlight for several weeks, the camera, strapped to a major Atlanta bridge, was blown up. This case of mistaken identity over a Georgia State University student’s art project caused an unusually large commotion. But this is far from the first time student artwork has been mistaken as a dangerous device or drawn the attention of law enforcement. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
The “Wild West” of Academic Publishing
Holding the odd bestseller aside, the digital disruption of the print world that is transforming commercial publishing also affects publishers of scholarly books and journals—and is changing structures for teaching, research, and hiring and promoting professors. Time-honored traditions appear vulnerable to overhaul or even extinction. Sarah Thomas, vice president for the Harvard Library, says, “We are still in the Wild West of sorting out how we will communicate our academic developments effectively.” (Read more from Harvard Magazine.)
How Reviews on Rate My Professors Describe Men and Women Differently
Easy or demanding? Boring or engaging? And what about homework? The student-evaluation site Rate My Professors contains a huge stockpile of information about what college students think of their instructors. And thanks to a new tool created by a Northeastern University professor, those millions of reviews can be mined to reveal students’ biases about male and female professors. (Read more from Chronicle of Higher Education.)
New York Museums Are Banning Selfie Sticks? What a Heroic Idea
At last, someone has stood up to the swilling tide of pseudodemocracy that threatens to turn museums into playgrounds and shopping malls. The selfie stick is now banned in many New York museums. The doctrine that a museum should be full of people at all times, however uninterested they may be, means that most big museums and art galleries will do anything, literally anything, to make themselves more approachable. (Read more from the Guardian.)
Inside Look
Last fall, as I was finishing my doctorate and applying to tenure-track jobs outside my institution, I served on a search committee for assistant-professor openings at my doctoral institution in my areas of study with my dissertation mentors—all of whom are senior scholars. Although I could have declined the service, I recognized that being on the committee would help me gain insights that could improve my own job search. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Help the NEH Celebrate Its Fiftieth Anniversary
posted by CAA — Jan 29, 2015
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), an independent federal agency created in 1965 and one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the United States, is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in 2015–16. To mark this historic event, we would like you to tell us about an NEH grant or grant product that has made a difference in your life, career, community, or academic field. To contribute stories about NEH’s past or for more information, send an email to NEH50@neh.gov. Please include your name and telephone number in your message.
Because democracy demands wisdom, the NEH serves and strengthens our republic by promoting excellence in the humanities and conveying the lessons of history to all Americans. The endowment accomplishes this mission by awarding grants for top-rated proposals examined by panels of independent, external reviewers. NEH grants typically go to cultural institutions, such as museums, archives, libraries, colleges, universities, public television, and radio stations, and to individual scholars. The grants:
- strengthen teaching and learning in schools and colleges
- facilitate research and original scholarship
- provide opportunities for lifelong learning
- preserve and provide access to cultural and educational resources
- strengthen the institutional base of the humanities
Since 1965, the endowment has opened new worlds of learning for the American public with noteworthy projects such as:
- Seven thousand books, 16 of which have won Pulitzer Prizes and 20 of which have received the Bancroft Prize
- The Civil War, the landmark documentary by Ken Burns viewed by 38 million Americans
- The Library of America editions of novels, essays, and poems celebrating America’s literary heritage
- The United States Newspaper Project, which catalogued and microfilmed 63.3 million pages of historic newspapers and paved the way for the National Digital Newspaper Program and its digital repository, Chronicling America
- Annual support for 56 states and territories to help support some 56,000 lectures, discussions, exhibitions, and other programs each year
We look forward to hearing from you!
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for January 2015
posted by CAA — Jan 10, 2015
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.
January 2015
Nicole Miller at Artists’ Film International
Ballroom Marfa
108 East San Antonio Street, Marfa, TX 79843
November 22, 2014–February 22, 2015
Ballroom Marfa is presenting two recent videos by Nicole Miller, as a highlighted artist participating at the Artists’ Film International. This project means a collection of artists’ film, video and animation from around the world that has been coorganized with Whitechapel Gallery in London.
Miller (b. 1982; Tucson, Arizona) lives and works in Los Angeles. Her films and installations explore the transformative capabilities of the moving image to reconstruct interpretations of self and culture. Through storytelling, self-representation and self-presentation become a narrative in search for the reconstitution of physical and psychic manifestations of loss. Her videos often focus on the interplay between preconception and reality in terms of African American identity, as in the case of The Conductor (2009), presented earlier this year at the High Line Art Program.
In this occasion, Ballroom Marfa is presenting two recent projects by Miller. In David (2012) we can observe the fragmented image of the profile of a man that the artist encountered by chance on the street. Here, he narrates the events that lead to the amputation of his left arm whilst his right limb is reflected in a mirror—a rehabilitation technique that helps patients deal with the painful symptoms of a phantom limb. Death of a School (2014) is a predominantly silent four-channel video that meditates on the events of a soon to be shutdown school in Tucson, which is Miller’s hometown. Presented together, Miller’s films become powerful narratives that carry the possibility of reconstitution of lost histories and identities.
Johanna Calle: Indicios
Casas Reigner
Calle 70A # 7-41, Bogotá, Colombia
October 2, 2014–January 30, 2015
Casas Riegner presents Indicios (Signs), an exhibition that gathers Johanna Calle’s most representative works produced between 1990 and 2014. Seeking to examine closely the visual language that has characterized her work for more than two decades, the exhibition includes a selection of projects in which different processes developed by the artist are juxtaposed. In each series of work, Calle exposes her approach to the creative process, where she also unveils a sense of unsettledness and curiosity.
Featuring her conceptual research and creative use of unconventional materials, the display includes Calle’s assemblages, signs, and phonetic representations of indigenous languages, photographic drawings made on vintage analogue photographs, and the intervention of archives and documents that are part of different research projects. For the documentation-based installation Hermanas Figueiredo (2013–14), Calle reconstructed a story as a gesture of redemption to the Brazilian sisters that devoted their life to a scientific research around the life of butterflies in the first half of the twentieth century. However, they have lost the legal battle with a recognized Brazilian professor who was hired to catalogue their collection and had deliberately chosen to wrongly assign its authorship and ownership. The case was dismissed and labeled as exhaustive and rigorous maniac women’s work.
Calle holds a BFA from Universidad de Los Andes en Bogotá and an MFA from Chelsea College of Arts in London, England. Her projects Perímetros I and Perímetros II were included at the thirty-first Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil in 2014.
Donna Sharrett: Love Songs
Pavel Zoubok Gallery
531 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
January 8–February 7, 2015
Pavel Zoubok Gallery presents Love Songs, a solo exhibition of new work by Donna Sharrett, including two of her largest—yet humanly scaled—works to date, framed by Sampling, a related group show curated by Dara Meyers-Kingsley.
With a variety of needlework techniques, Sharrett creates painstakingly wrought concentric assemblages sewn together from a potent and personal material lexicon consisting of donated or inherited jewelry, clothing, and buttons; hair, bone beads, dirt, and guitar strings. Passed down from a congenial and ancestral sorority of craftswomen and fiber artists, Sharrett’s techniques instill in each piece cross-cultural references to life, death, and rebirth. Addressing the shared human ability and desire to remember, her works transcend the confines of economic, religious and cultural boundaries.They instead evoke “life as it is lived and remembered—a notion of lineage that is not always linear and narrative but sometimes acts more like a spiral—a growing flower that rises from the earth and whose seeds scatter to become the next crop.”
Sharrett (b. Philadelphia, 1958) is the recipient of two fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts as well as notable residencies and grants from Smack Mellon, the Bronx Museum and the Millay Colony for the Arts Residency. Her work has been widely exhibited, including a solo exhibition at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York, and group exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York; the Bellevue Arts Museum in Bellevue, Washington; the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York; and Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. Her work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Arts and Design in New York; the United States Embassy in Valletta, Malta; the Hebrew Home for the Aged in New York; and J. P. Morgan Chase in New York. A full-color catalogue will accompany the exhibition.
Cameron: Songs for the Witch Woman
MOCA Pacific Design Center
8687 Melrose Avenue, West Hollywood, CA 90069
October 11, 2014–January 18, 2015
Cameron: Songs for the Witch Woman is the first survey of Cameron’s work since 1989 and explores the artist’s role as a seminal figure within Los Angeles’s midcentury counterculture, her unique melding of surrealism and mysticism, and her unwavering commitment to live her life as art. “Navigating between disciplines and traditions of poetry, cinema, visual arts, and spirituality; Cameron has opened many doors that continue to intrigue and inspire generations of artists,” while “her hallucinated vision … embodies an aspect of modernity that deeply doubts and defies cartesian logic at a moment in history when these values have shown their own limitations,” as stated by MOCA’s director, Philippe Vergne.
Born in Belle Plaine, Iowa, Cameron (Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel) (1922–1995) emerged as an artist, performer, poet, and occult practitioner in Los Angeles, uniquely bridging the city’s flourishing spiritual and art worlds at midcentury. She arrived in Los Angeles by way of the Second World War, where she drew maps and labored in a photographic unit for the United States Navy. A visionary painter and unparalleled draftsman best known today for her paintings and drawings of human and fantastical figures, she spend her last days in West Hollywood largely unrecognized. Cameron’s frenetic, delicate renderings of mythological figures reveal a singular attention to line and the idea of spiritual metamorphosis, evoking the surrealism and symbolism of the French poets. She is closely associated with Beat artists such as Wallace Berman, George Herms, and Dennis Hopper, the filmmakers Kenneth Anger and Curtis Harrington, and the occultist Aleister Crowley, while she was mentor to younger artists and poets such as David Meltzer and Aya (Tarlow). Cameron’s artwork appeared in the first issue of Berman’s celebrated journal Semina (1955–64) and has also been included in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Martin-Gropius Bau in Berlin, the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in 1989.
Comprised of nearly one hundred artworks and ephemeral artifacts, the exhibition includes pieces formerly thought to be lost, ranging from early paintings to drawings, sketchbooks, and poetry from her late years, as well as ephemera and correspondence with individuals such as her husband Jack Parsons (1914–1952), a rocket pioneer and a founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell. The exhibition brings to life the recently published book titled Songs for the Witch Woman that features a series of poems written by Parsons alongside illustrations drawn by Cameron that echo the intimate themes of their turbulent love story.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the Cameron Parsons Foundation is producing an eighty-eight-page catalogue with approximately seventy-five full-color illustrations.
Sylvie Blocher: S’inventeur autrement
Mudam Luxemburg
Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean 3, Park Dräi Eechelen L-1499 Luxembourg-Kirchberg
August 11, 2014–May 25, 2015
Since the early 1990s, the French artist Sylvie Blocher has built up a body of video work that takes the human as its material, in all its fragility, unpredictability, and yet full presence. She engages with a poetics of relation, emancipation, the questioning of identities, the writing of history, the permeability of the masculine/feminine border, and codes of representation in a world under control. Created in different geographic regions, her works are based on exchange: they often involve the participation of lay people, who are invited to present themselves in a completely new fashion before the camera, as the artist “shares her authority with her models” to create what she calls Living Pictures.
This solo exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg revolves around an ambitious project titled Dreams Have a Language, which combines a participative work, a video installation, and the production of a movie. As envisioned by the artist, the show was meant to be “the story of an event at a museum in Luxembourg in which the visitors will not be content to look politely at the works, but decide impulsively to experience leaving the world for a few minutes, in a journey filmed and broadcast, a story of fragmented, floating bodies. Then a movie, the start of another story.”
During the first weeks of the exhibition, the museum’s Grand Hall became a fully active film studio that centered on the operation of a flying machine twelve meters tall. Through the placement of an ad in various media, Blocher invited the public to visit the museum, to leave the ground for a few minutes, and to “rethink the world.” “Shooting conditions: allow one hour and present yourself at Mudam with an idea to change the world. It might be poetic, political, aesthetic, emotional, revolutionary, scientific, architectural, educational, financial, culinary, sonic, etc.” Forming the content for a video installation at the center of the exhibition, the pictures of the suspended bodies will be the starting point for a movie created with the Luxembourg director Donato Rotunno, to be released in spring 2015. By combining a documentary approach with fictional writing, the movie will offer “an assemblage of words, gestures and moments that will open up an imaginary universe, an expectancy, a suspense.”
A survey of the artist’s work is also presented in two of the museum’s galleries, where video installations and drawings sample key themes of Blocher’s work: the sharing of responsibility, the question of politics, identity, dreams, and utopia. By using music to give new life to important speeches and manifestos made in contemporary history (by Angela Davis, Édouard Glissant, and Barack Obama, among others), the five videos that form the series Speeches (2009–12), which are part of the Mudam Collection, engage with the political dimension of the imagination, individual and collective. Other works, such as the diptych Change the Scenario (Conversation with Bruce Nauman) (2013) and the three videos recently created by Blocher in Texas, tackle historic and racial aspects in the construction of the individual. Placed at the entrance to each gallery, a series of drawings that the artist has made every day for a year, based on the front page of the newspaper Libération, emphasizes the passages between the personal and the political initiated by her practice.
Affiliated Society News for January 2015
posted by CAA — Jan 09, 2015
American Society of Appraisers
The American Society of Appraisers (ASA) will host the upcoming 2015 Personal Property Conference, titled “Issues in Determining the Authenticity in Visual Art and Objects, the Catalogue Raisonné, Art Scholarship, and Value in the Marketplace.” The conference will be held at the prestigious Yale Club in New York from March 25 to 27, 2015. World renown and highly regarded experts in art law, art, and antiques will gather together for discussion on relevant and timely issues facing art-industry professionals, collectors, museum curators, dealers, auctioneers, insurance underwriters, estate attorneys, and appraisers. Individuals practicing in any of these areas of fine art and decorative arts will not want to miss this important gathering of respected scholars and authorities. Topics of discussion include connoisseurship, authentication, conservation, research, provenance, and value in the markets. In addition, a representative from the Internal Revenue Service will cover issues of compliance regarding appraisals for estates and charitable contributions, and an FBI agent will discuss fraud and art crime as they affect the global marketplace. For registration and more information, please visit www.appraisers.org or call 800-272-8258.
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries
The Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) has appointed Christopher Bedford, director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, to be the keynote speaker for the organization’s next annual conference, taking place April 24–26, 2015, in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2009, the Rose became infamous for Brandeis’ attempt to sell significant objects from its collection. Bedford was hired in 2012 to turn this situation around and has been building staff and acquiring new works. He also recently commissioned a work by Chris Burden that highlights the university’s renewed commitment to the museum and its collection.
For a limited time, AAMG is offering free student memberships. Student membership is an important way to explore the field while preparing informed professionals. In addition, student membership provides access to scholarship funds to help attend educational programs such as the AAMG’s annual conference, which offers a résumé workshop and the opportunity to connect first-hand with over two hundred attendees.
Whether you are a student, new to the field, or a seasoned professional, AAMG’s listserv connects more than four thousand museum professionals and those in related fields, from across the country and the world, who can provide assistance and mentoring on a wide range of issues facing museums today.
Historians of Islamic Art Association
The Historian of Islamic Art Association (HIAA) held its fourth biennial symposium at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Ontario, from October 16 to 18, 2014. The HIAA conference is the biennial forum for the presentation and discussion of papers on various aspects of Islamic art history, and is open to all, regardless of nationality or academic affiliation. The overarching theme of the symposium was “Forms of Knowledge and Cultures of Learning in Islamic Art.”
International Association of Art Critics
The International Association of Art Critics (AICA-USA) welcomed the return of Judith Stein to its board in fall 2014. The organization will hold its session at the CAA Annual Conference in New York on Wednesday, February 11, 2015, 12:30–2:00 PM in the Beekman Parlor, 2nd Floor, New York Hilton Midtown, 1335 Avenue of the Americas. The title of the session is “How Dare We Criticize: Contemporary Art Critics on the State of Their Art.”
International Association of Word and Image Studies
Over 150 scholars met this summer for the tenth international conference of the International Association of Word and Image Studies (IAWIS/AIERTI), held August 11–15, 2014, in in Dundee, New Zealand. Focusing on the theme of “Riddles of Form: Exploration and Discovery in Word and Image,” the conference was hosted by the Scottish Word and Image Group at the University of Dundee. Over fifty panels were presented around thirty-two themed sessions, ranging from “Exploring Neuroscience” and “Science in the Twentieth-Century Avant Gardes” to “Charting Interior Spaces” and “Spirals in Nature and Art.” Anchoring the themes in locality, influential ideas from two of Dundee’s renowned visual thinkers and polymaths, D’Arcy Thompson and Patrick Geddes, served as springboards into global debates. Keynotes addressed the themes from complementary perspectives: in “Real Unicorns and Other Strange Tales,” Martin Kemp (emeritus professor, University of Oxford) explored the topic of truth claims in evolving forms of mediated knowledge; while in “Burnsiana,” professor of photography Calum Colvin Duncan (of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee) raised fundamental questions about processes of perceiving and discovering though his own multimedia artworks about Scotland’s national bard. A highlight was the excursion to Little Sparta, retreat of the “avant-gardener” and word/image artist Ian Hamilton Finlay.
International Center of Medieval Art
The International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA) is pleased to announce that it was recently awarded a renewal of its grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation—$10,000 a year for the next three years—to support travel costs for members participating in conference sessions sponsored by ICMA. ICMA regularly sponsors sessions at such major conferences as the CAA Annual Conference and the ICMA at Western Michigan University, as well as at a number of smaller conferences here and abroad. For the next three years, ICMA members who deliver papers in these sponsored sessions will be eligible for funding that can be used to defer the costs of travel and lodging at these conferences. To learn more about ICMA funding opportunities for scholars working in the field of medieval art or to become a member, please visit www.medievalart.org. For information about proposing an ICMA-sponsored session, please contact Janis Elliott.
International Sculpture Center
Each year the International Sculpture Center (ISC) presents an award competition to its member colleges and universities as a means of supporting, encouraging, and recognizing the work of young sculptors and their supporting schools’ faculty and art program. The Student Award winners participate in an exhibition at Grounds for Sculpture, as well as in a traveling exhibition hosted by arts organizations across the country. Winners’ work is also featured in Sculpture magazine. Each winner receives a one-year ISC membership; all winners are eligible to apply for a fully sponsored residency to study in Switzerland. To nominate a student for this competition, a nominee’s university must first be an ISC university-level member. University membership costs $200 for universities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico or $220 for international universities; this level includes a number of benefits. Interested students should talk to their professors about getting involved. To find out more about the program, please visit http://www.sculpture.org/StudentAwards/2015 or email studentawards@sculpture.org. Deadlines: Nominations open: January 1, 2015; university membership registration: March 16, 2015; online student nomination form: March 23, 2015; online student submission form: April 13, 2015.
ISC seeks proposals for panels for the twenty-fifth “International Sculpture Conference: New Frontiers in Sculpture in Central Arizona.” Taking place in fall 2015, the conference will feature keynote speakers, panels, and breakout sessions. The conference will explore: Creative Placemaking; Multi-Disciplinary Artist Led Investigations; Desert as Site: New Earthworks; and other topics in contemporary sculpture. The panel proposal submission deadline is March 1, 2015. All accepted submissions will be notified in May 2015. To learn more about topics, guidelines, and deadlines and to submit a proposal, please visit www.sculpture.org/az2015.
Italian Art Society
The Italian Art Society (IAS) will sponsor a session, entitled “Di politica: Intersections of Italian Art and Politics since WWII” and organized by Christopher Bennett and Elizabeth Mangini, at the upcoming CAA Annual Conference in New York on Wednesday, February 11, 2015, 12:30–2:00 PM. Current and prospective members are invited to attend the IAS business breakfast meeting on Thursday, February 11, at 7:30–9:00 AM, Madison Suite, 2nd Floor, New York Hilton Midtown. IAS will cosponsor two related study days entitled “Untying the Knot: The State of Postwar Italian Art History Today” at the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York, February 9–10, 2015. Additionally, the IAS will sponsor five sessions at the meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Berlin, Germany, in March 2015.
IAS seeks member applicants for its annual research and publication grant (deadline: January 10, 2015) and for the sixth annual 2015 IAS/Kress Lecture by an established scholar on a Neapolitan topic in Naples, Italy, on May 20, 2015 (deadline: January 4, 2015). IAS welcomes all interested in Italian art to join the society.
National Council of Arts Administrators
The National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA) convened its forty-second annual meeting on September 24–26, 2014, in Nashville, Tennessee. The organization owes a debt of gratitude to Mel Ziegler of Vanderbilt University for organizing a provocative and compelling conference. Speakers included: Pablo Helguera, an artist and the director of the Museum of Modern Art’s Education Department; Steven Tepper, a sociologist and dean of the Herberger Institute at Arizona State University; and Ruby Lerner, executive director of Creative Capital.
Three new board members were elected: Lynne Allen, Boston University; Elissa Armstrong, Virginia Commonwealth University; and Cathy Pagani, University of Alabama. They join these returning directors: Leslie Belavance, Alfred University (secretary); Tom Berding, Michigan State University; Steve Bliss, Savannah College of Art and Design; Cora Lynn Deibler, University of Connecticut, Storrs; Andrea Eis, Oakland University (treasurer); Nan Goggin, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Amy Hauft, University of Texas at Austin (president); Jim Hopfensperger, Western Michigan University (past president); Lydia Thompson, Texas Tech University; and Mel Ziegler, Vanderbilt University.
Activities at the 2015 CAA Annual Conference in New York include the annual NCAA reception (Thursday, February 12, 5:00–8:00 PM) and an NCAA–CAA affiliate session, “Yes Is a World: Creativity in an Expanding Field,” which will be a fast-paced series of five-minute presentations (Thursday, February 12, 12:30–2:00 PM). NCAA enthusiastically welcomes new members, current members, and all interested parties.
Pacific Arts Association
The Pacific Arts Association (PAA) will hold a session at the 2015 CAA Annual Conference in New York called “Early Missionary Activity on Erromango and Its Impact on Local Material Culture.” Four panelists will examine the interplay between imposed change and local innovation in objects past and present.
An event titled “Trading Traditions: The Role of Art in the Pacific’s Traditional Trading Networks” will be organized by PAA (Pacific) in Tonga on September 28, 2015. For further information, please contact Karen Stevenson, vice president of PAA (Pacific).
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) made a strong showing at the annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies from November 20 to 23, 2014, in San Antonio, Texas. Members participated in numerous panels ranging from eighteenth-century prints to twentieth-century art and architecture, as well as film and contemporary art, in Eastern Europe and Russia.
At CAA’s Annual Conference in February, SHERA will sponsor two sessions: “Infiltrating the Pedagogical Canon,” chaired by Marie Gasper-Hulvat; and a double session led by Galina Mardilovich and Maria Taroutina, titled “Reconsidering Art and Politics: Toward New Narratives of Russian and Eastern European Art.”
In January 2015, Natasha Kurchanova became president of SHERA, as Margaret Samu’s term ended. Elections are planned for early January for the next vice president/president elect.
SHERA is delighted to welcome ARTINRUSSIA as a new institutional member. A division of the School of Russian and Asian Studies, ARTINRUSSIA creates study abroad programs, organizes faculty-led tours, and offers travel-assistance services. The organization’s website serves as a platform for publishing student writing about art in Russia and Eurasia.
Society for Photographic Education
Registration is open for the fifty-second national conference of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE), titled “Atmospheres: Climate, Equity, and Community in Photography” and taking place March 12–15, 2015, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Connect with 1,600 artists, educators, and photographers from around the world for programming that will fuel your creativity—four days of presentations, industry seminars, and critiques to engage you! Explore an exhibits fair featuring the latest equipment, processes, publications, and photography/media schools. Participate in one-on-one portfolio critiques and informal portfolio sharing and take advantage of student volunteer opportunities to receive a full rebate on admission. Other highlights include a print raffle, a silent auction, mentoring sessions, film screenings, exhibitions, receptions, a dance party, and more. The guest speakers are Rebecca Solnit, Chris Jordan, and Hank Willis Thomas. Preview the conference schedule and register at www.spenational.org/conference. Preregistration ends on February 20, 2015.
Southeastern College Art Conference
The seventieth annual meeting of the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) was held October 8–11, 2014, in Sarasota, Florida, and hosted by the Ringling College of Art and Design. Jeff Schwartz served as conference director. Five hundred thirty people attended 122 sessions and workshops. Brandon Oldenburg, a Ringling alumnus, an Academy Award winner, and the founder of Moonbot Studios, delivered the keynote lecture.
Notable awards presented:
- $5000 Artist’s Fellowship: Derek Larson, Georgia Southern University
- $5000 William R. Levin Award for Research in the History of Art: Michelle Moseley-Christian, Virginia Tech
- Achievement in Graphic Design: Doug Barrett, University of Alabama, Birmingham
- Outstanding Exhibition and Catalogue of Contemporary Materials: Ron Meyers: A Potter’s Menagerie (Stephen Driver)
- Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication: The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Folk Art vol. 23 (Carol Crown, University of Memphis)
- Excellence in Teaching: Jeff Schwartz, Ringling College of Art and Design
- Certificates of Merit: Jane Hetherington Brown, University of Arkansas, Little Rock; Carol Mattusch, George Mason University; and Cheryl Goldsleger, University of Georgia
- Awards of Distinction: Peter Scott Brown, University of North Florida; and Jenny Hager, University of North Florida
- Annual Juried Exhibition: juror’s choice: Rob Tarbell, New College; honorable mention: Hye Young Kim, Winston-Salem State University; Margy Rich, State College of Florida; and Jennifer Brickey, Pellissippi State Community College
Visual Resources Association
The Visual Resources Association is pleased to present its thirty-third annual conference, to be held March 11–14, 2015, in Denver, Colorado. Attendees will converge in Colorado to exchange information about the latest developments in image and media management within the educational, cultural heritage, and commercial environments. The top-notch conference program includes representation from a broad range of perspectives, with sessions and workshops addressing digital humanities, visual literacy, mapping and geospatial projects, image rights and reproductions, usability testing, new technologies, digital asset management, crowdsourcing, cataloging, embedded metadata, sharing collections, professional advancement, archives, research data management, and visualization. The plenary speakers will frame the conference with inspiring talks on image and media management in two unique contexts. The opening speaker, Aaron Straup Cope, head of engineering at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Museum and also an artist, will discuss how the New Cooper Hewitt Experience engages visitors with interactive and immersive creative technologies. The closing speaker, Emily Gore, director for content for the Digital Public Library of America, will discuss the strategic vision for DPLA content and oversight of the DPLA Hubs program. Online registration is available through February 20, 2015 (with discounted registration offered until February 6). Onsite registration will be available in Denver.
Women’s Caucus for Art
The Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) has announced three recipients of the 2015 WCA Lifetime Achievement Awards: Sue Coe, Kiki Smith, and Martha Wilson. The recipient for the 2015 President’s Art and Activism Award is Petra Kuppers. The WCA Lifetime Achievement Awards were first presented in 1979 in President Jimmy Carter’s Oval Office to Isabel Bishop, Selma Burke, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, and Georgia O’Keeffe. The awards were the first awards recognizing the contribution of women to the arts and their profound effect on society.
Join WCA for the awards celebration on Thursday, February 12, 2015, in New York. The event will be held at the New York Institute of Technology Auditorium at 1871 Broadway. The evening will kickoff with a ticketed cocktail reception from 5:30 to 7:00 PM. The reception will include food, open bar, and the opportunity to congratulate the awardees. The awards ceremony (free and open to the public) will take place from 7:30 to 9:00 PM; coffee and desserts will follow from 9:00 to 10:00 PM. The celebration is held during the annual WCA and CAA conferences. For more information on the event or to purchase tickets (which includes a special rate for CAA members) please visit www.nationalwca.org.
Janet Kaplan: In Memoriam
posted by CAA — Dec 19, 2014
The following obituary for Janet Kaplan was published by the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on December 15, 2014. CAA will follow up with its own text in the new year.
It is with deepest sorrow that we share with you the news that on Friday, December 12, Art History Faculty Professor and Curatorial Studies Director, Dr. Janet Kaplan passed away.
We will honor Professor Kaplan by hosting a remembrance to honor her here at Moore in the spring semester at a date to be determined. Dr. Kaplan was beloved and respected by many artists and scholars in the Philadelphia community and beyond. She will be deeply missed by the students and those who teach and work at Moore.
Dr. Kaplan had a long and fruitful career at Moore College of Art & Design. She began teaching at Moore in 1980 as an Assistant Professor, promoted to Associate Professor in 1987 and to full Professor in 1993. Dr. Kaplan received tenure in 1987 and served as the Chair of Liberal Arts from 1989 to 2003. Professor Kaplan served as the Executive Editor of the Art Journal for the College Art Association in New York City from 1995 to 2002. The Art Journal was the winner of the Utne Award for Independent Magazine Publishing in 2002. Dr. Kaplan was instrumental in the planning and development for the Curatorial Studies major, working in collaboration with Dr. Maureen Pelta, Chair of the Liberal Arts department, the Liberal Arts faculty and Academic Dean to develop curriculum for the nation’s first undergraduate Curatorial Studies program that successfully launched in fall 2006.
Throughout her teaching career Dr. Kaplan also taught at NYU, Institute of Fine Arts as a Visiting Professor and Graduate Colloquium; Vermont College as a graduate faculty in the MFA in Visual Arts program; and at the University of New Hampshire. She served as a moderator, panelist and speaker at regional, national and international conferences and symposia on a wide range of topics related to art criticism, artist responses to social issues, women and surrealism, media spectacle and the politics of representation. She was a leader in generating dialogue about women in the arts, organizing symposia including a 2000 symposium at The National Museum of Women in the Arts and 3 Curatorial Conversations here at Moore including “Curating and Activism: An International Panel and Conversation” in 2009. These Curatorial Conversations were supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and through the support from Frances and Bayard Storey. Dr. Kaplan published widely on modern and contemporary art. Her essays and interviews have been published in numerous national and international art journals. She frequently wrote book reviews for art journals including one on Whitney Chadwick’s book on Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. She is the author of Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys, an important internationally known scholarly work, published in multiple languages.
In 2001, Dr. Kaplan received a Fellowship in Arts Criticism from the Pennsylvania Council for Humanities and in 2003 she received a Special Opportunities Stipend from the Pennsylvania Council for Humanities. Professor Kaplan served on the advisory board, consultant and/or review panelist for numerous organizations and institutions including the School of Art at Carnegie-Mellon University; the Arts Advisory Board of the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority; the Rosenbach Museum and Library; NEA grants panel in 2001 for Visual Arts Creativity and Organizational Capacity; review panelist for the Philadelphia Cultural Fund in 1998; the Advisory Board for the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, 1997–99; and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum – Varian Fry Project. In 2012, she co-curated an exhibition fo the work of artist Ashley Hune in Sinop, Turkey.
Dr. Kaplan gave back to the Moore community through her extensive service to the College and to the community. In addition to the institutions and organizations where she served in an ongoing capacity, she frequently participated in citywide and College organized events. She moderated panels organized by The Galleries at Moore in conjunction with the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program and served as a panelist at the Free Library of Philadelphia for one film/one book events. Recently, Dr. Kaplan had an essay published in 70 x 7 The Meal, act XXXIV, Lucy + Jorge Orta, City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, 2013. Moore College of Art & Design is proud to have had the honor of Dr. Kaplan’s service, teaching and scholarship; she will be missed by her colleagues, her students and the staff at Moore.