CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Oct 12, 2016
Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Cruelty and Kindness in Academia
Academics don’t have a reputation for being kind. To put it gently, higher education values intellect over affect. Kindness tends to be viewed as the opposite of criticism. Scholars, after all, are trained in critique, and not necessarily the constructive kind. (Read more from Vitae.)
Why New-Media Art Still Hasn’t Fully Gone Mainstream
Artists working in “new” media have never been so widely admired—a generation of artists in their twenties and thirties, including Amalia Ulman, Neil Beloufa, Ian Cheng, Jon Rafman, and Cécile B. Evans, are now shown internationally. Yet a quarter of a century after the emergence of digital art, it continues to raise challenges for museums, galleries, and collectors. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
The Questions We Should Be Asking Our Students
How much do you know about how your students study? I’ve been asking the question a lot lately, and most of the answers I’ve heard aren’t all that impressive. They’re more about how the faculty member thinks students study, how they should study, or how they aren’t studying. (Read more from Faculty Focus.)
What It Takes to Recover a Stolen Work of Art
A recent highly publicized announcement that two stolen van Gogh paintings had been recovered after fourteen years was a welcome surprise. How do thieves make off with a painting? What should a victim do after realizing they’ve been robbed? Why are only a tiny percentage of works recovered? (Read more from Artsy.)
Alizarin Crimson: Now You See It…
If a single color embodies the dividing line between pigments considered suitable for permanent works of art and those that are suspect and poor in lightfastness, Alizarin Crimson (PR 83) would be it. And yet the color is still used by many artists who are drawn to it in spite of its many problems. (Read more from Just Paint.)
Old Media, New Media, Data Media: Evolving Publishing Paradigms
Not so long ago we routinely talked of old vs. new media. The old was characterized by investment in and creation of content, which gave rise to a common set of properties—definitive and authoritative journalism and scientific reports, the fixed text, and the pursuit of the finest authors and top creative talent. New media, on the other hand, was digital and had its own set of properties. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
The Rise of Living-Room Galleries in London
Young artists and curators throughout London are organizing public exhibitions in their own homes. Many are recent graduates who cannot afford the hefty cost of renting a temporary space. “There’s a pressing need for young artists to find inexpensive places to show art,” said Elena Colman. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
What’s behind Art’s Uneasy Celebrity Courtship?
The art world collectively raised its eyebrows when Sotheby’s Hong Kong announced a collaborative curated auction with Choi Seung-hyun, the 28-year-old Korean boy-band star known as T.O.P. Yet the art world’s newly discovered courtship of celebrity is deeper than it seems, which is why it’s making so many people uneasy. (Read more from Artnet News.)
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — Oct 07, 2016
Gina McDaniel Tarver reviews the exhibition and catalogue Moderno: Design for Living in Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela, 1940–1978. The “rich multivocal production” occasionally fails “to tackle some of the complex issues it raises,” but “provides valuable insights into modern impulses and contradictions that manifested in compelling ways in Brazilian, Mexican, and Venezuelan design.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Anne Collins Goodyear examines the Getty Foundation’s Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI), which led to the creation of several digital catalogues by eight museums. Discussing “the implications of the project as a whole,” Goodyear finds the “undertaking represents but a first step,” yet “lays a significant foundation for the future of scholarship in the museum, and beyond.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Patricia Emerson discusses Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns, an exhibition catalogue examining the history of metalpoint in Europe and the United States over the course of six centuries. By “studying a medium across stylistic boundaries,” the book “helps us to recognize the versatility of a medium that might have been thought, repeatedly, to be obsolete.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Caa.reviews publishes over 150 reviews each year. Founded in 1998, the site publishes timely scholarly and critical reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by the College Art Association. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate. Read more reviews at caa.reviews.
RAAMP—A Digital Resource for Academic Museum Professionals
posted by CAA — Oct 06, 2016
Guy Laramée, The Grand Library, 2004. Altered book, pigment, metal stand, 96 x 21 x 44 inches. Courtesy of the artist and JHB Gallery. Courtesy of University of Richmond Museums, Virginia. Photo: Gordon Schmidt/University of Richmond Communications.RAAMP (Resources for Academic Art Museum Professionals) is an online repository and forum that collects, stores, and shares resources to promote scholarship, advocacy, and discussion related to the role of academic art museums and their contribution to the educational mission of their parent institutions. RAAMP aims to strengthen the educational mission of academic museums and their parent organizations, and is oriented toward colleagues at academic art museums as well as university and other museum colleagues. RAAMP is a project of CAA made possible with a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The principal investigators for RAAMP are N. Elizabeth Schlatter, deputy director and curator of exhibitions at the University of Richmond Museums in Virginia and an officer of CAA’s Board of Directors; and Celka Straughn, Andrew W. Mellon Director of Academic Programs at the University of Kansas’s Spencer Museum of Art and a member of CAA’s Museum Committee. Schlatter says, “Art museums at colleges and universities today are creating some of the most dynamic connections to their academic communities. RAAMP creates a virtual place to share these accomplishments and gain inspiration from colleagues. Academic museums can use examples created by their peers and posted on RAAMP to enhance their offerings to faculty and students.”
Straughn adds, “They can find curricular materials utilizing museum resources to emphasize critical thinking skills or sample reports that demonstrate and quantify how a campus museum contributes to its parent institution. RAAMP is also a place to promote professional development activities, to find research related to academic museums, and to engage in discussions with fellow professionals.”
RAAMP was created in response to a 2013 CAA Annual Conference session organized by the organization’s Museum Committee. Attendees at the session expressed a need to have a digital space where they could easily share information and strategies for communicating how their academic museums contribute to the educational mission of their parent institutions.
RAAMP would not be possible without the help of its partner organizations: Association of American Museum Curators (AAMC), Association of American Museum Director (AAMD), and Association of Academic Museums & Galleries (AAMG), and representatives from the following US-based academic museum stakeholders:
The Art Galleries at Lafayette College, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, The Fowler Museum at the UCLA, Galleries of Contemporary Art at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs; The Hood Museum at Dartmouth University, Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami, Neuberger Museum at SUNY Purchase College, Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida, Schnitzer Museum at the University of Oregon, Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, Spelman College Museum of Art, Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, University of Iowa Museum of Art, University of Richmond Museums
Visit the RAAMP website to learn more.
Visit the RAAMP submissions page to submit materials.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Sep 28, 2016
Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Zero Correlation between Evaluations and Learning
A number of studies suggest that student evaluations of teaching are unreliable due to various biases against instructors. Yet conventional wisdom remains that students learn best from highly rated instructors. What if the data backing up conventional wisdom were off? A new study suggests that past analyses linking student achievement to high student teaching evaluation ratings are flawed. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
How Colleges Should Adapt in a Networked Age
Perhaps you’ve stood in the front of a classroom, looked out on the room full of students distractedly checking email or Facebook, and thought: they’re just not that into this. When you were younger, students were more respectful of the professor at the podium. The change may indicate a bigger shift in attitudes toward college and authority figures in general. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Autocorrect: The Politics of Museum Collection Re-Hangs
In the past year, three major New York museums—the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Brooklyn Museum—as well as a host of others around the world, have reinstalled their collection galleries in ways that privilege the alternative historical trajectory or new discovery over the transcendent masterpiece. (Read more from ARTnews.)
Back to Nature
By 2016 it is obvious that midcentury modernism is the defining design influence of the decade, with slim, sculpted furniture and thin, minimalist lines now ubiquitous. But a parallel trend has developed that revives a different aspect of the modernist aesthetic, just in time to address newer anxieties about our looming environmental apocalypse: the use of plants as design elements. (Read more from Curbed.)
How to Create Gender Equality in the Arts
Last week at the New School in New York, four female museum directors gazed up at an image of a woman sporting the all-caps slogan “The Future Is Female.” They were gathered to discuss the dearth of women in art-world leadership roles—and what it takes to get there. (Read more from Artsy.)
Self-Made Supermodels
In early 2015, near the end of her MFA in fine arts at Parsons, Leah Schrager set out on a project to create a celebrity by 2020—entirely via the internet—as an art practice. The celebrity she began to create was a hyper-sexy, cyber-savvy female rock star named Ona. (Read more from Rhizome.)
MoMA Will Make Thousands of Exhibition Images Available Online
After years of planning and digitizing, hundreds of thousands of documents and photographs in the Museum of Modern Art’s archives will now be available online. The digital-archive project will include almost 33,000 exhibition installation photographs, along with the pages of 800 out-of-print catalogs and more than 1,000 exhibition checklists, documents related to more than 3,500 exhibitions from 1929 through 1989. (Read more from the New York Times.)
How to Be a Better Networker
Your network starts locally with the people know from your lab or office, the floor you are on, your department, the journal club you attend, the lunchroom, and the like. Then, what do you do outside your training? Do you play a sport in a student league? Are you involved in a religious organization? Do you have kids and meet other parents through their care or activities? (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
2017 Annual Conference Registration is Now Open!
posted by CAA — Sep 23, 2016
 Artwork by Julia Oldham, The Loneliest Place, 2015. Art Journal Spring 2016. Our very busy September at CAA rolls on. Earlier this month we launched CAA Connect, our new digital discussion and resource library platform. This week, we open registration for the 2017 Annual Conference in New York, February 15–18, 2017 at the New York Hilton Midtown. With the opening of registration we also launch myCAA, a new campaign aimed at making CAA the best organization for its members. MyCAA is designed to encourage participation in and ownership of CAA. You will hear more about myCAA in the coming months, but contributing to the myCAA discussion community on CAA Connect is a great start! There is also an Annual Conference discussion community that will help us build a better conference with your feedback. For the 2017 Annual Conference we kept registration rates the same as the 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. and we managed to secure the lowest hotel rates for New York City since 2011. This is all part of our effort to create an Annual Conference our members will return to year after year. Single session tickets are also now at the lowest rate since 2001. Early and online registration is available through December 19, 2016.
The 2017 Annual Conference will have more sessions than ever, an astounding 270-plus, due to the changes we made to the conference structure last year. We are thrilled to welcome two leading scholars as our Convocation Speaker and our Distinguished Scholar for 2017. Convocation Keynote Speaker Mary Miller, Sterling Professor of History of Art, and recently appointed the senior director of the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage at Yale University Distinguished Scholar Kaja Silverman, Katherine Stein Sachs CW’69 and Keith L. Sachs W’67 Professor of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania Also new for the 2017 Annual Conference:
For more information on travel discounts, car rentals, and booking your hotel room, visit the conference website, email CAA Member Services at membership@collegeart.org, or call 212-691-1051, ext. 1. We look forward to seeing you in New York! |
Affiliated Society News for September 2016
posted by CAA — Sep 15, 2016
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries
You’ve probably heard the rumors, but now it’s official: the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) will hold its annual conference in Eugene, Oregon, June 22–26, 2017. “Why Museums Matter: The Teaching Museum Today” will be hosted by the University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. The program will begin at 5:30 PM on Thursday, June 22, and offer tracks for: professional development (emerging and seasoned professionals); governance, best practices, and administration; curricular connections and new teaching and training models; relevance, diversity, and engagement; renovations and new facilities; and more. AAMG will post a call for proposals in early September, along with registration and hotel information.
American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works
The Weissman Preservation Center at Harvard Library and the Foundation for the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (FAIC) will present a multidisciplinary, two-day symposium called “Salted Paper Prints: Process and Purpose.” The program will focus on the preservation, characterization, use, and interpretation of the salt print process, now over 175 years old. Scholarly presentations will include the technical history of the salt print process (both positive and negative images), historical applications of the process for copying and disseminating information, and innovative materials analysis. While many salt prints have survived as beautifully preserved images with rich tonal ranges, they can also be prone to fading and color shifts. New conservation research has assisted our understanding of these fragile items, and renewed interest in the historical and artistic aspects of salt prints has paralleled this preservation research.
Papers are currently being accepted to present at the symposium. Applicants are encouraged to submit abstracts or drafts of three hundred words or less, along with a brief bio or CV. The symposium will include individual presentations of no more than twenty minutes in length and panel discussions on an applicable topic—submissions for both formats are welcome. Preference will be given to recent collaborative research that uses scientific and art-historical evidence to shed light on the preservation of salt prints, their technical evolution and identification, and the cultural impact of this seminal photographic process. Visit the call for papers page on the AIC website for more details. Abstracts must be submitted by December 16, 2016. The symposium will take place September 14–15, 2017, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Association of Historians of American Art
The Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA) invites you to attend its fourth biennial symposium, to be held October 6–8, 2016, in Fort Worth, Texas. Online registration is now open. To learn more about the schedule, obtain hotel information, and register, visit www.ahaaonline.org/?page=2016Symposium. The registration fee is $40, and the event is only open to current AHAA members. If you are not yet a member, please consider joining this scholarly community. Membership rates start at $35.
AHAA is also proud to announce a third issue of its online journal, Panorama, which includes a roundtable devoted to pedagogical approaches (featuring the work of Jules Prown), a special section on “Art and Invention,” an article on Kara Walker, new Research Notes, book and exhibition reviews, and responses to the question “Is American art history conservative?” AHAA is grateful for the efforts of Panorama staff, editors, and contributors, and for the support of our readers. As always, the association invites your input and contributions.
AHAA looks forward to gathering in New York for the 2017 CAA Annual Conference. The annual business meeting will take place noon–1:30 PM on Friday, February 17. The AHAA-sponsored scholarly session will be “The Gustatory Turn in American Art” (date/time TBA).
In the coming year, several board terms will expire. AHAA wishes to thank board members who have served the organization and to welcome nominations and self-nominations for the open positions, each with three-year terms. These include three appointed positions (membership coordinator, secretary, and web coordinator) and two elected positions (treasurer and cochair). The cochair alternates annually between academic and museum professionals; this year we invite candidates from the academy. Please contact AHAA at info@ahaaonline.org or chair@ahaaonline.org if you are interested in the position or wish to nominate a colleague.
Foundation in Art: Theory and Education
Celebrating its fiftieth year of first principles educational leadership, the KCAI’s Foundation Department will host FATE’s sixteenth biennial conference, “To the Core and Beyond,” to take place April 5–8, 2017, in Kansas City, Missouri. Registration for the conference is now open. Leading voices in fundamental art and design instruction will gather at the InterContinental Kansas City at the Plaza. Early-bird registration is open until September 30, 2016. Conference registration includes breakfast and lunch (April 6–8). For conference registration and more information, please visit http://www.foundations-art.org/conferences.
FATE has improved Silver and Gold Institutional Sponsorship levels this year and now offers a new biennial Retiree Faculty Individual Membership! See http://www.foundations-art.org/membership for more information. Also coming up is the FATE regional conference, “Technology Integration into Design Foundations Tech Swap,” which meets on Saturday, November 5, 2016, 10:00 AM–3:00 PM at the University of North Texas. The $20 cost includes coffee, muffins, and lunch (vegetarian option available). For more details, send an email to the event’s coordinator, Deanna Ooley, or visit http://www.foundations-art.org/regional.
FATE’s affiliated-society session at CAA’s 2017 Annual Conference, titled “Using the F-Word for Good, Not Evil: Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better,” meets on Thursday, February 16, 10:30 AM–noon in the Madison Suite, Second Floor, New York Hilton Midtown. How do we, as teachers, ignite courage and curiosity in students to explore and jump past their fears of failing? Discoveries occur when we allow tinkering, investigation, and getting things “wrong”—colossal failures hold surprising connections, connotations, and fruitful risks. That’s where the good stuff lives. “Don’t give up!” (see Miranda July). “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better” (see Samuel Beckett). This FATE session will proactively frame failure (pep talks), continue inquiries (experiments), and describe what to do when things go off the rails (glean the good). Speakers will present discussions starters, brainstorming, projects, ways of critiquing, pedagogy, and practice.
Italian Art Society
Last month the Italian Art Society sponsored two sessions at the annual meeting of the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (SCSC) in Bruges, Belgium. “Co-petition: Testing the Boundaries of Cooperation and Competition” was organized by Alexis Culotta (American Academy of Art, Chicago), and “The Holy Republic of Venice,” was organized by Allison Sherman (Queen’s University) and Eveline Baseggio Omiccioli (Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York). Along with the Historians of Netherlandish Art and the Flemish Research Centre for the Arts in the Burgundian Netherlands, IAS sponsored a special event at the Groeningemuseum in Bruges. Anne Van Oosterwijk, assistant curator of old master paintings at the museum, lectured on sixteenth-century painters’ workshops and practices in Bruges; the lecture was followed by a gala reception.
IAS has announced the upcoming deadlines for two travel awards: the IAS Conference Travel Grant for Modern Topics (deadline: October 1, 2016) provides a minimum of $500 to subsidize transoceanic travel to present in an IAS-sponsored session on the art or architecture of Italy from the early nineteenth century to the present. The deadline for the IAS Travel Grant for Graduate Students and Emerging Scholars, which funds travel to any conference at which IAS has a presence, is November 1, 2016.
IAS is pleased to announce that Karen Lloyd (Stony Brook University) has joined the executive board as acting vice president for program coordination.
Society of Architectural Historians
An SAH Study Day “Louis Kahn in San Diego and La Jolla,” organized by the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), will take place on November 4, 2016. William Whitaker, curator and collections manager of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, and Jochen Eisenbrand, chief curator of the Vitra Design Museum, will lead a special preview tour of their exhibition Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture at the San Diego Museum of Art, the first retrospective of Louis Kahn’s work in two decades. After lunch, participants will get a behind-the-scenes tour of Kahn’s renowned Salk Institute for Biological Studies with Whitaker, Tim Ball, director of facilities at the Salk Institute, and Claire Grezemkovsky, associate director of foundation relations. Sara Lardinois of the Getty Conservation Institute will be on hand to discuss Kahn’s designs of the teak window walls, which are currently under conservation by the Getty. A Study Program Fellowship will be available for a graduate student or emerging professional to participate in this Study Day. Registration opens on September 13.
SAH will present its 2016 Awards for Architectural Excellence at its seventh annual awards gala on Friday, November 4, 2016, at the Racquet Club of Chicago. Honorees include the philanthropist Richard H. Driehaus (for architectural stewardship); Sarah Herda, director of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and coartistic director of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (for public engagement with the built environment); and Peter Landon, founder and principal of Landon Bone Baker Architects (for design, planning, and sustainability). The awards represent a unique gathering of architectural practice and academic study, honoring the contributions of individual projects to the built environment. Gala proceeds benefit the society’s educational mission and the ongoing restoration of SAH’s headquarters, the Landmark Charnley-Persky House. Tickets are available at sah.org/gala.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Sep 14, 2016
Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
The Most Relevant Art Today Is Taking Place outside the Art World
The central claim in Michael J. Lewis’s essay on the demise of art-as-culture is that “while the fine arts can survive a hostile or ignorant public, or even a fanatically prudish one, they cannot long survive an indifferent one.” The argument, however, ignores both the artists who have been historically marginalized from galleries and museums and the artists who are taking their practices outside those places. (Read more from Artsy.)
Art Demystified: The Gallery Breakdown
The art gallery remains one of the most important pillars of the art world today. It is where artists are first introduced and their careers are launched, and where the discourse is started. But what goes on behind the heavy doors of these often secretive empires? And what are the roles of those who work there? (Read more from Artnet News.)
President Obama’s Arts Focus Was National, Not Local
It should come as no surprise that where the arts were concerned, the Obamas didn’t just ignore the Pennsylvania Avenue playbook—they wrote their own script. They established dynamic programs and raised considerable money for arts initiatives. They also sometimes drifted away from the traditions of the past, which could leave locals frustrated and impatient. (Read more from the Chicago Tribune.)
Balancing the Books at Yale University Press in London
A letter signed by over 290 academics, curators, and writers expressed a “sense of shock at the restructuring of Yale University Press in London, particularly as it affects the renowned art books department.” Having learned that two commissioning editors were to be made redundant, the signatories asked for reassurance about Yale’s commitment to scholarly art publishing and for the rationale for the changes. (Read more from Apollo.)
Publish or Be Damned
The London office of Yale University Press has been a leading publisher of art history in the English language. When we heard of a new book planned by a leading scholar in the field, we expected to learn that Yale had pledged to publish it. When a bright graduate finished his or her dissertation, we hoped that Yale would publish it. (Read more from the Burlington Magazine.)
How Much Does Publishing Cost?
Whenever someone talks about the cost of publishing, the conversation seems to take place in a vacuum. Step inside a publishing company and ask this question: Where is the greatest amount of energy expended? The answer is in finding the best authors. Publishing, in other words, is about the relentless pursuit of the best content for a particular program. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
Why the Hammer Museum’s New Free Digital Archives Are a Game Changer
Museum archives are historically places that draw only the most dedicated researchers to poke through boxes of files, trays of objects, and piles of ephemera generated by exhibitions. But the Hammer Museum is aiming to change the way museum archives are accessed and organized. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)
Valuing Intellectual Property in an AIA World
Whether one celebrates or decries the fifth anniversary of the America Invents Act, this much is clear: the law has had a dramatic impact on the value of US patents and, in turn, the broader US economy. A cloud of uncertainty hanging over patents has depressed their value and may have broader ramifications that are yet to be seen. (Read more from IP Watchdog.)
New and Forthcoming in CAA’s Journals
posted by CAA — Sep 12, 2016
caa.reviews
Boris Charmatz’s If Tate Modern Was Musée de la Danse? (May 15–16, 2015) is the focus of a new multimedia review on the Scalar platform, If caa.reviews were performance.reviews?. Organized by Juliet Bellow, the project includes an introduction by Bellow, and three reviews of the performances at the Tate Modern by Arabella Stanger, Nicole Zee, and Tamara Tomic-Vajagic. The review presents the complexities of Charmatz’s transformation of the Tate Modern into a museum of dance for two days and features an interactive map showing where the performances occurred in the Tate Modern, in addition to videos and still images. Charmatz’s project challenges conceptions of museums as institutional spaces and incorporates audience participation and “unauthorized” performances. This review is part of a new caa.reviews initiative to review time-based media works.
Art Journal Open
Art Journal Open this summer launched a new cluster of conversations featuring artist residencies, with artists who have participated in residencies interviewed by those who organize these programs. Through the conversations, Art Journal Open examines how residencies operate logistically and conceptually, and how they contribute to creative production. Conversations published in the series include Caitlin Masley-Chalet of Guttenberg Arts (Guttenberg, NJ) with artist Diana Shpungin, Vanessa Kauffman of Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA) with artist Patricia Fernández Carcedo, and Amy Cancelmo of Root Division (San Francisco, CA) with artist Kija Lucas.
Earlier this summer, Art Journal Open published the third of a three-part series on appropriation as an artistic strategy: “Knight’s Heritage: Karl Haendel and the Legacy of Appropriation, Episode Three, 2013” by Natilee Harren, with a response by Nate Harrison. Recent features also include a review of Wetware: Art, Agency, Animation (Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine, February 6–May 7, 2016) by Charissa Terranova, and “Humans Have Been Human for So Long,” a dialogue between artist Shana Lutker and curator Mika Yoshitake on Lutker’s exhibition Shana Lutker: Le “NEW” Monocle, Chapters 1–3 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC (October 27, 2015–February 16, 2016).
Art Journal
The forthcoming Fall 2016 Art Journal features a project by the artist Penelope Vlassopoulou, whose source material is the phrases and drawings carved in underground cells by detainees during the Nazi occupation of Greece. In other feature articles, Mario Merz’s fascination with the Fibonacci series is the cruz of Elizabeth Mangini’s examination of works created within the intellectual and political ferment of 1960s Italy, and Emily Hage rethinks Romare Bearden’s historical and political position in relation to the dense collages he made for the covers of Time and Fortune. The Reviews section includes Eve Meltzer’s account of the film Eva Hesse and reviews of books by Thomas Crow, Claire Robins, and Joan Kee. An annotated bibliography by Roger F. Malina, the astrophysicist who also serves as executive editor of Leonardo Publications/MIT Press, explores the highly productive intersections of art and science.
Recently published in the Summer 2016 Art Journal is a project by the renowned artist Harmony Hammond. The covers of the journal were given a waxy coating to convey the nature of her intensely tactile paintings and prints, featured in a twenty-page portfolio. In the features, Amanda Jane Graham takes a close look at the interweaving of domestic and performing spaces in Trisha Brown’s 1975 dance Locus; Mechtild Widrich investigates the effects on the urban fabric of the new/old National Gallery of Singapore, created from a colonial-era court building; and Dan Adler traces the idea of an all-pervasive Apparatus in 1980s and 1990s works by the German photographer Thomas Ruff. The Reviews section begins with Chris Taylor’s examination of the film Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art. Other reviews examine a new book by Chika Okeke-Agulu and the exhibition and catalogue Hippie Modernism. An annotated bibliography by Audra Wolowiec explores the poetics of sound and language.
The Art Bulletin
The cover of the September 2016 issue of The Art Bulletin depicts Buddhist monks evoking ghosts in a nocturnal ceremony; the large detail from a polychrome silk scroll accompanies Phillip E. Bloom’s essay on twelfth-century Chinese paintings of Buddhist rituals. In other essays featured in the September issue, Judy Sund reconsiders nineteenth-century perceptions of Watteau’s Pierrot character as forlorn, Christine I. Ho contextualizes a brush-and-ink painting created by a collective in the early People’s Republic of China, and James Nisbet surveys intersections of global politics and imaging in the site-specific art of Walter De Maria. In his “Whither Art History?” essay, Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz explores Kongo visual and cultural practices in contemporary art.
The Reviews section, with a theme of “Urban Images, Memories, and Fragments,” includes four reviews of recent books on the cultures of fifth-century BCE Athens, seven Dutch cities from 1200 to 1700, early modern Rome, and Mexico City in light of Aztec civilization.
Taylor & Francis Online
In addition to their print subscription(s), CAA members receive online access to current and back issues of Art Journal and The Art Bulletin. Taylor & Francis, CAA’s publishing partner, also provides complimentary online access to Word and Image, Digital Creativity, and Public Art Dialogue for CAA members. To access these journals, please log into your account at collegeart.org and click the link to the CAA Online Publications Platform on Taylor & Francis Online.
CAA Connect is Live
posted by CAA — Sep 12, 2016
We are pleased to announce the launch of CAA Connect, our new digital discussion platform and resource library. CAA Connect is a user-friendly social hub offering discussion communities with topic threads, the ability to post and share many forms of media, and the opportunity for collaboration across disciplines. We hope that many of the cross-disciplinary and scholarly conversations that occur at the Annual Conference each year continue on CAA Connect. Registration will open next week for the 105th Annual Conference in New York, February 15-18, 2017.
We are launching CAA Connect with a series of starter communities that address important issues for visual arts professionals. Below is a list of the starter communities that are accessible for all CAA members and the names of those who have offered to facilitate discussion in the communities.
To contribute to community discussions, please log in to CAA Connect (click “Log In” in upper right of home page) using your existing CAA Account credentials. If this is your first time logging in to CAA Connect, you will be prompted to accept CAA Connect’s Community Guidelines before continuing. Please review the CAA Connect tutorials for a quick overview of the platform. Once you have signed in to CAA Connect or your CAA account, you will automatically be logged in to both sites and you will be able to switch back and forth without logging in again. The CAA member directory will now reside on CAA Connect. By default all members are included in the searchable directory. To learn more about how to be excluded from the directory, read the “Logging in and Profile Setup” tutorial in the Welcome to CAA Connect community.
Starter Communities
Museums
Anuradha Vikram, Director of Residency Programs at 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, California
Anne Goodyear, Co-Director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art
CAA Annual Conference
Tiffany Dugan, Director of Programs at College Art Association
Judith Rodenbeck, Annual Conference Program Chair and Associate Professor at University of California at Riverside
Fair Use
Patricia Aufderheide, University Professor, School of Communication, American University and Co-Principal Investigator on the CAA Fair Use Initiative
Peter Jaszi, Professor of Law, Washington College of Law, American University, and Co-Principal Investigator on the CAA Fair Use Initiative
Janet Landay, Program Manager, Fair Use Initiative and Project Director, CAA-Getty International Program
Latin American Art
Michele Greet, Associate Professor of Art History at George Mason University
Elisa Mandell, Associate Professor of Art History at California State University, Fullerton
Most importantly, we want CAA Connect to grow with our members, to be influenced by the work and focus of our members. Look for a survey in early October asking you what communities and types of content you’d like to see on CAA Connect. We can only build the right kind of platform to push forward the visual arts with your help.
Please contact us if you have any questions at all.
We look forward to the discussions!
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — Sep 09, 2016
Boris Charmatz’s If Tate Modern Was Musée de la Danse? (May 15–16, 2015) is the focus of a new multimedia review on the Scalar platform, If caa.reviews were performance.reviews. Organized by Juliet Bellow, the project includes an introduction by Bellow, and three reviews of the performances at the Tate Modern by Arabella Stanger, Nicole Zee, and Tamara Tomic-Vajagic. The review presents the complexities of Charmatz’s transformation of the Tate Modern into a museum of dance for two days and features an interactive map showing where the performances occurred in the Tate Modern, in addition to videos and still images. Charmatz’s project challenges conceptions of museums as institutional spaces and incorporates audience participation and “unauthorized” performances. This review is part of a new caa.reviews initiative to review time-based media works.
caa.reviews publishes over 150 reviews each year. Founded in 1998, the site publishes timely scholarly and critical reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by the College Art Association. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate. Read more reviews at caa.reviews.