CAA News Today
Grants, Awards, and Honors
posted by CAA — Dec 15, 2016
CAA recognizes its members for their professional achievements, be it a grant, fellowship, residency, book prize, honorary degree, or related award.
Grants, Awards, and Honors is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
December 2016
Devon Baker, a PhD student in art history at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has been awarded a 2016–17 Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She will conduct research for her dissertation, which explores print culture in Renaissance Lombardy, using printmaking to examine larger themes of mobility, north-south exchange, and transmateriality.
Amy Beecher, an artist based in New York and Providence, Rhode Island, has received a fall 2016 fellowship from the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in the interdisciplinary artist category.
Daniella Berman, a doctoral candidate at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, has been awarded a 2016–17 Theodore Rousseau Fellowship by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to work on her dissertation, which considers the unfinished history paintings of the French Revolution and identifies an emergent aesthetic of “unfinishedness” developed by artists in response to the shifting sociopolitical landscape.
Douglas Brine, associate professor of art history at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, has accepted a 2016–17 J. Clawson Mills Scholarship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to undertake research and writing for his book project, “The Art of Brass in the Burgundian Netherlands: Makers, Markets, Patrons, Products.”
Emily Casey, a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Delaware in Newark, has been given a Sylvan C. Coleman and Pam Coleman Memorial Fund Fellowship for 2016–17 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She will examine representations of oceanic space in American art and material culture to show how colonial and early national identities were constructed in relation to these.
Joshua Cohen, assistant professor at City College, City University of New York, has received a 2016–17 Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to complete a book that tracks modernist appropriations of African sculpture by European and African artists between 1905 and 1980.
Joelle Dietrick, assistant professor of art and digital studies at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina, has accepted a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award to support her studio production during the 2016–17 academic year before she goes to Hamburg, Germany, for her Fulbright Global Award (April–July 2017). As part of the Fulbright, Dietrick will travel to Santiago, Chile, and Hong Kong, China, during the next two winter breaks.
Brad Hostetler, who earned a PhD in art history last year at Florida State University in Tallahassee, has been awarded a 2016–17 Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to complete revisions for a book project, “Enshrining Sacred Matter: The Form, Function, and Meaning of Reliquaries in Byzantium, 843–1204.”
Amy Huang, a doctoral candidate in the history of art and architecture at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and an adjunct lecturer for Boston University in Massachusetts, has received a 2016–17 Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She will research visual modes of remembrance in Chinese paintings through seventeenth-century Nanjing and investigate how memory operated through texts, images, and historic sites.
Frances Jacobus-Parker, a PhD student in art and archaeology at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, has been given a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship for 2016–17 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where he will work on the first comprehensive study of the oeuvre of the pivotal American artist Vija Celmins.
Samuel Johnson, who earned his PhD in the history of art and architecture at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2015, has been awarded a Leonard A. Lauder Fellowship by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 2016–17 Johnson will study the effects of the papiers collés of Georges Braques and Pablo Picasso on the photographs of El Lissitzky, László Moholy-Nagy, and Man Ray.
Anna Jozefacka, an adjunct professor at Hunter College, City University of New York, has been awarded a 2016–17 Leonard A. Lauder Fellowship by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to conduct research on Cubism’s relationship to the evolution of modern architectural and interior design in the first three decades of the twentieth century.
Julia McHugh, a doctoral student in art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, has accepted a Douglass Foundation Fellowship in American Art for 2016–17 from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to work on her dissertation, which examines the ways in which patrons used tapestries and other textiles to adorn interiors, both domestic and sacred, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Peru.
Patricia Miranda, Invasive, 2016 (artwork © Patricia Miranda)Patricia Miranda, an artist, curator, educator, and founder of MAPSpace, a gallery in Port Chester, New York, has completed an October 2016 residency at I-Park Residency in East Haddam, Connecticut.
Jiha Moon, an artist who lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia, has received a 2016 Artadia Award.
Elyse Nelson, a PhD candidate in the history of art at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, has been given a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. During 2016–17 she will work on a dissertation that explores the Italian neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova’s renewed relationship with his British patrons after Napoleon’s defeat in 1814.
Giulia Paoletti, a core lecturer at Columbia University in New York, has been awarded a 2016–17 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellowship by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to research and assist with the development and preparation for a planned reinstallation and renovation of the African art galleries.
John Richardson, professor of art and chair of the James Pearson Duffy Department of Art and Art History at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, has received the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Mid America College Art Association.
Miriam Said, a doctoral student in the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley, has accepted a 2016–17 Frances Markoe Fellowship by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to explore material-based mechanisms of ritual affect as it was manifested in and between the Near East and Greece in the first millennium BC.
John A. Tyson, a recent recipient of a PhD in art history from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, has joined the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, as a 2016–17 participant in the fellowship and internships program. He will assist the Department of Modern Art with research for the upcoming Rachel Whiteread retrospective and lead tours in the newly reinstalled East Building permanent and special exhibition galleries.
Aaron Wile, a PhD candidate in the history of art and architecture at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has accepted a Chester Dale Fellowship from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. During 2016–17 he will complete his dissertation, “Painting, Authority, and Experience at the Twighlight of the Grand Siècle, 1690–1721,” and begin transforming it into a book manuscript, consulting materials at the museum.
Katharine Wright, who earned her PhD in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 2015, has been awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Research/Collections Specialist Fellowship for 2016–17 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to catalogue the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art’s collection of American modernism.
Tara Zanardi, an associate professor at Hunter College, City University of New York, has accepted a 2016–17 Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to research the Porcelain Room at the Royal Palace in Aranjuez, a tour-de-force in its implementation and display of porcelain, the interior exemplifies Charles III’s innovative artistic and political strategies at court.
Books Published by CAA Members
posted by CAA — Dec 15, 2016
Publishing a book is a major milestone for artists and scholars—browse a list of recent titles below.
Books Published by CAA Members appears every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
December 2016
Susan Best. Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
Louis Kaplan. Photography and Humour (London: Reaktion Books, 2016).
Ceren Özpınar. Turkiye’de Sanat Tarihi Yazimi (1970–2010) [The Art Historiography in Turkey (1970–2010)] (Istanbul: History Foundation Yurt Publications, 2016).
An Interview with Mary Miller, CAA 2017 Convocation Speaker
posted by Christopher Howard — Dec 06, 2016
Mary Miller, Sterling Professor of History of Art at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, will deliver the keynote address during Convocation at the 2017 Annual Conference, to be held at the New York Hilton Midtown in Manhattan. Free and open to the public, Convocation takes place on Wednesday, February 15, 5:30–7:00 PM. The event will include the presentation of the annual Awards for Distinction and be followed by the conference’s Opening Reception.
Miller earned an AB in 1975 at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. Six years later she completed her PhD at Yale, joined the faculty there, and has remained at the school ever since. Miller was recently appointed as senior director of the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage at Yale. She also served as dean of Yale College from 2008 to 2014 and has taken many other professorial and administrative roles over the years.
Miller is the author of The Murals of Bonampak (1986), The Art of Mesoamerica: From Olmec to Aztec (1986), and Maya Art and Architecture (1999). A frequent collaborator, she wrote The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya (1993) with Karl Taube and edited A Pre-Columbian World (2006) with Jeffrey Quilter and The Aztec Calendar Stone (2010) with Khristaan D. Villela. In recent years Miller edited Painting a Map of Sixteenth-Century Mexico City (2012), a study of a rare indigenous map in Yale’s Beinecke Library, with Barbara Mundy and completed The Spectacle of the Late Maya Court: Reflections on the Murals of Bonampak (2013) with Claudia Brittenham.
Miller has written essays for both of CAA’s scholarly print publications. In “A Re-examination of the Mesoamerican Chacmool,” published in The Art Bulletin in 1985, Miller proposed Maya sources for “the form, location, variety, and iconography” of the chacmool, the Mesoamerican stone sculptures of reclining male figures associated with war and sacrifice; previous scholarship had assumed they were of Central American origin and introduced to the Maya during the Toltec era.[1] In “Shaped Time,” published in Art Journal in 2009, Miller considered George Kubler’s 1962 landmark study The Shape of Time, “so rich in its textured treatment of the ways that streams of history and art-making intersect.”[2] She drew on her deep knowledge of ancient Mesoamerica to contextualize the book in relation to both Kubler’s research and other postwar scholarship in the field.
In 1988 Miller and Linda Schele accepted CAA’s Alfred H. Barr Award for museum scholarship for The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art (1986). The book, with photographs by Justin Kerr, was the catalogue for a traveling exhibition organized by Schele and Miller for the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.
Among Miller’s many accolades are a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2010 she gave the fifty-ninth A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC—one of the highest honors in American art history.
CAA communicated with Miller via email last month. Here’s what she had to say.
How has teaching art history changed over the last twenty years?
Well, that takes us back to 1996, and just about then I volunteered to be the departmental pioneer (or guinea pig, take your pick) for digital images. I had to wrestle with the visual resources department to be allowed to build my own PowerPoints in that first iteration! And before I knew it, the slide cabinets had departed for remote storage. But that is the technical change. There are other changes that come along, especially in terms of what it is students bring to the class, and how the visual image is beginning to be the center for most of them.
What were the most important lessons you learned while serving as a dean?
You don’t want to know most of them! But, seriously, I gave a lot of thought to grading while dean. I also paid attention to learning outcomes, especially the importance of short assignments and detailed feedback early in the term. And I committed to developing opportunities for public speaking for students in class—a critical part of education but rarely intentionally instructed these days.
What does your current research concern?
My current research is focused on the gold disks of the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá. The only serious study of the full set of them was published in 1952, although everyone knows them. Or thinks they know them. They’ve turned out to be even more fascinating than I though they’d be: the material—gold—was entirely new to the Maya of the ninth century, the technique of executing imagery on it entirely new as well. And then the imagery itself quite distinct. All but one of the disks were burned, ripped into pieces, crumpled, stomped upon, and then hurled into the Cenote (and the “one” is distinct only in not having been torn apart). There is meaning embedded in that dramatic ending! But three other projects have been developing along the edges. I keep all the files and notes for one of them—a history of the dealers, collectors, and materials that are critical to the formation of pre-Hispanic art as a field in the United States, 1940 onward—in a folder I call “The Rabbit Hole,” which tells you it is a wild and winding journey.
What was your first CAA Annual Conference experience like?
Oh, gosh. I think I was the driver of a group of Yale graduate students to DC [in 1979] and I am almost certain that George Shackelford was in the car. I’d had the bad fortune to have my wallet relieved of folding bills while I snoozed in the Yale Art and Architecture Library, so I scrounged together $40 to make the trip. I slept in the basement of a house some of my college friends shared near the Washington Cathedral, and then I hiked down Mass Ave to the Hilton—a good distance, I can assure you. I attended a session chaired by Joel Snyder that thrilled me. I watched a grad-school colleague give a presentation on African time, among other talks, and I had a lot of fun.
What are two or three pressing issues that both artists and academics share?
We all share the problem of the Google search: no matter what I am looking for, once I start searching for images, by page three the algorithm is offering me pictures of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. If I am looking for a work of art, then surely I must want Sunflowers!
Seriously, I think the most pressing issue we share is that of conservation and preservation. How can the past—or the present—be preserved for the future?
Can you give us a teaser of what you will discuss at Convocation?
Well, last year I gave a talk at the Clark Art Institute in which I said art history can play a different role in twenty-first-century humanities than it did in twentieth-century humanities. I’ve developed these ideas more fully—and I hope I have some interesting things to say to the community of art historians, and the community of artists!
Notes
[1] See Mary Ellen Miller, “A Re-examination of the Mesoamerican Chacmool,” The Art Bulletin 67, no. 1 (March 1985): 7–17.
[2] See Mary Miller, “Shaped Time,” Art Journal 68, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 71–77.
At the Forefront: Intersections of Race and Art at the CAA Conference
posted by Christopher Howard — Dec 05, 2016
Photo Credit Maxwell Leung, Ph.D., CCAThe 2017 Annual Conference in New York, taking place February 15–18, boasts a number of presentations addressing the intersections of race and contemporary art, colonialism in art history, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Here are a few highlights:
Deborah Willis of New York University and Cheryl Finley from Cornell University will provide a historical overview through a session titled “Picturing Social Movements from Emancipation to Black Lives Matter.” Kellie Jones, an art historian at Columbia University and winner of a 2016 MacArthur fellowship, is among the speakers. Public Art Dialogue, one of CAA’s many affiliated societies, will host a discussion on “Public Art in the Era of Black Lives Matter.” The first presenter will be Evie Terrono from Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, who has researched “Symbolic Interventions, New Narratives: Challenging the Authority of the Confederate Flag.”
The session “Race and Labor in the Art World” will be chaired by Hayes Peter Mauro of Queensborough Community College, City University of New York. The scheduled speakers—Sarah Cervenak, John Ott, and LaTanya Autry—teach in North Carolina, Virginia, and Connecticut, respectively. Elsewhere, four panelists will offer case studies of race and representation in nineteenth-century art, and another collection of scholars will examine “Blackness, Violence, Representation.” The Arts Council of the African Studies Association, also a CAA affiliated society, has given the tantalizing title of “Flesh” to its session, while another panel will give form to “Post-Black and Liquid Blackness” in contemporary African American art.
Richard Hylton from University for the Creative Arts in England will lead a panel that sheds light on British perspectives regarding “Contemporary Art, Ethnography, and the Western Museum,” while scholars from Italy and South Africa will lead a session called “Writing Art History in the Margins: Rethinking Centers and Peripheries in ‘Non-Western’ Art Historiography.” Finally, the Association for Critical Race Art History, another CAA affiliate, will present “Riff: Black Artists and the European Canon.” Among the artists to be examined are Robert Colescott, Carrie Mae Weems, and Moe Brooker.
Your Support Is Vital to the Arts
posted by CAA — Dec 02, 2016
Imagine our world without culture.
In today’s economy-driven society, it is easy to imagine a world where our past and present cultural history is ignored—or even worse, destroyed. We see educational systems focused more on science and technology and less on the arts and humanities, with art department budgets slashed and employment opportunities shrinking while student debt is rising to an all-time high and our collective historic cultural past is destroyed in the Middle East and other parts of the world.
That’s why the College Art Association is important. For more than a century, CAA has been the preeminent international leadership organization in the field of visual arts. We strive to create an environment where visual artists, art historians, designers, museum professionals, critics, and scholars successfully and freely create and prosper in their professional fields. We do this because we know if these professionals prosper, our culture will not only be preserved, it will thrive.
We ask that you join us in celebrating CAA’s rich history and prosperous future by making a tax-deductible gift to the organization. Your support goes directly to the programs we offer.
Register now for the 2017 Annual Conference, February 15-18 in New York. The Early Registration deadline is December 19.
Together, we can ensure that our culture is preserved.
Sincerely,
Hunter O’Hanian
Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer
2016 Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant Winners
posted by Christopher Howard — Nov 29, 2016
CAA is pleased to announce eight recipients of the annual Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant for 2016. Thanks to a generous grant from the Wyeth Foundation, these awards are given annually to publishers to support the publication of one or more book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art, visual studies, and related subjects. For this grant program, “American art” is defined as art created in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
The eight grantees for 2016 are:
- Ella Diaz, Flying under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force: Mapping a Chicano/a Art History, University of Texas Press
- Jason Hill, Artist as Reporter: Weegee, Ad Reinhardt, and the PM News Picture, University of California Press
- Wadsworth Jarrell, AfriCOBRA: Experimental Art toward a School of Thought, Duke University Press
- Kellie Jones, South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s, Duke University Press
- Jennifer Josten, Mathias Goeritz: Modernist Art and Architecture in Cold War Mexico, Yale University Press
- Lauren Kroiz, Cultivating Citizens: The Regional Work of Art in the New Deal Era, University of California Press
- Tirza Latimer, Eccentric Modernism: Making Differences in the History of American Art, University of California Press
- Jennifer Van Horn, The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America, University of North Carolina Press
Eligible for the grant are book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American 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. Authors must be current CAA members. Please review the application guidelines for more information.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Nov 23, 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.
Trump and the Arts: Evita, Huge Towers, and a Snub for Warhol
For the arts world, the question is essentially the same as the one being asked everywhere right now, across the political spectrum: “What will a President Donald J. Trump mean for me?” The answer from artists, museums, theaters, actors, writers, musicians, and the movie and television industry is: “Your guess is as good as mine.” (Read more from the New York Times.)
How to Fix the Art World, Part 1
Last August ARTnews embarked on an epic project: finding out what inhabitants of the art world think is wrong with their world and how they would fix it. In the ensuing months ARTnews spoke with more than fifty individuals—artists and curators, critics and historians, art dealers and an art-fair director—to gather a range of perspectives. (Read more from ARTnews.)
An Era for Women Artists?
Nearly half a century has passed since Linda Nochlin posed her question “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Now we face it again, as a new wave of all-women exhibitions revives the question and suggests a new answer. (Read more from the Atlantic.)
The Ballet of White Victimhood: On Jordan Wolfson, Petroushka, and Donald Trump
The white body, through its repetition in a history of art that is largely painted white itself, has become an easy and lazy signifier for a universal body, for a metaphorical body, one that becomes symbolic and slippery, that can always be more than its mere representation. The nonwhite body has greater difficulty in attaining this metaphorical bounty. (Read more from Artspace Magazine.)
“Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor”: Artists Space Steps out of Analysis and into Action
Amid all the election paraphernalia of the past few months, some bold stickers have been appearing across New York City. With white text on a red background, they demand: “Decolonize This Place.” At Artists Space Books and Talks, the home base of Decolonize This Place through December 17, the “source” is more complicated than any one person, location, or idea. (Read more from ARTnews.)
Thinking outside the Pipeline
Many faculty diversity initiatives are predicated on the pipeline theory: that getting more minority students to enroll in PhD programs eventually will lead to gains in numbers of professors from underrepresented backgrounds. The pipeline theory has long had its critics, who point to other problems within the academic recruitment, hiring, and retention system. A new study seeks to back up such criticisms with hard data. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Impostor Syndrome Is Definitely a Thing
Impostor syndrome is the feeling that you don’t belong—in graduate school or in your first academic or alt-ac job—and it’s more common that you might think. It makes people believe that they aren’t good enough, smart enough, or deserving enough. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Ugly Consequences of Complaining about “Students These Days”
Sometimes we do need to vent. It isn’t easy teaching students who don’t come to class prepared, seem to always want the easiest way, are prepared to cheat if necessary, don’t have good study skills, and aren’t interested in learning what we love to teach. At some point, though, venting morphs into complaining, and what we say about students becomes what we think about them. (Read more from Faculty Focus.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Nov 16, 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.
Donald Trump, Taste, and the Cultural Elite
It’s said that taste defines us. The music I like lets you know, to some degree, what kind of person I am. Yet though this year’s presidential election has raised issues of racism, sexism, and classism, not much has been said about taste, and the role it may or may not have played in getting Donald Trump to the White House. (Read more from the Washington Post.)
Now, More Than Ever, Designers Must Transform America
Thoughtful design, whether it’s a logo, an object, or a well-organized protest, has always had the ability to effect political change. And yet, in days following the election, the power of design felt—at least momentarily—diminished. Graphic design didn’t affect the outcome. (Read more from Wired.)
The Obligation to Explain
One of the striking aspects of the controversy around Kelley Walker’s exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum in Saint Louis is how many important issues it raises: the perilous state of race relations; the dilemmas that arise when one person’s freedom of speech is perceived as hate speech; whether white artists can tackle the subject of black experience without engaging in cultural appropriation; and the extent to which social media pressures museums to bring more transparency to their curatorial process. (Read more from Artcritical.)
Iconic Ancient Sites Ravaged in ISIS’s Last Stand in Iraq
Recently released satellite imagery of archaeological sites around the northern Iraqi city of Mosul has revealed extensive destruction at two capital cities of ancient Mesopotamia, according to researchers with the American Schools of Oriental Research Cultural Heritage Initiatives. (Read more from National Geographic.)
The Future of the Tiny Liberal-Arts College
At first glance, it sounds like a grim affair: a group of fifteen presidents from the country’s tiniest liberal-arts institutions met in New York in June, even amid experts’ predictions of small-college mergers and closings. Attendees who were at the meeting report the mood was far from somber, though. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Crash and Burn
Your course plan looked great on paper. It passed departmental faculty review. Perhaps it even integrated some progressive pedagogical experimentations. In sum, the class held real promise. But when it got to the classroom, your first-run of the course was received with far less enthusiasm than you anticipated. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)
Auditioning for the Role of Colleague
Far too many graduate students earnestly prepare for their job talk as if the talk itself is what matters most. It was not until a casual meeting with a member of my dissertation committee in her cozy office that I learned the secret to delivering a great job talk: nothing matters more than how you manage the Q&A portion. (Read more from Vitae.)
Makeover Mania: Inside the Twenty-First-Century Craze for Redesigning Everything
In theory, the redesign begins with a problem. The problem might be specific or systemic or subjective. A logo makes a company’s image feel out of date. A familiar household object has been overtaken by new technology. A service has become too confusing for new users. The world is, after all, full of problems. (Read more from the New York Times Magazine.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Nov 02, 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.
Net Art Anthology Launches
Net Art Anthology, Rhizome’s two-year online exhibition presenting one hundred works of restored and reperformed net art, has launched. The project will be divided into five chapters: early network cultures and early web; Flash and blogs; surf clubs, early postinternet art, and social-media platforms; and mobile apps and social-media saturation. (Read more from Rhizome.)
Artificial Intelligence as a Bridge for Art and Reality
How to get people interested in art? How to engage millennials? How to expose permanent-collection works that sit in storage? These are questions art museums constantly ponder. Recently, Tate Britain asked another one: How can artificial intelligence help? (Read more from the New York Times.)
MIT Task Force Releases Preliminary “Future of Libraries” Report
An MIT task force has released a preliminary report featuring proposals to help the school’s library system become an “open global platform” enabling the discovery, use, and stewardship of information and knowledge for future generations. The report contains recommendations to develop a global library for a global university while strengthening the library’s relationship with local academic and public communities. (Read more from MIT News.)
Help Desk: Breaking Up Is Hard to Do
Simple in theory, painful in practice—but the way to break up a collaborative partnership is the same as for a romantic one: with as much honesty and compassion as you can muster. If you’re splitting up to pursue solo projects, then you have to say so; if you’ve found a new collaborator, you’ll need to announce it. (Read more from Daily Serving.)
Why Are Some Artists Remembered More Than Others?
Every year, thousands of art-school graduates across the globe embark on their careers in the hopes of becoming professional artists. With the influx of new talent, older generations inevitably make way. But why are some artists remembered and revered, while others remain forgotten? (Read more from Artnet News.)
How Important Is Art History in Today’s Market?
“Rembrandt weeps.” “The humanities are under assault.” “An educational disaster.” These were just a few of the howls of online dismay that followed the announcement that AQA, the last examining board offering History of Art as an A-level test to 16- to 18-year-olds in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, would be dropping the subject. The small number of students taking the subject and its wide range of topics had made it difficult to compare exam performance, the board explained. (Read more from the New York Times.)
The Remix Wars: Originality in the Age of Digital Reproduction
Is there nothing new under the sun? In the first of a series of articles, New Atlas will examine how twenty-first-century digital technology has given artists a set of tools that has dismantled traditional definitions of originality and is challenging the notions of copyright that dominated much of the twentieth century. (Read more from New Atlas.)
MoMA Curator Laura Hoptman on How to Tell a Good Painting from a “Bogus” Painting
A veteran organizer of cutting-edge exhibitions, Laura Hoptman built her career in part through her insistence on championing the medium, even—or perhaps especially—through its perennial periods of unpopularity and critical disdain. This has earned her both accolades and scorn, but her track record of introducing vital contemporary painters to American audiences largely speaks for itself. (Read more from Artspace.)
Art Journal Seeks Web Editor
posted by Christopher Howard — Nov 01, 2016
The Art Journal Editorial Board invites nominations and self-nominations for the position of web editor for the term of July 1, 2017–June 30, 2020. A candidate may be an artist, art historian, critic, educator, curator, or other art professional; institutional affiliation is not required. Art Journal Open is an independently edited companion of the quarterly Art Journal; it is likewise devoted to twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and visual culture. Content is published on a continual, rolling basis.
Working with the editorial board, the web editor is responsible for commissioning all content for the Art Journal Open website. He or she solicits or commissions projects, texts, images, and time-based content by artists and other authors, and determines the appropriate scope and format of each project. In consultation with the editor-in-chief and editorial board, the web editor determines which pieces should undergo peer review and subsequent revision before acceptance for publication. The web editor also works with authors and a CAA staff editor on the development and preparation of materials for publication. The editorial board expects that a major portion of the website projects will be by artists or geared to the concerns of artists and that the web editor will endeavor to give voice to under-represented perspectives. Qualifications for the position include a broad knowledge of current art, the ability to work closely with artists in a wide variety of practices, and experience in developing content for an arts website. The three-year term includes membership on the Art Journal Editorial Board and an annual honorarium, paid quarterly.
The web editor attends the three meetings each year of the Art Journal Editorial Board—held by teleconference or in New York in the spring and fall, and at the CAA Annual Conference in February—and submits an annual report to CAA’s Board of Directors.
Candidates must be current CAA members and should not serve concurrently on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. The web editor may not publish her or his own work in the journal or on the website during the term of service. Nominators should ascertain a 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 the position, a CV, and at least one letter of recommendation to: Art Journal Web Editor Search, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004; or email the documents to Joe Hannan, CAA editorial director. Deadline: January 9, 2017; finalists will be interviewed on February 15 in New York or via Skype.