CAA News Today

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.

June 2014

Swoon: Submerged Motherlands
Brooklyn Museum
Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery, Fifth Floor, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238
April 11–August 24, 2014

Submerged Motherlands, a solo exhibition by the Brooklyn-based artist Swoon, is a collaborative inhabitable shelter that explores social and environmental issues. Born in Florida in 1977 as Caledonia Dance Curry, Swoon is best known for her large, intricate linocut prints that are wheat pasted onto industrial buildings in Brooklyn and Manhattan. In this occasion Swoon leaves the streets to appropriate the Brooklyn Museum as a temporary home for transforming the rotunda gallery into a “submerged motherland,” an inhabitable installation that includes previous traveling boats and rafts, figurative prints, drawings, and painting, dyed fabrics, and cut-paper foliage that grew around a monumental sculptural tree.

Swoon’s practice is rooted in collaboration, community, experimentation, and discovery. From conceptualization through production, her practice means an immersive, provocative, and transformative experience for both participants and visitors. She has translated her projects to both galleries and museums, but also to socially rooted arts activism in places such as Konbit Shelter Project in Haiti and Transformazium in Braddock, Pennsylvania, among others.

A meditation on humanity, climate change, and the artist’s own mother passing away during the ideation stage for the installation, Submerged Motherlands reflects on the notion of home—and the loss of it. In the artists’ words, the creative process of this inhabitable installation follows an “impulse to build a safe space in the world for herself and her community; some place to be a little bit different from the norm.” Swoon’s fantastic installation transformed the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Rotunda Gallery in a temporary and yet memorable shelter for many.

Judith Shea
Kent Fine Art
210 Eleventh Avenue, Second Floor, New York, NY 10001
May 9–June 28, 2014

Judith Shea’s solo exhibition is a sculptural homage to the role of women in the arts. For decades, Shea studied the representation of the human figure through a constant observation of people and the exploration of materials. In absence or presence of the body, from her late 1970s clothes-based series to the present sculptures that honors the role of women in the arts, powerful human emotions are evident in Shea’s work.

Shea reflects on the origin of her sculptural approach to the human form to different and yet meaningful experiences of her educational upbringing. Being raised as a Catholic, she was a constant witness of the representation of religious statues in church. While being trained as a ballet dancer as a child, she grew connected with her own body.

Graduated with a fashion-design degree from Parsons in 1969, Shea continues pursuing her interests in visual art, earning her BFA at Parsons in 1975. Based on “her own style”—as titled the successful exhibition she curated on women self-portraits at National Academy Museum in 2012—“the artist who makes clothes” was invited to collaborate with Trisha Brown and the Eye and Ear Theater Company—working with artists such as Red Grooms and Elizabeth Murray.

At Kent Fine Arts, Shea presents seven new sculptures that pay tribute to the role of women in the arts. Through these sculptural portraits, Shea demonstrates her unique sense of observation and virtuosity with materials. A fully illustrated monograph documenting Shea’s work from 1976 to the present accompanies the exhibition.

Nalini Malani: Transgressions
Asia Society and Museum
725 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10021
February 19–August 3, 2014



Transgressions is a solo exhibition by Nalini Malani. Born in Karachi in 1946, Malani is considered one of the foremost artists from India today. Her work is influenced by her experiences as a refugee of the Partition of India in 1947. Trained as a painter at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in Mumbai, Malani has created work gradually evolved toward new media and international collaboration, expanding the pictorial surface into the surrounding environment, such as ephemeral wall drawing, installation, shadow play, and theater. In the 1980s, she became a pioneer in India for her attention to feminist issues. In the early 1990s, her innovative theater, installations, and multimedia projects featured recurring themes on gender, memory, race, and transnational politics, especially in reference to India’s postcolonial history after independence and partition.

Her current exhibition at the Asia Society and Museum includes Trangressions II (2009), a video that draws from the museum’s collection, exploring the nuances of Western postcolonial dominance in India, integrating the folk sensibility of traditional shadow plays with new technology. Using projections through transparent Lexan cylinders, painted by the artist in a fashion that references the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Bengal Kalighat style and inspired by the genre of reverse glass painting, brought to the subcontinent in the eighteenth century by the Chinese, Malani examines the power dynamics of transnational commerce in our increasingly globalized world. Through a mesmerizing projection of colors and imagery inspired by Edward Said’s book Orientalism, an ever-shifting tableau including wrathful female deity, boxers, and animals is accompanied by a recording of a poem written by the artist. The exhibition includes a selection of artist’s books that highlight the relevance of drawing and painting in Malani’s practice.

Zilia Sánchez: Heróicas Eróticas en Nueva York
Galerie Lelong
528 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
May 3–June 21, 2014

Heróicas Eróticas en Nueva York, Zilia Sánchez’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Lelong, offers a delightful opportunity to experience masterpieces of sensuous and haptic minimalism, while timely questioning the canonic premises of Minimalism as being reconstituted at the Jewish Museum. Spanning fifty years of her production, including recent works such as the monumental diptych Conversation (from the Eros and Communication series), the exhibition brings together “paintings” rarely seen outside Puerto Rico, made in the artist’s signature technique of stretching canvas over hand-molded wooden armatures—often in modular configurations or reworked as parts of ongoing series—that was developed during the period she lived in New York (1964–72). Heroically erotic, Sánchez’s curvy and soft minimalist hybrid objects “queer” hard-edge minimalism differently evoking the body in a manner that does not adhere to fixed categories of gender.

Born in Cuba in 1926, Sánchez studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro and became associated with the group Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo. Under the influence of Victor Manuel, she developed her own modernist approach to formal abstraction through paintings and drawings, while also designing furniture and theater sets (especially for the anti-Batista guerilla theater group Los Yesistas). Several grants allowed her to travel in Europe, and in 1964 she settled in New York, where she first begun experimenting with shaped canvases. In 1972, Sánchez moved to Puerto Rico, where she became inspirational through her teaching at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico. From 1972 to 1975 she designed the influential experimental literary journal Zona de Carga y Descarga, while in the 1980s she renewed her signature style by including line drawing or drawing transfer of semaphores and sign language on her canvases.

Sharon Lockhart: Milena, Milena

Bonniers Konsthall
Torsgatan 19
SE-11390, Stockholm, Sweden
April 16–June 29, 2014



Bonniers Konsthall hosts the second iteration of the exhibition trilogy Sharon Lockhart: Milena Milena that begun in Warsaw in 2013 at the Center for Contemporary Art and will be concluded in Switzerland in 2015 at the Kunstmuseum Luzern. This exhibition is the first large-scale survey of the work of the renowned American photographer and filmmaker in Scandinavia, where Lockhart has been particularly influential. Drawing inspiration from filmmaking and documentary photography, as well as from ethnography and anthropology, she has distinguished herself since the 1990s for her fascinating portrayals of individuals and communities, and a minimalist attention to the everyday, the subjective, and the human.

As a cross-sectional presentation of both her photographic and filmic work in the past twenty years, the exhibition explores the middle ground between the filmic and the photographic that is inhabited by her meticulously staged photographs and almost still films, emphasizing the relationship they both maintain to time and space, while also claiming the biographical dimension of her work. As such, the exhibition opens with the cinematic Double Tide (2009)—filmed in Maine, where Lockhart spent her childhood—and concludes with the rarely exhibited series Untitled Studies (1993–ongoing), Lockhart’s photographic diary, composed of rephotographed snapshots found in her own family album.

At the center of the exhibition’s narrative is Milena, an enigmatic figure who remains disquietly absent, distilling different threads of identification in her very nonpresence. Lockhart first met Milena when nine years old in 2009 in Łódź, Poland, while filming Podwórka, also a centerpiece of the exhibition. Literally translated as “courtyard” from Polish, Podwórka displays six different courtyards in Łódź and the children that live and play there. Lockhart and Milena developed a friendship through the act of play. Upon the rekindling of their friendship when staging the show for Warsaw, Lockhart discovered Milena’s desire to write an autobiography about her life, which provided the impetus through which the two have explored artistic expression together. The exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall features a specially commissioned, monumental stained-glass portrait of the Polish master glass painter Piotr Ostrowski as a personal and culturally specific tribute.

Kalliopi Lemos: I Am I Between Worlds and Between Shadows
Ioakimion School for Girls
Fener, Istanbul
September 11, 2013–December 14, 2014

Curated by Beral Madra as a parallel event of the thirteenth Istanbul Biennale but now extended to December 2014, I Am I Between Worlds and Between Shadows is a major site-specific installation of new work by the London-based Greek artist Kalliopi Lemos. A painter, sculptor, and installation artist, Lemos has become internationally known for a series of public installations that make poignant commentaries about the hopes and tragedies that underpin illegal migration by using the abandoned relics of successful or failed illegal migration typical of the Aegean coasts—small wooden boats (such as Crossing, Eleusis, Greece [2006/9]; Round Voyage, Istanbul [2007]; At Crossroads, Brandenburg Gate, Berlin [2009]; and Pledges for a Safe Passage, Canakkale, Turkey [2012]). Complementing Lemos’s concern with the dispossessed from a transnational feminist perspective that links the injustices against the racial, classed, and religious underdogs of global capital—best represented by the illegal migrant—with those against the gendered others of patriarchal societies—women—I Am I Between Worlds and Between Shadows tackles the issue of violence against women in a poetic, multidisciplinary, and site-specific way.

I Am I Between Worlds and Between Shadows consists of a series of seven sculptures depicting variously violated hybrid creatures, a sound installation, and a constantly renewed archive of women’s abuse, comprised of world news print outs, all evocatively installed in the abandoned yet intact rooms of the Ioakimion Greek High School for Girls. A gem of the once booming Greek Orthodox minority in Fener, the latter was founded in nineteenth century but closed in the 1980s when its attendance dropped to six students. The sound collage of joyful schoolchildren playing and singing affectively evokes the lively atmosphere of the past of the school as a breeding ground of dreams for the girls who attended it. Yet the injustices awaiting women, even in Western societies, are hinted by the evocations of gendered violation and sacrifice embedded in the Greek folk songs and international fairy tales narrated by children (also part of the sound installation), echoing the monstrosity of contemporary actuality that marks the news’ readings of the absent schoolgirls with transcultural staples of patriarchal myth. Hung from a butcher’s hook, on crutches or on gigantic prosthetic devices or confined by rails—and more often than not mutilated, amputated, and violently dismembered—these sculptural bodies most poignantly hint at various kinds of bodily, psychic, and gendered abuse, both through their imaginative bodily articulations and their manner of installation. Masterfully cast in stonelike steel with embedded resin, these half-animal, half-human creatures evoke familiar mythological and Surrealist creatures that suggestively cut across a wide spectrum of cultural and artistic references. Melancholically posed in the place of the teacher, the beheaded mermaid, the multibreasted hung rabbit, and the decapitated hen with the splayed vulva hovering on crutches, for instance, become protagonists of a tale from a children’s book that keeps going wrong in the world of the adults, raising awareness of all kinds of abuse that, whether explicitly or implicitly, threatens not only the egalitarian realization of women in various societies, but also their unencumbered expression of difference, and above all their human dignity. A two-faced chicken, clumsily balancing on two bases—itself a metaphor of unstable youth, according to the artist—looms also as an evocative stand-in for liminal creatures of exile. With its gaze fixed here and there, it aids the artist by bringing in full circle her concerns by perhaps planting a metaphor for the modern transnational, subject—forced migrant or cosmopolitan—and its vulnerability in the heart of a charged site of convoluted transcultural and imperial histories—an abandoned stronghold of Greek and Christian culture in Istanbul in the era of globalization and yet renewed and bloody nationalisms and religious fundamentalisms that, like all kinds of violence, make children and women their primary victims.

Kara Walker: A Subtlety
Domino Sugar Factory
316 Kent Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11249
May 10–July 6, 2014

Commissioned by Creative Time as a public-art farewell to a loaded site—the Domino Sugar Factory—where American industrial capitalism, consumerism, and racism have variously intersected and will be perhaps redefined through its upcoming neoliberal gentrification, Kara Walker’s A Subtlety is a both moving and canning, sugar-coated, monumental memorial to chief confectioners of the American Dream, black slaves and laborers, as well as the artist’s first large scale sculptural public work. The subtitle of the work tellingly summarizes its poignant agenda: Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plan.

A Subtlety comprises a gigantic sphinx whose hybrid body combines cliché apparitions of the black woman as domestic slave and sex object and a series of black boys cast in molasses. The latter are cast after contemporary giftware made in China but reference the original “subtleties”: sugar-made, edible sculptures and dinner emblems of power and wealth that decorated the tables of Middle Eastern sultans and European nobility.

“In Greek mythology the sphinx is a guardian of the city, a devourer of heroes and the possessor of a riddle that maybe can’t be answered,” says the artist, explaining its conception: “the factory is a modern-day ruin, and I think the sphinx contains the various readings of history that the place represents.” Exchanging her signature black for the site-specific whiteness of sugar, a material central to the slave trade and in effect of the American way, Walker has thus unsubtly “refined” the black body of her mighty benign monster, mixing references to the labor of sugar production and trade and white’s classical and sanctifying purity, in effect both honoring black bodies’ unsung contribution to Western pleasures while foregrounding the lasting whiteness of power in America. Moreover half a century after Niki de Saint Phalle’s Hon in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the temporary gigantic Nana that exorcised the riddles surrounding the female body, Sugar Baby toys with them yet also from the radical, even though controversial, perspective of a woman of color: “she’s a woman, a bootylicious figure with something paradoxical about her pose. She’s both a supplicant and an emblem of power. From the front, she seems to hold her ground. But what you see from behind is what happens when a nude woman bends over, raising a question of whether it’s a gesture of sexual passivity or not.”

As put by the project’s curator, Nato Thompson, A Subtlety speaks “of power, race, bodies, women, sexuality, slavery, sugar refining, sugar consumption, wealth inequity, and industrial might that uses the human body to get what it needs no matter the cost to life and limb. Looming over a plant whose entire history was one of sweetening tastes and aggregating wealth, of refining sweetness from dark to white, she stands mute, a riddle so wrapped up in the history of power and its sensual appeal that one can only stare stupefied, unable to answer.”

CAA Professional-Development Fellowships Suspended

posted by Michael Fahlund — May 20, 2014

At its May 4, 2014, meeting, the Board of Directors agreed to suspend the Professional-Development Fellowships in Art History and Visual Arts until a thorough analysis of the program and an exploration into other professional-development opportunities take place. When CAA’s newly approved Strategic Plan 2015–2020 begins on July 1, 2014, the board will, among the plan’s priorities, investigate the full range of possibilities that might best serve the professional-development needs of CAA’s membership.

CAA’s fellowship program began in 1993 and, with the exception of 2009, when it was suspended for a year due to the global financial crisis, has provided grants to worthy graduate students about to receive their terminal PhD or MFA degrees. The program has benefitted 51 graduate students in the last seven years and 154 since 1993.

The board hopes to reinstate the fellowships by May 2015 or to design another program to help professionals in the visual arts and art history.

Filed under: Board of Directors, Grants and Fellowships, Strategic Plan, Students —

Affiliated Society News for May 2014

posted by CAA — May 09, 2014

American Council for Southern Asian Art

The American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA) invites you to visit its newly updated website, where you can browse calls for papers, job and fellowship listings, and, for members, recent and past issues of the ACSAA Bulletin. Please send news and postings for the website to ACSAA’s webmaster, Cathleen Cummings.

Please also watch the ACSAA website and listserv for news about upcoming elections. ACSAA will be voting on new board members, changes to membership fees, and several other initiatives. You must be a member in good standing to be eligible to cast your vote. Help shape the future of ACSAA.

Association of Art Historians

The Association of Art Historians (AAH) has announced that Christine Riding is the new AAH chair, serving a three-year post. She takes over from Alison Yarrington. Riding is senior curator and head of art at the Royal Museums Greenwich in London. Previously she was curator of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British art at Tate Britain and held curatorial positions at the Palace of Westminster, Museum of London, and the Wallace Collection. Riding has lectured and published widely on the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British art and has organized a number of international exhibitions at Tate Britain and Tate Modern. Her current projects include curating Turner and the Sea, a major exhibition that opened at Greenwich in November 2013. She also served as an AAH trustee between 2004 and 2007 and was deputy editor of Art History between 2007 and 2012. Riding has participated on the Clore Leadership Programme and was recently appointed as an impact assessor for REF2014.

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 in Chicago. “Starting the Conversation: Engaging Students in the Studio and Art History,”chaired by Susan Altman of Middlesex County College, featured: Tyrus Clutter, College of Central Florida, “Flipping the Classroom with Digital Demonstrations”; Monica Anke Hahn, Community College of Philadelphia, “Virtual Engagement: Conversations in Online and Hybrid Classes”; and Julianne Parse Sandlin, Portland Community College, “Low-Tech Engagement: Art History and the Class Discussion.” The prospectus for next year’s conference session will be posted later this spring on CCPAAH’s Facebook page. To become more involved in the organization, please email ccpaah@gmail.com.

Foundations in Art: Theory and Education

The next biennial conference of Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE), called “Tectonic Shifts” and hosted by the Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, will be held March 25–28, 2015. The event will take place in the heart of downtown Indianapolis at the Westin Hotel Indianapolis, which just completed a $14 million renovation. You can access hotel registration information via the FATE website.

FATE’s Programming Committee is now reviewing the call for session proposals. While the call for sessions is now closed, a call for papers was sent in April 2014. Approximately one hundred sessions will run during the three-day conference. Papers will be accepted from all who contribute to the foundation experience. The “Tectonic Shifts” FATE members exhibition will take place in one of Indianapolis’s most respected exhibition venues, the Herron School Art and Design Galleries. A call for exhibition entries will go out in mid-May. The conference keynote speaker is Wayne White, an American artist, art director, illustrator, puppeteer, and much, much more.White has traveled the country delivering an incredibly entertaining hour-long talk in which he discusses his life and work, while making time for banjo and harmonica playing.

Historians of German and Central European Art and Architecture

The Historians of German and Central European Art and Architecture (HGCEA) has elected a new board of directors for a three-year term, 2014–17. They are: Marsha Morton, president; Jay Clarke, secretary; Jim Van Dyke, treasurer; Elizabeth Cronin, web manager; and Keith Holz, Karla Huebner, Juliet Koss, and Elizabeth Otto, at-large members.

Historians of Netherlandish Art

The Historians of Netherlandish Art (HNA) will hold its next conference June 5–7, 2014, in Boston, Massachusetts. The event will be held in cooperation with the American Association for Netherlandic Studies and involve sessions and workshops with focus on Netherlandish art from 1350 to 1750. Please see the HNA website for more information.

The next formal deadline for submitting manuscripts to the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, HNA’s peer-reviewed, open-access ejournal, is August 1, 2014. In addition to longer articles, the journal welcomes shorter notes on archival discoveries, iconographical issues, technical studies, and rediscovered works. For submission guidelines, see the journal’s website or contact Alison Kettering, senior editor, at aketteri@carleton.edu or aketteri@jhna.org for more information.

International Association of Art Critics

The United States chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA-USA) will hold its awards ceremony and dinner to honor the best exhibitions that opened between January and December 2013 at the studio of Izhar Patkin in New York on Monday, May 12, 2014, 6:00–9:00 PM.

Italian Art Society

The Italian Art Society (IAS) invites scholars in Italy this spring to attend the fifth annual IAS/Kress Lecture in Italy by Jean K. Cadogan, professor of fine arts at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, whose paper is titled “‘Maravigliose istorie’: The Mural Decoration of the Camposanto in Pisa.” Cadogan will share her intriguing work on the multiphase, comprehensive program of painting on the walls of the Camposanto in a presentation on May 27, 2014, at the Gipsoteca of the Università di Pisa. See the IAS website for details.

In addition, the IAS website publishes information about the organization’s activities at the upcoming forty-ninth International Congress of Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, taking place May 8–11, 2014. IAS will hold a business meeting at 5:30 PM on Thursday, May 8 (in Valley II, Garneau Lounge), plus three IAS-sponsored sessions (all in Bernhard 209) and an IAS reception (in the second floor lobby of Bernhard) at 5:30 PM on Friday, May 9. All members and prospective members are welcome!

National Art Education Association

The National Art Education Association (NAEA) is accepting proposals for presentations for the 2015 NAEA national convention, to be held March 26–28 in New Orleans, Louisiana. You must be an NAEA member to submit a proposal. The deadline is May 15, 2014.

NAEA also announces two new publications: Practice Theory: Seeing the Power of Art Teacher Researchers and Purposes, Principles, and Standards for School Art Programs.

Studies in Art Education, the NAEA’s professional refereed journal, is a quarterly publication that reports quantitative, qualitative, historical, and philosophical research in art education. View a sample digital issue. The cost for a one-year subscription is $20 for NAEA members, $30 for nonmembers, and $45 for Canadian/foreign subscriptions.

NAEA announces SummerVision DC: Hands-On Learning in Art Museums. Choose from two sessions: July 8–11, 2014, or July 22–25, 2014. Now in its fifth year, NAEA SummerVision DC is an annual event offered by NAEA in partnership with Washington, DC–area art museums. Upon completion of the program, participants will receive a certificate of participation with thirty clock hours of professional development. The cost is $495 (NAEA members) and $549 (nonmembers). Each session is limited to twenty-five participants.

New Media Caucus

The New Media Caucus (NMC) has announced the results of its recent board and officer elections. The NMC board of directors voted to add two new officer positions to its Executive Committee: chair of the Communications Committee and chair of the Events and Exhibitions Committee. A. Bill Miller, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin in Whitewater, joins the board and begins a one-year term as the chair of the Communications Committee. Joyce Rudinsky, associate professor at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, was voted as the chair of Exhibitions and Events Committee. NMC also welcomes new and reelected board members: Barbara Rauch, Kevin Hamilton, Joshua Selman, A. Bill Miller, Rachel Clarke, and Mat Rappaport. Rappaport was reelected as secretary, and Vagner Whitehead, associate professor at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, begins his term as the fourth NMC president.

The NMC board would like to thank its former president, Paul Catanese, for his leadership over the past six years. Under his tenure NMC has grown into an organization of over nine hundred members and developed annual programming that highlights the practice and scholarship of new-media art and theory. He now sits on the Executive Committee as immediate past president. NMC also wants to thank board members whose terms have ended for all the work they have done in the past years: Mike Salmond, Dima Strakovsky, Leslie Raymond, and Gwyan Rhabyt (president emeritus). Finally, NMC thanks the members of the Nominations Committee who oversaw the election: Mina Cheon, Meredith Hoy, and Mat Rappaport.

Pacific Arts Association

The conference of the European chapter of Pacific Arts Association (PAA) was held April 24–26, 2014, at the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum-Cultures of the World in Cologne, Germany. The conference coincided with the exhibition Made in Oceania: Tapa – Art and Social Landscapes. Learn more about conference registration, programs, accommodations, and special events on the PAA website.

Public Art Dialogue

At CAA’s 2014 Annual Conference in Chicago, Jack Becker received the 2014 Public Art Dialogue Award for Achievement in the Field of Public Art. In honoring his thirty-five years of service to the profession, Harriet F. Senie, cochair of Public Art Dialogue (PAD), observed, “I don’t think there is anyone in the field who has done more to legitimize the field of public art than Jack Becker. I can’t begin to imagine where we would all be without the Public Art Review and its ongoing response to and expansion of our enterprise.”

A CAA session on “Public Art and Its Role in Placemaking from an International Perspective” featured the speakers Marisa D. Lerer, Norie Sato, and Jack Becker. Chaired by Erika Doss, another session, “Vandalism, Removal, Relocation, Destruction: The Dilemma of Public Art’s Permanence,” featured the following presentations: “Yankees, Automobiles, and Other Hazards: Shattered Monuments and the Problem of Confederate Memory,” by Sarah Beetham; “Marking Memory: Ambiguity and Amnesia in the Monument to Soviet Tank Crews in Prague,” by Jenelle Davis; “Maintaining Problematic Public Art,” by Christine Young-Kyung Hahn; “Distant Stars, Black Holes, and Burned Out Sculptures: Media Obsolescence and the Trouble with Public Art,” by Julia E. Marsh; and “The Sordid Pasts of Public Art and How We Go About Protecting Them,” by Michele Bogart.

Society for Photographic Education

The Society for Photographic Education (SPE) is accepting proposals for its 2015 conference, “Atmospheres: Climate, Equity, and Community in Photography.” Topics 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; proposals are peer reviewed. Proposals are due by June 1, 2014. Visit the SPE website for full proposal guidelines.

SPE is pleased to announce these award opportunities:

• Future Focus Project Support Grant: Established to recognize exceptional photographic work, this $5,000 grant is partially funded by the SPE Future Focus Campaign. The recipient also receives a complimentary one-year SPE membership and two years of conference registration
• Honored Educator Award: Bestowed upon a career educator recognizing significant contribution to the field of photographic education. The recipient receives a lifetime SPE membership and a $1,000 honorarium
• Insight Award: Given to up to five members annually who demonstrate excellence in innovative teaching, sustained mentoring of colleagues or students, broad contribution to technical, critical, pedagogical, or visual aspects of the field, breadth or depth of exhibition or publication, and/or sustained presence in the field

Applications and nominations are due by July 1, 2014. Visit the SPE website for more information about these awards.

Society of Architectural Historians

The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) is accepting applications for its 2014 SAH/Mellon Author Awards, designed to support emerging authors publishing monographs on the history of the built environment who are responsible for paying for rights and permissions for images in their publications. The deadline is June 1, 2014.

SAH is also accepting abstracts for papers for its sixty-eighth annual conference, taking place April 15–19, 2015, in Chicago, Illinois. Abstracts may be submitted for one of the thirty-two thematic sessions or for an open session. The deadline to submit is June 6, 2014. Visit the SAH website for details.

Carolyn Garrett has been named SAH development director. She has over twelve years of experience in resource development and previously held positions at Changing Worlds and Chicago Foundation for Women.

Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture

The Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) seeks proposals of papers for its sponsored session, “Reconsidering Art and Politics: Toward New Narratives of Russian and Eastern European Art” at CAA’s 2015 Annual Conference in New York. The session aims to move beyond conventional binary narratives of art and power by inviting papers that challenge these interpretations and highlight the complexity of artistic responses produced at the nexus of aesthetics and politics. The chairs seek historically grounded case studies of Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian art from the Byzantine era to modern times that productively explore these issues. Interested contributors should see CAA’s 2015 Call for Participation and send proposals with other required materials to the session’s cochairs, Galina Mardilovich and Maria Taroutina. The deadline for proposals is May 9, 2014.

SHERA is delighted to welcome two new institutional members: the Russian American Cultural Center, an organization that sponsors exhibitions, arts events, and scholarly symposia in the greater New York area; and Centro Studi sulle Arti della Russia in Venice, Italy, a center for the research and study of Russia’s rich cultural heritage.

Southeastern College Art Conference

The Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) has announced the newly elected members of its board of directors: Sandra Reed, Savannah College of Art and Design; Reni Gower, Virginia Commonwealth University; and Ria O’Foghludha, Whittier College were reelected to a three-year term. In addition, Heather Stark of Marshall University and Ute Wachsmann-Linnan of Columbia College were elected to a three-year term.

The new issue of the Southeastern College Art Conference Review has been published. It is volume 17, number 3, 2013.

Visual Resources Association

The 2014 Summer Educational Institute for Visual Resources and Image Management (SEI) will be held June 10–13 at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. This intensive workshop features a curriculum addressing the latest 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 development. SEI is open to all individuals interested in visual resources and image management. Past participants have included: current graduate students and recent graduates; visual-resources professionals; information, library, and museum professionals; art historians; and digital-collection managers.

Founded over ten years ago, SEI is a joint project of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) and the Visual Resources Association Foundation (VRAF). SEI provides information professionals with the information and experience needed to stay current in a rapidly changing field, and significant networking opportunities. Registration for members of VRA or ARLIS/NA and University of Illinois staff and students is $595; registration for nonmembers is $675. For more information or to register, visit the SEI website.

Filed under: Affiliated Societies —

News from the Art and Academic Worlds

posted by Christopher Howard — May 07, 2014

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.

Michelangelo’s David Sculpture at Risk of Collapse

Michelangelo’s famous statue of the biblical figure David is at risk of collapse due to the weakening of the artwork’s legs and ankles, according to a report recently published by art experts. The findings, which were made public by Italy’s National Research Council, show microfractures in the ankle and leg areas. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times).

The False Promise of the Digital Humanities

The humanities are in crisis again, or still. But there is one big exception: digital humanities. In 2009, the nascent field was the talk of the Modern Language Association convention: “among all the contending subfields,” a reporter wrote about that year’s gathering, “the digital humanities seem like the first ‘next big thing’ in a long time.” Even earlier, the National Endowment for the Humanities created its Office of Digital Humanities to help fund projects. And digital humanities continues to go from strength to strength, thanks in part to the Mellon Foundation, which has seeded programs at a number of universities with large grants. (Read more from the New Republic).

The Adjunct Revolt: How Poor Professors Are Fighting Back

Mary-Faith Cerasoli has been reduced to “sleeping in her car, showering at college athletic centers and applying for food stamps,” the New York Times recently reported. Is she unemployed? No, in fact, she is a college professor—but an adjunct one, meaning she is hired on a short-term contract with no possibility of tenure. (Read more from the Atlantic).

Art and the Internet of Things: A Turning Point in Creative Education

In the art world’s internal sense of time, the degree show is in many ways the equivalent of New Year’s Eve: a point at which to collectively celebrate the birth of the future, while taking stock of the events of the past year. Reflecting on the 2013–14 academic year, it is clear that one of the most pressing issues is that of value, and the need continually to defend the arts in this respect. It is interesting to note the difference between making art for yourself—which holds value for you as an individual—and pursuing a career as an artist by studying for a degree in fine art or a related field. By doing the latter, you are implicitly deciding that your creativity also holds value for others. (Read more from the Guardian).

To Bind and to Liberate: Printing Out the Internet

“Printing the internet is not creative nor art. It is a waste of time and resources. Please, find something more creative to do.” So reads a comment on a petition on change.org. Directed at Kenneth Goldsmith, the petition was published in 2013 in response to a project the poet organized at LABOR gallery in Mexico City, where Goldsmith invited people from all over the world to print out the internet and send the pages to the gallery. (Read more from Rhizome).

Five Tips for Grant Research

It’s easy to get excited about the prospect of funding via grants, which carry a certain amount of prestige and the assurance that your work is (at least somewhat) funded, not to mention the fact that, if a funder is willing to give you a grant, they respect your work. But as the saying goes, only fools rush in. (Read more from Fractured Atlas).

Pat Badani at CAA: In Conversation with the Editor of Media-N Journal

At CAA’s 2014 Annual Conference in Chicago, Joshua Selmanand Pat Badanilaunched a discussion that examined what was happening at CAA this year as it applied to the New Media Caucus, to Media-N Journal, and to CAA members. (Read more from Artist Organized Art).

Filed under: CAA News —

« Previous Entries | Next Entries »

CAA News

• CAA News Today
• CAA Weekly Newsletter
• Archive 1976–2010

Categories

• Acknowledgments
• Advertising
• Advocacy
• Affiliated Societies
• Annual Conference

• Art Bulletin
• Art Fairs
• Art History
• Art Journal
• Art Journal Open (AJO)
• Artists
• Artists’ Materials
• ARTspace
• Audio
• Awards
• Blogs
• Board of Directors
• Book and Trade Fair
• Books
• CAA Conversations
• CAA News
• caa.reviews
• Calls for Papers
• Career Services
• CDP Highlights
• Centennial
• Committees
• Conservation
• Copyright
• Cultural Heritage
• CWA Picks
• Design
• Development
• Digital Issues
• Dissertations
• Education
• Emerging Professionals
• Event
• Exhibitions
• Fair Use
• Film
• First Amendment
• Global Conversations
• Google+ Hangout
• Governance
• Government and Politics
• Graduate Programs
• Grants and Fellowships
• Higher Education
• Highlighted Content
• Humanities
• Intellectual Property
• International
• Jobs
• Learned Societies
• Legal Issues
• Libraries
• Member Benefit Highlight
• Member Spotlight
• Membership
• Membership Benefit
• Membership Partners
• Mentoring
• myCAA
• Obituaries
• Online Resources
• Organizations
• Orphan Works
• Pedagogy
• People in the News
• Podcast
• Professional Development
• Publications
• Research
• Service
• Social Media
• Staff
• Standards and Guidelines
• Strategic Plan
• Students
• Surveys
• Task Force
• Teaching
• Tours
• Uncategorized
• Video
• Webinars
• Workforce
• Workshops

More +

Archive

• 2024 +
  • August 2024
  • July 2024
  • June 2024
  • May 2024
  • April 2024
  • March 2024
  • February 2024
  • January 2024
• 2023 +
  • December 2023
  • November 2023
  • October 2023
  • September 2023
  • July 2023
  • June 2023
  • May 2023
  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
• 2022 +
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
• 2021 +
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
• 2020 +
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
• 2019 +
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
• 2018 +
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
• 2017 +
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
• 2016 +
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
• 2015 +
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
• 2014 +
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
• 2013 +
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
• 2012 +
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
• 2011 +
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
• 2010 +
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
• 2009 +
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
• 2008 +
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
• 2007 +
  • December 2007
  • October 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007
  • May 2007
  • April 2007
  • March 2007
  • January 2007
• 2006 +
  • December 2006
  • November 2006
  • September 2006
  • July 2006
  • May 2006
  • April 2006
  • March 2006
  • January 2006
• 2005 +
  • November 2005
  • October 2005
  • September 2005
  • July 2005
  • May 2005
  • March 2005
• 2004 +
  • September 2004
  • July 2004
  • June 2004
  • March 2004
  • January 2004
• 2003 +
  • November 2003
  • September 2003
  • March 2003
  • January 2003
• 2002 +
  • November 2002
  • September 2002
  • March 2002
  • February 2002
  • January 2002
• 2001 +
  • December 2001
  • November 2001
  • September 2001
  • July 2001
  • May 2001
  • March 2001
  • January 2001
• 2000 +
  • October 2000

Privacy Policy | Refund Policy

Copyright © 2024 College Art Association of America, Inc.

50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004 | T: 212-691-1051 | F: 212-627-2381 | info@collegeart.org