CAA News Today
People in the News
posted by CAA — Aug 15, 2016
People in the News lists new hires, positions, and promotions in three sections: Academe, Museums and Galleries, and Organizations and Publications.
The section is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
August 2016
Academe
Jeff Bellantoni (photograph by Peter Tannenbaum)Jeff Bellantoni has left his position as vice president for academic affairs at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida.
Tamara Brantmeier has resumed teaching and research duties as professor of art, after serving as director of the School of Art and Design at the University of Wisconsin, Stout, in Menomonie, Wisconsin.
Kimberly Callas, formerly executive director of the Belfast Creative Coalition in Belfast, Maine, has taken a tenure-track position in the Department of Art and Design at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey.
Frank L. Chance, associate director for academics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for East Asian Studies in Philadelphia, has retired.
Alexis Clark, a lecturer in the Department of Art History at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has accepted a visiting assistant professorship in art history and visual culture at Denison University in Granville, Ohio.
Mia Reinoso Genoni, formerly John B. Madden Dean of Berkeley College and lecturer in the history of art and humanities at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has become dean of Westhampton College and associate dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Richmond in Virginia.
Glenn J. Hild, a professor of painting and drawing and interim dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, has retired.
Arnold KempArnold Kemp, associate professor and chair of the Department of Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, has been named dean of graduate studies for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois. He has also joined the school’s Department of Painting and Sculpture as a professor.
Donna Moran has been appointed dean of the School of Art and Design at Pratt Institute’s campus in Utica, New York, called the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute.
Michael Wille, professor of art at Illinois State University in Normal, has been named director of his college’s School of Art. He had previously served as interim director since 2014.
Museums and Galleries
Lucinda BarnesLucinda Barnes, chief curator and director of programs at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in California, has retired.
Peter Nisbet, chief curator of the University of North Carolina’s Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, has ended his service as interim director. The new director began work in July.
Halona Norton-WestbrookHalona Norton-Westbrook, associate curator of contemporary art and head of visitor engagement at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, has been appointed to the newly created position of director of collections.
Nicole Simpson has joined the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, as assistant curator of prints and drawings.
Organizations and Publications
Mariët Westermann has been promoted to executive vice president for programs and research at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, based in New York.
Propose a Paper or Presentation for the 2017 Annual Conference
posted by CAA — Aug 08, 2016
The 2017 Call for Participation for CAA’s 105th Annual Conference, taking place February 15–18, 2017, in New York, describes many of next year’s programs sessions. The chairs of these sessions invite your participation: please follow the instructions in the booklet to submit a proposal for a paper or presentation. This publication also includes a call for Poster Session proposals.
Listing 127 panels, the 2017 Call for Participation is only available as a PDF download; CAA will not mail hard copies of this thirty-seven-page document.
The deadline for proposals of papers and presentations for the New York conference is Tuesday, August 30, 2016. The deadline for Poster Sessions proposals is Thursday, September 15, 2016.
In addition to dozens of wide-ranging panels on art history, studio art, contemporary issues, and professional and educational practices, CAA conference attendees can expect participation from many area schools, museums, galleries, and other institutions. The Hilton New York Midtown is the conference headquarters, holding most sessions, Career Services, the Book and Trade Fair, ARTspace, special events, and more.
Contact
For more information about proposals of papers and presentations for the 2017 Annual Conference, please contact Katie Apsey, CAA manager of programs, or Tiffany Dugan, CAA director of programs.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Jul 27, 2016
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.
Great Colleges to Work For 2016
The annual “Great Colleges to Work For” survey was administered between March 14 and April 15. All survey-related content in this issue, including college presidents’ statements about what makes their institution a great place to work, was provided by ModernThink, which drew institutional data from the colleges and the US Department of Education. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Should Colleges Really Eliminate the College Lecture?
Despite the increased emphasis in recent years on improving professors’ teaching skills, such training often focuses on incorporating technology or flipping the classroom, rather than on how to give a traditional college lecture. It’s also in part why the lecture—a mainstay of any introductory undergraduate course—is endangered. (Read more from the Atlantic.)
What Learning People Really Think about Lecturing
Is there really a war on lecturing going on across higher education? Do learning professionals want to kill the lecture? Read Christine Gross-Loh’s “Should Colleges Really Eliminate the College Lecture?” and you would be forgiven in thinking that there is and that we do. The problem is that her description of the current climate bears little resemblance to reality. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
These Four Technologies May Finally Put an End to Art Forgery
Like method actors and bearded brewmasters, the best art forgers are obsessed with authenticity. But thanks to a handful of new authentication technologies, even history’s most painstaking efforts wouldn’t stump today’s art sleuths. (Read more from Artsy.)
How the Rich Are Hurting the Museums They Fund
For museum executives, the dirty secret of expansions has been that they are often motivated by the need to have some exciting new thing to rally board members and interest potential patrons. These institutions depend heavily on rich people to fund them. Those rich people like to pay for flashy new buildings; no one wants to donate to boring old museum upkeep. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Supporting Transgender Students in the Classroom
As the higher-education community continues to work to create a more inclusive learning environment, the needs of gender-variant students are too often overlooked. This article outlines a few ways faculty can create an atmosphere that supports trans-identified and gender-nonconforming students. (Read more from Faculty Focus.)
The Way We Publish Now
All signs point toward an open-access future for scholarship. The pressure from funders as well as from academic authors to publish openly is growing. So is the convergence of the affordances of open web–enabled publishing with the present-day means of scholarly conversation, much of it online. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
How to Resign
Leaving an academic job is different than vacating a nonacademic one. A professor can’t just give two weeks’ notice and walk out the door. I’ve submitted my share of resignation letters and watched others leave their posts, so I’ve gleaned a few tips on how to depart a faculty position gracefully. (Read more from Vitae.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Jul 13, 2016
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.
Academic Libraries and the Textbook Taboo: Time to Get Over It?
Librarians have allowed an unfortunate limitation of the print world to shape not only their behaviors but also their philosophy, to the point that many of us perceive excluding textbooks as a defining value of librarianship—not a service we regretfully forego because it’s not feasible, but a service we forego because “That’s not who we are as librarians.” (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
Textbooks in Academic Libraries: The Publisher’s Case
There is no precise and inarguable definition of a college textbook. Even the lines that define “college” are blurry: Do we mean elite, private schools like Harvard and Stanford; four-year state institutions; community colleges; the for-profit world; or MOOCs? The “college textbook,” in other words, is a slippery concept, and it is important to know exactly what someone means when uttering it. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
When College Students Need Food Pantries More Than Textbooks
As a more racially and socioeconomically diverse body of students pursues college in the United States, schools find themselves responding to more requests to stock food pantries and hand out vouchers for supplies at campus bookstores. (Read more from the Atlantic.)
How the Art World Responded to AIDS
How artists grappled—and continue to grapple—with the epidemic is the focus of Art AIDS America, an exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. In some 120 works by close to one hundred artists, the show captures the rage, anguish, and overwhelming sense of loss that accompanied the epidemic at its height, along with the activism it sparked and its continuing reverberation through the culture. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)
The State: A Friend Indeed to Artists in Need?
Createquity imagines that a healthy arts ecosystem is one in which opportunities to make one’s living as an artist are distributed equitably across socioeconomic levels. Unfortunately, this is not the case in many Western countries, where research indicates that people of lesser means are not as equipped to take on the risk involved in pursuing a career in the arts. (Read more from Createquity.)
Wonders and Blunders: What Makes a Great Museum?
What makes a museum building successful? Until the arrival of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao in 1997, this question may have exclusively focused on the best environments in which to view art. But the Guggenheim’s phenomenal success, which allowed the Basque government to recoup the construction costs within three years, moved the debate on to issues of branding and statement architecture. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Five Time-Saving Strategies for the Flipped Classroom
I often hear comments like “The flipped classroom takes too much time,” “I don’t have time to devise so many new teaching strategies,” “It takes too much time to record and edit videos,” or “I don’t have time to cover everything on the syllabus.” I also hear “I tried to flip my class, but it was exhausting; so I quit.” If these comments sound familiar, it might be helpful to create margins in your flipped classroom. (Read more from Faculty Focus.)
Real Estate for the 1 Percent, with Art for the Masses
Richard Serra, a stickler about the differences between art and architecture, once described most public sculpture in urban architectural settings as “displaced, homeless, overblown objects that say, ‘We represent modern art.’” In twentieth-century New York, residential and commercial developments tended to marry architecture and art with that kind of ambivalence, if they married them at all: lobbies with a few pretty, unremarkable paintings; courtyards with pleasant design pieces; or plop art by sculptors whose work rarely showed up in the museums around town. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Art In America is CAA’s Featured Member Partner for July
posted by CAA — Jul 04, 2016
As one of the most venerable American art publications for collectors, artists, art dealers, and art professionals, Art in America is CAA’s featured membership partner for July.
Since 1913, Art in America has been instrumental in defining the many art movements that coalesced over the course of a dynamic century. The magazine works with the finest critics, scholars and reporters, identifying trends and creating a record of key developments in the world of art. Having earned a reputation for the highest journalistic and critical standards, Art in America has helped shape the sensibilities and standards of generations of curators, artists, collectors and dealers.
Each month Art in America, the world’s premiere art magazine, provides in-depth coverage of the global, and often controversial, art scene. Every issue contains articles on both respected and rising talents, and reviews of current exhibitions around the world. Each subscription to Art in America includes the “Guide to Museums, Galleries & Artists,” published in August.
CAA members can receive a special discount (CAA members $24.95; regular $45) on a one-year subscription to Art in America. Simply log into your CAA member page to unlock the special discount code and apply it to checkout on the Art in America subscription page.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Jun 22, 2016
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.
Who Can Afford to Be a Starving Artist?
Take a minute and picture a world in which every adult on the planet is a full-time, professional artist. Arts funding and education are abundant, and folks spend their days in the studios, galleries, stages, pages, screens, and streets creating in collaborative groups or in Zenlike isolation. Would that be a good world to live in? (Read more from Createquity.)
Medieval Scots Used Art the Way We Use Social Media
Medieval Scots once gave each other postcard-sized artworks to forge social bonds, in the same way we post pictures on social media today, according to new research. The “postcards on parchment”—whose painted images included patron saints, the Virgin Mary and child, and highly decorated lettering—revealed status, allegiances, and values among the wealthy classes in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. (Read more from the Scotsman.)
Learn from My Mistakes as a Dean
If you’re reading this, you most likely are either a new dean or you aspire to the job. Perhaps you are about to start your first deanship this summer. Whether you become a dean at your current institution or at a new one, here are a few things to keep in mind—advice entirely based on what I did wrong in my first few years as a dean. (Read more from Vitae.)
Wrap Up Your Dissertation with a Writing Plan
Anyone pursuing a graduate degree has experienced the feeling that a project will go on forever. Writing a dissertation can be, and quite often is, the biggest academic undertaking that many of us have experienced. Grant applications, manuscripts, and literature reviews pale in comparison to the size of the average dissertation, and writing one can be an incredibly intimidating goal. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
How Do I Get My Foot in the Art World?
I’m a recent grad and want to learn more about the art world, so hopefully, one day, I can work in the arts. I didn’t major in art, but I took several art history and art classes and really loved them. I also love going to galleries and museums. Could you give me some suggestions on how to learn more? (Read more from Burnaway.)
Making “Skins” with Fluid Acrylics
An acrylic “skin” is a dry acrylic film that can be made of paint, medium, or a combination of paint and medium, that is not attached to any substrate. While acrylic skins can be made with just about any acrylic medium, gel, paste, or paint, fluid acrylics work particularly well since the consistency allows for easy pouring and spreading onto a casting surface. (Read more from Just Paint.)
Using Computers to Better Understand Art
A new field of research aims to deepen, and even quantify, our understanding of the aesthetic experience. Visual stylometry uses computational and statistical methods to calculate and compare underlying image features in ways humans never could before. Instead of relying only on what our senses perceive, we can use mathematical techniques to discover novel insights into artists and artworks. (Read more from the Conversation.)
Getty Research Portal Grows with a New Design and More Than 100,000 Digitized Volumes
Marking the occasion of its four-year anniversary, the Getty Research Portal has been rebuilt and redesigned, making it easier to explore the digitized literature of art history. The portal is a catalogue providing free access to books and journals made available online by contributing institutions. (Read more from the Getty Iris.)
Call for Applicants to PIPS Committees for 2017–20 Terms
posted by CAA — Jun 21, 2016
The Professional Interests, Practices and Standards (PIPS) committees address critical concerns of CAA’s members set out in the goals of CAA’s Strategic Plan. CAA invites members to apply for service on one of these PIPS committees.
Committee on Diversity Practices
http://www.collegeart.org/committees/diversity
The Committee on Diversity Practices supports the development of global perspectives on art and visual culture. The committee promotes artistic, curatorial, scholarly and institutional practices that deepen appreciation of political and cultural heterogeneity, as educational and professional values. To that end, the committee assesses and evaluates the development and implementation of curricular innovation, new research methods, curatorial and pedagogical strategies, and hiring practices that contribute to the realization of these goals.
Committee on Intellectual Property
http://www.collegeart.org/committees/ip
The Committee on Intellectual Property monitors and interprets copyright legislation for the benefit of CAA’s various constituencies. In so doing, it seeks to offer educational programs and opportunities for discussion and debate in response to copyright legislation that affects educators, scholars, museum professionals, and artists.
Committee on Women in the Arts
http://www.collegeart.org/committees/women
The Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) promotes the scholarly study and recognition of women’s contributions to the visual arts and to critical and art-historical studies; advocates for feminist scholarship and activism in art; develops partnerships with organizations with compatible missions; monitors the status of women in the visual-arts professions; provides historical and current resources on feminist issues; and supports emerging artists and scholars in their careers.
Education Committee
http://www.collegeart.org/committees/education
The Education Committee promotes the visual arts as essential human activity; as a creative Endeavor and subject of cultural and historical inquiry and critical appreciative activity, and encourages excellence in teaching at all levels. Its focus is on pedagogy at the higher education level in art history, visual culture, studio, aesthetics, and art criticism, and on the interface between arts teaching and learning research and practice.
International Committee
http://www.collegeart.org/committees/international
The International Committee seeks to foster an international community of artists, scholars and critics within CAA; to provide forums in which to exchange ideas and make connections; to encourage engagement with the international student community; to develop relationships between CAA and organizations outside the United States with comparable goals and activities; and to assist the CAA Board of Directors by identifying and recommending advocacy issues that involve CAA and cross national borders.
Museum Committee
http://www.collegeart.org/committees/museum
The Museum Committee provides a bridge between scholars and arts professionals in the academic and museum fields. It offers a forum for the discussion of issues of mutual interest and promotes museum advocacy issues within CAA. The committee lends support and mentorship for both seasoned and emerging professionals to protect and interpret the arts within museums.
Professional Practices Committee
http://www.collegeart.org/committees/professional
The Professional Practices Committee responds to specific concerns of the membership in relation to areas such as job placement and recruitment, tenure and promotion procedures, scholarly standards and ethics, studio health and safety, and artists’ practices. The Professional Practices Committee also oversees CAA’s Standards and Guidelines.
Services to Artists Committee
http://www.collegeart.org/committees/services
The Services to Artists Committee (SAC) was formed by the CAA Board of Directors to seek broader participation by artists and designers in the organization and the Annual Conference. SAC identifies and addresses concerns facing artists and designers; creates and implements programs and events at the conference and beyond; explores ways to encourage greater participation and leadership in CAA; and identifies ways to establish closer ties with other arts professionals and institutions. To this end, committee members are responsible for the programming of ARTspace and its related events.
Student and Emerging Professionals Committee
http://www.collegeart.org/committees/student
Established in February 1998, the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee is comprised of CAA members who are students, recent graduates, and experienced arts professionals with the intention of better representing students and emerging professionals within the larger CAA and academic framework.
In the past year the Committee on Diversity continues to address how CAA as an association can positively address diversity awareness, training and implementation and maintains a site for resources on diversity practices: http://www.collegeart.org/diversity/; the Committee on Intellectual Property has organized conference sessions on the new Fair Use Code and maintains a resource cite on intellectual property: http://www.collegeart.org/ip/; the Committee on Women in the Arts provides CWA Picks: http://www.collegeart.org/committees/picks and supports scholarship on women in the arts; the Education Committee organizes conference panels on issues in education, and in 2017 will examine Teaching Art and Art History to Non-Majors; the International Committee promotes interactions between scholars on a global basis and continues to support the CAA/Getty International Travel program that brings international scholars to the annual conference; the Museum Committee focuses on the history and theory of art museums and academia and has implemented its project—Resources for Academic Art Museum Professionals (RAAMP) supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Professional Practices Committee updates and develops important guidelines for the profession; Services to Artists Committee plans and organizes ArtSpace at the annual conference that presents prominent artists and designers, discussions on artist/designer concerns from safety in the workplace to professional development; the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee organizes panels related to emerging professionals and holds mentoring and mock job interviews at the conference. All committees are seeking new members with expertise in these areas.
New this year, each PIPS Committee may propose and present one session on a subject related to their committee charge. If a Committee wishes to propose a second session, that session must be vetted and approved by the Annual Conference Committee.
Committee members serve three-year terms (2017–20), with at least one new member rotating onto a committee each year. Candidates must be current CAA members and possess expertise appropriate to the committee’s work. Members of all committees volunteer their services without compensation. It is expected that once appointed to a committee, a member will involve himself or herself in an active and serious way.
The following vacancies are open for terms beginning in February 2017:
- Committee on Diversity Practices: 3–4 members
- Committee on Intellectual Property: 3–4 members
- Committee on Women in the Arts: 3–4 members
- Education Committee: 3–4 members
- International Committee: 6 members
- Museum Committee: 5 members
- Professional Practices Committee: 7 members
- Services to Artists Committee: 4–5 members
- Student and Emerging Professionals Committee: 3–4 members
CAA’s president, vice president for committees, and executive director review all candidates in the fall, and announce the appointments after November 1, prior to the Annual Conference. New members are introduced to their committees during their respective business meetings at the conference.
Nominations and self-nominations should include a brief statement (no more than 150 words) describing your qualifications and experience and an abbreviated CV (no more than 2–3 pages). Please send all materials to Vanessa Jalet, CAA executive liaison at vjalet@collegeart.org. Deadline: Friday, September 30, 2016. Kindly enter subject line in email: 2017 PIPS Applicant.
People in the News
posted by CAA — Jun 15, 2016
People in the News lists new hires, positions, and promotions in three sections: Academe, Museums and Galleries, and Organizations and Publications.
The section is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
June 2016
Academe
Susan Cohen has left her position as director of the Council for the Arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, which she led for ten years.
Kris Ebeling, formerly assistant director of enrollment management for the Art Academy of Cincinnati in Ohio, has joined the exhibit crew at the Cincinnati Museum Center.
Alison Hardie, senior lecturer in Chinese studies at the University of Leeds in England, has retired.
Larry Hinz has stepped down from his position as president of the Santa Fe University of Art and Design in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Mark Hoversten, currently dean of the College of Art and Architecture at the University of Idaho in Moscow, has been appointed dean of the College of Design at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Hoversten will start his new job on July 1.
Patricia C. PhillipsPatricia C. Phillips, dean of graduate studies at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, has been appointed chief academic officer and academic dean of the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She will begin her new position on July 1.
Charlie White, professor of fine art in the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has become head of the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Museums and Galleries
Judy DitnerJudy Ditner has been appointed Richard Benson Assistant Curator of Photography and Digital Media at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut.
Laura FryLaura Fry, the inaugural Haub Curator of Western American Art for the Tacoma Museum of Art in Tacoma, Washington, has joined the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as curator of art.
Francesca GianiFrancesca Giani, guest curator for the University of Oklahoma’s Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art in Norman, has been named curator of modern and contemporary art at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
Christine Giviskos, associate curator for the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, has been promoted to curator of prints, drawings, and European art.
Sarah Johnson (photograph by Sarah Murray)Sarah Johnson has been appointed director of the Cahoon Museum of American Art in Cotuit, Massachusetts.
Hannah KlemmHannah Klemm, formerly Fisher Collection Graduate Curatorial Fellow at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California, has joined the Saint Louis Art Museum in Missouri as assistant curator of modern and contemporary art.
Brett Knappe, formerly associate professor of art history at Baker University in Baldwin City, Kansas, has been appointed executive director of the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in Saint Joseph, Missouri.
Robert MintzRobert Mintz, previously chief curator and curator of Asian art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, has joined the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco in California as deputy director of art and programs.
Jennifer Stettler ParsonsJennifer Stettler Parsons has become the new assistant curator at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut.
John R. Stomberg (photograph by Gary Westcott)John R. Stomberg, formerly Florence Finch Abbott Director of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in South Hadley, Massachusetts, has become director for Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Martha TedeschiMartha Tedeschi, previously deputy director for art and research at the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, has been appointed Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Jacqueline Terrassa (photograph by Rachel Herman)Jacqueline Terrassa, managing museum educator for gallery and studio programs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since 2011, has become the new Woman’s Board Endowed Chair of Museum Education at the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois.
Julia Tulovsky, associate curator for Rutgers University’s Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick, New Jersey, has been promoted to curator of Russian and Soviet Nonconformist Art.
Jonathan Frederick Walz has left his position as curator of American art at the University of Nebraska’s Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln.
Claire WhitnerClaire Whitner has been promoted to assistant director of curatorial affairs and senior curator of collections at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum in Wellesley, Massachusetts.
Organizations and Publications
Jenny Norton-Wright has left her position at the Islamic Manuscript Association, based in Cambridge, England.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Jun 15, 2016
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.
Online Platforms Are Not Enough. Artists Need Affordable Space
In 2008, a bunch of friends and I built out and managed a studio space in Brooklyn. We signed a five-year lease, with a three-year option, and hoped for the best. We wanted to make our work and to innovate. This meant taking risks and failing often, and we needed low overhead to make this possible. (Read more from Creativz.)
The Best Intentions: Inside the Wild World of Charity Auctions
Benefit auctions have become about as ubiquitous as art fairs and openings. Charity sales are the primary means by which artists can pack a philanthropic punch, but they can also burden those who donate work with drawbacks and tax disadvantages. People have been questioning the model for years, but these conversations tend to stall in the absence of alternatives. (Read more from ARTnews.)
Against the Crowdfunding Economy
Which people get to live their dreams and which do not? In the art world, as elsewhere, success is often tightly correlated with pedigree and acceptance into elite institutions. And amid the increasing consumption of digital media, the conditions for success have become ever more fraught. (Read more from Jacobin.)
Public Art Piece Uses Augmented Reality to Explore Our Relationship to Technology
Public art has the power to shift not only our perspectives on specific sites, but also our relationship to space and location more generally. The artist Ivan Toth Depeña has created a multilayered public work of art, called Lapse, that considers these themes along with the ways we use technology. (Read more from PSFK.)
Copyright Q&A
The Copyright Alliance asked creators to submit questions about the copyright registration process. Rob Kasunic, director of registration policy and practices at the US Copyright Office, answered a few of them to provide clarity about the process. (Read more from the Copyright Alliance.)
How User-Friendly Are Museum Image Rights?
Display at Your Own Risk is a primarily web-based exhibition that examines the current status of digital cultural heritage and public accessibility to it through the online collections of some of the world’s most physically frequented museums. Spearheaded by Andrea Wallace, Display approaches the task from an internet user’s perspective to see if an institution provides the everyday person with enough information to avoid violating its image rights. (Read more from Hyperallergic.)
Liberal-Arts Majors Have Plenty of Job Prospects, If They Have Some Specific Skills, Too
The knock that liberal-arts graduates have a tough time landing a first job is confirmed by data. Yet a new analysis of help-wanted postings for entry-level jobs suggests that those graduates can improve their prospects by acquiring a small level of proficiency in one of eight specific skill sets, such as social media or data analysis. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Advice for the Newly Tenured
I would love to share with you the three biggest mistakes that I observe newly tenured faculty members make. If you know what those mistakes are, then you are not only far less likely to make them, but you also have the opportunity to experiment with new ways of thinking and working that will help you to truly enjoy your tenured status. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Art History Pedagogy and Practice Now Live on Digital Commons
posted by michelle — Jun 13, 2016
Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR), in partnership with the Office of Library Services at the City University of New York (CUNY), is excited to announce the launch of Art History Pedagogy and Practice (AHPP) on Academic Works’ Digital Commons platform. Published by AHTR, a practitioner-led, open-educational resource for educators who address art history, visual culture, and material culture, AHPP is the first academic journal dedicated to the scholarship of teaching and learning in art history (SoTL-AH). The result of a two-year initiative, AHPP responds to a long-standing need to advance, collect, disseminate, and demonstrate pedagogical research specific to the discipline. The call for papers for the inaugural issue, forthcoming in fall 2016, is available on the AHTR website.
SoTL in Art History
AHPP results from a two-year initiative that sought to examine the ways in which art historians devote time, effort, and energy to classroom teaching, curriculum development, and student engagement. Generously funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, AHTR began preliminary research in 2015, which included a field-wide survey conducted by Randi Korn and Associates and a literature review assessing existing pedagogical scholarship in art history. These findings were synthesized in a white paper that demonstrated the need for SoTL-AH to be acknowledged as a legitimate area of intellectual inquiry by the institutions and communities encompassing academic art history. As a peer-reviewed journal devoted to SoTL-AH, AHPP will facilitate this process by providing scholars a forum to share research on pedagogical topics and by encouraging further academic investigation and discourse around teaching and learning in art history.
Art History Teaching Resources
AHPP builds on the success of AHTR as a platform to exchange ideas related to pedagogy in art history. Founded on dual goals to raise the value of the academic labor of teaching and to provide peer support across ranks of tenured, tenure-track, and contingent instructors, AHTR began as a collaboration between Michelle Millar Fisher at the Graduate Center and Karen Shelby at Baruch College in 2011. Fisher, then a graduate teaching fellow with a background in museum education, and Shelby, then assistant professor of art history, organized meetings where colleagues shared teaching materials and experiences. These gatherings suggested potential for a digital forum to connect a wider community of practitioners and gave rise to the arthistoryteachingresources.org website, which launched publicly in 2013.
Since that time, the site has had more than 400,000 hits from over 91,000 educators in K-12, postsecondary institutions, and art museums, and from academic support staff including reference librarians and curriculum designers. AHTR’s administration has similarly expanded to a leadership collective of art historians, ranging in experience from early career scholars to those well established in the field, and an advisory network, assembled for expertise and leadership in art history, museum education, and digital humanities and united by their interest in advancing pedagogical research. The unique relationship between AHPP and AHTR will give scholars access to diverse resources about teaching and learning—including lesson plans and the AHTR Weekly on the OER—as well as peer-reviewed articles published in the journal.
AHPP in Digital Commons
In choosing the Digital Commons platform, AHPP is enthusiastic to extend the relationship with CUNY that was first established when AHTR was born in the Graduate Center’s New Media Lab with support from Baruch Learning and Technology Grants. In keeping with the site’s origins, AHTR also contracted CHIPS, a New York web-development studio known for innovative work with cultural institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History and 82nd and Fifth. CHIPS also redesigned the AHTR website in 2014 and created the AHPP logo.
The editors, editorial collective, and advisory board of AHPP are excited to join CUNY’s Office of Library Services in the broader open-access movement and look forward to the ways in which journal contributions will be used in the fields of SoTL, art history, and beyond. AHPP worked closely with librarians at the Office of Library Services to develop editorial policies and guidelines that are transparent to authors and readers.
AHTR and CAA
Members of the AHTR advisory board have recently collaborated with CAA’s Education Committee. At the 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC, Renee McGarry spoke on “Crowdsourcing the Art History Survey: How Communities and Conversations Might Help Shape the Global Survey 3.0” in a session cochaired by Anne R. Norcross, an Education Committee member. In addition, AHTR advisory-board member Kelly Donahue Wallace has been collaborating with the committee’s Denise Baxter, including leading a workshop on SoTL initiatives at next year’s conference in New York.