CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Jun 08, 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.
The Disappearing Humanities Jobs
The arrival of annual reports on the job market in various humanities fields this year left many graduate students depressed about their prospects and professors worried about the futures of their disciplines. This week, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences released several new collections of data that show that these declines, part of a continuing pattern, are far more dramatic when viewed over a longer time frame. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
How Campus Policies Limit Free Speech
Colleges and universities are supposed to be places where freedom of expression flourishes. Sadly, that is not the case. At a recent debate at Yale University, 66 percent of the attendees supported a proposition that “free speech is threatened.” Yet places of higher learning seem more interested in “safe spaces” rather than in freedom of expression. (Read more from the Conversation.)
New White Paper on 3D Scanning and (the Lack of) Copyright
It may come as a surprise, but in many cases 3D scans will not be protected by copyright. This does not mean that scans are not important, but it does mean that people making and distributing scans should understand what rights they do—and do not—have in those scans. (Read more from Shapeways Blog.)
The Conflict around Diversity at AAM
This year’s American Alliance of Museums conference made a significant effort to meaningfully engage with issues of diversity and the inclusion of historically underrepresented populations. Among the most visible gesture was the Alliance Resource Center, which held gatherings and workshops in the MuseumExpo Hall throughout the conference that specifically targetied bias in hiring practices, the politics of unpaid internships, and the mechanics of credentialing. (Read more from Hyperallergic.)
US Senate Committee Submits Private Museum Findings to IRS
In November, the Senate Finance Committee sent a letter to eleven museums set up by collectors asking about their opening hours, attendance figures, and the role of the founders in day-to-day operations. Six months later, the results are in. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Artspeak: On Press Releases
Language binds humanity together. Which language we speak forms our community and identity and ultimately shapes our worldview. I believe language—communication in all forms—is meant to bring us together. What use are my words if you do not understand them? (Read more from Burnaway.)
Why You Weren’t Picked
There are two major downsides to not getting that tenure-track job you applied for. The second one is the less obvious but may be the more pernicious in the long run: no one will tell you why you weren’t chosen. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
How to Avoid Being Misquoted by Journalists
Researchers are often wary of speaking to mainstream media outlets for fear of misrepresentation. There are certainly pressing issues with how journalists simplistically present research findings, but scholars that deliver a clear, on-target message can help to ensure their research doesn’t accidentally get lost in translation. (Read more from Impact Blog.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Jun 01, 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.
Surface, Image, Reception: Painting in a Digital Age
Painting has always existed in relation to technology, when the term is understood in its broad definition as the practical application of specialized knowledge: brush, compass, camera obscura, photography, or inkjet printer. Yet it is only now that, through a physical presence and a shared role as content-delivery system, painting is so closely affiliated with the technologies it engages. (Read more from Rhizome.)
The Rise of Pirate Libraries
All around the world, shadow libraries keep growing, filled with banned materials. But no actual papers trade hands: everything is digital, and the internet-accessible content is not banned for shocking content so much as that modern crime, copyright infringement. But for the people who run the world’s pirate libraries, their goals are no less ambitious for their work’s illicit nature. (Read more from Slate.)
Raid the Database 2 with Nafis White
Raid the Database 2 with Nafis White is the second artist-curated digital project inspired by the RISD Museum’s historic exhibition Raid the Icebox 1 with Andy Warhol (1969–70). Each project in the series takes shape as the artist works closely with museum staff to gather materials, navigate the museum’s database and website, and delve into the original show. (Read more from Manual.)
Academic Publishing: Toward a New Model
Academic publishing is one area on which the web’s impact has been modest at best. Though a few open-access journals exist and many academics maintain blogs, journal costs have soared. Our writings remain less accessible, locked behind paywalls while libraries forgo buying print versions. While we understand why this has happened, a solution to it has been elusive. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
How Does a Museum Sponsorship Deal Really Work?
Museums have needed to diversify revenue streams, and forging deeper ties with corporate sponsors has become widely seen as imperative. These pressures come at a time when there is an increased awareness of contemporary art in culture—allowing museums to offer a certain kind of cred, or cool, even, in addition to the obvious exposure to their moneyed audiences. (Read more from Artspace Magazine.)
Six Things to Keep in Mind When Applying for Art Grants
With governments cutting funding for the arts, it is getting harder for artists and art institutions to obtain art grants, fellowships, or scholarships. The professional grant writer Ethan Haymovitz has put together a list of things to keep in mind when writing your application. (Read more from Art Report.)
Recap of SAH’s 2016 Annual Conference
Seven hundred thirty-eight members participated in the Society of Architectural Historians’ sixty-ninth annual international conference, which took place April 6–10, 2016, in Pasadena, California. Attendees hailed from thirty-six countries and forty-two states. A brief recap of the conference’s events follows. (Read more from the Society of Architectural Historians.)
The Real Threat to Free Expression
The threat to free speech on college campuses has become a crisis, although not the one commonly posited in public debate. How young people armed with smartphones became so skeptical of expression and what to do about it is a fundamental challenge for higher education. The answer will be to change the discourse from what to allow to what to listen to. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for May 2016
posted by CAA — May 16, 2016
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.
May 2016
Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–2016
Hauser Wirth & Schimmel
901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles, CA
March 13–September 4, 2016
Hauser Wirth & Schimmel opens its inaugural exhibition at its new Los Angeles space with Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–2016. On view is one hundred works made by thirty-four artists over the past seventy years. The show traces how women have “changed the course of art by deftly transforming the language of sculpture since the post war period.”
“Works on view reveal their makers inventing radically new forms and processes that privilege solo studio practice, tactility, and the idiosyncrasies of the artist’s own hand.” The exhibition explores a variety of artistic approaches such as stacking, hanging, and intertwining, examining the role of this work within current practices and expanded definitions of sculpture.
In addition to known artists from the prewar era to today, the exhibition contains commissioned works by a new generation of sculptors, including Phyllida Barlow, Karla Black, Abigail DeVille, Sonia Gomes, Rachel Khedoori, Laura Schnitger, Shinique Smith, Jessica Stockholder, and Kaari Upson.
“Perhaps most significant of all, the discreet human body—a central preoccupation of women abstract sculptors in earlier decades—has now disappeared. In its place, the artists in the final section of ‘Revolution in the Making’ offer an empty space for the viewer’s own body. Moving through, under, around, and within these new sculptures, the visitor becomes partner and participant in the continuing quest to articulate the female experience through art.”
The Sister Chapel: An Essential Feminist Collaboration
Rowan University Art Gallery at Westby Hall
201 Mullica Hill Road, Glassboro, New Jersey
March 28–June 30, 2016
Rowan University Art Gallery presents The Sister Chapel, a series of paintings celebrating a “nonhierarchical, secular commemoration of female role models from a female perspective.” Originally conceived by Ilise Greenstein in 1974, The Sister Chapel, which takes its name from Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, was last show in 1980 before the pieces drifted into different collections.
The exhibition is presented for the first time in the initially conceived, twelve-sided fabric structure that was designed by the artist Maureen Conner and that includes work by twelve other women. Greenstein’s eighteen-foot abstract ceiling is suspended above a circular arrangement of eleven nine-foot canvases, each depicting a figure of a heroic women. The subjects of these portraits were determined by the individual artist: Bella Abzug – the Candidate, a portrait of the American Congresswoman and social reformer, painted by Alice Neel; Betty Friedan as the Prophet, a portrayal of the influential author of The Feminine Mystique, by June Blum; Marianne Moore, the American poet, by Betty Holliday; Frida Kahlo, the celebrated Mexican artist, by Shirley Gorelick; Artemisia Gentileschi, the seventeenth-century Italian Baroque artist, by May Stevens; Joan of Arc, the sainted fifteenth-century French military heroine, by Elsa M. Goldsmith; Lilith, the rebellious first wife of Adam, by Sylvia Sleigh; God, a female manifestation of the creator of the universe, by Cynthia Mailman; Durga, the powerful Hindu goddess, by Diana Kurz; Womanhero, a conceptual embodiment of female strength and power, by Martha Edelheit; and Self-Portrait as Superwoman (Woman as Culture Hero) by Sharon Wybrants.
The exhibition at Rowan is only the third time the individual components of this work has been shown together.
A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s–1980s
Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art
Northwestern University, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, IL
January 16–July 17, 2016
“This exhibition replaces the indelible image of Charlotte Moorman (1933–1991)—playing the cello topless save for a pair of strapped-on miniature television sets—with a more complex but equally powerful portrait of the girl from Little Rock, Arkansas, who metamorphosed into a seminal and barrier-breaking figure in performance art and an impresario of the postwar avant-garde.”
The Block Museum of Art transforms its two-story building, with its ground-floor gallery transformed into a double viewing room for screenings of videos, including rare footage from the Charlotte Moorman Archive. With loans from private collections, including that of Yoko Ono, the exhibition presents Moorman’s commitment to taking the avant-garde to the streets. Through an assortment of artworks, film clips, music scores, audio recordings, documentary photographs, snapshots, performance props and costumes, ephemera, and correspondence, Moorman’s career takes shape in full form.
“I have asked myself why Charlotte Moorman is largely missing from the narratives of 20th-century art,” says Lisa Corrin, the Block Museum’s Ellen Philips Katz Director and curator of modern and contemporary art. “She is mainly remembered as a muse to Nam June Paik, but she was much more. In light of her influence on contemporary performance and her role as an unequaled popularizer of the avant-garde it is long overdue for her to be appreciated as a seminal figure in her own right.”
The companion exhibition Don’t Throw Anything Out, the scope of the Charlotte Moorman Archive at Northwestern University is explored with selection of objects and media ranging from Moorman’s double-barreled, heavily notated Rolodex to audio recordings of greetings and voice messages saved from her telephone message machine.
A Feast of Astonishments will travel in fall 2016 to New York University’s Grey Art Gallery in Manhattan and to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg in Austria in spring 2017.
Teresa Jaynes: Common Touch: The Art of the Senses in the History of the Blind
Library Company of Philadephia
1314 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107
April 4–October 21, 2016
The Library Company’s Louise Lux-Sions and Harry Sions Gallery presents Common Touch: The Art of the Senses in the History of the Blind, a multimedia exhibition of new works by the Philadelphia-based artist-in-residence Teresa Jaynes. Common Touch explores the nature, foundations, and limits of perception through the juxtaposition of Jaynes’s multisensory artwork—in which sight does not dominate—with historical materials documenting the education of visually impaired people in the nineteenth century. At its heart, Common Touch is the story of an artisan, a mathematician, a composer, and a surveyor. Drawing on their accomplishments, the artist developed “first person constructions” for each, infused with the geometric and abstract forms that were fundamental to the education of the blind in the nineteenth century. These forms were tools used to navigate and perceive the physical world—a radical approach years before the beginnings of modernism.
For more than twenty-five years, Jaynes has created installations and artist’s books based on extensive research in special collections and libraries, including the Rosenbach Museum and Library, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and the Newberry Library. Common Touch follows The Moon Reader, Jaynes’s interactive art installation that invites participants to learn through touch a raised-letter writing system for the blind invented by the blind educator William Moon in 1845. Designed as a primer, the book begins with an exercise for learning Moon that is then followed by “lessons” related to geometry, geography, botany, and astronomy. The stories and diagrams are taken from the Michael Zinman Collection of Printing for the Blind at the Library Company of Philadelphia.
As in previous Jaynes’s research-based projects, through art and artifact, Common Touch examines transformations in our understanding of sight while exploring the nature and limits of perception. The experience as a whole is intended to expand the “readers” understanding of historical and contemporary connotations of sight through curiosity, humor, and empathy.
Claudia DeMonte, Sarah Hinckley, Hayv Kahraman, Toyin Odutola, Lisa Ruyter, and Laurie Simmons: Making her Mark
Mattatuck Museum
144 West Main Street, Waterbury, CT 06702
April 17–June 5, 2016
The Mattatuck Museum presents Making Her Mark, a multimedia exhibition of work by six female contemporary artists curated by Lauren P. Della Monica. The artists featured in the exhibition—Claudia DeMonte, Sarah Hinckley, Hayv Kahraman, Toyin Odutola, Lisa Ruyter, and Laurie Simmons—range from emerging talent to renowned international artists. Such diversity bears witness to their experiences as female artists over the past few decades in an art world often criticized for undervaluing the contributions of deserving women artists. Their professional successes are testament to their talents and are especially compelling at a time of heightened interest in women’s roles in the arts and their presence on the walls of museums.
This show includes a range of diverse work from abstract and representational paintings to drawings, sculpture, and photography created by artists at various stages of their careers, each of whom is making a significant contribution to the overall cannon of contemporary art, all making their marks as leaders in the field. These artists address their personal experiences and backgrounds through their work, drawing upon an array of geographic and cultural influences—such as DeMonte’s Italian American heritage, Odutola’s African and African American upbringing, Kahraman’s childhood in Iraq, or Hinckley’s New England roots—and presenting these influences with an understanding of their continuing impact on their work. Ruyter and Simmons document popular culture’s influence by transforming pop-culture images into works of fine art. Viewing this spectrum of work collectively allows the audience to form a broader view of the contemporary social context as the works themselves also address global issues such as feminism, cultural identity, and universalism.
The exhibition is sponsored in part by the Connecticut Community Foundation with promotional partnership from Saint Mary’s Hospital’s Spirit of Women program.
Janine Antoni, Anna Halprin, Stephen Petronio: Ally
Fabric Workshop and Museum
1214 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107
April 21–July 31, 2016
The Fabric Workshop and Museum is presenting Ally, a series of works combining sculpture, installation, film, and performance created through the Artist-in-Residence Program. The art and dance project conceived and performed by Janine Antoni was initiated by herself in collaboration with the choreographer, theater, and community artist Anna Halprin and the pioneering choreographer Stephen Petronio.
In Ally, Antoni pursues her interest in bodily presence, touch, and movement through a series of unique collaborations in which the trio investigates the translation of ideas across forms and the vast potential that lies in their relations. The encounter between these artists from diverse practices and generations becomes a means of unearthing unknown affinities and historical entwinements, forging a new visual language and tactile experiences within processes of transformation.
Conceived by Antoni “as a kind of retrospective of my art making told through dance,” the project has evolved into a truly collaborative creation that allows the three artists to find a way to continue making new work while reflecting in their previous practices. The exhibition comprises four projects: Rope Dance, Swallow, The Courtesan and the Crone,and Paper Dance. Once a week for fourteen weeks Antoni will perform Paper Dance, an improvised movement performance that draws on images and concerns which have long preoccupied her as an artist. Antoni (born in the Bahamas, 1964) uses rolls of brown paper originally employed by Halprin (born in Winnetka, Illinois, 1920) in her seminal work Parades and Changes (1965). These performances take place within an installed arena of many wooden packing crates containing artworks by Antoni. Each iteration calls for Antoni to begin by unpacking one of her earlier works from a crate, whether it be a sculpture made of chocolate and soap like Lick and Lather (1993) or a photographic image like Mortar and Pestle (1999). Throughout the series of performances, a “retrospective” of Antoni’s previous works slowly emerges, remaining for a week, then disappearing as they are repacked into the installed crates.
Ally, in Petronio’s words, means a project “fundamentally about connection. And part of that is three distinct artistic languages coming together to meet in the gap between art and dance.”
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — May 11, 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.
The Digital Age of Data Art
Many artists use raw data produced by our societies as material, seeking innovative means of display or transforming it into a work of art. By blurring boundaries between art and information, data art dispels the myth of the romantic artist while offering a fundamental artistic act in a critical commentary of the digital age in which we live. (Read more from TechCrunch.)
Help Desk: Getting Paid for Curatorial Work
I’m a professional curator with over a decade of experience, mostly as a salaried professional. I’d like to do more freelance work, but curators seem to get paid nothing, absurdly little, or astronomical sums. How can I actually get paid for the work I do? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
Creating Value around Women Artists
Helen Molesworth, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, discusses why gender imbalance in museums persists, why we must expand our definition of “genius,” and what hard choices institutions must make in order to create a truly balanced program. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Beyond Cool?
I once confessed to having volunteered on a political campaign. My friend reacted with surprise: “But, nobody actually does that, do they?” With that roundabout question, he accused me of two crimes: one political, the other aesthetic. (Read more from the Point.)
Van Gogh Museum Wants to Share Its Expertise, for a Price
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has started a program to offer its professional services to private collectors, corporations, and other institutions. It says the move could create a new revenue stream as a hedge against declining government financing and global events like terror attacks that could have an effect on visitor numbers. (Read more from the New York Times.)
This Art Historian Teaches FBI Agents and Surgeons How to See
Amy Herman teaches people how to see. Her tools of choice are famous artworks from major art institutions all over the world. Her typical pupils? Cops, FBI officers, medical students, and first responders. Herman teaches a class that helps people fine-tune their observational skills—which often prove critical in solving a crime or conducting open-heart surgery. (Read more from Fast Company.)
Technology Can Make Art-History Lessons Come to Life
It’s one thing to study the elegance, beauty, and sophistication of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, but what if virtual reality or mobile technology could actually transport you there to experience the marvel itself, rather than just reading about it? A handful of organizations and technologies are tinkering in this space to make art education something that leaps out of the textbooks and engages students on a richer sensory level. (Read more from EdTech.)
Accessing Publisher Resources via a Mobile Device
Step 1: Google search on intermittent stem-cell cycling to look for article mentioned by a colleague. Step 2: Land on article at publisher website. Look at author list. Skim abstract. Yup, this is the one. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
Fair Use Is Up to Date in Kansas City
posted by Janet Landay, Program Manager, Fair Use Initiative — Apr 21, 2016
“Do we have to seek copyright permission to post on our website a scholarly checklist of twentieth-century paintings?” “Our museum wants to put an image of a contemporary sculpture from its collection on an invitation for a fundraiser. Do we need copyright permission?” These are the kinds of questions a group of art-museum professionals discussed at a half-day workshop on copyright and fair use sponsored by CAA with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and held at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, on April 8, 2016.
When Patricia McDonnell, director of the Wichita Art Museum, decided her museum could use input and guidance in applying the policies outlined in CAA’s Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, she organized a meeting for art museums in her region, believing that the support and information she needed was likely the same as her neighboring colleagues. As a member of CAA’s Task Force on Fair Use, McDonnell was familiar with the approach outlined in the Code, and her primary goal was to design an event that would generate immediate practical results. To that end, the “fair use summit” featured two elements that made it particularly effective. First, each of the eight participating museums was represented by its director, legal counsel, and staff member responsible for rights and reproduction. Second, each museum submitted a case study of a fair-use issue from their institution in advance, thereby providing practical examples for consideration during the workshop. As a result, the pragmatic discussions that took place exemplified the type of analysis necessary to determine on a case-by-case basis if the use of a copyrighted text or image is fair; the talks also unified the participating staffs in their understanding of this work.
The workshop was led by Peter Jaszi, a lead principal investigator on CAA’s fair-use project and a professor at American University’s Washington College of Law. After providing a brief history of fair use and how court opinion has evolved on this aspect of copyright law, Jaszi guided participants in analyzing each case study to determine if the use in that instance required copyright permission or if the museum could rely on fair use. Participants referred to CAA’s Code to understand the basic principles and limitations that applied in each case. In every situation, the key question was whether or not the use under consideration was “transformative.” Did it show the work of art in a new context, add to its meaning, or change our understanding of it? Was it an educational use? As the discussion continued, it became apparent that every user of copyrighted materials has to decide for him or herself if a use is fair. One museum might decide that the fair-use doctrine applies to a copyrighted image on the cover of a catalogue, for example, while another museum using the same image on the cover of a similar publication might decide to seek permission. It all depends on how each institution understands its own purpose.
The summit included the following museums: the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Kansas State University; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College; the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas; the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University; and the Wichita Art Museum. As a result of the meeting, the directors and staff of these institutions have decided to continue their work on fair use by sharing documents related to rights and reproductions―donation agreements, artist contracts, and the like. The goal is to develop additional best practices among their museums related to copyright and fair use.
Julian Zugazagoitia, director of the Nelson-Atkins, summarized the accomplishments of the meeting like this: “I think it brought immensely valuable information to all our participants and will allow us to use images in a more robust and self-assured way.” McDonnell also commented: “The CAA Code opens the door to a sea change in art-museum practice related to image use. Arriving at wise conclusions about interpretations of fair use with other art-museum colleagues provided grounded information and confidence about possible new practices.” What better results can one ask for?
Image: Shuttlecock (1994) by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen on the lawn of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for April 2016
posted by CAA — Apr 15, 2016
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.
April 2016
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Sidsel Meineche Hansen, DICKGIRL 3D(X), 2016, CGI animation, HD video with sound, 3 min loop (artwork © Sidsel Meineche Hansen; photograph by Andy Keate)
Sidsel Meineche Hansen: ‘SECOND SEX WAR’
Gasworks
155 Vauxhall Street, London SE11 5RH, United Kingdom
March 17–May 29, 2016
Gasworks presents ‘SECOND SEX WAR’, a multidisciplinary solo exhibition by the London-based Danish artist Sidsel Meineche Hansen. Born in Denmark in 1981, Hansen has led a research-based practice rooted in the exploration of nervousness and the body and its industrial complex in what the artist refers to as a “techno-somatic variant of institutional critique.” The visual outcome includes woodcuts, sculptures, and CGI animations often made by combining her own low-tech manual craft with outsourced, skilled digital labor. Hansen’s research is not only manifested as exhibitions, but also as cross-disciplinary seminars and publications.
‘SECOND SEX WAR’ includes several new works commissioned by Gasworks in partnership with Trondheim Kunstmuseum and supported by the Danish Arts Foundation, including a pornographic CGI animation, a series of laser-cut drawings, and a large-scale ceramic relief.
Between them, the animation DICKGIRL 3D(X) is presented on a virtual-reality headset, appropriating hypersexualised 3D models, “genitalia props,” and readymade “pose sets” that have been used for animating sex scenes to critique posthuman porn production from within. Also included is the CGI animation No Right Way 2 Cum (2015) and the ceramic sculpture Cite Werkflow Ltd (2016), which expand on the artist’s investigation and commentary on commodity status of virtual 3D models in relation to gender.
The exhibition also features a large-scale clay relief Cultural Capital Cooperative Object, made in collaboration with the artists Manuela Gernedel, Alan Michael, Georgie Nettell, Oliver Rees, Matthew Richardson, Gili Tal, and Lena Tutunjian. ‘SECOND SEX WAR’ incorporates and reflects on the artist’s working relationships—with her friends, the avatar EVA 3.0, and digital arts studio Werkflow Ltd.
Rebecca Warren: Pas de Deux (Plaza Monument) & The Main Feeling
Dallas Museum of Art
1717 North Harwood, Dallas, TX 75201
March 13–July 17, 2016
The Dallas Museum of Art presents Pas de Deux (Plaza Monument) & The Main Feeling, a commission and a sculpture survey by the British artist Rebecca Warren. Born in London in 1965, Warren is one of Britain’s most vital contemporary artists. Her restless and sometimes contradictory work challenges us to engage with the aesthetic conventions of an earlier generation of male sculptors through a freshly feminist sensibility.
The Dallas Museum of Art is the first US museum to commission a sculpture from Warren, representing also one of the first commissioned works by a living female artist to be installed at the entrance of an American museum. Pas de Deux (Plaza Monument) is the inaugural sculpture in a series of site-specific works located in the museum’s new Eagle Family Plaza, to be unveiled this April. Pas de Deux (Plaza Monument) refers to the dynamic, fluctuating relationship between art history’s most persistent binaries: male/female, high/low, old/new, Dionysus/Apollo, classic/grotesque.
To coincide with the installation of the first US museum–commissioned sculpture by Warren, the Dallas Museum of Art will present an exhibition of her work: Rebecca Warren: The Main. This survey of twenty works selected from ten years of sculptural innovations, from 2003 to the present, will include work from a pivotal transitional phase in the artist’s practice characterized by the emergence of an increasingly abstract style in her work, evidencing a distinct shift from her earlier use of softer materials such as clay to steel, and then to bronze, where the artist referenced the work of canonical male artists such as Auguste Rodin, Edgar Degas, and Willem de Kooning. From mystical prehistoric sources up to the present moment—Warren’s ambiguous, figurative forms disrupt entrenched notions of the classical ideal.
Edith Dekyndt: Indigenous Shadows
WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre
Av. Van Volxemlaan 354, 1190 Brussels, Belgium
February 2–April 24, 2016
WIELS Contemporary Art Centre presents Indigenous Shadows, the first major retrospective of the Belgian artist Edith Dekyndt. Through associations with material, environment, and support, Dekyndt (born Ypres, Belgium, 1960) designs complex forms and surfaces applying biochemical, organic, or nonorganic processes on unusual supports, combining the abstract and the concrete, the particular and the universal. Thus, her works in permanent transformation appeal to us through their strong material and corporeal character.
Dekyndt has approached her first retrospective creating a dialogue between new creations and already existing works, faithful to her practice of inhabiting an exhibition location and its environment and taking as a starting point its substances, materials, and specific elements. The environment she has constructed for WIELS has been freely organized according to the nature of the location—a former brewery—and consists of works based on copper, yeast, earth, water from the local river Senne, and bacteria used to brew the Brussels specialty beer, gueuze. In this way, she links the specificity of the site with the characteristics and general qualities of natural elements while forging connections between the particular and the universal, the concrete and the abstract.
The first floor welcomes visitors with a large surface of “domestic” dust, accompanied by a soundtrack with the song from a Native American rain dance. A carpet of dust collected at WIELS over the course of a year shines underneath a spotlight, which shifts like a shadow throughout the day. Following this nomadic, shifting frame the dust is meticulously brushed back under the light. This in-situ installation One Thousand and one Nights sets the tone for her first major retrospective in Brussels. On this carpet we are invited to enter her alchemist universe of projections, painterly abstracts and drawings, visual objects, and installations as embracing our permanent state of transformation.
Zoe Leonard, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson: Nothing Personal
Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL
Through May 1, 2016
Nothing Personal, at the Art Institute of Chicago, presents works by three feminist artists, Zoe Leonard, Cindy Sherman, and Lorna Simpson, in an exhibition “about the passage from personhood to persona.”
The piece The Fae Richards Archive is a culmination of Leonard’s meticulous work to create an archive around Fae Richards, a woman who did not exist. Instead, her persona exists through a mix of eighty-two publicity shots, film stills, and personal photographs that Leonard prints on historically appropriate papers. “The results show happiness tinged with melancholy and ask us to think about what it means to go through life behaving as a credible facsimile.”
In her well-known series Untitled Film Stills, Sherman enacts the role of actress during publicity shoots. While not re-creating any particular film or mimicking any particular actress, the artist stages scenes modeled on European art-house cinema, postwar genres, and female roles. “The characters weren’t just airhead accesses,” Sherman has said. “The clothes make them seem a certain way, but then you look at their expression and wonder if maybe ‘they’ are not what they clothes are communicating.”
Completing the triptych is Simpson’s video work Corridor, which features another accomplished female artist, Wangechi Mutu, playing the role of both a mid-nineteenth-century household servant or freed slave and a mid-twentieth century homeowner. In the video, the “two characters, each alone in her domestic world, bring these moments to life, moving in parallel or in tandem through their respective daily routines,” creating a dialogue across time. Accompanying the visuals is a soundtrack, composed by John Davis, with “echos of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ Chopinesque piano, New Orleans dirges, and free jazz.”
Laurie Simmons: In and Around the House
Addison Gallery of American Art
Phillips Academy, Corner of Route 28 [Main Street] and Chapel Avenue, Andover, MA
February 6–April 17, 2016
In In and Around the House (1976–78), Laurie Simmons pushed the boundaries of photography into the realm of Conceptual art, while focusing on stereotypical chores of a 1950s housewife. “I was simply trying to recreate a feeling, a mood … a sense of the Fifties that I knew was both beautiful and lethal at the same time,” Simmons said in describing the work.
The Addison recently acquired a complete set of fifty-nine photographs in Simmons’s series, created at the threshold of her career. “These poignant and melancholy black and white photographs reflect concerns and themes—artifice, and fiction, gender and identity, and memory and nostalgia—that continue to inform her work today.” The images reflect both an attention to the daily details of a housewife, as well as those of a photograph—whether through Simmons’s intentional use of lighting to cast shadows across the compositions or her shallow depth of field, directing attention.
In her photographs, the painstakingly wallpapered rooms are arranged with furniture, utensils, and other ephemera in a recognizable yet distinctly unnerving form. As the review in the Boston Globe by Mark Feeney commented, “Most unsettling of all is ‘Falling Off Chair,’ which shows a piece of furniture hanging on a tow truck hook—odd enough, but so far so good—near a doll lying on the ground: far too odd, and not good at all.” (February 17, 2016)
Sophie Barbasch’s: Training to Be a Girl
Despacio
Avenida Central – Calle 11, San José, Costa Rica
March 3, 2016–onward
Now on view both at Despacio and online are two book sets by the New York photographer Sophie Barbasch who, among other artists, was invited to curate and create a selection of books in Despacio’s Library in Residence. The library is an “ever-evolving selection of artworks, artist books, and unique handmade publications that together not only reimagine ingrained librarian systems but also examine literature’s role in contemporary art.”
Barbasch began by asking men on Craigslist questions such as: “Are you lonely?” “Is there anything you’ve never told anyone?” “Tell me why I’m a good girl,” “Please send me a picture of your bed,” and “Please write me a love letter.”
The questions led to two projects, a six-book set called Hello I Am Lonely, and the ten-book set titled Training To Be A Girl. Both projects contain original photography generated from her questions posted on Craigslist as well as photographs taken from Chat Roulette, transcribed dreams, reprinted psychic readings, and pictures from ads on Craigslist of wedding rings and dresses for sale. The full PDF files of her work can be found at http://sophiebarbasch.com/pdfs-of-books-with-full-text/.
People in the News
posted by CAA — Apr 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.
April 2016
Academe
Robin Kelsey, Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography and chair of the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been appointed dean of art and humanities at his school.
Robert Storr, dean of the Yale University School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut, has resigned from his position.
Museums and Galleries
Adrienne Edwards, a curator for Performa in New York, has been appointed curator at large for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Katharine Martinez, director of the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, has retired.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Apr 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.
Wikimedia Art Database Breaks Copyright Law
Sweden’s highest court has found Wikimedia Sweden guilty of violating copyright laws by providing free access to its database of photographs of artworks without the artists’ consent. Wikimedia, part of the nonprofit foundation that oversees Wikipedia, among other online resources, has a database of royalty-free photographs that can be used by the public for educational purposes or the tourism industry. (Read more from Art Daily.)
How Creative Capital Replaced the NEA and Taught Artists to Be Ambitious
Creative Capital is such a big deal in the art world that it even affects the lives of artists who don’t receive its awards. This grant-making organization, based in New York but serving artists nationally, was created in 1999 to counter the economic loss to artists when the NEA killed the majority of its individual artist grants. (Read more from the Stranger.)
How Do I Handle a Backlash against My Art Review?
I wrote a negative review about a show on my blog and received a considerable backlash to it. I eventually took the post down and feel like my entire art scene has blacklisted me. How do I write negative criticism in a small, intimate art community without upsetting everyone? (Read more from Burnaway.)
When Your Art Bleeds You Dry
Art should be ennobling or give us pleasure or, in Picasso’s words, wash “the dust of daily life off our souls.” But sometimes art makes people nervous and worried. Not necessarily because of the content but because it needs to be protected, conserved, and insured—and all those things cost money. (Read more from the New York Observer.)
Art in the New Plutocracy
In 2010, a cadre of muckraking activists started a project called Artigarchy. Its aim was to investigate the relationship between rising inequality and rising art prices, not merely to identify key individuals but to expose institutional relationships, for example, between banks and museums. How do the institutions of the art world shape and actually harm society? (Read more from the Chronicle Review.)
Will the Monograph Experience a Transition to E-Only?
The scholarly literature incorporates a number of different material types. Reference publishing and collections have perhaps been transformed more than any other content type. Why should a database be issued in print format at all? (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
Does It Count for Tenure?
I am starting a new tenure-track job in the fall. I have a journal article from this past year and another one coming out this spring. Will they count toward my tenure case at the new job? (Read more from Vitae.)
An App That Pushes Aside the Art-World Curtain
The process of buying and selling art has a reputation for opacity, but a new mobile app that promises to instantly provide price data could help open the market. The free app, called Magnus, uses digital-recognition technology similar to that of Shazam, which “hears” music to provide song titles, and Vivino, which reads wine labels and reveals ratings and restaurant markups. (Read more from the New York Times.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Apr 06, 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.
The Resurgence of Women-Only Art Shows
While some artists are ambivalent about being viewed through the lens of gender, the all-women’s group exhibition, which fell out of favor in the 1980s and 1990s, is flourishing again. At least a dozen galleries and museums across the United States are featuring women-themed surveys, a surge curators and dealers say is shining a light on neglected artists, resuscitating some careers, and raising the commercial potential of others. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Help Desk: Why Your Show Wasn’t Reviewed
None of my shows has ever been reviewed, even though I’ve exhibited my work in solo and group shows for almost six years. Press releases, personal emails, and newsletters have been sent from me and from the galleries. The galleries aren’t blue-chip, but they’re decent, and there’s an audience. Why can’t I get a review? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
How Critical Thinking Sabotages Painting
Critical thinking benefits disciplines based in words, and I use it myself when teaching modern art history and humanities seminars. But it’s a disaster when used to teach painting, whether to college art majors who want to become painters, to students who want to go into neighboring fields like graphic design or photography, or to biology students who decide to give painting a try. (Read more from Two Coats of Paint.)
We Need Ethnographic Museums Today—Whatever You Think of Their History
Since the 1970s ethnographic museums, perceived as warehouses of colonial loot, were charged with divesting non-Western works of the significance they once carried, in the heat and dust of ceremony, in the movement of dance or oratory, on the bodies of their former owners, in the flow of life. Among commentators and curators, there was much argument regarding approaches to display. (Read more from Apollo.)
Grade Inflation, Higher and Higher
The first major update in seven years of a database on grade inflation has found that grades continue to rise and that A is the most common grade earned at all kinds of colleges. Since the last significant release of the survey, faculty members at Princeton University and Wellesley College, among other institutions, have debated ways to limit grade inflation, despite criticism from some students who welcome the high averages. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Revising the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Dissertation
Like many graduate students, I wrote a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad dissertation, so revising it into a book has been something of a challenge. I’ve worked through it in two different ways. First, I’ve changed my writing and editing habits for what feels like the hundredth time. Second, I’ve adopted a strategy of recasting my chapters as journal articles. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
How Readers Discover Content in Scholarly Publications
Some survey findings make good sense and deserve attention on their own merits. Perhaps the most significant of these—which is a theme explored across the report—is that discovery patterns and practices vary across different sectors such as academic, corporate, and medical; different countries and levels of national income; and different fields and disciplines. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
Getting Down to Brass Taxes: An Interview with Tax Expert Rus Garofolo
Tax day is fast approaching—what’s a freelance artist or burgeoning arts organization to do? In anticipation of the IRS’s upcoming deadline, Amanda Keating sat down with Rus Garofolo, founder of Brass Taxes, to discuss some key questions that arts organizations might want to consider in their tax prep. (Read more from Fractured Atlas.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Mar 23, 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.
The Cost of Being Decent to Adjuncts
Even if the adjunct movement for better working conditions succeeds, most adjuncts will lose. That’s one bold claim of a recent paper on the costs associated with a number of the movement’s goals, such as better pay and benefits. While activists and scholars have criticized what they call the paper’s inherently flawed logic, the study’s authors say it is a first step toward a more critical dialogue. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Abstraction Isn’t Neutral: Sondra Perry on the NCAA, Subjecthood, and Her Upcoming Projects
Earlier this month Ella Coon spoke with the video artist Sondra Perry to talk about recent projects, her upcoming exhibitions, and her thoughts on a variety of other subjects, including the role of generosity in her life and work. (Read more from ARTnews.)
Halting Academic Incivility (That’s the Nice Word for It)
A report published last year in the Journal of Applied Psychology confirms what many might say is obvious: “Incivility … defined as insensitive behavior that displays a lack of regard for others, is rampant and on the rise.” This will not be news for academics. Consider the regular calls for an end to faculty incivility—the rudeness, abusive language, bullying, and general meanness that seem to characterize many of our interactions. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
European Museums Adapt to the American Way of Giving
Museums in the United States, helped by favorable tax laws, are sustained by a culture of giving by private donors and a universe of trained development officials. That culture isn’t common in other parts of the world, where governments often support museums. That is changing. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Managing an MOOC
Several years ago I wrote a MOOC, “The Modern Genius: Art and Culture in the 19th Century,” which initially ran through the Canvas network, and then Kadenze. I had never assigned the MOOC course to any of my students, but that changed this January, when my honors modern art students enrolled in the MOOC, and we experimented with a completely flipped classroom. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)
Whither the Digital Humanities?
The digital humanities can be viewed in two ways: as emerging and as emergent. The tension between them is a central force animating the field today. There are two areas—writing and the university—in which this tension is especially apparent, as digital technologies are upending, questioning, or reframing traditional or cherished assumptions. (Read more from Digital Pedagogy Lab.)
Pirating Papers
Peer-to-peer research sharing looks a lot like sharing of other forms of media, a new study suggests. While some researchers are personally opposed to copyright, others pirate research simply for the sake of convenience. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Asia Week Raids: New Details on the Christie’s Seizures
Last week, a series of five federal raids during New York’s Asia Week led to the seizure of at least eight looted antiquities and the arrest of at least one dealer. This is the first of several posts that will discuss the alleged smuggling networks disrupted by those raids. (Read more from Chasing Aphrodite.)