CAA News Today
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — Sep 16, 2016
Annie Borneuf reviews Kurt Schwitters: Space, Image, and Exile by Megan R. Luke. This “compelling study” of the German artist’s “largely neglected works of the 1930s and 1940s” draws on unpublished archival material to demonstrate how the artist arrived “at a new sculptural theory of space that pivots on the interchange between work and beholder.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Trevor Stark discusses the Museum of Modern Art’s first digital-only publication, Picasso: The Making of Cubism, 1912–1914. The volume focuses on “the artist’s use of unorthodox materials and his development of new and still little-understood techniques for manipulating them,” and the “interactive hyperlink architecture” within the book opens up new possibilities for encountering Picasso’s work. Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Amy R. Bloch reads Stefanie Solum’s Women, Patronage, and Salvation in Renaissance Florence: Lucrezia Tornabuoni and the Chapel of the Medici Palace. In this “stimulating book,” the author asks “whether or not laywomen commissioned significant paintings, sculptures, or buildings in the city during the fifteenth century” by focusing on a Fra Filippo Lippi altarpiece possibly commissioned by Lucrezia Tornabuoni. Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Caa.reviews publishes over 150 reviews each year. Founded in 1998, the site publishes timely scholarly and critical reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by the College Art Association. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate. Read more reviews at caa.reviews.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for September 2016
posted by CAA — Sep 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.
September 2016
Simone Leigh: Hammer Projects
Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA
September 17, 2016–January 1, 2017
In her first solo museum exhibition in Los Angeles, the award-winning artist Simone Leigh presents a selection of recent ceramics and a site-specific installation. Organized by the Hammer Museum’s assistant curator Jamillah James, the exhibition includes public programming related to Leigh’s ongoing research and work in public engagement.
“Working across ceramics, sculpture, video, installation, and social practice, Simone Leigh examines the construction of black female subjectivity and economies of self-preservation and exchange.” Her research-based methods include ethnography, feminist discourse, folklore, and histories of political resistance. In her ceramics the “vessels, cowrie shells, and busts are reoccurring forms, each making symbolic reference to the black body,” as well as referencing the vernacular visual traditions from the Caribbean, the American South, the African continent, and the black diaspora experience.
Leigh’s social practice includes work inspired by the outreach work of the Black Panther Party. In The Free People’s Medical Clinic (2014) and The Waiting Room (2016), Leigh locates her practice within institutions that are geared toward underserved communities, focusing on the rights of women of color as a central concern. “These free workshops empower visitors to take back the care of their bodies from agents of capitalism.”
Southern Accents: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art
Nasher Museum of Art
Duke University, 2001 Campus Drive, Durham, NC
September 1, 2016–January 8, 2017
This September, the Nasher Museum of Art opens its newest exhibition, Southern Accents: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art, which investigates “the complex and contested space of the American South.” The show will feature the work of sixty artists, including several celebrated and emerging female artists. “The art reflects upon and pulls apart the dynamic nature of the South’s social, political and cultural landscape.”
On exhibition is work by Catherine Opie from her Domestic series, which was a journey to photograph lesbian couples. Through two photographs taken with an 8 x 10 inch camera, Melissa & Lake, Durham, North Carolina (1998) and Tammy Rae & Kaia, Durham North Carolina (1998), Opie “documents the many different iterations of family, making visible an often underrepresented and misrepresented sector of society.”
Belle (2010), by Stacey Lynn Waddell, depicts a portrait of a southern belle, a term often used to refer to a wealthy, white Southern woman, with her head obscured by a replication of the bell from the British trade ship Henrietta Marie, known to transport both slaves and goods between Africa, the West Indies, and England. “By placing the ship’s bell, a symbol of the slave trade, upon the southern belle’s head, Waddell implicates her in the South’s slave-owning past. Leaving a disfigured portrait to be contemplated.”
Artists include: Kara Walker, Sally Mann, Deborah Luster, Xaviera Simmons, Amy Sherald, Ebony G. Patterson, Tameka Norris, Jessica Ingram, Deborah Grant, Minnie Jones Evans, Sonya Clark, Rachel Boillot, Jing Niu, Beverly Buchanan, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others.
Women of Abstract Expressionism
Denver Art Museum
100 West 14th Avenue Parkway, Denver, CO
June 12–September 25, 2016
Women of Abstract Expressionism at the Denver Art Museum features more than fifty major paintings by female artists from the mid-twentieth-century art movement. Featured are works by Mary Abbott, Jay DeFeo, Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Sonia Gechtoff, Judith Godwin, Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Deborah Remington, and Ethel Schwabacher.
The exhibition “focuses on the expressive freedom of direct gesture and process at the core of abstract expressionism, while revealing inward reverie and painterly expression in these works by individuals responding to particular places, memories, and life experiences.” The twelve female artists, from the East and West Coasts during the 1940s and 1950s, contended with gender politics in relationship to their work, as well as issues affecting women at the time. A video accompaning the exhibition explores these creative and political narratives in the artists’ lives.
In October 2016 Women of Abstract Expressionism will travel to the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, and then to the Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Springs, California, in February 2017.
Bharti Kher: Matter
Vancouver Art Gallery
750 Hornby Street, Vancouver, BC V6Z 2H7, Canada
July 9–October 10, 2016
Matter is the first survey of Bharti Kher’s work in North America. As the title of exhibition presented at Vancouver Art Gallery implies, her diverse practice is represented here throughout a variety of material, sensibility, and subject matter that explores human relationships, spirituality, the animal world, and gender merging as a whole experience.
Born and educated in London, Kher moved in the early 1990s to New Delhi, where she has lived until today. Her iconic bindi paintings unveil a personal language that speaks movingly about ritual and repetition. During the last two decades, the artist investigated ideas of hybridity through photography and sculpture by creating images that merge “classical” stereotypes of beauty with contemporary domesticity and female empowerment.
Based on everyday objects such as saris and domestic furniture, the absence of the body becomes notable in her sculptures. Kher comments on the complexities of personal and societal norms with particular emphasis in identity and gender that touches both local and global discourses. Though in Six Women (2013–15), her most recent project included in this survey, the physical returns through the artist confrontation of perceptions about the aging female body.
She: International Women Artists Exhibition
Long Museum
Xuhui District, 3398 Longteng Avenue, Shanghai, China
July 23–October 30, 2016
The Long Museum presents She, the first exhibition in China that features women artists from such a vast region and extensive history. Throughout the display of artworks by 105 artists from thirteen countries and that spans over ten centuries, the exhibition narrates the rise of women from a macro perspective. Divided into four chapters—self-annihilation, self-liberation, self-introspection and self-expression—this exhibition is a reminder to the visitor: learn what “she” has achieved, care about what “she” is pursuing, and support what “she” is longing for.
“The Annihilation of Self” evokes the anonymous talent and lives of women artists gone with the current of history in a male-dominated art system. “The Liberation of Self” touches on the discourse of women liberated from oppression and discrimination during early twentieth century. Under the influence of Western culture, a new generation of women advanced from household to society and actively participated in political and cultural events. “The Introspection of Self” presents the work of women artists who began to explore their own mode of expression from personal experience. “The Expression of Self” focuses on open discussions of “self” that, based on feminist discourses, will deepen our understanding of it. These expressions of “self” will eventually connect everyone.
Virginia Maksymowicz: Architectural Overlays
SACI Gallery in Florence
Palazzo dei Cartelloni, Via Sant’Antonino, 11, 50123, Florence, Italy
September 5–October 16, 2016
SACI Gallery in Florence presents Architectural Overlays, an exhibition by the Philadelphia-based sculptor Virginia Maksymowicz (b. 1952, New York). The project explores the link between the human body and architecture through a variety of media: photography, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. Over the past two decades, Maksymowicz has created site-sensitive work for very particular architectural spaces such as gallery corners, small rooms, and parlors with fireplaces. Informed by architectural theories of Vitruvius, Jacques-François Blondel, and Joseph Rykwert, the artist attempts to connect them visually in metaphorical and narrative contexts.
These conceptual and aesthetical explorations have led Maksymowicz to follow a complex visual trail of architecture and figurative elements. Her work considers the metaphorical implications of the female body, especially when tied to place—buildings, fountains, and other structures. The Erechtheion caryatids and the cult of Demeter, with their legacy in architectural ornamentation that extends into contemporary times, continue to symbolically undergird the material and social character of human society.
Maksymowicz has been a member of the Women’s Caucus for Art for nearly thirty years and was a writer for Women Artists News and New Directions for Women. Read more about the artist from the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Her work was included in Reconstructing the Feminist Past: Art World Critique, 1960 to Now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Affiliated Society News for September 2016
posted by CAA — Sep 15, 2016
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries
You’ve probably heard the rumors, but now it’s official: the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) will hold its annual conference in Eugene, Oregon, June 22–26, 2017. “Why Museums Matter: The Teaching Museum Today” will be hosted by the University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. The program will begin at 5:30 PM on Thursday, June 22, and offer tracks for: professional development (emerging and seasoned professionals); governance, best practices, and administration; curricular connections and new teaching and training models; relevance, diversity, and engagement; renovations and new facilities; and more. AAMG will post a call for proposals in early September, along with registration and hotel information.
American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works
The Weissman Preservation Center at Harvard Library and the Foundation for the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (FAIC) will present a multidisciplinary, two-day symposium called “Salted Paper Prints: Process and Purpose.” The program will focus on the preservation, characterization, use, and interpretation of the salt print process, now over 175 years old. Scholarly presentations will include the technical history of the salt print process (both positive and negative images), historical applications of the process for copying and disseminating information, and innovative materials analysis. While many salt prints have survived as beautifully preserved images with rich tonal ranges, they can also be prone to fading and color shifts. New conservation research has assisted our understanding of these fragile items, and renewed interest in the historical and artistic aspects of salt prints has paralleled this preservation research.
Papers are currently being accepted to present at the symposium. Applicants are encouraged to submit abstracts or drafts of three hundred words or less, along with a brief bio or CV. The symposium will include individual presentations of no more than twenty minutes in length and panel discussions on an applicable topic—submissions for both formats are welcome. Preference will be given to recent collaborative research that uses scientific and art-historical evidence to shed light on the preservation of salt prints, their technical evolution and identification, and the cultural impact of this seminal photographic process. Visit the call for papers page on the AIC website for more details. Abstracts must be submitted by December 16, 2016. The symposium will take place September 14–15, 2017, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Association of Historians of American Art
The Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA) invites you to attend its fourth biennial symposium, to be held October 6–8, 2016, in Fort Worth, Texas. Online registration is now open. To learn more about the schedule, obtain hotel information, and register, visit www.ahaaonline.org/?page=2016Symposium. The registration fee is $40, and the event is only open to current AHAA members. If you are not yet a member, please consider joining this scholarly community. Membership rates start at $35.
AHAA is also proud to announce a third issue of its online journal, Panorama, which includes a roundtable devoted to pedagogical approaches (featuring the work of Jules Prown), a special section on “Art and Invention,” an article on Kara Walker, new Research Notes, book and exhibition reviews, and responses to the question “Is American art history conservative?” AHAA is grateful for the efforts of Panorama staff, editors, and contributors, and for the support of our readers. As always, the association invites your input and contributions.
AHAA looks forward to gathering in New York for the 2017 CAA Annual Conference. The annual business meeting will take place noon–1:30 PM on Friday, February 17. The AHAA-sponsored scholarly session will be “The Gustatory Turn in American Art” (date/time TBA).
In the coming year, several board terms will expire. AHAA wishes to thank board members who have served the organization and to welcome nominations and self-nominations for the open positions, each with three-year terms. These include three appointed positions (membership coordinator, secretary, and web coordinator) and two elected positions (treasurer and cochair). The cochair alternates annually between academic and museum professionals; this year we invite candidates from the academy. Please contact AHAA at info@ahaaonline.org or chair@ahaaonline.org if you are interested in the position or wish to nominate a colleague.
Foundation in Art: Theory and Education
Celebrating its fiftieth year of first principles educational leadership, the KCAI’s Foundation Department will host FATE’s sixteenth biennial conference, “To the Core and Beyond,” to take place April 5–8, 2017, in Kansas City, Missouri. Registration for the conference is now open. Leading voices in fundamental art and design instruction will gather at the InterContinental Kansas City at the Plaza. Early-bird registration is open until September 30, 2016. Conference registration includes breakfast and lunch (April 6–8). For conference registration and more information, please visit http://www.foundations-art.org/conferences.
FATE has improved Silver and Gold Institutional Sponsorship levels this year and now offers a new biennial Retiree Faculty Individual Membership! See http://www.foundations-art.org/membership for more information. Also coming up is the FATE regional conference, “Technology Integration into Design Foundations Tech Swap,” which meets on Saturday, November 5, 2016, 10:00 AM–3:00 PM at the University of North Texas. The $20 cost includes coffee, muffins, and lunch (vegetarian option available). For more details, send an email to the event’s coordinator, Deanna Ooley, or visit http://www.foundations-art.org/regional.
FATE’s affiliated-society session at CAA’s 2017 Annual Conference, titled “Using the F-Word for Good, Not Evil: Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better,” meets on Thursday, February 16, 10:30 AM–noon in the Madison Suite, Second Floor, New York Hilton Midtown. How do we, as teachers, ignite courage and curiosity in students to explore and jump past their fears of failing? Discoveries occur when we allow tinkering, investigation, and getting things “wrong”—colossal failures hold surprising connections, connotations, and fruitful risks. That’s where the good stuff lives. “Don’t give up!” (see Miranda July). “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better” (see Samuel Beckett). This FATE session will proactively frame failure (pep talks), continue inquiries (experiments), and describe what to do when things go off the rails (glean the good). Speakers will present discussions starters, brainstorming, projects, ways of critiquing, pedagogy, and practice.
Italian Art Society
Last month the Italian Art Society sponsored two sessions at the annual meeting of the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (SCSC) in Bruges, Belgium. “Co-petition: Testing the Boundaries of Cooperation and Competition” was organized by Alexis Culotta (American Academy of Art, Chicago), and “The Holy Republic of Venice,” was organized by Allison Sherman (Queen’s University) and Eveline Baseggio Omiccioli (Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York). Along with the Historians of Netherlandish Art and the Flemish Research Centre for the Arts in the Burgundian Netherlands, IAS sponsored a special event at the Groeningemuseum in Bruges. Anne Van Oosterwijk, assistant curator of old master paintings at the museum, lectured on sixteenth-century painters’ workshops and practices in Bruges; the lecture was followed by a gala reception.
IAS has announced the upcoming deadlines for two travel awards: the IAS Conference Travel Grant for Modern Topics (deadline: October 1, 2016) provides a minimum of $500 to subsidize transoceanic travel to present in an IAS-sponsored session on the art or architecture of Italy from the early nineteenth century to the present. The deadline for the IAS Travel Grant for Graduate Students and Emerging Scholars, which funds travel to any conference at which IAS has a presence, is November 1, 2016.
IAS is pleased to announce that Karen Lloyd (Stony Brook University) has joined the executive board as acting vice president for program coordination.
Society of Architectural Historians
An SAH Study Day “Louis Kahn in San Diego and La Jolla,” organized by the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), will take place on November 4, 2016. William Whitaker, curator and collections manager of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, and Jochen Eisenbrand, chief curator of the Vitra Design Museum, will lead a special preview tour of their exhibition Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture at the San Diego Museum of Art, the first retrospective of Louis Kahn’s work in two decades. After lunch, participants will get a behind-the-scenes tour of Kahn’s renowned Salk Institute for Biological Studies with Whitaker, Tim Ball, director of facilities at the Salk Institute, and Claire Grezemkovsky, associate director of foundation relations. Sara Lardinois of the Getty Conservation Institute will be on hand to discuss Kahn’s designs of the teak window walls, which are currently under conservation by the Getty. A Study Program Fellowship will be available for a graduate student or emerging professional to participate in this Study Day. Registration opens on September 13.
SAH will present its 2016 Awards for Architectural Excellence at its seventh annual awards gala on Friday, November 4, 2016, at the Racquet Club of Chicago. Honorees include the philanthropist Richard H. Driehaus (for architectural stewardship); Sarah Herda, director of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and coartistic director of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (for public engagement with the built environment); and Peter Landon, founder and principal of Landon Bone Baker Architects (for design, planning, and sustainability). The awards represent a unique gathering of architectural practice and academic study, honoring the contributions of individual projects to the built environment. Gala proceeds benefit the society’s educational mission and the ongoing restoration of SAH’s headquarters, the Landmark Charnley-Persky House. Tickets are available at sah.org/gala.
New and Forthcoming in CAA’s Journals
posted by CAA — Sep 12, 2016
caa.reviews
Boris Charmatz’s If Tate Modern Was Musée de la Danse? (May 15–16, 2015) is the focus of a new multimedia review on the Scalar platform, If caa.reviews were performance.reviews?. Organized by Juliet Bellow, the project includes an introduction by Bellow, and three reviews of the performances at the Tate Modern by Arabella Stanger, Nicole Zee, and Tamara Tomic-Vajagic. The review presents the complexities of Charmatz’s transformation of the Tate Modern into a museum of dance for two days and features an interactive map showing where the performances occurred in the Tate Modern, in addition to videos and still images. Charmatz’s project challenges conceptions of museums as institutional spaces and incorporates audience participation and “unauthorized” performances. This review is part of a new caa.reviews initiative to review time-based media works.
Art Journal Open
Art Journal Open this summer launched a new cluster of conversations featuring artist residencies, with artists who have participated in residencies interviewed by those who organize these programs. Through the conversations, Art Journal Open examines how residencies operate logistically and conceptually, and how they contribute to creative production. Conversations published in the series include Caitlin Masley-Chalet of Guttenberg Arts (Guttenberg, NJ) with artist Diana Shpungin, Vanessa Kauffman of Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA) with artist Patricia Fernández Carcedo, and Amy Cancelmo of Root Division (San Francisco, CA) with artist Kija Lucas.
Earlier this summer, Art Journal Open published the third of a three-part series on appropriation as an artistic strategy: “Knight’s Heritage: Karl Haendel and the Legacy of Appropriation, Episode Three, 2013” by Natilee Harren, with a response by Nate Harrison. Recent features also include a review of Wetware: Art, Agency, Animation (Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine, February 6–May 7, 2016) by Charissa Terranova, and “Humans Have Been Human for So Long,” a dialogue between artist Shana Lutker and curator Mika Yoshitake on Lutker’s exhibition Shana Lutker: Le “NEW” Monocle, Chapters 1–3 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC (October 27, 2015–February 16, 2016).
Art Journal
The forthcoming Fall 2016 Art Journal features a project by the artist Penelope Vlassopoulou, whose source material is the phrases and drawings carved in underground cells by detainees during the Nazi occupation of Greece. In other feature articles, Mario Merz’s fascination with the Fibonacci series is the cruz of Elizabeth Mangini’s examination of works created within the intellectual and political ferment of 1960s Italy, and Emily Hage rethinks Romare Bearden’s historical and political position in relation to the dense collages he made for the covers of Time and Fortune. The Reviews section includes Eve Meltzer’s account of the film Eva Hesse and reviews of books by Thomas Crow, Claire Robins, and Joan Kee. An annotated bibliography by Roger F. Malina, the astrophysicist who also serves as executive editor of Leonardo Publications/MIT Press, explores the highly productive intersections of art and science.
Recently published in the Summer 2016 Art Journal is a project by the renowned artist Harmony Hammond. The covers of the journal were given a waxy coating to convey the nature of her intensely tactile paintings and prints, featured in a twenty-page portfolio. In the features, Amanda Jane Graham takes a close look at the interweaving of domestic and performing spaces in Trisha Brown’s 1975 dance Locus; Mechtild Widrich investigates the effects on the urban fabric of the new/old National Gallery of Singapore, created from a colonial-era court building; and Dan Adler traces the idea of an all-pervasive Apparatus in 1980s and 1990s works by the German photographer Thomas Ruff. The Reviews section begins with Chris Taylor’s examination of the film Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art. Other reviews examine a new book by Chika Okeke-Agulu and the exhibition and catalogue Hippie Modernism. An annotated bibliography by Audra Wolowiec explores the poetics of sound and language.
The Art Bulletin
The cover of the September 2016 issue of The Art Bulletin depicts Buddhist monks evoking ghosts in a nocturnal ceremony; the large detail from a polychrome silk scroll accompanies Phillip E. Bloom’s essay on twelfth-century Chinese paintings of Buddhist rituals. In other essays featured in the September issue, Judy Sund reconsiders nineteenth-century perceptions of Watteau’s Pierrot character as forlorn, Christine I. Ho contextualizes a brush-and-ink painting created by a collective in the early People’s Republic of China, and James Nisbet surveys intersections of global politics and imaging in the site-specific art of Walter De Maria. In his “Whither Art History?” essay, Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz explores Kongo visual and cultural practices in contemporary art.
The Reviews section, with a theme of “Urban Images, Memories, and Fragments,” includes four reviews of recent books on the cultures of fifth-century BCE Athens, seven Dutch cities from 1200 to 1700, early modern Rome, and Mexico City in light of Aztec civilization.
Taylor & Francis Online
In addition to their print subscription(s), CAA members receive online access to current and back issues of Art Journal and The Art Bulletin. Taylor & Francis, CAA’s publishing partner, also provides complimentary online access to Word and Image, Digital Creativity, and Public Art Dialogue for CAA members. To access these journals, please log into your account at collegeart.org and click the link to the CAA Online Publications Platform on Taylor & Francis Online.
Grants, Awards, and Honors
posted by CAA — Aug 15, 2016
CAA recognizes its members for their professional achievements, be it a grant, fellowship, residency, book prize, honorary degree, or related award.
Grants, Awards, and Honors is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
August 2016
Paul Catanese, Visible from Space Field Test: Sidney R. Yates Gallery, 2015, installation, dimensions variable (artwork © Paul Catanese)Paul Catanese, director of the interdisciplinary arts and media MFA program at Columbia University Chicago in Illinois, has embarked on a three-month residency at the Chicago Cultural Center’s Sidney R. Yates Gallery.
Ruth Ezra, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has accepted a 2016–17 Henry Moore Institute Visiting Research Fellowship. She will work on “Eliding Sculpture and Plane in German Art, 1490–1523.”
Chiara Fabi from the City Council of Milan in Italy has been chosen as a short-term research scholar by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. She will continue researching “American Sculptors in Italy, 1911–1949.”
Christine Göttler, professor of history of early modern art at the University of Bern in Switzerland, has completed a fellowship in residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Amsterdam.
Mary Beth Heffernan (photograph by Marc Campos)Mary Beth Heffernan, professor of art in the Department of Art and Art History at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California, has become an artist in residence at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino.
Patricia A. Johnston, chair of Department of Visual Arts at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, has been awarded a Terra Foundation Senior Fellowship in American Art for the 2016–17 academic year by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Her project is titled “Art and Global Knowledge in Early America.”
Kelly Kaczynski, an artist and lecturer for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, has been awarded a 2015 biennial grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation in the amount of $20,000.
Margarita Karasoulas, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware in Newark, has received the Douglass Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship in American Art from the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. She will work on “Mapping Immigrant New York: Race and Place in Ashcan Visual Culture” during the 2016–17 academic year.
R. Tess Korobkin, a graduate student in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has earned a 2016–17 predoctoral fellowship from the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Her project is called “Sculptural Bodies of the Great Depression.”
Laurette E. McCarthy, an independent scholar based in Indianapolis, Indiana, has been named George Gurney Senior Fellow for 2016–17 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. She will research “Anarchists, Mormons, Blue Bloods, and the Armory Show: Sculpting America.”
Helina Metaferia, an interdisciplinary artist, has been placed at the San Francisco Art Institute in California for a second consecutive year as part of the Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship program, organized by the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design. She will teach in the school’s New Genres program in fall 2016.
Alexander Nemerov, Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities and chair of the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University in Stanford, California, has been tapped to give the sixty-sixth annual A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. His series of talks, “The Forest: America in the 1830s,” will take place in spring 2017.
Joshua O’Driscoll (photograph by Graham S. Haber)Joshua O’Driscoll, assistant curator in the Department of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, has received the prestigious Paul Clemen Prize, which promotes the study of art from Germany’s Rhineland area. O’Driscoll’s submission, in the form of his 2015 doctoral dissertation on illuminated manuscripts produced in Cologne around the year 1000, is the first English-language study to receive the award.
Corey Piper, a PhD candidate in art history in the University of Virginia’s McIntire Department of Art in Charlottesville, has been appointed a 2016–17 Wyeth Foundation Predoctoral Fellow by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Her project is called “Animal Pursuits: Hunting and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century America.”
William L. Pressly, professor emeritus of art history for the University of Maryland in College Park, has become a 2016–17 senior fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. He will research “America’s Paper Money: A Canvas for an Emerging Nation.”
Sheryl E. Reiss, president of the Italian Art Society and former editor-in-chief of caa.reviews, has become the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference Fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago, Illinois, for spring 2017. Her project is titled “A Portrait of a Medici Maecenas: Giulio de’ Medici (Pope Clement VII) as Patron of Art.”
Fabiola Martínez Rodríguez, coordinator of art history for Saint Louis University in Madrid, Spain, has been selected as a short-term research scholar by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC.
James Rosenow, a PhD candidate in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago in Illinois, has been named a 2016–17 predoctoral fellow by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. His research topic is “‘For God’s Sake Don’t Call It Art’: The 1930s American Laboratory and Its Film Experiments.”
Claudia Sbrissa, professor of art and design at St. John’s University in Jamaica, New York, has accepted an artist’s fellowship from the Institute of Culture Brazil Italy Europe in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, for July and August 2016.
Emily Thames, a graduate student in the Department of Art History at Florida State University in Tallahassee, has been named Joe and Wanda Corn Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. During the 2016–17 academic year, she will research “The Life and Art of José Campeche: Enlightenment, Reform, and Identity in Late Eighteenth-Century Puerto Rico.”
Sajda van der Leeuw from the University of Oxford in England has been appointed Terra Foundation Predoctoral Fellow in American Art by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. During the 2016–17 academic year, she will work on “Earth in Focus: The Origins of Land Art through the Lens of Photography and Film.”
Nancy L. Wicker (photograph by Matthew L. Murray)Nancy L. Wicker, professor of art history at the University of Mississippi, has been named Allen W. Clowes Fellow by the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Between September 2016 and May 2017, Wicker will work on a project focusing on the roles of people—patrons, artists, consumers, and subjects—in Viking art.
Nancy L. Wicker, professor of art history at the University of Mississippi, has been awarded a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities, codirected with colleagues at the Catholic University of America and the University of Virginia. The grant will support pilot implementation of Project Andvari, an online portal that will aggregate digital collections of northern European early medieval art.
Hannah Yohalem, a graduate student in the Department of Art and Archeology at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, has been awarded a 2016–17 predoctoral fellowship from the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Her research project is called “The Johns Device: Bodies, Words, and Objects in Jasper Johns’s Art, 1954–1968.”
Books Published by CAA Members
posted by CAA — Aug 15, 2016
Publishing a book is a major milestone for artists and scholars—browse a list of recent titles below.
Books Published by CAA Members appears every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
August 2016
Hala Auji. Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2016).
Norman M. Klein and Margo Bistis. The Imaginary 20th Century (Karlsruhe, Germany: ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, 2016).
Valentina Locatelli, ed. Without Restraint: Works by Mexican Women Artists from the Daros Latinamerica Collection (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2016).
Neil McWilliam, Constance Moréteau, and Johanne Lamoureux, eds. Histoires sociales de l’art: Une anthologie critique (Dijon, France: Les Presses du réel, 2016). 2 vols.
Derek Conrad Murray. Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Transforming African-American Identity after Civil Rights (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016).
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — Aug 12, 2016
Zeynep Çelik Alexander reads Spyros Papapetros’s On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life, “the latest foray into the late nineteenth-century Germanic discourse” known as “empathy theory.” Behind the author’s web of connections between figures such as Aby Warburg, Wilhelm Worringer, and Fernand Léger, “there is a radical historiographical proposition.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Frances Colpitt visits Melvin Edwards: Five Decades at the Nasher Sculpture Center. Curated by Catherine Craft and featuring over sixty sculptures along with maquettes and preparatory drawings, the traveling retrospective is a “fluid and compelling exhibition” that encompasses both the “clenching brutality” and “seductive formalism” of the artist’s work. Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Krystel Chehab reviews Rubens, Velázquez, and the King of Spain by Aneta Georgievka-Shine and Larry Silver, an examination of Peter Paul Rubens’s and Diego Velàzquez’s paintings for the Torre de la Parada, a royal hunting lodge near Madrid. The authors “commendably broaden an understanding of exchanges between these two leading seventeenth-century painters.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Michael Guadio examines Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age, Dániel Margócsy’s study of “science as commerce” in “the early capitalist economy of the Netherlands.” The book “tells a persuasive story about visual culture, commodification, and the mobility of knowledge in early modern science.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Caa.reviews publishes over 150 reviews each year. Founded in 1998, the site publishes timely scholarly and critical reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by the College Art Association. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate. Read more reviews at caa.reviews.
AVIS Is CAA’s Featured Member Partner For August
posted by CAA — Aug 02, 2016
Did you know that as a CAA member, you can save up to 25% off Avis base rates when making a reservation with Avis Worldwide Discount?
As you plan your get away for the last month of summer, make sure you get the most out of your car rental options! Special discounts are available on a wide selection of vehicles from eco-friendly and fuel-efficient compacts and hybrids to stylish premium and luxury sedans.
The Avis Budget Group, Inc. is a leading global provider of vehicle rental services, both through its Avis and Budget brands, which have more than 11,000 rental locations in approximately 180 countries around the world.
Visit the special Avis page for CAA members to learn more about your benefits. And don’t miss the Avis discounts offered during the Annual Conference!
Members of CAA’s new Committee on Design
posted by CAA — Aug 01, 2016
In 2015 CAA established a Task Force on Design charged with suggesting positions the organization might adopt toward design, design studies, designers, design educators, historians, and theorists. In early 2016 the CAA Board of Directors announced it would replace the Task Force with a new Committee on Design to be among CAA’s ten standing Professional Interests, Practices, and Standards Committees.
Jim Hopfensperger, CAA’s VP for Committees, is pleased to announce the following members who will constitute the inaugural Committee on Design:
Audrey Bennett, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Holly Cline, Chair, Radford University
Federico Freschi, University of Johannesburg
Chris Garvin, University of Georgia
Matthew Gaynor, Kansas State University
Elizabeth Guffey, State University of New York at Purchase
David Howarth, Zayed University, Dubai
Zach Kaiser, Michigan State University
Sarah Lawrence, Parsons School of Design
Yelena McLane, Florida State University
Victoria Pass, Salisbury University
David Raizman, Drexel University
Bess Williamson, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Dan Wong, New York City College of Technology, CUNY
The Committee on Design will promote and advance issues in design practice, design history/theory/criticism, and design education through advocacy, engagement, and a commitment to the diversity of practices and practitioners. The committee will further support discussion and action in these areas to stimulate intellectual curiosity and advance skills that enrich the individual and society.
CAA is grateful to these dedicated members who will work to advance the interests of all design disciplines through their service to CAA.
A Radical Change: An Interview with Irving Sandler
posted by Christopher Howard — Jul 29, 2016
The art critic and historian Irving Sandler was a regular contributor to ARTnews and other magazines in the 1950s and 1960s. He is best known for The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (London: Pall Mall, 1970) and its follow-up, The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties (New York: Harper and Row, 1978). Born in New York in 1925, Sandler turned 91 years old on July 22.
He and his wife, Lucy Freedman Sandler, a historian of medieval art and an accomplished author in her own right, are CAA life members. Both scholars have a long involvement with CAA spanning several decades: Lucy served as president of the Board of Directors from 1981 to 1984 and organized the 1978 Annual Conference with her husband. Both have spoken many times at the conference; they have organized and moderated numerous panels and sessions as well. In addition, Irving was part of a group of CAA members who introduced a new format to Art Journal, back in 1979.
Sandler’s second book of memoirs, Swept Up by Art (Brooklyn: Rail Editions, 2015), follows his first, A Sweeper-Up after Artists (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003). Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, visited Sandler in May 2016 at his New York apartment to talk about his recent book and about his involvement with CAA over the years.
CAA: Let’s start with Art Journal. In the late 1970s you and a handful of others—Anne Coffin Hansen, Ellen Lanyon, George Sadek—got together to reinvent the publication.
Irving Sandler: That is pretty much it. We took the journal, which had become pretty moribund—it was sort of run by an old guard—and we turned it into something much more interesting by doing thematic issues, and also getting interesting editors to do it. It’s still working more or less that way.
Yes, it is. Editors have three-year terms—but they get a longer time span to take it over. You even produced one of those early issues, in Winter 1980, yourself.
Yes, I did. This issue was, to my knowledge, was the first issue on modernism and postmodernism, indicating the change that had been taking place in art, and in the art world as well. That was a very good issue.
You and your wife first joined CAA in 1954. How has the teaching of art and art history changed over the last sixty years?
Well, one of the things—the primary thing I believe—that’s changed would be the introduction of contemporary art into curricula. That simply wasn’t done. In places like the Institute of Fine Arts, you couldn’t write a dissertation on an artist who wasn’t dead for a century. And suddenly, not only do you have contemporary art, but the primary emphasis, in our art-history programs now, is on the contemporary. That’s a radical change to the entire approach to art.