CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Feb 17, 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.
Where Are the Minority Professors?
On average, seventy-five out of every one hundred full-time faculty members at four-year colleges are white. Five are black, and even fewer are Hispanic. But that’s not the whole story. Among the higher ranks and at certain types of institutions, the faculty is even less diverse. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Seven Tips from the Top: Essential Job Advice from US Museum Directors
How do you become a museum director? That’s the question behind a new book of interviews—Eleven Museums, Eleven Directors: Conversations on Art and Leadership—by Michael Shapiro, the former director of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
How Do You Make a Living, Midcareer Artist?
Hank Willis Thomas is midway through the long, slow climb to success as an artist. It’s the type of career that’s seen interest but doesn’t feel solidly sustainable. He talked about the value of an MFA, the problems and advantages of living in New York as an artist, and what banking and art have in common. (Read more from Pacific Standard.)
Syllabus Adjunct Clause
Here is a sample adjunct clause that can be inserted into any syllabus for courses taught by temporary faculty. Please keep in mind that since situations differ from school to school—and even from department to department—the following may not be universally applicable as written. Therefore, if you do decide to use it, make sure to make the necessary changes so as to accurately reflect your own situation. (Read more from School of Doubt.)
Maintaining the Artist Within
Don’t lose sight of that which you love. More important, don’t let life take you out of tune to your source of creativity. An artist’s mind never rests, for everything they see, experience, and taste pours over into their vision. Whether you are a painter, writer, architect, chef, dancer, musician, or actor, the fuel for creativity and passion comes from every interaction you have in life. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)
Why Use a Paintbrush When You Can Make Mind-Bending Art with Code?
Computer code underpins many aspects of our lives. Usually we know exactly what we want that code to do—but what if we didn’t? This is the question posed by the Los Angeles software artist Casey Reas, who employs code to form abstract, bewildering, and literally unexpected creations. (Read more from Wired.)
Social Practice Degrees Take Art to a Communal Level
The first academic concentration in social-practice art dates to just 2005, at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Since then, at least ten other institutions have established graduate-level degree programs in the field, which is sometimes called community engagement, contextual practice, or socially engaged art making. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Ten Questions Gallerists Should Be Asking Themselves Now
Art Basel director Marc Spiegler gave a lecture at the Talking Galleries Conference in Barcelona at the end of last year, at a starkly transitional moment within the art world, and posed ten questions that every gallerist should be considering seriously because the answers they find will define their future. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Results of the 2016–20 Board Election
posted by Vanessa Jalet — Feb 04, 2016
The CAA Board of Directors welcomes four newly elected members, who will serve from 2016 to 2020:
- Carma Gorman Associate Professor & Assistant Chair, Department of Art and Art History, University of Texas at Austin
- N. Elizabeth Schlatter Deputy Director and Curator of Exhibitions, University of Richmond Museums, Richmond
- Andrew Schulz Associate Dean for Research & Associate Professor, College of Arts and Architecture, Pennsylvania State University
- Anuradha Vikram Lecturer, Graduate Public Practice, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles
DeWitt Godfrey, CAA board president, announced the election results during the Annual Members’ Business Meeting, held on Wednesday, February 3, 2016, at the 104th Annual Conference in Washington, DC.
The Board of Directors is charged with CAA’s long-term financial stability and strategic direction; it is also the association’s governing body. The board sets policy regarding all aspects of CAA’s activities, including publishing, the Annual Conference, awards and fellowships, advocacy, and committee procedures.
For the annual board election, CAA members vote for no more than four candidates; they also cast votes for write-in candidates (who must be CAA members). The four candidates receiving the most votes are elected to the board.
News from the Art and Academic World
posted by Christopher Howard — Feb 03, 2016
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Who Should Pay for the Arts in America?
After fifty years, the ethos on which the National Endowment for the Arts was founded—inclusion and community—has been eroded by consistent political attack. As the NEA’s budget has been slashed, private donors and foundations have jumped in to fill the gap, but the institutions they support, and that receive the bulk of arts funding in this country, aren’t reaching the people the NEA was founded to help serve. (Read more from the Atlantic.)
New White Paper Examines Arts Organizations of Color
The National Center for Arts Research at Southern Methodist University released a white paper titled “Does ‘Strong and Effective’ Look Different for Culturally Specific Organizations?” that examines the distinguishing characteristics of arts organizations primarily serving Asian American, African American, and Hispanic/Latino communities. The study is designed to provide insights, based on measurable data, about the operating contexts and unique challenges that these organizations face. (Read more from the National Center for Arts Research.)
New York Arts Organizations Lack the Diversity of Their City
New York City’s cultural sector does not match the demographic diversity of the its population, though the sector is more diverse than arts organizations on the national level, according to a survey released by the city’s Cultural Affairs Department. By examining the staff and leadership at city‐funded nonprofit cultural organizations, the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio hoped to show its commitment to promoting and building diversity among arts institutions. (Read more from the New York Times.)
How University Museums Bridge the Gap between Art and Science
It is hard to resist looking at images of your own brain. When the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive reopens on January 31 in a new $112 million building, visitors will see intricate drawings of radiolaria by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel and sketches of the human brain’s branching neural networks by the Spanish-born Santiago Ramón y Cajal, known as the father of neuroscience. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Academics Get Real
Academic bios—such as those for department or personal websites, conference proposals, and social media—are supposed to simultaneously explain scholars’ work and “sell” their potential. While they aim to make one seem intellectually desirable and hirable, authenticity isn’t usually a priority. But what if academic bios got real? (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
The Limits of Open
As Coursera tweaks its business model to find a financially viable way to offer massive open online courses, critics say its MOOCs are becoming less open. Coursera has announced the release of dozens of new courses and course sequences, which it calls Specializations, in subjects ranging from career brand management to creative writing. But many new MOOCs cost $79 up front for the first of five courses or $474 prepaid for the entire program. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Teaching “Selfies”
If you’re looking for ways to improve your teaching this year, record yourself teaching in the classroom. There are many reasons why this form of self-observation works. As uncomfortable as it can be to see yourself on screen, recording yourself is also a powerful tool for reflection. It is relatively easy, low-risk, and totally customizable (Read more from GradHacker.)
What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us
College course syllabuses are curious documents that represent the best efforts by instructors to distill human knowledge on a given subject into fourteen-week chunks. They structure the main activity of colleges and universities. And then, for the most part, they disappear. Despite the bureaucratization of higher education over the past few decades, syllabuses have escaped systematic treatment. (Read more from the New York Times.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Feb 03, 2016
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Who Should Pay for the Arts in America?
After fifty years, the ethos on which the National Endowment for the Arts was founded—inclusion and community—has been eroded by consistent political attack. As the NEA’s budget has been slashed, private donors and foundations have jumped in to fill the gap, but the institutions they support, and that receive the bulk of arts funding in this country, aren’t reaching the people the NEA was founded to help serve. (Read more from the Atlantic.)
New White Paper Examines Arts Organizations of Color
The National Center for Arts Research at Southern Methodist University released a white paper titled “Does ‘Strong and Effective’ Look Different for Culturally Specific Organizations?” that examines the distinguishing characteristics of arts organizations primarily serving Asian American, African American, and Hispanic/Latino communities. The study is designed to provide insights, based on measurable data, about the operating contexts and unique challenges that these organizations face. (Read more from the National Center for Arts Research.)
New York Arts Organizations Lack the Diversity of Their City
New York City’s cultural sector does not match the demographic diversity of the its population, though the sector is more diverse than arts organizations on the national level, according to a survey released by the city’s Cultural Affairs Department. By examining the staff and leadership at city‐funded nonprofit cultural organizations, the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio hoped to show its commitment to promoting and building diversity among arts institutions. (Read more from the New York Times.)
How University Museums Bridge the Gap between Art and Science
It is hard to resist looking at images of your own brain. When the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive reopens on January 31 in a new $112 million building, visitors will see intricate drawings of radiolaria by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel and sketches of the human brain’s branching neural networks by the Spanish-born Santiago Ramón y Cajal, known as the father of neuroscience. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Academics Get Real
Academic bios—such as those for department or personal websites, conference proposals, and social media—are supposed to simultaneously explain scholars’ work and “sell” their potential. While they aim to make one seem intellectually desirable and hirable, authenticity isn’t usually a priority. But what if academic bios got real? (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
The Limits of Open
As Coursera tweaks its business model to find a financially viable way to offer massive open online courses, critics say its MOOCs are becoming less open. Coursera has announced the release of dozens of new courses and course sequences, which it calls Specializations, in subjects ranging from career brand management to creative writing. But many new MOOCs cost $79 up front for the first of five courses or $474 prepaid for the entire program. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Teaching “Selfies”
If you’re looking for ways to improve your teaching this year, record yourself teaching in the classroom. There are many reasons why this form of self-observation works. As uncomfortable as it can be to see yourself on screen, recording yourself is also a powerful tool for reflection. It is relatively easy, low-risk, and totally customizable (Read more from GradHacker.)
What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us
College course syllabuses are curious documents that represent the best efforts by instructors to distill human knowledge on a given subject into fourteen-week chunks. They structure the main activity of colleges and universities. And then, for the most part, they disappear. Despite the bureaucratization of higher education over the past few decades, syllabuses have escaped systematic treatment. (Read more from the New York Times.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Jan 27, 2016
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Artists’ Rejection Letters Add Up—Should They Hold onto Them?
Nothing irks artists more than criticism and rejection. A lot of meaning is imputed to what is often a form letter: the art isn’t good; the artist is a bad artist; the artist is an idiot for having submitted artwork in the first place; the person who sent the letter is stupid and biased; that person expressed the considered opinion of the entire world. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)
When Students Won’t Do the Reading
Is there a more common lament among college instructors than “Why won’t students just do the reading?” It’s an important and difficult question. In my experience, many students understand, at least in the abstract, that the reading is important. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Museums Are Keeping a Ton of the World’s Most Famous Art Locked Away in Storage
Most of Georgia O’Keeffe’s work is in storage. Nearly half of Pablo Picasso’s oil paintings are put away. Not a single Egon Schiele drawing is on display. Since the advent of public galleries in the seventeenth century, museums have amassed huge collections of art for society’s benefit. But just a tiny fraction of that art is actually open for people to view and enjoy. (Read more from Quartz.)
A Brief History of Women in Video Art
In the 1960s, following the postwar advent of television in America, video cameras became available to consumers and quickly found their way into the hands of the international art scene. Unlike traditional mediums, however, this one wasn’t dominated by men. (Read more from Artsy.)
AAUP Member Presses to Launch Diversity Fellowship
The Association of American University Presses congratulates the University of Washington on the receipt of a $682,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create a pipeline program to diversify academic publishing through funded acquisitions apprenticeships at four university presses. (Read more from the Association of American University Presses.)
Essential PhD Tips: Ten Articles All Doctoral Students Should Read
If you’re still deciding whether to study for a doctorate, or even if you’re nearing the end of your PhD and are thinking about your next steps, we’ve selected ten articles that you really should take a look at. They cover everything from selecting your topic to securing a top job when your years of hard graft come to an end. (Read more from Times Higher Education.)
Feminist Art Historian Amelia Jones Believes That Art History Should Embrace New Narratives and Diverse Voices
“What I am trying to do in my academic life is change art discourse. I want to change the field of art history. It is time to have a new narrative and it is time to bring new, more diverse voices to the field.” So maintains Amelia Jones, vice dean of critical studies at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)
Art-Forgery Trial Set to Begin
On the verge of a trial over the art-forgery scandal that sank one of New York’s most venerable galleries, this much is agreed upon: the black-and-red painting that sold for more than $8 million in 2004 is definitely not by Mark Rothko. Whether that fact was known by Ann Freedman, the former president of Knoedler and Co. who sold the work to the family of Sotheby’s chairman Domenico De Sole, is another matter. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)
Recipients of the 2015 Professional Development Fellowships
posted by Christopher Howard — Jan 22, 2016
CAA has awarded four 2015 Professional-Development Fellowships—two in the visual arts and two in art history—to graduate students in MFA and PhD programs across the United States. In addition, CAA has named two honorable mentions in art history and four in the visual arts. The fellows and honorable mentions also receive a complimentary one-year CAA membership and free registration for the 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC.
Receiving fellowships in the visual arts are:
- Delano Dunn, School of Visual Arts, $10,000
- Derrick Woods-Morrow, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, $4,000 (gift of the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation)
The two recipients of the fellowship in art history are:
- Marin Sarvé-Tarr, University of Chicago, $10,000
- Emilie Boone, Northwestern University, $2,500 (gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Museum Educational Trust)
The honorable mentions for art history go to: Adrian Anagnost, University of Chicago; and Monica Bravo, Brown University. For the visual arts, honorable mentions are bestowed upon: Zhiwan Cheung, Carnegie Mellon University; Sarah Hewitt, Purchase College, State University of New York; Victoria Maidhof, San Francisco Art Institute; and Kaiya Rainbolt, San Diego State University.
DeWitt Godfrey, president of the CAA Board of Directors, will formally recognize the fellows and honorable mentions at the 104th Annual Conference during Convocation, taking place on Wednesday evening, February 3, 2016, at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel.
CAA’s fellowship program supports promising artists and art historians who are enrolled in MFA and PhD programs nationwide. Awards are intended to help them with various aspects of their work, whether for job-search expenses or purchasing materials for the studio. CAA believes a grant of this kind, without contingencies, can best facilitate the transition between graduate studies and professional careers. The program is open to all eligible graduate students in the visual arts and art history. Applications for the 2016 fellowship cycle will open in late spring.
Fellows in the Visual Arts
Delano Dunn
Born in Los Angeles, California, Delano Dunn currently lives and works in New York. Through painting, mixed media, and collage, he explores questions of racial identity and perception through various contexts, ranging from the personal to the political and drawing from his experience growing up in South Central LA.
Dunn has had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, and Buffalo and is currently completing an MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He holds a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo show at the 2016 Affordable Art Fair and a group show at Artspace in New Haven, Connecticut. His work is also on view at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts in Wilmington until March 4.
View images of Dunn’s work: Example 1, Example 2, Example 3.
Derrick Woods-Morrow
Derrick Woods-Morrow was born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina. He is an MFA student in the Photography Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in Illinois. He holds a BA from Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and earned a postbaccalaureate certificate from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt) in Boston. Woods-Morrow’s work has been shown at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, Randolph’s Maier Museum of Art, the President’s Gallery at MassArt, the Sullivan Galleries at SAIC, and the ACRE residency, where he was a Terry Plumming Scholar. He has received the Carol Becker Merit Scholarship at SAIC.
Woods-Morrow’s work explores the problematic ideals of masculinity embedded in systems that constructs gay pornography, where intimacy is frail and domination and disregard are desired traits; where oppressive force is the norm; where the African American does not exist except as fetishized commodity; and where a prevailing use of heterosexual vocabulary continues to establish masculine credibility within queer imagery.
View images of Woods-Morrow’s work: Example 1, Example 2.
Fellows in Art History
Marin Sarvé-Tarr
Marin Sarvé-Tarr will complete a PhD in art history at the University of Chicago in Illinois in summer 2016. Her dissertation, “Seizing the Everyday: Lettrist Film and the French Postwar Avant-Garde, 1946–1954,” examines the films produced by members of Lettrism, Nouveau Réalisme, and the Situationist International; it also identifies informal networks between later rivals forged in cafés and ciné-clubs in 1950s Paris. Her project shows how artists’ collaborative films and public demonstrations impacted the agendas of publishers, cinemas, and museums that patronized artists, molded public reception of the arts, and figured social progress in reconstruction France. With support from the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte, the Getty Research Institute, and the Georges Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust, Marin presented on religion and the avant-garde at CAA’s 2014 Annual Conference. She is also publishing a chapter on Lettrist cinema in a forthcoming volume from the European Postwar and Contemporary Art Forum, to be published later this year.
Marin earned a BA in 2008 from Scripps College in Claremont, California, where she curated The Politics of Satire: La Caricature in Post-Revolutionary France at the Clark Humanities Museum. She contributed to exhibitions and programs at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, and the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Marin helped to organize Interiors and Exteriors: Avant-Garde Itineraries in Postwar France (2013–14) at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art. As a 2015–16 Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Research Fellow for the Chicago Object Study Initiative at the Art Institute of Chicago, Marin is currently preparing object-based research and publications on Surrealism.
Emilie Boone
Emilie Boone is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She focuses on the history of photography, the art of the African diaspora, and American art. Her dissertation, “Visions of Harlem: Reconsidering the Studio Photography of James Van Der Zee,” demonstrates the intrinsic role of Van Der Zee’s images in constructing multivalent narratives of Harlem. Boone has written for History of Photography and African Arts and for Columbia College Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography and Washington University’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in Saint Louis, Missouri. Most recently, she has contributed to an exhibition catalogue, From Within and Without: The History of Haitian Photography, for the NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale in Florida. She also has an essay in the forthcoming anthology, Towards an African-Canadian Art History: Art, Memory, and Resistance.
Boone’s honors include a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Portrait Gallery, a Fulbright fellowship at the Notman Photographic Archives, a Terra Foundation Residency in Giverny, France, and an Eliza Dangler Curatorial Fellowship at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2011, 2013, and 2015, she was an invited participant of the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. A critical-studies residency at the Center for Photography at Woodstock led to her recent role as a selection panelist for the Woodstock Artist-in-Residency Program for artists working in the photographic arts. As a postdoctoral Mellon curatorial fellow, Boone looks forward to advancing her research, teaching, and curatorial engagement at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Honorable Mentions in Visual Art and Art History
Adrian Anagnost
Adrian Anagnost is a historian of modern and contemporary art whose scholarship investigates the intersections of urban space, political economy, and aesthetic practice. She earned a PhD from the University of Chicago in Illinois in December 2015. Her dissertation, titled “Contested Spaces: Art and Urbanism in Brazil, 1928–1969,” considers how the artists and architects Flávio de Carvalho, Lúcio Costa, Lina Bo Maria Bardi, Waldemar Cordeiro, Lygia Clark, and Hélio Oiticica engaged with the built environment as a concretization of social relations in Brazil.
Before coming to Chicago, Anagnost completed an MA in modern art from Columbia University in New York, with a thesis on the contemporary photographer James Welling. She also worked in the archive and registration departments of David Zwirner in New York. Anagnost’s writings on Waldemar Cordeiro, Carol Bove, Oswald de Andrade, and Pedro Almodóvar have appeared in the Chicago Art Journal, Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas, and ArtUS. Her upcoming publications include an article on the Polish Constructivist Teresa Żarnower for the Woman’s Art Journal and an essay on the work of the contemporary artist Theaster Gates.
Monica Bravo
Monica Bravo is an ABD doctoral candidate specializing in American art in a global context and the history of photography at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She received her BA in studio art from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 2004, and an MA in art history and criticism from Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York, in 2009. Bravo’s dissertation examines exchanges between modernist photographers in the United States and modern Mexican artists working in painting, poetry, music, and photography, resulting in the development of a greater American modernism in the interwar period.
Bravo has been a fellow at the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography, the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is currently a Wyeth predoctoral fellow at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, DC.
Zhiwan Cheung
They say that geography defines a person. Born in America and raised by Chinese immigrants, Zhiwan Cheung lives in a sort of permanent in-between state of being neither fully American nor Chinese. As a journey toward a home that does not exist, a rite of passage with no destination, he uses his work to search for a critical understanding of an impossible homecoming. Cheung’s practice focuses on the meaning and space between identities, examining the feeling of a liminal displacement through sculpture, film, and performance. In approaching this journey, he probes the intersection of national identity and the personal psyche with an open-ended, multimedia approach.
Performativity gets closer to the heart of all identity. It is no coincidence that many great actors continue to employ their characters long after the camera stopped running. For the best performances, the blurring between fake and real becomes so powerful that we cease to see the actor or the character: one is constantly subsumed by the other, leaving the residue of the actual and the imaginary to shift and ebb between various in-between-states. This sacrificing of the self and the fabrication of a persona speak to the destruction of the self for art. Or is it perhaps the other way around? James Luna, a Native American performance artist, once said, “How do you talk about things like intercultural identity[?] Do you talk about it in third person? If you sacrifice yourself, so to speak, then it becomes much more dynamic.” The sacrificing of the true self and the fabricated persona speaks to the destruction of the soul for art, or perhaps it is the other way around. Life is art. Art is life.
The intersection of national identity and the personal psyche is complex, not always clear nor fixed. As an artist, Cheung probes the paths and how and where they join and diverge. This personal odyssey explores the permanent liminal through diverse strategies and processes. It is a journey guided by an allusive visual language, with a mix of pop-cultural, art-historical, and aesthetic choices that also guide audiences into finding their own rites of passage.
View images of Cheung’s work: Example 1, Example 2, Example 3.
Sarah Hewitt
She vows
To make plastic art
Redefine plastic art
To make you love plastic art
To challenge and bewitch you with what you think is formal or plastic
To make you bow to her craft\
Redefine craft
To weave
To weave your mind
To weave your mind into confusion
To drag you into the sacred without your consent
Let the work be deep, dark, and dirty—gritty. It comes from a place of authenticity. Sarah Hewitt is not looking to create a spectacle for fun or frivolity. This is serious business for her. She is crafting a new fabric in a manner that is complicated—as complicated and fragile as our contemporary moments.
Hewitt’s works are exhibited around the country and have garnered many awards, grants, and residencies, including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and a fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center. This spring she will receive her MFA in visual art from Purchase College, State University of New York.
View images of Hewitt’s work: Example 1, Example 2, Example 3.
Victoria Maidhof
Victoria Maidhof has been fascinated by unconventional people for as long as she can remember. She was raised in a middle-class suburban neighborhood where her family stood out as eccentrics. They were the only secular family on the block, and her parents encouraged their children to run wild, play hard, and reject authority. Maidhof’s father told captivating stories about his unusual upbringing, many of which revolved around his mother, a paranoid schizophrenic, and his father, a merchant marine with severe posttraumatic stress disorder.
As Maidhof got older, she became curious about other people that lived unorthodox lifestyles. Having seen the work of Mary Ellen Mark and Diane Arbus, she knew that the camera could grant permission into the lives of complete strangers. In 2003, Maidhof moved to San Francisco to study photography at the San Francisco Art Institute in California. After completing her BFA, she returned to her home town, San Diego, with her now-husband Tahan in tow. They currently reside in La Mesa, where she works full time as a photographer. Maidhof is finishing her MFA through the San Francisco Art Institute’s low-residency program.
View images of Maidhof’s work: Example 1, Example 2, Example 3.
Kaiya Rainbolt
Kaiya Rainbolt earned her BA in English literature at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, and studied studio art at City College of San Francisco in California, with a focus in metalwork. She currently attends the MFA program in jewelry and metalwork at San Diego State University. Rainbolt has participated in several national juried exhibitions and has been recognized with numerous scholarships and awards.
Though trained as a metalsmith, Rainbolt currently uses a wide variety of materials in her work, including fabrics, clothing, steel, lead, and animal hide. She is focused on creating work that has the potential to elicit a visceral response from the viewer in order to promote engagement in a way that makes it easier to participate in dialogue about socially sensitive issues. Rainbolt believes that an art object, as a representation of a particular human struggle, has the potential to span differences in experience, background, and culture in a way that creates connection, generates empathy, and fosters understanding.
View images of Rainbolt’s work: Example 1, Example 2.
Voting Ends Soon! 2016 Board of Directors Election
posted by Vanessa Jalet — Jan 21, 2016
The annual CAA Board of Directors election is ongoing. To participate, all you need is your CAA member ID number and password. Visit the board election page or click the candidates’ names below to read their statements, biographies, and endorsements—and to watch their video presentations—before casting your vote:
The six candidates are:
- Dina Bangdel, Associate Professor and Director, Art History Program, Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar
- Carma Gorman, Associate Professor and Assistant Chair, Dept. of Art and Art History, University of Texas at Austin
- N. Elizabeth Schlatter, Deputy Director and Curator of Exhibitions, University of Richmond Museums
- Andrew Schulz, Associate Dean for Research and Associate Professor, College of Arts and Architecture, Pennsylvania State University
- Roberto Tejada, Cullen Distinguished Professor, Departments of English and Art History, University of Houston
- Anuradha Vikram, Lecturer, Graduate Public Practice, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles
How to Vote
Log into your CAA account with your CAA User ID# and password. Then click the Vote Now image at the center of your screen to begin the process. If you are already logged in, click the “Home” link at left, and then the “Vote Now” image.
You may vote for up to four candidates, including one write-in candidate if you wish. Ballots that indicate more than four candidates will be void. The election ends at 5:00 PM (EST) on Wednesday, February 3, 2016.
Send your Proxy
CAA encourages all members to attend its Annual Business Meeting at the 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC. If you cannot attend, kindly check the box appointing a proxy. By doing so, you appoint the CAA board officers named thereon — DeWitt Godfrey, John J. Richardson, Charles A. Wright, Suzanne Blier, Gail Feigenbaum, and Doralynn Pines — to vote, in their discretion, on such matters as may properly come before such a meeting.
A quorum of 100 members is required to hold the Annual Business Meeting; therefore CAA requests your proxy to insure the Annual Business Meeting can take place. Please submit your proxy by 5:00 p.m. EST on Wednesday, February 3, 2016. Thank you!
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Jan 20, 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.
Here Are the Guerrilla Girls on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
The anonymous feminist art collective Guerrilla Girls appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last week and talked about gender inequality in the art world. The collective is known for wearing gorilla masks and using the names of deceased female artists as monikers. Kathe, Zubeida, and Frida were the members that spoke with Colbert. (Read more from ARTnews.)
How Advocates of African American Art Are Advancing Racial Equality in the Art World
Only a small group of African Americans occupy curatorial positions at mainstream museums, relatively few African American artists have been given major solo museum shows, and works by nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American artists are undervalued by the art market relative to those by white artists of equal standing. Change doesn’t come organically, however. It takes individuals. (Read more from Artsy.)
New York Dealers Cannot Afford to Represent Emerging Artists
For visitors to New York art galleries who want to know why the prices are so high—or for artists who want to exhibit their work in those galleries—part of the blame may lie with the landlord, or with the real-estate market as a whole. Rents are high, averaging $100 to $200 per square foot in Chelsea and $80 to $120 on the Lower East Side. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)
Help Desk: Self-Promotion
I’m an artist who just got a solo show at a little gallery but have no idea how to promote it. I didn’t go to art school and don’t have a huge group of people to invite. I’m lost on how to market the show. Where do I start? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
320 Hours: Slow Looking and Visitor Engagement with El Greco
By the time the painting returned to its home in Cleveland, El Greco’s Holy Family with Saint Mary Magdalene and I had spent 320 hours and four months together. As an interpretation assistant for the Portland Art Museum, I was in the gallery four days a week, interacting with visitors, experimenting with interpretive strategies, and reflecting on this four-hundred-year-old painting. This experience gave me room to experiment with visitor engagement, changed how I approach the act of looking, and influenced my teaching outside the museum. (Read more from Art Museum Teaching.)
How to Explain Pictures to a Difficult Date
We live in an age when “kitsch” almost defies definition but is tossed around with great abandon: If Jeff Koons can turn tacky garden sculptures and gift-shop figurines into gazillion-dollar collectibles, lauded by a fair number of critics, what then becomes of kitsch? (Read more from Vasari21.)
Getting Your Citations in Order
Failure to acknowledge is not as big a sin as outright plagiarism, but there is something disconcerting about it. Two related problems necessarily task academics. One confronts those who enter a new field: how to make sure to build on already existing developments and avoid unnecessary wheel reinvention. The answer—as all research students are told—is to do the desk research first. (Read more from Times Higher Education.)
Facing an Impossible Choice
Maybe the problem with academics is that we take too much pride in our jobs. No doubt that sounds counterintuitive: How can pride in our work be a bad thing? It can when it inspires far too many PhDs to labor willingly for far too long in contingent positions. (Read more from Vitae.)
Conference Message from the CAA President
posted by DeWitt Godfrey — Jan 12, 2016
I want to share my excitement about the offerings at the upcoming 2016 annual conference, taken together we think they represent the diversity of areas on which CAA is focused. We are thrilled to be in Washington DC, home to so many excellent museums and cultural institutions. The conference kicks off with a keynote by Tania Bruguera, an artist whose work, specially relevant in this election year, explores the relationship between art, activism, and social change. Our Distinguished Artists’ Interviews feature MacArthur Fellows Rick Lowe (2014) with LaToya Ruby Frazier (2015) and Joyce Scott with George Ciscle from the Maryland Institute College of Art. We have Jane Chu, Chair of the NEA, and William “Bro” Adams, Chairman of the NEH, to discuss their organizations half a century of supporting the arts and humanities. Jarl Mohn, National Public Radio CEO and President, will speak on the visual arts and the public. We will honor scholars Richard Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History and Dean of Humanities, Duke University and Linda Nochlin, Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at New York University, in two special panel sessions. With sessions ranging from Latin American artists, design, artists working with data, public art, workshops on job hunting, portfolio and résumé preparation, there is something for everyone. I hope you can join us.
CAA in Review
posted by CAA — Jan 11, 2016
The College Art Association advances the highest standards of instruction, knowledge and practice in the visual arts to stimulate intellectual curiosity and advance skills that enrich the individual and society. Below is a sampling of CAA’s recent work on Fair Use, Standards and Guidelines in the Visual Arts, international scholarship programs, publishing grants, and professional development fellowships for artists and scholars. For more information and updates, visit www.collegeart.org.
CAA Project on Fair Use in the Visual Arts
- Conceived with guidance of over 60 members of the CAA governing community
- Directly reached nearly 2,000 people through talks and webinars
- Publication of groundbreaking Code of Best Practices in the Visual Arts
- Endorsed and supported by the American Library Association, Art Libraries Society of North America, Association of Art Museum Curators, Association of College and Research Libraries Association of Research Libraries, Society of Architectural Historians, Visual Resources Association, American Alliance of Museums, and Association of Art Museum Directors
Standards and Guidelines for the Visual Arts
- Development of workplace practices, pedagogical guidelines, official statements, and establishment of professional ethics in the visual arts
- From 2014-2015, CAA issued the following Standards and Guidelines:
- Statement On Terminal Degree Programs in The Visual Arts and Design (2015)
- Guidelines for CAA Interviews (2015)
- Guidelines for Part-Time Professional Employment (2015)
- Standards for Professional Placement (2015)
- Standards for the Practice of Art History (2014)
- Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, CAA (2015)
- Fine Art Print Publication Guidelines for Artists (2015)
- Standards for the Practice of Art History (2014)
- General Principles for Academic Arts Administrators (2015)
Publishing Toward the Future
- Sharp increase in readership after co-publishing contract with Taylor & Francis
- 2014-15 Art Bulletin full text downloads: 37,631
- 2014-15 Art Journal full text downloads: 29,891
- CAA Reviews website visits: 88,131
- Joint Task Force between CAA and the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) to developing guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship in art and architectural history.
- Art Journal Open launches new features including Bookshelves of art historians, artists, curators, and designers and discussions between curators and artists
- Graduate Programs in the Visual Arts published in two volumes for the fifth consecutive year
CAA International Reach
- In its first four years the CAA-Getty International Program has had 75 Participants from 37 Countries hosted by 46 CAA members
- Launch of the International News Desk on CAA website
- Organized CAA Member International Tour to Cuba for the Havana Biennial
- Expansion of membership to art critics, art historians, and artists based abroad
Increasing Digital Footprint
- 2014-15 visitors to CAA website over 6.5 million
- Continued growth in social media reach: Facebook (6,462 likes) and Twitter (13.7K)
- Launch of Instagram account and Flickr image archive
- Launch of Social Media Wall for 2016 Annual Conference
Grants Awarded to CAA
- CAA projects and initiatives funded by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Getty Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Milton and Sally Avery Foundation, and Elizabeth A. Sackler Museum Educational Trust
Fellowships, Grants, and Support Offered by CAA
- CAA offered to artists, authors, and art historians grants and fellowships including the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award, CAA Getty International Program, the Millard Meiss Publications Fund, the Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant, Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, CAA Professional Development Fellowships, and travel grants supporting graduate students and international members of CAA.