CAA News Today
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.”
Affiliated Society News for May 2016
posted by CAA — May 15, 2016
Art Council of the African Studies Association
In the past year, the Art Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) sponsored a panel and a well-attended members’ meeting at the African Studies Association (ASA) annual meeting and hosted a session at the CAA Annual Conference. The council also distributed three extensive newsletters and is finalizing plans for a triennial conference, to be held in Ghana in 2017. To build support for the Ghana event, ACASA has undertaken a fundraising campaign with a five-member committee that meets every three weeks.
ACASA has also implemented a new online system for member payments and had a sizable presence at the European Conference on African Studies (ECAS) in Paris in July 2015. ACASA financially sponsored one artist’s performance at ECAS in a series Dominique Malaquais organized that was devoted to the arts. Finally, ACASA held elections to replace most of the organization’s board members.
Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture
The Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA) has elected new officers. The new president is Amelia Rauser of Franklin and Marshall College. She is a specialist in eighteenth-century British art and the author of numerous scholarly studies, including Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008). Christina Lindeman from the University of South Alabama is the new treasurer. She is the author of articles on art and gender in eighteenth-century Germany, with a special emphasis on the court of Anna Amalia of Weimar. Her book Representing Anna Amalia’s Bildung: Visual Metamorphosis from Personal to Political in Eighteenth-Century Germany, is forthcoming from Routledge.
HECAA also maintains a wonderful serial newsletter.
Midwest Art History Society
The Midwest Art History Society (MAHS) held its “Icons of the Midwest” session at CAA’s 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC. The meeting was meant to highlight important and museum-related art and art history from America’s vital middle region. This year’s topic was the Chicago Jazz Age painter Archibald Motley (1891–1981). The session’s cochairs were MAHS members Amy M. Mooney (Columbia College) and Mark Pohlad (DePaul University); the speakers were Jerma A. Jackson (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Phoebe E. Wolfskill (University of Indiana), and Romi Crawford (School of the Art Institute of Chicago). A highlight of this lively session was the remarks of the renowned Motley scholar, Richard J. Powell.
The forty-third MAHS annual conference took place in Chicago from April 7 to 9, 2016. Approximately two hundred participants and registrants convened at DePaul University’s Loop Campus to hear more than thirty academic sessions devoted to a wide range of art history. The keynote address, held at the nearby Art Institute of Chicago, was delivered by Gloria Groom, chair of European painting and sculpture and David and Mary Winton Green Curator in the Department of European Painting and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, who was involved the concurrent Van Gogh’s Bedrooms exhibition. Other conference highlights included a reception at Columbia College’s Museum of Contemporary Photography, a session on “Recent Acquisitions in Midwest Collections” (held at the Art Institute and chaired by the curator Judith W. Mann), and two sessions comprised of undergraduate scholars. For more information and to read conference proceedings and paper abstracts, visit the conference page of the MAHS website.
MAHS will hold its forty-fourth annual conference in Cleveland, Ohio, from April 6 to 8, 2017. The event will be hosted by the Cleveland Museum of Art, Case Western Reserve University, and Cleveland State University. To open the conference, a distinguished keynote panel will speak on Raphael’s School of Athens Cartoon, currently undergoing restoration in Milan. The panel will include: Don Alberto Rocca, director of the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan; Maurizio Michelozzi, a Florentine paper conservator who is undertaking the restoration; and Carmen Bambach, curator of drawings and prints for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Funding for the panel has been provided by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Chicago, the Italian Art Society, the University of Notre Dame, and MAHS.
New Media Caucus
The New Media Caucus (NMS) has elected new officers and members to its board of directors in February 2016. Mat Rappaport is president elect, Rachel Clarke is secretary, and Kevin Hamilton is chair of the caucus’s journal, Media-N. The new board members are Victoria Bradbury, Darren Douglas-Floyd, Mina Cheon, Abigail Susik, and Doreen Maloney. For more information on the organization’s structure, visit the New Media Caucus website.
Public Art Dialogue
At the CAA Annual Conference in February, Public Art Dialogue (PAD) hosted a roundtable chaired by Kirk Savage, professor of the history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. Also participating were Thomas Luebke, secretary of the United States Commission of Fine Arts, and Lucy Kempf, a member of the National Capital Planning Commission.
The 2016 PAD award recipient was Kirk Savage, who has contributed extensively to our understanding of American memorials, particularly those dedicated to Civil War soldiers. He is the author of two award winning books: Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (1997) and Monument Wars: Washington DC, the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (2009). Savage has also edited The Civil War in Art and Memory (2016). In presenting the award, PAD cochair Cameron Cartiere observed that one of the most compelling aspects of Savage’s scholarship is that it helps us “to look back into our history of memorialization as a means of understanding the ramifications of the political, social, and cultural decisions we make in developing contemporary memorials that mark the present, acknowledge our tumultuous past, and help us to embrace our uncharted future.”
Renaissance Society of America
The Program Committee for the sixty-third annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America invites submissions for individual papers or sessions on any aspect of Renaissance studies or the era 1300–1700. Because RSA is a multidisciplinary society, we especially welcome submissions that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries, as well as those that spotlight scholarship that is discipline specific. Sessions sponsored by our Associate Organizations and Discipline Representatives will make up part of the program. The rest will consist of sessions and individual papers proposed by RSA members and selected by the Program Committee.
Because the RSA Annual Meeting is a large conference—with as many as fifty sessions meeting concurrently—we have developed guidelines over the years that greatly facilitate the work of the Program Committee and help to ensure an audience for every session. Please note that proposing a session or a paper indicates your commitment to attend. The committee will not be able to accept every submission; good papers will have to be turned away. To take a slot and then later withdraw is discourteous to colleagues who would have liked to present a paper. Once the rooms are scheduled and the AV equipment is ordered, no substitutions are possible.
Organizers may propose a series of linked sessions, up to a limit of five. However, the Program Committee prefers that series be limited to three, to facilitate scheduling them in a row. Sessions organized in honor or in memory of an individual scholar are limited to no more than two. Proposals for roundtables are also welcome, but the committee asks that roundtables be stand-alone sessions in terms of their content. Roundtables that merely involve recapping the content of a series of sessions take up valuable space in the program that could be used to present other research; proposals for them are not likely to be accepted.
The committee welcomes sessions that present the scholarship of members at various stages of their careers. Each session must include at least one speaker who has received a PhD or other terminal degree. Graduate-student speakers should be in candidacy or the equivalent for their program; that is, they must be advanced students who have completed coursework, examinations, and much of their dissertation research. They are invited to speak on topics directly related to their dissertation research, rather than presenting term papers.
Please visit the RSA website for more details. The submission site will open in May, with a submission deadline in early June (TBA). You do not need to be a member to submit a proposal, but if your proposal is accepted you will need to be an RSA member for the year of the conference.
Society for Photographic Education
The Society for Photographic Education (SPE) welcomes conference proposals from photographers, writers, educators, curators, historians, and professionals from other fields for “Family Values,” the fifty-fourth SPE national conference, to be held March 9–12, 2017, in Orlando, Florida. Topics are not required to be theme based; they may include but are not limited to: imagemaking, history, contemporary theory and criticism, multidisciplinary approaches, new technologies, effects of media and culture, educational issues, funding, and presentations of work in photography, film, video, performance, and installation.
The presentation formats are:
- Graduate Student: short presentation of your own artistic work and a brief introduction to your graduate program (must be enrolled in graduate program at time of submission)
- Imagemaker: presentation of your own artistic work (photography, film, video, performance, installation, multidisciplinary approaches)
- Lecture: presentation on historical topic, theory, or another artist’s work
- Panel Discussion: active discussion among panelists (maximum of three), a moderator, and the audience on a chosen topic
- Teaching and Learning: presentations, workshops, and demos that addresses educational issues, including teaching resources and strategies (syllabi, videos, assignments, readings, class preparation and setup, and PowerPoint presentations); curricula to serve diverse artists and changing student populations; seeking promotion and tenure; avoiding burnout; and professional exchange
Current SPE membership is required of all participants with accepted proposals. Please visit the SPE website for full proposal guidelines and special award details.
Society of Architectural Historians
The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) is accepting abstracts for its 2017 annual international conference in Glasgow, Scotland (June 7–11). Abstracts may be submitted for one of the thirty-six paper sessions, for the Graduate Student Lightning Talks, or for open sessions. SAH encourages submissions from architectural, landscape, and urban historians; museum curators; preservationists; independent scholars; architects; and members of SAH chapters and partner organizations. Deadline: June 6, 2016.
Applications are open for the SAH/Mellon Author Awards, which are designed to provide financial relief to scholars who are publishing their first monograph on the history of the built environment and who are responsible for paying for rights and permissions for images or for commissioning maps, charts, or line drawings in their publications. Deadline: May 15, 2016.
SAH invites nominations and self-nominations for the next editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH) to serve a three-year term: January 1, 2018–December 31, 2020. JSAH is a quarterly, blind-peer-reviewed international journal devoted to all aspects of the history of the global built environment and spatial practice, including architecture, landscape architecture, urbanism, and city planning. Published since 1941, JSAH has defined the field of architectural history and is a pioneer in digital publication. Articles published in JSAH are historically rigorous, conceptually sophisticated, and theoretically innovative. Deadline: June 15, 2016.
Registration is open for the SAH Field Seminar, “Architectural Layers of a Southeast Asian Region,” to take place December 1–13, 2016. The program will explore the fascinating architectural landscape of Vietnam, focusing in particular on the modern era from the nineteenth century to today. Participants will also visit the spectacular Angkor complex in Cambodia, capital of the Khmer empire from the ninth to fifteenth century. The SAH Study Program Fellowship deadline is August 11, 2016.
Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture
In February and March 2016, the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) conducted an election for its board of directors. As a result, a SHERA–Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) liaison was created, with Anna P. Sokolina as an officer. This new position will be open for reelection every three years. In addition, Hanna Chuchvaha, Natalia Kolodzei, and Andrei Shabanov were designated members at large, and Nicholas Iljine was reelected a member at large for another two-year term.
SHERA has launched a call for papers for its sponsored session for emerging scholars for CAA’s 2017 Annual Conference, chaired by Alice Sullivan.
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/.
Megan Holmes to Give Annual Italian Art Society/Kress Lecture
posted by CAA — Apr 14, 2016
As noted in CAA’s Affiliated Society News for March 2016, the Italian Art Society (IAS) is delighted to announce that Megan Holmes, a professor of art history at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, will deliver the seventh annual IAS/Kress Lecture in Florence at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, on June 1, 2016. Her lecture is titled “New Perspectives on the Reception of Florentine Panel Painting: Interpreting Scratch Marks.” Holmes was the recipient of CAA’s 2015 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award for her volume titled The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). For more on the lecture, including the abstract, visit the Italian Art Society website.
The annual IAS/Kress Lecture Series in Italy, inaugurated in 2010 with the generous support of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, encourages intellectual exchange between North American art historians and the international community of scholars based in Italy. The lectures offer IAS member-speakers the opportunity to engage in productive discussions about their research with a wider range of specialists in the field of Italian art historical studies than is available in the United States; they also create lasting relationships between the IAS and the Italian cultural institutions that host the talks. The lectures are held in late May or early June to accommodate travel to Italy by North American academics and may be given in English or Italian. The IAS provides an honorarium, along with funds to help offset travel expenses, and organizes a reception open to all attendees.
Former IAS/Kress Lecture speakers have reported the many benefits of what one lecturer called a “stimulating experience,” noting how “the lecture really seems to be the sort of international event that many benefit from and that represents what the Kress often endorses.” Another wrote: “Giving the Kress lecture … was a wonderful experience. The event brought together American and Italian scholars and students for a lively exchange. I enjoyed seeing old friends and meeting new colleagues, all in the city whose rich history is our shared passion.”
The IAS/Kress Lectures Series has drawn a wide range of experts from a variety of fields, as well as American graduate students studying in Italy, Italian university students, and many others who have attended and enjoyed the presentations and receptions afterward. Moreover, a number of attendees at these lectures have subsequently joined the IAS, helping to further our mission to promote the study of Italian art and architecture. In keeping with the mission of the Kress Foundation, our speakers have been selected from proposals on subjects ranging from antiquity to the early nineteenth century. Thus far, the IAS/Kress lectures have been on topics ranging from the medieval through early modern periods, and the organization hopes to host lectures on both earlier and later art and architecture in Italy.
If any CAA members or other interested parties are in Florence on June 1, 2016, the IAS encourages attendance at the Villa I Tatti for the seventh annual IAS/Kress Lecture by Megan Holmes! Please do not hesitate to contact the IAS president, Sheryl E. Reiss, with any questions.
Image: IAS/Kress Lecture 2013, Rome, Fondazione Marco Besso (photograph by Olga Posazhennikova)
“William Kentridge’s Project for the City of Rome”
posted by Jennifer Griffiths — Apr 07, 2016
Emperor Marcus Aurelius
Rome’s Tiber embankments have been receiving an eye-catching mural makeover in the past few weeks, as a series of large-scale figures, up to ten meters in height, take shape as a century of pollution and biological patina is slowly power washed from the travertine walls. When William Kentridge’s 550-meter long mural, Triumphs and Laments: A Project for the City of Rome (2016), is complete and inaugurated on April 21, the mythical anniversary of the founding of Rome, it will constitute the South African artist’s largest public work to date.
Occupying the straightest stretch of urban riverfront between Ponte Sisto and Ponte Mazzini, the frieze will decorate a much-neglected space at the heart of the Eternal City. In fact, this reverse graffiti project is part of ongoing cultural programming by the organization Tevereterno, whose goal is to “revitalize Rome’s urban waterfront through the establishment and stewardship of Piazza Tevere, the first public space for contemporary art in Rome.” This international nonprofit initiative and multidisciplinary cultural project partners with the River//Cities Platform to create dialogue with other cities across Europe, America, and Asia about initiatives to develop rivers or waterfronts as cultural spaces. Speaking to a group of volunteers last month, Teverterno’s founder and artistic director Kristin Jones explained, “Everyone comes to Rome to take inspiration from the past, but who is caring for the present?” It was Jones who courted and convinced Kentridge to take on the Rome project.
La Lupa Romana sans Romulus and Remus
Since its founding in 2004, Tevereterno has orchestrated a series of artistic happenings along the riverfront, including pieces by Jenny Holzer and Barnaby Evans. Holzer’s Words of Love and War (2007) was a projection of texts by international poets and writers in English and Italian onto a series of Roman monuments, including the Piazza Tevere. WaterFire Roma (2012) by Evans featured thirty bonfires floating on the surface of the river as a conceptual reflection on the struggle between light and dark. As with many of the other events, WaterFire Roma was fashioned after a gesamtkunstwerk, combining visual spectacle with original music by Stag of Marco Guazzone and choreography by Linda Foster.
Kentridge’s drawings of the historical symbols and figures for Triumphs and Laments were first shown at the Italian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2015. Ten workers have been laboring to stencil the eighty silhouettes onto the embankments over the course of the past month. The images evoke both the city’s two thousand-year history and a more universal story of our collective successes and failures as human beings. Even as the name and subject suggest the history of an ancient Roman triumph, or a celebration of victory against Carthage, Britannia, or Parthia along the Sacred Way, Kentridge’s parade of images critically conjures up the specters of conquest and the contradictions of civilization. Just as one nation’s victory demands another’s defeat, one person’s rise often hinges on another’s fall.
Kentridge’s works consistently address issues of social justice by making the personal political and visualizing states of mind, and, in this respect, Triumphs and Laments does not disappoint. Kentridge often returns to themes of estrangement, exile, and transience, all of which are explored in the Rome frieze. Working in a wide range of media, from prints and drawings to theater, tapestry, and sculpture, he is perhaps best known for creating animated films with a palimpsestic process of sketch and erasure. In 9 Drawings for Projection (1989–2003), short films that narrate changing lives in apartheid South Africa, the artist used images of human processions and running water as metaphors for the passage of time. While there are meanings inherent to each individual silhouette along the river, the larger elements of process and iconography resonate with the artist’s other works and add another layer of meaning to his “projection” onto the Tiber walls.
At work along the Tiber embankments
The fate of Kentridge’s frieze is to fade, like all things, under the patina of time, as the Tiber tides rise and fall year by year. This work, like the artist’s films, echoes the palimpsest that has been built, unbuilt, and rebuilt on the banks of the river over the centuries. Yet while the name and image of Rome resound through layers of history, this waterfront spectacle draws attention to the city’s cosmopolitan and contemporary art scene. What is truly lamentable is how the municipal administration of Rome frustrated and delayed such an innovative, creative contribution to the cityscape for so long; it took three years simply to obtain the necessary authorization.
In the run-up to the inauguration, Kentridge is in the city, hosted by the American Academy in Rome, inspecting the riverside work underway and giving a number of talks. He will be in conversation with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev at the British School at Rome on April 15. Triumphs and Laments will play out as a kind of total work of art at the opening, which will premiere a theatrical program created in collaboration with the composer Philip Miller, and feature live shadow play and two processional brass bands.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Mar 30, 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.
How to Be an Unprofessional Artist
No one likes being called an amateur, a dilettante, a dabbler. “Unprofessional” is an easy insult. The professional always makes the right moves, knows the right thing to say, the right name to check. Controlled and measured, the professional never sleeps with the wrong person or drinks too much at the party. (Read more from Momus.)
The Complicated Relationship between Animals and Art
At this year’s CAA Annual Conference, I organized a session on “The Art of Animal Activism” with Keri Cronin of Brock University. The session explored art since the nineteenth century that has taken nonhuman animals seriously as subjects with sentience and agency—not just as decorative ornaments or symbols. I was pleased, and somewhat surprised, that the session was so well received. (Read more from National Public Radio.)
Volume, Weight, and Pigment to Oil Ratios
Oil painters concerned with fat over lean will often turn to information about the oil absorption values for particular pigments as a way to compare how oily or lean certain colors might be. This has led to many misconceptions and outright wrong conclusions that seem to persist in various forums and articles. (Read more from Just Paint.)
Can an Art Critic Fairly Review an Artist Friend’s Work?
There’s no upside for an artist to be friends with an art critic. The personal connection means the critic must pass on reviewing the artist’s work, and while the loss of critical wisdom may be negligible, the loss of exposure is a nuisance for the artist. I have wanted to write about Maggie Michael’s work for years now but can’t without first offering the reader a huge caveat. (Read more from the Washington Post.)
Hundreds of Looted Ancient Artifacts Are Returned to Italy
Hundreds of looted archaeological artifacts that officials say were handled by the London dealer Robin Symes and destined for markets in the United States, Japan, and Britain have been returned to Italy. The artifacts—dating from the seventh century BC to the second century AD—were found two years ago in a storage unit at the Geneva Freeport that investigators traced to Symes. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Business Looms Larger in Art Classes
The new art expert is not necessarily an expert in art. Art-history students used to tackle questions of symbolism, social context, and style in art. Now, many young scholars are at least as focused on prices as they are on the art itself. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)
What You Teach Is What You Earn
A new assistant professor of computer science at a public four-year college or university in 2015–16 earns, on average, a little more than $85,000. A full professor of history—likely with twenty-plus more years of teaching experience—earns on average a little less than $90,000 and will likely have his or her salary passed by the new computer-science professor in a few years. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
University Press Redux: Preserving Heritage, Charting the Future
University presses in the United Kingdom are enjoying something of a renaissance. Over the past few years, established presses such as Cambridge, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Manchester, Oxford, and Wales have been joined by a raft of new publishers. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
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.)
caa.reviews Seeks Field Editors
posted by CAA — Mar 18, 2016
caa.reviews invites nominations and self-nominations for individuals to join its Council of Field Editors, which commissions reviews within an area of expertise or geographic region, for a term ending June 30, 2019. An online journal, caa.reviews is devoted to reviewing books, museum exhibitions, and projects relevant to art history, visual studies, and the arts.
The journal seeks field editors for books in the following subject areas: early modern Iberian and Latin American art; design history; American art; architecture and urbanism, pre-1800; eighteenth-century art; and Japanese art. The journal also seeks field editors for exhibitions in the following areas: modern and contemporary art; New York and international; and west coast pre-1900. Candidates may be artists, art or design historians, critics, curators, or other professionals in the visual arts; institutional affiliation is not required.
Working with the caa.reviews editor-in-chief, the editorial board, and CAA’s staff editor, each field editor selects content to be reviewed, commissions reviewers, and reviews manuscripts for publication. Field editors for books are expected to keep abreast of newly published and important books and related media in their fields of expertise, and field editors for exhibitions should be aware of current and upcoming exhibitions (and other related projects) in their geographic regions. The Council of Field Editors meets annually at the CAA Annual Conference. Field editors must pay travel and lodging expenses to attend the conference.
Candidates must be current CAA members and should not currently serve on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please send a statement describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and your contact information to: caa.reviews Editorial Board, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004; or email the documents to Deidre Thompson, CAA publications assistant. Deadline: April 15, 2016.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Mar 16, 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.
Announcing NEH-Mellon Fellowships for Digital Publication
The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the two largest funders of humanities research in the United States, have announced a new joint fellowship opportunity to support high-quality, born-digital research in the humanities. (Read more from the National Endowment for the Humanities.)
Go Pro: The Hyper-Professionalization of the Emerging Artist
I can understand the widespread notion among curators and critics that the role of the emerging artist has changed dramatically during the past few years. The shift toward professionalization is further encouraged by the growing involvement of wealthy individuals in the art market who first made their capital by investing in financial markets, real estate, or related industries. (Read more from ARTnews.)
Ten Upcoming Shows by Groundbreaking Female Artists
March is Women’s History Month, so there’s no better time to outline a few upcoming shows by female artists admired by Artnet News. From Hong Kong to Los Angeles, 2016 is brimming with exhibitions by awesome artists, who range in age from twentysomethings to one very impressive centenarian. (Read more from Artnet News.)
Winning Strategies for Journal Publishers
“The Inexorable Path of the Professional Society Publisher” takes the view of the underdog—the small or midsized professional society publisher—that struggles to remain competitive in an environment in which administrative costs explode, budgets of customers are flat or declining, and libraries invite consolidation among vendors in order to reduce administrative costs. While few journals truly lose out entirely, some publishers win bigger than others. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
Should All Research Papers Be Free?
Drawing comparisons to Edward Snowden, a graduate student from Kazakhstan named Alexandra Elbakyan is believed to be hiding out in Russia after illegally leaking millions of documents. While she didn’t reveal state secrets, she took a stand for the public’s right to know by providing free online access to just about every scientific paper ever published, on topics ranging from acoustics to zymology. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Job-Market Challenges for Tenure-Track Academics
Often in life our personal experience is limited, and thus we fail to understand the total, complex reality. That is certainly true of the academic job market. Many of us participate in that market only a handful of times as a candidate, and even if we serve on search committees regularly, that experience tends to be limited to certain fields and to our own institutions. (Read more from Vitae.)
Why They Stay and Why They Go
Whether the separation is voluntary or not, losing a tenure-line or otherwise full-time faculty member is always a costly to an institution. The departing professor will take any external research grants with him or her, not to mention the sunk costs of hiring and training. Then there are additional costs that are harder to quantify, such as those to morale, mentorship, service, and leadership. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
What’s the Value of a Liberal-Arts Education in Our Twenty-First Century Digital Economy?
Achieving goals associated with liberal-arts education would require business schools to move into territory more traditionally related to the liberal arts: multidisciplinary approaches, an understanding of global and historical context, a greater focus on leadership and social responsibility, and learning to think critically. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)