CAA News Today
The 2015 Conference of the Argentinian Center for Art Researchers and a Call for Papers for 2016
posted by Georgina Gluzman, post-doctoral fellow, Universidad de San Andrés (Argentina), and 2015 Participant in the CAA-Getty International Program — Feb 17, 2016
The sixteenth conference of the Centro Argentino de Investigadores de Arte (CAIA) took place in Buenos Aires from October 1 to 3, 2015. The CAIA was founded in 1989 by art historians working in the University of Buenos Aires. Its purpose is to encourage debates in art history through its conferences and editorial program, which publishes anthologies and the conference proceedings. In 2013, the CAIA started another project: a peer-reviewed online journal, Caiana.
The 2015 conference was devoted to the relationship between images and desire. More than twenty art historians from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Uruguay gathered in the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires to discuss the multilayered connection between art, pleasure, devotion, and reception in a series of panels, a roundtable, and two lectures.
The opening lecture was Laura Malosetti Costa’s “Cartografías del deseo,” in which she addressed nineteenth-century iconographies of desire and sexuality, as well as their fin-de-siècle reception in Buenos Aires. The closing lecture was María Angélica Melendi’s “La canción de las locas. Una historia sudamericana,” which was devoted to a rereading of Pedro Lemebel and the Yeguas del Apocalipsis work in Chile. These two activities framed three days of debates with nine panels dealing with different aspects of the conference theme. The topics ranged from the representation of desire to art collecting, including the cult of images and the allure of publicity. Although most of the delivered papers engaged with the visual arts, some addressed other media, such as cinema and dance.
The roundtable, organized by Viviana Usubiaga, called attention to the work of two remarkable artists: the writer Néstor Perlongher and the visual artist Liliana Maresca. This event, which attracted a wide audience, featured scholars and journalists discussing the legacies of Perlongher and Maresca. Daniel Molina, a noted art critic, offered insights into the lives and works of these two individuals through a personal recollection of the troubled decades of the 1970s and 1980s.
Traditionally, the CAIA has organized one conference every two years. These conferences are aimed at both emerging and established scholars, but the CAIA board hopes to engage undergraduate and young graduate students as well. For this reason, on even years the CAIA organizes a smaller conference for researchers who are just beginning their own projects. The call for papers for this event, which will take place from October 12 to 14, 2016, is open until May 30. The conference is open to art historians from around the world, and submissions are accepted in Spanish, Portuguese, and English For more information, please write to jornadascaia@gmail.com or visit the CAIA’s website (http://www.caia.org.ar/).
A Call to Action
posted by DeWitt Godfrey — Feb 16, 2016
DeWitt Godfrey, President of the CAA Board of Directors
A Call to Action
That there are many things wrong in and around our current cultural, educational, and political institutions goes almost without saying. But students of color and their allies at my university and across the country are saying and naming many of the endemic failings of our institutions, refusing to remain silent in the face of systemic racism, inequalities, and oppression. These protests demand redress, unquestionably deserved and long overdue, refusing to let the status quo resettle into old and harmful patterns. There is much anger, much emotion, and sometimes even much empathy. In the pursuit of new paradigms and patterns, territories are marked out, language crafted seeking discourse that ideally cannot support or makes impossible the reification of old injustices.
In the quest for these new spaces, in the specificity we believe will prevent and dismantle these systems of oppression and in their focused intention to redescribe and reframe the terms and debate around the responsibility of institutions and individuals, there also exists the possibility of curtailing and preventing the very conversations that might productively contribute to a process of recognition, acknowledgment, and critique of these pernicious systems of privilege and inequality. In the face of these very real grievances, in a climate of anxiety and fear, all around us the collective is at risk of fracture, dispersing into self-referential self-reinforcing pockets that create false senses of common purpose, aligned against a shared enemy composed of those who refuse or who are excluded by the preconditions of inclusion. In the final irony, this fracturing of the collective along clannish lines most suits those who opportunistically exploit the fears of those who fear losing their spaces of privilege, in a zero sum game predicated on the notion that to gain someone has to lose. We are weaker divided, and the institutional spaces, such as those enshrined at the heart of the university, a collective under which many disparate forms of knowledge production can find common purpose and support, grow also weaker, creating conditions under which the entire enterprise of higher education comes under attack as irrelevant, disconnected, and even antagonistic to the ideologically oriented common good.
Rather than arguing and debating ideas we are reduced to defending positions, constructs that by design resist and reject critique in conditions that neuter dialogue. While these constructs are created out of real conditions—real pain, suffering, and oppression—we should not counter by discounting or mediating the raw feelings at the center this experience. But we might be careful not to fall into a trap of our own design, in which debate and conversation can only occur with those in our likeminded cohort.
What does this have to do with CAA? Over the past decade the largest learned societies such as CAA and MLA have experienced steady and sometimes rapid declines in membership, while smaller discipline-specific societies’ memberships have grown.
From a peak in 2010 of 13,000 members, our current individual enrollment has fallen to 9,000. Conference attendance in New York, historically the highest and most consistent, was down 25 percent from 2013 to 2015. There are many substantive reasons for this downward trend: some are demographic (research shows that millennials are not joiners), so we restructured our membership categories when we launched our copublishing agreement with Taylor & Francis. The great recession of 2009 sharply reduced institutional support for research and conference travel and transformed hiring practices—a lot less of you are here interviewing candidates or seeking jobs than in years past. But beyond that, the fact remains that for many of our former and even current members, CAA is no longer relevant. For many the answer is to gather with like-minded individuals in narrowly defined subgroups. This has tangible consequences for CAA, but I also believe this current trend of atomization is a threat to the difficult cross-disciplinary, cross-identity, and cross-cultural conversations that must be supported and preserved that are less likely to be taken up by insular groups.
So what do productive and viable institutions make possible? What can large institutions provide that small ones can’t? Specifically, CAA carves out spaces of debate and conversation, opportunities to talk across difference, to bring focus and attention to issues that cross disciplines and fields. Our Mellon-funded task force produced guidelines for the fair use of third-party images in teaching, publishing, and creative work could not have been undertaken without the broad reach, constituency and intellectual reputation that we have at CAA. In the past five years our partnership with the Getty Foundation has gathered ninety art historians from over forty-five countries in every conceivable area of art and art-historical inquiry for a one-day preconference. The plurality and heterogeneity of our membership should be seen as our greatest asset, how a diverse spectrum of practitioners and scholars gather at the annual conference, through our publications and programs from across the range of arts, artists, art historians, museum and arts professionals, designers, and educators.
What I have offered above is a frank appeal for your support and advocacy for CAA, an appeal for an association that has been, in particular for our academic members, at the front lines for over a century, for an organization that has played a critical role in the integration of art history and studio practice into a frequently resistant academy. Times have changed, battles have been fought and won, and while there are standards to be defended, CAA must face a future where many—even most—of our colleagues no longer have access to the institutional resources which were once the norm, to advocate for the fair and equitable treatment of part-time and contingent faculty, to lead the debate around how education will be delivered, to keep education affordable, to protect and preserve a higher-education system that despite its flaws remains the envy of the world. We must also imagine a CAA that reaches further beyond the academy than we already do, as relevant to the unaffiliated artist, designer, and even art historian, as we are to those of us who hold academic positions. Our task force on design, design theory, design education, and design history has uncovered exciting potential for greater advocacy for our design colleagues and how to reimagine our structures and programs to strengthen and expand our association, acknowledging the growing stature of design in our culture and in our institutions. Artists without a permanent or sometime itinerant academic connection have long been, despite specific outreach attempts, on the periphery of our association because we have yet to clearly articulate what the benefits of membership are. CAA will need to clear new spaces for such new contributors and membership
Change is frightening and nearly everyone despises ambiguity—conversely conditions in which art and artists thrive. In the midst of an election cycle that has upended assumptions on both the left and right, now more than ever art matters. And I mean matters more than instrumentally—not merely as an economic driver and not as an adjunct practice that increases student’s math scores or that it is somehow “good for us.” Art matters because artists work and thrive in the interstitial spaces between disciplines, around institutions, who assume the permission to ask questions that cannot be formulated from inside the confines of a particular, single point of view or perspective.
This speech was first delivered as opening remarks at the CAA Annual Conference Convocation Ceremony on February 3, 2016. A Keynote talk by artist Tania Bruguera followed (Watch on YouTube).
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for February 2016
posted by CAA — Feb 10, 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.
February 2016
Lisa Yuskavage: The Brood
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
3750 Washington Boulevard, St. Louis, Missouri
January 15–April 3, 2016
The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis presents Lisa Yuskavage: The Brood, her first solo museum exhibition in the United States in fifteen years. The show charts the artist’s career development through twenty-five years of her painting. On view are her surreal, otherworldly figures arranged in diptychs, triptychs, and what Yuskavage calls “symbiotic portraits.”
“Merging the grand tradition of portraiture with the expansive vocabulary of female transgression and empowerment, Yuskavage’s sensuous palette and confrontational subject matter provoke the imagination and create a sometimes polarizing space: the artist presents the female body as a site of defiance and decadence.”
The sometimes doll-like figures of Yuskavage’s paintings give way to sexualized poses and hint unsettling realities beneath the exquisitely painted canvases. As Christian Viveros-Fauné says in a review of the exhibition, previously at the Rose Art Museum (published by ARTnews on September 11, 2015), “The result is a bawdy brood of shocking figures painted with classical luminosity. Despite Yuskavage’s formal delicacy and love of bright colors, it’s no stretch to say that the best of her works are as dark as Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings.”
The exhibition is accompanied by a large-scale, comprehensive publication by Skira Rizzoli, created in close collaboration with the artist.
Betye Saar: Still Tickin’
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art
7374 East Second Street, Scottsdale, AZ
January 30–May 1, 2016
The Los Angeles artist Beyte Saar’s new exhibition Still Tickin’ at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art presents nearly six decades of her work exploring African American identity, spirituality, and the interconnectedness between different cultures. The exhibition is divided into three themes: nostalgia and memory; mysticism and ritual; the political and racial.
From collage to sculpture to works on paper, Saar has used her artistic career to explore the lives of black people. In video interview for the 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award from the California African American Museum, she asks “What can I do as an artist to liberate Aunt Jemima?” after encountering the racially charged figure at a flea market. “I can make her a warrior,” she answers, giving Aunt Jemima a shotgun in the seminal piece, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972).
Saar began her career in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, using found objects such as clocks, dolls, and cages among other bits and pieces, creating assemblages and installations. The Scottsdale exhibition brings together recent work and historical pieces.
Though Saar was featured in eight Pacific Standard Time exhibitions in 2010 and received the 2012 Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Arts Distinguished Feminist Award, she remains largely overlooked. Still Tickin’ comes to Arizona from Saar’s first museum solo exhibition in Europe at the Museum Het Domein in the Netherlands.
Firelie Báez: Bloodlines
Pérez Art Museum Miami
1103 Biscayne Boulevard, Miami, FL
October 15, 2015–March 6, 2016
The Dominican-born artist Firelie Báez’s first solo museum show, Bloodlines, at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami presents new works inspired by lineages of black resistance. Several works were created specifically for the exhibition and depict textiles, hair designs, and body ornaments, linking traditionally loaded symbols with individual human gestures.
“Báez’s new works embody a provocative investigation on decorative elements, textiles, hair designs, and body ornaments that explores methods of resistance in black communities within the United States and the Caribbean. Her exceptional paintings show a profound appreciation of diasporic histories, as well as new contemporary approaches towards painting,” said María Elena Ortiz, the museum’s assistant curator, who organized the show.
Works on view include: Patterns of Resistance (2015), a series comprising blue and white drawings centered on a textile pattern created by Báez, using different political references from social movements in the black diaspora in the United States and the Caribbean; and Bloodlines (2015), a new series of portraits inspired by the tignon, a headdress which free women of color were obligated to use by law in eighteenth-century New Orleans.
While exploring black culture, Afro Caribbean folklore, and the diaspora, Báez brings her female viewpoint, “thereby claiming the relevance of the excluded historical perspective of women of color and reclaiming the female body and mind.” A catalogue of the exhibition, featuring contributions by Naima Keith and Roxane Gay, is available.
Lorraine O’Grady: Art Is…
Studio Museum in Harlem
144 West 125th Street, New York
July 16, 2015–March 6, 2016
Lorraine O’Grady (b. Boston, 1934) began her career in art in 1980, developing pioneering works in performance, installation, and works that address subjects of diaspora and black female subjectivity. Her iconic performances include Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (1980–83), Rivers: First Draft (1982), and Art Is… (1983), whose documentation is now presented at the Studio Museum in Harlem more than three decades later, organized by the assistant curator Amanda Hunt.
The performance was held on a sunny Sunday in September 1983 as part of the African American Day Parade, a monumental event that celebrates African and African American culture and heritage and that has been taking place Harlem since 1969. Choosing this context, the artist “ensured the largest black audience possible” and intended to challenge assumptions about race and accessibility, addressing in particular the idea that creating art is a privilege available only to some.
In this landmark performance, O’Grady entered her own float, riding up Harlem’s Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard (Seventh Avenue) along fifteen collaborators, all dressed in white. The float displayed an enormous, ornate gilded frame, while the words “Art Is…” was inscribed in its decorative skirt. Along the itinerary, O’Grady and troupe jumped off the float and held up empty, gilded picture frames, inviting people to be “portrayed” in them. The response was overwhelming, as enthusiastic onlookers became participants, confirming to O’Grady that Harlem’s residents were ready to see themselves as works of art.
Hundreds of snapshots were taken by various people who witnessed the performance. Later on O’Grady collected them to compose the series of forty images that capture the energy and spirit of the original performance. These images not only document the event but also form an archive of the architectural and cultural relics of Harlem’s past through a joyful partnership between visual art and lived experience. O’Grady’s performance engaged a broad and spontaneous audience in a way that no contemporary artist had done before. The joyful engagement follows her idea that Art Is… for everyone.
Marie Lund, Rallou Panagiotou, and Mary Ramsden: Vanilla and Concrete
Tate Britain
Millbank, London SW1P 4RG, UK
November 9, 2015–June 19, 2016
As part of the Art Now series, Tate Britain presents Vanilla and Concrete: Marie Lund, Rallou Panagiotou, and Mary Ramsden. Curated by Sofia Karamani, the exhibition brings together new and recent work by emerging artists who explore everyday objects, spaces, and gestures. From the finger smudges on a touchscreen to the sun-bleached fabric of a curtain, the work of these artists gives new form and meaning to apparently mundane objects and everyday incidental moments. Based on the artists’ intimate observations of today’s world, the works draw out connections between surface and essence and address the concept of transformation between individual and cultural identity.
Marie Lund (b. 1976, Copenhagen) presents sculptures inspired by the human impact on common spaces and objects, changing the way in which they are perceived. Lund recovers curtains stained with sunlight over many years and stretches them to look like abstract paintings, marrying light traces with poetic content.
Rallou Panagiotou (b. 1978, UK) takes interest in everyday “luxury” items, from make-up and jewelry to a cocktail, and from a straw-painted toe to marks of eyeliner. Panagiotou embraces these objects as artificial extensions of the human body, investigating how they define and express the individual within a wider cultural context.
Mary Ramsden (b. 1984, London) presents paintings that are inescapably informed by our digital reality. They hint to the smudges on digital touchscreens. Her works are displayed both individually and in groups that mimic multiple windows opened on a computer screen, reflecting the messy, human touch within a pristine and impersonal environment.
The Feminist Art Project
National Museum of Women in the Arts
1250 New York Ave NW, Washington, DC 20005
Saturday February 6, 2016, 9:00 AM–4:30 PM
Coinciding with the 104th CAA Annual Conference, the Feminist Art Project is proud to partner with the Studio Arts Program at American University to bring this extraordinary event to the public on Saturday, February 6, at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The Feminist Art Project’s TFAP@CAA Day of Panels will present a day of diverse panels and performances. This year’s theme is the representation of identity as intersectional—recognizing the multiple aspects of identity (gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality) and how they intersect, compound, and complicate the very categories they construct.
A second TFAP@CAA event invites the public to participate in an interactive performative action, Feminism: Remembrance & Legacy, organized by Claudia Sbrissa and Kathleen Wentrack in honor of the tenth anniversary of TFAP and the legacy of feminism. All are invited to share their experiences with TFAP and/or offer advice to future generations in the form of a written or visually expressed “letter to a young artist.” In reciprocity, participants will receive a gift from the project collaborators reflecting the generous exchange of ideas, art, connections, and friendship through the Feminist Art Project. All responses will be available to view online.
This event is free and open to the public and does not require conference registration. View the full 2016 schedule, abstracts, panel and event descriptions, and location details on the project’s website.
Coco Fusco
Alexander Gray Associates
510 West 26th Street, New York City
January 9–February 6, 2016
Accompanying her current exhibition, Alexander Gray Associates is presenting a screening series by the interdisciplinary artist and writer Coco Fusco. The selection is a survey, brought together for the first time, of her seminal videos created over the past two decades. The first screening includes Fusco’s most recent videos on Cuba: La Confesión (2015), created for the fifty-sixth Venice Biennale in Italy; and La botella al mar de María Elena (2015), which premiered at the 2015 Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art in Sweden.
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.)
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.
Affiliated Society News for January 2016
posted by CAA — Jan 09, 2016
Art Council of the African Studies Association
The current board members of the Art Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) are: President – Silvia Forni, Curator, Anthropology, Department of World Cultures, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; President Elect/Vice President – Shannen Hill, Associate Curator for African Art and Head of the AAAPI Department, Baltimore Museum of Art, and Senior Fellow, National Museum of African Art; Past President – Dominique Malaquais, Senior Researcher, Centre d’Etudes des Mondes Africains, CNRS; Secretary – Liese Van der Watt, Independent Writer and Researcher, London; Treasurer – Jordan Fenton, Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Art, Miami University, Ohio; Website Editor – Cory Gundlach, PhD student (ABD) in African Art History, and Associate Curator of African and Non-Western Art at the University of Iowa Museum of Art; Newsletter Editor – Deborah Stokes, Curator for Education, National Museum of African Art; Assistant Newsletter Editor – Leslie Rabine, Professor Emerita at the University of California, Davis; ASA Liaison – Cécile Fromont, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History at the University of Chicago; CAA Liaison – Yaëlle Biro, Associate Curator for African Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Eric Appau Asante, Lecturer of African Art and Culture; Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology; Boureima Diamitani, Executive Director of the West African Museums Programme; and Sidney Kasfir, Professor Emerita, Art History Department, Emory University.
Art Libraries Society of North America and the Visual Resources Association Foundation
A Summer Educational Institute for Visual Resources and Image Management (SEI 2016) will be held at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill from June 7 to 10, 2016. Founded over ten years ago, SEI is a joint project of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) and the Visual Resources Association Foundation (VRAF). It is designed to serve a wide range of professionals eager to learn about new technologies and update job skills: museum staff, visual-resources curators, librarians, archivists, art educators, and all those managing digital image media. This intensive workshop offers a mix of hands-on and lecture sessions presented by expert instructors. Registration for SEI 2016 opened in January. Please feel free to contact the SEI cochairs with any questions: Greta Bahnemann, University of Minnesota; and Jesse Henderson, University of Wisconsin.
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries
The Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) Leadership Seminar will take place June 19–24, 2016, at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The application deadline is January 15, 2016. Join colleagues from throughout the United States and beyond for AAMG’s flagship professional development program at Northwestern’s prestigious Kellogg School Center for Nonprofit Management. Dynamic, engaging, highly interactive by design, and interspersed with team and individual problem-solving exercises in leadership and management, this intensive five-day certificate program will allow you to learn from one another and be guided and inspired by nationally recognized scholars drawn principally from Kellogg’s renowned faculty. To learn more about the program and to download an application, please visit the AAMG website.
Association of Art Editors
The Association of Art Editors (AAE) website underwent a major remodeling in the summer of 2015. The New York–based graphic designer Matt See created the fresh and attractive template, which was refined, detailed, and implemented by DataCom Ota of Duluth, Minnesota. The site’s format is now simpler, easier on the eyes (more legible type and appealing colors), and more flexibly viewable (including via smartphone). Among other improvements, the member entries and services index have greater clarity, and job opportunities are linked via the homepage rather than incorporated in the Services section, as before. Over all, navigation has been much enhanced. The AAE website is accessible—free to all.
International Center of Medieval Art
The International Center of Medieval Art (IMCA) is pleased to announce and solicit applications for two recently created awards. First, the Graduate Student Travel Award. Three grants will be awarded this year, at $3,000 each, for PhD students in the early stages of dissertation research. Applications are due on March 1, and applicants must be ICMA members. The second award, the new ICMA book prize, will be awarded in 2017 to the best single-authored, printed book on any topic in medieval art published in 2016. Books published in English, French, Spanish, Italian, or German are eligible for consideration. For more information, please contact Ryan Frisinger.
Italian Art Society
The annual members’ business meeting of the Italian Art Society (IAS) will take place at the 2016 CAA Annual Conference on Friday, February 5, 2016, 7:30–9:00 AM in the Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, Washington 4, Exhibition Level. In addition to reports on IAS activities and election results, three IAS founders will be honored, the 2016 IAS/Kress lecturer will be announced, and recipients of various grants and awards will be recognized. The IAS long session, “Beyond Texts and Academies: Rethinking the Education of the Early Modern Italian Artists,” organized by Jesse Locker of Portland State University, will follow at 9:30 AM in Washington 1, Exhibition Level. The IAS-sponsored short session, “Rethinking the Rhetoric and Force of Images,” organized by Robert Williams of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Anna Marazuela Kim of the Courtauld Institute of Art, will take place the same day, 12:30–2:00 PM, in the Maryland Suite, Lobby Level.
The deadline for the new IAS Conference Grant for Modern Topics is February 15, 2016. Up to $1,000 will be provided to subsidize transoceanic travel to present in an IAS-sponsored session on the art, architecture, or visual culture of Italy from the early nineteenth century to the present.
Public Art Dialogue
Public Art Dialogue (PAD) is excited to announce two events at the 2016 CAA Annual Conference in Washington, DC. On Thursday, February 4, 6:00–8:00 PM, PAD will host a Public Art Salon and Award Reception in conjunction with Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) at the WPA gallery at 2124 8th Street NW. Local artists will show slides and talk about their public art projects in and around DC. At the event, Kirk Savage, professor of history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, will receive the 2016 PAD Award for Achievement in the Field of Public Art. On Friday, February 5, 5:30–7:00 PM, Savage will chair a roundtable, “Public Art: Process and Practice,” with Thomas Luebke of the US Commission of the Fine Arts and Lucy Kempf of the National Capital Planning Commission.
The Fall 2015 Public Art Dialogue (PAD) Newsletter has an interview by Marisa Lerer and Jennifer K. Favorite with Sarah Beetham on “Confederate Monuments and the Black Lives Matter Movement.” As Lerer and Favorite note: “Countries around the world, from Syria to Spain to Argentina, have grappled with the bronze and stone sculptural legacy of leaders who represent a dark chapter in their nation’s past.” This issue has a strong link PAD’s forthcoming journal issue, “The Dilemma of Public Art’s Permanence,” edited by Erika Doss. Also in the newsletter, Marisa Lerer has an essay “Public Art’s Role in International Biennials.” She considers the role of public-art practices in contemporary biennials and includes responses from curators, artists, and academics from Cuba, the United States, Ireland, and Canada. The guest editors of two special issues of PAD’s journal are seeking papers and artists’ projects for the topics “Borders and Boundaries” (coeditors: Cher Krause Knight and Harriet F. Senie; submission deadline: March 1, 2016); and “Higher Ed: College Campuses and Public Art” (editor: Monika Burczyk; submission deadline: September 1, 2016). For more information, go to the PAD website.
SECAC
The SECAC board and membership voted to change the name of the organization from the Southeastern College Art Conference to SECAC.
Awards presented at SECAC’s annual meeting, which took place October 22–24, 2015, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, are:
- Excellence in Teaching: Debra Murphy, University of North Florida
- Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication: Bibiana Obler, George Washington University
- Outstanding Artistic Achievement: Matthew Kolodziej, University of Akron
- Outstanding Exhibition and Catalogue of Contemporary Materials: Hannah Israel and Michele McCrillis, Columbus State University
- Outstanding Professional Achievement in Graphic Design: Jerry Johnson, Troy University; and Scott Fisk, Samford University
The President’s Awards are:
- Award for Exemplary Achievement: Michael Aurbach, Vanderbilt University
- Certificates of Merit: Thomas Brewer, University of Central Florida; Carol Crown, University of Memphis; and Virginia Derryberry, University of North Carolina, Asheville
The Juried Exhibition featured:
- First-place award: Michael Holsombeck, Chattanooga State Community College
- Second-place awards: Efram Burk of Curry College; and Sara Madandar, University of Texas at Austin
- $5,000 Artist’s Fellowship: Duane Paxson, Troy University
- $5,000 William R. Levin Award for Research in the History of Art: John Ott, James Madison University
Society of Architectural Historians
The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) will hold its next annual international conference April 6–10, 2016, at the Pasadena Convention Center, 300 East Green Street, in Pasadena, California. Over seven hundred people from around the world will convene to share new research on the history of the built environment from antiquity to the critical present. “New Local/Global Infrastructures” is the theme of the 2016 Pasadena/Los Angeles conference, which includes forty-two sessions with papers, as well as roundtables, exhibits, talks, and public architecture tours. Regional sessions include “Los Angeles Infrastructure: Design, Aesthetics, Publics,” “Styles, Revival Styles, California Styles,” and “Reappraising California Counterculture.” Speakers include Eric Avila, professor of urban cultural history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Dana Cuff, UCLA architecture professor and director of the cityLAB research center. SAH will present “Surveying L.A.: Past, Present, Future,” a public seminar that will take an in-depth look at SurveyLA, the city’s comprehensive study of historic resources funded by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the City of Los Angeles. Panelists will discuss the local and global implications and applications of SurveyLA and its website, HistoricPlacesLA. Early registration ends February 3, 2016. View the complete program and register online.
Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture
Following voting in December 2015, the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) has elected Ksenia Nouril as its new secretary/treasurer for a two-year term, succeeding Yelena Kalinsky. In addition, Amy Bryzgel will replace Ksenya Gurshtein as the web news editor for a one-year term.
On December 11–12, several SHERA members participated in “The 100 Years of Suprematism Conference” at the Harriman Institute, organized by the Malevich Society. The conference proved to be an important international event, bringing together scholars from the United States, Europe, and the former Soviet Union. The program of the conference is available on the website of the Malevich Society.
At CAA’s Annual Conference in February 2016, SHERA will sponsor the following sessions: “Collecting, Curating, Canonizing, Critiquing: The Institutionalization of Eastern European Art,” chaired by Ksenia Nouril; and a double session led by Alison Hilton called “Exploring Native Traditions in the Arts of Eastern Europe and Russia.”
Recipients of the 2016 Awards for Distinction
posted by Emmanuel Lemakis — Jan 04, 2016
CAA has announced the recipients of the 2016 Awards for Distinction, which honor the outstanding achievements and accomplishments of individual artists, art historians, authors, conservators, curators, and critics whose efforts transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.
CAA will formally recognize the honorees at a special awards ceremony to be held during Convocation at the 104th Annual Conference in Washington, DC, on Wednesday evening, February 3, 2016, 5:30–7:00 PM. Led by DeWitt Godfrey, president of the CAA Board of Directors, the awards ceremony will take place in the Marriott Ballroom, Salon 2, Lobby Level, Washington Marriott Wardman Park. Convocation and the awards ceremony are free and open to the public. The Washington Marriott Wardman Park is located at 2660 Woodley Road NW, Washington, DC 20008.
The 2016 Annual Conference—presenting scholarly sessions, panel discussions, career-development workshops, a Book and Trade Fair, and more—is the largest gathering of artists, scholars, students, and arts professionals in the United States.
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Krista Thompson
Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice
Duke University Press
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann
New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic 1919–1933
Los Angeles County Museum of Art and DelMonico Books
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions
Myroslava M. Mudrak and Tetiana Rudenko
Staging the Ukrainian Avant-Garde of the 1910s and 1920s
Ukrainian Museum
Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Matthew C. Hunter
“Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Nice Chymistry’: Action and Accident in the 1770s”
The Art Bulletin, March 2015
Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism
Chika Okeke-Agulu
Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria
Duke University Press
Art Journal Award
Abigail Satinsky
“Movement Building for Beginners”
Art Journal, Fall 2015
Distinguished Feminist Award
Carrie Mae Weems
Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
Sabina Ott
Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
Patricia Berger
Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work
Arlene Shechet
Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Carmen Herrera
CAA/American Institute for Conservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
Debra Hess Norris
Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Rosalind E. Krauss
Morey and Barr Award Finalists
CAA recognizes the 2016 finalists for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Awards for their distinctive achievements:
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award Finalists
- Paul Binski, Gothic Wonder: Art, Artifice, and the Decorated Style, 1290–1350, Yale University Press, for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
- Elina Gertsman, Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Adam Herring, Art and Vision in the Inca Empire: Andeans and Europeans at Cajamarca, Cambridge University Press
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award Finalist
- Jens M. Daehner and Kenneth Lapatin, eds., Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World, J. Paul Getty Museum
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions Finalist
- Timothy Verdon and Daniel M. Zolli, eds., Sculpture in the Age of Donatello: Renaissance Masterpieces from Florence Cathedral, Museum of Biblical Art, in association with D. Giles
Contact
For more information on the 2016 Awards for Distinction, please contact Emmanuel Lemakis, CAA director of programs. Visit the Awards section of the CAA website to read about past recipients.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Dec 02, 2015
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.
Black Artists and the March into the Museum
After decades of spotty acquisitions, undernourished scholarship, and token exhibitions, American museums are rewriting the history of twentieth-century art to include black artists in a more visible and meaningful way than ever before, playing historical catch-up at full tilt, followed by collectors who are rushing to find the most significant works before they are out of reach. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Can Art Exist on Social Media?
The arrival of a new passport is not usually newsworthy. But in July 2015, when the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei posted a photo of himself with his new passport to Instagram, the world responded with barely contained excitement. The story was covered by the New York Times, CNN, and Time, among others. (Read more from Apollo.)
Carnegie Museum Computer Program Collects Every Detail on Its 30,098 Artworks
Elysa, a computer-software program named for Andrew Carnegie’s housekeeper, cleans up and standardizes information already known about 30,098 artworks in the Carnegie Museum of Art collection. Elysa (pronounced Eliza) breaks apart a paragraph packed with names and dates and organizes it into a format that computers can manipulate or turn into a map. (Read more from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)
Will Video Kill the Lecturing Star?
You may have heard about the flipped classroom approach, in which lectures are viewed at home and class time is used for discussion, project work, and other practical exercises. You may also have been wondering whether to bother with it, and how it actually would work in practice. (Read more from the Guardian.)
Google Steps Up to Defend Fair Use, Will Fund YouTubers’ Legal Defenses
After years of missteps, blunders, and disasters in which YouTube users have been censored through spurious copyright claims or had their accounts deleted altogether, Google has announced an amazing, new, user-friendly initiative through which it will fund the legal defense of YouTube creators who are censored by bad-faith copyright-infringement claims. (Read more from Boing Boing.)
The New Art-World Math: What It Really Costs to Run a Gallery
Pity the poor art dealer. Not a phrase you hear a lot in an industry for which the stereotype is of jet setting and high living. But veteran art dealers report that some big things have changed to make it more difficult, and less profitable, to run an art gallery—even in what’s been a booming market for contemporary art. (Read more from the New York Observer.)
Where Is the Union for Arts Admin Workers?
Contrary to what you might expect from a New England–born Irish American whose descendants worked on railroads, pubs, and politics, I was raised with a healthy ambivalence toward unions. But having worked in nonprofits and the arts since before I was legally able, I’ve started to think that there might be some value in bringing the camaraderie and collective bargaining of unions into the arts, specifically on the administrative side. (Read more from HowlRound.)
Art Critics Have Ignored the Condition of Artworks for Too Long
Judging the quality of an artwork must always involve some appreciation of its current condition. This is not to say that an artist’s reputation should be defined by the injuries their work may have suffered over the centuries—although an understanding of the endurance of materials might well be one mark of artistic success. Rather, anyone who enjoys looking closely at works of art should always be conscious that they are unlikely to be presented as they were originally intended or achieved by the artist. (Read more from Apollo.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Nov 18, 2015
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.
Internationalization and Tenure
Should universities incorporate internationally focused criteria in their tenure and promotion policies? A majority of institutions (52 percent) have identified internationalization as one of their top five strategic priorities, but only a minority (8 percent) report having guidelines in place specifying international work or experience as a consideration in faculty tenure and promotion decisions. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
“This Is a Genocide”: Art Historian Zainab Bahrani on ISIS’s Destruction of Cultural Heritage
Last year, news outlets began reporting that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria had begun bombing and bulldozing cultural-heritage sites and artifacts, some dating back to ancient times. A few weeks ago, I sat down with Zainab Bahrani, Edith Porada Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology at Columbia University and director of Mapping Mesopotamian Monuments, to ask about her perspective on the matter. (Read more from ARTnews.)
Online Arts Publishing: A Roundtable with Artnet News, Momus, and Temporary Art Review
Everything about publishing is changing, including art criticism and news. What sort of art coverage we consume, how we consume it, and on what devices is rapidly and constantly evolving. If art magazines are dead, then what is taking their place—and why? (Read more from Temporary Art Review.)
Unseen Art Is Crowdfunding an Open-Source Platform to Make Fine Art Accessible via 3D Printing
Making art more accessible to blind and visually impaired people is Unseen Art’s founder Marc Dillon’s new mission. After almost a quarter century working in the mobile industry, he says it’s time to give back. “I’ve been in mobile for twenty-five years nearly and I wanted to do something that gives back to people,” Dillon said. “I wanted to find a place where I could basically find a community that had a need and give back to that, with the experience that I have.” (Read more from TechCrunch.)
Using SmartHistory to Generate Good Conversations in the Art-History Survey
I had been aware of Smarthistory for years, occasionally assigning videos as supplemental readings and directing students to its content. But following their use of the Khan Academy platform in 2011, the site’s content expanded exponentially. Suddenly, there were enough videos on diverse topics that I could assign Smarthistory videos for every topic in my syllabus. (Read more from Smarthistory.)
With $170.4 Million Sale at Auction, Modigliani Work Joins Rarefied Nine-Figure Club
In an overheated art market where anything seems possible, a painting of an outstretched nude woman by the early-twentieth-century artist Amedeo Modigliani sold last week for $170.4 million with fees to Liu Yiqian, a former taxi driver turned billionaire art collector, in a packed sales room at Christie’s. It was the second-highest price paid for an artwork at auction. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Why Are Art Galleries White Cubes?
Four white walls and appropriate lighting is the go-to, de facto way of presenting art. But it hasn’t always been that way. The existence of art galleries in general is a relatively new concept in the grand scheme of history. So how did it standardize so quickly? Why is the white cube the “best” place to present art, commercially and institutionally? Will it always be this way? (Read more from Hopes and Fears.)
The Etiquette Minefield of the Interview Meal
As you prepare for the job market you are undoubtedly focusing on your research, polishing your job market paper, and honing your presentation skills. Those absolutely should be your highest priorities. However, when you have time, you should also be sure to brush up on your dining etiquette. It can save you stress and embarrassment later. (Read more from Vitae.)