CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — May 20, 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.
Entire USC First-Year MFA Class Is Dropping Out
We are a group of seven artists who made the decision to attend USC Roski School of Art and Design’s MFA program based on the faculty, curriculum, program structure, and funding packages. We are a group of seven artists who have been forced by the school’s dismantling of each of these elements to dissolve our MFA candidacies. In short, due to the university’s unethical treatment of its students, we, the entire incoming class of 2014, are dropping out of school and dropping back into our expanded communities at large. (Read more from Art and Education.)
Behind the Impasse That Led USC’s 2016 MFA Students to Withdraw in Protest
The graduate class of 2016 at USC’s Roski School of Art and Design has withdrawn in protest from the visual-arts program over administration and curriculum changes. The conflict stems from changes made to the program after students had already arrived on campus, as well as resignations by prominent faculty members. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)
The Conference Manifesto
We are weary of academic conferences. We are humanists who recognize very little humanity in the conference format and content. We have sat patiently and politely through talks read line by line in a monotone voice by a speaker who doesn’t look up once, wondering why we couldn’t have read the paper ourselves in advance with a much greater level of absorption. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Noodling on the Future of Conferences
May I just say, for the record, that I love love love the American Alliance of Museums annual meeting staff. They do a glorious job each year of pulling off the near impossible—decamping for a distant city to host a few thousand of our besties, orchestrating content, transportation, signage, A/V, food, drink, and the logistics of getting a couple hundred vendors in and out of a massive exhibit hall. They totally rock. But I’m a futurist. (Read more from the Center for the Future of Museums.)
The Machine Vision Algorithm Beating Art Historians at Their Own Game
Few areas of academic inquiry have escaped the influence of computer science and machine learning. But one of them is the history of art. The challenge of analyzing paintings, recognizing their artists, and identifying their style and content has always been beyond the capability of even the most advanced algorithms. That is now changing thanks to recent advances in machine learning based on approaches such as deep convolutional neural networks. (Read more from the MIT Technology Review.)
Thinking about Art Thinking
One of the problems we face when talking about art education is that we take the term “work of art” for granted. “Work” refers to labor as much as to an object, while “art” means the discipline in which this is performed, although it is also used as a laudatory adjective. In any case this divides people in two groups: those who make the objects, and those who appreciate them. Those who make them are subject to the criteria of meritocracy, and the educational system aims to distill the few that may rise to the top. (Read more from e-flux Journal.)
Should Graduate Students and Adjuncts Unionize for Better Pay?
Colleges have been cutting costs by using more nontenured instructors, including graduate student teaching assistants and adjuncts, instead of professors. They account for over half of teachers on college campuses. Both adjuncts and graduate instructors have been organizing for higher pay and employment benefits. But is unionization the answer? (Read more from the New York Times.)
Using Art Therapy to Open the Minds of Jihadists
Of all the problems therapists have been tasked with solving, altering the mindsets of committed jihadists is one of the toughest and most important. In Saudi Arabia, which has more experience with this problem than any other nation, they have found a simple tool provides invaluable assistance in this challenging process: paint brushes. (Read more from Pacific Standard.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — May 13, 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.
Court Rejects Royalties for Artists in Out-of-State Sales
California owners of fine art will not be required to pay artists a share of the profits when the work is resold out of state, a federal appeals court decided last week. In an 8–3 decision, the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a provision of a 1976 state law that required Californians to pay 5 percent royalties to the artist if the sale occurred in California or if the owner was a Californian who sold the work out of state. The law is the only one of its kind in the US, though similar requirements exist in some other countries. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)
Asking Students to Bare It All
Art instruction—which has long featured nude models—is not the same as instruction in other subjects. But a complaint from the parent of a student at the University of California at San Diego has drawn attention to the pedagogy behind a course in which all students (and the professor) are naked for a class session. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
What’s the Point of a Professor?
In the coming weeks, two million Americans will earn a bachelor’s degree and either join the work force or head to graduate school. They will be joyous that day, and they will remember fondly the schools they attended. But as this unique chapter of life closes and they reflect on campus events, one primary part of higher education will fall low on the ladder of meaningful contacts: the professors. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Re: Your Recent Email to Your Professor
In the age of social media, many students approach emailing similar to texting and other forms of digital communication, where the crucial conventions are brevity and informality. But most college teachers consider emails closer to letters than to text messages. This style of writing calls for more formality, more thoroughness, and more faithful adherence to the conventions of Edited Standard Written English—that is, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and syntax. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
How Collectors Use Instagram to Buy Art
According to a recent survey of collectors on Instagram, an incredible 51½ percent have purchased works from artists they originally discovered through Instagram. More important, this discovery led to an average of five purchased works by artists originally found on the app. Although respondents are all active on Instagram, and nearly half have collections of one hundred plus works, these are significant findings. Is Facebook’s image-sharing platform the next big sales channel for fine art? (Read more from Artsy.)
Help Desk: The Vanishing Curator
I’m a new MFA grad and I’m trying to break into the gallery system. Recently I had a great studio visit with a well-known curator. We talked for a long while about the work and he seemed very interested, but since then he hasn’t been in touch. What should I do? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
Stop Worrying about Job Security
I hear two common concerns from graduate students and postdocs who are considering a nonacademic career path: Will the work be intellectually stimulating? And will my job be secure? I can easily allay their concerns on the first point, as my work in industry has always been intellectually stimulating. The second concern is harder to dismiss because it is founded in truth. For everyone but tenured faculty professors, job security is mostly a thing of the past. (Read more from Vitae.)
Onwards and Upwards
More than a third of American art-museum directors are of retirement age. The impending influx of new blood at the top may offer museums an opportunity to rethink the job and question many of the assumptions that underlie traditional museum operations: the emphasis on splendid buildings, the primacy of curatorial authority, and the balance between rich donors, for whom museums are often personal vanity projects, and the public, who see museums as shared common goods. (Read more from the Economist.)
CAA’s Webinar on Fair Use in Teaching and Art Practice Is This Friday, May 15!
posted by CAA — May 11, 2015
Register now for the next webinar in CAA’s series on fair use in the visual arts, meeting this Friday, May 15 at 1 PM EDT. Join the lead principal investigators of CAA’s new Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, Patricia Aufderheide, university professor in the School of Communication at American University and Peter Jaszi, professor of law in the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University’s Washington College of Law, for an in-depth look at the Code’s sections on fair use in teaching and art practice. Registration for the live event is free and open to the public thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Video recordings of the first two webinars in this series are now available for CAA members. To access, log into your account on collegeart.org and click on the “Webinars” tab in the left-hand navigation column. Recordings of each webinar in the series will be made available to members the week following the event.
CAA will issue Certificates of Participation to those who attend all five webinars in the series. Registration secures you a spot in all three remaining webinars, however you may attend any number of the remaining webinars through this registration. The webinars will cover the following topics:
May 15, 2015, 1:00-2:00 PM (EDT): Fair Use in Teaching and Art Practice
May 29, 2015, 1:00-2:00 PM (EDT): Fair Use in Museums and Archives
June 5, 2015, 1:00-2:00 PM (EDT): Fair Use in the Visual Arts: A Review
Affiliated Society News for May 2015
posted by CAA — May 09, 2015
American Society for Aesthetics
The American Society for Aesthetics (ASA), an association for aesthetics, criticism, and theory of the arts, will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the ASA Feminist Caucus Committee with a full day of workshop discussions, followed by a celebratory reception, on Saturday, November 14, 2015. The Feminist Caucus Committee anniversary is part of the annual ASA conference, to be held November 11–14 at the Desoto Hilton in Savannah, Georgia. Noted scholars will discuss the evolution and contributions of feminist scholarship within philosophical aesthetics and the history of the ASA and its publication, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Topics will include: “Forty Years of Feminist Scholarship in Aesthetics,” “The Influence—Hidden or Otherwise—of Feminist Scholarship in Aesthetics,” and “Feminist Pedagogy and Curricula in Aesthetics.” For more information, please visit http://www.aesthetics-online.org/feminist/ or contact Peg Brand.
American Society of Hispanic Art Historical Studies
The American Society of Hispanic Art Historical Studies (ASHAHS) announced an award at its business meeting at the CAA Annual Conference in February 2015. The Eleanor Tufts Book Award, which recognizes an outstanding English-language publication in the area of Spanish or Portuguese art history, went to Glaire D. Anderson for The Islamic Villa in Early Medieval Iberia: Architecture and Court Culture in Umayyad Córdoba (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013).
Art Libraries Society of North America
The Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS) met in Fort Worth, Texas, from March 19 through 23, 2015, for its forty-third annual conference. The conference’s theme, “New Frontiers on the Old Frontier,” allowed members to explore current and emergent interests in the art and visual-information profession. The society awarded the George M. Wittenborn Memorial Book Award to Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. of the National Gallery of Art for Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century. The ARLIS/NA Distinguished Service Award was given to Daniel A. Starr, deputy chief librarian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Read about incoming members of the executive board.
Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey
The Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) has awarded the 2015 Rhonda A. Saad Prize for Best Graduate Paper in Modern and Contemporary Arab Art to Christopher Barrie for “Myth and Mythology on the Nile: The Surrealism of Georges Henein and ‘Abd al-Hadi al-Gazar.” Barrie is a master’s degree student in Middle East politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. His paper analyzes the treatment of myth in the poetry of Henein and the visual art of al-Gazzar. The paper challenges understandings of al-Gazzar’s “Contemporary Art Group” as the first example of a purportedly authentic national Egyptian art and instead looks to analyze the dialogical interpenetration of the cosmopolitan and the local in al-Gazzar’s work.
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries
Save the date for next annual conference of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) in Washington, DC: the weekend of May 20, 2016.
AAMG is in the process of compiling standards and documentation for Best Practices for University Museums and Collections. Once compiled, this can serve as a companion guide for accreditation as well as a resource for working within a parent institution. Please contact Barbara Rothermel, director of the Daura Gallery and assistant professor of museum studies at Lynchburg College, directly with documents, suggestions, or comments about practices with which you are most concerned.
Information about the AAMG Summer Leadership Seminar 2016 (rolling deadlines) is coming soon. Questions about the leadership seminar can be directed to David Robertson.
Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art
During its 2015 Annual Conference, CAA presented Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, past president of the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA), board member at large, and managing editor of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, with its 2015 Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award. Chu also received a certificate of appreciation from AHNCA’s membership for her organizational leadership and for the establishment of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide. Also at the CAA conference, AHNCA sponsored a two-part session entitled “What Is Realism?”and a shorter session on “Future Directions in Nineteenth-Century Art”; both were well attended. AHNCA’s major session for CAA’s 2016 conference will be “Between the Covers: The Question of Albums in the Nineteenth Century.”
During the AHNCA business meeting, Yvonne Weisberg extended her term as treasurer, but her successor must be in place by February 2016. Thus the organization now seeks nominations for the position; please send these via email to Peter Trippi, AHNCA president. Caterina Pierre also agreed to continue as newsletter editor.
AHNCA’s recent and upcoming activities include attending a Mellon lecture by Penelope Curtis, director of Tate Britain, at the Yale Center for British Art (April 23); a tour of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts exhibition about artists’ gardens, with the curator Anna O. Marley (April 25); a tour of Sotheby’s nineteenth-century European art sale, with the expert Seth Armitage (May 1); and a visit to the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami with the museum’s director, Jill Deupi (May 12).
Historians of Islamic Art Association
The Historians of Islamic Art Association (HIAA) has announced the winners of its recent grant and essay competitions. Anna McSweeney, a senior teaching fellow in Islamic art and archaeology at SOAS, received a Grabar Fellowship to complete the research for her book, The Alhambra Cupola at the Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin.Natalia Di Pietrantonio, a doctoral candidate at Cornell University, was awarded a Grabar Travel Grant to deliver a paper at the 2015 Association of Art Historians conference at the University of East Anglia. Sugata Ray, assistant professor of art history at the University of California, Berkeley, received the 2014 Margaret B. Ševčenko Prize for his essay, “Shangri La: The Archive-Museum and the Spatial Topologies of Islamic Art History.” The Grabar Grants and Fellowships Program, which supports the scholarly activity and professional development of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in Islamic art, was established in memory of Professor Oleg Grabar. The Ševčenko Prize, awarded annually for the best unpublished article written by a young scholar on any aspect of Islamic visual culture, honors the memory of Margaret Ševčenko, the longtime managing editor of Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Cultures of the Islamic World.
International Center of Medieval Art
The International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA) will present sessions and receptions at the fiftieth International Congress on Medieval Studies, to be held May 14–17, 2015, at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. Sessions presented by the organization include the “Cross in Medieval Art,” “Moving Women, Moving Objects,” and “Super Medieval! Visual Representations of ‘Medieval Superheroes.’” This last session is sponsored by the organization’s student committee. Two receptions are planned, one for all members and another for students.
International Sculpture Center
The International Sculpture Center will host the twenty-fifth International Sculpture Conference, “New Frontiers in Sculpture,” to be held November 4–7, 2015, in Phoenix, Arizona. The conference will feature panel discussions at Phoenix Art Museum and Arizona State University; special programming at Bollinger Atelier; optional trips to James Turrell’s Skyspaces and Cosanti, among others; gallery hops, the annual ISC members’ littleSCULPTURE show; and much more. Registration opens in June. For more information and to join the mailing list for updates, please visit www.sculpture.org/az2015.
Italian Art Society
The Italian Art Society (IAS) has announced information regarding the sixth annual IAS/Kress Lecture in Italy: Nino Zchomelidse of Johns Hopkins University will present her paper “Scena Sacra Scena–Tribuna Civica: Il ruolo dell’ambone nella Campania medievale” on May 20, 2015. The lecture will take place in the Dipartimento degli studi umanistici of the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II. The Emerging Scholars Committee of IAS has inaugurated a new mentoring program that will match established scholars with graduate students and junior scholars with similar interests.
On May 15, IAS will host three linked sessions on the topic “Civic Foundation Legends in Italian Art” at the 2015 International Congress on Medieval Studies, to be held at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. IAS will also sponsor a long session titled “Beyond Texts and Academies: Rethinking the Education of the Early Modern Italian Artist” at the next CAA Annual Conference, taking place February 3–6, 2016, in Washington, DC.
The deadline for IAS/KRESS travel grants for scholars undertaking transoceanic travel to the annual meeting of the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference in Vancouver is May 20, 2015. Please consider writing for the IASblog on any topic related to Italian art from prehistory to the present.
IAS has announced its new executive board: Sheryl E. Reiss, president; Anne Leader, executive vice president; Frances Gage, vice president for program coordination; Martha Dunkelman, treasurer and membership coordinator; and Sean Roberts, secretary.
Mid-America College Art Association
The School of Art in the College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning (DAAP) at the University of Cincinnati will host the biennial conference of the Mid-America College Art Association (MACAA), October 26–28, 2016. This follows the 2014 conference, “Mash Up,” which was hosted by the University of Texas at San Antonio. Jeffrey Adams, current MACAA president, and Kate Bonansinga, director of DAAP’s School of Art and site coordinator, are working with the MACAA board and DAAP faculty to develop ideas for sessions for the conference and a potential theme. Since the 1930s MACAA has provided a forum for artists/teachers of America to discuss and debate the issues of our profession, to share ideas and information of mutual benefit, and to affirm the friendships and collegiality that bind us together. The College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning at the University of Cincinnati has as its primary mission the creation of a better visual and design environment. Through excellence in educational programs, research, creative works, and service to the community, the faculty, the students, and administrative officers of DAAP are dedicated to achieve this mission.
National Art Education Association
The National Art Education Association (NAEA) invites you to participate in Summer Vision, joining a professional learning community and spending four days in America’s heartland or the nation’s capital exploring art, architecture, nature, and the museum as a work of art!
New Media Caucus
The New Media Caucus (NMC) has reported the results of its recent elections. The new board members are: Nadav Assor, assistant professor, Connecticut College; Rachel Clarke, associate professor, California State University, Sacramento; Renate Ferro, visiting assistant professor of art, Cornell University; Meredith Hoy, assistant professor, Arizona State University; Patrick Lichty, assistant professor, Columbia College Chicago; Jessye McDowell, assistant professor of art and exhibitions and lectures coordinator, Auburn University; Carlos Rosas, associate professor, Pennsylvania State University; Daniel Temkin, independent artist; and Stephanie Tripp, associate professor of communication, University of Tampa.
The newly elected officers are: Jim Jeffers, treasurer, assistant professor, Indian River State College; A. Bill Miller, chair, Communication Committee, assistant professor, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater; and Joyce Rudinsky, chair, Events Committee, associate professor, University of North Carolina.
These artists and scholars will be joining the following: Vagner Whitehead, president, associate professor, Oakland University; Mat Rappaport, secretary, associate professor, Columbia College Chicago; Pat Badani, editor-in-chief of Media-N Journal, independent artist and scholar; Victoria Bradbury, researcher at CRUMB, Sunderland, United Kingdom; Mina Cheon, interdisciplinary professor, Maryland Institute College of Art; Kevin Hamilton, associate professor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Barbara Rauch, associate professor, Ontario College of Art and Design University, Toronto; Josua Selman, president, Artist Organized Art; and Jessica Westbrook, assistant professor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Pacific Arts Association
The Pacific Arts Association-Europe conference will be held July 2–4, 2015, at the Museo de América in Madrid, Spain. The presentation of papers is open to any topic within the theme of “Recent Research in Pacific Arts.” Presentations can be either thirty minutes (twenty to twenty-five minutes of talk, five to ten minutes of discussion) or ten-minute reports on current exhibition projects or work in progress in museums or galleries. For more information, please contact adama@adamaamerica.com.
Pacific Arts Association-Pacific is calling for interest in its 2015 conference on “Trading Traditions: The Role of Art in the Pacific’s Expansive Exchange Networks,” to be held at the Fa’onelua Conference Centre in Nuku’alofa, Tonga, September 30–October 4, 2015. The conference theme examines the role art has played in the exchange of objects, peoples, technologies, and ideologies in the prehistoric, historic, or modern Pacific. It is not limited to “physical” exchanges but also addresses complex social, economic, and political arrangements and interactions among interconnected systems, structures, and peoples. For further information, please write to Karen Stevenson.
Public Art Dialogue
Public Art Dialogue (PAD) sponsored two sessions at CAA’s 2015 Annual Conference in New York. “Museums and Public Art: Coexistence or Collaboration,” chaired by Harriet Senie and Cher Krause Knight, featured papers by Kasia Ozga (“False Advertising? Public Art and Monographic Exhibitions”),Glenn Wallace (“‘Western Exposure’: The Contemporary Art Museum, Public Art, and the Global City”),Andrew Wasserman (“Sites of Counter Culture: Navigating a Future Bowery”), and Carole Anne Meehan(“Raising Expectations for the Public Sphere”). The artist Norie Sato chaired a second session, “Student Debt, Real Estate, and the Arts”; participating in the panel were Tom Finkelpearl, commissioner of New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs and the artists Caroline Woolard and Paul Ramirez Jonas. Finkelpearl received the 2015 PAD award for achievement in the field of public art. This award recognizes an individual whose contributions have influenced public art practice.
Society for Photographic Education
Each spring, the Society for Photographic Education (SPE) hosts a forum for the presentation of artistic work and research to a community of peers. SPE has announced the call for proposals for “Constructed Realities,” the fifty-third national conference, to be held March 10–13, 2016, in Las Vegas, Nevada. SPE is accepting proposals for the 2016 conference with a submission deadline of June 1, 2015. Topics are not required to be theme-based and may include but are not limited to: image-making, history, contemporary theory and criticism, new technologies, effects of media and culture, educational issues, and funding. SPE membership is required to submit, and proposals are peer reviewed.
The presentation formats are:
- Graduate Student: short presentation of your own artistic work and a brief introduction to your graduate program
- Imagemaker: presentation of your own artistic work (photography, film, video, performance, installation, multidisciplinary approaches)
- Lecture: presentation of a historical topic, theory, or another artist’s work
- Panel: group led by a moderator to discuss a chosen topic
- Teaching: presentations, workshops, demos that address educational issues, including teaching resources and strategies; curricula to serve diverse artists and changing student populations; seeking promotion and tenure; avoiding burnout; and professional exchange
Please www.spenational.org for information on SPE membership and full proposal guidelines.
Society for the Study of Early Modern Women
The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (SSEMW) has announced the following awards for 2014 at its annual meeting, held during the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, last October:
- Best Book: Melinda S. Zook, Protestantism, Politics, and Women in Britain, 1660–1714 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
- Honorable Mention: George McClure, Parlour Games and the Public Life of Women in Renaissance Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2013)
- Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition: Barbara Torelli Benedetti, Partenia, a Pastoral Play, ed. and trans. Lisa Sampson and Barbara Burgess-Van Aken (Toronto, 2013)
- Best article: Diane Wolfthal, “Household Help: Early Modern Portraits of Female Servants,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 8 (2013): 5–52
- Best collaborative project: Noelia S. Cirnigliaro and John Beusterien, eds., Touching the Ground: Women’s Footwear in the Early Modern Hispanic World 14.2 (2013). Special issue of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies
- Honorable Mention: Anne J. Cruz and Maria Galli Stampino, eds., Early Modern Habsburg Women: Transnational Contexts, Cultural Conflicts, Dynastic Continuities (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013)
- Best Translation: Pere Torrellas and Juan de Flores, Three Spanish Querelle Texts: “Grisel and Mirabella,” “The Slander against Women,” and “The Defense of Ladies against Slanderers,” ed. and trans. Emily Francomano (Toronto, 2013)
- Best Teaching Edition: Valerie Worth-Stylianou, ed. and trans., Pregnancy and Birth in Early Modern France: Treatises by Caring Physicians and Surgeons (1581–1625) (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2013)
- Best Digital Scholarship, New Media, and Art Project: Caroline Bowden, principal investigator, 2012–13; James Kelly, project manager, 2012–13; along with Jan Broadway, David Horne, Katherine Keats-Rohan, and Michael Questier, coinvestigator and principal investigator, 2008–11), Who were the Nuns: A Prosopographical study of the English convents in exile 1600–1800
Society of Architectural Historians
The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) is accepting abstracts for its sixty-ninth annual international conference in Pasadena and Los Angeles, California, April 6–10, 2016. Please submit abstracts by June 9, 2015, for one of the thirty-eight thematic sessions, the Graduate Student Lightning Talks, or the open sessions. The thematic sessions have been selected to cover topics across all time periods and architectural styles. SAH encourages submissions from architectural, landscape, and urban historians; museum curators; preservationists; independent scholars; architects; and members of SAH chapters and partner organizations.
SAH is accepting applications for the 2015 H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship. The prestigious $50,000 fellowship allows a recent graduate or emerging scholar to study by travel for one year. The deadline to apply is October 1, 2015.
Registration is open for the 2015 SAH Field Seminar, “Architecture in the Rio de la Plata Basin: Between Tradition and Cosmopolitanism.” The seminar features a customized itinerary and includes visits to sites not open to the general public, supplemental lectures, and a significant educational component designed to enhance your experience of the region’s built environment.
Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian and Russian Art and Architecture
The Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) seeks proposals of papers for its sponsored 2½-hour session, “Exploring Native Traditions in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia,” at CAA’s 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC. Within a broad historical and geographical framework of the region, which assimilated and reacted to a succession of cultures from Greek, Roman, and Byzantine to Mongol, Ottoman, and Soviet, the session seeks to balance the significance of international contacts and the experiences of artists who worked primarily in their native land. Artists expressed regional identities through distinctive themes and motifs in every art form; some made use of traditional techniques and designs, or represented provincial spaces, distinct ethnicities, and social customs. Papers may focus on individual artists or on broader institutional contexts that affected evolving concepts of regionalism and nationalism. The discussions might also address contemporary tensions surrounding regional and national identity. Interested contributors should see CAA’s 2016 Call for Participation and send proposals with other required materials to the session’s chair, Alison Hilton. The deadline for proposals is May 8, 2015.
Southeastern College Art Conference
The application for the 2015 Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) Artist’s Fellowship, which carries a $5,000 award, is August 1, 2015.
New directors to the Board of Directors were elected in February:
- Alabama: Wendy Deschene, Auburn University
- Kentucky: Boris Zakic, Georgetown College
- Louisiana: Jill Chancey, Nicholls State University
- North Carolina: Lawrence Jenkens, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
The new issue of the Southeastern College Art Conference Review (vol. 16, no. 4, 2014) is now available.
The next four conferences will take place:
- October 21–24, 2015: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
- October 19–22, 2016: Virginia Tech with Hollins University, in Roanoke, Virginia
- October 25–28, 2017: Columbus College of Art and Design, in Columbus, Ohio
- October 17–20, 2018: University of Alabama in Birmingham
Visual Resources Association
The Visual Resources Association (VRA) honored the recipients of the organization’s highest honors at a members and awards dinner on March 12, 2015, during the VRA’s thirty-third annual conference in Denver, Colorado. Maureen Burns of IMAGinED Consulting received the Distinguished Service Award for her contributions to visual resources and image management. Comments from Burns’s nominators and a description of her engagement with visual-resources advocacy, service to the profession, and long-term involvement with VRA and the VRA Foundation throughout her career can be found online. VRA presented the Nancy DeLaurier Award for distinguished achievement to the editors of Cataloging Cultural Objects (Chicago: American Library Association, 2006). The editors are: Murtha Baca, head of the Getty Digital Art History Access Program; Patricia Harpring, managing editor of the Getty Vocabulary Program; Eliza Lanzi, director of digital strategies and services at Smith College; Linda McRae, retired director of the Visual Resources Library at the University of South Florida; and Ann Baird Whiteside, librarian and assistant dean for information resources for the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. The Nancy DeLaurier Award nomination and acceptance remarks by Patricia Harpring are available online. VRA publishes images and information about the awards presentation on its website.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — May 06, 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.
QS World University Rankings by Subject 2015: Art and Design
Discover the world’s top universities for art and design, with the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2015. The rankings highlight the world’s top universities in thirty-six individual subjects, based on academic reputation, employer reputation, and research impact. (Read more from Top Universities.)
How to Get On with Artists, Handle Mergers, and Avoid Lawsuits
Museums collaborate with artists on projects such as exhibitions, artist residencies, commissions, and acquisitions. What should the contracts for these arrangements cover? When a museum commissions a work of art, it generally gets rights of first refusal to buy the work, to be credited in exhibitions, and to apply the commission fee to the purchase price, said John Thomas, a New York–based lawyer. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Four Questions to Answer before Commissioning an Artist
A successful commission, like any transaction, depends on both parties. The artist must deliver the work to spec, and the collector, once engaged, must step back and let the artist create. This duality adds a layer of complexity to the already nuanced arena of art collecting. Here are four questions to answer before commissioning an artist to create an original work of art. (Read more from Forbes.)
What Is Being Learned from MOOCs? New Report Takes Stock
The hype around the free online courses called MOOCs has drawn millions of students, who are all essentially part of a teaching experiment of unprecedented scale. These days, researchers are increasingly checking in on that experiment. A new report, released last week, seeks to answer the question “Where is research on massive open online courses headed?” (Read more from Wired Campus.)
Recognizing Complicity
Here is where my description of T. J. Clark’s project in Farewell to an Idea ends and questions about its premises arise. If we understand modernism only through those works that despised it, those artists whose output stood in a negative or negating relation to it, then do we provide ourselves with an adequate assessment of what occurred and what role fine art has played in its complicities? What alternative is there to the consensual narratives that propose that the function of aesthetic work is the power and legitimacy of critique? (Read more from the Los Angeles Review of Books.)
The Object as Subject
The books in Bloomsbury Academic’s series Object Lessons are small-formatted volumes, well designed and well packaged, under 150 pages; they fit easily into the palm. They not only discuss everyday objects but they are handsome objects in their own right, which bespeaks their place in the current zeitgeist. They look like things one might want to collect and showcase. In their subject matter and their presentation they tap a fascination with objects, which is hardly new, but seems to be intensifying. Why? (Read more from the Chronicle Review.)
The Trouble with Collaboration
A few weeks ago, I terminated an eight-year-old collaboration with someone who had once been my professor. I was the lead author on the paper, having done all of the writing and analyses. My one-time professor was second author—he’d promised that with his edits and his name on the paper, we would get it in a top journal. Unfortunately, I finished a draft four years ago, and I’ve been waiting … and waiting … and waiting for his input ever since. (Read more from Vitae.)
Museums in Europe and US Draw Up Rescue Plans for Ravaged Sites in Iraq
European and American museums that preserve and display Assyrian artifacts from the ancient royal cities under attack by Islamic State are working to help their Iraqi colleagues prepare for a day when the sites are liberated. A coalition of the willing exists, but it remains to be seen whether institutions will coordinate their efforts. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Fair Use in the Visual Arts: Detroit Happenings
posted by Patricia Aufderheide — May 06, 2015
The visual arts community is already putting the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts to work in Detroit. At a late-April meeting at the Cranbrook Art Museum, speakers showed fair use can enable work in five areas.
After a presentation on the Code by Janet Landay of the College Art Association and myself, a panel of experts explained why fair use matters to them:
Publishing. At Wayne State University Press, explained its director Jane Hoehner, fair use is essential to publishing work on film studies, one of the press’ major lines. Until now, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies code of best practices in fair use has been useful, but this new code opens more opportunities. The press does not depend on fair use for covers of the books, which function more like advertisements and are much harder to justify as a transformative use because of that.
Teaching. Diana Y. Ng, who teaches art history at University of Michigan-Dearborn, was pleased to see that current practice in her department agrees generally with the field’s consensus on using teaching materials. Fairly-used materials are, among other things, limited both to a particular course and to the students, teachers and staff in that course, and images are used at an appropriate resolution for teaching.
Art. Mark Newport, Artist-in-Residence and Head of the fiber department at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, recalled an earlier project in which he created an artwork incorporating a DC Comics character. His rationale for doing so fell squarely within the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts. But when DC Comics sent a letter asking him if he would like to license the work, he found himself having to take sole responsibility for his copyright choice. He hopes that the Code would provide guidance for institutions on what level of risk is involved in a fair use decision, since working within a field consensus generally significantly lowers the risk. “As an artist, I think you should use your fair use rights,” he said, “and be a problem for anyone who believes you should not.”
Collections. At the Henry Ford Museum, Nardina Mein, who manages the archives and library at the Benson Ford Research Center there, a number of policies encourage access to archival materials. Her museum provides digital access to some collections, and “the Code will help us tremendously with this work, especially in cases where we cannot find the copyright holders.”
Museums. Terry Segal, a registrar for the Detroit Institute of Arts, sees fair use as a way of expanding access and also streamlining work. She took heart from the simplicity of CAA’s fair use code. As someone who has spent a lot of time granting and getting permissions, she found the fact that fair use is so simple to execute heartening. “When we’re using fair use, we don’t have to worry about what all the rights in the piece are,” she noted.
Librarians, museum staff, scholars, artists, and teachers at the event seized upon copies of the Code to share with their colleagues. We look forward to stories of how the Code was received and used; stay in touch at nyoffice@colleageart.org.
Fair Use in the Visual Arts: The News Spreads
posted by Patricia Aufderheide — May 06, 2015
Since the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts launched in February, it has begun conversations in libraries, museums, archives, editorial offices, and classrooms. (Need a refresher on that code? Check out this video!) Now, it’s picking up fans.
The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) have just endorsed the Code and other organizations have also expressed their enthusiasm. The Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) sent a letter of support to CAA in February, as has the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), which also posted it on their resource page.
The Code’s facilitators have been busy with workshops and presentations at the San Francisco Art Institute, the Art Libraries Society of America annual conference in Dallas, a meeting of the Legal Issues in Museum Administration in Washington, D.C., the University of Chicago and Western Illinois University among others. The College Art Association has also sponsored several webinars, including a five-part series that continues into May.
If you’re interested in hosting an event on fair use in the visual arts, contact nyoffice@collegeart.org.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Apr 29, 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.
Next Practices in Digital
Next Practices in Digital and Technology comprises forty-one examples of recent and ongoing digital initiatives designed by AAMD member museums. From social media and mobile apps, to in-gallery interpretation and behind-the-scenes collections management, Next Practices in Digital and Technology explores the ways museums are using technology to advance accessibility, scholarship, education, and audience engagement. (Read more from the Association of Art Museum Directors.)
Dear Artists, Stop Turning in Bad Grant Applications (Part 1)
Show of hands—how many of you who’ve applied for a grant or fellowship have turned in your application on the deadline day, right before the post office closed or the website shut down, after dashing off an unspellchecked artist’s statement and recruiting friends to write your reference letters the night before? (Read more from GrantSpace.)
Dear Artists, Stop Turning in Bad Grant Applications (Part 2)
When panelists are reading through the material, this is the only impression we have of you. Often, the judging is blind and sourced from out of town. If not, and a panelist has a conflict of interest, they have to state that up front and inform the organization and withdraw themselves from the conversation about your work. So, typically your work will be reviewed and assessed by strangers. (Read more from GrantSpace.)
Time to Change the Rules of Negotiation
It is job-offer season, and lately I’ve received an inordinate number of inquiries related to “negotiating while female.” In addition to the normal jitters that come with going back and forth on an offer, it seems lots of women have heard about the Nazareth College case and read the research that suggests they must play into gender stereotypes in order to secure competitive deals. For example, they have been told that they should make requests on behalf of others rather than themselves so as not to seem pushy or aggressive. (Read more from Vitae.)
Should Art Respond to Science? On This Evidence, the Answer Is Simple: No Way
Physics—it really does your head in. That seems to be the less-than-enlightening message the Japanese visual artist and composer Ryoji Ikeda took from a residency at CERN in Geneva. Ikeda’s installation Supersymmetry, staged in the darkened uppermost level of a multistory car park, is apparently what you get when you introduce an artist to the world’s most advanced particle research institute and its renowned Large Hadron Collider: a lot of sound and light, signifying nothing. (Read more from the Guardian.)
Competing or Complementing: Art Loss Databases Proliferate
Stolen art seems to be ubiquitous and difficult to track. It is relatively easy to ship and sell around the world, and can remain easily hidden for decades. The owner faces the conflict of wanting to publicize the loss widely, while also keeping their personal lives private. The development of databases to record losses was first preceded by newsletter alerts of stolen art that proliferated in the arts community to halt sales with questionable provenance. (Read more from the Center for Art Law.)
Three Quarters of New Collectors Buy Art Online for Investment, Study Finds
Collectors who buy art online are increasingly doing it for investment, according to a report released by the fine-art insurance company Hiscox. As many as 63 percent are driven by the value potential of works of art, with 75 percent of new buyers saying they buy art for investment. However, 93 percent of respondents say they collect for passion. Robert Read, the head of fine art at Hiscox, says rapid growth in the contemporary art market, coupled with a lack of options in other markets, is enticing people to “get on the art ladder.” (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Tax Break Used by Investors in Flipping Art Faces Scrutiny
Introduced in the 1920s to ease the tax burden of farmers who wanted to swap property, it soon became a tool for real-estate investors flipping, say, office buildings for shopping malls. Now, this little-known provision in the tax code, known as a like-kind exchange, has become a popular tactic for a new niche of investors: buyers of high-end art who want to put off—and sometimes completely avoid—federal taxes when upgrading their Diebenkorns for Rothkos. (Read more from the New York Times.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Apr 22, 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.
Democrats Lobby for US Artists’ Economic Rights with Two Bills
Two bills introduced in Congress aim to improve the lives of artists. One proposal seeks to bring droit de suite, also known as the artist’s resale royalty, to the United States. The other encourages artists to donate their own work to museums by allowing them to deduct the works’ fair market value from their taxes. Both bills have been proposed repeatedly in recent years but have never successfully passed into law. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
The Four-Hour Art Week? Read Carol Bove’s Self-Help Guide for Artists
The sculptor Carol Bove likes to play with associations and forms as she builds her assemblages of constructed and readymade objects. Time and space to experiment are crucial elements of her process, as is a certain psychological sovereignty—Bove writes that “creating a nonpurposive, free space in which to play and have fun is essential.” Here, the Brooklyn-based artist gives her best advice for finding happiness (rather than “succeeding”) as an artist, excerpted in its entirety from the new book AKADEMIE X: Lesson in Art + Life. (Read more from Artspace Magazine.)
Ten Techniques from Professional Artists for Breaking through Creative Blocks
Danielle Krysa had a successful career as a creative director for an advertising and branding agency in Canada. She was proud of her professional work but was secretly making her own art on the side. Krysa didn’t talk about her creative work with the same bravado that she approached her professional work. She rarely showed anyone what she was making and often felt a rush of jealousy when coming across the work of artists she admired. (Read more from Fast Company.)
The Art of Selling Art: Young Artists Navigate the Digital World
The art world has been slow to get online. But young artists are increasingly partnering with edgy digital start-ups to turn their creative passion into cash and reach new audiences—even if the big bucks are elsewhere. Nevertheless, online art sales are steadily growing, with 2.5 billion euros in revenue in 2013, according to the annual report of the European Fine Art Fair. (Read more from Deutsche Welle.)
Are Algorithms Conceptual Art’s Next Frontier?
In recent years, algorithms have been telling us what music to listen to, who we should date, what stocks we should buy, and even what we should eat. It comes as no surprise, then, that it should also tell us what art we should view. But what happens when the art we are looking at becomes the algorithm itself? (Read more from Artsy.)
There’s a Game for That: Teaching Art History with “Reacting to the Past”
When faculty facilitate involvement in activities such as simulations and games, and when students work collaboratively through role play and debate, deeper learning and transfer occurs. As part of my efforts to include more active and student-centered learning opportunities into my courses and to encourage knowledge, skills, and attitudes that support higher-order thinking tasks such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, I added a “Reacting to the Past” role-playing game to my introductory-level art-history course. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)
Soap, Chocolate, and Dung—How to Preserve Materials Not Built to Last
Dung, soap, chocolate, plants, blood, hair, urine, light bulbs, petroleum, smoke, animals, and more beauty, hygiene, and medical products than you can find in most chemists: artists have explored an unprecedented range of materials and technologies since the start of the twentieth century. Many are untested for longevity, and others are ticking timebombs where deterioration is concerned. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
The Future of Museums Is Reaching Way beyond Their Walls
The American Museum of Natural History has always been one of the most popular destinations in New York. Even with this influx of people coming to its doorstep, the museum is equally focused on drawing a crowd beyond its campus. The museum today is a sprawling outreach institution that is using apps, social media, and educational programs to slowly grow its reach. (Read more from Fast Company.)
People in the News
posted by CAA — Apr 17, 2015
People in the News lists new hires, positions, and promotions in three sections: Academe, Museums and Galleries, and Organizations and Publications.
The section is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
April 2015
Academe
Raymond AllenRaymond Allen, a painter, professor, and longtime vice president of academic affairs and provost at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, will retire in June 2015.
Leslie Bellavance, currently dean, director of graduate programs, and professor in the School of Art and Design at Alfred University’s New York State College of Ceramics, has been named president of Kendall College of Art and Design at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. Her appointment begins on July 1, 2015.
Susan Best has become convenor of fine art and art theory in the Queensland College of Art at Griffith University in South Brisbane, Australia.
David Bogen, currently vice president academic and provost at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, British Columbia, has been appointed provost and vice president of academic affairs at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, effective August 2015.
Tanya SheehanTanya Sheehan, associate professor of art at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, has earned tenure at her school.
Museums and Galleries
Margaret C. Conrads, formerly deputy director of art and research at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, has been appointed director of curatorial affairs at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Anne Hawley, director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachussetts, has announced her retirement after twenty-five years of service. She will step down at the end of 2015.
Katherine Jentleson, a doctoral candidate in art history at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, has been appointed the inaugural Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia.
David Joselit, distinguished professor of art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, has joined the board of directors of Artists Space in Manhattan.
Narayan Khandekar (photograph provided by Harvard Art MuseumsNarayan Khandekar, senior conservation scientist in the Harvard Art Museums’ Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has become the center’s director.
Thomas KrenThomas Kren, associate director for collections at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California, will retire from his position in October 2015.
Kate Kunau, a doctoral candidate in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, has become associate curator at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Jeongho Park, formerly Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellow at the Frick Collection in New York, has become curatorial research associate for the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Blanton Museum of Art, part of the University of Texas at Austin.
Lowery Stokes Sims, chief curator of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, has retired from the museum.
David Stark, previously director of administration for museum education at the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, has been appointed chief curator of the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio.
Michael Taylor has left his position as director of Dartmouth University’s Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Daniel H. Weiss, an art historian and president of Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania, has been named president of the board of trustees at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Chris Yates, formerly director of CORE Studio and associate professor of art at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio, has become assistant director of Gund Gallery at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.
Organizations and Publications
Michael Conforti, director of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has announced his retirement. He will leave the institute in summer 2015.
Joni Doherty, formerly director of the New England Center for Civic Life at Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, New Hampshire, has accepted a position as program officer for the Kettering Foundation in Dayton, Ohio.