CAA News Today
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Letter
posted by Linda Downs — Apr 15, 2015
CAA sent the following letter on April 9, 2015.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Letter
Daniel Ashe, Director
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
1849 C Street NW
Washington, D.C. 20240
Dear Mr. Ashe:
We are writing on behalf of the 11,000 art historians, curators, artists and conservators who comprise the membership of the College Art Association, a learned society for higher education professionals in the visual arts, regarding the changes suggested by the Association of Art Museum Directors to the proposed regulations, “Endangered Species Listed Objects and Objects with African Elephant Ivory (“Objects”).
CAA supports the U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s and the Association of Art Museum Directors’ efforts to end the poaching of elephant tusks throughout Africa and to end the commercial gain from these slaughters. At the same time we also understand the difficulties that import and export regulations impose on museums, collectors and conservators to traveling exhibitions, loans of individual art works, bequests of works of art, donations of art works and importation of art objects that contain ivory.
We support the Association of Art Museum Director’s suggested changes and respectfully request that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife adopt these changes to the Endangered Species Listed Objects and Objects with African Elephant Ivory.
Sincerely yours,
DeWitt Godfrey, CAA President
Linda Downs, Executive Director
Cc: Judith McHale
Chair Advisory Council on Wildlife Trafficking
c/o Cane Investments, LLC
3 West Main St.
Suite 101-1
Irvington, NY 10533
Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members
posted by CAA — Apr 15, 2015
Check out details on recent shows organized by CAA members who are also curators.
Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members 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
Mike Bullock and Linda Aubry Bullock. Lagan. Fourth Wall Space, Vox Populi, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, April 3–26, 2015.
N. Elizabeth Schlatter and Kenta Murakami. The Life in the Land: Art by Anna Líndal and Erling Sjovold. University of Richmond Museums, Richmond, Virginia, February 19–April 26, 2015.
Jennifer Tyburczy. Irreverent: A Celebration of Censorship. Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York, February 13–May 3, 2015.
Charlotte Vignon. Coypel’s Don Quixote Tapestries: Illustrating a Spanish Novel in Eighteenth-Century France. Frick Collection, New York, February 25–May 17, 2015.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for April 2015
posted by CAA — Apr 10, 2015
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
April 2015
Nina Bunjavec: Out of the Fatherland
Art Gallery of Ontario
317 Dundas Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5T 1G4
December 13, 2014–summer 2015
The Canadian graphic novelist Nina Bunjevac, in her work Fatherland, explores the influence of extremism and ideologies on her own family and personal history. Now on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Out of the Fatherland is a selection of drawings from Bunjevac’s tale of the patriarch of her family—a member of the radical nationalist group Freedom for Serbian Fatherland—as told through the memories of her mother, sister, and grandmother, among other relatives. In the painstakingly detailed panels Bunjevac reflects on her mother’s flight from her husband back to Yugoslavia with her two daughters in 1975, the history and political climate of Yugoslavia, and the death of her father while assembling a bomb in a Toronto garage two years later. Bunjevac was three at the time of her father’s death.
The graphic novel, as Bunjevac explains, is two parts in order to reflect the “duality presented in the book: maternal – paternal, nationalist – communist, old country – new country.” At times drawing directly from childhood photographs, the artist said it resembled detective work, where she would scan images, and through enlarging them discover hidden history. During an NPR interview Bunjevac revealed how an overexposed photograph of her grandmother, who was in an abusive relationship, once darkened, exposed a black eye, and subsequently the photographers desire to mask it. Bunjevac takes these frozen records of violence and forced smiles, and with her pen reveals sociopolitical issues at play on both a personal and national stage while maintaining her role as the neutral narrator. Fatherland follows Bunjevac’s debut graphic novel, Heartless (2012), which features Zorka, a depressed, alcoholic, chain-smoking antiheroine.
Lori Vrba: The Moth Wing Diaries
Daylight Project Space
121 West Margaret Lane, Hillsborough, NC 27278
March 27–May 22, 2015
The photographer Lori Vrba describes her work as “reeking Southern woman.” In her new exhibition at Daylight Project Space, and in her forthcoming book The Moth Wing Diaries (published by Daylight Books), Vrba edited photographs from four projects—Drunken Poet’s Dream, Piano Farm, Safekeeping, and My Grace Is Sufficient—into a monograph that addresses “themes of memory, providence, revival and dreams … [exploring a] sense of conflict and ultimate peace with the Southern terrain.”
Vrba’s work oscillates between dreamlike scenes and reflections of innocence and confrontational moments. In the photograph Orchid from My Grace is Sufficient, a woman stands naked, the frame dipping only so far as to expose a partial breast. She clenches an orchid in her hand. The model’s face and identity is obscured by what appears to be a sheer silken fabric, keeping the viewer from knowing her.
Vrba’s work has been compared to that of Sally Mann, a comparison, Vrba says, that almost made her cry. She admires and is influenced by Mann, but while both often photograph their children, the difference between the two artists, Vrba explains, is that her own work is entirely autobiographical. The landscapes she choses, either the Southern rolling hills or the body landscapes of her human models, is a means to explore internal tensions via her visual sensitivities and ultimately her femininity, intimacy, and vulnerability. Working in a traditional darkroom, Vrba has a love of printmaking that is reflected in the rich warmth and sultriness of her toned images. Unapologetic about her style, Vrba writes, “my work is inherently feminine … and has a traditionally beautiful aesthetic without apology.”
A larger selection of photographs from The Moth Wing Diaries will be on view at the Catherine Courturier Gallery in Houston, Texas, in June.
Cat Del Buono: Voices
Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami
Joan Lehman Building, 770 NE 125th Street, North Miami, FL 33161
April 14–19, 2015 (panel discussion on April 18 at 4:00 PM)
The Miami artist Cat Del Buono is bringing her video installation Voices to the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami for a short exhibition and panel discussion. Voices, created with a New Works Grant from Baang & Burne Contemporary, is a multichannel video installation focusing on domestic violence. Each small video monitor exposes only the lips of an anonymous domestic violence survivor as she recounts her personal experience of abuse for the unknown audience. Upon entry into the installation each voice is heard simultaneously, creating a “symphony of unrecognizable words.” Not until the viewer stands intimately close to a single monitor does the story of that woman become clear.
Filmed in Miami, New York, Connecticut, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Chicago, Voices brings stories from women of all ages and ethnicities to the viewer. “As a society, we must not allow the epidemic of domestic violence and those who are affected by it to remain an invisible and inaudible crowd of statistics,” Del Buono said in an exhibition statement.
Del Buono has a history of work aimed at raising awareness on women’s issues, as well as body image. In her work Beauty Box, during Art Basel Miami Beach in 2014, Del Buono and the Refemme team invited women and men into their “medical” tent to receive individualize beauty consultations. Instead of prescribing ways to improve, participants were complimented as part of the project’s “social interruption.”
Voices will cap its short stay at MoCA North Miami with a panel discussion moderated by Bonnie Berman of WLRNand featuring a victim’s advocate from the Lodge Miami, an abuse survivor, and Adrienne Von Lates from MoCA.
Anicka Yi: You Can Call Me F
The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011
March 5–April 11, 2015
The Kitchen’s gallery is transformed into a forensic laboratory in which Anicka Yi’s You Can Call Me F proposes a parallel between society’s increasing paranoia—private and public—regarding hygiene and contagion with the longstanding patriarchal fear of feminism and strength of female networks.
During 2014–15, Yi (b. Seoul, 1971) has been developing new projects as a visiting artist at MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology (CAST). For You Can Call Me F, the New York–based artist gathered biological information from one hundred women in order to cultivate the idea of the female figure as a viral pathogen that suffers external attempts to be both contained and neutralized.
Following her trilogy Divorce, Denial,and Death, in which Yi privileged scent, memory, and other aspects of the “avisual” over physical components, You Can Call Me F is based in the visual language of quarantine tents, a context that allows a translucent view, at the same time that intends to protect the fragile ecosystems within. Yi’s feminist approach focuses in the impact of the politics and subjectivities of smell on our empathic understanding of each other.
Curated by Lumi Tan, the project was possible by collaborative efforts from a hundred contributing women—some listed at the exhibition, some anonymous donors—as well as scientist and researchers, including: Tal Danino, MIT postdoc in synthetic biology; the biologist Patrick Hickey; and the provision of scent analysis and formulation by Air Variable, a scent fabrication company founded in 2014 by Sean Raspet that focuses exclusively on olfactory and chemistry-related art and design projects.
Camille Henrot: The Pale Fox
Westfälischer Kunstverein
Rothenburg 30, 48143 Münster, Germany
February 21–May 10, 2015
Westfälischer Kunstverein presents The Pale Fox, the first large-scale solo exhibition in Germany by the New York–based French artist Camille Henrot (b. 1978). This traveling exhibition (Münster, London, Copenhagen, and Paris) has been coproduced by four European institutions and was ranked by the Guardian as among the ten best art shows of the year.
The Pale Fox is borrowed character from an anthropological study, published by Griaule and Dieterlen in 1965, that reflects on the incorporation of several different cultures, as well as astronomical, mathematical, and philosophical systems of thought and beliefs in the West African Dogon tribe’s mythology. In this system, the character of the Pale Fox represents disorder and chaos not only as a transgression but also as a necessary condition for creativity. Based in a cycle from which accumulation and excess become productive again, and her interest in disorder as a fertile foundational principle for creative practice and formulation of knowledge, Henrot understands the fox as a potential model for our primitive selves, as well as a symptom of our digital age in which humans driven by curiosity and impatience.
Populating a highly constructed and meditative environment with images and objects, Henrot conceived this installation as a sort of a domestic atmosphere in which she orders and arranges more than four hundred photographs, bronze sculptures, books, watercolors, and drawings that were bought on eBay, borrowed from museums, or found or produced by Henrot. In the artist’s words, there is “an excess of principles” in The Pale Fox, a pathological and almost erotic “cataloguing psychosis” that allows the potential for disorder to return. Through this compulsive superimposition, the artist intends to make sense of our shared desire to understand the world intimately through the objects that surround us. A video produced by a seemingly hidden camera at the exhibition opening evidences audience engagement toward personal reconstructions of the multilayered environment of narratives.
Channa Horwitz: Counting in Eight, Moving by Color
KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Auguststrasse 69, 10117 Berlin, Germany
March 15–May 25, 2015
The KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin presents Counting in Eight, Moving by Color, the first comprehensive solo exhibition of Channa Horwitz (1932–2013). Many of the works on view, including a selection of construction drawings and documentary materials have never been shown before. The exhibition features representative works from all phases of Horwitz’s career, providing an introduction to her oeuvre and insight into key series of her creative process, such as the Language Series, Sonakinatography, Rhythms,and Structures. Some of her central works were reconstructed based on the plans that the artist made herself for her own future.
Departing from a system of notation based on the number eight, Horwitz developed a visual language in the late 1960s that achieved freedom based in the restriction to a few simple rules. Searching for a simple yet universal language, she created variations of complex systems resembling musical scores that allow movements to be visualized by means of color schemes and graphic scales. Since then, each of her works has been based on the numbers one through eight, while each number is assigned an specific color code, in this way designing structures that translate spatial-temporal relations into drawings, paintings, and multimedia sculptures.
The comprehensive exhibition at KW retraces the development that led Horwitz from figurative painting to conceptual abstraction, linking her creative practice to her contemporary minimal and conceptual artists. The display includes a large number of the compositions from “Sonakinatography” (her new term combining the Greek words for “sound,” “movement,” and “writing/recording”), which are perhaps the artist’s most well-known works to date. Despite her creative commitment, Horwitz lived and worked in complete seclusion from the midsixties until the 2000s, and her work was rarely exhibited. She seemed to have just begun her artistic career when she passed away at the age of 81. Sadly Horwitz did not live to see the overwhelming international recognition that her oeuvre gained at the last Venice Biennale.
CAA’s Webinar on Fair Use in Scholarship Is This Friday, April 10!
posted by Janet Landay, Program Manager, Fair Use Initiative — Apr 09, 2015
Register now for the next webinar in CAA’s series on fair use in the visual arts meeting this Friday, April 10 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 section on fair use in analytic writing. Registration for the live event is free and open to the public thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
A video recording of the first webinar held on March 27th, “An Introduction to CAA’s Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts,” is now available for CAA members. To access, log into your CAA account and click on the “Webinars” link in the left-hand navigation. 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 four remaining webinars, however you may attend any number of the remaining webinars through this registration. The webinars will cover the following topics:
April 10, 2015, 1:00-2:00 PM (EDT): Fair Use in Scholarship
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
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Apr 08, 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.
Almost One Third of Solo Shows in US Museums Go to Artists Represented by Just Five Galleries
Nearly one third of the major solo exhibitions held in American museums between 2007 and 2013 featured artists represented by just five galleries, according to new research. The Art Newspaper analyzed nearly 600 exhibitions submitted by 68 museums for its annual attendance-figures survey and found that 30 percent of prominent solo shows featured artists represented by Gagosian, Pace, Marian Goodman, David Zwirner, and Hauser and Wirth. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
How to Navigate the Art World
The art world can feel like that first time you walk into a high-end luxury store: everything is out of your reach, you’re not quite sure where to start, and there are a whole lot of venomous people judging your every move. Enter Roger White, author of the delicious new book The Contemporaries: Travels in the 21st Century Art World. Astute and conversational, White’s writing unveils the current state of the art academy, the studio, and the art market through the careers of the artists Dana Schutz, Mary Walling Blackburn, and Stephen Kaltenbach. (Read more from the Daily Beast.)
Artists, Not Judges, Should Decide Fair Use
This piece will focus on two implications of the Cariou and Sconnie Nation analyses: (1) the inherently factual nature of “fair use” analysis; and (2) fair use as an affirmative defense. “Fair use” started as a judge-made remedy to technically correct legal conclusions that led to absurd results, a practice commonly known as “equity.” Generally, and in the case of “fair use,” equity requires a court to make a significant factual investigation so as to demonstrate why the technical law should not apply. (Read more from the Center for Art Law.)
White Lies? Fibs? Tall Tales? Just Tell the Truth
Certainly, there are a lot of things that you might be reluctant to tell the truth about that don’t seem so terrible, such as one’s age. It may be embarrassing for some artists to be older and starting out, or to have not ever sold any work or to not have academic degrees in studio art or to not have any real exhibition history. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)
How the Tax Code Hurts Artists
With tax day looming, you can practically hear the cries of creative professionals across the country. That’s because the tax code hits many right where it hurts, by penalizing them for the distinctive way they make money. The biggest offender is still the alternative minimum tax, despite the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, which brought long-overdue reform. (Read more from the New York Times.)
English-Only PhDs
What does it mean to be a doctor of philosophy in the sciences? What skills do we expect PhDs to possess? One thing you have to leave off that list: the ability to read or communicate in a language other than English. Nearly all US doctoral programs in the sciences have dropped their foreign-language requirement. (Read more from Vitae.)
An Illustrated Guide to Arthur Danto’s “The End of Art”
In an obituary for the New York Times, Ken Johnson described Arthur Danto as “one of the most widely read art critics of the Postmodern era.” Danto, both a critic and a professor of philosophy, is celebrated for his accessible and affable prose. Despite this, his best-known essay, “The End of Art,” continues to be cited more than it is understood. What was Danto’s argument? Is art really over? And if so, what are the implications for art history and art making? (Read more from Hyperallergic.)
AHTR Reports on AP Art History (Part II)
The second of two-part series on AP Art History, this post examines the revised curriculum for art history that will go into effect later this year, its intended outcomes, and its relevance to art historians at all educational levels. The post also identifies new resources developed specifically for the new curriculum, as well as others that are appropriate for both secondary and university-level instruction in art history. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)
Update on CAA Task Forces
posted by Linda Downs — Apr 06, 2015
Task forces are established on occasion by the CAA Board of Directors to carry out research, address issues that are critical to the academic visual arts and art museums and require a limited commitment of time. There are currently seven task forces at CAA that have been established by the Board of Directors.
Task Force on Fair Use
Established in October 2012, this task force is cochaired by Jeffrey Cunard, CAA Counsel and Managing Partner of the Washington, DC, office of Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, and Gretchen Wagner, former General Counsel, ARTstor, and former member, Committee on Intellectual Property. Its twelve members have been overseeing a four-year fair use initiative supported by an initial grant from the Kress Foundation and a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Led by the efforts of Peter Jaszi and Patricia Aufderheide of American University, the first two years included interviews with 100 artists, art historians, curators, editors, librarians, publishers; a survey of 2,000 CAA members; and discussions with another 100 visual arts professionals. Based on the consensus developed through this process, the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts was published in February 2015 and presented to the CAA membership at the Annual Conference. Over the next two years the task force will assist in the dissemination of the Code through webinars, presentations at conferences, and in small meetings of professionals in the visual arts. The project will be completed in December 2016.
Download the Resolution to Form Task Force to Develop Fair Use Guidelines.
Task Force on Advocacy
Established by the Board in February 2015, this task force is chaired by Jacqueline Francis, Associate Professor, Visual and Critical Studies, California College of the Arts. The task force is charged with prioritizing CAA members’ critical advocacy issues.
Download the Resolution for a Task Force on Advocacy.
Task Force on the Annual Conference
Established by the Board in February 2015, this task force is chaired by Suzanne Preston Blier, CAA Vice President for the Annual Conference and Allen Whitehill Clowes Chair of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. The task force is charged with evaluating the structure, format, and technologies of the Annual Conference to facilitate information exchange, presentation of creative work, and professional support of members.
Download the Resolution for a Task Force on the Annual Conference.
Task Force on Committees
Established by the Board in October 2014, this task force is chaired by Charles A. Wright, CAA Vice President for Committees and Professor and Chair, Department of Art, Western Illinois University. The task force is charged with reviewing the nine Professional Interest Practices and Standards (PIPS) committees of CAA in order to ensure that the 2015–2020 Strategic Plan priorities, the structure of the committees, and the organization best meet the needs of CAA members.
Download the Resolution for a Task Force on Professional Interests, Practices and Standards Committees.
Task Force on Design
Originally established by the Board in May 2014 and recently reconfigured, the task force is chaired by Jim Hopfensperger, CAA Board Member and Professor of Art, Western Michigan University. The task force is charged with addressing and making recommendations on how to increase the sessions on design at the Annual Conference, engage designers as members, and address guidelines specific to designers.
Download the Resolution to Form a Task Force on Design.
Task Force to Develop Guidelines for Evaluating Digital Art and Architectural History for Promotion and Tenure
Established by the Board in October 2014 and supported by funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, this joint task force of CAA and the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) is co-chaired by DeWitt Godfrey, President, CAA and Professor of Art and Art History, Colgate University; and Ken Breisch, SAH President and Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, University of Southern California. The Mellon grant supports a research assistant, Alice Lynn McMichael, Graduate Center Digital Fellow and Digital Dissertations Liaison, The Graduate Center, CUNY and Adjunct Assistant Professor, Hunter College; and a statistician, Raym Crow, Chain Bridge Group. The task force charge is to develop guidelines for digital art and architectural history for use in promotion and tenure.
Task Force on Governance
Established by the Board in October 2014, this task force is chaired by DeWitt Godfrey, CAA President and Professor of Art and Art History, Colgate University. The charge is to review the structure and transparency of Board of Directors’ responsibilities to better serve and communicate with CAA members.
Download the Resolution for a Task Force on Governance.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Mar 25, 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.
Median Salaries of Tenured and Tenure-Track Professors at Four-Year Colleges, 2014–15
The median base salaries of tenured and tenure-track professors at four-year colleges increased by 2 percent in 2014—a rate of salary growth that was down a tenth of a percent from the previous year, according to the results of an annual survey from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Help Desk: Put the Artist First
In the role of writer and curator, I find myself playing bureaucratic middleman between artists and the public, or between artists and institutions. When I get an idea for an exhibition or written feature, the appropriate order of things often gets confusing for me. Should I first approach the artists with the idea, to make sure they are willing and able to participate, or should I discuss the project with the institution or publication, to be sure it gets green-lit? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
Museums Turn to Technology to Boost Attendance by Millennials
Art museum attendance dipped 5 percent from 2002 to 2012, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. Museumgoers 75 and older were the only age group to increase over that period. The guardians of posterity must be concerned about the future, no matter how long the lines may be. Curators worry most about millennials. How do static galleries of canvas and artifact engage a generation raised on the reactive pleasures of right swipes and hyperlinks? How do you sell Goya when Game of Thrones is a click away? (Read more from the New York Times.)
Taking Note: More Resources for Arts Data-Miners
The nation’s museums and libraries are taking prodigious steps to bring their most prized collections of artistic and cultural heritage online. But what about the data concerning those institutions? If we increasingly have the chance to view a painting, piece of sculpture, or rare manuscript from any location, then how easy is it to access basic stats about those items, to run them through analysis without cumbersome software, and to create visualizations that can be shared on multiple platforms? (Read more from the National Endowment for the Arts.)
Dimensions: Expanded Measures of Textiles
The contributions to this issue of Art Practical explore making and process in several ways—through elemental fibers, woven structures, and cloth’s capacity to hold color. Sonya Clark employs the most elemental of fibers—hair—in her essay, while Rebecca Gates’s exploratory text reveals how certain artists employ the warp and weft of a woven textile to create works that are simultaneously aural and visual experiences. (Read more from Art Practical.)
Museums Unite in Campaign to Save Massive Land Art Project
American museums—including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and the Walker Art Center—are campaigning for the conservation of Basin and Range, the stretch of the land surrounding Michael Heizer’s City. Michael Govan, director of LACMA, said, “The extraordinary Basin and Range landscape by itself is worth protecting. Michael Heizer’s art must be protected too. Together, the environment and the artwork comprise one of the nation’s greatest natural and artistic treasures.” (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
A Report on AP Art History (Part I)
The College Board has released a significant revision of the curriculum for Advanced Placement (AP) Art History that goes into effect in 2015–16. This presents the opportunity to encourage greater exchange between secondary and university educators who have developed innovative teaching methods that can be effective at any level of art-historical study. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)
How to Improve the Job Search Process, from the Perspective of a Candidate
Job openings are both a blessing and a curse. Search committees spend their time and energy reading through applications, selecting candidates, and making choices. But, no matter the stress that current faculty members are under, the applicants are under more. Each of us applicants is applying for dozens of jobs, possibly year after year. (Read more from Tenure, She Wrote.)
Register Now for CAA’s Webinar Series on Fair Use in the Visual Arts
posted by Janet Landay, Program Manager, Fair Use Initiative — Mar 18, 2015
Want to know more about fair use in the visual arts? Have questions about how you can use fair use in your work? 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 a series of webinars offering in-depth tutorials on the Code. CAA will issue Certificates of Participation to those who complete the entire series of webinars. The series will include the following topics:
March 27, 2015, 1:00–2:00 PM (EDT): An Introduction to CAA’s Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts
April 10, 2015, 1:00–2:00 PM (EDT): Fair Use in Scholarship
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
You may register for the first webinar (March 27) here. Registration for the remaining four webinars is available as a series here. Regardless of the number of these sessions you wish to attend, please register for the entire series and participate in whichever sessions you would like.
Registration is free and open to the public thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The webinars will be available at a later date as archived videos for CAA members.
Questions? Email CAA at nyoffice@collegeart.org.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Mar 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.
Welcome to the Brave New World of the Corporate-Sponsored Artist
It has never been easy for writers and artists to pursue their craft: art takes time and does not, in most cases, result in much monetary payoff. Since the 1900s, nonprofit organizations have filled this role with residency programs that are usually funded by wealthy donors or public donations. The Alliance of Artists Communities tracks these programs: there are currently over two hundred in the United States. But over the last couple of years, a new variety of artist-in-residence program has entered the scene, this time sponsored by big companies. (Read more from Fast Company.)
A Real Estate Investment Cooperative for NYC
In 2008, some friends and I built out and managed a studio space in New York. We signed a five-year lease (with a three-year option) and hoped for the best. Most of us got involved to save money, but quickly the space became an emotional intellectual home. When I realized that we would pay our landlord $960,000 over eight years for a dilapidated 8,000-square-foot studio space, I became obsessed with affordable, equitable ownership models. (Read more from Medium.)
A Palette of Textures
We become painters at some deep level not out of a love of images—after all, there are many ways to create those. Instead, at some point, we fall in love with the very stuff of our chosen medium. And if that happens to be oils, then our love is with the silky, dense, slippery, and intractable mud we spend our lives trying to master. (Read more from Just Paint.)
The Near and Far Future of Libraries
Recently, Google vice president Vint Cerf warned that we might be headed for a digital dark age, a massive loss of information with obsolete file types and hardware. That’s an especially dire prophecy in an era when digitization is rapidly eclipsing print media, artificial intelligence is perfecting search queries, and drastic upheavals are quietly underfoot at the world’s historic libraries. All this leads to the question of what happens if we lose our traditional libraries? (Read more from Hopes and Fears.)
In the Memory Ward
At first, the library of the Warburg Institute, in London, seems and smells like any other university library: four floors of fluorescent lights and steel shelves, with the damp, weedy aroma of aging books everywhere, and sudden apparitions of graduate students wearing that look, at once brightly keen and infinitely discouraged, eternally shared by graduate students, whether the old kind, with suede elbow patches, or the new kind, with many piercings. Only as the visitor begins to study the collections does the oddity of the place appear. (Read more from the New Yorker.)
Global Audiences, Zero Visitors: How to Measure the Success of Museums’ Online Publishing
Fifty percent of arts organizations in the United States maintain a blog. The Metropolitan Museum of Art calculated that while it draws six million visitors in a year, its website attracts 29 million users and its Facebook page reaches 92 million. Yet only a small percentage of these online visitors would ever walk up the New York museum’s famous steps. If the internet has changed the definition of what a museum’s audience is, then it also poses the difficult question of how to interact with it. (Read more from Rhizome.)
Spare Us the So-Called Experts and Call for the Connoisseurs
In the quest for academic impartiality, we often ignore actual ability. True attributional expertise—let us be grown up and call it connoisseurship—can only be gained through years of experience. It requires intense scrutiny of paintings by all manner of artists, of all levels of quality, and of pictures in varying conditions. Although there is a certain element of natural talent in connoisseurship, there is no substitute for training your “eye” over time. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Teaching Art History and Race: Bridging Gaps in the Global Survey Course
Designed to explore art from prehistory through the present, the current global survey course is often problematic. Many popular textbooks analyze art in the Western world extensively and chronologically while reviewing thousands of years of non-Western art history geographically in single chapters. This imbalance avoids addressing important issues including gender and race. In 2014, the murders of Eric Gardner and Michael Brown brought similar concerns in our society to light. These events provoked us to engage our art-history survey students about the relationship of art and race, and how that interaction calls attention to the inherent inequalities in our own field. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)
2015 CAA-Getty International Program Participants Attend Annual Conference in New York
posted by Janet Landay, Program Manager, Fair Use Initiative — Mar 17, 2015
This year, fifteen scholars from around the world attended CAA’s Annual Conference in New York as participants in the CAA-Getty International Program. The temperature in town when everyone arrived on February 8 was a frigid 10 degrees; nonetheless, the international travelers were intrepid, and their warmth and excitement did much to allay the cold weather outside.
Now in its fourth year, the program brings together art historians, artists who teach art history, and museum curators to meet with CAA members in their fields of study, attend conference sessions, and participate in a one-day preconference colloquium on international issues in art history. Funded by a generous grant from the Getty Foundation, this year’s scholars came from Argentina (Georgina Gluzman), Bangladesh (Mokammal H. Bhuiyan), Brazil (Ana Mannarino), Burkina Faso (Boureima Diamitani), China (Shao Yiyang), Croatia (Ljerka Dulibić), Hungary (Márton Orosz and Nóra Veszprémi), India (Savita Kumari), Mexico (Dafne Cruz Porchini), Russia (Andrey Shabanov), South Africa (Nomusa Makhubu and Lize van Robbroeck), Uganda (Angelo Kakande), and Ukraine (Nazar Kozak). For some, it was their first visit to the United States; for all, it was their first time at a CAA Annual Conference.
A highlight of the program was a full-day preconference colloquium about international issues in art history. Each of the fifteen participants gave presentations about their work, relating their specific research interests to one of five broader topics: Questioning the Discourse, Beyond Borders/Beyond Context, Activism and the Political, Cross-Cultural Encounters/Reception, and Exhibiting Cultures in a Global Society. The talks featured a wide range of art and varied approaches to the field. They were followed throughout the day by Q&A sessions and open discussions moderated by Rosemary O’Neill, chair of CAA’s International Committee, and Marc Gotlieb, president of the National Committee for the History of Art. As Nóra Veszprémi, a scholar from Hungary wrote, “The topics were as diverse as the participants themselves, but the questions that lay at the heart of the papers were closely related. Everyone was interested in the ‘internationalization’ of art history, and it was a wonderful experience to be able to discuss these issues with colleagues from all over the world.”
The colloquium included a number of CAA members serving as hosts to the international scholars. This year, many hosts came from select CAA affiliated societies, thereby sharing scholarly interests and providing networking opportunities for the participants. For example, Deepali Dewan, president of the American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA), was paired with Savita Kumari, an Indian art historian specializing in medieval and premodern Indian art, and Elisa Mandell, president of the Association for Latin American Art (ALAA), served as host to Georgina Guzman from Argentina and Dafne Cruz Porchini from Mexico. Other hosts came from the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA), the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA), the Renaissance Society of America (RSA), and the Society of Contemporary Art Historians (SCAH). CAA’s International Committee also supplied hosts, rounding out an excellent group of art historians to welcome and assist the international scholars. CAA is grateful to the National Committee for the History of Art for its financial support of the hosting activities of these CAA members.
The CAA-Getty scholars were busy throughout the conference week, attending sessions, meeting colleagues, and visiting New York museums and galleries. On Thursday the group attended two sessions, sponsored by CAA’s International Committee, that examined the legacy of the landmark exhibition Magiciens de la Terre, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin in 1989 at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Grande Halle at the Parc de la Villette in Paris. Martin, who participated in the sessions and attended Tuesday’s preconference as well, discussed the rationale behind the exhibition, which challenged Western preconceptions about non-Western art by displaying an unprecedented mix of objects—half of the works were by Western artists and the other half by artists from the rest of the world. Martin’s presentation was followed by other talks and, later in the afternoon, a roundtable discussion. In all, the events of this day provided an excellent platform for continuing Tuesday’s discussion about international issues in art history.
As in past years, CAA’s International Committee was centrally involved in planning this year’s international program. We are particularly grateful to Rosemary O’Neill, chair of the committee, for her enthusiastic support. In addition to organizing the sessions on Magiciens de la Terre (with her fellow committee member Gwen Farrelly), O’Neill helped to coordinate the preconference colloquium and even raised outside funds to bring Martin to the conference.
At the close of the week’s activities, program participants met again to learn about publishing art history in the United States and opportunities for residencies at research institutes. Susan Bielstein from the University of Chicago Press, Kirk Ambrose, editor of The Art Bulletin, and Gail Feigenbaum of the Getty Research Institute provided enormously helpful information on these subjects.
The CAA-Getty scholars then had a weekend on their own to explore New York before heading to the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, to meet with scholars there and learn about the research opportunities offered by that institution’s Research and Academic Program. The trip was a wonderful opportunity to see a great museum and experience a totally different part of the United States (where it was even colder than New York).
The purpose of the CAA-Getty International Program is to bring a more diverse and global perspective to the study of art history by generating international scholarly exchange. This year’s visitors brought with them a great deal of knowledge, enthusiasm, and curiosity about the field, which they shared with the CAA members they met, as well as with each other. In return, conference attendees offered their expertise and friendship, beginning relationships that will hopefully bear fruit in future projects and collaborations.
Nazar Kozak, an art historian from Ukraine, summarized the experiences of many when he wrote, “To put it simply, I understood that I can become a part of a global scholarly community. I felt like I belong here.”
Images
2015 CAA-Getty International Program participants. Front row, left to right: Savita Kumari, Andrey Shabanov, Nóra Veszprémi, Shao Yiyang, Janet Landay (from CAA), Ana Mannarino, Nomusa Makhubu, and Dafne Cruz Porchini. Back row, left to right: Nazar Kozak, Márton Orosz, Angelo Kakande, Boureima Diamitani, Ljerka Dulibić, Lize van Robbroeck, and Georgina Gluzman. Not pictured: Mokammal H. Bhuiyan (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Nazar Kozak with his host, Margaret Samu (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Ana Mannarino, Dafne Cruz Porchini, and Namusa Makhubu (photograph by Bradley Marks)
CAA President DeWitt Godfrey and Ljerka Dulibic (photograph by Bradley Marks)