CAA News Today

CAA Announces the Recipients of the 2011 Awards for Distinction

posted by Christopher Howard — Jan 05, 2011

CAA has announced the recipients of the 2011 Awards for Distinction, which honor the outstanding achievements and accomplishments of individual artists, art historians, authors, conservators, curators, and critics whose efforts transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.

CAA will formally recognize the honorees at a special ceremony to be held during the 99th Annual Conference in New York, on Thursday evening, February 10, 2011, 6:00–7:30 PM, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Led by Barbara Nesin, president of the CAA Board of Directors, the ceremony will take place in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium (use the 83rd Street entrance) and precede the Centennial Reception in the museum’s Great Hall and Temple of Dendur (7:30–9:00 PM). In connection with CAA’s one-hundredth anniversary, past recipients of each award will introduce the winners of the same award, bringing past and present together. The awards ceremony is free and open to the public; tickets for the reception are $35. RSVP to the event on Facebook.

In addition, Nesin, will formally introduce the five recipients of CAA’s 2010–11 Professional-Development Fellowships in the Visual Arts: Alma Leiva, Sheryl Oring, Brittany Ransom, Mina T. Son, and Amanda Valdez. This fellowship program awards grants to outstanding MFA students who are nearing graduation. She will also has also recognized five additional artists who have received honorable mentions: Maria Antelman, Caetlynn Booth, Gregory Hayes, Ashley Lyon, and Georgia Wall.

The 2011 Annual Conference—presenting scholarly sessions, panel discussions, career-development workshops, art exhibitions, a Book and Trade Fair, and more—is the largest gathering of artists, art historians, students, and arts professionals in the United States.

Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Lynda Benglis
For more than forty years, Lynda Benglis has challenged prevailing views about the nature and function of art, producing sculpture, painting, video, photography, and installation that demonstrate extraordinary breadth and invention. She models the life of an artist lived according to the rhythm of her own creativity and curiosity, rather than to the beat of fashion or the market and its enormous but inconstant rewards. Benglis’s career inspires younger artists, not because she was a star as a young artist, or because she has now begun to be recognized as a major artist at a later date. Her work has been and continues to be an ever-shifting monument to the body in motion, as she herself continues to change and grow as an artist. Her retrospective exhibition, Lynda Benglis, opens at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York on February 9.

Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work
John Baldessari
Few artists of the postwar era are so influential—or so elusive of definition—as John Baldessari, who has made extraordinary contributions in such wide-ranging registers as Conceptualism, appropriation, and art education. This seeming paradox—in which the artist at once towers over contemporary art and often slips through its cracks (while also prompting his students to seek new alternatives)—no doubt arises, at least in part, from his subtle wit. This year’s retrospective exhibition, John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, which opened at Tate Modern in London, appeared at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and ends its tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (on January 9), firmly establishes his preeminence over the course of five decades of artistic production.

Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Mieke Bal
The protean career of Mieke Bal, Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences Professor at the University of Amsterdam, has traversed many fields in the humanities. Emerging as a brilliant biblical scholar with path-breaking books that explored the gendered nature of Old Testament narratives, Bal became a star in literary criticism with the English translation of her 1977 book Narratology (1985). Ever curious and creative, her interests then migrated to art history, where she rapidly challenged established methodological conventions with Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word Image Opposition (1991) and Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (1999)—not to mention her well-known essay “Semiotics and Art History,” coauthored with Norman Bryson and published in The Art Bulletin (1991). Applying philosophical principles to an enterprise too often obsessed with empirical “evidence,” Bal provocatively rethinks the status of artistic authorship, the nature of the text/image relationship, the structure of text/context relationships, and the character of historical time.

Frank Jewett Mather Award
Luis Camnitzer
Luis Camnitzer has translated his tricultural perspective—born in Germany, raised and educated in Uruguay, and a participant in the New York art world—into a tripled practice. As an artist, teacher, and critic, he has lucidly addressed the aesthetic, social, and political conundrums of our times with firm but low-key authority. His latest collection of writings, On Art, Artists, Latin America, and Other Utopias (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), speaks incisively to issues of cultural displacement, transnational aesthetics, and the peripheral condition of contemporary art. Written originally for international art journals, exhibition catalogues, and academic conferences, the essays, which date from 1969 to 2007, assume a universal address, and Camnitzer’s intricate perception, laced with humor and irony but not dependent on them, allows him reasoned closeness to, and passionate distance from, his myriad topics.

Distinguished Feminist Award
Faith Ringgold
Faith Ringgold has been a forceful voice for feminism, successfully and gracefully encapsulating crucial issues of race despite the often-contentious relationship between gender and race in enfranchisement movements over the last four decades. Her work not only captures the strength of black women in fighting slavery, oppression, and sexual exploitation, but it also chronicles the dreams of black women who sought to transcend circumstance and find a brighter future. Ringgold’s American People paintings (1963–67) and Black Light series (begun in 1967) sought to examine how traditional color values could be modified for black subjects. From there she explored traditions of “women’s work” in fabric, first in collaboration with her late mother and then in her Story Quilts, which have become her signature statement. As a committed activist, Ringgold was a founder of Women, Students, and Artists for Black Liberation and a cofounder and member of Where We At, a collaborative of black women artists in the 1970s and 1980s.

Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
William Itter
William Itter’s gifted teaching approach, dedication to the instruction of freshman students, and curricular innovations in foundations have had a momentous, immeasurable impact on art pedagogy for more than fifty years. During his tenure as director of the Fundamentals Studio Program at Indiana University in Bloomington, which he joined in 1969, Itter has mentored several generations of graduate students with insight and commitment, turning them into great artists and teachers from a time when the MFA degree was in its infancy to the present day. In a unique pedagogical approach, he has regularly and generously shared his museum-quality collection of ceramics, textiles, baskets, and sculpture with his students as pedagogical tools to help them understand how visual languages have manifested across cultures and times. Now professor emeritus of fine arts, Itter continues to exhibit his own painting and drawing in prestigious venues nationwide.

Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
Patricia Hills
An active, gifted teacher, faithful mentor, and valued colleague, Patricia Hills has maintained a prodigious career, producing scholarship that has profoundly shaped the history of American art and visual culture. Her textbook Modern Art in the USA: Issues and Controversies of the Twentieth Century (2001) has become standard reading in the field, and her work on Jacob Lawrence, Alice Neel, Stuart Davis, John Singer Sargent, and Eastman Johnson is highly esteemed. As professor of art history at Boston University, she is a creative, active, and engaged classroom leader who has developed an innovative style of teaching that emphasizes intellectual role-playing and demonstrates striking methodological openness. Hills’s admirable commitment to the time-demanding aspects of pedagogy, such as her rigorous attention to student writing and her ability to combine that investment with a remarkable publication record, are a model for students and teachers across the discipline.

Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Molly Emma Aitken
Informed by history, connoisseurship, and contemporary artistic practice, Molly Emma Aitken’s The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) is an original contribution to the history of South Asian art. Aitken’s closely argued yet accessible account overturns long-held assumptions regarding the conservatism of Rajasthani miniatures, revealing the subtle yet powerful dynamism that animates this tradition. She acknowledges that the “enormous red-tipped eyes, narrow skulls, and squat or strangely arching bodies” of the figures depicted in these works can seem formulaic or alienating, but these images cannot be understood as mere repetitions of moribund conventions. Instead, Aitken shows that these court paintings were intended to elicit emotional states from the viewer, a conclusion she reaches through an innovative application of formal analysis and social history.

CAA announced the shortlist on December 15, 2010.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award
Darielle Mason, ed.
Darielle Mason’s Kantha: The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection and the Stella Kramrisch Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2009) constitutes a model of how to make a catalogue about specific collections that far outreaches the task of honoring the collectors in question. Offering acute insights into an important region and an understudied medium, the book not only celebrates a lively vernacular textile tradition but also accords, for the first time, a comprehensive, sensitive treatment to this form of women’s domestic, creative, and social expression. In a series of richly grounded, engagingly written essays, Mason and her collaborators—Pika Ghosh, Katherine Hacker, Anne Peranteau, and Niaz Zaman—locate Kantha in wider sociocultural, historical, political, economic, and religious currents while tackling issues sometimes avoided in such studies, such as matters surrounding the quiltmakers’ agency.

CAA announced the shortlist on December 15, 2010.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, and Collections
Yasufumi Nakamori
Yasufumi Nakamori’s Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture; Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2010) revisits a book of photographs of an elegant imperial villa in Kyoto, a seventeenth-century structure that interestingly foreshadows Western modernist design. While this errand may sound obscurantist to some, the author has a profoundly fascinating story to tell. It emerges that the architect Tange Kenzō (with Walter Gropius, who authored the original Herbert Bayer–designed book from 1960) extensively altered the vision of Ishimoto, a fledgling photographer, by drastically cropping the images to better align them with Bauhaus aesthetics, and to reinforce his own position in postwar Japanese debates on the relation of the modern to tradition. In this astutely, impeccably produced catalogue, Nakamori importantly rehabilitates Ishimoto’s initial vision of Katsura, reproducing his original, perfectly stunning photographs.

Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Ross Barrett
In “Rioting Refigured: George Henry Hall and the Picturing of American Political Violence,” published in the September 2010 issue of The Art Bulletin, Ross Barrett recovers the history of the artist and a landmark painting of an American laborer. Rooting his analysis in close observation, the author enlivens a work that could easily be dismissed as little more than an academic study of a male model. Calling attention to the title Hall gave his 1858 painting (The Dead Rabbit, a term New Yorkers applied to a street rowdy), to bruises on the man’s torso, and to the brick clutched in his right hand, Barrett identifies the figure as a working class, Irish immigrant. Barrett calls on an arsenal of resources—history, biography, iconography, pedagogical practices in the academy, reports and illustrations in the popular press, theories of the body and spectatorship, and ancillary images of the male athlete in mid-nineteenth-century America—to build a clear and convincing case for reading class conflict and civil disorder in this material body.

Art Journal Award
Kirsten Swenson, Janet Kraynak, Paul Monty Paret, and Emily Eliza Scott
Organized by Kirsten Swenson for the forthcoming Winter 2010 issue of Art Journal, “Land Use in Contemporary Art” is an impressive, useful, and theoretically significant series of articles on a new genre of aesthetic practices. Presented with relevant introductions and histories, the contributions address social, economic, and conceptual issues on Land Use, which has attributes related to but occasionally outside what is usually considered art. Especially impressive are the differences among the texts, particularly in the authors’ descriptions of their values and approaches, which range from self-conscious nonjudgementalism to explicit activism. (CAA members will receive the Winter 2010 Art Journal later this month.)

CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
Joyce Hill Stoner
Based at the University of Delaware’s Art Conservation Department, Joyce Hill Stoner is a highly respected scholar, a dynamic, beloved professor, and a meticulous conservator of paintings. As director of the doctoral program in preservation studies, which developed from the first art-conversation program in the United States that she founded at her school in 1990, she has developed an interdisciplinary focus on art history and conservation. In the words of one nominator: “Three decades ago the prospect of conservation as a scholarly discipline was, at best, nascent if not merely notional. Since that time conservation scholarship has come to embody inquiries that include the investigation of an artist’s materials and techniques, the documentation of a contemporary artist’s ideas and intentions, the history of conservation, and the development of new techniques in the conservation of art, to name but a few. Stoner has contributed essential research in each of these areas and has thereby fundamentally shaped the discipline.”

Contact

For more information on the 2011 Awards for Distinction, please contact Emmanuel Lemakis, CAA director of programs. Visit the Awards section of the CAA website to read about past recipients. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is located at 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028.

Updated on January 27 and February 3, 2011.

Filed under: Annual Conference, Awards, People in the News —

Books Published by CAA Members

posted by CAA — Dec 15, 2010

Publishing a book is a major milestone for artists and scholars. Browse a list of recent titles below.

To learn more about submitting a listing, please see the instructions on the main Member News page.

December 2010

Scott Allan and Mary Morton, eds. Reconsidering Gérôme (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010).

Diane E. Booton. Manuscripts, Market, and the Transition to Print in Late Medieval Brittany (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010).

Blake de Maria. Becoming Venetian: Immigrants and the Arts in Early Modern Venice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

Henry John Drewal. Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria (Long Island City, NY: Museum for African Art, 2009).

Ann Lane Hedlund. Gloria F. Ross and Modern Tapestry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, in association with the Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona, 2010).

Andreas Luescher. The Architect’s Portfolio: Planning, Design, Production (New York: Routledge, 2010).

Pamela Pecchio. 509 (Carrboro, NC: Daniel 13 Press, 2010).

Valerie Steele, with Patricia Mears, Yuniya Kawamura, and Hiroshi Narumi. Japan Fashion Now (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, in association with the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, 2010).

Michael Yonan. Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011).

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: Books Published, Member News, Member Spotlight —

Affiliated Society News for December 2010

posted by CAA — Dec 09, 2010

American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Art Works

The Institute of Museum and Library Services has awarded a $219,245 grant for Collections Emergency Response Training to the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Art Works (AIC). AIC will expand and enhance its Collections Emergency Response Team (AIC-CERT) program to better support small museums and historic sites in responding to emergencies. Continuing education will be provided for existing team members to update and maintain skills between deployments. Forty additional museum professionals will be trained in the same body of knowledge and to the same standard as the original AIC-CERT. Participants will be selected based on their ability to respond to emergencies in underserved areas of the country. In collaboration with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, AIC will provide basic emergency preparedness and response training for staff members of over two hundred small museums to prepare their institutions, assist other museums in their region, and work more effectively with AIC-CERT members following a disaster.

American Society of Hispanic Art Historical Studies

The American Society of Hispanic Art Historical Studies (ASHAHS) invites nominations for its annual Eleanor Tufts Award for a distinguished book in English on the history of art and architecture in Iberia. ASHAHS established the award in 1992 to honor Professor Tufts’ contributions to the study of Spanish art history. A PDF of the submission guidelines is available on the website. Deadline: December 15, 2010.

ASHAHS also invites its student members to apply for the Photographs Grant for those preparing an MA thesis or a doctoral dissertation on topics in the history of Spanish or Portuguese art and architecture, according to the procedure listed in the Fall 2010 newsletter.

Art Libraries Society of North America

CAA’s Professional Practices Committee recently asked the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) and the Visual Resources Association (VRA) to prepare an updated version of their joint document, “Criteria for the Hiring and Retention of Visual Resources Professionals.” The ARLIS and VRA boards authorized a joint task force and named Allan Kohl and Amy Lucker, immediate past presidents of the two organizations, as cochairs. The Criteria Revision Task Force will investigating current practices and trends, taking into account recent research, statistical information, and anecdotal evidence. The 2009 VRA White Paper and the 2007 VRA Professional Status Survey, along with similar documents and related research, will provide useful summaries of conditions and practices. The task force also wants to apply the document to various constituencies, including administrators and faculty, in addition to library and visual-resources professionals. The new version will acknowledge the development of many different administrative models, combinations of duties, and relationships with other reporting areas within our organizations. We welcome your direct input; feel free to contact any of the task force members listed below: Amy Lucker ARLIS/NA cochair, New York University; Allan Kohl, VRA cochair, Minneapolis College of Art and Design; Linda Callahan, Mount Holyoke College; Meghan Musolff, University of Michigan; and Margaret Webster, Cornell University.

Arts Council of the African Studies Association

The board of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) seeks three new members for the 2011–13 term. Self-nomination and outside nomination will be considered. Please contact Jean Borgatti or Karen Milbourne for more information.

The fifteenth ACASA triennial symposium on African art, entitled “Africa and Its Diasporas in the Market Place: Cultural Resources and the Global Economy,” will be held at the University of California, Los Angeles, from March 23 to 26, 2011. The core theme will examine the current state of Africa’s cultural resources and the influence—for good or ill—of market forces both inside and outside the continent. For information on hotels and schedules, please visit the ACASA website.

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) is organizing its first conference, titled “Modern Arab Art: Objects, Histories, and Methodologies.” This two-day event will be hosted in collaboration with Mathaf:Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar, and will take place December 14–17, 2010, in conjunction with the museum’s inauguration events. The museum will use its preeminent collection of modern and contemporary Arab art as a catalyst for critical and creative exchanges across diverse audiences, and this conference will bring together both established and emerging scholars working throughout the world in order to interrogate potent issues of concern that define and shape modern Arab art today. The conference will also historicize and contextualize the production of modern Arab art and modernity—and by extension the “contemporary”—through thematic and historiographic inquires into the field.

Association for Textual Scholarship in Art History

The Association for Textual Scholarship in Art History (ATSAH), in collaboration with the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, will present a symposium, “Artistic Manifestations in Architecture,” at the Whistler House Museum of Art on December 11, 2010. Among the speakers are: James O’Gorman, presenting “Portraying an Emerging Profession: The Changing Image of the Nineteenth-Century American Architect”; Hasan-Uddin Khan, discussing “At the Cutting Edge Architecture and Urbanism in Asia”; and John Hendrix, speaking on “Lincoln Cathedral: A Work of Art.” For information, please contact, Liana Cheney, ATSAH president, or visit ATSAH’s new website.

Association of Academic Museums and Galleries

The University of Houston will host the 2011 AAMG annual conference. Clockwise from top left: the Blaffer Art Museum, the Moores Opera House, and the Roy G. Cullen Building (photographs provided by the University of Houston)

The Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) will hold its next annual conference, “Who’s Muse? Challenges to the Curatorial Profession in Academic Museums,” on May 21, 2011, at the University of Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum in Texas. Curatorial practices in academic museums and galleries are sometimes highly experimental. Faculty members from a wide variety of fields and with limited curatorial experience periodically recommend and help lead exhibition projects. The organization of exhibitions likewise engages both graduate and undergraduate students, museum-education professionals, librarians, and even area school classes in project leadership roles. Exhibitions thus generated offer unorthodox approaches to curatorial planning and execution. Appropriate to a scholarly mission, they can stretch disciplinary boundaries, cross-fertilize disciplinary methodologies, and generate wholly new paradigms for knowledge. Academic museums and galleries thus become vital centers of original research, interdisciplinary dialogue, and participatory learning. While this democratic and laboratory approach to curatorial practice contributes in significant ways to the groundbreaking research and all-important teaching missions of universities and colleges, it can also challenge conventional standards of the curatorial profession. Through the presentation of outstanding case studies and lively roundtable discussions, the 2011 conference will explore the pros and cons of the broad curatorial approaches found in academic museums and galleries. This year, AAMG will include a late-morning, lunch-period session, called HOT TOPICS, on current issues in academic museums and galleries. Submit your ideas for this session with your conference registration, vote, and select a HOT TOPICS table for lunchtime conversation.

Association of Art Museum Curators

The Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) has announced the ten outstanding curators from art museums across the United States who will participate in the 2011 fellowship program of the Center for Curatorial Leadership. Selected by a panel of leading museum directors, the 2011 recipients are:

Stephanie D’Alessandro, Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago
Andria Derstine, curator of collections and curator of European and American art, Allen Memorial Art Museum
Dan Finamore, Russell W. Knight Curator of Maritime Art and History, Peabody Essex Museum
Toby Jurovics, curator of photography, Smithsonian American Art Museum
Griffith Mann, chief curator, Cleveland Museum of Art
Roxana Marcoci, curator, Museum of Modern Art
Olivier Meslay, senior curator of European and American art and Barbara Thomas Lemmon Curator of European Art, Dallas Museum of Art
Jeannine O’Grody, chief curator, Birmingham Museum of Art
Michael Taylor, Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Beth Venn, curator of modern and contemporary art and senior curator of American art, Newark Museum.

The Center for Curatorial Leadership is a nonprofit organization that trains curators for leadership positions.

Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art

The Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) will sponsor a two-part session at the upcoming CAA Annual Conference in New York. James H. Rubin will chair “Music and Other Paradigms for Nineteenth-Century Art,” which takes place on Saturday, February 12, at two locations. The morning session will be held 9:30 AM–NOON in the Nassau Suite, Second Floor, Hilton New York; and the afternoon counterpart will happen 2:30–5:00 PM in the Madison Suite, Second Floor. Read the full program for a list of speakers and the titles of their papers.

AHNCA will also make appearances at three additional conferences. Julie Codell and Allison Morehead will chair a session at the annual conference of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association. Called “Money/Myths,” the conference will take place March 3–6, 2011, at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. AHNCA will sponsor a session at “Speaking Nature” the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies at Pitzer College, taking place March 31–April 3, 2011. At the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Association, Marni Kessler will chair a session on the theme of “Methods and Theory: Art Histories.” chaired by. Read the list of speakers.

Foundations in Art: Theory and Education

Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE) and the Mid-America College Art Association, another CAA affiliated society, will present a joint conference, called “ON STREAM,” at the Ball Park Hilton in St. Louis, Missouri. Taking place March 30–April 2, 2011, the conference will explore how artists and teachers develop and foster creativity in the second decade of the third millennium. For more details, visit the FATE website or contact Jeff Boshart, conference coordinator.

Historians of Islamic Art Association

The 2011 annual majlis (meeting) of the Historians of Islamic Art Association (HIAA) will take place on February 12, 2011, 1:00–5:30 PM, at Hunter College, City University of New York. To access the event, taking place in the Lang Auditorium, on the fourth floor of the North Building, you will need your current HIAA membership. The program, organized by Ülkü Bates of Hunter’s Art Department, comprises five papers to be delivered in two sessions. The first session, chaired by Priscilla Soucek of the Institute of Fine Arts (IFA) at New York University, contains the following papers:

Denise-Marie Teece, IFA and Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Ruzbihan al-Muzahhib and Artist Families of the Qara Quyunlu, Aq Quyunlu, and Early Safavid Period”
Sharon Laor-Sirak, Austin Peay University, “Anatolia as the Meeting-place between the Christian and Muslim Traditions as Reflected in Stone-vaulting and Decorative Motifs of the Local Architecture”
Angela Andersen, Ohio State University, “The Kırlangıç Tavan in Anatolia: Hidden Religious Space and Structure as Symbol”

The second session, chaired by F. Barry Flood, Institute of Fine Arts NYU, consist of the following papers:

Phoebe Hirsch, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, “First Mosques in the Early Cape of Good Hope”
Göksun Akyürek, Gebze Institute of Technology, “Reconstructing Knowledge: Building of the First Ottoman University in Istanbul”

A discussion and question-and-answer period will follow the sessions. The program will terminate with the HIAA business meeting, reports of the executive board, and a general discussion, followed by a reception in the Faculty Dining Room. Members and interested colleagues are encouraged to attend the annual meeting. For more information, please contact: Ülkü Ü. Bates, Department of Art, Hunter College, City University of New York, 695 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10065.

Italian Art Society

The Italian Art Society (IAS) invites proposals for the 2011 Italian Art Society/Kress Foundation Lecture in Italy. Sponsored by IAS with the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the lecture series seeks to promote intellectual exchanges between art historians of North America and the international community of scholars living or working in Italy. The lecture will be held in Florence in late May or early June 2011. The proposed lecture may address any period in Italian art but must relate to the city of Florence or the region of Tuscany; it also may not have been previously published or presented at another conference or venue. Application details are published online. Deadline: January 1, 2011.

Japan Art History Forum

The Japan Art History Forum is sponsoring a graduate-student panel at the CAA Annual Conference in New York. In addition, it will sponsor two panels at the Association for Asian Studies conference in March 2011: “Elite Patronage and Viewership of Japanese Art in the Age of the Toyotomi-Tokugawa Transition” and “The Dark Valley: Japanese Art and the Second World War.”

Society for Photographic Education

The Society for Photographic Education (SPE) forty-eighth national conference, called “Science, Poetry, and the Photographic Image,” will examine the confluence of the ideologies of scientists and poets in the context of photography. To be held March 10–13, 2011, at the Sheraton Atlanta Hotel in Georgia, the conference will feature presentations from artists, educators, historians, and curators, as well as one-on-one portfolio critiques and informal portfolio sharing, a print raffle and silent auction, and film screenings, exhibitions, tours, and receptions. Speakers include Abelardo Morell, Catherine Wagner, Carolyn Guertin, and Justine Cooper. Student volunteers receive discounted admission.

Society of Architectural Historians

The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) will hold its sixty-fourth annual meeting in New Orleans, April 13–17, 2011. The meeting will focus on new research in the history of architecture, landscapes, and urbanism in 150 papers delivered by historians, preservationists, and architects from around the world. Additional offerings at the meeting include evening receptions, networking opportunities, and a vast array of architecture and landscape tours of the city and region. This year, SAH will offer attendees the opportunity to perform community service at the Priestly School, a charter high school devoted to architecture and the arts. For more information, visit the SAH website. Registration will open after January 2, 2011.

Society of North American Goldsmiths

The Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG) has partnered with curators Lauren Kalman (United States) and Carinne Terreblanche (South Africa) to produce the exhibition, Dichotomies in Objects: Contemporary South African Studio Jewelry from the Stellenbosch Area, on view January 23–April 1, 2011, at the Metal Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. All selected artists are affiliated with Stellenbosch University, the only university in South Africa teaching conceptual approaches to jewelry making.

Work featured in the 2010 “Exhibition in Print” issue of Metalsmith, the magazine produced by SNAG, is now on view in Realizing the Neo-Palatial at the Metal Museum. The exhibition, curated by Garth Clark, is on view November 5, 2010–January 9, 2011.

Registration opens in mid-January for the SNAG conference, “FLUX,” which will take place May 26–29, 2011, in Seattle, Washington. Hosted by the Seattle Metals Guild and sponsored by Rio Grande. Visit the SNAG website for all you need to know information about the conference and many programs. Student and educator registration grants and discounts are available. For more information, write to SNAG.

Filed under: Affiliated Societies —

Todd DeVriese: In Memoriam

posted by CAA — Nov 23, 2010

Jean M. K. Miller is associate dean of administrative affairs in the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas in Denton. She is also a member of the CAA Board of Directors.

Todd DeVriese

Todd Joseph DeVriese, a gifted artist, a dedicated art administrator, and a respected colleague, died on November 15, 2010, in New Delhi, India. Born in Peoria, Illinois, on December 9, 1960, he was 49 years old.

With a group of academics from ten colleges and universities, DeVriese had traveled to India in his role as dean of the College of Fine Arts and Humanities at St. Cloud State University, located in St. Cloud, Minnesota. At last month’s International Council of Fine Arts Deans conference, he had shared his excitement about his upcoming trip and, using his gentle humor, urged many of us to become more involved in building strong relationships with international partners.

DeVriese had a strong history of international collaborations. From 2001 to 2006 he lived in the United Arab Emirates, working at Zayed University first as chair of the Department of Art and Design and then as interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He arrived at Zayed—the first national university for women in the Emirates—with a mandate to create and develop a program for fine art and design. After successfully doing so, he returned to the United States and became, in 2007, director of the School of Art at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Two years later, his career took him to St. Cloud State University, where he oversaw the undergraduate and graduate programs in more than twenty disciplines, including music, dance, theater, film studies, English, foreign languages and literature, philosophy, and mass communications. A native Midwesterner, DeVriese made his academic start as an associate professor at Ohio State University in Columbus, where he taught in the Department of Art from 1996 to 2001.

Todd DeVriese, New World Order: Policy, 2000, collage on paper, 34 x 46 in. (artwork © Todd DeVriese; photograph © Ohio Arts Council, 2003)

Ohio State is also where DeVriese received his MFA in printmaking in 1992. Before that he earned two degrees from Illinois State University in Normal—an MS in 1988 and a BFA in printmaking and painting in 1985—which provided a foundation for his creative work. DeVriese is perhaps best known for his collages using maps, which challenge prevailing notions of history, nationality, and the myths that surround them. During the past fifteen years his work evolved to engage digital media. He exhibited internationally in twenty-five solo exhibitions and over one hundred group shows; his work can also be found in numerous private and public collections. The recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, DeVriese had a residency at Anchor Graphics in Chicago, Illinois, and participated in the Ohio Arts Council International Program, traveling to Germany to work in the Dresden Graphic Workshop. As a curator, he organized a handful of exhibitions, including The Method and the Matrix: Contemporary Printmaking in Ohio with Bellamy Printz, which took place in 2003–4 at the Riffe Gallery in Columbus and at the Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati.

DeVriese was an active member of CAA, the National Council of Art Administrators, the International Council of Fine Arts Deans, the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, and EDUCAUSE. This year, CAA’s Nominating Committee had selected him as a candidate for the Board of Directors for the 2011–15 term. He often stated to his friends how deeply honored he was to be considered for the board.

Todd will be remembered as a man who spoke about his wife, Leila, and two-year old son, Johann, as his true pride and joy. He will also be remembered as an inspired and generous soul who loved the arts and was committed to family, friends, and making the world a better place for all.

A memorial gathering for DeVriese will be held on November 30, 2010, 3:00–5:00 PM in the Atwood Ballroom at his school. In lieu of flowers, contributions can be made to the Todd DeVriese Scholarship Fund for Arts and Humanities. For more information, please call the office of the St. Cloud State University Foundation at 320-308-3984.

Filed under: Obituaries —

CAA Begins Its Centennial Campaign

posted by Nia Page — Nov 16, 2010

The year 2011 marks the College Art Association’s one-hundredth anniversary, a celebratory landmark for any organization but particularly so given CAA’s dynamic influence in shaping the study and practice of the visual arts. Without dedicated members like you, CAA would not be where it is today. You can continue demonstrating your loyal support with a contribution to the new Centennial Campaign, which begins this week.

Since 1911, CAA has led many progressive developments in the art and academic worlds. In the 1920s, the organization helped establish art history as a legitimate subject in the humanities, and during the Great Depression it was instrumental in the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration. A 1960s statement declaring the MFA as the terminal degree for artists led to a robust Standards and Guidelines program in the next decade, and the Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s spurred CAA to take a firm stance supporting the First Amendment. The past ten years have been the busiest, with a small, dedicated staff administering a wide range of programs—from book grants and graduate-student fellowships to intellectual-property assistance and advocacy for contingent faculty—while continuing to publish distinguished journals and produce the largest international conference in the visual arts.

The Centennial is a time to think about CAA’s future. Earlier this year, the Board of Directors unveiled a new strategic plan, based on feedback from members, that identifies core goals and objectives for the next five years. Priorities include increasing support to artists, bringing designers into our circle, enhancing international outreach, and stepping up advocacy efforts—all of which allows the organization to strengthen its vital presence throughout the field.

CAA will kick off its Centennial celebration in New York at the 99th Annual Conference, to be held February 9–12, 2011. A variety of programs and events will complement the usual conference format, including a special awards ceremony and reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a public-art project in Times Square, sessions that bring together well-known figures for passionate cross-disciplinary exchange, and a toast to CAA’s anniversary at the Annual Members’ Business Meeting.

CAA remains dedicated to serving professionals and students in the visual arts, but it needs your assistance. Contributions to the Centennial Campaign at every level make a difference; they are also fully tax deductible. Your gift will not only sustain the organization now, but it will also help guarantee CAA’s leadership for the next one hundred years.

Filed under: Centennial —

Affiliated Society News for October 2010

posted by CAA — Oct 09, 2010

American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies

The American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies (ASHAHS) has partnered with ARTES, a group based in the United Kingdom and Ireland dedicated to Iberian and Latin American art, to produce an annual issue of Hispanic Research Journal on the visual arts. To be released in December 2010, the issue will feature studies on Spanish and Latin American topics by Hilary Macartney, Jesusa Vega, Mercedes Cerón, and Rosemarie Mulcahy, plus a tribute to Nigel Glendinning by Marjorie Trusted.

Arts Council of the African Studies Association

The Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) is currently seeking three new board members. If interested, please contact Karen Milbourne. Current issues of the new ACASA newsletter will now only be available to members; past issues are archived online. Please visit the website for more information on the upcoming 2011 triennial conference in Los Angeles.

Association of Academic Museums and Galleries

The Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) will hold its next annual conference, “Who’s Muse? Challenges to the Curatorial Profession in Academic Museums,” on May 21, 2011, at the University of Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum in Texas. Curatorial practices in academic museums and galleries are sometimes highly experimental. Faculty members from a wide variety of fields and with limited curatorial experience periodically recommend and help lead exhibition projects. The organization of exhibitions likewise engages both graduate and undergraduate students, museum-education professionals, librarians, and even area school classes in project leadership roles. Exhibitions thus generated offer unorthodox approaches to curatorial planning and execution. Appropriate to our scholarly mission, they can stretch disciplinary boundaries, cross-fertilize disciplinary methodologies, and generate wholly new paradigms for knowledge. Our academic museums and galleries thus become vital centers of original research, interdisciplinary dialogue, and participatory learning. While this democratic and laboratory approach to curatorial practice contributes in significant ways to the groundbreaking research and all-important teaching missions of our universities and colleges, it can also challenge conventional standards of the curatorial profession. Through the presentation of outstanding case studies and lively roundtable discussions, the 2011 conference will explore the pros and cons of the broad curatorial approaches found in academic museums and galleries. This year, AAMG will include a late-morning, lunch-period session, called HOT TOPICS, on current issues in academic museums and galleries. Submit your ideas for this session with your conference registration, vote, and select a HOT TOPICS table for lunchtime conversation.

Association of Historians of American Art

The Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA) is offering a travel grant to cover CAA Annual Conference expenses up to $500 for an ABD student of historical art of the United States who will travel to the 2011 meeting in New York to participate in the program. The successful recipient must be enrolled in a graduate program and an AHAA member. Deadline: February 1, 2011.

AHAA is seeking to sponsor a 1½-hour professional session at the CAA Annual Conference in Los Angeles in 2012. Submission guidelines for session proposals are located online. Deadline: March 1, 2011.

Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art

Starting in September 2010, the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) will send its membership directory electronically as a searchable PDF. Members who do not have email will continue to receive a hardcopy by mail.

At the CAA Annual Conference in New York in 2011, AHNCA members are invited to a free, private visit to the New York Public Library Prints and Photographs Study Room on Wednesday, February 9, 2011, 11:00 AM–12:30 PM. Curators Stephen Pinson and David Christie will introduce members to highlights and rarely exhibited holdings in the library’s extensive collection of prints and photographs. There is no cost for AHNCA members, but space is limited. Please contact Elizabeth Mansfield before January 15, 2011, to reserve your place.