CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Jan 14, 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.
Artists’ Low Income and Status Are International Issues
In the UK, as the Paying Artists campaign revealed in 2014, the majority of contemporary artists are barely surviving financially, with no or low pay the norm. In real terms, nearly three-quarters of artists are getting just 37 percent of the average UK salary from their practice. But while some argue that it’s the absence of collective bargaining mechanisms that result in such exploitation, even in countries where there are well-developed fees systems, low pay for artists remains the burning issue. (Read more from the Guardian.)
New Focus: The Art of Making a Living
When administrators at University of the Arts were seeking a new way to prepare students for work after graduation, they didn’t have to look far. An answer lay just across Pine Street. They struck a cross-registration deal with Peirce College, a neighboring school that offers classes in finance, ecommerce, marketing, and app development. Kirk Pillow, the university’s provost, said it’s part of a broader effort to create value for students. (Read more from the Philadelphia Inquirer.)
What Can Learned Societies Do about Adjuncts?
What power do learned societies have to effect change? What is actually within their reach? These are not omnipotent organizations, despite the attempts to suggest they are. Their resources are finite as are their spheres of influence. What they should do doesn’t neatly fit with what they can do. This is not to defend the inaction of learned societies on the issue of contingent labor, but rather to contextualize the possibility of action and recourse. (Read more from Vitae.)
Help Desk: Breaking into Arts Journalism
I love writing and I love art. I have been teaching for ten years and am now looking to break into journalism and the arts. Should I head back to university and do a journalism course or attempt every competition possible in order to build a portfolio? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
Thirty Art-Writing Clichés to Ditch in the New Year
It’s a new year, which is a fine excuse as any to ditch old bad habits. Here below, I have assembled a not-at-all exhaustive list of art-writing words that I could do without in 2015. I admit, I’ve been guilty myself of abusing some or all of them—but of course that’s what New Year’s resolutions are for. (Read more from Artnet News.)
The Problem of the Overlooked Female Artist: An Argument for Enlivening a Stale Model of Discussion
Recently I was told that a certain art magazine editor, who had deleted the feminist critique from a review I had written, “can only take so much feminism.” At the time, I was infuriated that someone who is tasked with shaping the way art is discussed would take such an explicit and condescending stance against gender equality. With art-world professionals like him hoping that feminism would just go away, it feels necessary to be supportive of any museum exhibitions, gallery shows, market successes, or media attention given to women artists. (Read more from Hyperallergic.)
Measuring Diversity in City Arts Organizations
A mecca for the arts, New York City has also become one of the most multicultural cities in the country, with no single dominant racial or ethnic group and residents who speak more than two hundred languages, according to the Department of City Planning. Whether its cultural institutions reflect those demographics is another issue. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)
Raising the Profile of Columbia’s Art
Columbia University owns thousands of antiquities, antiques, and paintings, but it has no major display spaces and no comprehensive database. So the works largely go unnoticed even by some staff members. Roberto C. Ferrari, an art historian and librarian who became Columbia’s curator of art properties in 2013, has set out to raise the profile of the ten thousand objects on campus. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Will There Be Life after Death for New Private Museums?
From the opening of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in October to the construction of the Broad in Los Angeles, now set to open this autumn, the model of the single-donor museum is thriving. You’d have to dial back the clock more than a century to the American “robber barons” like Frick, Morgan, and Huntington to find another moment in art history when so many great institutions were founded by powerful individuals instead of broader coalitions or private-public alliances. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for January 2015
posted by CAA — Jan 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.
January 2015
Nicole Miller at Artists’ Film International
Ballroom Marfa
108 East San Antonio Street, Marfa, TX 79843
November 22, 2014–February 22, 2015
Ballroom Marfa is presenting two recent videos by Nicole Miller, as a highlighted artist participating at the Artists’ Film International. This project means a collection of artists’ film, video and animation from around the world that has been coorganized with Whitechapel Gallery in London.
Miller (b. 1982; Tucson, Arizona) lives and works in Los Angeles. Her films and installations explore the transformative capabilities of the moving image to reconstruct interpretations of self and culture. Through storytelling, self-representation and self-presentation become a narrative in search for the reconstitution of physical and psychic manifestations of loss. Her videos often focus on the interplay between preconception and reality in terms of African American identity, as in the case of The Conductor (2009), presented earlier this year at the High Line Art Program.
In this occasion, Ballroom Marfa is presenting two recent projects by Miller. In David (2012) we can observe the fragmented image of the profile of a man that the artist encountered by chance on the street. Here, he narrates the events that lead to the amputation of his left arm whilst his right limb is reflected in a mirror—a rehabilitation technique that helps patients deal with the painful symptoms of a phantom limb. Death of a School (2014) is a predominantly silent four-channel video that meditates on the events of a soon to be shutdown school in Tucson, which is Miller’s hometown. Presented together, Miller’s films become powerful narratives that carry the possibility of reconstitution of lost histories and identities.
Johanna Calle: Indicios
Casas Reigner
Calle 70A # 7-41, Bogotá, Colombia
October 2, 2014–January 30, 2015
Casas Riegner presents Indicios (Signs), an exhibition that gathers Johanna Calle’s most representative works produced between 1990 and 2014. Seeking to examine closely the visual language that has characterized her work for more than two decades, the exhibition includes a selection of projects in which different processes developed by the artist are juxtaposed. In each series of work, Calle exposes her approach to the creative process, where she also unveils a sense of unsettledness and curiosity.
Featuring her conceptual research and creative use of unconventional materials, the display includes Calle’s assemblages, signs, and phonetic representations of indigenous languages, photographic drawings made on vintage analogue photographs, and the intervention of archives and documents that are part of different research projects. For the documentation-based installation Hermanas Figueiredo (2013–14), Calle reconstructed a story as a gesture of redemption to the Brazilian sisters that devoted their life to a scientific research around the life of butterflies in the first half of the twentieth century. However, they have lost the legal battle with a recognized Brazilian professor who was hired to catalogue their collection and had deliberately chosen to wrongly assign its authorship and ownership. The case was dismissed and labeled as exhaustive and rigorous maniac women’s work.
Calle holds a BFA from Universidad de Los Andes en Bogotá and an MFA from Chelsea College of Arts in London, England. Her projects Perímetros I and Perímetros II were included at the thirty-first Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil in 2014.
Donna Sharrett: Love Songs
Pavel Zoubok Gallery
531 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
January 8–February 7, 2015
Pavel Zoubok Gallery presents Love Songs, a solo exhibition of new work by Donna Sharrett, including two of her largest—yet humanly scaled—works to date, framed by Sampling, a related group show curated by Dara Meyers-Kingsley.
With a variety of needlework techniques, Sharrett creates painstakingly wrought concentric assemblages sewn together from a potent and personal material lexicon consisting of donated or inherited jewelry, clothing, and buttons; hair, bone beads, dirt, and guitar strings. Passed down from a congenial and ancestral sorority of craftswomen and fiber artists, Sharrett’s techniques instill in each piece cross-cultural references to life, death, and rebirth. Addressing the shared human ability and desire to remember, her works transcend the confines of economic, religious and cultural boundaries.They instead evoke “life as it is lived and remembered—a notion of lineage that is not always linear and narrative but sometimes acts more like a spiral—a growing flower that rises from the earth and whose seeds scatter to become the next crop.”
Sharrett (b. Philadelphia, 1958) is the recipient of two fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts as well as notable residencies and grants from Smack Mellon, the Bronx Museum and the Millay Colony for the Arts Residency. Her work has been widely exhibited, including a solo exhibition at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York, and group exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York; the Bellevue Arts Museum in Bellevue, Washington; the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York; and Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. Her work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Arts and Design in New York; the United States Embassy in Valletta, Malta; the Hebrew Home for the Aged in New York; and J. P. Morgan Chase in New York. A full-color catalogue will accompany the exhibition.
Cameron: Songs for the Witch Woman
MOCA Pacific Design Center
8687 Melrose Avenue, West Hollywood, CA 90069
October 11, 2014–January 18, 2015
Cameron: Songs for the Witch Woman is the first survey of Cameron’s work since 1989 and explores the artist’s role as a seminal figure within Los Angeles’s midcentury counterculture, her unique melding of surrealism and mysticism, and her unwavering commitment to live her life as art. “Navigating between disciplines and traditions of poetry, cinema, visual arts, and spirituality; Cameron has opened many doors that continue to intrigue and inspire generations of artists,” while “her hallucinated vision … embodies an aspect of modernity that deeply doubts and defies cartesian logic at a moment in history when these values have shown their own limitations,” as stated by MOCA’s director, Philippe Vergne.
Born in Belle Plaine, Iowa, Cameron (Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel) (1922–1995) emerged as an artist, performer, poet, and occult practitioner in Los Angeles, uniquely bridging the city’s flourishing spiritual and art worlds at midcentury. She arrived in Los Angeles by way of the Second World War, where she drew maps and labored in a photographic unit for the United States Navy. A visionary painter and unparalleled draftsman best known today for her paintings and drawings of human and fantastical figures, she spend her last days in West Hollywood largely unrecognized. Cameron’s frenetic, delicate renderings of mythological figures reveal a singular attention to line and the idea of spiritual metamorphosis, evoking the surrealism and symbolism of the French poets. She is closely associated with Beat artists such as Wallace Berman, George Herms, and Dennis Hopper, the filmmakers Kenneth Anger and Curtis Harrington, and the occultist Aleister Crowley, while she was mentor to younger artists and poets such as David Meltzer and Aya (Tarlow). Cameron’s artwork appeared in the first issue of Berman’s celebrated journal Semina (1955–64) and has also been included in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Martin-Gropius Bau in Berlin, the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in 1989.
Comprised of nearly one hundred artworks and ephemeral artifacts, the exhibition includes pieces formerly thought to be lost, ranging from early paintings to drawings, sketchbooks, and poetry from her late years, as well as ephemera and correspondence with individuals such as her husband Jack Parsons (1914–1952), a rocket pioneer and a founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell. The exhibition brings to life the recently published book titled Songs for the Witch Woman that features a series of poems written by Parsons alongside illustrations drawn by Cameron that echo the intimate themes of their turbulent love story.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the Cameron Parsons Foundation is producing an eighty-eight-page catalogue with approximately seventy-five full-color illustrations.
Sylvie Blocher: S’inventeur autrement
Mudam Luxemburg
Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean 3, Park Dräi Eechelen L-1499 Luxembourg-Kirchberg
August 11, 2014–May 25, 2015
Since the early 1990s, the French artist Sylvie Blocher has built up a body of video work that takes the human as its material, in all its fragility, unpredictability, and yet full presence. She engages with a poetics of relation, emancipation, the questioning of identities, the writing of history, the permeability of the masculine/feminine border, and codes of representation in a world under control. Created in different geographic regions, her works are based on exchange: they often involve the participation of lay people, who are invited to present themselves in a completely new fashion before the camera, as the artist “shares her authority with her models” to create what she calls Living Pictures.
This solo exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg revolves around an ambitious project titled Dreams Have a Language, which combines a participative work, a video installation, and the production of a movie. As envisioned by the artist, the show was meant to be “the story of an event at a museum in Luxembourg in which the visitors will not be content to look politely at the works, but decide impulsively to experience leaving the world for a few minutes, in a journey filmed and broadcast, a story of fragmented, floating bodies. Then a movie, the start of another story.”
During the first weeks of the exhibition, the museum’s Grand Hall became a fully active film studio that centered on the operation of a flying machine twelve meters tall. Through the placement of an ad in various media, Blocher invited the public to visit the museum, to leave the ground for a few minutes, and to “rethink the world.” “Shooting conditions: allow one hour and present yourself at Mudam with an idea to change the world. It might be poetic, political, aesthetic, emotional, revolutionary, scientific, architectural, educational, financial, culinary, sonic, etc.” Forming the content for a video installation at the center of the exhibition, the pictures of the suspended bodies will be the starting point for a movie created with the Luxembourg director Donato Rotunno, to be released in spring 2015. By combining a documentary approach with fictional writing, the movie will offer “an assemblage of words, gestures and moments that will open up an imaginary universe, an expectancy, a suspense.”
A survey of the artist’s work is also presented in two of the museum’s galleries, where video installations and drawings sample key themes of Blocher’s work: the sharing of responsibility, the question of politics, identity, dreams, and utopia. By using music to give new life to important speeches and manifestos made in contemporary history (by Angela Davis, Édouard Glissant, and Barack Obama, among others), the five videos that form the series Speeches (2009–12), which are part of the Mudam Collection, engage with the political dimension of the imagination, individual and collective. Other works, such as the diptych Change the Scenario (Conversation with Bruce Nauman) (2013) and the three videos recently created by Blocher in Texas, tackle historic and racial aspects in the construction of the individual. Placed at the entrance to each gallery, a series of drawings that the artist has made every day for a year, based on the front page of the newspaper Libération, emphasizes the passages between the personal and the political initiated by her practice.
December 2014 Issue of The Art Bulletin
posted by Christopher Howard — Jan 09, 2015
The opening essay of the December 2014 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, is Cheng-hua Wang’s examination of Sino-European artistic interaction, the latest in the quarterly journal’s “Whither Art History?” series.
In other essays in the issue: John K. Papadopoulos identifies the Motya Youth, unearthed in 1979, as a kalathiskos dancer and explores the political implications of this new interpretation. In her article “Old Plates, New Impressions,” Alexandra Onuf analyzes editorial interventions in a sixteenth-century print series reissued in seventeenth-century Antwerp as responses to the upheavals of the Eighty Years’ War. In “The Emptiness behind the Mask,” Nóra Veszprémi considers how the Rococo revival in mid-nineteenth-century Austria, suffused with contradictory meanings, prompted musings on time, history, and national identity. For the issue’s final essay, Annika Marie reads Ad Reinhardt’s black square paintings as object lessons in Marxist dialectics that ultimately serve to demystify art.
In the Reviews section, Khristaan D. Villela surveys four recent multiauthor books on Maya art, including Ancient Maya Art at Dumbarton Oaks and Dancing into Dreams: Maya Vase Painting of the Ik’ Kingdom. Rebecca Zorach reviews two books addressing chromatic subjects: The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400–1800, edited by Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin, and Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Closing the December issue is Brian Kane’s review of Whitney Davis’s book, A General Theory of Visual Culture.
CAA sends The Art Bulletin to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the journal as a benefit of their membership. The digital version at Taylor & Francis Online is currently available to all CAA individual members.
In the next issue of the quarterly journal, March 2015, essays will consider the five members of the Società del 1496 workshop, portraitlike representations of slaves in Pietro Tacca’s Quattro Mori, Joshua Reynolds’s use of unstable and unconventional materials, and Marie-Denise Viller’s A Study of a Woman after Nature.
Affiliated Society News for January 2015
posted by CAA — Jan 09, 2015
American Society of Appraisers
The American Society of Appraisers (ASA) will host the upcoming 2015 Personal Property Conference, titled “Issues in Determining the Authenticity in Visual Art and Objects, the Catalogue Raisonné, Art Scholarship, and Value in the Marketplace.” The conference will be held at the prestigious Yale Club in New York from March 25 to 27, 2015. World renown and highly regarded experts in art law, art, and antiques will gather together for discussion on relevant and timely issues facing art-industry professionals, collectors, museum curators, dealers, auctioneers, insurance underwriters, estate attorneys, and appraisers. Individuals practicing in any of these areas of fine art and decorative arts will not want to miss this important gathering of respected scholars and authorities. Topics of discussion include connoisseurship, authentication, conservation, research, provenance, and value in the markets. In addition, a representative from the Internal Revenue Service will cover issues of compliance regarding appraisals for estates and charitable contributions, and an FBI agent will discuss fraud and art crime as they affect the global marketplace. For registration and more information, please visit www.appraisers.org or call 800-272-8258.
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries
The Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) has appointed Christopher Bedford, director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, to be the keynote speaker for the organization’s next annual conference, taking place April 24–26, 2015, in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2009, the Rose became infamous for Brandeis’ attempt to sell significant objects from its collection. Bedford was hired in 2012 to turn this situation around and has been building staff and acquiring new works. He also recently commissioned a work by Chris Burden that highlights the university’s renewed commitment to the museum and its collection.
For a limited time, AAMG is offering free student memberships. Student membership is an important way to explore the field while preparing informed professionals. In addition, student membership provides access to scholarship funds to help attend educational programs such as the AAMG’s annual conference, which offers a résumé workshop and the opportunity to connect first-hand with over two hundred attendees.
Whether you are a student, new to the field, or a seasoned professional, AAMG’s listserv connects more than four thousand museum professionals and those in related fields, from across the country and the world, who can provide assistance and mentoring on a wide range of issues facing museums today.
Historians of Islamic Art Association
The Historian of Islamic Art Association (HIAA) held its fourth biennial symposium at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Ontario, from October 16 to 18, 2014. The HIAA conference is the biennial forum for the presentation and discussion of papers on various aspects of Islamic art history, and is open to all, regardless of nationality or academic affiliation. The overarching theme of the symposium was “Forms of Knowledge and Cultures of Learning in Islamic Art.”
International Association of Art Critics
The International Association of Art Critics (AICA-USA) welcomed the return of Judith Stein to its board in fall 2014. The organization will hold its session at the CAA Annual Conference in New York on Wednesday, February 11, 2015, 12:30–2:00 PM in the Beekman Parlor, 2nd Floor, New York Hilton Midtown, 1335 Avenue of the Americas. The title of the session is “How Dare We Criticize: Contemporary Art Critics on the State of Their Art.”
International Association of Word and Image Studies
Over 150 scholars met this summer for the tenth international conference of the International Association of Word and Image Studies (IAWIS/AIERTI), held August 11–15, 2014, in in Dundee, New Zealand. Focusing on the theme of “Riddles of Form: Exploration and Discovery in Word and Image,” the conference was hosted by the Scottish Word and Image Group at the University of Dundee. Over fifty panels were presented around thirty-two themed sessions, ranging from “Exploring Neuroscience” and “Science in the Twentieth-Century Avant Gardes” to “Charting Interior Spaces” and “Spirals in Nature and Art.” Anchoring the themes in locality, influential ideas from two of Dundee’s renowned visual thinkers and polymaths, D’Arcy Thompson and Patrick Geddes, served as springboards into global debates. Keynotes addressed the themes from complementary perspectives: in “Real Unicorns and Other Strange Tales,” Martin Kemp (emeritus professor, University of Oxford) explored the topic of truth claims in evolving forms of mediated knowledge; while in “Burnsiana,” professor of photography Calum Colvin Duncan (of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee) raised fundamental questions about processes of perceiving and discovering though his own multimedia artworks about Scotland’s national bard. A highlight was the excursion to Little Sparta, retreat of the “avant-gardener” and word/image artist Ian Hamilton Finlay.
International Center of Medieval Art
The International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA) is pleased to announce that it was recently awarded a renewal of its grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation—$10,000 a year for the next three years—to support travel costs for members participating in conference sessions sponsored by ICMA. ICMA regularly sponsors sessions at such major conferences as the CAA Annual Conference and the ICMA at Western Michigan University, as well as at a number of smaller conferences here and abroad. For the next three years, ICMA members who deliver papers in these sponsored sessions will be eligible for funding that can be used to defer the costs of travel and lodging at these conferences. To learn more about ICMA funding opportunities for scholars working in the field of medieval art or to become a member, please visit www.medievalart.org. For information about proposing an ICMA-sponsored session, please contact Janis Elliott.
International Sculpture Center
Each year the International Sculpture Center (ISC) presents an award competition to its member colleges and universities as a means of supporting, encouraging, and recognizing the work of young sculptors and their supporting schools’ faculty and art program. The Student Award winners participate in an exhibition at Grounds for Sculpture, as well as in a traveling exhibition hosted by arts organizations across the country. Winners’ work is also featured in Sculpture magazine. Each winner receives a one-year ISC membership; all winners are eligible to apply for a fully sponsored residency to study in Switzerland. To nominate a student for this competition, a nominee’s university must first be an ISC university-level member. University membership costs $200 for universities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico or $220 for international universities; this level includes a number of benefits. Interested students should talk to their professors about getting involved. To find out more about the program, please visit http://www.sculpture.org/StudentAwards/2015 or email studentawards@sculpture.org. Deadlines: Nominations open: January 1, 2015; university membership registration: March 16, 2015; online student nomination form: March 23, 2015; online student submission form: April 13, 2015.
ISC seeks proposals for panels for the twenty-fifth “International Sculpture Conference: New Frontiers in Sculpture in Central Arizona.” Taking place in fall 2015, the conference will feature keynote speakers, panels, and breakout sessions. The conference will explore: Creative Placemaking; Multi-Disciplinary Artist Led Investigations; Desert as Site: New Earthworks; and other topics in contemporary sculpture. The panel proposal submission deadline is March 1, 2015. All accepted submissions will be notified in May 2015. To learn more about topics, guidelines, and deadlines and to submit a proposal, please visit www.sculpture.org/az2015.
Italian Art Society
The Italian Art Society (IAS) will sponsor a session, entitled “Di politica: Intersections of Italian Art and Politics since WWII” and organized by Christopher Bennett and Elizabeth Mangini, at the upcoming CAA Annual Conference in New York on Wednesday, February 11, 2015, 12:30–2:00 PM. Current and prospective members are invited to attend the IAS business breakfast meeting on Thursday, February 11, at 7:30–9:00 AM, Madison Suite, 2nd Floor, New York Hilton Midtown. IAS will cosponsor two related study days entitled “Untying the Knot: The State of Postwar Italian Art History Today” at the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York, February 9–10, 2015. Additionally, the IAS will sponsor five sessions at the meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Berlin, Germany, in March 2015.
IAS seeks member applicants for its annual research and publication grant (deadline: January 10, 2015) and for the sixth annual 2015 IAS/Kress Lecture by an established scholar on a Neapolitan topic in Naples, Italy, on May 20, 2015 (deadline: January 4, 2015). IAS welcomes all interested in Italian art to join the society.
National Council of Arts Administrators
The National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA) convened its forty-second annual meeting on September 24–26, 2014, in Nashville, Tennessee. The organization owes a debt of gratitude to Mel Ziegler of Vanderbilt University for organizing a provocative and compelling conference. Speakers included: Pablo Helguera, an artist and the director of the Museum of Modern Art’s Education Department; Steven Tepper, a sociologist and dean of the Herberger Institute at Arizona State University; and Ruby Lerner, executive director of Creative Capital.
Three new board members were elected: Lynne Allen, Boston University; Elissa Armstrong, Virginia Commonwealth University; and Cathy Pagani, University of Alabama. They join these returning directors: Leslie Belavance, Alfred University (secretary); Tom Berding, Michigan State University; Steve Bliss, Savannah College of Art and Design; Cora Lynn Deibler, University of Connecticut, Storrs; Andrea Eis, Oakland University (treasurer); Nan Goggin, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Amy Hauft, University of Texas at Austin (president); Jim Hopfensperger, Western Michigan University (past president); Lydia Thompson, Texas Tech University; and Mel Ziegler, Vanderbilt University.
Activities at the 2015 CAA Annual Conference in New York include the annual NCAA reception (Thursday, February 12, 5:00–8:00 PM) and an NCAA–CAA affiliate session, “Yes Is a World: Creativity in an Expanding Field,” which will be a fast-paced series of five-minute presentations (Thursday, February 12, 12:30–2:00 PM). NCAA enthusiastically welcomes new members, current members, and all interested parties.
Pacific Arts Association
The Pacific Arts Association (PAA) will hold a session at the 2015 CAA Annual Conference in New York called “Early Missionary Activity on Erromango and Its Impact on Local Material Culture.” Four panelists will examine the interplay between imposed change and local innovation in objects past and present.
An event titled “Trading Traditions: The Role of Art in the Pacific’s Traditional Trading Networks” will be organized by PAA (Pacific) in Tonga on September 28, 2015. For further information, please contact Karen Stevenson, vice president of PAA (Pacific).
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) made a strong showing at the annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies from November 20 to 23, 2014, in San Antonio, Texas. Members participated in numerous panels ranging from eighteenth-century prints to twentieth-century art and architecture, as well as film and contemporary art, in Eastern Europe and Russia.
At CAA’s Annual Conference in February, SHERA will sponsor two sessions: “Infiltrating the Pedagogical Canon,” chaired by Marie Gasper-Hulvat; and a double session led by Galina Mardilovich and Maria Taroutina, titled “Reconsidering Art and Politics: Toward New Narratives of Russian and Eastern European Art.”
In January 2015, Natasha Kurchanova became president of SHERA, as Margaret Samu’s term ended. Elections are planned for early January for the next vice president/president elect.
SHERA is delighted to welcome ARTINRUSSIA as a new institutional member. A division of the School of Russian and Asian Studies, ARTINRUSSIA creates study abroad programs, organizes faculty-led tours, and offers travel-assistance services. The organization’s website serves as a platform for publishing student writing about art in Russia and Eurasia.
Society for Photographic Education
Registration is open for the fifty-second national conference of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE), titled “Atmospheres: Climate, Equity, and Community in Photography” and taking place March 12–15, 2015, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Connect with 1,600 artists, educators, and photographers from around the world for programming that will fuel your creativity—four days of presentations, industry seminars, and critiques to engage you! Explore an exhibits fair featuring the latest equipment, processes, publications, and photography/media schools. Participate in one-on-one portfolio critiques and informal portfolio sharing and take advantage of student volunteer opportunities to receive a full rebate on admission. Other highlights include a print raffle, a silent auction, mentoring sessions, film screenings, exhibitions, receptions, a dance party, and more. The guest speakers are Rebecca Solnit, Chris Jordan, and Hank Willis Thomas. Preview the conference schedule and register at www.spenational.org/conference. Preregistration ends on February 20, 2015.
Southeastern College Art Conference
The seventieth annual meeting of the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) was held October 8–11, 2014, in Sarasota, Florida, and hosted by the Ringling College of Art and Design. Jeff Schwartz served as conference director. Five hundred thirty people attended 122 sessions and workshops. Brandon Oldenburg, a Ringling alumnus, an Academy Award winner, and the founder of Moonbot Studios, delivered the keynote lecture.
Notable awards presented:
- $5000 Artist’s Fellowship: Derek Larson, Georgia Southern University
- $5000 William R. Levin Award for Research in the History of Art: Michelle Moseley-Christian, Virginia Tech
- Achievement in Graphic Design: Doug Barrett, University of Alabama, Birmingham
- Outstanding Exhibition and Catalogue of Contemporary Materials: Ron Meyers: A Potter’s Menagerie (Stephen Driver)
- Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication: The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Folk Art vol. 23 (Carol Crown, University of Memphis)
- Excellence in Teaching: Jeff Schwartz, Ringling College of Art and Design
- Certificates of Merit: Jane Hetherington Brown, University of Arkansas, Little Rock; Carol Mattusch, George Mason University; and Cheryl Goldsleger, University of Georgia
- Awards of Distinction: Peter Scott Brown, University of North Florida; and Jenny Hager, University of North Florida
- Annual Juried Exhibition: juror’s choice: Rob Tarbell, New College; honorable mention: Hye Young Kim, Winston-Salem State University; Margy Rich, State College of Florida; and Jennifer Brickey, Pellissippi State Community College
Visual Resources Association
The Visual Resources Association is pleased to present its thirty-third annual conference, to be held March 11–14, 2015, in Denver, Colorado. Attendees will converge in Colorado to exchange information about the latest developments in image and media management within the educational, cultural heritage, and commercial environments. The top-notch conference program includes representation from a broad range of perspectives, with sessions and workshops addressing digital humanities, visual literacy, mapping and geospatial projects, image rights and reproductions, usability testing, new technologies, digital asset management, crowdsourcing, cataloging, embedded metadata, sharing collections, professional advancement, archives, research data management, and visualization. The plenary speakers will frame the conference with inspiring talks on image and media management in two unique contexts. The opening speaker, Aaron Straup Cope, head of engineering at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Museum and also an artist, will discuss how the New Cooper Hewitt Experience engages visitors with interactive and immersive creative technologies. The closing speaker, Emily Gore, director for content for the Digital Public Library of America, will discuss the strategic vision for DPLA content and oversight of the DPLA Hubs program. Online registration is available through February 20, 2015 (with discounted registration offered until February 6). Onsite registration will be available in Denver.
Women’s Caucus for Art
The Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) has announced three recipients of the 2015 WCA Lifetime Achievement Awards: Sue Coe, Kiki Smith, and Martha Wilson. The recipient for the 2015 President’s Art and Activism Award is Petra Kuppers. The WCA Lifetime Achievement Awards were first presented in 1979 in President Jimmy Carter’s Oval Office to Isabel Bishop, Selma Burke, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, and Georgia O’Keeffe. The awards were the first awards recognizing the contribution of women to the arts and their profound effect on society.
Join WCA for the awards celebration on Thursday, February 12, 2015, in New York. The event will be held at the New York Institute of Technology Auditorium at 1871 Broadway. The evening will kickoff with a ticketed cocktail reception from 5:30 to 7:00 PM. The reception will include food, open bar, and the opportunity to congratulate the awardees. The awards ceremony (free and open to the public) will take place from 7:30 to 9:00 PM; coffee and desserts will follow from 9:00 to 10:00 PM. The celebration is held during the annual WCA and CAA conferences. For more information on the event or to purchase tickets (which includes a special rate for CAA members) please visit www.nationalwca.org.
Institutional News
posted by CAA — Dec 17, 2014
Read about the latest news from institutional members.
Institutional News 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.
December 2014
The Archives of American Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, has received a $413,000 award from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support a survey of archival collections related to American art that are located in the Chicago area, as well as a few other initiatives on Chicagoan art, artists, and archives.
The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has accepted a $85,000 award from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support the exhibition The Left Front: Radical Artists in the “Red Decade,” 1929–1940.
The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, has developed a three-day conference called “Global Encounters in Early America” with support from a $25,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art.
The Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington has received three generous gifts totaling $1.7 million to fully endow the museum’s Curator of the Bancroft Collection of Pre-Raphaelite Art. Two donations were given anonymously, and a third came from Peggy and Ed Woolard. The endowment will be named the Annette Woolard-Provine Endowed Curator of the Bancroft Collection, in honor of the Woolards’ daughter.
The Maine College of Art in Portland has received accreditation for its ten-month master of art in teaching program by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design and the state of Maine. The college has also accepted funding from the Bob Crewe Foundation to initiate a program that explores the intersection of music and art.
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia has received a three-year $150,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to support the new School and Community Partnership Program, which will unite the academy’s existing resources for schools, families, and community outreach into a single initiative.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania has been awarded a $165,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to help fund the exhibition Paul Strand: Photography and Film for the Twentieth Century.
The Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey, has accepted a $99,493 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to help complete the cataloguing and digitization of the Minor White Archive.
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois has received a $2.5 million gift from the Mohn Family Foundation to advance the school’s leadership in the history of contemporary art. The funds will support a professorship and graduate-student fellowship within the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism.
Stanford University in California has accepted a $30,780 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to help the Department of Art and Art History fund a two-day conference called “The Ends of American Art.”
The University of California, Santa Barbara, has accepted a $136,479 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support an academic exchange symposium and a publication associated with “Modernism in the United States and China,” a project organized by the university and the China Art Academy in Hangzhou.
The University of Texas at Dallas has partnered with the Dallas Museum of Art to create the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History, which will offer master’s and doctoral degrees. The institute is funded by a $17 million gift from Edith O’Donnell.
The Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, has received a $25,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support the borrowing of Hiram Power’s statue The Greek Slave (1844), along with an attendant two-day colloquium, in conjunction with the exhibition Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837–1901.
Yale University Press in New Haven, Connecticut, has accepted an $80,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support a translation prize for a book-length publication by a non-US author that contributes to scholarship on historical American art.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Dec 17, 2014
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.
Smithsonian’s Asian Art Collection Goes Online
The Smithsonian Institution’s museums of Asian art are due to release their entire collections online on January 1, 2015. More than forty thousand works, from ancient Chinese jades to thirteenth-century Syrian metalwork and nineteenth-century Korans, will be accessible through high-resolution images without copyright restrictions for noncommercial use. The Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery are the first Smithsonian museums—and the only Asian art museums—to complete the labor-intensive process of digitizing and releasing their entire collections online. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Balling off Painting: MoMA Opens The Forever Now
At the Museum of Modern Art’s opening for The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, most people had a hard time remembering when the last group show of young painters had happened at the museum. (Technically, the last full-on contemporary painting survey was in 1984.) With that in mind, no matter what anyone thinks about the show—or even the current state of painting in general—it could be argued that an exhibition of this nature was somewhat overdue. (Read more from ArtNews.)
New Art Now
At first glance, the three words “new,” “art,” and “now” might be considered synonyms. In order to be counted as art, an object or expression must be new, and its newness is strictly defined by the temporal limits of the present moment, now. But this is where the synonymy of the three terms starts to look like a contradiction. If contemporary art is art always happening “now,” can we ever really make sense of the present? (Read more from ArtReview.)
Unsustainable Postdocs
Postdoctoral fellowships make sense in theory: they offer recent PhDs, especially those aspiring to careers in academic research, a place to develop professionally and build a research profile before or while hitting the job market. But too often, these fellowships are underpaid, undermentored positions in which young academics languish during what are potentially their most creative, productive years. That’s the upshot of a new report that is highly critical of the structural factors driving the growth of postdoctoral ranks. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
The State of Professional Development in Higher Education
Earlier this year, Academic Impressions surveyed higher-education professionals to learn if institutions, on the whole, regard professional development as mission-critical, if investments in professional development is proactive or reactive, and if professional development is tied to performance appraisal. This report shares the findings. (Read more from Academic Impressions.)
Storming the Ivory Tower
All manner of treasure accumulates in the Ivory Tower, but too often that’s where valuable scholarship stays locked up, obscure and inaccessible. “Free the knowledge!” might be the rallying cry behind a creative new plan from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The federal agency, which bills itself as one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the country recently announced the Public Scholar program. Its goal is to motivate scholars to publish nonfiction books for general readers rather than for each other. (Read more from the Washington Post.)
Is a Museum a Database? Institutional Conditions in Net Utopia
The museum is pressured into adapting to the logic of the database from all sides, and we begin to entertain questions of absurd technological determinism. Is a museum a database? While this may be a ridiculous provocation on its face, we have seen that anxious cultural institutions are among the first to uncritically adopt the metabolism of database, to transform the institution into an indexed site of transmission. (Read more from e-flux journal.)
Can We Create a Culture That Values Good Teaching?
How might we create a culture that esteems effective teaching? The value of such a thing ought to be clear, if only because it would blunt some of the frequent public criticisms of universities for a too-narrow focus on research. But creating a teaching culture hasn’t proved so easy. It’s not that campuses don’t harbor great teachers—even the most research-intensive universities do. But those professors usually tend their personal classroom gardens on their own. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)
Support CAA’s Journals through the Publications Fund
posted by Nia Page — Dec 15, 2014
This was an exciting year for CAA’s publications—for the very first time The Art Bulletin and Art Journal were published online using a multi-media platform that allows authors to include video and hyperlinks directly in their essays, and caa.reviews became fully open-access with broader interactive functionality coming soon. Most important, the journals continued to bring readers more of what they expect from the world’s leading publisher of art history journals: exceptional in-depth scholarship exploring the full range of the visual arts, in formats as diverse as long-form essays, innovative artists’ projects, and critical reviews. It is the support of readers like you that enable CAA to carry out this vital work.
Because you share our mission of advancing the highest standards of intellectual engagement in the arts, please make a tax-deductible gift to the Publications Fund today.
Here are some recent highlights from CAA publications:
In The Art Bulletin:
- Continued support of the long-form, peer-reviewed essay, including John K. Papadopoulos reinterpreting the Greek fifth-century BCE Motya Youth, Douglas Brine on the architectural and cultural context of a Jan van Eyck painting, Aaron Wile identifying a distinctly modern sense of self in Wattaeu’s fête galantes, and Joseph Siry on Frank Lloyd Wright’s theater for Dallas
- In the recurring “Whither Art History?” Cheng-Hua Wang examines artistic interaction between China and Europe in the early modern period
- Reviews of books on a wide variety of topics, from Maya art to sixteenth-century sculpture in Florence, from the politics of Mughal architecture to the materiality of color
In Art Journal:
- Projects by artists such as the sculptor Conrad Bakker, the British animator Jonathan Hodgson, and Karen Schiff, whose colorful drawings intervened in the very fabric of the printed journal
- A forum devoted to conceptual art in Latin America in the 1970s, a time of political oppression and upheaval, featuring four essays in the original Spanish and Portuguese with facing-page English translations
- The journal’s open-access website relaunched with a new name, Art Journal Open, and a new editor, the new-media scholar and curator Gloria Hwang Sutton
- Reviews of monographs on the artists Forrest Bess; books by Claire Bishop, Tom Finkelpearl, and Lev Manovich; and a Le Corbusier exhibition at MoMA
In caa.reviews:
- New Field Editor position established for reviews covering Digital Humanities and Art History
- Over 150 book and exhibition reviews across many subject areas and geographic regions
With your support, CAA publications will continue to delight, challenge, and engage readers for many years to come. Contributors who give at a level of $250 or higher are prominently acknowledged in the publication they support for four consecutive issues, as well as on the publication’s website for one year and through CAA News. On behalf of the scholars, critics, and artists who publish in the journals, we thank you for your continued commitment to maintaining a strong and spirited forum for the visual-arts community.
With best regards,
Suzanne Preston Blier
Vice President for Publications
Finalists for the 2015 Morey and Barr Awards
posted by Christopher Howard — Dec 11, 2014
CAA is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2015 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award. The winners of both prizes, along with the recipients of ten other Awards for Distinction, will be announced in mid-December and presented during Convocation in New York, in conjunction with the 103rd Annual Conference.
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
The Charles Rufus Morey Book Award honors an especially distinguished book in the history of art, published in any language between September 1, 2013, and August 31, 2014. The four finalists for 2015 are:
- Megan Holmes, The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013)
- Matthew C. Hunter, Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)
- Karl Whittington, Body-Worlds: Opicinus de Canistris and the Medieval Cartographic Imagination (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2014)
- Catherine Zuromskis, Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013)
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
The Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for museum scholarship is presented to the author(s) of an especially distinguished catalogue in the history of art, published between September 1, 2013, and August 31, 2014, under the auspices of a museum, library, or collection. The two finalists for 2015 are:
- Kimberly A. Jones, et al., Degas/Cassatt (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art and DelMonico Books, 2014)
- Susan Weber, ed., William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain (New York: Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013)
The Barr jury did not shortlist any books for the second Barr Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, or Collections.
The presentation of the 2015 Awards for Distinction will take place on Wednesday evening, February 11, 5:30–7:00 PM, at the New York Hilton Midtown. The event is free and open to the public. For more information about CAA’s Awards for Distinction, please contact Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs and archivist.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for December 2014
posted by CAA — Dec 10, 2014
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.
December 2014
Suzanne Lacy: Gender Agendas
Museo Pecci Milano
Ripa di Porta Ticinese 113, Milan, Italy
November 14, 2014–January 6, 2015
The Milan Pecci Museum is presenting a Suzanne Lacy’s Gender Agendas. This retrospective exhibition launches a whole new line of investigation at the the Centre for Contemporary Art Luigi Pecci that has been dedicated to the pioneering work in the arts developed internationally in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Born in California in 1945 and based in Los Angeles, Lacy is an influential artist, educator, and writer. She is known as one of the pioneer artists blending Conceptual and Performance art with social commitment in the early seventies in Los Angeles. Her approach to researching and making follows her questioning the relationship of “service” to “activism,” and of both to “art practice.” Her diverse approach to this investigation stretches from explorations of the body and intimate reflections to the production of large and lengthy public demonstrations involving dozens of artists and thousands of spectators.
Gender Agendas presents, for the first time in Europe, a large series of Lacy’s projects that follow a constant of her artistic development: the investigation of the female condition. From a more intimately approach to a strong political and civic one, Lacy explores the power of art as a useful and effective tool for social struggle and for the promotion of progressive ideas, digging in this way into the meanings of the hundreds of anonymous female and working-class performers who would have no access to the communication systems otherwise. Sexual exploitation, violence, media representation of the aging woman, and social issues ranging from racism to the conditions of labor and class may have been provocative and avant-garde in the seventies and eighties, but are still deeply relevant today.
Through the curatorial approach of Lacy’s retrospective exhibition, Fabio Cavallucci and Megan Steinman, propose a readaptation of some of her most important works, including Prostitution Notes (1974); Three Weeks in May (1977); In Mourning and In Rage (1977); The Crystal Quilt (1985–87); and Full Circle (1994); as well as one of her most recent projects, Storying Rape (2012), a discussion among significant personalities in the media, activists, and politicians in an attempt to find a new cultural narrative that describes sexual violence.
Birgit Jurgenssen
Fergus McCaffrey
514 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
November 6–December 20 2014
For the second exhibition of Birgit Jurgenssen, Fergus McCaffrey brings together a large group of her photographic works in combination with a number of sculptures in order to underscore the variety and complexity of her work.
Highly experimental, Jurgenssen’s photographic work is exemplified by her Stoff-arbeiten (Fabric Works), which were created from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. The “fabric works” consist of photographic prints mounted on canvases that have been screwed to iron frames made by the artist, giving a highly sculptural character to their combinations. Thin, translucent fabrics such as gauze are stretched over the surface, veiling and slightly obscuring the images. The photographs themselves are created through a range of processes, including photograms, solarization, and multiple exposures. The juxtaposition of hard-welded iron frames and delicate textile emphasizes their materiality and draws a direct relationship to Jürgenssen’s sculptural works.
The exhibition also includes works that Jurgenssen referred to as “painted” photography. These large format photograms were created by manipulating sheets of photo paper in developer and fixing baths and by pouring photo chemicals directly over the paper. The resulting marbled and dripped images were then exposed to light and fixed, after which the surfaces were scratched, creating gestural drawings over the “painted” photographic surfaces.
Born and educated in Vienna, Jürgenssen (1949–2003) died prematurely at the age of 54. Her studio practice encompassed drawing, performance, photography, and sculpture, through which she compellingly combined classically refined draftsmanship, mixed media, and experimental photo techniques. She is best known for her connection to the Austrian feminist movement of the 1970s. Equally important is her engagement with Surrealism and her concern for materials and processes.
Cover of the catalogue for Sturtevant: Double Trouble
Sturtevant: Double Trouble
Museum of Modern Art
Special Exhibitions Gallery, Third Floor; and Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Painting and Sculpture Gallery, Gallery 5, Fifth Floor, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10009
November 9, 2014–February 22, 2015
Elaine Sturtevant (American, 1924–2014) began “repeating” the works of her contemporaries in 1964, using some of the most iconic artworks of her generation as a source and catalyst for the exploration of originality, authorship, and the interior structures of art and image culture. Beginning with her versions of works by Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, she initially turned the visual logic of Pop art back on itself, probing uncomfortably at the workings of art history in real time. Yet her chameleonlike embrace of other artists’ art has also resulted in her being largely overlooked in the history of postwar American art. As a woman making versions of the work of better-known male artists, she has passed almost unnoticed through the hierarchies of midcentury modernism and postmodernism, at once absent from these histories while nevertheless articulating their structures.
Far more than copies, her versions, for instance, of Johns’s flags, Warhol’s flowers, and Joseph Beuys’s fat chairs are studies in the action of art that expose aspects of its making, circulation, and canonization. Working primarily in video since 2000, the artist remained deeply engaged with the politics of image production and reception, using stock footage from Hollywood films, television, and advertising to point to the exhaustion built into much of postwar cultural production.
This exhibition is the first comprehensive survey in America of Sturtevant’s fifty-year career and the only institutional presentation of her work organized in the United States since her solo show at the Everson Museum of Art in 1973. Rather than taking the form of a traditional retrospective, the exhibition offers a historical overview of her work from a contemporary vantage point, interspersing more recent video pieces among key artworks from all periods of her career.
Michelle Stuart: Silent Movies
Leslie Tonkonow: Art Works and Projects
535 West 22nd Street, Sixth Floor, New York, NY 10011
November 1–December 20, 2014
Michelle Stuart (American, b. 1933) became internationally known in the 1970s for innovative works that synthesize Land art, drawing, and sculpture, as well as her pioneering use of natural materials in sculpture, painting, and drawing. Since 2011 photography has been her primary medium, although present in her work both literally and conceptually since the 1970s. Devising a highly personal and original method of photographic manipulation, Stuart conveys the impression of deeply felt images seen through time and layers of consciousness. It is “a combination of fact and fiction, truth and lies—and lies that tell the truth,” as put by the artist.
The exhibition at Leslie Tonkonow comprises photographs drawn from Stuart’s vast archive of analogue and digital photographs taken for almost half a century. Stuart activates their aesthetic and storytelling potential by arranging them in gridlike groups or occasionally altering them. Each work is composed of between seven and seventy separate images, digitally printed on 8½ x 11 inch sheets of archival paper. Both painterly and cinematic in their rhythmic visual arrangement, the works in this exhibition amount to meditations on the nature of memory.
As dreamlike recollections of her past, these works continue her lifelong artistic engagement with specific locations, while affirming the significance of place as a unique source of memory. “Memories are silent until we either articulate them in words on paper or depict them visually,” as put by the artist herself. Two years ago, in Palimpsests, her first solo show of exclusively photographic works, Stuart expressed thoughts on war, the cosmos, the passing of time, and on form itself. The compositions in Silent Movies, all created since then, present universal themes with deeply personal associations that contain keys to momentous events and evoke times and places in a manner that is both specific and archetypical. With abundant literary, cinematic, and historical references, these works do not merely address memories, but, as put in the press release, the very process of recall itself.
Meet the 2015 Participants in the CAA-Getty International Program
posted by Janet Landay, Program Manager, Fair Use Initiative — Dec 04, 2014
CAA has published short biographies for this year’s recipients of travel support through the CAA-Getty International Program. In an effort to promote greater interaction and exchange between American and international art historians, CAA will bring scholars from around the world to participate in the 2015 program, held during the association’s Annual Conference in New York City from February 11–14, 2015. This is the fourth year of the program, which has been generously funded by grants from the Getty Foundation since its inception. The participants—professors of art history, curators, and artists who teach art history—were selected by a jury of CAA members from a highly competitive group of applicants. In addition to covering travel expenses, hotel accommodations, and per diems, the CAA-Getty International Program includes support for conference registration and a one-year CAA membership.
Click here to read the biographies of the fifteen participants.