CAA News Today
Fall 2014 Recipients of the Millard Meiss Publication Fund
posted by Christopher Howard — Dec 03, 2014
This fall, CAA awarded grants to the publishers of nine books in art history and visual culture through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to the generous bequest of the late Prof. Millard Meiss, CAA gives these grants to support the publication of scholarly books in art history and related fields.
The nine Meiss grantees for fall 2014 are:
- Amy R. Bloch, Lorenzo Ghiberti’s “Gates of Paradise”: Humanism, History, and Artistic Philosophy in the Italian Renaissance, Cambridge University Press
- Elena Boeck, Imagining the Byzantine Past, Cambridge University Press
- Palmira Brummett, Mapping the Ottomans: Sovereignty, Territory, and Identity in the Early Modern Mediterranean, Cambridge University Press
- Robert DeCaroli, Image Problems: The Origin and Development of the Buddha’s Image in Early South Asia, University of Washington Press
- Lisa Pon, Printed Icon: Forlì’s Madonna of the Fire in Early Modern Italy, Cambridge University Press
- Maggie Popkin, The Architecture of the Roman Triumph: Monuments, Memory, and Identity, Cambridge University Press
- Stephanie Porras, Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Mary Roberts, Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans, Orientalists, and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture, University of California Press
- Freek Schmidt, Passion and Control: Dutch Architectural Culture of the Eighteenth Century, Ashgate
Books eligible for Meiss grants must already be under contract with a publisher and on a subject in the visual arts or art history. Authors must be current CAA members. Please review the application guidelines for more information.
CAA NAMES RECIPIENTS FOR 2015 CAA-GETTY INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM
posted by Janet Landay, Program Manager, Fair Use Initiative — Dec 01, 2014
CAA is pleased to announce 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.
The CAA-Getty International Program participants’ activities begin with a one-day preconference colloquium on international issues in art history, during which they meet with North-American-based CAA members to discuss common interests and challenges. The participants are assisted throughout the conference by CAA member hosts, who recommend relevant panel sessions and introduce them to colleagues who share their interests. Members of CAA’s International Committee have agreed to serve as hosts, along with representatives from several Affiliated Societies of CAA, including the American Council for Southern Asian Art, the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, the Association for Latin American Art, the Society of Contemporary Art Historians, and the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasia, and Russian Art and Architecture.
This program has increased international participation in the association’s activities, and expanded international networking and the exchange of ideas both during and after the conference. The CAA-Getty International Program supplements CAA’s regular program of Annual Conference Travel Grants for graduate students and international artists and scholars. We look forward to welcoming the recipients at the Annual Conference in New York City this February.
2015 CAA-Getty International Program Participants
Mokammal H. Bhuiyan
Mokammal H. Bhuiyan
Mokammal H. Bhuiyan is chairman of the Department of Archaeology at Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. With a BA (honors), MA, MPhil, and PhD in archaeology, he has developed scholarly interests that also include art history, iconography, and heritage studies and management of Eastern India and Bangladesh. The author of a 2003 book, Terracotta Art of Ancient Bengal, Bhuiyan has written numerous scholarly articles on art, iconography, archaeology, and heritage, both nationally and internationally, as well as newspaper articles on current issues in Bangladesh. He edited Studies in South Asian Heritage, featuring contributions by leading international scholars, as well as Pratnatattva, Vols. 17 and 18. He was a member of the editorial board of the Jahangirnagar Review Part-C, Vol. XXIII, 2011–2012 and serves on the Board of Advanced Studies and Academic Council of Jahangirnagar University. A participant in conferences and seminars around the world, Bhuiyan is a research fellow of the SAARC Cultural Centre and was a research fellow of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh. As a member of Object Identification Committee, Department of Archaeology, Government of Bangladesh, he has been actively involved in researching the vernacular architecture of Narsingdi, Bangladesh, and conducting a comparative study between Buddhist stone sculptures found in Mainamati, Bangladesh, and those in Tripura, India.
Dafne Cruz Porchini
Dafne Cruz Porchini
Dafne Cruz Porchini is a curator at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes (Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts) in Mexico City. From 2007 to 2011 she was the deputy director of the Museo Nacional de Arte (National Museum of Art), Mexico City. Cruz studied at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), where she received a PhD in art history in 2014. Her main research interests include the history of modern exhibitions and transcultural artistic exchanges, topics she has tried to link with her curatorial practice. Her most recent publication is a critical catalogue of twentieth-century modern Mexican painting, Catálogo comentado de pintura del siglo XX (Museo Nacional de Arte-Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 2013), for which she served as the academic coordinator. She is currently organizing the exhibition Mexican Modernisms,which will open at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in fall 2016.
Boureima Tiékoroni Diamitani
Boureima Tiékoroni Diamitani
Since 2001, Boureima Tiékoroni Diamitani has been the executive director of the West African Museums Programme (WAMP), based in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. From 1989 to 1993, he served as the director of cultural heritage and museums of Burkina Faso and then as a consultant to the World Bank. Diamitani received his PhD in art history from the University of Iowa in Iowa City and is a specialist in the art of the Senufo people. He also holds a master’s degree in architecture and town planning from the African Crafts School of Architecture and Urbanism in Lomé, Togo. Diamitani was a predoctoral fellow at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, and a Coleman fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Among the many exhibitions he has organized is Deux Roues (Two Wheels: History of Bicycles and Motorcycles in Burkina), National Museum of Burkina Faso, April 1990.
Ljerka Dulibić
Ljerka Dulibić
Ljerka Dulibić is senior research associate and curator of Italian paintings at the Strossmayer Gallery of Old Masters of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She received her PhD in the history of art from Zagreb University in 2007 with a thesis on Tuscan fifteenth-century paintings from the Strossmayer Gallery collection. Since 2008 she has taught courses on art history and iconography at the Catholic Faculty of Theology, Zagreb University. Dulibić has received several awards and scholarships, including a grant from the Attingham Trust, England (2008). She has published papers in international conference proceedings and scholarly articles in international journals, as well as several books on the painting collection at the Strossmayer Gallery. Dulibić’s main research interests are focused on Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting, the history of art collecting and collections, provenance research of works of art in Croatian collections, and the history of the European art market in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Georgina Gluzman
Georgina Gluzman
Georgina Gluzman is an assistant professor of art history at the Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She graduated with honors from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, where she is currently completing her PhD. Gluzman’s research focuses on the work of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Argentine women artists. She has published articles and book chapters concerning women artists in Buenos Aires, the iconography of the women of the 1810 revolution, and the role of women artists in early Argentine art-history surveys. In 2014 she cocurated Desbordando los géneros (Undoing Genders: Women Artists from the Ateneo) at the Museo de Arte de Tigre. This exhibition, based on the dissertation she is currently working on, showcased the work of three women artists active between 1880 and 1920.
Angelo Kakande
Angelo Kakande
Angelo Kakande is a senior lecturer and head of the Department of Industrial Arts and Applied Design, College of Engineering Design, Art, and Technology, Makerere University in Uganda. He holds degrees in fine arts (painting and ceramics), art history (MA and PhD), and law (bachelor of law). This combination of interests and training has altered the path of his studio practice and approach to art history and turned him into an activist-scholar. Kakande’s research now lies in the nexus of popular culture, art, art history, law, and the injustices and inequities afflicting many African citizens. Currently, he is exploring the ways in which widespread breaches in human rights form the character of Uganda’s art and art history. He has pursued this subject through two postdoctoral research projects. The first, called “Surviving as Entrepreneurs: Contemporary Ugandan Art and the Era of Neoliberal Reform”(2013), explores the ways in which artists have responded to the Structural Adjustment Programme in Uganda since the 1980s. The second project, “Kampala’s Public Monuments and Allegories of Exclusion: Perspectives on Governance, Human Rights, and Development (2014–16),” questions the ways in which Uganda’s national monuments function as agents of exclusion.
Nazar Kozak
Nazar Kozak
Nazar Kozak is a senior researcher in the Department of Art Historical Studies in the Ethnology Institute at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. After receiving his PhD from the Lviv Academy of Arts in Ukraine, he spent a year at the University of Athens under the auspices of the State Scholarships Foundation. A recipient of research and publication grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, Kozak also earned a fellowship to conduct research at the University of Vienna. Between 2001 and 2013, he taught art history at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv (Ukraine). Kozak’s research focuses on political and religious iconography. He has published a monograph about the portraits of rulers in the art of Kyivan Rus’ as well as articles dealing with Byzantine and post-Byzantine murals preserved in Ukraine. His current studies are concerned with the iconography of the Akathistos Hymn in post-Byzantine art of the sixteenth century.
Savita Kumari
Savita Kumari
Savita Kumari is currently an assistant professor in the Department of History of Art at the National Museum Institute of History of Art, Conservation, and Museology, New Delhi, India. She holds a PhD from the same institute and specializes in medieval and premodern Indian art history. Engaged in research and teaching for the past eight years, Kumari is currently working on an international research project called “Cham Sculptures from Vietnam and Their Interface with Indian Art,” in collaboration with the Da Nang Museum of Cham Sculpture, Vietnam. She published a book entitled Tombs of Delhi: Sultanate Period in 2006 and coauthored a book entitled Heritage of Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan: Art and Architecture in 2012. Kumari has been awarded fellowships from the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), Charles Wallace India Trust Grants for Research and Visit (CWIT), and a UK Travel Award from Nehru Trust for Indian Collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum (NTICVA).
Nomusa Makhubu
Nomusa Makhubu
Nomusa Makhubu holds a PhD in art history and visual culture from Rhodes University, South Africa, and lectures in art history at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. She is also a practicing artist who received the ABSA L’Atelier Gerard Sekoto Awardin 2006 and the Rhodes Amnesty International Woman of the Year Award(Art). Since then Makhubu has exhibited her work in South Africa, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Swaziland, China, and Reunion Island. In 2008 she was nominated as the presenting artist for the Business Day: Business and Art South Africa (BASA) Awardsand received the Purvis Prize for Academic Achievement in Fine Art, Rhodes University. Makhubu has presented research papers nationally and internationally. In 2010, she completed her fellowship with the Omooba Yemisi Adedoyin Shyllon Art Foundation (OYASAF) in Nigeria. Her current research focuses on African popular culture and photography. She has worked as a Cue reviewer for the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown (2007, 2010, 2012) and was appointed to the National Arts Festival committee in 2011. Makhubu is a member of the Friends of the Michaelis Collection Committee at the Iziko South African National Gallery.
Ana Mannarino
Ana Mannarino
Ana Mannarino is an art-history professor at Rio de Janeiro Federal University in Brazil, where she teaches courses for students working on bachelor’s degrees in art history, as well as for other art degrees at the same institution. She is also an art historian and researcher. Mannarino received a PhD in art history from the Rio de Janeiro Federal University (PPGAV–UFRJ, Brazil) and participated in a year-long collaborative study program at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. Her doctoral thesis, “Word in Brazilian Art: Mira Schendel and Waltercio Caldas,” focused on the relationship between text and image in Brazilian contemporary art, especially in the work of these two artists. Her research also considers the connections between art and poetry in Brazil, Concrete and Neoconcrete art, and the production of artist’s books.
Márton Orosz
Márton Orosz
After receiving an MA in art history and in graphic design ten years ago, Márton Orosz defended his PhD in the Institute of Art History at the University of Eötvös Loránd in Budapest, Hungary, in 2014. Since 2005 he has been working at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Budapest. There, as part of the Department of Art after 1800, he established the collection of photography and media art. In 2014 he became the director of the Victor Vasarely Museum, which is affiliated with the MFA. He now works as a curator in both institutions. Orosz’s research focuses on media art of the twentieth century such as photography, animated film and motion picture, as well as the art of the classical avant-garde, including architecture, design, and collectorship. Orosz has been a Terra Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; an ESKAS Fellow at University of Berne in Switzerland; a Baden-Württemberg Research Fellow at Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) in Karlsruhe, Germany; and he was awarded a Gyorgy Kepes Fellowship for Advanced Studies and Transdisciplinary Research in Art, Culture and Technology at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is now working on the first monograph of the Hungarian–American visual artist, Gyorgy Kepes.
Andrey Shabanov
Andrey Shabanov
Andrey Shabanov received an MA in art history from the European University at Saint Petersburg, Russia (EUSPB) in 2004. In 2013 he completed his PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, with a thesis entitled “Re-Presenting the Peredvizhniki: a Partnership of Artists in Late Nineteenth-Century Imperial Russia.” A monograph based on the thesis and translated into Russian will be published by EUSP Press in early 2015. It will be followed in due course by a monograph in English. Shabanov is an associate research fellow in the Department of Art History of EUSPB, where he teaches graduate courses called “Russia and Europe: Emergence and Modernisation of Art Institutions and Practices in XVIII–XX Centuries” and “From Descriptive to Critical, Problem-Based Art Historical Research: Some Aspects of Academic Writing.” Inspired and informed by his work at the Courtauld, these courses aim to meaningfully link the present Russian art-historical scholarship practice with modern Western academic research standards and knowledge on the subject. Shabanov’s broader research interests are Russian and Western art of the second half of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century, contemporary art, the social history of art, the sociology of art, modern institutional art history, and the history of art exhibitions in Europe.
Shao Yiyang
Shao Yiyang
Shao Yiyang is a professor of art history and theory and the head of Western art studies at the Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing. She is also a member of the Chinese executive committee of the Committée Internationale d’Histoire d’Art (CIHA). Shao received her PhD in art history and theory in 2003 from the University of Sydney, and her MA degree at the University of Western Sydney. Her teaching and research focuses on Western art history, theory, and Chinese modern and contemporary art. She has published widely on contemporary art and theory in Chinese including two books, Art after Postmodern (Hou xian dai zhi hou) and Beyond Postmodern (Chuanyue hou xiandai). Shao presented papers on Chinese modern art at the thirty-second CIHa congress in Melbourne (2008), the thirty-third CIHA congress in Nuremburg (2012), and the twenty-ninth art-history conference organized by Verband deutscher Kunsthistoriker (Association of German Art Historians) in Regensburg in 2007.
Lize van Robbroeck
Lize van Robbroeck
Lize van Robbroeck completed her honors degree in the history of art at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Her MA, from the same university, dealt with the ideology and practice of community arts in South Africa. Van Robbroeck completed her PhD at the University of Stellenbosch, studying the discursive reception of modern black art in white South African writing. Her subsequent publications focused on postcoloniality and nationalism in South African visual arts. As a council member of the South African Visual Arts Historian’s Association (SAVAH), van Robbroeck organized the association’s 2008 annual conference. She is one of the editors and writers of Visual Century: South African Art in Context: 1907–2007, a four volume revisionist history of South African art in the twentieth century. Recently her research interests have expanded to include psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity, which she is applying to postcolonial visual culture. She is currently associate professor in the Department of Visual Arts at Stellenbosch University, where she coordinates the visual-studies courses.
Nóra Veszprémi
Nóra Veszprém
Nóra Veszprémi is a lecturer at the Institute of Art History, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. She studied art history and Hungarian literature at the same university, where she completed her PhD in art history in 2012. In 2011, Veszprémi was a visiting research student in art history at University College London, and in 2013 she received a research fellowship from the Cantemir Institute, University of Oxford. Until 2014, she was a curator at the Hungarian National Gallery, where she cocurated a retrospective of the nineteenth-century Hungarian painter József Borsos (2009) and a major exhibition on art and national identity in nineteenth-century Hungary (2010). Veszprémi’s research focuses on nineteenth-century Hungarian and Austrian visual culture. Her PhD thesis, which will soon be published as a book, provided a critical investigation of the concept of “national Romanticism.” She has presented papers at conferences in Hungary and abroad and has published essays on topics including the representation of gypsies in nineteenth-century Hungarian painting and literature, gothic imagery in Hungarian Romanticism, and the artists Miklós Barabás, József Borsos, and Viktor Madarász. Her article on the Rococo revival in mid-nineteenth-century Hungarian and Austrian painting will be published in The Art Bulletin in December 2014.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for November 2014
posted by CAA — Nov 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.
November 2014
Ciara Phillips: Turner Prize Nominee
Tate Britain
Millbank, London SW1P 4RG, United Kingdom
September 30, 2014–January 4, 2015
Ciara Phillips has been nominated for the Turner Prize 2014. The nomination was based on her solo exhibition presented at the Showroom, London. Workshop was an installation made up of multiple screen prints on newsprint and large-scale works on cotton set as a two-month temporary print studio within the gallery space over the course of the exhibition. Along this project, Phillips collaborated with invited artists, designers, and local women’s groups to produce new screen prints. Guests contributed to Workshop their diverse knowledge and experiences of working collectively. These collaborations initiated conversations and actions that aren’t contained within specific disciplines of art, community action, design, or activism, leaving the workshop/exhibition structure open for development as the project progresses.
By making prints in these new collaborative groupings, Phillips explores the potential of “making together” as a way of negotiating ideas and generating discussions around experimental and wider uses of print. Her long-term commitment to collaborative production underpins her expansive printing practice that makes use of screen printing, wall drawing, and photography to create context-specific installations.
Phillips (born in Canada, 1976) lives and works in Glasgow. She acknowledges having been inspired by Corita Kent in her collaborative approach to art practice. Corita Kent (a.k.a. Sister Mary Corita, 1918–1986) was a pioneering artist, educator, and activist who reinterpreted the advertising slogans and imagery of 1960s consumer culture.
A piece to be highlighted from the exhibition is New Things to Be Discussed (2014), a circular booth installation including screen prints on paper and audio recording based on her conversations with fellow artists and with Justice for Domestic Workers, a self-organized group of migrant domestic workers who work in private houses in the United Kingdom. Engagements and discussions among J4DW, artists, curators, and curatorial projects have sought to address making domestic work visible in British society and the employment of artistic and aesthetic strategies to this end.
Someday Is Now: The Art of Corita Kent
Artis—Naples, Baker Museum
5833 Pelican Bay Boulevard, Naples, FL 34108
September 27, 2014–January 4, 2015
The Baker Museum presents Someday Is Now: The Art of Corita Kent. Corita Kent (Iowa, 1918–Boston, 1986), also known as Sister Mary Corita, was a pioneering Los Angeles–based artist, designer, educator, and activist. She has experimented in printmaking, producing a groundbreaking body of work that combines faith, activism, and teaching with messages of acceptance and hope. Through vibrant, Pop-inspired prints, Corita posed philosophical questions about racism, war, poverty, and religion through work that has been described as saucy, funny, and yet deeply devotional.
Mixing street signs, scripture, poetry, philosophy, advertising, and pop-song lyrics, Corita developed her own version of Pop art. Exploring printmaking as a collaborative and popular medium to communicate with the world, her bright and bold imagery, along provocative texts drawn from a range of secular and religious sources, were widely disseminated as billboards, book jackets, illustrations, and posters.
As a Sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Corita taught at the Art Department at Immaculate Heart College from 1947 through 1968. She lectured extensively and appeared on television and radio talk shows across the country and on the cover of Newsweek in 1967. As an educator, Corita inspired her students and international artists for many generations (See Ciara Phillips at Turner Prize 2014) to discover new ways of experiencing the world and search for revelations in the everyday. Sister Mary Corita left her order in 1968 and was thereafter known as Corita Kent. She continued to make art, producing prints and carrying out many commissions. In 1985 Kent designed the celebrated Love stamp for the US Postal Service.
Her passionate creative practice made us aware that she walked a bumpy road after the Vatican criticized her work has been infected by “radical feminism.” Corita believed that “women’s liberation is the liberation of the feminine in the man and the masculine in the woman.”
22 Women: A Project by Alfredo Jaar
SKMU Sørlandets Kunstmuseum
Skippergata 24B, Kristiansand, Norway
October 10, 2014–February 15, 2015
SKMU Sørlandets Kunstmuseum presents 22 Women, a project by Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956, Santiago de Chile) that casts light on brave activists women who, despite being active in the world today, remain unknown to the wider public.
Jaar is an international artist, architect, and filmmaker whose work explores art’s possibilities for conveying perceptions and interpretations of real historical events and situations. His uncompromising, innovative, and captivating large installations explore and discuss themes such as war, corruption, social injustice, and imbalances in global power structures. Reacting to specific events in real life, Jaar examines and reflects on the position that art can and should have in a global social debate for sharing opinions in ways that mass media and politics cannot.
Jaar’s 22 Women follows Three Women (2010), a project that cast light on Graça Machel, Ela Bhatt, and Aung San Suu Kyi. The new installation means the first iteration of Jaar’s ongoing project that aims to shine light on the life and work of at least one hundred remarkable women. Here, twenty-two minuscule portraits are illuminated by a multitude of light projectors. Spotlighting on the portraits of 22 Women, Jaar acknowledge their invisibility, while their stories are told in a separate booklet accompanying the exhibition. Amira Hass (Israel/Palestine), Bertha Oliva (Honduras), Camila Vallejo (Chile), Hawa Abdi (Somalia), Jenni Williams (Zimbabwe), Kalpona Akhter (Bangladesh), Lina Ben Mhenni (Tunisia), Lydia Cacho (Mexico), Mahnaz Mohammadi (Iran), Malalai Joya (Afghanistan), Mathilde Muhindo (Democratic Republic of the Congo), Nawal El Saadawi (Egypt), Ni Yulan (China), Olayinka Koso-Thomas (Nigeria/Sierra Leone), Razan Zaitouneh (Syria), Sandra Gomes Melo (Brazil), Susan Burton (United States), Svetlana Gannushkina (Russia), Ta Phong Tan (Vietnam), Tetyana Chornovol (Ukraine), Vandana Shiva (India), and Zainab Alkhawaja (Bahrain) are outstandingly achieved women whose crucial work is underrecognized, suppressed, or ignored. Jaar’s project aims to pay homage to these women who are models of resistance that fight human-rights violations, sexual violence, censorship, ethnic persecution, and social injustice.
Jaar’s 22 Women is following up on a series of exhibitions at SKMU that focus on women, equality, and women rights, looking critically at the museum collection and how it represents women.
Judith Lauand: Brazilian Modernist, 1950s–2000s
Driscoll Babcock Galleries
525 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001
October 23–December 20, 2014
Judith Lauand:Brazilian Modernist, 1950s–2000s is the first New York solo exhibition of one of the most celebrated—and yet overlooked in North America—Brazilian artists of the postwar era. Lauand developed her formative career in São Paulo, alongside prolific debates and investigations into the critical definitions of the planar surface and abstraction, and is justifiably known as the “first lady of Concretism.” Seeking to illuminate and establish Lauand’s critical significance as a pioneer of modernism and qualifying as a mini survey, this exhibition brings together over thirty works that span the critical periods of Lauand’s career from the 1950s to 2007; it is accompanied a fully illustrated book by the curator of the show, the art historian Aliza Edelman, that investigates the artist’s prolific achievements in postwar abstraction, geometry, and feminism.
As put by Edelman, Lauand’s “modernist geometric abstractions actively unhinge the rational and seemingly impersonal grid of Concretism. Her objective, mathematical, and precise constructions—primary components of Arte Concreta—introduced new geometries aligned with contemporary ideas on space, time, and matter. Lauand was the only female artist invited to join Grupo Ruptura, an artist group initially formed in São Paulo in 1952, and her successful demonstration of postwar Concretism led in the following decades to further experimentations, with figural and popular representation, assemblage, and optical color contrasts. Thus, Lauand successfully negotiated the development of Brazilian avant-garde tendencies after World War II—including the influence and reception of Pop art and New Figuration in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the political disruption initiated during the military dictatorship—continually buttressing Concretism’s critical ideas while formulating her own meaningful intersections with notions of rupture.”
Works from her early groundbreaking work in the exhibition include Concreto 88, Acervo 186 (1957), a gouache on paper that evokes the photographically inspired architectural façades in Geraldo de Barros’s Fotoformas (Photoforms) and exemplifies the way in which “horizontal bands across shifting chains that link positive and negative space rupture the Concrete grid with rhythmic motion and the perception of subtle contradictions.” Conversely, Sem título (Untitled) (2007) illustrates the diverse ways in which Lauand continues exploring her geometric systems of the 1960s by reworking her principle set of shapes and networks and using color to expand her vision of infinite constructions and her exploration of the endless permutations of structure.
Lauand had her first solo exhibition after being a gallery monitor in the second Bienal de São Paulo in 1953–54. She has participated in significant group shows, including the III Bienal de São Paulo in 1955; the I Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta (First National Exhibition of Concrete Art) in 1956; and the international retrospective on Concretism, Konkrete Kunst: 50 Jahre Entwicklung (Concrete Art: 50 Years of Development), organized by Max Bill in Zurich in 1960. A recipient of multiple prestigious awards and an exhibitor in numerous editions of the Bienal de São Paulo, as well as the Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna, Lauand was the subject of a major retrospective, Judith Lauand: Experiências (Judith Lauand: Experiences), at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo in 2011.
Aikaterini Gegisian: Is This Why I Cannot Tell Lies?
Tintype
107 Essex Road, London N1 2SL United Kingdom
November 19–December 13, 2014
Is This Why I Cannot Tell Lies? is the first solo exhibition in London of work by the multimedia Greek Armenian artist Aikaterini Gegisian. Although she is better known for her films, including the recent Pink City (2014), filmed in Yerevan and exploring gendered divisions in the experience of the city, this exhibition brings together new samples of her extensive collage practice along with photographs and a sound installation based on a dream diary and a textbook on how to become a male escort.
Gegisian’s work is largely concerned with challenging received notions of cultural and sexual identity, as manifested in her multifaceted and ongoing investigation of the identity of Ottoman Woman. Formally structured around the idea of movement and the cinematic device of the jump cut, the collages featured in this show are assembled from heterogeneous material, such as Soviet and Western photo albums and magazines, and feature incongruous images, such as female gymnasts and space missions, scientific illustrations of Eisenstein’s theory of relativity, flower patterns, and home interiors. As such, the works reflect upon female sexuality by referencing a set of spaces in which ideological and gender conflicts are played out, from the outer space to the female body, from the natural world to the space of dream. Repossessing photographic representations of female gymnasts that foreground the highly disciplined form of their activity, and juxtaposing them with photographs of space rockets, scientific illustrations, botanical imagery, and pornographic material, Gegisian conjurs the radical potential of the jump cut in order to suggest the possibility of transformation. She negotiates contrasting ideologies that have restricted female imagination to ignite release from conventional narratives and eventually questions how women are positioned—literally and symbolically—in the space of the future by deconstructing and articulating female sexuality.
Represented byKalfayan Galleriesin Greece, Gegisianstudied at the University of Brighton and Chelsea College of Art and Design and holds a PhD from the University of Westminster in London (2014). She is currently visiting research scholar-artist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She has participated in numerous group shows—the most recent include Re-Tracing the Land at NARS Foundation in Brooklyn (2014); Visualising the Ottoman City at Peltz Gallery at Birkbeck College in London (2014); and Sensible Action at Vladikafkaz Fine Arts Museum in North Ossetia, Russia (2013)—and in international residencies in Russia, Armenia, Egypt, and Turkey. Gegesian’s films have been screened in several film festivals around the world, and her work is represented in public collections, such as the National Centre of Contemporary Art (North Ossetia), the State Museum of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki), and the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as in many private collections in Greece.
Sonia Delaunay: Les Couleurs de l’Abstraction
Musée d’art de la ville de Paris
11 avenue du Président Wilson, 75116 Paris, France
October 17 2014–February 22 2015
Highlighting the agelessness of Sonia Delaunay’s work that, while always of its time, remains fresh and relevant in its formal explorations and quest for a synthesis of the arts even today, this touring survey (curated by Anne Montfort et Cécile Godefroy) is surprisingly the first major retrospective of the artist in Paris since 1967. Bringing together three re-created environments and over four hundred works that include paintings, wall decorations, gouaches, prints, fashion items, and textiles, Les Couleurs de l’Abstraction traces the artist’s evolution since the beginning of the twentieth century to the late 1970s.
As aptly put in the press release, while her husband Robert Delaunay was busy conceptualizing abstraction as a universal language, Sonia was testing it out in painting, posters, garments, bookbinding, and household items, and collaborating with the poet Blaise Cendrars on the artist’s book Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France. Her Spanish and Portuguese years during the First World War saw her first ventures into theater and commercial fashion design in Madrid before her return to Paris in the 1920s. The following decade brought a pared-down abstraction in the International Style that harmonized with the architecture of the time, as in the big mural decorations for the Air Transport Pavilion at the International Exhibition of Art and Technology in Modern Life, on view here for the first time since 1937. Her role as a “go-between” for the pioneers of abstraction and the postwar generation is pointed out through her contributions to the Salons des Réalités Nouvelles, her involvement in various architecture projects, and her exhibitions at the Denise René Gallery in Paris. After the war her painting underwent a profound renewal, culminating in the late 1960s in an intensely poetic form of abstraction. Her formal and technical gifts found expression in monumental paintings, mosaics, carpets, and tapestries, and her late work was marked by the albums of etchings she produced for Editions Artcurial.
It is by exploring her work in the applied arts, her distinctive place in Europe’s avant-garde movements, and her idiosyncratic approach to color (which relates to her childhood in Russia and art study in Germany) that this exhibition promises to effect a rigorous and lasting reassessment of Delaunay’s major and pioneering role as an abstractionist.
Women in Visual Arts 1960–1980: Their Contribution to the Greek Avant-Garde
ISET
9a Valaoritou Street, 106 71 Athens, Greece
October 16, 2014–January 10, 2015
The contemporary Greek art institute ISET presents the exhibition Women in Visual Arts 1960–1980: Their Contribution to the Greek Avant-Garde. Assessing the contributions of female artists in the formation of various avant-garde manifestations in Greece, this exhibition is remarkable for its focus on female artists in a country where gender and feminism have not yet played an important role in the discourse of art.
Curated by Charis Canelopoulou and accompanied by an in-depth catalogue, the exhibition claims the marginalized importance of female artists in various avant-garde experimentations that took place in Greece during the military junta and the tumultuous period that followed it. While castigating the secondary place female artists have played in the historiography of Greek art as “women artists,” it sheds new light on the work of a great assortment of artists whose diverse practices—which range from feminist performance to political Pop, Minimalism to multimedia and conceptual practices—variously contributed to the formation of a multifaceted postwar Greek avant-garde scene and its politics.
The included artists are: Celeste Polycroniadi, Eleni Zerva, Nausica Pastra, Sosso Houtopoulou-Kontaratou, Alex Mylona, Ioanna Spiteris-Veropoulou, Chrysa Romanos, Bia Davou, Niki Kanagini, Aspa Stassinopoulou, Celia Daskopoulou, Rena Papaspyrou, Maria Karavela, Vasso Kyriaki, Opy Zouni, Diohandi, and Leda Papaconstantinou.
A nonprofit civil company, ISET was founded in February 2009 by the senior partners of Nees Morfes Art Gallery, in collaboration with art professionals and consultants (such as artists and art historians). ISET’s main objective is to collect and preserve a comprehensive archive of contemporary Greek art (1945 to the present). It’s archival database was originally based on the archives of the Nees Morfes and Desmos art galleries and is being complemented and enriched continuously with archival material generously donated by public and private institutions, artists, art historians, and individuals.
Affiliated Society News for November 2014
posted by CAA — Nov 09, 2014
American Society of Appraisers
The Personal Property Committee of the American Society of Appraisers invites you to its annual spring conference, “Current Issues in Determining Authenticity in Visual Art and Objects, the Catalogue Raisonné, Art Scholarship, and Value in the Marketplace,” to be held March 25–28, 2015, at the Yale Club in New York. This scholarly conference will gather highly regarded and renowned experts to discuss timely and relevant topics, including authentication of jade objects, certificates of authenticity, conservation issues, connoisseurship in collecting, authenticity of American paintings, who is an expert, and much more. Field trips to the Princeton University museum and library collections and gallery visits in New York will also be part of conference activities. Accommodations have been reserved at the Yale Club for this event. Early-bird registration pricing will be available. This will be a not-to-miss conference! There is limited space for this event, which is expected to sell out. Stay tuned for additional details.
Art, Literature, and Music in Symbolism and Decadence
Art, Literature, and Music in Symbolism and Decadence (ALMSD) will host the session “Symbolist Art and the Unconscious” at the CAA Annual Conference on Saturday, February 14, 2015, 12:30–2:00 PM. This session will feature papers on art and related disciplines that were influenced by the studies of hysteria and the unconscious conducted by the French neurologist Jean Martin Charcot, Sigmund Freud’s teacher.
ALMSD is organizing a conference on angst in visual arts, literature, and philosophy in Paris, to be held June 4–6, 2015, at Univ. Paris IV. The organization is also accepting the submission of articles on mental illnesses and the Symbolist movement for the first issue of its journal, to be published in fall 2015.
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries
This past summer, the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) and the Kellogg School of Management’s Center for Nonprofit Management held its second Academic Museum Leadership Seminar on the campus of Northwestern University (June 23–27, 2014). Forty-two museum leaders from throughout the United States, Canada, Qatar, and Ireland participated in the leadership-training program. Loyola University Museum of Art and Northwestern’s Block Museum also hosted dinners for seminar fellows during the weeklong program. Funding for the seminar was generously provided by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
New AAMG board and staff members are: Craig Hadley, DePauw University, board member at large (communications); Katie Kizer, Vanderbilt University, membership coordinator; and Joseph Mella, Vanderbilt University, executive board member
Historians of Islamic Art Association
The Historians of Islamic Art Association (HIAA) has established a permanent fund in memory of Professor Oleg Grabar and in support of the annual award of Grabar Grants and Fellowships. These competitive grants and fellowships, open to all nationalities, are intended to encourage and further the professional development of PhD students and postdoctoral scholars in the history of Islamic art, architecture and archaeology. The next deadline for the Grabar Travel Grant and Post-Doctoral Fellowship is December 15, 2014.
International Association of Art Critics
The International Association of Art Critics (AICA-USA), in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, will present the eighth AICA/USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at the New School featuring Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, curator of the fourteenth Istanbul Biennale (2015). In addition to her other positions, Christov-Bakargiev has been appointed as a guest scholar at the Getty Research Institute for 2015. Her lecture will be held at the New School, 12th Street Auditorium, 66 West 12th Street, New York, on Thursday, November 20, 2014, 6:30–8:00 PM. Admission is free.
International Sculpture Center
International Sculpture Day, or IS Day, is an annual celebration event held worldwide on April 24, 2015, to further the International Sculpture Center (ISC) mission of advancing the creation and understating of sculpture and its unique, vital contribution to society. IS Day will include a wide range of events, openings, and educational and promotional activities around the world to include, but not limited to: open day at museum/sculpture park; open studios tours; demonstrations and workshops; panels, talks, presentations, and discussions; parties and openings; sculpture exhibits and shows; tours of private and public collections; pop-up shows; exhibitions; and more. Visit www.sculpture.org/isday to learn more about the event and how to participate.
Italian Art Society
The Italian Art Society (IAS) will sponsor a CAA annual meeting session in New York, organized by Christopher Bennett and Elizabeth Mangini entitled “Di politica: Intersections of Italian Art and Politics since WWII” (February 11, 2015, 12:30–2:00 PM). IAS will also cosponsor a related two-day conference entitled “Untying the Knot: The State of Postwar Italian Art History Today” at the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York on February 9–10, 2015. IAS encourages members and prospective members to attend the IAS business meeting on February 11, 7:30–9:00 AM. In March 2015, IAS will sponsor five sessions at the March annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Berlin.
IAS is pleased to provide a research and publication grant (deadline: January 10, 2015). In addition, the society seeks proposals of papers from senior scholars for the sixth annual 2015 IAS/Kress Lecture, scheduled for May 20, 2015, in Naples, Italy, on a Neapolitan topic (deadline: January 4, 2015).
National Council of Arts Administrators
The forty-second annual conference of the National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA) convened September 23–26, 2014 in Nashville, Tennessee. The organization is indebted to Mel Ziegler and Heather Rippetoe of Vanderbilt University for organizing a provocative, powerful conference. Featured speakers included: Pablo Helguera, artist, writer, and raconteur; Jon Rubin, artist and social practitioner; Steven J. Tepper, a sociologist focused on creativity in education; and Ruby Lerner, founding director of Creative Capital.
The membership elected three new board members: Lynne Allen, Boston University; Elissa Armstrong, Virginia Commonwealth University; and Cathy Pagani, University of Alabama. They join these returning directors: Leslie Bellavance, Alfred University (secretary); Steve Bliss, Savannah College of Art and Design; Cora Lynn Deibler, University of Connecticut; Andrea Eis, Oakland University (treasurer); 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. Special thanks goes to Sergio Soave of Ohio State University for his excellent service; he rotates off the board this year.
Activities at the 2015 CAA Annual Conference in New York include the annual NCAA reception (February 12, 5:00–8:00 PM) and an affiliated-society session, “Hot Problems/Cool Solutions in Arts Leadership,” a fast paced series of presentations on leadership (February 12, 12:30–2:00 PM). NCAA welcomes new and current members as well as all interested parties.
Society for Photographic Education
The fifty-second national conference of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE), titled “Atmospheres: Climate, Equity and Community in Photography,” will take 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 or attend as a student volunteer for free admission. Other highlights include a print raffle, silent auction, mentoring sessions, film screenings, exhibitions, receptions, a dance party, and more! The guest speakers will be Rebecca Solnit, Chris Jordan, and Hank Willis Thomas. Registration will open on November 3, 2014. Preview the conference schedule and register online at www.spenational.org/conference.
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) looks forward to the ASEEES annual convention November 20–23, 2014, in San Antonio, Texas, where its members will participate on a dozen panels ranging from eighteenth-century prints to twentieth-century art and architecture in Eastern Europe and Russia. SHERA’s business meeting, to be held on Saturday, November 22, at 3:30 PM, is open to both members and nonmembers.
In recent months SHERA’s members have been busy organizing exhibitions, publishing new research, and planning conferences. To see their activities, go to www.shera-art.org and click on News; for members’ recent publications and work in progress, click on Research.
SHERA is delighted to welcome the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre (CCRAC) as a new institutional member. CCRAC is a joint initiative between the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London to provide a forum for the investigation of Russian and Soviet art. It aims to stimulate debate, support collaborative work, and generate and disseminate research on all aspects of the visual arts, architecture, design, and exhibitions in Russia and the Soviet Union.
Visual Resources Association
The Visual Resources Association (VRA) presented the organization’s highest honors at a membership and awards dinner on March 13, 2014, during the VRA’s thirty-second annual conference, held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Virginia Mason Green (Macie) Hall of the Center for Educational Resources at Johns Hopkins University received the Distinguished Service Award for her contributions to visual resources and image management. Her service as the VRA representative to the Conference on Fair Use and the National Information Infrastructure at the US Patent and Trademark Office from 1994 to 1999 was only the beginning of her contributions to the field of visual resources.
The Nancy DeLaurier Award for distinguished achievement in the field of visual resources was presented to Ann Baird Whiteside of Harvard University. Whiteside was honored for her leadership in the development and implementation of the Society of Architectural Historians’ SAHARA Project. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, SAHARA was developed by the Society of Architectural Historians in collaboration with ARTstor. It contains over 47,000 images of architecture and landscapes contributed by architects, scholars, photographers, graduate students, preservationists, and others who share an interest in the built environment. Nominator and recipient acceptance remarks are available on the VRA Awards website.
Committee on Diversity Practices highlights for November/December 2014
posted by CAA — Nov 09, 2014
The CAA Committee on Diversity Practices highlights exhibitions, events, and activities that support the development of global perspectives on art and visual culture and deepen our appreciation of political and cultural heterogeneity as educational and professional values. Current highlights are listed below; browse past highlights through links at the bottom of this page.
November/December 2014
Esterio Segura
Museum of Latin American Art
Long Beach, California
November 22, 2014–February 15, 2015
“MOLAA is proud to present the first solo U.S. museum exhibition of pioneering contemporary artist Esterio Segura. Based in Cuba, Segura creates work that addresses topics of commercialization, migration, censorship and cultural isolation viewed from a contemporary Cuban perspective. Utilizing a variety of media; from drawing and painting to sculpture, photography and installation, he reflects upon contemporary Cuban anxieties. Segura delivers his social critique with humor and satire, at times evoking controversy. Embracing pop culture, Afro-Cuban influences, religious iconography and eroticism, he celebrates the beauty and ingenuity of the island while challenging the absurdity of the barriers that isolate and separate its people.
Esterio Segura studied at the prestigious Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) of Cuba where he also taught professionally. He has had solo exhibitions in Havana, Berlin, London and New York, and has participated in group exhibitions in Argentina, Canada, Costa Rica, Ecuador, France, London, Mexico and Spain. His works can be found in numerous museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Arizona State University Art Museum, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Cuba, Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York, the Latin American Art Museum of the University of Essex, and the Museum of Latin American Art.” (http://www.molaa.org/Art/Exhibitions/upcoming-exhibitions/Esterio-Segura.aspx)
More information: http://www.molaa.org
Prospect.3: New Orleans
Numerous venues
New Orleans, Louisiana
October 25, 2014–January 25, 2015
“In Walker Percy’s 1961 novel The Moviegoer, the protagonist Binx Bolling is consumed by “the search” in the week leading up to his thirtieth birthday. Pointedly, the birthday falls on Ash Wednesday—the day after the most important holiday in New Orleans, Mardi Gras. Though Binx’s attendance at the carnival is peripheral, there’s much to be learned from his vantage point at the margins of the crowd. Bolling, a solitary moviegoer, lives his life on the margin, slowly creeping closer to the center as he embraces “the search.” He begins the book in the isolated suburbs of New Orleans, comfortably away, and apart from other people’s lives, but finds solace in the contested city by its end. The novel, set in a time of heightened social awareness in the first half of the decade’s movement for civil rights in America, delves into the depths of existentialism in a world where people were legally segregated from each other, making it impossible to celebrate the individual. “The peculiar institution” of slavery and immigration during the 18th century created a city that, even in 1961, was a complex social arrangement, one that remains palpable today. The third Prospect biennial (P.3) is invested in and will explore ‘the search’ to find the self and the necessity of the other as part of that quest.
It is New Orleans’ distinct history that makes it an illuminating source of philosophical inquiry for the present. Percy, a student of Soren Kierkegaard and acolyte of Jean-Paul Sartre, was attempting to “explore the dislocation of man in the modern age,” and certainly the physical and psychological violence we do to each other is one of the continuing facets of our species’ ‘dislocation.’ The “search” in Prospect.3 (P.3) also aims to further explore a philosophical inquiry on humanity, an effort to interrogate human feelings and human relationships. Recognizing the position of P.3 as a biennial-type exhibition for the United States—passionately committed to being international in scope and weary of geographic location as something that is increasingly interchangeable in today’s world of contemporary art—Prospect.3 is, in the mode of past Prospect projects, vitally committed to the city of New Orleans. Placed at the foot of the Mississippi River on the Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans’ influx of people has been remarkable in its diversity, and unlike any other American city. As a node for thinking through global issues, New Orleans offers an example that is revelatory, generative and frictional.” (http://www.prospectneworleans.org/exhibition-description/)
Past Forward
Artspace 111
Fort Worth, Texas
October 17–November 29, 2014
“Artspace111 looks forward to exhibiting the first major tour of Emirati artwork—which features over 50 paintings, photographs, sculptures, video installations, and other media by 25 Emirati artists—will showcase the creativity radiating throughout the Emirati art scene and highlight the development and history of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).The overarching theme of the exhibition highlights the balance between the UAE’s rapid development while maintaining its ties to its heritage and past and honoring traditional values. The exhibition features core elements of Emirati life and represents all seven emirates while emphasizing the importance of kinship and home, nature and landscape, as well as technology and innovation to Emirati culture. Artspace111 has partnered with the UAE Embassy to share the UAE’s compelling narrative and rich cultural heritage through this groundbreaking cultural diplomacy art initiative, which will be a powerful tool for finding common ground, building lasting relationships, and fostering respect. Past Forward will provide an opportunity for peer-to-peer exchanges of ideas, information, and experiential learning, as well as a framework for Americans and Emiratis to better understand one another through first-hand insight into life and culture in the UAE through these works of art. The exhibition will travel across the United States over the next 18 months, including stops in Texas, California, and Washington.” (http://www.artspace111.com/past-forward/ )
More information: http://www.artspace111.com
Rising Up: Hale Woodruff’s Murals at Talladega College
National Museum of African American History and Culture
Washington, DC
November 7, 2014–March 1, 2015
“Talladega College in Alabama commissioned prominent African American artist Hale Woodruff to paint a series of murals for its newly built Savery Library in 1938. Woodruff painted six murals portraying significant events in the journey of African Americans from slavery to freedom. On Nov. 7, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture will present “Rising Up: Hale Woodruff’s Murals at Talladega College,” an exhibition of murals and other significant works by the artist. The exhibition will be on view in the NMAAHC Gallery at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History through March 1, 2015.
This will be the first time the murals have been exhibited in the Washington metro area. The murals were removed from Talladega College for a five-year collaborative restoration project organized by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, which also organized a multicity tour of the works. The murals are six monumental canvases arranged in two cycles of three, portraying heroic efforts of resistance to slavery and moments in the history of Talladega College, which opened in 1867 to serve the educational needs of a new population of freed slaves. The first cycle includes the murals “The Mutiny on the Amistad,” which depicts the uprising on the slave ship La Amistad; “The Trial of the Amistad Captives,” depicting the court proceedings that followed the mutiny; and “The Repatriation of the Freed Captives,” portraying the subsequent freedom and return to Africa of the Amistad captives.
The companion murals “The Underground Railroad,” “The Building of Savery Library” and “Opening Day at Talladega College” show themes of the Underground Railroad, the construction of Savery Library at Talladega College and the early days of the college campus, for which the murals were commissioned, respectively.
“Rising Up: Hale Woodruff’s Murals at Talladega College” is presented by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and is organized by the High Museum of Art in collaboration with Talladega College. The exhibition is co-curated by Jacquelyn Serwer, chief curator at NMAAHC, and Rhea Combs, museum curator. A full-color, 155-page catalog, published by the High Museum of Art, will be on sale in the National Museum of American History’s store during the exhibition.” (http://americanhistory.si.edu/exhibitions/rising-up)
More information: http://nmaahc.si.edu
Classical Nudes and the Making of Queer History
Leslie + Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art
New York, NY
October 17, 2014–January 4, 2015
“Classical Nudes and the Making of Queer History, curated by scholar Jonathan David Katz, investigates the continued centrality of the classical nude over centuries of art making. This exhibition explores how images of the classical past have acted as recurring touchstones in the historical development of same-sex representation, and as such, constitute a sensitive barometer of the shifting constructions of what we today call gay and lesbian or queer culture. The classical past is thus gay culture’s central origin myth, and its representation offers far more information about the culture that appropriates the classical past then it does about that past itself. In tracing this trajectory of the classical nude across history, this show concentrates on four major periods: Antiquity, the Renaissance, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the modern/contemporary periods.” (https://www.leslielohman.org/exhibitions/current.html)
More information: https://www.leslielohman.org
V. S. Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
New York, NY
October 24, 2014–February 11, 2015
“An artist of singular stature, modernist painter Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde (1924–2001) was known to fellow artists and intellectuals, as well as to later generations of students and admirers, as a man of uncompromising integrity of spirit and purpose. Born in Nagpur, India in 1924, Gaitonde was briefly affiliated with avant-garde collectives such as the Progressive Artists’ Group and the Bombay Group in the early ’50s. Nonetheless, he remained independent throughout most of his career. This exhibition draws an arc from Gaitonde’s early, figurative, mixed-medium compositions and watercolors inspired by Paul Klee, through his major bodies of signature canvases from the 1960s and ’70s, to his late works from the 1980s and ’90s. Departing from Klee, Gaitonde’s practice began in the late 1950s in a nonrepresentational mode—or, as he preferred to call it, a nonobjective style. This turn towards abstraction is in accordance with the artistic principles first espoused by Vasily Kandinsky, as is embodied by the Guggenheim’s origins as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, and also dovetails with Gaitonde’s lifelong interest in Zen Buddhism.
Short, stocky, self-critical, and confident, Gaitonde scorned sentimentality in his biography and his artistic practice. As fellow painter Krishen Khanna has stated, “There’s a very strong correlation I see between the way Gaitonde thought, the way he lived, and the way he painted.” Alongside art, he was an avid admirer of Indian and Western poetry, cinema, literature, theater, and classical music. Stressing the importance of the present moment, the completeness and joy of the creative process, and the intimate relationship between painter and painting, “Gai,” as he was popularly known among peers, was an intrepid and influential artist whose career remains unequaled in the history of South Asian modern art. Yet Gaitonde remains sorely understudied in the genealogies of twentieth-century world art.
As current scholarship revisits non-Western traditions of mid-twentieth-century modern art, this seminal retrospective exhibition presents an unparalleled opportunity to explore the context of Indian modern art as it played out in the metropolitan centers of Bombay (now Mumbai) and New Delhi from the late 1940s through the end of the twentieth century. It comprises forty-five major paintings and works on paper drawn from thirty leading public institutions and private collections, forming the most comprehensive overview of Gaitonde’s work to date. Including many pieces that have never been seen by the public, the exhibition reveals Gaitonde’s extraordinary use of color, line, form, and texture, as well as symbolic elements and calligraphy, in works that seem to glow with an inner light.
A transnational set of references and influences provides an art historical context for Gaitonde’s work and defines this exhibition. Gaitonde’s work spans the traditions of nonobjective painting and Zen Buddhism as well as Indian miniatures and East Asian hanging scrolls and ink paintings. When looking at Gaitonde’s oeuvre within the wider related context of international postwar art, one can also draw parallels to artists working within the contemporary School of Paris, as well as movements such as Art Informel, Tachisme, and Abstract Expressionism. Yet Gaitonde’s output continues to be defined by the particular ethos of India, where the artist lived and worked his entire life.
A scholarly catalogue and series of public programs accompanies the exhibition, which is organized by Sandhini Poddar, Adjunct Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, with Amara Antilla, Curatorial Assistant, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.” (http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view/v-s-gaitonde-painting-as-process-painting-as-life)
More information: http://www.guggenheim.org
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Oct 29, 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.
An Interview with Jane Chu, Chairman of the NEA
Jane Chu was confirmed as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts this past June. She recently answered a few questions about the NEA’s priorities in relation to local arts agencies. (Read more from Americans for the Arts.)
Study Shows That Recent Arts Alumni Are Resilient, Adaptable, and Involved
A study released by the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project shows that America’s most recent arts graduates are using skills learned in school combined with internship experiences to find work, forge careers, and engage their communities, despite higher student debt levels than older alumni. The report, Making It Work: The Education and Employment of Recent Arts Graduates, analyzes data from more than 88,000 arts alumni of all ages, with a particular focus on the 17,000 recent alumni—those who finished their undergraduate or graduate level degrees up to five years prior. (Read more from Indiana University Bloomington.)
Georgia State University’s Loss in “E-Reserves” Case Might Actually Be a Win for Librarians
Two weeks ago a federal appeals court ended that celebration by reversing the judge’s decision and sending the “e-reserves” case back to the lower court for further action. At a glance, the latest ruling looks like a loss for Georgia State University and its allies, and a win for three academic publishers that had sued it. But was it, really? In the days since the ruling was issued, several university-based copyright experts have argued that the reversal is not as bad as it might seem. (Read more from Wired Campus.)
The Best Teaching Resources on the Web
Those of us old enough to remember traveling to an out-of-the-way library to track down a potentially crucial roll of microfilm know just how much new technologies have transformed the way academics do research. We now happily rely on Google Books, JSTOR, and a whole parade of resources and databases available at the click of a finger. But what may be less obvious is the way new technologies have made improving our teaching a whole lot easier as well. (Read more from Vitae.)
Participatory Learning in the Art-History Classroom
In a participatory learning environment, learners get the opportunity to become part of a community of inquiry and explore abstract concepts in a nonhierarchical social context. Rather than the mere transmission and acquisition of knowledge, learning becomes relevant, engaging, and creative. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)
Tenure Track Wisdom Part Two
In the second of this series of faculty interviews, we hear from Laura Krystal Porterfield, who just finished her first year as an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. She received her PhD in urban education in 2013 from Temple University, where she a held fellowship at the Center for the Humanities. (Read more from Vitae.)
Finding a Job While ABD
Going on the job market without a degree in hand, emphasizing that holding off on job-searching until the dissertation, is a luxury that is not available to everyone. Yet the prospect of landing a job can be an invaluable motivator for an ABD candidate struggling with dissertation procrastination. Here are some tips for ABDs on how to juggle the demands of grad-student life and job searching while maximizing your chances at job-market success. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
The Museum Interface
It’s no longer a question of whether art institutions should have a virtual presence. Rather, the onus is being placed on designers to facilitate meaningful interactions with art that might occur in the gallery, via web-based applications or in new hybrid spaces that merge the real and the virtual. Any attempt to augment an encounter with artwork using technological means invariably raises questions about the values we assign to certain modes of viewing. After all, isn’t visiting a museum inherently tied to a very deep, very primary real-life experience? (Read more from Art in America.)
Sheila J. McNally: In Memoriam
posted by CAA — Oct 24, 2014
Sheila J. McNally, professor emerita of art history at the University of Minnesota, passed away in Minneapolis on September 24, 2014. She was 81 years old.
McNally graduated with a BA from Vassar College in 1953. Following studies at the University of Kiel, the University of Munich, and the Radcliffe Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, she received her PhD from Harvard University in 1965, writing a dissertation on “The Role of Ornament in Protocorinthian Vase Painting.” After serving as a lecturer and instructor at Ohio State University and Mount Holyoke College, McNally joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota in 1965. Until 1987 she was a member of the Art History Department; between 1987 and 2004 she was affiliated with the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies; and then from 2004 until her retirement in 2010 she was again a faculty member in the Department of Art History.
Over the course of her long career McNally was widely recognized as a dynamic educator and accomplished scholar. In addition to numerous publications on Diocletian’s Palace in Split, Croatia—including her 1996 book The Architectural Ornament of Diocletian’s Palace at Split—her work engaged Coptic Egypt and the art and archaeology of monasticism, as well as Greek and Roman sculpture, mosaics, and pottery. She served as a member of the board of directors of the College Art Association and Mid-America Art History Society, and as a member of the advisory board of the Women’s Caucus for Art, the board of governors and other committees of the Archaeological Institute of America, and the Rome Prize jury of the American Academy in Rome.
McNally was a pathbreaking scholar and archaeologist—among the earliest women to make a name for herself in a field long dominated by men—and was an inspiring role model to young women in the field of Classical archaeology. She will be remembered as a passionate individual who lived her life in an utterly unique fashion, and will be missed by all who knew her.
Contributions in her honor can be made to the Sheila McNally Fellowship Fund (care of the Department of Art History), which supports graduate students pursuing the PhD in the art and archaeology of the late antiquity.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Oct 22, 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.
AIA Statement on the Recent Sale of Artifacts by the St. Louis Society
The Archaeological Institute of America has learned with grave concern that the AIA St. Louis Society has sold a collection of Egyptian artifacts entrusted to its care. These objects were intended to benefit the citizens of St. Louis by helping them to understand the record of past human achievement. The decision to sell these objects after a century of custodianship contravenes this expectation. (Read more from the Archaeological Institute of America.)
Publishers Win Reversal of Court Ruling That Favored “E-Reserves” at Georgia State University
How much copyrighted material can professors make available to students in online course reserves before they exceed the boundaries of educational fair use? That’s the essential question at the heart of a long-running copyright-infringement lawsuit that has pitted three academic publishers against Georgia State University. Last week, in a setback for the university, a federal appeals court reversed a May 2012 ruling that mostly favored Georgia State. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Nurturing Talent
Design education leaves designers lacking in business skills—it’s hard enough to learn to be a designer, but there needs to be a next step for the business side that caters to the entrepreneur. Who wants to spend two years getting an MBA if you’ve got a hot idea? We need a place where smart, talented designers can get an on-demand education about how to start a business, which includes everything from financial planning and costing to how to stay out of trouble. (Read more from Metropolis.)
“Looking” at Art in the Smartphone Age
“Beyoncé and Jay-Z Take Selfie with Mona Lisa!” headlines all over the internet blared. And it’s true, the first couple of American pop culture did take a photo of themselves in front of one of the masterpieces of European art history. But in the instantly iconic image, the two musicians aren’t even looking at the famous work of art that they knowingly appropriate. In fact, they have their backs turned to it, with the Mona Lisa’s face poking out over their shoulders like a photobomb across the centuries. (Read more from Pacific Standard.)
Soft Fabrics Have Solid Appeal
Once dismissed as utilitarian, homespun, and intellectually flimsy, textiles are gaining international stature in art museums. The artist Richard Tuttle just unveiled a vast installation in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, called I Don’t Know, or the Weave of Textile Language, while new and older works are on view in his retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London. Meanwhile, there are shows on fiber art, weaving, and embroidery at the Drawing Center in New York and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Hanging a Tapestry in the Met Is a Lot More Complicated Than You Think
The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently opened a new exhibition: Grand Design, a collection featuring nineteen massive tapestries by the Renaissance master Pieter Coecke van Aelst. The tapestries are epic, intricate pieces, spanning up to thirty feet in length and weighing an average of one hundred pounds—which begs the question of how, exactly, the museum hangs them. (Read more from Slate.)
The Confidence Gap in Academic Writing
As a writing workshop instructor, I’ve become familiar with the garden-variety problems that graduate students face in writing a dissertation. Often those difficulties boil down to an avoidance of the daily grind of writing itself. Sometimes students lack any concrete feedback on their drafts or receive comments that are too general to be of much help in the revision process. Many students are unfamiliar with the tricks and tools of the writing trade itself—things like reverse outlines, free writing, or “storyboarding.” (Read more from Vitae.)
Managing Your Academic Career
In my ten years of interviewing and/or observing approximately one hundred faculty members at various types of institutions, I have learned a great deal about how to shape and manage academic work in ways that promote meaningful, balanced, and satisfying careers. To prepare for a presentation at new faculty orientation at Saint Joseph’s University, I reviewed the field notes, interview transcripts, and publications from my past studies with one question in mind: What strategies might best help new faculty members manage their academic careers during a time of rising expectations, decreasing resources, and diminishing boundaries between work and life? (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Oct 15, 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.
Tax Court Ruling Is Seen as a Victory for Artists
If you say you are an artist, but you make little money from selling your art, can your work be considered a profession in the eyes of the Internal Revenue Service? In a ruling handed down in early October by the United States Tax Court and seen by many as an important victory for artists, the answer is yes. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Can the Monograph Survive?
The first four chapters prove the scholar’s done the work, and the next two chapters—the ones “people might actually read”—present the argument. Elsewhere and in between are the reworking of the author’s dissertation and implicit tenure pitch. That’s how Timothy Burke, professor and chair of history at Swarthmore College, described the scholarly monograph during a recent forum on its future sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
An Expert Cites Dozens of Paintings as Rembrandt’s
Are there suddenly dozens more genuine Rembrandts in the world? There are if art authorities accept the findings of Ernst van de Wetering, the Dutch art historian and longtime head of the Netherlands-based Rembrandt Research Project. In its sixth and final volume, published last week, van de Wetering reattributes seventy paintings—often discounted by previous scholars as well as the institutions that own them—to the Dutch master. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)
Bonfire of the Humanities
It has long been fashionable to say that the globe is shrinking. In the wake of the telegraph, the steamship, and the railway, thinkers from the late-nineteenth century onward often wrote of space and time being annihilated by new technologies. In our current age of jet travel and the internet, we often hear that the world is flat, and that we live in a global village. Time has also been compressed. In the 1980s, this myopic vision found a name: short-termism. (Read more from Aeon.)
Will My Nonacademic Writing Come Back to Haunt Me?
As a graduate student, I have published in nonacademic venues on the topic of parenting a special-needs child. Now I am concerned that this is going to come back to haunt me on the faculty job market. Some of my professors have pressured me to quit the graduate program, assuming I couldn’t manage academia and motherhood. I kept at it, and finished my degree, but will search committees secretly think the same thing as those professors? (Read more from Vitae.)
Warburg Institute Threatened by Funding Woes
The Warburg Institute here has trained generations of scholars, who liken its world-renowned library of Renaissance and post-Classical material to an intellectual paradise. Now many scholars fear for the Warburg’s future over a funding dispute with the University of London, which has housed the collection since 1944, after it was moved from Nazi Germany. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Tate and Oil: Does the Art World Need to Come Clean about Sponsorship?
In a cramped second-floor room in an office block mostly used for immigration hearings, one of the most famous museums in the world is fighting to keep a secret. In March, the Information Commissioner ruled that Tate must, against its wishes, reveal some of what was said in meetings where the latest of several sponsorship deals with oil giant BP was discussed. (Read more from the Guardian.)
Preventing a “Digital Landfill”
University libraries need to advocate for government openness and electronic record keeping, speakers during the Association of Research Libraries fall membership conference implored, or risk the digital landscape’s becoming a “digital landfill.” The call to action emerged from a day during which members of the association debated how libraries should involve themselves in producing accessible digital resources, managing institutional data, and supporting campus innovation. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for October 2014
posted by CAA — Oct 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.
October 2014
Cover of the catalogue for Judith Scott: Bound and Unbound
Judith Scott: Bound and Unbound
Brooklyn Museum
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Fourth Floor, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238
October 24, 2014–March 29, 2015
Bringing together sculptures and works on paper that span the eighteen years of her career, this much-awaited exhibition is the first survey of Judith Scott’s work that Matthew Higgs has described as “one of the most important bodies of work—‘insider’ or ‘outsider’—produced anywhere and under any circumstances in the past twenty years.”
Judith and her twin sister Joyce were born in Columbus Ohio. Judith was diagnosed with Down syndrome and considered retarded due to learning difficulties caused from undiagnosed deafness. At the age of eight she was tragically separated from her sister and spent the next thirty-five years of her life as ward in Dickensian institutions for the disabled and the discarded. Her art production began after Joyce decided to become Judith’s legal guardian and introduced her to a visionary studio-art program, the Creative Growth Art Center.
Judith Scott developed a unique and idiosyncratic method to produce a body of work of remarkable originality and visual complexity. Often working for weeks or months on individual pieces, she begun by pilfering and assembling together all sorts of objects; she then enveloped and intertwined them with miscellaneous threads, twines, strings, ropes, and fibers, somewhat protecting and concealing their core. As the art historian Lucienne Peiry says, her unconventional textile sculptures “are endowed with an intense power of expression: they resemble giant multicolored cocoons and … are evocative of magical fetishes” holding a special connection to life and death. Moreover, although it does not appear that her work was directed by intention, “these sculptures conceal a secret that their author always took great care to hide…. There is no doubt but that the sculptures themselves play an essential role in embodying the physical presence—that of ‘the other twin’—throughout the feverish act of creation. Judith Scott’s approach thus involved a process that may seem paradoxical because, on one hand, it consisted of dissimulating and concealing, and on the other hand, of growing and shaping…. The emotional and physical reunion with her sister led Judith Scott to recover an identity, and then to develop an intimate experience at a fantasy level where she sublimated the tearing apart of which she was a victim.”
Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden
Stedelijk Museum
Museumplein 10, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
September 6, 2014–January 4, 2015
Closely examining key themes and motifs that Marlene Dumas has developed throughout her career, Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden is the first major solo exhibition of her work in the Netherlands in twenty years. It is also the most comprehensive retrospective survey of her work in Europe to date. The title of the exhibition derives from the work The Image as Burden (1993) and refers to the conflict between the painterly gesture and the illusion of the painted image. The exhibition brings together almost two hundred drawings and paintings from private and museum collections throughout the world.
Dumas was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1953 and moved to Amsterdam after her studies at the Ateliers ‘63 in Haarlem. Today she is considered one of the most significant and influential painters. While often inspired by images found in newspapers and magazines, she has been renewing the meaning of painting in an era dominated by visual culture. Believing that the endless stream of photographic images that bombards us every day influences how we see each other and the world around us, she redresses this onslaught by focusing on the psychological, social, and political aspects of the image. Her intense, emotionally charged paintings and drawings address existentialist themes and often reference art-historical motifs and current political issues.
In addition to her most important and iconic works, the exhibition presents lesser-known paintings and drawings, including many works never before seen in the Netherlands, and a selection of her most recent paintings. While paying special attention to her early Amsterdam production (1976–82), the Stedelijk presentation features a number of exclusive highlights, such as a gallery devoted to drawings that have come straight from her studio, which have rarely been on public view, and the one-hundred-piece series Models from the collection of the Van Abbemuseum.
Niki de Saint Phalle
Grand Palais Galeries Nationales
Paris, France
September 17–February 2, 2015
Curated by Camille Morineau for the Grand Palais and traveling to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, this is a major retrospective of the work of Niki de Saint Phalle, one of the most popular and innovative artists of the previous century. Mapping the opposing and often conflicting forces of eros and thanatos, creation and destruction, joie de vivre and trauma, feminity and masculinity, that underpin her production and illuminating key aspects of her poetics and multifaceted politics, the exhibition brings together an incredible assortment of her prolific oeuvre in all the media that she worked—paintings, assemblages, sculptures, works on paper, films, theater settings, illustrated books, etc.
Already by the early 1960s de Saint Phalle had an unusually successful international career for a female artist of her time. Propelled by the outrageousness of her shooting events as well as the joie de vivre of her signature Nanas, her fame quickly transcended not only national borders but continents, often providing rare inspiration to other female artists as manifested by her inclusion, by Mona Gorovitz in a 1965 essay in São Paolo that highlighted the achievements of women artists. While honored with major museum shows, retrospectives, including a museum dedicated to her in Japan, both posthumously and while still living, the complexities of de Saint Phalle’s contribution to international postwar avant-garde and their diverse politics, including the feminism underpinning her work, have not yet been fully examined or appreciated. Her recent inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art’s sixties rooms acknowledges finally her place in postwar Neodada and Pop scene; yet the failure of this exhibition to be hosted in an American institution proves the ongoing resistance to embrace de Saint Phalle as a great artist rather than a beautiful woman or just the partner of Jean Tinguely, an exotic outsider, a commercially successful irrelevance, a naïve colorist or essentialist. Illuminating lesser-known bodies of works with feminist effects, such as her series Devouring Mothers, and accompanied with a catalogue that brings together leading scholars of postwar art, de Saint Phalle and feminist art—such as Amelia Jones and Sarah Wilson, in thorough investigation of all periods and aspects of her work, including her life and writings, the exhibition offers a serious reassessment of de Saint Phalle’s work and its importance.
De Saint Phalle was born in France to an upper-class family of aristocratic and Catholic Franco-American origins and raised in New York. Although educated for the “marriage market,” and briefly modeling, she turned decisively to art upon a nervous breakdown while leading an unconventional family life in France. In the early 1960s she left her children to devote herself to art, eventually joining Tinguely to an extraordinary creative partnership that outlived their relationship. In 1961 she was the only female artist accepted in the circle of New Realism in Paris for her shooting paintings, themselves a groundbreaking performative and participatory form of painting by gun, but the politics of her work were also welcomed as example of the Figuration Narrative. Around 1963 she rediscovered herself as a sculptor, channeling the protofeminist underpinnings of her multifaceted rebellion against patriarchal power to a critical investigation of the stereotypical role of the feminine in Western society as well as an empowering and celebratory reenvisioning of it through the grotesque and joyous bodies of her now signature Nanas. Complementing her own critical contemplation on maternity and motherhood, her pioneering film Daddy in 1973 (in collaboration with Peter Whiteread) debunked patriarchal power, daringly addressing and revenging a repressed childhood trauma, her violation by her father, that she would later continue to address in autobiographic writings. In interviews of the early 1960s, de Saint Phalle, however, was always describing one major driving dream of her practice since her first encounter of the work of Gaudí and Facteur Cheval: to make joyous sculpture gardens. Since the 1970s she indeed channeled her energy in making her dream a reality, with a true belief in the life-changing democratic power of joy-giving public art. Her magnum opus, The Tarot Garden (1978–98), is the ultimate proof of the ambition and vision, monumentality and complexities of her architectural sculptural oeuvre, but so are many homes, playgrounds, public fountains, and sculptural complexes around the world that unfold central themes of her mythopoetic imagination and its politics.
Mika Tajima: Total Body Conditioning
Art in General
79 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013
September 13–October 25, 2014
Art in General presents Total Body Conditioning,a new commission by the New York–based artist Mika Tajima. Invoking technologies developed to control and affect the body, the exhibition is presented as three scenes: display, work, and fitness. Each scene in the exhibition outlines bodily experiences in different time and space. Contexts change, while the human body consistently becomes a target of power, where individual practices of freedom are intertwined with modes of domination.
Born in Los Angeles in 1975, Tajima use sculpture, painting, video, music, and performance to investigate how material objects define the action and engagement of the performing subject in a constructed space.
Exhibited works include hot-tub painting, reverse spray enameled in saturated gradient colors. Created specifically for the exhibition, these objects are ergonomically molded to the human form, emphasizing how the body is articulated in relation to an object. Tajima will also present a new group of works from her Furniture Art series. This consist of spray-enameled transparent paintings that are subtitled based on diverse geographic locations that draw on the psychological and geographic associations produced by the affective names of industrial colors and paints.
In addition, the exhibition features Negative Entropy‖, a new series of abstract acoustic-woven textile portraits resulted from recordings at a Toyota car factory in Japan and a server collocation center. The recordings were translated into image files and later interpreted by a weaving designer into a tangible fabric. Many of the works in the exhibition are set to shifting lighting and sound sequences, among them, a sound collaboration between New Humans, a group with which Tajima has collaborated before.
Disobedient Objects
Victoria and Albert Museum
Cromwell Road, London SW7 2RL United Kingdom
July 26, 2014–February 1, 2015
The Victoria and Albert Museum presents Disobedient Objects, a pioneering exhibition that investigates the powerful role of objects in movements for social change. Focusing on the period from the late 1970s until now, a time of constant technological development and political challenges, the exhibition demonstrates how political activism drives toward a collective creativity that challenges standard definitions of art and design. Evidencing arts of rebellion from around the world, the object are mostly produced by “nonprofessional” makers that work collaboratively with limited and accessible resources, resulting in effective responses to complex situations.
Since many of the artifacts were loaned directly from activist groups, the objects exhibited were hardly ever seen in a museum before. This exhibition provides a unique opportunity to observe these Disobedient Objects within a contextual background that includes newspaper cuttings, how-to guides, interviews, and footage of the objects in action, along with the makers’ statement explaining how and why the objects were created.
The exhibition is organized in several sections, including the introduction of the design of activist objects in relation to four ways of effecting social change: direct action, speaking out, making worlds, and solidarity. From a tableau of three puppets used in protests against the first Gulf War by the politically radical United States–based Bread and Puppet Theater, to simple pamphlets, to hand-painted placards by gay-rights activists, to banners used in conjunction with social media—solidarity can be demonstrated by even the smallest objects.
The final part of the exhibition maps out every “visual” protest since 1979. The case studies include an installation of masks and posters by the Guerrilla Girls, the anti–death penalty Tiki-Love Truck by the artist Carrie Reichardt, and a project by the Barbie Liberation Organization, responsible for switching the voice boxes on hundred of toys, including talking GI Joe and Barbie dolls, a project that sparked a widespread discussion about gender stereotypes.
Katie Paterson: Future Library
Oslo, Norway
The Berlin-based artist Katie Paterson launched Future Library, her new public artwork that will unfold over the next one hundred years in the city of Oslo, Norway. From 2014 to 2114, Paterson, along the leading publishers and editors from Future Library Trust, will invite one writer every year to contribute a new text to a growing collection of the as-yet unpublished and unread manuscripts. The Future Library project has received its foundations as a gift from the City of Oslo: a forest in Nordmarka. There, Paterson planted one thousand new trees in May 2014. These trees will be cut down in 2114 in order to provide the paper on which the commissioned texts along a century will be printed as an anthology of books. Currently, Future Library exists as a limited-edition “certificate” print that entitles the holder to a copy of the anthology in 2114, an anthology of stories that will only be read beyond the lifetime of certificate holders, writers, and the artist herself.
Paterson (b. 1981, Glasgow) is known for her conceptually driven works that make use of sophisticated technologies. Her poetic installations evidence her philosophical engagements between people and their natural environment, an engagement that derives from an intensive and sensitive research and collaboration with specialists as diverse as astronomers, geneticists, nanotechnologists, and fireworks.
Paterson has named the prizewinning author, poet, essayist, and literary critic Margaret Atwood as the first writer to contribute to Future Library. Atwood has begun writing the first text that will be handed over at a special event to be held in May 2015. While the forest shows the slow growth of the trees and the library, inch by inch, year by year, Paterson’s work engages with the landscape, as a physical entity and as an idea. As Atwood stated when invited to be part of this endeavor: “This project, at least, believes the human race will still be around in a hundred years!”—a hopeful sense of reality that stands beyond the purely visible.