CAA News Today
People in the News
posted by CAA — Oct 17, 2014
People in the News lists new hires, positions, and promotions in three sections: Academe, Museums and Galleries, and Organizations and Publications.
The section is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
October 2014
Academe
Amy Freund, previously an assistant professor at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, has become assistant professor and Kleinheinz Family Endowed Chair in Art History in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
Adriene Jenik, director of the Herberger Institute School for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University in Tempe, has taken a year’s leave, which began on August 1, 2014.
Stephanie Langin-Hooper has left Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, to begin a new position as assistant professor and Karl Kilinski II Endowed Chair of Hellenic Visual Culture in the Department of Art History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
Aleca Le Blanc has left her position as managing editor of the Getty Research Journal at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California, to become assistant professor of Latin American art in the Department of the History of Art at the University of California, Riverside.
Kathryn Maxwell has been appointed acting director of the Herberger Institute School for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University in Tempe.
Judith Rodenbeck, professor of modern and contemporary art at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, has accepted a position on the faculty of the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside, for the 2014–15 academic year.
Ashley Thompson, formerly senior lecturer in the School of Fine Art at Leeds University in England, has become professor and Hiram W. Woodward Chair in Southeast Asian Art in the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
Museums and Galleries
Esther Bell, formerly curator of European paintings, drawings, and sculpture at the Cincinnati Art Museum in Ohio, has become the new curator in charge of European paintings at the Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco, California.
Kate Ezra has left her position as Nolen Curator of Education and Academic Affairs at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut.
Erika Holmquist-Wall, formerly assistant curator of paintings at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minnestoa, has been named Mary and Barry Bingham Sr. Curator of European and American Painting and Sculpture at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky.
Ted Mann, formerly assistant curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, has become a San Francisco–based consulting curator for the museum’s Panza Collection.
Virginia Reynolds, curatorial assistant for the Detroit Institute of Arts in Michigan, has left her position at the museum.
Kailin Weng has left her position at Chinese art project manager at the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington, DC. She is now a graduate student at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Organizations and Publications
Roger Thorp, formerly publishing director for Tate Publishing in London, England, has been appointed editorial director for art and children’s books at Thames and Hudson, also in London.
Institutional News
posted by CAA — Oct 17, 2014
Read about the latest news from institutional members.
Institutional News is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
October 2014
The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has been awarded a grant of $118,737 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency, in the Museums in America program. The Clark will use the funds to digitize significant volumes from the Julius S. Held Collection of Rare Books.
The North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh has accepted a $1.9 million grant from the State Employees’ Credit Union Foundation to help fund research in art education.
The University of Texas at Dallas has received a $17 million contribution from the arts patron Edith O’Donnell to create the school’s new Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History, which opened this fall.
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.)
Participants Selected for 2015 CAA-Getty International Program
posted by Janet Landay, Program Manager, Fair Use Initiative — Oct 09, 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 and artists, CAA will bring colleagues from around the world to its Annual Conference, this year to be held 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. Their names and affiliations are listed below. 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 U.S.-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 specific 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.
CAA hopes that this program will not only increase international participation in the organization’s activities, but will also expand 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 next Annual Conference in New York City.
2015 CAA-Getty International Program Participants
Mokammal Bhuiyan, Professor, Department of Archeology, Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh
Dafne Cruz Porchini, Curator, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico
Boureima Diamitani, Executive Director, West African Museums Program, Burkina Faso
Ljerka Dulibic, Senior Research Associate, Curator of Italian Paintings 1400-1900, Strossmayer, Gallery of Old Masters, Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Croatia
Georgina Gluzman, Assistant Professor of Argentine Art History, Universidad de San Andrés, Argentina
Angelo Kakande, Senior Lecturer and Head of Department of Industrial Arts and Applied Design, Makarere University, College of Engineering, Design Art and Technology, Uganda
Nazar Kozak, Senior Researcher, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Department of Art Historical Studies, Ukraine
Savita Kumari, Assistant Professor, National Museum Institute of History of Art, Conservation and Museology, India
Nomusa Makhubu, Lecturer, Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Ana Mannarino, Adjunct Professor of Art History, Rio de Janeiro Federal University, Brazil
Marton Orosz, Curator, and Director of the Vasarely Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, Hungary
Andrey Shabanov, Associate Research Fellow, Lecturer, European University at St. Petersburg, Art History Department, Russia
Shao Yiyang, Professor, Head of Western Art Studies, Central Academy of Fine Arts, China
Lize Van Robbroeck, Associate Professor, Stellenbosch University, Department of Visual Arts, South Africa
Nora Veszpremi, Lecturer, Institute of Art History, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Oct 08, 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.
Parody Copyright Laws Set to Come into Effect
Changes to legislation in the United Kingdom allowing the parody of copyright works are set to come into force. Under current rules, there has been a risk of being sued for breach of copyright if clips of films, TV shows, or songs were used without consent. But the new European Copyright Directive will allow the use of the material so long as it is fair and does not compete with the original version. (Read more from BBC News.)
How the UK’s New Copyright Law Benefits Libraries, Archives, and Museums
A suite of new copyright exceptions in the United Kingdom’s legislative framework will mean that infringements, such as format shifting for personal use of legitimately bought or gifted works, will be legitimized, and as a result, bad and impossible to police laws will finally be removed from the statute books. But the other beneficiaries of these important and in some cases, sweeping changes, will be libraries, archives, educational establishments, and museums. (Read more from the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.)
Authors Guild vs. Google: Fair Use or Foul Play?
Google has digitized millions of books for its Google Books Library Project, a database that allows a user to search the content of all books that have been scanned into it. The Authors Guild maintains that the project constitutes mass copyright infringement, because Google did not obtain licenses from the rights holders for millions of the books. When the Authors Guild sued Google in the Southern District of New York for copyright infringement, Google prevailed via fair use. The Authors Guild has appealed the ruling to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, where the case is pending and being briefed. The entertainment attorney Mark Robertson discussed the case with Jay Dougherty of Loyola Law School Los Angeles, where he is a professor of law. (Read more from the Los Angeles Review of Books.)
Inquiry: Art Law and Attribution
The quest for compensation and probing legal investigations into how alleged Knoedler Gallery fraud could have happened has exposed the processes behind art sales, forcing the thorny issue of what should be the reasonable and reasoned business of authentication and attribution into the spotlight. However, recent years have seen many expert sources become increasingly wary of assisting in authentication processes, something that can be equated directly with the pressure of market value and the difficulties inherent in the process. (Read more from Apollo.)
JSTOR, Daily
Much of the world’s knowledge is contained in JSTOR, a vast digital academic library. But most of that content is behind a subscription wall. And if you’re not looking for something specific—or even if you are—attempting to take in all that knowledge can be an overwhelming experience. Wanting to make JSTOR’s content more digestible and to engage a different kind of audience, the library has launched a new online magazine, JSTOR Daily. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
For Adjuncts, a Lot Is Riding on Student Evaluations
In February 2012, Miranda Merklein received the email that many adjunct professors dread. “I am sorry to inform you that we cannot extend an employment offer to you at this time,” wrote a department chair at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, where Merklein had been teaching English and writing courses as an adjunct. “A review of your course evaluations, coupled with concerns filed by students and other contributing faculty, resulted in the decision to remove your application from the liberal arts adjunct pool.” At first, Merklein recalled, she was shocked. Then she got angry. (Read more from Vitae.)
An Open Letter to Journal Editors
I write to you today about the graduate-student submissions you receive. Most of you publish a lot of them. That’s because today’s students do first-rate work. Nonetheless, I’ve got an idea for you: What if you stopped publishing articles by doctoral students until they graduated? (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
What Is the Fair Market Value of a Museum Job?
Last week’s post on “The Museum Sacrifice Measure” generated much discussion on Twitter and Facebook and in the Center for the Future of Museum blog’s comment section. A number of commenters point out that various categories of people, in museums or other sectors, have “sacrificed” income for their chosen career but are quite pleased with the trade. (Read more from the Center for the Future of Museums.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Oct 01, 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.
Why Academics Stink at Writing
Together with wearing earth tones, driving Priuses, and having a foreign policy, the most conspicuous trait of the American professoriate may be the prose style called academese. An editorial cartoon by Tom Toles shows a bearded academic at his desk offering the following explanation of why SAT verbal scores are at an all-time low: “Incomplete implementation of strategized programmatics designated to maximize acquisition of awareness and utilization of communications skills pursuant to standardized review and assessment of languaginal development.” (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Always Talk to Strangers
I attended a conference recently and stayed at a hotel that required me to take a shuttle to get to my events. On my first shuttle ride back to the hotel, I chatted with another hotel guest who was attending a different conference and also not staying at his conference hotel. We chatted about a variety of things before we got to that pivotal point when I was very glad I chose this particular hotel. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
End the Conference Interview
Why is it so hard to kill off the tradition of conference interviews? For decades, search committees in many fields have been holding first-round interviews at the annual meetings of their disciplinary organizations. That means the poorest and most vulnerable members of our profession—graduate students, adjuncts, and fixed-term appointees—have to spend a minimum of $1,000 just to get a shot at the next round. No one would call that a just system, and yet, it lives on. (Read more from Vitae.)
Fight over DIA Value Resumes in Court
When Detroit’s bankruptcy trial restarts, the battle over the value of the Detroit Institute of Arts will return to center stage. The city’s largest holdout creditor, the bond insurer Financial Guaranty Insurance Co., is betting its case against the city’s so-called grand bargain on the premise that the city-owned DIA is worth billions more than the Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr is willing to admit. (Read more from the Detroit Free Press.)
Millennials and Museums: Oil and Water?
It’s not enough to rely on the “intrinsic awesomeness” of your collections. If I don’t know about them, they don’t exist. In fact, even if I do know about them, that’s probably not enough to get me to come. Where do my priorities lie? Well, I’m trying to save money, I like to socialize and blow off steam with my friends, we like concerts and cocktails, to see art and go dancing. So, what can you offer me? (Read more from the Tronvig Group.)
The Museum Sacrifice Measure
How much are you willing to give up to work in a museum? How much did you give up to work in a museum? I’m not talking about quality of life issues such as relocating to a new city, having to explain over and over again, at parties, what a “registrar” is, or spending the day in a windowless cubicle tucked in next to collections storage. I’m talking about cold hard cash. (Read more from the Center for the Future of Museums.)
On the False Democracy of Contemporary Art
Art claims that it expands into the sphere of social transformation and genuine democracy. Yet paradoxically, art’s ambition for direct social engagement and its self-abandonment loop back to the very territory of contemporary art, its archive machine, and its self-referential rhetoric of historicizing. Hence the question is: Are we really witnessing the anticapitalist transformation that excuses art’s self-sublation and its dissolution in newly transformed life? (Read more from e-flux Journal.)
Something Old, Something New
The National Endowment for the Humanities has a new home and a new chairman, but the agency’s work to fund digital humanities projects continues unabated. The NEH Digital Humanities Project Directors Meeting was recently hosted for the eighth time in Washington, but for the first time in the agency’s new premises in the recently renovated Constitution Center. The event brings together grant recipients of the Office of Digital Humanities, the grant-making arm of the agency. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Sep 24, 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.
Detroit Institute of Arts Will Sue If the City’s Bankruptcy Plan Is Not Approved
The Detroit Institute of Arts is prepared to sue to prevent the sale of its collection if Detroit’s plan for exiting bankruptcy is not approved, the museum’s chief operating officer told the US Bankruptcy Court last week. When Detroit filed for the largest-ever municipal bankruptcy fourteen months ago, the museum began preparing for possible litigation to keep its artworks from being sold to pay city creditors. (Read more from Reuters.)
What to Expect from Artist Residencies
Artist residencies can be an incredible way to expand and improve your art practice, but getting into the right one can be a challenge. I’ve completed residency programs in 2012, 2013, and 2014. Through this process, I’ve learned how to pick the right residency and how to use one residency experience to gain another. Here’s my advice for anyone wishing to dive into the artist residency circuit. (Read more from BurnAway.)
Artists Raising Kids: Thoughts on How to Have It All
This summer, Creative Capital conducted a survey entitled “Artists-As-Parents” to find out how working artists sustain their practice while also being busy parents (or prepare themselves to do so as parents-to-be). We received nearly six hundred responses, giving us a good idea of the profile of artist-parents in our network, the challenges they face, and the strategies they use to maximize their time and productivity. (Read more from Creative Capital.)
Scholars Take Aim at Student Evaluations’ “Air of Objectivity”
Student course evaluations are often misused statistically and shed little light on the quality of teaching, two scholars at the University of California, Berkeley, argue in the draft of a new paper. Even though evaluations have become ubiquitous in academe, they remain controversial because they often assume a high-stakes role in determining tenure and promotion. But they persist because they are easy to produce, administer, and tabulate, said Philip B. Stark, a professor of statistics at Berkeley, in an interview. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
We Asked Twenty Women “Is the Art World Biased?” Here’s What They Said
Artnet News has noticed that bias, both conscious and unconscious, is rampant throughout the world. It’s in the umpteenth exhibition not featuring a woman. It’s in the evening auction whose top winners are male. It’s in art schools the world over, germinating and putting down roots. What to do? We canvassed women collectors, dealers, curators, advisers, and artists to find out their responses to the question “Is the art world biased?” (Read more from Artnet News.)
Why Original Artworks Move Us More Than Reproductions
Now that we can view high-definition reproductions of virtually any artwork from our computer screens, why do people visit art museums anyway? Sure, arranging individual pieces into compelling exhibitions enhances our appreciation, but it’s doubtful that people come for the curation. Clearly, encountering original artworks in person is a unique experience. But why? (Read more from Pacific Standard.)
Who Funds the Arts and Why We Should Care
Anyone passing through Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall one recent Saturday might have witnessed an unscheduled performance by a group of people writhing beneath a huge square of black cloth. Taking its motif from the Malevich exhibition at Tate, the event was designed to flag the museum’s refusal to reveal details of its financial relationship with BP. It was the latest in a series of protests about the sponsorship of institutions—among them the British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery—by the energy giant responsible for the Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010. (Read more from the Financial Times.)
Crimes against Dissertation Humanities
Since I left academia in 2013, I’ve had a part-time job as something called a “dissertation coach.” I work one-on-one with a stable of about a dozen private clients, helping them manage both their workload and the emotional vicissitudes of graduate school. And no matter their field—I’ve worked with scientists, engineers, sociologists, psychologists, historians, and literary scholars—one thing remains the same: my services simply would not be necessary if the faculty advisers of the world saw fit to do their jobs. (Read more from Vitae.)
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for September 2014
posted by CAA — Sep 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.
September 2014
Simone Forti, Crescent Roll in an unknown venue in New York, 1979, gelatin silver print, (photograph © Nathaniel Tileston)
Thinking with the Body: A Retrospective in Motion
Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Mönchsberg 32, 5020 Salzburg, Austria
July 18–November 9, 2014
Museum der Moderne Salzburg presents the first comprehensive retrospective of the significant work of the “movement artist” Simone Forti (b. 1935, Florence). The program for Thinking with the Body: A Retrospective in Motion includes numerous performances, many of them presented in live enactments, as well as an exhibition of the artist’s sculpture, drawing, work with holograms and sound, and video that demonstrates her strikingly broad creative practice.
A choreographer, dancer, artist, and writer, Forti figured prominently in postmodern dance and Minimal art. She has been engaged with kinesthetic awareness and composition, dedicating herself to experimentation and improvisation. Her artistic projects include collaborations with other artists, such as the musicians Charlemagne Palestine and Peter Van Riper. In the early 1960s, together with dancers including Steve Paxton and Yvonne Rainer, Forti introduced movements from everyday life, revolutionizing the idea of dance and performance art. When living near the zoo in Rome in the late 1960s, she began to develop performance pieces based on the movements of animals. Forti also explored working with minimalist objects made of simple materials. In her most recent works, the News Animations, she includes spoken words in her dance, evidencing her ongoing interest in incorporating current events into movement. Through these works, the artist states that physicality and the language relationship to thought are pretty basic to us.
During the duration of the exhibition, students at the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance will enact Forti’s famous Dance Constructions (1960–61) and other performance pieces in the galleries and in public spaces.
Annette Messager: Motion/Emotion
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
140 George Street, The Rocks, Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
July 24–October 26, 2014
The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia celebrates the work of the internationally renowned French artist Annette Messager with the artist’s first retrospective in Australia. Messager’s diverse practice encompass drawing, artist’s books, photography, sculpture, and installation and is characterized by her modest choice of materials (clothing, stuffed toys, yarn, etc.), images culled from pop culture, a multifaceted toying with language, and the underpinning centrality of the body.
As put by the curator of the show, Rachel Kent, “since her debut in the Paris art scene in 1971–72, Messager has created an eccentric menagerie of creatures” whose often hybrid nature captures the “complexity of life as well as the mythologies, superstitions, and vanities that underpin it—the shadowy ‘other’ within us all. From her earliest works exploring concepts of the feminine, to works of the 1980s that explore hybrid beings or ‘chimeras,’ to later works featuring dismembered soft toys, unraveled woolen sweaters, and hand-stitched limbs and organs, the body remains central, while identity is destabilized.”
Featuring works from the early 1970s to the present, including her large kinetic installations, Annette Messager: Motion/Emotion reflects a crucial duality—motion and emotion—that underpins the artist’s practice and infatuation with what she describes as the fantastic in everyday life, rather than in the imagination. While motion is central to Messager’s recent works—whether employing mechanical elements, complex inflating mechanisms, household objects, or the movement of the spectator—it is by “probing the body from outside and within” that Messager’s work reveals “the keen interest in humanity and fragile, emotional core” that this exhibition seeks to highlight.
Ewa Partum: Installations and Provocations
Limerick City Gallery of Art
Carnegie Building, Pery Square, Limerick, Ireland
July 17–September 14, 2014
Limerick City Gallery of Art presents the first exhibition of Ewa Partum’s work in Ireland, examining notions of gestural and symbolic “public place.” Defining the essence of her work through the tautology of “the act of thought” and the “act of art,” Partum (b. 1945, Grodzisk Mazowiecki) belongs to the first generation of the Polish conceptual avant-garde and is a pioneer of feminist art. Embedded in the mail-art tradition, concrete poetry, and performance, and with a language-oriented conceptual spine, her work, since the mid 1960s, has variously and provocatively touched upon such issues as the notion of public space, the situation of women, female subjectivity, and the Polish political context. She was the first woman artist to encroach upon public space in the nude in Poland, publicly making a value statement about being a female artist, basing her art and its vocabulary on her specific experience as a woman, and connecting her artistic gestures with political statements and a visible presence in the public. Her work includes actions, objects, photography, films that she herself calls “tautological cinema,” visual poetry performances, and mail art.
For a long time the reception of Partum’s work was hampered by East–West division, and following the imposition of martial law in Poland she left her country to live in Berlin (since 1983). Her 2006 retrospective in Gdansk and her inclusion in Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007–8) have marked her recent international acknowledgment as one of the leading figures of feminist and conceptual avant-garde in Poland and beyond.
Three Person Show: Tamar Ettun, Monika Sziladi, Aimee Burg
Bosi Contemporary
48 Orchard Street, New York, NY 10002
September 17–October 18, 2014
Curated by Naomi Lev, this exhibition explores the distinct role of object-human relationship as manifested in the work of three New York–based artists: Tamar Ettun, Monika Sziladi, and Aimee Burg, all 2010 graduates of the Yale MFA program but of diverse cultural origins and practices.
Incorporating repetitive and meditative tasks using metaphoric objects from everyday life, Burg’s installation revolves around the notion of rituals and the suspension of time. Her recycling of mundane objects of everyday rituals renders them archeological artifacts that preserve ancient ceremonial events. The installation’s dynamic presence plays with the relevance of “time” by bringing the past into a science fiction–like future.
In her recent series of works, Ettun explores the concept of “neuron mirroring.” Originally defined as “mirror neuron,” the term refers to a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Her sculptures, video, and onsite installation are a reflection of a longer process, which traces the correspondence between objects and bodies, as well as sculptures and movement. As she often states, in her works the body becomes sculptural and the objects become performative.
Through a photographic process Sziladi creates unique digital collages that are constructed from scenes she shoots at events, conventions, and meet-ups of various subcultures that communicate through social networks. In her most recent series, Prisoners of Our Own Device, she enhances moments of the complex physical and psychological exchange we develop with objects, garments, architecture, devices, or other people with which we surround ourselves.
Reflections on the Aftermath: Lydda Airport
Bristol Museum and Art Gallery
Queen’s Road, Bristol BS8 1RL, United Kingdom
July 26, 2014–January 4, 2015
The Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, in partnership with Arnolfini, presents Lydda Airport by the Palestinian artist Emily Jacir (b. Bethlehem, 1970), as part of the program “Reflections on the Aftermath: Global to Local.” Through a subtle and delicate narrative set in an airport built in Palestine in 1936 by the British Mandate, Jacir considers politics, place, and history. While this haunting film was shown previously in New York (2009) and at the Sharjah Biennial (2010), its screening in the United Kingdom in the context of a program that reflects on the impact of the First World War around the globe becomes particularly meaningful.
Lydda Airport, an important stop along the empire route for the British government, is shown under construction and deserted except for the figure of Jacir and the main character, Hannibal, one of the largest passenger planes in the world at the time, that disappeared in 1940 over the Gulf of Oman on its way to Sharjah. The film also invokes the story of Amelia Earhart, the pioneering pilot who crossed the Atlantic Ocean on her own in 1932 and disappeared over the Pacific in her journey around the world in 1937.
Jacir—an artist known for her historical narratives through photography, film, installation, social intervention, writing, and sound—wrote, directed, performed, and created the soundtrack for this film. The animation was created using archive footage from the Library of Congress as well as original aerial photographs taken by Geoffrey Grierson. The exhibition also includes the artist’s re-creation of the original proposed model of the airport, a solid representation that contrasts with the fragile narrative of a film that exacerbates the experience of absence and disappearance.
Geta Brătescu / MATRIX 254
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
University of California, Woo Hon Fai Hall, 2626 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA 94720
July 25–September 28, 2014
Organized by Apsara DiQuinzio, MATRIX 254 features the first solo exhibition in an American museum of the Romanian artist Geta Brătescu (b. 1926, Ploesti). Brătescu is a central figure in postwar Romanian art. With a practice that spans a wide range of media, such as illustration, graphic design, drawing, video, textiles, performance, installation, photography, and printmaking, the artist defines herself as a natural drawer. In her own words: “For me, the line is the essence. Drawing is the foundation of my language. I draw with a pencil, I draw with scissors … with anything.”
Having maintained a rigorous and mostly secluded studio practice that continues into the present, Brătescu exhibited regularly in Romania throughout her career. She has chosen to remain in Romania during the Communist times, and she feels it was the right choice. However, due primarily to Communist totalitarian regime (1967–89) and the subsequent political isolation of the country, Brătescu’s work was little known to international audiences until fairly recently.
In this context, MATRIX 254 presents a focused selection of the artists’ key works made between 1974 and 2000, in which the space of Brătescu’s studio assumes an essential position within the artist’s oeuvre. In her early video The Studio (1978), we can see the artist creating inside this intimate room surrounded by her artworks, an environment that captures the playful, experimental, and feminine (as she defines it) approach that characterizes her practice, making also evident her frequent use of role playing and self-portraiture.
Committee on Diversity Practices highlights for September/October 2014
posted by CAA — Sep 09, 2014
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Diversity Practices highlights a number of 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.
September/October 2014
Whitfield Lovell: Deep River
Telfair Museums, Jepson Center for the Arts
Savannah, Georgia
August 15, 2014‒February 1, 2015
“Artist Whitfield Lovell is internationally renowned for his thought-provoking portraits and signature tableaux. In this exhibition, Lovell utilizes sculpture, video, drawing, sound, and music to create an environment that fully engages our senses and emotions. His art pays tribute to the lives of anonymous African Americans and is universal in its exploration of passage, memory, and the search for freedom.”
National Conference of Artists, New Orleans Chapter 21st Anniversary Exhibition
Southern University
Visual Arts Gallery, Frank Hayden Hall
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
October 9‒November 15, 2014
The art on display will feature pieces by the New Orleans Chapter of the National Conference of Artists. Admission is free.
The National Conference of Artists organizes chapters to preserve, promote, and develop African-American culture and creative forces. The conference was granted charter in 1991.
My Generation: Young Chinese Artists
Museum of Fine Arts
St. Petersburg, Florida
June 7 –September 28, 2014
This is the first U.S. exhibition to focus solely on the new post-Mao generation of Chinese artists, who work in a variety of media and address issues of alienation, self-definition, cynicism, and rebellion. Almost all of the artists are products of the One-Child Policy and have been brought up in a country with a high-powered market economy. These artists have grown up in an international milieu, liberated from stereotypes of an east-west dichotomy. They speak volumes about China, a society that has undergone rapid industrialization and globalization in the past two decades. As such, this exhibition is a window on to this new China with new technologies, exhibition strategies, and reinvention of traditional practices that reflect the impact that rapid development has had on these artists’ lives.
My Generation is curated by Barbara Pollack, and is co-presented in two venues simultaneously through a unique collaboration with the Tampa Museum of Art.
Mel Chin: Confucius
Social Science CLASS Gallery
Savannah State University
Savannah, GA
September 1, 2014 ‒October 31, 2014
For more information about Mel Chin’s work, please see http://www.melchin.org/.
New Publication Grants for Manuscripts on American Art
posted by Christopher Howard — Sep 03, 2014
The Terra Foundation for American Art has awarded CAA a major, three-year grant to administer an annual grant program to support book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art. The Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant will award funds of up to $15,000 for books that examine American art in an international context, increase awareness of American art internationally through publication outside the United States, allow wider audiences to access important texts through translation, and/or result from international collaboration. The program is designed to offset image acquisition and translation costs, however other editing and production expenses will be considered.
The publication grants will support publications that make significant contributions to the field in three award categories: grants to US publishers for manuscripts that consider American art in an international context, grants to non-US publishers for books on topics in American art, and grants for the translation of books on topics in American art to or from English. In addition to the publication grants, the program will support the creation of an international network of American art scholars by providing two non-US authors whose books are funded through the grant program with travel stipends and complimentary registration to attend CAA’s Annual Conference.
Grant guidelines, detailed eligibility requirements, and application instructions are available on the CAA website. For this grant program, “American art” is defined as art (circa 1500–1980) of what is now the geographic United States. Letters of inquiry should be submitted to CAA no later than October 15, 2014. Applicants whose projects fall within the guidelines and successfully fulfill the mission of the grant program will be invited to submit full applications, due December 15, 2014. The first round of award winners will be announced in April 2015.
About CAA
CAA is dedicated to providing professional services and resources for artists, art historians, and students in the visual arts. CAA serves as an advocate and a resource for individuals and institutions nationally and internationally by offering forums to discuss the latest developments in the visual arts and art history through its Annual Conference, publications, exhibitions, website, and other programs, services, and events. CAA focuses on a wide range of advocacy issues, including education in the arts, freedom of expression, intellectual-property rights, cultural heritage and preservation, workforce topics in universities and museums, and access to networked information technologies. Representing its members’ professional needs since 1911, CAA is committed to the highest professional and ethical standards of scholarship, creativity, criticism, and teaching.
About the Terra Foundation
The Terra Foundation for American Art is dedicated to fostering exploration, understanding, and enjoyment of the visual arts of the United States for national and international audiences. Recognizing the importance of experiencing original works of art, the foundation provides opportunities for interaction and study, beginning with the presentation and growth of its own art collection in Chicago. To further cross-cultural dialogue on American art, the foundation supports and collaborates on innovative exhibitions, research, and educational programs. Implicit in such activities is the belief that art has the potential both to distinguish cultures and to unite them.
Contact
For more information please contact Hillary Bliss, CAA development and marketing manager, at hbliss@collegeart.org or 212-392-4436. For more information on applying to the Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant, please contact Betty Leigh Hutcheson, CAA director of publications, at bhutcheson@collegeart.org or 212-392-4417.
Image: Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits, 1849, oil on canvas, 44 x 36 in. (artwork in the public domain)