CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Dec 25, 2013
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.
The World’s Most Famous Missing Painting
Vincenzo Peruggia was not the kind of criminal mastermind that makes up the majority of art thieves in Hollywood films. He was not a genius cat burglar. He managed to walk into the Louvre in Paris and walk out with the Leonardo painting after minimal preparation. But his theft created a sensation. (Read more from BBC News.)
Understanding Wood Supports for Art: A Brief History
Historically, wood panels were used for paintings long before the adoption of flexible fabric supports. Most of the earliest icons still intact from the second and third century as well as a large portion of the Renaissance paintings were created on solid wood panels. Many of Raphael’s paintings, for example, are painted on primed wood panels. The method for preparing the panels was laborious as the solid wood was first dried well and sanded very smooth. It was then covered with layers of ground made by mixing gypsum (pounded into powder) with hide glue made from animal skins. The panel was then sanded and burnished until it was smooth and ready for painting. (Read more from Just Paint.)
Academic Freedom and Electronic Communications
This report brings up to date and expands upon the association’s 2004 report, Academic Freedom and Electronic Communications. It reaffirms that report’s overriding principle: “Academic freedom, free inquiry, and freedom of expression within the academic community may be limited to no greater extent in electronic format than they are in print, save for the most unusual situation where the very nature of the medium itself might warrant unusual restrictions.” (Read more from the American Association of University Professors.)
The British Library Puts One Million Images into the Public Domain, Making Them Free to Reuse and Remix
Earlier this week, Oxford’s Bodleian Library announced that it had digitized a 550-year old copy of the Gutenberg Bible along with a number of other ancient bibles, some of them quite beautiful. Not to be outdone, the British Library came out with its own announcement on Thursday: “We have released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to us, allowing us to release them back into the Public Domain.” (Read more from Open Culture.)
Fakers, Fakes, and Fake Fakers
Many years ago, I interviewed a forger named David Stein. He had been arrested for faking hundreds of drawings, gouaches, and watercolors by Matisse, Chagall, Picasso, Cézanne, Degas, Miró, and many others. One day, while he was out on bail, I asked him how an art forger creates works by well-known artists whose styles are so different. “The first thing you have to do is know intimately the artist you are imitating, not only to know him but also to like him, to love his art,” Stein said. (Read more from ARTnews.)
Job Placement Confusion
With tuition prices continuing to rise and greater numbers of graduates struggling in the job market, families, students and policy makers—most visibly President Obama—are increasingly questioning the “value” that colleges are providing. In response to that mounting pressure, more colleges and universities are turning to alumni outcome surveys. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
How to Score That Elusive Spousal Hire
The spousal/couple/dual-career search is, hands down, the most stressful kind of academic job search there is. And I know this viscerally, because I had an ex-husband with a PhD—in a different humanities field, but still—and can still remember the sick feeling in my stomach, the cold sweats late at night, the gut-wrenching anxiety as I contemplated just how in god’s name we were going to get both of us gainfully employed on the tenure track. (Read more from Vitae.)
Need for Leaders at DC Arts Institutions Could Be a Golden Opportunity or a Squandered One
The Kennedy Center recently announced that Deborah Rutter of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association will become its new president, but many high-profile Washington cultural and arts institutions are still searching for new leaders to fill their top posts. The Smithsonian Institution announced in October that its secretary, Wayne Clough, would be stepping down next year, and Richard Koshalek, the former director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, resigned in May after the demise of his seasonal inflatable structure project. (Read more from the Washington Post.)
LACMA Resurrects Art and Technology Program, Teams with Google
More than forty-five years ago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art created an experimental program to bring artists and technology companies together in the hopes of inspiring innovative thinking in the visual arts. Earlier this month museum announced that it is resurrecting the program in the form of a laboratory and has partnered with companies including Google and SpaceX. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)
Solo Exhibitions by Artist Members
posted by CAA — Dec 22, 2013
See when and where CAA members are exhibiting their art, and view images of their work.
Solo Exhibitions by Artist Members is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
December 2013
Abroad
Sue Johnson. Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, Salisbury, England, February 1–May 10, 2014. Pitt Rivers: Collecting Patterns. Painting and printmaking.
Mid-Atlantic
Peter Dueker. Outer Space, Washington, DC, October 5–26, 2013. 19 Hot Biscuits. Photography.
Midwest
Michelle Grabner. Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Ohio, November 1, 2013–February 16, 2014. I Work from Home. Painting, printmaking, video, and sculpture.
Michelle Handelman. Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, September 20, 2013–March 30, 2014. Irma Vep, the last breath. Multichannel video installation.
Amy Reidel. Meramec Contemporary Art Gallery, Saint Louis Community College, Saint Louis, Missouri, October 3–25, 2013. Relic-quarry: New Work by Amy Reidel. Painting, installation, collage, and video.
Northeast
Michele Brody. Casa Frela, New York, November 9–December 9, 2013. Harlem Roots. Environmental installation.
Sharon Louden. Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, October 24–December 7, 2014. Community. Sculpture and video.
Josette Urso. Anthony Giordano Gallery, Dowling College, Oakdale, New York, September 4–October 12, 2013. Multiple Choice.
Michael Velliquette. DCKT, New York, October 25–December 8, 2013. Their Arising and Passing Away. Sculptural cut-paper construction.
South
Kyra Bélan. Fine Arts Gallery, Cape Coral Arts Studio, Cape Coral, Florida, December 6–26, 2013. Painting and text.
Kyra Bélan. Member Gallery, Alliance for the Arts, Fort Meyers, Florida, December 6–28, 2013. Painting, drawing, digital media, and mixed media.
Blane De St. Croix. Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas, December 5, 2013–February 16, 2014. Broken Landscapes III. Sculpture.
Sue Johnson. Eleanor D. Wilson Museum, Hollins University, Roanoke, Virginia. October 3–December 7, 2013. Sue Johnson: American Dreamscape. Installation.
Josette Urso. Maitland Art Center Galleries, Art and History Museum Maitland, Maitland, Florida, October 11–December 29, 2013. Artist-in-Residence ONE: Josette Urso. Painting.
West
Mira Schor. CB1 Gallery, Los Angeles, California, October 19–December 8, 2013. Mira Schor: Chthonic Garden. Painting.
Art Journal Seeks Web Editor
posted by Joe Hannan — Dec 20, 2013
The Art Journal Editorial Board invites nominations and self-nominations for the new position of web editor for a three-year term, July 1, 2014–June 30, 2017. A candidate may be an artist, art historian, art critic, art educator, curator, or other art professional with stature in the field; institutional affiliation is not required. Art Journal, published quarterly by CAA, is devoted to twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and visual culture.
Working with the editorial board, the web editor is responsible for commissioning and acquiring all content for the website of the journal. He or she will determine the number, format, and type of artists’ projects, news items, commentary, or other content that will be published on the website. The web editor also works with authors, artists, and CAA staff in the development and preparation of content as necessary, and assists authors in revising their work. The web editor must have a strong grasp of twentieth-century and contemporary art, criticism, theory, and visual culture; it is crucial that the he or she keeps abreast of digital innovations in the arts and websites that publish content, archives, or other projects on contemporary art. The three-year term includes membership on the Art Journal Editorial Board and a small annual honorarium, paid quarterly.
The web editor attends the Art Journal Editorial Board’s three meetings each year—held twice in New York in the spring and fall and once at the CAA Annual Conference in February—and submits an annual report to CAA’s Board of Directors. CAA reimburses the web editor for travel and lodging expenses for the two New York meetings in accordance with its travel policy, but he or she pays these expenses to attend the conference.
Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Members may not publish their own work in the journal during the term of service. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please send a letter describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, at least one letter of recommendation, and your contact information to: Art Journal Web Editor Search, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004; or email the documents to Joe Hannan, CAA editorial director. Deadline: January 20, 2014; finalists will be interviewed in February at CAA’s Annual Conference in Chicago.
December 2013 Issue of The Art Bulletin
posted by Christopher Howard — Dec 19, 2013
The December 2013 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, leads off with “Regarding Art and Art History,” in which Zainab Bahrani highlights the indispensable role of ancient Near Eastern art in Western art history. For “Notes from the Field,” twelve artists, scholars, curators, anthropologists, and thinkers—Obiora Udechukwu, John Brewer, Jay Clarke, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Hans Hayden, Gregg Horowitz, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Susanne Küchler, Maria Loh, Ruth Phillips, Regine Prange, and Alessandra Russo—ruminate on tradition in art. Next, Stephen Bann and Karen Lang consider the sense of the past and the writing of art history in the December “Interview.”
The first essay, by Gerd Blum, closely examines Vasari’s alleged account of Roman Jews pilgrimaging every Sabbath to venerate Michelangelo’s Moses, revealing that Vasari’s Lives is underpinned by a Christian theology of history and the theological topos of the “eschatological Jew.” In an article titled “‘Precisely These Objects,’” Jennifer Raab explores Frederic Edwin Church’s use of detail in relation to nineteenth-century American debates concerning the aims of landscape painting, scientific and artistic representation, and the detail as a cultural object.
In “Awa Tsireh and the Art of Subtle Resistance,” Sascha Scott studies silence, misdirection, coding, and masking in Tsireh’s paintings of the 1920s to show how these visual strategies controlled the flow of information about Pueblo Indian culture at a time when the Pueblos were being besieged by anthropologists and persecuted by the Office of Indian Affairs. Finally, Natasha Eaton’s essay analyzes the contested status of color in the art of Indian nationalism—with particular attention to the speeches, manifestoes, and works of art by M. K. Gandhi, Abanindranath and Rabindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, and Jamini Roy—to demonstrate the role of color in establishing a new Bengali aesthetic.
The Reviews section features scholarly assessments written by former Art Bulletin editors: Marc Gotlieb considers Edward Snow’s monograph A Study of Vermeer, and David Roxburgh analyzes Laurence Binyon, J. V. S. Wilkinson, and Basil Gray’s book Persian Miniature Painting. Richard J. Powell takes on Freeman Henry Morris Murray’s Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture, and Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer reviews Daniel Arasse’s Le détail: Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture. In a jointly authored review, Michael W. Cole and Christopher S. Wood assess L’antirinascimento by Eugenio Battisti.
CAA sends The Art Bulletin to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the journal as a benefit of their membership. The next issue of the quarterly publication, to appear in March 2014, will feature Griselda Pollock’s critical engagement with interpretative and institutional trends in an essay titled “Whither Art History?” The March issue will also publish essays on Michelangelo’s drawing Children’s Bacchanal, Pedro Teixeira’s monumental 1656 map of Madrid, olfactory traditions in Ottoman incense burners, and the twentieth-century Brazilian artist Vicente do Rego Monteiro, as well as reviews of books on art and science in the United States and Japan, Mexican modernism, the genealogy of new-media art, and the golden age of Dutch art.
People in the News
posted by CAA — Dec 17, 2013
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.
December 2013
Academe
Anna Collette has been appointed assistant professor in photography by the Department of Art and Art History in the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.
Luba Freedman, a specialist of Italian Renaissance art and professor in history of art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, has been named Jack Cotton Professor in Architecture and Fine Arts at her school.
Carma Gorman has joined the Department of Art and Art History in the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin as associate professor in design.
LaToya M. Hobbs has been appointed to teach foundations at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.
Museums and Galleries
Cathleen Chaffee, assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, has joined the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, as curator.
Amy Galpin, an associate curator for the San Diego Museum of Art in California, has become the new curator for the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.
Mazie McKenna Harris, a doctoral candidate in the history of photography at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, has been named Linda Wyatt Gruber ’66 Curatorial Fellow in Photography by the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts.
Ronda Kasl, formerly senior curator of painting and sculpture before 1800 at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indiana, has become a curator of colonial Latin American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Karl Kusserow, curator of American art at the Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey, has been named the inaugural John Wilmerding Curator of American Art at his institution.
Michael W. Maizels, most recently a research assistant and predoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, has been appointed Mellon New Media Curator and Lecturer by the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts.
Joanne Pillsbury, an associate director of the Getty Research Institute, has been named Andrall E. Pearson Curator in the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Kelly Taxter, a cofounder of Taxter and Spengeman Gallery in New York and a curatorial consultant for the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, has joined the Jewish Museum in New York as assistant curator.
Mary M. Tinti, formerly a curatorial fellow for the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, has been appointed associate curator of the Fitchburg Art Museum in Fitchburg, Massachusetts.
2013 Wyeth Grant Recipients
posted by Christopher Howard — Dec 16, 2013
CAA is pleased to announce the five recipients of the annual Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, established in 2005. Thanks to a generous grant from the Wyeth Foundation, these awards are given annually to publishers to support the publication of one or more book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art, visual studies, and related subjects. For this grant program, “American art” is defined as art created in the United States, Canada, and Mexico through 1970.
Receiving 2013 grants are:
- Ross Barrett, Rendering Violence: Riots, Strikes, and Upheavals in Nineteenth-Century American Art, University of California Press
- Craig Burnett, Philip Guston: The Studio, Afterall Books
- Sarah Hamill, David Smith in Two Dimensions: Photography and the Matter of Sculpture, University of California Press
- Sascha T. Scott, A Strange Mixture: The Art and Politics of Painting Pueblo Indians, University of Oklahoma Press
- Karen Stanworth, Visibly Canadian: Imaging Collective Identity in the Canadas, 1820–1910, McGill-Queens University Press
Eligible for the grant are book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art, visual studies, and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy. Authors must be current CAA members. Please review the application guidelines for more information.
Books Published by CAA Members
posted by CAA — Dec 15, 2013
Publishing a book is a major milestone for artists and scholars—browse a list of recent titles below.
Books Published by CAA Members appears every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
December 2013
David S. Areford. The Art of Empathy: The Mother of Sorrows in Northern Renaissance Art and Devotion (London: D. Giles, 2013).
Kathryn Brown, ed. The Art Book Tradition in Twentieth-Century Europe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013).
Donna Gustafson and Susan Sidlauskas. Striking Resemblance: The Changing Art of Portraiture (New York: DelMonico/Prestel; New Brunswick, NJ: Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, 2014).
Marsha Meskimmon and Dorothy C. Rowe, eds. Women, the Arts, and Globalization: Eccentric Experience (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013).
Griselda Pollock, ed. Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis: Art in Post-Traumatic Cultures (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013).
Perri Lee Roberts. The Material of Culture: Medals and Textiles from the Ulrich A. Middeldorf Collection (Athens: Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, 2013).
Dorothy C. Rowe. After Dada: Marta Hegemann and the Cologne Avant-Garde (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013).
Deanna Sirlin. She’s Got What It Takes: American Women Artists in Dialogue (Milan, Italy: Charta, 2013).
Rosanne Somerson and Mara Hermano, eds. The Art of Critical Making: Rhode Island School of Design on Creative Practice (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2013).
Mónica Domínguez Torres. Military Ethos and Visual Culture in Post-Conquest Mexico (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013).
Dennis Wardleworth. William Reid Dick, Sculptor (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013).
2014 RECIPIENTS OF CAA’S INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL GRANTS
posted by CAA — Dec 04, 2013
In an effort to promote greater interaction and exchange between American and international art historians and artists, CAA offers twenty International Travel Grants to bring colleagues from around the world to its Annual Conference, to be held next year in Chicago from February 12 to 15, 2014. This is the third year of the program, which has been generously funded by the Getty Foundation since its inception. CAA is pleased to announce this year’s recipients—professors of art history, curators, and artists who teach art history—who were selected by a jury of CAA members from a highly competitive group of applicants. Their biographies are listed below.
In addition to covering travel expenses, hotel accommodations, and per diems, the CAA International Travel Grants include conference registration and a one-year CAA membership. At the conference, the twenty recipients will be paired with hosts, who will introduce them to CAA and to specific colleagues who share their interests. Members of CAA’s International Committee have agreed to serve as hosts, along with representatives from the National Committee for the History of Art (NCHA). CAA is grateful to NCHA for renewing its generous underwriting of the hosts’ expenses. The program will begin on February 11 with an introductory preconference for grant recipients and their hosts.
Grant recipients from previous years have found the experience enormously beneficial. Didier Houenoude, a 2012 grantee from Benin, reflected that “Meeting different colleagues from all over the world was a great experience…. I learned how possible and great it is to work with others although we have different research fields. I am convinced that it is very important to work in collaboration with other researchers.” Marina Vicelja-Matijašić, a 2013 grantee from Croatia, stated: “The possibility to talk about ‘general problems and issues’ such as global art history or crisis in art history in an international audience and sharing ideas from different perspectives was of great value.” Musarrat Hasan, a 2013 grantee from Pakistan, described the personal impact of the program, saying: “A whole new range and scope of possibilities have entered my horizon…. On a personal and human level it was a great gathering for creating global understanding.”
CAA hopes that the travel-grant program will not only increase international participation in the organization’s activities, but also expand international networking and the exchange of ideas both during and after the conference. The Getty-funded International Travel Grant 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 grant recipients in Chicago at the next Annual Conference. To learn more about the CAA International Travel Grant Program, visit www.collegeart.org/travelgrants/gettyor contact project director Janet Landay at jlanday@collegeart.org.
Rael Artel
Rael Artel
Rael Artel is a curator of contemporary art and, since April 2013, director of the Tartu Art Museum in Estonia. She graduated from the Institute of Art History at the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2003 and participated in the De Appel Curatorial Training Programme in Amsterdam in 2004–5. Since 2000 she has curated projects in Estonia, Warsaw, Lisbon, Amsterdam, and New York. Artel is the artistic director of the festival of contemporary art in Tartu called ART IST KUKU NU UT. She is also the initiator and moderator of Public Preparation, an international platform for network-based communication and collective research.
Recent exhibitions include Let’s Talk about Nationalism! Between Ideology and Identity (Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia, 2010); Lost in Transition (Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn, 2011); Art Must Be Beautiful: Selected Works by Marina Abramović (Tartu Art Museum, 2011); Life in the Forest (Arsenal Gallery, Bialystok, Poland, 2011); After Socialist Statues, KIM? (Contemporary Art Centre, Riga, Latvia, 2011); Explosion in Pärnu (Kumu Art Museum, 2012); and Marge Monko: How to Wear Red? (Tartu Art Museum, 2013).
Eric Appau Asante
Eric Appau Asante
Eric Appau Asante is a senior member and lecturer of art history at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana. He earned a PhD in art history (African art and culture) from the same university, where he currently teaches courses in the history of African art and culture, philosophy of African art and culture, research methodology, and history of global art.
For the past seven years Asante has concentrated his efforts on research and teaching people about history and symbolism in African art as well as art and memorial culture. In addition to these subjects he is interested in gender and art production, philosophies and educational connotations of African art, and wood culture and art production. In January 2013 he became Ghana’s coordinator for the International Wood Culture Society.
Cezar Bartholomeu
Cezar Bartholomeu
Cezar Bartholomeu is a photographer and professor of art history at the School of Fine Arts, Department of Art History, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), in Brazil. He received a PhD in Visual Languages from both the UFRJ and the École de Hautes Études in Paris. Since 2010 he has been the editor-in-chief of Arte & Ensaios, one of Brazil’s major art journals. His areas of research include photography as art, photography’s history and theory, and contemporary art and photography in Brazil and worldwide.
As a photographer, Bartholomeu exhibits widely in Brazil and Europe. His publications include “Três pequenos instantâneos: Benjamin, Barthes, Derrida” in Artefoto (Rio de Janeiro: CCBB, 2002), Celebrações/Negociações – Fotografia Africana na coleção Gilberto Chateaubriand (African Photography in the Gilberto Chateaubriand Collection, Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, 2011), and “Emanation/Abjection” in Laboratório Público de Históra da Arte Mundial (Public World Art History Lab, Rio de Janeiro: UERJ, to be published in 2014).
Laris Borić
Laris Borić
Laris Borić studied art history at the University of Zadar (MA) and Zagreb (MSc) before receiving his PhD from the University of Zadar in 2010. His thesis, “Renaissance Sculpture and Architectural Decoration in Zadar,” indicates his ongoing interest in artistic and architectural production in Adriatic rim cultures between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is especially interested in problems related to the permeation of heterogeneous influences in art (particularly sculpture and architecture) of towns in the northern part of the Adriatic (Venice, Veneto, Istria, Dalmatia, and Marche) and particularly the dominant role of Venice and Padua, and to a lesser degree, Marche, Lombardy, and Tuscany.
Borić is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Zadar, where he teaches courses in European and Croatian Renaissance and Baroque art. In October 2013 he became chair of the department.
Eddie Butindo-Mbaalya
Eddie Butindo-Mbaalya
Eddie Butindo-Mbaalya teaches art history, theory, criticism, and education in the Department of Art and Industrial Design at Kyambogo University in Kampala, Uganda. With degrees in art history, art education, and fine arts, he is currently completing his PhD at Makerere University with a dissertation on contemporary public art in Uganda. Butindo-Mbaalya is especially interested in the complexity behind commemorative monuments and the debate about their role in constructing national collective memories.
As an artist, Butindo-Mbaalya is represented in the collection of the Weltkulturen Museum (World Cultures Museum) in Frankfurt, Germany. He has written about the art and architecture of recreational facilities in Uganda and also designed a logo for his country’s National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS) as a World Bank–funded project.
Josefina de la Maza Chevesich
Josefina de la Maza Chevesich
Josefina de la Maza Chevesich studied art history and theory at Universidad de Chile before receiving her PhD in art history and criticism from Stony Brook University (New York) in 2013. Her academic interests revolve around the development of Chilean and Latin American art of the long nineteenth century, the definition of pictorial genres, the emergence of fine-art academies and museums, and the impact of authoritarian regimes on art history.
De la Maza’s dissertation, “Contesting Nationalism: Mamarrachos, Slave-Pieces, and ‘Masterpieces’ in Chilean Nineteenth-Century Painting,” explores the development of Chilean painting in the 1880s. Using the notion of mamarracho (bad or passé art) her work explores the emergence of official and unofficial discourses organized around Chilean painting in the midst of the War of the Pacific (1879–83), the constitution of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, and the official actions developed to preserve and promote “national art” in Europe. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Art at Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Santiago, Chile.
Katerina Gadjeva
Katerina Gadjeva
Katerina Gadjeva received a PhD in art history from the National Academy of Arts in Sofia, Bulgaria. She studies the history and theory of photography, in particular, the concept of “visual propaganda” and the role of photography in Socialist ideology in the USSR and Bulgaria. In 2012, she published a monograph on the subject, entitled Between Desire and Reality: Photographic Illustrations in Bulgarian Periodicals 1948–1956.
Gadjeva is an assistant professor in the Institute of Art Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Science, Sofia, and a lecturer in the New Bulgarian University and St. Kliment Ohridski University, Sofia. She also works with young Bulgarian artists who are interested in alternative photographic processes.
Heba Nayel Barakat Hassanein
Heba Nayel Barakat Hassanein
Heba Nayel Barakat Hassanein is the head of the Curatorial Affairs Department at the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia (IAMM). A graduate of the American University in Cairo, she is a specialist in Islamic art and architecture. She holds an MA in the history of architecture from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, and a PhD from the Oriental Institute in Moscow, Russia. As project manager at the Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage in Cairo, Egypt, she researched and documented Cairo’s nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century presidential palaces.
Hassanein has also documented the early Islamic papyrus collection and the Persian illuminated manuscript collection at the Egyptian National Library in Dar el-Kotob, Egypt, and worked on the pigment analysis of early miniatures. Currently she is overseeing the refurbishment of IAMM’s permanent galleries, researching artifacts, and supervising exhibitions and accompanying catalogues for the museum’s special-exhibition galleries.
Lilianne Lugo Herrera
Lilianne Lugo Herrera
Lilianne Lugo Herrera holds a degree in theater arts with a specialization in playwriting from the Universidad de las Artes in Havana, Cuba. Since 2010 she has been a professor at that university and vice dean of research and postgraduate studies at its Faculty of Theater.
Herrera is also the editor of Tablas, a magazine of Cuban theater. Herrera researches the relationships between the history of art and the history of theater and their interrelationships in the contemporary practice of art and the performing arts. Three of her plays have been published, one of them in the United States, and she has won several awards in playwriting. Herrera is an active participant in festivals, conferences, and residencies both in Cuba and internationally.
Hugues Heumen Tchana
Hugues Heumen Tchana
Hugues Heumen Tchana is a junior lecturer in the Department of Fine Arts and Heritage Sciences at the Higher Institute of the Sahel, University of Maroua, Cameroon. He is currently completing his PhD in museology with a dissertation on “Museums in the Cultural Sphere of the Grassfields of Cameroon: History, Management, and Current Stake.” The Higher Institute of the Sahel opened in 2010.
Heumen Tchana teaches courses on cultural heritage and museum management and supervises student internships in a number of museums in Cameroon. In 2007, he was awarded the international competitive examination scholarship for a master’s degree (2007–9) from the University of Senghor in Alexandria, Egypt. In 2009, Heumen Tchana completed an MA in development specializing in the management of cultural heritage, also from the University of Senghor.
Kanwal Khalid
Kanwal Khalid
Kanwal Khalid holds a BFA and MFA in graphic design, an MPhil in art history, and a PhD in fine arts, all from Punjab University in Lahore, Pakistan. She specializes in the history of South Asian art and design, with a particular focus on miniature painting in nineteenth-century Lahore. A practicing miniaturist, she is currently an assistant professor at the Institute of Design and Visual Arts, Lahore College for Women University. Previously she was the curator of paintings at the Lahore Museum.
Khalid serves on the editorial board of the Trust for History, Art and Architecture of Pakistan (THAAP), a forum for publications and research journal. She is also a board member of several organizations, including the Rotary Club Lahore Mozang and the Delaware Lahore Delhi Partnership for Peace, a nonprofit NGO of private citizens in the United States, Pakistan, and India dedicated to the creation of mutual understanding and goodwill.
Mahmuda Khnam
Mahmuda Khnam
Mahmuda Khnam is an assistant professor in the Department of Islamic History and Culture, Jagannath University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. She has been teaching and researching Islamic art, especially that of the Indian subcontinent, for more than a decade. Before joining the newly established university in 2012, she taught at Eden College in Dhaka.
Having earned her MPhil with a dissertation on Mughal architecture in the Comilla region of Bangladesh, Khnam is currently completing her PhD, researching the development of painting in Bengal during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In addition to a monograph based on her MPhil thesis, Khnam has published a number of articles on Islamic art and the art of Bengal, mostly in her native language, Bangla.
Daria Kostina
Daria Kostina
Daria Kostina is an assistant professor in the Department of Art History and Cultural Studies at the Ural Federal University in Yekaterinburg, Russia. She is also a curator at the B.U.Kashkin Museum, an experimental exhibition space and collection of underground and alternative art, housed within the same department and university. In addition to Yekaterinburg, Kostina has curated exhibitions in Saint Petersburg and New York.
Kostina studies Russian émigré art of the 1920s and 1930s, in particular artists who lived in the Czech Republic, and regional Russian underground and alternative art from the 1960 to the 1980s. Her PhD dissertation (in progress) is devoted to the work of Grigory Musatov, a Russian artist who emigrated to Prague in 1920. She is also interested in urban studies and in 2012 organized interdisciplinary workshop for emerging scholars, Contemporary Art as a Humanization Instrument for Public Spaces (Yekaterinburg).
Portia Malatjie
Portia Malatjie
Portia Malatjie is a South African curator and art historian based in Grahamstown and Johannesburg. She completed an MA in the history of art at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2011, following a fine-art degree at the same institution in 2008. She has curated numerous exhibitions of contemporary art, including CityTales and CountryScapes at Museum Africa (2011), Transference at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (2012), and the 2012 MTN New Contemporaries Award, an exhibition held at the historic Castle of Goodhope’s B Block in Cape Town. She has published widely in the Mail & Guardian, Artthrob, and Third Text and in numerous exhibition catalogues.
In 2011, Malatjie participated in the 24 Hour Suburban Residency at the Sober and Lonely Institute for Contemporary Art, where she organized a one-day workshop for emerging curators. A lecturer at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, she is currently researching the subject of black feminism in the context of South African art history and contemporary curatorial practices in her country and in other parts of Africa.
Fernando Martínez Nespral
Fernando Martínez Nespral
Fernando Martínez Nespral was trained as an architect at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina and holds a PhD in history from Torcuato Di Tella University in Buenos Aires. He studies connections between the Islamic world and Hispanic American culture in the fields of architecture and art history. Approaching this subject from diverse starting points—a dictionary of Spanish words with Arabic origins, foreign accounts of domestic architecture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, transcultural use of Spanish tiles—he is currently working on Islamic mashrabiya (balconies closed with lattice) and their frequent use in Latin American countries, especially Peru.
Martínez Nespral teaches courses on the history of architecture and is also a main researcher at the American Art and Aesthetics Research Institute, both positions at the School of Architecture, Design and Urbanism at the University of Buenos Aires.
Susana S. Martins
Susana S. Martins
Susana S. Martins is currently an FCT-Portugal Research Fellow both at the Institute for Art History, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, and at the Institute for Cultural Studies, Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. Initially trained as an art historian in Lisbon, she was awarded a PhD in photography and cultural studies from the arts faculty of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, with the work “Portugal as Seen through Foreign Eyes: Photography and Visual Culture in the 1950s.”
Martins studies the history and theory of photography, with a particular focus on travel books, tourism, exhibitions, cinema, visual arts, surveillance, national identities, and postcolonial studies. She is interested in the different roles photography has played in international and universal exhibitions since the nineteenth century and also studies contemporary art, film, and politics. Since 2008 Martins has served as an art-history professor in the fields of photography, visual arts, communication semiotics, Impressionism, and modernity.
Magdalena Anna Nowak
Magdalena Anna Nowak
Magdalena Anna Nowak is an assistant curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Museum in Warsaw. She received an MA from the Institute of Art History at the University of Warsaw in 2010, having spent the previous year at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris in the Department of Theories et Pratiques du Langage et des Arts. Her research then concentrated mainly on contemporary video art. In her current position she is in charge of the film and new-media collections at the museum and also curates temporary exhibitions.
Nowak is currently writing a PhD dissertation on repetition and reenactment of old-master paintings in video art. Her research concerns the interactions between old and contemporary art, the empathy theory, Aby Warburg’s legacy, the representation of emotions in art, and viewers’ reactions toward depicted passions and neuro art history. She is also interested in Polish art from the 1970s.
Freeborn Odiboh
Freeborn Odiboh
Freeborn Odiboh is a Nigerian artist, art historian, and critic. He holds a BFA in sculpture from the University of Benin, Benin City (1984), an MA in African visual arts history from the University of Ibadan (1987), and a PhD in art history from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (2004). He is an associate professor of art history and art criticism, Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Benin. Odiboh has received a number of international awards, including the Leventis postdoctoral fellowship at the University of London (2006) and a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies’ African Humanities Postdoctoral Program (2010–11).
In addition to publishing over twenty-seven articles in international and national journals, Odiboh published his first book, entitled Creative Reformation of Existing African tradition: The Abayomi Barber Art School and Modern Nigerian Art, in 2012. He is currently writing his second book, Africanizing a Modern African Art History Curriculum from Nigerian Experience. Odiboh’s art has been presented in several solo and group exhibitions in his country.
Adriana Oprea
Adriana Oprea
Adriana Oprea is a Romanian critic and art historian. She received her MA in art history at the National University of Arts in Bucharest with a study of feminism in recent Romanian art. She is currently pursuing a PhD, focusing on the discourse of art criticism and the status of the art critic during and after the Communist regime in Romania. Since 2006, Oprea has been a researcher and archivist at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest, where she organizes data regarding the activity of Romanian artists.
Oprea frequently collaborates with art spaces and writes essays for exhibition catalogues and reviews for Romanian magazines. She is associate editor for ARTA magazine, the main Romanian art publication during the Communist era and one of the few concerned with the present state of Romanian art. She sometimes curates exhibitions and on rare occasions poses as an artist. Oprea lives and works in Bucharest.
Ahmed Wahby
Ahmed Wahby
Ahmed Wahby is an Egyptian architect, art historian, and lover of Islamic art and architecture. Born in Nigeria, he grew up in the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates and moved to Cairo in the late 1980s. As a child, due to his many travels with his parents, he developed an interest in different cultures. While pursuing an MA in Islamic art from the American University in Cairo, he traveled to eastern China to explore historical Chinese mosques.
Wahby further developed his understanding of Islamic art, architecture, and culture by completing a PhD in the Oriental Department of the Otto-Friedrich University, School of Human Sciences, Art and Culture, in Bamberg, Germany. His dissertation research investigated the influences of Arab merchants on the shrines and mosques of the Indonesian island of Java in the fifteen and sixteenth centuries. Wahby is currently an assistant professor of design theory in the Faculty of Applied Sciences and Arts at the German University in Cairo.
Support
Major support for CAA’s International Travel Grant Program has been provided by: Getty Foundation
Donate to the Annual Fund
posted by Nia Page — Nov 27, 2013
For over a century, CAA has proudly represented the individuals and institutions that make up the world’s largest professional association in the visual arts. Since its founding, the organization is known for the engagement and steadfast dedication of its members. CAA is strengthened by every member who serves on a committee or jury, shares research and insight on Annual Conference panels and in journal articles, guides younger colleagues in our mentoring programs, and contributes in so many other ways. I hope we can count on your continued participation and support now and in the years to come.
In return, CAA is devoted to honoring its members’ accomplishments, promoting scholarship, and providing essential resources—serving as the central hub for a vibrant and expanding community of visual-arts professionals. Today, I ask that you join your fellow members with a gift to the Annual Fund to support all that CAA does for the field.
The generous, voluntary support of CAA members is critical to our collective advancement. Only in dialogue can we learn from diverse perspectives. Only with shared purpose can we shape the agenda for policy issues affecting the visual arts. Your contribution to the Annual Fund makes this important work possible.
On behalf of the artists, art historians, curators, critics, collectors, educators, and other professionals who make up CAA, I thank you for your dedicated support; together we are a strong and dynamic visual-arts community. Please give generously!
Sincerely,
Maria Ann Conelli
Vice President for External Affairs
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Nov 27, 2013
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.
Can—and Should—Charitable Foundations Help Rescue Detroit Pensions and DIA Artwork?
National and local foundations have been asked to help bail out Detroit. But getting them to open their checkbooks will be a complicated dance of priorities, politics, and practicalities. The federal mediator in the Detroit bankruptcy is asking a group of at least nine local and national foundations to consider collectively contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to solve two of the most contentious issues in the case: municipal pensions on the chopping block and Detroit Institute of Arts paintings on the auction block. (Read more from the Detroit Free Press.)
Christie’s Price-Tagging of DIA Artwork for Bankruptcy Planning Is Delayed
A highly anticipated evaluation of thousands of city-owned treasures at the Detroit Institute of Arts is not expected to be finished until at least the second week of December. The report from Christie’s auction house in New York, which Detroit officials previously said would be completed in October or November, is expected to have a major impact on the fate of the museum’s world-class collection. The report also will likely influence negotiations between emergency manager Kevyn Orr and creditors and the settlement plan Orr eventually submits in court. (Read more from the Detroit Free Press.)
A Real Pollock? On This, Art and Science Collide
For nearly sixty years, a small painting with swirls and splotches of red, black, and silver has stood as a symbol of enmity between two women: Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock’s widow, and Ruth Kligman, his lover. Until her death, in 2010, Kligman, herself an artist, insisted the painting was a love letter to her created by Pollock in the summer of 1956, just weeks before he died in a car crash. But the painting was rejected by an expert panel set up to authenticate and catalogue all of Pollock’s works by a foundation established by Krasner. (Read more from the New York Times.)
German “Lost Art” Register Posts Further Pictures
German authorities released more pictures and details of the massive trove of art that was discovered in a Munich apartment last year. Prosecutors gave the official “Lost Art” website permission to put an additional fifty-four entries online, taking the total to seventy-nine. The new items include works by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, the French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and the German impressionist Max Liebermann. (Read more from USA Today.)
Dealer’s Hand
David Zwirner, the son of a famous German dealer, opened his first gallery in 1993, in SoHo. Since then, he has risen to be one of the most prominent dealers in the world. He is not really a pioneer, in terms of the art he has championed, or the style in which he has presented it, or the people he has sold it to. He is, in many respects, one more boat on a rising tide. (Read more from the New Yorker.)
The (Off-Campus) Future of MIT
Anant Agarwal has quit cold turkey—coffee, that is. But the president of edX, the massive open online course provider cofounded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is as energetic about MOOCs as ever, despite almost daily calls from traditionalists for the death of his product. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
The Resurgent Interest in Performance-Based Funding for Higher Education
Observers of higher-education policy might be forgiven a sense of surprise at recent developments in the funding of state higher-education systems. At the turn of the century, after indifferent results and occasional policy debacles, it was easy to find commentary from chastened proponents on the declining commitments to performance-based funding and budgeting systems for public higher education. Yet in recent years, performance funding has risen from the near dead, returning forcefully to the policy and political agendas of many states. What factors have driven this resurgence? (Read more from the American Association of University Professors.)
Art Makes You Smart
For many education advocates, the arts are a panacea: they supposedly increase test scores, generate social responsibility, and turn around failing schools. Most of the supporting evidence, though, does little more than establish correlations between exposure to the arts and certain outcomes. A few years ago, however, through a large-scale, random-assignment study of school tours to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, scientists were able to determine that strong causal relationships do in fact exist between arts education and a range of desirable outcomes. (Read more from the New York Times.)