CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Dec 11, 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.
Want to Help DIA Art and Detroit Pensions? Now You Can
Inspired by the philanthropist A. Paul Schaap’s $5 million pledge, a local foundation said it created a fund so the public can contribute tax-deductible money to help protect the Detroit Institute of Arts’ collection and city pensions. The Free Press also confirmed that DIA has joined federally mediated talks—which include leaders from at least ten national and local charitable foundations—to create a $500 million fund that could be leveraged for the same dual purpose of shielding the art collection and lessening pension cuts. (Read more from the Detroit Free Press.)
Don’t Loot Detroit’s Art Museum to Pay the City’s Creditors
Last week a federal judge ruled that Detroit was eligible to enter Chapter 9 bankruptcy—the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. That same day, we got a price tag for how much the collection of the threatened Detroit Institute of Arts, one of the country’s oldest and best museums, is likely worth. For months, salivating creditors have circled the museum while the institution has tried to keep them at bay. Now, for better and for worse, we have a price tag. (Read more from the Guardian.)
Fate of Detroit Hangs in the Balance
With a ruling by a federal judge last week that Detroit is eligible to enter bankruptcy, the fate of the city’s art collection—one of the finest in the country—now moves front and center in the legal battle over the city’s future. But the judge, Steven W. Rhodes, questioned for the first time the push by some of the city’s largest creditors to sell paintings and sculpture from the Detroit Institute of Arts. While he did not say specifically that the art should be spared, Judge Rhodes, in a brief mention of DIA by name, said that such a sale would not have helped Detroit avoid bankruptcy. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Invisible No Longer
In 1993 the book The Invisible Faculty commanded the attention of college officials from around the country, seizing on what was then a fast-growing but barely examined trend reshaping the higher-education landscape: the burgeoning role of adjunct, part-time professors being hired as college administrators scoured budgets for ways to cut costs. Two decades later, adjuncts—also called contingent faculty—are no longer invisible. They are squarely in the media spotlight, pushed there by the Affordable Care Act. (Read more from Community College Week.)
Street Artists Go to Court to Protect Their Work
A legal battle between a group of artists and the owners of 5Pointz, the Long Island City graffiti complex, has challenged the way street art is viewed as an ephemeral medium. The case, which the lawyer representing the artists says is not over despite the murals being whitewashed last month, is the first to examine whether authorized graffiti is protected under United States law. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
The Latest Leonardo Debate
The discovery of a previously unknown painting by Leonardo never fails to stir up the experts, the press, and the public. After all, only fifteen to twenty paintings—finished and unfinished—are generally attributed to him. In early October, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported the existence of a painting closely resembling Leonardo’s colored chalk and pastel drawing of the noblewoman Isabella d’Este in the Louvre. (Read more from ARTnews.)
The Overexposed Museum
For some time, art museums have been expending considerable amounts of energy and other resources on a broad campaign of public engagement designed to establish a stronger bond between themselves and the public, and thus cement the museum’s place as an essential—even indispensable—component of public life. Social media promotes their programs and addresses the public in other ways, crowdsourcing guides them in their acquisition and exhibition decisions, and crowdfunding helps pay for them. So far this campaign seems to be paying dividends. (Read more from the New Criterion.)
Inside the Box
In the United States we are raised to appreciate the accomplishments of inventors and thinkers—creative people whose ideas have transformed our world. We celebrate the famously imaginative, the greatest artists and innovators from van Gogh to Steve Jobs. Viewing the world creatively is supposed to be an asset, even a virtue. It’s all a lie: most people don’t actually like creativity. Studies confirm what many creative people have suspected all along: people are biased against creative thinking, despite all of their insistence otherwise. (Read more from Slate.)
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for December 2013
posted by CAA — Dec 10, 2013
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
December 2013
Installation view of Harmony Hammond’s work at Alexander Gray Associates (artworks © Harmony Hammond)
Harmony Hammond
Alexander Gray Associates
508 West 26th Street, No. 215, New York, NY 10001
October 23–December 7, 2013
The first one-person exhibition of work by Harmony Hammond in New York since the 1990s at Alexander Gray Associates is a must-see minisurvey and a reminder that a retrospective of this feminist- and queer-art pioneer, activist, writer, and cofounder of A.I.R. Gallery and Heresies in the city where she began her career in the late 1960s, before moving to New Mexico in the 1980s, is still overdue.
In one of her statements Hammond reminisces that: “the post-modern focus on representation, contributed to an inaccurate reading of the creative climate in New York during the late 1960s and ’70s, a period of interdisciplinary experimentation that resulted in work both conceptual and abstract. Artists moved between the disciplines ignoring, crossing, dissolving boundaries. Abstract painting, especially that coming out of post-minimal concerns of materials and process, was central to the experimentation…. Feminism brought a gendered content to this way of working. I moved to New York’s Lower East Side, and then to the corner of Spring and West Broadway in early fall 1969. It was a period of civil rights and antiwar activism, the gay liberation movement, the second wave feminist movement, and the birth of feminist art. I was influenced by and contributed to early feminist art projects. I painted on blankets, curtains, and bedspreads recycled from women friends, literally putting my life in my art. Rag strips dipped in paint and attached to the painting surface hung down like three-dimensional brushstrokes, their weight altering the painting rectangle. Eventually the rags took over and activated the painting field…. This led to the series Bags, and the slightly larger than life-size Presences. These new pieces could be touched, retouched, repaired, and, like women’s lives, reconfigured. In 1973, I created a series of six floor paintings made out of knit fabric my daughter and I picked from dumpsters. Strips of fabric were braided according to traditional braided rug techniques, but slightly larger and thicker in scale, coiled, stitched to a heavy cloth backing, and partially painted with acrylic paint—the ‘braided rug’ literally and metaphorically becoming ‘the support’ for the painting. The Floorpieces occupied and negotiated a space between painting (off the wall) and sculpture (nearly flat). Placed directly on the floor they called into question assumptions about the ‘place’ of painting.”
Focusing on her longstanding commitment to process-based abstraction, the exhibition includes paintings and works on paper from the past five decades, with a focus on recent paintings and sculptures, allowing a fresh consideration of the way activist concerns and queer identity is inscribed in her work.
Martha Wilson: Staging the Self
Mary H. Dana Women Artist Series at the Douglass Library Galleries
Rutgers University, 8 Chapel Drive, New Brunswick, NJ 08901
October 21, 2013–January 31, 2014
Named the 2013–14 Estelle Lebowitz Visiting Artist in Residence for the Mary H. Dana Women Artist Series, Martha Wilson is the honorary subject of the exhibition Martha Wilson: Staging the Self, organized by the founding directors of the Institute for Women and Art at Rutgers University, Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin, and featuring primarily early work, namely Wilson’s famed photo-text series A portfolio of models.
Born in 1947, Wilson is a pioneering feminist artist and gallery director, belatedly recognized for her innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through roleplaying, costume transformations, “invasions” of other people’s personae and the “camera’s presence.” She began making these works in the early 1970s while in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and further developed her practice after moving to New York in 1974. Two years later Wilson founded and continues to direct Franklin Furnace, an artist-run space that champions the exploration, promotion, and preservation of artist’s books, video, and installation, online, and performance art, “challenging institutional norms, the roles artists play within society, and expectations about what constitutes acceptable art mediums.” As a performance artist she founded and collaborated with Disband, the all-girl conceptual punk band of women artists who couldn’t play any instruments; she also impersonated political figures such as Alexander M. Haig Jr., Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, and Tipper Gore.
Wilson has been described by the New York Times critic Holland Cotter as one of “the half-dozen most important people for art in downtown Manhattan in the 1970s” and was championed early in her career by pioneering critics such Lucy R. Lippard. Yet while prefiguring notions of gender performativity as theorized by Judith Butler and explored by Cindy Sherman, Wilson’s prefeminist strategies of masquerade were marginalized, and her use of her own body often caused her to be written out of the history of Conceptual art, an area in which she radically intervened during the 1970s from the perspective of a woman. Tellingly, Wilson had her first solo exhibition in New York at Mitchell Algus Gallery, Martha Wilson: Photo/Text Works, 1971–74, only in 2008.
Isa Genzken. Disco Soon (Ground Zero), 2008, synthetic polymer paint on plastic, cardboard, mirror, spray paint, metal, fabric, hose lights, mirror foil, printed sticker, wood blocks, fiberboard, and casters, 86 1/4 x 80 11/16 x 64 15/16 in. Carlos and Rosa de la Cruz Collection (artwork © Isa Genzken; photograph provided by the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin)
Isa Genzken: Retrospective
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019
November 23, 2013–March 10, 2014
Isa Genzken: Retrospective is the first comprehensive retrospective of the German multimedia artist in an American museum and the largest survey of her work to date. Surprisingly embraced by MoMA, Genzken has been both a controversial and an influential figure in German art of the past thirty years, appreciated mostly outside her country and known as much for her work as for her marriage with Gerhardt Richter, her Nazi family background, and her self-destructive lifestyle (due to mental illness and alcoholism). Capitalizing idiosyncratically on found objects and collage, this exhibition features Genzken’s small- and installation- scale works that have helped to redefine contemporary assemblage. The artist, however, has worked in many media over the past forty years, including painting, photography, collage, drawing, artist’s books, film, and public sculpture. She begun in the 1970s with geometric curved sculptures from wood whose often-ellipsoid shape could reference the theosophic investigations of her grandfather. The cement sculptures she initiated in the 1980s remain an incredibly powerful chapter of her work and interweave her constant interest in architecture with the “metaphors of vulnerability” that play a central role in her art making, according to the Der Spiegel critic Ulrike Knöfel. Bringing almost 150 objects shown in the United States for the first time, this retrospective offers a thorough introduction to the artist’s work, as well as to the role of “minimalism and trash, neon and despair” in it, as the same critic observes. After its run at MoMA, the show will travel to museums in Dallas and Chicago.
KIMSOOJA: Unfolding
Vancouver Art Gallery
750 Hornby Street, Vancouver, British Columbia,
Canada V6Z 2H7
October 11, 2013–January 26, 2014
Constantly addressing issues of the displaced self and conditions of humanity, Kimsooja “experiments with various media through immobility and non-doing that inverts the notion of the artist as the predominant actor and maker.”
Born in Daegu, Korea, Kimsooja is based in New York, Paris, and Seoul and came to international fame in the 1990s following a P.S.1 residency in New York. This period paved the way for some of her most signature pieces: Bottari, Cities on the Move—2727km Bottari Truck, and A Needle Woman, shown in numerous exhibitions and biennales around the world. Bottari Truck consisted of a truck loaded with bottari, the Korean word for bundle, which traveled throughout Korea for eleven days. Replaced by bags in modern society, as the artist has recently said, “Bottari is the most flexible container in which we carry the minimized valuable things and its use is universal through history. We keep precious things, mostly in dangerous zones of our life, such as war, migration, exile, separation or a move where urgency take places. Anyone can make Bottari…. however, I’ve been intentionally wrapping it with used or abandoned Korean bedcovers that were made for newly married couples with symbols and embroideries and mostly wrapping used clothing inside—that has significant meanings and questions on life. In other words, the Bottari I wrap is an object that contains husks of our body wrapped with a fabric that is the place of birth, love, dream, suffering and death—a frame of life. While Bottari wraps bodies and souls, containing past, present, and future, a Bottari truck is rather a process than a product, or rather oscillating between the process and the object that is a social sculpture. It represents an abstraction of personage, an abstraction of society and history, and that of time and memory. It is a loaded self, a loaded others, a loaded history, a loaded in-between. Bottari Truck is a processing object throughout space and time, locating and dislocating ourselves to the place where we came from, and where we are going. I find Bottari as a womb and a tomb, globe and universe, and Bottari Truck is a bundle of bundle of bundle folding and unfolding our mind and geography, time and space.”
Following the Bottari Truck project, Kimsooja started a video performance called A Needle Woman, showing the artist from the back standing in the middle of main thoroughfares in various cities throughout the world. This work further developed the concept of sewing toward abstraction, bringing together people, nature, cultures, and civilizations.
As a broad survey that includes early textile-based pieces from the 1980s to large site-specific installations as Bottari Truck and videos, this exhibition highlights works that address notions of time, memory, and displacement in the face of change and social flux, and of the relationship between the human body and the material world.
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
Artists’ Resale Royalty Bill to Be Reintroduced
posted by Linda Downs — Nov 26, 2013
Representative Jerrold Nadler (D, NY) announced on Monday, November 22, 2013 his intent to introduce a revised Equity for Artists bill early in 2014. He and Senator Edward J. Markey (R-Mass) who will co-sponsor the bill finished a draft on Monday and support has already been committed by Senator Tammy Baldwin (D, Wis). The bill is similar to HR 3688 introduced last year and not acted upon by the Judiciary Committee. This bill maintains the 5% of the sales price for works auction for prices at $5,000 and above for living artists and those deceased plus 70 years, which follows the copyright law. The motivation for the bill is to ensure that artists do not lose out on any increase in value for future sales and provides reciprocity with the 70 countries that already have adopted similar legislation. The new bill eliminates the portion allocated in the first bill to art museums for new acquisitions. The AAMD requested that this clause be eliminated. Only those sales through auction houses are included in the bill. Nadler indicated that galleries were not included at this time in order to provide greater opportunity to get the bill passed.
Nadler spoke on Monday as part of a five-person panel sponsored by the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR) at Scandinavia House. In addition to Nadler the panel included Philippa S. Loengard, Assistant Director and Lecturer in Law, Kernochan Center, Columbia Law School; Karyn Temple Claggett, Associate Register of Copyrights; Director of Policy and International Affairs, U.S. Copyright Office; Theodore H. Feder, Ph.D., Founder and President, Artists Rights Society (ARS); and Sandra L. Cobden, General Counsel, Dispute Resolution and Legal Public Affairs, Christie’s. Loengard provided the historical context of artists’ resale royalty rights from the 1920s in France and the 2006 updated legislation of the European Union to the most recent legal action in the U.S. regarding the California resale royalty law originally instituted in 1976 and ruled unconstitutional by California Judge Nguyen. This case is currently on appeal brought by Chuck Close and other artists in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court and is expected to be decided early in 2014 http://clancco.com/wp/2012/05/art-law-droit-de-suite/.
At the request of Congressman Nadler the U.S. Copyright Office undertook an extensive study and analysis of the status of artists in regard to copyright and in relation to other artists such as writers, actors, screen writers and musicians who receive residuals for their work and whether artists are fully exploiting their rights within the current copyright law. The Copyright Office will issue their findings on or before December 12th. The issues they addressed were 1) financial—are visual artists benefiting within the allowance of the copyright law; 2) morality issues—are visual artists benefiting as well as other artists; 3) fairness—would this benefit a large number of professional artists, is the proposed amount reasonable and are the administrative aspects a burden; 4) limitations—what regulations or limitations should be put in place considering that the art market is generally unregulated. The Copyright Office requested formal comments in March and 59 individuals and organizations sent formal comments. On April 23, 2013 the Copyright Office held a hearing in which among other organizations, CAA made its case for the artists resale royalty represented by Anne Collins Goodyear, President. The Copyright Office also reviewed all the government studies on the effectiveness of the European Union system of resale royalties.
While many of the specifics of the Copyright Office could not be presented until it is published in December the following general observations were shared by Claggett: 1) Of all the world art markets, only China and the U.S. (the two largest art markets) do not have resale rights programs; 2) government studies indicate that these programs have no negative impact on the art market; 3) it is difficult to grasp how artists are hindered by current law and practice and the Copyright Office questions whether the resale royalty law is the best solution; 4) opposing parties are using the same statistical information to “prove” opposing perspectives on the legislation. The Copyright office staff refers to this as the “Rorschach Test.” Claggett stated that given the different perspectives on this issue that the Copyright Office report will not make any of the interested parties happy.
Ted Feder from ARS pointed out that this is only visual artists who currently do not get royalties and cited the current rates that Christie’s “taxes” buyers, from 20% to 25% and sellers from 1% to 10% depending on the price of the art work. He believes that the small percentage increase in sales required by the resale royalty legislation would be negligible to Christie’s clientele.
Sandra Cobden from Christie’s stated that while the auction house supports the rights and interests of artists it believes that the proposed resale royalty legislation is a “broken model.” She cited the study commissioned by Christie’s of the impact of the EU art market after the latest 2006 legislation where the art market in the EU grew 32% while that in the US grew 120% and China’s grew 121% in the same period. This was countered by Nadler who indicated that the EU at that time was in a general economic slump. She also suggested that this legislation is unconstitutional since it would only require auction houses and no galleries or ecommerce sites to institute this system. Her solution is to abandon this legislation and amend the tax laws so that artists may deduct the sales price when donating works to art museums and non-profit institutions.
Watch
Art for Sale? Bankruptcy and the Detroit Institute of Arts from Sharon Flescher on Vimeo.
Finalists for the 2014 Morey and Barr Awards
posted by Christopher Howard — Nov 18, 2013
CAA is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2014 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award. The winners of both prizes, along with the recipients of ten other Awards for Distinction, will be announced in January and presented during Convocation in Chicago, in conjunction with the 102nd Annual Conference.
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
The Charles Rufus Morey Book Award honors an especially distinguished book in the history of art, published in any language between September 1, 2012, and August 31, 2013. The four finalists are:
- Jacqueline E. Jung, The Gothic Screen: Space, Sculpture, and Community in the Cathedrals of France and Germany, ca. 1200–1400 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013)
- Joan Kee, Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013)
- Yukio Lippit, Painting of the Realm: The Kano House Painters in 17th-Century Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012)
- Cynthia Robinson, Imagining the Passion in a Multiconfessional Castile: The Virgin, Christ, Devotions, and Images in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013).
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
The Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for museum scholarship is presented to the author(s) of an especially distinguished catalogue in the history of art, published between September 1, 2012, and August 31, 2013, under the auspices of a museum, library, or collection. The two finalists for this year are:
- Jean-Louis Cohen, Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013)
- Jeff L. Rosenheim, Photography and the American Civil War (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013)
Second Barr Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, or Collections
The Barr jury has shortlisted a second Barr Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, or Collections. The two finalists are:
- Colin G. Calloway, ed., Ledger Narratives: The Plains Indian Drawings of the Lansburgh Collection at Dartmouth College (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, in cooperation with the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2012)
- Peter C. Sturman and Susan S. Tai, eds., The Artful Recluse: Painting, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century China (Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum of Art; New York: Delmonico/Prestel, 2012)
The presentation of the Awards for Distinction will take place on Wednesday evening, February 12, 2014, 5:30–7:00 PM, at the Hilton Chicago. The event is free and open to the public. For more information about CAA’s Awards for Distinction, please contact Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs and archivist.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Nov 13, 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.
Two Founders of Dia Sue to Stop Art Auction
Two founders of the Dia Art Foundation have taken the unusual step of going to court to try to stop the art organization from auctioning off as much as $20 million in works from its world-class holdings at Sotheby’s. The foundation has come under fire from many parts of the art world over its decision to sell the works and has defended itself by saying that it needed the money to continue to grow and to buy new artworks. (Read more from the New York Times.)
New Council to Develop Standards, Best Practices for Online Learning
Carnegie Mellon University is convening a high-powered consortium of educators, researchers, and technology-company executives that will spearhead efforts to develop standards and promote best practices in online education. The Global Learning Council—to be led by Carnegie Mellon’s president Subra Suresh—will also look for ways to leverage education-technology resources and disseminate data in an education landscape that some think is being turned on its head. (Read more from Wired Campus.)
The Twenty Most Powerless People in the Art World: 2013 Edition
Art Review recently published its art-world power list that starts with a Qatari royal and includes an artist who “doesn’t make a thing.” Hyperallergic has highlighted people, places, and things that it think deserves more attention than the rich, powerful, and well connected for its annual Powerless 20 list. (Read more from Hyperallergic.)
Families and Museums Demand List of Nazi-Looted Art
Jewish heirs are fighting to find out if an uncovered Nazi treasure trove contains art stolen from their families during the Holocaust. Families and museums are now demanding that German authorities publish a complete list of the $1.35 billion worth of art found hidden in a Munich storage closet so they can find out if their heirlooms have been recovered. But despite international pressure, German prosecutors are refusing to publish a full inventory of the works. (Read more from USA Today.)
Who Were the Mystery Men behind Germany’s Nazi-Looted Art Haul?
It was the art discovery that stunned the world: more than 1,400 works of art, many of them masterpieces, hidden away for over seventy years, unearthed not in a high-security vault or long-forgotten museum basement, but an anonymous apartment in an upscale German neighborhood. A vast stash of paintings by the likes of Picasso, Matisse, and Chagall, some previously unknown, others that had been presumed lost forever. (Read more from CNN.)
You Need a Website
When you first hear about a fellow academic or receive an email from a person you do not know, what do you do? How do you try to find out basic information about such a person? There is a good chance that you do an online search. Then, you likely click on one of the top results returned by the search engine. You look for information that will give you details about the person’s background, interests, education, papers, and conference presentations, or at minimum their affiliation and the focus of their work. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
The Wedge Driving Academe’s Two Families Apart
More than one scientist friend at the University of California, Berkeley, has complained to me recently that the stuff coming out of English departments seems pretty wacky. My friends in the English department accuse those in the STEM fields of doing anything corporations want so long as it keeps their labs going. (Read more from the Chronicle Review.)
The Art of Emoji
Digital communication, once confined to letters, numbers, and punctuation, has become a cartoonish full-color landscape littered with pictographs designed to help express emotions and ideas. But as emoji design has developed to include a growing number of icons, the pictographs have become more than as a visual aid for verbal communication, evolving into a vehicle for expression in their own right. (Read more from Slate.)
SHERYL REISS INTERVIEW
posted by Christopher Howard — Nov 12, 2013
Fifteenth Anniversary for caa.reviews
This fall caa.reviews celebrates its fifteenth year of publication. Founded in the fall of 1998, the online journal has published thousands of reviews of books, exhibitions, and more. The journal averages approximately 150 reviews annually.
The journal’s editor-in-chief, Sheryl Reiss, has been involved with caa.reviews since the beginning, first as field editor for books on early modern Southern European art and then as an editorial-board member. In 2010 she returned as editor designate, taking the reins from Lucy Oakley of New York University’s Grey Art Gallery in July 2011. CAA News spoke with Reiss in October via email.
How does caa.reviews fit in with established online journals such as Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, as well as with newer digital publications and reviews journals (Triple Canopy, Cassone, Art Book Review)?
The journal distinguishes itself from these and other online publications in several ways. Founded in 2002, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide focuses exclusively on the “long” nineteenth century in a global context and publishes scholarly articles along with reviews of exhibitions and books. In contrast, caa.reviews covers materials from all periods and cultures, and while we seek to expand the number of essays we publish, our primary focus is on reviews of books, exhibitions, conferences, and recently, digital media. In this sense we also differ from the website of the Historians of Netherlandish Art, which includes a vibrant selection of book reviews. Our audience, currently CAA members, consists primarily of art historians, artists, museum professionals, and others with academic affiliations or interests. When the journal becomes open access next year, we anticipate significant expansion of our readership. The newer review journals you mention serve a broader public with greater emphasis on contemporary art and exhibitions in commercial galleries. Cassone, which focuses primarily on art in the United Kingdom, features interviews and editorial commentary, which could be fruitful paths for our journal to follow.
Have you noticed any subject trends in caa.reviews over the last year or two? If so, have they matched other trends in the academic and museum worlds?
Our coverage is so broad, and the interests of our more than thirty field editors—the group of scholars that commissions the book and exhibition reviews—so varied, that it is difficult to isolate just a few specific trends. That said, I would say that across the board I have noticed interest in materiality as a focus of books under review. Another major trend—in both academia and museums—is tremendous interest in global themes and cross-cultural interchange. In my view, one of the greatest strong points of caa.reviews is the extraordinary range of topics and approaches covered in our reviews.
Field editors will soon write subject pieces of their own, called “Re-views,” which I understand will be somewhat similar to the recent “State of the Field” essays in The Art Bulletin. What would you like to achieve with these contributions?
For some time, members of the caa.reviews Editorial Board have expressed their desire to increase the number of essays we publish. Indeed, this was a goal of the founding editors of the journal. At the CAA Publications Committee session I organized and chaired at the Annual Conference in February of this year, titled “Book Reviews and Beyond: caa.reviews at 15,” the panel (consisting of past editors of the journal and former editorial-board members) considered the scope and object of the reviewing enterprise—not only of books and exhibitions, but also in a more comprehensive sense. The participants and audience members agreed that expanding our efforts to publish thematic essays would be one way to broaden the journal’s mission and appeal. While somewhat similar to our sister journal’s “State of the Field” essays, the “Re-views” series will provide a locus for our field editors to reflect upon their respective fields as seen through the lens of the reviews they have commissioned. We envision publishing one or two of these essays each year, in which the field editors will consider the topics, methodologies, and debates current in publications and exhibitions in their respective areas. Our first essay in the series, by Tanya Sheehan (field editor for photography and an editorial-board member), is titled “Reflections on Photography” and was published in early October. It is our hope that this series will see anew—or re-view—the many fields covered by caa.reviews in the context of reviews the journal has published.
What were some of the challenges and highlights when initiating, working on, and completing the Scalar project on the exhibition Bernini: Sculpting in Clay?
Perhaps the greatest challenge was learning to use the Scalar digital platform, which is very powerful, but also quite daunting. Some of the work was using HTML code, which I had not done for many years. Thankfully, the staff at the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture (which provided a generous grant for the project) was always there to help. One of the great highlights was making the video walkthrough last February at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. The project not only permits users to visit the exhibition virtually, it also includes an introductory essay, links to other educational videos and to reviews by a scholar and an artist, a bibliography of further reading, and an interview with one of the curators. I should add that it was a joy to work with two of the exhibition’s curators, C. D. Dickerson III of the Kimbell and Tony Sigel of the Harvard Art Museums. I was fortunate to attend the study days associated with the show both in New York and Fort Worth, which greatly enriched my understanding of Bernini’s terra-cotta models. Finally, I have been really thrilled by the positive response to the project, particularly for classroom use.
How has the road to open access been for the journal? How can the journal encourage more commentary and interaction?
This is a very exciting time for caa.reviews. The path to open access for the journal has been long and steep, with a number of roadblocks along the way. For many years, it has been the desire of past editors and editorial-board members to reinstate the journal’s initial open status. The topic has been discussed at every meeting of the editorial board since I rejoined the journal in 2010, and it is a source of much gratification that in 2014, with the advent of CAA copublishing its journals with Taylor & Francis, the journal will once again be open to all interested readers worldwide. This is a great accomplishment! The editorial board is exploring new ways of presenting review content as the journal’s audience continues to expand. These include implementing moderated commentary and increasing the use of multimedia platforms, as in the recently completed Scalar Bernini project.
New and Updated Standards and Guidelines
posted by CAA — Nov 11, 2013
In line with CAA’s practice to update regularly its Standards and Guidelines for professional practices in the visual arts, the Board of Directors approved one new and four revised guidelines at its meeting on October 27, 2013. The Professional Practices Committee, chaired by Jim Hopfensperger of Western Michigan University, worked with subcommittees over the past several years to revise these guidelines. DeWitt Godfrey, CAA vice president for committees and president-elect of CAA, presented the documents to the CAA Board of Directors for approval.
Guidelines for CAA Interviews
Guidelines for CAA Interviews, an updated version of Etiquette for CAA Interviewers, was developed by the Ad Hoc Committee on Guidelines for CAA Interviews, chaired by Jim Hopfensperger. It was formulated to protect the interests of applicants and of hiring institutions and to provide both with an awareness of their separate responsibilities during the interview process.
Guidelines for Part-Time Professional Employment
The intent of Guidelines for Part-Time Professional Employment is to encourage the fair and equitable treatment of all part-time employees in the visual arts, to advocate for those who may be very modestly compensated for their work, and to ensure that part-time employees are not hired to replace and/or diminish the number of full-time employees at an institution. Thomas Berding of Michigan State University and John Richardson of Wayne State University co-chaired the ad hoc committee that developed these guidelines.
Guidelines for Presenting Works in Digital Format
A new document, Guidelines for Presenting Works in Digital Format, was developed to assist visual-arts professionals with the presentation and review of artistic works using digital technologies. These guidelines aim to provide individuals and institutions with recommendations for formatting, handling, screening, and exhibiting time-based works and still images using digital technology. Dana Clancy of Boston University chaired the task force to create these new guidelines.
Statement Concerning the Deaccession of Works of Art
Developed by the Museum Committee, chaired by N. Elizabeth Schlatter of the University of Richmond, the Statement Concerning the Deaccession of Works of Art addresses the deaccession of artworks of from the collections of museums or other institutions or entities that function as public trusts and suggests best practices for these public trusts when they consider removing works from their collections.
Standards for Professional Placement
Standards for Professional Placement, last updated in 2012, was developed to protect the interests of both applicants and hiring institutions during the placement process and to allow both to know their separate responsibilities. Jim Hopfensperger chaired the ad hoc committee that updated these standards.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for November 2013
posted by CAA — Nov 10, 2013
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
November 2013
Wangechi Mutu, still from The End of eating Everything, 2013, animated video with color and sound, 8 min. Commissioned by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (artwork © Wangechi Mutu)
Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Wangechi Mutu scrutinizes globalization by combining found materials, magazine cutouts, sculpture, and painted imagery. Sampling such diverse sources as African traditions, international politics, the fashion industry, pornography, and science fiction, her work explores gender, race, war, colonialism, global consumption, and the exoticization of the black female body. Mutu is best known for spectacular and provocative collages depicting female figures—part human, animal, plant, and machine—in fantastical landscapes that are simultaneously unnerving and alluring, defying easy categorization and identification. Bringing her interconnected ecosystems to life for this exhibition through sculptural installations and videos, Mutu encourages audiences to consider these mythical worlds as places for cultural, psychological, and sociopolitical exploration and transformation.
Organized by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University by Trevor Schoonmaker, chief curator and Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Curator of Contemporary Art and coordinated by Saisha Grayson, assistant curator at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, for its Brooklyn Museum version, Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey is the first survey in the United States of this internationally renowned, Brooklyn-based artist. Spanning from the mid-1990s to the present, the exhibition unites more than fifty pieces, including Mutu’s signature large-scale collages as well as video works, never-before-seen sketchbook drawings, a site-specific wall drawing, and sculptural installations.
Sarah Lucas
SITUATION Absolute Beach Man Rubble
Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX England
October 2–December 15, 2013
The photographer, installation artist, and sculptor Sarah Lucas is one of the most important figures of the YBA generation that emerged in London in 1988 through Freeze and gained prominence in the early 1990s with her first two solo shows, The Whole Joke and Penis Nailed to a Board. Uniting works that span two decades, Situation Absolute Beach Man Rubble surveys Lucas’s multifaceted and multimedia take on the body—“the bawdy euphemisms, repressed truths, erotic delights, and sculptural possibilities of the sexual body” that lie at the heart of her work’s exploration of the erotic and abject, mediated and repressed body—and ranges from the angry sensationalism that underpins the gendered and classed criticality of her installations from the early 1990s to the masterful pseudomaturity of the hybrid sex contours of her latest, soft, or metal sculptures.
The show takes the viewer from Lucas’s early forays “into the salacious perversities of British tabloid journalism to the London premiere of her sinuous, light-reflecting bronze where intertwined limbs, breasts, and phalli transform the abject into a dazzling celebration of polymorphous sexuality,” while reviewers agree that it pays fair attention to the intellectual rigor, visual strikingness, and complex art-historical references of Lucas’s work, without compromising the uneasy thrill of its revelations. Deemed “not recommended for children” for its sexually explicit material, Lucas’s uncanny and humorous defamiliarization of the body perhaps pose more problems for adults than for children, as wittingly put in a review of the show in the Guardian.
Lucas’s early iconic works, in which cloths, furniture, food, and language are used as stand-ins for the body, and her found objects, such as the ubiquitous toilet, echo the Duchampian readymade in their Rabelaisian sourcing of urban experience are featured in the lower galleries of the Whitechapel Gallery. The upper galleries present two environments: a color-saturated chamber featuring acephalous male nudes against a red backdrop, where masculinity is mocked through a sequence of edible phallic stand-in, despite its totemic scale; and a sculptural landscape of shiny bronze or polymorphous conglomerations of soft limbs or breasts and genitalia. Also running through this exhibition is a new series of “plinths” made from crushed cars; as well as screens and benches made from breeze blocks framed within. The artist’s face reappears throughout the exhibition “as an all-seeing presence, frankly returning the viewer’s stare, or lost in existential reflection.” The space behind Gallery 1 presents monochrome portraits of Lucas by the artist Julian Simmons, taken from the couple’s recent publication TITTIPUSSIDAD, and portraits of Lucas at her base in Suffolk taken by the artist Juergen Teller.
Installation view of Anita of New York at Suzanne Geiss Company (photograph by Adam Reich)
Anita Steckel
Anita of New York
Suzanne Geiss Company
6 Grand Street, New York, NY 10013
November 2–December 7, 2013
Anita of New York celebrates the work of the recently deceased and largely understudied feminist New York artist Anita Steckel (1930–2012). Bringing together a selection of works from two series, The Giant Woman (1970–73) and New York Landscape (1970–80), the exhibition not only illustrates the changing montage principles of her feminist art practice but also captures the centrality of New York in her feminist critique of patriarchy. Allowing Steckel to idiosyncratically juxtapose references to art and politics “with a mix of sexuality, violence, and humor”—to paraphrase the curator of the show Rachel Middleman from a recent article on Steckel in Woman’s Art Journal—montage became Steckel’s key means “to push the boundaries of acceptable imagery and decorum in art” and to speak radically about art, race, gender, and sexuality.
Steckel first became known for her photomontage series Mom art, which mocked Pop art by comprising historic photographs and reproductions of famous works of art on which painted additions turned the found images into social critiques of racism, war, and sexual inequality. In the early 1970s she joined the feminist movement and in 1973, in response to an attempted censorship of her solo exhibition The Feminist Art of Sexual Politics at Rockland Community College’s art gallery, she founded (along with artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Hannah Wilke) the Fight Censorship Group, which protested censorship and advocated the acceptance of women’s erotic art into museums. “We believe sexual subject matter should be removed from the ‘closet’ of the fine arts,” Steckel wrote when the members of the Group came first together. “We believe sexual subject matter includes many things: political statements, humor, erotica, sociological and psychological, statements—as well as purely sensual or esthetic art concerns—and of course—the primitive, mysterious reasons none of us know.” In fact, the exhibition at Suzanne Geiss Company includes many of the “obscene” objects that a Rockland County legislator had attempted to censor, fueling Steckel’s defense of women’s right to represent the sexual body, both for critical and pleasurable ends, further shaping her work and leading to the founding of the Fight Censorship Group.
As described in the press release: Steckel’s large-scale series New York Landscape consist[s] of collage paintings that fuse imagery inspired by the human, art-historical, and urban bodies. Supine female figures, erect phalluses, dollar bills, the Mona Lisa, and other massive cultural symbols are inserted into the skyline. They sit on skyscrapers, make love, even battle in a humorous take on the city’s fraught, psychosexual sense of identity.” Superimposing her own face onto gigantic female nudes that subversively colonize New York, The Giant Woman series makes more palpable how Steckel raised the personal into political and its quasi-Surrealist empowering poetics.
Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz / Her Noise Archive
Patriarchal Poetry / Slow Runner: Her Noise Archive II
Badischer Kunstverein
Waldstraße 3, 76133 Karlsruhe, Germany
September 27–November 24, 2013
Curated by Anja Casser and Nadjia Quante and titled after a Gertrude Stein quote that highlights the association of revolutionizing queer politics and aesthetics, Patriarchal Poetry is the first institutional solo exhibition of Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz in Germany. Combining the debut of their film To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation (2013) with the film installations Toxic (2012) and Salomania (2009), the show explores how the two artists investigate the emergence of photography and film against the backdrop of colonial history and the invention of body norms, the diverse ways in which their work challenge filmic illusion, and how their new film pushes boundaries, asking “whether and how changing structures engenders queer relations, whether musical and filmic forms can become revolutionary?” For Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe is based on the eponymous 1970 score of the avant-garde composer Pauline Oliveros, which itself influenced by Solanas’s radical feminist SCUM Manifesto affords the musicians an equal role, rejecting the hierarchical structures of traditional music.
Patriarchal Poetry is accompanied by a concurrent exhibition, Slow Runner: Her Noise Archive II, that brings together new and existing content from the Her Noise Archive and interlaces references to Boudry and Renate’s Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe and the pioneering composer Pauline Oliveros’s eponymous 1970 score. During the 1970s Oliveros’s feminist philosophies of music not only radically challenged the patriarchal Western musical canon, but also paralleled “women’s music” of the feminist movement by interrogating the notion of “performer,” “audience,” and the very meanings and forms of music itself. These rich tensions are explored through a series of contemporaneous works on display from Barbara Hammer, Lis Rhodes, Robert Ashley, and others, while a new series of posters by the New York–based artist Emma Hedditch creates a spatial manifestation of fragments from these histories and the wider archive.
This display of works is accompanied by a selection from the Her Noise Archive, a multiannual research project and study collection initially founded in 2001 by Lina Dzuverovic and Anne Hilde Neset, which includes records, CDs, tapes, moving image, books, catalogues, magazines, fanzines, and exclusive interview material by artists who work with sound and experimental music such as Kim Gordon, Christina Kubisch, and Kevin Blechdom. The archive—accessible for the public at CRiSAP, London College of Communication—is a physical manifestation of the desire to draw lines of affinity between different moments of the avant-garde, from the radical contemporary composition of Oliveros to No Wave, Riot Grrrl, and other more contemporary experimentations in sound and feminism.
The museum will host an artist’s talk with Boudry and Lorenz on Saturday, November 23, at 7:00 PM, followed by performances by Antonia Baehr and William Wheeler (Scores for Laughter and Without You I’m Nothing) at 8:30 PM.
Rembrandt van Rijn, A Lady and Gentleman in Black, 1633, oil on canvas, 131.6 x 109 cm (artwork in the public domain)
Sophie Calle: Last Seen
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
280 The Fenway, Boston, MA 02115
October 24, 2013–March 3, 2014
Sophie Calle: Last Seen brings together fourteen photographic and text-based works from the series Last Seen (1991) and its recent pendant What Do You See? (2012). The exhibition is a potent contemplation on absence, memory, and the effect of art, typical of Calle’s scripto-visual outsourcing of it, inspired by the famous theft of thirteen works from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
In 1990, during an exhibition of Calle’s work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the artist was interviewed for a Parkett magazine article in front of Jan Vermeer’s The Concert (1658–60), one of her favorite paintings. Later that March, the painting became one of the thirteen works stolen from the museum. The half-joking suggestion that Calle might have been responsible for the theft inspired her to create Last Seen. Standing in front of the empty spaces on the museum walls on which works were once hung, Calle asked curators, guards, conservators, and other museum staff members what they remembered of the missing pieces. With the text from the interviews and the photographic images she eventually created a visual meditation on absence and memory, as well as a reflection on the emotional power works of art hold over their viewers.
In 2012, Calle revisited Last Seen on the museum’s invitation. In What Do You See? Calle once again questioned people in the museum’s Dutch room, yet in front of the empty frames that once held the absent works that had been reinstalled in the galleries, literally framing the emptiness. But this time she did not mention the missing paintings but asked each viewer to respond to what they saw before them.
Ana Mendieta: Traces
Hayward Gallery
Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX, England, United Kingdom
September 24–December 15, 2013
Ana Mendieta: Traces is the first retrospective survey in the United Kingdom of the work of a Cuban American artist best known for her intimate, ephemeral, performance-based Siluetas, in which her body merges with the natural world, often engaging elemental materials such as earth, water, fire, and blood, evoking goddess archetypes and exploring a mythic relationship with nature while performing cathartic rituals that evoking both Afro-Cuban and Catholic traditions helped her perform a reliving exorcism of the trauma of her early exile from Cuba. Chronologically arranged films, sculptures, photographs, drawings, personal writings, and notebooks that span Mendieta’s entire career reveal different, often neglected, facets of her practice while highlighting her work’s radical contribution to feminist and Land art. An extensive research room with hundreds of photographic slides that were not developed during Mendieta’s short life provides unique access to her signature “earth-body” actions, her Siluetas, while archival material sheds new light on the way the artist worked and documented her artistic practice.
Amy Sillman: one lump or two
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
100 Northern Avenue, Boston, MA 02210
October 3, 2013–January 5, 2014
Featuring more than ninety works, including drawings, paintings, zines, and recent forays into animated film, one lump or two is the first museum retrospective of work by Amy Sillman, a painter whose self-proclaimed “skeptical” devotion to painting and whose fine interlacing of abstraction and figuration has contributed to painting’s renewed vitality in the New York scene since the 1990s. The exhibition unites early works that, characterized by cartoon lines and pastel or acid hues, “move effortlessly from figure to landscape, playfully and often humorously exploring problems of physical and emotional scale with observations that are both wry and revealing,” with her mid-2000s series couples—which were drawn from life in pencil, ink, and gouache and translated into paintings from memory with bold brushstrokes and abstract blocks of color—that have been claimed as reinvigorating forms of twenty-first-century Abstract Expressionism, as put in the press release. Also included are works that seem to question the role of painting in the age of reproduction and mass media quite idiosyncratically, whether employing the diagram or resorting to iPhone drawing, then turned into movies that “bring back the neurotic figures of her early images while delving further into the current roles of abstraction, color, and the diagram.”
Dayanita Singh: Go Away Closer
Hayward Gallery
Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX, England, United Kingdom
October 8–December 15, 2013
Go Away Closer is the first major retrospective in the United Kingdom of work by Dayanita Singh, one of today’s foremost photographers who nonetheless uses photography as a starting point rather than an end. The exhibition presents examples from the past twenty-five years as well as her portable museums, a major new body of work that has developed from her experiments in book making. These large wooden structures, which the artist calls “photo-architectures,” can be placed and opened in various configurations, each holding 70 to 140 photographs. Allowing images to be endlessly displayed, sequenced, edited, and archived within the structures, as well as stories to be fashioned in different ways, these objects expand photography into the realm of not only sculpture and architecture but also of fiction and poetry. The show also includes a recent video titled Mona and Myself, Singh’s first “moving still.”
Dear Art
Calvert 22 Gallery
22 Calvert Avenue, London E2 7JP, England, United Kingdom
September 29–December 8, 2013
Calvert 22 presents Dear Art, a new project by What, How & for Whom (WHW) that is titled after Mladen Stilinovic’s 1999 letter to art, provocatively questions the standing of art in the contemporary world, its reception and distribution value. WHW is a critically acclaimed yet radical all-women curatorial collective from Zagreb, Croatia, with a decade of international curatorial practice behind them, including the curatorship of the 2009 Istanbul Biennial. Dear Art is the group’s first exhibition in the United Kingdom.
Dorothea Rockburne
Drawing Which Makes Itself
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019
September 21, 2013–January 20, 2014
Drawing Which Makes Itself is a great opportunity to familiarize oneself with Dorothea Rockburne’s drawing practice—her mathematical and structural precision as well as the material sensibility of her process—and a sad reminder that this female survivor of the Black Mountain College remains unduly understudied and invisible, while still in life. Focusing on the artist’s groundbreaking project Drawing Which Makes Itself (1972–73), the exhibition foregrounds the question that shapes her practice (How drawing could be of itself and not about something else?) and highlights the ideas that Rockburne has pursued throughout her career.
This includes the “terrific importance” of paper for her as a metaphysical object, as an active material whose inherent qualities determine the form of the artwork, as manifested with Scalar (1971)—with its planed chipboard and paper stained with crude oil—and in various carbon-paper drawings, some of which are exhibited for the first time. Her Golden Section Paintings and the works on paper that followed refer to the mathematical ratio used by artists and architects since antiquity to produce shapes of harmonious proportions, while echoing the teachings of the mathematician Max Dehn, whose decipherment of the underlying geometries in nature and art affected her profoundly. The exhibition includes examples of Rockburne’s later work, including recent watercolors, that continue her exploration of these principles in nature and specifically in the motion of planets.
Margaret Murphy, Tell Your Son to Behave, 2013, acrylic and ink on fabric mounted on wood, 14 x 14 in. (artwork © Margaret Murphy)
Margaret Murphy
Toile News Project
Gallery Aferro
73 Market Street, Newark, NJ 07102
November 16–December 14, 2013
Gallery Aferro presents new work by Margaret Murphy that includes individual paintings, a wallpaper installation, and a dress. Murphy is known for figurative paintings whose protagonists are painted after figurines against decorative backgrounds that often interlace the opacity of enamel with the transparency of watercolor in colorful and sentimental compositions that cast timely commentaries on feminine experience and consumerism. In her new paintings, Murphy departs from her resort to figurines, turning instead on the inevitable and often violent news-image blitz of Facebook and Google, substituting sections of toile fabric designs with found images of violent or silly actualities drawn with acrylic or silkscreen. While her new work makes a comment about the latest forms of digital-image colonization of our private lives and imaginary, reminiscent of historic Pop’s commentaries, a continuity of material and thematic concerns is witnessed in Murphy’s reinvented practice that often juxtaposes historic sentimentalized views of life with current images of local or global issues, such as women’s rights protests from around the world or the Boston Marathon bombing event, as well as decorative abstraction and figuration.
Mary Beth Edelson
Collaborative 1971–1993
Accola Griefen Gallery
547 West 27th Street, No. 634, New York NY 10001
October 19–November 23, 2013
This exhibition is the first to address the more than twenty-five collaborative performance rituals and community-based workshops produced by Mary Beth Edelson starting as early as 1969. These pioneering participatory works were presented at the Corcoran Gallery, A.I.R. Gallery, the Albright-Knox Gallery, the Malmö Konstmuseum, and Franklin Furnace, as well as at universities across the United States and abroad. In planning and presenting these programs Edelson collaborated with organizations such as A.I.R Gallery, with the utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana, and with artists from the Women’s Building in Los Angeles.
The collaborations are represented by drawings and a chronology of photo documentation as well as a study area with scriptbooks, texts by and about the artist, and other documents. Collaborative also includes two Story Gathering Boxes, works that Edelson has created since 1972 and constitute an archive of participants’ personal thoughts. The box Gender Parity asks “What did your mother teach you about women?” and “What did your mother teachyou about men?” Participants may view previous handwritten responses and respond to new questions posed by the artist.
CAA Journals to be Published by Taylor & Francis
posted by Nia Page — Nov 05, 2013
The College Art Association and Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group are pleased to announce a new publishing partnership to commence in 2014. Beginning January 1, 2014, Taylor & Francis will publish and distribute CAA’s two highly regarded journals, The Art Bulletin and Art Journal, under the Routledge imprint, and provide an open-access digital platform for CAA’s reviews journal, caa.reviews.
The partnership is a positive step for both parties and will bring CAA’s journals to the attention of a wider international audience through Routledge’s state-of-the-art online publishing platforms, high-quality production, and innovative marketing strategies.
The Routledge visual arts program encompasses contemporary art, design, photography, regional art, and visual culture and includes leading titles in the field such as Visual Resources, Photographies and Public Art Dialogue. The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and caa.reviews will be an indispensable addition to Routledge’s prestigious list of more than 130 Arts & Humanities titles. To learn more about the Routledge library, please visit www.tandfonline.com.
CAA’s Board president Anne Goodyear states, “CAA’s historic partnership with Taylor and Francis promises exciting innovations in the production, design, and dissemination of our leading flagship journals—The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and caa.reviews. We look forward to expanding the reach of these important publications to new audiences and to offering new means to present groundbreaking scholarship.”
Katherine Burton, art and design journals publisher at Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, notes, “Routledge, Taylor & Francis is delighted to have the opportunity to enter into a partnership with the College Art Association. In partnering with the Association, we will continue to promote the finely tuned mission of The Art Bulletin, Art Journal and caa.reviews as vital spaces for widening critical debate in art history, criticism and review, while supporting the future sustainability of the publications in the Routledge program. Routledge and the Association will continue to work closely to ensure a smooth transition period for the journals.”
Linda Downs, CAA executive director, says, “The CAA Board, Editorial Boards, and the staff welcome this partnership with Routledge, Taylor & Francis. For the very first time The Art Bulletin and Art Journal will be published online on a multi-media Atypon platform offering authors the capabilities to include video and Internet links. Routledge, Taylor & Francis will be developing broader interactive functionality for caa.reviews. We anticipate increased readership world-wide and greater marketing capabilities. The Art Bulletin and Art Journal will continue to be offered in print. We are excited by all the new opportunities this partnership will bring to the CAA journals.”
The Art Bulletin publishes leading scholarship in the English language on all aspects of art history as practiced in the academy, museums, and other institutions. From its founding in 1913, the journal has published, through rigorous peer review, scholarly articles and critical reviews of the highest quality in all areas and periods of the history of art. Articles take a variety of methodological approaches, from the historical to the theoretical. In its mission as a journal of record, The Art Bulletin fosters an intensive engagement with intellectual developments and debates in contemporary scholarly practice. It is published four times a year, in March, June, September, and December.
Art Journal provides a forum for scholarship and exploration in the visual arts, with a particular focus on contemporary art. It operates in the spaces between commercial publishing, academic presses, and artist presses. Published since 1941, the peer-reviewed journal gives voice and publication opportunity to artists, art historians, curators, critics, and other writers in the arts. The content explores diverse forms of art practice and production, as well as the relationships among art making, art history, visual studies, theory, and criticism. Since 2011, a companion website, artjournal.collegeart.org, has both complemented the contents of the quarterly journal and published stand-alone material, with an emphasis on artists’ projects. Art Journal is published four times a year, in spring, summer, autumn, and winter.
Celebrating its fifteenth anniversary as a born-digital journal, caa.reviews fosters timely, worldwide access to the intellectual and creative materials and issues of art-historical, critical, curatorial, and studio practice, and promotes the highest standards of discourse in the disciplines of art and art history. The journal publishes on a continual basis an average of 150 scholarly reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by the College Art Association. The journal also publishes a list of recently published books in the arts and dissertation titles from the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.