CAA News Today
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.
Art Journal Explores “Queer Affect and Queer Archives”
posted by Christopher Howard — Nov 12, 2013
In its new issue, the quarterly Art Journal features an eighty-page forum, “Conversations on Queer Affect and Queer Archives.” The forum, which includes works of art, conversations, and explorations by artists, art historians, curators, and other scholars, promises to be a milestone in the art and art history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. It will serve as a critical resource for artists, activists, and scholars alike.
“Conversations on Queer Affect and Queer Archives” is organized by Art Journal’s editor-in-chief, Lane Relyea, in collaboration with Tirza True Latimer, chair of the graduate program in Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. “Artists, scholars, and activists have been rethinking the politics of what archives preserve, demonstrating that the piecing together of cultural memory is not a neutral pursuit,” Latimer writes in her introduction. “These questions resonate with particular poignancy in outlaw cultures and communities…. Queer archival practices are not only propelled by strong feelings, they may also reanimate suppressed histories of sentiment.”
The forum documents the preservation of the material effects of LGBT people in archives as diverse as the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles, the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, New York University’s Fales Library and Special Collections, and the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, among many other archives. The issue includes a list of thirty-seven archives worldwide, with detailed contract information. It also explores the innovative ways in which artists, curators, and scholars are drawing on and showcasing these legacy materials.
Astonishing stories emerge from these archives:
- The artist Tina Takemoto becomes obsessed with the archival legacy of a gay male Japanese immigrant who arrived in San Francisco in the 1920s and spent WWII in an internment camp in Utah. Takemoto then creates artworks based on the man and the eighty-year span of his life in the United States
- Barbara McBane discovers the papers of a father of two who transitions to become Veronica Marie Friedman. McBane, a professional film editor and scholar, pieces together Friedman’s frame of mind during the metamorphosis, through casual writings such as journal entries, datebook pages, a timeline, and poems written on napkins
- E. G. Crichton, artist-in-residence at San Francisco’s GLBT Historical Society, plays matchmaker with artists such as Takemoto and McBane on the one hand, and the archival materials of specific individuals on the other. From the artworks that result, Crichton organizes exhibitions that travel the world. In her text, she details the amazingly widespread network of international archives she has discovered
- Ann Cvetkovich, the author of the book An Archive of Feelings, converses with the artist Tammy Rae Carland, who has photographed ephemeral aspects of lesbian life and dozens of hand-decorated mix tapes given her over the years, as well as behind-the-scenes events at the legendary Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival
- Zackary Drucker contributes “Bring Your Own Body,” the script and images from a 2012 performance work that recounts the transformation of Lynn Edward Harris from Miss Costa Mesa 1968 to a bearded guest on a 1983 television talk show.
- The artist Henrik Olesen uses an intuitive system of classification close to the one elaborated by the art historian Aby Warburg in his unfinished “Mnemosyne Atlas” to organize archival images and artworks into a homoaffirmative historical counternarrative called Some Faggy Gestures (2007)
This issue of Art Journal also includes an essay by Alexandra Kokoli on the British artist Susan Hiller and an exploration by Kirsten Olds of the visual culture of 1970s glam rock in Los Angeles, as exemplified in the work of Les Petites Bonbons.
About Art Journal
Art Journal is published four times a year by CAA for its membership of fourteen thousand. A peer-reviewed journal devoted to twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, it is one of the most vital, intellectually compelling, and visually engaging periodicals in the field. Art Journal features scholarly articles, conversations, portfolios, and other contributions by leading art historians, artists, curators, and critics.
Nonmembers may purchase single copies by writing to rlawson@collegeart.org or by calling 212-392-4404.
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.
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
![](http://www.collegeart.org/images/committees/cwa-picks/WangechiMutu.jpg)
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.
![](http://www.collegeart.org/images/committees/cwa-picks/AnitaSteckel.gif)
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.
![](http://www.collegeart.org/images/committees/cwa-picks/RembrandtLadyGentleman.jpg)
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.
![](http://www.collegeart.org/images/committees/cwa-picks/MargaretMurphy2.jpg)
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.
Affiliated Society News for November 2013
posted by CAA — Nov 09, 2013
Appraisers Association of America
The Appraisers Association of America (AAA) has published Appraising Art: The Definitive Guide to Appraising the Fine and Decorative Arts, a 450-page, color-illustrated book that covers all aspects of appraising the fine and decorative arts, including connoisseurship, the marketplace, legal considerations, and more. Edited by the late Wendell Garret along with Helaine W. Fendelman, David A. Gallager, and Jane C. H. Jacob, Appraising Art will serve as an excellent resource for professionals in the arts, legal, insurance, and financial communities, as well as for private and corporate collectors. The book addresses nearly ninety topics, such as: the Appraisal Procedure; Comparables; The Effect of Regional Concerns on Value; Conservation Issues; Due Diligence and Authenticity; Appraising Works of Art for Tax Purposes; and Resolving Art Disputes. Among the fifty connoisseurship topics are: Old Master Paintings; American Paintings and Drawings; Contemporary Art; Photography; Arts and Crafts Furniture; Pottery and Porcelain; Gems and Jewelry; Historic Documents; and Entertainment Memorabilia. Appraising Art was designed by Patrick Seymour with Elena Penny and Tsang Seymour. The consulting editor was Margaret L.Kaplan, editor-at-large for Abrams Books. The Avery Group at Shapco Printing of Minneapolis, Minnesota, produced the book.
Art Historians of Southern California
In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the Art Historians of Southern California (AHSC) held its 2013 annual symposium at the museum on October 19, 2013. Longstanding partnerships with the schools of anthropology, humanities, and especially art history were integral to the Fowler’s dynamic collection of world art. This partnership provided a context for discussion considering the much-pondered valuation of the humanities. The Fowler’s development exemplified the expansion of art history in Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago’s Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (2004). A panel discussion, “The Art Academy: The Museum, Art History, and the Art Association,” addressed the classification of cultural objects within “world art” genres and asked the question “Can a humanities perspective be differentiated from scientific models?” The panel, chaired by Jane Chin Davidson of California State University, San Bernardino, and Sandra Esslinger of Mt. San Antonio College, included the following participants: Donald Preziosi, UCLA; Claire Farago, University of Colorado, Boulder; Selma Holo, University of Southern California; Lothar Von Falkenhausen, UCLA; and Gemma Rodrigues, Fowler Museum.
Association of Academic Museum and Galleries
The Association of Academic Museum and Galleries (AAMG) invites you to attend the AAMG/Kellogg Academic Museum and Gallery Leadership Seminar Northwestern University’s Kellogg School Center for Nonprofit Management from Sunday evening, June 22, through Friday afternoon, June 27, 2014. Piloted in 2012, the seminar has two main goals: to have an impact on the professional lives of the participating museum professionals and, though them, on the field as a whole. Dynamic, engaging, highly interactive by design and interspersed with team and individual problem-solving exercises in leadership and management, this intensive five-day certificate program will allow attendees to learn from one another and be guided and inspired by nationally recognized scholars drawn principally from Kellogg’s renowned faculty. Email your expression of interest to leadershipseminar@aamg-us.org to receive updated information about the program.
AAMG is excited to welcome our new Western regional representative: Meg Linton, director of galleries and exhibitions of the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California.
Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art
The Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) will sponsor two sessions, hold its annual business meeting, and conduct a special offsite visit at the CAA Annual Conference in Chicago in February 2014. Please visit AHNCA website and look under “AHNCA at CAA 2014” for the program details.
Peter Trippi, president of AHNCA, has organized a truly unique offsite visit for Friday, February 14, 2014. Both National Historic Landmarks, the American Arts and Crafts Second Presbyterian Church and the Glessner House Museum, designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, are located within two miles of the conference hotel (the Hilton Chicago). The total cost is $14 per person, payable on the day of the visits. If you would like to participate in this outing, please email Trippi before January 15, 2014, to confirm.
Foundations in Art: Theory and Education
Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE) will host two events this year at the CAA Annual Conference in Chicago. The affiliated-society session is “A Hybrid Practice: Getting Rid of Digital Media Courses,” and FATE will use its business meeting to host a regional conference, “Project Share.” The projects that are presented specifically use digital tools in the classroom and will be related to the affiliated-society session topic.
The presenters on “A Hybrid Practice” are: Elissa Armstrong, assistant professor and director of art foundation at Virginia Commonwealth University; Jenna Frye, coordinator of electronic media and culture at Maryland Institute College of Art; Mark Schatz, assistant professor and foundations coordinator at Kent State University; and Chris Yates, associate professor and director of foundation studies at Columbus College of Art and Design.
The “Project Share” presenters are: Heather Deyling, professor of foundation studies at the Savannah College of Art and Design; David Fobes, instructor in foundations at San Diego State University; Deborah Hall, associate professor in studio art at Skidmore College; Norberto Gomez, artist and independent scholar; and Harry St.Ours, professor of communication arts at Montgomery College.
Historians of Netherlandish Art
The next formal deadline for submitting manuscripts to Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, the peer-reviewed, open-access ejournal published by the Historians of Netherlandish Art (HNA), is March 1, 2014. In addition to longer articles, the journal now welcomes shorter notes on archival discoveries, iconographical issues, technical studies, and rediscovered works. For submission guidelines, see www.jhna.org or contact Alison Kettering (aketteri@jhna.org), senior editor, for more information.
HNA will hold its next conference June 5–7, 2014, in Boston, Massachusetts. The event will be held in cooperation with the American Association for Netherlandic Studies (AANS) and involve sessions and workshops with focus on Netherlandish art from 1350 to 1750. For submissions on art from 1750 to the present, please contact Henry Luttikhuizen, president of AANS. For the call for papers and more information, visit http://www.hnanews.org/hna/conferences/Call-for-Papers-Boston-2014.pdf.
International Sculpture Center
International Sculpture Center (ISC) has launched Search Feature for Web Special. Since April 2007, a new article not featured in Sculpture magazine has been posted in Web Special in the Online Member Area each month. Topics are aimed at assisting artists and include resource links, when applicable. With the new search feature, members can now find articles posted in Web Special by keywords, tags, or authors. Take a look at the comprehensive information and perspectives offered in Web Special today!
Each year ISC presents an award competition to its member colleges and universities as a means of supporting, encouraging, and recognizing the work of young sculptors and their supporting schools’ faculty and art program. The student-award winners participate in an exhibition at Grounds for Sculpture and in a traveling exhibition hosted by arts organizations across the country. Their work is also featured in Sculpture. Each winner receives a one-year ISC membership; all winners are eligible to apply for a fully sponsored residency to study in Switzerland. To nominate students for this competition, the nominees’ university must first be an ISC university-level member. University memberships cost $200 for institutions in the United States, Canada, and Mexico ($220 for international universities) and include a number of benefits. Students who are interested should talk to their professors about getting involved. To find out more about the program, please visit www.sculpture.org/StudentAwards/2014 or email studentawards@sculpture.org. Nomination deadline: January 1, 2014; University membership form due: March 17, 2014; online student nomination form deadline: March 24, 2014; online student submission form due: April 14, 2014.
Italian Art Society
The Italian Art Society (IAS) seeks proposals for papers for the annual IAS/Kress Lecture Series in Italy, which will take place in Pisa on May 29 or June 16, 2014 (deadline: January 4, 2014). The distinguished scholar selected will speak on a topic related to art of any period from Pisa or Tuscany and will receive an honorarium and lecture allowance.
At the 2014 CAA Annual Conference, IAS invites members to attend its breakfast business meeting at 7:30 AM on February 14, 2014, as well as its sessions on the same day: “Periodization Anxiety in Italian Art: Renaissance, Baroque, or Early Modern” at 9:30 AM and “‘Futuro Anteriore’: Cultural Self-Appropriation as Catalyst in the Art of Italy” at 12:30 PM.
The Program Committee is looking for submissions for IAS-sponsored sessions at the Society for Architectural Historians (Chicago, April 2015; deadline to IAS: December 1, 2014); and the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (New Orleans, October 2014; deadline to IAS: March 2014). Like IAS on Facebook, visit the website and popular Italian art blog, and follow the IAS at Academia.edu and on Twitter. All who are interested in Italian art history are welcomed to join IAS.
National Council of Arts Administrators
The forty-first annual meeting of the National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA) convened September 25–28, 2013, in Richmond, Virginia. The organization owes a debt of gratitude to Richard Roth, Joe Seipel, and Kelly Kerr of VCUarts for organizing a first-rate affair. Speakers included Adam Gopnik, essayist and staff writer for the New Yorker; Jessica Stockholder, sculptor and installation artist; Ben Katchor, cartoonist and MacArthur fellow; and Richard Shiff, Director, director of the Center for the Study of Modernism at the University of Texas at Austin.
Three new board members were elected at the meeting: Leslie Bellavance (Alfred University), Tom Berding (Michigan State University), and Nan Goggin (University of Illinois). They join returning directors Steve Bliss (Savannah College of Art and Design), Cora Lynn Deibler (University of Connecticut ), Andrea Eis (Oakland University, Treasurer), Amy Hauft (University of Texas at Austin, president), Jim Hopfensperger (Western Michigan University, past president), Sergio Soave (Ohio State University), Lydia Thompson (Texas Tech University), and Mel Ziegler (Vanderbilt University).
Activities at CAA’s 2014 Annual Conference in Chicago will include the annual NCAA reception (Thursday, February 13, 5:00–8:00 PM); an affiliated-society session, “Hot Problems/Cool Solutions in Arts Leadership”; and a fast-paced series of five-minute presentations on leadership (Friday, February 14, 5:30–7:00 PM). NCAA enthusiastically welcomes new members, current members, and all interested parties to attend its events.
Public Art Dialogue
Public Art Dialogue (PAD) has several special thematic issues of its scholarly journal, Public Art Dialogue, in progress. “Perspectives on Relational Art,” guest edited by Eli Robb, is in production. The call for submissions for “The Mural Issue,” which will be guest edited by Sally Webster and Sarah Schrank, just closed. There are two current calls for submission. The first is for an “Open Issue” (Fall 2014), to be coedited by Cher Krause Knight and Harriet F. Senie; the submission deadline is March 1, 2014. The second will be on “Digital Art” and guest edited by John Craig Freeman and Mimi Sheller; the submission deadline is September 15, 2014. PAD is published by Taylor and Francis, and for more information, consult the journal’s homepage, which provides detailed descriptions of the forthcoming journal and instructions for submissions. The fall 2013 PAD Newsletter features an interview with Senie and an article on Banksy.
Society for Photographic Education
Registration is now open for the fifty-first national conference of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE), titled “Collaborative Exchanges: Photography in Dialogue” and taking place March 6–9, 2014, in Baltimore, Maryland. Join 1,600 artists, educators, and photographic professionals for programming and dialogue that will fuel your creativity. Explore an exhibits fair featuring over seventy vendors showing the latest equipment, processes, publications, and schools with photo-related programs. Participate in one-on-one portfolio critiques and informal portfolio sharing and take advantage of student volunteer opportunities for reduced admission. Other conference highlights include a print raffle, silent auction, film screenings, exhibitions, tours, receptions, and a dance party. Preview the conference schedule and register online.
Society of Architectural Historians
The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) seeks session proposals for the sixty-eighth annual conference, taking place April 15–19, 2015, in Chicago, Illinois. Celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of its founding, SAH will offer six concurrent paper sessions, in six modules over two days, for a total of thirty-six paper sessions. The society invites both members and nonmembers to chair a session. Since the principal purpose of the conference is to inform attendees of the general state of research in architectural history and related disciplines, session proposals covering every period in the history of architecture and all aspects of the built environment, including landscape and urban history, are encouraged. Session proposals are to be submitted via email by January 15, 2014, to Ken Tadashi Oshima, general chair of the SAH sixty-eighth annual conference, with a cc to Kathy Sturm, SAH director of programs.
Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture
The Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) has planned an active schedule at the annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), to be held November 21–24, 2013, in Boston, Massachusetts. The society will host nine sessions ranging from the imperial era to the present day, including panels that focus on textiles, performance art, artist associations, and collectives, as well as sessions devoted to Russia in the 1890s and Prague in the 1920s. Please join SHERA for its business meeting, scheduled for Friday, November 22, 3:00–4:45 PM.
Since the launch of its website in August 2013, SHERA’s membership has nearly doubled. Members can contribute items to the news blog by sending them to SHERA.artarchitecture@gmail.com. SHERA is pleased to welcome the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as a new institutional member.
Brooklyn Museum Exhibition Catalogue Wins the Inaugural Alice Award
posted by CAA — Nov 01, 2013
Furthermore and Joan K. Davidson, the grants in publishing program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund is pleased to present the inaugural Alice award to the Brooklyn Museum for Youth and Beauty Art of the American Twenties, edited by Teresa A. Carbone and published by Skira Rizzoli Publishing. Awarded in honor of Alice M. Kaplan, the prize recognizes this book’s fresh approach to and keen analysis of its subject and for its general excellence. The Alice was presented to the Brooklyn Museum on October 29, 2013, at the Morgan Library and Museum.
The jury comprised: Paula Cooper of Paula Cooper Gallery; William M. Griswold, director of the Morgan Library and Museum; Gianfranco Monacelli, publisher of Monacelli Press; Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale University Art Gallery; and Massimo Vignelli of Vignelli Associates.
The Alice was established in 2013 by Joan K. Davidson, president of Furthermore, to honor her mother, Alice Manheim Kaplan. Alice loved and collected the illustrated book as a work of art in itself and an essential document of a civilized society. This new award is intended to buttress the kind of slow reading movement that recognizes and cherishes the lasting values of the well-made illustrated book, and the special sense of intimacy it affords. In the fast-changing publishing universe, with its ever rising costs, the continuing life of high-quality printed books will depend upon the determined commitment of writers, editors, designers, and publishers, and their friends. The Alice is dedicated to that heroic commitment and the accomplished books that result from it.
The launching of the award also marks Furthermore’s record so far of financial assistance to some one thousand publications, for a total of $5 million. The Alice carries an award of $25,000. Each year a jury of leaders in publishing and the arts will select the Alice book from the hundreds of eligible titles that have been honored with a grant from Furthermore.
Furthermore grants in publishing is a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund that supports the publication of significant visual books—and will help to keep them coming in the years ahead. For information on the Alice, please contact Elizabeth Howard at 917-692-8588.
Reception at the Art Institute of Chicago
posted by Emmanuel Lemakis — Oct 21, 2013
The Opening Reception for the 2014 Annual Conference will take place in the Art Institute of Chicago’s recently inaugurated Modern Wing on Wednesday evening, February 12, from 7:00 to 9:30 PM. Designed by the Pritzker Prize–winning architect Renzo Piano, this stunning addition to the venerable institution provides a new home for the museum’s renowned collection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art.
Tickets are required for admission and cost $35 for members and $45 for nonmembers. Availability is limited; please purchase your ticket online by January 10, 2014. Tickets will not be sold at the door at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Image Caption
The Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago during the reception for the CAA Annual Conference in 2010 (photograph by Bradley Marks).
Institutional News
posted by CAA — Oct 17, 2013
Read about the latest news from institutional members.
Institutional News is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
October 2013
The Archives of American Art, a branch of the Smithsonian Institution based in New York and Washington, DC, has received a $37,500 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support its first symposium on digital humanities and American art, scheduled for November 2013.
The Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois has received a $125,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support an exhibition called Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture, and Cuisine, which will open in November 2013.
The Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois has received a $100,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support the development and implementation of “American Sources: Using Visual Art in the Humanities Curriculum,” a yearlong professional-development program that will explore the use of American artworks as primary documents and guide participants in the development of related curriculum for middle and high school students in the region.
Artspace, a nonprofit art organization in New Haven, Connecticut, has received a 2013 grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
The Association of Research Institutes in Art History, an organization based in Miami Beach, Florida, has accepted a $75,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support three research fellowships in American art.
The Bard Graduate Center in New York has recieved a 2013 grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. The school will use the funds for the exhibition Artek: Design, Domesticity, and the Public Sphere.
The Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, Quebec, has received a 2013 grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. The institution will use the funds for a publication, Chandigarh and Casablanca: Modern Urbanism, New Geographies.
Columbia College Chicago in Illinois has applied a $40,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art toward a professional-development program for teachers in twenty-five public schools in Chicago for the 2012–13 academic year.
DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, has received a $12,560 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support an exhibition called For and against Modernity: The Armory Show + 100, which took place at the DePaul Art Museum earlier this year.
Elmhurst College in Elmhurst, Illinois, has spent a $18,870 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art on a public symposium that explored the role of humor in American art of the 1960s through the 1980s. The event took place on April 27, 2013, in partnership with the DePaul Art Museum.
The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California, has acquired the archive of the photographer Lewis Baltz, which includes his negatives, prints and proofs, ephemera, photographs, and publications.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York has accepted a $200,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support its forthcoming exhibition, Robert Motherwell: The Early Collages.
The Herron Art Library at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis has become the only American library housing a permanent art collection honoring the literary history of Iraq. The library signed an agreement with an international coalition of artists and writers to preserve and showcase a collection of more than three hundred printed materials remembering the destruction of al-Mutanabbi Street, the centuries-old literary center of Baghdad.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and the National Museum of Korea in Seoul have collaborated on an exhibition project called America: Painting a Nation, which received $849,968 in funds from the Terra Foundation of American Art.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has accepted a $300,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support American West in Bronze, 1850–1925, an exhibition that will open in December 2013 and later travel to Denver, Colorado, and to China.
Montana State University in Bozeman has accepted a $30,140 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support an international scholarly conference, “Dialect[ic]s of Diplomacy: American and French Political Portraits during the Revolutionary and Federal Areas, circa 1776–1815.” The event will take place at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, in September 2014.
The Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has created a new website. The school invites students, faculty, alumni, and others to visit the site and return often for updates.
New York University has received a $20,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support an international graduate-student symposium, “Mapping the Landscape: Geography, Power, and the Imagination in the Art of the Americas,” which was held March 7–8, 2013.
Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago has accepted a $40,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art on behalf of the Chicago Teachers’ Center. The funds support the second year of a three-year initiative for public-school teachers called “Studio Thinking and American Art.”
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia has established a new endowment for the purchase of contemporary works of art. The school’s goal is to greatly increase an aspect of the acquisitions program that has long been critical to building the renowned collection of the academy’s museum.
San Francisco State University in California has received a $95,165 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support an exhibition in its Fine Arts Gallery called The Moment for Ink, which took place earlier in 2013.
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois has applied a 2013 grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for a public lecture “Toyo Ito: Architecture after 3.11,” taking place on October 15, 2013.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, has acquired one hundred photographs from the Irving Penn Foundation. The gift includes rare street photographs from the late 1930s and 1940s, many of which are unpublished; images of postwar Europe; iconic portraits of figures such as Agnes de Mille, Langston Hughes, and Truman Capote; color photographs made for magazine editorials and commercial advertising; self-portraits; and some of Penn’s most recognizable fashion and still-life photographs. An exhibition is planned for 2015.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum and its Renwick Gallery, both in Washington, DC, have received a $25,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support travel by a to-be-appointed international member of the American Art editorial board to strengthen the journal’s global ties and networks.
Tate, a family of four museums in England, has accepted a $435,546 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support the appointment of a three-year Terra Research Fellow in American Art (2014–17) as part of the “American Art Initiative.”
The Terra Foundation for American Art in Chicago, Illinois, has awarded itself a $733,210 grant to support a three-year initiative, “American Art at the Core of Learning,” which helps cultural organizations in Chicago to address the new Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts.
The Terra Foundation for American Art in Chicago, Illinois, has applied a $117,000 grant toward supporting its international publication initiative, “Perspectives in American Art,” which explores fundamental ideas shaping American art and culture.
The Terra Foundation for American Art in Chicago, Illinois, has earmarked a $79,000 grant to support the 2014 Terra Research Travel Grants, which have been awarded annually since 2003.
The Terra Foundation for American Art in Chicago, Illinois, has awarded itself a $150,000 grant to support a scholarly peer-reviewed anthology to accompany the single-painting exhibition, Samuel F. B. Morse’s “Gallery of the Louvre” and the Art of Invention, during its upcoming tour of American museums.
The Terra Foundation for American Art in Chicago, Illinois, has used a $39,000 grant to support planning for programming focused on Chicago’s art and design legacy. The funds support an advisory committee to assess program and content ideas for the initiative and to develop an initiative plan, including various kinds of public and K–12 programs, archival projects, publications, and more.
The University of Glasgow in Scotland has won a $100,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support an inventory of historical American art in public collections in the United Kingdom.
The University of Kentucky in Lexington has taken a $61,443 grant from the Terra Foundaiton for American Art to support an academic conference called “American Art in Exhibition: Presentations of American Art at Home and Abroad from the Nineteenth Century to the Present,” that will take place November 15–16, 2013, at Tsinghua University in China.
The University of Nottingham in Nottingham, England, has used a $17,450 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support a two-day symposium, “Art across the Black Diaspora: Visualizing Slavery in America,” which took place in May 2013 at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford.
The University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, has received a 2013 grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts to help produce an exhibition called The Uncertainty of Enclosure: Leo Saul Berk and Bruce Goff, to be held in summer 2014.
The Wolfsonian at Florida International University in Miami Beach, Florida, has received a 2013 grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. The museum will use the funds to publish a special issue of the Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts on Turkey.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Oct 16, 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.
Were the First Artists Mostly Women?
Women made most of the oldest-known cave paintings, suggests a new analysis of ancient handprints. Most scholars had assumed these ancient artists were predominantly men, so the finding overturns decades of archaeological dogma. The archaeologist Dean Snow analyzed hand stencils found in eight cave sites in France and Spain. By comparing the relative lengths of certain fingers, he determined that three-quarters of the handprints were female. (Read more in National Geographic.)
How to Pronounce Artists’ Names, Vol. 1
The art world isn’t really as snobbish as depicted in movies and TV shows like Bravo’s Gallery Girls, and it’s apt to be liberally forgiving of most uncouth behavior … with one notable exception: you can’t get away with mispronouncing artists’ names. To ensure you avoid such embarrassments, consult this handy guide to pronouncing some of the thorniest artist names out there. (Read more from Artspace.)
Who Holds the Rights?
Faculty must defend their rights to their intellectual property, which are increasingly under threat, according to a draft report released by the American Association of University Professors. The report, called “Defending the Freedom to Innovate: Faculty Intellectual Property Rights after Stanford v. Roche,” argues that university attempts to assert ownership over faculty intellectual property have accelerated since—and in response to—that 2011 US Supreme Court decision. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Why the Detroit Institute of Arts Is One Asset That Kevyn Orr Shouldn’t Touch
Detroit’s emergency manager Kevyn Orr has taken on a Herculean task. He must untangle decades of mismanagement and bureaucratic negligence and devise a way for the city to meet its obligations to, among others, private contractors and hundreds of police officers, firefighters, and civil servants. To do so, he must view every potential solution and option dispassionately in order to elaborate a fair and balanced plan to pay the staggering debt. What he should not do is view the stunning collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts as a fungible asset, available to satisfy the city’s creditors. (Read more in the Detroit Free Press.)
Hunting Detroit’s Masterworks of Architecture before They Go Extinct
Though Detroit has recently been looking like it was hit by a convoy of mile-wide firenados, there remain signs of architectural grandeur illustrating why it was once known as the Paris of the Midwest. Perhaps nowhere is this faded beauty more palpable than in the large-format photography of Philip Jarmain, a Vancouver native who’s spent three years shooting Detroit’s sublime edifices, sometimes just months before they were wiped out by bulldozers. (Read more in Atlantic Cities.)
AbEx Fakes Scandal Silences the Experts
The crisis around fake Abstract Expressionist works sold in New York—around forty of which were handled by the now-defunct Knoedler Gallery—has sent shockwaves through the art market and is having a chilling effect on scholars. As well as a federal investigation, there has been a slew of civil lawsuits. (Read more in the Art Newspaper.)
Should Academics Write for Free?
In 2006, I published my first article in an academic journal, a lengthy analysis debunking the existence of an Uzbek terrorist organization. I called my mother to tell her the news. “Great,” she said. “What are they paying you?” “Nothing.” She laughed. Then she realized I was serious. (Read more in Chronicle Vitae.)
Why No Nobel Prize for Art?
Science, literature, and peace are recognized—but why is there not a Nobel prize for art? Since the Nobel was first awarded in 1901, it has always included literature in its mainly scientific and political mission. This reflects the hierarchy of the arts at the beginning of the twentieth century. (Read more in the Guardian.)
Grants, Awards, and Honors
posted by CAA — Oct 15, 2013
CAA recognizes its members for their professional achievements, be it a grant, fellowship, residency, book prize, honorary degree, or related award.
Grants, Awards, and Honors is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
October 2013
Karen Barzman from Harvard University’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been appointed visiting professor at Villa I Tatti in Florence, Italy, for the fall 2013 semester. She will work on a book project called “The Limits of Identity: Venice, Dalmatia, and the Representations of Difference.”
Ruthann Godollei, DeWitt Wallace Professor of Art in the Department of Art and Art History at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, was awarded the 2013 Thomas Jefferson Award for teaching and service to the college.
Michelle Kogan, an artist based in Chicago, Illinois, has received a 2013 Individual Artist Program Grant from the city of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events Grants Department.
Jacqueline Marie Musacchio has been awarded the inaugural ARIAH Prize for Online Publishing from the Association of Research Institutes in Art History. Musacchio’s winning article, “Infesting the Galleries of Europe: The Copyist Emma Conant Church in Paris and Rome,” was published in the Autumn 2011 issue of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide.
Kori Newkirk, an artist based in Los Angeles, California, has won a $10,000 FOCAFellowship Award for 2013 from the Fellows of Contemporary Art.
Josette Urso has received a 2013–14 Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant for her painting.