Donate Now
Join Now      Sign In
 

CAA News Today

Affiliated Society News for September 2013

posted by CAA — Sep 09, 2013

American Council for Southern Asian Art

The American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA) will hold its sixteenth biennial meeting at the University of California, Los Angeles, from November 7 to 10, 2013. The conference program and registration information can be found on the ACSAA website or as a PDF.

American Institute for Conservation

The forty-second meeting of the American Institute for Conservation (AIC) will take place May 28–31, 2014, in San Francisco, California. The event, whose theme is “Conscientious Conservation: Sustainable Choices in Collection Care,” will showcase current practice, projects, tools, and ideas in sustainable preventive conservation and collection care. Conservation and collection-care professionals routinely incorporate preventive measures into the guardianship of cultural heritage. Coupled with the awareness that this work takes place within the larger context of an increasingly interconnected and vulnerable global society, economy, and environment, conservators have become more dedicated to sustainability. The new AIC Collection Care Network and the AIC Sustainability Committee are combining forces to develop a program for 2014 that explores how these two concepts—preventative measures and sustainability—are changing the way conservation is practiced.

Association of Art Editors

The newly revised Association of Art Editors Style Guide is now available. The 2013 revision of the online-only style guide, first published by the Association of Art Editors (AAE) in 2006, was created with a dual aim: to bring the document into alignment with sixteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style; and to make it reflect changes in manuscript preparation, editing, and publishing that have occurred since 2006—mainly due to evolving technologies. There’s a new Electronic Media and Devices section, and the sections for Photographs and Artwork and for Manuscript Preparation contain much fresh material. The former Reference Books section has been renamed Reference Sources, because of its mix of print and online resources. Technology-related terms have been added to the Words and Terms list and woven into various other sections. The Bibliography section has been reorganized to display more clearly the two systems of citation (notes and bibliography, author-date), while the Notes section has been substantially updated. Other sections underwent less extensive but equally necessary updates. In tandem with the revision, an extensive chart, Handy Guide to Metric Conversions with Fractions, has been added to the AAE website (see Helpful Links).

Association of Art Historians

The Association of Art Historians (AAH) has announced that Christine Riding is the organization’s new chair-elect. She will start her three-year term in April 2014, when AAH will be celebrating its fortieth anniversary. Riding is senior curator and head of art at the Royal Museums Greenwich. She was previously curator of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British art at Tate Britain and has held curatorial positions at the Palace of Westminster, the Museum of London, and the Wallace Collection, as well as being the former deputy editor of the association’s journal, Art History. AAH looks forward to working with Riding on its development as the United Kingdom–based organization responsible for promoting the professional practice and public understanding of art history.

Historians of British Art

The Historians of British Art (HBA) offers a travel grant to a graduate student who will be presenting a paper on British art or visual culture at an academic conference in 2014. The award of $750 is intended to offset travel costs. Applicants must be current members of HBA. To apply, send a letter of request, a copy of the letter of acceptance from the organizer of the conference session, an abstract of the paper to be presented, a budget of estimated expenses (noting what items may be covered by other resources), and a CV to Renate Dohmen, HBA Prize Committee Chair. Deadline: September 15, 2013.

Historians of Islamic Art Association

The Historians of Islamic Art Association (HIAA) will hold a majlis (meeting) with four presentations on October 10 in conjunction with the 2013 conference of the Middle East Studies Association in New Orleans, Louisiana. HIAA is also pleased to announce that its fourth biennial symposium will take place October 16–18, 2014, at the new Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Ontario. The call for papers and further symposium information are available on the HIAA website. The deadline for proposals is October 18, 2013.

International Association of Word and Image Studies

The Max Nänny Prize for the Best Article in Word and Image Studies (€500) is awarded every three years on the occasion of the triennial conference of the International Association of Word and Image Studies (IAWIS/AIERTI). IAWIS membership is not required. Articles submitted must have been already published. The date of publication should not be earlier than three years before the submission deadline. Articles should be sent in triplicate to IAWIS/AIERTI’s secretary: Catriona MacLeod, Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Pennsylvania, 745 Williams Hall, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305. The deadline for submissions is October 31, 2013.

International Sculpture Center

The International Sculpture Center (ISC) is accepting nominations for the 2014 Outstanding Educator Award, which recognizes individual artist-educators who have excelled at teaching sculpture in institutions of higher learning. Candidates for this award are masters of sculptural processes and techniques who have devoted their careers to the education of the next generation and to the advancement of the field of sculpture as a whole. Nominations for the Outstanding Educator Award will be accepted through October 25, 2013. Anyone can nominate a qualified educator: submissions are not limited to participants in the United States; international submissions are welcomed and encouraged. Award recipients receive benefits such as a featured article in Sculpture magazine, a lifetime ISC professional-level membership, and an award ceremony to be held at their academic institution. Educational institutions of awardees also receive benefits, including recognition in Sculpture and a one-year ISC university-level membership.

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 to present will speak on a topic related to the art of any period from Pisa or Tuscany and will receive an honorarium and supplementary lecture allowance. IAS is also pleased to provide travel grants to graduate students and recent PhD recipients presenting conference papers about the art and architecture of Italy (deadline: November 1, 2013). The second annual IAS research and publication grant will be offered to a scholar of Italian art seeking support for costs related to research and publication (deadline: November 1, 2013). It is more worthwhile than ever to join IAS. For details on the application requirements for the lecture series and for the travel and publication grants, please visit the IAS website. Members can contribute news items and articles for the IAS newsletter: please contact newsletter@italianartsociety.org. IAS has a new Italian art blog on Tumblr created by the IAS webmaster, Anne Leader. To stay current, visit the website, like IAS on Facebook, and follow IAS on Twitter.

New Media Caucus

Media-N, the journal of the New Media Caucus (NMC), has published its summer issue, “CAA Conference Edition 2013,” an annual publication showcasing NMC-sponsored conference proceedings. At CAA in New York, NMS held two panels and two events. The new edition includes essays by panel members Jenny Vogel, David Stout, David Schwartz, Nadar Assor, Clark Shaffer Stoecklet, Micha Maya Cárdenas, Zach Blas, Pinar Yoldas, Jacob Gaboury, and Alison Reed. It also includes artist statements from event participants Margaret Dolinsky, Belinda Haikes, Arthur Liou, James Morgan, Ed Osborn, Linda Post, Elia Vargas, Valentina Vella, Doo-Sung Yoo, Meredith Drum, Meredith Hoy, Paul Johson, Carolyn Kane, Leslie Raymond, Nicolas Ruley, and Ellen Wetmore.

Media-N publishes thematic editions in the fall and spring of each year in addition to the conference edition. As part of an ongoing commitment to examining new-media works and their present theoretical frameworks; the spring 2013 issue dealt with “Tracing/New/Media/Feminisms.” This provocative edition mapped the topic by way of twelve international contributors: Faith Wilding; Morehshin Allahyari and Jennifer Way; Annina Rüst; Kim Sawchuk (Studio XX) and Stéphanie Lagueux (Matricules) in conversation with Media-N; Meighan Ellis; Colleen Keough; Eleanor Dare; and Laura Gemini and Federica Timeto in conversation with Lynn Hershman Leeson.

National Art Education Association

The National Art Education Association (NAEA) is now publishing its academic journal, Studies in Art Education, in both print and digital format. The first digital issue (vol. 54, no. 4), posted on the organization’s website for free access, is a special issue on underserved populations. The forthcoming September issue of Studies in Art Education will focus on street art and include three visual essays by graffiti artists.

NAEA has just published a new research book, Teaching and Learning Emergent Research Methodologies in Art Education, edited by Candace Jesse Stout. The authors explore innovative ways to conceptualize what research in art, education, and human experience might be, what it might mean, and what it might do.

Public Art Dialogue

The spring 2013 issue of Public Art Dialogue, published by Taylor and Francis, has been edited by Cher Krause Knight and Harriet F. Senie. This special issue, called “Memorials 2: The Culture of Remembrance,” features seven articles: “L’Oiseau lunaire: Joan Miró’s to 45 rue Blomet” by Scott D. Juall; “Careless Talk Costs Lives: Beth Derbyshire’s Public Art in the London Underground” by Katherine Ingrey; “Competing for Memory: Argentina’s Parque de la memoria” by Marisa M. Lerer; “Commemorating the Oklahoma City Bombing: Reframing Tragedy as Triumph” by Harriet F. Senie; “Ground Floor Memorial” by Judith Shea; “Response: Louise Bourgeois’ The Touch of Jane Addams” by Mary Jane Jacob; and “Border Memorial: Frontera de los muertos” by John Craig Freeman. The journal also includes two book reviews: one by Cameron Cartiere of This One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context by Grant Kester; and a second by Janet Zweig of Locating the Producers: Durational Approaches to Public Art, edited by Paul O’Neill and Claire Doherty. Public Art Dialogue is a membership benefit of the organization.

Society for Photographic Education

The Society for Photographic Education (SPE) offers student scholarships to offset the cost of attending the next national conference, to be held March 6–9, 2014, in Baltimore, Maryland. Each award includes a $500 travel stipend, a conference fee waiver, and a one-year SPE membership. Deadline: November 1, 2013.

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 launched a new website featuring information about the organization, a news blog, member research, and a resources page with over one hundred listings and links to museums, online resources, and more. Prospective members may now join SHERA online through a secure PayPal system. Please contact SHERA’s officers to provide comments and suggestions about the website and to send contributions to the news blog and the resources page. The website was designed and built by Adam Snetman, founder of Starting Now, with input from SHERA’s officers. Special thanks are due to Kathleen Duff and Anna Sokolina for their outstanding contributions to the resources page. SHERA will continue to use its listserv for questions and discussion. You may subscribe to the listserv at http://lists.oakland.edu/mailman/listinfo/shera. Sending an email to shera@lists.oakland.edu will post your message to all list subscribers.

SHERA welcomes two new institutional members: the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, which houses over 750 works of Russian art, many of them from the collection of Thomas P. Whitney; and the Harriman Institute at Columbia University in New York, one of the world’s leading academic institutions devoted to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies.

Southeastern College Art Conference

The Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) will hold its sixty-ninth annual meeting in Greensboro, North Carolina, October 30–November 2, 2013, at the Sheraton Greensboro at Four Seasons and Koury Convention Center. The University of North Carolina, Greensboro, will host; Lawrence Jenkens is the conference director. The internationally renowned artist and North Carolina resident Mel Chin has agreed to deliver the conference’s keynote address. Art in Odd Places (AiOP), which presents visual and performance art in unexpected places, will host AiOP Greensboro 2013 during the conference. Approximately 140 sessions and panels and the SECAC 2013 Juried Exhibition will be conference highlights.

SECAC has announced the results of its board election. Elected to a first term: Laura Amrhein, University of Arkansas, Little Rock. Reelected to a second term: Amy Broderick, Florida International University; Vida Hull, East Tennessee State University; Benjamin Harvey, Mississippi State University; Kurt Pitluga, Slippery Rock University (at-large); and Beth Mulvaney, Meredith College (secretary/treasurer). Richard Doubleday of Louisiana State University has been appointed to fill the Louisiana seat.

The latest issue of Southeastern College Art Conference Review (vol. 45, no. 2) is now available.

Women’s Caucus for Art

The International Caucus of the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) has created a global opportunity for women in a project called Half the Sky: Intersections in Social Practice Art. WCA is fortunate to offer an unprecedented art-based cultural exchange for American women artists and essayists to exhibit and share their work with women artists in China at the LuXun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang, China. The academy is interested in providing an opportunity for Chinese women artists to interact with artists from the United States, to learn more about feminist art history in the West, and to share their art with American artists. The exhibition will run from April 15 to 30, 2014, at the academy’s gallery; essays will be included in the exhibition catalogue. The submission deadline for art is October 6, 2013, and October 13, 2013 for essays. Calls for submission are open to all self-identified women in the US. A limited number of delegates may be selected from those whose works are accepted into Half the Sky. For more details and to apply, go to http://wcainternationalcaucus.weebly.com/half-the-sky-2014shenyang-china.html.

Filed under: Affiliated Societies

Herb & Dorothy 50×50 Premieres in New York

posted by Nia Page — Sep 05, 2013

The new art documentary film Herb & Dorothy 50×50, the sequel to the beloved Herb & Dorothy, opens on September 13, 2013, at IFC Center in New York. Join Fine Line Media on the opening weekend for special appearances and postscreening Q&As by the director Megumi Sasaki, the art collector Dorothy Vogel, and prominent contemporary artists in the Vogel Collection.

Herb and Dorothy Vogel were two ordinary New Yorkers—a postal worker and librarian, respectively—who built a world-class collection of modern and contemporary art with their modest salaries and then donated it, in its entirety, to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. They never sold a piece for profit, and when the collection grew too large even for the National Gallery, the Vogels launched an unprecedented gift project that distributed fifty works of art to one museum in each of the fifty states in America—a total of 2,500 works.

Early-bird tickets for the screening of Herb & Dorothy 50×50 at IFC Theater can be purchased in advance. Use Facebook and Twitter to keep up with the film’s activities.

Following the New York premiere, the film will screen in forty theaters and museums across the United States; please see the full theater list for a location close to you. Fine Line Media would love to reach out to colleges and universities near these venues to see if there might be the possibility of joining forces to promote the film. Fine Line Media would also deeply appreciate the chance to connect with schools that do not have a screening planned near them to discuss the possibility of showing Herb & Dorothy 50×50 at their institution.

Watch the Trailer

Filed under: CAA News

News from the Art and Academic Worlds

posted by Christopher Howard — Sep 04, 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.

Higher-Ed Associations Form Joint Steering Group to Build Federated System for Publicly Funded Research

The Association of Research Libraries, the Association of American Universities, and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities have announced the formation of a joint steering group to advance a proposed network of digital repositories at universities, libraries, and other research institutions across the United States that will provide long-term public access to federally funded research articles and data. (Read more from the Association of Research Libraries.)

Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology

Online education arguably came of age in the last year, with the explosion of massive open online courses driving the public’s (and politicians’) interest in digitally delivered courses and contributing to the perception that they represent not only higher education’s future, but its present. Faculty members, by and large, still aren’t buying—and they are particularly skeptical about the value of MOOCs, Inside Higher Ed’s new Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology suggests. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

The Berlin Decision: Old Masters Stay Put

Jeffrey Hamburger, the Harvard professor behind the petition, now more than a year old, asking Prussian authorities to reconsider their plan to mothball half of Berlin’s collection of old masters so they could place a modern art collection in the Gemäldegalerie, its current home, is declaring victory. And, true, the old-master paintings will not move from their current location. (Read more in Real Clear Arts.)

Insider Tips from the Art World’s Social-Media Pros

Just a few years ago most major museums’ social-media strategy consisted of a sporadically updated Facebook page and little else. Today, social media is a key aspect of art organizations’ outreach. Many institutions maintain profiles on multiple platforms, from Tumblr and Twitter to Instagram and YouTube, updating each one multiple times throughout the day. But with this expansion in the volume of content and the number of channels through which it’s posted has also come a better understanding of the role social media can play in helping museums and art organizations accomplish their goals. (Read more from Blouin Artinfo.)

A Conversation with an Artist/Nonprofit Worker about Her Money

I’m 29. I work in the communications department at a nonprofit in Manhattan and live in Brooklyn. Currently my salary is $39,750. Benefits include health insurance, life insurance (which is free via the health insurance), optional dental and vision, and 401(k). Public transit, parking, and childcare can be put on a prepaid card pre-tax. My office doesn’t participate in any federally available tax breaks for reimbursing bike expenses, which irks me since I mostly bike there. There’s also an FSA card for healthcare costs not covered by insurance, like copays and glasses. (Read more in the Billfold.)

Discovering Open-Access Art History

This article evaluates the indexing of open-access art journals in four frequently used art indexes: Art Full Text, ARTBibliographies Modern, Art and Architecture Complete, and Bibliography of the History of Art/International Bibliography of Art. The authors also compare the indexing of open-access journals in Google Scholar to that in the traditional indexes mentioned above and demonstrate that the content coverage from commercial indexes currently lags behind that of Google Scholar. This article argues that increased indexing of open-access art journals in the traditional, subject-specific indexes will be integral to their acceptance within the discipline of art history. (Read more in the Serials Librarian via Alex Watkins 123)

Help Desk: Art Fairs Everywhere

I may be in an enviable position, but it is a sticky one nonetheless. I’m getting to the position where I may be represented by multiple galleries that want to show my work at art fairs. With the rise of the art fair as a way of selling and promoting artists, how might I go about deciding which gallery will show my work at a fair? (Read more in Daily Serving.)

Academy Fight Song

This essay starts with utopia—the utopia known as the American university. It is the finest educational institution in the world, everyone tells us. Indeed, to judge by the praise that is heaped upon it, the American university may be our best institution, period. With its peaceful quadrangles and prosperity-bringing innovation, the university is more spiritually satisfying than the church, more nurturing than the family, more productive than any industry. (Read more in the Baffler.)

Filed under: CAA News

Dmitrii V. Sarabianov: In Memoriam

posted by CAA — Aug 21, 2013

Alison Hilton is Wright Family Professor of Art History at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

Dmitrii V. Sarabianov, a Russian art historian and a specialist on nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, died in Moscow on July 19, 2013. He was 89 years old. Sarabianov was one of the great art historians of his generation, those who began their scholarly careers during and following World War II.

Born on October 10, 1923, into the family of a Marxist philosopher, Sarabianov showed an early interest in the arts, especially poetry and music, as well as camping and athletics. Soon after he began his undergraduate studies in 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. He joined the army to serve as a translator, was wounded twice, and received several medals for military merit. After the war Sarabianov completed his undergraduate work at Moscow State University and was admitted into the school’s graduate program in art history, earning his candidate’s degree in 1952.

In 1954 he began work at Moscow’s prestigious Institute of Art History, first as a senior researcher and later as deputy director. From 1966 to 1996 Sarabianov taught and served as the head of the Art History Department at Moscow State University. He earned his doctorate in 1971. (In Russia this signifies substantial scholarly achievement beyond the candidate’s degree; it is roughly equivalent to full professorship.) Sarabianov became a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1987 and was elected to the rank of academician five years later.

Sarabianov was an inspiring teacher and mentor whose influence guided the careers of many Russian academics and museum scholars for several generations. Even for those who did not encounter him directly, Sarabianov’s publications—numbering more than 360 books and articles—set a standard for scholarship recognized both in Russia and abroad. Subjects of his monographs, many of them translated, include important nineteenth-century artists, among them Pavel Fedotov, Orest Kiprenskii, Aleksei Venetsianov, Ilya Repin, and Valentin Serov, as well as key figures in early-twentieth-century art such as Vasilii Kandinsky, Pavel Kuznetsov, Robert Falk, Liubov Popova, and Kazimir Malevich. What distinguishes Sarabianov’s work is the scope and originality of his interpretations of Russian art movements. He was among the first to write about Russian nineteenth-century painting in relation to European art, and he published a path-breaking study of international Art Nouveau in 1989. His book Russian Art: From Neoclassicism to the Avant Garde 1800–1917 (1990) is considered the fundamental text on the subject.

Sarabianov always took his civic responsibility as an academic very seriously. He spoke up at meetings, defended intellectual freedom, and voted on policy questions. In 2005, he and colleagues in Moscow’s major museums and other art institutions created the National Organization of Art Experts (NOEXI) to monitor and cope with the unprecedented demands of the chaotic art market in Russia and to establish means of ensuring professional credibility and trust.

Regarded by his peers, his former students, and his readers as a scholar of absolute integrity, Dmitrii Sarabianov will be missed most for his immense charm and kindness. He is survived by his wife, Elena Borisovna Murina, and his sons, Andrei and Vladimir Sarabianov.

Filed under: Obituaries

News from the Art and Academic Worlds

posted by Christopher Howard — Aug 21, 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.

Almanac of Higher Education 2013

The Chronicle of Higher Education takes the measure of higher education in its 2013–14 almanac, an annual compendium of data on colleges regarding the profession, students, diversity, finance, technology, and international issues. This year’s almanac features many new tables and charts along with the familiar ones. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

A Guide to the Web’s Growing Set of Free Image Collections

The J. Paul Getty Trust has launched its Open Content Program, making more than 4,600 high-quality images of artwork available for free online. Though works by van Gogh, Rembrandt, and Dürer had already fallen into the public domain, the Getty’s program makes their digital reproductions much easier to use. The Getty is not the first museum to put so many images online this year. The Atlantic has listed the museums and research institutions that have large, high-quality, free-to-use collections of historically or aesthetically notable images online. (Read more in the Atlantic).

Help Desk: Pressure to Review

I’m a new arts administrator and live in a midsized city. I started writing art reviews last year and now feel pressure to write about my artist friends’ work. It’s not like they are asking me directly, but hints have been dropped. I have no problem reviewing work that I think is good; the problem is that I like some people very much but don’t think their work is that great. How do I avoid reviewing work I don’t like without losing my friends? (Read more in Daily Serving.)

Christie’s Appraisal Will Reveal Value of Detroit Institute of Arts’ Collection

Art museums treat estimated values of their art like state secrets. In fact, major museums such as the Detroit Institute of Arts don’t even know precisely what all of their multi-million-dollar treasures are worth. When officials from the New York–based auction house Christie’s finish formally appraising city-owned works in Detroit this fall, the results will open an unprecedented public window into the market value of thousands of artworks at a top American museum. (Read more in the Detroit Free Press.)

Feminist Anti-MOOC

At first glance, “Feminism and Technology” sounds like another massive open online open course (MOOC) that would involve video components and be available online to anyone, with no charge. But don’t look for this course in any MOOC catalogue. “Feminism and Technology” is taking a few MOOC elements but then changing them in ways consistent with feminist pedagogy to create a distributed open collaborative course (DOCC). (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

More Smiles? More Money

Last November, the artist Martha Rosler had her first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, an installation and performance piece called Meta-Monumental Garage Sale. It was, in fact, an enormous garage sale, with heaps of toys, furniture, clothes, and crockery arranged on a tidy maze of racks and tables winding through the museum’s main atrium. The show continued a project Rosler began in 1973 with Monumental Garage Sale, a performance she staged as a graduate student at UC San Diego and later re-created in museums all over the world. Like its predecessors, Meta-Monumental Garage Sale was a meditation on value. (Read more from N+1.)

Jasper Johns’s Assistant Charged with Stealing the Artist’s Work

In the twenty-seven years that James Meyer worked for Jasper Johns, the assistant answered the artist’s phone, stretched his canvases, bought his paintbrushes, and even drew lines on his canvases. Meyer was recently arrested for stealing at least twenty-two works from his employer and selling them through an unnamed New York gallery for $6.5 million, falsely telling the dealer and buyers that Johns had given them to him as presents and that they would be in the official catalogue raisonné. (Read more in New York Times.)

Pre-Raphaelite Mural Discovered in William Morris’s Red House

It began as an attempt to restore one blurry image that had been hidden for a century behind a large built-in wardrobe on William Morris’s bedroom wall. Months later, the painstaking removal of layers of paint and wallpaper revealed that an entire wall at the artist and craftsman’s first married home was painted by his young friends who would become world-famous Pre-Raphaelite artists. (Read more in the Guardian.)

Filed under: CAA News

People in the News

posted by CAA — Aug 17, 2013

People in the News

People in the News lists new hires, positions, and promotions in three sections: Academe, Museums and Galleries, and Organizations and Publications.

The section is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.

August 2013

Academe

Keliy Anderson-Staley has joined the School of Art at the University of Houston in Texas as a tenure-track professor of photography.

Rebecca Parker Brienen has been named Vennerberg Professor of Art and head of the Department of Art, Graphic Design, and Art History at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. Brienen previously served as the head of art history at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, from 2008 to 2013.

Jean M. K. Miller has joined the University of Missouri in St. Louis as dean of the College of Fine Arts and Communication and professor in the Department of Art and Art History. Miller was formerly associate dean of administrative affairs in the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas in Denton.

Kent Minturn, a lecturer in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in New York, has been appointed director of the MA Program in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies.

Jennifer Raab, the first IFA/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, has joined the faculty of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

Erika Schneider has been promoted to associate professor in the Art Department at Framingham State University in Framingham, Massachusetts, where she has taught since 2007.

Mark Tribe, an artist, educator, and the founder of Rhizome, has become chair of the MFA Fine Arts Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Sarah Victoria Turner, a lecturer in the Department of the History of Art at the University of York in York, England, has been appointed to the new post of assistant director for research at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London. Her appointment begins in November 2013.

Deborah Zlotsky, an artist who taught at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, from 1996 to 2013, has accepted a teaching position at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.

Museums and Galleries

Gloria Groom, David and Mary Winton Green Curator in the Department of Medieval through Modern European Painting and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, has been appointed the museum’s first senior curator.

Jennifer Gross has joined the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, as deputy director for curatorial affairs and chief curator. Gross had served as Seymour H. Knox Jr. Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, since 2000.

Sarah Schroth, Nancy Hanks Senior Curator at Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, North Carolina, has been named the museum’s new Mary D. B. T. and James H. Semans Director. Schroth had been serving as interim director since November 2012.

Susan Shifrin, associate director for education at the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, has left the museum to serve as director of ARTZ Philadelphia, a newly formed chapter of ARTZ: Artists for Alzheimer’s.

Janne Gallen-Kallela-Sirén, formerly director of the Helsinki Art Museum in Finland, has become the new director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York.

Organizations and Publications

Maura Reilly has been appointed executive director of the Linda Pace Foundation, based in San Antonio, Texas. Most recently Reilly was professor and chair of art theory at Queensland College of Art, part of Griffith University in Nathan, Australia.

Tali Weinberg, program officer for Global Goods Partners, a nonprofit that provides economic opportunity, small grants, and training to artisans in marginalized communities around the world, has been selected to lead the Textile Society of America, based in Berkeley, California, as executive director.

Grants, Awards, and Honors

posted by CAA — Aug 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.

August 2013

Joseph Ackley, a PhD candidate in art history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, has been awarded a research grant for his participation in the Mellon Research Initiative conference, “Art History and the Art of Deception,” taking place in October 2013.

Sarah Archino, a teaching fellow in the Department of Art at Millsaps College in Jackson Mississippi, who earned her doctorate in art history from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, has accepted a 2013–15 postdoctoral teaching fellowship at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris, France, from the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Chris Barnard, an artist based in Los Angeles, California, has spent the month of June 2013 in residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont.

Julia Whitney Barnes, an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, has received a commission to create a permanent glass-mosaic installation, titled Coloridas Historias de México, for the Brooklyn School of Inquiry.

Sinclair Bell, associate professor of art history at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, has been awarded a Howard Fellowship from the Howard Foundation at Brown University for 2013–14 to complete a monograph on chariot racing in ancient Rome.

Sarah Berkeley has been named a resident artist by the Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions (ACRE) in Steuben, Wisconsin. Berkeley’s collaborator, Regin Igloria, will join her during the summer 2013 program.

Wendy Bellion, associate professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware in Newark, has received an eight-week visiting professorship at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris, France, for spring 2015.

Steven Bleicher has been awarded a commission to produce a public art project, called Nature and Man in Rhapsody of Light at the Water Cube, in Beijing, China. His collaborators for the work were the artist Jennifer Wen Ma and the lighting designer Zheng Jianwei. Bleicher was the color specialist.

Suzanne Preston Blier, Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and Professor of African and African American Studies in the Department of Art and Architecture at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been named a 2013–14 Getty scholar by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. She will work on a project entitled “By Sea, Sand, and River: Africa and the West, a History in Art (1300–1800).”

Michele Brody, an artist based in New York, has completed the Emmanuel College Artist in Residence Program, where she worked with three other artists on a class called “Contemporary Art and Artistic Practice.”

Larry Busbea has won a 2013 Grant to Individuals in the category of research from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, based in Chicago, Illinois. His project is called “The Responsive Environment: Aesthetics, Design, and Ecology in the 1970s.”

Katherine Bussard, Peter C. Bunnell Curator of Photography at the Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey, has earned a 2013 Grant to Individuals in the publication category from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Her publication is called Unfamiliar Streets: Photographs by Richard Avedon, Charles Moore, Martha Rosler, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia.

Kimberly Callas, an artist based in Brooks, Maine, has received a Puffin Foundation Grant for her sculptural project Portraits of the Ecological Self. The project includes ten hand-sculpted, life-size portraits that combine a detailed likeness of an individual with natural materials chosen to reveal the unique bond an individual has with nature.

Luis M. Castañeda has won a 2013 Grant to Individuals in the publication category from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, based in Chicago, Illinois. His book is called The Exhibitionist State: Image Economies of the Mexican “Miracle.”

Sheila Crane has won a 2013 Grant to Individuals in the category of research from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, based in Chicago, Illinois. Her project is called “Inventing Informality.”

Florina Hernandez Capistrano-Baker, a consultant for the Ayala Museum in Makati City, Philippines, has been named a 2013–14 Getty scholar by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Her project is called “Routes of Exchange: Tenth–Thirteenth Century Gold from Butuan and Links to the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Trade Network.”

Grace Chuang, a doctoral student in art history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, has received the 2013–14 IFA/Centre Allemand Fellowship in Paris, France.

William Coleman, a doctoral student in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, has been appointed a 2013–14 predoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. He will continue work on “Thomas Cole’s Buildings: Architecture in Painting and Practice in the Early Republic.”

Erin Corrales-Diaz, a PhD student in the Art Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has been named Joe and Wanda Corn Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Her research involves “Remembering the Veteran: Disability, Trauma, and the American Civil War, 1861–1915.”

Vanessa Frances Rhiannon Crosby, a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has been named a 2013–14 predoctoral fellow by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. She will work on “Foreign Goods and Trans-Regional Identities: Commemoration as Cross Cultural Encounter.”

John J. Curley, assistant professor in the Department of Art at Wake Forest University in Winston Salem, North Carolina, has received a publication grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art for his book A Conspiracy of Images: Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Cold War Visuality, forthcoming from Yale University Press.

Melissa Dabakis, professor of art history at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, has been appointed Terra Foundation Senior Fellow in American Art for 2013 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. She will work on “A Cultural History of Italo-American Relations, 1760–1900.”

Melissa Dabakis, professor of art history at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, has received a publication grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art for her book The American Corinnes: Women Sculptors and the Eternal City, 1850–1876, forthcoming from Pennsylvania State University Press.

Chanchal Dadlani, assistant professor of art history in the Department of Art at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, has been awarded a 2013–14 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Her project is titled “Art and Epistemology between Early Modern India and France: The Collection of Jean-Baptiste Gentil.”

Andrew Demirjian, an artist based in Palisades Park, New Jersey, has been awarded a 2013 New Jersey Individual Artist’s Fellowship in the media/digital art category from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Laura DeVito, a student in the MFA program in collaborative design at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, has completed a 2013 Spring Break Residency with Signal Fire in the deserts of Southern California.

Barbara Diener has accepted a residency for summer 2013 at the Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions (ACRE), based in Steuben, Wisconsin.

Rob Duarte has been awarded a summer 2013 residency at the Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions (ACRE), based in Steuben, Wisconsin.

Sam Durant, an artist based in Los Angeles, California, has been selected to participate in the 2013 Getty Artists Program, administered by the Education Department at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Kara Fiedorek, a doctoral student in art history in the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, has accepted a research grant for her upcoming participation in a Mellon Research Initiative conference, “Art History and the Art of Deception,” scheduled for October 4–5, 2013.

Coco Fusco, an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in Brooklyn, New York, has completed a May–June 2013 residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida.

Ken Gonzales-Day, an artist and the chair of the Art Department at Scripps College in Claremont, California, has accepted a 2013 summer residency at the Terra Residency Program in Giverny, France. He will work on a project called Absence, Stasis, and Other Non-Decisive Moments.

Ellery Foutch, who completed her PhD in the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, has earned a 2013–15 postdoctoral teaching fellowship at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, England, with help from the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Carl Fuldner, a doctoral student in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago in Illinois, has been appointed a 2013–14 predoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. His dissertation examines “Evolving Photography: Naturalism and American Pictorialism, 1890–1917.”

Christine Eva Göttler, a professor and chair of the Institut für Kunstgeschichte at Universität in Bern, Switzerland, has been named a 2013–14 Getty scholar by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. She will work on “Inventing Newness: Art, Local History, and ‘World Knowledge’ in Early Modern Antwerp (Mid-Sixteenth to Mid-Seventeenth Centuries).”

Jennifer Greenhill, associate professor of art history in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has been awarded an eight-week visiting professorship at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris, France, for spring 2014, thanks to the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Kenneth Haltman, H. Russell Pitman Professor of Art History in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, has accepted a visiting professorship in the John F. Kennedy Institute at Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany, for spring–summer 2014, with assistance from the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Adam Han, an MFA student in fiber and material studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, has been chosen as a 2013 Windgate Museum Intern by the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design. He will contribute to a digital exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art in Washington, DC, that tells the story of studio craft in the United States through primary-source material.

Mazie Harris, a doctoral student in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, has accepted a fellowship to attend the 2013 Terra Summer Residency in Giverny, France. She will work on “The Portraits and Proprietary Claims of New York Photography Studios on Broadway 1853–1884.”

Andrew Hemingway, emeritus professor of history of art in the Department of History of Art at University College London in England, has accepted a visiting professorship in the John F. Kennedy Institute at Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany, for fall–winter 2013, courtesy the Terra Foundation of American Art.

Christopher Heuer, assistant professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, has accepted a 2013 Grant to Individuals in the category of public program from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. He will work on a project called “7 March 1965” with his collaborators, Abbey Dubin and Matthew Jesse Jackson, in a collective called Our Literal Speed.

Patricia Hills, professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Boston University in Massachusetts, has been selected as a guest lecturer for 2013 at the Terra Summer Residency in Giverny, France. She will present “Whatever Happened to the ‘New Art History’? Reflections on Theoretical and Methodological Approaches since the 1970s.

Jessica L. Horton, an independent scholar who earned her doctorate in the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, has been appointed a 2013–14 postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. She will work on “Diplomatic Choreographies: The Travels of Native American Dance Paintings during the Cold War.”

Kellie Jones, associate professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in New York, has been named a senior scholar for the 2013 Terra Summer Residency in Giverny, France. Her project is titled “Crisscrossing the World: Los Angeles Artists and the Global Imagination, 1960–1980.”

Wendy Katz, an associate professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, has been appointed a 2013–14 senior fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Her project is “The Politics of Art Criticism in the Penny Press, 1833–61.”

Miri Kim, a PhD student in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, has accepted a fellowship to attend the 2013 Terra Summer Residency in Giverny, France. She will work on “‘Right Matter in the Right Place’: The Paintings of Albert Pinkham Ryder.”

Kristina Renee Kleutghen, assistant professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri, has been awarded a 2013–14 National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. She will continue her work on “Visions of the West: Rediscovering Eighteenth-Century Chinese Perspective Prints and Viewing Devices.”

Marina Kliger, a PhD student in art history in the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, has accepted a nine-week summer internship at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. She will catalogue and digitize rare French and Belgian reproductive prints.

Ethan W. Lasser, Margaret S. Winthrop Associate Curator of American Art at the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has received the ninth annual Patricia and Phillip Frost Essay Award from the editorial board of the journal American Art, published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, based in Washington, DC. His article, “Selling Silver: The Business of Copley’s Paul Revere,” appeared in the Fall 2012 issue of the journal.

Dimitrios Latsis, a PhD candidate in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, has been named Committee on Institutional Cooperation–Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellow by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. In a position jointly hosted with the National Museum of American History, Latsis will research “Nature, Nation, Narrative: The Discourse of Landscape in Pre–World War II American Cinema.”

Tirza T. Latimer, chair of the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts in Oakland, has been appointed a guest lecturer at the 2013 Terra Summer Residency in Giverny, France. She will give a talk on “The Making of Modernism’s Origin Myths.”

Craig Lee, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware in Newark, has taken a nine-week summer internship at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. He will review files, construction plans, and progress photographs to produce materials showing the development and evolution of the museum’s master facilities plan projects.

Sara Lees, along with her coauthors Richard Tand and Sandra L. Webber, has won the thirty-third annual George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award from the Art Libraries Society of North America. Their publication is called Nineteenth-Century European Paintings at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2012).

Lihong Liu, who recently earned her doctorate in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, has received a 2013–14 postdoctoral fellowship from the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. She will work on “Artistic Exchange between China and Europe during the Eighteenth Century.”

Michael Lobel, professor of art history at Purchase College, State University of New York, in Purchase, New York, has received a 2012–13 Chancellor’s Award for Excellence from his institution. The award recognizes his work in the category of scholarship and creative activities.

Stéphane Loire, chief curator in the Paintings Department at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, France, has been named a 2013–14 museum guest scholar by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. His host at the J. Paul Getty Museum will be the Department of Paintings.

Joe Madura, a doctorial student in the Art History Department at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, has been appointed a 2013–14 predoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. His dissertation topic is “Revising Minimal Art in the AIDS Crisis, 1984–98.”

Christopher Manzione, an artist based in Vernon, New Jersey, has been awarded a 2013 New Jersey Individual Artist’s Fellowship in the category of media/digital art from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Lee Mazow, associate professor of art history in the Department of Art at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, has been awarded the twenty-fifth annual Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, based in Washington, DC. The prize recognizes his latest book, Thomas Hart Benton and the American Sound (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012).

Kori Newkirk, an artist based in Los Angeles, California, has won a 2013 fellowship from the Fellows of Contemporary Art. The award comes with a $10,000 prize.

Laura Hart Newlon has accepted a residency at the Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions (ACRE) in Steuben, Wisconsin. Newlon’s collaborator, Kate O’Neill, will join her at the summer 2013 program.

Kasia Ozga has been awarded a summer 2013 residency at the Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions (ACRE), based in Steuben, Wisconsin.

Laure Poupard, a doctoral student at Université Paris IV—Sorbonne in Paris, France, has earned a research travel grant to the United States from the Terra Foundation for American Art. He/she will work on “The Artistic Sources of Propaganda Photographs: Official Photographic Exhibitions in America, 1935–1946.”

Meha Priyadarshini, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Columbia University in New York, has been named a 2013–14 predoctoral fellow by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California, to work on “From Jingdezhen to Puebla: Cultural and Artistic Exchange across the Pacific.”

Jennifer Quick, a graduate student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been accepted the 2013 Phillip and Patricia Frost Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Her project is called “The Dynamics of Deskilling: Ed Ruscha 1956–70.”

Leslie Reinhardt, an independent scholar based in Maryland, has been appointed a 2013–14 senior fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. She will explore “Copley’s Death of Major Peirson” in a joint position with the National Portrait Gallery

Steve Rowell, an artist, curator, and researchers, has won a 2013 Grant to Individuals in the film category from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. His project is called Parallelograms.

Casey Ruble, an artist based in Clinton, New Jersey, has been awarded a 2013 New Jersey Individual Artist’s Fellowship for her works on paper from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Sofia Sanabrais, an independent scholar based in Los Angeles, California, has been named a 2013–14 Getty scholar by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Her research project is called “The Globalization of Taste: The Influence of Asia on Artistic Production in Colonial Latin America.”

Emily Schlemowitz, an MA student in art history at Hunter College, City University of New York, has been selected as a 2013 Windgate Museum Intern by the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design. She will work closely with curatorial and exhibitions staff at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, to assist with research in preparation for the 2014 Arts/Industry exhibition and publication.

Ileana Selejan, a PhD student in art history in the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, has been awarded a research grant to participate in a Mellon Research Initiative conference, “Art History and the Art of Deception,” that will take place October 4–5, 2013.

Yoshiaki Shimizu, Frederick Marquand Professor of Art and Archaeology (emeritus) at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, has been named a 2013–14 guest scholar by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. His topic is “Transmission and Transformation: The China–Japan Interface in Arts and Other Things.”

Elizabeth Simmons, a graduate student on the PhD curatorial track in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware in Newark, has accepted a nine-week summer internship at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. She will assist in updating collections records according to recent catalogues raisonnés and other art-historical research.

Xiao Situ, a PhD student in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has accepted a 2013–14 predoctoral fellowship from the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. Situ will continue research and writing for “Emily Dickinson’s Window Culture, 1830–86” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC.

Marie M. Sivak, an artist based in Portland, Oregon, has received the 2013 Margo Harris Hammerschlag Direct Carving Award, which comes with a $10,000 prize.

Deborah Stratman, an artist and filmmaker based in Chicago, Illinois, has won a 2013 Grant to Individuals in the exhibition category from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Her project is titled Subsurface Voids.

Edward J. Sullivan, Helen Gould Sheppard Professor in the History of Art at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, has received a publication grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. His book, forthcoming from Yale University Press, is called From San Juan to Paris and Back: Francisco Oller, Caribbean Artist in the Age of Impressionism.

Tina Tahir, an artist based in Chicago, Illinois, has been selected a winner of the 2013 ARTslanT Prize for her mixed-media sculpture Thirty (2012).

Ellen Tani, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University in Stanford, California, has received a 2013–15 predoctoral dissertation fellowship from the Carter Woodson Institute for African and African-American Studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Her dissertation is entitled “Black Conceptualism and the Atmospheric Turn, 1968–2008.”

Alex Taylor a doctoral student in the Department of History of Art at Oxford University in Oxford, England, has accepted a fellowship to attend the 2013 Terra Summer Residency in Giverny, France. She will work on Forms of Persuasion: Art and Corporate Enterprise in the 1960s.”

Nancy Um, associate professor in the Department of Art History at Binghamton University, State University of New York, in Binghamton, New York, has been named a 2013–14 Getty scholar by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Um will continue working on
“The Material World of the Overseas Merchant in Yemen: Ceremonies, Gifts, and the Social Protocols of Trade, 1700-1750.”

Luis Vargas-Santiago, a graduate student in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, has been named Terra Foundation Predoctoral Fellow in American Art for 2013–14 by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. His dissertation is called “The Diaspora of Emiliano Zapata: From the Mexican Revolution to the American Imagination.”

Charlene Villaseñor-Black, associate professor in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been named a 2013–14 Getty scholar by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. She is researching “Itinerant Artists in the Global Early Modern World.”

Emily Warner, a PhD candidate in the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, has accepted a 2013–14 predoctoral fellowship from the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Her dissertation is entitled “Crafting the Abstract Environment: The Abstract Mural in New York, 1935–60.”

Sarah Warren, assistant professor of art history at Purchase College, State University of New York, in Purchase, New York, has been named James Renwick Senior Fellow in American Craft at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. The name of her research project is “Craft between Modernism and Counterculture: Rhinebeck and the Studio Craft Movement.”

Spencer Wigmore, a doctoral student in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware in Newark, has taken a nine-week summer internship at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. He will assist in research and organization for a forthcoming exhibition on nineteenth-century American landscape photography.

Tatsiana Zhurauliova, a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has accepted a 2013 fellowship for the Terra Summer Residency in Giverny, France. She will work on
“Arcadia Americana: American Landscape in the Art of Arshile Gorky, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi during World War II.”

Claire Zimmerman, assistant professor of art history and architecture at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has won a 2013 Grant to Individuals for a publication from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, based in Chicago, Illinois. Her book project is called Photographic Modern Architecture.

News from the Art and Academic Worlds

posted by Christopher Howard — Aug 07, 2013

Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

The Young Wellesley Professor Who Invented Contemporary Art

When you think of the cities that helped define cutting-edge art in the twentieth century, you think of Paris, New York, maybe Berlin. In the standard histories, Boston plays a decidedly background role, with the city’s gatekeepers ensuring that the wild works by artists like Picasso, Braque, or Mondrian didn’t soil their elegant private and public collections. “Boston is very dead so far as contemporary art is concerned,” complained a young Wellesley art-history instructor, Alfred Barr Jr., writing to a friend and gallery owner in New York in 1926, well after modernism had caught fire elsewhere. (Read more in the Boston Globe.)

How to Build a Digital Humanities Took in a Week

Twelve scholars convened at the George Mason University last week to build a web application for the digital humanities as part of the “One Week | One Tool” challenge, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The participants—who included web developers, faculty members, museum professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, and a high-school librarian—spent five days brainstorming, designing, and developing their tool. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Arts Majors Jump Ahead of Tech Grads in Landing Jobs

Here’s a surprise for college students: recent graduates with technology degrees are having a tougher time finding a job than their peers in the arts. The unemployment rate for recent grads with a degree in information systems is more than double that of drama and theater majors, at 14.7 percent vs. 6.4 percent, according to a recent Georgetown University study. Even for computer science majors, the jobless rate for recent grads nears 9 percent. (Read more in USA Today.)

Protecting Detroit’s Artwork Is a Job for Detroit

By now, everybody knows that the city of Detroit has finally filed for bankruptcy—and everybody in the art world knows that its museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, is in deep trouble. Here’s why: Detroit owes roughly $18 billion that it doesn’t have. The sixty-thousand-plus works of art in the permanent collection are owned by the city, not the museum (as is normally the case). According to the Detroit Free Press, the thirty-eight most important pieces have a market value of about $2.5 billion. What next? (Read more in the Wall Street Journal.)

Only the Artists Can Save the Arts Critics

How do you put a price on thought? How do you price an opinion? How do you even price the creative thought that the opinion was formed on? How do you do this in a culture—I think that’s the right word—where people are used not only to getting opinion for nothing, but expect good information for nothing as well? (Read more in the Guardian.)

Caveat Emptor: An Art Exhibit Made Entirely of Forgeries Confiscated by the FBI

Upon entering Caveat Emptor you will likely recognize the exhibition’s work with confidence. Iconic pieces made famous by art legends such as Chagall, Warhol, Gauguin, and de Kooning adorn the walls, and yet, you probably haven’t heard of a single artist showing. That’s right, Caveat Emptor, which translates to “let the buyer beware,” is composed entirely of forgeries that have been confiscated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. (Read more in the Huffington Post.)

The Hole in Our Collective Memory: How Copyright Made Midcentury Books Vanish

Last year I wrote about research being done by Paul J. Heald at the University of Illinois, based on software that crawled Amazon for a random selection of books. At the time, his results were only preliminary, but they were nevertheless startling: there were as many books available from the 1910s as there were from the 2000s. The number of books from the 1850s was double the number available from the 1950s. Why? Copyright protections—which cover titles published in 1923 and after—had squashed the market for books from the mid-twentieth century, keeping those titles off shelves and out of the hands of the reading public. (Read more in the Atlantic.)

Did You Hear That? It Was Art

Nothing? Listen again. Note the sound of your computer’s fan amid distant sirens. Hear your spouse in the next room, playing the Bowie channel on Spotify while chatting on the phone with your mother-in-law. Farther off, a TV is tuned to the news and a stereo plays Bach, while a mouse skitters inside a wall. And know that every one of those sounds can now be the subject of art, just as every vision we see and imagine, from fruit in a bowl to the color of light to melting clocks, has been grist for painting and sculpture and photos. (Read more in the New York Times.)

Filed under: CAA News

News from the Art and Academic Worlds

posted by Christopher Howard — Jul 24, 2013

Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

The Rise of the Machines: NEH and the Digital Humanities, the Early Years

Stephen Mitchell suffered from allergies. “When the trees come out, I can’t see. People stand around saying, ‘Isn’t it lovely,’ but I weep,” he told the New York Times in 1965. A thirty-five-year-old professor at Syracuse University, he found sanctuary in the temperature-controlled environment of the school’s computer center, where he surprised many people by showing how computers could be used to advance work in the humanities. (Read more in Humanities.)

Well-Marked Paths to Tenure Put New Professors at Ease

Peter Seldin has visited more than 350 colleges as a consultant specializing in faculty evaluation. At nearly every one, he says, young faculty members have the same problem: “They are scared to death.” The reason, he says, is that unclear expectations about tenure generate apprehension among tenure-track faculty members who are worried their careers might stall or jump the rails. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

AHA Statement on Policies regarding the Embargoing of Completed History PhD Dissertations

In its June 2013 meeting, the AHA Council drafted a statement on policies regarding best practices for embargoing completed history PhD dissertations. “The American Historical Association,” the document begins, “strongly encourages graduate programs and university libraries to adopt a policy that allows the embargoing of completed history PhD dissertations in digital form for as many as six years.” (Read more from the American Historical Association.)

Detroit Art Caught in Bankruptcy Battle

Detroit, which became the largest city to declare bankruptcy in United States history, is home to one of the most prestigious collections of art in the world. And one of the options on the table to deal with its crippling debt is for all of that to be sold. But it’s not so simple. To Rod Spencer, the Detroit Institute of Arts is priceless. “The DIA is the history of Detroit. That’s what it means to me,” he said. (Read more from CBS News.)

Does Art Help the Economy?

An unexpected upshot in the wake of Britain’s latest spending review was the fate of the culture budget—it avoided a pummeling. What might be considered an easy target in a time of austerity emerged relatively unscathed, with only a 5 percent decrease in funding from £472 million to £451 million. The arts world had already been hit by a 30 percent cut meted out in the 2010 budget and had been waiting to find out whether they might be granted a reprieve at this latest round of belt-tightening. This time, advocates for arts funding breathed a collective sigh of relief, with the budget reduction described as a “best-case scenario.” (Read more in the Atlantic.)

LACMA, Broad, and Other Art Museums Work to Put Storage on Display

Behind an art museum’s gleaming galleries lies the off-limits and uninviting space that can hold as much as 95 percent of its collection: storage. These spaces are often packed with hundreds or even thousands of paintings, decorative art objects, and other artifacts that can languish, unappreciated and untouched by curators, for years. But as a way to bring art out from its underbelly and display more of a museum’s possessions, several institutions are embracing “visible storage” in public areas, exhibiting the art without the expense of a spacious, beautifully installed and curated show. (Read more in the Los Angeles Times.)

Smithsonian Institution Grapples with Maintenance of Its Growing Inventory

The world’s largest museum complex is bursting with stuff, from elephants to first-lady gowns, biological specimens to space shuttles. Now, the Smithsonian Institution is grappling with a long-term challenge: how to maintain the 137 million items in its collection. Last week the Committee on House Administration held a collections stewardship hearing to discuss challenges to implementing a maintenance plan to care for the art, archival footage, and dinosaur bones. (Read more in the Washington Post.)

Art Education Fails to Paint a Pretty Picture

The views of older men of painting are often dismissed as out-of-touch and old-fashioned, harking back to a mythical golden age. But the critical remarks made by the acclaimed artist Ken Currie, in advance of his first exhibition in over ten years—Meditations on Portraiture at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery—warrant consideration. He raises serious questions about the problems with art schools today. (Read more in the Scotsman.)

Filed under: CAA News

News from the Art and Academic Worlds

posted by Christopher Howard — Jul 10, 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.

Remember Talent? Does It Still Matter in Art Education?

The cost of an education at an art school or in a college art department has gotten too expensive for merely learning how to express oneself in the likes of painting, sculpture, and printmaking. Who wants to go tens of thousands of dollars into debt just to become another starving artist? Today’s art students now look to the commercial specialties—graphic design, fashion, comic strips and graphic novels, industrial design, textiles, video, filmmaking—to provide them with postgraduate employment and, in the bargain, status as hip young determiners of society’s style. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Same-Sex Ruling Brings Bumper Tax Benefits to Art-World Professionals

A decision by the US Supreme Court will bring significant tax benefits to art collectors, artists, and dealers who are in same-sex marriages. In a ruling on June 26, 2013, the court said that the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defined “marriage” as a legal union between a man and woman only, was unconstitutional. The historic decision means better fiscal deals for gay spouses such as estate tax deduction and copyright revision, among new arrangements. (Read more in the Art Newspaper.)

Confidentiality and Faculty Representation in Academic Governance

This report argues that requiring faculty members to sign confidentiality agreements as a requirement to serve on university committees is in most cases inconsistent with widely accepted standards of shared governance and with the concept of serving as a representative. This argument does not apply to faculty serving on promotion and tenure committees and similar bodies, where faculty do not serve as representatives, but instead are elected to exercise their own professional judgment in interpreting and applying faculty-established criteria relevant to these areas. (Read more from the American Association of University Professors .)

Division of Preservation and Access Evaluates the Impact of Its Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Program

Excellence in research, education, and public programming in the humanities depends heavily upon the ongoing availability of source materials. To address this need, a National Endowment for the Humanities program called Humanities Collections and Reference Resources provides critical support to the nation’s libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural-heritage institutions to help enable long-term public access to significant collections of books, manuscripts, photographs, art and artifacts, sound recordings, moving images, and more. (Read more from the National Endowment for the Humanities.)

Yes, Kickstarter Raises More Money for Artists Than the NEA. Here’s Why That’s Not Really Surprising

During a session at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Aspen Institute president Walter Isaacson asked Perry Chen, founder of Kickstarter, whether it was true that Kickstarter now funds more arts-related projects than the National Endowment for the Arts. The crowdfunding site has, Chen told Isaacson, funded over $600 million in arts projects. (Read more in the Washington Post.)

Help Desk: Release the Press!

If you poke around the internet, you’ll find a lot of information about how to write a press release. In fact, there is so much information on the subject that I recommend you start with a broad search to familiarize yourself with the fundamentals, which are too numerous to cover here. (Read more in Daily Serving.)

Speedier Visas Planned for US-Bound Artists

A comprehensive immigration reform bill recently passed by the US Senate stands to make it easier for foreign artists to visit the country. The 1,200-page bill, which offers a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants, also requires the government to process artists’ visa requests within one month of their initial filing. Under the current system, artists can wait up to six months for a visa and must pay a fee of $1,225 to receive expedited service. (Read more in the Art Newspaper.)

Learning to Love Rejection

Rejections are a dirty secret among academics. Publication successes are cause for celebration, or at least a proud listing on CVs and departmental lists. Failures—rejected papers and unsuccessful grant and promotion applications—are usually hidden and sometimes a source of shame. The result is that many scholars, especially junior ones, have unrealistic expectations. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Filed under: CAA News