CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Jun 19, 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 New World of Net Art
When internet art first emerged in the early 1990s, it was regarded as something that dealt almost exclusively with the architecture of the World Wide Web itself. During that period, the German-born Wolfgang Staehle constructed The Thing, an electronic bulletin-board system that served as a forum for discussions about and dissemination of what was referred to as “net art.” But as the web has evolved, so too has the notion of what might be considered internet art. (Read more in ARTnews.)
Internet Real Estate, Art, and Power: The Cases of Artsy and .art
The forthcoming introduction of generic top-level domains—which will replace the .com or .net suffix with specific words or terms, such as .food, .movies, or .microsoft—poses new speculative opportunities as dizzying as those of Zola’s nineteenth-century Paris. Last year, e-flux announced that it had applied to manage the proposed .art domain. The application fee alone was $185,000, and the successful applicant will pay ICANN a further $25,000 per year. There is clearly money to be made in top-level domains, but the management of .art may be more than a business; it holds within it the power to act as gatekeeper. (Read more from Rhizome.)
2011: Michael Sanchez on Art and Transmission
Are we living in an aftermath? The unspoken consensus seems to be that, in relation to the art of the previous decade, the early 2010s are a caesura—a waiting period at best, analogous to the early 1970s in relation to the ’60s, or the early ’90s in relation to the ’80s. Those older historical moments were not just lulls, however, but scenes of profound discursive and technological mutation. And likewise, over the past few years, a set of technical innovations have arisen that have reconfigured conditions for the production and distribution of art. (Read more in Artforum.)
Smart Phones and Academic Research
For academics, smart-phone cameras can be used to gather and document information during field research, augment presentations, and connect to a wider audience through the myriad of communities online. Scholars in fields as different as clinical medicine and art are using smart-phone technology to not only aid in research, but also to share their findings with people who would not otherwise be engaged with their academic research. (Read more in Just Publics @365.)
Google Leads Search for Humanities PhD Graduates
Those worried about the value of studying the arts and humanities, particularly at the postgraduate level, take heart: Google wants you. In a boldly titled talk at a recent conference at Stanford University, Damon Horowitz, director of engineering—and in-house philosopher—at Google, discussed the question of “Why you should quit your technology job and get a humanities PhD.” (Read more in Times Higher Education.)
Connoisseurship, Physics Envy, and the Wages of Error
What is the nature of connoisseurship as a form of knowledge, and how precisely does it differ from other fields? To what special forms of cognitive error is it prone? What does the art historian do to arrive at an attribution when there is no evidence to go on other than what is before our eyes? (Read more from Neil Jeffares.)
Learning from Taksim Square: Architecture, State Power, and Public Space in Istanbul
In a matter of days, “Taksim Square” has become a household name akin to Tahrir Square, shorthand for a youthful protest movement against the brutality of state power in the Middle East. What began as a peaceful sit-in to protest the uprooting of trees from Gezi Park, one of Istanbul’s last open green spaces near Taksim Square, has morphed into a broader Occupy movement against the Turkish government. For an architectural historian, it is no accident that the great plans to remake Taksim, as well as the protestors’ speeches and actions, often invoke history and architectural memory to buttress their arguments in the present. (Read more in the SAH Blog.)
Just Look at the Data, If You Can Find Any
Advisers and prospective students need something more than a scattered helping of infrequently updated best-case scenarios. We need externally verified, reasonably comprehensive data about individual programs and maybe even individual advisers. Aggregated data about graduate schools have limited usefulness when individual programs have such variability in their placement outcomes. Also, aggregated data place little pressure on individual universities to reform themselves. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Grants, Awards, and Honors
posted by CAA — Jun 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.
June 2013
Dora ApelDora Apel has received a Marilyn Williamson Distinguished Faculty Fellowship for 2013–14, awarded by the Humanities Center at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.
Sarah D. Beetham, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware in Newark, has received a 2013 Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship. Her research project is titled “Sculpting the Citizen Soldier: Reproduction and National Memory, 1865–1917.”
Leigh Behnke, an artist and lecturer at the School of Visual Arts in New York, has earned a 2013 fellowship in fine arts from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Jill E. Bugajski, a PhD student in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has accepted a 2013 Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship. She is researching “Totalitarian Aesthetics and the Democratic Imagination in American Art, 1933–1947.”
Mary Katherine Campbell, assistant professor of art history in the School of Art at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has earned a 2013 ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Her project is called “Mormon Porn: Charles Ellis Johnson’s Stereographic Sinners and Latter-Day Saints.”
Cora Cohen, R 77, 2011, acrylic, Flashe, and tape on roentgenograph, 15⅝ x 11¾ in. (artwork © Cora Cohen)Cora Cohen, an artist based in Long Island City, New York, has received a 2013 fellowship in fine arts from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Huey Copeland, associate professor of art history at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has been given a 2013 ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. He will use the funds to work on his project, “In the Arms of the Negress: A Brief History of Modern Artistic Practice.”
Katelyn D. Crawford, a doctoral student in the McIntire Department of Art at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, has accepted a 2013 Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship to continue work on “Transient Painters, Traveling Canvases: Portraiture and Mobility in the British Atlantic, 1750–1780.”
Elise Dodeles, San Francisco Area Fighter A885 in Profile, 2012 (artwork © Elise Dodeles)Elise Dodeles has been awarded a 2013 New Jersey Individual Artist’s Fellowship for Painting from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
Klint Ericson, a doctoral student in the Art Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has earned a 2013 Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship. He will continue working on “Sumptuous and Beautiful, As They Were: Architectural Form, Everyday Life, and Cultural Encounter in a Seventeenth-Century New Mexico Mission.”
Coco Fusco, an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, has won a 2013 fellowship in film and video from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Mary D. GarrardMary D. Garrard, professor emerita of art history at American University in Washington, DC, visited the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, as Stanford Distinguished Professor in the Humanities in February 2013. While in residence, Garrard delivered the keynote address for a conference celebrating the university’s Center for the Humanities as the new publication site for Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal; she also gave another plenary session lecture for conferees.
Ann Eden GibsonAnn Eden Gibson, professor emerita of art history at the University of Delaware in Newark, has won the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation’s Research Center Book Prize for Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (1997). The triennial $5,000 prize honors the author of a significant book on some aspect of American modernism published from the mid-1980s to 2009.
Sharon Harper, an artist and associate professor of visual and environmental studies at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has received a 2013 fellowship in photography from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Guy Heedren, professor of art at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has won a 2013 fellowship in fine-arts research from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Laura Turner Igoe, a graduate student in art history at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has received a 2013 Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship. Her research project is called “The Opulent City and the Sylvan State: Art and Environmental Embodiment in Early National Philadelphia.”
Sharon IrishSharon Irish, an art and architectural historian, has been awarded a Colston Research Fellowship from the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Bristol in England for spring 2014, hosted by the Department of Drama: Theatre, Film, and Television, in conjunction with the Productive Margins program. As a Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professor, Irish will continue her research on the artists Stephen Willats and Suzanne Lacy, in collaboration with the Knowle West Media Centre in Bristol. Her project is entitled “In the Margins? Local Knowledge and Self-Organization.”
Susan N. Johnson-Roehr, who recently earned her PhD in architectural history from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has been named a New Faculty Fellow by the American Council of Learned Societies. She will take up a two-year position at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
Tirza True LatimerTirza True Latimer, chair of the graduate program in Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend to complete research for a book, provisionally titled Eccentric Modernisms: Making Differences in the History of American Art.
Megan R. Luke, assistant professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and Sarah B. H. Hamill, assistant professor of art at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, have received a Collaborative Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Their project is entitled “Sculpture and Photography: The Art Object in Reproduction.”
Lyle Massey, associate professor in the Art History Department at the University of California, Irvine, has been awarded a Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. She will be in residence at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in Pasadena to work on her project, “Woman Inside Out: Gender, Dissection, and Representation in Early Modern Europe.”
Carrie Moyer, Hook, Line & Sinker, 2012, acrylic, graphite, and glitter on canvas, 72 x 60 in. Collection of the artist (artwork © Carrie Moyer)Carrie Moyer, an artist based in Brooklyn and associate professor of art and art history at Hunter College, City University of New York, has received a 2013 fellowship in fine arts from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Jennifer Anne Norman has completed a fall 2012 artist residency at the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts, located in New Berlin, New York.
Erin K. Pauwels, a doctoral candidate in the history of art at Indiana University in Bloomington, has received a 2013 Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship. She continue working on her dissertation, “Sarony’s Living Pictures: Performance, Photography, and Gilded Age American Art.”
Naomi Ruth Pitamber, a doctoral student in art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has earned a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. She will continue work on her research project, “Re-Placing Byzantium: Laskarid Urban Environments and the Landscape of Loss, 1204–1261.”
D. Jacob Rabinowitz, a PhD student in the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, has been awarded a 2013 Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship to continue his project, “Public Construction: Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence.”
Yael Rice, an art historian who teaches at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, has received a Rare Book School Mellon Fellowship in Critical Bibliography to attend the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School, a three-year program for early-career scholars that seeks to reinvigorate bibliographic studies in the humanities.
Conrad Rudolph, professor of medieval art history at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), has won a 2012–13 Digital Humanities Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a project, “FACES: Faces, Art, and Computerized Evaluation Systems,” that he is researching with his UCR colleagues, Amit Roy-Chowdhury (electrical engineering) and Jeanette Kohl (art history).
D. Fairchild Ruggles, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has won a 2013 fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. The award, which supports individual scholars working in the humanities and related social sciences, will sustain her project, “Shajar al-Durr: The Extraordinary Architectural Patronage of a Thirteenth-Century Egyptian Slave-Queen.”
Gary Schneider, an artist based in Brookhaven, New York, and assistant professor of visual arts in the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, has received a 2013 fellowship in photography from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
William Tronzo of the University of California, San Diego, and an affiliate of Università degli Studi Roma Tre has been awarded a multiyear grant from the Getty Foundation for a project he has been working on with Kimberly Bowes of the University of Pennsylvania and Mellon Professor at the American Academy in Rome. Called “Framing the Medieval Mediterranean: Museums and Archaeology in National Discourse,” the project will bring together scholars and museum professionals from North Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and America to discuss their common and divergent aims, methodologies, approaches, and techniques regarding the collection and display of medieval material culture, as well as the influence of national narratives on shaping field- and institution-specific goals. The grant is part of the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative, which aims to increase scholarly exchange among individuals in key international regions whose economic or political realities have prevented previous collaboration.
Edward Vazquez, assistant professor of the history of art and architecture at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont, has earned a 2013 ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for his research on “Aspects: Fred Sandback’s Sculpture.”
Fotini Vurgaropulou, Red Hook Mama, 2013, steel, paint, copper, and cast resin (artwork © Fotini Vurgaropulou)Fotini Vurgaropulou, an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, has been commissioned by the Backyard Garden and New York’s GreenThumb program to install a 9-foot-tall mixed-media sculpture (steel, paint, copper, and cast resin) in a public garden in the neighborhood of Red Hook. The piece is on view from April 21 to August 4, 2013.
Nancy L. WickerNancy L. Wicker, professor of art history at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, has been named a recipient of a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to initiate “Project Andvari: A Digital Portal to the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe” with a codirector, Lilla Kopár of the Catholic University and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia.
Alice Pixley Young has accepted a fellowship for a summer residency at the Jentel Artist Residency Program. She will spend the month of July living and working in Banner, Wyoming.
Gregory A. Zinman, who recently earned a doctorate in cinema studies from New York University, has been appointed by the American Council of Learned Societies as a two-year New Faculty Fellow in film at Columbia University in New York.
Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members
posted by CAA — Jun 15, 2013
Check out details on recent shows organized by CAA members who are also curators.
Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
June 2013
Patricia G. Berman and Pari Stave. MUNCH | WARHOL and the Multiple Image. Scandinavia House, Nordic Center in America, New York, April 27–July 27, 2013.
June Blum. A Celebration of Women’s Art. Cocoa Beach Library, Cocoa Beach, Florida, April 1–19, 2013.
Bruce Boucher. Corot to Cézanne: French Drawings from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Fralin Museum of Art, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, January 25–June 2, 2013.
Rachel Epp Buller. Postpartum. Erman B. White Gallery of Art, Butler Community Collece, El Dorado, Kansas, March 1–April 5, 2013.
Rachel Epp Buller. Working on the Bias. Stiefel Watson Gallery, Stiefel Theater for the Performing Arts, Salina, Kansas, February 21–April 22, 2013.
Virginia Fabbri Butera. Persona: Externalizing the Psychological Self. Therese A. Maloney Art Gallery, Annunciation Center, College of Saint Elizabeth, Morristown, New Jersey, January 22–April 14, 2013.
Richard Anuszkiewicz, New Glory, 1975, screen print, 26 x 19½ in. (artwork © Richard Anuszkiewicz)Tyrus R. Clutter. Out of Abstraction: Divergent Directions in Late 20th Century Art. Appleton Museum of Art, Ocala, Florida, April 5–June 2, 2013.
Suzanne McClelland, Soft Partition, 2012, ink and graphite on Yupo paper, 9 x 12 in. (artwork © Suzanne McClelland)Jennifer Farrell. STrAY: Found Poems from a Lost Time. Fralin Museum of Art, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, January 25–May 26, 2013.
Jean-Baptiste Isabey, Jeanne Justine Laurice de Salienne (The Artist’s Wife), ca. 1789, pencil and grey wash, 7 x 5⅛ in. Fralin Museum of Art, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (artwork in the public domain)Lawrence O. Goedde. Traces of the Hand: Master Drawings from the Collection of Frederick and Lucy S. Herman. Fralin Museum of Art, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, January 25–May 26, 2013.
Reni Gower. Papercuts. Eleanor D. Wilson Museum, Hollins University, Roanoke, Virginia, May 31–September 14, 2013.
Reni Gower. Heated Exchange: Contemporary Encaustic. Elizabeth Stone Harper Gallery, Harper Center for the Arts, Presbyterian College, Clinton, South Carolina, January 17–February 23, 2013.
James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne, 1878, lithotint on blue laid chine collé, second state, 6¾ x 10⅛ in. Fralin Museum of Art, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (artwork in the public domain)Emilie Johnson. Becoming the Butterfly: Landscapes of James McNeill Whistler. Fralin Museum of Art, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, January 25–April 28, 2013.
Emilie Johnson. Becoming the Butterfly: Portraits of James McNeill Whistler. Fralin Museum of Art, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, April 30–August 4, 2013.
Julian Kreimer. Part of the Story. Lower East Side Printshop, New York, March 20–May 12, 2013.
Installation view of La Florida: 500 Years of Florida ArtPreston Thayer. La Florida: 500 Years of Florida Art. Thomas H. Jacobsen Gallery of American Art, Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, Jacksonville, Florida, January 15–October 6, 2013.
Books Published by CAA Members
posted by CAA — Jun 15, 2013
Publishing a book is a major milestone for artists and scholars—browse a list of recent titles below.
Books Published by CAA Members appears every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
June 2013
Dora Apel. War Culture and the Contest of Images (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012).
Jonathan Fineberg. Alice Aycock: Drawings; Some Stories Are Worth Repeating (Southampton, NY: Parrish Art Museum, 2013).
Wayne Franits. The Paintings of Dirck van Baburen, ca. 1592/93–1624: Catalogue Raisonné (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2013).
Jennifer A. Greenhill. Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
Ellen G. Landau. Mexico and American Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
William Marotti. Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).
Julie Wosk. Breaking Frame: Technology, Art, and Design in the Nineteenth Century (New York: An Authors Guild Backinprint.com Edition, 2013).
Andrés Mario Zervigón. John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
June 2013 Issue of The Art Bulletin
posted by Christopher Howard — Jun 11, 2013
The June 2013 Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, is the second issue of the journal’s centennial year. In “Regarding Art and Art History,” Cecelia F. Klein ponders Precolumbian art and the canon. “Notes from the Field” offers short essays on the subject of mimesis by Dexter Dalwood, Suzanne Preston Blier, Daniela Bohde, Helen C. Evans, Sarah E. Fraser, Thomas Habinek, Tom Huhn, Jeanette Kohl, Niklaus Largier, Peter Mack, and Alex Potts. The June interviewee is Timon Screech, who discusses fantasies and foreign contact in the art history of Japan with Yukio Lippit.
In their essay “An Émigré Art Historian and America: H. W. Janson,” Elizabeth Sears and Charlotte Schoell-Glass explore institutional art history in the mid-twentieth century through the lens of the American career of the German-born author of the classic survey text, History of Art. Emine Fetvaci’s “From Print to Trace” considers why the Ottoman creators of a 1579 book of imperial portraits may have consulted European models, raising questions about the understanding of the portrait as a visual document and the concepts that underpinned it.
Analyzing the intricate iconography of an illustrated thesis print on the system of natural philosophy by the seventeenth-century Franciscan professor Martin Meurisse, Susanna Berger demonstrates the complex uses of imagery in philosophy education in early modern France. Viccy Coltman studies a group of portraits of the Frasers of Reeling, a Scottish Highland family, by the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Scottish artist Henry Raeburn to reveal an understanding of portrait likeness as present and prescient in the global British Empire. Finally, in “The Cultural Politics of the Brushstroke” Martin Powers examines the debates between and among European, American, and Chinese intellectuals over some four centuries in order to deconstruct the seductive rhetoric of the brushstroke as employed in both “East” and “West.”
In the Reviews section, Charles Palermo considers three books on fin-de-siècle culture in Europe: Dario Gamboni’s The Brush and the Pen: Odilon Redon and Literature, Linda Goddard’s Aesthetic Rivalries: Word and Image in France, 1880–1926, and Anna Sigrídur Arnar’s The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, the Artist’s Book, and the Transformation of Print Culture. Next, Bridget Alsdorf reviews Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner’s edited volume, The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists, and Bolaji Campbell assesses David T. Doris’s Vigilant Things: On Thieves, Yoruba Anti-Aesthetics, and the Fates of Ordinary Objects in Nigeria.
CAA sends The Art Bulletin to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the journal as a benefit of their membership. The next issue of the quarterly publication, to appear in September 2013, will feature essays on, among other topics, Albrecht Dürer, Horace Walpole, Tanaka Atsuko, and public fountains in nineteenth-century Havana.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for June 2013
posted by CAA — Jun 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.
June 2013
Carolee Schneemann, Untitled (from the Dust Paintings series), 1984, ink, ashes, acrylic paint, string, vegetable dye, glass particles, photograph on fabric, and circuit board on heavy rag paper, 37½ x 49 in. (artwork © Carolee Schneemann)
Carolee Schneemann: Flange 6rpm
PPOW Gallery
535 West 22nd Street, Third Floor, New York, NY 10011
May 11–June 22, 2013
Titled after a multisensory installation that immerses the viewer in an environment of projected foundry fires, animated by motorized hand-sculpted components cast in aluminum, the fourth exhibition of the pioneering feminist multimedia artist Carolee Schneemann at PPOW Gallery brings together an assortment of works that date from the 1980s to today, illuminating diverse aspects of her expansion of media and her exploration of materials, as well as revealing the politics of her work. In addition to Flange 6rpm, the show features four examples from her Dust Paintings series (1983–86), created with degraded materials, layers of dust, spilled paint, and circuit boards in critical reference to the effacement of Lebanese and Palestinian villages by continuous bombardment. Two major grid installations of photographs and text—Saw Over Want (1980–82) and Vulva’s Morphia (1995)—are also included.
Nicole Eisenman / Matrix 248
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Woo Hon Fai Hall, 2625 Durant Avenue, No. 2250, Berkeley, CA 94720
May 3–July 14, 2013
Curated by Apsara DiQuinzio, Nicole Eisenman / MATRIX 248 brings together approximately forty paintings and works on paper by this New York–based artist created after 2009 that variously contemplate the human condition—though they are specifically inspired by and reflect the post-Bush-era economic crisis and sociopolitical instability. The exhibition includes examples of Eisenman’s first reaction to social turmoil—a series of monotypes featuring weeping people—and other works in which she idiosyncratically grafts historical styles such as American Regionalism and the Italian Renaissance with German Expressionism, updating familiar art forms to make timely social commentaries, as in Triumph of Poverty (2009), based on Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting of the same name, and Tea Party (2011).
Ellen Gallagher, Wiglette from DeLuxe, 2004, photogravure and plasticine, 13 x 10¼ in. (artwork © Ellen Gallagher)
Ellen Gallagher: AxME
Tate Modern
Bankside, London SE1 9TG, England
May 1–September 1, 2013
The first overview of this American artist’s twenty-year career and the first major survey of her work in the United Kingdom, Ellen Gallagher: AxME illuminates signature themes of her exploration of myth, nature, social issues, and art history through painting, drawing, relief, collage, print, sculpture, film, and animation, while inviting the viewer to closely study her fascinating mode of production. Along with key works such as the various series of wig-map grid collages that cast sharp commentaries on black beauty ideals, along with the intricate relief Bird in Hand, the exhibition presents Gallagher’s film installation Murmur (2003–4), her ongoing series of watercolor collages Watery Ecstatic, and a new series called Morphia, comprising two-sided drawings that combine “the intimate with the epic, the urban with the oceanic, the ethereal with the physical, and history with the present.”
Nicola L: Body Language under the Sun and the Moon
Broadway 1602
1181 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10001
May 4–June 22, 2013
Focusing on Nicola L’s radical perspective on the gendered body, whether in pain or in joy, this exhibition introduces the work of an overlooked French artist. Although based in New York since the 1980s, Nicola began her career in Paris in the 1960s as a conceptual artist working in installation, performance, and functional art (since 1976 she also turned to film). A larger-than-life-sized installation, a penetrable sculpture for three performers called The Cylinder, debuted at the Biennale de Paris in 1967 with the rock group the Soft Machine; it was then shown at La MaMa Theater in New York. Pierre Restany welcomed her exceptional vision in his essay “A Long Day’s Journey to the End of the Skin” for her first exhibition at Galerie Daniel Templon in 1969, the same year he hailed Evelyne Axell’s nudes, shown in the same gallery, as signs of sexual liberation.
Nicola’s functional objects became classics of 1960s experimental furniture and soft-art design. But their eroticism is underpinned by an early feminist perspective that merits comparison with the work of several women artists of the sixties onward, whether in France or elsewhere: see, for instance, La Femme Commode (1969–2012), The Lover’s Wardrobe (1967–70), and The Lips Lamp (1969), and soft sculptures such as The Giant Foot (1967–2013) and Giant Woman Sofa (1970–2012). In 1969 Nicola created The Red Coat for Eleven People or Same Skin for Everyone—whose original is included at Broadway 1602—that was first performed with Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970. Characterized as her pivotal “collective object of performance,” the work was used for performances around Europe, including one in Barcelona, where she was arrested by Francisco Franco’s army.
In 1974, Nicola participated in the exhibition Grandes Femmes, Petits Formats at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris, presenting her provocative multimedia sculpture Woman Pregnant from TV (1970). By 1979, the artist moved definitively to New York, where she witnessed and was inspired by the city’s countercultural movements and vibrantly experimental art milieu. In 1981, she directed a film on Abbie Hoffman, the radical social activist and leader of the Yippie movement, called My Name Is Abbie: Orphan of America. Nicola continues to work on her Penetrable Universe series.
Eve Sussman | Rufus Corporation
Bass Museum of Art
2100 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33139
April 12–November 3, 2013
Featuring the Rape of the Sabine Women (2004) and 89 Seconds at Alcázar (2007) and complemented by an interventional installation of photographic stills from both works alongside historical portraits from Bass Museum’s collection, this exhibition interweaves masterpieces of Eve Sussman’s film productions through Rufus Corporation (which she founded in 2003) that dazzle with their opulent settings. Conventionally screened in a darkened room, the twelve-minute 89 Seconds at Alcázar delights with Sussmann’s enactment of the enigmatic moment of court life captured in Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas (1656).
With its five acts inventively presented as a five-part video installation, Sussman’s celebrated Rape of the Sabine Women is a potent interpretation of the myth of Rome’s founding—filmed in Germany and Greece and set in the Cold War sixties—as ideal vehicle for her critique of utopia, power, and gender relationships in comparable historical settings of hope and decadence. Although Rape of the Sabine Women was made as a feature film, the action of its presentation at the Bass unspools on over thirty screens—including sprawling wall projections, a houselike construction, several tiny video monitors, and a massive installation of television sets piled randomly on the floor—and offers a mesmerizing immersive filmic experience that enhances the visual poetics and the power of Sussman’s reinterpretation of the Roman legend with government agents and Greek butchers’ daughters.
Niki de Saint Phalle, My Monster, 1968 (artwork © Niki de Saint Phalle/BUS 2013)
Niki de Saint Phalle: The Girl, the Monster, and the Goddess
Moderna Museet
Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Sweden
April 20–December 1, 2013
Capitalizing mainly on the Moderna Museet’s comprehensive collection of works by Niki de Saint Phalle, largely thanks to Pontus Hulten and a generous donation by the late artist, this exhibition captures the centrality of the figures of the girl, the monster, and the goddess in de Saint Phalle’s artistic universe, exploring its autobiographic and feminist underpinnings and advocating the importance of the artist in the twentieth-century postwar avant-garde. Enhanced by archival material that reflects the reception of her Ur-Goddess, She – A Cathedral, constructed for the museum in 1966, the exhibition evokes the meeting of the girl, the monster and the goddess in de Saint Phalle’s film Daddy and is accompanied by a new documentary on the artist.
VALIE EXPORT: Images of Contingence
Żak | Branicka
Lindenstrasse 35, Third Floor, Berlin D-10969 Germany
April 26–June 16, 2013
“For me, contingence is how and where you perceive borders, and how and where and when borders explode,” said VALIE EXPORT, and it is the exploration of a variety of borders that Images of Contingence illuminates by highlighting the artist’s interest in physical contact and its implications in various media, including installation, drawing, photography, film, and archival materials. Along with the installation Fragments of Images of Contingence (1994), in which light bulbs hanging from poles and wires are sensuously yet dangerously immersed into cylinders filled with fundamental-to-our-existence liquids such as milk, used oil, or water, and its rhythmic pendant, The un-ending/-ique melody of cords (1998), a recording of a threadless sewing machine and its sound, the exhibition brings together a selection of videos permeated by issues of contingency, liminality, and sensual experience. The show also includes the artist’s celebrated Touch Cinema, performed in Munich in 1969, for its political activation of touch. A series of drawings from the early 1970s, depicting hands that protect and caress or cause suffering, complements this showcase of EXPORT’s negotiation of borders by illuminating her contradictory exploration of touch and the female body as ciphers of intimacy, sensuality, and carnality, as well as violence and aggression.
Promoting Creativity and Public Access to the Arts
posted by Linda Downs — May 23, 2013
The following document, called “Promoting Creativity and Public Access to the Arts,” contains talking points to help American citizens to advocate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
National Endowment for the Arts: Promoting Creativity and Public Access to the Arts
We urge Congress to support a budget of $155 million for the NEA in the fiscal year 2014 (FY 2014) Interior Appropriations bill to preserve citizen access to the cultural, educational, and economic benefits of the arts and to advance creativity and innovation in communities across the United States.
NEA Annual Appropriations, FY 1992 to present (in millions of dollars)
|
FY |
’92 |
’93 |
’94 |
’95 |
’96/’97 |
’98/’99 |
’00 |
’01 |
’02 |
’03 |
’04 |
’05 |
’06/’07 |
’08 |
’09 |
’10 |
’11 |
’12 |
’13 |
|
$ |
176 |
174.5 |
170.2 |
162.3 |
99.5 |
98 |
97.6 |
104.8 |
115.2 |
115.7 |
121 |
121.3 |
124.4 |
144.7 |
155 |
167.5 |
155 |
146 |
138.4* |
* FY13 reflects a 5 percent cut mandated by sequestration, applied to the CR budget from FY12. The figures above are not adjusted for inflation. (Source: NEA)
Talking Points
The NEA budget has been reduced in previous years to a level that threatens the agency’s ability to make grants in every congressional district.
- Due to recent congressional budget cuts, the NEA had to decrease funding to state arts agencies and cut more than 175 direct grants to arts organizations
- Restoring the NEA to $155 million will help maintain grant support to arts organizations and partnerships in communities across the country
The NEA contributes to the economic growth and development of communities nationwide.
- The arts put people to work. More than 905,000 US businesses are involved in the creation or distribution of the arts, employing 3.35 million people: visual artists, performing artists, managers, marketers, technicians, teachers, designers, carpenters, and a variety of other trades and professions—jobs that pay mortgages and send children to college. Artists are a larger workforce group than the legal profession, medical doctors, or agricultural workers. (Sources: Americans for the Arts, Creative Industries, 2012; NEA, Artists in the Workforce, 2008)
- The arts are a business magnet. A strong arts sector stimulates business activity, attracting companies that want to offer employees and clients a creative climate and a community with high amenity value. The arts are a successful strategy for revitalizing rural areas and inner cities. Arts organizations purchase goods and services that help local merchants thrive. Arts organizations spend money—more than $61 billion—on salaries, local products, and professional and skilled trade services that boost local economies. (Source: Americans for the Arts, Arts and Economic Prosperity IV (AEPIV) study, 2012). In 2013, the American creative sector will be measured by the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). The BEA and NEA will develop an “Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account,” which will identify and calculate the arts and culture sector’s contributions to the gross domestic product (GDP)
- The arts help communities prosper in a diversified twenty-first-century economy. Nonprofit arts organizations, along with creative enterprises, contribute to state and local economies, generating employment and tax revenues and providing goods and services demanded by the public. The nonprofit arts industry generates $135.2 billion annually in economic activity, supports 4.13 million full-time equivalent jobs in the arts and related industries, and returns $9.59 billion in federal income taxes. (Source: AEPIV study)
- The arts attract tourism revenue. Cultural tourism accounts for 78 percent of US travelers—some 118 million tourists—who include arts and heritage in their trips each year. They stay longer and spend 36 percent more money than other kinds of travelers do, contributing more than $192 billion annually to the US economy. (Source: US Cultural and Heritage Tourism Marketing Council, US Department of Commerce, Cultural and Heritage Traveler Research, 2009)
- Federal funding for the arts leverages private funding. The NEA requires at least a one-to-one match of federal funds from all grant recipients—a match far exceeded by most grantees. On average, each NEA grant leverages at least $8 from other state, local, and private sources. Private support cannot match the leveraging role of government cultural funding
Talking Points (Continued)
The NEA improves access to the arts; supports artistic excellence; and fosters lifelong learning in the arts through grants, partnerships, research, and national initiatives.
- NEA funds spread across the country and expand arts access. Every US congressional district benefits from an NEA grant, leveraging additional support from a diverse range of private sources to combine funding from government, business, foundation, and individual donors. The NEA awarded more than 2,200 grants in 2012, totaling more than $108 million in appropriated funds. A listing of these grants is online at www.AmericansForTheArts.org/go/NEAgrants
- State arts agencies extend the reach of federal arts dollars. Forty percent of all NEA program funds—approximately $46 million in FY 2013—are regranted through state arts agencies. In partnership with the NEA, state arts agencies awarded more than 22,000 grants to organizations, schools, and artists in 5,000 communities across the US (Source: National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, Summary Report: 2011 Funding and Grant Making, 2011)
- NEA grants support a range of educational projects. Arts education in school and participation in arts lessons are the most significant predictors of arts participation later in life. The NEA funds school- and community-based programs that help children and youth acquire knowledge and skills in the arts. The NEA also supports educational programs for adults, collaborations between state arts agencies and state education agencies, and partnerships between arts institutions and K–12 and college/university educators. (Source: NEA, Arts Education in America: What the Declines Mean for Arts Participation, 2011)
- Rural and underserved communities benefit from the Challenge America Fast-Track category, which offers support to small and midsized organizations for projects that extend the reach of the arts to populations whose opportunities to experience the arts are limited by geography, ethnicity, economics, or disability. The Lawton Philharmonic Orchestra in Lawton, Oklahoma, for instance, received funding for an original work paying tribute to Native American themes in a concert that drew 250 Native American guests from the surrounding tribal nations
- The NEA has supported military families by partnering with Blue Star Families to present Blue Star Museums, offering free admission to active-duty military and their families, and a similar effort to launch Blue Star Theatres. Other NEA programs for the military have included Operation Homecoming; Great American Voices Military Base Tour; and Shakespeare in American Communities Military Base Tour.
- When public arts funding is lost, private dollars do not reliably pick up the slack. Tough economic conditions mean less revenue from public, private, and corporate sources. Loss of support to arts organizations across the country during the recent recession has meant cuts in administrative costs and cuts to programs. Programs for lower‐income populations and at‐risk children are typically hit hard because a larger majority of their funding comes from public sources
Background
America’s arts infrastructure, supported by a combination of government, business, foundation, and individual donors, is critical to the nation’s well-being and economic vitality. In a striking example of federal/state partnership, the NEA distributes 40 percent of its program dollars to state arts agencies, with each state devoting its own appropriated funds to support arts programs throughout the state. This partnership ensures that each state has a stable source of arts funding and policy. These grants, combined with state legislative appropriations and other dollars, are distributed widely to strengthen arts infrastructures and ensure broad access to the arts.
For close to fifty years, the NEA has provided strategic leadership and investment in the arts through its core programs, including those for dance, design, folk and traditional arts, literature, local arts agencies, media arts, multidisciplinary arts, music, theater, visual arts, and other programs. Among the proudest accomplishments of the NEA is the growth of arts activity in areas of the nation that were previously underserved or not served at all, especially in rural and inner-city communities. Americans can now see professional productions and exhibitions of high quality in their own hometowns.
The FY 2013 NEA appropriation reflects a 5 percent cut mandated by sequestration, applied to the continuing resolution budget allocation of $146 million from FY 2012, despite the president requesting an increase to $154.3 million and the Senate Appropriations Committee proposing an equal amount. The administration’s FY 2014 budget proposes $154.466 million for the NEA, which would nearly restore the agency to FY 2011 funding levels and would provide support to a healthy nonprofit arts sector in communities nationwide. Current funding amounts to just 47 cents per capita, as compared to 70 cents per capita in 1992.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for May 2013
posted by CAA — May 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.
May 2013
Hung Liu, Avant-Garde, 1993, oil on shaped canvas and on wood, 116 x 43 in. Collection of Hung Liu and Jeff Kelley (artwork © Hung Liu)
Summoning Ghosts: The Art of Hung Liu
Oakland Museum of California
1000 Oak Street, Oakland, CA 94607
March 16–June 30, 2013
Curated by René de Guzman, Summoning Ghosts: The Art of Hung Liu is the first comprehensive survey of one of the most prominent Chinese painters working in the United States. It features approximately eighty paintings as well as personal ephemera, such as photographs, sketchbooks, and informal painting studies from private and public collections around the world. Bringing together examples of her socialist-realist drawings from the 1970s, made at the height of the Cultural Revolution in China, with paintings realized since her immigration to the United States in 1984, Summoning Ghosts offers an illuminating exploration of Liu’s development and technical experimentation and captures the expressive bending of her training as social realist and muralist in Maoist China and the sophisticated ways in which she interlaces portraiture and documentation for her exploration of memory and history, among other themes.
Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey
Nasher Museum of Art
Duke University, 2001 Campus Drive, Durham, NC 27705
March 21–July 21, 2013
Bringing together about fifty works from the mid-1990s to the present, including previously unseen sketchbooks, this first comprehensive survey of the internationally renowned artist Wangechi Mutu thoroughly investigates her work and its contribution to transnational feminism, Afrofuturism, and globalization. It also presents the artist’s first-ever animated video, made with the pop producer and singer Santigold, commissioned for the Nasher Museum, as well as site-specific installations that enliven her collages. Organized by Trevor Schoonmaker, A Fantastic Journey is accompanied by a major catalogue that contains essays by the artist and the curator, as well as texts by dream hampton, Kristine Stiles, and Greg Tate.
Gina Pane, Azione Sentimentale, 1973, seven color photographs on wood panel, 48¼ x 40⅛ in. (artwork © Gina Pane; photograph by Francoise Masson and provided by ADAGP, Anne Marchand, and Kamel Mennour, Paris)
Parallel Practices: Joan Jonas and Gina Pane
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
5216 Montrose Boulevard, Houston, TX 77006
March 22–June 30, 2013
Presented in the Brown Foundation Gallery, Parallel Practices celebrates two major female contributors to early performance art working on both sides of the Atlantic—Joan Jonas and Gina Pane—and captures the complementary and disparate natures of their contemporaneous practices. To illuminate the multidisciplinary apects of their work as an essential element of their performative poetics, the exhibition brings together a great selection of early and later sculpture, photography, video, drawing, installations, and performances. Importantly, Parallel Practices is the first major presentation of Pane’s work in the United States and accompanied by an illustrated catalogue that explores the intersections of the two artists through texts by the art historians Barbara Clausen, Élisabeth Lebovici, and Anne Tronche, as well as an essay by the exhibition’s curator, Dean Daderko.
Les Immémoriales
49 Nord 6 Est – Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain de Lorraine
1 bis, rue des Trinitaires
F-57000 Metz, France
March 2–June 23, 2013
A rare meeting of Agnes Denes (b. 1931, Hungary), Monica Grzymala (b. 1970, Poland), and Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948, Chile) at Frac Lorraine by means of three installations that poetically interweave past and future through references to the rituals, languages, and material culture of Andean, Native American, and Australian Aboriginal people, Les Immémoriales offers an evocative contemplation on “the vital connection of human and Earth” with timely political resonance. The exhibition also ruminates on timeless questions regarding our passing from Earth and addresses a variety of political issues that hint at its modern abuses.
Gillian Wearing, Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say, I’M DESPERATE, 1992–93, c-type print mounted on aluminium, 44.5 x 29.7 cm (artwork © Gillian Wearing)
Gillian Wearing
Pinakothek der Moderne
Museum Brandhorst, Theresienstraße 35, 80333 Munich, Germany
March 21–July 7, 2013
Gillian Wearing’s first major retrospective in Germany showcases photographic works and film installations, providing an overview of her entire oeuvre and illuminating the sophisticated ways in which this British artist uses portraiture to make social relationships visible. Organized by Bernhart Schwenk and meant to travel to London and Düsseldorf, Gillian Wearing is distinguished by the evocative framing of Wearing’s works through several pieces by Andy Warhol from the museum’s collection.
Marie Laurencin
Musée Marmottan Monet
2 Rue Louis Boilly 75016 Paris, France
February 21–June 30, 2013
The first French museum exhibition to celebrate the work of Marie Laurencin (1883–1956), one of the most successful female artists of the first half of the twentieth century in Paris, features more than ninety paintings.
Kara Walker: Rise Up Ye Mighty Race!
Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60603
February 21–August 11, 2013
Kara Walker returns to the cut-paper medium in monumental form for a new commissioned installation that includes five large framed graphite drawings and forty small framed mixed-media pieces, along with cut-paper silhouettes. The exhibition’s title refers to comments made by Barack Obama in his 1995 book, Dreams from My Father, about the challenges of community organizing in Chicago, in which he quotes the Jamaican political leader Marcus Garvey. Merging handwritten text with images, the work revolves around The Turner Diaries, written in 1978 by the white nationalist William Luther Pierce; it also investigates the notion of “race war” as it exists in the contemporary imagination. Walker has referred to the work as “a kind of paranoid panorama wall work—with supplemental drawings large and small, to chronicle what can be called a diary of my ever-present, never-ending war with race.”
Installation view of As it were … So to speak at the Jewish Museum (photograph by David Heald)
As it were … So to speak: A Museum Collection in Dialogue
with Barbara Bloom
Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128
March 15–August 4, 2013
Inspired partly by Talmudic discourse unfolding across time and space and capitalizing on the use of objects as “placeholders for thoughts,” the artist Barbara Bloom interestingly weaves artworks and objects from the Jewish Museum’s permanent collection with her own texts, creating polysemous narratives and unpredictable encounters that pressure and energize the museum experience.
Someday Is Now: The Art of Corita Kent
Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery
Skidmore College, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866
January19–July 28, 2013
The well-deserved attention that Sister Corita (1918–1986) has been receiving internationally during the past couple years is topped with this major survey of her work, organized by Ian Berry and Michael Duncan, that brings together more than two hundreds items spanning her entire career. Someday Is Now offers serigraphs, paintings, ephemera, and videos of protests and performances with her students that illustrate the complexities of Sister Corita’s visual language as a printmaker and capture the diversity of her political agenda as an activist, teacher, and Catholic nun. An extensive catalogue that sheds further light on the complexities of her life and work accompanies the exhibition.
LaToya Ruby Frazier, Grandma Ruby and Me, 2005, gelatin silver photograph, 15½ x 18½ in. Brooklyn Museum, Emily Winthrop Miles Fund, 2011.63.1 (artwork © LaToya Ruby Frazier)
LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238
March 22–August 11, 2013
With about forty photographs of the artist’s family and their hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania—a formerly prosperous steel-mill town that became a “distressed municipality” of fewer than 2,500 residents—LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital showcases the way the artist uses social documentary and portraiture to metaphorize an industrial town’s decline, comment on the effects of deindustrialization on individuals and communities, and critique recent forms of Braddock’s corporate exploitation that continue to threaten and distort the dire realities of the working-class community to which her family belongs.
Affiliated Society News for May 2013
posted by CAA — May 09, 2013
American Institute for Conservation
The American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC) is hosting its 2013 annual meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana, from May 29 to June 1, 2013. Its theme, “The Contemporary in Conservation,” will focus on contemporary approaches to conservation—not only the conservation of contemporary art—and include perspectives from both within and outside the field. In addition to the treatment of contemporary art, the conference will consider digitization, environmental sustainability, and the effects of architectural design on the preservation of objects as well as current trends in exhibition design and the new challenges they present for preservation, including greater physical access, longer display times, and more touring exhibitions. Learn more about the upcoming AIC meeting at www.conservation-us.org/meetings and join the organization for the lively discussions that will take place.
Art Libraries Society of North America
The Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) and the Visual Resources Association Foundation (VRAF) will once again sponsor the Summer Educational Institute for Visual Resources and Image Management (SEI), to be held June 18–21, 2013, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. This collaborative professional training program, now in its tenth year, addresses the evolving requirements of image-management professionals. Expert instructors will cover intellectual-property rights, offer a hands-on digital-imaging workshop, and describe best practices and tools for metadata and cataloging. A “think-camp” discussion session will identify topic preferences from registrants, such as the future of the profession, uses of social and new media, visual literacy, and the digital humanities. More than four hundred people serving in a range of professional roles have benefited from past SEIs, including art historians, visual-resources curators, university librarians, archivists, and museum professionals responsible for image rights and reproductions. For more information, please contact the SEI cochairs: Betha Whitlow or Amy Trendler.
Historians of German and Central European Art and Architecture
During CAA’s 2013 Annual Conference in New York, the Historians of German and Central European Art and Architecture (HGCEA) hosted a two-part panel, “Central Europe’s Others in Art and Visual Culture,” chaired by Brett Van Hoesen and Elizabeth Otto, and an Emerging Scholars panel, led by Keith Holz. HGCEA also organized a dinner party at the Scandinavia House, which was attended by about sixty members of the society. The gathering celebrated the achievements of two retiring colleagues, Françoise Foster-Hahn and Reinhold Heller. Former HGCEA president Steven Mansbach delivered a eulogy on Foster-Hahn, and present board member Jay Clark did the same for Heller. The current HGCEA president, Marsha Morton, presented the prize for the winner of HGCEA’s first essay contest to Pepper Stetler and bestowed honorary mention to Amy Hamlin and Elizabeth Brisman. The contest was an initiative for the encouragement and recognition of young scholars. Sixteen essays published during 2011 and 2012 were submitted. A new appeal will be issued for essays published in 2012.
Historians of Netherlandish Art
The Historians of Netherlandish Art (HNA) has published the winter 2013 issue of the open-access, refereed electronic journal, the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art. Contents include articles by Sally Whitman Coleman, Matthijs Ilsink and Monica Marchesi, and Elizabeth Sutton, as well as translations of part one and two of D. C. Meijer Jr.’s “The Amsterdam Civic Guard Portraits within and outside the New Rijksmuseum.”
HNA solicits session and workshop proposals for the organization’s quadrennial conference, to be held in Boston, Massachusetts, June 5–7, 2014. For the first time, this event will take place together and in cooperation with the conference of the American Association for Netherlandic Studies. HNA welcomes proposals for sessions that represent new directions in the study of Netherlandish art between 1350 and 1750. Proposals may focus on individual disciplines within this chronological spectrum or feature interdisciplinary approaches and collaborative endeavors. Sessions will be two hours long with a maximum of four papers each. HNA also invites proposals for workshops designed to allow for group discussion of focused topics. Workshop proposals should define the matter to be addressed and describe how discussion will be generated. Prospective session and workshop proposals should be sent via email by May 15, 2013, to Paul Crenshaw, chair of the program committee.
International Sculpture Center
The International Sculpture Center (ISC) will hold the 2013 International Sculpture Symposium in Miami, Florida, from December 1 to 4, 2013. The program is cosponsored by Florida International University and the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum and will comprise daytime and evening programming, including keynote addresses, panel discussions, and an iron pour led by the international sculptor Coral Lambert, joined by Iron Maidens and other selected artists. The symposium marks the first ISC program held in the city of Miami, spans four days, and precedes Art Basel Miami Beach, which takes place December 5–8. Artists and enthusiasts from around the world will have the opportunity to participate in a week of dynamic cultural events. Please visit www.sculpture.org/miami2013 for more details and to join the Miami event mailing list to receive updates as they become available. Discounted early-bird registration for ISC members opens on June 1. Questions should be directed to events@sculpture.org or 609-689-1051, ext. 302.
Italian Art Society
The Italian Art Society (IAS) has announced its new officers and committee members: Cathleen A. Fleck, president; Sheryl E. Reiss, executive vice president; and Nicola Camerlenghi, vice president for programming. The Awards Committee now includes Janis Elliott (chair), Jill Pederson, and Eve Straussman-Pflanzer. Joining the Nominating Committee are Brian Curran (chair) and Janna Israel. The Program Committee welcomes Dorothy Glass and Rebekah Perry, and the Graduate Student and Emerging Scholars Committee greets its new members, Sarah Wilkins and Ashley Elston. IAS thanks those whose terms have ended for their service.
IAS will sponsor four sessions at the International Congress for Medieval Art in Kalamazoo, Michigan; see the IAS website for the titles and the names of the speakers. IAS seeks proposals for papers for its two 2014 CAA Annual Conference sessions: “Periodization Anxiety in Italian Art: Renaissance, Baroque, or Early Modern?” (chairs: Frances Gage and Eva Struhal); and “‘Futuro Anteriore’: Cultural Self-Appropriation as Catalyst in the Art of Italy”(chairs Alison Perchuk and Irina D. Costache). Please visit the IAS website for the CAA session descriptions and submission instructions. Deadline: May 6, 2013.
The speaker of the fourth annual Italian Art Society–Kress Foundation Lecture Series in Italy is Sarah Blake McHam of Rutgers University, who will present “Laocoön, or Pliny Vindicated” at the Fondazione Marco Besso in Rome on Tuesday, May 28, 2013, at 6:00 PM.
Mid-America College Art Association
The board of the Mid-America College Art Association (MACAA) will hold a retreat May 24–25, 2013, in San Antonio, Texas, in preparation for its 2014 conference, which will be hosted by the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). The conference chair is Scott Sherer, and the UTSA institution coordinator is Gregory Elliot. The conference contact is Laura Crist, who can be reached at macaa2014@utsa.edu or 210-458-4391. Conference details will be posted on the MACAA and conference websites, as planning develops.
National Council of Arts Administrators
From September 25 to 28, 2013, Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond will host the forty-first annual conference of the National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA), which will focus on reexamining the value of uncertainty and doubt in the arts. The gathering will also spotlight current trends in arts administration; offer forums, speakers, and workshops; and create opportunities to network within a diverse community of higher-education arts professionals. You can expect top-notch speakers, timely and forward-looking sessions, an engaging administrator’s workshop, and much more. NCAA enthusiastically welcomes new members and any interested parties to its events. Learn more about the 2013 conference.
New Media Caucus
The New Media Caucus (NMC) has announced the results of the elections for president, treasurer, and board members. The new president is Vagner Whitehead, associate professor at Oakland University. His term as president-elect begins immediately and runs until the 2014 CAA Annual Conference in Chicago, when he will become president at the 2014 annual business meeting. Reelected as treasurer is Jim Jeffers, visiting lecturer at College of the Holy Cross, who has been actively involved in NMC leadership since the organization’s founding ten years ago. He has served as treasurer for the past two years, a critical position as NMC pursues 501(c)(3) status. Joining the board are Victoria Bradbury, a researcher at the Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss, University of Sutherland; Mina Cheon, interdisciplinary professor, Maryland Institute College of Art; Carlos Rosas, associate professor, Pennsylvania State University; and Jessica Westbrook, assistant professor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. View a listing of the entire NMC board of directors and officers and the constitution and bylaws, which describes the terms and election processes.
Public Art Dialogue
At the 2013 CAA Annual Conference in New York, Public Art Dialogue (PAD) sponsored Sally Webster’s session, “Reconsidering Mural Painting: New Methodologies,” which featured five papers: “In the Making: Mural Painting and the Look of Reform in Theodore Roosevelt’s America” by Annelise K. Madsen; “Picturing Jewish History in 1920s Hollywood: The Murals in the Wilshire Boulevard Temple” from MacKenzie Stevens; “‘No Vain Glory’: Cartography and Murals in the American War Cemeteries in France” by Kate C. Lemay; “Looking Beyond ‘The Wall’: Reconstructing City Walls’ Gateway to Soho” from Andrew Wasserman; and “The Renewed ‘Spirit of Hyde Park’: A Case Study in Mural Restoration” by Emily Scibilia. Sarah Schrank was the discussant. A roundtable chaired by Norie Sato on “Time, Transience, Duration” featured presentations by Penny Balkin Bach, Renee Piechocki, and Marisa Lerer.
Penny Balkin Bach of the Association for Public Art (aPA), based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, received PAD’s annual lifetime achievement award. Bach has been in the field since the early 1970s, and under her leadership aPA (formerly called the Fairmount Park Art Association, whose staff she joined in 1980) has sponsored numerous groundbreaking installations and special projects. Open Air, which premiered in October 2012, was a spectacular interactive light installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Bach’s tireless and innovative work has transformed the field of public art.
Society for Photographic Education
The Society for Photographic Education (SPE) seeks proposals for “Collaborative Exchanges: Photography in Dialogue,” its fifty-first national conference, to be held March 6–9, 2014, in Baltimore, Maryland. SPE is accepting proposals for the 2014 conference through June 1, 2013. Topics, which are not required to be theme based, may include but are not limited to: image making, history, contemporary theory and criticism, new technologies, effects of media and culture, educational issues, and funding. Membership in SPE is required to submit, and all proposals are peer reviewed. Descriptions for the five presentation formats follow:
- Graduate Student: short presentation of your own artistic work and a brief introduction to your graduate program
- Imagemaker: presentation on your own artistic work (photography, film, video, performance, installation, multidisciplinary approaches)
- Lecture: presentation on historical topic, theory, or another artist’s work
- Panel: a group led by a moderator to discuss a chosen topic
- Teach: presentations, workshops, or demos that address educational issues, including teaching resources and strategies; curricula to serve diverse artists and changing student populations; seeking promotion and tenure; avoiding burnout, and professional exchange
Visit the website for information on how to join SPE and for full proposal guidelines.
Society for the Study of Early Modern Women
The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (SSEMW) has announced the names, fields, and affiliations of its officers and committee members for 2013: the new president is Jane Couchman, French and women’s studies, York University; the new vice president is Megan Matchinske, comparative literature and English, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; a past president is Allyson Poska, history, Mary Washington University; a second past president is Pamela Benson, English, Rhode Island College; the new treasurer is Deborah Uman, English, St. John Fisher College; the new secretary is Abby Zanger, French, independent scholar; and the new web and listserv coordinator is Karen Nelson, Center for Literary and Comparative Studies, English, University of Maryland, College Park.
The Executive Committee now comprises: Eve Straussman-Pflanzer, art, Art Institute of Chicago; Shannon Miller, English, Temple University; Michelle Dowd, English, University of North Carolina, Greensboro; Meredith Ray, Italian and women’s studies, University of Delaware; Renee Baernstein, history, Miami University; Sheila Cavanaugh, English, Emory University; and Lauren Shook, English, University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
The Awards Committee will consist of: Marina Leslie, English, Northeastern University (chair for 2013); Heidi Brayman Hackel, English, University of California, Riverside; Wendy Heller, music, Princeton University; Mary Nyquist, women and gender, University of Toronto; Eleanor Hubbard, history, Princeton University; Bronwen Wilson, art history, University of British Columbia; Leah Chang, French, George Washington University; Sheila ffolliott, art history, George Mason University (emerita); and Sarah Ross, English, Massey University.
For additional information, including members of the Nominating Committee, please see About SSEMW section on http://ssemw.org.
Society of Architectural Historians
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a one-year grant of $51,330 to the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) to administer the SAH/Mellon Author Awards. The award is a temporary measure to provide financial relief to early-career scholars who are publishing monographs on architectural history and the history of the built environment and responsible for paying for rights and permissions for images in their publications. Through this grant SAH will provide awards to emerging scholars (those with PhDs earned during the past six years) to help defray the high costs of image licensing and reproduction for monographs on the history of the built environment. Awards will be made once in 2013 for print (hardcover, softcover) and digital publications (ebook, DVD). Awardees will be selected on the basis of the quality and demonstrated financial need for their project. SAH anticipates awarding approximately ten SAH/Mellon Author Awards in 2013. Deadline: June 1, 2013.
Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture
In response to increasing interest in the field, the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) is extending its activities with renewed vigor under new leadership. After voting in January 2013, Margaret Samu was elected president, and Natasha Kurchanova was chosen vice president and will serve as president-elect. Yelena Kalinsky has become secretary-treasurer, and Inge Wierda will be the society’s webmaster. Joining them on the board of directors are Kathleen Duff, Eva Forgacs, Mark Svede, Danilo Udovicki, and Alla Vronskaya.
SHERA sponsors sessions and holds regular meetings at both CAA and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, maintains an active listserv and Facebook page, and is currently creating a new website. New members are welcome; please direct your inquiries to SHERA.artarchitecture@gmail.com for more information.
Society of North American Goldsmiths
The Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG) will hold its forty-second annual conference from May 15 to 18, 2013, in Toronto, Ontario, at the downtown historic Fairmont Royal York Hotel. Titled “Meta-Mosaic,” the event will celebrate the multiple industries within jewelry and metalsmithing in the twenty-first century. Toronto is a mosaic of peoples and cultures as well as the center of Canada’s jewelry industry. This conference will examine a fluid identity within art, craft, and design and inspire attendees to embrace a collective mosaic. Join SNAG for presentations and panels featuring industry luminaries from across the globe, rapid-fire presentations by international designers and artists, over twenty exhibition, the third annual member Trunk Show Sale, social events, and so much more! Online registration has closed, but you can still register onsite beginning at 3:00 PM on May 15.
Visual Resources Association
The Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) and the Visual Resources Association Foundation (VRAF) will once again sponsor the Summer Educational Institute for Visual Resources and Image Management (SEI), to be held June 18–21, 2013, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. This collaborative professional training program, now in its tenth year, addresses the evolving requirements of image-management professionals. Expert instructors will cover intellectual-property rights, offer a hands-on digital-imaging workshop, and describe best practices and tools for metadata and cataloging. A “think-camp” discussion session will identify topic preferences from registrants, such as the future of the profession, uses of social and new media, visual literacy, and the digital humanities. More than four hundred people serving in a range of professional roles have benefited from past SEIs, including art historians, visual-resources curators, university librarians, archivists, and museum professionals responsible for image rights and reproductions. For more information, please contact the SEI cochairs: Betha Whitlow or Amy Trendler.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — May 08, 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.
Long Hidden, Vatican Painting Linked to Native Americans
For close to four hundred years, the painting was closed off to the world. For the past 124 years, millions of visitors walked by without noticing an intriguing scene covered with centuries of grime. Only now, the Vatican says a detail in a newly cleaned fifteenth-century fresco shows what may be one of the first European depictions of Native Americans. The fresco, The Resurrection, was painted by the Renaissance master Pinturicchio in 1494—just two years after Christopher Columbus first set foot in what came to be called the New World. (Read more from National Public Radio.)
Ten Tips to Earn Tenure
I had complained to my colleague that after the intellectually, emotionally, and physically grueling experience of completing graduate school while teaching full-time, I would really look forward to “just” being a professor. She replied, “I hate to tell you this, but you’ll still be working sixty- and seventy-hour weeks to earn tenure and promotion because you’ll have all kinds of other responsibilities besides teaching that you don’t have now.” Over twelve years, three moves, and two blood pressure medicines later, I see how right she was that day. Here are my ten tips for earning tenure and promotion without becoming the nutty professor. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)
As Works Flood In, Nation’s Library Treads Water
The Sea Creatures, who recently sent their recording Naked in the Rain to the Library of Congress, probably did not ponder the impact of sequestration on their music’s journey from dream to copyright. Just as military contractors, air-traffic controllers, and federal workers are coping with the grim results of a partisan impasse over the federal deficit, the Library of Congress, whose services range from copyrighting written works to the collection, preservation, and digitalization of millions of books, photographs, maps, and other materials, faces deep cuts that threaten its historic mission. (Read more in the New York Times.)
Q&A with Denise Scott Brown
Denise Scott Brown, the cofounder of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates (now VSBA), talks to Architect about a petition to put her name on the 1991 Pritzer Architecture Prize, about her career in design. and about the ways she has been treated as a woman architect in a profession that she has described as a “nineteenth-century upper-middle-class men’s club.” (Read more in Architect.)
Smithsonian Sequestration Closures Could Get Worse
The Smithsonian Institution has announced that parts of three museums—the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Museum of African Art, and the Smithsonian Castle—will close through September 30 because of mandatory budget cuts, but the true effect of sequestration on the museum group is far wider. A Smithsonian spokeswoman says that in addition to these closures, sections of other museums will go dark this year as exhibitions come to their scheduled ends. (Read more in the DCist.)
English Teachers Reject Use of Robots to Grade Student Writing
Critics of standardized tests argue that the written portion of those assessments can short-circuit the process of developing ideas in writing. Using machines to grade those tests further magnifies their negative effects, according to a statement adopted last month by the National Council of Teachers of English. As high-school students prepare for college, the statement reads, they “are ill served when their writing experience has been dictated by tests that ignore the evermore complex and varied types and uses of writing found in higher education.” (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)