CAA News Today
CAA Staff Spotlight: Mira Friedlaender
posted by CAA — Mar 10, 2023
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On Guard, performance centering on the installation of long-stored objects from the Bilge Civelekoglu Friedlaender Estate, FiveMyles, Brooklyn, 2014.
Mira Friedlaender is CAA’s Senior Manager of Annual Conference and Programs. Since joining CAA in 2018, Mira has worked with a significant portion of members (new and returning!) and continues to do so each year to support their participation in conference sessions and events. She produces the event with CAA staff, committees, and partners, attending to myriad details while also working to refine and reshape the conference each year in support of CAA’s long-term strategic goals. Mira was previously an exhibition manager for nonprofits such as No Longer Empty and HappyLuckyNo1. She also worked in television production and co-owned a restaurant in Brooklyn, New York.
As an artist and independent scholar of art stewardship, Mira has exhibited locally and internationally, and her work has been featured in the New York Times and Bomb. She has held residencies at the American Center in Bangladesh and Recess in New York. She is the Director of the Bilge Friedlaender Estate, was a fellow in the Art & Law Program, and cocurated Bilge Friedlaender: Words, Numbers, Lines in Istanbul.
“Since her death, I’ve been stewarding the art my mother Bilge Friedlaender (née Civelekoglu) made, beginning more actively in 2014 with my project at Recess, which was still in Soho at that time. I’ve contributed to the scholarship on artist estates through this work and through knowledge sharing; as an artist and artist’s heir I am most interested in performing an emotional institutional critique of the challenges artist-stewards face, particularly those without infinite resources,” explains Mira.
Curated by Işın Önol, Bilge Friedlaender’s never-before-seen works from the 1970s are on view now at Sapar Contemporary in New York City through April 10. Bilge’s work occupies a unique place in the Turkish and Middle Eastern modernist tradition as well as in the history of twentieth-century American art, especially the soulful minimalism of 1970s—not unlike the work of Zarina Hashmi, Etel Adnan, and Huguette Caland. Bilgé’s minimalism is infused with Sufi mysticism, sacred numerology, and reverence for nature and the divine feminine. Her spiritual feminism evolved into an overt ecofeminism as she grew older.
“My mother left Turkey in 1958 to come to the US and be an artist, and she exhibited until her death. Since 2015 there has been a museum show of her work in Istanbul and there have been subsequent opportunities for Bilge’s work, but this is the first time her work has been shown in New York City since 1981. This is a big step for the estate. Next, we are looking to travel this incredible selection of the works on paper and artist books with the goal of expanding the scholarship around Bilge’s artworks and extensive writings.”
Join Mira and curator Işın Önol in conversation with guests on April 4, 6 p.m. ET, at Sapar Contemporary.
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Bilge Friedlaender, Weightless Pink, 1975
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Bilgé: Lifespan of a Horizontal Line, Sapar Contemporary, 2023, and, right column, Half of What’s There, Recess Art, 2014
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Bilge Friedlaender, Tides Time II, 1975
CAA Signs ACLS Statement on Florida House Bill 999
posted by CAA — Mar 07, 2023
CAA has signed on to a statement issued by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) regarding Florida HB 999. This bill would radically shift Florida’s approach to higher education in a manner that negatively impacts diversity and academic freedom; this is antithetical to CAA’s mission.
CAA stands with ACLS, together with other academic societies, and shares their belief that, if passed, the bill “ends academic freedom in the state’s public colleges and universities, with dire consequences for their teaching, research, and financial well-being.”
The full ACLS statement on Florida HB 999 can be viewed here. CAA encourages individual and institutional members to visit the ACLS website and sign on to the ACLS statement, as well as contact legislators, write op-eds, and proliferate information on social media to fight this bill.
Other learned societies and higher education institutions who have signed the ACLS statement:
American Academy of Religion
American Anthropological Association
American Association for Italian Studies
American Folklore Society
American Historical Association
American Musicological Society
American Philosophical Association
American Political Science Association
American Society for Environmental History
American Sociological Association
Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Association for the Study of African American Life and History
Association of University Presses
College Art Association
German Studies Association
Latin American Studies Association
Linguistic Society of America
Medieval Academy of America
Modern Language Association
National Council of Teachers of English
National Council on Public History
National Women’s Studies Association
Organization of American Historians
Rhetoric Society of America
Sixteenth Century Society & Conference
Society for Ethnomusicology
Society for Music Theory
Society for the History of Technology
Society of Biblical Literature
World History Association
CAA has also signed on to a Florida HB 999 statement issued by the American Historical Association (AHA) which can be viewed here.
Other organizations who have signed the AHA statement:
African American Intellectual History Society
American Anthropological Association
American Association for the History of Medicine
American Association of University Professors
American Folklore Society
American Philosophical Association
American Society for Environmental History
American Sociological Association
Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Association for the Study of African American Life and History
Association of Ancient Historians
Association of University Presses
Berkshire Conference of Women Historians
Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire
Central European History Society
College Art Association
Committee on LGBT History
Conference on Latin American History
Executive Committee of the Czechoslovak Studies Association
French Colonial Historical Society
German Studies Association
H-France
Historians for Peace and Democracy
Immigration and Ethnic History Society
Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library
Labor and Working Class History Association
LGBTQ History Museum of Central Florida
Linguistic Society of America
Medieval Academy of America
National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education
National Council on Public History
National Council of Teachers of English
New England Historical Association
North American Conference on British Studies
North American Society for Oceanic History
Organization of American Historians
PEN America
Polish American Historical Association
Radical History Review
Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media
Shakespeare Association of America
Social Welfare History Group
Society for Austrian and Habsburg History
Society for French Historical Studies
Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Society for Textual Scholarship
Society for the History of the Early American Republic
Society for the History of Technology
Society for the History of the Early American Republic
Society for U.S. Intellectual History
Southern Historical Association
Texas Institute of Letters
Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse University
Western Society for French History
Woodhull Freedom Foundation
World History Association
Meet the Michael Aurbach Fellowship for Excellence in Visual Art Inaugural Recipient and Honorable Mentions
posted by CAA — Mar 07, 2023
CAA is pleased to announce the first ever recipient of the first Michael Aurbach Fellowship for Excellence in Visual Art: Lauren Sandler.
Lauren Sandler is a ceramic artist and educator whose work deconstructs mythologies and investigates narratives of power and perspective. Sandler exhibits nationally, and gives talks, workshops, and publishes work concerning contemporary and historic issues in ceramics. She holds an MFA in Ceramics from Penn State University, and undergraduate degrees in Anthropology and Ceramics from Ithaca College and SUNY New Paltz. She served on the Board of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts as Director at Large from 2019–22 and is currently Associate Professor and Program Head of Ceramics at Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Ellen Wetmore, University of Massachusetts Lowell
Ellen Wetmore is a Professor of Art and Chair of the Department of Art and Design at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan (BFA, BA in Art History) and Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), and joined UMass Lowell in 2007. She is a participant of CAA, UFVA, Cultivamos Cultura, and past member of the Boston Sculptors Gallery. Her awards include a 2017 Berkshire Taconic ART Fellowship and a 2017 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship. Her social concerns include neuro-atypical disabilities, race and teaching, money and art. Wetmore’s current artistic practice reinterprets history, art history, and investigates visual thinking. Wetmore’s projects have been featured at the Boston Cyberarts Art on the Marquee, the Indianapolis Art Center, the Sandwell Arts Trust, Ciné Lumière, London, CologneOff, Germany, the InShadow Festival, Lisbon, and Videoholica in Bulgaria. She is a 2012 School of the Museum of Fine Arts Traveling Fellow and a summer 2015 visiting artist at the American Academy of Rome. Her most recent solo exhibition was a drawing study of the collection at the Fitchburg Art Museum. Her current science collaborations explore printed, fabric-based video displays, text and memory in fat cells, and the characterization of high fire ceramic glazes in a Cambodian wood fired kiln. Her first graphic novel, Dante’s Inferno, is a fictional account of race and the academic hiring process.
Allison Wiese, University of San Diego
Allison Wiese is an interdisciplinary artist who makes sculptures, installations, sound works, performances, and architectural interventions. Her work is often created for public spaces at the boundaries of or outside institutions, and has been exhibited at, among other venues, Machine Project, Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego and Socrates Sculpture Park, New York. She is the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and has received grants from Art Matters, Creative Capital, the Cultural Arts Council of Houston, and the City of San Diego’s Commission for Arts and Culture. A fellow of MacDowell and an alumna of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Wiese was a Core Fellow of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, received her MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and a BA from Brown University. Wiese is an Associate Professor at the University of San Diego.
Ziui Vance, Temple University
Ziui explores the semiotics of bodies, their chaotic signals, and spatiality. She makes the paintings, objects, and installations inside the disputed realm between affection and dominance, rules and reality. Characterized by a play-like process, Ziui describes a variety of body configurations with an intricate intensity that reflected on gender, ethnicity, and perceptions: an infinite tapestry of imagery associated with her exoneration from the polar complexities of being Chinese in the United States.
ABOUT THE FELLOWSHIP
The Michael Aurbach Fellowship for Excellence in Visual Art recognizes and honors CAA members who have obtained an MFA or equivalent in studio art and are currently teaching studio classes full-time or part-time. The purpose is to support these artist members as they fulfill their goals as visual arts professionals. On an annual basis, CAA will grant a $7,500 award and registration to the CAA Annual Conference to a qualified artist member teaching at an American or international university or community college. A jury of artists will adjudicate the fellowship and a proposal will not be required; the recipient will be selected solely based on their work. Learn more.
CAA 2023 Awards for Distinction
posted by CAA — Feb 06, 2023
CAA announces the 2023 recipients of Awards for Distinction. By honoring outstanding member achievements, CAA reaffirms its mission to encourage the highest standards of scholarship, practice, connoisseurship, and teaching in the arts. With these annual awards, CAA seeks to honor individual artists, art historians, authors, museum professionals, and critics whose accomplishments transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.
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Installation view, Barbara Kruger, David Zwirner, New York, June 30–August 12, 2022. Courtesy David Zwirner.
Among the awards, the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement is presented to Barbara Kruger whose influential works have consistently had viewers question the larger society around them for over four decades.
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Griselda Pollock
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Svetlana Alpers
The Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Awards for Writing on Art are being presented to feminist art historian Griselda Pollock and art historian of northern Renaissance and Dutch Golden Age art Svetlana Alpers.
Art Journal Award
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
Julia Burtenshaw, Héctor García Botero, Diana Magaloni, and María Alicia Uribe Villegas, The Portable Universe / El universo en tus manos: Thought and Splendor of Indigenous Colombia (DelMonico Books/Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2022)
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions
No recipient this year
Frank Jewett Mather Award
Eduardo Cadava
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Sylvia Houghteling, The Art of Cloth in Mughal India (Princeton University Press, 2022)
Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Tomasz Grusiecki, “Doublethink: Polish Carpets in Transcultural Contexts” and Hugo Shakeshaft, “Beauty, Gods, and Early Greek Art: The Dedications of Mantiklos and Nikandre Revisited”
Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work
Dawoud Bey
CAA/AIC Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
Michele Marincola and Lucretia Kargère
Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Barbara Kruger
Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Svetlana Alpers and Griselda Pollock
Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
Mary Lum
Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
No recipient this year
Excellence in Diversity Award
Arlene M. Dávila
Citations:
Art Journal Award
Emilie Boone, “When Images in Haiti Fail: The Photograph of Charlemagne Péralte,” Art Journal, Winter 2022
The 2022 jury has chosen Emilie Boone as the recipient of the 2022 Art Journal Award for the essay, “When Images in Haiti Fail: The Photograph of Charlemagne Péralte.” Boone’s deconstruction of a single photo offers readers an entry into the contested history surrounding the US occupation of Haiti, as well as the attendant visual politics of this period (1915–34). Through close textual analysis of Péralte’s historically significant image, the author weaves together a situated narrative of Haitian visual culture under occupation, interrogating crucial notions of ontology through examination of photographic composition. Boone frames the racialized body as a contested and imagined site rife for adaptation and tampering, first through vernacular photographic techniques, as well as other forms of pictorial representation. In the end, Boone’s text summons an interrogation of tradition, and indeed, of the implicit politics of the medium of photography itself.
Jury members:
Omar Kholeif, Sharjah Art Foundation, Chair
Phil Taylor, George Eastman Museum
Tilo Reifenstein, York St John University
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
Julia Burtenshaw, Héctor García Botero, Diana Magaloni, and María Alicia Uribe Villegas, The Portable Universe/El universo en tus manos: Thought and Splendor of Indigenous Colombia (DelMonico Books / Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2022)
The Western concept of El Dorado has long impacted the study of the ancient cultures of Colombia, overshadowing the manifold stories that pre-Columbian art weaves across time and space. How can museum curators uncover those stories, illuminate their nuanced complexities, and present them to the public in engaging and innovative ways? The Portable Universe/El universo en tus manos is the remarkable outcome of just such an undertaking. Both the catalog and related exhibition are the result of a six-year collaboration between the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Museo del Oro, Bogotá. Most importantly, the curators collaborated with a contemporary Indigenous community in Colombia, the Arhuaco of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. The Portable Universe reveals that pre-Columbian artifacts—including goldworks, ceramics, and textiles—are not mere objects, but rather messengers that link living beings (people, animals, plants) and places across space and time. Each is, in brief, a portable universe. The Arhuaco explain that these messengers need to be “nourished,” or brought back to life. Thus, the concept of nourishment enters curatorial practice: a form of sustained, reciprocal attention that goes well beyond customary models of stewardship. Incisively written, gorgeously illustrated, and ingeniously designed, this groundbreaking book brings together interdisciplinary research (in history, archaeology, anthropology, environmental studies, and ornithology) and Indigenous knowledge to propose a new approach to the material and spiritual culture of ancient Colombia, one which underscores the transformative powers of cross-cultural dialogue. A major advance in the study of Indigenous art, the book spurs us to creatively rethink our notions of both the museum and scholarship.
Jury Members:
Benjamin Anderson, Cornell University, Co-chair
Karen Lang, Independent Scholar, Co-chair
Francesca Pietropaolo, Independent Scholar
Jochen Wierich, Aquinas College
Frank Jewett Mather Award
Eduardo Cadava
The jury has awarded this year’s prize to Eduardo Cadava, based on his elegant book Paper Graveyards (MIT Press, 2021) and in recognition of his long career within the field of art criticism, especially his influential theories of photography. Paper Graveyards is the culmination of decades of Cadava’s thinking about how images and technical media actively transform social and political life, and his far-ranging case studies (including examinations of artists Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Fazal Sheikh, and Susan Meiselas) orient themselves towards activist practices that speak to and from the margins. Wending through ruminations on materiality, forms of documentary, and modes of circulation, Cadava writes a new account of what it means to pay visual witness in the face of constant emergency.
Jury members:
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Columbia University, Chair
Nicole Fleetwood, New York University
Kim Theriault, Dominion University
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Sylvia Houghteling, The Art of Cloth in Mughal India (Princeton University Press, 2022)
The Art of Cloth in Mughal India by Sylvia Houghteling focuses on the production, circulation, and consumption of South Asian textiles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period of both global manufacturing dominance and intense artistic creativity for Indian cloth-makers. The book offers a uniquely comprehensive account of the complex meanings of cloth as it moved across the Mughal imperial courts, the kingdoms of Rajasthan, the Deccan sultanates, and the British Isles, all the while remaining attentive to the richness of regional specialties. Houghteling brilliantly weaves together a capacious range of topics including issues of patronage and labor, iconography and symbolism, technical and ecological considerations, connections with poetry and other fine as well as decorative arts, and the sensory experience of the various textiles, from gauzy muslins to tent panels. Starting with an account of the Emperor Akbar’s patronage of dyers and weavers, Houghteling analyzes the elaborate Bikaner Robe, which Akbar’s successor Jahangir presented to a provincial raja. She moves on to the elegant textile culture of the Rajput Court of Amber and the kalamkari cloth of Machilipatnam, ending with a survey of the flourishing market for Hindustani cloth in early modern Britain, evidence of a new global cosmopolitanism that linked the Mughal court with the Stuarts. The book’s handsome design, color illustrations, and vivid writing make Art of Cloth an engaging read for scholars and general readers alike.
Jury members:
Lisa Schrenk, University of Arizona, Chair
John Cunnally, Iowa State University
Laura Anne Kalba, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
J. P. Park, University of Oxford
Andrew Wasserman, American University
Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Tomasz Grusiecki and Hugo Shakeshaft
Tomasz Grusiecki, “Doublethink: Polish Carpets in Transcultural Contexts,” The Art Bulletin, September 2022
That art objects move, and that in doing so their meaning changes, is now widely accepted, but conceptualizing and describing the ways in which such changes occur still often eludes us. Tomasz Grusiecki’s winning essay provides a framework for doing just that, in its elegant examination of the lives and plural significances of carpets in early modern Eastern and Central Europe. Borrowing George Orwell’s notion of “doublethink,” Grusiecki shows, with a keenly historical eye, that there was little tension for early modern patrons between the provenience of carpets in Safavid Persia or Ottoman Turkey and their adaptation into local European contexts, where they became fundamental to the construction of individual and burgeoning national identities. Grusiecki moves past the simple charting of the “surprising” provenances of individual objects to weave a complex web in which he embraces the inevitable messiness of movement—and of meaning—in early modernity. Grusiecki’s transcultural doublethink promises to be a concept of great utility for our discipline as it continues to grapple with these issues.
Hugo Shakeshaft, “Beauty, Gods, and Early Greek Art: The Dedications of Mantiklos and Nikandre Revisited,” The Art Bulletin, May 2022
In his groundbreaking article “Beauty, Gods, and Early Greek Art: The Dedications of Mantiklos and Nikandre Revisited,” Hugo Shakeshaft transforms narratives around the topic of beauty in the religious art of archaic Greece. He moves away from such still-influential Enlightenment frameworks as Kant’s account of aesthetic autonomy and Winckelmann’s concern with timeless aesthetic values to examine the question of beauty from a historicizing vantage point. In order to assess how beauty mattered for those who patronized, created, employed, and observed artworks in ancient Greece, Shakeshaft focuses on two anthropomorphic votive figurines—a bronze statuette dedicated by Mantiklos (ca. 700–675 BCE) and a marble life-size statue dedicated by Nikandre (ca. 660–630 BCE). In his deeply researched discussion, he reconsiders these celebrated objects through a layered analysis of their forms, inscriptions, and materials as well as by reading them alongside aesthetic values expressed in the writings of Homer and Hesiod. In particular, he calls attention to the ideal of charis, a rich concept that can be translated as “beauty,” “favor,” “gratitude,” and “grace,” to show how beauty was inextricably tied to ideas of reciprocity. Ultimately, Shakeshaft posits that beauty needs to be treated as rigorously as any other interpretive category, and—far from being a universal—demands contextualized cultural awareness.
Jury members:
Adam Jasienski, Southern Methodist University, Chair
Susanna Berger, University of Southern California
Christine I. Ho, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work
Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey has a photographic career spanning four decades, beginning in 1975 with the seminal five-year portrait project of everyday life in Harlem. His work has recently traveled in a retrospective titled An American Project” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art. In his recent publication, Dawoud Bey: Two American Projects, his work explores race, African American history and underrepresented communities; featuring portraits memorializing the six children who were victims of the Ku Klux Klan’s bombing at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, and a group of black-and-white landscapes made in Ohio where the Underground Railroad once operated. In the 1980s Bey collaborated with artist David Hammons by documenting the performances Bliz-aard Ball Sale and Pissed Off. In 2017 he received the MacArthur Fellowship and is Professor of Photography at Columbia College Chicago where he has taught for over twenty years. Bey’s work is in permanent collections of leading museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Jury members:
Derek G. Larson, Purdue University, Chair
Stephen Fakiyesi, Independent Artist
Jessica Hong, Art Museum
CAA/AIC Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
Michele Marincola and Lucretia Kargère
Michele Marincola and Lucretia Kargère are recognized by conservators, curators, and art historians, for their contributions to the study of European sculpture. Their recent, joint publication titled The Conservation of Medieval Polychrome Wood Sculpture: History, Theory, Practice (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2020) is a major contribution to the fields and represents two-decades of collaborative work.
Marincola is the Sherman Fairchild Chair, and Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of Conservation, at the Conservation Center, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, a position she has held since 2014. Kargère is a Conservator of Medieval Sculptures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters. Marincola previously worked with Kargère at the Cloisters where they collaborated on conservation and research. Marincola’s contributions to scholarship include research on the sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider and the translation and commentary of Johannes Taubert’s Farbige Skulpturen into English. Kargère, who is known for her work on French sculpture, has collaborated with Maricola and conservation scientists at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the publications about the materials and techniques used in Medieval polychrome sculpture.
Both Marincola and Kargère are recognized for having educated students and colleagues about the history and conservation of European Medieval polychrome sculpture. Numerous students, interns, and Fellows have benefitted from their expertise both at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at New York University. Moreover, Marincola and Kargère are known for producing publications and presentations that touch upon important issues in art conservation, art making, art history, and ethics.
Jury members:
Tiarna Doherty, University of Delaware and Smithsonian, Chair
Fernanda Valverde, Amon Carter Museum
Rebecca Rushfield, Rebeccah Rushfield Arts Consultants
Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger’s distinct artistic practice has palpably shaped the broader social, cultural, and visual fields for decades. For over four decades, the artist has persistently expanded her practice, exploring new media, from video to large-scale installations, collaborating with popular brands (with some even co-opting her iconic visual language) extending her influence beyond the art world, to pursuing intrepid interventions in the public sphere. Best known for her works with bold, declarative, often imposing and seemingly authorless text in which she overlays appropriated black-and-white imagery, Kruger interrogates mass media and consumer culture’s effects on how we see and understand ourselves. As the artist expressed, “I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are, what we want to be and what we become,” and she sees her works as prompts “to question and change the systems that contain us.” With the internet boom, explosion of social media, advertising’s increasingly sophisticated, if not untruthful, tactics, and advertising’s constant presence now from an infinite number of sources, Kruger’s work, past and present, feels more relevant than ever (as seen with numerous and recent solo presentations around the globe). Throughout her dedicated practice, Kruger has reminded us that these issues will continue to raise existential concerns and impact society writ-large until actively contended with.
Jury members:
Derek G. Larson, Purdue University, Chair
Stephen Fakiyesi, Independent Artist
Jessica Hong, Art Museum
Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Svetlana Alpers and Griselda Pollock
Renowned for her groundbreaking work on Dutch Golden Age painting, Svetlana Alpers’ writings have had a profound impact on the field of art history. A founder of the journal Representations and one of the central figures in the revisionist turn of the new art history, Alpers broke with long-standing approaches to northern European art by asking new questions about visual culture and ways of seeing. In The Art of Describing (1983), her questions about optics and image-making devices ignited scholarship in premodern and modern fields alike. In subsequent publications, Alpers’ notions about the monetary value of art materials and the marketing strategies of artists also proved fertile ground for later scholars. However, the Art of Describing did not only reinvent methodologies for understanding Dutch art, pushing against the field’s reliance on ideas forged in the study of Italian artistic practices; it recast what it means to “describe” art, the ekphrastic basis of our field, effecting the writing of art history ever since.
Professor Emerita from the University of California at Berkeley, where she taught from 1962–98, Alpers continues to publish across and redefine fields ranging from the Baroque to contemporary art and photography history. Widely known for Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (1988), which won CAA’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in 1990, Alpers has also penned field-changing monographs on Tiepolo, Rubens, and Velázquez. To this list, Alpers has added her latest book, Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch (2020), a monograph on one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century, and part of a subset of her writings that have confronted directly the challenges of photography, as The Art of Describing long ago became required reading in this field. Her recent publications such as Roof Life (2013) make concrete the writerly challenge that her work has always issued to art history, the need to reinvent “how” as well as “what” we say and write about art.
Arguably the leading feminist art historian of the generation after Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock first made an impact with a vigorous dissembling of the “artists mythologies and media genius” that attended the canonization of artists such as Vincent van Gogh. She went on to devote close attention to previously devalued women artists such as Mary Cassatt, Eva Hesse, and, more recently, in her innovative Virtual Feminist Museum, Charlotte Salomon. Essays such as “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity” in her 1987 book Vision and Difference were powerful examples of her strategy of “feminist interventions” into the history of art, rather than falling for the trap of settling for the inclusion of women artists within the prevailing patriarchal structures.
The Award acknowledges this groundbreaking work as well as a wider, far-reaching achievement, ranging across several decades. Pollock’s writing has long refused to stay in its art historical place, to belong to a single position or way of working. Her brand of feminist revisionism constantly engages the social history of art, bridges art history with cinema studies, opens onto the fields of psychoanalysis and cultural geography, while also participating in the debates of postcolonial theory and responding to the imperatives of decolonization. While remaining attentive to the demands of each of these critical disciplines, her writing about art remains passionate, profound, open-hearted, and, always, political.
Jury Members:
Terry Smith, University of Pittsburgh, Chair
George Baker, University of California Los Angeles
Gillian Elliott, George Washington University
Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
Mary Lum
Mary Lum is CAA’s 2023 Distinguished Teaching of Art Award recipient. Lum, an accomplished visual artist in her own right, has been a professor of painting and drawing at Bennington College in Vermont since 2005, and prior to that taught at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Among her many notable contributions as an educator is her ability to nurture a passion for art making in her students that has taken many of them from foundational studies, to graduate school, and to successful professional practices as artists, art directors, curators, and academic professors.
Steven Frost, Assistant Professor and Faculty Director, University of Colorado Boulder says of his time as a foundation student under Lum; “With her help I began to understand a creative practice needed to be fed by more than time in the studio . . . She took the time to bring me up to speed and prepare me for the professional world.”
Rebekah Modrak, foundation student, current professor University of Michigan, STAMPS School of Art and Design says of Lum “Thank goodness her main concern was the possibility that there might be compelling artists lurking below our early and often tenuous attempt at artmaking.” “When I think of moments in my life that changed my trajectory,” says former student and UK-based art director and curator Christine Serchia, “Mary Lum is responsible for multiple moments.”
CAA is excited to recognize Mary Lum’s more than two decades of teaching with this award.
Jury members:
Derek G. Larson, Purdue University, Chair
Stephen Fakiyesi, Independent Artist
Jessica Hong, Art Museum
Distinguished Feminist Awards
Nalini Malani and Marsha Meskimmon
Nalini Malani’s work has been recognized in solo exhibitions at over thirty international institutions. Her work has embraced painting, video, stop-motion, and other time-based media, while engaging issues of women’s equality in India, where her family took refuge in 1946 after the partition. Malani’s early career in painting gave way to a more focused approach to time-based media in the 1990s, making works such as the 1998 Remembering Toba Tek Singh, a meditation on nuclear testing in India and Pakistan. Focusing on the aftereffects of the devastating partition of India and Pakistan, Malani’s work has been liberal in its use of media types and productions, including the emotive devices of theater.
Malani has turned this unflinching attention to the ways in which the woman’s body has been used as a pawn in games of nationalism and internationalism. Her Mother India: Transitions in the Construction of Pain (2005) combined archival footage and other imagery, a series of juxtapositions that shed new light on the depicted contorted bodies of women. She continues this thread in a 2020 multimedia performance of images projected onto the Taj Mahal Hotel, inspired by the week-long gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl. Malani’s work is a beacon; her work is eminently important now as the world bears witness to an increase in femicide and gender-based violence.
Marsha Meskimmon, PhD is a professor of art history who studies, teaches, and writes on global feminisms. Her groundbreaking scholarly work has been matched by a commitment to promoting and mentoring women in the field. Meskimmon is editor for Drawing In, and she is also a consultant editor for Open Arts Journal. She has authored or co-authored twelve books over her career, with a sustained focus on the political stakes of feminism and its ability to shed light on the circulation of art and the discourse of aesthetics. With Amelia Jones, she edits the book series Rethinking Art’s Histories for Manchester University Press, a series that has promoted books that rethink art and its histories, and has used feminist thought in relation to “global” and non-Western approaches to art history. Her work on the exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution marked an important return to feminism in the art world, a redefinition of the stakes and of the purview of its ideas. Her essay for the exhibition succeeded in arguing why feminism is global—describing it as a constellation of approaches, places, and times. It models an interdisciplinary and collaborative idea of feminism, not a static theory that spreads from the North Atlantic out to world. Her tireless work on behalf of women in the arts is a model for scholars who do their work out of a stated commitment.
Jury Members:
Delinda Collier, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chair
Yvonne Love, Penn State University
Midori Yoshimoto, New Jersey City University
Excellence in Diversity Award
Arlene M. Dávila
Arlene M. Dávila is Professor of Anthropology and American Studies at New York University and founding director of The Latinx Project. Established in 2018, The Latinx Project is an interdisciplinary space focusing on US Latinx Art, Culture and Scholarship. In addition to hosting artists and programs, it functions as a platform fostering critical public programming.
Professor Dávila’s has published extensively on Latinx cultural politics in museums and contemporary art, media, and urban environments to explore the intricacies and ultimate challenges of visualizing Latinx art and culture. Her research spans urban ethnography, the political economy of culture and media, consumption, immigration and geographies of inequality and race.
Professor Dávila’s publications, with a focus on public imagery and cultural politics, include Latinx art: Artists, Markets and Politics (Duke University Press, 2020), El Mall: The Spatial and Class Politics of Shopping Malls in Latin America (University of California Press, 2016), the revised edition of Latinos Inc: Marketing and the Making of a People (University of California Press, 2012), Culture Works: Space, Value, and Mobility Across the Neoliberal Americas (NYU Press, 2012), and Latino Spin: Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race (NYU Press, 2008). Dávila also co-edited the collection Contemporary Latina/o Media: Production, Circulation, Politics (NYU Press, 2014). Her articles have appeared in AZTLAN: A Journal of Chicano Studies and Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies.
Carmenita Higginbotham, Virginia Commonwealth University, Chair
Anne H. Berry, Cleveland State University
Kelly Walters, Parsons School of Design
Meet the 2023 CAA Annual Conference Kress Travel Grant Recipients
posted by CAA — Jan 30, 2023
Recognizing the value of the exchange of ideas and experience among art historians, the Kress Foundation is offering support for scholars participating as speakers at the 2023 CAA Annual Conference. The scholarly focus of the papers must be European art before 1830.
Samuel H. Kress Foundation CAA Annual Conference Travel Fellows 2023
Presentation: “Ordering the Ground: Ornamental Parterres and the Emergence of Academic Botany”
Session: Making Green Worlds (ca. 1450–1700)
Lauren Cannady, University of Maryland, College Park
Rather than the depiction of scholarly work taking place in Sébastien Leclerc’s engraved headpiece for Denis Dodart’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle des plantes (1676), it is a scene of the direct observation of nature glimpsed through a window that is most striking. Three men stand in an arabesque-patterned parterre to more closely examine the individual plants that compose the garden. One uses his walking cane to point out a specimen—literally embedded in the undulating scrollwork of the parterre—to his companions. This ornamental plantation—or manner of “ordering of the ground” as Francis Bacon lamented in his essay “Of Gardens” (1625)—reflects the dominant style of contemporary aristocratic pleasure and academic botanic gardens across northern Europe. Such impositions of formal, physical order on the natural world, however, belie the acknowledged chaos of seventeenth-century natural history. Bacon, among others, contended that empirical observation could best be used to make sense of the “many things in nature [that] have been laid open and discovered,” including organic material from around the world collected by Europeans in the name of colonialism. The renewed emphasis on empiricism did little, however, to rectify linguistic confusion and imprecise nomenclature, particularly pressing issues for the emerging field of botany. As a repository for nonnative flora and living laboratory for the production of naturalist knowledge, the patterned garden proved a visibly reliable way to order the natural world in early modern Europe.
Presentation: “’ A “New World” for Profit: Christopher Columbus’s Search for Gold on Genoese Silver”
Session: Making Green Worlds (ca. 1450–1700)
Jillian Laceste, Boston University
A seventeenth-century silver vase made by the Flemish silversmith Gio Aelbosca Belga for Agostino Pallavicino, the future doge of Genoa, depicts a moment of encounter between Christopher Columbus and Indigenous Americans. The vessel emphasizes a one-sided transaction by showing Indigenous figures greeting the explorer with gifts at the shore of the Atlantic. While painted Columbian artworks created in early modern Genoa treat the explorer’s arrival as a heroic maritime feat or moment of introduction of Christianity into the Americas, silver vessels such as Aelbosca’s differ because they depict Columbus’s journey for Cipangu—a land rich with gold—on the surface of silver, a precious metal crucial to Spanish colonization of the Americas. This paper will analyze the subject matter and material to address the presentation of Europe’s fertile “New World” contained within Aelbosca’s vessel. By connecting it to the history of the Americas—in particular Columbus’s failed search for gold but eventual outpouring of silver—I argue that this vase offers a view of the Americas that emphasizes not only its novelty and foreignness but also its utility for mining and profit.
Presentation: “Architectural Drawing, Information Management, and Early Modern Science: Wendel Dietterlin Drafts the Architectura (1593–98)”
Session: Drawing (New) Stories
Elizabeth Petcu, University of Edinburgh
This paper surveys the massive corpus of drawings associated with Wendel Dietterlin’s 1593–98 Architectura treatise to establish how architectural drawing in sixteenth-century Europe came to model practices for managing visual information in scientific research. To craft the Architectura drawings, Dietterlin and his assistants wielded tactics of annotation, bricolage, folding, and copying that had long aided architects in stimulating creativity, exposing problems, saving materials, enhancing productivity, facilitating communication, and documenting progress. I compare the 164 known Architectura drawings—among the largest surviving bodies of Renaissance architectural treatise drawings—to botanical and geological drawings in the collections of physician Felix Platter and natural historians Conrad Gessner and Ulisse Aldrovandi to show that natural philosophers (i.e. early modern scientists) came to derive similar benefits from such drawing techniques. I argue that Dietterlin’s tactics for orchestrating his Architectura’s wealth of visual information attests that, by 1600, techniques of visual research originating in architectural drawing circulated freely between makers of architectural drawings and natural philosophers. I thereby expose how makers of architectural drawings and natural philosophers in Europe began to exchange and codevelop parallel, empirical methods for forming knowledge.
Presentation: “Problematising the Notion of ‘Eastern European Art’: Two Case Studies of a Multiplicity”
Session: What is Eastern European Art?
Marta Zboralska, University of Oxford
Radek Przedpełski, Trinity College Dublin
This presentation aims to challenge the ontological assumption of there being a monolithic ontological entity such as “Eastern European art,” dialectically elaborated in its opposition to “Western art,” which then needs to be put on the map in an IRWIN-like gesture. We propose two case studies that problematize such an assumption, arguing instead that starting on the ground and unfolding an analysis from there might offer a more fruitful art-historical path of inquiry. We shall demonstrate that the model of a case study enfolds multiple frameworks of reference cutting across the East/West dichotomy, such as the immediately local or the regional on the one hand, or the long durée of the Anthropocene on the other.
The first case study will outline a media archaeology of Tatar timber mosques/minarets on the territories of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, showing how these under-researched media blend aniconism with local contexts and engage a continuum of artefacts and practices including muhir tableaux, hramotka (talismans), siufkanie (sorcery), and fał (divination). This case study argues that these architectural artworks explode the concept of “Eastern Europe(an art).” Instead, they open up a liminal space conjoining Islamicate architecture, Turkic animism, the “Long Baroque” of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as well as the vernacular regional traditions of timber building construction and ornamentation.
The second case study will zoom in on the ideas of Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz to consider the issue of regional artistic identity. As noted by literary scholar Anita Starosta, Gombrowicz refused the binary choice of either affirming Polishness or aspiring to Europeanness. Instead, it was within the periphery’s “not quite-ness” that the writer located the potential to “reveal Europe’s immaturity.” Looking at Diary by the American appropriation artist Sherrie Levine, a 2019 work inspired by Gombrowicz, this case study will argue for embracing the incompleteness of “Eastern Europe” as an area of art-historical enquiry.
Presentation: “‘Narrating’ the Landscape: Pictorial and Aesthetical Inventiveness to Portray the Essence of Nature”
Session: Eighteenth-Century Atmospheres: Science, Politics, Aesthetics
Marie Beaulieu Orna, France
Leaving the port of Naples for Sicily in 1777, the connoisseur Richard Payne Knight (1750–1824) wrote in his travel diary: “The infinite variety of tints were all harmonized together by that pearly hue, which is particular to that climate. (This tint very particularly marks Claude Lorraine’s Coloring). As we advanced into the open sea, the colours and forms seemed to sink into the Atmosphere and grow gradually indistinct, till at last the Sun withdrew its rays and left all in darkness.” Disclosing the term “atmosphere” in its literal meaning, Knight’s remark paradoxically reveals the fundamental role of optical theories and their interpretation in artistic practice in giving rise to the figurative essence of this same word, or to “spreading the tone” as Coleridge expressed it in Biographica Literaria (1817). Following Knight’s example, certain late eighteenth-century British landscapists aimed at conveying their personal impression felt upon observing the natural scenery, especially by handling color in travel sketches. Their Grand Tour became an artistic and aesthetical laboratory, into which they experimented with materials and processes in order to depict exotic landscapes with sensibility, intended for “polite” amateurs. The specific training these artists as well as these amateurs shared contributed to relate their mutual perception of nature and to develop this specific sense of “atmosphere.” This paper intends to demonstrate this artistic and aesthetical pivotal turn, embedded in the British contemporary scientific and philosophical context.
Presentation: “Imperial Materials: Extracting White Marble during the 18th and 19th Centuries”
Session: The Extractive Nineteenth Century
Amalie Skovmøller, University of Copenhagen
Since antiquity, white marble has been extracted from quarries centered in the Mediterranean, and transported to workshops to be crafted into sculpture and architectural decoration. While marble extracting activities declined following the collapse of the Roman Empire, they resumed with new intensity during the eighteenth century, peaking in nineteenth as quarries were sought out throughout Europe, Scandinavia, and in the US. Intertwined with Imperial policies, ideas about aesthetics and nation building, white marble assumed the role as prime material for high art and monumental embellishment. Traditionally studied as an omnipresent, abstract material with little regard to the complex infrastructures framing its extraction, the role of white marble consumption in relation to histories of colonialism remains peripherally explored. This paper centers on the intense marble extraction initiated by the Danish king Frederik V (1723–1766), when the Danish Empire included all of Norway. The king initiated expeditions into Norwegian territories to locate new sources of white marble, and the quarries established at Fauske, near Oslo, and in Hordaland secured the desired stones, which were extracted in thousands of blocks and shipped to Copenhagen. This paper explores the sculptures and architectural decoration in Copenhagen, deriving from the intense exploitation of Norwegian resources, as representing the Imperial ideologies, extractive capitalism, and colonial expansion politics of the Danish Empire during the latter eighteenth century. In doing so, the paper also touches upon the global economics and ideologies of marble extraction and circulation taking place throughout Europe and the US during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Presentation: “Byzantine Embroideries and the Entangled Visual Traditions of Eastern Europe”
Session: What is Eastern European Art?
Catherine Volmensky, The University of British Columbia
A late-Byzantine liturgical veil shows the recumbent figure of the dead Christ. Referred to as the aër-epitaphios of John of Skopje, this red silk textile is lavishly embroidered with gold, metallic, and silk threads. Similar types of embroidered veils were found in monasteries and churches throughout the Byzantine empire and its religious sphere. Drawing on a theory of line, this paper discusses the entangled artistic, religious, and economic networks of workshops and patrons shared between Thessaloniki, Mount Athos, and the regions of the Balkan Peninsula. Through this methodology, this paper traces the movement of images across spaces and media and provides a new approach to late and post-Byzantine textiles to demonstrate the vibrant and multifaceted connectivity between the regions of Eastern and Southern Europe. The role of the patron is also questioned in the context of the economic value of silk and gold-figure embroidery during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, emphasizing the position of elite women patrons in the Balkans, and how they have been examined or overlooked in previous scholarship. Since the intersection of lines create networks, this methodology also emphasizes a nonhierarchical approach to works created within Byzantium’s religious sphere. The emphasis on communication and interconnected structures offers a grounded methodology with which to examine gold-figure embroidery created and used in religious spaces of the Balkan Peninsula, Thessaloniki, and Mount Athos.
Presentation: “Begarelli, Model for Algardi? Renaissance Clay Modelling as a Precedent of Baroque Marble Sculpting”
Session: The Essence of Things? Limits and Limitlessness in Early Modern Sculpture
Lucia Simonato, Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy
In her monograph on Alessandro Algardi, Jennifer Montagu intuited the influence of Antonio Begarelli’s model on the works of art by the Bolognese Baroque sculptor. Yet, a systematic study of this possible relationship has not followed this intelligent opening. Begarelli was a sculptor who until his death in 1565 made monumental statues in Emilia and in Lombardy, using almost exclusively white-painted terracotta—a choice, according to Vasari, criticized by Michelangelo, who would have said in front of his works: “If this clay were to become marble, woe to the ancient statues!” Reassessing Begarelli as a model for Algardi poses not only an issue of intermediality in the transmission of formal solutions, but also a question on matter’s expressive possibilities. To what extent did the Renaissance terracotta, with its easier naturalistic adhesion and its dynamic spatial conception, offer a model to Baroque marble figuration? How did the dialogue with Begarelli shape Algardi’s use of terracotta modelling within his artistic process as compared, for example, to Bernini’s? This paper will focus on these issues.
In addition, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation has provided funds for alumni of the program to return and take part in our vast network of both international and North American scholars:
- Iro Katsaridou, Greece, 2022
- Tomasz Grusiecki, Canada, 2015
- Halyna Kohut, Ukraine, 2020
- Angeliki Pollali, Greece, 2014
Meet the 2023 CAA Annual Conference Edwards Support Grant Recipients
posted by CAA — Jan 30, 2023
Meet this year’s grant recipients and find information about their presentations at the conference and their corresponding session below. Dozens of other support grants were given to CAA members through the Presidents Council of CAA and the “Pay it Forward” initiative.
CAA TRAVEL GRANT IN MEMORY OF ARCHIBALD CASON EDWARDS, SENIOR, AND SARAH STANLEY GORDON EDWARDS
The CAA Support Grant in Memory of Archibald Cason Edwards, Senior, and Sarah Stanley Gordon Edwards was made possible by Mary D. Edwards. The grant supports women who are emerging scholars at either an advanced stage of pursuing a doctoral degree or who have received their PhD within the two years prior to the submission of the application.
Amanda Gutierrez, Concordia University
Presentation: “Walking away from the Western Flâneuse, moving forward to perspectives from the Global South”
Session: The Art of Walking
This presentation frames a critique to the concept of the Flâneuse, which reduces the walking experience of all women into a hegemonic Western perspective, not considering the ontologies of violence that women and LGBGT+2 bodies from the Global South experience every day. Women’s safety cannot exist where gender violence, war, political conflicts, and economic crises are present. Therefore, reflecting on the privilege and political conditions needed to walk safely and with freedom is essential. Considering the colonial implications of industrialized countries holding infrastructural and economic power is also critical, as is reflection on the creation of safe public spaces for citizens. We also need to consider that racialized immigrants living in Western countries hold additional risks in confronting racist bias experiences in the public spaces due to their race, ethnicity, gender, and citizenship status. Understanding these political dimensions, these questions arise:
Are we aware of these political implications when romanticizing the Flâneuse as a universal agent of walking freedoms in public space? Is this figure of agency excluding many women and non-conforming bodies who cannot experience these freedoms under political crises? Can we think of other subaltern figures besides the Flâneuse to consider the walking experiences of women and LGBGT+2 in the Global South?
This paper will reflect on these questoins while looking at examples of collectives from India, such as Blank Noise and Women Walk at Midnight as well as the artistic practices of BIPOC feminist artists approaching walking as a form of resistance and enunciation.
Sila Ulug, The University of Chicago
Presentation: “The Blind Man(et): On the Aesthetics of the Blind Man after European Painting” Session: The Art of the Periodical
The Blind Man (1917) is a two-issue magazine published by Henri-Pierre Roché; Marcel Duchamp; and Beatrice Wood in coordination with the First Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York. The Blind Man introduced Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) to the public as a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, shortly after it was physically disappeared. My presentation examines The Blind Man against a history of rejected, Modernist painting. I demonstrate that The Blind Man distinguishes itself from contemporaneous magazines affiliated with the New York avant-garde in three notable respects: (1) its multiple levels of self-referentiality; (2) its direct address of the reader in multiple figurative roles; and (3) its concomitant incorporation and rejection of the reader as part of its dramatic world. I suggest that the incongruence of The Blind Man’s representational scheme can be resolved when examined against the work of Édouard Manet, especially as its reception aesthetics take after those of Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas (1656). Positioning The Blind Man alongside critical terms associated with the reception of work by Manet and others who exhibited in the 1863 Salon des Refusés suggests that The Blind Man may have aspired to the condition of tableau, while remaining a morceau to the public.
Elia Alba and Postcommodity to Participate in Annual Artists’ Interviews at CAA’s 111th Annual Conference
posted by CAA — Jan 19, 2023
CAA is pleased to announce that this year’s Annual Artists’ Interviews will feature Elia Alba and Postcommodity!
![](http://www.collegeart.org/news/wp-content//MicrosoftTeams-image-33-260x300.jpg)
Photo: Michael Palma Mir
Elia Alba was born in Brooklyn to parents who immigrated from the Dominican Republic in the 1950s. She is a multidisciplinary artist whose artistic practice is concerned with the social and political complexity of race, identity, and the collective community. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Hunter College in 1994 and completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2001. She has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad, including at the Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Science Museum, London, Smithsonian Museum of Art, National Museum of Art, and Reina Sofía, Madrid. Awards include the Studio Museum in Harlem Artist-in-Residence Program in 1999; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2002; Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2002 and 2008; Anonymous Was a Woman Award in 2019; and Latinx Artist Fellowship in 2021. Her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, and Lowe Art Museum. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, ArtNews, and Forbes, among others. Her book, Elia Alba, The Supper Club (2019) brings together artists, scholars, and performers of diasporic cultures through photography, food, and dialogue to examine race and culture in the United States. She was part of the curatorial team for El Museo del Barrio’s critically acclaimed exhibition, Estamos Bien: La Trienal 20/21. She lives and works in the Bronx.
Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary art collective comprised of Cristóbal Martínez (Mestizo), and Kade L. Twist (Cherokee). Postcommodity’s art functions as a shared Indigenous lens and voice to engage the assaultive manifestations of the global market and its supporting institutions, public perceptions, beliefs, and individual actions that comprise the ever-expanding, multinational, multiracial, and multiethnic colonizing force that is defining the twenty-first century through ever-increasing velocities and complex forms of violence. Postcommodity works to forge new metaphors capable of rationalizing our shared experiences within this increasingly challenging contemporary environment; promote a constructive discourse that challenges the social, political, and economic processes that are destabilizing communities and geographies; and connect Indigenous narratives of cultural self-determination with the broader public sphere.
Postcommodity are the recipients of grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2010), Creative Capital (2012), Art Matters (2013), Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (2014), Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation (2017), Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship (2017–18), Harker Fund of the San Francisco Foundation (2018–19), Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Shift Award (2021), and Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions (2022). The collective has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Contour: 5th Biennial of the Moving Image, Mechelen, Belgium; Nuit Blanche, Toronto; Adelaide International 2012, Adelaide, Australia; 18th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; 2017 Whitney Biennial; Art in General, New York; documenta 14; 57th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh; Desert X, Coachella Valley, CA; Art Institute of Chicago; LAXART, Los Angeles; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Remai Modern Museum, Saskatoon, Canada. Their historic Land Art installation Repellent Fence occurred at the US/Mexico border near Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico. The collective was awarded the Fine Prize for From Smoke and Tangled Waters, They Carried Fire Home, commissioned for the 57th Carnegie International.
Postcommodity acknowledges the important contributions of its previous collaborators: Steven Yazzie (2007–2010), Nathan Young (2007–2015), Raven Chacon (2009–2018), Adam Ingram-Goble (Game Remains), Andrew McCord (If History Moves at the Speed of Its Weapons, Then the Shape of the Arrow is Changing, and Promoting a More Just, Verdant and Harmonious Resolution), Annabel Wong (Dead River) and Existence AD (Dead River).
CAA’s Annual Artist Interviews will be held on Friday, February 17, 4:30–7 p.m. ET, in Grand Ballroom East.
The 111th CAA Annual Conference will be held February 15–18, 2023 at the New York Hilton Midtown. Register now!
CWA Picks: Winter 2023
posted by CAA — Jan 12, 2023
The CAA Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) Winter Picks include exhibitions and events that explore language through form, abstraction, the archive, and narrative. The artists included in this season’s picks investigate language and how it shapes our vision and experience of the world. They also reveal the systems of power embedded within language and how it often acts as a mediator.
Put It This Way: (Re)Visions of the Hirshhorn Collection
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Until August 31, 2023
Put It This Way includes almost a century of work from fifty women and nonbinary artists in the Hirshhorn’s collection. The exhibit presents a range of media from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a particular emphasis on the Hirshhorn’s mission to highlight global voices.
Caroline Kent
Until January 28, 2023
Figge Art Museum
Language and invented vocabulary made up of geometric shapes, marks, and colors are central to Caroline Kent’s practice. Her work challenges the viewer to consider how the indecipherable might play a role in their understanding of the world.
The Age of Roe: The Past, Present, and Future of Abortion in America
Until March 4, 2023
Conference: “The Age of Roe: The Past, Present, and Future of Abortion in America”
Friday January 27, 2023
This two-day conference at Harvard Radcliffe Institute will explore how Roe v. Wade and its aftermath shaped the United States and the world beyond it for nearly half a century. The conference will include lectures and panel discussions from experts in constitutional law, historians, health policy advocates, and other scholars. An accompanying exhibition curated by Mary Ziegler, Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law, will also be on view through March 4, 2023.
Until April 23, 2023
re:collection includes the work of five artists—Ali Cherri, Nicole Cherubini, Lily Cox-Richard, NIC Kay, and SANGREE—whose work reconsiders the Tufts University collection. Specifically, the artists explored about 200 objects from the fifth century BCE to the seventh century CE, including early Greco-Roman ceramics, stone carvings, pre-Columbian vessels, jewelry, and textiles. The exhibition has a range of approaches, from performance and installation to sculpture and painting.
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Valiant postures/A ruse! A ruse!
2021
Acrylic on Belgian linen, acrylic on walnut
63 × 74 × 2 1/2 in
Emerging Professional Director Candidate: Lauren Van Nest
posted by CAA — Dec 22, 2022
Statement
My name is Lauren Van Nest and I am a doctoral candidate at the University of Virginia (UVA) studying the art and architecture of medieval Europe. My dissertation examines the relationships crafted between objects of imperial patronage in the Ottonian Empire, their ritual environments, and the bodies of their patrons. I research the ways in which artistic materials—their form, aesthetics, symbolism—transmit concepts of divinity and power across media and iconographies. My work has been supported by a twelve-month fellowship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (German Academic Exchange Service) in affiliation with the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen in Göttingen, Germany. Additionally, I have been awarded research grants by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), Center for Global Inquiry + Innovation, and UVA Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. I received my undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (B.A.) and a graduate degree from the University of Toronto (M.A.).
I would define my duty as a College Art Association (CAA) board member as a commitment to service towards the community via cultivation and advocacy. I am passionate about developing and promoting programming that creatively adapts to the pressures facing the visual arts today and continues to make the arts more accessible to wider audiences. As the Emerging Professional Director on the Board of Directors, I would bring my own enthusiasm for the visual arts alongside my skills in project management, communicating complex ideas, and collaboration. As an organization drawing together diverse and vibrant professionals, CAA is uniquely positioned to advocate for the value of the arts nationally and internationally. During my term, I will develop robust advocacy strategies that not only promote continued federal and public funding of the arts, but also attend to the needs of CAA members through grants and workshops. I envision CAA as a partner to its individual members, navigating the various obstacles facing aspiring as well as established visual arts professionals.
I have served in international organizations during my graduate career, including the Medieval Academy of America (MAA) and the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA). It is in these roles that I have coordinated mentorship programming, produced podcasts, and organized roundtables on topics related to graduate and early career professionalization. I am also committed to engaging with digital humanities projects that analyze and document the history of academic institutions, namely universities (Land and Legacy) and organizations (ICMA Oral History Project). With CAA, I am able to harness my previous and future interests to contribute to the goals of the organization.
Emerging Professional Director Candidate: Carolyn Jean Martin
posted by CAA — Dec 22, 2022
Statement
I am honored to be nominated as a candidate for Emerging Professional Director. Having been introduced to CAA at the start of my graduate school education, membership has been a sustaining source of knowledge, professional growth, and collaboration. If selected, I will utilize the platform to assist in strengthening the commitment of the CAA mission for diverse practices and practitioners, as well as maintaining an international presence. Students and emerging professionals, as they continue to move the art world in dynamic directions, are a critical part of those commitments and vital to the growth of CAA. As someone whose educational pursuits include art practice, art history, and the philosophy of aesthetics I seek to continue and expand upon the efforts that make CAA the place where diverse, intersecting practices converge in a sustained global conversation. Additionally, previously serving on the Student and Emerging Professionals committee facilitated an understanding of the spaces where opportunities for growth and development can take place – particularly for undergraduate and graduate student membership.
Now, more than ever, as global politics reflect isolationist worldviews and the creative arts are fighting to stay alive in colleges and universities, an international organization such as CAA is perfectly poised as the platform for arts professionals to come together for ongoing conversations, to strategize, and harness the collective power of the arts as an agent of change. If provided an opportunity to serve on the board as Emerging Professional Director I bring energy and excitement to build upon the work currently being executed at CAA that makes use of the technological innovations gained over the past two years that will ensure a variety of options for engagement throughout the year, and further aid in the democratization of access to scholarship and networking opportunities across practice and borders.