CAA News Today
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — Oct 24, 2012
In its monthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, architects, photographers, and others whose work has significantly influenced the visual arts. This month was marked by the loss of the conceptual artist Michael Asher, the Belgian abstract painter Raoul De Keyser, the sculptor and activist An Dekker, and the English gallery director Michael Stanley. CAA has published a special obituary of Jeffrey R. Hayes, a professor of art history at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.
- Michael Asher, the trailblazing Los Angeles conceptual artist and beloved CalArts professor, passed away on October 15, 2012. He was 69 years old. Active since the early 1970s, Asher was one of the first artists to engage in institutional critique by altering the norms that define galleries, museums, and schools. His contribution to the 2010 Whitney Biennial, which requested that the museum be free and open for twenty-four-hours, earned him the prestigious Bucksbaum Award
- Bruno Bobak, a Polish-born Canadian “war artist” during the Second World War, passed away on September 24, 2012, at the age of 88. Bobak enlisted in the Canadian Army at the age of 18, making him the youngest soldier to create artwork during the war. His watercolors and drawings were evocative and disturbing, showing the bare reality of life on the front lines
- Melvin Charney, a Montreal-based architect and teacher, died on September 17, 2012. He was 75 years old. Charney created bold public works that blurred the lines between art and architecture, such as the garden for the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the world’s first human-rights monument in Ottawa, Canada. He was also instrumental in establishing the architecture program at the University of Montreal
- Raoul De Keyser, a Belgian abstract painter, died on October 5, 2012. He was 82 years old. In an ever-expanding art world that prizes the brashest statement, De Keyser’s compositions stood out as examples of forceful gentleness, muted and lyrical. Long admired as a “painter’s painter,” he came to greater prominence during the 2000s with a series of major exhibitions in Germany, France, and England. He is represented by David Zwirner in New York
- An Dekker, a socially conscious sculptor of biomorphic forms, died on September 14, 2012, at the age of 80. Dekker was born in the Netherlands and traveled extensively throughout Europe and Africa. Residing in London the 1970s and 1980s, she was a cofounder of the Hackney Flashers’ photography workshop (with her fellow artist Jo Spence, also recently deceased) and the Women’s Graphic Workshop
- Préfète Duffaut, a Haitian muralist and painter, passed away on October 6, 2012, at the age of 89. Duffaut created brilliantly colored murals of imaginary cities for hospitals and churches. His imagery was inspired by the Haitian religion of voodoo and a personal mysticism
- Gilbert Warren Einstein, an art dealer who founded G. W. Einstein Company in New York, passed away on September 21, 2012, at the age of 70. Einstein’s gallery specialized in twentieth-century works on paper, and he was a member of the International Fine Print Dealers Association of America
- Robin Fior, a British graphic designer at the forefront of the 1960s print revolution, died on September 19, 2012. He was 77 years old. Fior made a name for himself as a designer for radical newspapers, such as Black Dwarf and Peace News. He was political to the bone, active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and in later years served as the art director at the left-wing Pluto Press
- Ulrich Franzen, a polarizing German-born architect whose projects exemplified the modernist architecture ethos of “form follows function,” passed away on October 6, 2012. He was 91. Franzen’s most visible project was the skywalks at Hunter College in New York, an enclosed pedestrian walkway connecting the school’s buildings; other prominent commissions included Houston’s Alley Theater in 1968
- Richard Gordon, a photographer and writer based in Berkeley, California, died on October 6, 2012. He was 67 years old. Gordon’s black-and-white street photography followed the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt, and Robert Frank. An exhibition devoted to his 1970s photographs of American cities is on view at Gitterman Gallery in New York until November 7, 2012
- Pedro E. Guerrero, a photographer who gained recognition for his dynamic images of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture, died on September 13, 2012, at the age of 95. Guerrero’s working relationship with Wright, which began in the late 1930s, led to magazine assignments and book projects. In the 1960s and 1970s he embarked on a new photography series documenting the work and personality of the artists Alexander Calder and Louise Nevelson
- Jeffrey R. Hayes, a professor of art history and director of the master’s degree program in liberal studies at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, passed away on June 18, 2012. He was 65 years old. A specialist in outsider art, Hayes wrote several books on the artist Oscar Bluemner. CAA has published a special obituary of Hayes
- Mick Jones, a British illustrator, teacher, and dedicated socialist, died in August 2012 at the age of 68. Jones took part in the Prague Spring of 1968, an experience that revealed to him how art can be a force for social change. Back in England he shared his devotion to politics through community murals and trade-union banners. He spearheaded the Camden Mural Project (1978), which instructed young people in the art of mural painting in public spaces and housing projects
- Jeremy Le Grice, an English painter inspired by the landscape of his native Cornwall, died on August 9, 2012. He was 75. As a young man he studied with the Cornish painter Peter Lanyon and took classes at the Slade School of Art in London. Le Grice’s paintings, a cross between abstraction and representation, have a rough-hewn quality, fitting for an artist who lived for most of his life in close proximity to the sea
- Howard R. Moody, a reverend with a love for radical art and social justice, passed away on September 12, 2012, at the age of 92. For over thirty years Moody was the minister of Judson Memorial Church in New York’s Greenwich Village. No ordinary congregation, the church became famous as an alternative space for experimentation in visual art, theater, and dance; likewise establishing itself as a safe haven for the marginalized poor and drug-addicted inhabitants of the neighborhood
- Harris Savides, a cinematographer who worked closely with young directors, died on October 9, 2012. He was 55 years old. Independent filmmakers depended on Savides’s exacting vision and technical skill to achieve the perfect look for their films. Notable films include Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere (2010) and Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding (2007), both of which benefited from Savides’s moody and poetic atmosphere
- Serge Spitzer, a Romanian-born installation artist whose work addresses the passing of time and collective memory, died on September 9, 2012, at the age of 61. The artist participated in Documenta and the Venice Biennale. One of his best-remembered works was a 2010 installation at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, a labyrinthine network of plastic tubing that evoked earlier forms of communication in the city
- Michael Stanley, the director of Modern Art Oxford, a contemporary art gallery in England, passed away on September 22, 2012. He was 37 years old. As the director of both Modern Art Oxford and the Milton Keynes Gallery, Stanley championed young artists, including Jenny Saville, Phil Collins, and Pawel Althamer. This year he served as a judge for the prestigious Turner Prize
- John Steiger, a Chicago-based illustrator and artist known for his educational drawings, died on September 5, 2012, at the age of 89. A veteran of World War II, Steiger contributed work to Encyclopaedia Britannica Films and the children’s magazine Highlights; he also maintained a separate studio practice as a realist painter
- Albin Trowski, a Polish-born artist and illustrator who made his home in Manchester, England, following World War II, passed away on September 12, 2012. He was 93 years old. A gifted draftsman, Trowski realized charming city scenes and landscapes in watercolor and oil paint
- Rodney Uren, an Australian architect known for his large-scale urban projects, passed away on September 9, 2012, at the age of 63. He was a principal designer at the international design firm Hassell Practice; notable projects include the Olympic Park Station, a majestic, environmentally friendly structure that was built for the Sydney Olympics in 2000
Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries, or your completed texts, to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the November list.
People in the News
posted by CAA — Oct 17, 2012
People in the News lists new hires, positions, and promotions in three sections: Academe, Museums and Galleries, and Organizations and Publications.
The section is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
October 2012
Academe
Steven BleicherSteven Bleicher, an artist and professor of foundations in the Department of Visual Arts at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina, has been promoted to associate dean of the Thomas W. and Robin W. Edwards College of Humanities and Fine Arts at his school.
Lucy Bradnock, formerly managing editor of the Getty Research Journal and a research associate at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California, has been appointed lecturer in art history at the University of Nottingham in England.
Blane De St. Croix, an installation artist and sculptor, has been appointed to head the Sculpture Department with the rank of tenured associate professor at the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts at Indiana University in Bloomington. De St. Croix was formerly associate professor of sculpture at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.
Andrea Giunta has been appointed to the newly established endowed chair in Latin American art history and criticism in the department of art and art history at the University of Texas at Austin. Her position is partially endowed by a $1 million grant from the Longhorn Network and an anonymous matching donation. Giunta founded the school’s Center for Latin American Visual Studies program in 2009.
Elisa P. Korb, assistant professor of humanities at Anderson University in Anderson, Indiana, has accepted a position as assistant professor of fine arts at Misericordia University in Dallas, Pennsylvania.
Jason LaFountainJason LaFountain, a recent PhD graduate from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has joined the Art History Department of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, as the Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in American Art. LaFountain specializes in colonial American and early modern British subjects.
Alix Lambert, an artist and filmmaker, has been named visiting assistant professor at the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts at Indiana University in Bloomington.
Richard Meyer, formerly an associate professor of art history and fine arts at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has been appointed professor of art history at Stanford University in Stanford, California.
Guna Nadarajan, formerly vice provost for research and dean of graduate studies at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, has been selected as the new dean of the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan.
Howard Paine, associate professor of printmaking at the Memphis College of Art in Tennessee, has been released from the faculty. The controversial decision to eliminate several positions, in June 2012, was made as a result of the college’s financial burden.
Museums and Galleries
Ethan Lasser, a former curator of the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has been appointed Margaret S. Winthrop Associate Curator of American Art in the Harvard Art Museums’ Division of European and American Art, where he is currently developing two new exhibitions, The Practice and Poetics of Repair and Makers: Craft and Industry in American Art.
Melissa Jordan LoveMelissa Jordan Love has been appointed the first academic curator of the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Love holds a joint appointment in the McIntire Department of Art in the College of Arts and Sciences and will participate in the new Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures.
Elizabeth MilroyElizabeth Milroy, professor of art history and American studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, has joined the Division of Education at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania as Zoë and Dean Pappas Curator of Education for Public Programs. Milroy is a specialist in the history of the city of Philadelphia and a scholar of cultural institutions in the United States.
Mary Morgan Darby Radcliff has served as a summer 2012 intern at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where she assisted the Development Office. Radcliff is pursuing an MA in visual arts administration at New York University.
Anne-Imelda Radice (photograph by Dennis Brack)Anne-Imelda Radice, a senior consultant for the Dilenschneider Group and a member of the CAA Board of Directors, has been named the director of the American Folk Art Museum in New York.
David RussickDavid Russick has joined the staff of the Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin as its new exhibition designer. Russick formerly was the chief designer at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indiana.
Institutional News
posted by CAA — Oct 17, 2012
Read about the latest news from institutional members.
Institutional News is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
October 2012
The Cincinnati Art Museum in Ohio has been awarded a $1.5 million grant by the state of Ohio in support of a major renovation project of the museum’s Romanesque revival building, library, and archives. In addition, the museum has also won a grant from the Institute of Museums and Library Services for $149,656, with a matching amount of $176,722, to aid its digital inventory of approximately 25,000 works on paper, including pastels, watercolors, posters, and illustrated books.
Karl KilinskiThe Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, has received a $1.5 million gift from the estate of the late professor Karl Kilinski to fund an endowed chair in Hellenic visual vulture. The award will allow the university to hire a professor with expertise in the art of the Bronze Age, classical Greece, and Byzantium.
The Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in South Hadley, Massachusetts, has received a Museums for America grant from the Institute of Museums and Library Services for $148,599, with a matching amount of $400,696. The grant will be used to digitize approximately four thousand objects in its collection, including works on paper, objects of American material culture, and American and European silver.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston has won a grant from the Institute of Museums and Library Services for $146,559, with a matching amount of $264,122. The award will be used to develop the Texas Artisans and Artists Archive, a digital resource that documents the lives and practices of individuals who lived and worked in Texas in the early twentieth century.
Claude Lorrain, Ideal View of Tivoli, 1644, oil on canvas, 117 x 147 cm. New Orleans Museum of Art (artwork in the public domain)The New Orleans Museum of Art in Louisiana has received a Museums for America grant of $150,000, with a matching amount of $360,179, to help fund the second phase of a digitization project that will make ten thousand images of works held in the collection accessible online.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania has been awarded a Museums for America grant of $150,000, with a matching amount of $444,884. The award money will be applied to a digitization project of more than four thousand items in the museum’s holdings, including paintings and decorative objects from its Chinese collection.
Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma, has received a grant from the Institute of Museums and Library Services for $141,232, with a matching amount of $143,162, to support a program, called Free 2nd Saturdays, that seeks diversify the museum’s public.
The Seattle Art Museum in Washington has earned a grant from the Institute of Museums and Library Services for $140,000, with a matching amount of $146,134. The funds will support the museum’s teen programs, which help educate young people using the museum’s collection.
The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond has received a Museums for America grant of $150,000, with a matching amount of $550,622, to aid in the creation of an online catalogue of the museum’s collection. The new catalogue system will make accessible works of art that are held in offsite storage facilities.
The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, has won a grant from the Institute of Museums and Library Services for $111,615, with a matching amount of $298,447. The museum will apply the money toward a twenty-three-month educational program called American Visions: Engaging the Community with American Art.
The Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, has received a grant of $123,679 administered by the Institute of Museums and Library Services. The award will aid in the museum’s digital archiving of eight hundred American and European paintings currently in storage. The project will make available works by artists such as Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, Gustave Courbet, and Camille Pissarro.
Grants, Awards, and Honors
posted by CAA — Oct 15, 2012
CAA recognizes its members for their professional achievements, be it a grant, fellowship, residency, book prize, honorary degree, or related award.
Grants, Awards, and Honors is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
October 2012
Fred C. Albertson, associate professor in the Department of Art at the University of Memphis in Tennessee, has been named a 2012–13 Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Albertson will be in residence at the Getty Villa in Malibu, working on a project titled “Palmyrene Sculpture in North American Museums.”
Ronni Baer, the William and Ann Elfers Senior Curator of Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has been named a Museum Guest Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Baer will be in residence from January to March 2013.
Martina Bagnoli, curator of medieval art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, will be a scholar in residence at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Bagnoli will use her residency to research “The Five Senses and Medieval Art.”
Susanna Berger, a graduate student at the University of Cambridge in England, has been awarded a 2011–13 Samuel H. Kress Fellowship via the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The title of Berger’s research project is “The Art of Philosophy: Early Modern Illustrated Thesis Prints, Broadsides, and Student Notebooks.”
Kathryn BrownKathryn Brown, assistant professor of art history at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, has been awarded a funded visiting fellowship at the Humanities Centre of the Australian National University in Canberra for July and August 2013. Her project is titled “Global Art and the Networked City.”
Kaira Marie CabañasKaira Marie Cabañas, a lecturer and director of the MA Program in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in New York, has been named a 2012–13 Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. She will spend her residency on “Expressive Restraint: Geometric Abstraction and the History of Madness in Brazil.”
Matthew P. Canepa, assistant professor of art history at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, will be a Getty Scholar in residence at the Getty Villa in Malibu, California. Canepa, a specialist in the art and archeology of ancient Iran and the Mediterranean, will be working on a project, “Royal Glory, Divine Fortune: Contesting the Global Idea of Iranian Kingship in the Hellenized and Iranian Near East, Central and South Asia (330 BCE–642 CE).”
Tiziana D’Angelo, a doctoral candidate in the Department of the Classics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been awarded a predoctoral fellowship from the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. D’Angelo’s residency will be devoted to a research project, titled “Travelling Colors: Artistic Models and Cultural Transfers in South Italian Funerary Wall Painting (IV–II BCE).”
Thierry de Duve, emeritus professor at the Charles de Gaulle Université Lille 3 in Villaneuve, France, has been awarded a William C. Seitz Senior Fellowship at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, DC. His research project is called “Manet’s Testament, Duchamp’s Message, Broodthaers’ Lesson.”
Jessica Feldman, an intermedia artist based in New York, has earned an emerging artist fellowship from Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, New York. An exhibition of outdoor work by the fifteen fellowship recipients will be on view from September 9, 2012, to March 31, 2013.
Ksenya GurshteinKsenya Gurshtein, a recent PhD graduate of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has been named a 2011–13 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Cynthia Hahn, professor of art history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, has been named an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Hahn will use the fellowship to work on her project, “Reliquaries: Objects, Action, Response.”
Marius Bratsberg Hauknes, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, has been awarded a twenty-four-month Chester Dale Fellowship. The 2011–13 fellowship is administered by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Hauknes’s dissertation is titled “Imago, Figura, Scientia: The Image of the World in Thirteenth-Century Rome.”
Jessica L. HortonJessica L. Horton, a PhD candidate in the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, has been named a 2011–13 Wyeth Fellow through the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. She will use her fellowship, from the International Dissertation Research Fellowship Program, to conduct research on “Places to Stand: Native Art beyond the Nation.”
Mark Jamra, a typographic designer and associate professor at the Maine College of Art in Portland, has won a Stonington Residency at the Stephen Pace House in Stonington, Maine. The residency provides studio space and living accommodations and is open only to college alumni, faculty, and staff members.
Paul B. JaskotPaul B. Jaskot, professor of the history of art and architecture at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, has been named Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Jaskot will use his fellowship to work on a project, titled “Cultural Fantasies, Ideological Goals, and Political Economic Realities: The Built Environment at Auschwitz.”
Nathaniel B. JonesNathaniel B. Jones, a doctoral student in art history at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has received the David E. Finley Fellowship via the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. He intends to conduct research on his dissertation, “Nobilibus pinacothecae sunt faciundae: The Inception of the Roman Fictive Picture Gallery,” in Europe for two years, spending the third year of the fellowship in residence at CASVA.
Jennifer Josten, assistant professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, has been named a Getty Postdoctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Josten’s project is titled “Mathias Goeritz’s Arquitectura Emocional: Shades of the New Monumentality in Midcentury Mexico.”
Subhashini Kaligotla, a poet and a doctoral student in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in New York, has been named an Ittleson Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Her fellowship, which spans from 2012 to 2014, will be devoted to her dissertation, “Shiva’s Waterfront Temples: Reimagining the Sacred Architecture of India’s Deccan Region.”
Cindy Kang, a PhD candidate in the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, has been named a Getty predoctoral fellow for 2012–13. Kang will be in residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California, working on her dissertation, “Wallflowers: Tapestry and the Nabis in the Fin-de-siècle France.”
Jinah Kim has been named a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Kim, a recent PhD graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, will devote her fellowship to “Visions and the Visual: Color in Esoteric Buddhist Visual Practices in Medieval South Asia.”
Stuart Lingo, associate professor of art at the University of Washington’s School of Art in Seattle, has been named a Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Lingo will use his fellowship to work on a project titled “Bronzino’s Bodies: Fortunes of the Ideal Nude in an Age of Reform.”
Beili Liu, a multidisciplinary artist and associate professor of art at the University of Texas at Austin, received the Distinction Award at the 2011 Kaunas Biennial in Lithuania. Liu’s art uses elemental materials, such as wood, paper, salt, metal, and incense, to transform gallery spaces into meditative installations.
David S. Mather, who recently earned his PhD in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego, has received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Mather will use his residency at the Getty Center to further develop “‘The Wild Joy of Color’: Boccioni and the European Avant-Garde,” a chapter from his dissertation.
Jennifer Nelson, a graduate student in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has been awarded a Robert H. and Clarice Smith Fellowship for 2012–13 from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Nelson will use the award to work on “Image beyond Likeness: The Chimerism of Early Protestant Visuality, 1517–1565.”
Joshua O’Driscoll, a doctoral candidate in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been named a 2011–14 Paul Mellon Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. O’Driscoll will spend time on “Picti Imaginativo: Image and Inscription in Ottonian Manuscripts from Cologne.”
Ann E. PatnaudeAnn E. Patnaude, a PhD student in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago in Illinois, has received a twelve-month Chester Dale Fellowship for 2012–13, administered by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Her dissertation is called “Locating Identity: Mixed Inscriptions in Archaic and Classical Greek Pottery and Stone, ca. 675–336 BCE.”
Gabriel Huquier, after François Boucher, Chinese Man and Woman Fishing at the Fish-Pond, ca. 1738–45, etching and engraving, 11⅞ x 9 5/16 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (artwork in the public domain)David Pullins, a doctoral candidate the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been named a David E. Finley Fellow for 2012–15. The fellowship, which comes from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, will allow him to work on his dissertation, “Cut and Paste: The Mobile Image from Watteau to Pillement.”
William W. Robinson, the Maida and George Abrams Curator of Drawings in the Fogg Museum’s Division of European and American Art at Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been named a Museum Guest Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Robinson will be in residence at the Getty from July to September 2013.
Sophia Ronan Rochmes, a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has received a predoctoral fellowship from the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Rochmes will work on “Shades of Gray: Functions of Color and Colorlessness in Grisaille Manuscripts.”
Jennifer Margaret Simmons Stager, who earned her PhD from the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, has received a fellowship to study at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. She will be in residence at the Getty Villa in Malibu, researching “The Embodiment of Color in Ancient Mediterranean Art.”
Roberto TejadaRoberto Tejada, the Distinguished Endowed Chair in Art History in the Meadows School of Art at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, has been named the 2012–13 recipient of the Fulbright-FAAP Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts. The award from the Fulbright US Scholar Program will enable Tejada to engage in scholarship with faculty and students at the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP) in São Paulo, Brazil.
Krista ThompsonKrista Thompson, associate professor of art history at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has received an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship for her project, “Photography, Screen, and Spectacle in Contemporary African Diasporic Cultures.”
Ming Tiampo, associate professor of art history at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, has received an honorable mention from the Dedalus Foundation’s Robert Motherwell Book Award for Gutai: Decentering Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Noa Turel has been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Turel, who recently received her PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, will be in residence from September 2012 to June 2013, working on “Living Color: The Animation Paradigm of Pictorial Realism 1350–1550.”
Susan M. Wager, a PhD student in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in New York, has been named a Samuel H. Kress Fellow for 2012–14 from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Wager, whose specialty is eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French visual culture, will research her dissertation, titled “Boucher’s Bijoux: Luxury Reproductions in the Age of Enlightenment.”
Gennifer Weisenfeld, associate professor in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, has been awarded a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for her book, Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
Stephen Hart Whiteman has been awarded a 2012–14 A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. His project is titled “Vocabularies of Culture: The Landscape of Multiethnic Emperorship in the Early Qing Dynasty (1661–1722).”
Jeff Williams, an artist and assistant professor in studio art at the University of Texas at Austin, has won the 2012 Texas Prize, a $30,000 triennial award sponsored by the Austin Museum of Art/Arthouse. The prize, given to an emerging artist based in Texas, is juried by an international group of artists, scholars, and curators.
Marie Yasunaga, a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature and Culture at the University of Tokyo in Japan, has received a predoctoral fellowship from the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Yasunaga will be a resident from September 2012 to June 2013; her project is titled “Color Theories in Museum Spaces: Installation Experiments by Karl Ernst Osthaus and Karl With. From German Kunstgewerbe-Reformbewegung through Symbolism and Expressionism to the Era of the White Cube.”
Mantha Zarmakoupi, a Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow in the Archäologisches Institut at the Universität zu Köln in Germany, has been named a 2012–13 Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Zarmakoupi specializes in classical art and archeology, which she will explore during her residency in a project titled “The Idea of Landscape in Roman Luxury Villas.”
Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members
posted by CAA — Oct 15, 2012
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.
October 2012
Reni Gower. Heated Exchange. Upstairs Artspace, Tryon, North Carolina, September 21–November 17, 2012.
Martha Jackson Jarvis, Ancestors’ Bones #4, 2010–11, mixed-media drawing with black walnut ink, watercolor, oil, wax, raw pigment, collage, and photo transfer, 20 x 26¼ in. (photograph provided by Martha Jackson Jarvis Studio)Julie L. McGee. Martha Jackson Jarvis: Ancestors’ Bones. Mechanical Hall Gallery, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware, September 5–December 9, 2012.
Gustave Courbet, Apples, Pears, and Primroses on a Table, 1871–72, oil on canvas, 23½ x 28¾ in. Norton Simon Art Foundation (artwork in the public domain)Gloria Williams Sander. Significant Objects: The Spell of Still Life. Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena, California, July 20, 2012–January 21, 2013.
Cortney Lane Stell. Something about the State of Being. Philip J. Steele Gallery, Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, Denver, Colorado, August 31–October 13, 2012.
Register for the 2013 Annual Conference
posted by CAA — Oct 11, 2012
Registration is now open for the 101st Annual Conference, taking place February 13–16, 2013, in New York. Register before the early deadline, December 14, 2012, to ensure the lowest rate and your place in the online Directory of Attendees.
Registration includes access to all conference sessions and to the Book and Trade Fair. Each registrant will receive a copy of the Conference Program and access to the online Directory of Attendees, along with online access to Abstracts 2013 and free admission to selected museums and galleries throughout greater New York during the conference.
Those interested in Career Services should sign up now to secure a place in several high-demand activities. Register for a variety of Professional Development Workshops covering topics ranging from grant writing to tenure issues. Sign up for Mentoring Sessions that include the Artists’ Portfolio Review and Career Development Mentoring.
Making travel plans and hotel reservations? Check out the special discounts available to conference attendees. Students can take advantage of further reductions on accommodations at select conference hotels.
You may also purchase tickets for a variety of Events taking place in the New York area, including:
- Opening Night Reception at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
- Chelsea Gallery District Walking Tour
- Montclair Art Museum Tour and Reception
Space is limited, so please register early.
CAA will regularly update the conference website over the next few months, with additional details on the program, awards, tours, and more. A list of session names and chairs has been posted, with the names of all speakers and the titles of their presentations coming in November.
The CAA Annual Conference is the world’s largest international forum for professionals in the visual arts, offering more than two hundred stimulating sessions, panel discussions, roundtables, and meetings. CAA anticipates more than six thousand artists, art historians, students, curators, critics, educators, art administrators, and museum professionals to attend the meeting, which brings CAA’s Centennial year to a close.
Kress Foundation Awards CAA Grant for Fair Use in the Visual Arts
posted by Linda Downs — Oct 03, 2012
The Samuel H. Kress Foundation has awarded CAA a start-up grant to support the development of a Code of Best Practices for Fair Use of Copyrighted Images in the Creation and Curation of Artworks and Scholarly Publishing in the Visual Arts. The project will address all areas of the visual arts and involve participants from the fields of art history, studio art, print and online publishing, art museums and related areas.
CAA’s Board of Directors recognized the need for the development of a Code of Best Practices by establishing a Task Force on Fair Use at the May 7, 2012 meeting. The rationale for this undertaking is to address what amounts to a crisis in the visual arts field. At this time, there is significant evidence that concerns around the implications of copyright—and especially uncertainty surrounding the fair use doctrine (currently codified under section 107 of the Copyright Act)—is substantially inhibiting the ability of scholars and artists to develop new work requiring the use of images and other third-party copyrighted works. The visual arts field needs the opportunity to explore and better understand copyright and fair use law, come to a consensus on best practices in the use of third-party images, and adhere to a code that is within the law and practicable for visual arts scholarly publications and creative work.
This fall, with the support of the Kress Foundation, CAA will establish a research plan and administrative framework for developing a comprehensive Code of Best Practices for Fair Use. CAA’s newly-created Task Force on Fair Use will begin work with two recognized authorities on the subject: Peter Jaszi, Professor of Law, Washington School of Law, American University and Pat Aufderheide, Director, Center for Media Studies, American University. Jaszi and Aufderheide, the authors of Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back into Copyright (Chicago University Press, 2011) have worked with numerous disciplines—including documentary film makers, dance archivists, research librarians, and journalists—to develop best practices in fair use. CAA’s Task Force will be co-chaired by Jeffrey P. Cunard (CAA Counsel and Partner, Debevoise & Plimpton) and Gretchen Wagner (CAA Committee on Intellectual Property and ARTstor General Counsel); its other members include Anne Collins Goodyear (CAA President and Associate Curator, Prints and Drawings, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institute); Linda Downs (CAA Executive Director and CEO); Suzanne Blier (CAA Board Member and Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University); DeWitt Godfrey (CAA Vice President for Committees and Director, Institute for Creative and Performing Arts, Colgate University); Randall C. Griffin (ex-officio as CAA Vice President for Publications, Professor, Division of Art History, Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University); Paul Jaskot (CAA Past President and Professor of History of Art and Architecture, DePaul University); Patricia McDonnell (CAA Vice President for External Affairs and Director, Wichita Art Museum); Charles Wright (CAA Board Member and Chair, Department of Art, Western Illinois University). Throughout the project, CAA will involve its members and the larger visual arts community in building a comprehensive Code designed to serve all members of its constituency. CAA’s Committee on Intellectual Property will address CAA’s work on Fair Use at its upcoming public session at the Annual Meeting in February 2013 (Saturday, February 16, at 12:30 pm).
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — Sep 17, 2012
In its monthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, curators, designers, photographers, filmmakers, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. This month was marked by the loss of the art historian Natalie Boymel Kampen, Magnum photographer Martine Franck, and the young Egyptian artist Amal Kenawy. CAA has published a special obituary for Kampen.
- Lee Wick Dennison, a long-time financial officer for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), passed away on August 31, 2012. She was 60 years old. Dennison joined the NEA in 1975 and campaigned for funding for arts organizations across the country through her various roles as grants officer, assistant director of the challenge and advancement programs, and director of organizational capacity. She received the Distinguished Service Award from the NEA twice, in 1988 and 1999
- Martine Franck, a versatile documentary photographer in the humanist tradition who was among the first women accepted into the elite Magnum photography agency, died on August 16, 2012, at the age of 74. Franck’s images ranged from formal portraits of artists, such as Balthus, to intimate street scenes. She was married to the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson
- Hans Josephsohn, a Swiss figurative sculptor, passed away on August 21, 2012, at the age of 92. His primitive-looking sculptures of reclining figures, heads, and busts on plinths suggest a marriage of classical art and expressionist fervor. He worked primarily in plaster, a material that for him was “a cross between modeling and working with stone”
- Natalie Boymel Kampen, a pioneering feminist scholar and professor of Roman art history and gender studies, died on August 12, 2012. She was 68 years old. Kampen was the author of Image and Status: Roman Working Women in Ostia and Family Fictions in Roman Art and served as chair of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board from 2009 to 2010. CAA has published a special obituary for Kampen
- Amal Kenawy, an Egyptian artist who showed her video, performance, and installation work in Cairo galleries and in many international biennials, died on August 19, 2012. She was 38. Her diverse artworks dealt with the subject of communication and translation, often to controversial and awe-inspiring effect. The performance Silence of the Sheep, staged at the Cairo Biennial in 2011, featured the artist as a shepherd leading a flock of artists and workers on their hands and knees through the city’s streets
- Joe Kubert, a Polish-born comic-book artist, died on August 12, 2012, at the age of 85. Kubert created many memorable cartoon heroes for DC Comics in the 1940s and 50s, including Sgt. Rock, Hawkman, and Tor, the first 3D comic book. He passed on his passion for drawing and invention at the Kubert School in Dover, New Jersey, founded in 1976 and still going strong today
- Helen Scott Lidgett, a lively British publicist, passed away on July 31, 2012, at the age of 63. Lidgett wore many hats during her varied career: she ran a popular vintage-clothing stall in Camden Town, wrote art criticism for London’s Time Out, and was the famously flamboyant head of publicity for the art-book publishers Thames and Hudson. In later years Lidgett was a champion for arts funding and served as a cultural advisor to Prime Minister Gordon Brown
- William Moggridge, a British designer and educator, died on September 8, 2012, at the age of 69. Moggridge’s invention of the clamshell design of the first laptop computer in 1979 was a revolutionary step for digital technology. He cofounded the product-design firm IDEO and worked on a range of products, from heart defibrillators to Palm Pilots. In 2010 he was named the director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York
- Dmitri Plavinsky, a Russian artist associated with the Nonconformist Art movement, passed away on September 1, 2012, at the age of 76. His paintings and etchings explored imagery that flew in the face of officially sanctioned Soviet Realism. Plavinsky was one of a select group of artists to be shown in museums in the United States and in Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Jan Sawka, a Polish-born artist, illustrator, and sculptor known to many outside the art world for his luminous stage sets for Grateful Dead concerts, died on August 9, 2012, at the age of 65. Sawka began his art career working as an underground graphic artist in Krakow, Poland. He has shown his work in museums throughout the United States and in Europe
- Lee Sherry, a New York–based abstract artist, passed away in August 2012 at the age of 65. Sherry attended Reed College with her fellow painter David Reed in the 1960s; she was also close to many writers in the Language school of poetry. Sherry designed the typography for several covers of the experimental poetry journal Roof and showed her work at Susan Caldwell Gallery in New York in the 1970s
- Michael Seward Snow, a British abstract painter who was associated with the St Ives artist colony in the 1950s, passed away on July 15, 2012, at the age of 82. His compatriot artists were Ben Nicholson, Terry Frost, and the poet W. S. Graham. Snow was a professor of art from 1965 to 1985 at Exeter College of Art in Devon, England
- Steve M. Street, a champion for the rights of adjunct faculty members, died on August 17, 2012, at the age of 56. Street had been a non-tenure-track professor of writing at the State University of New York at Buffalo since 1980. He was a frequent contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education on the subject of adjunct benefits and most recently wrote about his own struggle with cancer in light of his adjunct position
Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries, or your completed texts, to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the September list.
Affiliated Society News for September 2012
posted by CAA — Sep 09, 2012
Art Libraries Society of North America
Windows on the War: Soviet Tass Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941–1945, edited by Peter Kort Zegers and Douglas W. Druick, won the 2011 George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award
The 2012 George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award Committee of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) welcomes submissions of notable art books published in North America during 2012. This prestigious award is presented annually to publications demonstrating excellence in art publishing. Established by ARLIS/NA in 1980, the award honors the memory of George Wittenborn (1905–1974), a premier New York art-book dealer and publisher who was a strong supporter of ARLIS/NA in its formative years. Each year, eligible titles are evaluated for excellence in standards of content, documentation, layout, and format. From these titles, one exemplary publication will be chosen to receive the George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award. Titles eligible for consideration include books (print and electronic), exhibition catalogues, and new periodical titles in any language, published in 2012 and originating from a North American publisher. Publications submitted by foreign publishers with North American offices must have been authored or edited in North America. The book-selection guidelines, entry form, and application address can all be found online. The deadline for consideration is December 31, 2012; the presentation of the awards will take place in April 2013 during the ARLIS/NA forty-first annual conference in Pasadena, California.
Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey
The Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) held its second annual conference, “The Longevity of Rupture: 1967 in Art and Its Histories,” at the American University in Beirut. Lebanon, on June 1–2, 2012.
AMCA is currently accepting submissions for the Rhonda A. Saad Prize for Best Graduate Paper in Modern Arab Art, 2012. In its second year, the award aims to recognize and promote excellence in the field of modern and contemporary Arab art. The prize is offered to a graduate student working in any discipline whose paper is judged to provide the most significant contribution to Middle Eastern studies and art history. Submissions must have been produced between June 2011 and September 2012, must not exceed thirty-five pages (excluding notes and bibliography), and must not have been previously published or be currently under consideration for publication. Submissions are due by September 30, 2012, and should be emailed to info@amcainternational.org. The winner will be announced during the AMCA members meeting, held at the Middle East Studies Association annual meeting in Denver, Colorado, in November 2012.
Association of Historians of American Art
Join the Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA) on October 11 to 13, 2012, for its second symposium, “American Art: The Academy, Museums, and the Market,” in Boston, Massachusetts. The keynote speaker is Holland Cotter, art critic for the New York Times. The Boston Athenaeum and Boston University will host the sessions; additional events include a special viewing of the newly installed Art of the Americas wing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a reception at the Boston University Art Gallery. The full symposium schedule of speakers and registration information can be found at the conference website. Hurry! Registration is only open until September 15, 2012, and there are a limited number of spaces available. For more information, please contact the symposium cochairs, David Dearinger and Melissa Renn.
Historians of British Art
The Historians of British Art (HBA) has moved up the application deadline of its annual travel grant in order to give the successful applicant more lead-up time to plan his or her travel in calendar year 2013. This grant of $750 is intended to help offset travel costs incurred by a graduate-student member of HBA who will be presenting a paper on British visual culture at an academic conference. To apply, please send a letter of request, a copy of the letter of acceptance from the organizer of the conference session, an abstract of the paper to be presented, a budget of estimated expenses (noting what items may be covered by other resources), and a CV to Renate Dohmen, grant committee chair. The deadline for the 2013 application is September 15, 2012, with notification to the winner by October 15, 2012. An annual student membership in HBA is only $15; consider joining today.
Historians of Netherlandish Art
The next formal deadline for submitting manuscripts to the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, the peer-reviewed, open-access ejournal published by the Historians of Netherlandish Art (HNA), is March 1, 2013. In addition to longer articles, the journal now welcomes shorter notes on archival discoveries, iconographical issues, technical studies, and rediscovered works. Please review the submission guidelines or contact the journal’s editor-in-chief, Alison Kettering, for more information.
Historians of Islamic Art Association
The Historians of Islamic Art Association (HIAA) would like to remind fellow CAA affiliates and members that registration for our third biennial symposium, “Looking Widely, Looking Closely,” hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, October 18–20, 2012, remains open. HIAA is pleased to offer a reduced rate for student members ($35). For more information about the symposium program, and about travel accommodations in New York, please visit the HIAA website.
International Sculpture Center
The International Sculpture Center (ISC) is accepting nominations for the 2013 Outstanding Educator Award, which recognizes individual artist-educators who have excelled at teaching sculpture in institutions of higher learning. Candidates for this award are master sculptors who have devoted their careers to the education of the next generation and to the advancement of the sculpture field as a whole. Nominations for the award will be accepted from September 3 through October 26, 2012. Anyone can nominate a qualified educator: submissions are not limited to United States participants, and international submissions are welcomed and encouraged. Award recipients receive benefits such as a featured article in Sculpture, a lifetime ISC professional-level membership, and an award ceremony to be held at their academic institution. Educational institutions of awardees also receive benefits, including recognition in Sculpture and a one-year ISC university-level membership.
Leonardo Education and Art Forum
The Leonardo Education and Art Forum (LEAF) has welcomed David Familian as its new chair-elect. Familian, an artist and educator, has served as the artistic director of the Beall Center for Art and Technology at the University of California, Irvine, since 2005. He has curated one-person exhibitions of Shih Chieh Huang, Golan Levin, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Chico MacMurtrie, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Nam June Paik, and Victoria Vesna.
LEAF seeks contributions to a scholarly project that examines interdisciplinary curricula that span the art, science, and humanities fields. Interested participants should send examples of courses and curricula in areas such art and biology, music and mathematics, art and chemistry, dance and environmental sciences, and similar pairings. The project, a relaunch of a similar call issued in 2009, is spearheaded by Roger Malina, Leonardo executive editor, and Kathryn Evans, a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Dallas. Please address all questions and syllabi or curricula information to Kathryn Evans.
Jill Scott of Z-Node and Ellen K. Levy, former chair of LEAF and an advisor for the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, are cochairs of a panel for the eighteenth International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), taking place September 19–24, 2012, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Their panel, “Synaptic Scenarios for Ecological Environments,” will addresses cognitive issues in relation to ecology with the goal of gaining a greater embodied sense of place within the ecological environment. Another ISEA panel is “Eco-Art + the Evolving Landscape of Social and Situated Practices,” moderated by Patricia Olynyk, an artist and LEAF chair. The panel will focus on education and the complex triad of ecoart, situated practices, and project-based public work that embrace various democratic processes and inspire progressive social, cultural, and environmental change. “Breaking Tradition: Rethinking the Economy of Learning,” an education workshop for ISEA 2012 convened by Nina Czegledy, former chair of LEAF, will discuss the latest developments of educational policy investigations and evaluate the role of educational research and existing educational business strategies, financial modeling, and risk management. Olynyk and Adrienne Klein, incoming LEAF cochair, will moderate the panel “Art and Medicine: Reciprocal Influence” at the 2013 CAA Annual Conference in New York, taking place February 13–16, 2013. Their panel will explore the impact of medicine on artistic practice, of creative process on medical research, and of the idea of the artist’s body as subject matter. Joseph Lewis III of the University of California, Irvine, will moderate a second panel at the CAA conference, called “Re/Search: Art, Science, and Information Technology (ASIT): What Would Leonardo da Vinci Have Thought?”.
Mid-America College Art Association
Save the date for the Mid-America College Art Association (MACAA) biannual conference, taking place October 3–6, 2012, in Detroit, Michigan. The James Pearson Duffy Department of Art and Art History at Wayne State University will host the conference in downtown Detroit. Programming will include three featured speakers; panel presentations in art, design, art history, and visual resources; and studio workshops, MACAA member exhibitions, and museum visits. The conference will have two content areas, “Meaning and Making” and “Community and Collaboration.” Visit the conference website to learn more about the event, to check travel and hotel information, and to become an MACAA member.
National Council of Arts Administrators
From November 7 to 10, 2012, Ohio State University and Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio will host “Granting Permission“ the fortieth annual conference of the National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA). The event will focus on a reexamination of the importance of arts and art education as professionals face “occasions piled high with difficulty.” The conference 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.
Northern California Art Historians
The Northern California Art Historians (NCAH) has inaugurated an annual travel award for promising emerging scholars. Cheyanne Cortez, a master’s degree candidate at San José State University in California, received the award in recognition of her paper, “The Ladies’ American Girl: Delineating an Age through the Ladies Home Journal,” presented at the Women in Magazines conference held at Kingston University in London, June 22–23, 2012. The NCAH gives its sincere thanks to the anonymous donor who generously contributed $300 for this year’s award.
Public Art Dialogue
Public Art Dialogue (PAD) has announced Penny Balkin Bach as the 2013 recipient of the PAD award in recognition of her longstanding and continuing contributions to the field of public art. Join the dialogue with PAD’s newest awardee at the 2013 CAA Annual Conference in New York. More information will be available soon.
Public Art Dialogue is now accepting submissions for its upcoming special issue, “Memorials: The Culture of Remembrance.” This issue seeks to explore memorials in regard to their range of subjects, various formal and conceptual strategies, and critical issues pertaining to their study. PAD welcomes submissions that address related topics (except war or peace, covered in the previous issue) from any time period or place. Please see the journal website for guidelines. The submission deadline is September 15, 2012.
Society for Photographic Education
The Society for Photographic Education (SPE) seeks curators, professors, gallerists, art historians, and scholars to review student and/or professional member portfolios at SPE’s fiftieth annual conference, taking place March 7–10, 2013, in Chicago, Illinois. Portfolio reviewers receive a discounted admission to the four-day event in exchange for their participation. For more information on the conference offerings and to express interest in serving as a portfolio reviewer, please contact SPE. The deadline for portfolio review is November 15, 2012; the deadline for conference registration is February 22, 2013.
Society of North American Goldsmiths
The Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG) will hold their forty-second annual conference on May 15–18, 2013, in Toronto, Canada. Titled “Meta-Mosaic,” the event will celebrate the multiple industries within jewelry and metal-smithing 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 our collective mosaic. Join SNAG for presentations and panels featuring industry luminaries from across the globe, rapid-fire presentations by international designers and artists, and over twenty exhibitions.
Southeastern College Art Conference
The sixty-eighth annual meeting of the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC), hosted by Meredith College, will be held in historic Durham, North Carolina, from October 17 to 20, 2012. SECAC membership is required to attend and to participate in the conference; registration opened on August 1, 2012. Please visit the website for registration fees, travel and accommodation details, and local information on Durham. Questions? Please contact Beth Mulvaney, conference chair for SECAC 2012.
Women’s Caucus for Art
The Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) will present “Honoring Women’s Rights,” a conference and exhibition in celebration of WCA’s fortieth anniversary, taking place September 7–9, 2012, at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California. The conference will feature a celebrated roster of speakers and panelists, including Malissa Feruzzi Shriver, California Arts Council chair, as well as Louise Bernikow, Sandra Fluke, Judy Baca, Flo Oy Wong, Kim Abeles, Ani Zonneveld, Emelia Fuentes Grant, Enid Blader, Geri Montano, Jane Schonberger, Laurie Frank, Linda Bynoe, Marta Donayre, Martha Richards, Melanie Cervantes, Pia Guerrero, and Thea Iberall. The speakers will cover a wide range of topics related to art, activism, and women’s rights. Works of art were juried by Ruth Weisberg, Joyce Aiken, and Patricia Rodriguez and will remain on view through November 25, 2012.
NEW ART JOURNAL REVIEWS EDITOR
posted by Christopher Howard — Sep 04, 2012
Michael Corris (2013–16)
Michael Corris, incoming Art Journal reviews editor
Michael Corris, professor of art and chair of the Division of Art in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, has been appointed reviews editor of Art Journal. He will serve one year as reviews editor designate, taking over from Howard Singerman of the University of Virginia in July 2013.
As both an artist and an author of many works on postwar and contemporary art and theory, Corris is looking forward to bringing new voices and perspectives into the conversation that surrounds the literature of art. For Corris this means a thorough investigation into myriad ways in which scholars and artists are reading art history today, both inside the classroom and in the larger art world. He writes, “I’d like to know what artists are reading and why; what goes into the construction of a bibliography for students at all levels; and how technology and social media alter the way we reflect critically on art and culture. In short, how the dialogue on art is authorized, shaped, and sustained through all sorts of textual means.” The social reality of art making and writing about art has always been present in Corris’s work. In his new role as reviews editor he is committed to seeking out non-Western art practices and those that merge with political activism.
With a comparative perspective on studio-art and art-history programs from his substantial teaching record in the United States and England, Corris sees both countries as “facing a crisis in higher education” and laments the fact that programs in art education and art history “are constantly under threat to justify their existence in purely economic terms.” However, the academic intensity of art schools in England holds a great appeal for Corris: “The British higher-education system places great emphasis on individual and small-group tutorials; it also demands a great deal more of students in terms of written output. Studio-art undergraduates are generally required to produce a research paper of up to 10,000 words; master’s level students may have to produce a research paper of up to 20,000 words. This is all in addition to their artwork.”
As a visual artist who slips easily into the role of critic, and as a critic who is equally at home in academia, Corris is long familiar with the fluidity of all three roles. He also recognizes the importance of a playful attitude as a way to explore new spaces of thought production. “It’s no longer surprising to find an artist who writes, a writer who draws, or a studio-art professor who curates art. The challenge here is to find ways to destabilize all these terms: visual artist, editor, writer, and educator. I turned my office at Southern Methodist University into the Free Museum of Dallas to offset the drudgery and power of academic bureaucracy. I’m constantly seeking ways to collectivize the various activities that I engage in or fall into. When it comes to my role as educator, my current concern is trying to figure out the precise shape of this Faustian bargain called tenure and my limits of tolerance to the trend to subject the arts and humanities to a corporate logic. My great joy is that the students remain engaged and delightfully open.”
Concurrent with his position at Art Journal, Corris will remain an editor at Transmission Annual, a peer-reviewed journal of contemporary art and culture, cofounded in 2008 with Sharon Kivland and Jaspar Joseph-Lester, both professors at Sheffield Hallam University in England. “We came up with the idea to publish an annual collection of essays, structured correspondence, and artist’s projects that revisited the themes of the school’s weekly artist and theorist lecture series, while allowing academics the luxury to experiment with forms of exposition. Our first issue was based on the theme of hospitality, the second on the theme of provocation, and the third on the theme of catastrophe. We anticipate a fourth issue on the theme of agency, so you see there is a glimmer of reality amongst the poetry.” Corris hopes his Transmission Annual experience will inspire new formats for Art Journal devoted to the critical review of literature on art.
Corris received a BA from Brooklyn College, City University of New York, in 1970. Two years later he earned an MFA in painting and media from the Hoffberger School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, and later was awarded a scholarship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. In 1971 he began participating in the Conceptual-art collective Art & Language (whose transatlantic members included Terry Atkinson, Joseph Kosuth, Mel Ramsden, and Charles Harrison) and contributed to the group’s journal, Art-Language. As a member of the collective, and as a solo artist, Corris has exhibited his artwork in galleries and museums across the United States and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Michael Corris, ed., Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
The relationship of writing and language to the visual arts has been a paramount concern of Corris’s throughout his career. His editorial experience began with cofounding the artist-run journals The Fox in 1975 and Red-Herring in 1977. The move from art making into publishing was a natural extension of his essayistic art practice. For Corris, and for the other Art & Language artists, these journals served as “sites of artistic production and were intentionally set in opposition to the values and institutions that sustained a managerial culture of art.” His early essays, such as “The Organization of Culture under Monopoly Capitalism,” published in The Fox in 1976, and “Frameworks and Phantoms,” written with Mel Ramsden for Art-Language in 1973, reflect this radical ethos. Since then Corris has written essays and reviews for Artforum, Art History, and Art Monthly that cover a wide spectrum of artists working today, from Jeff Koons to Alfredo Jaar and Tracey Emin.
Corris’s PhD dissertation, completed in 1996 at University College London, formed the basis for a monograph, Ad Reinhardt, published by Reaktion Books in 2008. A 2006 winner of the first CAA Publication Grant, the book recontextualizes an overlooked aspect of Reinhardt’s art practice: the political cartoons and illustrations that were published in the 1930s through the 1950s in New Masses and Soviet Russia Today. Corris’s lifelong commitment to the intersection of art and politics is evident in Ad Reinhardt, as well as in two forthcoming books: The Artist Out of Work: Selected Writings on Art (Les Presses du Reel/JRP Ringier) and What Do Artists Know? Art’s Encounter with Philosophy (Reaktion). Corris is also the author of a volume on the painter David Diao, published by TimeZone8 Books in 2005, and coauthor, with John Dixon Hunt and David Lomas, of Art, Word, and Image: 2,000 Years of Visual/Textual Interaction, published by Reaktion in 2010.
A selection of Corris’s academic appointments include visiting lecturer in history of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London (1999–2001); head of the Department of Art and Photography at the University of Wales, Newport (2003–7); visiting professor of art theory at the Bergen National Academy of Art in Norway (2005–7); and professor of fine art at Art and Design Research Center, Sheffield Hallam University (2007–9).