CAA News Today
Institutional News
posted by CAA — Jun 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.
June 2012
South view of the Michigan Avenue façade of the Art Institute of Chicago (photograph provided by the Art Institute of Chicago)The Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, on behalf of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has been awarded a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the Teacher Institute in Contemporary Art at the school, an enrichment program for high school art teachers to engage with the art community of Chicago.
The Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland has been granted $65,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the reinstallation of its American art collection into newly refurbished galleries, originally designed in 1929 by John Russell Pope.
The Brooklyn Museum in New York has won two bronze 2012 MUSE awards: in the category of Interpretative Interactive Installations for the exhibition Vishnu: Hinduism’s Blue-Skinned Savior; and in the Online Presence category for the website of the exhibition Split Second: Indian Paintings (2011).
California State University, Long Beach, has been awarded Best Show in a University Art Gallery by the United States section of the International Art Critics Association for Perpetual Motion: Michael Goldberg (2010).
Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, is the recipient of a $45,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in support of a program called Objects and Their Makers: New Insights at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, which aims to introduce students to the arts of Africa, China, Japan, Tibet, and Southeast Asia, and to Precolumbian and Native American art.
The Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, has been granted a $50,000 award from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the online publication of the museum’s collection of European and contemporary art.
The Dallas Museum of Art in Texas has recently launched a new website application called DMA Dashboard, which offers the public access to real-time museum statistics such as financial data, fundraising, and building operations.
The Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, California, has launched the Conserving Modern Architecture Initiative, an international effort that aims to “increase knowledge for the field and develop new tools to assist practitioners,” according to Tim Whalen, the institute’s director. The initiative’s first project is the long-term conservation of the Eames House in Los Angleles, built by Charles and Ray Eames in 1949.
The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California, has won a 2012 MUSE award, receiving a silver award in the category of Audio Tours and Podcasts for Demons, Angels, and Monsters: The Supernatural in Art (2011). The museum also earned an honorable mention in the category of Applications and APIs for The Life of Art: Context, Collecting, and Display (2012).
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York has been awarded the second-place prize for Best Thematic Museum Show in New York by the United States section of the International Art Critics Association for Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936 (2010–11).
The Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indiana has received a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the documentation and conservation of the museum’s Western European design collection, a project that is in tandem with moving the collection to a newly designed 9,000-square-foot gallery. The museum has also won a bronze 2012 MUSE award in the category of Public Outreach for its campaign XLVI Reasons to Visit the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia, has received a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to aid a multimedia installation by the artist Matt Haffner for display in the lobby of the visual-arts building. A $3 million addition to the Kennesaw State University Art Museum and Galleries was recently approved by the University System of Georgia’s board of regents. The new 9,200-square-foot space, to open in March 2013, will house the university’s art collection and an interdisciplinary research center.
Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, has been awarded a $35,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for an exhibition at the Kent State University Museum, called Shifting Paradigms of Identity: Creative Technology and Fashion, which will address how changing technology affects fashion.
Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston has received a $50,000 award from the National Endowment for the Arts to support scholarships for high school juniors and seniors to attend a four-week intensive summer art program.
The Mead Art Museum at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, has received a $1 million matching endowment grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of an initiative to integrate the museum’s collection into the college curriculum and to endow the position of coordinator of college programs. A stipulation of the grant calls for Amherst to raise a matching $1 million within three years.
The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, has been awarded the second place in the category of Best Monographic Museum Show Nationally by the United States section of the International Art Critics Association for Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage (2010–11).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has been awarded first place in the category of Best Architecture or Design Show by the United States section of the International Art Critics Association for Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (2011). The museum also won first place for Best Historical Museum Show Nationally for The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde (2012).
Michigan State University in East Lansing has been awarded a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to expand the reach of the Michigan Traditional Arts Program. In addition to documenting traditional artists and folk-art events, the program will enhance its online resources and use of social media to help connect folk artists, audiences, and other cultural workers.
Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is the recipient of a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the conservation and documentation of William Lightner’s Our Mother of Sorrows Grotto, an outdoor environment and shrine made up of semiprecious stones, cement, and mosaics, built between 1929 and 1941.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in Massachusetts has received $80,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts to support two components of the museum’s Korean Collection Access Initiative—the publication of a catalogue and the reinstallation of the Korean art collection into a new 1,200-square-foot gallery.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York has been awarded first place in the category of Best Thematic Museum Show in New York by the United States section of the International Art Critics Association for On Line: Drawing through the Twentieth Century (2010–11). The museum has also won a gold 2012 MUSE award in the Public Outreach category for its interactive ad campaign “I went to MoMA and….”
The National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, based in Erie, Colorado, has accepted a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to assist exhibitions related to its 2013 national conference, to be held in Houston, Texas. An additional exhibition will take place in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to coincide with the forty-fifth general assembly of the International Academy of Ceramics.
The National Palace Museum in Taipei City, Taiwan, has won a gold 2012 MUSE award in the category of Multimedia Installations for the exhibition Along the River, During the Ching-ming Festival (2009).
The National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, has received a first-place award from the United States section of the International Art Critics Association for the Best Thematic Museum Show Nationally for Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (2010–11).
The National Portrait Gallery in London, England, has recorded its highest-ever attendance figure for a single year, with 2 million museum-goers in 2011.
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, has received $100,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts for the digitization of its collection of more than 8,400 photographs ranging from 1839 to the present day.
The Neuberger Museum of Art, part of Purchase College, State University of New York, in Purchase, New York, has been awarded second place by the United States section of the International Art Critics Association for Best Thematic Museum Show Nationally for The Deconstructive Impulse: Women Artists Reconfigure the Signs of Power, 1973–1999 (2011).
Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, has received a $30,000 grant from the Collins Foundation in support of an initiative called Persist and Thrive, which seeks to diversify the student body and provide mentoring services and academic support for students from underrepresented backgrounds.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania has received a 2012 Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative Grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. The museum will use the $250,000 grant to fund an exhibition for fall 2013, called Dancing around the Bride, devoted to Marcel Duchamp and his influence on John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg.
Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, has earned a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to aid the school’s community outreach program, Design Initiative for Community Empowerment. The program provides a platform for underserved Brooklyn high school students to learn about design through guided studio work, public exhibitions, and studio visits.
The San Diego Museum of Art in California has received a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support an artist’s residency for teenagers from the culturally diverse neighborhood of southeast San Diego. The residency will consist of visits to local art museums and also provide studio space and instruction from professional artists.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California has received a $375,000 grant from the Getty Foundation to support the Robert Rauschenberg Research Project, an online catalogue scheduled for completion in 2013 that will feature all the artist’s works held in the museum’s permanent collection. The project is part of a larger initiative to digitize museum catalogues, spearheaded by the Getty Foundation, called the Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative.
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois has received an award from the United States section of the International Art Critics Association for Best Show Involving Digital Media, Video, Film, or Performance for Yael Bartana: A Declaration, held at the Gene Siskel Film Center on March 10, 2011.
Scripps College in Claremont, California, has won a grant of $10,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the offsite conservation of seven Chinese textiles from the sixteenth and seventeenth century in its Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery.
Syracuse University Library in Syracuse, New York, has received more than 1,350 digitized documents, letters, and images from the Archives of American Art for its recently launched Marcel Breuer Digital Archive.
UB Anderson Gallery at the University of Buffalo in New York has been declared a 2012 MUSE award winner, receiving a silver Honeysett and Din Student Award for the touch-based website component of a permanent installation, Cravens World: The Human Aesthetic.
The Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas, has been awarded $100,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts to restore a 1978 mural by Joan Miró that decorates the museum’s façade.
The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has won a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support a juried design/building competition called Something from Nothing: Eco-ventions for Urban Landscapes. The competition seeks proposals that reimagine derelict and underused urban spaces.
The University of Massachusetts in Amherst has earned $100,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts to support an exhibition and related programming devoted to the legacy of W. E. B. DuBois at the University Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and will examine DuBois’s influence on social and political movements throughout the twentieth century.
The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor has received a $55,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to update the University of Michigan Museum of Art with multimedia tools that will enhance visitors’ experience of the collection.
The University of Oregon in Eugene has been awarded a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support an apprenticeship program called Preserving and Sustaining Oregon’s Cultural Traditions, which connects master folk artists to apprentices.
The University of Rochester in Rochester, New York has been granted $15,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts. The school will use the funds to conserve paintings and drawings by Carl W. Peter in the collection of the Memorial Art Gallery.
The University of South Florida in Tampa has been awarded a $75,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the development of a traveling exhibition, UnCommon Practice: Graphicstudio, organized in partnership with the Tampa Museum of Art and the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum. The exhibition documents the forty-five-year history of the Graphicstudio at the university.
The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has received a gold 2012 MUSE award in the category of Online Presence for its new website, launched in late 2011.
The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, has won a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for $265,000 to support the digitization of 113 medieval Flemish manuscripts, including eighty Books of Hours prayer books. Since 2008, the museum has received two other grants for the purpose of digitizing their manuscript collection.
The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York has received $1.5 million from the Henry Luce Foundation. The grant will assist the museum’s relocation in 2015 to a new Renzo Piano–designed building in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. The funds will also go toward the Whitney’s Collections Documentation Initiative, an effort to further document its permanent collection before the move. The United States section of the International Art Critics Association has awarded a first-place prize for the Best Monographic Museum Show in New York to the Whitney for Paul Thek: Diver (2010–11), and second-place prize for Glenn Ligon: AMERICA (2011). Last, the Whitney has won a silver 2012 MUSE award in the category of Education and Outreach for its interactive website, For Kids, and a bronze 2012 MUSE award for Video, Film, and Computer Animation for the Vlog Project, comprising short videos that feature deaf museum educators discussing contemporary art in American Sign Language.
Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library in Winterthur, Delaware, has received a $50,000 award from the National Endowment for the Arts to support a digitization project that will document 4,000 works on paper, including eighteenth-century maps, watercolors, drawings, and silhouettes.
The Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, has been awarded $20,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts to aid a project called Teen Artists @ WAM, in which students take classes with artist mentors and compete to make large-scale installations with the assistance of professional artists.
Grants, Awards, and Honors
posted by CAA — Jun 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.
June 2012
Peter Jonathan Bell, a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, has received the Robert Lehman Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize to study at the American Academy in Rome. Bell will be working on a project titled “The Reinvention of the Bronze Statuette in Renaissance Italy: Presentation, Material, Facture.”
Pat Boas, an artist and graduate of Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, has been awarded the Bonnie Bronson Fellowship from her alma mater. The fellowship includes the purchase of an artwork for permanent installation at Reed College.
Elizabeth Hill Boone, Martha and Donald Robertson Chair in Latin American Art at Tulane University in New Orleans, has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a corresponding member of the Academia Mexicana de la Historia.
Bradford R. Collins, associate professor of art history at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, has been listed in the Princeton Review’s 2012 publication The Best 300 Professors.
Sophie Cras, a doctoral candidate at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, has been awarded the 2012 Terra Foundation for American Art International Essay Prize for her essay “Art as Investment and ‘Artistic Shareholding’ Experiments in the 1960s,” an examination of how a group of American conceptual artists made money and financial transactions the subject of their work.
Diana H. DePardo-Minsky, assistant professor of art history at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and a specialist in Italian Renaissance and ancient Roman art and architecture, has been recognized in the Princeton Review’s publication The Best 300 Professors (2012).
Charles Fairbanks, a filmmaker from Eustis, Nebraska, has earned a 2012 fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In his recent work Fairbanks documents his involvement with Lucha Libre wrestling in Mexico. He is also collaborating with an indigenous Zoque community in Chiapas, Mexico, on a new film.
Margot Fassler, professor of theology and music at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, has been named an American Council of Leaned Societies 2012 Digital Innovation Fellow. Fassler’s project proposal is to create a digitized, sounding model of Hildegard of Bingen conception of the cosmos, utilizing the advanced technology of Notre Dame’s Digital Visualization Theater.
Leonard Folgarait, professor of history of art at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and a scholar of modern art of Latin America, Mexico, Europe, and America, has been listed in the Princeton Review’s The Best 300 Professors (2012).
Seth Adam HindinSeth Adam Hindin, a historian of medieval art and architecture, has been appointed American Council of Leaned Societies New Faculty Fellow at the University of California, Davis.
Stanya Kahn, a video artist from Los Angeles, California, and an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Intermedia at the University of Southern California, has won a 2012 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
Dana Leibsohn, professor of art at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and Carolyn Dean, professor and associate dean of the arts division at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have been jointly awarded an American Council of Leaned Societies Collaborative Research Fellowship in support of their book project on colonial Spanish America and the art and objects of its indigenous people.
Brenda Longfellow, associate professor of art and art history at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, has been awarded an Andrew Heiskell Post-Doctoral Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. Longfellow intends to work on a project called “Past Lives, Present Meanings: Reused Statues in Imperial Rome.”
Camille S. Mathieu, a PhD candidate in art history at the University of California, Berkeley, has been granted a second year at the American Academy in Rome via the Donald and Maria Cox/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize. Her project is entitled “Revolutionizing the Antique: French Artists and Artistic Community in Napoleonic Rome, 1803–1819.”
Maurie D. McInnis, professor of American art and material culture at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, has been awarded the twenty-fourth Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art for her book, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). In conjunction with the award, McInnis will present the Eldredge Prize lecture at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, DC, on October 18, 2012.
Kathryn Blair Moore has been appointed an American Council of Leaned Societies New Faculty Fellow in History of Art and Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Jennifer W. Reeves, a painter based in Callicoon, New York, has been awarded a 2012 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
Conrad Rudolph and Jeantte Kohl, both professors of art history at the University of California, Riverside, and Amit Roy-Chowdhury, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Riverside, have received a start-up grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for “FACES: Faces, Art, and Computerized Evaluation Systems,” a project that will test the use of facial-recognition software in the context of art history, with a long-term goal of assisting in the identification of human subjects in portraiture.
Lisa Saltzman, a professor of art history at Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, has received a 2012 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Saltzman’s project is entitled “Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects.”
Claudia Sbrissa, a New York–based based artist who works in drawing and collage, has received a residency fellowship from the Constance Saltonstall Art Foundation in Ithaca, New York, for May and June 2012.
Tanya SheehanTanya Sheehan, assistant professor of art history at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, has been awarded two fellowships for 2012–13: a research fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin; and the Beatrice, Benjamin, and Richard Bader Fellowship in the Visual Arts of the Theatre from Harvard University.
Gesche Würfel, Basement Series, digital C-type print (artwork © Gesche Würfel)Gesche Würfel, an artist based in New York, has recently been awarded two grants: a Manhattan Community Arts Fund grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and a Creative Grant from the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance. Both awards will help her to develop a new photography project, Basement Sanctuaries, which documents how superintendents decorate basements of apartment buildings in upper Manhattan.
Books Published by CAA Members
posted by CAA — Jun 15, 2012
Publishing a book is a major milestone for artists and scholars—browse a list of recent titles below.
Books Published by CAA Members appears every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
June 2012
Andrew Stephen Arbury. About Art, 3rd rev. ed. (Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2012).
Claude Cernuschi. Barnett Newman and Heideggerian Philosophy (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012).
Irina D. Costache. The Art of Understanding Art: A Behind the Scenes Story (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
Lennert Gesterkamp. The Heavenly Court: Daoist Temple Painting in China, 1200–1400 (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2011).
Donna Gustafson. Serena Bocchino: Fever (Milburn, NJ: Greg Smith Exhibit A Fine Art and Editions, 2012).
Deborah Martin Kao and Michelle Lamunière, eds. Instituting Reform: The Social Museum of Harvard University, 1903–1931 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2012).
Andreas Marks. Kamisaka Sekka: Rinpa Traditionalist, Modern Designer (San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2012).
Rosemary O’Neill. Art and Visual Culture on the French Riviera, 1956–1971 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012).
Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago. Art Is Not What You Think It Is (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
William S. Rodner. Edwardian London through Japanese Eyes: The Art and Writings of Yoshio Markino, 1897–1915 (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2012).
James L. Yarnall. John La Farge, a Biographical and Critical Study (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012).
Philip Zuchman. Summer on the Hill: Paintings by Philip Zuchman (New York: Abingdon Square Publishing, 2012).
June 2012 Issue of The Art Bulletin
posted by Christopher Howard — Jun 13, 2012
The cover image of the June 2012 issue of The Art Bulletin shows the unmistakable signature style of the contemporary artist Georg Baselitz, who has also written the lead text for the issue’s Notes from the Field. In this section, nine scholars from divergent fields—among them Kirk Ambrose, Elizabeth Edwards, Cordula Grewe, Daniel Heller-Roazen, and Ian McLean—join the artist in writing on the theme of appropriation. The June issue presents the second installment of new features in The Art Bulletin, sections that will continue for several years in the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship. In Regarding Art and Art History, Andrew Hemingway revisits his early fascination with a John Constable painting, Chain Pier, Brighton (1826–27), and describes how the work has shaped his methodological approach to writing art history. Finally, in a wide-ranging interview with Dan Karlholm, the art historian Linda Nochlin discusses her five-decade career.
The June Art Bulletin features four essays that cover a wide range of topics and time periods in the history of art. Sonya S. Lee examines the role of patronage and appropriation in tenth-century Dunhuang through her analysis of the pictorial program of Cave 61 at Mogao in northwestern China. Kishwar Rizvi’s article explores the dynamic relationship between image and text in the 1605 manuscript Shahnama (Book of Kings) and how the folio’s paintings can be viewed as a surrogate portrait of the charismatic king, Shah ‘Abbas. Next, Katherine M. Kuenzli explores the “total work of art” that is Henry van de Velde’s 1914 Werkbund Theater Building and its role in shaping German modernism and national identity before and after World War I. In “Picasso’s First Constructed Sculpture: A Tale of Two Guitars,” Christine Poggi analyzes the artist’s 1912 paper Guitar as a modernist masterpiece unto itself, and not merely as the model for subsequent versions made from sheet metal; Poggi’s essay also features unusual new photographs of several paper sculptures that she discusses.
In the Reviews section, Cammy Brothers assesses Marvin Trachtenberg’s book, Building-in-Time: From Giotto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion, and Diane H. Bodart reviews two books, Joanna Woodall’s Anthonis Mor: Art and Authority and Laura R. Bass’s The Drama of the Portrait: Theatre and Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain. Then, Victor I. Stoichita looks at Michael Fried’s The Moment of Caravaggio, and Jonathan Hay discusses Craig Clunas’s approach to Chinese art history through a reading of five of his recent books on the subject. Finally, Barbara Wittmann reviews two catalogues—The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) and Reconsidering Gérôme—that accompanied a 2011 exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
Please see the full table of contents for June to learn more. CAA sends The Art Bulletin to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the journal as a benefit of their membership.
The next issue of The Art Bulletin, to be published in September 2012, will feature the art historian Richard Shiff on the concept of interpretation in Regarding Art and Art History, “contingency” as the topic in Notes from the Field, and an interview with the architectural historian James S. Ackerman. The long-form essays will examine iconoclasm and the image as representation in the eighth century, Francesco Rosselli’s engravings and the development of print culture in Renaissance Italy, seventeenth-century Chinese handscroll painting, and the trials of the modern Viennese architect Adolf Loos. The Reviews section will include analyses of books on Giotto, Willem de Kooning, civil rights, photography, and the image of the wind.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for June-Juy 2012
posted by CAA — Jun 10, 2012
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
June–July 2012
Fullmoon Night with Yoko Ono
Djurgården, Stockholm
Moderna Museet, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Sweden
June 4–5, 2012
On the night of June 4 turning into June 5, art lovers had the chance to experience two early Yoko Ono pieces, Evening till Dawn (1964) and Secret Piece (1953), on the lush island of Djurgården in Stockholm. The event will take place in conjunction with Yoko Ono: Grapefruit at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, a retrospective that showcases early experimental films and a selection of “instructions” published in Ono’s book Grapefruit (1964). The exhibition provides a welcome opportunity to view Ono’s art in the context of the Fluxus movement of the 1960s, in which she was a key player, and to see her wide-ranging influence on today’s art scene. Specifically for the Moderna Museet, Ono has created a new instruction, “Search for the Fountain,” that has been interpreted in a variety of mediums by a group of international artists.
Klonaris/Thomadaki: The Angel Ablaze
Benaki Museum
138 Pireos Street, Athens, Greece 11854
June 9, 2012
The Angel Ablaze offers a thorough introduction to the work of two avant-garde filmmakers and multimedia pioneers, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki, whose holistic approach to filmmaking is called Cinema of the Body. At the Benaki Museum, Klonaris and Thomadaki will teach a master class after a screening of The Angel Cycle, a work inspired by a photograph of a hermaphrodite found in the archives of Klonaris’s gynecologist father in 1985. The film explores the idea of the intersexual body as partially angelic and further explicates this figure as the ideal metaphor for a bodily approach to the cinema.
“How Women Work”
Nottingham Contemporary
Weekday Cross, Nottingham, NGI 2GB, United Kingdom
June 14–19, 2012
In conjunction with Mika Rottenberg’s eponymous exhibition (May 5–July 1, 2012), Nottingham Contemporary is hosting “How Women Work,” a three-part symposium that addresses the relationship of women to labor in postindustrial economies and how feminist thought on the role of women in the workplace has evolved since the 1960s. The first event, on June 14, is a screening of María Ruido’s documentary film, Amphibious Fictions (2005), about the lives of female factory workers in two Spanish cities in the industrial belt surrounding Barcelona. The next day, a symposium titled “Art, Gendered Labor, and Resistance” will engage artists and theorists from the United Kingdom and Europe to explore the issue of art as gendered labor, the relationship between resistance and oppression, and the generational shifts that have affected the feminist dialogue on labor. The featured speakers are Jo Applin, professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of York; Angela Dimitrakaki, professor of modern and contemporary art the University of Edinburgh; Julia Morandeira, professor of Spanish contemporary art at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona; Nina Power, a philosophy professor at Roehampton University in London; Maria Ruido, an artist and filmmaker; and Marina Vishmidt, a London-based art writer. The last event, on June 19, is a screening of African director, Ousmene Sembène’s La Noire de… (1966). The fictional film takes place in postcolonial Senegal and tells the story of a young woman from Dakar who faces many trials and tribulations as a live-in nanny working for a family in the French Riviera.
Sigalit Landau: Soil Nursing
Kamel Mennour
47 rue Saint-André des arts, Paris, France 75006
June 2–July 25, 2012
With Soil Nursing, Sigalit Landau brings together a potent combination of sculptures, photographs, and videos that evokes the body in space and its changing relationship to nature. Madonna and Child (2012), a series of twisted marble forms resting on exquisitely carved wooden bases, suggests a larvalike, maternal body crossed with the streamlined effervescence of Constantin Brancusi’s Bird in Space (1923). The abstract sculptures are complemented by lush, color photographs and videos depicting the dreamy environment of an olive grove in the Negev Desert in southern Israel, the artist’s native country.
Chantal Joffe
Cheim and Read
547 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001
May 4–June 22, 2012
For her second solo show at Cheim and Read, the British painter Chantal Joffe continues her investigation of portrayals of woman in art with a selection of large and small paintings. Joffe’s influences extend from fashion photography and personal snapshots to works by contemporary artists such as Alex Katz and Elizabeth Peyton, who similarly address society and subjectivity through portraiture. In this exhibition Joffe also pays explicit homage to Alice Neel with a striking self-portrait of herself, naked on a bed with stripped covers—an image reminiscent of Neel’s 1980 portrait of herself, sitting nude in a stripped armchair.
Wangechi Mutu: blackthrones
Gladstone Gallery
12 Rue de Grand Cerf, Brussels, Belgium 1000
May 15–July 7, 2012
In blackthrones, Wangechi Mutu’s first solo exhibition in Brussels, the artist fills the elegant rooms of Gladstone Gallery with chairs wrapped in black garbage bags, metallic tinsels, and colorful debris and supported by spindly, insectlike legs. Despite this decoration, the wooden chairs are recognizable as being representative of English colonial design, hinting at a critique of Western hegemony while having fun with the transformative possibilities of sculpture.
Jo Spence: Work (Part I)
SPACE
129–131 Mare Street, London, E8 3RH, United Kingdom
June 1–July 15, 2012
Jo Spence: Work (Part II)
Studio Voltaire
1a Nelson’s Row, London, SW4 7JR, United Kingdom
June 12–August 11, 2012
A two-part retrospective of the photographic work of Jo Spence (1934–1992) offers a unique opportunity for the critical reassessment of an often misunderstood and certainly understudied “amateur” photographer. Spence emerged as a pivotal figure in the mid-1970s from the British photographic left, bridging her commitment to feminism, socialism, and education with a hungry, documentary impulse that took in every aspect of her life and those around her. The first part of the exhibition, on view at SPACE, focuses on the 1960s to the 1980s, years in which Spence founded the Hackney Flashers, a collective of women photographers, and organized photography co-ops and workshops. The exhibition continues at Studio Voltaire with her move toward methods of therapy through photography and patient empowerment and through her own struggles with breast cancer.
Edy Ferguson: Selected Works 1993 to the Present
Benaki Museum
138 Pireos Street, Athens, Greece 11854
June 1–July 29, 2012
Edy Ferguson’s survey exhibition at the Benaki Museum familiarizes Greek audiences with the multifaceted work of this American artist who now lives and works in Athens and London. Ferguson fuses a Pop art sensibility (her slick painting style is reminiscent of James Rosenquist) into her work that address a host of contemporary issues, such as the recent economic upheavals in Greece. The museum installation does not indicate boundaries in Ferguson’s various practices, opting instead to showcase her drawing, painting, videos, and performances as a “single and articulated Gesamtkunstwerk.”
Doris Salcedo: Plegaria Muda
MAXXI: National Museum of 21st Century Arts
Via Guido Reni 4A, Rome, Italy 00196
March 15–June 24, 2012
Doris Salcedo’s installation Plegaria Muda (translated as Mute Prayer) is an antimonumental memorial to victims of war and urban violence. Composed of over one hundred pairs of rectangular wooden tables whose tops sandwich a mound of earth that enables clumps of grass to grow through the crevices, the installation is keenly evocative of a graveyard or war memorial. Salcedo researched two specific atrocities when creating the memorial: the brutality of life in the ghettoes of southeast Los Angeles and the murder of numerous impoverished Colombians by factions of the Colombian army from 2003 to 2009. According to the artist, “Plegaria Muda is an attempt to live out this grief, a space demarcated by the radical limit imposed by death. A space that is outside of life, a place apart, that reminds us of our dead.”
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — May 30, 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 avant-garde film historian and exhibitor Amos Vogel and the Swiss artist David Weiss.
- Anne Burkhardt, a professor of philosophy at Bennington College in Vermont and a long-time associate of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Darwin Correspondence Project, passed away on March 11, 2012. She was 96 years old. Burkhardt was married to Frederick Burkhardt, ACLS president emeritus, who first established the Darwin project in 1974 as a means to collect all letters by and to Charles Darwin
- Royal Cloyd, the founding director of the Boston Center for the Arts, passed away on February 23, 2012, at the age of 86. In the 1960s Cloyd saw immense potential in the industrial neighborhood of Boston’s South End, defying popular opinion that the area was unsafe by persuading the city to purchase and renovate a series of buildings, including the landmark Cyclorama
- David Hillman Curtis, a pioneer of web design, a filmmaker, and a former rock-and-roll musician, died on April 18, 2012, at age 51. In the mid-1990s in San Francisco, Curtis mastered the new Flash technology, which enabled websites to display high-quality animation. He became a technology guru for many and wrote a best-selling book on media design. Curtis’s latest project was a feature-length documentary film on the musician David Byrne, called Ride, Rise, Roar
- Judy Egerton, an Australian-born scholar and curator of eighteenth-century British art, died on March 21, 2012, at the age of 83. In 1974 Egerton became the assistant keeper in the Historic British Department at Tate Gallery in London, where she organized the exhibition George Stubbs: Anatomist and Animal Painter (1976). She put together many popular shows at her museum, wrote catalogue essays, and completed a new edition of the catalogue for the National Gallery in London
- Denise Gray, a photographer who captured the people and events of Atlanta, Georgia, died on April 22, 2012. She was 54 years old. Gray was a high-spirited individual who worked hard to make her passion for photography into a career. She didn’t have a permanent studio, instead preferring to work on location
- Al Hurwitz, chair and graduate director of art education at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, passed away on March 24, 2012, at the age of 91. Hurwitz had also served as president of the National Art Education Association and frequently lectured on art education across the United States and abroad
- Jean Laplanche, a French psychoanalyst, theorist, and translator of works by Sigmund Freud, died on May 6, 2012, at the age of 87. Laplanche studied under Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the École Normale Supérieure and later cofounded the Psychoanalytic Association of France in 1964. His best-known work, a revision of Freud’s seduction theory, was published in 1987
- Louis le Brocquy, an Irish painter and tapestry designer who created his own place within the modernist idiom of Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti, died on April 25, 2012, at the age of 95. Le Brocquy painted portraits of Irish literati such as Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, and Samuel Beckett. The artist described his working process as: “I try to paint the head image from the ‘inside out’ as it were, working in layers or planes, implying a certain flickering transparency“
- Herbert C. Lee, a prominent Boston arts patron and philanthropist, died on April 4, 2012. He was 97 years old. Lee and his wife Micki were long-time supporters of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Harvard Art Museums, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, and the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts
- Margaret Cassidy Manship, a sculptor, art teacher, and archivist passed away on February 13, 2012, at age 91. The free-spirited daughter of an artist mother, Manship won a scholarship to Italy that led to an apprenticeship working for the master sculptor Antonio Berti in the Vatican. Manship and her husband, the artist John Manship, had lived and worked in Maine, Vermont, and New York
- Jackie McAllister, a Scottish curator, artist, and writer living in New York, died on April 28, 2012. He was 49 years old. In the early 1990s McAllister was vice president of the cutting-edge SoHo gallery American Fine Arts, which put him at the forefront of the city’s art scene. In 2011 McAllister created an artwork comprising Lego pieces for the exhibition An Exchange with Sol LeWitt at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
- Norman Richard “Rick“ Pope, a ceramist and professor of art for thirty years in the School of Art at Montana State University, died on March 19, 2012. He was 70 years old. Born in Oklahoma, Pope has seen his work collected by the Archie Bray Foundation and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow
- Robert Raymond, a photographer and videographer who worked as a television broadcast engineer, passed away on February 27, 2012, at age 59. Raymond was an assistant director for the Boston Film/Video Foundation and worked with his wife in the Mobius Artists Group
- Amos Vogel, the last “lion of cinema” according to Werner Herzog, passed away on April 24, 2012, at the age of 91. A Viennese refugee, Vogel came to New York in 1938 and established an avant-garde film society, Cinema 16, with his wife Marcia. Based on the European model of a ciné-club, Cinema 16 debuted the work of Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage. Vogel also helped found the New York Film Festival and wrote Film as Subversive Art (1974)
- David Weiss, a Swiss artist and half of the Fischli and Weiss partnership, passed away on April 27, 2012, at the age of 66. Weiss was living a nomadic, free-spirited life in Europe before meeting the artist Peter Fischli in the late 1970s. The duo captured the imagination of the art world and beyond with the film The Way Things Go (1987), an ode to the joy of art production, and with Visible World (1987–2001), a table display of images of the sacred, profane, and everything in between
Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the June list.
Getty Foundation to Fund a Second Year of CAA’s International Travel Grant Program
posted by Christopher Howard — May 23, 2012
For the second year in a row, the Getty Foundation has awarded a major grant to CAA that will enable twenty international professionals to attend the 101st Annual Conference, taking place February 13–16, 2013, in New York. With the Getty grant, CAA will continue its International Travel Grant Program, providing funds to art historians, artists who teach art history, and museum curators for travel expenses, hotel accommodations, per diems, conference registrations, and one-year CAA memberships.
The goal of the project is to increase international participation in CAA and to diversify the organization’s membership (presently seventy-two countries are represented). CAA also wishes to familiarize international participants with the submission process for conference sessions and to expand their professional network in the visual arts. As they did last year, members of CAA’s International Committee and the National Committee for the History of Art have agreed to host the participants.
For the program’s second year, CAA will offer preconference meetings on February 11 and 12 for grant recipients to present and discuss their common professional interests and issues.
The application process for 2013 grants will open shortly. Professionals from developing countries or from nations underrepresented in CAA’s membership are especially encouraged to apply. A jury assembled by CAA will select the twenty grant recipients. The deadline for applications will be August 15, 2012.
Affiliated Society News for May 2012
posted by CAA — May 09, 2012
American Council for Southern Asian Art
The American Council for Southern Asian Art(ACSAA) welcomes Cathleen Cummings, assistant professor of art history at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, as its new webmaster. Lisa N. Owen, an ACSAA board member, and Catherine Becker, the ACSAA secretary, have each agreed to serve an additional term.
Past newsletters from 1974 to 2007 and annual bulletins from 2008 to the present have been scanned and are now available to all members on the ACSAA website. Members are invited to submit news regarding publications, exhibitions, or conferences for inclusion in the 2012 bulletin. Please send your information to Melody Rod-ari, ACSAA bulletin editor.
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries
The Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) is offering a leadership seminar for thirty-five participants, in partnership with the Kellogg Center for Nonprofit Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Taking place June 24–29, 2012, the course is designed for directors and director-curators of academic museums and galleries who are at any career stage and who work in any collecting field. The seminar includes museum and gallery leaders from institutions ranging from large state universities to small private colleges. Visit the AAMG website for a list of faculty members and seminar details.
Association of Historians of American Art
The Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA) has awarded a $500 AHAA Travel Grant to Rebecca Uchill, a PhD candidate in art history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Uchill presented a paper, “Processing History, Forming Transactions: Preservation and Exchange in the Work of Allison Smith,” at the 2012 CAA Annual Conference session, “Trading Zones: Strategies for the Study of Artists and Their Art-Making Practices.”
Save the date for the second AHAA symposium, “American Art: The Academy, Museums, and the Market,” to be held October 11–13, 2012, and hosted by the Boston Athenaeum and Boston University in Massachusetts. Visit AHAA online for more information or contact the symposium cochairs, David Dearinger and Melissa Renn.
Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art
The Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) has received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a three-year capacity-building initiative to maximize the possibilities of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, the organization’s scholarly electronic journal. The grant is intended to help authors in the development phase of their articles as well as to aid the journal in the implementation phase. Therefore, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide seeks scholarship that engages in one or more of the following interrelated areas of investigation: data mining and analysis; geographic information systems and mapping; and high-resolution imaging and dynamic image presentation. Authors should be generally knowledgeable about the technological possibilities related to their project and able to articulate how both specific computer-based research methods and the online publication format connect with the research questions on which their project focuses. In addition, authors should expect to collaborate with technical experts to help complete their projects. Proposals should outline projects that are relatively small scale, able to be realized within about three to six months, and requiring approximately one hundred hours of development work. Interested contributors may review the proposal guidelines for more details. For further information, contact Petra Chu or Emily Pugh.
Foundations in Art: Theory and Education
Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE) will hold its national biennial conference in Savannah, Georgia, April 3–6, 2013, at the Savannah College of Art and Design’s School of Foundation Studies. Titled “postHaus,” the conference has the theme “Instructing, Constructing, and Connecting with Students in the Twenty-First Century.” The question posed is: “As models of education evolve, what new teaching models are forming?” Each FATE biennial conference attracts a fantastic group of first-year studio professors and instructors from two- and four-year colleges across the United States and internationally. For “postHaus,” FATE seeks to expand its reach. Topics can include but are not limited to: innovation in studio courses, curriculum development, approaches to art history, liberal-arts instruction, the importance of research librarians, and the vital role of lab technicians. Proposals for papers and presentation must be submitted by June 1, 2012.
Need FATE sooner? The next FATE regional workshop, “Removing the Curse of the Demo,” will take place on August 11, 2012, at the Art Institute of Atlanta–Decatur in Georgia. Participants should bring their favorite demo and share the way they approach the subject through perspective drawing, cutting paper straight, paint mixing, paint application, finding proper proportions, obtaining proper value, or anything else related to the topic.
Historians of British Art
John Everett Millais, Isabella, 1848–49, oil on canvas, 102.9 x 142.9 cm. National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery (artwork in the public domain)
Please join the Historians of British Art (HBA) and the English-Speaking Union (ESU) for a preview of the exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde on Thursday, May 24, 2012, 6:30–8:30 PM, in New York. Two of the show’s three curators, Tim Barringer of Yale University and Jason Rosenfeld of Marymount Manhattan University, will give American audiences an early look at this important exhibition—addressing its key themes and its evolution as a project—during an informal, richly illustrated conversation, moderated by Peter Trippi, HBA president and a cocurator of J. W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite. The discussion will be followed by a wine reception.
In September 2012, Tate Britain in London will open Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde. Inspired by early Renaissance painting and led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood rebelled against the establishment of the mid-nineteenth century and became Britain’s first modern art movement. The curators, which include Alison Smith of Tate London, will bring together more than 150 works in different media, including painting, sculpture, photography, and the applied arts, revealing the Pre-Raphaelites to be advanced in their approach to every genre. After closing at Tate in January 2013, the exhibition will move to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and then to Moscow and Tokyo.
Advance registration for the conversation is required: $20 for HBA and ESU members; $25 for nonmembers. Payment may be made by credit card or by check payable to “The English-Speaking Union.” Checks should be mailed to: Caitlin Murphy, English-Speaking Union, 144 East 39th Street, New York, NY 10016. You will receive a confirmation of payment if you provide your email address. Call 212-818-1200 or write to mnicoll@esuus.org for more information. For content-related questions, please email Peter Trippi. For questions about payment, please contact Caitlin Murphy.
International Association of Art Critics
The International Association of Art Critics (AICA/US) held its annual awards ceremony at the Asia Society in New York on April 2, 2012. These awards honor artists, curators, museums, galleries, and other cultural institutions in recognition of excellence in the conception and realization of exhibitions. AICA’s four hundred active members nominated and voted on outstanding exhibitions from the previous season (June 2010–June 2011). The twenty-four winners of first and second places in twelve categories, selected from over one hundred finalists, included exhibitions of work by the contemporary artists Christian Marclay, Sarah Sze, and Ai Weiwei and by the twentieth-century artists Pablo Picasso, Sonia Delaunay, Kurt Schwitters, and Paul Thek, as well as thematic exhibitions dealing with the history of drawing through the twentieth century, contemporary Japanese art, and Fluxus. Lowery Sims, Peter Plagens, and Sanford Biggers presented the awards. This year’s nominating committee comprised Eleanor Heartney (chair), Marek Bartelik (AICA/US president), Rebecca Cochran, Peter Frank, Francine Miller, and Susan Snodgrass.
International Association of Word and Image Studies
The International Association of Word and Image Studies (IAWIS/AIERTI) seeks proposals for “From the Wall, to the Press, to the Streets,” its affiliated-society session for CAA’s 2013 Annual Conference in New York, that reflect on contemporary art practices that occur outside the traditional framework of the gallery or museum space. Topics to consider include: public art rhetoric (how language challenges elitist/populist divides); working around the frame (spatial transgression as institutional critique); art’s new open-access sites (the internet and social networks); and institutional responses (marketing and copyright laws). Please submit your proposal and a CV to Eve Kalyva and Ignaz Cassar by June 1, 2012. IAWIS/AIERTI membership is not required.
International Sculpture Center
The International Sculpture Center (ISC), in collaboration with the National Academy Museum and School in New York, will present the year’s first ISConnects panel, “Against the Grain: Strategies, Choices, and Controversies of Women in Sculpture,” at the National Academy on May 30, 2012. Joan Marter, professor of art history at Rutgers University in New Jersey, will moderate; a list of participating artists is forthcoming. For more information and to view videos from previous ISConnects events, please visit the website.
Italian Art Society
The Italian Art Society (IAS) would like to congratulate its new officers and committee members: Alison Perchuk, treasurer; Kay Arthur, newsletter editor; Catherine McCurrach, secretary and membership coordinator; Anne Leader, webmaster; Nicola Camerlenghi and Esperança Camara, program committee; and Brian Curran, Frances Gage, and Mark Rosen, nominating committee.
IAS seeks proposals for papers and presentations for its two sponsored sessions at CAA’s 2013 Annual Conference in New York: “Bad Boys, Hussies, and Villains” and “Disegno.” Please visit the proposal guidelines for more information on how to participate.
IAS is sponsoring four linked sessions, entitled “Italian Art and Confluence of Cultures (I–IV),” at the forty-seventh International Congress on Medieval Art, taking place May 10–13, 2012, at the University of Western Michigan in Kalamazoo.
The organization welcomes all to the third annual IAS/Kress Lecture in Italy, to be given by Debra Pincus on June 6, 2012, at the Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti in Venice, seat of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere, ed Arti. Pincus’s talk is entitled “The Lure of the Letter: Renaissance Venice and the Recovery of Antique Writing.”
Mid-America College Art Association
The James Pearson Duffy Department of Art and Art History at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, will host the next Mid-America College Art Association (MACAA) conference, taking place October 3–6, 2012. The event has two themes: “Community and Collaboration” and “Meaning and Making.” Programming will include three featured speakers, panel presentations, studio workshops, MACAA member exhibitions, and museum visits. You may register for the conference and find out how to become a MACAA member on the Detroit conference website.
National Council of Arts Administrators
National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA) congratulates a member, Charles A. Wright, who was recently elected to serve on CAA’s Board of Directors. NCAA members Georgia Strange, Denise Mullen, and Leslie Bellavance were elected in 2011 to serve on the same board, where they had worked with three fellow members, Judith Thorpe, Jean Miller, and Jay Coogan.
At the 2012 CAA Annual Conference, several NCAA members—Sergio Soave, Tom Berding, Donna Meeks, Lee Ann Garrison, Amy Hauft, John Kissick, Jim Hopfensperger, Tom Loeser, and David Yager—presented a concise and compelling session, “Hot Problems/Cool Solutions in Arts Leadership.” In addition, the annual NCAA Reception at CAA, cohosted by the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at the University of California, Irvine, was an amazing affair. Thanks to all who attended.
It’s not too late to submit a proposal for the next NCAA meeting. The thirty-first annual conference, “Granting Permission,” will take place November 7–10, 2012, hosted by Ohio State University and Columbus College of Art and Design. The NCAA board seeks proposals for presentations, sessions, and/or panels for the annual Arts Administrators Workshops. Topics may include, but are not limited to: leadership and management; promotion and tenure; interpersonal communication; budget management, personnel evaluation, and growth; career paths; and case studies related to arts administration. Proposals and inquiries should be sent to Jim Hopfensperger, NCAA president. Initial proposals of no more than 350 words are due by May 21, 2012.
Public Art Dialogue
Public Art Dialogue (PAD) welcomes two new officers: Sarah Schrank begins her first term as cochair; and Sierra Rooney begins her first term as secretary.
Public Art Dialogue, a scholarly journal published biannually, invites 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 the 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. The deadline for the submission of papers is September 15, 2012.
Society for Photographic Education
Each spring the Society for Photographic Education (SPE) hosts a forum for the presentation of artistic work and research to a community of peers. SPE is accepting proposals for its fiftieth annual conference, “Conferring Significance: Celebrating Photography’s Continuum,” which will be held March 7–10, 2013, in Chicago, Illinois. Proposals will be accepted until June 1, 2012. Topics are not required to be theme-based and may include, but are not limited to: image making, history, contemporary theory and criticism, new technologies, effects of media and culture, educational issues, and funding. SPE membership is required for submission; proposals are peer reviewed.
Society of North American Goldsmiths
The Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG) will hold its forty-first annual conference, “The Heat Is On,” from May 23 to 26, 2012, at the Westin Kierland Resort and Spa in Scottsdale, Arizona. The keynote speaker is Garth Clark, an art dealer, historian, and critic. Other guest speakers include Megan Auman, Kim Cridler, Steve Midgett, Kevin O’Dwyer, and Bettina Speckner. The spotlight is also on these emerging artists: Allyson Bone, Andrew Hayes, Caitie Sellers, Loring Taoka, and Amy Tavern. Join the Professional Development Seminar and the Education Dialogue, and also spend an evening on the annual Exhibition Crawl in Scottsdale, Phoenix, and Mesa. View outstanding craftsmanship in the annual juried exhibition, the student digital presentation, and SNAG members’ work on SNAG TV.
Visual Resources Association
The Visual Resources Association (VRA) has transitioned the VRA Bulletin from a print journal to an electronic journal, published by the Berkeley Electronic Press, also know as Bepress. In order to celebrate the inaugural issue and to spread the word, the first issue is readily accessible to read, but succeeding issues will be available to VRA members only for the first six months after publication, after which time the journal will be open access. Feature articles include Janice L. Eklund’s “Cultural Objects Digitization Planning: Metadata Overview,” which provides a discussion of image metadata types, applications, and best-practice considerations for such projects. In Maureen Burns’s “Musings on Electronic Publishing,” the former VRA president summarizes the open-access movement, new models of electronic publishing, and how traditional publication processes change in an electronic environment. In this issue you can also find the complete text of Visual Resources Association: Statement on the Fair Use of Images for Teaching, Research, and Study, endorsed by CAA and published with an executive summary.
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — Apr 24, 2012
In its regular roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, designers, architects, photographers, curators, dealers, 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 sculptor Elizabeth Catlett, the divisive art critic Hilton Kramer, the scholar and curator John Golding, and the art dealer Donald Young.
- Cris Alexander, a portrait photographer and actor who landed a starring role in the 1944 Broadway musical On the Town, died on March 7, 2012, at the age of 92. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Alexander arrived in New York in the late 1930s with dreams of stardom. He photographed Martha Graham, collaborated on satirical novels about Hollywood, and worked for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine
- Rex Babin, an editorial cartoonist for the northern Californian newspaper the Sacramento Bee since 1999, died on March 30, 2012, age 49. Babin was known for cartoons that tackled current events with whimsy, humor, and pathos
- Toni Beauchamp, a Texan patron of the arts, passed away on March 9, 2012, at the age of 66. Beauchamp was an assistant director of Houston’s Blaffer Gallery in the 1970s and 1980s and was a proponent of the burgeoning art scene around Houston and the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. A collection of essays about Marfa’s cultural community will be released posthumously
- Eliy Belyutin, a Russian art historian and art teacher, died on February 29, 2012, at the age of 87. Belyutin attended the Moscow Art Institute, and in 1954 he founded a painting school called the New Reality that encouraged an individualistic approach to art-making
- Eleanor Callahan, a striking muse for her photographer husband, Harry Callahan, died on February 28, 2012. She was 95 years old. Eleanor Callahan was photographed throughout her sixty-three years of marriage, an arc that traced the couple’s early courtship to their family life with their daughter, Barbara. The stark, black-and-white portraits drew comparisons to Alfred Stieglitz’s famous photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe
- Elizabeth Catlett, a figurative sculptor whose art practice was rooted in social reality, passed away on April 12, 2012, at the age of 96. Catlett drew from her own experience as an African American woman and expressed a desire to make art that would empower the lives of other African Americans and appeal to a broad sweep of humanity. She moved to Mexico in the late 1940s, where she was the first woman to head the art department at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City
- John S. Chase, a prominent modern architect and the first African American to serve on the United States Commission of Fine Art in 1980, died on March 29, 2012. He was 87 years old. Chase’s notable projects include the United States embassy in Tunis, Tunisia. During his tenure on the commission, he oversaw the creation of the Vietnam War Memorial
- Sid Couchey, a comic-book artist who was a principle illustrator for the 1950s Harvey Comics characters of Richie Rich, Little Lotta, and Little Dot, died on March 11, 2012, at the age of 92. Couchey also created cartoon mascots for national drug-prevention campaigns and for the 1980 Winter Olympics on Lake Placid
- David Lee Craven, distinguished professor of art history at the University of New Mexico, died on February 11, 2012, at the age of 60. He was an expert in twentieth-century Latin American art, postwar American art, and the methodology of art history and visual culture
- Bruno Giacometti, a Swiss architect and the younger brother of the artist Alberto Giacometti, died at the age of 104 on March 21, 2012. The youngest of four children, Bruno Giacometti remembered posing as a child for his older brother’s first attempts at sculpture. In 1930 he joined the Zurich architectural firm of Karl Egender, but it was after World War II that he completed his most important works as a freelance architect, including the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1952
- Jean Giraud, the French comic-book artist known as Moebius, died on March 10, 2012, at age 73. Giraud was something of a national treasure in France, beloved by artists and the general public alike. An early success was the Wild West–themed comic book, Les Adventures de Blueberry (1963). Giraud’s fantasy visions led to work in cinema: he contributed drawings to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unfinished film Dune and to Ridley Scott’s Alien
- John Golding, a British art historian of twentieth-century art with a focus on Cubism, died on April 9, 2012, at the age of 82. Golding taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, from which he also graduated, and was the head of the painting school at the Royal College of Art. He curated two seminal exhibitions for Tate Modern, Picasso: Sculptor/Painter (1994) and Matisse/Picasso (2002), and in his later years focused on his own abstract painting
- John Griffiths, a British illustrator who designed a series of covers for Penguin paperbacks in the 1950s and 1960s, passed away on March 13, 2012. He was 85 years old. Trained as a painter and printmaker, Griffiths applied his technique to darkly outlined, hand-drawn covers that were beloved by readers as a companion to the text inside
- Bernard Otto Gruenke, a stained-glass artist who created one of the first faceted glass windows in America, passed away on March 21, 2012. He was 99. Gruenke attended the Corcoran Art School in Washington, DC, and created stained-glass windows for churches, synagogues, and theaters throughout the country. For many years he served as the vice president of the Stained Glass Association of America
- Albert Hadley, an interior decorator for high society on the East Coast, died on March 30, 2012, at the age of 91. Hadley and the socialite-decorator Sister Parish founded their company, Parish-Hadley, in 1962. Important commissions for the pair included the library at Brooke Astor’s Park Avenue home and the breakfast room of the Kennedy White House
- Francis Hewlett, a British sculptor and painter who was head of painting at the Falmouth School of Art in Cornwall, died on March 19, 2012. He was 81 years old. Hewlett studied at the Slade School of Art in London and in the 1960s was inspired by Pop art to make large-scale ceramic sculptures of hands and other body parts
- Robert Hoozee, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium, and a scholar of nineteenth-century British art, died on February 21, 2012, at the age of 62. Hoozee’s last exhibition at the museum was the critically acclaimed British Vision (2007), which offered a radical take on the history of British art, with an emphasis on underrepresented artists such as Stanley Spencer
- Thomas Kinkade, a populist artist and the self-proclaimed “painter of light,” died on April 6, 2012, at age 54. His early influences were Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney. Kinkade believed that his artistic ambition was one that he shared with Disney: to inspire happiness through the dissemination of rosy-toned images of a bucolic American past
- Hilton Kramer, the controversial art critic who championed his particular definition of modernism, died on March 27, 2012. He was 84 years old. Kramer’s career was kick-started by his impassioned rebuttal to Harold Rosenberg’s psychoanalytic theory of Abstract Expressionism. Kramer began writing regularly for Arts Digest (later renamed Arts) and was chief art critic for the New York Times before founding the decidedly more conservative New Criterion in 1982
- Sergio Larrain, a Chilean photographer and member of the Magnum Photos agency, passed away on February 7, 2012, at the age of 80. Larrain often captured his subjects in a “state of grace”: children playing in the street, a portrait of poet Pablo Neruda’s house, and a series of accidental photographs of a couple outside the Notre Dame Cathedral that became the inspiration for Julio Cortozar’s short story “Blow-Up”
- Mauricio Lasansky, an Argentine printmaker and draftsman remembered for his series The Nazi Drawings, died on April 2, 2012, at the age of 97. Lasansky established the printmaking department at the University of Iowa and bolstered the school’s reputation as a center for graphic arts. His attention to simple art materials (pencil, paper, water washes) and weighty subject matter singled him out as an innovator in his field
- Simon Marsden, a British photographer noted for his Romantic subject matter and an attraction to the spectral dimensions of architecture and landscapes, died on January 22, 2012, at the age of 63., A keen critic of consumer culture and other ills of modernity, Marsden published twelve books of photography and inspired album-cover art by the rock band U2
- Ralph McQuarrie, a conceptual designer who worked on the Star Wars trilogy as a primary illustrator and set designer, died on March 3, 2012, at the age of 82. McQuarrie’s rich sense of science fiction and fantasy aided him in subsequent work on the Battlestar Galactica television series and on the films E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Cocoon, for which he won an Academy Award
- Brett Miller, the general counsel for the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, died on April 14, 2012, aged 47. After joining the Barnes in 2009, Miller played a key role in the foundation’s move from Merion, Pennsylvania, to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia. His background as a curator made him a strong candidate for the high-profile position at the foundation
- Jackson L. Narcomey, a Native American painter and printmaker and a member of the Muskogee Creek tribe, passed away on March 22, 2012, at the age of 70. Born in Oklahoma, Narcomey came to prominence in his community during the late 1960s for his oil paintings of tribal legends
- Christopher Powell, a British architectural historian noted for his work on the architecture of Wales, passed away on March 9, 2012, at age 70. In addition to his work as a professor at the Welsh School of Architecture, Powell established the Construction History Society and served as editor of the society’s academic journal
- Kenneth Price, an artist who helped bridge the gap between ceramics and sculpture with his shockingly vibrant clay vessels, died at his home in Taos, New Mexico, on February 24, 2012. He was 77 years old. A native of Los Angeles, Price had several high profile shows in the 1960s at the Ferus Gallery, famed for its stable of Pop artists. A retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is scheduled to open in fall 2012
- Leonard Rosoman, a British painter, graphic artist, and longtime professor at the Royal College of Art in London, died on February 21, 2012, at the age of 98. During World War II he was appointed official war artist, an assignment that dispatched him to dangerous scenes of conflict to record what he saw. Rosoman’s work as a visual artist extended to exhibition design, most notably working on the Sergei Diaghilev exhibition in London in 1954
- Al Ross, a cartoonist at the New Yorker for over sixty years, passed away on March 25, 2012. He was 100 years old. Born in Romania, Ross began his career in the 1930s working alongside his four brothers at the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s before joining the New Yorker in 1937. His arch sensibility and educated silliness were illustrated by sketchy line drawings of arguing couples, animals, therapists, and other denizens of the magazine’s cartoon universe.
- Paul Rudall, a British artist, teacher, and illustrator, died on February 10, 2012, at the age of 91. Rudall served as the head art teacher at Chiswick Grammar School and Dudley Grammar School, where he influenced several generations of students. Since retiring from teaching in 1980, he lived in Bath, England and exhibited his oil paintings across the United Kingdom and in Germany
- Charlie Stagg, an eccentric Texan artist, died on February 20, 2012, at the age of 72. Stagg attended Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia but chose to live and work as an outsider artist in the A. V. Stagg Art Studio and Wildlife Preserve, a “folk-art style, glass bottle and cement home,” where visitors were always welcome
- Anita Steckel, a painter and feminist activist who worked under the radar for many decades, died on March 16, 2012, at the age of 82. Steckel was a self-proclaimed enemy of “good taste in art” who fought for the rights of women artists. She faced criticism and censorship for a series of erotic paintings that she exhibited in 1973
- Eduard Steinberg, a Paris-based, Russian avant-garde painter who created mystical, geometric abstractions, died on March 28, 2012, at the age of 75. His childhood home in Tarus, a town near Moscow, was a meeting ground for artists and poets who were persecuted during Stalin’s regime. Steinberg saw his work as a synthesis of Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism, Russian icon painting, and personal religious belief
- Barry Walker, a former curator of prints and drawings at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, died on April 18, 2012, at the age of 67. Walker joined the museum in 1991 and was instrumental in establishing the print and drawing department and boosting the museum’s modern and contemporary art collection. Popular shows he organized at the museum include Alice Neel: Painted Truths (2010) and Singular Multiples: The Peter Blum Edition Archive, 1980–1994 (2006)
- Eric Watson, a British rock-and-roll photographer with an artful eye, noted for his work with the Pet Shop Boys, died on March 18, 2012, at the age of 56. In the 1970s and 1980s Watson’s images were published in the magazine Smash Hits, and he also directed music videos influenced by art photography, such as Robert Mapplethorpe’s. Watson’s work, transcending its original pop origins, is now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, both in London
- Isabel Brown Wilson, a Texan philanthropist who was a prominent figure in Houston’s art scene, died on March 27, 2012, at the age of 80. Wilson was a life trustee and chairman of the board of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Through her family’s charitable trust, the Brown Foundation, she helped to raise the museum’s endowment, to enlarge the collection, and to ensure the institution’s future stability
- Donald Young, a noted Chicagoan art dealer, passed away on April 16, 2012, at the age of 69. Born in England, Young lived in Paris and New York before opening the Young-Hoffman Gallery, with Rhona Hoffman, in Chicago in 1976. Their gallery championed Conceptual and Minimal art; when it was later renamed the Donald Young Gallery, he showed video art by Bruce Nauman, Bill Viola, and Rodney Graham
Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the May listing.
Report on the CAA International Travel Grant Program
posted by Janet Landay, Program Manager, Fair Use Initiative — Apr 18, 2012
Janet Landay is project manager of the CAA International Travel Grant Program.
Last February, twenty art historians and curators from eighteen countries around the world attended the 2012 Annual Conference in Los Angeles through the CAA International Travel Grant Program, a new initiative that was generously funded by the Getty Foundation. For many grant recipients, this visit was their first to the United States, and for most of them it was their first time at the CAA conference.
By coincidence, on the conference’s opening day, the Los Angeles Convention Center held two swearing-in ceremonies for twenty thousand new citizens and their guests, welcoming people from several nations to the US. Indeed, the CAA group felt like a miniature United Nations, and it was equally moving to see colleagues arrive at the conference from countries around the world. Participants included: Ganna Rudyck (Ukraine), Irena Kossowska (Poland), Pavlina Morganová (Czech Republic), Dóra Sallay and Gyöngyvér Horváth (Hungary), Cristian Nae (Romania), Daniel Premerl (Croatia), Malvina Rousseva (Bulgaria), Salam Atta Sabri (Iraq), Angela Harutyunyan (Lebanon), Nadhra Shahbaz Naeem Khan (Pakistan), Parul Pandya Dhar (India), Jageth Weerasinghe (Sri Lanka), Shao-Chien Tseng (Taiwan), Olabisi Silva (Nigeria), Didier Houenoude (Benin), Jean Celestin Ky (Burkina Faso), Federico Freschi and Judy Peter (South Africa), and Rosa Gabriella de Castro Gonçalves (Brazil). Read more about the recipients, their home institutions, and their areas of interest.
The purpose of this initiative was to encourage greater participation from countries not well represented at CAA’s Annual Conference in order to bring a more diverse and global perspective to the study of art history. The Getty travel-grant participants, as they became known, were selected by a jury of CAA members from among 150 applicants based on three general criteria: all had to be professors of art history, artists who teach art history, or museum curators with advanced degrees in art or art history; they had to work in a country where art history is an emerging discipline; and they needed to explain how attending the conference would significantly support or strengthen their work.
To welcome the participants and to ensure that they got the most out of the conference’s abundant offerings, members of CAA’s International Committee and representatives from the National Committee for the History of Art (NCHA) volunteered to act as hosts. CAA warmly thanks these members for their service as hosts: Ann Albritton, Frederick M. Asher (NCHA chair), Kathryn Brown, Nicola M. Courtright, Diane Derr, Stephanie Dickey, Thomas W. Gaehtgens, Paul B. Jaskot, Geraldine A. Johnson, Jennifer Milam (International Committee chair), Steven Nelson, Nada Shabout, and Beth A. Steffel.
This wonderful aspect of the program revolved around informal dinners, lunches, and drinks, in which both participants and hosts could trade stories and share information about the ins and outs of practicing art history in their respective countries. Two roundtable meetings brought everyone together to meet CAA staff, providing opportunities for assessment and reflection on the various aspects of the conference program. Equally stimulating were the friendships made among the participants, as they learned about each other and discovered shared interests and challenges. Now, nearly two months later, a number of grant recipients have already begun to collaborate on research and teaching projects, with ambitious plans in the works.
In the coming months, CAA will publish online interviews with several participants and report on their collaborative work as it unfolds. Stay tuned to future issues of CAA News for these special announcements.
Top image: Participants in the CAA International Travel Grant Programs (from left): Shao-Chien Tseng, Salam Atta Sabri, Olabisi Silva, Jean Celestin Ky, Pavlina Morganová, Dóra Sallay, Federico Freschi, Judy Peter, Didier Houenoude, Rosa Gabriella de Castro Gonçalves, Daniel Premerl, Angela Harutyunyan, Malvina Rousseva, Cristian Nae, Ganna Rudyck, Irena Kossowska, Parul Pandya Dhar, Jageth Weerasinghe, and Nadhra Shahbaz Naeem Khan; Gyöngyvér Horváth is not pictured (photograph by Katie Underwood and provided by the Getty Foundation)
Middle image: Ganna Rudyck from Ukraine introduces herself to fellow grant recipients (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Bottom image: Among the grant recipients were (from left): Shao-Chien Tseng from Taiwan, Didier Houenoude from Benin, and Jean Celestin Ky from Burkina Faso (photograph by Bradley Marks)