CAA News Today
People in the News
posted by CAA — Jun 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.
June 2012
Academe
Ellen K. LevyEllen K. Levy, an artist, writer, and former CAA president, has joined the faculty of the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in Portland, Maine, as special advisor on art and sciences.
Museums and Galleries
Colette Crossman (photograph by Rick Hall)Colette Crossman, administrator of arts and programs for the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art of the University of Texas at Austin, has been appointed curator of exhibitions at the museum.
Karen Sherry, previously associate curator of American art at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, has been named curator of American art at the Portland Museum of Art in Oregon.
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.
Senate Committee Approves IMLS Funding; Congress Needs to Hear from You
posted by CAA — Jun 15, 2012
The American Association of Museums (AAM) sent the following email on June 15, 2012.
Senate Committee Approves IMLS Funding; Congress Needs to Hear from You
This week, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved a bill to fund the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). While the bill would sustain the current $30.8 million for the Office of Museum Services for FY13, this is just the first step in the appropriations process.
The bill faces an uncertain future because it includes funding for implementation of the health care reforms enacted in 2010. In a preview of the difficult budgetary decisions to come, Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Richard Shelby said, “In this grave fiscal climate we should not fund programs we know are going to force our country deeper into debt…. We should not mortgage our children’s future for non-essential, unproven programs.”
AAM President Ford W. Bell urged continued advocacy. “At a time when every federal program is being scrutinized, Members of Congress need to hear from constituents about how IMLS funds are essential to museums and how successful they are in serving our communities,” he said. “Participating in ‘Invite Congress to Visit Your Museum Week’ is a great opportunity to demonstrate our value.”
The bill would provide $158.8 billion in discretionary funding, a $2 billion increase over FY12 levels, which is in line with President Obama’s FY13 budget request. The bill also includes $549 million (level funding) for the Race to the Top initiative, President Obama’s signature competitive grant program, which rewards states for making changes in elementary and secondary education.
Let your Members of Congress know how important funding for the Office of Museum Services is to you!
Invite Congress to Visit Your Museum.
Visit www.speakupformuseums.org to learn more about AAM’s Advocacy for Museums.
Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members
posted by CAA — Jun 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.
June 2012
Nina Gara Bozicnik. Pretty Ugly. Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, May 18–June 24, 2012.
Installation view of Art Lives! Kansas Chapter of the Feminist Art ProjectRachel Epp Buller. Art Lives! Kansas Chapter of the Feminist Art Project. City Arts, Wichita, Kansas, March 30–April 21, 2012.
Katie Cercone. Butter Digger. Cuchifritos Gallery/Project Space, New York, April 14–May 27, 2012.
Invitation card for So Close and Yet So FarIrina D. Costache. So Close and Yet So Far. José Drudis-Biada Art Gallery, Mount Saint Mary’s College, Los Angeles, California, February 7–March 24, 2012.
Susan Dackerman, Jennifer L. Roberts, and Jennifer Quick. Jasper Johns/In Press: The Crosshatch Works and the Logic of Print. Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 22–August 18, 2012.
Invitation card for Papercuts: A Poetic Interplay of Light and ShadowReni Gower. Papercuts: A Poetic Interplay of Light and Shadow. Norman and Emmy Lou P. Illges Gallery, Columbus State University, Columbus, Georgia, March 22–April 21, 2012.
Kerry Oliver-Smith. 2012 Westmoreland Juried Biennial. Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania, April 28–July 22, 2012.
Wafaa Bilal, The Ashes Series, 2009, archival inkjet print mounted on diebond, 38 x 46½ in. (artwork © Wafaa Bilal)Susanne Slavick. Out of Rubble. Bowling Green University Galleries, Bowling Green, Ohio, September 7–October 7, 2012.
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).
REPORT ON THE MEETINGS OF THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE AND THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS
posted by Linda Downs — Jun 12, 2012
The CAA Board of Directors met in New York on Sunday, May 6, 2012, for its spring meeting. One day before, the Executive Committee convened to hear presentations from invited guests. The following report summarizes the contents of these two meetings.
Executive Committee
The Executive Committee meeting featured two invited speakers. The first, Raym Crow of the Chain Bridge Group, presented the first phase of the Publications Analysis, a report that is exploring the online development of CAA’s two print journals. He announced the results from a survey of individual CAA members to determine their interest in receiving online and/or print journals. The majority of members, Crow disclosed, prefer both options. He also offered findings from a thorough financial risk analysis, should institutional online subscriptions cannibalize individual memberships. In the analysis’s next phase, Crow will assess the production costs of The Art Bulletin and Art Journal and compare CAA’s business model to others in academic publishing. The resulting baseline figures will be used to determine the future direction of journal publications. Crow anticipates that it will take about six to eight months to complete this stage.
The second presenter, Gretchen Wagner, general counsel of ARTstor and a member of CAA’s Committee on Intellectual Property, discussed the current state of guidelines for fair use of copyrighted materials in the arts and humanities, including two documents recently created by the Visual Resources Association and the Association of Research Libraries that were endorsed by CAA in February 2012. She described how many academic and professional organizations for library science, video, poetry, and dance have developed fair-use guidelines for their fields; she also talked about OpenCourseWare. Some have noted that US courts increasingly rely on best practices from professional organizations to interpret cases related to fair use. Therefore CAA, which represents key stakeholders—artists, art historians, museum curators, conservators, and art administrators—is uniquely positioned to develop effective guidelines for fair use of copyrighted works of art and other visual material in scholarship, art making, and related activities. (See below for more on this topic.)
Board of Directors
CAA’s incoming board president, Anne Collins Goodyear of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, warmly welcomed four recently elected board members: Suzanne Preston Blier, Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and Professor of African American Studies, Harvard University; Stephanie D’Alessandro, Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago; Gail Feigenbaum, Getty Research Institute; and Charles A. Wright, Professor and Chair, Department of Art, Western Illinois University. The board also accepted the resignation of Jean Miller of the University of North Texas and elected Doralynn Pines, a New York–based independent art historian and consultant to museums and libraries, to fill the remaining two years of Miller’s term. The board also appointed Roger Crum of the University of Dayton (and a CAA board member) to the Nominating Committee.
Teresa Lopez, CAA chief financial officer, presented a balanced operating budget at $4.79 million for fiscal year 2013 (July 1, 2013–June 30, 2014), which the board discussed and approved. She also distributed the organization’s IRS Form 990 for 2011. The board then approved resolution to amend CAA’s statement of investment policy and guidelines to comply with the investment standards for nonprofit corporations under the New York Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act.
Randall C. Griffin, CAA vice president for publications, presented a resolution to revise the Statement of Conflict of Interest and Confidentiality that addresses proper relationships for CAA jurors and journal editors. The board approved the resolution and adopted the revised statement.
In response to Wagner’s discussion on intellectual property at the Executive Committee meeting, Goodyear presented a resolution to establish a Task Force to Develop Fair-Use Guidelines, which the board reviewed, discussed, and approved. As the resolution states, “CAA believes that it would be appropriate to establish a set of guidelines that would document current fair-use practices in the visual arts with respect to the activities of scholarly publishing, the creation of works of art, and the curation and exhibition of works that include another’s copyrighted works.” The board anticipates that it will take the task force eighteen months to two years to develop the guidelines, using focus groups of CAA members, a community advisory group, and a legal advisory group.
Michael Fahlund, CAA deputy director, and Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs and archivist, presented an Archives Policy Statement, which the board approved. Over the past two years, Stark has led the establishment of an archive of CAA records, which is available to scholars.
For further information, or if you have questions or have advocacy issues you would like to bring to the board’s attention, please contact Anne Collins Goodyear, board president, and Linda Downs, executive director and chief executive officer, at info@collegeart.org.
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.
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.
People in the News
posted by CAA — Apr 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.
April 2012
Academe
Luba FreedmanLuba Freedman, a scholar of Italian Renaissance art and a member of the Renaissance Studies editorial board and the Sixteenth Century Journal editorial committee, has been promoted to the rank of full professor in the History of Art Department at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.
Scott Johnson, a sculptor, photographer, and installation artist, has received tenure in the Art Department at Colorado College in Colorado Springs.
Susan Yelavich, a longtime faculty member at Parsons the New School for Design in New York, has been appointed director of the master of arts in design studies program at her school.
Museums and Galleries
Emily Beeny (photograph provided by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)Emily Beeny will join the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in June 2012 as assistant curator of nineteenth-century painting in Art of Europe. Beeny is presently a doctoral candidate completing a year in Paris on the Rudolf Wittkower Dissertation Fellowship from Columbia University in New York.
Olivier Meslay (photograph provided by the Dallas Museum of Art)Olivier Meslay, senior curator of European and American art and Barbara Thomas Lemmon Curator of European Art at the Dallas Museum of Art in Texas, has been named associate director of curatorial affairs at his institution.
Joanne Pillsbury (photograph provided by Getty Communications)Joanne Pillsbury, formerly director of Precolumbian studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, has been named associate director of scholarly programs at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California.
Joel Smith (photograph provided by the Morgan Museum and Library)Joel Smith, currently Peter C. Bunnell Curator of Photography at the Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey, has been appointed curator of photography at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. Smith begins his new position in September 2012.
Institutional News
posted by CAA — Apr 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.
April 2012
The Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois has received a $500,000 grant from the Indian government in support of a four-year exchange program with museums in India. The Art Institute is the first American museum to receive the grant, named the Vivekananda Memorial Program for Museum Excellence, in honor of Swami Vivekananda, an Indian musician, playwright, and philosopher.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has taken steps to make its digital-image collection more comprehensive and accessible to the public by integrating staff from the analogue-image library into the digital-media department.
The Rhode Island School of Design in Providence has partnered with the US Department of State’s Office of Art in Embassies to create a permanent, large-scale outdoor artwork for the future American embassy in Rabat, Morocco. An artist and RISD alumnus, Jim Drain, spearheaded the project with a special six-week course called “Art in Embassies: Morocco,” which he taught in winter 2012, collaborating with students and a visiting Moroccan artist. The artwork will debut on November 30, 2012, at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.