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CWA Picks for July–August 2011

posted by Christopher Howard — Aug 16, 2011

Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts produces a curated list, called CWA Picks, of recommended exhibitions and events related to feminist art and scholarship in North America and around the world.

The CWA Picks for July–August 2011 shine invigorating spotlights on two momentous forces that supported and inspired international artistic developments in the twentieth century: the Baltimore sisters Claribel and Etta Cone, and the writer and impresario Gertrude Stein. The Jewish Museum in New York hosts an exhibition dedicated to the Cones’ stunning collection of modern art, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco focuses on the Stein’s life and legacy.

If in New York, CWA also suggests viewing a new multichannel video work by Dara Birnbaum at Marian Goodman Gallery and taking a journey around the world via Ruth Gruber’s photographs at the International Center of Photography. Elsewhere, The Guerrilla Girls Talk Back is a recommended exhibition of newly acquired prints, multiples, and ephemera at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, and Claude Cahun’s comprehensive retrospective at Jeu de Paume in Paris, France, addresses issues in feminist scholarship and turning points in the understanding of the female artist.

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.

Image: Claribel Cone, Gertrude Stein, and Etta Cone sitting a table in Settignano, Italy, June 26, 1903. Baltimore Museum of Art. Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone Papers, Archives and Manuscripts Collection, CG.12 (photograph provided by the Baltimore Museum of Art)

Filed under: Committees, Exhibitions

Grants, Awards, and Honors

posted by CAA — Aug 15, 2011

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.

August 2011

Joseph Ackley, a doctoral candidate in the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University focusing on medieval art, issues of translation, and material identity, has recently received a German Academic Exchange Service with a graduate scholarship to support research in Germany.

Andrea Bell, a PhD student in the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University with an interest in eighteenth-century French drawing, has accepted a one-year doctoral fellowship for research in Paris through an inaugural program of the Centre Allemand/Deutsches Kunstforum.

Doris Berger, an independent scholar based in Los Angeles, has earned a postdoctoral fellowship from the Getty Research Institute. She will investigate the avant-garde, contemporary film, and gender studies in her project, “Hans Richter’s Artistic Practice in Painting and Film.”

Susanneh Bieber of the Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany, has been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Smithsonian American Art Museum for research in Washington, DC. Her project is entitled “Construction Sites: American Artists Engage the Built Environment.”

Alan C. Braddock, assistant professor in the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has received a senior fellowship from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. During academic year 2011–12, he will be in residence at the museum in Washington, DC, to research his project, called “Gun Vision: The Ballistic Imagination of American Art from Homer to O’Keeffe.”

Shira Niamh Brisman, a doctoral candidate at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has been named an ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow for her paper on the communicative nature of images and the influence of letters, particularly in the case of Albrecht Durer, entitled “Art and the Epistolary Mode of Address in the Age of Albrecht Dürer.”

Jonathan Brown, Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Fine Arts in the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, has received the Bernardo de Galvez Award from the US-Spain Council. The award acknowledges an extreme appreciation and contribution to the comprehension of Spanish art and history.

Kathryn Jane Brown, an assistant professor of art history at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, has received a $5,000 grant from the Shpilman Institute of Photography. Her project is entitled “Photography, Poetry, and Sculpture: ‘La Mort et les statues’ by Pierre Jahan and Jean Cocteau.”

Amy Buono, a scholar of colonial Latin American art and assistant professor in the Art History Department at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, has earned a postdoctoral fellowship through the Getty Research Institute for academic year 2011–12. She will continue her project, “Techniques of Color and Deception: Brazilian Art in Early Modern Europe.”

Derek Scott Burdette, a doctoral candidate at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, has been awarded an ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship to complete his investigation of “Miraculous Crucifixes and the Construction of Mexican Colonialism: The Artistic, Devotional, and Political Lives of Mexico City’s Early-Colonial Cristos.”

Joanna Cannon, a reader in the History of Art Department at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, England, has received a Los Angeles Architecture fellowship from the Getty Research Institute in the Manuscripts department.

Jenny Carson of the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, has received a senior fellowship from the Smithsonian American Art Museum for the 2011–12 academic year. She will conduct research at the museum in Washington, DC, for her project, “The Art and Studio of William Henry Rinehart.”

Ignaz Cassar has been awarded a $5,000 grant from the Shpilman Institute of Photography for research on his project, “The Imaginary of the Darkroom: Interiority and the Aesthetics of the Secret.” This project, part of an inaugural Grants Program, will consider the infinite intrigue of the darkroom in the wake of the digital era.

Liam Considine of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University has been named Sara Roby Predoctoral Fellow in Twentieth-Century American Realism by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. During the 2011–12 academic year, he will conduct research at the museum for his dissertation, titled “Innovation and Disavowal: American Pop Art in France, 1962–1968.”

Alexandra Davis, a doctoral candidate in the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadephia, has received a 2011 Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art. Her winning essay, “The Portrayal of the Artist-as-Celebrity in American Fashion and Lifestyle Magazines, 1923–1952“, analyzes the fusion of artist and celebrity in the media.

Sabina de Cavi, an independent scholar and curator based in Rome, Italy, has received a postdoctoral fellowship through the Getty Research Institute for the 2011–12 academic year. Her project, “Architectural Drawing as a Collaborative Process: Materials, Tools, Workshop Production, and Pattern Transmission in the Sicilian Workshop of Giacomo Amato (1643–1732),” will build on her enthusiasm for aspects of ritual and materiality in art.

Elise Dodeles, a painter based in New Jersey, has been awarded first prize in the William Way LGBTQ Community Center’s sixth annual juried show competition. She will have a solo show at the gallery space in Philadelphia in January 2012.

Ross K. Elfline has been presented with a research grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. With it he will investigate the photomontages and drawings published by Superstudio, a radical architectural collective established in the 1960s.

Rachel Federman, a doctoral candidate in art history in the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, has been honored with a $1,500 Getty Research Institute’s Library Research Grant.

Seth Feman of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, has been named Patricia and Phillip Frost Predoctoral Fellow by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. For academic year 2011–12, he will be in residence at the museum to work on “Paintings in Place: Encountering Art in Washington’s National

Matthew Fisk, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been awarded a 2011 Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art for his essay, “Art, Speculation, and Diplomacy: John Trumbull, A Federalist Painter in Europe, 1780–1816,“ which offers insight into Trumbull’s complex outlook as an artist, speculator, and diplomat living abroad during the American and French revolutions.

Francesco Freddolini has been granted the Display of Art in Roman Palaces Fellowship through the Getty Research Institute for the 2011–12 academic year. A recipient of a PhD from the Universita di Pisa in Italy, he will investigate Italian Baroque sculpture in his project, “Collecting and Displaying Sculpture in Medicean Tuscany, c. 1600–1737.”

Heidi Gearhart, who completed her doctorate in the Department of Art History at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has earned a postdoctoral fellowship for the 2011–12 academic year from the Getty Research Institute for her project, “Theophilus’ On Diverse Arts: Artists and Art-Making in the High Middle Ages.”

Bridget Gilman, a doctoral candidate in the History of Art Department at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has received a 2011 Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art. Her project, “Re-envisioning Everyday Spaces: Photorealism in the San Francisco Bay Area,” proposes a link between landscape painting and realist painting of the twentieth century that may reveal a new understanding of the American lifestyle.

Michelle Handelman has received a grant from the MAP Fund to generate Triangle of Resistance, an interdisciplinary performance with the musician and composer Miya Masaoka that investigates media’s ability to motivate or frame social action.

Natilee Harren, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, has received a Getty Research Institute Predoctoral Fellowship for the 2011–12 academic year. She will continue her project, “Objects without Object: The Artwork in Flux, 1958–1969.”

Elizabeth W. Hutchinson, associate professor of art history at Barnard College in New York, has been granted a 2011 ACLS Fellowship for her paper, “Muybridge’s Pacific Coast: Landscape Photographs and Cultural Topography,” a comprehensive study of Eadweard Muybridge’s early interaction with the Pacific coast.

Timothy Hyde has secured a 2011 publications grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for his book manuscript, A Constitutional Modernism: Architecture and Civil Society in the Cuban Republic, which proposes the significance of architecture and urban planning in modernism in Cuba between 1933 and 1959.

Sharon Irish has been awarded a 2011 research grant from the Graham Foundation of Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts to investigate the interdisciplinary innovations of the London-based artist Stephen Willats and his exploration of social interactions, power structures, and distinct behavior in particular cities.

Barthèlèmy Jobert, professor of history of contemporary art at the Universitè Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), has been appointed a guest scholar at the Getty Research Institute for spring 2011 to work on “Delacroix: Romantic Artists and the Drawing Album.”

Karolina Karlic, an artist based in Los Angeles, California, has been named a 2011 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in photography.

Sonya S. Lee, assistant professor of art history at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has been presented with a 2011 ACLS Fellowship. Her research project, “Between Culture and Nature: Cave Temples of Sichuan,” analyzes the cultural foundation of China’s sacred grounds and their contribution to aesthetic, historical, and religious dialogues.

Sarah Lepinski, a scholar who recently received her doctorate from the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Archeology at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, has been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Getty Research Institute. For the 2011–12 academic year she will work on her project, titled “Painting Practices in Roman and Late Antique Corinth, Greece.”

Emily Liebert of Columbia University in New York has received a predoctoral fellowship at the Archives of American Art, awarded through the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. She will conduct research in 2011–12 on her project, called “Roles Recast: Eleanor Antin and the 1970s.”

Anne Lindberg, an artist based in Kansas City, Missouri, has earned a grant from the Lighton International Artists Exchange Program to facilitate a three-month residency at Kunstnerhuset i Lofoten in Svolvaer, Norway. She departs in September 2011.

Michael Lobel, associate professor of art history at Purchase College, State University of New York, has been awarded a Getty scholarship with an emphasis on artistic practice. His research project examines “Becoming an Artist: John Sloan, the Ashcan School, and Popular Illustration.”

Natalia Majluf, director of the Museo de Arte de Lima and academic coordinator of the MA program in art history at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, has been honored as a 2011 Fellow in Latin American and Caribbean studies by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She will complete a book during her tenure on the Peruvian painter Francisco Laso and his portrayal of the nineteenth-century Peruvian native.

George H. Marcus has been awarded a publications grant from the Graham Foundation of Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for The Houses of Louis Kahn, a book manuscript written with William Whitaker that will analyze the historical framework and spatial details of nine homes designed by Louis Kahn between 1940 and 1973.

Areli Marina has received a publications grant from the Graham Foundation of Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Her book manuscript, The Italian Piazza Transformed: Parma in the Communal Age, explores the development of civic centers in the northern Italian city of Parma and their cultural significance.

Tara Cooke McDowell, a doctoral candidate in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, has been awarded a Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art 2011. Her study, “Image Nation: The Art of Jess 1951–1991,” investigates the San Francisco–based artist Jess and his cross-disciplinary practice in the atomic age.

Jonathan Mekinda has been awarded a publication grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts to produce Chicago in the World, a collection of essays written with Alexander Eisenschmidt that reveal the city’s significance as an incubator of architectural and urban innovation.

Kimberli Meyer has received a 2011 research grant from the Graham Foundation of Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for “Hyper House and Home”, a project exploring how domestic space mingles with do-it-yourself design, digital technology, and the public.

Cynthia J. Mills, an independent scholar, has been granted an ACLS Fellowship for research at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She will conduct a study of figurative sculpture produced at the end of the nineteenth century for American cemeteries in an essay called “Beyond Grief: Art, Mourning, and Mystery in the Gilded Age.”

Nicholas Mirzoeff, a professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University, has been awarded a $5,000 grant from the Shpilman Institute of Photography for a research project entitled “The Photographic Common and Authoritarian Realism: A Genealogy of the 2011 Revolutions.”

Kate Mondloch, assistant professor of art history at the University of Oregon in Eugene, has earned a 2011 ACLS Fellowship for “Eye Desire: Media Art after Feminism,” a paper that presents a theoretical and historical analysis of media arts since 1990 that have been informed by feminism.

Iris Moon, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, has been awarded a predoctoral fellowship through the Getty Research Institute. During the 2011–12 academic year, she will research “Charles Percier and Pierre-François-Lèonard Fontaine’s Interior Decoration Practice in Napoleonic France, ca. 1800.”

Emily L. Moore, a doctoral candidate in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, has earned a 2011 Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art for her research on “‘For Future Generations’: Transculturation and the Totem Parks of the New Deal, 1938–1942,“ which uncovers the intricacies of the New Deal’s interactions with Alaskan “totem parks.”

Steven Nelson, associate professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, has earned a Getty scholarship for academic year 2011–12 and has also qualified as the Consortium Scholar. His research project, “Dakar: The Making of an African Metropolis,” pivots on Africa’s diasporas and history, queer studies, and the urban environment in Africa.

Linda Nochlin, Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art in the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, has been honored with a 2011 Icon Award from the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut for her commitment to the arts and art history.

Bibiana Obler, a doctoral student at George Washington University in Washington, DC, has been named James Renwick Postdoctoral Fellow in American Craft by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She will further develop her project, “The Anti-Craft Tradition,” in residence at the museum during the 2011–12 academic year.

Erin Pauwels of Indiana University in Bloomington has received a Wyeth Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship to conduct research at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, during academic year 2011–12. Her dissertation is called “Impersonating Identity: Celebrity, Costume, and Dramatic Realism in the Gilded Age American Portraiture.”

Lauren Hackworth Petersen, associate professor of art history at the University of Delaware in Newark, has been awarded an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship for The Material Life of Roman Slaves, a forthcoming book coauthored with Sandra R. Joshel on the presence of slaves through archeological findings in the Roman landscape and textual references.

Cory Pillen, a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, has received a predoctoral fellowship from the Smithsonian American Art Museum to research his project, “WPA Posters: A New Deal for Design,” at the museum in Washington, DC, for the 2011–12 academic year.

Amy Powell, assistant professor of art history at the University of California in Irvine, has received an ACLS Fellowship for 2011. She will generate a paper on “The Whitewashed Image: Iconoclasm and Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscapes.”

Miguel Rivera, an artist and director of the Printmaking Department at the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri, has been awarded a three-week residency at Proyecto’ACE in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to develop his project, “Cities’ Dialogues and Paranoia.”

Iraida Rodríguez-Negrón is a PhD candidate in the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, has received a 2011–12 The Meadows/Kress Prado Fellowship, to conduct research at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, Spain.

Sarah Ross has been awarded a 2011 grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for her traveling exhibition, Global Cities, Model Worlds, organized with Ryan Griffis and Lize Mogel. Each incarnation of the show, scheduled to appear through 2013 in cities that have hosted or bid for the Olympics or a World’s Fair, explores the ideological and social impact of such major events.

Vimalin Rujivacharakul has accepted a 2011 research grant from the Graham Foundation of Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts to develop his project, “The Orient of the East and the West of the Ocean,” which examines the perception of world architecture from the standpoint of a leading Japanese intellectual, Ito Chuta.

Tanya Sheehan, assistant professor of art history at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, has received a short-term research fellowship from the New York Public Library and a fellowship from the W E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University to examine references to race in photographic humor from 1839 through the twentieth century.

Elena Shtromberg, assistant professor of art and art history at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, has been awarded a 2011 ACLS Fellowship to conduct research for her paper, “Art and Information: Political Encounters in Brazil, 1968–1978,” which examines the relation of art production to social spheres, information theory, and international discourse during Brazil’s most violently tyrannical decade.

Molly Springfield, an artist based in Washington, DC, has received a $5,000 grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities via its the 2011 Artist Fellowship program.

Allison Stagg of University College London in England has been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She will conduct research her project, “The Art of Wit: Political Caricature in the United States, 1780–1830.”

Nathaniel Stein, a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, has been awarded a $5,000 research grant from the Shpilman Institute of Photography for a paper titled “Authorities of Presence: Robert Gill, Survey Photography, and the Colonial Sublime.”

Helena Katalin Szepe, associate professor of art history at the University of South Florida in Tampa, has been honored with a fellowship for scholarly research from ACLS. Her project, “Privilege and Duty in the Serene Republic: Illuminated Manuscripts of Renaissance Venice,” investigates the duality of illuminated civic manuscripts and their role in memorializing and glorifying statesmen of the Renaissance.

Penelope Umbrico, an artist and a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts in New York and in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, has received a 2011 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in photography.

Catharine H. Walsh, a doctoral candidate in the Art History Department at University of Delaware in Newark, has received a 2011 Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art. Her research, titled “Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Orality in Nineteenth Century American Visual Culture,” investigates the multisensory experience of art produced between 1830 and 1870.

P. Gregory Warden, University Distinguished Professor of Art History and associate dean for academic affairs in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, has been accepted into the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity and received the title of cavaliere in the name of the president of the Italian republic. Warden’s contributions include spearheading the excavation of Poggio Colla, an Etruscan site, since 1995; organizing an extensive exhibition of Etruscan art for his institution in 2009; and enhancing the prestige and understanding of Etruscan and Roman art since joining the Art History Department in 1982.

Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss has received a 2011 publications grant from the Graham Foundation of Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for Socialist Architecture: The Vanishing Act, a collaborative project with Armin Linke that documents the dismissed architecture of Croatia, Macedonia, and Serbia left vacant since the dissolution of the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia.

Kelly Whitford, a graduate student in the Department of Art History at the University of Oregon in Eugene, has accepted a $5,000 award via the 2010–11 Dean’s Graduate Fellowship for her research and scholarship in the final phase of her dissertation, called “A Re-Performance: Viewing Stefano Madern’s St. Cecilia during the Jubilee of 1600.”

John M. Willis, an artist and professor of photography at Marlboro College in Marlboro, Vermont, has received a 2011 photography fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Hannah Wong of the University of Texas at Austin has accepted predoctoral fellowship at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, awarded by the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. During academic year 2011–12, she will conduct research on “A ‘Funny Guy’ Visits America: The Role of Humor in the Works of Francis Picabia, 1913–17.”

Cassie Wu, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been awarded a 2011 Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art for her study, “Perfect Objects: The Lives of Allan McCollum’s Work.” Her monographic study of this American artist reveals an aggressive critique of commoditization through his production of dynamic objects.

Kathryn Wysocki, a doctoral candidate in the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University whose research explores bronze installations by the King of Benin in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has accepted a graduate scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service, which will allow for study in Germany.

Tatsiana Zhurauliova, a graduate student in art history at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has accepted a Terra Foundation for American Art Predoctoral Fellowship from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She will conduct research at the museum during academic year 2011–12 for her project, “Arcadia Americana: Landscape in the Art of Arshile Gorky, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi during World War II.”

Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members

posted by CAA — Aug 15, 2011

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.

August 2011

Babette Bohn and Robert R. Coleman. The Art of Disegno: Italian Prints and Drawings from the Georgia Museum of Art. Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Georgia, May 14–August 7, 2011.

Jeanne Brasile. Intuitive Realities: Working Space 11. Cuchifritos Gallery and Project Space, New York, July 2–July 31, 2011.

Nathalie Campbell. Heat Island. Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, New York, June 18–July 31, 2011.

Anne-Marie Eze. Illuminating the Serenissima: Books of the Republic of Venice. Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum, Boston, Massachusetts, May 3–June 19, 2011.

Sandra Q. Firmin. Artpark: 1974–1984. University at Buffalo Art Gallery, Center for the Arts, State University of New York, Buffalo, New York, September 25–December 18, 2010.

Alia Nour and J. David Farmer. Reconnecting East and West: Islamic Ornament in Nineteenth-Century Works from the Dahesh Museum of Art and Syracuse University. Dubai Community Theater and Arts Centre, Mall of the Emirates, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, June 18–July 18, 2011.

Nada Shabout. Interventions: A Dialogue between the Modern and the Contemporary. Al-Riqaw Art Space, Doha, Qatar, December 30, 2010–May 28, 2011.

Nada Shabout and Wassan al-Khudhairi. Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art. Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar, December 30, 2010–October 1, 2011.

Rachel Sloan. Drawn to Modernism: Selected Gifts from Wright S. Ludington. Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California, April 16–July 24, 2011.

Books Published by CAA Members

posted by CAA — Aug 15, 2011

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.

August 2011

Edith Balas. Bird in Flight: Memoir of a Survivor and Scholar (Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2011).

Francesca G. Bewer. A Laboratory for Art: Harvard’s Fogg Museum and the Emergence of Conservation in America, 1900–1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2010).

Kathryn Brush, ed. Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier (London, ON: Museum London and the McIntosh Gallery, University of Western Ontario, 2010).

Kathleen K. Desmond. Ideas about Art (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

Sandra Q. Firmin. Artpark: 1974–1984 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010).

Dale Allen Gyure. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Florida Southern College (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010).

Dale Allen Gyure. The Chicago Schoolhouse: High School Architecture and Educational Reform, 1856–2006 (Chicago: Center for American Places, Columbia College Chicago Press, 2011).

Andrew D. Hottle. June Blum: Black and White Paintings, 1963 through 2010 (Cocoa Beach, FL: Blue Note Publications, 2011).

Li Zhiyan, Virginia L. Bower, and He Li, ed. Chinese Ceramics from the Paleolithic Period through the Qing Dynasty (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

Laurette E. McCarthy. Walter Pach (1883–1958): The Armory Show and the Untold Story of Modern Art in America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011).

Richard Minsky. The Book Art of Richard Minsky (New York: George Braziller, 2011).

Judith W. Page and Elise L. Smith. Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England’s Disciples of Flora, 1780–1870 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Aimée Brown Price. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, vol. 1, The Artist and His Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

Aimée Brown Price. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, vol. 2, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Painted Work (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010)

Tanya Sheehan. Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth Century America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011).

Nino Zchomelidse and Giovanni Freni. Meaning in Motion: The Semantics of Movement in Medieval Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

Recent Deaths in the Arts

posted by Christopher Howard — Jul 14, 2011

In its semimonthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, curators, collectors, museum directors, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts.

  • Karen Aqua, a filmmaker and teacher based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose works in animation can be found in her eleven films and in the twenty-two segments she had created for Sesame Street since 1990, died on May 30, 2011. She was 57 years old
  • José Argüelles, an eccentric artist and scholar who, after earning a doctorate in art history, taught aesthetics at universities nationally and wrote about the Mayan calendar in his book The Mayan Factor: Path beyond Technology, passed away on March 23, 2011, at age 72. He is known for organizing the Harmonic Convergence event of 1987
  • Thomas N. Armstrong III, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York from 1974 to 1990 and who later led the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, died on June 20, 2011, at the age of 78. Armstrong facilitated the museum’s purchase of Frank Stella’s Die Fahne Hoch!, Jasper John’s Three Flags, and Alexander Calder’s Circus; he is also known for his firing of the curator Marcia Tucker, which prompted her to found the New Museum of Contemporary Art
  • Ariege Arseguel, an independent art consultant and a former executive director of the Sonoma County Museum in California, died on June 5, 2011, at the age of 49. She had also worked for the San Francisco Art Institute, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
  • Terry Ball, an artist who drew architectural reconstructions, including historic depictions of the Tower of London and Windsor Castle, among other locations, died on February 23, 2011. He was 79 years old
  • Luciano Bellosi, an art historian specializing in Italian artists from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries—notably Cimabue, Duccio, Giotto, and Masaccio—died on April 26, 2011, at age 74. He taught medieval art history at the University of Siena from 1979 to 2006
  • Ron Bone, a British painter known for his quiet interior scenes that critics compared to Andrew Wyeth and to seventeenth-century Dutch painting, died on February 26, 2011. He was 60 years old
  • Claudio Bravo, a Chilean-born, largely self-taught artist who established his reputation in the 1960s by painting portraits of elite society in Spain and the Philippines, passed away on June 4, 2011, at age 74. Influenced by Mark Rothko and Antoni Tàpies, Bravo transitioned into trompe l’oeil paintings of drapery and crumpled paper in his later years
  • Thalia Noras Carlos, a philanthropist who contributed millions of dollars worth of Greek and Roman antiquities to the Michael C. Carlos Museum, which bears the name of her late husband, at Emory University in Atlanta, passed away on May 22, 2011. She was 83 years old
  • Leonora Carrington, a British-born Surrealist artist and writer and a muse to Max Ernst, died on May 25, 2011, at the age of 94. Though she traveled and exhibited her work internationally, she settled in Mexico City, where she spent time with her female artistic colleagues, Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo, and developed her unique, highly praised painting style
  • Ira Cohen, a filmmaker, photographer, poet, publisher, and musician whose greatest work was life itself, died on April 25, 2011, at the age of 76. The New York–based Cohen traveled internationally and had collaborated with William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Paul Bowles
  • Stephen De Staebler, a Bay Area–based creator of figurative sculpture in clay and bronze that depicted hauntingly fractured body parts, died on May 13, 2011, at the age of 78. The de Young Museum in San Francisco will host a retrospective of his work, Matter and Spirit, that opens in January 2012
  • Bernhard Heisig, a celebrated and criticized East German painter who addressed themes of suffering in war and under fascism, died on June 10, 2011, at the age of 86. After reunification, Heisig’s work was exhibited across the country and presented in a solo show at Berlin’s Martin Gropius Bau in 2005
  • M. F. Husain, a painter often described as the Picasso of India, died on June 9, 2011, at the age of 95. After starting his career as a Bollywood poster and billboard artist, Husain shifted into a style of painting inspired by Hindu temple art and Cubism, and his controversial depictions of deities and politically charged nude women sent him into self-exile
  • Denis Mahon, a historian and collector of art who contributed his significant collection of Italian Baroque paintings to several British institutions, died on April 24, 2011, at age 100. His book Studies in Seicento Art and Theory, published in 1947, is a leading text on the subject; he also wrote extensively about Caravaggio and Nicolas Poussin
  • Adolfas Mekas, a filmmaker associated with New American Cinema and the founder, with his brother Jonas, of Film Culture, a journal that advanced avant-garde film, died on May 31, 2011, at age 85. Mekas was also a founding member of the film department at Bard College, directing the program from 1971 to 1994 and teaching there until 2004
  • Robert Miller, an art dealer whose eponymous New York gallery represents many blue-chip artists and their estates, including Ai Weiwei, Diane Arbus, Lee Krasner, and Alice Neel, died on June 22, 2011. He was 72 years old
  • Andrew Morgan, an artist and a professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Miami from 1970 to 1987, died on March 18, 2011, at age 88. He was known for paintings and drawings of the Florida landscape and the Everglades
  • Mordechai Omer, director and chief curator of the Tel Aviv Museum for the last seventeen years, passed away in June 2011 at the age of 70. He was also a professor at Tel Aviv University and worked to cultivate the Israeli art scene by supporting both young and established artists
  • David E. Rust, a curator who worked at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, for many years until his retirement in 1984, died on April 8, 2011, at the age of 81. A specialist in French painting, Rust also studied Spanish and Italian art
  • John S. Slorp, president of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design from 1990 to 2002 and an accreditor for the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, passed away on May 21, 2011, at the age of 74. Previous to his stint in Minnesota, Slorp was president of the Memphis College of Art for eight years
  • Jack Smith, one of four artists known as the Beaux Arts quartet—or the Kitchen Sink artists, after an article by the critic David Sylvester—who came to prominence in England in the 1950s with abstract paintings that channeled Social Realism, died on June 11, 2011. He was 82
  • Cy Twombly, an influential and revered postwar abstract painter whom the critic Robert Hughes elevated to an artistic pantheon that included Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, died on July 5, 2011. He was 83 years old
  • Osamu Ueda, an Osaka-born curator at the Art Institute of Chicago who catalogued the museum’s collection of Japanese woodblock prints in the Claire E. Buckingham Collection, died on January 30, 2011, at age 83. Ueda was the coeditor of an important museum book, The Actor’s Image: Print Makers of the Katsukawa School, published in 1994
  • Polly Ullrich, a Chicago-based journalist who wrote for United Press International, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the Chicago Sun Times, and the New York Times before she turned to ceramics, which she created and exhibited across the United States, passed away on July 6, 2011, at age 60. Ullrich also lectured across the Midwest and taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned an MA in art history, theory, and criticism in 1994

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 August listing.

Filed under: Obituaries, People in the News

Affiliated Society News for July 2011

posted by CAA — Jul 09, 2011

American Council for Southern Asian Art

The fifteenth biennial symposium of the American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA) will take place at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis from September 22 to 25, 2011. The engaging event will feature speakers presenting a wide range of papers on historical and contemporary art from South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Himalayan region. Please direct any questions about the symposium to Rick Asher at the University of Minnesota. You may download a PDF of the full program, registration, and related information.

Art Historians of Southern California

Three years ago, Sandra Esslinger, PhD, and Cristina Hernandez, MA, two Mt. San Antonio College professors and members of the Art Historians of Southern California (AHSC), attempted to charter a resolution that would require only an MA to teach art history in California Community Colleges. They were rejected and turned to CAA for support, but there was no mention of community colleges in CAA’s Standards and Guidelines. Esslinger chaired a CAA task force that, among other things, amended the Standards of Retention and Tenure of Art Historians to include language for community colleges. The change justified resubmitting the resolution to the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges. Two professors from Napa Valley Community College, Erik Shearer, MFA, and Amanda Badgett, PhD, joined the campaign, and AHSC reinforced the effort with relentless member support. The proposed revision was fortified by over seventy letters and passed unanimously by the academic senators.

Arts Council of the African Studies Association

ACASA

The Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) recently concluded the fifteenth triennial symposium on African art, entitled “Africa and Its Diasporas in the Marketplace: Cultural Resources and the Global Economy,” held March 23–26, 2011, at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). With the assistance of a generous grant from the Getty Foundation, ACASA brought fifteen colleagues from Africa to participate as presenters in addition to nineteen graduate students and four additional colleagues from the continent supported by ACASA’s own funds. Corinne Kratz from Emory University gave the keynote speech, entitled “Recurring Wodaabe: Proliferating Images of Pastoralists, Gender, and Performance.” Forty-six panels covered past and modern nodes of art-historical inquiry, photography, modes of exhibiting and funding, and contemporary art establishments in Africa. The number of panels has doubled since the original incarnation of the symposium in 1986, highlighting an evolving interest in the field.

ACASA has named new officers to its board: Steven Nelson of UCLA is president; Jean M. Borgatti of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, is past president; and Lisa Binder from the Museum for African Art in New York is president elect and vice president. Continuing as secretary and treasurer is Carol Magee of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the independent scholar Joyce Youmans will remain the newsletter editor. The board also welcomed several new members: Shannen Hill, University of Maryland, College Park; Kinsey Katchka, independent curator; and John Peffer, Ramapo College.

Jessica Winegar

Jessica Winegar’s Creative Reckonings won the 2011 Arnold Rubin Book Award for a single-authored book

In 2011, ACASA honored two leaders in the field: Rowland Abiodun, John C. Newton Professor of the History of Art and Black Studies at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and Doran Ross, curator emeritus at UCLA’s Fowler Museum. The organization also presented a handful of book awards and honorable mentions. The Arnold Rubin Book Award for a single-authored book was given to Jessica Winegar for Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture In Contemporary Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), with an honorable mention going to Steven Nelson for From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture in and out of Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). The Arnold Rubin Award for books with multiple authors was bestowed on Henry John Drewal’s edited volume, Sacred Waters: Arts for Mami Wata and Other Divinities in Africa and the Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); the honorable mention went to Inscribing Meaning (Milan: 5Continents Press, 2007) by Christine Mullen Kreamer, Polly Nooter Roberts, Elizabeth Harney, and Allyson Purpura. The Roy Sieber Outstanding Dissertation Award was given to Alexander Bortolot for “A Language for Change: Creativity and Power in Mozambican Makonde Masked Performance, circa 1900–2004” (Columbia University, 2007), with an honorable mention for Nichole Bridges’s “Contact, Commentary, and Kongo Memory: Perspectives on Loango Coast Souvenir Ivories, ca. 1840–1910” (University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2009).

Association of Art Historians

The Association of Art Historians (AAH), based in the United Kingdom, has named Alison Yarrington as its new chair, to serve a three-year term. An expert in sculpture, Yarrington is dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Hull in England and governor of the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. She has long been involved with AAH and is committed to its mission of promoting the professional practice and the public understanding of art history.

Association of Historians of American Art

The Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA) will sponsor two sessions at CAA’s 2012 Annual Conference in Los Angeles. Wendy Katz from the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln will chair the shorter, professional session, “Ideology, Industry, and Instinct: The Art of Labor,” and Erica Schneider of Framingham State University in Framingham, Massachusetts, will lead the longer, scholarly session, “American Symbolism.”

The next AHAA symposium, chaired by David Dearinger and Melissa Renn, will take place in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 12–13, 2012. Please visit the AHAA website later this summer for more details on the event.

Historians of British Art

The Historians of British Art (HBA) have welcomed new board members: Dianne Sachko Macleod, University of California, Davis; Morna O’Neill, Wake Forest University; and Emily Talbot, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The organization has also chosen its new officers: Peter Trippi, editor of Fine Art Connoisseur, is president; Colette Crossman of the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin, is first vice president; Craig Hanson of Calvin College is second vice president; and Jongwoo Kim from the University of Louisville, a new board member, is treasurer and membership chair.

International Association of Art Critics

AICA

Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for the New Yorker, will deliver the International Association of Art Critics (AICA-USA) fifth annual Distinguished Critic Lecture in the Tishman Auditorium at the New School in New York on Thursday, November 17, 2011, 6:30–8:00 PM. The topic of his talk is “The Critic as Artist, in 2011: Is updating Oscar Wilde possible? It seems worth a try.” An American art critic, a celebrated poet, and an educator, Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1998. Before that he wrote on art for Village Voice from 1980 to 1998, as well as for the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. The author of four books, including The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings of Peter Schjeldahl, 1978–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), he received CAA’s Frank Jewett Mather Award in 1980 and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1995.

Presented by AICA with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, the Distinguished Critic Lecture at the New School addresses current issues in the world of art criticism. General admission for the Schjeldahl talk is $8; free for all students, AICA members, and New School faculty, staff, and alumni with a valid ID.

Leonardo/International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology

The San Francisco–based Leonardo/International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST) has appointed Jeffrey N. Babcock as interim executive director. A current member and former chairman of Leonardo/ISAST’s governing board, Babcock has more than thirty years of experience as a senior nonprofit arts and academic executive, consultant, event and media producer, and entrepreneur. He has been actively involved in creative technologies throughout his career, collaborating with arts technology engineers and artists to produce and present complex projects.

Paul Thomas, associate professor in the College of Fine Art at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, will moderate a Leonardo Education and Art Forum (LEAF) education workshop in collaboration with the Australian Forum at ISEA2011 Istanbu. Called “Transdisciplinary Visual Arts, Science, and Technology Renewal Post–New Media Assimilation” and sponsored by the National Institute for Experimental Arts, the workshop will address issues encountered while developing transdisciplinary art–science research, teaching, and meshing curricula from diverse fields.

Submissions are now being accepted for ISEA2012 Albuquerque: Machine Wilderness. This symposium will consist of a conference, to be held September 19–24, 2012, with events exploring the discourse of global proportions on the subject of art, technology, and nature. Deadline: October 1, 2011.

Mid America College Art Association

Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, will host the next conference of the Mid-America College Art Association (MACAA) from October 3 to 6, 2011. The call for papers will be posted soon to the organization’s website.

National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts

NCECA

The National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) will hold its next symposium, titled “Shared Journeys II,” at West Virginia University in Morgantown from October 14 to 16, 2011. The event will explore achievements in Chinese ceramics and its influence in the West by examining legacies and tensions of craftsmanship, pedagogy, philosophy, and social currents. Representatives from the Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute and contemporary artists versed in overglaze and underglaze painting, slab construction, hand building, and wheel throwing will join American presenters for demonstrations and lectures. Visit the NCECA website for information on programming, travel, and lodging—and also to register.

New Media Caucus

The New Media Caucus (NMC) has produced the first print-on-demand version of its scholarly journal, Media-N, available via Lulu. The theme of the issue, from Fall 2010, is “Dynamic Coupling.” NMC applauds the persistence and determination of those who made this significant moment possible, among them the designer Rachel Beth Egenhoefer, the associate editor Juliet Davis, and the editor-in-chief Pat Badani. In addition, the organization gives a sincere thanks to Jessica Westbrook and Adam Trowbridge, editors of the original online version of the issue, and also three contributors and reviewers: Rachel Clarke, Jim Jeffers, and James Khazar. A portion of the funds from each Media-N purchase will contribute to the organization’s exploration of digital media for conceptual and artistic purposes. MNC plans to continue its dual publication model—online and print-on-demand—in the future.

Public Art Dialogue

The eponymous journal of Public Art Dialogue, published twice a year by Taylor and Francis, debuted in the spring of 2011 with a themed issue on “Reinterpreting the Canon.” Public Art Dialogue is one of multiple benefits included with a paid membership in the organization. Other member benefits include the opportunity to participate in the annual Public Art Portfolio Review, coordinated by Renee Piechocki, in which experienced public-art administrators, artists, consultants, and curators offer feedback on the work of graduate students, emerging artists, and established artists. Read about the inaugural portfolio review, which took place in February 2011 at the CAA Annual Conference.

Society for Photographic Education

The website of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE) now features galleries in which members can upload up to six distinct portfolios with up to thirty images each. Anyone can view public portfolios, and SPE members can interactively browse and comment on work from the entire SPE community.

Society for the Study of Early Modern Women

Suzanne Cusick

Suzanne G. Cusick’s Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court received a 2010 Book Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women

The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (SSEMW) formally announced the 2010 winners of its annual awards, along with the honorable mentions, at its October 2010 meeting. The names of the seven categories, the recipients, and their books and projects follow.

The winner of the Book Award is Suzanne G. Cusick’s Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), and the honorable mention goes to Dena Goodman for Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf took the Collaborative Project Award for Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). Julie Campbell and Anne R. Larsen received an honorable mention for Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009).

The Josephine A. Roberts Scholarly Edition Award was bestowed upon Sarah E. Owens, the editor and translator of Journey of Five Capuchin Nuns (Toronto: Iter and the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2009). Lynne Tatlock’s similar work as editor and translator, published as Meditations on the Incarnation, Passion, and Death of Jesus Christ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), written in the seventeenth century by Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, received an honorable mention. Elizabeth I and Her Age: Authoritative Texts, Commentary, and Criticism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), edited by Donald Stump and Susan M. Felch, won the Translation or Teaching Edition Award.

The Essay or Article Award went to Dana Wessell Lightfoot for “The Projects of Marriage: Spousal Choice, Dowries, and Domestic Service in Early Fifteenth-Century Valencia,” published in Viator in 2009. Crystal B. Lake received an honorable mention for “Redecorating the Ruin: Women and Antiquarianism in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall,” published in English Literary History (or ELH) in 2009.

The Graduate Student Conference Paper Award was shared by Michelle DiMeo and Brian Oberlander. DiMeo presented “Lady Katherine Ranelagh or Lady Margaret Orrery? Reattributing Authorship for ‘The Boyle Family Receipt Book’” at the Modern Language Association’s 2009 annual conference, held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Oberlander spoke on “Susanne as Symbol in the Sixteenth-Century French Chanson” at a meeting of the American Musicological Society’s Midwest chapter in Berea, Ohio, in the same year.

An audio CD from Candace Smith and her ensemble Cappella Artemisia called Soror Mea, Sponsa Mea, Arte e Musica nei Conventi Femminili in Italia tra Cinque e Seicento (Poligrafo, 2009), which accompanied the publication of proceedings from a 2005 conference, received the Arts and Media Award.

Visual Resources Association

The Visual Resources Association (VRA) presented the winners of the organization’s highest honors at a Convocation ceremony on March 25, 2011, at the VRA and Art Libraries Society of North America’s second joint conference, held in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Eileen Fry received the Distinguished Service Award for her contributions to visual resources and image management. Comments from Fry’s nominators and a discussion of her engagement with research, service, and innovation over her thirty-five year career can be found online. In addition, VRA presented the Nancy DeLaurier Award for distinguished achievement to Renate Wiedenhoeft. Spearheading Saskia and Scholars Resource, Wiedenhoeft has provided high-quality images for teaching art history for over forty-five years. Her acceptance remarks can also be found online. Relatedly, VRA has published images from and information about the awards presentation as well as conference presentations.

Filed under: Affiliated Societies

New Appointments to CAA’s Journals

posted by Christopher Howard — Jul 05, 2011

Earlier this spring, the president of the CAA Board of Directors, Barbara Nesin, has confirmed new appointments to the editorial boards of CAA’s three scholarly journals, in consultation with then–vice president for publications, Anne Collins Goodyear. The appointments took effect on July 1, 2011.

Art Journal

Art Journal has announced its next editor-in-chief: Lane Relyea, an art critic and associate professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Since the 1990s Relyea has contributed to Artforum, Parkett, Frieze, and Afterall, among other publications. His book D.I.Y. Culture Industry: Signifying Practices, Social Networks, and Other Instrumentalizations of Everyday Art is forthcoming from MIT Press. Relyea will succeed Katy Siegel of Hunter College, City University of New York, and begin his three-year term on July 1, 2012, with the preceding year as editor designate.

Joining the Art Journal Editorial Board for four-year terms are Doryun Chong, associate curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Saloni Mathur, associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Chong is a contributing editor at Art Asia Pacific and worked as associate curator of visual arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, from 2003 to 2009. His recent exhibitions include Bruce Nauman: Days (2010) and Haegue Yang: Integrity of the Insider (2009–10). Mathur, a specialist in the art of South Asia, wrote India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Her recently compiled volume, The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora, is forthcoming from Yale University Press.

The Art Bulletin

Rachael DeLue, assistant professor at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, has been named the next reviews editor of The Art Bulletin, succeeding Michael Cole of Columbia University in New York. A specialist in American art, DeLue focuses on visual language in culture as it pertains to race, stereotypes, and beauty, and her most recent publication, Landscape Theory (New York: Routledge, 2008), coedited with James Elkins, considers its titular subject from an interdisciplinary perspective. DeLue will serve one year as reviews editor designate before beginning her three-year term on July 1, 2012.

In addition, two CAA members have joined the the Art Bulletin Editorial Board for four-year terms: Dana Leibsohn, Priscilla Paine Van der Poel Professor of Art at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts; and Steven Ostrow, professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and chair of its Department of Art History. Leibsohn concentrates on visual culture in colonial Latin America, highlighting the relevance of maps and modes of literacy in particular. A recent grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities is supporting her collaborative multimedia project, “Vistas: Colonial Latin American Visual Culture 1520–1820.” Ostrow has extensive knowledge of early Italian visual culture and has published on a variety of subjects, including sculpture and illuminated manuscripts, with an emphasis on patronage, iconography, and artistic practice. Most recently he contributed an essay to Rome Italy Renaissance: Essays in Art History Honoring Irving Lavin on His Sixtieth Birthday (New York: Italica, 2009).

The Art Bulletin Editorial Board also has a new chair, appointed from within its ranks: Thelma Thomas, associate professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, will serve for two years. Thomas specializes in Byzantine and Eastern Christian art and architecture, leading seminars such as “Material Culture in Late Antiquity: Textiles,” and “Byzantine Art and Architecture: 9th–15th Century.”

caa.reviews

The caa.reviews Editorial Board welcomes a new member, Tomoko Sakomura, assistant professor at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, who will serve for four years. Currently the journal’s field editor for books on Japanese art, she is working on a book project called Poetry as Image: The Visual Culture of Waka Poetry in Late Medieval Japan.

Five new field editors for books and exhibitions have recently been chosen by the editorial board to serve three-year terms. Joseph Alchermes of Connecticut College in New London will commission reviews of exhibitions of pre-1800 art in New York and the Northeast, and Kirsten Swenson of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is field editor for exhibitions in the Southwest. Aida Wong of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, will assign reviews of books on Chinese and Korean art; Pamela Jones of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, will do the same for books on early modern and southern European art; and Juliet Bellow of American University in Washington, DC, will cover books on nineteenth-century art.

Sheryl Reiss, lecturer at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, began her three-year term as editor-in-chief of caa.reviews on July 1, 2011, succeeding Lucy Oakley, head of education and programs at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University. CAA will publish an interview with Reiss, who served on the journal’s editorial board from 2001 to 2005, later this summer.

Essays in the June 2011 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, examine a range of topics that include works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Philip Guston, Edgar Degas, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. A fifth essay on aesthetics and a collection of important book reviews round out the issue, which has been mailed to all individual CAA members who elect to receive the journal, and to all institutional members. The issue is dedicated to the memory of the late Anne L. Schroder, an expert on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art; one of her final essays appears in it.

Leading off the issue is Margaret A. Sullivan’s article that uncovers the beginnings of genre in Bruegel’s debt to stoicism, ancient satire, and the art of Pieter Aertsen. Next, Schroder explores Fragonard’s later career through two revived projects, his illustrations for La Fontaine’s Contes et nouvelles (1788–1809) and his unfinished painting series, the Progress of Love. For “Hegel’s Contested Legacy,” Jason Gaiger reexamines the Hegelian inheritance in art history in light of newly published transcripts of the lectures on aesthetics and, in doing so, raises broader questions about the concourse between art history and philosophy.

Looking at French art in the nineteenth century, André Dombrowski reveals layered political and historical significations embedded in Degas’s Place de la Concorde (ca. 1875), an urban genre portrait of Viscount Lepic and his daughters. For his contribution, Robert Slifkin finds that Guston’s unsettling return to figuration in the 1960s, which partook in a larger “1930s renaissance,” used the disjunction between two moments to comment on the present.

The June 2011 issue includes reviews of two books on humor in Greek vase painting and Roman visual culture, two on Chinese painting, one on medieval Buddhist sculpture, and one on forgery in premodern German art, as well as an exhibition review of Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures, which appeared in Los Angeles, Nuremberg, and Berlin in 2009–10.

Please see the full table of contents for June for more details. The next issue, to be published in September 2011, will feature essays on Roman mosaic floors, an emblematic Michelangelo cartoon for a fresco, portraiture in France after 1789, and the American painter John Sloan.

Filed under: Art Bulletin, Publications

A Tribute to Sylvia Sleigh (1916–2010)

posted by Christopher Howard — Jun 16, 2011

Amy Ingrid Schlegel is director of galleries and collections for the Aidekman Arts Center at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. She served on the CAA Board of Directors from 2007 to 2011 and was liaison to the Committee on Women in the Arts from 2008 to 2011.

Sylvia Sleigh

Sylvia Sleigh (photograph by Judy Schiller)

When I first met Sylvia Sleigh at her Chelsea brownstone in 1993 during the course of my dissertation research, I realized what a treasure trove her home/studio was and how enchanting her amiable, anecdotal manner of recalling the past also was. Until recently, within the last decade, most people knew little about Sleigh’s seventy-year oeuvre other than her best-known painting, The Turkish Bath (1973), often reproduced as one of the very few works by a woman artist in art-history textbooks. Despite the tokenistic way in which many students might know Sleigh’s work, it has long been clear how the women’s movement in New York during the 1970s helped boost her from relative obscurity since arriving in the United States from England in 1961, where she had just one solo exhibition. Now, in 2011, she posthumously received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art, after earning the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association in 2008.

It seems disingenuous not to acknowledge and assess how Sleigh’s remarkable and, in many ways, paradoxical career as a feminist artist was fostered, even born of, her long-term monogamous relationship with the art critic, curator, and writer Lawrence Alloway, whom she married in 1956 (and remained happily married to until his premature death in 1990). Sleigh and Alloway managed a long-term romance and marriage while their roles as “traditional” realist painter and “avant-garde” critic and theorist diverged during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Yet each participated in the other’s private, creative fantasies, and those fantasies were projected in the creative work of both, produced on different floors in that Chelsea brownstone.

Sylvia Sleigh Turkish Bath

Sylvia Sleigh, The Turkish Bath, 1973, oil on canvas, 76 x 100 in. Collection of the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago (artwork © Estate of Sylvia Sleigh)

Indeed, their relationship was the subtext of a 2001 retrospective exhibition I curated in Philadelphia, “An Unnerving Romanticism”: The Art of Sylvia Sleigh and Lawrence Alloway. Sleigh painted more portraits of Alloway than of anyone else; he also appeared several times in her group ensembles, including The Turkish Bath. Naturally, Alloway’s visage could be identified throughout the exhibition, and drawings he penned in ink within longer letters written to Sleigh during his travels were also part of the display.

The exhibition’s title was lifted from an undated letter Eleanor Antin wrote to Sleigh after seeing Sleigh’s 1971 painting Philip Golub Reclining: “It romanticism is unnerving,” Antin gushed. “The contrast between your fierceness and his lush languourous [sic] beauty is violent.…. Sylvia, dear, you are a magnificent romantic and not a lady.” In the work Golub, then about sixteen years old, gazes dreamily into a large, wall-mounted mirror, while Sleigh’s reflection—she is seated in front of her easel—scrutinizes the sitter’s naked, teenaged body and effeminate face partly obscured by his long, wavy hair. In Golub’s case, as the son of Sleigh and Alloway’s close friends Nancy Spero and Leon Golub, the desire was purely visual—Philip is essentially eye candy—but this certainly was not always the case.

One of Sleigh’s gifts as a painter was her ability to establish an intensely personal and professional dynamic between herself as creative subject and, in the case of her many straight or gay male sitters, the object of her desiring gaze. This intense dynamic also characterized her relationship with Alloway. Already wed and ten years his senior, she married him after a five-year affair. Unlike some creative couples, romantic love and intellectual partnership were not incompatible for Sleigh and Alloway. They were each other’s muses and sounding boards. They were, in many ways, separate but equal partners, autonomous agents yet fondly attached. Despite their career imbalance, particularly during the 1960s, when Alloway was in his heyday, they nurtured one another’s aesthetic and intellectual sensibilities, including their penchant for iconoclasm in their separate challenges to the art world’s prevailing notions of aesthetic quality judged in exclusively formal terms.

Sylvia Sleigh Max Warsh

Sylvia Sleigh, Max Warsh Seated Nude, 2006, oil on canvas, 52 x 56 in. (artwork © Estate of Sylvia Sleigh)

During the 1970s some reviewers questioned the quality of Sleigh’s paintings depicting nude men. Ironically, it is those portraits for which Sleigh is now canonized in art history today. Linda Nochlin argued in her 1974 article “Some Women Realists: Painters of the Figure” that quality in Sleigh’s work was a red herring, writing that Sleigh “most pointedly raises the issues involved in the female artist’s representation of the male nude. While not overtly political in intention, [her works representing nude men] are certainly political in effect, if we accept sexuality as one of the major political arenas of our day.”1 While Sleigh did not deliberately distort her figures, she tended to idealize the bodies of her models and to render their faces as highly individualized portraits. This propensity creates a frisson that some critics may have misread as incompetence. Or, as Nochlin asserted, “Similar accusations of formal weakness, technical insufficiency, or even willful distortion were, of course, leveled at Courbet, Manet and even at the young Ingres, at least in part because the underlying politics of their art affronted ‘normal,’ i.e., unconscious of ideological expectations.”2 We recognize in hindsight that sex discrimination hindered Sleigh’s reputation as one of the most important painters of the twentieth century for decades. While Alloway chose not to publish a single review of Sleigh’s solo exhibitions, he certainly understood the forceful challenge her paintings of nude men posed to assumptions about spectatorship as a male domain of pleasure. After all, the same art gallery that he critiqued as a reviewer for the Nation and for many art magazines during the 1970s exhibited her nude and seminude portraits of him.

Sleigh’s paintings are, fundamentally, intimate testaments to the relationships that she maintained and nurtured over her lengthy, prodigious career. As an index of the people she knew at the time, her oeuvre collectively reads like a perpetual, unnerving romance with that rare professional intimacy expected from a realist painter who works from life, a romance that is unnerving for its unexpected capacity to simultaneously charm and alarm.

Endnotes

1. Linda Nochlin, “Some Women Realists: Painters of the Figure” Arts 48, no. 8 (May 1974), 32.
2. Ibid.

Filed under: Obituaries

Books Published by CAA Members

posted by CAA — Jun 15, 2011

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 2011

Patricia Albers. Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011).

Andrew Arbury. About Art (Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt, 2011).

Lisa Beaven. An Ardent Patron: Cardinal Camillo Massimo and His Antiquarian and Artistic Circle (London: Paul Holbertson, in association with Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2010).

Wanda M. Corn and Tirza True Latimer. Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories. (Berkeley: University of California Press; San Francisco: Contemporary Jewish Museum; Washington, DC, National Portrait Gallery, 2011).

Brenda Longfellow. Roman Imperialism and Civic Patronage: Form, Meaning, and Ideology in Monumental Fountain Complexes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Andreas Marks, ed. Fukami: Purity of Form (Hanford, CA: Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture, 2011).

John R. Senseney. The Art of Building in the Classical World: Vision, Craftsmanship, and Linear Perspective in Greek and Roman Architecture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).