CAA News Today
Winter 2010 Art Journal Published
posted by Christopher Howard — Feb 23, 2011
The Winter 2010 issue of Art Journal, CAA’s quarterly of modern and contemporary art, has just been published. A benefit of CAA membership, the publication is mailed to those individual members who elect to receive it and to all institutional members.
Included is a collection of essays, called “Land Use in Contemporary Art,” that investigates a new genre of aesthetic practices that redefine and expand on earthworks. Organized by Kirsten Swenson and with texts by Janet Kraynak, Paul Monty Paret, and Emily Eliza Scott, “Land Use” won the 2011 Art Journal Award. In her editor’s introduction, Katy Siegel writes that the above contributors: “eschew the extremely long view taken by Land artists in the 1960s and 1970s…. The more recent generation considered here focuses on a shorter-term history, directly or obliquely addressing modern life’s interaction with nature: airports and the evacuation of rural America, economic injustice in communities along the highway, global tourism and utopia in rural Thailand.”
The Winter 2010 issue also features Kelly Baum’s short essay on Santiago Sierra that includes photographs of the artist’s project, Submission (formerly Word of Fire) from 2006–7, and Jordan Troeller’s exploration of Zoe Leonard’s photographic series, called Analogue. In addition, Chika Okeke-Agulu writes about Who Knows Tomorrow, an exhibition of projects by five African artists, sponsored by the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, that were shown in museums across the city. Okeke-Agulu also interviews Zarina Bhimji, a participating artist whose Waiting (2007) appeared in the Hamburger Banhof. Finally, Michel Oren writes about the activities of the USCO Group, a multimedia art collective from the 1960s.
The Winter 2010 issue publishes two artist’s projects: a centerfold by Fabian Marcaccio titled Black Hole $ Paintant and the final installment of Dailies, Kerry James Marshall’s comic for the inside front and back covers. Among the book reviews are Rachel Haidu’s assessment of Christine Mehring’s recent book on Blinky Palermo and Monica McTighe’s analysis of Kate Mondloch’s Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art.
Art Journal offers a pair of texts from the print publication—David Reed’s “Soul-Beating,” on his relationship to Philip Guston, and Lauren O’Neill-Butler’s review of Lee Lozano: Notebooks 1967–70—on its new website. In celebration of CAA’s Centennial year, the website also highlights Howard Singerman’s “Art Journal at Fifty,” an essay exploring the history of the publication, and “A Baker’s Dozen from the Archives,” thirteen selections from Art Journal and its predecessors, which you can download as PDFs and read.
People in the News
posted by CAA — Feb 17, 2011
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.
February 2011
Academe
Philip Ursprung, formerly professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, has been appointed professor of the history of art and architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, as of February 1, 2011.
Museums and Galleries
Amanda C. Burdan has been promoted to assistant curator at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut. She joined the museum in July 2008 as the first Catherine Fehrer Curatorial Fellow.
Organizations and Publications
Thomas W. Lollar, a ceramicist, an instructor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and former director of visual arts and of the List Print Program at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York, has been named director of the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions. The Brodsky Center is housed in the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Anne-Imelda Radice Joins the Board as Appointed Director
posted by Christopher Howard — Feb 14, 2011
CAA has named Anne-Imelda Radice, a senior consultant for the Dilenschneider Group, to the Board of Directors as an appointed director. Radice has a strong record of public service, serving in all three federal cultural agencies: the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
Prior to joining the Dilenschneider Group, Radice was director of the IMLS from 2006 to 2010. Previously acting assistant chairman for programs at the NEH, she served as chief of staff to the secretary of the United States Department of Education. In the early 1990s she was acting NEA chairman and senior deputy chairman. From 1989 to 1991, Radice was chief of the Creative Arts Division of the United States Information Agency and also served as the first director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (1983–89). Before that she worked as a curator and architectural historian for the Architect of the Capitol and as an assistant curator at the National Gallery of Art.
Radice earned a PhD in art and architectural history from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, an MBA from American University in Washington, DC, and a BA in art history from Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. She also holds an MA from the Villa Schifanoia in Florence, Italy.
About CAA Appointed Directors
In addition to the areas of art, art history, museums, law, and finance that currently are represented on the board, CAA seeks expertise in marketing, technology, and philanthropy, among other areas. In February 2010, CAA members approved an amendment to Article VII, Section IV, of the organizational By-laws to establish a new category of appointed director to serve this function. Read more about the amendment.
Challenges to membership societies have increased a great deal in the last decade. Even before the recent financial downturn, membership societies became more complex and expensive to operate. Fund raising, strategies to make the organization structure more efficient, and advice on offering member services in new ways, such as through digital technologies, are just some of the areas that are increasingly important to address and could aid our organization in its mission. CAA will benefit enormously from a variety of views and skills, brought by appointed directors, that will contribute to the organization’s growth and stability.
Image: photograph by Dennis Brack
CAA Signs the Association of Art Museum Directors’ Statement regarding Egypt
posted by Christopher Howard — Feb 03, 2011
The Executive Committee of the CAA Board of Directors has reviewed and approved the support of the following statement, published on February 2, 2011, under the aegis of the Association of Art Museum Directors. You may download a PDF of the letter.
Statement regarding Egypt
New York, NY—February 2, 2011—Recent news reports about the turmoil in Egypt have varyingly reported that some damage was done to works of ancient art in Egyptian museums—and that those who attempted to do harm were stopped. Just as we worry about the safety of Egypt’s citizens in this time of civil unrest, so, too, do we worry about the safety of the country’s cultural heritage—works of art and material culture crucial to our understanding of world civilization and humanity.
We, the representatives of the leading American museums and university art and art history departments, stand with the people of Egypt in their determination to protect 5,000 years of history, including those objects from history that remain unexcavated. Our members—more than 21,000 institutions and individuals—stand ready to assist in any way possible to secure the art and artifacts of Egypt.
Association of Art Museum Directors, Kaywin Feldman, President
American Association of Museums, Ford Bell, President
Association of Art Museum Curators, John Ravenal, President
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries, David Alan Robertson, President
College Art Association, Barbara Nesin, President
Contact
Janet Landay and Christine Anagnos
Association of Art Museum Directors
212-754-8084
Sascha Freudenheim and Elizabeth Chapman
Resnicow Schroeder Associates
212-671-5172 and 212-671-5159
CAA Signs the Association of Art Museum Directors’ Statement regarding Egypt
posted by Christopher Howard — Feb 03, 2011
The Executive Committee of the CAA Board of Directors has reviewed and approved the support of the following statement, published on February 2, 2011, under the aegis of the Association of Art Museum Directors. You may download a PDF of the letter.
Statement regarding Egypt
New York, NY—February 2, 2011—Recent news reports about the turmoil in Egypt have varyingly reported that some damage was done to works of ancient art in Egyptian museums—and that those who attempted to do harm were stopped. Just as we worry about the safety of Egypt’s citizens in this time of civil unrest, so, too, do we worry about the safety of the country’s cultural heritage—works of art and material culture crucial to our understanding of world civilization and humanity.
We, the representatives of the leading American museums and university art and art history departments, stand with the people of Egypt in their determination to protect 5,000 years of history, including those objects from history that remain unexcavated. Our members—more than 21,000 institutions and individuals—stand ready to assist in any way possible to secure the art and artifacts of Egypt.
Association of Art Museum Directors, Kaywin Feldman, President
American Association of Museums, Ford Bell, President
Association of Art Museum Curators, John Ravenal, President
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries, David Alan Robertson, President
College Art Association, Barbara Nesin, President
Contact
Janet Landay and Christine Anagnos
Association of Art Museum Directors
212-754-8084
Sascha Freudenheim and Elizabeth Chapman
Resnicow Schroeder Associates
212-671-5172 and 212-671-5159
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for January 2011
posted by CAA — Jan 10, 2011
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following symposium, conference sessions, and exhibitions should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view.
January 2011
Women and the Word: Muslim Women Artists Explore Spirit, Form, and Text
Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California
1433 Madison Street, Oakland CA 94612
January 3–March 30, 2011
The art gallery of the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California is the first San Francisco Bay Area space to specialize in Muslim artists and Islamic art. From January to March 2011, the gallery will mount three one-woman shows of work by local artists who explore the Islamic tradition of calligraphy and abstract forms. The artists’s names and dates of presentations are: Rubina Kaz, January 3–February 2; Rabea Chaudhry, February 4–March 2; and Salma Arastu, March 4–30.
!Women Art Revolution
New Frontier at the Sundance Film Festival
Historic Miners Hospital, 1354 Park Avenue, Park City, UT 84060; and Salt Lake Art Center, 20 South West Temple, Salt Lake City, UT 84101
January 20–30, 2011
!Women Art Revolution is a documentary film exploring the feminist art movement in the United States from 1968 to the present. The filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson includes interviews with artists, innovators, art historians, and critics taken over a forty-year period, asking why so many female artists are little known and why museums fill their walls with the works of men. Accompanying the film is RAW/WAR, an interactive, community-curated video collection that allows users to access archival footage about the achievements and practices of women artists and to share their own stories through text, images, video clips, and links.
Hand, Voice & Vision: Artists’ Books from Women’s Studio Workshop
Grollier Club
47 East 60th Street, New York, NY 10022
December 8, 2010–February 5, 2011
Curated by Kathleen Walkup, Hand, Voice & Vision: Artists’ Books from Women’s Studio Workshop features forty books by thirty-six artists created over a thirty-year period. The four artists who founded the workshop—Ann Kalmbach, Tatana Kellner, Anita Wetzel, and Barbara Leoff Burge—wanted to operate and maintain a workspace that would encourage the visions of individual women artists, provide professional opportunities for them, and promote programs designed to stimulate public involvement with and support for the visual arts.
The Grollier Club also presents two tandem events. On Tuesday, January 25, three of the exhibition’s artists (Clarissa Sligh, Susan Mills, and Emily Speed) will talk about their work from 2:00 to 4:00 PM. Jae Jennifer Rossman, assistant director for special collections at Yale University, will moderate the panel. On the following day, Walkup will speak on “Women Making Art: Artists’ Books from Women’s Studio Workshop” from 2:00 to 3:00 PM.
Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women
Cartoon Art Museum
655 Mission Street, San Francisco CA 94105
October 1, 2010–January 30, 2011
The history of women in comics is well documented, and the Jewish contribution to the art form is widely acknowledged. Curated by Michael Kaminer and Sarah Lightman, Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women is the first museum exhibition to combine both groups in a single exhibition. Many of the original artworks on display have never before been shown in public. Among the eighteen American, European, and Israeli artists are Sharon Rudahl of Wimmen’s Comix and Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Diane Noomin of Twisted Sisters—all pioneers from the 1970s and 1980s—alongside younger artists. The exhibition catalogue was designed and published as an eight-page newspaper broadsheet.
New Book on the History of CAA: The Eye, the Hand, the Mind
posted by Christopher Howard — Jan 07, 2011
Edited by Susan Ball, executive director emerita, The Eye, the Hand, the Mind: 100 Years of the College Art Association surveys the impressive history of the organization from 1911 to the present. The 330-page hardcover book, published jointly by CAA and Rutgers University Press, can be ordered now ($29.95); it will also be available at the upcoming Annual Conference in New York—just in time for CAA’s Centennial Kickoff.
CAA was founded with a single stated purpose: “to promote art interests in all divisions of American colleges and universities.” From this humble yet ambitious origin, Ball has organized her book thematically instead of chronologically, with sixteen “purposes” from the CAA By-laws that are covered in twelve chapters. Written by artists and scholars who have worked closely with the organization over the last few decades, The Eye, the Hand, the Mind offers not a comprehensive history but rather a presentation of memorable highlights that tells the complex, contentious story of a venerable organization.
The Eye, the Hand, the Mind reviews familiar aspects of CAA. Craig Houser negotiates the long history of CAA’s dynamic publications program, which began in 1913 with the first issue of The Art Bulletin, and Julia A. Sienkewicz chronicles the evolution of the celebrated Annual Conference. Less known is CAA’s traveling-exhibition program in the 1930s, uncovered by Cristin Tierney. More recently, Ellen K. Levy explores how CAA has similarly supported presentations of artwork by its members, both students and professionals. Other authors investigate myriad other topics: developments in pedagogy and curriculum; political involvements and advocacy work; visual resources, libraries, and issues of copyright; professional support and career development; partnerships with museums and their associations; relationships to other learned societies in the humanities; governance structure and diversity matters; and much more. In the conclusion, Paul B. Jaskot anticipates the future of the organization as it enters its next one hundred years.
Ball, who served as CAA executive director from 1986 to 2006, is now director of programs at the New York Foundation for the Arts. In addition to organizing the book project, she wrote the introduction and contributed a chapter on the founding of CAA, administrative and financial matters, and the organization’s larger role in the visual arts.
The renowned artist Faith Ringgold has generously allowed the use of her lithograph, The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles (1996), for the book’s cover. She created the work, published by the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper (now the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions), as a benefit print to support CAA’s Professional Development Fellowship Program. Ringgold will be honored this year with CAA’s Distinguished Feminist Award.
Events at the Annual Conference
At the Annual Conference, CAA and Rutgers University Press are planning several events to promote The Eye, the Hand, the Mind. Judith K. Brodsky will operate a table outside Convocation, to be held at the Hilton New York on Wednesday evening, February 9, 2011, in the East Ballroom, Third Floor. Book signings with many of the contributors will take place in CAA’s Book and Trade Fair, also at the Hilton, on Thursday and Friday afternoons, February 10–11. Please check back later this month for more details on these events and more.
Table of Contents
Below is a list of the fifteen authors and their chapter titles:
- Susan Ball, “Introduction”
- Steven C. Wheatley, “The Learned Society Enterprise”
- Susan Ball, “The Beginnings: “Art for higher education, and higher education for Artists”
- Cristin Tierney, “A Stimulating Prospect: CAA’s Traveling Exhibition Program, 1929–1937”
- Barry Pritzker, “Cooperative Relationships with Museums”
- Craig Houser, “The Changing Face of Scholarly Publishing: CAA’s Publications Program”
- Julia A. Sienkewicz, “United the Arts and the Academy: A History of the CAA Annual Conference”
- Ofelia Garcia, “Mentoring the Profession: Career Development and Support”
- Ellen K. Levy, “Art in an Academic Setting: Contemporary CAA Exhibitions”
- Matthew Israel, “CAA, Pedagogy, and Curriculum: A Historical Effect, An Unparalleled Wealth of Ideas”
- Christine L. Sundt, “Visual Resources for the Arts”
- Judith K. Brodsky, Mary D. Garrard, and Ferris Olin, “Governance and Diversity”
- Karen J. Leader, “CAA Advocacy: The Nexus of Art and Politics”
- Paul B. Jaskot, “Conclusion: The Next 100 Years”
The book also includes four appendices that list CAA’s sixteen purposes, past presidents of the Board of Directors, volunteer and staff administrators, and the editors from the publications program.
CAA Announces the Recipients of the 2011 Awards for Distinction
posted by Christopher Howard — Jan 05, 2011
CAA has announced the recipients of the 2011 Awards for Distinction, which honor the outstanding achievements and accomplishments of individual artists, art historians, authors, conservators, curators, and critics whose efforts transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.
CAA will formally recognize the honorees at a special ceremony to be held during the 99th Annual Conference in New York, on Thursday evening, February 10, 2011, 6:00–7:30 PM, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Led by Barbara Nesin, president of the CAA Board of Directors, the ceremony will take place in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium (use the 83rd Street entrance) and precede the Centennial Reception in the museum’s Great Hall and Temple of Dendur (7:30–9:00 PM). In connection with CAA’s one-hundredth anniversary, past recipients of each award will introduce the winners of the same award, bringing past and present together. The awards ceremony is free and open to the public; tickets for the reception are $35. RSVP to the event on Facebook.
In addition, Nesin, will formally introduce the five recipients of CAA’s 2010–11 Professional-Development Fellowships in the Visual Arts: Alma Leiva, Sheryl Oring, Brittany Ransom, Mina T. Son, and Amanda Valdez. This fellowship program awards grants to outstanding MFA students who are nearing graduation. She will also has also recognized five additional artists who have received honorable mentions: Maria Antelman, Caetlynn Booth, Gregory Hayes, Ashley Lyon, and Georgia Wall.
The 2011 Annual Conference—presenting scholarly sessions, panel discussions, career-development workshops, art exhibitions, a Book and Trade Fair, and more—is the largest gathering of artists, art historians, students, and arts professionals in the United States.
Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Lynda Benglis
For more than forty years, Lynda Benglis has challenged prevailing views about the nature and function of art, producing sculpture, painting, video, photography, and installation that demonstrate extraordinary breadth and invention. She models the life of an artist lived according to the rhythm of her own creativity and curiosity, rather than to the beat of fashion or the market and its enormous but inconstant rewards. Benglis’s career inspires younger artists, not because she was a star as a young artist, or because she has now begun to be recognized as a major artist at a later date. Her work has been and continues to be an ever-shifting monument to the body in motion, as she herself continues to change and grow as an artist. Her retrospective exhibition, Lynda Benglis, opens at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York on February 9.
Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work
John Baldessari
Few artists of the postwar era are so influential—or so elusive of definition—as John Baldessari, who has made extraordinary contributions in such wide-ranging registers as Conceptualism, appropriation, and art education. This seeming paradox—in which the artist at once towers over contemporary art and often slips through its cracks (while also prompting his students to seek new alternatives)—no doubt arises, at least in part, from his subtle wit. This year’s retrospective exhibition, John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, which opened at Tate Modern in London, appeared at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and ends its tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (on January 9), firmly establishes his preeminence over the course of five decades of artistic production.
Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Mieke Bal
The protean career of Mieke Bal, Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences Professor at the University of Amsterdam, has traversed many fields in the humanities. Emerging as a brilliant biblical scholar with path-breaking books that explored the gendered nature of Old Testament narratives, Bal became a star in literary criticism with the English translation of her 1977 book Narratology (1985). Ever curious and creative, her interests then migrated to art history, where she rapidly challenged established methodological conventions with Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word Image Opposition (1991) and Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (1999)—not to mention her well-known essay “Semiotics and Art History,” coauthored with Norman Bryson and published in The Art Bulletin (1991). Applying philosophical principles to an enterprise too often obsessed with empirical “evidence,” Bal provocatively rethinks the status of artistic authorship, the nature of the text/image relationship, the structure of text/context relationships, and the character of historical time.
Frank Jewett Mather Award
Luis Camnitzer
Luis Camnitzer has translated his tricultural perspective—born in Germany, raised and educated in Uruguay, and a participant in the New York art world—into a tripled practice. As an artist, teacher, and critic, he has lucidly addressed the aesthetic, social, and political conundrums of our times with firm but low-key authority. His latest collection of writings, On Art, Artists, Latin America, and Other Utopias (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), speaks incisively to issues of cultural displacement, transnational aesthetics, and the peripheral condition of contemporary art. Written originally for international art journals, exhibition catalogues, and academic conferences, the essays, which date from 1969 to 2007, assume a universal address, and Camnitzer’s intricate perception, laced with humor and irony but not dependent on them, allows him reasoned closeness to, and passionate distance from, his myriad topics.
Distinguished Feminist Award
Faith Ringgold
Faith Ringgold has been a forceful voice for feminism, successfully and gracefully encapsulating crucial issues of race despite the often-contentious relationship between gender and race in enfranchisement movements over the last four decades. Her work not only captures the strength of black women in fighting slavery, oppression, and sexual exploitation, but it also chronicles the dreams of black women who sought to transcend circumstance and find a brighter future. Ringgold’s American People paintings (1963–67) and Black Light series (begun in 1967) sought to examine how traditional color values could be modified for black subjects. From there she explored traditions of “women’s work” in fabric, first in collaboration with her late mother and then in her Story Quilts, which have become her signature statement. As a committed activist, Ringgold was a founder of Women, Students, and Artists for Black Liberation and a cofounder and member of Where We At, a collaborative of black women artists in the 1970s and 1980s.
Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
William Itter
William Itter’s gifted teaching approach, dedication to the instruction of freshman students, and curricular innovations in foundations have had a momentous, immeasurable impact on art pedagogy for more than fifty years. During his tenure as director of the Fundamentals Studio Program at Indiana University in Bloomington, which he joined in 1969, Itter has mentored several generations of graduate students with insight and commitment, turning them into great artists and teachers from a time when the MFA degree was in its infancy to the present day. In a unique pedagogical approach, he has regularly and generously shared his museum-quality collection of ceramics, textiles, baskets, and sculpture with his students as pedagogical tools to help them understand how visual languages have manifested across cultures and times. Now professor emeritus of fine arts, Itter continues to exhibit his own painting and drawing in prestigious venues nationwide.
Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
Patricia Hills
An active, gifted teacher, faithful mentor, and valued colleague, Patricia Hills has maintained a prodigious career, producing scholarship that has profoundly shaped the history of American art and visual culture. Her textbook Modern Art in the USA: Issues and Controversies of the Twentieth Century (2001) has become standard reading in the field, and her work on Jacob Lawrence, Alice Neel, Stuart Davis, John Singer Sargent, and Eastman Johnson is highly esteemed. As professor of art history at Boston University, she is a creative, active, and engaged classroom leader who has developed an innovative style of teaching that emphasizes intellectual role-playing and demonstrates striking methodological openness. Hills’s admirable commitment to the time-demanding aspects of pedagogy, such as her rigorous attention to student writing and her ability to combine that investment with a remarkable publication record, are a model for students and teachers across the discipline.
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Molly Emma Aitken
Informed by history, connoisseurship, and contemporary artistic practice, Molly Emma Aitken’s The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) is an original contribution to the history of South Asian art. Aitken’s closely argued yet accessible account overturns long-held assumptions regarding the conservatism of Rajasthani miniatures, revealing the subtle yet powerful dynamism that animates this tradition. She acknowledges that the “enormous red-tipped eyes, narrow skulls, and squat or strangely arching bodies” of the figures depicted in these works can seem formulaic or alienating, but these images cannot be understood as mere repetitions of moribund conventions. Instead, Aitken shows that these court paintings were intended to elicit emotional states from the viewer, a conclusion she reaches through an innovative application of formal analysis and social history.
CAA announced the shortlist on December 15, 2010.
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award
Darielle Mason, ed.
Darielle Mason’s Kantha: The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection and the Stella Kramrisch Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2009) constitutes a model of how to make a catalogue about specific collections that far outreaches the task of honoring the collectors in question. Offering acute insights into an important region and an understudied medium, the book not only celebrates a lively vernacular textile tradition but also accords, for the first time, a comprehensive, sensitive treatment to this form of women’s domestic, creative, and social expression. In a series of richly grounded, engagingly written essays, Mason and her collaborators—Pika Ghosh, Katherine Hacker, Anne Peranteau, and Niaz Zaman—locate Kantha in wider sociocultural, historical, political, economic, and religious currents while tackling issues sometimes avoided in such studies, such as matters surrounding the quiltmakers’ agency.
CAA announced the shortlist on December 15, 2010.
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, and Collections
Yasufumi Nakamori
Yasufumi Nakamori’s Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture; Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2010) revisits a book of photographs of an elegant imperial villa in Kyoto, a seventeenth-century structure that interestingly foreshadows Western modernist design. While this errand may sound obscurantist to some, the author has a profoundly fascinating story to tell. It emerges that the architect Tange Kenzō (with Walter Gropius, who authored the original Herbert Bayer–designed book from 1960) extensively altered the vision of Ishimoto, a fledgling photographer, by drastically cropping the images to better align them with Bauhaus aesthetics, and to reinforce his own position in postwar Japanese debates on the relation of the modern to tradition. In this astutely, impeccably produced catalogue, Nakamori importantly rehabilitates Ishimoto’s initial vision of Katsura, reproducing his original, perfectly stunning photographs.
Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Ross Barrett
In “Rioting Refigured: George Henry Hall and the Picturing of American Political Violence,” published in the September 2010 issue of The Art Bulletin, Ross Barrett recovers the history of the artist and a landmark painting of an American laborer. Rooting his analysis in close observation, the author enlivens a work that could easily be dismissed as little more than an academic study of a male model. Calling attention to the title Hall gave his 1858 painting (The Dead Rabbit, a term New Yorkers applied to a street rowdy), to bruises on the man’s torso, and to the brick clutched in his right hand, Barrett identifies the figure as a working class, Irish immigrant. Barrett calls on an arsenal of resources—history, biography, iconography, pedagogical practices in the academy, reports and illustrations in the popular press, theories of the body and spectatorship, and ancillary images of the male athlete in mid-nineteenth-century America—to build a clear and convincing case for reading class conflict and civil disorder in this material body.
Art Journal Award
Kirsten Swenson, Janet Kraynak, Paul Monty Paret, and Emily Eliza Scott
Organized by Kirsten Swenson for the forthcoming Winter 2010 issue of Art Journal, “Land Use in Contemporary Art” is an impressive, useful, and theoretically significant series of articles on a new genre of aesthetic practices. Presented with relevant introductions and histories, the contributions address social, economic, and conceptual issues on Land Use, which has attributes related to but occasionally outside what is usually considered art. Especially impressive are the differences among the texts, particularly in the authors’ descriptions of their values and approaches, which range from self-conscious nonjudgementalism to explicit activism. (CAA members will receive the Winter 2010 Art Journal later this month.)
CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
Joyce Hill Stoner
Based at the University of Delaware’s Art Conservation Department, Joyce Hill Stoner is a highly respected scholar, a dynamic, beloved professor, and a meticulous conservator of paintings. As director of the doctoral program in preservation studies, which developed from the first art-conversation program in the United States that she founded at her school in 1990, she has developed an interdisciplinary focus on art history and conservation. In the words of one nominator: “Three decades ago the prospect of conservation as a scholarly discipline was, at best, nascent if not merely notional. Since that time conservation scholarship has come to embody inquiries that include the investigation of an artist’s materials and techniques, the documentation of a contemporary artist’s ideas and intentions, the history of conservation, and the development of new techniques in the conservation of art, to name but a few. Stoner has contributed essential research in each of these areas and has thereby fundamentally shaped the discipline.”
Contact
For more information on the 2011 Awards for Distinction, please contact Emmanuel Lemakis, CAA director of programs. Visit the Awards section of the CAA website to read about past recipients. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is located at 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028.
Updated on January 27 and February 3, 2011.
CAA VISITS ART SCHOOLS AND ART-HISTORY DEPARTMENTS IN NEW YORK AND PHILADELPHIA
posted by Christopher Howard — Dec 22, 2010
Andrea Kirsh, an independent scholar and curator, is CAA vice president for external affairs. In summer 2010, she and Linda Downs, CAA executive director, held meetings with leaders from art schools and departments in New York and Philadelphia.
Linda Downs and I had a great opportunity to learn more about the membership and its needs by talking with a number of department chairs and deans in New York this summer, despite the 95-degree heat, and then during torrential storms in Philadelphia (my home) in the fall. We wanted to let them know about the upcoming Centennial conference and, in particular, the opportunities for students. Such prospects include free Wi-Fi at the Students and Emerging Professionals Lounge, which will be open throughout the conference and doesn’t require a badge. If students can’t afford the $120 discounted fee to register for the entire conference, they can attend on a session pass and participate in numerous free events, such as Convocation, sessions planned especially for the Centennial, and all ARTspace events, including the Annual Artists’ Interviews. They can volunteer as room monitors in exchange for conference registration.
Mostly we visited with colleagues to listen. We asked what they thought CAA has been doing right, and how we might better serve their needs. We learned a lot. What struck me was the range of comments and the variety of useful suggestions. Nancy Barton, chair of the Art and Art Education Department at New York University (NYU), told us about her school’s program in Ghana, which made us realize that CAA’s revived International Committee should include artists as well as art historians. Downs and I then met with Pepe Karmel and Kathryn Smith, the outgoing and incoming chairs of NYU’s Art History Department. They teach undergraduates only, so we discussed ways the CAA conference might give their students taste of graduate school and professional life, as well as a chance to network.
David Rhodes, president of School of Visual Arts, opened our visit by vigorously accusing CAA of favoring art historians over artists on the issue of orphan works and opposing droit moral for artists. We let him know that CAA doesn’t favor either side on orphan works: the organization supports potential users making a serious search for copyright holders and, failing that, publishing the works and then paying copyright holders if they turn up. And we’ve never opposed droit moral. Rhodes’s major request of CAA was help in organizing foundations courses, which always receive the lowest ratings. We’ll bring the issue to the Education Committee, which regularly presents conference sessions on pedagogy, and will also consider it as a subject for the practical publications that CAA hopes to produce.
The issue of advocacy came up again during our visit with Patricia Rubin, director of NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts; the topic was the cost of reproduction rights. Rubin came to the institute from England, where several major museums recently eliminated charges for scholarly use of images. Downs told her that she regularly attends the American Association of Museum Directors’ meetings and works the crowd on the issue, but it could use help from a more concerted group of organizations.
In Philadelphia we began at the University of Pennsylvania, whose faculty has been very involved with CAA. Holly Pittman, chair of the Department of the History of Art, was pleased that I’d be addressing Penn graduate students about the upcoming conference during a departmental colloquium. At University of the Arts, Joe Girandola, director of the MFA programs in ceramics, painting, and sculpture, was enthusiastic about the value of CAA conferences and suggested that his school organize a group to attend the New York meeting in February. His colleague, Susan Viguers, director of the MFA program in book arts, thought CAA didn’t do enough for artists; however she hadn’t attended recent conferences and had no idea about ARTspace activities. She also didn’t realize that this year all of CAA’s Professional-Development Fellowships were targeted at artists because of their greater funding needs.
Stephen Levine, chair of art history at Bryn Mawr College, told us about calling CAA in the past to request demographic information about the field to use in hiring discussions. He said more such information would be useful, and also hoped CAA might help schools reach minority candidates whose work spans fields (archaeology, anthropology, history, and area studies) and who might not be alert to possibilities in art history. He further expressed the desire that CAA develop standards so that schools do not require letters of recommendation before candidates are shortlisted.
Timothy Rubb, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was emphatic that the most important thing CAA could do for museums was to circulate the word that art-history departments are not turning out sufficient students in areas such as East Asian and ancient Near Eastern art to fill curatorial positions. He also hoped CAA might address guidelines for museum-studies programs, as his institution finds that graduates of current programs have neither useful skills nor realistic expectations.
Gerald Silk, chair of the Art History Department at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, gave us a tour of his school’s new facilities and showed us a number of studios. We were able to talk with artists and art historians who work together successfully, asking them to suggest ways CAA might build on the presence of both groups at the Annual Conference. They suggested that art historians might want to join artists in participating in critiques. Hester Stinnett, printmaker and a Tyler vice dean, thought we should consider themed conferences, so that one meeting was distinguished from another. We liked the idea and said that the upcoming Centennial conference in New York was built around a series of interdisciplinary sessions chaired by pairs of scholars from different fields, and that the Los Angeles conference in 2012 was addressing art of the Pacific Rim. Stinnett also suggested, based on her experience with a recent graphics conference, that students preferred informal events away from the conference center to the usual formal sessions. While CAA always offers many offsite events at conferences, it will be a challenge to organize a conference for five thousand attendees if that cohort continues to prefer dispersed events.
People in the News
posted by CAA — Dec 17, 2010
People in the News lists new hires, positions, and promotions in three sections: Academe, Museums and Galleries, and Organizations and Publications.
To learn more about submitting a listing, please see the the instructions on main Member News page.
December 2010
Academe
Anthony Cutler, the Evan Pugh Professor of Art History at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, has been selected by the University of Oxford in England to hold the Slade Professorship of Fine Art for 2011–12, in association with All Souls College. Cutler will present eight lectures and four seminars during Oxford’s Hilary Term, January to March 2012.
Beauvais Lyons, professor of art at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, has been awarded a James R. Cox Professorship from 2010 to 2013. The Cox professorships honor faculty members who are outstanding teachers, who dedicate their service to the University, community, and their profession, and who model excellence in scholarship.
Bissera Pentcheva has been promoted to associate professor with tenure in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
Museums and Galleries
Aram Moshayedi, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has been appointed assistant curator at the Gallery at REDCAT, also in Los Angeles.
Klaus Ottmann, formerly Robert Lehman Curator at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York, has become the first curator at large at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. He will manage the Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art.
Organizations and Publications
Sandra Sider, an independent curator and critic based in New York, has been appointed president of Studio Art Quilt Associates, an international arts organization with headquarters in Storrs, Connecticut. She will serve in this capacity until 2013.