CAA News Today
Support CAA with a Donation to the Centennial Campaign
posted by Nia Page — Apr 12, 2011
The year 2011 marks the College Art Association’s one-hundredth anniversary, a celebratory occasion for any organization but particularly so given CAA’s dynamic influence in shaping the study and practice of the visual arts over the past century. Without dedicated members like you, CAA would not be where it is today. Show your support with a donation to the 2011 Centennial Campaign.
The Centennial Campaign is an opportunity for you to help CAA support the field and give back to its members. Your contributions allow us to provide fellowships to MFA students, keep conference rates affordable, and subsidize the memberships of student, retired, and low-income members. Donations also help publish an information-packed website, which features calls for entries and papers and listings for grants and fellowships in the Opportunities section, as well as job classifieds in the Online Career Center. Additionally, your donations support advocacy at a time when art is, once again, under political attack.
Contributions at every level are appreciated and will be acknowledged publicly; they are also 100 percent tax deductible. Your generous gift will both sustain the organization now and guarantee its leadership role over the next one hundred years.
New Officers for the Board of Directors
posted by Vanessa Jalet — Mar 28, 2011
At its February 2011 meeting, the CAA Board of Directors elected new officers—four vice presidents and a secretary—from among its members to serve one-year terms, from May 2011 to April 2012. Elected officers (other than the president) hold their positions for one year and may be reelected to a second term. For more information about the election process for officers, please read Article VII, Section 5 of the CAA By-laws.
The new vice president for external affairs is Patricia McDonnell, director of the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University in Kansas. She will work closely with Linda Downs, CAA executive director, and Nia Page, CAA director of membership, development, and marketing, on fund-raising initiatives and advocacy matters. McDonnell succeeds Andrea Kirsh, an independent scholar and curator based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who will rotate off the board in May.
The board reelected Maria Ann Conelli, director of the American Folk Art Museum in New York, to a second term as vice president for committees. She will act as a liaison between the board and the nine Professional Interests, Practices, and Standards Committees and coordinate committee work that advances CAA’s goals. Conelli will also chair the Nominating Committee, the Professional-Development Fellowships jury, and the Appointed Directors Nominating Committee.
Anne Collins Goodyear, who was vice president for publications for two years, has been named vice president for Annual Conference. She will chair the Annual Conference Committee, which determines conference programming and content, and work with CAA staff to devise and implement flexible session scheduling and formats for the event. Goodyear, who is assistant curator of prints and drawings at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC, succeeds Sue Gollifer, an artist and principal lecturer in fine art at the University of Brighton in England, who served as vice president for Annual Conference for two years.
Taking over from Goodyear as vice president for publications is Randall C. Griffin, professor of art history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He will oversee CAA’s publications program, serve as chair of the Publications Committee, and be a resource for the editorial boards of The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and caa.reviews.
DeWitt Godfrey, an artist and associate professor of art and art history at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, was reelected secretary. This officer informs each board member of upcoming meetings and notifies all CAA members of the Annual Members’ Business Meeting. The secretary also attends the above meetings, as well as all Executive Committee sessions, and records the votes and the minutes of the proceedings in a book to be kept for that purpose.
Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences Established in Response to Congress
posted by CAA — Mar 23, 2011
Last month the American Academy of Arts and Sciences announced the creation of the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, a national group dedicated to bolstering teaching and research in the humanities and social sciences—fields that are critical to culture, education, and America’s economic competitiveness.
Leading the commission are two cochairs: Richard H. Brodhead, president of Duke University, and John W. Rowe, chairman and chief executive officer of Exelon Corporation. The group also includes prominent Americans from the humanities, the social sciences, the physical and life sciences, business, law, philanthropy, the arts, and the media, including Chuck Close, George Lucas, Emmylou Harris, Billie Tsien, and John Lithgow. Other representatives come from the Institute for Advanced Study, Lockheed Martin, the Association of American Universities, the J. Paul Getty Trust, the American Council of Learned Societies, TIAA-CREF, and Adobe Systems, among others. Many commission members serve as presidents of universities and colleges nationwide.
The commission formed in response to a bipartisan request from the United States government. Senators Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee) and Mark Warner (D-Virginia) and Representatives Tom Petri (R-Wisconsin) and David Price (D-North Carolina) gave the following charge:
What are the top ten actions that Congress, state governments, universities, foundations, educators, individual benefactors, and others should take now to maintain national excellence in humanities and social scientific scholarship and education, and to achieve long-term national goals for our intellectual and economic well-being; for a stronger, more vibrant civil society; and for the success of cultural diplomacy in the twenty-first century?
The commission’s findings will serve as a companion to a forthcoming report of the National Academies on the future of the research university and on ways to strengthen the American scientific enterprise. The group will draw on past research efforts, data from the Humanities Indicators, and the experience and expertise of a multidisciplinary group of national leaders to recommend specific, actionable steps to maintain the nation’s excellence in the humanities and the social sciences. The commission expects to complete its work over the next eighteen to twenty-four months.
For more information on the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, please read the National Humanities Center press release.
CAA Welcomes Four New Affiliated Societies
posted by Emmanuel Lemakis — Mar 17, 2011
At its February 2011 meeting, the CAA Board of Directors approved applications from four organizations to become affiliated societies, which are groups of art professionals and other organizations whose goals are generally consonant with those of CAA, with a view toward facilitating intercommunication and mutual enrichment.
Art, Literature, and Music in Symbolism and Decadence
Established in 2010, Art, Literature, and Music in Symbolism and Decadence (ALMSD) focuses on European culture from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. Working to demonstrate the philosophical connection between arts in different countries that were affected by Symbolist ideas, the organization facilitates the exchange of ideas among scholars through an annual newsletter and a conference held every four years at the Allerton Park and Retreat Center in Monticello, Illinois, or at other international locations.
Asian American Women Artists Association
The Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA), founded in 1989, is dedicated to the visibility and documentation of Asian American women in the arts. Through exhibitions, publications, and educational programs, the organization offers thought-provoking perspectives that challenge societal assumptions and promote dialogue. AAWAA activities include a resource portal; regular lectures in art, ethnic, and Asian American studies classes; thought-provoking exhibitions, panel discussions, literary readings, and workshops; and books and catalogues on Asian American women artists.
The Curator’s Network
A new organization established last year by Independent Curators International, the Curator’s Network brings together curators from around the world who want to share their work and exchange information with other professionals in the field. Among the sponsored activities are an online Curator’s Index; a forum for members to share information, called the Network Directory; and Dispatch, a bimonthly newsletter. More than one hundred curators have joined the network.
National Alliance of Artists from Historically Black Colleges and Universities
Founded in 2000, the National Alliance of Artists from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (NAAHBCU) brings art and art education to the forefront of member institutions. It also provides comprehensive activities that offer opportunities for professional artists employed at member institutions. In addition, NAAHBCU highlights the artistic achievements of artists through exhibitions; provides scholarships for promising art majors; meets annually to confront issues that affect art departments at historically black colleges and universities; shares information on current technology, art history, and art trends; and disseminates employment opportunities.
CAA’s Directory of Affiliated Societies is currently accepting updates. If you are an officer or the official CAA contact for an organization, please send an updated text, in the same format as your current listing, to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs, either as a Word attachment or pasted in the body of an email.
March 2011 Issue of The Art Bulletin Features Essays on the Bocca della Verità and on German Painting and Czech Cubism
posted by Christopher Howard — Mar 15, 2011
Articles in the March 2011 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, examine a range of topics that include the Bocca della Verità in Rome and German painting and Czech Cubism. Two additional essays 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.
In “The Mouth of Truth and Forum Boarium,” Fabio Barry evaluates the Bocca della Verità in Rome from numerous perspectives to recover its origin as an antique drain cover in the form of the god Oceanus, relating the Bocca to the myth of the Romanized Hercules from the reign of Hadrian. Moving to modern times, Eleanor Moseman uses the case study of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Bohumil Kubiša to explore the relation of German painting and Czech Cubism, revealing “style” as a central issue in the international dialogue of the visual arts of early-twentieth-century Central Europe.
Two essays focus on historical Chinese art and culture. In “The Buddha’s Finger Bones at Famensi and the Art of Chinese Esoteric Buddhism,” Robert H. Sharf argues that the “finger bone” relics of the Buddha, discovered in 1987 in a crypt beneath the Famensi (Dharma Gate Monastery) in Shaanxi Province, China, could be considered as “art.” For her contribution, Jeehee Hong examines the peddler as a skeletal puppeteer in Li Song’s thirteenth-century painting, The Skeletons’ Illusory Performance, to unveil a midimperial Chinese visual commentary on the relations among performance, the everyday world, and death.
In the Reviews section, Robert S. Nelson surveys several books on art, architecture, and urbanism in the Turkish capital from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, including Shirine Hamadeh’s The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century and Murat Gül’s The Emergence of Modern Istanbul. Stephen J. Campbell examines the understudied field of Renaissance portrait medals through a recent book and a two-volume catalogue, while Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom consider the implications of Finbarr Barry Flood’s Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter, a book about the material culture of the region from western Afghanistan to northern India from the eighth to the thirteenth century. Last, Kirk Ambrose reviews the English translation of Friedrich Kittler’s Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, a theoretical study of visuality and technology that considers such topics as Renaissance perspective, photography, film, and television, and the computer.
Please read the full table of contents for more details. The next issue, to be published in June 2011, will feature essays on Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Edgar Degas, and Philip Guston.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for March 2011
posted by CAA — Mar 10, 2011
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following artists’ conversation and three 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 or touring.
March 2011
Margarita Cabrera, contents of Backpack (Green), 2006, vinyl, thread, fabric, and mixed media, 16 x 13 x 4 in. (artwork © Margarita Cabrera; photograph provided by the artist, Walter Maciel Gallery, and the Sweeney Art Gallery)
Margarita Cabrera: Pulso y Martillo (Pulse and Hammer)
Sweeney Art Gallery
Culver Center of the Arts, University of California, Riverside, 3834 Main Street, Riverside, CA 92501
February 5–April 2, 2011
For years, Margarita Cabrera has worked on a number of collaborative projects that combine contemporary art practices, indigenous Mexican folk art and craft traditions, and relations between the United States and Mexico. These projects have actively investigated the creation of fair working conditions and the protection of immigrant rights. This exhibition includes a survey of past works from 2003 to 2008; a performance, called Florezca Board of Directors: Performance; and a new installation, Pulse and Hammer.
Taking place on Saturday, March 5, Florezca Board of Directors: Performance will be the first meeting of the “leaders” of Florezca Inc., a multinational corporation founded by Cabrera for undocumented people in the US. Consisting of Cabrera, students, and others, the performance will mix rehearsed statements with improvisation. Also a collaboration with Juan Felipe Herrera, a creative-writing professor at Riverside, Florezca Board of Directors: Performance is part of daylong series of events exploring issues around the border, undocumented workers, and a maquiladora-based economy.
For Pulse and Hammer, Cabrera will install approximately one thousand copper butterflies in Culver Center’s North Atrium Gallery, creating a swarmlike environment that represents the manic transformation of the Mexican economy.
Yoko Ono and Kara Walker in Conversation
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019
March 8, 2011
In conjunction with the exhibition Contemporary Art from the Collection, the artists Yoko Ono and Kara Walker will discuss their art and how social, political, and gender issues inform their work. Glenn Lowry, director of the museum, will moderate the conversation, which takes place on Tuesday, March 8, at 6:30 PM.
Maira Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz’s cover of the New Yorker
Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World)
Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128
March 11–July 31, 2011
The illustrator, author, and designer Maira Kalma is perhaps best known for the cartoon map of New York City that she created with Rick Meyerowitz for a New Yorker cover from December 10, 2001. Organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, this retrospective exhibition includes works on paper from a thirty-year period and highlights lesser-known photographs, textiles, and performances.
Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay
Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution
2 East 91st Street, New York, NY 10128
March 18–June 5, 2011
With her husband Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay founded the early-twentieth-century movement, Orphism. This exhibition focuses on her work with fashion and textiles that display the same strong colors and geometric shapes as her paintings. Included are designs from her fashion line, Atelier Simultané, created in Paris during the 1920s, and textiles she designed in the 1930s for the Metz & Co., a department store in Amsterdam.
Affiliated Society News for March 2011
posted by CAA — Mar 09, 2011
American Council for Southern Asian Art
The American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA) has elected three new officers. Stephen Markel, curator and head of the South and Southeast Asian Art Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California, is the new president. Serving as vice president will be Deepali Dewan, curator in the Department of World Cultures at the Royal Ontario Museum and assistant professor in the Department of Art at the University of Toronto. Last, John Cort, professor in the Department of Religion at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, has become a board member.
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries
The University of Houston will host the 2011 AAMG annual conference. Clockwise from top left: the Blaffer Art Museum, the Moores Opera House, and the Roy G. Cullen Building (photographs provided by the University of Houston)
The Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) will hold its next annual conference, “Who’s Muse? Challenges to the Curatorial Profession in Academic Museums,” on May 21, 2011, at the University of Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum in Texas. Curatorial practices in academic museums and galleries are sometimes highly experimental. Faculty members from a wide variety of fields and with limited curatorial experience periodically recommend and help lead exhibition projects. The organization of exhibitions likewise engages both graduate and undergraduate students, museum-education professionals, librarians, and even area school classes in project leadership roles. Exhibitions thus generated offer unorthodox approaches to curatorial planning and execution. Appropriate to a scholarly mission, they can stretch disciplinary boundaries, cross-fertilize disciplinary methodologies, and generate wholly new paradigms for knowledge. Academic museums and galleries thus become vital centers of original research, interdisciplinary dialogue, and participatory learning. While this democratic and laboratory approach to curatorial practice contributes in significant ways to the groundbreaking research and all-important teaching missions of universities and colleges, it can also challenge conventional standards of the curatorial profession. Through the presentation of outstanding case studies and lively roundtable discussions, the 2011 conference will explore the pros and cons of the broad curatorial approaches found in academic museums and galleries.
Association of Historians of American Art
The Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA) seeks to sponsor a scholarly session for CAA’s 2013 Annual Conference in New York. The scholarly session, lasting two-and-half hours and part of the regular conference program, tends to be similar to the type of sessions generally held at CAA, although sometimes more topical issues are addressed. Please read the submission guidelines and send your session proposal by April 1, 2011, for notification by June 1.
Foundations in Art: Theory and Education
Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE) and the Mid-America College Art Association, another CAA affiliated society, will present a joint conference, called “ON STREAM,” at the Ball Park Hilton in St. Louis, Missouri. Taking place March 30–April 2, 2011, the conference will explore how artists and teachers develop and foster creativity in the second decade of the third millennium. For more details, visit the FATE website or contact Jeff Boshart, conference coordinator.
Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture
The Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA) congratulate the recipients of the Mary Vidal Memorial Fund for graduate student travel. Georgina Cole, a PhD student at the University of Sydney in Australia, will present a paper, “Eavesdropping: Rethinking Space and Subjectivity in the Eighteenth Century,” at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, The second recipient, Susan Wager, a doctoral student at Columbia University in New York, presented a paper, “Madame de Pompadour’s Indiscreet Jewels: Boucher, Reproduction, and Luxury in Eighteenth-Century France,” at CAA’s 2011 Annual Conference in New York.
Historians of German and Central European Art and Architecture
The Historians of German and Central European Art and Architecture (HGCEAA) have announced the results of its recent board election: Marsha Morton is president; Rose-Carol Washton Long is treasurer; Eva Forgacs is secretary; Emily Pugh is newsletter editor; and Jay Clark, James van Dyke, Keith Holz, and Juliet Koss are at-large board members.
Historians of Netherlandish Art
Jan van Eyck, Virgin and Child with Saints Catherine and Michael and a Donor (the Dresden or Giustiniani Triptych), 1437, oil on oak panel, 33.1 x 27.5 cm (center), 33.3 x 13.6 cm (wings) (artwork in the public domain)
The Historians of Netherlandish Art (HNA) have published the Winter 2011 issue of its open-access, online peer-reviewed, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, which features articles by Noëlle L. W. Streeton on Jan van Eyck, Jürgen Müller on Albrecht Dürer, Stephanie Porras on peasant imagery, and Alexandra Onuf on Claesz Visscher’s landscape prints.
The HNA Fellowship for Scholarly Research, Publication, and Travel for 2011 has been awarded to Christopher D. M. Atkins of Queen’s College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, for his book Frans Hals’s Signature Style: Painting, Subjectivity, and the Market in Early Modernity (forthcoming from Amsterdam University Press).
Italian Art Society
The Italian Art Society (IAS) has selected Alison Luchs, curator of early European sculpture at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, to present the 2011 Italian Art Society–Kress Foundation Lecture. Her talk, entitled “The Wake of Desiderio: His Impact on Sculpture of the Late Quattrocento,” will take place at the historic Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence at 4:00 PM on June 8, 2011.
Leonardo/The International Society for the Arts, Science, and Technology
Leonardo/The International Society for the Arts, Science, and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST) has partnered with the Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences to present DC Art and Science Evening Rendezvous (DASER), a monthly discussion forum on art and science projects in or near Washington, DC. Historically, the artist has communicated, educated, and preserved the ideas of science. But how does the creative processes of artists inform the work of scientists, engineers, physicians, and experts from other disciplines? Each DASER will feature presentations by such practitioners along with time for discussion and socializing. The monthly series began on February 16 at the Keck Center in Washington, DC. The next events take place on March 16 and April 21.
National Council of Arts Administrators
The National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA) has announced the names and affiliations of its 2011 board officers and members. Officers for the coming year are: Carolyn Henne, Florida State University, Executive Director; Jim Hopfensperger, Western Michigan University, President; Cora Lynn Diebler, University of Connecticut, Secretary; Andrea Eis, Oakland University, Treasurer. Board members for 2011 are: John Kissick, University of Guelph; Sally McRorie, Florida State University; Kim Russo, Ringling College of Art and Design; Sergio Soave, Ohio State University; and Georgia Strange, University of Georgia.
The next NCAA annual meeting, entitled “Push: The Artistic Engine of Innovation,” will take place November 2–5, 2011, at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. The NCAA board seeks proposals for presentations, sessions, and/or panels for the annual Arts Administrators Workshops, scheduled for Wednesday, November 2. Initial proposals should be no more than 350 words. Topics may include but are not limited to: leadership and management; promotion and tenure; interpersonal communication; succeeding with external constituencies; budget management; personnel evaluation; personal growth; career paths; and case studies (in any area related to arts administration). Please send proposals and inquiries to Sergio Soave by May 16, 2011. Selected entries will be asked to submit a 1,000-word abstract by June 20. The NCAA board will formally acknowledge the presenters, whose names will be posted to the NCAA website.
Society for Photographic Education
The Society for Photographic Education (SPE) seeks proposals for its forty-ninth national conference, called “Intimacy and Voyeurism: The Public/Private Divide in Photography” and taking place March 22–25, 2012, in San Francisco, California. Topics, which need not be theme based, may include but are not limited to: image making, history, contemporary theory and criticism, new technologies, effects of media and culture, educational issues, and funding. The conference offers six presentation formats: (1) Lecture: presentation on historical topic, theory, or another artist’s work; (2) Imagemaker: presentation on your own artistic work (photography, film, video, performance and installation, multidisciplinary approaches); (3) Panel: a moderator-led group discussing a chosen topic; (4) Demonstration: a how-to presentation; (5) Graduate Student: short presentation of your own artistic work and a brief introduction to your graduate program (you must be enrolled in a graduate program at the time of submission); and (6) Academic Practicum Workshop: lectures and panels that address educational issues. SPE membership is required to submit; proposals are peer reviewed. Visit the SPE website for information on membership and to read the full proposal guidelines. Deadline: June 1, 2011.
Society of Architectural Historians
On March 1, 2010, a multimedia edition of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH Online), led by the editors Hilary Ballon and David Brownlee with the stewardship of the University of California Press, became available to individual members of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH). As part of the Current Scholarship Program at JSTOR, JSAH Online has begun publishing papers that incorporate images, video, and geographic information system (GIS) technologies, enabling readers to engage in new ways and better understand their arguments. SAH has also mounted a campaign to encourage submissions of this kind and is working with other societies in the arts to do the same. Read more on the Resource Shelf blog and view a sample multimedia article in JSAH Online. SAH also offers instructional videos about how to prepare multimedia content for JSAH Online and other internet-based journals.
In addition, SAH will hold its sixty-fourth annual meeting in New Orleans, April 13–17, 2011. The meeting will focus on new research in the history of architecture, landscapes, and urbanism in 150 papers delivered by historians, preservationists, and architects from around the world. Additional offerings at the meeting include evening receptions, networking opportunities, and a vast array of architecture and landscape tours of the city and region. This year, SAH will offer attendees the opportunity to perform community service at the Priestly School, a charter high school devoted to architecture and the arts.
Southeastern College Art Conference
The Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) will hold its sixty-seventh annual meeting at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Georgia this fall. Taking place November 9–12, 201, the conference theme is “Text + Texture: an intersection of academics and the arts.” The conference headquarters will be the DeSoto Hilton Hotel, located in the heart of historic Savannah. Featuring extensive panels and sessions for the exchange of ideas and concerns relevant to the practice and study of art, the conference will include the annual awards luncheon and the fourteenth annual members’ exhibition, as well as offer a rich array of tours, workshops, and evening events. Dan Cameron, founding director of Prospect New Orleans, will present a plenary address and jury the SECAC members’ exhibition, to be held at one of SCAD’s premier venues.
The conference website offers PDFs of both the call for papers and the call for entries. Please download and review the documents and follow the instructions for proposals on the website. The deadline for papers is April 20; the deadline for entries is April 1. For more information, write to secac@secollegeart.org or secac2011@scad.edu. All are welcome to SECAC membership, which is required for exhibitors.
Southern Graphics Council International
For a panel called “Coaction: Innovative Printmaking Collaborations” for the 2012 CAA Annual Conference in Los Angeles, the Southern Graphics Council International (SGCI) invites proposals from artists, curators, and historians who have participated in or have written about innovative community print projects that contribute to social change, the environment, communications, and technology. Historically, printmakers are artists who enjoy the sense of community that a print shop creates by sharing their images, ideas, and techniques. They also produce multiples, thus increasing their reach to individuals outside their immediate community in the practice of exchanging prints. The use of the multiple, the shared history of fine art printmaking with commercial graphics, and the need for printmakers to share equipment and expertise have encouraged the propagation of community print projects—many that have redefined the role of printmaking as a vehicle for social innovation. This panel focuses on printmaking collaborations that extend beyond the traditional print exchange or work that is done in the print shop, hence examining partnerships between printmakers and the communities they live in; the impact that collaborations have in these communities; and the innovations in printmaking that have resulted. Please email your proposal—which must include a one-page abstract; 1–4 JPEGs of referenced images (no more than 1.5 MB each); and short CV—to Candace Nicol. Deadline: May 1, 2011.
Visual Resources Association
The Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress, in partnership with the Visual Resources Association (VRA), is now hosting the VRA Core, a data standard for descriptions of works of visual culture and images that document them. VRA has also published user support materials, such as VRA Core examples, FAQs, and presentations.
VRA’s Data Standards Committee formed the Embedded Metadata Working Group (EMwg) to explore use of embedded metadata in images of artworks and other cultural resources. EMwg is developing guidelines and tools to make embedded metadata easy to create and use. The group’s first product is a free custom File Info Panel (beta) for use with Photoshop and Bridge in Adobe’s Creative Suites 4 and 5. This panel allows users—including students, faculty, and image-collection assistants—to enter rich descriptive metadata that can then be ingested into a database or used on a local computer to find and organize images. You can download the info panel and user guide, which contain instructions for installing and using the panel.
The Modern Art Iraq Archive Offers New Hope for Lost Works of Modern Art from Iraq
posted by Christopher Howard — Mar 04, 2011
The newly created Modern Art Iraq Archive (MAIA) is part of a long-term effort to document and preserve the modern artistic works from the Iraqi Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad, most of which were lost and damaged in the fires and looting during the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq by the United States in 2003. As the site shows, little is known about many works, including their current whereabouts and their original location in the museum. The lack of documents about modern Iraqi art prompted the growth of the project to include supporting text. The site makes the works of art available as an open-access database in order to raise public awareness of the many lost works and to encourage interested individuals help document the museum’s original and/or lost holdings.
The MAIA site is the culmination of seven years of work by its project director, Nada Shabout, professor of art history and director of the Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural Studies Institute at the University of North Texas in Denton. Since 2003, Shabout has been collecting information on the lost works through intensive research, interviews with artists, museum personnel, and art-gallery owners. Shabout received two fellowships from the American Academic Research Institute in Iraq, in 2006 and 2007, to conduct the first phase of data collection. In 2009, she teamed with colleagues at the Alexandria Archive Institute, a California-based nonprofit organization dedicated to opening global cultural heritage for research, education, and creative works. The team won a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a comprehensive archive of works once housed in museum’s galleries. These significant national treasures are displayed in an format that invites worldwide use, including the Iraqi national and expatriate communities. Users are encouraged to help identify and further document individual pieces.
MAIA aims to map the development of modern art in Iraq during the twentieth century and be a research tool to scholars, students, authorities, and the general public. It also strives to raise awareness of the rich modern heritage of Iraq. Furthermore, the creation of an authoritative, public inventory of the collection will not only act as a reminder of its cultural value and thus hopefully hasten its return, but it will also help combat smuggling and black-market dealings of the works.
Audio Downloads from the 2011 Annual Conference
posted by Christopher Howard — Mar 01, 2011
The 2011 Annual Conference in New York boasted an incredibly diverse array of sessions. Audio recordings for sixty-three of the panels—including “Performative Tendencies,” “Color and Nineteenth-Century American Painting,” and “The Erasure of Contemporary Memory”—are now available for sale.
A set of MP3 audio recordings from the New York conference is available for only $149.95, either as a download or on CD-ROMs. Individual sessions, available only as downloads, are $24.95 each. Please visit Conference Media to view the list of sessions and to order.
The full range of art history is represented in sessions such as “The Afterlife of Cubism,” “The Global Eighteenth Century,” and “(Re)Contextualizing Precolumbian Art in the Twenty-First Century.” CAA also recorded many other popular 2011 sessions, such as “Parallel Practices: When the Mind Isn’t Focused on Art,” which featured the artists Robert Gober, Vija Celmins, Petah Coyne, Janine Antoni, and Philip Taafe, as well as the two-part “Dark Matter of the Art World.” Other topics about contemporary art include “Contemporary Drawing: Purpose, Practice, Performance,” “Textiles and Social Sculpture,” and “The Art of Pranks.” Curators will be especially interested in “Recurating: New Practices in Exhibition Making” and “Artist as Curator.”
Whether you took part in, attended, or missed a particular conference session, these recordings are a must-have for your library, research, or teaching. Listen to them while walking across campus, while driving in your car or using public transportation, or while relaxing in your home.
In addition to the New York sessions, you can also purchase recordings from the past five conferences: Boston (2006), New York (2007), Dallas–Fort Worth (2008), Los Angeles (2009), and Chicago (2010). See CAA’s Conference Audio section for details.
Apply for a Spring Grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund
posted by CAA — Feb 24, 2011
CAA is accepting applications for spring 2011 grants through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to a generous bequest by the late art historian Millard Meiss, the twice-yearly program supports book-length scholarly manuscripts in any period of the history of art and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher but require further subsidy to be published in the fullest form.
The publisher, rather than the author, must submit the application to CAA. Awards are made at the discretion of the jury and vary according to merit, need, and number of applications. Awardees are announced six to eight weeks after the deadline. Please review and follow the application guidelines carefully, as some requirements have changed. Deadline: April 1, 2011.