CAA News Today
Donate to Help Save Haitian Libraries and Archives
posted by Christopher Howard — Feb 08, 2010
The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), an international collaboration of educational, research, governmental, and nongovernmental institutions that provides access to electronic collections about the Caribbean, is seeking donations and technical assistance for the recovery and protection of Haiti’s libraries and their valuable historical, governmental, and cultural resources.
The Digital Library of the Caribbean has initiated the Protecting Haitian Patrimony Initiative, the goal of which is to help the country’s three largest heritage libraries and the National Archives, all of which were damaged in the January 12 earthquake. While the main structures remain standing, one library must be evacuated and most likely demolished and the others suffered significant damage, leaving their collections extremely vulnerable. As a result, significant resources will be needed to protect the already brittle, rare books and documents, now left in piles and covered with debris.
The damaged institutions have indicated they need gloves, masks, archival boxes, and temporary staff to assist in the clean-up. Later, they will need to replace broken shelving, repair or replace damaged electronic equipment, and provide more advanced restoration for many of the rarest books and documents.
Laura Probst, dean of FIU Libraries and a dLOC executive committee member, said protecting the historical documents is crucial in the earthquake’s aftermath.
“The collections in these archives represent the collective memory of the Haitian people, their culture, and Haiti’s role in the history of the western hemisphere and the world,” Probst said. “With this initiative we seek to preserve these invaluable resources for Haiti’s future, and for our own.”
FIU has a longstanding partnership with Haiti’s libraries and the National Archives through the Digital Library of the Caribbean and is one of the founding partners and administrators of dLOC, along with the University of Florida and the University of the Virgin Islands.
The Digital Library of the Caribbean’s operations are run out of the Latin American and Caribbean Center at FIU. Brooke Wooldridge, coordinator of dLOC at FIU, will be traveling to Haiti this week to assist the libraries and archives in documenting their needs and planning for the next phases of their recovery.
The Protecting Haitian Patrimony Initiative at first will channel resources to four institutions in Port-au-Prince:
- Archives Nationales d’Haïti houses both civil and state records, including births, marriage and death certificates, documentation of social works, civil governance and records of the Office of the President, and most government ministries
- Bibliothèque haïtienne des Pères du Saint-Esprit was founded in 1873 by the Fathers of the Holy Spirit. The library holds resources documenting the history of Haiti, French colonization, slavery, and emancipation, and 20th Century records, as well as newspapers and periodicals
- Bibliothèque haïtienne des Frères de l’Instruction Chrétienne was founded in 1912 by the Christian Brothers. It served as depository-library for Haitian imprints and holds titles not even available in the National Library. It also holds one of the most significant collections of Haitian newspapers
- Bibliothèque National d’Haïti was established in 1940 and also serves as a public library providing resources, study space, and research support. It has a small but significant collection of rare books, manuscripts, and newspapers
For more information or to contribute to the Protecting Haitian Patrimony Initiative, please visit the dLOC website or call dLOC at 305-348-3008.
The text was published earlier today on the website of Florida International University (FIU) and is reprinted here with permission by news.FIU.edu.
Student and Emerging Professionals Committee Offers Conference Sessions on Job-Interview Techniques
posted by Christopher Howard — Feb 05, 2010
Aristotle once remarked, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Interviewing well is one such skill that is built not only through sheer practice, but also with constructive feedback.
With this in mind, CAA’s Student and Emerging Professionals Committee will help you polish your interview style and tailor your comments appropriately during two events at the 2010 Annual Conference in Chicago. Both sessions will be held on Thursday, February 11, in the Student and Emerging Professionals (SEP) Lounge, found in the Wrigley Room, West Tower, Bronze Level, at the Hyatt Regency Chicago.
The first event is a morning lecture and discussion about interviewing techniques, where you can learn how to perfect an “elevator speech.” The second is a special afternoon panel devoted to practice interviews, conducted by seasoned CAA members. Both are moderated by Daniel Larkin, administrative assistant, Friends of Materials for the Arts; and Niku Kashef, artist and adjunct instructor, California State University, Northridge, and Woodbury University. Details are below.
Interviewing Strategies: Interview Techniques and Perfecting Your Elevator Speech
Thursday, February 11, 9:15–10:15 AM
This panel discussion will be an honest and frank discussion on interviewing techniques, focusing on gauging and adapting to the cues of the interviewer, appropriate levels of intellectual detail, and how to keep your “elevator speech” crisp.
Mock Interview Session
Thursday, February 11, 1:00–4:00 PM
These fifteen-minute mock interviews will allow conference attendees to practice interview questioning and techniques, applying what was learned in the morning session. CAA volunteer interviewers include art-history professors, studio-art professors, artists, and more. To schedule an interview, please call Daniel Larkin at 646-246-5497 between 10:00 AM and 10:00 PM (any day of the week). Please note that interviews will be made on a first-come, first-served basis.
The Students and Emerging Professionals Committee looks forward to dynamic discussions and hopes you can join us. If you have questions about these events, or about the committee itself, feel free to contact Daniel Larkin at the phone number listed above.
Reports on Art and Cultural Heritage in Postearthquake Haiti
posted by Christopher Howard — Jan 25, 2010
While most news updates in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in Haiti on January 12 are rightly focused on rescue efforts, information about losses of the country’s artistic, architectural, and cultural life have begun surfacing.
A report from the Rutland Herald, published a few days after the quake, told us about the death of Flo McGarrell, a thirty-five-year-old artist who had been the director of FOSAJ, a nonprofit art center in Jacmel, a French colonial town in southern Haiti.
The Biblical murals at the Cathedrale of Sainte Trinite (also known as the Episcopal Holy Trinity Cathedral) by some of Haiti’s best-known artists “are now largely dust,” according to Lesley Clark of the Miami Herald. The Centre d’Art, founded in the 1940s by a group of Haitian artists and writers in collaboration with an American educator, is badly damaged as well, and the Culture Creation Foundation has lost its offices and eighteen years of work.
Clark details other significant losses, including the private collections of Carmel Delatour, who herself perished in the quake, and Georges Nader. Nader and his wife survived, but hundreds of paintings by Philomé Obin and Hector Hyppolite, among many other artists, did not. About 100 of his 15,000 works were salvaged from the Musée d’Art Nader, which was part of the collector’s home. (Other sources number 50 surviving works from a 12,000 piece collection.) There is some good news: his son’s Nader Gallery in nearby Pétionville was barely touched.
Clark also reports that a Quebec-based Haitian critic and curator, Gerald Alexis, is working to mobilize arts groups to help preserve surviving works, and the Waterloo Center for the Arts in Iowa, which has a large collection of Haitian art, has established a relief fund. In addition, the Haitian government has deputized Daniel Elie, a former minister of culture, to conduct a nationwide inventory.
For the Wall Street Journal, Pooja Bhatia describes the loss of the Sacre Coeur church, including its stained-glass windows, as well as the National Cathedral in Port-au-Prince. She also provides a biography of Nader and an account of the Haitian art scene before and after the disaster. Bhatia notes that none of his works was insured.
Marc Lacey of the New York Times mentions the destruction of the Supreme Court building and the National Palace, a French Renaissance–style building that was home the Haiti’s president. Although no permanent collection of art and artifacts were housed there, the status of works in the ceremonial rooms is unknown. Some believe the collections in the nearby National Museum, which was built underground, survived, and the contents of the National Archives appear to have fared well.
Because of continuously unstable government situations, Lacy writes, “private groups and individuals had become some of the most important protectors of the country’s treasures. Many of the country’s most valuable historical texts, for instance, were owned by individuals, and preserved at their homes—rather than under glass or in wood-walled libraries as they might have been in Washington or other moneyed capitals.” The reporter encountered a sculptor, Patrick Vilaire, who was strategizing on how to protect art and books in private collection from looting. Vilaire said, “The dead are dead, we know that. But if you don’t have the memory of the past, the rest of us can’t continue living.”
UNESCO reports that the National History Park, an early-nineteenth-century complex in northern Haiti made up of the Palace of Sans Souci, buildings at Ramiers, and the Citadel, was probably spared. However, the colonial town of Jacmel in the south has witnessed the collapse of many buildings.
The International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) has assembled a Haiti Steering Committee to help formulate and guide the assistance and rescue effort of cultural heritage in the country, to begin after humanitarian rescue operations conclude. Gustavo A. Araoz, ICOMOS president, writes:
ICOMOS has assessed the situation and considers it impractical, perhaps even insensitive, to send team that will further tax the scarce local ability to provide food, shelter, medical attention and other basic services, especially while our Haitian colleagues and all the Haitian nation are still struggling for sheer survival while dealing with personal tragedies, loss of family and the wholesale destruction of their homes…. At this time, our efforts are focused on planning and preparing the mobilization process and all its logistics, on the field work methodology, and on the composition and training of the international and multidisciplinary volunteer teams in order that they be ready to be deployed as soon as the go-ahead to do so is given. It is important that this work be centralized in ICOMOS to ensure uniformity in the field evaluations and avoid redundancy.
Katherine Slick, executive director of US/ICOMOS, has announced that her organization has set up a fund to receive tax-deductible donations to support these efforts. Checks may be made out to US/ICOMOS-Haiti Recovery and mailed to: US/ICOMOS, Ste. 331, 401 F St. NW, Washington, DC 20001. An easy method to make your donation online will be set up soon on the US/ICOMOS website.
Reports on Art and Cultural Heritage in Postearthquake Haiti
posted by Christopher Howard — Jan 25, 2010
While most news updates in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in Haiti on January 12 are rightly focused on rescue efforts, information about losses of the country’s artistic, architectural, and cultural life have begun surfacing.
A report from the Rutland Herald, published a few days after the quake, told us about the death of Flo McGarrell, a thirty-five-year-old artist who had been the director of FOSAJ, a nonprofit art center in Jacmel, a French colonial town in southern Haiti.
The Biblical murals at the Cathedrale of Sainte Trinite (also known as the Episcopal Holy Trinity Cathedral) by some of Haiti’s best-known artists “are now largely dust,” according to Lesley Clark of the Miami Herald. The Centre d’Art, founded in the 1940s by a group of Haitian artists and writers in collaboration with an American educator, is badly damaged as well, and the Culture Creation Foundation has lost its offices and eighteen years of work.
Clark details other significant losses, including the private collections of Carmel Delatour, who herself perished in the quake, and Georges Nader. Nader and his wife survived, but hundreds of paintings by Philomé Obin and Hector Hyppolite, among many other artists, did not. About 100 of his 15,000 works were salvaged from the Musée d’Art Nader, which was part of the collector’s home. (Other sources number 50 surviving works from a 12,000 piece collection.) There is some good news: his son’s Nader Gallery in nearby Pétionville was barely touched.
Clark also reports that a Quebec-based Haitian critic and curator, Gerald Alexis, is working to mobilize arts groups to help preserve surviving works, and the Waterloo Center for the Arts in Iowa, which has a large collection of Haitian art, has established a relief fund. In addition, the Haitian government has deputized Daniel Elie, a former minister of culture, to conduct a nationwide inventory.
For the Wall Street Journal, Pooja Bhatia describes the loss of the Sacre Coeur church, including its stained-glass windows, as well as the National Cathedral in Port-au-Prince. She also provides a biography of Nader and an account of the Haitian art scene before and after the disaster. Bhatia notes that none of his works was insured.
Marc Lacey of the New York Times mentions the destruction of the Supreme Court building and the National Palace, a French Renaissance–style building that was home the Haiti’s president. Although no permanent collection of art and artifacts were housed there, the status of works in the ceremonial rooms is unknown. Some believe the collections in the nearby National Museum, which was built underground, survived, and the contents of the National Archives appear to have fared well.
Because of continuously unstable government situations, Lacy writes, “private groups and individuals had become some of the most important protectors of the country’s treasures. Many of the country’s most valuable historical texts, for instance, were owned by individuals, and preserved at their homes—rather than under glass or in wood-walled libraries as they might have been in Washington or other moneyed capitals.” The reporter encountered a sculptor, Patrick Vilaire, who was strategizing on how to protect art and books in private collection from looting. Vilaire said, “The dead are dead, we know that. But if you don’t have the memory of the past, the rest of us can’t continue living.”
UNESCO reports that the National History Park, an early-nineteenth-century complex in northern Haiti made up of the Palace of Sans Souci, buildings at Ramiers, and the Citadel, was probably spared. However, the colonial town of Jacmel in the south has witnessed the collapse of many buildings.
The International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) has assembled a Haiti Steering Committee to help formulate and guide the assistance and rescue effort of cultural heritage in the country, to begin after humanitarian rescue operations conclude. Gustavo A. Araoz, ICOMOS president, writes:
ICOMOS has assessed the situation and considers it impractical, perhaps even insensitive, to send team that will further tax the scarce local ability to provide food, shelter, medical attention and other basic services, especially while our Haitian colleagues and all the Haitian nation are still struggling for sheer survival while dealing with personal tragedies, loss of family and the wholesale destruction of their homes…. At this time, our efforts are focused on planning and preparing the mobilization process and all its logistics, on the field work methodology, and on the composition and training of the international and multidisciplinary volunteer teams in order that they be ready to be deployed as soon as the go-ahead to do so is given. It is important that this work be centralized in ICOMOS to ensure uniformity in the field evaluations and avoid redundancy.
Katherine Slick, executive director of US/ICOMOS, has announced that her organization has set up a fund to receive tax-deductible donations to support these efforts. Checks may be made out to US/ICOMOS-Haiti Recovery and mailed to: US/ICOMOS, Ste. 331, 401 F St. NW, Washington, DC 20001. An easy method to make your donation online will be set up soon on the US/ICOMOS website.
Free Webinar on the National Arts Index
posted by Christopher Howard — Jan 25, 2010
This week Americans for the Arts will present a free webinar on the findings of the first annual National Arts Index, a measure of the health and vitality of arts in the United States between 1998 and 2008.
Randy Cohen, vice president of local arts advancement at Americans for the Arts and index coauthor, will host the webinar on Wednesday, January 27, 2010, at 2:00 PM EST. Outlining the findings of the study, the webinar is free and available exclusively to professional members of Americans for the Arts and Half-Century Summit registrants. Registration is required.
How sustainable are arts and culture in our dynamic society? Are the economic resources and potentials sufficient for their future vitality? Join us in a lively discussion about the health and vitality of the arts sector through the lens of the National Arts Index. It’s illuminating and often provocative. Findings include trends in organizational capacity, changes in personal participation and creation, nonprofit vs. for-profit, funding, education, and more. Learn how the index can be used to spur conversations, shape strategies, and educate decision makers, and improve the state of the arts in America.
This webinar will introduce content that will also be covered in more depth at the Americans for the Arts Half-Century Summit.
Karl Lunde: In Memoriam
posted by CAA — Jan 09, 2010
William A. Peniston is librarian at the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey.
Karle Lunde
Karl Lunde, art historian and professor emeritus at William Paterson University, died peacefully at his home in New York City on December 27, 2009. He was 78.
He was born on Staten Island on November 1, 1931, to Karl and Elisa Lunde, who had emigrated to America from Norway in the 1920s. He was educated at Columbia University, where he received his BA in 1952 and MA in 1954, in the field of art history. From 1957 to 1970 he was an instructor in the School of General Studies at Columbia.
Lunde directed the Contemporaries, an art gallery on Madison Avenue devoted to modern painting and sculpture, from 1956 to 1965. While there, he was among the first to encourage the collecting and appreciation of modern fine prints and to introduce Americans to the work of Fernando Botero, Jose de Creeft, Antonio Music, and Ricardo Martinez. He was an early champion of several young American artists, now much celebrated, including Robert Kipniss, Richard Anuszkiewicz, and Lorrie Goulet.
In 1970 Lunde received his PhD in art history from Columbia University. His dissertation on Johan Christian Dahl was the first English-language study of this influential nineteenth-century Norwegian landscape painter. That same year, Lunde became a professor of art history at William Paterson University of New Jersey, where he taught until his retirement in 1996. Over the years, Lunde developed a wide-ranging repertoire of courses, including classes on American painting and sculpture, Asian art, prehistoric art, and European Neoclassicism and Romanticism. A mesmerizing lecturer, Lunde received a university award for teaching excellence. He also assembled an impressive collection of over 30,000 personally annotated color slides, which he used in teaching and which he later donated to Columbia University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library.
A frequent contributor to professional and scholarly journals, Lunde also wrote several books devoted to the works of twentieth-century American artists, including Isabel Bishop (1975), Anuszkiewicz (1977), Robert Kipniss: The Graphic Work (1980), and John Day (1984). He also amassed a large and important collection of rare books, art objects, and antiques and donated paintings to the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Newark Museum.
Lunde was predeceased by his partner, the artist and arts administrator Roy Moyer, and is survived by his brother, Asbjorn Lunde of New York.
CAA Announces 2010 Awards for Distinction
posted by Christopher Howard — Jan 08, 2010
CAA announces today the recipients of its 2010 Awards for Distinction. These annual awards honor outstanding achievements in the visual arts and reaffirm CAA’s mission to encourage the highest standards of scholarship, practice, and teaching.
CAA President Paul B. Jaskot will formally recognize the honorees and present the awards at Convocation, to be held during CAA’s 98th Annual Conference on Wednesday evening, February 10, 2010, 5:30–7:00 PM, at the Hyatt Regency Chicago. The Annual Conference—hosting 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.
With these awards, CAA honors the 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.
Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Suzanne Lacy
The continuum of Suzanne Lacy’s career mirrors the history of contemporary art: performance, installation, activism, social practice, and public engagement. An internationally regarded artist whose work includes installations, video, and performance, Lacy has addressed issues of sexual violence, aging, incarceration, illness, poverty, and a range of social-justice issues for almost four decades. Beginning in the early 1970s as a student at University of California, Fresno, and then in the Feminist Art Program at California Institute for the Arts, she was an integral and pioneering member of the Women’s Studio Workshop, Woman’s Building, and other important landmarks of feminist art. Since then, Lacy has maintained a career resolute in its commitment to feminism and social change.
Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work
Emory Douglas and Barkley L. Hendricks
Emory Douglas and Barkley L. Hendricks have long challenged the art world’s boundaries and received definitions in different but historically important ways. While working on opposite coasts and in different mediums, they transformed how African Americans saw themselves, and how they were seen. Emerging during the mid-1960s at a time of intense social upheaval, the two made work that was confrontational and incendiary, subversive and sly. While Douglas worked outside the confines of the art world as the Black Panther Party’s minister of culture, contributing to the Black Panther newspaper, Hendricks worked inside it without succumbing to the pressures and proscriptions against painting, particularly observational painting, and, to go one step further, portraiture.
Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Holland Cotter
As a staff art critic at the New York Times for more than ten years, Holland Cotter has been remarkable for his unwavering attention to the work of those less recognized—including women artists, artists of color, and artists from all five boroughs of New York—giving important visibility to work of all kinds. His subjects have ranged from Italian Renaissance painting to street-based communal work by artist collectives. Writing widely about non-Western art and culture as well, Cotter has introduced readers to a broad range of contemporary Chinese art and helped bring contemporary art from India to wider critical notice.
Frank Jewett Mather Award
Terry Smith
Terry Smith is that rare art and social historian able to write criticism at once alert to the forces that contextualize art and sensitive to the elements and qualities that inhere to the works of art themselves. His most recent book, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), contains a series of interrelated essays that unpack a vast range of topics and issues and take the reader on a theoretical tour through some of the world’s most influential art museums, laying bare their conflicted missions and studying the heightening distinction, and dispute, between modern and contemporary art.
Distinguished Feminist Award
Griselda Pollock
Griselda Pollock has earned a reputation not only as an influential scholar of modern and contemporary art and cultural studies, but also as a pioneer of feminist art, scholarship, and criticism. Her writings—including her groundbreaking 1980 monograph on Mary Cassatt and the pioneering volume Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), coauthored with Rozsika Parker—have had a major influence on feminist theory, feminist art history, and gender studies. Teaching at Leeds University since 1977, she was appointed chair in social and critical histories of art in 1990 and has served as director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory, and History.
Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
Dean Nimmer
Dean Nimmer, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts College of Art, has had a distinguished, dynamic, and astonishing career as an educator, empowering generations of artists through his enthusiasm and unbridled creativity. After thirty-four years of teaching painting, drawing, and printmaking in Boston, Nimmer thwarted all expectations for a retired professor by embarking on a second career as community arts educator, author, and provocateur. His recently published book, Art from Intuition: Overcoming Your Fears and Obstacles to Making Art (New York: Watson-Guptill, 2008), is a vehicle for him to share his wisdom with a new generation of artists and educators.
Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
Richard Shiff
The impact of Richard Shiff, who holds the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art and directs the Center for the Study of Modernism at the University of Texas at Austin, on the teaching of art history comes not only through his many scholarly contributions to the field, but also through his extraordinary forty years of active teaching and mentorship. Students and colleagues alike praise his long and influential career, describing how he teaches art history within many contexts, weaving together elements of formal analysis, connoisseurship, and theory within the larger web of human history and experience. Shiff’s talent for merging the sometimes-uncomfortable process of learning with playfulness and adventure instills a love of discovery and thought in all who have experienced his charisma, no matter their chosen life path.
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Cammy Brothers
When one considers the vast bibliography on Michelangelo, it is a tribute to Cammy Brothers that her book is such a readable and masterful work of new scholarship and substantial insight into both the artist’s working methods and his modes of thinking. Remarkably erudite, Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) marshals compelling visual evidence along with literary, historical, and philosophical support on behalf of a fresh and persuasive argument.
See the shortlist for the Morey award.
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award
Debra Diamond, Catherine Glynn, and Karni Singh Jasol, Gardens and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur
Gardens and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur (Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2008) documents an exhibition that dramatically debuted to wide audiences a body of nineteenth-century Jodhpur painting little known even to experts in the field. The authors Debra Diamond, Catherine Glynn, and Karni Singh Jasol, with their fellow contributors Jason Freitag and Rahul Jain, are to be commended for this publication, which makes a major contribution to the study of the art of Southeast Asia through the production of breathtaking color plates and a text that impressively grounds the work in the context of Jodhpur history and the Nath religious sect.
See the shortlist for the Barr award.
Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Michael Schreffler, “‘Their Cortés and Our Cortés’: Spanish Colonialism and Aztec Representation”
In his methodologically sophisticated and skillfully argued article, published in the December 2009 issue of The Art Bulletin, Michael Schreffler examines a key moment of cultural exchange and the misunderstandings to which it gave rise. Bravely departing from the consensus that Spanish conquistadors’ accounts of Aztec painting they saw at Antigua in 1519 constitute objective primary evidence about Aztec art, he offers instead a complex, nuanced, yet always clear explanation of what the accounts reveal about the colonizers and their subjective attitudes toward Aztec culture.
Art Journal Award
Joanna Grabski, “Urban Claims and Visual Sources in the Making of Dakar’s Art World City”
Joanna Grabski’s fascinating and ambitious essay, published in Art Journal in Spring 2009, is rich in first-hand information from her years of experience with the artists and institutions that make up this West African metropolis. Understanding the Senegalese capital as both site for innovative art practices, research, and international exchange, the author effectively demonstrates that in the hands of the city’s artists found objects have produced artworks and environments that meld their histories with languages of local form that reverberate with each other to piercing levels of impact.
CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
David Bomford
David Bomford, currently associate director for collections at the J. Paul Getty Museum, is celebrated for more than forty years of scholarship, practical application, and leadership in the field of paintings conservation. Beginning in 1968 as an assistant restorer at the National Gallery in London, he assumed the role of senior restorer by 1974, a position he held until 2005. In the course of his work, Bomford has advanced the study of art conservation to new levels by combining science, art history, and practical conservation knowledge in his extraordinary list of publications, and by spearheading the influential interdisciplinary study of technical art history. He wrote the single-most useful book for introducing both students and the public to the profession of paintings conservation, Conservation of Paintings (London: National Gallery Publications, 1997), which has become a standard reference guide for the discipline.
Contact
For more information on the 2010 Awards for Distinction, please contact Emmanuel Lemakis, CAA director of programs. Visit the Awards section of the CAA website to read about past awards recipients.
December 2009 Issue of The Art Bulletin Published
posted by Christopher Howard — Dec 15, 2009
The December 2009 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of art-historical scholarship, has just been published. It will be mailed to those CAA members who elect to receive it, and to all institutional members.
For the first time, a work of twenty-first-century art graces the cover of the esteemed journal—Kehinde Wiley’s Portrait of Andries Stilte (2005). The painting accompanies an essay by Krista Thompson exploring how contemporary artists such as Wiley and Luis Gispert combine the visual language of hip-hop with late Renaissance and Baroque painting techniques.
Four essays precede Thompson’s. Leading off is Michael Schreffler, who analyzes how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spaniards described the practice of Aztec painting by looking through the lens of European art theory. Next, Emma Barker contends that Jean-Baptiste Greuze evokes both the innocence and vulnerability of children in his A Child Playing with a Dog, while implicating the viewer in the child’s fate.
Matthew Rampley’s essay expresses an opposing view of the Vienna school of art history, not as progressive and aesthetically liberal, but as a proponent of an imperialist outlook, related to the cultural politics of Austria-Hungary in the early-twentieth-century. The next contributor is Roberta Wue, who investigates the ways late-nineteenth-century Chinese artists positioned themselves in the marketplace through the classifieds in the Shanghai newspaper Shenbao. She also examines the changing relationship between artists and urban audiences in the late Qing era.
The December issue of The Art Bulletin also contains six reviews of books about tapestries at the Tudor court, engravings of Native American Indians, the gardens of Versailles and panoramic landscape painting, Buckminster Fuller, Tony Conrad, and issues on museum ownership of antiquities. Please read the full table of contents for more details.
GOOGLE BOOK SETTLEMENT
posted by Christopher Howard — Nov 09, 2009
With this feature on the Google Book Settlement, CAA hopes to better inform you about the issues at stake, with links to articles and editorials from authors and reporters supporting or criticizing the settlement. CAA’s constituency includes both creators and users of books, and the Committee on Intellectual Property has taken up the matter for consideration and is currently considering what position, if any, to recommend.
For nearly five years, Google has been scanning books, most still under copyright, for its Google Library Book Project. More than ten million books, including many that are out of print, have been scanned since 2004.
Proponents of Google Books, which include authors, researchers, librarians, disability-rights advocates, and more, have been enthusiastic about the possibilities it offers them. However, opponents of the project—other authors, academics, publishers, and organizations such as the Open Book Alliance (which includes Microsoft, Yahoo!, Amazon, and the Internet Archive), as well as foreign governments (Google has been scanning books in languages other than English)—have been equally fierce.
Among other individuals and groups, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers protested the unauthorized copying of in-copyright books by Google. Two suits, one of them a class action, were filed against the internet company in the fall of 2005; a Copyright Class Action Settlement between Google and the author and publisher class representatives was announced in October 2008.
Objections to the settlement and statements of support were filed by September 8, 2009. The US Department of Justice launched an inquiry into the settlement and filed a statement on September 18, raising numerous concerns, including one that the agreement might violate antitrust laws. The settlement is pending before US District Judge Denny Chin, who held a status conference on October 7. At the status conference, the parties announced that they would be filing an amended settlement agreement, and Judge Chin set a November 9 deadline to do so. The parties also announced that the deadline for filing claims to receive cash payments for books that were scanned prior to May 6, 2009, has been extended to June 5, 2010.
The original settlement was complex, and parts of it will likely change during the renegotiations. One important feature was that copyright holders had the responsibility to limit previews of their out-of-print, in-copyright works, that is to say, the author or publisher would have had full rights to tell Google to remove the book if it has already been scanned or to refrain from displaying the contents of that book. Otherwise, Google could have displayed larger previews of books without the copyright holder’s permission. Unless copyright holders opted out of the settlement by September 4, 2009, their works—both in and out of print—that have already been scanned would have been subject to the settlement. As mentioned before, however, these terms may change.
The status of copyrighted images within books scanned by Google is not yet clear. Artists and photographers (except illustrators of children’s books) were excluded from the old settlement. Important questions, which may or may not be addressed in the revision, include: Will copyrighted images be reproduced in volumes available in Google Books? Will the authors or publishers who signed (sometimes limited) reproduction-rights be liable for infringement?
Recent Press and Points of View
Below are summaries of recent articles on Google Books and the settlement, which can give you a better understanding of the issue.
“Depending on one’s perspective, the landmark book-search deal represents either a literary cartel that would lead to higher prices and less competition—or a breakthrough that would make millions of hard-to-find books available to anyone online.” So writes the authors of “Google wants to be world’s librarian,” published in the October 2009 issue of eSchool News. This text is a broad account about the issues at stake and a good place to start for beginners.1
Kenneth Crews of the Copyright Advisory Office (CAO) at Columbia University Libraries/Information Services was present at the October 7 status conference and gives an account on the CAO blog.
Alexis Madrigal, a science writer at Wired.com who is working on a book about the history of green technology, makes an impassioned case for Google Books, without which his study would have been impossible to write. He also cites online sources such as JSTOR, Proquest, arXiv, and of course Google Books as indispensable resources for twenty-first-century research, which save authors and scholars immeasurable time and money. The comments section of his article contains a useful dialogue among Madrigal and his readers; some new ideas, such having an NGO or other “profit-neutral org” take over the stewardship of Google’s initial work, have come forth in the discussion.
Miguel Helft of the New York Times addresses the prehearing issues in “In E-Books, It’s an Army vs. Google,” with a good number of objections about Google becoming too powerful, locking out competitors, and neglecting user privacy. Meanwhile in the same paper, Lewis Hyde address a subissue in the settlement, that of orphan works, whose rights Google could exploit—and profit from—in the absence of copyright holders who come forward to claim their books. “Of more than seven million works scanned by Google so far,” Hyde estimates, “four to five million. appear to be orphaned.” The settlement was “a smart way to untangle the orphan works mess, but it has some serious problems…. [P]arties to the Google settlement are asking the judge to let them be orphan guardians but without any necessary obligation to the public side of the copyright bargain.”
At the Huffington Post, Peter Brantley calls Google’s plans wrong and even dangerous in “Google Books: Right Goal, Wrong Solution.” Even though digitizing millions of books and making them searchable internationally is a laudable goal, “[a]ny settlement these parties reach will necessarily consider their own commercial gain first, trampling public rights in the process.” Congress, he feels, is the place in which the issue should be dealt.
Tim Wu at Slate writes that Google Books is “great for a researcher like me, but as a commercial venture it is almost certainly a perpetual money-loser.” With their stacks of old and unpopular books, brick-and-mortar libraries aren’t generally run for profit, and public utilities like sewer systems aren’t built “without prodding or—dare I say it—a monopoly of some kind.” Scanning books isn’t a profitable enterprise, he notes. (Even eSchool News reports that years ago Microsoft scrapped plans for a book-scanning project years ago due to unprofitability.) Wu does concede that the settlement “isn’t perfect and needs to be better to serve the public.”
November 9 Update
In addition to his own post from last week about his thoughts on the pending revision to the Google Books settlement, Kenneth Crews of the Copyright Advisory Office at Columbia University provides links to two recently published articles in the November issue of the Economist’s Voice:
- Paul Courant, “What’s at Stake in the Google Books Search Settlement”
- Pamela Samuelson, “The Google Book Settlement: Real Magic or a Trick?”
Matthew Sag of DePaul University’s College of Law has recently published a substantial essay on the settlement, “The Google Book Settlement and the Fair Use Counterfactual,” which is available for download on the Social Science Research Network.
Using Google Books
According to Google, pages from books scanned without permission are not currently displayed in Google Books. However, the company is presenting preview pages from some titles through the Google Partner Program, which is not part of this settlement. The Partner Program scans only books that are approved by their copyright holders. (Of course, public-domain books are available in their entirety.) If you believe Google is displaying pages from your book without your permission, you should contact your agent, publisher, or Google directly.
Note
1. Reprinted with permission (http://www.eschoolnews.com; info@eschoolnews.com). © 2009 eSchool News, all rights reserved.
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — Oct 27, 2009
CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, curators, photographers, collectors, architects, museum directors, and other professionals and important figures in the visual arts.
- Maurice Agis, a London-born sculptor and creator of Dreamspace, an inflatable, interactive sculpture that explores color, form, movement, light and sound, died on October 12, 2009, at the age of 77
- Maryanne Amacher, a composer of site-specific sound installations that explore psychoacoustic properties, died on October 22, 2009. She was 66
- Ruth Duckworth, a modernist sculptor of abstract ceramic forms, a muralist, and a ceramics teacher at the University of Chicago, died on October 18, 2009, at the age of 90
- Amos Ferguson, a Bahamian folk artist known for his depictions of biblical scenes and of the landscape and culture of his country, died on October 19, 2009. He was 89.
- Gerald Ferguson, an artist who established the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where he taught for thirty-eight years, as a major international center of conceptual art, died on October 8, 2009, at the age of 72
- Suzanne Fiol, the founder of Issue Project Room, an art and performance space in Brooklyn, died on October 5, 2009. She was 49
- Nat Finkelstein, the house photographer for Andy Warhol’s Factory for three years in the mid-1960s, died on October 2, 2009. He was 76
- Donald Fisher, a cofounder of the Gap who collected modern art and supported the arts and civic culture in San Francisco, died on September 27, 2009, at the age of 81
- Anne Friedberg, an art historian, theorist, and teacher whose work combined media and film studies, art history, and architecture, died on October 9, 2009, at the age of 57
- Bernard Leo Fuchs, an illustrator whose works for Cosmopolitan, Sports Illustrated, and TV Guide combined realism with avant-garde techniques, died on September 17, 2009. He was 76
- Lawrence Halprin, a landscape architect whose best-known works include the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, DC, and Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco, died on October 25, 2009 at the age of 93
- Jenelsie Walden Holloway, an artist, advocate for African American art, and a teacher at Spelman College for thirty-eight years, died on October 15, 2009, at the age of 89
- Henry T. Hopkins, former director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hammer Museum, founder of the Huysman Gallery in Los Angeles, and professor and chair of the Department of Art at UCLA, died on September 27, 2009, at the age of 81
- Barry Horn, executive director of the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art in Brownsville, Texas, died on October 24, 2009. He was 59
- Michael Komechak, a teacher of English and art and a curator at Benedictine University in Illinois, where he helped to acquire over 3,700 works of art from around the world, died on August 19, 2009. He was 77
- Barbara Morris, a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum who was one of the first scholars to treat the study of Victorian art and design as an academic discipline, died on July 15, 2009, at the age of 90
- Robert M. Murdock, an independent curator and scholar of modern and contemporary art who was also a museum director and curator, died on October 8, 2009, at the age of 67
- Emile Norman, an artist and sculptor whose best-known works are the glass mosaic window and sculptural reliefs created for a Masonic temple in San Francisco, died on September 24, 2009. He was 91
- Irving Penn, a fashion photographer whose elegant, minimal works appeared in the pages of Vogue and on the walls of museums, died on October 7, 2009, at the age of 92
- Monica Pidgeon, an editor at Architectural Design who promoted the work of major modernist architects, died on September 17, 2009. She was 95
- Don Ivan Punchatz, an illustrator of novels, magazines, and the first Star Wars film poster, died on October 22, 2009, at the age of 73
- Richard Robbins, a painter, etcher, and sculptor who was the head of fine art at Middlesex University in London, died on July 28, 2009, at the age of 82
- George Sample, an architect who founded the nonprofit Chicago Architectural Assistance Center, which provided design and construction support to inner-city neighborhoods, died on October 4, 2009. He was 90
- Harry Sefarbi, a painter and teacher at the Barnes Foundation whose colorful paintings can be found in many museum collections, died on September 28, 2009. He was 92
- Charles Seliger, an Abstract Expressionist painter whose small works of imaginary forms were influenced by Surrealism and automatism, died on October 1, 2009, at the age of 83
- Nancy Spero, an artist and feminist who combined drawing, painting, collage, and printmaking to create politicized work, died on October 18, 2009 at the age of 83. She was a member of Women Artists in Revolution and a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery, which promotes women’s art
- Alfred Brockie Stevenson, an American realist painter known for his nostalgic images of American life, died on September 1, 2009. He was 89
- Dietrich von Bothmer, curator emeritus of Greek and Roman antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a professor at the Institute of Fine Art at New York University, died on October 12, 2009, at the age of 91. He helped to develop the museum’s collection of Greek vases into one of the largest in the world
Read all past obituaries in the arts on the CAA website.