CAA News Today

News from the Art and Academic Worlds

posted by Christopher Howard — Feb 11, 2015

Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

President Proposes Funding Increases for Cultural Agencies and Institutions

President Barack Obama has released his administration’s fiscal year 2016 budget request to Congress. In the budget, the president recommended a range of increases in federal funding for the majority of national arts and cultural agencies, programs, and institutions. Specifically, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities are being recommended for a $2 million increase. (Read more from Americans for the Arts.)

Obama Requests $147.9 Million for NEH in 2016

The Obama administration today released a budget request of $147,942,000 for the National Endowment for the Humanities for fiscal year 2016. The NEH, the independent federal agency that will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary this year, awards grants supporting research, education, and public programs in history, philosophy, literature, and other areas of the humanities. (Read more from the National Endowment for the Humanities.)

Smithsonian American Art Museum Launches Effort to Create National Art Database

The Smithsonian American Art Museum is leading a group of fourteen institutions from around the country in an effort to build a shared—and searchable—online database that could spur research and scholarship about American art. One of the first in the nation to make its entire collection available through Linked Open Data, the museum received a grant from the Andrew M. Mellon Foundation to create the American Art Collective to expand the project to other museums. (Read more from the Washington Post.)

Dangers of Art (Students)

The beginning was innocent enough: a class assignment to photograph the rising and setting of the sun. Yet instead of tracking sunlight for several weeks, the camera, strapped to a major Atlanta bridge, was blown up. This case of mistaken identity over a Georgia State University student’s art project caused an unusually large commotion. But this is far from the first time student artwork has been mistaken as a dangerous device or drawn the attention of law enforcement. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

The “Wild West” of Academic Publishing

Holding the odd bestseller aside, the digital disruption of the print world that is transforming commercial publishing also affects publishers of scholarly books and journals—and is changing structures for teaching, research, and hiring and promoting professors. Time-honored traditions appear vulnerable to overhaul or even extinction. Sarah Thomas, vice president for the Harvard Library, says, “We are still in the Wild West of sorting out how we will communicate our academic developments effectively.” (Read more from Harvard Magazine.)

How Reviews on Rate My Professors Describe Men and Women Differently

Easy or demanding? Boring or engaging? And what about homework? The student-evaluation site Rate My Professors contains a huge stockpile of information about what college students think of their instructors. And thanks to a new tool created by a Northeastern University professor, those millions of reviews can be mined to reveal students’ biases about male and female professors. (Read more from Chronicle of Higher Education.)

New York Museums Are Banning Selfie Sticks? What a Heroic Idea

At last, someone has stood up to the swilling tide of pseudodemocracy that threatens to turn museums into playgrounds and shopping malls. The selfie stick is now banned in many New York museums. The doctrine that a museum should be full of people at all times, however uninterested they may be, means that most big museums and art galleries will do anything, literally anything, to make themselves more approachable. (Read more from the Guardian.)

Inside Look

Last fall, as I was finishing my doctorate and applying to tenure-track jobs outside my institution, I served on a search committee for assistant-professor openings at my doctoral institution in my areas of study with my dissertation mentors—all of whom are senior scholars. Although I could have declined the service, I recognized that being on the committee would help me gain insights that could improve my own job search. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Filed under: CAA News —

Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for the 2015 Annual Conference

posted by CAA — Feb 10, 2015

Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events 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.

2015 Annual Conference in New York

The CWA Picks for the New York conference are dedicated to Kalliopi Minioudaki for her tremendous efforts in working on the Picks during her tenure on the CWA (2012–15). You will be missed!

Cover of the catalogue for Judith Scott: Bound and Unbound

Judith Scott: Bound and Unbound
Brooklyn Museum
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Fourth Floor, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238
October 24, 2014–March 29, 2015

Bringing together sculptures and works on paper that span the eighteen years of her career, this much awaited exhibition is the first survey of Judith Scott’s work that Matthew Higgs has described as “one of the most important bodies of work—‘insider’ or ‘outsider’—produced anywhere and under any circumstances in the past twenty years.”

Judith and her twin sister Joyce were born in Columbus, Ohio. Judith was diagnosed with Down syndrome, and considered retarded due to learning difficulties caused from undiagnosed deafness. At the age of eight she was tragically separated from her sister and spent the next thirty-five years of her life as ward in Dickensian institutions for the disabled and the discarded. Her art production begun after Joyce decided to become Judith’s legal guardian and introduced her to a visionary studio art program, the Creative Growth Art Center.

Judith Scott developed a unique and idiosyncratic method to produce a body of work of remarkable originality and visual complexity. Often working for weeks or months on individual pieces, she begun by pilfering and assembling together all sorts of objects; she then enveloped and intertwined them with miscellaneous threads, twines, strings, ropes, fibers, somewhat protecting and concealing their core. As the art historian Lucienne Peiry says, her unconventional textile sculptures “are endowed with an intens

e power of expression: they resemble giant multicolored cocoons and … are evocative of magical fetishes” holding a special connection to life and death. Moreover, although it does not appear that her work was directed by intention “these sculptures conceal a secret that their author always took great care to hide…. There is no doubt but that the sculptures themselves play an essential role in embodying the physical presence—that of ‘the other twin’—throughout the feverish act of creation. Judith Scott’s approach thus involved a process that may seem paradoxical because, on one hand, it consisted of dissimulating and concealing, and on the other hand, of growing and shaping…The emotional and physical reunion with her sister led Judith Scott to recover an identity, and then to develop an intimate experience at a fantasy level where she sublimated the tearing apart of which she was a victim.”

Cover of the catalogue for Sturtevant: Double Trouble

Sturtevant: Double Trouble 
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10009
November 9, 2014–February 22, 2015

Elaine Sturtevant (American, 1924–2014) began “repeating” the works of her contemporaries in 1964, using some of the most iconic artworks of her generation as a source and catalyst for the exploration of originality, authorship, and the interior structures of art and image culture. Beginning with her versions of works by Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, she initially turned the visual logic of Pop art back on itself, probing uncomfortably at the workings of art history in real time. Yet her chameleonlike embrace of other artists’ art has also resulted in her being largely overlooked in the history of postwar American art. As a woman making versions of the work of better-known male artists, she has passed almost unnoticed through the hierarchies of midcentury modernism and postmodernism, at once absent from these histories while nevertheless articulating their structures.

Far more than copies, her versions, for instance, of Johns’s flags, Warhol’s flowers, and Joseph Beuys’s fat chairs are studies in the action of art that expose aspects of its making, circulation, and canonization. Working primarily in video since 2000, the artist remained deeply engaged with the politics of image production and reception, using stock footage from Hollywood films, television, and advertising to point to the exhaustion built into much of postwar cultural production.

This exhibition is the first comprehensive survey in America of Sturtevant’s fifty-year career and the only institutional presentation of her work organized in the United States since her solo show at the Everson Museum of Art in 1973. Rather than taking the form of a traditional retrospective, the exhibition offers a historical overview of her work from a contemporary vantage point, interspersing more recent video pieces among key artworks from all periods of her career.

Marisol: Self-Portrait Looking at The Last Supper
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Lila Acheson Wallace Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art, Design, and Architecture, Gallery 909, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028
October 8, 2014–April 5, 2015

For the first time in nearly thirty years, Marisol’s monumental sculptural assemblage, Self-Portrait Looking at The Last Supper, has been on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, complementing the retrospective celebration of the renowned yet understudied sculptor by her recent retrospective that travelled to El Museo del Barrio this fall.

Inspired by Leonardo’s monumental fresco, Marisol (Maria Sol Escobar, b. 1930) faithfully rendered the painting’s composition into three dimensions to create this 30-foot-long installation. The biblical scene depicts Christ and his Apostles at the Passover meal, with each disciple reacting to the announcement by Jesus that one of them would betray him. The work is primarily carved from wood, with a rough, sketchy technique that includes painted and drawn elements. Marisol is particularly skillful at joining seemingly incompatible components. In fact, the seated figures are neither fully rounded nor consistently flat, oscillating between two and three dimensions. The artist chiseled the central figure of Christ from a block of salvaged New York City brownstone. Christ’s physical solidity and ashen, serene appearance contrast with the blackened, twisted figure of Judas to provide the composition’s emotional tension. In Marisol’s sculptural version of the Last Supper, a novel figure is added opposite the tableau. It portrays the artist contemplating the scene and with a hieratic presence that shares visual affinities with the stocky, solemn figures of Precolumbian sculpture.

Plastic Age: IN/OUT: Banners and Sculptures by Barbara Madsen
New York Public Library
Mid-Manhattan Library, Corner Room, 455 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016
February 3–May 21, 2015

Barbara Madsen’s work is a hybrid practice between photography, print, and sculpture. Her banners, a series of photographs of inanimate plastic objects occupy the windows of the Corner Room on Fifth Avenue and 40th Street. Madsen’s sculptures facing Fifth Avenue are architectural plywood structures, jutting walls, boxed, minimal, acute—stacked on top of each other. The angled surfaces are covered with photographs of objects that have been consumed and discarded. Vibrant color plays a central tenant in her cast of objects: the child’s crimson fireman’s ladder; a lime-colored dome from a hair drier; and cobalt, yellow, scarlet plastic remnants of toys. Within the complex shadows and highlights of the images, dust and flaws are naked—the invisible becomes visible. Madsen is an artist and associate professor in the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University known for her work in photography, prints, sculpture, and installation.

E. E. Smith: The Ballad of Delia
Kim Foster Gallery
529 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011
January 8–February 14, 2015

The Ballad of Delia is an installation of new photo-based oil prints by E. E. Smith. This piece is part of a series in which Smith uses song forms as the point of departure for her work. The Ballad of Delia consists of ten panels of varying sizes that tell the story of Delia Greene’s murder, an account best known from covers by Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. Like the singers, and especially the now-forgotten songwriters, Smith takes liberties with the telling of the tale, presenting various details and asking the viewer to fill in the story.

Each panel represents a clue to this murder mystery, yet stylistically they differ. The lush landscape harkens back to the evocative paintings of Albert Pinkham Ryder, drawing us into the location of the crime. Other images are shockingly explicit: the menacing axe and thick footprints allude to police photographic evidence, while the male silhouette suggests a mug shot. And the hand holding a teacup (the victim perhaps?) makes reference to film stills.

In contrast to the songs—and most likely any contemporaneous news accounts—Smith deliberately dispenses with a time-dependent linear narrative, opting instead to display several moments simultaneously. The effect is not so much “the truth” about a murder but “a truth” told without words. The trope of the murder-mystery in American culture is ubiquitous, and Smith’s iteration in The Ballad of Delia makes a compelling episode.

Louise Nevelson: Collage and Assemblage
Pace Gallery
534 West 25th Street, New York, NY 1001
January 24–February 28, 2015

Pace Gallery presents an exhibition of Louise Nevelson’s rarely seen collages, accompanied by a catalogue by Germano Celant. Nevelson began producing collages in the mid-1950s, inspired by her longstanding interest in Cubism and a correspondence with Jean Arp. Prompting her remark “the way I think is collage,” collage signifies an important aspect of her work.

The exhibition features the artist’s earliest collages, produced along her monochromatic black, gold, and white sculptures, by using scraps of wood and metal collected from the streets outside of her Little Italy studio. The show also includes examples of her later unpainted assemblages that manifest a departure from her monochromatic work, while continuing to prove the centrality of collage in her practice. Among the last works of her life, two large-scale, black wall reliefs, including Spring Street (1984), which was installed in Nevelson’s home from its completion until her death, are also part of this exhibition.

Nevelson (b. 1899 Kiev; d. 1988, New York) emigrated from czarist Russia as a child and grew up in Rockland, Maine. As an adult she returned to Europe, where she studied with Hans Hoffmann. Upon her return to the United States, she served as Diego Rivera’s assistant and later as an art instructor in the Works Progress Administration. In 1941, Nevelson had her first solo exhibition and, in 1946, was included for the first time in the Whitney Annual exhibition, which she would participate in eleven more times. The artist exhibited her first all-black sculptures in the mid-1950s. Although she worked in white and gold and later with painted steel, her developments in the 1950s sustained her work throughout the rest of her life. Considered today as one of America’s most significant artists, Nevelson has been the subject of one-artist exhibitions and retrospectives at numerous institutions in the US, and her work is found in many prominent museums and public collections worldwide.

Yael Bartana
Petzel Gallery
456 West 18th Street, New York, NY 10011
January 8–February 14, 2015

Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce a new exhibition by the Israeli artist Yael Bartana (b. 1970, Kfar-Yehezkel, Israel) that debuts her latest two films: Inferno and True Finn. This will be the gallery’s second solo show with the artist.

Bartana studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, the School of Visual Arts in New York, and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. She has had several solo exhibitions held at various international venues and in New York. Bartana was Poland’s choice for the 2011 Venice Biennale, where she was the first non-Polish citizen to represent the country. Bartana’s photography, film, and sound works investigate society, spirituality, and politics. Her films, film installations, and photographs challenge the national consciousness that is propagated by her native country of Israel. Homeland, return, and belonging are the central questions that she explores. Her investigation includes ceremonies, public rituals and social diversions that are intended to reaffirm the collective identity of countries. Working outside the country, Bartana observes it from a critical distance. Her early films were primarily registrations in which aesthetic interventions, including soundtracks, slowing the image, and specific camera perspectives, played a role.

In Inferno, Bartana films the inauguration of a grand temple, the destruction of it, and the worship of its debris. The starting point is the construction of a replica of Solomon’s Temple in São Paulo by an evangelical neo-Pentecostal church called the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG). The temple is built with stones imported from Israel, as UCKG intends to bring part of the Holy Land to São Paulo, thus inverting the traditional path taken by pilgrims who would leave Brazil for the Holy Land. The film’s conflation of place, history, and belief allows Bartana to weave connections between the complex realities of São Paulo and Jerusalem. Shot and edited with stylistic references to Hollywood action epics, her film employs what she refers to as “historical pre-enactment,” a methodology that commingles fact and fiction, and prophesies and histories. Using this powerful cinematic language, Inferno combines histories of antiquity in the Middle East with Brazil’s contemporary hybrid culture.

True Finn is a documentary-style film asking eight people from Finland one simple question: who is a true Finn? Bartana’s objective with True Finn, produced in connection of Finland’s Pro Arte Foundation, was to create and record a utopian moment that would yield an answer to this question. As a result of an open call, eight Finnish residents of different ethnic, religious, and political background came to live together for seven days in a house in the countryside. Life, discussions, and specifically designed assignments were filmed, with the edited material forming the core of the artwork and allowing True Finn to probe questions about identity, nationhood, and belonging.

Diana Thater: Science, Fiction
David Zwirner
533 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011
January 8–February 21, 2015

David Zwirner presents new work by Diana Thater in the form of a new type of installation that involves an enclosed video projection, ceiling screen, and light, as well as two new video walls. Thater is one of the most important video artists working today. Since the early 1990s, she has created a wide range of film, video, and installation-based works whose sculptural forms engage spatial perception in physical and conceptual terms. Her work pushes the boundaries of how new-media art is displayed. Through a combination of the temporal qualities of video and the architectural dimension of its installation, Thater’s work explores the artifice of its own production and its capacity to construct perception about the world through its image. Natural diversity, wildlife, and conservation have been persistent themes in the artist’s work. While her in-depth studies of ecosystems and animal behavior propose observation as a kind of understanding in itself, her ethical position is implicit in the work, providing subtly political views of the sublime.

In Science, Fiction, Thater focuses on the dung beetle and the intricate navigation system it deploys in disposing balls of animal excrement, its main source of nutrition. Recent studies have revealed that the species uses the Milky Way to orientate itself at night, currently the only insect known to do so. Thater’s video projection appears at once abstract and particular, juxtaposing the sophistication of the small insects’ navigation systems with the close-up views of their earthy setting in a meditative fusion of macro and micro realms. Deploying a new type of installation, Thater presents the footage on a screen attached to the ceiling, projected from within a closed-off, freestanding box. Mirroring the setup of the scientific experiment with the dung beetles, the white square further references the Light and Space movement in California in the 1960s. The exhibition is illuminated by soft blue lights, creating an environment that mimics the evening sky, while the walls of the box themselves are lit from below, which offers the illusion of levitation. Also on view are two video walls showing the Milky Way, respectively titled Sidereus Nuncius and The Starry Messenger.

Born in 1962 in San Francisco, Thater lives and works in Los Angeles. She studied art history at New York University before receiving her MFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Over the past decade, her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide, and she is the recipient of many awards. In fall 2015, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will host a midcareer survey of her work, which will coincide with an installation at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado.

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook
SculptureCenter
44-19 Purves Street, Long Island City, NY 11101
January 25–March 30, 2015

SculptureCenter presents Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, the Thai artist’s first retrospective in the United States. The exhibition, which brings together over twenty artworks spanning over a decade of the artist’s career, includes video, sculpture, and photography, presenting significant highlights as well as works that have rarely been viewed in the US. As such the show features The Class and Conversation series, for which Rasdjarmrearnsook conducts discussions with corpses, and the video Village and Elsewhere: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes; Jeff Koons’ Untitled, and Thai Villagers (2011), in which a Buddhist monk leads a comical conversation about these two Western paintings in a temple. A more recent group of works featured focuses on the status of dogs in Thai culture and beyond. SculptureCenter will also include works produced specifically for this exhibition.

Rasdjarmrearnsook is one of the leading visual artists working in Southeast Asia. She is based in the northern city of Chiang Mai in Thailand, where she teaches in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Chiang Mai University. Rasdjarmrearnsook is internationally known for videos and installations that profoundly explore aspects of human experience and understanding, often touching on taboo topics such as death and insanity. In 2005 she represented Thailand in the Venice Biennale. Working with psychologically rich materials, she considers a wide range of subjects that have existed in marginal spaces, including women, the deceased, the insane, and animals. She creates complex narratives that confront societal structures of power and pedagogy. Concerned with systems of language and communication, Rasdjarmrearnsook attempts to converse with subjects who don’t speak in languages that are comprehended by or even acknowledged by mainstream society.

Looking Back: The 9th White Columns Annual
White Columns
320 West 13th Street, New York, NY 10014
January 13–February 21, 2015

Not an exhibition of women artists, this year’s White Columns Annual is curated by an all women’s curatorial collective, Cleopatra’s. Founded in 2008, Cleopatra’s works collaboratively with artists and cultural producers to create projects that forge new networks and dialogues among individuals, art practices, and institutions. These projects are realized in their flagship noncommercial storefront in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. From 2011 to 2012 the collective also operated a satellite art space in Berlin, Germany. Further investigations also occur in the form of offsite public programs, events, and printed publications, encompassing various fields and locales. The aim of Cleopatra’s is to present work and advance ideas informed by both individual and collective perspectives, and to disseminate that work and those ideas among a broad and diverse audience. Current and founding members of the Cleopatra’s are Erin Somerville, Colleen Grennan, Bridget Finn, and Bridget Donahue.

Samara Golden: The Flat Side of the Knife
MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, NY 11101
October 26, 2014–August 30, 2015

MoMA PS1 presents Samara Golden’s first solo museum exhibition and her largest installation to date: The Flat Side of the Knife. The Los Angeles–based Golden (American, b. 1973) creates immersive installations that explore what the artist calls the “sixth dimension,” where a multiple pasts, presents, and futures coexist. Golden’s multilayered installation fills the double-height of MoMA PS1’s Duplex Gallery with staircases, beds, couches, lamps, musical instruments, video, and sound. The Flat Side of the Knife combines physical with illusory spaces. Some appear only in mirrors, reflecting what the artist refers to as “layers of consciousness,” akin to psychological and hallucinatory spaces in the mind. Her use of mirrors in conjunction with sculptural elements made from a silvery insulation board allows the illusion of space to expand in multiple directions, suggesting imaginary spaces, such as adjacent rooms that do not exist in reality.

Golden received her MFA from Columbia University and has exhibited her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; SculptureCenter in New York; Night Gallery in Los Angeles; CANADA in New York; Cardi Black Box in Milan; Loyal Gallery in Stockholm; and Galerie Crevecoeur in Paris. Most recently, her work was featured in the Hammer Museum’s biennial, Made in L.A., in 2014.

Anne Imhof: DEAL
MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, NY 11101
January 31–March 9, 2015

MoMA PS1 presents DEAL, Anne Imhof’s inaugural solo project in the United States, which consists of a two-day performance followed by an exhibition. The project, conceived specifically for the museum, revolves around the structures of illegal street transactions that are underpinned by strict rules and codes while functioning beyond words and juridical regulations. Along the opening performances, nine performers will enact highly complex and abstract movements, evoking power relations, secret codes, and unspoken rules that underlie daily human interactions. Here, tasks and patterns are unceasingly repeated over an entire day and progressively shift as they push toward a point of collapse. The exhibition expands on the same formal interrogations and ideas through diverse media such as drawing, video, sculpture, painting, and a variation of the initial performance, SOTSB for DEAL, which repeats every Sunday during museum hours.

Imhof (German, b. 1978) was trained as a visual artist and considers the different media as integral to the process for creating images that gradually emerge in time. Live events, their documentation, objects, and props—Imhof believes that each component in a body of work is interrelated and of equal relevance, contributing to the creation of a visual image that is perpetually in process, highly precarious, and in a constant verge of dissolution.

Chitra Ganesh: Eyes of Time
Brooklyn Museum
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Herstory Gallery, Fourth Floor, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238
December 12, 2014–July 12, 2015

The Herstory Gallery at the Brooklyn Museum is hosting Eyes of Time, an exhibition by the Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh that explores ideas of femininity, empowerment, and multiplicity. Her drawing, installation, text-based work, and collaborations suggest and excavate buried narratives typically absent from official canons of history, literature, and art. For more than a decade, Ganesh has used the iconography of mythology, literature, and popular culture to bring to light feminist and queer narratives.

For Eyes of Time, the artist draws inspiration from the museum’s encyclopedic collection to create a site-specific multimedia installation at the gallery. Eyes of Time focus on the portrayal of female power and plurality based on Kali—the Hindu goddess of destruction and rebirth—as well as other figures from Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party as point of departure. Tales of Amnesia (2002)—a zine inspired by Indian comic books acquired by the museum—is also on view.

As stated about her creative practice, “by layering disparate materials and visual languages, Ganesh asks her viewers to ‘seek and consider new narratives of sexuality and power.’ In this process the body becomes a site of transgression and transformation, both social and psychic, doubled, dismembered and continually exceeding its limits.”

TENDREL – Interconnections
Tibet House
22 West 15th Street, New York, NY 10011
January 2–March 2, 2015

TENDREL – Interconnections is an exhibition by artists who are linked to and inspired by the life work of Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, the first Western woman to become a Buddhist nun. Diverse yet interconnected, the themes investigated by the artists include Tibet and its culture, Buddhism, women, spiritual life, meditation, and activism. Works consist of photographs of nomads and nunneries in Tibet that provide profound insight and stark contrast to the social cultural changes of the Tibetan community, and art based on Buddhist and meditative iconography that explores the practice of visualization in painting, sculpture, drawing, and detailed stained-glass artistry. Among those presenting works are these artists: Diane Barker, Caterina De Re, Mary DeVincentis, Maxine Henryson, Heather Kessinger, Chrysanne Stathacos, Tsunma Jamyang Donma/Yulokod Studios, and Kate Temple.

Art in the First Person Lecture Series
School of Visual Arts
Various Locations in Manhattan
February 3–17, 2015

The School of Visual Arts presents the spring 2015 lineup of its Art in the First Person lecture series, jointly presented by the following departments: MA Curatorial Practice, MPS Digital Photography, BFA Fine Arts, MFA Fine Arts and BFA Visual and Critical Studies. All events are free and open to the public. The lecture series includes:

Amy Smith-Stewart, independent curator and art advisor, on Tuesday, February 3, 6:00 PM
Lumi Tan, curator at the Kitchen, on Tuesday, February 10, 6:00 PM
Kira Pollack, director of photography at Time, on Tuesday, February 10, 7:00 PM
Judith Page, artist, on Tuesday, February 17, 6:00 PM

Collective Creativity: Collaboration and Collectives in Feminist Art Practice
Feminist Art Project
Museum of Arts and Design, 2 Columbus Circle, New York, NY 10019
February 14, 2015

News from the Art and Academic Worlds

posted by Christopher Howard — Jan 28, 2015

Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

The $1,000 Job Interview That Will Not Die

I’m relieved to see that more departments, in a diverse array of fields, are choosing to offer alternatives to the traditional convention interview—or to forego the first-round conference interview altogether, like they should, since, as many sane voices have already opined quite loudly, it is no longer necessary. However, it dismays me to report that some holdouts remain. (Read more from Vitae.)

Don’t Kill the Conference Interview

Rebecca Schuman recently called for the death of the conference interview for faculty jobs. A key reason she listed was the expense, citing the Modern Language Association’s recent convention as a case in point. In fact, she went to considerable length to prove that anyone traveling to Vancouver for that meeting would need to spend more than $1,000. But a data point is not a universal. Many faculty members with full-time jobs and many graduate students seeking employment still think the conference interview is a useful enterprise. (Read more from Vitae.)

How Not to Be a Jerk at Your Next Academic Conference

If you’ve spent any time at an academic conference, you know the scene: a stage full of scholars have just finished presenting their papers. As the Q&A session begins, a woman rises from the audience and prefaces her remarks by saying, in so many words, that she hadn’t been invited to appear on the panel. But here, anyway, are the highlights of her paper—and her credentials and biography, too. (Read more from Vitae.)

Teaching Artists Applying the Breadth of Their Skills

The typical structure of 99 percent of American nonprofit arts organizations includes segregated artistic, administrative, and development departments. My colleagues who work in such segregated institutions experience chasms between departments and waste time bickering and competing for an even share of resources. Aside from the intention of human-resource efficiency, I have never understood the acceptance of this structure. (Read more from ARTSblog.)

L’Origine du Monde Sparks Facebook Legal Battle

Facebook has been taken to court by a French user whose account was closed after he posted an image of Gustave Courbet’s racy painting L’Origine du Monde (1866). According to Le Figaro, the world-famous oil on canvas was part of a promo for an art-history video about the artwork, broadcasted by the highbrow TV channel Arte. The plaintiff, a Parisian schoolteacher, seeks the reactivation of his Facebook account and €20,000 in damages. (Read more from Artnet News.)

The NEA and the Federal Reserve Bank Reports

First, the release of the NEA report, A Decade of Arts Engagement, on arts attendance and participation—widely reported almost everywhere. Not much new here. Confirmation that attendance in the core arts continues a two-decade decline, while distribution of arts via technology is on the increase. Arts participation is up overall if you count “selfless” and downloading your favorite pop song, or maybe dancing in front of your mirror. (Read more from Barry’s Blog.)

Might at the Museum

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s big, new move into twentieth-century art—propelled by Leonard Lauder’s recent $1 billion gift of eighty-one Cubist masterpieces—is altering the balance of power among New York’s biggest museums, a change compounded by the Whitney’s relocation downtown and the Museum of Modern Art’s controversial expansion plans. Sorting through talk of a growing rivalry between the Met and MoMA for artworks, board members, and prestige, Bob Colacello uncovers the forces at work. (Read more from Vanity Fair.)

Effective Ways to Structure Discussion

The use of online discussion in both blended and fully online courses has made clear that those exchanges are more productive if they are structured, if there’s a protocol that guides the interaction. This kind of structure is more important in the online environment because those discussions are usually asynchronous and miss all the nonverbal cues that facilitate face-to-face exchanges. But I’m wondering if more structure might benefit our in-class discussions as well. (Read more from Faculty Focus.)

Filed under: CAA News —

News from the Art and Academic Worlds

posted by Christopher Howard — Dec 17, 2014

Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Smithsonian’s Asian Art Collection Goes Online

The Smithsonian Institution’s museums of Asian art are due to release their entire collections online on January 1, 2015. More than forty thousand works, from ancient Chinese jades to thirteenth-century Syrian metalwork and nineteenth-century Korans, will be accessible through high-resolution images without copyright restrictions for noncommercial use. The Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery are the first Smithsonian museums—and the only Asian art museums—to complete the labor-intensive process of digitizing and releasing their entire collections online. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

Balling off Painting: MoMA Opens The Forever Now

At the Museum of Modern Art’s opening for The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, most people had a hard time remembering when the last group show of young painters had happened at the museum. (Technically, the last full-on contemporary painting survey was in 1984.) With that in mind, no matter what anyone thinks about the show—or even the current state of painting in general—it could be argued that an exhibition of this nature was somewhat overdue. (Read more from ArtNews.)

New Art Now

At first glance, the three words “new,” “art,” and “now” might be considered synonyms. In order to be counted as art, an object or expression must be new, and its newness is strictly defined by the temporal limits of the present moment, now. But this is where the synonymy of the three terms starts to look like a contradiction. If contemporary art is art always happening “now,” can we ever really make sense of the present? (Read more from ArtReview.)

Unsustainable Postdocs

Postdoctoral fellowships make sense in theory: they offer recent PhDs, especially those aspiring to careers in academic research, a place to develop professionally and build a research profile before or while hitting the job market. But too often, these fellowships are underpaid, undermentored positions in which young academics languish during what are potentially their most creative, productive years. That’s the upshot of a new report that is highly critical of the structural factors driving the growth of postdoctoral ranks. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

The State of Professional Development in Higher Education

Earlier this year, Academic Impressions surveyed higher-education professionals to learn if institutions, on the whole, regard professional development as mission-critical, if investments in professional development is proactive or reactive, and if professional development is tied to performance appraisal. This report shares the findings. (Read more from Academic Impressions.)

Storming the Ivory Tower

All manner of treasure accumulates in the Ivory Tower, but too often that’s where valuable scholarship stays locked up, obscure and inaccessible. “Free the knowledge!” might be the rallying cry behind a creative new plan from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The federal agency, which bills itself as one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the country recently announced the Public Scholar program. Its goal is to motivate scholars to publish nonfiction books for general readers rather than for each other. (Read more from the Washington Post.)

Is a Museum a Database? Institutional Conditions in Net Utopia

The museum is pressured into adapting to the logic of the database from all sides, and we begin to entertain questions of absurd technological determinism. Is a museum a database? While this may be a ridiculous provocation on its face, we have seen that anxious cultural institutions are among the first to uncritically adopt the metabolism of database, to transform the institution into an indexed site of transmission. (Read more from e-flux journal.)

Can We Create a Culture That Values Good Teaching?

How might we create a culture that esteems effective teaching? The value of such a thing ought to be clear, if only because it would blunt some of the frequent public criticisms of universities for a too-narrow focus on research. But creating a teaching culture hasn’t proved so easy. It’s not that campuses don’t harbor great teachers—even the most research-intensive universities do. But those professors usually tend their personal classroom gardens on their own. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)

Filed under: CAA News —

Support CAA’s Journals through the Publications Fund

posted by Nia Page — Dec 15, 2014

This was an exciting year for CAA’s publications—for the very first time The Art Bulletin and Art Journal were published online using a multi-media platform that allows authors to include video and hyperlinks directly in their essays, and caa.reviews became fully open-access with broader interactive functionality coming soon. Most important, the journals continued to bring readers more of what they expect from the world’s leading publisher of art history journals: exceptional in-depth scholarship exploring the full range of the visual arts, in formats as diverse as long-form essays, innovative artists’ projects, and critical reviews. It is the support of readers like you that enable CAA to carry out this vital work.

Because you share our mission of advancing the highest standards of intellectual engagement in the arts, please make a tax-deductible gift to the Publications Fund today.

Here are some recent highlights from CAA publications:

In The Art Bulletin:

Continued support of the long-form, peer-reviewed essay, including John K. Papadopoulos reinterpreting the Greek fifth-century BCE Motya Youth, Douglas Brine on the architectural and cultural context of a Jan van Eyck painting, Aaron Wile identifying a distinctly modern sense of self in Wattaeu’s fête galantes, and Joseph Siry on Frank Lloyd Wright’s theater for Dallas
In the recurring “Whither Art History?” Cheng-Hua Wang examines artistic interaction between China and Europe in the early modern period
Reviews of books on a wide variety of topics, from Maya art to sixteenth-century sculpture in Florence, from the politics of Mughal architecture to the materiality of color

In Art Journal:

Projects by artists such as the sculptor Conrad Bakker, the British animator Jonathan Hodgson, and Karen Schiff, whose colorful drawings intervened in the very fabric of the printed journal
A forum devoted to conceptual art in Latin America in the 1970s, a time of political oppression and upheaval, featuring four essays in the original Spanish and Portuguese with facing-page English translations
The journal’s open-access website relaunched with a new name, Art Journal Open, and a new editor, the new-media scholar and curator Gloria Hwang Sutton
Reviews of monographs on the artists Forrest Bess; books by Claire Bishop, Tom Finkelpearl, and Lev Manovich; and a Le Corbusier exhibition at MoMA

In caa.reviews:

New Field Editor position established for reviews covering Digital Humanities and Art History
Over 150 book and exhibition reviews across many subject areas and geographic regions

With your support, CAA publications will continue to delight, challenge, and engage readers for many years to come. Contributors who give at a level of $250 or higher are prominently acknowledged in the publication they support for four consecutive issues, as well as on the publication’s website for one year and through CAA News. On behalf of the scholars, critics, and artists who publish in the journals, we thank you for your continued commitment to maintaining a strong and spirited forum for the visual-arts community.

With best regards,

Suzanne Preston Blier
Vice President for Publications

Filed under: Art Bulletin, Art Journal, caa.reviews, Development, Publications —

Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for December 2014

posted by CAA — Dec 10, 2014

December 2014

Suzanne Lacy: Gender Agendas
Museo Pecci Milano
Ripa di Porta Ticinese 113, Milan, Italy
November 14, 2014–January 6, 2015

The Milan Pecci Museum is presenting a Suzanne Lacy’s Gender Agendas. This retrospective exhibition launches a whole new line of investigation at the the Centre for Contemporary Art Luigi Pecci that has been dedicated to the pioneering work in the arts developed internationally in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Born in California in 1945 and based in Los Angeles, Lacy is an influential artist, educator, and writer. She is known as one of the pioneer artists blending Conceptual and Performance art with social commitment in the early seventies in Los Angeles. Her approach to researching and making follows her questioning the relationship of “service” to “activism,” and of both to “art practice.” Her diverse approach to this investigation stretches from explorations of the body and intimate reflections to the production of large and lengthy public demonstrations involving dozens of artists and thousands of spectators.

Gender Agendas presents, for the first time in Europe, a large series of Lacy’s projects that follow a constant of her artistic development: the investigation of the female condition. From a more intimately approach to a strong political and civic one, Lacy explores the power of art as a useful and effective tool for social struggle and for the promotion of progressive ideas, digging in this way into the meanings of the hundreds of anonymous female and working-class performers who would have no access to the communication systems otherwise. Sexual exploitation, violence, media representation of the aging woman, and social issues ranging from racism to the conditions of labor and class may have been provocative and avant-garde in the seventies and eighties, but are still deeply relevant today.

Through the curatorial approach of Lacy’s retrospective exhibition, Fabio Cavallucci and Megan Steinman, propose a readaptation of some of her most important works, including Prostitution Notes (1974); Three Weeks in May (1977); In Mourning and In Rage (1977); The Crystal Quilt (1985–87); and Full Circle (1994); as well as one of her most recent projects, Storying Rape (2012), a discussion among significant personalities in the media, activists, and politicians in an attempt to find a new cultural narrative that describes sexual violence.

Birgit Jurgenssen
Fergus McCaffrey
514 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
November 6–December 20 2014

For the second exhibition of Birgit Jurgenssen, Fergus McCaffrey brings together a large group of her photographic works in combination with a number of sculptures in order to underscore the variety and complexity of her work.

Highly experimental, Jurgenssen’s photographic work is exemplified by her Stoff-arbeiten (Fabric Works), which were created from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. The “fabric works” consist of photographic prints mounted on canvases that have been screwed to iron frames made by the artist, giving a highly sculptural character to their combinations. Thin, translucent fabrics such as gauze are stretched over the surface, veiling and slightly obscuring the images. The photographs themselves are created through a range of processes, including photograms, solarization, and multiple exposures. The juxtaposition of hard-welded iron frames and delicate textile emphasizes their materiality and draws a direct relationship to Jürgenssen’s sculptural works.

The exhibition also includes works that Jurgenssen referred to as “painted” photography. These large format photograms were created by manipulating sheets of photo paper in developer and fixing baths and by pouring photo chemicals directly over the paper. The resulting marbled and dripped images were then exposed to light and fixed, after which the surfaces were scratched, creating gestural drawings over the “painted” photographic surfaces.

Born and educated in Vienna, Jürgenssen (1949–2003) died prematurely at the age of 54. Her studio practice encompassed drawing, performance, photography, and sculpture, through which she compellingly combined classically refined draftsmanship, mixed media, and experimental photo techniques. She is best known for her connection to the Austrian feminist movement of the 1970s. Equally important is her engagement with Surrealism and her concern for materials and processes.

Cover of the catalogue for Sturtevant: Double Trouble

Sturtevant: Double Trouble
Museum of Modern Art
Special Exhibitions Gallery, Third Floor; and Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Painting and Sculpture Gallery, Gallery 5, Fifth Floor, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10009
November 9, 2014–February 22, 2015

Michelle Stuart: Silent Movies
Leslie Tonkonow: Art Works and Projects
535 West 22nd Street, Sixth Floor, New York, NY 10011
November 1–December 20, 2014

Michelle Stuart (American, b. 1933) became internationally known in the 1970s for innovative works that synthesize Land art, drawing, and sculpture, as well as her pioneering use of natural materials in sculpture, painting, and drawing. Since 2011 photography has been her primary medium, although present in her work both literally and conceptually since the 1970s. Devising a highly personal and original method of photographic manipulation, Stuart conveys the impression of deeply felt images seen through time and layers of consciousness. It is “a combination of fact and fiction, truth and lies—and lies that tell the truth,” as put by the artist.

The exhibition at Leslie Tonkonow comprises photographs drawn from Stuart’s vast archive of analogue and digital photographs taken for almost half a century. Stuart activates their aesthetic and storytelling potential by arranging them in gridlike groups or occasionally altering them. Each work is composed of between seven and seventy separate images, digitally printed on 8½ x 11 inch sheets of archival paper. Both painterly and cinematic in their rhythmic visual arrangement, the works in this exhibition amount to meditations on the nature of memory.

As dreamlike recollections of her past, these works continue her lifelong artistic engagement with specific locations, while affirming the significance of place as a unique source of memory. “Memories are silent until we either articulate them in words on paper or depict them visually,” as put by the artist herself. Two years ago, in Palimpsests, her first solo show of exclusively photographic works, Stuart expressed thoughts on war, the cosmos, the passing of time, and on form itself. The compositions in Silent Movies, all created since then, present universal themes with deeply personal associations that contain keys to momentous events and evoke times and places in a manner that is both specific and archetypical. With abundant literary, cinematic, and historical references, these works do not merely address memories, but, as put in the press release, the very process of recall itself.

Filed under: CWA Picks, Uncategorized — Tags: CWA Picks —

Recent Deaths in the Arts

posted by CAA — Jul 25, 2014

In its periodic list of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, historians, teachers, curators, dealers, philanthropists, and others whose work has significantly influenced the visual arts. Of special note is a text on a distinguished scholar of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Russian art, Grigorii Iurevich Sternin.

Roger Ackling, a British sculptor who was a contemporary of Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, and other artists who graduated from Saint Martins School of Art in the 1960s, died on June 5, 2014. He was 66 years old
Jack Agüeros, a writer, activist, and the former director of El Museo del Barrio in New York, died on May 4, 2014. He was 79
Eppie Archuleta, a New Mexican weaver who worked in fiber and fabric, passed away on April 11, 2014, age 92. In 1985 she received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the nation’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts
Gordon Bennett, a pioneering Australian artist whose work challenged race, power, history, and social conventions, died on June 3, 2014. He was 58 years old
Tito Enrique Canepa Jiménez, a Dominican painter who lived and worked in New York after immigrating there in the 1930s, died on February 11, 2014. He was 97
Lynne Cohen, an award-winning Canadian photographer who had taught at the University of Ottawa from 1974 to 2005, passed away on May 12, 2014. She was 69
Deborah Deery, an art educator and academic administrator at Moore College of Art and Design, died on August 19, 2013. She was 49 years old
Joseph Doyle, an artist and teacher based in Houston, Texas, died on July 9, 2014, at age 54
Lee MacCormick Edwards, a philanthropist as well as a lecturer in art history, a photographer, and an author, passed away on April 19, 2014. She was 76
John Clovis Fontaine, chairman emeritus for both the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, died on September 23, 2013. He was 81 years old
Edythe Goodridge, a curator and the former director of visual arts for the Canada Council, died on June 4, 2014. She was 77
Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of a Nazi art dealer who secretly hoarded millions of dollars’ worth of modern art for decades, died on May 6, 2014. He was 81
Anne Hollander, a celebrated author and a historian of fashion and costume, died on July 6, 2014. She was 83 years old
Hans Hollein, an Austrian architect and educator who won the Pritzker Prize in 1985, passed away on April 24, 2014. He was 80
On Kawara, a Conceptual artist and painter whose work addressed the passage of time, died in late June 2014. He was 81 years old
Maria Lassnig, an Austrian figurative painter whose retrospective is on view at MoMA PS1, died on May 6, 2014, age 94
Stanley Marsh, an eccentric Texan millionare who commissioned the Cadillac Ranch outside Amarillo, died on June 17, 2014. He was 76
Cynthia Mills, the executive editor of the Smithsonian Institution’s journal American Art, died on May 1, 2014. She was 67 years old
Robert Olsen, a Los Angeles–based painter of outdoor urban scenes, died on April 14, 2014. He was 44.
Jennifer Wynne Reeves, an abstract painter based in New York, passed away on June 22, 2014. She was 51
Nan Rosenthal, a curator for the National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, died on April 27, 2014, at the age of 76
Jerry Rothman, a Los Angeles–based sculptor who was a member of a ceramics movement called Otis Clay, died on June 5, 2014, at age 80
Frederic Schwartz, an architect, city planner, and the designer of several memorials for September 11, died on April 28, 2014. He was 63
Claude Simard, a cofounder and director of Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, died on June 24, 2014, at the age of 57. Simard was also an artist and performer
Grigorii Iurevich Sternin, a distinguished scholar of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Russian art, died on November 23, 2013, age 86. CAA has published a special text on Sternin
Massimi Vignelli, an Italian-born graphic designer who created the 1970s map for New York’s subway system, died on May 27, 2014. He was 83
Ultra Violet, an artist, actor, author, and Andy Warhol superstar, passed away on June 14, 2014. She was 78
Melvin J. Wachowiak Jr., a senior conservator for the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum Conservation Institute, died on May 28, 2014. He was 56
Khin Maung Yin, an influential modernist Burmese artist who painted colorful portraits, passed away on June 10, 2014, age 76

Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries, or your completed texts, to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the next list.

Filed under: Obituaries, People in the News —

Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for April 2014

posted by CAA — Apr 10, 2014

April 2014

Claudia DeMonte: La Forza del Destino
June Kelly Gallery
166 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012
April 10–May 13, 2014

Claudia DeMonte: La Forza del Destino presents a new series of paintings and sculptures focused on symbols of good and bad luck from around the world. For decades, Claudia DeMonte has been involved in collaborative research and art production with women artists across the globe. As curator, DeMonte is the artifice of WOMEN OF THE WORLD: A Global Collection of Art. This traveling exhibition, with accompanying comprehensive publication, includes the works and statements of women artists from 177 countries portraying their image of what means being a woman in their cultural environment. In her later project, Real Beauty, DeMonte commissioned handmade fabric dolls from artists and crafters to express local concepts of female beauty, standards that are being lost due to plastic reproductions and globalization.

From Bhutan, Laos, and Saudi Arabia to Senegal and Tibet, DeMonte has traveled the globe observing cultures, customs, and idiosyncrasies from women perspectives and often working collaboratively with local women workshops. In one of the works presented in La Forza del Destino, DeMonte uses a female form sculpted from wood and laden with pictographic configurations suggesting lucky charms of protection. Her new works make evident, once again, her continued interest in women’s multifaceted roles and impact as storytellers, historians, and mythological controllers of destiny. In DeMonte’s own words, La Forza del Destino examines from a women’s perspective the icons that represent luck, superstition, and protection from the evils of the world.

Ane Mette Hol: In the Collection
Trondheim Kunstmuseum
Bispegata 7 B, 7013 Trondheim, Norway
February 8–May 18, 2014

Trondheim Kunstmuseum presents In the Collection, a solo exhibition by the Oslo-based artist Ane Mette Hol (b. Bodø, 1979), who uses drawing as a research method that investigates the relationships between originals and reproductions. The “accurate copies” of objects and phenomena are the result of a painstaking work, questioning the very medium of drawing. By using paper and drawing tools, Hol copies things with precision down to the finest detail. She has made copies of brown paper, rolls of drawing paper, music sheets, drawing pads, and book covers, as well as printouts from the internet and botched photocopies. Through her completed works, she challenges the relationship between original and copy with an almost Borgesian approach. Furthermore, through this relationship, Hol’s works comment on our continuous recycling of what already exists and on our common knowledge about art history and theory. In this, she questions the nature of art; its premises in terms of content, politics, and institution through remarkable technical skill and through innovative frames of reference and conceptual discourse.

In the exhibition at Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Hol has based her work on a drawing of a photocopy from Charles Wood’s book How to Draw Portraits (1943). The drawing shows the book’s list of contents, and the exhibition is based on the different sections of the book. As the exhibition title suggested, the show features works from the museum’s collections and from Hol’s drawings, animations, and sound installations.

Maria Lassnig
MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, NY 11101
March 9–May 25, 2014

Maria Lassnig (Austrian, b. 1919) is one of the most important contemporary women painters. Through what she called “body awareness,” her paintings mean an exploration of the inner world. She focused on representing the way her body feels to her from the inside, rather than attempting to depict it from outside. Lassnig’s remarkable career has spanned more than seventy years. Throughout the decades she has continued to create work that vulnerably explores the way she comes into contact with the world, emphasizing often the disjunctions between her own self-image, challenging the way she may be seen by others as a woman, as a painter, and as a person who has lived through the dramatic technological and cultural shifts that have marked the century of her lifetime. In her paintings, Lassnig exposes personal traumas, fantasies, and nightmares, offering instruction for courageous living in a time of social interaction.

From all creative periods of her career, spanning her early involvement with graphic abstraction in Paris and Art Informel, to her later shift to figural representation, Lassnig’s exhibition at PS1 is the most significant survey of the artists’ work ever presented in the United States. The show, focusing in her self-portraits, features approximately fifty paintings drawn from public and private holdings and from the artist’s own collection. A selection of watercolors and filmic works, many of which have never been previously seen in the United States, also make an appearance in the exhibition.

Mimi Smith: Constructing Art about Life
Harold B. Lemmerman Gallery
New Jersey City University Galleries, Hepburn Hall, 2039 Kennedy Boulevard, Room 323, Jersey City, NJ 07305
March 20–April 24, 2014

Mimi Smith: Constructing Art about Life is a concise survey of Mimi Smith’s work over the past five decades, curated by Midori Yoshimoto. A New York–based artist and a graduate of Rutgers University, Smith is best known for the clothing sculptures she begun in the mid-1960s, the most prominent being Steel Wool Peignoir (1966), a see-through dressing gown embellished with lace and steel wool that has become an icon of early feminist art. Combining banal consumer or domestic objects—such as the wrapping plastics of various consumer goods in Recycle Coat (1965), the bath mats in Girdle (1966), or the pieced-together plastics in Maternity Dress (1966)—Smith radically intervened in Pop art, producing feminist sartorial sculptures that addressed the role of fashion in women’s individual and social identities, while unmasking the complicated relationship of the public and the private in women’s lives.

In the early 1970s Smith challenged the Conceptual art of her time from the homebound perspective of a female artist and a mother, then raising her children in Ohio, with a series of works that merit further evaluation for their contribution to postwar art and their diverse politics. These include series of large-scale drawings done with measuring tape and knotted thread that replicates the rooms and furniture of her home, as well as multimedia installations that allude to the pervasiveness of new technologies and the increasing invasiveness of the news media, and also to the environment and nuclear threats.

Sculptural cloth making and clothing itself continue to play a great role in Smith’s contemporary investigation of gendered identity and politics, as seen in her recent ruminations on women’s aging through drawn representations of underwear.

Lee Bontecou: Drawn Worlds
Menil Collection
1533 Sul Ross Street, Houston, TX 77006
January 31–May 11, 2014

Curated by Michelle White under the auspices of the Menil Drawing Institute, Lee Bontecou: Drawn Worlds is the first museum survey to focus on Lee Bontecou’s works on paper. It brings together over seventy works from various collections, including that of the Menil, that sample her drawing practice from 1958 to 2012. The show is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by White, Dore Ashton, and Joan Banach.

Advancing the understanding of the work of this incredible artist, Drawn Worlds explores Bontecou’s experimentation in materials and techniques, such as her early use of a welding torch to deposit velvet layers of black soot on paper, muslin, and canvas. The exhibition also contextualizes the artist’s distinctive iconography, especially her penchant for circles and voids, within the political and environmental concerns of the time of their making. Above all it provides a unique opportunity to witness the “unsettling realms of human folly and the frailty of the natural world” in which Bontecou’s “drawn words” take the viewer, while studying the forms that characterize them, whether as origins of her sculptures or independent transmutations of her haunting vocabulary.

Betye Saar: Redtime Est
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery
100 Eleventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001
March 15–May 3, 2014

Betye Saar is widely known for multimedia collages, box assemblages, altars, and installations consisting of found materials that, as put by the artist, “reach across the barriers of art and life to bridge cultural diversity and forge new understandings,” in effect voicing various political, racial, spiritual and gender concerns. Redtime Est (2011), a variation of the eponymous installation for Pacific Standard Time in Los Angeles three years ago, offers a unique opportunity to indulge the affective sensibility of her highly political objects.

Redtime Est consists of red, or chameleonlike red, works that are curated by the artist in and around a room whose walls are painted red, “the color of anger, danger, violence, heat, passion, blood and fire.” A caged mannequin with a crow as head and dressed with shackles guards the entrance to Redtime Est, setting its tone, while Red Ascension, a painted red ladder, hangs diagonally across the wall that faces the viewer upon his or her entrance, cinematically commemorates the slaves’ trip from Africa to America with various symbolic objects featured in each frame, ranging from an African mask to handcrafted ships to red-painted chains and padlocks.

Unlike the miniretrospective character of the Redtime Est, this one is a mega-assemblage of recent works, the earliest dating from the early 1990s, whose subject matter, as in Justice (2011) features Aunt Jemima, is manifested with signature tropes of the feminist and antiracist underpinnings of the artist’s assemblage practice since the 1960s. Focusing on the most political aspects of her work, the artist brings together objects for Redtime Est that, while sampling the various modes of her practice from painting to assemblage and the sheer repurposing of found objects, illustrate the way in which she used “derogatory” stereotypes of blackness and recycled objects of poignant history and function, such as washboards, to make powerful and empowering critical statements about race and gender with an idiosyncratic marriage of past and present, her homage to her ancestors and her radical legacy to future.

Alexandra Bachzetzis and Claire Hooper
Bonner Kunstverein
Hochstadenring 22, D-53119 Bonn, Germany
February 22–May 25, 2014

Bonner Kunstverein juxtaposes the deconstructive and seductive ways in which pop culture is respectively employed in the work of the performer and choreographer Alexandra Bachzetsis and the filmmaker Claire Hooper, putting in dialogue the exploration of the distinct significance given by social media in the staging of personality and life today as well as the ways in which their practice challenges the exhibition format. While Bachzetsis performed with Anne Pajunen for A Piece Danced Alone (2011) during the opening, her work is mostly represented through video documentations of her choreographies. Hooper’s videos are exhibited as part of structures that function as projection surfaces and architectural ornamentation, creating links between the exhibition space, the illusionistic space of the film, and its documentary function in a manner typical of Hooper, as, for instance, by recreating a Berlin subway environment.

Bachzetsis’s works depict the controlled movements of bodies following a clear sequence in evocative situations that condense reflections of the contemporary media culture into studies of motion by means of mirroring and repetition. By isolating gestures and body language from the flow of the familiar as signs of cultural codes she deconstructs the sequence of events, while also variously analyzing the mechanics of TV soaps and hip hop video clips, classical ballet, modern dance, and performance art.

Hooper’s films, in which the British tradition of documentaries encounters Greek mythology, focus on figures in precarious social circumstances and their entanglement in restrictive systems that are converted into collective social areas through parablelike, mythological enhancement. Interchangeable elements from everyday life in documentary fashion oscillate kaleidoscopically with theatrically charged passages. While pop culture plays an equally important part in the staging of her figures, Hooper depicts the body in seemingly surreal dance performances that enable her to portray the irrational and also the compulsive forces that continue to drive our society. A dialogue about the body and its representation in the media, as well as its physical and social limitations, develops between their works. Both artists depict the body and the figure as shimmering, constantly changing projection surfaces.

Filed under: CWA Picks, Uncategorized — Tags: CWA Picks —

Institutional News

posted by CAA — Feb 17, 2014

Read about the latest news from institutional members.

Institutional News is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.

February 2014

The Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Frick Collection, whose institutional libraries formed the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC), have been awarded a $340,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to initiate a program of web archiving for specialist art-historical resources. The two-year program will follow a 2012 pilot study, Reframing Collections for the Digital Age, also funded by the Mellon Foundation.

The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville has accepted a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support an upcoming exhibition, Joseph Cornell and Surrealism, organized by the museum and the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, France.

The J. Paul Getty Trust, based in Los Angeles, California, and the British Museum in London, England, have announce a three-year collaboration with the National Cultural Fund and the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), under the aegis of the Indian government’s Ministry of Culture, to build the capacities of ASI’s site-museum and site-management professionals. Nearly one hundred ASI professionals—among them archaeologists, site-museum professionals, site managers, directors, and caretakers—will participate in workshops, trainings, conferences, and working-group meetings in India, Los Angeles, London, and other Asian sites to help reimagine Indian site-museums with enhanced narratives, better collection management, and conservation.

The Herron School of Art and Design, part of Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, has received a $2 million gift from Cindy Simon Skjodt, a philanthropist and advocate for mental health, to endow a chair for the school’s program in art therapy.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania has met the goal of a major five-year initiative, the Lenfest Challenge, having raised a total of $54 million to endow twenty-nine staff positions in its curatorial, conservation, library, archive, education, publishing, and digital-technology departments. H. F. (Gerry) Lenfest, chairman emeritus of the museum’s board of trustees, and his wife, Marguerite, offered a $27 million grant in September 2008, challenging donors to match this gift on a one-to-one basis to endow and name these positions.

The University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles and the Pacific Asia Museum of Pasadena, one of the few American museums dedicated to the arts and culture of Asia and the Pacific Islands, have announced a new partnership that will preserve the museum’s 1924 Chinese Qing Dynasty–inspired mansion in downtown Pasadena as an art museum. The partnership will also enhance the scholarship of the creative faculty and students at USC’s six arts schools and those in the departments of art history, East Asian language and cultures, religion, and archaeology. In addition, the alliance will provide a foundation for a renewed museum-studies and curatorial-training program at USC.

The University of Texas at Dallas has announced the new home for the Arts and Technology (ATEC) program: the Edith O’Donnell Arts and Technology Building. This new 155,000-square-foot facility will host programs and promote advancements in visual art, emerging media technology, and multimedia communications.

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, has received a $9.6 million bequest from the estate of Charles H. Schwartz to establish an endowment to expand and enhance the museum’s collection of English and European works of art from the eighteenth century.

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: Institutional News, Member News, Member Spotlight —

Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for February 2014

posted by CAA — Feb 10, 2014

February 2014

The CWA Picks for February 2014 are dedicated to the memory of Wanda D. Ewing (January 4, 1970–December 8, 2013), an artist and educator who lived and worked in Omaha, Nebraska, by her friends and fellow members of the Committee on Women in the Arts.

Jillian Mayer: Salt 9
Utah Museum of Fine Arts
University of Utah, Marcia and John Price Museum Building, Salt Lake City, UT 84112
January 17–August 17, 2014

The Utah Museum of Fine Arts presents the first museum exhibition of Jillian Mayer (American, b. 1984). Engaging the ubiquitous self, duping Google Image, or subverting facial-recognition software, Mayer’s newest body of work tosses aside the physical body to investigate modern identity formation. Identity, online and IRL, is a fluid performance of multiple selves in constant construction, but online there is no place, need, or value for the real body.

The mind, untethered by physical limits, can be free in its construction of identity. While presenting tools to maintain online identities, Mayer exposes moments when the virtual world defines the physical world, creating an alternate reality. In salt 9 she sets up scenarios, often using her own image, that call attention to how Web 2.0’s architecture of participation is changing perceptions of truth, privacy, authorship, and authenticity. By accepting the web’s uncontrollable context and by being open to malleable meaning, Mayer enlists an ever-expanding audience of collaborators and challenges the traditional relationship between artist and viewer, in which the latter becomes a participant, a collaborator, and even an active creator of content and meaning.

Doris Salcedo
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611
February 21–May 31, 2015

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, presents the first survey of the work of the renowned sculptor Doris Salcedo (Colombian, b. 1958). Salcedo, who lives and works in Bogotá, gained prominence in the 1990s for her fusion of Postminimalist forms with sociopolitical concerns. The exhibition features all major bodies of work from the artist’s twenty-five-year career—most of which have never been shown together before—as well as the American debut of her recent major work Plegaria Muda (Silent prayer) (2008–10) and a site-specific public project.

Salcedo’s work is deeply rooted in her country’s social and political landscape, including its long history of civil wars, yet her sculptures and installations subtly address these fraught circumstances with elegance and a poetic sensibility that balances the gravitas of her subjects. She grounds her art in intense research and fieldwork, which involves extensive interviews with people who have experienced loss and trauma in their everyday lives due to political violence. In more recent years, Salcedo has become increasingly interested in the universal nature of these experiences and continues to pursue research in different locations, including Turkey, Italy, Great Britain, and the United States. Rather than making literal representations of violence or trauma, however, her artworks convey the idea of corporeal fragility and evoke a collective sense of loss. The resulting pieces engage with multiple dualities at once—strength and fragility, ephemeral and enduring—and bear elements of healing and reparation in the careful, laborious process of their making.

Güler Ates: Whispers of Colour
Kubik Gallery
Rua da Restauração, 2, 4050-499 Porto, Portugal
January 25–March 1, 2014

The central themes of gender, identity, and cultural hybridity are driving forces in Güler Ates’s practice, which examines how various settings can challenge and disrupt a person’s assumptions on these topics. The lone veiled woman is the central motif of her work, an ambiguous figure whose identity is consistently kept from the viewer.

While the veiled female figure is a recurring motif, it is the setting that informs her practice. Each series is site-specific in that Ates’s captures through photography the ways in which her figure interacts with each environment. Thus, by responding to her surroundings, her work explores the nuanced ways in which locale and context affect our interpretation of figures. This aspect works in tandem with the concept of performativity. An essential element to Ates’s work, this theme stems form Judith Butler’s seminal theory that such supposedly fixed concepts, such as gender, ethnicity, or nationality, are in no way fixed but are rather merely roles that we perform. Thus, while the repetition of our actions reinforces the identity to which those actions are associated, when the cultural context in which this performance takes place changes, so too does the identity. In her use of a veil, Ates interrogates what it means for a woman to be covered. She reclaims the female body by respecting the autonomy of the figure. In doing so, the artist is able to reclaim not simply the female body but also Orientalist imagery, thus creating highly charged images that are alluring yet defiant.

Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128
January 24–May 14, 2014 

Organized by Frist Center for Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee, where it first opened in 2012, Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video—the first major museum retrospective of the work of Carrie Mae Weems—finally comes to New York. Featuring more than 120 works—primarily photographs but also texts, videos, and an audio recording—and a range of related educational programs, the exhibition thoroughly traces the evolution of the artist’s career over the last thirty years, from her early documentary and autobiographical photographic series to later conceptual and philosophically complex works of global concerns. As such Carrie Mae Weems offers a great opportunity to explore the breadth of her practice and marvel at the visual poetics of her politics.

Having opened influential paths for younger generations of photographers with sociopolitical and gender concerns over the past forty years, Weems has sharply, movingly and beautifully contemplated issues surrounding race, gender, and class inequality. It is by positioning herself “as history’s ghost,” as put by Nancy Princenthal, that her work brings to light the ignored or erased experiences of marginalized people, even though the artist strives to propose a multidimensional picture of history and humanity, intended to raise greater cultural awareness and compassion. While Weems’s subjects are often African American, “Her work speaks to human experience and of the multiple aspects of individual identity, arriving at a deeper understanding of humanity,” as said by Mary Jane Jacobs.

Organized in a loose chronology throughout two of the museum’s Annex Levels, Carrie Mae Weems begins with the breakthrough series Family Pictures and Stories (1978–84) and brings together most landmark series of the artist’s photographic work. Also included, of course, is the celebrated Kitchen Table Series (1990), which employs text and photography and explores the range of women’s roles within a community, pointedly situating the photographs’ subject within a domestic setting and foregrounding the artist’s gendered concerns. The exhibition also looks at the role of video as a natural extension of Weems’s narrative photographic practice and as an opportunity to include music in her work. Along with a selection of videos such as Italian Dreams (2006), Afro Chic (2009), and Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment (2008) placed near related photographic series, Weems’s first major endeavor in film, Coming Up for Air (2003–4), a work comprised of series of poetic vignettes, will be screened in the New Media Theater in the Guggenheim’s Sackler Center for Arts Education.

Theresa Bernstein: A Century in Art
Phillips Museum of Art
Franklin and Marshall College, Colonel J. Hall Steinman College Center, College Avenue, Lancaster, PA 17603
February 7–April 12, 2014

This exhibition features work from the American artist Theresa Bernstein (1890–2002), one of the few—if not the only—artist to display work in every decade of the twentieth century. Although Bernstein found great success early in her career as an art student, she struggled with fluctuations in popularity as various art movements came and went, resulting in her work falling into obscurity for most historians and art critics. Despite this neglect, Bernstein has recently begun to receive recognition, and her work is being touted as noteworthy, even in comparison to her contemporaries such as Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, and John Sloan. Through her realist technique, Bernstein captured many iconic American themes from the twentieth century, such as women’s suffrage, World War I, the struggles of immigrants, jazz, and even Hassidic life. Therefore her work is not only skilled and aesthetic, but it also offers another perspective on American history. Theresa Bernstein: A Century in Art was curated by Gail Levin, Distinguished Professor of Art History, American Studies, and Women’s Studies at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019
December 21, 2013–April 21, 2014

Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New is an homage to one of the most foresighted art dealers of the late twentieth century. Organized by Ann Temkin with the assistance of Claire Lehmann, the exhibition is accompanied by an extensive publication with the same title and celebrates the donation of Robert Rauschenberg’s combine Canyon (1959) to the Museum of Modern Art by Ileana Sonnabend’s Estate. Bringing together works of over forty major artists—from Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol to Mario Merz and Vito Acconci—who either debuted at her gallery in Paris (1959–1968) or New York (1968– ) or entered into her personal collection early, the exhibition captures Sonnabend’s instrumental role in introducing American Pop and Minimalism to Europe and Arte Povera to the United States, while exploring her legendary eye and championship of new artists.

Despite frustrating limitations, including the politics of the exhibition, the donation of Canyon, and an unsurprising selection of masterpieces that self-congratulatorily reinforces mainstream narratives of American and European art of the late twentieth century housed in modern art temples such as MoMA (as justly implied by Holland Cotter in his New York Times review), Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New is a great reminder that the often-catalytic contribution of several female agents’ of postwar art in shaping its course in North America and Europe remains unexplored, if not unsung. Instead of just marveling at iconic landmarks of postwar, especially American, art as known, this exhibition should trigger further interest in Sonnabend’s story and raise questions that will pressure the histories of postwar art as we know them by illuminating the impact of the stories Sonnabend fashioned from the art of her time with her choices or the difference of her staging of her finds in Europe and in the United States.

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