CAA News Today
CAA’s 110th Annual Conference Museum-Related Sessions
posted by CAA — Dec 14, 2021
See below for information on CAA’s virtual Resources for Academic Art Museum Professionals (RAAMP) session and a list of other sessions with museum topics, organized by the two conference components, the first from February 17-19 and the second March 3-5.
Note: As of January 7, all in-person sessions and activities scheduled for February 16-19 in Chicago are now virtual on the same dates. Virtual sessions and activities scheduled for March 3-5 will remain the same. This change will allow for more access and engagement, regardless of location.
CAA’s RAAMP Session and Talks
New and Improved: Using Recent Experiences to Inform the Future of Museums
Thursday, March 3, 2022, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM CST (12:00 PM – 1:30 PM EST)
Walking the Talk: New Low Carbon Curatorial and Educational Structures that Amplify Impact and Reduce Costs
Natalie Marsh, ViVA Virtual Visiting Artists
Amanda Potter, Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University
Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye, ViVA Virtual Visiting Artists
Lessons Learned from a Year of Virtual Teaching
Ellen M. Alvord and Kendra Weisbin
Speculative Annotation at the Library of Congress: A Web-Based Annotation Tool that Invites Virtual Engagement with the Library’s Collection
Courtney Lynn McClellan and Jaime Mears, Library of Congress
Museum Sessions, February 17-19
Canonizing the Intangible: Aromatic Strategies in the Making of the U.A.E.’s National Identity
Friday, February 18, 2022, 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM CST
Francesca Bacci, Zayed University
Economies of Discipline and Display: Curating Conflict in Israel/Palestine
Friday, February 18, 2022, 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM CST
Michelle Facos, Indiana University
Instrumentalizing Memory and the Politics of Commemoration
Friday, February 18, 2022, 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM CST
Iro Katsaridou, Museum of Byzantine Culture, Thessaloniki, Greece
Eve Kalyva, University of Kent
Reassessing the Art Biennial
Friday, February 18, 2022, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM CST
Paloma Checa-Gismero, Swarthmore College
Recent Perspectives in the Philosophy of Curatorial Practice
Friday, February 18, 2022, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM CST
Rossen Ventzislavov
The Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series at Rutgers University’s Douglass College: A 50 Year History of Exhibition and Space Making for Woman-Identifying Artists through the Voices of the Artists Themselves
Friday, February 18, 2022. 2:30 PM – 4:00 PM CST
Julia E. Marsh, Cedar Crest College
The Practice of Care: Trauma Informed Pedagogy
Education Committee
Saturday, February 19, 2022, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM CST
Jenna Ann Altomonte, Mississippi State University
TFAP Feminist Solidarities and Kinships, Panel 3 – Exhibitions and Curatorial Spaces
The Feminist Art Project (TFAP)
Saturday, February 19, 2022, 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM CST
Erina Duganne, Texas State University
Susan E. Richmond, Georgia State University – School of Art and Design
Tatiana E. Flores, Rutgers University
New Frontiers: Creating, Collecting, Preserving and Displaying Digital Based Art of Russia and Eastern Europe
Saturday, February 19, 2022, 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM CST
Natalia Kolodzei. Kolodzei Art Foundation
Museum Sessions, March 3-5
Curatorial Care: Feminist and Queer Practices
Friday, March 4, 2022, 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM CST (10:00 AM – 11:30 AM EST)
Nomusa Makhubu, University of Cape Town
The Global Rise of Traveling Exhibitions at Mid-Century
Friday, March 4, 2022, 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM CST (10:00 AM – 11:30 AM EST)
Agata Justyna Pietrasik
Magdalena Moskalewicz, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Activist Exhibitions
Friday, March 4, 2022, 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM CST (5:30 PM – 7:00 PM EST)
Rebecca J. DeRoo, Rochester Institute of Technology
New Age of Teaching the Art of the Islamic World
Museum Committee
Saturday, March 5, 2022, 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM CST (10:00 AM – 11:30 AM EST)
Xenia Gazi, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Reconsidering Art History Through Access
Saturday, March 5, 2022, 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM CST (10:00 AM – 11:30 AM EST)
Sara Catherine Woodbury, College of William and Mary
Curating Craft: Contemporary Making in Global Museums of Islamic Art
Saturday, March 5, 2022, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM CST (12:00 PM – 1:30 PM EST)
Leslee Michelsen, Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art at Shangri La
New Perspectives in Art, Design, and Art History: Supporting and Showcasing Emerging Voices from Marginalized Communities
Committee on Diversity Practices
Saturday, March 5, 2022, 2:30 PM – 4:00 PM CST (3:30 PM – 5:00 PM EST)
Stefanie Snider, Kendall College of Art and Design
Rachel Lynn de Cuba, Clemson University
In Conversation: Coffee talk on the Annual Conference, Part II
posted by CAA — Dec 06, 2021
Our series of coffee talk conversations continues with a follow up chat between Meme Omogbai, our executive director and CEO, and Theresa Avila, the Program Chair of the 110th Annual Conference. In this video, they address questions from international participants, safety protocols and more details. Check it out and send us your thoughts for the next installment! Please send us your questions: programs@collegeart.org .
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES
Theresa Avila is a curator and an Assistant Professor of non-Western Art History at California State University, Channel Islands. She earned a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of New Mexico with a focus on Modern Latin American and Latin@x art. As a scholar and curator her work focuses on the intersections between the visual and political, as she interrogates historiography, empire and nation building, and systems of differentiation. Published works include “Echoing the Call for Revolution: Emiliano Zapata in Chican@x Art” for the exhibition catalogue Emiliano Zapata despues de Zapata (2019), the book Making and Being Made: Contemporary Citizenship, Art, and Visual Culture (2017), as well as the forthcoming “The History of the Barrio Mobile Art Studio, a vehicle for creative transformations” for the fifty-year anthology of Self Help Graphics (2023) and the project “Dialogos: on Landscapes of the Americas” for Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture Journal. (2023). As the Director of the Broome Library Gallery at CSUCI she curated Magnetic Currents: Art charged by the U.S. and Mexico Border (2020); Colecion de Lucha, Desde Santa Paula a las Americas: The Personal Archive of Luzma Espinosa (2019); and Tracing History: Mapping California (2018). Dr. Avila firmly believes we must activate art in meaningful and engage art as a tool for change.
Meme Omogbai, CAA Executive Director and CEO: Before joining CAA, Meme Omogbai served as a member and past board chair of the New Jersey Historic Trust, one of four landmark entities dedicated to preservation of the state’s historic and cultural heritage, and Montclair State University’s Advisory Board. Named one of 25 Influential Black Women in Business by The Network Journal, Meme has over twenty-five years of experience in corporate, government, higher education, and museum sectors. As the first American of African descent to chair the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), Omogbai led an initiative to rebrand the AAM as a global, inclusive alliance. While COO and trustee, she spearheaded a major transformation in operating performance at the Newark Museum. During her time as deputy assistant chancellor of New Jersey’s Department of Higher Education, Omogbai received legislative acknowledgment and was recognized with the New Jersey Meritorious Service award for her work on college affordability initiatives for families. Omogbai received her MBA from Rutgers University and holds a CPA. She did postgraduate work at Harvard University’s executive management program and has earned the designation of Chartered Global Management Accountant. She studied global museum executive leadership at the J. Paul Getty Trust Museum Leadership Institute, where she also served on the faculty.
CAA Then & Now: Reflections on the Centennial Book and the Next Century
posted by CAA — Nov 15, 2021
![book cover](http://www.collegeart.org/news/wp-content//theeyethehandthemind-210x300.jpeg)
Cover of The Eye, the Hand, the Mind: 100 Years of the College Art Association, edited by Susan Ball (Rutgers, 2011) featuring detail of Faith Ringgold, The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, 1996
On November 4, CAA had the privilege to host the digital event celebrating The Eye, the Hand, the Mind: 100 Years of the College Art Association. If you were unable to make it, please watch this recording of the event.
Published in 2010, this book documents and examines over a century of CAA’s history. The event features Susan Ball, editor of the publication, and author Julia Sienkewicz, who will discuss their contributions to the project and how topics and issues have shifted and changed in the last decade. A conversation between CAA CEO and Executive Director, Meme Omogbai, and art historian, Anne Higonnet, will reflect on these insights and CAA’s plans for the future. This conversation also will honor Robert L. Herbert, the dedicatee of the book, and will discuss how his legacy has impacted the field and so many at CAA.
Following this event, CAA will release a series of short videos from authors discussing their specific chapters within the book, including Julia A. Sienkewicz, Judith Brodsky, Ellen Levy, and Karen Leader. Their presentations will cover a range of topics concerning CAA’s history, from advocacy and feminist initiatives to CAA’s past exhibition programs and conferences.
About the book:
Susan Ball, editor. The Eye, the Hand, the Mind: 100 Years of the College Art Association (Rutgers University Press, 2011). Copies are available for purchase here.
In 1911 the College Art Association began with a small group of college art teachers whose single mission was to promote “art interests in all divisions of American colleges and universities.” One hundred years later the CAA, as it is commonly known, is as diverse as the decades that witnessed its maturity and growth. As leadership and membership grew dynamically, art and art history professors were joined by non-academic visual artists and art historians, museum professionals, art librarians, visual resource curators, independent scholars and artists, collectors, dealers, conservators, and non-college educators.
The Eye, the Hand, the Mind is a collaborative journey, filled with pictorial mementoes and enlivening stories and anecdotes. In these essays readers discover the important role CAA played in major issues in higher education such as curriculum development, preservation of world monuments, workforce issues and market equity, intellectual property and free speech, capturing conflicts and reconciliations inherent among artists and art historians, pedagogical approaches and critical interpretations/interventions as played out in association publications, annual conferences, advocacy efforts, and governance.
Celebrating the centennial of CAA members and milestones, Susan Ball and renowned contributors honor the organization’s complex history which, in part, also represents many learned societies and the humanities over the last one hundred years.
About the speakers:
Susan Ball, Ph.D.: Susan Ball edited The Eye, the Hand, the Mind. Ball holds a Ph.D. in art and architectural history from Yale University and holds over 35 years of professional experience – as a professor, scholar, museum professional and nonprofit agency director. Ball served as Interim Director of Programs at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). Prior, she was Executive Director at the College Art Association, Professor of Art History at the University of Delaware, the Director of Government and Foundation Affairs at the Art Institute of Chicago, and a consultant with the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation. As an author and editor, she has contributed significant works of scholarship in her field, such as The Profitable Artist: A Handbook for All Artists in the Literary, Media, Performing, and Visual Arts with Peter Cobb and Felicity Hogan (Allworth Press, 2011), and has served on many boards.
Julia A. Sienkewicz, PhD: In The Eye, the Hand, the Mind, Sienkewicz authored the chapter, “Uniting the Arts and the Academy: A History of the CAA Annual Conference.” Sienkewicz, an Associate Professor of Art History at Roanoke College, holds both an MA and PhD from the University of Illinois and a BA from Mt. Holyoke College. She is the author of Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor (2019). Currently, she is at work on the monograph Forms of White Hegemony: Transnational Sculpture, Racialized Identity, and the Torch of Civilization, 1836-1865, research that has been recognized with the award of a Terra Foundation Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. She recently edited a special issue of the Art History Pedagogy and Practice journal entitled, “Teaching and Learning the Art History of the United States.” Sienkewicz served in leadership roles at CAA for more than a decade, most recently concluding a term on the Board of Directors as the VP for Committees.
Anne Higonnet, Ph.D.: Anne Higonnet is now Professor of Art History at Barnard College of Columbia University. She received her BA from Harvard College in 1980 and her PhD from Yale University in 1988 under Robert Herbert. Her work has been supported by Getty, Guggenheim, and Social Science Research Council fellowships, as well as by grants from the Mellon, Howard and Kress Foundations. In 2019-2020 she was a Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute. She has published many essays, five print books, and two book-scale digital projects, is a prize-winning teacher, and has lectured widely, including in the Live Arts program of the Met Museum. One of her courses, Clothing, is among the most popular at Barnard and Columbia. She is now writing a book under contract with Norton: Three Fashion Stars and the Revolution They Wore; Joséphine Bonaparte, Juliette Récamier, Térésia Tallien.
Meme Omogbai, CAA Executive Director and CEO: Before joining CAA, Omogbai served as a member and past board chair of the New Jersey Historic Trust, one of four landmark entities dedicated to preservation of the state’s historic and cultural heritage, and Montclair State University’s Advisory Board. Named one of 25 Influential Black Women in Business by The Network Journal, Meme has over twenty-five years of experience in corporate, government, higher education, and museum sectors. As the first American of African descent to chair the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), Omogbai led an initiative to rebrand the AAM as a global, inclusive alliance. While COO and trustee, she spearheaded a major transformation in operating performance at the Newark Museum. During her time as deputy assistant chancellor of New Jersey’s Department of Higher Education, Omogbai received legislative acknowledgment and was recognized with the New Jersey Meritorious Service award for her work on college affordability initiatives for families. Omogbai received her MBA from Rutgers University and holds a CPA. She did postgraduate work at Harvard University’s executive management program and has earned the designation of Chartered Global Management Accountant. She studied global museum executive leadership at the J. Paul Getty Trust Museum Leadership Institute, where she also served on the faculty.
In Memoriam: Julie L. Green
posted by CAA — Nov 04, 2021
![](http://www.collegeart.org/news/wp-content//MicrosoftTeams-image-59-300x200.jpg)
Artist Julie Green in front of one of their pieces in The Armory Show 2020, which included a salon-style presentation of Fashion Plate works, painted on Chinet plates and platters. (Photo by Theo Downes-Le Guin/Upfor Gallery)
Artist and educator Julie Green died at home on Tuesday, October 12, 2021. Green (who preferred gender neutral pronouns) was diagnosed with ovarian cancer nearly two years ago.
Julie Lynn Green was born in 1961 in Yokosuka, Japan to Frederick William (Bill) Green and Jane Green. Green’s birth wasn’t without excitement: their father was airlifted by helicopter off a Navy ship to support Jane during pregnancy complications. Both mother and child were fine. As a child, Green lived in Washington State, Ohio, New Jersey, Illinois, and Iowa, where they attended Des Moines Roosevelt High School, graduating in 1979. From an early age, Green shared their mother’s passion for creative projects, thriving as an artist and performing with a high school mime group. One of Green’s favorite pastimes was to play Scrabble with grandmother “GrandMary.” In 1995, Green married longtime partner Clay Lohmann, who encouraged a lifelong interest in yoga and expanded Green’s artistic pursuits.
Green wrote that they wanted to be a stewardess until age four, but became a painter instead. Green received a B.F.A. and M.F.A. from The University of Kansas, studying with noted artist Roger Shimomura, who remained a lifelong mentor and friend. Green joined the faculty at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon in 2000 as a professor in the Art and Art History Department. While garnering admiration and affection from a generation of students, Green also maintained an active studio practice. Green started their best-known work, a series of paintings on second-hand plates depicting the last meal requests of death row prisoners titled The Last Supper, in 2000. A few weeks before their death, Green decided to end the project at 1,000 plates. The first 800 plates are currently on view at the Bellevue Arts Museum in Bellevue, Washington.
Green worked in a variety of mediums but identified primarily as a painter, often combining humble materials and techniques with art historical traditions. Green painted on linens, Tyvek, and Chinet-brand paper plates as well as paper and canvas, with pigments from sources as diverse as industrial waste byproducts, rare earth elements and 7UP. Awarded a Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts from The Ford Family Foundation, Green’s accolades also included grants and fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission, the ArtPrize 3-D Juried Award, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Green’s work was featured in a variety of publications and programs including The New York Times, Rolling Stone, NPR, and PBS, and was exhibited widely in museums and galleries throughout the United States. Green’s final public exhibition in their lifetime, at The Armory Show in New York in 2020, garnered the Presents Award.
Green was preceded in death by their father Frederick WIlliam Green. Green is survived by their husband, artist Clay Lohmann, brother Scott Green, and mother Jane Hamilton.
–Theo Downes-Le Guin and Scott Green
In Conversation: Meme Omogbai speaks with Theresa Avila
posted by CAA — Nov 01, 2021
We’re delighted to introduce CAA members to a new series of coffee talk conversations between Meme Omogbai, our executive director and CEO, and Theresa Avila, the Program Chair of the 110 Annual Conference. In this first video, they discuss the format of the Conference and how this key program is part of CAA’s response to members, both domestic and international, and vital to positioning our organization for sustainable growth. Upcoming conversations will address questions sent by members. Check it out and send us your thoughts for the next installment!
Please send us your questions: programs@collegeart.org
Speaker Biographies
Theresa Avila is a curator and an Assistant Professor of non-Western Art History at California State University, Channel Islands. She earned a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of New Mexico with a focus on Modern Latin American and Latin@x art. As a scholar and curator her work focuses on the intersections between the visual and political, as she interrogates historiography, empire and nation building, and systems of differentiation. Published works include “Echoing the Call for Revolution: Emiliano Zapata in Chican@x Art” for the exhibition catalogue Emiliano Zapata despues de Zapata (2019), the book Making and Being Made: Contemporary Citizenship, Art, and Visual Culture (2017), as well as the forthcoming “The History of the Barrio Mobile Art Studio, a vehicle for creative transformations” for the fifty-year anthology of Self Help Graphics (2023) and the project “Dialogos: on Landscapes of the Americas” for Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture Journal. (2023). As the Director of the Broome Library Gallery at CSUCI she curated Magnetic Currents: Art charged by the U.S. and Mexico Border (2020); Colecion de Lucha, Desde Santa Paula a las Americas: The Personal Archive of Luzma Espinosa (2019); and Tracing History: Mapping California (2018). Dr. Avila firmly believes we must activate art in meaningful and engage art as a tool for change.
Meme Omogbai, CAA Executive Director and CEO: Before joining CAA, Meme Omogbai served as a member and past board chair of the New Jersey Historic Trust, one of four landmark entities dedicated to preservation of the state’s historic and cultural heritage, and Montclair State University’s Advisory Board. Named one of 25 Influential Black Women in Business by The Network Journal, Meme has over twenty-five years of experience in corporate, government, higher education, and museum sectors. As the first American of African descent to chair the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), Omogbai led an initiative to rebrand the AAM as a global, inclusive alliance. While COO and trustee, she spearheaded a major transformation in operating performance at the Newark Museum. During her time as deputy assistant chancellor of New Jersey’s Department of Higher Education, Omogbai received legislative acknowledgment and was recognized with the New Jersey Meritorious Service award for her work on college affordability initiatives for families. Omogbai received her MBA from Rutgers University and holds a CPA. She did postgraduate work at Harvard University’s executive management program and has earned the designation of Chartered Global Management Accountant. She studied global museum executive leadership at the J. Paul Getty Trust Museum Leadership Institute, where she also served on the faculty.
Museum Committee Research Survey: Developing New Directions with College Art Association Member Input
posted by CAA — Aug 26, 2021
![Visitors in the Musée du Louvre in 2020 © Antoine Mongodin](http://www.collegeart.org/news/wp-content//louvre.jpg)
Visitors in the Musée du Louvre in 2020 © Antoine Mongodin
In the spring of 2021, the CAA Museum Committee initiated a survey of our members for the purposes of revising current directions and charting new ones that respond to updated knowledge of their concerns.
The results indicate that the Museum Committee‘s previous and planned Conference sessions and professional development workshops in 2021–2022 are appropriate, that they should publicize their presence more, and should use these projects and others to strengthen connections with professional museum groups; encourage diversity, decolonization, and the use of museums to educate; in addition to fight for salary equity. In this endeavor, they ask any interested CAA members to join and help in this mission.
Key Takeaways of the Report
In general, respondents likely appreciate the recent focuses and activities of the Committee, yet wish they would also move forward in new directions.
Both the CAA panels and professional development workshops should be continued and can be used to achieve the following desired goals culled from survey responses:
- Help publicize the Museum Committee more broadly.
- Give museum and curatorial studies students, young professionals, and museum professionals, particularly those from underrepresented groups, necessary resources as they start their careers, and mentor persons who want to become museum professionals or teach museum/curatorial studies, including in concert with art history coursework.
- Support the function of museums as pedagogical sites, especially during the processes of decolonizing and defining decolonization.
- Develop and disperse a list of curatorial/museum studies programs in American universities, including those offered on conjunction with art history training, and perhaps have a dedicated space on CAA’s website or another location with a link on the CAA website homepage to publicly disperse this list.
- Renew efforts to craft and chart the implementation of policy statements and best-practice guidelines particularly concerning salary equity and unpaid internships, among similar issues relevant to the field, and to do so in concert with professional museum organizations, such as the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC), American Alliance of Museums (AAM), and the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG). One way to do this is to have present and future Museum Committee members actively reach out to persons within professional museum groups to create joint projects.
Meet the 2021 Recipients of Terra Foundation for American Art Research Travel Grants
posted by CAA — Jul 19, 2021
We’re delighted to announce fourteen scholars have been awarded Terra Foundation for American Art Research Travel Grants in 2021.
These grants provide support to doctoral, postdoctoral, and senior scholars from both the US and outside the US for research topics dedicated to the art and visual culture of the United States prior to 1980.
International Research Travel Grants for US-based Scholars
Doctoral Scholars
Thomas Busciglio-Ritter, The University of Delaware, “‘The Union of Excellences’: An Atlantic History of Early American Landscape Views (1790–1860)”
Ann Tartsinis, Stanford University, “Modernism in Pieces: Transatlantic Visual Culture Between the Wars”
Postdoctoral & Senior Scholars
Caroline Riley, Boston University, “Thérèse Bonney’s Photography: The Politics of Art, the Body,and War from 1920–1970”
Nadia Sethi, University of Washington, “Alaska Native Cultural Belongings held in Museums in Estonia, Finland and Sweden”
Kay Wells, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, “Uncanny Revivals: Designing Early America during the Rise of Fascism”
International Research Travel Grants to the United States
Doctoral Scholars
Max Böhner, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, “Twilight Aesthetics: Queer Visual Culture in the United States Between 1945 and 1969”
Sarah Happersberger, Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Germany, “Connection, Community, Kinship, Network: Women Artists Performing Togetherness in the Long 1970s”
Jacqueline Mabey, University College London, England, “This Must Be the Place: Mapping Artistic Kinship and Economic Change in Downtown New York, 1973–1987”
Ana Gabriela Rodriguez, The Courtauld Institute of Art, England, “Tracing Puerto Rican Graphic Arts: Bridging Workshops and Crossing Borders, 1940s –1970s”
Frances Varley, The Courtauld Institute of Art, England, “Identity, Provincialism and Modernism in the US and Britain from a Comparative Perspective, c. 1870–1914”
Wen Yao, The University of York, England, “A Travelling Surrealist: Mobility and Representation in Stella Snead’s Paintings, Photographs and Collages Made in the US (1940–1980)”
Postdoctoral & Senior Scholars
Dafne Cruz Porchini, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, “Jean Charlot: A French Artist in the United States and Mexico (1921–1944)”
Maria Stavrinaki, Université Paris I Panthéon–Sorbonne, France, “‘After History’: Variations on a Theme in the Art and Thought of the 1950s–1960s”
Emily Warner, Independent Scholar, “Abstraction Unframed: Abstract Murals at Midcentury”
Learn more about the Terra Foundation Research Travel Grants
Remembering Rick Asher
posted by CAA — Jul 13, 2021
![Rick Asher](http://www.collegeart.org/news/wp-content//MicrosoftTeams-image-20-776x1024.jpg)
Rick Asher. Photograph by Ben Fractenberg.
Frederick M. Asher, beacon of collegiality and builder of institutions, died on June 26, 2021, having turned 80 just one month earlier. His generosity of spirit guided many scholars through their graduate years and beyond: at the University of Minnesota, where he spent his academic career, and around the world. With Catherine B. Asher, his wife and fellow historian of South Asian art, he led initiatives to document and preserve images of art, archaeological, and architectural objects and sites in India; mentored numerous colleagues and students; and contributed his energies to making academic organizations flourish across the world. He was an early, active member of the American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA); served as president of the American Institute of Indian Studies; and played many roles at CAA, most recently as part of the CAA-Getty International Program where his energies encouraged many of us to reach out across physical and intellectual distances to begin new conversations.
His early research, published in 1980 as The Art of Eastern India, 300–800 (Minnesota), draws connections across the Gupta and Pala eras, thinking deeply about continuities across media—terracotta, bronze, and stone—and across belief systems. His subsequent research led him to study contemporary sculptural practices as a way of understanding the work of unnamed historical sculptors and to a deep engagement with the materiality, crafting, and afterlives of both sculptural objects and the sites where they were worshipped and excavated. His final book, Sarnath: A Critical History of the Place Where Buddhism Began (Getty 2020), published just months before his death, focused on the place where the historical Buddha preached his first sermon, tracing the establishment, excavation, and reimagining of the monastic site from that founding moment to the present. In April, Rick discussed the book with James Cuno for a Getty podcast, giving us a glimpse into his intellectual process and offering many of us a reminder of the rhythms of his class lectures. With his students, Rick always ran toward questions and tantalizing bits of information, wondering at what we don’t know about the past and at the same time marveling at contemporary uses of ancient sculptures and sites. At Sarnath, this meant both the tourists shuttling in from Varanasi with their local guides (guides who almost certainly had met Rick and discussed their mutual love of the site with him) and the international monastic Buddhist communities with pilgrimage centers nearby. Rick cared deeply about his students, and his engaging, dynamic teaching was renowned. He received the University of Minnesota’s Morse-Alumni Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2005–2006, one of his most treasured moments of recognition.
I was incredibly fortunate to visit Sarnath for the first time with Rick and Cathy as part of a trip they organized for the cohort of graduate students in the late 1990s. The trip was exemplary of the Ashers’ generosity and openness—recognizing the hurdles associated with pursuing academic research in India, they sought to pass on their extensive experience by offering us the opportunity to shadow them in their respective projects. Rick had been working with a scientist at the University of Minnesota to ascertain the locations of quarries for various Pala-era (8th–12th century) sculptures by matching stone samples. The project focused on both the materiality and the process of crafting the sculptures—he considered how stone was separated from the earth, how it would have been chosen for a sculpture, and then how it was carefully carved with the detailed iconographies of a Vishnu or a Tara.1 The project’s success relied on his ability to bring people together in a common project: Rick recruited curators and conservators at museums around the world to undertake the delicate process of excising a thin section from the back of these sculptures to compare to the samples he gathered from quarries in Bihar and Bengal. It was this latter piece of the project that he embarked on that summer, taking two of us green graduate students with him into remote areas of Bihar, where we stayed in dak bungalows (remnants of the nineteenth-century postal system) and revisited many of his early research sites from his own graduate days. Rick’s enthusiasm for reconnecting with the people of the region and introducing us to them still resonates with me today, guiding my own fieldwork experiences beyond the inert object to understand the deep interconnections between art, history, and the people who made and continue to interact with the “works of art” we study, works that remain very much alive in the present.
Rick had an incredible gift for open and positive leadership. He hosted ACSAA’s first conference in 1981, and he made sure that the group served as a space of warm, collegial exchange as it grew over the decades. He attended every conference, symposium, workshop, and meeting, seeking out the panels where colleagues and former students were presenting. He would often ask the first question, to draw out commonalities across a diverse panel and also, I came to realize, to facilitate discussion and to give everyone else in the audience time to formulate their own questions. It was primarily at conferences that he would make connections between scholars, a kind of academic matchmaking, if you will. One of the truths of my academic life is that if we have met, Rick probably introduced us. He would stride over, beaming, happy to see you, and then almost immediately say, “there’s someone here you should meet.” Then he would bound off, urging you to follow, to joyfully connect you to a towering senior scholar or newly minted PhD, offering a few choice intellectual threads to solidify the link. Rick understood that the big institutions—CAA prominent among them—only worked because of the dedication of an interconnected group of individuals who recognized their shared commitment to the field. These introductions wove the fabric of these institutions such that when he passed, my email inbox was filled with loving notes and remembrances from colleagues around the world—his colleagues, and also, because of him, my colleagues.
Rick, whose intellectual pursuits focused on the material connections between works of art and people and who cared deeply for makers of objects and sites and the ways in which places and people shaped one another over time, thus continues to connect us even at the moment of his passing. His own post-history has yet to be written, but I have a strong feeling that his energy and presence will be with us at each future academic meeting, in each future encounter. So wonderful to see you! Come, there’s someone here you should meet.
–Rebecca M. Brown, Johns Hopkins University
CAA at 2021 Advocacy Days
posted by CAA — Apr 16, 2021
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Screenshot of CAA in virtual conversation with NY Senator Chuck Schumer, 2021
CAA representatives advocated for the arts and humanities with partners at the American Association of Museums (AAM) and the National Humanities Alliance (NHA) this spring for Museums Advocacy Day on February 23 and Humanities Advocacy Day on March 11, 2021. Alongside other academic societies, scholars, and museum professionals, CAA urged congressional representatives and senators to back full funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and particularly the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), which provides grants for museums and arts organizations throughout the country, for the fiscal year 2022. Increased allocations for these programs would bring funding levels back to what they were over a decade ago in 1998. We met with the offices of New York representatives Tom Reed, Jerry Nadler, Carolyn Maloney, John Katko, and Yvette Clarke and senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer. Sen. Schumer joined Museums Advocacy Day in person to share his enthusiasm about moving forward with emergency relief funds for arts organizations and supporting more space for them in the next year’s congressional budget.
CAA has been participating in these meetings for the past three years. We noted that 1/3 of all museums in the US are at risk of closing without assistance. We also stressed the importance of museums as institutions that have served our community greatly during COVID and have come up with creative solutions for childhood education, community building, virtual exhibitions, and out-of-the-box engagement strategies. The arts and humanities have helped our communities cope and their spaces—schools, libraries, and museums—remain some of the only spaces in communities that can be accessed freely by the public.
Julie Hollenbach and Carla Taunton–Decolonization, Settler Responsibility, and Treaty Principles
posted by Allison Walters — Mar 14, 2021
The CAA Conversations Podcast continues the vibrant discussions initiated at our Annual Conference. Listen in as educators explore arts and pedagogy, tackling everything from the day-to-day grind to the big, universal questions of the field.
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This podcast explores key concepts of decolonization, settler responsibility, and treaty principles. Join Dr. Julie Hollenbach in conversation with Dr. Carla Taunton in a dynamic dialogue that considers key ideas and concepts of decolonization. Hollenbach and Taunton discuss the potential roles and responsibilities of white-settler scholars in decolonizing and unsettling initiatives within museums, academia, and the classroom to include the movement towards decolonial accomplice focused methodologies.
Dr. Carla Taunton, a white-settler scholar, is an Associate Professor in the Division of Art History and Contemporary Culture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the department of Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. She is the Special Advisor to the VP Academic and Research, Social Justice and Decolonization. Her research contributes to arts-based critiques of settler colonialism, Indigenous arts and methodologies, contemporary Canadian art and activism, museum and curatorial studies, as well as theories of decolonization, anti-colonialism and settler responsibility. Her recent publications include, “Unsettling Canadian Heritage: Decolonial Aesthetics in Canadian Video and Performance Art,” with Sarah E.K Smith in Journal Canadian Studies (2018), “Embodying Sovereignty: Indigenous Women’s Performance Art in Canada,” in Narratives Unfolding (2017), and “Performing Sovereignty: Forces to be Reckoned With” in More Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women (2016). She co-edited PUBLIC 54: Indigenous Art, the first special issue on global Indigenous new media and digital arts, and RACAR: Continuities Between Eras: Indigenous Arts (2017). She is an independent curator and was a curatorial team member for Abadakone at the National Gallery of Canada (2019). Taunton’s recent collaborative research projects include: The GLAM Collective, The Pilimmaksarniq/Pijariuqsarniq Project: Inuit Futures in Arts Leadership (2017), and The Archive/Counter-Archive: Activating Canada’s Moving Image Heritage (2017).
Julie Hollenbach is a queer white-settler scholar also at NSCAD University where she is an Assistant Professor of Craft History and Material Culture. Her work addresses craft practices and craft cultures at the intersections of history and location, tradition and ritual, contact and connection, meaning and use. Julie’s curatorial and academic research is influenced by queer, feminist, anti-racist and decolonial methodologies. If you’d like to learn more about her work, check out an article she published online with Studio magazine entitled, “Moving Beyond a Modern Craft: Thoughts on White Entitlement and Cultural Appropriation in Professional Craft in Canada,” or check out her recent curatorial project Unpacking the Living Room at Mount St. Vincent University Art Gallery. A website chronicling and documenting the exhibition can be found at: www.unpackingthelivingroommsvu.ca.