CAA News Today
Session Audio from Los Angeles Conference Available
posted by Emmanuel Lemakis — Mar 26, 2009
“Toward an Art Pedagogy for the Twenty-First Century,” “Torture, Extraordinary Renditions, and the Aesthetics of Disappearance,” and “About Face: Portrait, Mask, and Facial Expression in Mesoamerica and the Andes, 6000 BC–AD 1600”—these are titles of only three of the many exciting sessions from the 2009 Annual Conference in Los Angeles. They are also available as audio recordings from Conference Media. Nearly eighty sessions—including special Saturday sessions hosted by the Feminist Art Project—are included.
A set of MP3 audio recordings from the conference is available for only $149.95, either as a download or on interactive CD-ROMs. Individual sessions, available only as downloads, are $24.95 each. Please visit Conference Media to view the list of sessions and to order.
Whether you took part in, attended, or missed a particular conference session, these recordings are a must-have for your library, research, or teaching. Listen to them while walking across campus, while driving in your car or using public transportation, or while relaxing in your home.
You can also purchase session audio recordings from the 2006–8 conferences in Boston, New York, and Dallas–Fort Worth.
Photo: A 2009 Annual Conference session (photograph by Brad Marks)
March 2009 Issue of The Art Bulletin Published
posted by Christopher Howard — Mar 20, 2009
The March 2009 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, has been published and was mailed to CAA members earlier this month.
Special to this issue is the publication of Picasso’s Closet, a play by the Chilean American writer and Duke University professor Ariel Dorfman, which examines Pablo Picasso’s thorny politics and raises questions about the role of an artist during wartime. The art historians Pepe Karmel and Patricia Leighton and the theorist Mieke Bal respond.
Two essays examine on art and culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France. Judy Sund reads Antoine Watteau’s Les charmes de la vie as a commentary on the ways that nature was domesticated and aestheticized for wealthy Parisians, with the artist standing as mediator between the realms of culture and nature. Meanwhile, Jennifer Olmsted considers how Eugène Delacroix’s The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage was at odds with the triumphalist paintings of French domination over North Africa that were also on view at the Salon of 1845 in Paris.
This issue of The Art Bulletin also contains four book reviews on Roman visuality, the Buddhist afterlife in art, the Psalter of Saint Louis, and African architecture. Please read the full table of contents for more details.
US Court Appeal May Overturn Ban on Foreign Scholar
posted by Christopher Howard — Mar 18, 2009
On Tuesday, March 23, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will reconsider the case of a Swiss professor and Muslim scholar, Tariq Ramadan, who was banned from entering the country in 2004, reports John Schwartz of the New York Times. Based on a provision for ideological exclusion in the USA Patriot Act, Ramadan was declined a visa by the US government to travel to America and take a position at the University of Notre Dame.
The American Academy of Religion, the American Association of University Professors, and PEN American Center all support the American Civil Liberties Union, which is challenging a 2007 ruling that upheld the government’s decision. Arguing for Americans’ First Amendment rights to hear Ramadan, this coalition is also calling on the new presidential administration to end ideological exclusion.
The Patriot Act allows the US to deny a visa to anyone whom it believes has endorsed or espoused terrorist activity or persuaded others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity. The ACLU, however, claims the government used the provision more broadly to deny entry to scholars, writers, and activists whose political views it disfavored. After the ACLU initially filed suit, Schwartz reports, the government asserted that Ramadan made contributions from 1998 to 2002 to a charity in Switzerland, called the Association de Secours Palestinien, which the Treasury Department had deemed a Hamas-affiliated terrorist organization.
US COURT APPEAL MAY OVERTURN BAN ON FOREIGN SCHOLAR
posted by Christopher Howard — Mar 18, 2009
On Tuesday, March 23, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will reconsider the case of a Swiss professor and Muslim scholar, Tariq Ramadan, who was banned from entering the country in 2004, reports John Schwartz of theNew York Times. Based on a provision for ideological exclusion in the USA Patriot Act, Ramadan was declined a visa by the US government to travel to America and take a position at the University of Notre Dame.
The American Academy of Religion, the American Association of University Professors, and PEN American Center all support the American Civil Liberties Union, which is challenging a 2007 ruling that upheld the government’s decision. Arguing for Americans’ First Amendment rights to hear Ramadan, this coalition is also calling on the new presidential administration to end ideological exclusion.
The Patriot Act allows the US to deny a visa to anyone whom it believes has endorsed or espoused terrorist activity or persuaded others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity. The ACLU, however, claims the government used the provision more broadly to deny entry to scholars, writers, and activists whose political views it disfavored. After the ACLU initially filed suit, Schwartz reports, the government asserted that Ramadan made contributions from 1998 to 2002 to a charity in Switzerland, called the Association de Secours Palestinien, which theTreasury Department had deemed a Hamas-affiliated terrorist organization.
March CAA News Published
posted by Christopher Howard — Feb 20, 2009
The March 2009 CAA News has been posted to the CAA website as a PDF download. Printed copies for individual and institutional members will be mailed next week, with your copy arriving in early March.
Highlighted in the issue are the four 2008 recipients of CAA’s Professional Development Fellowship Program for graduate students: Mary Reid Kelley, Yale University; Justin Shull, Rutgers University; Nichole N. Bridges, University of Wisconsin, Madison; and Wendy Ikemoto, Harvard University. Six honorable mentions are also named.
In the Publications section, CAA announces the appointment of Katy Siegel as the next Art Journal editor-in-chief. In addition, the editorial boards of our three journals—The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and caa.reviews—and the Millard Meiss Publication Fund Jury all seek new members. Read the calls for nominations and self-nominations inside.
The deadline for submissions to the May 2009 CAA News is March 10. Please read the newsletter submission guidelines or write to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor.
This Week at the Rose Art Museum
posted by Christopher Howard — Feb 06, 2009
News about the closing of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University and the selling of its collection slowed down this week, but not without several highlights. Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz issued a formal apology—not for the decision to dismantle the museum’s collection but rather for his mishandling the announcement to do so. He also regretted leaving out the Brandeis community in the board of trustees’ deliberations.
Michael Rush, director of the Rose, posted his statement on the closing and sale directly to his museum’s website this week. The university’s Department of Fine Arts also joined the chorus of protest voices, issuing a statement to all university faculty, students, alumni, and friends of the department. Also, the New York Times condemned the Brandeis decision in an article by Roberta Smith and in an unsigned editorial.
Jeff Gilbride of the Daily News Tribune in Waltham, Massachusetts, was at the “funeral march” held this week by Brandeis students as an “emotional and rowdy counterpart” to last week’s sit-in at the museum. Relatedly, Jeff Weistein from Obit wonders, “Can a Museum Die?”
Greg Cook reviews the current exhibition at the Rose, Hans Hoffmann: Circa 1950, for the Boston Phoenix, and Daniel Grant considers donor responses and restrictions on gifts in his article “Is the University’s Museum Just a Rose to Be Plucked?” for the Wall Street Journal.
The Rose Art Museum website is chronicling the press on the closing and sale. Laurie Fendrich has been passionately following the story in the Chronicle Review, the blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education. And, of course, the Boston Globe has been leading the charge with daily reports.
THIS WEEK AT THE ROSE ART MUSEUM
posted by Christopher Howard — Feb 06, 2009
News about the closing of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University and the selling of its collection slowed down this week, but not without several highlights. Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz issued a formal apology—not for the decision to dismantle the museum’s collection but rather for his mishandling the announcement to do so. He also regretted leaving out the Brandeis community in the board of trustees’ deliberations.
Michael Rush, director of the Rose, posted his statement on the closing and sale directly to his museum’s website this week. The university’s Department of Fine Arts also joined the chorus of protest voices, issuing a statement to all university faculty, students, alumni, and friends of the department. Also, the New York Times condemned the Brandeis decision in an article by Roberta Smith and in an unsigned editorial.
Jeff Gilbride of the Daily News Tribune in Waltham, Massachusetts, was at the “funeral march” held this week by Brandeis students as an “emotional and rowdy counterpart” to last week’s sit-in at the museum. Relatedly, Jeff Weistein fromObit wonders, “Can a Museum Die?”
Greg Cook reviews the current exhibition at the Rose, Hans Hoffmann: Circa 1950, for the Boston Phoenix, and Daniel Grant considers donor responses and restrictions on gifts in his article “Is the University’s Museum Just a Rose to Be Plucked?” for the Wall Street Journal.
The Rose Art Museum website is chronicling the press on the closing and sale. Laurie Fendrich has been passionately following the story in the Chronicle Review, the blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education. And, of course, theBoston Globe has been leading the charge with daily reports.
Winter Obituaries in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — Jan 26, 2009
CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, designers, architects, philanthropists, and collectors.
- Joan Abelló, a Spanish painter who lived in Barcelona, died on December 25, 2008, one day before he would have turned 86
- Leonard E. B. Andrews, a collector of Andrew Wyeth’s “Helga Pictures” and an arts philanthropist, died on January 2, 2009, in Malvern, Pennsylvania. He was 83
- Manjit Bawa, an Indian figurative painter of mythological and Sufi spiritual themes, died on December 29, 2008, in New Delhi. He was 67
- Aldo Crommelynck, an artist and master printer who worked with artists ranging from Matisse, Picasso, and Miró to Jim Dine, Chuck Close, and Terry Winters, died on December 22, 2008, in Paris, France. He was 77
- Hannah Frank, a Scottish artist and sculptor, died on December 18, 2008. She was 100
- Betty Freeman, an art collector and supporter of twentieth-century music, died on January 3, 2009, at the age of 97
- Shigeo Fukuda, a graphic designer and poster artist, died on January 11, 2009, in Tokyo, Japan. He was 76
- Betty Goodwin, a highly acclaimed Canadian artist, died on December 1, 2008, at the age of 85
- Robert Graham, a Los Angeles–based artist who focused on monumental public bronze sculpture, including those depicting Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Joe Louis, and Charlie Parker, died on December 27, 2008. He was 70
- Robert Gumbiner, a physician, healthcare innovator, and founder of the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California, died on January 20, 2009. He was 85
- Jan Kaplický, a Czech architect whose radical, organic building forms can be seen across Europe and the UK, died on January 14, 2009, at the age of 71
- Michael Levy, an art historian and director of the National Gallery in London from 1973 to 1987, died on December 28, 2008, at the age of 81
- Pierre Mendell, a graphic designer and poster artist who worked on the visual identity of the International Design Museum in Munich, Germany, died on December 19, 2008. He was 79
- Govinder Nazran, an illustrator and designer turned fine artist, died on December 30, 2008, at the age of 44
- Ann Sperry, a New York–based sculptor and feminist whose work was collected by art institutions nationwide, died on November 27, 2008
- Coosje van Bruggen, an art historian, critic, and artist who collaborated with her husband Claes Oldenburg, died on January 10, 2009, in Los Angeles. She was 66
- Andrew Wyeth, a respected and reviled American realist painter, died on January 16, 2009, at his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. He was 91
- Ray Yoshida, a painter and collage artist who taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for many years, died on January 10, 2009, in Kauai, Hawai‘i. He was 78
Read all past obituaries in the arts on the CAA website.
Art Journal Seeks Reviews Editor and Editorial-Board Members
posted by Joe Hannan — Jan 22, 2009
Art Journal, published quarterly by CAA, is devoted to twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and visual culture.
Art Journal Seeks Reviews Editor
The Art Journal Editorial Board invites nominations and self-nominations for the position of reviews editor of Art Journal, for a three-year term, July 1, 2010–June 30, 2013 (preceded by half a year as reviews editor designate, from January 1 to June 30, 2010).
Working with the editorial board, the reviews editor is responsible for the commissioning of all book and exhibition reviews in Art Journal. He or she selects books and exhibitions to be reviewed, commissions reviewers, and determines the appropriate length and character of reviews. The reviews editor also works with authors and CAA’s manuscript editor in the development and preparation of review manuscripts for publication and is expected to keep abreast of newly published and/or important books and recent exhibitions in the fields of twentieth-century and contemporary art, criticism, theory, and visual culture. This is a three-year term, which includes membership on the Art Journal Editorial Board.
The reviews editor attends the three annual meetings of the Art Journal Editorial Board—held in the spring and fall in New York and once at the CAA Annual Conference—and submits an annual report to CAA’s Publications Committee. CAA reimburses the reviews editor for travel and lodging expenses for the spring and fall meetings in accordance with its travel policy, but the reviews editor pays these expenses to attend the Annual Conference.
Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Members may not publish their own work in the journal during the term of service. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name. Please send a letter describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, CV, and contact information to: Chair, Art Journal Editorial Board, CAA, 275 Seventh Ave., 18th Floor, New York, NY 10001. Deadline: April 15, 2009.
Art Journal Seeks Editorial-Board Members
CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for two individuals to serve on the Art Journal Editorial Board for a four-year term, July 1, 2009–June 30, 2013.
Candidates are individuals with a broad knowledge of modern and contemporary art; institutional affiliation is not required. Applicants who are artists, museum-based scholars, or scholars interested in pedagogical issues are especially invited to apply.
The editorial board advises the editor-in-chief and assists him or her to seek authors, articles, artist’s projects, and other content for the journal; guides its editorial program and may propose new initiatives for it; performs peer reviews and recommends peer reviewers; and may support fundraising efforts on the journal’s behalf. Members also assist the editor-in-chief to keep abreast of trends and issues in the field by attending and reporting on sessions at the CAA Annual Conference and other academic conferences, symposia, and events in their fields.
Each year the editorial board meets twice in New York and once at the CAA Annual Conference. CAA reimburses members for travel and lodging expenses for the spring and fall New York meetings in accordance with its travel policy, but members pay these expenses to attend the conference.
Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Members may not publish their own work in the journal during the term of service. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name. Please send a letter describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, CV, and contact information to: Chair, Art Journal Editorial Board, CAA, 275 Seventh Ave., 18th Floor, New York, NY 10001. Deadline: April 15, 2009.
2009 Awards for Distinction
posted by Christopher Howard — Jan 13, 2009
CAA announced today the recipients of its 2009 Awards for Distinction. These annual awards honor outstanding member achievements and reaffirm CAA’s mission to encourage the highest standards of scholarship, practice, and teaching in the visual arts.
CAA President Paul Jaskot will formally recognize the honorees and present the awards at Convocation, to be held during CAA’s 97th Annual Conference on Wednesday, February 25, 2009, at the Los Angeles Convention Center in California. The Annual Conference—hosting scholarly sessions, panel discussions, career-development workshops, art exhibitions, and more—is the largest gathering of artists, art historians, students, and arts professionals in the United States.
With these awards, CAA honors the accomplishments of individual artists, art historians, authors, conservators, curators, and critics whose efforts transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large. The 2009 winners are:
Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work
Mary Heilmann
Mary Heilmann’s contribution to contemporary art has been long and generous, as seen in her recent retrospective exhibition, Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone, curated by Liz Armstrong, that opened at the Orange County Museum of Art in California in the spring of 2007. Traveling for nearly two years to the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas; the Wexner Center for Arts in Columbus, Ohio; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the exhibition showcased the work of an audacious yet respected artist who, after moving to New York from California (where she had grown up and gone to school) in 1968, gave up a more object-based practice in favor of painting—mostly because, to hear her tell it, painting was what you “shouldn’t” do.
Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Chris Burden
One of the most recognized and respected artists of his generation, Chris Burden has for more than thirty years engaged the most intellectually challenging and provocative ideas of our time. Beginning with his now-legendary performance pieces of the early 1970s that tested the limits and endurance of the body, Burden helped to reshape the possibilities for body and performance art, and his work has had a major influence on artists throughout the world. Much of his work has been about experience and the concept of trust, and how society depends on interpersonal responsibility. Throughout his practice he has maintained his aesthetic and social purpose, principles based in deeply abiding personal ethics and grounded in his immense integrity.
Distinguished Feminist Award
The Guerrilla Girls
In many ways the Guerrilla Girls, recipients of CAA’s inaugural Distinguished Feminist Award, embody the very spirit of the feminist art world: collaborative, proactive, and persistent. Since 1985, members of the group have harassed, entertained, shamed, and moved the art world with their direct campaigns that provide statistical information on the inequities of the art world. Their masked appearances and performances, as well as their public posters, have precisely and pertinently “called out” the art world on its practices and habitual behaviors, using humor and satire to expose gender bias, gender erasure, and gender-centric concepts of creativity and genius. The Guerrilla Girls also won CAA’s Frank Jewett Mather Award in 2004.
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Anthony J. Barbieri-Low, Artisans in Early Imperial China, University of Washington Press
In this book, a magisterial study of the myriad and mostly anonymous artisans of early imperial China, Anthony J. Barbieri-Low examines the lives of artisans—from the men and women working in the royal court to the indentured workers in prison and slave camps—who crafted objects as diverse as lacquer bowls, stone funerary monuments, bronze lamps, ceramic sculpture, and wall paintings. Artisans in Early Imperial China goes far beyond the materialist analysis of works, adding an often-overlooked human dimension to an already brilliant synthesis of social history, archaeology, anthropology, and aesthetics.
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award
Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, eds., Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, Yale Center for British Art, in association with Yale University Press
Remaining attentive to the material objects, the editors and authors of Art and Emancipation in Jamaica advance bold arguments to elucidate a complex network of colonial interchange, and in the process address subjects as seemingly disparate as English slavery, Jamaican Jewry, and hybrid traditions of performance. The exhibition catalogue for a show at the Yale Center for British Art offers a striking, new perspective on a remarkable set of objects and a pivotal venue at a volatile moment in history and in the history of art.
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, and Collections
Phillip Earenfight, ed., A Kiowa’s Odyssey: A Sketchbook from Fort Marion, University of Washington Press, in association with the Trout Gallery, Dickinson College
In what has become a substantial body of art-historical study and literature on Plains Indian ledger book art, and on the drawings of the Fort Marion prisoners in particular, A Kiowa Odyssey stands out because of its more comprehensive evocation of historical and ethnographic context and its astute visual analysis. Although the broad story has been told in print many times before, this book ventures far deeper into the “mirror dance” of colonialist visual expression as told through the poignant experiences and powerful artistic expressions of the artist/prisoner.
Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Marnin Young, “Heroic Indolence: Realism and the Politics of Time in Raffaëlli’s Absinthe Drinkers”
In his nuanced and elegant article from the June 2008 issue of The Art Bulletin, Marnin Young offers an insightful and original interpretation of the work of an artist who has been virtually ignored since the early twentieth century. Firmly grounding his reading in social and historical context, the author closely analyzes contemporary critical responses to Absinthe Drinkers when it was exhibited at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition in 1881 and charts the ways in which the painting engages with the politics of both absinthe and the banliue. Young’s well-crafted and subtle argument is beautifully paced, a kind of enactment of the very subject of his study that reminds us that when we look closely and proceed slowly, depth of meaning reveals itself in ever-more eloquent ways.
Art Journal Award
Richard Meyer, “ ‘Artists sometimes have feelings,’ ”
The Art Journal Award is presented to Richard Meyer for his insightful, rich, and personal essay, “ ‘Artists sometimes have feelings,’ ” published in the Winter 2008 issue as part of a larger forum focused on working with living artists. Grounding his exegesis in the Fogg Art Museum director Edward Forbes’s 1911 account of the beauties and pitfalls of working with living artists, Meyer gives an unusual measure of historical depth to his work and the issue’s topic, making clear that the “problem of the living artist” is indeed not new. Using the interview as a subject—he writes about his experiences talking with Paul McCarthy and Anita Steckel—Meyer explores how personal feelings structure work on contemporary art, and how those feelings, even in their capacity to hinder and thwart communication, construct useful boundaries and limitations.
Frank Jewett Mather Award
Boris Groys
The work of Boris Groys maintains and extends the tradition of art criticism as provocation. His essays in Art Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008) posit his arguments as stylish paradoxes that dismantle contemporary art and modernism, their presentation in public venues such as museums, and the role of curatorship and criticism within this framework. Groys consistently questions established and fashionable art-world notions but acknowledges and even honors the continued significance of utopian ideals in our construction of modernity.
Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Georges Didi-Huberman
One of the most distinctive and influential voices in the field of art history, Georges Didi-Huberman has written a cascade of publications that address works of art created in a variety of geographical locations and widely differing historical moments. His work constitutes a call for the recognition of the poetry of images and their continuing appeal to interpretation, while nevertheless perpetually escaping its grasp. Among his important books are the pioneering The Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (1982, translated to English in 2003); Confronting Images (a 2005 translation of Devant l’image of 1990), Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration (1995; from a French edition of 1990); L’Image survivante (2002); and Images Malgré Tout (2003), translated as Images in Spite of All (2008).
Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
Roland Reiss, Claremont Graduate University
Roland Reiss, professor emeritus of the art program at Claremont Graduate University in California, stands out through his legendary energy, passion, and intellectual commitment—and above all for his transformative connection with the individual student. During the course of thirty-five years, he helped shape his school’s reputation as a cutting-edge art program. An exceptional teacher can connect with the current generation of students and lead them into the future, and it is a rare educator who can do this generation after generation, deeply penetrating the pulse of the times.
Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
Charles W. Haxthausen, Williams College
Charles W. Haxthausen has provided long, transformative, and inspiring leadership to one of the most important master’s degree programs in art history in the United States. As Robert Sterling Clark Professor of Art History at Williams College in Massachusetts and director of the Graduate Program there from 1993 to 2007, he has served as an enthusiastic and energetic intellectual model, with his love of scholarship and carefully crafted and innovative pedagogy creating a degree program that in turn has produced numerous leading scholars, teachers, and curators in art history.
CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
Carol Stringari, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Chris McGlinchey, Museum of Modern Art
For Imageless: The Scientific Study and Experimental Treatment of an Ad Reinhardt Black Painting, Carol Stringari and Chris McGlinchey presented the work of the AXA Conservation Research Project in conjunction with their respective museums. The results of this effort were several: a major advance in the understanding of Ad Reinhardt’s materials and techniques; the improvement of a relatively new conservation technique, laser ablation, which now holds much greater promise for the treatment of intractable problems like those posed by Reinhardt’s damaged and overpainted black paintings; and the presentation of these findings in a modest but remarkable exhibition and catalogue that presented the damaged work together with pristine examples by the artist and a lucid explanation of the treatment and findings, assisted by a video produced for an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Contact
For more information on CAA’s Awards for Distinction, please download the full press release or contact Emmanuel Lemakis, CAA director of programs.