CAA News Today

Blane De St. Croix, an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, has been selected to participate in the 2011 Art and Law Residency Program, a new initiative from the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts in New York. She will join other resident artists, writers, and curators for semimonthly seminars exploring intersections of art and law; their projects and papers will culminate in an exhibition and symposium.

Mazie McKenna Harris, a doctoral student in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, has been selected to participate in the 2011 Art and Law Residency Program, a new initiative from the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts in New York. She will join other resident artists, writers, and curators for semimonthly seminars exploring intersections of art and law; their projects and papers will culminate in an exhibition and symposium.

Corin Hewitt, an artist based in Richmond, Virginia, has received a $25,000 grant in the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s 2010 Painters and Sculptors Grant Program, established in 1993 to assist individual artists creating work of exceptional quality.

Darryl Lauster, an artist and assistant professor of intermedia and sculpture at the University of Texas at Arlington, has received a $25,000 grant in the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s 2010 Painters and Sculptors Grant Program, established in 1993 to assist individual artists creating work of exceptional quality.

Kamau Amu Patton has been named a winner of the 2010 SECA Art Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California. Administrated by the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA), the biennial award honors four Bay Area artists who are working independently at a high level of artistic maturity but who have not yet received substantial recognition. Artists receive a modest cash prize and will be featured in a museum exhibition, with a catalogue, in fall 2011.

Nicole Pietrantoni (photograph by Devon Wootten)

Nicole Pietrantoni has been awarded a Fulbright grant to Iceland for the 2010–11 academic year. She has also been awarded a Leifur Eiríksson Foundation Scholarship, receiving a $25,000 grant for scholarly exchange and research between the United States and Iceland. While in Iceland, she will teach art workshops and create a new body of work, which will explore layers of narratives and histories that shape the way in which one pictures and frames the natural world, at the Icelandic Printmaker’s Association in Reykjavik.

Piotr Piotrowski, Polish art historian and theoretician, has won the 2010 Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory, initiated and funded by the ERSTE Foundation, based in Vienna, Austria. The biennial prize, which comes with a €40,000 cash award, acknowledges a cultural protagonist whose work is dedicated to broadening international knowledge of Central and South Eastern European visual culture.

Christine Poggi, professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, has received the twenty-first Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Modern Language Association for her book, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). The biennial prize recognizes an outstanding book in Italian literature or comparative literature involving Italian.

Liz Rodda, Curtains (model for exhibition), 2011, single-channel video (artwork © Liz Rodda; photograph provided by the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition)

Liz Rodda, an artist and assistant professor of media art and video in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, has been chosen as one of five artists to receive the Art 365 Award from the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition. She will receive a $12,000 grant and one year of guidance from a guest curator, Shannon Fitzgerald, in preparation for a group exhibition to be held March 25–May 7, 2011, at Artspace at Untitled in Oklahoma City.

Allison Smith, an artist based in Oakland, California, has been named a USA Friends Fellow by United States Artists, a national grant-making and advocacy organization. As one of fifty-two artists receiving the honor, she will be given an unrestricted grant of $50,000.

Lynne Yamamoto, an artist based in Northampton, Massachusetts, has received a $25,000 grant in the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s 2010 Painters and Sculptors Grant Program, which was established in 1993 to assist individual artists creating work of exceptional quality.

James Cahill

James Cahill, professor emeritus at the University of California in Berkeley, has been awarded the Charles Lang Freer Medal by the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. The medal recognizes Cahill’s lifetime of contributions to the history of Chinese and Japanese art.

Henry Drewal, the Evjue-Bascom Professor of African and African Diaspora Arts at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, has been awarded a senior fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at his school. During the four-year appointment he will research and write a book on art and the senses.

Nancy Feldman has received the 2010 Founding Presidents Award from the Textile Society of America for “Shipibo Textile Practices 1950–2010,” a paper written with Claire Odland and presented at the society’s twelfth biennial symposium in October.

Ruth Fine, curator of special projects in modern art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, has been honored for curatorial excellence by the Print Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The November 2010 celebration was the first of five annual events leading to the center’s one-hundredth anniversary in 2015.

Hal Foster, the Townsend Martin ’17 Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, has received the 2010 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Established in 2006 and awarded every two years, the Clark Prize recognizes individuals whose critical or art-historical writing has had a significant impact on public understanding and appreciation of the visual arts.

William R. Levin,
professor emeritus of art history
at Centre College in
Danville, Kentucky, has received two prestigious award from the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) at its October meeting: the Award for Excellence in Teaching, granted each year to a member “who demonstrates an exceptional command of his or her discipline through the ability to teach effectively, impart knowledge, and inspire students”; and the occasionally bestowed Award for Exemplary Achievement, “the organization’s most prestigious award, given in recognition of personal and professional development as well as long-standing service to SECAC.”

Beili Liu, Lure/Wave, Grand Rapids, 2010, thread and sewing needles, dimensions variable (artwork © Beili Liu; photograph by Brian Kelly)

Beili Liu, an artist based in Austin, Texas, has received third place in the 2010 ArtPrize, an annual competition established last year, for her installation Lure/Wave, Grand Rapids at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her award includes a $50,000 prize.

Jules Prown, the Paul Mellon Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has been recognized by the Bookbuilders of Boston for his book, The Architecture of the Yale Center for British Art (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2009). The title won Best of Category in Professional Illustrated Books at the fifty-third annual New England Book Show, which recognizes outstanding work by New England publishers, printers, and graphic designers.

Shelley Rice and Kenneth Silver (who was also named a chevalier) celebrate with their “horses,” compliments of their fellow NYU professor Finbarr Barry Flood (photograph by Miriam Basilio)

Shelley Rice, Arts Professor in the Department of Art History and in Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts, both at New York University, has been named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government.

Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, assistant curator of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, has received the thirtieth annual George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award from the Art Libraries Society of North America for Mrs. Delany and Her Circle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), an exhibition catalogue coedited with Mark Laird.

The Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program has announced the recipients of its 2010 grant cycle. Among the winners are these CAA members and their projects: Douglas Crimp, for his book Before Pictures; Clare Davies, for short-form writing; Matthew Jesse Jackson, for his blog Our Literal Speed; Raphael Rubinstein, for his blog The Silo; Irene Small, for her book Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame; and Sandra Zalman, for her article “Whose Modern Art? Huntington Hartford, MoMA, and the Fight for Modern Art’s Legacy.” Participating in the program’s 2010 Writing Workshop, which pairs a practicing writer with an established critic through the International Association of Art Critics/USA Section, are Colin Edgington of New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Christina Schmid of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The National Academy Museum and School in New York has elected eighteen American artists and architects as members of the 185-year-old institution. Two are CAA members: Garth Evans, an abstract sculptor; and Nancy Friese, a landscape painter and printmaker.

The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, a nine-week summer-residency program for emerging visual artists in Skowhegan, Maine, hosted the following CAA members in 2010: Yui Kugimiya, for video and film; Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli, for installation; Abraham Storer, for painting; and Cullen Washington Jr., for drawing.

The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has named its 2010–11 fellows. Among the recipients are these CAA members: Adrienne Childs, University of Maryland, College Park; Dario Gamboni, Université de Genève; Michèle Hannoosh, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Mark Ledbury, Power Institute, University of Sydney; Griselda Pollock, University of Leeds; Susan Siegfried, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and Adrian Sudhalter, independent scholar.