CAA News Today

Screen shot of the Backbone Metals website

Benjamin Carpenter, an artist based in San Francisco, California, has received a $1,500 alumni grant from the Maine College of Art’s Belvedere Fund for Professional Development to purchase a new welder for Backbone Metals, his metal-smithing and fabrication business.

Henry John Drewal, the Evjue-Bascom Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, has won the 2011 Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association for his edited volume, Sacred Waters: Arts for Mami Wata and other Divinities in Africa and the Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).

Rebecca Hackemann, an artist based in New York, has received a 2011 grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Manhattan Community Arts Fund for her project Visionary Sightseeing Binoculars, consisting of eight altered sightseeing binoculars containing stereoscopic images of the past and future of that site to be installed in unlikely places that have traditionally been underserved by public art.

Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann

Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, the Frederick Marquand Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, has been awarded an honorary doctorate (Doctor Philosophiae Honoris Causae) by Technische Universität Dresden in Germany on the basis of the quality of his research and because of his service to international art historical exchange.

Karen Lang (photograph by Flora Lang)

Karen Lang, associate professor of art history at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin, has been awarded a prestigious Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at the University of Warwick in England. Lang delivered four Leverhulme Lectures in February and March 2011.

Heather Hyde Minor, assistant professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, has won the 2010 Helen and Howard Marraro Prize in Italian History for her book, The Culture of Architecture in Enlightenment Rome (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010). The Marraro Prize is conferred annually by the Society for Italian Historical Studies.

Lili White, an artist based in New York, has received a 2011 grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Manhattan Community Arts Fund to hold a screening of women’s experimental films that feature underrepresented themes and issues distinct to women and girls.

Nancy L. Wicker

Nancy L. Wicker, professor of art history the University of Mississippi in Oxford, has been invited to participate in a Getty Foundation Seminar on “The Arts of Rome’s Provinces.” The seminar comprises two intensive two-week sessions: first in Great Britain in May 2011 and second in Greece in January 2012.

ArtTable, a national organization for professional women in the visual arts celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, has recognized the achievements of thirty women whose contributions have transformed the field. Among the honorees are the following CAA members: Elizabeth Easton, cofounder and director, Center for Curatorial Leadership; Ann Sutherland Harris, professor of art history, Frick Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh; Mary Jane Jacob, professor and executive director of exhibitions and exhibition studies, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Margo Machida, associate professor, Department of Art and Art History, University of Connecticut; and Susan Fisher Sterling, director, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC.

The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, based in New York, has awarded grants to artists for 2009–10. The list includes to the following CAA members: Francis Cape, Russell Floersch, Cynthia Knott, Matthew Kolodziej, Eve Laramee, G. Daniel Massad, Shona McDonald, Natalie Moore, Margaret Murphy, Stephen Nguyen, Diana Puntar, James Stroud, and June Wayne.

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.