About CAA
Ellen K. Levy Elected CAA President
Ellen K. Levy, a New York–based artist and teacher, has been elected president of the College Art Association for a two-year term, beginning May 2004. She was chosen by CAA’s Board of Directors from among the current elected officers. Levy succeeds Michael Aurbach, who will remain on the board for one year as past president. CAA warmly thanks him for his skillful leadership and generous services during the past two years.
Levy teaches the intersections of art and science, combining a theoretical and hands-on approach, to undergraduates at the School of Visual Arts and to honors students at Brooklyn College, both in New York; she also lectures and publishes widely. She received a BA in zoology at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachussetts, and a diploma in painting from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1978, the year of her first solo exhibition at the Bertha Urdang Gallery in New York.
A CAA member since 1981, Levy was elected to the board in 2000 and served as vice president for Annual Conference in 2003–4. She has participated in a number of conference panels over the years and chaired the studio-art thematic session “Modeling Nature” at the 2000 conference.
Issues of diversity, activism on behalf of the arts in the public sphere, and advocacy are high on her agenda for her presidency. Building on the mentoring activities of Aurbach, she notes that we could do even more. “CAA needs to research and analyze the gap between the training of artists, art historians, and museum professionals and their postgraduate job opportunities. Depending on our findings, CAA might then make specific recommendations with the aim of sustaining professional viability at a time of great technological change.”
A key element of CAA’s 2005–10 strategic plan, now taking shape, is better communication among CAA’s constituencies. Levy sees the joint membership of practitioners and interpreters of visual art as a core CAA strength, each group offering complementary viewpoints. As an artist with a strong intellectual and theoretical base, she aims to encourage CAA to provide a vital, many-faceted discourse among artists, art historians, critics, curators, and other voices of our world.
“The organization’s advocacy work—both in academia and government—is critical,” she says. “CAA should leverage its cumulative strength to lend greater weight to its workforce guidelines. We face pressing issues relating to part-time employment and affordable health insurance, among other urgent matters.” She continues, “I strongly support CAA’s efforts to promote public understanding of the importance of art to society. The arts are at great risk today, both through erosion of funding and through the indifference of leaders. CAA has a role to play in supporting both the making and preservation of art and in promoting scholarship about it at all levels. CAA offers a public life to valuable ideas and art that are fragile when they must rely on topicality or commercial viability alone.”
Levy hopes to explore the creation of a CAA recognition award to politicians or public figures who support the arts. She is actively looking for ways to effect contact with the unconverted, with the aim of furthering their understanding of the arts. Other ideas include continued support for CAA’s Professional Development Fellowship Program, in which she has participated as a juror. “I am also interested,” she adds, “in proposing that CAA sponsor exhibitions that are as significant and prestigious to artists as CAA’s journals are to scholars.” She notes that CAA has a rich history, still little known, of exhibitions, stemming from WPA times.
CAA works to bridge gaps among its various constituent groups: artists and scholars, independent and institution-based members, students and professionals. “I look forward to working with the board and CAA committees to explore ways in which CAA can facilitate productive exchanges,” Levy says. “CAA is a crucial link between the academic and nonacademic art communities. Our strength is in our numbers and our shared aims. The organization can provide access for scholars to the living world of art as it is practiced; and artists can use it to take advantage of the resources of institutions. CAA, through its many programs—the conference, the journals, the website, and the work of the committees—provides an arena for discourse free of the pressures of the commercial realm. Alternative art spaces and university art galleries have become places that foster exciting artistic developments, and this may be a model for CAA. We can play a role in presenting opportunities for greater exchange beyond our Annual Conference and its accompanying exhibitions.”
Reflecting her own artistic interest in the dialogue between art and science, Levy has been influential in encouraging interdisciplinary activities at CAA during her time on the board. In the last two conferences, she notes, session topics “have reflected the surge of interest in cross-disciplinary discourse, including issues of civil liberties, the preservation of monuments, identity politics, and the influence of military power and war on artistic production. I am pleased to see that this broadening of our conversation has taken place without a loss of attention at the conference to the core work of art history and art practice. We can, and should, provide both traditional and expansive programming at the conference and throughout the organization.”
Levy is eager to work with CAA in developing new forums for conversation and discussion about the organization’s future direction. She is eager to see us develop moderated online discussions through our website—an electronic town meeting, or “Voice of the People,” in the words of Gregory Sholette, a fellow board member. “It is easy to be passionate about values of academic and artistic free expression and excellence,” she says. “We all believe in the power of artistic culture to foster positive change within society. The question is: How will we use our limited resources to act on our shared belief?” Levy encourages CAA’s membership to resist defining our fields narrowly and to take advantage of the opportunities that the organization offers.
Levy’s own career has followed an independent path. She has exhibited her work in galleries, museums, and alternative spaces in the United States, Europe, and Israel. Her solo exhibition, Shared Premises: Innovation and Adaptation, toured from 1999 to 2001, appearing in New York, Prague, New Britain, Connecticut, and Saratoga Springs, New York. In her current work, she creates genealogies of inventions by tracking the evolution of related technological innovations, such as nuclear shelters. Her patterns reflect the ongoing adaptations inherent in patented inventions over a roughly two-hundred-year span. She generates digital prints that consist of layered and transformed images and text drawn from a database of registered patents; she then further transforms these with paint. She notes, “I use patents in my monoprints with the deliberate intent to provoke controversial thinking: I select inventions related to nuclear energy, the ecosystem, the space station, and the patenting of new life forms. The finished prints suggest a complex, evolutionary portrait of how economic competition and innovation develop over time.”
Her work reflects a longstanding interest in the study of complex systems and emergence, as formulated by the Santa Fe Institute, an interdisciplinary think tank in New Mexico. The science of complexity is a central interest, for it “examines how interdependencies among parts of a system can lead to its collective behavior, and how that system then interacts with its environment. These studies are relevant to a range of disciplines, including evolution, economics, art, and business management. Complexity science investigates relationships between behavior and scale. We know that some of the patterns that occur in the world are self-organizing, arising from local, incremental changes. I explore these ideas visually in my work.” Science and art have grown estranged in our time, and are seen as having little to offer one another. Yet, Levy says, “a deeper understanding of scientific growth and form may lead to enriched visual considerations—and to an appreciation of science and technology as sources of metaphor and process. In this way, we can address some of our fears, hopes, and inspirations regarding scientific innovation.”
Levy has used this art-and-science paradigm in original ways. With Berta M. Sichel, she was guest editor of Art Journal in spring 1996, compiling a themed issue entitled, “Contemporary Art and the Genetic Code.” At the time, this topic was little explored. In addition to contributions from artists, art historians, and critics, Levy solicited texts from scientists such as the physiologist Robert Root-Bernstein and the late paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. In 2002, she and the artist Philip Galanter organized Complexity: Art and Complex Systems, an extensive museum exhibition devoted to artists’ responses to the study of complex systems. Complexity was first shown at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York, New Paltz.
Among other honors, Levy was the Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Arts and Sciences at Skidmore College in spring 1999, a position funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. She received an Emerging Artist Award from the Association International des Critiques d’Art in 1996 and was awarded a commission for a painting from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1985. That work was subsequently toured by SITES as part of NASA’s traveling exhibition, Visions of Flight.
Published in May 2004.
