Awards

2006 CWA Annual Recognition Awards

CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) will honor two outstanding women—the art historian and critic Moira Roth and the filmmaker and writer Trinh T. Minh-ha—at its eleventh annual Recognition Awards Ceremony during the CAA Annual Conference in Boston. The ceremony will take place Thursday, February 23, 2006, from 5:30 to 7:00 PM; tickets are available in advance ($25) and onsite ($30). Please join us in celebrating their amazing and continuing careers.

Moira Roth

Moira Roth (photograph by Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie)

The internationally recognized critic and art historian Moira Roth is committed to what she refers to as “retelling the tale” of the history of American art. Currently Trefethen Professor of Art History at Mills College in Oakland, Calif. (and, earlier, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, from 1974 to 1985), Roth has devoted much of her career to studying, teaching, and writing about performance art, women artists, and artists of color, and to bridging cultural divides. She has lectured widely, organized numerous groundbreaking exhibitions, and published books, articles, essays, and conversations with artists that bring visibility and give voice to artists underrepresented in the art world.

Roth received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1974. From her early writings on Marcel Duchamp, the subject of her dissertation, to her numerous publications on performance and feminist art and multiculturalism, she has gently and tirelessly urged the discipline of art history to expand and reconfigure the scope of its vision. In 1991, Roth and the photographer Diane Tani founded Visibility Press and, in conjunction with local galleries, began publishing catalogues on recognized but underresearched Bay Area artists. Among her major publications, Roth edited and contributed to The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America 1970–1980 (Los Angeles: Astro Artz, 1983), Connecting Conversations: Interviews with 28 Bay Area Artists (Oakland: Eucalyptus Press, Mills College, 1988), We Flew over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), and Rachel Rosenthal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Her book Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp, and John Cage (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1998) appears with commentaries by Jonathan D. Katz.

Moira Roth, Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp, and John Cage (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1998)

In recent years, Roth has continued to broaden her intellectual reach to encompass travel, memory, language, and artists’ responses to war and its aftermath. A thoughtful, politically impassioned, and courageous interrogation of buried histories and human interconnections, her ongoing series of essays, “Traveling Companions/ Fractured Worlds,” first commissioned by CAA’s Art Journal, began in 1999. She has intermittently published these texts, in print and online, on themes and subjects ranging from Faith Ringgold to Linda Nochlin, and on international cultures from England to Cambodia. Part 12 of the series, “Remnants and Reverberations: Drawing(s) in Time & Space,” is included in the exhibition catalogue Persistent Vestiges: Drawing from the American-Vietnam War (New York: Drawing Center, 2005). In this eight-part text, Roth reflects on the work of Nancy Spero, Martha Rosler, Binh Danh, and Dinh Q. Lê, as well as artists from North Vietnam. She concludes this series with “Letters from Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City,” based on email letters she sent to herself while in Vietnam during August 2005.

Continuing to develop her own creative voice, Roth has been writing fiction and plays during the past several years. In 2001, she began work on The Library of Maps, which she describes as “a series of texts revolving around a fictional library and its inhabitants” (see The Library of Maps Series [2001–3]). She has collaborated with several artists in developing multimedia performances, including The Library of Maps: An Opera in Many Parts (begun in 2001) with the composer and performer Pauline Oliveros; From Vietnam To Hollywood (2003) with Lê, and Dancing/Dreaming: Izanami and Amaterasu (2003) and Amaterasu, The Blind Woman and Hiroshima (2004) with the dancer Mary Sano, performed in San Francisco, Tokyo, and Kyoto. In 2005, readings of her play Rachel Marker, Franz Kafka and Alice Sommer were staged in Hawai‘i and California.

The Women’s Caucus for Art honored Roth with its Mid-Career Art History Award in 1989 and its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. She also received CAA’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism in 2000.

—Melanie Herzog, professor of art history, Edgewood College, and member of the CAA Committee on Women in the Arts

Trinh T. Minh-ha

Trinh T. Minh-ha (photograph by Jean-Paul Bourdier)

Best known as a film director and writer, Trinh T. Minh-ha is a cross-disciplinary artist whose work often defies existing categories and boundaries. After her childhood in Vietnam, Trinh studied comparative literature and music composition in Saigon. In 1970, she moved to the United States and earned a PhD in French literature from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, at the age of twenty-four. In 1974–75, Trinh lived in Paris, teaching English while continuing to study literature and music at Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne. From 1977 to 1980, she taught music theory at the National Conservatory of Music and Drama in Dakar, Senegal. Inspired by her encounter with the peoples of Senegal, Trinh started making films.

Trinh’s widely acknowledged resistance to standardized or normative practices is present in her earliest films. Reassemblages (1982), her first work, portrays the lives of Senegalese women in extreme close-up, with jump cuts and repetitions that question the constructed reality of many ethnographic documentary films. Her next film, Naked Spaces: Living is Round (1985), continues to explore relationships between African women and their spaces; this film won the Blue Ribbon Award for Best Experimental Feature at the American Film Festival and received an esteemed showing at the 1987 Whitney Biennial. Trinh earned international acclaim with her third film, Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), which questions the fixed notions of identity, popular memory, and culture through the eyes of Vietnamese women. The film was featured at the New Director’s Film Festival in New York and earned much praise, including the Merit Award from the Bombay International Film Festival and the Film as Art Award from the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). Her other films include Shoot for the Contents (1991), which received the Jury’s Best Cinematography Award at Sundance Film Festival in 1992, and A Tale of Love (1995), which premiered in Europe at the Berlin Film Festival. Two of her recent works, The Fourth Dimension (2001) and Night Passages (2004), are digital videos that meditate on time and travel inspired by contemporary Japanese culture. Her seven films have been shown internationally, and she has had thirty-two retrospectives in Asia, Europe, and the United States. Trinh recently presented two largescale multimedia installations, Nothing But Ways (1999) at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and The Desert is Watching (2003) at the Kyoto Biennale 2003, in collaboration with her long-time partner, Jean-Paul Bourdier. She is currently working on a large-scale, twenty-seven-screen installation for the Museé du Quai Branly in Paris, which opens in June 2006.

Still from the digital film Night Passage, produced and directed by Trinh T. Minh-ha and Jean-Paul Bourdier

Among Trinh’s numerous publications, Women, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989) garners the most attention from students and scholars in a wide range of disciplines. She also coedited Out There: Marginalization in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990) and published her collected essays on the concepts of anonymity and the decentered subject in literature, music, and painting in an earlier work, Un Art sans oeuvre (Troy, MI: International Book Publishers, 1981). Her other books include En Minuscules (Paris: Le Meridien Editeur, 1987), a collection of her poems; When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991); and three books on film theory and aesthetics: Framer Framed: Film Scripts and Interviews (New York: Routledge, 1992), Cinema Interval (New York: Routledge, 1999), and The Digital Film Event (New York: Routledge, 2005). A professor of women’s studies and rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1992, she has lectured on art, feminism, film, and cultural politics at institutions worldwide, from Harvard University to Ochanomizu University in Tokyo.

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