Awards
2007 CWA Annual Recognition Awards
CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) will present its twelfth annual Recognition Awards Ceremony during the CAA Annual Conference in New York. Each organization’s awards honor women art professionals in their middle and late career who have made major contributions to the visual arts, art history, and arts administration. CWA honors Judith Brodsky and Ferris Olin, two dynamic individuals who have tirelessly devoted time and energy to serving in leadership roles in academia and arts organizations.
CWA established the Annual Recognition Awards Ceremony in 1996. While the committee gave one award each year to the distinguished honorees until 1999, it instituted the second award in 2000 to recognize a greater number of accomplished but under recognized women in the visual arts.
—Midori Yoshimoto, assistant professor of art history at New Jersey City University in Jersey City and CWA chair
Judith Brodsky
Judith Brodsky (left) with the artist Rina Banerjee in the Brodsky Center studio at Rutgers University
For nearly four decades, the visionary leadership of Judith Brodsky, emerita professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, has been a crucial force in changing the situation for women in the art world from the “bad old days” of unbridled sexism to an enlightened time where feminism is so taken for granted that some people insert “post” in front of the word.
Brodsky and I first worked together in 1974 on FOCUS (Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts), one of the first initiatives of the early feminist movement in the arts. Because of her contagious energy, incisive planning, and near-magical ability to raise funds for causes she believes in, she helped to make FOCUS a tremendous success.
As the third national president of WCA, from 1976 to 1978, Brodsky was instrumental in giving the organization a strong political voice, arranging for the White House to host WCA honorees in 1979 and inviting Joan Mondale to participate in the CAA conference in New York in 1978. As CAA president (1994–96), she invigorated the endowment and initiated many groundbreaking directives, such as the Professional Development Fellowship Program; she also served on the CAA Board of Directors from 1987 to 1996. With the editors Mary Garrard and Norma Broude, she spearheaded the publication of the first comprehensive history of the American women’s movement in art, The Power of Feminist Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994).
In 2001, Brodsky was president of ArtTable, an organization that highlights the accomplishments of women in the art world. Presently, she is the founder and codirector of the Institute for Women and Art at Rutgers and is the coprinciple investigator and codirector of the Women Artists Archives National Directory. Brodsky is the cochair, with Ferris Olin, of the Feminist Art Project. She is a former dean and associate provost at Rutgers University as well as a former chair of the Art, Design, and Art History Department at the Rutgers campus in Newark.
In 1986, Brodsky founded the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper (RCIPP). Three years ago, June Wayne, the artist and founder of Tamarind Lithography Workshop, gave her art estate to the center through Brodsky’s efforts; valued at $5.5 million, the gift is the largest ever received by the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers. In early 2007, RCIPP will be renamed the Brodsky Center.
Brodsky has organized many exhibitions and written extensively about women artists and prints. She is organizing RCIPP’s twenty-fifth anniversary exhibition, scheduled to open at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2011. Brodsky recently curated How American Women Artists Invented Postmodernism: 1970–1975, which toured New Jersey as well as nationally.
Active in policy-making positions in the art world, Brodsky presently serves on the boards of ArtPride/New Jersey, the Jersey City Museum, and the International Print Center in New York. Her most recent project is Philagrafika, an international arts festival in Philadelphia, slated for 2010, for which she serves as president. It was the catalytic Brodsky who helped to take the spark of an idea—focusing on the varied manifestations of the “printed image” in today’s art—and ignite the energies of an international curatorial advisory board.
Brodsky has succeeded as an innovative printmaker and artist in her own right. Her work is in the permanent collections of more than one hundred museums and corporations, including the Library of Congress; the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the Stadtsmuseum in Berlin; the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles; and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. Brodsky earned an MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia and a BA from Harvard University, where she majored in art history.
Brodsky’s energy is prodigious and inspires everyone around her, and the breadth of her influence and accomplishment is overwhelming. Creative in all matters, she has consistently found a way to weave feminist issues, issues of conscience, and art into the fabric of whatever she touches.
—Diane Burko, artist and CWA member.
Ferris Olin
Ferris Olin
As a visionary feminist scholar, activist, educator, curator, and librarian, Ferris Olin is dedicated to making knowledge accessible across discursive boundaries within and outside the academy. Head of the Margery Somers Foster Center: A Resource Center and Digital Archive on Women, Scholarship, and Leadership as well as professor in the University Libraries at Rutgers University, she is a passionate believer in the power of librarians to enrich and transform society. Defying categorization, her work negotiates, expands, and transforms the intersections of art history, visual culture, women’s and gender studies, and library science.
Envisioning new possibilities for the study of women’s leadership in the visual arts and other arenas, Olin is at the forefront in the development of digital resources for research on women in the visual arts. She is the codirector of the Women Artists Archives National Directory, an innovative web directory of archival collections holding primary source materials by and about women visual artists, art organizations, publications, and artist communities active in the US since 1945. She has acquired materials crucial to the study of women’s art history for the Rutgers University Libraries, including the archives of the national WCA, the New York Feminist Art Institute, and the Heresies Collective, as well as the personal papers of pioneering women of the feminist art movement. As curator of the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series at the Mabel Smith Douglass Library, the longest continuous-running exhibition space in the US dedicated to the work of women artists, she has organized and written catalogues for exhibitions that highlight the rich diversity of contemporary women’s art. Olin is committed to the transformation of women’s- and gender-studies curriculum and pedagogy as well, as exemplified by her groundbreaking work directing the only statewide and state-funded project to incorporate what was, at the time, new scholarship on gender, race and ethnicity, class, and sexual preference, and by her creation of the only state women’s history website in the US, New Jersey Women’s History. The result of more than two decades of collaborative work with the Women’s Project of New Jersey, this website offers a chronological overview of women’s history in New Jersey, illustrated by photographs, documents, and museum objects; it also features the history of New Jersey women in the visual arts.
Olin is also an exemplary scholar—holding a PhD in art history (1998), a graduate certificate in women’s studies (1988), and a master’s degree in library science (1972), all at Rutgers—whose numerous groundbreaking articles, essays, and book chapters on women artists and women art collectors have made substantial contributions to these fields. Her essay “Career Markers,” coauthored with Catherine C. Brawer and published in the exhibition catalogue Making Their Mark: Women Artists Move into the Mainstream, 1970–85 (New York: Abbeville, 1989), examines the status of contemporary women artists and their visibility in the art world; it remains among her most widely cited works. As a scholar and a reference librarian whose vast array of knowledge is informed by her own passionate and dynamic interdisciplinary research, she has assisted countless students and scholars in a variety of fields. As codirector of the newly established Institute for Women and Art at Rutgers and as a national committee member and coordinator, with Judith Brodsky, of the Feminist Art Project, she continues to ensure that the historical contributions of women in the arts are properly recognized.
Olin’s dedication to making visible the aesthetic and intellectual work of women in the arts, infused with her unswerving commitment to cultural diversity and the recognition of the contributions of artists and scholars of various ethnicities, pervades all of her work, including her service on the CAA Board of Directors (2001–5; vice president for committees, 2004–5, and CWA chair, 2002). Her numerous professional activities have furthered scholarship and teaching in a variety of fields by making resources and educational opportunities available for researchers, educators, and students, and by empowering the production and transmission of knowledge. Often collaborative, her work with emerging and established artists and scholars epitomizes a feminist practice that melds scholarship, mentoring, and activism.
—Melanie Anne Herzog, professor of art history at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin, and CWA member.
