Board of Directors Election
2011 Candidates
Brian Bishop, Framingham State University
Brian Bishop, professor of art at Framingham State University in Framingham, Massachusetts
Statement: My genuine and deep interest in serving on the CAA Board of Directors stems from my desire to see practicing artists, especially recent graduates of professional programs in the arts, become more active in the organization and at the Annual Conference. CAA has been an integral part of my professional life, since I first joined in 1994. My relationship with the organization has shifted at various benchmarks in my career and has been invaluable to me in divergent ways throughout the years. As an emerging professional, I turned to CAA primarily for professional-development mentoring and placement services. Like many at this career stage, I felt like an outsider at the conference. Consequently, my initial interest in joining the Services to Artists Committee in 2005 was to create programming to engage these individuals and to carve out a niche where they could become more connected with CAA. Such inclusion remains my primary motivation for getting involved with the governance of the organization. If elected to the board, I would work toward identifying mechanisms to captivate members throughout the calendar year and to continually shape their perceptions about the role the organization plays in their professional lives.
Specifically, I want to help CAA strengthen its use of social media and identify innovative ways of utilizing internet-based collaborative technologies to create a matrix of interconnected opportunities for all our members—artists, art historians, curators, museum professionals, and students. This could encompass interactive online exhibitions and accompanying publications that would encourage the production of original, creative work and scholarly research.
As shifts occur in our current pedagogical paradigm, CAA must remain vigilant and flexible in order to provide leadership in this ever-evolving landscape. The importance of the organization in ongoing debates about the field, and about the scholarship of teaching, cannot be overstated. Therefore, I would like to see in place similar applications of interactive media, as outlined above, to facilitate a continuing debate about our profession outside the confines of the Annual Conference.
I am also driven to work toward increasing awareness of CAA’s services to student members and tailoring specific programs to help them develop not only as academic professionals but also as artists and scholars. CAA is not just a destination for career services, and I want to help them view the organization as the predominant arena for scholarly debate, intellectual stimulation, and artistic inspiration.
Biography: Brian Bishop attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and received a BFA from Memphis College of Art in Tennessee in 1993. Two years later, he earned his MFA at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. An artist and educator, Bishop has exhibited his work in twenty-six states and abroad. Prior to joining the faculty at Framingham State University in 2008, he taught at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, the University of Memphis, and Memphis College of Art. In addition to his teaching experience, Bishop has served as director and curator of the Art Workers Union/Plan B Gallery in Memphis and as director of exhibitions at Memphis College of Art.
Currently, Bishop serves on CAA’s Annual Conference Committee, which selects sessions for each meeting and ensures that programming reflects the organization’s vision, goals, and quest for diversity—all while facilitating a timely and engaging dialogue about the state of visual art. He is also completing his third year as chair of CAA’s Services to Artists Committee, which is the body responsible for ARTspace. Initiated in 2001 and celebrating its tenth anniversary this year in New York, ARTspace presents a lineup of conference panels and events designed by artists for artists. Working in tandem with two affiliated programs, the Media Lounge and ARTexchange, ARTspace promotes dialogue about visual-arts practice and its relation to critical discourse and provides professional-development seminars, roundtables, and opportunities for the creative exchange of ideas.
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How to Vote
If you have not opted to vote online, you will receive a paper ballot in the mail. If you have chosen to vote online, please log into your CAA account with your Member ID and password. Click the Vote Now link to begin the process. You may vote for up to four candidates, including one write-in candidate. Ballots with more than four candidates indicated will be void. No ballot received after 5:30 PM (EST) on Friday, February 11, 2011, will be accepted.
