Board of Directors Election
2009 Candidates
Carol Crown, University of Memphis
Carol Crown, University of Memphis
Statement: CAA’s 2005–2010 Strategic Plan outlines a broad agenda focusing on five priorities, which range from membership to advocacy to research issues. Underlying the plan is the organization’s commitment to its membership and to the arts as a fundamental aspect of human expression.
As a member of higher education for more than forty years, first as a student and then as a teacher, administrator, curator, and scholar, I have been involved in almost every aspect of our field’s professions. This broad range of experience—which includes CAA membership since my graduate-school days and service on the board of the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) and on the National Association of Schools of Art and Design’s Commission on Accreditation—leads me to believe that now, as in the future, CAA must interrelate even more effectively with its constituency. As a board member, I would be especially interested in broadening avenues of communication among the organization’s members and in helping to realize priorities associated with membership, communication, the Annual Conference, and regional programs.
Biography: Carol Crown is professor of art history at the University of Memphis in Tennessee. She received her PhD in 1975 from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where she studied medieval art. During her thirty-three year tenure at Memphis, she served as chair of the Art Department (thirty full-time faculty, four hundred majors) for ten years, during which time she established the department’s Institute of Egyptian Art and Archaeology and the Dorothy Kayser Hohenberg Chair of Excellence in Art History.
Crown has also played an active role in the Art Museum of the University of Memphis. She orchestrated the 1984 exhibition Divine Tour of Ancient Egypt, which featured ancient objects never before loaned by the British Museum. In 2004, after turning her research interests to contemporary self-taught art, Crown curated the traveling exhibition Coming Home! Self-Taught Artists, the Bible, and the American South. To support such projects, Crown wrote successful grant proposals to Humanities Tennessee, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Crown has given papers at CAA, SECAC, the Southeastern Council on Studies in Religion, and the American Academy of Religion. A former treasurer of the National Council of Art Administrators, she is a SECAC board member and chair of Number: An Independent Journal of the Arts. Her own publications include Wonders to Behold: The Visionary Art of Myrtice West (1998), Coming Home! Self-Taught Artists, the Bible, and the American South (2004), Sacred and Profane: Voice and Vision in Southern Self-Taught Art (2007), and Amazing Grace: Self-Taught Artists from the Mullis Collection (2007). Currently, she is coediting the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture’s volume on folk art.
