Board of Directors Election
Gail Feigenbaum, Getty Research Institute
Statement
Gail Feigenbaum, Getty Research Institute
CAA has long provided a common ground for artists, art historians, curators, and other professionals in the visual arts. Supporting these diverse constituencies is a challenge in a time of dramatic and accelerated change. We see fluctuations in the make-up of art and art history departments, in the interests of students, scholars, artists, and museum visitors, in wider and differing views of what is within our purview, and in reversals of center and periphery, inclusion and exclusion. These pressures can divide and weaken our discipline, or they can open our eyes and provoke vital conversation and collaboration. Encompassing varied communities and in large numbers, CAA is uniquely positioned to help us to negotiate this transition and to encourage exchange across every kind of border.
These days, when job interviews are likely to be conducted via Skype and as we keep up with colleagues via electronic media, CAA’s great annual gathering is all the more important—the rare chance to catch up face to face, and to hear from younger artists and scholars. CAA is our professional association, imperfect yet indispensable, for it represents our interests and priorities. We share complicated problems: reduced funding for arts and education; disappearing tenure-track positions; more adjuncts who teach with low pay and few benefits; intellectual-property laws that are fair to neither artists nor scholars—not to mention the question of how to benefit from the technological juggernaut that is transforming the way in which we work. CAA must be our advocate in all of this, ensuring that we do not become casualties of economic crises or of obsolete ways of thinking.
Biography
Gail Feigenbaum has long been involved with CAA in a variety of roles, serving on committees, peer reviewing publications, organizing sessions, and speaking at the Annual Conference. She attended Oberlin College and then earned a doctorate from Princeton University. She was curator of French painting at the National Gallery of Art, where she lectured, collaborated on exhibitions, led the new Academic Programs Department, and built up the internship program. A fellow and later acting associate dean of the Center for the Advanced Study of Visual Arts, Feigenbaum has also been a fellow of the American Academy in Rome and held a Getty postdoctoral fellowship.
Over the years she has taught at several universities, including Georgetown and Tulane, and was a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins. In 1997 she became curator of painting at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Of the many exhibitions she has organized, her favorites are Ludovico Carracci (Bologna and Fort Worth) and Degas in New Orleans: A French Impressionist in America (New Orleans and Copenhagen).
As associate director of the Getty Research Institute, Feigenbaum’s responsibilities have included exhibitions, programs, research, and publications. She is actively involved in programs that embrace new technologies (digital humanities and electronic publishing) as well as ancient scholarship (paleography institutes). She directs an international research project on the display of art in Roman palaces, has recently coedited a volume on collecting religious art, and has another collection on provenance and art history forthcoming. Outside the Getty, she is vice chair of the Association of Research Institutes in Art History, a CAA affiliated society.
Endorsement
It gives me great pleasure to endorse Gail Feigenbaum’s candidacy for the CAA Board of Directors. I have known her as a colleague and as a friend since we were both in graduate school. Our paths have crossed at different times in our careers, and I have always been impressed with her dedication to scholarship, her passion for art, and her ability to bridge the complex worlds of museums, academic art history, and publishing. Gail is a sophisticated thinker and a superb communicator.
My own membership in CAA dates to 1979, and I also served on the board in the 1980s. I can therefore speak with confidence when I say that Gail’s ability to raise difficult questions and to work to resolve them makes her ideally suited for this leadership position at CAA. She has experience working with people from diverse backgrounds, she is a consensus builder, and most importantly she approaches her work with unrivaled passion and dedication. Her extensive experience in several fields served by CAA gives her a breadth of vision that is invaluable in a board member.
I trust that you will give Gail’s nomination your positive consideration. She would be a major asset to the CAA board and to the organization as a whole.
—Danielle Rice, Executive Director, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware
Video
How to Vote
CAA members may vote for up to four candidates, including one write-in candidate (who must be a CAA member). The four candidates receiving the most votes will be elected to the board. CAA members may cast their votes and submit their proxies online; no paper ballots will be mailed. Please have your CAA user/member ID# and password handy when you are ready to vote. All voting must take place by 5:00 PM PST on Friday, February 24, 2012. CAA will provide a computer dedicated to the election in the registration area at the upcoming 100th Annual Conference in Los Angeles.
Barbara Nesin, CAA board president, will present the election results at the close of the next Annual Members’ Business Meeting, to be held on Friday, February 24, 2012, 5:30–7:00 PM (PST) in the West Hall Meeting Room 503, Level 2, Los Angeles Convention Center, 1201 South Figueroa Street, Los Angeles, California.
