Board of Directors Election
2009 Candidates
Patricia Mathews, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Patricia Mathews, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Statement: CAA has recently moved in constructive directions. I particularly applaud the interest in diversity and would like to improve financial support and organizational visibility for women and underrepresented scholars and artists. Further, as an extremely vital and lively organization, CAA should have a broader profile, especially in light of shrinking resources for arts organizations across the country.
As a member of a small liberal-arts college, I am interested in pedagogy and curricula. I have personally worked to develop these areas at Hobart and William Smith Colleges over the last few years and consider both of importance for the future of art history. To this end, I recently attended a Lilly Conference on College and University Teaching on new ideas in education and have been working closely with the director of the Center of Teaching and Learning at my school. There is a great deal of new literature on how students learn and what keeps them from learning well, and the workshops on pedagogy this year at the CAA Annual Conference in Los Angeles look quite valuable. Accordingly, I would like to institute our own study of best practices for teaching art and art history that could benefit both our professionals and our students.
I would bring to the board an unusual talent among art historians. I supported myself as an undergraduate by working for a small accounting firm, where I kept the books and did taxes for a number of medium-size companies. These skills would be useful in the board’s work with the annual budget.
Biography: Mathews is a professor of modern and contemporary art history at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. Until the fall of 2008, she taught at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. Her scholarship extends across the entire modern period, with publications on late-nineteenth-century France and contemporary women artists; cultural studies and critical theory are also central to her thinking. She received her PhD from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
Mathews’s most notable early article, published in The Art Bulletin in 1987, is “The Feminist Critique of Art History.” Written with Thalia Gouma-Peterson, this essay has been republished numerous times, most recently in a Turkish book on feminism. She wrote a follow-up piece in the anthology Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspectives in 1998. Other important essays, all invited, include “Gender Analysis in the Work of Meyer Shapiro” (Oxford Art Journal, 1994) and “What Matters in Art History? A Pedagogical Approach to the Introductory Course” (Art Journal, Fall 1995). She is most proud of her second book, Passionate Discontent: Creativity and Gender in French Symbolist Art (1999), which was nominated for CAA’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in 2001. She has recently finished a third book, Speaking to Absence, Listening to Silence: The Art of May Stevens, about a contemporary New York artist who was instrumental in early feminism. Mathews is now three chapters into her next project, “A Different Vision: Gender, Class and Embodiment in the Nudes of Suzanne Valadon,” which examines a working-class artist and model living in late-nineteenth-century France.
Mathews’s awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, a Georges Lurcy Foundation Fellowship, and a Duke-UNC Women’s Studies Research Center Grant, among others. She has served on committees of the Fulbright Senior Scholar Awards, the National Endowment for the Humanities Awards, and many others.
