Board of Directors Election
2009 Candidates
Perri Lee Roberts, University of Miami
Perri Lee Roberts, University of Miami
Statement: I am proud to be a member of CAA as it approaches the celebration of one hundred years of serving the needs of artists, art historians, and other visual-arts professionals. I endorse the goals of CAA’s current strategic plan that call for better communication between the Board of Directors and the members, retaining and increasing membership, and maintaining an electronic database of up-to-date research in the visual arts.
In planning for the future health of the association, I believe that fiscal soundness and advocacy for the visual arts should be among the top priorities of the next strategic plan. The board also needs to continue to assess its services and programs in order to maintain the value of membership. Given the current economic downturn, CAA leadership will have to worker harder than ever before to secure grants and attract corporate and private sponsorships, making the organization independent of earnings from the endowment. As a board member, I would welcome the opportunity to participate in fundraising and outreach activities on behalf of the association.
Biography: Perri Lee Roberts is professor of art history at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. She received an AB from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and PhD in art history from Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
She joined the faculty at Miami in 1981 as a visiting lecturer, was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 1991, and became full professor in 2002. Since 1994, Roberts has held several administrative positions, including director of the General Honors Program (1994–99, 2004–6), assistant provost for the Office of Honors and Academic Enhancement (1996–99), and vice provost for undergraduate affairs (1999–2006). She is currently senior associate dean for the arts and humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences and oversees the university’s Lowe Art Museum.
Roberts’s research focuses on late-medieval and early Renaissance art, religious iconography, artistic collaboration, and the history of old-master collections. She has authored or coauthored Masolino da Panicale (1993), Sacred Treasures: Early Italian Paintings from Southern Collections (2002), and The Corpus of Early Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections: The South (forthcoming from the Georgia Museum of Art). The essay “Collaboration in Early Renaissance Art: The Case of Masaccio and Masolino” was published in The Cambridge Guide to Masaccio (2002), and numerous scholarly articles have appeared in the Burlington Magazine, Artibus et Historiae, Arte Cristiana, and Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz. Her most recent work is on the late-fourteenth-century decoration of the Castellani Chapel in Santa Croce, Florence.
Roberts is adjunct curator of Renaissance and Baroque art for the Lowe Art Museum and has worked on catalogues and other publications for the Georgia Museum of Art, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, and the Bass Museum of Art. She was guest curator for the Georgia Museum of Art’s exhibition Sacred Treasures: Early Italian Paintings from Southern Collections, which traveled to Alabama and Florida in 2002–3.
Roberts has served on CAA’s Professional Practices Committee and is currently a member of the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award Jury..
