Fellowships

2003 Professional Development Fellows and Honorable Mentions

CAA proudly announces its fellowship recipients for 2003. CAA administered six grants and two honorable mentions this year in the Professional Development Fellowship Program, funded with the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Terra Foundation for the Arts, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, and the Wyeth Endowment for American Art.

CAA initiated the fellowship program in 1993 to help student artists and art historians bridge the gap between their graduate studies and professional careers. The program’s main purpose is to support outstanding students from socially and economically diverse backgrounds who have been underrepresented in their fields. By sustaining artists and scholars at this critical juncture in their careers, CAA assists the rising generation to complete degrees in a timely fashion and to find first employment opportunities easily. In turn, by nurturing outstanding artists and scholars at the beginning of their careers, CAA aims to strengthen and diversify the profession as a whole.

Lisa Bradley

Lisa Bradley is the recipient of the Professional Development Fellowship for Artists, funded by the NEA. She earned a BFA (summa cum laude) in sculpture and extended media from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond in 2001 and is currently pursuing her MFA in studio art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Bradley’s educational experience includes ten years of independent studio work and research in non-art-related disciplines (aromatherapy in France, alternative healing in West Africa), all of which makes an impact on the scope of her work. Beginning this month, she will be a resident fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York.

Bradley’s current art practice is performative and examines concepts of the absurd as they relate to prevailing notions of gender, culture, and race. In a video piece entitled Patriot’s Parfait (2002), she creates an action performance influenced by the historical writings of W. E. B. DuBois, particulary his concept of double consciousness in the life of African Americans. This video is representative of much of her work, employing objects of cultural significance (here, black jelly beans, hair rollers, burnt clothing, and cotton balls) and pairing them with humor and irony in a durational, task-based action. Bradley also makes sculptural objects that trigger performative acts and stages performances that often create residual objects. Her work is informed by Dada, folklore, Butoh, and the Cartoon Network.

Presently, Bradley is most interested in examining theories of race and ethnography as they relate to the history and perception of beauty. She is discovering the work of the anthropologist Franz Boas and finds it exciting to compare and contrast his concepts with those of the philosophers Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault. Her attraction to history has led her to study the folklore, language, and humor of the African diaspora and their effects upon the collective culture.

Erina Duganne

Erina Duganne is the recipient of the Wyeth Endowment for American Art Fellowship. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, with a BA in art history. She received her MA in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is currently completing her PhD dissertation, “Looking In/Looking Out: African Americans and Photographic Practices, 1953–1967.”

During the 1950s and 1960s, an intricate network of photographic images of and by African Americans circulated in the contexts of sociological studies, New York art exhibitions, and the print media. Using these contexts as models, Duganne considers how photographers of varying racial backgrounds constructed, and how different venues disseminated, representations of race during this period. Rather than assume that these images are transparent representations whose significance rests on the expression of a visual truth about African American people and culture, she explores the complex and contradictory relationship of photographers, subjects, and viewers to the representation of race during the 1950s and 1960s. A selection from her dissertation entitled “Transcending the Fixity of Race: The Kamoinge Workshop and the Question of a ‘Black Aesthetic’ in Photography” will appear in the anthology New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement, forthcoming from Rutgers University Press in 2004.

Duganne’s research has been supported by grants from her school’s department; she is also a recipient of the American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellowship. In addition to teaching at the University of Texas at Austin, she has served as a curatorial intern in the Department of American and Contemporary Art at the school’s Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art and has recently organized the exhibition Beyond the Academy: Encouraging New Talent From Texas at Arthouse at the Jones Center in Austin.

Jonathan Gitelson

Jonathan Gitelson is the recipient of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellowship. He is an MFA photography student at Columbia College Chicago. He received his BA in literature and photography from Marlboro College in Vermont in 1997.

Upon graduation he moved to Guatemala City, where he taught photography to homeless teenagers living in garbage dumps. He also helped to establish an outreach program in which his students taught photography to other teenagers in rural areas of Guatemala in order to create a dialogue about their experiences during the country’s civil war, then recently ended. Since returning to the United States, he has lived in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago and has taught photography at a number of schools and nonprofit organizations. His current work consists of artist’s books and videos based upon found objects that he has collected from Chicago’s side streets and alleys. He has regularly exhibited and published his work throughout the past two years and is currently working on an anthology of his artist’s books, to be self-published.

James C. Hughes

James C. Hughes has received the Professional Development Fellowship for Art Historians, funded by the NEH. He grew up in North Carolina and attended public schools during and after the period of desegregation. His early experiences instilled in him a concern for issues of fairness and human dignity. He planned to study law, with an eye to practicing constitutional law, an area focused on fundamental questions of social responsibility and justice. In college, he majored in government, and then for a number of years in the 1980s his idealism found an outlet in full-time volunteer work for several groups, including the World Student Service Corps.

Returning to Harvard University in 1989, he graduated with an American political history degree and attended graduate school at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Currently Hughes is living in Lowell, Massachusetts, where he is finishing his dissertation, “Politics, Religion, and the Lost Michelangelo.” It examines the details of the artist’s design for a colossal fresco in the Florentine Palazzo della Signoria, the city hall, in the context of a spectrum of factors, public and personal, that imbue the composition with meaning. Hughes analyzes the project, never finished, in terms of the ambitions, fears, and dreams of those involved, encoded in surviving sketches and copies. In writing, as in teaching art history, he hopes to touch on a sense of human community across temporal and cultural boundaries.

Linda Kim

Linda Kim is a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation grant recipient. She earned her BA in women’s studies with a concentration in art history from Barnard College in New York, where she was inspired by the school’s strong tradition of feminist scholarship and art-history curriculum to pursue an advanced degree in art history. She received her MA from the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her master’s thesis, entitled “Womanliness as Artifact in Hannah Höch’s Ethnographic Museum Series,” studies a series of photomontages by the Weimar Dada artist to explore issues of race, sexuality, museology, ethnographic description, and early-twentieth-century primitivism. She is currently completing her PhD in the history of art at Berkeley with a dissertation entitled “Somatotypes: Race and Materiality in Early Twentieth-Century Sculpture and Photography.” In it, Kim traces the history of a series of sculptures of racial types by Malvina Hoffman, commissioned by the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago in 1930. Although this research focuses on American art, she pursues many of the same interests defined in her master’s thesis on European modernism. Kim’s dissertation also probes into the training and reception of early-twentieth-century women artists, museums and critical histories of institutions, histories of anthropology and racial science, and postcolonial theory. She also explores the history and technical processes of sculpture and its relationship to other forms of three-dimensional media, such as plaster casts and mannequins.

Kim has been a teaching assistant for both the modern and premodern sections of the art-history survey at Berkeley. Most recently she lectured in the modern art-history survey course and a survey on twentieth-century avant-gardes at California State University, Fullerton. She has also worked as a gallery manager for the Tufts University Art Gallery and as a docent for the Berkeley Art Museum. In the 2003–4 academic year, she will defer her Dodge fellowship for a year to accept a fellowship residency at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Upon graduation, she plans to continue teaching while working in public museums.

Megan Smetzer

Megan Smetzer is a recipient of the Terra Foundation for the Arts Pre-1940 American Art Fellowship. Born and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska, she earned her BA in American studies at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, minoring in art history. After working at Sotheby’s, followed by a job designing art tours for museum groups, she returned to school and earned an MA in art history from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Currently, she is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Smetzer’s dissertation, “Assimilation or Resistance? The Production and Consumption of Tlingit Beadwork,” examines a largely undocumented area of Tlingit women’s art: nineteenth- and twentieth-century beadwork. The art of the Southeast Alaskan Tlingit has been extensively researched within the fields of art history and anthropology. But unlike other aspects of Tlingit visual production, such as totem poles, masks, and Chilkat weaving, beadwork has been marginalized in the scholarly literature due to Western notions of authenticity, tradition, and the hierarchy of the fine and applied arts. As there is little written evidence for beadwork production, Smetzer’s research combines interviews with contemporary Tlingit beaders, the compilation of a digital database of beadwork in museum collections, the critical examination of historic photographs, and the reading of published texts against the grain in order to enrich the history of artistic production on the Northwest Coast. In a series of four case studies, beadwork is investigated in terms of tourism and collecting, gender, indigenous agency, and identity to understand how these objects become sites for the negotiation of meaning across cultural boundaries.

Smetzer’s research has been generously supported through several fellowships. She has received the American Council of Learned Societies/Luce Predoctoral Dissertation Fellowship in American Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts’ Chester Dale Fellowship, and several University Graduate Fellowships from her school. She plans to return to Alaska upon the completion of her dissertation and continue working with Tlingit artists.

Honorable Mentions

From a highly competitive pool of applicants, the visual-artist and art-historian juries also chose to award honorable mentions to the following individuals: Catherine Caesar, a PhD candidate at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia; and Jessica Mallios, an MFA student at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Fellowship Juries

The 2003 visual-artist jury included: Miguel Luciano, artist-in-residence at El Puente in Brooklyn, New York, and former CAA fellow; John Kissick, director of the School of Fine Art and Music, University of Guelph; Laura Heyman, associate professor in photography, Syracuse University; and Holly Hughes, Rhode Island School of Design and an artist based in New York.

The 2003 art-historian jury comprised: Elizabeth Kennedy, associate curator at the Terra Museum for American Art; Bruce Altshuler, director of museum studies at New York University; Katherine Manthorne, Graduate Center, City University of New York; and Susan Aberth, Bard College and former CAA fellow.

About the Fellowships

First, fellowship recipients receive awards of $5,000 toward the completion of their MFA or PhD degrees in the 2003–4 academic year. In the following year, fellows seek postgraduate employment at museums, art institutes, colleges, or universities, and CAA subsidizes their professional salary with a $10,000 grant to the fellows’ hiring institutions, which must be matched two to one.

The Terra Foundation Pre-1940 American Art Fellowship recipient receives a grant of $5,000 toward the completion of his or her PhD degree in the 2003–4 academic year. During the following summer, the fellow receives a $10,000 stipend for a three-month residency at the Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago. The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation fellowship requires that successful applicants work at a New Jersey museum, art center, college, or university.

All recipients receive complimentary CAA memberships and travel grants to attend the 2004 Annual Conference, where they will be paired with mentors who will help them make the most of the conference’s resources and provide advice as they pursue their professional goals during their fellowship term. At the conference, each recipient will give a presentation about his or her work during a session entitled “Work-in-Progress: 2003 Professional Development Fellows.”

CAA is grateful for the long-term support of its funders, without whom these programs would be impossible. CAA also thanks the numerous individual supporters who have contributed to the funding of these fellowships.

Published in September 2003.

Also in this Section