Fellowships

2004 Professional Development Fellows and Honorable Mentions

CAA proudly announces its fellowship recipients for 2004. CAA administered four 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 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.

Glaire D. Anderson

Glaire D. Anderson, the 2004 recipient of the Professional Development Fellowship for Art Historians, funded by the NEH, is completing her PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge in the history, theory, and criticism of architecture section, and in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. Her research focuses on medieval Islamic architecture and urbanism.

Interchange across spatial, religious, and geographical boundaries, and the ways in which buildings and cities are shaped and perceived across such borders, are themes that inform her work. Anderson’s interest in notions of encounter and hybridity arises partly from her Filipino American background, and from childhood experiences living in the Philippines, Italy, and the southern United States. In her dissertation, “Cultivating Refinement and the Suburban Estate (munya) in Umayyad Cordoba,” Anderson examines the suburban villa culture that flourished around Cordoba, the capital of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain), under the patronage of the Umayyad rulers and court elites between the eighth and tenth centuries. Through a consideration of the wide variety of textual and material evidence for the Umayyad suburban estates (none of which survives intact), Anderson frames the estates as a social and landscape phenomenon. She attributes the rise of the Umayyad suburban estates to the confluence of Islamic notions of refinement and agriculture’s importance on the Iberian Peninsula, and argues that the estates and their landscape embodied Umayyad ideals of refinement and good government.

Earlier this year, Anderson taught courses on Islamic art and architecture at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. She has recently begun coediting a collection of essays on the material culture of al-Andalus with Mariam Rosser-Owen of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Anderson has received awards from the Barakat Foundation, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Society of Architectural Historians, and the Historians of Islamic Art.

Jennifer Dudley

The 2004 Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellow in Studio Art, Jennifer Dudley, is an MFA candidate in painting in the School of Art at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1997, she received her BFA with emphasis on painting from the University of Georgia in Athens. Although painting and drawing were her primary focus, Dudley also studied photography and filmmaking, both of which greatly influenced her work and structured her interpretation of current art-making practices. During her undergraduate education, she studied in Cortona, Italy.

After receiving her BFA, Dudley immersed herself in the surrounding arts community in Athens. She worked with many local businesses in the area to provide emerging artists with much-needed exhibition space, served as guest curator to a local gallery, and helped to convert warehouses into art and performance venues.

Dudley’s current work incorporates historical references from both visual and literary sources. While maintaining her investment in how the visual language of photography and cinema has shaped the way in which she thinks about the painted or drafted image, Dudley draws and paints fictions in which popular culture’s articulation of the past can coexist with a personal vision of the individual self. Working from such sources as the writings of Jane Austen and mid-1990s Hollywood film adaptations of Austen’s novels, Dudley makes literature, movies, and photography collide with her humorous and revisionist histories.

Carmenita Higginbotham

Carmenita Higginbotham is the recipient of the Wyeth Endowment for American Art Fellowship. She earned her BA in art history and English from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and her MA in art history from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is currently completing her doctoral dissertation, “Saturday Night at the Savoy: Blackness and the Urban Spectacle in the Art of Reginald Marsh,” at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

For the New York artist and urban realist Reginald Marsh, the city, as both location and social space, informed much of the work he produced. At the time Marsh was painting the city and its inhabitants, rendering the urban environment legible for his viewers, popular conceptions of urban culture were being reshaped by a perceptible black presence in large American cities. Higginbotham examines Marsh’s imagery from 1928 to 1938, an anomalous period in his oeuvre when he produced more than forty paintings that include African American figures. Rather than identifying the artist’s black figures as simply accurate or realistic representations of the African American urban lifestyle of this period, Higginbotham explores the racializing strategies Marsh employed to negotiate public perception, popular imagery, and his own experience of observing those who live in New York City. She contextualizes Marsh’s complex, contradictory representations of blacks within mainstream culture’s attempts to determine the country’s new urban and ethnic landscape. As substantive cultural and visual markers, these representations are manifest concerns about the urban presence of African Americans.

Higginbotham’s research has been generously supported by several awards. She received several grants from the University of Michigan, a predoctoral fellowship from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and a 2003–4 Chester Dale fellowship from the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA). In the fall of 2005, she will be an assistant professor of art history and American studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Brenna Chee Youngblood

Brenna Chee Youngblood has received the 2004 Professional Development Fellowship for Artists, funded by the NEA. She earned a BFA in photography from California State University, Long Beach, and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Youngblood is working on a series of images that simultaneously uses photomontage as a formal and conceptual device while historically examining the technique. The works demonstrate the dialogical relationship among the subject, its immediate context, and the greater environment, which is not depicted but implied. Employing images and memory of the familiar objects of home (chairs, televisions, light fixtures), she explores the private life and personal history of the individual that is largely made up of manufactured objects and identities, examining alienation issues and spatial relationships.

Youngblood acknowledges that her aesthetic is influenced chiefly by mass media, especially pre-1934 Soviet-era photomontage and cinematography. In her work, however, she examines the political representation of the black body, a highly personal subject. For her, this representation is not specific to the academic and aesthetic spheres, but rather epitomizes various issues of race and gender that she confronts on a daily basis.

Youngblood has earned several academic awards, including the Lilian Levinson Award, the Midler Award, a UCLA Affiliates Scholarship, and a graduate opportunity fellowship. She also has served as a teaching assistant at UCLA and has exhibited throughout the Los Angeles area.

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: Christine Lee, an MFA student at San Diego State University in California; and Jeanne Nugent, a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Fellowship Jurors

The 2004 visual-artist jury included: Laura Heyman, associate professor of photography, Syracuse University; Maxine Payne, assistant professor of photography, Hendrix College, and former CAA fellow; and Harris Wiltsher, assistant professor, Florida A&M University.

The 2004 art-historian jury comprised: Anne Collins Goodyear, assistant curator of prints and drawings, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Katherine Manthorne, professor, Graduate Center, City University of New York; Shalon Parker, Gonzaga University and former CAA fellow; and Joyce Hill Stoner, professor and conservator, Winterthur Museum and the University of Delaware.

Fellowship Program

First, fellowship recipients receive awards of $5,000 toward the completion of their MFA or PhD degrees in the 2004–5 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 Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellowship requires that recipients work at a New Jersey museum, art center, college, or university, while the Wyeth Endowment for American Art Fellowship necessitates study in American art.

All recipients receive complimentary CAA membership and a travel grant to attend the 2005 Annual Conference, where they will be paired with mentors who will help them to 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: 2004 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 2004.

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