Fellowships

2005 Professional Development Fellows and Honorable Mentions

CAA proudly announces its fellowship recipients for 2005. 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) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

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.

Erica Aldana

Erin Aldana has received the CAA Professional Development Fellowship for Art Historians, funded by the NEH. She earned a BA in studio art and art history from Scripps College in Claremont, California, and an MA in art history from the University of California, Riverside. She is now a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Texas at Austin.

Ever since Aldana read John Berger’s Ways of Seeing in her first survey class, she has been interested in alternative approaches to art history. She thought that studying Latin American art would involve an inherent criticism of the discipline but became frustrated with the limitations of much English-language scholarship, in particular the work in her specialization, contemporary Brazilian art. During the past decade, she discovered that the work of the best-known Brazilian artists has been assimilated into international art circuits to the point of undermining or even losing much of its original historical significance. For this reason, Aldana wants to contribute to a deeper understanding of Brazilian culture and artistic production by researching less-familiar artists for whom the issue of historical and geographical context is unavoidable.

Aldana’s dissertation examines a group of artists called 3Nós3 (literally “three we three” in Portuguese), who performed artistic actions that they referred to as “Urban Interventions” on the streets of São Paulo in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although these simple actions were often interpreted as pranks, the Urban Interventions evoked deeper meanings, engaging with the city on historical, spatial, and social levels. At the same time, they critiqued the role of artistic institutions in São Paulo and their lack of relevance to young artists.

Aldana has worked at several museums and taught art-history courses at her school and at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. She has also received the 2000–1 Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship for Portuguese/Latin American Studies.

Tammy Renée Brackett

Tammy Renée Brackett has been awarded the CAA Professional Development Fellowship for Visual Artists, funded by the NEA. She received a BA in fine arts from Alfred University in Alfred, New York, where she graduated summa cum laude and with honors in fine arts in 2003. She is currently pursuing an MFA in electronic integrated art in the School of Art and Design at Alfred. Critiques of the impact of scientific “breakthroughs” on identity formation inform Brackett’s work. Using new media and traditional artistic mediums, she explores the factors that contribute to the invention of new identities and the overlapping fluid structures behind them.

Through disciplines such as biotechnology and cartography, her art demonstrates the impossibility of finding any absolute structure governing identity or pinpointing its location. Brackett raises questions concerning the manipulations of science and mass media as they define human epistemology on both an individual and collective scale, and her work explores the blurry ethics of a frenetic acceleration in acquisition of scientific knowledge. Brackett’s recent work uses scientific data, such as the Map of the Human Genome, brainwave biofeedback, and infrared frequencies, as elements in her musical compositions and surround-sound installations. By using her own voice to generate the frequencies of DNA, she combines the individual human with its collective representation. These compositions in turn create video imagery when they are used by a computer program that remaps the information into a video matrix.

Brackett has exhibited in Japan, Croatia, Hungary, and the United States and was recently included in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s biennial exhibition, Beyond/In Western New York. This fall she will be codeveloping and teaching an honors seminar course at Alfred University, “Mind the Gap: Art + Science,” with the biologist Jean A. Cardinale. She is also an active member of the Evolutionary Girls Club, a group of artists and activists who work and exhibit globally; the artistic and managing director of the Loupe Arts Center in Prattsburgh, New York; and a singer/songwriter with her band, the Swindle Sisters.

Heather Lee McCarthy

Heather Lee McCarthy is a recipient of the CAA Professional Development Fellowship for Art Historians, funded by the NEH. She earned her BA in ancient Near Eastern civilizations from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1991 and began her graduate studies at New York University in 1996, where she received an MA in Near Eastern studies (with a concentration in museum studies) in 1999. McCarthy earned a second master’s degree in the history of art and archaeology (focusing on Egyptology) at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, where she is currently a PhD candidate.

McCarthy’s dissertation, “Queenship, Cosmography, and Regeneration: The Decorative Programs and Architecture of Ramesside Royal Women’s Tombs,” provides a comprehensive analysis of the decorative programs and architecture of fifteen (mostly unpublished) ancient Egyptian queens’ tombs from the Ramesside period (1292–1075 BCE) in order to explore three interrelated issues: 1) the function of the tomb as a document of the netherworld cosmography assigned to royal women and the impact of status and gender upon the content of the decorative programs, the architectural form, and layout of this “document”; 2) the way royal women were believed to experience regeneration and afterlife existence; and 3) what these two issues communicate about the status of queens and the ideological role of queenship during the Ramesside period. Her dissertation builds on her earlier research concerning ancient Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife experience of royal women.

McCarthy’s research has been supported by fellowships from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. During the 2002–3 academic year, she was a recipient of the Kress Fellowship in Egyptian Art and Architecture (administered by the American Research Center in Egypt), which funded her field research in Luxor, Egypt.

Lauren Woods

Lauren Woods has been awarded the CAA Professional Development Fellowship for Visual Artists, funded by the NEA. She is completing her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in California. Wood’s hybrid media projects use video and 16-mm film as well as appropriated imagery to reflect on, reenvision, and rewrite the history of a postcolonial and global society. Her work, in the form of single-channel projections and large-scale multichannel video installations, contemplate and question cultural and collective memory and examine sociopolitical discourses.

Approaching the documentary as subjective, not objective, Woods creates “ethnofictive” (a term borrowed from Jean Rouch) documents of her navigation through the world as an American woman artist of the African diaspora. Committed to her creative desires as an artist and to confronting her subjectivity, she is intrigued with cinema’s ability to manipulate emotion and attempts to create visceral work that translates her personal perspective to communicate across ethnic, cultural, and national divisions. Woods’s devotion to cinema as a public art form and method of communication has led her to public art. Currently, she is exploring how traditional monument-making and public site-specific work can be translated into new contemporary models of memorializing—substituting the traditional marble and granite for the newer medium of video.

Studying in Spain and Puerto Rico, Woods finished her undergraduate studies in 2002 at the University of North Texas in Denton, receiving a BA in radio, television, and film and a BA in Spanish with a minor in sociology. For the past ten years, she has worked with youths, conducting workshops, serving in mentorship positions, and working as a middle school teacher. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States, including Washington DC, San Francisco, Dallas, and San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Honorable Mentions

Keith Jordan

Keith Jordan is working on his doctoral thesis in pre-Columbian art history, entitled “Stone Trees Transplanted? Central Mexican Stelae and the Question of Maya ‘Influence,’” at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His dissertation focuses on Epiclassic (650–950 CE) and Early Postclassic (950–1150 CE) stelae in Central Mexico, a monument form often regarded as quintessentially Classic Maya. Parallels in form and iconography with specific Maya counterparts led to past claims of Maya “influence” on the stelae of Tula and Xochicalco. Jordan’s dissertation is a critical assessment of these hypotheses and suggests alternatives that incorporate overlooked local antecedents as well as Maya contacts to explain the origins of the Central Mexican monuments. In a more general sense, his research promises to critique what he sees as the “mechanistic” fashion in which “influence” is all too often discussed in art history.

Since 2002, Jordan has taught undergraduate classes in African, Native American, Oceanic, and Mesoamerican Art at Hunter College, Pace University, Rutgers University, and the Fashion Institute of Technology, as well as courses in the same subjects at the Folk Art Institute of the American Folk Art Museum in New York.

Adrienne Pao

Adrienne Pao is an MFA candidate in photography at San Jose State University in California. After graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1997, she studied photography at Humboldt State University in Arcata before deciding to pursue her graduate degree at San Jose. She is currently an instructor at Modesto Junior College and has taught at her own school.

Pao is working on two photography-based projects. Hawaiian Cover-Ups examines the dual nature of the colonized experience in Hawaii through her own position as a part-Hawaiian person born and raised in California. She is also collaborating with Robin Lassser on Dress Tents, which are wearable sculptures that are photographed in the landscape and that playfully look at female representation in the twenty-first century. Both projects investigate notions of tourism in real and simulated fantasy landscapes and involve a combination of performative and staged strategies and scenarios.

Pao has shown her work at the Morris Graves Museum of Art in Eureka, California, and at Wave Hill Glyndor Gallery in the Bronx, New York. Pao received a 2005 Society for Photographic Education scholarship award and will travel to Argentina in 2006 for an exhibition of the Dress Tents at the New Museum of Arts in Neuquen, Patagonia.

Fellowship Juries

The 2005 visual-artist jury included: Joseph S. Lewis III, dean, School of Art and Design, Alfred University; Maxine Payne, assistant professor, University of Central Arkansas; Harris R. Wiltsher II, assistant professor, Florida A&M University, and program administrator, Art in State Buildings Program.

The 2005 art-historian jury comprised: Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, curator, Jersey City Museum, and former CAA fellow; Marilyn S. Kushner, department head and curator of prints and drawings, Brooklyn Museum; C. Jill O’Bryan, independent scholar, artist, and documentarian and archivist for Charles Ross’s earthwork, Star Axis, in New Mexico.

About the Fellowships

First, fellowship recipients receive awards of $5,000 toward the completion of their MFA or PhD degrees in the 2005–6 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. Honorable mentions received $1,000 awards.

All recipients receive complimentary CAA membership and a travel grant to attend the 2006 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: 2005 Professional Development Fellows.”

CAA is grateful for the long-term support of its funders and also thanks the numerous individual supporters who have contributed to the funding of these fellowships.

Published in September 2005.

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