Fellowships

2006 Professional Development Fellows and Honorable Mentions

This year, CAA awarded five grants and two honorable mentions through our 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 Wyeth Foundation for American Art, and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

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 graduate students at this critical moment, CAA assists the rising generation to complete degrees in a timely fashion and to find first employment opportunities easily. And by nurturing outstanding artists and scholars at the beginning of their careers, CAA aims to strengthen and diversify the profession as a whole.

Here is how the grants work: first, fellowship recipients receive awards of $5,000 toward the completion of their MFA or PhD degrees in the 2006–7 academic year. In the following year, fellows seek postgraduate employment at museums, art institutions, colleges, or universities. CAA subsidizes their professional salary with a $10,000 grant to the fellows’ hiring institutions. Honorable mentions receive $1,000 awards.

Eva Diaz

Eva Diaz has been awarded the CAA Professional Development Fellowship for Art Historians, funded by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. Diaz is a New York–based art historian and critic and a doctoral candidate in art history at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, where she is completing her dissertation, “Chance and Design: Experimental Art at Black Mountain College.” Her research focuses on rival methodologies of experimental art as elaborated, practiced, and disputed by three key Black Mountain teachers—Josef Albers, John Cage, and Buckminster Fuller—in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In fall 2005, Diaz completed her dissertation chapter on Albers, entitled “The Ethics of Perception: Josef Albers in America,” which is being revised for publication. A separate essay, “Experiment, Expression, and the Paradox of Black Mountain,” was published in the catalogue for the exhibition Starting at Zero: Black Mountain College, 1933–1957, held in 2005–6 at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol and Kettle’s Yard at Cambridge University in Cambridge, England. In 2005, she was a presenter at the International Contemporary Art Experts Forum at ARCO in Madrid and gave a talk on the history of experimental performance at the CAA Annual Conference in Atlanta.

Diaz’s writing has appeared in Art in America, Time Out New York, and numerous exhibition catalogues; she has also contributed an essay to a forthcoming book, Curating Subjects x 21, edited by Paul O’Neill and published by Open Editions. She recently coorganized an exhibition, Mind the Gap, at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, New York, in spring 2006. Her essay for the accompanying catalogue examines artists’ interventions in city spaces and how the privatization of public spaces continues to affect sites of and for art. During 2006–7, Diaz is the guest curator of a series of exhibitions about experiment, art, and performance at Black Mountain College, to be held at the Asheville Art Museum in North Carolina. She was recently named Joanne Leonhardt Cassulo Curatorial Fellow at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York for 2006–7. Since 1999, she has served as an instructor in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

LaToya Ruby Frazier

LaToya Ruby Frazier has been awarded the CAA Professional Development Fellowship for Visual Artists, funded by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. A Pittsburgh native, Frazier received a BFA in photography and graphic design from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. She is pursuing her MFA in art photography in the School of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York.

Influenced by documentary photography, African American studies, and her personal experience growing up poor in a marginalized community, Frazier uses photography and video to produce sociopolitical work within the emotional realm of the African American experience. Frazier’s body of work, entitled The Notion of Family: Family Work 2002–2006, is a collaborative project with her mother and grandmother. With honest, relentless black-and-white photographs and a documentary film, called A Mother to Hold, Frazier depicts an intensely complex relationship with her drug-addicted mother. The artist’s combined role as daughter, photographer, and filmmaker transcends the objective approach of traditional documentary practice, which Frazier believes has allowed many observers to disregard the poor and working class African American experience.

Frazier received an Outstanding Achievement Award in Photography from Edinboro University and a Patron Purchase Award from the Erie Art Museum in Erie, Pennsylvania. Her photographs have been exhibited at Light Work, Community Folk Art Center, and the Everson Museum of Art, all in Syracuse, and at the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center in Auburn, New York. A Mother to Hold was screened at the 2006 Black Maria Film Festival in Jersey City, New Jersey, and in New York at the Brooklyn Underground Film Festival, the Black International Film Festival, and the Women of Color Film Festival, where she received the Producer’s Choice Award. Frazier has taught photography at Syracuse University, Light Work Community Darkrooms, and the Community Folk Art Center and has conducted workshops in central New York. Frazier is currently producing work in housing projects on the Bronx, New York.

Álvaro Ibarra

Álvaro Ibarra has been awarded the CAA Professional Development Fellowship for Art Historians, funded by the NEH. Ibarra attends the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1998 and a master’s degree in 2001. He is currently a doctoral candidate in art history, writing his dissertation, “Legions in Mourning: Reconstructing Community in the Roman Provinces.”

Ibarra’s work disputes prevalent assumptions that limit scholarly interpretation of provincial Roman communities and their material culture. By examining visual representations at the edge of the Roman Empire, he explores how people accepted or rejected Romanitas. He contests previous expectations regarding the Roman assimilation of provinces and their peoples, views based on the assumption that the Roman and the barbarian are clearly defined oppositional categories. Study of the material remains of liminal areas and reviewing their so-called prototypes from the city of Rome allows Ibarra to postulate the negotiation of imperial culture, political authority, and identity among Romans and non-Romans. He discusses this dynamic interaction through the analysis of ancient Roman military trophy monuments. Although the most prevalent message is that of Roman conquest, each trophy contains other narratives that provide a more nuanced picture of the people who built and viewed these structures.

Since 2001, extensive archeological fieldwork with the American Academy in Rome, Southern Methodist University’s Mugello Valley Archaeological Project in Tuscany, Terra Europaea’s Constanta County Excavations, and the Ancient Frontiers Foundation Transylvania Project in Romania have all contributed to Ibarra’s dissertation and the overall knowledge of Roman material remains. The Kress Foundation and the University of Texas’s Department of Art and Art History supported additional fieldwork in Greece and southern France respectively. To reach students beyond the lecture hall, he is developing an archaeological field school in Romania that promotes interest in and interaction between American and Romanian students and scholars in conjunction with the Ancient Frontiers Foundation.

Jennifer King

Jennifer King has been awarded the CAA Professional Development Fellowship for Art Historians, funded by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. She is a doctoral candidate at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, where she is writing her dissertation, “Michael Asher and the Art of Infrastructure: Space, Cities, Institutions.” King received an MA from the Graduate Program in the History of Art at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and a BA in studio art and art history from Rice University in Houston, Texas.

King’s dissertation examines the work of the contemporary American artist Michael Asher, a figure often cited as one of the most important conceptual artists of his generation but whose work, because of its ephemeral nature, remains largely undocumented. Asher emerged in the late 1960s, participating in such seminal exhibitions as Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969. During the 1970s, he continued his pathbreaking activities in what has come to be known as institutional critique. A professor at CalArts for more than thirty years, Asher has influenced several generations of artists, many of whom are graduates of the celebrated “post-studio” class. In her dissertation, King uses the concept of “infrastructure” to address Asher’s longstanding engagement with both space (such as the material and architectural aspects of an environment) and organization (such as institutional frameworks and urban systems). In so doing, she aims to provide the first book-length study of Asher’s work.

Before attending graduate school, King worked as a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2003–4 and organized the exhibition Useful Forms: Furniture by Charlotte Perriand at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2004. During 2006–7, she will be a graduate curatorial intern at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

Christopher Scott Lowther

Christopher Scott Lowther has been awarded the CAA Professional Development Fellowship for Visual Artists, funded by the NEA. He received a BA in art history and an MS in education (instructional systems technology) from Indiana University in Bloomington. He is now an MFA candidate in the digital-media program at Indiana, where he teaches the class “Introductory Digital Art: Survey and Practice.”

For the past two years, Lowther’s work has focused on themes of dream recollection, surveillance, and gender through video, Flash animation, and installation. More recently, he has worked with mobile technology, multiple projection, and installation to explore gay rural experience, suburban alienation, and constructions of masculinity in media representations.

Lowther is completing his Out of the Myth trilogy, in which he appropriates Hollywood films to reveal a history belonging to gays and lesbians. The first part of the trilogy, Cowboy Cruising, appropriates the final standoff scene from Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly to question and broaden the discourse about the homosocial life of the nineteenth-century cowboy. Edited and projected onto three adjoining walls, the footage of each cowboy transforms cinematic space and time into real space and time. Lowther edits the footage to create moments of danger and desire that can only be communicated through the gaze, that is, through signals associated with “cruising.” Lustful glances teeter on contempt, and the film characters seem to detest the thing they desire—a common symptom of homophobia.

Lowther has exhibited in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Denton, Texas, as well as in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This summer he completed Cycling 74’s Max/MSP Workshop at Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio and assisted Leslie Sharpe, Indiana University professor and AT&T fellow, with a video podcasting project for the school’s digital-media program and the Indiana University Art Museum.

Honorable Mentions

Kate Palmer

Kate Palmer is enrolled in the PhD program in art history at Boston University in Massachusetts, where she is working on her dissertation, “Archive/Atlas/Album: The Photographic Records of Christian Boltanski, Dinh Q. Lê, and Gerhard Richter.” Palmer’s dissertation examines the emergence of the photographic archive as a critical subject for contemporary artists. Boltanski, Lê, and Richter are an internationally diverse group of contemporary artists, yet each has produced work that navigates the terrain between personal memory and large-scale historic events, as seen through and constructed by photographic archives. In binding abstract and theoretical debates about the nature of photography, memory, and history to specific people, places, and events, each artist uses methods to complicate our understanding of the relationship between photographs and the shaping and construction of history.

Palmer works part-time in the Department of Photographs at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she helped to organize the recent exhibition, A New Kind of Historical Evidence: Photographs from the Carpenter Center Collection. She has taught courses on the history of photography and modern and contemporary art at Boston University and in 2005 was named an Outstanding Teaching Fellow by the College of Arts and Sciences at her school. She has received a Graduate Research Abroad Fellowship to support dissertation research in France and Germany and participated in the 2006 Getty Dissertation Workshop at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Before moving to Boston, Palmer worked in the Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the California Museum of Photography in Riverside, and the James Danziger Gallery in New York. She received her MA in art history from the University of California, Riverside, in 2000 and her BA from Colorado College in Colorado Springs in 1996.

Amy Yao

Born in Los Angeles, California, Amy Yao is an MFA candidate in sculpture at Yale University’s School of Art in New Haven, Conneticut. She received her BFA with an emphasis on digital media from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

Yao’s current work uses methods of abstraction to recontextualize and highlight visual information of everyday life in a way that is both humorous and critical. Employing a variety of mediums, she explores how a work of art sits in a room and how nuance can center its meaning. Her work slows the spectator’s attention, opposing the rapid pace of popular media in the contemporary world, so that information is revealed not in a quick glance but rather through close observation. Yao encourages viewers to regard the object’s material form on all possible sides in hopes of creating an opportunity to reassess our relationship to visual culture.

With classmates from the Art Center College of Design, Yao opened China Art Objects Galleries, a commercial gallery in Los Angeles’s Chinatown district, which includes a record library and listening room in the gallery’s basement. She also organized the Art Swap Meet at High Desert Test Sites in Joshua Tree, California; the Wishing Well Cinema Club at Mountain Bar in Los Angeles; and a pirate radio station at Art Center College. Her work was recently shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and High Desert Test Sites.

Fellowship Program

All recipients receive a complimentary CAA membership and a travel stipend to attend the 2007 Annual Conference, where they will give a presentation on their work during a session entitled “Work-in-Progress: 2006 Professional Development Fellows,” to be held on Thursday, February 15, 2007.

CAA thanks its jury members for 2006. The visual-artist jury included: Joseph S. Lewis, III, dean, School of Art and Design, Alfred University; Michael Aurbach, professor of art, Vanderbilt University; and Marie Watt, visual artist and former CAA fellow.

The art-historian jury comprised: Jill O’Bryan, artist and independent scholar; Anne Collins Goodyear, assistant curator of prints and drawings, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; and Kevin E. Consey, director, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

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

Published in September 2006.

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