Fellowships

2007 Professional Development Fellows and Honorable Mentions

This past year, CAA awarded two grants and four honorable mentions through the Professional Development Fellowship Program.

CAA initiated the 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 offering financial assistance to promising MFA and PhD students, CAA can assist the rising generation during this important transitional period in their lives.

Unlike previous years in which CAA fellowships were awarded in two parts—$5,000 to the fellows at the outset and $10,000 to an employer (with a matching requirement) upon the recipients securing a professional position—fellows are now honored with a one-time grant of $15,000 to help them with various aspects of their work, whether it be for their job-search expenses or purchasing materials for their studio. CAA believes a grant of this kind, without contingencies, can best nurture artists and scholars at the beginning of their professional careers.

Both fellows and honorable mentions receive free one-year CAA memberships and complimentary registration to CAA’s Annual Conference.

Hagit Barkai

Hagit Barkai is an MFA student in visual arts at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, where she is currently working on her thesis show, Every Body Knows. An Israeli native, Barkai received a BA in philosophy from Hebrew University of Jerusalem and studied painting and drawing at the Jerusalem Studio School.

Viewing the body as the prime location in which rights are given and removed, and through which histories take place and are understood, Barkai reflects somatic experiences in her work, seeing them as political, social, and psychological symbols. The bodies in her paintings are confined within the frame in unstable and uncomfortable positions. Her work focuses on conflicts regarding identities, morality, and difference, which are embodied through demands addressed to the body in public and personal spaces. She is influenced by cultural critics such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Judith Butler, and by artists such as Hannah Wilke, Mona Hatoum, and Marlene Dumas.

Barkai’s paintings have been exhibited at Chashama Gallery in New York and at the Pennsylvania State Museum in Harrisburg. Her painting represented Pennsylvania State University at the Big Ten Conference in Chicago, Illinois. At Penn State, she received a first-place award in the university-wide Graduate Research Exhibition; a travel grant to Israel from the University’s School of Visual Arts; and a painting commission from the Alumni Association.

Nouchinne Nini Lavasani

Born in Tehran, Iran, Nouchinne Nini Lavasani moved to southern California following high school. After studying architecture and design, she decided to continue in art and architectural history; Lavasani is currently a PhD candidate in those subjects at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and teaches art history in the Los Angeles Community College District.

Her dissertation, “Tehran: Architecture and Urbanism as Forms of Tutelage and Conveyors of National Identity,” deals with an inquiry into the emergence of nationalism and its expression in the built environment, cultural meaning of urban space, and architectural symbolism and iconography in postrevolutionary Tehran. This work is a continuation of her interest in the nature of cities, particularly capital cities of the nineteenth century, and the buildings and neighborhoods within them. What is Islamic about a city—and images of what is Islamic and of what is considered modern that dominated the nineteenth century—have been at the heart of her studies during the past several years. She is now asking these questions in a contemporary period, exploring connections between urban planning and religion and how they form national identity and mark human relationships.

A fellow at the American Research Institute in Istanbul, Turkey, Lavasani earned her master’s degree from UCLA with an emphasis in art history; her thesis focused on panoramic views of Istanbul in the nineteenth century. She worked closely with the J. Paul Getty Museum’s exhibition Displaying the Asian Shore: Nineteenth-Century Photographs of the Ottoman Empire (1998) and collaborated with the Getty’s Research Institute in the Vocabulary and Provenance Program. Lavasani also helped to train six docents for the exhibition Royal Persian Painting: The Qajar Epoch 1785–1925 at the UCLA Hammer Museum (1999), which displayed well-known yet rarely viewed paintings and objects. Before starting her doctoral program, she was a curatorial intern at Los Angeles County Museum of Art for the Legacy of Genghis Khan exhibition.

A painter as well as a scholar, Lavasani had an exhibition, entitled Abstract Romanticism: Once Again with Feelings, in Tehran and Florence, Italy, in 2003.

2007 Honorable Mentions

Michelle Dizon

Michelle Dizon is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and theorist based in Los Angeles, California. Her work addresses postcoloniality, globalization, racialization, sexuality, identity, and historical memory. She is completing an MFA in interdisciplinary studio in the Department of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and is also a doctoral student in the Department of Rhetoric, with a designated emphasis in women, gender, and sexuality, at the University of California, Berkeley.

For her MFA exhibition, Dizon is working on an interdisciplinary project comprised of a feature-length film, a video installation, and a series of photographs that deal with situations of urban revolt, specifically those that occurred in Los Angeles in 1992 and Paris in 2005. On the one hand, this inquiry into events of civil unrest attempts to locate the relation such events hold to questions of decolonization, subjecthood, and citizenship, with specific attention paid to the gendering of such terms; on the other, it tries to examine how history relates to such events. The principle that governs the project is one of “echos,” or an “echoing” that passes between geographically and temporally distinct moments. By removing us from the realm of historic causality, the echo expresses how ideas such as nonpresence, delay, drag, and deferral might expose the present to itself.

Dizon is also working on two books. The first, entitled Race in Ruins: The Field of Vision and Its Unbeseen, elaborates on the project described above and will complete her doctorate in rhetoric. Race in Ruins theorizes the regime of vision in which racial and gendered subjects are formed, and how a notion of “visuality of the unseen” might expand the terms through which we understand the condition of subalternity. The other book project is a photonovella entitled Letters to a Daughter I Will Never Have, which focuses on the political and ethical demands of inheritance, understood through the passage of intergenerational loss between women.

She has exhibited at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Pacific Film Archive, Artist’s Television Access, Southern Exposure, the New Wight Gallery, Film Arts Foundation, the Cinema Project, the Women in the Director’s Chair Festival, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the Asian American International Film Festival, the Visual Communications Film Festival, the San Diego Asian Film Festival, CineManila, and Documental, as well as in universities throughout the United States.

Courtney M. Leonard

Courtney M. Leonard is an MFA student in ceramics at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence. After receiving an AFA in museum studies and three-dimensional arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she earned a BFA in ceramics from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in Alfred, New York.

Leonard’s current work explores memory and language through her personal narrative as a woman from the Shinnecock Indian Nation of Long Island, New York. Believing that tradition is not stagnant and that the past strengthens the present, she embodies a mixture of the “old” and “new” in her work. Scheduled for May 2008, her MFA thesis exhibition, Connecting Shards, explores the unspoken history and influence between Dutch delftware and the Algonquin pottery of the Shinnecock. The artist fuses coats of monochromatic shades of blue, going beyond traditional delftware techniques in order to create her own visual language. If both the English and Dutch have delft, then this work opens the door to a new visual category: Shinnecock delftware.

Leonard received her teaching certificate from Brown University’s Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning. For the past two years, she has taught courses such as “Hand Building” and “Wheel Throwing” at RISD. The founder of the ceramics program at the Art Farm, a summer camp in the Hamptons on Long Island, she teaches ceramics to children during the summer months, with an emphasis on expressing a broader care and concern for nature and animals through art.

In fall 2007, Leonard presented a lecture, “Connecting Shards: A Retrospective on Eastern Algonquin Pottery,” to the International Ceramics Symposium at the University College for the Creative Arts in Farnham, England. Also that fall, she presented her work on the “The Colonial Dutch Impact on Native American Art in New York” at the University of Rostock in Germany. She is the recipient of a 2007 Cultural Fellowship from the Netherland-America Foundation and hopes to facilitate a great conversation of the cross-cultural exchange still ongoing among European and indigenous American art via her work.

Erika Navarrette

A native of California, Erika Navarrete was born in Santa Cruz and raised in Visalia, located in the heart of San Joaquin Valley. She is currently an MFA student in painting at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. She received her BFA in painting and art history in 2003 from the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri.

Navarrete is a storyteller. The dominance of women in her extended family and friendships marks the underlying current of these stories and experiences. Her work almost exclusively includes female protagonists. Through these characters, she explores the transformation between childhood and adulthood and the tendency to revert back to childlike states as adults. This tendency also influences the physical distortions of the characters she creates, merging the proportions of children with those of adults. Through this integration of body types, Navarrete explores issues of body image and sexuality. Her characters exist in a world that is both reality and the thought process inside their own minds. They are confrontational, weak, whiny, strong, self-conscious, and defiant all at once. Whether her paintings depict a single character or a set of three, they all reflect a story or state of being waiting to be unraveled. The figure is a central component of Navarrete’s work, allowing her to investigate these stories, relationships, and life as a woman on a fundamentally human level.

An active member of the local artistic community in Lincoln, Navarette volunteers at the Haydon Art Center, a local nonprofit organization that values the artistic community, including art education. She was recently awarded the Hispanic Scholarship Fund/McNamara Creative Arts Project Grant, which funded the creation of a substantial body of work. She has exhibited her work in Visalia, Lincoln, Kansas City, numerous cities in South Dakota, and Highland Heights, Kentucky.

Charles A. Stewart

Charles A. Stewart is completing his dissertation in Byzantine architectural history and theory at Indiana University in Bloomington. Previously, he earned an MA in medieval archaeology from the University of York in England. His research concerns intersections of Umayyad Arab and Byzantine-Cypriot culture, specifically concentrating on the development of multiple-domed basilica in Cyprus.

The island of Cyprus was a nexus where artistic styles and different cultures converged, often developing into new forms. Stewart is interested in how such transculturation is then recorded, analyzed, and interpreted by later art historians.

His focus on cultural diversity stems from his own multicultural background. As a first-generation college student and a Filipino American who grew up in both urban Los Angeles and rural Missouri, he has experienced the dynamics of cultural exchange. Stewart firmly believes that studying the humanities can provide understanding and tolerance in an increasingly fragmented North American culture.

In his dissertation, Stewart examines how Cypriots carved out a national identity separate from the Byzantines and Arabs, who simultaneously controlled the island from the seventh to tenth century. The multiple-domed basilica—a unique architectural type not found in other parts of the Byzantine Empire—became a symbol of Cypriot independence. For his study, he draws on such diverse fields as hagiography, church history, liturgical studies, numismatics, and archaeology.

Stewart has received awards from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation/Society of Architectural Historians, the Cyprus Fulbright Program, the Medieval Academy of America, the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute, and the British Schools and Universities Foundation. Currently he teaches a correspondence course in art history at Indiana University, which provides him with an opportunity to educate nontraditional college students. Stewart has been invited to coorganize a symposium on Byzantine Cyprus for the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute in spring 2009.

Fellowship Juries

CAA is grateful to members of the visual-arts fellowship jury for their participation: Michael Aurbach, Vanderbilt University; Thomas Kleese, University of Wisconsin, Richland; Marie Watt, artist, Portland; and Philip Yenawine, Visual Understanding in Education (VUE).

The organization is also grateful to the following art-history jury members: Kevin Consey, Harriet and Esteban Vicente Trust; Anne Collins Goodyear, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; and Denise Leidy, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Published in March 2008.

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