CAA News

Jacki Apple and Mat Rappaport, the producers of a 2014 ARTspace session, seek your participation for “Designing a Better Future: A Participatory Platform for Exchange,” taking place at the 102nd CAA Annual Conference in Chicago on Saturday, February 15, 10:00 AM–2:00 PM. Deadline for proposals: June 1, 2013; notification of selection: June 20, 2013.

Designing a Better Future: A Participatory Platform for Exchange

Artists and designers operating as thinkers and communicators, visualizers and producers, can be leaders in changing how we think, live, and act in order to make a better world. Are we ready to discuss cultural production and the arts as viable and meaningful practices beyond the established system of commodity trading? What potential models of an effective creative practice can we envision and develop?

Artists, designers, media producers, photographers, filmmakers, architects, writers, theorists, educators, and cultural historians are invited to submit proposals for presentation and discussion that will inspire others to join them in imagining, inventing, and actualizing a more sustainable and enlightened possible future, whether it be local or global.

What would you do to effect change? What would that look like? Do aesthetics matter?

We seek provocative and challenging theoretical concepts and/or models for practical application. Encouraged are visionary, daring, and unconventional ideas and collaborations across fields in the arts, sciences, and humanities that conceive different ways to address social, economic, and environmental realities.

General topics and themes to consider may include:

1. Climate change, the environment, and sustainable living: consumption, energy, waste, food, water, air, and economic and social consequences
2. The culture of violence: all its social, political, cultural, and economic manifestations
3. Technology and human rights: biological, political, intellectual, and spiritual

Presentation Format

The format for presentation will be an interactive forum of exchange between speakers and audience. There will be no podium. Speakers will be placed within the audience. Presentations may include visuals such as images, texts, charts, etc.

Each speaker will be given seven minutes to present his or her proposal. The audience will then have equal time—seven minutes—to respond and discuss. Time may be slightly less or more depending on the number of outstanding proposals selected.

Submission Instructions

Please send a description of your topic and the theoretical concepts and/or model that you intend to propose in approximately three hundred words, plus a brief biography or CV of no more than two pages. The written proposal must include a title, name(s) of author(s), address, email, and phone number. Please submit all proposal files as PDF documents to studio@meme01.com. Deadline for proposals: June 1, 2013; notification of selection: June 20, 2013.

Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Cultivating Partnerships in the Digital Humanities

As academics we can be too snug in our institutional silos. We sometimes think of one another as competitors for students, and as a result we duplicate scarce resources in mutually damaging ways. Without more coordinated programs, will we go on teaching the way we have since the Industrial Revolution? Will our students, knowing it doesn’t have to be that way and worried about their future, lose patience with us? The digital humanities provide a context for facing those questions head-on. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

What We’re Not Arguing About

The solutions to the crisis in higher education are still a subject of fierce debate, and I’m happy to see people from a variety of perspectives and backgrounds adding their voices to the conversation. At the same time, I think it’s important to clarify what academics and former academics are and aren’t arguing about. (Read more at Adventures in (Post) Gradland.)

How Long Is the Average Dissertation?

The best part about writing a dissertation is finding clever ways to procrastinate. The motivation for this blog comes from one of the more creative ways I’ve found to keep myself from writing. I’ve posted about data mining in the past, and this post follows up on those ideas using a topic that is relevant to anyone that has ever considered getting, or has successfully completed, their PhD. (Read more at R Is My Friend.)

To Raze or Not? MoMA Rethinks Plan

After impassioned protests from prominent architects, preservationists, and design critics, the Museum of Modern Art said that it would reconsider its decision to demolish its next-door neighbor, the former home of the American Folk Art Museum, to make room for an expansion. In a recent board meeting, the directors were told that a board committee had selected the design firm Diller Scofidio & Renfro to handle the expansion and to help determine whether to keep any of the existing structure. (Read more in the New York Times.)

Help Desk: Ideal Representation

I’ve been meeting with a commercial gallery in my city for some time, and they’ve extended me an offer to come aboard. I’m excited about the idea of professional representation, having a platform to promote myself to a larger audience and further opportunity for sale of work. Some of the work the gallery represents is totally not my style, which is to say, artwork that favors more commercially viable subject matter or style at the cost of exercising any real dynamic or conceptual verve. How much should this influence my decision to join the gallery? (Read more in Daily Serving.)

Thinking about Accreditation in a Rapidly Changing World

Enormous change is under way in higher education, driven by a perfect storm of crisis (around cost, access, quality, and funding), technological innovation and what that innovation makes possible, the growing presence and influence of for-profit providers, abuses (of various kinds), opportunity, and workforce-development needs in a global and technological context. Any one of those challenges might fill an agenda for a commissioners’ retreat or a small conference, but accreditors now wrestle with all of these various forces across a broad landscape of change and urgency. (Read more in Educause Review.)

Counting, Not Curtailing, Adjuncts’ Work

Nowhere does the Law of Unintended Consequences run more rampant than in the field of taxation. That was clearly demonstrated at the Internal Revenue Service’s rule-making hearing on April 23, in the agency’s attempts to craft regulations to impose a steep tax on employers who fail to provide employee health-care coverage required by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. While most of the twenty-five other witnesses at the hearing represented various employers or organizations, I testified in my personal capacity as an interested citizen who happens to be an adjunct faculty member and former IRS lawyer. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

How Prevalent Is Money Laundering in the Art World?

Recent federal charges against the New York dealer Helly Nahmad included that he worked “to launder tens of millions of dollars on behalf of the illegal gambling business.” While Nahmad has pleaded not guilty to all the charges in the indictment, the accusation raises the questions of whether (and if so why) art would be used in this way. Art lends itself to money laundering because the market’s lack of transparency means art can become what Judge Fausto Martin De Sanctiscalls an “invisible asset.” Values can be manipulated, and complex ownership schemes, with an emphasis on secrecy, are commonplace. (Read more in the Art Newspaper.)

In its regular roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, architects, photographers, filmmakers, publishers, and others whose work has significantly influenced the visual arts.

• Les Blank, a documentary filmmaker whose Burden of Dreams (1982) chronicled the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, died on April 7, 2013. He was 77 years old. Blank also directed films on the musicians Lightning Hopkins, Dizzy Gillespie, and Clifton Chenier
• Ellen Cantor, an artist and filmmaker known for her ongoing work Pinochet Porn, passed away on April 21, 2013. She was 51 years old
• Bernard Cheese, a British painter, printmaker, and educator, died on March 15, 2013, at the age of 88. Cheese taught at Saint Martins School of Art (1950–68), Goldsmiths College (1970–78), and Central School of Art and Design, London (1980–89)
• Les Coleman, a London-based artist, writer of aphorisms, and “all-around rare bird,” died on January 17, 2013. He was 67
• Edward de Grazia, an American lawyer who fought censorship of Tropic of Cancer, Lysistrata, and The Naked Lunch, died on April 11, 2013, at age 86. De Grazia taught at Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York for thirty years and was the author of Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius (1991)
• Dominic Elliott, the personal assistant of the artist David Hockney, died on March 17, 2013. He was 23 years old
• Nigel Glendinning, a scholar of Spanish art who was an expert on Francisco de Goya, passed away on February 23, 2013. He was 83 years old. Glendinning held various professorships and fellowships across the United Kingdom and Ireland
• Sidney Goodman, a figurative painter and emeritus professor of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, passed away on April 11, 2013. He was 77
• Regina Granne, an artist based in New York whose drawings demonstrated creative interpretations of feminism, war, and politics, died on January 26, 2013. She was teaching most recently at Parsons the New School for Design
• Jene Highstein, a Postminimalist sculptor whose work was shown internationally, passed away on April 27, 2013, at the age of 70. Highstein was involved in the fabled exhibition space 112 Greene Street in the 1970s
• Jack Jaeger, a Dutch artist and curator known for coediting eight issues of ZAAP, a quarterly VHS video-art magazine, from 1994 to 1996, died on March 15, 2013. Born in 1937, he also worked as a cameraman, producer, director, and editor of television commercials and films
• L. Brent Kington, a professor of metalsmithing at Southern Illinois University Carbondale from 1961 to 1997 and former chairperson of its School of Art and Design, died on February 7, 2013, at age 78. A retrospective of his career, L. Brent Kington, Mythic Metalsmith, toured the United States from 2007 to 2011
• Martyl Langsdorf, the artist who created the Doomsday Clock image that symbolized the dangers of nuclear power during the Cold War, died on March 26, 2013. She was 96 years old
• Bert Long, a former chef who left the kitchen to become an artist, passed away on February 1, 2013, at age 72. The Houston-based Long, considered an outsider artist by some, won an NEA grant in 1987 and the Prix de Rome in 1990
• Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, a Russian artist and gay-rights icon, died in March 2013 at the age of 43. Known for his impersonations of Marilyn Monroe, Mamyshev-Monroe emerged as a performing and video artist in Saint Petersburg in the late 1980s
• Rick Mather, an American architect based in London who designed extensions to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Dulwich Picture Gallery, and Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, among other institutions, died on April 20, 2013, at age 75
• Walter Pierce, an American architect who designed the modernist houses of Peacock Farm, a subdivision in Lexington, Massachusetts, passed away on February 27, 2013. He was 93 years old
• Joe N. Prince, director of education for the National Endowment for the Arts from 1977 to 1985, died on February 23, 2013, at age 75. He also served as special assistant to the agency’s chairman for two years
• Ganesh Pyne, an Indian artist who was called the “painter of darkness” for his fantastical imagery in watercolor, gouache, and tempera, died on March 12, 2013, at age 76. Among his his influences ranged from the Bengal school of art (a forerunner to Indian modernism) to his personal experience as a child witnessing the Kolkata riots
• Daniel Reich, an unconventional art dealer based in New York, died on December 25, 2012. He was 39 years old
• Martin Rogers, a British printer, sculptor, and publisher who founded the Small Publishers Fair in London, has died. He was 61 years old
• Dorothy Sanders, a philanthropist who founded the Milwaukee Art Museum’s African-American Art Acquisition Committee, passed away on February 13, 2013. She was 96
• James Schell, an Atlanta artist and illustrator whose works were published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Sunday magazine, died on January 6, 2013, at age 94. He was the art director for Kirkland White and Schell Advertising, which he helped establish
• Shozo Shimamoto, a Japanese artist who was a member of the Gutai group, died on January 25, 2013, at the age of 85
• Merton D. Simpson, a painter, collector, and dealer in African art, died on March 9, 2013, at the age of 84. Simpson founded his gallery of African and tribal art in 1954, and his artwork became politicized in the early 1960s after joining the Spiral group, which counted Romare Bearden and Hale Woodruff among its members
• Paolo Soleri, the innovative architect of an ecologically minded city in the Arizona desert called Arcosanti, passed away on April 9, 2013. He was 93
• Jack Stokes, the animation director of the Beatles’ film Yellow Submarine, died on March 20, 2013. He was 92. Stokes also worked on titles and inserts for Magical Mystery Tour
• Clinton Darlington Swingle, who oversaw the purchase, preservation, and restoration of the Fabric Workshop and Museum’s building in Philadelphia, died on January 27, 2013. He was 84
• Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, a Mexican architect who combined modern and Precolumbian forms, died on April 16, 2013, at age 94. His best-known buildings are the Basilica of Guadalupe, National Museum of Anthropology, and Azteca Stadium
• William Wilson, a former critic for the Los Angeles Times, died on April 20, 2013, at the age of 78. He began writing for the paper in 1965, contributing exhibition reviews through 2001
• Zao Wou-Ki, a Chinese artist whose work combined the traditional landscape painting of his country with European abstraction, died on April 9, 2013, age 92. He had lived and worked in Paris from 1948 to 2011

Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries, or your completed texts, to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the next list.

CAA has begun accepting applications from MFA and PhD students for its Professional-Development Fellowships in the Visual Arts and Art History. For the current cycle, CAA will award grants of $5,000 each to outstanding students who will receive their MFA and PhD degrees in calendar year 2014.

Fellows also receive a free one-year CAA membership and complimentary registration to the 102nd Annual Conference in Chicago, taking place February 12–15, 2014. Honorable mentions, given at the discretion of the jury, earn a free one-year CAA membership and complimentary conference registration.

CAA’s fellowship program supports promising artists and art historians who are enrolled in MFA and PhD programs nationwide. Awards are intended to help them with various aspects of their work, whether it be for job-search expenses or purchasing materials for the studio. CAA believes a grant of this kind, without contingencies, can best facilitate the transition between graduate studies and professional careers.

Please visit the Fellowship section for more information and to download the 2014 MFA and PhD application forms. The postmarked deadline for applications is Tuesday, October 1, 2013. Winners will be announced in January 2014.

Image: Kate Louise Peterson, Untitled, silver gelatin print, 20 x 16 in. (artwork © Kate Louise Peterson). An MFA student at Columbia University, Peterson received a CAA fellowship in 2013

Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Long Hidden, Vatican Painting Linked to Native Americans

For close to four hundred years, the painting was closed off to the world. For the past 124 years, millions of visitors walked by without noticing an intriguing scene covered with centuries of grime. Only now, the Vatican says a detail in a newly cleaned fifteenth-century fresco shows what may be one of the first European depictions of Native Americans. The fresco, The Resurrection, was painted by the Renaissance master Pinturicchio in 1494—just two years after Christopher Columbus first set foot in what came to be called the New World. (Read more from National Public Radio.)

Ten Tips to Earn Tenure

I had complained to my colleague that after the intellectually, emotionally, and physically grueling experience of completing graduate school while teaching full-time, I would really look forward to “just” being a professor. She replied, “I hate to tell you this, but you’ll still be working sixty- and seventy-hour weeks to earn tenure and promotion because you’ll have all kinds of other responsibilities besides teaching that you don’t have now.” Over twelve years, three moves, and two blood pressure medicines later, I see how right she was that day. Here are my ten tips for earning tenure and promotion without becoming the nutty professor. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)

As Works Flood In, Nation’s Library Treads Water

The Sea Creatures, who recently sent their recording Naked in the Rain to the Library of Congress, probably did not ponder the impact of sequestration on their music’s journey from dream to copyright. Just as military contractors, air-traffic controllers, and federal workers are coping with the grim results of a partisan impasse over the federal deficit, the Library of Congress, whose services range from copyrighting written works to the collection, preservation, and digitalization of millions of books, photographs, maps, and other materials, faces deep cuts that threaten its historic mission. (Read more in the New York Times.)

Q&A with Denise Scott Brown

Denise Scott Brown, the cofounder of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates (now VSBA), talks to Architect about a petition to put her name on the 1991 Pritzer Architecture Prize, about her career in design. and about the ways she has been treated as a woman architect in a profession that she has described as a “nineteenth-century upper-middle-class men’s club.” (Read more in Architect.)

Smithsonian Sequestration Closures Could Get Worse

The Smithsonian Institution has announced that parts of three museums—the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Museum of African Art, and the Smithsonian Castle—will close through September 30 because of mandatory budget cuts, but the true effect of sequestration on the museum group is far wider. A Smithsonian spokeswoman says that in addition to these closures, sections of other museums will go dark this year as exhibitions come to their scheduled ends. (Read more in the DCist.)

English Teachers Reject Use of Robots to Grade Student Writing

Critics of standardized tests argue that the written portion of those assessments can short-circuit the process of developing ideas in writing. Using machines to grade those tests further magnifies their negative effects, according to a statement adopted last month by the National Council of Teachers of English. As high-school students prepare for college, the statement reads, they “are ill served when their writing experience has been dictated by tests that ignore the evermore complex and varied types and uses of writing found in higher education.” (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts produces a curated list, called CWA Picks, of recommended exhibitions and events related to feminist art and scholarship in North America and around the world.

The CWA Picks for May 2013 include solo exhibitions of work by Hung Liu at the Oakland Museum of California, Kara Walker at the Art Institute of Chicago, Gillian Wearing at the Museum Brandhorst in Munich, Latoya Ruby Frazier at the Brooklyn Museum, and Wangechi Mutu at the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, North Carolina. Of special note is a two-person show at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, called Parallel Practices, that features the first major presentation in the United States of work by the French body artist Gina Pane (1939–1990) alongside her contemporary, the American Joan Jonas.

Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.

Image: Gina Pane, Azione Sentimentale, 1973, seven color photographs on wood panel, 48¼ x 40⅛ in. (artwork © Gina Pane; photograph by Francoise Masson and provided by ADAGP, Anne Marchand, and Kamel Mennour, Paris)

Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Cariou v. Prince Decision

We conclude that the district court applied the incorrect standard to determine whether Richard Prince’s artworks make fair use of Patrick Cariou’s copyrighted photographs. We further conclude that all but five of Prince’s works do make fair use of Cariou’s copyrighted photographs. With regard to the remaining five Prince artworks, we remand to the district court to consider, in the first instance, whether Prince is entitled to a fair-use defense. (Read more from the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.)

Appropriate Standards in Appropriation Art? Cariou v. Prince Decision Garners Relief but Fails to Provide Substantive Guidance

One of the most closely watched copyright cases in the legal and contemporary-art worlds was settled last week. On Thursday, April 25, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned the 2011 District Court decision, holding that the contemporary artist Richard Prince’s appropriation of thirty images from the photographer Patrick Cariou’s book Yes Rasta for his own Canal Zone series was protected under the fair-use doctrine. (Read more from the Center for Art Law.)

Second Circuit Victory for Richard Prince and Appropriation Art

The decision in Cariou v. Prince confirms the principle that a use can be fair even if it doesn’t criticize or comment on the original work. While it’s far from groundbreaking to say that commentary or criticism isn’t necessary for fair use, it is a principle that hasn’t been applied before in the visual-art context. (Read more from the Center for Internet and Society, Stanford Law School.)

Judicial Activism and the Return of Modernism in the Cariou v. Prince Decision

The Cariou v. Prince decision was handed down last Thursday. I have struggled with what to write primarily because I have been shocked into a catatonic state. How two intelligent minds could draft such an epic disaster is beyond any form of comprehension. One would hope that after eleven months of deliberation and critical analysis we would have been given something more than twenty-three pages of judicial poetry. (Read more at Clancco.)

A More Positive Take

You may remember the fantastic piece on art and copyright by the artist and lawyer Alfred Steiner that I linked to couple months ago. I asked him what he thought about the Second Circuit’s decision in Cariou v. Prince, and this is what he had to say. (Read more in the Art Law Blog.)

House Judiciary Chairman to Launch Sweeping Review of US Copyright Law

House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Virginia) said last week that his committee will launch a sweeping review of the country’s copyright law and hold a series of hearings on the matter “in the months ahead.” In remarks at the Library of Congress, Goodlatte argued that existing copyright law lags behind the rapid pace of technology, forcing policymakers to make challenging decisions based on these outdated rules. (Read more in the Hill.)

UK Museums Must Pay for Images Where Copyright Is Unknown

Museums will have to pay upfront for orphan images, or images whose copyright owners cannot be found, after an amendment to the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill to limit proposals was narrowly defeated in the House of Lords. Several members condemned the government’s plans, which require holders of orphan works to pay for copyright licensing on use, rather than when a rights holder steps forward. (Read more in the Art Newspaper.)

How Copyright Drives Innovation in Scholarly Publishing

Today’s public-policy debates frame copyright policy solely as a “trade off” between the benefits of incentivizing new works and the social deadweight losses imposed by the access restrictions imposed by these (temporary) “monopolies.” I recently wrote and published a paper, “How Copyright Drives Innovation in Scholarly Publishing,” explaining that this is a fundamental mistake that has distorted the policy debates about scholarly publishing. (Read more from the Copyright Alliance.)

In Sobel v. Eggleston, Limited Edition Is No Limit to Subsequent Editions

It took less than a year for Judge Deborah A. Batts to rule in Sobel v. Eggleston, dismissing the plaintiff Jonathan Sobel’s claims with prejudice. In summary, Sobel purchased eight of the defendant William Eggleston’s photographs between 2008 and 2011. The plaintiff’s belief that the works were part of limited editions supposedly led him to pay a premium for them. Eggleston, however, created reprints of these images different in size, medium, and production date from the set purchased by the plaintiff. Subsequently, according to Sobel, the monetary value of the original limited edition was “substantially diminished.” (Read more from the Center for Art Law.)

Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Colleges Are Slashing Adjuncts’ Hours to Skirt New Rules on Health-Insurance Eligibility

Allison G. Armentrout, an adjunct instructor at Stark State College, doesn’t get paid by the hour. She earns $4,600 to teach two English composition courses. But now she carefully tracks how many hours she works on an electronic time sheet. On a recent week, she spent three hours preparing for her lectures, close to six hours in the classroom, and sixteen more grading assignments for a grand total of about twenty-five hours. She came in under the college’s new twenty-nine-hour-a-week wire designed to keep her ineligible for health-care coverage under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Women on the Verge

A lady in a bonnet is shaking up the art world. When After Lunch, Berthe Morisot’s portrait of a doe-eyed woman, sold for $10.9 million in February, it set a record as the most expensive work by a female artist ever sold at auction. It also helped power a wave of interest among collectors and dealers looking to identify undervalued female artists. While an age-old debate rages over whether talent, sexism, or lack of promotion has held many women out of the art world’s boys club, everyone agrees that prices for female artists have always lagged behind those of their male counterparts. (Read more in the Wall Street Journal.)

Born Digital: Rhizome’s Heather Corcoran

When Heather Corcoran was appointed executive director of the art and technology nonprofit Rhizome last summer—replacing the long-time director Lauren Cornell, who had resigned in the spring to curate the New Museum’s triennial with Ryan Trecartin—she was an unknown quantity in New York. Nevertheless, her entire career has focused on the overlapping fields of contemporary art and technology (mostly in the United Kingdom), making the twenty-nine-year-old Canadian a good fit for Rhizome. (Read more in Art in America.)

Meet the First Digital Generation. Now Get Ready to Play by Their Rules

Anna Daniszewski, a sophomore at Bard College, takes a dozen or more cell-phone pictures daily, usually around dusk or after dark—moody shots of found objects, bare branches against a gray sky, or lighted windows in the distance, evoking the way sensitive, artistic young men and women have always felt about life. You can totally imagine Goethe doing the same thing, preserving each precious instant of angst for the posterity that would someday recognize his genius. Except Daniszewski doesn’t preserve them all—she is embracing the ephemeral. (Read more in Wired.)

Open Access: Four Ways It Could Enhance Academic Freedom

Are politicians stealing our academic freedom? Is their fetish with open-access publishing leading to a “pay to say” system for the rich? And will the trendy goal of making publicly financed research freely available skew the world of scholarship even further toward the natural sciences? I don’t think so. But it took me a while to get there. (Read more in the Guardian.)

Credit without Teaching

Earlier this year Capella University and the new College for America began enrolling hundreds of students in academic programs without courses, teaching professors, grades, deadlines, or credit-hour requirements, but with a path to genuine college credit. The two institutions are among a growing number that are giving competency-based education a try. Students can earn credit by successfully completing assessments that prove their mastery in predetermined competencies or tasks—maybe writing in a business setting or using a spreadsheet to perform calculations. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)

Spirituality and Sprite, Aisle 1? What an Artist Sees in Walmart

Most people would be hard-pressed to call Walmart a source of artistic inspiration. Yet that’s exactly what the artist Brendan O’Connell sees in the sprawling big-box stores. For the past decade, O’Connell has been snapping photographs inside dozens of Walmarts. The images have served as inspiration for an ongoing series of paintings of everyday life—much of which involves shopping, which he calls “that great contemporary pastime.” (Read more from National Public Radio.)

Top 10 Online Colleges Names the “Top 30 Most Beautiful College Art Galleries”

A website dedicated to college rankings, Top 10 Online Colleges, recently named the “30 Most Beautiful College Art Galleries” in the world. The international list is based on qualities such as reputation, location, architecture, history, and artistic culture, making a handy web resource for students to learn more about the role of fine arts in college life. (Read more at BWW Art World.)

CAA has been awarded a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to support the next ARTspace, taking place during the 2014 Annual Conference in Chicago. Initiated twelve years ago by CAA’s Services to Artists Committee, ARTspace is a forum for presenting programming designed by artists for artists that is free and open to the public. Held at each conference since 2001, ARTspace is intended to reflect the current state of the visual arts and arts education and is among the most vital and exciting aspects of the yearly meeting.

The grant, which is the NEA’s fifth consecutive award to CAA for ARTspace, will help fund ARTexchange, the popular open-portfolio event for artists, and [Meta] Mentors, which has recently addressed such topics as making a living as an artist with and without a dealer. ARTspace programming at the 2013 conference in New York also included several panels on the intersections of art and ethics, law, and social change.

Designed to engage CAA’s artist members as well as the general public, ARTspace offers program sessions free of charge and includes diverse activities such the Annual Artists’ Interviews (most recently with Mira Schor and Janine Antoni); screenings of film, video, and multimedia works; live performances; and papers and presentations that facilitate a conversational yet professional exchange of ideas and practices.

Image: the painter and writer Mira Schor (left) participated in CAA’s Annual Artists’ Interviews, hosted by ARTspace during the 2013 Annual Conference in New York. Schor was interviewed by Stuart Horodner, artistic director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (photograph by Bradley Marks)

Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts produces a curated list, called CWA Picks, of recommended exhibitions and events related to feminist art and scholarship in North America and around the world.

The CWA Picks for April 2013 are composed of seven significant exhibitions now on view in Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, is hosting the traveling retrospective Hilma af Klint: A Pioneer of Abstraction, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid is presenting a survey of work by Cristina Iglesias, who lives and works in the Spanish capital. Visitors to the British Isles can see daring painting and sculpture in Dorothy Iannone: Innocent and Aware at the Camden Arts Centre in London and extraordinary photographs by Edith Tudor-Hart at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. Across the pond, institutions in New York are displaying hybrid drawings by the Italian Pop artist Giosetta Fiorni, video installations and photographs by the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, and strikingly innovative prints by the American Impressionist Mary Cassatt.

Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.

Image: installation view of Cristina Iglesias: Metonymy at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid