CAA News

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.

One CWA Pick for March 2011 is a conversation between the artists Yoko Ono and Kara Walker at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, taking place on Tuesday evening, March 8. Another selection is an exhibition at the University of California, Riverside, called Margarita Cabrera: Pulso y Martillo (Pulse and Hammer). On Saturday, March 5, the artist will present Florezca Board of Directors: Performance with Riverside students and faculty. The March picks also include two exhibitions in New York: Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World) at the Jewish Museum and Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

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: Margarita Cabrera, Black Toaster, 2003, vinyl, thread, and appliance parts, 10 x 7 x 10 in. (artwork © Margarita Cabrera; photograph provided by the artist, Walter Maciel Gallery, and the Sweeney Art Gallery)

CAA will present its next National Professional-Development Workshop for Artists at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), in partnership with the Baltimore Museum of Art, on Saturday, March 26, 2011. The one-day event, called “Galleries, Grants, and Networking: Effective Strategies for Artists to Make It Happen,” will address important career issues for visual artists and provide them with valuable skills, resources, best practices, and networking suggestions to help meet their professional goals.

“Galleries, Grants, and Networking” will take place 9:00 AM–5:00 PM on the MICA campus: Brown Center, Falvey Hall, 1301 West Mt. Royal Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217. Registration is free for MICA students, alumni, faculty and staff; $15 for all other participants. A limited number of stipends are available; please contact Susan Schear, CAA national workshop project consultant, at 973-482-1000 for more information.

The day will begin at 8:00 AM with registration, check-in, and an opportunity for group networking; complimentary coffee will be served. At 9:00 AM, Doreen Bolger, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, will give a keynote presentation. Next, René Treviño will lead a panel discussion on “Leveraging Opportunities for Your Artwork” with Julie Cavnor, George Hemphill, and Jack Rasmussen. The three afternoon presentations are “Compelling Grant Writing” with Deborah Bedwell; “Maximizing Social Media and Networking” with Cara Ober; and “Realizing Your Goals” with Susan Schear.

A postworkshop reception, taking place 5:00–6:00 PM, will conclude the day’s program. Workshop participants can either bring their lunch or take advantage of a $10 all-you-can-eat buffet at MICA.

Participants from MICA and those requesting stipends must register in advance; please contact Susan Schear at 973-482-1000 and include your name, mailing address, and telephone number. All others can register and pay by credit card or PayPal. If paying with cash or by check at the door, you must still register in advance; call or email Susan Schear.

Sponsors

Established in 1826, Maryland Institute College of Art is the oldest continuously operating degree-granting school of art and design in the United States. It enrolls more than 2,000 undergraduate, graduate, and continuing-studies students and offers degrees and noncredit programs in fine art, design, electronic media, art education, the liberal arts, and professional studies. MICA has pioneered interdisciplinary approaches to art and design education, emphasizing innovation, research, and community and social engagement. The school’s alumni and programming reach around the globe, even as the school remains a cultural cornerstone in the Baltimore and Washington, DC, regions, hosting hundreds of exhibitions and events annually by students, faculty, and emerging and established artists.

The Baltimore Museum of Art is home to an internationally renowned collection of nineteenth-century, modern, and contemporary art—including the largest holding of works by Henri Matisse in the world. Among the museum’s 90,000 works are an outstanding selection of European and American fine and decorative arts; prints and drawings from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries; contemporary art by established and emerging artists; objects from Africa, Asia, the ancient Americas, and Pacific Islands; and two beautifully landscaped sculpture gardens. The museum organizes and presents a variety of dynamic exhibitions and innovative programs and hosts special events with cultural and educational partners. Thanks to extraordinary government and private support, general museum admission is free.

Founded in 1911, the College Art Association serves the needs and interests of 12,000 individual and 2,000 institutional members. It publishes two scholarly journals in art history, an online reviews journal for books and exhibitions, a weekly email newsletter, and a website with news about the organization, its members, and the larger art and academic worlds. CAA also hosts an Annual Conference for 4,000 to 6,000 artists, art historians, and students, provides career counseling, and advocates for national issues in the visual arts.

The College Art Association recently held its 99th Annual Conference and Centennial Kickoff at the Hilton New York in midtown Manhattan. Taking place February 9–12, 2011, the conference began the organization’s yearlong celebration of its one hundredth anniversary. The program comprised four days of presentations and discussions on art, art history, and visual culture; career-development workshops, mentoring programs, and job interviews with colleges and universities; a Book and Trade Fair featuring publishers of art books and journals, manufacturers of artists’ materials, and providers of various services for artists and academics; and a host of special events throughout the New York area.

Attendance

The New York conference was not only the largest CAA has produced, it was also the best attended. More than seven thousand art professionals from across the United States and around the world—including artists, art historians, students, educators, curators, critics, collectors, and museum staff—came the event.

Sessions

The conference offered more than two hundred sessions, panels, and talks—all developed by CAA’s members, affiliated societies, and committees. These sessions, which featured presentations from participants and institutions across the country and internationally, addressed a wide range of topics. With papers and presentations as manifold as “The Aesthetics of Sonic Spaces,” “Gender and Sexuality in the Art Museum,” and “Civic Performance and the Genesis of the Roman Social Cityscape,” the 2011 conference was highly diverse.

CAA also organized seven special Centennial Sessions in which invited panelists from different corners of the visual arts—among them Mark Tribe, Griselda Pollock, and James Elkins—came together to debate core concepts, such as diversity, experience, feminism, globalization, medium, technology, and tradition.

Career Services

Career Services included three days of mentoring and portfolio-review sessions, workshops and roundtables on professional-development issues, and job interviews. Approximately one hundred schools, academic departments, and institutions conducted interviews at the conference. Workshops addressed such topics as planning for retirement, advice for new instructors, securing a job in the arts, and self-marketing for artists.

Book and Trade Fair

The Book and Trade Fair presented 149 exhibitors, including participants from the United States, Turkey, Spain, England, Scotland, France, Germany, Italy, and Belgium, displaying new publications, artists’ materials, digital resources, and innovative products of interest to artists and scholars. The Book and Trade Fair also featured book signings, lectures, and demonstrations, as well as three exhibitor sessions on artists’ materials and publishing.

ARTspace and ARTexchange

ARTspace, a “conference within the conference” tailored to the needs and interests of practicing artists, presented the Annual Artists’ Interviews with Krzysztof Wodiczko and Mel Chin, as well as wealth of presentations and programming by and for artists. ARTexchange, an open-portfolio event in which artist members displayed their small paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and work on laptops, hosted over fifty artists this year.

Convocation and Centennial Awards

More than six hundred people attended Convocation and the Centennial Awards Presentation, held at the Hilton New York on Wednesday, February 9. Jim Leach, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, spoke about the importance of the humanities, and eco-art pioneers Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison delivered a lively keynote address.

On the occasion of CAA’s centennial year, the Board of Directors presented four awards to living individuals who have contributed significantly to the advancement of the visual arts in the United States. The recipients of CAA’s four Centennial Awards are:

• Stuart E. Eizenstat, attorney and former US ambassador, Centennial Award for Protecting Art as a Cultural Product, presented by Paul Jaskot of DePaul University
• Agnes Gund, arts advocate and philanthropist, Centennial Award for Service to the Field, presented by Ann Temkin of the Museum of Modern Art
• Philippe de Montebello, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Centennial Award for Leadership, presented by Linda Downs, CAA executive director
• Dorothy and Herbert Vogel, collectors of contemporary art, Centennial Award for Patronage, presented by Anne Goodyear of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Awards for Distinction

Each year CAA recognizes the accomplishments of individual artists, art historians, authors, conservators, curators, and critics whose efforts transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large. More than four hundred people attended the presentation of the 2011 Awards for Distinction in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Thursday, February 10.

The recipients of CAA’s 2011 Awards for Distinction are:

• Lynda Benglis, Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
• John Baldessari, Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work
• Mieke Bal, Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
• Luis Camnitzer, Frank Jewett Mather Award
• Faith Ringgold, Distinguished Feminist Award
• William Itter, Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
• Patricia Hills, Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
• Molly Emma Aitken, Charles Rufus Morey Book Award for The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting
• Darielle Mason, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for Kantha: The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal
• Yasufumi Nakamori, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions for Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture
• Ross Barrett, Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize for “Rioting Refigured: George Henry Hall and the Picturing of American Political Violence”
• Kirsten Swenson, Janet Kraynak, Paul Monty Paret, and Emily Eliza Scott, Art Journal Award for “Land Use in Contemporary Art”
• Joyce Hill Stoner, CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation

Centennial Book

CAA introduced The Eye, the Hand, the Mind: 100 Years of the College Art Association, a new book that surveys the impressive history of the organization from 1911 to the present. Susan Ball, executive director emerita, edited the 330-page hardcover book, which was published jointly by CAA and Rutgers University Press.

Special Events

The Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted CAA’s Centennial Reception in the Great Hall and the Temple of Dendur. Hunter College offered its expansive galleries for the CAA Regional MFA Exhibition, which surveyed work by artists from twenty institutions within one hundred miles of New York. The New York Center for Art and Media Studies (NYCAMS) hosted the CAA Regional BFA Exhibition, which featured seventeen undergraduate student artists from seven area BFA programs. Sold-out tours explored the riches of New York’s cultural attractions, from a Chelsea Gallery District excursion to a preview tour of the Museum for African Art.

Save the Date

CAA will conclude its Centennial Celebration at the 100th Annual Conference, to be held February 22–25, 2012, in Los Angeles, California.

About CAA

The College Art Association is dedicated to providing professional services and resources for artists, art historians, and students in the visual arts. CAA serves as an advocate and a resource for individuals and institutions nationally and internationally, offering forums to discuss the developments in art and art history through its Annual Conference, publications, exhibitions, website, and other avenues. CAA focuses on a wide range of issues, including education in the arts, freedom of expression, intellectual-property rights, cultural heritage and preservation, and workforce topics in universities and museums. Representing its members’ professional needs since 1911, CAA is committed to the highest professional and ethical standards of scholarship, creativity, criticism, and teaching.

The 2011 Annual Conference in New York boasted an incredibly diverse array of sessions. Audio recordings for sixty-three of the panels—including “Performative Tendencies,” “Color and Nineteenth-Century American Painting,” and “The Erasure of Contemporary Memory”—are now available for sale.

A set of MP3 audio recordings from the New York conference is available for only $149.95, either as a download or on CD-ROMs. Individual sessions, available only as downloads, are $24.95 each. Please visit Conference Media to view the list of sessions and to order.

The full range of art history is represented in sessions such as “The Afterlife of Cubism,” “The Global Eighteenth Century,” and “(Re)Contextualizing Precolumbian Art in the Twenty-First Century.” CAA also recorded many other popular 2011 sessions, such as “Parallel Practices: When the Mind Isn’t Focused on Art,” which featured the artists Robert Gober, Vija Celmins, Petah Coyne, Janine Antoni, and Philip Taafe, as well as the two-part “Dark Matter of the Art World.” Other topics about contemporary art include “Contemporary Drawing: Purpose, Practice, Performance,” “Textiles and Social Sculpture,” and “The Art of Pranks.” Curators will be especially interested in “Recurating: New Practices in Exhibition Making” and “Artist as Curator.”

Whether you took part in, attended, or missed a particular conference session, these recordings are a must-have for your library, research, or teaching. Listen to them while walking across campus, while driving in your car or using public transportation, or while relaxing in your home.

In addition to the New York sessions, you can also purchase recordings from the past five conferences: Boston (2006), New York (2007), Dallas–Fort Worth (2008), Los Angeles (2009), and Chicago (2010). See CAA’s Conference Audio section for details.