CAA News Today
Books Published by CAA Members
posted by CAA — August 15, 2012
Publishing a book is a major milestone for artists and scholars—browse a list of recent titles below.
Books Published by CAA Members appears every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
August 2012
Irina Aristarkhova. Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
Helene Aylon. Whatever Is Contained Must Be Released: My Jewish Orthodox Girlhood, My Life as a Feminist Artist (New York: Feminist Press, 2012).
Paul Catanese and Angela Geary. Post-Digital Printmaking: CNC, Traditional, and Hybrid Processes (London: A&C Black, 2012).
Sharon Lee Hart. Sanctuary: Portraits of Rescued Farm Animals (Milan, Italy: Charta, 2012).
Elaine O’Brien, Everlyn Nicodemus, Melissa Chiu, Benjamin Genocchio, Roberto Tejada, and Mary C. Coffey, eds. Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: An Introduction to Global Modernisms (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
Conrad Ross. Perceptual Drawing: A Handbook for the Practitioner (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011).
Carolyn E. Tate. Reconsidering Olmec Visual Culture: The Unborn, Women, and Creation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012).
Eugene F. Farrell: In Memoriam
posted by CAA — August 14, 2012
Francesca G. Bewer is research curator at the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, Harvard Art Museums.
Eugene Farrell, ca. late 1970s, in the analytical laboratory at the Center for Conservation and Technical Studies (photograph provided by the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, Harvard Art Museums)
It is with sadness that I inform you of the death of Eugene F. Farrell, former senior conservation scientist at the Harvard Art Museums’ Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. Gene passed away in his sleep on March 19, 2012, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was 78 years old. Farrell will be remembered by generations of conservators as a generous colleague and a dedicated teacher. He was knowledgeable, calm, and open minded—qualities for which he was greatly appreciated, especially during discussions and at meetings.
Born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1933, Farrell came to the conservation field with a background in geology. He received a BA cum laude and an MA in geology from Boston University, which he supplemented with courses in X-radiography, physics, mathematics, geochemistry, and petrology. In 1956, the same year he married Lynne Breda, he became a member of the Scientific Research Society, Sigma Xi, which “honors excellence in scientific investigation and encourages a sense of companionship and cooperation among researchers in all fields of science and engineering.” Farrell was a teaching fellow the following year at Boston University and spent the summer of 1958 studying ice cores in Thule, Greenland, as a crystallographer for Permafrost Ice Studies at the Snow, Ice, and Permafrost Research Establishment (then based in Wilmette, Illinois, and now in Hanover, New Hampshire). That led to a job as a research staff member in the Crystal Physics Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1960–77), during which time he published numerous papers in the American Mineralogist, Materials Research Bulletin, and American Ceramics Society Bulletin,among others. He also collaborated on a patent for a “Cathode Ray Tube Whose Image Screen Is Both Cathodochromic and Fluorescent and the Material for the Screen.”
Farrell began his museum career in 1977 after he answered a small “help wanted” ad in the Boston Globe for analytical work at Harvard University’s Fogg Museum in the Center for Conservation and Technical Studies (CCTS). Like Rutherford John Gettens, the museum’s illustrious first staff chemist from 1928 to 1950, Farrell had no prior museum experience but quickly learned to apply his skills and knowledge to the materials of art. He started as assistant conservation scientist under the museum’s science associate, Leon Studolski, and helped to integrate petrography, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), and X-ray diffraction (XRD) in the laboratory work. He was soon promoted to conservation scientist. Shortly thereafter, in 1980, he became the senior conservation scientist of the CCTS, which is now called the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. It was a position he held until his retirement in 2004.
Farrell greatly enjoyed the collaboration among scientists, curators, conservators, and students. His quiet demeanor belied his great productivity; the quality and quantity of analyses he carried out is attested by the cabinets filled with report files and by his numerous publications. Among the broad range of topics and materials he investigated were: the painting materials of Vincent van Gogh and Winslow Homer; the composition of pigments from ancient Persia and from sixteenth- to eighteenth-century house paint; and pasteprints. His research on illuminated Renaissance manuscripts found in the Historical Library of the University of Valencia in Spain, while he was a visiting professor at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in 1990 culminated in the bilingual book he coauthored with Salvador Muñoz Viñas, published in 1999. The materials of stone in Indian and Gothic art and in Chinese scholar’s rocks fascinated Farrell, as did the substance of Chinese ceramics and Baroque terracotta sculpture. He contributed to an eighteen-month project on the analysis of Gothic stone sculpture from New England collections, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He also trained his analytical skills on the origins of turbidity in acrylic paints and on the metal composition of Renaissance bronze medals.
Farrell was a lecturer in history of art and architecture at Harvard University from 1984 onward, teaching courses on the “Technical Examination of Works of Art” and “The Materials of Art” and in the Harvard freshmen seminar program. His many students will remember him for his patience and courteousness: regardless of their level of scientific knowledge, they knew that they could depend on him for any help they needed. He also genuinely took pleasure in helping the Straus Center’s graduate conservation interns and fellows with their research projects and worked with them enthusiastically. Some of the projects that he oversaw were of great interest to the museum community at large. For instance, in 1984–85, under the guidance of Farrell and the center’s director Arthur Beale, Pamela Hatchfield and Jane Carpenter undertook the first major investigation of the potential effects of formaldehyde and formic acid on museum collections.
Farrell, along with Beale and a fellow conservation scientist, Richard Newman, publicized the effects of acid rain on outdoor cultural properties. He was also involved in the important two-day seminar on “The Role of Conservation and Technical Examination in the Art Museum” that was hosted in 1985 by the CCTS in conjunction with the New England Museum Association; more than a hundred participants attended the seminar. Also, in collaboration with colleagues at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, Farrell developed ways of applying atomic absorption spectroscopy instrumentation to the analysis of cultural artifacts.
At the beginning of the 1990s he oversaw the major upgrading of the Straus Center’s analytical facilities and, together with his colleagues, began creating libraries of FTIR and X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectra using the Forbes Pigment Collection and the Gettens Collection of Binding Media and Varnishes. He also oversaw a new internship in conservation science and, more recently, the first Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellowship in conservation science at the center—a program initiated in 2002.
After a brief break from museum work following his retirement, Farrell worked on a part-time basis on a range of analytical projects at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, collaborating anew with his former colleague Newman, who is now head of the MFA’s Scientific Research Department.
Farrell always had a dual interest in science and art. Throughout much of his adult life he took courses in art history, languages, and history. He played the guitar and studied instrument making at the Museum of Fine Art’s antique instruments collection, building several guitars and a lute. Farrell also obtained a certificate in the art of hand-wrought ironwork, of which he was very proud. His interests ranged beyond science and art—particularly to all matters Gaelic. The Farrell ancestors had come from the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland before they settled in what is now West Virginia. He took numerous trips back to the old homeland starting in 1968, both with his family and with study groups, and he also studied Gaelic assiduously at the Harvard Extension School. It is in Ireland that he and his family made the acquaintance of—and fell in love with—Irish wolfhounds. They adopted their first one from a shelter in 1982. Farrell was an indefatigable student to the end: in addition to other courses, he was giving himself a self-tutorial on quantum physics in the period before he died.
Gene Farrell is survived by his wife Lynne Breda Farrell, his son Eugene Thoralf, and his dog Owen (Gaelic for Eugene)—the latest in a long line of rescued Irish hounds. Gene will be greatly missed and remembered by all who had the very good fortune to spend time with him.
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — August 14, 2012
In its monthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, curators, designers, photographers, filmmakers, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. This month was marked by the loss of the larger-than-life art critic Robert Hughes, the French filmmaker Chris Marker, the beloved collector Herbert Vogel, the New York painter and professor Denyse Thomasos, and the Austrian sculptor Franz West.
- Jane Barbour, a British researcher of African artifacts and textiles, died on June 14, 2012, at the age of 89. Barbour and her husband, a geographer, lived in different parts of Africa from the 1950s to the 1980s. She edited the volumes Adire Cloth in Nigeria (1971) and Kenyan Pots and Potters (1989)
- Karl Benjamin, a prominent member of the West Coast art scene in the 1950s and 1960s, died on July 26, 2012. He was 86 years old. Benjamin painted in an ordered geometric pattern, dubbed Abstract Classicism by his painting cohort as a response to New York’s Abstract Expressionism. His methodology was informed by many decades as an elementary school art teacher in southern California
- Bram Bogart, a Dutch-born artist who lived in France and Belgium and was known for his heavily layered pigment-and-cement paintings, died on May 2, 2012. He was 90 years old. Associated with the CoBrA art movement in Europe, Bogart exhibited with Jean Dubuffet, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Pierre Soulages, and Karel Appel
- Horacio Coppola, an Argentine photographer active in the avant-garde art scene of Buenos Aires, died on June 18, 2012, at the age of 105. Coppola worked in two modes of black-and-white photography: Surrealist-tinged nocturnal shots of city streets, and stark abstract portraits of objects reminiscent of Bauhaus experiments with the medium
- Stephen Dwoskin, an experimental filmmaker and teacher originally from New York and based in London for over forty years, passed away on June 28, 2012, at age 73. In 1966 he cofounded the London Film-Makers’ Co-op with his fellow filmmaker Jeff Keen (who died in June) and the poet Bob Cobbing. Dwoskin’s films include Chinese Checkers (1964) and Trixi (1969); retrospectives of his work have been held at the British Film Institute in 2009 and at the Arsenal in Berlin in 2010
- Eugene F. Farrell, formerly senior conservation scientist at the Harvard Art Museums’ Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, passed away on March 19, 2012. He was 78 years old. Farrell’s colleague Francesca G. Bewer has written a special obituary for CAA
- Mary Fedden, a British painter of modernist-inflected still lifes, passed away on June 22, 2012, at the age of 96. Her subject matter was domestic life, but her work also made reference to the choices of Cubist painters and Henri Matisse: flattened tabletops, vases, bottles, and flowers. Fedden was the first woman to teach at the Royal College of Art in London, a position she held from 1956 to 1964
- Chris Honey, a British architect and humanitarian, died on June 20, 2012, at the age of 52. Honey’s most significant assignment was the design of the Sanctuary Lakes Resort in Melbourne, Australia. He and his wife Rebecca were supporters of the Oxford-based charity Lifelines that works to abolish the death penalty in the United States
- Marilyn Houlberg, an artist and a scholar of the arts of Haiti and Western Africa, died on June 30, 2012. She was 72 years old. Houlberg was a professor emeritus of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She cocurated the traveling exhibition Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (1995) and contributed essays to the publications Fragments of Bone: Neo-African Religions in a New World (2005) and Vodou: Visions and Voices of Haiti (1998)
- Robert Hughes, the Australian-born art critic, died on August 6, 2012, at the age of 74. Hughes began writing for Time in 1970, and in 1980 his book and BBC television series The Shock of the New brought his theory of modern art and culture to a wider audience. Hughes was known for his elegant yet fiery critical voice that rattled the genteel art worlds of New York and London
- Georgina Hunt, a British artist known for her luminous, gradient-color paintings, passed away on April 16, 2012. She was 89. Hunt was transformed by her time spent in New York in the early 1970s, where she furthered developed her minimalist approach to painting. Another early influence on her technique was Carl Jung’s theory of the integrated personality
- Sunil Janah, a photojournalist who captured India as it fought against colonial rule to become an independent state in 1947, died on June 21, 2012. He was 96 years old. Working with a rudimentary camera—a Kodak Box Brownie—he photographed Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, as well as moments of ordinary life and mass demonstrations
- Wael Issa Kaston, a Syrian sculptor who worked in wood and mud, has reportedly been killed in Homs under torture by the Syrian government. He was 46 years old, and the news of his death was first announced on July 24, 2012. Kaston’s figurative work dealt with the “freedom of women,” and he described his choice of materials as connected to the elemental life force of the human body
- Bill Komodore, a painter and professor of art at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, died on August 3, 2012, at the age of 80. Born in Athens, Greece, Komodore made expressive, lyrical work that engaged the subjects of myth, war, and love. His 2010 exhibition Arcadia: The Recent Paintings was held at the Decorazon Gallery in Dallas
- Chris Marker, the renowned French filmmaker who invented the essay-film and took the medium to new heights of poetry and political force, passed away on July 30, 2012. He was 91. Marker’s best-known films, La Jetée (1962) and Sans Soleil (1982), deal with memory, time travel, and human longing. He also worked in photography, video installations, and new media: his last exhibition was a portrait series of anonymous Paris métro riders, called Passengers (2011) at Peter Blum in New York
- Helen Messenger, one half of a flamboyantly bohemian artist couple (her husband was the artist Tony Messenger), died on April 11, 2012, at the age of 77. The Messengers met as students at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London and established an informal salon for new ideas in fashion, art, and lifestyle, in their Notting Hill home in London. Helen was later involved in costume design in the 1960s and 1970s, working for Ossie Clark, Laura Ashley, and, most famously, David Bowie
- Dewey Mosby, a specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French art and director emeritus of the Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, died on August 1, 2012, at the age of 70. Mosby was the first African American to receive a PhD in art history from Harvard University and also the first African American curator of European art at a major art museum (Detroit Institute of Arts)
- Alvin Nickel, a fabric artist and professor emeritus of art and art history at the University of Texas at Austin, died on August 27, 2011. He was 85 years old. Prior to joining the university in 1960, he worked as a craft director for the United States government in Germany. Nickel created large-scale painterly wall hangings using the dyeing process of batik
- Walter Pichler, a visionary Austrian architect and artist, passed away on July 16, 2012, at the age of 75. Pichler called his architectural plans “dream drawings” and was invested in the narrative possibilities of architecture and design. In later years he moved even further in the direction of fine art with a series of drawings and installations based on his farm in rural Austria
- Jacinto Quirarte, professor emeritus and former dean of the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Texas at San Antonio, died on July 20, 2012. He was 81 years old. Quirarte specialized in Precolumbian art, Latin American art, and Latino art history. From 1982 to 1987 he chaired the National Task Force on Hispanic Art of the National Endowment for the Arts. His books include The Art and Architecture of the Texas Missions (2002), Izapan-Style Art: A Study of Its Form and Meaning, and Mexican American Artists (both 1973)
- Mary Louise Milligan Rasmuson, a patron of the arts in Alaska, died on July 30, 2012, at the age of 101. She was married to Elmer Rasmuson, chairman of the National Bank of Alaska, and through the Rasmuson Foundation the couple helped to found Alaska’s Anchorage Museum of History and Art in 1968. During World War II and after, she was an ardent campaigner for women’s rights in the military and was named fifth commandment of the Women’s Army Corp in 1957 by President Dwight Eisenhower
- Denise René, a Parisian gallery director and an art collector whose stable of abstract artists included Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, and Piet Mondrian, passed away on July 9, 2012. She was 99. A 1938 meeting with the artist Victor Vasarely in the Café de Flore in Paris ignited her career in dealing art. In 2001 the Pompidou Center in Paris held an exhibition in homage to her cultural impact as a gallerist
- Wayne Roberts, a Bronx-based graffiti artist known by the street moniker Stay High 149, died on June 11, 2012, at the age of 61. Roberts’s heyday was in the 1970s; his work was featured in Norman Mailer’s book The Faith of Graffiti (1973), and he was respected by graffiti aficionados for his easily identifiably tag of a joint-smoking haloed stick figure
- Martin E. Segal, a patron of the arts and a long-time supporter of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York, passed away on August 5, 2012. He was 96 years old. Segal was instrumental in setting up the Film Society of Lincoln Center, where he served as chief executive from 1968 to 1978. In his last years he remained a spritely figure in the philanthropic world, always wearing a rose in his lapel at social functions around the city
- Roy Shaw, formerly secretary-general of the Arts Council of Great Britain, died on May 15, 2012, at the age of 93. During his tenure, Shaw sought to make the arts more accessible to the public without consenting to vulgarization and commercialism. He was knighted in 1979 and authored the volume The Arts and the People (1987)
- Jack Simcock, a British painter, died on May 13, 2012, at the age of 82. Simcock’s signature paintings were rich, dark-toned images of the village of Mow Cop in North West England, where he lived and worked from 1958 until his death. He exhibited his work at the Piccadilly Gallery in London and also published an autobiography and a collection of poems
- Jonathan Speirs, an architect who specialized in creatively lighting monumental buildings around the world, passed away on June 18, 2012, at the age of 54. In 1993 Speirs founded the architectural lighting firm Speirs + Major, with Mark Major, and the projects the team worked on include Terminal 5 at the Madrid Barajas International Airport, the Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi, and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s tallest building
- Denyse Thomasos, a painter who created large-scale expressionistic work that referenced urban space, maps, and travel, died on July 19, 2012, at the age of 47. Thomasos was a beloved professor to many art students at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where she taught from 1995 to the present day. Her work is represented by Lennon Weinberg in New York and Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto
- Herbert Vogel, one half of a legendary contemporary art collecting couple, died on July 22, 2012, at the age of 89. Vogel worked as a postal clerk in New York for decades and, with his wife Dorothy, came to collecting from a genuine love of art. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC—the institution that first ignited the couple’s fascination with modern art during a 1962 honeymoon visit—was bequeathed a significant portion of their collection. CAA plans to publish a tribute to Herbert Vogel
- Franz West, the Austrian sculptor of ebullient abstract forms, passed away on July 25, 2012, at the age of 65. West was invested in the functionality of an artwork, bridging the darker currents of the European avant-garde with the lightness and accessibility of Pop art. Recent installations include an outdoor sculpture in New York’s Central Park, called The Ego and the Id (2009)
- George Wyllie, a Scottish sculptor who called himself a “scul?tor” to emphasize the social aspect of his practice, died on May 15, 2012, at the age of 90. Wyllie specialized in outdoor artwork that commented on the decline of industry in his native Glasgow. His best-known pieces are two temporary works, Straw Locomotive, a full-scale reproduction of a train made from straw and chicken wire, and Paper Boat, a vessel that caused a stir when it docked at the harbor of New York’s World Financial Center in 1990
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 September list.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for August 2012
posted by CAA — August 10, 2012
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. 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.
August 2012
Rineke Dijkstra, Self Portrait, Marnixbad, Amsterdam, Netherlands, June 19, 1991, 1991, chromogenic print, 35 x 28 cm (artwork © Rineke Dijkstra; photograph provided by the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum)
Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128
June 29–October 8, 2012
It has been a great year for female photographers exhibiting in New York museums: Cindy Sherman at the Museum of Modern Art, Francesca Woodman at the Guggenheim, and now the Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra, who has a midcareer survey at the Guggenheim. Active since the early 1990s, Dijkstra works in video and large-format color photography, addressing a diverse range of subjects, from adolescents in Poland, Ukraine, and the United States to new recruits to the Israeli army, juxtaposed in their civilian dress and soldier gear.
Feminist Genealogies in Spanish Art: 1960–2010
MUSAC: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León
Avenida de los Reyes Leoneses 24, León, Spain 24008
June 23, 2012–January 6, 2013
Curated by Juan Vicente Aliaga and Patricia Mayayo, this exhibition investigates the underrecognized role that feminist activism and theory has played in Spanish art since the 1960s. Showcasing the work of seventy-seven artists (individuals and artist collectives) and representing several generations, Feminist Genealogies in Spanish Art: 1960–2010 strives to restore what the museum justifiably refers to as “the erased memory of feminist knowledge, practices, and genealogies” from Spanish art history—from the waning years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship to the current rise of the Indignados (“Indignant”) protest movement.
Ulrike Müller: Raw/Cooked
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238
June 29–September 9, 2012
In the fifth installment of the Brooklyn Museum’s Raw/Cooked series, Ulrike Müller asked queer and feminist artists to create drawings based on slogans from historical feminist t-shirts found in the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The resulting one hundred drawings are both a valentine to the work of queer and feminist activists of the past and a testament to the ongoing struggle faced by the contributing artists. In addition, Müller also culled the museum’s permanent collection to find objects that spoke to her project, displaying these alongside the drawings.
Joana Vasconcelos Versailles
Palace, Museum, and National Estate of Versailles
Versailles, France 78646
June 16–September 30, 2012
The Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos’s installation of large-scale sculptures in the Palace of Versailles addresses history and politics with a child’s sense of wonder and a master craftsman’s feel for material and form. Starting from the idea that the “world is an opera and Versailles embodies the operatic and aesthetic ideal,” Vasconcelos has installed her work, made from everyday objects and materials, in primary locations throughout the palace and its gardens. Mary Poppins (2010), a colorful creature composed of handmade and industrial fabric, hovers expectantly above a grand staircase. A pair of giant-sized high-heel shoes, made entirely from stainless-steel pots and pans, occupies the Hall of Mirrors, adding an Alice in Wonderland element to the ornate surrounding.
Sharon Hayes, Beyond, 2012, research/ production still (photograph © Sharon Hayes and photograph provided by the artist and provided by the artist, Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin, and the Whitney Museum of American Art)
Sharon Hayes: There’s So Much I Want to Say to You
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10021
June 21–September 9, 2012
Sharon Hayes uses photography, film, video, sound, and performance to investigate the critical relationships among politics, history, speech, and desire. In her largest museum installation to date, Hayes worked with a collaborator, Andrea Geyer, to build an environment on the Whitney Museum’s third floor for staging a collection of the artist’s “speech acts,” which date from 2000 to today. The radical conceit of the installation calls to mind moments in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, such as Dawn Kasper’s studio residency, while also evoking the contemporary protest culture that the biennial displaced outside the museum.
Burnt Breakfast and Other Works by Su Richardson
Constance Howard Gallery and Women’s Art Library
Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW, United Kingdom
July 6–September 9, 2012
Curated by Alexandra Kokoli for the Constance Howard Gallery and Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths, Burnt Breakfast and Other Works by Su Richardson is the latest in a string of exhibits and symposia around London that have been dubbed the “Feminist Art Spring.” Richardson’s crocheted plate of a typical English breakfast of sausage, egg, bacon, and tomato was created in 1975 as a transatlantic exchange with other women artists. It has since become an iconic work and been reclaimed as a precursor of the contemporary use of crafts in fine art by artists working in the United Kingdom.
Niki de Saint Phalle on Park Avenue
Park Avenue between 52nd and 60th Street, New York, NY
July 12–November 15, 2012
Ten years after Niki de Saint Phalle’s death and forty-four years since her art was exhibited in Central Park’s Conservatory Garden, residents of and visitors to New York can once again commune with her sculptures of mosaic-bejeweled figures, installed in the traffic islands that line Park Avenue from 52nd to 60th Street. The parade of nine sculptures includes signature de Saint Phalle pieces, such as her everywoman “Nana” figures, as well as work from a series that celebrate African American jazz musicians and athletes. This outdoor exhibition is sponsored by Nohra Haime Gallery.
Exhibitor and Advertiser Prospectus for the 2013 Annual Conference
posted by CAA — August 10, 2012
The Exhibitor and Advertiser Prospectus for the 2013 Annual Conference in New York is now available for download. Featuring essential details for participation in the Book and Trade Fair, the booklet also contains options for sponsorship opportunities and advertisements in conference publications and on the conference website.
The Exhibitor and Advertiser Prospectus will help you reach a core audience of artists, art historians, educators, students, and administrators, who will converge in New York for CAA’s 101st Annual Conference, taking place February 13–16, 2013. With three days of exhibit time, the Book and Trade Fair will be centrally located at the Hilton New York, where most programs sessions and special events take place. CAA offers several options for booths and tables that can help you to connect with conference attendees in person.
In addition, sponsorship packages will allow you to maintain a high profile throughout the conference. Companies, organizations, and publishers may choose one of four visibility packages, sponsor specific areas and events such as the Student and Emerging Professionals Lounge, or work with CAA staff to design a custom package. Advertising possibilities include the Conference Program, distributed to over six thousand registrants, and the conference website, seen by thousands more.
The priority deadline for Book and Trade Fair applications has been extended to Friday, November 16, 2012; the final deadline for all applications and full payments, and for sponsorships and advertisements in the Conference Program, is Friday, December 7, 2012.
Questions about the 2013 Book and Trade Fair? Please contact Paul Skiff, CAA assistant director for Annual Conference, at 212-392-4412. For sponsorship and advertising queries, speak to Helen Bayer, CAA marketing and communications associate, at 212-392-4426.
FIELD REPORT
posted by CAA — August 07, 2012
Doralynn Pines is an independent scholar and consultant based in New York and a member of the CAA Board of Directors. She served as associate director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and was chief librarian of the museum’s central research library.
The Digital World Meets Art History at Princeton University
On July 12, 2012, the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University in New Jersey sponsored a one-day conference that covered topics of digital archiving, research, and technical innovation in art history. Entitled “The Digital World of Art History: Databases, Initiatives, Policies, and Practices,” the conference was attended by almost one hundred art historians, art librarians, and museum and visual-resources curators. The year 2012 marks the ninety-fifth anniversary of the index, which was founded in 1917 by Charles Rufus Morey. The anniversary also celebrates the fact that the index’s information, held in library reserves for decades, has evolved into a growing digital database for use by scholars all over the world.
Organized by Colum Hourihane, director of the index, the conference featured eighteen invited speakers who discussed topics as varied as the future of art bibliography (Carole Ann Fabian, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University), copyright, scholarship, and fair use in the fine arts (Gretchen Wagner, ARTstor), art-historical research (Gwen David, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Queens College, City University of New York), and a database of performances of medieval narratives (Evelyn [Timmie] Birge Vitz and Marilyn Lawrence, both from New York University). Melitte Buchman, also of NYU, spoke about current best digital practices. The Morgan Library and Museum was represented by curators and librarians (Maria Oldal, Elizabeth O’Keefe, William Voelkle), who described their recently completed collaboration with the index. Approximately 58,000 images from over nine hundred Western medieval and Renaissance manuscripts will soon be available through the Morgan Library’s website and through the index.
Several talks outlined exciting new digital projects currently underway at Princeton, including databases and new initiatives at the index (Judith Golden, Jessica Savage, Beatrice Radden Keefe, Jon Niola, Henry Schilb), in the Visual Resources Collection (Trudy Jacoby), and in the Digital Humanities Initiative (David Mimno). Sandra Ludig Brooke, a librarian at the Marquand Library of Art and Archeology, spoke about the Blue Mountain Project, a team effort of scholars and librarians to catalogue, and make freely available, digital editions of avant-garde arts journals produced in Europe and North America between 1848 and 1923. The project is off to a running start with a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
To wrap up the conference, Eleanor Fink of the World Bank Group presented “Art Clouds: Reminiscences and Prospects for the Future,” a look back at the well-known projects she oversaw during her tenure at the Getty Information Institute, including the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN), the Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN), and the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA). She also noted how far the field had come, with collaborative and cross-platform efforts being the norm. In looking to future prospects for seamless access to art information, Fink pointed to Linked Open Data and some recent projects that have begun to use it.
Hourihane has just announced the online publication of the papers on the Index of Christian Art website.
CAA Members Receive Discounts with Zipcar
posted by Nia Page — August 06, 2012
CAA has partnered with Zipcar to bring car sharing to members at a greatly reduced rate. CAA members can join for a $25 annual fee—as opposed to the regular rate of $60 per year. In addition, if you join through CAA, Zipcar will waive the one-time $25 application fee and also give you $25 in free driving credit.
Zipcar is an easy, economical, and environmentally friendly alternative to traditional car-rental programs. With Zipcar you can reserve a vehicle by the hour or the day and select from a wide range of cars, vans, and trucks. Gas, insurance, and 180 miles are included in each reservation. A membership with Zipcar is universal: pick up a car in over fifteen participating cities in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, including New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, DC, Toronto, and London. Faculty and students also have the added benefit of being able to access Zipcars right on campus, with more than 250 colleges and universities participating in the car-sharing program.
Join today; don’t forget to use the promotional code member25 to earn $25 in free driving credit to your account.
EDITORS OF THE ART BULLETIN
posted by Christopher Howard — August 06, 2012
Nora Griffin is an artist and CAA assistant editor.
Kirk Ambrose (2013–16)
Kirk Ambrose
Kirk Ambrose, associate professor of medieval art history and chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado in Boulder, will become editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin. His three-year term begins on July 1, 2013, after he concludes a year as editor designate. Ambrose will succeed Karen Lang of the University of Warwick in England, who has led the journal since 2010.
As incoming editor, Ambrose plans to build on the legacies of two previous Art Bulletin editors, Karen Lang and Nancy Troy, and to develop alternative forums for debate within the journal, such as the recently inaugurated special features “Regarding Art and Art History” and “Notes from the Field.” Like Lang, he is also inspired by the journal’s approaching centennial, in 2013, and sees The Art Bulletin’s current moment as intellectually parallel to the “speculative and creative” art history that was being practiced in its pages in the early twentieth century. The recent decision of the German government to fund “clusters of excellence” has resulted in new structures at universities and has spurred Ambrose into dialogue with a group of international scholars from Brazil, France, India, and Turkey, to better understand the nuances of how “art-historical research and pedagogy is now conceived.” This international perspective on art history will be thoroughly addressed in a new series of short essays for The Art Bulletin, tentatively titled “Whither History?” in which invited scholars will “reflect upon how trends toward globalization in the humanities have had an impact on the ways we conceive art history.”
In 1999, Ambrose earned his PhD in the history of art from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with a dissertation on “Romanesque Vézelay: the Art of Monastic Contemplation,” completed under the guidance of Ilene Forsyth and Elizabeth Sears. Ambrose’s education also includes a BA from Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1990 and additional study at the Goethe Institut in Düsseldorf, Germany, and McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
A faculty member at the University of Colorado since 1999, Ambrose has taught a range of courses on topics of medieval art history and methodology at the undergraduate and graduate level and has served as an MA and PhD thesis advisor for many students. A specialist in Romanesque sculpture, Ambrose is dedicated to the idea of art history as a global discipline and to this end has worked to diversify his department at Colorado. He recently worked with the administration to create a tenure-track position for an art historian specializing in colonial Latin America.
Within Ambrose’s own field of interest, he has consistently chosen topics and methodologies of inquiry that enlarge the scope of medieval studies. His book Monsters in Twelfth-Century European Sculpture, is forthcoming from Boydell and Brewer, and he received a Samuel H. Kress Foundation grant for the volume The Nave Sculpture of Vézelay: The Art of Monastic Viewing (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2006). Recent book chapters include “Male Nudes and Embodied Spirituality in Romanesque Sculpture,” published in Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), edited by Sherry Lindquist. A 2011 essay, “Viollet-le-Duc’s Judith at Vézelay: Romanesque Sculpture Restoration as (National) Art,” published in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, discusses the restoration of a medieval monument in nineteenth-century France as it relates to the country’s republican politics. He recently contributed to The Art Bulletin a review of Friedrich Kittler’s Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, translated by Anthony Enns, that was published in the March 2011 issue, and a short piece on appropriation and medieval art in the multiauthored section “Notes from the Field” in June 2012.
Ambrose’s practice of a socially and culturally mindful art history has led to opportunities beyond the classroom. With colleagues Davide Stimilli and Lisa Tamiris-Becker, he is currently planning a 2014 exhibition at the University of Colorado Art Museum, tentatively titled Aby Warburg and the Beginning of Cultural Studies in the American Southwest. Ambrose states, “Warburg’s 1895–86 expedition to the Southwest is well known, but this journey looks very different when viewed from an American, rather than European, perspective. Much of Warburg’s vision appears indebted to a network of mostly Jewish merchants across the Southwest, who sold photographs of Indian rituals as well as ceramics and other objects that Warburg collected.” For Ambrose the exhibition is a means to explore the multifariousness of art-historical vision, and how “art practices can serve as vehicles of knowledge” for scholars at the turn of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Travel Grants to Attend the 2013 Annual Conference in New York
posted by Lauren Stark — August 02, 2012
CAA offers Annual Conference Travel Grants to graduate students in art history and studio art and to international artists and scholars. In addition, the Getty Foundation has funded the second year of a program that enables twenty applicants from outside the United States to attend the 2013 Annual Conference in New York. Applicants may apply for more than one grant but can only receive a single award.
CAA Graduate Student Conference Travel Grant
CAA will award a limited number of $250 Graduate Student Conference Travel Grants to advanced PhD and MFA graduate students as partial reimbursement of travel expenses to attend the 101st Annual Conference, taking place February 13–16, 2013, in New York. To qualify for the grant, students must be current CAA members. Successful applicants will also receive a complimentary conference registration. Deadline: September 14, 2012.
CAA International Member Conference Travel Grant
CAA will award a limited number of $500 International Member Conference Travel Grants to artists and scholars from outside the United States as partial reimbursement of travel expenses to attend the 101st Annual Conference, taking place February 13–16, 2013, in New York. To qualify for the grant, applicants must be current CAA members. Successful applicants will also receive a complimentary conference registration. Deadline: September 14, 2012.
CAA International Travel Grant Program
The CAA International Travel Grant Program, generously supported by the Getty Foundation, provides funding to twenty art historians, museum curators, and artists who teach art history to attend the 101st Annual Conference, taking place February 13–16, 2013, in New York. The grant covers travel expenses, hotel accommodations, per diems, conference registrations, and one-year CAA memberships. For 2013, CAA will offer preconference meetings on February 11 and 12 for grant recipients to present and discuss their common professional interests and issues. Applicants do not need to be CAA members. Deadline extended: August 24, 2012.
Donate to the Annual Conference Travel Grants
CAA’s Annual Conference Travel Grants are funded solely by donations from CAA members—please contribute today. Charitable contributions are 100 percent tax deductible. CAA extends a warm thanks to those members who made voluntary contributions to this fund during the past twelve months.
Image: Joseph Mallord William Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed—The Great Western Railway, 1844, oil on canvas, 35⅞ x 49 in. National Gallery, London (artwork in the public domain)
August 2012 Picks from CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — August 01, 2012
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 Americn and around the world.
The CWA Picks for August 2012 include several important exhibitions in New York and a handful on view this month in Europe. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is hosting a survey of work by the Dutch photographer and video artist Rineke Dijkstra; the Whitney Museum of American Art has given over its third floor to Sharon Hayes, who is incorporating performance into her exhibition of photography and video; and the Brooklyn Museum is presenting a collaborative project led by Ulrike Müller in its Raw/Cooked series, which features artists who live and work in the borough.
Across the Atlantic, MUSAC in León, Spain, has staged Feminist Genealogies in Spanish Art: 1960–2010, organized by Juan Vicente Aliaga and Patricia Mayayo, which investigates the underrecognized role that feminist activism and theory has played in Spanish art since the 1960s. Elsewhere, the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos has created an installation of large-scale sculptures in the Palace of Versailles, and Goldsmiths in London has spread work by Su Richardson across two venues in London.
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: Rineke Dijkstra, The Krazyhouse (Megan, Simon, Nicky, Philip, Dee), Liverpool, UK, 2009, four-channel HD video projection with sound, 32 min., looped (artwork © Rineke Dijkstra; photograph provided by the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum)