CAA News Today
New Members of CAA Committees
posted by Christopher Howard — February 06, 2013
CAA’s nine Professional Interests, Practices, and Standards Committees welcome their newly appointed members, who will serve three-year terms (2013–16). In addition, five new chairs will take over committee leadership, and several members of the CAA Board of Directors assume liaison posts. New committee members, chairs, and board liaisons will begin their terms at the 101st Annual Conference, to be held February 13–16, 2013, in New York. CAA warmly thanks all outgoing committee members for their years of service to the organization.
A call for nominations for these committees appears annually from July to September in CAA News and on the CAA website. CAA’s president, vice president for committees, and executive director review all nominations in November and make appointments that take effect the following February. CAA’s vice president for committees, DeWitt Godfrey of Colgate University, is an ex officio member of all nine groups.
New Committee Members, Chairs, and Board Liaisons
Committee on Diversity Practices: Julie L. McGee, University of Delaware; and Staci Scheiwiller, California State University, Stanislaus. The new board liaison is Leslie Bellavance of Alfred University, and the new committee chair is Susan D. Zurbrigg from James Madison University, replacing Kevin Concannon of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
Committee on Intellectual Property: Kenneth Cavalier, University of British Columbia; Anne Norcross, Ferris State University; and Cynthia Underwood, United States Patent and Trademark Office. A new board liaison to the committee is Suzanne Preston Blier of Harvard University.
Committee on Women in the Arts: Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, El Museo del Barrio; Jonathan D. Katz, University at Buffalo, State University of New York; and Neysa Page-Lieberman, Columbia College Chicago. The new chair is Claudia Sbrissa of St. John’s University, taking over from Maria Elena Buszek of the University of Colorado in Denver.
Education Committee: Kirsten Ataoguz, Indiana University–Purdue University, Fort Wayne; Leda Cempellin, South Dakota State University; and Bertha Gutman, Delaware County Community College. After serving three years as committee chair, Rosanne Gibel of the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale will be succeeded by Julia A. Sienkewicz of Duquesne University.
International Committee: Francesca Fiorani, University of Virginia; Federico Freschi, University of Johannesburg; Annelise Jarvis-Hansen, independent artist, Copenhagen; and Valérie Rousseau, American Folk Art Museum. Gail Feigenbaum of the Getty Research Institute joins the committee as board liaison.
Museum Committee: Jeffrey Abt, Wayne State University; Joseph Becherer, Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park; Makeda Best, University of Vermont; and Tracy Fitzpatrick, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York. The new committee chair is N. Elizabeth Schlatter of the University of Richmond Museums, who takes over from Karol A. Lawson of Sweet Briar College.
Professional Practices Committee: Thomas Berding, Michigan State University; Virginia Maksymowicz, Franklin and Marshall College; and Jonathan F. Walz, Rollins College.
Services to Artists Committee: Michelle Grabner, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Jenny Marketou, independent artist, New York; Martha Schwendener, critic, Brooklyn; and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, artist, Chicago.
Student and Emerging Professionals Committee: Jacquelyn N. Coutré, Adelphi University; Lauren Grace Kilroy, Brooklyn College, City University of New York; Carolyn Jean Martin, San Francisco Art Institute; and John Douglas Powers, University of Alabama, Birmingham. Megan Koza Mitchell-Young of the Dishman Art Museum at Lamar University succeeds Jennifer Stoneking-Stewart of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, as chair.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — February 06, 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.
Classroom Meets Gallery
At the Yale University Art Gallery, a sunny new fourth-floor gallery was filled recently with a collection of artworks highly unlikely ever to meet in such proximity again. What thread could possibly unite these works? Not a purely curatorial one, of course, but a thread that wends its way through the often wonderfully murky territory where art appreciation meets education. The room, the Levin Study Gallery, is given over to professors—from art history but also from African American studies, South Asian studies, and gender and sexuality studies, among others—who choose pieces from Yale’s vast collection to serve as teaching tools. (Read more in the New York Times.)
Draft Document on Open Review Practices and Possibilities
In April 2011, MediaCommons and New York University Press jointly received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support a yearlong study of open review practices and possibilities. The document that follows is a draft of the white paper that will serve as the grant’s primary outcome. (Read more at MediaCommons Press.)
Publishers and Library Groups Spar in Appeal to Ruling on Electronic Course Reserves
Fair use and electronic course reserves are back in court. A keenly watched copyright case that pitted three academic publishers against Georgia State University has entered the appeals phase, with a flurry of filings and motions this week and more expected soon. One surprise motion came from the United States Department of Justice, which requested more time to consider filing an amicus brief either in support of the publishers or in support of neither party. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
An Art Installation Made of the Cable News Crawl
We’re constantly inundated with news. Just look at your Twitter feed. We hop from North Korea to Top Chef to productivity tips without a second’s thought. But it’s strange, if you really think about it, that we process the world’s news as indiscriminately as sticking our fingers into every dish on a buffet. And That’s the Way It Is explores this idea of media inundation. By Ben Rubin, it’s a media installation at the University of Texas that scans closed-captioned chirons during the nightly news and projects those hot topics onto a building. (Read more at Fast Company.)
Major Art Museum Group Bolsters Rules for Acquiring Ancient Art
The ethics for adding ancient works to American art museum collections became substantially more stringent five years ago when the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) decided to set the bar higher—prompted by complaints from Italy, Greece, and other ancient lands that museums had long turned a blind eye to evidence that pieces they owned had been looted from archaeological sites. Last month, the group announced a few more subtle tweaks to those guidelines, including requiring a public explanation on the AAMD’s website if a museum decides to acquire a piece despite gaps in its ownership record going back to fall 1970. (Read more in the Los Angeles Times.)
A Bronx Post Office, Home to Ben Shahn Murals, Could Be Sold
A landmark post office in the Bronx that contains thirteen Depression-era murals by the famed New Jersey artist Ben Shahn could be put up for sale. The proposal to sell the Bronx General Post Office on the Grand Concourse was outlined in a letter from the postal service to the Bronx borough president, Ruben Diaz Jr. (Read more at NJ.com.)
A New Way Forward
While some American art museums receive some government support, most depend on three main sources of money: (1) earned income from admissions, retail, restaurants, and the like; (2) revenue drawn from their endowments; and (3) annual contributions, which too often provide the largest part. In lean times, those donations tend to drop or level off—forcing cuts in staff, programming, and other costs or, sometimes, an increase in debt—and if Washington ever caps the tax deductibility of charitable donations, as many politicians want, it will make matters worse. (Read more in the Wall Street Journal.)
Curator, Tear Down These Walls
A modest proposal for this country’s great repositories of pre–twentieth-century American art: why don’t you, as Diana Vreeland might have asked, mix folk art in with the more realistic, academically correct kind that has so dominated museums since the nineteenth century? Despite rising interest in and scholarship about folk art—and even after the wholesale rethinking of several major American wings on the East Coast—the isolation of folk from academic is still the norm. (Read more in the New York Times.)
Download the Conference Abstracts and Directory of Attendees
posted by Christopher Howard — February 05, 2013
Registrants for the 2013 Annual Conference in New York can now download the Abstracts and Directory of Attendees. These publications, available as PDFs, summarize the contents of hundreds of papers and talks that will be presented in program sessions and list the names and contact information for those attendees who registered by both the early and advance deadlines.
Reading the abstracts in advance can help you plan your daily schedule at the conference. Program sessions are alphabetized by the chair’s last name and appear in the contents pages (4–10). An index in the back of the publication names all the speakers. Alternatively, use your Adobe Reader to conduct a keyword search for terms relevant to your interests. Similarly, the Directory of Attendees helps with networking during and communication after the conference.
To download the two publications, registrants can log into their CAA account, click the “Conference Registrant Information” image, and then click the Abstracts and/or Directory of Attendees icon to download a PDF. The Abstracts and Directory of Attendees are part of the registration package; there is no added cost to paid or complimentary registrants for access to these publications.
Conference attendees who purchase single-time slot tickets, or those who want the Abstracts but are not coming to New York, may attain the document for a charge: $30 for CAA members and $35 for nonmembers. The Abstracts and Directory of Attendees will remain on the CAA website for download or sale through July 31, 2013.
Beginning with the 2010 conference in Chicago, CAA offers its Abstracts exclusively as a PDF download. Past issues of the printed publication from 1999 to 2009 are also available. The cost per copy is $30 for CAA members and $35 for nonmembers. For more information and to order, please contact Roberta Lawson, CAA office coordinator.
Bridging the Digital Divide and So Much More
posted by Linda Downs — February 05, 2013
Ray Kurzweil predicts in How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (New York: Viking, 2012) that, by 2030, intelligent computer devices will be scaled down to the size of blood cells. Kurzweil is a leading inventor (the CCD flatbed scanner, omnifont optical character recognition, a print-top-screen reading machine for the blind, and the first text-to-speech synthesizer, which led to the development of Siri) and director of engineering at Google. He believes that computer technology will soon replicate and exceed the functions of the human neocortex to a point where the barriers between the brain and computer will be totally permeable.
Until that time art historians, artists, and curators continue to rely on their neocortices to carry out creative work and research but with the help of extraordinary tech tools. CAA’s conference next week provides introductions to new technologies in the visual arts.
- THATCamp (The Technology and Humanities Camp) is being held two days prior to the Annual Conference to bring art historians, curators, and artists who publish together to focus on new technologies and means of accessing them for group and individual projects
- For those who could not attend THATCamp, a summary will be held during the conference at a panel session on Thursday, February 13 at 9:00 AM
- There are sessions throughout the conference that address the history, future, and current use of digital resources (“OS.XXI: Art’s Digital Future” on Wednesday, February 13) and online teaching (“Issues Surrounding the Online Foundations Experience” on Thursday, February 14). See http://conference.collegeart.org
- The Art Bulletin’s one-hundredth anniversary project is taking the form of a digital review. Thelma Thomas, chair of the Art Bulletin editorial board and associate professor of art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, has developed a multimedia review of the journal in partnership with the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. The preview of the project will be presented at the Annual Members’ Business Meeting on Friday, February 14
- ARTspace will be screening new digital work in the Media Lounge throughout the conference, in addition to hosting artists’ interviews and sessions
Keynote Address: Rob Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art, will address the state of the visual arts in the keynote address.
Fair Use: Come to the Committee on Intellectual Property session on Saturday, February 16 to hear about the progress of CAA’s fair-use project with Peter Jaszi, Pat Aufderheide, Jeffrey Cunard, and Chris Sundt.
Attention Artists: The American Institute for Conservation (AIC) will provide free conservation advice and assistance to artists whose work was damaged by Hurricane Sandy. Please visit the table across from registration on Thursday and Friday.
These are just a few of the highlights of CAA’s conference this year. There are over 120 sessions on a very broad range of topics in the visual arts. I look forward to seeing you there!