CAA News Today

Meet this year’s grant recipients and find information about their presentations at the conference and their corresponding session below. Dozens of other support grants were given to CAA members through the Presidents Council of CAA and the “Pay it Forward” initiative. 

CAA TRAVEL GRANT IN MEMORY OF ARCHIBALD CASON EDWARDS, SENIOR, AND SARAH STANLEY GORDON EDWARDS 

The CAA Support Grant in Memory of Archibald Cason Edwards, Senior, and Sarah Stanley Gordon Edwards was made possible by Mary D. Edwards. The grant supports women who are emerging scholars at either an advanced stage of pursuing a doctoral degree or who have received their PhD within the two years prior to the submission of the application. 

Amanda Gutierrez, Concordia University
Presentation: “Walking away from the Western Flâneuse, moving forward to perspectives from the Global South”
Session: The Art of Walking 

This presentation frames a critique to the concept of the Flâneuse, which reduces the walking experience of all women into a hegemonic Western perspective, not considering the ontologies of violence that women and LGBGT+2 bodies from the Global South experience every day. Women’s safety cannot exist where gender violence, war, political conflicts, and economic crises are present. Therefore, reflecting on the privilege and political conditions needed to walk safely and with freedom is essential. Considering the colonial implications of industrialized countries holding infrastructural and economic power is also critical, as is reflection on the creation of safe public spaces for citizens. We also need to consider that racialized immigrants living in Western countries hold additional risks in confronting racist bias experiences in the public spaces due to their race, ethnicity, gender, and citizenship status. Understanding these political dimensions, these questions arise:

Are we aware of these political implications when romanticizing the Flâneuse as a universal agent of walking freedoms in public space? Is this figure of agency excluding many women and non-conforming bodies who cannot experience these freedoms under political crises? Can we think of other subaltern figures besides the Flâneuse to consider the walking experiences of women and LGBGT+2 in the Global South? 

This paper will reflect on these questoins while looking at examples of collectives from India, such as Blank Noise and Women Walk at Midnight as well as the artistic practices of BIPOC feminist artists approaching walking as a form of resistance and enunciation. 

Sila Ulug, The University of Chicago
Presentation: “The Blind Man(et): On the Aesthetics of the Blind Man after European Painting” Session: The Art of the Periodical 

The Blind Man (1917) is a two-issue magazine published by Henri-Pierre Roché; Marcel Duchamp; and Beatrice Wood in coordination with the First Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York. The Blind Man introduced Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) to the public as a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, shortly after it was physically disappeared. My presentation examines The Blind Man against a history of rejected, Modernist painting. I demonstrate that The Blind Man distinguishes itself from contemporaneous magazines affiliated with the New York avant-garde in three notable respects: (1) its multiple levels of self-referentiality; (2) its direct address of the reader in multiple figurative roles; and (3) its concomitant incorporation and rejection of the reader as part of its dramatic world. I suggest that the incongruence of The Blind Man’s representational scheme can be resolved when examined against the work of Édouard Manet, especially as its reception aesthetics take after those of Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas (1656). Positioning The Blind Man alongside critical terms associated with the reception of work by Manet and others who exhibited in the 1863 Salon des Refusés suggests that The Blind Man may have aspired to the condition of tableau, while remaining a morceau to the public.