CAA News Today
MEET THE 2022 PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWS
posted by CAA — February 07, 2023
CAA is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2022 Professional Development Fellowships. The recipient of the $10,000 fellowship in art history is Mechella Yezernitskaya, Bryn Mawr College, and the recipient of the $10,000 fellowship in visual art is Boone Nguyen, California State University, Los Angeles.
The honorable mentions in art history were awarded to Jack Crawford, City University of New York, and Astrid Tvetenstrand, Boston University. The honorable mentions in visual art are awarded to Jenna Carlie, California Institute of the Arts, and Alberto Lozano Ruvalcaba, Mendocino College.
2022 PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWSHIP IN ART HISTORY
Mechella Yezernitskaya, Bryn Mawr College
Mechella Yezernitskaya is a Ukrainian American art historian, writer, and curator. She is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College where she specializes in modern and contemporary art. Mechella received her M.A. from Bryn Mawr College and B.A. with honors in Art History from Fordham University. Her dissertation examines representations of temporal rupturing in the wartime visual, literary, and film culture of the avant-gardes of the late Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union. She examines war-related imagery in the work of artists of Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian origin across media including illustrated books, poetry, collage painting, performance, and film. By drawing upon theories from trauma and disability studies, Mechella explores the roles of the civilian and combatant, the temporal boundaries of wartime and peacetime, the consequences of imperialism, the rise of nationalism, and the affective experiences of war.
Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Association of University Women, the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), the Pittsburgh Foundation, the Malevich Society, the New York Public Library, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Bryn Mawr College. She has published in ARTMargins Online, Baltic Worlds, post: notes on art in a global context, Slavic & East European Information Resources, and in the edited volume Artistic Expressions and the Great War, A Hundred Years On (Peter Lang Publishing, 2020). She has presented her research at Södertörn University, Stockholm; Karazin University, Kharkiv; Hofstra University, New York; Temple University, Philadelphia; The Museum of Russian Art, Minneapolis; and ASEEES. She has also held guest curatorial positions and fellowships at The Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Brooklyn Museum.
HONORABLE MENTIONS IN ART HISTORY
Jack Crawford, City University of New York
Jack Crawford is a teaching artist and art historian. She is currently a Lecturer at Vanderbilt University and University of Tennessee, Knoxville and has previously taught at the New York City College of Technology. She holds a BA from Barnard College and is currently completing her PhD in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research, for which she received a 2021–2022 ACLS/Luce Dissertation Fellowship in American Art and a dissertation award from the CUNY Committee on Globalization and Social Change, focuses on appropriation and aesthetics of abundance in queer performance in the postwar period.
Astrid Tvetenstrand, Boston University
Astrid studies the history of American painting, decorative arts, and architecture. She explores these fields through practices of collection, economic development, and the consumption of American property. Her dissertation traces the connections between American art patronage, second homeownership, and landscape painting at the end of the nineteenth century. She argues that the process of collecting art and land was an effort made by affluent Americans to “buy a view.” By recognizing landscape paintings as investments and monetary goods, Astrid sheds new light on Gilded Age consumerism, aesthetics, and taste. She also localizes art market exchanges within a larger conversation about the privatization of public space.
Astrid’s work is encouraged by positions and fellowships held at the New York Public Library, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts Historical Society, Nichols House Museum, Bundy Museum of History and Art, Peabody Essex Museum, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Decorative Arts Trust, and Winter Antiques Show.
2022 PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWSHIP IN VISUAL ARTS
Boone Nguyen, California State University, Los Angeles
Boone Nguyen is an artist of the Southeast Asian diaspora. When he was a child, his family left Saigon and resettled as refugees in South Philadelphia. His experience as a refugee in the metropole informs his work through the themes of displacement and place-building, landscape and historical memory, leaving and returning, loss and transformation. His immersive moving image installations are thus fueled by a continuing search for a distant yet familiar homeplace, where the intimacies of life and death and the dialectic of subjection and resistance serve as a living archive of critical memory that is both personal and collective. He has exhibited his work in Philadelphia, Honolulu, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Tokyo.
Boone Nguyen has served in curatorial and management positions in community arts organizations, including Asian Arts Initiative, Frameline, and Scribe Video Center. He holds a BA in American Studies (minor in Asian American Studies) from Yale University. As a Cota-Robles Fellow, he earned an MA in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He was a recipient of a 2018/19 MCAD–Jerome Foundation Fellowships for Early Career Artists, administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and funded by the Jerome Foundation. Nguyen is currently in his final semester of the MFA program at California State University, Los Angeles where he also lectures in the Asian and Asian American Studies Department.
Jenna Carlie, California Institute of the Arts
Jenna studied photography at Speos Institute of Photography in Paris, France and went on to study at Rhode Island School of Design. During the time at RISD, Jenna worked under Annie Leibovitz, Mark Katzman, and Dusty Kessler. In 2016, Jenna graduated with a BFA in photography from Rhode Island School of Design. Jenna moved to Los Angeles and in 2017 worked for Lauren Greenfield, in 2018 worked for Alexa Meade, and by the end of 2018 Jenna Carlie Photography and Design was opened for business. Between 2018 and 2020 Jenna worked on various photographic series for different private collections in the Midwest. In 2020, the Saint Louis Art Museum hired Jenna as their travel contract photographer and later as their in-house photographer, where Jenna is still employed. Jenna is currently getting an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and is expected to graduate in 2024.
Alberto Lozano Ruvalcaba, Mendocino College
I was born in Tijuana, Baja California in 1993. My family lived in Rosarito next to the beach on a street called Niño Artillero (artillery child). My school was named after Emiliano Zapata, a leader of the Mexican revolution. My parents moved us to the USA when I was eight years old. We left everything behind except for each other and the memories that persist of our home and of the natural landscape around it. They brought us to this country for my siblings and I to have a better future than what was available back home. Thanks to my parents and siblings and my own perseverance, I am now the first person in my family to pursue a master’s degree from a university. I am now a permanent resident of the USA and a candidate for an MFA degree.
ABOUT THE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWSHIP
CAA’s Professional Development 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 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. The program is open to all eligible graduate students in the visual arts and art history. Learn more.
CAA 2023 Awards for Distinction
posted by CAA — February 06, 2023
CAA announces the 2023 recipients of Awards for Distinction. By honoring outstanding member achievements, CAA reaffirms its mission to encourage the highest standards of scholarship, practice, connoisseurship, and teaching in the arts. With these annual awards, CAA seeks to honor individual artists, art historians, authors, museum professionals, and critics whose accomplishments transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.
Installation view, Barbara Kruger, David Zwirner, New York, June 30–August 12, 2022. Courtesy David Zwirner.
Among the awards, the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement is presented to Barbara Kruger whose influential works have consistently had viewers question the larger society around them for over four decades.
Griselda Pollock
Svetlana Alpers
The Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Awards for Writing on Art are being presented to feminist art historian Griselda Pollock and art historian of northern Renaissance and Dutch Golden Age art Svetlana Alpers.
Art Journal Award
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
Julia Burtenshaw, Héctor García Botero, Diana Magaloni, and María Alicia Uribe Villegas, The Portable Universe / El universo en tus manos: Thought and Splendor of Indigenous Colombia (DelMonico Books/Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2022)
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions
No recipient this year
Frank Jewett Mather Award
Eduardo Cadava
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Sylvia Houghteling, The Art of Cloth in Mughal India (Princeton University Press, 2022)
Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Tomasz Grusiecki, “Doublethink: Polish Carpets in Transcultural Contexts” and Hugo Shakeshaft, “Beauty, Gods, and Early Greek Art: The Dedications of Mantiklos and Nikandre Revisited”
Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work
Dawoud Bey
CAA/AIC Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
Michele Marincola and Lucretia Kargère
Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Barbara Kruger
Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Svetlana Alpers and Griselda Pollock
Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
Mary Lum
Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
No recipient this year
Excellence in Diversity Award
Arlene M. Dávila
Citations:
Art Journal Award
Emilie Boone, “When Images in Haiti Fail: The Photograph of Charlemagne Péralte,” Art Journal, Winter 2022
The 2022 jury has chosen Emilie Boone as the recipient of the 2022 Art Journal Award for the essay, “When Images in Haiti Fail: The Photograph of Charlemagne Péralte.” Boone’s deconstruction of a single photo offers readers an entry into the contested history surrounding the US occupation of Haiti, as well as the attendant visual politics of this period (1915–34). Through close textual analysis of Péralte’s historically significant image, the author weaves together a situated narrative of Haitian visual culture under occupation, interrogating crucial notions of ontology through examination of photographic composition. Boone frames the racialized body as a contested and imagined site rife for adaptation and tampering, first through vernacular photographic techniques, as well as other forms of pictorial representation. In the end, Boone’s text summons an interrogation of tradition, and indeed, of the implicit politics of the medium of photography itself.
Jury members:
Omar Kholeif, Sharjah Art Foundation, Chair
Phil Taylor, George Eastman Museum
Tilo Reifenstein, York St John University
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
Julia Burtenshaw, Héctor García Botero, Diana Magaloni, and María Alicia Uribe Villegas, The Portable Universe/El universo en tus manos: Thought and Splendor of Indigenous Colombia (DelMonico Books / Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2022)
The Western concept of El Dorado has long impacted the study of the ancient cultures of Colombia, overshadowing the manifold stories that pre-Columbian art weaves across time and space. How can museum curators uncover those stories, illuminate their nuanced complexities, and present them to the public in engaging and innovative ways? The Portable Universe/El universo en tus manos is the remarkable outcome of just such an undertaking. Both the catalog and related exhibition are the result of a six-year collaboration between the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Museo del Oro, Bogotá. Most importantly, the curators collaborated with a contemporary Indigenous community in Colombia, the Arhuaco of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. The Portable Universe reveals that pre-Columbian artifacts—including goldworks, ceramics, and textiles—are not mere objects, but rather messengers that link living beings (people, animals, plants) and places across space and time. Each is, in brief, a portable universe. The Arhuaco explain that these messengers need to be “nourished,” or brought back to life. Thus, the concept of nourishment enters curatorial practice: a form of sustained, reciprocal attention that goes well beyond customary models of stewardship. Incisively written, gorgeously illustrated, and ingeniously designed, this groundbreaking book brings together interdisciplinary research (in history, archaeology, anthropology, environmental studies, and ornithology) and Indigenous knowledge to propose a new approach to the material and spiritual culture of ancient Colombia, one which underscores the transformative powers of cross-cultural dialogue. A major advance in the study of Indigenous art, the book spurs us to creatively rethink our notions of both the museum and scholarship.
Jury Members:
Benjamin Anderson, Cornell University, Co-chair
Karen Lang, Independent Scholar, Co-chair
Francesca Pietropaolo, Independent Scholar
Jochen Wierich, Aquinas College
Frank Jewett Mather Award
Eduardo Cadava
The jury has awarded this year’s prize to Eduardo Cadava, based on his elegant book Paper Graveyards (MIT Press, 2021) and in recognition of his long career within the field of art criticism, especially his influential theories of photography. Paper Graveyards is the culmination of decades of Cadava’s thinking about how images and technical media actively transform social and political life, and his far-ranging case studies (including examinations of artists Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Fazal Sheikh, and Susan Meiselas) orient themselves towards activist practices that speak to and from the margins. Wending through ruminations on materiality, forms of documentary, and modes of circulation, Cadava writes a new account of what it means to pay visual witness in the face of constant emergency.
Jury members:
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Columbia University, Chair
Nicole Fleetwood, New York University
Kim Theriault, Dominion University
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Sylvia Houghteling, The Art of Cloth in Mughal India (Princeton University Press, 2022)
The Art of Cloth in Mughal India by Sylvia Houghteling focuses on the production, circulation, and consumption of South Asian textiles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period of both global manufacturing dominance and intense artistic creativity for Indian cloth-makers. The book offers a uniquely comprehensive account of the complex meanings of cloth as it moved across the Mughal imperial courts, the kingdoms of Rajasthan, the Deccan sultanates, and the British Isles, all the while remaining attentive to the richness of regional specialties. Houghteling brilliantly weaves together a capacious range of topics including issues of patronage and labor, iconography and symbolism, technical and ecological considerations, connections with poetry and other fine as well as decorative arts, and the sensory experience of the various textiles, from gauzy muslins to tent panels. Starting with an account of the Emperor Akbar’s patronage of dyers and weavers, Houghteling analyzes the elaborate Bikaner Robe, which Akbar’s successor Jahangir presented to a provincial raja. She moves on to the elegant textile culture of the Rajput Court of Amber and the kalamkari cloth of Machilipatnam, ending with a survey of the flourishing market for Hindustani cloth in early modern Britain, evidence of a new global cosmopolitanism that linked the Mughal court with the Stuarts. The book’s handsome design, color illustrations, and vivid writing make Art of Cloth an engaging read for scholars and general readers alike.
Jury members:
Lisa Schrenk, University of Arizona, Chair
John Cunnally, Iowa State University
Laura Anne Kalba, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
J. P. Park, University of Oxford
Andrew Wasserman, American University
Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Tomasz Grusiecki and Hugo Shakeshaft
Tomasz Grusiecki, “Doublethink: Polish Carpets in Transcultural Contexts,” The Art Bulletin, September 2022
That art objects move, and that in doing so their meaning changes, is now widely accepted, but conceptualizing and describing the ways in which such changes occur still often eludes us. Tomasz Grusiecki’s winning essay provides a framework for doing just that, in its elegant examination of the lives and plural significances of carpets in early modern Eastern and Central Europe. Borrowing George Orwell’s notion of “doublethink,” Grusiecki shows, with a keenly historical eye, that there was little tension for early modern patrons between the provenience of carpets in Safavid Persia or Ottoman Turkey and their adaptation into local European contexts, where they became fundamental to the construction of individual and burgeoning national identities. Grusiecki moves past the simple charting of the “surprising” provenances of individual objects to weave a complex web in which he embraces the inevitable messiness of movement—and of meaning—in early modernity. Grusiecki’s transcultural doublethink promises to be a concept of great utility for our discipline as it continues to grapple with these issues.
Hugo Shakeshaft, “Beauty, Gods, and Early Greek Art: The Dedications of Mantiklos and Nikandre Revisited,” The Art Bulletin, May 2022
In his groundbreaking article “Beauty, Gods, and Early Greek Art: The Dedications of Mantiklos and Nikandre Revisited,” Hugo Shakeshaft transforms narratives around the topic of beauty in the religious art of archaic Greece. He moves away from such still-influential Enlightenment frameworks as Kant’s account of aesthetic autonomy and Winckelmann’s concern with timeless aesthetic values to examine the question of beauty from a historicizing vantage point. In order to assess how beauty mattered for those who patronized, created, employed, and observed artworks in ancient Greece, Shakeshaft focuses on two anthropomorphic votive figurines—a bronze statuette dedicated by Mantiklos (ca. 700–675 BCE) and a marble life-size statue dedicated by Nikandre (ca. 660–630 BCE). In his deeply researched discussion, he reconsiders these celebrated objects through a layered analysis of their forms, inscriptions, and materials as well as by reading them alongside aesthetic values expressed in the writings of Homer and Hesiod. In particular, he calls attention to the ideal of charis, a rich concept that can be translated as “beauty,” “favor,” “gratitude,” and “grace,” to show how beauty was inextricably tied to ideas of reciprocity. Ultimately, Shakeshaft posits that beauty needs to be treated as rigorously as any other interpretive category, and—far from being a universal—demands contextualized cultural awareness.
Jury members:
Adam Jasienski, Southern Methodist University, Chair
Susanna Berger, University of Southern California
Christine I. Ho, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work
Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey has a photographic career spanning four decades, beginning in 1975 with the seminal five-year portrait project of everyday life in Harlem. His work has recently traveled in a retrospective titled An American Project” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art. In his recent publication, Dawoud Bey: Two American Projects, his work explores race, African American history and underrepresented communities; featuring portraits memorializing the six children who were victims of the Ku Klux Klan’s bombing at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, and a group of black-and-white landscapes made in Ohio where the Underground Railroad once operated. In the 1980s Bey collaborated with artist David Hammons by documenting the performances Bliz-aard Ball Sale and Pissed Off. In 2017 he received the MacArthur Fellowship and is Professor of Photography at Columbia College Chicago where he has taught for over twenty years. Bey’s work is in permanent collections of leading museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Jury members:
Derek G. Larson, Purdue University, Chair
Stephen Fakiyesi, Independent Artist
Jessica Hong, Art Museum
CAA/AIC Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
Michele Marincola and Lucretia Kargère
Michele Marincola and Lucretia Kargère are recognized by conservators, curators, and art historians, for their contributions to the study of European sculpture. Their recent, joint publication titled The Conservation of Medieval Polychrome Wood Sculpture: History, Theory, Practice (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2020) is a major contribution to the fields and represents two-decades of collaborative work.
Marincola is the Sherman Fairchild Chair, and Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of Conservation, at the Conservation Center, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, a position she has held since 2014. Kargère is a Conservator of Medieval Sculptures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters. Marincola previously worked with Kargère at the Cloisters where they collaborated on conservation and research. Marincola’s contributions to scholarship include research on the sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider and the translation and commentary of Johannes Taubert’s Farbige Skulpturen into English. Kargère, who is known for her work on French sculpture, has collaborated with Maricola and conservation scientists at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the publications about the materials and techniques used in Medieval polychrome sculpture.
Both Marincola and Kargère are recognized for having educated students and colleagues about the history and conservation of European Medieval polychrome sculpture. Numerous students, interns, and Fellows have benefitted from their expertise both at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at New York University. Moreover, Marincola and Kargère are known for producing publications and presentations that touch upon important issues in art conservation, art making, art history, and ethics.
Jury members:
Tiarna Doherty, University of Delaware and Smithsonian, Chair
Fernanda Valverde, Amon Carter Museum
Rebecca Rushfield, Rebeccah Rushfield Arts Consultants
Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger’s distinct artistic practice has palpably shaped the broader social, cultural, and visual fields for decades. For over four decades, the artist has persistently expanded her practice, exploring new media, from video to large-scale installations, collaborating with popular brands (with some even co-opting her iconic visual language) extending her influence beyond the art world, to pursuing intrepid interventions in the public sphere. Best known for her works with bold, declarative, often imposing and seemingly authorless text in which she overlays appropriated black-and-white imagery, Kruger interrogates mass media and consumer culture’s effects on how we see and understand ourselves. As the artist expressed, “I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are, what we want to be and what we become,” and she sees her works as prompts “to question and change the systems that contain us.” With the internet boom, explosion of social media, advertising’s increasingly sophisticated, if not untruthful, tactics, and advertising’s constant presence now from an infinite number of sources, Kruger’s work, past and present, feels more relevant than ever (as seen with numerous and recent solo presentations around the globe). Throughout her dedicated practice, Kruger has reminded us that these issues will continue to raise existential concerns and impact society writ-large until actively contended with.
Jury members:
Derek G. Larson, Purdue University, Chair
Stephen Fakiyesi, Independent Artist
Jessica Hong, Art Museum
Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Svetlana Alpers and Griselda Pollock
Renowned for her groundbreaking work on Dutch Golden Age painting, Svetlana Alpers’ writings have had a profound impact on the field of art history. A founder of the journal Representations and one of the central figures in the revisionist turn of the new art history, Alpers broke with long-standing approaches to northern European art by asking new questions about visual culture and ways of seeing. In The Art of Describing (1983), her questions about optics and image-making devices ignited scholarship in premodern and modern fields alike. In subsequent publications, Alpers’ notions about the monetary value of art materials and the marketing strategies of artists also proved fertile ground for later scholars. However, the Art of Describing did not only reinvent methodologies for understanding Dutch art, pushing against the field’s reliance on ideas forged in the study of Italian artistic practices; it recast what it means to “describe” art, the ekphrastic basis of our field, effecting the writing of art history ever since.
Professor Emerita from the University of California at Berkeley, where she taught from 1962–98, Alpers continues to publish across and redefine fields ranging from the Baroque to contemporary art and photography history. Widely known for Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (1988), which won CAA’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in 1990, Alpers has also penned field-changing monographs on Tiepolo, Rubens, and Velázquez. To this list, Alpers has added her latest book, Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch (2020), a monograph on one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century, and part of a subset of her writings that have confronted directly the challenges of photography, as The Art of Describing long ago became required reading in this field. Her recent publications such as Roof Life (2013) make concrete the writerly challenge that her work has always issued to art history, the need to reinvent “how” as well as “what” we say and write about art.
Arguably the leading feminist art historian of the generation after Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock first made an impact with a vigorous dissembling of the “artists mythologies and media genius” that attended the canonization of artists such as Vincent van Gogh. She went on to devote close attention to previously devalued women artists such as Mary Cassatt, Eva Hesse, and, more recently, in her innovative Virtual Feminist Museum, Charlotte Salomon. Essays such as “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity” in her 1987 book Vision and Difference were powerful examples of her strategy of “feminist interventions” into the history of art, rather than falling for the trap of settling for the inclusion of women artists within the prevailing patriarchal structures.
The Award acknowledges this groundbreaking work as well as a wider, far-reaching achievement, ranging across several decades. Pollock’s writing has long refused to stay in its art historical place, to belong to a single position or way of working. Her brand of feminist revisionism constantly engages the social history of art, bridges art history with cinema studies, opens onto the fields of psychoanalysis and cultural geography, while also participating in the debates of postcolonial theory and responding to the imperatives of decolonization. While remaining attentive to the demands of each of these critical disciplines, her writing about art remains passionate, profound, open-hearted, and, always, political.
Jury Members:
Terry Smith, University of Pittsburgh, Chair
George Baker, University of California Los Angeles
Gillian Elliott, George Washington University
Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
Mary Lum
Mary Lum is CAA’s 2023 Distinguished Teaching of Art Award recipient. Lum, an accomplished visual artist in her own right, has been a professor of painting and drawing at Bennington College in Vermont since 2005, and prior to that taught at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Among her many notable contributions as an educator is her ability to nurture a passion for art making in her students that has taken many of them from foundational studies, to graduate school, and to successful professional practices as artists, art directors, curators, and academic professors.
Steven Frost, Assistant Professor and Faculty Director, University of Colorado Boulder says of his time as a foundation student under Lum; “With her help I began to understand a creative practice needed to be fed by more than time in the studio . . . She took the time to bring me up to speed and prepare me for the professional world.”
Rebekah Modrak, foundation student, current professor University of Michigan, STAMPS School of Art and Design says of Lum “Thank goodness her main concern was the possibility that there might be compelling artists lurking below our early and often tenuous attempt at artmaking.” “When I think of moments in my life that changed my trajectory,” says former student and UK-based art director and curator Christine Serchia, “Mary Lum is responsible for multiple moments.”
CAA is excited to recognize Mary Lum’s more than two decades of teaching with this award.
Jury members:
Derek G. Larson, Purdue University, Chair
Stephen Fakiyesi, Independent Artist
Jessica Hong, Art Museum
Distinguished Feminist Awards
Nalini Malani and Marsha Meskimmon
Nalini Malani’s work has been recognized in solo exhibitions at over thirty international institutions. Her work has embraced painting, video, stop-motion, and other time-based media, while engaging issues of women’s equality in India, where her family took refuge in 1946 after the partition. Malani’s early career in painting gave way to a more focused approach to time-based media in the 1990s, making works such as the 1998 Remembering Toba Tek Singh, a meditation on nuclear testing in India and Pakistan. Focusing on the aftereffects of the devastating partition of India and Pakistan, Malani’s work has been liberal in its use of media types and productions, including the emotive devices of theater.
Malani has turned this unflinching attention to the ways in which the woman’s body has been used as a pawn in games of nationalism and internationalism. Her Mother India: Transitions in the Construction of Pain (2005) combined archival footage and other imagery, a series of juxtapositions that shed new light on the depicted contorted bodies of women. She continues this thread in a 2020 multimedia performance of images projected onto the Taj Mahal Hotel, inspired by the week-long gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl. Malani’s work is a beacon; her work is eminently important now as the world bears witness to an increase in femicide and gender-based violence.
Marsha Meskimmon, PhD is a professor of art history who studies, teaches, and writes on global feminisms. Her groundbreaking scholarly work has been matched by a commitment to promoting and mentoring women in the field. Meskimmon is editor for Drawing In, and she is also a consultant editor for Open Arts Journal. She has authored or co-authored twelve books over her career, with a sustained focus on the political stakes of feminism and its ability to shed light on the circulation of art and the discourse of aesthetics. With Amelia Jones, she edits the book series Rethinking Art’s Histories for Manchester University Press, a series that has promoted books that rethink art and its histories, and has used feminist thought in relation to “global” and non-Western approaches to art history. Her work on the exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution marked an important return to feminism in the art world, a redefinition of the stakes and of the purview of its ideas. Her essay for the exhibition succeeded in arguing why feminism is global—describing it as a constellation of approaches, places, and times. It models an interdisciplinary and collaborative idea of feminism, not a static theory that spreads from the North Atlantic out to world. Her tireless work on behalf of women in the arts is a model for scholars who do their work out of a stated commitment.
Jury Members:
Delinda Collier, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chair
Yvonne Love, Penn State University
Midori Yoshimoto, New Jersey City University
Excellence in Diversity Award
Arlene M. Dávila
Arlene M. Dávila is Professor of Anthropology and American Studies at New York University and founding director of The Latinx Project. Established in 2018, The Latinx Project is an interdisciplinary space focusing on US Latinx Art, Culture and Scholarship. In addition to hosting artists and programs, it functions as a platform fostering critical public programming.
Professor Dávila’s has published extensively on Latinx cultural politics in museums and contemporary art, media, and urban environments to explore the intricacies and ultimate challenges of visualizing Latinx art and culture. Her research spans urban ethnography, the political economy of culture and media, consumption, immigration and geographies of inequality and race.
Professor Dávila’s publications, with a focus on public imagery and cultural politics, include Latinx art: Artists, Markets and Politics (Duke University Press, 2020), El Mall: The Spatial and Class Politics of Shopping Malls in Latin America (University of California Press, 2016), the revised edition of Latinos Inc: Marketing and the Making of a People (University of California Press, 2012), Culture Works: Space, Value, and Mobility Across the Neoliberal Americas (NYU Press, 2012), and Latino Spin: Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race (NYU Press, 2008). Dávila also co-edited the collection Contemporary Latina/o Media: Production, Circulation, Politics (NYU Press, 2014). Her articles have appeared in AZTLAN: A Journal of Chicano Studies and Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies.
Carmenita Higginbotham, Virginia Commonwealth University, Chair
Anne H. Berry, Cleveland State University
Kelly Walters, Parsons School of Design
Meet the 2023 CAA Annual Conference Kress Travel Grant Recipients
posted by CAA — January 30, 2023
Recognizing the value of the exchange of ideas and experience among art historians, the Kress Foundation is offering support for scholars participating as speakers at the 2023 CAA Annual Conference. The scholarly focus of the papers must be European art before 1830.
Samuel H. Kress Foundation CAA Annual Conference Travel Fellows 2023
Presentation: “Ordering the Ground: Ornamental Parterres and the Emergence of Academic Botany”
Session: Making Green Worlds (ca. 1450–1700)
Lauren Cannady, University of Maryland, College Park
Rather than the depiction of scholarly work taking place in Sébastien Leclerc’s engraved headpiece for Denis Dodart’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle des plantes (1676), it is a scene of the direct observation of nature glimpsed through a window that is most striking. Three men stand in an arabesque-patterned parterre to more closely examine the individual plants that compose the garden. One uses his walking cane to point out a specimen—literally embedded in the undulating scrollwork of the parterre—to his companions. This ornamental plantation—or manner of “ordering of the ground” as Francis Bacon lamented in his essay “Of Gardens” (1625)—reflects the dominant style of contemporary aristocratic pleasure and academic botanic gardens across northern Europe. Such impositions of formal, physical order on the natural world, however, belie the acknowledged chaos of seventeenth-century natural history. Bacon, among others, contended that empirical observation could best be used to make sense of the “many things in nature [that] have been laid open and discovered,” including organic material from around the world collected by Europeans in the name of colonialism. The renewed emphasis on empiricism did little, however, to rectify linguistic confusion and imprecise nomenclature, particularly pressing issues for the emerging field of botany. As a repository for nonnative flora and living laboratory for the production of naturalist knowledge, the patterned garden proved a visibly reliable way to order the natural world in early modern Europe.
Presentation: “’ A “New World” for Profit: Christopher Columbus’s Search for Gold on Genoese Silver”
Session: Making Green Worlds (ca. 1450–1700)
Jillian Laceste, Boston University
A seventeenth-century silver vase made by the Flemish silversmith Gio Aelbosca Belga for Agostino Pallavicino, the future doge of Genoa, depicts a moment of encounter between Christopher Columbus and Indigenous Americans. The vessel emphasizes a one-sided transaction by showing Indigenous figures greeting the explorer with gifts at the shore of the Atlantic. While painted Columbian artworks created in early modern Genoa treat the explorer’s arrival as a heroic maritime feat or moment of introduction of Christianity into the Americas, silver vessels such as Aelbosca’s differ because they depict Columbus’s journey for Cipangu—a land rich with gold—on the surface of silver, a precious metal crucial to Spanish colonization of the Americas. This paper will analyze the subject matter and material to address the presentation of Europe’s fertile “New World” contained within Aelbosca’s vessel. By connecting it to the history of the Americas—in particular Columbus’s failed search for gold but eventual outpouring of silver—I argue that this vase offers a view of the Americas that emphasizes not only its novelty and foreignness but also its utility for mining and profit.
Presentation: “Architectural Drawing, Information Management, and Early Modern Science: Wendel Dietterlin Drafts the Architectura (1593–98)”
Session: Drawing (New) Stories
Elizabeth Petcu, University of Edinburgh
This paper surveys the massive corpus of drawings associated with Wendel Dietterlin’s 1593–98 Architectura treatise to establish how architectural drawing in sixteenth-century Europe came to model practices for managing visual information in scientific research. To craft the Architectura drawings, Dietterlin and his assistants wielded tactics of annotation, bricolage, folding, and copying that had long aided architects in stimulating creativity, exposing problems, saving materials, enhancing productivity, facilitating communication, and documenting progress. I compare the 164 known Architectura drawings—among the largest surviving bodies of Renaissance architectural treatise drawings—to botanical and geological drawings in the collections of physician Felix Platter and natural historians Conrad Gessner and Ulisse Aldrovandi to show that natural philosophers (i.e. early modern scientists) came to derive similar benefits from such drawing techniques. I argue that Dietterlin’s tactics for orchestrating his Architectura’s wealth of visual information attests that, by 1600, techniques of visual research originating in architectural drawing circulated freely between makers of architectural drawings and natural philosophers. I thereby expose how makers of architectural drawings and natural philosophers in Europe began to exchange and codevelop parallel, empirical methods for forming knowledge.
Presentation: “Problematising the Notion of ‘Eastern European Art’: Two Case Studies of a Multiplicity”
Session: What is Eastern European Art?
Marta Zboralska, University of Oxford
Radek Przedpełski, Trinity College Dublin
This presentation aims to challenge the ontological assumption of there being a monolithic ontological entity such as “Eastern European art,” dialectically elaborated in its opposition to “Western art,” which then needs to be put on the map in an IRWIN-like gesture. We propose two case studies that problematize such an assumption, arguing instead that starting on the ground and unfolding an analysis from there might offer a more fruitful art-historical path of inquiry. We shall demonstrate that the model of a case study enfolds multiple frameworks of reference cutting across the East/West dichotomy, such as the immediately local or the regional on the one hand, or the long durée of the Anthropocene on the other.
The first case study will outline a media archaeology of Tatar timber mosques/minarets on the territories of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, showing how these under-researched media blend aniconism with local contexts and engage a continuum of artefacts and practices including muhir tableaux, hramotka (talismans), siufkanie (sorcery), and fał (divination). This case study argues that these architectural artworks explode the concept of “Eastern Europe(an art).” Instead, they open up a liminal space conjoining Islamicate architecture, Turkic animism, the “Long Baroque” of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as well as the vernacular regional traditions of timber building construction and ornamentation.
The second case study will zoom in on the ideas of Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz to consider the issue of regional artistic identity. As noted by literary scholar Anita Starosta, Gombrowicz refused the binary choice of either affirming Polishness or aspiring to Europeanness. Instead, it was within the periphery’s “not quite-ness” that the writer located the potential to “reveal Europe’s immaturity.” Looking at Diary by the American appropriation artist Sherrie Levine, a 2019 work inspired by Gombrowicz, this case study will argue for embracing the incompleteness of “Eastern Europe” as an area of art-historical enquiry.
Presentation: “‘Narrating’ the Landscape: Pictorial and Aesthetical Inventiveness to Portray the Essence of Nature”
Session: Eighteenth-Century Atmospheres: Science, Politics, Aesthetics
Marie Beaulieu Orna, France
Leaving the port of Naples for Sicily in 1777, the connoisseur Richard Payne Knight (1750–1824) wrote in his travel diary: “The infinite variety of tints were all harmonized together by that pearly hue, which is particular to that climate. (This tint very particularly marks Claude Lorraine’s Coloring). As we advanced into the open sea, the colours and forms seemed to sink into the Atmosphere and grow gradually indistinct, till at last the Sun withdrew its rays and left all in darkness.” Disclosing the term “atmosphere” in its literal meaning, Knight’s remark paradoxically reveals the fundamental role of optical theories and their interpretation in artistic practice in giving rise to the figurative essence of this same word, or to “spreading the tone” as Coleridge expressed it in Biographica Literaria (1817). Following Knight’s example, certain late eighteenth-century British landscapists aimed at conveying their personal impression felt upon observing the natural scenery, especially by handling color in travel sketches. Their Grand Tour became an artistic and aesthetical laboratory, into which they experimented with materials and processes in order to depict exotic landscapes with sensibility, intended for “polite” amateurs. The specific training these artists as well as these amateurs shared contributed to relate their mutual perception of nature and to develop this specific sense of “atmosphere.” This paper intends to demonstrate this artistic and aesthetical pivotal turn, embedded in the British contemporary scientific and philosophical context.
Presentation: “Imperial Materials: Extracting White Marble during the 18th and 19th Centuries”
Session: The Extractive Nineteenth Century
Amalie Skovmøller, University of Copenhagen
Since antiquity, white marble has been extracted from quarries centered in the Mediterranean, and transported to workshops to be crafted into sculpture and architectural decoration. While marble extracting activities declined following the collapse of the Roman Empire, they resumed with new intensity during the eighteenth century, peaking in nineteenth as quarries were sought out throughout Europe, Scandinavia, and in the US. Intertwined with Imperial policies, ideas about aesthetics and nation building, white marble assumed the role as prime material for high art and monumental embellishment. Traditionally studied as an omnipresent, abstract material with little regard to the complex infrastructures framing its extraction, the role of white marble consumption in relation to histories of colonialism remains peripherally explored. This paper centers on the intense marble extraction initiated by the Danish king Frederik V (1723–1766), when the Danish Empire included all of Norway. The king initiated expeditions into Norwegian territories to locate new sources of white marble, and the quarries established at Fauske, near Oslo, and in Hordaland secured the desired stones, which were extracted in thousands of blocks and shipped to Copenhagen. This paper explores the sculptures and architectural decoration in Copenhagen, deriving from the intense exploitation of Norwegian resources, as representing the Imperial ideologies, extractive capitalism, and colonial expansion politics of the Danish Empire during the latter eighteenth century. In doing so, the paper also touches upon the global economics and ideologies of marble extraction and circulation taking place throughout Europe and the US during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Presentation: “Byzantine Embroideries and the Entangled Visual Traditions of Eastern Europe”
Session: What is Eastern European Art?
Catherine Volmensky, The University of British Columbia
A late-Byzantine liturgical veil shows the recumbent figure of the dead Christ. Referred to as the aër-epitaphios of John of Skopje, this red silk textile is lavishly embroidered with gold, metallic, and silk threads. Similar types of embroidered veils were found in monasteries and churches throughout the Byzantine empire and its religious sphere. Drawing on a theory of line, this paper discusses the entangled artistic, religious, and economic networks of workshops and patrons shared between Thessaloniki, Mount Athos, and the regions of the Balkan Peninsula. Through this methodology, this paper traces the movement of images across spaces and media and provides a new approach to late and post-Byzantine textiles to demonstrate the vibrant and multifaceted connectivity between the regions of Eastern and Southern Europe. The role of the patron is also questioned in the context of the economic value of silk and gold-figure embroidery during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, emphasizing the position of elite women patrons in the Balkans, and how they have been examined or overlooked in previous scholarship. Since the intersection of lines create networks, this methodology also emphasizes a nonhierarchical approach to works created within Byzantium’s religious sphere. The emphasis on communication and interconnected structures offers a grounded methodology with which to examine gold-figure embroidery created and used in religious spaces of the Balkan Peninsula, Thessaloniki, and Mount Athos.
Presentation: “Begarelli, Model for Algardi? Renaissance Clay Modelling as a Precedent of Baroque Marble Sculpting”
Session: The Essence of Things? Limits and Limitlessness in Early Modern Sculpture
Lucia Simonato, Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy
In her monograph on Alessandro Algardi, Jennifer Montagu intuited the influence of Antonio Begarelli’s model on the works of art by the Bolognese Baroque sculptor. Yet, a systematic study of this possible relationship has not followed this intelligent opening. Begarelli was a sculptor who until his death in 1565 made monumental statues in Emilia and in Lombardy, using almost exclusively white-painted terracotta—a choice, according to Vasari, criticized by Michelangelo, who would have said in front of his works: “If this clay were to become marble, woe to the ancient statues!” Reassessing Begarelli as a model for Algardi poses not only an issue of intermediality in the transmission of formal solutions, but also a question on matter’s expressive possibilities. To what extent did the Renaissance terracotta, with its easier naturalistic adhesion and its dynamic spatial conception, offer a model to Baroque marble figuration? How did the dialogue with Begarelli shape Algardi’s use of terracotta modelling within his artistic process as compared, for example, to Bernini’s? This paper will focus on these issues.
In addition, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation has provided funds for alumni of the program to return and take part in our vast network of both international and North American scholars:
- Iro Katsaridou, Greece, 2022
- Tomasz Grusiecki, Canada, 2015
- Halyna Kohut, Ukraine, 2020
- Angeliki Pollali, Greece, 2014
Meet the 2023 CAA Annual Conference Edwards Support Grant Recipients
posted by CAA — January 30, 2023
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.
Michael S. Roth, President of Wesleyan University, to give keynote address at CAA’s 111th Annual Conference Convocation
posted by CAA — January 17, 2023
Michael S. Roth, President of Wesleyan University.
We are thrilled to announce that Michael S. Roth, President of Wesleyan University, will give the keynote address at CAA’s Convocation during the organization’s 111th Annual Conference.
Michael S. Roth ’78 became the sixteenth president of Wesleyan University in 2007, after having served as Hartley Burr Alexander Professor of Humanities at Scripps College, Associate Director of the Getty Research Institute, and President of the California College of the Arts. At Wesleyan, Roth has overseen the launch of such academic programs as the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life and the Shapiro Center for Writing as well as four new interdisciplinary colleges that emphasize advanced research and cohort building in the areas of the environment, film, East Asian studies, and integrative sciences. Under his leadership, Wesleyan experienced its most ambitious fundraising campaign in its history, raising more than $482 million, primarily for financial aid. Roth has undertaken several initiatives that have energized the curriculum and helped to make a Wesleyan education more affordable and accessible to students from under-represented groups, creating a supportive and diverse campus community that inspires students to achieve their personal best.
Author and curator (most notably of the exhibition Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture, Library of Congress, 1998–99), Roth describes his scholarly interests as centered on “how people make sense of the past.” His 2015 book Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (Yale University Press) has been a powerful tool for students, their families, faculty, and policymakers who are wrestling with the future of higher education in America. It was recognized in 2016 with the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ Frederic W. Ness award for a book that best illuminates the goals and practices of a contemporary liberal education. Roth’s newest book, Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness (Yale University Press), addresses some of the most contentious issues in American higher education, including affirmative action, safe spaces, and questions of free speech. Roth regularly publishes essays, book reviews, and commentaries in the national media and in scholarly journals. He continues to teach undergraduate courses and has offered MOOCs through Coursera, most recently, “How to Change the World.”
CAA’s Convocation will be held on Wednesday, February 15, 6:30–8 p.m. ET, in Grand Ballroom East.
The CAA 111th Annual Conference will be held February 16–18, 2023 at the New York Hilton Midtown. Register now!
Finalists for the 2023 Morey and Barr Awards
posted by CAA — November 28, 2022
CAA is pleased to announce the 2023 finalists for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the two Alfred H. Barr Jr. Awards. The winners of the three prizes, along with the recipients of other Awards for Distinction, will be announced in January 2023 and presented during Convocation in conjunction with CAA’s 111th Annual Conference, February 15–18, 2023.
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award Shortlist, 2023
Cécile Fromont, Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022
Sylvia Houghteling, The Art of Cloth in Mughal India, Princeton University Press, 2022
Sonya S. Lee, Temples in the Cliffside: Buddhist Art in Sichuan, University of Washington Press, 2022
Natalia Majluf, Inventing Indigenism: Francisco Laso’s Image of Modern Peru, University of Texas Press, 2021
Thy Phu, Warring Visions, Duke University Press, 2022
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award Shortlist, 2023
Darsie Alexander and Sam Sackeroff, eds., Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art, Yale University Press and the Jewish Museum, New York
Kristin Juarez, Rebecca Peabody, and Glenn Phillips, eds., Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures, X Artists’ Books and Art + Practice
Victoria I. Lyall and Terezita Romo, eds., Traitor, Survivor, Icon: The Legacy of La Malinche, Yale University Press and Denver Art Museum
Julia Burtenshaw, Héctor García Botero, Diana Magaloni, and María Alicia Uribe Villegas, The Portable Universe / El universo en tus manos: Thought and Splendor of Indigenous Colombia, DelMonico Books and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Jessica Niebel, Hayao Miyazaki, DelMonico Books and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions Shortlist, 2023
Katherine D. Alcauskas, ed., Michael Rakowitz: Nimrud, DelMonico Books and Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College
Janet Dees, ed., A Site of Struggle: American Art against Anti-Black Violence, Princeton University Press and The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University
Adriano Pedrosa and Tomás Toledo, eds., Afro-Atlantic Histories, DelMonico Books and the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand
Janice Glowski, ed., The Pandemic Portraits by Nicholas Hill, The Frank Museum of Art, Otterbein University
Announcing the 2023 Distinguished Scholar
posted by CAA — November 15, 2022
We are delighted to announce the Distinguished Scholar Session at the 111th CAA Annual Conference will honor Edward J. Sullivan. This session will highlight his career and provide an opportunity for dialogue between and among colleagues. This event will be held in-person at the New York Hilton Midtown during the 111th Annual Conference, February 16, 2022 at 4:30–6:00 pm.
Established in 2001, the Distinguished Scholar Session illuminates and celebrates the contributions of senior art historians. The Annual Conference Committee identifies a distinguished scholar each year who then invites a group of colleagues to create the session. The honoree’s involvement is fundamental to the series, which has become a tradition that gives voice to the continuities and ruptures that have shaped art-historical scholarship from the twentieth century into the new millennium.
Access to this program requires registration and is included with an All Access–level registration. Recordings will be accessible to registrants after the event. Register here.
Sullivan’s work has been transformative for the field of art history, especially in relation to the study and elevation of Latin American and Caribbean, Latina/o/x art and artists, and for the advancement of women and the BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities in these regions.
Edward J. Sullivan is the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art at New York University (Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Art History). Since receiving his PhD from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts in 1979 (with a dissertation on painting in Madrid after the death of Velázquez) he has taught at Hunter College, Williams College, the University of Miami, and Trinity College, Dublin. However, his service as professor and administrator at New York University has been the defining aspect of his professional career. Sullivan has mentored hundreds of students at the undergraduate and graduate levels. His fields of research and teaching focus on a wide variety of geographical and temporal areas from Viceregal art in the Americas and the Philippines, to nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century art in Mexico, Central and South America, the United States, and the Caribbean. Sullivan has also had a parallel career as an independent curator and has worked on exhibitions in museums and cultural institutions throughout the US, Latin America, and Europe. He is the author of more than thirty books and exhibition catalogs, among which are The Language of Objects in the Art of the Americas (Yale University Press, 2007), Fragile Demon: Juan Soriano in Mexico 1935–1950 (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2008), Continental Shifts: The Art of Edouard Duval Carrié (Haitian Cultural Institute 2008), Nueva York 1613–1945 (Scala Books, 2010), From San Juan to Paris and Back: Francisco Oller and Caribbean Art in the Era of impressionism (Yale University Press, 2014), Making the Americas Modern: Hemispheric Art 1910–1960 (Laurence King, 2018), and Brazilian Modern: The Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx (New York Botanical Garden, 2018).
The panel will include Ilona Katzew (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Estrellita Brodsky (Another Space), Sean Nesselrode-Moncada (Rhode Island School of Design), Joseph Shaikewitz (Institute of Fine Arts), and Lynda Klich (City University of New York, Hunter College) as moderator.
Global Conversations: Mentoring Beyond the Classroom
posted by CAA — April 21, 2022
Filmed at the National Museum of Mexican Art, this program features a discussion about mentoring between two Chicago-based artists, Rubén Aguirre and Dan Ramirez, mediated by Cesáreo Moreno, Director and Curator of the National Museum of Mexican Art. Their conversation takes place inside the Aguirre’s exhibition Tectonic Reflections, open at the National Museum of Mexican Art until July 24. This program was a part of the session, “Mentoring Beyond the Classroom: The Continuing Relationship Over Time,” at CAA’s 2022 Annual Conference in February, chaired by Richard Serrano, a member of CAA’s Services to Artists Committee.
Distinguished Scholar, Kirsten P. Buick
posted by CAA — April 14, 2022
On February 17, 2022, Kirsten P. Buick was featured as the Distinguished Scholar at CAA’s 110th Annual Conference. The Distinguished Scholar session highlighted her career and provided an opportunity for dialogue between and among colleagues. Moderated by Annual Conference Chair, Theresa Avila, the session also featured presentations by a few of Buick’s students, including Shana Klein, Abbey Hepner, Annette M. Rodriguez, and Emmanuel Ortega. Watch the session in full below!
Established in 2001, the Distinguished Scholar Session illuminates and celebrates the contributions of senior art historians. The Annual Conference Committee identifies the distinguished scholar each year and each session typically brings together the distinguished scholar and a group of colleagues. The honoree’s involvement is fundamental to the series as a way of demonstrating a living tradition that gives voice to the continuities and ruptures that have shaped art-historical scholarship from the twentieth century into the new millennium.
We are inviting nominations for next year’s Distinguished Scholar at CAA’s 2023 Annual Conference in New York. Nominate individuals here!
On her career, Buick explains:
“I identify as a scholar of the visual and material culture of the first British Empire, and the British diaspora in the US, Caribbean, and India. My teaching encompasses topics such as surveys of British Colonial and U.S. Art, American Landscape representation, African American Art, Pro- and Anti-Abolitionist Images in the Atlantic World; and seminars such as Photographing Jim Crow, 1890-1965, Patronizing Women: Taste and Collecting in the 19th and 20th Centuries, and The Victorian Nude: Representing Women, Men, Intersex, and Children. My research and teaching interests encompass histories of science, medicine, religion, as well as monuments, and the use of public space. Increasingly, I am interested in the racialization of mobility—what I characterize as critical mobility studies. I publish primarily in the realm of the history of African American art and its roots in US cultural formations. My first book, “Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject,” is a good example of how I wed my teaching and publication imperatives together with my challenge to art history and visual studies to be more and to do better. Ultimately, teaching is my passion; and I tell my students that job # 1 is surviving the damage, and job # 2 is to never concede the center.”
Kirsten Pai Buick is a professor of art history at the University of New Mexico. She received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Michigan and was a SAAM Predoctoral Fellow and a Charles Gaius Bolin Fellow at Williams College. Buick is a recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize for African American Art and has published extensively on African American art, including her book Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (Duke Univ. Press, 2010). Her second book, In Authenticity: “Kara Walker” and the Eidetics of Racism, is in progress.
Annual Artist Interview, Willie Cole
posted by CAA — April 05, 2022
On February 18, 2022, Willie Cole was featured in the Annual Artists’ Interviews at CAA’s 110th Annual Conference. Watch the interview in full below!
Beginning in 1997, the Annual Artists’ Interviews were established to provide the opportunity for esteemed artists to have one-on-one conversations with colleagues at the Annual Conference. Each year, the Services to Artists Committee (SAC) identifies two distinguished artists to participate. The interviews are held annually as part of the Services to Artists Program at the conference.
Willie Cole is a contemporary American sculptor, printer, and perceptual engineer. His work uses contexts of postmodern eclecticism, and combines references and appropriation from African and African American imagery. Cole is best known for his Dada and Surrealist readymades, which assemble and transform ordinary domestic and used objects such as irons, ironing boards, high-heeled shoes, hair dryers, bicycle parts, wooden matches, lawn jockeys, and other discarded appliances and hardware. Cole grew up in Newark, NJ. He attended the Boston University School of Fine Arts, received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1976, and continued his studies at the Art Students League of New York from 1976 to 1979.
Recent exhibitions of Cole’s work include To Reclaim, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; New Concepts in Printmaking 2: Willie Cole, MoMA, New York, NY, USA; Reconfiguring an African Icon: Odes to the Mask by Modern and Contemporary Artists from Three Continents, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA; Chicago, Surrealism: The Conjured Life, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, USA; and Afro: Black Identity in America and Brazil, Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, NM, USA. Cole’s work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; MoMA, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; and many others.