CAA News

The September 2010 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, has just been published. It will be mailed to all individual CAA members who elect to receive the journal, and to all institutional members.

The issue interweaves three essays that focus on art and visual culture in Europe with three texts exploring works from the Americas. On the Continent, Molly Swetnam-Burland looks at issues of reuse, display, and cross-cultural appropriation through the history of the obelisk in the Piazza Montecitorio in Rome. For his essay “Material Futures,” Richard Taws views Philibert-Louis Debucourt’s print Almanach national (1790) as articulating relations between the materiality expressed in the image and changing conceptions of time in the French Revolution. In his contribution, Darius A. Spieth investigates the “politics of nostalgia” in modern Italian culture through the reception history of Giandomenico Tiepolo’s fresco Il Mondo Nuovo (1791).

Across the Atlantic, “Circles of Creation” is Amara L. Solari’s exploration of how the Maya in early colonial Yucatán invented their own cartographic tradition that allowed for the preservation of community identity during the chaos of colonization. In “Rioting Refigured,” Ross Barrett examines the way in which George Henry Hall’s painting A Dead Rabbit (1858) reframes a mid-nineteenth-century rioter in New York City as an ideal nude, both tempering and exacerbating connotations of violence. Moving into the twentieth century, Ken Allen argues that Ed Ruscha’s experimentations with size and scale in his images of 1960s Los Angeles gave viewers a new experiential understanding of the city.

The reviews section presents four books on diverse topics. Timon Screech evaluates Melissa McCormick’s study of an early member of the Tosa School in Tosa Mitsunobu and the Small Scroll in Medieval Japan, and Charles Dempsey examines Stuart Lingo’s book on Federico Barocci: Allure and Devotion in Late Renaissance Painting. Erika Naginski’s Sculpture and Enlightenment, which looks at how historical forces and philosophical debated affected public funerary monuments in eighteenth-century France, is reviewed by Satish Padiyar. Finally, Karen Beckman considers Flesh of My Flesh, the latest book by the film theorist and art historian Kaja Silverman.

Read the full table of contents for the September issue. The final Art Bulletin for 2010 will be published in December.

At its meeting on May 2, 2010, the CAA Board of Directors voted to restore several important programs for the next fiscal year, beginning July 1. After a year of conservative budgeting in response to the economic downturn, the board eased financial constraints on the following programs that benefit CAA members.

Professional Development Fellowships

Later this fall, CAA will award five Professional Development Fellowships in the Visual Arts of $5,000 each to outstanding students who will receive MFA degrees in calendar year 2011. Eligibility requirements and application guidelines will be available on the CAA website by June 1, 2010; the deadline for applications will be October 1, 2010.

The number of artists applying for support has always been consistently high. Given this significant interest by artists—as well as the emphasis in CAA’s 2010–2015 Strategic Plan on strengthening programs and support for artist members—the board agreed that renewing artists’ fellowship is an important first step toward full restoration of the fellowship program.

Although the operating budget is lean, CAA hopes that Professional Development Fellowships in Art History can again be awarded to doctoral candidates in 2011.

The Art Bulletin and Art Journal

CAA’s two scholarly print publications, The Art Bulletin and Art Journal, will return to regular quarterly publication in 2011, with four issues appearing next year. In 2010, each journal is producing just three issues in response to the financial constraints of the previous fiscal year. The Art Bulletin combined its March and June 2010 issues, and Art Journal produced a joint Spring–Summer 2010 issue.

Millard Meiss Publication Fund

The CAA Publications Department will once again make grants to publishers from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund beginning this fall. The Meiss fund, founded in 1975, awards grants to support book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of art and related subjects that have been accepted by publishers on their merits, but cannot be published in the most desirable form without subsidy.

The grant program had been suspended for two cycles, in fall 2009 and spring 2010. Awards will also be made in spring 2011, pending later approval.

The combined March–June 2010 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, has just been published. It will be mailed to all individual CAA members who elect to receive the journal, and to all institutional members.

The central scene of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas graces the cover and introduces the issue’s Interventions essay series. Byron Ellsworth Hamann applies postcolonial and materialist strategies in “The Mirrors of Las Meninas: Cochineal, Silver, and Clay” to consider the artist’s masterpiece within a transatlantic visual archive. A group of six scholars from such diverse disciplines as pre-Columbian studies, Romance studies and literature, art history, and Aztec and Spanish colonial art respond to Hamann’s article with texts of their own.

The issue features two other major essays. In “Family Space: Buddhist Materiality and Ancestral Fashioning in Mogao Cave 231,” Winston Kyan considers the diverse integration of family references into the visual program of ninth-century Buddhist Mogao caves at Dunhuang, which marked a turning point in the construction of religious space in medieval China. For “Portrait of Luca Pacioli and Disciple: A New, Mathematical Look,” Renzo Baldasso examines the famous painting as a statement about the achievements of mathematical humanists as well as the subject of mathematics as a mode of thinking, as court activity, and as a form of education.

In the reviews section, Rebecca Zorach evaluates Margaret D. Carroll’s Painting and Politics in Northern Europe: Van Eyck, Bruegel, Rubens, and Their Contemporaries, and Jonathan Unglaub examines Maria H. Loh’s Titian Remade: Repetition and the Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art. In addition, Joel Smith reviews the history and evolution of the notion of objectivity as presented in Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s book Objectivity.

Read the full table of contents for the March–June issue. The next two Art Bulletins for 2010 will appear in September and December.

The December 2009 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of art-historical scholarship, has just been published. It will be mailed to those CAA members who elect to receive it, and to all institutional members.

For the first time, a work of twenty-first-century art graces the cover of the esteemed journal—Kehinde Wiley’s Portrait of Andries Stilte (2005). The painting accompanies an essay by Krista Thompson exploring how contemporary artists such as Wiley and Luis Gispert combine the visual language of hip-hop with late Renaissance and Baroque painting techniques.

Four essays precede Thompson’s. Leading off is Michael Schreffler, who analyzes how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spaniards described the practice of Aztec painting by looking through the lens of European art theory. Next, Emma Barker contends that Jean-Baptiste Greuze evokes both the innocence and vulnerability of children in his A Child Playing with a Dog, while implicating the viewer in the child’s fate.

Matthew Rampley’s essay expresses an opposing view of the Vienna school of art history, not as progressive and aesthetically liberal, but as a proponent of an imperialist outlook, related to the cultural politics of Austria-Hungary in the early-twentieth-century. The next contributor is Roberta Wue, who investigates the ways late-nineteenth-century Chinese artists positioned themselves in the marketplace through the classifieds in the Shanghai newspaper Shenbao. She also examines the changing relationship between artists and urban audiences in the late Qing era.

The December issue of The Art Bulletin also contains six reviews of books about tapestries at the Tudor court, engravings of Native American Indians, the gardens of Versailles and panoramic landscape painting, Buckminster Fuller, Tony Conrad, and issues on museum ownership of antiquities.

The September 2009 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of art-historical scholarship, has just been published. It will be mailed to those CAA members who elect to receive it, and to all institutional members.

Five articles make up the issue. Leading off is Rachel Kousser’s “Destruction and Memory on the Athenian Acropolis,” which argues that in the way it was commemorated, the Persians’ sack of the Acropolis in 480 BCE took on paradigmatic significance as an example of “Oriental violence.” Next is a text by Elena Boeck, who in “Simulating the Hippodrome: The Performance of Power in Kiev’s St. Sophia” analyzes strategies of display, appropriation, and simulation of Byzantine imperial symbols by Prince Iaroslav “the Wise” in the paintings of the hippodrome in Kiev’s St. Sophia.

In “Rubens and the Northern Past: The Michielsen Triptych and the Thresholds of Modernity,” Lynn F. Jacobs interrogates the miraculous thresholds of this work by Peter Paul Rubens, which negotiate relations between the donors and God and between the meanings inherent in the life and theology of Christ. Her essay is followed by “Nature and the Ideal in Khnopff’s Avec Verhaeren: Un Ange and Art, or the Caresses,” in which Brendan Cole examines the work of Fernand Khnopff from an iconographic perspective to reveal how the central concerns for all Symbolist artists—of duality and the reconciliation of opposites—are encoded in his paintings.

Last, Phoebe Wolfskill’s “Caricature and the New Negro in the Work of Archibald Motley Jr. and Palmer Hayden” evaluates the perplexing appearance of racial caricature in compositions by these two “New Negro” Renaissance painters and considers how pervasive stereotypes might inform self-perception. Hayden’s Nous quatre à Paris from ca. 1930 is the cover image for this issue.

Also included are seven reviews of books on Romanesque Partheny, Castilian culture, Inigo Jones, Utamaro, science in art, and more.

As part of information-gathering pursuant to the preparation of CAA’s 2010–2015 Strategic Plan, a 2009 member survey was developed, coordinated, and carried out by a team under the leadership of Elizabeth Knapp, vice president in the Research Division of the marketing firm Leo Burnett Worldwide, to determine member preferences, awareness of CAA publications and programs, and motivations for joining and renewing membership.

In total, 1,451 CAA members responded to the online survey, a response rate of 11 percent (which is within an acceptable range for statistical analysis). The final sample was then weighted to accurately reflect the total CAA membership based on membership type. The results are an enlightening view into CAA members’ views and opinions, revealing important strengths but also giving direction to how the organization can use the next strategic plan to improve its programs and services.

Demographically speaking, CAA members are more likely to be female (70 percent), within the age range of 35–49 (34 percent), Caucasian (87 percent), and in academic settings (73 percent), and to have ten years or more of professional experience (48 percent).

The top three reasons individuals gave for joining CAA and renewing their memberships were for job postings (69 percent), networking (54 percent), and debate in the visual arts (50 percent).

CAA is perceived as most relevant to art historians (78 percent agree). From artist members, enthusiasm for ARTspace at the Annual Conference was one of the higher-ranking areas of interest (61 percent). CAA is viewed as a well-known organization among peers (75 percent agree) and a well-run organization (51 percent agree). Members who responded to the question about CAA’s roles believe the most important are advocacy for artists, art historians, and university art museums (24 percent), a conference provider (21 percent), and a leader of creative and intellectual discourse (17 percent). The most common contact points between members and CAA are through publications and emails. The Art Bulletin has the strongest reputation among members (64 percent). The most used features of the CAA website are membership renewal (76 percent), conference registration (70 percent), and CAA News (60 percent). At least half the members also visit the CAA website regularly. A near majority of members (45 percent) have interest in social networking through CAA.

The CAA Annual Conference is perceived as important for networking (68 percent) and career development (62 percent), an opportunity for intellectual exchange about the visual arts (58 percent), and relevant to professional development (53 percent). At the conference, members mostly likely attend sessions (76 percent), the Book and Trade Fair (65 percent), and, as noted above, ARTspace (61 percent). The most popular conference topics are criticism and theory (33 percent) and contemporary art history (31 percent).

The most popular publication topics for the future are curriculum development for teaching studio and art-history courses; legal and copyright issues in publishing; career-development strategies; and standards and guidelines in the visual arts in academia. Members agree that digital publications are valuable because they can be searched online (76 percent), are environmentally friendly (71 percent), can expand readership and distribution (59 percent), and can include dynamic content (56 percent). Members are undecided on the future of digital publications, but 49 percent of respondents do not favor online, non–peer reviewed publications.

CAA continues to advocate on issues of importance to members and to the visual arts. Among these, members feel that full-time vs. adjunct status is most important (50 percent), followed by intellectual-property issues (38 percent) and salary equity (39 percent).

In efforts to increase its visibility and recognition for the programs and services it provides, CAA is eager to know how members react to or view its name. While some members felt that the name “College Art Association” or “CAA” is not descriptive of what the organization does, or that it does not fit the mission, 65 percent believe that the name is understood in the field of visual arts. Name recognition and identity will be assessed as part of CAA’s communications activities in the strategic plan.

Other directions gathered from this survey that will be addressed in the strategic plan are to: 1) increase programming and publications for artists; 2) attract more young professionals; 3) increase the diversity of members; 4) increase career-development sessions at the conference; 5) increase interactive communications; 6) develop practical peer-reviewed publications; and 7) continue working on advocacy issues, particularly related to adjunct faculty.

CAA thanks its members for participating in this recent survey. Comments and responses have been extremely helpful and are being used to guide changes and improvements in the organization’s services.

Paul Jaskot, president of the CAA Board of Directors, has made new appointments to CAA’s three scholarly journals.

Karen Lang, associate professor of art history at the University of Southern California, has been appointed the next editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin, succeeding Richard J. Powell of Duke University. Lang begins her three-year term on July 1, 2010, with the preceding year as editor designate.

Michael Cole is the new reviews editor for The Art Bulletin, succeeding David J. Roxburgh of Harvard University, who served the journal for three years. Cole became reviews editor designate in February and took over from Roxburgh this month.

Joining the Art Bulletin Editorial Board for four-year terms beginning July 1, 2009, are: Linda Komaroff, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Thelma K. Thomas, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; and Eugene Wang, Harvard University. The newly selected editorial-board chair is Natalie Kampen of Barnard College, who will serve for two years.

At Art Journal, Howard Singerman of the University of Virginia has been appointed the new reviews editor; he will take over from Liz Kotz of the University of California, Riverside, and serve from July 1, 2010, to June 30, 2013, with a year as reviews editor designate starting this month.

Also at Art Journal, Rachel Weiss of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Constance DeJong of Hunter College, City University of New York, have joined the Art Journal Editorial Board for the next four years.

Now on the caa.reviews Editorial Board is Michael Ann Holly of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, who will serve for four years. In addition, seven new field editors for books and related media have been chosen:

• Molly Emma Aitken, City College, City University of New York, South and Southeast Asian art
• Darby English, University of Chicago, contemporary art
• Jonathan Massey, Syracuse University, architecture and urbanism, 1800–present
• Adelheid Mers, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, arts administration and museum studies (a new field-editor position)
• Tanya Sheehan, Rutgers University, photography
• Janis Tomlinson, University Museums at the University of Delaware, Spanish art
• Tony White, Indiana University, Bloomington, artist’s books and books for artists (a new field-editor position)

Field editors work with the journal for three years, starting July 1, 2009.

All editors and editorial-board members are chosen from an open call for nominations and self-nominations, published in at least two issues of CAA News (usually January and March) and on the CAA website.

The June issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of art-historical scholarship, has just been published. It will be mailed to those CAA members who elect to receive it, and to all institutional members.

On the cover is a detail of a pillowcase designed ca. 1916 by the Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber, which accompanies an essay by Bibiana Obler that considers the difference between Taeuber’s and Hans Arp’s public and private identities through a set of collaborative and closely related works and why they kept their most “advanced” work to themselves.

For her contribution, Stephanie Leitch investigates Hans Burgkmair’s images of non-Western communities in the woodcut frieze The Peoples of Africa and India (1508), which neither played into iconographic presets nor invented new stereotypes. Two more essays round out the issue: Norma Broude explores the political dynamics of gender informing the intentions, subjects, production, and reception of Giambattista Tiepolo’s frescoes for the palazzina of the Villa Valmarana, and Laura Morowitz examines the extraordinary popularity and religious undercurrents of the Hungarian artist Mihály Munkácsy’s paintings Christ before Pilate and Christ on Golgotha in late-nineteenth-century America.

The June issue of The Art Bulletin also contains reviews of books on Chinese epigraphy, Giovanni Bellini, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Marcel Duchamp.

Updated May 14, 2009.

Like most universities, art museums, and learned societies, CAA has been significantly affected by the global economic downturn. The Board of Directors made difficult decisions at its May 2009 meeting that nevertheless will allow CAA to maintain the high quality of member services and programming. Strategic reductions and other measures have been instituted throughout the association to balance the budget and keep core programs, publications, and services in operation. With this careful financial planning, CAA remains dedicated to supporting members and the visual-arts community at large through our advocacy, career services, publications, and conference.

Annual Conference

The 2010 Annual Conference in Chicago will commence on Wednesday evening, February 10, with Convocation and the Gala Reception. All 120 planned sessions will be presented over the following three days, Thursday, February 11 to Saturday, February 13, with the addition of extended evening hours. No sessions will take place on Wednesday.

Publications

Newsletter: Beginning July 2009, CAA News will only be distributed online in a new reader-friendly design. This allows us to save printing and mailing costs and help to preserve coverage of core programs and publications. CAA’s website, www.collegeart.org, will become the primary hub of up-to-date information on the organization.

Journals: CAA’s longtime support of the journals is absolutely central to the mission, and the association is fully committed to maintaining them now and in the future. The Art Bulletin and Art Journal will continue to be published. Illustrations, however, will be limited to black and white for 2009–10, except where editorial and budget decisions may allow the insertion of color. caa.reviews will be unchanged, with new book reviews, exhibition reviews, and conference and symposia reports published regularly. While the CAA Board of Directors has determined the budget restrictions necessary for this part of the association, the editors-in-chief will work closely with staff and editorial boards to make sure that any further reductions are implemented with a strict attention to quality consistent with the identity and mission of the journals.

Grants and Fellowships

Two programs in CAA’s grant-making arm will be suspended for 2009–10: the Professional Development Fellowship Program for graduate students and the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. However, the Annual Conference Travel Grants and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant will both continue, and the CAA Annual Exhibitions, also funded by a grant, will take place at the Chicago and New York conferences.

The March issue of The Art Bulletin has been published and was mailed to CAA members earlier this month. Special to this issue is the publication of Picasso’s Closet, a play by the Chilean American writer and Duke University professor Ariel Dorfman, which examines Pablo Picasso’s thorny politics and raises questions about the role of an artist during wartime. The art historians Pepe Karmel and Patricia Leighton and the theorist Mieke Bal respond.

Two essays examine on art and culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France. Judy Sund reads Antoine Watteau’s Les charmes de la vie as a commentary on the ways that nature was domesticated and aestheticized for wealthy Parisians, with the artist standing as mediator between the realms of culture and nature. Meanwhile, Jennifer Olmsted considers how Eugène Delacroix’s The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage was at odds with the triumphalist paintings of French domination over North Africa that were also on view at the Salon of 1845 in Paris.

This issue of The Art Bulletin also contains four book reviews on Roman visuality, the Buddhist afterlife in art, the Psalter of Saint Louis, and African architecture.