CAA News

For CAA’s Centennial Conference in 2011, recognize someone who has made extraordinary contributions to the fields of art and art history by nominating him or her for one of twelve Awards for Distinction. Award juries consider your personal letters of recommendation when making their selections. In the letter, state who you are; how you know (of) the nominee; how the nominee and/or his or her work or publication has affected your practice or studies and the pursuit of your career; and why you think this person (or, in a collaboration, these people) deserves to be recognized.

You should also contact five to ten colleagues, students, peers, collaborators, and/or coworkers of the nominee to write letters. The different perspectives and anecdotes from multiple letters of nomination provide juries with a clearer picture of the qualities and attributes of the candidates.

All nomination campaigns should include one copy of the nominee’s CV (limit: two pages). Nominations for book and exhibition awards should be for authors of books published or works exhibited or staged between September 1, 2009, and August 31, 2010. No more than ten letters per candidate are considered.

Please read descriptions of all twelve awards and see past recipients. Detailed instructions for nominations are available. You may also write to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs, for more information. Deadline: July 31, 2010, for the Morey and Barr Awards; August 31, 2010, for all others.

Image: Barkley L. Hendricks accepts the 2010 Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work at the Annual Conference in Chicago (photograph by Bradley Marks)

The Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA), a CAA affiliated society, has announced the 2011 recipients of its Lifetime Achievement Award: Beverly Buchanan, Diane Burko, Ofelia Garcia, Joan Marter, Carolee Schneemann, and Sylvia Sleigh.

The WCA Lifetime Achievement Awards were first presented in 1979 in President Jimmy Carter’s Oval Office to Isabel Bishop, Selma Burke, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Past honorees have represented the full range of distinguished achievement in the visual arts, and this year’s awardees are no exception, with considerable accomplishments and contributions represented by their professional efforts.

This year’s Lifetime Achievement Awards will be held in New York on Saturday evening, February 12, 2011, in conjunction with the WCA and CAA Annual Conferences. More details and ticket information will be posted this summer to the WCA website. For more on the awards, please contact Karin Luner, WCA national administrator.

Beverly Buchanan

Born in 1940, Beverly Buchanan began creating art at an early age. She received a bachelor’s degree in medical technology from Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, and then earned a master’s of science in parasitology and a master’s of public health degree, both from Columbia University. Rather than pursuing a degree in medicine, she decided to focus on making art. Buchanan studied at the Art Students League before moving to Georgia, where she still lives, dividing her time between there and Michigan. Her early sculptures were poured concrete and stone, and she has since worked in a variety of media, focusing on southern vernacular architecture. Buchanan is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award, and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. In addition, she was a Georgia Visual Arts honoree and a recipient of an Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and was honored with a Recognition Award by CAA’s Committee for Women in the Arts in 2005.

Diane Burko

A painter and photographer who resides in Philadelphia and Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Diane Burko has been involved in the feminist movement since the early 1970s. She is a founding member of WCA who also founded and organized the first multivenue feminist citywide art festival in Philadelphia, called “Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts, Past and Present,” also known as “Focus.” After that event, Burko continued her feminist commitment to the present day, serving on the WCA and CAA boards and on the Philadelphia Art Commission. She is now the chair of CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts. Burko has been recognized with fellowships from the Bellagio Center, the Terra Summer Residency in Giverny, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among many other honors. One of the first movers and shakers in the feminist art movement, Burko has not yet been fully recognized for her important contributions.

Ofelia Garcia

Ofelia Garcia is professor of art at William Paterson University, where she was dean of the College of the Arts and Communication for a decade. She earned her BA at Manhattanville College and her MFA at Tufts University, and was a Kent fellow at Duke University. Garcia has been on the art faculty at Boston College, a critic at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, director of the Print Center in Philadelphia, and president of the Atlanta College of Art and Rosemont College. Also a former president of WCA, Garcia has served on numerous boards, including those of CAA, the American Council on Education, and Haverford College; she was most recently board chair of the Jersey City Museum. Garcia now serves as vice chair of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, on the Hudson County Art Commission, and on the boards of the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions and Catholics for Choice.

Joan Marter

Joan Marter is distinguished professor of art history at Rutgers University. She received her PhD from the University of Delaware and has lectured and published widely. She is currently editor-in-chief of The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, a five-volume reference set forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2010. Marter serves as editor of Woman’s Art Journal, in print continuously for thirty-one years. She has published monographs on artists such as Alexander Calder and has written extensively about Abstract Expressionism and women artists. In 2004, she was inducted into the Alumni Wall of Fame at the University of Delaware. Marter is currently president of the Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Carolee Schneemann

Carolee Schneemann is a multidisciplinary artist whose radical works in performance art, installation, film, and video are widely influential. The history of her imagery is characterized by research into archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos, and the body of the artist in dynamic relationship with the social body. Her involvement in collaborative groups includes the Judson Dance Theater, Experiments in Art and Technology, and many feminist organizations. Schneemann has exhibited her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and in New York at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Internationally, she has shown at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the Centre George Pompidou in Paris. Her recent multichannel video installation Precarious was presented at Tate Liverpool in September 2009. The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York in New Paltz is currently presenting a major retrospective, on view through July 25, 2010.

Sylvia Sleigh

Born in 1916 in Wales, Sylvia Sleigh paints portraits in a realist style, informed by sources ranging from the Pre-Raphaelites to famous portraits throughout history. Her first solo exhibition was held in 1953 at the Kensington Art Gallery; her most recent, at I-20 Gallery in New York, closed in January 2010. She married the art critic Lawrence Alloway in 1954, with whom she became part of the London avant-garde. They later moved to the United States, where she continued painting and showing her work. In 1970, Sleigh became actively involved in feminism and started painting life-size nudes in her precise, realist style. She was active in many of the first women-artist-run galleries, including A.I.R. Gallery and Soho 20. Her work can be found in numerous major public and private collections. Sleigh was honored with CAA’s Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2008.

CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for individuals to serve on juries for the annual Awards for Distinction for three years (2010–12). Terms begin in May 2010; award years are 2011–13. CAA’s twelve awards honor artists, art historians, authors, curators, critics, and teachers whose accomplishments transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.

Candidates must possess expertise appropriate to the jury’s work and be current CAA members. They should not be serving on another CAA committee or editorial board. CAA’s president and vice president for committees appoint jury members for service.

Nominations and self-nominations should include a brief statement (no more than 150 words) outlining the individual’s qualifications and experience and an abbreviated CV (no more than two pages). Please send all materials to: Vice President for Committees, c/o Lauren Stark, Manager of Programs, CAA, 275 Seventh Ave., 18th Floor, New York, NY 10001. Materials may also be sent to lstark@collegeart.org; all email submissions must be sent as Microsoft Word attachments. Deadline: April 16, 2010.

The following jury vacancies will be filled this spring:

• Charles Rufus Morey Book Award: 2 members
• Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award: 3 members
• Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize: 2 members
• Art Journal Award: 2 members
• Frank Jewett Mather Award: 1 members
• Distinguished Teaching of Art Award: 1 member
• Distinguished Feminist Award: 2 members
• Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art: 2 members
• CAA/Heritage Preservation Award: 2 members

No jury members are needed for the Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award, the Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work, and the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement. For more information on each award, please visit www.collegeart.org/awards.

The College Art Association (CAA) hosted its 98th Annual Conference in Chicago, February 10–13, 2010, at the Hyatt Regency Chicago. The program included three days of presentations and panel discussions on art history and visual culture; career-development workshops, mentoring programs, and job interviews with colleges and universities; a Book and Trade Fair of academic and trade art publishers and artist-materials distributors; and a host of special events throughout the Chicago area.

Here are some conference highlights.

Attendance

More than 4,000 art professionals from throughout the United States and abroad—including art historians, visual artists, students, educators, curators, critics, collectors, and museum staff—were in attendance.

Sessions

Conference sessions featured presentations from art-history scholars, graduate students, artists, and curators from institutions across the country and internationally. Conference sessions address a range of topics in art history and the visual arts. In total, over 150 sessions, developed by CAA members, affiliated societies, and committees, were offered.

Career Services

Career Services included three days of mentoring and portfolio-review sessions, career-development workshops, and job interviews. Approximately 185 (mentoring only) interviewees and 26 (mentoring only) interviewers were on hand to participate in Career Services.

Book and Trade Fair

This year’s Book and Trade Fair presented 135 exhibitors, including participants from the United States, Mexico, Turkey, England, Belgium, Scotland, and the Netherlands, displaying new publications, artists’ materials, digital resources, and innovative products of interest to artists and scholars. The Book and Trade Fair also featured book signings, lectures, and art-materials demonstrations, as well as three exhibitor-sponsored program sessions on art materials and publishing.

ARTspace and ARTexchange

ARTspace, a “conference within the conference” tailored to the needs and interests of practicing artists, presented this year’s Annual Artists’ Interviews: Tony Tasset was interviewed by John Neff, and Phyllis Bramson was interviewed by Lynn Warren. Over 150 people attended this extraordinary event. Programmed by CAA’s Services to Artists Committee, ARTspace was made possible in part by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

ARTexchange, an open-portfolio event where CAA artist members displayed drawings, prints, photographs, small paintings, and works on laptop computers. Fifty-two artists participated in ARTexchange this year.

Convocation and Awards for Distinction

More than 600 people attended CAA’s Convocation and Presentation of the 2010 Awards for Distinction. The keynote address was delivered by the renowned photographer Dawoud Bey.

Recipients of CAA’s awards are as follows:

• Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement: Suzanne Lacy
• Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work: Emory Douglas and Barkley L. Hendricks
• Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art: Holland Cotter
• Frank Jewett Mather Award: Terry Smith
• Distinguished Feminist Award: Griselda Pollock
• Distinguished Teaching of Art Award: Dean Nimmer
• Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award: Richard Shiff
• Charles Rufus Morey Book Award: Cammy Brothers, Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture
• Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award: Debra Diamond, Catherine Glynn, and Karni Singh Jasol, Gardens and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur
• Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize: Michael Schreffler, “‘Their Cortés and Our Cortés’: Spanish Colonialism and Aztec Representation”
• Art Journal Award: Joanna Grabski, “Urban Claims and Visual Sources in the Making of Dakar’s Art World City”
• CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation: David Bomford

CAA’s well-attended Gala Reception was held at the Art Institute of Chicago’s newly inaugurated Modern Wing. Designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Renzo Piano, this stunning space served as the kick-off venue for the conference.

Special Events

CAA’s Annual Exhibition, Picturing the Studio, was presented at the new Sullivan Galleries of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sold-out tours explored the riches of Chicago’s arts and architecture, from Frank Lloyd Wright to the city’s historic skyscrapers.

Save the Date

CAA’s Centennial Celebration and 99th Annual Conference will be held in New York City from February 9 to 12, 2011.

About CAA

The College Art Association is dedicated to providing professional services and resources for artists, art historians, and students in the visual arts. CAA serves as an advocate and a resource for individuals and institutions nationally and internationally by offering forums to discuss the latest developments in the visual arts and art history through its Annual Conference, publications, exhibitions, website, and other events. CAA focuses on a wide range of issues including education in the arts, freedom of expression, intellectual-property rights, cultural heritage, preservation, workforce topics in universities and museums, and access to networked information technologies. Representing its members’ professional needs since 1911, CAA is committed to the highest professional and ethical standards of scholarship, creativity, criticism, and teaching.

CAA announces today the recipients of its 2010 Awards for Distinction. These annual awards honor outstanding achievements in the visual arts and reaffirm CAA’s mission to encourage the highest standards of scholarship, practice, and teaching.

CAA President Paul B. Jaskot will formally recognize the honorees and present the awards at Convocation, to be held during CAA’s 98th Annual Conference on Wednesday evening, February 10, 2010, 5:30–7:00 PM, at the Hyatt Regency Chicago. The Annual Conference—hosting scholarly sessions, panel discussions, career-development workshops, art exhibitions, a book and trade fair, and more—is the largest gathering of artists, art historians, students, and arts professionals in the United States.

With these awards, CAA honors the accomplishments of individual artists, art historians, authors, conservators, curators, and critics whose efforts transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.

Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Suzanne Lacy
The continuum of Suzanne Lacy’s career mirrors the history of contemporary art: performance, installation, activism, social practice, and public engagement. An internationally regarded artist whose work includes installations, video, and performance, Lacy has addressed issues of sexual violence, aging, incarceration, illness, poverty, and a range of social-justice issues for almost four decades. Beginning in the early 1970s as a student at University of California, Fresno, and then in the Feminist Art Program at California Institute for the Arts, she was an integral and pioneering member of the Women’s Studio Workshop, Woman’s Building, and other important landmarks of feminist art. Since then, Lacy has maintained a career resolute in its commitment to feminism and social change.

Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work
Emory Douglas and Barkley L. Hendricks
Emory Douglas and Barkley L. Hendricks have long challenged the art world’s boundaries and received definitions in different but historically important ways. While working on opposite coasts and in different mediums, they transformed how African Americans saw themselves, and how they were seen. Emerging during the mid-1960s at a time of intense social upheaval, the two made work that was confrontational and incendiary, subversive and sly. While Douglas worked outside the confines of the art world as the Black Panther Party’s minister of culture, contributing to the Black Panther newspaper, Hendricks worked inside it without succumbing to the pressures and proscriptions against painting, particularly observational painting, and, to go one step further, portraiture.

Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Holland Cotter
As a staff art critic at the New York Times for more than ten years, Holland Cotter has been remarkable for his unwavering attention to the work of those less recognized—including women artists, artists of color, and artists from all five boroughs of New York—giving important visibility to work of all kinds. His subjects have ranged from Italian Renaissance painting to street-based communal work by artist collectives. Writing widely about non-Western art and culture as well, Cotter has introduced readers to a broad range of contemporary Chinese art and helped bring contemporary art from India to wider critical notice.

Frank Jewett Mather Award
Terry Smith
Terry Smith is that rare art and social historian able to write criticism at once alert to the forces that contextualize art and sensitive to the elements and qualities that inhere to the works of art themselves. His most recent book, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), contains a series of interrelated essays that unpack a vast range of topics and issues and take the reader on a theoretical tour through some of the world’s most influential art museums, laying bare their conflicted missions and studying the heightening distinction, and dispute, between modern and contemporary art.

Distinguished Feminist Award
Griselda Pollock
Griselda Pollock has earned a reputation not only as an influential scholar of modern and contemporary art and cultural studies, but also as a pioneer of feminist art, scholarship, and criticism. Her writings—including her groundbreaking 1980 monograph on Mary Cassatt and the pioneering volume Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), coauthored with Rozsika Parker—have had a major influence on feminist theory, feminist art history, and gender studies. Teaching at Leeds University since 1977, she was appointed chair in social and critical histories of art in 1990 and has served as director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory, and History.

Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
Dean Nimmer
Dean Nimmer, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts College of Art, has had a distinguished, dynamic, and astonishing career as an educator, empowering generations of artists through his enthusiasm and unbridled creativity. After thirty-four years of teaching painting, drawing, and printmaking in Boston, Nimmer thwarted all expectations for a retired professor by embarking on a second career as community arts educator, author, and provocateur. His recently published book, Art from Intuition: Overcoming Your Fears and Obstacles to Making Art (New York: Watson-Guptill, 2008), is a vehicle for him to share his wisdom with a new generation of artists and educators.

Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
Richard Shiff
The impact of Richard Shiff, who holds the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art and directs the Center for the Study of Modernism at the University of Texas at Austin, on the teaching of art history comes not only through his many scholarly contributions to the field, but also through his extraordinary forty years of active teaching and mentorship. Students and colleagues alike praise his long and influential career, describing how he teaches art history within many contexts, weaving together elements of formal analysis, connoisseurship, and theory within the larger web of human history and experience. Shiff’s talent for merging the sometimes-uncomfortable process of learning with playfulness and adventure instills a love of discovery and thought in all who have experienced his charisma, no matter their chosen life path.

Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Cammy Brothers
When one considers the vast bibliography on Michelangelo, it is a tribute to Cammy Brothers that her book is such a readable and masterful work of new scholarship and substantial insight into both the artist’s working methods and his modes of thinking. Remarkably erudite, Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) marshals compelling visual evidence along with literary, historical, and philosophical support on behalf of a fresh and persuasive argument.

See the shortlist for the Morey award.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award
Debra Diamond, Catherine Glynn, and Karni Singh Jasol, Gardens and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur
Gardens and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur (Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2008) documents an exhibition that dramatically debuted to wide audiences a body of nineteenth-century Jodhpur painting little known even to experts in the field. The authors Debra Diamond, Catherine Glynn, and Karni Singh Jasol, with their fellow contributors Jason Freitag and Rahul Jain, are to be commended for this publication, which makes a major contribution to the study of the art of Southeast Asia through the production of breathtaking color plates and a text that impressively grounds the work in the context of Jodhpur history and the Nath religious sect.

See the shortlist for the Barr award.

Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Michael Schreffler, “‘Their Cortés and Our Cortés’: Spanish Colonialism and Aztec Representation”
In his methodologically sophisticated and skillfully argued article, published in the December 2009 issue of The Art Bulletin, Michael Schreffler examines a key moment of cultural exchange and the misunderstandings to which it gave rise. Bravely departing from the consensus that Spanish conquistadors’ accounts of Aztec painting they saw at Antigua in 1519 constitute objective primary evidence about Aztec art, he offers instead a complex, nuanced, yet always clear explanation of what the accounts reveal about the colonizers and their subjective attitudes toward Aztec culture.

Art Journal Award
Joanna Grabski, “Urban Claims and Visual Sources in the Making of Dakar’s Art World City”
Joanna Grabski’s fascinating and ambitious essay, published in Art Journal in Spring 2009, is rich in first-hand information from her years of experience with the artists and institutions that make up this West African metropolis. Understanding the Senegalese capital as both site for innovative art practices, research, and international exchange, the author effectively demonstrates that in the hands of the city’s artists found objects have produced artworks and environments that meld their histories with languages of local form that reverberate with each other to piercing levels of impact.

CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
David Bomford
David Bomford, currently associate director for collections at the J. Paul Getty Museum, is celebrated for more than forty years of scholarship, practical application, and leadership in the field of paintings conservation. Beginning in 1968 as an assistant restorer at the National Gallery in London, he assumed the role of senior restorer by 1974, a position he held until 2005. In the course of his work, Bomford has advanced the study of art conservation to new levels by combining science, art history, and practical conservation knowledge in his extraordinary list of publications, and by spearheading the influential interdisciplinary study of technical art history. He wrote the single-most useful book for introducing both students and the public to the profession of paintings conservation, Conservation of Paintings (London: National Gallery Publications, 1997), which has become a standard reference guide for the discipline.

For more information on the 2010 Awards for Distinction, please contact Emmanuel Lemakis, CAA director of programs. Visit the Awards section of the CAA website to read about past awards recipients.

CAA is pleased to announce the finalists for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for 2010. The winners of both prizes, along with the recipients of other Awards for Distinction, will be announced in early January and presented in February during Convocation at the 2010 Annual Conference in Chicago.

The Charles Rufus Morey Book Award honors an especially distinguished book in the history of art, published in any language between September 1, 2008, and August 31, 2009. The four finalists are:

• Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009)
• Cammy Brothers, Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008)
• Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008)
• Shelley Perlove and Larry Silver, Rembrandt’s Faith: Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009)

The Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for museum scholarship is presented to the author(s) of an especially distinguished catalogue in the history of art, published between September 1, 2008, and August 31, 2009, under the auspices of a museum, library, or collection. The three finalists are:

• Andrea Bayer, ed., Art and Love in Renaissance Italy (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2008)
• Debra Diamond, Catherine Glynn, and Karni Singh Jasol, Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur (Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2008)
• Sarah Greenough, Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans” (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2009)

Convocation at the 2010 Annual Conference, which includes the awards ceremony, takes place on Wednesday evening, February 10, 5:30–7:00 PM, in Grand EF, East Tower, Gold Level, Hyatt Regency Chicago. The event is free and open to the public.

For more information about CAA’s Awards for Distinction, please contact Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs, at 212-691-1051, ext. 248.

The Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) has announced the recipients of the 2010 Lifetime Achievement Awards: Tritobia Hayes Benjamin, an educator and art historian from Washington, DC; Mary Jane Jacob, a curator and educator in Chicago; Senga Nengudi, an artist based in Colorado Springs; Joyce J. Scott, a visual and performance artist from Baltimore; and New York’s Spiderwoman Theater, comprising Lisa Mayo, Gloria Miguel, and Muriel Miguel.

These awards were first awarded in 1979 to Isabel Bishop, Selma Burke, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, and Georgia O’Keeffe in a ceremony at President Jimmy Carter’s Oval Office. Past honorees have represented the full range of distinguished achievement in the visual arts, and this year’s awardees are no exception, with considerable accomplishment, achievement, and contributions represented by their professional efforts.

Tritobia Hayes Benjamin

Tritobia Hayes Benjamin is professor of art history and director of the Gallery of Art at Howard University in Washington, DC, where she is also associate dean of the Division of Fine Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences. After receiving her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art history from Howard, she earned a PhD in the same subject from the University of Maryland. On the faculty of Howard since 1970, Benjamin has written and lectured widely on African American art and artists, including the 1994 publication, The Life and Art of Lois Mailou Jones.

Mary Jane Jacob

Mary Jane Jacob is a curator, educator, and author noted for her work on the national and international art scene. She currently serves as professor in the Department of Sculpture and executive of exhibitions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She began her curatorial career at the Detroit Institute of Arts in the late 1970s before becoming chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In the public realm, Jacobs has organized multiyear installations and commissioned outdoor sculptures in urban and park settings. She has also published numerous books and exhibition catalogues on contemporary art.

Senga Nengudi

Senga Nengudi is strongly committed to both creating art and arts education. Currently a lecturer at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs in the Visual Arts and Performing Arts Department, she has always been involved with bringing arts programs emphasizing diversity to the communities in which she resides. Presently Nengudi’s sculptures are taking the form of installations of increasing size. She has been a featured performance artist, dancer, and installation artists in numerous exhibitions at major museums.

Joyce J. Scott

A native of Baltimore, Joyce J. Scott is a highly internationally regarded artist whose work incorporates various artistic media, including sculpture, jewelry, glass, printmaking, installation, and performance art. Her pieces draw strong influence from a wide range of sources: African and Native American experiences, comic books, television, popular American culture, and the culture of the streets of her urban Baltimore neighborhood. The use of beads is a central element throughout Scott’s work, helping turn her works into bold statements about such issues as racism, sexism, violence, and other forms of social injustice.

Spiderwoman Theater (Lisa Mayo, Gloria Miguel, and Muriel Miguel)

Spiderwoman Theater was founded in 1976 when Muriel Miguel gathered a diverse company of women of varying ages, races, sexual orientations, and worldviews, which included her two sisters. As the oldest women’s theater company in North America and originally emerging from the feminist movement, Spiderwoman continues moving toward its goal of creating an artistic environment where indigenous arts and culture—the three are from the Kuna and Rappahannock nations—thrive as an integrated and vital part of the larger arts community. Taking its name from the Hopi creation goddess Spiderwoman, who taught the people to weave, the theater calls its technique of creating their theatrical pieces “story weaving,” in which performers write and present personal and traditional stories that are layered with movement, text, sound, music, and visual images.

Award Ceremony in Chicago

The Lifetime Achievement Awards will be held at the Chicago Cultural Center, 77 East Randolph Street, on Saturday, February 13, 2010, in conjunction with the WCA and CAA annual conferences (WCA is a CAA affiliated society). A dinner will be held from 6:30 to 7:30 PM in the center’s G.A.R. Hall. The awards ceremony will follow at 7:30 PM in the Cassidy Theater. Tickets for the dinner—$90 before January 1, 2010, and $100 after—will be available for purchase from the WCA website. Reserved seating tickets for the awards ceremony will also be available for $10; limited general-audience seating for the awards ceremony is free and available on a first-come, first-served basis—please arrive early. For more information about WCA, please contact Karin Luner, national administrator.

Recognize someone who has made extraordinary contributions to the fields of art and art history by nominating him or her for one of twelve CAA Awards for Distinction for 2010. Award juries consider your personal letters of recommendation when making their selections. In the letter, state who you are; how you know (of) the nominee; how the nominee and/or his or her work or publication has affected your practice or studies and the pursuit of your career; and why you think this person (or, in a collaboration, these people) deserves to be recognized. We also urge you to contact five to ten colleagues, students, peers, collaborators, and/or coworkers of the nominee to write letters. The different perspectives and anecdotes from multiple letters of nomination provide juries with a clearer picture of the qualities and attributes of the candidates.

All nomination campaigns should include one copy of the nominee’s CV (limit: two pages). Nominations for book and exhibition awards should be for authors of books published or works exhibited or staged between September 1, 2008, and August 31, 2009. No more than ten letters per candidate are considered. Visit the main Awards page for descriptions of all twelve awards and read the General Guidelines for details on submitting a name. You may also write to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs, for more information.

The deadline for nominations for the Morey and Barr awards—July 31, 2009—has just passed. The deadline for all other CAA awards is August 31, 2009.

Photo: Mary Heilmann accepts the 2009 Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work at the CAA Annual Conference in Los Angeles (photograph by Brad Marks)

Holland Cotter of the New York Times has received the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. It’s the first time in thirty-five years that an art critic has received the prestigious journalism award. The last Pulitzer for art criticism went to the late Emily Genauer of Newsday in 1974.

Since 1980 a number of art critics have been finalists, including, most recently, Sebastian Smee of the Boston Globe (2009); Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times (2007); and Jerry Saltz, then writing for the Village Voice (2006).

CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for individuals to serve for three years (2009–11) on juries for the Awards for Distinction. Terms begin in May 2009; award years are 2010–12. CAA’s twelve awards honor artists, art historians, authors, curators, critics, and teachers whose accomplishments transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.

Candidates must possess expertise appropriate to the jury’s work and be current CAA members. They should not be serving on another CAA committee or editorial board. CAA’s president and vice president for committees appoint jury members for service.

The following jury vacancies are filled later this spring:

• Charles Rufus Morey Book Award: three members
• Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award: one member
• Art Journal Award: one member
• Distinguished Teaching of Art Award: one member
• Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award: two members
• Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work: one member
• Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement: one member
• CAA/Heritage Preservation Award: one member

Nominations and self-nominations should include a brief statement (no more than 150 words) outlining the individual’s qualifications and experience and an abbreviated CV (no more than two pages). Please send all materials to: Vice President for Committees, c/o Lauren Stark, Manager of Programs, CAA, 275 Seventh Ave., 18th Floor, New York, NY 10001. Materials may also be sent to lstark@collegeart.org; all email submissions must be sent as Microsoft Word attachments. Deadline: April 20, 2009.