CAA News

CAA wishes to thank the artists, art historians, curators, critics, and educators who generously served as mentors in two Career Services programs at the 2011 Annual Conference in New York: the Artists’ Portfolio Review and Career Development Mentoring. The organization also thanks the leaders of the Roundtable Discussions, the presenters of the Professional Development Workshops, and the speakers at Orientation.

Artists’ Portfolio Review

Pam Aloisa, US Air Force Academy; Aaron Bible, Robischon Gallery; Michael Bzdak, Johnson & Johnson; Susan Canning, College of New Rochelle; Brian Curtis, University of Miami; Les Joynes, TransContemporary; Peter Kaniaris, Anderson University; Jason Lahr, University of Notre Dame; Julie Langsam, Rutgers University; Suzanne Lemakis, Citigroup; Sharon Lippman, Art Without Walls; Craig Lloyd, College of Mt. St. Joseph; Margaret Murphy, New Jersey City University; Judith Pratt, Judith Pratt Studio; Jeannene Przyblyski, San Francisco Art Institute; Habibur Rahman, Claflin University; John Silvis, New York Center for Art and Media Studies; Katherine Smith, Agnes Scott College; Steve Teczar, Maryville University; and Midori Yoshimoto, Jersey City University.

Career Development Mentoring

Edward A. Aiken, Syracuse University; Susan Altman, Middlesex County College; Michael Aurbach, Vanderbilt University; Roann Barris, Radford University; Ruth Bolduan, Virginia Commonwealth University; Jeffery Cote de Luna, Dominican University; Michelle Erhardt, Christopher Newport University; James Farmer, Virginia Commonwealth University; Reni Gower, Virginia Commonwealth University; Courtney Grim, Medaille College; Amy Hauft, Virginia Commonwealth University; Jim Hopfensperger, Western Michigan University; Simeon Hunter, Loyola University; Dennis Y. Ichiyama, Purdue University; Sue Johnson, St. Mary’s College of Maryland; Arthur Jones, University of North Dakota; Carol Krinsky, New York University; Seth McCormick, Western Carolina University; Heather McPherson, University of Alabama, Birmingham; Mark O’Grady, Pratt Institute; Morgan Paine, Florida Gulf Coast University; Pamela Patton, Southern Methodist University; Doralynn Pines, Metropolitan Museum of Art (emerita); Andrea Polli, University of New Mexico; David Raizman, Drexel University; Martin Rosenberg, Rutgers University; Paul Ryan, Mary Baldwin College; Betsy Schneider, Arizona State University; Gerald Silk, Tyler School of Art, Temple University; David Sokol, University of Illinois, Chicago (emeritus); Kim Theriault, Dominican University; Larry Thompson, Samford University; Ann Tsubota, Raritan Valley Community College; Jenifer K. Ward, Cornish College of the Arts; and Barbara Yontz, St. Thomas Aquinas College.

Roundtable Leaders

Susan Altman, Middlesex County College; Michael Aurbach, Vanderbilt University; John Silvis, New York Center for Art and Media Studies; and Annie V. F. Storr, Corcoran College of Art and Design.

Professional Development Workshops

Michael Aurbach, Vanderbilt University; Barbara Bernstein, Rhode Island School of Design and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; Steven Bleicher, Coastal Carolina University; Mika Cho, California State University, Los Angeles; Kim Potvin, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC; Susan Schear, ArtIsIn; and David M. Sokol, University of Illinois, Chicago (emeritus).

Orientation

Emmanuel Lemakis, College Art Association; Sheila Pepe, Pratt Institute; Harriet Senie, Graduate Center and City College, City University of New York; and David Sokol, University of Illinois, Chicago (emeritus).

With its Centennial in mind, CAA invites members to discuss the future of the organization in three conference forums. The Board of Directors is hosting two Strategic Plan Focus Group Discussions on Thursday and Friday mornings on topics in communication and career enhancement. A third opportunity, the Annual Members’ Business Meeting, takes place on late Friday afternoon.

Strategic Plan Focus Group Discussion Part I: Communication

This first Strategic Plan Focus Group Discussion, led by Sue Gollifer, CAA vice president for Annual Conference, will explore new forms of communication using innovative and improved technology. The session will take place on Thursday, February 10, 7:30 AM–9:00 AM in the Madison Suite, 2nd Floor, Hilton New York.

After presentations by invited participants, who will talk about new forms of CAA communication. The informal panel will be straightforward, quick moving, and guided in the spirit of conversation and sharing. Next, the floor will open to discussion, enabling CAA members to give their input and to raise concerns of their own. The ideas from this session will then feed the Annual Members’ Business Meeting (see below).

CAA’s Nia Page and Christopher Howard will talk about the organization’s traditional and digital communications, and Randall Griffin of Southern Methodist University and Paul Jaskot of DePaul University will discuss e-publishing. Two speakers on social media, Bonnie Mitchell of Bowling Green State University and Cora Lynn Deibler of the University of Connecticut, will close the introductory presentations. Andrea Kirsh, CAA vice president for external affairs, and Judith Thorpe of the University of Connecticut will also be present.

Strategic Plan Focus Group Discussion Part II: Career Enhancement

Jean Miller of the University of North Texas and a CAA board member will lead a conversation about how CAA can improve its advocacy efforts, career-development activities, and workforce issues in order to assist professional growth. The focus group takes place on Friday morning, February 11, 7:30–9:00 AM in Beekman Parlor, 2nd Floor, Hilton New York.

Participants include these leaders from leading nonprofits and arts organizations: Steve Bliss, a former board member of the Society for Photographic Education; Sally Block, executive director of the Association of Art Museum Curators; Michael Fahlund, CAA deputy director; Jim Hopfensperger, 2011 president of the National Council of Art Administrators; and Richard Grefe, AIGA executive director. Randall Griffin of CAA’s board will also be present.

Annual Members’ Business Meeting

CAA invites all members to attend the Annual Members’ Business Meeting, taking place on Friday, February 11, 2011, 5:30–7:00 PM in the Rendezvous Trianon Ballroom, Third Floor, Hilton New York. Barbara Nesin, CAA board president will lead the meeting and welcome discussion on new organizational business and projects in progress.

In addition, the meeting’s agenda will include summaries of ideas presented in the two Strategic Plan Focus Groups, a financial report from Teresa Lopez, CAA’s chief financial officer, and an update on the 2012 Annual Conference in Los Angeles from Ruth Weisberg. At the end of the meeting, Nesin will announce the results of the current board election. To celebrate CAA’s Centennial, a reception will follow the business meeting.

CAA has awarded five 2010–11 Professional-Development Fellowships in the Visual Arts to artists enrolled in MFA programs across the United States. The organization has also recognized the work of five additional artists with honorable mentions.

CAA will award each fellow a one-time grant of $5,000. The fellows and honorable mentions will also receive complimentary one-year CAA memberships and free registrations for the 2011 Annual Conference in New York. In addition, Barbara Nesin, president of the CAA Board of Directors, will formally introduce and recognize the ten artists during the presentation of the 2011 Awards for Distinction, which takes place on Thursday evening, February 10, 6:00–7:30 PM, in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

CAA will publish full profiles of all ten artists later this month, with images of their recent work. Initiated in 1993, the fellowship program helps student artists and art historians bridge the gap between their graduate studies and professional careers. It is open to all eligible graduate students in the visual arts.

2010–11 Fellows

Born in Honduras, Alma Leiva is an artist working in photography, film, and installation at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. In her latest series, Celdas (Prison Cells), she builds sets in her studio that she then photographs. These absurd constructions allude to the way in which citizens in Central American, where she often returns to reseach and work, have learned to subsist within violent societies. Her next project, a documentary, will focus on how individuals cope with loss and repression in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

An MFA student at the University of California, San Diego, Sheryl Oring investigates technology and its role in society through projects that incorporate old and new media. Her work tells stories, examines public opinion, encourages civic engagement, and creates platforms for public discussion. Formerly a journalist, Oring uses the tools of that trade––camera, typewriter, pen, interview and archive—to create concept-driven photographic and video installations, performances, artist’s books, and internet-based works.

Working in new media at the University of Illinois, Chicago, Brittany Ransom probes the relationships and differences among humans, animals, and the environment in the form of interactive sculpture, possible prosthetics, wearable recording devices, and digital manipulations. Her artwork invites technology—real and imagined—to heighten a viewer’s awareness of the existence and perspectives of the world from the point of view of other species.

Currently pursuing an MFA in documentary film and video at Stanford University in California, Mina T. Son makes films on an eclectic range of topics, offering a glimpse into underrepresented and rarely seen subjects and individuals. Her thesis film, a short observational film following two Korean students who attend the California School for the Deaf, explores how each navigates the complexities of adolescence and the transition to adulthood in both deaf and Korean cultures. Watch Son’s An Architect’s Vision online at KQED Media.

Amanda Valdez, an MFA student at Hunter College, City University of New York, uses fabric, scissors, a sewing machine, and a frame as ingredients for her current body of work, which she calls Fabric Paintings. Her approach grants her a recycling-based process of invention that plays with images and material from diverse sources. These works also combine her interests in craft and abstraction, encouraging an intimate relationship with shape and line between them while pushing these forms toward the edge of their frame.

Honorable Mentions

The jury also named five artists as honorable mentions: Maria Antelman, who studies photography and video at Columbia University’s School of Fine Arts in New York; Caetlynn Booth, a painter enrolled in the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey; Gregory Hayes, a painter pursuing an MFA at Brooklyn College, City University of New York; Ashley Lyon, an artist working in sculpture and extended media at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond; and Georgia Wall, who creates works in video and performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois.

Jury Members

The 2010–11 jury members are: Virginia Derryberry, professor of painting and drawing, University of North Carolina, Asheville; Dianna Frid, assistant professor in studio arts, School of Art and Design, University of Illinois, Chicago; Reni Gower, professor of art, Department of Painting and Printmaking, Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond; Dennis Y. Ichiyama, professor of art and design at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana; and Maria Ann Conelli, executive director of the American Folk Art Museum in New York. As CAA vice president of committees, Conelli is a nonvoting juror.

First image: Sheryl Oring, I Wish to Say, 2010, performance at the 01SJ Biennial in San Jose, California (artwork © Sheryl Oring)

Second image: Brittany Ransom, Only a Mother Could Love, 2008, digital manipulations, 5 x 7 in. (artwork © Brittany Ransom)

Today, CAA introduces a series of podcasts devoted to professional-development topics for artists. Evolving from the National Professional-Development Workshops for Artists and now produced in tandem with them, the series will continue throughout the year, with new audio to be added on a regular basis. While the initial focus is on artists, CAA hopes to develop podcasts for art historians, curators, nonprofit art professionals, and other constituencies in the future.

To download an mp3 file, please visit the Podcasts section and right click or control click on the podcast icon or title. To stream the audio, click the podcast icon or title; the audio will open in a new tab or window.

CAA is committed to assisting its members through a variety of means and at various stages in their careers. The podcasts join CAA’s other Career Services programs, which include workshops and mentoring sessions for artists and scholars at the Annual Conference, fellowships for graduate students, professional Standards and Guidelines, and the Online Career Center.

The Career Services Guide is designed to inform job seekers and employers about career services at the 2011 Annual Conference in New York. The publication, which will help you navigate Career Services events and provides answers to frequently asked questions, is available now as a PDF. Study this guide carefully so that you will know what to expect from conference interviewing and how best to prepare for a successful experience.

Job candidates can review the basics of the conference employment search. Read about Orientation, the introduction to Career Services where you can ask questions, and the Candidate Center, your home base at the conference. Also, learn more about the Online Career Center, where you can search for position listings, post application materials, and arrange interviews. The guide includes tips for improving your CV, portfolio, and supplemental application materials.

Employers will find details in the guide for renting interview booths or tables as well as recommendations for posting jobs and conducting interviews at the conference. You can begin preparations now for Career Services through the Online Career Center or onsite at the Interviewer Center.

The Career Services Guide will also be handed out at Orientation and in the Candidate Center. All conference Career Services will take place at the Hilton New York. For more information about job searching, professional-development workshops, and more, visit the Career Services section of the conference website.

At its May 2010 meeting, the CAA Board of Directors approved a resolution that updates the Standards for Retention and Tenure of Art Historians. Submitted by Anne Collins Goodyear, vice president for publications, the addendum urges academic tenure-and-promotions committees to consider and evaluate museum publications when making their deliberations. Exhibition catalogues, the resolution notes, may be published by an academic press or museum, or in association with a nonacademic press.

The following paragraphs, which are part of the addendum, provide background for the resolution:

During the past ten years, while academic publishing has been shrinking dramatically, museum publishing has flourished, moving to the forefront as the venue for much substantial scholarship in our field.

Museum exhibition and collection catalogues are not, by and large, peer-reviewed in the traditional sense. The long lead times required for blind peer review do not accommodate the tight schedules of most exhibition catalogues, which must appear when shows open. Yet exhibition catalogues do undergo a form of peer review. Though not blind, it is thorough, as the collaborative curatorial teams that produce exhibition catalogues, and museums’ editorial departments and consultants, carefully evaluate the scholarship contained within, striving to ensure that it is accurate and of the highest possible quality.

In the past, one argument lodged against exhibition catalogues has been that the essays can vary in quality. Some essays in exhibition catalogues—at times in the same catalogue—contain original, important scholarship, while others can be included for political reasons, perhaps to secure certain loans or financial contributions essential to the successful mounting of a show. In fact, this situation is not fundamentally different from scholarship published in festschrifts, anthologies, or other non-museum collections of scholarly essays. It is not unusual for some authors in such publications to be included for practical, rather than scholarly, reasons. Yet this does not disqualify every essay in these publications from being considered in tenure decisions.

Helen Evans of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Lucy Oakley of the Grey Art Gallery at New York University authored the proposal, with input from the Publications Committee. The Professional Practices Committee, which reviews new and revised Standards and Guidelines, endorsed the proposal, which the board then passed.

The addendum has been added to Standards for Retention and Tenure of Art Historians and joins updates made in 2005 and 2007. CAA encourages you to review all official Standards and Guidelines for professionals in the visual arts.

Space One Eleven in Birmingham, Alabama, will present the next CAA National Professional-Development Workshop for Artists on Saturday, November 20, 2010, from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM. The one-day event, called “Professionalizing and Enhancing Your Art Practice,” will concentrate on career-building skills for both emerging and established artists.

In the morning session, Larry Jens Anderson of the Savannah College of Art and Design will guide participants through the ins and outs of producing bios, résumés, and artist’s statements for job applications and gallery presentations. Leading an afternoon panel of artists and professors, Erin Wright of the University of Alabama in Birmingham will discuss such topics as “Getting into Galleries,” “Marketing and Marketing Yourself,” “Pricing Your Work,” and “Social Media.”

A light breakfast and lunch are included for participants, and a postworkshop reception will take place from 4:00 to 5:30 PM.

Registration for the workshop is first-come, first-served; seating is limited. The investment is $20 for students, seniors, and CAA members; $30 for all others. Stipends are available; contact Susan Schear, CAA national workshop project consultant, at 973-482-1000. You may pay by credit card or PayPal. Please make checks payable to College Art Association and mail to: Linda DeRocher, CAA Workshops, Space One Eleven, 2409 2nd Avenue North, Birmingham, AL 35203.

CAA’s National Professional-Development Workshops for Artists, sustained by a generous grant from the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, focus on supporting visual artists in underserved areas. The Birmingham workshop concludes CAA’s program for 2009–10.

As a CAA member, you have special access to a diverse range of mentors at Career Services during the 2011 Annual Conference in New York. All emerging, midcareer, and even advanced arts professionals can benefit from one-on-one discussions with dedicated mentors about the presentation of your artwork in digital and physical portfolios, career-management skills, and professional strategies for seeking a job in academia and the art world.

You may enroll in either the Artists’ Portfolio Review or Career Development Mentoring—please choose one. Both sessions are offered free of charge, and conference registration, while encouraged, is not necessary to participate.

Artists’ Portfolio Review

The Artists’ Portfolio Review offers CAA members the opportunity to have digital images or DVDs of their work reviewed by curators and critics in personal twenty-minute consultations. You may bring battery-powered laptops; wireless internet, however, is not available in the room. Sessions are filled by appointment only and are scheduled for Thursday, February 10, and Friday, February 11, 8:00 AM–NOON and 1:00–5:00 PM each day.

All applicants must be current CAA members. Participants are chosen by a lottery of applications received by the deadline; all applicants are notified by email. To apply, download and complete the Artists’ Portfolio Review Enrollment Form, or fill out the form in the 2011 Conference Information and Registration booklet, which will be mailed to CAA members in mid-October. Send the completed form by email to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs; by fax to 212-627-2381; or by mail to: Artists’ Portfolio Review, CAA, 275 Seventh Ave., 18th Floor, New York, NY 10001. Deadline: January 7, 2011.

Career Development Mentoring

Artists, art historians, art educators, and museum professionals at all stages of their careers may apply for one-on-one consultations with veterans in their fields. In personal twenty-minute sessions, Career Development Mentoring offers a unique opportunity for participants to receive candid advice on how to conduct a thorough job search, present work (cover letters, CVs, digital images, etc.), and prepare for interviews. Sessions are filled by appointment only and are scheduled for Thursday, February 11, and Friday, February 12, 8:00 AM–NOON and 1:00–5:00 PM each day.

All applicants must be current CAA members. Participants are chosen by a lottery of applications received by the deadline; all applicants are notified by email. To apply, download and complete the Career Development Enrollment Form, or fill out the form in the 2011 Conference Information and Registration booklet, which will be mailed to CAA members in mid-October. Send the completed form by email to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs; by fax to 212-627-2381; or by mail to: Career Development Mentoring, CAA, 275 Seventh Ave., 18th Floor, New York, NY 10001. Deadline: January 7, 2011.

Image: Career Development Mentoring at the 2008 Annual Conference in Dallas–Fort Worth (photograph by Teresa Rafidi)

Eager to serve CAA members and curious about the possibility of a new source for earned revenue, CAA recently formed a Task Force on Practical Publications. A committed group of educators, administrators, and staff members has begun studying a potential program devoted to practical publications.

For several years, CAA has considered publishing slim books of an instructional nature devoted to the practical issues so many members face. Questions these publications might address include: What options do scholars have for online publishing? How does someone lead a dual studio-art and art-history department as chair? If I am faced with teaching Baroque or Abstract Expressionism for the first time and it is not my expertise, how do I best tackle this unfamiliar terrain? CAA members confront these and similar problems so often. And we regularly invent ways to resolve them. A program of pragmatic publications that share good solutions or best practices at a modest cost might be a great boon to the field, or so CAA leaders and staff have imagined for some time.

Such programs are already in place at many learned societies, and revenue from sales creates a vital source of organizational income. As CAA maneuvers through a still-unsteady economic climate, it must continue developing new sources of support—earned and contributed—to thrive as an organization. In this context, the Task Force on Practical Publications developed.

This summer, the task force offered an online survey that queried the membership about the perceived viability of this prospective program, as well as a host of related questions. About six percent of CAA members participated, a number within the range of reasonable expectation. A healthy 85 percent of respondents believed that CAA members would purchase this kind of publication, if available, and 65 percent said that they would buy such publications for their own use. Both statistics are impressive, given that people made a positive judgment sight unseen. The responses are also constructive in giving CAA a clearer picture of what needs to be done.

You will learn more about the discoveries and recommendations of the Task Force on Practical Publications on the CAA website in the months to come. Please stay tuned!

Patricia McDonnell is director of the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University in Kansas and chair of the Task Force on Practical Publications.

For the 2011 Annual Conference in New York, CAA seeks established professionals in the visual arts to volunteer as mentors for two Career Services programs: the Artists’ Portfolio Review and Career Development Mentoring. Participating as a mentor is an excellent way to serve the field and assist the professional growth of the next generation of artists and scholars.

Artists’ Portfolio Review

The Artists’ Portfolio Review provides an opportunity for artists to have digital images or DVDs of their work critiqued by professionals in the visual arts. CAA member artists are paired with a critic, curator, or educator for twenty-minute appointments. Whenever possible, artists are matched with mentors based on medium or discipline. Mentors provide an important service to artists, enabling them to receive professional criticism of their work. Art historians and studio artists must be tenured; critics, museum educators, and curators must have five years’ experience. Curators and educators must have current employment with a museum or university gallery.

Interested candidates must be current CAA members and willing to provide at least five successive twenty-minute critiques in a two-hour period on one of the two days of the review: Thursday, February 10, and Friday, February 11, 8:00 AM–NOON and 1:00–5:00 PM each day. Conference registration, while encouraged, is not required to be a mentor. Please send your CV and a brief letter of interest to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs. Deadline: December 3, 2010.

Career Development Mentoring

CAA seeks mentors from all areas of art history, studio art, art education, film and video, graphic design, the museum professions, and other related fields to serve in Career Development Mentoring. In this program, mentors give valuable advice to emerging and midcareer professionals, reviewing cover letters, CVs, digital images, and other pertinent job-search materials in twenty-minute sessions.

Interested candidates must be current CAA members and prepared to give five successive twenty-minute critiques in a two-hour period on one of the two days of the session: Thursday, February 10, and Friday, February 11, 8:00 AM–NOON and 1:00–5:00 PM each day. Conference registration, while encouraged, is not required to be a mentor. Art historians and studio artists must be tenured; critics, museum educators, and curators must have five years’ experience. Curators and educators must have current employment with a museum or university gallery.

Career Development Mentoring is not intended as a screening process by institutions seeking new hires. Applications are not accepted from individuals whose departments are conducting a faculty search in the field in which they are mentoring. Mentors should not be attending the conference as candidates for positions in the same field in which mentoring participants may be applying. Please send your CV and a brief letter of interest to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs. Deadline: December 3, 2010.