CAA News

The information on this page has been updated. Please visit the main directories page for the most up-to-date information.

This fall CAA will publish new editions of Graduate Programs in Art History and Graduate Programs in the Visual Arts. As comprehensive resources of schools across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, the guides list over 650 programs in fine art and design, art and architectural history, curatorial studies, arts administration, and more.

Prospective graduate students will find everything they need to know before beginning the application process. The directories are also key professional references for career-services representatives, department chairs, graduate and undergraduate advisors, librarians, professional-practices educators, and professors interested in helping emerging generations of artists and scholars find success.

Graduate Programs in Art History covers four disciplines: Art History, Curatorial and Museum Studies, Arts Administration, and Library Science. This directory integrates programs in visual studies and architectural history into Art History. Similarly, Graduate Programs in the Visual Arts comprises four areas: Studio Art and Design, Art Education, Film Production, and Conservation and Historic Preservation. Studio Art and Design combines programs in fine art with those in graphic, industrial, and object design.

Organized alphabetically by school name within each discipline noted above, entries describe curricula, class size, faculty specializations, admission and degree requirements, library and studio facilities, opportunities for fellowships and assistantships, and more. Readers can draw important conclusions from these facts, such as the competitiveness of a program based on the amount of applications received and accepted. Need health insurance or housing while in school? Many programs provide details about what they offer.

The directories are available in multiple print and digital formats, as books, ebooks, and downloadable PDFs. The complete volumes of each directory are only available in print.

Print

The complete Graduate Programs in Art History and Graduate Programs in the Visual Arts cost $41 each for CAA members and $51 for nonmembers, plus shipping and handling.

You can also order all entries within five of the eight disciplines as discrete perfect-bound, soft-cover books. The prices below do not include shipping and handling:

Art History: $22
Art Education: $18
Curatorial and Museums Studies: $16
Film Production: $15

The three remaining disciplines—Arts Administration, Library Science, and Conservation and Historic Preservation—are available only as ebooks and cannot be ordered as discipline-specific books.

Individuals can order both directories and the discipline-specific books through the CAA website (link forthcoming). If you are ordering for a school, institution, or department within a college or university, please download the PDF form (forthcoming) and return the completed version with payment to Roberta Lawson, CAA office coordinator, who will ship the directories to you within two business days of your purchase.

Ebooks

All entries within a particular discipline may be ordered as single ebooks. After placing your order on the CAA website, you will receive an email with a link(s) to the ebook(s). Each ebook can be downloaded a limited number of times and will be compatible with your personal computer and most smart phones and ereaders (excluding Kindles).

You can also order all entries within five of the eight disciplines as ebooks:

Art History: $22
Art Education: $18
Curatorial and Museums Studies: $16
Film Production: $15
Studio Art and Design: $26

Ebooks of all entries in Arts Administration, Library Science, and Conservation and Historic Preservation are priced as follows:

Arts Administration: $14
Conservation and Historic Preservation: $14
Library Science: $12

Ebooks can only be ordered through the CAA website (link forthcoming).

Sets of Entries

Individuals can search the directories by discipline, faculty specialization, country, region, state, degree type, and availability of health insurance via the CAA website and download PDFs of entries from either or both directories for $2 per entry (up to twenty entries). Upon ordering the entries, you will receive an email with a link to a single PDF containing the entries you have selected.

Contact

Questions about ordering? Please contact Roberta Lawson, CAA office coordinator, at 212-392-4404.

CAA’s two Directories of Graduate Programs in the Arts, covering MA, MFA, and PhD programs in art and art history, are now on sale: $15 for CAA members and $20 for nonmembers, plus $4 shipping.

Published in late 2008 and early 2009, the directories remain the most comprehensive resources available for prospective graduate students in the visual arts, listing hundreds of programs in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere worldwide. CAA will introduce revised, online versions of the directories in fall 2011, with a price to be determined.

The directories come in two volumes, each sold separately: Graduate Programs in Art History includes art history, visual studies, museum studies, curatorial studies, arts administration, and library science; and Graduate Programs in the Visual Arts comprises studio art, graphic design, applied arts and design, film production, art education, and conservation. An index lists schools alphabetically and by state and country for quick reference. An introductory essay presents a detailed description of the elements of a program entry, including explanations of the various kinds of programs and degrees offered, helping place your search and selection process in context.

CAA accepts online purchases from individuals only. If you are ordering on behalf of a school, department, library, museum, or other institution, please download and complete this form and submit it via mail or fax to: CAA, 275 Seventh Ave., 18th Floor, New York, NY 10001; 212-627-2381.

Updated on February 23, 2011.

Earlier this year, the Coalition on the Academic Workforce (CAW) published an issue brief estimating 72.5 percent of all faculty members at American colleges and universities are contingent, that is, they do not have tenure or are not on the tenure track. Since no comprehensive national data exist for pay scales, benefits, working conditions, and involvement in departmental decision-making—let alone specifics on academic-based artists and art historians, and for university museum researchers—this figure cannot be verified.

For this reason, CAW has developed a Survey of Contingent Faculty Members and Instructors, which will examine compensation and working conditions, among other issues, at the institutional and course levels. The goal of the survey, which is live from September 27 to November 30, 2010, is to gather accurate information so that CAW may advocate more effectively at the local and national level.

As an active CAW member, CAA supports workforce equity through its Standards and Guidelines, advocacy efforts, and data compilation, and it urges all contingent faculty, instructors, and researchers to complete this survey and to alert others to do the same.

Open to full- and part-time teachers, graduate students (remunerated as teaching assistants or employed in other roles), researchers, and postdoctoral fellows, the survey is an excellent opportunity for CAW to count contingent faculty properly and record their working conditions. Survey results will be shared with you once they are compiled. This information will also contribute to a national database that will assist future advocacy work.

CAA specifically requested that the survey include distinct categories for artists, art historians, and related researchers, so that the visual arts will be fully represented. On an individual level, the conclusions drawn may help determine your working conditions in relation to national trends. Results will also inform specific CAA Contingent Faculty Standards and Guidelines, as well as future advocacy by CAA on your behalf.

Take the Survey of Contingent Faculty Members and Instructors now. If you have questions about it or about CAW, please contact Linda Downs, CAA executive director.

Read reactions to the survey in Inside Higher Ed.

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.

Space 4 Art will present a CAA National Professional-Development Workshop for Artists on Saturday, October 2, 2010, from 8:30 AM to 5:30 PM. The full-day event, called “The Nuts and Bolts of Professionalizing Your Art Practice,” will concentrate on career-building skills for both emerging and established artists. The San Diego Foundation is cosponsoring the workshop.

Presenters from the San Diego and Los Angeles areas will conduct the workshop, which includes these topics: “It’s All about You”; “Marketing Yourself to Market Your Art”; “Show Me the Money”; and “Getting Your House in Order to Do Business.” Karen Atkinson, an artist, curator, collaborator, and founder of GYST, will offer a lunch keynote on “Hybrid Careers.”

A light breakfast and lunch are included for participants, and a postworkshop reception will take place from 5:00 to 6:00 PM.

Registration for the workshop is first-come, first-served. The investment is $15 for students, seniors, and CAA members; $25 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: CAA Workshops, Space 4 Art, 325 15th Street, San Diego, CA 92101.

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. Three additional workshops are scheduled for this fall in Portland, Albuquerque, and Birmingham.

Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts produces a curated list, called CWA Picks, of recommended exhibitions and events related to feminist art and scholarship from North America and around the world.

The CWA Picks for September 2010 include “Heritage and Hope,” an international symposium on women in higher education, with a focus on the global, to be held at Bryn Mawr College from September 23 to 25. Four special exhibitions on view this month—featuring women Pop artists, the photographer Catherine Opie, female artists from the Hudson River School, and women’s contributions to Fluxus—round out the selections for this month.

Check out past CWA Picks archived at the bottom of the page, as exhibitions highlighted in previous months are often still on view.

The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque will host a CAA National Professional-Development Workshop for Artists on Saturday, October 9, 2010, from 8:00 AM to 5:30 PM. The full-day event, called “Professionalizing Your Art Practice,” will concentrate on career-building skills for both emerging and established artists.

Preceded by a keynote address from the art historian Libby Lumpkin on “The Changing Climate of the Art World,” the workshop will include these topics, each one hour in length: “CV/Résumé/Artist Statement Preparation”; “Creating a Digital Portfolio”; “Social Media: Facebook and Twitter”; and “Marketing/Self-Promotion/Networking.” A panel discussion on “Getting into Galleries” will conclude the presentations.

Registration for the workshop is first-come, first-served. The investment is $25 for students and CAA members; $40 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: Dept. of Art and Art History, MSC04 2560, 1 University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131.

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. Three additional workshops are scheduled for this fall in Portland, San Diego, and Birmingham.

Over the last decade, artists and educators have become acutely aware of the environmental and health repercussions of their studio endeavors. How have the serious consequences for personal health and the environment, as well as the legal and ethical responsibilities of institutions of higher education, shaped individual studio practice and the teaching of visual art? This session will examine the wide-ranging responses of artists working today and offer practical solutions for artists to safely create work without sacrificing their vision. We invite proposals for twenty-minute presentations about individual experiences, personal or institutional, dealing with these pressing matters.

This session will be part of ARTspace at the 2011 CAA Annual Conference in New York. Initiated in 2001, ARTspace has grown into one of the most vital and exciting aspects of the annual meeting, with programming is designed by artists for artists that is free and open to the public. Working in tandem with its affiliated programs, the Media Lounge and ARTexchange, ARTspace promotes dialogue about visual-arts practice, its relation to critical discourse, professional-development programming, and opportunities for the creative exchange of ideas.

Interested parties should submit a one-hundred-word abstract and a fifty-word autobiography in a single Word document to session cochairs Brian Bishop and Mark Gottsegen. Deadline: October 1, 2010.

The next editions of CAA’s two directories of graduate programs in the arts will be published in an online format in fall 2011. First printed in December 2008 and January 2009 and still available for purchase, the CAA directories are the most comprehensive source books for graduate education for artists and art scholars, with program information for hundreds of schools, departments, and programs in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and elsewhere worldwide. Colleges, universities, and independent art schools are all included.

The pricing structure for the 2011 online editions has not yet been determined. Each current volume costs $49.95—$39.95 for CAA members—plus shipping and handling. You may order them online.

Graduate Programs in Art History includes programs in art history and visual studies, museum studies, curatorial studies, arts administration, library science, and related areas. Graduate Programs in the Visual Arts describes programs in studio art, graphic design, digital media, art education, conservation, historic preservation, film production, and more.

For more information, please send an email to directories@collegeart.org.

The Oregon College of Art and Craft in Portland will host a CAA National Professional-Development Workshop for Artists on Saturday, September 25, 2010. The full-day event, called “Marketing and Entrepreneurship for Artists: Maximizing Your Practice,” will concentrate on career-building skills for both emerging and established artists. Workshop cosponsors are two other local institutions: the Pacific Northwest College of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Craft.

Presenters from the region will conduct the workshop, which offers two options for morning and afternoon sessions. In the morning, participants can choose either “Marketing 101: Getting Started” or “Entrepreneurship 101: Taking Personal and Direct Control of Your Business.” In the afternoon, “Marketing 201: Thinking outside the Box” and “Entrepreneurship 201: The Company Perspective” will be offered.

A light breakfast and lunch for participants are included, and a postworkshop reception will take place from 4:00 to 6:00 PM.

Registration for the workshop is first-come, first-served. The investment for students, alumni, seniors, and CAA members is $15; $25 for all others. Stipends are available; contact Susan Schear, CAA national workshop project consultant, at 973-482-1000. You may pay by credit card at www.ocac.edu/caa. Please make checks payable to College Art Association and mail to: Oregon College of Art and Craft, Attn: CAA Registration, 8245 SW Barnes Rd., Portland, OR 97225.

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. Three additional workshops are scheduled this fall in San Diego, Albuquerque, and Birmingham.