CAA News

CAA has received a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to support the next ARTspace, taking place during the 101st Annual Conference in New York, February 13–16, 2013.

The grant, which is the NEA’s fourth consecutive award to CAA for ARTspace programming, will help fund, among other things, ARTexchange, a popular open-portfolio event for artists, as well as [Meta] Mentors programming, which has covered topics such as do-it-yourself curatorial and exhibition practices, international networks for artists, and assistance with grants, taxes, and promotion.

Designed to engage CAA’s artist members and the general public, ARTspace offers program sessions free of charge and includes diverse activities such the Annual Artists’ Interviews, screenings of film, video, and multimedia works, live performances, and papers and presentations that facilitate a conversational yet professional exchange of ideas and practices. Held at each conference since 2001, ARTspace is intended to reflect the current state of the visual arts and arts education.

Image: Art in Odd Places and Performance Exchange sponsored performances outside the Los Angeles Convention Center as part of ARTspace’s Art in the Public Realm, a daylong event at the 2012 Annual Conference (photograph by Bradley Marks)

Janet Landay is project manager of the CAA International Travel Grant Program.

Last February, twenty art historians and curators from eighteen countries around the world attended the 2012 Annual Conference in Los Angeles through the CAA International Travel Grant Program, a new initiative that was generously funded by the Getty Foundation. For many grant recipients, this visit was their first to the United States, and for most of them it was their first time at the CAA conference.

By coincidence, on the conference’s opening day, the Los Angeles Convention Center held two swearing-in ceremonies for twenty thousand new citizens and their guests, welcoming people from several nations to the US. Indeed, the CAA group felt like a miniature United Nations, and it was equally moving to see colleagues arrive at the conference from countries around the world. Participants included: Ganna Rudyck (Ukraine), Irena Kossowska (Poland), Pavlina Morganová (Czech Republic), Dóra Sallay and Gyöngyvér Horváth (Hungary), Cristian Nae (Romania), Daniel Premerl (Croatia), Malvina Rousseva (Bulgaria), Salam Atta Sabri (Iraq), Angela Harutyunyan (Lebanon), Nadhra Shahbaz Naeem Khan (Pakistan), Parul Pandya Dhar (India), Jageth Weerasinghe (Sri Lanka), Shao-Chien Tseng (Taiwan), Olabisi Silva (Nigeria), Didier Houenoude (Benin), Jean Celestin Ky (Burkina Faso), Federico Freschi and Judy Peter (South Africa), and Rosa Gabriella de Castro Gonçalves (Brazil). Read more about the recipients, their home institutions, and their areas of interest.

The purpose of this initiative was to encourage greater participation from countries not well represented at CAA’s Annual Conference in order to bring a more diverse and global perspective to the study of art history. The Getty travel-grant participants, as they became known, were selected by a jury of CAA members from among 150 applicants based on three general criteria: all had to be professors of art history, artists who teach art history, or museum curators with advanced degrees in art or art history; they had to work in a country where art history is an emerging discipline; and they needed to explain how attending the conference would significantly support or strengthen their work.

To welcome the participants and to ensure that they got the most out of the conference’s abundant offerings, members of CAA’s International Committee and representatives from the National Committee for the History of Art (NCHA) volunteered to act as hosts. CAA warmly thanks these members for their service as hosts: Ann Albritton, Frederick M. Asher (NCHA chair), Kathryn Brown, Nicola M. Courtright, Diane Derr, Stephanie Dickey, Thomas W. Gaehtgens, Paul B. Jaskot, Geraldine A. Johnson, Jennifer Milam (International Committee chair), Steven Nelson, Nada Shabout, and Beth A. Steffel.

This wonderful aspect of the program revolved around informal dinners, lunches, and drinks, in which both participants and hosts could trade stories and share information about the ins and outs of practicing art history in their respective countries. Two roundtable meetings brought everyone together to meet CAA staff, providing opportunities for assessment and reflection on the various aspects of the conference program. Equally stimulating were the friendships made among the participants, as they learned about each other and discovered shared interests and challenges. Now, nearly two months later, a number of grant recipients have already begun to collaborate on research and teaching projects, with ambitious plans in the works.

In the coming months, CAA will publish online interviews with several participants and report on their collaborative work as it unfolds. Stay tuned to future issues of CAA News for these special announcements.

Top image: Participants in the CAA International Travel Grant Programs (from left): Shao-Chien Tseng, Salam Atta Sabri, Olabisi Silva, Jean Celestin Ky, Pavlina Morganová, Dóra Sallay, Federico Freschi, Judy Peter, Didier Houenoude, Rosa Gabriella de Castro Gonçalves, Daniel Premerl, Angela Harutyunyan, Malvina Rousseva, Cristian Nae, Ganna Rudyck, Irena Kossowska, Parul Pandya Dhar, Jageth Weerasinghe, and Nadhra Shahbaz Naeem Khan; Gyöngyvér Horváth is not pictured (photograph by Katie Underwood and provided by the Getty Foundation)

Middle image: Ganna Rudyck from Ukraine introduces herself to fellow grant recipients (photograph by Bradley Marks)

Bottom image: Among the grant recipients were (from left): Shao-Chien Tseng from Taiwan, Didier Houenoude from Benin, and Jean Celestin Ky from Burkina Faso (photograph by Bradley Marks)

CAA is accepting applications for spring 2012 grants through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to a generous bequest by the late art historian Millard Meiss, the twice-yearly program supports book-length scholarly manuscripts in any period of the history of art and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher but require further subsidy to be published in the fullest form.

The publisher, rather than the author, must submit the application to CAA. Awards are made at the discretion of the jury and vary according to merit, need, and number of applications. Awardees are announced six to eight weeks after the deadline. For complete guidelines, application forms, and a grant description, please visit the Meiss section of the CAA website or write to publications@collegeart.org. Deadline: April 1, 2012.

CAA has awarded seven 2012 Professional-Development Fellowships, five in the visual arts and two in art history, to graduate students in MFA and PhD programs across the United States and in England. In addition, CAA has named four honorable mentions in art history and three in the visual arts. Each fellow receives a one-time grant of $5,000. The fellows and honorable mentions also receive complimentary one-year CAA memberships and free registration for the 2012 Annual Conference in Los Angeles.

Barbara Nesin, president of the CAA Board of Directors, will formally recognize the fellows and honorable mentions at the conference during the presentation of the 2012 Awards for Distinction on Thursday February 23, 12:30–2:00 PM in West Hall Meeting Room 502 AB, Level 2, Los Angeles Convention Center.

Initiated in 1993, CAA’s fellowship program supports promising artists and art historians who are enrolled in MFA and PhD programs nationwide. Awards are intended to help them with various aspects of their work, whether for job-search expenses or purchasing materials for the studio. CAA believes a grant of this kind, without contingencies, can best facilitate the transition between graduate studies and professional careers. The program is open to all eligible graduate students in the visual arts and art history. Applications for the 2013 fellowships will open in May 2012.

Selin Balci

Selin Balci, an installation and bioartist based in Washington, DC, received a bachelor of science degree from Istanbul University in Turkey and a BFA from West Virginia University in Morgantown. She is in her final semester at the University of Maryland in College Park, where she is pursuing an MFA degree in studio arts.

Balci applies her knowledge of scientific laboratory practices to create her process-based work. Focused on interactions and transformations, she is constantly discovering and combining nontraditional art media and materials, such as living organisms, in her work. She has received multiple awards, including the Anne Truitt MFA Scholarship, a Vermont Studio Residency Artist Award, and a Jacob K. Goldhaber Travel Grant from the University of Maryland Graduate School. Most recently she was awarded a fellowship from the Hamiltonian Gallery in Washington, DC. Balci’s work has been exhibited at national and international venues, such as the Scope Art Fair in Miami, Florida,in 2010 and in the “Mind the Gap” project in Istanbul during ISEA 2011 Istanbul.

 

Susanna Berger

Susanna Berger’s research explores the functions of art in the transmission and organization of knowledge in early modern Europe. In her dissertation, “The Art of Philosophy: Early-Modern Illustrated Thesis Prints, Broadsides, and Student Notebooks,” which she is completing at the University of Cambridge in England, she studies the uses of art in philosophy education and academic ceremony in seventeenth-century Paris, Rome, and Leuven. In particular, Berger focuses on engraved broadsides that represent logic and natural philosophy through the synthesis of text and image. By examining class notebooks in which images illustrating philosophical concepts are interpolated with handwritten lecture notes, she considers how students created and employed drawings and prints.

Berger is a 2011–13 Samuel H. Kress Fellow via the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, as well as Kathleen Bourne Junior Research Fellow at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. She has published and forthcoming articles in the Gutenberg-Jahrbuch and the British Art Journal. Berger has held a Frances A. Yates Research Fellowship at the Warburg Institute of the University of London; an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California; and research grants from the Burlington Magazine Foundation and the Renaissance Society of America.

Julie Casper Roth

Julie Casper Roth is a video artist and filmmaker at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Her work focuses primarily on issues of identity and perception. Currently the artist is working on a video installation about the effects of Mormonism on gender and sexuality, inspired by her personal experience as a lesbian and former Mormon. The installation, which will both reflect and critique Mormon beliefs and practices, has received a research grant from the University at Albany’s Graduate Student Organization to support its development. Additionally, Casper Roth is developing a feature-length film about autism and identity, which will present autism spectrum disorders as the next stage in human evolution and grapple with issues of normalcy in human society. Her prior work has also focused on identity in relation to mental health, sexuality, and perception.

Casper Roth received her BA in American studies from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. After working as a video artist and as a professional broadcast producer, she enrolled in the graduate art program at Albany, where she is completing her MFA. Casper Roth received a fellowship in video from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2008 and has won festival and grant awards for her work in experimental video.

James Coquia

James Coquia creates work in ceramic and sculpture with an emphasis on the figure and the ritualized vessel. He received a dual degree in these disciplines from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, where he concentrated on learning the intricacies of the ceramic wood-firing process and foundry. He is currently enrolled in the MFA program at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco.

When Coquia began the program at CCA, he set several parameters to help foster creative growth. His goal was to step away from the established rules and materials of art making, using only materials that were readily available, and thus expanding his conception of and perspective on what defines art. Coquia perpetually explores how every aspect of a life lived creatively can be considered and incorporated into an artistic practice. He looks for beauty where there typically is none, mining it in refuse, residues, and the useless. He is drawn to the anomalous and the uncanny, ugly things and the timeworn. The objects he generates are sympathetically linked to temporality and flux, and his work speaks to process and offers an alternate window into what it means to inhabit this body, this time, and this place.

Claudia Mastrobuono

Claudia Mastrobuono’s involvement with three-dimensional form began when she was young. Growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, her father owned a jewelry factory, and she and her sister began working with him at an early age, mastering the stamping, soldering, and polishing processes used in the design and creation of jewelry. Mastrobuono’s interest in metal work took her to the industrial-design program at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York, where she studied form, function, ergonomics, materials, and processes, and also the philosophy and ethics of design.

After leaving Syracuse, she moved to Boston and began working odd jobs, which led her to start a freelance upholstery design business called Jane of All Trades. During this time she accepted a teaching position in the fashion merchandising and marketing program at Mount Ida College in Newton, Massachusetts. Mastrobuono began teaching a class in home furnishings and was soon asked to lead an introductory class on textiles and a handwork studio, which included knitting and embroidery. This experience encouraged her to apply to graduate school and pursue a profession as a fine artist and teacher.

Mastrobuono will receive her MFA in ceramics from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, in May 2012. Using the dynamics of emotional relationships as the basis for her work, she illustrates the coping mechanisms that humans use to deal with their insecurities. Her pairing of anthropomorphic clay forms with mixed-media support systems speaks to the vulnerability and desperation that can occur within the self.

Ander Mikalson

Ander Mikalson is an artist working in performance, sound, sculpture, and drawing at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Her work transforms abstract concepts such as the Big Bang, or those found in quantum physics, into visceral experiences and familiar objects. She converts the digital into the analogue and back again, translating data through the human body and voice.

In her latest performance, Score for a Cyclone, the audience creates live Foley sounds to the twister scene from The Wizard of Oz. For her upcoming thesis exhibition, thirty-eight vocalists will sing the sound of the Big Bang in a cathedral in Richmond. In 2011 Mikalson was a sponsored fellow at Mildred’s Lane in Beach Lake, Pennsylvania, and this year received a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Graduate Fellowship. She has shown her work in Ecuador and Austria and throughout the United States.

Jennifer Reut

Jennifer Reut recently completed her PhD in architectural history at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, under Sheila Crane. Her dissertation, “‘3000 Years in 15 Minutes’: American Tourists and Historic Monuments in Post-War Europe,” examines the influence of architectural tourism on the reception of the historic architectural landscapes of Europe after World War II and the consequences of that dynamic for historic preservation in the United States. Prior to this undertaking, Reut completed her MA in architectural history at Virginia with a certificate in historic preservation. Her master’s thesis under Dell Upton looked at urban form and architecture in postwar Wildwood, New Jersey.

Although much of Reut’s work thus far has explored the consequences of tourism on American architecture and landscape, she is particularly interested in the postwar period and the spatial and narrative implications drawn from hidden landscapes, itineraries, and popular culture. Her graduate research has been supported by the Council for European Studies and the Hartman Center at Duke University, as well as by several grants and fellowships from the University of Virginia. Reut has presented aspects of her dissertation research at the 2011 Buell Dissertation Colloquium at Columbia University in New York and at the 2010 Council for European Studies Annual Conference in Montreal, Quebec. In 2012, she will begin an appointment as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, working on a project to map The Negro Motorist Green Book. She will be presenting initial research from this project at the 2012 CAA Annual Conference in Los Angeles.

2012 Honorable Mentions

Sarah Archino

Sarah Archino is a PhD candidate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, specializing in early-twentieth-century art. Her dissertation, “Rewriting the Narrative of Dada in New York,” examines the avant-garde of the 1910s and the development of an American Dada aesthetic based on anarcho-individualism and the vernacular. Approaching Dada from the perspective of an Americanist, she conducts research that reconnects artists previously divided into separate stylistic camps and salons, dismissing Eurocentric definitions of Dada in favor of tracing a native, anti-institutional spirit that emerged in New York. Her next project will expand on these themes of anarchy and the vernacular in an examination of early-twentieth-century American modernism.

Archino has received research fellowships from the City University of New York and the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin, and participated in the Terra Foundation for American Art’s summer residency program in Giverny, France, in 2011. Among her research interests are collage, little magazines, and humor. She will cohost a conference, “Deadly Serious Art: Strategies of Humor as Critique,” in New York in March 2012. Archino has served as a writing fellow and has a special interest in teaching writing to undergraduates. In 2010 she edited the second volume of the instructor’s manual for the fourth edition of Marilyn Stokstad’s textbook, Art History. She is currently visiting assistant professor at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, and has previously taught at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and on the Hunter College and Queens College campuses of the City University of New York.

Shira Brisman

Shira Brisman is a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. She is currently completing her dissertation, “Briefkultur: Art and the Epistolary Mode of Address in the Age of Albrecht Dürer,” which argues that the experience of writing, sending, and receiving letters shaped how artists in the age of print reflected on the unique message-bearing properties of the work of art. By the turn of the sixteenth century, the eruption of information coming from the printing press had defined a set of alternative capabilities for the handwritten letter: its secrecy, controlled audience, and even, with the establishment of regularized postal systems, its rapid delivery. Yet correspondences faced delay, interception by unintended recipients, and publication without consent—threats that deepened during the volatile years of the Reformation. Presenting prints, drawings, and paintings alongside maps, courier journals, and messenger brooches, Brisman’s project demonstrates how visual images began to mimic the letter’s ability to connect author and recipient, directing through dialectics of advertisement and concealment how individuals address one another and how communities construct their borders.

Brisman has received the Albrecht Dürer Fellowship from the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, Germany; a 2009–11 Samuel H. Kress Predoctoral Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; and an Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Her next book project, “Emblems of the Bright and Better Land,” will investigate how astrological thinking shaped the ways in which people recorded patterns and anomalies from the lived world in diaries, family chronicles, and sketches of “strange things” perceived as signs from above.

Brianne Cohen

Brianne Cohen works on contemporary art and critical theory. She is in her last year at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, finishing her dissertation, “Contested Collectivities: Europe Reimagined by Contemporary Artists,” under the supervision of Terry Smith. Her study analyzes a particular current of contemporary art, exemplified by Harun Farocki, Thomas Hirschhorn, and the artist collective Henry VIII’s Wives, which is devoted to exploring positive models for an intercultural imaginary in Europe. Through these three cases, Cohen charts a changing narrative of “Europeanness” from hopes for a federation after the racial genocide of World War II through critiques of nationalism after decolonization, the “failure” of multiculturalism since the 1990s, and intensified Roma discrimination, Islamophobia, and right-wing extremism in the twenty-first century.

An article recently published at Art & Education, “Raising the Stakes of the Game,” investigates Farocki’s twelve-screen video installation, Deep Play (2007), at Documenta 12. This work highlights the contentious cultural politics of the 2006 World Cup final between France and Italy while also critiquing a contemporary mass news media—with its numbingly repetitive, reductive visual “information” that ultimately says little about the complex problems affecting globalized society in Europe.

With a DAAD Research Scholarship in 2009–10, Cohen spent a year in Berlin, Germany, to conduct research for her dissertation. In 2005, she received a distinction for her MA thesis, “Thomas Hirschhorn: Making Art Politically,” at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, England.

Lucia Henderson

Lucia Henderson graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a BA in archaeology in 2001. She received her MA in art history from the University of California, San Diego, in 2005 and entered the University of Texas at Austin as a Harrington Doctoral Fellow in 2006. She is currently finishing her dissertation in the Department of Art and Art History there.

Henderson was trained in archaeological illustration through the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions at the Harvard Peabody Museum, a skill she considers crucial to her research. Her dissertation, “Bodies Politic, Bodies in Stone: Imagery of the Human and the Divine in the Sculpture of Late Preclassic Kaminaljuyú, Guatemala,” focuses on the sculpture of Kaminaljuyú, a massive early Maya site that has been all but destroyed by the rampant expansion of Guatemala City. Henderson has worked to find and catalogue the site’s scattered sculptures and to create accurate illustrations of their bas-relief iconography. The resultant corpus of images has revealed much about the changing nature of kingship and divinity in the early Maya world.

Henderson has published a volume on Maya sculpture from Tonina (Chiapas, Mexico), a book on Hopi Yellow Ware, a monograph on the Aztec earth deity, and articles on such diverse subjects as pulque, human sacrifice, and pilgrimage in the ancient Maya world. Her research has been supported by the Harrington Fellows Program, the P.E.O. Scholar Award, the Georgia B. Lucas Foundation Fellowship, the University of Texas Graduate Dean’s Prestigious Fellowship, and the Casa Herrera in Antigua, Guatemala. Henderson is also a master diver with an interest in subaquatic archaeology.

Cindy Mason

Cindy Mason is a visual artist who uses installation, painting, and sculpture to create coded systems of power and structure existing on the fringes of reality. Her interest lies in exploiting the contradiction between what we know to be there and what we actually see. Materials such as paint, hair, paper towels, pins, wood, hot glue, 24.75-karat gold leaf, aluminum foil, and porcelain become explorations of societal value systems. Mason uses painted surfaces to mask what is below, like faux façades hiding what is secret or hidden beneath. Her work addresses the hidden classifications of power and the ambiguous yet regulated framework of our visual environment.

Mason received her BFA in graphic and interactive communication from Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of South Florida in Tampa. She is the recipient of a Florida Artist Enhancement Grant and has been selected for artist residencies at Jentel Artist Residency Program in Banner, Wyoming, and at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Mason currently lives and works in Saint Petersburg, Florida.

Ragen Moss

Ragen Moss forages diverse fields of inquiry—spatiality, law, and poetics—and reorients them toward a singularly cogent form that, while ripening to something fresh, simultaneously acknowledges the contributions of each discrete discourse. A principle behind the work is to compound the machinations and living procedures of these specific realms of knowledge, to exhale a breaking breath into them, and thereby to productively expand their horizons. The result is work that intends to reach across boundaries built around disciplines in order to kindle novel propositions and suggest that such propositions are necessary for our society.

The installation Pregnant Ceiling best exemplifies the themes in Moss’s work The piece consists of a sweeping gesture: the suspension of a transparent ceiling filled with water and aquatic plants stretched over the entirety of a large room, creating a hovering pond. The space of the room is simultaneously compressed by the sagging water above and expands through the limitlessness of volumetric water and the viewer’s ability to see completely above and through the pond-ceiling. A legal-poetic statement is scrawled across the clear boundary above the viewer: “treading on the brink of a precipice of absurdity.” The phrase set within the piece doubles back on itself, the water acting as a lens casting enlarged shadows on the floor and back onto the surface of the floating pond. The work encourages simultaneous pleasure, curiosity, and beauty in the system—a desire to approach and confront, mixed with a desire to resist the authority, to puncture the ceiling and break loose its water, to trespass the boundary even as it keeps us dry and safe.

Moss is currently an MFA candidate in interdisciplinary studio at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She has shown her work in exhibitions in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, most recently in Chiasmus: Zones of Political and Aesthetic Imagination at the University Art Gallery at the University of California, Irvine. She received a BA in art history from Columbia University in New York. She also holds a JD from UCLA and is an attorney.

Amy Santoferraro

Amy Santoferraro is currently an MFA candidate in the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in Alfred, New York. Born in Akron, Ohio, she earned a bachelor of art education and a bachelor of fine arts in ceramics from Ohio State University in Columbus in 2004. While at Ohio State, she was an apprentice and an undergraduate research scholar.

Santoferraro is currently an advisory board member at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Newcastle, Maine, where she has also been a summer resident and studio manager. She spent a year at Louisiana State University as a postbaccalaureate student and as an employee of Southern Pottery Equipment and Supplies in Baton Rouge. A resident 2005–6 artist at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, Santoferraro spent four years as a resident artist at the Clay Studio in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has taught hand building and mold making to children and adults in classroom and workshop settings, and her work is exhibited and housed in permanent and private collections nationally and internationally.

Santoferraro’s work questions our affection for objects and materials and evokes memories of the past through the use of recognizable found objects from contemporary pop culture.

The National Committee for the History of Art (NCHA) has awarded travel grants to fourteen PhD students at American universities to attend the thirty-third congress of the International Committee of the History of Art (Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art, or CIHA), taking place July 15–20, 2012, in Nuremberg, Germany. Each student’s department will match the NCHA funds. Nominated by their departments, the students were selected from among a much larger group of highly competitive nominees.

The NCHA grant recipients are:

• Krysta Black, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
• Brianne Cohen, University of Pittsburgh*
• Jennifer Cohen, University of Chicago*
• Dana Cowen, Case Western Reserve University*
• Jill Holaday, University of Iowa*
• Elizabeth Kassler-Taub, Harvard University
• Anna Kim, University of Virginia
• Laine Little, State University of New York, Binghamton
• Jennifer A. Morris, Princeton University*
• Turkan Pilavci, Columbia University
• Stephanie E. Rozman, University of Minnesota*
• Erin Sullivan, University of Southern California*
• John A. Tyson, Emory University
• Maureen Warren, Northwestern University

The asterisk (*) indicates a current CAA member.

NCHA is the American affiliate of the international community of art historians. Two representatives from CAA, usually the past presidents from the Board of Directors, are NCHA individual members. Both NCHA and CIHA aim to foster intellectual exchange among scholars, teachers, students, and others interested in art history broadly conceived as encompassing art, architecture, and visual culture across geographical boundaries and throughout history. Through the organization of scholarly conferences of varying size and scope, NCHA and CIHA promote the communication, dissemination, and exchange of knowledge and information about art history and related fields, ultimately seeking to promote a global community of art historians.

CAA has awarded travel grants to twenty art historians and artists from around the world who will convene in Los Angeles to attend and participate in the 100th Annual Conference, taking place February 22–25, 2012. The CAA International Travel Grant Program was made possible by a generous grant from the Getty Foundation.

At the conference, the twenty recipients will participate in mentoring activities and other events planned in connection with the grant. Members of CAA’s International Committee have agreed to host the participants, and the National Committee for the History of Art will also lend support to the program.

This travel-grant program is intended to familiarize international professionals with the Annual Conference program, including the session participation process. CAA accepted applications from art historians, artists who teach art history, and art historians who are museum curators; those from developing countries or from nations not well represented in CAA’s membership were especially encouraged to apply. In late 2011, a jury of CAA members selected the final twenty awardees, whose names, home institutions, and primary areas of scholarly and professional interest are as follows:

• Salam Atta Sabri, Director, National Museum of Modern Art, Baghdad, Iraq. Atta Sabri conducts research on missing works of art from Iraq and is also a ceramic artist
• Parul Pandya Dhar, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Delhi, Delhi, India. Dhar focuses on the history of Indian art and architecture to 1300 CE, cultural interactions in South and Southeast Asia, the visual arts and visual archives as sources of history, performing arts, and the historiography of Indian art
• Federico Freschi, Associate Professor, History of Art, Wits School of Arts, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Freschi’s work explores South African modern art and architecture and postcolonial identity politics
• Rosa Gabriella de Castro Gonçalves, Professor of Art Theory and Aesthetics, Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador, Brazil. Gonçalves is interested in the role of modernism in recent debates in art theory
• Angela Harutyunyan, Assistant Professor, Department of Fine Arts and Art History, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon. Harutyunyan is interested in methodologies of reading and historicizing contemporary art and studies the political aesthetics of the Armenian avant-garde
• Gyöngyvér Horváth, Assistant Professor of Art History, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest, Hungary. Horváth studies the historiography of narrative painting
• Didier Houenoude, Assistant Professor, Université d’Abomey-Calavi, Cotonou, Benin. Houenoude teaches art history and drawing and closely follows contemporary art in Benin
• Nadhra Shahbaz Naeem Khan, Visiting Faculty, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan. Khan’s work focuses on Sikh art and architecture
• Irena Kossowska, Professor of Art History, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland. Kossowska works on national identity in Central Europe as reflected in the visual arts and also researches nineteenth- and twentieth-century European art
• Jean Celestin Ky, Professor of Art History, University of Ouagadougou, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Celestin researches African art and works with the National Museum of Burkina Faso in conserving and promoting contemporary art
• Pavlína Morganová, Researcher and Professor, Academy of Fine Arts, Prague, Czech Republic. Morganová works on contemporary art
• Cristian Nae, PhD Lecturer, Department of Art History and Theory, Faculty of Fine Arts, George Enescu University of Arts, Iaşi, Romania. Nae examines post–World War II art history, critical theory, hermeneutics, and cultural studies
• Judy Peter, Lecturer, Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture, and Head, Department of Jewellery Design and Manufacture, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa. Peter works in art history, theory, cultural and postcolonial studies, the history of jewellery. She is also interested in curriculum development in the context of a neoliberal South Africa
• Daniel Premerl, Research Associate, Institute of Art History, Zagreb, Croatia. Premerl is interested in Renaissance and Baroque art and art-historical methodology
• Malvina Rousseva, Professor, Institute of Art Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria. Rousseva pursues research in archaeology, Thracian tombs and temples, interdisciplinary studies, architectural history, cultural and visual studies, and philosophy
• Ganna Rudyk, Deputy Director General of Research, Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko Museum of Arts, Kyiv, Ukraine. Rudyk is a specialist in Islamic art who presents Islamic and generally non-Western art to broad publics
• Dóra Sallay, Curator of Italian Painting, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, Hungary. Sallay works with thirteenth- to sixteenth-century Italian art, in particular Sienese painting, the history of collecting and museums, and the history of the reception of Gothic and Renaissance painting
• Olabisi Silva, Director, Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, Nigeria. Silva is working on the first roaming African art academy, placing equal emphasis on artistic practice, art history, critical thinking, and curatorial practice
• Shao-Chien Tseng, Associate Professor of Art History, Graduate Institute of Art Studies, National Central University, Jhongli City, Taiwan. A specialist in nineteenth-century French art, Tseng is interested in modern art and natural history, landscape painting and photography, and postcolonialism and Taiwanese art
• Jagath Weerasinghe, Director and Professor, Postgraduate Institute of Archaeology, Colombo, Sri Lanka. Trained in fine arts, archeology, and conservation, Weerasinghe recently established his country’s first graduate program in art history, which will offer postgraduate diplomas and master of arts degrees in art history, focusing primarily on Asian art

CAA hopes that this travel grant will not only increase international participation in the organization’s activities, but will also expand international networking and the exchange of ideas. The Getty Foundation grant allows CAA to expand greatly the participation of international colleagues beyond its regular program of Annual Conference Travel Grants for graduate students and international artists and scholars.

CAA has awarded grants to the publishers of thirteen books in art history and visual culture through two programs: the Millard Meiss Publication Fund and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant.

Meiss Grants Winners

This fall, CAA awarded grants to the publishers of eight books in art history and visual culture through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to the generous bequest of the late Prof. Millard Meiss, CAA gives these grants to support the publication of scholarly books in art history and related fields.

The eight grantees for fall 2011 are:

• Esra Akcan, Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House, Duke University Press
• Helen Hills, The Matter of Miracles: Forms of Holiness in Baroque Naples, Manchester University Press
• Paul B. Jaskot, The Nazi Perpetrator and Postwar German Art, University of Minnesota Press
• Jacqueline Jung, The Gothic Screen: Sculpture, Space, and the Community in the Cathedrals of France and Germany, 1200–1400, Cambridge University Press
• Jinah Kim, Receptacle of the Sacred: Illustrated Manuscripts and the Buddhist Book Cult in South Asia, University of California Press
• Mary Quinlan-McGrath, Influences—From the Orb of the Universe to the Orb of the Eye: Astrology and Art in the Italian Renaissance, University of Chicago Press
• Hanna Rose Shell, Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Animal Skin, and the Media of Reconnaissance, Zone Books
• Charlotte Townsend-Gault, Northwest Coast Native Art: The History of an Idea, University of British Columbia Press

Books eligible for Meiss grants must already be under contract with a publisher and on a subject in the visual arts or art history. Authors must be current CAA members. Please review the application guidelines for more information. The deadline for the spring 2012 grant cycle is March 1, 2012.

Wyeth Grant Winners

CAA is pleased to announce five recipients of the annual Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant. Thanks to a second generous three-year grant from the Wyeth Foundation, these awards are given annually to publishers to support the publication of one or more book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art, visual studies, and related subjects.

Receiving 2011 grants are:

• Amanda Carlson and Robin Poynor, Africa in Florida: 500 Years of African Presence in the Sunshine State, University Press of Florida
• Mary Coffey, Mexican Muralism and the “Philanthropic Ogre”: How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture, Duke University Press
• Mónica Domínguez Torres, Military Ethos and Visual Culture in Post-Conquest Mexico, Ashgate
• Tatiana Flores, From Estridentismo to ¡30-30!: The Historical Avant-Gardes of Post-Revolutionary Mexico, Yale University Press
• Sue Rainey, Harry Fenn’s Career in Art: Creating a World on Paper, University of Massachusetts Press

For the purpose of this program, “American art” is defined as art created in the United States, Canada, and Mexico prior to 1970. Books eligible for a Wyeth grant must already be under contract with a publisher. Authors must be current CAA members. Please review the application guidelines for more information. The deadline for the 2012 grant cycle is October 1, 2012.

CAA offers Annual Conference Travel Grants to graduate students in art history and studio art and to international artists and scholars. In addition, the Getty Foundation has funded a one-year program that will enable twenty applicants from outside the United States to attend the 2012 Annual Conference in Los Angeles. Applicants may apply for more than one grant but can only receive a single award.

CAA Graduate Student Conference Travel Grant

CAA will award a limited number of $150 Graduate Student Conference Travel Grants to advanced PhD and MFA graduate students as partial reimbursement of travel expenses to attend the 100th Annual Conference in Los Angeles, taking place February 22–25, 2012. To qualify for the grant, students must be current CAA members. Successful applicants will also receive a complimentary conference registration. Deadline: September 23, 2011.

CAA International Member Conference Travel Grant

CAA will award a limited number of $300 International Member Conference Travel Grants to artists and scholars from outside the United States as partial reimbursement of travel expenses to attend the 100th Annual Conference in Los Angeles, taking place February 22–25, 2012. To qualify for the grant, applicants must be current CAA members. Successful applicants will also receive a complimentary conference registration. Deadline: September 23, 2011.

CAA International Travel Grant Program

Through the new CAA International Travel Grant Program, generously funded by the Getty Foundation, CAA will provide funds to twenty applicants that fully cover travel, lodging, and meal costs to attend the 100th Annual Conference in Los Angeles, taking place February 22–25, 2012. Recipients will also receive conference registration and a one-year CAA membership. Applicants may be art historians, artists who teach art history, and art historians who are museum curators. Those from developing countries or from nations not well represented in CAA’s membership are especially encouraged to apply. Deadline: September 23, 2011.

Donate to the Annual Conference Travel Grants

CAA’s Annual Conference Travel Grants are funded solely by donations from CAA members—please contribute today. Charitable contributions are 100 percent tax deductible. CAA extends a warm thanks to those members who made voluntary contributions to this fund in 2010.

Image: Joseph Mallord William Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed—The Great Western Railway, 1844, oil on canvas, 35⅞ x 49 in. National Gallery, London (artwork in the public domain)

CAA is offering two publishing-grant opportunities this fall—through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant—that support new books in art history and related subjects. The publisher must submit the application to either grant or to both funds, though only one award can be given per title. Awards are made at the discretion of each jury and vary according to merit, need, and number of applications. Both programs have a deadline of October 1, 2011. CAA will announce the recipients of the Meiss and Wyeth grants in late November or early December 2011.

Millard Meiss Publication Fund

CAA awards grants from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund to support book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of art and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy. For complete guidelines, application forms, and a grant description, please visit www.collegeart.org/meiss or write to publications@collegeart.org. Deadline: October 1, 2011.

Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant

Thanks to generous funding from the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, CAA awards a publication grant to support book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art and related subjects. For purposes of this program, “American art” is defined as art created in the United States, Canada, and Mexico prior to 1970. Books eligible for the Wyeth Grant have been accepted by a publisher on their merits but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy. For complete guidelines, application forms, and a grant description, please visit www.collegeart.org/wyeth or write to publications@collegeart.org. Deadline: October 1, 2011.

This spring, CAA awarded grants to the publishers of five books in art history and visual culture through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to the generous bequest of the late Prof. Millard Meiss, the grants are given to support the publication of scholarly books in art history and related fields.

The five grantees for spring 2011 are:

• Elizabeth Childs, Vanishing Paradise: Art and Exoticism in Colonial Tahiti, 1800–1901, University of California Press
• Shih-shan Susan Huang, Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Medieval China, Harvard University Asia Center
• Patricia Leighten, A Politics of Form: Art, Anarchism, and Audience in Avant-Guerre Paris, University of Chicago Press
• Pamela Patton, Art of Estrangement: Redefining the Jews in Reconquest Spain, Pennsylvania State University Press
• Richard Taws, The Politics of the Provisional: Visual Culture in Revolutionary France, Pennsylvania State University Press

Books eligible for Meiss grants must already be under contract with a publisher and on a subject in the visual arts or art history. Authors must be current CAA members. Please review the application guidelines for more information. The deadline for the fall 2011 grant cycle is October 1, 2011.