CAA News

CAA has received a $25,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to support the next ARTspace, taking place during the 100th Annual Conference and Centennial Celebration in Los Angeles, February 22–25, 2012.

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, performances, 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.

The grant, which is the NEA’s third 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.

Image: ARTexchange participants at the 2011 Annual Conference in New York (photograph by Bradley Marks)

CAA is accepting applications from MFA and PhD students for its Professional-Development Fellowships in the Visual Arts and Art History. For the current cycle, CAA will award five grants of $5,000 each to outstanding students who will receive their MFA degrees in the 2012 calendar year. Similarly, two PhD candidates in art history will receive $5,000 each.

Fellows for 2012 also receive a free one-year CAA membership and complimentary registration to the Annual Conference in Los Angeles. Honorable mentions, given at the discretion of the jury, also earn a free one-year CAA membership and complimentary conference registration.

CAA’s fellowship program support 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 it be 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.

Please visit the Fellowship section for more information and to download the 2012 MFA and PhD Application Forms. The deadline for applications is Friday, September 30, 2011. Winners will be announced in January 2012.

Image: Sheryl Oring, I Wish to Say, 2010, performance at the 01SJ Biennial in San Jose, California (artwork © Sheryl Oring). Oring received a 2010–11 fellowship

The Getty Foundation has awarded a $100,000 grant to CAA in support of international travel for twenty applicants to attend the 100th Annual Conference and Centennial Celebration, taking place February 22–25, 2012, in Los Angeles. Through the new CAA International Travel Grant Program, CAA will provide funds for travel expenses, hotel accommodations, per diems, and conference registrations. Recipients will also receive one-year CAA memberships. 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.

The goal of the project is to increase international participation in CAA and to diversify the organization’s membership (presently sixty-five countries are represented). CAA also wishes to familiarize international participants with the submission process for conference sessions and to expand their professional network in the visual arts. 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.

CAA will publish an official call for grant applications on its website on Friday, July 8, 2011; the program will also be publicized in CAA News. A jury will select the twenty grant recipients.

CAA seeks nominations and self-nominations for scholars with a specialization in non-Western subject matter to serve on the jury for the Millard Meiss Publication Fund for a four-year term, July 1, 2011–June 30, 2015. Candidates must be actively publishing scholars with demonstrated seniority and achievement; institutional affiliation is not required.

The Meiss jury awards grants that subsidize the publication of book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of art and related subjects. Members review manuscripts and grant applications twice a year and meet in New York in the spring and fall to select the awardees. CAA reimburses jury members for travel and lodging expenses in accordance with its travel policy.

Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on another CAA editorial board or committee. Jury members may not themselves apply for a grant in this program during their term of service. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please send a letter describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and contact information to: Millard Meiss Publication Fund Jury, College Art Association, 275 Seventh Avenue, 18th Floor, New York, NY 10001; or send all materials as email attachments to Alex Gershuny, CAA editorial associate. Deadline: April 22, 2011.

In March 2011, CAA received two significant grants to continue offering the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant for three more years and to fund the National Professional-Development Workshops for Artists through 2012.

The Wyeth Foundation for American Art approved funding that will allow CAA to award $40,000 in grants to publishers each year from 2011 to 2013. Wyeth grants support the publication of books on the history of American art, visual studies, 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. The program has helped publish twenty-two books since 2005.

The Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation awarded $70,000 to CAA for sustaining the National Professional-Development Workshops for Artists. This program focuses on supporting visual artists in underserved areas across the United States and providing essential training to emerging, midcareer, and established professionals. CAA has held sixteen Tremaine-sponsored workshops since 2007.

CAA seeks nominations and self-nominations for two individuals with expertise in any branch of American art history, visual studies, or a related field to serve on the jury for the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant for a three-year term, July 1, 2011–June 30, 2014. Candidates must be actively publishing scholars with demonstrated seniority and achievement; institutional affiliation is not required.

The Wyeth jury awards grants that subsidize the publication of book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art and related subjects. Members review manuscripts and grant applications once a year and meet in New York in the fall to select awardees. CAA reimburses jury members for travel and lodging expenses in accordance with its travel policy.

Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on another CAA editorial board or committee. Jury members may not themselves apply for a grant in this program during their term of service. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please send a letter of interest describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and contact information to: Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, College Art Association, 275 Seventh Avenue, 18th Floor, New York, NY 10001; or send all materials as email attachments to Alex Gershuny, CAA editorial associate. Deadline: May 13, 2011.

CAA seeks nominations and self-nominations for scholars with a specialization in non-Western subject matter to serve on the jury for the Millard Meiss Publication Fund for a four-year term, July 1, 2011–June 30, 2015. Candidates must be actively publishing scholars with demonstrated seniority and achievement; institutional affiliation is not required.

The Meiss jury awards grants that subsidize the publication of book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of art and related subjects. Members review manuscripts and grant applications twice a year and meet in New York in the spring and fall to select the awardees. CAA reimburses jury members for travel and lodging expenses in accordance with its travel policy.

Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on another CAA editorial board or committee. Jury members may not themselves apply for a grant in this program during their term of service. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please send a letter describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and contact information to: Millard Meiss Publication Fund Jury, College Art Association, 275 Seventh Avenue, 18th Floor, New York, NY 10001; or send all materials as email attachments to Alex Gershuny, CAA editorial associate. Deadline: April 22, 2011.

CAA is accepting applications for spring 2011 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. Please review and follow the application guidelines carefully, as some requirements have changed. Deadline: April 1, 2011.

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)

CAA has awarded grants to the publishers of nine 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 has awarded four grants from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to the generous bequest of the late Prof. Millard Meiss, these grants are given to publishers to support the publication of scholarly books in art history and related fields. The 2010 grantees are:

• Cynthia Hahn, Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries 400–circa 1204 (Pennsylvania State University Press)
• Megan E. O’Neil, Engaging Ancient Maya Sculpture at Piedras Negras, Guatemala (University of Oklahoma Press)
• J. P. Park, Ensnaring the Public Eye: Painting Manuals of Late Ming China and the Negotiation of Taste (University of Washington Press)
• Stephen C. Pinson, Speculating Daguerre: Art and Enterprise in the Work of L. J. M. Daguerre (University of Chicago Press)

Books eligible for a Meiss grant must already be under contract with a publisher and be on a subject in the arts or art history. Authors must be current CAA members. Application criteria and guidelines for the Meiss grant are available online or from Alex Gershuny, CAA editorial associate.

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 2010 grants are:

• Marianne Kinkel, Races of Mankind: The Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman (University of Illinois Press)
• Analisa Leppanen-Guerra, Children’s Stories and “Child-Time” in the Works of Joseph Cornell and the Trans-Atlantic Avant-Garde (Ashgate)
• Leo Mazow, Thomas Hart Benton and the American Sound (Pennsylvania State University Press)
• Maurie McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Visualizing the Southern Slave Trade (University of Chicago Press)
• Marian Wardle, ed., The Weir Family, 1820–1920: Expanding the Traditions of American Art (University Press of New England)

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. Application criteria and guidelines for the Wyeth grant are available online or from Alex Gershuny, CAA editorial associate.