CAA News

Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Project to Put UK’s Publicly Owned Artworks Online Catalogues 200,000 Paintings

The Public Catalogue Foundation collaborated with more than three thousand venues across the United Kingdom to archive 211,861 paintings, many of which have never been photographed before. Every oil painting in public ownership is available online at the Your Paintings website—most of which are not currently on public display. Andrew Ellis, the foundation’s director, said: “No country has ever embarked on such a monumental project to showcase its entire oil painting collection online.” (Read more from the Telegraph.)

Freelance Professors

“Self-employed professor” could soon be an actual job title, thanks to two companies that are helping a small group of college professors market their own online courses, set prices for them, and share the tuition revenue. In January, StraighterLine will launch fifteen professor-taught courses. This is new territory for the company, which currently offers forty-two low-cost and self-paced online courses. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Help Desk: Internship Woes

I wrote the blog for a gallery for over six months without having my name attached. The blog did very well and was picked up on by a local magazine that asked the gallery owner to contribute a regular guest column for their publication. I proceeded to plan and outline the next six months of art-related subject matter with the pretext that I would be getting paid as my internship was completed. After the internship had ended, I wrote three posts for the gallery’s blog before the owner told me it was no longer in his budget. I was never paid for those entries, and my ideas continue to be used thereafter. Where do we draw the line on our unpaid time and efforts while aspiring to get recognition for the work that we do? (Read more from Daily Serving.)

Harvard’s 3D-Printing Archaeologists Fix Ancient Artifacts

Indiana Jones practiced archaeology with a bullwhip and fedora. Joseph Greene and Adam Aja are using another unlikely tool: a 3D printer. Greene and Aja work at Harvard University’s Semitic Museum, using 3D printers and 3D scanning software to re-create a ceramic lion that was smashed three thousand years ago when Assyrians attacked the ancient Mesopotamian city of Nuzi, located in modern-day Iraq. (Read more from Wired.)

Are Curators a Vanishing Breed?

Strong support for California’s ambitious program to limit greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming was reconfirmed in a recent USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll, showing once more the state’s celebrated environmental consciousness. So perhaps it’s time at least to ring a warning bell about a puzzling situation in Los Angeles’ cultural environment, rather than its natural one. At area art museums, the job of chief curator appears to be edging toward the endangered species list. Three notable chief curators have left their museum jobs in the past year. Successors are nowhere in sight. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)

Friends and Rivals: Copley, West, Peale, Trumbull, and Stuart

The podcast of a lecture by Jules David Prown, recorded on October 15, 2003, presents the inaugural online offering of the Wyeth Lecture in American Art, a biennial event hosted by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and supported by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. (Read more from the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts.)

In the Thick of It

I remember September. I recall staring at the postings on H-Net and bemoaning the absence of jobs. Now it’s November, and oh, how I long for September. My friends who went on the market last year complained about applying to sixty or more jobs, but by late August I could count only fifteen or so that I could reasonably convince myself were suitable—not because the others were too far away, or the teaching load was too heavy, but because I couldn’t conceive of any way to assert that I was a good candidate. Where, I wondered, would those many additional job ads come from? (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

When Nasty Reviews Strike: What’s the Role of the Reviewer?

The question of the value of nasty reviews of cultural products has been in the news a lot lately, but it’s an issue that has been debated for as long as I can remember. I remember publishing in the Globe and Mail in about 1990 an article discouraging the writing of negative reviews of books from tiny local presses. I can’t remember exactly what my argument was, and it seems like a silly idea now. (Read more from the Globe and Mail.)

Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Openness, Value, and Scholarly Societies: The MLA Model

In 2011, the Modern Language Association established a new office of scholarly communication and began a series of experiments in ways of supporting the open exchange of scholarly work among its members. While the office and its platforms are new, the motivating force behind the office is not. From the beginning, scholarly societies were designed to play a crucial role in facilitating communication between scholars working on common subjects. (Read more from College and Research Libraries News.)

Ten Essential Apps for the Mobile Artist

Michelangelo, Raphael, and the rest of the old masters drew everything they saw, everywhere they went. The new masters of the twenty-first century can still adhere to that artistic custom, with powerful apps designed for a mobile and creative world. GeekSugar has rounded up apps with specific media in mind, such as ink, charcoal, and watercolor, and more general-purpose digital drawing tools, too. When inspiration unexpectedly strikes, modern-day artists will be grateful they had these ten essential iOS drawing apps in their mobile toolkit. (Read more from GeekSugar.)

Monday Musings: The Price of a Free Membership

I’ve been following with interest the news that the Dallas Museum of Art is abolishing admission for the permanent exhibits and offering free memberships to all. I hear with increasing frequency from colleagues in cultural nonprofits that people don’t want to make long-term commitments such as season passes or memberships anymore and want their experiences a la carte; and that people want real and meaningful engagement with organizations—they don’t want to be anonymous, interchangeable customers. Making memberships free in response to these drivers of change seems like a reasonable experiment. But how does the math work out? (Read more from the Center for the Future of Museums.)

Museum Policies and Art Images: Conflicting Objectives and Copyright Overreaching

Museums face steady demand for images of artworks from their collections, and they typically provide a service of making and delivering high-resolution images of art. The images are often intellectually essential for scholarly study and teaching, and they are sometimes economically valuable for production of the coffee mugs and note cards sold in museum shops and elsewhere. Though the law is unclear regarding copyright protection afforded to such images, many museum policies and licenses encumber the use of art images with contractual terms and license restrictions often aimed at raising revenue or protecting the integrity of the art. (Read more from the Fordham Intellectual Property, Media, and Entertainment Law Journal.)

A New (Kind of) Scholarly Press

The FAQ to go with the announcement that Amherst College is launching a new scholarly press ends with the question “Isn’t this endeavor wildly idealistic?” The answer is yes. But Amherst thinks that there may be long-term gains—both for scholarship and the economics of academic publishing—by publishing books that are subject to traditional peer review, edited with rigor, and then published in digital form only, completely free. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

The Moment of Digital Art History?

Two thousand and twelve has proven to be a significant year as art history continues its transition into the sphere of the digital humanities. The following post aims to provide a summary of discussions around “digital art history,” which at present describes a mode of practice without a fully articulated definition. This summary will also extend beyond the institutional considerations primarily expressed in recent reports and consider the implications for digital art history on public engagement, including the involvement of new-media practitioners, such as bloggers and users of social-media platforms. (Read more from 3 Pipe Problem.)

If He Did It

In trying to figure out the why—no seriously, WHY?—of Bob Dylan’s second painting exhibition at Gagosian, Gallerist NY’s Michael Miller was left with the same Only Possible Explanation that’s been dogging me since the musician’s first baffling Gagosian gig in October 2011: “All I could come up with was a conspiracy theory cooked up by a friend, that both of Mr. Dylan’s shows at Gagosian are actually the work of Richard Prince using ‘Bob Dylan’ as a pseudonym, making the ultimate statement on art and artifice, and proving once and for all that Bob Dylan is whoever you want him to be.” (Read more from Greg.org.)

USC and MOCA Are in Talks about “A Possible Partnership”

Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art and the University of Southern California are in talks about a possible partnership that would link the ambitious private university with the fiscally struggling downtown museum. Responding to Los Angeles Times inquiries, USC’s provost Elizabeth Garrett said that discussions are underway “about a possible partnership that would enhance the missions of both institutions.” Talks “are very preliminary at this time,” she added, providing no further details. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)

Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

NEH Solicits Comments on Digital Projects for the Public Grant Program Guidelines

The National Endowment for the Humanities will launch a new Digital Projects for the Public grant program in fiscal year 2014 and seeks public comment on its proposed guidelines. The new program will fund humanities projects using digital formats such as websites, mobile applications, games, social media, and virtual environments to reach the public and foster lifelong learning. (Read more from the National Endowment for the Humanities.)

“Can I Use This?” How Museum and Library Image Policies Undermine Education

Although eight years have passed since Eastman Kodak announced that it would stop manufacturing slide projectors, we have built only a fragmented system for distributing high-quality digital images—one that is failing our students, our discipline, and the public. More has changed than the technology we use to illustrate our lectures. (Read more from E-Literate.)

Who Owns Captured Lectures?

Lecture-capture technology has advanced to a point where implementing a solution can be disarmingly simple. But it’s important for faculty and administrators not to be lulled into a false sense of security—recording faculty and guest lectures still comes with its share of legal issues covering copyright, intellectual-property rights, distribution, and permissions. While some lecture-capture technology provides assistance even in these areas, colleges and universities need to develop clearly defined guidelines on how recorded lectures can be used. (Read more from Campus Technology.)

The Genomics of Art, Education, and Commerce

Recently I blogged about Art.sy, a service built on the Art Genome Project that enables users to discover, learn about, and collect art that is suggested to them via a mathematical algorithm. That post provoked so much interesting discussion that I followed up with Christine Kuan, chief curator and director of strategic partnerships at Art.sy, to relay some of the questions raised by commentators related to Art.sy’s educational goals, its for-profit business model, and its relationship to the art world. (Read more from the Center for the Future of Museums.)

Bucking Conventional Wisdom: Arts Graduates Gauge Success Differently

A new report by the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project offers important new insights into the value of an arts school education, countering prevailing views about salary levels and job prospects as the most important indicators of alumni satisfaction and career success. Called Painting with Broader Strokes: Reassessing the Value of an Arts Degree, the report offers insights into the careers and perspectives of 13,851 arts graduates from 154 institutions surveyed in 2010, shedding new light on educational training and experiences, employment paths, involvement in the arts outside work, and overall job satisfaction and income. (Read more from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project.)

A Different Kind of Application Fee

A tenure-track job is surely a valuable commodity, but would you pay for a shot at one? A listing for a faculty painting position at Colorado State University attracted some heat on Twitter when several academics noticed the $15 fee attached to the position. The job ad states simply: “In lieu of postage and duplication costs you will be charged a fee of $15.” (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Ten No-Nonsense Tips for Landing a Career in the Art World

Congratulations, you’ve got your shiny degree in curating, art history, or critical theory. Now, how will you make your way in the notoriously cutthroat art world? Sophie Macpherson is the right person to ask. Her company, Sophie Macpherson Ltd, is the leading art recruitment agency, with a London office and representatives in Paris, New York, and soon, East Asia. (Read more from Blouin Artinfo.)

What’s Hot, What’s Not

Frieze shares what terms are hot, not, and holding steady in the world of artist’s statement. What’s hot? An art practice that “is transversal,” “inhabits a transgendered space,” “is post-/para-fictional,” and “references both my height and the height of my bedroom ceiling when I was a teenager.” (Read more from Frieze.)

Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Register for Arts Advocacy Day

The 2012 election has made a dramatic impact on Congress, with more than eighty new members taking office in early January 2013. The next Congress will renew the focus on reducing the federal deficit and creating jobs, and it is imperative that arts advocates work together to craft a policy agenda that supports the nonprofit arts sector and arts education. (Read more from Americans for the Arts.)

Humanities Advocacy Day Registration

Registration for Humanities Advocacy Day and the annual meeting of the National Humanities Alliance will help you to connect with a growing network of humanities leaders, to communicate the value of the humanities to members of Congress, and to become a year-round advocate for the humanities. (Read more from the National Humanities Alliance.)

How Art History Is Failing at the Internet

The history of art as practiced in museums and the academy is sluggish in its embrace of the new technology. Of course we have technology in our galleries and classrooms and information on the web; of course we are exploiting social media to reach and grow our audiences, by tweeting about our books and articles, including links to our career accomplishments on Facebook, and chatting with our students online. But we aren’t conducting art-historical research differently. We aren’t working collaboratively and experimentally. (Read more at the Daily Dot.)

Grad School Confidential: How to Choose the Right Degree

Graduate school is hard. It’s also really expensive. But if you’re actually going to invest the time and money to do it, make it count for yourself. If you need a good graduate school to be able to do the things you want to do, aim high. You can go online and check the US News and World Report rankings, of course. And there are some damn good schools on that list. But if you choose a graduate school based on the institution’s reputation alone, you may find yourself in a discipline or among peers that simply don’t suit you. (Read more at Burnaway.)

More on Pedagogy in Arts Entrepreneurship

As I’ve been working on a pedagogical approach for emerging arts entrepreneurs, I’ve immersed myself in literature and resources on creative thinking and creative problem solving. What keeps striking me is the stark difference between creativity as applied in the development of complex ideas and the creative process in the making of art. The former lends itself, at least to a great degree, to techniques, processes, and formulae, while the making of art does not. One is rational, the other un-rational. (Read more at State of the Art.)

Shift in Heritage: Richard Serra Sculpture Has Uncertain Future

The closest thing southern Ontario has to Stonehenge is Shift, a sculpture by Richard Serra in a King City farmer’s field. Serra is a superstar artist whose work is worth millions of dollars, but Shift remains relatively obscure. Though many places would envy our big Serra, last month the Ontario Conservation Review Board decided not to support King Township’s request that Serra’s work be protected under the Ontario Heritage Act, so its future remains uncertain. (Read more at the Toronto Star.)

Dating and Job Hunting

Last January, I returned mentally and emotionally exhausted from the American Historical Association meeting. I had been lucky to have had a few interviews, and all I could do was refresh my email every few minutes, hoping for any updates. I toggled over to Facebook and quickly posted the status, “If the academic job market is like dating (and it totally is) I hope to be engaged by Valentine’s Day.” The likes and comments poured in from family and friends. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)

Masterpieces on Loan Leave MFA Walls Lacking

Visitors to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, this holiday season can see the celebrity and fashion photographs of Mario Testino. But if they wander off into the permanent collection galleries, they won’t find the museum’s most famous Renoir, Dance at Bougival. Nor will they see any of the museum’s five paintings by Cezanne, five of its six great paintings by Manet, its most distinctive Monet, or its two greatest van Goghs. Some of these works have been lent to serious and scholarly museum shows in the United States, Japan, and Europe. Agreeing to such loans is common practice and builds goodwill for when the museum asks to borrow for its own exhibitions. (Read more at the Boston Globe.)

CAA warmly welcomes three full-time and one part-time employees who have joined CAA since summer 2011. Two new staffers work in the Publications Department, and two more in the Membership, Development, and Marketing Department.

Hannah O’Reilly Malyn became CAA development associate, a new position, in October. Previously, she assisted the development and marketing associate at Hester Street Collaborative while completing her master’s degree in visual arts administration at New York University, where her thesis explored the advent of populist audience development tactics in art museums. Before attending NYU, she earned a dual BA in economics/business and studio art from Kalamazoo College in Michigan. As an artist, Malyn is mostly interested in the human form; her undergraduate senior solo exhibition, Re-Conceptions: Women in Art, explored the role of women in the art world through a series of watercolor figure studies. She also works in oil and charcoal.

Nancy Nguyen is CAA’s new institutional membership assistant, where she is the primary contact for all institutional members. She succeeds Helen Bayer, who was promoted to marketing and communications associate. Nguyen recently graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a BA in history. Prior to joining CAA in October, she worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as a visitor assistant. During her undergraduate career, she was the public programs assistant at the Harry Ransom Center while interning in the departments of marketing and public relations at several Austin museums and arts organizations, such as the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Arthouse at the Jones Center, Mexic-Arte Museum, and Landmarks Public Art Program.

Joining CAA as editorial assistant is Alyssa Pavley, who graduated with a BA from New York University this past May, majoring in art history with a minor in creative writing, concentrating in fiction. Before coming to CAA in August, Pavley served as an intern at two magazines, Art in America and Art + Auction, and at the Judd Foundation and Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, all in New York. Her writings and reviews have been published at thefanzine.com and Artinfo.com and in Art + Auction.

Erika Nelson has been directories data collections coordinator since June, succeeding Cecilia Juan, who departed in the spring. Nelson earned a BA in art history and communication at the College of Saint Benedict in Saint Joseph, Minnesota, and will receive her MA in art history from Brooklyn College, City University of New York, in February. Her thesis, “You Are What You Eat: Catholic Cannibalism and Cultural Consumption in the Codex Espangliensis.” examines the influence of both martyrs and Mickey Mouse on contemporary Mexican society. Nelson hopes to pursue her PhD in modern Latin American art in the coming year. Previously, Nelson perfected her data-entry skills through positions at Fordham University and Mutualart.com and developed her communication skills through a teaching assistantship at Brooklyn College and an internship at the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library in Collegeville, Minnesota.

After two years of research and numerous site visits in the five boroughs of New York, CAA signed a fifteen-year lease for a new office at 50 Broadway in lower Manhattan. The property—located in a rich historical district near Wall Street, Battery Park, Trinity Church, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum—is owned by the 50 Broadway Realty Corporation, an entity of the United Federation of Teachers, which is headquartered in the building. The move comes at the end of CAA’s twenty-five-year lease at 275 Seventh Avenue in Chelsea.

The affordable, furnished office of approximately 9,500 square feet is located on a single floor with a variety of building amenities, including an auditorium, meeting rooms, and a staff cafeteria. It also features natural light through windows on the east, west, and north sides. Since the new office comes largely furnished, CAA has invested little in construction, equipment, and furniture, other than the purchase of a few desks, bookshelves, and a conference table and chairs. Two significant changes, a new telephone system and a new internet service provider, will improve member communications. The installation of carpet, resurfacing of concrete corridors, and repainting of office walls are currently under way and should be completed prior to the move day: Saturday, July 23, 2011.

Meanwhile, CAA staff has been reorganizing and purging files, archiving materials, completing a space utilization analysis, relocating books and periodicals, and coordinating logistics with the movers and with the managements of the old and new buildings. The physical move will happen in one day, and—aside from the normal readjustment period required to be comfortably relocated—CAA expects no interruption in services or operations: the main website, the Online Career Center, caa.reviews, and other online services and publications will all function normally.

CAA is excited about the prospect of becoming a player in lower Manhattan’s ongoing revitalization efforts for residential, commercial, and cultural purposes. The new address for the organization beginning Monday, July 25, 2011, is: College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004. The primary telephone and fax numbers will remain the same: 212-691-1051 and 212-627-2381, respectively. CAA staff, however, will be unavailable from Thursday, July 21, through Monday morning, July 25; the telephone and fax numbers will also not be working during that time.

The CAA Board of Directors and staff wish to thank the legal acumen of Steven Alden and Jeffrey Cunard of Debevoise & Plimpton LLC and the real-estate expertise of Carri Lyon of Cushman & Wakefield in securing the new location. Everyone is welcome to attend an open house at the new CAA office, to be held on Saturday afternoon, October 22, 2011.

This month CAA debuts several new sections of its website, gathering previously published material and adding new historical content. Read about the Distinguished Scholars, review a full list of Annual Conference dates and locations, see who served as a CAA president, and browse obituaries written especially for the website since mid-2008.

Established in 2001, the Distinguished Scholar Session illuminates and celebrates the contributions of senior art historians who emerged in the wake of World War II. Not intended as a static honor, the event can be viewed as the equivalent of a living Festschrift: an occasion for applauding, examining, and extending a distinguished career in art history and an opportunity for encouraging dialogue between and among several generations of scholars.

The first three Distinguished Scholars are James S. Ackerman, Leo Steinberg, and Phyllis Pray Bober. CAA honored the current recipient, Jonathan Brown of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, at the 2011 Annual Conference in New York.

CAA held its first gathering in 1911 in Urbana, Illinois, as the College Art Section of the Western Drawing and Manual Training Association. After adopting a constitution in May 1912, the newly formed organization held its second meeting seven months later in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Subsequent Annual Conferences have been held across North America, from Boston to San Francisco, Toronto to San Antonio, and Atlanta to Seattle.

The CAA president leads the Board of Directors and represents the organization as a whole for a single two-year term. CAA’s first president, Holmes Smith, was a professor of art at Washington University in St. Louis, where he taught drawing and designed his school’s official sea in 1896. For many decades, though, an art historian led the organization—Henry Radford Hope and Lamar Dodd were notable exceptions. In 1990, visual artists began filling the role more often, with five of the last eleven presidents—including the current one, Barbara Nesin—being practitioners instead of scholars.

In the Obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. In addition to publishing a semimonthly roundup of recent deaths in the arts, CAA accepts texts written especially for the newsletter and website. Authored obituaries from mid-2008 are collected online, with earlier texts to be published over the coming months.

What is CAA doing today? Read more about important dates and deadlines for the organization’s programs, events, and services in Deadlines. Find out how you can get involved!

Image: Leo Steinberg was the 2002 Distinguished Scholar (photograph by Pamela Blackwell)

Over the summer of 2010, CAA made four new hires—two full-time and two part-time positions—and benefited from the help of several interns who worked across CAA departments. We warmly welcome the new staff members and thank the interns for their hard work.

New CAA Staff

Teresa Lopez has been CAA’s chief financial officer since June 2010. Before coming to the organization, she was controller at the Dia Art Foundation in New York and held the same position at David Zwirner and Zwirner and Wirth, two Manhattan-based art galleries. After studying engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, she took up accounting at Hunter College, City University of New York. A certified public accountant in the state of New York, Lopez has an interest in both art and art history. She succeeds Robert Wayne, who is now chief financial officer at the Palm Springs Art Museum in California.

As the new CAA office coordinator, Roberta Lawson helps route information, acts as liaison with vendors, and manages the general functioning of the office. She previously held positions at Art Crating and Crozier Fine Art, two top firms in New York’s art shipping and storage industry. Lawson has taught studio art at Rutgers University’s Newark campus and on the high school level, at Hunter College High School in New York. After completing a BFA at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, she earned an MFA from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Both programs were invaluable for her development as an artist, providing strong foundational and conceptual perspectives. A longtime figurative painter, Lawson is investigating the nude in an imaginative landscape in her current work, referencing myth while using color as a psychological force. She replaces Anitral Haendel, who is now pursuing an MFA at the California Institute of Arts in Valencia.

Cecilia Juan joined CAA’s Publications Department in July as data collection coordinator, where she is the primary contact for universities participating in the 2011 editions of the Directories of Graduate Programs in the Arts. A former intern at Exit Art and the New York Council for the Humanities, Juan is pursuing an MA in visual-arts administration at New York University, researching online fundraising strategies for alternative and community-based arts organizations. Before moving to New York last year, she spent two years traveling and teaching English in Japan and the Czech Republic. Juan has a BFA in photography and a BA in English from the University of Florida in Gainesville. Her position at CAA is a new one.

Elizabeth Donato is CAA’s new programs assistant, helping with various aspects of planning and preparing for upcoming annual conferences. Prior to joining the Programs Department, she was a research assistant for scholars and curators in New York; she also interned in curatorial departments at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania and the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. With a BA in art history from the University of Richmond in Virginia, Donato has begun work toward a PhD in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is focusing on modern and contemporary Latin American art, with an emphasis on art from the Southern Cone of South America and on socially engaged aesthetics. Donato succeeds Jeanne Jo, who is now in the doctoral program in media arts and practice at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

CAA Summer Interns

Grace Paik and Maureen Ragalie worked in the Membership, Marketing, and Development Department. Paik, a fall intern at Horton Gallery in New York, recently double-majored in art history and English at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. Ragalie is currently at New York University, earning an MA in museum studies. She is also interning at the New York Public Library and Independent Curators International.

Tom Carr, a junior at Rutgers, interned in the Publications Department. In addition to studying art history, he is an accomplished viola player who performs in his school’s orchestra.

Two recent high school graduates, Amanda Morton and Tyroo Tyler, worked in CAA’s Finance Department. They participated in the Summer Youth Employment Program in New York City’s Department of Youth and Community Development before heading to college this fall. Morton is enrolled at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, and Tyler is attending Alfred State College, State University of New York College of Technology in Alfred.

For our one-hundredth birthday, CAA got a face-lift. And don’t we look great? You’ve probably seen our new look trickle out over the past month on CAA’s Facebook and Twitter pages, for example, and on organizational letterhead. The complete design transformation launched full throttle last Friday with a revamped homepage and changes made site-wide.

In planning the upcoming Centennial year, CAA board and staff desired to celebrate past achievements while focusing significantly on the future. The old CAA logo, used since the mid-1970s, had worn out. A fresh identity with a more creative character, we felt, would appropriately signify CAA’s leadership in our quickly changing, adaptive field.

LaPlaca Cohen, a marketing firm specializing in arts and culture, had recently assisted CAA during the 2010–15 strategic-planning process. Since that team already possessed a deep understanding of CAA’s mission, vision, history, and membership, it was only natural that they help conceptualize our new look. Tom Zetek, director of creative services and production at LaPlaca Cohen, says, “The dynamic stance of the logotype is meant to depict the progressive nature of CAA. The fluid, looping sketch element with the logo reflects the creative roots of the organization.”

CAA’s Centennial Celebration, which begins at the 2011 Annual Conference in New York and ends one year later at the Los Angeles meeting, presents you with a unique opportunity to help refine our purpose and core values, and to influence and activate everything we do. For many, CAA represents a professional community; for others, it’s a wellspring of opportunity. We’d like to know what CAA means to you. Please send your comments on CAA’s identity to centennial@collegeart.org.

This month, CAA News transforms from a bimonthly PDF download into a weekly email. The new format is an excellent way of getting compelling CAA information more quickly; it also offers news essential to your life and career as an artist or scholar. If CAA has your email address, you will automatically receive CAA News every Wednesday, beginning September 8.

Each email newsletter begins with short timely notices about CAA programs and publications, grant and fellowship opportunities, conference updates, advocacy work, and more. Links to the CAA website allow you to read the full articles, and social-networking buttons let you easily share these links with friends and colleagues.

Keeping you up to date with the larger art and academic worlds, CAA News features selected headlines from national and international newspapers and magazines on topics that matter to you: publishing and teaching, contemporary art and its practice, new art-historical research, and copyright and intellectual property, to name a few.

In addition, CAA News brings you something different each week: fresh listings from Opportunities, links to recently published reviews in caa.reviews, news from our many affiliated societies, and monthly listings of Member News, which present a record of your solo exhibitions, books published, fellowships received, and more (starting September 8). As we get closer to the 2011 Annual Conference and Centennial Kickoff, immediate updates on special events and member-discount rates will arrive in your inbox.

To keep CAA News out of your spam folder, you may need to set your email preferences to allow messages from caanews@collegeart.org. If you wish to change your email for the newsletter, or to unsubscribe from it, you can do so at http://multibriefs.com/briefs/caa/index.php. To give your email address to CAA, log into your CAA account and update your Contact Info.

Comments, questions, or suggestions? Write to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor.