CAA News

In its regular roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, designers, architects, photographers, dealers, filmmakers, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. This month was marked by the loss of three major artists: Mike Kelley, Dorothea Tanning, and Antoni Tàpies.

• Leopold (Lee) Adler II, former president of the Historic Savannah Foundation, died on January 29, 2012. He was 88 years old. Born into a wealthy Savannah family, Adler worked all his life to preserve the city’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century homes, gaining a reputation as a committed preservationist
• Theo Angelopoulos, a celebrated Greek filmmaker whose work placed him in a critical pantheon of auteur directors, among them Michaelangelo Antonioni, died on January 24, 2012. He was 76. Angelopoulos’s best-known films include Eternity and a Day (1998), which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. At the time of his death, Angelopoulos was working on The Other Sea, the last film in a trilogy about Greek history
• Carolyn Autry, an artist, printmaker, and educator who taught at the University of Toledo in Ohio for thirty-six years, died on December 12, 2011, at the age of 71. Autry exhibited her work nationally and internationally and was an avid world traveler in her final years
• Lillian Bassman, a fashion and fine-art photographer, died on February 13, 2012, age 94. Bassman first came to prominence in the 1940s as an art director for Junior Bazaar, a youth-orientated version of Harper’s Bazaar. She also showed her pictures in galleries around the world, influencing several generations of fashion photographers
• Emmanuel Cooper, a ceramicist, died on January 21, 2012, at the age of 73. Cooper was primarily known as potter but also established himself as an art critic, educator, and gay-rights activist. His work is in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Philadelphia Museum of Art
• Mary Louise Coulouris, a vibrant painter, printmaker, and muralist, died on December 20, 2011, at the age of 72.  Born in New York to Greek parents, Coulouris moved to London to attend school, eventually settling in Scotland. Well known for her public artworks in railway stations and hospitals across the United Kingdom, she also showed in galleries in Paris and London and is included in the collections of the New York Public Library, the Bibliothèque National in Paris, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England
• Peter de Francia, a celebrated artist, intellectual, and professor of painting at the Royal College of Art in London, passed away on January 19, 2012, at the age of 90. De Francia, born in France to an English mother and an Italian father, was multilingual from an early age. He served in World War II and was a lifelong socialist and an active member of the British art scene since the 1950s
• Malcolm Fowler, a fine artist and illustrator who brought artful creativity and humor into the world of advertising, died on January 18, 2012, at age 68. Fowler founded the pioneering illustration and model-making Shirt Sleeve Studio in London with his wife, Nancy Fouts, in the late 1960s. The couple crafted seminal ad campaigns for Tate Gallery, and their work has been collected by the Victoria and Albert Museum
• John Gage, a beloved, freethinking art historian known for his scholarship on J. M. W. Turner, died on February 13, 2012, age 73. Gage taught art history at the University of Cambridge from 1970 to 1996 and was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1995
• Robert E. Hecht Jr., a controversial American dealer in ancient antiquities died, on February 8, 2012, at the age of 92. Just three weeks prior to his death, Hecht was on trial in Rome for charges of antiquity tomb looting and black-market dealing. A lifelong passion for collecting and selling ancient art began when he was a student at the American Academy in Rome
• John House, an art historian known for his scholarship on Impressionism, specifically Claude Monet, passed away on February 7, 2012. He was 66. House began teaching at the University of East Anglia and University College of London before going to the Courtauld Institute of Art. He often took a radical approach to his subject, challenging previous scholarship with his books and with the popular exhibitions he organized
• Mike Kelley, a groundbreaking artist who put Los Angeles on the map as a contemporary art mecca, committed suicide at the age of 57 on February 1, 2012. Kelley worked in video, installation, painting, and performance, often combining genres to spectacular and grotesque effect. A traveling retrospective of Kelly’s work, originating at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, will come to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2014
• Ricardo Legorreta, the Mexican-born architect known for his design of vibrant, modernist buildings throughout the southwestern United States and internationally, died on December 30, 2011. He was 80
• Steven Leiber, a San Franciscan art collector and rare-book dealer, died on January 28, 2012. He was 54 years old. Leiber operated a website devoted to his collection and knowledge of art ephemera and helped appraise several important archives, including those of Avalanche magazine, Allan Kaprow, and Claus Oldenberg
• John Madin, an architect and planner who transformed the look of postwar England, passed away on January 8, 2012. He was 87. Madin is known for his monolithic designs for commercial buildings in cities throughout the North of England, the West Midlands, and Leeds
• Isi Metzstein, an esteemed Scotish architect and teacher, died on January 10, 2012, at age 83. Metzstein founded the architectural practice Gillespie Kidd and Coia, which designed churches in Scotland, including the Le Corbusier–influenced St. Peter’s Seminary (now falling into ruin), and created buildings for Robinson College and Cambridge University
• Amy Page, a writer and former editor-in-chief of Art + Auction magazine passed away on January 19, 2012, at age 72. A native New Yorker, Page was as comfortable in the rough and tumble world of art journalism as she was with socializing with collectors, gallery directors, and traveling the world to attend art fairs
• Gianfranco Pardi, an Italian artist who created minimalist paintings, died on February 2, 2012, at age 78. Pardi lived and worked in Milan, where he showed at the Gio Marconi Gallery. In 1986 he exhibited at the Venice Biennale, and his 1970s series Architettura combines hard-edge abstraction, drawing, cable wires and aluminum
• Vita Petersen, an artist, teacher, and legendary fixture at the New York Studio School, passed away on October 22, 2011, age 96. Born in Berlin to an aristocratic, art-loving family, Petersen moved to New York in 1938 and became involved in the heady art scene of the 1940s and 1950s. She showed her colorful abstractions at the Betty Parsons Gallery in the 1960s and was known to paint every day of her life
• Jessie Poesch, an art professor at Tulane University’s Newcomb College in New Orleans, died on April 23, 2011, at the age of 88. Poesch was a specialist in decorative arts, pottery, and Louisiana architecture. She taught at Newcomb College from 1963 to 1992 and wrote books and articles that established her as an expert in her field
• Julie Carter Preston, a Liverpool-born ceramicist whose clients included members of the British Royal Family, died on January 6, 2012. She was 85 years old. Preston is best known for her use of sgraffitto, an ancient scratching technique that creates a rich-looking surface texture. She taught for many years at the Liverpool College of Art, and her work is represented by the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool
• Peter Saunders, a British painter whose favorite subject was the city of London and its people, passed away on November 19, 2011, age 70. Saunders attended Camberwell School of Art, where he studied under Euan Uglow. He later taught at schools throughout London and was a member of the Soho crowd of artists who gathered at the Colony Room in the 1960s and 1970s
• Ian Simpson, an artist and art instructor who was a presenter on the BBC program Eyeline (1968–69), died on December 15, 2011, at the age of 78. Simpson taught at Hornsey College of Art in London and at St Martins School of Art from 1972 to 1988. He was a great believer in demystifying the world of art-making, and that technical skills could be taught to anyone with the dedication to learn them
• Norma Merrick Sklarek, the first African American woman to become a licensed architect, died on February 6, 2012, aged 85. Born in Harlem, Sklarek was one of only two women to graduate from Columbia University with a degree in architecture. She moved to Los Angeles to join Gruen Associates in 1960, where she worked as the project director for Terminal 1 at Los Angeles International Airport and later was a founding partner of Siegel-Sklarek-Diamon, an all-woman architectural firm
• Kazimierz Smolen, the former director and cofounder of the State Museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau and a survivor of the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Mauthausen, died on January 27, 2012, at the age of 91. In addition to founding the State Museum at Auschwitz, he appeared as a witness in many war criminal trials, including the Nuremberg Trials in 1945–46
• Tobi Lim Sonstroem, a graphic-design alumnus of the Tyler School of Art in Pennsylvania, took his own life on February 2, 2012. He was 25 years old. Sonstroem was remembered by friends and teachers as a passionate young man who was dedicated to his burgeoning art and graphic-design career
• Dorothea Tanning, a painter, sculptor, and muse to the Surrealists, died on January 31, 2012. She was 101 years old. Tanning was married for thirty years to Max Ernst and lived with him in New York, Arizona, and France. In addition to an esteemed career as a painter, she published several books of verse and in 1994 established the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award at the Academy of American Poets
• Antoni Tàpies, the Catalan painter known for large-scale works that often mix oil painting with sand, chalk, and household objects, died on February 6, 2012. He was 88. The critic Roland Penrose described Tàpies as “a painter who was to create mysteries in matter itself.” The Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona, Spain, was created in 1984 as a museum and research center dedicated to the artist’s work and to other international modern artists
• Eugene Weston III, an architect who revolutionized the look of Los Angeles homes in the 1950s, died on January 31, 2012, at the age of 87. Weston’s designs emphasized space, glass windows, and natural light, bringing an elegant, modern sensibility to middle-class family homes. Later commissions include the Scripps College Research Center and the San Diego Zoo
• Erica Wilson, a craftswoman who popularize embroidery and needlework through numerous television appearances, books, and magazine articles, died on December 13, 2011. She was 83. The British-born Wilson moved to New York in 1954, where she taught at Cooper Union and gave private lessons in her apartment. Wilson later opened boutique shops on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and on Long Island, as well as in Palm Beach, Florida, and in Nantucket, Massachusetts
• Althea Wynne, a British sculptor known for her equestrian statues in bronze and ceramic, died on January 24, 2012, at the age of 75. Inspired by Etruscan art and a childhood love of horseback riding, Wynne created sculptures recognized as powerful and graceful monuments. Her best-known commission is the three bronze horses that stand sentinel at Minister Court in the City of London

Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the April listing.

 

The CAA Board of Directors welcomes four newly elected members, who will serve from 2012 to 2016:

• Suzanne Preston Blier, Harvard University
• Stephanie D’Alessandro, Art Institute of Chicago
• Gail Feigenbaum, Getty Research Institute
• Charles A. Wright, Western Illinois University

Barbara Nesin, CAA board president, announced the election results during the Annual Members’ Business Meeting, held on Friday, February 24, at the 100th Annual Conference in Los Angeles.

The Board of Directors is charged with CAA’s long-term financial stability and strategic direction; it is also the association’s governing body. The board sets policy regarding all aspects of CAA’s activities, including publishing, the Annual Conference, awards and fellowships, advocacy, and committee procedures.

For the annual board election, CAA members vote for no more than four candidates; they also cast votes for write-in candidates (who must be CAA members). The four candidates receiving the most votes are elected to the board.

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 warmly thanks the many contributions of the following dedicated members who joined CAA in 1961 or earlier. This year, the annually published list welcomes fourteen new members. Twelve are distinguished scholars and curators whose teaching, publications, and exhibitions have shaped the history of art over the last fifty years. The other two are celebrated artists: G. Kendall Shaw, a painter and former professor based in Brooklyn who showed recent work in a solo exhibition in New York this past fall; and Conrad H. Ross, a printmaker who lives and works in Alabama, where he taught at Auburn University for many years.

1961: Matthew Baigell; Malcolm Campbell; Margaret Diane David; W. Bowdoin Davis Jr.; David Farmer; J. D. Forbes; Isabelle Hyman; Henry A. Millon; Clifton C. Olds; Marion E. Roberts; David Rosand; Conrad H. Ross; G. Kendall Shaw; and Alan Shestack.

1960: Shirley N. Blum; Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt; David C. Driskell; Mojmir S. Frinta; Dan F. Howard; W. Eugene Kleinbauer; Ruth Mellinkoff; Edward W. Navone; Linda Nochlin; and J. J. Pollitt.

1959: Edward Colker; Geraldine Fowle; Edith M. Hoffman; Carol H. Krinsky; James F. O’Gorman; Charles S. Rhyne; and Ann K. Warren.

1958: Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr.; Damie Stillman; and Clare Vincent.

1957: Marcel M. Franciscono; Bruce Glaser; William C. Loerke; Susan R. McKillop; and John F. Omelia.

1956: Svetlana L. Alpers; Norman W. Canedy; John Goelet; Joel Isaacson; John M. Schnorrenberg; and Jack J. Spector.

1955: Lola B. Gellman; Irving Lavin; Marilyn A. Lavin; Suzanne Lewis; and Cornelius C. Vermeule.

1954: Franklin Hamilton Hazlehurst; Patricia C. Loud; Thomas McCormick; Jules D. Prown; Jane E. Rosenthal; Irving Sandler; Lucy Freeman Sandler; Harold E. Spencer; and A. Richard Turner.

1953: Dorathea K. Beard; Margaret McCormick; John W. Straus; and Jack Wasserman.

1951: Wen C. Fong; and Carl N. Schmalz Jr.

1950: Jane Dillenberger; Alan M. Fern; and Marilyn J. Stokstad.

1949: Dario A. Covi; Norman B. Gulamerian; and Ann-Sofi Lindsten.

1948: William S. Dale; Clarke H. Garnsey; and Peter H. Selz.

1947: Dericksen M. Brinkerhoff; David G. Carter; Ellen P. Conant; Ilene H. Forsyth; and J. Edward Kidder Jr.

1946: Mario Valente.

1945: James Ackerman; Paul B. Arnold; and Rosalie B. Green.

In its regular roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, designers, architects, photographers, dealers, filmmakers, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. Included this month are the major twentieth-century artists John Chamberlain and Helen Frankenthaler, who both died in December 2011.

• Eve Arnold, a photojournalist and writer who was the first woman to join the Magnum Photo agency, died on January 4, 2012, at age 99. Beginning her career in the late 1940s, Arnold photographed celebrities, documented the McCarthy hearings and the civil rights movement, and did extensive work in Britain, China, and Russia.
• John Buchanan, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco who brought in a string of successive hit shows, including Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs and a survey of masterpieces by Pablo Picasso from the Musée National in Paris, died on December 30, 2011. He was 58 years old
• John Chamberlain, a sculptor of found metal whose work bridged Pop art, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism, passed away on December 21, 2011, at the age of 84. Chamberlain first used car parts and then pieces of raw galvanized steel to create his sculptures, whose form and colors offered a dystopian take on the automobile as American Dream
• Niles Ford, a New York–based dancer and choreographer whose work combined elements of ballet, jazz, and modern dance while embedding themes of political and social activism, died on January 14, 2012. He was 52.
• Helen Frankenthaler, an abstract painter whose stain technique led to the development of the Color Field movement, passed away on December 27, 2011, at age 83. Once married to Robert Motherwell, Frankenthaler was an active member of the downtown New York art community in the 1950s and 1960s and had major solo exhibitions at the Jewish Museum (1960), the Whitney Museum of American Art (1969), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1998)
• Andrew Geller, a postwar architect of prefabricated homes who designed the room in which Nikita Kruschev and Richard Nixon had their famous Kitchen Debate, died on December 25, 2011. He was 87
• Iris Gill, a painter inspired by nature who was a member of the San Diego branch of the Women’s Caucus for Art, died on January 2, 2012. She was 41 years old
• Jan Groover, an American photographer who had lived in France since 1991 and who produced painterly still lifes with formalist concerns, died on January 1, 2012, at age 68. In 1987, Groover became one of the first women to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York
• John McWhinnie, a dealer and collector of rare twentieth-century books and ephemera and the director of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in New York, died on January 6, 2012. He was 43
• Robert Nelson, an avant-garde filmmaker active in the San Francisco art scene of the 1950s and 1960s, died on January 9, 2012, at the age of 81. Known for the wit and playful energy he brought to the world of underground filmmaking, Nelson was the creator of Plastic Haircut (1963), Oh Dem Watermelons (1965), and Grateful Dead (1967–68)
• Bill Radawec, an eclectic multimedia artist based in Los Angeles and Cleveland whose recent work consisted of colorful paintings inspired by manufacturer house paint chips and the work of Ellsworth Kelly and Brice Marden, died on July 5, 2011, at age 59. Well-loved for his generosity and support of other artists, Radawec organized art shows in major museums and artist-run galleries
• James Rizzi, a New York–based Pop artist known for his three-dimensional graphic constructions, died on December 26, 2011, at age 61. Playful, colorful, and full of childlike energy, Rizzi’s work included designs for tourist guides and German postage stamps, as well as the cover artwork for Tom Tom Club’s first album in 1980 and two music videos for the band
• Garrison Roots, a public artist, sculptor, and chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he had taught since 1982, died on December 21, 2011. He was 59 years old
• Anne Tyng, a pioneering female architect and architectural theorist who had a professional and personal relationship with Louis Kahn, died on December 27, 2011, at age 91. Born in Jiangxi, China, Tyng was one of the first women to graduate from Harvard’s architecture school, in 1944
• Haydee Venegas, an art critic and educator who served as vice president of the International Association of Art Critics, died on December 31, 2011. She was 61
• John C. Wessel, a New York–based art dealer who championed gay artists in the 1980s and 1990s, passed away on December 9, 2011. Born in 1941, Wessel also served as regional representative for the National Endowment for the Arts from 1977 to 1984
• Eva Zeisel, a renowned ceramic tableware artist and designer, died on December 30, 2011, at the age of 105. After emigrated to the United States from Vienna in 1938, Zeisel began a celebrated teaching career at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York

Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the February/March listing.

 

CAA’s nine Professional Interests, Practices, and Standards Committees welcome their newly appointed members, who will serve three-year terms, 2012–15. In addition, three new chairs will take over committee leadership, with one current chair appointed for an additional year. New committee members and chairs will begin their terms next month at the 100th Annual Conference, to be held February 22–25, 2012, in Los Angeles. CAA warmly thanks all outgoing committee members for their years of service to the organization.

A call for nominations for these committees appears annually from July to September in CAA News and on the CAA website. CAA’s president, vice president for committees, and executive director review all nominations in December and make appointments that take effect the following February.

New Committee Members and Chairs

Committee on Diversity Practices: Peggy Blood, Savannah State University; Sunanda K. Sanyal, Art Institute of Boston; and Susan Zurbrigg, James Madison University. Barbara Nesin, president of the CAA Board of Directors, is a new board liaison.

Committee on Intellectual Property: Elaine Koss, Frick Collection; Judith Metro, National Gallery of Art; and Gretchen Wagner, ARTstor.

Committee on Women in the Arts: Temma Balducci, Arkansas State University; Melissa Dabakis, Kenyon College; Kalliopi Minioudaki, independent curator and art historian, New York; Margaret Murphy, independent artist and curator, Jersey City; and Sarah Schuster, Oberlin College.

Education Committee: Barbara Airulla, Franklin University. Rosenne Gibel has been appointed chair for one more year, and Hilary Braysmith received a term extension for committee membership through February 2013. Georgia Strange of the University of Georgia joins the committee as a board liaison.

International Committee: Timothy Collins, Glasgow School of Art; Radha Dalal, College of Charleston; and Rosemary O’Neill, Parsons the New School of Design. Ann Albritton of Ringling College of Art and Design has been named committee chair, succeeding Jennifer D. Milam of the University of Sydney. Anne-Imelda Radice of the Dilenschneider Group is a new board liaison.

Museum Committee: Bruce Boucher, University of Virginia Art Museums; Saadia N. Lawton, Lincoln University; and Celka Straughn, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence.

Professional Practices Committee: Elliot Bostwick Davis, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Helen C. Evans, Metropolitan Museum of Art. James Hopfensperger of Western Michigan University takes over as chair from Charles Wright of Western Illinois University.

Services to Artists Committee: Blane De St. Croix, independent artist, Brooklyn; Niku Kashef, California State University, Northridge; and Jenny Krasner, independent artist, New York. Sharon Louden, an independent artist based in New York, succeeds Jacki Apple of Art Center College of Design as chair. Saul Ostrow of the Cleveland Institute of Art is a new liaison from the CAA board.

Student and Emerging Professionals Committee: Anitra Haendel, California Institute of the Arts; Amanda Hawley Hellman, Emory University; and Megan Koza Young, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence. Serving as board liaison is Leslie Bellavance of Alfred University.

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 announced the recipients of the 2012 Awards for Distinction, which honor the outstanding achievements and accomplishments of individual artists, art historians, authors, conservators, curators, and critics whose efforts transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.

CAA will formally recognize the recipients at a special awards ceremony during the 100th Annual Conference in Los Angeles, on Thursday afternoon, February 23, 2012, 12:30–2:00 PM, at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Led by Barbara Nesin, president of the CAA Board of Directors, the awards ceremony will take place in West Hall Meeting Room 502AB, Level 2; it is free and open to the public. The Los Angeles Convention Center is located downtown, at 1201 South Figueroa Street adjacent to the Staples Center.

The 2012 Annual Conference—presenting scholarly sessions, panel discussions, professional-development workshops, a Book and Trade Fair, and more—is the largest gathering of artists, art historians, students, and arts professionals in the United States.

David Hammons, Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement

The innovative, far-ranging work of David Hammons is central to the history of postwar art in all its complexities. For the past five decades, Hammons has ingeniously blurred boundaries separating sculpture, Conceptual art, performance, and installation. Through a restless hybridization of practices, he has explored many timely and urgent contemporary issues, commenting on the civil rights movement, racial stereotyping, institutional exclusion, and the commodification of artistic identity. Hammons is not only one of the great political artists of our time, but also a crafter of careful assemblage and canny composition, creating irreverent, sometimes scathing works that are as formally riveting as they are incisive.

Adrian Piper, Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work

Since the late 1960s, the provocative and often challenging work of Adrian Piper has profoundly influenced the language and form of Conceptual art. Her 2010 exhibition Past Time: Selected Works 1973–1995, presented at Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York, showcased several bodies of work that dealt with dissent in varying forms and represented a period of time widely considered as her most influential. Piper’s artistic practice flirts with the syntax of Minimalism and infuses it with explicitly political content, addressing issues of race, gender, and identity politics. Additionally, her work has been shaped by studies in philosophy, a subject on which she has lectured since earning a doctorate in the discipline thirty years ago. A keen interlocutor of mass culture, Piper has produced art and writing that makes us question our constantly shifting contemporary social landscape.

Lucy R. Lippard, Distinguished Feminist Award

For more than five decades, the critic, activist, and curator Lucy R. Lippard has been a consistent, passionate, and influential advocate of feminist art. A prolific author first honored by CAA in 1975 with the Frank Jewett Mather Award, she is known for her concise, accessible, and lucid prose that brings feminist perspectives to bear on a wide scope of art and activism—from Eva Hesse (1976) to The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art (1995). Lippard’s curatorial efforts—such as c. 7,500 (1973), the groundbreaking all-woman exhibition of Conceptual art—have also been vital to the feminist art movement and offered some of the earliest considerations of global feminisms. Throughout her life, she has modeled a complex, ever-changing point of view as it intersects with progressive notions of art and politics.

Allan Sekula, Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art

Allan Sekula has devoted his life as an artist to writing, photography, installation, and film. While his multidisciplinary approach to problems of representation and politics has earned him accolades as an artist, his writings have helped students, scholars, and the public to think critically about interventions in the political and social realities of our world. The essays collected in his first book, Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–83 (1984), significantly altered the way in which the documentary function of photography was conceptualized. His more recent volumes—such as Fish Story (1995), Titanic’s Wake (2003), and Performance under Working Conditions (2003)—mobilize us through his vision and words to carefully consider the effects of capitalism, globalization, information formats, and the dematerialization of image and word.

David Antin, Frank Jewett Mather Award

David Antin has been a singular, combative voice in art criticism since the mid 1960s. His Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature 1966 to 2005 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) demonstrates his sustained critical commitment, constant formal experimentation, and a style of thought and expression that is unique to both the visual arts and poetry. The essays and “talking poems” in Radical Coherency display a no-nonsense, skeptical intelligence squaring off firsthand with the work of artists—many of them his contemporaries—who were bent on radically transforming art, from Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol to the artists of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 1971 exhibition Art and Technology.

Alexander Nagel, Charles Rufus Morey Book Award

Alexander Nagel’s The Controversy of Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) is a compelling reexamination of the key paradoxes that define this era and the works associated with it. Guided in part by sixteenth-century religious history and the writings of historians of that era, Nagel positions sixteenth-century art making in the realm of the experimental, a vantage also in concert with the efforts of the religious reformers concerned with ritual and devotional practices usually associated with the Middle Ages. A breakthrough volume that makes significant contributions to scholarship on sixteenth-century Italian art, Nagel’s book compels art historians more generally to reconsider “standard” interpretations of many canonical monuments of the periods in which they are working.

Maryan W. Ainsworth, Stijn Alsteens, and Nadine M. Orenstein, Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award

Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2010) is a “summa” of Maryan Ainsworth’s decades-long exploration of the artistic legacy of this place and time. Using a variety of methods—technical analysis, connoisseurship, archival research, biography, iconography, and sustained attention to each object—she and the other authors place Gossart at the center of a rich world of intertwined relationships. Together they reveal the artist’s groundbreaking engagement with Rome and antiquity, his intent study of architecture and sculpture, his carefully crafted experimentation in a variety of media, and his amazing versatility as a painter of religious scenes, mythological subjects, and innovative portraits over a long career. The book is also significant for the insightful way in which it situates Gossart among his contemporaries, including the painters Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach, the sculptor Conrad Meit, and the patron and connoisseur Philip of Burgundy.

Roy Flukinger, Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions

With The Gernsheim Collection (Austin: Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas Press, 2010), Roy Flukinger has crafted an exceptional catalogue of the Helmut and Alison Gernsheim Collection, one of the earliest and most comprehensive collections of photography in the world. One hundred and twenty-six items are beautifully illustrated and analyzed in readable, absorbing prose that traces the story of the couple’s achievements as sleuths, gatherers, connoisseurs, photographers, devotees, and champions, while at the same time recognizing and examining their (sometimes controversial) role as architects of the study of photography. Contributions by Alison Nordstrom and Mark Haworth-Booth illuminate the role this collection has played in the history of photography as well as the Gernsheims’ commitment to the medium as a form of fine art. In this way, the book considers the process (in addition to the underlying principles, assumptions, and implications) of canon formulation in an emerging discipline.

Jacki Apple, Distinguished Teaching of Art Award

For the past twenty-eight years, Jacki Apple has provided students at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, with a dynamic, inspiring, and evolving model of the possibilities and rewards of an interdisciplinary practice. An artist, writer, and producer, she has produced work in multiple modes—performance, installation, drawing, book art, photography, film, radio, text, and audio—and presciently engages the opportunities afforded by new technologies. Praised by students and colleagues alike for her intelligence, generosity, enthusiasm, and critical discernment, Apple adeptly bridges various disciplines using a wide scope of knowledge about contemporary culture and technology and a depth of understanding about the history and practice of the visual and performing arts. A gifted communicator, Apple is exceptionally effective in encouraging students to think for themselves.

Gabriel P. Weisberg, Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award

Gabriel P. Weisberg’s distinguished teaching record—which includes faculty positions at the University of New Mexico, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Pittsburgh, Case Western Reserve University, and the University of Minnesota, where he is currently a professor in the Department of Art History—spans nearly half a century. His students, both graduate and undergraduate, praise his presentation of art as a dynamic interplay among culture, aesthetics, and human experience, revealed through direct examination of works of art in the context of primary historical documentation. Weisberg’s varied and distinguished background as a historian, curator, and administrator seamlessly integrates academic and museum realms, and his scholarship has shaped the discipline of nineteenth-century art history in a profound way.

Francesca G. Bewer, CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation

Francesca G. Bewer, research curator in the Harvard Art Museums’ Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, is an exemplary technical art historian. An expert in the materials and techniques of European Renaissance and Baroque bronze sculpture, she trained as both an art historian, at University College London, and as a conservator, at Palazzo Spinelli in Florence. A highly valued teacher and lecturer, Bewer has published a steady stream of superb texts in conservation and art-historical journals, exhibition catalogues, and monographs. She also recently authored a book on the history of conservation, A Laboratory for Art: Harvard’s Fogg Museum and the Emergence of Conservation in America, 1900–1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museum; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

Rebecca Molholt, Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize

Rebecca Molholt’s article “Roman Labyrinth Mosaics and the Experience of Motion,” published in the September 2011 issue of The Art Bulletin, is an imaginative study of seven North African mosaics that were once floors in Roman bathhouses. She introduces a fresh methodology for their assessment, building on a distinction that Walter Benjamin drew between “vertical and horizontal forms of viewing.” Moholt argues that mosaics have long been read as if they were vertical easel paintings rather than understood as “materials underfoot,” which are experienced while kinetically moving over their horizontal surfaces. She uncovers a metaphoric reading of these mosaics that relates the labyrinths, their subject matter, and architectural context—the Roman bath—to athleticism and heroism.

Art Journal Award

An article by the online journal Triple Canopy, authored primarily by Colby Chamberlain of Columbia University, has won the 2012 Art Journal Award. The text, called “The Binder and the Server,” appears in the Winter 2011 issue.

Contact

For more information on the 2012 Awards for Distinction, please contact Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs. Visit the Awards section of the CAA website to read about all past recipients.

CAA announced the shortlists for the 2012 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the two Alfred H. Barr Jr. Awards on December 2, 2011.

In its regular roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, curators, collectors, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. Of special note is a text on Nancy Shelby Schuller, a curator of visual resources, published on the CAA website.

• Jerry W. Bates, a photographer who managed the Graphics Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University for thirty years, passed away on September 9, 2011. He was 63
• Adrian Berg, a British landscape painter and member of the Royal Academy who was inspired by Claude Monet, died on October 22, 2011, at the age of 82. The Serpentine Gallery in London hosted a survey of his work in 1986
• Peter Campbell, a writer, editor, illustrator, and book designer who served as the resident art critic and designer for the London Review of Books for more than thirty years, died on October 25, 2011. He was 74 years old
• Manon Cleary, a realist painter and influential professor of art based in Washington, DC, known primarily for her frankly autobiographical subject matter, passed away on November 26, 2011, at age 69. The Washington Arts Museum hosted a retrospective of her work in 2006
• Benjamin “Ben” Day, who taught graphic design and visual communications at Louisiana Tech University, Missouri State University, Boston University, and Virginia Commonwealth University, died on July 14, 2011. He was 68
• Vittorio de Seta, an Italian filmmaker and screenwriter whose work was celebrated in a 2006 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, died on November 29, 2011. He was 88
• Norton T. Dodge, a professor of Soviet economics at the University of Maryland and St. Mary’s College of Maryland and the owner of the world’s largest collection of Soviet dissident art, now housed at Rutgers University, died on November 5, 2011. He was 84
• Alan Haydon, an arts administrator who served on Arts Council England and the London Arts Board, died on October 9, 2011, at age 61. He also directed the De La Warr Pavillion, a contemporary art center in East Sussex, from 1999 to 2011
• Mary Hunt Kahlenberg, an authority on antique and ethnographic textiles and a former curator and head of the Department of Costume and Textiles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, died on October 27, 2011. She was 71 years old
• Keo Kinal, a Cambodian archaeologist at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, died on November 13, 2011. Born in 1973, he had taught the history of art and architecture after finishing a master’s degree at the Tokyo National University of the Arts
• Gerald Laing, an English Pop artist active in New York who depicted current events and celebrities such as Kate Moss and Amy Winehouse in large-scale painting and sculpture, passed away on November 23, 2011. He was 75
• Jon Lovelace, a financier, philanthropist, and a founding board member of the California Institute of the Arts, died on November 16, 2011. He was 84 years old
• Cargill MacMillan Jr., an heir to the Cargill family’s agricultural business and a benefactor who gifted many works to the Palm Springs Arts Museum in California, died on November 14, 2011, at the age of 84
• William McKeown, an Irish painter of ethereal abstractions who represented Northern Ireland in the 2005 Venice Biennale, died on October 25, 2011. He was 49
• Pat Passlof, an artist of the New York School, the wife of the painter Milton Resnick, and a longtime faculty member of the College of Staten Island, died on November 13, 2011. She was 83
• Nancy Shelby Schuller, who spent thirty-four years as curator of the Visual Resources Collection at the University of Texas at Austin, died on November 8, 2011, at age 71. CAA has published a special text on her
• Dugald Stermer, an illustrator, designer, and teacher who served as art director for the left-wing magazine Ramparts in the 1960s and later as chairman of the Department of Illustration at California College of the Arts, died on December 2, 2011. He was 74
• Bruno Weber, a Swiss architect and sculptor known for his multimedia sculpture park in Dietikon, Switzerland, died on October 24, 2011. He was 80 years old
• George Whitman, the New Jersey–born founder and owner of Shakespeare & Company, a celebrated bookstore in Paris, died on December 14, 2011, at the age of 98

Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the January listing.