CAA News

April Greiman, an innovative designer whose work with digital technology freed graphic design and typography from its reliance on the modernist grid, helping push an analogue profession into the digital realm, will speak at CAA’s upcoming Annual Members’ Business Meeting.

Born and raised in New York, Greiman attended the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri. She completed graduate studies with the designers Armin Hoffman and Wolfgang Weingart at the Allgemeine Kunstgewerbeschule (General Arts Trade School) in Basel, Switzerland, an early 1970s hotbed for the emerging “new wave” aesthetic. Greiman’s early visual identity and publication projects—especially her experimental issue of Design Quarterly in 1986—were notable for their pioneering use of early Apple Macintosh computers and software, and for their radical combination of video and print technologies.

As head of the design studio Made in Space, Greiman consults in transmedia identity and architectural branding, and with color, surfaces, and materials. In the academic sphere, she has taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and the California Institute of the Arts, where she led the design program in the 1980s and served as chair of Visual Communications in the 1990s. She is the author of several books on design, including Hybrid Imagery: The Fusion of Technology and Graphic Design (1990) and Something from Nothing: Design Process (2001).

As a practicing fine artist, Greiman has produced work encompassing digital photography, video, installation design, and architecture. Her public projects in Los Angeles, where she has lived since 1976, include Poet’s Walk for Citicorp Plaza and the seven-story mural Hand Holding a Bowl of Rice at the entrance to the Wilshire Vermont Metro Station in Koreatown. Greiman’s digital photography and transmedia work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Pasadena Museum of California Art. Most recently, her work was included in the exhibition elles@centrepompidou at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Greiman has received numerous local, state, and national design awards, including a Hall Chair Fellowship from the Hallmark Corporation, a Gold Medal from the American Institute of Graphic Arts, a Chrysler Award for Innovation from the Chrysler Corporation, an AIGA Fellowship, and an American Institute of Architects Award.

CAA’s Annual Members’ Business Meeting will take place during the 100th Annual Conference on Friday, February 24, 2012, from 5:30 to 7:00 PM at Los Angeles Convention Center.

Rocco Landesman, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) since 2009, will deliver the keynote address at Convocation during CAA’s 100th Annual Conference and Centennial Celebration. Convocation takes place on Wednesday evening, February 22, 2012, at the Los Angeles Convention Center, West Hall Meeting Room 502AB, Level 2. Scheduled from 5:30 to 7:00 PM, Convocation also includes a welcome from Linda Downs; CAA executive director, an address from Barbara Nesin, president of the CAA Board of Directors; remarks from Susan Hildreth of the Institute of Museum and Library Services; and the presentation of the CAA Centennial Awards.

Born and raised in Saint Louis, Missouri, Landesman pursued his undergraduate education at Colby College and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, before earning a doctorate in dramatic literature at the Yale School of Drama. After completing his coursework, he stayed at the school for four years, working as an assistant professor.

Landesman’s ensuing career has been a hybrid of commercial and artistic enterprises. He left Yale in 1977 to start a private investment fund, which he ran until his appointment ten years later as president of Jujamcyn, a company that owns and operates five Broadway theaters. Before and after joining Jujamcyn, He produced Broadway shows, the most notable of which are Big River, Angels in America: Millenium Approaches, Angels in America: Perestroika, and The Producers, all of which won Tony Awards. In 2005, he purchased Jujamcyn and operated it until President Barack Obama announced his intention to nominate him to lead the NEA. The United States Senate confirmed Landesman as the tenth NEA chairman on August 7, 2009.

Landesman has been active on numerous boards, including the Municipal Arts Society, the Times Square Alliance, the Actor’s Fund, and the Educational Foundation of America. He has also vigorously engaged the ongoing debate about arts policy, speaking at forums and writing numerous articles, focusing mainly on the relationship between the commercial and nonprofit sectors of the American theater. Over the years, he returned to the Yale School of Drama and the Yale Repertory Theatre to teach.

In its semimonthly 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 from Patricia Mainardi on Filiz Burhan for CAA.

• Julie Apap, a ceramicist who lived, worked, and taught art in Malta, died on March 16, 2011. She was 62 years old
• Martha Brincklow, the founder of the International Studies Program at Saint Petersburg College in Florida who led students on tours of the Louvre, the Sistine Chapel, and Tate Gallery, died on January 14, 2011. She was 95
• Filiz Burhan, a long-time professor of art history at the American University in Paris whose work opened new directions in the study of Symbolism, died on May 23, 2011, at 60 years of age. Patricia Mainardi has written a special text on her for CAA
• Robert Fluhr, an artist who taught for thirty years in the Philadelphian high schools and led sculpture classes for the blind and visually impaired at the Allens Lane Art Center, died on June 20, 2011. He was 84
• Hoda Garnett, an Egyptian-born news photographer who began her career in the US Navy in the 1950s and whose work appeared in Life magazine, died on October 13, 2011. She was 84 years old
• Beatrice Gersh, an arts patron in Los Angeles who was instrumental in founding the Museum of Contemporary Art in her city, died on October 9, 2011, at age 87
• Frank B. Gettings, who spent thirty years as a curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, died on August 4, 2011. He was 80 years old
• Shifra Goldman, a political activist and a pioneering scholar of Latin American and Chicano art who taught for twenty years in southern Californian institutions, died on September 11, 2011. She was 85
• Addie James, a folk artist based in North Carolina who created colorful paintings of family life in the South, died on July 17, 2011. She was 67
• Szeto Keung, a Chinese American artist based in New York who showed his mixed-media work extensively in Taiwan and Hong Kong, died on September 5, 2011. He was 62
• Friedrich Kittler, a German media theorist who taught internationally, most recently at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, died on October 18, 2011, at age 68
• Mathieu Lefèvre, a Canadian artist who lived and worked in Brooklyn, died on October 18, 2011. He was 30
• Robert Loughlin, an artist and scavenger who advised collectors in modern design and furniture, including Andy Warhol, died on September 27, 2011. He was 62 years old
• James More, a Scottish design-studio manager and an emeritus professor of design at Northumbria University in England, died on September 27, 2011, at age 65
• William Mostyn-Owen, an artist historian who specialized in the Italian Renaissance and served as Bernard Berenson’s bibliographer, died on May 2, 2011. He was 81 years old
• Sadamasa Motonaga, a Japanese painter who began his career in the Gutai movement, died on October 3, 2011. He was 88
• Werner Muensterberger, a psychoanalyst, art historian, and collector of African art, died on March 6, 2011. He had reached the age of 98
• John Neuhart, an American designer who taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, and who, with his wife Marilyn, was a colleague of Ray and Charles Eames, died on September 19, 2011. He was 82
• Malcolm H. Preston, an art critic and historian who taught for many years at Hofstra University, died on July 10, 2011, at age 91. He was also a figurative and landscape painter
• Richard Randell, a sculptor and filmmaker who taught art at Stanford University, died on May 25, 2011, at the age of 81. He also helped found the World of Languages, which preserved and studied disappearing Kenyan and Tanzanian song, poetry, and dance
• Jehangir Sabavala, a pioneering artist in postcolonial India whose work was always at odds with popular contemporaneous styles, died on September 2, 2011. He was 89
• Pamela Hemenway Simpson, a historian of art and architecture at Washington and Lee University who served as president of the Southeastern College Art Conference, died on October 4, 2011, at the age of 65
• Bernard Smith, a renowned Australian intellectual and author whose academic leadership helped form the discipline of art history in his country, died on September 2, 2011. He was 94 years old
• Ronald Thomason, a Texan sculptor, designer, and teacher, died on August 4, 2011, on his 80th birthday
• Jacques Vilain, a French curator at the Musée Rodin in Paris who later became its director, died on September 23, 2011
• Richard DeLos Wells, a professor of art, art history, and American studies at Brigham Young University in Hawai‘i, died on July 26, 2011, at the age of 63

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 December listing.

Anne Collins Goodyear, associate curator of prints and drawings at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, has been elected president of the CAA Board of Directors for a two-year term, beginning May 2012. A member of the board since 2006, Goodyear has served as vice president for external affairs (2007–9), vice president for publications (2009–11) and vice president for Annual Conference (2011–12). She succeeds Barbara Nesin of the Art Institute of Atlanta, who has led the board since May 2010.

Goodyear writes, “CAA sets a standard for professional excellence and best practices that is not only enjoyed by our membership, but which resonates far beyond. In an era of increasing financial constraints and expanding channels for outreach, the association must continue to aspire to balancing nimbleness with the reflection that goes along with responsible judgment. These are challenges I would enjoy addressing in tandem with CAA staff, fellow board members, and the membership at large.”

Goodyear began work at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, in 2001 and was promoted from assistant to associate curator in 2009. Her recent exhibitions include Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture, organized with James W. McManus (2009), and Reflections/Refractions: Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century, collaborating with Wendy Wick Reaves (2009). Both exhibitions were accompanied by scholarly catalogues of the same title. Goodyear has also helped organize six installations for the museum’s ongoing Portraiture Now series, initiated in 2006. Additionally, she has taught a graduate seminar in American art at George Washington University since 2008.

Goodyear earned her MA and PhD in art history from the University of Texas at Austin, after receiving a BA in the history of art and architecture and French civilization at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She has published essays in the scholarly journals American Art and Leonardo and contributed chapters to several exhibition catalogues and edited volumes, including Unexpected Reflections (2010), The Political Economy of Art: Creating the Modern Nation of Culture (2008), Cold War Modern: Art and Design in a Divided World (2008), and Photography Theory (2007).

Within CAA, Goodyear served on the Museum Committee, chaired the Education Committee, and participated on the Task Force on Practical Publications, the Task Force on Editorial Safeguards, the Strategic Plan Steering Committee, and the Centennial Task Force, among other groups. Equally active outside the organization, she has chaired the Washington, DC, chapter of ArtTable since 2010 and currently leads the Smithsonian Network Review Committee, which oversees programming for the institution’s documentaries and other videos. As chair of the Smithsonian’s Material Culture Forum, she facilitated interdisciplinary programing for scholars in the nation’s capital.

Goodyear continues, “I have been a member of CAA since my years as a graduate student. During that time, I had the opportunity to see firsthand John Clarke’s clear passion for and enjoyment of his service on the CAA board and his role as president. Dr. Clarke’s enthusiasm for CAA touched each of the students with whom he worked. I would ultimately seek to bring a similar level of engagement and commitment to the role of president, and would seek to inspire future leaders to become further engaged with the organization to render it as adaptive and responsive as possible to the diverse emerging needs of emerging and established professionals in the visual arts.”

The CAA board chooses its next president from among the elected directors in the fall of the current president’s final year of service, providing a period in which the next president can learn the responsibilities of the office and prepare for his or her term. For more information on CAA and the Board of Directors, please contact Vanessa Jalet, CAA executive assistant.

A full report on the October board meeting is forthcoming later this month.

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.

In its semimonthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, filmmakers, curators, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. Of special note are two texts written for CAA: Amalia Nelson-Croner writes about her mother, Karin Christine Nelson; and Janis Bergman-Carton pays tribute to Karl Kilinski II, her colleague at Southern Methodist University.

• Jordan Belson, a Californian experimental filmmaker who created groundbreaking work in nonobjective cinema, died on September 6, 2011. He was 85
• Bernhard Blume, a German artist who worked in photography with his wife Anna, passed away on September 1, 2011. He was 73
• Nicolas Djandji, an artist born in Egypt who graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art and worked for the Dia Foundation in New York, died on September 2, 2011. He was 24 years old
• John Dobbs, an award-winning New York–based painter who taught at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, the New School for Social Research, and John Jay College, passed away on August 9, 2011. He was 80
• Paul Gardère, a Haitian artist who emigrated to the United States in 1959, died on September 2, 2011. Born in 1944, the artist had been showing at Skoto Gallery in New York
• Hugh Gumpel, a New York artist who taught for many years at the National Academy School and at Purchase College, State University of New York, passed away on May 2, 2011, at the age of 85
• Richard Hamilton, an influential British artist who inspired Pop art and whose diverse oeuvre comprises works in painting, found objects, collage, printmaking, graphic design, typography, and digital images, died on September 13, 2011. He was 89
• Michael Hart, a computer engineer who founded Project Gutenberg, which has digitized more than 36,000 books in 60 languages, died on September 6, 2011. He was 64 years old
• Mohammed Ghani Hikmat, a prominent Iraqi sculptor who emerged in the 1960s and who was instrumental in the recovery of looted artworks from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, died on September 12, 2011. He was 82
• John Hoover, an Alaskan artist who drew on indigenous traditions, died on September 3, 2011, at the age of 91. The Anchorage Museum held a retrospective of his work in 2002
• Budd Hopkins, an Abstract Expressionist painter and sculptor who became obsessed with unidentified flying objects and alien abductions, left this earth for a higher plane on August 21, 2011. He was 80 years old
• Jeanette Ingberman, a curator who cofounded and led Exit Art, an important nonprofit art space in New York, died on August 24, 2011. She was 59 years old
• Harry Jackson, an artist who traded his Abstract Expressionist style for realist depictions of the American West, passed away on April 25, 2011. He was 87
• Beverly Whitney Kean, a Hollywood film star who wrote several books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian art and art patrons, died on July 9, 2011. She was 89 years old
• Karl Kilinski II, a specialist in Greek vase painting and a longtime professor of art history at Southern Methodist University, died on January 6, 2011, at age 64. His colleague Janis Bergman-Carton has written a special text on him
• Wlodzimierz Ksiazek, a Polish artist who lived, worked, and showed his work in the northeastern United States for thirty years, died under mysterious circumstances in May 2011. He was 59
• George Kuchar, an experimental filmmaker who had taught at the San Francisco Art Institute since 1971, died on September 6, 2011, at the age of 69. Among his best-known films are Sins of the Fleshapoids, Hold Me While I’m Naked, and Thundercrack!
• Stephen Mueller, a New York–based Color Field painter whose mystical work drew on the art of India, Persia, and Mexico, died on September 16, 2011, at the age of 63
• Vann Nath, a Cambodian painter who survived the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge in Security Prison 21, known as S21, died on September 5, 2011. He was 65 years old
• Karin Christine Nelson, a Bay Area author, administrator, and curator who specialized in textiles, passed away on June 22, 2011, at the age of 64. Her daughter Amalia Nelson-Croner has contributed an obituary that is published in the CAA website
• Anne Odom, a curator and historian of imperial Russian art who worked for more than thirty years at Hillwood Estate, Museum, and Gardens in Washington, DC, died on August 25, 2011. She was 75 years old
• Margaret Olley, an Australian painter and a generous patron of the arts, died on July 26, 2011. She was 88 years old
• Efrén Ordoñez, a Mexican artist who worked in painting, sculpture, and stained glass, passed away on August 21, 2011. He was 84
• Damian Priour, a Texan sculptor who created public monuments, died on September 14, 2011, at the age of 61. He was also known for his community involvement in Austin
• Phillip Renaud, a Chicagoan artist and teacher who illustrated articles for Playboy in the 1960s, died on June 27, 2011. He was 77 years old
• Susan Shatter, a painter who specialized in watercolor and a regular colonist at Yaddo, died in July 2011. Born in 1953, she had served as secretary and president of the National Academy in New York
• Keith W. Tantlinger, an engineer who invented the modern cargo container, an object that has become increasingly popular with artists and designers, died on August 27, 2011. He was 92
• June Wayne, an accomplished artist who founded the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, which drew artists from around the world, passed away on August 23, 2011. She was 93 years old

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 November listing.

In its semimonthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, curators, collectors, museum directors, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. Of special note is Adrian Hicken’s text on the Hungarian-born British art historian George Thomas Noszlopy, written especially for CAA.

• Tadek Beutlich, a teacher, printmaker, and textile artist whose experiments with three-dimensional weaving toured internationally in the 1960s, passed away on April 16, 2011, at 88. Beutlich authored The Technique of Woven Tapestry (1967) and pushed the boundaries of his medium further with “free-warp” tapestries, a technique that created wall hangings and freestanding pieces that resembled living organisms
• Robert Breer, an artist and animator who cofounded the Film-makers’ Cooperative in New York and taught the medium at Cooper Union from 1971 to 2001, passed away on August 13, 2011, at age 84. A major figure in Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), Breer began animating his own abstract paintings, which he referred to as “Form Phases,” in the 1950s, successfully derailing narrative and assaulting the viewer with movement and speed through glitchy imagery
• Charles E. Buckley, director of the Currier Museum of Art (1955–64) and the Saint Louis Art Museum (1964–75) who helped enlarge the collections of both institutions with American and European works, furniture, and wares, died on June 26, 2011, at age 86. He served as president of the American Association of Museums from 1972 to 1974, helping to establish the organization’s important accreditation system
• Duncan Campbell, a London art dealer who championed modern British printmaking and promoted the White Stag group of the 1930s, died on February 14, 2011, at the age of 66
• Edmund Carpenter, an archeologist and anthropologist who with Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto laid the foundation for modern media studies, died on July 1, 2011, at age 88. Carpenter’s work considered the effects of media on human interactions, supported by investigations of tribal peoples in Papua New Guinea in the 1970s and further research at the Museum of Ethnology in Basel in the 1980s. He also edited the journal Explorations and gathered the papers of the art historian Carl Schuster, published in twelve volumes
• Irene Chou (born Zhou Luyun), a prominent artist of the New Ink Painting movement in Hong Kong who reinvigorated the Zen and Tao-derived “one stroke” technique in oil, acrylic, and watercolor, died on July 1, 2011, at the age of 87. She was a founding member of two collectives, the In Tao Art Association (Yuan Dao huahui) and the One Art Group (Yi huahui), which sought new ways to combine Eastern and Western techniques while maintaining the principles of traditional Chinese art
• Roger Davies, the chief book designer for the British Museum from the 1970s through the 1990s whose work won numerous awards, has passed away at the age of 72
• Biren De, an internationally exhibited Indian artist who depicted universal energies through geometry, light, and traditional Hindu or Buddhist symbols, died on March 12, 2011. He was 85 years old
• Fred Dubery, a figurative painter known for his quietly colorful and off-kilter oils and a longtime professor at the Royal Academy Schools, passed away on April 8, 2011, at the age of 84. He was also a lifetime member of the New English Art Club
• T. Lux Feininger, a painter and photographer who documented the daily lives of the German avant-garde and the Bauhaus in particular, died on July 7, 2011, at the age of 101. After emigrating to the United States in 1936, he taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Virginia Fields, a distinguished scholar, educator, and the first curator of Precolumbian art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, died on June 15, 2011, at the age of 58. In her twenty two years at the museum, Fields helped acquire more than three thousand ancient objects for the  collection, organized blockbuster shows on Mayan and Olmec art, and allocated new resources for the study of ancient American art
• Gunnar Fischer, Ingmar Bergman’s cinematographer who shot twelve of the director’s films between 1948 and 1960, including The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), and The Devil’s Eye (1960), passed away on June 11, 2011. He was 90 years old
• Trevor Frankland, a British painter of abstract scenes who served as president of the Royal Watercolor Society from 2003 to 2006, died on April 17, 2011, at the age of 79
• Lucian Freud, a major twentieth-century artist whose dedication to painting the human figure kept stark realism alive throughout an era of modernist abstraction, died on July 20, 2011. He was 88 years old. He was also the grandson of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud
• Ussman Ghauri, a celebrated Pakastani printmaker known for his investigations of alphabets, symbolic narratives, and societal distress, died on April 9, 2011, at the age of 41. Ghauri was also an associate professor at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture and served as a curator for the IVS Gallery and the Koel Gallery
• Selwyn Goldsmith, an advocate for the functional evolution of architecture in England and the author of Universal Design (2000) and Designing for the Disabled (1963), a pioneering guidebook that suggested adjustments for facilities and buildings to better accommodate handicapped people, died on April 3, 2011. He was 78
• Dov Gottesman, the president of the Israel Museum, a collector of art, and the recipient of the 2005 King Solomon Award for art patronage, died on February 22, 2011, at age 82. Gottesman founded the Artist’s Portfolio Project, a program and workshop that published twenty series of prints by Israeli artists and that turned into the Gottesman Etching Center
• Fred Griffin, an artist based in the Pacific Northwest who taught graphic design at the Art Institute of Seattle and the Burnley School of Professional Art, passed away on April 23, 2011. He was 79 years old
• Nancy Hamon, a passionate philanthropist and cultural advocate in Dallas who served on the board of trustees at the Dallas Museum of Art, passed away on July 31, 2011, at age 92. Hamon helped fund the acquisition of the Nora and John Wise Collection of ancient American artworks and objects, the construction of new exhibition spaces and a library at the museum, and the Jake and Nancy Hamon Art Library at Southern Methodist University
• Melissa Hines, the director of cultural partnerships at the Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs since 2004 and a member of the King County Arts Commission (now called 4Culture) from 1996 to 2001, died on April 8, 2011. She was 63 years old
• John Hoyland, an English painter and printmaker who created emotionally charged abstract imagery that favored size, pigment, and form over visual references, passed away on July 21, 2011. He was 76 years old
• Freda Koblick, a prominent San Franciscan sculptor who in the 1960s produced abstract work in cast acrylic, passed away June 18, 2011, at the age of 90. Before using the new medium, she designed functional objects in plastic, often collaborating with architects
• Owen Land, an American teacher and filmmaker associated with the Fluxus movement who was keen on disregarding narrative in exchange for a more essentially visual experience of film, died on June 8, 2011, at the age of 67. Born George Landow, he was the founder of the Experimental Theatre Workshop in the Performance Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
• Lawrence Lee, a master glass artisan responsible for creating large public stained-glass compositions throughout Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, died on April 25, 2011, at age 101. He was the author of several books, among them Stained Glass (1967), Stained Glass, an Illustrated Guide (1976), and The Appreciation of Stained Glass (1977)
• Jerome Liebling, a member of the Photo League, a collective of photojournalists documenting the social climate in New York, in the 1930s and 1940s and the founder of photography and film programs at the University of Minnesota and Hampshire College, died on July 27, 2011. He was 87
• Gilbert Luján aka Magú, a teacher, painter, sculptor, muralist, and pioneer of the Chicano art movement in California since the 1960s, died on July 24, 2011, at the age of 70. Magu was a founding member of the art collective Los Four, responsible for enhancing the political and aesthetic aims of Chicano art
• Norma “Duffy” Lyon, the official Iowa State Fair butter cow sculptor from 1960 to 2006, died on June 26, 2011, at the age of 81. Lyon also created likenesses of celebrities and presidents, and even produced a life-size reproduction of Leonardo’s The Last Supper from two thousand pounds of butter
• Ján Mančuška, an experimental writer, painter, and video artist who challenged traditional presentations of art within architectural environments and was notorious for his conceptually playful installations, died on July 1, 2011. He was 39 years old
• Rachel Maxwell-Hyslop, a teacher, archaeologist, and president of the British School of Archaeology in the 1990s, died on May 9, 2011, at age 97. A scholar of jewelry, Maxwell-Hyslop wrote extensively on Bronze Age weapons and tools from West Asia
• Eddy G. Nicholson, an industrialist who was an avid collector of early American art and furniture, passed away on June 16, 2011, at the age of 73
• Christiane Desroches Noblecourt, a French Egyptologist who rescued antiquities from southern Nubia in the 1960s and mounted the groundbreaking King Tut exhibition at the Musée du Louvre in 1967, died on June 23, 2011. She was 97 years old
• George Thomas Noszlopy, a Hungarian-born scholar and longtime professor at Birmingham Polytechnic in England who produced novel explorations on early-twentieth-century art, Renaissance art, and British art and crafts, passed away on June 5, 2011, at age 78. Adrian Hicken has written a special text on him for CAA
• Breon O’Casey, a modernist jeweler, weaver, printmaker, painter, and sculptor who was a member of the St. Ives School in England, which included Barbara Hepworth, died on May 22, 2011. He was 83
• Roman Opalka, a Polish painter recognized for his series Opalka 1965/1 — ∞, which numerically annotated his days starting in 1965 with the number one, passed away on August 6, 2011. He was 79 years old
• Ruth Perelman, a cultural patron in Philadelphia who contributed to the expansion of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and funded the Perelman Building, which opened in 2007, died on July 31, 2011. She was 90
• Edward Carlos Plunkett, an Irish abstract painter known as Lord Dunsany who emerged in the 1960s but traded in art for design in the 1980s, died on May 24, 2011, at the age of 71. He helped found de Marsillac Plunkett, for which he created furniture and decorative vessels to complement his wife’s architectural work, yet returned to painting in the 1990s
• Wonil Rhee, a prolific South Korean curator who organized numerous exhibitions and biennials around the world, died on January 11, 2011, at the age of 50. Working at several musuems and independently, Rhee diligently promoted contemporary Asian artists and evoked broader international dialogue via exhibitions such as Thermocline of Art: New Asian Waves (2007) at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Germany
• Albert M. Sack, a New York–based antique dealer and the author of Fine Points of American Furniture: Good, Better, Best (1950), an important criterion for aesthetic judgment of furniture for collectors and nonspecialists alike, died on May 29, 2011. He was 96
• Stanley Seeger, a coy patron of art known for a stunning collection of homes in the United Kingdom and an expansive collection of work by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Egon Schiele, and Francis Bacon, died on June 24, 2011. He was 81 years old
• Robert Sklar, a professor of cinema studies at New York University from 1977 to 2009 and the author of several publications exploring how film influences morals, beliefs, and social context, including Movie-Made America: A History of American Movies (1975), died on July 2, 2011, at age 74. An active member of the National Film Preservation Board, Sklar served on the New York Film Festival selection committee during the 1990s
• Geoffrey Squire, a designer and an educator at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Sotheby’s Institute of Art, both in London, died in June 2011 at the age of 86. Squire was the author of Dress, Art, and Society, 1560–1970 (1974) and The Observer’s Book of European Costumes (1975)
• Alex Steinweiss, an art director at Columbia Records who in 1940 invented the modern album cover when he packaged a Rodgers and Hart 78 RPM record with a grandly lit marquee on the sleeve rather than a flat monochrome packaging, died on July 17, 2011. He was 94
• Zdenek Sykora, a Czech artist whose computer-generated compositions in the 1960s garnered attention for their relentless mathematical method and abstraction within predetermined rules, died on July 12, 2011, at age 91. He was also a professor at Charles University in Prague
• Prince Twins Seven-Seven, a Nigerian painter associated with the Oshogbo School in Ibadan who focused on Yoruban myths through intricate patterns and bright colors, died on June 16, 2011, at the age of 67. His work was shown internationally, including the controversial 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre in Paris
• James Earnest Vivieaere, a New Zealand–based artist whose multimedia and video work demonstrated the multifarious identity of Pacific Islanders outside their enforced exoticism, died on June 3, 2011, at age 63. As a curator, Vivieaere produced the survey exhibitions Bottled Ocean (1994) in his home country and The Great Journey: In Pursuit of the Ancestral Realm (2009) in Taiwan
• Shelagh Wakeley, an installation artist who focused on integrating continuity and sensation into public spaces in Britain while contrasting nature and artifice, died on March 19, 2011, at the age of 78. She met the Brazilian artist Tunga in 1989 and collaborated with him on video projects in the 1990s
• George White, architect of the American Capitol from 1971 to 1995 who was responsible for maintaining the Supreme Court, Library of Congress, and the surrounding grounds, died on June 17, 2011, at the age of 90. White oversaw the complete restoration of the Capitol Building’s rotunda, renovations of the Supreme Court and Senate Chamber, and the revitalization of the electrical and transportation systems in Congressional office buildings

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 September listing.

The 2012 Distinguished Scholar Session, taking place at the 100th Annual Conference in Los Angeles, will honor Rosalind Krauss, University Professor at Columbia University in New York. Yve-Alain Bois of the Institute for Advanced Studies will chair a session, called “The Theoretical Turn,” in which five to six participants—among them Harry Cooper, Jonathan Crary, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and Hal Foster—will explore and celebrate Krauss’s many contributions to the history of art. The Distinguished Scholar Session will be held in Room 515B at the Los Angeles Convention Center on Thursday, February 23, 2:30–5:00 PM.

Krauss’s acute observation of twentieth-century art began at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she received her undergraduate degree in 1962. She began writing criticism in 1966, mostly for Artforum, while working on her PhD at Harvard University, which she earned in 1969. MIT Press published an expanded version of her dissertation as Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith in 1971.¹

Krauss continued writing criticism and generating art-historical essays that challenged steadfast analyses of Auguste Rodin, the Surrealists, and Jackson Pollock, to name a few topics. She joined the Artforum editorial board in the late 1960s and appeared on the masthead as assistant editor from 1971 to 1974. Krauss and her colleague Annette Michelson left the magazine in 1975 to establish the scholarly October, which strove to forge a relationship between contemporary concerns and scholarship, with particular emphases on the history of modernism, its fundamental premises, and the ability of writing to reinvigorate the era. For Krauss and others, October was an opportunity to integrate artists such as Richard Serra and Sol LeWitt into their theoretical convictions and investigative criticism.

Krauss collected her essays into several influential books, including Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977), The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985), and Bachelors (1999). She has also written monographs on David Smith and Cindy Sherman, among others, as well as shorter books such as The Optical Unconscious (1993) and A Voyage on the North Sea (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000). Her curatorial work—which includes Joan Miro: Magnetic Fields (1971) and Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem (1994) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Richard Serra/Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in 1986—has resulted in significant advances in art history while relaying her amorous relationship with the provocations of Minimalism and the tactility of sculptural mediums. Most recently, she organized L’Informe: Mode d’emploi with Bois at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1996.

For the last decade, Krauss has battled what she calls the “post-medium condition”—the claim that a momentous shift from a singular artistic medium (such as canvas, plaster wall, or metal armature) to work that amalgamates various materials has only advanced ambiguity in art. In contrast, she suggests that the specificity of the aesthetic medium vitalizes modernism’s strengths, and that contemporary work that integrates text and technology has the capacity to triumph in similar terms. Perpetual Inventory (2011) is Krauss’s most recent publication intent on restoring logic and scrutinizing specificity in the history of art. A personal meditation on the relationships between aesthetics and memory, called Under Blue Cup, is forthcoming.

The integration of literary and philosophical references in her writing, combined with an enthusiasm for ravaging stagnant theories, has made Krauss a tenacious teacher and mentor. She joined Hunter College in New York in 1974, rising to Distinguished Professor both there and at the Graduate Center. In 1995 she transitioned to the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia, where she became Meyer Shapiro Professor of Modern Art and History and then, ten years later,  University Professor. Krauss’s experiences as a scholar and educator culminated in the textbook Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004), a didactic yet vital interpretation of modern art that was coauthored by Bois, Buchloh, and Foster. (A revised edition is expected soon.) As a further testament to her academic success, Krauss was an honorary degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2008 and another from Harvard University in 2011.

CAA inaugurated its Distinguished Scholar Session in 2001, first honoring James S. Ackerman of Harvard University. Since then, the organization has recognized the most illustrious writers, teachers, and curators, including Leo Steinberg (2002), John Szarkowski (2006), Linda Nochlin (2007), Svetlana Alpers (2009), and Jonathan Brown (2011).

1. MIT Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has published Krauss’s books mentioned in this article, unless indicated otherwise.

In its semimonthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, curators, collectors, museum directors, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts.

• Karen Aqua, a filmmaker and teacher based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose works in animation can be found in her eleven films and in the twenty-two segments she had created for Sesame Street since 1990, died on May 30, 2011. She was 57 years old
• José Argüelles, an eccentric artist and scholar who, after earning a doctorate in art history, taught aesthetics at universities nationally and wrote about the Mayan calendar in his book The Mayan Factor: Path beyond Technology, passed away on March 23, 2011, at age 72. He is known for organizing the Harmonic Convergence event of 1987
• Thomas N. Armstrong III, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York from 1974 to 1990 and who later led the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, died on June 20, 2011, at the age of 78. Armstrong facilitated the museum’s purchase of Frank Stella’s Die Fahne Hoch!, Jasper John’s Three Flags, and Alexander Calder’s Circus; he is also known for his firing of the curator Marcia Tucker, which prompted her to found the New Museum of Contemporary Art
• Ariege Arseguel, an independent art consultant and a former executive director of the Sonoma County Museum in California, died on June 5, 2011, at the age of 49. She had also worked for the San Francisco Art Institute, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Terry Ball, an artist who drew architectural reconstructions, including historic depictions of the Tower of London and Windsor Castle, among other locations, died on February 23, 2011. He was 79 years old
• Luciano Bellosi, an art historian specializing in Italian artists from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries—notably Cimabue, Duccio, Giotto, and Masaccio—died on April 26, 2011, at age 74. He taught medieval art history at the University of Siena from 1979 to 2006
• Ron Bone, a British painter known for his quiet interior scenes that critics compared to Andrew Wyeth and to seventeenth-century Dutch painting, died on February 26, 2011. He was 60 years old
• Claudio Bravo, a Chilean-born, largely self-taught artist who established his reputation in the 1960s by painting portraits of elite society in Spain and the Philippines, passed away on June 4, 2011, at age 74. Influenced by Mark Rothko and Antoni Tàpies, Bravo transitioned into trompe l’oeil paintings of drapery and crumpled paper in his later years
• Thalia Noras Carlos, a philanthropist who contributed millions of dollars worth of Greek and Roman antiquities to the Michael C. Carlos Museum, which bears the name of her late husband, at Emory University in Atlanta, passed away on May 22, 2011. She was 83 years old
• Leonora Carrington, a British-born Surrealist artist and writer and a muse to Max Ernst, died on May 25, 2011, at the age of 94. Though she traveled and exhibited her work internationally, she settled in Mexico City, where she spent time with her female artistic colleagues, Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo, and developed her unique, highly praised painting style
• Ira Cohen, a filmmaker, photographer, poet, publisher, and musician whose greatest work was life itself, died on April 25, 2011, at the age of 76. The New York–based Cohen traveled internationally and had collaborated with William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Paul Bowles
• Stephen De Staebler, a Bay Area–based creator of figurative sculpture in clay and bronze that depicted hauntingly fractured body parts, died on May 13, 2011, at the age of 78. The de Young Museum in San Francisco will host a retrospective of his work, Matter and Spirit, that opens in January 2012
• Bernhard Heisig, a celebrated and criticized East German painter who addressed themes of suffering in war and under fascism, died on June 10, 2011, at the age of 86. After reunification, Heisig’s work was exhibited across the country and presented in a solo show at Berlin’s Martin Gropius Bau in 2005
• M. F. Husain, a painter often described as the Picasso of India, died on June 9, 2011, at the age of 95. After starting his career as a Bollywood poster and billboard artist, Husain shifted into a style of painting inspired by Hindu temple art and Cubism, and his controversial depictions of deities and politically charged nude women sent him into self-exile
• Denis Mahon, a historian and collector of art who contributed his significant collection of Italian Baroque paintings to several British institutions, died on April 24, 2011, at age 100. His book Studies in Seicento Art and Theory, published in 1947, is a leading text on the subject; he also wrote extensively about Caravaggio and Nicolas Poussin
• Adolfas Mekas, a filmmaker associated with New American Cinema and the founder, with his brother Jonas, of Film Culture, a journal that advanced avant-garde film, died on May 31, 2011, at age 85. Mekas was also a founding member of the film department at Bard College, directing the program from 1971 to 1994 and teaching there until 2004
• Robert Miller, an art dealer whose eponymous New York gallery represents many blue-chip artists and their estates, including Ai Weiwei, Diane Arbus, Lee Krasner, and Alice Neel, died on June 22, 2011. He was 72 years old
• Andrew Morgan, an artist and a professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Miami from 1970 to 1987, died on March 18, 2011, at age 88. He was known for paintings and drawings of the Florida landscape and the Everglades
• Mordechai Omer, director and chief curator of the Tel Aviv Museum for the last seventeen years, passed away in June 2011 at the age of 70. He was also a professor at Tel Aviv University and worked to cultivate the Israeli art scene by supporting both young and established artists
• David E. Rust, a curator who worked at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, for many years until his retirement in 1984, died on April 8, 2011, at the age of 81. A specialist in French painting, Rust also studied Spanish and Italian art
• John S. Slorp, president of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design from 1990 to 2002 and an accreditor for the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, passed away on May 21, 2011, at the age of 74. Previous to his stint in Minnesota, Slorp was president of the Memphis College of Art for eight years
• Jack Smith, one of four artists known as the Beaux Arts quartet—or the Kitchen Sink artists, after an article by the critic David Sylvester—who came to prominence in England in the 1950s with abstract paintings that channeled Social Realism, died on June 11, 2011. He was 82
• Cy Twombly, an influential and revered postwar abstract painter whom the critic Robert Hughes elevated to an artistic pantheon that included Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, died on July 5, 2011. He was 83 years old
• Osamu Ueda, an Osaka-born curator at the Art Institute of Chicago who catalogued the museum’s collection of Japanese woodblock prints in the Claire E. Buckingham Collection, died on January 30, 2011, at age 83. Ueda was the coeditor of an important museum book, The Actor’s Image: Print Makers of the Katsukawa School, published in 1994
• Polly Ullrich, a Chicago-based journalist who wrote for United Press International, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the Chicago Sun Times, and the New York Times before she turned to ceramics, which she created and exhibited across the United States, passed away on July 6, 2011, at age 60. Ullrich also lectured across the Midwest and taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned an MA in art history, theory, and criticism in 1994

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 August listing.

Earlier this spring, the president of the CAA Board of Directors, Barbara Nesin, has confirmed new appointments to the editorial boards of CAA’s three scholarly journals, in consultation with then–vice president for publications, Anne Collins Goodyear. The appointments took effect on July 1, 2011.

Art Journal

Art Journal has announced its next editor-in-chief: Lane Relyea, an art critic and associate professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Since the 1990s Relyea has contributed to Artforum, Parkett, Frieze, and Afterall, among other publications. His book D.I.Y. Culture Industry: Signifying Practices, Social Networks, and Other Instrumentalizations of Everyday Art is forthcoming from MIT Press. Relyea will succeed Katy Siegel of Hunter College, City University of New York, and begin his three-year term on July 1, 2012, with the preceding year as editor designate.

Joining the Art Journal Editorial Board for four-year terms are Doryun Chong, associate curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Saloni Mathur, associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Chong is a contributing editor at Art Asia Pacific and worked as associate curator of visual arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, from 2003 to 2009. His recent exhibitions include Bruce Nauman: Days (2010) and Haegue Yang: Integrity of the Insider (2009–10). Mathur, a specialist in the art of South Asia, wrote India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Her recently compiled volume, The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora, is forthcoming from Yale University Press.

The Art Bulletin

Rachael DeLue, assistant professor at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, has been named the next reviews editor of The Art Bulletin, succeeding Michael Cole of Columbia University in New York. A specialist in American art, DeLue focuses on visual language in culture as it pertains to race, stereotypes, and beauty, and her most recent publication, Landscape Theory (New York: Routledge, 2008), coedited with James Elkins, considers its titular subject from an interdisciplinary perspective. DeLue will serve one year as reviews editor designate before beginning her three-year term on July 1, 2012.

In addition, two CAA members have joined the the Art Bulletin Editorial Board for four-year terms: Dana Leibsohn, Priscilla Paine Van der Poel Professor of Art at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts; and Steven Ostrow, professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and chair of its Department of Art History. Leibsohn concentrates on visual culture in colonial Latin America, highlighting the relevance of maps and modes of literacy in particular. A recent grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities is supporting her collaborative multimedia project, “Vistas: Colonial Latin American Visual Culture 1520–1820.” Ostrow has extensive knowledge of early Italian visual culture and has published on a variety of subjects, including sculpture and illuminated manuscripts, with an emphasis on patronage, iconography, and artistic practice. Most recently he contributed an essay to Rome Italy Renaissance: Essays in Art History Honoring Irving Lavin on His Sixtieth Birthday (New York: Italica, 2009).

The Art Bulletin Editorial Board also has a new chair, appointed from within its ranks: Thelma Thomas, associate professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, will serve for two years. Thomas specializes in Byzantine and Eastern Christian art and architecture, leading seminars such as “Material Culture in Late Antiquity: Textiles,” and “Byzantine Art and Architecture: 9th–15th Century.”

caa.reviews

The caa.reviews Editorial Board welcomes a new member, Tomoko Sakomura, assistant professor at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, who will serve for four years. Currently the journal’s field editor for books on Japanese art, she is working on a book project called Poetry as Image: The Visual Culture of Waka Poetry in Late Medieval Japan.

Five new field editors for books and exhibitions have recently been chosen by the editorial board to serve three-year terms. Joseph Alchermes of Connecticut College in New London will commission reviews of exhibitions of pre-1800 art in New York and the Northeast, and Kirsten Swenson of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is field editor for exhibitions in the Southwest. Aida Wong of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, will assign reviews of books on Chinese and Korean art; Pamela Jones of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, will do the same for books on early modern and southern European art; and Juliet Bellow of American University in Washington, DC, will cover books on nineteenth-century art.

Sheryl Reiss, lecturer at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, began her three-year term as editor-in-chief of caa.reviews on July 1, 2011, succeeding Lucy Oakley, head of education and programs at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University. CAA will publish an interview with Reiss, who served on the journal’s editorial board from 2001 to 2005, later this summer.