CAA News

Leonardo López Luján, senior researcher and professor of archaeology at the Museo del Templo Mayor, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), in Mexico City, will deliver the keynote address during Convocation at the 2009 CAA Annual Conference in Los Angeles. Convocation takes place at the Los Angeles Convention Center on Wednesday evening, February 25, 5:30–7:00 PM.

For nearly thirty years, López Luján has worked on the excavations of the Templo Mayor (Grand Temple), a fifteenth-century Aztec pyramid and its surroundings that are located in the heart of the Mexican capital; he has been director of the project since 1991. The temple lies beneath the Zócalo, also known as the Plaza de la Constitución, one of the largest public squares in the world.

In his talk, López Luján will focus on the most recent archaeological discoveries, while giving an overview of the history of archaeology in the Aztec capital. He will also discuss other topics, among them the recovery of the Tlaltecuhtli stone, an iconographic analysis that may unveil this sculpture’s functions and meanings, the rich offerings buried underneath it, and the possible presence of a royal tomb in this area of the sacred precinct.

For more information on López Luján, please read the CAA News biography or download Johanna Tuckman’s article, “In Search of an Aztec King,” from the Summer 2008 issue of American Archaeology.

CAA recognizes the lives and careers of the following individuals in the arts, all of whom recently passed away.

• Albert Boime, an art historian and longtime professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who researched the social history of art, died on October 18, 2008. He was 75
• Robert H. Chaney, a Houston business man who collected contemporary Asian and British art, died October 22, 2008
• Patricia Faure, a Los Angeles–based art dealer, died October 21, 2008, at the age of 80
• Jason Gleeson, an Australian artist and art critic who helped shape the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, died on October 20, 2008, a month shy of his 93rd birthday
• Ardeshir Mohasses, an Iranian-born political cartoonist and satirist whose work was the subject of a recent exhibition at the Asia Society in New York, died on October 9, 2008. He was 70
• Iba Ndiaye, a highly influential modern painter from Senegal who also lived and worked in Paris, died October 5, 2008, at the age of 80
• Paritosh Sen, a pioneering and well-known Indian artist, died October 22, 2008. He was 80.

CAA pays respect to the following artists, scholars, critics, and academics who recently passed away:

• Tina Allen, a sculptor of influential African Americans, died September 9, 2008, at age 58
• Dale Chisman, an abstract painter based in Denver, died August 28, 2008. He was 65
• George Deem, a painter who cleverly reworked old-master paintings, died August 11, 2008, at the age of 75
• Elizabeth Eames, a scholar of medieval tiles at the British Museum, died September 20, 2008. She was 90
• Marian Griffiths, a longtime director at Sculpture Center in New York, died September 8, 2008, at age 86
• Simon Hantaï, a reclusive French painter, died September 11, 2008. He was 85
• France Alain Jacquet, a French painter associated with nouveau réalisme, died September 4, 2008, at the age of 69
• Stephen A. Kliment, a former editor of the Architectural Record, died September 10, 2008, at the age of 78
• Paul Overy, a British art critic, died August 7, 2008, at age 68
• Petrus Schaesberg, a scholar of modern and contemporary art and an adjunct professor at Columbia University, died September 23, 2008. He was 40
• George Zarnecki, an expert on Romanesque art and a former director of the Courtauld Institute in London, died September 8, 2008, a few days before his 93rd birthday

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has named Richard Armstrong to the position of director of the foundation, beginning November 4. He had served as Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh since 1996 before announcing his resignation in June. Armstrong succeeds Thomas Krens, who stepped down earlier this year. As director of both the foundation and its flagship museum in New York, Armstrong will focus on the pivotal role of that museum and its collection while also providing leadership and management for the three other Guggenheim institutions in Venice, Bilbao, and Berlin, as well as the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Museum, scheduled to open in early 2013.

Photograph by David M. Heald and © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

The National Endowment for the Arts announced today that Dana Gioia, chairman of the NEA since 2003, will leave his position in January 2009. He will return to writing, his primary occupation prior to leading the endowment. Gioia will also join the Aspen Institute on a half-time basis as the first director of the Harman/Eisner Program in the Arts.

Under Gioia’s leadership, the NEA has effectively democratized its programs and services, maintaining the highest artistic and educational standards and while achieving unprecedented outreach to millions of Americans. Gioia has also made arts education central to the agency’s mission, creating many programs that combine the presentation of arts with arts education to foster the next generation of artists, audiences and patrons.

The Star Tribune in Minneapolis–St. Paul recently reported that Darsie Alexander has been named chief curator at the Walker Art Center in Minnesota. Alexander, senior curator of contemporary art at the Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland, starts her new position on November 10, replacing Philippe Vergne, who served as both the Walker’s deputy director and chief curator before he leaving last month to direct the Dia Art Foundation in New York.

Alexander’s recent exhibitions in Baltimore include SlideShow (2005) and Robert Motherwell: Meanings of Abstraction (2006). Two additional shows, Franz West, To Build a House You Start with the Roof: Work, 1972–2008, a retrospective of the Austrian sculptor’s work, and Front Room: Dieter Roth and Rachel Harrison, open next month.

Photograph by Mitro Hood and provided by the Walker Art Center.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today that Thomas P. Campbell—an accomplished curator with a specialty in European tapestry who has worked at the museum since 1995—has been elected its next director and chief executive officer, succeeding Philippe de Montebello, who announced in January his intention to retire from the Metropolitan Museum at the end of this year.

Campbell organized the groundbreaking and widely acclaimed exhibitions Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence (2002), whose catalogue won CAA’s Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award in 2003, and Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor (2007). Currently curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts as well as supervising curator of the museum’s Antonio Ratti Textile Center, Campbell was elected at yesterday’s meeting of the board of trustees and will assume the directorship of the Metropolitan Museum on January 1, 2009.

Image: Thomas P. Campbell (left) and Philippe de Montebello (photograph by Don Pollard and provided by the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Stuart Cary Welch, Jr., curator emeritus of Islamic and later Indian art at the Harvard Art Museum and former special consultant in charge in the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, died on August 13, 2008, while traveling in Hokkaido, Japan. He was 80 and a resident of New Hampshire.

Welch, a legendary scholar, collector, and connoisseur, studied and taught at Harvard University, where he was instrumental in transforming the Department of Islamic Art, establishing a curriculum of study of the arts of the Middle East and South Asia, and developing one of the finest collections of Islamic and later Indian art in this country. His lifelong association with Harvard culminated in his role over the past two decades as one of the most generous donors to the Harvard Art Museum.

Welch developed an appreciation of art early in his childhood. Aside from being a collector of drawings at a very young age, Welch himself was an accomplished draftsman, a skill that carried through to his enrollment at Harvard and beyond. He was a graduate of the St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1946. That same year he began his undergraduate studies in fine arts at Harvard, where he continued his graduate work in Classical art from 1952 to 1954. During that time, Welch intensified his study and collecting of Islamic and Indian art. He also published some of his more entertaining and lighthearted drawings in Harvard’s literary and humor magazines, including his series of Popular Professions Illustrated that appeared in the Harvard Lampoon and the Harvard Advocate.

While Welch concentrated in the study of fine arts at Harvard, at the time there were no classes or formal instruction available in the subject of Islamic or Indian art. Ever resourceful, Welch took the initiative to devise his own “course of study” by traveling extensively throughout the Middle East and South Asia to absorb regional traditions and culture and to witness firsthand the lands that captivated him, his interest driven by the drawings that he had already begun to acquire. At the same time, Eric Schroeder, then honorary keeper of Islamic Art at the Fogg Museum, became his mentor at Harvard.

In 1956, Schroeder invited Welch to become honorary assistant keeper of Islamic Art at the Fogg, and thus began an era that saw Welch use his infinite enthusiasm to transform the fledgling Department of Islamic Art. At the same time, as part of the vanguard of Islamic art scholars at Harvard, he spearheaded the effort to establish one of the first American university curriculums in the study of the arts of the Islamic world. In 1960, he taught the first class at Harvard in Near Eastern Art. An instructor for twenty-five years at Harvard, Welch arranged for works of art to be made available for study by students and scholars. Welch was a teacher and mentor to many distinguished museum leaders and scholars, including Lentz; Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art; and Michael Brand, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. Over four decades at Harvard, Welch served as honorary keeper, curator (retiring in 1995), and finally curator emeritus. He worked brilliantly with such esteemed donors as John Goelet, Edwin Binney III, and John Kenneth Galbraith, and during his tenure he vastly enriched Harvard’s holdings of Islamic and Indian art.

Concurrent with his work at Harvard, Welch served as special consultant in charge in the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1979 to 1987. He was instrumental in making many important acquisitions that greatly enhanced the Metropolitan Museum’s collection and, in 1985, organized the groundbreaking exhibition India: Art and Culture, 1300–1900, a comprehensive presentation of over three hundred works including masterpieces of the sacred and court traditions that ranks among his greatest achievements as a curator.

Welch’s scholarship, particularly in the fields of Persian and Indian painting and drawing, served as the foundation for many important exhibitions and accompanying publications, including The Art of Mughal India, Paintings and Precious Objects (1964), the first important American exhibition devoted to Mughal art; Gods, Thrones, and Peacocks: Northern Indian Painting from Two Traditions, Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries (1965); Room for Wonder: Indian Painting during the British Period, 1760–1880 (1978); Wonders of the Age: Masterpieces of Early Safavid Painting, 1501–1576 (1979); Gods, Kings, and Tigers: The Art of Kotah (1997); and From Mind, Heart, and Hand: Persian, Turkish, and Indian Drawings from the Stuart Cary Welch Collection (2004), an exhibition of drawings from Welch’s landmark gift to Harvard in 1999 of over three hundred works.

Welch produced countless exhibitions over the forty years that he spent at Harvard, many of which may have been small in size, but which always tended toward the visual and poetic. His last exhibition is the first in a series entitled Perspectives that is part of the long-term exhibition Re-View at the Harvard Art Museum/Arthur M. Sackler Museum. The small installation, titled Tree of Life: Five Indian Variations on a Theme, includes just five works of art but is characteristic of Welch’s vision and approach. It opened in April 2008, just a few days after Welch’s eightieth birthday.

Considered his greatest scholarly achievement was the immense, two-volume study of The Houghton Shahnameh, coauthored with Martin B. Dickson of Princeton University, which focused on the great early Safavid dynasty copy of the Persian national epic executed for the Safavid ruler and patron of the arts Shah Tahmasp (r. 1524–1576). Welch’s insights fundamentally changed the way scholars thought about the development of early Safavid painting, demonstrating that it was, in fact, a brilliant synthesis of the earlier Timurid and Turkman styles of painting.

Welch’s numerous exhibitions, publications, public lectures, and years of teaching propelled the study and appreciation of Islamic and Indian art to new heights, educating and enlightening generations of students, scholars, and museum visitors.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has announced that Ann Temkin will succeed John Elderfield as chief curator of painting and sculpture. Temkin, who served for thirteen years at the Philadephia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania, has been a curator at MoMA for five years. Among her exhibitions there are Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today (2008) and Against the Grain: Contemporary Art from the Edward R. Broida Collection (2006).

The New York Times has the story. Photograph by Robin Holland and provided by the Museum of Modern Art.

The Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) has selected five recipients for its 2009 Lifetime Achievement Awards:

• Maren Hassinger, director of the Rinehart School of Graduate Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art
• Ester Hernandez, a San Francisco–based artist who was a pioneer in the Chicana/Chicano civil rights art movement
• Joyce Kozloff, a political and feminist artist who was a founding member of the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s
• Margo Machida, a renowned authority on contemporary Asian American art and visual culture and associate professor at the University of Connecticut
• Ruth Weisberg, an artist and dean of fine arts at the University of Southern California

The awards ceremony will be held at the Wilshire Grand Hotel in Los Angeles on Saturday, February 28, 2009, in conjunction with the CAA Annual Conference. This ceremony, which is free and open to the public, will be the thirtieth anniversary of the awards. As in past years, the awards ceremony will include an accompanying catalogue, outlining the awardees’ accomplishments in greater detail. Please check the WCA website for more details about the ceremony (free), the awards dinner (tickets are $90 before December 1, 2008, and $105 after), and other planned events.