CAA News

The September 2010 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, has just been published. It will be mailed to all individual CAA members who elect to receive the journal, and to all institutional members.

The issue interweaves three essays that focus on art and visual culture in Europe with three texts exploring works from the Americas. On the Continent, Molly Swetnam-Burland looks at issues of reuse, display, and cross-cultural appropriation through the history of the obelisk in the Piazza Montecitorio in Rome. For his essay “Material Futures,” Richard Taws views Philibert-Louis Debucourt’s print Almanach national (1790) as articulating relations between the materiality expressed in the image and changing conceptions of time in the French Revolution. In his contribution, Darius A. Spieth investigates the “politics of nostalgia” in modern Italian culture through the reception history of Giandomenico Tiepolo’s fresco Il Mondo Nuovo (1791).

Across the Atlantic, “Circles of Creation” is Amara L. Solari’s exploration of how the Maya in early colonial Yucatán invented their own cartographic tradition that allowed for the preservation of community identity during the chaos of colonization. In “Rioting Refigured,” Ross Barrett examines the way in which George Henry Hall’s painting A Dead Rabbit (1858) reframes a mid-nineteenth-century rioter in New York City as an ideal nude, both tempering and exacerbating connotations of violence. Moving into the twentieth century, Ken Allen argues that Ed Ruscha’s experimentations with size and scale in his images of 1960s Los Angeles gave viewers a new experiential understanding of the city.

The reviews section presents four books on diverse topics. Timon Screech evaluates Melissa McCormick’s study of an early member of the Tosa School in Tosa Mitsunobu and the Small Scroll in Medieval Japan, and Charles Dempsey examines Stuart Lingo’s book on Federico Barocci: Allure and Devotion in Late Renaissance Painting. Erika Naginski’s Sculpture and Enlightenment, which looks at how historical forces and philosophical debated affected public funerary monuments in eighteenth-century France, is reviewed by Satish Padiyar. Finally, Karen Beckman considers Flesh of My Flesh, the latest book by the film theorist and art historian Kaja Silverman.

Read the full table of contents for the September issue. The final Art Bulletin for 2010 will be published in December.

The next editions of CAA’s two directories of graduate programs in the arts will be published in an online format in fall 2011. First printed in December 2008 and January 2009 and still available for purchase, the CAA directories are the most comprehensive source books for graduate education for artists and art scholars, with program information for hundreds of schools, departments, and programs in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and elsewhere worldwide. Colleges, universities, and independent art schools are all included.

The pricing structure for the 2011 online editions has not yet been determined. Each current volume costs $49.95—$39.95 for CAA members—plus shipping and handling. You may order them online.

Graduate Programs in Art History includes programs in art history and visual studies, museum studies, curatorial studies, arts administration, library science, and related areas. Graduate Programs in the Visual Arts describes programs in studio art, graphic design, digital media, art education, conservation, historic preservation, film production, and more.

For more information, please send an email to directories@collegeart.org.

CAA offers two publishing grants—the Millard Meiss Publication Fund and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant—that have fall deadlines fast approaching.

Millard Meiss Publication Fund

CAA awards grants through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund to support book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of art and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy. For complete guidelines, application forms, a grant description, and past winners, please visit www.collegeart.org/meiss or write to publications@collegeart.org. Deadline: October 1, 2010.

Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant

Thanks to a second generous three-year grant from the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, CAA awards a publication grant to support book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art and related subjects. Books eligible for the Wyeth grant have been accepted by a publisher on their merits but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy. For complete guidelines, application forms, a grant description, and past winners, please visit www.collegeart.org/wyeth or write to publications@collegeart.org. Deadline: October 1, 2010.

New appointments have been made to the editorial boards of two of CAA’s three scholarly journals.

Sheryl Reiss, lecturer in art history at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has been appointed the next editor-in-chief of caa.reviews, succeeding Lucy Oakley of the Grey Art Gallery at New York University. Reiss will begin her three-year term on July 1, 2011, with the preceding year as editor designate. Reiss had previously served on the caa.reviews Editorial Board from 2001 to 2005, and was also a field editor for books on early modern art in southern Europe.

Joining the caa.reviews Editorial Board for the next four years is Conrad Rudolph of the University of California, Riverside. In addition, five new field editors for books and related media have been chosen this year: Christopher Heuer of Princeton University in New Jersey will assign reviews in northern European art, and Tomoko Sakomura of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania will do likewise for Japanese art. Marika Sardar of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is field editor for books on Islamic art, Yekaterina Barbash of the Brooklyn Museum in New York will commission reviews on Egyptian and ancient Near Eastern art, and Christina Kiaer is in charge of books on twentieth-century art. Field editors work with caa.reviews for three years.

At Art Journal, Jenni Sorkin has joined the editorial board for a four-year term. Formerly a faculty member at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, she recently received her PhD from Yale University. In 2010–11 Sorkin will be a postdoctoral residential fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. The editorial board also has a new chair, appointed from within its ranks: Karin Higa, director of the Curatorial and Exhibitions Department and senior curator of art at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, will serve for two years.

All editors and editorial-board members are chosen from an open call for nominations and self-nominations, published in at least two issues of CAA News (usually January and March) and on the CAA website.

The July 2010 issue of CAA News just been published. You may download a PDF of it immediately.

Introduced by Andrea Kirsh, CAA’s vice president of external affairs, the July newsletter brings you up to date on all CAA programs and services. It also includes an interview with James Sloss Ackerman, a celebrated professor of Renaissance architecture, and updates on the future of the Bibliography of the History of Art.

In addition, the July issue solicits your participation in the two upcoming Centennial Conferences in New York (2011) and Los Angeles (2012). For Los Angeles, CAA continues to accept your session proposals through an online process, and an article provides full details on the process. For New York, CAA invites artists to submit video documentation of performance work for the ARTspace Media Lounge, and the organizers of several panels—on Damien Hirst, the future of art history, and health and safety in the artist’s studio—want to hear from you.

The CAA News managing editor welcomes your submissions to the Endnotes section of the next issue. Please send listings for recent solo exhibitions, books published, and exhibitions curated, as well as news about your new position or your grant or fellowship, to Christopher Howard. Deadline: August 13, 2010.

The May issue of CAA News—which requests your participation in the two upcoming Centennial Conferences in New York (2011) and Los Angeles (2012)—has just been published. You may download a PDF of it immediately.

Although the deadline for papers for the New York conference has passed, ARTspace seeks participation from members for two events. First, CAA invites artists to submit video documentation of performance work for the ARTspace Media Lounge, on continuous view during the conference. Second, the organizers of a panel on health and safety in the artist’s studio seek presenters from diverse points of view. (See pp. 17–18 for information on both.) For Los Angeles, CAA will begin accepting your session proposals through an online process starting June 28; see pages 9–11 for full details.

Introduced by Barbara Nesin, the new president of the CAA Board of Directors, the May newsletter brings you up to date on all CAA programs and services, including a profile of Karen Lang, the incoming editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin, and an announcement that CAA is reinstating its fellowships for MFA students and restoring the Millard Meiss Publication Fund.

The CAA News managing editor welcomes your submissions to the Endnotes section of the July issue. Please send listings for recent solo exhibitions, books published, and exhibitions curated, as well as news about your new position or your grant or fellowship, to Christopher Howard. Deadline extended: June 7, 2010.

Interested in advertising in CAA News? Please contact Bradford Nordeen, CAA marketing and membership assistant, at 212-691-1051, ext. 252.

At its meeting on May 2, 2010, the CAA Board of Directors voted to restore several important programs for the next fiscal year, beginning July 1. After a year of conservative budgeting in response to the economic downturn, the board eased financial constraints on the following programs that benefit CAA members.

Professional Development Fellowships

Later this fall, CAA will award five Professional Development Fellowships in the Visual Arts of $5,000 each to outstanding students who will receive MFA degrees in calendar year 2011. Eligibility requirements and application guidelines will be available on the CAA website by June 1, 2010; the deadline for applications will be October 1, 2010.

The number of artists applying for support has always been consistently high. Given this significant interest by artists—as well as the emphasis in CAA’s 2010–2015 Strategic Plan on strengthening programs and support for artist members—the board agreed that renewing artists’ fellowship is an important first step toward full restoration of the fellowship program.

Although the operating budget is lean, CAA hopes that Professional Development Fellowships in Art History can again be awarded to doctoral candidates in 2011.

The Art Bulletin and Art Journal

CAA’s two scholarly print publications, The Art Bulletin and Art Journal, will return to regular quarterly publication in 2011, with four issues appearing next year. In 2010, each journal is producing just three issues in response to the financial constraints of the previous fiscal year. The Art Bulletin combined its March and June 2010 issues, and Art Journal produced a joint Spring–Summer 2010 issue.

Millard Meiss Publication Fund

The CAA Publications Department will once again make grants to publishers from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund beginning this fall. The Meiss fund, founded in 1975, awards grants to support book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of art and related subjects that have been accepted by publishers on their merits, but cannot be published in the most desirable form without subsidy.

The grant program had been suspended for two cycles, in fall 2009 and spring 2010. Awards will also be made in spring 2011, pending later approval.

The Spring–Summer 2010 issue of Art Journal marks the first issue produced by the art historian and critic Katy Siegel, who began work as editor-in-chief in July 2009. Special artists’ projects by Sharon Lockhart and Kerry James Marshall are highlights of this issue, and the magazine also features never-before-published photographs of a project by the cult artist Jack Smith and his collaborator, the renowned avant-garde actress Kate Manheim. Completing the mix are feature essays by Hannah Higgins, Cary Levine, and Martin Patrick, and an interview with the London-based artist Goshka Macuga by Achim Borchardt-Hume.

Katy Siegel, a professor of art history at Hunter College in New York, a contributing editor to Artforum, and author of the forthcoming “Since ’45”: America and the Making of Contemporary Art (Reaktion, 2010), will serve as editor-in-chief of Art Journal for three years. She says of this first issue, “While preserving its integrity as an academic journal, I want to make sure that every issue of Art Journal also represents the vitality and vicissitudes of the real life of art and artists.”

Readers immediately encounter four pages of Kerry James Marshall’s comic Dailies: On the Stroll, placed in the inside front and back covers. Marshall’s bold black-and-white graphics weave together racial politics in the larger society with those of the art world in the first episode of a frankly polemical serial.

Sharon Lockhart’s Lunch Break Times previews a publication the artist will launch later this year. Working with blue-collar workers throughout the state of Maine, Lockhart conveys the visual aspects of the industrial workplace by means of intriguing objects she has found there: antique postcards and photos, a coffee-cart sign emblazoned on a state map, a labor activist’s painting hanging in the union hall, and more.

Kate Manheim is best known for several decades of performances as the lead actor in Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater. Jack Smith (1932–1989) blazed through the underground art and film scenes in lower Manhattan in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, creating films and performances with his coterie of Flaming Creatures. Smith and Manheim collaborated on a project exploring marriage, melodrama, and the Hollywood star Maria Montez. A selection of their atmospheric and amusing photographs is published for the first time ever in the pages of Art Journal, introduced by a beautiful personal essay by the film historian P. Adams Sitney.

The art historian Hannah Higgins has contributed a clear-eyed and moving account of the intertwined careers of her parents, the Fluxus artists Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins, and her relationship to them as both daughter and historian. Martin Patrick considers the present-day implications of the work of another important Fluxus artist, Robert Filliou. Cary Levine reflects on a somewhat sinister body of work by the West Coast artist Mike Kelley, which draws on the themes and techniques of do-it-yourself crafts. And the curator of London’s Whitechapel Gallery, Achim Borchardt-Hume, interviews Goshka Macuga about her yearlong installation at Whitechapel that was based on Picasso’s tapestry version of Guernica, presented here with documentation of the artist’s project. This is the first installation of a new feature, “Before and After,” which will expand Art Journal’s engagement with the making of art as well as its social afterlife.

The quarterly Art Journal, published since 1929, is available by subscription to CAA members. Single copies may be purchased by calling 212-691-1051, ext. 204, or by writing to nyoffice@collegeart.org. Art Journal is made possible by a generous grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, CAA membership support, and contributions from individuals and institutions. To make a contribution, please contact Sara Hines at 212-691-1051, ext. 216; or visit www.collegeart.org/support.

The combined March–June 2010 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, has just been published. It will be mailed to all individual CAA members who elect to receive the journal, and to all institutional members.

The central scene of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas graces the cover and introduces the issue’s Interventions essay series. Byron Ellsworth Hamann applies postcolonial and materialist strategies in “The Mirrors of Las Meninas: Cochineal, Silver, and Clay” to consider the artist’s masterpiece within a transatlantic visual archive. A group of six scholars from such diverse disciplines as pre-Columbian studies, Romance studies and literature, art history, and Aztec and Spanish colonial art respond to Hamann’s article with texts of their own.

The issue features two other major essays. In “Family Space: Buddhist Materiality and Ancestral Fashioning in Mogao Cave 231,” Winston Kyan considers the diverse integration of family references into the visual program of ninth-century Buddhist Mogao caves at Dunhuang, which marked a turning point in the construction of religious space in medieval China. For “Portrait of Luca Pacioli and Disciple: A New, Mathematical Look,” Renzo Baldasso examines the famous painting as a statement about the achievements of mathematical humanists as well as the subject of mathematics as a mode of thinking, as court activity, and as a form of education.

In the reviews section, Rebecca Zorach evaluates Margaret D. Carroll’s Painting and Politics in Northern Europe: Van Eyck, Bruegel, Rubens, and Their Contemporaries, and Jonathan Unglaub examines Maria H. Loh’s Titian Remade: Repetition and the Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art. In addition, Joel Smith reviews the history and evolution of the notion of objectivity as presented in Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s book Objectivity.

Read the full table of contents for the March–June issue. The next two Art Bulletins for 2010 will appear in September and December.

This month the International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art, known as RIHA, has launched a new online publication, RIHA Journal. This peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal provides a unique publishing platform for international research articles in the history of art.

Open to the entire range of art-historical topics and approaches, RIHA Journal will feature articles in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Three essays have already published so far: read Michèle Hannoosh on Eugène Delacroix’s Journal (in French), Maria Poprzęcka’s ruminations on the experience of viewing paintings under reflective glass (in English), and Manuel Weinberger on a cartography collection at the Austrian National Library (in German). Contributions can be subscribed to via an RSS feed.

The not-for-profit RIHA Journal makes all articles available free of charge. Manuscripts undergo a double-blind peer-review process and are published within a few weeks of submission. A joint project of twenty-seven institutes in eighteen countries, RIHA Journal has an editing processes that is locally organized, with each RIHA institute being responsible for acquiring submissions, organizing reviews, and copy editing. In the United States, these are the Getty Research Institute, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.

The Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich is responsible for developing and organizing the journal. Funding is provided by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (Beauftragter der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien).