CAA News

CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for two individuals to serve on the juries for CAA’s Professional-Development Fellowships for a three-year term, 2012–15. CAA’s fellowship program supports promising artists and art historians who are enrolled in MFA and PhD programs nationwide, assisting them during the transition between graduate studies and professional careers with unrestricted $5,000 grants.

Needed now are one person for the Professional-Development Fellowships in Art History Jury, and one person for the Professional-Development Fellowships in Visual Arts Jury. Both juries have four voting members each. Candidates must possess senior-level expertise appropriate to the jury’s work; they may be artists, art historians, critics, curators, or other professionals in the visual arts; institutional affiliation is not required.

Jurors review all submissions in October and November prior to a one-day meeting, held at the CAA office in New York in early December or early January, to discuss the merits of the applications and portfolios. Fellowship recipients are named by mid-January. All jurors volunteer their services to CAA without compensation.

Jurors must be current CAA members and should not be serving on another CAA editorial board or committee. CAA’s president and vice president for committees appoint jury members for service. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please send a statement (no more than 150 words) describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, an abbreviated CV (no more than two pages), and your contact information by email to Michael Fahlund, CAA deputy director; submissions must be sent as Microsoft Word attachments. Deadline: June 8, 2012.

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.

Dissertation titles in art history and visual studies from US and Canadian institutions, both completed and in progress, are published annually in caa.reviews, making them available through web searches. PhD-granting institutions may send a list of their doctoral students’ dissertation titles for 2011 to dissertations@collegeart.org. The complete Dissertation Submission Guidelines regarding the format of listings are now available. CAA does not accept listings from individuals. Improperly formatted lists will be returned to sender. For more information, please write to the above email address or visit the guidelines page. Deadline: January 16, 2012.

The information on this page has been updated. Please visit the main directories page for the most up-to-date information.

This fall CAA will publish new editions of Graduate Programs in Art History and Graduate Programs in the Visual Arts. As comprehensive resources of schools across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, the guides list over 650 programs in fine art and design, art and architectural history, curatorial studies, arts administration, and more.

Prospective graduate students will find everything they need to know before beginning the application process. The directories are also key professional references for career-services representatives, department chairs, graduate and undergraduate advisors, librarians, professional-practices educators, and professors interested in helping emerging generations of artists and scholars find success.

Graduate Programs in Art History covers four disciplines: Art History, Curatorial and Museum Studies, Arts Administration, and Library Science. This directory integrates programs in visual studies and architectural history into Art History. Similarly, Graduate Programs in the Visual Arts comprises four areas: Studio Art and Design, Art Education, Film Production, and Conservation and Historic Preservation. Studio Art and Design combines programs in fine art with those in graphic, industrial, and object design.

Organized alphabetically by school name within each discipline noted above, entries describe curricula, class size, faculty specializations, admission and degree requirements, library and studio facilities, opportunities for fellowships and assistantships, and more. Readers can draw important conclusions from these facts, such as the competitiveness of a program based on the amount of applications received and accepted. Need health insurance or housing while in school? Many programs provide details about what they offer.

The directories are available in multiple print and digital formats, as books, ebooks, and downloadable PDFs. The complete volumes of each directory are only available in print.

Print

The complete Graduate Programs in Art History and Graduate Programs in the Visual Arts cost $41 each for CAA members and $51 for nonmembers, plus shipping and handling.

You can also order all entries within five of the eight disciplines as discrete perfect-bound, soft-cover books. The prices below do not include shipping and handling:

Art History: $22
Art Education: $18
Curatorial and Museums Studies: $16
Film Production: $15

The three remaining disciplines—Arts Administration, Library Science, and Conservation and Historic Preservation—are available only as ebooks and cannot be ordered as discipline-specific books.

Individuals can order both directories and the discipline-specific books through the CAA website (link forthcoming). If you are ordering for a school, institution, or department within a college or university, please download the PDF form (forthcoming) and return the completed version with payment to Roberta Lawson, CAA office coordinator, who will ship the directories to you within two business days of your purchase.

Ebooks

All entries within a particular discipline may be ordered as single ebooks. After placing your order on the CAA website, you will receive an email with a link(s) to the ebook(s). Each ebook can be downloaded a limited number of times and will be compatible with your personal computer and most smart phones and ereaders (excluding Kindles).

You can also order all entries within five of the eight disciplines as ebooks:

Art History: $22
Art Education: $18
Curatorial and Museums Studies: $16
Film Production: $15
Studio Art and Design: $26

Ebooks of all entries in Arts Administration, Library Science, and Conservation and Historic Preservation are priced as follows:

Arts Administration: $14
Conservation and Historic Preservation: $14
Library Science: $12

Ebooks can only be ordered through the CAA website (link forthcoming).

Sets of Entries

Individuals can search the directories by discipline, faculty specialization, country, region, state, degree type, and availability of health insurance via the CAA website and download PDFs of entries from either or both directories for $2 per entry (up to twenty entries). Upon ordering the entries, you will receive an email with a link to a single PDF containing the entries you have selected.

Contact

Questions about ordering? Please contact Roberta Lawson, CAA office coordinator, at 212-392-4404.

Working as a projectionist or room monitor at the 2012 Annual Conference in Los Angeles is a great way to save on conference expenses. All candidates must be US citizens or permanent US residents. CAA encourages students and emerging professionals—especially those in southern California—to apply for service.

Projectionists

CAA seeks applications for projectionists for conference program sessions. Successful applicants are paid $10 per hour and receive complimentary conference registration. Projectionists are required to work a minimum of four 2½-hour program sessions, from Wednesday, February 22 to Saturday, February 25, and attend a training meeting on Wednesday morning at 7:30 AM. Projectionists must be familiar with digital projectors. Please send a brief letter of interest to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs. Deadline: January 6, 2012.

Room Monitors

CAA needs room monitors for two Career Services mentoring programs (the Artists’ Portfolio Review and Career Development Mentoring), several offsite sessions, and other conference events, to be held from Wednesday, February 22 to Saturday, February 25. Successful candidates are paid $10 per hour and receive complimentary conference registration. Room monitors are required to work a minimum of eight hours, checking in participants and facilitating the work of the mentors. Please send a brief letter of interest to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs. Deadline: January 6, 2012.

CAA, in partnership with the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCUarts), will present its next National Professional-Development Workshop for Artists at the Grace Street Theater on Saturday, October 1, 2011. The one-day event, called “Toolkit for a Sustainable Life in the Arts: Ideas XS, S, M, L, XL,” will explore strategies for launching, renewing, and sustaining a career in the arts.

“Toolkit for a Sustainable Life in the Arts” will take place 8:00 AM–7:00 PM at VCUarts, Grace Street Theater, 934 West Grace Street, Richmond, VA 23284 (map). The workshop is free for all VCUarts students, faculty, and staff; $25 for all other participants. A limited number of stipends are available; please contact Susan Schear, CAA national workshop project consultant, at 973-482-1000 for more information.

Check-in and registration begin at 8:00 AM, with a complimentary continental breakfast and an opportunity for group networking. At 9:00 AM, Aaron Landsman, a renowned playwright, actor, and teacher, will deliver the keynote address, “Exploring How a Life in the Arts Can Be Sustained.” Next, the artist Karen Atkinson, also an independent curator and the founder of GYST, will present “Analog Toolkit: Pragmatic Strategies for Creating Opportunities.”

After a buffet lunch (included in the registration fee), Peter Baldes, an artist and VCUarts professor in the Department of Painting and Printmaking, will lead workshop participants through “2.0 Toolkit: Extending Opportunities through Social Media, Web Presence, and New Distribution Channels.” Next, two speakers—Sarah Cunningham, former director of arts education for the National Endowment for the Arts and now VCUarts director of research, and Melissa Potter, an artist and faculty member in the Interdisciplinary Arts Department at Columbia College Chicago—will present “Solvent Toolkit: Realizing Grant Opportunities.”

The final panel, “DIY Toolkits: Innovative Models for Making Art and Collaborating with an Engaged Community,” moderated by Jack Risley, VCUarts associate dean of academic affairs, will consist of three VCUarts professors with diverse artistic practices: Kendall Buster and Corin Hewitt from the Department of Sculpture and Extended Media and Hope Ginsburg of the Department of Painting and Printmaking. A Q&A session will conclude the workshop.

Following the workshop, VCUarts cordially invites participants to a networking reception at its Anderson Gallery (907½ West Franklin Street, Richmond, VA 23284), to be held 5:30–7:00 PM. The exhibition Environment and Object: Recent African Art will be on view.

Registration for the workshop is first-come, first-served. Because space is limited, CAA encourages you to register in advance. Participants from VCUarts should contact Susan Schear at 973-482-1000; please include your name, mailing address, and telephone number in your voicemail or email to receive a confirmation for registration. All others can pay by credit card, debit card, or PayPal. If paying with cash or by check at the door, or if requesting a stipend, please contact Susan Schear and include your name, mailing address, and telephone number in your voicemail or email.

Partners

The School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University comprises sixteen programs in fine art, design, the performing arts and art history. The main campus in Richmond hosts more than 3,000 undergraduate and graduate students in the arts, while a sister campus in Doha, Qatar, counts 214 students enrolled in five programs. VCUarts has grown to become the top American public university for the visual arts, as ranked by US News and World Report.

Founded in 1911, the College Art Association serves the needs and interests of 13,000 individual and 2,000 institutional members. It publishes two scholarly journals in art history, an online reviews journal for books and exhibitions, a weekly email newsletter, and a website with news about the organization, its members, and the larger art and academic worlds. CAA also hosts an Annual Conference for 4,000 to 7,000 artists, art historians, and students, provides career counseling, and advocates for national issues in the visual arts.

CAA offers Annual Conference Travel Grants to graduate students in art history and studio art and to international artists and scholars. In addition, the Getty Foundation has funded a one-year program that will enable twenty applicants from outside the United States to attend the 2012 Annual Conference in Los Angeles. Applicants may apply for more than one grant but can only receive a single award.

CAA Graduate Student Conference Travel Grant

CAA will award a limited number of $150 Graduate Student Conference Travel Grants to advanced PhD and MFA graduate students as partial reimbursement of travel expenses to attend the 100th Annual Conference in Los Angeles, taking place February 22–25, 2012. To qualify for the grant, students must be current CAA members. Successful applicants will also receive a complimentary conference registration. Deadline: September 23, 2011.

CAA International Member Conference Travel Grant

CAA will award a limited number of $300 International Member Conference Travel Grants to artists and scholars from outside the United States as partial reimbursement of travel expenses to attend the 100th Annual Conference in Los Angeles, taking place February 22–25, 2012. To qualify for the grant, applicants must be current CAA members. Successful applicants will also receive a complimentary conference registration. Deadline: September 23, 2011.

CAA International Travel Grant Program

Through the new CAA International Travel Grant Program, generously funded by the Getty Foundation, CAA will provide funds to twenty applicants that fully cover travel, lodging, and meal costs to attend the 100th Annual Conference in Los Angeles, taking place February 22–25, 2012. Recipients will also receive conference registration and a one-year CAA membership. Applicants may be 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 are especially encouraged to apply. Deadline: September 23, 2011.

Donate to the Annual Conference Travel Grants

CAA’s Annual Conference Travel Grants are funded solely by donations from CAA members—please contribute today. Charitable contributions are 100 percent tax deductible. CAA extends a warm thanks to those members who made voluntary contributions to this fund in 2010.

Image: Joseph Mallord William Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed—The Great Western Railway, 1844, oil on canvas, 35⅞ x 49 in. National Gallery, London (artwork in the public domain)

caa.reviews has just published the authors and titles of doctoral dissertations in art history and visual studies—both completed and in progress—from US and Canadian institutions for calendar year 2010. Titles can be browsed by subject, such as Art of the Middle East/North Africa, Latin American/Caribbean Art, or Contemporary Art. Each institution granting the PhD in art history and/or visual studies submits dissertation titles once a year to CAA for publication. The listing in caa.reviews also includes dissertations completed and in progress between 2002 and 2009, making them available through web searches.

CAA is accepting applications from MFA and PhD students for its Professional-Development Fellowships in the Visual Arts and Art History. For the current cycle, CAA will award five grants of $5,000 each to outstanding students who will receive their MFA degrees in the 2012 calendar year. Similarly, two PhD candidates in art history will receive $5,000 each.

Fellows for 2012 also receive a free one-year CAA membership and complimentary registration to the Annual Conference in Los Angeles. Honorable mentions, given at the discretion of the jury, also earn a free one-year CAA membership and complimentary conference registration.

CAA’s fellowship program support 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 it be 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.

Please visit the Fellowship section for more information and to download the 2012 MFA and PhD Application Forms. The deadline for applications is Friday, September 30, 2011. Winners will be announced in January 2012.

Image: Sheryl Oring, I Wish to Say, 2010, performance at the 01SJ Biennial in San Jose, California (artwork © Sheryl Oring). Oring received a 2010–11 fellowship

CAA, in partnership with Artworks and Arts Plan New Jersey, will present its next National Professional-Development Workshop for Artists at the Mill Hill Playhouse on Saturday, May 14, 2011. The one-day event, called “Achieving Success as a Visual Artist: Your Art Practice Made Real,” will address important career issues for visual artists and provide them with valuable skills, resources, best practices, and networking techniques to help meet their professional goals.

“Achieving Success as a Visual Artist” will take place 9:00 AM–5:00 PM at the Mill Hill Playhouse, 205 East Front Street, Trenton, NJ 08611. Registration is $15 for students, seniors, and CAA members; $25 for all other participants. A limited number of stipends are available; please contact Susan Schear, CAA national workshop project consultant, at 973-482-1000 for more information.

The day will begin at 8:00 AM with registration, check-in, and an opportunity for group networking; complimentary coffee will be served. At 9:00 AM, Judith K. Brodsky, the renowned printmaker and founder of the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions, will give a keynote presentation that reflects on her personal journey and her vision as an arts leader. Next, the artist and educator Michelle Hinebrook will present a seminar on “Artists: Maximize Your Marketing through Social Media, Websites, Print Materials, and Networking.” The afternoon panel, to address “Linking Artists to Opportunities: Galleries, Grants, Residencies, and Public Spaces,” will feature five successful women in the arts: Diane Burko, artist and professor; Dahlia Elsayed, artist and educator; Kat Griefen, curator and director of A.I.R. Gallery; Teresa Jaynes, artist, curator, and director of Philagrafika; and Lin Swensson, artist, professor, dealer, and arts consultant. For the lunch break at noon, attendees can either buy a $8 lunch onsite or bring their own.

Participants can continue experiencing the arts in Trenton after the workshop ends. The Candlelight Lounge (24 Passaic Street) will host a postworkshop networking reception during its Saturday afternoon jazz series, and the Passage Theatre will offer group rates for its production of Samuel J. and K., to be presented at the Mill Hill Playhouse at 8:00 PM.

Registration for the workshop is first-come, first-served; space is limited. You can pay by credit card or PayPal. If paying with cash or by check at the door, or if requesting a stipend, please contact Susan Schear at 973-482-1000 and include your name, mailing address, and telephone number.

Partners

Artworks, a center for the visual arts in downtown Trenton, has offered classes, exhibitions, and events for over twenty years, serving professional, aspiring, and visionary artists throughout central New Jersey and the Delaware Valley.

Conceived by almost 1,000 citizens, cultural leaders, and government officials in all sectors, Arts Plan New Jersey is a blueprint to create a better New Jersey through and for the arts. Its statewide agenda harnesses the power of the arts to enrich and inspire individuals and to address civic challenges such as the economy, education, community development, and cultural understanding. One of Arts Plan’s six goals is to “foster a strong network of support for artists.”

Founded in 1911, the College Art Association serves the needs and interests of 12,000 individual and 2,000 institutional members. It publishes two scholarly journals in art history, an online reviews journal for books and exhibitions, a weekly email newsletter, and a website with news about the organization, its members, and the larger art and academic worlds. CAA also hosts an Annual Conference for 4,000 to 6,000 artists, art historians, and students, provides career counseling, and advocates for national issues in the visual arts.