CAA News
Conference Press and Blog Roundup
From left, Joshua Gaetjen, Danielle Correll, and Benjamin Hirschkoff at the 2008 CAA Annual Conference (photograph by Teresa Rafidi)
Also in this Section
Current
For the past two years, CAA has published a roundup of print and blog press about the conference so you can hear what others have to say about our annual gathering. Dallas–Fort Worth was a great conference, full of activity and with many opportunities for fun, business, and everything in between. But you don’t have to take our word for it.
Prior to the conference, the pipelines picked up the announcement that Paul Jaskot of DePaul University had recently been elected the next president of the CAA Board of Directors. The buzz generated by the Art History Newsletter, Artforum.com, and the Radical Art Caucus lent an air of celebrity to our oft-bow-tied leader-elect, who diligently rushed around the conference, meeting, greeting, and always smiling.
Speaking of the Art History Newsletter, Jonathan Lackman and company helpfully culled posts on daily conference happenings from attendee bloggers who came from far and wide. It is here that we learned about SlideRoom’s Chris Jagers’s corrective eyewear debacle, Yoko Ono’s admiration of one conference attendee’s coiffure, and CAA’s near beguilement by blogger “B.S.” and his alleged fake press passes (whew!). The Art History Newsletter also published highlights from descriptions of session papers in this year’s Abstracts, which were then picked up by Jennifer Howard at the Chronicle for Higher Education blog.
Besides the barbecue and Texas Stadium, another great thing about Dallas was the abundance of incredible museums and universities in the area that participated in the conference through a variety of programming, open houses, and event hosting. The Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth was advantageously hosting The Art of the American Snapshot: 1888–1978, a traveling exhibition originating at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, curated by this year’s Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award winners Sarah Greenough and Diane Waggoner. The exhibition received nice press attention from the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, as well as a mention on the PDNedu blog.
Local newspapers raved about Points of Convergence: Masters of Fine Arts, the CAA Annual Exhibition curated by the artist Benito Huerta and held at the University of Texas at Arlington. Points of Convergence also made it onto the Art 21 blog, which posted a request for impressions and photos of the exhibition.
For those unfamiliar with the contemporary art scene in Texas, there are two go-to sources: Art Lies, a nonprofit quarterly magazine based in Houston, and Glasstire, a website that is the place for Texas visual art online. Art Lies participated as an exhibitor in the Book and Trade Fair. Their Winter issue on collectivity and collaboration dovetailed nicely to the conference with the issue’s guest editor, Noah Simblist of Southern Methodist University, chairing Wednesday’s session on “Collecting and Collectivity: Contemporary Art at the Interstices of Acquisition and Community.” Glasstire helped get the word out about some conference events and has since posted remarks by the Art Lies editor, Anjali Gupta, from a much-blogged-about session entitled “Can Anyone Be a Critic: The Collision between Traditional Criticism and Blogging,” which also hosted Glasstire’s founder and executive director, Rainey Knudson, and Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes.
For those with celebrity aspirations, keep Brooklyn-based artist Sheryl Oring on your radar. You may remember her as the frocked lady stationed on the second floor of the Adam’s Mark Hotel who was inviting passersby to dictate a letter to the next president of the United States. You just might end up on her website or in her next book! Check back periodically.
Finally, we have to recognize our Savannah College of Art and Design buddies—Kyle, Dave, Eric, Walker, and Jason—who contributed to the looming web traffic jam with two YouTube videos depicting the ups and downs of traveling to this year’s conference.
We hope to have our own conference blog up and running for Los Angeles. In the meantime, if you come across any mention of the 2008 Annual Conference in Dallas–Fort Worth, please forward it to Sara Hines, CAA development and marketing assistant.