CAA News

New CAA Board Members

CAA members have elected four candidates to serve on the Board of Directors from 2008 to 2012. Faya Causey, Jay Coogan, Randall C. Griffin, and Judith Thorpe take office at the next Board meeting, in May 2008.

The original candidates’ statements by each new CAA Board member are printed below. To read their complete biographies, go to www.collegeart.org/candidates. For a full list of current Board members and their affiliations, please visit www.collegeart.org/aboutus/board.html.

Faya Causey, National Gallery of Art
CAA’s efforts to address the regional, national, and international issues that affect academic institutions, museums, and professionals in the arts deserve increased support. As a Board member, I would continue to advocate for opportunities for both emerging professionals and established art historians, artists, and other practitioners. As a museum administrator and educator, as a former faculty member at an art school and a state university, and as a specialist in ancient art, I would offer the constituency a broad range of experience and outlook. A CAA member for twenty-two years and a sponsoring member for the last decade, I have regularly participated in Annual Conferences and have actively supported the association’s programs for art, museums, education, cultural diversity, and professional development.

Jay Coogan, Rhode Island School of Design
Change is probably the largest challenge that art and design programs face today. With change thrust upon us and bubbling from within, we need to keep a razorlike focus on the best educational practices for our students. As we are whipsawed by the global economy, we need to invest in thinking about how to deliver an art and design education that is relevant and timely. On top of that, we must walk the tightrope between raising tuition and growing programs to meet expenses while continually worrying about overpricing art and design education.

What role does faculty leadership through CAA play in shaping these issues? What skills, knowledge, and creative abilities do we expect our students to have after graduation? Is traditional discipline-based instruction applicable in an interdisciplinary world? What educational models make the best artists? Should we provide alternative career choices for art students as we help them to develop into artists? Do we need to explore global partnerships to keep art and design education relevant?

When facing questions like these, I find that maintaining our educational standards, or even just slightly improving them, is not necessarily the best answer. We need to learn to relinquish our old ways of thinking and working in order to create a new vocabulary. I believe that CAA is a forum for discussing these issues.

Randall C. Griffin, Southern Methodist University
In order to make CAA a true locus of interdisciplinarity, I would like our organization to entice more people from outside art and art history—in such areas as linguistics, architecture, poetry, and history—to participate in sessions at the Annual Conference. CAA would also benefit from encouraging more artists to get involved in the conference, perhaps with collaborative sessions between artists and art historians that transcend their respective worldviews. Despite our differences, we often grapple with the same issues, for example, the gap between words and images and the ways in which different identities are constructed. Given that artists, art historians, and also museum professionals share many similar interests, and given that each group constitutes about a third of the membership, we should make collaborations and partnerships a major CAA priority.

Judith Thorpe, University of Connecticut
My vision of the arts and education is to create a forum for critical dialogue regarding the making and study of the arts. Such a program requires an intensive and rigorous study of the fields and supports cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to teaching, creative activity, and scholarship. The result is a broad education inclusive of the study of the liberal arts and a curriculum emphasizing creative expression, critical thinking, equality, diversity, and integrity.

My artistic practice is central to my administrative leadership: my creative work guides and nurtures my passion for art education. In my academic appointments, I have worked closely with colleagues in art history, architecture, design, and film and media arts, as well as those in music, drama, and creative writing. My wealth of knowledge and experience has well prepared me to serve the CAA membership.

As a Board member, I will bring my varied experiences as an artist, educator, administrator, and curator. But most important, I will bring my passion and advocacy for the arts.

Board Statistics
With the addition of these four, 61 percent of the eighteen voting members on the CAA Board of Directors are women, and 39 percent are men. These figures almost match the composition of the CAA membership as a whole: 65 percent women and 35 percent men. In terms of professional specialization, 39 percent of the eighteen voting members of the Board are art historians, 28 percent are visual artists, and 33 percent work in libraries, museums, or other arts-related organizations. In comparison, 32 percent of the overall membership are art historians, 36 percent are visual artists, and 32 percent work in libraries, museums, or other arts-related organizations.

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