CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Feb 22, 2017
Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Popular Domestic Programs Face Ax under First Trump Budget
The White House budget office has drafted a hit list of programs that President Trump could eliminate to trim domestic spending, including longstanding conservative targets like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Legal Services Corporation, AmeriCorps, and the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Can Only Rich Kids Afford to Work in the Art World?
Two years ago, Naiomy Guerrero left her job in the art world. She hasn’t lost her passion for art and still blogs about it at GalleryGirl.nyc, but as the daughter of two immigrant parents she chose financial stability. Guerrero now works as a financial aid counselor, earning over 50 percent more than she did at her most recent art-related job. (Read more from Artsy.)
Habitat: Moonlighting—Artists’ Side Jobs
Most artists, unless they are selling a lot of work, need a good side job. For some, it’s just a way to pay the rent; for others, it’s a parallel passion. But whether they consider it a temporary solution or a career, a boon to their art or something entirely separate from it, the artists ARTnews interviewed all seem to find satisfaction in what they do for money. (Read more from ARTnews.)
“Our Women Have Always Carved”
On the West Coast, in the rich and diverse world of First Nations art, the master carvers responsible for the totem poles and myriad other monumental works are usually men. There are exceptions. And two exceptional women—trailblazing female First Nations artists who have carved their way into Canadian cultural history—are getting their due in two new exhibitions. (Read more from the Globe and Mail.)
The Red of Painters
For the most part, painters have always loved red, from the Paleolithic period to the most contemporary. Red’s palette offers a variety of shades and favors more diverse and subtle chromatic play than any other color. In red, artists found a means to construct pictorial space, distinguish areas and planes, create accents, produce effects of rhythm and movement, and highlight one figure or another. (Read more from the Paris Review.)
Academic Ethics: Rethinking the Justification of Tenure
Tenure for professors has been under pressure, and even the subject of outright attacks, for a long time. But the pace of the assault has accelerated lately, and there is no more significant canary in the coal mine than events in Wisconsin over the past two years. (Read more from Vitae.)
The Changing Monograph Market
The market for original humanities monographs may be shrinking, according to a report on the output of university presses. After remaining stable from 2009 to 2011, the number of original works in the humanities published by university presses fell both in 2012 and 2013, according to estimates from the two publishing consultants who wrote the report. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
An Activity That Promotes Engagement with Required Readings, Even in Large Classes
Encouraging students to complete the course readings is an age-old problem. On the first day of class, I often say something like this to my students: “Nothing floats my boat more than great discussion. Nothing promotes great discussion like having completed the readings. And nothing promotes completing the readings like having points attached to it.” (Read more from Faculty Focus.)
A CAA Road Trip
posted by Janet Landay, Program Manager, Fair Use Initiative — Oct 18, 2016
Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine (photograph by Janet Landay)In late September, Hunter O’Hanian and I had the pleasure of spending a weekend at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, to attend two CAA events hosted by Anne Goodyear, codirector of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and a former CAA president. We arrived at the picturesque New England campus on a beautiful fall day. The college’s art museum, one of the oldest in the country, anchors the western edge of the quad, its neoclassical façade presiding gracefully over green lawns and majestic trees where students played Frisbee, read, or walked across campus. It was a perfect weekend to welcome CAA members to campus.
The first group arrived that Saturday afternoon to attend a CAA member reception, the first of several Hunter has planned around the country to provide an opportunity for him to meet with members in a relaxed setting and talk about CAA. The event began with a tour of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art given by Anne and her husband, the museum’s codirector, Frank Goodyear. Immediately following, we all walked a block away to Anne and Frank’s house to enjoy some wine and cheese on their back patio. The fifteen or so participants hailed from several schools and museums in addition to Bowdoin—Colby College, Bates College, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Farnsworth Art Museum—and included art historians, artists, librarians, and independent scholars.
Members spoke in turn about their most memorable CAA experiences: attending a first conference, interviewing and getting a job, meeting old friends, or networking with scholars in their fields. Hunter then shared thoughts about his goals for CAA based on what he has learned from members since he became executive director in July. He observed the importance of connectivity—how to keep CAA members in touch with issues in the field, but especially how to keep them in touch with each other. And he described many of the changes members will experience at the next Annual Conference, including a focus on personal experience, captured by a new theme for the meetings, myCAA.
On Sunday morning, several of the same CAA members returned, joined by others from around the state, for a half-day workshop about copyright and fair use. Peter Jaszi, a co–lead investigator on CAA’s Fair Use Initiative, came from Washington, DC, to Bowdoin to lead the program, which focused on how visual-arts professionals can use CAA’s Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts in their work. Following an introduction to copyright and fair use, the workshop began with a look at how museum professionals can use the Code when employing copyrighted materials in their work.
Participants had been asked to bring real-life questions with them. Thus, a museum director wanted to know whether his museum could allow photography in the galleries of works still protected by copyright. A curator described a challenge she had in getting an image for a catalogue from a museum in central China. When she received no reply from the museum, she resorted to scanning the image from another book. Is that fair use? Other questions involved loan forms, credit lines, and online projects.
As the day continued, the program moved on to address questions from professionals in other areas: librarians and archivists, professors and teachers, artists and independent scholars. Can a faculty member use images in class that she got from a flash drive she had received from a foreign museum? What kind of credit information is necessary for a blog about films? Is Shepard Fairey’s image of Obama a good case study for students learning about fair use? How should the institutional repository on a college campus view the copyright protection of yearbook photographs? By the end of the afternoon, a remarkable range of questions had been discussed, and the forty participants came away with a much greater understanding of fair use and how to rely on it in their work.
Peter Jaszi and Kyle Courtney at CAA’s fair-use town hall at Harvard University (photograph by Janet Landay)On Monday, Hunter, Peter, and I were in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to join Kyle Courtney, a copyright specialist in Harvard’s Office for Scholarly Communication, for a fair-use town hall on the campus of Harvard University. As in Maine, Peter began the program with an introduction to fair use, and I followed with a description of CAA’s Fair Use Initiative. Kyle spoke about a program he directs at Harvard that trains librarians to be “first responders” to users’ questions about fair use. Although relatively new, the program has proven to be an effective way to support and teach visual-arts professionals about fair use. It is now being replicated on other university campuses. The event was then opened to questions from the sixty-five members of the audience, which Peter and Kyle discussed in depth.
Many of the topics were similar to those that had been addressed at the Bowdoin workshop, but a new subject emerged as well: advocacy. Does a professor who has had a manuscript accepted have any recourse when her publisher requires signed author agreements stating that all images had been cleared for publication and all fees paid? The answer is yes; she can ask her publisher to read CAA’s Code and explain that many, if not all, of her uses of images comply with the doctrine of fair use. While the effort may not succeed (though CAA has several success stories on file), over time it will familiarize publishers with the principles outlined in the Code. Changes have already taken place, in large part due to this kind of challenge from users. Yale University Press now accepts fair-use defenses from its authors who are publishing monographs; the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation embraced a fair use policy for that artist’s work; and CAA not only encourages its authors to consider whether or not their uses are fair, but it also indemnifies authors against lawsuits about works used under fair use.
The program concluded with a reminder that CAA is happy to answer questions about fair use; please don’t hesitate to contact us at nyoffice@collegeart.org.
The CAA member reception at Massachusetts College of Art and Design (photograph by Janet Landay)Later on Monday, Hunter and I joined another group of CAA members at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design for a wine-and-cheese reception at the school’s President’s Gallery and Bakalar and Paine Galleries. Attendees included a wide range of members, from professors who have belonged to the association for thirty years to new members just graduating from MFA programs. Lisa Tung, the gallery’s director and curator, kicked off the event with a tour of two exhibitions currently on view, Encircling the World: Contemporary Art, Science, and the Sublime and Women’s Rights Are Human Rights: International Posters on Gender-Based Inequality, Violence, and Discrimination. Hunter, who is a former vice president for development at MassArt, then invited participants to speak about how CAA is valuable to them. He emphasized the importance of hearing from members so that CAA can support them as fully as possible in this rapidly changing world.
CAA’s road trip continued in early October with another member’s reception in Portland, Oregon. Later this month we will convene a fair-use workshop in Seattle, Washington. More events are planned for early next year in Georgia and Virginia. Stay tuned!
The Bowdoin College fair-use event was organized by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and CAA, with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Harvard University fair-use event was organized by Harvard’s Office for Scholarly Communication, thanks to the generous support of the Arcadia Fund, and by CAA, with funds provided by the Mellon Foundation.
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — Aug 05, 2016
Abigail McEwan reviews Alejandro Anreus’s Luis Cruz Azaceta, the tenth volume in the A Ver: Revisioning Art History series, which publishes monographs on Latino artists. Focusing on the career of Luis Cruz Azaceta, a Cuban American artist, the book interweaves “biographical and diasporic coordinates within a richly informed social history of his work.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Stella Ramage visits the Fiona Pardington: A Beautiful Hesitation exhibition. Held at three venues in New Zealand, the show is a “survey of thirty years’ work by one of New Zealand’s most prolific photographers,” showcasing Fiona Pardington’s “unashamed, lyrical romanticism” and “persistent preoccupations with mortality and memory.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Rosemary Hawker examines The Photograph and Australia, an exhibition that “brings together over five hundred photographs from major Australian collections of historical and contemporary works.” The Art Gallery of New South Wales Curator Judy Annear “helps us find multiple ways to think about the photographic record of Australia and what Australian photography might be.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Caa.reviews publishes over 150 reviews each year. Founded in 1998, the site publishes timely scholarly and critical reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by the College Art Association. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate. Read more reviews at caa.reviews.
Art Journal Open Seeks Submissions
posted by CAA — Apr 11, 2016
Art Journal Open, an open-access, independently edited website, seeks Artists’ Projects and Bookshelf submissions. An agile counterpart to the quarterly Art Journal, the website presents artwork, scholarly essays, conversations and interviews, artifacts of materials and process, and news items. The site serves as a provisional, suggestive, and projective archive for contemporary art. Gloria Sutton of Northeastern University serves as web editor for Art Journal Open, which publishes content on a rolling basis.
Artists’ Projects: We welcome submissions from all artists, ranging from those who work in more traditional mediums to those who have a digital and web-based focus. All formats and projects will be considered. Examples of published artist projects can be viewed on our website. Please send a short proposal describing your project, your website URL or images of your recent work, and your contact information to Gloria Sutton at art.journal.website@collegeart.org.
Bookshelf: Launched last year, Art Journal Open Bookshelf asks a simple question: “What are you reading?” Each answer provides a glimpse into the contributor’s personal reading list, from academic publications and artist monographs to novels, memoirs, and travel guides. Contributors to the series have included academics, artists, curators, and librarians. To submit your own Bookshelf to Art Journal Open, send a brief description of what you’re reading and why, a list of the titles (including author, publisher, and year of publication), and a photograph of your books or reading site to art.journal.website@collegeart.org.
CAA Celebrates National Fair Use Week
posted by Janet Landay, Program Manager, Fair Use Initiative — Feb 22, 2016
The College Art Association is proud to participate in the 2016 National Fair Use Week. This event is held annually during the last week of February, this year from Monday, February 22, through Friday, February 26. It celebrates the important doctrines of fair use in the United States and fair dealing in Canada and other jurisdictions. In honor of National Fair Use Week, CAA presents the following article about ways its fair use code has been embraced in the year since it was first released.
It’s been exactly one year since CAA published its Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts. A session at this year’s Annual Conference took stock of the progress made during the past twelve months, and panelists recounted remarkable progress in applying fair use to the visual arts. Chaired by Judy Metro, editor-in-chief at the National Gallery of Art and chair of CAA’s Committee on Intellectual Property, five CAA members described how they or their institutions modified their approach to using copyrighted materials because of CAA’s new Code.
Leading the way was the College Art Association itself, which overturned its copyright policies for authors. As Betty Leigh Hutcheson, CAA’s director of publications, explained, instead of demanding that authors get permissions for all images and indemnify the press, CAA’s contracts now ask authors to read the Code and apply it to their uses. Indemnification is no longer required when asserting fair use.
Other publishers of artwork also told of changing policy. Patricia Fidler, art publisher at Yale University Press, described how, inspired by the Code, the press has now created its own fair use guidelines specific to scholarly publishing. Just as important for Fidler is the fact that other parts of Yale University, including its museums, are now considering expanding their access to fair use. “It’s a big step,” she said, “to give authors the last word on their fair use. And we are proud that it says at the top of our new author guidelines, ‘Yale University Press supports the fair use of art images in scholarly monographs.’”
Joseph Newland, head of publications at the Menil Collection in Houston, announced new policies at his museum. Thanks to the Code, the Menil has expanded access to fair use throughout the institution by adapting CAA’s policy for internal criteria. He said improvements are already apparent: “It’s really helped work flow, especially at the press office, which often needs to respond to the news cycle in a timely way.”
Sometimes progress includes learning from frustration. Susan Higman Larsen, head of publications at the Detroit Institute of Arts, talked about having to publish a work in a scholarly catalogue without a relevant image, because of intolerable attempts at controlling content by an estate. “We misunderstood fair use,” she explained. “We didn’t understand that some commercial uses are just as eligible for fair use as non-commercial ones.” The Code helped clear that up, she said, and now the DIA is publishing a new book, in which the author wants to reproduce an image by the same artist. “This time, we’ll claim fair use,” she said. Furthermore, the DIA is considering changing its institutional policies about fair use.
The last success story of the session was from an artist, Rebekah Modrak, who teaches at the University of Michigan. She recounted the challenges she encountered after creating a work of art that incorporated copyrighted material. She made a video introducing an imaginary company, Re Made Co., that spoofed the overexemplifying hipster-Brooklyn site Best Made Co. After receiving a cease-and-desist letter, she turned for advice to CAA, which steered her to good legal advice at the University of Michigan. Her university’s lawyers welcomed the opportunity to support her fair uses and endorsed her intention to keep her video online. Modrak then published an account of her experience for a Routledge publication, Consumption Markets & Culture. When the editors there initially asked her to get permission to reproduce images from her video, she relied on CAA’s Code to persuade them that fair use would apply.
Another way CAA is measuring the impact of the Code is through annual surveys that provide longitudinal data on how CAA members are relying on fair use. At the conference session, Patricia Aufderheide shared early results from a recent 2,500-person CAA survey, showing broad awareness of the Code. More than two thirds of respondents indicated they knew about the Code, and a third of that group had already shared their knowledge, usually with more than one kind of interlocutor—for example, students, colleagues, and association members. Many of those aware of the Code had already put it to use. Indeed, 11% of all respondents had begun to employ fair use only after the appearance of the Code last year, a big leap and a demonstration of the power of understanding community values and best practice.
Peter Jaszi concluded the session by discussing next steps in CAA’s fair use efforts. Over the coming year he and Aufderheide will work to educate in-house legal counsel about the importance of mission-oriented fair use, resulting in expanded employment of fair use by museums. They will continue to give presentations about the Code to groups of arts professionals around the country, with a special focus on publishing and museum activities. And Jaszi encouraged CAA members to avail themselves of the many resources—FAQs, explainers, infographics, background documents, slideshows and more—available both on the CAA website and at the Center for Media & Social Impact.
CAA will be posting updates about fair use on its website, including the success stories described above. We would like to hear from any of you whose practices have changed because of the Code, whether you have a success story or a challenge to share. Both types of information will support the field’s efforts to make appropriate reliance on fair use the norm. If you have fair use news to share, please contact me at jlanday@collegeart.org.
Find out more about National Fair Use Week here: http://fairuseweek.org/
Below are links to some of the events taking place around the country:
https://blog.library.gsu.edu/2015/02/23/fair-use-week/
http://www.udel.edu/udaily/2016/feb/fair-use-week-021716.html
A comprehensive collection of fair use codes, articles, videos and teaching materials can be found at the Center for Media and Social Impact, http://www.cmsimpact.org/fair-use
And don’t forget to look at the materials available on CAA’s website, which focus on our fair use code. There you will find Frequently Asked Questions, explanatory videos, infographics, and a five-part webinar, along with the Code itself.
Image Captions
Betty Leigh Hutcheson (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Patricia Fidler (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Joseph Newland, Peter Jaszi, and Susan Higman Larsen (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Rebekah Modrak (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Rebekah Modrak, Fair Use Badge of Honor
Fall 2015 Recipients of the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award
posted by Christopher Howard — Nov 30, 2015
CAA has announced the five recipients of the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award for fall 2015. Thanks to a grant of $60,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, CAA is supporting the work of emerging authors who are publishing monographs on the history of art and related subjects.
The five Meiss/Mellon grantees for fall 2015 are:
- Anastasia Aukeman, Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Conner and the Rat Bastard Protective Association, University of California Press
- Mari Dumett, Corporate Imaginations: Fluxus Strategies for Living, University of California Press
- Namiko Kunimoto, Anxious Bodies: Gender and Nation in Postwar Art, University of Minnesota Press
- Miya Lippit, Aesthetic Life: The Artistic Discouse of Beauty in Modern Japan, Harvard University Press
- Allison Morehead, Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form, Pennsylvania State University Press
The purpose of the Meiss/Mellon subventions is to reduce the financial burden that authors carry when acquiring images for publication, including licensing and reproduction fees for both print and online publications.
What’s New with ACLS Humanities E-Book?
posted by Christopher Howard — Oct 15, 2015
October … shorter days, cooler nights, pumpkin spice in everything, and ACLS Humanities E-Book’s launch of Round 12! This recently released collection of 370 scholarly books offers new titles selected by scholars and learned societies. ACLS Humanities E-Book is the online publisher of CAA’s monographs, and this partnership has helped to develop an essential resource in art history and architecture.
Round 12 includes four winners of CAA’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, all published by Princeton University Press:
- The Sculpture of Donatello by H. W. Janson (1957)
- Esprit De Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War 1914–1925 by Kenneth Silver (1989)
- Only Connect . . . Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance by John Shearman (1992)
- Lorenzo Ghiberti by Richard Krautheimer (1956)
Eighteen titles in the Villa I Tatti series, published in collaboration with Harvard University Press and the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, are also featured as part of ACLS Humanities E-Book’s online collection. Since 1961, the Villa I Tatti program has welcomed over one thousand fellows working in the fields of Italian Renaissance art, history, literature, and music. The research center has thus generated some of the most significant scholarship on the Italian Renaissance published over the last decades.
Subscriptions to Humanities E-Book are available to individual and institutional members of CAA. Individuals should write to subscriptions@hebook.org; institutions should contact lwalton@hebook.org.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for June 2015
posted by CAA — Aug 10, 2015
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
August 2015
Beverly Semmes: Feminist Responsibility Project (FRP)
Weatherspoon Art Museum
Bob and Lissa Shelley McDowell Gallery, University of North Carolina, 500 Tate Street, Greensboro, NC 27413
May 24–September 6, 2015
The Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro presents the Feminist Responsibility Project (FRP) by the New York artist Beverly Semmes. The exhibition features drawings, ceramics, suspended and illuminated glass sculpture, and video work.
“The metaphors and imagery of Beverly Semmes’s art typically flow in this direction: from the female body and out into the landscape,” Ingrid Schaffner wrote in the 2011 exhibition catalogue from Rowan University Art Gallery. This is noticeably experienced through the large fabric sculpture, Buried Treasure, on view at the Weatherspoon. Buried Treasure, made of black crushed velvet, has one arm of the dress snaking its way off the wall and across the floor of the gallery, enveloping the active space. Continuing to connect mediums in space, her video, Kick, depicts Semmes kicking a reddish-pink potato across icy terrain, the color reflective of the pot sculptures dotting the gallery landscape.
“Her totemic and abstract works create alternative lenses from which to see the body in relationship to domestic or natural landscapes,” says the Weatherspoon exhibition description. In her works on paper, Semmes manipulates photographs in vintage “gentlemen” magazines, as she calls them, covering various parts of the depicted female bodies in ink to perform “a personal act of feminist censorship, blotting out the literal to leave behind abstract, nuanced images that speak in a different voice.”
Semmes will be at the Weatherspoon on Thursday, September 3, 2015, at 6:00 PM for an artist’s talk.
Linda Nochlin: Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader
Edited by Maura Reilly
Recent book release
In addition to two new essays in this recently released volume, Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader, readers are treated to twenty-nine of Nochlin’s essays over her career, including “Women Artists after the French Revolution” and “Starting from Scratch: The Beginnings of Feminist Art History.”
The new anthology includes the provocative essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”—a continuing relevant question. In May of this year, ARTnews revisited Nochlin’s groundbreaking 1971 essay (originally published in ARTnews), exploring women in the arts today, and including eight contemporary artists replies to Nochlin’s essay. In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, the journalist Chris Kraus acclaims, “Nochlin writes with a dazzling mix of erudition and candor, but what’s most remarkable about her work is that it’s driven by an exhaustive investigation as to why and how certain artworks have been meaningful to her.”
Presenting artist monographs alongside the essays, the volume collects Nochlin’s writings on artists such as Mary Cassatt, Louise Bourgeois, Cecily Brown, Kiki Smith, Miwa Yanagi, and Sophie Calle, written in a voice that feels as contemporary as when they first appeared. Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader is published by Thames and Hudson and edited by Maura Reilly, founding curator of the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.
A. L. Steiner: Come & Go
Blum and Poe
2727 South La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90034
July 2–August 22, 2015
The press release from Blum and Poe presents the new exhibition Come & Go by the artist A. L. Steiner in dramatic fashion: “Between the interlude of state-sanctioned exploitation and violence, the Amerikkkin project of mass incarceration and slavery, the uncertain future of California’s viability, and planetary implosion, A. L. Steiner presents an overview of her photo archive from 1995–2015.”
Despite the chance of planetary implosion, the exhibition by Steiner is a constructed “relaxing space” dedicated to the viewing of print work. Sparsely covered white walls are adorned only with a limited number of photographs and collages, while attention in the gallery is focused on a wooden desk and file system. Through the installation, and with an archivist on hand daily, the audience is encouraged to explore twenty years of Steiner’s work.
“A. L. Steiner utilizes constructions of photography, video, installation, collage, collaboration, performance, writing and curatorial work as seductive tropes channeled through the sensibility of a skeptical queer eco-feminist androgyne,” her website bio states.
In addition to the exhibition, Steiner has collaborated with a “revolving cast of subversives and interlocutors,” including a collaboration with Shinichiro Okuda/WAKA WAKA and additional live performances by Brave Accepter, Jibade-Khalil Huffman on August 15, and YACHT on August 22; and an archivist to guide viewers daily, 10:00 AM–1:00 PM and 2:00–6:00 PM.
Women Make Movies: 2015 Catalogue
Online and Print Resource
This thirty-two-page special-edition catalogue is the first in ten years released by Women Make Movies. Focused on their collection, the catalogue includes briefs and data on classics that focus on feminism and gender studies as well as films from diverse regions from across the globe. Highlighted are Academy Award winners such as Saving Face, “a harshly realistic view of violence against women in South Asia,” and new releases, Regarding Susan Sontag and Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth—illuminating portraits of the literary giants.
The catalogue is meant to facilitate rental or purchasing access to the Women Make Movies holdings. Established in 1972, Women Make Movies is a “multicultural, multiracial, non-profit media arts organization, which facilitates the production, promotion, distribution and exhibition of independent films and videotapes by and about women.” They provide distribution services and production assistance programs, while facilitating feminist media, including a special emphasis to support work by women of color.
Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019-5497
May 17–September 7, 2015
The Museum of Modern Art presents the first One Woman exhibition dedicated to the work of Yoko Ono. This retrospective is a survey of the decisive decade that led up to Ono’s unauthorized exhibition (One Woman Show, Museum of Modern [F] art, 1971), revalorizing one of the most misunderstood artists of the last sixty years.
Featuring Ono’s most celebrated pieces between 1960 and 1971, the exhibition brings together approximately 125 of Ono’s early objects, works on paper, installations, performances, audio recordings, and films, alongside rarely seen archival materials. During these years, Ono (born in Tokyo, 1933) moved between New York, Tokyo, and London. A pioneer in the international development of Conceptual art, experimental film, and performance art, Ono was then creating artworks that could exist as mere instructions, meant to be executed once, multiple times, or none. Since her early projects are often based on verbal or written instructions, the exhibited pieces focus in the participation on viewers, where the artist generously opens up to their diverse responses to “complete” her pieces, or perhaps towards a sense beyond a One-Woman proposal, but rather an invitation to a collaborative creativity.
Among the exhibited pieces to be highlighted are Grapefruit (1964), Ono’s influential book of instructions; the typescript for which is displayed here page by page—consisted of nothing but terse, open-ended instructions for readers to follow—and Half-A-Room (1967), an installation of bisected, incomplete, white-painted domestic objects. The film Cut Piece (1964), documentation of one of Ono’s seminal performances, is also on view. Here, Ono confronted issues of gender, class, and cultural identity by asking viewers to cut away pieces of her clothing as she sat quietly on stage. Cut Piece remains one of the most disturbing works of performance art of the 1960s, that stands as a foundation of feminist and body-centered art.
A Feminist Fiber Art Exhibition
Traveling Exhibition and Call for participation
First venue opens August 14, 2015
Organized by Iris Nectar Studio, this DIY feminist art exhibition will feature female artists from around the world whose practice focus on fiber art. The project will take the form of an art crawl throughout the Boston area, with an opening on August 14. The project was inspired by the “Guerrilla Girls’ statistics” of women underrepresented in the art world. Originally envisioned as a little exhibit to take place in a single venue for a few weeks, the initiative was transformed into a traveling exhibition using alternative art spaces all across the greater Boston area because of overwhelming response and support. The exhibition will evolve slightly, with a different lineup of artists in each new space.
The Feminist Fiber Art Exhibition will feature artwork created by artists that identify as female. The constantly growing collection include the witty—knitting from the Icelandic artist Ýrúrarí, the historic and esoterically influenced—as well as work with strong female characters embroided by Alaina Varrone (New Haven, Connecticut), “pubism” pieces by Sally Hewitt (England), and “retex” (recycled textile) sculptures from the London-based German artist Jess de Wahls. The project online also features a zine, a blog, and a call for participation.
Michelle Stuart: Topographies: Drawings & Photographic Works 1968–2015
Marc Selwyn Fine Art
9953 South Santa Monica Boulevard, Beverly Hills, CA 90212
July 18–September 5, 2015
Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to announce Topographies: Drawings & Photographic Works 1968–2015, an exhibition by the New York–based artist Michelle Stuart. Stuart (b. Los Angeles, 1933) is a multidisciplinary artist best known for a rich and diverse practice, including site-specific earth works, intimate drawings, multimedia installations, paintings, sculpture, and photographs, all centered on a lifelong interest in the natural world and the cosmos. Her work questions conventional notions of drawing as it merges performative rubbing and frottage gestures with elements of the landscape itself. Stuart brings forth imagery by both adding natural materials and revealing the texture of the earth, combining the fundamentals of both drawing and photography.
Each work is a unique meditation on the nature of memory, digitally printed on sheets of archival paper. The individual panels feature untouched and altered elements, including appropriated vintage images and her own photographs, combined in a filmic manner. These dreamlike recollections of her past not only continue her life-long artistic engagement with specific locations, but also affirm the significance of place as a unique source of memory.
The exhibition highlights include #9 Zen, an iconic scroll that will be accompanied by a selection of works on paper, ranging from early collages such as Traces to more recent indexical works in which earth and seeds are pressed and merged onto her paper supports. The second gallery features a selection of her cinematic photographs, including the walk-about narratives of The Beginning, Islas Encantadas,and Past Shadows, Orkney.
Summer 2015 Recipients of the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award
posted by Christopher Howard — Aug 03, 2015
CAA has announced the five recipients of the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award for summer 2015. Thanks to a grant of $60,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, CAA is supporting the work of emerging authors who are publishing monographs on the history of art and related subjects.
The five Meiss/Mellon grantees for summer 2015 are:
- Elise Archias, The Concrete Body—Rainer, Schneemann, Acconci, Yale University Press
- Molly Brunson, Russian Realisms: Literature and Painting, 1840–1890, Northern Illinois University Press
- Jeehee Hong, Theater of the Dead: A Social Turn in Chinese Funerary Art, 1000–1400, University of Hawai‘i Press
- Susan Rosenberg, Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art (1962–1987), Wesleyan University Press
- Christina Bryan Rosenberger, Drawing the Line: The Early Works of Agnes Martin, University of California Press
The purpose of the Meiss/Mellon subventions is to reduce the financial burden that authors carry when acquiring images for publication, including licensing and reproduction fees for both print and online publications.
Bookshelf: A New Series on Art Journal Open
posted by Alyssa Pavley — Jul 06, 2015
Art Journal Open has launched Bookshelf, a new series that asks a simple question: “What are you reading?” Each answer provides a glimpse into the contributor’s personal reading list, from academic publications and artist monographs to novels, memoirs, and travel guides. Two installments have appeared so far: Rebecca M. Brown, associate professor at Johns Hopkins University and incoming editor-in-chief of Art Journal, shares both the physical books on her shelf and the digital books on her Kindle. The Bookshelf of the artist Lenore Chinn is a fascinating mix of theoretical texts, art books, and biographies. To submit your own Bookshelf to Art Journal Open, send a brief description of what you’re reading and why, a list of the titles (including author, publisher, and year of publication), and a photograph of your books to art.journal.website@collegeart.org.