CAA News Today
An Interview with Suzanne Preston Blier on CAA’s Code of Best Practices and Publishing with Fair Use
posted by CAA — May 19, 2020
In 2019, Suzanne Preston Blier, professor of African art at Harvard University and former president of CAA, published a major book on Picasso’s use of global imagery, Picasso’s Demoiselles: The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece. In addition to its scholarship the book is groundbreaking for its reliance on fair use, the principle within US copyright law that permits free reproduction of copyrighted images under certain conditions. CAA led the way among visual arts groups in calling for reliance on fair use, producing in 2015 its Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts.
In this interview with Patricia Aufderheide, university professor and founding director of the Center for Media & Social Impact (CMSI) at American University, and a principal investigator in the CAA fair use project, Blier relates how she became an inadvertent pioneer of fair use in art history.
An Interview with Suzanne Preston Blier, Harvard University
By Patricia Aufderheide, American University
I met Prof. Blier, an award-winning art historian, when CMSI joined others in facilitating the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts for the College Art Association (CAA), with funding from the Samuel H. Kress and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations. Fair use is the well-established US right to use copyrighted material for free, if you are using that material for a different purpose (such as academic analysis, for instance) and in amounts relevant to the new purpose. Blier was the incoming president, as the Code launched.
The project addressed a huge need. Art historians, visual artists, art journal and book editors, and museum staff all have faced major hurdles in accomplishing their work because of copyright. Art historians avoided contemporary art in favor of analyzing public domain material. Visual artists hesitated to undertake innovative projects that reuse existing cultural material. Editors, or sometimes their authors, faced monumental bills for permissions and sometimes those permissions depended on an artist or artist’s estate agreeing with what they say. Museums hesitated to do virtual tours, or use images in their informational brochures, or even to mount group exhibits, because of prohibitive permissions costs. All together, some people in the visual arts called this “permissions culture.”
Once the Code came out, some things changed immediately. Museums rewrote their copyright use policies. Artists made new work. CAA’s publications—some of the leading journals in the field—adopted fair use as a default choice.Yale University Press prepared new author guidelines for fair use of images in scholarly art monographs to encourage fair use. Blier was one of the Code’s champions.
And then she needed it herself. As she began work on her most recent book, which ultimately resulted in Picasso’s Demoiselles: The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece (Duke University Press, 2019, winner of the 2020 Robert Motherwell Book prize for an outstanding publication in the history and criticism of modernism in the arts by the Dedalus Foundation), she realized the subject faced the stiffest possible copyright challenge. To tell her story, she would have to be able to show images from a variety of artists, most challengingly, Picasso. She thought of Duke University Press, a publisher that has been willing to go ahead of others on fair use. So Blier approached them. Duke was very supportive, and they ended up hiring extra legal counsel for this. In the end, Blier said, she had to rewrite certain sections, and redo some images at the suggestion of outside counsel, to strengthen the fair use argument.
Blier tells the story of how the book got out into the world (and won an award), below.
Figure 1. Congo masks published in Leo Frobenius’ 1898 Die Masken und Geheimbünde Afrikas alongside Pablo Picasso’s Study of Man (1907). The Congo mask at the bottom, second from the left is the likely source for the crouching demoiselle. The mask at the top left shows tear lines from the eyes crossing diagonally down the cheeks similar to Picasso’s preliminary study for one of the men in an early compositional drawings for the canvas.
You’re an expert in African art. How did you end up writing a book about one of the most famous modernist artists?
This is a book I never intended to write; it found me. For my previous book, Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba: Ife History, Power, and Identity, I was doing those last-minute bits of work in the library to check sources, and I pulled out a book adjacent to the book I was looking for, an old book by the German anthropologist, Leo Frobenius. I hadn’t read it since graduate school. As I opened it up, I looked down and I said, Wow, this is a book on African masks and they look like they’d be the ones Picasso used as models for his famous 1907 painting Demoiselles d’Avignon. At the time I had first read the book, Picasso’s drawings for the painting hadn’t been released. This time I saw it differently and as I was looking at it in the library, I saw there was tracing paper over the pictures. There was a line drawing covering each mask, and that seemed significant too.
The next thing I knew, I was hunting for a book from the Harvard library on Dahomey women warriors. It turned out it was in the medical school library, which should have been a sign. When I picked it up at the main library and flipped it open, I thought, Oh my god, it’s pornography! It was photos and line drawings of women around the world, in supposed “evolutionary” order. Photos of naked women begin with so-called “archaic,” in Papua New Guinea, right through to southern Europe, then Denmark. In the library I’m bending over, kind of hiding it, out of embarrassment. I bring it home and realize, Ohhhh! Here’s another key source for Demoiselles. This volume, which was by Karl Heinrich Stratz, had gone through multiple editions, and one was published about the same time Picasso stopped using living models. Then I found another book, by Richard Burton, which had a rendering that Picasso clearly used for his 1905 sketch Salomé.
What happened next was the clincher. I went to Paris to lecture at Collège de France. The week before my lectures, I went to hear another speaker at the Collège, a medieval historian. One of the first slides he presented was a work from a medieval illustrator, Villard De Honnecourt. This book was a modern edition of an illustrated medieval manuscript, published in the right time frame for Picasso to have seen it. And I thought, Well, here’s another source Picasso used.
Later I was also able to rediscover a photo that allowed me to date the painting to a single night in March 1907. The scene is often identified as a brothel, but bordel in French doesn’t mean bordello, but rather a chaotic or complex situation. It was my belief that Picasso was creating a time-machine kind of image of the mothers of five races, as he understood them from the Stratz ethno-pornography book and other sources, each depicted in the art style of that region or period. My larger argument is not only that Picasso was using book illustration sources, but also that these books invite us to see the canvas in a new light, and that, for Picasso, the painting has its intellectual grounding in colonial-era ideas about human and artistic evolution.
Figure 2. Illustrations from Leo Frobenius’ 1898 Die Masken und Geheimbünde Afrikas showing (top two rows) the visual development of a mask into a human face. The middle illustration ,from the same Frobenius book shows line drawings of ijaw masks from Nigeria. The bottom image is a detail of the standing African figure from Picasso’s 1907, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon which appears to be based on a combination of these two masks.
What a sleuthing job! And so you decided to write the book then?
I wrote the first two chapters while I was in Paris doing the lecture. I saw it not as a coffee-table art book, but the kind of book you put in your knapsack as you head off to a long ride on the subway.
It was easy to write, but it was a very different story for the images. I immediately got a trade publisher in Britain to agree to publish it, and then they said they could not do it, because of problems getting permission to reproduce images from the Picasso Foundation.
The Picasso Foundation is notorious for making it difficult to access Picasso images, isn’t it?
The price of permissions is high, and this Foundation like many estates is interested in guarding the artist’s reputation as well. The difficulties of publishing on Picasso have been manifested in how little publishing was being done, and how scarce the images were in that work. Since 1973, there have been few heavily illustrated books about Picasso, except by wealthy individuals or museums in relation to an exhibition. I had heard about Rosalind Krauss publishing a work without permissions—at least that’s what I heard—anyway, she used very few images. Leo Steinberg apparently had not been able to arrange the rights for a work he wanted to do, a book edition of his two seminal articles on Les Demoiselles.
Although I hadn’t realized it until recently, in September 2019 there was an important case in the US, about a set of illustrated books by Christian Zervos with a wide array of Picasso illustrations. The case was started in France, but a US judge has allowed fair use.
But generally, yes, there’s common wisdom among art historians that the Picasso Foundation is a formidable challenge.
So how did you proceed when the first publisher backed out?
I was disheartened, but I got an agent. He sent it off to ten or twelve trade publishers worldwide—and came up with nothing.
Then I realized I was going to have to go to a university press. That was a big decision. The trade publication will pay for the images, and do all the work on the rights clearance. But with a university press, you’re on your own.
One of the first people I contacted was legendary editor Ken Wissoker at Duke University Press. He was interested, but then came the issue of the images. I may have broached fair use with him from the start. The manuscript had gone through peer review and it was in great shape except for this copyright issue. I had quite a number of images—in the end, it was 338. At Duke, they won’t begin the editorial process until you have all the copyright clearances on images done. So I began the difficult process of deciding how to get the images.
Were you in contact with the Picasso Foundation directly?
I did contact them, in order to let them know about the project in general. I was doing final research work in Paris. I had framed the book as a travelogue in part addressing my discovery of these sources. I also wanted to find out so much more about Picasso. I’m not a modernist, I’m an outsider to the field. So I worked hard to get as much insight and criticism of the manuscript from specialists as I could.
I made it a point to meet with people at the Picasso Foundation. I had a Powerpoint of the images, which I showed to one of the key people there. Later I wrote to them, “here’s the manuscript, let me know if you have any thoughts.” And I heard nothing back. I had heard that with some manuscripts, they have been concerned one way or another. I didn’t want their permission for the intellectual content, but since they knew this artist and his life and family better than any academic could, I wanted their insights.
And then you started to look for permissions?
Well, I began to think about the cost of acquiring the images. The process is such that you have to go through the Artists Rights Society (ARS, a US licensing broker). And to get a price, you have to furnish the number of images, how many are color, the size of the print run, the prospective profit, and a whole series of things we could not know. Duke wouldn’t even look at the project editorially without having the rights in hand. I had heard difficult stories—that they were interested in looking at the galleys along the way, and requesting changes, for quality control, but it wasn’t possible to do this and work with the press.
If I had to guess, I would say that it might have cost me something like $80,000 of my own money to purchase the minimum number of images for this scholarly book, from which I expect to make no money, or very little.
Figure 3 from left to right: Pablo Picasso, Nude Combing Her Hair, 1906; Girl braiding hair from C. H. Stratz, La beauté de la femme, 1900 (Paris); Girl from Vienna from C.H. Stratz, La beauté de la femme, 1900; Picasso Seated Female Nude, 1908. Over the course of his long career Picasso would continue to use key visual insights from Frobenius, Stratz, and other illustrated sources he was exploring in this late 1906 to early 1907 period.
So how did you come to the decision to use them under fair use?
I had been president of CAA in 2016-17, and a longtime promoter of fair use and IP issues more generally. I was involved in the creation of the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts. For me, CAA’s role in fair use is one of the most important and radical (in a positive way) things that it has ever done.
I decided that fair use would make the most sense in this context. This was a book about an important modern artist. In addition, I’m a senior scholar—this was not my first publication. If the worst happened, if I had problems, well, I’ve had a great career and this would not harm it. I have tenure and so on. Also, as the then-president of CAA, I thought it was important to do this.
Besides, this to me was part of a larger picture of what I had done in my larger career. I’m very active locally in civic affairs, and really interested in promoting transparency, and democratic ideals. I was also very fortunate to have Peter Jaszi, a foremost legal scholar on fair use (and another principal investigator on the CAA project), working with me. At his suggestion, I took out an insurance policy, which for a fee—I think about $5,000—(with a $10,000 deductible) I was able to lower my anxiety level. I also paid $400 for an attorney to look over the insurance contract. And I had good friends like you, who when I got cold feet assured me it was the right thing to do. And of course, Duke is a publisher that has been willing to go ahead of others on fair use.
Can you give me an example of something you had to change in the text to strengthen the fair use argument?
With a museum photograph of an African mask, for example, I had to explain why this particular way of photographing the work was critical to the argument in my book. I had to ad a few sentences to justify my selection of several Picasso works as well. I also had to give reasons in my text for why each of the chapter epigraphs was necessary.
Did you have to alter the use of imagery in any way to accommodate fair use?
There are changes the press made, design-wise, that reflected in part the decision to employ fair use. Many of the photos are shown in black-and-white and the majority are reduced in size. I was constrained by the fact that I could only employ fair use if I could get access to the materials without going through the Picasso Foundation. So I had to acquire nearly all the images from published books, and many of the Picasso images were published in black and white and at a very small size, in a grainy context. I had to spend a lot of time hunting down the best possible images to use. In my book they are shown in relatively small size, along with information on where you can find color versions online.
That didn’t bother me too much, though. For readers and viewers at this juncture in the Internet era, we have become expert at extrapolating the fuller figure from a small image.
There is also a small spread of color images, a couple Picasso works as well as from other artists. For these images color was central to the book.
The decision to publish largely in black-and-white was, I think, also related to the fact that the Picasso Foundation and others are concerned that color representations be incredibly accurate, and it is very hard to get the color exactly right, when copying from books. You also have an issue with paper quality in getting accurate representation.
The cover is a handsome design, and very clever. They broke up the images into thumbnail-like sections, requiring you as a viewer to put them together as one image, similar to how Picasso was thinking in the early stages of cubism, where you as a viewer of an assemblage have to assemble them in your own mind, to make it work for you as a whole.
How was the book received?
It was a finalist for the Prose Prize, a prize of publishers to authors. My previous book won it in 2016. I didn’t expect to win it this time again, in 2019. I was very honored that it was a finalist. It was also featured in the Wall Street Journal’s holiday art book list. And then, just recently, it won the Robert Motherwell Book Award.
Has the Picasso Foundation seen the book?
To date I’ve heard nothing. I was thinking earlier that the Picasso Foundation might want to stop it pre-publication. So much so that when I came back from travel in Africa, I went first to my academic mailbox, and was relieved when I saw no big legal envelope. But there has been no pushback. I certainly gave them the opportunity to comment on the content while it was still in manuscript. And last April or May, I went to France to meet with the curators at Musée Picasso about contributing an essay to a catalog. I sent them an article draft which they decided not to publish, which is fine, but also sent them a copy of the manuscript, and of course the Musée speaks to the Foundation.
Interestingly, the two cases where the Foundation has sued or prevented publication that I know of have to do with children’s books about Picasso. I don’t know what that means.
Does the wider art history community know about this?
I hope this personal story makes a difference. We still have a lot of educating to do, in spite of the work we did around the Code. I continually get, on the art history listservs, questions—How can I get permission, and I always say, Use fair use. People still don’t trust it or believe it’s more difficult than it is.
At the CAA conference I just went to in Chicago, there seems to be a division between presses. Presses at private universities–Yale, Princeton, MIT, Duke—seem to feel more comfortable exploring this. But for university presses at some public institutions, these legal issues have to be taken up with the state attorney general, and there can be real nervousness stepping outside a narrow parameter. I learned this speaking to an editor at a state university press in a progressive state, who believes they’re being held back because of this fear.
I was pleased to see at this same conference a pamphlet on fair use by Duke University Press’s former Director, Steve Cohn. In his essay, he mentions my Picasso book and how happy he is that Duke chose to publish it this way. I figured, if Steve is openly talking about this fair use project, then the proverbial cat is out of the bag, and I could be more open and provide some of the back story from my end.
CAA’s scholarly publications, The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and Art Journal Open rely on fair use as a matter of policy, and indicate when they do so in their photo credits. View a complete discussion of fair use and CAA’s Code of Best Practices.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by CAA — Feb 05, 2020
Patricia Walters. Photo: Sarah L. Voisin, via The Washington Post
|
|
|
|
|
Want articles like these in your inbox? Sign up: |
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by CAA — Jan 29, 2020
Much of the collection of the Museum of Chinese in America may have been ruined after a fire broke out at a building in Chinatown where its acquisitions were stored. Photo: Lloyd Mitchell, via New York Times
|
|
|
|
|
Want articles like these in your inbox? Sign up: |
Meet the 2020 CAA-Getty International Program Participants
posted by CAA — Nov 14, 2019
We’re pleased to announce this year’s participants in the CAA-Getty International Program. Now in its ninth year, this international program supported by the Getty Foundation will bring fifteen new participants and five alumni to the 2020 Annual Conference in Chicago, Illinois.
The participants—professors of art history, curators, and artists who teach art history—hail from countries throughout the world, expanding CAA’s growing international membership and contributing to an increasingly diverse community of scholars and ideas. This year we are adding participants from four countries not included previously—Bolivia, Saudi Arabia, Côte d’Ivoire, and Singapore—bringing the total number of countries represented by the program to fifty. Selected by a jury of CAA members from a highly competitive group of applicants, the participants will receive funding for travel expenses, hotel accommodations, conference registration, CAA membership, and per diems for out-of-pocket expenditures.
At a one-day preconference colloquium, to be held this year at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the fifteen new participants will discuss key issues in the international study of art history together with five CAA-Getty alumni and several CAA members from the United States, who also will serve as hosts throughout the conference. The preconference program will delve deeper into subjects discussed during last year’s program, including such topics as postcolonial and Eurocentric legacies, interdisciplinary and transnational methodologies, and the intersection of politics and art history.
This is the third year that the program includes five alumni, who provide an intellectual link between previous convenings of the international program and this year’s events. They also serve as liaisons between CAA and the growing community of CAA-Getty alumni. In addition to serving as moderators for the preconference colloquium, the five alumni will present a new Global Conversation during the 2020 conference titled Things Aren’t Always as they Seem: Art History and the Politics of Vision.
The goal of the CAA-Getty International Program is to increase international participation in the organization’s activities, thereby expanding international networks and the exchange of ideas both during and after the conference. CAA currently includes members from sixty countries around the world. We look forward to welcoming the following participants at the next Annual Conference in Chicago.
2020 Participants in the CAA-Getty International Program
Irene Bronner is a senior lecturer with the South African Research Chair in South African Art History and Visual Culture, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Her doctorate (DLitt et Phil), titled “Representations of Domestic Workers in Post-apartheid South African Art Practice,” was conferred by the University of Johannesburg in 2016. She then held a three-year postdoctoral research fellowship with the same institution, during which time she received a Postdoctoral Research Fellows’ Excellence Award. Her research interests center on feminist studies in the visual arts, with a focus on contemporary southern Africa. She works principally with feminist, queer and postcolonial cultural theory as well as issues of memory, affect, gender, and the aftermath of trauma. She has published in local and international journals, recently in Woman’s Art Journal and Textile: Journal of Cloth and Culture.
Eiman Elgibreen is an artist and an assistant professor of art history at the Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. She obtained a PhD in art history from the University of Sussex (UK) for her research on “Image Making: Representations of Women in the Art and Career of Safeya Binzagr 1968-2000.” Since 2011 Elgibreen has also been a freelance writer for Al-Riyadh Daily Newspaper and Al-Jazirah Daily Newspaper, and an art consultant for organizations that are concerned with preserving the legacy of Saudi pioneer artists such as Darat Safeya Binzagr (a museum devoted to the artist’s work), and Saudi Arts House (a family foundation devoted to the work of Mohammed Alsaleem). In addition, she has curated a number of art exhibitions, including the Saudi National Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, 2019. Elgibreen is interested in exploring the forgotten and/or misrepresented aspects of Saudi and Arab culture through her research and her art. A goal of her work is to encourage acceptance of cultural differences.
Dária G. Jaremtchuk is an associate professor of art history at the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on contemporary art. As Fulbright Brazil Distinguished Chair at Emory University in 2019, she taught a course in the art history department about Brazilian contemporary visual arts. In 2018, she was a visiting scholar at Georgetown University and at Brown University in 2011. In 2010, she edited the book Arte e política: situações (Art and politics: situations) (Alameda Editora) and in 2007 she published Anna Bella Geiger: Passagens Conceituais (Anna Bella Geiger: conceptual passages) (C/Arte and Editora da Universidade de São Paulo). She is currently researching the relocation of Brazilian artists during the Brazilian military dictatorship of the 1960s and 70s and the artistic exchange between Brazil and the United States at that time. She has published on this topic in journals, conference proceedings, and book chapters.
Ganiyu Jimoh received a PhD in art history from the University of Lagos, Nigeria, where he is also a lecturer. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow with the Arts of Africa and Global Souths research program in the Department of Fine Art at Rhodes University in South Africa. His research, which focuses on contemporary art, new media, satire, and cartoons has attracted major awards, including the prestigious University of Lagos Best Researcher Award in Arts and Humanities in 2011. In 2015 he received a grant to conduct research for his PhD dissertation at the African Studies Center at Michigan State University. Jimoh is also a recipient of the 2019 African Studies Association Presidential fellowship. As a scholarly writer who is also a practicing political cartoonist, Jimga (his cartoon signature) has several local and international exhibitions to his credit and currently serves as the secretary of Cartoonists Association of Nigeria (CARTAN).
Mariana Levytska is a research associate in the Department of Art Studies of the Ethnology Institute at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Lviv. She received a PhD in the history of art from the Lviv National Academy of Arts in 2003. Based on her thesis, she published a monograph about Ukrainian portrait painting as an artistic and memorial phenomenon of the long nineteenth century. In addition, she has worked as a senior lecturer from 2005–14 and associate professor in 2015 at the Department of Architectural Environment Design in the Faculty of Architecture of the Lviv National Agricultural University. Levytska’s current area of research is Ukrainian religious art of the eighteenth century (late Baroque-Rococo period), focusing on the concept of cultural transfer according to “peripatetic works of art (such as engravings and albums)” as well as peripatetic artists. She is also interested in issues of Ukrainian historiography of the art of the twentieth century.
Daniela Lucena holds a PhD in social sciences from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and specialize in the sociology of art and culture. A researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Buenos Aires, she teaches sociology of art courses at UBA, where she is also head of a research team. Since 2003 she has studied various aesthetical projects where art, culture, and politics are intertwined. Her books include Contaminación artística. Arte concreto, comunismo y peronismo en los años 40 (Artistic contamination: concret avant-garde, communism and Peronism in the 40s) (Biblios, 2015) and Modo mata moda. Arte, cuerpo y (micro)política en los 80 (Form kills fashion: art, body and [micro]politics in the 80s), coauthored with Gisela Laboureau, (EDULP, 2016). In addition to her work as researcher, since 2007 she has collaborated with PH15, a foundation that organizes photography workshops for children of vulnerable populations, assessing programs and community work linked to art.
Ali Mahfouz is the director of the Mansoura Storage Museum, part of the Ministry of Egyptian Antiquities. He received a BA in 2010 and an MA in Egyptology in 2017, both from Mansoura University. He is currently working on his PhD. Mahfouz began working as an inspector of antiquities at the Ministry of Antiquities in 2012. In August 2015 he was appointed the supervisor of the Mansoura Storage Museum and in October 2018 he became its director. With colleagues, Mahfouz founded Save Mansoura, a volunteer organization dedicated to raising public awareness about the value of cultural heritage and the restoration of historic sites. He is also the cofounder of the Documentation of Architectural and Urban Heritage of Mansoura City Project, which aims to document, digitize, and archive that city’s cultural history. His greatest concern is the fate of archaeological sites damaged or destroyed because of political conflicts and the need to preserve his country’s cultural heritage in the wake of that destruction.
Priya Maholay-Jaradi is the founding convenor of a new art history academic program, a collaboration between the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the National Gallery Singapore. She earned an MA in art history from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London (2001); a PhD from NUS (2012), and a postdoctoral fellowship at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden (2013). A former curator at the Asian Civilizations Museum, Singapore, she has curated Portrait of a Community (National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, 2002), Beauty in Asia (Asian Civilizations Museum, Singapore, 2007) and Tautology of Memory (NUS Museum, Singapore, 2012). Jaradi’s monograph, Fashioning a National Art: Baroda’s Royal Collection and Institutions (1875-1924) (Oxford University Press, 2016), mobilizes provincial archives to reveal links between princely modernities and nationalisms in South Asia. She is the volume editor of Baroda: A Cosmopolitan Provenance in Transition (Marg Foundation, 2015). Her current research examines India-Singapore museological imaginations within the context of cold war diplomacy, the Non-Aligned Movement, and decolonization.
Valeria Paz Moscoso specializes in modern and contemporary Bolivian art history. She is the academic coordinator and advisor in the Department of Culture at the Universidad Católica Boliviana (La Paz), where she is also a temporary lecturer and editor of the journal Ciencia y Cultura (Science and culture). Her PhD dissertation examined the concept of repression and emancipation in the work of Bolivian artist Roberto Valcárcel. Currently, she is researching the disruption of the narrative of Indigenism in contemporary art. Additional research interests include gender, humor, critical theory, postcolonial studies, and arts-based research. She has curated exhibitions in Bolivia and the United Kingdom, and published in journals such as ESCALA Research Papers, Ciencia y Cultura, Bisagra (Hinge), Terremoto (Earthquake), and in the books Corrosión y Anomalía: escenas del arte contemporáneo boliviano (Corrosion and anomaly: scenes from contemporary Bolivian art) (2019) and Bolivia: Los caminos de la escultura (Bolivia: the paths of sculpture) (2009), a publication selected for the Bicentennial Library of Bolivia.
Daria Panaiotti is a photography curator and research associate in the Contemporary Art Department of the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. She graduated with honors from the European University in St. Petersburg (EUSPB), where she is currently completing her PhD with a dissertation on the history of Soviet documentary photography in Brezhnev’s era. She is also a member of the program committee of the After Post-Photography international conference, the only annual conference on photographic theory and history in Russia. Previously she was involved in the project In Support of Photography in Russia, funded by the IRIS Foundation, Moscow, where she was a member of the curatorial team that organized exhibitions of Russian photography for FotoFest 2012—an international photography festival held every two years in Houston, Texas—and where she also participated in an international portfolio review for Russian photographers at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow in 2011.
Aleksandra Paradowska is a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Art History and Philosophy, Faculty of Art Education and Curatorial Studies, at the University of Fine Arts in Poznań, Poland. After receiving a PhD from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań in 2013, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wrocław from 2014–17. Her research focuses on architectural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially the relationship between architecture and politics. For the past five years she has studied Nazi architecture in Polish territories during the Second World War in relation to different perspectives of the humanities, that is, interdisciplinary views of postcolonial and heritage studies. Paradowska has published widely on Polish interwar architecture and received several scholarships: from DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) in 2010, START by the Foundation for Polish Science in 2014, and a scholarship for leading young researchers in Poland by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education in 2017–19.
Saurabh Tewari received a BArch in 2008 from the Sushant School of Art and Architecture, Gurgaon/GGSIP University, Delhi (India), and a MDes in 2010 from the Industrial Design Center, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. As a doctoral candidate in the Design Program at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, he is attempting to map out and understand the shifting role of design in postcolonial India within the broader narrative of national development. Currently an assistant professor of design in the School of Planning and Architecture in Bhopal, Tewari has developed a curriculum that includes design history, design culture, and design studies. Ultimately, his goal is to develop South Asia’s first postgraduate program in design history and studies. He views his role in two ways: as a design historian in South Asia exploring and constructing scholarly approaches to design history, and as a South Asian scholar in the design history community voicing the potential of decolonized approaches to the field.
Giuliana Vidarte received a BA in Latin American literature and an MA in art history from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. In 2013 she was part of a curatorial intensive course in Northern Ireland organized by Independent Curators International (New York). In 2014 she received a travel grant to participate in the annual meeting of the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CIMAM) in Qatar. Between 2015–18, she was the curator of Bufeo: Amazonía+Arte, a project for the research and dissemination of Amazonian art. Vidarte has developed exhibition projects about the relationship between visual arts and literature, the rewriting of history based on the recovery of unofficial discourses, and artistic production in the Peruvian Amazon. Currently, she is chief curator and head of exhibitions at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Lima (MAC Lima) and curatorial assistant for the Peruvian pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019.
Julia Waite is the curator of New Zealand art at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand’s largest art museum. She has worked on a number of large-scale exhibitions including the fifth Auckland triennial, If you were to live here . . . (2013) and Space to Dream: Recent Art from South America (2016). Her research interests are focused on the development of modern art in New Zealand and its connections with other peripheral modernisms. In 2015 she curated the exhibition Freedom and Structure: Cubism and New Zealand Art 1930–1960, which toured throughout New Zealand, and published an associated catalogue. She cocurated the major survey of New Zealand’s preeminent abstract painter Gordon Walters: New Vision, which opened at Auckland Art Gallery in 2018. Most recently, Waite has cocurated Louise Henderson: From Life, the first comprehensive retrospective of French-born New Zealand artist Louise Henderson. She has an MA in art history (First Class) and an MA in museum and heritage studies.
Jean-Arsène Yao received a PhD in Latin American history from the Universidad de Alcalá (Spain) in 2002. His scholarship focuses on teaching Spanish in the African Diaspora, particularly with blacks in Argentina. Currently professor of Latin America and Caribbean studies at the Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny (Côte d’Ivoire) and visiting professor at the Universidad de Alcalá and the Universidad de Granada (Spain), his teaching interests include Hispanic American culture and civilization; race, class, and ethnicity in Latin America; and Afro-Hispanic history. He has a special interest in the visual representation of people of African descent in art history and visual studies. Yao has conducted research in Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, and Uruguay. He has published widely, including five books, several book chapters, and over twenty articles in juried journals of research. Since 2016 he has been the founder-coordinator of the Group of Latin American Studies and Research (https://grelat-ufhb.org/).
Participating Alumni
Abiodun Akande is a senior lecturer at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, where he teaches painting, art education, and art history. Akande earned a BA in fine arts from the Obafemi Awolowo University and received an MA and PhD in the visual arts of Africa from the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. In 2013, he participated in the first Basel Summer School in African Studies at the University of Basel in Switzerland; he also attended a graduate symposium hosted by the School of Arts at Peking University in Beijing, China. Akande first participated in the CAA-Getty International Program in 2016 and returned the following year to participate in the 2017 CAA-Getty reunion program. His current research focuses on knowledge systems in the art and cultural practices of indigenous communities in Nigeria. A recent publication, “Ará òrun kìn-ìn kin-in: Òyó-Yòrùbá egúngún Masquerade in Communion and Maintenance of Ontological Balance,” (Genealogy, 3(1), 7, 2019) explores the Yòrùbá belief in life after death, and how the powers and spirits of the deceased are harnessed for the benefit of the living.
Pedith Chan is an assistant professor of Cultural Management in the Faculty of Arts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her PhD in Art and Archaeology from SOAS, University of London. Before joining the Chinese University of Hong Kong Chan was an assistant curator at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, and an assistant professor at the City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests focus on the production and consumption of art and cultural heritage in modern and contemporary China. Recent publications include The Making of a Modern Art World: Institutionalization and Legitimization of Guohua in Republican Shanghai (Leiden: Brill, 2017), “Representation of Chinese Civilization: Exhibiting Chinese Art in Republican China,” in The Future of Museum and Gallery Design (London: Routledge, 2018), and “In Search of the Southeast: Tourism, Nationalism, Scenic Landscape in Republican China,” (Twentieth-Century China, 2018). She is currently researching the making of scenic sites in modern China. Chan was a participant in the 2019 CAA-Getty International Program.
Iro Katsaridou has been the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Museum of Byzantine Culture in Thessaloniki, Greece since 2005. She studied art history at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the Université Paris I-Sorbonne, and also pursued museum studies at the City University of New York. Her doctoral dissertation focused on contemporary Greek photography (Aristotle University, 2010). For the past six years Katsaridou has been researching photography and art in World War I and II, during which time she has curated exhibitions on the subject and edited related catalogues. For the last four years she has been teaching as an adjunct faculty member at several Greek universities. She has co-edited two books about photography during the Nazi Occupation of Greece (1941-1944) and written articles and book chapters on photography, exhibition display policies, as well as the relationship between contemporary Greek art and politics. In 2019, she participated in the CAA-Getty International Program.
Cristian Nae is an associate professor at the George Enescu National University of Arts in Iași, Romania, where he teaches courses on contemporary art history, critical theory, visual and exhibition studies. He has benefited from scholarships and research grants from the Erste Foundation (Vienna), National Research Council, Romania (CNCS-UEFISCDI) , the CAA-Getty International Program, the Getty Foundation (Los Angeles), and New Europe College (Bucharest). His latest studies have appeared in collective volumes published by Wiley-Blackwell (2019, forthcoming) and Routledge (2018). Nae is the co-editor of Rethinking the Image of the World: Projects and Sketches. Contemporary Romanian Art 2010-2020 (Hatje Cantz, 2019, forthcoming). As a curator, he is the co-organizer of the exhibition Rethinking the Image of the World: Projects and Sketches (Musée Mill, La Louvrière, Belgium, 2019), which was part of the Europalia Arts Festival. Nae also curated Unfinished Conversations on the Weight of Absence, the exhibition marking Romania’s participation in the 58th Venice Biennale (2019). Nae participated in the first year of the CAA-Getty International Program, in 2012.
Nóra Veszprémi is a research associate for the European Research Council-funded project Continuity/Rupture: Art and Architecture in Central Europe 1918–1939 (CRAACE) at Masaryk University, Brno (Czech Republic). She is also an honorary research fellow at the University of Birmingham (UK), where she recently completed a project on museums in Austria-Hungary between 1867 and 1918. In 2014–15 she taught at the Institute of Art History at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest (Hungary), where she also received her PhD in 2013. Veszprémi specializes in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Central European art. A former curator at the Hungarian National Gallery, she is the author of a monograph on romanticism and popular taste in mid-nineteenth century Hungary (in Hungarian) and co-author (with Matthew Rampley and Markian Prokopovych) of two forthcoming volumes on museums in Austria-Hungary: An Empire on Display: The Art Galleries and Museums of Austria-Hungary (Penn State University Press, 2020); and Liberalism, Nationalism and Design Reform in the Habsburg Empire: Museums of Design, Industry and the Applied Arts (Routledge, 2020). She is currently working on a monograph about historical memory in Central Europe after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. Veszprémi was a 2015 participant in the CAA-Getty International Program.
International Review: Vibrancy In Stone: Masterpieces of the Đà Nẵng Museum of Cham Sculpture
posted by CAA — Aug 29, 2019
The following article was written in response to a call for submissions by CAA’s International Committee. It is by Swati Chembakur, an architectural historian at Jnanapravaha, a center for the arts in Mumbai, India. The author is also a 2019 alumna of the CAA-Getty International Program.
Vibrancy in Stone: Masterpieces of the Đà Nẵng Museum of Cham Sculpture, by Trần Kỳ Phương, V. Văn Thắng, and Peter D. Sharrock. Photographs by Paisarn Piemmettawat (Bangkok: River Books, 2018)
In 2018, the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) partnered with the Đà Nẵng Museum of Cham Sculpture in central Vietnam to produce a remarkable and visually striking centenary catalogue of its world-renowned collection of the sacred arts of the Cham people of Vietnam. The publication of Vibrancy in Stone: Masterpieces of the Đà Nẵng Museum of Cham Sculpture was timed to coincide with the renovation and expansion of the museum.
Beginning in the second century CE, settlements appeared along the central coast of what became Vietnam. The Chams probably migrated over the ocean from Borneo and were accomplished navigators. Their ports were the first call for any ship heading from China to India and the Arab world. Their role in the medieval maritime trade grew steadily and reached an apogee in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the great neighboring empire of Cambodia declined. The prosperity won from trade led to large scale temple construction earlier than the Cambodians.
Figure 1. Map of Cham archaeological sites in Vietnam
When tourism resumed in Vietnam after the wars of the twentieth century, the museum quickly became a prime attraction in the port city of Đà Nẵng. It is the world’s only museum devoted exclusively to the art of ancient Champa, the name given to the civilization of the Cham people. With 500 objects on display, its collection far outnumbers those in the Hanoi and Ho chi Minh City History museums, as well as the Musée Guimet in Paris.
Figure 2. Đà Nẵng Museum, Vietnam Photo: Trần Kỳ Phương
In the late nineteenth century, fifty sculptures were gathered by a French colonial administrator and amateur/enthusiastic collector, Charles Lemire, in a public garden at Tourane (Đà Nẵng), forming the embryo of the future museum collection. Some years later, French architect and archaeologist Henri Parmentier took charge of the neglected artworks and proposed a museum for their protection, which opened in 1919 (Fig. 2). He compiled the first comprehensive catalogue.
French colonial research formed the basis of Cham studies. Today a growing number of Vietnamese archaeologists and art historians are taking an active interest in this subject, expanding our understanding of the ancient art. Ethnic Cham scholars still remain few in number. Almost seventy years after Parmentier’s catalogue, a short guidebook to the museum was published about Cham history and art (Trần Kỳ Phương, 1987). It marked the first catalogue of the collection compiled by Vietnamese researchers and highlighted the link between Vietnamese and French research. After the devastating twentieth-century wars in Vietnam, some of the objects in Parmentier’s 1919 catalogue had disappeared, been damaged, or moved to other institutions. At the same time, many recently discovered artifacts have been added to the museum inventory.
Knowledge of Champa’s history, culture, and art, and an appreciation of its richness and uniqueness, has gradually progressed with the accumulation of new data and the engagement of various scholarly disciplines by both national and international scholars. Champa studies no longer appear in only French-language journals, as in the early twentieth century, but now attract a growing number of scholars from Europe, Asia, and North America, who work alongside Vietnamese experts.
Vibrancy in Stone is organized into two parts. Part I includes fourteen essays about the history and culture of Champa by Vietnamese and international scholars. Part II presents a stunningly illustrated chronology of Cham sculpture accompanied by meticulous descriptions and comments by contemporary scholars.
The introductory essay by museum director Vo Văn Thắng discusses the history of the museum, its collection, changing installations over the years, and the current renovation and expansion of the building. Subsequent essays by Kenneth Hall, John Whitmore and Đỗ Trường Giang address the importance of several Champa ports extending along the central Vietnam coast and their active role in the maritime trade network. Champa was probably never a unified state or kingdom but rather a series of loosely linked smaller polities. Its capitals were widely separated settlements on different parts of the coast, which took turns assuming hegemony over others.
Whitmore’s essay delineates fully for the first time the rise of Vijaya (in today’s Bình Đinh province) as the culture’s capital in the ninth century to its sudden demise in the fifteenth century.
Several essays address the Hindu-Buddhist religion, its rituals, archeology, and inscribed objects (by Shivani Kapoor, Ann-Valérie Schweyer, John Guy, Arlo Griffiths, Lâm Thị Mỹ Dung, and—full disclosure—myself) while others (by Trần Kỳ Phương and Parul Pandya Dhar) focus on the architecture, taking the reader through the history of Cham temples and highlighting the evolution of key construction techniques and design features that produced a series of tall, distinctive and elegant brick towers along the coastline (Fig. 3).
Figure 3. Mỹ Sơn valley temple displaying long, elegant brick sanctuaries Photo: Trần Kỳ Phương
The iconography of the beautiful and vibrant Cham sculptures erected in these towers—referenced in the catalogue title—is the subject of chapters by Thierry Zéphir, Grace Chiao-Hui Tu, and Peter D. Sharrock. Cham art has hitherto been almost exclusively studied through an Indic lens but Hui-Tu’s work brings out many new and unseen Sinitic aspects in Cham sacred art. For example, a ninth century monumental sandstone Buddha from Đồng Dương monastery is seated in the “European” position with pendant feet and palms resting on the knees (Fig. 4). While Buddhas seated with pendant legs can be found in Indian, Southeast Asian, and Chinese Buddhist art traditions, this particular hand posture is seen only in China and Đồng Dương.
Figure 4. Đồng Dương pedestal from Đồng Dương, Quảng Nam. 9th century, sandstone, 30 x 177 x 70 in. (76 x 449 x 389 cm); sandstone dais supporting the Buddha, 28 x 87 x 49 in. (70 x 222 x 124 cm). BTC 177-178 Photo: Paisarn Piemmettawat
The question of the relationship between Cham and neighboring Khmers forms the core of the paper by Peter D. Sharrock. Addressing the beautiful Khmer bronze of a naga-enthroned Buddha discovered by the French in the main Cham temple outside Vijaya, he points out that this icon was never part of Cham iconography. He then uses art historical and epigraphic evidence to untie a series of long-distorting knots in the history of the Khmer-Cham relationship.
Part II of Vibrancy in Stone focuses on masterpieces of the museum, one of which is the beautiful bronze illustrated in Figure 5, found in the Đồng Dương monastery in 1978. Earlier labelled as Tārā or Prajñāparāmita, here it has been correctly identified as the female aspect of Avalokitesvara and the main cult image of the monastery.
Figure 5. Lakṣmīndra-Avalokiteśvara, 9th century bronze found in the monastery of Đồng Dương. height 6 in. (115 cm). Attributes: lotus (right hand) and conch broken at the time of discovery. BTC 1651-BTĐN 535 Photo: Paisarn Piemmettawat
Other masterpieces include the most famous Mỹ Sơn Śivalinga pedestal (Fig. 6a-b), the only Cham sculpture that records the daily spiritual activities of ascetics performing rituals, practicing meditation, conversing, playing musical instruments, treating diseases, etc., and a widely acknowledge high relief of a Trà Kiệu dancer draped in beads (Fig. 7).
Figure 6a. Mỹ Sơn, 8th century temple pedestal displaying several daily ascetic activities, sandstone, 25 ½ x 107 x 131 in. (65 x 271 x 333 cm). BTC 6-22.4 Photo: Trần Kỳ Phương
Figure 6b. Details of the ascetic activities depicted on the Mỹ Sơn pedestal. Photo: Paisarn Piemmettawat
Figure 7. Trà Kiệu dancer/apsaras, Trà Kiệu, Quàng Nam, 11th century, sandstone, 43 x 106 in. (110 x 270 cm). BTC 118/1-22.5
Vibrancy in Stone brings together some of the most priceless and rare works of Cham art. As such, it proclaims the value and artistry of works by the Cham people whose heirs today are an ethnic minority in Vietnam. Equally important, it gathers together these beautiful and rare works of art as a resource for scholars, students, and connoisseurs alike.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by CAA — Jul 24, 2019
Want articles like these in your inbox? Sign up: collegeart.org/newsletter
A worker near an open part of Notre Dame’s roof. Some sections of the cathedral have since been exposed to rainfall and high temperatures that France has experienced. Photo: Patrick Zachmann—Magnum Photos for TIME
An Exclusive Look inside the Recovery Efforts to Save Notre Dame
Three months after the blaze, the cathedral’s chief architect Philippe Villeneuve leads us through the damage. (TIME)
It’s Not Just Sarah Milov. Female Academics Aren’t Credited in Media ‘All the Time.’
Original ideas from an academic, both journalists and academics agree, should have a name attached. (The Lily)
Colleges Fear Losing International Students over Visa Delays
Dozens of institutions have urged the government to expedite the approval process.(Education Dive)
I’m Emptying My Bank Account to Go to Columbia
“My hope has never been this fat, this wild. But my anxiety has never been this intense. I try to breathe. I smile when it gets unbearable.” (The Atlantic)
Ahdaf Soueif on Resigning from the British Museum’s Board of Trustees
“Will the museum use [their collection] to influence the future of the planet and its peoples? Or will it continue to project the power of colonial gain and corporate indemnity?” (LRB)
International Review: Opening of the Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, United Arab Emirates by Sabrina DeTurk
posted by CAA — Mar 21, 2019
The following article was written in response to a call for submissions by CAA’s International Committee. It is by Sabrina DeTurk, associate professor, College of Arts and Creative Enterprises, Zayed University, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Fig. 1: Exterior of Jameel Arts Center, Jaddaf Waterfront, Dubai, UAE. Photo by Sabrina DeTurk.
In November 2018, Dubai witnessed the opening of the Jameel Arts Centre, the city’s first non-commercial contemporary arts space (Fig. 1). Located on the banks of the Dubai Creek, in the still-developing area of the Jaddaf Waterfront, the center is a project of the Saudi-based organization Art Jameel, a foundation focused on arts and culture programming that is sponsored by the Jameel family. The Jameel Arts Centre will be programmed as a kunsthalle, featuring temporary exhibitions showcasing works drawn from the Jameel collection as well as commissioned works by contemporary artists and those on loan from other institutions. Community events and educational outreach are also key elements of the center’s programming initiatives and the 107,640 square-foot space includes facilities such as an open-access library of over 3,000 volumes as well as coworking areas. There will also be a sculpture park as well as an outdoor arena for performing arts or film screenings.
The Jameel Arts Centre’s inaugural exhibitions included a series of artist’s rooms featuring the work of women artists from the Middle East whose work has garnered critical acclaim though not always international visibility. Maha Al Malluh (Saudi Arabia), Mounira Al Solh (Lebanon), Lala Rukh (Pakistan), and Chiharu Shiota (Japan) showed work that reflected on the personal, communal, and political, sometimes all in one piece.
In Maha Al Malluh’s sculpture, Food for Thought, dozens of well-used cooking pots of all sizes are affixed to two walls of the gallery with their undersides facing the viewer. The burns, scrapes and dents on these surfaces become both a pattern and a portrait, suggesting the many meals, large and small, cooked and served in these vessels. The pots invoke both an individual and collective activity of dining. One senses that these pots have traveled far to reach their current destination, perhaps reflecting the experience of refugees who have fled from so many troubled parts of the region, often with few possessions other than simple cooking utensils and basic clothing.
Lala Rukh’s minimalist and meditative prints and video speak to the personal experience of her mother’s death as well as the changing political landscape of Southeast Asia in the 1990s. However, the darkness of the room in which the works are displayed made it all but impossible to read the contextualizing and interpretive materials that are necessary to understand the meaning of Rukh’s subtle forms.
Fig. 2: Installation view of Chiharu Shiota, Departure (2018). Photo by Sabrina DeTurk.
The inclusion of a sculptural installation by Chiharu Shiota, featuring an Arabian dhow (sailing vessel) sourced from a local boatyard, struck an odd note among the rooms (Fig. 2). While Shiota’s sculpture, which featured her signature webs of red yarn, was visually compelling, there was little sense, beyond the inclusion of the local boat, of its contribution to the larger dialogues encouraged by the exhibitions. In an image-obsessed city such as Dubai, one can’t help but wonder if this installation served more as an Instagrammable photo opportunity than as a work of serious contemporary art.
The inaugural group exhibition at Jameel Arts Centre, Crude, was curated by Murtaza Vali and featured the work of eighteen artists and artist collectives. In the show’s catalogue, Antonia Carver, the Director of Art Jameel, described the exhibition as “presenting an innovative material reading of a substance so crucial in shaping local and regional histories and cultures.” The included works run the gamut from archival photographs to video to sculptural installations to found objects and reflect a diversity of artistic approaches to the cultural, political, and economic significance of oil in the region throughout the last six decades.
Fig. 3: Houshang Pezeshknia, Portrait d’homme (1949). Photo by Sabrina DeTurk.
The earliest works in the show, documentary photographs by the Iraqi, Latif Al Ani, and paintings by the Iranian, Houshang Pezeshknia (Portrait d’homme, 1949, Fig. 3), highlight the role that the discovery of oil played in shaping the modern culture and identity of both countries. Al Ani’s photographs focus on the material benefits of the oil industry, featuring images of new, modernist housing developments and smiling children showing the bottles of milk now provided as part of the government school lunch program. Pezeshknia’s paintings are more introspective; their rough brushstrokes emphasize the harsh features of those who work on the pipelines and the scars left on the Iranian landscape by the new technologies of oil extraction.
Several artists in the exhibition drew on found images and archival film footage for their works. These include Raja’a Khalid, whose Desert Golf series (2014) uses vintage print media from American publications such as Life magazine to document the seemingly inexorable, if equally inexplicable, compulsion that expatriate oil executives had for finding ways to play golf in the hostile desert landscape. In several of these images, bewildered local residents look on, setting up an us/them dichotomy and pervasive sense of cultural difference that still marks expatriate and local relations in the Gulf region.
Fig. 4: Installation view of Crude exhibition. Monira Al Qadiri, Flower Drill (2016) is on the wall. Photo by Sabrina DeTurk.
Sculptural installations featured prominently in the exhibition. For example, Monira Al Qadiri’s Flower Drill (2016, Fig. 4), displayed high on the wall in one of the galleries, features fiberglass forms based on the design of drill heads and coated in two-toned automotive paint, connecting the work to both the initial and final stages of oil production and consumption. Alessandro Balteo-Yazbek’s Last Oil Barrel is a tiny wooden sculpture of a barrel, whose price is linked to oil futures and whose value will be determined only at some unspecified date in the future when a sale is fixed, reflecting the connections between the commodity value of both art and oil. The artist identifies the date of the work as “postponed,” indicating that it remains in some way incomplete until that time.
Although Crude was an intellectually rigorous and aesthetically compelling first exhibition from the Jameel Arts Centre, it remains to be seen whether there will be a sufficient audience for this type of show in Dubai over the long term. While the center’s opening weekend saw packed galleries, a weekday in January found the author almost alone in the spaces. The question of representation and inclusion of Emirati artists will undoubtedly also be raised at some point in the center’s development.
Fig. 5: Installation view of Crude exhibition. Hassan Sharif, Slippers and Wire (2009) is in the foreground. Photo by Sabrina DeTurk
A sculpture by the pioneering Emirati conceptualist artist Hassan Sharif (Fig. 5) was included in Crude and works by Emirati sculptors Shaikha Al-Mazrou and Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim were shown in the lobby and outside garden respectively. However, this is but a small sample of the variety of contemporary art being produced in the United Arab Emirates and local artists may, understandably, begin to call for greater visibility in this high-profile contemporary arts space. The Jaddaf Waterfront remains under construction and as yet there is not a sustained community to support the idea of the Jameel Arts Centre thriving as a local creative hub. That said, the potential for growth and development is there and the openness with which the center is positioning itself is welcome in a city where the arts scene can often feel closed and difficult to penetrate. Jameel Arts Centre is a welcome addition to the creative landscape of Dubai and will hopefully continue to develop as a space for contemporary expression.
Affiliated Society News for February 2019
posted by CAA — Feb 05, 2019
Affiliated Society News shares the new and exciting things CAA’s affiliated organizations are working on including activities, awards, publications, conferences, and exhibitions.
We’re seeking new organizations to join CAA’s Affiliated Societies. Click here to learn more.
New Media Caucus
Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus
Recent Publication Vol 15 No 1 (2019): Autonomous Art Systems
https://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/issue/view/7
For this issue, guest editors Nick Bontrager and Adam Fung invited submissions about the use of “Autonomous Art Systems.” Submissions included work on tethered and untethered systems of making, autonomous vehicles, and related programming in creative fields of study. Relevant subjects included: artworks that address concepts of drones or surveillance as subject or form; the influence of emerging technologies on studio art practices; or critical/historical analysis of the entanglement of art and technology.
NMC Events at CAA, 2019
2/13/19, 10:30 PM-12:00 PM, New York Hilton Midtown, Rendezvous Trianon, NMC Panel: Reframing Innovation: Art, the Maker Movement and Critique, chairs: Victoria Bradbury Suzy O’Hara
2/13/19, 12:30 PM-1:30 PM, New York Hilton Midtown – 2nd Floor – Sutton North, NMC Business Meeting: open to members and non-members alike.
2/13/19, 2:00 PM-3:30 PM, Media Lounge, Data Détournement, organized by Derek Curry (Northeastern University) and Jennifer Gradecki (Northeastern University).
2/14/19, 2:00 PM-3:30 PM, Media Lounge, Digital Art and Activism, organized by Morehshin Allahyari and Angela Washko (Assistant Professor of Art, Carnegie Mellon University)
2/14/19, 8:00 PM-9:30 PM, Hunter College MFA Building, 205 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10013, NMC Member Showcase, hosted by Christina Freeman, Department of Art & Art History, Hunter College of the City University of New York
2/15/19, 2:00 PM-3:30 PM, Media Lounge, Good Artists Torrent, Great Artists Fork, organized by Nick Bontrager (Texas Christian University) and Taylor Hokanson (Columbia College Chicago)
For more information on the above, and information on additional panels involving NMC members, consult the following list: http://www.newmediacaucus.org/caa-2019-in-nyc/
Border Control
The New Media Caucus proudly announces the 2019 Symposium and Exhibition, Border Control, at the University of Michigan, Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design and the Stamps Gallery.
SYMPOSIUM + EXHIBITION
SUBMISSIONS ACCEPTED THROUGH FEB. 28, 2019
Hosted by the University of Michigan, Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design and the Stamps Gallery. Ann Arbor, MI
EXHIBITION DATES: SYMPOSIUM DATES:
9/20/19 – 11/10/19 9/19/19 – 9/22/19
GUEST CURATOR:
Allison Collins, Media Arts Curator, Western Front
Borders and boundaries, both tangible and ephemeral, are closely tied to the ways in which humanity has made sense of the world and of our historical place in it. Yet historically, borders have figured as sources of tension and contestation as much as legibility and certainty. In our current moment, the promise of reassurance offered by borders and boundaries is being radically undermined and challenged by processes such as climate change, rapid techno-scientific development, and the unraveling of traditional hierarchies and stereotypes, as well as of accepted notions of demographic, political and economic boundaries.
How do you navigate borders in your own practice or research?
The New Media Caucus seeks to bring together artists and scholars who critically engage the topic of borders and boundaries through their practice and research.
http://bordercontrol.newmediacaucus.org
International Sculpture Center
Sculpture has launched a newly redesigned magazine with our Jan/Feb 2019 issue! Subscribe to Sculpture and follow us for more updates.
Red Grooms & Seward Johnson will be awarded with the 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award on April 18, 2018 at a Gala in NYC.
The Call For Panels is now open for the 29th International Sculpture Conference – the deadline to apply is March 14.
The ISC invites you to nominate up to 3 talented sculpture students for the Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture! Head to our link now and join as an ISC University level member to get started
Students who are interested should talk to their professors about getting involved. To find out more about the program please visit the website http://www.sculpture.org/StudentAwards/2019 or email studentawards@sculpture.org
FATE
FATE (Foundations in Art: Theory and Education) News: http://www.foundations-art.org/
Join us during CAA 2019 for FATE’s Affiliate session, “Get Up, Stand Up: Contingent Faculty and the Future of Higher Education in the Visual Arts,” Friday, Feb 15, 2019, from 6 – 7:30pm in the Bryant Suite at the New York Hilton Midtown. Chaired by Naomi J. Falk and Richard Moninski, with panelists Christopher Williams, Mark Stemwedel, and Laura Rodman Huaracha. Increasingly, tenure-track positions disappear, contingent faculty numbers swell, and those who are left standing teach more classes. Is this sustainable and how do we support each other? https://caa.confex.com/caa/2019/meetingapp.cgi/Session/2304
Register for FATE’s 17th Biennial Conference, “Foundations in Flux,” will be hosted by Columbus College of Art & Design in Columbus, Ohio on April 4th-6th, 2019. Registration includes Breakfast & Lunch for each day of the conference. https://www.foundations-art.org/conference
Foundations in Flux will host various workshops led by FATE members during the conference on Friday April 5th. Workshop sessions have limited numbers of seats & participants must register in advance, there are NO ADDITIONAL FEES to participate in these workshops. All workshops will be held on the campus of CCAD. All seats are on a first-come basis and some workshops will require materials to be supplied by the attendee. Please read all workshop details below before making your selection(s). For more info and to register: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdKwlrpTANzrgZICqL0LzyvG8Qwc3x_yw4ABLo2z7zu3dvDUw/viewform
Positive Space is FATE’s bi-monthly podcast providing opportunities for those passionate about art foundations to discuss and promote excellence in the development and teaching of college level foundations in art & design studio and history classes. To check out the latest episode, featuring FATE President, Valerie Hanks, discussing her recent workshop about discomfort and empathy in the classroom, visit: https://www.foundations-art.org/positive-space
If you have podcast ideas, contact us! Positive Space has a phone number: 904-990-FATE. Give us a call & record a message today!
American Institute for Conservation
Please join us at the 2019 AIC Annual Meeting being held at the Mohegan Sun, located in Uncasville, CT, May 13-17. With over 1,400 attendees, the AIC Annual Meeting is the largest international conservation and collection care conference held in North America. Visit our Annual Meeting webpages to see the online schedule and learn about the nearly 200 talks and events. Some highlights of the 2019 meeting include a new Opening General Session featuring TED-style talks, hundreds of specialty talks, and engaging lunch programing.
The Mohegan Sun, centrally located in New England, offers a 4-star quality hotel experience at a low nightly rate of $139 for AIC Annual Meeting attendees. We also have a block of student rooms starting at $98 per night. Getting to the Mohegan Sun is easy. Those located between Washington DC and Boston can drive or take Amtrak. AIC is also running direct buses from New York City and Boston. For more information on our host hotel, view the accommodations pages.
The proximity to major East coast cites allows AIC to offer workshop and tours all over New England during our pre-session, May 13-14. Visit the online schedule to view our pre-session offerings.
We welcome you to register now for the 2019 AIC Annual Meeting!
Visual Resources Association (VRA)
Tools and Trends in Visual Resources
The Visual Resources Association is using a scheduled business meeting at the annual College Art Association conference to share information about some of the tools that curators are using to enhance and manage digital image collections and discuss new trends in the field of visual resources and art librarianship.
Three speakers will be presenting their work in these areas:
Cataloging at Artstor: A New Look at Tried and True (and some AI) Strategies
Lisa Gavell, Senior Manager of Image Content at Artstor
Maximizing Metadata: VRA Embedded Metadata Tools
Marcia Focht, Curator of Visual Resources at Binghamton University
Images as Research Data
Jasmine Burns, Visual Resources Metadata Librarian at Cornell University and Chair of the Upstate New York Chapter of VRA.
Please join us for provocative presentations with time for questions and discussion on Friday, February 15th, 2019, in the Morgan Suite at the New York Hilton Midtown, from 12:30 to 1:30 pm.
This event is free and open to the public, so you do not need to be a CAA member or to register for the conference to attend this business meeting. If you wish to attend regular sessions, the book and trade fair, or other CAA conference activities, you must register. Advance registration for the full conference ends on Jan 30th, 2019 (only 3 days left), but single timeslot and day passes may be purchased onsite (not available in advance).
For questions, please contact:
Maureen Burns, IMAGinED Consulting & VRA CAA Affiliate Representative
moaburns@gmail.com or 310-489-3792
SECAC
The Call for Papers for SECAC 2019 in Chattanooga is open at https://secac.secure-platform.com/a/solicitations/home/5.
SECAC 2018: 74th ANNUAL CONFERENCE
In October, SECAC met for the 74th time in Birmingham, Alabama, hosted by the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Over 120 sessions were held, and 561 members representing 284 institutions attended. In its eighth year, participation in the SECAC mentoring program remained high with 40 members meeting as mentors and mentees.
Highlights of the conference included the SECAC 2018 Annual Juried Exhibition at UAB’s Abroms-Engel Institute for Visual Arts and a keynote address at the Birmingham Museum of Andrew Freear of the Rural Studio.
At the annual business meeting SECAC President Sandra Reed of Marshall University introduced new members of the Board of Directors: Alabama, Wendy DesChene, Auburn University; Florida, Jeff Schwartz, Ringling College of Art and Design; Kentucky, Eileen Yanoviak, Carnegie Center for Art and History; Louisiana, Jill Chancey, Nicholls State Univeristy (continuing); North Carolina, Kathryn Shields, Guilford College; and At Large #3 Claire Kovacs, Augustana College.
SECAC 2019 will be hosted by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, October 16-19. Calls for presentations, juried exhibition entries, and award applications will be published on the SECAC submissions site at https://secac.secure-platform.com/a in early 2018.
AWARDS PRESENTED AT SECAC 2018
The SECAC Artist’s Fellowship, a $5,000 prize, was awarded to photographer Karen Graffeo, Professor of Art at the University of Montevallo, author and photojournalist Julio Larramendi, photographer and editor at Ediciones Polymita in Cuba, photographer Sonja Rieger, Professor of Photography at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Alabama-based photographer and filmmaker Carolyn Sherer. Their proposed exhibition, My Other Body: Trans-Culture, Transgender Cuba/Alabama, will be on view at SECAC 2019 in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Andrew Wasserman, Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, won the 2018 Levin Award for his project Bang! We’re All Dead! The Places of Nuclear Fear in 1980s America.
The 2018 SECAC Award for Excellence in Teaching was presented to Wendy DesChene, Professor of Art at Auburn University.
The 2018 SECAC Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication was awarded to Olga U. Herrera, Director of the Washington Office of the Inter-University Program for Latino Research (IUPLR) headquartered at the University of Houston, for American Interventions and Modern Art in South America, University Press of Florida, 2017.
The 2018 SECAC Award for Outstanding Exhibition and Catalog of Historical Materials was presented to Keri Watson for In the Eyes of the Hungry: Florida’s Changing Landscape, exhibited at the UCF Art Gallery and the Terrence Gallery at the Orlando City Hall in 2017.
The 2018 SECAC Award for Outstanding Exhibition and Catalog of Contemporary Materials was given to Vesna Pavlović, Associate Professor of Art at Vanderbilt University, for the exhibition Vesna Pavlović’s Lost Art and its catalog edited by Pavlović and Morna O’Neill.
Thirty-four graduate students received Gulnar Bosch Travel Awards: Virginia Badgett, University of California, Santa Barbara; Gráinne Coughlan, Dublin Institute of Technology; Stephanie Crawford, Rutgers University; Erin Davenport, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Julia Detchon, University of Texas; Parissa Farmoudehyamcheh, Georgia Southern University; Dilmar Mauricio Gamero Santos, Tyler School of Art, Temple University; Elyse D. Gerstenecker, University of Virginia; Caroline Gillaspie, The Graduate Center, CUNY; Amy Catherine Hulshoff, University of New Mexico; Manami Ishimura, Texas A&M Corpus Christi; Ally Johnson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Tacie Jones, Virginia Tech University; Holly Kelly, University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Sharon Khalifa-Gueta, Ben Gurion University of the Negev; Patricia Lagarde, Tulane University; Mia Laufer, Washington University in St. Louis; Kimiko Matsumura, Rutgers University; Mary Mazurek, IDSVA ; Reed O’Mara, Case Western Reserve University; Ellie Perendy, Baruch College; Kathleen Pierce, Rutgers University; Catherine Popovici, The University of Texas at Austin; Ali Printz, Tyler School of Art, Temple University; Lily F. Scott, Temple University; Roberta Serra, Université Paul Valéry; Lauren Elizabeth Shea, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Jeff Siemers, IDSVA; Lauryn Smith, Case Western Reserve University; Tracy Spencer Stonestreet, Virginia Commonwealth University; Sarah Tietje-Mietz, Syracuse University; Vanessa S. Troiano, The Graduate Center, CUNY; Angela Whitlock, IDSVA; and Hayley Woodward, Tulane University.
Juror Peter Baldaia, Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Huntsville Museum of Art, selected Over There To Here (Gatlinburg), 2018, by Stacy Isenberger, University of Idaho, as Best in Show at the SECAC 2018 Annual Juried Exhibition. He also recognized five participants with Juror Awards: Joshua Brinlee, University of Mississippi, for Self-Portrait as Provider, 2017; Lily Kuonen, Jacksonville University, for Hewn, 2017;
Jessica Mongeon, Arkansas Tech University, for Drunken Trees: Permafrost Melts, Leaving Uneven Ground, 2017; Duane Paxson, Independent Artist, for Denying Dendera, 2018; and John Douglas Powers, University of Tennessee–Knoxville, for Terra Nuova, 2017.
EAHN
The EAHN wishes to draw attention to the three calls for proposals described below, all organized by EAHN’s Urban Representations Work Group, for the conference “The Global City: Urban Condition as a Pervasive Phenomenon” organized by the A.I.S.U. (Associazione Italiana di Storia Urbana) in Bologna, 11-14 September 2019.
The deadline for submitting abstracts has been extended to February 10th.
Abstracts indicating name, affiliation, email address, brief cv, and a description of the proposed topic of no more than 2000 characters should be sent both to the chairs of the session and to the conference organizers (congresso@storiaurbana.org) using the form found on the conference website http://www.storiaurbana.org/index.php/en/component/content/article/9-congressi/1131-bologna-2019-call-for-paper-uk
Session 3-5 “The Photo-book and the City”
The term ‘photo-book’ was coined in the 1920s by László Moholy-Nagy and went on to define a popular genre within 20th-century visual culture. While this genre emerged within the ‘New Vision’ of the inter-war period, it has a broader history that goes beyond the modernist avant-gardes. What role did this unique form of publication play within the history of urban representation? The aim of the session is to focus on the photo-book as an instrument for reading, analysing, and interpreting cities through a curated sequence of images. There is a long cultural and artistic history of these illustrated books, spanning from the late-19th to the early-21st century, which calls for comparative investigation. A tentative list should include celebrated examples, ranging from Alvin Langdon Coburn’s works inspired by Japanese view-making cultures (London 1909; Edinburgh 1909; New York 1910) to seminal books by Brassaï (Paris de nuit 1932), Berenice Abbott (Changing New York 1939), Horacio Coppola (Buenos Aires 1936) and William Klein (New York 1956; Rome 1959), but we are equally interested in less-known publications. Attention will also be given to by the work of photographers trained as architects who used the camera to capture specific qualities of urban space, such as Norman Carver (Italian Hilltowns 1979) and Gabriele Basilico, whose observations of cities around the world (Milan; Beirut; Berlin; Moscow; Istanbul) were the subject of carefully curated volumes. There is a history here that awaits to be written; one that is made all the more significant by the recent use of photo-books to preserve the narrative of urban campaigns stretching over decades (e.g., works by Martin Parr and Garry Badger published by Phaidon). Gradually, as with other photographic trends, this type of representation has been taken up by contemporary artists, historians, architects and urban designers for a variety of urban explorations. We encourage participants to propose case-studies as well as reflective papers focusing on photo-books across the history of photography – from its origins to the latest digital developments. Contributions that address the role of various figures involved in the production, circulation, and reception of these publications (e.g., photographers; editors; publishers; etc) are also welcome.
Chairs: Davide Deriu d.deriu@westminster.ac.uk; Angelo Maggi amaggi@iuav.it
Session 6-4 “Reading the City’s Histories Through Visual Documents”
Every city contains multitudes, presenting a collective artifact made up of innumerable places and lived narratives. Most present-day cities also overlay multitudes, covering or transforming earlier iterations of themselves. Our knowledge of those older layers, of urban landscapes since recast, quickly surrenders to the mortality of personal memory. We then come to depend heavily on the persistence of physical artifacts that capture fragments of the past city, whether through survivals and traces in the present-day built landscape or through records — textual, visual, and sometimes even three dimensional — of those largely supplanted deeper layers of the urban palimpsest.
But the city is a big and complicated artifact, and every such representation must be a purposeful distillation, begging questions of the part and the whole, and of choice. Each favors some kinds of information over others, and all demand a considered examination of the lens adopted by their creators, retrospectively framing the visual document in the context of agency, motives, models, and expected function. At the same time, even as we are conscious of such filtering frames, we want to ask what they tell us about their subject, as they offer posterity some of our best evidence of these places in time. They allow us to better see and read the built landscapes they portray as patterns of forms, as socio-economic artifacts, as settings of living and working and gathering, of entrepreneurial ambitions and communal organization, across the globe and through history.
For this session, we especially invite contributions that look to and interrogate visual documents that capture lost aspects of the city of both distant and recent history at a range of scales — from detailed surveys of common building forms to purposefully selected sets of views, from closely transcribed plans and streetscapes of whole blocks and neighborhoods to maps of larger spatial networks and depictions of a city as a whole — that offer us insights on both that city and our own vantage point, in terms of our intentions and responses, in our looking at and to it.
Contact person: Anat Falbel anatfalbel@uol.com.br
Chairs: The EAHN Interest Group “Urban Representations” (organized by group members Jeffrey Cohen, Anat Falbel, Min Kyung Lee, Nancy Stieber)
Session 6-6 “Stories We Tell: Narratives of Urban Space”
Architectural sites as tourist attractions challenge the histories and memories of the urban collective. The city beckons the potential visitor (both tourist and local alike) through the aestheticization and cultural branding that serve, particularly through pervasive mediatizations, to narrativize urban space that may be in contrast to, or stacked amongst, stories of place. This session will engage an assortment of pressing questions about the relationship of architecture to tourism and memory specifically to position concepts of demolition, preservation, heritagization and new construction within urban (geopolitically-shaped) sites, for no site is detached from place; no touristic visit can effectively be accomplished without considering — in some measure — the story of a place and the memories it holds for all those who dwell or pass through it. No guidebook is disentangled from interpretive memories and stories that contribute to how tourists come to learn about a site. Questions such as whose memories become the stories of a tourist’s encounter with a place, or how do we consider the terms heritage or heritagization within the context of placemaking and memory stories, will be discussed. Finally, what constitutes the memory or (competing) memories of a place in order for it to be preserved (and subsequently branded for a tourist economy)?
Chair: Shelley Hornstein shelleyh@yorku.ca
ATSAH
NEWS FROM ASSOCIATION FOR TEXTUAL SCHOLARSHIP IN ART HISTORY
AWARDS for Students and Scholars
In commemoration of our 30th anniversary, ATSAH plans to offer two awards: one prize for the best article by an emerging scholar (no higher than Associate level). The topic may range from classical to Pre-Raphaelite art, reflecting the aims of ATSAH. The second is a small travel grant for junior scholar presenting a paper an ATSAH session.
The board of ATSAH selects these awards.
For further data, contact:
Liana Cheney, PhD, President of ATSAH
Liana_Cheney@uml.edu
ATSAH Session at CAA 2019
Member’s publications
Special Edition in Iconocrazia Vol 13 – 2018
Art, Astronomy, Politics, and Religion
Liana De Girolami Cheney
Giorgio Vasari’s Moral Virtues in the Oratory of the Compagnia del Gesù at Cortona: Physical and Metaphysical Power
Andrzej Piotrowski
Politics, Architecture, and the Historiography of Denial in Poland
Brian D. Steele
Force Constrained: Hercules in Sixteenth-Century Venice
Charles Burroughs
The Graces and Political Order in the Renaissance Imaginary
Damiano Acciarino
Iconologia del Fato nel Rinascimento
Giangiacomo Gandolfi
Cosimo de’ Medici, Paolo Toscanelli e il Cielo dei Magi: una nuova ipotesi per gli Emisferi Celesti Fiorentini
Jennifer Bates Ehlert
Questioning the Oracle: Jacek Malczewski’s Pythia series and World War One
Lynette M.F. Bosch
Interpreting and Dating Michelangelo’s Crucified Christ for Vittoria Colonna: Fra Ambrogio Catarino Politi And St. Paul
Sarah J. Lippert
Egypt and Napoléon Displaced
Cassandra Sciortino
Armand Point’s St.Cecilia & the Painters of the Soul: Bridging Art & Life in Fin de Siècle France
Liana De Girolami Cheney
Edward Burne-Jones’s The Mirror of Venus: Physical and Intangible Female Beauty in Journal of Literature and Art Studies 9, no. 1 (January 2019):1-28.
International Association for Word and Image Studies (IAWIS)
New Publications
A selection of articles from the IAWIS Dundee conference (2014) has now been published in book form. The volume is entitled:
Art and Science in Word and Image: Exploration and Discovery, Brill/Rodopi (Word and Image Interactions, volume 9), edited by Keith Williams, Sophie Aymes, Jan Baetens and Chris Murray
It is available at https://brill.com/view/title/36202
- “Photographie et théâtre”, Revue internationale de photolittérature, ed. Marianne Drugeon, Christine Kiehl, Jean-Pierre Montier et Laurence Petit, n° 2, 2018. https://www.fabula.org/actualites/revue-internationale-de-photolitterature_88524.php
- Converging Lines: Needlework in English Literature and Visual Arts edited by Rachel Dickinson & Laurence Roussillon-Constanty, Revue E-Rea, n° 16.1/2018: https://journals.openedition.org/erea/6451
- Next IAWIS Triennial Conference
CALL FOR SESSIONS Water and Sea in Word and Image, University of Luxembourg, July 5th – 10th, 2020
In an era in which water scarcity is threatening us all and the mainland is affected even in the depths of its epicenter by what is happening on its shores, it seems of great importance to propose a subject both acutely topical and strongly tied to the collective imagination. In Alessandro Baricco’s novel Ocean sea (1993), the fictional character Plasson paints the sea with seawater. This emblematic scene sums up our topic to some extent: water is difficult to grasp and yet concerns us more and more. Shapeless, still waiting to be defined, it even resists any effort of conceptualization. Putting water and the sea into words and into images is not obvious, represents a real discursive and plastic challenge and is therefore particularly likely to call into question the relationship between text and image. Due to its rhythm “without measure” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980), water as an element transcends Lessing’s dichotomy between arts of time and arts of space (see Louvel, 2002). The water’s unspeakable nature does not coincide with its invisible essence. Yet, literary and plastic narratives constitute an actual semiosphere with, at its borders, an area where the semiotic links are violated (Lotman, 1966), the realm of the unstable, the arbitrary, the unaccountable.
Located at the heart of the European continent – however tightly interconnected with its periphery –, cradle of the siren Melusine, territory boasting its natural springs and its balneology, Luxembourg seems to be the appropriate place to host a world congress on this subject.
Abstracts for sessions should be a maximum of 300 words.
N.B.: All conference participants must be members of IAWIS/AIERTI (http://iawis.org/) and in order with their membership fee before the conference.
The deadline for SESSION PROPOSALS is February 28th, 2019. Submissions are to be dropped on our website: https://waterandsea2020.uni.lu
The selection committee will contact you before March 30th, 2019 about the outcome of your application.
POTENTIAL CONFERENCE SESSION THEMES
N.B.: The sessions consist of one or maximum two panels of 1h30 each (three papers). The panels will offer a tribune to experienced researchers in Word and Image Studies and/or young scholars (doctoral students/postdocs) whose proposals the chairs of the elected sessions will gather and select. The word and image interaction should be formulated in the title of the session. Please indicate if your session fits with one or several of the potential themes listed below (e.g.: 1, 7, 12).
- Water, a natural element (its virtues and dangers) and an esthetic challenge
- Water as energy in science and arts
- The biblical or mythical imaginary of water and sea
- Aquatic and maritime myths, rites and marine, fluvial or lacustrine folklore
- Melusine, nymphs, naiads and other sirens
- The seaside or still water in painting and literature
- Balneology, its history and actuality
- Harbours in texts and images
- Insular or peninsular cultures
- Touristic promotion of natural heritage (seaside, lakes, rivers)
- Aqueducts, thermal baths and dams in the Greater Region
- The Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean (shores, fauna, cultural and market routes, migration)
- Graphic novel, comics or cartoons on sea, water or migration
- Water and sea in film, video or in digital artefacts
- The future of water in arts and media
- Water scarcity, drought and sustainable issues in word and image
- The sea as epistemological metaphor (shipwreck, raft, wave, hurricane, liquidity, archipelago, foam)
- Scientific or imaginary cartography
- Other related topics
AHNCA
The Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) is pleased to announce that the Sixteenth Annual Graduate Student Symposium in the History of Nineteenth-Century Art, co-sponsored by AHNCA and the Dahesh Museum of Art, will be held on Sunday, March 24, 2019 (10:00 am – 5:00 pm), at the Dahesh Museum of Art, 145 Sixth Ave., New York, NY. The Mervat Zahid Cultural Foundation has generously provided the Dahesh Museum of Art Prize of $1,000 for the best paper. Information about the speakers and brief abstracts of their papers will be available online at http://ahnca.org/index.php/symposia after February 6, 2019.
Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art and Architecture (HGSCEA)
The Board recently awarded travel stipends to two members of HGSCEA, Sara Blaylock and Lauren Hanson, to help defray the costs of their participation in CAA’s annual conference. The Board also juried this year’s HGSCEA Emerging Scholars Prize competition, the winner of which will be announced at the reception and dinner in New York. As always, the dinner, which will take place on Thursday, February 14, from 7 to 9 p.m., is free to current members. For further information, contact a member of the Board.
HGSCEA’s sponsored session at the annual CAA conference, “Women Artists in Germany, Scandinavia, and Central Europe, 1880-1960,” is being chaired by Kerry Greaves on Saturday, February 16, from 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.. Emil Leth Meilvang, Nora Butkovich, Lauren Hanson, and Lynette Roth will read papers on Rita Kernn-Larsen, women in the Young Yiddish Group, Mary Bauermeister, and Anneliese Hager. For more information, go to the HGSCEA website (http://hgscea.org/ ) and the conference website (https://caa.confex.com/caa/2019/meetingapp.cgi/Session/1607)
The annual business meeting is scheduled for Friday, February 15. It will take place in the Harlem Room on the 4th Floor of the New York Hilton Midtown from 12:30-1:30 p.m. Members are welcome to attend.
The Midwest Art History Society
The Midwest Art History Society (MAHS) would like to call your attention to its recent e-publication Monumental Troubles: Rethinking What Monuments Mean Today, searchable by its title in WorldCat. The publication records selected papers presented at the 2018 MAHS Annual Conference held in Indianapolis. The essays in this e-volume contribute to contemporary conversations about public monuments, broadly defined as commemorative objects, images, and spaces, and the responses to them, including the calls to remove, relocate, or destroy them. Contributors consider these “monumental troubles” from multiple historical, geographic and theoretical perspectives, suggesting a generative rethinking about why they were made and how their meaning changed over time.” The original conference sessions were organized by Erika Doss, University of Notre Dame and the publication effort was guided to its successful conclusion by Cheryl Snay of the Snite Museum of Art.
And please consider attending the 2019 MAHS Annual Conference to be held in Cincinnati, March 21-23. The Cincinnati Art Museum & the Taft Museum of Art are conference hosts, keynote speaker is Hollis Clayson. Conference registration includes special tours, receptions, and more. Reduced fees for early registration end on March 1. Book a room in the Hilton Netherland Plaza at a discounted rate before Feb 27. Click the link below to register online & book a room. https://www.mahsonline.org/conference/register
HNA
What: CAA session: The Female Impact: Women and the Art Market in the Early Modern Era
When: Thursday, February 14, 2019, 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Where: New York Hilton Midtown – 2nd Floor – Morgan Suite
CHAIRS: Judith Noorman and Frans Grijzenhout
What: HNA Reception
When: Friday, February 15, 2019, 5:30-7 pm
Where: Syracuse University Lubin House, 11 East 61st Street, New York, NY
Please RSVP to Amy Golahny, Golahny@Lycoming.edu
EPCAF
The European Postwar and Contemporary Art Forum has changed its governance structure and will now be headed by a team of co-chairs. Lily Woodruff has transitioned from her previous role as president, and is now joined by Raffaele Bedarida. Raffaele is an art historian and curator specializing in twentieth-century Italian art and politics. In particular, his research has focused on cultural diplomacy, migration, and cultural exchange between Italy and the United States. He is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Cooper Union, New York. Bedarida is the author of two monographs in Italian, Bepi Romagnoni: Il Nuovo Racconto (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2005) and Corrado Cagli: La pittura, l’esilio, L’America (Rome: Donzelli, 2018; English edition upcoming), and numerous articles for academic journals (International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, Oxford Art Journal, Tate Modern’s In Focus) and exhibition catalogues (MART, Rovereto; CIMA, New York; Fundacion Juan March, Madrid; Frederick Kiesler Foundation, Vienna). He holds a PhD from the Art History Department of the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as MA and BA degrees in Art History from the Università degli Studi di Siena, Italy. Bedarida is currently working on the manuscript for his book: ‘Like a Giant Screen:’ The Promotion of Contemporary Italian Art in the United States, 1935–1969.
Public Art Dialogue (PAD)
Public Art Dialogue (PAD) will present its 2019 PAD Award for achievement in the field of public art to art collective fierce pussy during next week’s conference. Please see the announcement here: https://publicartdialogue.org/news/2019-01-09/2019-pad-award-fierce-pussy
Comprehensive Appraisal Studies Program (CASP)
Now Accepting CASP Applications!
The Appraisal Institute of America, the educational foundation of the Appraisers Association of America is now accepting applications for our Comprehensive Appraisal Studies Program (CASP) for both the Summer 2019 and Fall 2019/Spring 2020 Semester.
Enroll in CASP to learn to appraise the fine and decorative arts. Completing CASP will provide you with a certificate in Appraisal Studies from the Appraisal Institute of America.
For more information and to apply, please visit our website at www.appraisersassociation.org/CASP.
Society of Architectural Historians
The Society of Architectural Historians has been awarded a two-year, $508,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to study the status of the field of architectural history in higher education. The grant provides support for a data-gathering initiative that will gauge the health of architectural, urban and landscape history as fields of study, as well as degree programs and curricula across the higher education landscape. SAH plans to hire a post-doctoral researcher to design and manage the study to determine where, and in what ways, these fields of study are expanding, receding, changing, or holding steady and to consider the structural or cultural factors behind such trends. SAH also will hire a Project Coordinator to assist with the project. Visit the SAH Career Center for full job descriptions.
SAH has named architect Aymar Mariño-Maza and architectural historian Zachary J. Violette as the recipients of the 2018 H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship. The fellowship allows an emerging scholar to travel the world to experience architecture and landscapes firsthand. SAH awarded Mariño-Maza a one-year fellowship and Violette a short-term fellowship for three months of travel. They will begin their fellowship travels in March 2019 and will document their field studies through monthly updates on the SAH Blog.
SAH invites nominations and self-nominations for the next Editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. JSAH is a quarterly, blind-peer reviewed international journal devoted to all aspects of the history of the global built environment and spatial practice, including architecture, landscape architecture, urbanism, and city planning. Published since 1941, JSAH has defined the field of architectural history, and is a pioneer in digital publication. Nominations due by April 30, 2019.
Association of Print Scholars
The Association of Print Scholars is pleased to host its affiliated society panel at the College Art Association conference on Friday, February 15, 2019 in New York.
Chaired by Christina Michelon (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities), Coloring Print examines global printmaking traditions that advance our understanding of the role of the medium in the social construction of race. The papers chosen include “Red Ink: Ethnographic Prints and the Colonization of Dakota Homelands” by Annika Johnson (University of Pittsburgh); “Sites of Contest and Commemoration: The Printed Life of Richard Allen, America’s Early Race Leader” by Melanee C. Harvey (Howard University); “A Franco-Indian Album: Firmin Didot’s Indian Paintings and Le Costume Historique’s Chromolithography (1888)” by Holly Shaffer (Brown University); and “The White Native Body in Asia: Woodcut Engraving and the Creation of Ainu Stereotypes” by Christina M. Spiker (St. Catherine University).
Aaron M. Hyman and Dana Leibsohn have been awarded the Association of Print Scholars 2018 Publication Grant to support the forthcoming publication related to their project “Washing the Archive: Indigenous Knowledge, European Prints, and Colonial Histories of Latin America.”
The co-authored project focuses on the circulation of prints in colonial Latin America, highlighting unpublished documents and the methodological provocations indigenous practices can offer traditional early modern print histories. The funding supplied by the grant will provide both authors the opportunity to travel to the Library of Congress and to the University of Virginia to complete their study of indigenous uses of European prints in Spanish America, especially practices of re-use, circulation, and loss under colonial conditions. The $2,000 award is funded by the Association of Print Scholars and through the generosity of C.G. Boerner and Harris Schrank. We thank both print dealers for their support of APS and its mission.
SOCIETY OF HISTORIANS OF EASTERN EUROPEAN, EURASIAN, AND RUSSIAN ART AND ARCHITECTURE (SHERA)
The following members were elected to the SHERA Board: Kristin Romberg (Vice President/President Elect); Corina Apostol (Web News Editor); and, Anna P. Sokolina (SHERA-SAH Liaison). Karen Kettering now serves as President, Alice Isabella Sullivan as Secretary-Treasurer, and Yelena Kalinsky as Listserv Administrator.
Aglaya K. Glebova (UC-Irvine) has been awarded the SHERA Emerging Scholar Prize for her essay “Elements of Photography: Avant-garde Aesthetics and the Reforging of Nature” (Representations 142, Spring 2018). Ekaterina Heath (University of Sydney) was selected as the recipient of the SHERA Travel Grant for CAA 2019 to will deliver her paper entitled “Picturing the Cathay in Russia: Political use of Chinoiserie interiors under Empress Elisabeth Petrovna and Emperor Peter III.”
The generous anonymous donor who has funded the SHERA Travel Grant has increased their support to allow for more grants and to enlarge the pool of eligible applicants. The award was initially given out once per year, for travel to CAA and ASEEES conferences in alternate years and was limited to graduate students. Going forward, the Travel Grant will be awarded twice per year for travel to both CAA and ASEEES. Additionally, independent scholars who receive no institutional support are now eligible to apply. US-based scholars will receive $1,000 and scholars traveling from outside the US will receive $1,500. Calls for applications are published on H-SHERA and on CAA Opportunities.
SHERA’s Board would like to continue developing online resources for scholars and teachers in our field using the H-SHERA platform, including book reviews, sample syllabi, up-to-date contact information for obtaining image permissions, conference reports, information about graduate programs, or other resources. If you have ideas or would like to volunteer to help with this effort, please write to the H-SHERA editors at editorial-shera@mail.h-net.org.
Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) & AAMC Foundation
Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) & AAMC Foundation is currently accepting applications for its Conference Travel Fellowships for curators to attend its Annual Conference and Meeting. Since 2010 alone, over 200 individual Curatorial Travel Fellowships have been awarded.
This year we are proud to offer two opportunities:
- Conference Travel Fellowship for Junior Curators. Open to junior curators with less than ten years of experience. Funding generously provided by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
- Art Fund / AAMC Conference Travel Fellowship. Open to UK curators to travel, network and develop relationships with their international peers. These Fellowships are a collaboration between Art Fund and AAMC Foundation.
All applicants must commit to participating in the full Conference program (May 4-7, 2019 in New York City) at the time of application, including the all deadlines (non-negotiable), timelines, and travel. A stipend is granted as part of this Program to subsidize the travel requirements. Multiple curators from one museum are eligible, though individuals may only submit one application per year.
Each Fellowship has a separate application, and members may apply to one Fellowship only. Applications for both of these AAMC Foundation Conference Travel Fellowships are due via our online application portal by 12pm ET on Tuesday, February 12, 2019.
To view the full program benefits, eligibility, and the link to the applications, please visit:
https://www.artcurators.org/page/TravelGrants
—-
Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) Foundation is pleased to announce Digital & Outward Engagement, the next installment in its regional In-Conversation series. Launched in 2016, AAMC Foundation’s In-Conversation series brings together local communities and expands networks.
Slated for Tuesday, February 26 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, In-Conversation: Digital & Outward Engagement features six perspectives on building bridges between museums and their audiences through the use of ever-evolving technologies and digital tools. Moving past social media and traditional websites, this event brings together Philadelphia’s leading voices to dig deeper into the ways in which technology can help advance dialogues with visitors, donors, colleagues, and the larger global community. They will touch on the current efforts and platforms in the digital sector, and consider ways in which they could be used to help better connect with audiences. With a look at the topic from varying perspectives, we’ll also have the opportunity to reflect on ways to collaborate as well.
Moderated by Christopher D.M. Atkins, Ph.D, Agnes & Jack Mulroney Associate Curator of European Painting & Sculpture and Manager, Curatorial Digital Programs & Initiatives, Philadelphia Museum of Art, this program features Aaron Miller, Senior Producer, Digital Media, The Franklin Institute; William Noel, Associate University Librarian & Director, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts Director, Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, Penn Libraries; Amy Sadao, Daniel W. Dietrich, II Director, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania; Ariel Schwartz, Kathy and Ted Fernberger Associate Director of Interactive Technologies, Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Neville Vakharia, Program Director, Arts Administration Campus Program and Associate Professor and Research Director, Drexel University, Westphal College of Media Arts & Design.
This In-Conversation will be hosted at the Lecture Auditorium at the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Perelman Building on Tuesday, February 26, 2019 from 6:30pm – 8:00pm, followed by a short reception from 8:00pm – 8:30pm. Space is limited so pre-registration is required. Click here to reserve your seat!
ACASA – Arts Council of the African Studies Association
- ACASA welcomes new board members:
Peri Klemm, President
Peju Layiwola, President Elect/VP
Shannen Hill, Past President
Raphael Chikukwa, Secretary
Rachel Kabukala, Treasurer
Fiona Siegenthaler, Newsletter Editor
Erica Jones, Assistant Website Editor
Cynthia Becker, ASA Liaison
Olubukola Gbadegesin, CAA Liaison
El Hadji Malick Ndiaye
In office since 2017:
Nadine Siegert, Website Editor & ECAS Liaison
Brenda Schmahmann, Facebook Manager
Anitra Nettleton, ASA Task Force for the Protection of Academic Freedom
Shadreck Chirikure
We thank our outgoing board members Silvia Forni, Jordan Fenton, Yaëlle Biro, Cécile Fromont, Liese Van der Watt, Deborah Stokes, Leslie Rabine and Cory Grundlach for their great work and wish them all the best for the future!
- Africa, Technology, and Visual Cultures: ACASA sponsored panel at the 107th CAA Annual Conference, NYC, February 14, 2019, 8.30-10.00am
Join us at the ACASA sponsored panel Africa, Technology, and Visual Cultures chaired by Amanda Kay Gilvin with paper contributions by Suzanne Preston Blier, Stephen Adéyemí Folárànmí, Kate Ellen Cowcher and Fiona Siegenthaler.
https://caa.confex.com/caa/
- Behind-the-Scenes at the Brooklyn Museum during 107th CAA Annual Conference, NYC February 15, 2019, 10.15am- 12.00pm
Join Kristen Windmuller-Luna, Sills Family Consulting Curator of African Arts, for a behind-the-scenes tour of the new exhibition One: Egúngún. Featuring a Yoruba (Nigerian) masquerade costume composed of over 300 African, Asian, and European textiles, the exhibition uses new research and multiple perspectives to emphasize the global connections and contemporary contexts of African masquerades. Information about the exhibition: http://brooklynmuseum.org
Limited space: RSVP at bkm.nyc/caa2019acasa
H-AfrArts is looking for Editors and Advisory Board Members to join the team and share duties and responsabilities on a voluntary basis.
The Editor role involves moderating discussion posts and general CfPs. There is also an exciting opportunity (optional) to develop new content based on your interest and initiative, such as developing Teaching and Research Resources, Conference Reports, and Cross-Network Projects. A minimum of one year committment is required for this role. For a full description of the duties of Editors please consult: https://networks.h-net.org/node/905/pages/80264/becoming-editor
The Advisory Board Members assist with the general development and welfare of the Network and advise Editors in cases in which there are disputes with the members (such as when a post is rejected and a subscriber appeals). A minimum of two years commitment is required for this role. To find out more, please visit: https://networks.h-net.org/h-net-advisory-board-members
About the Network:
H-AfrArts is an international network jointly sponsored by H-Net (Humanities Online) and ACASA (Arts Council of the African Studies Association-USA) to provide a forum for the discussion and exploration of African art and expressive culture. There are a number of reasons and benefits for joining H-AfrArts Network, these include:
Collaboration: Volunteering with an H-Net Network can be an excellent opportunity to work within a multi-disciplinary and committed editorial team.
Engagement: H-AfrArts Network provides an excellent opportunity to engage with, support, and develop your field of study.
Best Practice: H-Net is committed to supporting editorial best practices. You will receive comprehensive H-Commons online training to moderate and safeguard the content of the network.
Support: H-Net has a Home Office staffed by trained historians, an online training program, a Help Desk, and a separate space where its Editors can discuss questions and concerns relating to academic best practices and project development.
Durability: H-Net is committed to the long-term digital preservation of its academic content.
Visibility: H-Net’s content is available online for free and uses an email notification system to deliver academic content directly to subscribers.
How to Apply:
Applicants must demonstrate expertise in African Arts and have regular and reliable access to email.
If you are interested, please send your CV and a covering letter by email to: editorial-afrarts@mail.h-net.msu.edu
For any questions or help please contact: Helena Cantone – Advisory Board yenacanta@gmail.com
Applications will be accepted until the positions are filled.
This is a voluntary position: The H-Net is a non-profit organization run by academics and built around a committed community of volunteers.
- Call for Applications: AFRICAN CRITICAL INQUIRY PROGRAMME: IVAN KARP DOCTORAL RESEARCH AWARDS FOR AFRICAN STUDENTS ENROLLED IN SOUTH AFRICAN Ph.D. PROGRAMMES
Closing Date: Wednesday 1 May 2019
The African Critical Inquiry Programme is pleased to announce the 2019 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards to support African doctoral students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who are enrolled at South African universities and conducting dissertation research on relevant topics. Grant amounts vary depending on research plans, with a maximum award of ZAR 40,000.
The African Critical Inquiry Programme (ACIP) seeks to advance inquiry and debate about the roles and practice of public culture, public cultural institutions and public scholarship in shaping identities and society in Africa. The Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards are open to African postgraduate students (regardless of citizenship) in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Applicants must be currently registered in a Ph.D. programme in a South African university and be working on topics related to ACIP’s focus. Awards will support doctoral research projects focused on topics such as institutions of public culture, particular aspects of museums and exhibitions, forms and practices of public scholarship, culture and communication, and the theories, histories and systems of thought that shape and illuminate public culture and public scholarship. Awards are open to proposals working with a range of methodologies in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, including research in archives and collections, fieldwork, interviews, surveys, and quantitative data collection. For full information about this opportunity and how to apply, see the full Call for Proposals listed under “ACIP Opportunities” on the website: http://www.gs.emory.edu/about/special/acip.html.
- Call for proposals to organize a workshop: AFRICAN CRITICAL INQUIRY PROGRAMME Closing Date: Wednesday 1 May 2019
The African Critical Inquiry Programme invites proposals from scholars and/or practitioners in public cultural institutions in South Africa to organise a workshop to take place in 2020. The African Critical Inquiry Programme (ACIP) seeks to advance inquiry and debate about the roles and practice of public culture, public cultural institutions and public scholarship in shaping identities and society in Africa.
ACIP Workshops are intended as annual occasions to identify and address critical themes, fundamental questions and pressing practical issues concerning public culture. For instance, Workshops might focus on particular notions and issues related to publics, visuality, museums and exhibitions, art, performance, representational forms, or institutional forms from different methodological, practical, and theoretical vantages. They might examine forms and practices of public scholarship and the theories, histories and systems of thought that shape and illuminate public culture and public scholarship. Workshops should encourage comparative, interdisciplinary, and cross-institutional interchange and reflection that brings into conversation public scholarship in Africa, creative cultural production, and critical theory. Workshop budgets will vary depending on proposed plans; the maximum award is ZAR 60,000.
Applications may be submitted by experienced scholars and cultural practitioners based in universities, museums, and other cultural organizations in South Africa who are interested in creating or reinvigorating interdisciplinary, cross-institutional engagement and understanding and who are committed to training the next generations of scholar-practitioners. Applications may be submitted by a single individual or a pair of individuals who have different institutional affiliations and bring different perspectives, approaches, or specializations to the proposed Workshop theme.
For full information about this opportunity and how to apply, see the full Call for Proposals listed under “ACIP Opportunities” on our website. A list of previously supported ACIP Workshops is also available there: http://www.gs.emory.edu/about/special/acip.html.
International Review: Gordon Walters: New Vision by Leonard Bell
posted by CAA — Dec 06, 2018
The following article was written in response to a call for submissions by CAA’s International Committee. It is by Leonard Bell, professor of art history, University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Exhibition and catalogue review: Gordon Walters: New Vision, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 11 November 2017- 8 April 2018, and Auckland Art Gallery, 7 July – 4 November 2018.
Marti Friedlander, Portrait of Gordon Walters in His Studio, 1978, Marti Friedlander Archive, EH McCormick Research Library, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Courtesy Gerrard and Marti Friedlander Charitable Trust.
The much-lauded work of Gordon Walters (1919-1995), one of New Zealand’s first geometric abstract painters, has also generated controversy. A retrospective show traveled the country in 1983, but the present exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of Walters’s complete oeuvre from the late 1930s until his last painting in 1995. A wonderful show, curated by Lucy Hammonds, Laurence Simmons, and Julia Waite, it clearly establishes Walters’s greatness as a painter. Walters’s art was informed and sustained by an extensive knowledge and sophisticated understanding of Euro-American—Piet Mondrian (principally), Sophie Tauber-Arp, Joseph Albers, Auguste Herbin and John McLaughlin, for instance—and Oceanic art, in particular the koru motif of Maori kowhaiwhai (painting, on rafters and paddles, for example) and moko (tattoo). Add to those his early, unusual-in-New Zealand interest in Surrealism and the idiosyncratic sketches of a mentally ill man, Rolf Hattaway. Walters learned about these from a close friend, émigré Dutch artist Theo Schoon, an ardent advocate of Bauhaus practices and Maori visual arts, especially “primitive” rock art.
The resultant body of work constitutes an imaginative and distinctive interweaving of elements from diverse societies and cultures. Formally and technically rigorous, visually refined, conceptually deep, Walters’s paintings are both still and tense. While pulling in different directions, his best known work, the so-called koru paintings, somehow betoken their place, a cluster of islands in the southwest Pacific. Their imprint extends far beyond the art world, to the New Zealand Film Commission’s logo, for instance. Yet, to present Walters’s art only in terms of these koru paintings would skew the overall picture and leave it incomplete. The exhibition rightly gives as much attention to his many other different paintings.
Sydney Parkinson, painted Maori paddle, 1769, Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Cambridge, UK.
Since Walters’s breakthrough shows at Auckland’s New Vision Gallery in 1966 and 1968 (his first since an early exhibition in 1949), writings about his art have proliferated. His abstractions attracted the keen attention not only of New Zealand art historians, critics, and philosophers, but also the eminent British critic Robert Melville (Architectural Review, 1968), who regarded Walters’s paintings as the best he encountered in New Zealand, polymathic Ernst Gombrich (The Sense of Order, 1979), as well as Australian art historians Rex Butler and A. D. S. Donaldson, and American Thomas Crow (in the present catalogue). The handsome publication reproduces a rich feast of Walters’s works. Nine writers produced eight essays exploring various aspects of Walters’s art and career. Several essays (notably by Peter Brunt and the Australians) offer new details and connections between Walters and other artists.
The trajectory of his career, his primary inspirational sources, his paintings’s formal qualities and conceptual substance, though, have already been intensively excavated, especially by Michael Dunn in the 1970s and 1980s, and Francis Pound from the mid-1980s until his death in 2017.
Gordon Walters, Untitled, 1989, Collection James Wallace Arts Trust, gift of the Rutherford Trust.
In an exhibition review in Art News New Zealand (Summer, 2017), David Eggleton observed, “Curiously, Pound is an absent if also an insistent presence in the catalogue of the show. Although not included as a contributor, many of the ideas and notions first proposed by him appear in the text, subsumed into the writings of others.” And a festschrift in 1989 to mark his 70th birthday, Gordon Walters: Order and Intuition, edited by James Ross and Laurence Simmons, had ten scholarly essays, including (disclosure) my “Walters and Maori Art: the nature of the relationship?”
Transformation of his inspirational sources characterizes Walters’s art. His first investigations of the Maori koru motif, small studies in ink and gouache, appeared in the mid-1950s. They were close to the source; the motif’s organic quality was semi-retained.
In the mid-1960s Walters geometricized the form. Except for circular shapes terminating the crisply delineated bars, curves were straightened out. The reshaped element provided a means, in league with Mondrian et al, for studies in formal relationships using a “deliberately limited range of forms” (Walters, 1966).
These were not intended to draw on the Maori motif’s symbolic values, though Walters’s use of Maori terms for many titles was an acknowledgement of the inspirational importance of Maori art as he had experienced it.
From the mid-1980s, most forcefully in the 1990s, possibly triggered by critiques leveled at the Museum of Modern Art’s 1984-1985 exhibition, Primitivism: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, Walters was accused of exploitative appropriation of Maori art by several critics, both Maori and Pakeha (European New Zealander).
Gordon Walters, Gouache, 1957-8, Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hākena.
Others, including Maori and Pakeha artists, also defended Walters. The catalogue touches on this sometimes acrimonious argument, though the exhibition’s wall texts and captions bypass it. Deidre Brown’s catalogue essay, “Pitau, Primitivism and Provocation: Gordon Walters’ Appropriation of Maori Iconography,” steers a near-neutral path between the antagonists, culminating with the claim that they moved onto other concerns: “the appropriation debate faded away from academic art history.” Several reviewers, though, questioned whether the contentious issue was satisfactorily addressed by the show.
Most of Walters’s detractors and advocates assumed a straightforward relationship between his work and Maori art: cause = koru motif and effect = the forms in Walters’s koru paintings. The detractors appeared to subscribe to a Manichean structure of polarities in which modernist borrowings are, ipso facto, “bad.” In this system a single component in the works becomes the only or dominant one. If the same paintings are seen within wider cultural and historical contexts, though, an interplay of multiple elements and global connections, in which no single one is dominant, becomes manifest. A complex of factors also mediates how Walters’s koru paintings have functioned. Depending on the kinds of knowledge and cultural baggage individual viewers bring to the encounter, they are clearly perceived very differently. Indeed, one could well wonder whether viewers with opposing perspectives are talking about the same pictures. The diverse opinions resist resolution; the conflicting perspectives are incommensurable. Just as creationists are unlikely to accept a logical refutation of the existence of “God,” so Walters’s critics are not likely to see his art in any other way than their own.
Gordon Walters, Painting No. 1, 1965, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Purchase 1965.
Take another slant. In 1910 the New Zealand Herald reported a “curious discovery” by Mme Boeufvre, wife of New Zealand’s French consul. Seeing the Book of Kells (c. 800 CE) in Dublin, she “was much struck by the similarity of Celtic ornaments to Maori conventional designs…how very closely the Maori patterns resembled those of the ancient artists of Ireland.” Since the nineteenth century parallels were frequently drawn between curvilinearities in Maori artifacts and those in the art and ornament of other societies, including such varied cultures and aesthetics as Egyptian, Greek, South East Asian, Victorian, and Art Nouveau, in addition to Celtic. For instance, renowned Austrian art historian Alois Riegl (‘Neuseelandische Ornamentik’, 1891, and Stilfragen, 1896) matched Maori and Egyptian spiraling forms. He noted that they could not possibly have had the same origin. Like many other forms, that of the swastika, for example, the form of the Maori koru motif is found all over the world. There is no singular point of invention.
Universal and local collide in Walters’s painting. Was Walters indigenizing the modern or modernizing the indigenous—or both, or neither? Can we look through several lenses simultaneously? Compelling art certainly can emerge from socio-cultural dissonance—Walters’s paintings continue to energize the spaces they inhabit. They have a contemporary urgency, informing the work of contemporary artists of both Pakeha and Maori descent, such as Darren George and Chris Heaphy. (The latter worked with Walters in his last years.) For others tension between Maori and Euro-American aesthetics and practices remains. Walters’s painterly synthesis of Maori, Oceanic, European, and American elements and ideas was virtually unique among Pakeha artists in his time. He trod a solitary path. In retrospect, though, his oeuvre constitutes a crucial watershed, in which the possibilities of bicultural coexistence of things Maori and Pakeha were explored, celebrated and contested.
Gordon Walters, Untitled, 1972, Dunedin Public Art Gallery Loan Collection, Courtesy of the Gordon Walters Estate.
CWA Picks for December 2018
posted by CAA — Dec 04, 2018
Installation view of Leonor Fini: Theatre of Desire, 1930-1990, on view at the Museum of Sex through March 4, 2019.
CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship to share with CAA members on a monthly basis. See the picks for December below.
CONTRIBUTION TO LIGHT: THE EARLY WORKS OF BARBARA HAMMER
September 13, 2018 – January 31, 2019
Kow Madrid
Barbara Hammer needs no introduction. One of the first filmmakers to openly address and document lesbian sexuality, Hammer is both a feminist pioneer of queer cinema and an influential force of avant-garde and experimental filmmaking. She is also dying.
In a recent talk at the Whitney Museum (The Art of Dying or [Palliative Art Making in the Age of Anxiety]) she frankly, movingly, and inspiringly spoke of death and (her) art, living with cancer and one’s right to die “when she wishes,” advocating terminally ill patients’ right to decide how and when to die. Concentrating instead on works that precede the specter of death in her work, Contribution to Light focuses only on very early films, photographs, and works on paper, including some previously unknown. It seeks to explore the role physical perception of space and relationships play in Hammer’s first steps as an artist, marking the signature combination of physical presence, painterly quality, and sensual expressionism that characterizes much of her work both on celluloid and paper. “Her camera gaze seems to literally touch the environment, inseparable from her body and its experiences, while her paint brush and her pencil are unafraid to discern the surface of the paper as a field of action and mental and formal discovery,” as put in the press release. Touch has been indeed central in Hammer’s vision, and she eloquently speaks about it during the aforementioned talk. While this show in Madrid is only a small homage to Hammer’s beginnings, her illness and own commitment to prepare for the aftermath of her death has already precipitated a wave of much-needed study, preservation, and celebration of her work in the US. A major retrospective will open next summer at the Wexner Center for the Arts. But will she be alive, or conscious to see it? Wishing so, this CWA selection symbolically reciprocates her loving goodbye while she is still in life.
Tomie Ohtake: At Her Fingertips
November 1 – December 22, 2018
Nara Roesler Gallery, New York
This concise exhibition focuses on Tomie Ohtake’s preparatory collages, drawings, and engravings from the 1960s and 1970s and proposes a new dimension to the Japanese-Brazilian artist’s expansive, six-decade career and legacy. Curated by Paulo Miyada, chief curator of the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, At Her Fingertips places Ohtake’s “studies” in direct relationship to a few select paintings, arguing for a dynamic reciprocity between media and offering further insight into the eminent artist’s approach to abstract gesturalism, geometry, and spirituality. These small, colorful collages—torn and ripped somewhat haphazardly—are hung directly from the ceiling in double-sided glass frames, highlighting the graphic and material nature of paper cutouts and promoting the dialectics of chance and control underlying Zen Buddhism and Japanese calligraphy. This tidy show further informs the interwoven dialogues on abstraction offered in postwar Brazil from which Ohtake readily drew upon, including those by the Seibi group’s second generation, including Manabu Mabe and Flávio-Shiró, and the Concrete principles of design and color theory by Wyllis de Castro and Hércules Barsotti, for example. In all, this exhibition continues the important historical work on Ohtake, and delivers a morsel of her brilliant career to a new audience in New York.
LINDA VALLEJO: AMERICAN Latinx
September 4 – December 14, 2018
Kean University Karl and Helen Burger Gallery, Union, New Jersey
Linda Vallejo provokes both directly and subtly poignant questions through her “Make ‘Em All Mexican” (MEAM) series of historical figures and contemporary pop personalities painted brown; and extended series, “The Brown Dot Project” of transformations of Latino populations and workforce data into engaging visual representations using brown dots. MEAM sculptures, handmade books and manipulated aluminum sublimation prints began in 2011 when the artist worked out her own query, “I’m a person of the world. What would the world of contemporary images look like from my own personal Mexican-American, Chicano lens?” From the Three Stooges to Jennifer Lawrence to the Statue of Liberty, these iconic works in brown and titled in Spanish, presented in striking fashion, challenge audiences, “Does color and class define our understanding and appreciation of our culture?” “The Brown Dot” series are dotted objects and abstract images on graphed pages with statistics built into the pointillated designs, stats as the titles, such as National Latino Authors and Writers 5.6% dotted to create a typewriter; or National Latino Architects 7.2% into a VW Beetle. The series has traveled in solo and group exhibitions for a few years now, but its relevancy endures.
ANNE BRIGMAN: A VISIONARY IN MODERN PHOTOGRAPHY
September 29, 2018 – January 27, 2019
Nevada Museum of Art, Reno
Not enough can be said about the innovative, ethereal and intimate photography of Anne Brigman, though this exhibition, the largest ever undertaken including over 300 works spanning her career, attempts to honor her amazing radical oeuvre. Objectifying her own nude body outside in near desolate wilderness was absolutely revolutionary at the turn of the twentieth century, moreover her well-known landscape photography, poetry and art criticism maintained for her a significant career. Her sinuous figure aligns naturally with the lines of the trees and landscapes of Sierra Nevada. Her powerful poses wreak vulnerability and strength, echoing Francesca Woodman decades after her, but with an inner confidence and strength. Brigman redefined the space through her work as did Judy Chicago, Brigman a feminist artist before the notion.
Leonor Fini: Theatre of Desire, 1930-1990
September 28, 2018 – March 4, 2019
Museum of Sex, New York
With an unapologetic dose of theatricality appropriate for its subject, this small but comprehensive survey curated by Lissa Rivera offers a delectable opportunity to discover, re-evaluate and celebrate the art and life of Leonor Fini as well as the rebellious inextricability of both.
Born in Buenos Aires, but raised in Trieste—only by her mother upon her separation of her abusive father whom she escaped by often dressing like a boy—Fini begun to paint at the age of thirteen and by the time she moved to Paris in 1931 had already established herself “as an artist to watch.” While best remembered today as a Surrealist due to her early style, affiliations and her participation in the seminal 1936 MoMA show, Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism, and her illustrations of Marquis de Sade Juliette, Fini refused membership in any of the contemporary avant-garde movements and pursued a fiercely independent course in life and art, marked by her eccentric disguises, life-long partnership with two men, and a radical exploration of desire, sexuality, and performativity that cuts across all the media she worked as painter, idiosyncratic draughtsman, and prolific theater designer. Spanning two floors and six decades of work, the exhibition brings together fascinating examples of the changing style of this largely self-taught artist’s painting (presided over by her 1940s androgynous male nudes guarded by female lovers), erotic drawings, book illustrations, and samples her work in theater and design, contextualizing her production and theatrically fleshing out her performative person with photographic and filmic documentation, signature outfits, a projected assortment of select quotes by the artist, and music.
While arrayed along chronological lines, the exhibits are curated in eloquent and eloquently analyzed groupings that capture Fini’s feminism both as an advocate of the feminine and female desire as well as an explorer of a radically boundlessness sexuality. “Subverting the Muse,” “Empowering the Feminine,” “Metamorphosis and Sexual Sorcery,” “Intellectual Explorations of Sexuality,” and “The Corporeal” are a few of such groupings’ titles that speak volumes of both the timeliness of Fini’s sexual politics and the earliness of her revolt, and are convincingly illustrated by her representations of both men and women, her empowering evocation of sorcery, mythology and nature, her work’s unrestricted erotics, ranging from androgynous objects of female desire to homoeroticism and Sadean sadomasochism, and the fluidity of gender and sexuality emanating from her images, disguises, and words.
Bridget Riley
November 16, 2018 – January 26, 2019
Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles
“The curve is a frozen moment,” said Bridget Riley in an interview with The Telegraph, “This side contracts. That side extends. When we see a painted curve we somehow recognize that.” This gathering of work from across Riley’s rigorous and focused career gives a viewer an opportunity to test that observation. From Riley’s early experiments with pointillism, Pink Landscape (1960), to her recent paintings and wall murals consisting of subtly-modulated, colored discs, this show is arranged by “conceptual and compositional affinity rather than chronology.” Seen in this way, what emerges is a set of related concerns—the stripe, for instance—which can then be traced across the artist’s career. More than a survey-text example of Op Art, Riley’s work asks for the perceptual and bodily investment of the viewer; a recognition, a frozen moment, a curve, a line.