CAA News Today
Two Art Organizations Join CAA’s Affiliated Societies
posted by Emmanuel Lemakis — Mar 05, 2010
At its February meeting in Chicago, the Board of Directors approved the applications of two groups to join CAA’s affiliated societies. The first new affiliate, the Appraisers Association of America, is a professional organization, while the second, the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey, is an area-studies organization.
The Appraisers Association of America (AAA) began in 1949; it currently has 650 members. Its purpose is to establish the highest standards of ethical conduct and promote the profession of appraising as a service to the national economy. An admissions committee insures that its members have met the standards of the profession. AAA advances the field though educational seminars, conferences, publications, and other activities. It publishes All About Appraising: The Definitive Appraisal Handbook and a biannual newsletter, and it offers classes in collaboration with New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. CAA recently partnered with AAA to host a symposium on art authentication in January 2010.
An affiliate of the Middle East Studies Association, the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) was established in 2007, and it currently has fifty-seven members. This newly formed academic organization aims to advance the study of this emerging field through the creation of an international network of interested scholars and organizations. AMCA facilitates communications by sponsoring conferences, meetings, a website, and a newsletter. It will be launching peer-reviewed exhibition and catalogue reviews on its website.
CAA’s Directory of Affiliated Societies is currently accepting updates. If you are an officer or the official CAA contact for an organization, please send an updated text, in the same format as your current listing, to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs, by March 31, either as a Word attachment or pasted into the body of an email.
New CAA Affiliated Societies
posted by Emmanuel Lemakis — Aug 26, 2009
CAA welcomes two art organizations into its family of affiliated societies: the European Architectural History Network and Public Art Dialogue. Affiliated societies are groups of art professionals and other organizations whose goals are generally consonant with those of CAA, with a view toward facilitating intercommunication and mutual enrichment.
The European Architectural History Network (EAHN) supports research and education by providing a public forum for the dissemination of knowledge about the histories of architecture. Based in Europe, it serves architectural historians and scholars in allied fields without restriction on their areas of study. The network seeks to overcome limitations imposed by national boundaries and institutional conventions through increasing the visibility of the discipline among scholars and the public; promoting scholarly excellence and innovation; fostering inclusive, transnational, interdisciplinary, and multicultural approaches to the history of the built environment; encouraging communication among the disciplines that study space; facilitating the open exchange of research results; and providing a clearinghouse for information related to the discipline.
Public Art Dialogue (PAD), cochaired by Harriet F. Senie and Cher Krause Knight, is an organization devoted to public art. Its membership includes art historians, artists, curators, administrators, architects, landscape architects, and others engaged with the wide arc that encompasses public art. PAD’s goal is to provide platforms for dialogue among public-art professionals and students across disciplines.
For more information on CAA’s affiliated societies, please write to Emmanuel Lemakis, CAA director of programs.
CAA Advocacy Policy and Procedures
posted by CAA — Apr 22, 2024
As the preeminent international leadership organization in the visual arts, CAA has an important role to play in public discourse on matters related to visual arts scholarship and practice. The CAA Board of Directors, Executive Director, members, and staff contribute to public understanding of visual arts advocacy through our newsletter, ED letters, social media platforms, special events, and sessions/workshops at our Annual Conference.
When the Executive Director or the Advocacy Committee perceives good reason to publish a statement on behalf of CAA (which may involve requesting endorsements from affiliated member societies/organizations or signing on to advocacy statements drafted by those affiliates), the Advocacy Committee convenes to interrogate the issue. If this issue is deemed in service to CAA’s mission and a majority of Advocacy Committee members agree to act, a member of the committee or staff will draft an original statement depending on capacity. The Advocacy Committee may approve the statement, reject it, or request changes; responses are needed from all members as soon as possible and no later than two days after receipt. The Advocacy Committee and Executive Director will agree on any action to be taken in response to expressed concerns. Once the entire committee reviews and approves the final draft, the statement will go live on the CAA website and will be distributed across social media channels when appropriate. In the case of a sign on to another organization’s advocacy statement, the Executive Director will share the sign on opportunity with the Advocacy Committee, and they will discuss and vote to determine whether to proceed.
The Executive Director is authorized to issue statements on behalf of the organization without review by the Advocacy Committee on time-sensitive matters (see example). At these times, the ED will specify this an ED response, so as not to speak on behalf of the Advocacy Committee, Executive Committee, or Board of Directors without consent.
CAA cannot respond to every advocacy request brought forth by our members. Our goal remains maximum impact when advocating for the field. There are times when calls to advocacy from one constituency directly conflict with another. It is for this reason that it is imperative our Board of Directors, and by extension, our Advocacy Committee remain diverse in background, field, and perspective, to ensure decisions are made as objectively as possible on behalf of membership and the field; advocacy action must also be in direct alignment with our mission, and in accordance with our 501(c)(3) status.
CAA must concentrate its energy and prestige on matters related to the advancement and protection of visual arts and scholarship, including academic infrastructure and professional practice.
Because CAA is the umbrella organization for a diverse membership with varying needs and viewpoints, we cannot engage in party politics and cannot take a stand on issues that are not in direct alignment with our mission.
CAA SOCIAL MEDIA POLICY
The CAA Board, Executive Director, and staff agree that due to the limitations of the mode, comments made on social media about visual arts practice or scholarship by CAA staff are most effective when they are constructive and celebratory of the achievements of CAA and members of the CAA community. CAA staff and Board members may wish and indeed are encouraged to share information about CAA and its programs, including on social media.
CONTACT US
If you have an advocacy request, please contact info@collegeart.org with the subject line “Constituent Advocacy Request” and your concern will be escalated to the Advocacy Committee for immediate discussion.
Policy adopted by the CAA Board of Directors on February 18, 2024.
CWA Picks: Spring 2024
posted by CAA — Mar 13, 2024
Rosana Paulino, Garça Branca from the Mangrove-Women series, 2023
The exhibitions, screenings, projects, and talks selected for CWA’s Spring Picks hint at the fleeting, ephemeral nature of memory and intimacy. The creatives highlighted here have left their mark, interpreting and imbuing their materials with meaning, often leaving behind evidence of their process.
UNITED STATES
Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures
Through April 28
Art on Hulfish Gallery, Princeton, NJ
Princeton University Art Museum’s Art on Hulfish presents a survey of work by Christina Fernandez, a Los Angeles–based artist who has spent more than thirty years conducting a rich exploration of migration, labor, gender, and her Mexican American identity through photography. Whether staged or candid, Fernandez’s photographs record touch and mark making, engaging the medium’s distinct ability to convey surfaces—the surfaces of bodies, architecture, and the images themselves. Multiple Exposures traces the development of the artist’s work from the late 1980s to now.
April 4–August 4
MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA
Since 2015, the Zagreb-born Miletić has worked almost exclusively with hand-produced textiles across several ongoing series.
Her Materials series is comprised of works hand woven on a 1970s loom. As an extension of her formal training as a photographer, their idiosyncratic shapes and color-schemes are based on Miletić’s snapshots of temporary repairs to buildings and objects in urban public spaces. Though never exhibited, her photographs of responsive, ad-hoc constructions become templates for seemingly abstract textile pieces. Her meticulous and time-consuming use of hand work to document the ephemeral repairs reproduces this ethos of care and provides a slowness and material intimacy that Miletić found lacking in photography. Across her various series, Miletić also calls attention to the gendered associations of textile craft, subtly relating forms of historically undervalued labor, like the “women’s work” of weaving, to other narratives of social and economic struggle and the larger political forces that give shape to them.
Through June 15
Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, Logan
Jane Catlin’s career as an artist and teacher has lasted more than forty years. During that time she has produced figural paintings to semi-abstract images of biological forms and processes. Throughout her career, Catlin’s style and content have shifted due to the profound influence of her travels through Japan, Korea, Africa, and Canada. This overview reveals her fascination with biology, ecology, and the environment. The mysterious imagery that results from her visual meditations evokes our mutating world and serves as a reminder of both the beauty and fragility of nature. This exhibition offers a unique opportunity to see some of her most significant works presented together for the first time.
Joan Jonas: Good Night, Good Morning
March 17–July 6
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Joan Jonas creates meditations on bodies, space, time, and nature. As she has explained, “The performer sees herself as a medium: information passes through.” The most comprehensive retrospective of Jonas’s work in the United States, this exhibition provides new insights into the artist’s process, unprecedented access to archival materials, and fresh historical perspectives on Jonas’s work. Drawings, photographs, notebooks, oral histories, film screenings, performances, and a selection of the artist’s installations, drawn from MoMA’s collection and institutions around the world, will trace the development of Jonas’s career, from works made in the 1960s and 1970s exploring the confluence of technology and ritual to more recent ones dealing with ecology and the landscape.
Joyce J. Scott: Walk a Mile in My Dreams
March 24–July 14
Baltimore Museum of Art
This fifty-year career retrospective celebrates one of the most significant artists of our time. Best known for her virtuosic use of beads and glass, Scott’s work across varying media beguiles viewers with beauty and humor while confronting racism, sexism, ecological devastation, and complex family dynamics. The exhibition includes more than 120 objects ranging from woven tapestries and soft sculpture from the 1970s and audacious performances and wearable art in the 1980s to sculptures of astonishing formal ingenuity and social force from the late 1970s to the present moment.
On April 11, 6:30–8:30 p.m. Joyce J. Scott will appear with longtime collaborator Kay Lawal-Muhammad, in a conversation moderated by Tracey Beale, BMA Director of Public Programs.
May 3–August 11
The Power Plant, Toronto
June Clark: Witness is the first survey in Canada of the Toronto-based artist June Clark, who, since the late 1960s, has developed a unique and groundbreaking practice spanning photo-based work, text, collage, installation, and sculptural assemblages. In this deeply personal exhibition, she explores how history, memory, and identity—both individual and collective—have established the familial and artistic lineages that shape her work.
Witness brings together four significant bodies of work that stretch from the 1990s to the present, many of them seen here for the first time. These include her iconic installations Family Secrets (1992) and Harlem Quilt (1997); a series of photo-based works from 2004 titled 42 Thursdays in Paris; Perseverance Suite (a new project); and Homage, a collection of sculptural assemblages that, in Clark’s words, “gave me permission to be the artist I am today.”
June Clark: Witness will be presented in tandem with another solo exhibition of the artist’s work at the Art Gallery of Ontario titled June Clark: Unrequited Love.
Thorugh July 21
Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA
LaToya M. Hobbs: It’s Time presents the series Carving Out Time (2020–21), a life-size suite of woodcuts by the Arkansas-born, Baltimore-based artist. Unfolding over five scenes, the work depicts a day in Hobbs’s life with her husband and children. Hobbs shares the labor and intimacy of her private life in these prints, centering the negotiations she brokers daily to balance her manifold responsibilities—as a wife, mother, educator, and artist. The series is also a powerful statement about her influences and self-fashioning as an artist: references to paintings, sculptures, and prints by prominent artists such as Elizabeth Catlett, Alma Thomas, Valerie Maynard, and Kerry James Marshall appear throughout. Carving Out Time is a part of Hobbs’s ongoing Salt of the Earth project, which she characterizes as “the personification of Black women as salt in relation to their role as preservers of family, culture and community.”
Lauren Lee McCarthy: Bodily Autonomy
Through May 25
Mandeville Art Gallery, University of California San Diego, La Jolla
Bodily Autonomy is Lauren Lee McCarthy’s largest US solo exhibition to date. For the past fifteen years, McCarthy has worked in performance, video, installation, software, artificial intelligence, and other media to address how an algorithmically determined world impacts human relationships and social life. The show brings together two major series of works—Surrogate and Saliva—to examine the current state of bio-surveillance in times of rapid technological development and increased corporate and government surveillance.
Loie Hollowell: Dilation Stage
Through April 20
Pace Gallery, New York
Hollowell will present ten new pastel drawings that document the dilation stage of labor. Displayed sequentially on a rounded wall, these drawings feature depictions of Hollowell’s own pregnant abdomen, rendered to scale. Below each belly is a circle the exact size of the effaced cervix as it expands. The cervical “circles” at the bottom of each drawing seem to pulse as the series progresses, culminating in a blazing cadmium red.
In addition to these drawings, the exhibition will include a unique birthing bench that Hollowell created collaboratively with her husband, sculptor Brian Caverly. The birthing chair has been used by women in labor throughout millennia and the rendition here, which visitors are invited to sit on, is created not just for the birther, but also for the partner, midwife, doula, doctor, or any other witness to the transcendent journey of birth.
Dilation Stage will coincide with Hollowell’s first museum survey, on view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, through August 11.
Modern Art for an Old Tale: Fuku Akino’s Illustrations for “The Dwarf Pine Tree”
Through July 31
Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
This exhibition presents more than twenty illustrations for The Dwarf Pine Tree by Fuku Akino (1908–2001), a Kyoto-based painter and teacher who was one of Japan’s most prominent woman artists during her lifetime. Published in 1963, The Dwarf Pine Tree is a modern retelling of a Japanese folk tale whose main character is a pine tree, an important symbol in Japanese culture representing love and endurance. The book is one of several collaborations between Akino, the author Betty Jean Lifton, and the editor Jean Karl, who promoted her vision to publish complex and culturally diverse stories for young American readers such as those written by Lifton, an American resident of Japan, and illustrated by Akino.
Through July 7
Brooklyn Museum, New York
“What does a Black person look like today in those places where Africans were once sold, a century and a half ago?” asks artist Nona Faustine (b. 1977). Using her own body, she interrogates this question in her photographic series White Shoes. Forty-two self-portraits show Faustine standing in sites across New York City, from Harlem to Wall Street to Prospect Park and beyond, that are built upon legacies of enslavement in New York—one of the last Northern states to abolish slavery. On her feet are a pair of sensible white pumps, which speak to the oppressions of colonialism and assimilation imposed on Black and Indigenous peoples locally, nationally, and globally. Otherwise nude, partially covered, or holding props, Faustine is at once vulnerable and commanding, standing in solidarity with ancestors whose bodies and memory form an archive in the land beneath her shoes. White Shoes is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition and the first complete installation of this consequential series.
April 11–September 22
Madison Square Park and Inwood Hill Park, New York
Seed explores the personal and collective experiences that have influenced artist Rose B. Simpson’s life and work with a series of new large-scale sculptures appearing in two major public parks in Manhattan. In Madison Square Park, Simpson assembles seven monumental androgynous sentinel figures fabricated in steel with bronze adornments around a central sculpture of a young female figure emerging from the earth. In addition, two life-size bronze sentinels stand watch in Inwood Hill Park, a contested space in Native American history as the site where Dutch colonial governor Peter Minuit “purchased” Manhattan Island from the Lenape in 1626. This marks Madison Square Park Conservancy’s first collaboration with another New York City public park.
Sarah Maldour: Tricontinental Cinema
Through April 28
Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus
Tricontinental Cinema explores Maldoror’s five-decade career as a maker of revolutionary cinema, tracing her involvement with Black liberation movements in France, Africa, and the Caribbean. Through an immersive, multisensory landscape of films, photographs, poetry, and letters, the exhibition invites you to experience the full scope of Maldoror’s radical practice.
A legendary filmmaker, Maldoror completed more than forty-five shorts, documentaries, and feature films before her death in 2020. Many of these works rewrite the rules of films focusing on resistance and rebellion, casting women as protagonists in movements dominated by men.
The exhibition includes several large-scale works by contemporary artists, including a monumental fiber sculpture by renowned Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga. It also features a newly commissioned mural, painted on-site, from Paris-based artist Maya Mihindou. Framing Maldoror’s films and archives, these works form a constellation of Black and Afro-Surrealist practices while amplifying the continued resonance of her work today.
Through August 18
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas
Always attuned to the built environment, Sze’s new site-specific installations across three gallery spaces integrate painting, sculpture, images, sound, and video with the surrounding architecture to create intimate systems that reference the rapidly changing world. This extraordinary new exhibition will blur the boundaries between making and showing, process and product, digital and material ultimately to question how objects acquire their meaning.
Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art: The 6000 Circle Project
Through April 6
Arc Project Gallery, San Francisco
In collaboration with The Calling (artists Yasmin Lambie-Simpson, Chantelle Goldthwaite, and Sheila Metcalf-Tobin) and the Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art (NCWCA) chapter of the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA), anyone interested in participating in this international art initiative is welcome! The 6000 Circle Project focuses on the circle as a symbol of balance and unity, a never-ending container of feminine energy and light. The Calling envisions 6000 circles created by a multitude of artists from around the globe. The 6000 Circle Project opens with more than 300 circles on the walls at Arc. Through the course of the exhibition, the public will be invited to make circles to add to the walls.
March 15, 6 –9 p.m.
MIT Bartos Theater, Cambridge, MA
Renowned Inuit lawyer Aaju Peter has led a lifelong fight for the rights of her people. But while launching an effort to establish an Indigenous forum at the European Union, Aaju finds herself facing a difficult, personal journey to mend her own wounds after the unexpected passing of her son. In this “powerful exploration of cultural trauma” (The Film Stage), director Lin Alluna follows alongside Aaju Peter as she strives to reclaim her language and identity after a lifetime of whitewashing and forced assimilation.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A discussion. Free and open to the public. Doors open at 5:30 p.m.
Panel: Vision is a Battlefield: Histories of Race and Media
March 26, 6:30 p.m.
Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, New York
How is our basic perception of the world influenced by concepts of racial identity? Join moderator Claire Bishop, professor of art history at the CUNY Graduate Center, for an illuminating discussion with the authors of four recent books exploring the intertwined histories of photography, media, and race. The panel features Brooke Belisle, associate professor of art at Stony Brook University, speaking on computational imagery and AI; Emilie Boone, assistant professor of art history at New York University, on Harlem Renaissance photographer James Van Der Zee; Monica Huerta, assistant professor of English and American studies at Princeton University, on the aesthetics of racial capitalism; and Nicholas Mirzoeff, professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University, on the visual politics of whiteness.
April 18, 6:30 p.m.
Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, New York
Natalie Dykstra’s Chasing Beauty is the vivid and masterful biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner—creator of one of America’s most stunning museums and a true American original. A wealthy Boston socialite at the turn of the twentieth century, Gardner was misunderstood for her eccentric lifestyle, but found her niche as a patron and friend to artists, including John Singer Sargent, who painted her portrait. Dykstra illuminates how the museum and its holdings can be seen as a kind of memoir created with objects, displayed per Gardner’s wishes, including not only masterwork paintings but tapestries, rare books, prints, porcelains, and fine furniture. Dykstra speaks about the new book with Rachel Cohen, author of A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists.
MEXICO
War and Peace: A Poetics of Gesture
Through June 30
Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City
Beatriz González is one of the most renowned living Latin American painters and one of the key references of her country’s culture. War and Peace: A Poetics of Gesture is a new review of Beatriz González’s work. This is the first monographic exhibition of the painter’s work to be held in Mexico: it will offer both an overview of her work and an original investigation of her approach to the figure and gestures as a vehicle for emotional communication.
CANADA
un/tangling, un/covering, un/doing
Through March 17
Surrey Art Gallery, British Columbia
From the moment of birth, hair takes on multifaceted meanings. Rooted within storytelling by families and communities, the politics of hair have been both intimately personal and profoundly social.
Artists from across Canada—including Audie Murray, Becky Bair, Wally Dion, Clare Yow, Sharon Norwood, Sarindar Dhaliwal, Karin Jones, Baljit Singh, Kiranjot Kaur, and Natasha Kianipour—offer reflections on how hair embodies the importance of culture. In this exhibition, artists employ compelling storytelling that express connections intertwined with familial teachings and their own informed experiences.
SOUTH AMERICA
March 22–June 10
Fundación Malba Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires
This is the first comprehensive exhibition to be held outside Brazil of the work of Rosana Paulino (b. 1967). It includes works made between 1994 and 2024, and approaches her oeuvre from the concept of “Amefricana” as proposed by the Brazilian philosopher Lélia Gonzáles.
Paulino’s poetic interventions reinscribe the archives of the African diaspora in South America. They do so through constant dialogue between personal and historical archives, reconceptualizations of Brazilian art, interrogations of the matrixes of Western science, and through an approach to the circumstances of black women in Brazilian and Latin American societies. The exhibition includes five large installations, displayed together with drawings, engravings, and video organized into four conceptual hubs that are not separate zones, but rather axes of meaning that run through almost all of Paulino’s works.
ASIA
Jorinde Voigt and Xiyadie: 2.0
Through May 4
Gallery P21, Seoul
In 2.0 paper transcends its two-dimensional origins to become a silent narrator telling tales of delicacy, rebellion, and existence. The title of the show is tri-fold: the exhibition is the first in the gallery’s new “2.0” space; the show comprises the work of two artists; and the binary symbolism behind the numbers: 2, which represents existence and material, and 0, which represents absence or the subconscious. The overlap of these artists’ practices is predominantly material, but presenting them alongside one another brings out conceptual overlap, allowing alternate readings of each artist’s works. For both artists the fragility of each cut or fold becomes a poetic marker of time, capturing moments in the evolution of the artwork. Both artists, through their engagement with paper, participate in a form of archiving, be it of cultural narratives or conceptual explorations.
EUROPE & UK
May 17–August 11
Kunsthalle Basel
For her first institutional exhibition in Switzerland, the Swedish artist Ghislaine Leung (b. 1980) presents a new, site-specific project. Leung’s artistic practice is characterized by a rigorous, conceptual approach that often traces physical and economic circuits as much as institutional and societal mechanisms. The result are artworks—which she considers “events”—that emerge from her interest in the various structures underlying commodities, sites, and human relations.
Leung’s work is also on view in the Turner Prize 2023 Shortlist Exhibition at Towner Eastbourne, UK, and in a solo show at the Renaissance Society, Chicago, both through April 14.
March 20–June 9
Städel Museum, Frankfurt
Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) chose prints and drawings as her essential media, finding in them an independent visual language of great immediacy. This exhibition presents more than 110 works on paper, sculptures, and early paintings by the artist from the collection as well as from leading museums and Kollwitz collections. Surprising, unconventional works and selected sculptures will be presented together with loans from around Germany to highlight her independent pictorial language that was distinguished by an incisive immediacy to respond to the essential questions of humanity and address troubling topics.
A major Kollwitz retrospective exhibition will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art, March 31 – July 20.
Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior
April 20–October 20
Venice Biennale
Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior is the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work to date, bringing together more than thirty works made over the past thirty-five years, including new site-specific drawings and glasswork created for this exhibition.
Collective Behavior traces Sikander’s ever-evolving explorations of gender, race, and colonial histories. The exhibition includes her breakthrough work The Scroll (1989–90), which established her position at the vanguard of the neo-miniature movement. Collective Behavior also debuts new works by Sikander that respond to the architecture and history of the Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel, the city of Venice, and global histories of trade and artistic exchange.
Vanessa Bell: A Pioneer of Modern Art
May 15–October 6
The Courtauld Project Space, London
Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) was one of the leading artists associated with the Bloomsbury Group, the avant-garde assembly of artists, writers, and philosophers who pioneered literary and artistic modernism in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century. This focused display will be the first devoted to the Courtauld’s significant collection of Bell’s work. It will include paintings such as her masterpiece A Conversation, as well as the bold, abstract textile designs she produced for the Omega Workshops, led by influential artist and critic Roger Fry in London, which aimed to abolish the boundaries between the fine and decorative arts and bring the arts into everyday life. The exhibition will highlight one of the most cutting-edge artists working in Britain in the early twentieth century.
MIDDLE EAST & NORTH AFRICA
Ana Mzzei: How to Disappear
Through April 20
Green Art Gallery, Dubai
How to Disappear marks the conclusion of Ana Mazzei’s ongoing project Love Scene Crime Scene, a three-part exhibition series centered around the fictional disappearance of a ballerina. In this latest installment presented by Green Art Gallery in Dubai, the Brazilian artist deepens the enigma by introducing a collection of bronze sculptures and oil paintings that leave the spectator wanting to play the role of investigator. Her sculptures, featuring half human, half animal creatures placed on raw concrete plinths, take center stage against an entire wall displaying approximately fifty paintings. The selection of paintings is divided into six themes: stage, vases, landscape, cages, beings, and the joker. Together, they form a vocabulary or alphabet of symbols put together in an attempt to illustrate how to disappear, if we ever wanted to.
Through December 6
Gulf Photo Plus Gallery, Dubai
Lara Chahine and Reem Falaknaz subvert a common documentary landscape in Swallow This! with works in photography and digital media. The exhibition explores the rampant pathologization of women’s bodies, where the politically absurd, visually surreal, and humorous converge. Drawing on the uncanny collective experience of womanhood, Chahine and Falaknaz veer into a kind of performance art, becoming the subjects of their own work at times.
Swallow This! weaves narratives where the clinical or scientific, the grotesque or bodily, the divine or occult coexist as contemporary reflections on a post-internet, Arab feminism. Both photographers seek to unpack “erotic capital,” where the strange is made familiar, and the familiar, strange.
OCEANIA
Through April 20
Michael Lett Gallery, Auckland
Material, action, trace. In myriad ways and with a diverse body of tools, Judy Millar applies and removes paint in order to explore embodied acts of making and how these enact particular forms of consciousness. With a palette made up of unexpected combinations of color, Millar often plays with the tension between background and foreground. Millar’s works are often large-scale, dwarfing those who encounter them, acting as a reminder that people belong to gestures and that painting can be a shift away from the self.
CAA Board President’s Open Letter to North American College and University Presidents
posted by CAA — Feb 09, 2024
On behalf of the College Art Association (CAA) and its Advocacy Committee, I write in support of an open letter from the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) written on December 18, 2023. As a partner learned society under the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), we urge you to uphold and protect academic and creative freedom on your campuses.
Since October 2023, we have seen a surge in threats to faculty, students, and college staff. The current Gaza-Israel conflict has generated widespread academic and scholastic debate; we call upon you during this difficult time to protect free speech and to defend academic freedom for all campus community members. We also urge you to refrain from censoring artist exhibitions in your campus galleries and museums.
CAA honors diversity and reflects an extraordinary range of cultures, perspectives, education, and experiences that make the advancement of art and design integral to our global constituencies and to culture at large.
CAA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of artistic expression and exhibition. We agree with MESA that “free speech is essential for any democratic polity, and this country’s institutions of higher education should be places in which even the most controversial and unpopular views can be expressed, debated and criticized. At the same time, all students deserve equal access to education, free from harassment and discrimination. Unfortunately, we are witnessing a dramatic increase in antisemitic, anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim harassment and discrimination on our campuses.”
As university leaders, you bear responsibility during charged political times to safeguard academic freedom, freedom of expression and artistic practice, as well as the physical welfare of all members of your community. We urge you to protect students, faculty, and staff and honor their right to freedom of speech without fear of intimidation, harassment, or retaliation.
Sincerely,
Jennifer Rissler, PhD
President, Board of Directors
CAA | Advancing Art and Design
CAA 2023 Professional Development Fellows Announced
posted by CAA — Feb 05, 2024
Congratulations to our 2023 Professional Development fellows, Zoe Weldon-Yochim, University of California, Santa Cruz (Art History) and Kelly Tapia-Chuning, Cranbrook Academy of Art (Visual Art)!
Honorable Mentions: Jocelyn E. Marshall, Emerson College (Art History); Breanna Reiss, University of New Mexico (Art History); Jessica Monette, Stanford University (Visual Art).
Zoe Weldon-Yochim is a PhD Candidate in Visual Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, whose areas of specialization include the art and visual culture of the United States, global contemporary art, and the theories and methods associated with ecocriticism. Her research involves attending to how various artists grapple with the difficulties of visuality and environmental injustices, particularly the long-term and often invisible slow violence of US militarism, nuclear toxicities, and extraction. Her dissertation, “Atomic Afterlives: Visualizing Nuclear Toxicity in Art of the United States, 1979–2011,” focuses on a selection of underrepresented American artists whose work, stemming from genealogies of research-based conceptual art and documentary practices, brings nuclear histories and concerns into aesthetic form in singular, conflictual, and shared ways. In this project, Weldon-Yochim examines how diverse visual approaches—such as installation, photography, print media, and painting—mediate, represent, and give agency to the nuclear and its atomic afterlives. Her research illuminates burgeoning artistic conceptualizations of the intersection of militarism and environmentalism during and beyond the last decade of the Cold War, where particular women, Indigenous, and Asian American artists mobilized varying visual grammar to consider the interconnectedness of environmental injustices and an ever-expanding US military system. Weldon-Yochim’s work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Henry Luce Foundation, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and numerous university grants.
Kelly Tapia-Chuning is a mixed-race Chicana artist of Indigenous descent from southern Utah who is currently based in Detroit. Tapia-Chuning’s work forms as a response to her family’s histories of assimilation, questioning power dynamics attached to representation, racial identity, and language. Tapia-Chuning utilizes research, textile deconstruction, and needle-felting to convey the dichotomy of being nepantla, born in-between spaces and cultures.
In 2020, she received a BFA in Studio Arts from Southern Utah University and is pursuing an MFA in Fiber at Cranbrook Academy of Art, where she was awarded a Gilbert Fellowship. Tapia-Chuning’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, GAVLAK (Los Angeles), Onna House (East Hampton, NY), The Border Project Space (NY), and solo exhibitions with Red Arrow Gallery (Nashville, TN) and Harsh Collective (NY). She has been an artist in residence at Stove Works (Chattanooga, TN), and Zion National Park, in Utah. Tapia-Chuning’s work is in numerous public and private collections across the US.
Jocelyn E. Marshall is faculty in the Departments of Visual & Media Arts and Writing, Literature, & Publishing at Emerson College. She previously was a Dissertation Scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center. Their interdisciplinary projects focus on contemporary US-based diasporic women and LGBTQ+ artists and writers, researching relationships between historical trauma and queer and feminist activism. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of American Culture, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Public Art Dialogue, and elsewhere. In 2022, they co-edited Trauma-Informed Pedagogy: Addressing Gender-Based Violence in the Classroom, and in 2023 edited a multimedia issue of Rutgers University’s Rejoinder journal, themed Textual-Sexual-Spiritual: Artistic Practice and Other Rituals as Queer Becoming and Beyond. She also curates contemporary art exhibitions, including Being In-Between | In-Between Being (2020–21) and Creativity in the Time of Covid-19 (2023). She currently co-chairs the Gender & Feminisms Caucus at the Society for Cinema & Media Studies and is a contributing editor at Art Journal Open for the Feminist Interview Project.
Dr. Marshall’s research has been supported by, among other institutions, the Mark Diamond Research Foundation, J. Burton Harter Foundation, and New York Public Library. Her first book project draws from interviews and archival research to connect select US-based Asian and Latinx diasporic women artists as an underexamined cohort in feminist art history, contextualizing their aesthetic and poetic interventions as coterminous with shifts in US trauma studies and feminist theory. A portion of this project received Honorable Mention for the 2022 National Women’s Studies Association-Feminist Formations Paper Award.
Breanna Reiss is a PhD candidate at the University of New Mexico who studies pre-Hispanic ceramics, primarily from coastal Ecuador and northern Peru, with a focus on their iconography and elements of their composition. She also received her MA from UNM where, in partnership with the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, she examined the chemical composition of rare blue and blue-green post-fire ceramic figurine colorants from Ecuador. Her dissertation explores ancient Moche plant motifs, relating them to identifiable species and exploring their contextual relationships to narrative scenes. This plantcentric approach has identified several biomes and ecological indicators important to Moche culture. Along with teaching introductory art history courses, she has received numerous fellowships with UNM’s Center for Southwest Research and the Digital Initiatives and Scholarly Communication Department, and currently works for Georgia Tech Research Institute.
Jessica Monette is an interdisciplinary artist living in the Bay Area whose creative endeavors span the diverse realms of painting, sculpture, installation, and collage. Materiality forms the core of Monette’s artistic expression, each chosen element serving as a deliberate conduit for context and personal narrative. Her repertoire includes a wide array of materials—from house paint, plaster, and thin-set mortar to found and fabricated objects, site-specific soil, rope, nails, cotton, railroad spikes, water from the Mississippi River, and clothing collected from various family members. To New Orleans–born Monette, these materials aren’t just art components, her materials are agents for rebuilding and storytelling. The cataclysmic events of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 undergird her work and serve as a potent visual metaphor for contemporary colonial sediment, encapsulating a temporal lens that reveals the nuances of systemic oppressions. Economic inequality, gentrification, unequal aid distribution, environmental racism, forced migration, and the erosion of cultural heritage—Katrina becomes a concentrated manifestation of these issues.
Monette’s reconstruction of her familial archive, challenges systems of oppression that are created to perpetuate silence. The threads of her narrative, woven together through materials and thematic exploration, contribute to a powerful dialogue that invites viewers to reexamine the need for persistence of cultural memory and the tenacity of the human spirit.
Learn more about CAA Professional Development Fellowships here.
S. Hollis Clayson Named AC2024 Distinguished Scholar
posted by CAA — Nov 29, 2023
The Distinguished Scholar session at the 112th CAA Annual Conference will honor the acclaimed career of S. Hollis Clayson. Clayson has been at the forefront of art history scholarship as part of the first generation of feminist academics whose work centers on representations of the female body, the role of art in social and political conflict, and the intersection of art and technology.
Hollis Clayson is Professor Emerita of Art History and Bergen Evans Professor Emerita in the Humanities at Northwestern University where she taught for thirty-five years, advising twenty-seven doctoral dissertations. A specialist in nineteenth-century European art, she has published widely on art practice in Paris as well as transatlantic cultural exchanges, especially those between France and the United States. Her books include Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era (Yale University Press, 1991), Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life Under Siege (1870–71) (University of Chicago Press, 2002), Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century? Essays on Art and Modernity, 1850–1900, co-edited with André Dombrowski (Routledge, 2016), and Illuminated Paris: Essays on Art and Lighting in the Belle Époque (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Her book in progress is entitled The Dark Side of the Eiffel Tower.
Clayson’s research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Getty Research Institute, the Clark Art Institute, Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), the Huntington Library, Columbia University’s Reid Hall in Paris, and the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art. In early 2014, she was named a Chevalier in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French Ministry of Culture.
From 2006–13 she served as the founding Director of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern. She was Sterling Clark Professor in Art History, Williams College in fall 2005; the Samuel H. Kress Professor at CASVA (2013–14; and in fall 2015, she was Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Most recently, she was the 2022–23 R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library.
Dr. Clayson’s career and her impact on the field will be celebrated with presentations and a dialogue with scholars and colleagues:
Session Chairs:
Anne Helmreich, Smithsonian Archives of American Art
Hector Reyes, University of Southern California
Session Panelists:
Thomas Crow, New York University
André Dombrowski, University of Pennsylvania
Marc Gotlieb, Williams College
Martha Ward, University of Chicago
The AC2024 Distinguished Scholar Session will be held on Thursday, February 15, 4:30–6:30 p.m. CT at the Hilton Chicago. This event will also be livestreamed on YouTube.
Register now for the CAA 112th Annual Conference, February 14–17, 2024 in Chicago!
CAA Signs ACLS Statement on Proposed Cuts at West Virginia University
posted by CAA — Sep 14, 2023
CAA has signed on to the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) statement, Fighting for an Ambitious Vision of Public Higher Education in America, in response to proposed cuts at West Virginia University. CAA stands with ACLS in the belief that the stewards of the university are “duty-bound to protect the creation and circulation of knowledge for the public good in all its diverse aspects, across disciplines and interdisciplinary areas.”
“By proposing major cuts in its undergraduate and graduate programs, including engineering, environmental planning, languages other than English, law, linguistics, mathematics, music, public administration, and theater, the university is denying its students and the people of West Virginia access to the wide range of knowledge necessary to fulfill that mission. The path WVU is treading is unprecedented for a public flagship and dangerous for American higher education and society.”
Other learned societies and higher education institutions who have signed the ACLS statement:
American Academy of Religion
American Folklore Society
American Historical Association
American Society for Environmental History
Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Association of University Presses
College Art Association
Dance Studies Association
Linguistic Society of America
Medieval Academy of America
North American Conference on British Studies
Rhetoric Society of America
Society for Cinema and Media Studies
Society for Ethnomusicology
Society for Music Theory
CAA Signs ACLS Statement on SCOTUS Affirmative Action Ruling
posted by CAA — Jul 07, 2023
Following the June 30 CAA Executive Director’s response to the US Supreme Court ruling invalidating race-conscious admissions considerations, CAA signed on to the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) statement on affirmative action.
The SCOTUS ruling stands in stark contrast to CAA’s commitment to meaningful diversity, equity, and inclusion practices. We concur with ACLS that “the active participation of diverse people in the scholarly enterprise is the best way to combat historic and systemic inequities,” and we remain dedicated to the contributions of all art scholars and practitioners.
Other learned societies and higher education institutions who have signed the ACLS statement:
American Academy of Religion
American Folklore Society
American Historical Association
American Philosophical Association
American Political Science Association
American Society for Environmental History
American Society for Theatre Research
Association for Jewish Studies
Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Association for the Study of African American Life and History
Association of University Presses
German Studies Association
Medieval Academy of America
National Women’s Studies Association
North American Conference on British Studies
Oral History Association
Organization of American Historians
Rhetoric Society of America
Shakespeare Association of America
Society for Cinema and Media Studies
Society for Ethnomusicology
Society for Social Studies of Science
Society of Architectural Historians
Society of Biblical Literature
CAA Signs ACLS Statement on Florida House Bill 999
posted by CAA — Mar 07, 2023
CAA has signed on to a statement issued by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) regarding Florida HB 999. This bill would radically shift Florida’s approach to higher education in a manner that negatively impacts diversity and academic freedom; this is antithetical to CAA’s mission.
CAA stands with ACLS, together with other academic societies, and shares their belief that, if passed, the bill “ends academic freedom in the state’s public colleges and universities, with dire consequences for their teaching, research, and financial well-being.”
The full ACLS statement on Florida HB 999 can be viewed here. CAA encourages individual and institutional members to visit the ACLS website and sign on to the ACLS statement, as well as contact legislators, write op-eds, and proliferate information on social media to fight this bill.
Other learned societies and higher education institutions who have signed the ACLS statement:
American Academy of Religion
American Anthropological Association
American Association for Italian Studies
American Folklore Society
American Historical Association
American Musicological Society
American Philosophical Association
American Political Science Association
American Society for Environmental History
American Sociological Association
Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Association for the Study of African American Life and History
Association of University Presses
College Art Association
German Studies Association
Latin American Studies Association
Linguistic Society of America
Medieval Academy of America
Modern Language Association
National Council of Teachers of English
National Council on Public History
National Women’s Studies Association
Organization of American Historians
Rhetoric Society of America
Sixteenth Century Society & Conference
Society for Ethnomusicology
Society for Music Theory
Society for the History of Technology
Society of Biblical Literature
World History Association
CAA has also signed on to a Florida HB 999 statement issued by the American Historical Association (AHA) which can be viewed here.
Other organizations who have signed the AHA statement:
African American Intellectual History Society
American Anthropological Association
American Association for the History of Medicine
American Association of University Professors
American Folklore Society
American Philosophical Association
American Society for Environmental History
American Sociological Association
Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Association for the Study of African American Life and History
Association of Ancient Historians
Association of University Presses
Berkshire Conference of Women Historians
Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire
Central European History Society
College Art Association
Committee on LGBT History
Conference on Latin American History
Executive Committee of the Czechoslovak Studies Association
French Colonial Historical Society
German Studies Association
H-France
Historians for Peace and Democracy
Immigration and Ethnic History Society
Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library
Labor and Working Class History Association
LGBTQ History Museum of Central Florida
Linguistic Society of America
Medieval Academy of America
National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education
National Council on Public History
National Council of Teachers of English
New England Historical Association
North American Conference on British Studies
North American Society for Oceanic History
Organization of American Historians
PEN America
Polish American Historical Association
Radical History Review
Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media
Shakespeare Association of America
Social Welfare History Group
Society for Austrian and Habsburg History
Society for French Historical Studies
Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Society for Textual Scholarship
Society for the History of the Early American Republic
Society for the History of Technology
Society for the History of the Early American Republic
Society for U.S. Intellectual History
Southern Historical Association
Texas Institute of Letters
Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse University
Western Society for French History
Woodhull Freedom Foundation
World History Association