CAA News Today

Affiliated Society News for May 2013

posted by CAA — May 09, 2013

American Institute for Conservation

The American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC) is hosting its 2013 annual meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana, from May 29 to June 1, 2013. Its theme, “The Contemporary in Conservation,” will focus on contemporary approaches to conservation—not only the conservation of contemporary art—and include perspectives from both within and outside the field. In addition to the treatment of contemporary art, the conference will consider digitization, environmental sustainability, and the effects of architectural design on the preservation of objects as well as current trends in exhibition design and the new challenges they present for preservation, including greater physical access, longer display times, and more touring exhibitions. Learn more about the upcoming AIC meeting at www.conservation-us.org/meetings and join the organization for the lively discussions that will take place.

Art Libraries Society of North America

The Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) and the Visual Resources Association Foundation (VRAF) will once again sponsor the Summer Educational Institute for Visual Resources and Image Management (SEI), to be held June 18–21, 2013, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. This collaborative professional training program, now in its tenth year, addresses the evolving requirements of image-management professionals. Expert instructors will cover intellectual-property rights, offer a hands-on digital-imaging workshop, and describe best practices and tools for metadata and cataloging. A “think-camp” discussion session will identify topic preferences from registrants, such as the future of the profession, uses of social and new media, visual literacy, and the digital humanities. More than four hundred people serving in a range of professional roles have benefited from past SEIs, including art historians, visual-resources curators, university librarians, archivists, and museum professionals responsible for image rights and reproductions. For more information, please contact the SEI cochairs: Betha Whitlow or Amy Trendler.

Historians of German and Central European Art and Architecture

During CAA’s 2013 Annual Conference in New York, the Historians of German and Central European Art and Architecture (HGCEA) hosted a two-part panel, “Central Europe’s Others in Art and Visual Culture,” chaired by Brett Van Hoesen and Elizabeth Otto, and an Emerging Scholars panel, led by Keith Holz. HGCEA also organized a dinner party at the Scandinavia House, which was attended by about sixty members of the society. The gathering celebrated the achievements of two retiring colleagues, Françoise Foster-Hahn and Reinhold Heller. Former HGCEA president Steven Mansbach delivered a eulogy on Foster-Hahn, and present board member Jay Clark did the same for Heller. The current HGCEA president, Marsha Morton, presented the prize for the winner of HGCEA’s first essay contest to Pepper Stetler and bestowed honorary mention to Amy Hamlin and Elizabeth Brisman. The contest was an initiative for the encouragement and recognition of young scholars. Sixteen essays published during 2011 and 2012 were submitted. A new appeal will be issued for essays published in 2012.

Historians of Netherlandish Art

The Historians of Netherlandish Art (HNA) has published the winter 2013 issue of the open-access, refereed electronic journal, the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art. Contents include articles by Sally Whitman Coleman, Matthijs Ilsink and Monica Marchesi, and Elizabeth Sutton, as well as translations of part one and two of D. C. Meijer Jr.’s “The Amsterdam Civic Guard Portraits within and outside the New Rijksmuseum.”

HNA solicits session and workshop proposals for the organization’s quadrennial conference, to be held in Boston, Massachusetts, June 5–7, 2014. For the first time, this event will take place together and in cooperation with the conference of the American Association for Netherlandic Studies. HNA welcomes proposals for sessions that represent new directions in the study of Netherlandish art between 1350 and 1750. Proposals may focus on individual disciplines within this chronological spectrum or feature interdisciplinary approaches and collaborative endeavors. Sessions will be two hours long with a maximum of four papers each. HNA also invites proposals for workshops designed to allow for group discussion of focused topics. Workshop proposals should define the matter to be addressed and describe how discussion will be generated. Prospective session and workshop proposals should be sent via email by May 15, 2013, to Paul Crenshaw, chair of the program committee.

International Sculpture Center

The International Sculpture Center (ISC) will hold the 2013 International Sculpture Symposium in Miami, Florida, from December 1 to 4, 2013. The program is cosponsored by Florida International University and the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum and will comprise daytime and evening programming, including keynote addresses, panel discussions, and an iron pour led by the international sculptor Coral Lambert, joined by Iron Maidens and other selected artists. The symposium marks the first ISC program held in the city of Miami, spans four days, and precedes Art Basel Miami Beach, which takes place December 5–8. Artists and enthusiasts from around the world will have the opportunity to participate in a week of dynamic cultural events. Please visit www.sculpture.org/miami2013 for more details and to join the Miami event mailing list to receive updates as they become available. Discounted early-bird registration for ISC members opens on June 1. Questions should be directed to events@sculpture.org or 609-689-1051, ext. 302.

Italian Art Society

The Italian Art Society (IAS) has announced its new officers and committee members: Cathleen A. Fleck, president; Sheryl E. Reiss, executive vice president; and Nicola Camerlenghi, vice president for programming. The Awards Committee now includes Janis Elliott (chair), Jill Pederson, and Eve Straussman-Pflanzer. Joining the Nominating Committee are Brian Curran (chair) and Janna Israel. The Program Committee welcomes Dorothy Glass and Rebekah Perry, and the Graduate Student and Emerging Scholars Committee greets its new members, Sarah Wilkins and Ashley Elston. IAS thanks those whose terms have ended for their service.

IAS will sponsor four sessions at the International Congress for Medieval Art in Kalamazoo, Michigan; see the IAS website for the titles and the names of the speakers. IAS seeks proposals for papers for its two 2014 CAA Annual Conference sessions: “Periodization Anxiety in Italian Art: Renaissance, Baroque, or Early Modern?” (chairs: Frances Gage and Eva Struhal); and “‘Futuro Anteriore’: Cultural Self-Appropriation as Catalyst in the Art of Italy”(chairs Alison Perchuk and Irina D. Costache). Please visit the IAS website for the CAA session descriptions and submission instructions. Deadline: May 6, 2013.

The speaker of the fourth annual Italian Art Society–Kress Foundation Lecture Series in Italy is Sarah Blake McHam of Rutgers University, who will present “Laocoön, or Pliny Vindicated” at the Fondazione Marco Besso in Rome on Tuesday, May 28, 2013, at 6:00 PM.

Mid-America College Art Association

The board of the Mid-America College Art Association (MACAA) will hold a retreat May 24–25, 2013, in San Antonio, Texas, in preparation for its 2014 conference, which will be hosted by the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). The conference chair is Scott Sherer, and the UTSA institution coordinator is Gregory Elliot. The conference contact is Laura Crist, who can be reached at macaa2014@utsa.edu or 210-458-4391. Conference details will be posted on the MACAA and conference websites, as planning develops.

National Council of Arts Administrators

From September 25 to 28, 2013, Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond will host the forty-first annual conference of the National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA), which will focus on reexamining the value of uncertainty and doubt in the arts. The gathering will also spotlight current trends in arts administration; offer forums, speakers, and workshops; and create opportunities to network within a diverse community of higher-education arts professionals. You can expect top-notch speakers, timely and forward-looking sessions, an engaging administrator’s workshop, and much more. NCAA enthusiastically welcomes new members and any interested parties to its events. Learn more about the 2013 conference.

New Media Caucus

The New Media Caucus (NMC) has announced the results of the elections for president, treasurer, and board members. The new president is Vagner Whitehead, associate professor at Oakland University. His term as president-elect begins immediately and runs until the 2014 CAA Annual Conference in Chicago, when he will become president at the 2014 annual business meeting. Reelected as treasurer is Jim Jeffers, visiting lecturer at College of the Holy Cross, who has been actively involved in NMC leadership since the organization’s founding ten years ago. He has served as treasurer for the past two years, a critical position as NMC pursues 501(c)(3) status. Joining the board are Victoria Bradbury, a researcher at the Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss, University of Sutherland; Mina Cheon, interdisciplinary professor, Maryland Institute College of Art; Carlos Rosas, associate professor, Pennsylvania State University; and Jessica Westbrook, assistant professor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. View a listing of the entire NMC board of directors and officers and the constitution and bylaws, which describes the terms and election processes.

Public Art Dialogue

At the 2013 CAA Annual Conference in New York, Public Art Dialogue (PAD) sponsored Sally Webster’s session, “Reconsidering Mural Painting: New Methodologies,” which featured five papers: “In the Making: Mural Painting and the Look of Reform in Theodore Roosevelt’s America” by Annelise K. Madsen; “Picturing Jewish History in 1920s Hollywood: The Murals in the Wilshire Boulevard Temple” from MacKenzie Stevens; “‘No Vain Glory’: Cartography and Murals in the American War Cemeteries in France” by Kate C. Lemay; “Looking Beyond ‘The Wall’: Reconstructing City Walls’ Gateway to Soho” from Andrew Wasserman; and “The Renewed ‘Spirit of Hyde Park’: A Case Study in Mural Restoration” by Emily Scibilia. Sarah Schrank was the discussant. A roundtable chaired by Norie Sato on “Time, Transience, Duration” featured presentations by Penny Balkin Bach, Renee Piechocki, and Marisa Lerer.

Penny Balkin Bach of the Association for Public Art (aPA), based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, received PAD’s annual lifetime achievement award. Bach has been in the field since the early 1970s, and under her leadership aPA (formerly called the Fairmount Park Art Association, whose staff she joined in 1980) has sponsored numerous groundbreaking installations and special projects. Open Air, which premiered in October 2012, was a spectacular interactive light installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Bach’s tireless and innovative work has transformed the field of public art.

Society for Photographic Education

The Society for Photographic Education (SPE) seeks proposals for “Collaborative Exchanges: Photography in Dialogue,” its fifty-first national conference, to be held March 6–9, 2014, in Baltimore, Maryland. SPE is accepting proposals for the 2014 conference through June 1, 2013. Topics, which are not required to be theme based, may include but are not limited to: image making, history, contemporary theory and criticism, new technologies, effects of media and culture, educational issues, and funding. Membership in SPE is required to submit, and all proposals are peer reviewed. Descriptions for the five presentation formats follow:

Graduate Student: short presentation of your own artistic work and a brief introduction to your graduate program
Imagemaker: presentation on your own artistic work (photography, film, video, performance, installation, multidisciplinary approaches)
Lecture: presentation on historical topic, theory, or another artist’s work
Panel: a group led by a moderator to discuss a chosen topic
Teach: presentations, workshops, or demos that address educational issues, including teaching resources and strategies; curricula to serve diverse artists and changing student populations; seeking promotion and tenure; avoiding burnout, and professional exchange

Visit the website for information on how to join SPE and for full proposal guidelines.

Society for the Study of Early Modern Women

The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (SSEMW) has announced the names, fields, and affiliations of its officers and committee members for 2013: the new president is Jane Couchman, French and women’s studies, York University; the new vice president is Megan Matchinske, comparative literature and English, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; a past president is Allyson Poska, history, Mary Washington University; a second past president is Pamela Benson, English, Rhode Island College; the new treasurer is Deborah Uman, English, St. John Fisher College; the new secretary is Abby Zanger, French, independent scholar; and the new web and listserv coordinator is Karen Nelson, Center for Literary and Comparative Studies, English, University of Maryland, College Park.

The Executive Committee now comprises: Eve Straussman-Pflanzer, art, Art Institute of Chicago; Shannon Miller, English, Temple University; Michelle Dowd, English, University of North Carolina, Greensboro; Meredith Ray, Italian and women’s studies, University of Delaware; Renee Baernstein, history, Miami University; Sheila Cavanaugh, English, Emory University; and Lauren Shook, English, University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

The Awards Committee will consist of: Marina Leslie, English, Northeastern University (chair for 2013); Heidi Brayman Hackel, English, University of California, Riverside; Wendy Heller, music, Princeton University; Mary Nyquist, women and gender, University of Toronto; Eleanor Hubbard, history, Princeton University; Bronwen Wilson, art history, University of British Columbia; Leah Chang, French, George Washington University; Sheila ffolliott, art history, George Mason University (emerita); and Sarah Ross, English, Massey University.

For additional information, including members of the Nominating Committee, please see About SSEMW section on http://ssemw.org.

Society of Architectural Historians

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a one-year grant of $51,330 to the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) to administer the SAH/Mellon Author Awards. The award is a temporary measure to provide financial relief to early-career scholars who are publishing monographs on architectural history and the history of the built environment and responsible for paying for rights and permissions for images in their publications. Through this grant SAH will provide awards to emerging scholars (those with PhDs earned during the past six years) to help defray the high costs of image licensing and reproduction for monographs on the history of the built environment. Awards will be made once in 2013 for print (hardcover, softcover) and digital publications (ebook, DVD). Awardees will be selected on the basis of the quality and demonstrated financial need for their project. SAH anticipates awarding approximately ten SAH/Mellon Author Awards in 2013. Deadline: June 1, 2013.

Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture

In response to increasing interest in the field, the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) is extending its activities with renewed vigor under new leadership. After voting in January 2013, Margaret Samu was elected president, and Natasha Kurchanova was chosen vice president and will serve as president-elect. Yelena Kalinsky has become secretary-treasurer, and Inge Wierda will be the society’s webmaster. Joining them on the board of directors are Kathleen Duff, Eva Forgacs, Mark Svede, Danilo Udovicki, and Alla Vronskaya.

SHERA sponsors sessions and holds regular meetings at both CAA and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, maintains an active listserv and Facebook page, and is currently creating a new website. New members are welcome; please direct your inquiries to SHERA.artarchitecture@gmail.com for more information.

Society of North American Goldsmiths

The Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG) will hold its forty-second annual conference from May 15 to 18, 2013, in Toronto, Ontario, at the downtown historic Fairmont Royal York Hotel. Titled “Meta-Mosaic,” the event will celebrate the multiple industries within jewelry and metalsmithing in the twenty-first century. Toronto is a mosaic of peoples and cultures as well as the center of Canada’s jewelry industry. This conference will examine a fluid identity within art, craft, and design and inspire attendees to embrace a collective mosaic. Join SNAG for presentations and panels featuring industry luminaries from across the globe, rapid-fire presentations by international designers and artists, over twenty exhibition, the third annual member Trunk Show Sale, social events, and so much more! Online registration has closed, but you can still register onsite beginning at 3:00 PM on May 15.

Visual Resources Association

Filed under: Affiliated Societies —

Reflections on the Annual Conference, the Year Past, and the Year to Come

posted by Anne Collins Goodyear — Mar 05, 2013

Anne Collins Goodyear is president of the CAA Board of Directors.

CAA’s Annual Conference was typically lively and rewarding. With nearly six thousand participants, representing all fifty states—and the District of Columbia—and fifty-three countries, CAA hosted well over two hundred sessions addressing a broad range of topics, including contemporary art practice, criticism, pedagogy, issues in museums, and the history of art. As participation in the conference by colleagues from around the world continues to grow, we were pleased to welcome twenty recipients of CAA International Travel Grants, generously supported by the Getty Foundation, and further discussed by Ann Albritton, Chair of CAA’s International Committee, in an article that will soon be published on the CAA website.

The conference took advantage of new technologies, providing, for the first time, wireless internet access free of charge to conference goers throughout the conference rooms, and making possible the broad spread use of Skype to involve panelists and respondents unable to be in New York. CAA also hosted its first ever THATCamp (The Humanities And Technology) on February 11 and 12, fully subscribed with seventy-five scholars, just before the official start of the conference. A follow up session held during the conference continued a stimulating discussion about the promise and current role of new technologies for art historians.

New technologies are shaping CAA’s publications, two of which celebrate major milestones this year. The Annual Conference enabled us to mark the centennial of The Art Bulletin and the fifteenth anniversary of caa.reviews—both of which were toasted with cake and champagne following our Annual Members’ Business Meeting. In connection with this, each publication, thanks to a $20,000 grant from the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, has undertaken open-access online projects using the Scalar platform. Thelma Thomas, chair of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board, graciously demonstrated her online compilation “Publishing The Art Bulletin: Past, Present, and Future,” (http://scalar.usc.edu/anvc/the-art-bulletin/index) at the meeting. A forthcoming Scalar project by the caa.reviews editor-in chief, Sheryl Reiss, will address the exhibition Bernini: Sculpting in Clay at the Kimbell Art Museum.

As the terrain of scholarly publishing continues to evolve, the high cost of scholarly publications, due in large part to the necessity of obtaining copyright and other clearance permissions for reproductions, concerns all of us. CAA is thus deeply appreciative of a one-year Meiss/Mellon Author Grant for $69,698 to offer subventions to emerging scholars who are publishing monographs in art history and visual studies and to advertise the award. Applications for the first round of the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award are now being accepted. The deadline for spring submissions is March 15, 2013. Fall applications are due October 1, 2013. For more information see: http://www.collegeart.org/meissmellon/.

The larger question of when copyrighted material may be used without licensing in accordance with the principles of fair use is at the heart of a major initiative by CAA to establish Fair Use Best Practice Guidelines, undertaken with the assistance of generous support from the Kress and Mellon Foundations. The project is addressed in greater depth in Jeffrey Cunard’s article, published today. See: https://www.collegeart.org/news/2013/03/05/caas-task-force-on-fair-use-meets-during-annual-conference/.

As the Strategic Plan for 2010–2015 draws to its conclusion (available at http://www.collegeart.org/about/plan), the Board of Directors has now embarked, having convened a task force for the purpose, on the development of a 2015–2020 Strategic Plan. We are eager for your input into the plan and to hear from you about what you feel is working well within the organization and where our services could be strengthened. A related survey will be distributed later this year, and key issues will be discussed with the CAA membership next February at the 2014 Annual Members’ Business Meeting.

As always, CAA welcomes input from its membership on any topic of interest to the field. Please feel free to consult directly with the staff and board and/or to take advantage of CAA’s Facebook page to share your views. See: https://www.facebook.com/collegeartassociation.

Filed under: Annual Conference, Board of Directors, Governance —

Mellon Foundation Helps CAA Initiate a Publishing Award for Emerging Scholars

posted by Christopher Howard — Jan 23, 2013

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the College Art Association (CAA) a one-year grant of $60,000 to administer the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award. The award is a temporary measure to provide financial relief to early-career scholars in art history and visual studies who are responsible for paying for rights and permissions for images in their publications. The Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award will provide grants directly to emerging scholars to offset the high costs of image acquisition. Recipients will be selected on the basis of the quality and financial need of their project, and awards will be made twice during the year (in the spring and fall) in conjunction with CAA’s Millard Meiss Publication Fund awards to publishers. CAA anticipates awarding between eight and ten Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Awards in 2013.

The Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award supports image rights and reproduction costs for books on topics in art history and visual studies. The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) also received one year of funding from the Andrew Mellon Foundation and will award grants to emerging scholars who are publishing monographs on the built environment. Both the CAA and SAH awards will provide leading authors in the early stages of their careers with the financial resources to acquire images for scholarly publications. For information about the SAH award, visit www.sah.org or contact Beth Eifrig at info@sah.org.

Applications for the first round of the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award are now being accepted. The deadline for submission is March 15, 2013, with a second round of applications due on September 15, 2013. CAA will administer the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award according to guidelines developed for the Millard Meiss Publication Fund grant, an award established in 1975 by a generous bequest from the late Professor Millard Meiss. The jury for the award, comprising distinguished, mid-career or senior scholars whose specializations cover a broad range of art scholarship, has discretion over the number of and size of the awards. For further information about the award and to apply, please visit www.collegeart.org/meissmellon.

CAA seeks to alleviate high reproductions rights costs related to publishing in the arts. With funding from a separate grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, CAA recently initiated a project to explore the overall impact of copyright on the arts and how different understandings of copyright affect creative and scholarly choices in the visual arts. Over a four-year period, from 2013–2016, CAA will produce an issues report and a code of best practices for fair use in the creation and curation of artworks and scholarly publishing in the visual arts.

For further information please contact Virginia Reinhart, CAA marketing and communications associate, at vreinhart@collegeart.org or 212-392-4426. For information on applying to the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award, please contact Alex Gershuny, CAA editorial associate, at agershuny@collegeart.org or 212-392-4424.

Filed under: Books, Grants and Fellowships, Publications —

Recent Deaths in the Arts

posted by Christopher Howard — Dec 19, 2012

In its monthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, architects, photographers, and others whose work has significantly influenced the visual arts. The end of 2012 was marked by the loss of the painter Will Barnet, the architect Oscar Niemeyer, and the museum director Gudmund Vigtel.

Evelyn Ackerman, a Californian artist and designer who worked in mosaics, tapestries, and wood carving, died on November 28, 2012, at age 88. She often collaborated with her husband, the artist Jerome Ackerman; their work was recognized in a retrospective exhibition, Masters of Mid-Century California Modernism, at the Mingei International Museum in San Diego
Gae Aulenti, the Italian architect and designer who transformed a Paris train station into the Musée d’Orsay, died on October 31, 2012. She was 84. Aulenti also worked on renovations to museums in Barcelona, Istanbul, San Francisco, and Venice
Takashi Azumaya, an independent Japanese curator, died on October 16, 2012, at the age of 44. After working at the Setagaya Art Museum and the Mori Art Museum, he became the first non-Korean director of the Busan Biennale, which he organized in 2010
Will Barnet, a painter and printmaker who lived and worked in New York for many decades, passed away on November 13, 2012. He was 101 years old. Barnet, who won CAA’s 2007 Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement, had taught at the Art Students League and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, among other schools
Marshall J. Bouldin III, a portraitist based in Mississippi who painted Richard Nixon’s daughters, died on November 12, 2012. He was 89 years old
David C. Copley, the former owner and publisher of the San Diego Union-Tribune and a philanthropist of the arts, died on November 20, 2012, at age 60. Copley was a member of board of directors for the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
Johanna Liesbeth de Kooning, the only daughter of the artist Willem de Kooning and the cofounder of his estate and trust, passed away on November 23, 2012. She was 56 years old
Robert W. Duemling, the former director of the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, and a board member of the Society of Architectural Historians, died on July 13, 2012, at age 83. Duemling had spent four years in naval intelligence and thirty years in the US Foreign Service after earning his master’s degree in the history of art and architecture from Yale University in 1953
Jacques Dupin, a French poet and art critic, died on October 27, 2012, at the age of 85. A longtime director of Galerie Maeght in Paris, Dupin wrote the official biography of Joan Miró as well as ten monographs on the artist’s work
Georgia Fee, the cofounder, chief executive officer, and editor-in-chief of Art Slant, died on December 8, 2012. Born in 1951, Fee developed Art Slant from a Los Angeles–based events calendar and online art magazine into a website with an international scope
Gray Foy, a New York artist and socialite, passed away on November 23, 2012, at the age of 90. Foy received acclaim for his drawing and illustrations in the mid-twentieth century but became better known as a tastemaker and salonnier, hosting parties and events that boasted attendees as diverse as Leonard Bernstein, Cary Grant, and Susan Sontag
Krisanne Frost, an artist based in San Antonio, Texas, and gallery liaison for the Blue Star Contemporary Art Center, died on December 6, 2012. She was 61 years old
Wendell Garrett, a historian and an appraiser on the television show Antiques Roadshow, died on November 14, 2012. He was 83. Among Garrett’s books are Victorian America: Classical Romanticism to Gilded Opulence (1993) and American Colonial: Puritan Simplicity to Georgian Grace (1995)
Richard Gordon, a photographer and a maker of handmade books, died on October 6, 2012, at age 67. Gordon’s most recent collection of images are American Surveillance (2009) and Notes from the Field (2012)
Rosalie B. Green, director of the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University from 1951 to 1981, passed away on February 24, 2012. She was 94 years old
Evelyn B. Harrison, a historian of Greek and Roman art and a professor in the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University from 1974 to 2006, died on November 3, 2012, at the age of 92. She had previously taught at the University of Cincinnati, Columbia University, and Princeton University
Alfred Kumalo, a South African photographer who document life under apartheid and the rise of Nelson Mandela, died on October 21, 2012. He was 82 years old
Glenys Lloyd-Morgan, a Canadian-born archaeologist of ancient Rome, passed away on September 21, 2012, at the age of 67. Raised and educated in England, she worked at the Grosvenor Museum in Chester and as a finds consultant
Arnaud Maggs, a Canadian photographer who shot portraits of Anne Murray and Leonard Cohen, died on November 17, 2012. He was 86 years old. Magg’s honors include a 2006 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and a 2012 Scotiabank Photography Award
Margaret M. Martin, a watercolorist based in Allentown, New York, died on November 29, 2012, at the age of 72. Her love of gardening inspired many of her still lifes of flowers
Menno Meewis, director of the Middelheimmuseum in Antwerp, Belgium, died on October 17, 2012, at age 58. He is credited with rejuvenating the museum and overseeing its expansion
Patricia Meilman, a scholar of Venetian Renaissance art, died on October 13, 2012. She was 65 years old. Her books include Titian and the Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice and The Cambridge Companion to Titian
Oscar Niemeyer, the renowned Brazilian architect, died on December 5, 2012, at the age of 104. He is best known for designing the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum and many government, commercial, and residential buildings for Brasília, his country’s new capital
Catherine Burchfield Parker, an artist who spent thirty years of her career in Buffalo, New York, died on November 6, 2012, at age 85. She was the daughter of the painter Charles Burchfield
Spain Rodriguez, an influential underground cartoonist based in San Francisco, California, died on November 28, 2012, at age 72. Rodriguez’s work was published by Zap Comics and in the East Village Other
William Turnbull, a modernist sculptor from Scotland, died on November 15, 2012. He was 90. Turnbull’s career, which spanned seven decades, included forays in figurative, organic semiabstract, and hard-edged geometric styles, as well as painting
Gudmund Vigtel, director of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, from 1963 to 1991, died on October 20, 2012. He was 87. Under his leadership the museum’s collection tripled in size and moved into a Richard Meier–designed building
Albert Wadle, an art dealer and philanthropist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, died on November 12, 2012. He was 84 years old
Shizuko Watari, the founder and director of Watari-um, the Watati Museum of Contemporary Art, in Japan, died on December 1, 2012, at age 80. She was also a curator and the director of Galerie Watari in Tokyo
Larry Welden, an artist and educator based in Sacramento, California, died on October 25, 2012, at age 90. He taught art at Sacramento City College from 1960 to 1985, and his watercolors focused on the landscapes of Northern California
Evelyn Williams, an English artist whose reliefs, drawings, and paintings were hard to categorize, died on November 14, 2012. She was 83 years old
Lebbeus Woods, an unconventional architect who built only one permanent structure, died on October 30, 2012. He was 72 years old. Woods was a professor at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York.

Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries, or your completed texts, to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the January list.

Filed under: Obituaries, People in the News —

Jeffrey R. Hayes: In Memoriam

posted by CAA — Oct 24, 2012

Tanya J. Tiffany is associate professor of art history in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

Jeffrey R. Hayes

Jeffrey R. Hayes, professor of art history and director of the master’s degree program in liberal studies at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, died on June 18, 2012. Hayes was an exceptional scholar, teacher, and colleague, and a pioneering figure in the field of outsider art in the United States.

Hayes received his BA in history from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1967. Following his service as captain in the US Army during the Vietnam War (from which he received an honorable discharge as a conscientious objector), Hayes returned to his native Maryland. In 1972 he earned an MLA in the history of ideas at Johns Hopkins University; the multidisciplinary scope of that program introduced him to art history. A decade later he completed his PhD in art history at the University of Maryland, where he worked under the guidance of Elizabeth Johns, who became a lifelong mentor and friend.

Hayes’s expertise in American art was far reaching. Building on his dissertation research, his first major scholarly works included an exhibition and catalogue as well as two groundbreaking monographs on the modernist painter Oscar Bluemner: Oscar Bluemner: Landscapes of Sorrow and Joy (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1988) and Oscar Bluemner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Hayes then turned his attention to curating exhibitions and writing catalogues on major collections and figures in outsider art, including Common Ground/Uncommon Vision: The Michael and Julie Hall Collection of American Folk Art, which was coauthored with Russell Bowman and Lucy Lippard and published by the Milwaukee Art Museum in 1993; The Art of Carl McKenzie (Milwaukee: UWM Art Museum, 1994); and Signs of Inspiration: The Art of Prophet William J. Blackmon (Milwaukee: Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, 1999).

In recent years Hayes returned to his research on Bluemner’s art with the volume Bluemner on Paper (New York: Barbara Mathes Gallery, 2005), and at the time of his death he was writing about the Wisconsin sculptors Mona Webb and Thomas Owen Every, known as Dr. Evermor. In addition to his many influential publications, Hayes also received prestigious awards and fellowships from institutions including the Smithsonian, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Philosophical Society.

From 1982 until his death, Hayes taught in the Department of Art History at University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, where he also served as department chair from 1989 until 1996. In 2000, he founded the master’s degree program in liberal studies, the only degree of its kind in the state school system; he remained the program’s director until his death.

Hayes was extraordinarily generous as a colleague and as a mentor to his many graduate students; his boundless energy, kindness, and humor will be greatly missed. In addition to his scholarship, Hayes was a strong political activist as well as an avid tennis player, fisherman, and swimmer.

Jeffrey Hayes is survived by his wife, Leslie; his three children, Eli, Zachary, and Ursula; and by his grandchildren.

Read another obituary on Hayes in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Filed under: Obituaries —

New Leaders for CAA’s Publications

posted by Christopher Howard — Jul 10, 2012

The president of the CAA Board of Directors, Anne Collins Goodyear, has confirmed new appointments to the editorial boards of CAA’s three scholarly journals and to the Publications Committee, in consultation with the vice president for publications, Randall C. Griffin. The appointments took effect on July 1, 2012.

The Art Bulletin

The Art Bulletin has announced its next editor-in-chief: Kirk Ambrose, associate professor and chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado in Boulder. In addition to numerous essays and book chapters, he is the author of The Nave Sculpture of Vézelay: The Art of Monastic Viewing (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2006) and the coeditor, with Robert A. Maxwell, of Current Directions in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Romanesque Sculpture Studies (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2010). His book Monsters in Twelfth-Century European Sculpture is forthcoming from Boydell and Brewer. Other future projects include a volume on Portuguese Romanesque sculpture and an exhibition at the University of Colorado Art Museum, tentatively entitled Aby Warburg and the Beginning of Cultural Studies in the American Southwest and scheduled for 2014. Ambrose will succeed Karen Lang of the University of Warwick in England, beginning his three-year term as editor-in-chief on July 1, 2013, with the preceding year as editor designate.

David J. Getsy, the Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has joined the Art Bulletin Editorial Board for a four-year term. His work focuses on modern and contemporary art in Europe and America from the 1870s to the present day. Among his books are Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905 (New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale University Press, 2004) and Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Getsy is currently editing the critical writings of the American postminimalist artist Scott Burton, for publication later this year by Soberscove Press.

Rachael DeLue, associate professor of art history at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, has begun a three-year term as the reviews editor of The Art Bulletin, succeeding Michael Cole of Columbia University in New York. Her first section will appear in the March 2013 issue. Thelma K. Thomas, associate professor of fine arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, has now entered the second year of her two-year service as the chair of the editorial board of the journal.

Art Journal

Michael Corris, professor of art and chair of the Division of Art in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, was appointed Art Journal reviews editor. He will serve one year as reviews editor designate, taking over from Howard Singerman of the University of Virginia in July 2013. Corris is both an artist and an author of many works on postwar and contemporary art and theory. The Peacock Gallery in London and the Reading Room in Dallas hosted his most recent solo shows; he has also exhibited widely as a member of the collaborative group Art & Language. Among Corris’s many publications are monographs on Ad Reinhardt (London: Reaktion Books, 2008) and David Diao (Beijing: Timezone 8, 2005). Two books forthcoming in 2013 are The Artist Out of Work: Selected Writings on Art (Les Presses du réel and JRP | Ringier) and What Do Artists Know? The Response to Deskilling in Art (Reaktion Books). Corris is a cofounder and editor of Transmission Annual, a collaborative project of Sheffield Hallam University in England and the Meadows School of the Arts.

Joining the Art Journal Editorial Board for four-year terms are Catherine Lord and Hilary Robinson. Lord is a writer, artist, and curator whose work addresses issues of feminism, cultural politics, and colonialism. She is a professor of studio art and women’s studies at the University of California, Irvine. Recent solo exhibitions were held at ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives and Jancar Gallery, both in Los Angeles. Lord is the author of the text-image experimental narrative The Summer of Her Baldness: A Cancer Improvisation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), and her forthcoming book project coedited with Richard Meyer, to be published by Phaidon, is called Art and Queer Culture, 1885–2005. Robinson is a professor of art theory and criticism in the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The focus of her scholarship is the history and theory of feminist art. Her books include Reading Art, Reading Irigaray: The Politics of Art by Women (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006) and Feminism-Art-Theory: A History, forthcoming from Blackwell. She is the editor of Visibly Female: Feminism and Art: An Anthology (London: Camden, 1987) and Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology 1968–2000 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001).

Lane Relyea, an art critic and associate professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has finished his year as editor designate of Art Journal and now assumes the position of editor-in-chief, succeeding Katy Siegel of Hunter College, City University of New York. His first edited issue will appear in spring 2013. Rachel Weiss, a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago whose work focuses on the art of Cuba, is the new chair of the journal’s editorial board. Weiss recently published To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

caa.reviews

The caa.reviews Editorial Board welcomes a new member, Tanya Sheehan, assistant professor in the Department of Art History at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, who will serve for four years. Currently the journal’s field editor for books on photography, she is the author of Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America, published by Pennsylvania State University Press in 2011.

Six new field editors for books and exhibitions have recently been chosen by the editorial board to serve three-year terms. Gloria Williams will commission reviews of exhibitions of pre-1800 art on the West Coast; Eve Straussman-Pflanzer will oversee reviews of exhibitions in the Midwest; and Jennifer Kingsley will commission reviews of exhibitions in the Southeast. Kirsten Swenson will assign books on contemporary art for review, and Megan O’Neil will commission reviews of books and related media on Precolumbian art. Michael Schreffler will handle reviews of books on early modern Iberian and colonial Latin American art.

Publications Committee

S. Hollis Clayson, Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities and professor of art history at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, was appointed to the Publications Committee as member-at-large. Clayson specializes in nineteenth-century modern European art, particularly French art; her most recent book is Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege (1870–71) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). She is the recipient of numerous research and teaching awards and, as director of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern, promotes discussion and projects focusing on humanities in the digital era. A former chair and member of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board, Clayson has served on CAA’s Annual Conference Committee and on the juries for three CAA awards: the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art, the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize, and the Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award.

Filed under: Art Bulletin, Art Journal, caa.reviews, Committees, People in the News, Publications —

Recipients of the 2012 Awards for Distinction

posted by Christopher Howard — Jan 18, 2012

CAA has announced the recipients of the 2012 Awards for Distinction, which honor the outstanding achievements and accomplishments of individual artists, art historians, authors, conservators, curators, and critics whose efforts transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.

CAA will formally recognize the recipients at a special awards ceremony during the 100th Annual Conference in Los Angeles, on Thursday afternoon, February 23, 2012, 12:30–2:00 PM, at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Led by Barbara Nesin, president of the CAA Board of Directors, the awards ceremony will take place in West Hall Meeting Room 502AB, Level 2; it is free and open to the public. The Los Angeles Convention Center is located downtown, at 1201 South Figueroa Street adjacent to the Staples Center.

The 2012 Annual Conference—presenting scholarly sessions, panel discussions, professional-development workshops, a Book and Trade Fair, and more—is the largest gathering of artists, art historians, students, and arts professionals in the United States.

David Hammons, Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement

The innovative, far-ranging work of David Hammons is central to the history of postwar art in all its complexities. For the past five decades, Hammons has ingeniously blurred boundaries separating sculpture, Conceptual art, performance, and installation. Through a restless hybridization of practices, he has explored many timely and urgent contemporary issues, commenting on the civil rights movement, racial stereotyping, institutional exclusion, and the commodification of artistic identity. Hammons is not only one of the great political artists of our time, but also a crafter of careful assemblage and canny composition, creating irreverent, sometimes scathing works that are as formally riveting as they are incisive.

Adrian Piper, Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work

Since the late 1960s, the provocative and often challenging work of Adrian Piper has profoundly influenced the language and form of Conceptual art. Her 2010 exhibition Past Time: Selected Works 1973–1995, presented at Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York, showcased several bodies of work that dealt with dissent in varying forms and represented a period of time widely considered as her most influential. Piper’s artistic practice flirts with the syntax of Minimalism and infuses it with explicitly political content, addressing issues of race, gender, and identity politics. Additionally, her work has been shaped by studies in philosophy, a subject on which she has lectured since earning a doctorate in the discipline thirty years ago. A keen interlocutor of mass culture, Piper has produced art and writing that makes us question our constantly shifting contemporary social landscape.

Lucy R. Lippard, Distinguished Feminist Award

For more than five decades, the critic, activist, and curator Lucy R. Lippard has been a consistent, passionate, and influential advocate of feminist art. A prolific author first honored by CAA in 1975 with the Frank Jewett Mather Award, she is known for her concise, accessible, and lucid prose that brings feminist perspectives to bear on a wide scope of art and activism—from Eva Hesse (1976) to The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art (1995). Lippard’s curatorial efforts—such as c. 7,500 (1973), the groundbreaking all-woman exhibition of Conceptual art—have also been vital to the feminist art movement and offered some of the earliest considerations of global feminisms. Throughout her life, she has modeled a complex, ever-changing point of view as it intersects with progressive notions of art and politics.

Allan Sekula, Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art

Allan Sekula has devoted his life as an artist to writing, photography, installation, and film. While his multidisciplinary approach to problems of representation and politics has earned him accolades as an artist, his writings have helped students, scholars, and the public to think critically about interventions in the political and social realities of our world. The essays collected in his first book, Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–83 (1984), significantly altered the way in which the documentary function of photography was conceptualized. His more recent volumes—such as Fish Story (1995), Titanic’s Wake (2003), and Performance under Working Conditions (2003)—mobilize us through his vision and words to carefully consider the effects of capitalism, globalization, information formats, and the dematerialization of image and word.

David Antin, Frank Jewett Mather Award

David Antin has been a singular, combative voice in art criticism since the mid 1960s. His Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature 1966 to 2005 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) demonstrates his sustained critical commitment, constant formal experimentation, and a style of thought and expression that is unique to both the visual arts and poetry. The essays and “talking poems” in Radical Coherency display a no-nonsense, skeptical intelligence squaring off firsthand with the work of artists—many of them his contemporaries—who were bent on radically transforming art, from Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol to the artists of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 1971 exhibition Art and Technology.

Alexander Nagel, Charles Rufus Morey Book Award

Alexander Nagel’s The Controversy of Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) is a compelling reexamination of the key paradoxes that define this era and the works associated with it. Guided in part by sixteenth-century religious history and the writings of historians of that era, Nagel positions sixteenth-century art making in the realm of the experimental, a vantage also in concert with the efforts of the religious reformers concerned with ritual and devotional practices usually associated with the Middle Ages. A breakthrough volume that makes significant contributions to scholarship on sixteenth-century Italian art, Nagel’s book compels art historians more generally to reconsider “standard” interpretations of many canonical monuments of the periods in which they are working.

Maryan W. Ainsworth, Stijn Alsteens, and Nadine M. Orenstein, Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award

Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2010) is a “summa” of Maryan Ainsworth’s decades-long exploration of the artistic legacy of this place and time. Using a variety of methods—technical analysis, connoisseurship, archival research, biography, iconography, and sustained attention to each object—she and the other authors place Gossart at the center of a rich world of intertwined relationships. Together they reveal the artist’s groundbreaking engagement with Rome and antiquity, his intent study of architecture and sculpture, his carefully crafted experimentation in a variety of media, and his amazing versatility as a painter of religious scenes, mythological subjects, and innovative portraits over a long career. The book is also significant for the insightful way in which it situates Gossart among his contemporaries, including the painters Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach, the sculptor Conrad Meit, and the patron and connoisseur Philip of Burgundy.

Roy Flukinger, Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions

With The Gernsheim Collection (Austin: Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas Press, 2010), Roy Flukinger has crafted an exceptional catalogue of the Helmut and Alison Gernsheim Collection, one of the earliest and most comprehensive collections of photography in the world. One hundred and twenty-six items are beautifully illustrated and analyzed in readable, absorbing prose that traces the story of the couple’s achievements as sleuths, gatherers, connoisseurs, photographers, devotees, and champions, while at the same time recognizing and examining their (sometimes controversial) role as architects of the study of photography. Contributions by Alison Nordstrom and Mark Haworth-Booth illuminate the role this collection has played in the history of photography as well as the Gernsheims’ commitment to the medium as a form of fine art. In this way, the book considers the process (in addition to the underlying principles, assumptions, and implications) of canon formulation in an emerging discipline.

Jacki Apple, Distinguished Teaching of Art Award

For the past twenty-eight years, Jacki Apple has provided students at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, with a dynamic, inspiring, and evolving model of the possibilities and rewards of an interdisciplinary practice. An artist, writer, and producer, she has produced work in multiple modes—performance, installation, drawing, book art, photography, film, radio, text, and audio—and presciently engages the opportunities afforded by new technologies. Praised by students and colleagues alike for her intelligence, generosity, enthusiasm, and critical discernment, Apple adeptly bridges various disciplines using a wide scope of knowledge about contemporary culture and technology and a depth of understanding about the history and practice of the visual and performing arts. A gifted communicator, Apple is exceptionally effective in encouraging students to think for themselves.

Gabriel P. Weisberg, Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award

Gabriel P. Weisberg’s distinguished teaching record—which includes faculty positions at the University of New Mexico, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Pittsburgh, Case Western Reserve University, and the University of Minnesota, where he is currently a professor in the Department of Art History—spans nearly half a century. His students, both graduate and undergraduate, praise his presentation of art as a dynamic interplay among culture, aesthetics, and human experience, revealed through direct examination of works of art in the context of primary historical documentation. Weisberg’s varied and distinguished background as a historian, curator, and administrator seamlessly integrates academic and museum realms, and his scholarship has shaped the discipline of nineteenth-century art history in a profound way.

Francesca G. Bewer, CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation

Francesca G. Bewer, research curator in the Harvard Art Museums’ Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, is an exemplary technical art historian. An expert in the materials and techniques of European Renaissance and Baroque bronze sculpture, she trained as both an art historian, at University College London, and as a conservator, at Palazzo Spinelli in Florence. A highly valued teacher and lecturer, Bewer has published a steady stream of superb texts in conservation and art-historical journals, exhibition catalogues, and monographs. She also recently authored a book on the history of conservation, A Laboratory for Art: Harvard’s Fogg Museum and the Emergence of Conservation in America, 1900–1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museum; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

Rebecca Molholt, Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize

Rebecca Molholt’s article “Roman Labyrinth Mosaics and the Experience of Motion,” published in the September 2011 issue of The Art Bulletin, is an imaginative study of seven North African mosaics that were once floors in Roman bathhouses. She introduces a fresh methodology for their assessment, building on a distinction that Walter Benjamin drew between “vertical and horizontal forms of viewing.” Moholt argues that mosaics have long been read as if they were vertical easel paintings rather than understood as “materials underfoot,” which are experienced while kinetically moving over their horizontal surfaces. She uncovers a metaphoric reading of these mosaics that relates the labyrinths, their subject matter, and architectural context—the Roman bath—to athleticism and heroism.

Art Journal Award

An article by the online journal Triple Canopy, authored primarily by Colby Chamberlain of Columbia University, has won the 2012 Art Journal Award. The text, called “The Binder and the Server,” appears in the Winter 2011 issue.

Contact

For more information on the 2012 Awards for Distinction, please contact Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs. Visit the Awards section of the CAA website to read about all past recipients.

CAA announced the shortlists for the 2012 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the two Alfred H. Barr Jr. Awards on December 2, 2011.

Filed under: Annual Conference, Awards, People in the News —

George Thomas Noszlopy: In Memoriam

posted by CAA — Aug 31, 2011

Adrian Hicken, a professor at Bath Spa University in England, is the author of Apollinaire, Cubism, and Orphism (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002).

George Thomas Noszlopy

The sudden death of George Thomas Noszlopy on June 5, 2011, age 78, removes a singular and memorable personality from the ranks of British art historians. A longtime member of CAA and a foundation member of the Association of Art Historians, he made notable contributions to the teaching and dissemination of art history in England for almost fifty years.

For more than a decade at Birmingham Polytechnic, Noszlopy served as course director of an ambitious and challenging master’s degree program of which he had been a principal instigator and architect in the early 1970s. At its height and under his aegis, this department was, perhaps, the largest and one of the most successful for postgraduate study of history of art and design in the country. To this achievement may be added his years of service as a regional convenor and tutor for the Open University and his supervision of many doctoral research candidates, an activity he continued as emeritus professor at Birmingham City University.

Born and educated in Budapest, Noszlopy belonged to a generation formed under two successive regimes: first the right-wing, pseudoparliamentarianism of Admiral Miklós Horthy and then the postwar Stalinism of Mátyás Rákosi and the tragic Imre Nagy. During these years black humor became the language of criticism, if not a technique of survival. Noszlopy was not alone in developing a somewhat wry, sardonic attitude. This was to become mollified later in life with an appreciative embrace of the ironic.

Noszlopy published some poetry while still attending gymnasium, but recognizing these efforts to be too derivative, he turned increasingly to the writing of art criticism and the study of art history. His early work matured in direct contact with major figures such as George Lukács and Robert Berény. Noszlopy shared their desire to search for radical alternatives to the then-dominant Stalinist orthodoxy, an attitude epitomized by his slightly older contemporary at university, the writer, poet, and activist István Eörsi, with whom Noszlopy served in the army.

Noszlopy took his first degree in museology (art history and subsidiary subjects) from Eötvös Lóránd University in 1956. His earliest academic experiences were blighted by his family’s “class alien” designation and the constant investigation of his alleged Trotskyist views. The decision to debar him from all universities and colleges in the country was repealed only after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953.

During the revolutionary fervor of October 1956, Noszlopy was elected to the Revolutionary Committee of the Hungarian Artists’ Association but was soon arrested following the second Soviet military intervention later that year. He escaped from custody and left Hungary, thanks to the sympathetic assistance of an influential friend. Adopting the transitory existence of a stateless individual, he first lived in Vienna, then had a short sojourn in Paris. Noszlopy later remembered this relatively short period, when a single suitcase held his few possessions, as the most intense sense of freedom he had ever experienced.

After Paris, where he was introduced to a circle of scholars around André Chastel, Noszlopy settled in London, having accepted a grant from the Courtauld Institute of Art. He joined the expatriate intelligentsia gathered around the Irodalmi Ujság (Literary Gazette), the organ of the Hungarian Writers’ Union in exile, becoming a regular contributor until 1961 when the editorial office moved from London to Paris. Thus for some five years Noszlopy was an active participant in this cultural milieu, presided over by such established figures as the essayist and editor Béla Szász, the poet and essayist László Cs. Szabó, the poet György Faludy, and the novelist Tamás Aczél. When Gyula Illyés, the pioneer of surrealist and expressionistic leftist poetry from the interwar years and the leading socialist spokesman for the oppressed peasant class, visited England, Noszlopy acted as his guide.

By this time Noszlopy was a student at the Courtauld, where the renowned Hungarian scholar Johannes Wilde was then coming to the close of his tenure as deputy director. Three years after graduating in 1960, and with the support of Leopold Ettlinger at the Warburg Institute, Noszlopy secured a full-time teaching post at Coventry College of Art. Shortly afterward, he moved to a similar position at Birmingham College of Art and remained in Birmingham throughout his subsequent career.

As an art historian, Noszlopy was quick to embrace the methods of Aby Warburg and Erwin Panofsky. Controversially, while still at the Courtauld, he had extended this methodology to the examination of the iconography of Pablo Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, to the displeasure of Anthony Blunt. This approach to early-twentieth-century art became evident in Noszlopy’s subsequent studies and seminars on Guillaume Apollinaire and on allegorical imagery in Cubism. The manuscript of a book, “Robert Delaunay’s ‘La Ville de Paris’ and the origins of Orphic Cubism…,” rested in the hands of a publisher for some time but fell victim to an economic downturn. It never appeared. Had a book been published then (1973) it would surely have secured Noszlopy a deserved position among the early, postformalist revisionist historians of Cubism and Orphism.

In 1991 Noszlopy received a DPhil summa cum laude from his alma mater, Eötvös Lóránd University, in recognition of his research on Apollinaire and art in Paris before 1914. This event was emblematic of the scholar’s emotional and physical reconnection with Hungary and his intellectual roots. After years of enforced absence from the country, the thawing of East–West relations offered opportunities for visits, for renewing old friendships, and for reclaiming treasured family possessions. These rediscoveries catalyzed an essay on Tivadar Kosztka Csontváry and two short monographs: the first on an older contemporary, the painter György Gordon, was followed by one devoted to Gordon’s first wife, the caricaturist Edma (Márta Edinger).

While devoting much time to Renaissance and early-twentieth-century European art, Noszlopy was highly responsive to, and enthusiastic about, aspects of British art and crafts hitherto ignored, undervalued, or maligned by local populations and professionals. His study of the painter Bryan Pearce in 1964 was the first monograph devoted to the artist. This was followed by a “Note on West’s ‘Apotheosis of Nelson’” and essays and lectures on the iconography of Britannia. The four volumes in the series Public Sculpture of Britain, surveying the entire West Midlands of England, which Noszlopy had brought to press since 1998, make a fitting memorial to the humanity and humanistic breadth of a scholar who lived and worked in the region for most of his life.

Filed under: Obituaries —

2012 Distinguished Scholar Session Honors Rosalind Krauss

posted by Christopher Howard — Aug 23, 2011

The 2012 Distinguished Scholar Session, taking place at the 100th Annual Conference in Los Angeles, will honor Rosalind Krauss, University Professor at Columbia University in New York. Yve-Alain Bois of the Institute for Advanced Studies will chair a session, called “The Theoretical Turn,” in which five to six participants—among them Harry Cooper, Jonathan Crary, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and Hal Foster—will explore and celebrate Krauss’s many contributions to the history of art. The Distinguished Scholar Session will be held in Room 515B at the Los Angeles Convention Center on Thursday, February 23, 2:30–5:00 PM.

Krauss’s acute observation of twentieth-century art began at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she received her undergraduate degree in 1962. She began writing criticism in 1966, mostly for Artforum, while working on her PhD at Harvard University, which she earned in 1969. MIT Press published an expanded version of her dissertation as Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith in 1971.¹

Krauss continued writing criticism and generating art-historical essays that challenged steadfast analyses of Auguste Rodin, the Surrealists, and Jackson Pollock, to name a few topics. She joined the Artforum editorial board in the late 1960s and appeared on the masthead as assistant editor from 1971 to 1974. Krauss and her colleague Annette Michelson left the magazine in 1975 to establish the scholarly October, which strove to forge a relationship between contemporary concerns and scholarship, with particular emphases on the history of modernism, its fundamental premises, and the ability of writing to reinvigorate the era. For Krauss and others, October was an opportunity to integrate artists such as Richard Serra and Sol LeWitt into their theoretical convictions and investigative criticism.

Krauss collected her essays into several influential books, including Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977), The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985), and Bachelors (1999). She has also written monographs on David Smith and Cindy Sherman, among others, as well as shorter books such as The Optical Unconscious (1993) and A Voyage on the North Sea (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000). Her curatorial work—which includes Joan Miro: Magnetic Fields (1971) and Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem (1994) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Richard Serra/Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in 1986—has resulted in significant advances in art history while relaying her amorous relationship with the provocations of Minimalism and the tactility of sculptural mediums. Most recently, she organized L’Informe: Mode d’emploi with Bois at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1996.

For the last decade, Krauss has battled what she calls the “post-medium condition”—the claim that a momentous shift from a singular artistic medium (such as canvas, plaster wall, or metal armature) to work that amalgamates various materials has only advanced ambiguity in art. In contrast, she suggests that the specificity of the aesthetic medium vitalizes modernism’s strengths, and that contemporary work that integrates text and technology has the capacity to triumph in similar terms. Perpetual Inventory (2011) is Krauss’s most recent publication intent on restoring logic and scrutinizing specificity in the history of art. A personal meditation on the relationships between aesthetics and memory, called Under Blue Cup, is forthcoming.

The integration of literary and philosophical references in her writing, combined with an enthusiasm for ravaging stagnant theories, has made Krauss a tenacious teacher and mentor. She joined Hunter College in New York in 1974, rising to Distinguished Professor both there and at the Graduate Center. In 1995 she transitioned to the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia, where she became Meyer Shapiro Professor of Modern Art and History and then, ten years later, University Professor. Krauss’s experiences as a scholar and educator culminated in the textbook Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004), a didactic yet vital interpretation of modern art that was coauthored by Bois, Buchloh, and Foster. (A revised edition is expected soon.) As a further testament to her academic success, Krauss was an honorary degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2008 and another from Harvard University in 2011.

CAA inaugurated its Distinguished Scholar Session in 2001, first honoring James S. Ackerman of Harvard University. Since then, the organization has recognized the most illustrious writers, teachers, and curators, including Leo Steinberg (2002), John Szarkowski (2006), Linda Nochlin (2007), Svetlana Alpers (2009), and Jonathan Brown (2011).

1. MIT Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has published Krauss’s books mentioned in this article, unless indicated otherwise.

Filed under: Annual Conference, People in the News —

Institutional News

posted by CAA — Aug 17, 2011

Read about the latest news from institutional members.

Institutional News is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.

August 2011

The American Academy in Rome has upgraded their website to include images of the community at a higher resolution and dedicated sections for News, Events, Publications, and Society of Fellows. The site is compatible with mobile devices and will soon offer the content in Italian.

South view of the Michigan Avenue façade of the Art Institute of Chicago (photograph provided by the Art Institute of Chicago)

The Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois has received a $40,000 Access to Artistic Excellence grant from the National Endowment for the Arts on behalf of School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The reward will go toward the Teacher Institute of Contemporary Art, a professional-development program that will facilitate workshops and lectures on new media and visual arts for 120 high school teachers across the United States.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Lucie Berard (Child in White), 1883, oil on canvas, 24¼ x 19¾ in. Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection, 1933.1172 (artwork in the public domain)

The Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois has also been awarded $400,000 from the Getty Foundation to help the Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative produce an online publication of forty-nine paintings and twenty-three drawings by Claude Monet and Pierre-August Renoir. The catalogue will be fully interactive and include features such as contemporary research, pigment analysis, access to underdrawings or infrared filters, a glossary of technical terms, and “sticky notes” for a user’s own observations.

The Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland has been granted an $80,000 award from the National Endowment for the Arts through the Access to Artistic Excellence program to aid the reinstallation of the West Wing for Contemporary Art, a collection that extends from Abstract Expressionism to the present. New lighting and technology systems will allow the museum to display light-sensitive objects and new media.

Julian Alden Weir, Portrait of John F. Weir, 1890, drypoint, 7 x 6 in. Brigham Young University Museum of Art (artwork in the public domain)

Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, has received a $60,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts’ Access to Artistic Excellence program to support the touring exhibition, The Weir Family, 1820–1920: Expanding the Traditions of American Art, which originated at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art.The funds will facilitate an accompanying catalogue and educational programs to investigate the contributions of John Weir and his two sons, Julian Alden Weir and John Ferguson Weir.

Frederic S. Remington, A Dash for the Timber, 1889, oil on canvas, 48¼ by 84⅛ in. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas. 1961.381 (artwork in the public domain)

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, has received a $75,000 Picturing America School Collaboration Project Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the second year in a row. The grant will predominantly fund the 2011 Picturing America Teaching Institute, in which Texan educators in public, private, and home-schooling environments to learn about American art and its relevance to the classroom. The program also provides classroom resources, online curricula, student fieldt rips, and interactive video conferences.

The Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, has been awarded a $45,000 grant by the National Endowment for the Arts through the Access to Artistic Excellence program. The museum will publish a catalogue on its permanent collection of glass, logging each item and providing previously unpublished scholarly analyses.

The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has received two 2011 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the category of fine arts: Picasso Looks at Degas by Elizabeth Cowling and Richard Kendell won a silver medal, and Eye to Eye: European Portraits 1450–1850 by Richard Rand and Kathleen M. Morris earned a bronze. The awards recognize original content, design, and production among independent, self-published, and university-press publications, as well as their impact on the community.

Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, has received $60,000 from the Access to Artistic Excellence program hosted by the National Endowment for the Arts. The fund will aid the reinstallation of the European and American works in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art’s collection, with an emphasis on flexibility and variety and a reinvigorated engagement with the public.

Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits, 1849, oil on canvas, 44 x 36 in. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas (artwork in the public domain)

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, scheduled to open in Bentonville, Arkansas, in November 2011, has received an $800 million contribution on behalf of the Walton Family Foundation. The funds are allocated for operating needs, general endowment, and future capital needs.

The Dallas Museum of Art in Texas has been awarded an $85,000 grant by the National Endowment for the Arts’ Access to Artistic Excellence program to create the Archival Exhibition Resources Online interface, which will enable the public to access digital content created for and during an exhibition, including images, video, audio, and other documents.

The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles has acquired Harald Szeemann’s extensive archive including correspondence with artists, proposals and brainstorms for exhibitions, documentary photographs of exhibitions, and other rare ephemera from his vibrant, international career as a curator. The Getty also attained Szeemann’s library, containing 28,000 volumes of monographs, artists’ books, and limited-edition publications.

The International Center of Photography in New York has been granted $100,000 through the Access the Artistic Excellence program of the National Endowment for the Arts to organize Roman Vishniac’s collection of more than 20,000 items from the early twentieth century. The collection encompasses many iconic photographs of Jewish life in Europe between the World Wars.

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri, has received approximately $33,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to conduct a survey of 435 sculptural objects, ranging from antiques to contemporary work, and determine long-term plans for care and treatment. This conservation effort will support research and educational advancement; it will also increase access to the museum’s sculpture by facilitating public display and loans to institutions.

The John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, has been awarded $75,000 by the National Endowment for the Arts’ Access to Artistic Excellence program to support an artist-in-residence program. In collaboration with the Plymouth School District, the Kohler will support eight visual artists during the 2011–12 school year for two weeks at a time.

Students from Maryland Institute College of Art teach art to Baltimore-area children in a recent festival in the Community Arts Partnerships program (photograph provided by Maryland Institute College of Art)

Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore has been honored by the Corporation for National and Community Service for programs that allow their students and staff members to participate in volunteer efforts and generous civic engagement. The school has thus been admitted to the 2010 President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll.

The New York State Historical Association has received $16,000 from the Access to Artistic Excellence program funded by the National Endowment for the Arts to support the conservation of seventy-three folk, Native American, and academic works of art housed in the Fenimore Art Museum. The award will animate the institution’s conservation priorities and treatment recommendations and facilitate a storage plan.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania has received a $250,000 exhibition grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage to fund a midcareer retrospective of Zoe Strauss, a photographer and native Philadelphian who highlights blue-collar experiences and marginalized people and places. The show—comprising more than 125 prints placed between the photography galleries and the lobby—will also host an interactive kiosk designed by publishing and curatorial collective Megawords, a slide show of Strauss’s work projected on the museum’s façade, and select photographs appearing on billboards throughout the city.

Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey,has been awarded $65,000 through the Access to Artistic Excellence program on behalf of the National Endowment for the Arts to support public programs related to Momentum: Women/Art/Technology. This exhibition, organized by Rutgers’ Institute for Women and Art with the Mason Gross School of the Arts, will be accompanied by lectures and symposia, educational workshops, interactive web activities, and a film and video festival highlighting the work of established and contemporary female artists who manipulate technology.

The San Diego Museum of Art in California has received a $60,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts’ Access to Artistic Excellence program to reinstall their permanent collection of East Asian art. Approximately four hundred works from Japan, Korea, and China from 1000 BCE to the present will be on display.

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois has accepted a $5 million donation from Leroy Neiman, an artist and alumni, to build the Leroy Neiman Center, a two-story student hub opening in spring 2012. The architecture firm Valerio Dewalt Train Associates will fabricate the interior design of the space, which will house a café, lounge, art gallery, and more.

The University of Maryland in College Park has been honored with a $60,000 grant from the Access to Artistic Excellence program, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts to support the conservation of the permanent collection at the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora. The award will facilitate the documentation of roughly 1,000 works, the addition of a full-time registrar, and further development of the collection’s management policies and procedures.

The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has received a $25,000 grant via the National Endowment for the Arts’ Access to Artistic Excellence program to publish a catalogue documenting the Ackland Museum of Art’s collection of Mediterranean art. The publication will cite 225 objects in the collection hailing from Egyptian, Grecian, Etruscan, and Roman origins between the third and first millennia.

The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York has announced an eight-year collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art to begin in 2015 at the Whitney’s landmark building, designed by Marcel Breuer. The Metropolitan will generate exhibitions and educational programming at the Breuer building with a global emphasis while supporting dialogue between the two distinct collections, publications, and educational initiatives. The Whitney will maintain a small space in the building for storage and permanent site-specific works.

The Yale Center for British Arts in New Haven, Connecticut, has launched a new online catalogue of their extensive collection and is offering free high-resolution images of all objects in the public domain. An exhibition, called Connections, will be on display through September 11, 2011, to emphasize the value of the vivacious holdings.

The Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, has been awarded $125,000 by the Access to Artistic Excellence grant program, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, to support the renovation of its ancient Mediterranean collection. The grant will initiate the construction of a new gallery to house the treasures from the university’s excavations in Dura-Europos in the 1930s and refurbish the existing exhibition space with another 13,000 objects from Egypt, Etruria, Greece, the Near East, and Rome.

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