CAA News Today
AC2024 Annual Artist Interviews Announced: Dawoud Bey and Anne Wilson
posted by CAA — Dec 11, 2023
Dawoud Bey (photograph by Frank Ishman) and Anne Wilson (photograph by Joe Mazza)
CAA is thrilled to announce that Chicago-based artists Dawoud Bey and Anne Wilson will be the featured guests of the CAA 112th Annual Conference Annual Artist Interviews. Established in 1997, the Annual Artist Interviews, sponsored by the CAA Services to Artists Committee (SAC), remains the most highly anticipated event at the conference. This year, Bey will be interviewed by Elisabeth Sherman, Senior Curator and Director of Exhibitions and Collections, International Center of Photography, and Wilson will be interviewed by Elissa Auther, Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs and the William and Mildred Lasdon Chief Curator, Museum of Arts and Design.
Dawoud Bey
Groundbreaking American artist and MacArthur Fellow, Dawoud Bey, is known for his evocative photographs and film works about communities that are often marginalized and for visualizing the oft disappeared histories of the Black presence in America. He began his career as a photographer in 1975 with a series of photographs, Harlem, USA, that was exhibited to critical acclaim in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. His work has since been the subject of numerous exhibitions and retrospectives, including recently, Dawoud Bey: An American Project and Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue, at museums and galleries worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the High Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Center, the Seattle Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
His work has also been the subject of several monographs, including a forty-year retrospective monograph Seeing Deeply (University of Texas Press, 2017) and the recent Street Portraits (MACK Books, 2021). His critical writings on contemporary art and photography have appeared in a range of publications. Most recently, Elegy (Aperture, 2023) accompanies an exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and brings together the history projects and landscape-based work Bey has made since 2012.
Dawoud Bey received his MFA from Yale University School of Art and is currently Professor of Photography and a former Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where he has taught since 1998. He is represented by Sean Kelly Gallery, Stephen Daiter Gallery, and Rena Bransten Gallery.
Anne Wilson
Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist who creates sculpture, material drawings, and performances that explore themes of time, loss, and private and social rituals. Wilson’s artwork resides in permanent collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Des Moines Art Center, Detroit Institute of Arts, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Foundation Toms Pauli, Lausanne, Switzerland, and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan. Wilson was named a 2015 United States Artists Distinguished Fellow and is the recipient of awards from the Renwick Alliance, Textile Society of America, the Driehaus Foundation, Artadia, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, National Association of Schools of Art and Design, Cranbrook Academy of Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Illinois Arts Council. She is represented by the Rhona Hoffman Gallery and Paul Kotula Projects. Wilson is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she advises graduate students. Her upcoming project opens at the Museum of Arts and Design, NYC in 2024.
The AC2024 Annual Artist Interviews will be held on Friday, February 16, 4:30–7:00 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!
Meet the 2024 CAA-Getty International Program Participants
posted by CAA — Nov 29, 2023
CAA is pleased to announce this year’s participants in the CAA-Getty International Program. Now in its thirteenth year, this international program, supported by the Getty Foundation, welcomes twelve new participants and four alumni to attend the 2024 Annual Conference in Chicago, IL. The goal of the CAA-Getty International Program is to increase international participation in CAA’s activities and the field of visual arts in academia, thereby expanding international networks and the exchange of ideas both during and after the conference. We look forward to welcoming this year’s participants!
At a preconference colloquium, the new participants will discuss key issues in the international study of art history together with CAA-Getty alumni and US hosts. The program will delve into topics such as postcolonial and Eurocentric legacies, decolonization of museums, scholarship and pedagogy, interdisciplinary and transnational methodologies, and the intersection of politics and art history. Learn more about the first ten years of the program in our online publication.
Program participants—art historians, curators, and artists—hail from multiple countries, expanding CAA’s international membership and contributing to an increasingly diverse community of scholars and ideas. Selected by a jury of CAA members from a highly competitive group of applicants, each participant will receive funding for travel, hotel accommodation, conference registration, CAA membership, and a per diem.
Alumni invited back to the 2024 conference will present at the Art, Authenticity, Migration, and Global Climate Change session while also connecting our new participants to our burgeoning group of nearly 160 CAA-Getty International Program alumni.
2024 PARTICIPANTS IN THE CAA-GETTY INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM
Mariela Cantú is a researcher, audiovisual preservationist, artist, and curator. She is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of San Martín (CIAP-UNSAM CONICET) and holds a master’s degree in Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image (University of Amsterdam). She is a member of RAPA—Argentinian Network of Audiovisual Preservationists, and the creator of Arca VIDEO, a collaborative archive of Argentinian video art. She has undergone specific training on video preservation at Associação Cultural Videobrasil (Brazil), La Camera Ottica (Italy), Media Burn Archive and Video Data Bank (USA), and Cinemateca Boliviana (Bolivia), while also attending the Film Preservation and Restoration School Latin America (CINAIN, Cineteca de Bologna, L’Immagine Ritrovatta and FIAF). She has been a professor at Universidad de Buenos Aires, Universidad del Cine, Universidad Nacional del Arte, and Universidad Nacional de La Plata, among others.
Kathleen Ditzig is a curator at National Gallery Singapore. She received a PhD from Nanyang Technological University in 2023 with a dissertation titled “Exhibiting Southeast Asia in the Cultural Cold War: Geopolitics of Regional Art Exhibitions (1940s–1980s).” She obtained an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, in 2015. Inspired by her experience in cultural policy, Ditzig studies modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art in relation to global histories of capitalism, technology, and international relations. As a curator and researcher, she is invested in advancing and interrogating art as an exceptional site and system of speaking to power. She won an IMPART Curatorial Award in 2021. Her writing has been published by Southeast of Now, Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, Afterall, post: notes on art in a global context, Art Agenda, and Artforum, among others.
Marzouka Hanna Ibrahim Gaied has a bachelor’s degree in Egyptology from El Minya University, Egypt. Their research has focused primarily on the art of Middle Kingdom (about 2000 BCE) in the Beni Hasan al-Shuruq area of Middle Egypt, and they have wide-ranging experience working on many archaeological sites across Egypt. In their current position as Inspector of Antiquities at the Central Department for Seized Antiquities, they are on the front lines of addressing the trade in looted artifacts, which drains Egypt of its cultural resources. Their experiences have provided them with a deep knowledge of excavation techniques, collection management, and a passion for local community engagement.
Paweł Ignaczak graduated in art history at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, where he earned a PhD for his thesis on etchings of Jean Pierre Norblin de la Gourdaine (1745–1830) in 2013. Between 2003–15 he worked in the Print Room of the National Museum in Poznań and in the print collection of the Polish Library in Paris. From 2015–22 he worked at the Museum of Warsaw. Since 2015, he has been lecturing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and since 2020 he has been vice-dean at the Faculty of Artistic Research and Curatorial Studies. Currently, he’s been conducting research on amateur artistic work in Poland in the second half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Eyitayo Tolulope Ijisakin is an associate professor in the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. His doctoral research focuses on printmaking and the developmental history and contributions of printmaking to contemporary Nigerian art. He has written for Critical Arts and African Arts. Dr Ijisakin is a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Society in the African Humanities Program. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Arts of Africa and the Global South, Rhodes University, South Africa (2017–18). He also received the Carnegie Corporation of New York Fellowship for the 63rd Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association (2020). He has served as a reviewer for several international journals. He is listed among the artists whose works engage social change by the Denver Art Museum, in 2022. He is a member of the Society of Nigerian Artists and the Nigerian Field Society.
Agnieszka Patala is an assistant professor in the Institute of Art History, University of Wroclaw. The area of her academic focus is medieval art in Europe, with particular reference to panel painting and sculpture—the (multisensorial) relations of artworks with the viewer and space, their use in devotional practices, extra-religious realities of their functioning, including afterlives in the nineteenth totwenty-first centuries. In 2015 she wrote her dissertation on the impact of Nuremberg art and artists on late Gothic panel painting in Silesia. It was published in 2018 and served as a foundation for exhibition, Migrations: Late Gothic Art in Silesia (National Museum in Wroclaw). Currently, she is at work on her postdoctoral project determining the origins, functions, and agency of early altarpieces in Central Europe. She is also a co-investigator in the project, Residua of Premodern Relations with Art in Selected Contemporary Convents in Poland.
Elena Stylianou researches, writes, and curates at the intersection of the history and theory of photography, modern and contemporary art, critical studies, and museum and curatorial practices. She is currently associate professor at European University Cyprus and president of the International Association of Photography and Theory (IAPT). Her scholarship has been published in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, and she is co-editor of Museums and Photography: The Display of Death (Routledge, 2018), Ar(t)chaeology: Intersections of Photography and Archaeology (IAPT Press, 2019), and Contemporary Art in Cyprus: Politics, Identity and Culture Across Borders (Bloomsbury, Spring 2021). She is currently working on a special issue on processes of decolonization and the photographic archive. Elena earned her doctoral degree from Columbia University Teachers College, is a recipient of numerous awards and grants, including a Fulbright and an ArtTable fellowship, and she held a postdoctoral position at UCL, London. She has curated international art exhibitions in Cyprus, and is the lead researcher of several funded projects dealing with arts and heritage.
Suvdaa Sampil is a curator at the History and Local Museum of Tuv province, Mongolia, and has been working as a museum curator since 2011. They have written academic articles on cultural heritage research, art history, and interethnic relations that have been published in national and international journals. Moreover, they wrote the books Cultural Heritage of the Central Region and The Settlement of Ethnic Groups in the Tuv Province: Some Cultures and Traditions. After receiving a master’s from the University of Mongolia in 2007, their research concentrated mainly on Mongolian and local cultural heritage and art history. Sampil is in charge of the cultural heritage and collections at the museum and curates permanent temporary exhibitions. In 2016, they were a member of the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CIMAM), an Affiliated Organization of ICOM, and became a member of the International Committee of Museums (ICOM) in 2018.
Igor Simões has a PhD in Visual Arts—History, Theory, and Criticism of Art at the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Artes Visuais da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (PPGAV-UFRGS) and is the adjunct professor of History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Methodology and Practice of Art Teaching (UERGS). He was assistant curator of the 12th Mercosur Biennial, member of the curatorial committee of the National Association of Fine Arts Researchers (ANPAP). He works with the links between exhibitions, film editing, art history, and racialization in Brazilian art and the visibility of Black subjects in the visual arts and is the author of the thesis “Film Editing and Exhibition: Black Voices in the White Cube of Brazilian Art.” He is also a member of the curatorial committee of the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo/USP. Curator of the exhibition “Presença Negra no Museu de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul” (2022). He is a member of the curatorial boards of the exhibitions Social Fabric and Enpowerment and a member of the board of AWARE—Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions and Fractured Times. In 2023 he was general curator of Dos Brasis: Arte e pensamento negro, the most comprehensive exhibition of Black Brazilian artists (Brazil- São Paulo). That same year he was guest curator at the Inhotim Institute for the 2023 season, curating the exhibitions Mestre Didi: The Initiates in Mystery Don’t Die and Doing the Modern, Building the Contemporary: Rubem Valentim and the Right to Form. In 2024, he will co-curate Rosana Paulino: Atlântica e Amefricana at Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA).
Trained as a studio artist with a major in sculpture, Kanwal Syed earned her PhD in art history from Concordia University as the 2023 Graduate Valedictorian. During her candidacy, she earned the prestigious FQRSC doctoral grant and numerous internal grants, published three journal articles, co-chaired two panels at the annual College Art Association conference, and presented papers at academic conferences in Vancouver, Brighton, Rome, and Chicago. Her dissertation titled “ھم گنہاگار عورتیں (We Sinful Women): Urban Feminist Visuality in Contemporary Art and Feminist Movements in Pakistan After 9/11,” garnered an Honorable Mention in the UC Berkeley South Asia Art & Architecture Dissertation Prize 2023 and has been nominated for NAGS Dissertation Award 2023–24. Before joining American University in Dubai as an Assistant Professor of Art history, she worked as an adjunct faculty at the University of British Columbia and as a part-time faculty at Concordia University. Her research interests encompass non-Western art, decoloniality and cultural feminist visuality in contemporary art.
Carolina Vanegas Carrasco researches the processes of creation and reception of nineteenth-century monuments in Latin America. She is the current director of Centro de Estudios Espigas at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina, and researcher of the Centro de Investigaciones en Arte y Patrimonio (CONICET-UNSAM). Vanegas is General Coordinator of the Group of Public Art Studies in Latin America based on the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She is the author of Disputas monumentales: escultura y política en el Centenario de la Independencia en Colombia (Bogotá, 1910) (2019, Instituto Distrital de Patrimonio Cultural of Bogotá).
Fanying Zhang, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Arts Administration, Education, and Policy at the China Academy of Art, earned her Ph.D. in Art History in 2021. Her research focuses on unraveling how the Western world shaped its perceptions of Chinese art in the 20th century. She places particular emphasis on analyzing exhibitions, conferences, publications, and the contributions of scholars, artists, and curators to the global dissemination of Chinese art. Zhang’s academic career commenced with a graduate program centered on Osvald Sirén who had already been an accomplished scholar in the study of Trecento painting before getting involved in the study of Chinese art. After that, she expanded her interests in transcultural art history, particularly the role of Chinese art in constructing global art history. She has incorporated this interest into her teaching and is engaged in international collaborations. She is also involved in a project on Professor James Cahill’s archive initiated by the China Academy of Art, further enriching her experience in the field.
PARTICIPATING ALUMNI
Amrita Gupta is an art historian, writer, administrator, and editor involved in arts education and cultural management. With over two decades in the nonprofit cultural sector in India, she has contributed through art historical research, teaching, published writing, arts programming, and institution building. In 2002, she joined the Mohile Parikh Center (MPC), Mumbai, and became its Program Director in 2005, a responsibility she served till early 2023. In this capacity, she facilitated critical thinking by curating a wide range of innovative art education programs, initiating public art projects, and co-creating short art videos for diverse audiences, and remains associated with the MPC in an honorary capacity. She is Founding Member and Co-director at the Council for Arts and Social Practice (CASP), established in 2013 as a transdisciplinary platform to facilitate critical dialogues on cultural sustainability. Her practice at CASP focuses on the interplay of social history, fieldwork, community-based art, and collective experience. She serves as a jury member for the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize for Art Bulletin articles and the SAIL Mentorship Program (Edition III) at Sunaparanta Goa Center for the Arts. In 2019, she co-founded and edits the e-journal, Partition Studies Quarterly (PSQ), which focuses on partition narratives of Northeast India, and other less-remembered partition stories in the subcontinent. Her ongoing and independent research focuses on the art practices of Northeast India, and an essay on this topic has been published in the edited book 20th Century Indian Art (Thames & Hudson and Art Alive, 2022). Her art writings for anthologies, journals, exhibition catalogs, and magazines have been published widely in leading print and digital platforms; she has edited art books for children and continues to write on Indian modern and contemporary art.
Delaram Hosseinioun received her first MA in literary criticism from the University of Exeter and her second MA in cultural studies from KU Leuven University. In her PhD project at Utrecht University, titled “Unveiling the Other: The Metamorphosis of Voices of Iranian Female Artists from the Mid-Twentieth Century to the Present Day,” Delaram draws from gender theories in poststructuralist psychoanalysis, such as in the works of Butler and Cixous, along with theories regarding self and forms of othering in continental philosophy, namely works of Bakhtin and Derrida. Her goal is to trace the trajectories and endeavors of Iranian female artists in reclaiming their identities. Working along with the artists Delaram explores the artworks as a pictorial form of dialogue and artists’ attempts in surpassing sociocultural restraints. Delaram’s focus rests on the revelation and universality of women’s voices in creative platforms, art journalism and interviewing artists beyond borders.
Mariana Levytska is an associate professor in the Department of Graphic Design and Artbooks of the Ukraine Academy of Printing. She works as a part-time senior research associate in the Department of Art Studies of the Ethnology Institute at the national Academy of Ukraine in Lviv. She received her PhD in the history of art from the Lviv National Academy of Arts in 2023. She specializes in Ukrainian art of the long nineteenth century through social art history optics. In 2022 she began a research project focused on artists’ response to the warfare in Ukraine, after the full-scale Russian invasion.
Ana Mannarino is an art historian and professor of Art History at School of Fine Arts at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (EBA-UFRJ) and at Visual Arts Postgraduate Program at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (PPGAV-UFRJ). She received her PhD in Art History/Visual Arts at PPGAV-UFRJ and participated in a yearlong collaborative study program at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3. Her doctoral thesis, “Word in Brazilian Art: Mira Schendel and Waltercio Caldas,” focuses on the relationship between text and image in Brazilian contemporary art, especially in the work of these two artists. Her research also considers modern art and historiography of art in Brazil, the connections between art and poetry, Concrete art, and the production of artists’ books.
This program is made possible with support from Getty through its Connecting Art Histories initiative.
Meet the 2024 CAA Annual Conference Kress Travel Grant Recipients
posted by CAA — Nov 28, 2023
Recognizing the value of the exchange of ideas and experience among art historians, the Kress Foundation is offering support for scholars participating as speakers at the 2024 CAA Annual Conference. The scholarly focus of the papers must be European art before 1830.
Samuel H. Kress Foundation CAA Annual Conference Travel Fellows 2024
Michela Degortes, Researcher, University of Lisbon
“Approaching the Portrait Gallery of the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon”
Art Collections of Academies of Sciences
Chair: Viktor Oliver Lorincz
The Academy of Sciences of Lisbon was founded in 1779 under the patronage of Maria I of Braganza, thanks to the effort of enlightened figures of the Portuguese aristocracy, clergy, and scientific elite. A print published the same year in the Jornal Enciclopedico to celebrate the event represents the queen surrounded by a circle of learned courtesans while holding hands with a figure symbolizing Knowledge. A portrait of Maria I located in one of the main rooms of the Academy celebrates her role as a patron.
Painted by the Irish artist Thomas Hickey in 1783, it is part of the gallery of paintings held by the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon, which brings together the portraits of remarkable figures of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Portuguese cultural milieu. It includes portraits of other members of the royal family as well as of important members of the institute, such as José Francisco Correia da Serra, Manuel de Cenaculo, and Joseph Mayne, whose cabinet of curiosities constitutes the museum of the Academy. Despite the remarkable quality of many of these artworks and their influence on the Portuguese artistic context, the collection still lacks a deep investigation. This paper focuses on the sitters, the artists involved, and the donations that formed the collection, and gives rise to interesting comparisons to similar art collections held by other academies of science.
Charline Fournier-Petit, PhD candidate, University of Maryland and Lecturer, École du Louvre
“Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi and Diplomacy: A Gift of Fourteen Portraits,”
Women and Diplomatic Art
Chair: Silvia Tita
Tense, if ever conflicting, were the relationships between Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, and her brother, the emperor Napoleon I. A clever ruler, she rapidly exploited the marble quarries of Carrara for diplomatic purposes, producing abundant portraits of the great sovereigns of her time. Sculpture also served her as a surrogate for diplomatic dialogue with the emperor to affirm her legitimacy as the sovereign of Tuscany and her daughter’s dynastic succession. In 1809, Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi gifted a series of fourteen marble portraits depicting members of the Bonaparte family to Napoleon I, including her own bust and that of her daughter, Napoléone-Elisa. Extracted from her own quarries and intended for the busy Galerie de Diane at the Palais des Tuileries, this series in marble was both a political message sent not only to the childless emperor, but also to their siblings and to the court. With this gift, Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi demonstrated her capability to impose her authority over a conquered province and restore the prestige of Carrara. And, by gathering quickly such a large number of sculptures, she was also displaying the production capacity of her marble quarries. The gift also epitomized her diplomatic strategy and dynastic aspiration, thorugh which Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi turned her motherhood into a powerful argument supporting her political ambitions.
Gohar Grigoryan, , University of Fribourg, Switzerland
“An Illustrated Armenian Law Book and the Ceremonial Mise-en-scène of the King’s Body”
Medieval Ritual Representations: Model of or Model for?
Chairs: Alice Isabella Sullivan and Robert Nelson
A miniature created in 1331 in the Cilician Armenian capital of Sis depicts the young king Lewon IV (r. 1321–1341) at the tense moment of executing—according to the nearby inscription— “just judgment.” The full-page image serves as frontispiece to the oldest extant copy of the Assizes of Antioch—a now-lost Frankish legal code. An important monument of secular law, the Assizes of Antioch was influential beyond the Principality of Antioch and the crusader states, reaching the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia (1198–1375). Its main purpose was the regulation of the relationship between the suzerain and his vassal lords, and it is exactly these relationships that are represented in the miniature in question, with the king seated on an elevated throne and executing justice over his lords. Initiated by the king himself, the juridical image of Lewon IV was heavily charged with realistic codes, idealizing symbols, and eschatological messages, the intended meanings of which will be tackled in my paper. I will first focus on how the king’s painter, Sargis Pitsak, visualized the ceremonial mise-en-scène around the sovereign’s imposing body and how the latter’s political agenda is reflected in this and other portrayals of him. The discussion continues with questions of visibility and the particular occasions at which the target audience could possibly see an emblematized image like this.
Laura Hutchingame, PhD candidate, University of California Los Angeles
“Red Larch at San Fermo: Ligneous Knowledge in the Upper Adriatic”
Wood: Medium Specificity in the Global Early Modern Period
Chair: Tatiana String
In the late medieval Adriatic, wood was a crucial natural resource and building material that required highly specialized knowledge. From felling alpine trees, preparing logs into rafts, floating rafts downriver, to storing and seasoning timbers, the preparation of lumber involved labor-intensive processes. The “ship-hull ceiling,” in the form of an inverted ship, was an important artifact that proliferated throughout the region from ca. 1300–1450 and was fostered by the collaboration between different wood-based artisans. The ceiling at the church of San Fermo in Verona, executed from ca. 1300–50, offers an exceptional case study. In addition to its innovative design, recent conservation work has uncovered material evidence of how artisans sourced appropriate lumber, prepared timbers, and crafted the ceiling from local red larch. I highlight the specialized ligneous knowledge of artisans who contributed to the production of the ceiling. I show how the ceiling (and wood itself) is a source of interconnections between patrons, artisans, political regimes, and religious orders of this time. At San Fermo, the material and physical qualities of wood are neither representational nor represented but are made visible through crafting.
Cynthia Kok, PhD candidate, Yale University, and Stephanie Archangel, Curator, Rijkmuseum
“Edvardt Abraham Akaboa de Moor, a Master Silversmith from Angola”
Center and Periphery?: Mapping a Future for Research in Netherlandish Art
Historians of Netherlandish Art
Chair: Stephanie Dickey
With origins as a “prestige project,” the Rijksmuseum grapples with the legacy of prioritizing upper-class artworks and narratives, leading to criticisms that the institution is a place of and for elites. Decorative arts within the collection, however, were rarely made by the upper classes. We turn to objects and archives to consider these marginalized makers more closely. We take as a case study a gun by Edvardt Abraham Akaboa de Moor. From archival research, we learn that de Moor was a Black man from Angola who likely found his way to the Netherlands via modern-day Ghana. By 1665, however, de Moor worked as a skilled weapons engraver as a member of the silversmith’s guild and lived with his Dutch wife and children in Utrecht. The Rijksmuseum’s flintlock hunting gun is signed “Edvardt Abraham de Moor” and “tot Utrecht,” claiming ownership of the lock, the most technically difficult part of the gun. As with other marginalized figures, little information remains of de Moor—certainly no portraits nor personal archives—yet traces of him and his descendants remain in the state archives and in museums. We ask, How do we recover the identity of individuals who operated and worked in craft workshops? Can a shift in focus to makers and archives allow museums to interrogate the narratives of marginalized peoples? And how can museums conscientiously address the question, to whom does the agency of craftsmanship belong?
Caroline Delia Koncz, Assistant Professor, Angelo State University
“Lavinia Fontana’s Minerva Unarmed: The Female Nude, as Seen and Painted by Woman”
What Did Women See? Gender and Viewing Experience in Early Modern Italy
Chair: Sabrina De Turk
Created shortly before the artist’s death in 1614, Lavinia Fontana painted a rather curious rendering of the virginal goddess of wisdom for Cardinal Scipione Borghese. Standing in profile, her head tilted speculatively towards the viewer, Minerva holds in her arms a sumptuous dress of luxurious fabrics and gold trim, which she is presumably about to don. Beside her in the room, one can find the deity’s pet owl alongside her previously adorned armor, helmet, and shield, all of which serve to identify the goddess. Such objects were likely necessary to include, since, beyond the subject of the Judgment of Paris, remarkably few Italian artists in the early modern period depicted Minerva unrobed, and even fewer were women. I consider the unique iconography of Fontana’s painting as well as the intended message this work held for its viewers in seventeenth-century Italy. In addition to considering the male owner’s reception of the piece, this talk will more closely study how female beholders of the period might have analyzed the nude Minerva, when fashioned by the hand of a woman painter.
Matthew Sova, PhD candidate, Johns Hopkins University
“Representations of Performance in the Konstanz Holy Sepulcher”
Medieval Ritual Representations: Model of or Model for?
Chairs: Alice Isabella Sullivan and Robert Nelson
Located in Konstanz Cathedral, a thirteenth-century holy sepulcher stands as significant material evidence for widespread medieval practices of architectural copying. Understood as a reconstruction of the Tomb of Christ aedicule in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, scholars emphasize the Konstanz holy sepulcher’s reliance on the plans, dimensions, spaces, and structures of its illustrious model. These interpretations often downplay variations in appearance and function between the two microarchitectural objects, as well as regional contexts for these deviations in the Konstanz copy. Specifically, the Konstanz holy sepulcher features an extensive sculptural program of figures from Christmas, Easter, and the early church, which has no precedent in the Jerusalem aedicule. My paper investigates these sculptures, linking them to a local tradition of religious performances undertaken in and around the Konstanz holy sepulcher. Numerous medieval texts from Konstanz describe ritualized Holy Week reenactments in the city’s cathedral, performed by the clergy outside of the Mass. These paraliturgical events emphasized the roles of the three Marys, apostles, and angels, central figures in the Konstanz object’s artistic program. I show that these sculptures not only visualized the scriptural events of Easter, but served as permanent, idealized representations of Holy Week performances. Consequently, I argue that the Konstanz holy sepulcher’s sculptural program both enhanced the function of the copy as a stage for paraliturgical drama, and perpetually reinscribed historical and spiritual connections between its associated medieval community and the site of Christ’s death and resurrection in Jerusalem.
Mark H. Summers, Lecturer, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
“Ritual Practice as Community Building in the Birds Head Haggadah”
Medieval Ritual Representations: Model of or Model for?
Chairs: Alice Isabella Sullivan and Robert Nelson
The Birds Head Haggadah, dated to around 1300 and produced in the Upper Rhine region of Southern Germany, is one of the earliest extant illuminated Ashkenazic haggadot, or manuscripts, that contain the ritualistic text recited at the Passover Seder. The book is well-known for its unusual approach toward figuration, styling Jewish people as hybrids with human bodies and heads of griffins, featuring the curving beaks of eagles and the pointed ears of lions. Throughout the manuscript, figurative illuminations in this style occupy the margins, enacting the historical events remembered at Passover and performing ritualistic activities associated with celebration of the feast. A pair of openings from the manuscript exemplifies this twofold approach. On folios 24v-25r, a scene from the Exodus unfolds across the lower margins. Though the story here refers to historical events of persecution, the figures that receive loaves of unrisen bread and turn to follow Moses appear in medieval styles of dress. While the story relates the flight from Egypt and pursuit by Egyptian soldiers, here the aggressors are likewise rendered as contemporary figures. As non-Jews, Pharoah and his soldiers appear as fully human figures with blank faces and are outfitted as German knights bearing the black eagle flag of the Holy Roman Empire. On the next opening spanning folios 25v-26r, the marginal program presents a scene of the ritualistic practice of making unleavened matzo, an act of abstinence that makes the historical suffering of the Jewish people tangible for the duration of Passover. The figures animating this scene, which is presented as a contemporary activity rather than a historical narrative, appear visually indistinct from the actors rendered in the previous opening. Here, the Jewish men and women working together to prepare dough, divide portions, and bake bread are all dressed in the same kinds of clothing as the followers of Moses, complete with modest hair coverings for women and the pointed hats worn by adult men that were at times compulsory accessories for men in northern medieval Europe. The approach in the visual program outlined in these openings creates a temporal elision connecting historical events with contemporary ritualistic practices. The result establishes the Passover Seder as what Marc Epstein calls a “metahistorical topos,” or a kind of temporal interconnectivity that links past, present, and future events and practices for the book’s users/viewers. I consider how the representation of ritual in the Birds Head Haggadah engages with metahistorical narratives to build community and identity for its medieval users.
Joyce Zhou, PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow, Yale University
“Playing with Porcelain: Reimagining the Self with the Early Modern Dutch Dollhouse”
Miniature Designs and Worldly Simulations: Questions of Scale in Early Modern Arts
Chair: Wenjie Su
Sometime between 1743 and 1751, a Dutch woman named Sara Rothé assembled two elaborate dollhouses. Rothé describes a porcelain display room in one of her dollhouses, which survives today in the Kunstmuseum in The Hague. The room contains a variety of miniature arts, including miniature porcelain imported by the Dutch East India Company from China and Japan, as well as domestic imitations in ivory and glass. Pioneered by Amalia van Solms, Princess of Orange (1602–1675), this practice of dedicating entire rooms to the collection and display of East Asian porcelain was associated exclusively with female members of the House of Orange. While Rothé did not have the status nor financial means to recreate van Solms’ porcelain display in full-scale, she was able to successfully do so in the intimate realm of her dollhouse.
I explore the intersection of two early modern Dutch female collecting practices: the curation of dollhouses by wealthy Dutch women, and the formation of dedicated porcelain display chambers in Dutch royal circles. Building on the work of Hanneke Grootenboer and Susan Stewart, I argue that early modern Dutch dollhouses facilitated aspirational and imaginative thinking. Rothé’s porcelain room, which encapsulates Dutch royal porcelain chambers on a reduced scale, was a controlled and manipulable space in which Rothé adopted an alternate subjectivity and engaged in imaginative play. Here, Rothé could take on the persona of a Dutch royal, handling the various fruits of global commercial exchange as she engaged in immersive self-fashioning.
Finalists for the 2024 Morey and Barr Awards
posted by CAA — Nov 16, 2023
CAA is pleased to announce the 2024 finalists for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the two Alfred H. Barr Jr. Awards. The winners of the three prizes, along with the recipients of other Awards for Distinction, will be announced in January 2024 and presented during Convocation in conjunction with CAA’s 112th Annual Conference, February 14–17, 2024.
CHARLES RUFUS MOREY BOOK AWARD SHORTLIST, 2024
Delia Cosentino and Adriana Zavala, Resurrecting Tenochtitlan: Imagining the Aztec Capital in Modern Mexico City, University of Texas Press
Matthew Francis Rarey, Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic, Duke University Press
Tatiana Reinoza, Reclaiming the Americas: Latinx Art and the Politics of Territory, University of Texas Press
Andrew M. Shanken, The Everyday Life of Memorials, Zone Books
Jennifer Van Horn, Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art during Slavery, Yale University Press
ALFRED H. BARR JR. AWARD SHORTLIST, 2024
Emily Braun and Elizabeth Cowling, eds., Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
James A. Doyle, Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos, and Joanne Pillsbury, eds., Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Maya Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Diana Seave Greenwald, ed., Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer, Princeton University Press and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Leo G. Mazow, Storied Strings: The Guitar in American Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
David Pullins, and Vanessa K. Valdés, eds., Juan de Pareja: Afro-Hispanic Painter in the Age of Velázquez, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
ALFRED H. BARR JR. AWARD FOR SMALLER MUSEUMS, LIBRARIES, COLLECTIONS, AND EXHIBITIONS SHORTLIST, 2024
Christophe Cherix, Courtney J. Martin, Akili Tommasino, and Stephanie Weissberg, Barbara Chase-Riboud Monumentale: The Bronzes, Princeton University Press, Princeton, and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation
Elliot Bostwick Davis, Edward Hopper & Cape Ann: Illuminating an American Landscape, Rizzoli Electa, New York, and The Cape Ann Museum, Boston
Apsara DiQuinzio, Jeff Gunderson, Alexander Nemerov, and Elaine Y. Yau, Adaline Kent: The Click of Authenticity, Rizzoli Electa New York and the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno
Perrin Lathrop, ed., African Modernism in America, Yale University Press, New Haven, and the American Federation of Arts
CAA-Getty International Program 2024: Applications now open!
posted by CAA — Jul 06, 2023
Photo: Stephen Fọlárànmí
Getty has awarded College Art Association (CAA) a grant to fund the CAA-Getty International Program for a thirteenth consecutive year. The Getty Foundation’s support will enable CAA to bring twelve international visual-arts professionals to the 112th Annual Conference, taking place in Chicago, February 14–17, 2024. These individuals will be first-time participants in the program and will be accompanied by alumni of the program returning to present papers during the conference.
Participants will receive funds for travel expenses, hotel accommodations, per diems, conference registrations, and one-year CAA memberships. We encourage all international art historians, art history educators, and museum curators to apply. The program will also include a one-day preconference colloquium on international issues in art history on Tuesday, February 14, as well as ongoing engagement with other alumni from the program online and at future conferences. The deadline for applications is August 15, 2023. Guidelines and application can be found here.
In 2021, CAA organized a publication to celebrate ten successful years of the CAA-Getty International Program. The publication, entitled Global Conversations: 10 Years of the CAA-Getty International Program features in-depth accounts of the program, a timeline of important events and milestones, and directories of past papers, members, and meetings.
The CAA-Getty International Program was established to increase international participation in CAA and the CAA Annual Conference. The program fosters collaborations between North American art historians, artists, and curators and their international colleagues and introduces visual arts professionals to the unique environments and contexts of practices in different countries.
Since it began in 2012, the program has brought 159 scholars to the conferences, from over 50 countries located in Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. Each year, a preconference colloquium on international topics in art history inaugurates the week, kicking off four days of conference sessions, meetings with new colleagues, and visits to museums and galleries. Subsequent to these events, the program has generated many scholarly collaborations, including publications, conferences, and exhibitions.
Most of all, former grant recipients have become ambassadors of CAA in their countries, sharing knowledge gained at the Annual Conference with their colleagues at home. Past recipients have said that “variety of topics presented also exposed me to the realization that there is so much to be done to unearth the hidden treasures of global art history, which hitherto I have overlooked in my discipline and nation but which will now form the basis of my future projects,” and “the direct contact with other global south researchers is an unique occasion, rarely possible and extremely enriching.”
CWA Picks: Summer 2023
posted by CAA — May 31, 2023
CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) curates a seasonal list of must-see exhibitions. The CWA Summer 2023 picks highlight the rich contributions of women-identifying African, Latinx, and Indigenous artists, bringing their voices to the forefront. These artists explore the legacies of their respective mediums and their enduring significance in contemporary art. Unafraid to tackle pressing social issues, their works offer a powerful lens through which to examine themes of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. By amplifying marginalized perspectives, these exhibitions provoke meaningful conversations and challenge existing narratives in the art world.
Tender Loving Care
July 22, 2023–July 28, 2025
Museum of Fine Art, Boston
This exhibition explores the theme of care through contemporary art. The act of creating and appreciating art is a form of care, and the exhibition highlights how artists address this concept through their materials, ideas, and processes. The exhibition showcases around 100 works from the museum’s collection, organized into five thematic groupings: threads, thresholds, rest, vibrant matter, and adoration. Examples of care in art can be seen in Gisela Charfauros McDaniel’s portrait of her mother, Nick Cave’s Sound Suit, and textiles and fiber art by Sheila Hicks, Howardena Pindell, and Jane Sauer. Through these works and others, visitors are invited to consider how care can inspire new models for living and feeling in the present and the future.
Creativity in the Time of COVID-19: Art as a Tool for Combatting Inequity and Injustice
August 25–September 30, 2023
Buffalo NY: Squeaky Wheel, Buffalo Arts Studio + Buffalo Game Space
In collaboration with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Michigan State University, and SUNY Buffalo’s Amatryx Lab & Studio, this exhibition features a range of BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and Buffalo-based artists and creatives to center marginalized experiences of the pandemic and social justice concerns.
Black Venus
Through August 20, 2023
Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco
BLACK VENUS, curated by Aindrea Emelife is an exhibition that surveys the legacy of Black Women in visual culture – from fetishized, colonial-era caricatures to the present-day reclamation of the rich complexity of Black womanhood by 18 artists (of numerous nationalities and with birth years spanning 1942 to 1997). This exhibition is a celebration of Black beauty, an investigation into the many faces of Black femininity and the shaping of Black women in the public consciousness – then and now.
In BLACK VENUS, archival depictions of Baartman and other historical Black women pair with the vibrant, narrative portraiture by some of today’s most influential Black image-makers whose work deals with layered narratives of Black femininity.
This exhibition reckons with difficult visual histories. It features some themes and images that are derogatory and many that are empowering. Sensitive visitors should be aware that several artists in the exhibition employ nudity and sexual imagery to explore their ideas.
Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archeology of Memory
Through August 13, 2023
UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Berkeley
Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory is the first retrospective exhibition of the work of longtime Bay Area artist Mesa-Bains. Presenting work from the entirety of her career for the first time, this exhibition, which features nearly 60 works in a range of media, including fourteen major installations, celebrates Mesa-Bains’s important contributions to the field of contemporary art locally and globally.
Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest
Through July 9, 2023
Bard Graduate Center, NYC
Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest invites you to explore the world of Navajo weaving. This dynamic gallery and online experience presents never-before-seen textiles created by Diné artists. These historic blankets, garments, and rugs from the American Museum of Natural History are situated alongside contemporary works by Diné weavers and visual artists, such as Barbara Teller Ornelas and Lynda Teller Pete. Shaped by the Loom highlights seasonal cycles that guide the harvesting of dye plants, the cosmologies that inform a weaver’s work, and the songs, stories, and prayers that are woven into every piece. The items in the exhibition will be accompanied by artist interviews, interactive storytelling, and stunning panoramic views of the Navajo Nation. Shaped by the Loom elevates the voices of Indigenous artists and makers to express the cultural legacy and continued vibrancy of weaving traditions in the American Southwest.
The Figure, Reclaimed
A Renaissance of the female body in visual culture
July 5–August 4, 2023
Carolla Arts Exhibition Center, Missouri State University
Throughout the history of visual culture, figurative painting has been regarded as one of the highest forms of Western art. Dazzling displays of hyper-realistic anatomical mastery and expansive narrative scenes depicting multiple figures through complex perspectives dominated as the pinnacle of art-making for centuries. While the artists of these historic images were all white male painters, it was the female body that was often leveraged for these narratives. Further, female artists were also excluded from painting these historic scenes and denied access to nude models to even attempt to study the art of figural painting.
The Figure, Reclaimed, seeks to celebrate and explore the Renaissance of the female body and the female figurative painter in visual culture. Through the work of Aneka Ingold and Livia Xandersmith, this exhibition explores how female figurative painters have combined the traditional art of figurative painting with contemporary, stylized approaches to redefine and expand upon what it means to be a figurative painter, ruminate on the female experience, and how representations of the female body are consumed.
As women face losing bodily autonomy in today’s contemporary society, what does it mean to be a female figurative painter in today’s context? What stories must be told on the scale of figurative painting about what it means to identify as a woman today? Why is the female body a contested landscape, and why does this form hold a sense of home base for visual culture? Is it the embodied connection to humanity and life?
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich: Too Bright to See
Perez Art Museum, Miami
Through January 7, 2024
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich (b. 1987) is a filmmaker and artist whose work blends narrative and documentary traditions to explore stories and experiences of Black women in the Americas.
Hunt-Ehrlich’s experimental narrative artwork Too Bright to See (Part I) draws on her extensive research on the legacy of Suzanne Roussi-Césaire, a writer and anticolonial and feminist activist from Martinique who, along with her husband, Aimé Césaire, was at the forefront of the Négritude movement during the first half of the 20th century. Roussi-Césaire would also become an important Surrealist thinker, influencing the likes of painter Wifredo Lam and writer André Breton. However, despite her critical contributions to Caribbean thought and Surrealist discourse, until recently much of her work was overlooked.
Too Bright to See (Part I) weaves archival materials with cinematic narrative scenes filmed with an unconventional and modern cast. Drawing inspiration from Caribbean aesthetics and Surrealist artwork, this film installation brings attention to new aspects of Roussi-Césaire’s legacy that are undocumented in the public arena, while addressing the broader question of the continued erasure of women from historical accounts.
Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now
Barbican Art Gallery, London
June 21–September 3, 2023
Opening 22 June 2023, Barbican Art Gallery is proud to present the first major solo exhibition of Carrie Mae Weems in a UK institution. Widely considered to be one of the most influential American artists working today, Weems (b.1953) is celebrated for her exploration of cultural identity, power structures, desire, and social justice through a body of work that develops questioning narratives around race, gender, history, class and their systems of representation.
Highlighting her remarkably diverse and radical practice, this survey brings together an outstanding selection of photographic series, films, and installations spanning over three decades, many of which have never been seen before in the UK. Presenting the development of her unique poetic gaze and formal language from the early 1990s to the present day, this exhibition reflects on Weems’s pioneering career. On display are works from her early iconic Kitchen Table Series (1990) which explores how power dynamics are articulated in the domestic sphere and the potential of the home as a space for resistance, to her acclaimed series Roaming (2006) and Museums (2016) where Weems’s muse confronts architecture as the materialisation of political and cultural power. Her oeuvre challenges dominant ideologies and historical narratives created by and disseminated within science, architecture, photography, and mass media.
The exhibition is accompanied by Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now, the first publication devoted to the artist’s writings. It will highlight Weems’s influence as an intellectual, reflecting the dual nature of her career as an artist and activist. A public programme of events, including a programme of films in Barbican cinema, will also run throughout the course of the exhibition.
Gio Swaby: Fresh Up
Through July 3, 2023
Art Institute of Chicago
Gio Swaby is a multidisciplinary artist whose textile-based practice explores the intersections of Blackness and womanhood. Her embroidered portraits are anchored in the connections she forges with her subjects: each portrait begins with a photo shoot in which her sitters are captured in a moment of self-awareness and empowerment. In her textile interpretations, Swaby foregrounds their hair, clothing, and jewelry—highlighting and celebrating the subjects’ use of fashion as unapologetic self-definition and self-expression.
This exhibition—Swaby’s first solo museum show—brings together seven of Swaby’s series from 2017 through 2021, such as My Hands Are Clean, Love Letters, and Pretty Pretty, along with approximately 15 new works, including her largest work to date, a commission for the US Embassy in Nassau, Bahamas. The title of the show, Fresh Up, developed with the artist, is a Bahamian phrase often used as a way to compliment someone’s style or confident way of being. Swaby has remarked, “It holds a lot of positivity and joy. It also speaks to the tone of confidence and power that I want to create with these works. I love that it is a way to form connections through a simple phrase.”
Lynn Hershman Leeson: Phantom Limb
Through July 8, 2023
Altman Seigel, San Francisco
Altman Siegel proudly presents a historical exhibition of works from Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Phantom Limb series, which was created in the 1980s. At the time that it was created, the Phantom Limb collages illustrated the more insidious impacts of mass media and technology on women’s bodies. Created prior to the advent of Photoshop, this body of work borrows from the visual language of advertising, fusing female forms with technology. Seductively posed women merge with cameras, TV screens, and electrical plugs, pointing to ways in which gendered mass media representations shape and distort women’s self-image. At once alluring and disarming, these black-and-white photo collages grapple with the absorption of female identity into modern media at a time when the depths of this issue were just beginning to be explored.
In this series Hershman Leeson was already musing on the implications of surveillance when she describes cameras as a “capture system”:
“This photographic series…suggests that we are not only being watched by surveillance systems, but that ‘capture’ systems are endemic to our society. The series questions individual complicity in a system that simultaneously steals images and warps personal identity. The seductive alliance of surveillance and capture inspired the sexually provocative positions in the anthropomorphic images.” – Lynn Hershman Leeson
My Hands Are Clean 4, 2017 Gio Swaby. Courtesy of Claire Oliver and Ian Rubinstein. © Gio Swaby
Nominations Open for CAA Juries
posted by CAA — May 11, 2023
CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for individuals to serve on our Awards for Distinction, Publication Grant, Fellowship, and Travel and Support Grant juries. Terms begin July 2023.
Candidates must possess expertise appropriate to the jury’s work and be current CAA members. They should not hold a position on a CAA committee or editorial board beyond May 31, 2023. CAA’s president and vice president for committees appoint jury members for service. Materials are due to CAA by June 1, 2023.
Amanda Williams speaks at Convocation at CAA’s 108th Annual Conference in Chicago
AWARDS FOR DISTINCTION JURIES
CAA has vacancies in the following juries for the annual Awards for Distinction for three years (2023–2026). Terms begin in July 2023.
- Art Journal Award (1 vacancy)
- The Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award/Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions for museum scholarship (2 vacancies)
- Charles Rufus Morey Book Award for non-catalogue books in the history of art (1 vacancy)
- Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism (2 vacancies)
- Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize for Art Bulletin articles (1 vacancy)
- The CAA/American Institute for Conservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation (1 vacancy)
- Jury for the Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work, Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement, and Distinguished Teaching of Art Award (1 vacancy)
- Excellence in Diversity Award (3 vacancies)
- Distinguished Feminist Awards for Scholars and Artists (1 vacancy)
FELLOWSHIP AND SCHOLARSHIP JURIES
CAA has vacancies on our Professional Development Fellowship juries for three years (2023–2026). Terms begin in July 2023.
- Professional Development Fellowships for Art History (2 vacancies)
- Professional Development Fellowships for Visual Art, CAA-GOLDEN Scholarship Program, and Michael Aurbach Fellowship for Excellence in Visual Art (3 vacancies)
TRAVEL/SUPPORT GRANT JURIES
CAA has vacancies on our jury for three years (2023–2026). Terms begin in July 2023.
- Art History Fund for Travel to Special Exhibitions (3 vacancies)
HOW TO APPLY
Nominations and self-nominations should include a brief statement (no more than 150 words) outlining the individual’s qualifications and experience and a CV (an abbreviated CV no more than two pages may be submitted). Please send all materials by email to Cali Buckley: cbuckley@collegeart.org. Nominations must be sent as a Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF attachment.
For questions about jury service and responsibilities, contact cbuckley@collegeart.org.
Deadline: June 1, 2023
The Art Bulletin Seeks Editorial Board Members
posted by CAA — Mar 21, 2023
**THESE POSITIONS HAVE BEEN FILLED. NOMINATIONS ARE CLOSED**
CAA invites nominations and self-nominations individuals to serve on The Art Bulletin Editorial Board for a four-year term, July 1, 2023–June 30, 2027.
The ideal candidate has published substantially in the field and may be an academic, museum-based, or independent scholar; institutional affiliation is not required. The Art Bulletin features leading scholarship in the English language in all aspects of art history as practiced in the academy, museums, and other institutions.
The editorial board advises The Art Bulletin Editor-in-Chief and assists by seeking authors, articles, and other content for the journal; performs peer review and recommends peer reviewers; may propose new initiatives for the journal; and may support fundraising efforts on the journal’s behalf. Members also assist the editor-in-chief to keep abreast of trends and issues in the field by attending and reporting on sessions at the CAA Annual Conference and other academic conferences, symposia, and events in their fields.
The Art Bulletin Editorial Board meets three times a year, with meetings in the spring and fall plus one at the CAA Annual Conference in February. The spring and fall meetings are held by teleconference. Members pay travel and lodging expenses to attend the conference in February if held in person. Members of all editorial boards volunteer their services to CAA without compensation.
Candidates must be current CAA members in good standing and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competitive journal. Members may not publish their own work in the journal during the term of service. CAA encourages applications from colleagues who will contribute to the diversity of perspectives on The Art Bulletin Editorial Board and who will engage actively with conversations about the discipline’s engagements with differences of culture, religion, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, and access. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Interested applicants—both self-nominated or nominated by someone else—should submit a CV and a cover letter as one PDF document to Eugenia Bell, Editorial Director, ebell@collegeart.org.
Deadline: April 30, 2023
The Art Bulletin Seeks Reviews Editor
posted by CAA — Mar 21, 2023
**THESE POSITIONS HAVE BEEN FILLED. NOMINATIONS ARE CLOSED**
Reviews Editor Opening
The Editorial Board of The Art Bulletin seeks nominations and self-nominations for the position of reviews editor for a three-year term July 1, 2024–June 30, 2027 (with service as incoming reviews editor designate July 1, 2023–June 30, 2024). The Art Bulletin, published quarterly by CAA, features leading scholarship in the English language in all aspects of art history as practiced in the academy, museums, and other institutions.
Candidates should be art scholars with stature in the field and experience in editing book and/or exhibition reviews; institutional affiliation is not required. Candidates should be published authors of at least one book.
The reviews editor is responsible for commissioning all book and exhibition reviews in The Art Bulletin. He or she selects books and exhibitions for review, commissions reviewers, and determines the appropriate length and character of reviews. The reviews editor also works with authors and CAA’s editorial director in the development and preparation of review manuscripts for publication. He or she is expected to keep abreast of newly published and important books and recent exhibitions in the fields of art history, criticism, theory, visual studies, and museum publishing. This is a three-year term, which includes membership on the Art Bulletin Editorial Board.
The reviews editor attends the three annual meetings of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board held three times a year: in the spring and fall plus one at the CAA Annual Conference in February. The fall and spring meetings are currently held by teleconference. Members are expected to pay travel and lodging expenses to attend the conference in February. Members of all editorial boards volunteer their services to CAA without compensation. The reviews editor submits an annual report to CAA’s Board of Directors.
Candidates must be current CAA members in good standing and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. CAA encourages applications from colleagues who will contribute to the diversity of perspectives on the Art Bulletin Editorial Board and who will engage actively with conversations about the discipline’s engagements with differences of culture, religion, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, and access. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please email a letter describing your or your nominee’s interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and your contact information to Eugenia Bell, Editorial Director, at EBell@collegeart.org.
Deadline: April 30, 2023. Finalists will be interviewed on the afternoon of Friday, May 5.
CAA 2023 Awards for Distinction
posted by CAA — Feb 06, 2023
CAA announces the 2023 recipients of Awards for Distinction. By honoring outstanding member achievements, CAA reaffirms its mission to encourage the highest standards of scholarship, practice, connoisseurship, and teaching in the arts. With these annual awards, CAA seeks to honor individual artists, art historians, authors, museum professionals, and critics whose accomplishments transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.
Installation view, Barbara Kruger, David Zwirner, New York, June 30–August 12, 2022. Courtesy David Zwirner.
Among the awards, the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement is presented to Barbara Kruger whose influential works have consistently had viewers question the larger society around them for over four decades.
Griselda Pollock
Svetlana Alpers
The Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Awards for Writing on Art are being presented to feminist art historian Griselda Pollock and art historian of northern Renaissance and Dutch Golden Age art Svetlana Alpers.
Art Journal Award
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
Julia Burtenshaw, Héctor García Botero, Diana Magaloni, and María Alicia Uribe Villegas, The Portable Universe / El universo en tus manos: Thought and Splendor of Indigenous Colombia (DelMonico Books/Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2022)
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions
No recipient this year
Frank Jewett Mather Award
Eduardo Cadava
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Sylvia Houghteling, The Art of Cloth in Mughal India (Princeton University Press, 2022)
Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Tomasz Grusiecki, “Doublethink: Polish Carpets in Transcultural Contexts” and Hugo Shakeshaft, “Beauty, Gods, and Early Greek Art: The Dedications of Mantiklos and Nikandre Revisited”
Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work
Dawoud Bey
CAA/AIC Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
Michele Marincola and Lucretia Kargère
Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Barbara Kruger
Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Svetlana Alpers and Griselda Pollock
Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
Mary Lum
Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
No recipient this year
Excellence in Diversity Award
Arlene M. Dávila
Citations:
Art Journal Award
Emilie Boone, “When Images in Haiti Fail: The Photograph of Charlemagne Péralte,” Art Journal, Winter 2022
The 2022 jury has chosen Emilie Boone as the recipient of the 2022 Art Journal Award for the essay, “When Images in Haiti Fail: The Photograph of Charlemagne Péralte.” Boone’s deconstruction of a single photo offers readers an entry into the contested history surrounding the US occupation of Haiti, as well as the attendant visual politics of this period (1915–34). Through close textual analysis of Péralte’s historically significant image, the author weaves together a situated narrative of Haitian visual culture under occupation, interrogating crucial notions of ontology through examination of photographic composition. Boone frames the racialized body as a contested and imagined site rife for adaptation and tampering, first through vernacular photographic techniques, as well as other forms of pictorial representation. In the end, Boone’s text summons an interrogation of tradition, and indeed, of the implicit politics of the medium of photography itself.
Jury members:
Omar Kholeif, Sharjah Art Foundation, Chair
Phil Taylor, George Eastman Museum
Tilo Reifenstein, York St John University
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
Julia Burtenshaw, Héctor García Botero, Diana Magaloni, and María Alicia Uribe Villegas, The Portable Universe/El universo en tus manos: Thought and Splendor of Indigenous Colombia (DelMonico Books / Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2022)
The Western concept of El Dorado has long impacted the study of the ancient cultures of Colombia, overshadowing the manifold stories that pre-Columbian art weaves across time and space. How can museum curators uncover those stories, illuminate their nuanced complexities, and present them to the public in engaging and innovative ways? The Portable Universe/El universo en tus manos is the remarkable outcome of just such an undertaking. Both the catalog and related exhibition are the result of a six-year collaboration between the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Museo del Oro, Bogotá. Most importantly, the curators collaborated with a contemporary Indigenous community in Colombia, the Arhuaco of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. The Portable Universe reveals that pre-Columbian artifacts—including goldworks, ceramics, and textiles—are not mere objects, but rather messengers that link living beings (people, animals, plants) and places across space and time. Each is, in brief, a portable universe. The Arhuaco explain that these messengers need to be “nourished,” or brought back to life. Thus, the concept of nourishment enters curatorial practice: a form of sustained, reciprocal attention that goes well beyond customary models of stewardship. Incisively written, gorgeously illustrated, and ingeniously designed, this groundbreaking book brings together interdisciplinary research (in history, archaeology, anthropology, environmental studies, and ornithology) and Indigenous knowledge to propose a new approach to the material and spiritual culture of ancient Colombia, one which underscores the transformative powers of cross-cultural dialogue. A major advance in the study of Indigenous art, the book spurs us to creatively rethink our notions of both the museum and scholarship.
Jury Members:
Benjamin Anderson, Cornell University, Co-chair
Karen Lang, Independent Scholar, Co-chair
Francesca Pietropaolo, Independent Scholar
Jochen Wierich, Aquinas College
Frank Jewett Mather Award
Eduardo Cadava
The jury has awarded this year’s prize to Eduardo Cadava, based on his elegant book Paper Graveyards (MIT Press, 2021) and in recognition of his long career within the field of art criticism, especially his influential theories of photography. Paper Graveyards is the culmination of decades of Cadava’s thinking about how images and technical media actively transform social and political life, and his far-ranging case studies (including examinations of artists Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Fazal Sheikh, and Susan Meiselas) orient themselves towards activist practices that speak to and from the margins. Wending through ruminations on materiality, forms of documentary, and modes of circulation, Cadava writes a new account of what it means to pay visual witness in the face of constant emergency.
Jury members:
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Columbia University, Chair
Nicole Fleetwood, New York University
Kim Theriault, Dominion University
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Sylvia Houghteling, The Art of Cloth in Mughal India (Princeton University Press, 2022)
The Art of Cloth in Mughal India by Sylvia Houghteling focuses on the production, circulation, and consumption of South Asian textiles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period of both global manufacturing dominance and intense artistic creativity for Indian cloth-makers. The book offers a uniquely comprehensive account of the complex meanings of cloth as it moved across the Mughal imperial courts, the kingdoms of Rajasthan, the Deccan sultanates, and the British Isles, all the while remaining attentive to the richness of regional specialties. Houghteling brilliantly weaves together a capacious range of topics including issues of patronage and labor, iconography and symbolism, technical and ecological considerations, connections with poetry and other fine as well as decorative arts, and the sensory experience of the various textiles, from gauzy muslins to tent panels. Starting with an account of the Emperor Akbar’s patronage of dyers and weavers, Houghteling analyzes the elaborate Bikaner Robe, which Akbar’s successor Jahangir presented to a provincial raja. She moves on to the elegant textile culture of the Rajput Court of Amber and the kalamkari cloth of Machilipatnam, ending with a survey of the flourishing market for Hindustani cloth in early modern Britain, evidence of a new global cosmopolitanism that linked the Mughal court with the Stuarts. The book’s handsome design, color illustrations, and vivid writing make Art of Cloth an engaging read for scholars and general readers alike.
Jury members:
Lisa Schrenk, University of Arizona, Chair
John Cunnally, Iowa State University
Laura Anne Kalba, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
J. P. Park, University of Oxford
Andrew Wasserman, American University
Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Tomasz Grusiecki and Hugo Shakeshaft
Tomasz Grusiecki, “Doublethink: Polish Carpets in Transcultural Contexts,” The Art Bulletin, September 2022
That art objects move, and that in doing so their meaning changes, is now widely accepted, but conceptualizing and describing the ways in which such changes occur still often eludes us. Tomasz Grusiecki’s winning essay provides a framework for doing just that, in its elegant examination of the lives and plural significances of carpets in early modern Eastern and Central Europe. Borrowing George Orwell’s notion of “doublethink,” Grusiecki shows, with a keenly historical eye, that there was little tension for early modern patrons between the provenience of carpets in Safavid Persia or Ottoman Turkey and their adaptation into local European contexts, where they became fundamental to the construction of individual and burgeoning national identities. Grusiecki moves past the simple charting of the “surprising” provenances of individual objects to weave a complex web in which he embraces the inevitable messiness of movement—and of meaning—in early modernity. Grusiecki’s transcultural doublethink promises to be a concept of great utility for our discipline as it continues to grapple with these issues.
Hugo Shakeshaft, “Beauty, Gods, and Early Greek Art: The Dedications of Mantiklos and Nikandre Revisited,” The Art Bulletin, May 2022
In his groundbreaking article “Beauty, Gods, and Early Greek Art: The Dedications of Mantiklos and Nikandre Revisited,” Hugo Shakeshaft transforms narratives around the topic of beauty in the religious art of archaic Greece. He moves away from such still-influential Enlightenment frameworks as Kant’s account of aesthetic autonomy and Winckelmann’s concern with timeless aesthetic values to examine the question of beauty from a historicizing vantage point. In order to assess how beauty mattered for those who patronized, created, employed, and observed artworks in ancient Greece, Shakeshaft focuses on two anthropomorphic votive figurines—a bronze statuette dedicated by Mantiklos (ca. 700–675 BCE) and a marble life-size statue dedicated by Nikandre (ca. 660–630 BCE). In his deeply researched discussion, he reconsiders these celebrated objects through a layered analysis of their forms, inscriptions, and materials as well as by reading them alongside aesthetic values expressed in the writings of Homer and Hesiod. In particular, he calls attention to the ideal of charis, a rich concept that can be translated as “beauty,” “favor,” “gratitude,” and “grace,” to show how beauty was inextricably tied to ideas of reciprocity. Ultimately, Shakeshaft posits that beauty needs to be treated as rigorously as any other interpretive category, and—far from being a universal—demands contextualized cultural awareness.
Jury members:
Adam Jasienski, Southern Methodist University, Chair
Susanna Berger, University of Southern California
Christine I. Ho, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work
Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey has a photographic career spanning four decades, beginning in 1975 with the seminal five-year portrait project of everyday life in Harlem. His work has recently traveled in a retrospective titled An American Project” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art. In his recent publication, Dawoud Bey: Two American Projects, his work explores race, African American history and underrepresented communities; featuring portraits memorializing the six children who were victims of the Ku Klux Klan’s bombing at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, and a group of black-and-white landscapes made in Ohio where the Underground Railroad once operated. In the 1980s Bey collaborated with artist David Hammons by documenting the performances Bliz-aard Ball Sale and Pissed Off. In 2017 he received the MacArthur Fellowship and is Professor of Photography at Columbia College Chicago where he has taught for over twenty years. Bey’s work is in permanent collections of leading museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Jury members:
Derek G. Larson, Purdue University, Chair
Stephen Fakiyesi, Independent Artist
Jessica Hong, Art Museum
CAA/AIC Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
Michele Marincola and Lucretia Kargère
Michele Marincola and Lucretia Kargère are recognized by conservators, curators, and art historians, for their contributions to the study of European sculpture. Their recent, joint publication titled The Conservation of Medieval Polychrome Wood Sculpture: History, Theory, Practice (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2020) is a major contribution to the fields and represents two-decades of collaborative work.
Marincola is the Sherman Fairchild Chair, and Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of Conservation, at the Conservation Center, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, a position she has held since 2014. Kargère is a Conservator of Medieval Sculptures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters. Marincola previously worked with Kargère at the Cloisters where they collaborated on conservation and research. Marincola’s contributions to scholarship include research on the sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider and the translation and commentary of Johannes Taubert’s Farbige Skulpturen into English. Kargère, who is known for her work on French sculpture, has collaborated with Maricola and conservation scientists at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the publications about the materials and techniques used in Medieval polychrome sculpture.
Both Marincola and Kargère are recognized for having educated students and colleagues about the history and conservation of European Medieval polychrome sculpture. Numerous students, interns, and Fellows have benefitted from their expertise both at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at New York University. Moreover, Marincola and Kargère are known for producing publications and presentations that touch upon important issues in art conservation, art making, art history, and ethics.
Jury members:
Tiarna Doherty, University of Delaware and Smithsonian, Chair
Fernanda Valverde, Amon Carter Museum
Rebecca Rushfield, Rebeccah Rushfield Arts Consultants
Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger’s distinct artistic practice has palpably shaped the broader social, cultural, and visual fields for decades. For over four decades, the artist has persistently expanded her practice, exploring new media, from video to large-scale installations, collaborating with popular brands (with some even co-opting her iconic visual language) extending her influence beyond the art world, to pursuing intrepid interventions in the public sphere. Best known for her works with bold, declarative, often imposing and seemingly authorless text in which she overlays appropriated black-and-white imagery, Kruger interrogates mass media and consumer culture’s effects on how we see and understand ourselves. As the artist expressed, “I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are, what we want to be and what we become,” and she sees her works as prompts “to question and change the systems that contain us.” With the internet boom, explosion of social media, advertising’s increasingly sophisticated, if not untruthful, tactics, and advertising’s constant presence now from an infinite number of sources, Kruger’s work, past and present, feels more relevant than ever (as seen with numerous and recent solo presentations around the globe). Throughout her dedicated practice, Kruger has reminded us that these issues will continue to raise existential concerns and impact society writ-large until actively contended with.
Jury members:
Derek G. Larson, Purdue University, Chair
Stephen Fakiyesi, Independent Artist
Jessica Hong, Art Museum
Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Svetlana Alpers and Griselda Pollock
Renowned for her groundbreaking work on Dutch Golden Age painting, Svetlana Alpers’ writings have had a profound impact on the field of art history. A founder of the journal Representations and one of the central figures in the revisionist turn of the new art history, Alpers broke with long-standing approaches to northern European art by asking new questions about visual culture and ways of seeing. In The Art of Describing (1983), her questions about optics and image-making devices ignited scholarship in premodern and modern fields alike. In subsequent publications, Alpers’ notions about the monetary value of art materials and the marketing strategies of artists also proved fertile ground for later scholars. However, the Art of Describing did not only reinvent methodologies for understanding Dutch art, pushing against the field’s reliance on ideas forged in the study of Italian artistic practices; it recast what it means to “describe” art, the ekphrastic basis of our field, effecting the writing of art history ever since.
Professor Emerita from the University of California at Berkeley, where she taught from 1962–98, Alpers continues to publish across and redefine fields ranging from the Baroque to contemporary art and photography history. Widely known for Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (1988), which won CAA’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in 1990, Alpers has also penned field-changing monographs on Tiepolo, Rubens, and Velázquez. To this list, Alpers has added her latest book, Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch (2020), a monograph on one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century, and part of a subset of her writings that have confronted directly the challenges of photography, as The Art of Describing long ago became required reading in this field. Her recent publications such as Roof Life (2013) make concrete the writerly challenge that her work has always issued to art history, the need to reinvent “how” as well as “what” we say and write about art.
Arguably the leading feminist art historian of the generation after Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock first made an impact with a vigorous dissembling of the “artists mythologies and media genius” that attended the canonization of artists such as Vincent van Gogh. She went on to devote close attention to previously devalued women artists such as Mary Cassatt, Eva Hesse, and, more recently, in her innovative Virtual Feminist Museum, Charlotte Salomon. Essays such as “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity” in her 1987 book Vision and Difference were powerful examples of her strategy of “feminist interventions” into the history of art, rather than falling for the trap of settling for the inclusion of women artists within the prevailing patriarchal structures.
The Award acknowledges this groundbreaking work as well as a wider, far-reaching achievement, ranging across several decades. Pollock’s writing has long refused to stay in its art historical place, to belong to a single position or way of working. Her brand of feminist revisionism constantly engages the social history of art, bridges art history with cinema studies, opens onto the fields of psychoanalysis and cultural geography, while also participating in the debates of postcolonial theory and responding to the imperatives of decolonization. While remaining attentive to the demands of each of these critical disciplines, her writing about art remains passionate, profound, open-hearted, and, always, political.
Jury Members:
Terry Smith, University of Pittsburgh, Chair
George Baker, University of California Los Angeles
Gillian Elliott, George Washington University
Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
Mary Lum
Mary Lum is CAA’s 2023 Distinguished Teaching of Art Award recipient. Lum, an accomplished visual artist in her own right, has been a professor of painting and drawing at Bennington College in Vermont since 2005, and prior to that taught at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Among her many notable contributions as an educator is her ability to nurture a passion for art making in her students that has taken many of them from foundational studies, to graduate school, and to successful professional practices as artists, art directors, curators, and academic professors.
Steven Frost, Assistant Professor and Faculty Director, University of Colorado Boulder says of his time as a foundation student under Lum; “With her help I began to understand a creative practice needed to be fed by more than time in the studio . . . She took the time to bring me up to speed and prepare me for the professional world.”
Rebekah Modrak, foundation student, current professor University of Michigan, STAMPS School of Art and Design says of Lum “Thank goodness her main concern was the possibility that there might be compelling artists lurking below our early and often tenuous attempt at artmaking.” “When I think of moments in my life that changed my trajectory,” says former student and UK-based art director and curator Christine Serchia, “Mary Lum is responsible for multiple moments.”
CAA is excited to recognize Mary Lum’s more than two decades of teaching with this award.
Jury members:
Derek G. Larson, Purdue University, Chair
Stephen Fakiyesi, Independent Artist
Jessica Hong, Art Museum
Distinguished Feminist Awards
Nalini Malani and Marsha Meskimmon
Nalini Malani’s work has been recognized in solo exhibitions at over thirty international institutions. Her work has embraced painting, video, stop-motion, and other time-based media, while engaging issues of women’s equality in India, where her family took refuge in 1946 after the partition. Malani’s early career in painting gave way to a more focused approach to time-based media in the 1990s, making works such as the 1998 Remembering Toba Tek Singh, a meditation on nuclear testing in India and Pakistan. Focusing on the aftereffects of the devastating partition of India and Pakistan, Malani’s work has been liberal in its use of media types and productions, including the emotive devices of theater.
Malani has turned this unflinching attention to the ways in which the woman’s body has been used as a pawn in games of nationalism and internationalism. Her Mother India: Transitions in the Construction of Pain (2005) combined archival footage and other imagery, a series of juxtapositions that shed new light on the depicted contorted bodies of women. She continues this thread in a 2020 multimedia performance of images projected onto the Taj Mahal Hotel, inspired by the week-long gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl. Malani’s work is a beacon; her work is eminently important now as the world bears witness to an increase in femicide and gender-based violence.
Marsha Meskimmon, PhD is a professor of art history who studies, teaches, and writes on global feminisms. Her groundbreaking scholarly work has been matched by a commitment to promoting and mentoring women in the field. Meskimmon is editor for Drawing In, and she is also a consultant editor for Open Arts Journal. She has authored or co-authored twelve books over her career, with a sustained focus on the political stakes of feminism and its ability to shed light on the circulation of art and the discourse of aesthetics. With Amelia Jones, she edits the book series Rethinking Art’s Histories for Manchester University Press, a series that has promoted books that rethink art and its histories, and has used feminist thought in relation to “global” and non-Western approaches to art history. Her work on the exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution marked an important return to feminism in the art world, a redefinition of the stakes and of the purview of its ideas. Her essay for the exhibition succeeded in arguing why feminism is global—describing it as a constellation of approaches, places, and times. It models an interdisciplinary and collaborative idea of feminism, not a static theory that spreads from the North Atlantic out to world. Her tireless work on behalf of women in the arts is a model for scholars who do their work out of a stated commitment.
Jury Members:
Delinda Collier, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chair
Yvonne Love, Penn State University
Midori Yoshimoto, New Jersey City University
Excellence in Diversity Award
Arlene M. Dávila
Arlene M. Dávila is Professor of Anthropology and American Studies at New York University and founding director of The Latinx Project. Established in 2018, The Latinx Project is an interdisciplinary space focusing on US Latinx Art, Culture and Scholarship. In addition to hosting artists and programs, it functions as a platform fostering critical public programming.
Professor Dávila’s has published extensively on Latinx cultural politics in museums and contemporary art, media, and urban environments to explore the intricacies and ultimate challenges of visualizing Latinx art and culture. Her research spans urban ethnography, the political economy of culture and media, consumption, immigration and geographies of inequality and race.
Professor Dávila’s publications, with a focus on public imagery and cultural politics, include Latinx art: Artists, Markets and Politics (Duke University Press, 2020), El Mall: The Spatial and Class Politics of Shopping Malls in Latin America (University of California Press, 2016), the revised edition of Latinos Inc: Marketing and the Making of a People (University of California Press, 2012), Culture Works: Space, Value, and Mobility Across the Neoliberal Americas (NYU Press, 2012), and Latino Spin: Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race (NYU Press, 2008). Dávila also co-edited the collection Contemporary Latina/o Media: Production, Circulation, Politics (NYU Press, 2014). Her articles have appeared in AZTLAN: A Journal of Chicano Studies and Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies.
Carmenita Higginbotham, Virginia Commonwealth University, Chair
Anne H. Berry, Cleveland State University
Kelly Walters, Parsons School of Design