CAA News

CAA seeks nominations and self-nominations from one member/individual with a specialization in a historic period in Asian, Southeast Asian, American, or Pre-Columbian art to serve on the jury for the Millard Meiss Publication Fund for a four-year term, ending on June 30, 2016. Candidates must be actively publishing scholars with demonstrated seniority and achievement; institutional affiliation is not required.

The Meiss jury awards grants that subsidize the publication of book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of art and related subjects. Members review manuscripts and grant applications twice a year and meet in New York in the spring and fall to select the awardees. CAA reimburses jury members for travel and lodging expenses in accordance with its travel policy.

Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on another CAA editorial board or committee. Jury members may not themselves apply for a grant in this program during their term of service. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please send a letter describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and contact information to: Millard Meiss Publication Fund Jury, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004; or send all materials as email attachments to Alex Gershuny, CAA editorial associate. Deadline: August 8, 2012.

caa.reviews has just published the authors and titles of doctoral dissertations in art history and visual studies—both completed and in progress—from American and Canadian institutions for calendar year 2011. You may browse by chronological or geographic subject, such as Renaissance/Baroque Art, Japanese/Korean Art, or Contemporary Art, or by specific medium or genre, such as Performance Studies or Drawings/Prints/Photography/Works on Paper. Identified in each category are the student’s name, dissertation title, school, and adviser.

Each institution granting the PhD in art history and/or visual studies submits dissertation titles once a year to CAA for publication. The caa.reviews list also includes dissertations completed and in progress between 2002 and 2010, making basic information about their topics available through web searches.

CAA, in partnership with the San Diego Foundation and the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, will present its next National Professional-Development Workshop for Artists on Friday and Saturday, June 29–30, 2012. The two-day event, called “Business of the Arts for Visual Artists: ‘Brand You’ and ‘Marketing Yourself to Market Your Art,’” will explore strategies for launching, renewing, and sustaining a career in the arts.

“Brand You” will take place on Friday evening, June 29, 5:00–7:00 PM, and “Marketing Yourself to Market Your Art” is scheduled for Saturday, June 30, 8:30 AM–5:15 PM. Both sessions will be held at the San Diego Foundation, 2508 Historic Decatur Road, Suite 200, San Diego, CA 92106.

The workshop kicks off on Friday evening with a wine-and-cheese networking reception, after which David Lecours, owner and creative director of Lecours Design, will deliver the keynote address, “Brand You.” His presentation will focus on how artists can determine their unique strengths and individual voices, apply them in the marketplace, and promote a personal brand for success.

On Saturday, Ashley McLean Emenegger, an art consultant, independent curator, writer, visual artist, and career coach, will present a full-day session entitled, “Marketing Yourself to Market Your Art.” Participants will learn how to identify and reach the target audience for their work. A continental breakfast and boxed lunch, included in the registration fee, will be served. Following the workshop, the San Diego Foundation will host a wine-and-cheese networking reception for participants.

The workshop is $15 for Friday only; $25 for Saturday only; and $35 for both days. Participants attending both days will receive the second edition of Business of Art: An Artist’s Guide to Profitable Self-Employment. A limited number of stipends are available for those who register for both days; please contact Susan Schear, CAA national workshop project consultant, at 973-482-1000. You may pay by credit card, debit card, or PayPal. If paying by check, write it out to College Art Association and mail to: Meryl Zwanger, San Diego Foundation, 2508 Historic Decatur Road, Suite 200, San Diego, CA 92106; include your name, complete mailing address, email, and phone number. Please specify if your registration is for Friday only, for Saturday only, or for both Friday and Saturday.

CAA’s National Professional Development Workshops for Artists, which focus on supporting visual artists in underserved areas, are sustained by a generous grant from the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation.

Workshop Partners

Founded in 1975, the San Diego Foundation promotes and increases effective and responsible charitable giving. It manages more than $560 million in assets, almost half of which reside in endowment funds that extend the impact of today’s gifts to future generations. Since its inception, the foundation has granted more than $700 million to San Diego’s nonprofit community. The CAA workshop, cosponsored by the foundation, is part of Innovation through the Arts, a multifaceted, multiyear initiative launched in 2010 to help San Diego realize its potential as a center of creativity and innovation. The initiative is achieved through three primary programs that together seek to advance San Diego’s artistic community by supporting professional artists, nonprofit arts and culture organizations, and strategic efforts that increase arts education in the city’s K–12 schools. Advised by the foundation’s Arts and Culture Working Group, Innovation through the Arts is made possible by the James Irvine Foundation and other generous philanthropic organizations and individuals.

The City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture advises the mayor and city council on promoting, encouraging, and increasing support for the region’s artistic and cultural assets. The commission also helps to integrate arts and culture into community life and to showcase San Diego as an international tourist destination. Supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, the commission has been officially designated by the City of San Diego as a CAC State/Local Partner since the early 1980s.

As a leading professional organization in the visual arts, the College Art Association serves the needs and interests of 12,000 individual and 2,000 institutional members. Founded in 1911, CAA publishes two scholarly journals in art history, an online reviews journal for books and exhibitions, a weekly email newsletter, and a website with news about the organization, its members, and the larger art and academic worlds. CAA also hosts an Annual Conference for 4,000 to 6,000 artists, scholars, and students, provides career services, and advocates the visual arts on a national level.

This spring, CAA awarded grants to the publishers of six books in art history and visual culture through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to the generous bequest of the late professor Millard Meiss, CAA gives these grants to support the publication of scholarly books in art history and related fields.

The six grantees for spring 2012 are:

• Todd Cronan, Matisse, Bergson, and the Philosophical Temper of Modernism, University of Minnesota Press
• John J. Curley, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Cold War Visuality: A Conspiracy of Images, Yale University Press
• Laurinda Dixon, The Dark Side of Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art, ca. 1500–1700, Pennsylvania State University Press
• Dorothy Habel, “When All of Rome Was under Construction”: The Building Process in Baroque Rome, Pennsylvania State University Press
• Mary Ellen Miller and Claudia Lozoff Brittenham, The Spectacle of the Late Maya Court: Reflections on the Paintings of Bonampak, University of Texas Press
• Diane Radycki, Paula Modersohn-Becker: The First Modern Woman Artist, Yale University Press

Books eligible for Meiss grants must already be under contract with a publisher and on a subject in the visual arts or art history. Authors must be current CAA members. Please review the application guidelines for more information. The deadline for the fall 2012 grant cycle is October 1, 2012.

The deadline has been extended to Friday, August 24, 2012.

CAA invites individuals to apply to the International Travel Grant Program, generously supported by the Getty Foundation. This program provides funding to twenty art historians, museum curators, and artists who teach art history to attend the 101st Annual Conference, taking place February 13–16, 2013, in New York. The grant covers travel expenses, hotel accommodations, per diems, conference registrations, and one-year CAA memberships. For 2013, CAA will offer preconference meetings on February 11 and 12 for grant recipients to present and discuss their common professional interests and issues.

The goal of the program is to increase international participation in CAA and to diversify the organization’s membership (presently seventy-two countries are represented). CAA also wishes to familiarize international participants with the submission process for conference sessions and to expand their professional network in the visual arts. As they did this year, members of CAA’s International Committee and the National Committee for the History of Art have agreed to host the participants in 2013.

Are You Eligible?

Applicants must be practicing art historians who teach at a university or work as a curator in a museum, or artists who teach art history. They must have a good working knowledge of English and be available to participate in CAA events from February 11 to 17, 2013. Applicants must be able to obtain a travel visa to visit the United States for the duration of the conference. Professionals from developing countries or from nations underrepresented in CAA’s membership are especially encouraged to apply. Applicants do not need to be CAA members. This grant program is not open to graduate students or to those participating in the 2013 conference as chairs, speakers, or discussants.

How to Apply

Please review the application specifications and complete the application form. If you have questions about the process, please email Janet Landay, project director of the CAA International Travel Grant Program.

Applications should include:

• A completed application form
• A two-page version of the applicant’s CV
• A letter of recommendation from the chair, dean, or director of the applicant’s school, department, or museum

Please send all application materials as Word or PDF files to Janet Landay, project director of the CAA International Travel Grant Program.

All application materials must be received by Friday, August 24, 2012. CAA will notify applicants on Monday, October 1, 2012.

CAA has begun accepting applications from MFA and PhD students for its Professional-Development Fellowships in Art History and Visual Arts. For the current cycle, CAA will award grants of $5,000 each to outstanding students who will receive their MFA and PhD degrees in calendar year 2013.

Fellows also receive a free one-year CAA membership and complimentary registration to the 101st Annual Conference in New York, taking place February 13–16, 2013. Honorable mentions, given at the discretion of the jury, earn a free one-year CAA membership and complimentary conference registration.

CAA’s fellowship program supports promising artists and art historians who are enrolled in MFA and PhD programs nationwide. Awards are intended to help them with various aspects of their work, whether it be for job-search expenses or purchasing materials for the studio. CAA believes a grant of this kind, without contingencies, can best facilitate the transition between graduate studies and professional careers.

Please visit the Fellowship section for more information and to download the 2013 MFA and PhD Application Forms. The deadline for applications is Monday, October 1, 2012. Winners will be announced in January 2013.

In its monthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, curators, designers, photographers, filmmakers, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. This month was marked by the loss of the avant-garde film historian and exhibitor Amos Vogel and the Swiss artist David Weiss.

• Anne Burkhardt, a professor of philosophy at Bennington College in Vermont and a long-time associate of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Darwin Correspondence Project, passed away on March 11, 2012. She was 96 years old. Burkhardt was married to Frederick Burkhardt, ACLS president emeritus, who first established the Darwin project in 1974 as a means to collect all letters by and to Charles Darwin
• Royal Cloyd, the founding director of the Boston Center for the Arts, passed away on February 23, 2012, at the age of 86. In the 1960s Cloyd saw immense potential in the industrial neighborhood of Boston’s South End, defying popular opinion that the area was unsafe by persuading the city to purchase and renovate a series of buildings, including the landmark Cyclorama
• David Hillman Curtis, a pioneer of web design, a filmmaker, and a former rock-and-roll musician, died on April 18, 2012, at age 51. In the mid-1990s in San Francisco, Curtis mastered the new Flash technology, which enabled websites to display high-quality animation. He became a technology guru for many and wrote a best-selling book on media design. Curtis’s latest project was a feature-length documentary film on the musician David Byrne, called Ride, Rise, Roar
• Judy Egerton, an Australian-born scholar and curator of eighteenth-century British art, died on March 21, 2012, at the age of 83. In 1974 Egerton became the assistant keeper in the Historic British Department at Tate Gallery in London, where she organized the exhibition George Stubbs: Anatomist and Animal Painter (1976). She put together many popular shows at her museum, wrote catalogue essays, and completed a new edition of the catalogue for the National Gallery in London
• Denise Gray, a photographer who captured the people and events of Atlanta, Georgia, died on April 22, 2012. She was 54 years old. Gray was a high-spirited individual who worked hard to make her passion for photography into a career. She didn’t have a permanent studio, instead preferring to work on location
• Al Hurwitz, chair and graduate director of art education at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, passed away on March 24, 2012, at the age of 91. Hurwitz had also served as president of the National Art Education Association and frequently lectured on art education across the United States and abroad
• Jean Laplanche, a French psychoanalyst, theorist, and translator of works by Sigmund Freud, died on May 6, 2012, at the age of 87. Laplanche studied under Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the École Normale Supérieure and later cofounded the Psychoanalytic Association of France in 1964. His best-known work, a revision of Freud’s seduction theory, was published in 1987
• Louis le Brocquy, an Irish painter and tapestry designer who created his own place within the modernist idiom of Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti, died on April 25, 2012, at the age of 95. Le Brocquy painted portraits of Irish literati such as Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, and Samuel Beckett. The artist described his working process as: “I try to paint the head image from the ‘inside out’ as it were, working in layers or planes, implying a certain flickering transparency“
• Herbert C. Lee, a prominent Boston arts patron and philanthropist, died on April 4, 2012. He was 97 years old. Lee and his wife Micki were long-time supporters of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Harvard Art Museums, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, and the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Margaret Cassidy Manship, a sculptor, art teacher, and archivist passed away on February 13, 2012, at age 91. The free-spirited daughter of an artist mother, Manship won a scholarship to Italy that led to an apprenticeship working for the master sculptor Antonio Berti in the Vatican. Manship and her husband, the artist John Manship, had lived and worked in Maine, Vermont, and New York
• Jackie McAllister, a Scottish curator, artist, and writer living in New York, died on April 28, 2012. He was 49 years old. In the early 1990s McAllister was vice president of the cutting-edge SoHo gallery American Fine Arts, which put him at the forefront of the city’s art scene. In 2011 McAllister created an artwork comprising Lego pieces for the exhibition An Exchange with Sol LeWitt at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
• Norman Richard “Rick“ Pope, a ceramist and professor of art for thirty years in the School of Art at Montana State University, died on March 19, 2012. He was 70 years old. Born in Oklahoma, Pope has seen his work collected by the Archie Bray Foundation and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow
• Robert Raymond, a photographer and videographer who worked as a television broadcast engineer, passed away on February 27, 2012, at age 59. Raymond was an assistant director for the Boston Film/Video Foundation and worked with his wife in the Mobius Artists Group
• Amos Vogel, the last “lion of cinema” according to Werner Herzog, passed away on April 24, 2012, at the age of 91. A Viennese refugee, Vogel came to New York in 1938 and established an avant-garde film society, Cinema 16, with his wife Marcia. Based on the European model of a ciné-club, Cinema 16 debuted the work of Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage. Vogel also helped found the New York Film Festival and wrote Film as Subversive Art (1974)
• David Weiss, a Swiss artist and half of the Fischli and Weiss partnership, passed away on April 27, 2012, at the age of 66. Weiss was living a nomadic, free-spirited life in Europe before meeting the artist Peter Fischli in the late 1970s. The duo captured the imagination of the art world and beyond with the film The Way Things Go (1987), an ode to the joy of art production, and with Visible World (1987–2001), a table display of images of the sacred, profane, and everything in between

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

 

CAA encourages members to nominate their colleagues for one of twelve Awards for Distinction for 2013, to be named in January and presented in February at the 101st Annual Conference in New York. The different perspectives and anecdotes from multiple personal letters of recommendation provide award juries with a clearer picture of the qualities and attributes of the nominees.

In the letter, state who you are; how you know (of) the nominee; how the nominee and/or his or her work or publication has affected your practice or studies and the pursuit of your career; and why you think this person (or, in a collaboration, these people) deserves to be recognized. You should also contact up to five colleagues, students, peers, collaborators, and/or coworkers of the nominee to write letters.

All submissions must include a completed nomination form and one copy of the nominee’s CV (limit: two pages); book awards do not require a CV. Nominations for book and exhibition awards should be for the authors of books published or works exhibited or staged between September 1, 2011, and August 31, 2012. No more than five letters per candidate are considered.

Please read the descriptions of the twelve awards, the names of all past recipients, and the full instructions for the nomination process. You may also write to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs, for more information. Deadline: July 31, 2012, for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award; August 31, 2012, for all other awards.

For the second year in a row, the Getty Foundation has awarded a major grant to CAA that will enable twenty international professionals to attend the 101st Annual Conference, taking place February 13–16, 2013, in New York. With the Getty grant, CAA will continue its International Travel Grant Program, providing funds to art historians, artists who teach art history, and museum curators for travel expenses, hotel accommodations, per diems, conference registrations, and one-year CAA memberships.

The goal of the project is to increase international participation in CAA and to diversify the organization’s membership (presently seventy-two countries are represented). CAA also wishes to familiarize international participants with the submission process for conference sessions and to expand their professional network in the visual arts. As they did last year, members of CAA’s International Committee and the National Committee for the History of Art have agreed to host the participants.

For the program’s second year, CAA will offer preconference meetings on February 11 and 12 for grant recipients to present and discuss their common professional interests and issues.

The application process for 2013 grants will open shortly. Professionals from developing countries or from nations underrepresented in CAA’s membership are especially encouraged to apply. A jury assembled by CAA will select the twenty grant recipients. The deadline for applications will be August 15, 2012.

Wayne State University in Detroit has named Linda Downs, CAA executive director and chief executive officer, as one of five recipients of its 2012 Arts Achievement Awards. The awards, which are given to school alumni at any stage of their career, honor a passionate dedication to their chosen field. Downs earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Monteith College at Wayne State in 1968. She also taught as an adjunct professor in the university’s Department of Art and Art History from 1976 to 1989.

The awards reception and program took place on April 13, 2012, at the school’s Alumni House. The four other honorees were: Kendall Smith, a lighting designer for the Michigan Opera House (class of 1982); Sonya Tayeh, a choreographer and dancer (class of 2002); Lisa Vallee-Smith, a public-relations consultant (class of 1984); and the Magenta Giraffe Theatre Company, a Detroit community theater founded in 2008 by three school alumni.

Downs joins a list of illustrious past recipients, including a 1998 winner, Arthur C. Danto, professor emeritus of philosophy at Columbia University in New York and a longtime art critic for the Nation (class of 1948). Like Danto, Downs has worn many hats during her four-decade career as a curator, educator, scholar, and administrator. Prior to her appointment as CAA executive director in 2006, she led the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, during which time she oversaw the museum’s privatization and subsequent expansion into a 100,000-square-foot building, designed by the architect David Chipperfield. In 2005, with Wanda Corn and Patricia McDonnell, Downs organized the museum’s inaugural exhibition in its new space, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935. From 1989 to 2002, she was head of education at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and before that worked as curator of education at the Detroit Institute of Arts from 1976 to 1989.

Downs has published articles on art-museum education and was an educational consultant for public-school projects in Detroit, Davenport, and Washington, DC. She also served on the Getty Education Center’s Discipline-Based Art Education Project. A scholar of twentieth-century Mexican art, Downs curated two shows devoted to Diego Rivera at the Detroit Institute of Arts: Diego Rivera: A Retrospective in 1986, with Ellen Sharp; and The Rouge: The Image of Industry in the Art of Charles Sheeler and Diego Rivera in 1978, with Mary Jane Jacob. Downs explored a surprising chapter in the history of arts patronage with her 1999 book, Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals, a close look at the artist’s controversial murals commissioned by Edsel Ford in 1932 for the Detroit Institute of Arts.

A tireless campaigner for art organizations, Downs has served on many national nonprofit boards and acted as a consultant to art museums throughout the United States, Mexico, Australia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Russia. She currently serves as secretary of the National Humanities Alliance’s board of directors.

Top image: Linda Downs was presented her award by John Richardson, chairperson of the James Pearson Duffy Department of Art and Art History at Wayne State (photograph by Janine Pixley, Wayne State University)