CAA News Today
Letter of Support for Malian Cultural Heritage
posted by CAA — May 31, 2012
May 31, 2012
Ecole du Patrimoine Africain
01 BP 2205
Porto-Novo
Benin
Dear Ecole du Patrimoine Africain:
On behalf of the College Art Association’s Board of Directors and 14,000 international members, we would like to express our grave concern for the protection of Mali’s cultural heritage in light of the current military action in the north of the country. On May 4, two mausoleums of Saints were intentionally defaced in Timbuktu, and there is reason to think such vandalism will continue unless the government of Mali and the National Army of the Republic of Mali act to safeguard the country’s cultural property.
Mali is renowned for its cultural achievements, and its cultural heritage is considered patrimony of Mali, Africa and the entire international community. Four sites have been declared World Heritage by UNESCO and six cultural practices are considered intangible heritage; they have been inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding.
We urge the Government and Army to protect Mali’s people and cultural artifacts in accordance with the international Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1954), the 1972 Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, and the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
We appeal to the political and military authorities in Mali to work for the best interest of the Malian nation, which should take precedence in ensuring the return to constitutional order in the north. We urge them to guarantee the preservation, integrity and security of cultural goods and people in all their dimensions and components, especially in occupied areas in Timbuktu, Gao, Kidal, and ask Mali’s neighbors to prevent the illicit transfer of objects and works of art from Mali through customs and police controls at their borders.
Sincerely yours,
Anne Collins Goodyear
President
Linda Downs
Executive Director
Letter of Support for the Council of American Overseas Research Centers
posted by CAA — May 31, 2012
May 31, 2012
Dr. Mary Ellen Lane
Executive Director
Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC)
PO Box 37012, MRC 178
Washington, DC 20013-7012
Dear Dr. Lane,
We are writing in support of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers’ (CAORC) proposal to the Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) to continue the work and operations of overseas research centers and of CAORC itself.
Our organization’s particular experience was with The American Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TAARII), without whose help we would not have been able to bring Salam Atta Sabri, the Director of Iraq’s Museum of Modern Art to the College Art Association’s Annual Conference in Los Angeles this past February. Mr. Atta Sabri was the recipient of a highly competitive and distinguished grant to participate in an international meeting of art historians, curators, and artists during the conference. From the outset, Beth Kangas, director of TAARII, and Nada Shabout, professor of art history at the University of North Texas, offered support in any way possible, including help obtaining a visa, help arranging travel, and advancing funds for the entire trip, because Dr. Sabri was not permitted to receive American dollars in Iraq. CAA could not have accomplished this work without TAARII’s active support. (Additionally, TAARII then arranged a speaking tour for Mr. Sabri to several universities in the United States, enriching his visit here substantially.)
As the scholarly world becomes increasingly global, organizations such as TAARII, and all the groups supported by CAORC, become ever more important. We fully endorse the CAORC proposal to continue the work and operations of overseas research centers and CAORC itself.
Sincerely,
Anne Collins Goodyear
President
Linda Downs
Executive Director
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — May 30, 2012
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 Seeks Nominations for the 2013 Awards for Distinction
posted by Lauren Stark — May 29, 2012
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.
Getty Foundation to Fund a Second Year of CAA’s International Travel Grant Program
posted by Christopher Howard — May 23, 2012
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.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for May 2012
posted by CAA — May 10, 2012
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
May 2012
Francesca Woodman, Untitled, New York, 1979–80, chromogenic print, 3⅜ x 3½ in. (photograph © George and Betty Woodman)
Francesca Woodman
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128
March 16–June 13, 2012
Francesca Woodman, only twenty-two years old when she committed suicide in 1981, was already an accomplished young artist breaking new ground with her stunning black-and-white photographs, primarily of herself, in dreamlike interior spaces. Her images are a palimpsest of Surrealism, fashion photography, literature, and daily ritual. This Guggenheim retrospective features 120 photographs that cover her teenage years in Boulder, Colorado, her time as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in the late 1970s, a meaningful year spent in Rome on a study-abroad program, and her last work, produced in New York.The exhibition also features two artist’s journals and recently unearthed videos made while Woodman was a student.
Malia Jensen: Stuff and Things
Cristin Tierney
546 West 29th Street, New York, NY 10001
April 19–June 2, 2012
Malia Jensen’s first solo show in New York, Stuff and Things, features sculptures of animals and other natural phenomena made from an often-deceiving variety of materials, such as bronze, wood, glass, porcelain, and salt. A dark, lyrical humor runs through Jensen’s work, and her animals are a study in opposites, simultaneously sensuous and funny, grotesque and formally beautiful. Each object has a punchy joke that gives way to pathos and contemplation. In the exhibition essay, John S. Weber describes the world that Jensen evokes as one in which “Everything is beautiful, puzzling, and inconclusive.”
FRAMEWORK: Activism, Memory, and the Social Landscape
A Proposition by LaToya Ruby Frazier
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002
May 17 and 19, 2012
Each month the New Museum’s public-seminar series, titled Propositions, focuses on a new artist and set of issues. For May, LaToya Ruby Frazier, a photographer and participant in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, will lead a two-day seminar based on her ongoing documentation of Braddock, Pennsylvania, the struggling steel-mill town where she was born. Frazier’s work makes the political deeply personal: she is concerned with salvaging the stories of her family and neighbors while archly exposing media exploitation, such as an ad campaign for Levi’s jeans that packaged the complex social reality of her hometown into a hip destination.
Evelyne Axell: The Great Journey into Space
Broadway 1602
1181 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10001
April 30–August 25, 2012
Evelyne Axell (1935–1972), a prominent Belgian actress and television personality in the 1950s, changed her course to become a visual artist with the encouragement of a family friend, René Magritte. Axell’s paintings are bold pictorial statements, often featuring nude female figures, assemblages with found objects à la Robert Rauschenberg, and the graphic, hallucinatory colors of Pop art and advertising. Like other artists from the 1960s who worked with figurative motifs—John Wesley and Rosalyn Drexler come to mind—Axell plays with the political implications of “erotic art,” feminism, and consumer culture. The Great Journey into Space, her second solo appearance at Broadway 1602, features paintings, drawings, sculpture, exhibition archives, and documentation of a wild Happening that the artist organized in 1969 at the Foncke Gallery in Ghent, Belgium.
Mona Hatoum: You Are Still Here
Arter, Vehbi Koç Foundation
Istiklal Cad. No 211, Beyoglu, Istanbul, Turkey, 34433
March 17–May 27, 2012
You Are Still Here, Mona Hatoum’s first solo show in Turkey, showcases work made since the 1990s. Hatoum’s art exists between the poetic and the political, exile and homecoming, exquisite craftsmanship and everyday objects. She works in a wide range of materials and forms, from singular sculptural objects to room-sized installations, as well as video, photograph, and work on paper. A 2012 installation comprising human-sized steel cages containing delicate hand-blown glass, titled Kapan (translated as “trap” in Turkish), was created specifically for the exhibition. Another new work, Shift (2012), is a wool carpet map of the world divided into danger zones by drawn-on yellow seismic waves.
Ellen Altfest: Head and Plant
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002
May 6–June 24, 2012
Ellen Alfest is a New York–based artist who makes precisely detailed oil paintings of humans and vegetation on a one-to-one scale. Her subjects are often men in states of unaware repose, sometimes rendered completely abstract as a zoomed-in landscape of hair, veins, and flesh. Altfest’s vision of the living human body as painted matter has its precedent in the work of Philip Pearlstein and Lucian Freud. Head and Plant is her first solo museum exhibition.
Maro Michalakakos: I Would Prefer Not To
Ileana Tounta Contemporary Arts Centre
48 Armatolon-Klephton Street, Athens, Greece, 114 71
March 29–May 26, 2012
Literary references abound in the work of the Greek artist Maro Michalakakos. She takes the title of her exhibition, I Would Prefer Not To, from a line favored by the protagonist of Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.” Happy Days, a heaping pile of red velvet fluff that hugs the gallery’s columns, nods to a Samuel Beckett play with the same name. A second installation using seductive velvet, Red Carpet, consists of a carpet unfurled from floor to ceiling, bearing the imprints of animal claw marks. The glamour of the “red-carpet” event here becomes a gateway to a predatory world of abuse, power, and victimization.
Members of the 2012–13 Nominating Committee
posted by Vanessa Jalet — May 09, 2012
CAA is pleased to announce the members of the 2012–13 Nominating Committee, which is charged with identifying and interviewing potential candidates for the Board of Directors and selecting the final slate of candidates for the membership’s vote. The committee members, their institutional affiliations, and their positions are:
- DeWitt Godfrey, Colgate University, Vice President for Committees and Chair
- Brian Bishop, Framingham State University
- Roger Crum, University of Dayton and CAA Board
- Kevin Hamilton, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- Patricia Mathews, Hobart and William Smith Colleges and CAA Board
- Sabina Ott, Columbia College Chicago and CAA Board
- Joseph H. Seipel, Virginia Commonwealth University
- Norie Sato, Independent Artist, Seattle
- Linda Downs, CAA Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer (ex officio)
The 2011 Nominating Committee chose the new members of the committee at its recent business meeting, held during the 2012 Annual Conference in Los Angeles in February. The Board of Directors also appointed three liaisons. CAA publishes a call for nominations and self-nominations for Nominating Committee service in CAA News and on the website in late fall of every year. Please direct all queries regarding the committee to Vanessa Jalet, CAA executive liaison.
Affiliated Society News for May 2012
posted by CAA — May 09, 2012
American Council for Southern Asian Art
The American Council for Southern Asian Art(ACSAA) welcomes Cathleen Cummings, assistant professor of art history at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, as its new webmaster. Lisa N. Owen, an ACSAA board member, and Catherine Becker, the ACSAA secretary, have each agreed to serve an additional term.
Past newsletters from 1974 to 2007 and annual bulletins from 2008 to the present have been scanned and are now available to all members on the ACSAA website. Members are invited to submit news regarding publications, exhibitions, or conferences for inclusion in the 2012 bulletin. Please send your information to Melody Rod-ari, ACSAA bulletin editor.
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries
The Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) is offering a leadership seminar for thirty-five participants, in partnership with the Kellogg Center for Nonprofit Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Taking place June 24–29, 2012, the course is designed for directors and director-curators of academic museums and galleries who are at any career stage and who work in any collecting field. The seminar includes museum and gallery leaders from institutions ranging from large state universities to small private colleges. Visit the AAMG website for a list of faculty members and seminar details.
Association of Historians of American Art
The Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA) has awarded a $500 AHAA Travel Grant to Rebecca Uchill, a PhD candidate in art history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Uchill presented a paper, “Processing History, Forming Transactions: Preservation and Exchange in the Work of Allison Smith,” at the 2012 CAA Annual Conference session, “Trading Zones: Strategies for the Study of Artists and Their Art-Making Practices.”
Save the date for the second AHAA symposium, “American Art: The Academy, Museums, and the Market,” to be held October 11–13, 2012, and hosted by the Boston Athenaeum and Boston University in Massachusetts. Visit AHAA online for more information or contact the symposium cochairs, David Dearinger and Melissa Renn.
Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art
The Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) has received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a three-year capacity-building initiative to maximize the possibilities of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, the organization’s scholarly electronic journal. The grant is intended to help authors in the development phase of their articles as well as to aid the journal in the implementation phase. Therefore, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide seeks scholarship that engages in one or more of the following interrelated areas of investigation: data mining and analysis; geographic information systems and mapping; and high-resolution imaging and dynamic image presentation. Authors should be generally knowledgeable about the technological possibilities related to their project and able to articulate how both specific computer-based research methods and the online publication format connect with the research questions on which their project focuses. In addition, authors should expect to collaborate with technical experts to help complete their projects. Proposals should outline projects that are relatively small scale, able to be realized within about three to six months, and requiring approximately one hundred hours of development work. Interested contributors may review the proposal guidelines for more details. For further information, contact Petra Chu or Emily Pugh.
Foundations in Art: Theory and Education
Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE) will hold its national biennial conference in Savannah, Georgia, April 3–6, 2013, at the Savannah College of Art and Design’s School of Foundation Studies. Titled “postHaus,” the conference has the theme “Instructing, Constructing, and Connecting with Students in the Twenty-First Century.” The question posed is: “As models of education evolve, what new teaching models are forming?” Each FATE biennial conference attracts a fantastic group of first-year studio professors and instructors from two- and four-year colleges across the United States and internationally. For “postHaus,” FATE seeks to expand its reach. Topics can include but are not limited to: innovation in studio courses, curriculum development, approaches to art history, liberal-arts instruction, the importance of research librarians, and the vital role of lab technicians. Proposals for papers and presentation must be submitted by June 1, 2012.
Need FATE sooner? The next FATE regional workshop, “Removing the Curse of the Demo,” will take place on August 11, 2012, at the Art Institute of Atlanta–Decatur in Georgia. Participants should bring their favorite demo and share the way they approach the subject through perspective drawing, cutting paper straight, paint mixing, paint application, finding proper proportions, obtaining proper value, or anything else related to the topic.
Historians of British Art
John Everett Millais, Isabella, 1848–49, oil on canvas, 102.9 x 142.9 cm. National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery (artwork in the public domain)
Please join the Historians of British Art (HBA) and the English-Speaking Union (ESU) for a preview of the exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde on Thursday, May 24, 2012, 6:30–8:30 PM, in New York. Two of the show’s three curators, Tim Barringer of Yale University and Jason Rosenfeld of Marymount Manhattan University, will give American audiences an early look at this important exhibition—addressing its key themes and its evolution as a project—during an informal, richly illustrated conversation, moderated by Peter Trippi, HBA president and a cocurator of J. W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite. The discussion will be followed by a wine reception.
In September 2012, Tate Britain in London will open Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde. Inspired by early Renaissance painting and led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood rebelled against the establishment of the mid-nineteenth century and became Britain’s first modern art movement. The curators, which include Alison Smith of Tate London, will bring together more than 150 works in different media, including painting, sculpture, photography, and the applied arts, revealing the Pre-Raphaelites to be advanced in their approach to every genre. After closing at Tate in January 2013, the exhibition will move to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and then to Moscow and Tokyo.
Advance registration for the conversation is required: $20 for HBA and ESU members; $25 for nonmembers. Payment may be made by credit card or by check payable to “The English-Speaking Union.” Checks should be mailed to: Caitlin Murphy, English-Speaking Union, 144 East 39th Street, New York, NY 10016. You will receive a confirmation of payment if you provide your email address. Call 212-818-1200 or write to mnicoll@esuus.org for more information. For content-related questions, please email Peter Trippi. For questions about payment, please contact Caitlin Murphy.
International Association of Art Critics
The International Association of Art Critics (AICA/US) held its annual awards ceremony at the Asia Society in New York on April 2, 2012. These awards honor artists, curators, museums, galleries, and other cultural institutions in recognition of excellence in the conception and realization of exhibitions. AICA’s four hundred active members nominated and voted on outstanding exhibitions from the previous season (June 2010–June 2011). The twenty-four winners of first and second places in twelve categories, selected from over one hundred finalists, included exhibitions of work by the contemporary artists Christian Marclay, Sarah Sze, and Ai Weiwei and by the twentieth-century artists Pablo Picasso, Sonia Delaunay, Kurt Schwitters, and Paul Thek, as well as thematic exhibitions dealing with the history of drawing through the twentieth century, contemporary Japanese art, and Fluxus. Lowery Sims, Peter Plagens, and Sanford Biggers presented the awards. This year’s nominating committee comprised Eleanor Heartney (chair), Marek Bartelik (AICA/US president), Rebecca Cochran, Peter Frank, Francine Miller, and Susan Snodgrass.
International Association of Word and Image Studies
The International Association of Word and Image Studies (IAWIS/AIERTI) seeks proposals for “From the Wall, to the Press, to the Streets,” its affiliated-society session for CAA’s 2013 Annual Conference in New York, that reflect on contemporary art practices that occur outside the traditional framework of the gallery or museum space. Topics to consider include: public art rhetoric (how language challenges elitist/populist divides); working around the frame (spatial transgression as institutional critique); art’s new open-access sites (the internet and social networks); and institutional responses (marketing and copyright laws). Please submit your proposal and a CV to Eve Kalyva and Ignaz Cassar by June 1, 2012. IAWIS/AIERTI membership is not required.
International Sculpture Center
The International Sculpture Center (ISC), in collaboration with the National Academy Museum and School in New York, will present the year’s first ISConnects panel, “Against the Grain: Strategies, Choices, and Controversies of Women in Sculpture,” at the National Academy on May 30, 2012. Joan Marter, professor of art history at Rutgers University in New Jersey, will moderate; a list of participating artists is forthcoming. For more information and to view videos from previous ISConnects events, please visit the website.
Italian Art Society
The Italian Art Society (IAS) would like to congratulate its new officers and committee members: Alison Perchuk, treasurer; Kay Arthur, newsletter editor; Catherine McCurrach, secretary and membership coordinator; Anne Leader, webmaster; Nicola Camerlenghi and Esperança Camara, program committee; and Brian Curran, Frances Gage, and Mark Rosen, nominating committee.
IAS seeks proposals for papers and presentations for its two sponsored sessions at CAA’s 2013 Annual Conference in New York: “Bad Boys, Hussies, and Villains” and “Disegno.” Please visit the proposal guidelines for more information on how to participate.
IAS is sponsoring four linked sessions, entitled “Italian Art and Confluence of Cultures (I–IV),” at the forty-seventh International Congress on Medieval Art, taking place May 10–13, 2012, at the University of Western Michigan in Kalamazoo.
The organization welcomes all to the third annual IAS/Kress Lecture in Italy, to be given by Debra Pincus on June 6, 2012, at the Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti in Venice, seat of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere, ed Arti. Pincus’s talk is entitled “The Lure of the Letter: Renaissance Venice and the Recovery of Antique Writing.”
Mid-America College Art Association
The James Pearson Duffy Department of Art and Art History at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, will host the next Mid-America College Art Association (MACAA) conference, taking place October 3–6, 2012. The event has two themes: “Community and Collaboration” and “Meaning and Making.” Programming will include three featured speakers, panel presentations, studio workshops, MACAA member exhibitions, and museum visits. You may register for the conference and find out how to become a MACAA member on the Detroit conference website.
National Council of Arts Administrators
National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA) congratulates a member, Charles A. Wright, who was recently elected to serve on CAA’s Board of Directors. NCAA members Georgia Strange, Denise Mullen, and Leslie Bellavance were elected in 2011 to serve on the same board, where they had worked with three fellow members, Judith Thorpe, Jean Miller, and Jay Coogan.
At the 2012 CAA Annual Conference, several NCAA members—Sergio Soave, Tom Berding, Donna Meeks, Lee Ann Garrison, Amy Hauft, John Kissick, Jim Hopfensperger, Tom Loeser, and David Yager—presented a concise and compelling session, “Hot Problems/Cool Solutions in Arts Leadership.” In addition, the annual NCAA Reception at CAA, cohosted by the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at the University of California, Irvine, was an amazing affair. Thanks to all who attended.
It’s not too late to submit a proposal for the next NCAA meeting. The thirty-first annual conference, “Granting Permission,” will take place November 7–10, 2012, hosted by Ohio State University and Columbus College of Art and Design. The NCAA board seeks proposals for presentations, sessions, and/or panels for the annual Arts Administrators Workshops. Topics may include, but are not limited to: leadership and management; promotion and tenure; interpersonal communication; budget management, personnel evaluation, and growth; career paths; and case studies related to arts administration. Proposals and inquiries should be sent to Jim Hopfensperger, NCAA president. Initial proposals of no more than 350 words are due by May 21, 2012.
Public Art Dialogue
Public Art Dialogue (PAD) welcomes two new officers: Sarah Schrank begins her first term as cochair; and Sierra Rooney begins her first term as secretary.
Public Art Dialogue, a scholarly journal published biannually, invites submissions for its upcoming special issue, “Memorials: The Culture of Remembrance.” This issue seeks to explore memorials in regard to their range of subjects, various formal and conceptual strategies, and the critical issues pertaining to their study. PAD welcomes submissions that address related topics (except war or peace, covered in the previous issue) from any time period or place. The deadline for the submission of papers is September 15, 2012.
Society for Photographic Education
Each spring the Society for Photographic Education (SPE) hosts a forum for the presentation of artistic work and research to a community of peers. SPE is accepting proposals for its fiftieth annual conference, “Conferring Significance: Celebrating Photography’s Continuum,” which will be held March 7–10, 2013, in Chicago, Illinois. Proposals will be accepted until June 1, 2012. Topics are not required to be theme-based and may include, but are not limited to: image making, history, contemporary theory and criticism, new technologies, effects of media and culture, educational issues, and funding. SPE membership is required for submission; proposals are peer reviewed.
Society of North American Goldsmiths
The Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG) will hold its forty-first annual conference, “The Heat Is On,” from May 23 to 26, 2012, at the Westin Kierland Resort and Spa in Scottsdale, Arizona. The keynote speaker is Garth Clark, an art dealer, historian, and critic. Other guest speakers include Megan Auman, Kim Cridler, Steve Midgett, Kevin O’Dwyer, and Bettina Speckner. The spotlight is also on these emerging artists: Allyson Bone, Andrew Hayes, Caitie Sellers, Loring Taoka, and Amy Tavern. Join the Professional Development Seminar and the Education Dialogue, and also spend an evening on the annual Exhibition Crawl in Scottsdale, Phoenix, and Mesa. View outstanding craftsmanship in the annual juried exhibition, the student digital presentation, and SNAG members’ work on SNAG TV.
Visual Resources Association
The Visual Resources Association (VRA) has transitioned the VRA Bulletin from a print journal to an electronic journal, published by the Berkeley Electronic Press, also know as Bepress. In order to celebrate the inaugural issue and to spread the word, the first issue is readily accessible to read, but succeeding issues will be available to VRA members only for the first six months after publication, after which time the journal will be open access. Feature articles include Janice L. Eklund’s “Cultural Objects Digitization Planning: Metadata Overview,” which provides a discussion of image metadata types, applications, and best-practice considerations for such projects. In Maureen Burns’s “Musings on Electronic Publishing,” the former VRA president summarizes the open-access movement, new models of electronic publishing, and how traditional publication processes change in an electronic environment. In this issue you can also find the complete text of Visual Resources Association: Statement on the Fair Use of Images for Teaching, Research, and Study, endorsed by CAA and published with an executive summary.
HUNG(A)RY FOR ART: DÓRA SALLAY
posted by CAA — May 09, 2012
Geraldine A. Johnson is a university lecturer in history of art and associate head of the Humanities Division at Oxford University.
The Hungarian curator and scholar Dóra Sallay (left) with Anne Helmreich, senior program officer at the Getty Foundation (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Rice congee, miso soup, and nori are not usually on the breakfast menu for most Hungarian museum curators. But when I met Dóra Sallay at the crack of dawn at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles during the 2012 CAA Annual Conference, the truly global offerings of the lavish breakfast buffet were a sign of things to come. As Sallay herself observed, “It made me realize just how international the conference was likely to be.”
Sallay, curator of early Italian painting at the Szépmüvészeti Múzeum, Budapest’s Museum of Fine Arts, was one of twenty international scholars awarded travel grants to attend this year’s conference through a new program administered by CAA and funded by the Getty Foundation. Hosts for each grant recipient were selected from CAA’s International Committee, led by its outgoing committee chair, Jennifer Milam, and from the National Committee for the History of Art, led by Frederick M. Asher. The trip to Los Angeles was Sallay’s first experience not only of the annual meeting, but also of California. Both proved to be eye-opening encounters for a curator who had previously only been to small, specialized art-history conferences. “This was the first time,” Sallay said, “that I was able to hear talks on such a wide range of subjects, including new methodological approaches and innovative research tools.”
Among the many sessions she attended, Sallay gave special praise to the Getty Research Institute’s presentation of its Digital Art History Texts project. She described it as a “cozy, relaxed, and genuinely interactive event, where I felt I really had a chance to influence how a major new research tool was being developed. As a curator working in a small country with limited financial resources, such digitalization projects are absolutely crucial.”
Sallay was also able to hear about the latest research being done in her field of specialization, Italian Renaissance art. She particularly enjoyed Max Grossman’s talk, “Brick Architecture and Political Strategy in Early Modern Siena,” and while at the Book and Trade Fair she saw publications not yet available in Budapest, such as Anne Leader’s 2011 book, The Badia of Florence: Art and Observance in a Renaissance Monastery. Unsurprisingly, Sallay’s suitcases were noticeably heavier upon her return to Hungary, filled with many such coveted finds, as well as new discoveries.
Giovanni di Paolo, Branchini Madonna, 1427, tempera and gold leaf on panel, 72 x 39 in. (182.9 x 99.1 cm). Norton Simon Foundation. F.1978.01.P (artwork in the public domain; photograph © 2012 Norton Simon Foundation)
Sallay was very enthusiastic about the opportunities she and her fellow travel-grant recipients had to take in some of southern California’s world-famous art collections, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art during the CAA Centennial Reception to the J. Paul Getty Museum on a trip arranged by the International Committee, now led by its new chair, Ann Albritton. A visit to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena was particularly significant for Sallay’s research as she was able to view Giovanni di Paolo’s panel painting, the Branchini Madonna (1427), which she had known only through reproductions. The museum’s chief curator, Carol Togneri, “was absolutely wonderful,” according to Sallay. “Not only did she show me all the files on the painting, but she even arranged for me to look at the work outside normal museum hours and provided a ladder for some productive close-up viewing.”
The social aspect of the conference was particularly important for the international scholars. Sallay praised the extensive program of activities that CAA provided for travel-grant recipients and enthused about making “fantastic connections with scholars and curators from all over the world: South Africa, India, Pakistan. We discussed problems of common interest such as, when curating exhibitions, how to find the right balance between the needs of the general public and the demands of academics.” She also noted, somewhat ironically, that she met a number of fellow researchers from Central and Eastern Europe, such as Daniel Premerl from Croatia’s Institute of Art History, for the first time in Los Angeles.
Getting to know members of the International Committee, who served as hosts to the travel-grant recipients, was also a terrific way to forge valuable new links across continents. Indeed, as Sallay’s official host, I am pleased to report that, thanks to email, we have continued the conversation we began over the breakfast table in Los Angeles—although the next time we meet in person, rice congee is much less likely to be on the menu!
Read about another travel-grant recipient, Judy Peter from South Africa, and review a report on all activities from the 2012 CAA International Travel Grant Program.
NEA Awards $20,000 Grant to CAA for ARTspace
posted by Nia Page — May 01, 2012
CAA has received a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to support the next ARTspace, taking place during the 101st Annual Conference in New York, February 13–16, 2013.
The grant, which is the NEA’s fourth consecutive award to CAA for ARTspace programming, will help fund, among other things, ARTexchange, a popular open-portfolio event for artists, as well as [Meta] Mentors programming, which has covered topics such as do-it-yourself curatorial and exhibition practices, international networks for artists, and assistance with grants, taxes, and promotion.
Designed to engage CAA’s artist members and the general public, ARTspace offers program sessions free of charge and includes diverse activities such the Annual Artists’ Interviews, screenings of film, video, and multimedia works, live performances, and papers and presentations that facilitate a conversational yet professional exchange of ideas and practices. Held at each conference since 2001, ARTspace is intended to reflect the current state of the visual arts and arts education.
Image: Art in Odd Places and Performance Exchange sponsored performances outside the Los Angeles Convention Center as part of ARTspace’s Art in the Public Realm, a daylong event at the 2012 Annual Conference (photograph by Bradley Marks)