CAA News Today
caa.reviews Publishes Dissertations Completed and In Progress for 2011
posted by Betty Leigh Hutcheson — June 07, 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.
Spring 2012 Recipients of the Millard Meiss Publication Fund
posted by Christopher Howard — June 04, 2012
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.
Apply to the CAA International Travel Grant Program
posted by Janet Landay, Program Manager, Fair Use Initiative — June 01, 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.
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.