CAA News Today
Books Published by CAA Members
posted by CAA — April 15, 2013
Publishing a book is a major milestone for artists and scholars—browse a list of recent titles below.
Books Published by CAA Members appears every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
April 2013
Thea Burns. The Luminous Trace: Drawing and Writing in Metalpoint (London: Archetype Publications, 2012).
Michael Ann Holly. The Melancholy Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).
Sharon Louden, ed. Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists (Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2013).
Joanne Pillsbury, ed. Past Presented: Archaeological Illustration and the Ancient Americas (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2012).
Anna K. Tuck-Scala. Andrea Vaccaro (Naples, 1604–1670): His Documented Life and Art (Naples, Italy: Paparo Edizioni, 2012).
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for April 2013
posted by CAA — April 10, 2013
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.
April 2013
Hilma af Klint, Altarpiece, No. 1, Group X, Altarpiece Series, 1915 (artwork © Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk; photograph by Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet)
Hilma af Klint: A Pioneer of Abstraction
Moderna Museet
Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Sweden
February 16–May 26, 2013
This major touring retrospective of Hilma af Klint’s work is a tribute to her unacknowledged contribution to abstract art. The exhibition traces its development and highlights the spiritual underpinnings of the symbolism and ornamentation that characterize her geometric idiom, in light of her interest in spiritism, theosophy, and anthroposophy. Also including Klint’s diaries and notebooks, A Pioneer of Abstraction proposes that she be considered a pioneer of abstract art, along with the genre’s main protagonists: Vasily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich. Klint, who believed that when painting she was expressing a higher consciousness, exhibited just her early representational paintings during her lifetime, stipulating in her will that her abstract works, which today amount to more than one thousand paintings and studies, could be shown only twenty years after her death. Not coincidentally, this exhibition comprises largely previously unseen works.
Dorothy Iannone: Innocent and Aware
Camden Arts Centre
Arkwright Road, London NW3 6DG England
March 8–May 5, 2013
Bringing together many works from the 1970s to the present, such as paintings, cut outs, illustrated books, and video installations, Dorothy Iannone: Innocent and Aware offers a great opportunity to study the radically combined celebration of sexual pleasure and quest for spirituality that underpin the work of this Berlin-based American artist, including the feminist politics of its pornographic aspects, its distinctive autobiographic mode, and its dialogue with both high and low culture, whether Western or non-Western.
Chantal Akerman: Maniac Shadows
The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011
April 12–May 11, 2013
Curated by Tim Griffin and Lumi Tan, Maniac Shadows is a mesmerizing installation featuring recent work by the great feminist Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. Images from multiscreen projections of recent video, shot during her residencies in various countries, interweave interior and outdoor views of the urban and natural environments, populated by figures or shadows, immersing the viewer in a shifting scenery of presence and absence. The exhibition also includes still photographs derived from the projections and a haunting video apparition of the artist in profil perdu reading My Mother Laughs, an autobiographic text about her aging mother. Evoking her film News from Home (1976), which interweaves shots of New York, where the artist had recently moved, with the reading of the letters of her mother from Brussels, Maniac Shadows unfolds as a city-specific installation, an autobiographic postscript that brings full circle the signature themes that have preoccupied Akerman throughout her career.
The artist Cristina Iglesias at the opening of her exhibition at the Reina Sofía in 2013 (photograph by Joaquín Cortés/Román Lores)
Cristina Iglesias: Metonymy
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Calle de Santa Isabel, 52, 28012, Madrid, Spain
February 6–May 13, 2013
Curated by Lynne Cooke, this major retrospective of Cristina Iglesias’s work combines signature sculptural installations from the beginning of her career to the present, including videos and serigraphs, and sums up the major preoccupations of her polymaterial art practice while showcasing her multifarious expansion of sculpture, her exploration of its relation with space and architecture, and the centrality of the idea of the refuge.
Giosetta Fioroni: L’Argento
Drawing Center
35 Wooster Street, New York, NY 10013
April 5–June 2, 2013
Curated by Claire Gilman, this exhibition is a unique opportunity to marvel at the early work of Giosetta Fioroni, an important Italian painter whose signature combination of silver enamel paint and drawing on canvas makes her ideal subject for an institution devoted to drawing. The daughter of artists, Fioroni was born in Rome in 1932 and studied theater design with Toti Scialoja. She began as an abstract painter under his influence, as well as that of Cy Twombly, whom she befriended in Rome, but by the sixties had shifted toward an idiosyncratic figurative idiom firmly associated with Italian Pop’s history in Rome. Though the show brings together over eighty works in drawing, painting, film, theater design, and illustration, dating from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, it consists primarily of her signature figurative works of the 1960s, whose iconography (whether based on family or anonymous photos, iconic Italian paintings, news images from the Fascist Era, and above all glamour shots of women’s faces taken from women’s magazines) and chromatic reference to photography and cinema (by her use of silver as a “non-color”) manifest her distinct contribution to international Pop art. Along with two other current shows in New York that feature contemporaneous female artists—Idelle Weber: The Pop Years at Hollis Taggart Galleries and The Pop Object: The Still Life Tradition in Pop Art at Acquavella Gallery, which includes works by Vija Celmins, Marjorie Strider, Marisol, and Jann Haworth—the Drawing Center’s introduction of Fioroni to the United States belatedly acknowledges the female contributors to Pop, a pleasant aftereffect of the 2010 touring exhibition Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists.
Catalogue cover of Daring Methods: The Prints of Mary Cassatt
Daring Methods: The Prints of Mary Cassatt
New York Public Library
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Print and Stokes Galleries, Third Floor, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York, NY 10018
March 8–June 23, 2013
Drawn from the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs Collection, this exhibition documents Mary Cassatt’s first tentative steps in printmaking—begun a year before her first participation in the Impressionist group exhibitions in 1878—and culminates with her highly accomplished, technically dazzling color prints. Spanning twenty years of her career, the arrangement unfolds chronologically, allowing the viewer to follow how the artist dealt with subjects, compositions, and an array of printing methods. It is also meant to convey the artist’s audacious experimentation with printmaking media and techniques.
Edith Tudor-Hart: In the Shadow of Tyranny
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
1 Queen Street, Edinburgh, EH2 1JD, Scotland
March 2–May 26, 2013
Drawn largely from the photographer’s archive of negatives, donated to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2004, In the Shadow of Tyranny surveys the life and extraordinary political work of the Austrian photographer Edith Tudor-Hart. The exhibition is a long-overdue acknowledgment of the influential role of her socialist-realist aesthetics in transforming British photography of the interwar period. Born Edith Suschitzky in 1908, Tudor-Hart grew up in radical Jewish circles in Vienna after World War I. She studied photography at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, and pursued a career as a photojournalist, though trained as a Montessori teacher. In May 1933 she was arrested for working as an agent for the Communist Party of Austria. She escaped imprisonment by marrying an English doctor and was exiled to London. Tudor-Hart continued to combine her practice as a photographer with low-level espionage for the Soviet Union and was pursued by the security services until her death in 1973. Dealing with social issues throughout her career—beginning with a focus on poverty, unemployment, and slum housing that captures the sociopolitical turmoil of the interwar period in Vienna and Britain and turning to child-welfare issues after World War II—Tudor-Hart used her camera as a political weapon in the service of working-class struggles and the workers’ movement in a manner that has left an indelible imprint on British photography. The exhibition presents over eighty photographs, many of which have never been shown, and includes film footage, Tudor-Hart’s scrapbook, and a selection of her published stories in books and magazines.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — April 10, 2013
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
AAUP Releases 2012–13 Salary Survey
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has released its new salary survey, called Here’s the News: The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2012–13. The AAUP’s annual report is the premier source for data on full-time faculty salaries, and this year’s document also provides updates on pay and working conditions for colleagues in contingent appointments. (Read more from the American Association of University Professors.)
From Math Teacher to Adult Film Extra: The Unexpected Early Jobs of Thirty Art Stars
Everyone started out somewhere—including your favorite art stars. Some of the biggest names in the visual arts came from surprisingly humble beginnings, and we’ve picked out thirty of the most telling examples of artists who had less-than-glamorous jobs while pursuing their craft. Sometimes, this exercise actually yields serious insight into the styles they became known for, sometimes not. In every case, though, it gives a window into the life behind the work. (Read more at Blouin Artinfo.)
The National Digital Public Library Is Launched
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), to be launched on April 18, is a project to make the holdings of America’s research libraries, archives, and museums available to all Americans—and eventually to everyone in the world—online and free of charge. How is that possible? In order to answer that question, I would like to describe the first steps and immediate future of the DPLA. But before going into detail, I think it important to stand back and take a broad view of how such an ambitious undertaking fits into the development of what we commonly call an information society. (Read more in the New York Review of Books.)
Scholars Increasingly Use Online Resources, Survey Finds, but They Value Traditional Formats Too
Scholars continue to get more comfortable with electronic-only journals, and they increasingly get access to the material they want via digital channels, including internet search engines and more-specific discovery tools provided by academic libraries. When it comes time to publish their own research, though, faculty members still seek out journals with the highest prestige and the widest readership in their fields, whether or not those journals are electronic and make articles free online. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Scientific Articles Accepted (Personal Checks, Too)
The scientists who were recruited to appear at a conference called Entomology-2013 thought they had been selected to make a presentation to the leading professional association of scientists who study insects. But they found out the hard way that they were wrong. The prestigious, academically sanctioned conference they had in mind has a slightly different name: Entomology 2013 (without the hyphen). The one they had signed up for featured speakers who were recruited by email, not vetted by leading academics. Those who agreed to appear were later charged a hefty fee for the privilege, and pretty much anyone who paid got a spot on the podium that could be used to pad a résumé. (Read more in the New York Times.)
To Salvage and Sell?
After Superstorm Sandy hit New York City last October, the conservator Gloria Velandia’s studio was littered with hundreds of damaged works of art. But whether she repaired a work depended not so much on the extent of the damage, but on whether or not she received approval to proceed from the insurance company paying the bill. “It’s a decision made by the insurance adjusters,” Velandia says, and they might decide it’s cheaper instead to declare a work “a total loss” and pay out its insured value. (Read more in the Art Newspaper.)
How Many Light Bulbs Does It Take to Discolor a van Gogh?
Last year, conservators at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam noticed that areas of bright yellow paint in many of the artist’s works, such as Sunflowers, were turning shades of green and brown. To find out why, they teamed up with scientists at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. Online news reports claimed that the scientists found prolonged exposure to LED lights to be the cause of the darkening. That conclusion, however, is inaccurate. (Read more in ARTnews.)
Fighting the Fear
Seeking to rouse their colleges to stand up against inadequate compensation and working conditions, adjunct instructors and labor activists at the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers conference collided with the concern that speaking out could be worse than keeping quiet. But in searching for solutions that would inspire instructors off the tenure track to overcome that fear, speakers at the conference cast about for cultural and historical analogies without seeming to settle on a specific one. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)
Summary of ITHAKA S + R Faculty Survey Findings
posted by Linda Downs — April 09, 2013
ITHAKA S + R has surveyed U.S. faculty members at four-year colleges and universities every three years since 2000 to determine practices and attitudes related to faculty research methods, teaching, and opinions about resource providers—libraries, archives and scholarly societies. The latest survey was presented April 8, 2013 at the Coalition for Networked Information. ITHAKA S + R: http://www.sr.ithaka.org/research-publications/us-faculty-survey-2012.
CAA sent the survey to its members who are art historians. In the past ITHAKA concentrated only on humanities, social science and science faculty. Thus, artists are unfortunately not represented in this survey since it is the government’s definition of the humanities that places artistic practice in the arts only, even though in reality it is part of the concept of the humanities.
Research Practices: The survey shows that there is increasing reliance on specific electronic research resources and general purpose search engines on the internet as compared to the online catalog of libraries and use of the library building. Yet, 78% of the journals and books routinely used are found in local college and university libraries. The majority of respondents also seek out freely available online resources.
Audiences for Faculty Research: 90% of humanities faculty and 95% of art historians believe that the audience for their research is scholars in their subdisciplines. Only 35% indicated that there is a public audience for their research. And yet 52% believe their research is important for a general public audience. 50% of art historians also believe that their research is important for an undergraduate audience.
Need for Scholarly Societies: The primary way that 71% of the respondents “keep up” with current scholarship in their field is by attending conferences and workshops.
Academic Publishing: The three most important characteristics of an academic journal that are important to art historians are 1) the journal has a high impact factor (85%); 2) the current issues of the journal are circulated widely, and are well read by scholars in the field (80%); 3) the journal’s area of coverage is close to the immediate area of research (75%); and 4) the journal permits scholars to publish articles for free, without paying page or article charges (72%).
The most highly valued activities performed by academic publishers by humanities faculty are 1) associating work with a reputable brand that signals its quality (70%); 2) providing professional copy-editing and lay-out of the work (65%); and 3) managing the peer review process to provide high-quality feedback to vet and improve the work (70%). Art historians in particular see the greatest value in 1) associating the work with a reputable brand (71%); 2) managing the peer review process; and 3) providing professional copy-editing and lay-out (all at 65%). The humanities faculty in general continues to rely on scholarly publishers as opposed to those in the sciences. Only 11% of art historians agreed with the statement: “Scholarly publishers have been rendered less important to my process of communicating scholarly knowledge by my increasing ability to share my work directly with peers online.”
Role of the Library: Faculty perceives the role of the library primarily as a buyer and repository of resources and less as a teaching facilitator. When asked whose responsibility it is to teach undergraduates how to locate and evaluate scholarly information, 42% of faculty believe it is their responsibility and 24% believe it is the library’s responsibility.
Transition to Online Journals: The increased interest on the part of humanities faculty in online journals declined from 60% in 2009 to 55% in 2012. There were also slight declines in the social sciences and sciences in this regard. 30% of humanities faculty are “…happy to see hard copy collections discarded and replaced entirely by electronic collections,” compared to 48% of social sciences and 47% of sciences. With regard to repositories of hard copy journals, 68% of humanities faculty agree that “…it will always be crucial for some libraries to maintain hard-copy collections of journals.” As CAA begins the transition to online journals, it will be important to stay informed on how faculty utilizes journals online and the value placed on online and print journals.
Scholarly Societies: Scholarly societies remain important to humanities faculty. 80% of art historians who responded to the survey were members of the primary society for their field and 72% were also members of other scholarly societies.
The most highly valued functions of scholarly societies are conferences, information on fellowships and jobs, peer-reviewed publications and advocacy for the field’s values and policy priorities. The conference is important as a source of hearing about new research by peers, socializing and networking, learning about new technologies and engaging in broad discussion about the state of the discipline (in that order). This information confirms the findings of CAA membership surveys.
Rethinking Humanities Graduate Education with Digital Humanities Centers
posted by Linda Downs — April 08, 2013
Flying over the Grand Canyon after a meeting at the University of Washington with digital humanities faculty and marveling at the fractal-like patterns that moving water has sculpted out of solid rock, made me think of the slow but steady impact digital humanities centers and institutes are having on academic structure of research and evaluation. Project by project new research tools, interdisciplinary and collaborative research and new approaches to problems at these centers are altering the once rock-solid academic structures of research, peer review and evaluation.
The Scholarly Communications Institute (SCI) http://uvasci.org/ called a meeting on March 11 and 12 in partnership with the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) http://chcinetwork.org/ and centerNet http://digitalhumanities.org/centernet/ an international organization of digital humanities centers with a focus on the topic of “Rethinking Humanities Graduate Education.” The meeting focused on developing pilot projects that would leverage the specific strengths of CHCI and center Net. Possible consortial courses and cross-institutional cohorts of scholars were two of the many ideas presented. Individuals from 15 universities and the American Association of Museum Directors, the New York Council for the Humanities and College Art Association. (For a summary of the meetings and a participants list see: http://uvasci.org/)
Digital humanities centers, institutes and computing centers have been an important presence at universities since the 1990’s first as resources to provide technical assistance to students and faculty and now as strong academic centers of intellectual activity unto themselves offering courses, research products, developing frameworks and digital tools, fellowships, and public programs. Each center has a different disciplinary and technological focus depending on their original mission and purpose. Many of the centers grew out of language, literature and history disciplines. Now the commonality is in method and approach rather than specific disciplinary content or theory. Visual arts projects are being developed in DH centers by graduate students and faculty who have been working on cross-disciplinary research projects.
Computing centers such as the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Center offer digital tools, one-on-one assistance in developing a project and introductory courses on organizing collaborative digitalinitiatives. The University of Virginia’s Scholar’s Lab http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/scholarslab/ offers students technical assistance on digital research to advanced students and faculty, graduate fellowships, workshops, and the opportunity to work on collaborative digital projects. The programs at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University are targeted to teachers and faculty of history with a huge number of online resources as well as sponsoring dozens of digital history projects as well as free tools such as Zotero, a research tool to help gather, organize and analyze data and images. The concept for THAT Camp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) held at the College Art Association Annual Conference in New York which focused on digital tools, data bases and collaborative projects in art history this past February, originated with Columbia University Libraries and Smarthistory at Khan Academy. Plans are to offer THAT Camps at the CAA Annual Conference again in Chicago next February 2014. The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture grew out of film and media studies. Their multimedia research and publishing platform, Scalar has been utilized for the anniversary projects of CAA’s The Art Bulletin (“Publishing The Art Bulletin: http://scalar.usc.edu/anvc/the-art-bulletin/index developed by Thelma Thomas at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University and of caa.reviews by Sheryl Reiss at the University of Southern California.
Other well established digital humanities centers offer digital resources, publications, programs and tools. The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities http://mith.umd.edu/, as their website indicates, “ is jointly supported by the University of Maryland College of Arts and Humanities and the University of Maryland Libraries, MITH engages in collaborative, interdisciplinary work at the intersection of technology and humanistic inquiry. MITH specializes in text and image analytics for cultural heritage collections, data curation, digital preservation, linked data applications, and data publishing.” (While I was attending the SCI Anne Collins Goodyear, CAA President was presenting at MITH on her digital curatorial work at the National Portrait Gallery.)
The wide-ranging discussions touched upon collaborating on introductory courses for first year graduate students; changing standards to assist in evaluating collaborative digital projects and dissertations and promotion and tenure; how DH can contribute to lowering the time-to-degree; interdisciplinary collaboration; developing shared meaning between humanities researchers and technologists unfamiliar with the humanities; teaching basic skills required for digital research and analysis in either keystone or capstone courses; and assessing the role that DH centers provide to graduate students who are considering non-faculty career alternatives. Ideas came forward on how the academy can introduce non-faculty career options to graduate students from shadowing professionals to internships at museum and non-profit public service institutions where they can apply the knowledge gained in graduate school.
There was general agreement on offering keystone courses on basic programming, how to approach a collaborative digital research project, and database organization and analysis. The University of Victoria Computing Center offers introductory courses in utilizing digital tools to entry level graduate students and to students who sign up for summer courses, or 5 day courses at learned society conferences.
The new standards mentioned at the meeting for evaluation of digital scholarship included the Modern Language Association’s Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media http://www.mla.org/guidelines_evaluation_digital and the digital dissertation guidelines at George Mason University http://historyarthistory.gmu.edu/graduate/rules-guidelines that were established in 2000. Tara McPherson, Associate Professor, School of Cinematic Arts at USC indicated that her graduate students are submitting digital dissertations but still feel compelled to provide approximately 120 pages of written and printed documentation on the process of building the digital tools that they used for research and analysis to the dissertation review committees. Tara also emphasized that her students, enter her program highly skilled in the use of digital technology and are able to devote greater effort in content study.
According to the Humanities Indicators statistics on time-to-degree for tertiary degrees in the humanities in the US is 10.93 years. The United States is ranked fifth internationally (behind Germany at 17 years, Japan, Hungary and Korea) http://www.humanitiesindicators.org/content/hrcoIIB.aspx#topII14 . Todd Presner, Professor of Germanic Languages, Comparative Literature, and Jewish Studies and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies and Chair of the Digital Humanities Program at UCLA floated a concept which became shortened throughout the day and a half meeting as “the twenty-year dissertation.” The idea is not to lengthen the time-to-degree average but to develop one collaborative digital project that several graduate students would work on in part. Each student could develop facets of a major problem that could encompass several disciplines and they could also contribute to enhancing the digital tools that could expand research, analysis and construction of databases.
The time-to-degree issue also raised the question of what is expected of DH graduate students. Are faculty expecting new knowledge or is the expectation that graduate students master problem solving, project organization and leadership qualities to prepare them for faculty positions or for non-academic positions where they can apply their academic knowledge on a daily basis? The reality check was the question as to how many current dissertations actually produce new knowledge.
Kevin Franklin, Executive Director, Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has developed cross-disciplinary projects where shared meaning is developed between programmers and framework and platform builders who are coming from STEM and humanities disciplines. I-CHASS is also reaching out to governmental policy makers in the Americas to provide collaborative projects that address major global challenges related to the environment, educations and cultural preservation where STEM and humanities researchers are collaborating with international government entities. Two projects that involve image recognition will be presented at future CAA Annual Conferences.
CAA will be seeking opportunities to bring DH courses, workshops and presentations of new digital tools and visual arts research projects to future annual conferences. We hope to find support for more open access publications such as The Art Bulletin and caa.reviews digital projects on the Scalar open access publishing platform. In the meantime, for those who are unfamiliar with the offerings of DH centers, I would recommend visiting the DH centers at your colleges and universities or reading up on DH in the latest issue of Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation (29:1-2) and Debates in the Digital Humanities, Ed. Matthew Gold, University of Minnesota Press, 2012 (and check out the review of this book by Paul Jaskot also in the latest issue of Visual Resources).
March 2013 Issue of The Art Bulletin Published
posted by Christopher Howard — April 04, 2013
The March 2013 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, launches the celebration of its centennial year. Gracing the cover is a photograph by the artist Martha Rosler that depicts the installation of her traveling library at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris in 2007. Karen Lang, the journal’s editor-in-chief, writes of this image: “These days … it remains unclear whether a ‘library user’ would hunker down with a book or nestle in for a session on a laptop…. Rosler invites us to consider how we interact with books. Her artwork makes us conscious of this activity and of the status of the book itself.”
In a brief essay, Craig Clunas ponders the conditions of seeing and description in “Regarding Art and Art History.” This issue’s “Notes from the Field” features short essays on the topic of materiality by Rosler, Caroline Walker Bynum, Natasha Eaton, Michael Ann Holly, Amelia Jones, Michael Kelly, Robin Kelsey, Alisa LaGamma, Monika Wagner, Oliver Watson, and Tristan Weddigen. The March interview brings Svetlana Alpers, professor emerita of history of art at the University of California, Berkeley, into conversation with her fellow scholar Stephen Melville.
In the opening essay, “Meaningful Spectacles: Gothic Ivories Staging the Divine,” Sarah M. Guérin uncovers the strategic use of microarchitectural frames in sacred ivory carvings of thirteenth-century Western Europe. Next, in the evocatively titled “Ingres’s Shadows,” Sarah Betzer demonstrates how the nineteenth-century French artist’s depictions of ancient sculpture for the publication Museé français relate to philosophical considerations of sensory experience, revealing the distinctly modern terms of its allure for the artist.
Paul Smith examines the perspectival distortions in Paul Cézanne’s paintings and the political implications of his repudiation of perspective, that is, the rejection of spectacle as the normative form of visual experience in modern life. Yi Gu’s essay “What’s in a Name?” studies the appellations of photography that circulated in China between 1840 and 1911 to trace the emergence of a new understanding of visual truth in Chinese art. Finally, Leora Maltz-Leca explores relations between William Kentridge’s ambulatory animation process and local imagery of striding figures as allegories of political regime change in South Africa.
The books under review in this issue represent a broad cross-section of art-historical scholarship. Robert H. Sharf examines Secrets of the Sacred: Empowering Buddhist Images in Clear, in Code, and in Cache, a collection of lectures delivered by the late scholar Helmut Brinker at the Spencer Museum of Art. An-Yi Pan assesses The Night Banquet: A Chinese Scroll through Time by De-nin D. Lee, the first book-length study on a well-known handscroll, and Leo G. Mazow evaluates Elizabeth Hutchinson’s The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturalism in American Art, 1890–1915. John Ott’s review considers three recent books on race and art: Kirsten Pai Buick’s Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject; Renée Ater’s Remaking Race and History: The Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller; and Jacqueline Francis’s Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America.
CAA sends The Art Bulletin to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the journal as a benefit of their membership. The next issue of the quarterly publication, to appear in June 2013, will feature essays on, among other topics, institutional art history in the mid-twentieth century through the lens of H. W. Janson’s classic survey text History of Art.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — April 03, 2013
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
ARTstor to Help Launch the Digital Public Library of America
ARTstor is partnering with the Digital Public Library of America to provide access to more than ten thousand high-quality images from six leading museums. In addition to linking to the original contributing museum’s own website, each DPLA record will link to the image in Open ARTstor, a new ARTstor initiative that allows users to view and download large versions of public-domain images. (Read more from the Digital Public Library of America.)
The Etiquette of Accepting a Job Offer
The academic job market is overcrowded, but departments are hiring, and each year thousands of graduate students and other candidates will get phone calls offering them tenure-track positions. It is typically a moment of mutual giddiness. The department heads are excited at the prospect of a terrific new colleague; the job applicants now know that their immediate future is assured. Then, well, complications may ensue. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Help Desk: Juried Shows
I am a painter who recently graduated from art school but haven’t had much gallery experience, and I was interested in submitting work to some juried shows as a way of gaining some experience and making some new connections. Could you offer some advice on finding reputable juried shows to apply to? (Read more at Daily Serving.)
Having “The Talk”
Anyone considering joining the alt-ac job market will eventually tell his or her academic colleagues that he or she might be jumping off the tenure-track train. For graduate students this will often mean having “the talk” with their advisers. There are several reasons why it is important to seek your adviser’s support, even for an alt-ac career. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)
How Can We Reimagine Arts Schools?
Perhaps what was most thrilling and unexpected about the meeting of 250 arts leaders at the “3 Million Stories” conference was an emerging sense of urgency and excitement about the need to think seriously about how arts schools and training institutions—especially at the collegiate level—might reimagine themselves and respond to changes in how creative work is done and the nature of creative careers. In short, who will invent the twenty-first-century arts school? (Read more at Barry’s Blog.)
STEM and Liberal Arts: Frenemies of the State
When I was getting ready for college, I knew I was going to pursue a degree in some area of science; I never even considered a liberal-arts degree. To be honest, I did my best to not take any liberal-arts courses I didn’t need to. These classes were at odds with my science, and I didn’t want to waste my time on something I wasn’t going to use. (Read more at Plos.)
Sotheby’s Controversial Sale of Precolumbian Artifacts Yields Low Sales Figures and Highlights the Increased Efforts of Countries to Repatriate Artifacts
Last week’s sale of Precolumbian artifacts predominantly from the Barbier-Mueller collection, conducted at Sotheby’s in Paris, proved an anticlimactic end to a controversial story. Though estimated to bring in $19 to 23 million, the sale only made $13.3 million, and 165 of the 313 lots were unsold. An unwelcome spotlight had been fixed on the sale, as four countries—Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, and Costa Rica—demanded return of artifacts that were allegedly stolen from their borders decades before. (Read more at the Center for Art Law.)
Managing Your Online Time
Over the course of a teaching day, most faculty members find themselves on Facebook, Twitter, Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, iTunes, Blackboard (or its competitors), blogs, and email. We manage a steady stream of online demands. Yet one of the most frequent complaints from students is that their instructors have “no online presence.” (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
CAA Seeks Nominations for the 2014 Awards for Distinction
posted by Lauren Stark — April 02, 2013
CAA has begun accepting nominations for the 2014 Awards for Distinction. Please review the guidelines below to become familiar with the nomination process and to download, complete, and submit the requested materials.
CAA will name the recipients of the 2014 awards in January and honor them in a special ceremony during Convocation at the 102nd Annual Conference in Chicago.
General Guidelines
In your 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. We also urge you to contact up to five colleagues, students, peers, collaborators, and/or coworkers of the nominee to write letters; no more than five letters are considered. Letters of support are important for reference, but the awards decisions are the responsibilities of the juries based on their expert assessment of the qualifications of the nominees.
Nominations for book and exhibition awards should be for authors of books published or works exhibited or staged between September 1, 2012, and August 31, 2013. Books published posthumously are not eligible. Letters of support are not required for the Morey and Barr awards. All submissions must include a completed 2014 nomination form and one copy of the nominee’s CV (limit: two pages); book-award nominations do not require a CV (see below for the appropriate forms for the Morey and Barr awards and the Porter Prize).
Please send all materials by mail or email to: Lauren Stark, 2014 Awards for Distinction, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004. Deadline: July 31, 2013, for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Awards; August 31, 2013, for all others.
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
To give the jury full opportunity to evaluate each submission fairly, submit materials well before the deadline of July 31, 2013. Please review the following nomination guidelines:
- A publisher may submit no more than five titles. In addition, CAA accepts nominations from its membership, jury members, reviews editors for The Art Bulletin and Art Journal, and caa.reviews field editors
- Publishers may not submit the same title for the Morey and Barr awards. The Morey jury does not accept exhibition catalogues
- Eligible books must have been published between September 1, 2012, and August 31, 2013
- Books published posthumously are not eligible
- CAA and each jury member must receive a copy of the nominated book by July 31, 2013. A total of six copies of the book must be sent. To receive the mailing addresses for the jury, please contact Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs
- Complete and submit the Morey nominaton form
- Letters of support are not required
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
To give the jury full opportunity to evaluate each submission fairly, submit materials well before the deadline of July 31, 2013. Please review the following nomination guidelines:
- A publisher may submit no more than five titles. In addition, CAA accepts nominations from its membership, jury members, reviews editors for The Art Bulletin and Art Journal, and caa.reviews field editors
- Publishers may not submit the same title for the Morey and Barr awards. The Morey jury does not accept exhibition catalogues
- Eligible books must have been published between September 1, 2012, and August 31, 2013
- Books published posthumously are not eligible
- CAA and each jury member must receive a copy of the nominated book by July 31, 2013. A total of six copies of the book must be sent. To receive the mailing addresses for the jury, please contact Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs
- Complete and submit the Barr nomination form
- Letters of support are not required
Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
To determine eligibility, authors of articles in The Art Bulletin must complete the Porter nomination form.
Frank Jewett Mather Award
Please submit copies of critical writings, which may be website links and printouts, photocopies or scanned pages of newspapers or magazines, and more. If the writing is contained in a single volume (such as a book), please provide the publication information.
Distinguished Teaching of Art and Art History Awards
Letters for these two awards are particularly important for the juries because of the personal contact involved in successful teaching.
Contact
Please write to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs, for more information about the nomination process.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — March 27, 2013
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Outside the Citadel, Social Practice Art Is Intended to Nurture
In Detroit a contemporary-art museum is completing a monument to an influential artist that will not feature his work but will instead provide food, haircuts, education programs, and other social services to the general public. In New York an art organization that commissions public installations has been dispatching a journalist to politically precarious places around the world where she enlists artists and activists—often one and the same—to write for a website that can read more like a policy journal than an art portal. And in St. Louis an art institution known primarily for its monumental Richard Serra sculpture is turning itself into a hub of social activism. If none of these projects sounds much like art, that is precisely the point. (Read more in the New York Times.)
The Troubling Dean-to-Professor Ratio
J. Paul Robinson, chairman of the Purdue University faculty senate, walks the halls of a ten-story tower, pointing out a row of offices for administrators. “I have no idea what these people do,” says the biomedical engineering professor. Purdue has a $313,000-a-year acting provost and six vice and associate vice provosts, including a $198,000-a-year chief diversity officer. Among its sixteen deans and eleven vice presidents are a $253,000 marketing officer and a $433,000 business school chief. The average full professor at the public university in West Lafayette, Indiana, makes $125,000. The number of Purdue administrators has jumped 54 percent in the past decade—almost eight times the growth rate of tenured and tenure-track faculty. (Read more in Business Week.)
Let’s Do Lunch
In master’s programs, and especially at the doctoral level, graduate students depend on their advisers more than on anyone else in their careers. Students do more work for their adviser’s eyes than for anyone else’s, and the adviser’s approval is the key to the door that leads to the next place, whether full-time employment or more school. So an adviser’s criticism of a graduate student’s work can pierce deeper than the tiny hooks on a burr. And the adviser may not know it. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
The Gallery’s Glass Ceiling: Sexism Persists in the German Art World
The art world is typically seen as open and progressive, even radical. But artists and curators in Germany say that, despite slow progress, the art scene is still plagued by widespread sexism and a conservative, macho culture. (Read more in Spiegel Online.)
The Chapman Brothers on Life as Artists’ Assistants
“It was hard labor by any measure,” says Jake Chapman, recalling his and brother Dinos’s apprenticeship as assistants to Gilbert and George. “There was absolutely no creative input at all. They were very polite and it was interesting to hear them talking—as we did our daily penance.” What did the work involve? “Coloring in their prints. We colored in Gilbert and George’s penises for eight hours a day.” (Read more in the Guardian.)
Protect Rights of Artists in New Copyright Law
The head of the US Copyright Office has suggested that it may be time to start considering “the next great Copyright Act.” The last general revision to US copyright law passed in 1976 at the end of a process that took over twenty years. Since then, incredible technological advances have brought new opportunities and challenges to which copyright law has not been immune. In fact, with the advent of digital platforms and the internet, the centuries-old legal doctrine of copyright has perhaps faced more challenges than any other area of the law. (Read more in the Hill.)
Can Unions Save the Creative Class?
They’re just for hard hats. They peaked around the time Elvis was getting big. They killed Detroit. They’ve got nothing to do with you or me. They’re a special interest—and they hate our freedom. That’s the kind of noise you pick up in twenty-first-century America—in politics and popular culture alike—when you tune your station to the issue of trade unions. (Read more in Salon.)
Tackling Concerns of Independent Workers
Soon after landing a job at a Manhattan law firm nearly twenty years ago, Sara Horowitz was shocked to discover that it planned to treat her not as an employee, but as an independent contractor. Her status meant no health coverage, no pension plan, no paid vacation—nothing but a paycheck. She realized that she was part of a trend in which American employers relied increasingly on independent contractors, temporary workers, contract employees, and freelancers to cut costs. (Read more in the New York Times.)
National Humanities Alliance Annual Meeting and Humanities Advocacy Day
posted by CAA — March 26, 2013
Anne Collins Goodyear, curator of prints and drawings at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, is the president of the CAA Board of Directors, and Hannah O’Reilly Malyn is CAA development associate.
Anne Collins Goodyear and Hannah O’Reilly Malyn attended a day of meetings and panel discussions presented by the National Humanities Alliance (NHA). This year’s annual event, held on March 18, 2013, in Washington, DC, addressed the practical need for continued support of humanities education and research and the importance of quantifying the benefits of such, as well as highlighting the Clemente Course in the Humanities program, an endeavor that illustrates the impact of humanities learning on people from all walks of life. These discussions helped prepare participants for Humanities Advocacy Day, taking place on Capitol Hill the following day.
CAA is a member of NHA, which advocates federal funding of the humanities. In addition to its annual meeting, NHA organizes Humanities Advocacy Day, which brings critical information to participants and prepares them for congressional visits to support the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the Fulbright Program, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and numerous Department of Education programs in the humanities.
The day began with a keynote address by Christina Paxson, president of Brown University, whose talk centered around the question “Are the Humanities Worth It?” and touched on demonstrating the tangible benefits derived from studying the humanities. She discussed the significance of understanding other cultures as we progress toward globalization and a world society, especially the ways in which humanists can help people respond to the social changes brought on by technological advances. Paxson stressed that we must train people not just with the immediately necessary skills for employment, which devalue over time, but also with the creativity to work in a rapidly changing world. She also revealed that, contrary to popular belief, the average lifetime incomes of people with bachelor’s degrees in the humanities are not much lower than those of people with bachelor’s degrees in STEM subjects, and noted that people with humanities degrees are more likely to pursue higher education above the bachelor’s.
The keynote address was followed by a panel on making the case for federal humanities funding, which consisted of six individuals: Stephen Kidd, executive director of NHA; Esther Mackintosh, president of the Federation of State Humanities Councils; Ben Kershaw, assistant director of congressional relations at the American Alliance of Museums; Lee White, executive director of the National Coalition for History; Miriam Kazanjian, consultant for the Coalition for International Education; and Mollie Benz Flounlacker, associate vice president for federal relations at the Association for American Universities. Continuing in the same line as Paxson’s talk, the panelists described the different government programs concerned with the humanities and what tactics are most effective in arguing for their continued funding—namely economic impact, the importance of creative thinking skills and well-rounded job candidates, and how the humanities relate to core American values such as citizenship and civic understanding and participation. The overarching message was that to remain competitive in the global economy, America must produce workers who are well rounded, creative, and able to interact effectively with stakeholders abroad. Panelists noted that bipartisan support for the humanities does exist in Congress so long as the emphasis is on the value created for communities and taxpayers.
Over lunch, Karl Eikenbarry, the former US ambassador to Afghanistan, spoke about how the humanities were brought home for him in his work abroad. His anecdotes affirmed the advantages of learning foreign languages and cultures and endorsed the effective use of soft and hard power in diplomatic situations. Cultural diplomacy through touring symphonies, he said, is a reminder of US good will that can mitigate displays of military strength.
In the afternoon, a panel was held on advocacy infrastructure. John Churchill, secretary of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, talked about a demand for new strategies in advocacy, particularly the year-round involvement of advocates at the state and local levels to truly involve elected officials in the humanities in their communities. Churchill introduced the new Phi Beta Kappa’s National Advocacy Initiative, which will pursue this goal through regional events and local member “emissaries” for the humanities. This was followed by presentations by Robert Townsend, deputy director of the American Historical Association, and Carolyn Fuqua, program associate for humanities at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, on recent studies and data regarding the humanities. They discussed the Humanities Indicators project, which compiles data on the humanities as a whole, and noted interesting statistics such as the fact that humanities majors score better than business majors on management program entrance exams.
The day concluded with a presentation on the Clemente Course program. This program offers humanities classes to underserved demographics such as incarcerated adults, people in economically disadvantaged communities, and immigrants. Past participants testified to how these courses, which offer college credit upon completion, changed their lives and their worldviews. Star Perry, a program graduate, spoke about how the program increased her self-value, improved her job prospects, and inspired her children to attend college. Moise Koffi, another graduate, shared how he came to the US as a manual laborer and, because of the Clemente Courses, has completed his PhD and is now an engineer and a professor. Senators Richard Durbin and Elizabeth Warren also gave a few words about the program and the humanities as a whole.
The following day, Malyn represented CAA while visiting the offices of seven members of congress, traveling with a group of New York professionals that included advocates from the Modern Language Association, Cornell University, Columbia University, and Queensborough Community College, City University of New York. (As a federal employee, Goodyear is not eligible to participate in such visits.) Together, the group met with five congressional staffers to discuss the importance of continued humanities funding. Advocates also thanked longtime supporters for their ongoing efforts and encouraged newly elected officials to join the Congressional Humanities Caucus. Malyn also visited the offices of Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) and Rep. Leonard Lance (R-NJ) to update them on CAA’s work on fair use (i.e., its task force and conference session) and to distribute copies of CAA’s letter regarding the use of orphan works.
