CAA News Today
Proposed Amendment to the CAA By-Laws
posted by Anne Collins Goodyear — January 13, 2014
Dear Colleagues:
Thank you for your membership in the College Art Association. Starting on January 6, 2014, CAA will open its online election. Not only do we have an excellent slate of six candidates to be considered for Board service, but we request your vote on a proposed amendment to the By-laws of College Art Association.
The amendment grows out of a detailed analysis of CAA’s current membership structure, and reflects the results of a recent member survey evaluating the most highly valued aspects of membership. Based on this study, designed in part to assess the needs of contingent faculty, the Board determined that it made sense to streamline the numerous categories of membership now in place and to develop a structure based on benefits rather than on income. Some of the new benefits that will be made available include online journal access, additional online access to a non-CAA publication published by Taylor & Francis (the new co-publisher of CAA’s journals), and JPASS access at a fifty percent discount, as well as discounted, part-time membership for contingent faculty.
Because changing the membership categories requires amending the By-laws, the Board unanimously adopted a resolution at its October 27, 2013 meeting recommending the amendment to the By-laws available at http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/caa_by-laws_amendment_02_2014.pdf. The Board believes that this change will benefit members and sustain the services the Association provides. The amendment also provides for flexibility in enabling the Association to make further changes to the membership structure as may be deemed desirable in the future.
We encourage you to review the proposed amendment to the By-laws and we urge you to cast your vote on January 6th.
With appreciation of your support of CAA, we look forward to welcoming you at the 2014 Annual Conference in Chicago!
All best wishes for the season,
Sincerely yours,
Anne Collins Goodyear
President, College Art Association
Co-Director, Bowdoin College Museum of Art
Live Video Chat and Q&A about CAA’s Publishing Grants
posted by CAA — January 13, 2014
WHEN: Wednesday, January 15, 3:00 PM (EST)
WHERE: RSVP and watch online here
Whether you’re in the middle of a grant application or just thinking about applying, this live Google Hangout will be a valuable resource for you.
The College Art Association offers a robust program of publishing grants to authors and publishers of scholarly books in art history, visual studies, and related subjects. Join CAA’s director of publications Betty Leigh Hutcheson and editorial manager Alex Gershuny to get practical tips and advice about CAA’s grants, as well as answers to all your questions! You’ll also hear from former juror Susan Higman Larsen (Director of Publishing and Collections Information, Detroit Institute of Arts) about how the awards committee evaluates proposals, and from past grant recipient Karl Whittington (Assistant Professor, Ohio State University) about his experience of the application process.
Submit your questions in advance to caabook@collegeart.org or on Twitter with the hashtag #caapubgrants. Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award, the Millard Meiss Publication Fund, and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant.
Learn more about CAA’s publishing grants at www.collegeart.org/publications/pgrants. The spring deadline for the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award and the Millard Meiss Publication Fund is March 15, 2014. The deadline for the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant is September 15, 2014. This event will cover all three grants.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for January 2014
posted by CAA — January 10, 2014
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.
January 2014
Jennifer Yorke, Pretty Little Lies, 2012, collage and acrylic on paper, 30 x 22 in. (artwork © Jennifer Yorke)
Jennifer Yorke: Twerks on Paper
Packer Schopf Gallery
942 West Lake Street, Chicago, IL 60607
January 10–February 15, 2014
Fashion! Food! Sex! Death! Through her Twerks on Paper, Jennifer Yorke laughs at them all. In her collages, the failures and flaws of the body assert themselves over the seductive veneer of beauty and propriety created by both costume and custom. Despite our best efforts to create controlled, socially appropriate selves, our bodies are often filled with unruly desires and only imperfectly contain the sticky, the smelly, and the wet. Yorke demonstrates the absurdity of our efforts at control through humor—and the humors that seep and spurt out of her fashionable figures. She conflates fashion’s celebration and distortion of the body with our more day-to-day experience of its flaws, failures, and expellants, encouraging us to shake our asses at them.
Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries
Three Walls
119 North Peoria Street, No. 2C, Chicago, IL 60607
January 10–February 22, 2014
Although best known for her contribution to Womanhouse—the 1972 performance Waiting—and for her role in the formation of the first Feminist Art Program in Fresno and Cal Arts, Faith Wilding remains largely understudied. As the first major retrospective of her work, Fearful Symmetries spans forty years and brings together and contextualizes the studio practice—especially works on paper—that accompanies Wilding’s performative work, illuminating the allegorical imagery that underpins her feminism and the centrality of transformation and emergence in its articulation. As such the exhibition highlights the theme of becoming—as transformative event and threshold to transfiguration—as a state of in-between-ness, evoked by iconographic motifs such as leaves, the chrysalis, hybrid beings, or “waiting” itself.
Alongside the exhibition is a curated archive featuring Wilding’s work with the collaborative research and performance group subRosa; rare videos of performances made throughout her career; and papers and publications dating from her participation in the feminist art movement in the 1970s. A series of special events will punctuate the exhibition, including a performance and discussion with Irina Aristarkhova on January 9.
Nora Schultz, image from Parrottree—Building for Bigger Than Real, 2013 (artwork © Nora Schultz)
Nora Schultz: Parrottree—Building for Bigger Than Real
Renaissance Society
University of Chicago, 5811 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637
January 12–February 23, 2014
The Renaissance Society presents the first museum solo exhibition of Nora Schultz, a Berlin-based artist who produces sculptural installations that double as analogue printing studios. Her primary materials are discarded objects scavenged from her studio and the site of her exhibitions, often in the form of metal bars and sheets, grates, tubes, and plastics. Schultz repurposes this refuse into sculptural objects, as well as contact printing devices, stencils, and even simple rotary presses with which she prints (often as public performance) abstractions scaled from the intimate to the monumental, exhibited individually or in accumulating heaps. Deeply engaged with material and process, Schultz’s installations are themselves, at times, engines of ongoing artistic creation.
Hannah Höch
Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High St, London E1 7QX, United Kingdom
January 15–March 23, 2014
The Whitechapel Gallery presents the first major UK exhibition of the influential German artist Hannah Höch (1889–1978), an important member of the Berlin Dada movement and a pioneer in collage. Splicing together images taken from popular magazines, illustrated journals, and fashion publications, Höch created a humorous and moving commentary on society, in particular questioning traditional gender and racial stereotypes, during a time of tremendous social change. She also established collage as a key medium for satire with extraordinary skill and beauty.
Nargess Hashemi: The Pleasure in Boredom
Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde
Street 8, Alserkal Avenue, Unit 17, Al Quoz 1, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
January 12–February 27, 2014
Nargess Hashemi (b. 1979, Tehran) takes a new direction in her latest show, deviating from largely figurative works centering on themes of domesticity and everyday life and moving in a surprising new trajectory. The Pleasure in Boredom charts Hashemi’s process of developing over ten years worth of experimentation on graph paper. Doodling in notebooks from a young age, the artist has made the practice somewhat of a lifelong obsession. Using only the most basic materials, Hashemi adopts a commonly unfocused and subliminal practice and refines it, resulting in vibrant artworks of great complexity. The title of the exhibition references an essay by E. H. Gombrich, in which the art historian examined the psychology behind the act of doodling and explored its artistic merit. A doodle by its very nature is a subconscious impulse, something that we are naturally compelled to do in a dreamlike, absentminded state. In her new series, Hashemi has evolved this instinctual act into artistic endeavors of great structure and precision.
Salla Tykkä: The Palace
Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art
Gateshead Quays, South Shore Road, Gateshead, NE8 3BA, United Kingdom
November 22, 2013–March 2, 2014
The Finnish artist Salla Tykkä (b. Helsinki, 1973) is known for photographs and videos with historically and psychologically charged narratives. Her dramatically edited footage plays with cinematic structures and is often set to familiar, grandiose film scores. Since 2008, Tykkä has been completing a trilogy of films: Victoria (2008), Airs above the Ground (2010), and, most recently, Giant (2013), which was partially commissioned by the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. The Palace comprises an installation featuring all three works and is the first exhibition to bring them together. It also marks the international premiere of Giant.
Victoria is a documentation of the nightly blossoming of the giant water lily; a ten-minute time-lapse of the plant’s life cycle as it unfurls its petals in the dark. The lily blossoms over two nights; the first night it is white and when it opens for a second time a day later, its color has changed to a red hue. European explorers brought Victoria amazonica and Victoria cruziana from South America to Europe and named them after Queen Victoria. Tykkä offers the plant as a symbol of colonial power and domination in the nineteenth century.
Chryssa Romanos, Labyrinth, 1965, collage on canvas, 55 x 65 cm (artwork © Chryssa Romanos)
Chryssa Romanos
The Breeder
45 Iasonos St, GR 10436, Athens, Greece
January 17–February 17, 2014
Focusing on Chryssa Romanos’s 1960s collage on canvas and her recent décollage on Plexiglas, this exhibition surveys the practice of this outstanding Greek artist—a vanguard member of the Greek diaspora in Paris from the 1960s to the 1980s and a neglected female participant in intersecting circles of the Parisian avant-garde—whose reputation has suffered from the usual predicament of gender, including the overshadowing of her work from that of her life partner, the celebrated artist Nikos Kessanlis.
Romanos began as an abstract painter in Greece, rebelling against both the academic realism favored by the art establishment and the social realism propagated by the communist party, though she was an active member of it. In the early sixties she moved to Paris and became affiliated, along with Nikos, with intersecting circles of the Parisian avant-garde, especially those evolving around the critic Pierre Restany. Reconsidering the communicative role of her art, she rediscovered herself in 1964 as a Pop collagist, turning to what Restany called the “sociological reality”—yet through a surfeit of print media rather than the everyday objects of “urban folklore”—in order to launch a staunch critique of societal injustice, industrialization and the society of spectacle, as put by Kalliopi Minioudaki in the exhibition Power Up: Female Pop Art (at the Vienna Kunsthalle in 2010), where she mapped Romanos’s work in the context of Pop.
In several collages, which constitute the first part of this exhibition at the Breeder, Romanos “explicitly criticized consumerism, exposing its inextricability with vital engines of capitalism, such as war. In her Reportage series, for instance, she unmasked the fallacies of capitalist democracy and the industries that supported its domestic myths in the years of decolonization struggles and the Vietnam War—by mimicking the symbiosis of advertising and photojournalism in print media, while sarcastically miscaptioning scenes of famine or war with alluring advertising messages and unfit captions. In her various versions of the Luna Parc (1965) series—structured as a vicious shooting gallery—the consumerist cornucopia of the American Dream, promised to the Cold War era consumer by means of the consumer goods that are pasted around targets—is suggestively predicated upon the extinction of humanity, whether by its shooting, or its rendering into mass. This is at least suggested by the anthropocentric collages that constitute the targets.” Such signature collages were well received when exhibited in Charlottenburg, West Berlin, in 1965 and at the São Paolo Biennial in 1967. In response, however, to a studio visit by Restany—who demanded she substitute clippings with found objects as a true Nouveau Realist would do—Romanos resolutely quit what she considered, by her account, as the most important step in her career: her political Pop.
Affiliated Society News for January 2014
posted by CAA — January 09, 2014
American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works
The American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC) has recently published Ethics and Critical Thinking in Conservation, a collection of essays that brings into focus a moment in the evolution of the complex decision-making processes required when conservators consider the treatment of cultural-heritage materials. The papers presented are drawn from two consecutive years of presentations during general sessions at the AIC annual meeting. These were “Ethos Logos Pathos: Ethical Principles and Critical Thinking in Conservation” (2011) and “The Conservation Continuum: Examining the Past, Envisioning the Future” (2010). The book is available in two formats: a full-color hardcover for $30 and a black-and-white paperback for $15. The hardcover features nearly fifty full-color figures and illustrations throughout the text. Copies can be ordered at www.conservation-us.org/shop.
Art Historians of Southern California
The Art Historians of Southern California (AHSC) will host a roundtable on “The Coalition of the Art Association: California Public Education and the Promise of the Humanities,” chaired by Jane Chin Davidson of California State University, San Bernardino, at CAA’s Annual Conference in Chicago. The event will take place on Thursday, February 13, 2014, 12:30–2:00 PM in Boulevard C, 2nd Floor, Hilton Chicago. The discussion will include professors of art history, visual studies, and the humanities who have represented the California system—California Community Colleges, the California State Universities (CSUs), and the Universities of California (UCs)—such as Amelia Jones, Catherine Cole, Jennifer Doyle, Jennifer Gonzalez, and Sandra Esslinger. This roundtable will address issues of legislation, labor, and class within the academy while finding ways to acknowledge the value of the humanities in university education. Through their membership in CAA, visual art and humanities professors have long been the organizing principle of our potential solidarity. The perpetual decline of art history and visual studies has recently led to public scrutiny of CAA’s centralized leadership (see “An Open Letter to Victoria H. F. Scott Regarding the CAA,” February 8, 2013). In light of the continuing need for political advocacy, the leadership of CAA could provide a means for organizing coalition and for affecting the status of the humanities by bringing greater representation and awareness to both academic and public spheres.
Art Libraries Society of North America
The Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) is pleased to announce the election of new executive board members: Kristen Regina of the Hillwood Estate, Museum, and Gardens is vice president and president elect; Mark Pompelia of the Rhode Island School of Design is treasurer; Sylvia Roberts of Simon Fraser University in Canadian member-at-large; and Holly Hatheway of Yale University is communications and publications liaison.
ARLIS/NA recently created the post of Multimedia and Technology Reviews. The first reviews will be posted on the ARLIS website in early 2014.
Save the date for the ARLIS/NA 2014 annual conference, which will be held May 1–5, 2014, in Washington, DC. For more information, please visit the conference website.
Community College Professors of Arts and Art History
The Community College Professors of Arts and Art History (CCPAAH) will hold two events at this year’s CAA Annual Conference: a business meeting on Friday, February 14, from 7:30 to 9:00 AM in the Williford C Room on the 3rd Floor of the Hilton Chicago; and the session “Starting the Conversation: Engaging Students in the Studio and Art History” at 12:30 PM in the same space. Interested in participating or any questions? Contact Susan Altman.
Historians of Islamic Art Association
The Historians of Islamic Art Association (HIAA) is pleased to announce the election of two new members to its executive board. Sussan Babaie has been elected president-elect, and Abigail Balbale is secretary. Each will serve a three-year term beginning in January 2014; both will be officially welcomed to the board at its 2014 members and business meeting on February 14, 2014, in conjunction with the CAA Annual Conference in Chicago. At that time, Sheila Canby will succeed Marianna Shreve Simpson as president. Preparations also continue for HIAA’s fourth biennial symposium, which will be hosted by the new Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Ontario, in October 2014.
Historians of Netherlandish Art
The Historians of Netherlandish Art (HNA) will hold its quadrennial conference in Boston, Massachusetts, from June 5 to 7, 2014, in cooperation with the American Association for Netherlandic Studies. Please refer to the HNA website for further information. Additionally, HNA is pleased to announce the publication of the Summer 2013 issue of the open-access, refereed ejournal Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art (JHNA). This special issue of the journal is dedicated to Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann. In addition to excerpts from an interview with Begemann discussing his life as a scholar, curator, and teacher, the issue includes essays by his former students. The next formal deadline for submissions to JHNA is March 1, 2014; please send correspondence to the editor in chief, Alison Kettering.
International Sculpture Center
Each year the International Sculpture Center (ISC) presents an award competition to its member colleges and universities as a means of supporting, encouraging, and recognizing the work of young sculptors and their supporting schools’ faculty and art program. The Student Award winners participate in an exhibition at Grounds for Sculpture, as well as a traveling exhibition hosted by arts organizations across the country. Winners’ work is also featured in Sculpture magazine. Each winner receives a one-year ISC membership; all winners are eligible to apply for a fully sponsored residency to study in Switzerland. To nominate students for this competition, the nominees’ university must first be an ISC university-level member. University membership costs $200 for universities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico ($220 for international universities) and includes a number of benefits. Students who are interested should talk to their professors about getting involved. To find out more about the program, please visit www.sculpture.org/StudentAwards/2014 or email studentawards@sculpture.org. Nominations open: January 1, 2014; University membership registration: March 17, 2014; online student nomination form: March 24, 2014; online student submission form: April 14, 2014.
Italian Art Society
The Italian Art Society (IAS) invites members attending the CAA Annual Conference in Chicago to its first session “Periodization Anxiety in Italian Art: Renaissance, Baroque, or Early Modern” at 9:30 AM on February 13, 2014; IAS’s business meeting at 7:30 AM on February 14; and its second session “‘Futuro Anteriore’: Cultural Self-Appropriation as Catalyst in the Art of Italy” at 12:30 PM on February 14.
The society’s website details the five IAS sessions at the Renaissance Society of America meeting (New York, March 27–29, 2014) and includes a call for submissions to IAS-sponsored sessions at the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (New Orleans, October 2014; deadline to IAS: March 1, 2014).
Launched in July 2013, the IAS-initiated IASblog offers news and notes on Italian art and architecture as a complement to its main website. IASblog, edited by the IAS webmaster, Anne Leader, now has over nine hundred followers and two thousand unique visitors. IASblog welcomes submissions from members via the Submit button or by email.
National Art Education Association
Register now for the national convention of the National Art Education Association (NAEA), taking place March 29–31, 2014, in San Diego, California. We are visual arts educators. We are artists. We are creative leaders. Lead your professional learning experience at the 2014 NAEA national convention. Choose from more than one thousand sessions, workshops, tours, and events. Fuse creative thinking with art knowledge, skills, emerging technology, and new research to create powerful opportunities for your classroom, career, and beyond. Connect with thousands of colleagues from around the globe for the largest gathering of visual arts education in the world. Join a professional learning community and spend four art-filled days in Washington, DC, exploring permanent collections, current exhibitions, and the museum itself as a work of art.
NAEA SummerVision DC, now in its fifth year, is an annual NAEA event that partners with Washington, DC–area art museums to showcase best practices in critical response to art while enhancing creativity through visual journaling and by using a balanced, interdisciplinary “Form + Theme + Context (FTC) Palette for Museums and Works of Art” to enhance visual learning. Participating museums include the National Gallery of Art and Sculpture Garden, the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the National Museum of African Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Phillips Collection, the National Building Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Portrait Gallery. Registration is limited to twenty-five participants per session. Choose from two sessions: July 8–11 or July 22–25, 2014.
New NAEA publications include Michelle Kraft and Karen Keifer-Boyd’s Including Difference: A Communitarian Approach to Art Education in the Least Restrictive Environment(no. 322); and The Learner-Directed Classroom: Developing Creative Thinking Skills through Art (no. 326), edited by Diane B. Jaquith and Nan E. Hathaway.
National Council of Arts Administrators
The National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA), a community of current and future arts administrators in higher education, announces two events for CAA’s 2014 Annual Conference in Chicago: NCAA MIXER—You’re all invited, administrators or not, grab a friend and bring ‘em along; Thursday, February 13, 5:00–8:00 PM, Hilton Chicago (room TBA); and the session “Hot Problems/Cool Solutions in Arts Leadership,” which is a fast-paced series of five-minute presentations on leadership occurring on Friday, February 14, 5:30–7:00 PM in Williford C, 3rd Floor, Hilton Chicago. NCAA members hope to see you at both events in which attendees will share conviviality and ideas.
Public Art Dialogue
Jack Becker, the 2014 recipient of Public Art Dialogue’s annual award, will make a presentation at the CAA Annual Conference in Chicago on Friday, February 14, 5:30–7:00 PM. A conference on “Monument/Anti-Monument” will be held in St. Louis in April. Stay tuned for details. There have been several changes in PAD personnel. Sarah Schrank has stepped down as cochair, and Kelly Pajek will complete her term. Sierra Rooney is now both PAD secretary and treasurer. The Fall 2013 issue of Public Art Dialogue, edited by Eli Robb, considers “Perspectives on Relational Art.” Six articles explore practices based on human interactions: Caroline Peters and Ben Bloch, “To the Quick with Paul Crik: The World’s First E-Motivator Kills It with Public Art Dialogue; Cara Jordan, “The Evolution of Social Sculpture in the United States: Joseph Beuys and the Work of Suzanne Lacy and Rick Lowe”; John Tain, “Peace Tower as Commonplace: Relational Aesthetics’ Lieux de mémoire”; Lauren Rotenberg, “The Prospects of “Freed” Time: Pierre Huyghe and L’Association des Temps Libérés”; Gediminas Gasparavičius, “How the East Saw East in 1992: NSK Embassy Moscow and Relationality in Eastern Europe”; and Dee Hibbert-Jones, “A New Band-Aid for Social Ailments? Raising Questions on Social Practice and Social Responsibilities.”
Society for Photographic Education
Registration is open for the fifty-first annual national conference of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE), titled “Collaborative Exchanges: Photography in Dialogue.” In an age of interconnectedness, photographers are no longer solitary practitioners peering at the world through the singular eye of the viewfinder. Rather, photography is positioned at the heart of the discourse on contemporary art, establishing relationships with a broad array of ideas and media. This conference illuminates this new paradigm and celebrates the spirit of cooperation and social linkages. Join 1,600 artists, educators, and photographic professionals from March 6 to 9, 2014, for programming and dialogue in Baltimore, Maryland, that will fuel your creativity. The event will be a celebration of the power of community and social exchange to propel new thinking in photographic practice. Explore SPE’s exhibits fair showing the latest equipment, processes, publications, and schools with photo-related programs. Participate in one-on-one portfolio critiques and informal portfolio sharing and take advantage of student volunteer opportunities for reduced admission. Other conference highlights include a print raffle, silent auction, photo scavenger hunt, film screenings, exhibitions, tours, receptions, a dance party and more! Keynote Speakers: Joan Fontcuberta, Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick, Taryn Simon, and Catherine Lord. Preview the conference schedule and register online.
Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture
The Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) will sponsor a session at the 2014 CAA annual conference in Chicago titled “Decentering Art of the Former East,” chaired by Kristen Romberg and Masha Chlenova. SHERA will also hold a business meeting that is open to both current and prospective members. In addition, the organization is pleased to welcome CAA International Travel Grant recipients from Eastern Europe and Russia to its events at the conference. Please visit the News section of the SHERA website for details as the conference approaches.
The annual conference of the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), held in Boston, Massachusetts, in November 2013, showed a surge in activity from SHERA members, who presented their work on fourteen panels and in roundtable discussions ranging from the imperial era to the present day. The SHERA business meeting attracted over forty people, including many new members. Ballot proposals for electronic voting in January 2014 would amend SHERA’s bylaws to include the listserv administrator on the list of officers and would also replace the position of webmaster with a web news editor. Balloting will also elect a new slate of members-at-large. SHERA members will receive voting information by email in early January.
Career Services Guide for the 2014 Annual Conference
posted by Lauren Stark — January 09, 2014
The January 21 and 28 issues of CAA News gave the incorrect URL for the Career Services Guide for the 2015 Annual Conference in New York. Please click here to download and read that document.
CAA has designed the Career Services Guide to inform job seekers and employers about placement activities at the 2014 Annual Conference in Chicago. The publication, available as a PDF, will help you navigate Career Services events and provides answers to frequently asked questions. Study this guide carefully so that you will know what to expect from conference interviewing and how best to prepare for a successful experience.
Job candidates can review the basics of the conference employment search. Read about the Candidate Center, your home base at the conference, as well as Orientation, an introduction to Career Services where you can ask questions. In addition, learn more about the Online Career Center, where you can search for position listings, post application materials, and arrange interviews. The publication includes tips for improving your CV, portfolio, and supplemental application materials.
Employers will find details in the guide for renting interview booths and tables as well as recommendations for posting jobs and conducting interviews at the conference. You can begin preparations now for Career Services through the Online Career Center or onsite at the Interviewer Center.
Printed copies of the Career Services Guide will be distributed onsite at Orientation and in the Candidate Center. All conference Career Services will take place at the Hilton Chicago. For more information about job searching, professional-development workshops, and more, visit the Career Services section of the conference website.
Art History Teaching Resources Seeks Lesson Plans
posted by Christopher Howard — January 08, 2014
Do you have a great lesson plan you want to take some time to codify and share? Following a recently awarded Kress grant for digital resources, Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR), a peer-populated platform for instructors that is home to a constantly evolving, collectively authored online repository of art-history teaching content, seeks contributors for specific subject areas in the art-history survey.
AHTR is particularly interested the following sections in art and architecture for publication in early spring 2014:
- Ancient Egyptian
- Ancient Aegean
- Ancient Greek
- Ancient Etruscan and Roman
- Proto-Renaissance and Fourteenth Century Italian Renaissance
- Fifteenth-Century Italian Renaissance
- Fifteenth-Century Northern Renaissance
For each content area, AHTR seeks lecture and lesson plans similar to those developed for its sections on Prehistory and Prehistoric Art in Europe and Art of the Ancient Near East. These plans, which will be posted to the AHTR website in early 2014, are supported by $250 writing grants made possible by the Kress award.
All parts in the art-history survey, however, will eventually need to be populated. If your area of interest is not listed above, AHTR is still interested in hearing from you. Let us know which area(s) you’d like to cover: a full list can be found under Survey 1: Prehistory to Gothic and Survey 2: Renaissance to Modern and Contemporary. In addition, we welcome suggestions on how to fill the gaps in these chronologies.
AHTR is looking for contributors who:
- Have strong experience teaching the art-history survey and strong interest in developing thoughtful, clear, and detailed lesson plans in particular subject areas
- Are committed to delivering lecture content (plan, PowerPoint, resources, activities) for one to two (a maximum of two) content areas in a timely manner. Each content area will be supported by a $250 Kress writing grant
- Want to engage with a community of peers in conversations about issues in teaching the art-history survey
AHTR’s intention is to offer monetary support for the often-unrewarded task of developing thoughtful lesson plans, to make this work freely accessible (and thus scalable), and to encourage feedback on them so that the website’s content can constantly evolve in tandem with the innovations and best practices in the field. In this way, AHTR wants to encourage new collaborators to the site—both emerging and experienced instructors in art history—who will enhance and expand teaching content. It also wishes to honor the production of pedagogical content at the university level by offering modest fellowships to support digital means of collaboration among art historians.
Please submit a short, teaching-centered CV and a brief statement of interest that describes which subject area(s) you wish to tackle to teachingarthistorysurvey@gmail.com. These initial texts should be delivered to AHTR in February 2014. Collaboration on content for further subject areas will be solicited throughout 2014.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — January 08, 2014
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.
Conventional Wisdom
Thousands of literature scholars will emerge from their research cocoons, don their finest black duds, and descend upon Chicago for this year’s convention of the Modern Language Association. They’ll all be there: muckety-mucks whose rings ache for kissing; frazzled early-career professors angling for tenure; and, of course, hordes of desperate graduate students and barely employed PhDs, hoping to break into what everyone actually calls “the profession.” (Read more from Slate.)
How the Humanities Compute in the Classroom
Computer-assisted scholarship in the humanities dates back decades. In the past five years, though, the kinds of work collectively known as the digital humanities have taken on fresh luster. Observers have called this technology-inflected research “the next big thing.” Beyond the headlines and hoopla, digital scholarship has begun to work its way into the academic ecosystem. In the following collection of articles, read more about how the digital humanities play now in the undergraduate classroom, whether they pay off in tenure and promotion, and what it takes to create a work of digital scholarship that will last. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Garage Sale Renoir Painting Sparks Legal Battle with Museum
A one-of-a-kind Renoir painting the size of a napkin is at the center of an intense legal battle between a museum that claims it was stolen and a Virginia woman who claims she bought it for $7. The tiny work of art is an 1879 landscape by the Impressionist painter titled Paysage Bords de Seine. In court papers filed this week, the Baltimore Museum of Art claims the painting was stolen in 1951. As evidence, the museum provided a sixty-year-old police report, old museum catalogues, and a receipt showing that a patron bequeathed the painting to the museum. (Read more from ABC News.)
Conserving Priceless Chinese Paintings Is an Art All Its Own
Outside China and Taiwan, American museums hold the world’s best collection of Chinese paintings. It’s worth billions of dollars, but it’s also fragile: over time, these paintings fall apart. In the US, only four master conservators know how to take care of them, and they’re all approaching retirement. The Freer and Sackler Galleries—one of the huge, stone Smithsonian buildings on the National Mall in Washington, DC—employ one of those masters. (Read more from National Public Radio.)
Technology in Museums: Less Is More!
The experience of going to a museum often feels a little engineered. A heavy curatorial hand leads you through an exhibition, making it hard to resist reading the panels of information contextualizing and explaining the art or artifacts on display rather than come to your own appreciation of them. Audio guides offer to fill in gaps in your knowledge and give you expert insights. Sometimes glistening screens nearby beckon you to see more. (Read more from Spiked.)
Let’s Change the World for Art Students in 2014
Funding cuts and a move to banish art lessons from schools made 2013 a sad year for creative education. But art students and their staff are regrouping for a fight they believe is there to be won. The number of students applying to study creative arts in British universities is on the decline. According to the latest available data from UCAS, the number of applications fell 17 percent from 2011 to 2012. (Read more from the Guardian.)
Mock, Phone, Video Interviews
Participating in a mock interview my first time on the job market was the most embarrassing moment of my academic career. I dressed in as close to a suit as I owned at the time and walked into the large classroom we had scheduled, where the seven faculty members sat in a semicircle. They were all specialists in their fields, so their questions probed my ability to be conversant in each field, whereas my specialty was about combining the fields. Yet I wasn’t able to articulate how or why I did that. Realizing that I really couldn’t answer their questions was incredibly humbling. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Ten Tips for Tweeting at Conferences
Tweeting at conferences is a great way to share what you’re learning in a session with your followers and the wider world. It’s also a great way to be in two places at once, as you can read tweets from other sessions that you weren’t able to attend. You can read those tweets as they come in or—if you’d rather not fracture your attention—read them after the fact using a Twitter search. (Read more from ProfHacker.)
Wix.com Webinar on Creating a Strong Online Presence
posted by CAA — January 07, 2014
Creating a strong online presence is the key to a successful career. During this special workshop for CAA, to be held on Wednesday, February 5, 2014, 3:00–4:00 PM EST, representatives from Wix.com will go over the fundamentals for creating a personal online brand. They will also explain how to choose the best social channels, visual branding, and website creation with Wix.com, a no-code, visual drag-and-drop editor that uses the latest HTML5 technology to help you build the best website possible. With Wix you can have a beautiful, free website in just a few hours.
Call for Testimonials for “Academic Porn”
posted by Christopher Howard — January 07, 2014
In academia, it is well known that politics among colleagues, institutions, and committees are rarely, if ever, spoken about publicly. Instead, an artist-educator and/or art historian is left alone to navigate what sometimes may be murky, dangerous waters in order to avoid getting eaten by the lurking academic sharks.
At the 2014 Annual Conference in Chicago, ARTspace will host an interactive, American Idol–like event titled “Academic Porn: Revealing the Politics in Academia” on Thursday, February 13, 2:30–5:00 PM. Focusing on difficult and uncomfortable circumstances that commonly arise in institutional environments, the four panelists will address dilemmas in academic politics, acting as “judges” adjudicating—and hopefully resolving—these issues.
In advance of this event, the organizers of “Academic Porn” need your testimonials. Feel free to anonymously (or not!) share situations that you or your colleagues have experienced. The panel’s moderator, Sharon Louden, will be reading these testimonials out loud, with a live Twitter feed and audience participation enthusiastically welcomed. Please send your testimonials directly to her at sharon.louden@gmail.com.
Meiss Grant Winners for Fall 2013
posted by Christopher Howard — January 06, 2014
This fall, CAA awarded grants to the publishers of eight books in art history and visual culture through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to the generous bequest of the late Prof. Millard Meiss, CAA gives these grants to support the publication of scholarly books in art history and related fields.
The grantees for fall 2013 are:
- Claudia Brittenham, The Cacaxtla Paintings, University of Texas Press
- Georges Didi-Huberman and Harvey Mendelsohn, trans., The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Cécile Fromont, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo, University of North Carolina Press
- Kristina Kleutghen, Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in Eighteenth-Century China, University of Washington Press
- Wei-Cheng Lin, Building a Sacred Mountain: The Buddhist Architecture of China’s Mount Wutai, University of Washington Press
- Maria Loh, Still Lives: Death, Desire, and the Portraits of the Old Masters, Princeton University Press
- T’ai Smith, Writing on Weaving: A Bauhaus Craft, a Bauhaus Medium, University of Minnesota Press
- Laura Weigert, Late Medieval Visual Culture and the Making of Theater in France, Cambridge 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.