CAA News Today

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.

An Interview with Jane Chu, Chairman of the NEA

Jane Chu was confirmed as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts this past June. She recently answered a few questions about the NEA’s priorities in relation to local arts agencies. (Read more from Americans for the Arts.)

Study Shows That Recent Arts Alumni Are Resilient, Adaptable, and Involved

A study released by the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project shows that America’s most recent arts graduates are using skills learned in school combined with internship experiences to find work, forge careers, and engage their communities, despite higher student debt levels than older alumni. The report, Making It Work: The Education and Employment of Recent Arts Graduates, analyzes data from more than 88,000 arts alumni of all ages, with a particular focus on the 17,000 recent alumni—those who finished their undergraduate or graduate level degrees up to five years prior. (Read more from Indiana University Bloomington.)

Georgia State University’s Loss in “E-Reserves” Case Might Actually Be a Win for Librarians

Two weeks ago a federal appeals court ended that celebration by reversing the judge’s decision and sending the “e-reserves” case back to the lower court for further action. At a glance, the latest ruling looks like a loss for Georgia State University and its allies, and a win for three academic publishers that had sued it. But was it, really? In the days since the ruling was issued, several university-based copyright experts have argued that the reversal is not as bad as it might seem. (Read more from Wired Campus.)

The Best Teaching Resources on the Web

Those of us old enough to remember traveling to an out-of-the-way library to track down a potentially crucial roll of microfilm know just how much new technologies have transformed the way academics do research. We now happily rely on Google Books, JSTOR, and a whole parade of resources and databases available at the click of a finger. But what may be less obvious is the way new technologies have made improving our teaching a whole lot easier as well. (Read more from Vitae.)

Participatory Learning in the Art-History Classroom

In a participatory learning environment, learners get the opportunity to become part of a community of inquiry and explore abstract concepts in a nonhierarchical social context. Rather than the mere transmission and acquisition of knowledge, learning becomes relevant, engaging, and creative. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)

Tenure Track Wisdom Part Two

In the second of this series of faculty interviews, we hear from Laura Krystal Porterfield, who just finished her first year as an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. She received her PhD in urban education in 2013 from Temple University, where she a held fellowship at the Center for the Humanities. (Read more from Vitae.)

Finding a Job While ABD

Going on the job market without a degree in hand, emphasizing that holding off on job-searching until the dissertation, is a luxury that is not available to everyone. Yet the prospect of landing a job can be an invaluable motivator for an ABD candidate struggling with dissertation procrastination. Here are some tips for ABDs on how to juggle the demands of grad-student life and job searching while maximizing your chances at job-market success. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

The Museum Interface

It’s no longer a question of whether art institutions should have a virtual presence. Rather, the onus is being placed on designers to facilitate meaningful interactions with art that might occur in the gallery, via web-based applications or in new hybrid spaces that merge the real and the virtual. Any attempt to augment an encounter with artwork using technological means invariably raises questions about the values we assign to certain modes of viewing. After all, isn’t visiting a museum inherently tied to a very deep, very primary real-life experience? (Read more from Art in America.)

CAA has just published the Annual Report 2013–2014, which describes the organization’s accomplishments over the past year. You may download a PDF of the fully illustrated, twenty-three-page document.

Abundantly illustrated by photographs from the 2014 Annual Conference in Chicago, the report presents a summary of an enormously productive year that included several major projects: a copublishing agreement with Taylor & Francis that brought all of CAA’s scholarly journals online; the ongoing fair-use initiative that will soon establish practical guidelines for the visual arts; and the restructuring of the individual membership program to better accommodate part-time faculty and independent art historians and artists.

Also covered is an overview of the CAA-Getty International Program, which brought twenty scholars from around the world to the Chicago conference, as well as a selected list of grants received during the fiscal year and statistics related to CAA News, www.collegeart.org, and social media. An update on professional-development activities and a financial statement on the 2014 fiscal year close the report.

We hope you will enjoy reading about CAA’s accomplishments.

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.

AIA Statement on the Recent Sale of Artifacts by the St. Louis Society

The Archaeological Institute of America has learned with grave concern that the AIA St. Louis Society has sold a collection of Egyptian artifacts entrusted to its care. These objects were intended to benefit the citizens of St. Louis by helping them to understand the record of past human achievement. The decision to sell these objects after a century of custodianship contravenes this expectation. (Read more from the Archaeological Institute of America.)

Publishers Win Reversal of Court Ruling That Favored “E-Reserves” at Georgia State University

How much copyrighted material can professors make available to students in online course reserves before they exceed the boundaries of educational fair use? That’s the essential question at the heart of a long-running copyright-infringement lawsuit that has pitted three academic publishers against Georgia State University. Last week, in a setback for the university, a federal appeals court reversed a May 2012 ruling that mostly favored Georgia State. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Nurturing Talent

Design education leaves designers lacking in business skills—it’s hard enough to learn to be a designer, but there needs to be a next step for the business side that caters to the entrepreneur. Who wants to spend two years getting an MBA if you’ve got a hot idea? We need a place where smart, talented designers can get an on-demand education about how to start a business, which includes everything from financial planning and costing to how to stay out of trouble. (Read more from Metropolis.)

“Looking” at Art in the Smartphone Age

“Beyoncé and Jay-Z Take Selfie with Mona Lisa!” headlines all over the internet blared. And it’s true, the first couple of American pop culture did take a photo of themselves in front of one of the masterpieces of European art history. But in the instantly iconic image, the two musicians aren’t even looking at the famous work of art that they knowingly appropriate. In fact, they have their backs turned to it, with the Mona Lisa’s face poking out over their shoulders like a photobomb across the centuries. (Read more from Pacific Standard.)

Soft Fabrics Have Solid Appeal

Once dismissed as utilitarian, homespun, and intellectually flimsy, textiles are gaining international stature in art museums. The artist Richard Tuttle just unveiled a vast installation in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, called I Don’t Know, or the Weave of Textile Language, while new and older works are on view in his retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London. Meanwhile, there are shows on fiber art, weaving, and embroidery at the Drawing Center in New York and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

Hanging a Tapestry in the Met Is a Lot More Complicated Than You Think

The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently opened a new exhibition: Grand Design, a collection featuring nineteen massive tapestries by the Renaissance master Pieter Coecke van Aelst. The tapestries are epic, intricate pieces, spanning up to thirty feet in length and weighing an average of one hundred pounds—which begs the question of how, exactly, the museum hangs them. (Read more from Slate.)

The Confidence Gap in Academic Writing

As a writing workshop instructor, I’ve become familiar with the garden-variety problems that graduate students face in writing a dissertation. Often those difficulties boil down to an avoidance of the daily grind of writing itself. Sometimes students lack any concrete feedback on their drafts or receive comments that are too general to be of much help in the revision process. Many students are unfamiliar with the tricks and tools of the writing trade itself—things like reverse outlines, free writing, or “storyboarding.” (Read more from Vitae.)

Managing Your Academic Career

In my ten years of interviewing and/or observing approximately one hundred faculty members at various types of institutions, I have learned a great deal about how to shape and manage academic work in ways that promote meaningful, balanced, and satisfying careers. To prepare for a presentation at new faculty orientation at Saint Joseph’s University, I reviewed the field notes, interview transcripts, and publications from my past studies with one question in mind: What strategies might best help new faculty members manage their academic careers during a time of rising expectations, decreasing resources, and diminishing boundaries between work and life? (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)