CAA News Today
The Getty Foundation to Fund a Fifth Year of the College Art Association-Getty International Program
posted by Christopher Howard — June 09, 2015
The Getty Foundation has awarded the College Art Association a grant to fund the CAA-Getty International Program for the fifth consecutive year. The Foundation’s support will enable CAA to bring fifteen international visual-arts professionals to the 104th Annual Conference, taking place February 3–6, 2016, in Washington DC. The CAA-Getty International Program provides funds for travel expenses, hotel accommodations, per diems, conference registrations, and one-year CAA memberships to art historians, artists who teach art history, and museum curators. The program will include a one-day preconference colloquium on international issues in art history on February 2, at which participants will present and discuss their common professional interests and issues.
The goals of the International Program are to increase international participation in CAA, to diversify the organization’s membership, and to foster collaborations between American art historians, artists, and curators and their international colleagues. CAA also strives to familiarize international participants with the submission process for conference sessions to encourage ongoing involvement with the association. CAA will provide hosts from its membership to welcome the international participants and introduce them to colleagues in their fields.
Historically, the majority of international registrants to CAA’s Annual Conferences have come from North America, the United Kingdom, and Western European countries. In the first four years of the CAA-Getty International Program, CAA has added seventy-five attendees from Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, Africa, Asia, Southeast Asia, Caribbean countries, and South America. As this alumni group grows, so too does international participation in CAA. Former grant recipients have become ambassadors of CAA in their countries, sharing knowledge gained at the Annual Conference with their colleagues and encouraging them to submit applications to the International Program. A number of scholarly collaborations have also ensued among grant recipients and CAA members. The value of attending a CAA Annual Conference as a participant in the CAA-Getty International Program was succinctly summarized by Nazar Kozak, a 2015 participant from Ukraine: “To put it simply, I understood that I can become part of a global scholarly community. I felt like I belong here.”
The deadline for applications has been extended to August 26, 2015. Grant guidelines and the 2016 application can be found here.
Two Months Left to Apply: American Art in Translation Book Prize
posted by Betty Leigh Hutcheson — June 08, 2015
TWO MONTHS LEFT TO APPLY!
American Art in Translation Book Prize
The Terra Foundation for American Art, in partnership with Yale University Press, is offering a new prize for an unpublished or previously published manuscript in a language other than English written by a non-US author. The manuscript should make a significant contribution to scholarship on the historical visual arts of what is now the geographic United States.
Applicants must submit a letter of inquiry by August 3, 2015.
For more information about the prize, please visit the Yale University Press website: www.yalebooks.com/terratranslationprize.
CAA Seeks Nominations for the 2016 Awards for Distinction
posted by Emmanuel Lemakis — June 04, 2015
CAA has begun accepting nominations for the 2016 awards. Please review the guidelines below to familiarize yourself with the nomination process and to download, complete, and submit the requested materials. Deadline: July 31, 2015, for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Awards, and the Frank Jewett Mather Award; August 31, 2015, for all others.
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, 2014, and August 31, 2015. Books published posthumously are not eligible. Letters of support are not required for the Mather, Morey, and Barr awards. All submissions must include a completed 2016 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 Mather, Morey, and Barr awards and the Porter prize).
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
To give the jury full opportunity to evaluate each submission fairly, submit materials well before the July 31 deadline. Please review the following nomination guidelines:
- A publisher may submit no more than three titles. In addition, CAA accepts nominations from its membership, jury members, reviews editors for The Art Bulletin and Art Journal, and field editors from caa.reviews
- 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, 2014, and August 31, 2015
- Books published posthumously are not eligible
- CAA and each jury member must receive a copy of the nominated book. A total of six copies of the book must be sent. To receive the mailing addresses for the jury, please contact Emmanuel Lemakis, CAA director 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 July 31 deadline. Please review the following nomination guidelines:
- A publisher may submit no more than three titles. In addition, CAA accepts nominations from its membership, jury members, reviews editors for The Art Bulletin and Art Journal, and field editors from caa.reviews
- 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, 2014, and August 31, 2015
- Books published posthumously are not eligible
- CAA and each jury member must receive a copy of the nominated book. A total of six copies of the book must be sent. To receive the mailing addresses for the jury, please contact Emmanuel Lemakis, CAA director of programs
- Complete and submit the Barr nomination form
- Letters of support are not required
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. In addition, complete and submit the Mather nomination form. To give the jury full opportunity to evaluate each submission fairly, submit materials well before the July 31 deadline.
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.
Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
To determine eligibility, authors of articles in The Art Bulletin must complete the Porter nomination form.
Contact
Please write to Emmanuel Lemakis, CAA director of programs, for more information about the nomination process.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — June 03, 2015
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.
IIE Launches Program to Assist Threatened Artists
The Institute of International Education will soon launch a program to save the lives and work of artists who face persecution in their home countries. The new Artist Protection Fund, a three-year pilot program supported by a $2.79 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will make life-saving fellowship grants to threatened artists from any field of artistic endeavor and place them at host universities and arts centers in countries where they can safely continue their work and plan for their future. (Read more from the Institute of International Education.)
Protecting Priceless Art from Natural Disasters
The reviews of the new design of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York have been glowing. But the most intriguing feature might be one that’s gone largely unnoticed: its custom flood-mitigation system, which was designed halfway through the museum’s construction, in the aftermath of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, when more than five million gallons of water flooded the site. (Read more from the Atlantic.)
Taking the Measure of Sexism: Facts, Figures, and Fixes
Despite encouraging signs of women’s improved status and visibility in the art world, there are still major systemic problems. Do not misunderstand me: women artists are in a far better position today than they were forty-five years ago, when Linda Nochlin wrote her landmark essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Access to “high art” education, to which women have historically been denied, is now possible for many with financial means. Moreover, the institutional power structures that Nochlin argued made it “impossible for women to achieve artistic excellence, or success, on the same footing as men, no matter what the potency of their so-called talent, or genius,” have been shifting. (Read more from ARTnews.)
62 Women Share Their Secrets to Art World Success: Part One
What are the secrets to a successful career in the art world? Artnet News asked sixty-two women in the upper echelons of museums, galleries, art public-relations firms, and art nonprofits to tell us what they’ve learned over the course of their careers, and to offer their advice for women looking to break into the business. (Read more from Artnet News.)
62 Women Share Their Secrets to Art World Success: Part Two
What are the secrets to a successful career in the art world? Artnet News asked sixty-two women in the upper echelons of museums, galleries, art public-relations firms, and art nonprofits to tell us what they’ve learned over the course of their careers, and to offer their advice for women looking to break into the business. (Read more from Artnet News.)
The Rise of the Private Art “Museum”
In the heart of Berlin stands a windowless concrete bunker so awesomely ugly that, when you see it, you instinctively avert your gaze. It is heavy, gray, and shrapnel-pocked, and has no signage to explain its protean history. Designed by the Nazi architect Karl Bonatz, the bunker was built in 1942 as an air-raid shelter for Germans. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the building was appropriated for use first as an avant-garde performance space and later as a techno club. In 2003, Christian and Karen Boros bought the building to display a portion of their sizable collection of contemporary art. (Read more from the New Yorker.)
Looking for Creativity in Brains Will Take More Creativity
About a decade and a half ago, the neuroscience world got super stoked about a sexy new way to look at living brains: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Now, fMRI is still a great tool—just as long as you’re applying it to questions that it can actually answer. The problem is, many questions that can be answered simply with fMRI data have, by virtue of being simple, already been answered. That means any successive studies done with fMRI have to meet a much, much higher bar. (Read more from Wired.)
Digitally Divided
There’s nothing like being without the internet for a few days to realize how much I don’t miss it, at least occasionally. But it also makes me realize how much I assume when I have regular access. I’ve been vacationing in parts of the country where our cell phones can’t reach a signal. It’s a good time to relax, listen to the wind in the trees, take long walks with no particular destination in mind, but you can’t pick up the latest news, keep your email clutter cut down to size, or check tomorrow’s weather, all things that I take for granted normally. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Changes Coming to the Annual Meeting!
posted by Linda Downs — June 02, 2015
Suzanne Preston Blier, Vice President for the Annual Conference, is heading the CAA Task Force on the Annual Conference and, along with other members of this group, she is seeking suggestions from CAA members on the kinds of changes that you would like to see.
Among the suggestions that have already been initiated is the following:
CAA has decided to return to its earlier policy of allowing members to annually submit proposals, present a paper, or chair a panel. This is a change from the every-other-year format that had been followed in recent years. Our goal is to keep members engaged and participating in CAA’s Annual Conference on a yearly basis.
Please send your suggestions to nyoffice@collegeart.org.
Support CAA’s Publications Fund
posted by Nia Page — June 02, 2015
This year, CAA’s journals made impressive use of their new digital platforms to provide access to their incredibly rich and influential back archive, engage an ever-broadening international audience, and explore new multimedia forms of scholarly publication. These digital efforts augment and support the journals’ longstanding mission to deliver the world’s leading scholarship in the visual arts in forms that engage the field at its most exciting frontiers while maintaining a commitment to the rigorous standards for which they are known.
We invite you to support our mission of advancing the highest standards of intellectual engagement in the arts by making a tax-deductible gift to the Publications Fund today.
Here are some recent highlights from CAA publications:
In The Art Bulletin:
- The long-form essay remains the cornerstone of the journal. Recent authors have included Marvin Trachtenberg on new elements in the history of the basilica of S. Lorenzo in Florence, Mark Rosen on Pietro Tacca’s sculptural portraits of slaves on a seventeenth-century monument in Livorno, Susan Siegfried’s exploration of the intersection of the classical ideal and post-Revolutionary fashion in a painting by Marie-Denise Viller, and Bridget Alsdorf on the figure of the gawker in woodcut illustrations by Félix Vallotton for this novel The Murderous Life
- For the “Whither Art History?” series, prominent art historians from around the world respond to that very inquiry about the direction of the discipline, among them Richard W. Hill Sr. on the art of being indigenous and Moye Okediji on the nature of African art
- Reviews of books on a wide range of topics, from prehistoric visual culture, to eighteenth-century eye miniatures, to humor and politics in recent German art
In Art Journal:
- The journal’s essays have recently featured Anna C. Chave on the career of Carl Andre, Luis M. Castañeda on mid-century art in Haiti, and Kenneth R. Allan on artists influenced by the thinking of Marshall McLuhan
- An artist’s project by Conrad Bakker delved into the library of Robert Smithson, and the artist Brian Molanphy offered a freewheeling annotated bibliography of ceramic art
- Art Journal Open, the journal’s independent website, has lately featured the interview format, with the artists William Lamson, Kate Gilmore, and the art duo robbinschilds each speaking about recent work with the curator Dina Deitsch, and Rudy Lemcke speaking with Tina Takemoto
- Reviews of new books on artists as diverse as Adrian Piper, Andrew Wyeth, and Andy Warhol; on Panamericanism during the Cold War; and on reevaluating modern artists who eschewed abstraction
In caa.reviews (now fully open access!):
- Continual publication reviews on diverse topics and geographic regions, including reviews of books: Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England, 1660–1760 by Chi-ming Yang, Grupo Antillano: The Art of Afro-Cuba, edited by Alejandro de la Fuente, and Mio Wakita’s Staging Desires: Japanese Femininity in Kusakabe Kimbei’s Nineteenth-Century Souvenir Photography; and exhibitions: Treasures from Korea: Arts and Culture of the Joseon Dynasty, 1392–1910, Passion and Virtuosity: Hendrick Goltzius and the Art of Engraving, and A Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and Photography
These highly regarded journals reach tens of thousands of readers around the world and serve as essential resources to those working in the visual arts—none of which would be possible without your support. Contributors who give at a level of $250 or higher are prominently acknowledged in the publication they support for four consecutive issues, as well as on the publication’s website for one year, through CAA News, and in the Annual Conference’s convocation booklet. On behalf of the scholars, critics, and artists who publish in the journals, we thank you for your continued commitment to maintaining a strong and spirited forum for the visual-arts community.
With best regards,
Gail Feigenbaum
Vice President for Publications
Spring 2015 Recipients of the Millard Meiss Publication Fund
posted by Christopher Howard — June 01, 2015
This spring, CAA awarded grants to the publishers of ten 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 ten Meiss grantees for spring 2015 are:
- Marisa Anne Bass, Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity, Princeton University Press
- George Bent, Public Painting and Visual Culture in Early Republican Florence, Cambridge University Press
- Sarah Gordon, Indecent Exposures: Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion Nudes, Yale University Press
- Anne Helmreich, Art and Science: The Quest for Truth to Nature in British Photography and Painting, 1839–1914, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Jeehee Hong, Theater of the Dead: A Social Turn in Chinese Funerary Art, 1000–1400, University of Hawai‘i Press
- Dorothy Ko, The Social Life of Inkstones: Craftsmen and Scholars in Early Qing China, University of Washington Press
- Catha Paquette, At the Crossroads: Patronage and Censorship of Diego Rivera in the 1930s, University of Texas Press
- Eric Ramírez-Weaver, Saving Science: Capturing the Heavens in Carolingian Manuscripts, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Oscar E. Vázquez, The End Again: Degeneration and Visual Culture in Modern Spain, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Robert Williams, Raphael and the Modernity of Italian Renaissance Art, 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.