CAA News Today
People in the News
posted by CAA — October 17, 2015
People in the News lists new hires, positions, and promotions in three sections: Academe, Museums and Galleries, and Organizations and Publications.
The section is published 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.
October 2015
Academe
Jeffrey Abt has been appointed fellow and visiting professor in the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for the 2015–16 academic year.
Nicole Awai has joined the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin as assistant professor in painting and drawing.
Douglas Brine, assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, has received tenure.
Anne Helmreich, formerly senior program officer for the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles, California, has been named dean of the College of Fine Arts at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth.
Adrian Randolph, Leon E. Williams Professor of Art History and associate dean of the faculty for the arts and humanities at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, has been appointed dean of the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
Marissa Vigneault has left the University of Nebraska in Lincoln to become assistant professor of art history at Utah State University in Logan.
Greg Watts, formerly professor and chair of the Art Department and executive director of the Center for Visual Art at Metropolitan State University in Denver, Colorado, has become dean of the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas in Denton.
Catherine Zuromskis has become assistant professor of photographic arts and sciences in the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology in Henrietta, New York.
Museums and Galleries
Leslie Anderson-Perkins has joined the Utah Museum of Fine Arts at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City as curator of European, American, and regional art. Previously she was curatorial assistant for European and American painting, sculpture, and works on paper at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indiana.
Seb Chan, director of digital and emerging media at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, has become the inaugural chief experience officer at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne.
Shawnya L. Harris has become the first Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Curator of African American and African Diasporic Art for the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens. Previously Harris taught at the Elizabeth City State University in Elizabeth City, North Carolina.
Claire Henry, senior curatorial assistant of the Andy Warhol Film Project at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, has been promoted to assistant curator at the museum.
Maureen Warren has been appointed curator of European and American art at the University of Illinois’s Krannert Art Museum in Champaign. She was previously Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Research Fellow in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Institutional News
posted by CAA — October 17, 2015
Read about the latest news from institutional members.
Institutional News is published 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.
October 2015
The Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri has accepted a $25 million gift from an anonymous donor. The funds will go toward the school’s general endowment, campus improvements, and, in the form of a challenge grant, student scholarships, endowed professorships, and visiting professors.
The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia has received a major $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The award, a Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections Implementation Grant, will support the construction of a collections storage expansion project.
The Terra Foundation for American Art, based in Chicago, Illinois, has opened the new location of its expanded Paris Center in the historic hôtel Lévis-Mirepoix. The facility includes a larger and improved event and library facilities and a collaborative exhibition space with the Fondation Custodia.
Mentoring at the 2016 Conference
posted by Katie Apsey — October 16, 2015
As a CAA member, you have free access to a diverse range of mentors at Career Services during the 104th Annual Conference, taking place February 3–6, 2016, in Washington, DC. All emerging, midcareer, and even advanced art professionals can benefit from one-on-one discussions with dedicated mentors about artists’ portfolios, career-management skills, and professional strategies.
You may enroll in either the Artists’ Portfolio Review or Career Development Mentoring—please choose one. Participants are chosen by a lottery of applications received by the deadline; all applicants are notified of their scheduled date and time slot by email in early 2016. Both sessions are offered free of charge. Conference registration, while encouraged, is not necessary to participate. All applicants must be current CAA members.
Artists’ Portfolio Review
The Artists’ Portfolio Review offers CAA members the opportunity to have digital images or DVDs of their work reviewed by artists, critics, curators, and educators in personal twenty-minute consultations. Whenever possible, CAA matches artists and mentors based on medium or discipline. You may bring battery-powered laptops; wireless internet, however, is not available in the room. Sessions are filled by appointment only and are scheduled for Thursday, February 4, and Friday, February 5, 2016, 8:00 AM–NOON and 1:00–5:00 PM each day.
To apply, download and complete the Career Development Enrollment Form. Send the completed form by email to Katie Apsey, CAA manager of programs; by fax to 212-627-2381; or by mail to: Artists’ Portfolio Review, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004. Deadline: December 21, 2015.
Career Development Mentoring
Artists, art historians, art educators, and museum professionals at all stages of their careers may apply for one-on-one consultations with veterans in their fields. Through personal twenty-minute consultations, Career Development Mentoring offers a unique opportunity for participants to receive candid advice on how to conduct a thorough job search; present cover letters, CVs, and digital images; and prepare for interviews. Whenever possible, CAA matches participants and mentors based on medium or discipline. Sessions are filled by appointment only and are scheduled for Thursday, February 4, and Friday, February 6, 2016, 8:00 AM–NOON and 1:00–5:00 PM each day.
To apply, download and complete the Career Development Enrollment Form. Send the completed form by email to Katie Apsey, CAA manager of programs; by fax to 212-627-2381; or by mail to: Career Development Mentoring, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004. Deadline: December 21, 2015.
Image: Two participants in Career Services programming at the 2015 Annual Conference in New York (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Grants, Awards, and Honors
posted by CAA — October 15, 2015
CAA recognizes its members for their professional achievements, be it a grant, fellowship, residency, book prize, honorary degree, or related award.
Grants, Awards, and Honors is published 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.
October 2015
Lauren Applebaum, a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, has won a Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Her project examines “Elusive Matter, Material Bodies: American Art in the Age of Electronic Mediation, 1865–1918.”
S. Elise Archias, assistant professor in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Illinois in Chicago, has been named George Gurney Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Her project is called “Armatures—Joan Mitchell, Lygia Clark, and Melvin Edwards circa 1960.”
Nadya Bair, a PhD student in art history at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has won a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Her project is titled “The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Art of Collaboration in Postwar Photojournalism.”
Nicole Bass, a PhD student in the history of art at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has received a Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. She will research “The Shade of Private Life: Privacy and the Press in Turn-of-the-Century American Art.”
David Brownlee, Frances Shapiro-Weitzenhoffer Professor of 19th Century European Art and chair of the Graduate Group in the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, has been inducted as a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians.
Emily Casey, a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware in Newark, has been appointed Terra Foundation Predoctoral Fellow in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Her project is called “Waterscapes: Representing the Sea in the American Imagination, 1760–1815.”
Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, professor of communications and arts at Seton Hall University in Seton Hall, New Jersey, has accepted an ACLS Comparative Perspectives on Chinese Culture and Society Grant from the American Council of Learned Societies for her project, “Artistic Exchanges between China and the West during the Late Qing Dynasty (ca. 1795–1911).”
Michael Cloud, an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, has received a 2015 fellowship for painting by the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Blane De St. Croix, an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, who is also associate professor and head of sculpture at Indiana University in Bloomington, has received an artist’s residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, Louisiana.
R. Ruth Dibble, a doctoral student in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has been named James Renwick Predoctoral Fellow in American Craft at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. She will work on “‘Strike Home to the Minds of Men’: Crafting Domesticity in the Civil War Era.”
Erica DiBenedetto, a graduate student in art history at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, has become Patricia and Phillip Frost Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Her project is called “Drawing from Architecture: The Conceptual Methods of Sol LeWitt’s Art, 1965–1980.”
Randall Edwards, a PhD student in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, has accepted a Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. He is researching “Dennis Oppenheim: Sites, 1967–75.”
George F. Flaherty, assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, has won the Founders’ JSAH Article Award from the Society of Architectural Historians for his essay, “Responsive Eyes: Urban Logistics and Kinetic Environments for the 1968 Mexico City Olympics,” published in the September 2014 issue of the Journal of Architectural Historians.
Kate Flint, professor of English and art history at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has earned an ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for “Flash! Photography, Writing, and Surprising Illumination.”
Finbarr Barry Flood, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the Humanities in the Institute of Fine Art at New York University, has received an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to work on “Object Histories—Flotsam as Early Globalism.”
Emily Ann Francisco, an MA student in art history and museum studies at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York, has completed the summer internship program at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. This program provides opportunities for graduate and postgraduate students to work on projects directed by a museum department head or curator.
Julie Green, professor of fine arts at Oregon State University in Corvallis, has received an artist’s residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Rachel Haidu, associate professor of art and art history and of visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, has earned an ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Her project is called “The Knot of Influence.”
Taro Hattori, an installation artist based in Oakland, California, has accepted a fall 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.
Mary Beth Heffernan, associate professor of sculpture and photography at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California, was awarded the Presidential Grant from the Arnold P. Gold Foundation for her Personal Protective Equipment Portrait Project, a social-practice art intervention in the Ebola epidemic.
Ellie Irons, an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, has been awarded a 2015 fellowship for interdisciplinary work by the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Saisha Grayson, assistant curator for the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and a doctoral candidate in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, has been awarded a Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Her research project is “Cellist, Catalyst, Collaborator: The Work of Charlotte Moorman, 1963–1980.”
Christopher Ketcham, a doctoral student in the history, theory, and criticism of architecture and art at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, has been awarded a Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship by the American Council of Learned Societies. His project is called “Minimal Art and Body Politics in New York City, 1961–75.”
Yuko Kikuchi, a professor at University of the Arts London in the United Kingdom, has been appointed Terra Foundation Senior Fellow in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Her project is titled “Russel Wright and Asia: Studies on the American Design Aid and Transnational Design History during the Cold War.”
Marci Kwon, a PhD student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, has accepted a Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. She will work on “Vernacular Modernism: Joseph Cornell and the Art of Populism.”
Lex Morgan Lancaster, a doctoral student in art history at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, has completed the summer internship program at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. This program provides opportunities for graduate and postgraduate students to work on projects directed by a museum department head or curator.
Solveig Nelson, a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Chicago in Illinois, has received a Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Her project is titled “Direct Action, Mediated Bodies: How Early Video Changed Art.”
Alexander Potts, Max Loehr Collegiate Professor of History of Art at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has been elected to the British Academy as a corresponding fellow.
John Paul Ricco has accepted a faculty research fellowship at the University of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute in Ontario for 2015–16.
Kristine K. Ronan, a PhD candidate in the history of art at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has earned a Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Her research examines “Buffalo Dancer: The Biography of an Image.”
Julia B. Rosenbaum, associate professor of art history at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, has become a senior fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Her project explores “Curated Bodies: The Display of Science and Citizenry in Post–Civil War America.”
James H. Rubin, professor of art history at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York, has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Grant for calendar year 2016.
Wenhua Shi, assistant professor of art and art history at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, has been awarded a 2015 fellowship by the New York Foundation for the Arts in the category of interdisciplinary work.
Mark Van Proyen, associate professor of painting at the San Francisco Art Institute in California, has received the Kenneth J. Botto Research Fellowship from the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson. His project examines “Kenneth J. Botto and the Tradition of Surrealist Photography.”
Alicia W. Walker, assistant professor of history of art at Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, has received a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for “Christian Bodies, Pagan Images: Women, Beauty, and Morality in Medieval Byzantium.”
Julie Warchol, formerly Brown Post-Baccalaureate Curatorial Fellow at the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Massachusetts, has completed the summer internship program at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. This program provides opportunities for graduate and postgraduate students to work on projects directed by a museum department head or curator.
Allison Wiese, associate professor of sculpture in the Department of Art and Architecture at the University of San Diego in California, has completed a July 2015 residency at the Montello Foundation near Montello, Nevada.
Tobias Wofford, assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California, has been named Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. He will work on “Visualizing Diaspora: Africa in African American Art.”
Elaine Y. Yau, a graduate student in art history at the University of California, Berkeley, has become the William H. Truettner Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. She will research “Acts of Conversion: Sister Gertrude Morgan and the Sensation of Black Folk Art, 1960–1983.”
Alice Pixley Young, an artist based in Cincinnati, Ohio, has finished an artist’s residency at the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences in Rabun Gap, Georgia.
Catherine Zuromskis, associate professor in the Department of Art and Art at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, has accepted an Ansel Adams Research Fellowship from the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Her project will investigate “The Crime Scene and the Archive: Reframing Evidence.”
Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members
posted by CAA — October 15, 2015
Check out details on recent shows organized by CAA members who are also curators.
Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members is published 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.
October 2015
Susan Ball. The Seven Deadly Sins: Pride. Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut, June 27–October 18, 2015.
Myroslava M. Mudrak. Staging the Ukrainian Avant-Garde of the 1910s and 1920s. Ukrainian Museum, New York, February 15–October 4, 2015.
Tatiana Reinoza and Luis Vargas-Santiago. Counter-Archives to the Narco-City. Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana, August 16–December 13, 2015.
Books Published by CAA Members
posted by CAA — October 15, 2015
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.
October 2015
Dora Apel. Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).
Matthew Baigell. Social Concern and Left Politics in Jewish American Art, 1880–1940 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015).
Lucy Bradnock, Courtney J. Martin, and Rebecca Peabody, eds. Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2015).
Douglas Brine. Pious Memories: The Wall-Mounted Memorial in the Burgundian Netherlands (Boston: Brill, 2015).
Jaroslav Folda. Byzantine Art and Italian Panel Painting: The Virgin and Child “Hodegetria” and the Art of Chrysography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Gabrielle Jennings, ed. Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).
David McCarthy. American Artists against War, 1935–2010 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).
Julia I. Miller and Laurie Taylor-Mitchell. From Giotto to Botticelli: The Artistic Patronage of the Humiliati in Florence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015).
Edward J. Olszewski. Dynamics of Architecture in Late Baroque Rome: Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni at the Cancelleria (Berlin: De Gruyter Open, 2015).
Jordana Moore Saggese. Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).
Steven Zahavi Schwartz, ed. Seeking Engagement: The Art of Richard Kamler (Champaign, IL: Common Ground Publishing, 2015).
Ruth Weisberg. Ruth Weisberg: Reflections through Time (Los Angeles: Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 2015).
What’s New with ACLS Humanities E-Book?
posted by Christopher Howard — October 15, 2015
October … shorter days, cooler nights, pumpkin spice in everything, and ACLS Humanities E-Book’s launch of Round 12! This recently released collection of 370 scholarly books offers new titles selected by scholars and learned societies. ACLS Humanities E-Book is the online publisher of CAA’s monographs, and this partnership has helped to develop an essential resource in art history and architecture.
Round 12 includes four winners of CAA’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, all published by Princeton University Press:
- The Sculpture of Donatello by H. W. Janson (1957)
- Esprit De Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War 1914–1925 by Kenneth Silver (1989)
- Only Connect . . . Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance by John Shearman (1992)
- Lorenzo Ghiberti by Richard Krautheimer (1956)
Eighteen titles in the Villa I Tatti series, published in collaboration with Harvard University Press and the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, are also featured as part of ACLS Humanities E-Book’s online collection. Since 1961, the Villa I Tatti program has welcomed over one thousand fellows working in the fields of Italian Renaissance art, history, literature, and music. The research center has thus generated some of the most significant scholarship on the Italian Renaissance published over the last decades.
Subscriptions to Humanities E-Book are available to individual and institutional members of CAA. Individuals should write to subscriptions@hebook.org; institutions should contact lwalton@hebook.org.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — October 14, 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.
Guardian of the Humanities
William “Bro” Adams is the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency that awards grants to researchers and cultural institutions to preserve America’s heritage. In an interview with Tom Fox, he discussed his mission at the NEH and his views on leading this federal organization. (Read more from the Washington Post.)
The NEA at 50 and the Death of the Public Good
Fifty years after the National Endowment for the Arts was founded, the agency struggles, doing great work despite being the victim of an unrelenting and highly successful conservative assault on the public sector that began with the election of Ronald Reagan and continues to this day. The NEA’s 2015 budget allocation clocked in at a mere $146 million, which accounts for 0.012 percent of total federal discretionary spending. (Read more from Culturebot.)
How an Art-History Class Became More Engaging with Twitter
When I was a college student, art-history courses revolved around a 1960s-era carousel slide projector. Its monotonous humming and clicking in the darkened lecture hall often put my classmates to sleep. As I prepared to teach my own art-history course last year, I wanted to implement new technologies to make the lectures more interactive and relatable to a twenty-first-century audience. (Read more from the Conversation.)
Can I Reuse a Past Show’s Title?
I’m a painter and had an exhibition in another state two months ago that comprised many of the pieces in the one I’m installing at a new gallery in a few weeks. Can or should I give the show the same title? Or should I come up with something new, since I’m showing some new work too? (Read more from Burnaway.)
Art Forgers Beware: DNA Could Thwart Fakes
Eric Fischl remembers the time a friend waved a catalogue at him to alert him that one of his paintings was up for auction for six figures. In reality, the work was a fake, but so convincing, the artist said, “I thought I was losing my mind.” Brushes with forgery like that one two decades ago, and concerns about his legacy and estate, prompted Fischl to appear in London to vouch for a new authentication system that would let artists sign their works with specks of synthetic DNA. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Copyright Registration Strategies
Copyright registration is something most artists can experiment without legal assistance and great cost, outside of more complex registration questions. However, this does not really help individual artists or small businesses who produce a lot of content. So let’s break it down and then you can make your own conclusions about how cheap and easy it is, depending on what type of content you are registering. (Read more from Clancco.)
On the Case: The Law on Augmented Reality and Museums
A few of our more tech-savvy museum clients have been exploring whether and how to make some of their exhibits come alive by using exciting new “augmented reality” technology. At the same time, they have been grappling with cutting-edge legal issues involved in this new technology—which is where we come in. (Read more from Artnet News.)
The Error of Margins: Vernacular Artists and the Mainstream Art World
Though the art world may not yet have a satisfactory way of referring to artists like Marlon Mullen, who are variously described by such leaky terms as self-taught, outsider, and vernacular, it has, over the past few years, shown more interest in them and is gradually growing the existing market for their work. (Read more from ARTnews.)
Candidates for CAA’s 2016 Board of Directors Election
posted by Vanessa Jalet — October 13, 2015
The 2015–16 Nominating Committee has announced a slate of six candidates for the annual election of four new CAA members to serve on the Board of Directors for a four-year term (2016–20). Voting will begin in January 2016. The webpages for the election, which will include the candidates’ statements, biographies, endorsements, and video presentations, will be published in late December 2015.
The six candidates are:
- Dina Bangdel, Associate Professor, Director, Art History Program, Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, Doha, Qatar
- Carma Gorman, Associate Professor and Assistant Chair, Design Division, Department of Art and Art History, The University of Texas at Austin
- N. Elizabeth Schlatter, Deputy Director and Curator of Exhibitions, University of Richmond Museums, Richmond, Virginia
- Andrew Schulz, Associate Dean for Research and Associate Professor of Art History, College of Arts and Architecture, Pennsylvania State University, University Park
- Roberto Tejada, Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor, Departments of English and Art History, University of Houston, Texas
- Anuradha Vikram, Lecturer, Graduate Public Practice, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, California
If you have questions about the Nominating Committee, the candidates, or the voting process, please contact Vanessa Jalet, CAA executive liaison.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for October 2015
posted by CAA — October 10, 2015
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.
October 2015
Dress/Shield
Lump Project
505 South Blount Street, Raleigh, NC 27601
October 2–31, 2015
Lump Project celebrates its twentieth anniversary in Raleigh, North Carolina, with Dress/Shield, an exhibition by six female artists whose identity as women underpin the work. Represented in the exhibition are: Leah Bailis, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Lee Delegard, Brooklyn, New York; Lydia Moyer, Covesville, Virginia; Molly Schafer, Chicago, Illinois; Tory Wright, Greenville, South Carolina; and Laura Sharpe Wilson, Salt Lake City, Utah.
Each artist has a history of showing at Lump, and the exhibition will feature diverse processes, including sculpture, textiles, video, photography, and works on paper. “This group show is an opportunity to see how the perception of those voices changes when they are in chorus and to explore the connections between the work of women artists who are disparate in geography and media.”
“Schafer and Wright respond to recent motherhood with drawing, photographs and intricate paper-cut (respectively) while Moyer frames the experience of being female through text-based work that references local and national politics. Bailis does so with quilts that double as full-body masks; Delegard uses painting and sculpture to explore relationships between desire, consumerism, and the body. Sharpe Wilson, whose practice is most often painting, expands on her nature-inspired work with an installation of newly created textiles referencing historical social concerns.”
Public Works: Artists’ Interventions 1970s–Now
Mills College Art Museum
5000 MacArthur Boulevard, Oakland, CA 94613
September 16–December 13, 2015
The Mills College Art Museum explores the public practice by women artists from the 1970s to the present. The multimedia exhibition includes audio, documentation, ephemera, photography, prints, and video examining “the inherent politics and social conditions of creating art in public space,” and examining public works beyond monumental artworks.
“Public Works focuses on the often small but powerful temporary artistic interventions found online and in the urban environment. Through various tactics, the exhibition explores themes of public space, public expression, public action, public platforms, and public life through the evolving lens of participatory projects, socially engaged performance, and political action, among other media.”
Featured are the artists Amy Balkin, Tania Bruguera, Candy Chang, Minerva Cuevas, Agnes Denes, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, Karen Finley, Coco Fusco, the Guerrilla Girls, Sharon Hayes, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Jenny Holzer, Emily Jacir, Suzanne Lacy, Marie Lorenz, Susan O’Malley, Adrian Piper, Laurie Jo Reynolds and Tamms Year Ten, Favianna Rodriguez, Bonnie Ora Sherk, Stephanie Syjuco, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. New commissions include performances by Constance Hockaday and Jenifer K. Wofford, produced in collaboration with Southern Exposure (San Francisco, California). A full-color catalogue with texts by María del Carmen Carrión, Courtney Fink, Christian L. Frock, Leila Grothe, Stephanie Hanor, Meredith Johnson, and Tanya Zimbardo is available.
Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries
Armory Center for the Arts
145 North Raymond Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91103
September 26, 2015–January 3, 2016
The Armory Center for the Arts features the performance artist Faith Wilding’s first retrospective from her studio practice spanning the past forty years. Highlights include works on paper, including drawings, watercolors, collage, and paintings. The exhibition focuses on themes of “becoming,” with Wilding’s work exploring pivotal moments between private and public.
“Viewed together in this exhibition, her work makes a powerful impression about psychological and physical transition and transformation. In the depiction of the chrysalis and the embryo, for example, gestation is suggested, while in imagery of tears, wounds, and ‘recombinant’ bodies, emergence and materialization are pronounced. The sum of these parts provides a unique account of how themes of emergence were central to Wilding’s articulation of feminism, and her own reflections on a childhood growing up in an intentional Christian commune.”
Wilding, a prominent in the formation of the first Feminist Art Program, in Fresno, California, in 1970, and later at California Institute of the Arts, was also a contributor to the famous Womanhouse exhibition housed in an abandoned mansion in Los Angeles in 1972, where she performed Waiting.
The traveling exhibition is organized by Threewalls in Chicago, Illinois. Concurrently OxyArts Gallery at Occidental College will present selections from Wilding’s archive that document her 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.
Women’s Art Society II
MOSTYN
Galleries 2 + 3, 12 Vaughan Street, Llandudno LL30 1AB, Wales, UK
July 18–November 1, 2015
MOSTYN presents the second edition of Women’s Art Society. Curated by Adam Carr, Women’s Art Society II is the fourth in a series of exhibitions that reflects on the rich heritage and history of the gallery building. Each exhibition in the series will examine the history of MOSTYN and its building, and how that history is tied to events beyond its context locally, nationally and internationally. With the aim to update the spirit of the original Ladies’ Art Society, this particular exhibitions discusses the history of MOSTYN and its building, while bridging the divide between past and present.
Women’s Art Society II follows an exhibition presented in October 2013 that took as its starting point the gallery’s founding in 1902. Mostyn Art Gallery was commissioned by Lady Augusta Mostyn and the first gallery in the world built specifically as a home for the presentation of artwork by female artists, in this case the work of the Gwynedd Ladies’ Art Society, who were denied membership of male-dominated local art societies on the basis of their gender. Women’s Art Society II continues the spirit of the original Ladies’ Art Society, inviting nine internationally active female artists to introduce work in the gallery space more than one hundred years later. This exhibition is also a survey of the discipline of painting today since the works in display ranges of approaches, styles, and conceptual concerns about the continued relevance of painting.
The exhibition includes works by Cornelia Baltes, Sol Calero, Ditte Gantriis, Lydia Gifford, May Hands, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Ella Kruglyanskaya, Shani Rhys James, and Caragh Thuring. Artworks on view are linked to the history of the original society by the way in which they examine the politics of gender, identity, and regulation, and aspects of exclusion and prejudice.
Shahzia Sikander: Parallax
Guggenheim Bilbao
Avenida Abandoibarra, 2, 48009 Bilbao, Spain
July 16–November 22, 2015
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s film and video room is currently inhabited by Parallax, Shahzia Sikander’s three-channel animation work. The installation, composed of hundreds of digitally animated images, combines abstract, representational, and textual forms that coexist and urge for domination. Along the moving images, human voices recite in Arabic six poems written specifically for the video on subjects that oscillate from regional historic context to reflections on human nature. In fact, that fluctuation reflects Parallax’s inspiration by the idea of conflict and control. Focused on the geostrategic position of the Strait of Hormuz and the area’s historical power tensions, such concepts emerge as the core themes of a perspective stretching from modern history to the postcolonial period. Underpinning the narrative is Sikander’s interest in paradox, societies in flux, and formal and visual disruption as a means to cultivate new associations.
The Pakistani-born American artist Shahzia Sikander (1969) is best known as a pioneer in translating the formal constructs of Indo-Persian miniature painting in a variety of formats and mediums in contemporary art, including video, animation, and mural, as well as for her collaborations with other artists.
Zina Saro-Wiwa: Did You Know We Taught Them How to Dance?
Blaffer Art Museum
University of Houston, 120 Fine Arts Building, Houston, TX 77204
September 26–December 19, 2015
Did You Know We Taught Them How to Dance? is the first solo museum exhibition of the British-Nigerian artist Zina Saro-Wiwa. It will open at Blaffer Art Museum in September 2015 and travel to the Krannert Art Museum in 2016.
Saro-Wiwa (Nigeria, 1976) has left a journalism background to change (and challenge) the way the world saw Africa. This is made evident in the new photographs, video, and a sound installation produced in southeastern Nigeria from 2013 to 2015. The project engages Niger Delta region residents both as subjects and collaborators and reflects the complex and expressive ways in which people live in an area historically fraught with the politics of energy, labor, and land, while making visible the cultural, spiritual, and emotional powers propelling the region, addressing also the global circulation of energy capital.
Being the artist’s current interest focused in mapping emotional landscapes, Did You Know We Taught Them How to Dance? unfolds a narrative device that renders environmental and emotional ecosystems as inseparable. Through the exploration of highly personal experiences and a carefully recorded choreography, Saro-Wiwa makes tangible the space between internal experience and outward performance. The exhibition uses folklore, masquerade traditions, religious practices, food, and Nigerian popular aesthetics to test art’s capacity to transform and to envision new concepts of environment and environmentalism. The artist reflects on spirit, emotion, and culture at the center of the conversation by titling the exhibition with a phrase from a private conversation between her and her father, the late writer, environmentalist, and human rights activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa.
For the Blaffer Art Museum, Saro-Wiwa will also stage a feast performance called The Mangrove Banquet: A love letter to the Niger Delta, offering her guests an opportunity to ingest the region’s agricultural bounty, “an experience designed to elicit the triumph of nature, imagination and the feminine over political despair.”