CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — November 11, 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.
The New Artist’s Medium: Getting Started with Virtual Reality
Virtual reality is invading every industry, but the arts in particular present an excellent opportunity for communicating personal vision. Whether you want to put someone inside a painting, send them into space, or envelop them in a music video, the sensation of “presence” afforded by virtual reality means that your audience is certain to walk away with an unforgettable experience. But where to start? (Read more from Fractured Atlas.)
The Games Art Historians Play: Online Game-Based Learning in Art History and Museum Contexts
I recently posted a query on the Consortium of Art and Architectural Historians listserv to research online game-based and game-ified learning in art history and museums. The post garnered animated comments hinting that it was nothing short of appalling that the subject had even been raised. That listserv discussion suggested there exists considerable confusion about what game-based learning is. (Read more from ProfHacker.)
How Do You Tell the Difference between Philanthropy and a Tax Write-Off?
Many art-world insiders who flew to Los Angeles for the opening of the billionaire Eli Broad’s self-named museum had positive things to say about it. The collection, if familiar, has its strengths. The building, if imperfect, has its moments. Yet occasional sniping could be heard, as in: “I still think this is a huge vanity project” and “It seems like one big tax-break to me.” (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Art Donors Give to Smaller Nonprofits
The Los Angeles art adviser and collector Elaine Gans was uncertain where to donate a large painting by San Francisco Bay Area artist Tom Holland. If she gave it to an art museum, the painting risked being put in storage and forgotten, Gans said. A museum also might not have accepted it, she added. So, earlier this year, she donated the painting to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)
What Are Some Good Art Documentaries?
What are some worthwhile art documentaries? I am an art instructor and working on compiling a list of films for my students to watch in their spare time. Any suggestions? (Read more from Burnaway.)
Gallery Guides: Six Gallerists on Their Role in the Art World
Gallerists play a significant role in the art world. While it is true that no two galleries are the same—each operating with distinct missions and each supporting unique groups of artists—their collective importance is increasing as much as it is evolving. To explore this further, I recently talked with six gallerists, taking a closer look at their motivations, responsibilities, and current concerns. (Read more from Visual Arts Journal.)
Detecting a Bad Fit
You took the job because you thought it seemed like a good fit and, after all, it was a tenure-track offer. Then you arrive on the campus only to find yourself trapped in a bog. Maybe the problem is bait-and-switch support, where the department promises much more than it intends or is able to give. Maybe the faculty culture turns out to be toxic, and you spend every day praying for deliverance from your sniping, backstabbing colleagues. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
We’ll Store Your Artifacts, US Tells Syrian Museums
As ISIL destroys ancient temples and monuments across Syria and Iraq, the Association of Art Museum Directors is encouraging American museums to act as safe havens for threatened works of art in the collections of governments, museums, and private individuals in conflict zones. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for November 2015
posted by CAA — November 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.
November 2015
Jumana Manna
Chisenhale Gallery
64 Chisenhale Road, London E3 5QZ UK
September 18–December 13, 2015
Chisenhale Gallery presents the first UK solo exhibition by the Berlin and Jerusalem–based artist Jumana Manna. The exhibition includes A magical substance flows into me (2015), a newly commissioned, seventy-minute feature-length film presented alongside an installation of sculptures.
Manna (b. 1987) works primarily with film and sculpture, addressing the historical and political resonance of materials and the physical relationships between objects and bodies. For the Chisenhale exhibition, the film was installed alongside a series of hollow plaster sculptures that carry an anthropomorphic charge. Installed in combination with plastic chairs and waste bins, these sculptures articulate a set of contradictions also evident in the film, where the audience seated bodies and sculptures extend the concepts explored in screen into a physical and tangible atmosphere.
A magical substance flows into me explores the different musical traditions of myriad communities living in and around Jerusalem. Inspired by her research on the German-Jewish ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann (who fled to Israel at the beginning of WWII), the artist revisits different diaspora groups—such as Kurds, Moroccans, Yemenite Jews, Samaritans, Palestinians, Bedouins, and Coptic Christians—whose traditional music Lachmann studied and recorded for the 1930s radio series Oriental Music. This recording was developed for the Palestine Broadcasting Service, established under the British Mandate (1920–1948).
Tracing links between physically, culturally, and linguistically separated communities, while allowing for ideas of the representation of authenticity and heritage to emerge through the possibilities of sound and listening, Manna creates a beautifully poignant film that explores how musical customs create identity and overcome cultural suppression. Waving together fragments Jerusalem’s story, the artist includes her parents as well as herself to reflect a personal connection to the subject within the historical narratives she portrays, a narrative in which the power of music truly transcends politics.
Firelei Báez: Patterns of Resistance
Utah Museum of Contemporary Art
20 S. West Temple, Salt Lake City, UT 84101
September 25, 2015–January 16, 2016
The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art presents Patterns of Resistance, the first solo exhibition of the Dominican artist Firelei Báez, on the occasion of the artist being awarded the prestigious Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting. This prize is given by the museum and the Jarvis and Constance Doctorow Family Foundation “to an emerging or mid-career painter whose work expresses a great range of talent and forward thinking within a contemporary idiom.”
Born in 1981 in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, Báez is best known for her large-scale intrincate works on paper. Her laborious studio practice draws together her interest in anthropology, science fiction, black female subjectivity, and women’s work. Throughout her work, Báez explores the humor and fantasy involved in self-making within diasporic societies, a process that implies an individual and creative capability to coexist with cultural ambiguities.
Inspired by lineages of black resistance, Báez’s work traces the history of social movements in the United States and the Caribbean. Throughout Patterns of Resistance, the artist interweaves the lives of eighteenth-century black women in Louisiana and the Cuban roots of the Latin American azabache with symbols used in the US during the tumultuous 1960s. Her paintings and drawings depict textiles, hair designs, and body ornaments linking traditionally loaded symbols with individual human gestures. Primarily focusing on female figures and their subjectivities, Báez has a labor-intensive process that reveals new emblems of power and invokes disparate patterns of resistance within the African diaspora while proposing the illumination of obscured narratives of identity.
Oliver Pickle and Ruth West: She Is Sitting in the Night: Re-visioning Thea’s Tarot
Book, available from Metonymy Press
Described as “a contemporary queer re-visioning of a beautiful feminist tarot deck,” She Is Sitting in the Night by the author and tarot reader Oliver Pickle, with the artist Ruth West, re-presents West’s original feminist drawings from Thea’s Tarot and rejects the “normative readings of the figures and imagery on the decks they discuss.”
The 192-page book features copies of the original seventy-eight drawings by West along with new interpretations celebrating both queer and feminist cultural production. Thea’s Tarot, originally released in 1984, features black and white cut-paper silhouettes, replacing the figures with all women, including child, daughter, mother, and amazon.
Pickle, through their interpretations of West’s work, challenges the heteronormative relationships to figure and body. This intergenerational conversation draws on the relationships between radical feminism of the 1970s and the evolving relationships to gender identity. Where West’s drawings replace male figures, such as the Emperor, with a woman, and the card for Lovers is a paper cut of two females, Pickle uses the absence of commentary by West to reframe the relationship between image/text and gender identity.
The book and drawings are designed to fit a specific need within the tarot community, but they also function as an example of artistic production shifting the binary representation of figure to a more fluid role. In an interview Pickle describes their interpretations of West’s drawings by not “imagining a sexual or gender identity for the person I am speaking to, so they can do interpretations of themselves.”
Nancy Cohen: Hackensack Dreaming
Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education
8480 Hagy’s Mill Road, Philadelphia, PA
November 5–December 19, 2015
Nancy Cohen’s Hackensack Dreaming, at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, fuses the artistic process with environmental education. The large-scale installation of handmade paper, glass, and rubber is the culmination of more than two years of Cohen’s work and time spent in a section of the Mill Creek Marsh tucked behind strip malls and a wastewater treatment plant along the New Jersey Meadowlands.
Exploring Cohen’s installation is to enter a world constructed by the human hand through manipulation of raw materials, a parallel not unlike the reality of marsh. In a subtle self-referential manner, the organic ingredients that constitute the hand-made paper and glass are documents of the natural world.
The installation serves as a document to the soul of the marsh and its own constructed reality. Hackensack Dreaming is rife with referential essence: translucent glass objects hint at cedar forest poking up through the water on an icy New Jersey day, and liquid rubber poured on the paper suggests, interchangeably, a wet or toxic surface.
“I want the viewer to move through Hackensack Dreaming discovering and finding connections—compelled by the beauty and strangeness,” says Cohen, who lives and works in Jersey City, New Jersey. Discovering, likewise, the fragility and strength found in both the installation and natural world by means of physical experience. Through conscious levels of manipulation of materials, Cohen “makes literal the delicate, ephemeral balance” of the marsh. The audience is invited to walk among the work, either by the narrow path at the center of the installation or by delicately placing one’s feet among the glass sculptures and maneuvering one’s body through the realities of Hackensack Dreaming.
Patricia Johanson: Environmental Remedies: Restoring Soil and Water
Winter Visual and Performing Arts Center
60 West Cottage Avenue, Millersville, PA
October 22–December 11, 2015
Related programming:
Conrad Nelson Fellow: Patricia Johanson, Artist Lecture
Ware Center, Millersville University
42 North Prince Street, Lancaster, PA
November 3, 2015, 7:30 PM
Panel discussion:
Ecological Art: Reconstructing Humanity’s Relationship with the Environment
Betsy Damon, Patricia Johanson, and Sue Spaid
Ware Center, Millersville University
42 North Prince Street, Lancaster, PA
November 4, 2015, 7:00 PM
Gallery Talk:
November 4, 2015, 3:00 PM
The Winter Visual and Performing Arts Center at Millersville University will feature work by the artist Patricia Johanson. As the 2015–16 Conrad Nelson Fellow, Johanson has combined sculptural projects, art, ecology, landscaping, and functional infrastructure to remedy environmental degradation and restore ecosystems. Trained as an artist and architect, she has transformed landfills into parks, restored lagoons, conserved land polluted by acid mine drainage and built water gardens that function as treatment plants.
In her 1969 commission by House & Garden, Johanson produced 150 drawings with essays and explanatory notes departing from traditional garden design. “Her images, drawn from precise botanical and biological sources, loop, uncoil, and crawl elegantly across the land, evoking evolution, life, and movement.”
One of Johanson’s early ecological artworks, Fair Park Lagoon in Dallas (1981), transformed the eroding shoreline and water contaminated with algal blooms into a thriving ecosystem. The park was fitted with gigantic, terra-cotta-colored Gunite sculptures that doubled as pathways as well as perches for birds and turtles as the work snaked its way through the park land and water. Fair Park Lagoon in Dallas continues to serve as a place of education and recreation.
In conjunction with her exhibition and the Conrad fellowship, Johanson will present an artist lecture at the Ware Center on November 3, 2015. Additionally, Johanson, along with the ecoartist Betsy Damon and the curator Sue Spaid, will participate in a panel discussion, “Ecological Art: Reconstructiong Humanity’s Relationship with the Environment,” on November 4, 2015. The panelists will discuss their outdoor sculptural projects designed to remedy environmental degradation and strengthen the planet’s weakened defenses.
Our Mother’s House: a multi-component program dedicated to empowering female artists and safeguarding cultural heritage in southern Saudi Arabia
United Nations Headquarters
New York, NY
November 16–27, 2015
Art Jameel, Edge of Arabia, and the Permanent Mission of Saudi Arabia to the United Nations present Our Mother’s House, a program that aims to draw attention to the urgent need of cultural-heritage protection and the equal representation of women in the Middle East.
The launch of this program will include an art exhibition of specially commissioned mural painting that celebrates the centuries-old tradition of (Majli) house-painting by skilled female artisans from the village of Rijal Alma, located in the southwestern region of Saudi Arabia. Highlighting the crucial role that Asiri female artists have played in the composition and archiving of their local history, Our Mother’s House means a celebration the creativity and determination of women artists who play an extraordinary role in preserving the cultural identity of their communities.
Project advisors include the artist Arwa Alnaemi, whose work explores the relationship of women to larger Saudi Society, and Asiri house painter Fatimah Jaber, who is also founder of Fatimah Museum in Abha.
For more information or to request a private tour of the exhibition, please email Mohammed Shaker.
JSTOR Migrates to a New Platform
posted by Christopher Howard — November 10, 2015
Over the last year and a half, JSTOR has been making the transition to a new and more flexible technology platform. This shift has been largely behind the scenes, while also simplifying and improving the site experience. Recent changes include:
New citation export and sharing options. Preformatted citations (in MLA, APA and Chicago styles) are now available. These can be exported in formats compatible with common citation management software. Social sharing options that allow for both emailing of citations as well as sharing article links via social media are also available.
New displays of journal content. There are now new journal landing pages and table of contents pages for all titles, as well as a display of title histories, which shows prior and subsequent titles as part of the journal bibliographic information.
An improved experience for books. A new and improved experience for books now mirrors the way journals are treated on JSTOR (including a clear presentation of key functions such as capturing citations and downloading PDFs, and an improved online chapter viewing experience). A new “search within the book” feature has also been introduced.
JSTOR includes what is likely the most substantial online collection of art and architectural history research materials available today. At present, JSTOR includes the complete publication back runs of more than 280 journals and over 1,000 books in these fields, and has worked in deep collaboration with advisors, foundations, museums, and libraries to build out our offerings over time. As a result, we have a network of relationships with the major scholarly art associations, including the College Art Association.
CAA members enjoy discounted access to JSTOR
As part of your membership to CAA, we are delighted to offer the annual JPASS plan for $99. If a year is too long for you, a monthly plan is also available for $19.50. Designed for those with limited or no JSTOR access, JPASS provides unlimited reading and up to 120 article PDF downloads from more than 1,900 journals available in JSTOR, including CAA’s Art Journal and Art Bulletin. That’s more than 300 years of scholarship right at your fingertips. Click here to learn more about College Art Association membership.
2015 SECAC Conference Report
posted by CAA — November 10, 2015
Vivian Woo is CAA marketing and development manager.
The Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) held its 2015 meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—the first time ever in a city north of the Mason-Dixon line. This expansion may reflect “the continual growing membership of the organization beyond the traditional confines of the south,” as Kurt Pitluga, an art historian at Slippery Rock University and director of this year’s SECAC, put it in the conference program.
From October 21 to 24, 2015, the industrial city was descended upon by students, educators, and administrators from universities, colleges, community colleges, art schools, and museums, as well as by independent artists and scholars. The four-day event at the Wyndham Grand Hotel in downtown Pittsburgh offered a rich variety of sessions that encouraged conversation and facilitated cooperation about pertinent creative, scholarly, and educational issues among professionals in higher education.
Representing CAA at SECAC this year were Anna Cline, development and marketing assistant, and myself. CAA’s participation as an exhibitor at the conference—alongside the fine-art paper producer Canson, the publisher Thames and Hudson, and the book distributor Scholar’s Choice—was a great opportunity to connect face to face with current CAA members and to meet prospective members. Our table displayed the latest editions of the graduate-program directories, membership brochures, and free copies of the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts—a publication that was especially warmly received. Most important, our presence reminded SECAC attendees of CAA’s own Annual Conference next year in Washington, DC, taking place February 3–6, 2016.
SECAC’s 2015 theme—“confluence”—alluded to Pittsburgh’s geographic location on the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, which form the Ohio River, and likened it to the conceptual convergence and fluidity of borders related to art, architecture, design, education, and pedagogy today. Highlights of the conference included sessions on various topics in art and design, including “Visual Art and the Aesthetics of Cuteness,” which examined Japanese culture and the power of cuteness in the arts, and “Is Graphic Design Fine Art? Does It Matter?,” where graphic designers and fine artists drew contrasts and comparisons to each other while also exploring the rise of the “meme” and the role of art and design in the internet age. The keynote address by Terry Smith, an art historian and theorist at the University of Pittsburgh, examined the two concepts in the title of his talk, “Defining Contemporaneity; Imagining Planetarity,” in an effort to finding productive connections between them.
Conference attendees were treated to perfect sunny fall weather in a city that offered plenty of art and culture outside the doors of the conference hotel. Gallery crawls were scheduled to visit the gallery Future Tenant, the Society for Contemporary Craft, and the Andy Warhol Museum. Paying tribute to the artist in his hometown, the Warhol Museum treated attendees to seven whole floors of gallery and exhibition space with an art collection that includes approximately nine hundred paintings, one hundred sculptures, and thousands of works on paper, prints, and photographs—a must see for any art lover visiting Pittsburgh. In addition, buses were arranged for attendees to visit the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, and the University Art Gallery at the University of Pittsburgh, among others.
Thank you, SECAC for allowing CAA to connect with familiar and new faces. We will see you again next year!
Affiliated Society News for November 2015
posted by CAA — November 09, 2015
Association of Research Institutes in Art History (ARIAH)
The Association of Research Institutes in Art History (ARIAH) is very pleased to announce the establishment of a new program that will strengthen intellectual connections among art history disciplines in different regions of the world. With generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Getty Foundation, and the Terra Foundation for American Art, ARIAH’s East Asia Fellowship program will enable twelve scholars from countries in East Asia to conduct research at ARIAH member institutes on any topic in the visual arts. The project is funded for a three-year period, beginning in 2016, with four fellowships offered each year.
The East Asia Fellowship program is open to art history scholars from Japan, Mongolia, the People’s Republic of China (including Hong Kong and Macau), the Republic of China (Taiwan), and South Korea. Each East Asia Fellow will be hosted by an ARIAH member institute, and will also have the opportunity to travel to other research centers during the fellowship period, which will last three to four months. Fellowships will be awarded through an open, competitive application process. The deadline for the first of three rounds of fellowships is December 31, 2015. Candidates can find more information about the program, including application instructions, at www.ariah.info/east_asia_fellowship.html.
More information about ARIAH, including a complete list of member institutes, can be found at www.ariah.info.
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) Annual Conference: Call for Proposals
Communities in Dialog: Models of Best Practices for Academic Museums, Galleries, and Collections
When: Tuesday and Wednesday, May 24-25, 2016
Where: Katzen Arts Center, American University, Washington DC
Deadline for Submissions: Monday, November 30th, 2015
The AAMG conference committee requests proposals on topics that address and can help establish guidelines, benchmarks, and best practices in all areas of academic museum and galleries, including, but not limited to: collections care and registration, governance, assessment, community engagement, teaching and museum education, exhibitions, public programming, fundraising, and professional development. Topics may address systemic challenges and present model programs that could become “templates” for the field.
AAMG seeks proposals that are representative of a cross-section of the academic field, including anthropology, art, history, science, and natural history museums, galleries, and collections. AAMG particularly encourages students and faculty to submit.
Submission Guidelines: A one-page outline of presentation proposal plus a contact list and CVs of each participant should be sent electronically to Vice President of Programs Leonie Bradbury, vp-programs@aamg-us.org If multiple presenters please add a one paragraph abstract for each paper or subtopic.
More details online at AAMG Annual Conferences.
The Historians of German and Central European Art and Architecture (HGCEA)
The Historians of German and Central European Art and Architecture (HGCEA) recently changed its name to Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art and Architecture (HGSCEA).
Northern California Art Historians
Call for Papers: “Zones of Representation: Photographing Contested Landscapes, Contemporary West Coast Perspectives on Photography and Photograph-Based Media,” symposium organized by Makeda Best (California College of the Arts), Bridget Gilman (Santa Clara University), and Kathy Zarur (California College of the Arts), at SF Camerawork, San Francisco, CA, on Saturday, April 23, 2016.
Contemporary global events and phenomena continue to shape visual interpretations of economic, social, environmental, and political geographies, and to disrupt conceptions of region, nation, citizenship, and community. “Zones of Representation” will consider how photographers and time-based media artists have responded to transformations in the global landscape through new ideas about the function of photographic media, and the shifting roles of makers and audiences. We want to know: how can novel visual practices disrupt traditional narratives of spatial representation?; in what unique ways do artists in time-based media acknowledge and respond to the historical contribution of their medium in defining, producing, and perpetuating these same narratives?; what new connections do these practices demonstrate and reveal?; and, in what ways do contemporary technologies, modes of distribution, and access impact interactions with the land?
We invite papers that address the expanded role of photography and time-based media in global landscape discourses and social fabrics. Proposals on contemporary topics or new perspectives on historic materials are encouraged. Proposals from image makers are also welcome. Please send a 300-word proposal, a one-paragraph biographical statement, and full contact information to zonesofrepresentation@gmail.com by January 8, 2015.
“Zones of Representation” aims to connect artists, historians, curators and arts professionals, and students in Northern California, facilitating a regional network for the latest art historical scholarship. The symposium is presented in collaboration with SF Camerawork and is co-sponsored by the Northern California Art Historians (NCAH), a College Art Association affiliated society.
American Society of Appraisers
The American Society of Appraisers will offer Signs and Symbols in the Visual Arts, a 2-day course, on January 15-16, 2016, at The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, CA.
Since the beginning of history, human beings have used visual images to signify concepts, beliefs, and ideas. This class will explore visual vocabularies and how they are used in material culture. We will look at images of the cosmos, the earth, geometric forms, animals, plants and the human body and how they are used in art, architecture and design. The focus will be on imagery of the European tradition, though examples from India, China, Japan and indigenous American cultures will also be considered. Because painting, sculpture, books, furniture, decorative arts, buildings, coins, and other objects will be used as sources, the course will be quite useful for those interested in visual studies and anyone wishing to deepen their appreciation of the rich vocabulary of art, architecture and design.
For more information, visit http://www.appraisers.org/Education/View-Course?CourseID=528
Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) and Visual Resources Association (VRA)
Join the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) and the Visual Resources Association (VRA) March 8-12, 2016 in Seattle, Washington for the third joint conference of the two organizations. The beautiful and technology-driven city of Seattle was proposed by a coalition of members from the VRA Pacific Rim Chapter and the Northwest Chapter of ARLIS/NA. Both chapters have proposed a theme of “Natural Connections” to highlight both the shared values of ARLIS and VRA as well as the close relationship in the Puget Sound area between its people and nature.
In addition to inspirational speakers, information-packed sessions, a preconference THATcamp, marquis events at the city’s hallmark art and library institutions, and many terrific opportunities for making “Natural Connections” with colleagues and friends old and new, the conference schedule allows a free weekend at either end. Come early, stay late, and check out what Seattle has to offer: stunning natural landscapes, unique architecture, fabulous food & drink, and a huge variety of cultural activities. There is no other place like Seattle to visit in March when it offers cherry blossoms as a cure to your late-winter doldrums.
The Italian Art Society (IAS)
The Italian Art Society (IAS) is delighted to announce the success of its “Campaign for 500.” In early November we reached and surpassed our goal of 500 members, an historic high. Thanks to the generosity of one of our patron members, Mr. Peter Folgliano, next year we will be able to offer two new research and publication grants of up to $1000.00 each. One will be for graduate students, and the other for PhD holders, whose projects concern art and architecture in Italy between 1250 and 1600.
The next IAS/Kress lecture will take place at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, on Wednesday, June 1, 2016 in Florence, Italy. The speaker will be a senior or established scholar working on a topic related to Florence or its environs (application deadline January 8, 2015, please see our website, www.italianartsociety.org, for more information).
The IAS is pleased to announce the recipients of the extra research and publication grants we offered this summer: Dr. Allison Levy (Independent Scholar), for her book, Misfits, Monstrosities, and Madness at the Villa Ambrogiana and Dr. Johanna Heinrichs (Dominican University) for her book, Mobile Lives, Stable Homes: The Palladian Villa between City and Country.
Mid America College Art Association (MACAA)
Building on the success of the 2014 conference, the 2016 MACAA conference will be held in Cincinnati, Ohio and hosted by the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP), with School of Art Director Kate Bonansinga and Kris Holland serving as Conference Co-Chairs. Numerous regional institutions and their faculty have been taking part in planning the conference including Ball State University, Miami University, Thomas Moore College, University of Dayton, University of Toledo, Wayne State University, and Western Michigan University. DAAP is also collaborating with FotoFocus 2016 on inviting and sponsoring keynote speakers.
The title of the conference, Studio Shift: MACAA2016 @ DAAP, was selected to underscore the constantly evolving character of art and design. During the last several decades there has been an escalating interest in socially engaged art and design. In this post-studio context, creative practitioners release control to the audience. While this conference will focus on past, present, and future kinds of creative research space for artists, designers, historians, curators, and critics, other presentation topics are also welcome. We welcome student participation in MACAA 2016 as well. The deadline for session proposals is December 1, 2015. The conference hotel is the Kingsgate Marriott on the campus of the University of Cincinnati.
MACAA continues to contract Eastern Illinois University continuing education for conference and membership support services. In 2014, MACAA was established as a non-profit registered in the State of Michigan and retained the services of a CPA to streamline its accounting and business practices. Since the last conference, we have elected Christopher Olszewski (Savannah College of Art and Design) as President of the organization, Barbara Giorgio (Ball State University) as Secretary, and welcome nine new board members. In addition to Kate Bonansinga (DAAP) and Kris Holland (DAAP), we are happy to welcome Mary Eisendrath (Virginia Commonwealth University), Heather Hertel (Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania), Jennifer Murray (Loyola University Chicago), Rod Northcutt (Miami University), Elizabeth Olton (University of New Mexico), and Scott Thorp (Georgia Regents University). Our new representative to Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE) is Guen Montgomery (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).
The 2014 MACAA conference, “Mash-Up: Navigating Art and Academia in This Millennium,” was held October 22-25, 2014 in San Antonio, Texas. The Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) was the conference host, with Dr. Scott A. Sherer serving as MACAA Conference Chair and Professor Greg Elliott serving as UTSA institutional coordinator. The city of San Antonio, with its well-known cultural history, provided a great foundation for camaraderie.
The conference featured 41 panels and presentations regarding diverse topics in studio disciplines, art history, and museum practices. Conference participants enjoyed a cabaret-style Hometown Artist’s Rodeo, organized by Ken Little (UTSA) and hosted by the Southwest School of Art; a keynote performance by The Art Guys hosted by the McNay Art Museum; and a keynote talk by Joseph Seipel (Virginia Commonwealth University) hosted by the San Antonio Museum of Art. Participants enjoyed presentations and extended discussions regarding research and creative endeavors.
The Members Meeting featured door prizes supplied by the University of Texas Press and Routledge/Taylor and Francis. The Green Bag Lady — Teresa VanHatten-Granath (Denver, CO) — contributed beautiful eco-friendly hand-made bags for all participants. Paula Owen, President of the Southwest School of Art, juried the Members’ Exhibition, held at the UTSA Art Gallery. Ellen Mueller (West Virginia Wesleyan College, Buckhannon, WV) won Best in Show and Rosemary Meza-DesPlas (El Centro College, Dallas, TX) was awarded Honorable Mention.
Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian and Russian Art and Architecture, Inc. (SHERA)
The Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian and Russian Art and Architecture, Inc. (SHERA) is actively participating in the yearly convention of the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), which took place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on November 19-22, 2015. SHERA members organized multiple sessions and roundtables on a wide range of topics covering history of art, theory of aesthetics, architecture, textile design, film, photography, and fashion among others. A roundtable discussion devoted to the state of the discipline and new research in histories of art in Russia and the countries of East and Central Europe also took place at this convention.
SHERA has successfully launched its visiting scholar program to Russia by arranging visa invitations this summer for two British scholars, members of SHERA, as part of the visiting scholar program with the Russian State University of Humanities in Moscow (RGGU). The visiting scholar program enables scholars to conduct individual research while being involved in educational activities with a partner institution. Apart from RGGU, SHERA has established working relationship with the Department of Art History of the European University in St. Petersburg. Inquiries about the application process should be directed to: shera.artarchitecture@gmail.com.
Association of Textual Scholarship in Art History (ATSAH)
Association of Textual Scholarship in Art History (ATSAH) cosponsored with The Università of Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy an international conference on Arts and Politics, November 4-8, 2015.
Members of ATSAH who presented inlcude Profs. Maureen Pelta, Moore College of Arts and Design, PA; Tina Bizzarro, Rosemont College, PA; Sarah Lippert, University of Michigan-Flint; Emilie Passignat, University of Florence, Italy; Brian Steel, Texas Tech University; Debra Murphy, University of North Florida; Liesbeth Grotenhuis, Hanze University, Groningen, Netherlands; and Liana De Girolami Cheney, President of ATSAH.
Liana De Girolami Cheney, PhD, President of the Association for Textual Scholarship in Art History (ATSAH), recently published articles in the following publications:
“Lavinia Fontana’s Two Minervas,” Woman’s Art Journal (Fall/Winter 2015), 30-40.
“Sofonisba Anguissola’s Ponce Portrait of a Young Man,” SOURCE: Notes in the History of Art Vol. 34, No. 4 (Summer 2015), 39-47.
“Giorgio Vasari’s Saint Michael: A Symbol of Neoplatonic Light,” Journal of Religious Studies, Davis Publishing Company, Vol. 3, No. 3 (May-June 2015), 152-66.
“Giorgio Vasari’s Saint Francis: Aretine Fervor,” Journal of Literature and Art Studies, David Publishing Company, Vol. 5, No. 8 (October 2015), 859-73.
“Giorgio Vasari’s “Sala degli Elementi” in Palazzo Vecchio, Florence: The Symbolism of Saturn as Heavenly Air,” in Heavenly Discourses, ed. Nicholas Campion (Bristol, UK: Sophia Centre Press, 2015), 14-24.
“Edward Burne-Jones’ Heavenly Conception: The Days of Creation,” in Brian Abbott, ed. City of Stars: New York: The Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena (2015), 75-86.
Committee on Diversity Practices highlights for November/December 2015
posted by CAA — November 09, 2015
The CAA Committee on Diversity Practices highlights exhibitions, events, and activities that support the development of global perspectives on art and visual culture and deepen our appreciation of political and cultural heterogeneity as educational and professional values. Current highlights are listed below; browse past highlights through links at the bottom of this page.
November/December 2015
Flawlessly Feminine: Women Who Graced the Cover of JET Magazine and Works by Willie Cole
Golden Lady: Works by Mario Moore
Diggs Gallery, Winston-Salem State University
Winston-Salem, North Carolina
July 9–December 2, 2015
“The pairing of two innovative exhibitions honoring women who graced the cover of JET Magazine, and drawings of young women with their favorite literature, is on display at Winston-Salem State University’s Diggs Gallery through December 2. The exhibits feature works by renowned artist Willie Cole and emerging artist Mario Moore.”
Deana Lawson: Ruttenberg Contemporary Photography Series
Art Institute of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois
September 5, 2015–January 10, 2016
“The first installment of the biennial Ruttenberg Contemporary Photography Series features the work of New York–based photographer Deana Lawson. For nearly a decade, Lawson has been investigating the visual expression of global black culture and how individuals claim their identities within it. Her staged portraits, carefully composed scenes, and found images speak to the ways in which personal and social histories, familial legacies, sexuality, social status, and religious-spiritual ideas may be drawn upon the body.
Lawson began her work in and around her Brooklyn neighborhood but has recently branched out nationally and internationally to places such as Louisiana, Haiti, Jamaica, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While her themes have remained consistent, her landscapes have shifted and broadened—the global scope of the pictures, in her words, “concern and affirm the sacred black body” and speak to a collective psychic memory of shared experiences.
Lawson starts her process by researching communities she has chosen for their cultural histories. Once on site, strangers met through chance encounters become her subjects, selected for a particular expression, mannerism, style of dress, or cultural or religious affiliation. The resulting images are often inspired by multiple trips or planned well in advance. They draw upon Western and African diasporic conventions of self-presentation, popular culture, mythology, and religious rituals and beliefs—emphasizing dialogues among the past, present, and future of black culture.”
Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980
Museum of Modern Art
New York, New York
September 5, 2015–January 3, 2016
“Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980 focuses on the parallels and connections among an international scene of artists working in—and in reference to—Latin America and Eastern Europe during the 1960s and 1970s. The radical experimentation, expansion, and dissemination of ideas that marked the cultural production of these decades (which flanked the widespread student protests of 1968) challenge established art-historical narratives in the West. Artists from Prague to Mexico City developed alternative and ever-expanding networks of distribution and organization, via Paris, Vienna, and Venice, to circumvent the borders established after World War II, local forms of state and military repression, and Western accounts of artistic mastery and individualism. One major transformation across Latin American and Eastern European art scenes was the embrace of institutional critique and an emphasis on the creation of art outside a market context.
The exhibition brings together landmark works from MoMA’s collection by Eastern European artists including Geta Brặtescu, Tomislav Gotovac, Ion Grigorescu, Sanja Iveković, Dóra Maurer, and the anti-art collectives Gorgona, OHO, Aktual, and Fluxus East, as well as Latin American artists such as Beatriz González, Antonio Dias, Lea Lublin, and Ana Mendieta. Particular attention is paid to the group of Argentine artists clustered around the influential Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, including Oscar Bony, David Lamelas, and Marta Minujín, who confronted the aesthetic and political implications of mass media communication—including film, television, and the telex—during a vibrant, experimental period of technological innovation and political tension.
Featuring series of works and major installations, several of which are on view for the first time, Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980 highlights multiple points of contact, often initiated and sustained through collective actions and personal exchanges between artists. The exhibition suggests possible counter-geographies, realignments, alternative models of solidarity, and new ways of thinking about art produced internationally in relation to the frameworks dictated by the Cold War.”
Philippine Gold: Treasures of Forgotten Kingdoms
The Asia Society
New York, New York
September 11, 2015–January 3, 2016
“This exhibition of more than 100 gold objects focuses on the wealth of the golden age of Butuan (pronounced boot’ wan), a polity on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao that rose to commercial prominence in the tenth century and declined in the thirteenth century. Works from ancient polities beyond Butuan, such as those on the islands of the Visayas and Luzon, bear witness to the early use of gold throughout the Philippines. A selection of the most extraordinary objects from a 1981 discovery—now in the collection of the Ayala Museum in Makati City and on view in the United States for the first time—forms the core of “Philippine Gold: Treasures of Forgotten Kingdoms.” The exhibition also includes a few important loans from public and private collections including the Central Bank of the Philippines. Featuring spectacular gold necklaces, chains, waistbands, bangles, ritual bowls, implements, and ceremonial weapons, the exhibition showcases the rich artistry and material wealth of Butuan and related island polities.”
Gates of the Lord: The Tradition of Krishna Paintings
Art Institute of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois
September 13, 2015–January 3, 2016
“This fall, the Art Institute of Chicago offers a glimpse into one of the world’s most intimate religious traditions. Bringing together over 100 artworks from private and public collections in India and the United States, Gates of the Lord: The Tradition of Krishna Paintings is the first major U.S. exhibition to explore the unique visual culture of the Pushtimarg, a Hindu denomination from Western India.
Founded in the 16th century by the saint and philosopher Shri Vallabhacharya (1479–1531), the Pushtimarg is a religious community dedicated to the devotion of Shrinathji, a divine image of the Hindu god Krishna as a seven-year-old child. The religious and artistic center of the sect is based in the temple town of Nathdwara (literally, “The Gates of the Lord”), near Udaipur in the state of Rajasthan, India. Scholars and artists have long been fascinated by the distinctive and highly aestheticized manner in which members of this group venerate Shrinathji, as well as by the legacy of miniature paintings created as a record of such worship. This exhibition showcases centuries of pichvais (textile hangings) and miniature paintings that have been created by and for the Pushtimarg in devotion of Shrinathji.
The exhibition takes visitors through a year in Nathdwara, where the daily worship of Shrinathji is characterized by the changing seasons and a bustling festival calendar. Gallery by gallery, visitors are introduced to the pichvais used as backdrops for Shrinathji in his shrine, each uniquely suited to a particular season or festival. The accompanying miniature paintings offer further insight into the Pushtimarg sect: its mode of veneration, history, and important priests and patron families. Enhancing the experience of the sect’s rich culture are festival and devotional music, a shrine reconstruction, and touchscreen kiosks that allow visitors to page through religious manuscripts, an artist’s sketchbook, and a historic photo album. The exhibition concludes with an exploration of the works, sketches, and observations of prominent 20th- and 21st-century Nathdwara artists who have kept the painting tradition flourishing through the present day.
Gates of the Lord comprises drawings, pichvais, paintings, and historic photographs borrowed chiefly from two major private collections in India, the Amit Ambalal Collection (Ahmedabad, India) and the TAPI Collection (Surat, India). These rare loans are augmented by important objects from a number of public and private collections within the United States, including the Art Institute’s own permanent collection, in order to present the richest possible story of Pushtimarg art and tradition.”
Kongo: Power and Majesty
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York, New York
September 18, 2015–January 3, 2016
“Central Africa’s Kongo civilization is responsible for one of the world’s greatest artistic traditions. This international loan exhibition will explore the region’s history and culture through 134 of the most inspired creations of Kongo masters from the sixteenth through the early twentieth century.
The earliest of these creations were diplomatic missives sent by Kongo sovereigns to their European counterparts during the Age of Exploration; they took the form of delicately carved ivories and finely woven raffia cloths embellished with abstract geometric patterns. Admired as marvels of human ingenuity, such Kongo works were preserved in princely European Kunstkammer, or cabinets of curiosities, alongside other precious and exotic creations from across the globe.
Kongo luxury arts from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century—many of which have never been exhibited before—will give an unprecedented historical backdrop to the outstanding work produced by master sculptors active in the same region during the nineteenth century. The array of figurative representations they produced range from miniature ivory finials for the staffs of office of Kongo leaders to the carved-wood commemorative shrine figures positioned above their burial sites.
The presentation will culminate with a gathering of fifteen monumental Mangaaka power figures produced in the Chiloango River region during the second half of the nineteenth century; these will include the celebrated example acquired by the Met in 2008, the original catalyst for the exhibition. For the first time, this electrifying form of expression will be understood as a defensive measure conceived by Kongo leaders to deflect Western incursions into this region of Central Africa.
With works drawn from sixty institutional and private lenders across Europe and the United States, Kongo: Power and Majesty will relate the objects on view to specific historical developments and will challenge misconceptions of Africa’s relationship with the West. In doing so, it will offer a radical, new understanding of Kongo art over the last five hundred years.”
Impressionism and the Caribbean: Francisco Oller and His Transatlantic World
Brooklyn Museum of Art
Brooklyn, New York
October 2, 2015–January 3, 2016
“The painter Francisco Oller contributed greatly to the development of modern art in both Europe and the Caribbean and revolutionized the school of painting in his native Puerto Rico.
Oller emerged from the small art world of San Juan in the 1840s, spending twenty years in Madrid and Paris, where he was inspired by the art of Gustave Courbet and joined the avant-garde circles of such artists as Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, and Claude Monet. While European Romanticism, Realism, and Impressionism formed a critical jumping-off point for Oller’s aesthetic, his most important source of inspiration was Puerto Rico, where he painted tropical landscapes, still lifes with indigenous fruits and vegetables, and portraits of distinguished artists and intellectuals.
This is the first U.S. exhibition to present Oller’s work within both its New and Old World contexts.”
Walid Raad
Museum of Modern Art
New York, New York
October 12, 2015–January 31, 2016
“MoMA presents the first comprehensive American survey of the leading contemporary artist Walid Raad (b. 1967, Lebanon), featuring his work in photography, video, sculpture, and performance from the last 25 years. Dedicated to exploring the veracity of photographic and video documents in the public realm, the role of memory and narrative within discourses of conflict, and the construction of histories of art in the Arab world, Raad’s work is informed by his upbringing in Lebanon during the civil war (1975–90), and by the socioeconomic and military policies that have shaped the Middle East in the past few decades.
The exhibition focuses on two of the artist’s long-term projects: The Atlas Group (1989–2004) and Scratching on things I could disavow (2007–ongoing). Under the rubric of The Atlas Group, a 15-year project exploring the contemporary history of Lebanon, Raad produced fictionalized photographs, videotapes, notebooks, and lectures that related to real events and authentic research in audio, film, and photographic archives in Lebanon and elsewhere. Raad’s recent work has expanded to address the Middle East region at large. His current ongoing project, Scratching on things I could disavow, examines the recent emergence in the Arab world of new infrastructure for the visual arts—art fairs, biennials, museums, and galleries—alongside the geopolitical, economic, and military conflicts that have consumed the region. The exhibition emphasizes the importance of performance, narrative, and storytelling in Raad’s oeuvre. The artist will give lecture-performances in MoMA’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium multiple times a week for the duration of the exhibition.”
Joaquín Torres-García: The Arcadian Modern
Museum of Modern Art
New York, New York
October 25, 2015–February 15, 2016
“This major retrospective of Joaquín Torres-García (Uruguayan, 1874–1949) features works ranging from the late 19th century to the 1940s, including drawings, paintings, objects, sculptures, and original artist notebooks and rare publications. The exhibition combines a chronological display with a thematic approach, structured in a series of major chapters in the artist’s career, with emphasis on two key moments: the period from 1923 to 1933, when Torres-García participated in various European early modern avant-garde movements while establishing his own signature pictographic/Constructivist style; and 1935 to 1943, when, having returned to Uruguay, he produced one of the most striking repertoires of synthetic abstraction.
Torres-García is one of the most complex and important artists of the first half of the 20th century, and his work opened up transformational paths for modern art on both sides of the Atlantic. His personal involvement with a significant number of early avant-garde movements—from Catalan Noucentismo to Cubism, Ultraism-Vibrationism, and Neo-Plasticism—makes him an unparalleled figure whose work is ripe for a fresh critical reappraisal in the U.S.”
Richard J. Powell Is 2016 Distinguished Scholar
posted by Christopher Howard — November 09, 2015
Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where he has taught since 1989, has been named CAA’s 2016 Distinguished Scholar. A specialist in American art, African American art, and theories of race and representation, Powell will be honored in February during a special session at CAA’s upcoming Annual Conference in Washington, DC.
Powell was chair of the school’s Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies from 1996 to 2001. He currently is dean of the humanities for the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke. In 2013, the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art bestowed the Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence upon Powell for his contributions to the field of American art history.
Powell earned a PhD in art history at Yale University in 1988, after receiving an MA in Afro-American studies in 1982 from the same school. He was awarded Yale’s Wilbur Cross Medal for Distinguished Alumni in 2009; three years later he received the James A. Porter Award for Excellence in African American Art Scholarship from Howard University, where he earned an MFA in printmaking in 1977. Other notable grants, fellowships, and residencies came from the Voyager Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University.
Powell led CAA’s flagship journal, The Art Bulletin, as editor-in-chief from 2008 to 2010. Among his many editorial accomplishments were substantial multiauthor interventions on decentering modernism, organized around an essay by Partha Mitter; on Pablo Picasso during wartime, for which a play by Ariel Dorfman served as anchor; and on Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas in light of postcolonial and materialist discourses. In the latter, for example, lead author Byron Ellsworth Hamann explored the presence in the painting of materials from the Americas, including silver, clay, and the red dye cochineal.
Powell’s books include Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (2008); Black Art: A Cultural History (2002); Jacob Lawrence (1992); and Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson (1991), which drew from his dissertation on this twentieth-century American artist. He was the primary or sole author of numerous exhibition catalogues, such as Circle Dance: The Art of John T. Scott (2005); Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow (2002); To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (1999); and James Lesesne Wells: Sixty Years in Art (1986).
As a curator, Powell has organized and cocurated such exhibitions as Conjuring Bearden at Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art (2006); Back to Black: Art, Cinema, and the Racial Imaginary at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London (2005); Rhapsodies in Black: The Art of the Harlem Renaissance for the Hayward Gallery in London and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (1997); and The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism for Washington Project for the Arts (1989). His first curated show, Impressions/Expressions: Black American Graphics, appeared at the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York and toured nationally.
The 2016 Distinguished Scholar Session will take place on Thursday, February 4, 2016, 2:30–5:00 PM, at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. Powell will be joined by three colleagues: Kobena Mercer, professor of history of art and African American studies at Yale University; Gwen Everett, associate professor of art history at Howard University and associate dean of the school’s Division of Fine Arts; Kellie Jones, associate professor of art history at Columbia University and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Art History and Archaeology; and Suzanne Preston Blier, Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
CAA inaugurated its Distinguished Scholar Session in 2001, first honoring James S. Ackerman of Harvard University. Since then, the organization has recognized many illustrious writers, teachers, and curators, including Leo Steinberg (2002), John Szarkowski (2006), Linda Nochlin (2007), Svetlana Alpers (2009), Jonathan Brown (2011), Rosalind Krauss (2012), and Wen C. Fong (2013).
A Visit with CAA 2016 Keynote Speaker Tania Bruguera at the Havana Biennial
posted by Christopher Howard — November 04, 2015
Kate Flint, Provost Professor of Art History and English at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, wrote an article for Public Books on her experiences at the Havana Biennial, which was held May 22–June 22, 2015. In her text, titled “Breaking Down Walls at the Havana Biennial” and published on November 1, Flint describes her encounters with works of art throughout the city. Here is one experience:
Many works of art on show in the “Zona Franca” were overtly political: Michel Mirabal’s distressed and fragmenting Cuban and American flags; Luis Camejo’s delicate drawings of Cuban monuments collapsed, flooded, overgrown at the end of the third millennium; Arlés del Rio’s La necesidad de otros aires (The Need for Other Airs), an entire room filled with breathing tubes hanging from the ceiling, like elongated snorkels, reminding us that being choked by police, or by political or social constraints, or, for that matter, by pollution (and deep concern for the environment was a frequently occurring theme at the Biennale) is a global, as well as a local, concern.
Flint, who traveled to Cuba as part of a trip organized by CAA, participated in a performance work by Tania Bruguera, the artist who will deliver the keynote address during Convocation at the 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC. Flint wrote:
During the Biennial’s first weekend, Bruguera staged a hundred-hour reading of Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism. Seated inside her own home, she was breaking no laws (she asked for, but was told she didn’t need, a police permit). The reading—usually in Spanish—was broadcast through loudspeakers, muted at night, to the street outside…. The readings were carried out by those who signed up on a sheet inside space, bare but for a chair, video camera, treats brought by supporters, and a tethered dove…. I was about the 124th person to sign up to read. About an hour later, I was invited to sit in the chair. I’d only intended to read a short paragraph, but no one around seemed to want to take over. Indeed, people seemed to be clearing up their things. Seven pages of Arendt (in Spanish) later, Bruguera herself came over and took the book from me, finished that particular paragraph, and we all exited.
You can also read another article on the same trip to Cuba, written by Katherine Jánszky Michaelsen, professor of art history at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, on the CAA website.
The next CAA-sponsored trip is the Turkish-Islamic Art Study Tour, taking place June 3–18, 2016. For more information, please visit CAA’s international tours page.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — November 04, 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.
New Data on Adjuncts
Teaching is the primary source of income for nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of adjunct faculty members, and two-thirds have actively sought a tenure-track position. Some 38 percent have been on the market for a tenure-track job for five or more years. Those are some of the preliminary findings of a survey of part-time faculty members released last week by the New Faculty Majority. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
College Students Say Campus Is Too PC, but Also Love Trigger Warnings
A newly commissioned poll suggests that a majority of American college students approve of campus speech restrictions, and nearly a third believe the First Amendment is “outdated.” The poll was commissioned by the William F. Buckley Jr. Program, a Yale University organization that describes its mission as promoting intellectual diversity on campus. It asked undergraduate students around the country about their views on a variety of free-speech topics. (Read more from the Daily Caller.)
Digital Preservation in the Artist’s Studio
The artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer recently wrote a great manifesto about the conservation of time-based media artworks. He mentions how the great majority of artists feel they are too busy keeping their studio running to think about conservation — let alone digital preservation. He goes on to frame conservation as a business opportunity for artists, showing them that they can offer maintenance of their work as a service to be monetized. (Read more from Medium.)
Come Right In: Artists in Residence Put Out the Welcome Mat
Artist-in-residence programs, which number in the hundreds across the United States, have been evolving in ways that benefit not only artists but also visitors. Ranging from a program in the Golden Gate Recreational Area in San Francisco to initiatives at scattered temporary quarters in lower Manhattan, artist-in-residence programs offer courses for children and adults, studio visits, performances, and exhibitions of work by the artists—and even opportunities to dine with them. (Read more from the New York Times.)
The Ins and Outs of Art Gallery Waiting Lists
When it comes to works by successful artists, demand often exceeds supply. Enter the waiting list. Galleries and dealers increasingly offer waiting lists to would-be purchasers of some of the most-sought-after works in the art market. No doubt, many collectors assume that such a list represents a kind of agreement, that those on the list are part of an orderly process that gives them a much better chance of obtaining a highly desired artwork. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)
Google’s Court Victory Is Good for Scholarly Authors. Here’s Why
The Authors Guild has lost the latest round of the copyright battle that it brought against Google more than a decade ago. And though the guild has decried the appellate court’s ruling as “damaging” to authors, it is nothing of the sort. The decision is actually a substantial boon for authors, especially scholarly ones, for at least four reasons. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Arts Salary Survey Reveals Stark Gender Pay Gap
The gender pay gap in the arts sector is greater than the national UK average, with women earning up to £5,000 less than men at similar stage in their careers, despite being better educated, according to the latest Arts Professional survey. Although women in full-time salaried work in the arts sector outnumbered men by two-to-one last year, the average earnings of the men were higher than the women in almost every type of job, art form, region, and age group. (Read more from Arts Professional.)
Ghost in the Machine
For years now there has been talk of a schism between the respective tribes of book and screen, between those whose medium relies on diligent, contemplative immersion and those who favor the more frictionless rewards of speed. In this conflict, the literary community has more often found itself on the defensive. (Read more from Boston Review.)
Practice Your Interviewing Technique at the 2016 Conference
posted by Katie Apsey — November 02, 2015
Students and emerging professionals have the opportunity to sign up for a twenty-minute practice job interview at the 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC. Organized by the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee, the Mock Interview Sessions give participants the chance to practice their interview skills one on one with a seasoned professional, improve their effectiveness during interviews, and hone their elevator speech. Interviewers also provide candid feedback on application packets.
Mock Interview Sessions are offered free of charge; you must be a CAA member to participate. Sessions are filled by appointment only and scheduled for Wednesday, February 3, 2:00–4:00 PM; Thursday, February 4, 11:00 AM–1:00 PM and 2:00–4:00 PM; and Friday, February 5, 9:00–11:00 AM.
To apply, complete the online Google Registration Form. You may enroll in one twenty-minute session. Conference registration, while encouraged, is not necessary to participate in the Mock Interview Sessions. Deadline: January 31, 2016.
You will be notified of your appointment day and time by email. Please bring your application packet, including cover letter, CV, and other materials related to jobs in your field. The Student and Emerging Professionals Committee will make every effort to accommodate all applicants; however, space is limited. Onsite enrollment will be limited and first-come, first-served.
If you have any questions, send an email to Megan Koza Young, chair of the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee.