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News from the Art and Academic Worlds

posted by January 31, 2018

Athi-Patra Ruga, Miss Azania — Exile is waiting, 2015, South Africa, 11th African Biennale of Photography

Each week CAA News summarizes articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Paris on Alert as River Seine Continues to Rise and Louvre Shuts Basements

The iconic museum had to close its basement amid the flooding, in a bid to protect the priceless artworks on display there. (The Sun)

Morris Louis Painting Shown at Jewish Museum, This Time Right-Side-Up

After years of being hung incorrectly, a work by Morris Louis has now been flipped 180 degrees. (New York Times)

PHOTOS: Shaking Up the Idea of What Africa Looks Like

The 11th African Biennale of Photography explores topics of identity and possibility through the theme of “Afrotopia.” (NPR)

Two Rodin Shows Cast the Sculptor’s Legacy in Very Different Lights

In New York, two major Rodin shows are up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum. (Hyperallergic)

Around the World in 14,000 “Do Not Disturb” Signs

Collector Edoardo Flores has amassed a collection of over 14,000 designs from more than 200 countries. (Atlas Obscura)

Languages Prioritized Over Arts in UK Government Teacher Plans

As the UK pushes for 75% of its students to study a foreign language, teaching time devoted to music, drama, art and design in secondary schools is set to drop. (Art Professional)

Filed under: CAA News

Meet the 2018 Student Scholarship Winners

posted by January 30, 2018

CAA Student Scholarships
with support from tf-logo
blick-utrecht-logo-bw-prof

For the second year in a row, CAA is proud to partner with our sponsors, multinational publisher, Routledge, Taylor & Francis, and art materials specialist, Blick Art Materials, on student scholarships to assist CAA student members with conference costs.

Routledge, Taylor & Francis Student Scholarship

CAA’s Annual Conference Partner Sponsor, Routledge, Taylor & Francis supports four CAA student members with complimentary registration and an additional $250 in scholarship money to help with conference expenses such as travel, housing, or meals. The 2018 winners are:

Painting by 2018 Scholarship Winner Patricia Chow, Outremer (detail), 2017

Patricia Chow
“Sustainability and Public Good,” MFA Exhibition at California State University, Los Angeles

Xinran Guo
Session: The Poetics and Politics of “Anonymous” Craft, February 21, 4:00 – 5:30 PM

Kira Jones
Session: He, She, and the In-Between: Reassessing Gender and Sexuality in Ancient Mediterranean Art, February 21, 8:30 – 10:00 AM

Chris Rioux

2018 Scholarship Winner Xinran Guo

2018 Scholarship Winner Kira Jones

Blick Art Materials Student Scholarship

CAA’s Annual Conference Presenter Sponsor, Blick Art Materials supports conference registration fees for four CAA student members. The 2018 winners are:

Merih Cantarella
Session: The Elements and Elementality in Art of the Premodern World, February 21, 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM

Indie Choudhury
Session: New Directions in Black-British Art History, February 24, 4:00 – 5:00 PM

Alyssa Fridgen
Member of CAA Committee on Women in the Arts
Meeting: February 21, 10:00 AM -12:00 PM

Yi Yi Mon Kyo
Session: Making Things Modular, February 24, 8:30 – 10:00 AM

2018 Scholarship Winner Merih Cantarella

2018 Scholarship Winner Yi Yi Mon Kyo

2018 Scholarship Winner Alyssa Fridgen

See Us Pick the Winners at the CAA Offices

Criteria for the Scholarship

Awardees were chosen at random and fulfilled the following criteria:

  • Individuals were registered for the Annual Conference by the Early Registration deadline
  • Individuals are current CAA members with proof of student status
  • Individuals did not receive conference registration or travel reimbursement from their institution or employer

We look forward to seeing you in Los Angeles! The 106th Annual Conference is February 21-14, 2018. Click here to explore the conference program. 

Explore the Latest Issue of The Art Bulletin

posted by January 30, 2018

Cover: The Art Bulletin, December 2017.

The portrait of a lavishly dressed young nun, an example of a genre of the “crowned nun,” appears on the cover of the December 2017 issue of The Art Bulletin. Baroque in several senses of the word, the painting by José de Alcíbar dates from ca. 1795 and appears in Cristina Cruz González’s essay “Beyond the Bride of Christ: The Crucified Abbess in Mexico and Spain.”

In other essays featured in the issue: Jenifer Neils assesses the Apollo Sauroktonos, the bronze statue of a boy killing a lizard, traditionally attributed to the fourth-century BCE sculptor Praxiteles, and concludes that the work is neither by Praxiteles nor of the mid-fourth century. Alice Isabella Sullivan relates the miraculous deliverance of Constantinople depicted in sixteenth-century Moldavian church murals to contemporary struggles over Ottoman rule in Eastern Europe. Jessica Maratsos examines the artistic tokens of friendship exchanged between Michelangelo and his patron Vittoria Colonna, and the dissemination of copies of these works in paint, manuscript, and print. Jennifer Van Horn considers the iconoclasm of enslaved and newly freed men and women during the American Civil War, who defaced and repurposed portraits of their former masters as a means of resisting dehumanization and asserting their own agency. Harmon Siegel finds that the interiors of Louise Nevelson’s homes, filled with dark sculptures and assemblages, borrow a page from gothic literature, critiquing domesticity as a trap and troubling the stability of modernist claims to autonomy.

The reviews section, on the theme of “Architectural Networks,” features recent books on the architecture of the Roman world, medieval Spain, Japan, the Caribbean, and the contemporary mosque.

Finally, the art historians Ewa Lajer-Burcharth and Tamar Garb present tributes to the pioneering historian Linda Nochlin, who died in October.

CAA sends print copies of The Art Bulletin to all institutional members and individual members who choose it as a benefit of membership. The digital version at Taylor & Francis Online is available to all CAA individual members regardless of their print subscription choice.

Filed under: Art Bulletin

CAA has awarded two 2017 Professional Development Fellowships—one in art history and one in visual art—to graduate students in MFA and PhD programs across the United States. In addition, CAA has named one honorable mention in art history and one in visual art. The fellows and honorable mentions both receive a complimentary one-year CAA membership and free registration for the 2018 Annual Conference in Los Angeles.

The recipient of the $10,000 fellowship in art history is Sooran Choi, a PhD candidate in Art History at CUNY Graduate Center. Accepting the $10,000 fellowship in visual art is Brenna K. Murphy, a MFA candidate in Studio Art at the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design.

The honorable mention for art history goes to Murad Khan Mumtaz, a PhD candidate in the Department of Art and Architectural History at the University of Virginia. The recipient of an honorable mention in visual art is Courtney N. Ryan, a MFA candidate in Ceramics and Sculpture at Georgia Southern University.

Suzanne Preston Blier, president of the CAA Board of Directors, will formally recognize the two fellows and two honorable mentions at the 106th Annual Conference during Convocation, taking place on Wednesday, February 21, 2018, at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

CAA’s fellowship program supports promising artists and art historians who are enrolled in MFA and PhD programs nationwide. Awards are intended to help them with various aspects of their work, whether for job-search expenses or purchasing materials for the studio. CAA believes a grant of this kind, without contingencies, can best facilitate the transition between graduate studies and professional careers. The program is open to all eligible graduate students in the visual arts and art history. Applications for the 2019 fellowship cycle will open in the late spring.

FELLOW IN ART HISTORY

Sooran Choi

Sooran Choi will complete her PhD in Art History at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, in summer 2018. Her dissertation The South Korean “Avant-Garde,” 1967-1992: Subterfuge as Radical Agency concerns the South Korean avant-garde under Cold War military dictatorships from 1967 to 1992, and focuses on the social and political tension between the military dictatorships and the opposition of political dissidents comprised mostly of artists, students, and intellectuals, who defined themselves as “avant-garde artists.” By examining various forms of performative and conceptual art along with the recontextualized rhetoric of the avant-garde in South Korea, Choi argues South Korean artists appropriated and repurposed various Euro-American post-WWII avant-garde practices such as Fluxus, Happenings, Conceptualism, and Environmental art to mask their social and political critique to evade censorship and torture by the military juntas. A re-purposed avant-garde as covert political agency, Choi contends, proved useful for the South Korean artists to further their own social and political ends, and requires a renewed and nuanced interpretation of non-Western art historical trajectories beyond the binary of center/periphery model, and expands the existing discourse on the avant-garde.

Choi has received a Center for Place, Culture and Politics Dissertation Fellowship, and research grants from The Academy of Korean Studies, and the City University of New York. Choi’s scholarly interest in diverse art historical trajectories has carried over into her teaching as an Adjunct Lecturer at the City University of New York and the Fashion Institute of Technology (SUNY) where she teaches art history. Her past writing included topics such as East Asian artists in diaspora, alternative art spaces in South Korea, Gwangju Biennials, the Korean War Memorial in Battery Park (NYC), Japanese students at the Bauhaus, and the eroticism of Japanese Shunga art.

 

FELLOW IN VISUAL ART

Brenna K. Murphy

Brenna K. Murphy explores the experience of loss and its relationship to the body using fiber-based techniques such as weaving, embroidery, and lace-making. She holds a B.F.A. from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill where she graduated with Highest Honors and was the recipient of the Alexander Julian Prize, an award for the Department of Art’s “best students making work with a high standard of design,” and is currently pursuing an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design.

A working artist for many years, Brenna has exhibited widely throughout the U.S. and internationally in China, Nepal, and France in community art centers, commercial galleries, and corporate venues. Her work has also been featured in exhibitions at museums and universities such as the Hunter Museum of American Art in Tennessee, the Patan Museum in Kathmandu, the University of Pennsylvania, Moore College of Art & Design, and the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. She has taught courses, led workshops, and given lectures at venues such as the Kathmandu University Center for Art & Design, the Nepal Art Council, and the Tyler School of Art, and her work has been collected by the Henry-Copeland Permanent Art Collection at the University of North Carolina and the prestigious West Collection. She is the recipient of many awards, including a competitive two-year fellowship from the Center for Emerging Visual Artists and the Fleisher Art Memorial Wind Challenge Award in Philadelphia, and has attended several artist residencies, such as the Santa Fe Arts Institute in New Mexico, the Kathmandu Contemporary Arts Centre in Nepal, and the CAMAC Centre d’Art and Cité Internationale des Arts in France.

 

HONORABLE MENTIONS IN ART HISTORY AND VISUAL ART

Murad Khan Mumtaz

Murad Khan Mumtaz is a Pakistani-American scholar who examines historical intersections of art, literature and religious expression in South Asia. His primary research focuses on devotional portraiture with a special interest in representations of Muslim saints in early modern India. He is also an artist trained in the traditional practices of North Indian painting, which he exhibits, researches and teaches internationally.

A native of Lahore, Mumtaz was educated at Pakistan’s National College of Arts, where he first studied Indian painting under the guidance of Ustad Bashir Ahmed. He later completed an MFA in visual art as a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art and Architectural History at the University of Virginia and is working toward the completion of his dissertation, “Objects of Devotion: Representations of Muslim Saints in Early Modern South Asian Painting,” which he expects to defend in April 2018.

Mumtaz has been awarded fellowships from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies and the CLIR-Mellon Program for dissertation research in original sources. As a Theodore Rousseau Fellow of the Metropolitan Museum of Art he has carried out research in European museums and libraries. He was recently appointed an art history research fellow of the Freer-Sackler Galleries at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

Courtney N. Ryan

Receiving her Master of Fine Arts in Ceramics and Sculpture this May, Courtney Ryan is known for her intricate clay sculptures that appear to have emerged organically from their surroundings. She currently resides in Statesboro, Georgia, near Savannah, where she teaches Two-Dimensional and Three-Dimensional design courses as an Instructor of Record at Georgia Southern University. Upon graduation, Courtney intends to continue her studio practice while exhibiting work as she searches for her future career. As an aspiring professor of art, she wants to continue teaching and remain involved within the art world both professionally and academically.

Over the course of her graduate career, Courtney has had the opportunity to travel abroad to experience the Venice Biennale, as well as spend two summers in Ireland on residency through the European Council. As an avid presenter, Courtney has participated in conferences such as SECAC, SLSA, and of course CAA. Last August, she had her first solo exhibition, Domestic Consumption, at Columbus State University, and has since shown her work at other universities including the University of Georgia, Georgia State University, and Augusta University. Featured in Sculpture Magazine as an Honorable Mention for the 2017 Outstanding Student Achievement Award, Courtney continues to push her work into new realms. Currently she is exhibiting in The Delaware Contemporary Museum’s 2017 MFA Biennale: Domestic, as well as an upcoming show-swap with Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. Having just completed a 40-foot mural and a public arts sculpture, Courtney is also heavily involved in her local community.

Bobby Tso and Andrew Casto

posted by January 29, 2018

The weekly CAA Conversations Podcast continues the vibrant discussions initiated at our Annual Conference. Listen in each week as educators explore arts and pedagogy, tackling everything from the day-to-day grind to the big, universal questions of the field.

This week, Bobby Tso, assistant professor of Fine Art at Northwest Missouri State University, and Andrew Casto, head of Ceramics at the University of Iowa, discuss teaching Contemporary Craft – Materiality and Concept in Ceramics.

Filed under: CAA Conversations, Podcast

New in caa.reviews

posted by January 26, 2018

       

Earnestine Jenkins discusses Clementine Hunter: A Sketchbook by Richard Gasperi. Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Rashmi Viswanathan reviews the exhibition After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India, 1947/1997. Read the full review at caa.reviews

Peter Christensen examines Noah’s Ark: Essays on Architecture by Hubert Damisch. Read the full review at caa.reviews

Lozana Rossenova writes on Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and Fiona Banner. Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Fred Rush discusses The Brain-Eye: New Histories of Modern Painting by Éric Alliez. Read the full review at caa.reviews. 

Filed under: caa.reviews

Honorees this year include Pepón Osorio, Firelei Báez, Kellie Jones, Joseph Masheck, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Lowery Stokes Sims, and many other scholars, artists, authors, and teachers

CAA Annual Conference, Los Angeles, CA, February 21-24, 2018

Pepón Osorio. Courtesy the artist.

CAA is pleased to announce the recipients and finalists of the 2018 Awards for Distinction and the creation of a new Award for Excellence in Diversity. Honorees this year are among the leading scholars, artists, teachers, and authors in the field of visual arts. The CAA Awards for Distinction are presented during Convocation at the CAA Annual Conference on Wednesday, February 21 at 6:00PM at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The CAA Annual Conference runs from February 21-24, 2018.

Among the winners this year is Pepón Osorio, recipient of the 2018 Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement. Osorio is the first artist of Puerto Rican descent to receive the award from CAA. Drawing on his childhood in Puerto Rico and his adult life as a social worker in the Bronx, Osorio creates meticulous installations incorporating the memories, experiences, and cultural and religious iconography of Latino communities and family dynamics. “The work is created when I bring together where I am and where the rest of society is,” said Osorio in an Art21 documentary about his work. Osorio is a professor in the Community Arts Practices Program at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. He is also the recipient of a 2018 United States Artists Fellowship, among many other awards and fellowships.

Firelei Báez. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco.

Firelei Báez is the winner of the 2018 Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work. Báez was born in the Dominican Republic and works in New York City. Her work on paper, canvas, and in sculpture explores black female subjectivity, myth, and science fiction. Baez is a creator of fantastical figures that transmute through ornate pattern and vivid color. She has held residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Joan Mitchell Center, Fine Arts Work Center, Lower East Side Print Shop, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace, and is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Award in Painting, the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting, and the Chiaro Award from Headlands Center for the Arts.

The newly created Award for Excellence in Diversity recognizes the work of an individual in the visual arts whose commitment to inclusion in scholarship or in practice stands out as groundbreaking and unifying.

The inaugural winner of the Award for Excellence in Diversity is Kellie Jones, Associate Professor in Art History and Archeology and the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. Jones’s research and teaching concerns African American and African Diaspora artists, Latinx and Latin American artists, and issues in contemporary art and museum theory. Her most recent book, South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s, was published by Duke University Press in 2017.

CAA will also award for the first time two Distinguished Feminist Awards, one to a visual artist and one to a scholar. The winners of the 2018 Distinguished Feminist Awards are Lynn Hershman Leeson (visual artist) and Lowery Stokes Sims (scholar).

In publishing, CAA recognizes the achievements of several authors and editors.

Charles Rufus Morey Book Award

Benjamin Anderson

Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art, Yale University Press, 2017

Laura Anne Kalba

Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art, Penn State University Press, 2017

Finalists:

Susanna Berger

The Art of Philosophy: Visual Thinking in Europe from the Late Renaissance to the Early Enlightenment, Princeton University Press, 2017

Dorothy Ko

The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China University of Washington Press, 2017

Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award

Barbara Drake Boehm and Melanie Holcomb, editors

Jerusalem, 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016

Finalists:

Wanda M. Corn

Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern, Brooklyn Museum, DelMonico Books, Prestel, 2017

Matthew Affron

Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910–1950, Yale University Press, 2016

Robert Cozzolino, Anne Classen Knutson, and David M. Lubin, editors

World War I and American Art, Princeton University Press, 2016

Pilar Silva Maroto

Bosch: The 5th Centenary Exhibition, Thames & Hudson, 2016

Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions

Melissa Rachleff

Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965, Grey Art Gallery, New York University and DelMonico Books, Prestel, 2017

Finalists:

Jane A. Sharp, editor

Thinking Pictures: The Visual Field of Moscow Conceptualism, Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, 2016

Kevin Sharp, editor

Wild Spaces, Open Seasons: Hunting and Fishing in American Art, University of Oklahoma Press, 2016

Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism

Elise Archias

The Concrete Body: Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci, Yale University Press, 2016

Art Journal Award

Heather Igloliorte

“Curating Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: Inuit Knowledge in the Qallunaat Art Museum,” Art Journal, Summer 2017

Finalists:

Nazar Kozak, “Art Embedded into Protest: Staging the Ukrainian Maidan,” Art Journal, Spring 2017

Allison Young, “Visualizing Apartheid Abroad: Gavin Jantje’s Screenprints of the 1970s,” Art Journal, Fall/Winter 2017

Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize

Aaron M. Hyman

“Inventing Painting: Cristóbal de Villalpando, Juan Correa, and New Spain’s Transatlantic Canon,” The Art Bulletin, June 2017

AWARDS FOR DISTINCTION IN TEACHING, WRITING ON ART, AND CONSERVATION

Helen Frederick is the winner of the 2018 Distinguished Teaching of Art Award.

Edward S. Cooke, Jr., and Alex Potts are the winners of the 2018 Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award.

Joseph Masheck is the winner of the 2018 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art.

The CAA/American Institute for Conservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation award for 2018 will be given to Paul Messier.

Learn about the juries that select the recipients of the CAA Awards for Distinction.

Contacts

Nick Obourn, Director of Communications, Marketing, and Membership
nobourn@collegeart.org, 212-392-4401

Joelle Te Paske, Media and Content Manager
jtepaske@collegeart.org, 212-392-4426

IMAGES AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

Hashtags: #CAA2018 #CAALA #CAAworks #CAAadvocacy #CAAfairuse

La Salle University. Image: Wikimedia Commons

CAA, the largest professional organization of visual artists and art historians, was disappointed to learn that La Salle University in Philadelphia plans to sell part of its art collection at the university’s museum. The university is currently planning to sell 46 works of art at a Christies’s auction estimated to bring in between $4.8 and $7.3 million.  The university states that the proceeds from the sale will be “invested in the future of our university to help grow and to be financially sustainable. More importantly, we are really looking to enhance student experience and student outcome.” A university spokesperson further points out that the decision to deaccession the works was the result of months of careful consideration by its Board of Trustees, which examined all of the university’s assets and made a decision that select artworks from their art museum could be reallocated for funding the university’s new strategic five-year plan. Read the Artnet News story about the deaccession.

Similar to other cultural professional organizations, CAA has set guidelines for conditions under which items in museums collections are to be divested or deaccessioned. CAA Executive Director Hunter O’Hanian said, “We join our colleagues from the American Alliance of Museums and Association of Art Museum Directors in questioning this sale. CAA’s guidelines make it clear that art held by museums is not to be considered ‘an asset’ in the traditional sense. Museums should sell work from their collection only under very limited circumstances.  And best practices dictate that the sale of the proceeds should only be used to acquire new works of art. We hope that the university Board of Trustees rethinks this position about selling the works that it holds in public trust.”

News from the Art and Academic Worlds

posted by January 24, 2018

Members of activist-artist collective We Make America at the NYC Women’s March. Photo: Deborah Stein, via Hyperallergic.

Each week CAA News summarizes articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Signs of Creative Resistance at the 2018 Women’s March

For the second year in a row, creativity was on full display. (Hyperallergic)

The Artist Questioning Authorship

Danh Vo’s art recasts the historical events and political ideas that have shaped his world. (The New Yorker)

Recovering Our Lost Public Esteem

Three ways higher education leaders can respond to declining public support and confidence. (Inside Higher Ed)

The Farewell to Utopia in Revolutionary Cuban Art

An interview with Rachel Weiss, author and professor of Arts Administration and Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. (Walker Reader)

The Ballets Russes Showcased Some of Picasso’s and Matisse’s Most Experimental Work

A look at the work of the groundbreaking dance company, active between 1909 and 1929. (Artsy)

A Checklist for Transformative Leaders

Transformative leadership is about shared ownership — buy-in rather than buying. (Chronicle of Higher Education)

 

Filed under: CAA News

Elliott King and Abigail Susik

posted by January 22, 2018

The weekly CAA Conversations Podcast continues the vibrant discussions initiated at our Annual Conference. Listen in each week as educators explore arts and pedagogy, tackling everything from the day-to-day grind to the big, universal questions of the field.

This week, Elliott King, assistant professor of Art History at Washington and Lee University, and Abigail Susik, associate professor of Art History at Willamette University in Oregon, discuss teaching Surrealism.

Filed under: CAA Conversations, Podcast