CAA News Today
A letter from CAA’s Executive Director
posted by CAA — October 28, 2021
| Dear CAA members,
Since March of 2020, we have been continually navigating through change—both internally and externally––at CAA. We’ve used this time to gather information from membership and listen to constituencies to position CAA for the future. I am writing to address the matter of a publications restructuring document that was recently shared publicly. The document was created as a preliminary proposal meant for internal discussion following a first-stage period of discovery. The document remains a work in progress. Our next steps in the process will be:
CAA values the voices and expertise of our community and respective constituencies. I will continue to create ongoing opportunities for engagement and dialogue.
Thank you for your continued support. I look forward to providing you with a more detailed monthly report of CAA’s activities in the coming week. In the meantime, please feel free to contact CAA at programs@collegeart.org to share any further comments.  Meme Omogbai
Executive Director and CEO
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Announcing the CAA 2022 Distinguished Scholar
posted by CAA — October 26, 2021
Kirsten Pai Buick
We’re delighted to announce the Distinguished Scholar session at the 110th CAA Annual Conference will honor Kirsten Pai Buick. This session will highlight her career and provide an opportunity for dialogue between and among colleagues. It will be held virtually during the 110th Annual Conference on February 17, 2022.
Established in 2001, the Distinguished Scholar Session illuminates and celebrates the contributions of senior art historians. The Annual Conference Committee identifies the distinguished scholar each year and each session typically brings together the distinguished scholar and a group of colleagues. The honoree’s involvement is fundamental to the series as a way of demonstrating a living tradition that gives voice to the continuities and ruptures that have shaped art-historical scholarship from the twentieth century into the new millennium.
Access to this program requires registration and is included with an All Access registration. Recordings will be accessible to registrants after the event. Register here.
“I identify as a scholar of the visual and material culture of the first British Empire, and the British diaspora in the US, Caribbean, and India. My teaching encompasses topics such as surveys of British Colonial and U.S. Art, American Landscape representation, African American Art, Pro- and Anti-Abolitionist Images in the Atlantic World; and seminars such as Photographing Jim Crow, 1890-1965, Patronizing Women: Taste and Collecting in the 19th and 20th Centuries, and The Victorian Nude: Representing Women, Men, Intersex, and Children. My research and teaching interests encompass histories of science, medicine, religion, as well as monuments, and the use of public space. Increasingly, I am interested in the racialization of mobility—what I characterize as critical mobility studies. I publish primarily in the realm of the history of African American art and its roots in US cultural formations. My first book, “Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject,” is a good example of how I wed my teaching and publication imperatives together with my challenge to art history and visual studies to be more and to do better. Ultimately, teaching is my passion; and I tell my students that job # 1 is surviving the damage, and job # 2 is to never concede the center.”
Kirsten Pai Buick is a professor of art history at the University of New Mexico. She received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Michigan and was a SAAM Predoctoral Fellow and a Charles Gaius Bolin Fellow at Williams College. Buick is a recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize for African American Art and has published extensively on African American art, including her book Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (Duke Univ. Press, 2010). Her second book, In Authenticity: “Kara Walker” and the Eidetics of Racism, is in progress.
Announcing the CAA 2022 Annual Artists’ Interviews Speakers
posted by CAA — October 26, 2021
Willie Cole (left) and Jessica Stockholder (right).
We are excited to announce that CAA’s Annual Artists’ Interviews will feature Willie Cole and Jessica Stockholder. Each artist will take part in a one-on-one interview with a colleague during CAA’s 110th Annual Conference. These interviews will take place virtually on February 18, 2022.
Beginning in 1997, the Annual Artists’ Interviews were established to provide the opportunity for esteemed artists to have one-on-one conversations with colleagues at the Annual Conference. Each year, the Services to Artists Committee (SAC) identifies two distinguished artists to participate.
The interviews are held as part of the Services to Artists Program. Access to this program requires registration and is included with an All Access registration, or with stand-alone program registration at no cost. Recordings will be accessible to registrants after the event. Register here.
Speaker Biographies
Willie Cole is a contemporary American sculptor, printer, and perceptual engineer. His work uses contexts of postmodern eclecticism, and combines references and appropriation from African and African American imagery. Cole is best known for his Dada and Surrealist readymades, which assemble and transform ordinary domestic and used objects such as irons, ironing boards, high-heeled shoes, hair dryers, bicycle parts, wooden matches, lawn jockeys, and other discarded appliances and hardware. Cole grew up in Newark, NJ. He attended the Boston University School of Fine Arts, received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1976, and continued his studies at the Art Students League of New York from 1976 to 1979.
Recent exhibitions of Cole’s work include To Reclaim, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; New Concepts in Printmaking 2: Willie Cole, MoMA, New York, NY, USA; Reconfiguring an African Icon: Odes to the Mask by Modern and Contemporary Artists from Three Continents, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA; Chicago, Surrealism: The Conjured Life, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, USA; and Afro: Black Identity in America and Brazil, Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, NM, USA. Cole’s work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; MoMA, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; and many others.
Jessica Stockholder is an internationally acclaimed visual artist and educator who lives and works in Chicago. In addition to earning her BFA from the University of Victoria in Canada and her MFA from Yale University, she was awarded two honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees: one from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2010, and one from Columbia College in 2013. Stockholder was Elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2018.
Stockholder’s works sit at the intersection of painting with sculpture, and often incorporate the architecture in which it has been conceived. Employing a wide range of ordinary everyday materials Stockholder orchestrates an intersection of pictorial and physical space. She probes how meaning derives from physicality, and engages the sensuality and pleasure evoked by color and formal order in an effort to call attention to the edges of understanding.
Stockholder’s work has been exhibited in many of the world’s most influential art venues, including Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Dia Center for the Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Venice Biennale. It is included in such museum collections as the Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA, and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Stockholder is currently the Raymond W. & Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago, a position she accepted in 2011, after 12 years as Director of the Sculpture Department at the Yale School of Art.
Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) Picks: October
posted by CAA — October 26, 2021
The October Picks from the Committee on Women in the Arts engage with the notion of space and its rich, multi-layered resonances with politics, gender, sexuality, ecology, diaspora and survival. Our selection features exhibitions featuring the work of feminist and womxn artists who respond to current urgencies and stress the importance of thresholds and their liberatory potential in showing these subjects, histories, narratives and discourses which have been invisible and silenced.
Bianca Bondi, The Daydream, 2021, exhibition view, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris.
Sharon Hayes
Ricerche
October 9–November 7, 2021
The Common Guild, Glasgow, United Kingdom
https://www.thecommonguild.org.uk/programme/project/ricerche-6b86
Inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1964 film Comizi d’Amore (Love Meetings), Ricerche comprises of several video works presented as ‘ricerche’ or research that navigate intersections between gender, sexuality, politics and contemporary collective identifications in the United States. Hayes’ project with The Common Guild includes three films featuring a range of individuals in which the artist continues her journey of exploration into the entanglements among activism, queerness, love, sexuality and history and their entanglements.
Noémie Goudal
Post Atlantica
October 10, 2021–January 2, 2022
Le Grand Café, Contemporary Art Centre, Saint-Nazaire, France
https://www.grandcafe-saintnazaire.fr/en/expositions/post-atlantica/
Noémie Goudal creates visual stories that via construction of handmade sceneries displaying structural imperfections and playing with perspectives and points of view reveal the process of making an image. Clues that she leaves unveil technical experiments and effects behind constructed scenes that at the first glance do not appear artificial. The exhibition includes works that explore layers of time and space. It features the artist’s new series Post Atlantica, a result of her research into paleoclimatology and her fascination with extreme mutations of landscapes subjected to the force of nature. With this work Goudal invites us to consider, via the image, past and future climate changes.
Frida Orupabo
How did you feel when you come out of the wilderness
September 23–November 21, 2021
Kunsthall Trondheim, Trondheim, Norway
https://kunsthalltrondheim.no/en/utstillinger/frida-orupabo
Frida Orupabo’s art practice reclaims spaces for narratives that are silenced or erased elsewhere. Her physical and digital collages, some of which are featured on her Instagram account @nemiepeba, emphasize the cracks and cuts that need to be sutured with care. Exploring mostly Black visual culture, Orupabo salvages fragments of counternarratives to create a body of knowledge that is rebellious, fugitive and willful. The exhibition presents the artist’s new body of work, including a wallpaper and a wooden sculpture that accompany collages, which engages with survival and the continuous struggle for freedom.
Bianca Bondi
The Daydream
September 22, 2021–January 24, 2022
Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France
https://www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr/en/events/open-space-8-bianca-bondi
Bianca Bondi’s The Daydream transforms Fondation Louis Vuitton’s gallery space into an artificial interior garden offering a multisensorial experience. Inspired by sacred springs, this landscaped place of meditation invites the audience to immerse themselves in reflection and reverie. The artist references rituals and occult practices which connect us to the invisible world. The exhibition features sound designed by Jenn Hutt and flower arrangements designed by Tata Msellati. Olfactive ambience is created by the perfumeur Yann Vasnier. Fostering mutations and transformations between materials, senses and experiences, Bondi’s artistic practice is alchemical, seeking to discover and reveal the intangible.
Eva Davidova
Global Mode > Omnivores
October 5–November 10, 2021
Instituto Cervantes, New York, USA
https://cultura.cervantes.es/nuevayork/en-US/espacios-ocupados-/143561
Global Mode > Omnivores is a solo exhibition of new media artist Eva Davidova. It is part of the Occupied Spaces program inviting multi-faceted collaborations between artists and contexts within which the Instituto Cervantes centres are located. Davidova’s interest in unfixed positions and counterstrategies that disrupt prevailing hierarchies translates into the exhibited single channel video Garden for Drowning Descendants. The work engages with global ecological disaster and interspecies dependency to reflect on the current condition of the world.
Diane Severin Nguyen
IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS
September 16–December 13, 2021
SculptureCenter, Long Island City, NY, USA
https://www.sculpture-center.org/exhibitions/13184/if-revolution-is-a-sickness
Diane Severin Nguyen’s new moving image work commissioned by SculptureCenter and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago traces the dichotomous relationship between the East and the West. Set in Warsaw, Poland, the film follows the character of an orphaned Vietnamese child fascinated with K-pop dance culture. The artist navigates the fractures between Eastern Europe and Asia with roots in Cold War allegiances to question inherited cultural divisions and layered conflicts and ways in which these are reckoned while trying to find shared identifications and symbols. The narrative is accompanied by the voice reading excerpts from texts on revolution by Ulrike Meinhof, Hanna Arendt, Mao Zendong among others. The juxtaposition of text and image, and the engagement with contradictory discourses via a photographic and moving image serve to interrogate subject formation and the tensions that emerge from cultural divisions.
Candeğer Furtun
September 16, 2021–April 17, 2022
ARTER, Istanbul, Turkey
https://www.arter.org.tr/en/exhibitions/candegerfurtun
This first retrospective exhibition of Candeğer Furtun’s works, curated by Selen Ansen, explores the notion of the ‘shell’ which often emerges, explicitly and implicitly, in Furtun’s ceramic practice. Featuring over a hundred works, the exhibition presents the artist’s innovative approach to ceramics embodying forms, textures and natural processes that liberate the soil. The notion of the shell manifests the threshold space between the human body and nature which are important in Furtun’s formal and conceptual explorations. It also enables the viewers to interrogate the dynamic transitions between interiority and exteriority, abstraction and figuration, or singularity and plurality.
Affiliated Society News: October
posted by CAA — October 18, 2021
Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art) (AHNCA)
Announcements
AHNCA announces the winners of their Best Paper Prize at their Graduate Symposium. The Eighteenth Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Nineteenth-Century Art, co-sponsored by the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) and the Dahesh Museum of Art was held virtually on September 25–26, 2021. Ten participants, representing future directions for nineteenth-century art history, presented their dissertation research. After prolonged deliberation because of the uniform high quality of the presentations, the jury awarded two Dahesh Prizes of $1000 each, funded by the Mervat Zahid Cultural Foundation, to Lieske Huits of the University of Cambridge and the Victoria & Albert Museum, and Sean Kramer of the University of Michigan.
Events
October 20, 2021, 7pm EDT – Upcoming Virtual Salon: The Art Market in the Nineteenth Century
Please join AHNCA on Wednesday, October 20th, at 7PM EDT for their October Virtual Salon on The Art Market in the Nineteenth Century. This series of online events is co-sponsored by the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) and the Dahesh Museum of Art.
For this event, AHNCA will host three specialists, Véronique Chagnon-Burke, Anne Helmreich, and Simon Kell, who will discuss this increasingly important area of nineteenth-century studies. Their discussion will be followed by a Q&A and then a break-out room where attendees can socialize informally.
The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Register here.
Mid-America College Art Association (MACAA)
Opportunities
Call for art submissions: MACAA Members Virtual Exhibition
MACAA invites its members to submit works of art for consideration to the Members Virtual Exhibition. This exhibition is in coordination with the 2022 Mid-America College Art Association
(MACAA) Virtual Conference, titled “Defining the Undefined: Art, Education, Technology and the Mapping of Ourselves,” hosted by Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania. The call is open to all mediums and themes. This exhibition, hosted by MACAA via a virtual gallery, is an opportunity to display the incredible work made by MACAA members.
For more information on submission visit this link. Deadline is December 1, 2021.
Bibliographical Society of America (BSA)
Events
October 21, 2021, 7pm EDT – Virtual Event: Bluestockings Bookstore: Empowering Queer and Activist Communities
Founded in 1999, Bluestockings Bookstore has served for many years as a cultural hub, activist network, and vibrant community space on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Entirely all-volunteer run, there are 80+ volunteers, a rotating weekly schedule, and a worker’s collective at the decision-making core. Home to over 300 events a year, Bluestockings offers poetry open-mics, letter writing to prisoners, zine-making workshops, book launches, reading clubs. Panelists Malav Kanuga, Emiliano Lemus, and Joan Dark will share from their personal experiences as former and current members of the Bluestockings collective, offering an in-depth exploration of the space and its pivotal role for queer, transgender, and gender non-conforming individuals.
Register for the event here.
November 1, 2021, 3pm EDT – Collecting, Knowledge, and Power: Perspectives from Latin America
December 9, 2021, 3pm EDT – Collecting and Preserving Colonial Latin America Materials Today: A Roundtable Discussion
The Bibliographic Society of America’s fall series explores the hemispheric histories and contemporary dynamics of collecting and preserving Latin American library and archival materials. Featuring scholars and library and archive professionals based in Latin America and the U.S., the series aims to promote dialogue among scholars and practitioners while confronting ways in which power dynamics have shaped and continue to shape collecting and stewardship practices today.
To view past virtual events produced by the Bibliographic Society of America, visit their YouTube page.
CAA Interviews Mariam Ghani for this week’s member spotlight and signs on to Open Letter from Arts for Afghanistan
posted by Allison Walters — October 05, 2021
Mariam Ghani, What We Left Unfinished, 2019 (artwork © Mariam Ghani; film still provided by the artist)
Mariam Ghani’s film, What We Left Unfinished (2019), began as a project that pulled from Ghani’s experience digitizing the Afghan Film Archive, featuring five films that were shot but never edited during the communist period of 1978–1991. Now its title takes on new meaning with the Taliban’s recent takeover of the government and the evacuation of over a hundred-thousand individuals from Afghanistan. Many Afghani cultural workers, whether relocated, remaining, or watching from abroad, will need to reimagine or shift their practice to accommodate this new reality.
Addressing these issues, CAA had the privilege to talk with Mariam Ghani, this week’s member spotlight, and explore her practice as an artist, filmmaker, activist, and teacher. The daughter of former Afghani President, Ashraf Ghani, Mariam is based in Brooklyn and has spent her life in the US. Her work has often drawn from her connection to Afghanistan, in her relationship to the country as both an insider and an outsider. Dominant themes in her practice also speak to the current moment and to Middle Eastern histories, including border zones, transitions, intersecting cultures, national identities, trauma, memory, loss, and migration.
Interviewed by Laura Anderson Barbata, current CAA Vice President for Annual Conference and Programs and trans-disciplinary artist also based in Brooklyn, this conversation begins with a look at Ghani’s work and then dives into the multiple ways you can support those affected by the current crises. To show its support and solidarity, CAA has signed on to An Open Letter from Arts for Afghanistan.
Image provided by Mariam Ghani
Mariam recommends supporting the following organizations:
artsforafghanistan.org
artisticfreedominitiative.org
the Asian Contemporary Art Forum (givebutter.com/ACAF)
afghanwomensnetwork.org
womenforafghanwomen.org
Every week we will feature a CAA member in our member spotlight series who is currently demonstrating exceptional talent. Please feel free to nominate a fellow member or send along any personal upcoming events or achievements for consideration to caanews@collegeart.org. In your email, put “Member Spotlight” in the subject line.