CAA News Today
Call for Submissions: Services to Artists Committee Exhibition During CAA114
posted by CAA — October 30, 2025
Resistance and change often begin in art.
—Ursula Le Guin
The CAA Services to Artists Committee (SAC) is now accepting submissions for Parallel Worlds, an exhibition during the CAA 114th Annual Conference in Chicago.
Since the nineteenth century, science fiction has provided conceptual spaces for questioning and criticizing our world and imagining alternative futures. As notable futurist Stuart Candy states in The Futures of Everyday Life, what is “central to the present future studies is not an effort to ‘predict’ the future . . . but the effort to sketch ‘alternative futures.’” In other words, creativity and imagination are needed to better prepare for the unknown.
With this exhibition, SAC aims to draw attention to parallel worlds, temporal shifts, and alternative futures. Addressing a legacy of different communities and building on critical movements such as Afrofuturism, Indigenous Futurism, Queer Futurisms, Post-Humanist Futurism, Crip Futurism, Eco-Solar Punk Futurism, Speculative Futurism, and AI Futurism, we hope to collectively imagine beyond our current reality.
Art can serve as a mode of critique, resistance, and speculation to address and disrupt our deeply rooted colonial history. SAC invites submissions that challenge dominant narratives and provide a critical repositioning of identity, environment, technology, and time. SAC is especially interested in work that responds to the current social and cultural climates while offering new, creative, revolutionary visions for all futures.
APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS
Please combine into one pdf:
- Artist statement (up to 200 words)
- Biography (up to 150 words)
- CV
- Website (if applicable)
- Corresponding image list (image number, title, medium, dimensions, date)
- Handling, framing, and hanging descriptions
- Technology/equipment requirements
- Accessibility requirements
Portfolio of 10–15 images:
- Each image must be sized to 1 MB
- Title format: 01_Last name_Title_Medium_Dimensions_Date
Incomplete applications will not be accepted.
Please Note:
- Entry is free, but all accepted artists must join CAA as an individual member to show their work.
- If selected, artists are responsible for arranging timely delivery (Wednesday, February 18) and pickup of artwork (Saturday, February 21) to the gallery in Chicago at their own expense during conference week.
- All work must be ready to be presented or hung equipped with D-rings or picture wire. Framing of the work and presentation details needs to be agreed upon in consultation with the curator.
- Any technology related to the work may need to be provided by the artist.
- Each artist is required to gallery sit for at least one shift during the exhibition and is strongly encouraged to attend the Thursday night reception.
Submit now via email to SAC!
Deadline: December 5
Elyse Longair, Cryopreservation Birth Chamber, 2020; Elyse Longair, Man in Capsule, 2022 (images provided by the artist)
CAA and the National Coalition Against Censorship Release Joint Letter to the President of Pepperdine University
posted by CAA — October 27, 2025
CAA and the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) have released a joint letter to Pepperdine University’s president calling for the reinstallation of two censored art installations, removed from the Hold My Hand in Yours exhibition for “overly political content.” The University argued that the works—until recently on view at the university’s Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art—placed their nonprofit status at risk. The exhibition has since been shut down by the university, and Andrea Gyorody, the museum’s director, has resigned.
CAA and NCAC stand firm in the belief that “. . . virtually every artwork on a topical subject can be interpreted as expressing a political position. Crucially, the exhibition of an object in a University museum does not mean that the University endorses the ideas it expresses any more than teaching a text in a classroom means that this text expresses the position of the University.”
CAA and NCAC call for reopening of the exhibition, a statement affirming the value of freedom of expression, and the development of guidelines for the exhibition of art on campus. Read the full joint letter here on NCAC’s website.
CAA Statement On the Dismantling of Free Speech and Freedom of Expression
posted by CAA — October 24, 2025
The College Art Association fervently opposes the systemic dismantling of free speech, censorship, and retaliation for various forms of expression in US-based cultural institutions, universities, and the press.
The most recent wave of censorship, suppression, and retaliation threatens every element of our mission and touches every single one of our constituencies—professors, curators, students, art makers, and other visual arts professionals.
CAA believes censorship fundamentally undermines scholarship and artistic expression, and that expression, along with public discourse and dissent, is powerful and necessary in a free society. Losing those freedoms will irreparably alter defining elements of our culture.
CAA unambiguously supports artistic and scholarly expression and believes in the principle that they must remain free from censorship and suppression. The arts and the academy are vital places of new and transformational ideas and a collective commitment to these principles has never been more urgent.
Faheem Majeed to give CAA114 Convocation Keynote Address
posted by CAA — October 23, 2025
Photograph: Michael Sullivan
We are delighted to announce Faheem Majeed as the 2026 Convocation keynote speaker at the organization’s 114th Annual Conference in Chicago.
Majeed is an artist, curator, educator, and nonprofit administrator whose work focuses on institutional critique and centers collaboration as a tool to engage communities in meaningful dialogue. He received his BFA from Howard University and an MFA from the University of Illinois Chicago, where he is currently an assistant professor of art. He is the recipient of the Field and MacArthur Foundations’ Leaders for a New Chicago award, the Joyce Award, and the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors grant, and has been recognized as a Harpo Foundation awardee. Majeed served as the executive director of the South Side Community Art Center from 2005 to 2011 and is the founder and co-director of the Floating Museum, an arts collective and nonprofit that creates new models to explore relationships between art, community, architecture, and public institutions. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Centre Pompidou, the Highline, and the Hyde Park Art Center. Majeed’s sculpture highlights marginalized objects, histories, people, and places them into powerful narratives that challenge and recontextualize their value while fostering dialogue and broader social change.
CAA114 Convocation will be held on Wednesday, February 18, 6:00–7:30 p.m. CT. at the Hilton Chicago. The event will also be livestreamed via YouTube.
Register now for the CAA 114th Annual Conference, February 18–21, 2026!
ACLS Releases Statement Regarding White House “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education”
posted by CAA — October 07, 2025
The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) released a statement regarding the October 1 White House proposal to nine universities which delineated a list of demands in exchange for receiving preferential access to research funding.
CAA stands with ACLS in the call for the immediate rejection of the “Compact for American Excellence in Higher Education” by all institutions of higher education in order to preserve academic independence.
“Universities and colleges have one mission: to advance knowledge. Faculty carry out the mission by conducting research and teaching students. The knowledge they produce and circulate is independently assessed by professional peers. Interfering with that process by forcing knowledge to pass through a political filter is a tactic adopted by the Soviet Union and other authoritarian states. The White House is dressing up its compact as a reasonable corrective to what it views as problems in campus culture. Let no one be deceived. This proposal imposes government censorship on academia. It is anti-American, and it weakens our democracy by devaluing academic expertise.”
Read the full statement here.