CAA News Today
An Interview with Linda Nochlin
posted by CAA — June 08, 2017
CAA is proud to launch our newest initiative for fostering academic discussions about art and its purpose through conversations with diverse scholars and practitioners from our community. Every month, executive director Hunter O’Hanian will interview a notable scholar or artist who is making or has made progressive change in his or her field, with the goal to not only learn more about their craft, but to understand the artist or scholar behind it.
Our first interview in this series is with renowned feminist art historian Linda Nochlin, a long time CAA member and author of the pioneering essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” We caught up with Linda at her home on the Upper West Side, where art and inspiring works lined every wall of her apartment. Read the full conversation below (or click the video!) to hear Linda recount the early beginnings of her career, her thoughts on feminism then and now, her advice to young scholars, and a sneak preview of her upcoming book, Misère.
| Hunter O’Hanian: | Hello, my name is Hunter O’Hanian, and I’m the Director of the College Art Association. I’m here today with Linda Nochlin. Hello Linda. |
| Linda Nochlin: | Hello. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | How are you? |
| Linda Nochlin: | I’m okay. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | You’ve been a member of CAA for a long time. It’s great to have this opportunity to chat with you. Let’s talk a little bit about your background. I know you grew up here in New York, in Brooklyn. You earned degrees from Vassar, Colombia, and NYU. You taught at Colombia, Vassar, Yale. You’ve won many awards from CAA. Most recently you won the 2006 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for writing in art. I know you’ve won a Guggenheim Fellowship. I know you’re a fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. You’ve got an honorary doctorate from Harvard. A lot of it’s really been about what you’ve been doing as far as thinking about, writing about, teaching about art. What brought you to art? |
| Linda Nochlin: |  I was always interested. When I was a little kid, I liked to paint and draw. I was very much encouraged to paint and draw both by mother and by my school. Being in New York, I had all these museums. There were a lot of other people who were interested in art that were around me, that were my friends. It seemed sort of natural to go to museums. I enrolled myself when I was 12 in the class for talented children at the Brooklyn Museum. A very interesting place. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | You enrolled yourself you said? |
| Linda Nochlin: | I went with a portfolio and they said, “Come on.” |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | Great. |
| Linda Nochlin: | I was always interested in art, music, dance. I loved to dance. The arts. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | Apart from your writing, have you been drawing and making work through your adult life as well? |
| Linda Nochlin: | No, I quit. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | How come you quit? |
| Linda Nochlin: | Well, I don’t know. I just got interested in writing about it rather than making it. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | You have a very long history of publishing. There’s certainly a lot of work that you’ve done with Realism and Courbet. What attracted you to that particular period and that particular genre? |
| Linda Nochlin: | Probably it was political I think. It was during the McCarthy period that I came to maturity. I went to the Institute. I really wanted to work on something that was anti-McCarthy. That was left. I was a person of the left and Courbet was the ideal subject in that. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | Tell me about what you remember of the McCarthy era and what was going on at the time and how artists and writers were dealt with. |
| Linda Nochlin: | It really was a very oppressive period for people in intellectual and artistic pursuits. Even if they didn’t come and get you, that was always a threat lying over. I remember I began my Frick talk with a long quotation from Karl Marx. People were dumbfounded. I remember my teacher said, “Linda, you’re so brazen.” It was scary times. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | Watching the news today, do you see any similarities? |
| Linda Nochlin: | No. I think it’s a different thing now. It’s scary in a different way, but you can say what you want. Unless you’re in government. I think it is a different take. It’s not good and it’s not pleasant, but I think it’s different. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | I noticed…. I’ve read that you said you were introduced to feminism in the late 1960s. You were probably in your 30s at that time. You wrote that you became a feminist virtually overnight. Tell me about that. |
| Linda Nochlin: | I had been in Italy in ‘68, ‘69. I came home and a friend came with all these publications and said, “Do you know about feminism”? It was called the women’s movement. I said, “No.” She said, “Read this.” She left me Off Our Backs and rather the somewhat crude broadsheets of the early feminist movement. I stayed up all night reading and I was a feminist the next day. Certainly I always had been to some degree, but I could see now I could become formally as part of an organization, as part of a movement. Yes, I was a feminist. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | Do you see the movement alive today? |
| Linda Nochlin: | Mm-hmm [affirmative] yes. But, of course, a lot of people I know happen to be feminists. I don’t know how alive it is otherwise. I think it still is. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | It’s interesting. I meet a lot of male feminists, too, which back in the beginning of the movement…. |
| Linda Nochlin: | It would be unheard of. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | It would be unheard of for a man to say he was a feminist. Now there’s many of us who are actually happy to say that. |
| Linda Nochlin: | You think of the Women’s March after the inauguration this year. It was enormous. Enormous. Not every one of those people might be a self-pronounced feminist, but they’re all feminists in the sense that they gathered together to show that they believed in something and were against other things. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | Of course there’s the essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” that you wrote in 1971. I think ARTnews published that? |
| Linda Nochlin: | Yes. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | First of all, tell me about the title. How did you end up with that title? Why have there been no great women artists? |
| Linda Nochlin: | I was at a Vassar graduation the year before and I think … I can’t remember who it was. He had a gallery. He was a well known gallerist. He said, “Linda, I would love to show women in my gallery, but why are there no great women artists?” I started really thinking about it and one thought followed another. It almost wrote itself. It seemed all so hitched together, so logical. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | You address the question in the beginning of the essay about how many great artists there are regardless of their gender, the fact of what actually makes a great artist. Talk a little bit about that. |
| Linda Nochlin: | I refuse to say it’s something inborn, a golden nugget I would say, but artistic greatness, artistic production depends so much on time, place, situation, etc. It was no accident that up through the Renaissance, even the 18th century that artists came in families. Father artists, mother artists. You think of the Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach family, family practice. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | You write in here “The problem lies not so much with some feminist concept of what femininity is, but rather with their misconception shared with the public at large of what art is with the naïve idea that art is the direct personally expression of individual, emotional experience, a translation of personal life into visual terms. Art is almost never that. Great art never is.” |
| Linda Nochlin: | Well that says what I mean. It always takes place within a context, within a setting, certain training, certain standards. What might be considered great art in one period might not be in others. It’s interesting. There’s a certain agreement in the Renaissance. They knew it was Raphael Michelangelo, etc., very little question. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | You also write here, “the fact of the matter is that there have been no supremely great women artists as far as we know.” I’m happy you added that in, “as far as we know,” although there have been many interesting and very good ones who remain insufficiently investigated or appreciated. |
| Linda Nochlin: | I think that’s been corrected to a certain extent today. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | Tell me about the ones who have been discovered or investigated. |
| Linda Nochlin: | I suppose Artemisia Gentileschi would be a primary one. Who else? |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | What about women artists in the latter part of the 20th century or beginning part of the 21st century? |
| Linda Nochlin: | I think women artists have definitely caught up as leaders, as being the interesting ones making art and so on. I’m thinking of somebody like Joan Jonas, for example. I’m thinking of somebody like Louise Bourgeois. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | I was just going to ask you about Louise. |
| Linda Nochlin: | Obviously. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | Judy Pfaff |
| Linda Nochlin: | The list itself is so long. I’m not saying they’re all Michelangelo, but I’m personally not a Michelangelo person. They’re really interesting and dynamic and have changed the way we look at art, which I think is important. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | I guess it’s in part because society has allowed them to some degree to be able to do that. |
| Linda Nochlin: | Yes, of course. They had to fight for it, too. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | Of course. One last quote that I thought was interesting. There’s so much of this essay. I hadn’t read it for years. It’s just so dense. It so wonderful. |
| Linda Nochlin: | It is. I tried to squeeze a lot in. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | You say “most men despite lip service to equality are reluctant to give up the natural order of things in which their advantages are so great. For women, the case is further complicated by the fact that unlike other oppressed groups or castes, men demand of them not only submission, but unqualified affection as well.” |
| Linda Nochlin: | It’s sort of hard. Say in terms of color, nobody demands that black people love and adore and cater to white people. It’s only gender that does that. It’s very confusing if on the one hand there is somebody you love, live with, etc., yet who is part of a group or caste that is really denying you equality and denying you self-expression. It’s confusing to put it mildly. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | As we said, we have made progress…. |
| Linda Nochlin: | I think so. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | But how much progress to do you think that we’ve made? How tough do you think it is for a young woman, 30 years old, starting out today? |
| Linda Nochlin: | I think it’s undeniably better. The conditions are better for a woman succeeding, and a lot of the major artists now certainly are women, but there’s still a boys’ club feeling about certain types of art and certain types of artists. I think you know equality has gone so far and no further maybe. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | It’s interesting when you think about it in the sense that we think women have had the right to vote for 100 years, but still they don’t get paid the same wage. It’s been 135 years since the Emancipation Proclamation has been signed. |
| Linda Nochlin: | No, it isn’t just done by words or by the progress of a few superstars either. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | Switching gears, but also on this one a little bit, obviously you’ve been involved in the academy and artistry for many, many years. What is your sense about the future for people graduating out of a master’s programs or PhD programs and getting jobs in higher education today? What do you think about that? |
| Linda Nochlin: |  I think it’s a difficult market as far as I can see. Although there are now galleries and museums throughout the country. It’s not just a question of the east coast and the west coast and Chicago. I think there is a sort of spreading, or a spread of art which allows for some jobs, but being an artist is tough no matter how you take it. I think it’s getting ahead, finding a gallery, getting a proper amount of publicity, making sure you show. It’s hard. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | What about for scholars, for those getting their PhD about being able to move their careers along? What advice would you have for them? |
| Linda Nochlin: | What advice would I have for them? Be very, very smart. Write a lot. Have strong opinions. Just don’t be a little library worm. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | It seems your strong opinions have done you well for your career. |
| Linda Nochlin: | I wouldn’t know how to not have them if you know what I mean. That’s what I’m about is my opinions. You have to know something. Frankly I know a great deal. There are very good…. I was a very good student, very good. I worked very hard. I really took pains and energy with my research, not just opinions. They have to be based on something. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | Can you think of an opinion that you had out there in some of your writing that you looked at it years later and thought, “I wouldn’t have come to the same conclusion?” |
| Linda Nochlin: | I’m sure there are. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | It’s so interesting how we develop those opinions based upon what we believe at a given time. |
| Linda Nochlin: | Oddly enough I’ve remained more or less consistent. I’ve added some artists in, subtracted some, but the ones that I like are still the ones that I’m interested in. At least many of the issues that I was committed to, I’m still committed to. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | What are you working on now? |
| Linda Nochlin: | I’ve just finished a large book called Misère about the representation about misery in the second half of the 19th century in France and England. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | Wonderful. |
| Linda Nochlin: | That’s at the publisher right now. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | When should we expect to see it? |
| Linda Nochlin: | In the fall I should think. Thames & Hudson as usual.* *Update: Misère is slated for release after Spring 2018. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | Are you excited about it? |
| Linda Nochlin: | Yeah, I am. I laughingly said to my editor, “Are you going to be able to sell a book called Misère?” He said, “Misère by Linda Nochlin, yes.” It was fascinating, really interesting. It pulls together a lot of things I’ve been interested in all along. It’s both new territory, but based on elements that I’ve been interested in for a long time. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | Any nuggets that you want to give away from that that come to mind? |
| Linda Nochlin: | Let me think. There’s been relatively little in investigation of the representation of the poor and oppressed. Middle class Impressionism, etc., upper class before that, religious high-minded themes, battles, just the everyday lives of the poor and “uninteresting,” so to speak, not much setting. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | It’s interesting because that seems like a very timely topic for us. |
| Linda Nochlin: | Exactly I thought of that too. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | As we think of how elections change and how government change and how the education system changes about access, I think it seems.… |
| Linda Nochlin: | Absolutely. It was certainly true in the 19th century, early 20th. I think it’s an interesting book. I hope other people find it interesting. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | I look forward to seeing it. Thank you so much for allowing us here in your home. It was great to chat with you about these things. |
| Linda Nochlin: | Good. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | I look forward to seeing you at another CAA event soon I hope. |
| Linda Nochlin: | I hope so. |
| Hunter O’Hanian: | Thank you. |
| Linda Nochlin: | I would love to. Thank you. |
Books Published by CAA Members
posted by CAA — June 06, 2017
Publishing a book is a major milestone for artists and scholars—browse a list of recent titles below.
Books Published by CAA Members appears every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
June 2017
Jeffrey Abt. Valuing Detroit’s Art Museum: A History of Fiscal Abandonment and Rescue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
Matthew Baigell. The Implacable Urge to Defame: Cartoon Jews in the American Press, 1877–1935 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2017).
Thea Burns. The “Compositiones variae”: A Late Eighth-Century Craftsman’s Technical Treatise Reconsidered (London: Archetype, 2017).
Kim Grant. All about Process: The Theory and Discourse of Modern Artistic Labor (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017).
James Housefield. Playing with Earth and Sky: Astronomy, Geography, and the Art of Marcel Duchamp (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England; Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2016).
Ruth E. Iskin, ed., Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World (New York: Routledge, 2017).
Tirza True Latimer. Eccentric Modernisms: Making Differences in the History of American Art (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).
Chari Pradel. Fabricating the Tenjukoku Shūchō Mandara and Prince Shōtoku’s Afterlives (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2016).
Athena Tacha. Visualizing the Universe: Athena Tacha’s Proposals for Public Art Commissions 1972–2012, ed. Richard E. Spear, introduction by Glenn Harper and Twylene Moyer (Washington, DC: Grayson, 2017).
Getty Supports the CAA-Getty International Program for a Seventh Year
posted by CAA — June 05, 2017
The Getty Foundation has awarded the College Art Association (CAA) a grant to fund the CAA-Getty International Program for a seventh consecutive year. The Foundation’s support will enable CAA to bring twenty international visual-arts professionals to the 106th Annual Conference, taking place February 21-24, 2018 in Los Angeles, CA. Fifteen individuals will be first-time participants in the program and five will be alumni, returning to present papers during the conference. The CAA-Getty International Program provides funds for travel expenses, hotel accommodations, per diems, conference registrations, and one-year CAA memberships to art historians, artists who teach art history, and museum curators. The program will include a one-day preconference colloquium on international issues in art history on February 20, this year to be held at the Getty Center.
The deadline for applications is August 21, 2017. Guidelines and application.
The CAA-Getty International Program was established to increase international participation in CAA and the CAA Annual Conference. The program fosters collaborations between North American art historians, artists, and curators and their international colleagues and introduces visual arts professionals to the unique environments and contexts of practices in different countries.
Since the CAA-Getty International Program’s inception in 2012, ninety scholars have participated in CAA’s Annual Conference. Historically, the majority of international registrants at the conference have come from North America, the United Kingdom, and Western European countries. The CAA-Getty International Program has greatly diversified attendance, adding scholars from Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, Africa, Asia, Southeast Asia, Caribbean countries, and South America. The majority of the participants teach art history (or visual studies, art theory, or architectural history) at the university level; others are museum curators or researchers.
Earlier this year, CAA organized a reunion to celebrate five successful years of the CAA-Getty International Program. Twenty alumni were selected to present papers at the Annual Conference in New York, held February 15-18, 2017. Organized into four sessions about international topics in art history, these Global Conversations were chaired by distinguished scholars from the United States and featured presentations by the CAA-Getty alumni.
Read Global Conversations: 20 Papers from the 2017 CAA-Getty Alumni
One measure of the program’s success is the remarkable number of international collaborations that have ensued, including an ongoing study of similarities and differences in the history of art among Eastern European countries and South Africa, attendance at other international conferences, publications in international journals, and participation in panels and sessions at subsequent CAA Annual Conferences. Former grant recipients have become ambassadors of CAA in their countries, sharing knowledge gained at the Annual Conference with their colleagues at home. The value of attending a CAA Annual Conference as a participant in the CAA-Getty International Program was succinctly summarized by alumnus Nazar Kozak, Senior Researcher, Department of Art Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine “To put it simply, I understood that I can become part of a global scholarly community. I felt like I belong here.”
About CAA
The College Art Association is the world’s largest professional association for artists, art historians, designers, arts professionals, and arts organizations. CAA serves as an advocate and a resource for individuals and institutions nationally and internationally by offering forums to discuss the latest developments in the visual arts and art history through its Annual Conference, publications, exhibitions, website, and other programs, services, and events. CAA focuses on a wide range of advocacy issues, including education in the arts, freedom of expression, intellectual-property rights, cultural heritage and preservation, workforce topics in universities and museums, and access to networked information technologies. Representing its members’ professional needs since 1911, CAA is committed to the highest professional and ethical standards of scholarship, creativity, criticism, and teaching.
About the Getty Foundation
The Getty Foundation fulfills the philanthropic mission of the Getty Trust by supporting individuals and institutions committed to advancing the greater understanding and preservation of the visual arts in Los Angeles and throughout the world. Through strategic grant initiatives, it strengthens art history as a global discipline, promotes the interdisciplinary practice of conservation, increases access to museum and archival collections, and develops current and future leaders in the visual arts. It carries out its work in collaboration with the other Getty Programs to ensure that they individually and collectively achieve maximum effect.
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — June 02, 2017
Rachel Goshgarian visits Court and Cosmos: The Great Age of the Seljuqs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As “the first major exhibition on the Seljuqs in the United States,” the show “sets out to elucidate how the orders of this world and the next were conceptualized and represented in the Seljuq Empire and its successor states,” and, “to a certain extent,” the curators “delivered.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Amy Chun Kim reads They Shall Not Have Me: The Capture, Forced Labor, and Escape of a French Prisoner in World War II, the artist Jean Hélion’s account of his imprisonment and escape from German camps. His “experience of the concrete as a camp inmate consolidated an aesthetic trajectory that was already in motion,” and this “vivid portrait” is “a stylistic testimony to this rejection of abstraction.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Agata A. Gomółka reviews Gretchen E. Henderson’s Ugliness: A Cultural History. The author “ventures on a critical journey through the history of ugliness, viewing the concept through the lens of culture and corporeality” and “packs an abundance of fascinating case studies and thought-provoking insights into a stimulating conceptual framework.” It is a “highly readable, erudite, and compelling account.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Rebecca Uchill is the New Web Editor for Art Journal Open
posted by CAA — June 01, 2017
Rebecca Uchill
CAA’s president, Suzanne Preston Blier, has appointed Rebecca Uchill as the new web editor for Art Journal Open, endorsing the recommendation of the editorial board of Art Journal. Uchill, who currently is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Art, Science, and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joins the College of Visual and Performing Arts at UMass Dartmouth in September as a full-time lecturer. Uchill’s three-year term for Art Journal Open commences on July 1, 2017; she succeeds inaugural web editor Gloria Sutton, assistant professor of contemporary art history and new media at Northeastern University. During her term, Uchill will be responsible for commissioning and vetting content for the website, including artist projects and essays. She will serve on the Art Journal editorial board.
Uchill is the coeditor (with Caroline A. Jones and David Mather) of Experience: Culture, Cognition, and the Common Sense (MIT Press, 2016), as well as curator of the artist entries for the volume. She organizes interdisciplinary events and programs, including the recent “Being Material” symposium at MIT and a series of curatorial experiments with the collaborative Experience Economies. Uchill has published in journals such as Future Anterior, Museum and Curatorial Studies Review, Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation, and Journal of Curatorial Studies. She has curated exhibitions at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Mass MoCA. Uchill earned her PhD in history, theory, and criticism of art at MIT in 2015.
CAA welcomes Rebecca Uchill to Art Journal Open.
Art Journal Open welcomes proposals for artists’ projects, critical writing, and other contributions, on a rolling basis. Please see the submission guidelines here. Submissions are accepted via e-mail to art.journal.open@collegeart.org.
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — May 26, 2017
Sarah R. Cohen reads On Display: Henrietta Maria and the Materials of Magnificence at the Stuart Court by Erin Griffey. In this “meticulously researched” and “densely detailed” volume, the author argues that “early modern sovereigns, especially powerful woman such as Queen Henrietta Maria of England, projected their authority through the specific and calculated allure of their material luxuries.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Paisid Aramphongphan reviews Wade Guyton’s One Month Ago, an artist’s book featuring the transposed contents of a Tumblr blog consisting “mainly of photographs of a variety of gay kink scenes.” The reviewer is “inclined to read the book as Guyton’s rebuke to the line of criticism that positions him as basking in the limelight without making a difference in the privileged art world of abstract paintings.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Ellis Dullaart discusses Confronting the Golden Age: Imitation and Innovation in Dutch Genre Painting, 1680–1750 by Junko Aono. The author aims “to investigate how artists working in the waning light of the Golden Age dealt with the illustrious artistic past,” and the book “delivers important insights” and “has the potential to revive interest in and appreciation for a long-neglected period in Dutch art history.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Betsy Fahlman examines the exhibition catalogue A Place in the Sun: The Southwest Paintings of Walter Ufer and E. Martin Hennings, edited by Thomas Brent Smith. Meticulously researched and “handsomely produced,” the volume “accomplishes the authors’ intention to restore these figures as artists of exceptional talent who were engaged with the significant art and historical issues of the day.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
CAA Statement on May 23, 2017 Trump Proposed Budget
posted by CAA — May 23, 2017
In early May, we recognized that your advocacy matters. Calls, letters, and visits from our members and arts and humanities supporters changed the fate of the NEA, the NEH, and the CPB for the remainder of the 2017 fiscal year. The federal agencies even got a little bump in funding.
With the release of the more detailed White House FY2018 budget this morning, we now know that we at CAA, our members, and advocates for the arts and humanities must renew our efforts to fund these agencies through another fiscal year.
The proposed budget put forth by the White House is nothing short of a gutting of federal support for the arts and humanities. The proposed budget asks for $29 million for the NEA, $30.45 million for the CPB, and $42 million for the NEH. These sums are intended as wind-down amounts resulting in the shuttering of the agencies in 2019. Yet, these are only three agencies among a long list facing cuts under the Trump FY2018 budget. Arts education through the Department of Education is zeroed out and the IMLS would see a 90-percent drop in funding, from $231 million to 23 million in FY2018. Social services agencies assisting the financially insecure are some of the hardest hit with cuts.
Though these numbers are disheartening, we do know from our advocacy efforts on Capital Hill this year that the arts and humanities garner bipartisan support. Many of our elected officials understand the importance of these programs. They see the impact in their own districts through the work of non-profits, higher education institutions, and others who receive grants from the federal agencies.
But the fight is far from over.
Once again, it is imperative that all those who have been touched by the arts and humanities renew the fight to keep these agencies alive and thriving. We urge our members and supporters to make contact with your local representative and tell them the NEA, NEH, and CPB are an integral part of your lives and society.
If you would like to hear what Holly Hughes, one of the NEA Four thinks about the rationale for defunding the NEA, click here.
Use our toolkit to contact your local representative.
Read our March 16, 2017 Statement on the FY2018 skinny budget.
CAA Amicus Brief on Trump’s Travel Ban
posted by CAA — May 22, 2017
CAA added its name to two amicus briefs in opposition to the United States president’s travel ban, officially known as Executive Order 13,780. We joined the Association of Art Museum Directors and American Alliance of Museums, along with ninety-four art museums. The cases are: International Refugee Assistant Project v. Donald J. Trump in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit; and State of Hawaii and Ismail Elshikh v. Donald J. Trump in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
The brief argues that the travel ban inhibits the work of museums. “The negative effects of the Order are already being felt,” the document reads, “as several museums have postponed or canceled future exhibitions that require foreign artists, lenders, collectors, curators, scholars, couriers, and others whose ability to contribute can no longer be assured.” Specific examples include the Cleveland Museum of Art, which canceled a music performance, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which has doubts about securing loans for an exhibition of Persian art.
We consider joining this amicus brief as inherent to our advocacy efforts and our international reach at CAA. The travel ban impacts the international attendees of our Annual Conference, it impinges on the flow of information and discussion between colleagues, and it harms the practice of research more broadly.
CAA Fair-Use Events in Los Angeles and Saint Louis
posted by CAA — May 19, 2017
A scene from the fair-use workshop at the UCLA Library (photograph by Sharon E. Farb)
On May 5, 2017, CAA hosted “Fair Use and the Visual Arts,” a presentation and panel discussion at the UCLA Library. The event was made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Speakers on the panel included Peter Jaszi, the lead investigator on the CAA Code of Best Practices in Fair Use in the Visual Arts and Professor at American University Washington College of Law in the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, and Janet Landay, Program Manager of the Fair Use Initiative at CAA. The pair, who have given presentations across the U.S. and internationally as part of the CAA Fair Use Initiative, talked about why it was important for CAA to undertake the project, their methodology, and the resulting Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts.
The second half of the event was devoted to a Q&A with the audience of approximately fifty-five people. Question topics ranged from addressing the issue of how the size at which an illustration is produced impacts fair use to indicating in a caption or illustration credits section that I am claiming fair use in the reproduction of an illustration.
A second discussion on CAA’s Fair Use Initiative took place at the American Alliance of Museum’s 2017 Annual Meeting and MuseumExpo in Saint Louis, Missouri. The panel discussion, titled “Copyrighted Material in the Museum: A Path to Fair Use,” took place on May 9. The panel brought together esteemed colleagues from the museum and publishing worlds and was comprised of Patricia Fidler, publisher of art and architecture at Yale University Press; Anne Collins Goodyear, codirector of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art; Judy Metro, editor in chief for the National Gallery of Art; and Joseph Newland, director of publishing for the Menil Collection. Hunter O’Hanian, CAA executive director, was the chair and moderator.
A presenter at AAM’s annual meeting discussed Andrea Wallace’s Still Life Pixel + Metadata Dress (photograph by Anne Young)
About seventy-five to one hundred people attended the standing-room only session and discussion revolved around fair-use issues for museums who want to use their own materials: catalogues, brochures, websites—even wall texts. A key takeaway from the session: museum representatives need to maintain good relations with donor and lenders, and getting approval from their own legal counsel, who tend to approach these matters with caution.
Later in the day Hunter O’Hanian spoke to faculty and students in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in Saint Louis.
Learn more about the CAA Fair Use Initiative
Learn more about the 106th CAA Annual Conference in Los Angeles, February 21-24, 2018
GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS 2017
posted by CAA — May 18, 2017
2017 CAA-Getty International Program Reunion Participants
Front row, left to right: Ana Mannarino (Brazil); Ding Ning (China); Sarena Abdullah (Malaysia); Rosa Gabriella Gonçalves (Brazil); Abiodun Akande (Nigeria); Sandra Uskokovic (Croatia); Hugues Heuman Tchana (Cameroon); Parul Mukerji (India); Ceren Ozpinar (Turkey); Irena Kossowska (Poland)
Second row, left to right: Nazar Kozak (Ukraine); Georgina Gluzman (Argentina); Shao Yiyang (China); Ljerka Dulibic (Croatia); Khademul Haque (Bangladesh); Janet Landay (CAA Program Director, USA); Richard Gregor (Slovakia); Davor Dzalto (Serbia); Portia Malatje (South Africa); Cristian Nae (Romania); Laris Boric (Croatia)
The following papers on international topics in art history were presented at four sessions during the 2017 Annual Conference. Organized to commemorate five years of the CAA-Getty International Program, each session includes five alumni scholars from around the world, joined by a distinguished scholar from the United States. The papers can be read in their entirety at the links below.
GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS I
Unsettling the Discipline: Decolonizing the Curriculum
Chair: Michael Ann Holly, Clark Art Institute
Decolonizing the Curriculum: Synthesizing “Multiple Consciousness” into the Art History Curricula of Nigeria and Ghana
Abiodun Akande, Emmanuel Alayande College of Education Oyo, Nigeria
The Emancipatory Potential of Karaman’s Concept of “Peripheral Art”: Still Operative?
Laris Borić, University of Zadar, Croatia
“Does this really matter?” Art History, Feminism, and Peripheral Positions
Georgina Gluzman, Universidad de San Andrés, Argentina
Decolonizing in the Age of Globalization: Experience of a Bangladeshi Art Historian
AKM Khademul Haque, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh
Dangers of Eurocentrism and the Need to Indigenize African and Grassfields Histories
Hugues Heumen Tchana, Higher Institute of the Sahel, University of Maroua, Cameroon
GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS II
Dominant Ideologies and Political Trauma: Can Art History Be Reborn?
Chair: Frederick M. Asher, University of Minnesota
After the Wall: Cultural Trauma and Methodological Challenges in Polish Art History
Irena Kossowska, Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences/Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland
How My Art History Was Reborn
Nazar Kozak, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
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Portia Malatjie, Goldsmiths, University of London (South Africa)
Visible and Invisible: How Art History Can Be Reborn from Dominant Ideology in China
Shao Yiyang, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China
“Reconstructing” Art History
Sandra Uskoković, University of Dubrovnik, Croatia
GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS III
The Trouble with (The Term) Art
Chair: Mary Miller, Yale University
SENI MODEN as an Evolving Term and Practice in Malaysian Art
Sarena Abdullah, School of the Arts, Universiti Sains Malaysia
“When Did Beauty Become So F…n’ Ugly?” Troubles with Art and Its Functions
Davor Džalto, The Institute for the Study of Culture and Christianity, Belgrade/American Academy in Rome (Serbia)
Short Introduction on Applying the “Homonymic Curtain” to Recent Exhibitions
Richard Gregor, Trnava University, Slovakia
Art History and Cultural Hegemony in Brazil: the Risks of Misunderstanding Indigenous Art and Colonial Art
Ana Mannarino, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Why Is the Miniature Painting Not History?
Ceren Özpınar, University of Sussex (Turkey)
GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS IV
Transnational Collaborations and Interdisciplinarity: Generating New Knowledge
Chair: David J. Roxburgh, Harvard University
Tracing the Transfer of Cultural Objects/Challenging the Burdens of the Past
Ljerka Dulibic, Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Croatia
Aby Warburg and the Science Without a Name
Rosa Gabriella de Castro Gonçalves, Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil
Decolonizing Mimesis: Mad Metaphors and Slippery Similarities in a Classical Sanskrit Text on Painting
Parul Dave Mukherji, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
Decolonizing Cartography? Visual Culture and the Poetics of Space in Critical Contemporary Art
Cristian-Emil Nae, George Enescu National University of Arts, Romania
Chinese Blue-and-White Porcelain in Western Painting
Ding Ning, Peking University, China