CAA News Today
Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members
posted by CAA — February 15, 2017
Check out details on recent shows organized by CAA members who are also curators.
Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members is published 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.
February 2017
Susan Ball points to a Brett Weston photographSusan Ball. Towards Abstraction, 1940–1985: Brett Weston Photographs from the Bruce Museum Collection. Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut, November 5, 2016–February 12, 2017.
Honoré Daumier, Le Nouveau St. Sébastien. Vierge et martyr. from the series Actualités, 1849, lithograph on newsprint. Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, gift of William H. Helfand (artwork in the public domain; photograph by Peter Jacobs)Christine Giviskos. Toutes Les Nouvelles – All the News: Current Events in Nineteenth-Century French Prints. Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, January 21–July 30, 2017.
Helen Miranda Wilson, The Cool Days of Early Spring, January 4, 2009, oil on panel. Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, gift of Leonard Rosenberg and Colombe Nicholas (artwork © Helen Miranda Wilson; photograph by Peter Jacobs)Donna Gustafson. Guerrilla (and Other) Girls: Art/Activism/Attitude. Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, February 4–July 30, 2017.
Books Published by CAA Members
posted by CAA — February 15, 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.
February 2017
Mónica Amor. Theories of the Nonobject: Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela 1944–1969 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).
Robert Craig Bunch. The Art of Found Objects: Interviews with Texas Artists (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2016).
Tal Dekel. Transnational Identities: Women, Art, and Migration in Contemporary Israel (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016).
Georgina G. Gluzman. Trazos invisibles. Mujeres artistas en Buenos Aires (1890–1923) (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2016).
Sabine T. Kriebel and Andrés Mario Zervigón, eds. Photography and Doubt (New York: Routledge, 2017).
John Lear. Picturing the Proletariat: Artists and Labor in Revolutionary Mexico, 1908–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017).
Jeff Rosen. Julia Margaret Cameron’s “Fancy Subjects”: Photographic Allegories of Victorian Identity and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).
Maureen G. Shanahan and Ana María Reyes, eds. Simón Bolívar: Travels and Transformations of a Cultural Icon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016).
Lawrence Waldron. Handbook of Ceramic Animal Symbols in the Ancient Lesser Antilles (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016).
Lloyd Engelbrech: In Memoriam
posted by CAA — February 06, 2017
Professor Emeritus, Dr. Lloyd Engelbrecht (1927–2016), died peacefully in his sleep in hospice on New Year’s Eve after battling neuroendocrine cancer for half a year. He was a beloved faculty member of the Art History program at the University of Cincinnati, 1980–2001, where he taught the history of design, and modern art and architecture, and mentored twenty-four M.A. advisees.
He was the author of the first comprehensive, fully-documented biography of László Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Mentor to Modernism (Flying Trapeze Press, 2009) and, with his wife June Engelbrecht, the award-winning biography, Henry C. Trost, Architect of the Southwest (El Paso Library Association, 1981). Together, they also created a catalogue raisonné of the work of Trost and his family firm of Trost & Trost. Additionally, Engelbrecht published essays in Taken by Design: Photographs from the Institute of Design, 1937–1971 (U of Chicago Press, 2002), Best of Triglyph (Arizona State U Press, 2002), The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910-1940 (U of Chicago Press, 1990), and 50 Jahre New Bauhaus (Bauhaus-Archiv, 1987). Recently, he was working on a biography of Chicago’s first Modernist painter, Rudolph Weisenborn (1881–1974). Engelbrecht’s publications concerned the influence of the German Bauhaus in the U.S., and he helped mount exhibitions in both American and European museums.
Engelbrecht’s degrees were AB in General Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1950; MS, Library Science, Columbia University, 1951; and an interdisciplinary doctorate from the Committee on History of Culture at the University of Chicago, University of Chicago, 1973. Engelbrecht received grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Engelbrecht was a remarkably kind, generous, and positive man who will be missed by his two daughters, Khadija Engelbrecht Fouad and Julie Rowlands, and their husbands, Aladdin Fouad and David Rowlands, four grandchildren, Omar Fouad, Maryam Fouad, Ibrahim Fouad, and Hussain Fouad, and numerous friends, as well as many devoted former students. He was predeceased by his wife June-Marie Fink Engelbrecht.
CAA Statement on Immigration Ban
posted by CAA — February 01, 2017
The College Art Association (CAA), the largest professional group for artists and art historians in the United States, strongly condemns and expresses its grave concern about the recent presidential executive order aimed at limiting the movement of members of CAA and the broader community of arts professionals who fall under the selective set of criteria for national status or ethnic affiliation.
CAA has counted international scholars and artists among its members for many years. Committed to the common purpose of understanding the visual arts in all its forms, professionals throughout the world have enriched CAA’s community by adding diverse perspectives to the study, making, and teaching of art. With funding in recent years from the Getty Foundation to support travel and programs for scholars and curators from Africa, Latin America, Russia and Eastern Europe, and Asia, the association now includes members from seventy countries. More than ten percent of our individual members are international. CAA has counted international scholars and artists among its members since the earliest years of its existence. The roots of CAA’s present-day international program stemmed from a desire to assist European refugees in the 1930s to support personal safety as well as academic and artistic freedom. During that decade, CAA had a “foreign membership” category; as art historians fled Hitler’s Europe, CAA ran a lecture bureau for refugee scholars that created speaking engagements for them at institutions throughout the United States.
The recently announced ban on travel to the United States for residents of seven predominantly Muslim countries not only goes against the inclusive, secular underpinnings of American democracy, it stifles the open access to scholarship and art upon which our work is founded. The executive order goes against our professional and scholarly commitment to diversity, the global exchange of ideas, and the respect for difference. The contribution of immigrants, foreign nationals, and people of all cultural backgrounds greatly strengthens our intellectual and creative world. Further, we believe the executive order law challenges the values at the heart of the US Constitution’s protections on speech and association as well as our national commitment to democratic process for all.
Turning our backs on refugees and closing our borders selectively stifles creative and intellectual work in addition to its very real impact on peoples’ daily lives. We call on our public officials to thwart this attempt to seemingly preserve our own safety at the expense of those who are vulnerable and who also contribute so much.
Without question, CAA welcomes all members and non-members to our upcoming Annual Conference to discuss and debate what constitutes a thriving artistic and intellectual society. Such openness is essential to our mission. We are committed through dialogue and action to help any CAA members who are affected by this policy. To this end, the association and the Board of Directors will continue to monitor and respond to policies related to this order as well as pressure for its immediate repeal.
 Suzanne Preston Blier President |
 Hunter O’Hanian Executive Director Chief Executive Officer |
myCAA Post-it Wall
posted by CAA — January 20, 2017
The myCAA Post-it Wall, located near registration on the Hilton’s second floor, is where attendees can post their notes, scribbles, messages, heartfelt missives, and anything else they feel like sharing on a myCAA Post-it. The myCAA Post-it pads will be easy to find and pick up around the conference. Get yours at CAA’s booth in the Book and Trade Fair, in the registration booth, or at the hospitality booth.
Hospitality Booth
posted by CAA — January 19, 2017
At the New York conference you will find a hospitality booth, where CAA staff and conference help will be stationed to answer questions about sessions and the Book and Trade Fair, or for directions to the restrooms, the lactation room, or the quiet room. Located on the second floor of the Hilton near the registration area, the hospitality booth is intended to make CAA members feel welcome at the conference. The CAA team will also be filming interviews with members at the hospitality booth.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks January 2017
posted by CAA — January 16, 2017
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
January 2017
The Future is Female
21c Museum Hotel
700 West Main Street, Louisville, Kentucky
November 2016–May 2017
The Future is Female at the Louisville, KY, 21c Museum Hotel, features feminist art from the 21c collection, including painting, video, photography, and installation. Works on view include pieces by Carrie Mae Weems, Jenny Holzer, Nandipha Mntambo, Kiki Smith, and Frances Goodman, among many others. “Gleaming acrylic fingernails glued into patterned, reptilian forms that emerge from the wall; barnacles and ceramic teeth encrusted in life-size human figures in decay; cement seeping through lace and paint; haunting words about the present overlaid on imagery of the past: surface tension abounds in this exploration of contemporary feminist art.”
Curated by Alice Gray Stites, chief curator and museum director, the exhibition fuses celebration and critique through engaging and evocative art. In Alison Saar’s work on view, Hades D.W.P., five glass jars are filled with water to varying levels. Each jar is “tagged with lines of poetry, their surfaces etched with figures that float between life and death.” While the work hints the water is meant for drinking, its toxic colors indicate otherwise, alluding to the drinking water disaster in Flint, Michigan.
Pat Oleszko: Fool for Thought
Women’s Studies Research Center/Kniznick Gallery
Brandeis University, Epstein Building, 515 South Street, Waltham, MA
November 21, 2016–March 3, 2017
The visual and performance artist Pat Oleszko brings her signature style to the Kniznick Gallery, which presents an exhibition of her costumes, inflatables, videos, and props. “With elaborate handmade costumes and props, Oleszko utilizes the body as armature for ideas in an array of lampoons that call her audience to action.” Through humor and the absurd, Oleszko touches on issues from the personal to the political. Fool for Thought highlights her performances, including Hello Folly: The Floes & Cons of Arctic Drilling, Oldiloks and the Bewares, Stalking Walking Topiary, and the Pat and the Hats. Self-identified as the Fool in question and the questioning Fool, Oleszko fans the flames with rousing absurdity and maintains that she who laughs, lasts.
The exhibition also includes several events, including an artist’s lecture with Oleszko and a reception on January 25 and a lecture on February 2 with Barbara Bodenhorn. The lecture will focus on the combination of art and science as it seeks to engage young people in ecologically vulnerable regions.
A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt
tBrooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York
Starting December 15, 2016
Through new research and scholarship, the Egyptian artifacts in A Woman’s Afterlife explore the gender transformation of deceased women and the difference between male and female access to the afterlife. The exhibition is part of A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum, a yearlong project celebrating a decade of feminist thinking at the institution.
“Egyptian medicine taught that a woman, once in her tomb, faced a biological barrier to rebirth. Because the ancient Egyptians believed that in human reproduction it was the man who created the fetus, transferring it to the woman during intercourse, rebirth was impossible for a woman alone.” It was the priest’s role to magically transform the woman’s mummy into a man, thus creating a fetus. This was accomplished through incanted spells with masculine pronouns, graphic representations of those spells on the coffin, and adding red skin—a color assigned to men. The centerpiece, a painted coffin and mask of Weretwahset, exemplifies these steps and depicts her fleeting transformation from female to male.
The exhibition was sparked by researched published by the scholars Kathlyn M. Cooney (University of California, Los Angeles), Heather McCarthy (New York University), Gay Robins (Emory University), and Ann Macy Roth (New York University). “This research has led to a better understanding of the logic behind this unexpected gender transformation by discovering that women were intentionally represented with red skin and with masculine pronouns. Previously, these representations were regarded as mere mistakes,” said Edward Bleiberg, curator of Egyptian art. “Feminism has changed the questions we ask of ancient history as well as the answers we offer. This is a striking example of how feminism has provided a basis for new scholarship that reinterprets an ancient puzzle.”
Catalina Schliebener: Growing Sideways
Bureau of General Services—Queer Division
208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York
Open until January 22, 2017
The Bureau of General Services Queer Division presents Growing Sideways, an exhibition of new work by the Buenos Aires–based Chilean artist Catalina Schliebener (b. Santiago, 1980). Organized by the independent curator John Chaich, the exhibition takes its title—and somewhat its conceptual and formal inspiration—from the queer scholar Kathryn Stockton Bond’s notion that rather than the normative view of “growing up,” the nonstraight child grows sideways through life-long, lateral interactions between childhood motivations and adult identifications, formed by sly intentions, blurred chronologies, and animalistic attachments.
Growing Sideways presents over five dozen drawings on collage that frame the space and culminate in a floor-to-ceiling mural, growing across two- and three-dimensional surfaces and creating a disjointed narrative exploring gender formation and erotic curiosity through Schiebener’s combination of cuttings from found children’s books with abstract drawings and vinyl mural recalling organic sensual shapes in nature and the body. An artist-curated selection of books accompanies the site-specific installation.
A dialogue with the artist, Chaich, and Kris Grey will take place on January 12, 2017, at 7:00 PM.
On Feminism
Aperture #225 (Winter 2016)
Aperture’s winter issue has focused “On Feminism.” In a moment that the very idea of gender is central to local and global conversations about equality, this approach arrives at a right moment to address the power and influence that women hold on the stage of the art world and beyond.
This issue focuses on intergenerational dialogues, debates, and strategies of feminism in photography, acknowledging the immense contributions by artists whose work articulates or interrogates representations of women in media and society. “On Feminism” features include a lively roundtable with curators from Paris and New York on modernist photographers between the wars, Nancy Princenthal on the feminist avant-garde of the 1970s, Eva Díaz on protest and visual politics, Laura Guy on lesbian erotica as critical rebellion, Eva Respini on abstraction, Julia Bryan-Wilson on visions of trans feminism, and a conversation with Renée Cox about black feminist icons, plus contributions from Martha Rosler and Maria Nicolacopoulou, among others, as well as portfolios by Farah Al Qasimi, Jennifer Blessing, Zackary Drucker, Catherine Morris, A. L. Steiner, Zanele Muholi, Yurie Nagashima, Elle Pérez, Laurie Simmons, Cosey Fanni Tutti, and Gillian Wearing.
The issue’s contents are organized in two main sections that underscores how photography has shaped feminism as much as how feminism has shaped photography. Use #OnFeminism to join the conversation on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Nairy Baghramian: Déformation Professionnelle
S.M.A.K.
Jan Hoetplein 1, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
November 26, 2016–February 19, 2017
S.M.A.K. presents Déformation Professionnelle, a solo exhibition by influential Iranian sculptor Nairy Baghramian. Born in 1971 in Isfahan, Iran, Baghramian is currently living and working in Berlin. She has become internationally known for her contextual approach to exhibition-making via sculpture and photography. Focusing in a site-responsive practice, her works explore the body and its supportive functions.
Déformation Professionnelle is a new production which builds on eighteen works in the artist’s oeuvre from 1999 to 2016. Baghramian alludes to existing work from discarded ideas to working material. In the artist’ words, she is “surveying the survey.” This body of work formulates fundamental questions about progress and economy, while interrogating what happens when something ceases to exist, and how something new comes into being.
The exhibition includes several large-scale works such as Class Reunion (2008), Retainer (2012), and French Curve (2014). Both inside and outside the museum,the display evidences the artist complex engagement with the transformation and consequent deformation of form, language, and meaning in its translation from one series into the other.
Nairy Baghramian | Déformation Professionnelle is organized by S.M.A.K. and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where the exhibition will travel in October 2017.
Affiliated Society News for January 2017
posted by CAA — January 15, 2017
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries
The Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) welcomes a new board member, Jamaal B. Sheats. Sheats is the director and curator of the Fisk University Galleries and assistant professor in the Fisk University Art Department. He has simultaneously maintained a strong and consistent exhibition record for nearly fifteen years in galleries across the nation and abroad. Most recently, Sheats curated Carl Van Vechten: Depth of Field; Selections from the Fisk University Galleries and the John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library Collection and Origins of Influence: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Modern Art at the Carl Van Vechten Art Gallery at Fisk University. He also completed a commission for the National Museum of African American Music. In 2015, Sheats organized the exhibition Topography at Tinney Contemporary Art Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee.
Sheats was commissioned to create Eight Octives for Music City Center in 2013. In addition to his appointments at Fisk, active art-making, exhibitions, and curatorial projects, he is the owner of Sheats Repoussé and the Charlotte Art Project. He continues to receive accolades for his work. In 2016 his exhibitions Origins of Influence and Topography were voted by the editors of the Nashville Scene as “Best Art Comeback” and “Best Group Exhibit,” respectively. Sheats has also been featured in the Boston Globe, the New York Times, Numbers, and Nashville Arts Magazine, as well as several other arts journals, newspapers, and magazines.
To support his commitment to the arts and art education, Sheats is active in the arts community and holds positions on the Frist Center for the Arts Education Council, the “To Share a Legacy” HBCU Alliance, the Nashville Conference on African-American History Culture planning committee, and the “Plan to Play” Steering Committee for the Metro Parks and Recreation. He is a board member of the Arts and Business Council also.
Sheats obtained his BA degree in art from Fisk University and an MFA degree with a concentration in studio art from the School of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, and Tufts University, where he also completed a postgraduate teaching fellowship. Sheat was a teaching artist-in-residence at the Nashville Public Library.
View the complete list of AAMG board members.
Association of Art Historians
The Association of Art Historians’ (AAH) 2017 annual conference and art-book fair will take place April 6–8, 2017, at Loughborough University. The keynote speakers are: Amelia Jones, Robert A. Day Professor in Art and Design and Vice Dean of Critical Studies at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who will speak on “Intimate Relations: Queer Performance in Art History”; and Mark Hallett, director of studies at the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art, who will address “Interactive Landscapes: From Thomas Gainsborough to George Shaw.”
The conference will celebrate the expansive spectrum of histories, theories, and practices that characterize art-historical research today. Internationally, the field of art history is eclectic and inclusive, reaching across geopolitical, cultural, and disciplinary divides to extend an understanding of the visual and material culture of many diverse periods and places. Loughborough University is engaged with art history, contemporary practice, and visual culture, linking arts-based research with advances in design, technology, media, and communication, centered on the development of more sustainable and equitable global communities. Full details and register information can be found on the AAH website.
New Media Caucus
The New Media Caucus (NMC) will be sponsoring a series of programs during CAA’s upcoming 2017 Annual Conference. Programs include panels, the annual showcase, and a membership business meeting where important news about NMC will be announced. More information can be found online.
The annual NMC business meeting will take place on Thursday, February 16, 1:30–3:00 PM. All members are invited. We will gather to discuss new developments and initiatives for the growth of our organization. Next is NMC’s panel, “Other Media: Decolonizing Practices and Cyborg Ontologies,” to be held 3:30–5:00 PM. The session will be followed at 7:00 PM with the NMC showcase in the Lang Auditorium at Hunter College, Main Campus, 695 Park Ave at 68th Street, New York, NY 10065. The showcase is a highlight of NMC’s events at CAA and will feature presentations by twenty new media artists who will talk about their current research. The showcase is followed by a public reception. On Friday, February 17, NMC has scheduled three events in the CAA Media Lounge: “Roundtable: New Media Futures” at 10:30 AM; “Game Studies at 20” at 1:30 PM; and “Between Biology and Art” at 3:30 PM.
Renaissance Society of America
The Renaissance Society of America (RSA) will hold its sixty-third annual meeting at the Palmer House Hilton Hotel in Chicago from March 30 to April 1, 2017. Some two hundred art-history sessions are featured in the program, as well as a plenary lecture by Paul Hills, professor emeritus at the Courtauld Institute of Art, taking place on Saturday, April 1, at noon. The conference program is available online, as well as information about fees and other practicalities.
Meanwhile, the society is sponsoring a session on “Early Modern Senses and Spaces” at the CAA Annual Conference in New York, scheduled for Wednesday, February 15, at 10:30 AM in Sutton Parlor South, 2nd Floor. RSA’s executive director plans to attend and hopes to see many RSA and CAA members there.
RSA offers numerous fellowships for art historians, including Samuel H. Kress Research Library Fellowships, Samuel H. Kress Mid-Career Research and Publication Fellowships in Renaissance Art History, the RSA-Kress Carlo Pedretti Fellowship in Leonardo da Vinci Studies, and our own RSA Fellowships. The next deadline for applications will be in fall 2017.
The winter 2016 issue of Renaissance Quarterly (vol. 69, no. 4) includes an article on “Vicenzo Danti’s Deceits,” coauthored by Michael Cole and Diletta Gamberini.
RSA is pleased to announce that James Shulman, senior fellow at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and former president of Artstor, has joined RSA’s executive board in July 2016 as a counselor.
Society for Photographic Education
Registration is open for the Society for Photographic Education’s (SPE) fifty-fourth national conference, “Family Values,” taking place March 9–12, 2017, in Orlando, Florida. Connect with artists, educators, and photographers from around the world for programming that will fuel your creativity—four days of presentations, industry seminars, and critiques to engage you! Explore an exhibits fair featuring the latest equipment, processes, publications, and photography/media schools. Participate in one-on-one portfolio critiques and informal portfolio sharing, and take advantage of student volunteer opportunities to receive a full rebate on admission. Other highlights include a print raffle, a silent auction, mentoring sessions, film screenings, exhibitions, receptions, a dance party, and more! The guest speakers are Renee Cox, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Jerry Uelsmann. Preview the conference schedule and register online. Preregistration ends on February 17, 2017. Don’t wait, register today!
Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture
Members of the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) took an active part in the forty-eighth convention of the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Washington, DC, organizing several panels and roundtable discussions. At the membership meeting held during the convention, matters of importance to the life of the organization were discussed, such as the upcoming conference in Venice in October 2017; possible replacement of a listserv communication platform with a network-based one; reelection of officers; and distribution of prizes and awards.
At CAA’s Annual Conference in February 2017, SHERA will sponsor the following double session: “Emerging Scholars: Politics and the Collective in East European and Russian Art: Part I,” taking place on Wednesday, February 15, 2017, at 10:30 AM in West Ballroom, 3rd Floor; and “Emerging Scholars: Russian Artists and International Communities: Part II,” to be held on Friday, February 17, 2017, at 8:30 AM in Sutton Parlor South, 2nd Floor. Both sessions will be chaired by Alice Isabella Sullivan, a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Visual Resources Association
The Visual Resources Association (VRA) has opened registration for its thirty-fourth annual conference, to be held March 28–April 1, 2017, in Louisville, Kentucky. Early-bird rates are good through February 28. Registration will continue online at the full rate until March 17, then continue onsite the week of the conference. Current members will be prompted to log in with MemberClicks ID-password through the registration form, while nonmembers will have the opportunity to join or register through the same single form. The payment structure for workshops is new: one workshop is included in the registration fee, and any additional workshops are $15 each. You can submit multiple conference registration forms. This may be helpful if using multiple forms of payment (institutional credit card for registration and personal card for tours, for example).
Check the conference schedule for event details and updates. Workshops and tours fill up fast and are on a first-come, first-served basis. Once the enrollment limits are reached, registration for them closes. If there is something you are really interested in, it is best to act early. Contact VRA’s secretary, Jasmine Burns, with any questions or registration changes. The conference website includes information about rates and date ranges for registration, the welcome letter from VRA president Jen Green, tips for travel to and from Louisville and the Marriott Hotel, and more.
Art Journal: Winter 2016 Issue
posted by CAA — December 26, 2016
Rolando del Fico, last seen in 1970s Italian gay underground comics, is resurrected in the Winter 2016 issue of Art Journal. A project by the Catalan artist Francesc Ruiz revives the irrepressible character, picaresque hero of myriad amorous adventures, in a visual tribute replete with Rolando’s thought-bubble iconography of salamis and cherubs in various states of excitement.
Other features in the issue explore little-examined aspects of more familiar bodies of work. Amy DaPonte analyzes the portraits of Turkish immigrants central to the early work of the German photographer Claudia Höfer. Liz Linden investigates the overlooked presence of the textual in the works Douglas Crimp gathered in 1977 for the watershed exhibition Pictures.
In the Reviews section, Lauren Richman reviews two exhibitions of work by the midcentury American photographer Lee Miller, along with their catalogues. The artist Liam Gillick considers a book by Dave Beech that grapples with the relation between art and capitalism in the contemporary neoliberal moment. Christa Noel Robbins assesses David J. Getsy’s book that sees the sculpture of the 1960s through the lens of transgender and “transformable” bodies. Finally, Kent Minturn reviews Pierre Leguillon’s book on the experimental typography of Jean Dubuffet—a significant compendium of the work that is also a work of art history.
CAA sends print copies of Art Journal to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the journal as a benefit of membership. The digital version at Taylor & Francis Online is currently available to all CAA individual members regardless of their print subscription choice.
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — December 23, 2016
Amanda Cachia visits Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–2016 at Hauser Wirth and Schimmel. Although “it was the inaugural project at Hauser Wirth and Schimmel, a commercial gallery-cum-arts complex,” the show “felt like an ambitious museum exhibition,” making it “an echo of the revolution taking place within the institutional world of museums and galleries themselves.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Sarahh E. M. Scher reads Architectural Vessels of the Moche: Ceramic Diagrams of Sacred Space in Ancient Peru by Juliet B. Wiersema. The book “is a significant contribution to the field of art history” that “addresses the relationship between architectural spaces and its representation” on ceramic vessels and architectural remains from the Moche culture, “a topic that has not been closely researched prior to this volume.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Johanna Seasonwein discusses Elina Gertsman’s Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna. In this “ambitious exploration” of about forty sculptures known as Shrine Madonnas, the author breaks with past studies “of these and other kinds of late medieval devotional objects” and “aims to suggest ways that medieval audiences understood and responded these objects.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Kristen Gaylord reviews Someday Is Now: The Art of Corita Kent, an exhibition and catalogue organized by the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery. Corita, “a teacher, nun, activist, and artist,” was a “national figure in her time,” and the “monumental” catalogue is “the first scholarly monograph dedicated to an important but previously understudied artist of the postwar period.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
caa.reviews publishes over 150 reviews each year. Founded in 1998, the site publishes timely scholarly and critical reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by the College Art Association. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate. Read more reviews at caa.reviews.