CAA News Today
Former CAA President Marvin Eisenberg Dies
posted by CAA — June 06, 2016
Marvin Eisenberg, professor of history of art at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and president of the CAA Board of Directors from 1968 to 1970, died on May 18, 2016. He was 93 years old.
In 1943 Eisenberg earned a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, after serving in the Army Signal Corps during World War II. Upon earning both an MFA and PhD from Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, he began teaching at Michigan, where he worked for his entire career. Eisenberg won CAA’s Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award in 1987. He retired in 1989.
Read more about Eisenberg’s life and career on the website of the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.
2016–2017 Nominating Committee Members
posted by CAA — May 31, 2016
CAA is pleased to announce the members of the 2016–2017 Nominating Committee, which is charged with identifying and interviewing potential candidates for the Board of Directors and selecting the final slate of candidates for the membership’s vote. The committee members, their institutional affiliations, and their positions are:
- Jim Hopfensperger, Vice President for Committees and Nominating Committee Chair, Professor, Frostic School of Art, Western Michigan University
- Jesús Escobar, Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Chair, Department of Art History, Northwestern University
- Helen C. Frederick, Professor, School of Art and Design, George Mason University
- Carmenita D. Higginbotham, Associate Professor, Program in American Studies, University of Virginia, Department of Art
- Thomas Lawson, Dean, School of Art, Jill and Peter Kraus Distinguished Chair in Art, California Institute of the Arts
- Sarah A. Lichtman, Assistant Professor, Director, Design-Curatorial Studies, Parsons School of Design
- Gunalan Nadarajan, Professor and Dean, Stamps School of Art and Design, University of Michigan
- David C. Terry, Director of Programs, Curator, New York Foundation for the Arts
Hunter O’Hanian, CAA’s incoming executive director and CEO, will also serve on the Nominating Committee as an ex-officio member.
CAA publishes a call for nominations and self-nominations for Nominating Committee service on the website in late fall of every year and publicizes it in CAA News and via social media. Please direct all queries regarding the committee to Vanessa Jalet, CAA executive liaison.
In Conversation: DeWitt Godfrey with CAA President Suzanne Preston Blier
posted by CAA — May 26, 2016
Earlier this month Suzanne Preston Blier of Harvard University succeeded DeWitt Godfrey, an artist and professor at Colgate University, as president of the CAA Board of Directors. To commemorate the passing of the CAA torch, Godfrey has interviewed Blier about what lies ahead for the organization.
DeWitt Godfrey: First, before we start the interview, I’d like to congratulate you on the being elected president of CAA. I can think of no one who is more ready to take on the role. I take comfort in handing the reins over to you.
Suzanne Preston Blier: Thank you so much! I’ve been involved with CAA for a long time and this feels like a culmination of many years of new engagement with the organization.
DG: As an historian of art who specializes in the arts of Africa, how will this interest shape your role as president of CAA?
SPB: CAA’s 2015-2020 strategic plan emphasizes the need to think more internationally – more globally. A key part of this strategy is to explore how CAA can better serve art and scholarly constituencies outside of the U.S., as well as projects here that address these wider sets of issues and concerns. It is important that artists and art historians in Africa, Latin America, and Asia are central part of the mix, along with our many colleagues in Europe and Australia. In a field such as art history that historically has been so Western-centric, the idea that CAA selected an Africanist as its new President also speaks volumes in terms of how far our field, and the Association itself, has come since its founding.
DG: We are in an important moment in CAA’s history characterized both by unique challenges and potentials. What are your perspectives on the organization as we go forward?
SPB: Being part of an organization of this complexity, one that is over a hundred years old is pretty awesome. Although in many ways it is a difficult time to be in this position of leadership, it is also a moment that carries real pluses in thinking about how we can renew and reshape the Association going forward. As to some of the challenges, we recently replaced two long-standing and really excellent senior staff members through retirement. Fortunately, we were able to find two great new leaders who I am excited to work with – people who bring new ideas, potential, and energy to the organization (Hunter O’Hanian and Tiffany Dugan). At the same time, many professional organizations, including ours, have seen financial challenges, due to budget cut-backs in university funding for not only professors but also support for things like research and travel. Because of these factors, we have to make CAA even more relevant and important as we begin to think more about both advocacy, and the kinds of intellectual and social sustenance that makes it not just worth participating, but also essential to do so. There is a lot we can do better, and I look forward to hearing from members (and non-members) about their specific suggestions and concerns.
DG: You do a fair amount with social media – and you helped found a website at Harvard on digital mapping. Do these interests extend to CAA and its digital presence?
SPB: Yes. I confess to being a fan of Facebook (indeed, I am active!). For many in my generation it has been important professionally. It is one of the ways I keep up with what is happening in my field and others. It is also a great means to bring in people internationally. I follow one group, African Art University, that has over 22,000 members, most of whom are in Africa. New technologies are coming into play and building on them as we go forward will be important. Being part of the team at Harvard that helped build Worldmap, an online digital mapping system that is readable in some 30-40 different languages, offered seminal insight. This nourished a passion for not only maps, but also digital tools, and the importance of both collaborative and cross-disciplinary work in building something that will serve a wide variety of needs and interests. In many ways I see this kind of experience offering insight for an organization like CAA as we move forward. New social media engagements and software technologies will be a key part of CAA’s future! For example, CAA Connect is scheduled to launch in the early fall of 2016.
DG: You have been involved with CAA for much of your career. How have you seen the Association change over time? What have been some of the real highlights for you?
SPB: Alas, some of it is a blur! Of course, it is hard to forget the trauma of job interviews in strange hotel rooms at the Annual Conference. I remember traveling up the elevators with other applicants – including artists – and thinking, not only did they look much better, but they had it far worse since decisions were based on works they chose to carry with them in their portfolios. On a better note, I remember being accepted for and giving my first paper at CAA. It was totally intimidating – a panel on semiotics, chaired by my future colleague Henri Zerner. Still today the CAA ballrooms tend to be really intimidating. I also remember the intellectual clashes that shaped earlier CAA conferences – Material Culture (labor, class, feminism) versus more traditional approaches. What I mostly remember however is meeting amazing scholars and artists over my years of service – many of whom are now good friends
DG: CAA has long brought artists and art historians together. What do you see as some of the advantages going forward of having such a broad wingspan organizationally?
SPB: As an organization we are clearly much broader in our interests and “wingspan” now than we were at the outset – including not only artists and art historians, but also museum professionals, critics, and designers. One of the great things about CAA is its very breadth. While today some of us are housed in different departments, many of us are visiting the same galleries, sharing the same social media posts, and interested in the same larger intellectual and social issues. In this period of economic uncertainty it is all the more important that we find ways to address shared interests and concerns collectively. Whether it is trivializing arts and culture through the recent STEM focus or finding tangent ways to help artists and art historians in our professional and other lives, there is clearly strength in numbers. One of the most important – and revolutionary – endeavors I have been part of at CAA is the Mellon Foundation-funded Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, which brought together artists and art historians in an effort to not only impact policy but also to change the law to help save time and money for many members of our group. In many ways it was a model.
DG: You chaired the task force on the Annual Conference that formulated substantial changes to the conference. What did you learn from that process? What are some of the impacts this will have on the conference itself and on the organization?
SPB: This was a great experience, working with a diverse group of people who helped to rethink the whole conference format. Basically, mine was more of a listening role and one of encouraging people to think creatively and outside the box. On a practical note, the time frame between proposal submission and presentation goes from nearly two years to eight months, and we are now encouraging members to present or participate in other ways multiple years in a row. In addition to a new time grid (shorter and a greater number of panels) we also have a Saturday suite of panels on key themes for the organization. Equally importantly we now have an Annual Conference chair (the first is Judith Rodenbeck) and with our new director of programs, Tiffany Dugan, we will be seeing lots of interesting things happening. I encourage everyone to keep making suggestions – and to come!
DW: “CAA is welcoming on board a new executive director to CAA, Hunter O’Hanian. What are your thoughts on this and other changes as you both begin this journey?”
SPB: I am really excited about being able to work with someone as skilled, knowledgeable, and energetic as Hunter. We share a similar vision about CAA, its potential, and how key changes might help. He is coming to the organization with lots of experience in areas that are important to both administration and the arts. In meetings with him he has stressed how much he looks forward to finding new and improved ways for CAA to support and encourage the professional lives of visual artists, art historians, designers, and curators. As he has said to me “We have to make CAA even more meaningful in terms of various aspects of our professional lives and engagements.” I feel the same way. Moreover, it is clear he not only listens deeply but thinks deeply, and I have found him very insightful in thinking through how to best get from where we are now to where we want to be in the years ahead.
DW: “You earlier chaired The Art Bulletin editorial board and later served as Vice President for Publications during a key moment of change – plus you publish extensively – how has this changed and what does the future hold for publishing in the organization?
SPB: Publishing great journals has long been a CAA strength and it will continue to be so. It has been exciting to watch the growth of a new CAA journal – caa.reviews, which is now one of the most productive journals anywhere in terms of the sheer volume of content, and the global reach of its reviews. It is also great to see how much the content and scope of The Art Bulletin has grown since I began to read it. Art Journal too has grown in so many interesting ways. What I hear too often (and would love to shake up) is the idea that X CAA journal only publishes articles in Y areas or Z subjects. I know the CAA journal editors are searching for new and provocative works that don’t fit any pre-conceived frame. Now that we have turned the digital corner with the journals, I hope we can see new kinds of digital writing – whether informal discussions in social media, posts on CAA Connect, blogs, and other content that can be brought together. In addition to expanding the journals’ reach, what the digital revolution and the Internet make possible is a revolution in how we think about, engage, and make available new kinds of textual and image engagements.
Exclusive CAA Member Discount for JSTOR Access
posted by CAA — May 25, 2016
With more than 2,000 scholarly journals, JSTOR is one of the world’s leading academic databases.
As part of your CAA membership, save 50% on a yearly JPASS, your personal access to the JSTOR archive. This fee includes unlimited reading access and 120 PDF article downloads. JSTOR adds new titles every month so you’ll have a growing collection of the world’s leading peer-reviewed journals only a click away. Plans start at $19.50.
Don’t miss this exclusive offer:
http://jpass.jstor.org/?soc=CAA3&mc=mMvU69P2M3
The Arts journals available in JPASS may be of particular interest to CAA members. Highlights include:
Publications from the College Art Association
Artibus Asiae
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians
And much more! The complete list is available here.
Thank you for your continued membership support.
Support the Visual Arts Community: Give to CAA’s Annual Fund
posted by CAA — May 24, 2016
Thank you for being a member of the College Art Association, the world’s leading professional association for the visual arts. As a dedicated member of CAA, you know firsthand about the important work that CAA does to serve and enhance the visual-arts community. We could not do this without your support.
Today, I ask that you join me in celebrating all that CAA does with a gift to the Annual Fund.
Beyond CAA’s ongoing advocacy efforts; vital professional documents like CAA’s Standards and Guidelines; critical projects like the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts; prestigious publishing grants for book manuscripts; career-development resources including the Online Career Center; Professional-Development Fellowships in support of promising artists, designers, craftspersons, historians, curators, and critics; important new writing and scholarship published in The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and caa.reviews; and CAA’s central forum for exchange of creative work and scholarly research at the Annual Conference—CAA does a great deal more to support its members, the lifeblood of the association.
CAA subsidizes over half of its members through discounted membership and registration fees for students, retirees, part-time faculty, and independent artists and scholars. CAA has made part-time faculty issues a priority, recommending that tenured faculty and administrators in the visual arts implement its Guidelines for Part-Time Professional Employment and also providing a resources section on its website for part-time faculty. At the conference, CAA offers Professional-Development Workshops and mentoring opportunities for artists, art historians, designers, and students. CAA is also dedicated to strengthening its support of its international members. Recently CAA launched a section on its website devoted to international topics, the International Desk, which includes reports from around the world and listings of international grants, conferences, and residencies.
In fall 2016, CAA will also launch CAA Connect, the digital social community where CAA members can discuss the latest in visual arts news and practices and collaborate on projects. CAA Connect will boast a number of private and public communities, each with its own discussion threads and resource libraries for multimedia content. We see it as an important tool in bringing together our members and the wider visual arts and humanities fields. Look for CAA Connect to launch in the fall of 2016.
Voluntary support from CAA members is critical to our collective advancement and your contribution to the Annual Fund will enable CAA to continue providing invaluable resources to its members.
On behalf of CAA’s diverse community of artists, art historians, curators, critics, collectors, designers, educators, and other arts professionals, I thank you for your commitment to CAA. Please give generously!
Sincerely,
Doralynn Pines
Vice President for External Affairs
Support CAA’s Publications Fund
posted by CAA — May 20, 2016
CAA’s journals continue to deliver the world’s leading scholarship in the visual arts. This year, we welcome many new additions and changes to the publications while maintaining our commitment to bringing readers the most vital, intellectually compelling, and visually engaging scholarly journals in art and art history.
We encourage you to support our mission of advancing the highest standards of intellectual engagement in the arts with a gift to the Publications Fund today. As always, your contribution is tax-deductible, so please give generously!
Beginning July 1, 2016, CAA welcomes Nina Athanasoglou-Kallmyer, Professor Emerita at the University of Delaware, as The Art Bulletin’s next editor-in-chief. Rebecca Brown, Art Journal’s editor-in-chief and Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University, published her first issue in Spring 2016. CAA’s exclusively online publication, caa.reviews recently launched a new website, and Art Journal Open, CAA’s accessible online venue for contemporary works, takes on appropriation as an artistic strategy in a three-part series.
Here are some recent highlights from CAA publications:
In The Art Bulletin:
- Recent articles include Erik Inglis on revelations in the 1534 inventory of the St-Denis treasury; Paola Demattè on cross-cultural factors in eighteenth-century Parisian prints of Chinese subjects; Richard Taws on the imposter dauphins in the wake of the French Revolution and the issue of truth in nineteenth-century discourse; and the tensions between the individual and the collective in postwar German art groups, in an analysis by Jacopo Galimberti
- In the “Whither Art History?” series, Youngna Kim explores the relation of Korean art history to global developments in the discipline; Shao Yiyang reflects on the state of art history in China
- Reviews of books range from art in Byzantine diplomatic encounters to transcontinental and transoceanic image networks in early America, and from Chinoiserie in eighteenth-century Britain to the circulation of artworks in late Ottoman Istanbul
In Art Journal:
- Artists’ projects by Jason Simon, Amy Adler, and Julia Oldham, the last an astrophysical exploration of loss, love, and canine connection
- Essays by Emma Chubb, examining Isaac Julien’s images of traumatic crossings of the Mediterranean by present-day migrants; Natilee Harren on the means by which materials and fragments of the urban fabric found their way into the confounding commodities of Fluxus artists in the 1960s; Cynthia Chris and Jason Simon on the economic elements of video art as it nears the half-century mark; and Daniel Rosenberg on the presentation of complex data about war and disaster in large photographic works by the Dutch artist Gert Jan Kocken
- A seven-author forum organized by Jordana Moore Saggese that sheds new light on diversity and difference from perspectives including queer failure, craft, diasporic studies, critical race history, and disability
- Reviews of books artists on William Kentridge, Isa Genzken, and Antonin Artaud; on decolonization in postwar France; and on art emerging from postsocialist nations
- In Art Journal Open, “Knight’s Heritage: Karl Haendel and the Legacy of Appropriation” by Natilee Harren. Harren’s three-part essay examines appropriation as an artistic strategy that pressures both the legal and conceptual definitions of authorship through a case study of three specific episodes in artist Karl Haendel’s practice of circulating existing images. Nate Harrison responds, offering a critical reminder of the historical specificity of postmodernism and appropriation. Haendel’s contribution Oral Sadism & the Vegetarian Personality (Approximately) is an animated representation of the artist’s extensive archival collection of some ten thousand found images and photographs, used as source material for his drawings. Other recent pieces are a report on Art + Feminism’s Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at the Museum of Modern Art by Chelsea Spengemann, and a conversation between curator Mia Locks and artist Math Bass.
In caa.reviews (Now fully open access!):
- caa.reviews continues to expand the number and type of reviews published each year. In 2015, the journal published 159 reviews on exhibitions and books in all areas of the visual arts. In 2016, an addition to the Re:Views series—an essay by Eddie Chambers, University of Texas Austin, on his role in commissioning reviews on African and African Diaspora art—discusses the division of subject categories within US academic communities and the lack of scholarship published on these topics. Forthcoming by caa.reviews Editor Designate, Juliet Bellow, is a multimedia project using the Scalar platform reviewing a two-day performance at the Tate Modern, If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse? by choreographer Boris Charmatz, which will be accompanied by an interactive floor plan and additional texts and images.
These highly regarded journals reach tens of thousands of readers around the world and serve as essential resources to those working in the visual arts—none of which would be possible without your support. Contributors who give at a level of $250 or higher are prominently acknowledged in the publication they support for four consecutive issues, as well as on the publication’s website for one year, through CAA News, and in the Annual Conference’s convocation booklet. On behalf of the scholars, critics, and artists who publish in the journals, we thank you for your continued commitment to maintaining a strong and spirited forum for the visual arts community.
With best regards,
Gail Feigenbaum
Vice President for Publications
College Art Association Announces Hunter O’Hanian as Executive Director
posted by CAA — May 18, 2016
The College Art Association (CAA) is pleased to announce Hunter O’Hanian as its next executive director. He will start at CAA on July 1, 2016. O’Hanian succeeds Linda Downs, who served as CAA executive director from 2006 to 2016. O’Hanian comes to CAA at a moment of expansion and opportunity in the organization. In January 2016, CAA announced comprehensive changes to its Annual Conference that will increase the number of sessions and chances for participation. In response to the changes, CAA received over 850 session proposals for its 2017 conference in New York, February 15–18.
“I am very excited to welcome Hunter O’Hanian to CAA as executive director,” says Suzanne Preston Blier, president of CAA. “He brings not only unique administrative experience but also striking energy and vision at this key moment in the Association’s history.”
As executive director, O’Hanian is an employee of the CAA Board of Directors and serves as the Association’s chief executive officer. In this role, he will work with board members, committees, and task forces to develop the Association’s strategic plans. O’Hanian’s experience in fundraising, law, and the arts will greatly benefit the membership and the larger visual arts, design, education, and cultural communities with whom CAA works. O’Hanian will oversee a wide variety of initiatives, including the CAA Annual Conference, an advocacy program, member services activities, the career center, fellowships, grants and opportunities offered by CAA, and the publications program, which includes The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Art Journal Open, and caa.reviews.
“I have long been an admirer of the work CAA has done. They have helped so many artists, art historians, and curators in the pursuit of their professional goals,” says O’Hanian. “I am pleased to be part of this exciting team and look forward to playing a role in growing its membership, bolstering the conferences, and helping the organization thrive on every level.”
O’Hanian is currently the director of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York’s Soho neighborhood. The Leslie-Lohman Museum is the only art museum devoted exclusively to artwork that speaks to the LGBTQ experience.
Prior to joining Leslie-Lohman, Hunter was the vice president of institutional advancement and executive director of the Foundation for Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. Previous to that, he led two renowned artists’ residencies programs, having served as the president of Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, outside of Aspen, Colorado, and executive director of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which is the largest residency program for emerging artists and writers in the United States. The Fine Arts Work Center recently permanently endowed a fellowship in his name.
O’Hanian has a long career of non-profit board and community involvement. He is the past board chair of the Alliance of Artists Communities, the national membership organization for artists’ residency programs. He studied painting at Boston College and received his bachelor of laws degree from Suffolk University in Boston. O’Hanian has an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the Art Institute of Boston.
Photo credit: Johnathan M. Lewis
The College Art Association and Terra Foundation for American Art Invite Applications for 2017 Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant
posted by CAA — May 17, 2016
The College Art Association (CAA) and Terra Foundation for American Art invite applications for the 2017 Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant. The grant provides financial support for the publication of book-length scholarly manuscripts on the history of American art from circa 1500 to 1980 in the current-day geographic United States. The deadline for applications is September 15, 2016.
“Now in its sixth year, this international grant program helps to ensure that the field of American art history includes a wide range of culturally and geographically diverse voices,” stated Terra Foundation Publication Program Director Francesca Rose. “For example, Vardan Azatyan’s Armenian translation of Erika Doss’s book Twentieth-Century American Art increases awareness of the historical art of the United States by making important scholarship available to a broader audience and fostering international collaboration.”
Awards of up to $15,000 will be made in three distinct categories:
Grants to US publishers for manuscripts considering American art in an international context
Grants to non-US publishers for manuscripts on topics in American art
Grants for the translation of books on topics in American art to or from English.
“The generous support by the Terra Foundation for American Art to help finance book publications in the field of art history will benefit not only the recipients of the grant, but also teachers, students, and the art book reading public more generally,” says Suzanne Blier, president of CAA.
For more information on submission process, guidelines, and eligibility, please visit the CAA website.
The 2016 Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant winners were announced in February after the CAA Annual Conference in Washington, DC.
2016 TERRA FOUNDATION FOR AMERICAN ART INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATION GRANT WINNERS
- Jean-Pierre Criqui and Céline Flécheux, eds., Robert Smithson. Mémoire et entropie, Les presses du réel
- Erika Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art, translated into Armenian by Vardan Azatyan, Eiva Arts Foundation
- Eva Ehninger and Antje Krause-Wahl, eds., In Terms of Painting, Revolver Publishing
- Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal, translated into French by Karine Douplitzky, Éditions des archives contemporaines
- Rockwell Kent, Voyaging Southward from the Strait of Magellan, translated into Spanish and edited by Fielding D. Dupuy, Amarí Peliowski, and Catalina Valdés, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Chile) and Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado
- Will Norman, Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile and Culture in Midcentury America, Johns Hopkins University Press
- Annika Öhrner, ed., Art in Transfer—Curatorial Practices and Transnational Strategies in the Era of Pop, Södertörn University
- Joshua Shannon, The Recording Machine: Art and the Culture of Fact, Yale University Press
- Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties, translated into French by Anne Lemoine, C & F Éditions
Two non-US authors of top-ranked books were also awarded travel funds and complimentary registration for CAA’s 2017 Annual Conference in New York from February 15 to 18; they also received one-year CAA memberships.
The two author awardees for 2016 are:
- Will Norman
- Annika Öhrner
Image caption: Winslow Homer, Three Boys on the Shore, 1873, gouache and watercolor on paper mounted on board, 8⅝ x 13⅝ in. (image); 14⅜ x 19½ in. (mat). Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.75 (artwork in the public domain)
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for May 2016
posted by CAA — May 16, 2016
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.
May 2016
Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–2016
Hauser Wirth & Schimmel
901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles, CA
March 13–September 4, 2016
Hauser Wirth & Schimmel opens its inaugural exhibition at its new Los Angeles space with Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–2016. On view is one hundred works made by thirty-four artists over the past seventy years. The show traces how women have “changed the course of art by deftly transforming the language of sculpture since the post war period.”
“Works on view reveal their makers inventing radically new forms and processes that privilege solo studio practice, tactility, and the idiosyncrasies of the artist’s own hand.” The exhibition explores a variety of artistic approaches such as stacking, hanging, and intertwining, examining the role of this work within current practices and expanded definitions of sculpture.
In addition to known artists from the prewar era to today, the exhibition contains commissioned works by a new generation of sculptors, including Phyllida Barlow, Karla Black, Abigail DeVille, Sonia Gomes, Rachel Khedoori, Laura Schnitger, Shinique Smith, Jessica Stockholder, and Kaari Upson.
“Perhaps most significant of all, the discreet human body—a central preoccupation of women abstract sculptors in earlier decades—has now disappeared. In its place, the artists in the final section of ‘Revolution in the Making’ offer an empty space for the viewer’s own body. Moving through, under, around, and within these new sculptures, the visitor becomes partner and participant in the continuing quest to articulate the female experience through art.”
The Sister Chapel: An Essential Feminist Collaboration
Rowan University Art Gallery at Westby Hall
201 Mullica Hill Road, Glassboro, New Jersey
March 28–June 30, 2016
Rowan University Art Gallery presents The Sister Chapel, a series of paintings celebrating a “nonhierarchical, secular commemoration of female role models from a female perspective.” Originally conceived by Ilise Greenstein in 1974, The Sister Chapel, which takes its name from Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, was last show in 1980 before the pieces drifted into different collections.
The exhibition is presented for the first time in the initially conceived, twelve-sided fabric structure that was designed by the artist Maureen Conner and that includes work by twelve other women. Greenstein’s eighteen-foot abstract ceiling is suspended above a circular arrangement of eleven nine-foot canvases, each depicting a figure of a heroic women. The subjects of these portraits were determined by the individual artist: Bella Abzug – the Candidate, a portrait of the American Congresswoman and social reformer, painted by Alice Neel; Betty Friedan as the Prophet, a portrayal of the influential author of The Feminine Mystique, by June Blum; Marianne Moore, the American poet, by Betty Holliday; Frida Kahlo, the celebrated Mexican artist, by Shirley Gorelick; Artemisia Gentileschi, the seventeenth-century Italian Baroque artist, by May Stevens; Joan of Arc, the sainted fifteenth-century French military heroine, by Elsa M. Goldsmith; Lilith, the rebellious first wife of Adam, by Sylvia Sleigh; God, a female manifestation of the creator of the universe, by Cynthia Mailman; Durga, the powerful Hindu goddess, by Diana Kurz; Womanhero, a conceptual embodiment of female strength and power, by Martha Edelheit; and Self-Portrait as Superwoman (Woman as Culture Hero) by Sharon Wybrants.
The exhibition at Rowan is only the third time the individual components of this work has been shown together.
A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s–1980s
Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art
Northwestern University, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, IL
January 16–July 17, 2016
“This exhibition replaces the indelible image of Charlotte Moorman (1933–1991)—playing the cello topless save for a pair of strapped-on miniature television sets—with a more complex but equally powerful portrait of the girl from Little Rock, Arkansas, who metamorphosed into a seminal and barrier-breaking figure in performance art and an impresario of the postwar avant-garde.”
The Block Museum of Art transforms its two-story building, with its ground-floor gallery transformed into a double viewing room for screenings of videos, including rare footage from the Charlotte Moorman Archive. With loans from private collections, including that of Yoko Ono, the exhibition presents Moorman’s commitment to taking the avant-garde to the streets. Through an assortment of artworks, film clips, music scores, audio recordings, documentary photographs, snapshots, performance props and costumes, ephemera, and correspondence, Moorman’s career takes shape in full form.
“I have asked myself why Charlotte Moorman is largely missing from the narratives of 20th-century art,” says Lisa Corrin, the Block Museum’s Ellen Philips Katz Director and curator of modern and contemporary art. “She is mainly remembered as a muse to Nam June Paik, but she was much more. In light of her influence on contemporary performance and her role as an unequaled popularizer of the avant-garde it is long overdue for her to be appreciated as a seminal figure in her own right.”
The companion exhibition Don’t Throw Anything Out, the scope of the Charlotte Moorman Archive at Northwestern University is explored with selection of objects and media ranging from Moorman’s double-barreled, heavily notated Rolodex to audio recordings of greetings and voice messages saved from her telephone message machine.
A Feast of Astonishments will travel in fall 2016 to New York University’s Grey Art Gallery in Manhattan and to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg in Austria in spring 2017.
Teresa Jaynes: Common Touch: The Art of the Senses in the History of the Blind
Library Company of Philadephia
1314 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107
April 4–October 21, 2016
The Library Company’s Louise Lux-Sions and Harry Sions Gallery presents Common Touch: The Art of the Senses in the History of the Blind, a multimedia exhibition of new works by the Philadelphia-based artist-in-residence Teresa Jaynes. Common Touch explores the nature, foundations, and limits of perception through the juxtaposition of Jaynes’s multisensory artwork—in which sight does not dominate—with historical materials documenting the education of visually impaired people in the nineteenth century. At its heart, Common Touch is the story of an artisan, a mathematician, a composer, and a surveyor. Drawing on their accomplishments, the artist developed “first person constructions” for each, infused with the geometric and abstract forms that were fundamental to the education of the blind in the nineteenth century. These forms were tools used to navigate and perceive the physical world—a radical approach years before the beginnings of modernism.
For more than twenty-five years, Jaynes has created installations and artist’s books based on extensive research in special collections and libraries, including the Rosenbach Museum and Library, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and the Newberry Library. Common Touch follows The Moon Reader, Jaynes’s interactive art installation that invites participants to learn through touch a raised-letter writing system for the blind invented by the blind educator William Moon in 1845. Designed as a primer, the book begins with an exercise for learning Moon that is then followed by “lessons” related to geometry, geography, botany, and astronomy. The stories and diagrams are taken from the Michael Zinman Collection of Printing for the Blind at the Library Company of Philadelphia.
As in previous Jaynes’s research-based projects, through art and artifact, Common Touch examines transformations in our understanding of sight while exploring the nature and limits of perception. The experience as a whole is intended to expand the “readers” understanding of historical and contemporary connotations of sight through curiosity, humor, and empathy.
Claudia DeMonte, Sarah Hinckley, Hayv Kahraman, Toyin Odutola, Lisa Ruyter, and Laurie Simmons: Making her Mark
Mattatuck Museum
144 West Main Street, Waterbury, CT 06702
April 17–June 5, 2016
The Mattatuck Museum presents Making Her Mark, a multimedia exhibition of work by six female contemporary artists curated by Lauren P. Della Monica. The artists featured in the exhibition—Claudia DeMonte, Sarah Hinckley, Hayv Kahraman, Toyin Odutola, Lisa Ruyter, and Laurie Simmons—range from emerging talent to renowned international artists. Such diversity bears witness to their experiences as female artists over the past few decades in an art world often criticized for undervaluing the contributions of deserving women artists. Their professional successes are testament to their talents and are especially compelling at a time of heightened interest in women’s roles in the arts and their presence on the walls of museums.
This show includes a range of diverse work from abstract and representational paintings to drawings, sculpture, and photography created by artists at various stages of their careers, each of whom is making a significant contribution to the overall cannon of contemporary art, all making their marks as leaders in the field. These artists address their personal experiences and backgrounds through their work, drawing upon an array of geographic and cultural influences—such as DeMonte’s Italian American heritage, Odutola’s African and African American upbringing, Kahraman’s childhood in Iraq, or Hinckley’s New England roots—and presenting these influences with an understanding of their continuing impact on their work. Ruyter and Simmons document popular culture’s influence by transforming pop-culture images into works of fine art. Viewing this spectrum of work collectively allows the audience to form a broader view of the contemporary social context as the works themselves also address global issues such as feminism, cultural identity, and universalism.
The exhibition is sponsored in part by the Connecticut Community Foundation with promotional partnership from Saint Mary’s Hospital’s Spirit of Women program.
Janine Antoni, Anna Halprin, Stephen Petronio: Ally
Fabric Workshop and Museum
1214 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107
April 21–July 31, 2016
The Fabric Workshop and Museum is presenting Ally, a series of works combining sculpture, installation, film, and performance created through the Artist-in-Residence Program. The art and dance project conceived and performed by Janine Antoni was initiated by herself in collaboration with the choreographer, theater, and community artist Anna Halprin and the pioneering choreographer Stephen Petronio.
In Ally, Antoni pursues her interest in bodily presence, touch, and movement through a series of unique collaborations in which the trio investigates the translation of ideas across forms and the vast potential that lies in their relations. The encounter between these artists from diverse practices and generations becomes a means of unearthing unknown affinities and historical entwinements, forging a new visual language and tactile experiences within processes of transformation.
Conceived by Antoni “as a kind of retrospective of my art making told through dance,” the project has evolved into a truly collaborative creation that allows the three artists to find a way to continue making new work while reflecting in their previous practices. The exhibition comprises four projects: Rope Dance, Swallow, The Courtesan and the Crone,and Paper Dance. Once a week for fourteen weeks Antoni will perform Paper Dance, an improvised movement performance that draws on images and concerns which have long preoccupied her as an artist. Antoni (born in the Bahamas, 1964) uses rolls of brown paper originally employed by Halprin (born in Winnetka, Illinois, 1920) in her seminal work Parades and Changes (1965). These performances take place within an installed arena of many wooden packing crates containing artworks by Antoni. Each iteration calls for Antoni to begin by unpacking one of her earlier works from a crate, whether it be a sculpture made of chocolate and soap like Lick and Lather (1993) or a photographic image like Mortar and Pestle (1999). Throughout the series of performances, a “retrospective” of Antoni’s previous works slowly emerges, remaining for a week, then disappearing as they are repacked into the installed crates.
Ally, in Petronio’s words, means a project “fundamentally about connection. And part of that is three distinct artistic languages coming together to meet in the gap between art and dance.”
Affiliated Society News for May 2016
posted by CAA — May 15, 2016
Art Council of the African Studies Association
In the past year, the Art Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) sponsored a panel and a well-attended members’ meeting at the African Studies Association (ASA) annual meeting and hosted a session at the CAA Annual Conference. The council also distributed three extensive newsletters and is finalizing plans for a triennial conference, to be held in Ghana in 2017. To build support for the Ghana event, ACASA has undertaken a fundraising campaign with a five-member committee that meets every three weeks.
ACASA has also implemented a new online system for member payments and had a sizable presence at the European Conference on African Studies (ECAS) in Paris in July 2015. ACASA financially sponsored one artist’s performance at ECAS in a series Dominique Malaquais organized that was devoted to the arts. Finally, ACASA held elections to replace most of the organization’s board members.
Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture
The Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA) has elected new officers. The new president is Amelia Rauser of Franklin and Marshall College. She is a specialist in eighteenth-century British art and the author of numerous scholarly studies, including Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008). Christina Lindeman from the University of South Alabama is the new treasurer. She is the author of articles on art and gender in eighteenth-century Germany, with a special emphasis on the court of Anna Amalia of Weimar. Her book Representing Anna Amalia’s Bildung: Visual Metamorphosis from Personal to Political in Eighteenth-Century Germany, is forthcoming from Routledge.
HECAA also maintains a wonderful serial newsletter.
Midwest Art History Society
The Midwest Art History Society (MAHS) held its “Icons of the Midwest” session at CAA’s 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC. The meeting was meant to highlight important and museum-related art and art history from America’s vital middle region. This year’s topic was the Chicago Jazz Age painter Archibald Motley (1891–1981). The session’s cochairs were MAHS members Amy M. Mooney (Columbia College) and Mark Pohlad (DePaul University); the speakers were Jerma A. Jackson (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Phoebe E. Wolfskill (University of Indiana), and Romi Crawford (School of the Art Institute of Chicago). A highlight of this lively session was the remarks of the renowned Motley scholar, Richard J. Powell.
The forty-third MAHS annual conference took place in Chicago from April 7 to 9, 2016. Approximately two hundred participants and registrants convened at DePaul University’s Loop Campus to hear more than thirty academic sessions devoted to a wide range of art history. The keynote address, held at the nearby Art Institute of Chicago, was delivered by Gloria Groom, chair of European painting and sculpture and David and Mary Winton Green Curator in the Department of European Painting and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, who was involved the concurrent Van Gogh’s Bedrooms exhibition. Other conference highlights included a reception at Columbia College’s Museum of Contemporary Photography, a session on “Recent Acquisitions in Midwest Collections” (held at the Art Institute and chaired by the curator Judith W. Mann), and two sessions comprised of undergraduate scholars. For more information and to read conference proceedings and paper abstracts, visit the conference page of the MAHS website.
MAHS will hold its forty-fourth annual conference in Cleveland, Ohio, from April 6 to 8, 2017. The event will be hosted by the Cleveland Museum of Art, Case Western Reserve University, and Cleveland State University. To open the conference, a distinguished keynote panel will speak on Raphael’s School of Athens Cartoon, currently undergoing restoration in Milan. The panel will include: Don Alberto Rocca, director of the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan; Maurizio Michelozzi, a Florentine paper conservator who is undertaking the restoration; and Carmen Bambach, curator of drawings and prints for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Funding for the panel has been provided by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Chicago, the Italian Art Society, the University of Notre Dame, and MAHS.
New Media Caucus
The New Media Caucus (NMS) has elected new officers and members to its board of directors in February 2016. Mat Rappaport is president elect, Rachel Clarke is secretary, and Kevin Hamilton is chair of the caucus’s journal, Media-N. The new board members are Victoria Bradbury, Darren Douglas-Floyd, Mina Cheon, Abigail Susik, and Doreen Maloney. For more information on the organization’s structure, visit the New Media Caucus website.
Public Art Dialogue
At the CAA Annual Conference in February, Public Art Dialogue (PAD) hosted a roundtable chaired by Kirk Savage, professor of the history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. Also participating were Thomas Luebke, secretary of the United States Commission of Fine Arts, and Lucy Kempf, a member of the National Capital Planning Commission.
The 2016 PAD award recipient was Kirk Savage, who has contributed extensively to our understanding of American memorials, particularly those dedicated to Civil War soldiers. He is the author of two award winning books: Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (1997) and Monument Wars: Washington DC, the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (2009). Savage has also edited The Civil War in Art and Memory (2016). In presenting the award, PAD cochair Cameron Cartiere observed that one of the most compelling aspects of Savage’s scholarship is that it helps us “to look back into our history of memorialization as a means of understanding the ramifications of the political, social, and cultural decisions we make in developing contemporary memorials that mark the present, acknowledge our tumultuous past, and help us to embrace our uncharted future.”
Renaissance Society of America
The Program Committee for the sixty-third annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America invites submissions for individual papers or sessions on any aspect of Renaissance studies or the era 1300–1700. Because RSA is a multidisciplinary society, we especially welcome submissions that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries, as well as those that spotlight scholarship that is discipline specific. Sessions sponsored by our Associate Organizations and Discipline Representatives will make up part of the program. The rest will consist of sessions and individual papers proposed by RSA members and selected by the Program Committee.
Because the RSA Annual Meeting is a large conference—with as many as fifty sessions meeting concurrently—we have developed guidelines over the years that greatly facilitate the work of the Program Committee and help to ensure an audience for every session. Please note that proposing a session or a paper indicates your commitment to attend. The committee will not be able to accept every submission; good papers will have to be turned away. To take a slot and then later withdraw is discourteous to colleagues who would have liked to present a paper. Once the rooms are scheduled and the AV equipment is ordered, no substitutions are possible.
Organizers may propose a series of linked sessions, up to a limit of five. However, the Program Committee prefers that series be limited to three, to facilitate scheduling them in a row. Sessions organized in honor or in memory of an individual scholar are limited to no more than two. Proposals for roundtables are also welcome, but the committee asks that roundtables be stand-alone sessions in terms of their content. Roundtables that merely involve recapping the content of a series of sessions take up valuable space in the program that could be used to present other research; proposals for them are not likely to be accepted.
The committee welcomes sessions that present the scholarship of members at various stages of their careers. Each session must include at least one speaker who has received a PhD or other terminal degree. Graduate-student speakers should be in candidacy or the equivalent for their program; that is, they must be advanced students who have completed coursework, examinations, and much of their dissertation research. They are invited to speak on topics directly related to their dissertation research, rather than presenting term papers.
Please visit the RSA website for more details. The submission site will open in May, with a submission deadline in early June (TBA). You do not need to be a member to submit a proposal, but if your proposal is accepted you will need to be an RSA member for the year of the conference.
Society for Photographic Education
The Society for Photographic Education (SPE) welcomes conference proposals from photographers, writers, educators, curators, historians, and professionals from other fields for “Family Values,” the fifty-fourth SPE national conference, to be held March 9–12, 2017, in Orlando, Florida. Topics are not required to be theme based; they may include but are not limited to: imagemaking, history, contemporary theory and criticism, multidisciplinary approaches, new technologies, effects of media and culture, educational issues, funding, and presentations of work in photography, film, video, performance, and installation.
The presentation formats are:
- Graduate Student: short presentation of your own artistic work and a brief introduction to your graduate program (must be enrolled in graduate program at time of submission)
- Imagemaker: presentation of your own artistic work (photography, film, video, performance, installation, multidisciplinary approaches)
- Lecture: presentation on historical topic, theory, or another artist’s work
- Panel Discussion: active discussion among panelists (maximum of three), a moderator, and the audience on a chosen topic
- Teaching and Learning: presentations, workshops, and demos that addresses educational issues, including teaching resources and strategies (syllabi, videos, assignments, readings, class preparation and setup, and PowerPoint presentations); curricula to serve diverse artists and changing student populations; seeking promotion and tenure; avoiding burnout; and professional exchange
Current SPE membership is required of all participants with accepted proposals. Please visit the SPE website for full proposal guidelines and special award details.
Society of Architectural Historians
The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) is accepting abstracts for its 2017 annual international conference in Glasgow, Scotland (June 7–11). Abstracts may be submitted for one of the thirty-six paper sessions, for the Graduate Student Lightning Talks, or for open sessions. SAH encourages submissions from architectural, landscape, and urban historians; museum curators; preservationists; independent scholars; architects; and members of SAH chapters and partner organizations. Deadline: June 6, 2016.
Applications are open for the SAH/Mellon Author Awards, which are designed to provide financial relief to scholars who are publishing their first monograph on the history of the built environment and who are responsible for paying for rights and permissions for images or for commissioning maps, charts, or line drawings in their publications. Deadline: May 15, 2016.
SAH invites nominations and self-nominations for the next editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH) to serve a three-year term: January 1, 2018–December 31, 2020. JSAH is a quarterly, blind-peer-reviewed international journal devoted to all aspects of the history of the global built environment and spatial practice, including architecture, landscape architecture, urbanism, and city planning. Published since 1941, JSAH has defined the field of architectural history and is a pioneer in digital publication. Articles published in JSAH are historically rigorous, conceptually sophisticated, and theoretically innovative. Deadline: June 15, 2016.
Registration is open for the SAH Field Seminar, “Architectural Layers of a Southeast Asian Region,” to take place December 1–13, 2016. The program will explore the fascinating architectural landscape of Vietnam, focusing in particular on the modern era from the nineteenth century to today. Participants will also visit the spectacular Angkor complex in Cambodia, capital of the Khmer empire from the ninth to fifteenth century. The SAH Study Program Fellowship deadline is August 11, 2016.
Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture
In February and March 2016, the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) conducted an election for its board of directors. As a result, a SHERA–Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) liaison was created, with Anna P. Sokolina as an officer. This new position will be open for reelection every three years. In addition, Hanna Chuchvaha, Natalia Kolodzei, and Andrei Shabanov were designated members at large, and Nicholas Iljine was reelected a member at large for another two-year term.
SHERA has launched a call for papers for its sponsored session for emerging scholars for CAA’s 2017 Annual Conference, chaired by Alice Sullivan.