CAA News Today
Institutional News
posted by CAA — October 17, 2015
Read about the latest news from institutional members.
Institutional News 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.
October 2015
The Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri has accepted a $25 million gift from an anonymous donor. The funds will go toward the school’s general endowment, campus improvements, and, in the form of a challenge grant, student scholarships, endowed professorships, and visiting professors.
The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia has received a major $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The award, a Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections Implementation Grant, will support the construction of a collections storage expansion project.
The Terra Foundation for American Art, based in Chicago, Illinois, has opened the new location of its expanded Paris Center in the historic hôtel Lévis-Mirepoix. The facility includes a larger and improved event and library facilities and a collaborative exhibition space with the Fondation Custodia.
Grants, Awards, and Honors
posted by CAA — October 15, 2015
CAA recognizes its members for their professional achievements, be it a grant, fellowship, residency, book prize, honorary degree, or related award.
Grants, Awards, and Honors 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.
October 2015
Lauren Applebaum, a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, has won a Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Her project examines “Elusive Matter, Material Bodies: American Art in the Age of Electronic Mediation, 1865–1918.”
S. Elise Archias, assistant professor in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Illinois in Chicago, has been named George Gurney Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Her project is called “Armatures—Joan Mitchell, Lygia Clark, and Melvin Edwards circa 1960.”
Nadya Bair, a PhD student in art history at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has won a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Her project is titled “The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Art of Collaboration in Postwar Photojournalism.”
Nicole Bass, a PhD student in the history of art at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has received a Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. She will research “The Shade of Private Life: Privacy and the Press in Turn-of-the-Century American Art.”
David Brownlee, Frances Shapiro-Weitzenhoffer Professor of 19th Century European Art and chair of the Graduate Group in the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, has been inducted as a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians.
Emily Casey, a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware in Newark, has been appointed Terra Foundation Predoctoral Fellow in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Her project is called “Waterscapes: Representing the Sea in the American Imagination, 1760–1815.”
Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, professor of communications and arts at Seton Hall University in Seton Hall, New Jersey, has accepted an ACLS Comparative Perspectives on Chinese Culture and Society Grant from the American Council of Learned Societies for her project, “Artistic Exchanges between China and the West during the Late Qing Dynasty (ca. 1795–1911).”
Michael Cloud, an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, has received a 2015 fellowship for painting by the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Blane De St. Croix, Broken Landscapes III, 2013 (artwork © Blane De St. Croix)Blane De St. Croix, an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, who is also associate professor and head of sculpture at Indiana University in Bloomington, has received an artist’s residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, Louisiana.
R. Ruth Dibble, a doctoral student in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has been named James Renwick Predoctoral Fellow in American Craft at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. She will work on “‘Strike Home to the Minds of Men’: Crafting Domesticity in the Civil War Era.”
Erica DiBenedetto, a graduate student in art history at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, has become Patricia and Phillip Frost Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Her project is called “Drawing from Architecture: The Conceptual Methods of Sol LeWitt’s Art, 1965–1980.”
Randall Edwards, a PhD student in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, has accepted a Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. He is researching “Dennis Oppenheim: Sites, 1967–75.”
George F. Flaherty, assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, has won the Founders’ JSAH Article Award from the Society of Architectural Historians for his essay, “Responsive Eyes: Urban Logistics and Kinetic Environments for the 1968 Mexico City Olympics,” published in the September 2014 issue of the Journal of Architectural Historians.
Kate Flint, professor of English and art history at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has earned an ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for “Flash! Photography, Writing, and Surprising Illumination.”
Finbarr Barry Flood, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the Humanities in the Institute of Fine Art at New York University, has received an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to work on “Object Histories—Flotsam as Early Globalism.”
Emily Ann Francisco, an MA student in art history and museum studies at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York, has completed the summer internship program at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. This program provides opportunities for graduate and postgraduate students to work on projects directed by a museum department head or curator.
Julie Green, The Last Supper, 2000–2015, ongoing, 600 plates completed to date, dimensions variable (artwork © Julie Green)Julie Green, professor of fine arts at Oregon State University in Corvallis, has received an artist’s residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Rachel Haidu, associate professor of art and art history and of visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, has earned an ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Her project is called “The Knot of Influence.”
Taro Hattori, an installation artist based in Oakland, California, has accepted a fall 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.
Mary Beth Heffernan’s Personal Protective Equipment Portrait Project (photograph by Marc Campos)Mary Beth Heffernan, associate professor of sculpture and photography at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California, was awarded the Presidential Grant from the Arnold P. Gold Foundation for her Personal Protective Equipment Portrait Project, a social-practice art intervention in the Ebola epidemic.
Ellie Irons, an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, has been awarded a 2015 fellowship for interdisciplinary work by the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Saisha Grayson, assistant curator for the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and a doctoral candidate in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, has been awarded a Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Her research project is “Cellist, Catalyst, Collaborator: The Work of Charlotte Moorman, 1963–1980.”
Christopher Ketcham, a doctoral student in the history, theory, and criticism of architecture and art at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, has been awarded a Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship by the American Council of Learned Societies. His project is called “Minimal Art and Body Politics in New York City, 1961–75.”
Yuko Kikuchi, a professor at University of the Arts London in the United Kingdom, has been appointed Terra Foundation Senior Fellow in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Her project is titled “Russel Wright and Asia: Studies on the American Design Aid and Transnational Design History during the Cold War.”
Marci Kwon, a PhD student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, has accepted a Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. She will work on “Vernacular Modernism: Joseph Cornell and the Art of Populism.”
Lex Morgan Lancaster, a doctoral student in art history at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, has completed the summer internship program at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. This program provides opportunities for graduate and postgraduate students to work on projects directed by a museum department head or curator.
Solveig Nelson, a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Chicago in Illinois, has received a Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Her project is titled “Direct Action, Mediated Bodies: How Early Video Changed Art.”
Alexander Potts, Max Loehr Collegiate Professor of History of Art at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has been elected to the British Academy as a corresponding fellow.
John Paul Ricco has accepted a faculty research fellowship at the University of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute in Ontario for 2015–16.
Kristine K. Ronan, a PhD candidate in the history of art at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has earned a Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Her research examines “Buffalo Dancer: The Biography of an Image.”
Julia B. Rosenbaum, associate professor of art history at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, has become a senior fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Her project explores “Curated Bodies: The Display of Science and Citizenry in Post–Civil War America.”
James H. RubinJames H. Rubin, professor of art history at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York, has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Grant for calendar year 2016.
Wenhua Shi, assistant professor of art and art history at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, has been awarded a 2015 fellowship by the New York Foundation for the Arts in the category of interdisciplinary work.
Mark Van Proyen, associate professor of painting at the San Francisco Art Institute in California, has received the Kenneth J. Botto Research Fellowship from the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson. His project examines “Kenneth J. Botto and the Tradition of Surrealist Photography.”
Alicia W. Walker, assistant professor of history of art at Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, has received a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for “Christian Bodies, Pagan Images: Women, Beauty, and Morality in Medieval Byzantium.”
Julie Warchol, formerly Brown Post-Baccalaureate Curatorial Fellow at the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Massachusetts, has completed the summer internship program at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. This program provides opportunities for graduate and postgraduate students to work on projects directed by a museum department head or curator.
Allison Wiese, associate professor of sculpture in the Department of Art and Architecture at the University of San Diego in California, has completed a July 2015 residency at the Montello Foundation near Montello, Nevada.
Tobias Wofford, assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California, has been named Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. He will work on “Visualizing Diaspora: Africa in African American Art.”
Elaine Y. Yau, a graduate student in art history at the University of California, Berkeley, has become the William H. Truettner Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. She will research “Acts of Conversion: Sister Gertrude Morgan and the Sensation of Black Folk Art, 1960–1983.”
Alice Pixley Young, an artist based in Cincinnati, Ohio, has finished an artist’s residency at the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences in Rabun Gap, Georgia.
Catherine Zuromskis, associate professor in the Department of Art and Art at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, has accepted an Ansel Adams Research Fellowship from the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Her project will investigate “The Crime Scene and the Archive: Reframing Evidence.”
Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members
posted by CAA — October 15, 2015
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.
October 2015
Gabriel Schachinger, Sweet Reflections, 1886, oil on canvas, 51 x 31 in. (photograph by Rick Echelmeyer; artwork in the public domain)Susan Ball. The Seven Deadly Sins: Pride. Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut, June 27–October 18, 2015.
Myroslava M. Mudrak. Staging the Ukrainian Avant-Garde of the 1910s and 1920s. Ukrainian Museum, New York, February 15–October 4, 2015.
Tatiana Reinoza and Luis Vargas-Santiago. Counter-Archives to the Narco-City. Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana, August 16–December 13, 2015.
Books Published by CAA Members
posted by CAA — October 15, 2015
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.
October 2015
Dora Apel. Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).
Matthew Baigell. Social Concern and Left Politics in Jewish American Art, 1880–1940 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015).
Lucy Bradnock, Courtney J. Martin, and Rebecca Peabody, eds. Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2015).
Douglas Brine. Pious Memories: The Wall-Mounted Memorial in the Burgundian Netherlands (Boston: Brill, 2015).
Jaroslav Folda. Byzantine Art and Italian Panel Painting: The Virgin and Child “Hodegetria” and the Art of Chrysography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Gabrielle Jennings, ed. Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).
David McCarthy. American Artists against War, 1935–2010 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).
Julia I. Miller and Laurie Taylor-Mitchell. From Giotto to Botticelli: The Artistic Patronage of the Humiliati in Florence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015).
Edward J. Olszewski. Dynamics of Architecture in Late Baroque Rome: Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni at the Cancelleria (Berlin: De Gruyter Open, 2015).
Jordana Moore Saggese. Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).
Steven Zahavi Schwartz, ed. Seeking Engagement: The Art of Richard Kamler (Champaign, IL: Common Ground Publishing, 2015).
Ruth Weisberg. Ruth Weisberg: Reflections through Time (Los Angeles: Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 2015).
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for October 2015
posted by CAA — October 10, 2015
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.
October 2015
Dress/Shield
Lump Project
505 South Blount Street, Raleigh, NC 27601
October 2–31, 2015
Lump Project celebrates its twentieth anniversary in Raleigh, North Carolina, with Dress/Shield, an exhibition by six female artists whose identity as women underpin the work. Represented in the exhibition are: Leah Bailis, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Lee Delegard, Brooklyn, New York; Lydia Moyer, Covesville, Virginia; Molly Schafer, Chicago, Illinois; Tory Wright, Greenville, South Carolina; and Laura Sharpe Wilson, Salt Lake City, Utah.
Each artist has a history of showing at Lump, and the exhibition will feature diverse processes, including sculpture, textiles, video, photography, and works on paper. “This group show is an opportunity to see how the perception of those voices changes when they are in chorus and to explore the connections between the work of women artists who are disparate in geography and media.”
“Schafer and Wright respond to recent motherhood with drawing, photographs and intricate paper-cut (respectively) while Moyer frames the experience of being female through text-based work that references local and national politics. Bailis does so with quilts that double as full-body masks; Delegard uses painting and sculpture to explore relationships between desire, consumerism, and the body. Sharpe Wilson, whose practice is most often painting, expands on her nature-inspired work with an installation of newly created textiles referencing historical social concerns.”
Cover of the exhibition catalogue for Public Works: Artists’ Interventions 1970s–Now
Public Works: Artists’ Interventions 1970s–Now
Mills College Art Museum
5000 MacArthur Boulevard, Oakland, CA 94613
September 16–December 13, 2015
The Mills College Art Museum explores the public practice by women artists from the 1970s to the present. The multimedia exhibition includes audio, documentation, ephemera, photography, prints, and video examining “the inherent politics and social conditions of creating art in public space,” and examining public works beyond monumental artworks.
“Public Works focuses on the often small but powerful temporary artistic interventions found online and in the urban environment. Through various tactics, the exhibition explores themes of public space, public expression, public action, public platforms, and public life through the evolving lens of participatory projects, socially engaged performance, and political action, among other media.”
Featured are the artists Amy Balkin, Tania Bruguera, Candy Chang, Minerva Cuevas, Agnes Denes, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, Karen Finley, Coco Fusco, the Guerrilla Girls, Sharon Hayes, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Jenny Holzer, Emily Jacir, Suzanne Lacy, Marie Lorenz, Susan O’Malley, Adrian Piper, Laurie Jo Reynolds and Tamms Year Ten, Favianna Rodriguez, Bonnie Ora Sherk, Stephanie Syjuco, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. New commissions include performances by Constance Hockaday and Jenifer K. Wofford, produced in collaboration with Southern Exposure (San Francisco, California). A full-color catalogue with texts by María del Carmen Carrión, Courtney Fink, Christian L. Frock, Leila Grothe, Stephanie Hanor, Meredith Johnson, and Tanya Zimbardo is available.
Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries
Armory Center for the Arts
145 North Raymond Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91103
September 26, 2015–January 3, 2016
The Armory Center for the Arts features the performance artist Faith Wilding’s first retrospective from her studio practice spanning the past forty years. Highlights include works on paper, including drawings, watercolors, collage, and paintings. The exhibition focuses on themes of “becoming,” with Wilding’s work exploring pivotal moments between private and public.
“Viewed together in this exhibition, her work makes a powerful impression about psychological and physical transition and transformation. In the depiction of the chrysalis and the embryo, for example, gestation is suggested, while in imagery of tears, wounds, and ‘recombinant’ bodies, emergence and materialization are pronounced. The sum of these parts provides a unique account of how themes of emergence were central to Wilding’s articulation of feminism, and her own reflections on a childhood growing up in an intentional Christian commune.”
Wilding, a prominent in the formation of the first Feminist Art Program, in Fresno, California, in 1970, and later at California Institute of the Arts, was also a contributor to the famous Womanhouse exhibition housed in an abandoned mansion in Los Angeles in 1972, where she performed Waiting.
The traveling exhibition is organized by Threewalls in Chicago, Illinois. Concurrently OxyArts Gallery at Occidental College will present selections from Wilding’s archive that document her work with the collaborative research and performance group subRosa, rare videos of performances made throughout her career, and papers and publications dating from her participation in the feminist art movement in the 1970s.
Women’s Art Society II
MOSTYN
Galleries 2 + 3, 12 Vaughan Street, Llandudno LL30 1AB, Wales, UK
July 18–November 1, 2015
MOSTYN presents the second edition of Women’s Art Society. Curated by Adam Carr, Women’s Art Society II is the fourth in a series of exhibitions that reflects on the rich heritage and history of the gallery building. Each exhibition in the series will examine the history of MOSTYN and its building, and how that history is tied to events beyond its context locally, nationally and internationally. With the aim to update the spirit of the original Ladies’ Art Society, this particular exhibitions discusses the history of MOSTYN and its building, while bridging the divide between past and present.
Women’s Art Society II follows an exhibition presented in October 2013 that took as its starting point the gallery’s founding in 1902. Mostyn Art Gallery was commissioned by Lady Augusta Mostyn and the first gallery in the world built specifically as a home for the presentation of artwork by female artists, in this case the work of the Gwynedd Ladies’ Art Society, who were denied membership of male-dominated local art societies on the basis of their gender. Women’s Art Society II continues the spirit of the original Ladies’ Art Society, inviting nine internationally active female artists to introduce work in the gallery space more than one hundred years later. This exhibition is also a survey of the discipline of painting today since the works in display ranges of approaches, styles, and conceptual concerns about the continued relevance of painting.
The exhibition includes works by Cornelia Baltes, Sol Calero, Ditte Gantriis, Lydia Gifford, May Hands, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Ella Kruglyanskaya, Shani Rhys James, and Caragh Thuring. Artworks on view are linked to the history of the original society by the way in which they examine the politics of gender, identity, and regulation, and aspects of exclusion and prejudice.
Shahzia Sikander: Parallax
Guggenheim Bilbao
Avenida Abandoibarra, 2, 48009 Bilbao, Spain
July 16–November 22, 2015
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s film and video room is currently inhabited by Parallax, Shahzia Sikander’s three-channel animation work. The installation, composed of hundreds of digitally animated images, combines abstract, representational, and textual forms that coexist and urge for domination. Along the moving images, human voices recite in Arabic six poems written specifically for the video on subjects that oscillate from regional historic context to reflections on human nature. In fact, that fluctuation reflects Parallax’s inspiration by the idea of conflict and control. Focused on the geostrategic position of the Strait of Hormuz and the area’s historical power tensions, such concepts emerge as the core themes of a perspective stretching from modern history to the postcolonial period. Underpinning the narrative is Sikander’s interest in paradox, societies in flux, and formal and visual disruption as a means to cultivate new associations.
The Pakistani-born American artist Shahzia Sikander (1969) is best known as a pioneer in translating the formal constructs of Indo-Persian miniature painting in a variety of formats and mediums in contemporary art, including video, animation, and mural, as well as for her collaborations with other artists.
Zina Saro-Wiwa: Did You Know We Taught Them How to Dance?
Blaffer Art Museum
University of Houston, 120 Fine Arts Building, Houston, TX 77204
September 26–December 19, 2015
Did You Know We Taught Them How to Dance? is the first solo museum exhibition of the British-Nigerian artist Zina Saro-Wiwa. It will open at Blaffer Art Museum in September 2015 and travel to the Krannert Art Museum in 2016.
Saro-Wiwa (Nigeria, 1976) has left a journalism background to change (and challenge) the way the world saw Africa. This is made evident in the new photographs, video, and a sound installation produced in southeastern Nigeria from 2013 to 2015. The project engages Niger Delta region residents both as subjects and collaborators and reflects the complex and expressive ways in which people live in an area historically fraught with the politics of energy, labor, and land, while making visible the cultural, spiritual, and emotional powers propelling the region, addressing also the global circulation of energy capital.
Being the artist’s current interest focused in mapping emotional landscapes, Did You Know We Taught Them How to Dance? unfolds a narrative device that renders environmental and emotional ecosystems as inseparable. Through the exploration of highly personal experiences and a carefully recorded choreography, Saro-Wiwa makes tangible the space between internal experience and outward performance. The exhibition uses folklore, masquerade traditions, religious practices, food, and Nigerian popular aesthetics to test art’s capacity to transform and to envision new concepts of environment and environmentalism. The artist reflects on spirit, emotion, and culture at the center of the conversation by titling the exhibition with a phrase from a private conversation between her and her father, the late writer, environmentalist, and human rights activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa.
For the Blaffer Art Museum, Saro-Wiwa will also stage a feast performance called The Mangrove Banquet: A love letter to the Niger Delta, offering her guests an opportunity to ingest the region’s agricultural bounty, “an experience designed to elicit the triumph of nature, imagination and the feminine over political despair.”
50th Anniversary Message from President Obama
posted by CAA — September 30, 2015
President Obama joined the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in celebrating the agency’s 50th anniversary, with the message that “The arts and humanities have always been central to the American experience.”
See a PDF of the White House message.
The full greeting reads as follows:
September 28, 2015
I am pleased to join in marking the 50th anniversary of the passage of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965.
The arts and humanities have always been central to the American experience. Fifty years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson helped lift up this legacy by establishing the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities, affirming: “The arts and the humanities belong to the people, for it is, after all, the people who create them.” Today, President Johnson’s vision—of a society that honors its artistic and cultural heritage and encourages its citizens to carry that heritage forward—endures as an essential part of who we are as a Nation.
Through their efforts to shape a future of opportunity and creativity for all, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities reflect a notion that has always driven America’s promise—that ours is a country where all things are possible for all people. If we join in common purpose and continue believing in the possibilities of tomorrow, I know that groundbreaking explorations and innovations—in the humanities, in the arts, and throughout our society—will always lie ahead.
As you reflect on a half century of progress, you have my best wishes.
—Barack Obama
About the National Endowment for the Humanities
Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for September 2015
posted by CAA — September 10, 2015
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.
September 2015
Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World
Tate Britain
Millbank, London SW1P 4RG, United Kingdom
June 24–October 25, 2015
Tate Britain presents Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World, a retrospective of one of the UK’s most famous artists and leader of a new generation of sculptors. Sculpture for a Modern World, the first major exhibition of Hepworth in London in the last fifty years, traces the extensive practice of the artist, offering novel ways of thinking about her art. The exhibition also evidences her achievements and international recognition, while playing around different spaces in which Hepworth presented her work, such as the reconstruction in the gallery of a modernist structure that was the artist’s “ideal” environment.
Hepworth (Yorkshire, 1903) has lived in Cornwall since 1939. Being associated with the “art of St Ives,” she began to make sculptures that translated her experience of the landscape. The exhibition features more than one hundred works that unveil her extensive creative practice. The highlights include a quartet of African hardwood pieces from her postwar period; Pelagos, her celebrated elm carving inspired by the Cornish coast, as well as drawings, collages, films, rarely seen textiles, and her fascinating photographs that have never been seen in public before.
From her earliest carvings to the imposing bronze pieces of the sixties, this major retrospective explores the progression of the artist’s abstract style, showcasing many of Hepworth’s iconic sculptures that helped to define modernism in the twentieth century. As the art critic Alastair Sooke stated: “the exhibition benefits from its decision to separate Hepworth’s sculptures from those of her friend and rival Henry Moore, with whom she is all too often compared. In this case, quite refreshingly, Hepworth’s work is allowed to breathe on its own terms.”
Cover of the exhibition catalogue for From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola
Grete Stern. From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019
May 17–October 4, 2015
The Museum of Modern Art presents From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola at the Edward Steichen Photography Galleries. This is the first major exhibition to focus on the work of two leading figures of avant-garde Argentinean photography, Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola. The couple met at the Bauhaus in 1932 and begun a creative life together. Among the rising threat of the Nazi powers in 1933, they fled Germany to London, and in 1935 embarked to Buenos Aires. Having been established themselves on both sides of the Atlantic, they played a key role in the arrival of modern photography in Argentina.
The exhibition begins in the late 1920s with each artist’s initial ventures into photography and typographic design, followed by a section focused on the extensive oeuvre of each artist. In 1928, Stern (born in Germany, 1904) met Ellen Auerbach at Walter Peterhans’s studio. Peterhans was Stern’s tutor, about to become head of photography at the Bauhaus. Grete and Ellen become friends and opened ringl + pit, a pioneering collaborative studio specializing in portraiture and advertising. Named after their childhood nicknames, the duo embraced commercial and avant-garde design to create protofeminist works and advertisements, using photomontage in their imagery to challenge the stereotypical presentations of women in advertising.
The highlights of Stern’s individual practice include the series Sueños (Dreams) that the artist produced between 1949 and early 1950s. This series of photomontages, commissioned as a contribution to the then-popular women’s magazine Idilio, reflects how psychoanalysis had captured the Argentinean imagination and infiltrated in popular culture. However, Stern opted to resist psychoanalyst interpretations, instead using the platform to comment on women’s unfulfilled promises and objectification at the Peronist society of the time.
Wendelien van Oldenborgh: Bete & Deise
Brazilian Screening Tour
Casa do Povo, São Paulo; Fundaj – Arte Contemporânea Recife; Capacete, Museum of Modern Art and Casa França-Brasil, Rio de Janeiro
August 5–September 30, 2015
If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution has commissioned the Rotterdam-based artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s film Bete & Deise- Brazilian Tour (2012) to be presented in several venues in São Paulo, Recife, and Rio de Janeiro during August and September. The screenings will be accompanied by conversations with the artist and invited guests, including the protagonists of the film, Bete Mendes and Deise Tigrona, who are special guests at the presentation in MAM Rio.
Van Oldenborgh (born 1962) addresses modern-day social issues in exceptional, authoritative, and multilayered works. She proposes a unique and subtle language to build a dialogue between a precisely selected social or historical theme, a space, and a film or photograph. Bete & Deise stages an encounter between two women in a building under construction in Rio de Janeiro. The actress Mendes and the Baile funk singer Tigrona have—each in their own way—given meaning to the idea of a public voice. Together these women talk about the use of their voice and their positions in the public sphere, allowing for the contradictions they each carry within themselves to surface, the artists confront us with considerations on the relation between cultural production and politics and the potential power that is generated when public issues intersect with the personal.
Shelley Spector: Keep the Home Fires Burning
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Perelman Building, 2525 Pennsylvania Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19130
March 7–September 24, 2015
The Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Keep the Home Fires Burning by the Philadelphia-based and community-engaged artist Shelley Spector. Spector (born 1960) was invited by the curator Dilys Blum to explore the museum’s collection of textiles and create an installation of new artwork. Her moving response became Keep the Home Fires Burning, a walk-through presentation of wood- and textile-based sculpture that reflects on the universal quest for hope, home, and connectedness.
The initial inspiration for the exhibition is a lively hand-stitched embroidered work decorated with images of a home, birds, tulips, trees, and couples designed by the folk art historian Frances Lichten and sewn by her mother in 1943. The piece was later donated to the museum by the artist Katherine Milhous, who was Lichten’s companion for four decades. Spector has re-created it in the exhibition by suspending large sculptures amid freestanding works, made from discarded second-hand clothing and furniture, with the help of her mother, Anita, who has—like did Lichten’s—carefully cleaned, deconstructed, and organized the material to be transformed into sculpture by the artist. Works in Keep the Home Fires Burning—a phrase that Spector found in a letter from Milhous to Lichten—spans from large, flowerlike structures and a birdcage to tomato-shaped pincushions and wood-and-fabric lions. The display also includes works dedicated to the couple: The Egg Tree (a nod to an award-winning children’s book by Milhous) and Frances Loves Katherine, which features two figures in front of a house inscribed with the words “give sunshine to others.”
Ana Mendieta, Untitled: Silueta Series, 1978, Super 8 film, color, silent (artwork © Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection)
Ana Mendieta: Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta
Katherine E. Nash Gallery
Regis Center for Art, University of Minnesota, 401 21st Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN
September 15–December 12, 2015
Program: September 19, 2015, 7:00 PM, followed by a reception from 8:00 to 10:00 PM
The unique exhibition at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery on Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-born artist who was sent to the United States as a child in 1961 as part of Operation Peter Pan, features twenty-one films by Mendieta, as well as a selection of her photographic work and a documentary short on the artist by the producer Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, the artist’s niece.
“Ana Mendieta was influenced by and interested in the artistic movements of her time, including Minimalism, earth art, performance art, and feminist art as well as the historical and spiritual legacies of many cultures, ancient and modern,” the exhibition statement says. Mendieta’s films touch on subjects from sexual assault in Moffitt Building Piece and Sweating Blood, which were made in response to the sexual assault and murder of Sarah Ann Ottens, a student at the University of Iowa, where Mendieta also matriculated, to films made in Mexico, such as Silueta del Laberinto and Burial Pyramid, developing her “earth-body” esthetic, as she termed the melding of sculpture, earth art, and performance.
“Mendieta’s artwork speaks powerfully to a wide diversity of audiences across the generations because a sustained and unflinching investigation of what it means to be human can be found at the core of her work.”
The program begins on September 19 with comments on Mendieta’s artistic legacy by her sister Raquelín Mendieta, her niece Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, and Mary Sabbatino of Galerie Lelong. Other programs and discussions on the role of the artist’s prolific career follow through the exhibition.
Judy Chicago: Star Cunts & Other Attractions
Riflemaker Gallery
79 Beak Street, London
September 14–December 31, 2015
The pioneering feminist artist Judy Chicago will have concurrent exhibitions in London this fall. Included is a series of never-before-seen works in Star Cunts & Other Attractions at Riflemaker. The solo show of Chicago’s archival work from the 1960s and 1970s “celebrates the visual language and core imagery of Judy Chicago’s minimalist and early feminist work.” Included are a suite of paintings and early sculpture work. Featured will be the Star Cunts series from 1969. The series, a set of prismacolor geometric shapes, suggests a sphincter. Also on exhibit will be test plates from The Dinner Party, which permanently lives at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. The test plates attest to the time Chicago invested in her work through practice of ceramic decoration.
While the exhibition at Riflemaker is open, Chicago will also have work in the Tate Modern exhibition The World Goes Pop, opening on September 17, 2015. On view together for the first time will be her Car Hood series from the mid-1960s, which is constructed of car hoods spray-painted in bold colors and depicting male and female forms—a reflection on the Los Angeles car scene of the time.
Affiliated Society News for September 2015
posted by CAA — September 09, 2015
Community College Professors of Arts and Art History
After successful sessions at last year’s CAA and FATE Conferences, the Community College Professors of Arts and Art History (CCPAAH) will hold two events at this year’s CAA Annual Conference in Washington, DC. Our business meeting will be held on Friday, February 5, from 7:30 AM to 9:00 AM. Please bring a project idea to share with your colleagues. Our session “In and out of the Studio: New ideas for Art Appreciation” will be held at 12:30 PM on Thursday, February 4. We are looking for additional presenters who are doing interesting things in Art Appreciation. If you are interested in presenting or have any questions, please contact Susan Altman. We look forward to seeing you at the conference!
Japan Art History Forum
Yurika Wakamatsu, PhD candidate at Harvard University, was selected as the winner of the 2015 Chino Kaori Memorial Essay Prize for an essay titled “Feminizing Art in Modern Japan: Noguchi Shōhin (1847-1917) and the Changing Conceptions of Art and Womanhood.” The prize was established by the Japan Art History Forum in 2003 in memory of distinguished colleague Chino Kaori, and is awarded annually to the best research paper written in English on a Japanese art history topic.
American Academy in Rome
The American Academy in Rome (AAR) invites applications for the 2016 Rome Prize competition. Up to thirty fellowships (from six months to two years) are awarded to emerging and established artists and scholars working in a variety of disciplines, including a stipend, room & board, and individual workspace at our eleven-acre center in Rome. Please visit aarome.org/apply for submission guidelines. Applications are due November 1.
AAR presents Bodies of Knowledge, the 2015 – 2016 series of lectures, exhibitions and events. Programming features artists and scholars offering multiple readings across disciplinary and geographical boundaries — questioning assumptions about the ways in which we structure knowledge and how these categories define our understanding of history, identity and culture. Fall events in Rome include a conversation with artist Isaac Julien and curator Mark Nash on filmmaking inspired by architect Lina Bo Bardi, and an exhibition of Cy Twombly photographs, accompanied by a talk with photographer Sally Mann. In New York, the Academy presents an evening on poetry and language with Edward Hirsch and Robert Polito, and a panel discussion on cultural patrimony and collective responsibility with scholar C. Brian Rose, antiquities expert Deborah Lehr and art historian James Cuno. Visit aarome.org for details.
Women’s Caucus for Art
The Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) is pleased to announce Susan M. King (previously Susan King Obarski), Ph.D., as the incoming president of the organization. An art historian and artist, she teaches at the Laguna College of Art and Design and at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA. Her doctorate in Visual Studies at UC, Irvine, “Surrealism: A Marxist Enterprise in 1930s London,” included a chapter on artist Eileen Agar. She recently reviewed the J.M.W. Turner exhibitions and catalogue for caa.reviews (in press). Susan is a long time board member of WCA and past chair of the Lifetime Achievement Awards. Her two-year term as president begins in February 2016 after the CAA and WCA conferences. One of her key goals is to cross the generational divide of feminist artists, writers, and scholars to engage an open and fruitful dialogue on a range of feminist and activist issues. To that end, she is curating WATER: AN ESSENTIAL CONVERSATION, featuring historical posters from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics and contemporary graphic and video art. Founded in 1972, the WCA is an affiliate society of CAA and a founding member of The Feminist Art Project. More at nationalwca.org.
Renaissance Society of America
The Renaissance Society of America will hold its 62nd annual meeting in Boston, 31 March–2 April 2016. The program will include nearly 700 sessions, with more than 200 in Renaissance and early modern art history. The full, searchable program and schedule can be viewed on our website.
The Renaissance Society of America annually awards short-term grants supporting research projects and publications that aim to advance scholarly knowledge about the Renaissance. Many grants in art history are funded by the generous support of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, through the Kress Mid-Career Research and Publication Fellowships in Renaissance Art History and the Kress Short-Term Research Library Fellowships for Art Historians programs. Please see our website for more information. Applicants must be members of RSA. Application deadline is 1 December 2015.
Public Art Dialogue
The newest issue of Public Art Dialogue (Volume 5, Issue Number 1) has been published. Edited by John Craig Freeman and Mimi Sheller, it is devoted to the theme of Hybrid Space and Digital Public Art. Articles include “Down the Rabbit Hole” by Esther Polak and Ivar van Bekkum; “Networked Monumental: Site, Production, and Distributed Publics—Online, and in Everyday Life,” by Dylan Gauthier; “Future Museums Now—Augmented Reality Musings” by Geoffrey Alan Rhodes; “#sQavengeRhunt: LoVid” by Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus; and “The Digital: A False Division?” by Patrick Lichty. Two interviews by Dorothy Santos are included: Kate Durban and Jim Dessicino. Finally, there are two book reviews: one on Vladimir Geroimenko’s Augmented Reality Art: From an Emerging Technology to a Novel Creative Medium by Lenore Metrick-Chen; and a second on Ricciarda Belgiosojoso’s Constructing Urban Space with Sounds and Music by Shawn Greenlee. More information is available on the journal’s website.
Association of Academic Museums & Galleries
AAMG/Kellogg 2016 Leadership Seminar: Join colleagues from throughout the U.S. and beyond for AAMG’s flagship professional development program at the prestigious Kellogg School Center for Nonprofit Management, Northwestern University. Now accepting applications online. APPLICATION DEADLINE JANUARY 15, 2016.
WHO: Faculty drawn from the Kellogg School of Management Center for Nonprofit Management and seasoned professionals in the academic museum field. Up to 40 Seminar Fellows selected from a national and international application pool by the Application Review Team.
WHAT: A Certificate Program. Intensive, week-long, highly interactive learning and sharing experience with top faculty in the field of leadership and management and academic museum and gallery colleagues from across the U.S. and abroad.
WHEN: June 19 – June 24, 2016
WHERE: Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois (metro-Chicago)
TUITION: $4,500. Limited scholarship funds may be available.
Association for Latin American Art
ALAA has launched a redesigned website aimed at providing current news and events on Latin American art to the public. The website features updated information on the ALAA bylaws, officers, book and dissertation awards, a newsletter archive, and a list of academic programs that offer graduate degrees in art history with a focus on Latin America. A Members Portal allows registered ALAA members to access a membership directory, discover fellow members’ research interests, and contribute to the public Events Calendar.
Triennial Conference: ALAA is pleased to invite proposals for papers to be presented at its Fourth Triennial Conference “Art at Large: Public and Monumental Arts in the Americas.” Hosted by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in collaboration with the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, the conference will be held the weekend of March 18–20, 2016 at the de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Deadline September 15, 2015.
Book Award: ALAA announces its Fourteenth Annual Book Award for the best scholarly book published on the art of Latin America from the Pre-Columbian era to the present. Deadline November 15, 2015.
Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey
AMCA is currently accepting submissions for the 2016 Rhonda A. Saad Prize for Best Paper in Modern and Contemporary Arab Art. Established in 2010, the award aims to recognize and promote excellence in the field of modern and contemporary Arab art. The prize honors our respected colleague and dear friend, Rhonda (1979-2010), who was, at the time of her tragic passing, in the process of researching a doctoral dissertation on modern Palestinian art in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University. Over the last five years, the prize has recognized excellence in graduate work completed on a variety of subjects in a number of disciplines at universities in the U.S. and abroad. This year, we are opening the competition to graduate students as well as to recent post-doctoral students who earned a PhD no earlier than 2013.
The prize is offered to a graduate student or recent PhDs working in any discipline whose paper is judged to provide the most significant contribution to the disciplines of Art History and Middle East Studies. Submissions must have been produced between June 2014 and December 2015, must not exceed 35 pages (excluding notes and bibliography), and must not have been previously published or be currently under consideration for publication.
Submissions are due to info@amcainternational.org by December 1, 2015. The winner will be announced during the AMCA Members Meeting, held this year at the College Art Association Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, in February 2016. The author of the winning paper will be awarded $500USD and the winning paper will be considered for publication in the Arab Studies Journal, pending the standard review process.
In October 2015, the School of Art, Design, and Media at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore brought together designers, artists, architects, and academics for a multi-disciplinary conference on contemporary Islamic art, design, and architecture. Although each discipline has its own practice and methodology, when collectively grouped under an Islamic identity, we are forced to redefine the term “Islamic.” While new forms, spaces, images, typographies, symbols, colors, and materials of contemporary Islamic art, design, and architecture share distinct cultural narratives from individual geographies, it remains essential to address how comparative and connective perspectives reorient our understanding of contemporary Islamic visual communication. This three-day conference took place October 7-9 and was an unprecedented forum dedicated to convening professionals and scholars from throughout Asia, Europe, and America who share an investment in contemporary Islamic art, design, and architecture. For more information, visit http://www.ciada2015.com/. Organization Committee: Gül İnanç, Peer Sathikh, Nada Shabout, Sarah Rogers and Dina B.
Association of Art Museum Curators and American Academy in Rome
The Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) and the American Academy in Rome (AAR) are pleased to announce the third year of The Samuel H. Kress Foundation AAMC Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. The program is intended to honor exceptional curatorial vision and help curators advance deserving projects. The purpose of the award is to provide essential funding for curators to develop projects that require research in Italy.
The Affiliated Fellowship is a 4-week appointment at the AAR, which includes housing, six lunches and five dinners a week, and access to residence hall kitchens; $1,500 in airfare; and $2,000 stipend. Affiliated Fellows have access to all the AAR facilities (including 24-hour a day access to the library and overall grounds) and all activities that occur at the Academy, such as concerts, exhibitions, conferences, lectures, and tours, etc. If desired, the Fellow can also schedule to give a talk about their project at the AAR during the Fellowship. For more information, visit http://www.artcurators.org/?KressAARFellowship or email aamc@artcurators.org.
Save the date: The 2016 AAMC Annual Conference & Meeting will be May 7 – 10 in Houston, Texas.
Society for Photographic Education
Society for Photographic Education (SPE) offers student member scholarships to offset the cost of attending SPE’s 2016 National Conference in Las Vegas, NV, March 10-13. Each award includes a $550 travel stipend, conference fee waiver, and complimentary one-year membership in SPE. For more information, visit www.spenational.org or contact info@spenational.org. Application deadline is October 15, 2015, at 11:59 PM EST.
Southeastern College Art Conference
Kevin Cates, Associate Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, has been appointed to the SECAC Board of Directors.
Committee on Diversity Practices highlights for September/October 2015
posted by CAA — September 09, 2015
The CAA Committee on Diversity Practices highlights exhibitions, events, and activities that support the development of global perspectives on art and visual culture and deepen our appreciation of political and cultural heterogeneity as educational and professional values. Current highlights are listed below; browse past highlights through links at the bottom of this page.
September/October 2015
Doris Salcedo
Guggenheim Museum
New York, New York
June 26–October 12, 2015
“This major retrospective will survey the searing, deeply poetic work of Doris Salcedo (b. 1958, Bogotá, Colombia). Over the past three decades, Salcedo’s practice has addressed the traumatic history of modern-day Colombia, as well as wider legacies of suffering stemming from colonialism, racism, and other forms of social injustice. Originating in lengthy research processes during which the artist solicits testimonies from the victims of violent oppression, her sculptures and installations eschew the direct representation of atrocities in favor of open-ended confluences of forms that are fashioned from evocative materials and intensely laborious techniques. Many of her works transmute intimate domestic objects into subtly charged vessels freighted with memories and narratives, paradoxically conjuring that which is tragically absent. The Guggenheim’s presentation of Doris Salcedo will occupy four levels of the museum’s Tower galleries. It will feature the artist’s most significant series from the late 1980s to the present, as well as a video documenting her remarkable site-specific public projects and architectural interventions.”
Flawlessly Feminine: Women Who Graced the Cover of JET Magazine and Works by Willie Cole
Golden Lady: Works by Mario Moore
Diggs Gallery, Winston-Salem State University
Winston-Salem, North Carolina
July 9–December 2, 2015
“The pairing of two innovative exhibitions honoring women who graced the cover of JET Magazine, and drawings of young women with their favorite literature, is on display at Winston-Salem State University’s Diggs Gallery through December 2. The exhibits feature works by renowned artist Willie Cole and emerging artist Mario Moore.”
Black Like Who?
Birmingham Museum of Art
Birmingham, Alabama
July 11–November 1, 2015
“Issues regarding visual depictions of blackness in American art have been such highly scrutinized topics in both artistic production and museum exhibitions that one could ask what else is there to examine that has not already been sufficiently analyzed? Black Like Who? answers that inquiry with a question that considers who renders imagery of blackness and contemplates the various reasons why.
Drawing on the Museum’s collection and select loans from Birmingham private collectors, the exhibition surveys a variety of historical and contemporary works, and explores how various representations of blacks in American art have been influenced at particular historical moments by specific political, cultural, and aesthetic interests, as well as the motives and beliefs of the artists. Comprising work by both white and black artists, the diverse works examined in Black Like Who? range from romanticized Civil War depictions painted in the early 20th century by Gilbert Gaul (1855–1919) to a contemporary print by Iona Rozeal Brown (born 1966) that blends hip-hop culture with late 19th-century Japanese art.”
Deana Lawson: Ruttenberg Contemporary Photography Series
Art Institute of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois
September 5, 2015–January 10, 2016
“The first installment of the biennial Ruttenberg Contemporary Photography Series features the work of New York–based photographer Deana Lawson. For nearly a decade, Lawson has been investigating the visual expression of global black culture and how individuals claim their identities within it. Her staged portraits, carefully composed scenes, and found images speak to the ways in which personal and social histories, familial legacies, sexuality, social status, and religious-spiritual ideas may be drawn upon the body.
Lawson began her work in and around her Brooklyn neighborhood but has recently branched out nationally and internationally to places such as Louisiana, Haiti, Jamaica, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While her themes have remained consistent, her landscapes have shifted and broadened—the global scope of the pictures, in her words, “concern and affirm the sacred black body” and speak to a collective psychic memory of shared experiences.
Lawson starts her process by researching communities she has chosen for their cultural histories. Once on site, strangers met through chance encounters become her subjects, selected for a particular expression, mannerism, style of dress, or cultural or religious affiliation. The resulting images are often inspired by multiple trips or planned well in advance. They draw upon Western and African diasporic conventions of self-presentation, popular culture, mythology, and religious rituals and beliefs—emphasizing dialogues among the past, present, and future of black culture.”
Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980
Museum of Modern Art
New York, New York
September 5, 2015–January 3, 2016
“Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980 focuses on the parallels and connections among an international scene of artists working in—and in reference to—Latin America and Eastern Europe during the 1960s and 1970s. The radical experimentation, expansion, and dissemination of ideas that marked the cultural production of these decades (which flanked the widespread student protests of 1968) challenge established art-historical narratives in the West. Artists from Prague to Mexico City developed alternative and ever-expanding networks of distribution and organization, via Paris, Vienna, and Venice, to circumvent the borders established after World War II, local forms of state and military repression, and Western accounts of artistic mastery and individualism. One major transformation across Latin American and Eastern European art scenes was the embrace of institutional critique and an emphasis on the creation of art outside a market context.
The exhibition brings together landmark works from MoMA’s collection by Eastern European artists including Geta Brặtescu, Tomislav Gotovac, Ion Grigorescu, Sanja Iveković, Dóra Maurer, and the anti-art collectives Gorgona, OHO, Aktual, and Fluxus East, as well as Latin American artists such as Beatriz González, Antonio Dias, Lea Lublin, and Ana Mendieta. Particular attention is paid to the group of Argentine artists clustered around the influential Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, including Oscar Bony, David Lamelas, and Marta Minujín, who confronted the aesthetic and political implications of mass media communication—including film, television, and the telex—during a vibrant, experimental period of technological innovation and political tension.
Featuring series of works and major installations, several of which are on view for the first time, Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980 highlights multiple points of contact, often initiated and sustained through collective actions and personal exchanges between artists. The exhibition suggests possible counter-geographies, realignments, alternative models of solidarity, and new ways of thinking about art produced internationally in relation to the frameworks dictated by the Cold War.”
Philippine Gold: Treasures of Forgotten Kingdoms
The Asia Society
New York, New York
September 11, 2015–January 3, 2016
“This exhibition of more than 100 gold objects focuses on the wealth of the golden age of Butuan (pronounced boot’ wan), a polity on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao that rose to commercial prominence in the tenth century and declined in the thirteenth century. Works from ancient polities beyond Butuan, such as those on the islands of the Visayas and Luzon, bear witness to the early use of gold throughout the Philippines. A selection of the most extraordinary objects from a 1981 discovery—now in the collection of the Ayala Museum in Makati City and on view in the United States for the first time—forms the core of “Philippine Gold: Treasures of Forgotten Kingdoms.” The exhibition also includes a few important loans from public and private collections including the Central Bank of the Philippines. Featuring spectacular gold necklaces, chains, waistbands, bangles, ritual bowls, implements, and ceremonial weapons, the exhibition showcases the rich artistry and material wealth of Butuan and related island polities.”
Gates of the Lord: The Tradition of Krishna Paintings
Art Institute of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois
September 13, 2015–January 3, 2016
“This fall, the Art Institute of Chicago offers a glimpse into one of the world’s most intimate religious traditions. Bringing together over 100 artworks from private and public collections in India and the United States, Gates of the Lord: The Tradition of Krishna Paintings is the first major U.S. exhibition to explore the unique visual culture of the Pushtimarg, a Hindu denomination from Western India.
Founded in the 16th century by the saint and philosopher Shri Vallabhacharya (1479–1531), the Pushtimarg is a religious community dedicated to the devotion of Shrinathji, a divine image of the Hindu god Krishna as a seven-year-old child. The religious and artistic center of the sect is based in the temple town of Nathdwara (literally, “The Gates of the Lord”), near Udaipur in the state of Rajasthan, India. Scholars and artists have long been fascinated by the distinctive and highly aestheticized manner in which members of this group venerate Shrinathji, as well as by the legacy of miniature paintings created as a record of such worship. This exhibition showcases centuries of pichvais (textile hangings) and miniature paintings that have been created by and for the Pushtimarg in devotion of Shrinathji.
The exhibition takes visitors through a year in Nathdwara, where the daily worship of Shrinathji is characterized by the changing seasons and a bustling festival calendar. Gallery by gallery, visitors are introduced to the pichvais used as backdrops for Shrinathji in his shrine, each uniquely suited to a particular season or festival. The accompanying miniature paintings offer further insight into the Pushtimarg sect: its mode of veneration, history, and important priests and patron families. Enhancing the experience of the sect’s rich culture are festival and devotional music, a shrine reconstruction, and touchscreen kiosks that allow visitors to page through religious manuscripts, an artist’s sketchbook, and a historic photo album. The exhibition concludes with an exploration of the works, sketches, and observations of prominent 20th- and 21st-century Nathdwara artists who have kept the painting tradition flourishing through the present day.
Gates of the Lord comprises drawings, pichvais, paintings, and historic photographs borrowed chiefly from two major private collections in India, the Amit Ambalal Collection (Ahmedabad, India) and the TAPI Collection (Surat, India). These rare loans are augmented by important objects from a number of public and private collections within the United States, including the Art Institute’s own permanent collection, in order to present the richest possible story of Pushtimarg art and tradition.”
Kongo: Power and Majesty
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York, New York
September 18, 2015–January 3, 2016
“Central Africa’s Kongo civilization is responsible for one of the world’s greatest artistic traditions. This international loan exhibition will explore the region’s history and culture through 134 of the most inspired creations of Kongo masters from the sixteenth through the early twentieth century.
The earliest of these creations were diplomatic missives sent by Kongo sovereigns to their European counterparts during the Age of Exploration; they took the form of delicately carved ivories and finely woven raffia cloths embellished with abstract geometric patterns. Admired as marvels of human ingenuity, such Kongo works were preserved in princely European Kunstkammer, or cabinets of curiosities, alongside other precious and exotic creations from across the globe.
Kongo luxury arts from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century—many of which have never been exhibited before—will give an unprecedented historical backdrop to the outstanding work produced by master sculptors active in the same region during the nineteenth century. The array of figurative representations they produced range from miniature ivory finials for the staffs of office of Kongo leaders to the carved-wood commemorative shrine figures positioned above their burial sites.
The presentation will culminate with a gathering of fifteen monumental Mangaaka power figures produced in the Chiloango River region during the second half of the nineteenth century; these will include the celebrated example acquired by the Met in 2008, the original catalyst for the exhibition. For the first time, this electrifying form of expression will be understood as a defensive measure conceived by Kongo leaders to deflect Western incursions into this region of Central Africa.
With works drawn from sixty institutional and private lenders across Europe and the United States, Kongo: Power and Majesty will relate the objects on view to specific historical developments and will challenge misconceptions of Africa’s relationship with the West. In doing so, it will offer a radical, new understanding of Kongo art over the last five hundred years.”
Impressionism and the Caribbean: Francisco Oller and His Transatlantic World
Brooklyn Museum of Art
Brooklyn, New York
October 2, 2015–January 3, 2016
“The painter Francisco Oller contributed greatly to the development of modern art in both Europe and the Caribbean and revolutionized the school of painting in his native Puerto Rico.
Oller emerged from the small art world of San Juan in the 1840s, spending twenty years in Madrid and Paris, where he was inspired by the art of Gustave Courbet and joined the avant-garde circles of such artists as Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, and Claude Monet. While European Romanticism, Realism, and Impressionism formed a critical jumping-off point for Oller’s aesthetic, his most important source of inspiration was Puerto Rico, where he painted tropical landscapes, still lifes with indigenous fruits and vegetables, and portraits of distinguished artists and intellectuals.
This is the first U.S. exhibition to present Oller’s work within both its New and Old World contexts.”
Walid Raad
Museum of Modern Art
New York, New York
October 12, 2015–January 31, 2016
“MoMA presents the first comprehensive American survey of the leading contemporary artist Walid Raad (b. 1967, Lebanon), featuring his work in photography, video, sculpture, and performance from the last 25 years. Dedicated to exploring the veracity of photographic and video documents in the public realm, the role of memory and narrative within discourses of conflict, and the construction of histories of art in the Arab world, Raad’s work is informed by his upbringing in Lebanon during the civil war (1975–90), and by the socioeconomic and military policies that have shaped the Middle East in the past few decades.
The exhibition focuses on two of the artist’s long-term projects: The Atlas Group (1989–2004) and Scratching on things I could disavow (2007–ongoing). Under the rubric of The Atlas Group, a 15-year project exploring the contemporary history of Lebanon, Raad produced fictionalized photographs, videotapes, notebooks, and lectures that related to real events and authentic research in audio, film, and photographic archives in Lebanon and elsewhere. Raad’s recent work has expanded to address the Middle East region at large. His current ongoing project, Scratching on things I could disavow, examines the recent emergence in the Arab world of new infrastructure for the visual arts—art fairs, biennials, museums, and galleries—alongside the geopolitical, economic, and military conflicts that have consumed the region. The exhibition emphasizes the importance of performance, narrative, and storytelling in Raad’s oeuvre. The artist will give lecture-performances in MoMA’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium multiple times a week for the duration of the exhibition.”
Joaquín Torres-García: The Arcadian Modern
Museum of Modern Art
New York, New York
October 25, 2015–February 15, 2016
“This major retrospective of Joaquín Torres-García (Uruguayan, 1874–1949) features works ranging from the late 19th century to the 1940s, including drawings, paintings, objects, sculptures, and original artist notebooks and rare publications. The exhibition combines a chronological display with a thematic approach, structured in a series of major chapters in the artist’s career, with emphasis on two key moments: the period from 1923 to 1933, when Torres-García participated in various European early modern avant-garde movements while establishing his own signature pictographic/Constructivist style; and 1935 to 1943, when, having returned to Uruguay, he produced one of the most striking repertoires of synthetic abstraction.
Torres-García is one of the most complex and important artists of the first half of the 20th century, and his work opened up transformational paths for modern art on both sides of the Atlantic. His personal involvement with a significant number of early avant-garde movements—from Catalan Noucentismo to Cubism, Ultraism-Vibrationism, and Neo-Plasticism—makes him an unparalleled figure whose work is ripe for a fresh critical reappraisal in the U.S.”
A Letter from Buenos Aires
posted by CAA — September 09, 2015
Fernando Martínez Nespral is a professor in the School of Architecture, Design, and Urbanism at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina and a participant in the 2014 CAA-Getty International Program.
This past July, there was a thought-provoking exhibition on view in Buenos Aires at the Museo de Arquitectura y Diseño (Museum of Architecture and Design), known as MARQ. Titled Secciones, this collection of drawings by Santiago Nicolás Lovecchio added a lively local commentary to the form versus function debate in architecture.
MARQ was founded by the Central Society of Architects to explore the architecture of Argentina, from its history and heritage to contemporary issues and projects. It is the first museum in the country dedicated specifically to architecture, and its activities have continued to grow since it opened fifteen years ago. The museum is situated in an old railway building on the Avenida del Libertador, sharing the Buenos Aires Museum Mile with the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (National Museum of Fine Arts), Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo (National Museum of Decorative Arts), Museo de Arte Hispanoamericano (Museum of Spanish American Art), and Museo de Arte Latinoamericano (Museum of Latin American Art), among others.
Lovecchio’s exhibition presented a series of digitally enhanced pencil and ink sectional drawings of detailed plans for imaginary buildings. Each one juxtaposes clear references to landmarks of architectural history with the typical shapes and traditional forms of domestic architecture in Buenos Aires.
This local perspective on history makes sense when we consider the biography of its author. Lovecchio is a young Argentine who combines his work as a practicing architect with his teaching of architectural history. In this exhibition, he courageously addressed a subject that is at the center of academic discussions about architecture in Argentina today. I am referring to the Dwelling Theory, which favors the analysis of architecture as a setting for the activities of those who live in the buildings, rather than the study of forms.
Thus, in Ninfeo, Lovecchio includes straightforward references to Italian grottos. Similarly, in Casa para dos caballos/caballeros (House for Two Horses/Knights) and especially Casa para dos señoritas bienudas (House for Two Distinguished Ladies), he includes elements reminiscent of the interior spaces in Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. Particularly in the latter two cases, references to the architecture, customs, and lifestyles of Argentina’s upper classes in the early twentieth century come to light with remarkable vividness. They harken back to the Anchorena Palace (now the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and the Errázuriz Palace (now the National Museum of Decorative Arts), both examples of upper-class residences in Buenos Aires.
The academic, monumental architecture that characterizes the heritage of Buenos Aires, as seen in the abovementioned drawings, is also evident in Invernadero (Greenhouse) and the fabulous Casa cúpulas (House of Domes). But the most attractive element in these imaginary architectural studies is the critical irony that seeps lucidly through Lovecchio’s drawings. Different eras, designs, and ways of living are superimposed and reveal new perspectives and interpretations of the past and present.
The work El porteño burguesón (The Buenos Aires Bourgeoisie) starkly displays—as only sectional drawings do—the intimacies of the typical apartments and apartment dwellers of Buenos Aires’s middle class, and it combines these traditional, conservative forms with an oneiric artificial cloud of glass polygons that recall complex underground mechanisms and outdated boilers from the Industrial Revolution.
But in my opinion, La manzana porteña (Buenos Aires City Block) is where the architecture of Buenos Aires is most starkly illuminated. The drawing shows the miseries of real-estate speculation and its promise of Patios de aire y luz (Courtyards for Air and Light), as we say here—that do not provide either—along with the chaos of cables, air conditioners, and tiny windows that coexist with modest traditional houses from a previous era that are still part of our time.
The title of the exhibition, Secciones, alludes to the structural cross sections depicted in the drawings, but in Spanish, sectional drawings are called cortes (cuts, or slices). So the choice of the word secciones undoubtedly refers to the idea that Lovecchio’s sections show more than just buildings. His drawings explore nuances, complexities, and contrasts that exceed traditional interpretations of architecture.
In sum, Lovecchio’s works bring a bold, young, and specifically Argentine point of view to the ever-present idea of the “complexity and contradiction of contemporary architecture” that Robert Venturi wisely warned us about almost half a century ago.
For more information, see the MARQ website or Facebook page. To enjoy these drawings online, see santiagonlove.tumblr.com or the recent article published on Plataforma Arquitectura (text in Spanish).