CAA News Today
Arts Victory in Congress!
posted by CAA — January 15, 2014
Nina Ozlu Tunceli, executive director of Americans for the Arts, sent the following email on January 14, 2014.
Arts Victory in Congress!
Victory – your voice was heard on Capitol Hill.
Late last night, Congress released the details of its massive FY 2014 Omnibus spending bill. I am pleased to share that the online petition that you and 40,000 other arts advocates signed this fall helped lead the way to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) being allocated $146 million for the year. We cannot thank you enough for taking the time to sign and share our petition.
Because of members like you, arts advocates successfully prevented a proposed 49% budget cut from taking place!
In fact, this new funding level is, in effect, an increase over last year’s since Congress is suspending the automatic sequester cuts that began last year. NEA will now have the full spending power of $146 million to invest in community-based arts programs across the country.
Together, we provided a strong voice for the arts. We now need your support to continue this momentum with the 2014 midterm elections right around the corner. With so many Members of Congress retiring, please consider contributing today to help us educate the next generation of elected leaders.
Live Video Chat and Q&A about CAA’s Publishing Grants
posted by CAA — January 13, 2014
WHEN: Wednesday, January 15, 3:00 PM (EST)
WHERE: RSVP and watch online here
Whether you’re in the middle of a grant application or just thinking about applying, this live Google Hangout will be a valuable resource for you.
The College Art Association offers a robust program of publishing grants to authors and publishers of scholarly books in art history, visual studies, and related subjects. Join CAA’s director of publications Betty Leigh Hutcheson and editorial manager Alex Gershuny to get practical tips and advice about CAA’s grants, as well as answers to all your questions! You’ll also hear from former juror Susan Higman Larsen (Director of Publishing and Collections Information, Detroit Institute of Arts) about how the awards committee evaluates proposals, and from past grant recipient Karl Whittington (Assistant Professor, Ohio State University) about his experience of the application process.
Submit your questions in advance to caabook@collegeart.org or on Twitter with the hashtag #caapubgrants. Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award, the Millard Meiss Publication Fund, and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant.
Learn more about CAA’s publishing grants at www.collegeart.org/publications/pgrants. The spring deadline for the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award and the Millard Meiss Publication Fund is March 15, 2014. The deadline for the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant is September 15, 2014. This event will cover all three grants.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for January 2014
posted by CAA — January 10, 2014
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
January 2014
Jennifer Yorke, Pretty Little Lies, 2012, collage and acrylic on paper, 30 x 22 in. (artwork © Jennifer Yorke)
Jennifer Yorke: Twerks on Paper
Packer Schopf Gallery
942 West Lake Street, Chicago, IL 60607
January 10–February 15, 2014
Fashion! Food! Sex! Death! Through her Twerks on Paper, Jennifer Yorke laughs at them all. In her collages, the failures and flaws of the body assert themselves over the seductive veneer of beauty and propriety created by both costume and custom. Despite our best efforts to create controlled, socially appropriate selves, our bodies are often filled with unruly desires and only imperfectly contain the sticky, the smelly, and the wet. Yorke demonstrates the absurdity of our efforts at control through humor—and the humors that seep and spurt out of her fashionable figures. She conflates fashion’s celebration and distortion of the body with our more day-to-day experience of its flaws, failures, and expellants, encouraging us to shake our asses at them.
Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries
Three Walls
119 North Peoria Street, No. 2C, Chicago, IL 60607
January 10–February 22, 2014
Although best known for her contribution to Womanhouse—the 1972 performance Waiting—and for her role in the formation of the first Feminist Art Program in Fresno and Cal Arts, Faith Wilding remains largely understudied. As the first major retrospective of her work, Fearful Symmetries spans forty years and brings together and contextualizes the studio practice—especially works on paper—that accompanies Wilding’s performative work, illuminating the allegorical imagery that underpins her feminism and the centrality of transformation and emergence in its articulation. As such the exhibition highlights the theme of becoming—as transformative event and threshold to transfiguration—as a state of in-between-ness, evoked by iconographic motifs such as leaves, the chrysalis, hybrid beings, or “waiting” itself.
Alongside the exhibition is a curated archive featuring Wilding’s 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. A series of special events will punctuate the exhibition, including a performance and discussion with Irina Aristarkhova on January 9.
Nora Schultz, image from Parrottree—Building for Bigger Than Real, 2013 (artwork © Nora Schultz)
Nora Schultz: Parrottree—Building for Bigger Than Real
Renaissance Society
University of Chicago, 5811 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637
January 12–February 23, 2014
The Renaissance Society presents the first museum solo exhibition of Nora Schultz, a Berlin-based artist who produces sculptural installations that double as analogue printing studios. Her primary materials are discarded objects scavenged from her studio and the site of her exhibitions, often in the form of metal bars and sheets, grates, tubes, and plastics. Schultz repurposes this refuse into sculptural objects, as well as contact printing devices, stencils, and even simple rotary presses with which she prints (often as public performance) abstractions scaled from the intimate to the monumental, exhibited individually or in accumulating heaps. Deeply engaged with material and process, Schultz’s installations are themselves, at times, engines of ongoing artistic creation.
Hannah Höch
Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High St, London E1 7QX, United Kingdom
January 15–March 23, 2014
The Whitechapel Gallery presents the first major UK exhibition of the influential German artist Hannah Höch (1889–1978), an important member of the Berlin Dada movement and a pioneer in collage. Splicing together images taken from popular magazines, illustrated journals, and fashion publications, Höch created a humorous and moving commentary on society, in particular questioning traditional gender and racial stereotypes, during a time of tremendous social change. She also established collage as a key medium for satire with extraordinary skill and beauty.
Nargess Hashemi: The Pleasure in Boredom
Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde
Street 8, Alserkal Avenue, Unit 17, Al Quoz 1, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
January 12–February 27, 2014
Nargess Hashemi (b. 1979, Tehran) takes a new direction in her latest show, deviating from largely figurative works centering on themes of domesticity and everyday life and moving in a surprising new trajectory. The Pleasure in Boredom charts Hashemi’s process of developing over ten years worth of experimentation on graph paper. Doodling in notebooks from a young age, the artist has made the practice somewhat of a lifelong obsession. Using only the most basic materials, Hashemi adopts a commonly unfocused and subliminal practice and refines it, resulting in vibrant artworks of great complexity. The title of the exhibition references an essay by E. H. Gombrich, in which the art historian examined the psychology behind the act of doodling and explored its artistic merit. A doodle by its very nature is a subconscious impulse, something that we are naturally compelled to do in a dreamlike, absentminded state. In her new series, Hashemi has evolved this instinctual act into artistic endeavors of great structure and precision.
Salla Tykkä: The Palace
Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art
Gateshead Quays, South Shore Road, Gateshead, NE8 3BA, United Kingdom
November 22, 2013–March 2, 2014
The Finnish artist Salla Tykkä (b. Helsinki, 1973) is known for photographs and videos with historically and psychologically charged narratives. Her dramatically edited footage plays with cinematic structures and is often set to familiar, grandiose film scores. Since 2008, Tykkä has been completing a trilogy of films: Victoria (2008), Airs above the Ground (2010), and, most recently, Giant (2013), which was partially commissioned by the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. The Palace comprises an installation featuring all three works and is the first exhibition to bring them together. It also marks the international premiere of Giant.
Victoria is a documentation of the nightly blossoming of the giant water lily; a ten-minute time-lapse of the plant’s life cycle as it unfurls its petals in the dark. The lily blossoms over two nights; the first night it is white and when it opens for a second time a day later, its color has changed to a red hue. European explorers brought Victoria amazonica and Victoria cruziana from South America to Europe and named them after Queen Victoria. Tykkä offers the plant as a symbol of colonial power and domination in the nineteenth century.
Chryssa Romanos, Labyrinth, 1965, collage on canvas, 55 x 65 cm (artwork © Chryssa Romanos)
Chryssa Romanos
The Breeder
45 Iasonos St, GR 10436, Athens, Greece
January 17–February 17, 2014
Focusing on Chryssa Romanos’s 1960s collage on canvas and her recent décollage on Plexiglas, this exhibition surveys the practice of this outstanding Greek artist—a vanguard member of the Greek diaspora in Paris from the 1960s to the 1980s and a neglected female participant in intersecting circles of the Parisian avant-garde—whose reputation has suffered from the usual predicament of gender, including the overshadowing of her work from that of her life partner, the celebrated artist Nikos Kessanlis.
Romanos began as an abstract painter in Greece, rebelling against both the academic realism favored by the art establishment and the social realism propagated by the communist party, though she was an active member of it. In the early sixties she moved to Paris and became affiliated, along with Nikos, with intersecting circles of the Parisian avant-garde, especially those evolving around the critic Pierre Restany. Reconsidering the communicative role of her art, she rediscovered herself in 1964 as a Pop collagist, turning to what Restany called the “sociological reality”—yet through a surfeit of print media rather than the everyday objects of “urban folklore”—in order to launch a staunch critique of societal injustice, industrialization and the society of spectacle, as put by Kalliopi Minioudaki in the exhibition Power Up: Female Pop Art (at the Vienna Kunsthalle in 2010), where she mapped Romanos’s work in the context of Pop.
In several collages, which constitute the first part of this exhibition at the Breeder, Romanos “explicitly criticized consumerism, exposing its inextricability with vital engines of capitalism, such as war. In her Reportage series, for instance, she unmasked the fallacies of capitalist democracy and the industries that supported its domestic myths in the years of decolonization struggles and the Vietnam War—by mimicking the symbiosis of advertising and photojournalism in print media, while sarcastically miscaptioning scenes of famine or war with alluring advertising messages and unfit captions. In her various versions of the Luna Parc (1965) series—structured as a vicious shooting gallery—the consumerist cornucopia of the American Dream, promised to the Cold War era consumer by means of the consumer goods that are pasted around targets—is suggestively predicated upon the extinction of humanity, whether by its shooting, or its rendering into mass. This is at least suggested by the anthropocentric collages that constitute the targets.” Such signature collages were well received when exhibited in Charlottenburg, West Berlin, in 1965 and at the São Paolo Biennial in 1967. In response, however, to a studio visit by Restany—who demanded she substitute clippings with found objects as a true Nouveau Realist would do—Romanos resolutely quit what she considered, by her account, as the most important step in her career: her political Pop.
Affiliated Society News for January 2014
posted by CAA — January 09, 2014
American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works
The American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC) has recently published Ethics and Critical Thinking in Conservation, a collection of essays that brings into focus a moment in the evolution of the complex decision-making processes required when conservators consider the treatment of cultural-heritage materials. The papers presented are drawn from two consecutive years of presentations during general sessions at the AIC annual meeting. These were “Ethos Logos Pathos: Ethical Principles and Critical Thinking in Conservation” (2011) and “The Conservation Continuum: Examining the Past, Envisioning the Future” (2010). The book is available in two formats: a full-color hardcover for $30 and a black-and-white paperback for $15. The hardcover features nearly fifty full-color figures and illustrations throughout the text. Copies can be ordered at www.conservation-us.org/shop.
Art Historians of Southern California
The Art Historians of Southern California (AHSC) will host a roundtable on “The Coalition of the Art Association: California Public Education and the Promise of the Humanities,” chaired by Jane Chin Davidson of California State University, San Bernardino, at CAA’s Annual Conference in Chicago. The event will take place on Thursday, February 13, 2014, 12:30–2:00 PM in Boulevard C, 2nd Floor, Hilton Chicago. The discussion will include professors of art history, visual studies, and the humanities who have represented the California system—California Community Colleges, the California State Universities (CSUs), and the Universities of California (UCs)—such as Amelia Jones, Catherine Cole, Jennifer Doyle, Jennifer Gonzalez, and Sandra Esslinger. This roundtable will address issues of legislation, labor, and class within the academy while finding ways to acknowledge the value of the humanities in university education. Through their membership in CAA, visual art and humanities professors have long been the organizing principle of our potential solidarity. The perpetual decline of art history and visual studies has recently led to public scrutiny of CAA’s centralized leadership (see “An Open Letter to Victoria H. F. Scott Regarding the CAA,” February 8, 2013). In light of the continuing need for political advocacy, the leadership of CAA could provide a means for organizing coalition and for affecting the status of the humanities by bringing greater representation and awareness to both academic and public spheres.
Art Libraries Society of North America
The Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) is pleased to announce the election of new executive board members: Kristen Regina of the Hillwood Estate, Museum, and Gardens is vice president and president elect; Mark Pompelia of the Rhode Island School of Design is treasurer; Sylvia Roberts of Simon Fraser University in Canadian member-at-large; and Holly Hatheway of Yale University is communications and publications liaison.
ARLIS/NA recently created the post of Multimedia and Technology Reviews. The first reviews will be posted on the ARLIS website in early 2014.
Save the date for the ARLIS/NA 2014 annual conference, which will be held May 1–5, 2014, in Washington, DC. For more information, please visit the conference website.
Community College Professors of Arts and Art History
The Community College Professors of Arts and Art History (CCPAAH) will hold two events at this year’s CAA Annual Conference: a business meeting on Friday, February 14, from 7:30 to 9:00 AM in the Williford C Room on the 3rd Floor of the Hilton Chicago; and the session “Starting the Conversation: Engaging Students in the Studio and Art History” at 12:30 PM in the same space. Interested in participating or any questions? Contact Susan Altman.
Historians of Islamic Art Association
The Historians of Islamic Art Association (HIAA) is pleased to announce the election of two new members to its executive board. Sussan Babaie has been elected president-elect, and Abigail Balbale is secretary. Each will serve a three-year term beginning in January 2014; both will be officially welcomed to the board at its 2014 members and business meeting on February 14, 2014, in conjunction with the CAA Annual Conference in Chicago. At that time, Sheila Canby will succeed Marianna Shreve Simpson as president. Preparations also continue for HIAA’s fourth biennial symposium, which will be hosted by the new Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Ontario, in October 2014.
Historians of Netherlandish Art
The Historians of Netherlandish Art (HNA) will hold its quadrennial conference in Boston, Massachusetts, from June 5 to 7, 2014, in cooperation with the American Association for Netherlandic Studies. Please refer to the HNA website for further information. Additionally, HNA is pleased to announce the publication of the Summer 2013 issue of the open-access, refereed ejournal Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art (JHNA). This special issue of the journal is dedicated to Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann. In addition to excerpts from an interview with Begemann discussing his life as a scholar, curator, and teacher, the issue includes essays by his former students. The next formal deadline for submissions to JHNA is March 1, 2014; please send correspondence to the editor in chief, Alison Kettering.
International Sculpture Center
Each year the International Sculpture Center (ISC) presents an award competition to its member colleges and universities as a means of supporting, encouraging, and recognizing the work of young sculptors and their supporting schools’ faculty and art program. The Student Award winners participate in an exhibition at Grounds for Sculpture, as well as a traveling exhibition hosted by arts organizations across the country. Winners’ work is also featured in Sculpture magazine. Each winner receives a one-year ISC membership; all winners are eligible to apply for a fully sponsored residency to study in Switzerland. To nominate students for this competition, the nominees’ university must first be an ISC university-level member. University membership costs $200 for universities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico ($220 for international universities) and includes a number of benefits. Students who are interested should talk to their professors about getting involved. To find out more about the program, please visit www.sculpture.org/StudentAwards/2014 or email studentawards@sculpture.org. Nominations open: January 1, 2014; University membership registration: March 17, 2014; online student nomination form: March 24, 2014; online student submission form: April 14, 2014.
Italian Art Society
The Italian Art Society (IAS) invites members attending the CAA Annual Conference in Chicago to its first session “Periodization Anxiety in Italian Art: Renaissance, Baroque, or Early Modern” at 9:30 AM on February 13, 2014; IAS’s business meeting at 7:30 AM on February 14; and its second session “‘Futuro Anteriore’: Cultural Self-Appropriation as Catalyst in the Art of Italy” at 12:30 PM on February 14.
The society’s website details the five IAS sessions at the Renaissance Society of America meeting (New York, March 27–29, 2014) and includes a call for submissions to IAS-sponsored sessions at the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (New Orleans, October 2014; deadline to IAS: March 1, 2014).
Launched in July 2013, the IAS-initiated IASblog offers news and notes on Italian art and architecture as a complement to its main website. IASblog, edited by the IAS webmaster, Anne Leader, now has over nine hundred followers and two thousand unique visitors. IASblog welcomes submissions from members via the Submit button or by email.
National Art Education Association
Register now for the national convention of the National Art Education Association (NAEA), taking place March 29–31, 2014, in San Diego, California. We are visual arts educators. We are artists. We are creative leaders. Lead your professional learning experience at the 2014 NAEA national convention. Choose from more than one thousand sessions, workshops, tours, and events. Fuse creative thinking with art knowledge, skills, emerging technology, and new research to create powerful opportunities for your classroom, career, and beyond. Connect with thousands of colleagues from around the globe for the largest gathering of visual arts education in the world. Join a professional learning community and spend four art-filled days in Washington, DC, exploring permanent collections, current exhibitions, and the museum itself as a work of art.
NAEA SummerVision DC, now in its fifth year, is an annual NAEA event that partners with Washington, DC–area art museums to showcase best practices in critical response to art while enhancing creativity through visual journaling and by using a balanced, interdisciplinary “Form + Theme + Context (FTC) Palette for Museums and Works of Art” to enhance visual learning. Participating museums include the National Gallery of Art and Sculpture Garden, the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the National Museum of African Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Phillips Collection, the National Building Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Portrait Gallery. Registration is limited to twenty-five participants per session. Choose from two sessions: July 8–11 or July 22–25, 2014.
New NAEA publications include Michelle Kraft and Karen Keifer-Boyd’s Including Difference: A Communitarian Approach to Art Education in the Least Restrictive Environment(no. 322); and The Learner-Directed Classroom: Developing Creative Thinking Skills through Art (no. 326), edited by Diane B. Jaquith and Nan E. Hathaway.
National Council of Arts Administrators
The National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA), a community of current and future arts administrators in higher education, announces two events for CAA’s 2014 Annual Conference in Chicago: NCAA MIXER—You’re all invited, administrators or not, grab a friend and bring ‘em along; Thursday, February 13, 5:00–8:00 PM, Hilton Chicago (room TBA); and the session “Hot Problems/Cool Solutions in Arts Leadership,” which is a fast-paced series of five-minute presentations on leadership occurring on Friday, February 14, 5:30–7:00 PM in Williford C, 3rd Floor, Hilton Chicago. NCAA members hope to see you at both events in which attendees will share conviviality and ideas.
Public Art Dialogue
Jack Becker, the 2014 recipient of Public Art Dialogue’s annual award, will make a presentation at the CAA Annual Conference in Chicago on Friday, February 14, 5:30–7:00 PM. A conference on “Monument/Anti-Monument” will be held in St. Louis in April. Stay tuned for details. There have been several changes in PAD personnel. Sarah Schrank has stepped down as cochair, and Kelly Pajek will complete her term. Sierra Rooney is now both PAD secretary and treasurer. The Fall 2013 issue of Public Art Dialogue, edited by Eli Robb, considers “Perspectives on Relational Art.” Six articles explore practices based on human interactions: Caroline Peters and Ben Bloch, “To the Quick with Paul Crik: The World’s First E-Motivator Kills It with Public Art Dialogue; Cara Jordan, “The Evolution of Social Sculpture in the United States: Joseph Beuys and the Work of Suzanne Lacy and Rick Lowe”; John Tain, “Peace Tower as Commonplace: Relational Aesthetics’ Lieux de mémoire”; Lauren Rotenberg, “The Prospects of “Freed” Time: Pierre Huyghe and L’Association des Temps Libérés”; Gediminas Gasparavičius, “How the East Saw East in 1992: NSK Embassy Moscow and Relationality in Eastern Europe”; and Dee Hibbert-Jones, “A New Band-Aid for Social Ailments? Raising Questions on Social Practice and Social Responsibilities.”
Society for Photographic Education
Registration is open for the fifty-first annual national conference of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE), titled “Collaborative Exchanges: Photography in Dialogue.” In an age of interconnectedness, photographers are no longer solitary practitioners peering at the world through the singular eye of the viewfinder. Rather, photography is positioned at the heart of the discourse on contemporary art, establishing relationships with a broad array of ideas and media. This conference illuminates this new paradigm and celebrates the spirit of cooperation and social linkages. Join 1,600 artists, educators, and photographic professionals from March 6 to 9, 2014, for programming and dialogue in Baltimore, Maryland, that will fuel your creativity. The event will be a celebration of the power of community and social exchange to propel new thinking in photographic practice. Explore SPE’s exhibits fair showing the latest equipment, processes, publications, and schools with photo-related programs. Participate in one-on-one portfolio critiques and informal portfolio sharing and take advantage of student volunteer opportunities for reduced admission. Other conference highlights include a print raffle, silent auction, photo scavenger hunt, film screenings, exhibitions, tours, receptions, a dance party and more! Keynote Speakers: Joan Fontcuberta, Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick, Taryn Simon, and Catherine Lord. Preview the conference schedule and register online.
Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture
The Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) will sponsor a session at the 2014 CAA annual conference in Chicago titled “Decentering Art of the Former East,” chaired by Kristen Romberg and Masha Chlenova. SHERA will also hold a business meeting that is open to both current and prospective members. In addition, the organization is pleased to welcome CAA International Travel Grant recipients from Eastern Europe and Russia to its events at the conference. Please visit the News section of the SHERA website for details as the conference approaches.
The annual conference of the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), held in Boston, Massachusetts, in November 2013, showed a surge in activity from SHERA members, who presented their work on fourteen panels and in roundtable discussions ranging from the imperial era to the present day. The SHERA business meeting attracted over forty people, including many new members. Ballot proposals for electronic voting in January 2014 would amend SHERA’s bylaws to include the listserv administrator on the list of officers and would also replace the position of webmaster with a web news editor. Balloting will also elect a new slate of members-at-large. SHERA members will receive voting information by email in early January.
Wix.com Webinar on Creating a Strong Online Presence
posted by CAA — January 07, 2014
Creating a strong online presence is the key to a successful career. During this special workshop for CAA, to be held on Wednesday, February 5, 2014, 3:00–4:00 PM EST, representatives from Wix.com will go over the fundamentals for creating a personal online brand. They will also explain how to choose the best social channels, visual branding, and website creation with Wix.com, a no-code, visual drag-and-drop editor that uses the latest HTML5 technology to help you build the best website possible. With Wix you can have a beautiful, free website in just a few hours.
Solo Exhibitions by Artist Members
posted by CAA — December 22, 2013
See when and where CAA members are exhibiting their art, and view images of their work.
Solo Exhibitions by Artist 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.
December 2013
Abroad
Sue Johnson, Paddling Brush, 2011, gouache, watercolor, and pencil on paper (artwork © Sue Johnson; photograph by Malcolm Osman/PRM)Sue Johnson. Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, Salisbury, England, February 1–May 10, 2014. Pitt Rivers: Collecting Patterns. Painting and printmaking.
Mid-Atlantic
Peter Dueker, Untitled (#9), digital c-print, 10 x 10 in. (artwork © Peter Dueker)Peter Dueker. Outer Space, Washington, DC, October 5–26, 2013. 19 Hot Biscuits. Photography.
Midwest
Michelle Grabner, Untitled, 2013 (artwork © Michelle Grabner; photograph provided by the artist and Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago)Michelle Grabner. Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Ohio, November 1, 2013–February 16, 2014. I Work from Home. Painting, printmaking, video, and sculpture.
Michelle Handelman, Irma Vep, the last breath, 2013, 4-channel HD video installation, 33:00 min. (artwork © Michelle Handelman; photograph by Laure Leber)Michelle Handelman. Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, September 20, 2013–March 30, 2014. Irma Vep, the last breath. Multichannel video installation.
Amy Reidel. Meramec Contemporary Art Gallery, Saint Louis Community College, Saint Louis, Missouri, October 3–25, 2013. Relic-quarry: New Work by Amy Reidel. Painting, installation, collage, and video.
Northeast
Invitation card for Michele Brody’s Harlem RootsMichele Brody. Casa Frela, New York, November 9–December 9, 2013. Harlem Roots. Environmental installation.
Sharon Louden, still from Community, 2013, digital animation, 2:35 min. (artwork © Sharon Louden)Sharon Louden. Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, October 24–December 7, 2014. Community. Sculpture and video.
Josette Urso. Anthony Giordano Gallery, Dowling College, Oakdale, New York, September 4–October 12, 2013. Multiple Choice.
Michael Velliquette, Working Arm, 2013, paper, ink, acrylic, foam, and glue, 52 x 36 in. (artwork © Michael Velliquette)Michael Velliquette. DCKT, New York, October 25–December 8, 2013. Their Arising and Passing Away. Sculptural cut-paper construction.
South
Invitation card for Kyra Bélan’s exhibitionsKyra Bélan. Fine Arts Gallery, Cape Coral Arts Studio, Cape Coral, Florida, December 6–26, 2013. Painting and text.
Kyra Bélan. Member Gallery, Alliance for the Arts, Fort Meyers, Florida, December 6–28, 2013. Painting, drawing, digital media, and mixed media.
Blane De St. Croix, Broken Landscapes III, 2013 (artwork © Blane De St. Croix)Blane De St. Croix. Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas, December 5, 2013–February 16, 2014. Broken Landscapes III. Sculpture.
Sue Johnson, Mod-style Hearth (left) and Picture Window Looking West, from the series Ready-Made Dream, 2013 (artworks © Sue Johnson)Sue Johnson. Eleanor D. Wilson Museum, Hollins University, Roanoke, Virginia. October 3–December 7, 2013. Sue Johnson: American Dreamscape. Installation.
Josette Urso, Cloud Lily, 2013, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 in. (artwork © Josette Urso)Josette Urso. Maitland Art Center Galleries, Art and History Museum Maitland, Maitland, Florida, October 11–December 29, 2013. Artist-in-Residence ONE: Josette Urso. Painting.
West
Mira Schor, Reversible Painting: Map, 2013, ink and oil on gesso on linen, 28 x 24 in. (artwork © Mira Schor)Mira Schor. CB1 Gallery, Los Angeles, California, October 19–December 8, 2013. Mira Schor: Chthonic Garden. Painting.
Wanda Ewing: In Memoriam
posted by CAA — December 20, 2013
Maria Elena Buszek is associate professor of art history in the College of Arts and Media at the University of Colorado Denver.
Wanda Ewing (photograph by Dana Damewood)
The artist and educator Wanda Ewing died in Omaha, Nebraska, on December 8, 2013, of complications from chemotherapy. She was 43 years old.
Born on January 4, 1970, Ewing received her BFA in printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute, and later both an MA and MFA in printmaking from the University of Iowa. She was an associate professor of art at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, where she began teaching in 2005, leading courses in foundations and senior capstones for studio majors. She was a longtime member of the College Art Association, on whose Committee on Women in the Arts she served at the time of her death, as well as the Southern Graphics Council, where she was the International Board of Directors’ secretary.
Ewing’s work ranged from traditional print media to sculpture and, most recently, fiber arts. She was influenced by folk-art aesthetics and the depiction—and lack thereof—of African American women in popular culture, often with a biting, comical edge. Ewing’s best-known series included her pin-ups Black as Pitch, Hot as Hell, voluptuous clothing from The Summer I Wore Dresses,and faux magazine covers entitled Bougie. Her work has been included in exhibitions and purchased for collections throughout the world, and was reproduced in such publications as the Paris Review.
At the time of her passing, her series of brand-new, latch-hook works, Little Deaths, was on display at the RNG Gallery in Council Bluffs, Iowa—which will remain on exhibit, with additional works, through January 2014 as a memorial. She was, perhaps, proudest of her inclusion in the 2010 exhibition A Greater Spectrum: One Hundred Years of African American Artists in Nebraska at the Museum of Nebraska Arts, where her work was included alongside that of luminaries such as Aaron Douglas. Ewing was the recipient of grants and honors from the Women’s Caucus for Art, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Nebraska Arts Council, among other accolades.
Wanda Ewing, Girl #9, from the series Black as Pitch, Hot As Hell, 2006, acrylic and latex paint on carved plywood, 48 x 48 in. (artwork © Wanda Ewing)
Ewing was also an excellent educator, beloved and respected by both colleagues and students at the University of Nebraska for her rigorous curricula, her no-nonsense critiques, and her outreach to the regional arts community. Her legacy at the school will live on in the form of the Wanda Ewing Scholarship Fund.
Wanda Ewing will be remembered by all who knew her for her larger-than-life personality, tremendous warmth, and indomitable spirit. She is survived by her mother Elouise Ewing; her siblings Mona Yaeger, Clarence Ewing III, and Annette Ewing McCann; and her nephew and niece Devlin and Kayleigh McCann.
People in the News
posted by CAA — December 17, 2013
People in the News lists new hires, positions, and promotions in three sections: Academe, Museums and Galleries, and Organizations and Publications.
The section 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.
December 2013
Academe
Anna ColletteAnna Collette has been appointed assistant professor in photography by the Department of Art and Art History in the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.
Luba Freedman, a specialist of Italian Renaissance art and professor in history of art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, has been named Jack Cotton Professor in Architecture and Fine Arts at her school.
Carma GormanCarma Gorman has joined the Department of Art and Art History in the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin as associate professor in design.
LaToya M. Hobbs has been appointed to teach foundations at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.
Museums and Galleries
Cathleen Chaffee (photograph by James Sevigny)Cathleen Chaffee, assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, has joined the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, as curator.
Amy Galpin, an associate curator for the San Diego Museum of Art in California, has become the new curator for the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.
Mazie McKenna Harris, a doctoral candidate in the history of photography at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, has been named Linda Wyatt Gruber ’66 Curatorial Fellow in Photography by the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts.
Ronda Kasl, formerly senior curator of painting and sculpture before 1800 at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indiana, has become a curator of colonial Latin American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Karl KusserowKarl Kusserow, curator of American art at the Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey, has been named the inaugural John Wilmerding Curator of American Art at his institution.
Michael W. Maizels, most recently a research assistant and predoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, has been appointed Mellon New Media Curator and Lecturer by the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts.
Joanne Pillsbury, an associate director of the Getty Research Institute, has been named Andrall E. Pearson Curator in the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Kelly TaxterKelly Taxter, a cofounder of Taxter and Spengeman Gallery in New York and a curatorial consultant for the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, has joined the Jewish Museum in New York as assistant curator.
Mary M. TintiMary M. Tinti, formerly a curatorial fellow for the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, has been appointed associate curator of the Fitchburg Art Museum in Fitchburg, Massachusetts.
Institutional News
posted by CAA — December 17, 2013
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.
December 2013
The December 2013 listing of Institutional News will be published in spring 2014.
Grants, Awards, and Honors
posted by CAA — December 15, 2013
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.
December 2013
Karen Barzman from Harvard University’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been appointed visiting professor at Villa I Tatti in Florence, Italy, for the fall 2013 semester. She will work on a book project called “The Limits of Identity: Venice, Dalmatia, and the Representations of Difference.”
Elisabeth Agro, Nancy M. McNeil Associate Curator of American Modern and Contemporary Crafts and Decorative Arts for the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania, has accepted a 2013 award from the Craft Research Fund by the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design, based in Asheville, North Carolina. The $7,000 in funds will help expand, envision, and prototype innovative structures for disseminating craft knowledge and fostering scholarly social networking through her project with Namita Gupta Wiggers, called Critical Craft Forum.
Sonya Clark, chair of craft/material studies in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, has received a 2013 award from the Craft Research Fund by the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design, based in Asheville, North Carolina. The $14,955 award will support Clark’s The Hair Craft Project, which investigates the relationship between textile arts and the craftsmanship of contemporary African American hair braiders within the localized intercultural context of Richmond.
Jessica Cochran, curator of exhibitions and acting assistant director of the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago in Illinois, and Melissa Potter, associate professor in the Interdisciplinary Arts Department at Columbia College Chicago, have been named 2013 Craft Research Fund recipients by the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design, based in Asheville, North Carolina. Their $7,642 award will support research for Social Paper, an exhibition and its accompanying catalogue charting the evolution of the art of hand papermaking in relation to the discourse on socially engaged art, with special attention to craft, labor, community, and site-specificity.
William L. Coleman, a PhD candidate in the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley, has been awarded the second annual Sir Denis Mahon Essay Prize for unpublished work on an early modern topic by a scholar under 30. The award comes with a £1,000 prize and the invitation to present the winning project, “‘To live in accord with nature’: Rubens’s Houses and the Construction of Neostoic Leisure,” as a lecture at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England.
Jane Fine has completed an artist’s residency at the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts. She was at the foundation’s studio center in Berlin, New York, from September 15 to October 12, 2013.
Lindsay Henry, a doctoral student in the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, has been accepted as a participant in the 2014 Art & Law Program, a semester-long seminar series to he held in New York that has a theoretical and philosophical focus on the effects of law and jurisprudence on cultural production and reception.
Michael Iauch, an artist based in Durham, North Carolina, has been named a 2013–14 recipient of the Franklin Furnace Fund. Since 1985 the fund has helped artists to prepare major works of performance art.
Sue Johnson, professor of art at St. Mary’s College of Maryland in St. Mary’s City, has been awarded two residency fellowships in 2014: one for the Frans Masereel Centrum in Kasterlee, Belgium, and the other for the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, Ireland.
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Frederick Marquand Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, has received a doctor honoris causa in art history from Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic.
Joyce Yu-Jean Lee, an artist who lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland, has received a 2013–14 award from the Franklin Furnace Fund. Since 1985 the fund has helped artists to prepare major works of performance art.
Elizabeth Perrill, assistant professor of art history at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, has accepted a 2013 award from the Craft Research Fund, administered by the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design, based in Asheville, North Carolina. She will work on “Burnished by History: The Legacies of Maria Martinez and Nesta Nala in Dialogue,” a scholarly article and companion artists’ interview focused on the legacies of two ceramists, Maria Marinez from the United States and Nasta Nala from South Africa.
Richard J. PowellRichard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, has been awarded the Smithsonian Institution’s Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History.
Marion Wilson has completed an artist’s residency at the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts. She was at the foundation’s studio center in Berlin, New York, from September 15 to October 12, 2013.
Alice Pixley Young has participated in a 2013 residency at the Jentel Artist Residency Program, located in Banner, Wyoming.