CAA News Today
Institutional News
posted by CAA — June 17, 2012
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.
June 2012
South view of the Michigan Avenue façade of the Art Institute of Chicago (photograph provided by the Art Institute of Chicago)The Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, on behalf of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has been awarded a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the Teacher Institute in Contemporary Art at the school, an enrichment program for high school art teachers to engage with the art community of Chicago.
The Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland has been granted $65,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the reinstallation of its American art collection into newly refurbished galleries, originally designed in 1929 by John Russell Pope.
The Brooklyn Museum in New York has won two bronze 2012 MUSE awards: in the category of Interpretative Interactive Installations for the exhibition Vishnu: Hinduism’s Blue-Skinned Savior; and in the Online Presence category for the website of the exhibition Split Second: Indian Paintings (2011).
California State University, Long Beach, has been awarded Best Show in a University Art Gallery by the United States section of the International Art Critics Association for Perpetual Motion: Michael Goldberg (2010).
Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, is the recipient of a $45,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in support of a program called Objects and Their Makers: New Insights at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, which aims to introduce students to the arts of Africa, China, Japan, Tibet, and Southeast Asia, and to Precolumbian and Native American art.
The Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, has been granted a $50,000 award from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the online publication of the museum’s collection of European and contemporary art.
The Dallas Museum of Art in Texas has recently launched a new website application called DMA Dashboard, which offers the public access to real-time museum statistics such as financial data, fundraising, and building operations.
The Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, California, has launched the Conserving Modern Architecture Initiative, an international effort that aims to “increase knowledge for the field and develop new tools to assist practitioners,” according to Tim Whalen, the institute’s director. The initiative’s first project is the long-term conservation of the Eames House in Los Angleles, built by Charles and Ray Eames in 1949.
The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California, has won a 2012 MUSE award, receiving a silver award in the category of Audio Tours and Podcasts for Demons, Angels, and Monsters: The Supernatural in Art (2011). The museum also earned an honorable mention in the category of Applications and APIs for The Life of Art: Context, Collecting, and Display (2012).
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York has been awarded the second-place prize for Best Thematic Museum Show in New York by the United States section of the International Art Critics Association for Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936 (2010–11).
The Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indiana has received a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the documentation and conservation of the museum’s Western European design collection, a project that is in tandem with moving the collection to a newly designed 9,000-square-foot gallery. The museum has also won a bronze 2012 MUSE award in the category of Public Outreach for its campaign XLVI Reasons to Visit the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia, has received a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to aid a multimedia installation by the artist Matt Haffner for display in the lobby of the visual-arts building. A $3 million addition to the Kennesaw State University Art Museum and Galleries was recently approved by the University System of Georgia’s board of regents. The new 9,200-square-foot space, to open in March 2013, will house the university’s art collection and an interdisciplinary research center.
Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, has been awarded a $35,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for an exhibition at the Kent State University Museum, called Shifting Paradigms of Identity: Creative Technology and Fashion, which will address how changing technology affects fashion.
Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston has received a $50,000 award from the National Endowment for the Arts to support scholarships for high school juniors and seniors to attend a four-week intensive summer art program.
The Mead Art Museum at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, has received a $1 million matching endowment grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of an initiative to integrate the museum’s collection into the college curriculum and to endow the position of coordinator of college programs. A stipulation of the grant calls for Amherst to raise a matching $1 million within three years.
The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, has been awarded the second place in the category of Best Monographic Museum Show Nationally by the United States section of the International Art Critics Association for Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage (2010–11).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has been awarded first place in the category of Best Architecture or Design Show by the United States section of the International Art Critics Association for Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (2011). The museum also won first place for Best Historical Museum Show Nationally for The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde (2012).
Michigan State University in East Lansing has been awarded a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to expand the reach of the Michigan Traditional Arts Program. In addition to documenting traditional artists and folk-art events, the program will enhance its online resources and use of social media to help connect folk artists, audiences, and other cultural workers.
Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is the recipient of a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the conservation and documentation of William Lightner’s Our Mother of Sorrows Grotto, an outdoor environment and shrine made up of semiprecious stones, cement, and mosaics, built between 1929 and 1941.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in Massachusetts has received $80,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts to support two components of the museum’s Korean Collection Access Initiative—the publication of a catalogue and the reinstallation of the Korean art collection into a new 1,200-square-foot gallery.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York has been awarded first place in the category of Best Thematic Museum Show in New York by the United States section of the International Art Critics Association for On Line: Drawing through the Twentieth Century (2010–11). The museum has also won a gold 2012 MUSE award in the Public Outreach category for its interactive ad campaign “I went to MoMA and….”
The National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, based in Erie, Colorado, has accepted a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to assist exhibitions related to its 2013 national conference, to be held in Houston, Texas. An additional exhibition will take place in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to coincide with the forty-fifth general assembly of the International Academy of Ceramics.
The National Palace Museum in Taipei City, Taiwan, has won a gold 2012 MUSE award in the category of Multimedia Installations for the exhibition Along the River, During the Ching-ming Festival (2009).
The National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, has received a first-place award from the United States section of the International Art Critics Association for the Best Thematic Museum Show Nationally for Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (2010–11).
The National Portrait Gallery in London, England, has recorded its highest-ever attendance figure for a single year, with 2 million museum-goers in 2011.
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, has received $100,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts for the digitization of its collection of more than 8,400 photographs ranging from 1839 to the present day.
The Neuberger Museum of Art, part of Purchase College, State University of New York, in Purchase, New York, has been awarded second place by the United States section of the International Art Critics Association for Best Thematic Museum Show Nationally for The Deconstructive Impulse: Women Artists Reconfigure the Signs of Power, 1973–1999 (2011).
Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, has received a $30,000 grant from the Collins Foundation in support of an initiative called Persist and Thrive, which seeks to diversify the student body and provide mentoring services and academic support for students from underrepresented backgrounds.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania has received a 2012 Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative Grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. The museum will use the $250,000 grant to fund an exhibition for fall 2013, called Dancing around the Bride, devoted to Marcel Duchamp and his influence on John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg.
Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, has earned a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to aid the school’s community outreach program, Design Initiative for Community Empowerment. The program provides a platform for underserved Brooklyn high school students to learn about design through guided studio work, public exhibitions, and studio visits.
The San Diego Museum of Art in California has received a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support an artist’s residency for teenagers from the culturally diverse neighborhood of southeast San Diego. The residency will consist of visits to local art museums and also provide studio space and instruction from professional artists.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California has received a $375,000 grant from the Getty Foundation to support the Robert Rauschenberg Research Project, an online catalogue scheduled for completion in 2013 that will feature all the artist’s works held in the museum’s permanent collection. The project is part of a larger initiative to digitize museum catalogues, spearheaded by the Getty Foundation, called the Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative.
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois has received an award from the United States section of the International Art Critics Association for Best Show Involving Digital Media, Video, Film, or Performance for Yael Bartana: A Declaration, held at the Gene Siskel Film Center on March 10, 2011.
Scripps College in Claremont, California, has won a grant of $10,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the offsite conservation of seven Chinese textiles from the sixteenth and seventeenth century in its Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery.
Syracuse University Library in Syracuse, New York, has received more than 1,350 digitized documents, letters, and images from the Archives of American Art for its recently launched Marcel Breuer Digital Archive.
UB Anderson Gallery at the University of Buffalo in New York has been declared a 2012 MUSE award winner, receiving a silver Honeysett and Din Student Award for the touch-based website component of a permanent installation, Cravens World: The Human Aesthetic.
The Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas, has been awarded $100,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts to restore a 1978 mural by Joan Miró that decorates the museum’s façade.
The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has won a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support a juried design/building competition called Something from Nothing: Eco-ventions for Urban Landscapes. The competition seeks proposals that reimagine derelict and underused urban spaces.
The University of Massachusetts in Amherst has earned $100,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts to support an exhibition and related programming devoted to the legacy of W. E. B. DuBois at the University Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and will examine DuBois’s influence on social and political movements throughout the twentieth century.
The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor has received a $55,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to update the University of Michigan Museum of Art with multimedia tools that will enhance visitors’ experience of the collection.
The University of Oregon in Eugene has been awarded a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support an apprenticeship program called Preserving and Sustaining Oregon’s Cultural Traditions, which connects master folk artists to apprentices.
The University of Rochester in Rochester, New York has been granted $15,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts. The school will use the funds to conserve paintings and drawings by Carl W. Peter in the collection of the Memorial Art Gallery.
The University of South Florida in Tampa has been awarded a $75,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the development of a traveling exhibition, UnCommon Practice: Graphicstudio, organized in partnership with the Tampa Museum of Art and the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum. The exhibition documents the forty-five-year history of the Graphicstudio at the university.
The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has received a gold 2012 MUSE award in the category of Online Presence for its new website, launched in late 2011.
The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, has won a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for $265,000 to support the digitization of 113 medieval Flemish manuscripts, including eighty Books of Hours prayer books. Since 2008, the museum has received two other grants for the purpose of digitizing their manuscript collection.
The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York has received $1.5 million from the Henry Luce Foundation. The grant will assist the museum’s relocation in 2015 to a new Renzo Piano–designed building in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. The funds will also go toward the Whitney’s Collections Documentation Initiative, an effort to further document its permanent collection before the move. The United States section of the International Art Critics Association has awarded a first-place prize for the Best Monographic Museum Show in New York to the Whitney for Paul Thek: Diver (2010–11), and second-place prize for Glenn Ligon: AMERICA (2011). Last, the Whitney has won a silver 2012 MUSE award in the category of Education and Outreach for its interactive website, For Kids, and a bronze 2012 MUSE award for Video, Film, and Computer Animation for the Vlog Project, comprising short videos that feature deaf museum educators discussing contemporary art in American Sign Language.
Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library in Winterthur, Delaware, has received a $50,000 award from the National Endowment for the Arts to support a digitization project that will document 4,000 works on paper, including eighteenth-century maps, watercolors, drawings, and silhouettes.
The Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, has been awarded $20,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts to aid a project called Teen Artists @ WAM, in which students take classes with artist mentors and compete to make large-scale installations with the assistance of professional artists.
Senate Committee Approves IMLS Funding; Congress Needs to Hear from You
posted by CAA — June 15, 2012
The American Association of Museums (AAM) sent the following email on June 15, 2012.
Senate Committee Approves IMLS Funding; Congress Needs to Hear from You
This week, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved a bill to fund the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). While the bill would sustain the current $30.8 million for the Office of Museum Services for FY13, this is just the first step in the appropriations process.
The bill faces an uncertain future because it includes funding for implementation of the health care reforms enacted in 2010. In a preview of the difficult budgetary decisions to come, Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Richard Shelby said, “In this grave fiscal climate we should not fund programs we know are going to force our country deeper into debt…. We should not mortgage our children’s future for non-essential, unproven programs.”
AAM President Ford W. Bell urged continued advocacy. “At a time when every federal program is being scrutinized, Members of Congress need to hear from constituents about how IMLS funds are essential to museums and how successful they are in serving our communities,” he said. “Participating in ‘Invite Congress to Visit Your Museum Week’ is a great opportunity to demonstrate our value.”
The bill would provide $158.8 billion in discretionary funding, a $2 billion increase over FY12 levels, which is in line with President Obama’s FY13 budget request. The bill also includes $549 million (level funding) for the Race to the Top initiative, President Obama’s signature competitive grant program, which rewards states for making changes in elementary and secondary education.
Let your Members of Congress know how important funding for the Office of Museum Services is to you!
Invite Congress to Visit Your Museum.
Visit www.speakupformuseums.org to learn more about AAM’s Advocacy for Museums.
Grants, Awards, and Honors
posted by CAA — June 15, 2012
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.
June 2012
Peter Jonathan Bell, a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, has received the Robert Lehman Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize to study at the American Academy in Rome. Bell will be working on a project titled “The Reinvention of the Bronze Statuette in Renaissance Italy: Presentation, Material, Facture.”
Pat Boas, an artist and graduate of Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, has been awarded the Bonnie Bronson Fellowship from her alma mater. The fellowship includes the purchase of an artwork for permanent installation at Reed College.
Elizabeth Hill Boone, Martha and Donald Robertson Chair in Latin American Art at Tulane University in New Orleans, has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a corresponding member of the Academia Mexicana de la Historia.
Bradford R. Collins, associate professor of art history at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, has been listed in the Princeton Review’s 2012 publication The Best 300 Professors.
Sophie Cras, a doctoral candidate at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, has been awarded the 2012 Terra Foundation for American Art International Essay Prize for her essay “Art as Investment and ‘Artistic Shareholding’ Experiments in the 1960s,” an examination of how a group of American conceptual artists made money and financial transactions the subject of their work.
Diana H. DePardo-Minsky, assistant professor of art history at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and a specialist in Italian Renaissance and ancient Roman art and architecture, has been recognized in the Princeton Review’s publication The Best 300 Professors (2012).
Charles Fairbanks, a filmmaker from Eustis, Nebraska, has earned a 2012 fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In his recent work Fairbanks documents his involvement with Lucha Libre wrestling in Mexico. He is also collaborating with an indigenous Zoque community in Chiapas, Mexico, on a new film.
Margot Fassler, professor of theology and music at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, has been named an American Council of Leaned Societies 2012 Digital Innovation Fellow. Fassler’s project proposal is to create a digitized, sounding model of Hildegard of Bingen conception of the cosmos, utilizing the advanced technology of Notre Dame’s Digital Visualization Theater.
Leonard Folgarait, professor of history of art at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and a scholar of modern art of Latin America, Mexico, Europe, and America, has been listed in the Princeton Review’s The Best 300 Professors (2012).
Seth Adam HindinSeth Adam Hindin, a historian of medieval art and architecture, has been appointed American Council of Leaned Societies New Faculty Fellow at the University of California, Davis.
Stanya Kahn, a video artist from Los Angeles, California, and an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Intermedia at the University of Southern California, has won a 2012 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
Dana Leibsohn, professor of art at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and Carolyn Dean, professor and associate dean of the arts division at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have been jointly awarded an American Council of Leaned Societies Collaborative Research Fellowship in support of their book project on colonial Spanish America and the art and objects of its indigenous people.
Brenda Longfellow, associate professor of art and art history at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, has been awarded an Andrew Heiskell Post-Doctoral Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. Longfellow intends to work on a project called “Past Lives, Present Meanings: Reused Statues in Imperial Rome.”
Camille S. Mathieu, a PhD candidate in art history at the University of California, Berkeley, has been granted a second year at the American Academy in Rome via the Donald and Maria Cox/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize. Her project is entitled “Revolutionizing the Antique: French Artists and Artistic Community in Napoleonic Rome, 1803–1819.”
Maurie D. McInnis, professor of American art and material culture at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, has been awarded the twenty-fourth Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art for her book, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). In conjunction with the award, McInnis will present the Eldredge Prize lecture at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, DC, on October 18, 2012.
Kathryn Blair Moore has been appointed an American Council of Leaned Societies New Faculty Fellow in History of Art and Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Jennifer W. Reeves, a painter based in Callicoon, New York, has been awarded a 2012 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
Conrad Rudolph and Jeantte Kohl, both professors of art history at the University of California, Riverside, and Amit Roy-Chowdhury, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Riverside, have received a start-up grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for “FACES: Faces, Art, and Computerized Evaluation Systems,” a project that will test the use of facial-recognition software in the context of art history, with a long-term goal of assisting in the identification of human subjects in portraiture.
Lisa Saltzman, a professor of art history at Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, has received a 2012 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Saltzman’s project is entitled “Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects.”
Claudia Sbrissa, a New York–based based artist who works in drawing and collage, has received a residency fellowship from the Constance Saltonstall Art Foundation in Ithaca, New York, for May and June 2012.
Tanya SheehanTanya Sheehan, assistant professor of art history at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, has been awarded two fellowships for 2012–13: a research fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin; and the Beatrice, Benjamin, and Richard Bader Fellowship in the Visual Arts of the Theatre from Harvard University.
Gesche Würfel, Basement Series, digital C-type print (artwork © Gesche Würfel)Gesche Würfel, an artist based in New York, has recently been awarded two grants: a Manhattan Community Arts Fund grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and a Creative Grant from the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance. Both awards will help her to develop a new photography project, Basement Sanctuaries, which documents how superintendents decorate basements of apartment buildings in upper Manhattan.
Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members
posted by CAA — June 15, 2012
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.
June 2012
Nina Gara Bozicnik. Pretty Ugly. Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, May 18–June 24, 2012.
Installation view of Art Lives! Kansas Chapter of the Feminist Art ProjectRachel Epp Buller. Art Lives! Kansas Chapter of the Feminist Art Project. City Arts, Wichita, Kansas, March 30–April 21, 2012.
Katie Cercone. Butter Digger. Cuchifritos Gallery/Project Space, New York, April 14–May 27, 2012.
Invitation card for So Close and Yet So FarIrina D. Costache. So Close and Yet So Far. José Drudis-Biada Art Gallery, Mount Saint Mary’s College, Los Angeles, California, February 7–March 24, 2012.
Susan Dackerman, Jennifer L. Roberts, and Jennifer Quick. Jasper Johns/In Press: The Crosshatch Works and the Logic of Print. Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 22–August 18, 2012.
Invitation card for Papercuts: A Poetic Interplay of Light and ShadowReni Gower. Papercuts: A Poetic Interplay of Light and Shadow. Norman and Emmy Lou P. Illges Gallery, Columbus State University, Columbus, Georgia, March 22–April 21, 2012.
Kerry Oliver-Smith. 2012 Westmoreland Juried Biennial. Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania, April 28–July 22, 2012.
Wafaa Bilal, The Ashes Series, 2009, archival inkjet print mounted on diebond, 38 x 46½ in. (artwork © Wafaa Bilal)Susanne Slavick. Out of Rubble. Bowling Green University Galleries, Bowling Green, Ohio, September 7–October 7, 2012.
Books Published by CAA Members
posted by CAA — June 15, 2012
Publishing a book is a major milestone for artists and scholars—browse a list of recent titles below.
Books Published by CAA Members appears every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
June 2012
Andrew Stephen Arbury. About Art, 3rd rev. ed. (Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2012).
Claude Cernuschi. Barnett Newman and Heideggerian Philosophy (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012).
Irina D. Costache. The Art of Understanding Art: A Behind the Scenes Story (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
Lennert Gesterkamp. The Heavenly Court: Daoist Temple Painting in China, 1200–1400 (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2011).
Donna Gustafson. Serena Bocchino: Fever (Milburn, NJ: Greg Smith Exhibit A Fine Art and Editions, 2012).
Deborah Martin Kao and Michelle Lamunière, eds. Instituting Reform: The Social Museum of Harvard University, 1903–1931 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2012).
Andreas Marks. Kamisaka Sekka: Rinpa Traditionalist, Modern Designer (San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2012).
Rosemary O’Neill. Art and Visual Culture on the French Riviera, 1956–1971 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012).
Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago. Art Is Not What You Think It Is (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
William S. Rodner. Edwardian London through Japanese Eyes: The Art and Writings of Yoshio Markino, 1897–1915 (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2012).
James L. Yarnall. John La Farge, a Biographical and Critical Study (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012).
Philip Zuchman. Summer on the Hill: Paintings by Philip Zuchman (New York: Abingdon Square Publishing, 2012).
Join the Millard Meiss Publication Fund Jury
posted by CAA — June 11, 2012
CAA seeks nominations and self-nominations from one member/individual with a specialization in a historic period in Asian, Southeast Asian, American, or Pre-Columbian art to serve on the jury for the Millard Meiss Publication Fund for a four-year term, ending on June 30, 2016. Candidates must be actively publishing scholars with demonstrated seniority and achievement; institutional affiliation is not required.
The Meiss jury awards grants that subsidize the publication of book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of art and related subjects. Members review manuscripts and grant applications twice a year and meet in New York in the spring and fall to select the awardees. CAA reimburses jury members for travel and lodging expenses in accordance with its travel policy.
Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on another CAA editorial board or committee. Jury members may not themselves apply for a grant in this program during their term of service. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please send a letter describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and contact information to: Millard Meiss Publication Fund Jury, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004; or send all materials as email attachments to Alex Gershuny, CAA editorial associate. Deadline: August 8, 2012.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for June-Juy 2012
posted by CAA — June 10, 2012
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.
June–July 2012
Fullmoon Night with Yoko Ono
Djurgården, Stockholm
Moderna Museet, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Sweden
June 4–5, 2012
On the night of June 4 turning into June 5, art lovers had the chance to experience two early Yoko Ono pieces, Evening till Dawn (1964) and Secret Piece (1953), on the lush island of Djurgården in Stockholm. The event will take place in conjunction with Yoko Ono: Grapefruit at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, a retrospective that showcases early experimental films and a selection of “instructions” published in Ono’s book Grapefruit (1964). The exhibition provides a welcome opportunity to view Ono’s art in the context of the Fluxus movement of the 1960s, in which she was a key player, and to see her wide-ranging influence on today’s art scene. Specifically for the Moderna Museet, Ono has created a new instruction, “Search for the Fountain,” that has been interpreted in a variety of mediums by a group of international artists.
Klonaris/Thomadaki: The Angel Ablaze
Benaki Museum
138 Pireos Street, Athens, Greece 11854
June 9, 2012
The Angel Ablaze offers a thorough introduction to the work of two avant-garde filmmakers and multimedia pioneers, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki, whose holistic approach to filmmaking is called Cinema of the Body. At the Benaki Museum, Klonaris and Thomadaki will teach a master class after a screening of The Angel Cycle, a work inspired by a photograph of a hermaphrodite found in the archives of Klonaris’s gynecologist father in 1985. The film explores the idea of the intersexual body as partially angelic and further explicates this figure as the ideal metaphor for a bodily approach to the cinema.
“How Women Work”
Nottingham Contemporary
Weekday Cross, Nottingham, NGI 2GB, United Kingdom
June 14–19, 2012
In conjunction with Mika Rottenberg’s eponymous exhibition (May 5–July 1, 2012), Nottingham Contemporary is hosting “How Women Work,” a three-part symposium that addresses the relationship of women to labor in postindustrial economies and how feminist thought on the role of women in the workplace has evolved since the 1960s. The first event, on June 14, is a screening of María Ruido’s documentary film, Amphibious Fictions (2005), about the lives of female factory workers in two Spanish cities in the industrial belt surrounding Barcelona. The next day, a symposium titled “Art, Gendered Labor, and Resistance” will engage artists and theorists from the United Kingdom and Europe to explore the issue of art as gendered labor, the relationship between resistance and oppression, and the generational shifts that have affected the feminist dialogue on labor. The featured speakers are Jo Applin, professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of York; Angela Dimitrakaki, professor of modern and contemporary art the University of Edinburgh; Julia Morandeira, professor of Spanish contemporary art at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona; Nina Power, a philosophy professor at Roehampton University in London; Maria Ruido, an artist and filmmaker; and Marina Vishmidt, a London-based art writer. The last event, on June 19, is a screening of African director, Ousmene Sembène’s La Noire de… (1966). The fictional film takes place in postcolonial Senegal and tells the story of a young woman from Dakar who faces many trials and tribulations as a live-in nanny working for a family in the French Riviera.
Sigalit Landau: Soil Nursing
Kamel Mennour
47 rue Saint-André des arts, Paris, France 75006
June 2–July 25, 2012
With Soil Nursing, Sigalit Landau brings together a potent combination of sculptures, photographs, and videos that evokes the body in space and its changing relationship to nature. Madonna and Child (2012), a series of twisted marble forms resting on exquisitely carved wooden bases, suggests a larvalike, maternal body crossed with the streamlined effervescence of Constantin Brancusi’s Bird in Space (1923). The abstract sculptures are complemented by lush, color photographs and videos depicting the dreamy environment of an olive grove in the Negev Desert in southern Israel, the artist’s native country.
Chantal Joffe
Cheim and Read
547 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001
May 4–June 22, 2012
For her second solo show at Cheim and Read, the British painter Chantal Joffe continues her investigation of portrayals of woman in art with a selection of large and small paintings. Joffe’s influences extend from fashion photography and personal snapshots to works by contemporary artists such as Alex Katz and Elizabeth Peyton, who similarly address society and subjectivity through portraiture. In this exhibition Joffe also pays explicit homage to Alice Neel with a striking self-portrait of herself, naked on a bed with stripped covers—an image reminiscent of Neel’s 1980 portrait of herself, sitting nude in a stripped armchair.
Wangechi Mutu: blackthrones
Gladstone Gallery
12 Rue de Grand Cerf, Brussels, Belgium 1000
May 15–July 7, 2012
In blackthrones, Wangechi Mutu’s first solo exhibition in Brussels, the artist fills the elegant rooms of Gladstone Gallery with chairs wrapped in black garbage bags, metallic tinsels, and colorful debris and supported by spindly, insectlike legs. Despite this decoration, the wooden chairs are recognizable as being representative of English colonial design, hinting at a critique of Western hegemony while having fun with the transformative possibilities of sculpture.
Jo Spence: Work (Part I)
SPACE
129–131 Mare Street, London, E8 3RH, United Kingdom
June 1–July 15, 2012
Jo Spence: Work (Part II)
Studio Voltaire
1a Nelson’s Row, London, SW4 7JR, United Kingdom
June 12–August 11, 2012
A two-part retrospective of the photographic work of Jo Spence (1934–1992) offers a unique opportunity for the critical reassessment of an often misunderstood and certainly understudied “amateur” photographer. Spence emerged as a pivotal figure in the mid-1970s from the British photographic left, bridging her commitment to feminism, socialism, and education with a hungry, documentary impulse that took in every aspect of her life and those around her. The first part of the exhibition, on view at SPACE, focuses on the 1960s to the 1980s, years in which Spence founded the Hackney Flashers, a collective of women photographers, and organized photography co-ops and workshops. The exhibition continues at Studio Voltaire with her move toward methods of therapy through photography and patient empowerment and through her own struggles with breast cancer.
Edy Ferguson: Selected Works 1993 to the Present
Benaki Museum
138 Pireos Street, Athens, Greece 11854
June 1–July 29, 2012
Edy Ferguson’s survey exhibition at the Benaki Museum familiarizes Greek audiences with the multifaceted work of this American artist who now lives and works in Athens and London. Ferguson fuses a Pop art sensibility (her slick painting style is reminiscent of James Rosenquist) into her work that address a host of contemporary issues, such as the recent economic upheavals in Greece. The museum installation does not indicate boundaries in Ferguson’s various practices, opting instead to showcase her drawing, painting, videos, and performances as a “single and articulated Gesamtkunstwerk.”
Doris Salcedo: Plegaria Muda
MAXXI: National Museum of 21st Century Arts
Via Guido Reni 4A, Rome, Italy 00196
March 15–June 24, 2012
Doris Salcedo’s installation Plegaria Muda (translated as Mute Prayer) is an antimonumental memorial to victims of war and urban violence. Composed of over one hundred pairs of rectangular wooden tables whose tops sandwich a mound of earth that enables clumps of grass to grow through the crevices, the installation is keenly evocative of a graveyard or war memorial. Salcedo researched two specific atrocities when creating the memorial: the brutality of life in the ghettoes of southeast Los Angeles and the murder of numerous impoverished Colombians by factions of the Colombian army from 2003 to 2009. According to the artist, “Plegaria Muda is an attempt to live out this grief, a space demarcated by the radical limit imposed by death. A space that is outside of life, a place apart, that reminds us of our dead.”
Letter of Support for Malian Cultural Heritage
posted by CAA — May 31, 2012
May 31, 2012
Ecole du Patrimoine Africain
01 BP 2205
Porto-Novo
Benin
Dear Ecole du Patrimoine Africain:
On behalf of the College Art Association’s Board of Directors and 14,000 international members, we would like to express our grave concern for the protection of Mali’s cultural heritage in light of the current military action in the north of the country. On May 4, two mausoleums of Saints were intentionally defaced in Timbuktu, and there is reason to think such vandalism will continue unless the government of Mali and the National Army of the Republic of Mali act to safeguard the country’s cultural property.
Mali is renowned for its cultural achievements, and its cultural heritage is considered patrimony of Mali, Africa and the entire international community. Four sites have been declared World Heritage by UNESCO and six cultural practices are considered intangible heritage; they have been inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding.
We urge the Government and Army to protect Mali’s people and cultural artifacts in accordance with the international Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1954), the 1972 Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, and the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
We appeal to the political and military authorities in Mali to work for the best interest of the Malian nation, which should take precedence in ensuring the return to constitutional order in the north. We urge them to guarantee the preservation, integrity and security of cultural goods and people in all their dimensions and components, especially in occupied areas in Timbuktu, Gao, Kidal, and ask Mali’s neighbors to prevent the illicit transfer of objects and works of art from Mali through customs and police controls at their borders.
Sincerely yours,
Anne Collins Goodyear
President
Linda Downs
Executive Director
Letter of Support for the Council of American Overseas Research Centers
posted by CAA — May 31, 2012
May 31, 2012
Dr. Mary Ellen Lane
Executive Director
Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC)
PO Box 37012, MRC 178
Washington, DC 20013-7012
Dear Dr. Lane,
We are writing in support of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers’ (CAORC) proposal to the Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) to continue the work and operations of overseas research centers and of CAORC itself.
Our organization’s particular experience was with The American Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TAARII), without whose help we would not have been able to bring Salam Atta Sabri, the Director of Iraq’s Museum of Modern Art to the College Art Association’s Annual Conference in Los Angeles this past February. Mr. Atta Sabri was the recipient of a highly competitive and distinguished grant to participate in an international meeting of art historians, curators, and artists during the conference. From the outset, Beth Kangas, director of TAARII, and Nada Shabout, professor of art history at the University of North Texas, offered support in any way possible, including help obtaining a visa, help arranging travel, and advancing funds for the entire trip, because Dr. Sabri was not permitted to receive American dollars in Iraq. CAA could not have accomplished this work without TAARII’s active support. (Additionally, TAARII then arranged a speaking tour for Mr. Sabri to several universities in the United States, enriching his visit here substantially.)
As the scholarly world becomes increasingly global, organizations such as TAARII, and all the groups supported by CAORC, become ever more important. We fully endorse the CAORC proposal to continue the work and operations of overseas research centers and CAORC itself.
Sincerely,
Anne Collins Goodyear
President
Linda Downs
Executive Director
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for May 2012
posted by CAA — May 10, 2012
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
May 2012
Francesca Woodman, Untitled, New York, 1979–80, chromogenic print, 3⅜ x 3½ in. (photograph © George and Betty Woodman)
Francesca Woodman
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128
March 16–June 13, 2012
Francesca Woodman, only twenty-two years old when she committed suicide in 1981, was already an accomplished young artist breaking new ground with her stunning black-and-white photographs, primarily of herself, in dreamlike interior spaces. Her images are a palimpsest of Surrealism, fashion photography, literature, and daily ritual. This Guggenheim retrospective features 120 photographs that cover her teenage years in Boulder, Colorado, her time as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in the late 1970s, a meaningful year spent in Rome on a study-abroad program, and her last work, produced in New York.The exhibition also features two artist’s journals and recently unearthed videos made while Woodman was a student.
Malia Jensen: Stuff and Things
Cristin Tierney
546 West 29th Street, New York, NY 10001
April 19–June 2, 2012
Malia Jensen’s first solo show in New York, Stuff and Things, features sculptures of animals and other natural phenomena made from an often-deceiving variety of materials, such as bronze, wood, glass, porcelain, and salt. A dark, lyrical humor runs through Jensen’s work, and her animals are a study in opposites, simultaneously sensuous and funny, grotesque and formally beautiful. Each object has a punchy joke that gives way to pathos and contemplation. In the exhibition essay, John S. Weber describes the world that Jensen evokes as one in which “Everything is beautiful, puzzling, and inconclusive.”
FRAMEWORK: Activism, Memory, and the Social Landscape
A Proposition by LaToya Ruby Frazier
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002
May 17 and 19, 2012
Each month the New Museum’s public-seminar series, titled Propositions, focuses on a new artist and set of issues. For May, LaToya Ruby Frazier, a photographer and participant in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, will lead a two-day seminar based on her ongoing documentation of Braddock, Pennsylvania, the struggling steel-mill town where she was born. Frazier’s work makes the political deeply personal: she is concerned with salvaging the stories of her family and neighbors while archly exposing media exploitation, such as an ad campaign for Levi’s jeans that packaged the complex social reality of her hometown into a hip destination.
Evelyne Axell: The Great Journey into Space
Broadway 1602
1181 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10001
April 30–August 25, 2012
Evelyne Axell (1935–1972), a prominent Belgian actress and television personality in the 1950s, changed her course to become a visual artist with the encouragement of a family friend, René Magritte. Axell’s paintings are bold pictorial statements, often featuring nude female figures, assemblages with found objects à la Robert Rauschenberg, and the graphic, hallucinatory colors of Pop art and advertising. Like other artists from the 1960s who worked with figurative motifs—John Wesley and Rosalyn Drexler come to mind—Axell plays with the political implications of “erotic art,” feminism, and consumer culture. The Great Journey into Space, her second solo appearance at Broadway 1602, features paintings, drawings, sculpture, exhibition archives, and documentation of a wild Happening that the artist organized in 1969 at the Foncke Gallery in Ghent, Belgium.
Mona Hatoum: You Are Still Here
Arter, Vehbi Koç Foundation
Istiklal Cad. No 211, Beyoglu, Istanbul, Turkey, 34433
March 17–May 27, 2012
You Are Still Here, Mona Hatoum’s first solo show in Turkey, showcases work made since the 1990s. Hatoum’s art exists between the poetic and the political, exile and homecoming, exquisite craftsmanship and everyday objects. She works in a wide range of materials and forms, from singular sculptural objects to room-sized installations, as well as video, photograph, and work on paper. A 2012 installation comprising human-sized steel cages containing delicate hand-blown glass, titled Kapan (translated as “trap” in Turkish), was created specifically for the exhibition. Another new work, Shift (2012), is a wool carpet map of the world divided into danger zones by drawn-on yellow seismic waves.
Ellen Altfest: Head and Plant
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002
May 6–June 24, 2012
Ellen Alfest is a New York–based artist who makes precisely detailed oil paintings of humans and vegetation on a one-to-one scale. Her subjects are often men in states of unaware repose, sometimes rendered completely abstract as a zoomed-in landscape of hair, veins, and flesh. Altfest’s vision of the living human body as painted matter has its precedent in the work of Philip Pearlstein and Lucian Freud. Head and Plant is her first solo museum exhibition.
Maro Michalakakos: I Would Prefer Not To
Ileana Tounta Contemporary Arts Centre
48 Armatolon-Klephton Street, Athens, Greece, 114 71
March 29–May 26, 2012
Literary references abound in the work of the Greek artist Maro Michalakakos. She takes the title of her exhibition, I Would Prefer Not To, from a line favored by the protagonist of Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.” Happy Days, a heaping pile of red velvet fluff that hugs the gallery’s columns, nods to a Samuel Beckett play with the same name. A second installation using seductive velvet, Red Carpet, consists of a carpet unfurled from floor to ceiling, bearing the imprints of animal claw marks. The glamour of the “red-carpet” event here becomes a gateway to a predatory world of abuse, power, and victimization.