CAA News Today
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.
Affiliated Society News for May 2012
posted by CAA — May 09, 2012
American Council for Southern Asian Art
The American Council for Southern Asian Art(ACSAA) welcomes Cathleen Cummings, assistant professor of art history at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, as its new webmaster. Lisa N. Owen, an ACSAA board member, and Catherine Becker, the ACSAA secretary, have each agreed to serve an additional term.
Past newsletters from 1974 to 2007 and annual bulletins from 2008 to the present have been scanned and are now available to all members on the ACSAA website. Members are invited to submit news regarding publications, exhibitions, or conferences for inclusion in the 2012 bulletin. Please send your information to Melody Rod-ari, ACSAA bulletin editor.
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries
The Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) is offering a leadership seminar for thirty-five participants, in partnership with the Kellogg Center for Nonprofit Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Taking place June 24–29, 2012, the course is designed for directors and director-curators of academic museums and galleries who are at any career stage and who work in any collecting field. The seminar includes museum and gallery leaders from institutions ranging from large state universities to small private colleges. Visit the AAMG website for a list of faculty members and seminar details.
Association of Historians of American Art
The Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA) has awarded a $500 AHAA Travel Grant to Rebecca Uchill, a PhD candidate in art history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Uchill presented a paper, “Processing History, Forming Transactions: Preservation and Exchange in the Work of Allison Smith,” at the 2012 CAA Annual Conference session, “Trading Zones: Strategies for the Study of Artists and Their Art-Making Practices.”
Save the date for the second AHAA symposium, “American Art: The Academy, Museums, and the Market,” to be held October 11–13, 2012, and hosted by the Boston Athenaeum and Boston University in Massachusetts. Visit AHAA online for more information or contact the symposium cochairs, David Dearinger and Melissa Renn.
Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art
The Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) has received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a three-year capacity-building initiative to maximize the possibilities of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, the organization’s scholarly electronic journal. The grant is intended to help authors in the development phase of their articles as well as to aid the journal in the implementation phase. Therefore, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide seeks scholarship that engages in one or more of the following interrelated areas of investigation: data mining and analysis; geographic information systems and mapping; and high-resolution imaging and dynamic image presentation. Authors should be generally knowledgeable about the technological possibilities related to their project and able to articulate how both specific computer-based research methods and the online publication format connect with the research questions on which their project focuses. In addition, authors should expect to collaborate with technical experts to help complete their projects. Proposals should outline projects that are relatively small scale, able to be realized within about three to six months, and requiring approximately one hundred hours of development work. Interested contributors may review the proposal guidelines for more details. For further information, contact Petra Chu or Emily Pugh.
Foundations in Art: Theory and Education
Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE) will hold its national biennial conference in Savannah, Georgia, April 3–6, 2013, at the Savannah College of Art and Design’s School of Foundation Studies. Titled “postHaus,” the conference has the theme “Instructing, Constructing, and Connecting with Students in the Twenty-First Century.” The question posed is: “As models of education evolve, what new teaching models are forming?” Each FATE biennial conference attracts a fantastic group of first-year studio professors and instructors from two- and four-year colleges across the United States and internationally. For “postHaus,” FATE seeks to expand its reach. Topics can include but are not limited to: innovation in studio courses, curriculum development, approaches to art history, liberal-arts instruction, the importance of research librarians, and the vital role of lab technicians. Proposals for papers and presentation must be submitted by June 1, 2012.
Need FATE sooner? The next FATE regional workshop, “Removing the Curse of the Demo,” will take place on August 11, 2012, at the Art Institute of Atlanta–Decatur in Georgia. Participants should bring their favorite demo and share the way they approach the subject through perspective drawing, cutting paper straight, paint mixing, paint application, finding proper proportions, obtaining proper value, or anything else related to the topic.
Historians of British Art
John Everett Millais, Isabella, 1848–49, oil on canvas, 102.9 x 142.9 cm. National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery (artwork in the public domain)
Please join the Historians of British Art (HBA) and the English-Speaking Union (ESU) for a preview of the exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde on Thursday, May 24, 2012, 6:30–8:30 PM, in New York. Two of the show’s three curators, Tim Barringer of Yale University and Jason Rosenfeld of Marymount Manhattan University, will give American audiences an early look at this important exhibition—addressing its key themes and its evolution as a project—during an informal, richly illustrated conversation, moderated by Peter Trippi, HBA president and a cocurator of J. W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite. The discussion will be followed by a wine reception.
In September 2012, Tate Britain in London will open Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde. Inspired by early Renaissance painting and led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood rebelled against the establishment of the mid-nineteenth century and became Britain’s first modern art movement. The curators, which include Alison Smith of Tate London, will bring together more than 150 works in different media, including painting, sculpture, photography, and the applied arts, revealing the Pre-Raphaelites to be advanced in their approach to every genre. After closing at Tate in January 2013, the exhibition will move to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and then to Moscow and Tokyo.
Advance registration for the conversation is required: $20 for HBA and ESU members; $25 for nonmembers. Payment may be made by credit card or by check payable to “The English-Speaking Union.” Checks should be mailed to: Caitlin Murphy, English-Speaking Union, 144 East 39th Street, New York, NY 10016. You will receive a confirmation of payment if you provide your email address. Call 212-818-1200 or write to mnicoll@esuus.org for more information. For content-related questions, please email Peter Trippi. For questions about payment, please contact Caitlin Murphy.
International Association of Art Critics
The International Association of Art Critics (AICA/US) held its annual awards ceremony at the Asia Society in New York on April 2, 2012. These awards honor artists, curators, museums, galleries, and other cultural institutions in recognition of excellence in the conception and realization of exhibitions. AICA’s four hundred active members nominated and voted on outstanding exhibitions from the previous season (June 2010–June 2011). The twenty-four winners of first and second places in twelve categories, selected from over one hundred finalists, included exhibitions of work by the contemporary artists Christian Marclay, Sarah Sze, and Ai Weiwei and by the twentieth-century artists Pablo Picasso, Sonia Delaunay, Kurt Schwitters, and Paul Thek, as well as thematic exhibitions dealing with the history of drawing through the twentieth century, contemporary Japanese art, and Fluxus. Lowery Sims, Peter Plagens, and Sanford Biggers presented the awards. This year’s nominating committee comprised Eleanor Heartney (chair), Marek Bartelik (AICA/US president), Rebecca Cochran, Peter Frank, Francine Miller, and Susan Snodgrass.
International Association of Word and Image Studies
The International Association of Word and Image Studies (IAWIS/AIERTI) seeks proposals for “From the Wall, to the Press, to the Streets,” its affiliated-society session for CAA’s 2013 Annual Conference in New York, that reflect on contemporary art practices that occur outside the traditional framework of the gallery or museum space. Topics to consider include: public art rhetoric (how language challenges elitist/populist divides); working around the frame (spatial transgression as institutional critique); art’s new open-access sites (the internet and social networks); and institutional responses (marketing and copyright laws). Please submit your proposal and a CV to Eve Kalyva and Ignaz Cassar by June 1, 2012. IAWIS/AIERTI membership is not required.
International Sculpture Center
The International Sculpture Center (ISC), in collaboration with the National Academy Museum and School in New York, will present the year’s first ISConnects panel, “Against the Grain: Strategies, Choices, and Controversies of Women in Sculpture,” at the National Academy on May 30, 2012. Joan Marter, professor of art history at Rutgers University in New Jersey, will moderate; a list of participating artists is forthcoming. For more information and to view videos from previous ISConnects events, please visit the website.
Italian Art Society
The Italian Art Society (IAS) would like to congratulate its new officers and committee members: Alison Perchuk, treasurer; Kay Arthur, newsletter editor; Catherine McCurrach, secretary and membership coordinator; Anne Leader, webmaster; Nicola Camerlenghi and Esperança Camara, program committee; and Brian Curran, Frances Gage, and Mark Rosen, nominating committee.
IAS seeks proposals for papers and presentations for its two sponsored sessions at CAA’s 2013 Annual Conference in New York: “Bad Boys, Hussies, and Villains” and “Disegno.” Please visit the proposal guidelines for more information on how to participate.
IAS is sponsoring four linked sessions, entitled “Italian Art and Confluence of Cultures (I–IV),” at the forty-seventh International Congress on Medieval Art, taking place May 10–13, 2012, at the University of Western Michigan in Kalamazoo.
The organization welcomes all to the third annual IAS/Kress Lecture in Italy, to be given by Debra Pincus on June 6, 2012, at the Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti in Venice, seat of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere, ed Arti. Pincus’s talk is entitled “The Lure of the Letter: Renaissance Venice and the Recovery of Antique Writing.”
Mid-America College Art Association
The James Pearson Duffy Department of Art and Art History at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, will host the next Mid-America College Art Association (MACAA) conference, taking place October 3–6, 2012. The event has two themes: “Community and Collaboration” and “Meaning and Making.” Programming will include three featured speakers, panel presentations, studio workshops, MACAA member exhibitions, and museum visits. You may register for the conference and find out how to become a MACAA member on the Detroit conference website.
National Council of Arts Administrators
National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA) congratulates a member, Charles A. Wright, who was recently elected to serve on CAA’s Board of Directors. NCAA members Georgia Strange, Denise Mullen, and Leslie Bellavance were elected in 2011 to serve on the same board, where they had worked with three fellow members, Judith Thorpe, Jean Miller, and Jay Coogan.
At the 2012 CAA Annual Conference, several NCAA members—Sergio Soave, Tom Berding, Donna Meeks, Lee Ann Garrison, Amy Hauft, John Kissick, Jim Hopfensperger, Tom Loeser, and David Yager—presented a concise and compelling session, “Hot Problems/Cool Solutions in Arts Leadership.” In addition, the annual NCAA Reception at CAA, cohosted by the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at the University of California, Irvine, was an amazing affair. Thanks to all who attended.
It’s not too late to submit a proposal for the next NCAA meeting. The thirty-first annual conference, “Granting Permission,” will take place November 7–10, 2012, hosted by Ohio State University and Columbus College of Art and Design. The NCAA board seeks proposals for presentations, sessions, and/or panels for the annual Arts Administrators Workshops. Topics may include, but are not limited to: leadership and management; promotion and tenure; interpersonal communication; budget management, personnel evaluation, and growth; career paths; and case studies related to arts administration. Proposals and inquiries should be sent to Jim Hopfensperger, NCAA president. Initial proposals of no more than 350 words are due by May 21, 2012.
Public Art Dialogue
Public Art Dialogue (PAD) welcomes two new officers: Sarah Schrank begins her first term as cochair; and Sierra Rooney begins her first term as secretary.
Public Art Dialogue, a scholarly journal published biannually, invites submissions for its upcoming special issue, “Memorials: The Culture of Remembrance.” This issue seeks to explore memorials in regard to their range of subjects, various formal and conceptual strategies, and the critical issues pertaining to their study. PAD welcomes submissions that address related topics (except war or peace, covered in the previous issue) from any time period or place. The deadline for the submission of papers is September 15, 2012.
Society for Photographic Education
Each spring the Society for Photographic Education (SPE) hosts a forum for the presentation of artistic work and research to a community of peers. SPE is accepting proposals for its fiftieth annual conference, “Conferring Significance: Celebrating Photography’s Continuum,” which will be held March 7–10, 2013, in Chicago, Illinois. Proposals will be accepted until June 1, 2012. Topics are not required to be theme-based and may include, but are not limited to: image making, history, contemporary theory and criticism, new technologies, effects of media and culture, educational issues, and funding. SPE membership is required for submission; proposals are peer reviewed.
Society of North American Goldsmiths
The Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG) will hold its forty-first annual conference, “The Heat Is On,” from May 23 to 26, 2012, at the Westin Kierland Resort and Spa in Scottsdale, Arizona. The keynote speaker is Garth Clark, an art dealer, historian, and critic. Other guest speakers include Megan Auman, Kim Cridler, Steve Midgett, Kevin O’Dwyer, and Bettina Speckner. The spotlight is also on these emerging artists: Allyson Bone, Andrew Hayes, Caitie Sellers, Loring Taoka, and Amy Tavern. Join the Professional Development Seminar and the Education Dialogue, and also spend an evening on the annual Exhibition Crawl in Scottsdale, Phoenix, and Mesa. View outstanding craftsmanship in the annual juried exhibition, the student digital presentation, and SNAG members’ work on SNAG TV.
Visual Resources Association
The Visual Resources Association (VRA) has transitioned the VRA Bulletin from a print journal to an electronic journal, published by the Berkeley Electronic Press, also know as Bepress. In order to celebrate the inaugural issue and to spread the word, the first issue is readily accessible to read, but succeeding issues will be available to VRA members only for the first six months after publication, after which time the journal will be open access. Feature articles include Janice L. Eklund’s “Cultural Objects Digitization Planning: Metadata Overview,” which provides a discussion of image metadata types, applications, and best-practice considerations for such projects. In Maureen Burns’s “Musings on Electronic Publishing,” the former VRA president summarizes the open-access movement, new models of electronic publishing, and how traditional publication processes change in an electronic environment. In this issue you can also find the complete text of Visual Resources Association: Statement on the Fair Use of Images for Teaching, Research, and Study, endorsed by CAA and published with an executive summary.