CAA News Today
Elia Alba and Postcommodity to Participate in Annual Artists’ Interviews at CAA’s 111th Annual Conference
posted by CAA — January 19, 2023
CAA is pleased to announce that this year’s Annual Artists’ Interviews will feature Elia Alba and Postcommodity!
Photo: Michael Palma Mir
Elia Alba was born in Brooklyn to parents who immigrated from the Dominican Republic in the 1950s. She is a multidisciplinary artist whose artistic practice is concerned with the social and political complexity of race, identity, and the collective community. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Hunter College in 1994 and completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2001. She has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad, including at the Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Science Museum, London, Smithsonian Museum of Art, National Museum of Art, and Reina Sofía, Madrid. Awards include the Studio Museum in Harlem Artist-in-Residence Program in 1999; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2002; Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2002 and 2008; Anonymous Was a Woman Award in 2019; and Latinx Artist Fellowship in 2021. Her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, and Lowe Art Museum. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, ArtNews, and Forbes, among others. Her book, Elia Alba, The Supper Club (2019) brings together artists, scholars, and performers of diasporic cultures through photography, food, and dialogue to examine race and culture in the United States. She was part of the curatorial team for El Museo del Barrio’s critically acclaimed exhibition, Estamos Bien: La Trienal 20/21. She lives and works in the Bronx.
Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary art collective comprised of Cristóbal Martínez (Mestizo), and Kade L. Twist (Cherokee). Postcommodity’s art functions as a shared Indigenous lens and voice to engage the assaultive manifestations of the global market and its supporting institutions, public perceptions, beliefs, and individual actions that comprise the ever-expanding, multinational, multiracial, and multiethnic colonizing force that is defining the twenty-first century through ever-increasing velocities and complex forms of violence. Postcommodity works to forge new metaphors capable of rationalizing our shared experiences within this increasingly challenging contemporary environment; promote a constructive discourse that challenges the social, political, and economic processes that are destabilizing communities and geographies; and connect Indigenous narratives of cultural self-determination with the broader public sphere.
Postcommodity are the recipients of grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2010), Creative Capital (2012), Art Matters (2013), Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (2014), Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation (2017), Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship (2017–18), Harker Fund of the San Francisco Foundation (2018–19), Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Shift Award (2021), and Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions (2022). The collective has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Contour: 5th Biennial of the Moving Image, Mechelen, Belgium; Nuit Blanche, Toronto; Adelaide International 2012, Adelaide, Australia; 18th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; 2017 Whitney Biennial; Art in General, New York; documenta 14; 57th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh; Desert X, Coachella Valley, CA; Art Institute of Chicago; LAXART, Los Angeles; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Remai Modern Museum, Saskatoon, Canada. Their historic Land Art installation Repellent Fence occurred at the US/Mexico border near Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico. The collective was awarded the Fine Prize for From Smoke and Tangled Waters, They Carried Fire Home, commissioned for the 57th Carnegie International.
Postcommodity acknowledges the important contributions of its previous collaborators: Steven Yazzie (2007–2010), Nathan Young (2007–2015), Raven Chacon (2009–2018), Adam Ingram-Goble (Game Remains), Andrew McCord (If History Moves at the Speed of Its Weapons, Then the Shape of the Arrow is Changing, and Promoting a More Just, Verdant and Harmonious Resolution), Annabel Wong (Dead River) and Existence AD (Dead River).
CAA’s Annual Artist Interviews will be held on Friday, February 17, 4:30–7 p.m. ET, in Grand Ballroom East.
The 111th CAA Annual Conference will be held February 15–18, 2023 at the New York Hilton Midtown. Register now!
CAA Issues Statement On Hamline University Termination of Dr. Erika López Prater
posted by CAA — January 18, 2023
CAA has been following the termination of Professor Erika López Prater at Hamline University. As of last Friday, the Board of Trustees at the university has been engaged in a review of institutional policies, including those focused on academic freedom and inclusion. CAA strongly urges the Board and the administration to uphold the tenets of academic freedom with respect to Dr. López Prater for their public statements that have defamed and damaged her person and her professional reputation.
Academic freedom is a core principle of both Hamline University’s mission and CAA’s charter, and Dr. López Prater’s termination is a tacit rejection of everything that principle stands for in higher education. Beyond an infringement on academic freedom, Hamline’s actions are a dangerous precedent of academic administrators endorsing one side of a religious controversy.
Hamline University’s characterization of Dr. López Prater’s action as “Islamophobic” contradicts widely held definitions of the term from prominent public interest advocacy groups, including the national organizations CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), and MPAC (Muslim Public Affairs Council). Dr. López Prater met and exceeded pedagogical standards for teaching by providing advance written and verbal notice of the intention to illustrate her lecture with two images of the Prophet Muhammed. Additionally, the images she used are historic and symbolic works of art of significance, essential to teaching the long and rich art history of Islam.
CAA calls upon Hamline University, President Fayneese Miller, and AVP David Everett to apologize to Dr. López Prater formally and publicly. Furthermore, this would be the appropriate time to affirm their commitment to both the informed pedagogy that Dr. López Prater demonstrated, and the academic freedom to pursue truth that all professors should expect. CAA speaks on behalf of a membership base that is facing increasingly precarious standards of employment—which is the very reason Hamline University was so easily able to terminate Dr. López Prater. Amends would be made if they recommitted to a tenure-line position for the teaching of art history.
Additional Signatories:
American Sociological Association
Other Statements of Support:
Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA)
Mesa (Middle Eastern Studies Association)
Michael S. Roth, President of Wesleyan University, to give keynote address at CAA’s 111th Annual Conference Convocation
posted by CAA — January 17, 2023
Michael S. Roth, President of Wesleyan University.
We are thrilled to announce that Michael S. Roth, President of Wesleyan University, will give the keynote address at CAA’s Convocation during the organization’s 111th Annual Conference.
Michael S. Roth ’78 became the sixteenth president of Wesleyan University in 2007, after having served as Hartley Burr Alexander Professor of Humanities at Scripps College, Associate Director of the Getty Research Institute, and President of the California College of the Arts. At Wesleyan, Roth has overseen the launch of such academic programs as the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life and the Shapiro Center for Writing as well as four new interdisciplinary colleges that emphasize advanced research and cohort building in the areas of the environment, film, East Asian studies, and integrative sciences. Under his leadership, Wesleyan experienced its most ambitious fundraising campaign in its history, raising more than $482 million, primarily for financial aid. Roth has undertaken several initiatives that have energized the curriculum and helped to make a Wesleyan education more affordable and accessible to students from under-represented groups, creating a supportive and diverse campus community that inspires students to achieve their personal best.
Author and curator (most notably of the exhibition Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture, Library of Congress, 1998–99), Roth describes his scholarly interests as centered on “how people make sense of the past.” His 2015 book Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (Yale University Press) has been a powerful tool for students, their families, faculty, and policymakers who are wrestling with the future of higher education in America. It was recognized in 2016 with the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ Frederic W. Ness award for a book that best illuminates the goals and practices of a contemporary liberal education. Roth’s newest book, Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness (Yale University Press), addresses some of the most contentious issues in American higher education, including affirmative action, safe spaces, and questions of free speech. Roth regularly publishes essays, book reviews, and commentaries in the national media and in scholarly journals. He continues to teach undergraduate courses and has offered MOOCs through Coursera, most recently, “How to Change the World.”
CAA’s Convocation will be held on Wednesday, February 15, 6:30–8 p.m. ET, in Grand Ballroom East.
The CAA 111th Annual Conference will be held February 16–18, 2023 at the New York Hilton Midtown. Register now!
CWA Picks: Winter 2023
posted by CAA — January 12, 2023
The CAA Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) Winter Picks include exhibitions and events that explore language through form, abstraction, the archive, and narrative. The artists included in this season’s picks investigate language and how it shapes our vision and experience of the world. They also reveal the systems of power embedded within language and how it often acts as a mediator.
Put It This Way: (Re)Visions of the Hirshhorn Collection
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Until August 31, 2023
Put It This Way includes almost a century of work from fifty women and nonbinary artists in the Hirshhorn’s collection. The exhibit presents a range of media from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a particular emphasis on the Hirshhorn’s mission to highlight global voices.
Caroline Kent
Until January 28, 2023
Figge Art Museum
Language and invented vocabulary made up of geometric shapes, marks, and colors are central to Caroline Kent’s practice. Her work challenges the viewer to consider how the indecipherable might play a role in their understanding of the world.
The Age of Roe: The Past, Present, and Future of Abortion in America
Until March 4, 2023
Conference: “The Age of Roe: The Past, Present, and Future of Abortion in America”
Friday January 27, 2023
This two-day conference at Harvard Radcliffe Institute will explore how Roe v. Wade and its aftermath shaped the United States and the world beyond it for nearly half a century. The conference will include lectures and panel discussions from experts in constitutional law, historians, health policy advocates, and other scholars. An accompanying exhibition curated by Mary Ziegler, Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law, will also be on view through March 4, 2023.
Until April 23, 2023
re:collection includes the work of five artists—Ali Cherri, Nicole Cherubini, Lily Cox-Richard, NIC Kay, and SANGREE—whose work reconsiders the Tufts University collection. Specifically, the artists explored about 200 objects from the fifth century BCE to the seventh century CE, including early Greco-Roman ceramics, stone carvings, pre-Columbian vessels, jewelry, and textiles. The exhibition has a range of approaches, from performance and installation to sculpture and painting.
Valiant postures/A ruse! A ruse!
2021
Acrylic on Belgian linen, acrylic on walnut
63 × 74 × 2 1/2 in
CAA 2023 Board of Directors Election: Vote Now!
posted by CAA — December 22, 2022
As a CAA member, voting is the best way to shape the future of your professional organization. Thank you for taking the time to vote!
The CAA Board of Directors is comprised of professionals in the visual arts who are elected annually by the membership to serve four-year terms (or, in the case of Emerging Professional Board members, two-year terms). The Board is charged with CAA’s long-term financial stability and strategic direction; it is also the Association’s governing body. The board sets policy regarding all aspects of CAA’s activities, including publishing, the Annual Conference, awards and fellowships, advocacy, and committee procedures. For more information, please read the CAA By-laws on Nominations, Elections, and Appointments.
MEET THE CANDIDATES
The 2022–23 Nominating Committee has selected the following candidates for election to the CAA Board of Directors. Click the names of the candidates below to read their bios/personal statements and CVs before casting your vote.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS CANDIDATES (FOUR-YEAR TERM, 2023–2027)
Associate Dean of Academic and Student Affairs, College of Visual Arts and Design
University of North Texas (Denton, TX)
Associate Professor of Painting, Department of Art
Mississippi State University (Starkville, MS)
Associate Professor & Director of Art History
VCUarts Qatar (Doha, Qatar)
Curator of exhibition Lucio Fontana’s Ceramics,
Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Milan, Italy)
Associate Professor of Art History & Head of Arts & Humanities Major
Yale-NUS College (Singapore)
Associate Professor in Visual Communication Design, Department of Art, Art History & Design
University of Notre Dame (Notre Dame, IN)
EMERGING PROFESSIONALS BOARD OF DIRECTORS CANDIDATES (TWO-YEAR TERM, 2023–2025)
PhD Candidate, David Driskell Fellow
Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (Portland, ME)
Ph.D. Candidate, Art and Architectural History
University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA)
CAA members must cast their votes online. The deadline for voting is 5 p.m. ET on Thursday, February 16, 2023.
The elected individuals will be announced at CAA’s Annual Business Meeting to be held from 1–2 p.m. ET on Friday, February 17, 2023.
Questions? Contact Maeghan Donohue, Chief of Staff and Manager, Strategic Planning, Diversity & Governance (mdonohue@collegeart.org).
Emerging Professional Director Candidate: Lauren Van Nest
posted by CAA — December 22, 2022
Statement
My name is Lauren Van Nest and I am a doctoral candidate at the University of Virginia (UVA) studying the art and architecture of medieval Europe. My dissertation examines the relationships crafted between objects of imperial patronage in the Ottonian Empire, their ritual environments, and the bodies of their patrons. I research the ways in which artistic materials—their form, aesthetics, symbolism—transmit concepts of divinity and power across media and iconographies. My work has been supported by a twelve-month fellowship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (German Academic Exchange Service) in affiliation with the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen in Göttingen, Germany. Additionally, I have been awarded research grants by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), Center for Global Inquiry + Innovation, and UVA Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. I received my undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (B.A.) and a graduate degree from the University of Toronto (M.A.).
I would define my duty as a College Art Association (CAA) board member as a commitment to service towards the community via cultivation and advocacy. I am passionate about developing and promoting programming that creatively adapts to the pressures facing the visual arts today and continues to make the arts more accessible to wider audiences. As the Emerging Professional Director on the Board of Directors, I would bring my own enthusiasm for the visual arts alongside my skills in project management, communicating complex ideas, and collaboration. As an organization drawing together diverse and vibrant professionals, CAA is uniquely positioned to advocate for the value of the arts nationally and internationally. During my term, I will develop robust advocacy strategies that not only promote continued federal and public funding of the arts, but also attend to the needs of CAA members through grants and workshops. I envision CAA as a partner to its individual members, navigating the various obstacles facing aspiring as well as established visual arts professionals.
I have served in international organizations during my graduate career, including the Medieval Academy of America (MAA) and the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA). It is in these roles that I have coordinated mentorship programming, produced podcasts, and organized roundtables on topics related to graduate and early career professionalization. I am also committed to engaging with digital humanities projects that analyze and document the history of academic institutions, namely universities (Land and Legacy) and organizations (ICMA Oral History Project). With CAA, I am able to harness my previous and future interests to contribute to the goals of the organization.
Emerging Professional Director Candidate: Carolyn Jean Martin
posted by CAA — December 22, 2022
Statement
I am honored to be nominated as a candidate for Emerging Professional Director. Having been introduced to CAA at the start of my graduate school education, membership has been a sustaining source of knowledge, professional growth, and collaboration. If selected, I will utilize the platform to assist in strengthening the commitment of the CAA mission for diverse practices and practitioners, as well as maintaining an international presence. Students and emerging professionals, as they continue to move the art world in dynamic directions, are a critical part of those commitments and vital to the growth of CAA. As someone whose educational pursuits include art practice, art history, and the philosophy of aesthetics I seek to continue and expand upon the efforts that make CAA the place where diverse, intersecting practices converge in a sustained global conversation. Additionally, previously serving on the Student and Emerging Professionals committee facilitated an understanding of the spaces where opportunities for growth and development can take place – particularly for undergraduate and graduate student membership.
Now, more than ever, as global politics reflect isolationist worldviews and the creative arts are fighting to stay alive in colleges and universities, an international organization such as CAA is perfectly poised as the platform for arts professionals to come together for ongoing conversations, to strategize, and harness the collective power of the arts as an agent of change. If provided an opportunity to serve on the board as Emerging Professional Director I bring energy and excitement to build upon the work currently being executed at CAA that makes use of the technological innovations gained over the past two years that will ensure a variety of options for engagement throughout the year, and further aid in the democratization of access to scholarship and networking opportunities across practice and borders.
Board of Directors Candidate: Neeta Verma
posted by CAA — December 22, 2022
Bio
Neeta Verma situates herself within the porous discipline of Visual Communication Design. Her areas of research and teaching explore the critical use of design as a tool for social equity and justice. Her work focuses on systemic social issues examined through the lens of power and privilege, and the examination of power structures within social ecologies. She teaches Social Design at the intersection of social innovation and collaborative practices, and Visualization of Data which investigates the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of representation. Her current research projects examine youth violence in urban contexts locally and the design of conducive environments for the visually impaired in India. She received her MFA from Yale University. She currently holds faculty fellowships at the Center for Social Concerns, the Liu Institute for Asia & Asian Studies, Pulte Institute for Global Development at the University of Notre Dame. She is also appointed as an affiliate faculty forThe Initiative on Race and Resilience. Her professional design practice of over twenty-five years has focused exclusively on museums, cultural organizations, not-for-profits, and educational institutions. Selected clients include the American Red Cross, Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, Liberty Science Center, The New York Botanical Garden, The New York Public Library, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Wildlife Conservation Society. She is the recipient of the Nehru-Fulbright Fellowship. She is also the recipient of several design awards that include the Core77 Design Awards, Graphis, A’Design Awards, International Design Awards, GDUSA, and the Design Incubation Teaching Award. She has been an invited speaker and has presented her research at both national and international conferences. She currently serves on the SEGD Academic Task Force and is a member of the Pluriversal Working Group of the Future of Design Education.
Board of Directors Candidate: Nozomi Naoi
posted by CAA — December 22, 2022
Bio
Nozomi Naoi is Associate Professor of Humanities at Yale-NUS College with joint appointment at the Department of Japanese Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore. She specializes in modern Japanese art and visual culture and is the author of Yumeji Modern: Designing the Everyday in Twentieth-Century Japan (University of Washington Press, 2020; awarded the Honorable Mention for the John Whitney Hall Prize 2022). She is preparing her second book, Modern Design and the Japanese Department Store(under advance contract with MIT Press) which demonstrates how material culture via modern design and visual materials creates the modern Japanese subject through the institution of department stores. She is also co-curating the exhibition, “Made in Japan: 20th-Century Poster Art” at the Poster House Museum in New York, opening in March 2023.
Board of Directors Candidate: Sharon Hecker
posted by CAA — December 22, 2022
Bio
Sharon Hecker (BA Yale University cum laude, MA and PhD UC Berkeley) is an art historian and curator specializing in modern and contemporary Italian art. A member of CAA since 1993, she is a leading authority on Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso and has a special interest in material history. She has published extensively on key twentieth-century Italian artists, including essays and articles on Lucio Fontana, Luciano Fabro, Marisa Merz, Giuseppe Penone and Francesco Lo Savio. She was Project Coordinator for Jenny Holzer, the first woman to represent the US at the Venice Biennale, winner of Golden Lion Award for Best Pavilion (1990) and was the liaison between Luciano Fabro and SFMoMA for his US retrospective at SFMoMA, for which she translated his theoretical writings into English.
Hecker’s books include A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture (UC Press, 2017, awarded CAA’s Millard Meiss Publication Fund and translated into Italian); with Marin R. Sullivan, Postwar Italian Art History: Untying the Knot (Bloomsbury, 2018); with Silvia Bottinelli, Lead in Modern and Contemporary Art (Bloomsbury, 2020); Finding Lost Wax: The Disappearance and Recovery of an Ancient Casting Technique and the Experiments of Medardo Rosso (Brill, 2020); with Peter J. Karol, Posthumous Art, Law and the Art Market: The Afterlife of Art (Routledge, 2022); with Raffaele Bedarida, Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today (Bloomsbury, 2022); with Catherine Ramsey-Portolano, Female Cultural Production in Modern Italy: Literature, Art and Intellectual History (Palgrave, 2023); and with Arianna Arisi Rota, Disguising Disease: Italian Political And Visual Culture From Post-Unification To Covid-19 (2023, Routledge, awarded the Columbia University Seminars in Modern Italy Prize).
Hecker has received fellowships from the Getty, Fulbright, and Mellon Foundations. Her exhibitions include Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions, with Harry Cooper (Harvard University Art Museums, catalogue Yale University Press, 2004); Medardo Rosso: Experiments in Light and Form, with Tamara H. Schenkenberg (Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 2017–18); Medardo Rosso: Sight Unseen, with Julia Peyton-Jones (Galerie Ropac, 2018). She is currently organizing an exhibition on Lucio Fontana’s ceramics at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2025).
Hecker is Series Editor of Bloomsbury Visual Arts’ Visual Cultures and Italian Contexts Series; Deputy Chair of the International Catalogue Raisonné Association (ICRA); member of ICOM; TEFAF Vetting Committee for Sculpture (19th-century to the present), Maastricht/New York (Chair); and Coordinator of the Expert Witness Pool for the Court of Arbitration for Art. She trademarked The Hecker Standard®, a best practices approach for conducting due diligence on artworks. She lives in Milan, Italy.