CAA News Today

As part of CAA’s 10-year anniversary celebration of its publication, The Eye, the Hand, the Mind: 100 Years of the College Art Association, chapter authors reflect on their contributions and how their impressions of the field have changed. Our final video in the series features Judith Brodsky, Mary Garrard, and Ferris Olin, who co-authored chapter 11, “Governance and Diversity.”

Involved not just in CAA, its Annual Conference, and its Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA), but also with CAA’s affiliate society the Women’s Caucus for Art, these three women represent pillars in the field of feminist art history.

In this video, they discuss the first 100 years of CAA’s history representing women and underrepresented groups, and point to the future: 2022 marks fifty years of the first committee to represent women at CAA. CAA is excited to honor this milestone at the 2022 Annual Conference and beyond.

Brodsky and Olin are each presenting at the upcoming 110th Annual Conference. See links underneath their bios below for more information on their sessions, panels, and talks.

SPEAKERS BIOGRAPHIES

Judith K. Brodsky is currently distinguished professor emerita at Rutgers University. She founded the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, now renamed the Brodsky Center in her honor and located at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. The Center has been instrumental in promoting the recognition of women artists and artists of color. She is also co-founder of the Rutgers Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities and The Feminist Art Project, a national and international program to promote women artists in the cultural milieu. With her colleague, Dr. Ferris Olin, she established the Miriam Schapiro Archives on Women Artists at Rutgers and was curator of the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series at Rutgers from 2006-2013. Brodsky was the co-founder of the Women Artists Archive National Directory (WAAND), funded initially by the Getty Foundation, a digital directory of archives where the papers of women artists active in the US since 1945 are located. A printmaker and book artist, Judith’s work is in over 100 permanent collections. She has also organized and curated many exhibitions and has published extensively, including contributions to The Power of Feminist Art and SIGNS, A Journal of Women in Culture and Society; Junctures in Women’s Leadership: The Arts. Most recently she published the first book on the impact of feminist theory on digital technology in the arts titled Dismantling the Patriarchy, Bit by Bit: Feminism, Art, and Technology, Bloomsbury, 2021. She served as CAA’s President and received the Annual Recognition Award from CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts, as well as past national president for ArtTable and Women’s Caucus for Art.

Details for Judith Brodsky’s participation in the 2022 Annual Conference: link.

Mary D. Garrard, professor emerita of art history at American University, Washington, D. C., is a scholar whose work has combined Italian Renaissance art with feminist studies. Her book, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton, 1989), was a groundbreaking contribution to the field, that launched modern studies of the now-famous artist. In Artemisia Gentileschi Circa 1622: The Shaping and Reshaping of an Artistic Identity (University of California, 2001), Garrard addressed new critical issues in Gentileschi studies. Her third book, Artemisia Gentileschi and Early Modern Feminism, positions the artist among the feminist treatises and debates of her time (Reaktion Books, London, 2020). Beyond Artemisia, Garrard has written and spoken extensively on Italian Renaissance, Early Modern art, and feminist art history. With her colleague Norma Broude, Garrard created and edited three books that have become basic texts in art history and women’s studies courses, including Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany (1982); The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (1992); and Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism (2005).  Broude and Garrard also created and contributed to The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s (1994).

Ferris Olin is distinguished professor emerita at Rutgers University, where she was the co-founder and co-director (with Judith K. Brodsky) of Rutgers Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities, and The Feminist Art Project, an international collaboration to make visible the impact of women on the cultural landscape. She also established the Miriam Schapiro Archives on Women Artists at Rutgers as well as the Margery Somers Foster Center, a research center focused on documenting women’s leadership in the public arena, and served as Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Women and earlier, Director of the Art Library. She was curator of the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series at Rutgers from 1995-2006 and later (with Judith K. Brodsky) from 2006-2013. With Brodsky, Olin also created the Women Artists Archive National Directory (WAAND). Olin has also published broadly. Her most recent book, co-authored with Judith K. Brodsky, is called Junctures in Women’s Leadership: The Arts (Rutgers University Press, fall 2018). Olin has served on the boards of numerous non-profit organizations and was Vice-President of the College Art Association. She is the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award and the College Art Association Committee on Women’s Annual Recognition Award (now known as Distinguished Feminist Award).

Details for Ferris Olin’s participation in the 2022 Annual Conference: link.