CAA News Today

Association of Academic Museums and Galleries

The Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) welcomes a new board member, Jamaal B. Sheats. Sheats is the director and curator of the Fisk University Galleries and assistant professor in the Fisk University Art Department. He has simultaneously maintained a strong and consistent exhibition record for nearly fifteen years in galleries across the nation and abroad. Most recently, Sheats curated Carl Van Vechten: Depth of Field; Selections from the Fisk University Galleries and the John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library Collection and Origins of Influence: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Modern Art at the Carl Van Vechten Art Gallery at Fisk University. He also completed a commission for the National Museum of African American Music. In 2015, Sheats organized the exhibition Topography at Tinney Contemporary Art Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee.

Sheats was commissioned to create Eight Octives for Music City Center in 2013. In addition to his appointments at Fisk, active art-making, exhibitions, and curatorial projects, he is the owner of Sheats Repoussé and the Charlotte Art Project. He continues to receive accolades for his work. In 2016 his exhibitions Origins of Influence and Topography were voted by the editors of the Nashville Scene as “Best Art Comeback” and “Best Group Exhibit,” respectively. Sheats has also been featured in the Boston Globe, the New York Times, Numbers, and Nashville Arts Magazine, as well as several other arts journals, newspapers, and magazines.

To support his commitment to the arts and art education, Sheats is active in the arts community and holds positions on the Frist Center for the Arts Education Council, the “To Share a Legacy” HBCU Alliance, the Nashville Conference on African-American History Culture planning committee, and the “Plan to Play” Steering Committee for the Metro Parks and Recreation. He is a board member of the Arts and Business Council also.

Sheats obtained his BA degree in art from Fisk University and an MFA degree with a concentration in studio art from the School of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, and Tufts University, where he also completed a postgraduate teaching fellowship. Sheat was a teaching artist-in-residence at the Nashville Public Library.

View the complete list of AAMG board members.

Association of Art Historians

The Association of Art Historians’ (AAH) 2017 annual conference and art-book fair will take place April 6–8, 2017, at Loughborough University. The keynote speakers are: Amelia Jones, Robert A. Day Professor in Art and Design and Vice Dean of Critical Studies at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who will speak on “Intimate Relations: Queer Performance in Art History”; and Mark Hallett, director of studies at the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art, who will address “Interactive Landscapes: From Thomas Gainsborough to George Shaw.”

The conference will celebrate the expansive spectrum of histories, theories, and practices that characterize art-historical research today. Internationally, the field of art history is eclectic and inclusive, reaching across geopolitical, cultural, and disciplinary divides to extend an understanding of the visual and material culture of many diverse periods and places. Loughborough University is engaged with art history, contemporary practice, and visual culture, linking arts-based research with advances in design, technology, media, and communication, centered on the development of more sustainable and equitable global communities. Full details and register information can be found on the AAH website.

New Media Caucus

The New Media Caucus (NMC) will be sponsoring a series of programs during CAA’s upcoming 2017 Annual Conference. Programs include panels, the annual showcase, and a membership business meeting where important news about NMC will be announced. More information can be found online.

The annual NMC business meeting will take place on Thursday, February 16, 1:30–3:00 PM. All members are invited. We will gather to discuss new developments and initiatives for the growth of our organization. Next is NMC’s panel, “Other Media: Decolonizing Practices and Cyborg Ontologies,” to be held 3:30–5:00 PM. The session will be followed at 7:00 PM with the NMC showcase in the Lang Auditorium at Hunter College, Main Campus, 695 Park Ave at 68th Street, New York, NY 10065. The showcase is a highlight of NMC’s events at CAA and will feature presentations by twenty new media artists who will talk about their current research. The showcase is followed by a public reception. On Friday, February 17, NMC has scheduled three events in the CAA Media Lounge: “Roundtable: New Media Futures” at 10:30 AM; “Game Studies at 20” at 1:30 PM; and “Between Biology and Art” at 3:30 PM.

Renaissance Society of America

The Renaissance Society of America (RSA) will hold its sixty-third annual meeting at the Palmer House Hilton Hotel in Chicago from March 30 to April 1, 2017. Some two hundred art-history sessions are featured in the program, as well as a plenary lecture by Paul Hills, professor emeritus at the Courtauld Institute of Art, taking place on Saturday, April 1, at noon. The conference program is available online, as well as information about fees and other practicalities.

Meanwhile, the society is sponsoring a session on “Early Modern Senses and Spaces” at the CAA Annual Conference in New York, scheduled for Wednesday, February 15, at 10:30 AM in Sutton Parlor South, 2nd Floor. RSA’s executive director plans to attend and hopes to see many RSA and CAA members there.

RSA offers numerous fellowships for art historians, including Samuel H. Kress Research Library Fellowships, Samuel H. Kress Mid-Career Research and Publication Fellowships in Renaissance Art History, the RSA-Kress Carlo Pedretti Fellowship in Leonardo da Vinci Studies, and our own RSA Fellowships. The next deadline for applications will be in fall 2017.

The winter 2016 issue of Renaissance Quarterly (vol. 69, no. 4) includes an article on “Vicenzo Danti’s Deceits,” coauthored by Michael Cole and Diletta Gamberini.

RSA is pleased to announce that James Shulman, senior fellow at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and former president of Artstor, has joined RSA’s executive board in July 2016 as a counselor.

Society for Photographic Education

Registration is open for the Society for Photographic Education’s (SPE) fifty-fourth national conference, “Family Values,” taking place March 9–12, 2017, in Orlando, Florida. Connect with artists, educators, and photographers from around the world for programming that will fuel your creativity—four days of presentations, industry seminars, and critiques to engage you! Explore an exhibits fair featuring the latest equipment, processes, publications, and photography/media schools. Participate in one-on-one portfolio critiques and informal portfolio sharing, and take advantage of student volunteer opportunities to receive a full rebate on admission. Other highlights include a print raffle, a silent auction, mentoring sessions, film screenings, exhibitions, receptions, a dance party, and more! The guest speakers are Renee Cox, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Jerry Uelsmann. Preview the conference schedule and register online. Preregistration ends on February 17, 2017. Don’t wait, register today!

Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture

Members of the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) took an active part in the forty-eighth convention of the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Washington, DC, organizing several panels and roundtable discussions. At the membership meeting held during the convention, matters of importance to the life of the organization were discussed, such as the upcoming conference in Venice in October 2017; possible replacement of a listserv communication platform with a network-based one; reelection of officers; and distribution of prizes and awards.

At CAA’s Annual Conference in February 2017, SHERA will sponsor the following double session: “Emerging Scholars: Politics and the Collective in East European and Russian Art: Part I,” taking place on Wednesday, February 15, 2017, at 10:30 AM in West Ballroom, 3rd Floor; and “Emerging Scholars: Russian Artists and International Communities: Part II,” to be held on Friday, February 17, 2017, at 8:30 AM in Sutton Parlor South, 2nd Floor. Both sessions will be chaired by Alice Isabella Sullivan, a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Visual Resources Association

The Visual Resources Association (VRA) has opened registration for its thirty-fourth annual conference, to be held March 28–April 1, 2017, in Louisville, Kentucky. Early-bird rates are good through February 28. Registration will continue online at the full rate until March 17, then continue onsite the week of the conference. Current members will be prompted to log in with MemberClicks ID-password through the registration form, while nonmembers will have the opportunity to join or register through the same single form. The payment structure for workshops is new: one workshop is included in the registration fee, and any additional workshops are $15 each. You can submit multiple conference registration forms. This may be helpful if using multiple forms of payment (institutional credit card for registration and personal card for tours, for example).

Check the conference schedule for event details and updates. Workshops and tours fill up fast and are on a first-come, first-served basis. Once the enrollment limits are reached, registration for them closes. If there is something you are really interested in, it is best to act early. Contact VRA’s secretary, Jasmine Burns, with any questions or registration changes. The conference website includes information about rates and date ranges for registration, the welcome letter from VRA president Jen Green, tips for travel to and from Louisville and the Marriott Hotel, and more.

Association of Academic Museums and Galleries

The Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) asks for your support in reaching 3,800 listserv members! Join the most active academic museum and gallery discussion board on the web and get answers to your questions about student engagement, faculty partnerships, and more. Visit us online.

Association of Print Scholars

The Association of Print Scholars (APS) recently celebrated its second anniversary, and the organization continues to grow through the dedicated work of its officers and members. According to its by-laws, APS must elect two officers biannually. In the coming weeks, online voting will take place for the positions of vice president and treasurer. Officers will also appoint a website coordinator.

The International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) and APS collaboratively presented a panel discussion on the market for contemporary prints. The event marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the IFPDA Print Fair, the largest and most celebrated art fair dedicated to fine prints. “Publishing the Contemporary: The State of Printmaking Today” took place on Saturday, November 5, 2016, in the Board of Officers Room at the Park Avenue Armory. The print specialist and critic Sarah Kirk Hanley moderated the conversation.

APS will host its affiliated-society panel at CAA’s 2017 Annual Conference in New York. “Collaborative Printmaking” is scheduled for Friday, February 17 at 3:30 PM in the Petit Trianon, 3rd Floor. Chaired by Jasper van Putten from Harvard University, the panel brings together a diverse group of print scholars and artists to explore the wide-ranging impact of collaboration in printmaking across cultures and times—from the European Middle Ages and colonial Peru to contemporary Johannesburg and Chicago. Speakers include: Suzanne Boorsch, Yale University Art Gallery; Emily C. Floyd, Tulane University; Kim Berman, University of Johannesburg; and Kate McQuillen, Independent Visual Artist. Please stay tuned for further updates on APS’s session, reception, and print-related activities.

APS members might enjoy reading the recent issue of Art in Print, which includes the National Gallery of Art curator Peter Parshall’s APS Inaugural Lecture, as well as responses from scholars and APS members.

Feminist Art Project

The Feminist Art Project has announced a call for submissions for “Bodies, Borders, Homes.” We live in a world of migratory population flows, resurgent nationalisms, and state-sanctioned violence. The next issue of Rejoinder web journal will explore the theme of bodies and borders in the context of these geopolitical phenomena. We invite submissions that focus on how the relationship between borders and bodies shapes our understandings of selfhood, exile, and home. Writing (including essays, commentary, criticism, fiction, and poetry) and artwork should address these relationships from feminist, queer, and social justice–inspired perspectives. We particularly welcome contributions at the intersection of scholarship and activism. For manuscript preparation details, please see our website. Rejoinder is published by the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University, in partnership with the Feminist Art Project, Rutgers University. Please send completed written work (2,000–2,500 words max), JPEGs of artwork, and short bios to the editor, Sarah Tobias, by December 9, 2016.

Italian Art Society

Next year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Italian Art Society (IAS). To celebrate this milestone, the organization has initiated both membership and fundraising campaigns that will run through the end of 2016. Please encourage colleagues, students, friends, and aficionados working on or appreciative of Italian art, architecture, and visual culture to join IAS. We are encouraging our members to offer gift memberships to emerging scholars, contingent faculty, and independent scholars. Membership options begin at $20 for graduate students and include three other membership levels ($30 regular; $60 patron, and $100 institution/benefactor). New or newly renewed lapsed memberships paid by December 31, 2016, are valid until January 1, 2018.

IAS has also launched an anniversary-specific campaign to celebrate the growth and longevity of the organization. We ask members and others to consider donations in permutations of three and/or thirty ($3, $30, $300, 2 x $30, 30 x $2) to support IAS’s mission, programs, grants, charitable activities, and publications. Thus far we have raised nearly $2,000 in this fall’s fundraising campaign. During CAA’s annual meeting next February, IAS will host a gala reception to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary at the beautiful New York restaurant Il Gattopardo (13–15 West 54th Street, New York, NY 10019, less than a block from CAA’s conference headquarters, the New York Hilton Midtown). At the event we will honor several early presidents of IAS. The early history of the society may be found on our website.

Next year’s IAS/Kress Lecture will take place in Bologna in the Aula Magna of the former monastery of Santa Cristina, which now houses the Arts Department of the University of Bologna. Proposals to present the eighth annual IAS/Kress Lecture, on a topic related to Bologna or its environs, will be due in early January.

Japan Art History Forum

The Japan Art History Forum (JAHP) has announced two recent developments. First, the Japanese Art Society of America (JASA) will provide funding in support of the Chino Kaori Memorial Essay Prize. JASA will award $1,000 to the 2016 prize winner and has committed to provide a $1,000 award for the prize winner in each of the next four years, for a total of $5,000. Established in 2003 in memory of the distinguished art historian Chino Kaori, the Chino Kaori Memorial Essay Prize is awarded annually to a graduate student who has written an outstanding essay on a topic in the study of Japanese art history or visual culture. The award recognizes excellence in scholarship, with several past prize-winning essays later published in peer-reviewed journals. More information, including a list of past winners, can be found on the JAHF website. The prize continues to be supported by the University of Hawai‘i Press, which provides $400 in books from the press’s catalogue.

Second, former curatorial interns at the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture in Hanford, California, have created the Clark Center Graduate Travel Grant, which will award $500 annually to a graduate student of Japanese art wishing to visit a public or private collection of Japanese art for the purpose of in-person, hands-on research. The grant was created in commemoration of the closing of the Clark Center and in recognition of and heartfelt gratitude for the experience the Clarks and the center provided to the former interns and to many more young and emerging scholars in the field.

In June 2015, the Clark Center closed its doors after twenty years of offering exceptional exhibitions and programs for visitors from the local community in California’s Central Valley as well as Japanese art specialists from across the country and around the world. From its inception, the Clark Center also hosted an unparalleled curatorial internship program, which graduated a total of nineteen interns with valuable hands-on experience handling and caring for artworks, planning exhibitions, and working with the public. Bill and Libby Clark, founders of the center, not only created this rare opportunity for young scholars in the field; they also opened their home to us and welcomed us as part of their family. Seed money for this fund has been donated by the past interns of the Clark Center, and additional contributions to the fund are welcome on an ongoing basis. Donations to the Clark Center Graduate Travel Grant program can be made by visiting the JAHF website.

National Council of Arts Administrators

The forty-fourth annual conference of the National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA) convened September 28–October 1, 2016 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The organization is indebted to Hester Stinnett of Tyler School of Art at Temple University for organizing a truly exceptional conference. Featured speakers included Sean Kelley, senior vice president and director of public programming at Eastern State Penitentiary; Pepon Osorio, artist and Tyler professor; Greg Anderson, sociologist and dean of Temple University’s College of Education; and Blake Bradford, director of the Lincoln University-Barnes Foundation Museum.

The membership elected three new board members: Joe Poshek (Irvine Valley College); Jeni Mokren (State University of New York, New Paltz); and Peter Chametzky (University of South Carolina). They join returning directors Leslie Bellavance (Kendall College of Art and Design, Secretary), Lynne Allen (Boston University), Elissa Armstrong (Virginia Commonwealth University, President), Cathy Pagani (University of Alabama, Treasurer), Tom Berding (Michigan State University), Nan Goggin (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), A. Blake Pearce (Valdosta State University), David LaPolombara (Ohio University), Michael Fels (Elon University), Andrea Eis (Oakland University, Past Treasurer) and Amy Hauft (University of Texas at Austin, Past President). Special thanks to Steve Bliss (Savannah College of Art and Design), Cora Lynn Deibler (University of Connecticut) and Jim Hopfensperger (Western Michigan University) for their excellent service and who rotated off the board this year.

Activities at the 2017 CAA Annual Conference include the annual NCAA reception (Thursday, February 16, 7:00–9:00 PM) and an NCAA-CAA affiliate session, “Entrepreneurship as Research, Teaching, Learning, or Service,” a fast-paced series of presentations on leadership (Thursday, February 16, 5:30–7:00 PM). NCAA welcomes new and current members, and all interested parties.

Public Art Dialogue

Public Art Dialogue (PAD) has announced the 2017 winner of its annual award for lifetime achievement in the field of public art. The artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles will be honored with an award reception during the CAA Annual Conference in New York, taking place February 15–18, 2017. PAD’s awards ceremony will take place at the Queens Museum. For more information, please see http://publicartdialogue.org/news

Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture

The Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) has welcomed several new members, including three institutions: St. Petersburg Arts Project, the Getty Research Institute, and ARTMargins. The organization has also received its first donation to establish the Maya Semina Graduate Student Travel Grant. Several SHERA members are participating in the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies convention, taking place November 17–20, 2016, in Washington, DC. The SHERA membership meeting will take place on Friday, November 18, 6:15–7:45 PM at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park.

At the CAA Annual Conference in February 2017, SHERA will host two emerging-scholar sessions and a membership meeting. “Emerging Scholars: Politics and the Collective in East European and Russian Art, Part I” will take place on Wednesday, February 15, 10:30 AM–NOON, and “Emerging Scholars: Russian Artists and International Communities, Part II” will transpire on Friday, February 17, 8:30–10:00 AM. The SHERA membership meeting will happen on Friday, February 17, 5:30–7:00 PM. All events will take place in the conference hotel.

Visual Resources Association

The Visual Resources Association (VRA) expresses gratitude to CAA and its membership for the distribution of the VRA Professional Status survey in fall 2015. VRA is pleased to announce the completion and availability of the VRA 2015-16 Professional Status Task Force Report on Professional Status. This report provides extremely valuable information about the landscape of the profession and the needs of colleagues working within a variety of visual-resource and related environments. Almost half of the 446 survey respondents identified themselves as non-VRA members, which is a good indication of how support from an organization like CAA increased the survey’s reach and our understanding of the professional status and needs of our colleagues working across related fields. Thanks again to all affiliated-society members who assisted in this important work. Please do not hesitate to contact the VRA board with questions about the report by sending a message to board@vraweb.org.

VRA has once again been included in the important Cross-Pollinator collaboration with Digital Library Federation/Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (DLF-GLAM). Through the cross-pollinator grant last year, Andrea Schuler from Tufts University attended the DLF meeting; Meagan Duever of the University of Georgia attended the VRA-ARLIS/NA joint conference in Seattle. Since this year’s grant was funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the grant can support eight new travel awards to foster collaboration among museum and digital library communities. Four $1,000 fellowships will be offered to non-DLF-affiliated GLAM professionals to attend the 2016 DLF Forum, and four DLF-affiliated practitioners will receive a $1,000 award plus free registration to attend one of the upcoming conferences of the following partnering organizations: the American Institute for Conservation; the Art Libraries Society of North America; the Museum Computer Network; and VRA.

Women’s Caucus for Art

The Women’s Caucus for Art will present its 2017 Lifetime Achievement Awards to Mary Schmidt Campbell, Audrey Flack, Martha Rosler, and Charlene Teters on Saturday, February 18, 2017, at the New York Institute of Technology in midtown Manhattan. CAA members are invited to attend the ticketed VIP Awards celebration from 6:00 to 7:30 PM that precedes the public awards presentation at 8:00 PM. The WCA Lifetime Achievement Awards were first presented in 1979 to Isabel Bishop, Selma Burke, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Like those women, this year’s awardees have made significant contributions to the visual arts. The art historian Mary Schmidt Campbell is president of Spellman College. The work of the photorealist painter and sculptor Audrey Flack is in major museum collections. Martha Rosler is a nationally known video, text, and performance artist, as well as a frequent contributor to Artforum. Charlene Teters is academic dean at the Institute of American Indian Arts as well as an artist, writer, and activist. The 2017 President’s Award for Art and Activism will be presented to the feminist curator and educator Kat Griefen.

The Lifetime Achievement Awards are the culminating event at WCA’s annual conference (held during CAA, February 16–18) that includes a Thursday evening reception for the exhibition Wage On! Women, Art, and Money at Ceres Gallery in Chelsea, professional workshops, caucus sessions, and other opportunities for networking. WCA’s affiliated-society panel on “Maternal Art and Activism” with cochairs Rachel Buller and Margo Hobbs will take place on Friday, February 17 at 10:30 AM in the Rendezvous Ballroom. Be sure to visit WCA in the CAA Book and Trade Fair, too. Early bird tickets are available for the awards VIP reception until January 7, 2017.

Association of Academic Museums and Galleries

You’ve probably heard the rumors, but now it’s official: the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) will hold its annual conference in Eugene, Oregon, June 22–26, 2017. “Why Museums Matter: The Teaching Museum Today” will be hosted by the University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. The program will begin at 5:30 PM on Thursday, June 22, and offer tracks for: professional development (emerging and seasoned professionals); governance, best practices, and administration; curricular connections and new teaching and training models; relevance, diversity, and engagement; renovations and new facilities; and more. AAMG will post a call for proposals in early September, along with registration and hotel information.

American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works

The Weissman Preservation Center at Harvard Library and the Foundation for the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (FAIC) will present a multidisciplinary, two-day symposium called “Salted Paper Prints: Process and Purpose.” The program will focus on the preservation, characterization, use, and interpretation of the salt print process, now over 175 years old. Scholarly presentations will include the technical history of the salt print process (both positive and negative images), historical applications of the process for copying and disseminating information, and innovative materials analysis. While many salt prints have survived as beautifully preserved images with rich tonal ranges, they can also be prone to fading and color shifts. New conservation research has assisted our understanding of these fragile items, and renewed interest in the historical and artistic aspects of salt prints has paralleled this preservation research.

Papers are currently being accepted to present at the symposium. Applicants are encouraged to submit abstracts or drafts of three hundred words or less, along with a brief bio or CV. The symposium will include individual presentations of no more than twenty minutes in length and panel discussions on an applicable topic—submissions for both formats are welcome. Preference will be given to recent collaborative research that uses scientific and art-historical evidence to shed light on the preservation of salt prints, their technical evolution and identification, and the cultural impact of this seminal photographic process. Visit the call for papers page on the AIC website for more details. Abstracts must be submitted by December 16, 2016. The symposium will take place September 14–15, 2017, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Association of Historians of American Art

The Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA) invites you to attend its fourth biennial symposium, to be held October 6–8, 2016, in Fort Worth, Texas. Online registration is now open. To learn more about the schedule, obtain hotel information, and register, visit www.ahaaonline.org/?page=2016Symposium. The registration fee is $40, and the event is only open to current AHAA members. If you are not yet a member, please consider joining this scholarly community. Membership rates start at $35.

AHAA is also proud to announce a third issue of its online journal, Panorama, which includes a roundtable devoted to pedagogical approaches (featuring the work of Jules Prown), a special section on “Art and Invention,” an article on Kara Walker, new Research Notes, book and exhibition reviews, and responses to the question “Is American art history conservative?” AHAA is grateful for the efforts of Panorama staff, editors, and contributors, and for the support of our readers. As always, the association invites your input and contributions.

AHAA looks forward to gathering in New York for the 2017 CAA Annual Conference. The annual business meeting will take place noon–1:30 PM on Friday, February 17. The AHAA-sponsored scholarly session will be “The Gustatory Turn in American Art” (date/time TBA).

In the coming year, several board terms will expire. AHAA wishes to thank board members who have served the organization and to welcome nominations and self-nominations for the open positions, each with three-year terms. These include three appointed positions (membership coordinator, secretary, and web coordinator) and two elected positions (treasurer and cochair). The cochair alternates annually between academic and museum professionals; this year we invite candidates from the academy. Please contact AHAA at info@ahaaonline.org or chair@ahaaonline.org if you are interested in the position or wish to nominate a colleague.

Foundation in Art: Theory and Education

Celebrating its fiftieth year of first principles educational leadership, the KCAI’s Foundation Department will host FATE’s sixteenth biennial conference, “To the Core and Beyond,” to take place April 5–8, 2017, in Kansas City, Missouri. Registration for the conference is now open. Leading voices in fundamental art and design instruction will gather at the InterContinental Kansas City at the Plaza. Early-bird registration is open until September 30, 2016. Conference registration includes breakfast and lunch (April 6–8). For conference registration and more information, please visit http://www.foundations-art.org/conferences.

FATE has improved Silver and Gold Institutional Sponsorship levels this year and now offers a new biennial Retiree Faculty Individual Membership! See http://www.foundations-art.org/membership for more information. Also coming up is the FATE regional conference, “Technology Integration into Design Foundations Tech Swap,” which meets on Saturday, November 5, 2016, 10:00 AM–3:00 PM at the University of North Texas. The $20 cost includes coffee, muffins, and lunch (vegetarian option available). For more details, send an email to the event’s coordinator, Deanna Ooley, or visit http://www.foundations-art.org/regional.

FATE’s affiliated-society session at CAA’s 2017 Annual Conference, titled “Using the F-Word for Good, Not Evil: Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better,” meets on Thursday, February 16, 10:30 AM–noon in the Madison Suite, Second Floor, New York Hilton Midtown. How do we, as teachers, ignite courage and curiosity in students to explore and jump past their fears of failing? Discoveries occur when we allow tinkering, investigation, and getting things “wrong”—colossal failures hold surprising connections, connotations, and fruitful risks. That’s where the good stuff lives. “Don’t give up!” (see Miranda July). “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better” (see Samuel Beckett). This FATE session will proactively frame failure (pep talks), continue inquiries (experiments), and describe what to do when things go off the rails (glean the good). Speakers will present discussions starters, brainstorming, projects, ways of critiquing, pedagogy, and practice.

Italian Art Society

Last month the Italian Art Society sponsored two sessions at the annual meeting of the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (SCSC) in Bruges, Belgium. “Co-petition: Testing the Boundaries of Cooperation and Competition” was organized by Alexis Culotta (American Academy of Art, Chicago), and “The Holy Republic of Venice,” was organized by Allison Sherman (Queen’s University) and Eveline Baseggio Omiccioli (Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York). Along with the Historians of Netherlandish Art and the Flemish Research Centre for the Arts in the Burgundian Netherlands, IAS sponsored a special event at the Groeningemuseum in Bruges. Anne Van Oosterwijk, assistant curator of old master paintings at the museum, lectured on sixteenth-century painters’ workshops and practices in Bruges; the lecture was followed by a gala reception.

IAS has announced the upcoming deadlines for two travel awards: the IAS Conference Travel Grant for Modern Topics (deadline: October 1, 2016) provides a minimum of $500 to subsidize transoceanic travel to present in an IAS-sponsored session on the art or architecture of Italy from the early nineteenth century to the present. The deadline for the IAS Travel Grant for Graduate Students and Emerging Scholars, which funds travel to any conference at which IAS has a presence, is November 1, 2016.

IAS is pleased to announce that Karen Lloyd (Stony Brook University) has joined the executive board as acting vice president for program coordination.

Society of Architectural Historians

An SAH Study Day “Louis Kahn in San Diego and La Jolla,” organized by the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), will take place on November 4, 2016. William Whitaker, curator and collections manager of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, and Jochen Eisenbrand, chief curator of the Vitra Design Museum, will lead a special preview tour of their exhibition Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture at the San Diego Museum of Art, the first retrospective of Louis Kahn’s work in two decades. After lunch, participants will get a behind-the-scenes tour of Kahn’s renowned Salk Institute for Biological Studies with Whitaker, Tim Ball, director of facilities at the Salk Institute, and Claire Grezemkovsky, associate director of foundation relations. Sara Lardinois of the Getty Conservation Institute will be on hand to discuss Kahn’s designs of the teak window walls, which are currently under conservation by the Getty. A Study Program Fellowship will be available for a graduate student or emerging professional to participate in this Study Day. Registration opens on September 13.

SAH will present its 2016 Awards for Architectural Excellence at its seventh annual awards gala on Friday, November 4, 2016, at the Racquet Club of Chicago. Honorees include the philanthropist Richard H. Driehaus (for architectural stewardship); Sarah Herda, director of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and coartistic director of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (for public engagement with the built environment); and Peter Landon, founder and principal of Landon Bone Baker Architects (for design, planning, and sustainability). The awards represent a unique gathering of architectural practice and academic study, honoring the contributions of individual projects to the built environment. Gala proceeds benefit the society’s educational mission and the ongoing restoration of SAH’s headquarters, the Landmark Charnley-Persky House. Tickets are available at sah.org/gala.

American Council for Southern Asian Art

The American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA), along with the University of Michigan History of Art Visual Resources Collections and the Center for Art and Archaeology (CA&A) of the American Institute of Indian Studies in Gurgaon, India, is pleased to announce that over 12,000 low-resolution images (suitable for PowerPoint presentations), known collectively as the ACSAA Digital Images, are now newly available for free direct downloading for noncommercial, educational, and scholarly purposes through the Virtual Museum of Images and Sounds (VMIS). Funded by India’s Ministry of Culture, VMIS was recently created by using the image and sound archives of the CA&A and the Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology (ARCE)—the two centers of the AIIS.

The ACSAA Digital Images were first distributed under the aegis of the ACSAA Color Slide Project, a nonprofit initiative administered through the former Asian Art Archives of the University of Michigan that from 1974 through 2006 provided high-quality original and duplicate 35mm color slides of the art and architecture of India and greater South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Indonesia, as well as the Himalayan regions, to individuals and institutions around the world for teaching and research purposes. With this new iteration, the original project’s educational intentions have not only been maintained, but have now been expanded to make the images available on an even wider scale and without fee. The user simply needs to register (free of charge) on the VMIS website before the images can be downloaded (free of charge).

Arts Council of the African Studies Association

News from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) includes a call for nominations for the new ACASA Curatorial Awards, coming soon. The spring 2016 Newsletter has been published (available to subscribers only).

ACASA is also sponsoring two panels at the upcoming annual meetings of the African Studies Association and the College Art Association. At the African Studies Association annual meeting, to be held December 1–3, 2016, in Washington, DC, the group will present “Shattering Single Stories in the Labeling and Presentation of Historical Arts of Africa.” The cochairs are Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi of Emory University and Yaëlle Biro from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. The participants are: Silvia Forni, Royal Ontario Museum; Kathryn Gunsch, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Nanina Guyer, Hans Himmelheber Photographic Archives, Museum Rietberg Zurich; and Matthew Francis Rarey, Oberlin College. The discussant is Karen E. Milbourne from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art.

The deadline for the call for submissions to the ACASA-sponsored panel at CAA’s next Annual Conference, taking place February 15–18, 2017, in New York, is August 30, 2016. Titled “Flesh,” the session will be chaired by Shannen Hill of the Baltimore Museum of Art.
The call for submissions and the full panel description will be listed on CAA website on July 1. By August 30, interested parties should send a CV and abstract of no more than 500 words to Shannen Hill. All parties will be notified of the outcome by September 15.

Foundations in Art: Theory and Education

Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE) has announced that the call for papers for its 2017 biennial conference, “To the Core and Beyond,” is now open.

Italian Art Society

In May, the Italian Art Society (IAS) sponsored two sessions titled “New Perspectives on Medieval Rome” at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Marius Hauknes (Johns Hopkins University) and Alison Locke Perchuk (California State University, Channel Islands) organized the panels. In August, IAS will sponsor two sessions at the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (SCSC) meeting in Bruges, Belgium: “Co-petition: Testing the Boundaries of Cooperation and Competition,” organized by Alexis Culotta (American Academy of Art, Chicago); and “The Holy Republic of Venice,” organized by Allison Sherman (Queen’s University) and Eveline Baseggio Omiccioli (Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York). An IAS Conference Travel Grant for Emerging Scholars has been awarded to Tenley Bick (doctoral candidate, University of California, Los Angeles) to support travel to the recent meeting of the American Association for Italian Studies in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. IAS/Kress International Conference Travel Grants have been awarded to Alexis Culotta and Giada Damen (Morgan Library and Museum) to support travel to SCSC in Bruges. The seventh annual IAS/Kress Lecture took place on June 1 at the Villa I Tatti in Florence. An audience of nearly eighty listened raptly to the paper presented by Megan Holmes (University of Michigan), “New Perspectives on the Reception of Florentine Panel Painting: Interpreting Scratch Marks.”

National Council of Arts Administrators

The forty-fourth National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA) annual gathering, “The Great Untapped: Unlocking Assets through Alliances,” will convene September 28–October 1, 2016, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Please join NCAA at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art for a discussion considering how institutions are now challenged to reconcile their own particular histories with the development of experiential curricula that connect students to an infinitely expanding world. How does one honor deep institutional history while cultivating alliances with other scholarly and cultural traditions? How can we foster alliances with outside communities as equal partners, and move away from an aesthetics of display to an ethics of care and deep understanding? We invite current and aspiring art department chairs, directors, and deans to attend. Visit the website to learn more about the conference and to join NCAA

Public Art Dialogue

Public Art Dialogue (PAD) has news. The winter 2016 issue of the Public Art Dialogue Newsletter features an interview by Jennifer K. Favorite with Kirk Savage, the recipient of the 2016 PAD award for achievement in public art. Marissa Lerer contributed an essay, “Built and Open Walls,” on public art in Washington, DC. There are several forthcoming special issues of PAD: Public Art Dialogue. The first is “Higher Ed: College Campuses and Public Art,” which will be edited by Monika Burczyk (submission deadline: September 1, 2016). Cher Krause Knight and Harriet F. Senie are serving as coeditors for an open issue (submission deadline: March 1, 2017). A third issue will feature guest editors Silvia Bottinelli and Margherita d’Ayala Valva; the theme will be “Food as Activism in Contemporary Public Art” (submission deadline: June 1, 2017). For more information, see http://publicartdialogue.org/journal/submissions.

SECAC

SECAC’s annual meeting will be held October 19–22, 2016, in Roanoke, Virginia, with Virginia Tech serving as host. Kevin Concannon, director of the School of Visual Arts and professor of art history at Virginia Tech, will serve as conference director. Sessions will take place at the official conference hotel, the Hotel Roanoke and Conference Center. The Hotel Roanoke, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1996, is in the heart of the city’s vibrant downtown and within easy walking distance of the Taubman Museum of Art, the Harrison Museum of African American Culture, and the O. Winston Link Museum, as well as many restaurants and bars. The conference schedule will be posted in early July on the SECAC website.

Excursions to Virginia Tech and Hollins University on Thursday and Friday evening include the 2015 Artist’s Fellowship exhibition opening, the 2016 SECAC Juried Exhibition, and the keynote speaker Lynn Hershman Leeson, who will present in the Moss Arts Center’s spectacular Snohetta-designed theater at Virginia Tech.

The last issue of the Southeastern College Art Conference Review has been published. The 2016 edition will be renamed Art Inquiries.

The deadline for the $5,000 SECAC 2016 Artist’s Fellowship is August 1, 2016. For application details, visit www.secacart.org/artists-fellowship.

Visual Resources Association

The Visual Resources Association (VRA) held its third joint conference with Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) in Seattle, Washington, this past March. The event offered an engaging and diverse program from ninety-five submitted paper or session proposals, resulting in thirty-nine sessions; fifteen submitted workshop proposals, resulting in six workshops; fifty-five submitted poster proposals, resulting in forty posters, and eleven SIG/SUG meetings. Topics included digital humanities, visual literacy, geospatial and visualization projects, image rights and reproductions, new technologies, museum education, environmental design, makerspaces, ebook publishing, materials education and research, diversity, RDF and LOD, crowdsourcing, cataloging, archives, visualization, and open access.

Key officers at the conference included VRA vice president for conference program, Chris Strasbaugh, as coordinator of the program and schedule in collaboration with Program Committee cochairs Dan McClure (ARLIS/NA), Denise Hattwig (ARLIS/NA), and Mar González Palacios (AASL, ARLIS/NA); VRA Education Committee cochairs Beth Wodnick Haas, Ryan Brubacher, and Marsha Taichman, who contributed toward programming; and the many presenters, instructors, and moderators who offered such timely, relevant, and forward-thinking content. The collaborative perspectives and working relationships of these individuals and many others set the tone for all conference planning and arrangements.

VRA honored Ann Whiteside with its Distinguished Service Award (she was also the recipient of the same award from ARLIS/NA) and conferred its Nancy DeLaurier Award to VRA Core 4.0 cocreators Kevin Esmé Cowles, Janice Eklund, Benjamin Kessler, and Trish Rose-Sandler. Sarah Bergmann, a design thinker and the founder of the Pollinator Pathway, spoke during convocation and shared perspectives on how the plight of the honey bee inspired her to consider symbiotic relationships and the importance of building pathways to support these relationships. While Bergmann’s consideration of bees inspired her to connect city dwellers to existing green spaces, her work inspired attendees to think about the benefits that might be realized when building connections across disciplines and professional organizations.

Art Council of the African Studies Association

In the past year, the Art Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) sponsored a panel and a well-attended members’ meeting at the African Studies Association (ASA) annual meeting and hosted a session at the CAA Annual Conference. The council also distributed three extensive newsletters and is finalizing plans for a triennial conference, to be held in Ghana in 2017. To build support for the Ghana event, ACASA has undertaken a fundraising campaign with a five-member committee that meets every three weeks.

ACASA has also implemented a new online system for member payments and had a sizable presence at the European Conference on African Studies (ECAS) in Paris in July 2015. ACASA financially sponsored one artist’s performance at ECAS in a series Dominique Malaquais organized that was devoted to the arts. Finally, ACASA held elections to replace most of the organization’s board members.

Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture

The Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA) has elected new officers. The new president is Amelia Rauser of Franklin and Marshall College. She is a specialist in eighteenth-century British art and the author of numerous scholarly studies, including Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008). Christina Lindeman from the University of South Alabama is the new treasurer. She is the author of articles on art and gender in eighteenth-century Germany, with a special emphasis on the court of Anna Amalia of Weimar. Her book Representing Anna Amalia’s Bildung: Visual Metamorphosis from Personal to Political in Eighteenth-Century Germany, is forthcoming from Routledge.

HECAA also maintains a wonderful serial newsletter.

Midwest Art History Society

The Midwest Art History Society (MAHS) held its “Icons of the Midwest” session at CAA’s 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC. The meeting was meant to highlight important and museum-related art and art history from America’s vital middle region. This year’s topic was the Chicago Jazz Age painter Archibald Motley (1891–1981). The session’s cochairs were MAHS members Amy M. Mooney (Columbia College) and Mark Pohlad (DePaul University); the speakers were Jerma A. Jackson (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Phoebe E. Wolfskill (University of Indiana), and Romi Crawford (School of the Art Institute of Chicago). A highlight of this lively session was the remarks of the renowned Motley scholar, Richard J. Powell.

The forty-third MAHS annual conference took place in Chicago from April 7 to 9, 2016. Approximately two hundred participants and registrants convened at DePaul University’s Loop Campus to hear more than thirty academic sessions devoted to a wide range of art history. The keynote address, held at the nearby Art Institute of Chicago, was delivered by Gloria Groom, chair of European painting and sculpture and David and Mary Winton Green Curator in the Department of European Painting and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, who was involved the concurrent Van Gogh’s Bedrooms exhibition. Other conference highlights included a reception at Columbia College’s Museum of Contemporary Photography, a session on “Recent Acquisitions in Midwest Collections” (held at the Art Institute and chaired by the curator Judith W. Mann), and two sessions comprised of undergraduate scholars. For more information and to read conference proceedings and paper abstracts, visit the conference page of the MAHS website.

MAHS will hold its forty-fourth annual conference in Cleveland, Ohio, from April 6 to 8, 2017. The event will be hosted by the Cleveland Museum of Art, Case Western Reserve University, and Cleveland State University. To open the conference, a distinguished keynote panel will speak on Raphael’s School of Athens Cartoon, currently undergoing restoration in Milan. The panel will include: Don Alberto Rocca, director of the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan; Maurizio Michelozzi, a Florentine paper conservator who is undertaking the restoration; and Carmen Bambach, curator of drawings and prints for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Funding for the panel has been provided by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Chicago, the Italian Art Society, the University of Notre Dame, and MAHS.

New Media Caucus

The New Media Caucus (NMS) has elected new officers and members to its board of directors in February 2016. Mat Rappaport is president elect, Rachel Clarke is secretary, and Kevin Hamilton is chair of the caucus’s journal, Media-N. The new board members are Victoria Bradbury, Darren Douglas-Floyd, Mina Cheon, Abigail Susik, and Doreen Maloney. For more information on the organization’s structure, visit the New Media Caucus website.

Public Art Dialogue

At the CAA Annual Conference in February, Public Art Dialogue (PAD) hosted a roundtable chaired by Kirk Savage, professor of the history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. Also participating were Thomas Luebke, secretary of the United States Commission of Fine Arts, and Lucy Kempf, a member of the National Capital Planning Commission.

The 2016 PAD award recipient was Kirk Savage, who has contributed extensively to our understanding of American memorials, particularly those dedicated to Civil War soldiers. He is the author of two award winning books: Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (1997) and Monument Wars: Washington DC, the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (2009). Savage has also edited The Civil War in Art and Memory (2016). In presenting the award, PAD cochair Cameron Cartiere observed that one of the most compelling aspects of Savage’s scholarship is that it helps us “to look back into our history of memorialization as a means of understanding the ramifications of the political, social, and cultural decisions we make in developing contemporary memorials that mark the present, acknowledge our tumultuous past, and help us to embrace our uncharted future.”

Renaissance Society of America

The Program Committee for the sixty-third annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America invites submissions for individual papers or sessions on any aspect of Renaissance studies or the era 1300–1700. Because RSA is a multidisciplinary society, we especially welcome submissions that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries, as well as those that spotlight scholarship that is discipline specific. Sessions sponsored by our Associate Organizations and Discipline Representatives will make up part of the program. The rest will consist of sessions and individual papers proposed by RSA members and selected by the Program Committee.

Because the RSA Annual Meeting is a large conference—with as many as fifty sessions meeting concurrently—we have developed guidelines over the years that greatly facilitate the work of the Program Committee and help to ensure an audience for every session. Please note that proposing a session or a paper indicates your commitment to attend. The committee will not be able to accept every submission; good papers will have to be turned away. To take a slot and then later withdraw is discourteous to colleagues who would have liked to present a paper. Once the rooms are scheduled and the AV equipment is ordered, no substitutions are possible.

Organizers may propose a series of linked sessions, up to a limit of five. However, the Program Committee prefers that series be limited to three, to facilitate scheduling them in a row. Sessions organized in honor or in memory of an individual scholar are limited to no more than two. Proposals for roundtables are also welcome, but the committee asks that roundtables be stand-alone sessions in terms of their content. Roundtables that merely involve recapping the content of a series of sessions take up valuable space in the program that could be used to present other research; proposals for them are not likely to be accepted.

The committee welcomes sessions that present the scholarship of members at various stages of their careers. Each session must include at least one speaker who has received a PhD or other terminal degree. Graduate-student speakers should be in candidacy or the equivalent for their program; that is, they must be advanced students who have completed coursework, examinations, and much of their dissertation research. They are invited to speak on topics directly related to their dissertation research, rather than presenting term papers.

Please visit the RSA website for more details. The submission site will open in May, with a submission deadline in early June (TBA). You do not need to be a member to submit a proposal, but if your proposal is accepted you will need to be an RSA member for the year of the conference.

Society for Photographic Education

The Society for Photographic Education (SPE) welcomes conference proposals from photographers, writers, educators, curators, historians, and professionals from other fields for “Family Values,” the fifty-fourth SPE national conference, to be held March 9–12, 2017, in Orlando, Florida. Topics are not required to be theme based; they may include but are not limited to: imagemaking, history, contemporary theory and criticism, multidisciplinary approaches, new technologies, effects of media and culture, educational issues, funding, and presentations of work in photography, film, video, performance, and installation.

The presentation formats are:

• Graduate Student: short presentation of your own artistic work and a brief introduction to your graduate program (must be enrolled in graduate program at time of submission)
• Imagemaker: presentation of your own artistic work (photography, film, video, performance, installation, multidisciplinary approaches)
• Lecture: presentation on historical topic, theory, or another artist’s work
• Panel Discussion: active discussion among panelists (maximum of three), a moderator, and the audience on a chosen topic
• Teaching and Learning: presentations, workshops, and demos that addresses educational issues, including teaching resources and strategies (syllabi, videos, assignments, readings, class preparation and setup, and PowerPoint presentations); curricula to serve diverse artists and changing student populations; seeking promotion and tenure; avoiding burnout; and professional exchange

Current SPE membership is required of all participants with accepted proposals. Please visit the SPE website for full proposal guidelines and special award details.

Society of Architectural Historians

The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) is accepting abstracts for its 2017 annual international conference in Glasgow, Scotland (June 7–11). Abstracts may be submitted for one of the thirty-six paper sessions, for the Graduate Student Lightning Talks, or for open sessions. SAH encourages submissions from architectural, landscape, and urban historians; museum curators; preservationists; independent scholars; architects; and members of SAH chapters and partner organizations. Deadline: June 6, 2016.

Applications are open for the SAH/Mellon Author Awards, which are designed to provide financial relief to scholars who are publishing their first monograph on the history of the built environment and who are responsible for paying for rights and permissions for images or for commissioning maps, charts, or line drawings in their publications. Deadline: May 15, 2016.

SAH invites nominations and self-nominations for the next editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH) to serve a three-year term: January 1, 2018–December 31, 2020. JSAH is a quarterly, blind-peer-reviewed international journal devoted to all aspects of the history of the global built environment and spatial practice, including architecture, landscape architecture, urbanism, and city planning. Published since 1941, JSAH has defined the field of architectural history and is a pioneer in digital publication. Articles published in JSAH are historically rigorous, conceptually sophisticated, and theoretically innovative. Deadline: June 15, 2016.

Registration is open for the SAH Field Seminar, “Architectural Layers of a Southeast Asian Region,” to take place December 1–13, 2016. The program will explore the fascinating architectural landscape of Vietnam, focusing in particular on the modern era from the nineteenth century to today. Participants will also visit the spectacular Angkor complex in Cambodia, capital of the Khmer empire from the ninth to fifteenth century. The SAH Study Program Fellowship deadline is August 11, 2016.

Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture

In February and March 2016, the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) conducted an election for its board of directors. As a result, a SHERA–Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) liaison was created, with Anna P. Sokolina as an officer. This new position will be open for reelection every three years. In addition, Hanna Chuchvaha, Natalia Kolodzei, and Andrei Shabanov were designated members at large, and Nicholas Iljine was reelected a member at large for another two-year term.

SHERA has launched a call for papers for its sponsored session for emerging scholars for CAA’s 2017 Annual Conference, chaired by Alice Sullivan.

American Council of Southern Asian Art

The fiftieth anniversary of the American Council of Southern Asian Art (ACSAA) was marked at the ACSAA Symposium XVII, which convened October 15–17, 2015, at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Deepali Dewan, senior curator for the Royal Ontario Museum and ACSAA president, was the symposium’s host. The event consisted of opening and closing keynote lectures by Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Michael Willis, respectively, and two full days of riveting panels, special presentations, and visits to the Royal Ontario Museum and the Aga Khan Museum. Participants included senior scholars, graduate students, museum curators, and artists from the United States, Canada, Europe, India, and the Middle East. The strong international constituency was fitting for the first ACSAA symposium held outside the United States.

American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works

To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Florence floods, the theme for the joint annual meeting of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC) and the Canadian Association for Conservation is “Emergency! Preparing for Disasters and Confronting the Unexpected in Conservation.” The event will be held May 13–17, 2016, at the Palais des Congrès in Montreal, Canada. Colleagues will address, in a broad-based way, the impact of past, present, and future disasters on the protection of cultural property. In addition, papers that address confronting the unexpected in conservation, whether it occurs during the treatment of an artifact or during a natural disaster, are requested. The scope of the theme will include immediate reactions, such as the application of crowd-mapping technology to aid response efforts, as well as longer term developments stemming from disasters, such as the adoption of simple strategies: effective risk-assessment methodologies, the rapid transformation of damaged artifacts into objects of veneration, and the repercussions of instantaneous visibility of destruction. Learn more and register at online.

American Society for Aesthetics

The American Society for Aesthetics (ASA) is sponsoring five meetings in 2016. Please visit the ASA website for the most up-to-date calls for papers for ASA events and for meetings organized by other schools and organizations.

Association of Print Scholars

The Association of Print Scholars (APS) hosted its inaugural lecture, “Why Study Prints Now?” by Peter Parshall, in September 2015. The group also held a scholarly conference in November 2015, with sections devoted to five-minute presentations by doctoral students on their dissertation topics and an afternoon session on “Method, Material, and Meaning: Technical Art History and the Study of Prints.”​

APS invites applications for two major opportunities directed at early-career scholars. A printmak​ing workshop, scheduled for May 20–21, 2016, in Providence, Rhode Island, ​is intended to provide advanced graduate students and early-career professionals with the opportunity to learn about prints in a hands-on way through presentations and instruction by practitioners including Andrew Raftery and Brian Shure. Some funding is available, by application, to offset the costs of travel. The Schulman and Bullard Article Prize ($2,000) is given annually to an article published by an early-career scholar that features compelling and innovative research on prints or printmaking, across any geographic region and all chronological periods. Nomination (and self-nomination) criteria and instructions are available on the APS website.

Foundations in Art: Theory and Education

Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE) will soon accept session proposals. The group will also have a series of new membership benefits this year. Members old and new can take advantage of the prorated membership period. Benefits of membership include all enewsletters and the annual FATE in Review journal. Please remember that membership is required to attend the 2017 FATE biennial conference, hosted by the Kansas City Art Institute.

FATE now offers a retiree faculty individual membership rate at $30 for the 2016–17 membership periods. Also, please consider an institutional sponsorship this year at the regular, gold, or silver levels. Annual regular sponsorship at $100 includes one individual membership, five copies of FATE in Review, and your institution’s name on FATE’s website and enewsletters.

FATE is offering further membership benefits for silver and gold institutional sponsorship levels this year. Support your institution’s instructional team through these group memberships. For $250, the silver institutional sponsorship offers four annual memberships and ten copies of FATE in Review. At $500, the gold sponsorship supports ten annual memberships and fifteen copies of FATE in Review.

Renew or sign up on the FATE website. Contact the vice president of FATE membership, Colleen Merrill, with any questions. FATE’s CAA affiliate representative is Naomi J. Falk.

Historians of British Art

The Historians of British Art have announced the winners of its book awards for publications from 2014. The winners were chosen from a nominating list of over eighty books from more than twenty different presses. Awards are granted in three categories. For pre-1800, the recipients are Paul Binski, Gothic Wonder: Art, Artifice, and the Decorated Style, 1290–1350 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); and Mark Hallett, Reynolds: Portraiture in Action (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). For post-1800 books, the winner is John Potvin, Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). In the multiauthor category, the award went to Catherine Jolivette, ed., British Art in the Nuclear Age (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014).

International Association of Art Critics

The United States chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA-USA) will hold its next annual meeting on May 3, 2016, at the Jewish Museum in New York. Please join members of the organization at noon for the press preview of the Roberto Burle-Marx exhibition, followed by the AICA business meeting at 1:00 PM and a workshop, “How Do Art Critics Use Social Media?”

Italian Art Society

The Italian Art Society (IAS) has announced that Megan Holmes of the University of Michigan will deliver the seventh annual IAS/Kress Lecture, in Florence at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, on June 1, 2016. Her lecture is titled “New Perspectives on the Reception of Florentine Panel Painting: Interpreting Scratch Marks.”

The recipient of the first IAS Dissertation Grant is Kelly Whitford, a PhD candidate at Brown University, whose project is “Embodying Belief: Crossing the Ponte Sant’Angelo with Bernini’s Angels.” The inaugural Fogliano/Lester Dissertation Research Grant has been awarded to Krisztina Ilko, a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge, for her project “Artistic Patronage of the Augustinian Hermits in Central Italy in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries.” The recipient of the IAS Research and Publication Grant is Amy Neff of the University of Tennessee, whose project is titled “A Soul’s Journey into God: Art, Theology, and Devotion in the Supplicationes variae (Blibliteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut.25.3).” Finally, the 2016 Fogliano/Lester Research Grant goes to Ioanna Christoforaki from the Research Centre for Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Art at the Academy of Athens for her project, “From Rags to Riches: Importing Cloth and Exporting Fashion between Venice and Cyprus.”

Society of Architectural Historians

The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) has received a $123,000 grant from the Alphawood Foundation to hire Harboe Architects to develop a conservation-management plan for the Charnley-Persky House, which serves as the headquarters of SAH. Designed by the firm Adler and Sullivan in 1891–92 when Frank Lloyd Wright was an apprentice in its office, the Charnley-Persky House will celebrate the 125th anniversary of its design in 2016 with a new conservation-management plan that will assess the current physical state of the structure, identify potential problem areas, and establish conservation priorities for the continued health of the building.

SAH will hold its annual international conference in Pasadena and Los Angeles from April 6 to 10, 2016. The conference will include forty-two paper sessions, roundtable discussions, awards ceremony, and more. Public events include architecture tours and a Saturday seminar on SurveyLA, the Los Angeles Historic Resources Survey. Register online.

SAH is accepting applications for the SAH/Mellon Author Awards, designed to provide financial relief to scholars who are publishing their first monograph on the history of the built environment and who are responsible for paying for image rights and permissions. Deadline: May 15, 2016.

Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture

At this year’s CAA Annual Conference in Washington DC, the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) sponsored two sessions: “Collecting, Curating, Canonizing, Critiquing: The Institutionalization of Eastern European Art,” chaired by Ksenia Nouril; and a double session led by Alison Hilton, “Exploring Native Traditions in the Arts of Eastern Europe and Russia.” The second part of Hilton’s session took place at the Hillwood Museum and Gardens, which also served as the location for the SHERA membership meeting.

Also at the conference, Margaret Samu served as a host to attendees from Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, and Russia, who were part of the CAA-Getty International Program. Samu arranged meetings with specialists in the visitors’ expertise and facilitated their participation in a full-day preconference program organized by CAA’s International Committee about international issues in art history, as well as in other events connected to the conference.

Visual Resources Association

Places are still available for the Summer Educational Institute (SEI) for Visual Resources and Image Management, to be held June 7–10, 2016, at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. This intensive workshop, organized by the Visual Resources Association (VRA), features a curriculum that will address the latest requirements for professionals in the visual arts charged with the responsibility of image management. Expert instructors will cover: intellectual-property rights; developing and delivering digital content; metadata for cultural-heritage materials; digital preservation; and bringing it all together (projects, people, and budgets). Founded over ten years ago, SEI is a joint project of the Art Libraries Society of North America (also a CAA affiliate) and the Visual Resources Association Foundation. SEI provides the information and experience needed to stay current in a rapidly changing field; the workshop also offers significant networking opportunities. Past participants have included current and recent graduate students, museum professionals, image-rights managers, and art historians. Please feel free to contact the SEI cochairs, Greta Bahnemann or Jesse Henderson, with any questions.

At its February 2016 meeting, the CAA Board of Directors approved applications from two organizations to become Affiliated Societies. CAA welcomes the two new organizations into the group of over 80 Affiliated Society members.

Design History Society

The Design History Society is the leading organization that promotes the study of global design histories, and brings together and supports all those engaged in the subject: students, researchers, educators, designers, designer-makers, critics and curators. The society aims to play an important role in shaping an inclusive design history.

Feminist Art Project

The Feminist Art Project is an international collaborative network of educators, artists, curators, and other arts professionals advancing the aesthetic, intellectual, and political impact of women on the visual arts, art history, and art practice, past and present. The project presents, documents, and promotes diverse feminist art activities, scholarship, education, and publications through its website, online calendar, and scheduled events; it also facilitates networking and regional program development throughout the world.

To learn more about applying to become an Affiliated Society member, visit the information page on the CAA website.

Art Council of the African Studies Association

The current board members of the Art Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) are: President – Silvia Forni, Curator, Anthropology, Department of World Cultures, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; President Elect/Vice President – Shannen Hill, Associate Curator for African Art and Head of the AAAPI Department, Baltimore Museum of Art, and Senior Fellow, National Museum of African Art; Past President – Dominique Malaquais, Senior Researcher, Centre d’Etudes des Mondes Africains, CNRS; Secretary – Liese Van der Watt, Independent Writer and Researcher, London; Treasurer – Jordan Fenton, Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Art, Miami University, Ohio; Website Editor – Cory Gundlach, PhD student (ABD) in African Art History, and Associate Curator of African and Non-Western Art at the University of Iowa Museum of Art; Newsletter Editor – Deborah Stokes, Curator for Education, National Museum of African Art; Assistant Newsletter Editor – Leslie Rabine, Professor Emerita at the University of California, Davis; ASA Liaison – Cécile Fromont, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History at the University of Chicago; CAA Liaison – Yaëlle Biro, Associate Curator for African Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Eric Appau Asante, Lecturer of African Art and Culture; Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology; Boureima Diamitani, Executive Director of the West African Museums Programme; and Sidney Kasfir, Professor Emerita, Art History Department, Emory University.

Art Libraries Society of North America and the Visual Resources Association Foundation

A Summer Educational Institute for Visual Resources and Image Management (SEI 2016) will be held at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill from June 7 to 10, 2016. Founded over ten years ago, SEI is a joint project of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) and the Visual Resources Association Foundation (VRAF). It is designed to serve a wide range of professionals eager to learn about new technologies and update job skills: museum staff, visual-resources curators, librarians, archivists, art educators, and all those managing digital image media. This intensive workshop offers a mix of hands-on and lecture sessions presented by expert instructors. Registration for SEI 2016 opened in January. Please feel free to contact the SEI cochairs with any questions: Greta Bahnemann, University of Minnesota; and Jesse Henderson, University of Wisconsin.

Association of Academic Museums and Galleries

The Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) Leadership Seminar will take place June 19–24, 2016, at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The application deadline is January 15, 2016. Join colleagues from throughout the United States and beyond for AAMG’s flagship professional development program at Northwestern’s prestigious Kellogg School Center for Nonprofit Management. Dynamic, engaging, highly interactive by design, and interspersed with team and individual problem-solving exercises in leadership and management, this intensive five-day certificate program will allow you to learn from one another and be guided and inspired by nationally recognized scholars drawn principally from Kellogg’s renowned faculty. To learn more about the program and to download an application, please visit the AAMG website.

Association of Art Editors

The Association of Art Editors (AAE) website underwent a major remodeling in the summer of 2015. The New York–based graphic designer Matt See created the fresh and attractive template, which was refined, detailed, and implemented by DataCom Ota of Duluth, Minnesota. The site’s format is now simpler, easier on the eyes (more legible type and appealing colors), and more flexibly viewable (including via smartphone). Among other improvements, the member entries and services index have greater clarity, and job opportunities are linked via the homepage rather than incorporated in the Services section, as before. Over all, navigation has been much enhanced. The AAE website is accessible—free to all.

International Center of Medieval Art

The International Center of Medieval Art (IMCA) is pleased to announce and solicit applications for two recently created awards. First, the Graduate Student Travel Award. Three grants will be awarded this year, at $3,000 each, for PhD students in the early stages of dissertation research. Applications are due on March 1, and applicants must be ICMA members. The second award, the new ICMA book prize, will be awarded in 2017 to the best single-authored, printed book on any topic in medieval art published in 2016. Books published in English, French, Spanish, Italian, or German are eligible for consideration. For more information, please contact Ryan Frisinger.

Italian Art Society

The annual members’ business meeting of the Italian Art Society (IAS) will take place at the 2016 CAA Annual Conference on Friday, February 5, 2016, 7:30–9:00 AM in the Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, Washington 4, Exhibition Level. In addition to reports on IAS activities and election results, three IAS founders will be honored, the 2016 IAS/Kress lecturer will be announced, and recipients of various grants and awards will be recognized. The IAS long session, “Beyond Texts and Academies: Rethinking the Education of the Early Modern Italian Artists,” organized by Jesse Locker of Portland State University, will follow at 9:30 AM in Washington 1, Exhibition Level. The IAS-sponsored short session, “Rethinking the Rhetoric and Force of Images,” organized by Robert Williams of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Anna Marazuela Kim of the Courtauld Institute of Art, will take place the same day, 12:30–2:00 PM, in the Maryland Suite, Lobby Level.

The deadline for the new IAS Conference Grant for Modern Topics is February 15, 2016. Up to $1,000 will be provided to subsidize transoceanic travel to present in an IAS-sponsored session on the art, architecture, or visual culture of Italy from the early nineteenth century to the present.

Public Art Dialogue

Public Art Dialogue (PAD) is excited to announce two events at the 2016 CAA Annual Conference in Washington, DC. On Thursday, February 4, 6:00–8:00 PM, PAD will host a Public Art Salon and Award Reception in conjunction with Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) at the WPA gallery at 2124 8th Street NW. Local artists will show slides and talk about their public art projects in and around DC. At the event, Kirk Savage, professor of history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, will receive the 2016 PAD Award for Achievement in the Field of Public Art. On Friday, February 5, 5:30–7:00 PM, Savage will chair a roundtable, “Public Art: Process and Practice,” with Thomas Luebke of the US Commission of the Fine Arts and Lucy Kempf of the National Capital Planning Commission.

The Fall 2015 Public Art Dialogue (PAD) Newsletter has an interview by Marisa Lerer and Jennifer K. Favorite with Sarah Beetham on “Confederate Monuments and the Black Lives Matter Movement.” As Lerer and Favorite note: “Countries around the world, from Syria to Spain to Argentina, have grappled with the bronze and stone sculptural legacy of leaders who represent a dark chapter in their nation’s past.” This issue has a strong link PAD’s forthcoming journal issue, “The Dilemma of Public Art’s Permanence,” edited by Erika Doss. Also in the newsletter, Marisa Lerer has an essay “Public Art’s Role in International Biennials.” She considers the role of public-art practices in contemporary biennials and includes responses from curators, artists, and academics from Cuba, the United States, Ireland, and Canada. The guest editors of two special issues of PAD’s journal are seeking papers and artists’ projects for the topics “Borders and Boundaries” (coeditors: Cher Krause Knight and Harriet F. Senie; submission deadline: March 1, 2016); and “Higher Ed: College Campuses and Public Art” (editor: Monika Burczyk; submission deadline: September 1, 2016). For more information, go to the PAD website.

SECAC

The SECAC board and membership voted to change the name of the organization from the Southeastern College Art Conference to SECAC.

Awards presented at SECAC’s annual meeting, which took place October 22–24, 2015, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, are:

• Excellence in Teaching: Debra Murphy, University of North Florida
• Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication: Bibiana Obler, George Washington University
• Outstanding Artistic Achievement: Matthew Kolodziej, University of Akron
• Outstanding Exhibition and Catalogue of Contemporary Materials: Hannah Israel and Michele McCrillis, Columbus State University
• Outstanding Professional Achievement in Graphic Design: Jerry Johnson, Troy University; and Scott Fisk, Samford University

The President’s Awards are:

• Award for Exemplary Achievement: Michael Aurbach, Vanderbilt University
• Certificates of Merit: Thomas Brewer, University of Central Florida; Carol Crown, University of Memphis; and Virginia Derryberry, University of North Carolina, Asheville

The Juried Exhibition featured:

• First-place award: Michael Holsombeck, Chattanooga State Community College
• Second-place awards: Efram Burk of Curry College; and Sara Madandar, University of Texas at Austin
• $5,000 Artist’s Fellowship: Duane Paxson, Troy University
• $5,000 William R. Levin Award for Research in the History of Art: John Ott, James Madison University

Society of Architectural Historians

The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) will hold its next annual international conference April 6–10, 2016, at the Pasadena Convention Center, 300 East Green Street, in Pasadena, California. Over seven hundred people from around the world will convene to share new research on the history of the built environment from antiquity to the critical present. “New Local/Global Infrastructures” is the theme of the 2016 Pasadena/Los Angeles conference, which includes forty-two sessions with papers, as well as roundtables, exhibits, talks, and public architecture tours. Regional sessions include “Los Angeles Infrastructure: Design, Aesthetics, Publics,” “Styles, Revival Styles, California Styles,” and “Reappraising California Counterculture.” Speakers include Eric Avila, professor of urban cultural history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Dana Cuff, UCLA architecture professor and director of the cityLAB research center. SAH will present “Surveying L.A.: Past, Present, Future,” a public seminar that will take an in-depth look at SurveyLA, the city’s comprehensive study of historic resources funded by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the City of Los Angeles. Panelists will discuss the local and global implications and applications of SurveyLA and its website, HistoricPlacesLA. Early registration ends February 3, 2016. View the complete program and register online.

Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture

Following voting in December 2015, the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) has elected Ksenia Nouril as its new secretary/treasurer for a two-year term, succeeding Yelena Kalinsky. In addition, Amy Bryzgel will replace Ksenya Gurshtein as the web news editor for a one-year term.

On December 11–12, several SHERA members participated in “The 100 Years of Suprematism Conference” at the Harriman Institute, organized by the Malevich Society. The conference proved to be an important international event, bringing together scholars from the United States, Europe, and the former Soviet Union. The program of the conference is available on the website of the Malevich Society.

At CAA’s Annual Conference in February 2016, SHERA will sponsor the following sessions: “Collecting, Curating, Canonizing, Critiquing: The Institutionalization of Eastern European Art,” chaired by Ksenia Nouril; and a double session led by Alison Hilton called “Exploring Native Traditions in the Arts of Eastern Europe and Russia.”