CAA News Today
Get Mentored at the Annual Conference
posted by Lauren Stark — January 04, 2010
CAA is committed to supporting and advancing the careers of arts professionals. As a CAA member, you have access to a diverse range of mentors at Career Services during the 2010 Annual Conference in Chicago. All emerging, midcareer, and even advanced arts professionals can benefit from one-on-one discussions with dedicated mentors about career-management skills, artists’ portfolios, and professional strategies.
You can enroll in either the Artists’ Portfolio Review or Career Development Mentoring. These sessions are offered free of charge.
Artists’ Portfolio Review
The Artists’ Portfolio Review offers artist members the opportunity to have slides, digital images, or DVDs of their work reviewed by curators and critics in personal twenty-minute consultations at the 2010 Annual Conference. You may bring battery-powered laptops; wireless internet, however, is not available in the room. Sessions are filled by appointment only and are scheduled for Thursday, February 11, and Friday, February 12, 8:00 AM–NOON and 1:00–5:00 PM each day.
All applicants must be current CAA members. Participants are chosen by a lottery of applications received by the deadline; all applicants are notified by email. To apply, download, complete, and return the Career Development Enrollment Form or use the form in the 2010 Conference Information and Registration booklet, which was mailed in October. Please send the completed form to: Artists’ Portfolio Review, CAA, 275 Seventh Ave., 18th Floor, New York, NY 10001; fax: 212-627-2381. Deadline: January 11, 2010.
Career Development Mentoring
Artists, art historians, art educators, and museum professionals at all stages of their careers may apply for one-on-one consultations with veterans in their fields at the 2010 Annual Conference. Career Development Mentoring offers a unique opportunity for participants to receive candid advice on how to conduct a thorough job search, present work, and prepare for interviews. Sessions are filled by appointment only and are scheduled for Thursday, February 11, and Friday, February 12, 8:00 AM–NOON and 1:00–5:00 PM each day.
All applicants must be current CAA members. Participants are chosen by a lottery of applications received by the deadline; all applicants are notified by email. To apply, download, complete, and return the Career Development Enrollment Form or use the form in the 2010 Conference Information and Registration booklet, which was mailed to you in October. Please send the completed form to: Career Development Mentoring, CAA, 275 Seventh Ave., 18th Floor, New York, NY 10001; fax: 212-627-2381. Deadline: January 11, 2010.
Become a Mentor
CAA also seeks mentors for the Artists’ Portfolio Review and Career Development Mentoring at the 2010 Annual Conference. Participating as a mentor is an excellent way to serve the field while assisting the professional growth of the next generation of artists and scholars.
Finalists for CAA’s 2010 Morey and Barr Book Awards
posted by Christopher Howard — December 08, 2009
CAA is pleased to announce the finalists for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for 2010. The winners of both prizes, along with the recipients of other Awards for Distinction, will be announced in early January and presented in February during Convocation at the 2010 Annual Conference in Chicago.
The Charles Rufus Morey Book Award honors an especially distinguished book in the history of art, published in any language between September 1, 2008, and August 31, 2009. The four finalists are:
- Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009)
- Cammy Brothers, Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008)
- Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008)
- Shelley Perlove and Larry Silver, Rembrandt’s Faith: Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009)
The Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for museum scholarship is presented to the author(s) of an especially distinguished catalogue in the history of art, published between September 1, 2008, and August 31, 2009, under the auspices of a museum, library, or collection. The three finalists are:
- Andrea Bayer, ed., Art and Love in Renaissance Italy (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2008)
- Debra Diamond, Catherine Glynn, and Karni Singh Jasol, Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur (Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2008)
- Sarah Greenough, Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans” (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2009)
Convocation at the 2010 Annual Conference, which includes the awards ceremony, takes place on Wednesday evening, February 10, 5:30–7:00 PM, in Grand EF, East Tower, Gold Level, Hyatt Regency Chicago. The event is free and open to the public.
For more information about CAA’s Awards for Distinction, please contact Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs, at 212-691-1051, ext. 248.
Mentors Needed for Conference Career Services
posted by Lauren Stark — November 30, 2009
Participating as a mentor in CAA’s two Career Services mentoring programs at the Annual Conference—the Artists’ Portfolio Review and Career Development Mentoring—is an excellent way to serve the field while assisting the professional growth of the next generation of artists and scholars.
Artists’ Portfolio Review
CAA seeks curators and critics to participate in the Artists’ Portfolio Review during the 2010 Annual Conference in Chicago. This program provides an opportunity for artists to have slides, digital images, or DVDs of their work critiqued by professionals; member artists are paired with a critic, curator, or educator for twenty-minute appointments. Whenever possible, artists are matched with mentors based on medium or discipline. Volunteer mentors provide an important service to artists, enabling them to receive professional criticism of their work. Art historians and studio artists must be tenured; critics, museum educators, and curators must have five years’ experience. Curators and educators must have current employment with a museum or university gallery.
Interested candidates must be current CAA members, register for the conference, and be willing to provide at least five successive twenty-minute critiques in a two-hour period on one of the two days of the review: Thursday, February 11, and Friday, February 12, 8:00 AM–NOON and 1:00–5:00 PM each day. Send your CV and a brief letter of interest to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs. Deadline: December 4, 2009.
Career Development Mentoring
CAA seeks mentors from all areas of art history, studio art, art education, film and video, graphic design, the museum professions, and other related fields to serve in CAA’s Career Development Mentoring. Mentors give valuable advice to emerging and midcareer professionals, reviewing cover letters, CVs, slides and digital images, and other pertinent job-search materials in twenty-minute sessions.
Interested candidates must be current CAA members, register for the conference, and be prepared to give five successive twenty-minute critiques in a two-hour period on one of the two days of the session: Thursday, February 11, and Friday, February 12, 8:00 AM–NOON and 1:00–5:00 PM each day. Art historians and studio artists must be tenured; critics, museum educators, and curators must have five years’ experience. Curators and educators must have current employment with a museum or university gallery.
This mentoring session is not intended as a screening process by institutions seeking new hires. Applications are not accepted from individuals whose departments are conducting a faculty search in the field in which they are mentoring. Mentors should not attend as candidates for positions in the same field in which workshop candidates may be applying. Send your CV and a brief letter of interest to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs. Deadline: December 4, 2009.
Exhibit Your Art at ARTexchange in Chicago
posted by Emmanuel Lemakis — November 17, 2009
CAA’s Services to Artists Committee invites artist members to participate in ARTexchange, an open forum for sharing work at the 2010 Annual Conference in Chicago. To be held Friday evening, February 12, at the Hyatt Regency Chicago, ARTexchange is free and open to the public; a cash bar will be available.
The space on, above, and beneath a six-foot table is available for each artist’s exhibition of prints, paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, and small installations; performance, sound, and spoken word are also welcome. Previous ARTexchange participants have found that this parameter sparked creative displays, and the committee looks forward to surprises and inspiring solutions at the upcoming conference. Please note that artwork cannot be hung on walls, and it is not possible to run power cords from laptops or other electronic devices to outlets—bring fully charged batteries.
To participate in Chicago, please write to the ARTexchange coordinators, with the subject heading “CAA ARTexchange.” Include your CAA member number and a brief description of what you plan to present. Please provide details regarding performance, sound, spoken word, or technology-based work, including laptop presentations. You will receive an email confirmation. Because ARTexchange is a popular venue and participation is based on available space, early applicants are given preference.
Participants are responsible for their work; CAA is not liable for losses or damages. Sales of work are not permitted. Deadline: December 18, 2009.
Image: Dennis Olsen (right), an artist and president of the Santa Reparata International School of Art in Florence, Italy, shows his work at ARTexchange during the 2009 Annual Conference in Los Angeles (photograph by Kenna Love)
Jules Prown Is CAA Distinguished Scholar
posted by Christopher Howard — November 13, 2009
Jules David Prown, a devoted teacher of the history of American art and material culture and Paul Mellon Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at Yale University, will be honored at the 2010 Distinguished Scholar Session. Held at the CAA Annual Conference in Chicago, this special event takes place on Thursday, February 11, 2010, 2:30–5:00 PM in Grand EF, East Tower, Gold Level, Hyatt Regency Chicago.
Bryan J. Wolf, a professor of American art and culture at Stanford University, writes this about Prown:
His remarkable career marks the coming of age of American art history. His two-volume study of the painter John Singleton Copley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966) overturned the usual concerns of positivistic biography. His growing focus during the next several decades on the formal properties of objects, together with what he termed the system of cultural “belief” embedded within them, led to a methodological revolution that still resonates loudly in classrooms wherever American art and material culture are taught.
Please read Wolf’s article on Prown and his accomplishments, which is also published in the November 2009 CAA News.
Prown is CAA’s tenth distinguished scholar. He joins a list of illustrious past honorees: Svetlana Alpers (2009), Robert L. Herbert (2008), Linda Nochlin (2007), John Szarkowski (2006), Richard Brilliant (2005), James Cahill (2004), Phyllis Pray Bober (2003), Leo Steinberg (2002), and James Ackerman (2001).
The 2010 Distinguished Scholar Session is generously funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Phyllis Bramson and Tony Tasset to Be Interviewed at the Chicago Conference
posted by Christopher Howard — November 10, 2009
Phyllis Bramson and Tony Tasset, two Chicago-based artists, will participate in CAA’s Annual Artists’ Interviews, hosted by ARTspace during the 2010 Annual Conference in Chicago. This session will be the fourteenth installment of the popular series, which features two major practicing artists in back-to-back interviews. The talks will be held on Friday, February 12, from 2:30 to 5:00 PM at the Hyatt Regency Chicago, Columbus GHIJ, Gold Level, East Tower.
The interviewers were selected by the artists: Lynne Warren, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, will interview Bramson; and John Neff, a fellow Chicago-based artist, will speak with Tasset.
Phyllis Bramson
Phyllis Bramson is a painter whose works evoke a fairy-tale world of bright and engaging colors. Often burlesquelike and erotically charged, her images wander between a physical and mental existence that juxtaposes the nonsensical with the profoundly meaningful, mediating between the pleasure, trauma, and difficulty of being. She has recently taken a new direction with the creation of mixed-media scroll paintings.
Robert Berlind has written of her paintings in connection with a recent exhibition: “The combination of sensual allure and downright goofiness in [her] art conveys that slippage between the erotic sublime and the sometimes fumbling awkwardness of sexual desire. While her works are loaded with evocative pleasures for the eye and mind, they are also about beauty, which is to say not merely (however pleasurably) seductive.”1
Bramson received a BFA from the University of Illinois in Urbana and earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1973. She is professor emeritus at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and has been advising graduate students in the MFA Drawing and Painting Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 2007.
In 2010, a two-person exhibition is planned for Carrie Secrist Gallery in Chicago. The Anitdote (the continued relevance of painting), curated by Bramson and Claire Oliver, will appear at Claire Oliver Gallery in New York, from January 21 to February 20, 2010. (The artist is represented by both Secrist and Oliver, as well as by Philip Slein Gallery in St. Louis, Missouri.)
Tony Tasset
Tony Tasset’s conceptually based, visually engaging art is manifested in a variety of media, including sculpture (using bronze, steel, fiberglass, resin, and more), photography, film, video, and performance. With great humor and pathos, his work engages a wide range of topics, from the historical weight of modernism and postmodernism to the playful tensions of domestic life. Nature mediated through humanity is also expressed in recent sculptural works depicting mudpies, carved pumpkins, snowmen, and colorfully painted stones.
Trained as a painter and sculptor, Tasset received a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 1983 and earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1985. Currently a professor of art and design at the University of Illinois, Chicago, he has lived and worked in the city for more than fifteen years.
Solo exhibitions of Tasset’s work have taken place at Kavi Gupta Gallery in Leipzig, Germany (Gupta also represents him in Chicago); Feigen Contemporary in New York; and Christopher Grimes in Los Angeles. His work has been included in several recent traveling group shows, such as Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll since 1967, Into Me/Out of Me, and Situation Comedy: Humor in Recent Art.
Tasset was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Award in 2006 and has received awards from the Illinois Art Council, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art.
1. Robert Berlind, “Phyllis Bramson at Little John Contemporary,” Art in America 89, no. 5 (May 2001).
Above photos:
Phyllis Bramson, Heat Seekers, 2008, oil and mixed media on canvas, 60 x 60 in. (artwork © Phyllis Bramson; photograph provided by the artist)
Tony Tasset, Snowman, 2008, bronze, resin, polystyrene foam, brass, epoxy, enamel, fiberglass, and galvanized steel, 85 x 48 x 30 in. (artwork © Tony Tasset; photograph provided by Kavi Gupta Gallery)
Projectionists and Room Monitors Needed for the Chicago Conference
posted by Lauren Stark — November 05, 2009
CAA seeks applications for projectionists at the 2010 Annual Conference in Chicago. Successful applicants are paid $10 per hour and receive complimentary conference registration. Projectionists are required to work a minimum of four 2½-hour program sessions, from Thursday, February 11, to Saturday, February 13, and attend a training meeting Thursday morning at 7:30 AM. Projectionists must be familiar with digital projectors.
Room monitors are needed for CAA’s two Career Services mentoring programs, the Artists’ Portfolio Review and Career Development Mentoring, and for several offsite conference sessions. Successful candidates are paid $10 per hour and receive complimentary conference registration. Room monitors are required to work a minimum of eight hours, checking in participants and facilitating the work of the mentors.
All projectionist and room-monitor candidates must be US citizens or permanent US residents. Please send a brief letter of interest to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs. Deadline: December 4, 2009.
Full Session Details for 2010 Annual Conference Posted
posted by Lauren Stark — November 03, 2009
Full session information for the 2010 Annual Conference in Chicago is now online. Along with session titles and chairs, the conference website now lists the names and affiliations of all panelists, their paper titles, and the days, times, and locations of their sessions.
You may browse by session day; listings are chronological. Both regular program sessions (2½-hours) and lunchtime and dinner sessions (1½-hours) are posted. The presenters of twelve poster sessions, slated for two early-afternoon time slots, are also included.
The website for the Chicago conference, which takes place February 10–13, was launched last month. It expands on the 2010 Conference Information and Registration booklet that was mailed to members last month; new material and information will be added regularly between now and February.
Online registration is now open. You can also buy tickets for other events, such as the Gala Reception, professional-development workshops, and postconference tours. Alternatively, you may use the printed forms in Conference Information and Registration. The deadline for early registration is December 11, 2009.
Art Journal Conference Roundtable: “Times Taken, and Given, by Contemporary Art”
posted by Christopher Howard — October 28, 2009
The editorial board of Art Journal seeks interested CAA members to join us at the 2010 Annual Conference in Chicago for a roundtable discussion on the sense of time in modern and contemporary art.
Critics, scholars, and particularly artists are invited to propose discussing specific artworks, projects, and texts that engage aspects of temporality and art. Artists working in all mediums seem increasingly interested in examining contemporary experiences of time—how subjectivity is being shaped by socially mediated time and how we as subjects might do some shaping of our own; in tracking the social and political implications of the interactions among the many temporalities currently operative across the globe; in understanding the presences of the past today; in treating history and the future as domains for time travel; in exploring time itself as a medium; and in providing opportunities to escape the present—or even history itself. Does modernity’s chronophilic–chronophobic dialectic still capture our sense of being simultaneously tied to our times yet unable to identify with them?
Led by Terence Smith, a member of the Art Journal editorial board, the discussion will be recorded and may provide material for publication in a future issue. The discussion will take place on Thursday, February 11, 2:00–4:00 PM, at a conference location to be announced.
Participation is by invitation. Please send a brief email describing your interest in the topic and how you foresee contributing to the discussion to tes2@pitt.edu. Invitations to participate will be sent in early January. Deadline: November 30, 2009.
Photographer Dawoud Bey Is the Keynote Speaker for the Chicago Conference
posted by Christopher Howard — October 22, 2009
The renowned photographer Dawoud Bey will deliver the keynote address during Convocation at the 2010 CAA Annual Conference in Chicago. A resident of the conference city, Bey is Distinguished College Artist and Associate Professor of Art at Columbia College Chicago. He is the second photographer in four years to speak at Convocation, with Duane Michals delivering the keynote address at the 2007 conference in New York.
Convocation, which also includes the presentation of the CAA Awards for Distinction, takes place at the Hyatt Regency Chicago on Wednesday evening, February 10, 2010, 5:30–7:00 PM. The event is free and open to the public.
Bey earned a BA at Empire State College and an MFA at the Yale University School of Art, and he has been teaching for more than thirty years. He began his artistic career in 1975 with a series of photographs, Harlem, USA, that was later exhibited in his first solo exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. He has since had numerous exhibitions worldwide, at such institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Barbican Centre in London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where his works were included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial.
Since 1992 he has completed several collaborative projects working with young people and museums together in a broad dialogue that seeks to create an engaging space for art making and institutional interrogation. These projects, such as photographs from the Character Project, have also been aimed at broadening the participation of various communities served by these institutions.
The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis organized a midcareer survey of his work in 1995 that traveled to institutions throughout the United States and Europe. A major publication, Dawoud Bey: Portraits, 1975–1995, was published in conjunction with that show. Aperture published his latest project, Class Pictures, in 2007 and mounted an exhibition of this work that has been touring museums nationally.
Bey’s works are included in permanent collections of art museums worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, among others. He has received numerous fellowships over the course of his career, including those from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
A writer as well as an artist, Bey has published critical writings on contemporary art in books and journals throughout the US and Europe. He is the author of several groundbreaking essays, including “The Black Artist as Invisible (Wo)Man” in the catalogue for High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967–1975 (2006), in which he places the work of African American artists Al Loving, Joe Overstreet, Howardena Pindell, and Jack Whitten within this important era in art history. Bey is also the author of “David Hammons: In the Spirit of Minkisi” (1994), which was one of the first texts to place this important African American artist within the tradition of Black Atlantic cosmological tradition. This essay appeared as the catalogue essay for Hammon’s survery exhibition at the Salzburger Kunstverein in Vienna. Closer to home, his text “Authoring the Black Image” was published in the Art Institute of Chicago’s book The VanDerZee Studio, accompanying the eponymous exhibition from 2004.
The above portrait photograph is © Bart Harris.