CAA News Today

Please join us February 16th at CAA’s Annual Conference Convocation for a keynote speech by Chancellor Juan Salgado. As Chancellor of City Colleges of Chicago, Salgado oversees Chicago’s community college system, serving 68,000 students across seven colleges. Seventy-four percent of credit students are Black and Latinx students. His initiatives have helped to stress the importance of the arts and the humanities to these audiences, such as the development of City Colleges’ partnership with the Joffrey Ballet Company, securing free access to Chicago’s cultural gems, including the Art Institute of Chicago, for City Colleges students and faculty, and supporting a Center of Equity in the Creative Arts at Kennedy-King College, one of the seven City Colleges of Chicago.

Under Salgado’s leadership, City Colleges of Chicago has seen an increase in student graduation rates to the highest level on record, an unprecedented systems-level partnership with the Chicago Public Schools, the launch of Fresh Start, a first-ever debt forgiveness program, the creation of Future Ready, which offers short-term programs at no cost, the completion of two new major state-of-the-art facilities, a re-energizing of fundraising for student supports, and campus specific plans focused on equity in student outcomes, among other efforts.

Salgado’s career has focused on improving education and economic opportunities for residents in low-income communities. Chancellor Salgado is a community college graduate himself, earning an associate degree from Moraine Valley Community College, prior to earning a Bachelor’s degree from Illinois Wesleyan University, and a Master’s degree in Urban Planning from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

From 2001 to 2017, Salgado served as CEO of Instituto del Progreso Latino, where he worked to empower residents of Chicago’s Southwest Side through education, citizenship, and skill-building programs that led to sustainable employment and economic stability.  He has been nationally recognized for his work, including as a 2015 MacArthur Fellow.  Among his civic commitments, he serves as a board member of the Obama Foundation.

Register for CAA’s upcoming conference and learn more at our registration and program schedule pages.

Note: As of January 7, all in-person sessions and activities scheduled for February 16-19 in Chicago are now virtual on the same dates. Virtual sessions and activities scheduled for March 3-5 will remain the same. The virtual Book and Trade Fair will be accessible from February 16 to April 14. Registrants can view recorded content until April 14, 2022. This change will allow for more access and engagement, regardless of location.

This year, CAA partnered with The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s (SAIC) College Arts Access Program (CAAP), which held a design competition for CAA’s upcoming Annual Conference. This three-year college bridge program provides Chicago Public Schools students who are dedicated to studying art and design with the skills and preparation needed for admission to and success at SAIC, art and design schools, or post-secondary institutions. Eight CAAP students participated in a graphic design workshop to produce designs for the CAA Annual Conference. Led by SAIC Alum Jenna Russo, students designed work based on the prompt “Chicago: City in a Garden.”

We are excited to share the winning design for the conference’s tote bag by Betty Leisen. It will be available at the Annual Conference, made possible by SAIC.

This second design was created by Ethan Rodriguez and will be presented at the conference digitally.

We’re delighted to introduce CAA members to a new series of coffee talk conversations between Meme Omogbai, our executive director and CEO, and Theresa Avila, the Program Chair of the 110 Annual Conference. In this first video, they discuss the format of the Conference and how this key program is part of CAA’s response to members, both domestic and international, and vital to positioning our organization for sustainable growth. Upcoming conversations will address questions sent by members. Check it out and send us your thoughts for the next installment! 

Please send us your questions: programs@collegeart.org  

Speaker Biographies 

Theresa Avila is a curator and an Assistant Professor of non-Western Art History at California State University, Channel Islands. She earned a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of New Mexico with a focus on Modern Latin American and Latin@x art. As a scholar and curator her work focuses on the intersections between the visual and political, as she interrogates historiography, empire and nation building, and systems of differentiation. Published works include “Echoing the Call for Revolution: Emiliano Zapata in Chican@x Art” for the exhibition catalogue Emiliano Zapata despues de Zapata (2019), the book Making and Being Made: Contemporary Citizenship, Art, and Visual Culture (2017), as well as the forthcoming “The History of the Barrio Mobile Art Studio, a vehicle for creative transformations” for the fifty-year anthology of Self Help Graphics (2023) and the project “Dialogos: on Landscapes of the Americas” for Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture Journal. (2023). As the Director of the Broome Library Gallery at CSUCI she curated Magnetic Currents: Art charged by the U.S. and Mexico Border (2020); Colecion de Lucha, Desde Santa Paula a las Americas: The Personal Archive of Luzma Espinosa (2019); and Tracing History: Mapping California (2018). Dr. Avila firmly believes we must activate art in meaningful and engage art as a tool for change. 

Meme Omogbai, CAA Executive Director and CEO: Before joining CAA, Meme Omogbai served as a member and past board chair of the New Jersey Historic Trust, one of four landmark entities dedicated to preservation of the state’s historic and cultural heritage, and Montclair State University’s Advisory Board. Named one of 25 Influential Black Women in Business by The Network Journal, Meme has over twenty-five years of experience in corporate, government, higher education, and museum sectors. As the first American of African descent to chair the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), Omogbai led an initiative to rebrand the AAM as a global, inclusive alliance. While COO and trustee, she spearheaded a major transformation in operating performance at the Newark Museum. During her time as deputy assistant chancellor of New Jersey’s Department of Higher Education, Omogbai received legislative acknowledgment and was recognized with the New Jersey Meritorious Service award for her work on college affordability initiatives for families. Omogbai received her MBA from Rutgers University and holds a CPA. She did postgraduate work at Harvard University’s executive management program and has earned the designation of Chartered Global Management Accountant. She studied global museum executive leadership at the J. Paul Getty Trust Museum Leadership Institute, where she also served on the faculty.  

Willie Cole (left) and Jessica Stockholder (right).

We are excited to announce that CAA’s Annual Artists’ Interviews will feature Willie Cole and Jessica Stockholder. Each artist will take part in a one-on-one interview with a colleague during CAA’s 110th Annual Conference. These interviews will take place virtually on February 18, 2022. 

Beginning in 1997, the Annual Artists’ Interviews were established to provide the opportunity for esteemed artists to have one-on-one conversations with colleagues at the Annual Conference. Each year, the Services to Artists Committee (SAC) identifies two distinguished artists to participate.  

The interviews are held as part of the Services to Artists Program. Access to this program requires registration and is included with an All Access registration, or with stand-alone program registration at no cost. Recordings will be accessible to registrants after the event. Register here. 

Speaker Biographies 

Willie Cole is a contemporary American sculptor, printer, and perceptual engineer. His work uses contexts of postmodern eclecticism, and combines references and appropriation from African and African American imagery. Cole is best known for his Dada and Surrealist readymades, which assemble and transform ordinary domestic and used objects such as irons, ironing boards, high-heeled shoes, hair dryers, bicycle parts, wooden matches, lawn jockeys, and other discarded appliances and hardware. Cole grew up in Newark, NJ. He attended the Boston University School of Fine Arts, received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1976, and continued his studies at the Art Students League of New York from 1976 to 1979.  

Recent exhibitions of Cole’s work include To Reclaim, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; New Concepts in Printmaking 2: Willie Cole, MoMA, New York, NY, USA; Reconfiguring an African Icon: Odes to the Mask by Modern and Contemporary Artists from Three Continents, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA; Chicago, Surrealism: The Conjured Life, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, USA; and Afro: Black Identity in America and Brazil, Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, NM, USA. Cole’s work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; MoMA, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; and many others. 

Jessica Stockholder is an internationally acclaimed visual artist and educator who lives and works in Chicago. In addition to earning her BFA from the University of Victoria in Canada and her MFA from Yale University, she was awarded two honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees: one from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2010, and one from Columbia College in 2013. Stockholder was Elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2018.  

Stockholder’s works sit at the intersection of painting with sculpture, and often incorporate the architecture in which it has been conceived. Employing a wide range of ordinary everyday materials Stockholder orchestrates an intersection of pictorial and physical space. She probes how meaning derives from physicality, and engages the sensuality and pleasure evoked by color and formal order in an effort to call attention to the edges of understanding.  

Stockholder’s work has been exhibited in many of the world’s most influential art venues, including Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Dia Center for the Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Venice Biennale. It is included in such museum collections as the Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA, and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.  

Stockholder is currently the Raymond W. & Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago, a position she accepted in 2011, after 12 years as Director of the Sculpture Department at the Yale School of Art.