CAA News Today
Survey about an Online Journal of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Art History
posted by Christopher Howard — July 02, 2015
ArtHistoryTeachingResources.org recently received a grant from The Kress Foundation to conduct preliminary research for an e-journal of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) in Art History that will launch in 2016.
We are writing to ask for your help with this initiative by completing a ten-minute survey before July 17.
AHTR is a peer-populated website, committed to experimentation, participation, and fostering community around teaching and learning in art history. The new e-journal Art History Pedagogy and Practice will build on this foundation to engage anyone interested in rigorous scholarship and quality content around pedagogical issues in art history.
This survey aims to identify stakeholders in this project and to make sure the e-journal responds to their needs. The survey will also help clarify the e-journal’s place within the existing landscape of SoTL, art history, and pedagogical research/practice, and help us better understand how a discipline-specific SoTL in art history might provide greater support for research around teaching and learning in the field.
We are distributing the survey to members of the art history and museum communities, but also seek input from university administrators, libraries, teaching/learning centers, academic technologists, and others involved in art history education. Please forward the survey to anyone you think would be willing to offer their feedback. We’re grateful for your time and theirs in helping shape what we hope will be a resource for many. We apologize for any cross-postings you may receive, but know the project will be strengthened by the broadest participation.
Click here to access the on-line survey.
(Survey participants will be eligible to win one of four $50 Amazon gift cards)
If you have questions or want more information about the e-journal initiative, we are in the process of creating an Art History Pedagogy and Practice page on the AHTR website. Immediate inquiries should be sent to teachingarthistorysurvey@gmail.com.
Sincerely,
Virginia B. Spivey, Parme Giuntini, Renee McGarry
Project Leaders, Art History Pedagogy and Practice Initiative
Michelle Millar Fisher, Co-Founder and Dean, AHTR
Karen Shelby, Co-Founder and Dean, AHTR
Kathleen Wentrack, Contributing Editor, AHTR
2015 Fellowships for MFA and PhD Students
posted by CAA — June 19, 2015
CAA has begun accepting applications from MFA and PhD students for its Professional-Development Fellowships in the Visual Arts and Art History. For the current cycle, CAA will award grants of $10,000 each to outstanding students who will receive their terminal degrees in the calendar year 2016. One award will be presented to a practitioner—an artist, designer, and/or craftsperson—and one award will be presented to an art, architecture, and/or design historian, curator, or critic.
Fellows also receive a free one-year CAA membership and complimentary registration to the 104th Annual Conference in Washington, DC, taking place February 3–6, 2016. Honorable mentions, given at the discretion of the jury, earn a free one-year CAA membership and complimentary conference registration.
CAA’s fellowship program supports promising artists, designers, craftspersons, historians, curators, and critics who are enrolled in MFA, PhD, and other terminal degree programs nationwide.. Awards are intended to help the students with various aspects of their work, whether it be for job-search expenses or purchasing materials for art/design practice. CAA believes a grant of this kind, without contingencies, can best facilitate the transition between graduate studies and professional careers.
Please visit collegeartassociation.slideroom.com to submit applications to the Professional-Development Fellowship programs. The deadline for applications for the PhD fellowships is Friday, October 2, 2015, and Monday, November 16, 2015, for the MFA fellowships. Awardees will be announced in January 2016.
caa.reviews Publishes Dissertations Completed and In Progress for 2014
posted by Alyssa Pavley — May 29, 2015
caa.reviews recently published the authors and titles of doctoral dissertations in art history and visual studies—both completed and in progress—from American and Canadian institutions for calendar year 2014. You may browse by listing date or by subject matter. Each entry identifies the student’s name, dissertation title, school, and advisor.
Each institution granting the PhD in art history and/or visual studies submits dissertation titles once a year to CAA for publication. The caa.reviews list also includes dissertations completed and in progress between 2002 and 2013, making basic information about their topics available through web searches.
The “Olympics” of Art History: CIHA in Beijing, 2016
posted by Paul B. Jaskot — May 12, 2015
Written by Paul B. Jaskot, Nicola Courtright, and Anne Collins Goodyear.
The thirty-fourth World Congress of Art History, organized by the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA), will take place September 15–22, 2016, in Beijing, China. CIHA is a once-every-four-year opportunity to bring the world’s art historians together in what is truly a global exchange of ideas, new approaches, and innovations in all areas of the discipline. As the American affiliate to CIHA, the National Committee of the Historians of Art (NCHA), a group with strong institutional ties to CAA, is happy to encourage any and all interested art historians to get involved. Now is the time to consider applying for one of the twenty-one sections that oversee the creation of specific panels for the upcoming conference. See the NCHA website for more information and for the call for papers.
CIHA traces its roots back to the 1930s, when it was officially founded at the Brussels Congress. The organization has now vastly exceeded its original Euro-American emphasis and currently has national chapters on all the continents. This will be the organization’s first conference in China. In addition to the international gathering held every four years, CIHA also sponsors specific thematic art-history conferences such as the upcoming “New Worlds: Frontiers, Inclusion, Utopias” in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (August 25–29, 2015).
In China, the broad overarching theme is “Terms” in art history. From there, a range of sessions will cover such topics as “Connecting Art Histories and World Art,” “Media and Visuality,” “Display,” and “Commodity and Markets,” to name just a few of the twenty-one different session topics. Each session is cochaired by an international scholar as well as a scholar based in China. All papers will be simultaneously translated into Chinese, English, French, and German. As with the last CIHA in Nuremberg, Germany, it promises to be an exciting event full of international exchange and chances to explore art and architecture in Beijing and beyond. NCHA hopes that CAA will be well represented and encourages all art historians to consider submitting a paper by the June 30, 2015, deadline.
NCHA was founded to foster participation of US scholars in the international committee, its conference, and other programs. As part of this charge, NCHA regularly provides travel support for US graduate students to the CIHA meetings and will do so again for China. In addition to sending young scholars to the quadrennial conference, NCHA, with generous funding from the Getty Foundation, also initiated a reverse exchange when it began to bring international scholars from Africa, Asia, South America, and Central Europe to the CAA Annual Conference to promote international exchange in the United States as well. That initial effort continues to be a regular part of the CAA conference, now coordinated by CAA and its International Committee with participation of NCHA members.
Institute of Fine Arts Publishes Report on Trends in Graduate Education
posted by Christopher Howard — March 24, 2015
Patricia Rubin is Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
In 2010, thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Institute of Fine Art at New York University inaugurated the Mellon Research Initiative. The initiative’s aim was to investigate trends in graduate education and advanced research in art history, archaeology, and conservation. That investigation took place at a time when those fields faced considerable challenges—financial, institutional, and conceptual. Cutbacks in funding from all sources and the concomitant or resulting instrumentalization of university education, which favors economic rationales for degree structures, department sizes, and disciplinary evaluation, presented explicit challenges to the humanistic as opposed to the “hard” sciences. They continue to do so.
The resulting publication, Pathways to the Future: Trends in Graduate Education, was introduced and discussed during three panels at CAA’s Annual Conference in February under the rubric of “Field/Work: Object and Site.” The Pathways report is the result of four years of consultation, undertaken through a series of workshops, conferences, and committees in which our fieldworkers—graduate students, professors, publishers, and university administrators, among others—were asked about the directions being taken in art history, archaeology, and conservation. These participants considered the resources those fields require to support graduate training and research; how those resources are most meaningfully allocated; and, crucially, how learning is best delivered in curriculum and training programs.
The public workshops and conferences (now available on the institute’s video archive) were accompanied by the work of three committees convened to pose relevant questions and investigate different aspects of our practices as researchers and educators. Unified in aim, the review committees largely operated independently. They shaped their work according to concerns and protocols specific to each field. The form of their reporting varies accordingly. All three committees considered both present conditions and future possibilities.
The examination of the state of our subjects found them to be generally robust. If anything they are stronger than ever before, existing as they do in today’s image-based environment and able to promote critical seeing along with critical thinking. They are inherently interdisciplinary and equally international or global in their inquiry and potential impact. They have direct relation to material understanding, in the recovery and safeguarding of our physical heritage, in interpreting its present condition, and in forecasting future manifestations.
Although based on wide consultation and meticulous deliberation, this report is intended to contribute to vital and ongoing conversations about the disciplines of art history, archaeology, and conservation, about their professional and intellectual situation, and about strengths, weaknesses, and strategies. Their thoughts on those matters are contained in this document, which is available on the institute’s website for downloading and circulating. The institute hopes this document generates discussion and stimulates further thoughts on the topics it raises and regarding training and research in art history, archaeology, and conservation.
The institute is profoundly grateful to the Mellon Foundation for its generous sponsorship, and to all those who participated in the initiative.
March 2015 Issue of The Art Bulletin
posted by Christopher Howard — March 16, 2015
The opening essay of the March 2015 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, is “The Fine Art of Being Indigenous” by the Tuscarora photographer Richard W. Hill Sr., the latest in the “Whither Art History?” series.
In other essays in the issue, Sheri Francis Shaneyfelt analyzes collaborations among the five painters of the Società del 1496 workshop in relation to the art market of Perugia. Next, Mark Rosen considers the portraitlike representation of slaves in Pietro Tacca’s Quattro Mori in Livorno in view of contemporary social conditions—including the slave trade—in seventeenth-century Tuscany. Matthew C. Hunter wrote “Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Nice Chymistry’: Action and Accident in the 1770s” to situate the artist’s use of unstable and unconventional materials within late-eighteenth-century cultural practices. Finally, Susan L. Siegfried investigates the classical ideal and fashion in post-Revolutionary France as sources for Marie-Denis Viller’s A Study of a Woman after Nature.
In the Reviews section, Robert J. Wallis considers Peter S. Wells’s How Ancient Europeans Saw the World: Visions, Patterns, and the Shaping of the Mind in Prehistoric Times, and Todd Cronan analyzes a translation of Henri Matisse and Pierre Courthion’s Chatting with Henri Matisse: The Lost 1941 Interview. A recent exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Italian Futurism 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe, is assessed by Anthony White, and Jennifer A. Greenhill reviews Permission to Laugh: Humor and Politics in Contemporary German Art by Gregory H. Williams.
CAA sends print copies of The Art Bulletin to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the journal as a benefit of membership. The digital version at Taylor & Francis Online is currently available to all CAA individual members regardless of their subscription choice.
In the next issue of the quarterly journal, to be published in June 2015, essays will consider the physical and textual evidence in the construction history of the basilica of S. Lorenzo in Florence, Anthony van Dyck’s paintings of Saint Sebastian, Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s images of lapdogs as evidence of an Enlightenment shift in attitudes about animals, and the largely unrecognized modern type of the gawker in Félix Vallotton’s prints and his novel, The Murderous Life.
December 2014 Issue of The Art Bulletin
posted by Christopher Howard — January 09, 2015
The opening essay of the December 2014 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, is Cheng-hua Wang’s examination of Sino-European artistic interaction, the latest in the quarterly journal’s “Whither Art History?” series.
In other essays in the issue: John K. Papadopoulos identifies the Motya Youth, unearthed in 1979, as a kalathiskos dancer and explores the political implications of this new interpretation. In her article “Old Plates, New Impressions,” Alexandra Onuf analyzes editorial interventions in a sixteenth-century print series reissued in seventeenth-century Antwerp as responses to the upheavals of the Eighty Years’ War. In “The Emptiness behind the Mask,” Nóra Veszprémi considers how the Rococo revival in mid-nineteenth-century Austria, suffused with contradictory meanings, prompted musings on time, history, and national identity. For the issue’s final essay, Annika Marie reads Ad Reinhardt’s black square paintings as object lessons in Marxist dialectics that ultimately serve to demystify art.
In the Reviews section, Khristaan D. Villela surveys four recent multiauthor books on Maya art, including Ancient Maya Art at Dumbarton Oaks and Dancing into Dreams: Maya Vase Painting of the Ik’ Kingdom. Rebecca Zorach reviews two books addressing chromatic subjects: The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400–1800, edited by Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin, and Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Closing the December issue is Brian Kane’s review of Whitney Davis’s book, A General Theory of Visual Culture.
CAA sends The Art Bulletin to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the journal as a benefit of their membership. The digital version at Taylor & Francis Online is currently available to all CAA individual members.
In the next issue of the quarterly journal, March 2015, essays will consider the five members of the Società del 1496 workshop, portraitlike representations of slaves in Pietro Tacca’s Quattro Mori, Joshua Reynolds’s use of unstable and unconventional materials, and Marie-Denise Viller’s A Study of a Woman after Nature.
Mellon Foundation Awards Grant to CAA to Partner with SAH on Digital Scholarship Guidelines
posted by Christopher Howard — October 29, 2014
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the College Art Association (CAA) a $90,000 grant to partner with the Society for Architectural Historians (SAH) in the development of guidelines for the evaluation of digital scholarship in art and architectural history for promotion and tenure. CAA and SAH will convene a task force, hire a researcher to examine evaluative practices in departments of art and architectural history, develop a survey to seek current practices from CAA and SAH members, and provide evaluative guidelines. CAA President DeWitt Godfrey said, “Since its founding in 1911, CAA has regularly issued Standards and Guidelines for the fields of art and art history. These guidelines will encompass projects in art and architectural history that use digital technologies in research, production, publication, and/or exhibition. These growing forms of scholarship are in critical need of support and recognition, and this grant will allow CAA and SAH to provide standardized guidelines for those evaluating digital art and architectural history.”
This project will mark the first time that CAA and SAH will collaborate on professional practice guidelines, although the two associations have worked closely in other areas in the past. Pauline Saliga, SAH executive director announced, “The Society of Architectural Historians is pleased to collaborate with our sister organization, the College Art Association, on this important endeavor. Because art and architectural historians are increasingly working collaboratively and using digital tools and data to construct their arguments, it is very important that we develop a set of guidelines for universities to recognize this innovative work.”
The ten-person task force will be chaired by CAA President DeWitt Godfrey and SAH President Ken Breisch. In addition to the chairs, the task force will comprise eight members with substantial experience in traditional and digital scholarship: two art historians, two architectural historians, a librarian, a museum curator, a scholar from another humanities or social-science field with expertise in digital scholarship, and a graduate student or emerging professional in art or architectural history.
The need for evaluative guidelines has been expressed by professors of art and architectural history who have developed research and/or publications using digital technologies, have created new digital tools for interpretation and understanding of art-historical and place-based subjects, or have collaborated with other scholars to develop digital archives and resources; by professors and administrators who have responsibility for dissertations and promotion and tenure committees but lack the necessary tools to assess digital scholarship; by CAA’s and SAH’s editorial boards and advisory committees, whose journals and online academic resources now require guidelines to facilitate critical reviews of digital scholarship; by CAA and SAH publication and award juries who need protocols for judging the quality of digital scholarship to determine awards; by academic publishers; and by other disciplines and their learned societies.
CAA and SAH anticipate that the guidelines will address different types of scholarly digital contributions: those that provide new resources, such as archives and new research tools (examples include SAH Archipedia and SAHARA); those that create scholarship in art and architectural history using publishing platforms such as Scalar and the JSTOR Current Scholarship program; those that create scholarship based on spatial and visualization technologies; and those that engage in new computational technologies.
CAA and SAH anticipate that shared guidelines will reassure art and architectural historians that new forms of digital research and scholarship will be evaluated and credentialed; provide tenure committees with specific criteria for evaluating digital projects in art and architectural history; and ensure that digital scholarship can be evaluated and supported through juries and grants, thereby increasing awareness and participation of scholars in the digital realm.
About CAA
The College Art Association is dedicated to providing professional services and resources for artists, art historians, and students in the visual arts. CAA serves as an advocate and a resource for individuals and institutions nationally and internationally by offering forums to discuss the latest developments in the visual arts and art history through its Annual Conference, publications, exhibitions, website, and other programs, services, and events. CAA focuses on a wide range of issues, including education in the arts, freedom of expression, intellectual-property rights, cultural heritage, preservation, workforce topics in universities and museums, and access to networked information technologies. Representing its members’ professional needs since 1911, CAA is committed to the highest professional and ethical standards of scholarship, creativity, criticism, and teaching. Learn more at collegeart.org.
About SAH
Founded in 1940, the Society of Architectural Historians is a nonprofit membership organization that promotes the study, interpretation and conservation of architecture, design, landscapes and urbanism worldwide. SAH serves a network of local, national and international institutions and individuals who, by vocation or avocation, focus on the built environment and its role in shaping contemporary life. SAH promotes meaningful public engagement with the history of the built environment through advocacy efforts, print and online publications, and local, national and international programs. Learn more at sah.org.
For more information, please contact Hillary Bliss, CAA development and marketing manager, at hbliss@collegeart.org or 212-392-4436.
caa.reviews Seeks 2014 Doctoral Dissertations
posted by Alyssa Pavley — October 21, 2014
Dissertation titles in art history and visual studies from American and Canadian institutions, both completed and in progress, are published annually in caa.reviews, making them available through web searches. PhD-granting institutions may send a list of their doctoral students’ dissertation titles for 2014 to dissertations@collegeart.org. The complete Dissertation Submission Guidelines regarding the format of listings are now available. CAA does not accept listings from individuals. Improperly formatted lists will be returned to sender. For more information, please write to the above email address or visit the guidelines page. Deadline: January 15, 2015.
September Issue of The Art Bulletin
posted by Christopher Howard — October 07, 2014
The opening essay of the September 2014 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, is by the Brazilan scholar Claudia Mattos, who examines local and global view on art history in “Geography, Art Theory, and New Perspectives for an Inclusive Art History.”
In other essays in the issue: Douglas Brine explores the memorializing function of Jan van Eyck’s van der Paele Virgin, with particular attention to its commissioning and original setting. Mitchell B. Merback considers the moral and phenomenological implications of a monstrous visage, reflected in the Centurion’s armor, in Hans Burgkmair’s Crucifixion in Augsburg. In “Watteau, Reverie, and Selfhood,” Aaron Wile finds that the French artist’s fêtes galantes establish a new relationship between painting and viewer, characterized by reverie and a modern sense of interiority. Finally, Rebecca Brown looks at the exhibitions associated with the 1985–86 Festival of India in the United States and how they isolated Indian art from broader movements in modern and contemporary art.
In the Reviews section, Matthew P. McKelway considers books by Alexander Hofmann and by Yukio Lippit on painting in early modern Japan. J. M. Mancini reviews Zahid R. Chaudhary’s Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India, and Ebba Koch examines Santhi Kavuri-Bauer’s Monumental Matters: The Power, Subjectivity, and Space of India’s Mughal Architecture.
CAA sends The Art Bulletin to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the journal as a benefit of their membership. The digital version at Taylor & Francis Online is currently available to all CAA individual members.
In the next issue of the quarterly journal, December 2014, Cheng-hua Wang offers a global perspective on eighteenth-century Chinese visual culture in “Whither Art History.” The feature essays offer new research and a reinterpretation of the Greek statue known as the Motya Youth, an analysis of two editions of a print series published in seventeenth-century Antwerp, an exploration of the Rococo revival in mid-nineteenth-century Austria, and a reading of Ad Reinhardt’s black square paintings as object lessons in Marxist dialectics. The issue will also include reviews on Maya art, color, and theories of visual culture.