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African Sky, an oil painting by James Wilson Edwards, will be included in the Arts Council of Princeton’s Retrieving the Life and Art of James Wilson Edwards and a Circle of Black Artists, an exhibition featuring the work of a diverse and vibrant regional arts community not acknowledged in contemporary American art history on view at the Arts Council of Princeton this October.

 

The Arts Council of Princeton will present a revolutionary exhibition in October 2022. Retrieving the Life and Art of James Wilson Edwards and a Circle of Black Artists reveals how Black artist/teachers were integral and influential members in a predominantly white regional community in the last quarter of the 20th century. While there have been blockbuster exhibitions of a few contemporary Black artists during recent years of efforts by museums and galleries to become more diverse, this is one of the first exhibitions to explore the historical context from which these artists emerged.

Co-curators Judith K. Brodsky and Rhinold Ponder say “this has been a magnificent voyage of discovery about the lives and roles in art history of Black artists who have largely been forgotten or ignored as well as a reminder of the significance of Black collectors in preserving and promoting the history of Black artists and ensuring that they are eventually remembered for their contributions. We trust that our efforts here encourage others to restore Black artists and arts communities to their rightful places in American national and regional histories.” Brodsky is a Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Department of Visual Arts at Rutgers and previously served as a president of CAA. Ponder is an artist, activist, writer, lawyer, and founder of Art Against Racism.

This exhibition focuses on five late 20th-century master artists who lived and worked within 25 miles of each other in the geographic region from Princeton, New Jersey to New Hope, Pennsylvania: James Wilson Edwards, Rex Goreleigh, Hughie Lee-Smith, Selma Hortense Burke, and Wendell T. Brooks. These Black artists represent a diverse and vibrant regional arts community largely unknown in contemporary American art history. Nearly all the works in this exhibition come from private collections, highlighting the importance of collectors of color in restoring Black and brown artists to American art history and how their collecting sheds light on the systemic racism of the American art world. Recent attention to diversity in museum collections has revealed that only 1.2% of the holdings are by African American artists.

Retrieving the Life and Art of James Wilson Edwards and a Circle of Black Artists will be on view in the Arts Council of Princeton’s Taplin Gallery from October 14 through December 3, 2022 and will include an opening reception, panel discussion, and more. Additional information can be found on the Art Council of Princeton’s website.

 

 

 

The CAA-GOLDEN Scholarship Program supports artists whose mission it is to give back to their communities through teaching, while nurturing and developing their own talents and capabilities as artists. Funded by Golden Artist Colors, Inc., CAA grants two unrestricted scholarships of $8,000 each on an annual basis to artists with an MFA who are pursuing a career in K-12 education. Grantees will also receive two weeks at the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation Residency Program, $1000 towards GOLDEN products, registration to the 2023 CAA Annual Conference, and one year of CAA membership.   

MEET THE GRANTEES  

Mick Bodnar  

Having grown up between two dairy farms in rural New York State, Mick Bodnar is something of an anomaly in the art world. He has over two decades of experience as a working-class graphic designer. After being displaced from that career, he embarked on a formal education. His collegiate career began at SUNY Broome Community College, where he gained an AS in Visual Communication Arts, and received the BCC Foundation Scholarship for Excellence in Liberal Arts, the Robert R. Cotten II Award in Graphic & Editorial Design, plus the SUNY Broome Second Chance Scholar Award. With those achievements, he was offered a generous scholarship to attend an elite private college. From that institution, Bard College, he earned a BA in Studio Arts, the Studio Arts Award, and the Bard Center for the Study of Hate Fellowship Award. In 2022, he gained an MFA in Painting & Drawing from SUNY New Paltz, as well as the Outstanding Graduate Award in Studio Arts and the Sojourner Truth Fellowship Award. In 2022, he plans to pursue a master’s degree in Art Education from Adelphi University. 

Mick is proud that his work to date has been well-received equally by the layman as well as by academics. He believes that art is the purest form of communication between humans, crossing the barriers of time, culture, and language — and that everyone should have access to it, regardless of background. He is committed to making art available to the general population. 

 

Beth Reitmeyer


Beth Reitmeyer. Photo by Krystal Henriquez / Assets for Artists. 

Beth Reitmeyer is a visual artist based in Nashville, TN who likes to make people happy with her colorful installations. Her work investigates landscapes and the joy of unexpected yet beautiful spaces and places that are discovered as one explores the land and structures within it: clouds, rivers, caves, geodes, stars. These environments allow viewers to explore the land and get to know one another in a more profound way, providing space for renewal and hope for persevering. 

Beth was born in Colorado Springs, CO and raised in Louisville, KY. She attended Northwestern University (MFA), The School of the Art Institute (Post Baccalaureate program), and the Pennsylvania State University (BFA). In the fall of 2022, she will be pursuing a Master’s in Education/Teaching at Western Kentucky University or Lipscomb University. 

Beth teaches with the Frist Art Museum, Western Kentucky University, Cheekwood Estates and Gardens, and Nashville School of The Arts. 

Beth’s work has been exhibited at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville; Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York; OZ Arts, Nashville; 1708 Gallery/Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; FIGMENT, Chicago; The Downing Museum, Bowling Green, KY; Kindling Arts Festival, Nashville; Zg Gallery, Chicago; Ground Floor Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Beth has been an artist-in-residence at The Studios at MASS MoCA, ChaNorth/ChaShaMa Foundation, The Ragdale Foundation, CONVERGE, and Mineral House Media. Recent awards include grants from the Metro Nashville Arts Commission/National Endowment for the Arts and a finalist for a Burning Man grant. 

 

 

Filed under: Artists, Artists’ Materials, Awards

Annual Artist Interview, Willie Cole

posted by April 05, 2022

On February 18, 2022, Willie Cole was featured in the Annual Artists’ Interviews at CAA’s 110th Annual Conference. Watch the interview in full below!

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 annually as part of the Services to Artists Program at the conference.

 


 

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. 

Filed under: Annual Conference, Artists

Annual Artist Interview, Jessica Stockholder

posted by March 28, 2022

Jessica Stockholder, Assist: Sidled, 2016 (Photograph © Jessica Stockholder)

On February 18, 2022, Jessica Stockholder was featured in the Annual Artists’ Interviews at CAA’s 110th Annual Conference, interviewed by Christine Mehring. See below to watch the interview in full!

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 annually as part of the Services to Artists Program at the conference.

 


 

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 conceivedEmploying 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.  

Filed under: Annual Conference, Artists

Participants in CAA 2020 ARTexchange. Photo by Stacey Rupolo.

CAA’s Services to Artists Committee seeks proposals for interactive and participatory projects and/or workshops for CAA’s 2022 ARTexchange and ARTexchange Online.

Originally formatted as a pop-up exhibition and meet-up event for artists and curators, ARTexchange provides an opportunity for artists to share their work and build affinities with other artists, historians, curators, and cultural producers.

This year, Columbia College Chicago will host ARTexchange, a dynamic exhibition of participatory projects and/or workshops, in their C33 Gallery. Located on the bustling corner of Ida B. Wells Drive (formerly Congress Parkway) and Wabash Avenue. Artists should be available February 15 or 16 for delivery and installation of their projects, and are highly encouraged to provide engaging and collaborative workshops or interactions with the public on February 17 or 18. The gallery will also be open to the public on Saturday, February 19, and ephemera will remain on exhibition through February 25.

Additionally, ARTexchange will include an online component. The virtual ARTexchange, a day of interactive and participatory projects and/or workshops accessed via Zoom, will take place on Saturday, March 5.

The Services to Artists Committee encourages applications that engage issues of social justice, inclusivity and intersectional discourses in the arts. Proposals that include community engagement and meaningful interaction with CAA and larger communities will be prioritized.

Please email any questions to <a href=”mailto:servicestoartists@gmail.com”>servicestoartists@gmail.com</a>. Include CAA ARTexchange or CAA ARTexchange Online in the subject line.

Apply for the in-person ARTexchange here.

Apply for the virtual ARTexchange Online here.

 

Visitors in the Musée du Louvre in 2020 © Antoine Mongodin

Visitors in the Musée du Louvre in 2020 © Antoine Mongodin

In the spring of 2021, the CAA Museum Committee initiated a survey of our members for the purposes of revising current directions and charting new ones that respond to updated knowledge of their concerns.

The results indicate that the Museum Committee‘s previous and planned Conference sessions and professional development workshops in 2021–2022 are appropriate, that they should publicize their presence more, and should use these projects and others to strengthen connections with professional museum groups; encourage diversity, decolonization, and the use of museums to educate; in addition to fight for salary equity. In this endeavor, they ask any interested CAA members to join and help in this mission.

Key Takeaways of the Report

In general, respondents likely appreciate the recent focuses and activities of the Committee, yet wish they would also move forward in new directions.

Both the CAA panels and professional development workshops should be continued and can be used to achieve the following desired goals culled from survey responses:

  • Help publicize the Museum Committee more broadly.
  • Give museum and curatorial studies students, young professionals, and museum professionals, particularly those from underrepresented groups, necessary resources as they start their careers, and mentor persons who want to become museum professionals or teach museum/curatorial studies, including in concert with art history coursework.
  • Support the function of museums as pedagogical sites, especially during the processes of decolonizing and defining decolonization.
  • Develop and disperse a list of curatorial/museum studies programs in American universities, including those offered on conjunction with art history training, and perhaps have a dedicated space on CAA’s website or another location with a link on the CAA website homepage to publicly disperse this list.
  • Renew efforts to craft and chart the implementation of policy statements and best-practice guidelines particularly concerning salary equity and unpaid internships, among similar issues relevant to the field, and to do so in concert with professional museum organizations, such as the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC), American Alliance of Museums (AAM), and the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG). One way to do this is to have present and future Museum Committee members actively reach out to persons within professional museum groups to create joint projects.

Check out the conclusions in the full report.

Filed under: Artists, CAA News, CWA Picks, Exhibitions

CWA Picks: August 2021

posted by August 03, 2021

The August “Picks” from the Committee on Women in the Arts respond to the danger and uncertainty that characterizes the contemporary moment and explore how gender figures into the possibility of imagining new forms of collectivity.

Malgorzata Markiewicz, "Medusa: Sensing-With and Thinking-With the World," 2021. Print on textile. Photo by Grzesiek Mart

Malgorzata Markiewicz, “Medusa: Sensing-With and Thinking-With the World,” 2021. Print on textile. Photo by Grzesiek Mart

Mona Hatoum
April 16 – September 12, 2021
Institut Valencià d’Art Moderne

Mona Hatoum received the Institut Valencià d’Art Moderne’s Julio González prize in 2020, and this exhibition is a tribute to the influential body of work she has created over the last two decades. Across her installations, sculptures, drawings, and textiles, Hatoum’s investment in materializing spatial concepts as instruments of power asserts itself with a poetic and severe consistency. This spatial refrain emerges from the histories she inherits as an Arab woman, but Hatoum is also committed to showing that oppression can be mapped across the globe. Empty and haunted, ephemeral and permanent, each of Hatoum’s pieces creates an aperture for seeing and sensing the pervasive threat of vulnerability that cannot be cordoned off with neat geographical boundaries.


Double Trouble
July 8 – September 21, 2021
Institute of Contemporary Art of Maine College of Art

The double has often meant trouble for women, as it can encapsulate an assembly-line definition of woman and a Stepford-wife loss of control. This exhibition, however, features the work of five artists who explore the double as a resource for upending habitual definitions of the self without indulging in the fantasy that one can leave historical patterns behind. Creating echoes of bright colors and bold graphic forms, the artwork in Double Trouble is immersed in Pop-like patterns–wallpaper is a recurring motif–as if to watch for the differences that slip free from repetitions.


Malgorzata Markiewicz: Medusa: Sensing-with and thinking-with the world
July 15 – September 30, 2021
Triangle, Riverside, Illinois

Malgorzata Markiewicz’s Medusa makes the production of textiles a form of feminist world-making. Slowly, persistently, intentionally, over seven months of the Covid-19 health emergency, Medusa’s crocheted body emerged, spreading with its fifty-feet long tentacles into the space, first from Markiewicz’s home in Kraków, Poland, and then into her studio. Markiewicz made Medusa with three double-warp fabrics specific to Podlasie, a region in the northeast of Poland. The figure of Medusa stands at the center of this exhibition, masked and regal. Her densely textured form also appears in a film, walking across a meadow and through a forest, and in a series of photographs that stage a liberating journey that moves away from the fear, disgust, and shame traditionally associated with Medusa and toward a new feminist way of sensing-with and thinking-with with the world.


New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century
August 28 – January 30, 2022
Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archives

New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century is a major survey exploring recent feminist practices in contemporary art. Rather than defining feminist art, New Time reveals all that the category can encompass as artists respond to the unfolding of history in the present. Although artworks made since 2000 are the primary focus, the objects and installations on view span several generations, mediums, geographies, and political sensibilities. New affinities emerge—the silhouettes of Kara Walker resonate with the sculpture of Kiki Smith—and convey the heterogeneous, intergenerational, and gender-fluid nature of feminist practices today.


Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter
May 21, 2021 – September 12, 2021
The Jewish Museum, New York

Louise Bourgeois viewed her artistic practice as a form of psychoanalysis. Rather than relegating that claim to a footnote or a biographical aside, this exhibition makes it central. Freud’s Daughter places Bourgeois’s original psychoanalytic writings, which include dream recordings and process notes, in dialogue with 40 works of art. These texts, many of which have not been seen before, become their own form of artmaking. They attest to Bourgeois’s onerous, often lyrical, and profoundly feminist struggle to loosen the Oedipal confines placed around women’s capacities to imagine and materialize different forms of feeling.


Wangechi Mutu: I Am Speaking, Are You Listening?
May 7 – November 7, 2021
Legion of Honor Museum, San Francisco

Wangechi Mutu’s I Am Speaking, Are You Listening? intervenes in the Legion of Honor’s homage to the classical imaginary of Euro-American culture. Many of her gorgeous sculptures portray earthy hybrid beauties who stand for the vulnerable physicality western culture systemically inflicts on people of African descent. Vibrant, damaged, and thoughtful survivors of colonial extraction, Mutu’s figures rhyme with the museum’s canonical objects but also register the pathologized differences Black bodies are made to bear. The Legion of Honor is known for Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker (1904), which dominates its atrium entrance, and in his field of vision, Mutu has placed bronze sculptures of corpses covered with opaque blankets that suggest a crime scene. Except for the hands with polished nails and the feet decorated with red stilettos that stick out from the edges of the blankets, the bodies are not visible. But the feminized excesses—one of the artist’s prominent themes—evoke other possibilities for thinking that Mutu has begun to create through her dialogue with histories of willed silence.


Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy
May 19 – August 29, 2021
Whitechapel Gallery, London

This definitive retrospective of the British-Argentinian artist Eileen Forrester Agar (1899–1991) demonstrates just how much her work absorbed and foresaw the twentieth century’s wide array of aesthetic innovations. Agar was included in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition, and her rebellious oeuvre certainly captures its feminist potential, but Angel of Anarchy resists the impulse to identify her work only or primarily through Surrealism. Exhibiting over 150 artworks and newly discovered archival material, Angel of Anarchy captures Agar’s nimble travels through artistic mediums, movements, and hierarchies to better see the bright, undulating landscapes of erotic anarchy she created in their wake.


Pauline Curnier Jardin, Fat to Ashes
April 12 – September 19, 2021
Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin

In 2019, the French artist Pauline Curnier Jardin won the Preis de Nationalgalerie, and the film installation Fat to Ashes lives up to the epic scale that might be associated with such an honor. In the historic halls of the Hamburger Banhof, Jardin has created a large-scale amphitheater with material that looks like pie dough—edible, soft, and supple. Inside the arena is a bright red seating area, and the elevated screen appears amidst draped fabrics of translucent pink. The film interweaves three scenes: the procession of St. Agatha in Sicily, the slaughter of a pig, and the carnival in Cologne. Jardin’s cinematic triptych, with its sensual, tactile visuality, portrays the excess and death swirling around the center of collective existence.


Lynn Hershman Leeson: Twisted
June 30 – October 3, 2021
New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York

Twisted is Lynn Hershman Leeson’s first solo exhibition in New York City and tracks her prescient engagement with technology—its sinister and generative impact on corporeal life. The exhibition displays Leeson’s drawings (many of which have never been seen before) and wax sculptures from the 1960s, and together they express her interest in the body’s porous boundaries and detachable parts. Twisted of course includes Roberta Breitmore (1973–1978), the well-known performance series that exemplifies feminist art’s look into the empty heart of identity. A new multi-media installation, Infinity Engine (2014–present), is also part of Twisted. Commissioned by ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Infinity Engine is a simulacrum of a genetics laboratory that replicates its world of science, technology, and self. “Twisted” is a great title for this exhibition: it evokes a sinister sickness, cords, the strands of a DNA molecule, and collaboration. Working with scientists, Leeson revitalizes the historical connection between art and scientific research, but her primary collaborators have always been viewers. She addresses her audience with her accessible message that technology does not have to cancel out the human, but can actually be part of realizing its ethical potential, and creates generous invitations for a participatory response.


 

Filed under: Artists, CAA News, CWA Picks, Exhibitions

CWA Picks: June 2021

posted by June 29, 2021

The June Picks from the Committee on Women in the Arts highlight a selection of events, exhibitions and calls for work that include feminist and womxn artists, and address issues about social justice, the visibility of marginalised subjects, and the digitisation of the everyday. Several of the exhibits engage with the question of relations among the human, non-human and other-than-human bodies but also corporeal entanglements that embed us within the world through embodied experiences. 

"Anne Minich: Her Bone" installation view of interior gallery

“Anne Minich: Her Bone” installation view of interior gallery

Anne Minich, Her Bone
May 22 – June 26, 2021
Thomas Erben Gallery

This solo exhibition of the Philadelphia-based artist Anne Minich engages with the materiality of the human body. Working across different media Minich explores the themes of pleasure and sexual desire, memory and intimacy, to develop personal mythologies and question the boundaries of corporeality. Her transversal language emphasizes the lived experience of being in the body, living it and dying in it. The works reveal multiple kinships and invite a closer inspection of bodily experiences. The interrelationality is emphasized by unexpected juxtapositions between the media used by Minich, including drawings, wooden sculptures and three-dimensional paintings, and found objects such as shells, fruit pits or bones. Intimate and fragile, these painterly collages invite the viewer to feel and sense with.


Susanne M. Winterling, TEMPERATE – under your skin, nano carriers through the web of life
May 20 – September 19, 2021
Schering Stiftung

Susanne M. Winterling’s installation TEMPERATE confronts the viewer with a fluorescent bacterium, inviting us to engage with nano-organisms that are invisible to the naked eye. Questioning that which is visible and that which remains invisible, the artist created large projection surfaces that show the bacterium moving across scientific images. Playing with scale, Winterling offers us another perspective in which magnified nano-organisms are larger than the visitors, articulating complex relationships between humans and microorganisms and interrogating the relevance of anthropocentric views. Inspired by research on drug-loaded nanocarriers, Winterling collaborated with Simone Schürle, a biomedical engineer and professor for Responsive Biomedical Systems at ETH Zurich along with her research team to bring awareness to the productive relations between forms of life and specifically bacteria equipped with therapeutic agents.


SHILPA GUPTA: Today Will End
May 21 – September 12, 2021
M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp

Shilpa Gupta’s multimedia works bring visibility to the contemporary art scene in Mumbai Critically engaged with identity politics and psychological discourse, Gupta articulates relationships between human diversity and new aesthetics, exploring entanglements between subjectivity and perception often via interactive installations and audio and visual technologies. Context-related and referring to specific cultural and socio-political framings, her works concern themes that, at the same time, are open to interpretation and may become localised to develop new micro-narratives. Gupta’s interest in conflict, borders and censorship can be seen in this exhibition, in which the artist traces the role of diverse media in the production of fear.


Hito Steyerl. I will survive. Physical and virtual spaces
May 19 – July 5, 2021
Centre Pompidou

This exhibition of Hito Steyerl’s major works is a retrospective in reverse, showing the most recent pieces at the beginning, which then lead to the artist’s 1990s films displayed at the end of the show. It is a collaboration between Centre Pompidou and the K21 Düsseldorf. The multimedia installations, some of which have been designed specifically for the exhibition, are a satirical and critical gesture exploring the relationships between the digital worlds, artistic creativity and its presentation, the pandemic and current social conditions. Steyerl’s point of departure is the architecture of the Centre Pompidou, which for over forty years has supported the heritage mission of the museum as a democratic project of a cultural resource centre. Steyerl engages once again in an intimate and astute manner with the invisible contradictions that drive the power structures of global capitalism and interrogates the challenges encountered by cultural institutions in the current moment of crisis.


AD MINOLITI: Biosfera Peluche / Biosphere Plush
July 24, 2021 – May 8, 2022
BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art

The exhibition of works of Ad Minoliti, a contemporary Argentine artist, takes place in the Baltic in the form of an ‘alien lounge’. Imagined as an extra-terrestrial space that goes beyond the idea of nature, it traverses dichotomous gender and anthropocentric narratives exploring non-binary and non-human identifications and embodiments. This first institutional presentation in the UK and the largest exhibition to date in Europe also features Minoliti’s ongoing project The Feminist School of Painting, which transforms part of the gallery space into an active classroom holding bi-weekly painting workshops. In her practice Minoliti activates feminist and queer theory to deconstruct the traditional genre of painting and art historical narratives, and generate alternatives that are intersectional, inclusive and diverse.


A Yellow Rose Project
June 1 – September 15, 2021 (virtual tour available)
BU Art Galleries

A Yellow Rose Project, a collaborative photography project between women from the United States, was initiated in 2019 to mark the 2020 centennial anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment. On that day women wearing yellow roses, symbolising the fight for equal representation, gathered into a concerted bodily collective and waited to hear if their right to a voice in the government would finally be granted. The photographs in the project engage with the complicated narratives attached to the 19th Amendment and its anniversary, and confront a multitude of histories, some of which are more visible than others. A remarkable historical event to celebrate also marks a troubling moment when only some women were given the right to vote. The collection of visions and voices opens up a dialogue on the power of the movement that led to the ratification, but also on erasures and the need to remember. The presented body of work celebrates women’s resilience and bodily gestures, including the gesture of the taking a photograph, that create a visual archive of vulnerability that through a concerted collective effort becomes a strength in the common.


Photo Vogue Festival 2021: REFRAMING HISTORY Open Call

Who is telling the story? The 6th edition of the Photo Vogue Festival ‘REFRAMING HISTORY’ invites projects that propose an alternative, different way of telling a tale. Selected projects will be featured in the exhibition.

Filed under: Artists, CAA News, CWA Picks, Exhibitions

CWA Picks: May 2021

posted by June 04, 2021

The May Picks from the Committee on Women in the Arts highlight a selection of events, exhibitions and calls for work that include feminist and womxn artists, and address issues about social justice, climate change and the ongoing global pandemic. Several of the exhibits expand and rework traditional narratives of American history, providing a more inclusive account of our country’s past and its current state. 

Sonya Clark: Heavenly Bound

April 10 – September 12, 2021

deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum

Sonya Clark’s Heavenly Bound, currently on view at the deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, explores the Underground Railroad and its connection to those seeking freedom throughout history and today. The piece includes a series of large-scale photographs of abolitionists, a night sky made up of the artist’s hair, a parachute installation and a book of cyanotype constellations, which all reference the treacherous journey that self-emancipated Black Americans experienced during their escape.

 


Personal and Political: Women Photographers, 1965–1985

May 1 – November 28, 2021

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Adriana Lestido, Mother and Daughter from Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, 1982. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Personal and Political: Women Photographers, 1965–1985 includes the work of many well-known American photographers including Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin alongside recently acquired works by lesser-known artists working internationally such as Adriana Lestido and Paz Errázuriz. The exhibit focuses on a specific time in photographic history when women were becoming professional photographers at a higher rate than ever before. 

 


 

Sharon Harper: Returning Light

April 9 – June 25, 2021

Rivalry Projects

Installation view

Sharon Harper’s Returning Light, currently on view at Rivalry Projects, includes several series of photographs that investigate the cycles of light, providing a more macro view of time and space. Through the imprint of light Harper’s work instills a sense of awe and points toward the changing climate and landscape of our world. 

 


 

Ground/work

Aug 1, 2020 – Oct 1, 2021 

Clark Art Institute

Ground/work includes the installation work of Kelly Akashi, Nairy Baghramian, Jennie C. Jones, Eva LeWitt, Analia Saban, and Haegue Yang. Each of the site-specific pieces considers the relationship between sculpture and nature as well as notions of time, scale and transformation.  

 


 

Judy Chicago Art Education award

Deadline: June 1, 2021

The Judy Chicago Art Education Award is open to scholars, artists, and educators whose projects engage with the Judy Chicago Research Portal. The award includes a $2,500 prize along with a certificate to be presented in July 2021 in Belen, New Mexico.  

 


 

Allison Katz: Artery

May 22 – October 31, 2021

Nottingham Contemporary 

Allison Katz’s exhibition, Artery includes paintings, ceramics and posters created in the past 18-months during a time of ongoing national lockdowns. The title of the exhibit speaks to the artist’s interest in networks and systems of connection as well as the spaces in between what is shared and private. Katz’s work will be on display at Nottingham Contemporary through October 2021 and will then be revisualized for the Camden Art Centre in January 2022.

 


 

On Hannah Arendt: What is Authority?

April 26 – June 6, 2021

Richard Saltoun 

What is Authority? exhibits work from Lili Dujourie, Everlyn Nicodemus, Lerato Shadi and sound artist Laima Leyton. The exhibit is part of a year-long series of shows inspired by Hannah Arendt’s writings about power structures. 

 


 

Girl You Want

ArtYard

May 1 – August 1, 2021

Genevieve Gaignard, Black is Beautiful, 2016. Installation view in ArtYard’s gallery, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter, Los Angeles, photo by Paul Warchol

Girl You Want, curated by J. Vanessa Lyon, includes the work of Genevieve Gaignard, Julia Greenburger, Jen Liu, Josh Rabineau, Wendy and Beatrice Red Star, Karinne Smith, Ivy Stewart, and María Vargas Aguilar. The exhibit is a broad exploration of what it means to be a girl and traverses the space between girlhood and adulthood. 

 


 

Promise, Witness, Remembrance

April 7 – June 6, 2021

Speed Art Museum

Installation view, Promise, Witness, Remembrance, Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky. Photo by Xavier Burrell

Promise, Witness, Remembrance was created under the direction of Breonna Taylor’s family along with a committee of artists, mental health professionals and community members. The exhibit pays tribute to Taylor’s life, reflecting on her killing in 2020 and the subsequent protests that took place both locally in Louisville and globally. The artists in this exhibit explore the disconnect between what the American dream has promised and the reality for many of its citizens.

 


 

Turkey Land Cove Foundation

Artist Residency

Deadline: October 1, 2021

Turkey Land Cove Foundation (TLC) offers a residency opportunity in Martha’s Vineyard for women who are in any stage of a project from development to completion. TLC specifically supports applicants who could not otherwise personally finance a residency. Room and board along with travel expenses are provided.

 


 

Mom Egg Review

Call for Submissions

Deadline: July 15, 2021

For the 20th annual issue, Mom Egg Review is requesting submissions that respond to the idea of “Mother Figures.” Artwork and Literary pieces including poetry, nonfiction, short fiction, and hybrid works should be submitted by July 15, 2021 for consideration. You do not need to be a mother to participate.

Filed under: Artists, CWA Picks, Uncategorized


Wednesday, October 14, 2020
12:00-12:30 PM (ET)

Free and open to the public

CLICK HERE TO JOIN THE CONVERSATION

We’re delighted to introduce CAA members to a new series of conversations between Meme Omogbai, our executive director and CEO, and N. Elizabeth Schlatter, the president of the CAA Board of Directors. Amidst so much change in our lives, workplaces, and world, join CAA leadership for an informal chat on how CAA is reshaping its efforts to provide access and resources where members need it most. Meme and Elizabeth will speak on the economic implications of COVID-19, the urgent importance of members’ scholarship, and the changing terrain of this cultural moment.

For best results, we recommend using the most up-to-date version of Chrome as your web browser. The conversation will be recorded and shared afterwards.

We would love to hear your questions, too. Please send them in advance to: caanews@collegeart.org

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

Meme Omogbai is Executive Director and CEO of College Art Association (CAA). Before joining CAA, 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 25 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, 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 acknowledgement 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 post-graduate 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.

N. Elizabeth Schlatter is the President of the CAA Board of Directors and Deputy Director and Curator of Exhibitions at the University of Richmond Museums, Virginia. A museum administrator, curator, and writer, she focuses on modern and contemporary art and on topics related to curating and issues specific to university museums. At UR, she has curated more than 20 exhibitions, including recent group exhibitions of contemporary art such as “Crooked Data: (Mis)Information in Contemporary Art,” “Anti-Grand: Contemporary Perspectives on Landscape,” and “Art=Text=Art: Works by Contemporary Artists.” She also serves on and chairs various University and School of Arts & Sciences committees. Prior to the University of Richmond, she worked with exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) in Washington, D.C, and in fundraising at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. She is author of Museum Careers: A Practical Guide for Novices and Students (Left Coast Press, Inc.) and a contributor to A Life in Museums: Managing Your Museum Career (American Association of Museums). She has a BA in art history from Southwestern University in Texas, and an MA in art history from George Washington University.