CAA News Today
Tania Bruguera Will Deliver Conference Keynote Address
posted by Christopher Howard — October 29, 2015
Tania Bruguera, a Cuban artist who works in performance, installation, and video, will deliver the keynote address during Convocation at CAA’s 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC. Convocation, which includes the presentation of the 2016 Awards for Distinction, will take place on Wednesday evening, February 3, from 5:30 to 7:00 PM. Free and open to the public, this event will be held at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. The title of Bruguera’s talk will be “Aest-ethics: Art with Consequences.”
Bruguera’s work on issues of free speech and immigration and her fearlessness to speak out against forces of oppression—many of which she has experienced firsthand in Cuban prisons—is important and undeniably relevant to not just the art and academic worlds, but also the world at large. This summer, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs jointly appointed Bruguera as their first artist-in-residence. The announcement of the position also revealed that the Museum of Modern Art had acquired its first work by Bruguera: Untitled (Havana, 2000), a large-scale installation that combines performance and video. First shown at the 2000 Havana Biennial, the work, like many others by Bruguera, deals with liberty and authority. The artist was also recently nominated as a finalist for the prestigious 2016 Huge Boss Prize, awarded every two years by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to an artist who has made a visionary contribution to contemporary art.
Bruguera’s work has been exhibited in museums and biennials around the world; she has also lectured and performed internationally. A faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she lives and works in Havana and Chicago. Bruguera earned MFAs from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Instituto Superior de Arte in Cuba. Her BFA is from Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro. Bruguera is the founder and director of Cátedra Arte de Conducta, the first program of performance-art-studies in Latin America, hosted by Instituto Superior de Arte.
Candidates for CAA’s 2016 Board of Directors Election
posted by Vanessa Jalet — October 13, 2015
The 2015–16 Nominating Committee has announced a slate of six candidates for the annual election of four new CAA members to serve on the Board of Directors for a four-year term (2016–20). Voting will begin in January 2016. The webpages for the election, which will include the candidates’ statements, biographies, endorsements, and video presentations, will be published in late December 2015.
The six candidates are:
- Dina Bangdel, Associate Professor, Director, Art History Program, Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, Doha, Qatar
- Carma Gorman, Associate Professor and Assistant Chair, Design Division, Department of Art and Art History, The University of Texas at Austin
- N. Elizabeth Schlatter, Deputy Director and Curator of Exhibitions, University of Richmond Museums, Richmond, Virginia
- Andrew Schulz, Associate Dean for Research and Associate Professor of Art History, College of Arts and Architecture, Pennsylvania State University, University Park
- Roberto Tejada, Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor, Departments of English and Art History, University of Houston, Texas
- Anuradha Vikram, Lecturer, Graduate Public Practice, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, California
If you have questions about the Nominating Committee, the candidates, or the voting process, please contact Vanessa Jalet, CAA executive liaison.
Former CAA Fellow LaToya Ruby Frazier Wins MacArthur Foundation Fellowship
posted by Christopher Howard — September 29, 2015
LaToya Ruby Frazier, a photographer and video artist who uses visual autobiographies to capture social inequality and historical change in the postindustrial age, has won a 2015 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
Frazier, an assistant professor in the Department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, was a 2006 recipient of a CAA Professional Development Fellowship. At the time, she was completing her MFA in art photography in the School of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. Before that Frazier earned a BFA in photography and graphic design from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania.
Informed by documentary practices from the turn of the last century, Frazier explores identities of place, race, and family in work that is a hybrid of self-portraiture and social narrative. The crumbling landscape of Braddock, Pennsylvania, a once-thriving steel town, forms the backdrop of her images, which make manifest both the environmental and infrastructural decay caused by postindustrial decline and the lives of those who continue—largely by necessity—to live among it.
Frazier’s work has appeared in solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Seattle Art Museum in Washington, and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. Her first book, The Notion of Family, was published in 2014. To learn more about Frazier’s work, watch her MacArthur Foundation video.
Other winners of the 2015 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship include the author Ta-Nehisi Coates, the painter Nicole Eisenman, and the playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda. For the entire list of 2015 fellows, visit the foundation’s website.
The MacArthur Fellows Program awards unrestricted fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction. There are three criteria for selection of fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work. The foundation does not require or expect specific products or reports from its fellows and does not evaluate recipients’ creativity during their term of the fellowship. The MacArthur fellowship is a “no strings attached” award in support of people, not projects. Each fellowship comes with a stipend of $625,000, paid out to the recipient in equal quarterly installments over five years.
Founded in 1993, CAA’s Professional-Development Fellowships program supports promising artists, designers, craftspersons, historians, curators, and critics who are enrolled in MFA, PhD, and other terminal-degree programs nationwide. The deadline for the MFA fellowship is Monday, November 16, 2015. CAA will send notifications in January 2016.
Image credit: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
New Chair of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board
posted by Joe Hannan — September 17, 2015
Sarah Betzer has been appointed the new chair of the editorial board of The Art Bulletin. Betzer is an associate professor in the McIntire Department of Art at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she has taught since 2007. Her research examines European art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries взять займ с 18 лет на карту, with a particular interest in the intersections of art-theoretical debates and artistic practice. Pennsylvania State University Press published her book Ingres and the Studio: Women, Painting, History in 2012. Betzer is midway through the four-year term as a member of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board and will now complete the final two years as its chair.Image credit: Dave Woody
New Appointments to CAA’s Journals
posted by Christopher Howard — August 14, 2015
The president of CAA’s Board of Directors, DeWitt Godfrey, has made appointments to the editorships and editorial boards of CAA’s three scholarly journals, in consultation with the editorial boards and the vice president for publications, Gail Feigenbaum. The appointments took effect on July 1, 2015.
The Art Bulletin
Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, professor emerita in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware in Newark, has been appointed the next editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin. She is a specialist in French art from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. In 2010 she published Théodore Géricault (Phaidon); other books have focused on Cézanne (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and Delacroix (Yale University Press, 1991). After a year as editor designate, Athanassoglou-Kallmyer will serve a three-year term, July 1, 2016–June 30, 2019. The March 2017 issue of The Art Bulletin will be her first issue. After her editorship, she will remain on the journal’s editorial board as past editor through June 30, 2020.
Two new at-large members have joined the Art Bulletin Editorial Board: Jonathan Reynolds is a scholar of modern Japanese art and architecture and a professor of art history at Barnard College and Columbia University in New York; Michael Schreffler, a specialist in early modern Latin American art, is an associate professor of art history at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Their terms run through June 30, 2019.
Art Journal
Kirsten Swenson, an assistant professor of art history, contemporary art, and aesthetics at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, has been appointed reviews editor of Art Journal. Two books of her work will publish later this year: Irrational Judgments: Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and 1960s New York (Yale University Press) and, coedited with Emily Eliza Scott, Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics (University of California Press). Swenson is serving as reviews editor designate for one year before her three-year term begins on July 1, 2016. Her first commissioned reviews will appear in the Spring 2017 issue.
Talinn Grigor, an associate professor of fine arts at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, is a new member of the Art Journal Editorial Board. Her area of expertise is modern and contemporary global art and architecture, with a focus on the art of Iran. Her term runs through June 30, 2019.
caa.reviews
The caa.reviews Editorial Board welcomes one new member-at-large, Ben Davis, an independent author and critic residing in New York. Davis is national art critic for Artnet News and the author of 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (Haymarket Books, 2013). He will serve on the editorial board for a four-year term, through June 30, 2019.
New field editors of book reviews for the journal are: Gwen Allen, associate professor of art history at San Francisco State University in California, as field editor for artists’ books and books for artists; Lisa Florman, professor and chair of the Department of History of Art at Ohio State University in Columbus, as field editor for twentieth-century art; Angela Vanhaelen, associate professor of art history at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, as field editor for northern European art; and Helen Westgeest, assistant professor of modern and contemporary art history and of theory of photography at Leiden University in Leiden, the Netherlands, as field editor in photography.
New field editors for exhibition reviews are: Susan Best, professor of art history for the Queensland College of Art at Griffith University in South Bank, Australia, as field editor for modern and contemporary exhibitions in Australia and New Zealand; Natilee Harren, assistant professor of contemporary art history and critical studies in the School of Art at the University of Houston in Texas, as field editor for exhibitions in the Southwest; and Susan Richmond, associate professor of art history at Georgia State University in Atlanta, as field editor for exhibitions in the Southeast.
Summer 2015 Recipients of the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award
posted by Christopher Howard — August 03, 2015
CAA has announced the five recipients of the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award for summer 2015. Thanks to a grant of $60,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, CAA is supporting the work of emerging authors who are publishing monographs on the history of art and related subjects.
The five Meiss/Mellon grantees for summer 2015 are:
- Elise Archias, The Concrete Body—Rainer, Schneemann, Acconci, Yale University Press
- Molly Brunson, Russian Realisms: Literature and Painting, 1840–1890, Northern Illinois University Press
- Jeehee Hong, Theater of the Dead: A Social Turn in Chinese Funerary Art, 1000–1400, University of Hawai‘i Press
- Susan Rosenberg, Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art (1962–1987), Wesleyan University Press
- Christina Bryan Rosenberger, Drawing the Line: The Early Works of Agnes Martin, University of California Press
The purpose of the Meiss/Mellon subventions is to reduce the financial burden that authors carry when acquiring images for publication, including licensing and reproduction fees for both print and online publications.
CAA Executive Director Linda Downs Announces Retirement
posted by Linda Downs — July 31, 2015
Linda Downs, executive director and chief executive officer of the College Art Association (CAA), has announced her retirement, effective February 2016. Under her direction during her nine-year tenure, CAA celebrated its Centennial with a new visual identity and reestablished itself as the largest and most active association in the academic and museum visual-arts field. CAA has been a strong advocate on critical issues in the field, including workforce issues such as equity for part-time faculty, changing the restrictions on visas for international scholars and artists, and state and federal support for visual-arts higher education. CAA has made major improvements to its publications: current and archived issues of The Art Bulletin and Art Journal are now available online as a result of a copublishing partnership with Taylor & Francis; caa.reviews became a fully open-access online journal with an increased readership; and the Art Journal Open website was established, with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, to focus more on artists and to complement Art Journal articles in print.
Over thirty professional guidelines and standards were developed through the expertise of the Professional Practices Committee. A task force supported by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation was established to develop the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, which has greatly clarified what fair use is and how to utilize it for third-party images and materials in creative and scholarly work. CAA has changed its journal author contracts accordingly. Book and author subventions increased to approximately sixteen per year through the support of the Mellon Foundation, Terra Foundation for American Art, and Wyeth Foundation for American Art. International membership increased through the CAA/Getty International Program, which supported attendance and seminars on international issues at the past four Annual Conferences. The Professional Development Fellowships for Art Historians and Artists was reinstated. A new project, Resources for Academic Art Museum Professionals, that was initiated by the Museum Committee and funded by the Mellon Foundation will establish a social community forum to promote the exchange of information related to the integration of academic art museums into various academic disciplines of study. Following CAA’s strategic plan, task forces have been established to review the structure of the nine Professional Interest, Practices, and Standards Committees, provide guidelines for digital art and architectural history in promotion and tenure, transform and extend the Annual Conference, review the governance structure, and address greater inclusion and attention to design in programs and publications. CAA has laid the groundwork for transforming itself in directions that are critical to the support of the visual-arts field.
The CAA Board of Directors has expressed its admiration for Downs’s outstanding leadership. DeWitt Godfrey, board president, stated, “Linda has brought CAA to a new professional level of service to members and the visual-arts field. We wish her well in retirement and thank her for her dedicated service.”
CAA has organized a search committee and will retain a search firm to seek a new Executive Director.
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 advocacy issues, including education in the arts, freedom of expression, intellectual-property rights, cultural heritage and 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 about CAA at www.collegeart.org.
For more information, please contact Nia Page, CAA director of membership, development, and marketing.
Rebecca M. Brown Is the Next Editor-in-Chief of Art Journal
posted by Christopher Howard — June 26, 2015
On July 1, Rebecca M. Brown becomes the new editor-in-chief of Art Journal, CAA’s quarterly journal of modern and contemporary art. A scholar of colonial and post-1947 South Asian art and visual culture, Brown is associate professor of history of art at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. She also chairs Hopkins’s Advanced Academic Program in Museum Studies. Brown succeeds Lane Relyea, associate professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who has led the journal since 2012.
In her nomination letter, Brown wrote, “In putting my name forward for editor, I am keenly aware that if I am selected my editorship would confirm a shift already well underway within the discipline—namely, the incorporation of questions related to global modern and contemporary art, transnational visual culture, and the machinations of art-making not solely in the northern Atlantic cities of Paris, London, and New York, but also in Lagos, Durban, Mexico City, Rio, Mumbai, Singapore, Beijing, Osaka, and Auckland. I believe the time has come for such a statement, but I also want to assert that in my own work I have been at pains to articulate a global modern that acknowledges the centrality of Europe and America as touchstones around the world. That is, rather than privilege such locations I suggest that thinking of the global modern as a set of distinct regional ‘modernisms’ is dishonest to the global interrelations of power that operate for artists around the world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Part of my own intellectual commitment is to bring the conversations happening around modernism in Asia, Africa, South America, Eastern Europe, and the Pacific region together with those in Europe and North America in order to enhance scholarship and the production of both art and its history, wherever its local focus might be.”
Brown earned her PhD in South Asian and Islamic art history at the University of Minnesota in 1999, where she was a Mellon Fellow in Humanistic Studies and a CAORC research fellow. Her undergraduate degree is from Pomona College in Claremont, California. She has served as a consultant and a curator for modern and contemporary Indian art for the Peabody Essex Museum, the Walters Art Museum, and the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation. She has led seminars in art history and museum studies at Georgetown University and George Washington University, and has lectured throughout North America and in Asia.
Brown has published her scholarship widely, notably in two books: Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India (2010) and Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 (2009). She wrote the exhibition catalogue for Goddess, Lion, Peasant, Priest: Modern and Contemporary Indian Art from the Shelley and Donald Rubin Collection (2011). She has also edited two publications with Deborah S. Hutton—A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture (2011) and Asian Art (2006)—and has written essays for Visual Anthropology, Res, Interventions, CSSAAME, Archives of Asian Art, Journal of Urban History, Screen, and Journal of Asian Studies.
Brown has performed the CAA journal trifecta: publishing in The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and caa.reviews. Her most recent contribution was “A Distant Contemporary: Indian Twentieth-Century Art in the US Festival of India (1985–86),” published in the September 2014 issue of The Art Bulletin. Previous to that, “P. T. Reddy, Neo-Tantrism, and Modern Indian Art” appeared in the Winter 2005 issue of Art Journal. Brown has written two book reviews and one exhibition review for caa.reviews over the years.
Before Johns Hopkins, Brown taught at Swansea University in Wales and the University of Redlands in California. She served as research associate for the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and was a visiting scholar in history at Pennsylvania State University. She started her academic career as an assistant professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
In discussing her plans as editor, Brown writes, “It is crucial that Art Journal maintains its reputation as the top venue for the publication of articles and other kinds of engagements with modern and contemporary art, and as a space for artists to share their work and experiment in the context of a print journal. I would love to see artists taking advantage of the ‘analogue’ quality of the page and the journal format, perhaps in concert with filmic or other media shared via Art Journal Open.
“As a scholar situated often on the margin of the discipline—and recognizing that every scholar feels that way to some extent—I think of modern and contemporary art in wide scope: the entirety of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, certainly, and from anywhere around the world, including sites outside the usual urban metropolises. In addition, I’d like to seek out other kinds of unexplored spaces for art and for art history: pockets where, for example, medievalists might encounter contemporary mosaicists, or where temperature becomes a central element of art making, displaying, or writing. These engagements can happen in artist projects and scholarly articles or in more informal spaces within the pages of the journal, as exchanges, responses, object-studies, artist reflections, or conversations. In all of these areas, I am committed to maintaining the focus of Art Journal on artist projects that push boundaries and challenge norms and on scholarly, rigorously peer reviewed contributions to the field.”
Issues of Art Journal edited by Relyea will appear through Winter 2015. Brown’s first issue will be Spring 2016.
Images
First: Portrait of Rebecca M. Brown (photograph by J. Roffman)
Second: Rebecca M. Brown, Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009)
CAA Salutes Its Fifty-Year Members
posted by Nia Page — April 23, 2015
CAA warmly thanks the many contributions of the following dedicated members who joined CAA in 1965 or earlier. This year, the annually published list welcomes eighteen artists, scholars, and curators whose distinguished exhibitions, publications, and teaching practices have shaped the direction and history of art over the last fifty years.
1965: Jean M. Borgatti; Norma Broude; Wanda M. Corn; Elaine K. Gazda; Diana Gisolfi; Dorothy F. Glass; Andree M. Hayum; Ellen V. Kosmer; Lillian D. MacBrayne; Jerry D. Meyer; Ann Lee Morgan; Myra N. Rosenfeld-Little; Ted E. Stebbins; Eugenia Summer; Charles Talbot; MaryJo Viola; Michele Vishny; and Wallace E. Weston.
1964: Richard J. Betts; Ruth Bowman; Vivian P. Cameron; Kathleen R. Cohen; Paula Gerson; Ronald W. Johnson; Jim M. Jordan; William M. Kloss; Rose-Carol Washton Long; Phyllis Anina Moriarty; Annie Shaver-Crandell; Judith B. Sobre; and Alan Wallach.
1963: Lilian Armstrong; Richard Brilliant; Eric G. Carlson; Vivian L. Ebersman; Francoise Forster-Hahn; Walter S. Gibson; Caroline M. Houser; Susan Koslow; E. Solomon; Lauren Soth; Richard E. Spear; Roxanna A. Sway; Athena Tacha; and Roger A. Welchans.
1962: Jo Anne Bernstein; Phyllis Braff; Jacquelyn C. Clinton; Shirley S. Crosman; Frances D. Fergusson; Gloria K. Fiero; Jaroslav Folda; Rosalind R. Grippi; Harlan H. Holladay; Seymour Howard; Alfonz Lengyel; Mary L. Maughelli; David Merrill; Francis V. O’Connor; John T. Paoletti; Aimee Brown Price; Nancy P. Sevcenko; Thomas L. Sloan; Elisabeth Stevens; Anne Betty J. Weinshenker; and William D. Wixom.
1961: Matthew Baigell; Margaret Diane David; Bowdoin Davis Jr.; David Farmer; J. D. Forbes; Isabelle Hyman; Henry A. Millon; Marion E. Roberts; and Conrad H. Ross.
1960: Shirley N. Blum; Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt; Dan F. Howard; Eugene Kleinbauer; Edward W. Navone; Linda Nochlin; and J. J. Pollitt.
1959: Adele M. Ernstrom; Geraldine Fowle; Carol H. Krinsky; James F. O’Gorman; and Ann K. Warren.
1958: Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr.; Carla Lord; Damie Stillman; and Clare Vincent.
1957: Marcel M. Franciscono; Bruce Glaser; E. Haverkamp-Begemann; Jane Campbell Hutchison; and Susan R. McKillop.
1956: Svetlana L. Alpers; John Goelet; Joel Isaacson; and Jack J. Spector.
1955: Lola B. Gellman; Irving Lavin; and Suzanne Lewis.
1954: Franklin Hamilton Hazlehurst; Patricia Cummings Loud; Thomas J. McCormick; Jules D. Prown; Irving Sandler; and Lucy Freeman Sandler.
1953: Dorathea K. Beard; Margaret McCormick; and Jack Wasserman.
1951: Wen C. Fong.
1950: Alan M. Fern; and Marilyn J. Stokstad.
1949: Ann-Sofi Lindsten.
1947: David G. Carter; Ellen P. Conant; and Ilene H. Forsyth.
1945: James S. Ackerman.
2015 CAA-Getty International Program Participants Attend Annual Conference in New York
posted by Janet Landay, Program Manager, Fair Use Initiative — March 17, 2015
This year, fifteen scholars from around the world attended CAA’s Annual Conference in New York as participants in the CAA-Getty International Program. The temperature in town when everyone arrived on February 8 was a frigid 10 degrees; nonetheless, the international travelers were intrepid, and their warmth and excitement did much to allay the cold weather outside.
Now in its fourth year, the program brings together art historians, artists who teach art history, and museum curators to meet with CAA members in their fields of study, attend conference sessions, and participate in a one-day preconference colloquium on international issues in art history. Funded by a generous grant from the Getty Foundation, this year’s scholars came from Argentina (Georgina Gluzman), Bangladesh (Mokammal H. Bhuiyan), Brazil (Ana Mannarino), Burkina Faso (Boureima Diamitani), China (Shao Yiyang), Croatia (Ljerka Dulibić), Hungary (Márton Orosz and Nóra Veszprémi), India (Savita Kumari), Mexico (Dafne Cruz Porchini), Russia (Andrey Shabanov), South Africa (Nomusa Makhubu and Lize van Robbroeck), Uganda (Angelo Kakande), and Ukraine (Nazar Kozak). For some, it was their first visit to the United States; for all, it was their first time at a CAA Annual Conference.
A highlight of the program was a full-day preconference colloquium about international issues in art history. Each of the fifteen participants gave presentations about their work, relating their specific research interests to one of five broader topics: Questioning the Discourse, Beyond Borders/Beyond Context, Activism and the Political, Cross-Cultural Encounters/Reception, and Exhibiting Cultures in a Global Society. The talks featured a wide range of art and varied approaches to the field. They were followed throughout the day by Q&A sessions and open discussions moderated by Rosemary O’Neill, chair of CAA’s International Committee, and Marc Gotlieb, president of the National Committee for the History of Art. As Nóra Veszprémi, a scholar from Hungary wrote, “The topics were as diverse as the participants themselves, but the questions that lay at the heart of the papers were closely related. Everyone was interested in the ‘internationalization’ of art history, and it was a wonderful experience to be able to discuss these issues with colleagues from all over the world.”
The colloquium included a number of CAA members serving as hosts to the international scholars. This year, many hosts came from select CAA affiliated societies, thereby sharing scholarly interests and providing networking opportunities for the participants. For example, Deepali Dewan, president of the American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA), was paired with Savita Kumari, an Indian art historian specializing in medieval and premodern Indian art, and Elisa Mandell, president of the Association for Latin American Art (ALAA), served as host to Georgina Guzman from Argentina and Dafne Cruz Porchini from Mexico. Other hosts came from the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA), the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA), the Renaissance Society of America (RSA), and the Society of Contemporary Art Historians (SCAH). CAA’s International Committee also supplied hosts, rounding out an excellent group of art historians to welcome and assist the international scholars. CAA is grateful to the National Committee for the History of Art for its financial support of the hosting activities of these CAA members.
The CAA-Getty scholars were busy throughout the conference week, attending sessions, meeting colleagues, and visiting New York museums and galleries. On Thursday the group attended two sessions, sponsored by CAA’s International Committee, that examined the legacy of the landmark exhibition Magiciens de la Terre, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin in 1989 at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Grande Halle at the Parc de la Villette in Paris. Martin, who participated in the sessions and attended Tuesday’s preconference as well, discussed the rationale behind the exhibition, which challenged Western preconceptions about non-Western art by displaying an unprecedented mix of objects—half of the works were by Western artists and the other half by artists from the rest of the world. Martin’s presentation was followed by other talks and, later in the afternoon, a roundtable discussion. In all, the events of this day provided an excellent platform for continuing Tuesday’s discussion about international issues in art history.
As in past years, CAA’s International Committee was centrally involved in planning this year’s international program. We are particularly grateful to Rosemary O’Neill, chair of the committee, for her enthusiastic support. In addition to organizing the sessions on Magiciens de la Terre (with her fellow committee member Gwen Farrelly), O’Neill helped to coordinate the preconference colloquium and even raised outside funds to bring Martin to the conference.
At the close of the week’s activities, program participants met again to learn about publishing art history in the United States and opportunities for residencies at research institutes. Susan Bielstein from the University of Chicago Press, Kirk Ambrose, editor of The Art Bulletin, and Gail Feigenbaum of the Getty Research Institute provided enormously helpful information on these subjects.
The CAA-Getty scholars then had a weekend on their own to explore New York before heading to the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, to meet with scholars there and learn about the research opportunities offered by that institution’s Research and Academic Program. The trip was a wonderful opportunity to see a great museum and experience a totally different part of the United States (where it was even colder than New York).
The purpose of the CAA-Getty International Program is to bring a more diverse and global perspective to the study of art history by generating international scholarly exchange. This year’s visitors brought with them a great deal of knowledge, enthusiasm, and curiosity about the field, which they shared with the CAA members they met, as well as with each other. In return, conference attendees offered their expertise and friendship, beginning relationships that will hopefully bear fruit in future projects and collaborations.
Nazar Kozak, an art historian from Ukraine, summarized the experiences of many when he wrote, “To put it simply, I understood that I can become a part of a global scholarly community. I felt like I belong here.”
Images
2015 CAA-Getty International Program participants. Front row, left to right: Savita Kumari, Andrey Shabanov, Nóra Veszprémi, Shao Yiyang, Janet Landay (from CAA), Ana Mannarino, Nomusa Makhubu, and Dafne Cruz Porchini. Back row, left to right: Nazar Kozak, Márton Orosz, Angelo Kakande, Boureima Diamitani, Ljerka Dulibić, Lize van Robbroeck, and Georgina Gluzman. Not pictured: Mokammal H. Bhuiyan (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Nazar Kozak with his host, Margaret Samu (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Ana Mannarino, Dafne Cruz Porchini, and Namusa Makhubu (photograph by Bradley Marks)
CAA President DeWitt Godfrey and Ljerka Dulibic (photograph by Bradley Marks)