CAA News Today
The Samuel H. Kress Foundation Funds Redesign of The Art Bulletin
posted by CAA — July 21, 2016
The College Art Association is pleased to announce a grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation to support a redesign of The Art Bulletin. CAA, the journal’s editors-in-chief, and its editorial boards have maintained unwavering attention to the quality of the journal’s scholarship for more than one hundred years of publication. Through the generosity of the Kress Foundation, the visual character of the print journal will gain a more contemporary and reader-friendly format, incorporating changes in the presentation of images and text, and an open, inviting look. CAA’s copublisher, Taylor & Francis, is also keen to assist with logistics and production support.
The first issue of The Art Bulletin slated for the new format is March 2017. The redesign is spearheaded by Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, the new editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin, who joined its editorial board in July. As she notes, “The journal not only represents our discipline and our professional association, but, even more, our wish to offer our members high-quality scholarship, a public platform, and a public profile that will earn them the recognition they merit on an international level.” Kallmyer is working closely with the journal’s editorial board, which identified key design elements during the course of several meetings, as well as with CAA staff.
CAA remains firm in its commitment to excellent scholarship in the print and online versions of its flagship journal, and is grateful to the Kress Foundation for making the redesign of the journal possible.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — July 20, 2016
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Life beyond Art School: What Next, Where Next, and How to Make It Happen
A recent symposium held in Glasgow and organized jointly by Glasgow School of Art and Q-Art saw fine-art staff, students, and industry professionals examine the role of art schools and how they prepare students for life after university. Laura Campbell reports on the issues raised and the possible solutions. (Read more from a-n.)
Black Bodies, White Cubes: The Problem with Contemporary Art’s Appropriation of Race
As new political movements like Black Lives Matter have gained influence, social practice has risen in stature and popularity. But a new wave of contemporary work influenced by racial injustices is decidedly more sensational. Artists have made systemic racism look sexy; galleries have made it desirable for collectors. (Read more from ARTnews.)
Who’s Going to Fix My Broken Art?
I shipped a ceramic sculpture across the country to a gallery for an important group show, and they said it was broken when they unpacked it—as in, shattered to pieces. I spent an absurd amount of time and money packing it up so that nothing would break. Is it wrong to ask the gallery to pay for the damage? (Read more from Burnaway.)
The Library of Last Resort
Responsibility for restoring the Library of Congress’s digital mandate has fallen to Carla Hayden. The job she has before her is to prepare the library to serve another century of US citizens that has become most accustomed to consuming information on the internet. (Read more from N+1.)
Rethinking Knowledge in the Internet Age
The internet started out as an assured tool for generating a well-informed citizenry. Over the past fifteen years, that optimism has given way to cynicism and fear—we have taught our children that the net is a swamp of lies spun by idiots and true believers and polluted by commercial entities whose sole aim is to have us click to the next ad-riddled page. (Read more from the Los Angeles Review of Books.)
Why Doing Something as Dull as Copyright Registration Gives You Stronger Rights
Like all things legal, copyright registration is boring and costs money—a standard electronic application costs $55. This is why the task tends to sit at the bottom of the never-ending to-do list that many creators make but never get through. (Read more from the Copyright Alliance.)
New Measures Initiated to Remedy the Surprising Pitfalls of Collecting Video Art
What are you actually buying when you purchase a work of video art? The answer isn’t quite what the uninitiated might expect. The tricky nature of video art has proven to be an unpleasant surprise for collectors in the past. (Read more from Artsy.)
Why Most Academics Will Always Be Bad Writers
For at least a generation, academics have elaborately and publicly denounced the ponderous pedantry of academic prose. So why haven’t these ponderous pedants improved, already? The critics would say the ponderous pedants are doing it on purpose. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — July 15, 2016
Rachel Middleman visits Earth Machines at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Featuring an international roster of artists, the exhibition reveals how “the local Silicon Valley high-tech industry propels a cycle of innovation and consumption that threatens to outstrip our ability to understand and manage its global, social, and environmental consequences.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Martha Lucy examines Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye, an exhibition co-organized by the National Gallery of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum. Focusing on fifty canvases produced between 1875 and the early 1880s, the curators tease out “the unusual terms of Caillebotte’s modernity” and his relationship to Impressionism. Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Blair French reviews Billy Apple®: The Artist Has to Live Like Everybody Else, “one of the most significant survey exhibitions ever accorded a living New Zealand artist.” Hosted by the Auckland Art Gallery, the show gives “institutional and public recognition” to the “extraordinarily complex and comprehensive individual practice” of the Pop-Conceptual artist Billy Apple. Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Noriko Murai looks at Edwardian London through Japanese Eyes: The Art and Writings of Yoshio Markino, 1897–1915 by William S. Rodner. The first English-language scholarly monograph on Yoshio Makino, or “Markino,” a Japanese illustrator who lived in London during the early twentieth century, the book provides a “detailed and engaging account of Markino’s most productive years.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Caa.reviews publishes over 150 reviews each year. Founded in 1998, the site publishes timely scholarly and critical reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by the College Art Association. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate. Read more reviews at caa.reviews.
Apply for a 2016 Wyeth Foundation Publishing Grant
posted by Christopher Howard — July 14, 2016
CAA is accepting applications for the 2016 Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant program. Thanks to generous funding from the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, CAA awards publishing grants once a year to support book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art and related subjects. For purposes of this program, “American art” is defined as art created in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Books eligible for the Wyeth Grant have been accepted by a publisher on their merits but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy.
The publisher, not the author, must submit the application. Awards are made at the discretion of the jury and vary according to merit, need, and number of applications. Awardees are announced six to eight weeks after the deadline. For complete guidelines, application forms, and a grant description, please visit the Wyeth section of the CAA website. Deadline: September 15, 2016.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — July 13, 2016
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Academic Libraries and the Textbook Taboo: Time to Get Over It?
Librarians have allowed an unfortunate limitation of the print world to shape not only their behaviors but also their philosophy, to the point that many of us perceive excluding textbooks as a defining value of librarianship—not a service we regretfully forego because it’s not feasible, but a service we forego because “That’s not who we are as librarians.” (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
Textbooks in Academic Libraries: The Publisher’s Case
There is no precise and inarguable definition of a college textbook. Even the lines that define “college” are blurry: Do we mean elite, private schools like Harvard and Stanford; four-year state institutions; community colleges; the for-profit world; or MOOCs? The “college textbook,” in other words, is a slippery concept, and it is important to know exactly what someone means when uttering it. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
When College Students Need Food Pantries More Than Textbooks
As a more racially and socioeconomically diverse body of students pursues college in the United States, schools find themselves responding to more requests to stock food pantries and hand out vouchers for supplies at campus bookstores. (Read more from the Atlantic.)
How the Art World Responded to AIDS
How artists grappled—and continue to grapple—with the epidemic is the focus of Art AIDS America, an exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. In some 120 works by close to one hundred artists, the show captures the rage, anguish, and overwhelming sense of loss that accompanied the epidemic at its height, along with the activism it sparked and its continuing reverberation through the culture. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)
The State: A Friend Indeed to Artists in Need?
Createquity imagines that a healthy arts ecosystem is one in which opportunities to make one’s living as an artist are distributed equitably across socioeconomic levels. Unfortunately, this is not the case in many Western countries, where research indicates that people of lesser means are not as equipped to take on the risk involved in pursuing a career in the arts. (Read more from Createquity.)
Wonders and Blunders: What Makes a Great Museum?
What makes a museum building successful? Until the arrival of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao in 1997, this question may have exclusively focused on the best environments in which to view art. But the Guggenheim’s phenomenal success, which allowed the Basque government to recoup the construction costs within three years, moved the debate on to issues of branding and statement architecture. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Five Time-Saving Strategies for the Flipped Classroom
I often hear comments like “The flipped classroom takes too much time,” “I don’t have time to devise so many new teaching strategies,” “It takes too much time to record and edit videos,” or “I don’t have time to cover everything on the syllabus.” I also hear “I tried to flip my class, but it was exhausting; so I quit.” If these comments sound familiar, it might be helpful to create margins in your flipped classroom. (Read more from Faculty Focus.)
Real Estate for the 1 Percent, with Art for the Masses
Richard Serra, a stickler about the differences between art and architecture, once described most public sculpture in urban architectural settings as “displaced, homeless, overblown objects that say, ‘We represent modern art.’” In twentieth-century New York, residential and commercial developments tended to marry architecture and art with that kind of ambivalence, if they married them at all: lobbies with a few pretty, unremarkable paintings; courtyards with pleasant design pieces; or plop art by sculptors whose work rarely showed up in the museums around town. (Read more from the New York Times.)
In the June 2016 Art Bulletin
posted by Christopher Howard — July 12, 2016
A grotesquely anthropomorphic hound standing on powerful back legs and blowing a stylized trumpet graces the cover of the June 2016 issue of The Art Bulletin. The etching is one of two dozen similar works by the early seventeenth-century artist Christopher Jamnitzer that Madeleine C. Viljoen explores in relation to early modern cosmography. The June issue also presents the first publication of an extraordinary eleventh-century enamel cup from a nomad’s grave in Ukraine, which Warren T. Woodfin examines in the context of other Middle Byzantine works with secular imagery. In addition, the issue features essays by David Young Kim on the multiple functions served by the carpets in Lorenzo Lotto’s paintings, and by Jean H. Duffy on issues of genre and perception in Jean Dubuffet’s mixed-genre spectacle Coucou Bazar. Shao Yiyang’s “Whither Art History?” essay reflects on the flourishing of art history in contemporary China.
The reviews section, with a theme of “Cosmopolitan Art Worlds,” includes six reviews of recent books on art in Renaissance Italy, late nineteenth-century Shanghai, turn-of-the-century Paris, modern India, contemporary Brazil and Japan, and twentieth-century Nigeria.
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 September, essays will consider Kongo visual and cultural practices in contemporary art, twelfth-century Chinese paintings of Buddhist rituals, the nineteenth-century perception of Watteau’s Pierrot character as forlorn, a brush-and-ink painting collectively created in the early People’s Republic of China, and intersections of global politics and imaging in the site-specific art of Walter De Maria. Four reviews will be presented under the rubric “Urban Images, Memories, and Fragments.”
Apply for a Fall 2016 Meiss Grant
posted by Christopher Howard — July 11, 2016
CAA is accepting applications for fall 2016 grants through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to a generous bequest by the late art historian Millard Meiss, the twice-yearly program supports book-length scholarly manuscripts in any period of the history of art, visual studies, and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy.
The publisher, rather than the author, must submit the application to CAA. Awards are made at the discretion of the jury and vary according to merit, need, and number of applications. Awardees are announced six to eight weeks after the deadline. For the complete guidelines, application forms, and a grant description, please visit the Meiss section of the CAA website. Deadline: September 15, 2016.
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — July 08, 2016
Katherine Smith visits the High Museum of Art’s exhibition Alex Katz, This Is Now. The show focuses on the artist’s landscape paintings, enabling visitors to “discover another, important aspect of Katz’s oeuvre” and “deepen an appreciation of the artist’s achievements in this genre.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Allan Antliff reviews The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College, Eva Díaz’s exploration of Josef Albers, John Cage, and R. Buckminster Fuller at the college from the 1930s to 1950s. She calls it “the first sustained examination of the interdisciplinary tensions arising from its protagonists’ shared interest in freedom through experimentation.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Emma Sachs examines The Cambridge History of Painting in the Classical World, edited by J. J. Pollitt, a survey of mural and panel painting from the Aegean Bronze Age to Late Antiquity in the Mediterranean. The nine authors “have space to express their own opinions,” resulting in a “refreshingly honest discussion” that “distinguishes this volume from a standard survey textbook.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Caa.reviews publishes over 150 reviews each year. Founded in 1998, the site publishes timely scholarly and critical reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by the College Art Association. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate. Read more reviews at caa.reviews.
Professional-Development Fellowships for Graduate Students
posted by CAA — July 06, 2016
About the Program
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. Fellows are honored with $10,000 grants to help them with various aspects of their work, whether it be for job-search expenses or purchasing materials for the studio. CAA believes a grant of this kind, without contingencies, can best facilitate the transition between graduate studies and professional careers.
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 Annual Conference. Honorable mentions, given at the discretion of the jury, also earn a free one-year CAA membership and complimentary conference registration.
CAA initiated its fellowship program in 1993 to help student artists and art historians bridge the gap between their graduate studies and professional careers.
Are You Eligible?
CAA seeks applications from students who are current members; are citizens or permanent residents of the United States; will receive their MFA or PhD degree in the calendar year following the year of application (2017 for the next fellowship cycle); and have outstanding capabilities and demonstrate distinction in approach, technique, or perspective in their contribution to art history and the visual arts. A jury of artists, curators, and other professionals will review all applications in fall 2016 and announce the recipients in January 2017.
How to Apply
Please visit collegeartassociation.slideroom.com to submit applications to the 2016 MFA and PhD Professional-Development Fellowship programs. The deadline for applications for the PhD fellowships is Monday, October 3, 2016, and Friday, November 11, 2016, for the MFA fellowships. CAA will send notifications in January 2017.
Contact
For more information about the CAA fellowship program, please contact Roberta Lawson, CAA fellowships coordinator, at 212-392-4404.
Photograph: Derrick Woods-Morrow
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — July 06, 2016
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
The Secret History of US Women Painters
Maurine St. Gaudens is an art conservator and the author of Emerging from the Shadows: A Survey of Women Artists Working in California, 1860–1960, a massive full-color, four-volume labor of love and scholarship. She and Joseph Morsman have compiled narratives of 320 female artists working in California in a century underscored with turmoil and change, from the Gilded Age to the world wars to the Great Depression. (Read more from the Philadelphia Inquirer.)
Eleven Artists Who Helped Pave the Way to Marriage Equality
Last year the US Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right—a victory representing long-sought political recognition and validation of identities that have been largely marginalized and stigmatized. To mark this political milestone, Artsy has highlighted eleven artists whose work demonstrates the power visual culture has to explore, share, and make relatable queer narratives. (Read more from Artsy.)
Does “African” Architecture Exist? This Rwandan Architect Thinks So
There aren’t that many African architects out there—Christian Benimana is one of the few. He completed his bachelor degree in 2008 at Tongji University in Shanghai before returning home to Rwanda to forge his career. Awut Atak spoke to Benimana about where Africa’s cities are heading—and what “African” architecture actually is. (Read more from True Africa.)
It’s an Art Gallery. No, a Living Room. OK, Both.
Since the 2008 economic downturn, temporary do-it-yourself art galleries have proliferated in apartments, storefronts, and other spaces all over the country. Call it a response to an art world in which dealer representation is increasingly hard to come by; exhibitions are costly; and formerly affordable areas have priced out artists, forcing them to seek out scrappier locations in which to show their work. (Read more from the New York Times.)
The Digital in the Humanities: An Interview with David Golumbia
The term “digital humanities” has captured the imagination and ire of scholars across America. Supporters of the field, which melds computer science with hermeneutics, champion it as the much-needed means to shake up and expand methods of traditional literary interpretation; for critics, it is a new fad that symbolizes the neoliberal bean counting that is destroying higher education. (Read more from the Los Angeles Review of Books.)
The Improbable History of NYC’s Revolutionary Art School, the Art Students League
If the humble five-story building of the Art Students League on Fifty-Seventh Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue was always easy to overlook, now the massive construction site makes it almost impossible to find. Yet behind the scaffolding, the doors of this 140-year-old art school are still open, with a legacy of the most famous artists in America, such as Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, and Ai Weiwei. (Read more from the Gothamist.)
Art Demystified: What Determines an Artwork’s Value?
What determines an artwork’s value? And why are some works so expensive? To art-world outsiders, the distinctions in price can be confusing. What makes one artwork sell for $10,000 and another for $10 million—or even $100 million? (Read more from Artnet News.)
On Academic Envy
Recently I logged into Facebook and there, right at the top of my news feed, was a link to a colleague’s third published piece in the New Yorker. The same afternoon, two other colleagues were approached by a literary agent about writing a popular nonfiction book. (Read more from Vitae.)