CAA News Today

Andrea Kirsh, an independent scholar and curator, is CAA vice president for external affairs. In summer 2010, she and Linda Downs, CAA executive director, held meetings with leaders from art schools and departments in New York and Philadelphia.

Linda Downs and I had a great opportunity to learn more about the membership and its needs by talking with a number of department chairs and deans in New York this summer, despite the 95-degree heat, and then during torrential storms in Philadelphia (my home) in the fall. We wanted to let them know about the upcoming Centennial conference and, in particular, the opportunities for students. Such prospects include free Wi-Fi at the Students and Emerging Professionals Lounge, which will be open throughout the conference and doesn’t require a badge. If students can’t afford the $120 discounted fee to register for the entire conference, they can attend on a session pass and participate in numerous free events, such as Convocation, sessions planned especially for the Centennial, and all ARTspace events, including the Annual Artists’ Interviews. They can volunteer as room monitors in exchange for conference registration.

Mostly we visited with colleagues to listen. We asked what they thought CAA has been doing right, and how we might better serve their needs. We learned a lot. What struck me was the range of comments and the variety of useful suggestions. Nancy Barton, chair of the Art and Art Education Department at New York University (NYU), told us about her school’s program in Ghana, which made us realize that CAA’s revived International Committee should include artists as well as art historians. Downs and I then met with Pepe Karmel and Kathryn Smith, the outgoing and incoming chairs of NYU’s Art History Department. They teach undergraduates only, so we discussed ways the CAA conference might give their students taste of graduate school and professional life, as well as a chance to network.

David Rhodes, president of School of Visual Arts, opened our visit by vigorously accusing CAA of favoring art historians over artists on the issue of orphan works and opposing droit moral for artists. We let him know that CAA doesn’t favor either side on orphan works: the organization supports potential users making a serious search for copyright holders and, failing that, publishing the works and then paying copyright holders if they turn up. And we’ve never opposed droit moral. Rhodes’s major request of CAA was help in organizing foundations courses, which always receive the lowest ratings. We’ll bring the issue to the Education Committee, which regularly presents conference sessions on pedagogy, and will also consider it as a subject for the practical publications that CAA hopes to produce.

The issue of advocacy came up again during our visit with Patricia Rubin, director of NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts; the topic was the cost of reproduction rights. Rubin came to the institute from England, where several major museums recently eliminated charges for scholarly use of images. Downs told her that she regularly attends the American Association of Museum Directors’ meetings and works the crowd on the issue, but it could use help from a more concerted group of organizations.

In Philadelphia we began at the University of Pennsylvania, whose faculty has been very involved with CAA. Holly Pittman, chair of the Department of the History of Art, was pleased that I’d be addressing Penn graduate students about the upcoming conference during a departmental colloquium. At University of the Arts, Joe Girandola, director of the MFA programs in ceramics, painting, and sculpture, was enthusiastic about the value of CAA conferences and suggested that his school organize a group to attend the New York meeting in February. His colleague, Susan Viguers, director of the MFA program in book arts, thought CAA didn’t do enough for artists; however she hadn’t attended recent conferences and had no idea about ARTspace activities. She also didn’t realize that this year all of CAA’s Professional-Development Fellowships were targeted at artists because of their greater funding needs.

Stephen Levine, chair of art history at Bryn Mawr College, told us about calling CAA in the past to request demographic information about the field to use in hiring discussions. He said more such information would be useful, and also hoped CAA might help schools reach minority candidates whose work spans fields (archaeology, anthropology, history, and area studies) and who might not be alert to possibilities in art history. He further expressed the desire that CAA develop standards so that schools do not require letters of recommendation before candidates are shortlisted.

Timothy Rubb, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was emphatic that the most important thing CAA could do for museums was to circulate the word that art-history departments are not turning out sufficient students in areas such as East Asian and ancient Near Eastern art to fill curatorial positions. He also hoped CAA might address guidelines for museum-studies programs, as his institution finds that graduates of current programs have neither useful skills nor realistic expectations.

Gerald Silk, chair of the Art History Department at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, gave us a tour of his school’s new facilities and showed us a number of studios. We were able to talk with artists and art historians who work together successfully, asking them to suggest ways CAA might build on the presence of both groups at the Annual Conference. They suggested that art historians might want to join artists in participating in critiques. Hester Stinnett, printmaker and a Tyler vice dean, thought we should consider themed conferences, so that one meeting was distinguished from another. We liked the idea and said that the upcoming Centennial conference in New York was built around a series of interdisciplinary sessions chaired by pairs of scholars from different fields, and that the Los Angeles conference in 2012 was addressing art of the Pacific Rim. Stinnett also suggested, based on her experience with a recent graphics conference, that students preferred informal events away from the conference center to the usual formal sessions. While CAA always offers many offsite events at conferences, it will be a challenge to organize a conference for five thousand attendees if that cohort continues to prefer dispersed events.

October SECAC/MACAA and Arts Education Conferences

Cover of the SECAC-MACAA conference program

It is a perennial pleasure to return to my native South for the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC). This year’s meeting, held in scenic Richmond, Virginia, was a joint venture with the Mid America College Art Association (MACAA), both CAA affiliated societies. Hosted by Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), the conference took place October 20–23, 2010, in the beautiful Jefferson Hotel, a Beaux Arts masterpiece operating since 1895.

With his VCU colleagues, the artist, printmaking teacher, and freelance art critic Andrew Kozlowski cleverly branded the conference with the title “Curiouser: Where Cerebellum Meets Antebellum,” and planned some very sexy aesthetics and materials to go along. Sessions featured—if you can believe it—representations of the penis in modern and postmodern culture among familiar discussions on curriculum development and connections between memory and art.

On Thursday evening, after the first day of sessions from artists, historians, and curators, we were treated to the genius that is Pablo Helguera, who delivered the keynote address. Born in Mexico City, Helguera is a New York–based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, and performance. His focus on a variety of topics such as history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd takes the form of lecture, museum display, musical performance, and written fiction—tailored made for a memorable public speech. Helguera, who is also director of adult education programs at the Museum of Modern Art, sagely pointed out that he has spent many an evening sitting in the back of a darkened auditorium listening to people bloviate on all manner of topics. Through a performance that reflected on the act of performing that is any lecture, Helguera teased insight from the five elements of classical oration, culminating in a cacophonous delivery of a talk presented in alternating voices for four different hypothetical audiences: postmodernists and theorists (defined as people who read October), art-world insiders, arts administrators and educators, and the Facebook generation. His take was an incisive remonstrance of the expectations we carry to these types of events, and he exploded the notion that an art-history conference should be serious, dry, humorless, and devoid of careful calibration of character.

Following Helguera was a reception for the annual members’ juried exhibition held at 1708 Gallery. Founded in 1978, this artist-run alt space plays a leading role in connecting Richmond’s diverse community with the work of exceptional, innovative artists from Virginia and beyond. With fifty-six participants, the show was packed with work in every medium imaginable. Congratulations to these three CAA members for receiving top honors from Joe Seipel, the curator and juror: photographers Antonio Martinez of Southern Illinois University Carbondale and Allyson Klutenkamper of Shawnee State University, and the painter Matthew Kolodziej of the University of Akron.

Philip Reinagle, Portrait of an Extraordinary Musical Dog, 1805, oil on canvas, 18¼ by 36½ in. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (artwork in the public domain; photograph by Ron Jennings)

On Friday the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts hosted a reception for SECAC and MACAA. Newly reopened after a $150-million expansion that boosted gallery space nearly 50 percent, the museum is perhaps best known for its stunning collection of Art Nouveau masterpieces, where I found this bed that, to me, looked more like a set piece from Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Boogie Nights than a product of French modernism. Amongst wings of amazing Faberge cloisonné, French drawings, and superb holdings in modern and contemporary American art, I most enjoyed the rooms of British sporting art. Donated by Paul Mellon, who was also the establishing patron of the Yale Center for British Art, this profuse collection of painting and sculpture is the largest display of horses, dogs, pheasants, and guns that I’ve ever seen all in one place.

A street arts festival on Friday called “InLight Richmond,” organized by the folks at 1708 Gallery, was a really fun way to get us out-of-towners to Shockoe Bottom, a major nightlife and dining district. On my way back to the hotel, I walked past the Virginia State Capitol. An incredibly ghostly lighting design courtesy of a major restoration project rendered the building a spectral vision in white, glowing, nearly pulsing, with the principles of the Enlightenment. This was a particularly arresting, inspiring experience to have within a fortnight of an important midterm election.

But really, SECAC is such a wonderful affair each year. As a three time attendee, I’m not sure if it’s because Rachel Frew, the central nervous system of the conference, is so freaking awesome, or if it’s because the month of October in any Southeastern state is so beautiful, or if it’s because I can gorge myself on fried green tomatoes and Hoppin’ John. One thing I know for sure is that I am consistently amazed by the quality of scholarship and camaraderie of experience at this particular conference. Start planning now for the next one, “Text/Texture,” hosted by the Savannah College of Art and Design, November 9–12, 2011.

A couple of days later, back in New York, I attended the twenty-fourth annual National Conference on Liberal Arts and the Education of Artists, organized by the Humanities and Sciences Department of the School of Visual Arts. The event provides a forum for the exchange of ideas and information about the role of the liberal arts in the education of artists, and this year’s theme was “Green, Greener, Greenest: Romancing Nature Again.” Taking place October 27–29, 2010, the conference is truly impressive for its interdisciplinarity. The first session I attended, on the topic of “Nature Study and Interdisciplinary Learning,” included papers by a biologist, a mathematician, an art professor, and a director of student outcomes, and I ate lunch with a journalism professor who presented a body of research on the visualization of the “truly American” landscape vis-à-vis illustrated editorial spreads in early Life magazines. One panel asked if we can pique people’s moral and ethical responsibilities to the environment by heightening aesthetic appreciation through depiction in art. Another session explored the dual metaphor of nature as both sublime and accessible through literature, Hindu myth, and Gerhard Richter’s paintings based on photos.

“Green, Greener, Greenest” was an intimate gathering presided over by the dark-cherry interior of the Algonquin Hotel, and as such our conversations could have a personal, more lasting effect. Each year the organizers seek proposals on diverse topics relating to an annual theme and on other interdisciplinary issues. Check out the conference history or contact the conference director, Maryhelen Hendricks, for more information on presenting and attending.