CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — March 08, 2017
Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
On Hiring and Diversity This Week
Many colleges and universities want to attract a more diverse workforce and foster greater inclusivity in their faculty and administrative ranks, but don’t know how. The Chronicle of Higher Education is helping by sharing stories, news, and data aimed at helping hiring managers and recruiters make better, more informed decisions about diversity hiring at their institutions and across higher education generally. (Read more from Vitae.)
How to Fix the Met: Connect Art to Life
With the precipitous decrease in art and history education in schools, much of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s encyclopedic collection now means little to younger viewers. It feels foreign and remote and unsociable in a way that contemporary art, with its familiar references, does not. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Russian and Syrian Forces Retake Palmyra from ISIL
Syrian government troops have retaken Palmyra from Islamic State forces, with help from Russian air support, the Syrian army said last week. Politicians in Russian welcomed the news as a triumph, as widely reported by the state’s media, but few details have emerged about the condition of the ancient site, where ISIL has previously wreaked large-scale destruction. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
The Earthquake in Amatrice, Norcia, and the Marche: A Cultural Emergency
This area of Italy—the Valnerina, the Appennine Marches, the Teramo region of the Abruzzo, and a segment of Lazio—has a distinguished cultural patrimony. There may be no large museums or significant art galleries, but in most cases the works of art are still in the buildings for which they were conceived, whether churches, convents, or tiny chapels in the mountains. (Read more from the Burlington Magazine.)
Very Serious Play: A Conversation with Jess Benjamin
The Nebraska-born sculptor Jess Benjamin creates work with an austere sensibility and eloquent narrative that is inextricably tied to the land—more specifically to the water—of her home state. The daughter of a rancher, she earned her BFA in ceramics from Hastings College before working as a studio assistant for Jun Kaneko, and then earning an MFA at Bowling Green State University. (Read more from Sculpture.)
SUPERFLEX’s Hospital Equipment: Context Is Everything
“Sometimes context is everything,” SUPERFLEX’s Jakob Fenger wrote, as he Instagrammed a photo of the latest installation of Hospital Equipment in a gallery in Switzerland. The Danish collaborative calls Hospital Equipment a “readymade upside down” because it pulls objects into an art context, only to send them on their way to a new context, as functional objects. (Read more from Greg.org.)
A Question of Resources
We hear regularly from arts funders and opinion formers about the need to diversify funding streams within the arts to protect future sustainability. And this is absolutely true. Any arts organization that finds itself over-reliant on government or statutory sources, or one single income stream that then dries up, can find itself in trouble. (Read more from Arts Professional.)
Identifying Quality in Scholarly Publishing: Not a Black-and-White Issue
Like every industry, publishing is open to scamming and deceptive behavior in many forms, and there are various influencing factors at play—including the pressure to publish that academics face. An abundance of unfamiliar new publications makes it difficult to know which can be trusted, and the merits of blacklisting or whitelisting publishers are being widely discussed. (Read more from the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.)
Solo Exhibitions by Artist Members
posted by CAA — February 15, 2017
See when and where CAA members are exhibiting their art, and view images of their work.
Solo Exhibitions by Artist Members is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
February 2017
Midwest
Jane Alden Stevens, Asparagus Patch, 1998, archival pigment print, 7 x 21 in. (artwork © Jane Alden Stevens)Jane Alden Stevens. Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio, February 10–April 2, 2017. The Thread in the River. Photography.
West
Alfred J. Quiroz. University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona, October 22, 2016–January 22, 2017. The Presidential Series. Painting.
People in the News
posted by CAA — February 15, 2017
People in the News lists new hires, positions, and promotions in three sections: Academe, Museums and Galleries, and Organizations and Publications.
The section is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
February 2017
Academe
Deborah BrightDeborah Bright has retired from her position as chair of the Department of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, to pursue her art practice. Bright previously served as interim dean of fine arts at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, where she also chaired the Photography Department and was a tenured professor.
Museums and Galleries
Camille Ann BrewerCamille Ann Brewer, formerly executive director of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium at the University of Chicago in Illinois, has been appointed curator of contemporary textile art at the George Washington University Museum and the Textile Museum, both in Washington, DC.
Heather Campbell CoyleHeather Campbell Coyle, curator of American art for the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington, has been promoted to chief curator at her institution.
Betsy Fahlman has become adjunct curator of American art at the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona. She will divide her time between the museum and Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts in Tempe, where she has served as a professor of art history for more than twenty-eight years.
Organizations and Publications
Robin VederRobin Veder, formerly associate professor of humanities, art history, and visual culture at Pennsylvania State University in Harrisburg, has been appointed executive editor of American Art, the journal of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC.
Institutional News
posted by CAA — February 15, 2017
Read about the latest news from institutional members.
Institutional News is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
February 2017
The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California, has acquired the archive of the artist, writer, curator, and scholar Harmony Hammond. The donation includes correspondence, photographs, original source material for her art, professional papers, publication drafts, editioned prints, original artwork, files, and a slide registry devoted to lesbian artists.
The Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have been awarded a $506,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to establish a new Summer Institute for Technical Studies in Art. The program, designed for graduate students from art-history programs across North America who are interested in broadening their experience with object-focused technical inquiry, methodologies, and instruction, will begin in June 2017.
The Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have received a $1 million gift from a Harvard Business School alumnus, Ken Hakuta, to establish the Hakuta Family Endowment Fund, enabling the creation of the Nam June Paik Fellowship at the Harvard Art Museums. Hakuta is the nephew of the pioneering artist Nam June Paik.
John Cabot University in Rome, Italy, has inaugurated a new MA program in art history to begin in fall 2017. Accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, the degree is the first US-accredited master’s degree in the history of art based entirely in Rome. The program can be completed in approximately fifteen months of full-time study.
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia has received a generous $500,000 gift from Julie Jensen Bryan and Robert Bryan to name the PAFA Printmaking Shop. This transformative commitment ensures that printmaking will remain one of the school’s core artistic disciplines.
The Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey, has posted to its website more than five thousand images and related photographic material by the seminal American modernist Minor White. The two-year digitization and cataloging project, funded in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, provides online access for the first time to the most significant photographic content of the Minor White Archive, which includes finished prints, artist’s proof cards, and bibliographic history.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, has surpassed its campaign goals for both financial gifts and significant art gifts, amassing a combined total of $105 million with more than one year remaining in the campaign. The $65 million cash goal was exceeded by $3 million, funds supporting the Renwick Gallery renovation, an education center for the museum’s National Historic Landmark building, and the museum’s endowments. The campaign will continue through 2017 with a focus on additional artworks and endowments to support curatorial, technology, and education initiatives.
Grants, Awards, and Honors
posted by CAA — February 15, 2017
CAA recognizes its members for their professional achievements, be it a grant, fellowship, residency, book prize, honorary degree, or related award.
Grants, Awards, and Honors is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
February 2017
Tatiana Flores, associate professor in the Department of Art History at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, with a joint appointment in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies, has won a 2016 award from the Arts Writers Grant Program, coordinated by Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Her grant will support a book, titled Art and Visual Culture under Chávez.
Marina Kassianidou, an artist and writer based in Boulder, Colorado, has received a $25,000 award from the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s 2016 Painters and Sculptors Grant Program.
Beili Liu, an artist based in Austin, Texas, has accepted a $25,000 grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation through the 2016 Painters and Sculptors Grant Program.
Christina Michelon, a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, has received a $8,500 project grant via the 2016–17 Craft Research Fund, supervised by the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design. The funds will support a dissertation focused on print’s relationship to domestic craft and interior design from 1830 to 1890.
Anya Montiel, a PhD student in American studies at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has accepted a $4,500 project grant from the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design through the 2016–17 Craft Research Fund. The funds will support dissertation research on government-funded basketry, pottery, and woodworking craft workshops in the 1960s and 1970s among the Florida Seminole, Mississippi Choctaw, and North Carolina Cherokee.
Klaus Ottmann, deputy director for curatorial and academic affairs at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, has been conferred the insignia of chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by Bénédicte de Montlaur, cultural counselor of the French Embassy in New York, on behalf of the French government.
Betsy Redelman, a student pursuing an MFA in craft studies at the Oregon College of Art and Craft in Portland, has received a $3,705 graduate research grant from the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design through the 2016–17 Craft Research Fund. The award will support thesis research on the neglected history of indigenous women potters in San Marcos Tlapaola, a small pueblo in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Margaret Samu, a freelance art historian based in New York, has been awarded the 2016 Mary Zirin Prize for independent scholarship from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies.
Maureen G. Shanahan, professor of history of art for the School of Art, Design, and Art History at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, has received a Fulbright Award for research in France from March to June 2017. The grant, entitled “World War I and the Colonial Legacy: Sites of Memory, Traces of Forgetting,” will support two projects: planning for a conference on the representation of the colonial subject during and after WWI; and archival research on a monograph, tentatively entitled Silence, Surveillance, and Psychiatry: Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault and the French Colonial Subject (1914–34).
Andrew Uroskie, director of graduate studies for the MA/PhD program in art history and criticism at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York, has won a 2016 award from the Arts Writers Grant Program, administered by Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The grant will support his book, titled The Kinetic Imaginary: Robert Breer and the Animation of Postwar Art.
Laura A. L. Wellen, a writer and curator based in Houston, Texas, has earned a 2016 award from the Arts Writers Grant Program, coordinated by Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The grant will support a blog called Piedrín.
Soyoung Yoon, program director and assistant professor of art history and visual studies in the Department of the Arts at the New School’s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts in New York, has received a 2016 awards via the Arts Writers Grant Program, supervised by Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The funds will support an article titled “The Evidence of Things Not Heard: On Mendi + Keith Obadike’s Numbers Station.”
Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members
posted by CAA — February 15, 2017
Check out details on recent shows organized by CAA members who are also curators.
Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
February 2017
Susan Ball points to a Brett Weston photographSusan Ball. Towards Abstraction, 1940–1985: Brett Weston Photographs from the Bruce Museum Collection. Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut, November 5, 2016–February 12, 2017.
Honoré Daumier, Le Nouveau St. Sébastien. Vierge et martyr. from the series Actualités, 1849, lithograph on newsprint. Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, gift of William H. Helfand (artwork in the public domain; photograph by Peter Jacobs)Christine Giviskos. Toutes Les Nouvelles – All the News: Current Events in Nineteenth-Century French Prints. Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, January 21–July 30, 2017.
Helen Miranda Wilson, The Cool Days of Early Spring, January 4, 2009, oil on panel. Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, gift of Leonard Rosenberg and Colombe Nicholas (artwork © Helen Miranda Wilson; photograph by Peter Jacobs)Donna Gustafson. Guerrilla (and Other) Girls: Art/Activism/Attitude. Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, February 4–July 30, 2017.
Books Published by CAA Members
posted by CAA — February 15, 2017
Publishing a book is a major milestone for artists and scholars—browse a list of recent titles below.
Books Published by CAA Members appears every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
February 2017
Mónica Amor. Theories of the Nonobject: Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela 1944–1969 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).
Robert Craig Bunch. The Art of Found Objects: Interviews with Texas Artists (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2016).
Tal Dekel. Transnational Identities: Women, Art, and Migration in Contemporary Israel (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016).
Georgina G. Gluzman. Trazos invisibles. Mujeres artistas en Buenos Aires (1890–1923) (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2016).
Sabine T. Kriebel and Andrés Mario Zervigón, eds. Photography and Doubt (New York: Routledge, 2017).
John Lear. Picturing the Proletariat: Artists and Labor in Revolutionary Mexico, 1908–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017).
Jeff Rosen. Julia Margaret Cameron’s “Fancy Subjects”: Photographic Allegories of Victorian Identity and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).
Maureen G. Shanahan and Ana María Reyes, eds. Simón Bolívar: Travels and Transformations of a Cultural Icon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016).
Lawrence Waldron. Handbook of Ceramic Animal Symbols in the Ancient Lesser Antilles (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016).
Artifex Press Catalogues Raisonnés – Introductory Webinar Invitation
posted by admin — January 27, 2017
Artifex Press, a publisher of digital catalogues raisonnés, is proud to launch their subscription service in February 2017. Currently available are catalogues raisonnes for Chuck Close, Jim Dine, and Tim Hawkinson; and in February 2017 they will release Agnes Martin and James Siena; later in 2017 they will publish Sol LeWitt and Lucas Samaras. Sign up for an introductory webinar about their platform, including a presentation by Tiffany Bell, Editor of their Agnes Martin Paintings catalogue and co-curator of the traveling 2015 – 2017 Agnes Martin Retrospective, which began at the Tate and just closed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Don’t forget to also visit their booth (#1111) at the 2017 CAA Conference!
New in caa.reviews
posted by admin — January 27, 2017
Wayne Franits reviews Genre Imagery in Early Modern Northern Europe: New Perspectives, edited by Arthur J. DiFuria. The eight essays “challenge” and “transcend” traditional studies on this topic “by exploring the complex, heterogeneous reception of such imagery among early modern viewers,” and they achieve this “noteworthy goal” with “varying degrees of success.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Deborah Lewittes discusses the exhibition catalogue for Designing Home: Jews and Midcentury Modernism, produced by the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. Offering “a fresh take on the popular topic of twentieth-century domestic design,” the “elegant” and “graphically stunning” book is “a work of scholarly importance” and “provides interesting cultural tidbits.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Astrid Köhler examines Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects by Lisa Saltzman. The volume “distinguishes itself from most other theories of photography, both in content and approach, via a lucid analysis” that “brings together heterogeneous objects that share a distinctive relation to time, identity, and memory.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — January 25, 2017
Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Does Private Funding Threaten Museums’ Public Missions?
With an incoming presidential cabinet threatening to slash public spending, placing additional strain on institutions, one might well ask: How will the next generation of museums be funded? What changes in museum funding models are already taking place, both in the US and elsewhere? (Read more from Artsy.)
Some Advice on Building Conference Panels
Some of the best panels I’ve created have been with very senior scholars. Even if you are a junior scholar, you can bet that if your panel is well assembled and you craft your approach email with kindness and respect, it’s very likely that invited senior scholars may say yes. (Read more from Raul Pacheco-Vega, PhD.)
Study on Arts Graduates Provides Continuing Evidence on the Value of an Arts Degree
A recent study provides new evidence that individuals with degrees in the arts from North American institutions are extremely satisfied with their arts education, with no substantive changes across income levels and employment status. The report analyzes data from more than 35,000 arts alumni of all ages who responded to a fall 2015 survey. (Read more from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project.)
Against the Design Thinking Meeting
The people who speak the language of design thinking are the cool kids. Not just the people with the awesome glasses and the black clothing. These are the people who have those awesome jobs with “innovation” or “disruption” on their business cards. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Artists Are Throwing Wrenches into the Art World’s Works
Even as one visible portion of the art world becomes ever more soaked in money, artists are picking up the ideas of first- and second-generation institutional critique and adapting them to the needs of the present. With increasing frequency, they are investigating, tweaking, and even striking out against the operation of museums, galleries, and the market as an integral part of their larger practices. (Read more from ARTnews.)
The Institution as User: Museums on Social Media
How does a museum talk? Its voice lives in wall texts, whether they deliver art history or gently admonish against touching work or using flash photography. Its tone has to be serious enough to honor the histories it was built to protect, and to convince visitors that the twenty dollars they paid to get in was well spent. (Read more from Art in America.)
Diversity in the Open-Access Movement, Part 1: Differing Definitions
Not only is there wide disagreement as to what “freely available” in open access really means, but not everyone in the movement even agrees that all scholarship must be freely available, or how quickly it should be made freely available, or what mechanisms are appropriate for making it that way. Since the fact of this ideological diversity doesn’t seem to be self-evident, it might be helpful to lay out some evidence for it here. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
Strengthening Networks, Sparking Change: Museums and Libraries as Community Catalysts
A new report from the Institute of Museum and Library Services includes case studies and a discussion of conceptual frameworks that can guide libraries, archives, and museums that seek to spark catalytic change in their communities. (Read more from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.)