CAA News Today
Event: In Conversation with Dr. Nancy Odegaard
posted by CAA — May 18, 2021
Dr. Nancy Odegaard discusses a strategy of pottery condition reporting with interns as a type of triage, or assignment of conservation treatments based on the types of damage or documentation need when a large volume of vessels are involved. The annual activity known as the Pottery Blitz has been a regular summer activity for many years at the Arizona State Museum.
Watch the recording of our virtual celebration of Dr. Nancy Odegaard, this year’s recipient of the CAA/American Institute for Conservation (AIC) Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation.
Dr. Odegaard’s scholarship and gracious leadership have been central to modeling collaboration between disciplines, advancing conservation discourse, and fostering a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of art and cultural heritage. She has authored several publications that have become standards in the field for conservators, academics in the arts, and students.
The CAA/AIC Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation annually recognizes outstanding contributions by one or more persons who, individually or jointly, have enhanced understanding of art through the application of knowledge and experience in conservation, art history, and art.
This event was produced in partnership with CAA’s affiliate organization, the American Institute for Conservation (AIC) in tandem with their 2021 AIC/SPNHC Joint Virtual Annual Meeting.
Submit Your Proposal for Graduate Screenings at the 2021 Annual Conference
posted by CAA — September 22, 2020
Film still from Tending Breadth (2019), courtesy of Heather Taylor and Jacklyn Brickman
CAA’s Services to Artists Committee (SAC) invites current graduate students (or 2020 graduates) to submit work for consideration in the 2021 Graduate Screenings: Film/Video, Animations, & New Genres program for the upcoming 109th Annual Conference in February 2021. For the conference, SAC will screen the selected winners online.
Through this screening and exhibition initiative, SAC aims to give the next generation of artists and practitioners an opportunity to display their work in a national forum. Our annual Graduate Screenings celebrates the hard work of graduate students across the nation and world, while exposing their artworks to a broad audience. We look forward to reviewing your submission.
Eligibility
Applicants must be enrolled currently in an MFA (or equivalent MA or PhD) program OR have graduated from a program in the spring or summer of 2020. Due to the university shutdowns in the spring of 2020, SAC will accept submissions from recent 2020 program graduates.
Please use the form below to submit your entry. Submission for consideration is free and membership with CAA is not required (we are collecting this information for statistical purposes). All videos must follow the specifications and meet all technical requirements or they will not be accepted.
SAC Jurors
Farhad Bahram, Indiana State University; Robert Howsare, West Virginia Wesleyan College; Sue Huang, University of Connecticut; Richard Serrano, Art This Week Productions
Guest Juror
Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, the Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)
Invited guest juror Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi will select one work from the SAC juried program to be awarded best in show.
Contact: servicestoartists@gmail.com; please include “Graduate Screening Question” in the subject line if you have a question
Deadline for submission: December 4, 2020
Acknowledgment of submission selection: January 19, 2021
Submissions Items for Application Form Input:
—First and last name
—Name of school and department
—Degree (MFA, PhD or MA) and major/concentration
—Year of graduation
—CAA member status (it is not required to be a member)
—If member, CAA membership number
—Narrative bio
—Artist statement
—Personal website (optional)
—Vimeo link (see specs below)
—Film still from your video to be used for promotion purposes (see specs below)
Video/Image Submission Specifications:
Please note that submissions missing any of the below specifications may be disqualified from consideration.
Video:
—5 minutes in maximum length (excerpts accepted)
—H.264 at 1920 x 1280px (MP4 file format)
—Include 2 opening title cards:
—1st card–5 seconds; include your full name (first and last), title of work, year of completion, name of school, department and/or program
—2nd card–5 seconds; include credits for music, sound, other camera people, editing. Even if these were you, include these credits
—Upload submission to Vimeo.com (include your link. Video must remain viewable on Vimeo until February 9th). —Selected participants will be required to upload their hi-res video file to a Google drive in late January and maintain their video on Vimeo till the end of the conference
Image:
—Still from video submission
—960 x 640px (landscape), 72 dpi (JPG file format)
Annual Conference Committee Chair Charlene Villaseñor Black on Why You Can’t Miss CAA 2019
posted by CAA — October 23, 2018
Charlene Villaseñor Black is Professor of Art History and Chicana/o Studies at UCLA and chair of the Annual Conference Committee for the 2019 Annual Conference in New York, February 13-16, 2019.
As a crucial player in the conference process, we asked Charlene to share her thoughts on the field, being a part of CAA, and what goes into making the conference a reality every year. Listen in or read her thoughts below.
So, chairing the Conference Committee is a huge job. We had a record number of submissions—there was a lot of reading—but it was also very exciting to see where our members are, and what kinds of things people are doing in terms of their artistic practice, what things art historians are thinking of. It was actually very exhilarating to read these submissions.
When I came on, agreed to do this, I had a couple of goals in mind, and the first one for me was diversifying CAA. Really broadening out what kinds of topics we were looking at. I was also interested in pulling in more people who are working on historic time periods. I’m someone who works on colonial, on early modern but I also work in contemporary Chicanx art. So I’m very much interested in seeing how differing fields can speak to each other, and I was also very much interested in studio art, and a little nervous about that because I actually think that dialogue with artists is extremely important for those of us who are historians.
The submissions that we read were very exciting. There are many different themes, a very diverse representation of subject areas. What was interesting to me was that several themes that transcend chronology or geography came out to me. There were a lot of panels on the politics of artistic production. There were a lot of panels looking at migration, immigration, globalism. There were a lot of panels looking at the environment, artistic practice in the environment. Materiality was another very important topic that I saw that’s still very popular.
So I was very attentive to the representation of historical panels for the annual conference. This is actually very important to me, and there were a lot of early modern panels. As someone who works on early modern colonial and contemporary, I really think about why history matters. And in this current political moment, I think we understand why history matters, and why facts matter. And thinking about the current migration crises in the world right now, the roots of those crises are really in the early modern period, during this period of European imperialism. So I actually think this is a moment when we can really speak to each other across time periods, across fields. It’s a really important moment for us to do that.
I hope that the biggest surprise about the conference is its incredible breadth, and the incredible range of interests that our members have, and people are working on in their studio practices, in their scholarship.
My very first CAA was in 1992. I was a graduate student. It was in Chicago, and I very clearly remember going to that first conference. I felt intimidated. I also remember very well, I think it was 1995, San Antonio. I was on the job market, but what I remember is that there were two Latin American panels. There were two colonial panels. They were scheduled at the same time unfortunately, but I remember presenting at that conference.
CAA is the major professional organization that I belong to. I’m also active in Latinx studies, but CAA for me feels like home. I was very fortunate to win one of the CAA Millard Meiss subventions early on for my first book. CAA to me is just fundamental in terms of you go to the conference, you see what everyone’s working on, what does the field look like at this moment? You see lots of old friends. You hopefully meet some new people.
The job market is a challenge right now for young scholars who are just finishing. Because of the fields I work in, I am very fortunate that my students have done really well. They tend to have multiple job offers. I had two people on the market this year, so I’m very grateful for that. I think it’s actually really important to broaden what it is we can teach and what we can talk about. Not just be highly specialized in twenty years of the 16th century, for example. It’s extremely important to have range, to be able to even move out of art history. A number of my students are also working in ethnic studies right now, and they’ve all done beautifully on the job market.
I think it’s also up to us to argue for the importance of what we do. Visual literacy could not be more important than it is at this particular moment. This is the most visual world that has ever existed, so that visual literacy argument is important for us to make, I feel.
So we had a record number of submissions this year, and I read a lot of them. I read hundreds of the submissions, and really allotted a lot of time to doing it, because you want to make sure you give every submission a fair read and a good read. You don’t want to be grouchy or tired when you’re reading someone’s submission. It’s their work. It’s very important. So I read I’m guessing 400 or 500 of the submissions. Yeah. I really wanted to get a sense of where everybody was.
The final decisions are made by a committee, by the Annual Conference Committee, and there were so many submissions this year that we pulled in extra readers. You want to have a very diverse group of readers because our knowledge tends to be very particular. For example, you want to make sure you have people who are in studio art reading studio art proposals. Somebody who understands maybe contemporary may not understand ancient pre-Columbian. So you want to have readers who are literate in a variety of areas able to read and fairly assess the submissions.
I think it’s really important, and I’m speaking as an advisor, as a mentor, as someone who’s also an editor, that I like it when we put our main idea out first or upfront. When we’re talking in a proposal submission, I think it’s important to not kind of unroll your way to the main point. So I think being direct can really help clarify what you’re talking about.
I think to be successful presenting, it is really important that you’re not just reading, looking down, reading your script. That even if you have to rehearse moments of engagement with the audience, that will really enliven the presentation. Take time to look at the images you’re talking about, to point out things in the images. Take time to engage directly with your audience, make eye contact with them. I know when I’m working with students, it’s very important to tell people that you need to do those things, and to rehearse the paper so that you’re not stumbling—you know what you’re going to say before you say it.
I love the opportunity to connect with people that I haven’t seen since the last conference. I love seeing the latest work that’s happening in art history, and I love hearing artists talk about what they’re doing.
Charlene Villaseñor Black, whose research focuses on the art of the Ibero-American world, is Professor of Art History and Chicana/o Studies at UCLA. Winner of the 2016 Gold Shield Faculty Prize and author of the prize-winning and widely-reviewed 2006 book, Creating the Cult of St. Joseph: Art and Gender in the Spanish Empire, she is finishing her second monograph, Transforming Saints: Women, Art, and Conversion in Mexico and Spain, 1521-1800. Her edited book, Chicana/o Art: Tradition and Transformation, was released in February 2015. She is co-editor of a special edition of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History entitled Trade Networks and Materiality: Art in the Age of Global Encounters, 1492-1800, with Dr. Maite Álvarez of the J. Paul Getty Museum; and editor of a forthcoming issue of Aztlán focused on teaching Chicana/o and Latina/o art history. She has held grants from the Getty, ACLS, Fulbright, Mellon, Woodrow Wilson Foundations and the NEH. While much of her research investigates the politics of religious art and global exchange, Villaseñor Black is also actively engaged in the Chicana/o art scene. Her upbringing as a working class, Catholic Chicana/o from Arizona forged her identity as a border-crossing early modernist and inspirational teacher.
Hunter O’Hanian in Conversation with Eric Segal, Director of Education and Curator of Academic Programs at the Harn Museum
posted by CAA — September 04, 2018
CAA’s executive director, Hunter O’Hanian, recently visited the Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida to speak with Eric Segal, the museum’s director of education and curator of academic programs, about the role of academic art museums and Resources for Academic Art Museum Professionals (RAAMP).
A project of CAA supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, RAAMP aims to strengthen the educational mission of academic museums and their parent organizations by providing a publicly accessible repository of resources, online forums, and relevant news and information.
Watch and read the interview below.
Hunter O’Hanian: Hello everybody. My name’s Hunter O’Hanian and I’m the director of the College Art Association. I’m very pleased today to be with Eric Segal, who is the director of education and curator of academic programs here at the Harn Museum in Gainesville, Florida. Hello, Eric. How are you?
Eric Segal: Hunter, I’m doing well. It’s great to have you here in Gainesville.
HO: Well, it’s absolutely beautiful. It’s been great to be spending time here and to go through the museum. Before we start, tell us a little bit about your background. I know you’ve been a CAA member since you were in graduate school, but tell us a little bit about your professional background.
ES: Sure. CAA since 1993.
HO: Yay.
ES: I actually started my college career as a computer engineering major. So, it was a big change when my sister made me take an art history class and that led me into art history, and I studied American art subsequently at UCLA, Masters.
HO: And, I think you won a Terra award, too.
ES: I was really fortunate to have a Terra award in 1999.
HO: Great.
ES: And that was very exciting for me and helped me in my studies. Following the completion of my doctoral dissertation, I took an assistant professor position here at University of Florida. So, I was in the art history department teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in American art, African American art, illustration and even occasionally about museum theory. Later, in 2010, a position opened up in the museum where I was able to take on museum practice a bit more. That position was the academic programs position, which had just been created as the museum realized it was important to draw closer to the university. At that time, before the position opened up, there were perhaps a few dozen courses using the museum, because there was no one doing the outreach to work with faculty across campus.
Since that time, about 10 years, we’ve maybe increased that tenfold. The number of courses, the number of faculty, the number of disciplines and students using the museum—we’ve been really delighted to expand that quite a bit.
HO: That’s great. So, [the] University of Florida here in Gainesville, about 50,000 students here on campus.
ES: Yes.
HO: You have an art history department here. And do you have a studio arts department as well?
ES: It’s a combined school of art and art history and they’re both very robust. There’s a faculty of about seven in art history and the tens, twenties in art and they’re all great colleagues. In fact, in 2019 we will have the studio art faculty show here at the museum, which comes [around] every five years.
HO: Wonderful. So, the Harn Museum has been around since 1990. Roughly, how big is it? How many square feet is the facility?
ES: The museum is about 26,000 square feet.
HO: That’s big for an academic art museum.
ES: It is. We have all of our storage onsite. We have great galleries devoted to five collecting areas. We collect in African [art], in Asian [art], in photography, in modern and contemporary art. And we have a curator in each area. So, we’re very lucky. Many academic museums don’t have such a robust curatorial staff. And we also have classrooms where we can do teaching, where we can bring objects out from storage in order to connect with academic classes on campus if we have a theme we want to try to address, say, “urban imagery.” It may be better just with works that are in storage, rather than those that happen to be on view at a given time.
HO: And 11,000 objects in the collection?
ES: That’s right.
HO: Wow. And so how do you go about procuring objects for the collection?
ES: Right. So our curators are very active along with our development officer and our director in building relationships. So, we do have an endowment for acquisitions, but many of our acquisitions do come through gifts from donors, and that would be in all areas.
HO: I noticed too in going through the museum with you that you also have a fair number of Florida artists in your collection. Can you speak about some of them?
ES: We have Florida artists from the 19th century through the present. Some of them are former faculty at UF with international and national reputations, and some include folk artists who work locally and are widely collected and whose work reveals unexpected and inspiring perspectives on our own community. So, we have both highly-trained professional artists and amateur or untrained artists.
HO: It seems to me also that you’ve done a lot of work in your role as far as inviting members of the local Gainesville community, people who are not part of the academic campus on or into the museum through different programs. Can you talk generally about how you’ve been programming in trying to bring the local Gainesville community into the museum?
ES: Sure. So, as curator of academic programs, I obviously personally focus a lot on the academic community, but I’m also director of education as you mentioned, and I have a staff with whom I work to engage the community. I also consider that my responsibility as well. We have public programs that I think of as creating layers of access. There’s programs that are traditional museum programs of lectures and educational docent tours, which have immediate appeal to people who are familiar with museums and have a museum-going experience and know they might want to learn something about an exhibition, but we also have our whole range of activities that invite the community in perhaps for a first time. We’re creating museum goers out of our local citizenry.
So, those might be experiences that sound more fun and social, but include informal learning opportunities. We have a museum nights event once a month which is open in the evenings. So, lots of programs such as that, but we also think it’s really important to reach audiences that aren’t even looking at the museum as a possible venue for leisure or art experiences and we find it’s really effective to work with the local public schools. All children go to schools and we’re able to work with them to provide transportation and rich tour experiences and programs that engage children and parents as well. Creating the opportunity to connect with families that might not be thinking of the museum, but may learn from the children that it’s a really welcoming, relevant, and meaningful space.
HO: Overall for the whole museum, how big is the staff here?
ES: The staff, including security and frontline staff, is about fifty.
HO: Wow. Great.
ES: So, it’s pretty robust.
HO: And for academic programs and education, how big is that?
ES: In education, we have six full-time staff and a number of part-time staff who support programs and activities. So, we’re also very lucky. There are smaller museums that are working on a narrower range of staff resources.
HO: What challenges do you see for the education programs here at the Harn Museum going forward?
ES: Well, you did ask about our connecting with community audiences and our challenge is to continue to grow that and be relevant and to let audiences know that we are welcoming. We want to reach audiences that have not seen themselves in museums. So, diversity in our audiences is something we’ve done a lot to improve with by partnering with local groups, with activists, with people in different communities. We’ve done a lot to improve our diversity of audiences, but we’re still expanding there. In staff, that’s another area where we really need to work hard and we have focused part of our strategic plan extension into 2019 to focus on developing new ways to build diverse staff members across the museum, including in senior staff, which as we know in museums in the United States is a real problem.
HO: If you were speaking to someone else in your position, maybe in a more rural location or a smaller facility, and they wanted to engage the community more, what advice would you give them?
ES: That’s a great question. I think that it’s really important to let audiences know that they’re welcome and to my mind, the best way to get that message out there is by being out in the community, attending community fora on relevant topics, being part of discussions of education and educational resources, being part of discussions on how universities are trying to engage—the local university or college may be trying to engage the community, both on campus and in the community. Being a face in the community makes you somewhat approachable and starts to build the relationship that’s hard to build with an advertisement in the paper that says, “Everyone’s welcome. Admission is free”. Hopefully.
So, that would be one of the first steps that I think I would try in that position is to really be part of the community and to make contact with community leaders who already have authentic connections to different members of different areas of the community.
HO: We’re going to be recording some video practicum about different areas in the museum and we’ll get into some more of those details later, but it also seems as if you’ve developed good relationships with different departments within the college itself. Can you speak a little bit about doing that and how you go about being successful there?
ES: Some of our failures in doing that have been—not that I wouldn’t continue to do it—you know, I go and give a talk to the faculty senate and I send a letter to all faculty and I get a lot of emails back, if I’m lucky, that say, you know, I saw your email but I didn’t read it last year because you sent it to everyone. So, the hard work is making individual contacts either by email but also being out there again on campus. I try to serve on committees, be it in the international center or on undergraduate curriculum, wherever it might be useful, seeing that the museum could be a resource that can be built into emerging programs and projects. So, being at the table is important. And then building the individual connections to faculty. One faculty member in a language and literature department can be your ambassador to other faculty members.
HO: And, of course you’re familiar with RAAMP resources for academic art museum professionals, and the Harn has been one of the original stakeholders, and this has been a great project that CAA has worked on with the Mellon Foundation.
ES: Yes.
HO: We’ve been very happy with the success. As a resource out there, how have you been able to use RAAMP and also were there any changes you’d like to see to it or more things you’d like to see us add to it?
ES: Yes. RAAMP is a great resource. It’s been wonderful to see it grow and the website has, for anyone who hasn’t visited it recently, really been improved in the last year, making it searchable in a way that it wasn’t before. So, it’s a resource where you can actually find the materials that are there pretty easily now and that makes it especially useful. So, for me, it’s been great as a source of inspiration when I come up against a problem such as “How do I…?” I haven’t found this one yet, but one of my problems is how do I connect with low temperature physics? I’ve never solved that problem, but when someone posts that to RAMP, that’s where I’m going find it.
HO: Great. So, for any of you out there who have an answer to that quick question as to how to deal with low temperature physics, please post it on RAAMP now.
ES: That’s right. But, it’s really a great source of inspiration [for] problem solving and models that exist out there. It’s also I think increasingly going to continue to serve the role of [a] point for conversations, which is something that I’m really looking forward to, because sometimes someone hasn’t posted on low temperature physics, but they may have already done it. And so it’s a chance to get feedback and ideas. I’m also really looking forward to in the future ideas about building diversity, as we discussed earlier. How it’s being pursued at other museums, both in terms of audiences but also in terms of staff. I think as a community academic program officers in museums need to come together to build the pipeline of museum professionals. That includes recruiting students when they’re young. I’ve been working with high school students in the past week to just tell them that museums are a career and that’s important.
It includes supporting internships. I think that discussion can happen in RAAMP about how we can sort of strategically create a pool that we’re all going draw on to diversify our staff. I’m also looking forward to learning from RAAMP more about ideas for academic programs working with development offices.
HO: Interesting. The fundraising piece.
ES: Yes. The fundraising piece. We’re all challenged in our budgets. In the past year, we’ve developed a program on early learning that we built with the college of education, and we built a really robust project, and someone said: “You need to do a video for this.” And that video has been helpful for us in developing private funds to continue to pursue this program that provides education for headstart students.
HO: Which is great, because it gives potential funders the opportunity to see what the programs are really about and be able to see that.
ES: It is. And that’s the kind of thing I’d love to share on RAAMP and also learn from others their strategies for taking our programs and having them be tools for building our funding.
HO: Yes. I’ve been recently reviewing the session proposals for the upcoming CAA conference in New York in February of 2019 and there are a lot of sessions that are coming up for professionals in academic art museums, because I do think it’s a growing field that a lot of PhD students or PhD holders and Masters will be going into it in the future. So, there will be a lot at this year’s conference in February.
ES: That’s really great to hear. And I hope that non-museum professionals, hope that artists and art historians will attend those as well, because their voices are really useful to be part of those conversations that art museum professionals are having. I was thinking about the sort of professionalization that another area of RAAMP is going help us connect on is going to be evaluation. Museums are always challenged in terms of evaluation. We know it’s important to prove that what we do is effective. Evaluation is time-consuming or expensive or both, and sharing expertise and ideas in that area I think is going to be something that’s going to really help us to build our case in the future.
HO: Yes, I mean, ultimately all museums are educational institutions, and we have to be able to quantify how that happened.
ES: I think that is the case.
HO: Eric, thank you so much for your time here. It’s been great to tour the museum and I really have appreciated it. And so good luck with all your work going forward.
ES: Thank you, Hunter, for sharing your interest of the museum with our RAAMP audiences.
Subscribe to CAA’s YouTube Channel!
posted by CAA — June 20, 2016
CAA’s YouTube channel is the home of videos from our Annual Conference, tutorials and presentations on fair use, and content on a variety of other topics. We ask our members “Why are you a CAA Member?” at our 2016 conference. Longtime conference attendees reflect on the impact of their experiences over the years in “In Their Own Words.”
Immerse yourself in social-practice art from our 2016 Distinguished Artists’ Interviews (Joyce Scott with George Ciscle and Rick Lowe with LaToya Ruby Frazier) and watch colleagues and friends honor art historians Richard Powell of Duke University and Linda Nochlin of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
The Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera is interviewed by Rachel Weiss, professor of arts administration and policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. William “Bro” Adams, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, talks with Jane Chu, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts; and Jarl Mohn, president and CEO of National Public Radio, speaks about his personal connection to the arts.
Subscribe to CAA’s YouTube channel to stay up to date on all our videos!