CAA News Today
Books Published by CAA Members
posted Jun 06, 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.
June 2017
Jeffrey Abt. Valuing Detroit’s Art Museum: A History of Fiscal Abandonment and Rescue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
Matthew Baigell. The Implacable Urge to Defame: Cartoon Jews in the American Press, 1877–1935 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2017).
Thea Burns. The “Compositiones variae”: A Late Eighth-Century Craftsman’s Technical Treatise Reconsidered (London: Archetype, 2017).
Kim Grant. All about Process: The Theory and Discourse of Modern Artistic Labor (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017).
James Housefield. Playing with Earth and Sky: Astronomy, Geography, and the Art of Marcel Duchamp (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England; Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2016).
Ruth E. Iskin, ed., Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World (New York: Routledge, 2017).
Tirza True Latimer. Eccentric Modernisms: Making Differences in the History of American Art (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).
Chari Pradel. Fabricating the Tenjukoku Shūchō Mandara and Prince Shōtoku’s Afterlives (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2016).
Athena Tacha. Visualizing the Universe: Athena Tacha’s Proposals for Public Art Commissions 1972–2012, ed. Richard E. Spear, introduction by Glenn Harper and Twylene Moyer (Washington, DC: Grayson, 2017).
Getty Supports the CAA-Getty International Program for a Seventh Year
posted Jun 05, 2017
The Getty Foundation has awarded the College Art Association (CAA) a grant to fund the CAA-Getty International Program for a seventh consecutive year. The Foundation’s support will enable CAA to bring twenty international visual-arts professionals to the 106th Annual Conference, taking place February 21-24, 2018 in Los Angeles, CA. Fifteen individuals will be first-time participants in the program and five will be alumni, returning to present papers during the conference. The CAA-Getty International Program provides funds for travel expenses, hotel accommodations, per diems, conference registrations, and one-year CAA memberships to art historians, artists who teach art history, and museum curators. The program will include a one-day preconference colloquium on international issues in art history on February 20, this year to be held at the Getty Center.
The deadline for applications is August 21, 2017. Guidelines and application.
The CAA-Getty International Program was established to increase international participation in CAA and the CAA Annual Conference. The program fosters collaborations between North American art historians, artists, and curators and their international colleagues and introduces visual arts professionals to the unique environments and contexts of practices in different countries.
Since the CAA-Getty International Program’s inception in 2012, ninety scholars have participated in CAA’s Annual Conference. Historically, the majority of international registrants at the conference have come from North America, the United Kingdom, and Western European countries. The CAA-Getty International Program has greatly diversified attendance, adding scholars from Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, Africa, Asia, Southeast Asia, Caribbean countries, and South America. The majority of the participants teach art history (or visual studies, art theory, or architectural history) at the university level; others are museum curators or researchers.
Earlier this year, CAA organized a reunion to celebrate five successful years of the CAA-Getty International Program. Twenty alumni were selected to present papers at the Annual Conference in New York, held February 15-18, 2017. Organized into four sessions about international topics in art history, these Global Conversations were chaired by distinguished scholars from the United States and featured presentations by the CAA-Getty alumni.
Read Global Conversations: 20 Papers from the 2017 CAA-Getty Alumni
One measure of the program’s success is the remarkable number of international collaborations that have ensued, including an ongoing study of similarities and differences in the history of art among Eastern European countries and South Africa, attendance at other international conferences, publications in international journals, and participation in panels and sessions at subsequent CAA Annual Conferences. Former grant recipients have become ambassadors of CAA in their countries, sharing knowledge gained at the Annual Conference with their colleagues at home. The value of attending a CAA Annual Conference as a participant in the CAA-Getty International Program was succinctly summarized by alumnus Nazar Kozak, Senior Researcher, Department of Art Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine “To put it simply, I understood that I can become part of a global scholarly community. I felt like I belong here.”
About CAA
The College Art Association is the world’s largest professional association for artists, art historians, designers, arts professionals, and arts organizations. 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.
About the Getty Foundation
The Getty Foundation fulfills the philanthropic mission of the Getty Trust by supporting individuals and institutions committed to advancing the greater understanding and preservation of the visual arts in Los Angeles and throughout the world. Through strategic grant initiatives, it strengthens art history as a global discipline, promotes the interdisciplinary practice of conservation, increases access to museum and archival collections, and develops current and future leaders in the visual arts. It carries out its work in collaboration with the other Getty Programs to ensure that they individually and collectively achieve maximum effect.
New in caa.reviews
posted Jun 02, 2017
Rachel Goshgarian visits Court and Cosmos: The Great Age of the Seljuqs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As “the first major exhibition on the Seljuqs in the United States,” the show “sets out to elucidate how the orders of this world and the next were conceptualized and represented in the Seljuq Empire and its successor states,” and, “to a certain extent,” the curators “delivered.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Amy Chun Kim reads They Shall Not Have Me: The Capture, Forced Labor, and Escape of a French Prisoner in World War II, the artist Jean Hélion’s account of his imprisonment and escape from German camps. His “experience of the concrete as a camp inmate consolidated an aesthetic trajectory that was already in motion,” and this “vivid portrait” is “a stylistic testimony to this rejection of abstraction.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Agata A. Gomółka reviews Gretchen E. Henderson’s Ugliness: A Cultural History. The author “ventures on a critical journey through the history of ugliness, viewing the concept through the lens of culture and corporeality” and “packs an abundance of fascinating case studies and thought-provoking insights into a stimulating conceptual framework.” It is a “highly readable, erudite, and compelling account.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Rebecca Uchill is the New Web Editor for Art Journal Open
posted Jun 01, 2017
Rebecca Uchill
CAA’s president, Suzanne Preston Blier, has appointed Rebecca Uchill as the new web editor for Art Journal Open, endorsing the recommendation of the editorial board of Art Journal. Uchill, who currently is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Art, Science, and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joins the College of Visual and Performing Arts at UMass Dartmouth in September as a full-time lecturer. Uchill’s three-year term for Art Journal Open commences on July 1, 2017; she succeeds inaugural web editor Gloria Sutton, assistant professor of contemporary art history and new media at Northeastern University. During her term, Uchill will be responsible for commissioning and vetting content for the website, including artist projects and essays. She will serve on the Art Journal editorial board.
Uchill is the coeditor (with Caroline A. Jones and David Mather) of Experience: Culture, Cognition, and the Common Sense (MIT Press, 2016), as well as curator of the artist entries for the volume. She organizes interdisciplinary events and programs, including the recent “Being Material” symposium at MIT and a series of curatorial experiments with the collaborative Experience Economies. Uchill has published in journals such as Future Anterior, Museum and Curatorial Studies Review, Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation, and Journal of Curatorial Studies. She has curated exhibitions at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Mass MoCA. Uchill earned her PhD in history, theory, and criticism of art at MIT in 2015.
CAA welcomes Rebecca Uchill to Art Journal Open.
Art Journal Open welcomes proposals for artists’ projects, critical writing, and other contributions, on a rolling basis. Please see the submission guidelines here. Submissions are accepted via e-mail to art.journal.open@collegeart.org.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted May 31, 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.
How a $25,000 NEA Grant Became a Springboard for Change in a Rural Minnesota Community
A grant of $25,000 is not even a drop in the bucket of the US federal government’s spending, but it effected visible change in Fergus Falls, a small rural community in Minnesota with a population of 13,000, which received that dollar amount from an NEA grant in 2011. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Is It Time for an Arts Think Tank Yet?
Two or three organizations have taken up studies, research, and positions on arts and culture topics, but these have been isolated, occasional forays. There is no think tank that has as its principal charge the arts, humanities, creativity, culture, heritage, and other facets and divisions of the wider field of culture and creativity. (Read more from Barry’s Blog.)
After Protests from Native American Community, Walker Art Center Will Remove Public Sculpture
Less than a week before the Walker Art Center was scheduled to open its newly renovated sculpture garden, it announced that one of the major new works added to the park will be removed. The sculpture in question, Scaffold (2012) by the Los Angeles–based artist Sam Durant, is a giant structure made of steel and wood. (Read more from Hyperallergic.)
Discovered in a Lab, a New Superblue Has Been Unleashed upon the World as a Crayola Crayon
When the chemist Mas Subramanian accidentally discovered the brilliantly bright YInMn blue at Oregon State University in 2009, he had no idea the bold shade would one day be embraced by doodling schoolchildren everywhere. Now, the first new blue pigment discovered in two hundred years is poised to become part of your kid’s next Crayola crayon box set. (Read more from Artnet News.)
These Eight Zines by People of Color Show Why the Medium Has Remained Relevant
There has been a resurgence of print in the age of expeditious digital consumption. The popularity of zines today, however, should not be chocked up to nostalgia alone. Rather, the printed medium has long been a tool for political and social engagement among artists and writers of color. (Read more from Artsy.)
The Dissertation-to-Book Transition
Which aspects of a dissertation are most commonly tossed out when presented in book format? For instance, while most of my dissertation is written as a book, I reserved an entire chapter for methodology. I assume that section will be significantly condensed—if not scrapped altogether —as a book manuscript? (Read more from Vitae.)
Is Criticism Dead Yet? Does Anyone Care?
Remember not so long ago when the crisis of criticism was on everyone’s tongue? It was only a couple of years ago, but it seems like a lifetime. Panels were convened, postmortems performed. The consensus, as far as there was one, was that the internet killed criticism. (Read more from Glasstire.)
Spring 2017 Recipients of the Millard Meiss Publication Fund
posted May 30, 2017
This spring, CAA awarded grants to the publishers of seven books in art history and visual culture through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to the generous bequest of the late Prof. Millard Meiss, CAA gives these grants to support the publication of scholarly books in art history and related fields.
The seven Meiss grantees for spring 2017 are:
- Mark Cheetham, Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature since the ’60s, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Justin Jesty, Arts of Engagement: Socially Engaged Art and the Democratic Culture of Japan’s Early Postwar, Cornell University Press
- Farhan Karim, Modernism of Austerity: Designing an Ideal House for the Poor, University of Pittsburgh Press
- Lynda Klich, The Noisemakers: Estridentismo, Vanguardism, and Social Action in Post-Revolutionary Mexico, University of California Press
- Mia Yinxing Liu, The Literati Lenses: Wenren Landscape in Chinese Cinema, University of Hawai’i Press
- J. P. Park, Conflicted Realities: Painting and Cultural Politics in Late Chosŏn Korea, University of Washington Press
- Øystein Sjåstad, Christian Krogh’s Naturalism, University of Washington Press
Books eligible for Meiss grants must already be under contract with a publisher and on a subject in the visual arts or art history. Authors and presses must be current CAA members. Please review the application guidelines for more information.
New in caa.reviews
posted May 26, 2017
Sarah R. Cohen reads On Display: Henrietta Maria and the Materials of Magnificence at the Stuart Court by Erin Griffey. In this “meticulously researched” and “densely detailed” volume, the author argues that “early modern sovereigns, especially powerful woman such as Queen Henrietta Maria of England, projected their authority through the specific and calculated allure of their material luxuries.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Paisid Aramphongphan reviews Wade Guyton’s One Month Ago, an artist’s book featuring the transposed contents of a Tumblr blog consisting “mainly of photographs of a variety of gay kink scenes.” The reviewer is “inclined to read the book as Guyton’s rebuke to the line of criticism that positions him as basking in the limelight without making a difference in the privileged art world of abstract paintings.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Ellis Dullaart discusses Confronting the Golden Age: Imitation and Innovation in Dutch Genre Painting, 1680–1750 by Junko Aono. The author aims “to investigate how artists working in the waning light of the Golden Age dealt with the illustrious artistic past,” and the book “delivers important insights” and “has the potential to revive interest in and appreciation for a long-neglected period in Dutch art history.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Betsy Fahlman examines the exhibition catalogue A Place in the Sun: The Southwest Paintings of Walter Ufer and E. Martin Hennings, edited by Thomas Brent Smith. Meticulously researched and “handsomely produced,” the volume “accomplishes the authors’ intention to restore these figures as artists of exceptional talent who were engaged with the significant art and historical issues of the day.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Southeast of Now: Introducing a New Journal about Contemporary and Modern Asian Art
posted May 25, 2017
One of the great challenges of our time is to make sense of the world on a global scale, even while facing ever more urgent concerns at various local levels. While artists, curators, critics, and scholars of art have embraced this challenge for some time now, the global discourse of contemporary and modern art remains stubbornly asymmetrical, with many contexts for discussion oriented to the North and the West, and also to the new and the now.
Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia was established by a collective of scholars and curators as a discursive space for creating encounters between critical texts of contemporary and modern art produced in, from, and around Southeast Asia. The editorial board includes researchers from Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Cambodia, and Malaysia. It is presently the only scholarly journal dedicated to the recent art of this region.
The journal presents a necessarily diverse range of views not only on the contemporary and modern art of Southeast Asia, but indeed of the region itself: its borders, its identity, its efficacy, and its limitations as a geographical marker and a conceptual category. As such, the journal is defined by a commitment to the need for and importance of rigorous discussion of the contemporary and modern art of the domain that lies south of China, east of India, and north of Australia.
Why ‘Southeast’ of ‘Now’?
The title of the journal has a playful yet provocative function as a reminder that Southeast Asia is named, and to a large extent discursively defined, in relation to an imagined geographical center in the North and the West. It is also a reminder that discussions of contemporary and modern art are increasingly framed by an imagined temporal center: that of the now.
The lack of educational infrastructure of art history in most countries in Southeast Asia was one of the principal motivations behind the creation of the journal. Resisting the pressure to be always up-to-date and forever new, the journal instead values the historicizing of recent practices, from the nineteenth century (and before) to the present (and after). This historical perspective is a foundation for contributions which may otherwise draw on a diverse range of disciplines and methodologies.
Of Themes and Form(ations)
The playful disquiet evoked by the title of the journal, which troubles linear notions of space-time and destabilizes any certainty of an imagined temporal center, gave rise to the inaugural volume’s theme: Discomfort. The provocations that the Southeast of Now editorial collective sought included pieces that reflect on the burdens and future possibility of wielding “regionalism” as a framework. The editors hope to locate this source of tension and anxiety through various discourses and narratives. Texts published in the journal’s first issue suggest also the possibility to discover some comfort within unease, even if merely within shared discomfort.
One key feature of the journal is the inclusion of less academically-driven sections (‘Interview’, ‘Archive’, ‘Artists’ Projects’ and ‘Review’)—spaces the editors felt were necessary for creating discourses about contemporary and modern Southeast Asian art, and providing access to conversations that are already ongoing. It was important for them to create an open platform within the journal where they could create opportunities for artistic responses as well as scholarly articles. Many contemporary artists are engaged in artistic research and are eager to present their views in formats other than written texts, essays, or reviews.
Images from video interview with Pak Edhi Sunarso by Tom Nicholson and Grace Samboh
In Volume 1, Number 1, for example, the section titled Artists’ Projects features a video by Tom Nicholson and Grace Samboh, in which they documented their interview with Pak Edhi Sunarso, one of Indonesia’s most eminent sculptors. Southeast of Now is a fitting place where this kind of research material could travel beyond the site of the physical exhibition in which it was originally viewed, which was the Jakarta Biennale. Within the context of the journal it is not only an artwork to be experienced; it is also a primary source of research material about a valuable figure in Indonesia’s modern art history.
The structure of the journal also provides numerous curatorial possibilities. The Artists’ Projects pages offer a space for a specifically curated sequence of images or texts, either by a member of the editorial collective, a guest curator, or a respondent to a call for proposals. This follows new approaches to publishing where printed matter may be considered as an exhibition format in two-dimensional form. In future issues the editors will alternate such presentations with archival pages from various collections within and beyond the region, as well as translations and other resources.
The Art of Re/De-Categorizing
Southeast of Now effectively aims to be a platform where the categories of “contemporary and modern art,” indeed of “art” in general, as much as the category of “Southeast Asia” itself, will always be open for debate. The editors anticipate continuous challenges in redefining these categories, by looking at aspects of culture that do not usually qualify as “art,” by treating the region’s borders as fluid, and also by looking at research that transcends these borders.
The journal strives to remain committed to the importance of an historical approach, however interwoven with methodologies from other disciplines and practices. The editors hope that future issues of the journal will look further back in time, to the nineteenth century (and before) with the goal of placing the historical research in dialogue with issues of today.
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The journal is published by the National University of Singapore Press and it is published twice a year (March and October), in print and online via Project MUSE.
To find out more about submission guidelines and subscription information, visit www.southeastofnow.com or the National University of Singapore Press website.
Images from video interview with Pak Edhi Sunarso by Tom Nicholson and Grace Samboh
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted May 24, 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.
Modern African Art Is Being Gentrified
I am tempted to think of contemporary African art as akin to an urban neighborhood undergoing gentrification. Now that it is high culture, investors are jostling to get a piece of the action, and private collections are growing in Africa and around the world. This is very good news for the African modernists who will benefit from the increased visibility. (Read more from the New York Times.)
The States Where Campus Free-Speech Bills Are Being Born
Last week Tennessee’s governor signed into law a measure that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education called “the most comprehensive state legislation protecting free speech on college campuses that we’ve seen passed anywhere in the country.” That new law, among other things, bars public colleges from establishing “free-speech zones” and requires them to adopt broad statements of support for free expression. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Agnes Gund on Diversity in the Art World and the Future of MoMA
In addition to helping museums like MoMA and the Met keep their doors open, Agnes Gund has also been devoted to increasing the diversity of the people who walk through those doors, by funding avenues for art education that reach beyond the halls of private schools to less privileged students who don’t have the same elite cultural access. (Read more from Artnet News.)
Why Can’t the Art World Embrace Robert Rauschenberg’s Queer Community?
Like Merce Cunningham and John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg found beauty in everyday objects. Through close observation, the quotidian could bloom into something either sublime or subversive. This is a tenet of queer art, the ability to transform normativity into the unexpected. (Read more from Artsy.)
On Not Writing a Book Right Now
I recently stumbled across a 2016 Paris Review essay about Robert Caro that notes, “If there is a question that annoys Caro more than ‘Do you like Lyndon Johnson?’ it is ‘When will the next book be published?’” I understand. No question makes me cringe more than “What are you working on next?” (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Writing a Book Pre-Tenure
I wrote a book before I earned tenure—a feat, given the heavy teaching and service load at my institution. Because my situation is different from most tenure-track faculty, talking about my book’s journey isn’t useful for other academics. Instead, I want to share the most important things I learned when writing my first book pre-tenure. (Read more from Vitae.)
“What Are the Arts and Sciences?”
Dan Rockmore asks a seemingly simple question in the title of collection he has just edited, What Are the Arts and Sciences? A Guide for the Curious. But the book is about disciplines, and not just the arts and sciences as a group. Twenty-six of his colleagues at Dartmouth College wrote chapters, explaining their disciplines for the nonexpert. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
U Can’t Talk 2 Ur Professor Like This
After one too many students called me by my first name and sent me email that resembled a drunken late-night Facebook post, I took a very fogeyish step. I began attaching a page on etiquette to every syllabus: basic rules for how to address teachers and write polite, grammatically correct emails. (Read more from the New York Times.)
CAA Statement on May 23, 2017 Trump Proposed Budget
posted May 23, 2017
In early May, we recognized that your advocacy matters. Calls, letters, and visits from our members and arts and humanities supporters changed the fate of the NEA, the NEH, and the CPB for the remainder of the 2017 fiscal year. The federal agencies even got a little bump in funding.
With the release of the more detailed White House FY2018 budget this morning, we now know that we at CAA, our members, and advocates for the arts and humanities must renew our efforts to fund these agencies through another fiscal year.
The proposed budget put forth by the White House is nothing short of a gutting of federal support for the arts and humanities. The proposed budget asks for $29 million for the NEA, $30.45 million for the CPB, and $42 million for the NEH. These sums are intended as wind-down amounts resulting in the shuttering of the agencies in 2019. Yet, these are only three agencies among a long list facing cuts under the Trump FY2018 budget. Arts education through the Department of Education is zeroed out and the IMLS would see a 90-percent drop in funding, from $231 million to 23 million in FY2018. Social services agencies assisting the financially insecure are some of the hardest hit with cuts.
Though these numbers are disheartening, we do know from our advocacy efforts on Capital Hill this year that the arts and humanities garner bipartisan support. Many of our elected officials understand the importance of these programs. They see the impact in their own districts through the work of non-profits, higher education institutions, and others who receive grants from the federal agencies.
But the fight is far from over.
Once again, it is imperative that all those who have been touched by the arts and humanities renew the fight to keep these agencies alive and thriving. We urge our members and supporters to make contact with your local representative and tell them the NEA, NEH, and CPB are an integral part of your lives and society.
If you would like to hear what Holly Hughes, one of the NEA Four thinks about the rationale for defunding the NEA, click here.
Use our toolkit to contact your local representative.
Read our March 16, 2017 Statement on the FY2018 skinny budget.