CAA News Today
CAA 2018: Los Angeles Travelogue
posted May 03, 2017
Director of Programs Tiffany Dugan and I just returned from a week in Los Angeles to make plans for CAA’s Annual Conference in 2018.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Scheduled for February 21-24 at the LA Convention Center, the 106th CAA Annual Conference promises to be one of the strongest ever. When the online session submissions portal closed last week, we had more than 800 submissions – one of the largest numbers in recent years. The Annual Conference Committee is reviewing the submissions this month and will be making final selections.
Based on past conference attendance, we anticipate more than 4,000 conference attendees in Los Angeles. We expect to schedule more than 250 sessions and over 200 events, including meetings, receptions, and tours. To house everyone, we secured three principal hotels, all within walking distance of the Convention Center, guaranteeing 6,000 guest nights.
We visited with the staffs and toured the Westin Bonaventure, Millennium Biltmore LA, and JW Marriott. Hotel rooms for the conference will range from $139 to $269 a night, depending on which hotel you select and the type of room you want. The John Portman designed Westin Bonaventure will be our host hotel and has the cool elegance reflecting the beginning of LA’s downtown revival in the mid-1970s. The Biltmore, which opened in 1923, reflects the opulence and beaux-arts style from LA’s golden age as the film industry was in its burgeoning stage. The new, swank JW Marriot is closest to the Convention Center and at the door of all the urban excitement of L.A. Live. All three hotels are within walking distance of the Convention Center. And the Westin even has a good cup of coffee below $2 in the lobby!
Food trucks in front of the Broad
Near the hotels, we found lots of great restaurants – everything from a hearty breakfast at the Original Pantry Café (which is open 24 hours) to the Blue Cow Kitchen & Bar, Bunker Hill Bar & Grill, Bottega Louie, Eat.Drink.Americano, and Water Grill. Food trucks are on virtually every corner (you have to try the sushi burrito). And there are plenty of artisanal coffee shops as well. In the coming months we will be working on setting up discounts at local restaurants and businesses for our attendees. Our hosts at the LA Convention Center gave us a great tour and we were able to see where the registration area, book and trade fair, and sessions rooms will be. We were able to secure more creature comforts like additional seating between sessions for impromptu conversations, charging stations for phone and laptops, and a quiet room to decompress from the hustle and bustle of the conference.
Getty Center
The Getty Museum, LACMA, and MOCA all opened their doors to us and we had great meetings. Each institution is looking forward to CAA 2018 and is making plans to ensure that your visit is meaningful. We met with leaders at UCLA and USC. In upcoming trips, we will be meeting with leaders at the Norton Simon Museum, The Huntington Library, Hammer Museum, Fisher Museum, and The Broad, as well as Otis College of Art and Design, Pasadena City College, Santa Monica College, and many others.
We also toured other cultural organizations including REDCAT, The Brewery Artist Lofts, Japanese American Museum, Chinese American Museum, 18th Street Arts Center, A+D Architecture and Design Museum, Craft and Folk Art Museum and many others. They are looking forward to welcoming CAA members to visit during the conference. We are planning on a day of programing for local LA area artists at the Annual Conference similar to what we did in NYC this year.
Los Angeles Public Library
Colleges and universities interested in holding reunions and receptions at the Annual Conference will also be able to find great spaces for their events. While there are some beautiful rooms available at the CAA hotels, we saw great spaces at the Hilton Checkers (check out the roof top terrace), the LA Public Library (check out the rotunda and courtyards), the gallery district in Chinatown (check out the Charlie James Gallery and A.G. Geiger Fine Art Books), and Hauser & Wirth. There are plenty of galleries in Hollywood and the Arts District, which will be available as well. We will keep adding to this list to create alternative reception options. Since the weather will be mild, there will be plenty of opportunities to sneak away from the Conference Center and check out what LA has to offer.
If you have not been to LA in a while, you will be happy to discover that getting around is easier than ever. While your CAA membership can get you a discount on an Avis rental car, ride sharing programs such as Uber and Lyft are popular and often cost less than $5 per trip between key cultural locations. LA has also been making great progress on its public transportation system as Metro stations are popping up everywhere.
Many thanks to Annual Conference Chair Judith Rodenbeck and CAA Regional Reps John Tain and Neha Choksi, who, along with Anu Vikram and Niku Kashef, made lots of great recommendations. If you have any more ideas of places you would like to see, just let Tiffany or me know.
Finally, we’ve pulled together all the details for the Getty sponsored Pacific Standard Time and will be offering that information in the months to come. You may want to arrive earlier to make sure that you take in as much as you can. President’s Day weekend is just before the Annual Conference. Be sure to watch CAA News for more updates about the conference as we solidify our planning.
Hunter O’Hanian
Executive Director
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted May 03, 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.
Top Twenty Most Vibrant Arts Communities in America
Southern Methodist University’s National Center for Arts Research has announced its third annual Arts Vibrancy Index, which ranks more than nine hundred communities across the country, examining the level of supply, demand, and government support for the arts in each city. (Read more from the National Center for Arts Research.)
What Other States Can Learn from Rhode Island’s Arts Incentives
While Rhode Island may be the smallest state in the country, it has become a powerhouse for attracting artists and art lovers to its shores. And the method by which state leaders have leveraged Rhode Island’s tax code to benefit the creative community could serve as a model for other states looking to cultivate a stronger arts economy. (Read more from Charleston City Paper.)
US Students Are Struggling in the Arts. Donald Trump’s Budget Would Make the Problem Worse
American teenagers are not excelling in the arts, and President Trump’s proposed budget cuts will likely make matters worse, experts say. The most recent results of a wide-ranging national educational assessment known as the Nation’s Report Card left significant room for improvement in the visual arts and music, the National Center for Education Statistics reported last week. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)
Want Happier Professors? Try Being Nice
When it comes to keeping tenured professors content in their jobs, you can catch more flies with honey than you can with big faculty-focused strategic initiatives. A new study has found that their organizational commitment hinged far more on whether they believed they worked in a caring, supportive environment than on their sense that administrators had undertaken broad efforts to support the faculty. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Frieze New York Gets Reframed for the Post-Truth Era
Reflecting director Victoria Siddall’s aim that Frieze, true to its editorial roots, should be “a place where art is made, discussed, and debated,” there will be protest in the air when the fair unfurls its serpentine white tent for its sixth edition in New York. Some galleries are using Frieze as a platform to respond to current events. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Wait—What Was That? History’s Bygone Art Movements
“Fame,” according to art critic Henry McBride, “is a most uncertain garment.” The same is true of art movements and labels. Some—Abstract Expressionism, for instance—are familiar to the average museumgoer. However, others that were at one time in the vanguard have slipped into the shadows and are now the province of art historians and other specialists. (Read more from ARTnews.)
Was Robert Rauschenberg the Con Man of Art?
There’s a volubility about Rauschenberg’s visual imagination that is irreconcilable with the discipline art demands. However monumental or panoramic a work of art may be, there must always be some acknowledgment of the limits of the artist’s vision. There was something of the outrageousness of a Ponzi scheme in the way Rauschenberg took this or that avant-garde idea and inflated it—over and over again. (Read more from the New York Review of Books.)
How Big Is the Online Art Market?
Despite a relative slowdown in the global art market, the online art market grew by 15 percent, to $3.75 billion, last year, according to Robert Read, head of art and private clients for Hiscox. The online art market’s share of the total art market also grew last year, from 7.4 percent in 2015 to 8.4 percent. While that may seem small, it is roughly equivalent to ecommerce sales’ share of the total retail market, which reached 8.3 percent last year, according to the US census. (Read more from Artnet News.)
CWA Picks for May 2017
posted May 01, 2017
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed.
Louise Lawler: A Movie Will Be Shown Without a Picture
Museum of Modern Art
11 W 53 Street, New York, NY
May 2 and 10, 2017
Marquee for A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture, Aero Theatre, Santa Monica, California, December 7, 1979 (photograph by Louise Lawler)
An appropriately deadpan announcement, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for Louise Lawler’s cinematic event A Movie Will Be Shown Without A Picture (1979), reproduced the work’s title on a flat black card. Indeed, this is what viewers to the Aeron Theater in Santa Monica would have encountered on the night of Lawler’s event: a film shown without its flickering image. We might understand Lawler’s gesture as a riposte to Laura Mulvey’s influential text “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” published five years before in the British film journal Screen. The filmic performance deprives audiences of the picture of the chosen film (the film changes with each iteration), instead asking them to rely on sound and soundtrack. Thus viewers are left to imagine and project their own fantasies (if they haven’t seen the film) or cobble together their memories of the film (if they have). As an arm of the programming for Louise Lawler’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, A Movie Will Be Shown Without a Picture will be screened two times.
Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter
Project Row Houses
2521 Holman St., Houston, TX
March 25–June 4, 2017
Usually the curatorial and programming staff at Project Row Houses determine a theme and invite a series of artists to make installations and public programming inside the block of row houses in Houston’s Third Ward. This time Public Art Director Ryan Dennis and artist Simone Leigh cocurated the round to be exclusively for Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter, a collective group that Leigh founded during her residency at the New Museum last year, and which now has chapters in London, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Performances, installations, platforms for dialogue and activation—these are the things that tie Project Row Houses and Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter together. What began with an incubation period to get Houston’s chapter of BWA for BLM started, and was inaugurated with a processional performance, is now a full-tilt community platform for building generative ideas and actions for entering into the movement. As if to sum up the sentiments of the current round, one of the row houses is emblazoned with a supergraphic of the following sentiment: “YOU’VE GOTTA LOVE US OR LEAVE US ALONE.”
Katharina Fritsch: Multiples
Walker Art Museum
725 Vineland Place, Minneapolis, Minnesota
May 11–October 15, 2017
Katharina Fritsch’s sculpture, which seeks to defamiliarize the familiar and query the boundaries between the natural and the symbolic, will be on view at the Walker Art Museum for the next several months. Animals, religious figurines, body parts, and other objects drawn from the history and fairy tales of her native Germany take one new meanings when color, scale, and materials of everyday objects are altered. The show will include some forty objects, ranging from her early work as a student to her more recent pieces, drawn from the museum’s permanent collection. Katharina Fritsch: Multiples is a companion exhibition to the installation of her monumental, ultramarine blue Hahn/Cock in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in June. Described by the artist as “a feminist sculpture,” this work was first displayed on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in the summer of 2013.
Musée Camille Claudel
Musée Camille Claudel
10, rue Gustave Flaubert, 10 400 Nogent-sur-Seine, France
Opened March 26, 2017
At long last, the beloved nineteenth-century French sculptor and feminist art icon Camille Claudel is receiving her due with a museum devoted to her work. Located in the small town of Nogent-sur-Seine, the Musée Camille Claudel is built around the family home where she spent her early adolescence. After a temporary exhibition of her work in 2003 brought over forty thousand visitors to Nogent-sur-Seine (pop. 6,000), it was determined that a museum dedicated to its most famous resident was in order. The Musée Camille Claudel now houses the world’s largest collection of the sculptor’s work. Visitors, who will be gratified to see such well-known pieces as The Waltz and The Gossips, will also be able to discover similarly remarkable works such as Abandon and Fortune. It takes under an hour by train to reach Nogent-sur-Seine from Paris.
Power: Work by African American Women from the Nineteenth Century to Now
Sprüth Magers
5900 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA
March 29–June 10, 2017
The exhibition Power at Sprüth Magers features thirty-seven African American women artists from the nineteenth century until now. Works span fine-art and folk-art traditions covering multiple mediums, including painting, photography, video, sculpture, and installation. The title of the exhibition takes its name from a 1970 gospel song by Sister Gertrude Morgan, a self-taught, musician, poet, artist, and preacher. The works, engaging in issues of race, gender, and class, trace the threads of the craft-based folk traditions to a newer, academically trained generation of artists, depicting the “struggle to establish themselves as equal players on the uneven field of the American republic.”
In a review of the show published in the Los Angeles Times on April 11, 2017, the author Leah Ollman writes, “Artists here treat the physical body and the emblematic body of the nation as contested sites. Historical trauma persists within both, and both serve as ready—if not always willing—vehicles for self-determination.”
Artists in the exhibition, which was curated by Todd Levin, include: Beverly Buchanan, Elizabeth Catlett, Sonya Clark, Renee Cox, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Karon Davis, Minnie Evans, Nona Faustine, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Ellen Gallagher, Leslie Hewitt, Clementine Hunter, Steffani Jemison, Jennie C. Jones, Simone Leigh, Julie Mehretu, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O’Grady, Sondra Perry, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Joyce J. Scott, Emmer Sewell, Ntozake Shange, Xaviera Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Shinique Smith, Renee Stout, Mickalene Thomas, Alma Woodsey Thomas, Rosie Lee Tompkins, Kara Walker, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Carrie Mae Weems, and Brenna Youngblood.
Power will also include an installation of over one hundred African American vernacular photographs from the early twentieth century on loan from the Ralph DeLuca Collection. They offer a diverse view into everyday lives of African American women, from images of positive change to difficult scenes of negative stereotyping and violence. Offered as an exhibition-within-an-exhibition, these images from a century ago encourage reflection upon the continued struggles of black lives in America today.
We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85
Brooklyn Museum
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia Gallery of Contemporary Art, Fourth Floor, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York
April 21–September 17, 2017
The exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 explores the intersections of avant-garde art worlds, radical political movements, and profound social change through photography, sculpture, printmaking, photography, performance, film, and video. Examining the political, social, cultural, and aesthetic priorities of women of color during the emergence of second-wave feminism, this exhibition is the first “to highlight the voices and experiences of women of color—distinct from the primarily white, middle-class mainstream feminist movement—in order to reorient conversations around race, feminism, political action, art production, and art history in this significant historical period.”
The artists represented in the exhibition include: Emma Amos, Camille Billops, Kay Brown, Vivian E. Browne, Linda Goode Bryant, Beverly Buchanan, Carole Byard, Elizabeth Catlett, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Ayoka Chenzira, Christine Choy and Susan Robeson, Blondell Cummings, Julie Dash, Pat Davis, Jeff Donaldson, Maren Hassinger, Janet Henry, Virginia Jaramillo, Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, Lisa Jones, Loïs Mailou Jones, Barbara Jones-Hogu, Carolyn Lawrence, Samella Lewis, Dindga McCannon, Barbara McCullough, Ana Mendieta, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O’Grady, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, Alva Rogers, Alison Saar, Betye Saar, Coreen Simpson, Lorna Simpson, Ming Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems.
A host of events accompanied the exhibition. In addition to the DJ reception on April 20, which paid tribute to the revolutionary music of black women, the week-long opening celebration also included a symposium on April 21, a Julie Dash film marathon on April 22, and a Black Lunch Table on April 23.
We Wanted a Revolution, organized by Catherine Morris, Sackler Family Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and Rujeko Hockley, former assistant curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, is part of A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum, a yearlong series of exhibitions celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.
CAA Members among the 2017–18 Rome Prize Winners
posted Apr 28, 2017
The American Academy in Rome has announced the recipients of its 2017–18 fellowships. The following CAA members are among the newest group of talented artists, scholars, writers, and composers chosen by the academy.
- Charles K. Williams II Rome Prize: Lisa Deleonardis, Austen-Stokes Professor, Department of the History of Art, Johns Hopkins University, “A Transatlantic Response to Worlds That Shake: Jesuit Contributions to Anti-Seismic Building Design in Early Modern Italy and Peru”
- Millicent Mercer Johnsen Post-Doctoral Rome Prize: Bissera V. Pentcheva, Professor, Department of Art History, Stanford University, “Animation in Medieval Art”
- Phyllis W. G. Gordan/Lily Auchincloss/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize: Joseph Williams, PhD Candidate, Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies, Duke University, “The Practice and Production of Architecture during the Mediterranean Commercial Revolution: The Church of S. Corrado in Moletta (ca. 1185–1303)”
- Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/National Endowment for the Humanities Post-Doctoral Rome Prize: Leslie Cozzi, Curatorial Associate, Hammer Museum, “Fra: Relation and Collaboration in Contemporary Italian Art”
- American Academy in Rome—Rome Prize: Cécile Fromont, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, University of Chicago, “Images on a Mission: Cross-Cultural Encounters and Visual Mediation in Early Modern Kongo and Angola”
For over a century, the American Academy in Rome has awarded the Rome Prize to support innovative and cross-disciplinary work in the arts and humanities. Rome Prize fellowships include a stipend, room and board, and an individual work space at the institute’s eleven-acre campus in Rome.
New in caa.reviews
posted Apr 28, 2017
Alise Tifentale reviews Anri Sala: Answer Me, an exhibition and catalogue organized by the New Museum. As the Albanian artist’s “first comprehensive survey exhibition in the United States,” the show primarily features video and sound works and “introduces Sala’s artistic strategies that often are aimed at multisensory confusion and a questioning of temporal and spatial coherence.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Nikolas Drosos reads Place and Displacement: Exhibiting Architecture, an edited collection of fifteen essays. Focusing on “the institutional structures that underpin architectural practice, theoretical discourse and its dissemination, as well as architecture’s relationship to its publics and to mass media,” the volume “reflects a greater tendency in scholarship to focus less on individual buildings.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Christiana Maranci discusses Rebuilding Anatolia after the Mongol Conquest: Islamic Architecture in the Lands of Rūm by Patricia Blessing. The author “emphasizes the local circumstances in which the monuments were produced” and “argues that the lack of centralized control in Anatolia led … to a diverse and dynamic tradition best understood on its own terms.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
William Sharpe examines Hélène Valance’s Nuits américaines: L’art du nocturne aux États-Unis, 1890–1917. This “much-needed history” shows “how image makers reacted to the ways in which the American night was lit, exploited, and commercialized from the turn of the twentieth-century until the U.S. entry into World War I,” often in relation to “aesthetic, racial, imperial, and economic interests.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.Communing with Dore Ashton
posted Apr 28, 2017
Dore Ashton at the kitchen table in her home on East Eleventh Street, New York, New York, 2011 (photograph © Madeline Djerejian)
“Communing with Dore Ashton” by Michael Corris has just been published at the open-access Art Journal Open. Corris, an artist and author based in Dallas, writes that Ashton, who died on January 30, was “one of the most energetic, widely published, and politicized American writers on art, and one of the chief proponents of the artists of the New York School (she decried the label Abstract Expressionism).” In addition to Corris’s personal memories of Ashton and their friendship, the project includes the audio and transcribed text of their 2011 conversation about Ashton’s experiences in New York art world during the 1950s and 1960s. Also included is a 2015 film by the artist Alfredo Jaar, Dore Ashton, you know, which features Ashton speaking candidly about her life, writing career, politics, and relationships with artists and writers, among them Harold Rosenberg, Philip Guston, and Louise Bourgeois. Recent photographs by Madeline Djerejian and Polly Bradford-Corris portray Ashton in her working and living spaces in New York City and Springs, Long Island.
Letter from Melbourne: An Exhibition at the Victorian College of the Arts Tackles Contested Lands and Landscape
posted Apr 27, 2017
We live in a world in which deeply contested perceptions of time and place coexist on lands shared by diverse populations. The unresolved politics of land that confront Indigenous cultures in Australia are a prime example of how such contestations continue to play out in a postcolonial context. Such tensions are particularly apparent when contrasting radically divergent artistic and historical representations of landscape. Australia is a vast and ancient continental landmass upon which a little over two centuries of colonization has savagely interrupted 50,000 years of continuous human culture expressed through over 500 distinct collective nominations. Presence, an ambitious exhibition curated by David Sequeira in the Margaret Lawrence Gallery at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), University of Melbourne (March 3–April 1, 2017), entered this seemingly inexpressible contestation with a curatorial strategy that provisionally marked out something of the possibility of aggregating these radically disparate understandings. As this text will attempt to demonstrate, Sequeira, in bringing otherwise ineffably distinct representations of the Australian landscape together, implicitly suggested that violently incompatible senses of time and place might indeed share space—and possibly even begin to communicate with one another.
Figures 1 and 2 show the gallery installation with Michael Riley’s film presented in the center. The two images from the film depict different contemporary perspectives of a land occupied by Indigenous cultures for tens of thousands of years. The smaller paintings installed on the perimeter wall are by well-known Australian artists who are all alumni of the Victorian College of the Arts upon the occasion of its 150-year celebration (see Figures 3–8 below).
Upon entering the dramatically darkened gallery, the viewer encountered a series of small uncaptioned spot-lit paintings by some of the VCA’s most distinguished alumni. These works appeared to be floating like a constellation of celestial objects around a large moving image projection at the center of the exhibition space. Sequeira strategically positioned Empire, a film by the late Indigenous Australian artist Michael Riley, at the heart of this carefully considered installation of historical and contemporary landscape paintings.
Figure 3: Eugene Von Guérard, From below the Lighthouse, Cape Shanck, Victoria, 1873, oil on paper on board, 9.7 x 12.4 in. (photograph provided by the Wilbow Collection)
Figure 4: Frederick McCubbin, At Macedon, 1913, oil on canvas 20.4 x 24.1 in. (photograph provided by the Wilbow Collection)
Figure 5: Fred Williams, Hillside III, 1968, oil on canvas, 24 x 26 in. (photograph provided by the Heidi Victoria Collection)
Contextualizing work by Eugene Von Guerard, Frederic McCubbin, Fred Williams, Clarice Beckett, Louise Hearman, and Rick Amor with that of Riley, Sequeira seductively stipulated that the viewer become mindful of Indigenous understandings of landscape that existed for 50,000 years prior to the VCA’s own 150-year history.
Figure 6: Clarice Beckett, Half Moon Bay, undated, oil on board, 11.2 x 15 in. (photograph provided by Rosalind Hollinrake and Niagara Galleries)
Figure 7: Louise Hearman, Untitled #480, 1997, undated, oil on composition board, 27 x 21 in. (photograph provided by the Wilbow Collection)
Figure 8: Rick Amor, Summer Morning Lucerne Crescent Alphington, 2012, oil on canvas, 20.1 x 15.9 in., Courtesy the artist and Niagara Galleries.
Not inconsequentially, Riley was not a VCA alumnus. This was a brave and deliberate curatorial gesture on the part of Sequeira to mark the occasion of the institution’s 150-year celebrations: “For most of its 150-year history, the Victorian College of the Arts ignored Indigenous Australian culture and art practices. I wanted the large-scale projection (including its soundtrack) by Indigenous artist Michael Riley to be the filter through which the other works of art are perceived.”[1]
Significantly, the deliberately modestly sized selection of paintings orbiting Riley’s intermittently expansive and forensic visual meditation upon the impact of colonialism and Christian missionary activities on Australian Aboriginal land and culture, were subsequently drawn inward to perform in concert with the deeply melancholic musical score by composer Antony Partos and performed by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra that accompanied Riley’s filmic essay. Sound is clearly an important part of Sequeira’s matrix of considerations. Considered together with the lighting design, we can see why Sequeira describes a “multi-sensory approach” as “critical in the process of generating new [historical] resonances.” Already an ode to the simultaneous expansiveness and minutiae of Australian landscape, once experienced on a big screen at the center of Sequeira’s installation, Empire commanded a hitherto unconsummated presence (especially when considered in comparison with earlier broadcast and exhibition presentations).
It was clear that none of these works had ever been exhibited like this before. Consequently, one of the most marked features of this exhibition was the conspicuous visibility of Sequeira’s curatorial voice. Moreover, it was not a stretch to reimagine this poetic exploration of new possibilities in selection and display as an installation by an artist rather than the work of a curator. Here, networks of relations marked between very different artistic materializations and senses of placemaking clearly instantiated the space of the exhibition itself as medium. In demonstrating profound new ways in which very different conceptions of landscape might sing together, and by extension, how accepted lineages of art history might in turn learn to incorporate understandings of Indigenous Australian art and culture, Sequeira created a work of art that far exceeded a sum of its parts. Although Sequeira understands his responsibilities to these histories “as part of a bigger commitment as an artist,” he also recognizes that curatorship demands very particular responsibilities. Despite the fact that we might reimagine the exhibition as an installation by Sequeira the artist, Sequeira the curator nevertheless understood that this would invariably “reflect a different style of authorship.” Interestingly, he appeared at once emboldened and troubled when asked to consider the exhibition as an installation by him as an artist. Clearly, Sequeira necessitates that these activities remain ontologically separate—for as Ruth Noack put it in 2015—just as “the other of the artist as curator is the curator,” it is also apparent that “the other of the curator as artist is the artist.”[2]
Importantly, Sequeira sees his “own subjectivity is a departure point for the exploration of other histories.” As a “middle-aged gay Indian born Australian man,” he sees his “subjectivity as an access to the disclosure of new understandings of art and art history.” For Sequeira, “creating opportunities for the revelation of new or previously undistinguished facets of history is integral to this process.” In order to facilitate this process, he first considers “selection and display strategies used in the construction mainstream histories” and then begins to develop alternative formats that suggest “new resonances within both individual works of art and a group as a whole.” When asked to imagine this exhibition as the first in a series, and that its next instantiation might be in the United States, Sequeira excitedly described one possible scenario:
the compelling video work of Mohawk artist Alan Michelson could be a potent context for re thinking American landscape painting. For example, set within a suite of small historic and contemporary landscape paintings by artists such as Thomas Cole, Josephine Chamberlin Ellis, Frederick Church, Georgia O’Keefe [sic], Alma Thomas, Andrew Wyeth, Michelson’s large scale projection (on a screen of turkey feathers), Mesprat, 2001 could expand the understandings of consumerism, spirituality, the sublime, environmentalism and ownership associated with considerations of landscape.
From exhibitions to nation states, delineations of place are destined to be dynamic and temporary. Unlike space, which possesses abstract physical and formal properties, the value of place is socially constructed. Against a backdrop of inevitable change, art performs both a mnemonic and a transitive role. This role is perhaps most apparent when art is experienced as a dynamic constellation of elements rather than as ossified objects. Although the idea of landscape is central to the sense of being in Australia, it can clearly evoke complex and unresolved historical and political tensions. Artists that deal with landscape as subject are by default connected to these tensions. The island continent of Australia is at once a timeless geological formation and a historically layered series of cultural projections. For a mere blip in historical time, a new nation has been superimposed over an ancient geological formation and accompanying appropriated nations. Landscape, like painting, is a register of gestures enacted upon a surface. Marks, together with conspicuous omissions and evacuations, can imply both desolation and new possibilities. Painting, like film, is a fertile ground upon which to stage a dynamic play between registers of information and space for the imagination to flourish. By suggesting new possibilities through the poetic play of disparate representations of landscape, and at the same time reminding the viewer that full comprehension is impossible, Sequeira has created an evocative vehicle with which to reimagine absence and presence.
[1] David Sequeira, email conversation with the author, March 31, 2017. All subsequent quotations by Sequeira are from email conversations that took place between March 31 and April 3, 2017.
[2] Ruth Noack, “The Curator as Artist?” (symposium presentation, Central Saint Martins, London, November 10, 2012). See http://afterall.org/online/artist-as-curator-symposium-curator-as-artist-by-ruth-noack/.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted Apr 26, 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.
A Letter to Soon-to-Be Art School Graduates
You’re about to begin your career as artists. At this defining moment of transition, I’d like to offer five pieces of advice that I wish someone had shared with me when I graduated art school. (Read more from CERF+.)
Help Desk: Recommendations for References
I am often torn when applying for jobs, residencies, and grants when it comes to references. Is it better to list the names of people you do not know well but carry more name recognition, or to list the names of lesser-known people you know well and would give you a good reference? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
How Galleries Support Their Artists
Galleries have multiple roles, both visible and invisible: to incubate and support their artists, often by going above and beyond the normal work of putting on shows, promoting their artists, and selling the works; and to providing services such as financial management or book publishing, to help their artists focus more fully on their work. (Read more from Artsy.)
Group Shows Bring Together Works by Black Women Artists
Nearly forty years ago, CAA’s National Women’s Caucus for Art planned an exhibition featuring works by “Afro-American” women artists. Cocurated by Emily Martin and Tritobia Benjamin of Howard University, the show was to be presented at the 1979 Annual Conference in Washington, DC. (Read more from Culture Type.)
The Kids Are Right
Is it inherently misguided to suggest some speech ought to be restricted not by law but by informal rules? Is the space in the discourse that liberalism has granted to bigots emboldened by the Trump era a real problem or not? (Read more from Slate.)
Critique vs. Harassment
The visual arts sometimes involve painful critiques of student work, but the University of Central Florida has warned a well-known professor that he crossed the line into harassment with some salty comments allegedly directed at a female student in an advanced painting class. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
To Depoliticize Art, Trump Has to Do More Than End Federal Endowments
Shut up and go fund yourself. That’s President Trump’s message to arts organizations in his proposal for eliminating the NEA and NEH. CAA is not amused. Declaring “complete and total opposition” to the proposal, it offers toolkits to members to arm them for a fight. (Read more from the Federalist.)
Congressman to Appeal Removal of Art Showing Cops as Pigs, Citing Free Speech
A Missouri congressman is appealing a judge’s ruling in a long-simmering dispute involving a 19-year-old’s painting that shows policemen as pigs. The work was on display at the US Capitol as part of a student art competition and has outraged Republican Congressmen and the conservative media, who have branded the work “anti-police.” (Read more from Artnet News.)
Art Professors of America Interview
posted Apr 25, 2017
CAA recently corresponded with Marc Handelman, an artist and assistant professor of visual arts for the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, about a new grassroots organization concerned with advocacy issues, called the Art Professors of America.
When and why did the Art Professors of America form? What are its goals?
A couple of dozen art professors from several schools in the Northeast came together in the wake of the election initially to discuss how we might respond to a right-wing campaign to blacklist liberal and progressive faculty by smearing them as un-American. Simultaneously, many of us were seeing a troubling uptick both of threats and attacks on Latino, Muslim, and LGBTQ students, and of anti-Semitism on campuses. Some of us were also experiencing increased feelings of anxiety and self-censorship. Most of all, we felt the urgency and need of being together and sharing our experiences as artists and educators and citizens. We decided to meet every two weeks in New York and continue the conversation. Because colleagues from around the country reached out to be part of the dialogue, we started an email group that now represents professors in well over a dozen states. We are currently working on expanding this network to all fifty states, welcoming art professors of all ranks and teaching status, including TAs and those between positions. Our primary goal right now is to be a platform that connects people nationally and shares critical information. Our latest project was the launch of our website that features news related to education in our political climate and a critical resource page.
What is the purpose of the advocacy resource APA is building?
There are many potential and actual threats that faculty are facing increasingly. Some of these issues begin at the state level, where funding for classes or entire programs are being cut due to their political content. Other issues range from online harassment to deceptively progressive legislation for free-speech protection on campus. Meanwhile, higher education in general continues to foster crippling student debt as institutions struggle to deal with increasing demands for greater diversity, inclusion, and equity. The resource page we launched and continue to build on modestly attempts to provide critical information and tools to help us deal with some of these problems, from distributing information about student loans for undocumented students to debt models in art education. Other items provide online security protocol and consent laws for recording in classrooms. Some of the categories include Censorship and Intimidation, Critical Pedagogy, Alternative Art Programs, Debt and Precarity, Sanctuary and Immigration, and Legal Resources, among others.
Where do the resources come from?
Nearly all of the content already exists online in some form, from other organizations and studies. Populating the website was an extensive three-month process of collecting information and links and aggregating them in these categories. We have been so grateful to other working groups and colleagues for sharing their resources as well.
What are the most urgent issues confronting art professors in the United States today?
Clearly we don’t assume to speak for every program. But in the immediate context, the travel ban and ICE deportations may have the most immediate effects on our students, faculty, and visiting artists. Academic freedom has been under various levels of threat for a long time, and it remains to be seen how deeply and broadly new threats develop. But economic precarity and inequality remain the most pressing structural issue in education both for art schools and the larger university system. This affects part-time adjuncts who, already underpaid, are increasingly asked to do things such as decrease their course loads so as not to trigger contingent benefits, the end of tenured lines, and students who suffer under crippling debt or have no access to higher education at all. Critical and progressive curricula can’t make up for the undergirded issues of access, which are directly tied to geography, race, and class.
Under this current political regime, arts faculty may actually have a greater deal of security than professors and departments researching and teaching social justice, antiracism, and climate change. We need to continually find ways to support our colleagues in other fields.
How can CAA members get involved?
We welcome new arts-affiliated adjuncts, TAs, and professors into our organization and dialogue—the more voices represented, the better. Members will have access to group documents and files, as well as The Story Collection Project, which shares and archives testimonials and stories about what is happening in different corners of our campuses and in classrooms across the country. Meanwhile, the Art Profs America website, offering news, links, and resources, is live and available to anyone online. Please feel free to share with other colleagues as well. You can visit us, or join at http://artprofsamerica.com.
To request to join the discussion, please visit https://groups.google.com/d/forum/art-profs-america. You may also follow APA on Twitter.
Staff Interview: Fernando Zelaya
posted Apr 24, 2017
The next in a series of interviews with staff members is a conversation with Fernando Zelaya, CAA controller.
How long have you worked at CAA?
I have been at CAA since December 2012—four years, four months.
What do you do at CAA?
I am the controller, in the Finance Department.
What does CAA mean to you?
CAA to me is a medium for all art scholars to come together and be a part of a community. It’s also a place to share with each other, and to teach each other.
Can you talk about one of your favorite member moments?
Since I interact with members mostly at the conference, I’ll tell one story here and add another in the conference question later on. My favorite member moment was when I helped an elderly member who reminded me of my grandmother. She had such vigor and enthusiasm and seemed genuinely happy to be at the conference. That made my day.
What do you like best about the arts and working in the arts?
What I like best is meeting and working with artists. In my daily life and my earlier years, I had never interacted with artists. Now, having worked for the Dia Art Foundation as well as CAA, I have learned to appreciate art more than I used to, because now I better understand the meaning behind the art.
Do you have a favorite moment from the Annual Conference?
Once at registration I was berated by a flustered member who was late to a session and wanted to get his ticket quicker than was possible. The nice moment came when he returned to my booth after the session was over and gave me a sincere apology.
People interested in art can sometimes rebuff things like sports. But you’re interested in sports like soccer and baseball. Do you see a conflict?
I think that art and sports have more in common than people think. Both require years of hard work to perfect, and both need a combination of grace and power to achieve the objective of the piece (in art) or to score (in a game). It takes grace to stop a soccer ball or save a shot coming toward you at fifty to sixty miles per hour, or to hit a baseball with a bat when both objects are about three inches wide. That kind of skill, to me, is just as beautiful as a stroke of a brush or a poem that can draw a tear or bring about a smile.
You’re also interested in science fiction. Are there any new television shows or movies that have piqued your interest?
Science fiction is my favorite type of television show or movie. My favorite is Doctor Who, because of its sheer brilliance and how it has evolved over the last fifty-three years. The series even survived being off the air, only living in print and audio for almost ten years. The best new show I have seen this year is The Man in the High Castle, which takes us to a world where the Axis powers won WWII and have divided the United States among them. I am also a big fan of the Marvel and DC movies. I love these types of shows or movies because it is fun to immerse myself for a couple of hours—okay, maybe more than a couple—and go somewhere magical or even quite insane.