CAA News Today
CAA-Getty International Program 2024: Applications now open!
posted by CAA — Jul 06, 2023
Photo: Stephen Fọlárànmí
Getty has awarded College Art Association (CAA) a grant to fund the CAA-Getty International Program for a thirteenth consecutive year. The Getty Foundation’s support will enable CAA to bring twelve international visual-arts professionals to the 112th Annual Conference, taking place in Chicago, February 14–17, 2024. These individuals will be first-time participants in the program and will be accompanied by alumni of the program returning to present papers during the conference.
Participants will receive funds for travel expenses, hotel accommodations, per diems, conference registrations, and one-year CAA memberships. We encourage all international art historians, art history educators, and museum curators to apply. The program will also include a one-day preconference colloquium on international issues in art history on Tuesday, February 14, as well as ongoing engagement with other alumni from the program online and at future conferences. The deadline for applications is August 15, 2023. Guidelines and application can be found here.
In 2021, CAA organized a publication to celebrate ten successful years of the CAA-Getty International Program. The publication, entitled Global Conversations: 10 Years of the CAA-Getty International Program features in-depth accounts of the program, a timeline of important events and milestones, and directories of past papers, members, and meetings.
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 it began in 2012, the program has brought 159 scholars to the conferences, from over 50 countries located in Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. Each year, a preconference colloquium on international topics in art history inaugurates the week, kicking off four days of conference sessions, meetings with new colleagues, and visits to museums and galleries. Subsequent to these events, the program has generated many scholarly collaborations, including publications, conferences, and exhibitions.
Most of all, former grant recipients have become ambassadors of CAA in their countries, sharing knowledge gained at the Annual Conference with their colleagues at home. Past recipients have said that “variety of topics presented also exposed me to the realization that there is so much to be done to unearth the hidden treasures of global art history, which hitherto I have overlooked in my discipline and nation but which will now form the basis of my future projects,” and “the direct contact with other global south researchers is an unique occasion, rarely possible and extremely enriching.”
Meet the Spring 2023 Millard Meiss Publication Fund Grant Recipients
posted by CAA — May 01, 2023
Caption: Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Rape of Proserpina, 1661–1662, Burkhard Mücke via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0
Twice a year, CAA awards grants through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund to support book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of art, visual studies, and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits, but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy.
Thanks to the generous bequest of the late Prof. Millard Meiss, CAA began awarding these publishing grants in 1975.
Spring 2023 Grantees
Doris Sung, Women of Chinese Modern Art Gender and Reforming Traditions in National and Global Spheres, 1900s–1930s, De Gruyter
Kristopher Kersey, Facing Images: Problems of Modernity in Japanese Art, Penn State University Press
Andrew Gayed, Queer World Making: Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art, University of Washington Press
Lee Sessions, Urgent Necessities: Science and White Identity in Colonial Cuba, Yale University Press
Saul Nelson, Never Ending: Modernisms Past and Future, Yale University Press
Ellen C. Caldwell, Cynthia S. Colburn, and Ella J. Gonzalez, eds., Gender Violence, Art, and the Viewer: An Intervention, Penn State University Press
Hye-shim Yi, Art by Literati: Calligraphic Carving in Middle Qing China, Cambria Press
Read a list of all recipients of the Millard Meiss Publication Fund since 1975.
Meet the Michael Aurbach Fellowship for Excellence in Visual Art Inaugural Recipient and Honorable Mentions
posted by CAA — Mar 07, 2023
CAA is pleased to announce the first ever recipient of the first Michael Aurbach Fellowship for Excellence in Visual Art: Lauren Sandler.
Lauren Sandler is a ceramic artist and educator whose work deconstructs mythologies and investigates narratives of power and perspective. Sandler exhibits nationally, and gives talks, workshops, and publishes work concerning contemporary and historic issues in ceramics. She holds an MFA in Ceramics from Penn State University, and undergraduate degrees in Anthropology and Ceramics from Ithaca College and SUNY New Paltz. She served on the Board of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts as Director at Large from 2019–22 and is currently Associate Professor and Program Head of Ceramics at Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Ellen Wetmore, University of Massachusetts Lowell
Ellen Wetmore is a Professor of Art and Chair of the Department of Art and Design at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan (BFA, BA in Art History) and Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), and joined UMass Lowell in 2007. She is a participant of CAA, UFVA, Cultivamos Cultura, and past member of the Boston Sculptors Gallery. Her awards include a 2017 Berkshire Taconic ART Fellowship and a 2017 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship. Her social concerns include neuro-atypical disabilities, race and teaching, money and art. Wetmore’s current artistic practice reinterprets history, art history, and investigates visual thinking. Wetmore’s projects have been featured at the Boston Cyberarts Art on the Marquee, the Indianapolis Art Center, the Sandwell Arts Trust, Ciné Lumière, London, CologneOff, Germany, the InShadow Festival, Lisbon, and Videoholica in Bulgaria. She is a 2012 School of the Museum of Fine Arts Traveling Fellow and a summer 2015 visiting artist at the American Academy of Rome. Her most recent solo exhibition was a drawing study of the collection at the Fitchburg Art Museum. Her current science collaborations explore printed, fabric-based video displays, text and memory in fat cells, and the characterization of high fire ceramic glazes in a Cambodian wood fired kiln. Her first graphic novel, Dante’s Inferno, is a fictional account of race and the academic hiring process.
Allison Wiese, University of San Diego
Allison Wiese is an interdisciplinary artist who makes sculptures, installations, sound works, performances, and architectural interventions. Her work is often created for public spaces at the boundaries of or outside institutions, and has been exhibited at, among other venues, Machine Project, Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego and Socrates Sculpture Park, New York. She is the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and has received grants from Art Matters, Creative Capital, the Cultural Arts Council of Houston, and the City of San Diego’s Commission for Arts and Culture. A fellow of MacDowell and an alumna of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Wiese was a Core Fellow of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, received her MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and a BA from Brown University. Wiese is an Associate Professor at the University of San Diego.
Ziui Vance, Temple University
Ziui explores the semiotics of bodies, their chaotic signals, and spatiality. She makes the paintings, objects, and installations inside the disputed realm between affection and dominance, rules and reality. Characterized by a play-like process, Ziui describes a variety of body configurations with an intricate intensity that reflected on gender, ethnicity, and perceptions: an infinite tapestry of imagery associated with her exoneration from the polar complexities of being Chinese in the United States.
ABOUT THE FELLOWSHIP
The Michael Aurbach Fellowship for Excellence in Visual Art recognizes and honors CAA members who have obtained an MFA or equivalent in studio art and are currently teaching studio classes full-time or part-time. The purpose is to support these artist members as they fulfill their goals as visual arts professionals. On an annual basis, CAA will grant a $7,500 award and registration to the CAA Annual Conference to a qualified artist member teaching at an American or international university or community college. A jury of artists will adjudicate the fellowship and a proposal will not be required; the recipient will be selected solely based on their work. Learn more.
Meet the 2022 Professional Development Fellows
posted by CAA — Feb 07, 2023
CAA is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2022 Professional Development Fellowships. The recipient of the $10,000 fellowship in art history is Mechella Yezernitskaya, Bryn Mawr College, and the recipient of the $10,000 fellowship in visual art is Boone Nguyen, California State University, Los Angeles.
The honorable mentions in art history were awarded to Jack Crawford, City University of New York, and Astrid Tvetenstrand, Boston University. The honorable mentions in visual art are awarded to Jenna Carlie, California Institute of the Arts, and Alberto Lozano Ruvalcaba, Mendocino College.
2022 PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWSHIP IN ART HISTORY
Mechella Yezernitskaya, Bryn Mawr College
Mechella Yezernitskaya is a Ukrainian American art historian, writer, and curator. She is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College where she specializes in modern and contemporary art. Mechella received her M.A. from Bryn Mawr College and B.A. with honors in Art History from Fordham University. Her dissertation examines representations of temporal rupturing in the wartime visual, literary, and film culture of the avant-gardes of the late Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union. She examines war-related imagery in the work of artists of Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian origin across media including illustrated books, poetry, collage painting, performance, and film. By drawing upon theories from trauma and disability studies, Mechella explores the roles of the civilian and combatant, the temporal boundaries of wartime and peacetime, the consequences of imperialism, the rise of nationalism, and the affective experiences of war.
Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Association of University Women, the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), the Pittsburgh Foundation, the Malevich Society, the New York Public Library, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Bryn Mawr College. She has published in ARTMargins Online, Baltic Worlds, post: notes on art in a global context, Slavic & East European Information Resources, and in the edited volume Artistic Expressions and the Great War, A Hundred Years On (Peter Lang Publishing, 2020). She has presented her research at Södertörn University, Stockholm; Karazin University, Kharkiv; Hofstra University, New York; Temple University, Philadelphia; The Museum of Russian Art, Minneapolis; and ASEEES. She has also held guest curatorial positions and fellowships at The Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Brooklyn Museum.
HONORABLE MENTIONS IN ART HISTORY
Jack Crawford, City University of New York
Jack Crawford is a teaching artist and art historian. She is currently a Lecturer at Vanderbilt University and University of Tennessee, Knoxville and has previously taught at the New York City College of Technology. She holds a BA from Barnard College and is currently completing her PhD in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research, for which she received a 2021–2022 ACLS/Luce Dissertation Fellowship in American Art and a dissertation award from the CUNY Committee on Globalization and Social Change, focuses on appropriation and aesthetics of abundance in queer performance in the postwar period.
Astrid Tvetenstrand, Boston University
Astrid studies the history of American painting, decorative arts, and architecture. She explores these fields through practices of collection, economic development, and the consumption of American property. Her dissertation traces the connections between American art patronage, second homeownership, and landscape painting at the end of the nineteenth century. She argues that the process of collecting art and land was an effort made by affluent Americans to “buy a view.” By recognizing landscape paintings as investments and monetary goods, Astrid sheds new light on Gilded Age consumerism, aesthetics, and taste. She also localizes art market exchanges within a larger conversation about the privatization of public space.
Astrid’s work is encouraged by positions and fellowships held at the New York Public Library, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts Historical Society, Nichols House Museum, Bundy Museum of History and Art, Peabody Essex Museum, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Decorative Arts Trust, and Winter Antiques Show.
2022 PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWSHIP IN VISUAL ARTS
Boone Nguyen, California State University, Los Angeles
Boone Nguyen is an artist of the Southeast Asian diaspora. When he was a child, his family left Saigon and resettled as refugees in South Philadelphia. His experience as a refugee in the metropole informs his work through the themes of displacement and place-building, landscape and historical memory, leaving and returning, loss and transformation. His immersive moving image installations are thus fueled by a continuing search for a distant yet familiar homeplace, where the intimacies of life and death and the dialectic of subjection and resistance serve as a living archive of critical memory that is both personal and collective. He has exhibited his work in Philadelphia, Honolulu, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Tokyo.
Boone Nguyen has served in curatorial and management positions in community arts organizations, including Asian Arts Initiative, Frameline, and Scribe Video Center. He holds a BA in American Studies (minor in Asian American Studies) from Yale University. As a Cota-Robles Fellow, he earned an MA in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He was a recipient of a 2018/19 MCAD–Jerome Foundation Fellowships for Early Career Artists, administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and funded by the Jerome Foundation. Nguyen is currently in his final semester of the MFA program at California State University, Los Angeles where he also lectures in the Asian and Asian American Studies Department.
Jenna Carlie, California Institute of the Arts
Jenna studied photography at Speos Institute of Photography in Paris, France and went on to study at Rhode Island School of Design. During the time at RISD, Jenna worked under Annie Leibovitz, Mark Katzman, and Dusty Kessler. In 2016, Jenna graduated with a BFA in photography from Rhode Island School of Design. Jenna moved to Los Angeles and in 2017 worked for Lauren Greenfield, in 2018 worked for Alexa Meade, and by the end of 2018 Jenna Carlie Photography and Design was opened for business. Between 2018 and 2020 Jenna worked on various photographic series for different private collections in the Midwest. In 2020, the Saint Louis Art Museum hired Jenna as their travel contract photographer and later as their in-house photographer, where Jenna is still employed. Jenna is currently getting an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and is expected to graduate in 2024.
Alberto Lozano Ruvalcaba, Mendocino College
I was born in Tijuana, Baja California in 1993. My family lived in Rosarito next to the beach on a street called Niño Artillero (artillery child). My school was named after Emiliano Zapata, a leader of the Mexican revolution. My parents moved us to the USA when I was eight years old. We left everything behind except for each other and the memories that persist of our home and of the natural landscape around it. They brought us to this country for my siblings and I to have a better future than what was available back home. Thanks to my parents and siblings and my own perseverance, I am now the first person in my family to pursue a master’s degree from a university. I am now a permanent resident of the USA and a candidate for an MFA degree.
ABOUT THE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWSHIP
CAA’s Professional Development Fellowship program supports promising artists and art historians who are enrolled in MFA and PhD programs nationwide. Awards are intended to help them with various aspects of their work, whether for job-search expenses or purchasing materials for the studio. CAA believes a grant of this kind, without contingencies, can best facilitate the transition between graduate studies and professional careers. The program is open to all eligible graduate students in the visual arts and art history. Learn more.
Meet the 2023 CAA Annual Conference Kress Travel Grant Recipients
posted by CAA — Jan 30, 2023
Recognizing the value of the exchange of ideas and experience among art historians, the Kress Foundation is offering support for scholars participating as speakers at the 2023 CAA Annual Conference. The scholarly focus of the papers must be European art before 1830.
Samuel H. Kress Foundation CAA Annual Conference Travel Fellows 2023
Presentation: “Ordering the Ground: Ornamental Parterres and the Emergence of Academic Botany”
Session: Making Green Worlds (ca. 1450–1700)
Lauren Cannady, University of Maryland, College Park
Rather than the depiction of scholarly work taking place in Sébastien Leclerc’s engraved headpiece for Denis Dodart’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle des plantes (1676), it is a scene of the direct observation of nature glimpsed through a window that is most striking. Three men stand in an arabesque-patterned parterre to more closely examine the individual plants that compose the garden. One uses his walking cane to point out a specimen—literally embedded in the undulating scrollwork of the parterre—to his companions. This ornamental plantation—or manner of “ordering of the ground” as Francis Bacon lamented in his essay “Of Gardens” (1625)—reflects the dominant style of contemporary aristocratic pleasure and academic botanic gardens across northern Europe. Such impositions of formal, physical order on the natural world, however, belie the acknowledged chaos of seventeenth-century natural history. Bacon, among others, contended that empirical observation could best be used to make sense of the “many things in nature [that] have been laid open and discovered,” including organic material from around the world collected by Europeans in the name of colonialism. The renewed emphasis on empiricism did little, however, to rectify linguistic confusion and imprecise nomenclature, particularly pressing issues for the emerging field of botany. As a repository for nonnative flora and living laboratory for the production of naturalist knowledge, the patterned garden proved a visibly reliable way to order the natural world in early modern Europe.
Presentation: “’ A “New World” for Profit: Christopher Columbus’s Search for Gold on Genoese Silver”
Session: Making Green Worlds (ca. 1450–1700)
Jillian Laceste, Boston University
A seventeenth-century silver vase made by the Flemish silversmith Gio Aelbosca Belga for Agostino Pallavicino, the future doge of Genoa, depicts a moment of encounter between Christopher Columbus and Indigenous Americans. The vessel emphasizes a one-sided transaction by showing Indigenous figures greeting the explorer with gifts at the shore of the Atlantic. While painted Columbian artworks created in early modern Genoa treat the explorer’s arrival as a heroic maritime feat or moment of introduction of Christianity into the Americas, silver vessels such as Aelbosca’s differ because they depict Columbus’s journey for Cipangu—a land rich with gold—on the surface of silver, a precious metal crucial to Spanish colonization of the Americas. This paper will analyze the subject matter and material to address the presentation of Europe’s fertile “New World” contained within Aelbosca’s vessel. By connecting it to the history of the Americas—in particular Columbus’s failed search for gold but eventual outpouring of silver—I argue that this vase offers a view of the Americas that emphasizes not only its novelty and foreignness but also its utility for mining and profit.
Presentation: “Architectural Drawing, Information Management, and Early Modern Science: Wendel Dietterlin Drafts the Architectura (1593–98)”
Session: Drawing (New) Stories
Elizabeth Petcu, University of Edinburgh
This paper surveys the massive corpus of drawings associated with Wendel Dietterlin’s 1593–98 Architectura treatise to establish how architectural drawing in sixteenth-century Europe came to model practices for managing visual information in scientific research. To craft the Architectura drawings, Dietterlin and his assistants wielded tactics of annotation, bricolage, folding, and copying that had long aided architects in stimulating creativity, exposing problems, saving materials, enhancing productivity, facilitating communication, and documenting progress. I compare the 164 known Architectura drawings—among the largest surviving bodies of Renaissance architectural treatise drawings—to botanical and geological drawings in the collections of physician Felix Platter and natural historians Conrad Gessner and Ulisse Aldrovandi to show that natural philosophers (i.e. early modern scientists) came to derive similar benefits from such drawing techniques. I argue that Dietterlin’s tactics for orchestrating his Architectura’s wealth of visual information attests that, by 1600, techniques of visual research originating in architectural drawing circulated freely between makers of architectural drawings and natural philosophers. I thereby expose how makers of architectural drawings and natural philosophers in Europe began to exchange and codevelop parallel, empirical methods for forming knowledge.
Presentation: “Problematising the Notion of ‘Eastern European Art’: Two Case Studies of a Multiplicity”
Session: What is Eastern European Art?
Marta Zboralska, University of Oxford
Radek Przedpełski, Trinity College Dublin
This presentation aims to challenge the ontological assumption of there being a monolithic ontological entity such as “Eastern European art,” dialectically elaborated in its opposition to “Western art,” which then needs to be put on the map in an IRWIN-like gesture. We propose two case studies that problematize such an assumption, arguing instead that starting on the ground and unfolding an analysis from there might offer a more fruitful art-historical path of inquiry. We shall demonstrate that the model of a case study enfolds multiple frameworks of reference cutting across the East/West dichotomy, such as the immediately local or the regional on the one hand, or the long durée of the Anthropocene on the other.
The first case study will outline a media archaeology of Tatar timber mosques/minarets on the territories of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, showing how these under-researched media blend aniconism with local contexts and engage a continuum of artefacts and practices including muhir tableaux, hramotka (talismans), siufkanie (sorcery), and fał (divination). This case study argues that these architectural artworks explode the concept of “Eastern Europe(an art).” Instead, they open up a liminal space conjoining Islamicate architecture, Turkic animism, the “Long Baroque” of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as well as the vernacular regional traditions of timber building construction and ornamentation.
The second case study will zoom in on the ideas of Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz to consider the issue of regional artistic identity. As noted by literary scholar Anita Starosta, Gombrowicz refused the binary choice of either affirming Polishness or aspiring to Europeanness. Instead, it was within the periphery’s “not quite-ness” that the writer located the potential to “reveal Europe’s immaturity.” Looking at Diary by the American appropriation artist Sherrie Levine, a 2019 work inspired by Gombrowicz, this case study will argue for embracing the incompleteness of “Eastern Europe” as an area of art-historical enquiry.
Presentation: “‘Narrating’ the Landscape: Pictorial and Aesthetical Inventiveness to Portray the Essence of Nature”
Session: Eighteenth-Century Atmospheres: Science, Politics, Aesthetics
Marie Beaulieu Orna, France
Leaving the port of Naples for Sicily in 1777, the connoisseur Richard Payne Knight (1750–1824) wrote in his travel diary: “The infinite variety of tints were all harmonized together by that pearly hue, which is particular to that climate. (This tint very particularly marks Claude Lorraine’s Coloring). As we advanced into the open sea, the colours and forms seemed to sink into the Atmosphere and grow gradually indistinct, till at last the Sun withdrew its rays and left all in darkness.” Disclosing the term “atmosphere” in its literal meaning, Knight’s remark paradoxically reveals the fundamental role of optical theories and their interpretation in artistic practice in giving rise to the figurative essence of this same word, or to “spreading the tone” as Coleridge expressed it in Biographica Literaria (1817). Following Knight’s example, certain late eighteenth-century British landscapists aimed at conveying their personal impression felt upon observing the natural scenery, especially by handling color in travel sketches. Their Grand Tour became an artistic and aesthetical laboratory, into which they experimented with materials and processes in order to depict exotic landscapes with sensibility, intended for “polite” amateurs. The specific training these artists as well as these amateurs shared contributed to relate their mutual perception of nature and to develop this specific sense of “atmosphere.” This paper intends to demonstrate this artistic and aesthetical pivotal turn, embedded in the British contemporary scientific and philosophical context.
Presentation: “Imperial Materials: Extracting White Marble during the 18th and 19th Centuries”
Session: The Extractive Nineteenth Century
Amalie Skovmøller, University of Copenhagen
Since antiquity, white marble has been extracted from quarries centered in the Mediterranean, and transported to workshops to be crafted into sculpture and architectural decoration. While marble extracting activities declined following the collapse of the Roman Empire, they resumed with new intensity during the eighteenth century, peaking in nineteenth as quarries were sought out throughout Europe, Scandinavia, and in the US. Intertwined with Imperial policies, ideas about aesthetics and nation building, white marble assumed the role as prime material for high art and monumental embellishment. Traditionally studied as an omnipresent, abstract material with little regard to the complex infrastructures framing its extraction, the role of white marble consumption in relation to histories of colonialism remains peripherally explored. This paper centers on the intense marble extraction initiated by the Danish king Frederik V (1723–1766), when the Danish Empire included all of Norway. The king initiated expeditions into Norwegian territories to locate new sources of white marble, and the quarries established at Fauske, near Oslo, and in Hordaland secured the desired stones, which were extracted in thousands of blocks and shipped to Copenhagen. This paper explores the sculptures and architectural decoration in Copenhagen, deriving from the intense exploitation of Norwegian resources, as representing the Imperial ideologies, extractive capitalism, and colonial expansion politics of the Danish Empire during the latter eighteenth century. In doing so, the paper also touches upon the global economics and ideologies of marble extraction and circulation taking place throughout Europe and the US during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Presentation: “Byzantine Embroideries and the Entangled Visual Traditions of Eastern Europe”
Session: What is Eastern European Art?
Catherine Volmensky, The University of British Columbia
A late-Byzantine liturgical veil shows the recumbent figure of the dead Christ. Referred to as the aër-epitaphios of John of Skopje, this red silk textile is lavishly embroidered with gold, metallic, and silk threads. Similar types of embroidered veils were found in monasteries and churches throughout the Byzantine empire and its religious sphere. Drawing on a theory of line, this paper discusses the entangled artistic, religious, and economic networks of workshops and patrons shared between Thessaloniki, Mount Athos, and the regions of the Balkan Peninsula. Through this methodology, this paper traces the movement of images across spaces and media and provides a new approach to late and post-Byzantine textiles to demonstrate the vibrant and multifaceted connectivity between the regions of Eastern and Southern Europe. The role of the patron is also questioned in the context of the economic value of silk and gold-figure embroidery during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, emphasizing the position of elite women patrons in the Balkans, and how they have been examined or overlooked in previous scholarship. Since the intersection of lines create networks, this methodology also emphasizes a nonhierarchical approach to works created within Byzantium’s religious sphere. The emphasis on communication and interconnected structures offers a grounded methodology with which to examine gold-figure embroidery created and used in religious spaces of the Balkan Peninsula, Thessaloniki, and Mount Athos.
Presentation: “Begarelli, Model for Algardi? Renaissance Clay Modelling as a Precedent of Baroque Marble Sculpting”
Session: The Essence of Things? Limits and Limitlessness in Early Modern Sculpture
Lucia Simonato, Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy
In her monograph on Alessandro Algardi, Jennifer Montagu intuited the influence of Antonio Begarelli’s model on the works of art by the Bolognese Baroque sculptor. Yet, a systematic study of this possible relationship has not followed this intelligent opening. Begarelli was a sculptor who until his death in 1565 made monumental statues in Emilia and in Lombardy, using almost exclusively white-painted terracotta—a choice, according to Vasari, criticized by Michelangelo, who would have said in front of his works: “If this clay were to become marble, woe to the ancient statues!” Reassessing Begarelli as a model for Algardi poses not only an issue of intermediality in the transmission of formal solutions, but also a question on matter’s expressive possibilities. To what extent did the Renaissance terracotta, with its easier naturalistic adhesion and its dynamic spatial conception, offer a model to Baroque marble figuration? How did the dialogue with Begarelli shape Algardi’s use of terracotta modelling within his artistic process as compared, for example, to Bernini’s? This paper will focus on these issues.
In addition, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation has provided funds for alumni of the program to return and take part in our vast network of both international and North American scholars:
- Iro Katsaridou, Greece, 2022
- Tomasz Grusiecki, Canada, 2015
- Halyna Kohut, Ukraine, 2020
- Angeliki Pollali, Greece, 2014
Meet the 2023 CAA Annual Conference Edwards Support Grant Recipients
posted by CAA — Jan 30, 2023
Meet this year’s grant recipients and find information about their presentations at the conference and their corresponding session below. Dozens of other support grants were given to CAA members through the Presidents Council of CAA and the “Pay it Forward” initiative.
CAA TRAVEL GRANT IN MEMORY OF ARCHIBALD CASON EDWARDS, SENIOR, AND SARAH STANLEY GORDON EDWARDS
The CAA Support Grant in Memory of Archibald Cason Edwards, Senior, and Sarah Stanley Gordon Edwards was made possible by Mary D. Edwards. The grant supports women who are emerging scholars at either an advanced stage of pursuing a doctoral degree or who have received their PhD within the two years prior to the submission of the application.
Amanda Gutierrez, Concordia University
Presentation: “Walking away from the Western Flâneuse, moving forward to perspectives from the Global South”
Session: The Art of Walking
This presentation frames a critique to the concept of the Flâneuse, which reduces the walking experience of all women into a hegemonic Western perspective, not considering the ontologies of violence that women and LGBGT+2 bodies from the Global South experience every day. Women’s safety cannot exist where gender violence, war, political conflicts, and economic crises are present. Therefore, reflecting on the privilege and political conditions needed to walk safely and with freedom is essential. Considering the colonial implications of industrialized countries holding infrastructural and economic power is also critical, as is reflection on the creation of safe public spaces for citizens. We also need to consider that racialized immigrants living in Western countries hold additional risks in confronting racist bias experiences in the public spaces due to their race, ethnicity, gender, and citizenship status. Understanding these political dimensions, these questions arise:
Are we aware of these political implications when romanticizing the Flâneuse as a universal agent of walking freedoms in public space? Is this figure of agency excluding many women and non-conforming bodies who cannot experience these freedoms under political crises? Can we think of other subaltern figures besides the Flâneuse to consider the walking experiences of women and LGBGT+2 in the Global South?
This paper will reflect on these questoins while looking at examples of collectives from India, such as Blank Noise and Women Walk at Midnight as well as the artistic practices of BIPOC feminist artists approaching walking as a form of resistance and enunciation.
Sila Ulug, The University of Chicago
Presentation: “The Blind Man(et): On the Aesthetics of the Blind Man after European Painting” Session: The Art of the Periodical
The Blind Man (1917) is a two-issue magazine published by Henri-Pierre Roché; Marcel Duchamp; and Beatrice Wood in coordination with the First Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York. The Blind Man introduced Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) to the public as a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, shortly after it was physically disappeared. My presentation examines The Blind Man against a history of rejected, Modernist painting. I demonstrate that The Blind Man distinguishes itself from contemporaneous magazines affiliated with the New York avant-garde in three notable respects: (1) its multiple levels of self-referentiality; (2) its direct address of the reader in multiple figurative roles; and (3) its concomitant incorporation and rejection of the reader as part of its dramatic world. I suggest that the incongruence of The Blind Man’s representational scheme can be resolved when examined against the work of Édouard Manet, especially as its reception aesthetics take after those of Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas (1656). Positioning The Blind Man alongside critical terms associated with the reception of work by Manet and others who exhibited in the 1863 Salon des Refusés suggests that The Blind Man may have aspired to the condition of tableau, while remaining a morceau to the public.
Elia Alba and Postcommodity to Participate in Annual Artists’ Interviews at CAA’s 111th Annual Conference
posted by CAA — Jan 19, 2023
CAA is pleased to announce that this year’s Annual Artists’ Interviews will feature Elia Alba and Postcommodity!
Photo: Michael Palma Mir
Elia Alba was born in Brooklyn to parents who immigrated from the Dominican Republic in the 1950s. She is a multidisciplinary artist whose artistic practice is concerned with the social and political complexity of race, identity, and the collective community. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Hunter College in 1994 and completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2001. She has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad, including at the Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Science Museum, London, Smithsonian Museum of Art, National Museum of Art, and Reina Sofía, Madrid. Awards include the Studio Museum in Harlem Artist-in-Residence Program in 1999; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2002; Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2002 and 2008; Anonymous Was a Woman Award in 2019; and Latinx Artist Fellowship in 2021. Her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, and Lowe Art Museum. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, ArtNews, and Forbes, among others. Her book, Elia Alba, The Supper Club (2019) brings together artists, scholars, and performers of diasporic cultures through photography, food, and dialogue to examine race and culture in the United States. She was part of the curatorial team for El Museo del Barrio’s critically acclaimed exhibition, Estamos Bien: La Trienal 20/21. She lives and works in the Bronx.
Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary art collective comprised of Cristóbal Martínez (Mestizo), and Kade L. Twist (Cherokee). Postcommodity’s art functions as a shared Indigenous lens and voice to engage the assaultive manifestations of the global market and its supporting institutions, public perceptions, beliefs, and individual actions that comprise the ever-expanding, multinational, multiracial, and multiethnic colonizing force that is defining the twenty-first century through ever-increasing velocities and complex forms of violence. Postcommodity works to forge new metaphors capable of rationalizing our shared experiences within this increasingly challenging contemporary environment; promote a constructive discourse that challenges the social, political, and economic processes that are destabilizing communities and geographies; and connect Indigenous narratives of cultural self-determination with the broader public sphere.
Postcommodity are the recipients of grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2010), Creative Capital (2012), Art Matters (2013), Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (2014), Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation (2017), Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship (2017–18), Harker Fund of the San Francisco Foundation (2018–19), Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Shift Award (2021), and Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions (2022). The collective has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Contour: 5th Biennial of the Moving Image, Mechelen, Belgium; Nuit Blanche, Toronto; Adelaide International 2012, Adelaide, Australia; 18th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; 2017 Whitney Biennial; Art in General, New York; documenta 14; 57th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh; Desert X, Coachella Valley, CA; Art Institute of Chicago; LAXART, Los Angeles; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Remai Modern Museum, Saskatoon, Canada. Their historic Land Art installation Repellent Fence occurred at the US/Mexico border near Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico. The collective was awarded the Fine Prize for From Smoke and Tangled Waters, They Carried Fire Home, commissioned for the 57th Carnegie International.
Postcommodity acknowledges the important contributions of its previous collaborators: Steven Yazzie (2007–2010), Nathan Young (2007–2015), Raven Chacon (2009–2018), Adam Ingram-Goble (Game Remains), Andrew McCord (If History Moves at the Speed of Its Weapons, Then the Shape of the Arrow is Changing, and Promoting a More Just, Verdant and Harmonious Resolution), Annabel Wong (Dead River) and Existence AD (Dead River).
CAA’s Annual Artist Interviews will be held on Friday, February 17, 4:30–7 p.m. ET, in Grand Ballroom East.
The 111th CAA Annual Conference will be held February 15–18, 2023 at the New York Hilton Midtown. Register now!
Emerging Professional Director Candidate: Lauren Van Nest
posted by CAA — Dec 22, 2022
Statement
My name is Lauren Van Nest and I am a doctoral candidate at the University of Virginia (UVA) studying the art and architecture of medieval Europe. My dissertation examines the relationships crafted between objects of imperial patronage in the Ottonian Empire, their ritual environments, and the bodies of their patrons. I research the ways in which artistic materials—their form, aesthetics, symbolism—transmit concepts of divinity and power across media and iconographies. My work has been supported by a twelve-month fellowship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (German Academic Exchange Service) in affiliation with the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen in Göttingen, Germany. Additionally, I have been awarded research grants by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), Center for Global Inquiry + Innovation, and UVA Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. I received my undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (B.A.) and a graduate degree from the University of Toronto (M.A.).
I would define my duty as a College Art Association (CAA) board member as a commitment to service towards the community via cultivation and advocacy. I am passionate about developing and promoting programming that creatively adapts to the pressures facing the visual arts today and continues to make the arts more accessible to wider audiences. As the Emerging Professional Director on the Board of Directors, I would bring my own enthusiasm for the visual arts alongside my skills in project management, communicating complex ideas, and collaboration. As an organization drawing together diverse and vibrant professionals, CAA is uniquely positioned to advocate for the value of the arts nationally and internationally. During my term, I will develop robust advocacy strategies that not only promote continued federal and public funding of the arts, but also attend to the needs of CAA members through grants and workshops. I envision CAA as a partner to its individual members, navigating the various obstacles facing aspiring as well as established visual arts professionals.
I have served in international organizations during my graduate career, including the Medieval Academy of America (MAA) and the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA). It is in these roles that I have coordinated mentorship programming, produced podcasts, and organized roundtables on topics related to graduate and early career professionalization. I am also committed to engaging with digital humanities projects that analyze and document the history of academic institutions, namely universities (Land and Legacy) and organizations (ICMA Oral History Project). With CAA, I am able to harness my previous and future interests to contribute to the goals of the organization.
Now Accepting Applications for the Art History Fund for Travel To Special Exhibitions
posted by CAA — Dec 06, 2022
Students from Rachel Stephens’ seminar on American portraiture at the University of Alabama visiting the Birmingham Museum of Art to view the exhibition, “Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now” in 2019.
In fall 2018, we announced CAA had received an anonymous gift of $1 million to fund travel for art history faculty and their students to special exhibitions related to their classwork. The generous gift established the Art History Fund for Travel to Special Exhibitions. We are happy to accept new applications again for this upcoming year.
The fund is designed to award up to $10,000 to qualifying undergraduate and graduate art history classes to cover students’ and instructors’ costs (travel, accommodations, and admissions fees) associated with attending museum special exhibitions throughout the United States and worldwide. The purpose of the grants is to enhance students’ first-hand knowledge of original works of art. Interested members can also see recent awardees share their experiences at the session at the CAA Annual Conference at the session Art History Fund for Travel to Special Exhibitions: Sharing Stories.
Applications are due by January 15, 2023.
Meet the 2022 Wyeth Award Winners
posted by CAA — Nov 30, 2022
Anton Refregier, History of San Francisco, 1941-1948, mural, panel 2: “Indians by the Golden Gate,” Rincon Center, San Francisco, California, public domain
Since 2005, the Wyeth Foundation for American Art has supported the publication of books on American art through the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, administered by CAA. The 2022 grantees are:
- Siobhan Angus, Camera Geologica: Temporality, Materiality, and Mining in Climate Breakdown, Duke University Press
- Julia Bailey, Painting and Paranoia: The Specter of Communist Art in Cold War USA, University of Illinois Press
- Janet Berlo, Not Native American Art? Fakes, Replicas, and Invented Traditions, University of Washington Press
- Stephanie Buhmann, Frederick Kiesler: Galaxies, The Green Box, Berlin
- Colby Chamberlain, Fluxus Administration: George Maciunas and the Art of Paperwork, University of Chicago Press
- Jessica L. Horton, Earth Diplomacy: Indigenous American Art and Reciprocity, 1953–1973, Duke University Press
- Darren Newbury, American Perspectives in Africa: Photographic Diplomacy and the Cold War Imagination, Penn State University Press
- Louise Siddons, Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon: Laura Gilpin and Navajo Sovereignty, University of Minnesota Press
The list of all recipients of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant from 2005 to the present can be found here.