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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.” 

 

 

This program is made possible with support from Getty.

Filed under: International

CWA Picks: Summer 2023

posted by CAA — May 31, 2023

CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) curates a seasonal list of must-see exhibitions. The CWA Summer 2023 picks highlight the rich contributions of women-identifying African, Latinx, and Indigenous artists, bringing their voices to the forefront. These artists explore the legacies of their respective mediums and their enduring significance in contemporary art. Unafraid to tackle pressing social issues, their works offer a powerful lens through which to examine themes of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. By amplifying marginalized perspectives, these exhibitions provoke meaningful conversations and challenge existing narratives in the art world.

 


Tender Loving Care
July 22, 2023–July 28, 2025
Museum of Fine Art, Boston

This exhibition explores the theme of care through contemporary art. The act of creating and appreciating art is a form of care, and the exhibition highlights how artists address this concept through their materials, ideas, and processes. The exhibition showcases around 100 works from the museum’s collection, organized into five thematic groupings: threads, thresholds, rest, vibrant matter, and adoration. Examples of care in art can be seen in Gisela Charfauros McDaniel’s portrait of her mother, Nick Cave’s Sound Suit, and textiles and fiber art by Sheila Hicks, Howardena Pindell, and Jane Sauer. Through these works and others, visitors are invited to consider how care can inspire new models for living and feeling in the present and the future.

 


Creativity in the Time of COVID-19: Art as a Tool for Combatting Inequity and Injustice
August 25–September 30, 2023
Buffalo NY: Squeaky Wheel, Buffalo Arts Studio + Buffalo Game Space

In collaboration with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Michigan State University, and SUNY Buffalo’s Amatryx Lab & Studio, this exhibition features a range of BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and Buffalo-based artists and creatives to center marginalized experiences of the pandemic and social justice concerns.

 


Black Venus
Through August 20, 2023
Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco

BLACK VENUS, curated by Aindrea Emelife is an exhibition that surveys the legacy of Black Women in visual culture – from fetishized, colonial-era caricatures to the present-day reclamation of the rich complexity of Black womanhood by 18 artists (of numerous nationalities and with birth years spanning 1942 to 1997). This exhibition is a celebration of Black beauty, an investigation into the many faces of Black femininity and the shaping of Black women in the public consciousness – then and now.

In BLACK VENUS, archival depictions of Baartman and other historical Black women pair with the vibrant, narrative portraiture by some of today’s most influential Black image-makers whose work deals with layered narratives of Black femininity.

This exhibition reckons with difficult visual histories. It features some themes and images that are derogatory and many that are empowering. Sensitive visitors should be aware that several artists in the exhibition employ nudity and sexual imagery to explore their ideas.

 


Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archeology of Memory 
Through August 13, 2023
UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Berkeley

Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory is the first retrospective exhibition of the work of longtime Bay Area artist Mesa-Bains. Presenting work from the entirety of her career for the first time, this exhibition, which features nearly 60 works in a range of media, including fourteen major installations, celebrates Mesa-Bains’s important contributions to the field of contemporary art locally and globally.

 


Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest
Through July 9, 2023
Bard Graduate Center, NYC

Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest invites you to explore the world of Navajo weaving. This dynamic gallery and online experience presents never-before-seen textiles created by Diné artists. These historic blankets, garments, and rugs from the American Museum of Natural History are situated alongside contemporary works by Diné weavers and visual artists, such as Barbara Teller Ornelas and Lynda Teller Pete. Shaped by the Loom highlights seasonal cycles that guide the harvesting of dye plants, the cosmologies that inform a weaver’s work, and the songs, stories, and prayers that are woven into every piece. The items in the exhibition will be accompanied by artist interviews, interactive storytelling, and stunning panoramic views of the Navajo Nation. Shaped by the Loom elevates the voices of Indigenous artists and makers to express the cultural legacy and continued vibrancy of weaving traditions in the American Southwest.

 


The Figure, Reclaimed
A Renaissance of the female body in visual culture
July 5–August 4, 2023
Carolla Arts Exhibition Center, Missouri State University

Throughout the history of visual culture, figurative painting has been regarded as one of the highest forms of Western art. Dazzling displays of hyper-realistic anatomical mastery and expansive narrative scenes depicting multiple figures through complex perspectives dominated as the pinnacle of art-making for centuries. While the artists of these historic images were all white male painters, it was the female body that was often leveraged for these narratives. Further, female artists were also excluded from painting these historic scenes and denied access to nude models to even attempt to study the art of figural painting.

The Figure, Reclaimed, seeks to celebrate and explore the Renaissance of the female body and the female figurative painter in visual culture. Through the work of Aneka Ingold and Livia Xandersmith, this exhibition explores how female figurative painters have combined the traditional art of figurative painting with contemporary, stylized approaches to redefine and expand upon what it means to be a figurative painter, ruminate on the female experience, and how representations of the female body are consumed.
 
As women face losing bodily autonomy in today’s contemporary society, what does it mean to be a female figurative painter in today’s context? What stories must be told on the scale of figurative painting about what it means to identify as a woman today? Why is the female body a contested landscape, and why does this form hold a sense of home base for visual culture? Is it the embodied connection to humanity and life?


Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich: Too Bright to See
Perez Art Museum, Miami
Through January 7, 2024

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich (b. 1987) is a filmmaker and artist whose work blends narrative and documentary traditions to explore stories and experiences of Black women in the Americas.

Hunt-Ehrlich’s experimental narrative artwork Too Bright to See (Part I) draws on her extensive research on the legacy of Suzanne Roussi-Césaire, a writer and anticolonial and feminist activist from Martinique who, along with her husband, Aimé Césaire, was at the forefront of the Négritude movement during the first half of the 20th century. Roussi-Césaire would also become an important Surrealist thinker, influencing the likes of painter Wifredo Lam and writer André Breton. However, despite her critical contributions to Caribbean thought and Surrealist discourse, until recently much of her work was overlooked.

Too Bright to See (Part I) weaves archival materials with cinematic narrative scenes filmed with an unconventional and modern cast. Drawing inspiration from Caribbean aesthetics and Surrealist artwork, this film installation brings attention to new aspects of Roussi-Césaire’s legacy that are undocumented in the public arena, while addressing the broader question of the continued erasure of women from historical accounts.

 


Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now
Barbican Art Gallery, London
June 21–September 3, 2023

Opening 22 June 2023, Barbican Art Gallery is proud to present the first major solo exhibition of Carrie Mae Weems in a UK institution. Widely considered to be one of the most influential American artists working today, Weems (b.1953) is celebrated for her exploration of cultural identity, power structures, desire, and social justice through a body of work that develops questioning narratives around race, gender, history, class and their systems of representation.

Highlighting her remarkably diverse and radical practice, this survey brings together an outstanding selection of photographic series, films, and installations spanning over three decades, many of which have never been seen before in the UK. Presenting the development of her unique poetic gaze and formal language from the early 1990s to the present day, this exhibition reflects on Weems’s pioneering career. On display are works from her early iconic Kitchen Table Series (1990) which explores how power dynamics are articulated in the domestic sphere and the potential of the home as a space for resistance, to her acclaimed series Roaming (2006) and Museums (2016) where Weems’s muse confronts architecture as the materialisation of political and cultural power. Her oeuvre challenges dominant ideologies and historical narratives created by and disseminated within science, architecture, photography, and mass media.

The exhibition is accompanied by Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now, the first publication devoted to the artist’s writings. It will highlight Weems’s influence as an intellectual, reflecting the dual nature of her career as an artist and activist. A public programme of events, including a programme of films in Barbican cinema, will also run throughout the course of the exhibition.

 


Gio Swaby: Fresh Up
Through July 3, 2023
Art Institute of Chicago

Gio Swaby is a multidisciplinary artist whose textile-based practice explores the intersections of Blackness and womanhood. Her embroidered portraits are anchored in the connections she forges with her subjects: each portrait begins with a photo shoot in which her sitters are captured in a moment of self-awareness and empowerment. In her textile interpretations, Swaby foregrounds their hair, clothing, and jewelry—highlighting and celebrating the subjects’ use of fashion as unapologetic self-definition and self-expression.

This exhibition—Swaby’s first solo museum show—brings together seven of Swaby’s series from 2017 through 2021, such as My Hands Are Clean, Love Letters, and Pretty Pretty, along with approximately 15 new works, including her largest work to date, a commission for the US Embassy in Nassau, Bahamas. The title of the show, Fresh Up, developed with the artist, is a Bahamian phrase often used as a way to compliment someone’s style or confident way of being. Swaby has remarked, “It holds a lot of positivity and joy. It also speaks to the tone of confidence and power that I want to create with these works. I love that it is a way to form connections through a simple phrase.”

 


Lynn Hershman Leeson: Phantom Limb
Through July 8, 2023
Altman Seigel, San Francisco

Altman Siegel proudly presents a historical exhibition of works from Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Phantom Limb series, which was created in the 1980s. At the time that it was created, the Phantom Limb collages illustrated the more insidious impacts of mass media and technology on women’s bodies. Created prior to the advent of Photoshop, this body of work borrows from the visual language of advertising, fusing female forms with technology. Seductively posed women merge with cameras, TV screens, and electrical plugs, pointing to ways in which gendered mass media representations shape and distort women’s self-image. At once alluring and disarming, these black-and-white photo collages grapple with the absorption of female identity into modern media at a time when the depths of this issue were just beginning to be explored.

In this series Hershman Leeson was already musing on the implications of surveillance when she describes cameras as a “capture system”:

“This photographic series…suggests that we are not only being watched by surveillance systems, but that ‘capture’ systems are endemic to our society. The series questions individual complicity in a system that simultaneously steals images and warps personal identity. The seductive alliance of surveillance and capture inspired the sexually provocative positions in the anthropomorphic images.” – Lynn Hershman Leeson

My Hands Are Clean 4, 2017  Gio Swaby. Courtesy of Claire Oliver and Ian Rubinstein. © Gio Swaby

 

Filed under: CWA Picks

caa.reviews Seeks Field Editors in Ten Areas

posted by CAA — May 16, 2023

CAA is inviting nominations and self-nominations for individuals to join the caa.reviews Council of Field Editors for the three-year term July 1, 2023–June 30, 2026.  caa.reviews is devoted to the peer review of new books, museum exhibitions, and projects relevant to art history, visual studies, and the arts. Candidates may be artists, art historians, art critics, art educators, curators, or other art professionals with stature in the field and experience writing or editing books and/or exhibition reviews; institutional affiliation is not required. caa.reviews is seeking Field Editors in the following fields:  

  • Architectural History, Urban Planning, Historic Preservation, Landscape Architecture  
  • South and Southeast Asian Art 
  • Indigenous Art  
  • Early Modern European Art (South) 
  • Nineteenth-Century Art 
  • Twentieth-Century Art 
  • Contemporary Art 
  • Cinema, Media, and Performance 
  • Exhibitions: Northeast 
  • Exhibitions: New York 

Working with the caa.reviews editor-in-chief, the caa.reviews Editorial Board, and CAA’s staff editor, each field editor selects content to be reviewed, commissions reviewers, and considers manuscripts for publication. Field editors for books are expected to keep abreast of newly published and important books and related media in their fields of expertise, and those for exhibitions should be aware of current and upcoming exhibitions (and other related projects) in their geographic regions.  

The Council of Field Editors meets once a year in February during the Annual Conference (although attendance at the conference is not necessary to participate in the meeting). Members of all CAA committees and editorial boards volunteer their services without compensation.  

Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competing journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome.  

Interested applicantsboth self-nominated or nominated by someone else—should submit a CV and a cover letter in a single PDF document to ebell@collegeart.org. 

Deadline: June 15, 2023  

Filed under: caa.reviews

Nominations Open for CAA Juries

posted by CAA — May 11, 2023

CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for individuals to serve on our Awards for Distinction, Publication Grant, Fellowship, and Travel and Support Grant juries. Terms begin July 2023. 

Candidates must possess expertise appropriate to the jury’s work and be current CAA members. They should not hold a position on a CAA committee or editorial board beyond May 31, 2023. CAA’s president and vice president for committees appoint jury members for service. Materials are due to CAA by June 1, 2023.

Amanda Williams speaks at Convocation at CAA's 108th Annual Conference in Chicago

Amanda Williams speaks at Convocation at CAA’s 108th Annual Conference in Chicago

AWARDS FOR DISTINCTION JURIES

CAA has vacancies in the following juries for the annual Awards for Distinction for three years (2023–2026). Terms begin in July 2023.

  • Art Journal Award (1 vacancy)
  • The Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award/Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions for museum scholarship (2 vacancies)
  • Charles Rufus Morey Book Award for non-catalogue books in the history of art (1 vacancy)
  • Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism (2 vacancies)
  • Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize for Art Bulletin articles (1 vacancy)
  • The CAA/American Institute for Conservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation (1 vacancy)
  • Jury for the Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work, Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement, and Distinguished Teaching of Art Award (1 vacancy)
  • Excellence in Diversity Award (3 vacancies)
  • Distinguished Feminist Awards for Scholars and Artists (1 vacancy)

FELLOWSHIP AND SCHOLARSHIP JURIES

CAA has vacancies on our Professional Development Fellowship juries for three years (2023–2026). Terms begin in July 2023.

  • Professional Development Fellowships for Art History (2 vacancies)
  • Professional Development Fellowships for Visual Art, CAA-GOLDEN Scholarship Program, and Michael Aurbach Fellowship for Excellence in Visual Art (3 vacancies)

 

TRAVEL/SUPPORT GRANT JURIES

CAA has vacancies on our jury for three years (2023–2026). Terms begin in July 2023.

  • Art History Fund for Travel to Special Exhibitions (3 vacancies)

 

HOW TO APPLY

Nominations and self-nominations should include a brief statement (no more than 150 words) outlining the individual’s qualifications and experience and a CV (an abbreviated CV no more than two pages may be submitted). Please send all materials by email to Cali Buckley: cbuckley@collegeart.org. Nominations must be sent as a Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF attachment.

For questions about jury service and responsibilities, contact cbuckley@collegeart.org.

Deadline: June 1, 2023

Filed under: Awards

The Art Bulletin Seeks Reviews Editor

posted by CAA — Mar 21, 2023

**THESE POSITIONS HAVE BEEN FILLED. NOMINATIONS ARE CLOSED**

Reviews Editor Opening

The Editorial Board of The Art Bulletin seeks nominations and self-nominations for the position of reviews editor for a three-year term July 1, 2024–June 30, 2027 (with service as incoming reviews editor designate July 1, 2023–June 30, 2024). The Art Bulletin, published quarterly by CAA, features leading scholarship in the English language in all aspects of art history as practiced in the academy, museums, and other institutions.  

Candidates should be art scholars with stature in the field and experience in editing book and/or exhibition reviews; institutional affiliation is not required. Candidates should be published authors of at least one book.  

The reviews editor is responsible for commissioning all book and exhibition reviews in The Art Bulletin. He or she selects books and exhibitions for review, commissions reviewers, and determines the appropriate length and character of reviews. The reviews editor also works with authors and CAA’s editorial director in the development and preparation of review manuscripts for publication. He or she is expected to keep abreast of newly published and important books and recent exhibitions in the fields of art history, criticism, theory, visual studies, and museum publishing. This is a three-year term, which includes membership on the Art Bulletin Editorial Board.  

The reviews editor attends the three annual meetings of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board held three times a year: in the spring and fall plus one at the CAA Annual Conference in February. The fall and spring meetings are currently held by teleconference. Members are expected to pay travel and lodging expenses to attend the conference in February. Members of all editorial boards volunteer their services to CAA without compensation. The reviews editor submits an annual report to CAA’s Board of Directors.    

Candidates must be current CAA members in good standing and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. CAA encourages applications from colleagues who will contribute to the diversity of perspectives on the Art Bulletin Editorial Board and who will engage actively with conversations about the discipline’s engagements with differences of culture, religion, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, and access. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please email a letter describing your or your nominee’s interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and your contact information to Eugenia Bell, Editorial Director, at EBell@collegeart.org.  

Deadline: April 30, 2023. Finalists will be interviewed on the afternoon of Friday, May 5.  

Filed under: Art Bulletin

caa.reviews Seeks Field Editors in Eleven Areas

posted by CAA — Mar 21, 2023

CAA is inviting nominations and self-nominations for individuals to join the caa.reviews Council of Field Editors for the three-year term July 1, 2023–June 30, 2026. An online journal, caa.reviews is devoted to the peer review of new books, museum exhibitions, and projects relevant to art history, visual studies, and the arts. Candidates may be artists, art historians, art critics, art educators, curators, or other art professionals with stature in the field and experience writing or editing books and/or exhibition reviews; institutional affiliation is not required.   

      • Indigenous Art
      • Architectural History, Urban Planning, Historic Preservation, Landscape Architecture  
      • South and Southeast Asian Art  
      • Islamic Art  
      • Cinema, Media, and Performance 
      • Nineteenth-Century Art 
      • Twentieth-Century Art 
      • Contemporary Art 
      • Early Modern European Art (South) 
      • Exhibitions: Midwest 
      • Exhibitions: Northeast

Working with the caa.reviews editor-in-chief, the caa.reviews Editorial Board, and CAA’s staff editor, each field editor selects content to be reviewed, commissions reviewers, and considers manuscripts for publication. Field editors for books are expected to keep abreast of newly published and important books and related media in their fields of expertise, and those for exhibitions should be aware of current and upcoming exhibitions (and other related projects) in their geographic regions. 

The Council of Field Editors meets once a year at the CAA Annual Conference. Members of all CAA committees and editorial boards volunteer their services without compensation.

Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competing journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome.

Interested applicantsboth self-nominated or nominated by someone else—should submit a CV and a cover letter, in one PDF document to ebell@collegeart.org.

Deadline: April 30, 2023 

Filed under: Uncategorized

caa.reviews Seeks Board Member

posted by CAA — Mar 21, 2023

**THESE POSITIONS HAVE BEEN FILLED. NOMINATIONS ARE CLOSED**

caa.reviews seeks a new Editorial Board Member to fill the post of Emerging Professional, defined as an active member of CAA who is in graduate school or in the first two (2) years of their career. The Emerging Professional will serve a four-year term, July 1, 2023–June 30, 2027. 

CAA encourages applications from candidates with a strong record of scholarship who are committed to the imaginative development of caa.reviews. An online journal, caa.reviews is devoted to the peer review of recent books, museum exhibitions, and projects relevant to the fields of art history, visual studies, and the arts.   

The editorial board advises the editor-in-chief and field editors for the journal and helps them to identify books and exhibitions for review and to solicit reviewers, articles, and other content for the journal. The editorial board guides the journal’s editorial program and may propose new initiatives for it. Members stay abreast of trends and issues in the field by attending and reporting on sessions at the CAA Annual Conference and academic conferences, symposia, and other events in their fields.  

The caa.reviews Editorial Board meets three times a year, twice in the spring and fall and once at the CAA Annual Conference in February. Members also attend the annual meeting of the caa.reviews Council of Field Editors at the Annual Conference. Members pay their travel and lodging expenses to attend the meeting at the conference. Meetings in the spring and fall are currently held by teleconference. Members of all editorial boards volunteer their services to CAA without compensation.  

Candidates must be current CAA members and should not currently serve on the editorial board of a competitive journal or another CAA editorial board or committee. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please email a statement describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and your contact information to Eugenia Bell, Editorial Director, ebell@collegeart.org. Please include the subject line caa.reviews Emerging Professional.  

Deadline: April 30, 2023; finalists will be interviewed in early May. 

 

Filed under: caa.reviews, Uncategorized

CWA Picks: Spring 2023

posted by CAA — Mar 06, 2023

The CAA Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) Spring Picks focus on exhibitions and literature that explore an interrelatedness of art and science. From the science of future technology to the science of biology, these artists utilize traditional and technological materials in their heterogeneous work. 

 

Hayv Kahraman, Eye megaphones, 2023, Oil and torshi on linen, 177.8 x 177.8 x 6.4 cm

 

Gut Feelings: Part II 

Hayv Kahramen, February 6 – March 25 

Third Line Gallery, Dubai 

Occupying both gallery spaces, Hayv Kahraman presents a series of new paintings and drawings that continue her ongoing scientific research and exploration into the effects of trauma on the body, and the role of the gut in our healing process.   

Kahraman’s practice is heavily guided by her refugee experience, where notions of gender and trauma are consistent themes throughout her work. Recently, the artist has directed her research towards neuroscience, human immunology and “neurosculpting” – the ability to restructure the neural pathways in our brain through the gut microbiome – and how they specifically relate to trauma, and our ultimate goal to heal and repair. 

Often referred to as the body’s “second brain”, the gut is responsible for our somatic state whereby the bacteria inside our gut regulates the hormones that control our feelings. Kahraman became increasingly fascinated with this theory, and how neurosculpting offers the potential to heal through the process of unlearning and relearning. In this body of work, Kahraman applies this theory alongside her own lived experiences to highlight the puissant connection between the mind and the body. Exposed and tangled digestive organs act as a visual metaphor of unraveling the restorative process. 

 Delving further into the gut microbiome as a site for recognition and renewal, Kahraman addresses the notion of “otherness” through the medium in which she paints. We have learnt to consider the bacteria and foreign microbes found inside our gut as undesirable, but in fact they are fundamental to our human psyche. By incorporating into her paintings the lilac dye from torshi – fermented beetroot served in Middle Eastern cuisine which is believed to improve mental wellbeing via the gut, and jars of which are on view in the exhibition – Kahraman affirms that the microbial world is verification of our acceptance of difference. Physically painting with torshi – i.e. bacteria – serves as an allegory to how we sentient beings live in symbiosis with the “other”. 


Timelapse 

Sarah Sze, March 31 – September 10 

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY 

Organized by Kyung An, Associate Curator, Asian Art, and was conceived and contributed to by Nancy Spector, former Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator. 

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum will present a solo exhibition of Sarah Sze (b. 1969, Boston) featuring a series of site-specific installations by the acclaimed New York–based artist. Sarah Sze: Timelapse will unravel a trail of discovery through multiple spaces of the iconic Frank Lloyd Wright building, from the exterior of the museum to the sixth level of the rotunda and the adjacent tower level gallery. The exhibition will explore Sze’s ongoing reflection on how our experience of time and place is continuously reshaped in relationship to the constant stream of objects, images, and information in today’s digitally and materially saturated world. 

Sze creates across multiple mediums employing painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, video, and installation. She is well known for her intricate constructions using a myriad of both fabricated and found objects and images. Whether an intimately scaled sculpture or a large, permanent public commission, her works possess a generative quality—as though in a cycle of growth and decay—and dynamically engage with the spaces they occupy. 

In Sze’s reimagination, the Guggenheim’s iconic, UNESCO World Heritage architecture becomes a public timekeeper in a reminder that timelines are built through shared experience and memory. In the words of the artist, “Like the collective efforts used by humans over centuries to communally mark time, to measure and mark it in physical form—ranging from Jantar Mantar, to the Prime Meridian line, to ubiquitous minarets, clock towers, and animated or astronomical clocks around the world—the museum building will become a site to explore the idea of a public clock, and an experiment in collective timekeeping that all in the city can experience.” 

Inside the museum, quiet gestures, such as a single pendulum hovering above the fountain on the rotunda floor and a small sculptural installation tucked into an interstitial space in front of the freight elevator, demonstrate Sze’s distinct engagement with unexpected spaces. Visitors will enter an immersive environment: a panoramic sequence of eight bays occupied by a new series of works comprising painting, sculpture, video, drawing, and sound. These will be connected by a river of videos—seen earlier on the building’s street-level facade—which slowly travels up the spiral expanse of the building’s interior, creating a horizon line of moving images. As it travels across, above, and behind the works on view, visitors will be absorbed into a generative experience, continually re-orienting themselves temporally and spatially. 


Kopotu Ipikosi (And They Overcame)

Pamela Enyonu, February 28 – March 28 

AKKA Projects, Dubai 

What is Fear? 

Why do we Fear equality? 

How does this Fear of achieving equality express itself in and around me? 

This artistic essay is an exploration of the phenomenon of fear, and the positions it is experienced from; the instigation of fear and the effects it has on individual bodies and entire communities. What are the elements that create fear, how do the instigators of fear experience it and weaponise fear to curtail autonomy, and how is this activity systemised because it grows in scope and effectiveness; mass hysteria. 

The artistic intervention aims to assess whether the effects of fear can be countered or even anticipated and to study the damage fear has on the quality of human expression. Pamela Enyonu was born in 1985 in Kampala, Uganda where she  currently lives and works. Pamela studied Art and Design at the Kyambogo University Banda of Kampala, Uganda.  Her artistic career started in 2017 with a 3 months residency at 32 degrees East, in Kampala, where she navigated the politics of identity, trauma, and healing. After her residency, she was invited to host a solo exhibition in June 2017. Another artist’s residency in Paris, France, followed in 2020, on the occasion of Africa 2020. In 2022, Enyonu has concluded her residency at AKKA Project in Venice, Italy, also being hosted by ProHelvetia, Zurich, Switzerland, in the same year. 

Pamela’s style is inspired by stories, materials, and the process it takes to transform them into works of art. Her works present a tactile and 3-dimensional quality that richly layered textures exploring narratives on gender, identity, empowerment, and self-awareness. Pamela is particularly interested in the “untokenized” experiences occupying the intersection of empowerment, mental health, and identity. She continuously engages with the different communities through collaborations, workshops and seminars. Recently, some of Pamela’s latest works have been acquired by Africa First, and have become part of its private collection of contemporary African art. 


No Evil 

Jennifer Chen , February 10 – April 30 

Sci Arc, Los Angeles 

No Evil imagines a long distant future when, after planetary scaled geoengineering systems have saved earth’s population from climate extinction, planet surviving events have become new creation stories: “machines that once filled the air, sown the seeds, fertilized the ocean, and dimmed the sun have long since been decommissioned.”  

Exploring a world that was once on the brink of collapse, “saved only by the forgotten creatures of the past,” Chen is interested in using radical geoengineering processes as a lens through which we can investigate practical responses to climate restoration.  

Using 2D and 3D data corrupting techniques to simulate the fading of memories across time and a mixture of analogue techniques including weaving, sewing, welding, and casting, as well as digital fabrication techniques including 3D printing and CNC milling, the exhibition combines decayed digital data and new cultural curiosities to imagine a world where new mythologies are created, giving rise to a new form of craft. Audiences will wander through an abstract forest landscape drawn from this future and encounter fragments of worship, shrines, tapestries, and stories told through film and objects. No Evil invites viewers to consider the forgotten tales, myths, and artifacts that once celebrated and revered these speculative relics of climate resistance as a reminder of what future could await us all if today, we turn a blind eye and cover our ears.  

Chen is faculty at SCI-Arc and an architect and designer who works at the intersection of science and fiction, exploring themes of geoengineering, remote sensing, and climate change futures in projects that take the form of buildings, installation, film, and performance. Her new exhibition imagines a long distant future when, after planetary scaled geoengineering systems have saved earth’s population from climate extinction, planet surviving events have become new creation stories. 


Revealing Threads 

Tia Keobounpheng , July 22 – October 9 

US Bank Gallery, The Minnesota Arts Exhibition Program 

A Finnish and Sámi descendent, Keobounpheng uses her artistic practice to recognize her familial connections to both the colonizers and the colonized. “Revealing Threads” will feature her abstract tapestries, influenced by traditional Nordic handwork techniques but infused with contemporary interpretations and symbolism. The results speak to marginalized histories, heritage, and the complexity of personal identity. The works will be informed by a research trip to Sápmi, the traditional land of the Sami people, in fall 2022. 

Keobounpheng is a designer/maker and artist living and working in North Minneapolis. She is a recipient of the 2017 and 2020 MN State Arts Board’s Artist Initiative Grant, 2018 McKnight Foundation’s Next Step Fund, and 2022 MN State Arts Board Creative Support for Individuals Grant. Her work has been shown at the American Swedish Institute, in Minneapolis; the Finlandia University Gallery, in Hancock, Michigan; the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul; and the Anderson Center, in Red Wing, Minnesota. Her laser-cut jewelry has been sold by design retailers across the country for over a decade. 


Chronicle 

Fran Siegel , January 14 – March 4 

Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles 

Curated by Jill Moniz 

Chronicle features 216 small drawings on paper that Siegel started at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Fran visualized the discourse around the virus as extensions of her focus on pinwheel and maps, as a shorthand of place, and the aesthetics approaching abstraction. Moniz pairs these ephemeral works with Siegel’s painted tapestries that incorporate porcelain as armatures, structural hardware that deciphers colonial appropriation and cultural production.  

 The exhibition offers multiple entry points into dialogues that magnify how making transforms moments, from staged and beautiful, to essential and abject. Siegel’s works are intimate in scale, reflecting how the pandemic dictated her process and inspired introspective collaging of dreams, news and opportunities, unpacking and reassembling iconography that influences how we interpret and shape our worlds.  

In her consideration of patterns and pinwheels, Siegel draws out form, emphasizing how we record our relationship to each other and the landscape, and how intricately and intimately connected we are. Siegel’s pinwheels represent for Moniz a fulcrum of visual language that expands and focuses our attention on both specificity and plurality of experiences that benefit from collective empathy. Chronicle explores Moniz and Siegel’s shared commitment to the depth and complexity of cultural associations foundational to place, and meaning making through art practice. 


Archaeology of Metaphor 

The Art of Gilah Yelin Hirsch 

Literature/publication 

curated and edited by Donna Stein 

A retrospective survey of the Canadian American artist’s career. 

Characterized by a search for meaning, Hirsch’s oeuvre connects psychological, scientific, and philosophical implications of form, bringing together ideas in art, science, ecology, and human consciousness. 

The artworks in multiple and mixed media provide an evolving history of Hirsch’s ideas and craft as they illustrate the progression of her original research on the origin of all alphabets. Her elegant theory about five fundamental shapes in nature that reflect forms of neurons and neural processes of perception and cognition as the source of all letterforms in alphabets ancient to modern has gained acceptance in scientific circles. Her evidence shows that while cultures and languages bring unique beauty and richness to the world, we, as humankind, are more alike than different. 

Since the 1980s, Hirsch has also been a pioneer in the field of mind/body healing, developing a type of visualization practice that serves as an instrument toward wellness. By organizing seemingly disparate information into a far-reaching scientific theory, Hirsch is recognized internationally for these techniques and has advanced healing practices through the arts. 

Archaeology of Metaphor connects the artist’s visual themes to her philosophy and ideas, simultaneously encouraging greater awareness of pattern recognition, social dynamics, and interconnectedness. 


Jessi Reaves: All possessive lusts dispelled 

The Arts Club of Chicago 

Chicago, IL 

February 16-May 20 

Jessi Reaves combines iconic modernist design with an irreverent aesthetic in sculpture that toys with functionality. Reaves often begins with found furniture, which she dismantles, converts, remakes, enhances, pads, and embellishes in ways that still allow the suggestion of physical contact or use. By breaking things open, she proposes that they be examined visually and in terms of their purpose in life. The exhibition at The Arts Club of Chicago centers on the work Personal Heat, 2021, a deconstructed étagère with accompanying video that explores themes of renovation and rebellion. The sculptural aspect features a pop punk aesthetic of hot pink animal stripes, as if Reaves had been locked in a room in her great aunt’s house with a can of paint, a saw, and some wood glue. The funk and humor of this work and other of Reaves’s sculptures and wall reliefs belie a mastery of complex composition, color, and the ability to integrate disparate materials. Reaves brings to her seemingly off-handed works a range of manual skills that she uses to both humorous and unsettling effect. Jessi Reaves: all possessive lusts dispelled offers a sensuous installation of works that allow the abject to infiltrate the ontology of the object. 


The Taxonomy of Peggy Macnamara  

March 9–April 28, 2023 

Glass Curtain Gallery—Columbia College Chicago 

1104 S Wabash Ave, 1st Floor, Chicago, IL 60605  

The Taxonomy of Peggy Macnamara features an immense array of artwork that has been created during Macnamara’s tenure as the only artist in residence at the Field Museum. This exhibition focuses on her relationship to observing and working among the collections over decades where practice as an artist, teacher, and collaborator has developed a process of long looking that has created a taxonomy of its own.   

Macnamara has traveled across the world, geared with her pencils and watercolors, investigating the fascinating intricacies of nature alongside scientists and peers from the Field Museum. Although her work uses the academic approach of illustrating, her savvy is evident in her loose handling of her art materials to document plants, animals, and related conservation work. Macnamara’s work artfully captures living things (or in some cases—once living), educates us, and sparks interest in the complexities of the natural world. 

This exhibition hones in on a tapestry of works that inspire curiosity and deep looking at plants, animals, and the dynamic relationships between them. Macanamara’s attention to detail, and skilled hand at analytically dissecting plants and animals is revealed through the works that leave the stages of the development of a piece visible. We engage with her work for the love of looking, but inevitably discussions about nature, extinction, conservation, and collections permeate its surface. Come take a peek behind the scenes of the Field Museum’s collections through Macnamara’s work, and through special tours accompanying this exhibition. 


Lygia Pape: Tecelares 

February 11-June 5th 

Art Institute of Chicago  

This exhibition brings together nearly 100 rarely seen woodblock prints by Pape, some of which have not been shown publicly since the artist exhibited them in the 1950s and 1960s. Composed of overlapping geometric and linear elements, they at times suggest the clash of atomic particles, rudimentary city plans, or slides of microscopic specimens. 

Filed under: Uncategorized

CAA 2023 Awards for Distinction

posted by CAA — Feb 06, 2023

CAA announces the 2023 recipients of Awards for Distinction. By honoring outstanding member achievements, CAA reaffirms its mission to encourage the highest standards of scholarship, practice, connoisseurship, and teaching in the arts. With these annual awards, CAA seeks to honor individual artists, art historians, authors, museum professionals, and critics whose accomplishments transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large. 

Installation view, Barbara Kruger, David Zwirner, New York, June 30–August 12, 2022. Courtesy David Zwirner.

Among the awards, the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement is presented to Barbara Kruger whose influential works have consistently had viewers question the larger society around them for over four decades.  

Griselda Pollock

Svetlana Alpers

The Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Awards for Writing on Artare being presented to feminist art historian Griselda Pollock and art historian of northern Renaissance and Dutch Golden Age art Svetlana Alpers 


Art Journal Award  

 

Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award  

Julia Burtenshaw, Héctor García Botero, Diana Magaloni, and María Alicia Uribe Villegas, The Portable Universe / El universo en tus manos: Thought and Splendor of Indigenous Colombia (DelMonico Books/Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2022) 

 

Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions  

No recipient this year 

 

Frank Jewett Mather Award  

Eduardo Cadava 

 

Charles Rufus Morey Book Award  

Sylvia Houghteling, The Art of Cloth in Mughal India (Princeton University Press, 2022)   

 

Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize 

Tomasz Grusiecki, “Doublethink: Polish Carpets in Transcultural Contexts” and Hugo Shakeshaft, “Beauty, Gods, and Early Greek Art: The Dedications of Mantiklos and Nikandre Revisited

 

Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work 

Dawoud Bey 

 

CAA/AIC Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation  

Michele Marincola and Lucretia Kargère 

 

Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement  

Barbara Kruger 

 

Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art  

Svetlana Alpers and Griselda Pollock 

 

Distinguished Teaching of Art Award  

Mary Lum 

 

Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award  

No recipient this year 

 

Excellence in Diversity Award 

Arlene M. Dávila


Citations:  

Art Journal Award  

Emilie Boone, “When Images in Haiti Fail: The Photograph of Charlemagne Péralte,” Art Journal, Winter 2022 

The 2022 jury has chosen Emilie Boone as the recipient of the 2022 Art Journal Award for the essay, “When Images in Haiti Fail: The Photograph of Charlemagne Péralte.” Boone’s deconstruction of a single photo offers readers an entry into the contested history surrounding the US occupation of Haiti, as well as the attendant visual politics of this period (1915–34). Through close textual analysis of Péralte’s historically significant image, the author weaves together a situated narrative of Haitian visual culture under occupation, interrogating crucial notions of ontology through examination of photographic composition. Boone frames the racialized body as a contested and imagined site rife for adaptation and tampering, first through vernacular photographic techniques, as well as other forms of pictorial representation. In the end, Boone’s text summons an interrogation of tradition, and indeed, of the implicit politics of the medium of photography itself. 

Jury members: 

Omar Kholeif, Sharjah Art Foundation, Chair
Phil Taylor, George Eastman Museum
Tilo Reifenstein, York St John University 

 

 

 

Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award  
Julia Burtenshaw, Héctor García Botero, Diana Magaloni, and María Alicia Uribe Villegas, The Portable Universe/El universo en tus manos: Thought and Splendor of Indigenous Colombia (DelMonico Books / Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2022) 

The Western concept of El Dorado has long impacted the study of the ancient cultures of Colombia, overshadowing the manifold stories that pre-Columbian art weaves across time and space. How can museum curators uncover those stories, illuminate their nuanced complexities, and present them to the public in engaging and innovative ways? The Portable Universe/El universo en tus manos is the remarkable outcome of just such an undertaking. Both the catalog and related exhibition are the result of a six-year collaboration between the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Museo del Oro, Bogotá. Most importantly, the curators collaborated with a contemporary Indigenous community in Colombia, the Arhuaco of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. The Portable Universe reveals that pre-Columbian artifacts—including goldworks, ceramics, and textiles—are not mere objects, but rather messengers that link living beings (people, animals, plants) and places across space and time. Each is, in brief, a portable universe. The Arhuaco explain that these messengers need to be “nourished,” or brought back to life. Thus, the concept of nourishment enters curatorial practice: a form of sustained, reciprocal attention that goes well beyond customary models of stewardship. Incisively written, gorgeously illustrated, and ingeniously designed, this groundbreaking book brings together interdisciplinary research (in history, archaeology, anthropology, environmental studies, and ornithology) and Indigenous knowledge to propose a new approach to the material and spiritual culture of ancient Colombia, one which underscores the transformative powers of cross-cultural dialogue. A major advance in the study of Indigenous art, the book spurs us to creatively rethink our notions of both the museum and scholarship. 

Jury Members: 

Benjamin Anderson, Cornell University, Co-chair
Karen Lang, Independent Scholar, Co-chair
Francesca Pietropaolo, Independent Scholar
Jochen Wierich, Aquinas College 

 

Frank Jewett Mather Award 

Eduardo Cadava 

The jury has awarded this year’s prize to Eduardo Cadava, based on his elegant book Paper Graveyards (MIT Press, 2021) and in recognition of his long career within the field of art criticism, especially his influential theories of photography. Paper Graveyards is the culmination of decades of Cadava’s thinking about how images and technical media actively transform social and political life, and his far-ranging case studies (including examinations of artists Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Fazal Sheikh, and Susan Meiselas) orient themselves towards activist practices that speak to and from the margins.  Wending through ruminations on materiality, forms of documentary, and modes of circulation, Cadava writes a new account of what it means to pay visual witness in the face of constant emergency. 

Jury members: 

Julia Bryan-Wilson, Columbia University, Chair
Nicole Fleetwood, New York University
Kim Theriault, Dominion University 

 

Charles Rufus Morey Book Award  

Sylvia Houghteling, The Art of Cloth in Mughal India (Princeton University Press, 2022) 

The Art of Cloth in Mughal India by Sylvia Houghteling focuses on the production, circulation, and consumption of South Asian textiles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period of both global manufacturing dominance and intense artistic creativity for Indian cloth-makers. The book offers a uniquely comprehensive account of the complex meanings of cloth as it moved across the Mughal imperial courts, the kingdoms of Rajasthan, the Deccan sultanates, and the British Isles, all the while remaining attentive to the richness of regional specialties. Houghteling brilliantly weaves together a capacious range of topics including issues of patronage and labor, iconography and symbolism, technical and ecological considerations, connections with poetry and other fine as well as decorative arts, and the sensory experience of the various textiles, from gauzy muslins to tent panels. Starting with an account of the Emperor Akbar’s patronage of dyers and weavers, Houghteling analyzes the elaborate Bikaner Robe, which Akbar’s successor Jahangir presented to a provincial raja. She moves on to the elegant textile culture of the Rajput Court of Amber and the kalamkari cloth of Machilipatnam, ending with a survey of the flourishing market for Hindustani cloth in early modern Britain, evidence of a new global cosmopolitanism that linked the Mughal court with the Stuarts. The book’s handsome design, color illustrations, and vivid writing make Art of Cloth an engaging read for scholars and general readers alike. 

Jury members: 

Lisa Schrenk, University of Arizona, Chair
John Cunnally, Iowa State University
Laura Anne Kalba, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
J. P. Park, University of Oxford
Andrew Wasserman, American University 

 

 

Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize  

Tomasz Grusiecki and Hugo Shakeshaft 

Tomasz Grusiecki, “Doublethink: Polish Carpets in Transcultural Contexts,” The Art Bulletin, September 2022
That art objects move, and that in doing so their meaning changes, is now widely accepted, but conceptualizing and describing the ways in which such changes occur still often eludes us. Tomasz Grusiecki’s winning essay provides a framework for doing just that, in its elegant examination of the lives and plural significances of carpets in early modern Eastern and Central Europe. Borrowing George Orwell’s notion of “doublethink,” Grusiecki shows, with a keenly historical eye, that there was little tension for early modern patrons between the provenience of carpets in Safavid Persia or Ottoman Turkey and their adaptation into local European contexts, where they became fundamental to the construction of individual and burgeoning national identities. Grusiecki moves past the simple charting of the “surprising” provenances of individual objects to weave a complex web in which he embraces the inevitable messiness of movement—and of meaning—in early modernity. Grusiecki’s transcultural doublethink promises to be a concept of great utility for our discipline as it continues to grapple with these issues. 

 

Hugo Shakeshaft, “Beauty, Gods, and Early Greek Art: The Dedications of Mantiklos and Nikandre Revisited,” The Art Bulletin, May 2022 

In his groundbreaking article “Beauty, Gods, and Early Greek Art: The Dedications of Mantiklos and Nikandre Revisited,” Hugo Shakeshaft transforms narratives around the topic of beauty in the religious art of archaic Greece. He moves away from such still-influential Enlightenment frameworks as Kant’s account of aesthetic autonomy and Winckelmann’s concern with timeless aesthetic values to examine the question of beauty from a historicizing vantage point. In order to assess how beauty mattered for those who patronized, created, employed, and observed artworks in ancient Greece, Shakeshaft focuses on two anthropomorphic votive figurines—a bronze statuette dedicated by Mantiklos (ca. 700–675 BCE) and a marble life-size statue dedicated by Nikandre (ca. 660–630 BCE). In his deeply researched discussion, he reconsiders these celebrated objects through a layered analysis of their forms, inscriptions, and materials as well as by reading them alongside aesthetic values expressed in the writings of Homer and Hesiod. In particular, he calls attention to the ideal of charis, a rich concept that can be translated as “beauty,” “favor,” “gratitude,” and “grace,” to show how beauty was inextricably tied to ideas of reciprocity. Ultimately, Shakeshaft posits that beauty needs to be treated as rigorously as any other interpretive category, and—far from being a universal—demands contextualized cultural awareness. 

 

Jury members:
Adam Jasienski, Southern Methodist University, Chair
Susanna Berger, University of Southern California
Christine I. Ho, University of Massachusetts Amherst 

 

Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work 

Dawoud Bey 

Dawoud Bey has a photographic career spanning four decades, beginning in 1975 with the seminal five-year portrait project of everyday life in Harlem. His work has recently traveled in a retrospective titled An American Project” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art. In his recent publication, Dawoud Bey: Two American Projects, his work explores race, African American history and underrepresented communities; featuring portraits memorializing the six children who were victims of the Ku Klux Klan’s bombing at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, and a group of black-and-white landscapes made in Ohio where the Underground Railroad once operated. In the 1980s Bey collaborated with artist David Hammons by documenting the performances Bliz-aard Ball Sale and Pissed Off. In 2017 he received the MacArthur Fellowship and is Professor of Photography at Columbia College Chicago where he has taught for over twenty years.  Bey’s work is in permanent collections of leading museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

Jury members: 

Derek G. Larson, Purdue University, Chair
Stephen Fakiyesi, Independent Artist

Jessica Hong, Art Museum  

 

 

CAA/AIC Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation 
Michele Marincola and Lucretia Kargère 

Michele Marincola and Lucretia Kargère are recognized by conservators, curators, and art historians, for their contributions to the study of European sculpture. Their recent, joint publication titled The Conservation of Medieval Polychrome Wood Sculpture: History, Theory, Practice (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2020) is a major contribution to the fields and represents two-decades of collaborative work. 

Marincola is the Sherman Fairchild Chair, and Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of Conservation, at the Conservation Center, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, a position she has held since 2014. Kargère is a Conservator of Medieval Sculptures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters. Marincola previously worked with Kargère at the Cloisters where they collaborated on conservation and research. Marincola’s contributions to scholarship include research on the sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider and the translation and commentary of Johannes Taubert’s Farbige Skulpturen into English. Kargère, who is known for her work on French sculpture, has collaborated with Maricola and conservation scientists at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the publications about the materials and techniques used in Medieval polychrome sculpture.  

Both Marincola and Kargère are recognized for having educated students and colleagues about the history and conservation of European Medieval polychrome sculpture. Numerous students, interns, and Fellows have benefitted from their expertise both at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at New York University. Moreover, Marincola and Kargère are known for producing publications and presentations that touch upon important issues in art conservation, art making, art history, and ethics. 

Jury members:
Tiarna Doherty, University of Delaware and Smithsonian, Chair
Fernanda Valverde, Amon Carter Museum
Rebecca Rushfield, Rebeccah Rushfield Arts Consultants 

 

Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement  

Barbara Kruger 

Barbara Kruger’s distinct artistic practice has palpably shaped the broader social, cultural, and visual fields for decades. For over four decades, the artist has persistently expanded her practice, exploring new media, from video to large-scale installations, collaborating with popular brands (with some even co-opting her iconic visual language) extending her influence beyond the art world, to pursuing intrepid interventions in the public sphere. Best known for her works with bold, declarative, often imposing and seemingly authorless text in which she overlays appropriated black-and-white imagery, Kruger interrogates mass media and consumer culture’s effects on how we see and understand ourselves. As the artist expressed, “I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are, what we want to be and what we become,” and she sees her works as prompts “to question and change the systems that contain us.” With the internet boom, explosion of social media, advertising’s increasingly sophisticated, if not untruthful, tactics, and advertising’s constant presence now from an infinite number of sources, Kruger’s work, past and present, feels more relevant than ever (as seen with numerous and recent solo presentations around the globe). Throughout her dedicated practice, Kruger has reminded us that these issues will continue to raise existential concerns and impact society writ-large until actively contended with. 

Jury members: 

Derek G. Larson, Purdue University, Chair
Stephen Fakiyesi, Independent Artist
Jessica Hong, Art Museum  

 

 

Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art  

Svetlana Alpers and Griselda Pollock 

Renowned for her groundbreaking work on Dutch Golden Age painting, Svetlana Alpers’ writings have had a profound impact on the field of art history. A founder of the journal Representations and one of the central figures in the revisionist turn of the new art history, Alpers broke with long-standing approaches to northern European art by asking new questions about visual culture and ways of seeing. In The Art of Describing (1983), her questions about optics and image-making devices ignited scholarship in premodern and modern fields alike. In subsequent publications, Alpers’ notions about the monetary value of art materials and the marketing strategies of artists also proved fertile ground for later scholars. However, the Art of Describing did not only reinvent methodologies for understanding Dutch art, pushing against the field’s reliance on ideas forged in the study of Italian artistic practices; it recast what it means to “describe” art, the ekphrastic basis of our field, effecting the writing of art history ever since. 

Professor Emerita from the University of California at Berkeley, where she taught from 1962–98, Alpers continues to publish across and redefine fields ranging from the Baroque to contemporary art and photography history. Widely known for Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (1988), which won CAA’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in 1990, Alpers has also penned field-changing monographs on Tiepolo, Rubens, and Velázquez. To this list, Alpers has added her latest book, Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch (2020), a monograph on one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century, and part of a subset of her writings that have confronted directly the challenges of photography, as The Art of Describing long ago became required reading in this field. Her recent publications such as Roof Life (2013) make concrete the writerly challenge that her work has always issued to art history, the need to reinvent “how” as well as “what” we say and write about art. 

Arguably the leading feminist art historian of the generation after Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock first made an impact with a vigorous dissembling of the “artists mythologies and media genius” that attended the canonization of artists such as Vincent van Gogh. She went on to devote close attention to previously devalued women artists such as Mary Cassatt, Eva Hesse, and, more recently, in her innovative Virtual Feminist Museum, Charlotte Salomon. Essays such as “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity” in her 1987 book Vision and Difference were powerful examples of her strategy of “feminist interventions” into the history of art, rather than falling for the trap of settling for the inclusion of women artists within the prevailing patriarchal structures.  

The Award acknowledges this groundbreaking work as well as a wider, far-reaching achievement, ranging across several decades. Pollock’s writing has long refused to stay in its art historical place, to belong to a single position or way of working. Her brand of feminist revisionism constantly engages the social history of art, bridges art history with cinema studies, opens onto the fields of psychoanalysis and cultural geography, while also participating in the debates of postcolonial theory and responding to the imperatives of decolonization. While remaining attentive to the demands of each of these critical disciplines, her writing about art remains passionate, profound, open-hearted, and, always, political. 

Jury Members:
Terry Smith, University of Pittsburgh, Chair
George Baker, University of California Los Angeles
Gillian Elliott, George Washington University 

 

 

Distinguished Teaching of Art Award  

Mary Lum 

Mary Lum is CAA’s 2023 Distinguished Teaching of Art Award recipient. Lum, an accomplished visual artist in her own right, has been a professor of painting and drawing at Bennington College in Vermont since 2005, and prior to that taught at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Among her many notable contributions as an educator is her ability to nurture a passion for art making in her students that has taken many of them from foundational studies, to graduate school, and to successful professional practices as artists, art directors, curators, and academic professors.  

Steven Frost, Assistant Professor and Faculty Director, University of Colorado Boulder says of his time as a foundation student under Lum; “With her help I began to understand a creative practice needed to be fed by more than time in the studio . . . She took the time to bring me up to speed and prepare me for the professional world.” 

Rebekah Modrak, foundation student, current professor University of Michigan, STAMPS School of Art and Design says of Lum “Thank goodness her main concern was the possibility that there might be compelling artists lurking below our early and often tenuous attempt at artmaking.” “When I think of moments in my life that changed my trajectory,” says former student and UK-based art director and curator Christine Serchia, “Mary Lum is responsible for multiple moments.”  

CAA is excited to recognize Mary Lum’s more than two decades of teaching with this award. 

Jury members: 

Derek G. Larson, Purdue University, Chair
Stephen Fakiyesi, Independent Artist
Jessica Hong, Art Museum  

 

 

Distinguished Feminist Awards  

Nalini Malani and Marsha Meskimmon 

Nalini Malani’s work has been recognized in solo exhibitions at over thirty international institutions. Her work has embraced painting, video, stop-motion, and other time-based media, while engaging issues of women’s equality in India, where her family took refuge in 1946 after the partition. Malani’s early career in painting gave way to a more focused approach to time-based media in the 1990s, making works such as the 1998 Remembering Toba Tek Singh, a meditation on nuclear testing in India and Pakistan. Focusing on the aftereffects of the devastating partition of India and Pakistan, Malani’s work has been liberal in its use of media types and productions, including the emotive devices of theater.  

Malani has turned this unflinching attention to the ways in which the woman’s body has been used as a pawn in games of nationalism and internationalism. Her Mother India: Transitions in the Construction of Pain (2005) combined archival footage and other imagery, a series of juxtapositions that shed new light on the depicted contorted bodies of women. She continues this thread in a 2020 multimedia performance of images projected onto the Taj Mahal Hotel, inspired by the week-long gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl. Malani’s work is a beacon; her work is eminently important now as the world bears witness to an increase in femicide and gender-based violence. 

Marsha Meskimmon, PhD is a professor of art history who studies, teaches, and writes on global feminisms. Her groundbreaking scholarly work has been matched by a commitment to promoting and mentoring women in the field. Meskimmon is editor for Drawing In, and she is also a consultant editor for Open Arts Journal. She has authored or co-authored twelve books over her career, with a sustained focus on the political stakes of feminism and its ability to shed light on the circulation of art and the discourse of aesthetics. With Amelia Jones, she edits the book series Rethinking Art’s Histories for Manchester University Press, a series that has promoted books that rethink art and its histories, and has used feminist thought in relation to “global” and non-Western approaches to art history. Her work on the exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution marked an important return to feminism in the art world, a redefinition of the stakes and of the purview of its ideas. Her essay for the exhibition succeeded in arguing why feminism is global—describing it as a constellation of approaches, places, and times. It models an interdisciplinary and collaborative idea of feminism, not a static theory that spreads from the North Atlantic out to world.  Her tireless work on behalf of women in the arts is a model for scholars who do their work out of a stated commitment. 

Jury Members: 

Delinda Collier, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chair
Yvonne Love, Penn State University
Midori Yoshimoto, New Jersey City University 

 

 

Excellence in Diversity Award 
Arlene M. Dávila

Arlene M. Dávila is Professor of Anthropology and American Studies at New York University and founding director of The Latinx Project. Established in 2018, The Latinx Project is an interdisciplinary space focusing on US Latinx Art, Culture and Scholarship. In addition to hosting artists and programs, it functions as a platform fostering critical public programming. 

Professor Dávila’s has published extensively on Latinx cultural politics in museums and contemporary art, media, and urban environments to explore the intricacies and ultimate challenges of visualizing Latinx art and culture. Her research spans urban ethnography, the political economy of culture and media, consumption, immigration and geographies of inequality and race. 

Professor Dávila’s publications, with a focus on public imagery and cultural politics, include Latinx art: Artists, Markets and Politics (Duke University Press, 2020), El Mall: The Spatial and Class Politics of Shopping Malls in Latin America (University of California Press, 2016), the revised edition of Latinos Inc: Marketing and the Making of a People (University of California Press, 2012), Culture Works: Space, Value, and Mobility Across the Neoliberal Americas (NYU Press, 2012), and Latino Spin: Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race (NYU Press, 2008). Dávila also co-edited the collection Contemporary Latina/o Media: Production, Circulation, Politics (NYU Press, 2014). Her articles have appeared in AZTLAN: A Journal of Chicano Studies and Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. 

Carmenita Higginbotham, Virginia Commonwealth University, Chair
Anne H. Berry, Cleveland State University
Kelly Walters, Parsons School of Design 

Filed under: Annual Conference, Awards

CWA Picks: Winter 2023

posted by CAA — Jan 12, 2023

The CAA Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) Winter Picks include exhibitions and events that explore language through form, abstraction, the archive, and narrative. The artists included in this season’s picks investigate language and how it shapes our vision and experience of the world. They also reveal the systems of power embedded within language and how it often acts as a mediator. 

  

Put It This Way: (Re)Visions of the Hirshhorn Collection 

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden 

Until August 31, 2023   

Put It This Way includes almost a century of work from fifty women and nonbinary artists in the Hirshhorn’s collection. The exhibit presents a range of media from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a particular emphasis on the Hirshhorn’s mission to highlight global voices.  

  

An Improvisation of Form 

Caroline Kent 

Until January 28, 2023 

Figge Art Museum 

Language and invented vocabulary made up of geometric shapes, marks, and colors are central to Caroline Kent’s practice. Her work challenges the viewer to consider how the indecipherable might play a role in their understanding of the world.  

 

The Age of Roe: The Past, Present, and Future of Abortion in America 

Until March 4, 2023  

Conference: “The Age of Roe: The Past, Present, and Future of Abortion in America” 

Friday January 27, 2023 

This two-day conference at Harvard Radcliffe Institute will explore how Roe v. Wade and its aftermath shaped the United States and the world beyond it for nearly half a century. The conference will include lectures and panel discussions from experts in constitutional law, historians, health policy advocates, and other scholars. An accompanying exhibition curated by Mary Ziegler, Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law, will also be on view through March 4, 2023.  

 

re:collection 

Until April 23, 2023  

re:collection includes the work of five artists—Ali Cherri, Nicole Cherubini, Lily Cox-Richard, NIC Kay, and SANGREE—whose work reconsiders the Tufts University collection. Specifically, the artists explored about 200 objects from the fifth century BCE to the seventh century CE, including early Greco-Roman ceramics, stone carvings, pre-Columbian vessels, jewelry, and textiles. The exhibition has a range of approaches, from performance and installation to sculpture and painting.  

  

Valiant postures/A ruse! A ruse!
2021
Acrylic on Belgian linen, acrylic on walnut
63 × 74 × 2 1/2 in

 

 

Filed under: CWA Picks