CAA News Today
NEA to Support ARTspace for 2017!
posted May 10, 2016
National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Jane Chu has approved more than $82 million to fund local arts projects and partnerships in the NEA’s second major funding announcement for fiscal year 2016. Included in this announcement is an Art Works award of $15,000 to the College Art Association (CAA) for ARTspace, part of the CAA Annual Conference. This is the eighth consecutive year the NEA has supported ARTspace. The Art Works category supports the creation of work and presentation of both new and existing work, lifelong learning in the arts, and public engagement with the arts through 13 arts disciplines or fields.
“The arts are all around us, enhancing our lives in ways both subtle and obvious, expected and unexpected,” said NEA Chairman Jane Chu. “Supporting projects like the one from CAA offers more opportunities to engage in the arts every day.”
ARTspace is a conference within the conference tailored to the interests and needs of artists and open to all attendees. Organized by CAA’s Services to Artists Committee, it includes a large-audience session space and a media lounge. ARTspace is the site of the Annual Artists’ Interviews held on Friday afternoon. Each morning begins with coffee and tea. The 2016 Annual Conference Artists’ Interviews featured conversations between Rick Lowe and LaToya Ruby Frazier and Joyce Scott with George Ciscle.
Save the date for the 2017 Annual Conference, February 15-18 in New York City.
To join the Twitter conversation about this announcement, please use #NEASpring16. For more information on projects included in the NEA grant announcement, go to arts.gov
Smarthistory Call for Essays
posted May 09, 2016
Smarthistory seeks to bring the expertise of individual scholars and curators to a new global audience. Smarthistory is now an independent not-for-profit organization and a leading resource for teaching and learning art history (Smarthistory received 13.5 million pageviews from more than 190 countries in 2015 alone). All content on Smarthistory is available for free and without advertising. Thanks in part to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in the last 15 months Smarthistory published 230 essays and videos with an emphasis on global content including the art of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Read more about Smarthistory here.
If you are interested in sharing your expertise in the form of short introductory essays, Smarthistory could really use your help. The website’s founders, Steven Zucker and Beth Harris, seek art historians, archaeologists, and conservators in many areas of study; they have a particular need for specialists in African, Asian, Native American, and Oceanic art.
Smarthistory uses Trello, an interactive list of essay topics chosen to support introductory art history courses. If you are interested in contributing, send an email to Zucker and Harris and please include your CV (beth@smarthistory.org and steven@smarthistory.org). If everything is in order, you will be added to the Trello Board, so that you can claim a topic in your area of specialization. If there is a topic that you feel should be added to Trello, please let Zucker and Harris know.
Spring 2016 Art Journal: Astrophysics to Arctic
posted May 05, 2016
An astrophysical dog who travels to and escapes from a black hole is the protagonist of Julia Oldham’s The Loneliest Place, an artist’s project featured in the Spring 2016 issue of Art Journal.
The issue, the first in the editorship of Rebecca M. Brown of Johns Hopkins University, also features Emma Chubb’s essay on small-boat Mediterranean migration in the work of Isaac Julien; Natilee Harren’s exploration of Fluxboxes, the confounding commodities produced by Fluxus artists in the 1960s; and a seven-author forum on diversity and difference, moderated by Jordana Moore Saggese.
The Reviews section examines books by Gil Z. Hochberg, Jay Murphy, and Anthony Gardner; an annotated bibliography by James Walsh takes a sidelong look at the arctic plants of New York City.
New Members to the CAA Board
posted May 04, 2016
CAA welcomes new members to the Board of Directors, Roberto Tejada of the University of Houston and Dina Bangdel of Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, who have filled vacant positions left by two resigning directors. The board also selected two directors to serve one-year officer terms: Tejada is secretary and N. Elizabeth Schlatter is vice president for Annual Conference. Four other new board members were elected in February 2016.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted May 04, 2016
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
How Identity Politics Captured the Art World
The background radiation is still there, two decades later, from the infamous 1993 Whitney Biennial—the so-called multicultural, identity-politics, political, or just bad biennial. Establishment art history at the time was a broken model, built on white men and Western civilization and certain ossified ideas about “greatness” and “genius.” New artists looking for new ways to speak to new audiences couldn’t get their voices heard or work seen. (Read more from New York.)
When the Art Gallery Closes
Although I am sad about the closing of Mixed Greens, the way the gallery presented its departure from the contemporary art scene in Chelsea feels more like a hopeful new beginning than an ending. This positive and inclusive attitude and a devotion to transparency set Mixed Greens apart from many other New York galleries. (Read more from Bmore Art.)
A Call to Replace Adjuncts with Tenure-Track Faculty Members
In his ten months as the University of Oregon’s president, Michael H. Schill has been a stalwart proponent of raising the academic profile of an institution that trails its peers in important areas, including graduation rates and research dollars. To reverse that trend, Schill says, the university needs to raise $2 billion, replace adjunct professors with tenure-track faculty members, and focus its marketing more on academics and less on athletics. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Catalogue of Internet Surf Clubs
The term “surf club,” which originated from the Nasty Nets group blog tagline “Internet Surfing Club,” is often used to describe group artist blogs where the prevailing subject is internet culture and aesthetics and where the roles of artist, curator, and archivist are blurred. Art club or online art club describes similar artist group blogs that explore digital illustration and collage or use a group blog to explore connections between works of noninternet art. (Read more from Rhizome.)
How Drawing Focuses the Mind
Sketching something close up and looking at it from afar are approached in quite different ways by the brain. When you see something familiar, the higher-order parts of the visual system quickly piece together information from the eyes to help you to understand what you’re looking at, whether it’s a whalebone corset or a designer lingerie set. (Read more from the Guardian.)
Help Desk: Quid Pro Quo
Until recently, I have only accepted offers to attend press previews at large-scale institutions when I knew I was going to write about the exhibition. Increasingly, I can’t predict whether I will want to write about a show until I see it. Is it okay—ethically, journalistically—to accept these invitations, attend press previews, and not write about the exhibition? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities
Advocates position the digital humanities as a corrective to the “traditional” and outmoded approaches to literary study. Like much Silicon Valley rhetoric, this discourse sees technological innovation as an end in itself and equates disruptive business models with political progress. Yet despite the aggressive promotion of the digital humanities as radical insurgency, its institutional success has largely involved displacing politically progressive humanities scholarship and activism in favor of manufacturing digital tools and archives. (Read more from the Los Angeles Review of Books.)
Learning from My Teaching Mistakes
As a professional failed academic, I get asked if my decisions in graduate school were to blame for my failures. The answer is, of course, yes and no. Similar to anyone else with a PhD who isn’t delusional or lying, my relationship with my doctorate contains multitudes of defeats. And now, six years after I finished, I’ve got some perspective on both what I screwed up and what I didn’t. (Read more from Vitae.)
Help Us Develop a Fair Use Curriculum!
posted May 03, 2016
In 2015, the College Art Association published a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts that established policies on the fair use of copyrighted materials for professionals in the visual arts field. The Code outlines the principles and limitations for applying the doctrine of fair use in five areas: critical writing, teaching, making art, museum uses, and online access to archives and special collections. It is available online, along with supplementary information, at the Fair Use web page.
With the input of our members, CAA is now developing curriculum materials to help teachers educate their students about fair use so that people entering the field will start out with a basic understanding of this important doctrine. Please help us develop useful materials by completing the following short survey, which is being administered by American University, CAA’s partner on the fair use initiative.
Please complete no later than May 20.
There are only six questions that should take less than five minutes to complete.
Thank you for your help!
Reflections on African and African Diaspora Art
posted Apr 29, 2016
Re-Views: Field Editors’ Reflections
Routledge and CAA are pleased to announce the fourth installment of “Re-Views: Field Editors’ Reflections,” a series of review essays authored by members of caa.reviews Council of Field Editors.
The latest essay, “Reflections on African and African Diaspora Art,” is by Eddie Chambers, associate professor of art and art history at the University of Texas at Austin. In the essay, Chambers reflects on his role assigning reviews in the area of African art and African diaspora and discusses the complexities of the relationship between the two.
Recent Book Reviews
David Kertai, The Architecture of Late Assyrian Royal Palaces (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Reviewed by Kiersten Neumann.
Mary Ann Eaverly, Tan Men/Pale Women: Color and Gender in Archaic Greece and Egypt, a Comparative Approach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013). Reviewed by Briana C. Jackson.
Recent Exhibition Reviews
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, International Pop (February 18–May 15, 2016). Reviewed by Taylor J. Acosta.
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, Habsburg Splendor: Masterpieces from Vienna’s Imperial Collections at the Kunsthistorisches Museum (October 18, 2015–January 17, 2016). Reviewed by Jan Volek.
About the Journal
caa.reviews, an open-access journal, publishes timely scholarly and critical reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by CAA. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted Apr 27, 2016
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Fair Use Prevails as Supreme Court Rejects Google Books Copyright Case
The US Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge from the Authors Guild and other writers claiming Google’s scanning of their books amounts to wanton copyright infringement and not fair use. The guild urged the high court to review a lower court decision in favor of Google that the writers said amounted to an “unprecedented judicial expansion of the fair-use doctrine.” (Read more from Ars Technica.)
Federal Ruling Puts California Artist Royalty Law in Jeopardy
A federal judge recently dismissed a lawsuit against several auction houses sued by artists over failure to pay them royalties as guaranteed by California law. The ruling could spell the end for the California Resale Royalty Act, which allowed some artists to collect 5 percent of any resale of their work if they lived in state or if the work was sold here. (Read more from the Los Angeles Business Journal.)
Loaded Symbols and Artistic Responsibility
An inexcusable cultural blind spot in the South is a glaring lack of education regarding imagery and symbols—their meaning, power, and unmitigated capacity to make people feel threatened. These minatory icons—nooses, Confederate flags, swastikas, blood drop crosses—are not symbols that can be recontextualized or reappropriated in art. They aren’t even “loaded images.” They are emblems of hate. (Read more from Burnaway.)
Does Mapplethorpe Still Matter?
The Perfect Medium, two concurrent retrospectives of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe hosted simultaneously at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Getty Center, provides the richest narrative about the photographer to date. By centering on Mapplethorpe’s world—his network of affiliations—instead of resting on the artist’s brand of sexual bombast, the shows manage to lift Mapplethorpe out of the often facile discourse on pornography’s contentions with fine art. (Read more from Aperture.)
Estimating Square Foot Coverage for Products
When it is important to know how much paint will be needed to complete a painting, as in the case of a mural or large painting, or simply priming a large surface, there are a few ways to estimate how much your tube, bottle, or jar of paint will cover or how much you will need to buy to complete the project. (Read more from Just Paint.)
Integrate to Innovate: Using Standards to Push Content Forward
At least once a month my colleagues and I walk out of a meeting and someone says: “Remember when we used to be publishers?” It’s become the obvious joke when all we talk about is metadata, digital content distribution, ecommerce solutions, or content licensing issues. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)
The Slow Professor
While professors may be accustomed to nonacademics clinging to an outdated image of faculty life, the newest resistance to letting it go comes from within the academy. In a new book, two tenured professors propose applying the “slow movement”—which describes everything from food to parenting to science to sex—to academic work. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
How Can the Disparity in Arts Funding along Racial Lines Be Fixed?
Nationally, only 6 percent of minority organizations receive comparable funding from individual donors to organizations serving mostly white patrons, according to Grantmakers in the Arts. At a time when foundations like Wallace are spending big bucks to maximize audience engagement, what root causes account for this discrepancy? (Read more from Inside Philanthropy.)
2017 Annual Conference Submissions Record!
posted Apr 26, 2016
Thank you to all our CAA members and conference submitters for the hard work in pulling together sessions and papers for the 2017 Annual Conference in New York, February 15-18. We are happy to report that we received over 850 submissions! This is a record number for CAA and none of this would be possible without the support and interest of our members, scholars, and practitioners in the visual arts. We thank you also for submitting materials in the shorter submission timeframe that came along with the changes to the Annual Conference .
Now begins the unenviable task of reviewing and selecting sessions and papers, the timeline for which you will find below.
- June 3 – Annual Conference Committee meets to select sessions and papers
- June 20 – Notification sent regarding approved sessions and papers
- July 1 – Call for Participation for approved sessions soliciting contributors announced
- August 30 – Paper titles and abstracts due to chairs of sessions soliciting contributors
Here’s what attendees to the 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC said [Video].
Annual Conference participants and attendees must be current CAA members and must register for the conference. Save $75 on a membership and registration package with a Premium Level Membership over Basic Level Membership.
The 105th CAA Annual Conference will be held at the Hilton New York Midtown from Wednesday, February 15 through Saturday, February 18. Registration opens in early fall 2016. CAA’s Annual Conference consists of four days and hundreds of presentations, panel discussions, workshops, special events, and exhibitions exploring the study, practice, and history of art and visual culture. As the best-attended international forum in the visual arts, the Annual Conference offers an unparalleled opportunity to expand your professional network, meet with potential employers, and strengthen your skills in a professional-development workshop, mentoring session, or portfolio review.
Fair Use Is Up to Date in Kansas City
posted Apr 21, 2016
“Do we have to seek copyright permission to post on our website a scholarly checklist of twentieth-century paintings?” “Our museum wants to put an image of a contemporary sculpture from its collection on an invitation for a fundraiser. Do we need copyright permission?” These are the kinds of questions a group of art-museum professionals discussed at a half-day workshop on copyright and fair use sponsored by CAA with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and held at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, on April 8, 2016.
When Patricia McDonnell, director of the Wichita Art Museum, decided her museum could use input and guidance in applying the policies outlined in CAA’s Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, she organized a meeting for art museums in her region, believing that the support and information she needed was likely the same as her neighboring colleagues. As a member of CAA’s Task Force on Fair Use, McDonnell was familiar with the approach outlined in the Code, and her primary goal was to design an event that would generate immediate practical results. To that end, the “fair use summit” featured two elements that made it particularly effective. First, each of the eight participating museums was represented by its director, legal counsel, and staff member responsible for rights and reproduction. Second, each museum submitted a case study of a fair-use issue from their institution in advance, thereby providing practical examples for consideration during the workshop. As a result, the pragmatic discussions that took place exemplified the type of analysis necessary to determine on a case-by-case basis if the use of a copyrighted text or image is fair; the talks also unified the participating staffs in their understanding of this work.
The workshop was led by Peter Jaszi, a lead principal investigator on CAA’s fair-use project and a professor at American University’s Washington College of Law. After providing a brief history of fair use and how court opinion has evolved on this aspect of copyright law, Jaszi guided participants in analyzing each case study to determine if the use in that instance required copyright permission or if the museum could rely on fair use. Participants referred to CAA’s Code to understand the basic principles and limitations that applied in each case. In every situation, the key question was whether or not the use under consideration was “transformative.” Did it show the work of art in a new context, add to its meaning, or change our understanding of it? Was it an educational use? As the discussion continued, it became apparent that every user of copyrighted materials has to decide for him or herself if a use is fair. One museum might decide that the fair-use doctrine applies to a copyrighted image on the cover of a catalogue, for example, while another museum using the same image on the cover of a similar publication might decide to seek permission. It all depends on how each institution understands its own purpose.
The summit included the following museums: the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Kansas State University; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College; the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas; the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University; and the Wichita Art Museum. As a result of the meeting, the directors and staff of these institutions have decided to continue their work on fair use by sharing documents related to rights and reproductions―donation agreements, artist contracts, and the like. The goal is to develop additional best practices among their museums related to copyright and fair use.
Julian Zugazagoitia, director of the Nelson-Atkins, summarized the accomplishments of the meeting like this: “I think it brought immensely valuable information to all our participants and will allow us to use images in a more robust and self-assured way.” McDonnell also commented: “The CAA Code opens the door to a sea change in art-museum practice related to image use. Arriving at wise conclusions about interpretations of fair use with other art-museum colleagues provided grounded information and confidence about possible new practices.” What better results can one ask for?
Image: Shuttlecock (1994) by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen on the lawn of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri