CAA News Today
Institutional News
posted Dec 17, 2015
Institutional News
Read about the latest news from institutional members.
Institutional News is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
December 2015
The University of Virginia in Charlottesville has received a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for the testing and implementation of a prototype for digitizing artist’s books by a group of curators, artists, critics, and scholars.
CAA 2016 Board of Directors Election
posted Dec 17, 2015
READ ABOUT CANDIDATES RUNNING FOR CAA’S BOARD OF DIRECTORS — VOTING BEGINS IN JANUARY 2016
The 2015 Nominating Committee has selected the following slate of six candidates for election to the CAA Board of Directors for the 2016-2020 term. Voting begins in early January 2016. Please go to CAA’s website to read each candidate’s statement, biography, and endorsement – and watch their video comments – before casting your vote. The candidates are:
- Dina Bangdel Associate Professor & Director, Art History Program, Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar
- Carma Gorman Associate Professor & Assistant Chair, Department of Art and Art History, University of Texas at Austin
- N. Elizabeth Schlatter Deputy Director and Curator of Exhibitions, University of Richmond Museums, Richmond
- Andrew Schulz Associate Dean for Research & Associate Professor, College of Arts and Architecture, Pennsylvania State University
- Roberto Tejada Cullen Distinguished Professor, Departments of English and Art History, University of Houston
- Anuradha Vikram Lecturer, Graduate Public Practice, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles
About the Board
The Board of Directors is charged with CAA’s long-term financial stability and strategic direction; it is also the Association’s governing body. The Board sets policy regarding all aspects of CAA’s activities, including publishing, the Annual Conference, awards and fellowships, advocacy, and committee procedures.
About the Election
CAA members may vote for no more than four (4) candidates (which may include one write-in candidate who must be a CAA member). The four candidates receiving the most votes will be elected to the Board. CAA members may cast their votes and submit their proxies online only. CAA holds the Board election on its own website. To vote, members will need only to log into their CAA member account.
All voting must take place prior to 5:00 p.m. EST on Wednesday, February 3, 2016. The results of the Board election will be announced at CAA’s Annual Business Meeting which is to be held at 5:30 p.m. EST at the start of Convocation at the Annual Conference in Washington on Wednesday, February 3, 2016 in the Marriott Ballroom, Salon 2, Lobby Level at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, 2660 Woodley Road, NW., Washington, D. C. 20008. CAA’s President, DeWitt Godfrey, will preside.
Questions? Contact Vanessa Jalet, executive liaison, at (212) 392-4434 or vjalet@collegeart.org
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted Dec 16, 2015
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.
Confronting America’s Shameful Mass Incarceration with Art
Yoko Ono and Chris Burden are known for challenging the relationship between the art and the audience. The thirty-three-year-old performance artist Lech Szporer does this, too. But, unlike the hard-to-define nature of his antecedents, Szporer’s The Cage Project and its kin clearly express their purpose, and the performances are accompanied by actions that the larger public can more easily recognize as real. (Read more from the New Yorker.)
Help Desk: Culture and Compensation
The problem: sincere offers, from sweet, well-intended people, to show my work without compensation. The result: my polite refusal is taken as a slight, and I’m thought of as ungrateful. These people think they are doing me a favor and are confused when their request is turned down. What I’d like to have access to: an article written for the layperson that elucidates the situation. (Read more from Daily Serving.)
For Art to Flourish and Leave Its Trace
Art museums pledge to collect, display, study, interpret, and conserve works of art because those objects provide rich and soulful echoes of who we are. How will art made using interactive, decidedly variable, hastily obsolescent high-tech media fare? Digital and computer-based artworks are an active force behind retooling the museum and expanding methods of stewardship. (Read more from the Voices of Contemporary Art Journal.)
Researchers Observe Effects of Art on the Brain
When it comes to art, beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but some scientists now are looking for it in bursts of brain waves. Seeking a biological basis for our response to art, researchers from the University of Houston recorded the electrical brain activity from 431 gallery visitors last year as they explored an exhibit of works by the conceptual artist Dario Robleto at the Menil Collection. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)
Influencing How Students Discuss Content
When students are talking with each other about content, many of us worry. We’ve all heard less-than-impressive exchanges. For example, four students are in a group discussing three open-ended questions about two challenging readings. In less than five minutes, they’re already on question three. Or, they’re working with clickers, supposedly exchanging ideas about a problem, but the group has already decided on one member’s solution. (Read more from Faculty Focus.)
Thoughts about Ashgate and Libraries
By now you are probably aware of the ongoing discussion about the fate of Ashgate Publishing, which was acquired by Informa last summer. Over the years Ashgate has increasingly become a respected venue for art historians, especially younger scholars publishing their early books on diverse and often groundbreaking topics that were organized—as the press matured—into a variety of interesting series. (Read more from the ARLIS/NA Collection Development SIG Blog.)
Breaking It to Your Family
We often discuss the effects of the tenure track on faculty lives. Much like the military, family members are also “drafted” into the academic lifestyle. Last month, we discussed how to break it to yourself that tenure does not mean less work. Here, we address this hard fact as it relates to families. The reality is that, even after gaining tenure, you may well face a relentless and often invisible set of career demands that can confuse and frustrate family members. (Read more from Inside Higher Education.)
Academic Job Hunts from Hell: Inappropriate, Hostile, and Awkward Moments
A doctoral student on the job market described a truly uncomfortable moment during a campus visit. An assistant professor giving her a campus tour stopped in front of an office filled with packing boxes and gestured inside, stating with a wistful air, “This is mine, or rather was. They are firing me; hence the opening.” Then he stood there, waiting for her reaction. My informant was so shocked that she responded, “That’s nice….” (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
ARIAH’s East Asia Fellowship Program
posted Dec 15, 2015
The Association of Research Institutes in Art History (ARIAH), a consortium of museums and research centers based in North America or affiliated with North American institutions, has established a new program that will strengthen intellectual connections among art-history disciplines in different regions of the world. With generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Getty Foundation, and the Terra Foundation for American Art, ARIAH’s East Asia Fellowship Program will enable twelve scholars from countries in East Asia to conduct research at ARIAH member institutes on any topic in the visual arts. The project is funded for a three-year period, beginning in 2016, with four fellowships offered each year.
The East Asia Fellowship Program is open to scholars of art history from Japan, Mongolia, the People’s Republic of China (including Hong Kong and Macau), Taiwan, and South Korea. Each fellow will be hosted by an ARIAH member institute and have the opportunity to travel to other research centers during the three- to four-month fellowship period. Fellowships will be awarded through an open, competitive application process. One fellowship per year, supported specifically by the Terra Foundation, will focus on research topics related to the art of the United States before 1980. Topics for all other fellowships will be open, as long as they can be supported by research on the collections of the host institute. The deadline for the first of three rounds of fellowships is December 31, 2015.
“It’s impossible to overstate how important material support, not to mention encouragement, from the Mellon, Getty, and Terra foundations has been for launching this program,” said Jon Mogul, chair of ARIAH and assistant director for research and academic initiatives at the Wolfsonian–Florida International University in Miami Beach, Florida. “Art history and visual studies, like other academic fields, thrive when scholars who come from different traditions and view their subject through different lenses have the chance to learn from one another. The birth of this program really underscores just how essential these three foundations are to sustaining an ecosystem in which such intellectual interchange among art historians from different regions of the world can happen more and more routinely.”
The East Asia Fellowship Program grew out of a successful project that ARIAH designed in the late 1990s which brought art historians from Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean to ARIAH member institutes. The Latin American program was part of larger process that yielded longer-term results and fostered increased collaboration and intellectual exchange among academic disciplines in Latin American countries.
ARIAH conceived of and developed the new program to encourage a similar intellectual, cross-cultural exchange between scholars and to establish lasting professional connections. The fellows will work side by side with curators, librarians, and fellows from other areas of research. Among the twenty-seven member organizations of ARIAH are the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Getty Research Institute. The largest concentration of members can be found in the Smithsonian museums in the Washington, DC, area.
Peter Lukehart, associate dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, said that East Asia is “a geographic region from which, historically, there have been fewer applications” to the programs of ARIAH’s member institutes. “Consequently, the rich resources of these institutes are not known or available to scholars who might otherwise benefit from them. ARIAH hopes that encounters between scholars and administrators at ARIAH institutes will lead to future collaboration and interchange between fellows and their hosts. “Given the increasingly global nature of the discipline of art history,” Lukehart said, “these goals seem especially urgent.”
Grants, Awards, and Honors
posted Dec 15, 2015
CAA recognizes its members for their professional achievements, be it a grant, fellowship, residency, book prize, honorary degree, or related award.
Grants, Awards, and Honors is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
December 2015
Carol Becker, dean of faculty for Columbia University’s School of the Arts in New York, has received the Dayawait Modi Award for Art, Culture, and Education, given by Arts for India.
Henry Colburn, who recently completed a doctorate in the Interdepartmental PhD Program in Classical Art and Archaeology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has been awarded the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award from the university’s Rackham Graduate School for the superior quality of his 2014 dissertation, “The Archaeology of Achaemenid Rule in Egypt.”
Craig Drennen, assistant professor of painting and drawing at Georgia State University in Atlanta, has accepted a fall 2015/winter 2016 residency at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
Barbara Foster, an artist based in Oakland, California, has received a spring 2016 residency at Playa in Summer Lake, Oregon.
Greg Hull at work during an IUPUI student art installationGreg Hull, professor of sculpture in the Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, has been awarded a Transformational Impact Fellowship from the Arts Council of Indianapolis.
Larry A. SilverLarry A. Silver, James and Nan Wagner Farquhar Professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, has been named a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar for the 2015–16 academic year.
Noah Simblist has won a 2015 Exhibition Grant from Artis for an exhibition, False Flags, he is organizing for Pelican Bomb in New Orleans, Louisiana, to take place in March 2016.
Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members
posted Dec 15, 2015
Check out details on recent shows organized by CAA members who are also curators.
Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
December 2015
Alexandra Keiser. Archipenko: A Modern Legacy. Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, September 22–December 13, 2015.
Valérie Rousseau. Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet. American Folk Art Museum, New York, October 13, 2015–January 10, 2016.
Books Published by CAA Members
posted Dec 15, 2015
Publishing a book is a major milestone for artists and scholars—browse a list of recent titles below.
Books Published by CAA Members appears every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
December 2015
Irina D. Costache. The Art of Understanding Art (Beijing: Publishing House of Electronics Industry, 2015).
Myroslava M. Mudrak and Tetiana Rudenko, ed. Staging the Ukrainian Avant-Garde of the 1910s and 1920s (New York: Ukrainian Museum, 2015).
Valérie Rousseau, ed. Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2015).
Andrew Jay Svedlow. Thirty Works of Art Every Student Should Know (Dubuques, IA: Kendall Hunt, 2015).
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for December 2015
posted Dec 10, 2015
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
December 2015
Marks Made: Prints by American Women Artists from the 1960s to the Present
Museum of Fine Arts
255 Beach Drive N.E., St. Petersburg, FL
October 17, 2015–January 24, 2016
The Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida, presents Marks Made, examining women in printmaking. Featuring over 75 works, including those from the printmaking pioneers Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and Anni Albers, the exhibition “conveys the breadth of innovation of both technique and conceptual approaches that have emerged in printmaking over the past 50 years.”
The exhibition draws on the private holdings and from the museum’s extensive collection of prints by American women, including Vija Celmins, Janet Fish, Ellen Gallagher, Yvonne Jacquette, Joyce Kozloff, Barbara Kruger, Hung Liu, Elizabeth Murray, Judy Pfaff, Susan Rothenberg, and Pat Steir. Limited-edition prints by the artists Elisabeth Condon and Jane Hammond were also created in collaboration with the University of South Florida and Bleu Acier Editions. Related programming events include film screenings, drawing workshops, and lectures.
“The printmaking process is an intensely collaborative one, between artist and printer. It is also a highly physical process, requiring strength, stamina, and technical prowess—Marks Made tells the story of what happens in the studio and the resulting artworks.” The themes of the exhibition vary from artist to artist and are loosely grouped, allowing interconnected exploration between themes of abstraction, realism, craft, appropriation strategies, and activism.
Linda Stein: The Fluidity of Gender
Noyes Museum of Art
Stockton University, 733 Lily Lake Road, Oceanville, NJ
September 21, 2015–January 3, 2016
The artist Linda Stein at the Noyes Museum of Art presents sculpture exploring “the continuum between the binaries of masculinity and femininity,” with her mixed-media figurative work. The leather and metal figures, along with use of pop0-cultural icons, embody both the essence of a warrior’s armor and comforting protection. Stein’s work concerns gender, oppression, bullying, strength, power, and justice in contemporary culture.
“My goal as an artist is to use my art to transform social consciousness and promote activism for gender justice,” Stein has said. “With my androgynous forms I invite the viewer to seek diversity in unpredictable ways, to ‘try on’ new personal avatars and self-definitions, knowing that every new experience changes the brain’s structure and inspires each of us toward a more authentic self.”
The tall, vertical sculptures of metal, wood, stones, leather, and images of Wonder Woman, among other materials, are wearable, body-swapping armor. “In my art,” Stein said in a June 2015 interview with A&U Magazine, “I place the female front and center for a social idealism that aims to transform violence, destruction, and fragility into strength for anyone who finds themselves bullied, harassed, or abused.” But while, the armor is distinctively female in many cases, with curves for hips and breasts, the body-swapping moment happens when a woman wears materials normally associated with male warrior attributes and a man wearing armor made to resemble a female form. Other creations by Stein, remain more androgynous, presenting what is normally associated as a male figure from behind, but female when viewed from the front.
what’s INSIDE HER never dies … a Black Woman’s Legacy
Yeelen Gallery
294 NW 54th Street, Miami, FL
December 1, 2015–February 28, 2016
Following Mariette Pathy Allen’s solo exhibition TransCuba, Yeelan Gallery continues its exhibition programming on gender with what’s INSIDE HER never dies … a Black Woman’s Legacy, in collaboration with Poets/Artists Magazine. The opening coincides with Art Basel Miami Beach. This group show features two images from Allen, as well as from twenty-four other artists and activists, including Sylvia Parker Maier, Tim Okamura, Joseph Adolphe, Jerome Siomaud, and Numa Perrier.
The exhibition showcases work in a variety of mediums—portraiture, drawing, photography, and installation—all seeking to “pay homage to the beauty and resiliency of the Black Woman,” said Karla Ferguson, the gallery owner and director. A reception for the artists will take place on Saturday, December 5, 2015, at 10:00 PM.
In her photographs, Allen gained access to photograph transgender peoples and friends in the privacy of their homes, as well as out in public during several visits to Cuba in 2012 and 2013. “The transgender people Allen depicts in TransCuba savor their new freedom to be able to be themselves publicly, while continuing to overcome challenges, such as health issues, and lack of steady work and money.”
In contrast, another artist in the exhibition, Judith Peck, often paints on broken plaster shards, “a world falling apart held together with the very same figure depicted within.” In her painting Pulled Over, a young woman sits in what appears to be the driver’s seat of a vehicle, her arm resting on the window and her head looking down, perhaps waiting. “The paintings are about the more universal message of meaning and preciousness of life healing a broken world.”
In addition to the exhibition, Yeelen Gallery will host a panel discussion at 1:00 PM on December 2, 2015, with Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin, and Kadiatou Diallo, the mother of Amadou Diallo, who will share their stories and grief along with other activist women.
Ebony G. Patterson: Dead Treez
Museum of Art and Design
2 Columbus Circle, New York, NY 10019
The Museum of Art and Design presents Dead Treez,the first solo New York museum show by the Jamaican-born artist Ebony G. Patterson. The exhibition, which spreads across the museum’s second floor, includes installations, floor tapestries, and a life-sized figural tableau of ten male mannequins dressed in a kaleidoscopic mix of floral fabrics.
Dead Treez is a meditation on dancehall fashion and culture, regarded as a celebration of the disenfranchised in postcolonial Jamaica. Borrowing from social media, her tapestries depict murder victims camouflaged in utterly adorned patterns to seduce viewers into witnessing the underreported brutality experienced by those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. Furthermore, the artist fusions her collage sensibility with a selection of jewelry from the museum’s permanent collection, transforming the Tiffany Jewelry Gallery’s vitrines into gardenlike environment of poisonous plants, in which bodies wrapped in patterned fabrics have succumbed to the violence often present in marginalized communities. Here, Patterson addresses how choices in jewelry, clothing, or other forms of personal adornment are means of visibility of populations rendered invisible by poverty and racism. Noting that the names of impoverished communities in Jamaica often include the word “garden” in them, Patterson’s …buried again to carry on going… exacerbates the contrast between places that are designed to be about beauty, growth, life, and the hardships that are daily obstacles in her native country’s inner city.
Patterson, (b. 1981, Kingston, Jamaica) splits her time between Kingston and Lexington, Kentucky. Through her extremely adorned mixed-media installations, the artist seduces viewers, with the intention to challenge them to look closer. Throughout Dead Treez the artist explores and reflects on the concept of “visibility,” raising questions about body politics, performance of gender, gender and beauty, beauty and stereotyping, race and beauty, and body and ritual. Throughout this exhibition, Patterson suggests that the popularity of skin alteration, such as skin bleaching and tattooing, may mean a form of “erasure” motivated by the desire of presence rather than a simple adornment.
The Rocca Family (RTF) is an ongoing project located in the everyday gestures of togetherness. A togetherness that could be much broader than just two people, proposing not to separate art/work from daily life, while dreaming of not being attached. Defying the traditional concept of traditional family as a terrible structure that imposes the pressure to be happy and the feeling of shame otherwise, TRF proposes a series of moving spaces that encourage art to take on new forms and identities. One of its ongoing research projects, Family, is an examination of different family structures, dynamics, demands, and expectations, and in that offers a reflection of the reasons behind the strict assumption of the family as a core unit to community.
Named after a cat and with a base in San Francisco, TRF challenges also the identity of art, proposing “events” that are simply moments in the timeline of relationships: conversation, meals, and phone calls. Furthermore, displacement, transit, and immigration help form the core of TRF discussions, with a particular attention on personal politics and an international awareness, as well as a sensitivity for domestic, mundane, flashy, sustainable, and unexpected things.
As Amanda Eicher describes the prohect in Who is TRF Series, #1-b: “Round is another way to describe it—leaving the scientific and transportative world of paths, flights, lines, and planes, we can say that it is a space in which many people come around a table, and they are all not necessarily leading not following either but learning—all parts of something which turns or presses outward from a center to meet a margin-frontier. Or it might be they are pressing together from the outside.”
Women Speaking to Power: An Evening of Conversation with Tania Bruguera and Shirin Neshat
School of Visual Arts Theatre
333 West 23rd Street, New York, NY
December 11, 2015
Organized by SVA’s MA Curatorial Practice program, “Women Speaking to Power” will open a conversation between two of the most significant and influential international contemporary practicing today: Tania Bruguera and Shirin Neshat. They will speak with each other about their experiences as citizens and artists, reflecting on how their works approach to gender and politics in their respective homelands, Cuba and Iran, and beyond. This event, which starts at 7:00 PM, is free and open to the public. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.
Support CAA with a Gift to the Annual Fund
posted Dec 10, 2015
As a member of the College Art Association, you understand the importance of the work of CAA in service to the individuals and institutions that make up the world’s largest international professional community in the visual arts. The Association supports and enhances the field through advocacy efforts on important issues such as those impacting populations, like part-time faculty, and the protection of archaeological and historical sites in countries of conflict, to name a few; vital professional tools like CAA’s Standards and Guidelines; critical projects like the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts; prestigious publishing grants for books; career-development resources, including the Online Career Center; Professional-Development Fellowships; new scholarship published in The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and caa.reviews; and CAA’s forum for exchange of creative work, scholarly research and critical issues in the field at the Annual Conference. None of this would be possible without the support of dedicated members like you.
With an ever-changing academic and museum landscape, CAA is responding to the evolving needs of its constituents. Many new member opportunities are being created, such as flexible and expanded Annual Conference programming, as well as new communication tools and platforms to further our dialogue beyond the conference. Even as CAA innovates, it continues its longstanding leadership in career development for early, mid, and senior level visual-arts professionals.
Today, I ask that you support CAA’s important work with a gift to the Annual Fund. Your contribution will enable us to continue providing invaluable resources and services to members like you. Voluntary support from individuals is critical to our collective advancement, and your contribution to the Annual Fund makes this possible. Your gift will benefit those who share your dedication to the visual arts.
Should you have given in the past, please know that your gift was very much appreciated. We hope you will continue your generosity at the same or even greater level. On behalf of the artists, art historians, collectors, critics, curators, designers, educators, and other professionals who make up CAA, I thank you for your dedication. Please give generously!
Sincerely,
John J. Richardson
VP for External Affairs and President-Elect
P.S. This year’s conference in Washington, DC February 3–6 will be one that you will not want to miss. I look forward to seeing you there.