CAA News Today
Committee on Diversity Practices highlights for July/August 2015
posted Jul 09, 2015
The CAA Committee on Diversity Practices highlights exhibitions, events, and activities that support the development of global perspectives on art and visual culture and deepen our appreciation of political and cultural heterogeneity as educational and professional values. Current highlights are listed below; browse past highlights through links at the bottom of this page.
July/August 2015
Hidden Histories in Latin American Art
Phoenix Art Museum
Phoenix, Arizona
May 9, 2015–August 23, 2015
“This exhibition features Latin American and Latino artists who investigate stories or histories marginalized by the media, historical events and present circumstances that we might rather forget. These artists explore neglected yet pressing histories, such as the violence against women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; the marginalization of indigenous communities in Guatemala; the fate of civilians “disappeared” by military and paramilitary groups in Colombia; and the lynching of Latinos in the southern United States beginning in the mid-19th century and continuing into the mid-20th.
These works allude to politics, though they touch upon different historical moments in diverse regions of Latin America as well as the special circumstances confronting Latinos living in the United States. Each story is different, but what unites them is the means by which they are told: through intentional processes of veiling and fragmentation. These artists engage in a kind of storytelling in which the part stands in for the whole. They also endow everyday objects with potent symbolism, often made all the more powerful through collaged imagery. In this way, a handcrafted dress, a felt blanket, a wooden barricade, a wardrobe, and even part of an urban glass wall become vehicles for exploring larger histories, made present before the viewer but only partially revealed.
Hidden Histories includes works by Luis González Palma (Guatemala, born 1957), Annie Lopez (US, 1958), Teresa Margolles (Mexico, 1963), Graciela Sacco (Argentina, 1956), Doris Salcedo (Colombia, 1958), and Vincent Valdez (US, 1977).”
Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Los Angeles, California
June 7, 2015–September 27, 2015
“Noah Purifoy (1917–2004) lived and worked most of his life in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, California. A founding director of the Watts Towers Art Center, his earliest body of sculpture, constructed out of charred debris from the 1965 Watts Rebellion, was the basis for 66 Signs of Neon, a landmark group exhibition about the riots that traveled to nine venues between 1966 and 1969. In line with the postwar period’s general fascination with the street and its objects, Purifoy’s 66 Signs of Neon constituted a Duchampian approach to the fire-molded alleys of Watts, a strategy that profoundly impacted artists such as David Hammons, John Outterbridge and Senga Nengudi.
In the late 1980’s, after eleven years of public policy work for the California Arts Council, where Purifoy initiated programs such as Artists in Social Institutions, bringing art into the state prison system, Purifoy moved his practice to the Mojave desert. He lived there for the last fifteen years of his life, creating ten acres of large-scale sculpture constructed entirely from junked materials.
The exhibition explores a pivotal yet under-recognized figure in the development of postwar American Art whose effect is only beginning to be fully understood.”
Zanele Muholi: Isibonelo/Evidence
Brooklyn Museum
Brooklyn, New York
May 1, 2015–November 1, 2015
“Zanele Muholi meshes her work in photography, video, and installation with human rights activism to create visibility for the black lesbian and transgender communities of South Africa. Zanele Muholi: Isibonelo/Evidence is the most comprehensive museum presentation to date of Muholi’s works and features several of the artist’s ongoing projects about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) communities, both in her home country and abroad.
The exhibition presents eighty-seven works created between 2007 and 2014, including Muholi’s Faces and Phases portrait series, which uses firsthand accounts to speak to the experience of living in a country that constitutionally protects the rights of LGBTI people but often fails to defend them from targeted violence. Also included is the new series Weddings and the video Being Scene, both of which focus on love, intimacy, and daily life within Muholi’s close-knit community.”
Arts Aids America
ONE Archives Gallery & Museum and the West Hollywood Library
West Hollywood, California
June 6, 2015–September 6, 2015
“Art AIDS America examines 30 years of artistic production made in response to the AIDS epidemic in the United States. Surveying the early 1980s to the present, this exhibition reintroduces and explores a spectrum of artistic responses to HIV/AIDS from the politically outspoken to the quietly mournful, considering how the disease shifted the development of American art away from the conceptual foundations of postmodernism and toward a more insistently political and autobiographical voice.
Presented in two parts at the ONE Gallery and the West Hollywood Library as a part of One City One Pride, this iteration of the exhibition comprises a select preview of the larger show opening at the Tacoma Art Museum in October 2015. In West Hollywood, works on view at the Library explore a wide range of creative expressions from the early years of AIDS to the present, while the presentation at the ONE Gallery focuses special attention on California-based artists.”
Hoy toca el Prado (Touching the Prado)
Museo Nacional del Prado
Madrid, Spain
January 20, 2015–October, 18 2015
The Prado Museum and the AXA Foundation, with the collaboration of ONCE have devised a pioneering initiative aimed essentially at people with visual disabilities. Curated by Fernando Pérez Suescun, the exhibition comprises six embossed paintings, which are the most representative of the Prado Museum, belonging to diverse genres and artistic styles (religious paintings, portraits, still life’s, mythology and traditional scenes). They include Touch me Not by Correggio; The Forge of Vulcan by Velázquez; The Parasol by Goya; The Mona Lisa from Leonardo da Vinci’s studio; Gentleman with his Hand on his Chest by El Greco; and Still Life with Artichokes, Flowers and Glass Vessels by Van der Hamen. The last three are real scale reproductions and the rest are on a lower scale. Visitors can touch them with their own hands, offering them the unique possibility of capturing their beauty down to the very smallest detail.
Coinciding with the presentation of Touching the Prado, the Museum has launched a new audioguide service that includes audio descriptions of fifty-three works in its collection. These detailed explanations of the figures, themes and other elements depicted in the works are specifically aimed at visually impaired visitors. Fourteen descriptions of masterpieces in the collection are particularly detailed. Audio descriptions are available free for visually impaired visitors at the Audioguide desks.
Rising Up: Hale Woodruff’s Murals at Talladega College
Birmingham Museum of Art
Birmingham, Alabama
June 13, 2015–September 6, 2015
“In 1938 Atlanta-based artist Hale Woodruff was commissioned to paint a series of murals for Talladega College, Alabama, one of the first colleges established for blacks in the United States. Installed in the institution’s newly constructed Savery Library, the six murals portray noteworthy events in the rise of blacks from slavery to freedom. Though he painted the murals for a local audience of students and faculty, Woodruff intended their impact to reach beyond Talladega’s campus.
They attracted national attention. Cultural leaders in the African American community, in particular, championed Woodruff’s murals, adopting the project as a statement of pride and hope for racial equality. Today the murals remain symbols of the centuries-long struggle for civil rights. This project, a collaboration between the High Museum of Art and Talladega College, conserves these works and presents them to a national audience for the first time.”
Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933–1945
Museum of Jewish Heritage
New York, New York
May 29, 2015–October 2, 2015
“Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi German regime promoted racial health policies that sought to eliminate all sources of biological corruption to its dominant “Aryan” race. Among the groups persecuted as threats to the national health were Germany’s homosexual men. Believing them to be carriers of a “degeneracy” that weakened society and hindered population growth, the Nazi state arrested and incarcerated in prisons and concentration camps tens of thousands of German men as a means of terrorizing them into social conformity.
This exhibition examines the Nazi regime’s attempt to eradicate homosexuality. The Nazis’ efforts left thousands dead and shattered the lives of many more.”
Baye Fall: Roots in Spirituality, Fashion, and Resistance
Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan
Brooklyn, New York
June 18, 2015–September 27, 2015
“Baye Fall: Roots in Spirituality, Fashion, and Resistance is a photographic series that visually engages the Baye Fall, an enterprising sub-group of Senegal’s notable Sufi Muslim community, the Mourides. These images encourage viewers to contemplate Sufism in a West African context by exploring the community’s reverence for Baye Fall’s founder and leader, Cheikh Amadou Bamba, and his most celebrated disciple, Ibrahima Fall, the namesake of this suborder.
An integral part of the cultural fabric of Senegalese society, the Baye Fall possess a unique aesthetic that includes ‘locked’ hair, patchwork garments, symphonic chanting and artisanal leather talismans and prayer beads. Gathering after the evening prayer to sing in collectives calleddahrias, their voices gently resonate throughout the shadows of the night. But perhaps the most distinctive aspect of their religious practice is the incorporation of physical labor as a form of worship.
Through witnessing the everyday lives of the Baye Fall, and the Senegalese cities in which they dwell, this series shows how indigenous ideology and pre- and post-colonial politics have influenced the contemporary spiritual practice of the Baye Fall, as well as their social, economic and political philosophies.”
Royals & Regalia: Inside the Palaces of Nigeria’s Monarchs
Recent Photographs by George Osodi
Newark Museum
Newark New Jersey
February 25, 2015–August 9, 2015
“Royals & Regalia: Inside the Palaces of Nigeria’s Monarchs presents 40 visually stunning portraits from a new series by acclaimed Nigerian photographer George Osodi. Exhibited for the first time in the U.S., these vibrant color photographs feature the regional rulers of modern-day monarchies throughout the country. They provide audiences with a rare and intimate look inside Nigeria’s palaces and throne rooms, capturing the personalities of the rulers, the splendor of their dress, and the details of their settings. The near life-size photographs will be shown to dramatic effect along with select examples of prestige dress and regalia from the internationally renowned collections of the Newark Museum.”
“The idea behind this project is to travel around this diverse country and go beyond the portraits to explore the subjects’ environments—being the custodians of our cultural heritage and peace makers—exploring their architecture and fashion with the view to showcase and celebrate them and to mirror the country’s great culture through their personalities.”— Photographer George Osodi
Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life
New York Botanical Gardens
New York, New York
May 16, 2015–November 15, 2015
“This blockbuster exhibition is the first to examine Frida Kahlo’s keen appreciation for the beauty and variety of the natural world, as evidenced by her home and garden as well as the complex use of plant imagery in her artwork. Featuring a rare display of more than a dozen original Kahlo paintings and works on paper, this limited six-month engagement also reimagines the iconic artist’s famed garden and studio at the Casa Azul, her lifelong home in Mexico City.
Accompanying events invite visitors to learn about Kahlo’s life and enduring cultural influence through music, lectures, Frida al Fresco evenings, Mexican-inspired shopping and dining experiences, and hands-on art activities for kids. As a complement to your visit, use our new mobile guide to see rare photos and footage, listen to expert commentary, and create your own Frida Selfie to share with friends.”
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted Jul 08, 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.
I’m Paid Less Than My Colleagues. Help!
I’m in the biological sciences at an R1 school and am a relatively new full professor. Recently, I was shown the mean salary for all faculty at this rank within my department. To my surprise, my salary was about 20 percent less than this number. Meanwhile the mean salary for full professors in my department is approximately 6 percent lower than the average provided by the Chronicle’s latest salary report for my university. (Read more from Vitae.)
Havana’s Vital Biennial Was Trumped by a Stifled Voice
The Havana Biennial raised the right questions in a society that continues to define itself, despite a creeping capitalist economy, as seriously socialist. How can a vital art be made for sharing rather than for private ownership? Who is allowed to decide what is art and what is not? And how, in a period that almost everyone acknowledges to be one of transition, do you create an art in progress, an art that can exist in the public realm and reflect the present, without being prematurely monumental? (Read more from the New York Times.)
Against Students
What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts that consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, free speech, civilization, even life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. (Read more from the New Inquiry.)
Heartbroken: Seventy-Two USC Alumni Write in Support of Withdrawn MFA Students
More than six-dozen alumni of the Roski School of Art and Design at USC published an open letter supporting the class of MFA students that withdrew from the university in May to protest changes in curriculum, faculty, and funding. “As alumni of the University of Southern California Roski School of Art and Design’s Master of Fine Arts Program,” reads the letter, “we are dismayed to hear that Dean Erica Muhl’s actions and lack of support for the Program have caused the entire graduating class of 2016 to withdraw.” (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)
Art Teachers “Paid the Same as McDonald’s Workers”
As President Obama announced plans to extend overtime pay to more US workers, many artists and nonprofit organizations are pushing for wage increases, including Andrea Bowers, an artist and senior lecturer at the Otis College of Art and Design. “Faculty are making the same amount as McDonald’s workers,” she says. Instructors are paid per course with a semester-long fee, but this hovers around minimum wage, if the number of hours spent on the course is taken into consideration. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
What Startups Can Learn from the Art Market
Although the denizens of Art Basel and the participants in Y Combinator may protest, the process of making art today is essentially identical to the process of making startups. Both the gallery and the incubator are singular spaces specifically designed to do the same thing: maximize volatility and promote creativity within a network of makers, gatekeepers, investors, marketers, and ultimately consumers. Guiding the players at the center is the Curator-Patron—the art dealer or the angel investor/venture capitalist. (Read more from Fast Company.)
The Fine Art of Forgery
In the radiant blue chamber of the ZPrinter 850, a skull is born. An inkjet arm moves across a bed of gypsum powder, depositing a layer of liquid that binds the powder together in the shape of a cranial cross-section. Then the arm sweeps across again, brushing on another thin layer of powder, followed by another layer of liquid, indistinguishable from the first, its imprint as abstract as a coffee stain on a napkin. Watching this process is akin to watching a movie with a slide projector—it’s slow. But after twelve hours and 1,500 layers, a technician will reach into the dust and pull out an impeccably structured replica of a hominid skull. (Read more from the Atlantic.)
Older and on the Market
Searching for employment tends to make people anxious about the ways in which they are different from the typical candidate. One such factor is age, especially if you are older than average on the market. I heard from two readers who had such concerns. One wrote: “A growing number of us earn PhDs post-40, post-50. I’m 58. I’ve been told pointblank not to even think of applying for conventional teaching positions.” (Read more from Vitae.)
Bookshelf: A New Series on Art Journal Open
posted Jul 06, 2015
Art Journal Open has launched Bookshelf, a new series that asks a simple question: “What are you reading?” Each answer provides a glimpse into the contributor’s personal reading list, from academic publications and artist monographs to novels, memoirs, and travel guides. Two installments have appeared so far: Rebecca M. Brown, associate professor at Johns Hopkins University and incoming editor-in-chief of Art Journal, shares both the physical books on her shelf and the digital books on her Kindle. The Bookshelf of the artist Lenore Chinn is a fascinating mix of theoretical texts, art books, and biographies. To submit your own Bookshelf to Art Journal Open, send a brief description of what you’re reading and why, a list of the titles (including author, publisher, and year of publication), and a photograph of your books to art.journal.website@collegeart.org.
Survey about an Online Journal of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Art History
posted Jul 02, 2015
ArtHistoryTeachingResources.org recently received a grant from The Kress Foundation to conduct preliminary research for an e-journal of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) in Art History that will launch in 2016.
We are writing to ask for your help with this initiative by completing a ten-minute survey before July 17.
AHTR is a peer-populated website, committed to experimentation, participation, and fostering community around teaching and learning in art history. The new e-journal Art History Pedagogy and Practice will build on this foundation to engage anyone interested in rigorous scholarship and quality content around pedagogical issues in art history.
This survey aims to identify stakeholders in this project and to make sure the e-journal responds to their needs. The survey will also help clarify the e-journal’s place within the existing landscape of SoTL, art history, and pedagogical research/practice, and help us better understand how a discipline-specific SoTL in art history might provide greater support for research around teaching and learning in the field.
We are distributing the survey to members of the art history and museum communities, but also seek input from university administrators, libraries, teaching/learning centers, academic technologists, and others involved in art history education. Please forward the survey to anyone you think would be willing to offer their feedback. We’re grateful for your time and theirs in helping shape what we hope will be a resource for many. We apologize for any cross-postings you may receive, but know the project will be strengthened by the broadest participation.
Click here to access the on-line survey.
(Survey participants will be eligible to win one of four $50 Amazon gift cards)
If you have questions or want more information about the e-journal initiative, we are in the process of creating an Art History Pedagogy and Practice page on the AHTR website. Immediate inquiries should be sent to teachingarthistorysurvey@gmail.com.
Sincerely,
Virginia B. Spivey, Parme Giuntini, Renee McGarry
Project Leaders, Art History Pedagogy and Practice Initiative
Michelle Millar Fisher, Co-Founder and Dean, AHTR
Karen Shelby, Co-Founder and Dean, AHTR
Kathleen Wentrack, Contributing Editor, AHTR
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted Jul 01, 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.
Despite Fears about Trigger Warnings, Survey Suggests Few Faculty Are Forced to Use Them
Very few college professors are forced to use trigger warnings in class, according to an online survey of CAA and MLA members. Out of 808 who responded, less than 1 percent said their college or university had adopted a trigger-warning policy. Eighty-five percent said in the survey that students had never asked them to use trigger warnings, and 93 percent did not know of any student-initiated efforts at their school to require them in class. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)
The Hostile Renegotiation of the Professor-Student Relationship
There is a scourge on college campuses today, driving a wedge between students and faculty. Political correctness? Maybe that, too. But I’m referring instead to the newly triumphant caricature of today’s undergrad (and perhaps some grad students as well) as a hypersensitive, helicoptered student-customer who will file a Title IX complaint if the dining hall kale isn’t organic. Today’s undergrad is so entitled as to demand to be employable after graduation. (Read more from the New Republic.)
Why State Lawmakers Must Support Tenure at Public Universities
Critics dismiss tenure as “a job for life.” Tenure, however, is not about protecting people but rather about protecting open conversation and debate. It is about academic freedom—the ability to research and teach on all topics, without fear of reprisal. Public universities, as state-chartered institutions, may be particularly prone to intervention when faculty members express politically unpopular ideas. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Fake Painting
Noah Charney, the founder of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art and the author of the novel The Art Thief, spoke to the New Inquiry editor Malcolm Harris about his new book, The Art of Forgery. (Read more from the New Inquiry.)
Why Are There Still So Few Successful Female Artists?
What will it take to finally put an end to sexism in art? Things are a lot better than in the mid-1980s, when the Guerrilla Girls formed to picket a Museum of Modern Art survey that contained just 13 women in a show of 169 artists. But they are still not great: of all artists represented by galleries in the US today, just 30 percent are female, according to the stats from Micol Hebron’s Gallery Tally project. And that total seems to have been stuck more or less in place for some time. (Read more from Artnet News.)
How a New Librarian of Congress Could Improve US Copyright
The Librarian of Congress has a somewhat strange position. He or she both runs the world’s largest library—which has a staff in the thousands and a collection in the millions—and oversees the Copyright Office, the government office that manages the register of all copyrighted materials. So when the current Librarian of Congress, James Billington, announced plans to retire, it wasn’t only librarians who perked up. Copyright advocates did so too, because of the librarian’s incredible power. (Read more from the Atlantic.)
Historian Uses Lasers to Unlock Mysteries of Gothic Cathedrals
Thirteen million people visit the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris every year, entering through massive wooden doors at the base of towers as solidly planted as mountains. They stand in front of walls filigreed with stained glass and gaze at a ceiling supported by delicate ribs of stone. If its beauty and magnificence is instantly apparent, so much about Notre Dame is not. To begin with, we don’t know who built this cathedral—or how. (Read more from National Geographic.)
A Realistic Summer Writing Schedule
The grueling grading period is over. The semester is finally finished. You’ve probably taken a few well-deserved weeks off, but now it’s time to start working on your own research and writing projects. Many of us use our precious summer “vacation” to churn out articles and book chapters. But as the tenure-track market tightens and pressure to publish increases, many people—especially junior faculty—feel intense anxiety over their summer writing schedules. (Read more from Vitae.)
Rebecca M. Brown Is the Next Editor-in-Chief of Art Journal
posted Jun 26, 2015
On July 1, Rebecca M. Brown becomes the new editor-in-chief of Art Journal, CAA’s quarterly journal of modern and contemporary art. A scholar of colonial and post-1947 South Asian art and visual culture, Brown is associate professor of history of art at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. She also chairs Hopkins’s Advanced Academic Program in Museum Studies. Brown succeeds Lane Relyea, associate professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who has led the journal since 2012.
In her nomination letter, Brown wrote, “In putting my name forward for editor, I am keenly aware that if I am selected my editorship would confirm a shift already well underway within the discipline—namely, the incorporation of questions related to global modern and contemporary art, transnational visual culture, and the machinations of art-making not solely in the northern Atlantic cities of Paris, London, and New York, but also in Lagos, Durban, Mexico City, Rio, Mumbai, Singapore, Beijing, Osaka, and Auckland. I believe the time has come for such a statement, but I also want to assert that in my own work I have been at pains to articulate a global modern that acknowledges the centrality of Europe and America as touchstones around the world. That is, rather than privilege such locations I suggest that thinking of the global modern as a set of distinct regional ‘modernisms’ is dishonest to the global interrelations of power that operate for artists around the world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Part of my own intellectual commitment is to bring the conversations happening around modernism in Asia, Africa, South America, Eastern Europe, and the Pacific region together with those in Europe and North America in order to enhance scholarship and the production of both art and its history, wherever its local focus might be.”
Brown earned her PhD in South Asian and Islamic art history at the University of Minnesota in 1999, where she was a Mellon Fellow in Humanistic Studies and a CAORC research fellow. Her undergraduate degree is from Pomona College in Claremont, California. She has served as a consultant and a curator for modern and contemporary Indian art for the Peabody Essex Museum, the Walters Art Museum, and the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation. She has led seminars in art history and museum studies at Georgetown University and George Washington University, and has lectured throughout North America and in Asia.
Brown has published her scholarship widely, notably in two books: Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India (2010) and Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 (2009). She wrote the exhibition catalogue for Goddess, Lion, Peasant, Priest: Modern and Contemporary Indian Art from the Shelley and Donald Rubin Collection (2011). She has also edited two publications with Deborah S. Hutton—A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture (2011) and Asian Art (2006)—and has written essays for Visual Anthropology, Res, Interventions, CSSAAME, Archives of Asian Art, Journal of Urban History, Screen, and Journal of Asian Studies.
Brown has performed the CAA journal trifecta: publishing in The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and caa.reviews. Her most recent contribution was “A Distant Contemporary: Indian Twentieth-Century Art in the US Festival of India (1985–86),” published in the September 2014 issue of The Art Bulletin. Previous to that, “P. T. Reddy, Neo-Tantrism, and Modern Indian Art” appeared in the Winter 2005 issue of Art Journal. Brown has written two book reviews and one exhibition review for caa.reviews over the years.
Before Johns Hopkins, Brown taught at Swansea University in Wales and the University of Redlands in California. She served as research associate for the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and was a visiting scholar in history at Pennsylvania State University. She started her academic career as an assistant professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
In discussing her plans as editor, Brown writes, “It is crucial that Art Journal maintains its reputation as the top venue for the publication of articles and other kinds of engagements with modern and contemporary art, and as a space for artists to share their work and experiment in the context of a print journal. I would love to see artists taking advantage of the ‘analogue’ quality of the page and the journal format, perhaps in concert with filmic or other media shared via Art Journal Open.
“As a scholar situated often on the margin of the discipline—and recognizing that every scholar feels that way to some extent—I think of modern and contemporary art in wide scope: the entirety of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, certainly, and from anywhere around the world, including sites outside the usual urban metropolises. In addition, I’d like to seek out other kinds of unexplored spaces for art and for art history: pockets where, for example, medievalists might encounter contemporary mosaicists, or where temperature becomes a central element of art making, displaying, or writing. These engagements can happen in artist projects and scholarly articles or in more informal spaces within the pages of the journal, as exchanges, responses, object-studies, artist reflections, or conversations. In all of these areas, I am committed to maintaining the focus of Art Journal on artist projects that push boundaries and challenge norms and on scholarly, rigorously peer reviewed contributions to the field.”
Issues of Art Journal edited by Relyea will appear through Winter 2015. Brown’s first issue will be Spring 2016.
Images
First: Portrait of Rebecca M. Brown (photograph by J. Roffman)
Second: Rebecca M. Brown, Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009)
Call On Your Member of Congress to Support the NEA!
posted Jun 24, 2015
Americans for the Arts sent the following email on June 24, 2015.
Call On Your Member of Congress to Support the NEA!
This week, key decisions affecting arts funding are getting made.
Last night, the House Rules Committee met to set parameters for floor debate on legislation that funds the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and other cultural agencies, including the Smithsonian and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Congressional Arts Caucus co-Chair Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) serves on that committee and spoke at length about arts funding, noting its impact on our economy, student achievement, and health. She made sure the committee knew that 4.7 million Americans work in the arts and that it makes up 4.3% of our U.S. GDP—more than $698 billion!
The House is scheduled to consider this legislation next on the House floor, beginning tomorrow. It’s been a while—the last time there were floor votes on this bill was back in 2011!
We urge every arts advocate to join Rep. Slaughter and help remind your member of Congress about the importance of the arts and arts funding as this key funding bill is debated.
Right now, the bill proposes sustained funding at $146 million. Last week in committee, efforts to increase funding by $2 million to the President’s request failed. Now on the floor, efforts to cut or even eliminate the agency are a possibility.
Arts advocates attending 2015 Arts Advocacy Day on Capitol Hill this spring You know better than anyone the top 10 reasons to support the arts; make sure your representatives do, too. Take two minutes to urge your representative to support at least level funding for the NEA, and reject any effort to reduce it.
Thank you for your support of the arts! Help us continue this important work by becoming an official member of the Arts Action Fund. If you are not already a member, play your part by joining the Arts Action Fund today—it’s free and easy to join.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted Jun 24, 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.
A Win for Academic Freedom: Steven Salaita Awarded Back-to-Back Victories against University That Fired Him
The first part of June has awarded back-to-back victories to Steven Salaita, a professor who last year was dismissed from his post at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for posting tweets considered by some to be beyond the pale of proper academic discourse. What makes this case especially interesting—and what the recent court decision and a critical vote by the largest confederation of US professors in the country shows—is the undue and improper interference of wealthy donors on the internal affairs of public educational institutions. (Read more from Salon.)
Should I Ask Someone to Write about My Show?
I’ve had two solo shows in the last couple of years that received absolutely no press coverage. I’m trying to get a better position at the college at which I currently teach and need all the help I can get. Reviews look good on a résumé. Should I ask some of the local writers to write about my next show? What if they are good friends? (Read more from Burnaway.)
Help Desk: Serious Damage
I have my work up in a solo exhibition at a well-known arts center in a large city. Last weekend during open gallery hours, I walked in to find five wall pieces and a major floor sculpture missing. The attendants had no idea what had happened or where the work was. Finally, I found someone who let me in to the offices where the work was being stored. Two pieces were broken and the rest were undamaged. How should I handle this situation? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
Blurring the Museum-Gallery Divide
Ever since Mark Rosenthal left his job as head of twentieth-century art at the National Gallery in Washington to become an independent curator, museums around the country have sought his talents. Now art galleries are trying to hire him, too—but not just for his scholarship. “There was a big expectation,” Rosenthal said, “that I could deliver works for sale.” (Read more from the New York Times.)
You Want to Write for a Popular Audience? Really?
At a recent job interview, I explained to the committee that I was trying to write a book for a popular audience. One of them smirked, but at least had the grace to try to hide it behind her hand. The self-described maverick of the team simply laughed out loud. The head of the committee stared at me in genuine amazement. “Why bother?” he asked. After all, there was no hope of reaching the general public. Or as he put it, “the masses will always just be the masses.” (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
World’s Most Inaccessible Art Found in the Heart of the Colombian Jungle
A British wildlife filmmaker has returned from one of the most inaccessible parts of the world with extraordinary footage of ancient rock art that has never been filmed or photographed before. In an area of Colombia so vast and remote that contact has still not been made with some tribes thought to live there, Mike Slee used a helicopter to film hundreds of paintings depicting hunters and animals believed to have been created thousands of years ago. (Read more from the Guardian.)
Arts Philanthropy Booming, Cultural Giving Rises 9.2 Percent, New Study Says
Americans’ donations to arts and culture rose 9.2 percent in 2014, the highest increase in nine categories tracked by Giving USA, an annual report on charitable contributions. Overall, however, arts and culture commanded a modest share of the philanthropic pie. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)
How to Use Student Evaluations Wisely
I’m well aware that the value of student evaluations is contested, but like my father, I’ve also found that they can be useful tools. At my own institution, I inherited a nuanced set of faculty-designed guidelines on the use of student evaluations. Among the best ideas I found in them. (Read more from Vitae.)
Preparing for Possible Anti-NEH Amendments in the House
posted Jun 23, 2015
Stephen Kidd, executive director of the National Humanities Alliance, sent the following email on June 20, 2015.
Preparing for Possible Anti-NEH Amendments in the House
Hello All,
I am writing with an update on challenges NEH and NEA may face in the House in the coming week. As many of you know, the Interior appropriations bill has been scheduled to be considered on the floor of the House on Thursday. We are preparing for the possibility that an amendment cutting or eliminating funding for NEH and NEA may be introduced. The Rules Committee is scheduled to meet on Tuesday at 5 pm, so we should know more after that.
In preparation. we are priming our members for a possible action alert and reaching out to specific organizations with ties to higher education institutions in strategically important Republican-held districts. We are asking them to be prepared to call on these institutions to reach out to the Members in support of NEH. I am attaching the list of 50 districts in case anyone has strong contacts to pursue if needed.
I know that many of you are already looped in through CAG and are already poised to act.
We’ll be in touch early in the week, and please let us know if you have any information.
Hopefully this will be much ado about nothing!
Hope you are all enjoying the weekend.
New and Forthcoming in CAA’s Journals
posted Jun 23, 2015
Here is what is new and forthcoming in CAA’s three scholarly journals.
caa.reviews
caa.reviews inaugurates a new field of coverage with “Reflections on Digital Art History” by art historian Pamela Fletcher. Editor-in-chief David Raskin provides an introduction to the essay including these statements: “The digital humanities is an emerging field that promises to merge technology with interpretative creativity, to create entirely new types of scholarly perspectives and methods for visualizing data. $500 loan online payday same day. Fletcher identifies two existing categories of projects that are already showing potential: archival modeling and visual data analysis. The former seeks to assemble tremendous detail in one central location, such as every document directly tied to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s art, while the latter seeks to make complicated time and space relationships comprehensible, such as the evolving physical plant of Auschwitz-Birkenau during World War II. The scholarship is inspiring, since it is these pioneers who are setting the course we will all soon travel.”
Art Journal Open and Art Journal
Last week Art Journal Open added two interviews to its growing content. “Broken Dishes: Kate Gilmore in Conversation with Dina Deitsch” is the second installment of a series in which Deitsch explores the creative process with artists whose work she has selected for exhibitions. She speaks with Gilmore about her performance and installation Like This, Before (2013), from the exhibition Paint Things: Beyond the Stretcher, which Deitsch and Evan Garza organized for the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. The page features striking video of the performance. In “Immemorial: The Poetics of AIDS; A Conversation with Rudy Lemcke,” the artist and scholar Tina Takemoto interviews Lemcke, a San Francisco-based artist best known for works that captured the sensibilities of the early stages of the AIDS crisis. Lemcke’s work is featured in the larger thematic exhibition Art AIDS America, which just opened in Los Angeles at the West Hollywood Library and One Archive Gallery and Museum. During the next year, the show will travel to museums in Tacoma, Washington, Kennesaw, Georgia, and the Bronx, New York.
Art Journal
The next issue of the quarterly Art Journal will have a special focus on the work of the pioneering artist Carolee Schneemann. Over a fifty-year career, she has consistently been at forefront of experimental art—as filmmaker, performance artist, creator of media installations, and feminist artist. The centerpiece of the issue is “The Kitch Portfolio,” for which the artist has compiled thirty pages of previously unpublished artworks, photographs, journal entries, letters, and other archival works pertaining to a central presence in her work from the mid-1950s through 1976, the feline artist and performer Kitch. Two essays on Schneemann’s work by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve and Kenneth White are also featured. The issue includes an essay by Kerr Houston on Richard Serra’s 1966 renunciation of painting, as well as reviews of books by Sharon Kivland, Sharon Louden, Stephen Wright, and Todd Cronan. It will publish in print and online in early July.
The Art Bulletin
Don’t miss these essays published in the June issue of The Art Bulletin: “Building and Writing San Lorenzo in Florence: The Architect, The Biographer, The Patron, and The Prior” by Marvin Trachtenberg, “Van Dyck Between Master and Model” by Adam Eaker, “Rococo Representations of Interspecies Sensuality and the Pursuit of Volupté” by Jennifer Milam, and “Félix Vallotton’s Murderous Life” by Bridget Alsdorf. The September issue of The Art Bulletin publishes its first digital supplement to a feature article in the online version of “Performing the Jeweled Pagoda Mandalas: Relics, Reliquaries, and a Realm of Text” by Halle O’Neal.
Taylor & Francis Online
In addition to their print subscription(s), CAA members receive online access to current and back issues of Art Journal and The Art Bulletin. Taylor & Francis also provides complimentary online access to Word and Image, Digital Creativity, and Public Art Dialogue for CAA members. To access these journals, please log into your account at collegeart.org and click the link to the CAA Online Publications Platform on Taylor & Francis Online