CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted Jan 14, 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.
Artists’ Low Income and Status Are International Issues
In the UK, as the Paying Artists campaign revealed in 2014, the majority of contemporary artists are barely surviving financially, with no or low pay the norm. In real terms, nearly three-quarters of artists are getting just 37 percent of the average UK salary from their practice. But while some argue that it’s the absence of collective bargaining mechanisms that result in such exploitation, even in countries where there are well-developed fees systems, low pay for artists remains the burning issue. (Read more from the Guardian.)
New Focus: The Art of Making a Living
When administrators at University of the Arts were seeking a new way to prepare students for work after graduation, they didn’t have to look far. An answer lay just across Pine Street. They struck a cross-registration deal with Peirce College, a neighboring school that offers classes in finance, ecommerce, marketing, and app development. Kirk Pillow, the university’s provost, said it’s part of a broader effort to create value for students. (Read more from the Philadelphia Inquirer.)
What Can Learned Societies Do about Adjuncts?
What power do learned societies have to effect change? What is actually within their reach? These are not omnipotent organizations, despite the attempts to suggest they are. Their resources are finite as are their spheres of influence. What they should do doesn’t neatly fit with what they can do. This is not to defend the inaction of learned societies on the issue of contingent labor, but rather to contextualize the possibility of action and recourse. (Read more from Vitae.)
Help Desk: Breaking into Arts Journalism
I love writing and I love art. I have been teaching for ten years and am now looking to break into journalism and the arts. Should I head back to university and do a journalism course or attempt every competition possible in order to build a portfolio? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
Thirty Art-Writing Clichés to Ditch in the New Year
It’s a new year, which is a fine excuse as any to ditch old bad habits. Here below, I have assembled a not-at-all exhaustive list of art-writing words that I could do without in 2015. I admit, I’ve been guilty myself of abusing some or all of them—but of course that’s what New Year’s resolutions are for. (Read more from Artnet News.)
The Problem of the Overlooked Female Artist: An Argument for Enlivening a Stale Model of Discussion
Recently I was told that a certain art magazine editor, who had deleted the feminist critique from a review I had written, “can only take so much feminism.” At the time, I was infuriated that someone who is tasked with shaping the way art is discussed would take such an explicit and condescending stance against gender equality. With art-world professionals like him hoping that feminism would just go away, it feels necessary to be supportive of any museum exhibitions, gallery shows, market successes, or media attention given to women artists. (Read more from Hyperallergic.)
Measuring Diversity in City Arts Organizations
A mecca for the arts, New York City has also become one of the most multicultural cities in the country, with no single dominant racial or ethnic group and residents who speak more than two hundred languages, according to the Department of City Planning. Whether its cultural institutions reflect those demographics is another issue. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)
Raising the Profile of Columbia’s Art
Columbia University owns thousands of antiquities, antiques, and paintings, but it has no major display spaces and no comprehensive database. So the works largely go unnoticed even by some staff members. Roberto C. Ferrari, an art historian and librarian who became Columbia’s curator of art properties in 2013, has set out to raise the profile of the ten thousand objects on campus. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Will There Be Life after Death for New Private Museums?
From the opening of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in October to the construction of the Broad in Los Angeles, now set to open this autumn, the model of the single-donor museum is thriving. You’d have to dial back the clock more than a century to the American “robber barons” like Frick, Morgan, and Huntington to find another moment in art history when so many great institutions were founded by powerful individuals instead of broader coalitions or private-public alliances. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Sign Up for a Mock Interview
posted Jan 13, 2015
Students and emerging professionals have the opportunity to sign up for a twenty-minute practice interview at the 2015 Annual Conference in New York. Organized by the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee, Mock Interview Sessions give participants the chance to practice their interview skills one on one with a seasoned professional, improve their effectiveness during interviews, and hone their elevator speech. Interviewers also provide candid feedback on application packets.
Mock Interview Sessions are offered free of charge; you must be a CAA member to participate. Sessions are filled by appointment only and scheduled for Thursday, February 12, 11:00 AM–1:00 PM and 3:00–5:00 PM; and Friday, February 13, 9:00–11:00 AM and 1:00–3:00 PM. Conference registration, while encouraged, is not necessary to participate.
To apply, download, complete, and send the 2015 Mock Interview Sessions Enrollment Form to Megan Koza Young, chair of the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee, by email to sepccaa@gmail.com or by mail to: 706 Webster Street, New Orleans, LA 70118. You may enroll in one twenty-minute session. Deadline: February 5, 2015.
You will be notified of your appointment day and time by email. Please bring your application packet, including cover letter, CV, and other materials related to jobs in your field. The Student and Emerging Professionals Committee will make every effort to accommodate all applicants; however, space is limited.
Onsite enrollment will be limited and first-come, first-served. Sign up in the Student and Emerging Professionals Lounge starting on Wednesday, February 11, at 4:00 PM.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for January 2015
posted Jan 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.
January 2015
Nicole Miller at Artists’ Film International
Ballroom Marfa
108 East San Antonio Street, Marfa, TX 79843
November 22, 2014–February 22, 2015
Ballroom Marfa is presenting two recent videos by Nicole Miller, as a highlighted artist participating at the Artists’ Film International. This project means a collection of artists’ film, video and animation from around the world that has been coorganized with Whitechapel Gallery in London.
Miller (b. 1982; Tucson, Arizona) lives and works in Los Angeles. Her films and installations explore the transformative capabilities of the moving image to reconstruct interpretations of self and culture. Through storytelling, self-representation and self-presentation become a narrative in search for the reconstitution of physical and psychic manifestations of loss. Her videos often focus on the interplay between preconception and reality in terms of African American identity, as in the case of The Conductor (2009), presented earlier this year at the High Line Art Program.
In this occasion, Ballroom Marfa is presenting two recent projects by Miller. In David (2012) we can observe the fragmented image of the profile of a man that the artist encountered by chance on the street. Here, he narrates the events that lead to the amputation of his left arm whilst his right limb is reflected in a mirror—a rehabilitation technique that helps patients deal with the painful symptoms of a phantom limb. Death of a School (2014) is a predominantly silent four-channel video that meditates on the events of a soon to be shutdown school in Tucson, which is Miller’s hometown. Presented together, Miller’s films become powerful narratives that carry the possibility of reconstitution of lost histories and identities.
Johanna Calle: Indicios
Casas Reigner
Calle 70A # 7-41, Bogotá, Colombia
October 2, 2014–January 30, 2015
Casas Riegner presents Indicios (Signs), an exhibition that gathers Johanna Calle’s most representative works produced between 1990 and 2014. Seeking to examine closely the visual language that has characterized her work for more than two decades, the exhibition includes a selection of projects in which different processes developed by the artist are juxtaposed. In each series of work, Calle exposes her approach to the creative process, where she also unveils a sense of unsettledness and curiosity.
Featuring her conceptual research and creative use of unconventional materials, the display includes Calle’s assemblages, signs, and phonetic representations of indigenous languages, photographic drawings made on vintage analogue photographs, and the intervention of archives and documents that are part of different research projects. For the documentation-based installation Hermanas Figueiredo (2013–14), Calle reconstructed a story as a gesture of redemption to the Brazilian sisters that devoted their life to a scientific research around the life of butterflies in the first half of the twentieth century. However, they have lost the legal battle with a recognized Brazilian professor who was hired to catalogue their collection and had deliberately chosen to wrongly assign its authorship and ownership. The case was dismissed and labeled as exhaustive and rigorous maniac women’s work.
Calle holds a BFA from Universidad de Los Andes en Bogotá and an MFA from Chelsea College of Arts in London, England. Her projects Perímetros I and Perímetros II were included at the thirty-first Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil in 2014.
Donna Sharrett: Love Songs
Pavel Zoubok Gallery
531 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
January 8–February 7, 2015
Pavel Zoubok Gallery presents Love Songs, a solo exhibition of new work by Donna Sharrett, including two of her largest—yet humanly scaled—works to date, framed by Sampling, a related group show curated by Dara Meyers-Kingsley.
With a variety of needlework techniques, Sharrett creates painstakingly wrought concentric assemblages sewn together from a potent and personal material lexicon consisting of donated or inherited jewelry, clothing, and buttons; hair, bone beads, dirt, and guitar strings. Passed down from a congenial and ancestral sorority of craftswomen and fiber artists, Sharrett’s techniques instill in each piece cross-cultural references to life, death, and rebirth. Addressing the shared human ability and desire to remember, her works transcend the confines of economic, religious and cultural boundaries.They instead evoke “life as it is lived and remembered—a notion of lineage that is not always linear and narrative but sometimes acts more like a spiral—a growing flower that rises from the earth and whose seeds scatter to become the next crop.”
Sharrett (b. Philadelphia, 1958) is the recipient of two fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts as well as notable residencies and grants from Smack Mellon, the Bronx Museum and the Millay Colony for the Arts Residency. Her work has been widely exhibited, including a solo exhibition at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York, and group exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York; the Bellevue Arts Museum in Bellevue, Washington; the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York; and Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. Her work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Arts and Design in New York; the United States Embassy in Valletta, Malta; the Hebrew Home for the Aged in New York; and J. P. Morgan Chase in New York. A full-color catalogue will accompany the exhibition.
Cameron: Songs for the Witch Woman
MOCA Pacific Design Center
8687 Melrose Avenue, West Hollywood, CA 90069
October 11, 2014–January 18, 2015
Cameron: Songs for the Witch Woman is the first survey of Cameron’s work since 1989 and explores the artist’s role as a seminal figure within Los Angeles’s midcentury counterculture, her unique melding of surrealism and mysticism, and her unwavering commitment to live her life as art. “Navigating between disciplines and traditions of poetry, cinema, visual arts, and spirituality; Cameron has opened many doors that continue to intrigue and inspire generations of artists,” while “her hallucinated vision … embodies an aspect of modernity that deeply doubts and defies cartesian logic at a moment in history when these values have shown their own limitations,” as stated by MOCA’s director, Philippe Vergne.
Born in Belle Plaine, Iowa, Cameron (Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel) (1922–1995) emerged as an artist, performer, poet, and occult practitioner in Los Angeles, uniquely bridging the city’s flourishing spiritual and art worlds at midcentury. She arrived in Los Angeles by way of the Second World War, where she drew maps and labored in a photographic unit for the United States Navy. A visionary painter and unparalleled draftsman best known today for her paintings and drawings of human and fantastical figures, she spend her last days in West Hollywood largely unrecognized. Cameron’s frenetic, delicate renderings of mythological figures reveal a singular attention to line and the idea of spiritual metamorphosis, evoking the surrealism and symbolism of the French poets. She is closely associated with Beat artists such as Wallace Berman, George Herms, and Dennis Hopper, the filmmakers Kenneth Anger and Curtis Harrington, and the occultist Aleister Crowley, while she was mentor to younger artists and poets such as David Meltzer and Aya (Tarlow). Cameron’s artwork appeared in the first issue of Berman’s celebrated journal Semina (1955–64) and has also been included in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Martin-Gropius Bau in Berlin, the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in 1989.
Comprised of nearly one hundred artworks and ephemeral artifacts, the exhibition includes pieces formerly thought to be lost, ranging from early paintings to drawings, sketchbooks, and poetry from her late years, as well as ephemera and correspondence with individuals such as her husband Jack Parsons (1914–1952), a rocket pioneer and a founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell. The exhibition brings to life the recently published book titled Songs for the Witch Woman that features a series of poems written by Parsons alongside illustrations drawn by Cameron that echo the intimate themes of their turbulent love story.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the Cameron Parsons Foundation is producing an eighty-eight-page catalogue with approximately seventy-five full-color illustrations.
Sylvie Blocher: S’inventeur autrement
Mudam Luxemburg
Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean 3, Park Dräi Eechelen L-1499 Luxembourg-Kirchberg
August 11, 2014–May 25, 2015
Since the early 1990s, the French artist Sylvie Blocher has built up a body of video work that takes the human as its material, in all its fragility, unpredictability, and yet full presence. She engages with a poetics of relation, emancipation, the questioning of identities, the writing of history, the permeability of the masculine/feminine border, and codes of representation in a world under control. Created in different geographic regions, her works are based on exchange: they often involve the participation of lay people, who are invited to present themselves in a completely new fashion before the camera, as the artist “shares her authority with her models” to create what she calls Living Pictures.
This solo exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg revolves around an ambitious project titled Dreams Have a Language, which combines a participative work, a video installation, and the production of a movie. As envisioned by the artist, the show was meant to be “the story of an event at a museum in Luxembourg in which the visitors will not be content to look politely at the works, but decide impulsively to experience leaving the world for a few minutes, in a journey filmed and broadcast, a story of fragmented, floating bodies. Then a movie, the start of another story.”
During the first weeks of the exhibition, the museum’s Grand Hall became a fully active film studio that centered on the operation of a flying machine twelve meters tall. Through the placement of an ad in various media, Blocher invited the public to visit the museum, to leave the ground for a few minutes, and to “rethink the world.” “Shooting conditions: allow one hour and present yourself at Mudam with an idea to change the world. It might be poetic, political, aesthetic, emotional, revolutionary, scientific, architectural, educational, financial, culinary, sonic, etc.” Forming the content for a video installation at the center of the exhibition, the pictures of the suspended bodies will be the starting point for a movie created with the Luxembourg director Donato Rotunno, to be released in spring 2015. By combining a documentary approach with fictional writing, the movie will offer “an assemblage of words, gestures and moments that will open up an imaginary universe, an expectancy, a suspense.”
A survey of the artist’s work is also presented in two of the museum’s galleries, where video installations and drawings sample key themes of Blocher’s work: the sharing of responsibility, the question of politics, identity, dreams, and utopia. By using music to give new life to important speeches and manifestos made in contemporary history (by Angela Davis, Édouard Glissant, and Barack Obama, among others), the five videos that form the series Speeches (2009–12), which are part of the Mudam Collection, engage with the political dimension of the imagination, individual and collective. Other works, such as the diptych Change the Scenario (Conversation with Bruce Nauman) (2013) and the three videos recently created by Blocher in Texas, tackle historic and racial aspects in the construction of the individual. Placed at the entrance to each gallery, a series of drawings that the artist has made every day for a year, based on the front page of the newspaper Libération, emphasizes the passages between the personal and the political initiated by her practice.
December 2014 Issue of The Art Bulletin
posted Jan 09, 2015
The opening essay of the December 2014 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, is Cheng-hua Wang’s examination of Sino-European artistic interaction, the latest in the quarterly journal’s “Whither Art History?” series.
In other essays in the issue: John K. Papadopoulos identifies the Motya Youth, unearthed in 1979, as a kalathiskos dancer and explores the political implications of this new interpretation. In her article “Old Plates, New Impressions,” Alexandra Onuf analyzes editorial interventions in a sixteenth-century print series reissued in seventeenth-century Antwerp as responses to the upheavals of the Eighty Years’ War. In “The Emptiness behind the Mask,” Nóra Veszprémi considers how the Rococo revival in mid-nineteenth-century Austria, suffused with contradictory meanings, prompted musings on time, history, and national identity. For the issue’s final essay, Annika Marie reads Ad Reinhardt’s black square paintings as object lessons in Marxist dialectics that ultimately serve to demystify art.
In the Reviews section, Khristaan D. Villela surveys four recent multiauthor books on Maya art, including Ancient Maya Art at Dumbarton Oaks and Dancing into Dreams: Maya Vase Painting of the Ik’ Kingdom. Rebecca Zorach reviews two books addressing chromatic subjects: The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400–1800, edited by Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin, and Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Closing the December issue is Brian Kane’s review of Whitney Davis’s book, A General Theory of Visual Culture.
CAA sends The Art Bulletin to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the journal as a benefit of their membership. The digital version at Taylor & Francis Online is currently available to all CAA individual members.
In the next issue of the quarterly journal, March 2015, essays will consider the five members of the Società del 1496 workshop, portraitlike representations of slaves in Pietro Tacca’s Quattro Mori, Joshua Reynolds’s use of unstable and unconventional materials, and Marie-Denise Viller’s A Study of a Woman after Nature.
Affiliated Society News for January 2015
posted Jan 09, 2015
American Society of Appraisers
The American Society of Appraisers (ASA) will host the upcoming 2015 Personal Property Conference, titled “Issues in Determining the Authenticity in Visual Art and Objects, the Catalogue Raisonné, Art Scholarship, and Value in the Marketplace.” The conference will be held at the prestigious Yale Club in New York from March 25 to 27, 2015. World renown and highly regarded experts in art law, art, and antiques will gather together for discussion on relevant and timely issues facing art-industry professionals, collectors, museum curators, dealers, auctioneers, insurance underwriters, estate attorneys, and appraisers. Individuals practicing in any of these areas of fine art and decorative arts will not want to miss this important gathering of respected scholars and authorities. Topics of discussion include connoisseurship, authentication, conservation, research, provenance, and value in the markets. In addition, a representative from the Internal Revenue Service will cover issues of compliance regarding appraisals for estates and charitable contributions, and an FBI agent will discuss fraud and art crime as they affect the global marketplace. For registration and more information, please visit www.appraisers.org or call 800-272-8258.
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries
The Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) has appointed Christopher Bedford, director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, to be the keynote speaker for the organization’s next annual conference, taking place April 24–26, 2015, in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2009, the Rose became infamous for Brandeis’ attempt to sell significant objects from its collection. Bedford was hired in 2012 to turn this situation around and has been building staff and acquiring new works. He also recently commissioned a work by Chris Burden that highlights the university’s renewed commitment to the museum and its collection.
For a limited time, AAMG is offering free student memberships. Student membership is an important way to explore the field while preparing informed professionals. In addition, student membership provides access to scholarship funds to help attend educational programs such as the AAMG’s annual conference, which offers a résumé workshop and the opportunity to connect first-hand with over two hundred attendees.
Whether you are a student, new to the field, or a seasoned professional, AAMG’s listserv connects more than four thousand museum professionals and those in related fields, from across the country and the world, who can provide assistance and mentoring on a wide range of issues facing museums today.
Historians of Islamic Art Association
The Historian of Islamic Art Association (HIAA) held its fourth biennial symposium at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Ontario, from October 16 to 18, 2014. The HIAA conference is the biennial forum for the presentation and discussion of papers on various aspects of Islamic art history, and is open to all, regardless of nationality or academic affiliation. The overarching theme of the symposium was “Forms of Knowledge and Cultures of Learning in Islamic Art.”
International Association of Art Critics
The International Association of Art Critics (AICA-USA) welcomed the return of Judith Stein to its board in fall 2014. The organization will hold its session at the CAA Annual Conference in New York on Wednesday, February 11, 2015, 12:30–2:00 PM in the Beekman Parlor, 2nd Floor, New York Hilton Midtown, 1335 Avenue of the Americas. The title of the session is “How Dare We Criticize: Contemporary Art Critics on the State of Their Art.”
International Association of Word and Image Studies
Over 150 scholars met this summer for the tenth international conference of the International Association of Word and Image Studies (IAWIS/AIERTI), held August 11–15, 2014, in in Dundee, New Zealand. Focusing on the theme of “Riddles of Form: Exploration and Discovery in Word and Image,” the conference was hosted by the Scottish Word and Image Group at the University of Dundee. Over fifty panels were presented around thirty-two themed sessions, ranging from “Exploring Neuroscience” and “Science in the Twentieth-Century Avant Gardes” to “Charting Interior Spaces” and “Spirals in Nature and Art.” Anchoring the themes in locality, influential ideas from two of Dundee’s renowned visual thinkers and polymaths, D’Arcy Thompson and Patrick Geddes, served as springboards into global debates. Keynotes addressed the themes from complementary perspectives: in “Real Unicorns and Other Strange Tales,” Martin Kemp (emeritus professor, University of Oxford) explored the topic of truth claims in evolving forms of mediated knowledge; while in “Burnsiana,” professor of photography Calum Colvin Duncan (of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee) raised fundamental questions about processes of perceiving and discovering though his own multimedia artworks about Scotland’s national bard. A highlight was the excursion to Little Sparta, retreat of the “avant-gardener” and word/image artist Ian Hamilton Finlay.
International Center of Medieval Art
The International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA) is pleased to announce that it was recently awarded a renewal of its grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation—$10,000 a year for the next three years—to support travel costs for members participating in conference sessions sponsored by ICMA. ICMA regularly sponsors sessions at such major conferences as the CAA Annual Conference and the ICMA at Western Michigan University, as well as at a number of smaller conferences here and abroad. For the next three years, ICMA members who deliver papers in these sponsored sessions will be eligible for funding that can be used to defer the costs of travel and lodging at these conferences. To learn more about ICMA funding opportunities for scholars working in the field of medieval art or to become a member, please visit www.medievalart.org. For information about proposing an ICMA-sponsored session, please contact Janis Elliott.
International Sculpture Center
Each year the International Sculpture Center (ISC) presents an award competition to its member colleges and universities as a means of supporting, encouraging, and recognizing the work of young sculptors and their supporting schools’ faculty and art program. The Student Award winners participate in an exhibition at Grounds for Sculpture, as well as in a traveling exhibition hosted by arts organizations across the country. Winners’ work is also featured in Sculpture magazine. Each winner receives a one-year ISC membership; all winners are eligible to apply for a fully sponsored residency to study in Switzerland. To nominate a student for this competition, a nominee’s university must first be an ISC university-level member. University membership costs $200 for universities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico or $220 for international universities; this level includes a number of benefits. Interested students should talk to their professors about getting involved. To find out more about the program, please visit http://www.sculpture.org/StudentAwards/2015 or email studentawards@sculpture.org. Deadlines: Nominations open: January 1, 2015; university membership registration: March 16, 2015; online student nomination form: March 23, 2015; online student submission form: April 13, 2015.
ISC seeks proposals for panels for the twenty-fifth “International Sculpture Conference: New Frontiers in Sculpture in Central Arizona.” Taking place in fall 2015, the conference will feature keynote speakers, panels, and breakout sessions. The conference will explore: Creative Placemaking; Multi-Disciplinary Artist Led Investigations; Desert as Site: New Earthworks; and other topics in contemporary sculpture. The panel proposal submission deadline is March 1, 2015. All accepted submissions will be notified in May 2015. To learn more about topics, guidelines, and deadlines and to submit a proposal, please visit www.sculpture.org/az2015.
Italian Art Society
The Italian Art Society (IAS) will sponsor a session, entitled “Di politica: Intersections of Italian Art and Politics since WWII” and organized by Christopher Bennett and Elizabeth Mangini, at the upcoming CAA Annual Conference in New York on Wednesday, February 11, 2015, 12:30–2:00 PM. Current and prospective members are invited to attend the IAS business breakfast meeting on Thursday, February 11, at 7:30–9:00 AM, Madison Suite, 2nd Floor, New York Hilton Midtown. IAS will cosponsor two related study days entitled “Untying the Knot: The State of Postwar Italian Art History Today” at the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York, February 9–10, 2015. Additionally, the IAS will sponsor five sessions at the meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Berlin, Germany, in March 2015.
IAS seeks member applicants for its annual research and publication grant (deadline: January 10, 2015) and for the sixth annual 2015 IAS/Kress Lecture by an established scholar on a Neapolitan topic in Naples, Italy, on May 20, 2015 (deadline: January 4, 2015). IAS welcomes all interested in Italian art to join the society.
National Council of Arts Administrators
The National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA) convened its forty-second annual meeting on September 24–26, 2014, in Nashville, Tennessee. The organization owes a debt of gratitude to Mel Ziegler of Vanderbilt University for organizing a provocative and compelling conference. Speakers included: Pablo Helguera, an artist and the director of the Museum of Modern Art’s Education Department; Steven Tepper, a sociologist and dean of the Herberger Institute at Arizona State University; and Ruby Lerner, executive director of Creative Capital.
Three new board members were elected: Lynne Allen, Boston University; Elissa Armstrong, Virginia Commonwealth University; and Cathy Pagani, University of Alabama. They join these returning directors: Leslie Belavance, Alfred University (secretary); Tom Berding, Michigan State University; Steve Bliss, Savannah College of Art and Design; Cora Lynn Deibler, University of Connecticut, Storrs; Andrea Eis, Oakland University (treasurer); Nan Goggin, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Amy Hauft, University of Texas at Austin (president); Jim Hopfensperger, Western Michigan University (past president); Lydia Thompson, Texas Tech University; and Mel Ziegler, Vanderbilt University.
Activities at the 2015 CAA Annual Conference in New York include the annual NCAA reception (Thursday, February 12, 5:00–8:00 PM) and an NCAA–CAA affiliate session, “Yes Is a World: Creativity in an Expanding Field,” which will be a fast-paced series of five-minute presentations (Thursday, February 12, 12:30–2:00 PM). NCAA enthusiastically welcomes new members, current members, and all interested parties.
Pacific Arts Association
The Pacific Arts Association (PAA) will hold a session at the 2015 CAA Annual Conference in New York called “Early Missionary Activity on Erromango and Its Impact on Local Material Culture.” Four panelists will examine the interplay between imposed change and local innovation in objects past and present.
An event titled “Trading Traditions: The Role of Art in the Pacific’s Traditional Trading Networks” will be organized by PAA (Pacific) in Tonga on September 28, 2015. For further information, please contact Karen Stevenson, vice president of PAA (Pacific).
Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture
The Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) made a strong showing at the annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies from November 20 to 23, 2014, in San Antonio, Texas. Members participated in numerous panels ranging from eighteenth-century prints to twentieth-century art and architecture, as well as film and contemporary art, in Eastern Europe and Russia.
At CAA’s Annual Conference in February, SHERA will sponsor two sessions: “Infiltrating the Pedagogical Canon,” chaired by Marie Gasper-Hulvat; and a double session led by Galina Mardilovich and Maria Taroutina, titled “Reconsidering Art and Politics: Toward New Narratives of Russian and Eastern European Art.”
In January 2015, Natasha Kurchanova became president of SHERA, as Margaret Samu’s term ended. Elections are planned for early January for the next vice president/president elect.
SHERA is delighted to welcome ARTINRUSSIA as a new institutional member. A division of the School of Russian and Asian Studies, ARTINRUSSIA creates study abroad programs, organizes faculty-led tours, and offers travel-assistance services. The organization’s website serves as a platform for publishing student writing about art in Russia and Eurasia.
Society for Photographic Education
Registration is open for the fifty-second national conference of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE), titled “Atmospheres: Climate, Equity, and Community in Photography” and taking place March 12–15, 2015, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Connect with 1,600 artists, educators, and photographers from around the world for programming that will fuel your creativity—four days of presentations, industry seminars, and critiques to engage you! Explore an exhibits fair featuring the latest equipment, processes, publications, and photography/media schools. Participate in one-on-one portfolio critiques and informal portfolio sharing and take advantage of student volunteer opportunities to receive a full rebate on admission. Other highlights include a print raffle, a silent auction, mentoring sessions, film screenings, exhibitions, receptions, a dance party, and more. The guest speakers are Rebecca Solnit, Chris Jordan, and Hank Willis Thomas. Preview the conference schedule and register at www.spenational.org/conference. Preregistration ends on February 20, 2015.
Southeastern College Art Conference
The seventieth annual meeting of the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) was held October 8–11, 2014, in Sarasota, Florida, and hosted by the Ringling College of Art and Design. Jeff Schwartz served as conference director. Five hundred thirty people attended 122 sessions and workshops. Brandon Oldenburg, a Ringling alumnus, an Academy Award winner, and the founder of Moonbot Studios, delivered the keynote lecture.
Notable awards presented:
- $5000 Artist’s Fellowship: Derek Larson, Georgia Southern University
- $5000 William R. Levin Award for Research in the History of Art: Michelle Moseley-Christian, Virginia Tech
- Achievement in Graphic Design: Doug Barrett, University of Alabama, Birmingham
- Outstanding Exhibition and Catalogue of Contemporary Materials: Ron Meyers: A Potter’s Menagerie (Stephen Driver)
- Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication: The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Folk Art vol. 23 (Carol Crown, University of Memphis)
- Excellence in Teaching: Jeff Schwartz, Ringling College of Art and Design
- Certificates of Merit: Jane Hetherington Brown, University of Arkansas, Little Rock; Carol Mattusch, George Mason University; and Cheryl Goldsleger, University of Georgia
- Awards of Distinction: Peter Scott Brown, University of North Florida; and Jenny Hager, University of North Florida
- Annual Juried Exhibition: juror’s choice: Rob Tarbell, New College; honorable mention: Hye Young Kim, Winston-Salem State University; Margy Rich, State College of Florida; and Jennifer Brickey, Pellissippi State Community College
Visual Resources Association
The Visual Resources Association is pleased to present its thirty-third annual conference, to be held March 11–14, 2015, in Denver, Colorado. Attendees will converge in Colorado to exchange information about the latest developments in image and media management within the educational, cultural heritage, and commercial environments. The top-notch conference program includes representation from a broad range of perspectives, with sessions and workshops addressing digital humanities, visual literacy, mapping and geospatial projects, image rights and reproductions, usability testing, new technologies, digital asset management, crowdsourcing, cataloging, embedded metadata, sharing collections, professional advancement, archives, research data management, and visualization. The plenary speakers will frame the conference with inspiring talks on image and media management in two unique contexts. The opening speaker, Aaron Straup Cope, head of engineering at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Museum and also an artist, will discuss how the New Cooper Hewitt Experience engages visitors with interactive and immersive creative technologies. The closing speaker, Emily Gore, director for content for the Digital Public Library of America, will discuss the strategic vision for DPLA content and oversight of the DPLA Hubs program. Online registration is available through February 20, 2015 (with discounted registration offered until February 6). Onsite registration will be available in Denver.
Women’s Caucus for Art
The Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) has announced three recipients of the 2015 WCA Lifetime Achievement Awards: Sue Coe, Kiki Smith, and Martha Wilson. The recipient for the 2015 President’s Art and Activism Award is Petra Kuppers. The WCA Lifetime Achievement Awards were first presented in 1979 in President Jimmy Carter’s Oval Office to Isabel Bishop, Selma Burke, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, and Georgia O’Keeffe. The awards were the first awards recognizing the contribution of women to the arts and their profound effect on society.
Join WCA for the awards celebration on Thursday, February 12, 2015, in New York. The event will be held at the New York Institute of Technology Auditorium at 1871 Broadway. The evening will kickoff with a ticketed cocktail reception from 5:30 to 7:00 PM. The reception will include food, open bar, and the opportunity to congratulate the awardees. The awards ceremony (free and open to the public) will take place from 7:30 to 9:00 PM; coffee and desserts will follow from 9:00 to 10:00 PM. The celebration is held during the annual WCA and CAA conferences. For more information on the event or to purchase tickets (which includes a special rate for CAA members) please visit www.nationalwca.org.
Committee on Diversity Practices highlights for January/February 2014
posted Jan 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.
January/February 2015
Chitra Ganesh: Eyes of Time
Brooklyn Museum, New York
December 12, 2014–July 12, 2015
“Exploring ideas of femininity, empowerment, and multiplicity, Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh draws inspiration from the Museum’s encyclopedic collection, including representations of the goddess Kali, to create a site-specific multimedia installation for the Herstory Gallery. Chitra Ganesh: Eyes of Time centers on a monumental mural that takes Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction and rebirth, and other figures from Judy’s Chicago’s The Dinner Party as starting points for portraying female power and plurality. The artist expands on this theme by showcasing works from our Egyptian, Indian, and Contemporary collections. For more than a decade, Ganesh has used the iconography of mythology, literature, and popular culture to bring to light feminist and queer narratives. One of her first major works, Tales of Amnesia (2002)—a zine inspired by Indian comic books that the Museum acquired out of our 2004 exhibition Open House: Working in Brooklyn—is also on view. Chitra Ganesh: Eyes of Time is organized by Saisha Grayson, Assistant Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum. This exhibition is made possible by the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation.” (http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/chitra_ganesh/)
More information:
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/home.php
Judith Scott–Bound and Unbound
Brooklyn Museum, New York
October 24, 2014–March 29, 2015
“Judith Scott’s work is celebrated for its astonishing visual complexity. In a career spanning just seventeen years, Scott developed a unique and idiosyncratic method to produce a body of work of remarkable originality. Often working for weeks or months on individual pieces, she used yarn, thread, fabric, and other fibers to envelop found objects into fastidiously woven, wrapped, and bundled structures. Born in Columbus, Ohio, with Down syndrome, Scott (1943–2005) was also largely deaf and did not speak. After thirty-five years living within an institutional setting for people with disabilities, she was introduced in 1987 to Creative Growth Art Center—a visionary studio art program founded more than forty years ago in Oakland, California, to foster and serve a community of artists with developmental and physical disabilities. As the first comprehensive U.S. survey of Scott’s work, this retrospective exhibition includes an overview of three-dimensional objects spanning the artist’s career as well as a selection of works on paper Judith Scott—Bound and Unbound is organized by Catherine J. Morris, Sackler Family Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum, and Matthew Higgs, artist and Director/Chief Curator of White Columns, New York. The accompanying catalogue is published by the Brooklyn Museum and Prestel. This exhibition is made possible by the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. Additional generous support has been provided by the Helene Zucker Seeman Memorial Exhibition Fund and Deedie Rose.” (http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/judith_scott/)
More information:
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/home.php
LOUD silence
gallery@Calit2
University of California San Diego
January 22–March 13, 2015
“LOUD silence is an exhibition that offers the opportunity for viewers to consider definitions of sound, voice, and notions of silence at the intersection of both deaf and hearing cultures. The exhibition displays prints, drawings, sculptures, videos, and a film installation, and features work by four artists who have different relationships to deafness and hearing, including Shary Boyle, Christine Sun Kim, Darrin Martin and Alison O’Daniel. These four artists explore how the binary of loudness and silence might be transformed in politicized ways through their own specificities, similarities and differences in relationship to communication and language. The stereotypical view of the deaf experience is that they live a life of total silence, where they retain little to no concept of sound. But on the contrary, deaf people actually know a lot about sound, and sound informs and inhabits their world just as much as the next person. Through these artworks, the artists aim to loudly explode the myth of a silent deaf world, and they seek to trouble just how “inaudible” sound really is through their own visceral experiences of it. The distinction between the deaf person and the hearing person in their relationship to sound is the extent to which deaf people use senses other than the auditory to understand what they are hearing. Sound is felt and sound is seen. Indeed, some of the artists’ “deaf hearing” in this exhibition often involves sensory input from a variety of sources, and is not simply confined to the ears. Ultimately, the work in LOUD silence offers an avenue for eradicating deaf oppression, where new ways of listening and thinking about sound and silence might be developed. A full-color catalogue will accompany this exhibition produced in partnership with the Grand Central Art Center at California State University Fullerton, with essays written by the exhibition curator, Amanda Cachia, alongside Dr. Zeynep Bulut, Lecturer in Music, Kings College, London, and Michael Davidson, Professor of American Literature in the Literature Department, UCSD.” (http://www.calit2.net/events/popup.php?id=2444)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted Jan 07, 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.
Cuba’s Art Scene Awaits a Travel Boom
As collectors, art connoisseurs, and institutions eagerly gear up to travel to Cuba after President Obama’s decision to loosen the economic embargo, the art scene that awaits them is sui generis: a world whose artists are cut off from supplies and the internet and, at the same time, celebrated by a coterie of international buyers whose curiosity and determination brought them to Cuba long before talk of a thaw. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Artist Who Tested Limits of Freedom of Expression in Cuba Warned off Havana Biennial
The Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera, who was arrested three times last week by Cuban officials, is now discussing with her attorney in Havana the details of the detentions with the aim to bring a case before the Cuban Courts and international bodies such as the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, according to a report on the Miami-based news website, Martinoticias.com. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur
Vision, inspiration, and mysterious gifts as from above: such are some of the associations that continue to adorn the word “artist.” Yet the notion of the artist as a solitary genius—so potent a cultural force, so determinative, still, of the way we think of creativity in general—is decades out of date. So out of date, in fact, that the model that replaced it is itself already out of date. (Read more from the Atlantic.)
Why Don’t Artists Like the Current Art Market?
Many artists feel scorned and rejected. They want to paint what they want to paint, dammit, and they want galleries to represent those paintings and people to love them and buy them. Or rather, they often feel certain that if only galleries would represent those artworks, people would love them and buy them. I wish it were that simple. (Read more from Slate.)
Museum Capturing Ferguson History as It Happens
From street-artist paintings on boards protecting store windows to signs bearing the now iconic statement “Hands Up Don’t Shoot,” cultural images from the Ferguson protests have become firmly established in recent Missouri history. So much so that the Missouri History Museum is gathering images and items cataloguing the unrest—physical artifacts, cell-phone videos, Twitter feeds, and oral histories from protesters, residents, and police—that followed the August shooting death of Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer. (Read more from the Charlotte Observer.)
California Colleges See Surge in Efforts to Unionize Adjunct Faculty
A wave of union organizing at college campuses across California and the nation in recent months is being fueled by part-time faculty who are increasingly discontented over working conditions and a lack of job security. At nearly a dozen private colleges in California, adjunct professors are holding first-time contract negotiations or are campaigning to win the right to do so. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)
How to Curate Your Digital Identity as an Academic
How might academics—particularly those without tenure, published books, or established freelance gigs—avoid having their digital identities taken over by the negative or the uncharacteristic? After all, no one wants to be associated almost exclusively with blogs of disgruntled students and other potentially contentious sites like Rate My Professors. As an academic or would-be academic, you need to take control of your public persona and then take steps to build and maintain it. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Simple Pictures That Artificial Intelligence Still Can’t Recognize
Computers are getting truly, freakishly good at identifying what they’re looking at. They can’t look at a picture and tell you it’s a chihuahua wearing a sombrero, but they can say that it’s a dog wearing a hat with a wide brim. A new paper, however, directs our attention to one place these super smart algorithms are totally stupid. (Read more from Wired.)
Voting Now Open – 2015 CAA Board Election
posted Jan 06, 2015
The annual CAA Board of Directors election has begun. Visit the board election page or click the candidates’ names below to read their statements, biographies and endorsements—and to watch their video presentations—before casting your vote.
The six candidates are:
- Derrick R. Cartwright, Director of University Galleries, University of San Diego
- Jawshing Arthur Liou, Professor and Director, Hope School of Fine Arts, Indiana University, Bloomington
- Chika Okeke-Agulu, Associate Professor, Department of Art and Archaeology and Center for African American Studies, Princeton University
- Katerina Ruedi Ray, Director, School of Art, Bowling Green State University
- Rachel Weiss, Professor of Arts Administration and Policy, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
- Andrés Zervigón, Associate Professor, History of Photography, Art History Department Rutgers University
How to Vote
Log into your CAA account with your CAA User ID# and password. Click the “Vote Now” image at the center of your screen to begin the process. If you are already logged in, click the “Home” link at left, and then the link to vote.
You may vote for up to four candidates, including one write-in candidate. Ballots that indicate more than four candidates will be void. The election ends at 5:00 p.m. (EST) on Friday, February 13, 2015.
Send your Proxy
CAA encourages you to attend its Annual Business Meeting at the 2015 Annual Conference in New York. If you cannot attend, please check the box appointing a proxy. By doing so, you appoint the CAA board officers named thereon—DeWitt Godfrey, Maria Ann Conelli, Charles A. Wright, Gail Feigenbaum, Suzanne Blier, and Doralynn Pines, to vote, in their discretion, on such matters as may properly come before such a meeting.
A quorum of 100 members is needed to hold the Meeting; therefore CAA kindly requests your proxy to insure the Annual Business Meeting can take place. Please submit your proxy by 5:00 p.m. EST on Friday, February 13, 2015. Thank you.
Top News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted Dec 31, 2014
As 2014 comes to a close, CAA would like to wish its members, subscribers, partners, and other visual-arts professionals a safe and happy holiday season. As we reflect on the past twelve months, we would like to offer you a look at the most accessed articles from 2014.
Ten of the Most Influential MFA Programs in the World
Artspace Magazine has tallied up the top ten master of fine arts programs in the world. While they may not be the cheapest avenues into the art world, these are, without a doubt, the top-ranked MFA programs for art students looking to add a gold star to the top of their CVs—and to build a ladder into the gallery sphere. Of course, there’s no “silver bullet” for instant postgraduate success. But there are certain programs that tend to spark the interest of curators, critics, and collectors alike. (Read more from Artspace Magazine.)
The Three Letters of Recommendation You Must Have
I am currently a visiting assistant professor at a regional campus of a state university system. Should I still be including a letter of recommendation from my grad-school advisor in applications? I’m three years out of grad school, and my advisor is great—always updates the letter, takes into account new work I’ve published, and so on—but does it look bad (too “grad student-y”) to rely on an advisor’s letter at this point in my career? (Read more from Vitae.)
Scholarly Journal Retracts Sixty Articles, Smashes “Peer Review Ring”
Every now and then a scholarly journal retracts an article because of errors or outright fraud. In academic circles, and sometimes beyond, each retraction is a big deal. Now comes word of a journal retracting sixty articles at once. The reason for the mass retraction is mind-blowing: a “peer review and citation ring” was apparently rigging the review process to get articles published. (Read more from the Washington Post.)
Race, Gender, and Academic Jobs
I am currently the lowest-paid tenure-track faculty member in my department and was told by the man paid to manage me that if I wanted a raise I would probably need to get a new job or at least an offer that might prompt a counteroffer. So I went on the job market and was lucky enough to score a campus interview for an assistant professor position at a liberal arts college in an ideal location. Let’s just call this place Rich Liberal Arts College. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
What’s the Most Common Mistake Artists Make?
Your question has set my head spinning. There are so many possibilities. So many mistakes that artists make—like not taking the business side of art seriously or only taking it seriously in the middle of a crisis when, as I mentioned in my last post, it is too late. Or romanticizing the “starving artist” notion. Or allowing themselves to become resentful of other artists’ success. (Read more from KCET.)
Dealing Direct: Do Artists Really Need Galleries?
When Haunch of Venison closed in 2013, the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos was left without a gallery in London or New York—the two cities where Haunch, which was bought by Christie’s in 2007, had spaces. Since her gallery closed, Vasconcelos’s career has been on an upward trajectory: she has represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale, unveiled public sculptures in Porto and Lisbon, and produced several new works for a retrospective at the Manchester Art Gallery. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Twelve Things You Should Never Say to an Artist
One of the hardest parts of being an artist is courting the seemingly endless barrage of awkward, inappropriate, and downright rude comments hurled your way. Whether it’s an intended compliment or an ignorant gaffe, some statements about l’arte are better left unsaid. Thus we’ve compiled an unofficial guide outlining what you definitely, positively should not say to an artist, whether friend or foe. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)
Good Art Is Popular Because It’s Good, Right?
In July of last year, a man named Sidney Sealine went to see the Mona Lisa in Paris. The idea was to spend some time with the picture, to see for himself the special spark that made the painting so famous. But he couldn’t even get close to Leonardo’s famous work. (Read more from National Public Radio.)
The Case for Banning Laptops in the Classroom
A colleague of mine in the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth College recently sent an email to all of us on the faculty. The subject line read: “Ban computers in the classroom?” The note that followed was one sentence long: “I finally saw the light today and propose we ban the use of laptops in class.” While the sentiment in my colleague’s email was familiar, the source was surprising: it came from someone teaching a programming class, where computers are absolutely integral to learning and teaching. Surprise turned to something approaching shock when, in successive emails, I saw that his opinion was shared by many others in the department. (Read more from the New Yorker.)
How to Avoid Being Published
I enjoyed Maureen Pirog’s recent piece “How to Get Published,” which is filled with common sense and good advice. Back in 2009, I too posted some publishing tips. I wish I could report that things have gotten better since then, but alas, from what I’ve observed with several journals, magazines, and newspapers with which I’m associated, writing in the humanities remains dire. Want to avoid being published? Here’s how. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Flipped Learning Skepticism: Do Students Want to Have Lectures?
Students in a flipped classroom are rebelling because they want you to lecture to them and to explain how to do everything so that they can earn a top grade in the class. Here are some responses to this issue that one could make. (Read more from Casting Out Nines.)
Creative Schools: The Artists Taking Art Education into Their Own Hands
Several artists and arts professionals, spotting the same or similar failures in the UK’s official education programs at both schools and universities, have taken matters into their own hands. If the government’s curriculum changes, funding cuts, and fees are barring the way to education for many aspiring artists, independent initiatives might offer alternative routes into the creative industry. Who’s leading the way? (Read more from Apollo.)
No Longer Appropriate?
“Appropriating” other artists’ work without consent is still common, but there is growing evidence—albeit rarely reported—that, although some artists may have started out as willing or unwitting outlaws, they decided that possibly infringing other artists’ copyright was legally unwise and potentially expensive, and they stopped. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Beyond the Relic Cult of Art
I am nostalgic for a time before the modern concept of art forgery had gelled, when it was possible to imagine many ways for artworks to exist out of their time. I love the culture of Renaissance art because it was not settled in its categories, and produced art out of that unsettlement. It knew forgery, but it wrinkled time in other ways as well. (Read more from the Brooklyn Rail.)
The Most Expensive Colleges in the Country Are Art Schools, not Ivies
I recently stumbled across this handy tool from the Department of Education, which generates lists of colleges by cost. The schools that usually get dinged for high tuition (and as a result, scare off low-income applicants) are the elite colleges. But many of those schools are quite rich and distribute a lot of financial aid. (Read more from the Washington Post.)
Whose Work Is It Really? On the Much-Maligned Role of the Artist’s Assistant
The job of artist’s assistant has a confusing reputation in the press. Articles about the ongoing saga of Jasper Johns’s civil suit against his longtime assistant for the theft and sale of $3.4 million of his drawings is a prime example of the way the media talks about the relationship between artist and assistant. The horrifyingly theft aside, one recent article about the incident presents the power difference between an artist and his assistant as tauntingly acute and palpable. (Read more from Artslant.)
Science and Art Meet, Unveiling Mystery and Cultural Tragedy
In the last decade, art conservators—the people who protect and preserve works of art—have begun practicing complicated science. Now they can tell more stories of the secret lives of artists, the chemistry behind great works, and why many of the most famous masterpieces no longer look anything like they did when they were painted. They also discovered that one form of paint may reduce great works of modern and Impressionist art into white canvases with smudges. (Read more from Inside Science.)
By Paying Artists Nothing, We Risk Severing the Pipeline of UK Talent
Contrary to public expectation, but not the experience of many in the sector, most galleries in the United Kingdom do not pay exhibiting artists. In the past three years, 71 percent of artists didn’t get a fee for contributions to publicly funded exhibitions. And this culture of nonpayment is actually stopping artists from accepting offers from galleries, with 63 percent forced to reject gallery offers because they can’t afford to work for nothing. (Read more from the Guardian.)
What They Never Told You about Consigning Your Art
Art consignment agreements are deceptively simple. This essay goes behind that simplicity to raise issues for art owners that are not fully addressed—or only imperfectly so—by the text of the usual agreement. Rescission by the auction house (undoing the sale long after the auction) is one of these issues. There are others. (Read more from Spencer’s Art Law Journal.)
Participatory Learning in the Art-History Classroom
In a participatory learning environment, learners get the opportunity to become part of a community of inquiry and explore abstract concepts in a nonhierarchical social context. Rather than the mere transmission and acquisition of knowledge, learning becomes relevant, engaging, and creative. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)
77,000 Images of Tapestries and Italian Monuments Join the Open Content Program
The Getty Research Institute has just added more than 77,000 high-resolution images to the Open Content Program from two of its most often-used collections. The largest part of the new open-content release—more than 72,000 photographs—comes from the collection Foto Arte Minore: Max Hutzel photographs of art and architecture in Italy. (Read more from Getty Iris.)
What Twitter Changes Might Mean for Academics
Time-based organization works really well for many popular academic uses of Twitter—particularly conferences, where it’s easy to find an interesting panel or meet-up in the moment, while the rest of the timeline becomes one historical record of the conference interactions. However, it’s precisely the timeline that may be at risk. (Read more from ProfHacker.)
Indicting Higher Education in the Arts and Beyond
There’s one very clear take-away from the latest report released by the collective BFAMFAPhD: people who graduate with arts degrees regularly end up with a lot of debt and incredibly low prospects for earning a living as artists. Or, as they put it in the report, titled Artists Report Back: A National Study on the Lives of Arts Graduates and Working Artists, “the fantasy of future earnings in the arts cannot justify the high cost of degrees.” (Read more from Hyperallergic.)
Help Desk: Performance Anxiety
I am not trained as a visual artist—I hold my graduate degree in dance choreography and before that worked primarily in live theatrical concert dance. However, my focus shifted in grad school, where I started developing work in performance that should live in a gallery space. Now that I am out of school, I have a great new project in the works but no idea how to make it happen. What are the unspoken rules for approaching art spaces and museums with performance work? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
The Adjunct Revolt: How Poor Professors Are Fighting Back
Mary-Faith Cerasoli has been reduced to “sleeping in her car, showering at college athletic centers and applying for food stamps,” the New York Times recently reported. Is she unemployed? No, in fact, she is a college professor—but an adjunct one, meaning she is hired on a short-term contract with no possibility of tenure. (Read more from the Atlantic.)
Are MFAs Ruining Art?
This summer has seen another bumper year of MA and MFA students. As ever, the work coming from international art schools is good, bad, and everywhere in between. There is also an increasing professionalization of the artists coming from the academic system. Degree-show presentations can resemble solo booths at art fairs. Often the work presented is ready to slip immediately into the gallery system. The question remains: Is this a good thing? (Read more from Artsy.)
On the False Democracy of Contemporary Art
Art claims that it expands into the sphere of social transformation and genuine democracy. Yet paradoxically, art’s ambition for direct social engagement and its self-abandonment loop back to the very territory of contemporary art, its archive machine, and its self-referential rhetoric of historicizing. Hence the question is: Are we really witnessing the anticapitalist transformation that excuses art’s self-sublation and its dissolution in newly transformed life? (Read more from e-flux Journal.)
No Laughing Matter: President’s Quip about Art History Pricks Some Ears
Art history caught some unwelcome attention from President Obama in a recent speech emphasizing the need for job training. To reinforce his point that manufacturing jobs pay off, Obama said that young people who train for them could outearn art-history majors. The remark drew laughter from the president’s audience in Wisconsin, but some in higher education felt slighted. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Why Drawing Needs to Be a Curriculum Essential
Drawing has seen something of a renaissance in the last twenty years in the United Kingdom. From the Campaign for Drawing to the Drawing Research Network, and from the Drawing Room to the Rabley Drawing Centre, we’ve witnessed a proliferation of passion, effort, and energy matched by increased museum exhibitions, dedicated degree courses, professors, publications, and conferences. All of the above have been established in pursuit of understanding, developing, and promoting drawing, and many inside and outside the sector endure to evidence drawing as the most sophisticated means of thinking and communicating as well as an activity for everyone. (Read more from the Guardian.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted Dec 24, 2014
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.
The Art of Healing
Over the last few decades, a growing body of studies and anecdotal evidence that suggests art facilitates healing has driven the incorporation of art into medical settings. Nearly half of the healthcare institutions in the United States reported including arts in their programming, ranging from art and music therapy to featuring visual art in hospitals. (Read more from the University of California, San Francisco.)
Framing Tips: The Hard(ware) Facts
Framing tips on hardware may not seem exciting, but understanding the function and limitations of various types of screws, hangers, and wires will ensure that your framed drawings and paintings are properly supported when displayed. Take a little time to tackle the terminology and technicalities. Your art deserves nothing less. (Read more from the Artist’s Magazine.)
In Defense of Art School Graduates
What’s wrong with our industry that we are so quick to belittle formal education? Whenever the topic of an art degree arises, there’s an angry mob that amasses, collectively chanting how “useless” a degree is in photography and that the best school to learn from is the University of Hard Knocks. To really understand this issue, we have to first step back and look at the value of art and why photographers are so polarized on the term. (Read more from Fstoppers.)
Why You (Yes, You!) Should Write Book Reviews
The conventional wisdom is that graduate students shouldn’t take time to write academic book reviews. There’s just not enough in it for them, the thinking goes. As a sociologist who has studied the publishing industry, I disagree with the dismissive attitude many have toward book reviewing. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Want to Be Taken Seriously as a Scholar in the Humanities? Publish a Monograph
A decade ago, in my first year as lecturer in a humanities department, an eminent professor helped me secure a book contract with a top university press for my recently completed doctoral thesis. Another senior colleague stopped me in the corridor: “This is very rare,” she said. “And this is what gets you ahead in this game.” (Read more from the Guardian.)
Best Way for Professors to Get Good Student Evaluations? Be Male
Many in academia have long known about how the practice of student evaluations of professors is inherently biased against women. Just as polling data continues to show that a majority of Americans think being a man automatically makes you better in the boss department, many professors worry that students automatically rate male professors as smarter, more authoritative, and more awesome overall because they are men. Now, a new study shows that there is good reason for that concern. (Read more from Slate.)
What You Need to Know before Donating Art
For investors thinking about donating art, the most important thing to know is this: It isn’t as simple as … donating art. The benefits of a donation are clear. The owners may have a fondness for a particular museum or university they have in mind as a recipient, for instance. And the ego gratification is powerful. But ego aside, donors have a lot of factors to consider before making a decision. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)
Acrylics on Plastics
When a liquid comes into contact with any solid, new interfaces or boundaries are generated between these dissimilar materials. Although many factors exist which will promote or inhibit adhesion of the acrylic paint onto solid plastic, the most important element is the ability of the liquid to “wet-out” the solid onto which it is painted. (Read more from Just Paint.)