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Statement

My name is Lauren Van Nest and I am a doctoral candidate at the University of Virginia (UVA) studying the art and architecture of medieval Europe. My dissertation examines the relationships crafted between objects of imperial patronage in the Ottonian Empire, their ritual environments, and the bodies of their patrons. I research the ways in which artistic materials—their form, aesthetics, symbolism—transmit concepts of divinity and power across media and iconographies. My work has been supported by a twelve-month fellowship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (German Academic Exchange Service) in affiliation with the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen in Göttingen, Germany. Additionally, I have been awarded research grants by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), Center for Global Inquiry + Innovation, and UVA Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. I received my undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (B.A.) and a graduate degree from the University of Toronto (M.A.).  

I would define my duty as a College Art Association (CAA) board member as a commitment to service towards the community via cultivation and advocacy. I am passionate about developing and promoting programming that creatively adapts to the pressures facing the visual arts today and continues to make the arts more accessible to wider audiences. As the Emerging Professional Director on the Board of Directors, I would bring my own enthusiasm for the visual arts alongside my skills in project management, communicating complex ideas, and collaboration. As an organization drawing together diverse and vibrant professionals, CAA is uniquely positioned to advocate for the value of the arts nationally and internationally. During my term, I will develop robust advocacy strategies that not only promote continued federal and public funding of the arts, but also attend to the needs of CAA members through grants and workshops. I envision CAA as a partner to its individual members, navigating the various obstacles facing aspiring as well as established visual arts professionals.  

I have served in international organizations during my graduate career, including the Medieval Academy of America (MAA) and the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA). It is in these roles that I have coordinated mentorship programming, produced podcasts, and organized roundtables on topics related to graduate and early career professionalization. I am also committed to engaging with digital humanities projects that analyze and document the history of academic institutions, namely universities (Land and Legacy) and organizations (ICMA Oral History Project). With CAA, I am able to harness my previous and future interests to contribute to the goals of the organization. 

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Statement

I am honored to be nominated as a candidate for Emerging Professional Director. Having been introduced to CAA at the start of my graduate school education, membership has been a sustaining source of knowledge, professional growth, and collaboration. If selected, I will utilize the platform to assist in strengthening the commitment of the CAA mission for diverse practices and practitioners, as well as maintaining an international presence. Students and emerging professionals, as they continue to move the art world in dynamic directions, are a critical part of those commitments and vital to the growth of CAA. As someone whose educational pursuits include art practice, art history, and the philosophy of aesthetics I seek to continue and expand upon the efforts that make CAA the place where diverse, intersecting practices converge in a sustained global conversation. Additionally, previously serving on the Student and Emerging Professionals committee facilitated an understanding of the spaces where opportunities for growth and development can take place – particularly for undergraduate and graduate student membership.  

Now, more than ever, as global politics reflect isolationist worldviews and the creative arts are fighting to stay alive in colleges and universities, an international organization such as CAA is perfectly poised as the platform for arts professionals to come together for ongoing conversations, to strategize, and harness the collective power of the arts as an agent of change. If provided an opportunity to serve on the board as Emerging Professional Director I bring energy and excitement to build upon the work currently being executed at CAA that makes use of the technological innovations gained over the past two years that will ensure a variety of options for engagement throughout the year, and further aid in the democratization of access to scholarship and networking opportunities across practice and borders. 

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Bio

Neeta Verma situates herself within the porous discipline of Visual Communication Design. Her areas of research and teaching explore the critical use of design as a tool for social equity and justice. Her work focuses on systemic social issues examined through the lens of power and privilege, and the examination of power structures within social ecologies. She teaches Social Design at the intersection of social innovation and collaborative practices, and Visualization of Data which investigates the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of representation. Her current research projects examine youth violence in urban contexts locally and the design of conducive environments for the visually impaired in India. She received her MFA from Yale University. She currently holds faculty fellowships at the Center for Social Concerns, the Liu Institute for Asia & Asian Studies, Pulte Institute for Global Development at the University of Notre Dame. She is also appointed as an affiliate faculty forThe Initiative on Race and Resilience. Her professional design practice of over twenty-five years has focused exclusively on museums, cultural organizations, not-for-profits, and educational institutions. Selected clients include the American Red Cross, Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, Liberty Science Center, The New York Botanical Garden, The New York Public Library, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Wildlife Conservation Society. She is the recipient of the Nehru-Fulbright Fellowship. She is also the recipient of several design awards that include the Core77 Design Awards, Graphis, A’Design Awards, International Design Awards, GDUSA, and the Design Incubation Teaching Award. She has been an invited speaker and has presented her research at both national and international conferences. She currently serves on the SEGD Academic Task Force and is a member of the Pluriversal Working Group of the Future of Design Education. 

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Bio

Nozomi Naoi is Associate Professor of Humanities at Yale-NUS College with joint appointment at the Department of Japanese Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore. She specializes in modern Japanese art and visual culture and is the author of Yumeji Modern: Designing the Everyday in Twentieth-Century Japan (University of Washington Press, 2020; awarded the Honorable Mention for the John Whitney Hall Prize 2022). She is preparing her second book, Modern Design and the Japanese Department Store(under advance contract with MIT Press) which   demonstrates how material culture via modern design and visual materials creates the modern Japanese subject through the institution of department stores. She is also co-curating the exhibition, “Made in Japan: 20th-Century Poster Art” at the Poster House Museum in New York, opening in March 2023. 

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Bio

Sharon Hecker (BA Yale University cum laude, MA and PhD UC Berkeley) is an art historian and curator specializing in modern and contemporary Italian art. A member of CAA since 1993, she is a leading authority on Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso and has a special interest in material history. She has published extensively on key twentieth-century Italian artists, including essays and articles on Lucio Fontana, Luciano Fabro, Marisa Merz, Giuseppe Penone and Francesco Lo Savio. She was Project Coordinator for Jenny Holzer, the first woman to represent the US at the Venice Biennale, winner of Golden Lion Award for Best Pavilion (1990) and was the liaison between Luciano Fabro and SFMoMA for his US retrospective at SFMoMA, for which she translated his theoretical writings into English. 

Hecker’s books include A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture (UC Press, 2017, awarded CAA’s Millard Meiss Publication Fund and translated into Italian); with Marin R. Sullivan, Postwar Italian Art History: Untying the Knot (Bloomsbury, 2018); with Silvia Bottinelli, Lead in Modern and Contemporary Art (Bloomsbury, 2020); Finding Lost Wax: The Disappearance and Recovery of an Ancient Casting Technique and the Experiments of Medardo Rosso (Brill, 2020); with Peter J. Karol, Posthumous Art, Law and the Art Market: The Afterlife of Art (Routledge, 2022); with Raffaele Bedarida, Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today (Bloomsbury, 2022); with Catherine Ramsey-Portolano, Female Cultural Production in Modern Italy: Literature, Art and Intellectual History (Palgrave, 2023); and with Arianna Arisi Rota, Disguising Disease: Italian Political And Visual Culture From Post-Unification To Covid-19 (2023, Routledge, awarded the Columbia University Seminars in Modern Italy Prize). 

Hecker has received fellowships from the Getty, Fulbright, and Mellon Foundations. Her exhibitions include Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions, with Harry Cooper (Harvard University Art Museums, catalogue Yale University Press, 2004); Medardo Rosso: Experiments in Light and Form, with Tamara H. Schenkenberg (Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 2017–18); Medardo Rosso: Sight Unseen, with Julia Peyton-Jones (Galerie Ropac, 2018). She is currently organizing an exhibition on Lucio Fontana’s ceramics at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2025).  

Hecker is Series Editor of Bloomsbury Visual Arts’ Visual Cultures and Italian Contexts Series; Deputy Chair of the International Catalogue Raisonné Association (ICRA); member of ICOM; TEFAF Vetting Committee for Sculpture (19th-century to the present), Maastricht/New York (Chair); and Coordinator of the Expert Witness Pool for the Court of Arbitration for Art. She trademarked The Hecker Standard®, a best practices approach for conducting due diligence on artworks. She lives in Milan, Italy. 

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Statement

CAA has been a constant in my professional journey from the time I was an art history graduate student at the University of Minnesota. Since then, I have served on CAA’s International Committee (2012-2015) followed by the Committee on Diversity Practices (2016-2020). As part of the former, I helped host members of one of the earliest cohorts of the CAA-Getty International Program. For the latter, I co-chaired the IDEA Exchange Roundtable “From Diversity to Decolonization: International Art History and its Pedagogy” (2020). I am now deeply honored to be selected by the Nominating Committee as one of the candidates in the upcoming Board of Directors election. It would be a privilege to collaborate with colleagues on the Board, and the membership at large, to support ongoing efforts and to activate new initiatives in advancing CAA’s vision and mission. 

As a historian of Islamic art, my career brought me to Qatar where I now serve as the Director of the Art History Program at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Art’s international campus. Leading an art history department within an art and design institution has made me keenly aware of the challenges the visual arts and humanities collectively face today. In this regard, structures and systems in higher education that provide equitable teaching, learning, and research environments, that foster diversity and inclusion in the truest sense, and that focus holistically on the needs of emerging and established professionals are of great interest to me. As we encounter pressures from pandemics to wars, the demands on educators and the burdens on students, especially in the visual arts, have become all the more acute. Since a good percentage of CAA’s membership falls under those categories, I believe CAA can play a much larger role in facilitating dialogue and actionable outcomes toward more robust and resilient educational and professional models.  

In the last two decades, my own field of Islamic art history has grown tremendously. New methodologies and approaches take into account the complex history of the discipline, its innovative engagement with collections and museums, the strengthening of relationships with creative fields, and the increasing efforts to decolonize curricula and to embrace a path informed by social justice concerns and the climate crisis. Such issues are mirrored across disciplines represented by CAA’s membership, placing the organization at the nexus of pivotal changes and exchanges throughout the visual arts. 

As a board member, I would advocate for expanding and reinforcing CAA’s international engagement, developing more support for emerging professionals and adjunct faculty, and nurturing a space for transdisciplinary scholarship and creative practice. The most important duty of a board member is to serve the membership with care and integrity. I look forward to discussions on how CAA might meaningfully engage upcoming generations of visual artists, designers, curators, art historians, and others. I recognize that CAA cannot be involved in everything for it will lose its ability to function properly, but we can more closely align with the needs of today’s membership and those who will join in the near future. With your support, I hope to work toward that goal. 

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Statement

I believe the future direction of College Art Association should have more diversity. We should look into new and ever-changing field of art by exploring every available technology. I hope to bring new ways of teaching and educating students to think more globally in this industrial and complex world of ours. We must not only think outside of the box, but we can “be” the box. We should find new pathways for our young artists to follow and to explore limitless ways on how all art is made or produced. We need to look into the profession as well as the business of art and how we can connect how art is made and sold and marketed. I think we should bring the business side of creativity to our students. This must be a part of our agenda, namely, to look at many ways to educate our students on how to get work. 

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