CAA News Today
CAA Professional-Development Fellowships Suspended
posted May 20, 2014
At its May 4, 2014, meeting, the Board of Directors agreed to suspend the Professional-Development Fellowships in Art History and Visual Arts until a thorough analysis of the program and an exploration into other professional-development opportunities take place. When CAA’s newly approved Strategic Plan 2015–2020 begins on July 1, 2014, the board will, among the plan’s priorities, investigate the full range of possibilities that might best serve the professional-development needs of CAA’s membership.
CAA’s fellowship program began in 1993 and, with the exception of 2009, when it was suspended for a year due to the global financial crisis, has provided grants to worthy graduate students about to receive their terminal PhD or MFA degrees. The program has benefitted 51 graduate students in the last seven years and 154 since 1993.
The board hopes to reinstate the fellowships by May 2015 or to design another program to help professionals in the visual arts and art history.
caa.reviews Seeks Field Editors in Korean and African Diaspora Art
posted May 19, 2014
caa.reviews invites nominations and self-nominations for two individuals to join its Council of Field Editors, which commissions reviews within an area of expertise or geographic region, for a three-year term: July 1, 2014–June 30, 2017. An online journal, caa.reviews is devoted to the peer review of new books, museum exhibitions, and projects relevant to art history, visual studies, and the arts.
The journal seeks two field editors for books in two areas: Korean art and African diaspora art. Candidates may be artists, art historians, critics, curators, or other professionals in the visual arts; institutional affiliation is not required.
Working with the caa.reviews editor-in-chief, the caa.reviews Editorial Board, and CAA’s staff editor, each field editor selects content to be reviewed, commissions reviewers, and reviews manuscripts for publication. Field editors for books are expected to keep abreast of newly published and important books and related media in his or her field of expertise. The Council of Field Editors meets annually at the CAA Annual Conference. Field editors must pay travel and lodging expenses to attend the conference.
Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please send a statement describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, a CV, and your contact information to: caa.reviews Editorial Board, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004; or email the documents to Mallory Roark, CAA publications department assistant. Deadline: June 15, 2014.
Mapping Titian: A New Digital Resource in Art History
posted May 15, 2014
Mapping Titian is a new digital resource that allows users to visualize one of the most fundamental concerns of the discipline of art history: the relationship between an artwork and its changing historical context. Focusing on the paintings executed by the Venetian Renaissance artist Titian (ca. 1488–1576), this site offers a searchable provenance index of his attributed pictures and allows users to create customizable collections of paintings and customizable maps that show the movement of the pictures over time and space. Mapping Titian has been generously funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation through a digital art-history grant to Boston University.
Mapping Titian contains the most up-to-date information available from print publications and from museum websites for the provenance of the paintings. The sources for each work’s provenance are cited each time the picture changes ownership and/or location. A references page includes a complete bibliographic entry for these sources. Users are encouraged to share new information or to offer corrections to the current database. As of now, the site has only paintings attributed to Titian and, because of attribution questions, does not yet include drawings by the artist. Information is still being entered and refined, and the site should be fully developed by September 2014.
Titian’s paintings have proven to be an especially rich microcosm of possible directions for the future project, Mapping Artworks, of which this current site would be one part. The application would provide a template for other scholars and educators to map other groups of objects, whether by artist, medium, or another criterion. Future phases of this project will include additional ways beyond geographic maps to visualize these “lives,” including nongeographic networks and three-dimensional virtual reconstructions of important collecting spaces in history.
CAA members who are interested in joining the advisory board for Mapping Titian and/or have any questions can contact Jodi Cranston, professor of Renaissance art at Boston University.
Image Caption
Titian, Madonna of the Pesaro Family, 1519–26, oil on canvas, 16 x 9 ft. Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice (artwork in the public domain)
CAA Seeks Nominations for the 2015 Awards for Distinction
posted May 14, 2014
CAA has begun accepting nominations for the 2015 Awards for Distinction, which will be presented at the 103rd Annual Conference in New York. Please review the guidelines below to familiarize yourself with the nomination process and to download, complete, and submit the requested materials. Deadline: July 31, 2014, for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Awards; August 31, 2014, for all others.
General Guidelines
In your letter, state who you are; how you know (of) the nominee; how the nominee and/or his or her work or publication has affected your practice or studies and the pursuit of your career; and why you think this person (or, in a collaboration, these people) deserves to be recognized. We also urge you to contact up to five colleagues, students, peers, collaborators, and/or coworkers of the nominee to write letters; no more than five letters are considered. Letters of support are important for reference, but the awards decisions are the responsibilities of the juries based on their expert assessment of the qualifications of the nominees.
Nominations for book and exhibition awards should be for authors of books published or works exhibited or staged between September 1, 2013, and August 31, 2014. Books published posthumously are not eligible. Letters of support are not required for the Morey and Barr awards. All submissions must include a completed 2015 nomination form and one copy of the nominee’s CV (limit: two pages); book-award nominations do not require a CV (see below for the appropriate forms for the Morey and Barr awards and the Porter Prize).
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
To give the jury full opportunity to evaluate each submission fairly, submit materials well before the deadline. Please review the following nomination guidelines:
- A publisher may submit no more than five titles. In addition, CAA accepts nominations from its membership, jury members, reviews editors for The Art Bulletin and Art Journal, and field editors from caa.reviews
- Publishers may not submit the same title for the Morey and Barr awards. The Morey jury does not accept exhibition catalogues
- Eligible books must have been published between September 1, 2013, and August 31, 2014
- Books published posthumously are not eligible
- CAA and each jury member must receive a copy of the nominated book. A total of six copies of the book must be sent. To receive the mailing addresses for the jury, please contact Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs
- Complete and submit the Morey nominaton form
- Letters of support are not required
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
To give the jury full opportunity to evaluate each submission fairly, submit materials well before the deadline. Please review the following nomination guidelines:
- A publisher may submit no more than five titles. In addition, CAA accepts nominations from its membership, jury members, reviews editors for The Art Bulletin and Art Journal, and field editors from caa.reviews
- Publishers may not submit the same title for the Morey and Barr awards. The Morey jury does not accept exhibition catalogues
- Eligible books must have been published between September 1, 2013, and August 31, 2014
- Books published posthumously are not eligible
- CAA and each jury member must receive a copy of the nominated book. A total of six copies of the book must be sent. To receive the mailing addresses for the jury, please contact Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs
- Complete and submit the Barr nomination form
- Letters of support are not required
Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
To determine eligibility, authors of articles in The Art Bulletin must complete the Porter nomination form.
Frank Jewett Mather Award
Please submit copies of critical writings, which may be website links and printouts, photocopies or scanned pages of newspapers or magazines, and more. If the writing is contained in a single volume (such as a book), please provide the publication information.
Distinguished Teaching of Art and Art History Awards
Letters for these two awards are particularly important for the juries because of the personal contact involved in successful teaching.
Contact
Please write to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs, for more information about the nomination process. Visit the Awards section of the CAA website to learn more about the individual awards.
AN INTERVIEW WITH DEWITT GODFREY
posted May 14, 2014
CAA caught up with DeWitt Godfrey, the new president of the CAA Board of Directors, via email shortly after the board’s spring meeting, which was held on May 4, 2014, to talk about the organization’s direction.
Godfrey, professor of sculpture in the Department of Art and Art History at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, recently began his two-year term. A board member since 2009, he has served on the Executive Committee as secretary (2010–12) and vice president for committees (2012–14). Godfrey succeeds Anne Collins Goodyear, codirector of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Bowdoin, Maine, who has led the board since May 2012.
You reorganized the Professional Practices Committee to bring many of the guidelines and standards up to date. What progress has been made over the past few years?
During my term as chair, the Professional Practices Committee created a set of procedures and practices that would ensure that each standard and guideline would be reviewed—and updated as needed—on a regular schedule. Over the past few years, using these “guidelines for guidelines,” the committee has updated dozens of our standards, some of which had languished for decades. The Standards and Guidelines section is one the most visited on our website, and the CAA staff members field inquiries concerning best practices in the field on almost a daily basis. This section is one of the most important services we provide for membership, institutions, and the field more broadly.
The 2015–2020 Strategic Plan addresses advocacy for part-time faculty, instituting leadership ladders at CAA, building membership, and social networking. How would you like CAA to respond to these four issues during your term as president?
I can think of no issue of greater importance to CAA and our membership than the rapidly changing academic workforce and the plight of part-time and contingent faculty. CAA has been premised on the assumption that the basic needs of our academic members—economic stability, benefits, support for scholarship—would be met by their home institutions. With the increasing reliance on part-time and adjunct faculty, those assumptions are eroding, sometimes with alarming consequences. CAA must respond to these challenges through expanded advocacy at the governmental and institutional level (we are already members of the Coalition on the Academic Workforce) and moving to understand and meet the professional needs of this growing segment of our constituents.
A strong organization requires strong leadership. We are striving to cultivate leaders among the members of our standing Professional Interests, Practices, and Standards Committees and our awards and publishing-grant juries. We are also working to persuade CAA members of the benefits of committee service who can help us meet the organization’s challenges both now and in the future. We often reach out to members and even beyond CAA for specific expertise to augment the work of committees and task forces. We volunteer our time and talents, committed to the vision of CAA as the preeminent international leadership organization in the visual arts. We also recognize how CAA has supported our own teaching, practice, and service in myriad ways and want to provide the same benefits for our colleagues at all stages of their careers.
As CAA begins its second century, we face many of the same issues confronting other membership organizations in a digital world in which access to rich troves of information and services are decentralized and diffuse. The arts are where a diversity of disciplines come together. Over time, the needs and interests of our membership have undergone dramatic transformation; we want to continue to provide programs, publications, services, and opportunities that reflect the changing needs in the field and to deliver critical support to individual members over the course of their careers. We need to ask what benefits CAA membership provides. What can CAA do for it members that other learned societies cannot? How can we advocate the visual arts more broadly? How can we cultivate a membership with a diversity of practices and practitioners?
DeWitt Godfrey, Layman, 2012, corten steel and bolts, 23 x 7 x 8 ft. Currently installed at Lehman College Art Gallery, Lehman College, Bronx, New York (artwork © DeWitt Godfrey)
How has teaching art changed over the last fifteen years?
Over the last fifteen years the disciplinary model of studio teaching has come under pressure, mirroring the shifting, overlapping boundaries of artistic practices. The challenge is to provide an equivalent depth and rigor of a particular disciplinary practice in an art world and context in which disciplinary distinctions have lost much of their meaning and value. More dramatically, the reach of digital tools into every area of art practice is creating a wholesale revolution, a fundamental disruption of how and what we make, how and what we teach, and how we understand the role of art and design in the twenty-first century.
How have your travels and study in other countries—Japan, England, and Scotland—affected how you teach art
Work and travel in other countries provides both rich new worlds and materials and new vantage points from which to examine on your own history and experience. As Buckaroo Banzai put it, “wherever you go there you are.” Different cultures and people understand the world in different ways. I draw upon my international experiences that bring alternative perspectives to my process and practice—often from outside an art context—which helps me to reimagine familiar materials, ideas, and histories.
The Cambridge Arts Council in Massachusetts recently commissioned a public-art project called Waverly. What’s the progress like?
We are currently working the engineers on the location and design of the foundation elements, ahead of the road and bike path improvements that my project will be part of. My piece will span a bike path in a converted railway right of way, along the edge of MIT housing. The path also provides access for fire and safety vehicles, so my sculpture must meet strict width and height requirements. Right now we are projecting a completion sometime in 2015.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted May 14, 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.
Sustaining Open Access
A recently proposed model on open-access publishing has drawn praise for rethinking the roles institutions, libraries, and professional organizations play in promoting scholarly communication, but can its collaborative structure be sustained? The proposal envisions stakeholders forming partnerships, each handling one or more of the duties of funding, distributing, and preserving open-access scholarly research—specifically in the humanities and social sciences. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Detroit’s Clever and Likely Illegal Art-for-Pensions Deal
The $816 million art-for-pensions deal that is designed to preserve the Detroit Institute of Arts collection is fascinating, imaginative, and clever. But it’s almost certainly illegal. And I’ll show you why. (Read more from the Washington Post.)
Artworks for Sale Online: It’s a Booming Way to Gatecrash the Elite Gallery World
The World Wide Web is frequently cast as the great enemy of traditional culture, undermining the music industry, the film industry, and publishing. Yet one form of art has now found a way through—perhaps even a way to thrive—and provide careers for artists of the future. The visual arts are booming online. Experienced art collectors and newcomers are both increasingly using websites to find original contemporary works and ordering them for delivery like furniture. (Read more from the Guardian.)
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.)
The Paradox of Art as Work
There are few modern relationships as fraught as the one between art and money. Are they mortal enemies, secret lovers, or perfect soul mates? Is the bond between them a source of pride or shame, a marriage of convenience, or something tawdrier? The way we habitually think and talk about these matters betrays a deep and venerable ambivalence. (Read more from the New York Times.)
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.)
Teaching Outside Your Subject Area
This spring Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR) asked Jenn Ball if it could facilitate a project with her students with the intent of posting the process on the AHTR site. At her suggestion, the discussion focused on teaching a unit in the survey outside of one’s area of expertise, something art history professors are faced with each semester. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)
Sixteen Artist Hangouts You Can Still Go To
Since the days of Hemingway and Faulkner, bars and cafes where writers, painters, and performance artists go to procrastinate have often caught the public’s imagination. The romance of the artist’s hangout is irresistible. From rivalries fermented over drinks to witty one-liners exchanged by Dorothy Parker and her well-read pals, these are the places of a struggling artist’s networking dreams. Even better, some of the most iconic artist hangouts and literary pubs that continue to welcome patrons today. (Read more from CNN.)
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for May 2014
posted May 10, 2014
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.
May 2014
Regina José Galindo: Estoy Viva
Pac/Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea
Via Palestro, 14, Milan, Italy
March 25–June 8, 2014
Curated by Diego Sileo and Eugenio Viola, this is the first survey of the work of the acclaimed Guatemalan performance artist and poet Regina Jose Galindo (b. 1974). Galindo became first known for political performances in Guatemala in the late 1990s, including her bloody walk from the Congress of Guatemala building to the National Palace in protest against the presidential candidacy of Guatemala’s former dictator, Jose Efrain Rios Montt. In 2005 she received the Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale, in the category of “artists under 30,” for her video Himenoplastia, a controversial feminist work featuring the artist undergoing surgical reconstruction of her hymen. Although Galindo has organized performances in which she does not take part, her work is distinguished for the political use of her own body in order to tackle a variety of social issues, including cultural traumas, and to denounce the ethical implications of social and cultural injustices, discriminations of race and sex, and, more in general, all kinds of abuses stemming from power. A postidentarian turning of her body into a symbolic evocation of the “social body differentiates the use of her self as the tool of her critique from the autobiographic one of several of her performance art progenitors.”
The exhibition Estoy Viva is divided in five sections that, conceived as permeable categories, illustrate the focus of her critique and poetics: politics, woman, violence, organic, and death. It is titled after the eponymous performance conceived and performed for the opening of the exhibition and featuring the artist naked in a white chilly room on a sort of tombstone, her life proved only by her invisible breath’s imprint on a mirror held by each visitor in front of her nose. The exhibition is accompanied by a film by Cosimo Alemà, a cinematographic reading of her work produced in collaboration with the artist as an emotional key to her work.
Sara VanDerBeek
Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland
11400 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH
March 7–June 8, 2014
The New York–based photographer Sara VanDerBeek (b. Baltimore, 1976) is known for her formally striking employment of photography, sculpture, and performative gestures that contemplate the construction of images, their relation to objects, and the passage of time. For her solo exhibition at MOCA Cleveland, organized by David Norr, VanDerBeek responded to the city of Cleveland in line with her recent work. She began by testing the relation of photograph to object by photographing architectural objects made in her studio that were in turn turned into photographic objects, but her most recent work explores photographically cities central to American history, such as Baltimore, New Orleans, and Detroit, their personal, historical, and political connotations, as well as their distinct urban features. Engaging the city as a physical site and a system undergoing continuous change, the displayed photographs are combined results of VanDerBeek’s experience of Cleveland’s landscape and cultural monuments within a range of material and cultural shifts.
Hito Steyerl: Junktime
Home Workspace Program
Ashkal Alwan, Building 110, First Floor, Jisr al Wati, Street 90, Beirut 2066-8421 Lebanon
April 16–May 31, 2014
Ashkal Alwan Home Workspace Program 2013–14 presents Hito Steyerl: Junktime, a series of video installations, screenings, and conversations as part of Creating and Dispersing Universes That Work without Working, led by the resident professors Jalal Toufic and Anton Vidokle. The screening series includes twelve films and video installations developed by Steyerl between 2004 and 2014. Between them is presented How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, launched in the Venice Biennale exhibition Il Palazzo Enciclopedico in 2013.
Born in Munich in 1966, Steyerl has produced a variety of work as a filmmaker and an author in the field of essayist documentary video. With the global circulation of images as her principal topic of interest, she focuses on the intersection of media technology, political violence, and desire. Departing from the digital image and using humor and charm as political means of expression, her films and essays envision a world in which war, genocide, capital flows, class conflicts, and digital detritus seem to take place only partially within images, thus reminding us we are no longer dealing with the virtual but with a “confusing concreteness.”
Eva Koťátková
Art en Valise
April 3–June 28, 2014
In collaboration with the scrap metal gallery in Dublin and the Unit E in Toronto, Art en Valise presents, as its inaugural project, the first solo exhibition of the multimedia Czech artist Eva Koťátková in Canada. Born in Prague (in 1982), where she lives and works today, Koťátková studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague, as well as at the San Francisco Art Institute and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna. The youngest-ever winner of the prestigious Jindrich Chalupecky Award for Czech artists, she has widely exhibited internationally, both in solo and group exhibitions, and her work was distinguished as one of the highlights of the exhibition The Encyclopedic Palace in the fifty-fifth Venice Biennale (2013).
Underpinned by her generation’s trauma—the contrast of her freedom to do what she wants as opposed to the suppression that haunted the dreams and desires of her parents generation—Koťátková creates work in various media, including collage, film collage, and “mad” sculptures, that seem to explore the often-failed attempts of people to both conform to and break free of the rules and codes of contemporary societal institutions, including family and school. Kotátková undermines and recontextualizes the values and mechanisms used to regulate our perception of the world, and, in turn, the way we perceive ourselves.
Bringing together drawing, collage, installation, sculpture, and performance, the exhibition investigates Kotátková’s process of deconstructing traditional behavioral systems to produce fragmented models that invite alternative ways of communication, while offering a unique opportunity to explore the idiosyncratic surrealist sensibility that underpins her multimedia practice, signature themes such as the cage, and her use of the body.
Dorothy Iannone: This Sweetness Outside of Time; Paintings, Objects, Books 1959–2014
Berlinische Galerie
Alte Jakobstraße 124–128, 10969 Berlin, Germany
February 20–June 2, 2014
The Berlinische Galerie presents This Sweetness Outside of Time, a major solo exhibition of the Berlin-based American artist Dorothy Iannone. This will be the first extensive retrospective to address the humorous and erotic oeuvre of one of the most unusual women artists of the twentieth and twenty-first century. This Sweetness Outside of Time includes paintings, objects, and books created by the self-taught artist between 1959 and 2014. The aim of this retrospective is to illustrate the radical subjectivity of this unique artist to a wider audience.
A pioneering spirit against censorship and for free love and autonomous female sexuality, Iannone (b. Boston, 1933) occupies a distinct place as an artist in the second half of the twentieth century. Her oeuvre spans more than fifty years and includes painting and visual narrative, autobiographical texts and films. Since the 1960s Iannone continues to go her own way without compromise, artistically and conceptually. She is a pioneer of women’s sexual and intellectual emancipation that draws uncompromisingly on her own life.
Iannone’s art frequently depicts the sexual union between man and woman with an unmistakably mystical dimension rooted in the spiritual and physical union of opposites. Through graphic paintings, object, and books, her visual universe portrays partly clothed and naked figures on bright psychedelic backgrounds of flora, mandalas, and biomorphic patterns in which male and female sexuality celebrate the joy of intimate relationships while subverting traditional gender stereotypes of control an dominance. This Sweetness Outside of Time presents a personal narrative of a passionate pursuit of “ecstatic unity” through transcendence and spirituality.
Tauba Auerbach: The New Ambidextrous Universe
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Mall, London
SW1Y 5AH, United Kingdom
April 16–June 15, 2014
The Institute of Contemporary Art, London, presents The New Ambidextrous Universe, the first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom of Tauba Auerbach (b. San Francisco, 1981), a New York–based artist who works in sculpture, photography, painting, weaving, prints, artist’s books, and performance. In her early career she created graphic sign paintings, producing abstract renderings of calligraphy and typography. In recent work she has developed a signature practice of ironing creases into her canvases and using industrial paint guns or hand-painted Ben Day dots to create the illusion of three-dimensional folded fabric that Auerbach describes as “Fold” paintings that occupy “a liminal state between two and three dimensions.” The artist plays with perceptions of space, taking a highly innovative approach to mechanical processes and color. For The New Ambidextrous Universe, Auerbach presents newly created sculptures and photographs that translate the scientific principles of symmetry and reflection in pallid plywood as a means “to hint at an alternate, mirror universe.”
Open Engagement Conference 2014
Queens Museum of Art
New York City Building, Flushing Meadows, Corona Park, Queens, NY 11368
May 16–18, 2014
Open Engagement is a free international conference that sets out to explore various perspectives on art and social practice with the aim to expand the dialogue around socially engaged art making. The conference will examine how economic and social conditions connect to life values and philosophies, situating the everyday in relation to a larger political and social issues that includes labor, economics, food production, ways of being, and education.
Directed and founded by Jen Delos Reyes, the 2014 Open Engagement Conference is copresented by the Queens Museum of Art and A Blade of Grass and takes place in the Hall of Science, the Queens Theater, Immigrant Movement International, and various locations throughout New York. As in previous conferences, Open Engagement will include a partnership with graduate programs featuring art and social engagement. This year this partnership will include a number of New York–based programs led by Social Practice Queens at Queens College, City University of New York. The event also features two keynote presenters, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and J. Morgan Puett, and focuses on the theme of “life/work.” The legacies of these two seminal figures have through their practices defined and redefined how life and work can be the foundation for artistic exploration.
Smarthistory Call for Essays
posted May 09, 2014
Khan Academy
’s mission is a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere, and the site has ten million unique visitors each month. During the past year, the art-history content alone was visited by every country in the world, save three, and Khan anticipates that this material will reach more than four million visitors during the fall 2014 semester. Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization whose content is free and free of advertising.
Smarthistory at Khan Academy seeks to bring the expertise of individual scholars and curators to a new global audience. In fact, Khan Academy is now partnering with select museums. And thanks to the nearly one hundred contributors that “claimed” topics and submitted essays during their first call in October 2013, Smarthistory has published close to ninety new essays. To get a sense of their vision, read Steven Zucker and Beth Harris’s recent post on the blog for AAM’s Center for the Future of Museums.
If you are interested in sharing your expertise in the form of short introductory essays, Smarthistory could really use your help. The website’s founders, Zucker and Harris, seek art historians, archaeologists, and conservators in many areas of study; they have a particular need for specialists in African, Asian, precolonial American, and Pacific art. Together we can ensure that strong, global art-history content is well represented.
Smarthistory has created an interactive list of topics, a Trello Board, with an eye toward supporting introductory art-history courses. If something critical is missing, please let Zucker and Harris know. Once you’ve decided on a topic, send an email to Zucker and Harris (along with your CV). If everything is in order, you will be added to the Trello Board, so that you can claim that topic.
Here are the essay guidelines:
- Length: 800–1,000 words
- Writing style: informal, experiential, contextual
- Content: for teaching (not original research)
Essays are reviewed and edited by Harris, Zucker, and Smarthistory’s contributing editors. As a general rule, Smarthistory looks for the narratives a great professor tells his or her class in order to make students fall in love with the history of art.
All accepted contributed content is published on both khanacademy.org and smarthistory.khanacademy.org. All content is published with a Creative Commons attribution noncommercial, share-a-like license. You remain the owner of your content, and your contribution is always attributed.
Affiliated Society News for May 2014
posted May 09, 2014
American Council for Southern Asian Art
The American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA) invites you to visit its newly updated website, where you can browse calls for papers, job and fellowship listings, and, for members, recent and past issues of the ACSAA Bulletin. Please send news and postings for the website to ACSAA’s webmaster, Cathleen Cummings.
Please also watch the ACSAA website and listserv for news about upcoming elections. ACSAA will be voting on new board members, changes to membership fees, and several other initiatives. You must be a member in good standing to be eligible to cast your vote. Help shape the future of ACSAA.
Association of Art Historians
The Association of Art Historians (AAH) has announced that Christine Riding is the new AAH chair, serving a three-year post. She takes over from Alison Yarrington. Riding is senior curator and head of art at the Royal Museums Greenwich in London. Previously she was curator of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British art at Tate Britain and held curatorial positions at the Palace of Westminster, Museum of London, and the Wallace Collection. Riding has lectured and published widely on the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British art and has organized a number of international exhibitions at Tate Britain and Tate Modern. Her current projects include curating Turner and the Sea, a major exhibition that opened at Greenwich in November 2013. She also served as an AAH trustee between 2004 and 2007 and was deputy editor of Art History between 2007 and 2012. Riding has participated on the Clore Leadership Programme and was recently appointed as an impact assessor for REF2014.
Community College Professors of Art and Art History
The Community College Professors of Art and Art History (CCPAAH) had a successful session at this year’s CAA Annual Conference in Chicago. “Starting the Conversation: Engaging Students in the Studio and Art History,”chaired by Susan Altman of Middlesex County College, featured: Tyrus Clutter, College of Central Florida, “Flipping the Classroom with Digital Demonstrations”; Monica Anke Hahn, Community College of Philadelphia, “Virtual Engagement: Conversations in Online and Hybrid Classes”; and Julianne Parse Sandlin, Portland Community College, “Low-Tech Engagement: Art History and the Class Discussion.” The prospectus for next year’s conference session will be posted later this spring on CCPAAH’s Facebook page. To become more involved in the organization, please email ccpaah@gmail.com.
Foundations in Art: Theory and Education
The next biennial conference of Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE), called “Tectonic Shifts” and hosted by the Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, will be held March 25–28, 2015. The event will take place in the heart of downtown Indianapolis at the Westin Hotel Indianapolis, which just completed a $14 million renovation. You can access hotel registration information via the FATE website.
FATE’s Programming Committee is now reviewing the call for session proposals. While the call for sessions is now closed, a call for papers was sent in April 2014. Approximately one hundred sessions will run during the three-day conference. Papers will be accepted from all who contribute to the foundation experience. The “Tectonic Shifts” FATE members exhibition will take place in one of Indianapolis’s most respected exhibition venues, the Herron School Art and Design Galleries. A call for exhibition entries will go out in mid-May. The conference keynote speaker is Wayne White, an American artist, art director, illustrator, puppeteer, and much, much more.White has traveled the country delivering an incredibly entertaining hour-long talk in which he discusses his life and work, while making time for banjo and harmonica playing.
Historians of German and Central European Art and Architecture
The Historians of German and Central European Art and Architecture (HGCEA) has elected a new board of directors for a three-year term, 2014–17. They are: Marsha Morton, president; Jay Clarke, secretary; Jim Van Dyke, treasurer; Elizabeth Cronin, web manager; and Keith Holz, Karla Huebner, Juliet Koss, and Elizabeth Otto, at-large members.
Historians of Netherlandish Art
The Historians of Netherlandish Art (HNA) will hold its next conference June 5–7, 2014, in Boston, Massachusetts. The event will be held in cooperation with the American Association for Netherlandic Studies and involve sessions and workshops with focus on Netherlandish art from 1350 to 1750. Please see the HNA website for more information.
The next formal deadline for submitting manuscripts to the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, HNA’s peer-reviewed, open-access ejournal, is August 1, 2014. In addition to longer articles, the journal welcomes shorter notes on archival discoveries, iconographical issues, technical studies, and rediscovered works. For submission guidelines, see the journal’s website or contact Alison Kettering, senior editor, at aketteri@carleton.edu or aketteri@jhna.org for more information.
International Association of Art Critics
The United States chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA-USA) will hold its awards ceremony and dinner to honor the best exhibitions that opened between January and December 2013 at the studio of Izhar Patkin in New York on Monday, May 12, 2014, 6:00–9:00 PM.
Italian Art Society
The Italian Art Society (IAS) invites scholars in Italy this spring to attend the fifth annual IAS/Kress Lecture in Italy by Jean K. Cadogan, professor of fine arts at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, whose paper is titled “‘Maravigliose istorie’: The Mural Decoration of the Camposanto in Pisa.” Cadogan will share her intriguing work on the multiphase, comprehensive program of painting on the walls of the Camposanto in a presentation on May 27, 2014, at the Gipsoteca of the Università di Pisa. See the IAS website for details.
In addition, the IAS website publishes information about the organization’s activities at the upcoming forty-ninth International Congress of Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, taking place May 8–11, 2014. IAS will hold a business meeting at 5:30 PM on Thursday, May 8 (in Valley II, Garneau Lounge), plus three IAS-sponsored sessions (all in Bernhard 209) and an IAS reception (in the second floor lobby of Bernhard) at 5:30 PM on Friday, May 9. All members and prospective members are welcome!
National Art Education Association
The National Art Education Association (NAEA) is accepting proposals for presentations for the 2015 NAEA national convention, to be held March 26–28 in New Orleans, Louisiana. You must be an NAEA member to submit a proposal. The deadline is May 15, 2014.
NAEA also announces two new publications: Practice Theory: Seeing the Power of Art Teacher Researchers and Purposes, Principles, and Standards for School Art Programs.
Studies in Art Education, the NAEA’s professional refereed journal, is a quarterly publication that reports quantitative, qualitative, historical, and philosophical research in art education. View a sample digital issue. The cost for a one-year subscription is $20 for NAEA members, $30 for nonmembers, and $45 for Canadian/foreign subscriptions.
NAEA announces SummerVision DC: Hands-On Learning in Art Museums. Choose from two sessions: July 8–11, 2014, or July 22–25, 2014. Now in its fifth year, NAEA SummerVision DC is an annual event offered by NAEA in partnership with Washington, DC–area art museums. Upon completion of the program, participants will receive a certificate of participation with thirty clock hours of professional development. The cost is $495 (NAEA members) and $549 (nonmembers). Each session is limited to twenty-five participants.
New Media Caucus
The New Media Caucus (NMC) has announced the results of its recent board and officer elections. The NMC board of directors voted to add two new officer positions to its Executive Committee: chair of the Communications Committee and chair of the Events and Exhibitions Committee. A. Bill Miller, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin in Whitewater, joins the board and begins a one-year term as the chair of the Communications Committee. Joyce Rudinsky, associate professor at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, was voted as the chair of Exhibitions and Events Committee. NMC also welcomes new and reelected board members: Barbara Rauch, Kevin Hamilton, Joshua Selman, A. Bill Miller, Rachel Clarke, and Mat Rappaport. Rappaport was reelected as secretary, and Vagner Whitehead, associate professor at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, begins his term as the fourth NMC president.
The NMC board would like to thank its former president, Paul Catanese, for his leadership over the past six years. Under his tenure NMC has grown into an organization of over nine hundred members and developed annual programming that highlights the practice and scholarship of new-media art and theory. He now sits on the Executive Committee as immediate past president. NMC also wants to thank board members whose terms have ended for all the work they have done in the past years: Mike Salmond, Dima Strakovsky, Leslie Raymond, and Gwyan Rhabyt (president emeritus). Finally, NMC thanks the members of the Nominations Committee who oversaw the election: Mina Cheon, Meredith Hoy, and Mat Rappaport.
Pacific Arts Association
The conference of the European chapter of Pacific Arts Association (PAA) was held April 24–26, 2014, at the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum-Cultures of the World in Cologne, Germany. The conference coincided with the exhibition Made in Oceania: Tapa – Art and Social Landscapes. Learn more about conference registration, programs, accommodations, and special events on the PAA website.
Public Art Dialogue
At CAA’s 2014 Annual Conference in Chicago, Jack Becker received the 2014 Public Art Dialogue Award for Achievement in the Field of Public Art. In honoring his thirty-five years of service to the profession, Harriet F. Senie, cochair of Public Art Dialogue (PAD), observed, “I don’t think there is anyone in the field who has done more to legitimize the field of public art than Jack Becker. I can’t begin to imagine where we would all be without the Public Art Review and its ongoing response to and expansion of our enterprise.”
A CAA session on “Public Art and Its Role in Placemaking from an International Perspective” featured the speakers Marisa D. Lerer, Norie Sato, and Jack Becker. Chaired by Erika Doss, another session, “Vandalism, Removal, Relocation, Destruction: The Dilemma of Public Art’s Permanence,” featured the following presentations: “Yankees, Automobiles, and Other Hazards: Shattered Monuments and the Problem of Confederate Memory,” by Sarah Beetham; “Marking Memory: Ambiguity and Amnesia in the Monument to Soviet Tank Crews in Prague,” by Jenelle Davis; “Maintaining Problematic Public Art,” by Christine Young-Kyung Hahn; “Distant Stars, Black Holes, and Burned Out Sculptures: Media Obsolescence and the Trouble with Public Art,” by Julia E. Marsh; and “The Sordid Pasts of Public Art and How We Go About Protecting Them,” by Michele Bogart.
Society for Photographic Education
The Society for Photographic Education (SPE) is accepting proposals for its 2015 conference, “Atmospheres: Climate, Equity, and Community in Photography.” Topics may include but are not limited to: image-making, history, contemporary theory and criticism, new technologies, effects of media and culture, educational issues, and funding. SPE membership is required to submit; proposals are peer reviewed. Proposals are due by June 1, 2014. Visit the SPE website for full proposal guidelines.
SPE is pleased to announce these award opportunities:
- Future Focus Project Support Grant: Established to recognize exceptional photographic work, this $5,000 grant is partially funded by the SPE Future Focus Campaign. The recipient also receives a complimentary one-year SPE membership and two years of conference registration
- Honored Educator Award: Bestowed upon a career educator recognizing significant contribution to the field of photographic education. The recipient receives a lifetime SPE membership and a $1,000 honorarium
- Insight Award: Given to up to five members annually who demonstrate excellence in innovative teaching, sustained mentoring of colleagues or students, broad contribution to technical, critical, pedagogical, or visual aspects of the field, breadth or depth of exhibition or publication, and/or sustained presence in the field
Applications and nominations are due by July 1, 2014. Visit the SPE website for more information about these awards.
Society of Architectural Historians
The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) is accepting applications for its 2014 SAH/Mellon Author Awards, designed to support emerging authors publishing monographs on the history of the built environment who are responsible for paying for rights and permissions for images in their publications. The deadline is June 1, 2014.
SAH is also accepting abstracts for papers for its sixty-eighth annual conference, taking place April 15–19, 2015, in Chicago, Illinois. Abstracts may be submitted for one of the thirty-two thematic sessions or for an open session. The deadline to submit is June 6, 2014. Visit the SAH website for details.
Carolyn Garrett has been named SAH development director. She has over twelve years of experience in resource development and previously held positions at Changing Worlds and Chicago Foundation for Women.
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) seeks proposals of papers for its sponsored session, “Reconsidering Art and Politics: Toward New Narratives of Russian and Eastern European Art” at CAA’s 2015 Annual Conference in New York. The session aims to move beyond conventional binary narratives of art and power by inviting papers that challenge these interpretations and highlight the complexity of artistic responses produced at the nexus of aesthetics and politics. The chairs seek historically grounded case studies of Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian art from the Byzantine era to modern times that productively explore these issues. Interested contributors should see CAA’s 2015 Call for Participation and send proposals with other required materials to the session’s cochairs, Galina Mardilovich and Maria Taroutina. The deadline for proposals is May 9, 2014.
SHERA is delighted to welcome two new institutional members: the Russian American Cultural Center, an organization that sponsors exhibitions, arts events, and scholarly symposia in the greater New York area; and Centro Studi sulle Arti della Russia in Venice, Italy, a center for the research and study of Russia’s rich cultural heritage.
Southeastern College Art Conference
The Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) has announced the newly elected members of its board of directors: Sandra Reed, Savannah College of Art and Design; Reni Gower, Virginia Commonwealth University; and Ria O’Foghludha, Whittier College were reelected to a three-year term. In addition, Heather Stark of Marshall University and Ute Wachsmann-Linnan of Columbia College were elected to a three-year term.
The new issue of the Southeastern College Art Conference Review has been published. It is volume 17, number 3, 2013.
Visual Resources Association
The 2014 Summer Educational Institute for Visual Resources and Image Management (SEI) will be held June 10–13 at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. This intensive workshop features a curriculum addressing the latest requirements of today’s visual-resources and image-management professionals. Expert instructors will cover: intellectual-property rights; digital imaging and digital preservation; metadata and cataloging; project management; and professional development. SEI is open to all individuals interested in visual resources and image management. Past participants have included: current graduate students and recent graduates; visual-resources professionals; information, library, and museum professionals; art historians; and digital-collection managers.
Founded over ten years ago, SEI is a joint project of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) and the Visual Resources Association Foundation (VRAF). SEI provides information professionals with the information and experience needed to stay current in a rapidly changing field, and significant networking opportunities. Registration for members of VRA or ARLIS/NA and University of Illinois staff and students is $595; registration for nonmembers is $675. For more information or to register, visit the SEI website.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted May 07, 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.
Michelangelo’s David Sculpture at Risk of Collapse
Michelangelo’s famous statue of the biblical figure David is at risk of collapse due to the weakening of the artwork’s legs and ankles, according to a report recently published by art experts. The findings, which were made public by Italy’s National Research Council, show microfractures in the ankle and leg areas. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times).
The False Promise of the Digital Humanities
The humanities are in crisis again, or still. But there is one big exception: digital humanities. In 2009, the nascent field was the talk of the Modern Language Association convention: “among all the contending subfields,” a reporter wrote about that year’s gathering, “the digital humanities seem like the first ‘next big thing’ in a long time.” Even earlier, the National Endowment for the Humanities created its Office of Digital Humanities to help fund projects. And digital humanities continues to go from strength to strength, thanks in part to the Mellon Foundation, which has seeded programs at a number of universities with large grants. (Read more from the New Republic).
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).
Art and the Internet of Things: A Turning Point in Creative Education
In the art world’s internal sense of time, the degree show is in many ways the equivalent of New Year’s Eve: a point at which to collectively celebrate the birth of the future, while taking stock of the events of the past year. Reflecting on the 2013–14 academic year, it is clear that one of the most pressing issues is that of value, and the need continually to defend the arts in this respect. It is interesting to note the difference between making art for yourself—which holds value for you as an individual—and pursuing a career as an artist by studying for a degree in fine art or a related field. By doing the latter, you are implicitly deciding that your creativity also holds value for others. (Read more from the Guardian).
To Bind and to Liberate: Printing Out the Internet
“Printing the internet is not creative nor art. It is a waste of time and resources. Please, find something more creative to do.” So reads a comment on a petition on change.org. Directed at Kenneth Goldsmith, the petition was published in 2013 in response to a project the poet organized at LABOR gallery in Mexico City, where Goldsmith invited people from all over the world to print out the internet and send the pages to the gallery. (Read more from Rhizome).
Five Tips for Grant Research
It’s easy to get excited about the prospect of funding via grants, which carry a certain amount of prestige and the assurance that your work is (at least somewhat) funded, not to mention the fact that, if a funder is willing to give you a grant, they respect your work. But as the saying goes, only fools rush in. (Read more from Fractured Atlas).
Pat Badani at CAA: In Conversation with the Editor of Media-N Journal
At CAA’s 2014 Annual Conference in Chicago, Joshua Selmanand Pat Badanilaunched a discussion that examined what was happening at CAA this year as it applied to the New Media Caucus, to Media-N Journal, and to CAA members. (Read more from Artist Organized Art).