CAA News Today
CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts, Archival Recordings from the 1994 Annual Conference
posted by CAA — Aug 18, 2022
Entry in 1994 Annual Conference program of the Committee on Women in the Arts’ session.
Abstract entry of the Committee on Women in the Arts session in the 1994 Annual Conference abstracts program.
Fifty years ago in 1972, CAA founded its first committees devoted to women in the arts. This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of this history by sharing historic materials from CAA members and archives that intersect with feminism at the organization, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts, and from its Affiliated Societies, the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) and The Feminist Art Project (TFAP). CAA established the Committee on the Status of Women (COSW), the first committee to focus on women in CAA’s history, in 1972. The COSW was renamed the Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) in 1996, and it continues to promote women in the visual arts field.
In 1994, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts held a panel chaired by Judith Stein that featured speakers Linda Nochlin, Ann Sutherland Harris, and Alessandra Comini. Their individual presentations look at the progress of women artists and art historians over the previous twenty years, since 1974. The talks use the exhibition, Women Artists 1550-1950, curated by Nochlin and Harris, as a benchmark for discussion. This landmark exhibition toured four American museums in 1976-77, such as the Brooklyn Museum in 1977, and raised public awareness of the many gifted women painters, sculptors, and architects.
The talks in this session compare and contrast the attitudes that prevailed when the show was being organized with views in the nineties. Releasing these recordings of the session almost another twenty years later, it is an opportunity to reassess the status of women in the arts once again.
Biographies of the speakers:
Judith E. Stein chaired CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts from 1992 to 1997, initiating a series of awards to women in the arts. A writer and curator, Stein studied at Barnard College, and has a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Pennsylvania.
Stein was recently awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) in 2020. She has written at length on feminism and women artists, beginning with her 1981 doctoral thesis on the neoclassic iconography of Sappho, one of the first feminist dissertations in art history at the University of Pennsylvania. She helped organize Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts (FOCUS) in 1973-74 and edited the WCA’s newsletter from 1975 to 1977. She was also a member of the WCA national advisory board from 1979 to 1981. Her first piece of art criticism was published in Art in America in 1974, reviewing a Judy Chicago exhibition. She also wrote on Cecilia Beaux, the first woman to teach at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Feminist Art Journal, Winter (1975–1976). Her work has also appeared in Art News, The New York Times Book Review, and the National Public Radio’s Fresh Air and Morning Edition.
Stein served on the advisory board of Philadelphia’s Leeway Foundation for women artists, (1994–2002) and was the first curator of Leeway Founder Linda Alter’s collection of art by American women artists. Stein wrote the foundational essay for Making Their Mark: Women Artists Move into the Mainstream, 1970–1985 (Abbeville, 1989) and “Collaboration,” for The Power of Feminist Art (Harry N. Abrams, 1994). She curated The Likeness of Being: Contemporary Self-Portraits by Sixty Women (DC Moore Gallery, New York, 2000), and co-curated Picturing the Modern Amazon: The Hypermuscular Woman (The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 2000).
She is the author of Eye of the Sixties, Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art, (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016). Other curatorial projects by Stein include Red Grooms, A Retrospective for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and I Tell My Heart: The Art of Horace Pippin, which traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1995 and earned a best catalogue award from AICA/USA.
Among her honors is a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant; a Pew Fellowship for literary non-fiction; and a Lannan Foundation writing residency in Marfa, Texas. Learn more about Judith Stein’s career on her webpage and in this WCA announcement.
Alessandra Comini is University Distinguished Professor of Art History Emerita at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. She received her B. A. degree from Barnard College, her M. A. from the University of California at Berkeley, and her Ph.D. “with distinction” from Columbia University where she taught for ten years. She has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Yale University, served as the Alfred Hodder Resident Humanist at Princeton University, and was named Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at Oxford University‘s European Humanities Research Centre (1996). Voted “outstanding professor” by her students sixteen times, she has been extended the Distinguished Teaching Prize of the Meadows School of the Arts and the United Methodist Church Scholar/Teacher of the Year Award (1996).
An undergraduate and a graduate scholarship in Comini’s name have been established by former students, one a professor of surgical oncology in Little Rock, Arkansas; the other, founder and co-owner of an international antiques business in Dallas. The author of major essays and eight books, one of them nominated for the National Book Award (see publications), Dr. Comini was awarded the Grand Decoration of Honor by the Republic of Austria in recognition of her contributions to Germanic culture in 1990. Her lively revisionist work in the history of women artists was acknowledged in 1995 by the Women’s Caucus for Art with the coveted Lifetime Achievement Award. A vibrant lecturer in both English and German, she is in great demand in America and abroad as a speaker in her chosen fields of art and cultural history as well as musical iconography (see lectures)…. (Source: https://www.alessandracomini.com/introduction/)
Ann Sutherland Harris was born in Cambridge, England and was educated in both the USA and the UK (BA 1961 & PhD 1965, University of London at the Courtauld Institute of Art). She has lived in the States since 1965, teaching at Barnard College and Columbia University, and at several other universities before joining the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh as Professor of the History of Art and Architecture in 1984. There she taught a variety of courses to under- graduate and graduate students. She retired from teaching in 2012.
Harris’s research focuses mainly on 17th century Europe, especially painters and sculptors working in Italy and France. She has a particular interest in artists’ drawings and what they reveal about artists’ ideas and intentions, as well as in artists’ self-perceptions and the roles they play as they interact with patrons and their demands. She has published books about Andrea Sacchi and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s drawings and, most recently, a substantial survey of European 17th century art and architecture (Laurence King, London; 2005; 2nd ed. 2008). A full bibliography of her publications is available on her university’s website.
Harris became interested in the past and present situation of women during the late 1960s and 1970s, when she became an activist for improved status for women in academe. She testified before the US Congress in 1970 about the discrimination faced by women in higher education, and then helped to set up the Women’s Caucus for Art, an advocacy organization for women active as artists, art historians, and museum professionals: she was its first President (1972-74). She also encouraged Wilhelmina Holladay to found a museum devoted to women artists, which she did twenty-five years ago: the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, DC.
Art history and activism came together when Harris and Linda Nochlin co-curated the traveling exhibition Women Artists, 1550-1950 for the Los Angeles County Museum in 1976-7 (also shown at the University Art Museum, Austin, Texas; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York). She was responsible for artists active in the 16th to 18th centuries, and Nochlin for the artists working after 1800, and she contributed most of the catalogue entries for the earlier artists as well as an introduction that provided the essential historical background for the pioneering women artists who emerged in Europe in the mid-sixteenth-century. Since then, she has occasionally written about twentieth-century women, including Alice Neel (1900-84), Elizabeth Murray (1940-2006) and Edna Andrade (1917- 2008), as well as contributing catalogue essays, articles and reviews about Artemisia Gentileschi and Sofonisba Anguissola, and a survey of recent scholarship on Sofonisba, Artemisia, Lavinia Fontana and Elisabetta Sirani for the exhibition, Italian Women Artists from the Renaissance to the Baroque held at the women’s museum in Washington in 2007.
Linda Nochlin was an American feminist art historian most well-known for her 1971 article “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” which widely influenced art history, leading to new research and awareness of history and how it is written, analyzed, and taught, as well as launching the field of feminist art history.
Nochlin graduated from Vassar College in 1951 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and earned a master’s degree in English from Columbia University in 1952. Her doctorate in art history from the Institution of Fine Arts at New York University (NYU) focused on realism and Gustave Courbet. From 1952 to 1979, Nochlin taught art history at Vassar and published two books on 19th-century art in 1966, Realism and Tradition in Art, 1848–1900 and Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874–1904. She shifted her focus to feminism in 1969, when she taught one of Vassar’s first art history courses on women, “The Image of Women in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” After her landmark article, in 1976 Nochlin co-curated “Women Artists: 1550–1950” with Anne Sutherland Harris.
Nochlin left Vassar for a professorship at the graduate school at the City University of New York, where she stayed from 1980 until 1990. In the eighties she published more on Courbet, such as Courbet Reconsidered (1988) with Sarah Faunce, which was also an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Nochlin also published Women, Art, and Power, and Other Essays (1988) and The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (1989). Nochlin than taught at Yale University (1990-1992) and then became a professor at NYU.
During this time, she published Women in the 19th Century: Categories and Contradictions (1997), Representing Women (1999), and Bathers, Bodies, Beauty: The Visceral Eye (2006).
In 1972, CAA founded its first committees devoted to women in the arts. As a part of this yearlong 50th anniversary celebration, we are sharing historic materials from CAA members and archives that intersect with feminism at the organization, including CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) and our Affiliated Societies, Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) and The Feminist Art Project (TFAP).
This celebration culminates in a program and reception at Boston University’s Joan and Edgar Booth Theatre on Friday, September 23, 2022. This program will reflect upon the incredible history of feminist pioneers at the organization while looking toward a more inclusive, equitable future through the continued work of the CWA. The members of CWA are carrying the torch of feminism during this crucial time of precarity for women’s rights.
Over the next couple months, visit this site (CAA News) and our social media pages to explore more about this history and items from our archives.
CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts Annual Recognition Award, 2006
posted by CAA — Aug 18, 2022
Photo of the 2006 CWA Award recipients, Moira Roth and Trinh T. Minh-ha holding paintings
Moira (left) talking at the podium while Eleanor Dickinson (middle), then chair of CWA getting ready with the award gift created by Carolyne Manosevitz
In 2006, during the CAA Annual Conference in Boston, the Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) honored Moira Roth (Trefethen Professor of Art History at Mills College in Oakland, CA) and Trinh T. Minh-ha (Professor of Women’s Studies and Rhetoric/Film at the University of California at Berkeley) with the CWA Annual Recognition Awards. Then CWA member, Carolyne Manosevitz, offered her own paintings as the award gifts. Roth, who recently passed away, was one of the first scholars to publish on feminist performance art. Her books, The Amazing Decade: Women in Performance Art in America (1983)and Rachel Rosenthal (1995), were groundbreaking. Minh-Ha is a Vietnam-born filmmaker, writer, and composer, whose practice is positioned within the fields of feminist and post-colonial studies.
After 2008, this award became a part of CAA’s Distinguished Awards program as the Distinguished Feminist Awards. The Distinguished Feminist Award is presented annually to a visual artist or designer who, through outstanding efforts in their practice or advocacy, has advanced the cause of equality for women in the arts; as well as a scholar who, through outstanding efforts in their scholarship, curatorial practice, or advocacy, has advanced the cause of equality for women in the arts. Read more about this award and its recipients here.
Post by Midori Yoshimoto
Midori Yoshimoto is associate professor of art history and gallery director at New Jersey City University. Yoshimoto specializes in post-1945 Japanese art and its diaspora with a focus on women artists, Fluxus, and intermedia. Her 2005 book, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York, led to numerous publications including an essay in Yoko Ono One Woman Show (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2015). Yoshimoto co-curated a major survey exhibition of Japanese American artist Shigeko Kubota, which traveled three museums in Japan in 2021-22. Its catalog, Viva Video! The Art and Life of Shigeko Kubota was published by Kawade Shobo Shinsha and received the Ringa Art Encouragement Award in Japan. She is also a co-editor and author of a recent publication, Women, Aging, and Art: A Crosscultural Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2021).
In 1972, CAA founded its first committees devoted to women in the arts. As a part of this yearlong 50th anniversary celebration, we are sharing historic materials from CAA members and archives that intersect with feminism at the organization, including CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) and our Affiliated Societies, Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) and The Feminist Art Project (TFAP).
This celebration culminates in a program and reception at Boston University’s Joan and Edgar Booth Theatre on Friday, September 23, 2022. This program will reflect upon the incredible history of feminist pioneers at the organization while looking toward a more inclusive, equitable future through the continued work of the CWA. The members of CWA are carrying the torch of feminism during this crucial time of precarity for women’s rights.
Over the next couple months, visit this site (CAA News) and our social media pages to explore more about this history and items from our archives.
Announcing New CAA Board Members for 2022!
posted by CAA — Mar 08, 2022
The results of the 2022 CAA Board of Directors Election were presented at the CAA Annual Business Meeting, Part II on Friday, February 18 at 2:00 p.m. (CST) at CAA’s 110th Annual Conference.
We are grateful to all the candidates who put forward their names for consideration this year.
ABOUT THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS
The Board of Directors is charged with CAA’s long-term financial stability and strategic direction; it is also the Association’s governing body. The board sets policy regarding all aspects of CAA’s activities, including publishing, the Annual Conference, awards and fellowships, advocacy, and committee procedures.
Thank you to all those who voted!
We would like to congratulate Gregory Gilbert, Nazar Kozak, Karen J. Leader, Adity Saxena, and Victoria McCraven on their election to CAA’s Board of Directors.
Gregory Gilbert
Gregory Gilbert received his BFA degree in Art History from the University of Kansas and his MA and PhD degrees in Art History from Rutgers University. He has taught at Rutgers University, Purdue University and Western Illinois University. He is currently Professor of Art History and Director of the Art History and Art Museum Studies programs at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. He also earned MA certification in Museum Studies from Rutgers University and has worked in several art museums, most recently as senior curator at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa. His primary area of research is 20th century American art, specifically Abstract Expressionism. He is currently researching the relationship of Robert Motherwell’s art to Pragmatist philosophy and American poetics and in 2015 received a Dedalus Foundation Visiting Scholar at the Archives of American Art Fellowship for this project. He is also writing a book on Abstract Expressionism and the mass visual culture of World War II and has published articles in the Oxford Art Journal and Arts on this topic. In addition, he has written critical exhibition and book reviews for The Art Newspaper.
Nazar Kozak
Nazar Kozak is Senior Researcher at the Department of Art Studies at the Ethnology Institute of the National Academy of Sciences, Ukraine and Associate Professor of Art History at Ivan Franko University of Lviv. Kozak received a PhD from Lviv Academy of Arts in 2000. His research was supported by scholarships and grants from the Fulbright Scholar Program, Getty Scholar Program, the American Council of Learned Societies, and other organizations. Kozak is working in two subfields of art history simultaneously: medieval and contemporary. His research on the medieval period concerns political iconography and art exchanges in Byzantine and post-Byzantine cultural spheres. He has authored the book (Lviv: Liha-Pres, 2007). In contemporary art studies, Kozak is exploring art’s agency in crisis situations. His essay on the art interventions during the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine (2013–14) received an honorable mention as a finalist for 2018 Art Journal Award. Currently, Kozak is writing a book about global artistic responses to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
Karen J. Leader
Karen J. Leader is Associate Professor of Art History and Faculty Associate in the Center for Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Florida Atlantic University. She received her BA from the University of California, Berkeley and her MA and Ph.D. at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her areas of interest include art and popular culture in the 19th-21st centuries, feminist theory and practice, and the history and future of the discipline of art history, the humanities, and higher education. She has published on the artist Gustave Courbet, representations of women in popular culture, and 21st-century tattoo culture. She directs the Barb Schmidt Fellowship: Cultivating Community Involvement, Advocacy and Social Change, and is currently the chair of CAA’s Services to Historians of the Visual Arts Committee.
Victoria McCraven
Victoria McCraven is the Programs Manager at NXTHVN, where she recently co-curated the Fall Exhibition Christian Curiel: Between Reveries. Based in New Haven, Connecticut, NXTHVN is an arts non-profit which invites emerging artists from all over the world to participate in its curatorial and studio fellowships. She is passionate about expanding historical narratives through the visual arts and creating community-based dialogue. Victoria earned her bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College, majoring in Geography with a minor in Art History. While at Dartmouth, she worked at the Hood Museum of Art where she curated the exhibition Black Bodies on the Cross which included works by Romare Bearden, Kara Walker, and Ashley Bryan. In 2019, Victoria was selected as a U.S.-U.K. Fulbright Postgraduate Grantee to complete her master’s degree in History of Art at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Previously, Victoria was the 2020-2021 Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellow at the Saint Louis Art Museum, where she worked on education and audience development projects across the museum. While completing her fellowship at the Saint Louis Art Museum, she co-curated the current New Media Series Nuotama Frances Bodomo: Afronauts which is currently on view through May 1, 2022.
Adity Saxena
I call myself a messenger of happiness and believe in empathy. Mind-map is my tool for plotting ideas and communicating through stories. In the past 18 years of my professional journey, I have progressed from a design educator of a vocational training institution to a Dean of the Woxsen School of Arts and Design, India. In addition, I have expanded my path from teaching to academic coordination to academic leadership.
Being a first-generation graduate, I have many pauses, slow and fast pace in my journey path, which gives me an understanding of people, culture, and power of empathy. I am a teenage girl’s mother, a certified design thinker, and a mentor.
My experience includes allied fields like working as a Restorative Justice co-facilitator in a school project in the United States and many global research projects. I am India representative of Restorative Justice Education, USA, a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) corporation) is to promotes the practice of Restorative in school education to create a culture of care.
The social role of art, wellbeing and education are the areas that interest me more. My research has been published globally and many of my research are the outcome of global collaborations. I have been invited to share my thoughts about the challenges in online education, corporate storytelling, and design thinking on many international platforms.
I have been featured in The Academic Woman Magazine, the UK, in Jan-March, 2022 issue. In addition, recently, I have been invited to work as an external member in Design Thinking for Social Change, a project funded by the European Union.
I am privileged to be connected with a global network and believe in the power of collaborations. My dream is to create an enjoyable learning space for students and teachers.
Meet the 2022 CAA Annual Conference Support Grant Recipients
posted by CAA — Feb 03, 2022
CAA offers Annual Conference support grants to graduate students in art history and to international artists and scholars. Meet this year’s recipients of our named support grants and find information about their presentations at the conference and their corresponding session below. Dozens of other support grants were given to CAA members through the Presidents Council of CAA and the “Pay it Forward” initiative.
CAA TRAVEL GRANT IN MEMORY OF ARCHIBALD CASON EDWARDS, SENIOR, AND SARAH STANLEY GORDON EDWARDS
The CAA Support Grant in Memory of Archibald Cason Edwards, Senior, and Sarah Stanley Gordon Edwards was made possible by Mary D. Edwards. The grant supports women who are emerging scholars at either an advanced stage of pursuing a doctoral degree or who have received their PhD within the two years prior to the submission of the application.
Kristan Hanson, Dumbarton Oaks
Presentation at the Annual Conference: “Nurturing Growth: Eva Gonzalès’s La Plante favorite and Berthe Morisot’s Fillette aux jacinthes”
Session: Enchanted by Nature: Picturing Gendered Plants and Female Agency in Europe and China (17th – 19th Century)
Kristan M. Hanson is an art historian and plant humanist. Her research examines the historical significance of individual plants and botanical forms in art to deepen understandings of human/plant interactions and anthropogenic environmental change. She currently holds a consultancy as Managing Digital Editor for the Plant Humanities Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks, prior to which she was a 2020–2021 academic year fellow. Hanson has also received fellowships and awards to support her research from the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, HASTAC Scholars program, Hall Center for the Humanities, and Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities.
Cynthia Kok, Yale University
Presentation at the Annual Conference: “’Een bloempoth van parlemoer’: Painting Life in Dirck van Rijswijck’s Mother-of-Pearl Floral Panels”
Session: Analogous Matter: Skeuomorphism as Method
Cynthia Kok is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University. Her dissertation focuses on sensorial engagement in making and craft experiments with mother-of-pearl in the early modern Dutch world. Cynthia received her MA from Bard Graduate Center and her BA from the University of California, Berkeley. She has held curatorial internships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, the Frick Collection, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum and she is the 2021-2023 Kress History of Art Institutional Fellow at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS).
Honorable Mention:
Shoghig Halajian, University of California San Diego
Presentation at the Annual Conference: “Destroying the Form: On the Spatial Politics of Rafa Esparza’s bust: A Mediation on Freedom”
Session: Monumentality in Art: Memory, History, and Impermanence in Diaspora
Shoghig Halajian is a curator and art historian, who serves on the Board of Directors at Human Resources LA and was previously Assistant Director at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions). She is co-editor of the online journal Georgia, in collaboration with Anthony Carfello and Suzy Halajian, which is supported by a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She has presented projects at the Hammer Museum and the ONE Archives at USC Libraries in Los Angeles; Le Magasin–National Center for Contemporary Art in Grenoble; Al Ma’mal Foundation for Art in Jerusalem, UKS in Oslo, among others. She was a 2021 Research Fellow at Ocean Space–TBA 21 in Venice. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History, Theory and Criticism with a Critical Gender Studies emphasis at University of California, San Diego, where her research explores contemporary queer aesthetics and performance through a critical race lens, focusing on artistic experiments with collaboration.
SAMUEL H. KRESS FOUNDATION CAA CONFERENCE SUPPORT FELLOWSHIP FOR INTERNATIONAL SCHOLARS
Recognizing the value of the international exchange of ideas and experience among art historians, the Kress Foundation is offering support for international scholars participating as speakers at the 2022 CAA Annual Conference. The scholarly focus of the papers must be European art before 1830.
Lorenzo Vigotti, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz
Presentation at the Annual Conference: “Diplomatic Exchanges and Architectural Inventions along the Silk Road: The Case of Soltaniyeh and Santa Maria del Fiore”
Session: Beyond the Silk Road
Lorenzo is a trained architect with a M. Arch. from the University of Florence, Italy, and a Ph.D. in architectural history from Columbia University with a dissertation on the origin of the Renaissance palace. He is currently a post-doc at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, where he studies the shift in spatial organization in domestic residences between the 14th and the 15th century, with an emphasis on early collecting practices and the birth of the studiolo as a manifestation of power by the urban oligarchy. Together with Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, Iran, Lorenzo is exploring the circulation of architectural knowledge between medieval Persia and Italy, specifically the materiality and the problems of preservation of brick dome structures. Finally, he oversees the virtual reconstruction of the now lost Florentine ghetto at the Medici Archive Project.
Ana Cristina Howie, University of Cambridge
Presentation at the Annual Conference: “’Favoured Black Attendants’ in ‘Splendid State Portraits’? Genoese merchants, Flemish painters, and the Spanish Atlantic Slave Trade”
Session: Archive, Object, Image: Reading Against the Grain in the Dutch and Spanish “Golden Ages”
Ana is originally from New Zealand and completed her bachelor’s degree in the History of Art and French at the University of Auckland. She continued her studies at the Université Paris-Sorbonne, then earned her MA in the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute in London, specializing in early modern Netherlandish artistic production. She began her PhD under the supervision of Professor Ulinka Rublack at the University of Cambridge in 2019, funded by the Prince of Wales International Scholarship. Her doctoral research investigates the relationships between women, dress, and portraiture in seventeenth-century Genoa, with a focus on the oeuvres of Flemish painters Peter Paul Rubens and Antony van Dyck. She is the recipient of the inaugural Society for Renaissance Studies/British School in Rome Residential Doctoral Research Scholarship for 2021/22. Her work and projects have been supported by the Royal Historical Society, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Magdalene College, Cambridge, and the Cambridge Trust.
Iro Katsaridou, Museum of Byzantine Culture, Thessaloniki, Greece
Presentation at the Annual Conference: “Through Foreign Eyes: Curating the 1821 Greek War of Independence”
Session: Instrumentalizing Memory and the Politics of Commemoration
Iro Katsaridou was recently (2021) appointed Director of the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, Greece. Previously, she has worked as curator of modern and contemporary art at the Museum of Byzantine Culture in Thessaloniki. She studied art history at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the Université Paris I-Sorbonne, and also pursued museum studies at the City University of New York. Her doctoral dissertation (Aristotle University, 2010) focused on contemporary Greek photography. Iro has researched photography and art in wartime (World War I and II), curated exhibitions and edited related catalogues in this particular field. More recently (2021) she has curated an exhibition at the Museum of Byzantine Culture on the aspects of Philhellenic movements in art and the Greek War of Independence. She has taught as adjunct faculty at several Greek universities. She has co-edited two books on photography during the Nazi Occupation of Greece (1941-1944), one on the art of World War I in Greece, and written articles and book chapters on photography, museum policies, as well as the relationship between contemporary Greek art and politics. She has presented her research in international conferences, while in 2019 and 2020 she participated in the CAA-Getty International Program.
Jana Kantoříková, Sorbonne University/CNRS
Presentation at the Annual Conference: “Crucified Women: The Way of the Cross in the Symbolist Movement”
Session: Women in Art in the second part of the 19th century-early part of the 20th
Jana Kantoříková is an associated researcher at the Center of Interdisciplinary Research on Central, Eastern and Balkanic Europe at Sorbonne University/CNRS. She received her PhD in Slavic Philology, History of Czech Literature and Literary Theory at the Charles University in Prague and the University of Regensburg (2018). She taught at the University of Passau (Germany) and the Sorbonne University. Her research focuses on European modernisms and cultural transfers between France, Germany and the Czech lands, for example “Horror Fragmenti in Czech Symbolism” in Angst, Anxiety, Anguish in Fin de Siècle Art and Literature (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020) or “Le Cycle de la volupté et de la mort : ‘livre empoisonné’ et ornementation du péché” in L’art (décoratif) du livre fin-de-siècle: éloge du parergon (Éditions Otrante, 2021). She is currently working on projects related to the reception of Friedrich Nietzsche in Central Europe and the blackness imagery in the Czech lands in the 19th century.
Judith Noorman, University of Amsterdam
Presentation: “The Invisibility Myth. Women, Art and Household Consumption in the Dutch Republic”
Session at the Annual Conference: Archive, Object, Image: Reading Against the Grain in the Dutch and Spanish “Golden Ages”
Judith Noorman is Assistant Professor of Art History in the Early Modern Period and Director of the Amsterdam Centre for Studies in Early Modernity (both at the University of Amsterdam). As of September 2021, she is leading a governmentally funded NWO VIDI project: The Female Impact. Women, Art and Household Consumption in the Dutch Republic, 1580-1720. She earned her PhD at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University and has conducted postdoctoral research at the Drawing Institute, Morgan Library & Museum. At the 110th CAA Annual Conference, she is presenting a paper on The Invisibility Myth. Women, Art and Household Consumption in the Dutch Republic, as part of the HNA-sponsored session Archive, Object, Image: Reading Against the Grain in the Dutch and Spanish “Golden Ages”, which is chaired by Carrie J. Anderson and Marsely Kehoe.
CAA-GETTY INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM
Every year since 2012, the CAA-Getty International Program has enabled art historians, museum curators, and artists who teach art history to attend CAA’s Annual Conference. This program is funded on an annual basis by the Getty Foundation. Meet the CAA-Getty International Program participants here.
Black History Month and the 110th Annual Conference
posted by CAA — Jan 31, 2022
Each week this Black History Month, we highlight the rich scholarship and programs produced at CAA that celebrate, recognize, and interrogate Black art, history, and experience. This week, we look forward to the research and scholarship that will be presented virtually at the upcoming Annual Conference. Many sessions feature talks that look at or investigate Blackness, racism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, and slavery, Black identity, theory of race, Afrofuturism, queerness, the African diaspora, and intersections between these topics.
In chronological order:
February 17-19:
Reimagining the Past alongside Black Women Artists, Thursday, February 17, 2022, 9:00 – 10:30 a.m. CST (10:00 – 11:30 a.m. EST)
Latinx Bodies: Presence/absence and representation (Part 1) , Thursday, February 17, 2022, 9:00 – 10:30 a.m. CST (10:00 – 11:30 a.m. EST)
To See, to Keep, to Know: Photography and Intergenerational Knowledge Production, Thursday, February 17, 2022, 11:00 – 12:30 p.m. CST (12:00 – 1:30 p.m. EST)
Archive, Object, Image: Reading Against the Grain in the Dutch and Spanish “Golden Ages,” , Thursday, February 17, 2022, 11:00 – 12:30 p.m. CST (12:00 – 1:30 p.m. EST)
U.S. Latinx Art, Pre-1950 ,Thursday, February 17, 2022, 11:00 – 12:30 p.m. CST (12:00 – 1:30 p.m. EST)
Latinx Bodies: Presence/Absence and Representation (Part 2) , Thursday, February 17, 2022, 2:30 – 4:00 p.m. CST (3:30 – 5:00 p.m. EST)
Haunting and Memory in Arts of Africa and the African Diaspora , Friday, February 18, 2022, 9:00 – 10:30 a.m. CST (10:00 – 11:30 a.m. EST)
The air we breathe: aesthetics and politics of the breath in transpacific and transatlantic visual cultures ,Friday, February 18, 2022, 9:00 – 10:30 a.m. CST (10:00 – 11:30 a.m. EST)
Flipping the Script , Friday, February 18, 2022, 2:30 – 4:00 p.m. CST (3:30 – 5:00 p.m. EST)
(re)activation of Exhibitions as sites of contestation, Friday, February 18, 2022, 4:30 – 6:00 p.m. CST (5:30 – 7:00 p.m. EST)
Decolonial Teaching Methodologies in Digital Arts & Design, Saturday, February 19, 2022, 9:00 – 10:30 a.m. CST (10:00 – 11:30 a.m. EST)
What’s the “matter” with American Sculpture?, Saturday, February 19, 2022, 9:00 – 10:30 a.m. CST (10:00 – 11:30 a.m. EST)
Signs o’ the Times: Music and Politics in Contemporary Art ,Saturday, February 19, 2022, 9:00 – 10:30 a.m. CST (10:00 – 11:30 a.m. EST)
The Price of Blackness: African American art and visual culture in the first two decades of the Twenty-First Century, Saturday, February 19, 2022, 11:00 – 12:30 p.m. CST (11:00 – 12:30 p.m. EST)
Knowing People: Black Practices in Queer Collaborations, Saturday, February 19, 2022, 2:30 – 4:00 p.m. CST (3:30 – 5:00 p.m. EST)
‘Heresies’ and Other Mythologies, Saturday, February 19, 2022, 2:30 – 4:00 p.m. CST (3:30 – 5:00 p.m. EST)
Signs o’ the Times: Music and Politics in Contemporary Art, Part II ,Saturday, February 19, 2022, 2:30 – 4:00 p.m. CST (3:30 – 5:00 p.m. EST)
Toward an Inclusive Methodology: Experiments in Art Writing,Saturday, February 19, 2022, 4:30 – 6:00 p.m. CST (5:30 – 7:00 p.m. EST)
March 3-5
Women in Architecture: The African Exchange,Thursday, March 3, 2022, 9:00 – 10:30 a.m. CST (10:00 – 11:30 a.m. EST)
The Promise of Modern Art and Design: Cold War-Era Art and Diplomacy,Thursday, March 3, 2022, 9:00 – 10:30 a.m. CST (10:00 – 11:30 a.m. EST)
DESIGN INCUBATION COLLOQUIUM 8.2: RECENT RESEARCH IN COMMUNICATION DESIGN , Thursday, March 3, 2022,9:00 – 10:30 a.m. CST (10:00 – 11:30 a.m. EST)
Blackness and the Ashcan School, Thursday, March 3, 2022, 2:30 – 4:00 p.m. CST (3:30 – 5:00 p.m. EST)
Carnival in Africa, Friday, March 4, 2022, 9:00 – 10:30 a.m. CST (10:00 – 11:30 a.m. EST)
Curatorial Care: Feminist and Queer Practices ,Friday, March 4, 2022,9:00 – 10:30 a.m. CST (10:00 – 11:30 a.m. EST
Reading Kerry James Marshall’s ‘Rythm Mastr’, Friday, March 4, 2022, 11:00 – 12:30 p.m. CST (12:00 – 1:30 p.m. EST)
Transnational, Transcultural, Transversal: On the Decolonial Discourse of Art,Friday, March 4, 2022, 11:00 – 12:30 p.m. CST (12:00 – 1:30 p.m. EST)
Black Collage, Friday, March 4, 2022, 2:30 – 4:00 p.m. CST (3:30 – 5:00 p.m. EST)
Abolitionist Aesthetics, Friday, March 4, 2022, 4:30 – 6:00 p.m. CST (5:30 – 7:00 p.m. EST)
Art History and Social Justice in Practice ,Friday, March 4, 2022,4:30 – 6:00 p.m. CST (5:30 – 7:00 p.m. EST)
Activist Exhibitions, Friday, March 4, 2022, 4:30 – 6:00 p.m. CST (5:30 – 7:00 p.m. EST)
On Afro-pessimism and Its Alternatives ,Saturday, March 5, 2022, 9:00 – 10:30 a.m. CST (10:00 – 11:30 a.m. EST)
Reconsidering Art History Through Access ,Saturday, March 5, 2022, 9:00 – 10:30 a.m. CST (10:00 – 11:30 a.m. EST)
New Perspectives in Art, Design, and Art History: Supporting and Showcasing Emerging Voices from Marginalized Communities ,Saturday, March 5, 2022, 2:30 – 4:00 p.m. CST (3:30 – 5:00 p.m. EST)
New Ways of Seeing ,Saturday, March 5, 2022, 2:30 – 4:00 p.m. CST (3:30 – 5:00 p.m. EST)
Botanical Intimacies: Colonialism, Decolonial Practice, and Queered Ecologies , Saturday, March 5, 2022,4:30 – 6:00 p.m. CST (5:30 – 7:00 p.m. EST)
CAA 2022 Awards for Distinction
posted by CAA — Jan 24, 2022
CAA announces the 2022 recipients of Awards for Distinction. By honoring outstanding member achievements, CAA reaffirms its mission to encourage the highest standards of scholarship, practice, connoisseurship, and teaching in the arts. With these annual awards, CAA seeks to honor individual artists, art historians, authors, museum professionals, and critics whose accomplishments transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.
Among the awards, the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement is presented to Betye Saar who has not only forged a singular practice for six decades but has also influenced generations of artists, makers, and thinkers. Calling upon the legacies of artists like Joseph Cornell, her symbolic and potent assemblages, of which she’s best known, reflect on the lives, experiences, and identities of African Americans, spirituality, and cultural connectivity.
The Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art is presented to Wu Hung. Perpetually interested in the shape of time, in relation to the time of the world, he has authored many books, essays, and exhibition catalogues that bring Chinese visual culture into different orders of focus, taking into account the changing conditions of tombs, screens, performances, and protests. The scope of his work has an epic quality, allowing arguments to unfold across centuries without losing sight of the very human presence of artists and audiences.
Art Journal Award
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions
Frank Jewett Mather Award
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Elina Gertsman, The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books, Penn State University Press, 2021.
Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work
Kent Monkman
CAA/AIC Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
Zahira Véliz
Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Betye Saar
Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Wu Hung
Distinguished Feminist Award – Artist
In lieu of the Distinguished Feminist awards, we will recognize leaders in the field of feminist art and art history in our 2022 programming highlighting the 50th Year Anniversary of feminism at CAA.
Distinguished Feminist Award – Scholar
In lieu of the Distinguished Feminist awards, we will recognize leaders in the field of feminist art and art history in our 2022 programming highlighting the 50th Year Anniversary of feminism at CAA.
Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
Fred Hagstrom
Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
Terry Smith
Excellence in Diversity Award
Citations:
Art Journal Award
In organizing a course of study predicated on the ontological challenge to discourses of art offered by trans and nonbinary positions, David J. Getsy and Che Gossett have generously identified a major lacuna in the field and provided a toolkit for its amelioration. The jury unanimously selected their “A Syllabus on Transgender and Nonbinary Methods for Art and Art History” as the most distinguished contribution to the Art Journal in 2021. The syllabus not only identifies, positions, and summarizes critical scholarship in the field of transgender and nonbinary studies, it also demonstrates the fruitful integration of pedagogy and emerging research methodologies. Noting the relative dearth of art historical scholarship that has taken up trans methods and histories, the authors suggest the ways in which key themes and terms from art might be critically reevaluated in light of transgender studies. An introduction to each section’s bibliography synthesizes complex debates and individual arguments with remarkable clarity. Sensitive to the necessary intersections of trans analytics with critical approaches to race, ability, and class, the authors highlight readings from Black feminist thought and abolition optics, among other transversal concerns, that elucidate points of fracture within and strategies of resistance to the regulatory gender binary. At once rigorous and accessible, Getsy and Gossett’s contribution offers an adaptable blueprint for researchers and educators.
Committee:
Omar Kholeif, Sharjah Art Foundation
Tilo Riefenstein, School of the Arts, York St John University
Phil Taylor, George Eastman Museum (Chair)
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
America is haunted. Genocidal policies unleashed on Native Americans; the horror of the transatlantic slave trade; war, racism, and social injustice; dark passages in community and individual histories – these traumas and more have left behind a trail of spirits. Taking as its topic the paranormal in American art, Supernatural America reveals the myriad ways in which citizens and artists have sought to see, understand, or come to terms with the ghosts of the past. Lavishly illustrated, with many images never seen before, Supernatural America breaks new ground in presenting the paranormal as a historical subject of wide-ranging importance. Incisive essays by scholars and artists cover painting and sculpture from the late 18th century to the present, spirit photography, art channeled through mediums, spiritualist paraphernalia, folk and outsider art, UFO-inspired materials, video and installation from a range of perspectives. This revealing, thought-provoking investigation into an emerging scholarly field gives proof to William Faulkner’s well-known line: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’.
Committee:
Susan Aberth, Bard College
Benjamin Anderson, Cornell
Karen Lang, University of Arizona
Andrew Saluti, Syracuse University (Chair)
Joyce Tsai, Clyfford Still Museum
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions
In 2015 the Ryerson Image Centre acquired the archives of Berenice Abbott, including more than 6000 photographs and 7000 negatives, her papers, correspondences, and manuscripts. One of the key figures in the history of documentary photography, Abbott is now known as an archivist as well as an artist. It was Abbott who preserved Eugene Atget’s archives at the end of the twenties and published his work. Her own photographs, taken while working for the WPA, consolidated her reputation as a documentary photographer. What exactly is that reputation? In order to answer that question, Documentary in Dispute meticulously reconstructs the manuscript of the book Changing New York, first published in 1939 by Dutton & Co, with photographs by Berenice Abbott and text by renowned art critic Elizabeth McCausland. In a tour de force of archival research and scholarly presentation, Sarah M. Miller reveals how the project was altered to obscure the aesthetic, political and ethical values of photographer and author. Miller’s beautifully written, highly focused essay on Abbott and McCausland situates them in an international avant-garde which recognized the potential of image and text to transform, even to break, our habits of seeing and being. Miller’s overall approach recalls Walter Benjamin’s own in the 1930s. Not coincidentally, Benjamin was inspired by Abbott’s archival and photographic achievements.
Committee:
Susan Aberth, Bard College
Benjamin Anderson, Cornell
Karen Lang, University of Arizona
Andrew Saluti, Syracuse University (Chair)
Joyce Tsai, Clyfford Still Museum
Frank Jewett Mather Award
The jury has unanimously selected Kaira M. Cabañas’ Immanent Vitalities: Meaning and Materiality in Modern and Contemporary Art. Cabañas has written a highly readable volume addressing the material relations between objects and subjects as well as addressing the limiting institutional conventions of academic art history. Her work draws upon theories of new materialism, an animating force that, when attended to, requires rethinking binary categories such as living and inert or life and matter. Cabañas’ volume traverses histories and hemispheres: from the perceptual doubts engendered by the force of color in Alejandro Otero’s paintings to the enmeshed material contingencies of Gego’s metal sculptures, from the sensorial therapeutic propositions of Lygia Clark’s relational objects to the curatorial entanglements of Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck’s challenges to the grid, and from the affective agencies Mario Pedrosa located in the paintings of Djanira da Motta e Silva to the documented rituals of care obfuscating boundaries between the organic and the inorganic in Matheus Rocha Pitta’s Polaroids. Cabañas proposes an alternative to the kind of nation-bounded analyses that often burden studies of modern and contemporary art of Latin America. She addresses academic art history’s tendency to isolate along geographic lines, marginalizing practices and scholarship. Cabañas’ text thus models a critical strategy for assessing not just artworks but the field itself.
Committee:
Julia Bryan-Wilson, University of California, Berkeley
Kim Theriault, Dominican University
Andrew Wasserman, Dominican University (Chair)
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Elina Gertsman, The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books, Penn State University Press, 2021.
Countering the customary interpretation of late medieval art as relentlessly profuse and exuberant, Elina Gertsman’s The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books, explores different constructions of emptiness ranging from the presentation of voids in illustrations to represent the unrepresentable to the deliberate inclusion of physical holes in manuscript pages designed to reveal portions of other pages. Gertsman’s investigation of the “fecundity of emptiness” is a generative and compelling topic for scholars of art history/visual studies across areas, both within and outside Medieval Studies. She argues and demonstrates that, between 1200s and 1500s, the broad circulation of scientific thought and its engagement with theology and formal and literary discourses on emptiness, absence, and negation account for visual, cognitive, and material expressions on the pages of medieval books. Cross-disciplinary in its approach, Gertsman’s book simultaneously draws attention to the visual and material aspects of the manuscripts, phenomenological experience, and philosophical, religious, and scientific theories of the period. In doing so she uncovers an unexpected kinship between the medieval artists and the modernist avant-garde, where the void is regarded as the locus of the sublime and of boundless possibility. Her erudite writing and compelling approach to the subject poses questions throughout that magnify the relevance of her study and stimulate personal inquiry—as a reader reflects on other areas of consideration across time called out in the text. The book is lavishly illustrated and artfully designed with a shape and size complementary to the subject of study.
Committee:
John Cunnally, Iowa State University
Christina Hellmich, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Laura Anne Kalba, University of Minnesota
Lisa D. Schrenk, University of Arizona
Dorothy Wong, University of Virginia (Chair)
Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Marius Hauknes offers a riveting and multi-layered interpretation of the role of spectatorship in the production of meaning in the 13th-century crypt of the Anagni Cathedral. Rather than consider a viewer as a passive onlooker, he devotes attention to multiple aspects of embodied spectatorship: movement, (shifting) angles/perspectives, (in)visibility, temporality, and knowledge. These offer a powerful vantage point from which to consider the intersection of the painting program with the body itself. Drawing attention to contemporary concerns and interests in the body’s health, its cognitive capacities (and limits), and its place in the universe, Hauknes places the paintings into conversation with medicine and astrology. The images emerge as intellectual acts in a religious and political setting that grappled with problems of temporality and being. Hauknes evinces deep and extensive scholarly research, and is able to draw precise and appropriate insights from contemporary cultural and historical contexts, without losing focus on the artwork itself. While offering compelling readings of specific scenes — showing how they could connect, overlap, or echo with one another — Hauknes posits that comprehensive spectatorship was not possible. Instead, human comprehension and temporality contrasts with the divine, creating a space for reflection on the need for medicine and astrology.
Committee:
Nathan T. Arrington, Princeton University (Chair)
Susanna Berger, University of Southern California
Rachel Miller, California State University, Sacramento
Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work
Kent Monkman
There is a long-standing history in the visual arts of artists bearing witness to atrocities: Goya’s painting “The Third of May,” Picasso’s “Guernica,” to name but two. Toronto-based Cree artist Kent Monkman’s exhibition “Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience” follows this tradition, with a few notable updates. On the occasion of Canada’s 150th anniversary in 2017, Monkman’s paintings featured in a cross-country touring exhibit that culminated at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology, August 6, 2020 – January 3, 2021, provides a searing critique of Canada’s colonial policies past and present, including, in the artist’s accounting: “the signing of the numbered treaties, the reserve system, genocidal policies of the residential schools, mass incarceration and urban squalor.” This is a body of work that, though tackling a grim subject matter, is often a blend of subversive humor, fantasy, and homoeroticism. And, although appropriating the form of Western history painting, Monkman’s artwork breaks from tradition by subverting and de-centering the Western gaze and re-presenting a perspective of history from the vantage point of the Indigenous peoples. Albeit, a history filtered through the particular lens of an artist who identifies as both queer and two-spirit, and through his trickster alter-ego, Miss Chief Share Eagle Testickle, the protagonist within much of Monkman’s paintings and performances. Through his use of history painting, Monkman’s project is one that reminds us of the potency of images, and the potential of the artist to provoke and challenge history and its representations.
Committee:
Stephen Fakiyesi, Independent Artist, Toronto
Jessica Hong, Hood Museum, Toledo Art Museum
Beauvais Lyons, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, (Chair)
CAA/AIC Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
Zahira Véliz
Zahria (Soni) Véliz has enhanced our understanding of art through her numerous, scholarly publications to the fields of art history and paintings conservation. Dr. Véliz has strengthened the methodological approaches of scholars who work on Spanish artists and Franz Kline through her publication record as well as her generosity as a colleague.
Through the translation and dissemination of Spanish texts, Dr. Véliz’s has made contemporaneous information about early modern painting accessible to researchers who do not read Spanish. Artists Techniques in Golden Age Spain (1987) is often cited in technical studies of Spanish paintings. More recently, Dr. Véliz edited a translation of Jusepe Martínez’s 1673-75 Practical Discourses on the Most Noble Art of Painting (2017). These publications, along with others by Dr. Véliz on subjects including blue pigments, wooden panels, and drawing practice, have been foundational to the study of Spanish art in the United States.
Dr. Véliz’s PhD dissertation on Alonso Cano served as a foundation for many publications on the artist. In addition, Dr. Véliz’s knowledge and skills of connoisseurship regarding Spanish drawing enriched her drawings catalogues for the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and the Museo de Bellas Artes in Asturias. As Senior Paintings Conservator for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Dr. Véliz published her research into a newly attributed painting to Diego Velázquez as well as technical and art historical research on Franz Kline’s paintings that are models of collaborative research.
Committee Members:
Jim Coddington, American Institute of Conservation
Tiarna Doherty, University of Delaware, (Chair)
Fernanda Valverde, Amon Carter Museum
Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Betye Saar
Betye Saar (b. 1926, Los Angeles, CA) has not only forged a singular practice for six decades but has also influenced generations of artists, makers, and thinkers. Calling upon the legacies of artists like Joseph Cornell, her symbolic and potent assemblages, of which she’s best known, reflect on the lives, experiences, and identities of African Americans, spirituality, and cultural connectivity. Part of the broader Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, Saar also confronted issues of racism and sexism in groundbreaking and radical works like The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972). Saar contends the continual thread in her work is her “curiosity about the mystical.” As she wrote in 1998, “I am intrigued with combining the remnant of memories, fragments of relics and ordinary objects, with the components of technology. It’s a way of delving into the past and reaching into the future simultaneously. The art itself becomes the bridge. Curiosity about the unknown has no boundaries. Symbols, images, place and cultures merge. Time slips away. The stars, the cards, the mystic vigil may hold the answers. By shifting the point of view an inner spirit is released. Free to create.” By foregrounding the mystical, Saar sees people, cultures, contexts, temporalities as part of a larger, interconnected spiritual fabric, an understanding that is needed in a time of extreme ideological polarization, inequities, and geopolitical strife. Saar and her practice continue to resonate and inspire current generations and those to come.
Committee:
Stephen Fakiyesi, Independent Artist, Toronto
Jessica Hong, Hood Museum, Toledo Art Museum
Beauvais Lyons, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, (Chair)
Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Wu Hung
Trained in both China and the United States, Wu Hung’s writing brings perspectives native to both cultures to bear on aesthetics, art history, and archaeology. His arguments ground the cultures of China, from the earliest ancient survivals to the interventions of our own time in structures of mind that defy the progress narratives of the West. He has received countless awards for work that has transformed the study of East Asian art and drawn attention to the relationship between images and the spaces within which they are observed, from the Dunhuang caves to the double screens to Zhu Jinshi’s Fangzhen: A Cubic Meter of Canvas in Berlin.
Overall, his writings explore the many, restless transitions across time and space. Perpetually interested in the shape of time, in relation to the time of the world, he has authored many books, essays, and exhibition catalogues that bring Chinese visual culture into different orders of focus, taking into account the changing conditions of tombs, screens, performances, and protests. The scope of his work has an epic quality, allowing arguments to unfold across centuries without losing sight of the very human presence of artists and audiences. He works in the discipline of art history as a poet-scholar who knows the brushstroke from the inside out, crafting prose of great clarity and nuance that opens the field to specialists and new readers alike.
Distinguished Feminist Award – Artist
In lieu of the Distinguished Feminist awards, we will recognize leaders in the field of feminist art and art history in our 2022 programming highlighting the 50th Year Anniversary of feminism at CAA.
Committee:
Robin Cass, Rochester Institute of Technology (Chair)
Delinda J. Collier, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Midori Yoshimoto, New Jersey City University
Distinguished Feminist Award – Scholar
In lieu of the Distinguished Feminist awards, we will recognize leaders in the field of feminist art and art history in our 2022 programming highlighting the 50th Year Anniversary of feminism at CAA.
Committee:
Robin Cass, Rochester Institute of Technology (Chair)
Delinda J. Collier, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Midori Yoshimoto, New Jersey City University
Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
Fred Hagstrom
Fred Hagstrom, a member of the Carleton College faculty since 1984, is the 2022 recipient of the CAA Distinguished Teaching of Art Award. Hagstrom’s nomination included endorsements from former students and colleagues, including a listing of 341 former students who have taken his printmaking, book arts, and drawing classes. Hagstrom also directed a bi-annual study abroad 10-week trip for students to Australia, New Zealand, and the Cook Islands twelve times over twenty years, where students learned about South Pacific and Maori art and culture. Based on this experience, Dylan Yvonne Welch (BA, ‘08) recalls “Each trip, he candidly and humbly facilitates conversations about colonial history, racism and art. As a student, this was a breath of fresh air as I had found that many other professors seemed uncomfortable or simply avoided discussing those topics.” Eleanor Jensen (BA, ’01) credit him with teaching her to both see and draw, while also observing that “Fred is deeply sensitive to his students and is always ready to stand up for somebody who has been harmed or overlooked.” Students observed that Hagstrom’s classes were interdisciplinary, challenging them to connect their studies in other disciplines as well as their life stories to their studio work. Jade Hoyer credits Professor Hagstrom with being a mentor long after she graduated in 2007. Fred Hagstrom has profoundly impacted his students, many of whom have pursued careers as artists and educators. We are pleased to recognize Fred Hagstrom’s more than three decades of teaching with this award.
Committee:
Stephen Fakiyesi, Independent Artist, Toronto
Jessica Hong, Hood Museum, Toledo Art Museum
Beauvais Lyons, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, (Chair)
Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
Terry Smith
Terry Smith has long written, curated and taught across borders, in the beginning coming from Australia to study and work in New York as both a scholar and an active member of Art & Language. He has been expanding his sights ever since. He has long advocated for the study of indigenous art. For the past twenty years, starting with projects such as Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s -1980s at the Queens Museum, he was the trusted collaborator of Okwui Enwezor. He has always insisted that the past and the present be given their due consideration and global perspectives.
All of this came to his teaching. Students have understood the breadth of his expertise and curiosity; they have used them as inspiration for their own paths; they have appreciated his warmth, his encouragement and the gift of his time. The example he has set as an art historian and a curator has had visible effects in the ranks of university professors and museum curators in the United States and abroad. They do not conform to a single, theoretical way. His students repeatedly speak of his belief in the independent existence of the art object and at the same time his insistence that it be grounded and imbricated in its own real time social relations. Art is allowed its scale, its interior place in our minds, and its exterior place in our world.
Committee:
Shirin Fozi, University of Pittsburgh (Chair)
Joseph Masheck, Hofstra University
Molly Nesbit, Vassar College
Excellence in Diversity Award
Committee:
Carmelita Higgenbotham, Virginia Commonwealth University
Kelly Murdoch-Kitt, University of Michigan
Sohl Lee, Stony Brook University
Meet the 2022 CAA-Getty International Program Participants
posted by CAA — Dec 22, 2021
We’re pleased to announce this year’s participants in the CAA-Getty International Program. Now in its eleventh year, this international program supported by the Getty Foundation will all twelve new participants and four alumni to participation in the 2022 Annual Conference. Learn more about the first ten years of the program in our online publication.
At a pre-conference colloquium, the new participants will discuss key issues in the international study of art history together with CAA-Getty alumni and US hosts. The program will delve into topics as postcolonial and Eurocentric legacies, interdisciplinary and transnational methodologies, and the intersection of politics and art history.
Alumni invited back to the 2022 conference will present in the session Can Art History Be Affective? Empathy, Emotion and the Art Historian, chaired by Getty alumni and International Committee members Nora Veszpremi and Cristian Nae, while also providing an intellectual and social link between new participants and our burgeoning group of CAA-Getty International Program alumni.
The goal of the CAA-Getty International Program is to increase international participation in CAA’s activities and the field of visual arts in academia, thereby expanding international networks and the exchange of ideas both during and after the conference. We look forward to welcoming the following participants.
2022 PARTICIPANTS IN THE CAA-GETTY INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM
Tatiana Muñoz Brenes is an art curator and researcher. She has combined the exercise of cultural management with Social Sciences by having degrees in Art History and Psychology, both from the University of Costa Rica. Her training has allowed her to work on the topics of community museums, sustainability, collection research, curating exhibitions and curatorial accompaniment for artistic production. Currently, her work focuses mainly on queer art and the LGBTIQ+ community in Latin America. In addition, she has extensive experience in international projects, lectures, publications and museum training in Scotland, Portugal, Spain, China, Japan, Ecuador, and other countries. Projects can be found at www.arthistorylady.com
Simona Cupic is Professor at the Department of Art History, University of Belgrade, Serbia. Her fields of research and teaching include art and culture between the World Wars, and the 1950s and 1960s. She is particularly interested in the visual and popular culture between 1920s and 1960s. She is the author of Mona Lisa & Superman. John F. Kennedy and the New Frontier of the Culture (2016), Elain de Kooning. Portraits (with Brandon Brame Fortune, Ann Eden Gibson, 2015), The JFK Culture (edited volume, 2013), and Bourgeois Modernism and Popular Culture. Episodes of the Fashionable, Faddish and Modern (1918-1941) (2011), among others.
Anica Draganić is an architectural historian, conservator and multimedia artist who currently serves as an Associate Professor at the University of Novi Sad, Serbia. She received her PhD in Architectural History and Heritage Preservation from the University of Belgrade with a dissertation on Austro-Hungarian historical breweries. Her work focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century European architecture, with particular emphasis on industrial heritage and identity issues in the intercultural context of Central Europe. Her extensive research on the architectural heritage of the Vojvodina region has been published in journals, conference proceedings, and books, but also presented in numerous exhibitions. Her most recent book, Shadows and Silhouettes of Industrial Past of Vojvodina, shows the complexities of the socio-political context in which the industrial architecture of a specific multicultural region emerged, developed and disappeared. She is currently particularly interested in European architecture from the socialist period, exploring its historical values and contemporary potential.
Heba Khairy Metwaly is an Exhibition coordinator at the Grand Egyptian Museum. She Oversees and provide rigorous, accurate and efficient exhibition coordination and follow up all aspects of exhibition development between all partners in the GEM. She is a PhD researcher specialized in the Collection Management and Documentation Practices in different museums. Heba has participated in many international and national field projects and studies focusing on the tangible and intangible material culture preservation and local community engagement and development. Heba has participated in the development of the daily life gallery “P34” at the Egyptian Museum of Cairo, the European Union Funding Project of Transforming the Egyptian Museum. In 2017 she participated in the British Museum International Training Program, where she curated the Object in Focus temporary exhibition. She Also participated in many international conferences focusing on the preservation of museum collection and exhibition design.
Roma Madan Soni is an art historian with a PhD from the University of Wolverhampton, an Assistant professor at Box Hill College Kuwait, an ecofeminist-artist, and a researcher. Her art, teaching, and research are interdisciplinary, positioned at the node of ecofeminism: practice, theory and history, and contemporary visual politics. Her articles are published in Journal of Visual Art Practice, Feminist Media Studies, Ecofeminism and Climate Change, Crafts Research, Art & The Public Sphere, Necsus, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Journal of Gender Studies, Swasti, and a chapter in Cambridge Scholars. She collaborated for conference presentations and conducted workshops at CAA, SVIMS-Pune, JNU, LSR, Raza Foundation, University of Wolverhampton, Kuwait-Nuqat, KISR, TEDx Global Day- Gulf University of Science and Technology, Dar Al Athar-Yarmouk, Kuwait University, American University of Kuwait, Box Hill College Kuwait, American Open University, UN Habitat and Beit Sadu. She has exhibited at Kunsthaus-Steffisburg, TAPRI-Finland, DarAlAthar AlIslamiyah, The Scientific Centre Kuwait, MOMA-Kuwait, Masaha13, Artsy, Mayinart, Artling, Saatchi galleries, and painted the book-cover for Routledge Handbook of Feminist Peace Research (2021). Research grants, commissions and awards from The Scientific Centre Kuwait, Kuwait Foundation of Advanced Sciences, Kuwait Institute of Scientific Research, UN Habitat, and Arab Open University aided her research and creations. She is a member of the Museum Committee and a Reader for the Council of Readers at CAA. I chair the “Transformative Education Think Tank”-Collective Impact Coalition-Konrad Adenauer Stiftung to address Kuwait’s academic challenges. Her work has been accepted at the Venice Art Fair and Florence Biennale 2021.
Patricia D. Meneses is an assistant professor of Art History at the University of Campinas (Brazil). She earned her PhD in History of the Visual Arts at the University of Pisa (2009). She is the author of Baccio Pontelli a Roma. L’attività dell’architetto per Giuliano Della Rovere (Felici Editore 2010) and editor of several books, such as Arte Não-Europeia. Conexões historiográficas a partir do Brasil (Esta ção Liberdade 2020), and A imagen como experimento. Debates contemporaneous sobre o olhar (Milfontes 2021). Recently, she was Hans Jonas visiting professor at the University of Siegen (2019), where she taught a course on “exotic” materials in Art History. She is currently part of a Connecting Art Histories project sponsored by the Getty Foundation (“Teaching Non-European at Brazilian Universities”). Her research focuses on the connections between art, science and ecology in the nineteenth-century. She is presently developing a book project about hummingbird’s ecology in Brazilian visual culture.
Akinwale Onipede is an art historian, researcher and teacher at the University of Lagos, Nigeria. He trained at the University of Benin, and, the University of Lagos, where he works in the area of the interface of global and local cultures and identities as expressed in visual arts. His main interest is in how developments globally in the philosophies, techniques, products and opportunities in visual arts, have affected its contemporary practice and direction in Nigeria. The universalization of cultures, consequent upon globalization, he argues, is skewed in favor of the West, whose culture is endorsed, whose pocket is deepest and whose machinery is most efficient, in the promotion of the direction of visual arts studies, practice, articulation and documentation. He is of the position that the continent that produced the great pyramids, the Nok, Igbo Ukwu, Ife and Benin masterpieces should play crucial roles in contemporary promotion of the arts.
Melissa M. Ramos Borges is an art historian with a predilection for the (re)vision of the discipline. She obtained her doctorate from the Programa de Estudios Artísticos, Literarios y Culturales with a specialty in Art History at the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid, where she presented the first comprehensive study of avant-garde art produced between 1960-1980 in Puerto Rico. She is a professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez and Río Piedras Campus. In addition, she is an independent researcher and curator who has published and presented her exhibitions and articles in various international platforms. She curated SUZI FERRER, the first retrospective exhibition of the groundbreaking feminist avant-garde artist, presently on view at the Museo de Arte y Diseño de Miramar. She is currently working on publishing a catalogue with contributions from various scholars which will accompany an upcoming traveling SUZI FERRER exhibition.
Shenouda Rizkalla is a trained archaeologist with extensive experience in archaeological fieldwork, database and collections management, and community outreach. His current research focus is the museum’s role in preserving the local community identity, applied to the content and display of the Sharm El-Sheikh museum and build up a sustainable community outreach program by engaging the local population with the collection and relate the results to wider discussions of repatriation and post-colonial heritage management in Egypt. Rizkalla is an Egyptology PhD graduate from Helwan University-Egypt. His research to date has been diverse, working on recording and translating Ptolemaic Period hieroglyphics, creating and executing site management strategies, and addressing the looting of archaeological sites. He is a member of many excavations and site management missions inside Egypt since 2012. He has many Presentations and Invited Talks, Academic Reports and Publications.
Nsima Stanislaus Udo is a Nigerian and an Africanist scholar. He completed his BA in History and International Relations in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. He then proceeded to South Africa where he completed his Honors and MA degrees (cum laude) at the University the Western Cape in Visual History and Theory. He lives in Cape Town and is a doctoral candidate at the University of the Western Cape. His research interest is in African cultural studies: in thinking around visual representations, histories and meanings of African cultural and festival practices. His doctoral research is currently looking at the history of Calabar Festival and Carnival, Nigeria. He is exploring the multiple-layered cultural, visual, aesthetic, economic and secular representations of this complex and elaborate festival. Nsima Stanislaus Udo presently serves as a teaching and research assistant at the Faculty of Art in the same university.
John Kelechi Ugwuanyi is a senior lecturer and the coordinator of postgraduate studies in the Department of Archaeology and Tourism, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He had his PhD in heritage studies at the University of York and MA and BA in Archaeology and Tourism at the University of Nigeria. His research interest is critical heritage studies, museum, indigenous knowledge systems, tourism, and contemporary archaeology. He is the co-editor of Journal of African Cultural Heritage Studies and sits on the editorial board of the Studies in Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory book series published by the Archaeopress in Oxford as part of the British Archaeological Report series of monograph. Kelechi has published in national and international journals of repute. He is a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and a recipient of other scholarship/grant including the Overseas Research Scholarship of the University of York, UK.
Elizabeth Catoia Varela holds a PhD in History and Criticism of Art from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2016). She worked at the Research and Documentation Center of the Modern Art Museum of Rio de Janeiro – MAM Rio (2009-2021). Her dissertation was published as a book in 2017 (Concrete Art Beyond Europe: Brazil, Argentina and the MAM Rio). She published other three books about the history of the museum. Varela was the curator of the exhibition “MAM: its history, its heritage” (2013-2016). She was awarded in 2020 with the AAM-Getty International Program/American Alliance of Museums and is a member of the College Art Association (CAA) and the International Council of Museums (ICOM).
PARTICIPATING ALUMNI
Nadhra Shahbaz Khan is Associate Professor of Art History and the Director of the Gurmani Centre for Languages & Literature at LUMS, Lahore, Pakistan. A specialist in the history of art and architecture of the Punjab from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, Dr. Khan’s research covers the visual and material culture of the region during the Mughal, Sikh, and colonial periods. Her interest lies in investigating levels of human agency behind artefacts and architectural spaces, both as creators and consumers to understand their political, religious and socio-economic ambitions at different historical intersections. Her publications, conference papers and other research activities spread over more than a decade, especially her book titled Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s Samādhi in Lahore: A Summation of Sikh Architectural and Decorative Practices has successfully brought Sikh art and architecture to the forefront of Pakistan’s heritage discussions and conservation activities.
Halyna Kohut is an associate professor in the Faculty of Culture and Arts at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine, where she teaches history of art, contemporary art, feminist art, and history of theatrical costume. Educated as an artist, she received her Ph.D. from the Lviv National Academy of Arts. Kohut is the CAA-Getty International Program alumna and a recipient of scholarships and grants from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Austrian Agency for International Mobility and Cooperation, the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta, and the Queen Jadwiga Foundation at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. Kohut specializes in eighteenth-century East European carpets and kilims. Her most recent research interest focus on woman art in Soviet Ukraine. She is especially interested in how ideology informed the identities of women artists and how they challenged that ideology with their art practices.
Irena Kossowska graduated from the Warsaw University in 1980. She obtained a Ph.D. degree and Habilitation at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences, in 1990 and 2001 respectively. Currently she is Full Professor of Art History at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, and at the Polish Institute of World Art Studies in Warsaw. She specializes in the field of nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual arts, art theory, and criticism. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including from the Bogliasco Foundation, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, National Humanities Center, Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Henry Moore Institute, and the British Academy. She has written extensively on Polish and European art, including Artistic Reconquest: Art in Interwar Poland and Europe, The Search for Cultural Identity in Eastern and Central Europe 1919-2014, Symbolism and Young Poland; Reinterpreting the Past: Traditionalist Artistic Trends in Central and Eastern Europe of the 1920s and 1930s; and The Beginnings of Polish Original Printmaking 1897-1917.
Ana Mannarino is an art historian and a professor of art history in the School of Fine Arts and the Visual Arts Postgraduate Program at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where she received her PhD in history of arts and visual arts. Her research focuses on Brazilian modern and contemporary art, particularly on the relationship between text and image, art and poetry, and the production of artists’ books.
CAA’s 110th Annual Conference Museum-Related Sessions
posted by CAA — Dec 14, 2021
See below for information on CAA’s virtual Resources for Academic Art Museum Professionals (RAAMP) session and a list of other sessions with museum topics, organized by the two conference components, the first from February 17-19 and the second March 3-5.
Note: As of January 7, all in-person sessions and activities scheduled for February 16-19 in Chicago are now virtual on the same dates. Virtual sessions and activities scheduled for March 3-5 will remain the same. This change will allow for more access and engagement, regardless of location.
CAA’s RAAMP Session and Talks
New and Improved: Using Recent Experiences to Inform the Future of Museums
Thursday, March 3, 2022, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM CST (12:00 PM – 1:30 PM EST)
Walking the Talk: New Low Carbon Curatorial and Educational Structures that Amplify Impact and Reduce Costs
Natalie Marsh, ViVA Virtual Visiting Artists
Amanda Potter, Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University
Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye, ViVA Virtual Visiting Artists
Lessons Learned from a Year of Virtual Teaching
Ellen M. Alvord and Kendra Weisbin
Speculative Annotation at the Library of Congress: A Web-Based Annotation Tool that Invites Virtual Engagement with the Library’s Collection
Courtney Lynn McClellan and Jaime Mears, Library of Congress
Museum Sessions, February 17-19
Canonizing the Intangible: Aromatic Strategies in the Making of the U.A.E.’s National Identity
Friday, February 18, 2022, 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM CST
Francesca Bacci, Zayed University
Economies of Discipline and Display: Curating Conflict in Israel/Palestine
Friday, February 18, 2022, 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM CST
Michelle Facos, Indiana University
Instrumentalizing Memory and the Politics of Commemoration
Friday, February 18, 2022, 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM CST
Iro Katsaridou, Museum of Byzantine Culture, Thessaloniki, Greece
Eve Kalyva, University of Kent
Reassessing the Art Biennial
Friday, February 18, 2022, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM CST
Paloma Checa-Gismero, Swarthmore College
Recent Perspectives in the Philosophy of Curatorial Practice
Friday, February 18, 2022, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM CST
Rossen Ventzislavov
The Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series at Rutgers University’s Douglass College: A 50 Year History of Exhibition and Space Making for Woman-Identifying Artists through the Voices of the Artists Themselves
Friday, February 18, 2022. 2:30 PM – 4:00 PM CST
Julia E. Marsh, Cedar Crest College
The Practice of Care: Trauma Informed Pedagogy
Education Committee
Saturday, February 19, 2022, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM CST
Jenna Ann Altomonte, Mississippi State University
TFAP Feminist Solidarities and Kinships, Panel 3 – Exhibitions and Curatorial Spaces
The Feminist Art Project (TFAP)
Saturday, February 19, 2022, 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM CST
Erina Duganne, Texas State University
Susan E. Richmond, Georgia State University – School of Art and Design
Tatiana E. Flores, Rutgers University
New Frontiers: Creating, Collecting, Preserving and Displaying Digital Based Art of Russia and Eastern Europe
Saturday, February 19, 2022, 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM CST
Natalia Kolodzei. Kolodzei Art Foundation
Museum Sessions, March 3-5
Curatorial Care: Feminist and Queer Practices
Friday, March 4, 2022, 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM CST (10:00 AM – 11:30 AM EST)
Nomusa Makhubu, University of Cape Town
The Global Rise of Traveling Exhibitions at Mid-Century
Friday, March 4, 2022, 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM CST (10:00 AM – 11:30 AM EST)
Agata Justyna Pietrasik
Magdalena Moskalewicz, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Activist Exhibitions
Friday, March 4, 2022, 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM CST (5:30 PM – 7:00 PM EST)
Rebecca J. DeRoo, Rochester Institute of Technology
New Age of Teaching the Art of the Islamic World
Museum Committee
Saturday, March 5, 2022, 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM CST (10:00 AM – 11:30 AM EST)
Xenia Gazi, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Reconsidering Art History Through Access
Saturday, March 5, 2022, 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM CST (10:00 AM – 11:30 AM EST)
Sara Catherine Woodbury, College of William and Mary
Curating Craft: Contemporary Making in Global Museums of Islamic Art
Saturday, March 5, 2022, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM CST (12:00 PM – 1:30 PM EST)
Leslee Michelsen, Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art at Shangri La
New Perspectives in Art, Design, and Art History: Supporting and Showcasing Emerging Voices from Marginalized Communities
Committee on Diversity Practices
Saturday, March 5, 2022, 2:30 PM – 4:00 PM CST (3:30 PM – 5:00 PM EST)
Stefanie Snider, Kendall College of Art and Design
Rachel Lynn de Cuba, Clemson University
Ellen Levy, Author of Chapter 8: Art in an Academic Setting
posted by CAA — Nov 29, 2021
As part of CAA’s 10-year anniversary celebration of its publication The Eye, the Hand, the Mind: 100 Years of the College Art Association, chapter authors reflect on their contributions and how their impressions of the field have changed. Our second video in the series features Ellen Levy, who wrote Chapter 8, “Art in an Academic Setting: Contemporary CAA Exhibitions.”
Ellen K. Levy, PhD, is a multimedia artist and writer known for exploring art, science and technology interrelationships since the mid-1980s. Levy highlights their importance through exhibitions, educational programs, publications and curatorial opportunities. Her graduate studies were at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston following a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College in Zoology. She was President of the College Art Association (2004-2006) before earning her doctorate (2012) from the University of Plymouth (UK) on the art and neuroscience of attention. She then was Special Advisor on the Arts and Sciences at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. She was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Arts and Sciences at Skidmore College (1999) and taught many transdisciplinary classes and workshops (e.g., the New School, Cooper Union, Brooklyn College, Banff). She was recipient of an AICA award and an arts commission from NASA following a solo exhibition at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) (1985).
She has exhibited her art internationally and in such landmark exhibitions as Weather Report (Boulder Museum, cur Lucy Lippard) and Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics (Field Museum, Chicago, adv. Martin Kemp). Levy has published widely on art and complex systems. With Berta Sichel, she guest edited and contributed to CAA’s special issue of Art Journal (spring 1996), likely the first widely distributed academic publication on contemporary art and the genetic code. With Charissa Terranova, she is co-editor of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s Generative Influences in Art, Design: From Forces to Forms (2021, Bloomsbury Press). Levy has also curated a related exhibition for Pratt Manhattan’s gallery. Levy and Barbara Larson co-edit the “art and science since 1750” book series of Routledge Press. Levy and Patricia Olynyk co-direct the NY LASER program, a central initiative of Leonardo/ISAST. She was twice an invited participant in Watermill’s Art and Consciousness Workshop, led by stage director and playwright, Robert Wilson.
Museum Committee Research Survey: Developing New Directions with College Art Association Member Input
posted by CAA — Aug 26, 2021
Visitors in the Musée du Louvre in 2020 © Antoine Mongodin
In the spring of 2021, the CAA Museum Committee initiated a survey of our members for the purposes of revising current directions and charting new ones that respond to updated knowledge of their concerns.
The results indicate that the Museum Committee‘s previous and planned Conference sessions and professional development workshops in 2021–2022 are appropriate, that they should publicize their presence more, and should use these projects and others to strengthen connections with professional museum groups; encourage diversity, decolonization, and the use of museums to educate; in addition to fight for salary equity. In this endeavor, they ask any interested CAA members to join and help in this mission.
Key Takeaways of the Report
In general, respondents likely appreciate the recent focuses and activities of the Committee, yet wish they would also move forward in new directions.
Both the CAA panels and professional development workshops should be continued and can be used to achieve the following desired goals culled from survey responses:
- Help publicize the Museum Committee more broadly.
- Give museum and curatorial studies students, young professionals, and museum professionals, particularly those from underrepresented groups, necessary resources as they start their careers, and mentor persons who want to become museum professionals or teach museum/curatorial studies, including in concert with art history coursework.
- Support the function of museums as pedagogical sites, especially during the processes of decolonizing and defining decolonization.
- Develop and disperse a list of curatorial/museum studies programs in American universities, including those offered on conjunction with art history training, and perhaps have a dedicated space on CAA’s website or another location with a link on the CAA website homepage to publicly disperse this list.
- Renew efforts to craft and chart the implementation of policy statements and best-practice guidelines particularly concerning salary equity and unpaid internships, among similar issues relevant to the field, and to do so in concert with professional museum organizations, such as the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC), American Alliance of Museums (AAM), and the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG). One way to do this is to have present and future Museum Committee members actively reach out to persons within professional museum groups to create joint projects.