CAA News Today
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for June 2013
posted Jun 10, 2013
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.
June 2013
Carolee Schneemann, Untitled (from the Dust Paintings series), 1984, ink, ashes, acrylic paint, string, vegetable dye, glass particles, photograph on fabric, and circuit board on heavy rag paper, 37½ x 49 in. (artwork © Carolee Schneemann)
Carolee Schneemann: Flange 6rpm
PPOW Gallery
535 West 22nd Street, Third Floor, New York, NY 10011
May 11–June 22, 2013
Titled after a multisensory installation that immerses the viewer in an environment of projected foundry fires, animated by motorized hand-sculpted components cast in aluminum, the fourth exhibition of the pioneering feminist multimedia artist Carolee Schneemann at PPOW Gallery brings together an assortment of works that date from the 1980s to today, illuminating diverse aspects of her expansion of media and her exploration of materials, as well as revealing the politics of her work. In addition to Flange 6rpm, the show features four examples from her Dust Paintings series (1983–86), created with degraded materials, layers of dust, spilled paint, and circuit boards in critical reference to the effacement of Lebanese and Palestinian villages by continuous bombardment. Two major grid installations of photographs and text—Saw Over Want (1980–82) and Vulva’s Morphia (1995)—are also included.
Nicole Eisenman / Matrix 248
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Woo Hon Fai Hall, 2625 Durant Avenue, No. 2250, Berkeley, CA 94720
May 3–July 14, 2013
Curated by Apsara DiQuinzio, Nicole Eisenman / MATRIX 248 brings together approximately forty paintings and works on paper by this New York–based artist created after 2009 that variously contemplate the human condition—though they are specifically inspired by and reflect the post-Bush-era economic crisis and sociopolitical instability. The exhibition includes examples of Eisenman’s first reaction to social turmoil—a series of monotypes featuring weeping people—and other works in which she idiosyncratically grafts historical styles such as American Regionalism and the Italian Renaissance with German Expressionism, updating familiar art forms to make timely social commentaries, as in Triumph of Poverty (2009), based on Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting of the same name, and Tea Party (2011).
Ellen Gallagher, Wiglette from DeLuxe, 2004, photogravure and plasticine, 13 x 10¼ in. (artwork © Ellen Gallagher)
Ellen Gallagher: AxME
Tate Modern
Bankside, London SE1 9TG, England
May 1–September 1, 2013
The first overview of this American artist’s twenty-year career and the first major survey of her work in the United Kingdom, Ellen Gallagher: AxME illuminates signature themes of her exploration of myth, nature, social issues, and art history through painting, drawing, relief, collage, print, sculpture, film, and animation, while inviting the viewer to closely study her fascinating mode of production. Along with key works such as the various series of wig-map grid collages that cast sharp commentaries on black beauty ideals, along with the intricate relief Bird in Hand, the exhibition presents Gallagher’s film installation Murmur (2003–4), her ongoing series of watercolor collages Watery Ecstatic, and a new series called Morphia, comprising two-sided drawings that combine “the intimate with the epic, the urban with the oceanic, the ethereal with the physical, and history with the present.”
Nicola L: Body Language under the Sun and the Moon
Broadway 1602
1181 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10001
May 4–June 22, 2013
Focusing on Nicola L’s radical perspective on the gendered body, whether in pain or in joy, this exhibition introduces the work of an overlooked French artist. Although based in New York since the 1980s, Nicola began her career in Paris in the 1960s as a conceptual artist working in installation, performance, and functional art (since 1976 she also turned to film). A larger-than-life-sized installation, a penetrable sculpture for three performers called The Cylinder, debuted at the Biennale de Paris in 1967 with the rock group the Soft Machine; it was then shown at La MaMa Theater in New York. Pierre Restany welcomed her exceptional vision in his essay “A Long Day’s Journey to the End of the Skin” for her first exhibition at Galerie Daniel Templon in 1969, the same year he hailed Evelyne Axell’s nudes, shown in the same gallery, as signs of sexual liberation.
Nicola’s functional objects became classics of 1960s experimental furniture and soft-art design. But their eroticism is underpinned by an early feminist perspective that merits comparison with the work of several women artists of the sixties onward, whether in France or elsewhere: see, for instance, La Femme Commode (1969–2012), The Lover’s Wardrobe (1967–70), and The Lips Lamp (1969), and soft sculptures such as The Giant Foot (1967–2013) and Giant Woman Sofa (1970–2012). In 1969 Nicola created The Red Coat for Eleven People or Same Skin for Everyone—whose original is included at Broadway 1602—that was first performed with Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970. Characterized as her pivotal “collective object of performance,” the work was used for performances around Europe, including one in Barcelona, where she was arrested by Francisco Franco’s army.
In 1974, Nicola participated in the exhibition Grandes Femmes, Petits Formats at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris, presenting her provocative multimedia sculpture Woman Pregnant from TV (1970). By 1979, the artist moved definitively to New York, where she witnessed and was inspired by the city’s countercultural movements and vibrantly experimental art milieu. In 1981, she directed a film on Abbie Hoffman, the radical social activist and leader of the Yippie movement, called My Name Is Abbie: Orphan of America. Nicola continues to work on her Penetrable Universe series.
Eve Sussman | Rufus Corporation
Bass Museum of Art
2100 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33139
April 12–November 3, 2013
Featuring the Rape of the Sabine Women (2004) and 89 Seconds at Alcázar (2007) and complemented by an interventional installation of photographic stills from both works alongside historical portraits from Bass Museum’s collection, this exhibition interweaves masterpieces of Eve Sussman’s film productions through Rufus Corporation (which she founded in 2003) that dazzle with their opulent settings. Conventionally screened in a darkened room, the twelve-minute 89 Seconds at Alcázar delights with Sussmann’s enactment of the enigmatic moment of court life captured in Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas (1656).
With its five acts inventively presented as a five-part video installation, Sussman’s celebrated Rape of the Sabine Women is a potent interpretation of the myth of Rome’s founding—filmed in Germany and Greece and set in the Cold War sixties—as ideal vehicle for her critique of utopia, power, and gender relationships in comparable historical settings of hope and decadence. Although Rape of the Sabine Women was made as a feature film, the action of its presentation at the Bass unspools on over thirty screens—including sprawling wall projections, a houselike construction, several tiny video monitors, and a massive installation of television sets piled randomly on the floor—and offers a mesmerizing immersive filmic experience that enhances the visual poetics and the power of Sussman’s reinterpretation of the Roman legend with government agents and Greek butchers’ daughters.
Niki de Saint Phalle, My Monster, 1968 (artwork © Niki de Saint Phalle/BUS 2013)
Niki de Saint Phalle: The Girl, the Monster, and the Goddess
Moderna Museet
Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Sweden
April 20–December 1, 2013
Capitalizing mainly on the Moderna Museet’s comprehensive collection of works by Niki de Saint Phalle, largely thanks to Pontus Hulten and a generous donation by the late artist, this exhibition captures the centrality of the figures of the girl, the monster, and the goddess in de Saint Phalle’s artistic universe, exploring its autobiographic and feminist underpinnings and advocating the importance of the artist in the twentieth-century postwar avant-garde. Enhanced by archival material that reflects the reception of her Ur-Goddess, She – A Cathedral, constructed for the museum in 1966, the exhibition evokes the meeting of the girl, the monster and the goddess in de Saint Phalle’s film Daddy and is accompanied by a new documentary on the artist.
VALIE EXPORT: Images of Contingence
Żak | Branicka
Lindenstrasse 35, Third Floor, Berlin D-10969 Germany
April 26–June 16, 2013
“For me, contingence is how and where you perceive borders, and how and where and when borders explode,” said VALIE EXPORT, and it is the exploration of a variety of borders that Images of Contingence illuminates by highlighting the artist’s interest in physical contact and its implications in various media, including installation, drawing, photography, film, and archival materials. Along with the installation Fragments of Images of Contingence (1994), in which light bulbs hanging from poles and wires are sensuously yet dangerously immersed into cylinders filled with fundamental-to-our-existence liquids such as milk, used oil, or water, and its rhythmic pendant, The un-ending/-ique melody of cords (1998), a recording of a threadless sewing machine and its sound, the exhibition brings together a selection of videos permeated by issues of contingency, liminality, and sensual experience. The show also includes the artist’s celebrated Touch Cinema, performed in Munich in 1969, for its political activation of touch. A series of drawings from the early 1970s, depicting hands that protect and caress or cause suffering, complements this showcase of EXPORT’s negotiation of borders by illuminating her contradictory exploration of touch and the female body as ciphers of intimacy, sensuality, and carnality, as well as violence and aggression.
Getty Foundation Funds a Third Year of CAA’s International Travel Grant Program
posted Jun 10, 2013
The Getty Foundation has awarded CAA a major grant to fund the International Travel Grant Program for a third consecutive year. The foundation’s support will enable CAA to bring twenty international visual-arts professionals to the 102nd Annual Conference taking place February 12–15, 2014, in Chicago. CAA’s International Travel Grant Program supports art historians, artists who teach art history, and museum curators, and provides the grantees with funds for travel expenses, hotel accommodations, per diems, conference registrations, and one-year CAA memberships. The program will include a one-day preconference meeting to be held on February 11, 2014, providing grant recipients and their hosts with the opportunity to address their common professional interests and issues.
The goal of the International Travel Grant Program is to increase international participation in CAA and to diversify the organization’s membership, which now includes members from seventy-five nations. CAA also strives to familiarize international participants with the submission process for conference sessions and foster collaboration among American art historians, artists, and curators and their international colleagues. As in previous years, members of CAA’s International Committee and the National Committee for the History of Art have agreed to host the program participants.
Grant guidelines and the 2014 application can be found on the CAA website. Professionals who have not previously attended a CAA conference are especially encouraged to apply. Applicants do not need to be CAA members. This grant program is not open to graduate students or to those participating in the 2014 conference as chairs, speakers, or discussants. The deadline for applications has been extended to August 23, 2013.
For information on applying to the International Travel Grant Program, please contact its project director, Janet Landay, at jlanday@collegeart.org or 212-392-4420.
Image: Two International Travel Grant recipients and their CAA hosts at the 2013 Annual Conference. From left to right: Elaine O’Brien (CAA host), Venny Nakazibwe (with back turned, from Uganda), Trinidad Perez (Ecuador), and Ann Albritton (host and chair of CAA’s International Committee) (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Report on Part-Time Faculty in Art History and Studio Art
posted Jun 07, 2013
The more information that is made available on critical issues in the field, the greater a case can be made for advocacy to promote change. One of the major challenges for the visual-arts field is ensuring that all faculty are properly supported so that they may provide outstanding teaching, research and creative work. It is estimated that over 70% of faculty at colleges and universities in the United States are now hired on a contingent bases. This upward trend began in the 1970s and appears to dominate the future.
Data on working conditions of part-time faculty is not easily available since the funding for the National Study on Postsecondary Faculty at the Department of Education was discontinued in 2003. Data on art history, studio art, and art education faculty is even more difficult to obtain since visual arts and performing arts faculty were historically aggregated together by the Department of Education.
In response to the lack of data, the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, http://www.academicworkforce.org/ comprising twenty six academic associations including CAA, organized an extensive survey. The report on this survey was published in June 2012 http://www.academicworkforce.org/CAW_portrait_2012.pdf. Of the 20,000 part-time faculty participating in the survey, 1,034 were CAA members. The data they contributed has been compiled and is now available [http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/CAA-CAWContingentFacultySurvey.pdf].
Some of the major findings from the art historians, artists and art educators indicate that: 1) part-time faculty in the visual arts field have a slightly higher salary rate than the median; 2) there are gender disparities in salaries within the visual arts; and 3) resources and benefits provided by institutions are two to three times lower for visual-arts faculty than the full sample of respondents.
What is CAA doing to address these issues? The Board adopted the Guidelines for Part-Time Faculty in 2004. The Professional Practices Committee under the chairmanship of Jim Hopfensperger and an ad hoc committee led by Tom Berding and CAA board member, John Richardson are working to update these guidelines to respond to present needs in order to provide standards for the field.
Several CAA annual conference sessions have been devoted to resources for administrators and part-time faculty. At the 2013 New York Annual Conference, a panel which included John Curtis from the American Association of University Professors and Rosemary Feal from the Modern Language Association, among others, provided valuable resources for networking among part-time faculty. An example is organizations such as CAW that are actively addressing workforce issues and state and national government advocacy. These resources can be found at http://www.collegeart.org/resources/contingentfaculty.
The CAA Board has organized a planning task force of members to address critical issues in the field over the next five years. The profound changes in the structure of faculty, teaching formats, digital research, publishing and creative work are some of the greatest challenges identified. The members of the task force welcome your comments in shaping how CAA can address these and other major issues of our profession. Please send your ideas and comments to CAA at nyoffice@collegeart.org.
I would like to thank Peter Bucchianeri at Harvard University for compiling the data and writing the report on the responses of CAA member respondents to the contingent faculty survey.
June 2013 Picks from CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts
posted Jun 06, 2013
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts produces a curated list, called CWA Picks, of recommended exhibitions and events related to feminist art and scholarship in North America and around the world.
The CWA Picks for June 2013 comprise seven solo exhibitions, most of them bringing together work spanning an artist’s career. In Manhattan, PPOW Gallery is presenting examples from several series by the pioneering feminist artist Carolee Schneemann, and Broadway 1602 has gathered several historical installations by Nicola L, an underrecognized French artist based in New York. Work made by Nicole Eisenman since 2009 is on view at the Berkeley Art Museum in California, and Eve Sussman is the subject of a survey at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, Florida. In Europe, Ellen Gallagher is having a midcareer retrospective at Tate Modern in London, VALIE EXPORT is showing work related to touch (i.e., physical contact) in Berlin, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm is focusing on Niki de Saint Phalle’s interest in the girl, the monster, and the goddess.
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.
Image: Niki de Saint Phalle, Could we have loved?, 1968 (artwork © Niki de Saint Phalle/BUS 2013)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted Jun 05, 2013
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
The Exit Interview: Frank Goodyear and Anne Collins Goodyear
They did not arrive at the Smithsonian together, but Frank H. Goodyear III and Anne Collins Goodyear, longtime curators at the National Portrait Gallery, are leaving it as a pair. After twelve years at the museum, this husband-and-wife team will begin their tenure as codirectors of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine, in June. (Read more in the Washington Post.)
Detroit Museum Not the First to Consider Selling Out
Museums sell works all the time but typically not their best stuff. When they do sell, it’s to get rid of pieces that don’t suit the collection. They use the money to buy new works that are a better fit. They’re not supposed to use the money to buy computers or pay down debt, according to industry standards. But when museums aren’t freestanding institutions, as is the case in Detroit, the larger entities that control them sometimes can’t help but see dollar signs. (Read more from National Public Radio.)
A Step in the Wrong Direction—or False Advertising?
What comes after crowd sourcing and crowd funding? Crowd deaccessioning, of course. Yup, the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens has opened an exhibition of five paintings from its collection by the French artist Bernard Smol (1897–1969). The museum wants to keep just one of them because of “limited storage space and evolving collecting philosophy.” (Read more in Real Clear Arts.)
“You Become Better with Age”
At what age do people hit their stride professionally? Categorically speaking, athletes, engineers, politicians, television writers, salesmen, and actresses all have varying norms and shelf lives, sometimes affected by physical attributes or societal expectations. Seemingly immune to ageist perceptions and traditional notions of retirement are artists. A historical look reveals that a striking number have been highly productive and turned out some of their best work late into old age, including Bellini, Michelangelo, Titian, Ingres, Monet, Matisse, Picasso, O’Keeffe, and Bourgeois. (Read more in ARTnews.)
Best Practices for Live Tweeting
I often live tweet the conferences and events I attend. For example, I was involved with the Twitter discussion while at the Linked Ancient World Data Institute, which led to great conversations with people who weren’t able to attend and allowed for continued engagement among the participants. However, there were times when people asked that information not be shared or that links not be posted—and this information was respected. Overall, though, live tweeting was a major boon to the event. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)
The Modern Writing-School Paradox: More Students, Fewer Jobs, More Glory
Never before have there been so many teachers telling so many students how to write. However meager the money, teaching is a paying gig and a subsidized education. The students, though, are a mystery. The number of traditional MFA programs, undergraduate writing programs, nontraditional low-residency writing programs, online writing courses, weekend writing workshops, summer writing conferences, writers’ colony retreats, private-instruction classes, and how-to-write books, blogs, and software programs has grown so colossally you’d think there is as much demand for new writers in the marketplace as there is for mobile-app designers. You’d be wrong. (Read more in the Atlantic.)
A Pollock Restored, a Mystery Revealed
Jackson Pollock’s process and his canvases have been so extensively studied that it would seem there could be nothing else to learn. Yet a ten-month examination and restoration of his One: Number 31, 1950, by conservators at the Museum of Modern Art, have produced new insights about how the artist worked. (Read more in the New York Times.)
Art Detective Warns of Missing Checks That Let Stolen Works Go Undiscovered
European auction houses, dealers, and collectors are failing to make adequate checks to avoid handling stolen artworks, an art lawyer has warned after recovering from an Italian auction an old-master painting taken from its British owner in a burglary more than thirty years ago. Christopher A. Marinello, who specializes in recovering stolen art and resolving title disputes, said: “We do find a lot of stolen and looted artwork in civil-law countries such as Italy, France, and Germany. Consigners of tainted works of art often try to hide behind the good-faith purchase laws of these countries while performing little or no due diligence.” (Read more in the Guardian.)
Inaugural Recipients of the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award
posted Jun 05, 2013
CAA is pleased to announce the five inaugural recipients of the new Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award. Thanks to a one-year grant of $60,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, CAA will provide funds to emerging authors who are publishing monographs on the history of art and related subjects. The purpose of the subventions is to reduce the financial burden that authors carry when acquiring images for publication, including licensing and reproduction fees for both print and online publications.
The winning books for spring 2013 are:
- Claudia Brittenham, The Cacaxtla Paintings: How Art Shaped the Identity of an Ancient Central Mexican City, University of Texas Press
- Chelsea Foxwell, In Search of Images: Kano Hogai and the Making of Modern Japanese-Style Painting, University of Chicago Press
- Jesse Locker, “The Hands of Aurora”: Artemisia Gentileschi and Her Contemporaries, Yale University Press
- Megan R. Luke, Kurt Schwitters: Space, Image, Exile, University of Chicago Press
- Karl Whittington, Body-Worlds: Opicinus de Canistris and the Medieval Cartographic Imagination, Press of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies
Successful applicants are emerging scholars who are under contract with a publisher for a manuscript on art history or visual studies. For full details on the grant, please review the Application Guidelines and the Application Process, Schedule, and Checklist. Fall deadline: September 15, 2013.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted May 29, 2013
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.
DIA’s Art Collection Could Face Sell-Off to Satisfy Detroit’s Creditors
The once unthinkable is suddenly thinkable. Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr is considering whether the multibillion-dollar collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts should be considered city assets that potentially could be sold to cover about $15 billion in debt. How much is the art at the DIA worth? Nobody knows exactly, but several billion dollars might well be a low estimate. (Read more in the Detroit Free Press.)
AAMD Statement on Detroit Institute of Arts Collection
A museum’s collection is held in public trust for current and future generations. This is a bedrock principle of the Association of Art Museum Directors and of the museum field as a whole. Art collections are vitally important cultural and educational resources that should never be treated as disposable assets to be liquidated, even in times of economic distress. (Read more from the Association of Art Museum Directors.)
Painting via “Power of Thought” May Hold Some Promise
An Austrian-based company called G-Tech Medical Engineering has developed software that allows people to “paint” on a computer through the “power of thought,” reports the Telegraph science correspondent Richard Gray. As Gray notes, the tool—which researchers are hoping to develop to the point that it can be a chip implanted in the brain—can help patients with progressive brain diseases. But there’s an aspect to art making that may be lost in translation. (Read more in the Houston Chronicle.)
Your Thievin’ Art? At Play in the Field of Fair Use
Julie Saul recently opened a show of work by Arne Svenson, an artist with a telephoto lens, a formalist’s eye, and a somewhat unsettling obsession with his neighbors in the glass-walled apartment building across the street. You can meet them, too, in the color pictures in The Neighbors. Assuming that they really are neighbors—and not conjured in the studio or on the computer—the work falls into one of those gray areas of fair use, the legal doctrine that allows artists to use images of or by others under certain circumstances. (Read more in ARTnews.)
Masterworks for One and All
Many museums post their collections online, but the Rijksmuseum has taken the unusual step of offering downloads of high-resolution images at no cost, encouraging the public to copy and transform its artworks into stationery, t-shirts, tattoos, plates, or even toilet paper. The museum, whose collection includes masterpieces by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Mondrian, and van Gogh, has already made images of 125,000 of its works available through Rijksstudio, an interactive section of its website. The goal is to add 40,000 images a year until the entire collection of one million artworks spanning eight centuries is available. (Read more in the New York Times.)
Thousands of Cave Paintings Have Been Discovered in Mexico
Archaeologists have uncovered nearly five thousand cave paintings at eleven different sites in Mexico, the likely product of early hunter-gatherers. What’s even more remarkable is that the area was previously thought to be uninhabited. The discovery was made in the northeastern region of Burgos in the San Carlos mountain range of Tamaulipas. The archaeologist Martha García Sánchez, who works at the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History, recently presented these findings at the Historic Archaeology meeting held in Mexico’s National History Museum. (Read more from io9 and BBC News).
Help Desk: Death and Taxes (Mostly Taxes)
I have recently been the lucky recipient of an unprecedented amount of small, but not insubstantial, payments. Some are for arts writing and editing, others are one-time grants, art sales, and various art-world-related odd jobs. All earnings have been issued through W-9s and will show up as 1099-MISC income. None of it has been taxed. I understand that I should set aside a portion of these funds for the state and feds, but where do I start? (Read more in Daily Serving.)
Rejection and Its Discontents
The probability that a researcher will have a grant proposal rejected nowadays is about 1. In the current climate, in which grant agencies and foundations are receiving more proposals than ever before even as their budgets stagnate or shrink, the last few remaining decimal places of uncertainty are rapidly disappearing. It is natural to feel disappointed, angry, hurt, and frustrated when a rejection notice arrives, and it’s OK to give in to those feelings—in private, anyway. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
An Open Letter to: Mr. Kevyn Orr, Emergency Manager, City of Detroit
posted May 28, 2013
An Open Letter to:
Mr. Kevyn Orr, Emergency Manager
City of Detroit
2 Woodward Avenue
Detroit, Michigan 48226
Dear Mr. Orr:
On behalf of the College Art Association that represents over 14,000 art historians, artists, curators, art educators and art conservators we express our shock and concern upon reading The Detroit Free Press article today, “DIA’s Collection Could Face Sell-Off to Satisfy Detroit’s Creditors.”
The Detroit Institute of Arts is one of the greatest art museums in the country that represents the finest creative achievements throughout the history of the world. The DIA is not only a great treasure but one of the very few places in Detroit where all people can enjoy, contemplate and study art and its many related concepts. The DIA has developed itself as a public educational institution and has been a leader in the profession at engaging with all segments of the community.
The CAA adheres to the principle that public art museums are held in the public trust and as such are to be protected for the public good. It also supports the Alliance of Museums Code of Ethics and the Association of Art Museum Directors’ Policy on Deaccessioning that states that the sale of art museum collections to support operating expenses is unethical.
We appeal to your higher judgment in assessing the true value of the DIA and its critical role for the public good of the city, state and the country in deliberating on the future of this great collection.
Sincerely yours,
Anne Collins Goodyear
President
Linda Downs
Executive Director
August Update
On August 26, 2013, the Executive Committee of the CAA Board of Directors has agreed to promote this petition, initiated by Jeffrey Hamburger of Harvard University, regarding the potential sale of the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Spring 2013 Meiss Winners
posted May 28, 2013
This spring, CAA awarded grants to the publishers of six books in art history and visual culture through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to the generous bequest of the late Prof. Millard Meiss, CAA gives these grants twice a year to support the publication of scholarly books in art history and related fields.
The grantees for spring 2013 are:
- Claudia Brown, Great Qing: Painting in China, 1644–1911, University of Washington Press
- James M. Cordova, The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico: Crowned-Nun Portraits and Reform in the Convents, University of Texas Press
- Elina Gertsman, Fragments, Ruptures, Imprints, Play: The Shrine Madonna in the Late Middle Ages, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Jeanette F. Peterson, Visualizing Guadalupe: From the Black Madonna to the Queen of the Americas, University of Texas Press
- Victoria L. Rovine, African Fashion, Global Style, Indiana University Press
- Karl Whittington, Body-Worlds: Opicinus de Canistris and the Medieval Cartographic Imagination, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies
Books eligible for Meiss grants must already be under contract with a publisher and on a subject in the visual arts or art history. Authors must be current CAA members. Please review the application guidelines for more information. Deadline for fall applications: September 15, 2013.
Updated Directory of Affiliated Societies
posted May 23, 2013
The Directory of Affiliated Societies, a comprehensive list of all seventy-six groups that have joined CAA as affiliate members, has just been updated. Please visit the directory to view a single webpage that includes the following information for each group: name, date of founding, size of membership, and annual dues; a brief statement on the society’s nature or purpose; and the names of officers and/or contacts for you to get more details about the groups or to join them. In addition, CAA links directly to each affiliated society’s homepage.