CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted May 22, 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.
What’s the Point of Art School?
As changes to the school curriculum and university funding undermine the arts education system, industry experts gathered at Central Saint Martin’s art school to discuss what the future holds for the field. Are you studying creative arts or design? Share an image or video that captures why you love art school. (Read more in the Guardian.)
It’s Time to Rethink and Expand Art History for the Digital Age
Continuing a conversation on Getty Voices about rethinking art history, the art historian Nuria Rodríguez Ortega, a recent participant in the Digital Art History Lab, argues that we must reestablish digital art history on a new ground, both adapting the field to the new web landscape and broadening its scope to include the full spectrum of human attempts to make meaning of art. (Read more in the Getty Iris.)
To Profit or Not? How Art Galleries Make Money in Chicago, and Why Some Choose Not To
More than once I have heard a Chicago art dealer joke that their commercial gallery is really a not-for-profit because, well, their business makes no profit. Despite that appraisal, nonprofit fundraising techniques are finding their way into the business models of some for-profit startups. Traditionally, commercial galleries have been run as shops that sell products with negotiable price tags. Now, some are experimenting with fundraising and sponsorships as strategies for growth. Oppositely, a couple of nonprofit art organizations are incorporating commercial aspects into their practices, such as selling art and organizing an art fair. (Read more in the New City.)
Andy Warhol and His Foundation: The Questions
After Andy Warhol died in 1987, his will directed that a foundation should be set up in his name, funded with proceeds from the sale of some 95,000 pictures, prints, sculptures, drawings, and photographs left in his estate. As well as creating and endowing the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts provides financial support to artists and scholars, galleries, publications, and educational projects. Warhol’s bequest made no provision for the authentication of his artwork. But in 1994 the foundation initiated work on a multivolume catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s art, in part because the project would “contribute to the stabilization of the market for Warhol works over time, thus having a direct benefit to the Foundation’s longterm goal of converting its Warhol works to cash at favorable prices.” (Read more in the New York Review of Books.)
The New Rules of Engagement
Predictably, the recession uncovered fundamental operational and structural weaknesses in American higher education. Few institutions managed to be as nimble as they should have been in responding to the depressed economy. Even fewer presidents had the courage to call on their boards of trustees to think strategically, make bold plans, innovate, and invest. The harsh truth is that the culture into which “change” presidents are placed commonly accepts limited programmatic innovation, except when it emerges from the faculty, and is intolerant of structural innovation. The culprits are not usually the faculty. (Read more in Academe.)
The Neoliberal Assault on Academia
Lost amid the fetishization of information technology and the pathos of the struggle over proper working conditions for adjunct faculty is the deeper crisis of the academic profession occasioned by neoliberalism. This crisis is connected to the economics of higher education but it is not primarily about that. The neoliberal sacking of the universities runs much deeper than tuition fee hikes and budget cuts. (Read more in Al Jazeera.)
Career Services Must Die
Well, not die, exactly. Transform. “The term ‘career services’ has been a phrase that has been used for several decades to describe what colleges have been doing,” says Andy Chan, vice president for personal and career development at Wake Forest University. “It’s not working.” Chan coedited the new report, A Roadmap for Transforming the College-to-Career Experience. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)
The Library’s Future Is Not an Open Book
Talk about imposing: the ceremonial stone stair leading to bronze gates and carved doors; the frieze of inspiring names; and the vaulted hall that seems the very definition of hallowed. And the books, bound portals opening to anywhere imaginable, available to all comers. In cities across the United States, the central public library came into being when the country was young and striving to impress. Architecturally grand, the central library was both beacon and monumental tribute to learning and civic pride; a people’s palace with knowledge freely available to all. But, really, when was the last time you spent any time there? (Read more in the Wall Street Journal.)
Members of the 2013–14 Nominating Committee
posted May 21, 2013
CAA is pleased to announce the members of the 2013–14 Nominating Committee, which is charged with identifying and interviewing potential candidates for the Board of Directors and selecting the final slate of candidates for the membership’s vote. The committee members, their institutional affiliations, and their positions are:
- DeWitt Godfrey, Colgate University, Vice President for Committees and Chair
- Dina Bangdel, Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar and Member at Large
- Leslie Bellavance, Alfred University and CAA Board Liaison
- Kevin Hamilton, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Member at Large
- Beauvais Lyons, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Member at Large
- Denise Mullen, Oregon College of Art and Craft and CAA Board Liaison
- Sabina Ott, Columbia College Chicago and CAA Board Liaison
- Melissa Potter, Columbia College Chicago and Member at Large
- Linda Downs, CAA Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer (ex officio)
The 2012–13 Nominating Committee chose the new members of the committee at its recent business meeting, held during the 2013 Annual Conference in New York in February. The Board of Directors also appointed three liaisons. CAA publishes a call for nominations and self-nominations for Nominating Committee service on the website in late fall of every year and publicizes it in CAA News. Please direct all queries regarding the committee to Vanessa Jalet, CAA executive liaison.
Designing a Better Future: A Participatory Platform for Exchange
posted May 16, 2013
Jacki Apple and Mat Rappaport, the producers of a 2014 ARTspace session, seek your participation for “Designing a Better Future: A Participatory Platform for Exchange,” taking place at the 102nd CAA Annual Conference in Chicago on Saturday, February 15, 10:00 AM–2:00 PM. Deadline for proposals: June 1, 2013; notification of selection: June 20, 2013.
Designing a Better Future: A Participatory Platform for Exchange
Artists and designers operating as thinkers and communicators, visualizers and producers, can be leaders in changing how we think, live, and act in order to make a better world. Are we ready to discuss cultural production and the arts as viable and meaningful practices beyond the established system of commodity trading? What potential models of an effective creative practice can we envision and develop?
Artists, designers, media producers, photographers, filmmakers, architects, writers, theorists, educators, and cultural historians are invited to submit proposals for presentation and discussion that will inspire others to join them in imagining, inventing, and actualizing a more sustainable and enlightened possible future, whether it be local or global.
What would you do to effect change? What would that look like? Do aesthetics matter?
We seek provocative and challenging theoretical concepts and/or models for practical application. Encouraged are visionary, daring, and unconventional ideas and collaborations across fields in the arts, sciences, and humanities that conceive different ways to address social, economic, and environmental realities.
General topics and themes to consider may include:
- Climate change, the environment, and sustainable living: consumption, energy, waste, food, water, air, and economic and social consequences
- The culture of violence: all its social, political, cultural, and economic manifestations
- Technology and human rights: biological, political, intellectual, and spiritual
Presentation Format
The format for presentation will be an interactive forum of exchange between speakers and audience. There will be no podium. Speakers will be placed within the audience. Presentations may include visuals such as images, texts, charts, etc.
Each speaker will be given seven minutes to present his or her proposal. The audience will then have equal time—seven minutes—to respond and discuss. Time may be slightly less or more depending on the number of outstanding proposals selected.
Submission Instructions
Please send a description of your topic and the theoretical concepts and/or model that you intend to propose in approximately three hundred words, plus a brief biography or CV of no more than two pages. The written proposal must include a title, name(s) of author(s), address, email, and phone number. Please submit all proposal files as PDF documents to studio@meme01.com. Deadline for proposals: June 1, 2013; notification of selection: June 20, 2013.
2013 Candlelight Vigil for Global Heritage
posted May 16, 2013
Saving Antiquities for Everyone (SAFE) invites CAA members to join the 2013 Candlelight Vigil for Global Heritage, marking the tenth anniversary of the looting of the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad. This year, SAFE encourages individuals and institutions to light a candle and share their remembrances and thoughts on the current situation, contemplate the future, and take the opportunity to announce their related projects and programs related to preserving our shared cultural heritage. Whether you are an expert or an “ordinary” concerned citizen, SAFE wishes to hear from you.
To observe the vigil, SAFE has launched a three-month global awareness campaign, 10 Years After, from April 10 to July 1, 2013 (also on Facebook). The organization is highlighting the efforts of individuals and institutions dedicated to global-heritage preservation; the global concern of looting and the illicit antiquities trade; how public awareness can contribute to the solution; and the many ways you participated in the Global Candlelight Vigil around the world.
These comments and reflections will be posted on SAFE’s website and disseminated via social media. Furthering the group’s commitment to raising public awareness about the global concern of looting and the illicit antiquities trade, SAFE will gather these reflections in a memorial booklet as a public statement of concern and as a tribute to all those who safeguard the future of our past.
As a nonprofit dedicated to preserving cultural heritage worldwide, SAFE initiated the Global Candlelight Vigil for the Iraq museum in 2007 with Donny George, the museum’s former director, to commemorate the looting of the museum, which became the impetus for the founding of the organization. Individuals and institutions from around the world hosted and attended lectures and candle-lighting ceremonies. A video of these events was compiled to mark the fifth anniversary. In 2011, the vigil was renamed to honor the memory of George, who died that year.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted May 15, 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.
Cultivating Partnerships in the Digital Humanities
As academics we can be too snug in our institutional silos. We sometimes think of one another as competitors for students, and as a result we duplicate scarce resources in mutually damaging ways. Without more coordinated programs, will we go on teaching the way we have since the Industrial Revolution? Will our students, knowing it doesn’t have to be that way and worried about their future, lose patience with us? The digital humanities provide a context for facing those questions head-on. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
What We’re Not Arguing About
The solutions to the crisis in higher education are still a subject of fierce debate, and I’m happy to see people from a variety of perspectives and backgrounds adding their voices to the conversation. At the same time, I think it’s important to clarify what academics and former academics are and aren’t arguing about. (Read more at Adventures in (Post) Gradland.)
How Long Is the Average Dissertation?
The best part about writing a dissertation is finding clever ways to procrastinate. The motivation for this blog comes from one of the more creative ways I’ve found to keep myself from writing. I’ve posted about data mining in the past, and this post follows up on those ideas using a topic that is relevant to anyone that has ever considered getting, or has successfully completed, their PhD. (Read more at R Is My Friend.)
To Raze or Not? MoMA Rethinks Plan
After impassioned protests from prominent architects, preservationists, and design critics, the Museum of Modern Art said that it would reconsider its decision to demolish its next-door neighbor, the former home of the American Folk Art Museum, to make room for an expansion. In a recent board meeting, the directors were told that a board committee had selected the design firm Diller Scofidio & Renfro to handle the expansion and to help determine whether to keep any of the existing structure. (Read more in the New York Times.)
Help Desk: Ideal Representation
I’ve been meeting with a commercial gallery in my city for some time, and they’ve extended me an offer to come aboard. I’m excited about the idea of professional representation, having a platform to promote myself to a larger audience and further opportunity for sale of work. Some of the work the gallery represents is totally not my style, which is to say, artwork that favors more commercially viable subject matter or style at the cost of exercising any real dynamic or conceptual verve. How much should this influence my decision to join the gallery? (Read more in Daily Serving.)
Thinking about Accreditation in a Rapidly Changing World
Enormous change is under way in higher education, driven by a perfect storm of crisis (around cost, access, quality, and funding), technological innovation and what that innovation makes possible, the growing presence and influence of for-profit providers, abuses (of various kinds), opportunity, and workforce-development needs in a global and technological context. Any one of those challenges might fill an agenda for a commissioners’ retreat or a small conference, but accreditors now wrestle with all of these various forces across a broad landscape of change and urgency. (Read more in Educause Review.)
Counting, Not Curtailing, Adjuncts’ Work
Nowhere does the Law of Unintended Consequences run more rampant than in the field of taxation. That was clearly demonstrated at the Internal Revenue Service’s rule-making hearing on April 23, in the agency’s attempts to craft regulations to impose a steep tax on employers who fail to provide employee health-care coverage required by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. While most of the twenty-five other witnesses at the hearing represented various employers or organizations, I testified in my personal capacity as an interested citizen who happens to be an adjunct faculty member and former IRS lawyer. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
How Prevalent Is Money Laundering in the Art World?
Recent federal charges against the New York dealer Helly Nahmad included that he worked “to launder tens of millions of dollars on behalf of the illegal gambling business.” While Nahmad has pleaded not guilty to all the charges in the indictment, the accusation raises the questions of whether (and if so why) art would be used in this way. Art lends itself to money laundering because the market’s lack of transparency means art can become what Judge Fausto Martin De Sanctiscalls an “invisible asset.” Values can be manipulated, and complex ownership schemes, with an emphasis on secrecy, are commonplace. (Read more in the Art Newspaper.)
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted May 14, 2013
In its regular roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, architects, photographers, filmmakers, publishers, and others whose work has significantly influenced the visual arts.
- Les Blank, a documentary filmmaker whose Burden of Dreams (1982) chronicled the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, died on April 7, 2013. He was 77 years old. Blank also directed films on the musicians Lightning Hopkins, Dizzy Gillespie, and Clifton Chenier
- Ellen Cantor, an artist and filmmaker known for her ongoing work Pinochet Porn, passed away on April 21, 2013. She was 51 years old
- Bernard Cheese, a British painter, printmaker, and educator, died on March 15, 2013, at the age of 88. Cheese taught at Saint Martins School of Art (1950–68), Goldsmiths College (1970–78), and Central School of Art and Design, London (1980–89)
- Les Coleman, a London-based artist, writer of aphorisms, and “all-around rare bird,” died on January 17, 2013. He was 67
- Edward de Grazia, an American lawyer who fought censorship of Tropic of Cancer, Lysistrata, and The Naked Lunch, died on April 11, 2013, at age 86. De Grazia taught at Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York for thirty years and was the author of Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius (1991)
- Dominic Elliott, the personal assistant of the artist David Hockney, died on March 17, 2013. He was 23 years old
- Nigel Glendinning, a scholar of Spanish art who was an expert on Francisco de Goya, passed away on February 23, 2013. He was 83 years old. Glendinning held various professorships and fellowships across the United Kingdom and Ireland
- Sidney Goodman, a figurative painter and emeritus professor of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, passed away on April 11, 2013. He was 77
- Regina Granne, an artist based in New York whose drawings demonstrated creative interpretations of feminism, war, and politics, died on January 26, 2013. She was teaching most recently at Parsons the New School for Design
- Jene Highstein, a Postminimalist sculptor whose work was shown internationally, passed away on April 27, 2013, at the age of 70. Highstein was involved in the fabled exhibition space 112 Greene Street in the 1970s
- Jack Jaeger, a Dutch artist and curator known for coediting eight issues of ZAAP, a quarterly VHS video-art magazine, from 1994 to 1996, died on March 15, 2013. Born in 1937, he also worked as a cameraman, producer, director, and editor of television commercials and films
- L. Brent Kington, a professor of metalsmithing at Southern Illinois University Carbondale from 1961 to 1997 and former chairperson of its School of Art and Design, died on February 7, 2013, at age 78. A retrospective of his career, L. Brent Kington, Mythic Metalsmith, toured the United States from 2007 to 2011
- Martyl Langsdorf, the artist who created the Doomsday Clock image that symbolized the dangers of nuclear power during the Cold War, died on March 26, 2013. She was 96 years old
- Bert Long, a former chef who left the kitchen to become an artist, passed away on February 1, 2013, at age 72. The Houston-based Long, considered an outsider artist by some, won an NEA grant in 1987 and the Prix de Rome in 1990
- Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, a Russian artist and gay-rights icon, died in March 2013 at the age of 43. Known for his impersonations of Marilyn Monroe, Mamyshev-Monroe emerged as a performing and video artist in Saint Petersburg in the late 1980s
- Rick Mather, an American architect based in London who designed extensions to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Dulwich Picture Gallery, and Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, among other institutions, died on April 20, 2013, at age 75
- Walter Pierce, an American architect who designed the modernist houses of Peacock Farm, a subdivision in Lexington, Massachusetts, passed away on February 27, 2013. He was 93 years old
- Joe N. Prince, director of education for the National Endowment for the Arts from 1977 to 1985, died on February 23, 2013, at age 75. He also served as special assistant to the agency’s chairman for two years
- Ganesh Pyne, an Indian artist who was called the “painter of darkness” for his fantastical imagery in watercolor, gouache, and tempera, died on March 12, 2013, at age 76. Among his his influences ranged from the Bengal school of art (a forerunner to Indian modernism) to his personal experience as a child witnessing the Kolkata riots
- Daniel Reich, an unconventional art dealer based in New York, died on December 25, 2012. He was 39 years old
- Martin Rogers, a British printer, sculptor, and publisher who founded the Small Publishers Fair in London, has died. He was 61 years old
- Dorothy Sanders, a philanthropist who founded the Milwaukee Art Museum’s African-American Art Acquisition Committee, passed away on February 13, 2013. She was 96
- James Schell, an Atlanta artist and illustrator whose works were published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Sunday magazine, died on January 6, 2013, at age 94. He was the art director for Kirkland White and Schell Advertising, which he helped establish
- Shozo Shimamoto, a Japanese artist who was a member of the Gutai group, died on January 25, 2013, at the age of 85
- Merton D. Simpson, a painter, collector, and dealer in African art, died on March 9, 2013, at the age of 84. Simpson founded his gallery of African and tribal art in 1954, and his artwork became politicized in the early 1960s after joining the Spiral group, which counted Romare Bearden and Hale Woodruff among its members
- Paolo Soleri, the innovative architect of an ecologically minded city in the Arizona desert called Arcosanti, passed away on April 9, 2013. He was 93
- Jack Stokes, the animation director of the Beatles’ film Yellow Submarine, died on March 20, 2013. He was 92. Stokes also worked on titles and inserts for Magical Mystery Tour
- Clinton Darlington Swingle, who oversaw the purchase, preservation, and restoration of the Fabric Workshop and Museum’s building in Philadelphia, died on January 27, 2013. He was 84
- Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, a Mexican architect who combined modern and Precolumbian forms, died on April 16, 2013, at age 94. His best-known buildings are the Basilica of Guadalupe, National Museum of Anthropology, and Azteca Stadium
- William Wilson, a former critic for the Los Angeles Times, died on April 20, 2013, at the age of 78. He began writing for the paper in 1965, contributing exhibition reviews through 2001
- Zao Wou-Ki, a Chinese artist whose work combined the traditional landscape painting of his country with European abstraction, died on April 9, 2013, age 92. He had lived and worked in Paris from 1948 to 2011
Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries, or your completed texts, to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the next list.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for May 2013
posted May 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.
May 2013
Hung Liu, Avant-Garde, 1993, oil on shaped canvas and on wood, 116 x 43 in. Collection of Hung Liu and Jeff Kelley (artwork © Hung Liu)
Summoning Ghosts: The Art of Hung Liu
Oakland Museum of California
1000 Oak Street, Oakland, CA 94607
March 16–June 30, 2013
Curated by René de Guzman, Summoning Ghosts: The Art of Hung Liu is the first comprehensive survey of one of the most prominent Chinese painters working in the United States. It features approximately eighty paintings as well as personal ephemera, such as photographs, sketchbooks, and informal painting studies from private and public collections around the world. Bringing together examples of her socialist-realist drawings from the 1970s, made at the height of the Cultural Revolution in China, with paintings realized since her immigration to the United States in 1984, Summoning Ghosts offers an illuminating exploration of Liu’s development and technical experimentation and captures the expressive bending of her training as social realist and muralist in Maoist China and the sophisticated ways in which she interlaces portraiture and documentation for her exploration of memory and history, among other themes.
Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey
Nasher Museum of Art
Duke University, 2001 Campus Drive, Durham, NC 27705
March 21–July 21, 2013
Bringing together about fifty works from the mid-1990s to the present, including previously unseen sketchbooks, this first comprehensive survey of the internationally renowned artist Wangechi Mutu thoroughly investigates her work and its contribution to transnational feminism, Afrofuturism, and globalization. It also presents the artist’s first-ever animated video, made with the pop producer and singer Santigold, commissioned for the Nasher Museum, as well as site-specific installations that enliven her collages. Organized by Trevor Schoonmaker, A Fantastic Journey is accompanied by a major catalogue that contains essays by the artist and the curator, as well as texts by dream hampton, Kristine Stiles, and Greg Tate.
Gina Pane, Azione Sentimentale, 1973, seven color photographs on wood panel, 48¼ x 40⅛ in. (artwork © Gina Pane; photograph by Francoise Masson and provided by ADAGP, Anne Marchand, and Kamel Mennour, Paris)
Parallel Practices: Joan Jonas and Gina Pane
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
5216 Montrose Boulevard, Houston, TX 77006
March 22–June 30, 2013
Presented in the Brown Foundation Gallery, Parallel Practices celebrates two major female contributors to early performance art working on both sides of the Atlantic—Joan Jonas and Gina Pane—and captures the complementary and disparate natures of their contemporaneous practices. To illuminate the multidisciplinary apects of their work as an essential element of their performative poetics, the exhibition brings together a great selection of early and later sculpture, photography, video, drawing, installations, and performances. Importantly, Parallel Practices is the first major presentation of Pane’s work in the United States and accompanied by an illustrated catalogue that explores the intersections of the two artists through texts by the art historians Barbara Clausen, Élisabeth Lebovici, and Anne Tronche, as well as an essay by the exhibition’s curator, Dean Daderko.
Les Immémoriales
49 Nord 6 Est – Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain de Lorraine
1 bis, rue des Trinitaires
F-57000 Metz, France
March 2–June 23, 2013
A rare meeting of Agnes Denes (b. 1931, Hungary), Monica Grzymala (b. 1970, Poland), and Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948, Chile) at Frac Lorraine by means of three installations that poetically interweave past and future through references to the rituals, languages, and material culture of Andean, Native American, and Australian Aboriginal people, Les Immémoriales offers an evocative contemplation on “the vital connection of human and Earth” with timely political resonance. The exhibition also ruminates on timeless questions regarding our passing from Earth and addresses a variety of political issues that hint at its modern abuses.
Gillian Wearing, Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say, I’M DESPERATE, 1992–93, c-type print mounted on aluminium, 44.5 x 29.7 cm (artwork © Gillian Wearing)
Gillian Wearing
Pinakothek der Moderne
Museum Brandhorst, Theresienstraße 35, 80333 Munich, Germany
March 21–July 7, 2013
Gillian Wearing’s first major retrospective in Germany showcases photographic works and film installations, providing an overview of her entire oeuvre and illuminating the sophisticated ways in which this British artist uses portraiture to make social relationships visible. Organized by Bernhart Schwenk and meant to travel to London and Düsseldorf, Gillian Wearing is distinguished by the evocative framing of Wearing’s works through several pieces by Andy Warhol from the museum’s collection.
Marie Laurencin
Musée Marmottan Monet
2 Rue Louis Boilly 75016 Paris, France
February 21–June 30, 2013
The first French museum exhibition to celebrate the work of Marie Laurencin (1883–1956), one of the most successful female artists of the first half of the twentieth century in Paris, features more than ninety paintings.
Kara Walker: Rise Up Ye Mighty Race!
Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60603
February 21–August 11, 2013
Kara Walker returns to the cut-paper medium in monumental form for a new commissioned installation that includes five large framed graphite drawings and forty small framed mixed-media pieces, along with cut-paper silhouettes. The exhibition’s title refers to comments made by Barack Obama in his 1995 book, Dreams from My Father, about the challenges of community organizing in Chicago, in which he quotes the Jamaican political leader Marcus Garvey. Merging handwritten text with images, the work revolves around The Turner Diaries, written in 1978 by the white nationalist William Luther Pierce; it also investigates the notion of “race war” as it exists in the contemporary imagination. Walker has referred to the work as “a kind of paranoid panorama wall work—with supplemental drawings large and small, to chronicle what can be called a diary of my ever-present, never-ending war with race.”
Installation view of As it were … So to speak at the Jewish Museum (photograph by David Heald)
As it were … So to speak: A Museum Collection in Dialogue
with Barbara Bloom
Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128
March 15–August 4, 2013
Inspired partly by Talmudic discourse unfolding across time and space and capitalizing on the use of objects as “placeholders for thoughts,” the artist Barbara Bloom interestingly weaves artworks and objects from the Jewish Museum’s permanent collection with her own texts, creating polysemous narratives and unpredictable encounters that pressure and energize the museum experience.
Someday Is Now: The Art of Corita Kent
Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery
Skidmore College, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866
January19–July 28, 2013
The well-deserved attention that Sister Corita (1918–1986) has been receiving internationally during the past couple years is topped with this major survey of her work, organized by Ian Berry and Michael Duncan, that brings together more than two hundreds items spanning her entire career. Someday Is Now offers serigraphs, paintings, ephemera, and videos of protests and performances with her students that illustrate the complexities of Sister Corita’s visual language as a printmaker and capture the diversity of her political agenda as an activist, teacher, and Catholic nun. An extensive catalogue that sheds further light on the complexities of her life and work accompanies the exhibition.
LaToya Ruby Frazier, Grandma Ruby and Me, 2005, gelatin silver photograph, 15½ x 18½ in. Brooklyn Museum, Emily Winthrop Miles Fund, 2011.63.1 (artwork © LaToya Ruby Frazier)
LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238
March 22–August 11, 2013
With about forty photographs of the artist’s family and their hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania—a formerly prosperous steel-mill town that became a “distressed municipality” of fewer than 2,500 residents—LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital showcases the way the artist uses social documentary and portraiture to metaphorize an industrial town’s decline, comment on the effects of deindustrialization on individuals and communities, and critique recent forms of Braddock’s corporate exploitation that continue to threaten and distort the dire realities of the working-class community to which her family belongs.
Affiliated Society News for May 2013
posted May 09, 2013
American Institute for Conservation
The American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC) is hosting its 2013 annual meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana, from May 29 to June 1, 2013. Its theme, “The Contemporary in Conservation,” will focus on contemporary approaches to conservation—not only the conservation of contemporary art—and include perspectives from both within and outside the field. In addition to the treatment of contemporary art, the conference will consider digitization, environmental sustainability, and the effects of architectural design on the preservation of objects as well as current trends in exhibition design and the new challenges they present for preservation, including greater physical access, longer display times, and more touring exhibitions. Learn more about the upcoming AIC meeting at www.conservation-us.org/meetings and join the organization for the lively discussions that will take place.
Art Libraries Society of North America
The Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) and the Visual Resources Association Foundation (VRAF) will once again sponsor the Summer Educational Institute for Visual Resources and Image Management (SEI), to be held June 18–21, 2013, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. This collaborative professional training program, now in its tenth year, addresses the evolving requirements of image-management professionals. Expert instructors will cover intellectual-property rights, offer a hands-on digital-imaging workshop, and describe best practices and tools for metadata and cataloging. A “think-camp” discussion session will identify topic preferences from registrants, such as the future of the profession, uses of social and new media, visual literacy, and the digital humanities. More than four hundred people serving in a range of professional roles have benefited from past SEIs, including art historians, visual-resources curators, university librarians, archivists, and museum professionals responsible for image rights and reproductions. For more information, please contact the SEI cochairs: Betha Whitlow or Amy Trendler.
Historians of German and Central European Art and Architecture
During CAA’s 2013 Annual Conference in New York, the Historians of German and Central European Art and Architecture (HGCEA) hosted a two-part panel, “Central Europe’s Others in Art and Visual Culture,” chaired by Brett Van Hoesen and Elizabeth Otto, and an Emerging Scholars panel, led by Keith Holz. HGCEA also organized a dinner party at the Scandinavia House, which was attended by about sixty members of the society. The gathering celebrated the achievements of two retiring colleagues, Françoise Foster-Hahn and Reinhold Heller. Former HGCEA president Steven Mansbach delivered a eulogy on Foster-Hahn, and present board member Jay Clark did the same for Heller. The current HGCEA president, Marsha Morton, presented the prize for the winner of HGCEA’s first essay contest to Pepper Stetler and bestowed honorary mention to Amy Hamlin and Elizabeth Brisman. The contest was an initiative for the encouragement and recognition of young scholars. Sixteen essays published during 2011 and 2012 were submitted. A new appeal will be issued for essays published in 2012.
Historians of Netherlandish Art
The Historians of Netherlandish Art (HNA) has published the winter 2013 issue of the open-access, refereed electronic journal, the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art. Contents include articles by Sally Whitman Coleman, Matthijs Ilsink and Monica Marchesi, and Elizabeth Sutton, as well as translations of part one and two of D. C. Meijer Jr.’s “The Amsterdam Civic Guard Portraits within and outside the New Rijksmuseum.”
HNA solicits session and workshop proposals for the organization’s quadrennial conference, to be held in Boston, Massachusetts, June 5–7, 2014. For the first time, this event will take place together and in cooperation with the conference of the American Association for Netherlandic Studies. HNA welcomes proposals for sessions that represent new directions in the study of Netherlandish art between 1350 and 1750. Proposals may focus on individual disciplines within this chronological spectrum or feature interdisciplinary approaches and collaborative endeavors. Sessions will be two hours long with a maximum of four papers each. HNA also invites proposals for workshops designed to allow for group discussion of focused topics. Workshop proposals should define the matter to be addressed and describe how discussion will be generated. Prospective session and workshop proposals should be sent via email by May 15, 2013, to Paul Crenshaw, chair of the program committee.
International Sculpture Center
The International Sculpture Center (ISC) will hold the 2013 International Sculpture Symposium in Miami, Florida, from December 1 to 4, 2013. The program is cosponsored by Florida International University and the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum and will comprise daytime and evening programming, including keynote addresses, panel discussions, and an iron pour led by the international sculptor Coral Lambert, joined by Iron Maidens and other selected artists. The symposium marks the first ISC program held in the city of Miami, spans four days, and precedes Art Basel Miami Beach, which takes place December 5–8. Artists and enthusiasts from around the world will have the opportunity to participate in a week of dynamic cultural events. Please visit www.sculpture.org/miami2013 for more details and to join the Miami event mailing list to receive updates as they become available. Discounted early-bird registration for ISC members opens on June 1. Questions should be directed to events@sculpture.org or 609-689-1051, ext. 302.
Italian Art Society
The Italian Art Society (IAS) has announced its new officers and committee members: Cathleen A. Fleck, president; Sheryl E. Reiss, executive vice president; and Nicola Camerlenghi, vice president for programming. The Awards Committee now includes Janis Elliott (chair), Jill Pederson, and Eve Straussman-Pflanzer. Joining the Nominating Committee are Brian Curran (chair) and Janna Israel. The Program Committee welcomes Dorothy Glass and Rebekah Perry, and the Graduate Student and Emerging Scholars Committee greets its new members, Sarah Wilkins and Ashley Elston. IAS thanks those whose terms have ended for their service.
IAS will sponsor four sessions at the International Congress for Medieval Art in Kalamazoo, Michigan; see the IAS website for the titles and the names of the speakers. IAS seeks proposals for papers for its two 2014 CAA Annual Conference sessions: “Periodization Anxiety in Italian Art: Renaissance, Baroque, or Early Modern?” (chairs: Frances Gage and Eva Struhal); and “‘Futuro Anteriore’: Cultural Self-Appropriation as Catalyst in the Art of Italy”(chairs Alison Perchuk and Irina D. Costache). Please visit the IAS website for the CAA session descriptions and submission instructions. Deadline: May 6, 2013.
The speaker of the fourth annual Italian Art Society–Kress Foundation Lecture Series in Italy is Sarah Blake McHam of Rutgers University, who will present “Laocoön, or Pliny Vindicated” at the Fondazione Marco Besso in Rome on Tuesday, May 28, 2013, at 6:00 PM.
Mid-America College Art Association
The board of the Mid-America College Art Association (MACAA) will hold a retreat May 24–25, 2013, in San Antonio, Texas, in preparation for its 2014 conference, which will be hosted by the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). The conference chair is Scott Sherer, and the UTSA institution coordinator is Gregory Elliot. The conference contact is Laura Crist, who can be reached at macaa2014@utsa.edu or 210-458-4391. Conference details will be posted on the MACAA and conference websites, as planning develops.
National Council of Arts Administrators
From September 25 to 28, 2013, Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond will host the forty-first annual conference of the National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA), which will focus on reexamining the value of uncertainty and doubt in the arts. The gathering will also spotlight current trends in arts administration; offer forums, speakers, and workshops; and create opportunities to network within a diverse community of higher-education arts professionals. You can expect top-notch speakers, timely and forward-looking sessions, an engaging administrator’s workshop, and much more. NCAA enthusiastically welcomes new members and any interested parties to its events. Learn more about the 2013 conference.
New Media Caucus
The New Media Caucus (NMC) has announced the results of the elections for president, treasurer, and board members. The new president is Vagner Whitehead, associate professor at Oakland University. His term as president-elect begins immediately and runs until the 2014 CAA Annual Conference in Chicago, when he will become president at the 2014 annual business meeting. Reelected as treasurer is Jim Jeffers, visiting lecturer at College of the Holy Cross, who has been actively involved in NMC leadership since the organization’s founding ten years ago. He has served as treasurer for the past two years, a critical position as NMC pursues 501(c)(3) status. Joining the board are Victoria Bradbury, a researcher at the Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss, University of Sutherland; Mina Cheon, interdisciplinary professor, Maryland Institute College of Art; Carlos Rosas, associate professor, Pennsylvania State University; and Jessica Westbrook, assistant professor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. View a listing of the entire NMC board of directors and officers and the constitution and bylaws, which describes the terms and election processes.
Public Art Dialogue
At the 2013 CAA Annual Conference in New York, Public Art Dialogue (PAD) sponsored Sally Webster’s session, “Reconsidering Mural Painting: New Methodologies,” which featured five papers: “In the Making: Mural Painting and the Look of Reform in Theodore Roosevelt’s America” by Annelise K. Madsen; “Picturing Jewish History in 1920s Hollywood: The Murals in the Wilshire Boulevard Temple” from MacKenzie Stevens; “‘No Vain Glory’: Cartography and Murals in the American War Cemeteries in France” by Kate C. Lemay; “Looking Beyond ‘The Wall’: Reconstructing City Walls’ Gateway to Soho” from Andrew Wasserman; and “The Renewed ‘Spirit of Hyde Park’: A Case Study in Mural Restoration” by Emily Scibilia. Sarah Schrank was the discussant. A roundtable chaired by Norie Sato on “Time, Transience, Duration” featured presentations by Penny Balkin Bach, Renee Piechocki, and Marisa Lerer.
Penny Balkin Bach of the Association for Public Art (aPA), based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, received PAD’s annual lifetime achievement award. Bach has been in the field since the early 1970s, and under her leadership aPA (formerly called the Fairmount Park Art Association, whose staff she joined in 1980) has sponsored numerous groundbreaking installations and special projects. Open Air, which premiered in October 2012, was a spectacular interactive light installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Bach’s tireless and innovative work has transformed the field of public art.
Society for Photographic Education
The Society for Photographic Education (SPE) seeks proposals for “Collaborative Exchanges: Photography in Dialogue,” its fifty-first national conference, to be held March 6–9, 2014, in Baltimore, Maryland. SPE is accepting proposals for the 2014 conference through June 1, 2013. Topics, which are not required to be theme based, may include but are not limited to: image making, history, contemporary theory and criticism, new technologies, effects of media and culture, educational issues, and funding. Membership in SPE is required to submit, and all proposals are peer reviewed. Descriptions for the five presentation formats follow:
- Graduate Student: short presentation of your own artistic work and a brief introduction to your graduate program
- Imagemaker: presentation on your own artistic work (photography, film, video, performance, installation, multidisciplinary approaches)
- Lecture: presentation on historical topic, theory, or another artist’s work
- Panel: a group led by a moderator to discuss a chosen topic
- Teach: presentations, workshops, or demos that address educational issues, including teaching resources and strategies; curricula to serve diverse artists and changing student populations; seeking promotion and tenure; avoiding burnout, and professional exchange
Visit the website for information on how to join SPE and for full proposal guidelines.
Society for the Study of Early Modern Women
The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (SSEMW) has announced the names, fields, and affiliations of its officers and committee members for 2013: the new president is Jane Couchman, French and women’s studies, York University; the new vice president is Megan Matchinske, comparative literature and English, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; a past president is Allyson Poska, history, Mary Washington University; a second past president is Pamela Benson, English, Rhode Island College; the new treasurer is Deborah Uman, English, St. John Fisher College; the new secretary is Abby Zanger, French, independent scholar; and the new web and listserv coordinator is Karen Nelson, Center for Literary and Comparative Studies, English, University of Maryland, College Park.
The Executive Committee now comprises: Eve Straussman-Pflanzer, art, Art Institute of Chicago; Shannon Miller, English, Temple University; Michelle Dowd, English, University of North Carolina, Greensboro; Meredith Ray, Italian and women’s studies, University of Delaware; Renee Baernstein, history, Miami University; Sheila Cavanaugh, English, Emory University; and Lauren Shook, English, University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
The Awards Committee will consist of: Marina Leslie, English, Northeastern University (chair for 2013); Heidi Brayman Hackel, English, University of California, Riverside; Wendy Heller, music, Princeton University; Mary Nyquist, women and gender, University of Toronto; Eleanor Hubbard, history, Princeton University; Bronwen Wilson, art history, University of British Columbia; Leah Chang, French, George Washington University; Sheila ffolliott, art history, George Mason University (emerita); and Sarah Ross, English, Massey University.
For additional information, including members of the Nominating Committee, please see About SSEMW section on http://ssemw.org.
Society of Architectural Historians
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a one-year grant of $51,330 to the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) to administer the SAH/Mellon Author Awards. The award is a temporary measure to provide financial relief to early-career scholars who are publishing monographs on architectural history and the history of the built environment and responsible for paying for rights and permissions for images in their publications. Through this grant SAH will provide awards to emerging scholars (those with PhDs earned during the past six years) to help defray the high costs of image licensing and reproduction for monographs on the history of the built environment. Awards will be made once in 2013 for print (hardcover, softcover) and digital publications (ebook, DVD). Awardees will be selected on the basis of the quality and demonstrated financial need for their project. SAH anticipates awarding approximately ten SAH/Mellon Author Awards in 2013. Deadline: June 1, 2013.
Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture
In response to increasing interest in the field, the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) is extending its activities with renewed vigor under new leadership. After voting in January 2013, Margaret Samu was elected president, and Natasha Kurchanova was chosen vice president and will serve as president-elect. Yelena Kalinsky has become secretary-treasurer, and Inge Wierda will be the society’s webmaster. Joining them on the board of directors are Kathleen Duff, Eva Forgacs, Mark Svede, Danilo Udovicki, and Alla Vronskaya.
SHERA sponsors sessions and holds regular meetings at both CAA and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, maintains an active listserv and Facebook page, and is currently creating a new website. New members are welcome; please direct your inquiries to SHERA.artarchitecture@gmail.com for more information.
Society of North American Goldsmiths
The Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG) will hold its forty-second annual conference from May 15 to 18, 2013, in Toronto, Ontario, at the downtown historic Fairmont Royal York Hotel. Titled “Meta-Mosaic,” the event will celebrate the multiple industries within jewelry and metalsmithing in the twenty-first century. Toronto is a mosaic of peoples and cultures as well as the center of Canada’s jewelry industry. This conference will examine a fluid identity within art, craft, and design and inspire attendees to embrace a collective mosaic. Join SNAG for presentations and panels featuring industry luminaries from across the globe, rapid-fire presentations by international designers and artists, over twenty exhibition, the third annual member Trunk Show Sale, social events, and so much more! Online registration has closed, but you can still register onsite beginning at 3:00 PM on May 15.
Visual Resources Association
The Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) and the Visual Resources Association Foundation (VRAF) will once again sponsor the Summer Educational Institute for Visual Resources and Image Management (SEI), to be held June 18–21, 2013, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. This collaborative professional training program, now in its tenth year, addresses the evolving requirements of image-management professionals. Expert instructors will cover intellectual-property rights, offer a hands-on digital-imaging workshop, and describe best practices and tools for metadata and cataloging. A “think-camp” discussion session will identify topic preferences from registrants, such as the future of the profession, uses of social and new media, visual literacy, and the digital humanities. More than four hundred people serving in a range of professional roles have benefited from past SEIs, including art historians, visual-resources curators, university librarians, archivists, and museum professionals responsible for image rights and reproductions. For more information, please contact the SEI cochairs: Betha Whitlow or Amy Trendler.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted May 08, 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.
Long Hidden, Vatican Painting Linked to Native Americans
For close to four hundred years, the painting was closed off to the world. For the past 124 years, millions of visitors walked by without noticing an intriguing scene covered with centuries of grime. Only now, the Vatican says a detail in a newly cleaned fifteenth-century fresco shows what may be one of the first European depictions of Native Americans. The fresco, The Resurrection, was painted by the Renaissance master Pinturicchio in 1494—just two years after Christopher Columbus first set foot in what came to be called the New World. (Read more from National Public Radio.)
Ten Tips to Earn Tenure
I had complained to my colleague that after the intellectually, emotionally, and physically grueling experience of completing graduate school while teaching full-time, I would really look forward to “just” being a professor. She replied, “I hate to tell you this, but you’ll still be working sixty- and seventy-hour weeks to earn tenure and promotion because you’ll have all kinds of other responsibilities besides teaching that you don’t have now.” Over twelve years, three moves, and two blood pressure medicines later, I see how right she was that day. Here are my ten tips for earning tenure and promotion without becoming the nutty professor. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)
As Works Flood In, Nation’s Library Treads Water
The Sea Creatures, who recently sent their recording Naked in the Rain to the Library of Congress, probably did not ponder the impact of sequestration on their music’s journey from dream to copyright. Just as military contractors, air-traffic controllers, and federal workers are coping with the grim results of a partisan impasse over the federal deficit, the Library of Congress, whose services range from copyrighting written works to the collection, preservation, and digitalization of millions of books, photographs, maps, and other materials, faces deep cuts that threaten its historic mission. (Read more in the New York Times.)
Q&A with Denise Scott Brown
Denise Scott Brown, the cofounder of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates (now VSBA), talks to Architect about a petition to put her name on the 1991 Pritzer Architecture Prize, about her career in design. and about the ways she has been treated as a woman architect in a profession that she has described as a “nineteenth-century upper-middle-class men’s club.” (Read more in Architect.)
Smithsonian Sequestration Closures Could Get Worse
The Smithsonian Institution has announced that parts of three museums—the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Museum of African Art, and the Smithsonian Castle—will close through September 30 because of mandatory budget cuts, but the true effect of sequestration on the museum group is far wider. A Smithsonian spokeswoman says that in addition to these closures, sections of other museums will go dark this year as exhibitions come to their scheduled ends. (Read more in the DCist.)
English Teachers Reject Use of Robots to Grade Student Writing
Critics of standardized tests argue that the written portion of those assessments can short-circuit the process of developing ideas in writing. Using machines to grade those tests further magnifies their negative effects, according to a statement adopted last month by the National Council of Teachers of English. As high-school students prepare for college, the statement reads, they “are ill served when their writing experience has been dictated by tests that ignore the evermore complex and varied types and uses of writing found in higher education.” (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
May 2013 Picks from CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts
posted May 07, 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 May 2013 include solo exhibitions of work by Hung Liu at the Oakland Museum of California, Kara Walker at the Art Institute of Chicago, Gillian Wearing at the Museum Brandhorst in Munich, Latoya Ruby Frazier at the Brooklyn Museum, and Wangechi Mutu at the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, North Carolina. Of special note is a two-person show at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, called Parallel Practices, that features the first major presentation in the United States of work by the French body artist Gina Pane (1939–1990) alongside her contemporary, the American Joan Jonas.
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: Gina Pane, Azione Sentimentale, 1973, seven color photographs on wood panel, 48¼ x 40⅛ in. (artwork © Gina Pane; photograph by Francoise Masson and provided by ADAGP, Anne Marchand, and Kamel Mennour, Paris)