CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted Feb 20, 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.
Move Over Galleries: Artists Sign with Agents
The British artist Stuart Semple has signed a contract for worldwide representation with the fashion agency Next Management, a move that highlights again how the traditional artist–gallery relationship is changing. Several artists, including Damien Hirst and Keith Tyson, have agents or managers who provide financial advice and handle their business dealings with galleries, but Semple says his collaboration will more closely resemble relationships in the music industry, where managers act as a buffer between their acts and the outside world, helping to promote their work and negotiate their projects. (Read more in the Art Newspaper.)
Help Desk: Art Consultant
I was just approached by an art consultant who asked me “how I normally work with art consultants.” I think what the person wanted to know is how I want to divide sales, like a percentage ratio, and I just don’t know what is normal. I tried to find online standards for art consultant–artist relationships that develop without a gallery being involved, but everything was all over the place and contradictory. (Read more at Daily Serving.)
The Humanities, Unraveled
Let me start with the bad news. It is not even news anymore; it is simply bad. Graduate education in the humanities is in crisis. Every aspect, from the most specific details of the curriculum to the broadest questions about its purpose, is in crisis. It is a seamless garment of crisis: if you pull on any one thread, the entire thing unravels. Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Four Common Misconceptions on Creative Thinking in Research
Research is a creative activity. In essence, to solve your research question, you will need to take a step outside the boundaries of current knowledge. If you are expected to develop a new theory as part of your research, you certainly need to get your creative juices flowing. When we read the work of great scientists, it sometimes seems as if they possess of some extraordinary tweak in their brain that makes them capable of taking a visionary leap and pushing their field to new advances. In reality, however, all creative solutions are simply the result of a long process of trying, researching, and chewing at the end of pencils. Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)
Fire at Pratt Institute Destroys Studios and Artwork of Students
Maria De Los Angeles, a twenty-four-year-old student at Pratt Institute, has an admissions interview at Yale University’s graduate art school next month and was planning to show the officers there some of her one hundred paintings and three hundred prints. But in last Friday’s early hours, a fast-moving fire ravaged the top two floors of the historic main building at the private art, design, and architecture college in Brooklyn, destroying dozens of art studios and the precious works they contained. (Read more in the New York Times.)
Will You Lose Your Museum Job to a Robot?
OK, maybe not to a robot, but to increasingly sophisticated automation. This question is prompted by a report released last month by the Associated Press forecasting the effect of technology on the economy and employment. The thesis of the authors is that the world is experiencing the first real “jobless recovery” in history, as we bounce back from the great recession of 2008. They argue that the millions of jobs that went away in the past few years not only are not coming back, even more jobs will be lost as automation takes over more work. (Read more at the Center for the Future of Museums.)
A Critic’s Take on Arts and Entrepreneurship
“Arts entrepreneurship” certainly isn’t an oxymoron, unless your definition of art is so narrow that any business success disqualifies it—the attitude of the stereotypical rock snob for whom the little-heard indie debut is always better than the major-label follow-up. On the other hand, the conflict between art and commerce is age old, and there’s no question pandering to an audience can undermine artistic quality. But there’s no magic formula for striking the balance. (Read more in Audience Wanted.)
Sotheby’s Sued over Caravaggio Attribution
Sotheby’s is being sued for damages over a work it attributed to a “follower” of Caravaggio that sold at auction in London to the late collector and scholar Denis Mahon in 2006, for a hammer price of £42,000. Mahon subsequently identified the painting as a work “by the hand of Caravaggio” and obtained an export license for it that gave an estimated selling price of £10 million, according to a claim filed at London’s High Court of Justice. (Read more in the Art Newspaper.)
CAA Seeks Nominations for 2014–18 Board Service
posted Feb 18, 2013
CAA seeks nominations and self-nominations from individuals interested in shaping the future of the organization by serving on the Board of Directors for the 2014–18 term. The board is responsible for all financial and policy matters related to the organization. It promotes excellence in scholarship and teaching in the history and criticism of the visual arts, and it encourages creativity and technical skill in the teaching and practice of art. CAA’s board is also charged with representing the membership on issues affecting the visual arts and the humanities.
Candidates must be current CAA members. Nominations and self-nominations should include the following information: the nominee’s name, affiliation, address, email address, and telephone number, as well as the name, affiliation, and email address of the nominator, if different from the nominee. Please send all information by mail or email to: Vanessa Jalet, Executive Liaison, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004. Deadline: April 1, 2013.
People in the News
posted Feb 17, 2013
People in the News lists new hires, positions, and promotions in three sections: Academe, Museums and Galleries, and Organizations and Publications.
The section is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
February 2013
Academe
Peter ChametzkyPeter Chametzky, formerly professor of art history and director of the School of Art and Design at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, has been appointed professor of art history and chair of the Department of Art at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.
Irene V. SmallIrene V. Small, formerly an assistant professor in art history at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, has joined the faculty of the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey.
Museums and Galleries
Austen Barron Bailly, previously head of the American Art Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California, has been named George Putnam Curator of American Art at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.
Susan L. Beningson has joined the Brooklyn Museum in New York as assistant curator of Asian art. She will help with a major reinstallation of the museum’s permanent galleries of Asian and Islamic art, scheduled to open in 2015.
Katherine A. Bussard, associate curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, has been named Peter C. Bunnell Curator of Photography at the Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey. She will begin work at the museum on April 15, 2013.
Nicholas CapassoNicholas Capasso, deputy director of curatorial affairs at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, has become the new director of the Fitchburg Art Museum in Fitchburg, Massachusetts.
Anne Collins GoodyearAnne Collins Goodyear, associate curator of prints and drawings for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, and president of the CAA Board of Directors, has been appointed codirector of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine. She will lead the institution with her husband, Frank H. Goodyear III.
Alisa LaGammaAlisa LaGamma has joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as curator in charge of the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. On April 1 she will succeed Julie Jones, who is retiring at the end of March 2013.
Lauren K. O’NealLauren K. O’Neal, a faculty member of the Graduate Arts Administration Program at Boston University in Massachusetts, has been appointed director of the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire.
Lynn Orr, curator in charge of European art for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in California, has left her position after twenty-nine years of service.
Valérie RousseauValérie Rousseau, an independent curator and scholar, has been chosen to serve as curator of twentieth-century and contemporary art at the American Folk Art Museum in New York.
Institutional News
posted Feb 17, 2013
Read about the latest news from institutional members.
Institutional News is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
February 2013
The Dallas Museum of Art in Texas has announced that it will offer free admission to all visitors and also initiate a rewards-for-participation system. A new online software system will enable visitors to track their museum-related activity and communicate their experiences with the museum.
The Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indiana has received a $190,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a project called “Documenting Modern Living: Digitizing the Miller House and Garden Collection,” which includes correspondence, drawings, blueprints, textile samples, and photographs that chronicle the design, construction, and maintenance of the Miller House and Garden in Columbus, Indiana.
Parsons the New School for Design in New York has opened a new academic center in Paris, France, opening in summer 2013. Called Parsons Paris, the center will offer undergraduate, graduate, and study-abroad programs.
The Rhode Island School of Design Museum in Providence has received a $250,000 gift from the Champlin Foundations to help complete ongoing improvements to the Eliza G. Radeke Building. The Champlin funds match an anonymous challenge from a large national foundation.
The Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kansas, has received a gift from Marilyn Stokstad, distinguished professor emerita of art history at the University of Kansas, to endow the museum’s directorship, a position she once held.
The Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, has opened the new Kubler-Thompson Gallery of Indo-Pacific Art, enabled by the generosity of Thomas Jaffe, a Yale alumnus, after a renovation and expansion project. The first installation features selections from Jaffe’s promised gift of ethnographic sculptures and Indonesian textiles.
Results of the 2013–17 Board of Directors Election
posted Feb 15, 2013
The CAA Board of Directors welcomes four newly elected members, who will serve from 2013 to 2017:
- Constance Cortez, Associate Professor of Art History, Texas Tech University
- Jennifer Milam, Professor of Art History, University of Sydney
- Sheila Pepe, Artist and Acting Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs, School of Art and Design, Pratt Institute
- John Richardson, Professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History, Wayne State University
Anne Collins Goodyear, CAA board president, announced the election results during the Annual Members’ Business Meeting, held on Friday, February 15, at the 101st Annual Conference in New York.
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.
For the annual board election, CAA members vote for no more than four candidates; they also cast votes for write-in candidates (who must be CAA members). The four candidates receiving the most votes are elected to the board.
Grants, Awards, and Honors
posted Feb 15, 2013
CAA recognizes its members for their professional achievements, be it a grant, fellowship, residency, book prize, honorary degree, or related award.
Grants, Awards, and Honors is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
February 2013
Tenley Bick, a PhD candidate in art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been awarded an Institute of International Education Graduate Fellowship for International Study, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in support of her dissertation, “Capital and Rags: Michelangelo Pistoletto and Arte Povera in Turin, 1958–1972.”
China Blue has been listed in Who’s Who of American Art and received a nomination for Best Monographic Museum Show Nationally in 2012 by the International Association of Art Critics. She also has received the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts Fellowship for New Genres and the Project Grant.
Maria Elena Buszek (photograph by Cortney Andrews)Maria Elena Buszek of the University of Colorado in Denver has won the twenty-eighth annual LoPresti Award for best essay collection of 2011. The award, administered by the Art Libraries Society of North America’s Southeast Chapter, recognizes Buszek’s anthology Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011) among those titles representing “excellence in art publications issued in the southeastern United States.”
Michael Cline, an artist based in Astoria, New York, has received a 2012 Artists’ Fellowship in painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Eva Díaz, assistant professor of contemporary art at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, has received a 2012 award in the book category from the Arts Writers Grant Program, administered by Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. She will work on The Fuller Effect: Contemporary Art and the Critique of Total Design.
Jennifer Doyle, associate professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, has been recognized by the Arts Writers Grant Program, administered by Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, with a 2012 award in the book category. She will continue developing The Athletic Turn, an exploration of interactions between sports and contemporary art.
Kate Gilmore, an artist based in New York, has earned a 2012 Artists’ Fellowship in interdisciplinary work from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Abigail McEwen, assistant professor of art history in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland in College Park, has received a 2013 Dedalus Foundation Senior Fellowship for her book project, “Revolutionary Horizons: Art and Polemics in 1950s Cuba.”
Ara H. Merjian, assistant professor of Italian studies and art history at New York University, has accepted a 2012 award in the book category from the Arts Writers Grant Program, administered by Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. His project is titled Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Politics of Art History: Heretical Aesthetics.
Lauren Hackworth Petersen, associate professor of art history at the University of Delaware in Newark, has received a grant from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation to complete a book manuscript, “The Material Life of Roman Slaves,” coauthored with Sandra Joshel, professor of history at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Daniel R. Quiles, assistant professor of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, has received a 2012 award in the article category from the Arts Writers Grant Program, administered by Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. He will continue developing “Counterpublic Access: The Live! Show and TV Party, 1978–1984.”
Kristine RonanKristine Ronan, a PhD candidate in the history of art at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has been appointed a 2012–13 CIC/Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellow at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution. Ronan specializes in American and Native American art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Alan Ruiz, an artist based in New York, has been accepted into the 2013 Art Law Program, a semester-long seminar series with a theoretical and philosophical focus on the effects of law and jurisprudence on cultural production and reception.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, professor emerita of the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has received a 2012 award in the category of short-form writing from the Arts Writers Grant Program, administered by Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Her project is titled Photography in the Age of Catastrophe.
Hakan Topal, an artist and scholar who teaches at the School of Visual Arts and in the Department of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, has been named a participant in the 2013 Art Law Program, a semester-long seminar series with a theoretical and philosophical focus on the effects of law and jurisprudence on cultural production and reception.
Corinne Ulmann, an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, has accepted a 2012 Artists’ Fellowship in painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Harry J. Weil, a doctoral candidate in art history and criticism at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York, has been recognized by the Arts Writers Grant Program, administered by Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, with a 2012 award in the category of short-form writing.
Deborah Zlotsky, an artist who lives and works in Albany, New York, has received a 2012 Artists’ Fellowship in painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members
posted Feb 15, 2013
Check out details on recent shows organized by CAA members who are also curators.
Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
February 2013
Website image for PapercutsReni Gower. Papercuts. Ritter Art Gallery, University Galleries, School of the Arts, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida, January 19–March 2, 2013.
Andreas Marks. Modern Twist: Contemporary Japanese Bamboo Art. Bellevue Arts Museum, Bellevue, Washington, November 13, 2012–February 3, 2013.
Barbara McPhail, Toxic Plume, 2010, monotype, 14 x 11 in. (artwork © Barbara McPhail; photograph by the artist)Barbara McPhail. No Land Escapes. Ink Shop, Ithaca, New York, February 1–March 29, 2013.
Gertrude Käsebier, The Sketch, 1903, platinum print, 6¼ x 8½ in. University Museums, gift of Mason E. Turner Jr. (photograph by Jim Schneck)Stephen Petersen. Gertrude Käsebier: The Complexity of Light and Shade. Old College Gallery, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware, February 6–June 28, 2013.
Books Published by CAA Members
posted Feb 15, 2013
Publishing a book is a major milestone for artists and scholars—browse a list of recent titles below.
Books Published by CAA Members appears every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
February 2013
Bridget Alsdorf. Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-Century French Painting (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
Billy X. Curmano. Futurism’s Bastard Son (Vienna: Mark Pezinger Verlag, 2012).
Jonathan Fineberg. A Troublesome Subject: The Art of Robert Arneson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).
Andreas Marks. Genji’s World in Japanese Woodblock Prints (Leiden, the Netherlands: Hotei, 2012).
Andreas Marks with Margalit Monroe. Modern Twist: Contemporary Japanese Bamboo Art (Washington, DC: International Arts and Artists, 2012).
Natasha Seaman. The Religious Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen: Reinventing Christian Painting after the Reformation in Utrecht (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012).
Ian Verstegen. A Realist Theory of Art History (New York: Routledge, 2013).
“Publishing The Art Bulletin” Launches
posted Feb 13, 2013
This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of the first issue of The Art Bulletin, CAA’s flagship journal of art-historical scholarship. “Publishing The Art Bulletin: Past, Present, and Future,” an ambitious online project, has just launched to celebrate the occasion. The project employs a deep exploration of the journal’s hundred-year archive to stimulate thinking about the forms that a future Art Bulletin might take.
Three outstanding essays—by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1939), Mehmet Aga-Oglu (1945), and Suzanne Preston Blier (1993)—stand at the heart of the project, which also features an array of features possible only in a digital format. Thelma K. Thomas, an associate professor in the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and chair of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board, created the website in collaboration with the Scalar project of the Alliance for the Networking of Visual Culture and the University of Southern California, which helped fund the project.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted Feb 13, 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.
Interview with NEA Chief of Staff Jamie Bennett
With Rocco Landesman’s announcement to step down from the chairmanship of the NEA, can you reflect on the major accomplishments of his and your tenure and assess the impact—current and future—on the field? What do you see as unfinished business at the agency? (Read more at Barry’s Blog.)
Artists in Egypt Work in a Tense Atmosphere
The Muslim women in Marwa Adel’s photographs are shadows, repressed by custom, religion, marriage, and regret. While nude, the figures are obscured by sepia scrims, scrawled upon with stifling words—as if their true selves may never be known. Like their creator, a single mother edging at the bounds of artistic freedom in a patriarchal society, the images are at once vulnerable and defiant. (Read more in the Los Angeles Times.)
Decompressing Salaries
It’s a dilemma many universities face: how to attract new, top faculty with competitive salaries without being unfair to senior professors, whose salaries often are tied to a pay scale or plan that hasn’t kept up with the outside market. Weighing recruiting needs against a desire to alleviate the morale-busting effect of salary compression on faculty, one Midwest university has launched a series of initiatives to address it. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)
In Search of a Good Critique
From the hiring side of the table, we’ve all seen job candidates who seem to be doing well only to fall flat in one venue: they ace the teaching demo and the dinner meeting but stumble during the research talk. Perhaps the candidate was disorganized, too strident, or just long winded and boring. Whatever the cause, the outcome is a strong negative ding when it comes time to vote on the hire. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Less Is More: The Rise of the Very Limited Edition
Good design used to be a simple matter. Was the object easy to use? Simple in appearance? Made from high-quality materials? Value for money? Those were the important questions. But today design is significantly more complex. Before a product ever gets to a consumer, it has usually been subjected to investment analysis, prototype development, focus-group discussion, and advertising campaigns. (Read more in the Art Newspaper.)
Why It’s Time for Galleries to Dump the Jargon
Do you like nature, and art? If so, you might like something called On Vanishing Land, produced by the British “sound artists and theorists” Mark Fisher and Justin Barton. What they’ve produced, which will be in an art gallery called the Showroom, is “a new form of sonic fiction from the dreamings, gleamings, and prefigurations that pervade the Suffolk coast.” Themes “of incursion” by “unnameable forces, geological sentience, or temporary anomaly” will, apparently, “recur throughout.” (Read more in the Independent.)
Help Desk: A Uniform Presentation
My question concerns the issue of a “signature style” and the importance of projecting an image of consistency, particularly on one’s personal website. I’ve done a lot of different things and tend to work in the medium that I feel best expresses what I am trying to communicate. As a result, I’ve got a real mix of things: photos, text-based pieces, assemblages/sculptures, some video work. While I can personally see the threads of consistency running through the work, I’ve been cautioned that I need to “grow up, pick one thing, and get known for it.” (Read more at Daily Serving.)
The Price of a Bad Review
Librarian questions quality of a publishing house. Librarian publicly criticizes said press on his personal blog. Two years later, librarian and current employer get sued for libel and damages in excess of $4 million. That’s been the progression of events for Dale Askey, associate university librarian at McMaster University in Ontario, where he’s been working since 2011. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)