CAA News Today
Institutional News
posted Dec 17, 2012
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.
December 2012
The Dallas Museum of Art in Texas has accepted a $94,681 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to create a Learning Lab, described as a space for young people to interact with mentors and peers using new media and traditional materials, with the goal of having museum visitors create content as well as consume it.
The Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma, has won a Community Service Award from the Oklahoma Arts Council, an official state agency. The award recognizes significant contributions to the arts in specific Oklahoma communities in areas of leadership and volunteerism.
The Saint Louis Art Museum in Missouri has received a $125,000 multiyear commitment from the Private Client Reserve of US Bank for the Beaux Arts Council, a leadership giving group that provides unrestricted support for the museum.
The University of Michigan School of Art and Design in Ann Arbor has received a $32.5 million pledge from Penny Stampls, a 1966 design graduate, and her husband, E. Roe Stampls, which will be matched with $7.5 million from the university.
The Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, has received the 2012 Benjamin West Award from the American Associates of the Royal Academy Trust. This annual award is given to an individual or institution that has shown extraordinary commitment to Anglo-American friendship and generosity to the arts.
Yale University Press, based in New Haven, Connecticut, has accepted a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a new digital initiative in its scholarly publishing program in art and architectural history. The grant will allow the press to launch extensive market research and development of a new electronic model for illustrated books.
Grants, Awards, and Honors
posted Dec 15, 2012
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.
December 2012
Anna Sigrídur ArnarAnna Sigrídur Arnar of Minnesota State University, Moorhead, has received the Robert Motherwell Book Award for the best publication in the history and criticism of modernism in the arts—including the visual arts, literature, music, and the performing arts. The $20,000 prize, administered by the Dedalus Foundation, based in New York, recognizes The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, the Artist’s Book, and the Transformation of Print Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Nominations are made by publishers, and the winner is chosen by a panel of distinguished scholars and writers.
Oskar Bätschmann of the Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft in Zürich, Switzerland, has been named Samuel H. Kress Professor at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, DC.
Nina Berson has used a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant to produce a summer institute, “Mesoamerica and the Southwest: A New History for an Ancient Land,” which took place June 17–July 23, 2012. This NEH institute, sponsored by the Community College Humanities Association and held in Mexico, Arizona, and New Mexico, examined the interconnections among Mesoamerican and ancient Southwestern archaeological, anthropological, and art-historical studies.
S. Hollis ClaysonS. Hollis Clayson, Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Art History at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has been named the 2013–14 Samuel H. Kress Professor at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, DC. Clayson will be the senior member of the center and counsel postdoctoral fellows. She will also complete her book, Electric Paris: The Visual Cultures of the City of Light in the Era of Thomas Edison (to be published by the University of Chicago Press).
Jonathan FinebergJonathan Fineberg, professor of art history emeritus at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, has received a 2012 Craft Research Fund Project Research Grant, administered by the University of North Carolina’s Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design in Hendersonville. He will use the $5,000 award to conduct research for the first scholarly monograph on the work of Robert Arneson.
Julia P. Herzberg has received a 2012–13 Fulbright Scholar grant. From March to May 2013, she will teach a graduate course, “Latin American Artists in the US from 1995: Globalism and Localism,” at the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile, and work on a curatorial project at el Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, also in Santiago.
Alexander Brier Marr of the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, has earned an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Predoctoral Fellowship for Historians of American Art to Travel Abroad. The fellowship is administered by the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, DC.
Constance Moffett has used a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant to produce a summer institute, “Leonardo da Vinci: Between Art and Science” which took place June 25–July 13, 2012. This NEH institute, sponsored by the University of Virginia and Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, explored how Leonardo melded art and science by using geography and cartography to begin his study of military engineering, canalization, and architecture.
Rachel Silberstein, a doctoral student in oriental studies at the University of Oxford in England, has earned a student and new professionals scholarship from the Textile Society of America. The award provided free registration for the society’s symposium, which was held September 19–23, 2012, in Washington, DC.
Carol SolomonCarol Solomon, visiting associate professor of art history at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania, has received a 2012–13 Fulbright Award in the Middle East and North Africa Regional Reserach Program. She will undertake research in Tunisia and Morocco on contemporary art of the Maghreb, focusing on issues of national memory, culture, and identity.
Jenni Sorkin, assistant professor of contemporary art history at the University of Houston in Texas, has received a 2012 Craft Research Fund Project Research Grant from the University of North Carolina’s Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design in Hendersonville. Her $12,500 award will go toward research on a book-length study that recovers the gendered history of weaving and its uncertain disciplinary status within the mid-twentieth-century university.
Catherine Whalen, assistant professor at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture in New York, has accepted a 2012 Craft Research Fund Project Research Grant, administered by the University of North Carolina’s Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design in Hendersonville. She will share the $8,000 award with a colleague, working toward a book on Paul Hollister, a critic and historian of the studio glass movement.
Teresa Wilkins, a doctoral student at Indiana University in Bloomington, has earned a 2012 Craft Research Fund Graduate Research Grant for $8,285 from the University of North Carolina’s Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design in Hendersonville. She will conduct dissertation research investigating the construction, use, and sociopolitical meaning of the modern feather arts of Hawai‘i.
Yanfei Zhu, a doctoral student in the Department of History of Art at Ohio State University in Columbus, has been named an Ittleson Fellow for 2011–13 by the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, DC. His project is titled “Transtemporal and Cross-Border Alignment: The Rediscovery of Yimin Ink Painting in Modern China, 1900–1949.”
Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members
posted Dec 15, 2012
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.
December 2012
Julia P. Herzberg. Iván Navarro: Fluorescent Light Sculptures. Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, Florida International University, Miami, Florida, November 17, 2012–January 2, 2013.
Maya, Motul de San José or vicinity, Petén Guatemala, Late Classic, ca. 755, Service Set with Wahy Figures, ceramic with polychrome slip, h. 20.4 cm., diam. 16.3 cm (largest). Princeton University Art Museum, museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund (y1993-17, 18, and 19) (artwork in the public domain; photograph by Bruce M. White)Bryan R. Just. Dancing into Dreams: Maya Vase Painting of the Ik’ Kingdom. Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey, October 6, 2012–February 17, 2013.
Larissa Leclair and Leslie J. Ureña. Captured by a Portrait: 20 Photobooks from the Indie Photobook Library. GautePhoto, Guatemala City, Guatemala, November 7–25, 2012.
Jennifer McComas. Pioneers and Exiles: German Expressionism at the Indiana University Art Museum. Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, Indiana, October 6–December 23, 2012.
Gertrude Fisher-Fishman, Joe in Yellow Pajamas, 1948, oil on Masonite, 24 x 18 in. (artwork © Gertrude Fisher-Fishman; photograph provided by the Louise Fishman Foundation)Matthew Palczynski. Generations: Louise Fishman, Gertrude Fisher-Fishman, Razel Kapustin. Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 13, 2012–January 6, 2013.
Janko Domsic, Untitled, no date, ballpoint pen on cardboard, 25¾ x 19¾ in. abcd Collection, Paris (photograph provided by Valérie Rousseau)Valérie Rousseau and Barbara Safarova. Collectors of Skies. Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York. September 13–November 3, 2012.
Leslie J. Ureña. The In-Between Space. Tina Keng Gallery, Beijing, China, June 9–July 15, 2012.
Books Published by CAA Members
posted Dec 15, 2012
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.
December 2012
Jill Bennett. Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affects, and Art after 9/11 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012).
Michele Brody and the World Tea Company. Reflections in Tea: World Tea Stories (New York: Magcloud, 2012).
Rachel Epp Buller, ed. Reconciling Art and Mothering (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012).
Julie Codell, ed. Power and Resistance: The Delhi Coronation Durbars (Ahmadabad, India: Mapin Publishing, 2012).
David Getsy, ed. Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance, 1965–1975 (Chicago: Soberscove Press, 2012).
Bryan R. Just. Dancing into Dreams: Maya Vase Painting of the Ik’ Kingdom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2012).
Patricia Karetzky. Femininity in Asian Women Artists’ Work from China, Korea, and USA:
If the Shoe Fits (London: KT Press, 2012).
Beth Lilly. the oracle @ wifi: Beth Lilly (Heidelberg, Germany: Kehrer Verlag, 2012).
Mike Mandel and Chantal Zakari. Multi-National Force: Iraq in Agatha Christie’s “They Came to Baghdad” (Boston: Eighteen Publications, 2012).
Valérie Rousseau (ed.), Barbara Safarova, and Champfleury. Collectors of Skies (New York: Andrew Edlin Gallery, 2012).
Cassone Subscriptions for Student Members
posted Dec 12, 2012
Cassone: The International Online Magazine of Art and Art Books is offering a free one-year subscription to all first-year students at any level (BA, MA, BSc, diploma, PhD, etc.) and in any subject. But time is running out—this offer is running only until December 31, 2012. Please pass the information below to your friends, colleagues, and students.
To obtain your free Cassone subscription, please go to www.cassone-art.com/subscription/register. Enter your email address in the box on the left and click the “Begin registration” button immediately underneath it. On the next page, type in your personal details. By the time you get to the page’s footer, a validation code email should have turned up in your email inbox (if not, check your junk folder). Copy and paste the code into the box marked with this phrase: “Please copy and paste the validation code just emailed to you into the box below.” Tick the two boxes under that (legal requirement) and the third box (optional) if you wish and click “Complete registration.” Then follow the onscreen instructions. On the page titled “Step 2: Activate your subscription,” you will see a box headed “Got a gift voucher or discount code?” In that box, copy and paste the code: STUDent12. Then click on “Apply voucher.” Your yearlong subscription has begun.
If you have any questions, please contact Cassone at production@cassone-art.com. For students beyond their first year, a subscription is only £5 per year and for nonstudents £10.
December 2012 Issue of The Art Bulletin
posted Dec 12, 2012
The December 2012 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, presents the fourth installment of a feature series that will continue through at least 2013. In Regarding Art and Art History, Rebecca Zorach reflects on politics and teaching. The subject of this issue’s Notes from the Field is detail, with twelve texts by artists, scholars, professors, conservators, and archaeologists: Susan Hiller, Spike Bucklow, Johannes Endres, Carlo Ginzburg, Joan Kee, Spyros Papapetros, Adrian Rifkin, Joanna Roche, Nina Rowe, Alain Schnapp, Blake Stimson, and Robert Williams. The Interview presents the German art historian Horst Bredekamp in conversation with the American scholar Christopher Wood. An installation view of Hiller’s Witness (2002), as seen as Tate London, appears on the cover.
The opening three long-form essays address the art of Italy. The first, by J. Keith Doherty, offers a new interpretation of the Judgment of Paris myth as it is depicted in Roman wall paintings. Robert Glass’s contribution, “Filarete’s Hilaritas: Claiming Authorship and Status on the Doors of St. Peter’s,” is a close reading of the Italian Renaissance sculptor’s bronze relief on the doors of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. David M. Stone’s article, “Signature Killer: Caravaggio and the Poetics of Blood,” considers the artist’s signature in his Beheading of Saint John the Baptist from 1608. Luisa Elena Alcalá’s “‘A Call to Action’: Visual Persuasion in a Spanish American Painting” analyzes a Central American painting from the mid-1680s sent to Madrid from Mexico as a tactic to lobby for continued royal support. Finally, Philip Cottrell explores the unpublished papers of the nineteenth-century English connoisseur George Scharf, who organized the celebrated exhibition Art Treasures of the United Kingdom in Manchester in 1857.
The Reviews section leads off with David J. Roxburgh’s take on the new galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Next, Elizabeth Hill Boone considers Carolyn Dean’s A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock, and Jesús Escobar looks at Gauvin Alexander Bailey’s The Andean Hybrid Baroque: Convergent Cultures in the Churches of Colonial Peru. Nicola Suthor’s book Bravura: Virtuosität und Mutwilligkeit in der Malerei der Frühen Neuzeit is appraised by Andreas Beyer, and Molly Emma Aitken’s study The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting, is evaluated by Pika Ghosh. The section concludes with Michael Leja’s assessment of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.
CAA sends The Art Bulletin to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the journal as a benefit of their membership. The next issue of the quarterly publication, to appear in March 2013, will feature essays on the strategic use of microarchitecture in Christian ivory carvings of the thirteenth century, perspectival “distortions” in Paul Cézanne’s paintings and the political implications of his repudiation of perspective, and appellations of photography that circulated in China between 1840 and 1911, which trace the emergence of a new understanding of visual truth in Chinese art.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted Dec 12, 2012
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.
Openness, Value, and Scholarly Societies: The MLA Model
In 2011, the Modern Language Association established a new office of scholarly communication and began a series of experiments in ways of supporting the open exchange of scholarly work among its members. While the office and its platforms are new, the motivating force behind the office is not. From the beginning, scholarly societies were designed to play a crucial role in facilitating communication between scholars working on common subjects. (Read more from College and Research Libraries News.)
Ten Essential Apps for the Mobile Artist
Michelangelo, Raphael, and the rest of the old masters drew everything they saw, everywhere they went. The new masters of the twenty-first century can still adhere to that artistic custom, with powerful apps designed for a mobile and creative world. GeekSugar has rounded up apps with specific media in mind, such as ink, charcoal, and watercolor, and more general-purpose digital drawing tools, too. When inspiration unexpectedly strikes, modern-day artists will be grateful they had these ten essential iOS drawing apps in their mobile toolkit. (Read more from GeekSugar.)
Monday Musings: The Price of a Free Membership
I’ve been following with interest the news that the Dallas Museum of Art is abolishing admission for the permanent exhibits and offering free memberships to all. I hear with increasing frequency from colleagues in cultural nonprofits that people don’t want to make long-term commitments such as season passes or memberships anymore and want their experiences a la carte; and that people want real and meaningful engagement with organizations—they don’t want to be anonymous, interchangeable customers. Making memberships free in response to these drivers of change seems like a reasonable experiment. But how does the math work out? (Read more from the Center for the Future of Museums.)
Museum Policies and Art Images: Conflicting Objectives and Copyright Overreaching
Museums face steady demand for images of artworks from their collections, and they typically provide a service of making and delivering high-resolution images of art. The images are often intellectually essential for scholarly study and teaching, and they are sometimes economically valuable for production of the coffee mugs and note cards sold in museum shops and elsewhere. Though the law is unclear regarding copyright protection afforded to such images, many museum policies and licenses encumber the use of art images with contractual terms and license restrictions often aimed at raising revenue or protecting the integrity of the art. (Read more from the Fordham Intellectual Property, Media, and Entertainment Law Journal.)
A New (Kind of) Scholarly Press
The FAQ to go with the announcement that Amherst College is launching a new scholarly press ends with the question “Isn’t this endeavor wildly idealistic?” The answer is yes. But Amherst thinks that there may be long-term gains—both for scholarship and the economics of academic publishing—by publishing books that are subject to traditional peer review, edited with rigor, and then published in digital form only, completely free. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
The Moment of Digital Art History?
Two thousand and twelve has proven to be a significant year as art history continues its transition into the sphere of the digital humanities. The following post aims to provide a summary of discussions around “digital art history,” which at present describes a mode of practice without a fully articulated definition. This summary will also extend beyond the institutional considerations primarily expressed in recent reports and consider the implications for digital art history on public engagement, including the involvement of new-media practitioners, such as bloggers and users of social-media platforms. (Read more from 3 Pipe Problem.)
If He Did It
In trying to figure out the why—no seriously, WHY?—of Bob Dylan’s second painting exhibition at Gagosian, Gallerist NY’s Michael Miller was left with the same Only Possible Explanation that’s been dogging me since the musician’s first baffling Gagosian gig in October 2011: “All I could come up with was a conspiracy theory cooked up by a friend, that both of Mr. Dylan’s shows at Gagosian are actually the work of Richard Prince using ‘Bob Dylan’ as a pseudonym, making the ultimate statement on art and artifice, and proving once and for all that Bob Dylan is whoever you want him to be.” (Read more from Greg.org.)
USC and MOCA Are in Talks about “A Possible Partnership”
Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art and the University of Southern California are in talks about a possible partnership that would link the ambitious private university with the fiscally struggling downtown museum. Responding to Los Angeles Times inquiries, USC’s provost Elizabeth Garrett said that discussions are underway “about a possible partnership that would enhance the missions of both institutions.” Talks “are very preliminary at this time,” she added, providing no further details. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)
Recipients of CAA’s Meiss and Wyeth Publishing Grants
posted Dec 11, 2012
CAA has awarded grants to the publishers of eighteen books in art history and visual culture through two programs: the Millard Meiss Publication Fund and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant.
Wyeth Grant Recipients
CAA is pleased to announce seven recipients of the annual Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, established in 2005. Thanks to a generous grant from the Wyeth Foundation, these awards are given annually to publishers to support the publication of one or more book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art, visual studies, and related subjects. For this grant program, “American art” is defined as art created in the United States, Canada, and Mexico through 1970.
Receiving 2012 grants are:
- Katherine A. Bussard, Unfamiliar Streets: Photographs by Richard Avedon, Charles Moore, Martha Rosler, and Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, Yale University Press
- Melissa Dabakis, The American Corinnes: Women Sculptors and the Eternal City, 1850–1876, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Michael Lobel, Becoming an Artist: John Sloan, the Ashcan School, and Popular Illustration, Yale University Press
- Amy F. Ogata, Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America, University of Minnesota Press
- John Ott, Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority, Ashgate
- Rachel Sailor, Meaningful Places: Local Landscape Photography in the Nineteenth-Century American West and Its Legacy, University of New Mexico Press
- George E. Thomas, Frank Furness and the Poetry of the Present: Architecture in the Age of the Great Machines, University of Pennsylvania Press
Eligible for the grant are book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art, visual studies, and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy. Authors must be current CAA members. Please review the application guidelines for more information.
Meiss Grant Winners
This fall, CAA awarded grants to the publishers of eleven 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 to support the publication of scholarly books in art history and related fields.
The grantees for fall 2012 are:
- Paroma Chatterjee, The Living Icon in Medieval Art, Cambridge University Press
- Anthony Colantuono and Steven F. Ostrow, eds., Critical Perspectives on Early Modern Roman Sculpture, Pennsylvania State University Press
- T. J. Demos, Migrations: The Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis, Duke University Press
- Jennifer Doyle, Hold It against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art, Duke University Press
- Dorita Hannah, Event Space: Theatre Architecture and the Historical Avant-Garde, Routledge
- Cara Krmpotich and Laura Peers, This Is Our Life: Haida People, Collections, and International Museums, University of British Columbia Press
- Asa Simon Mittman and Susan M. Kim, Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
- Bibiana Obler, Intimate Collaborations: Gender, Craft, and the Emergence of Abstraction, Yale University Press
- Dorothy C. Rowe, After Dada: Marta Hegemann and the Cologne Avant-Garde, Manchester University Press
- Linda Safran, Art and Identity in the Medieval Salento, University of Pennsylvania Press
- Robert Slifkin, Out of Time: Philip Guston and the Refiguration of Postwar American Art, University of California Press
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.
Image: The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts building, built by the American architects Frank Furness and George Hewitt, opened in 1876 (photograph by the Detroit Publishing Company, 1900)
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for December 2012-January 2013
posted Dec 10, 2012
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.
December 2012–January 2013
Mickalene Thomas: How to Organize a Room around a Striking Piece of Art
Lehman Maupin Gallery
540 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001; and 201 Chrystie Street, New York, NY 10002
November 14, 2012–January 5, 2013
The two-part Mickalene Thomas: How to Organize a Room around a Striking Piece of Art is a the artist’s third solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Gallery. The Lower East Side space will present new large-scale paintings depicting landscapes and interior scenes and a series of short films created during her recent travels in Europe. In Chelsea, Thomas’s first documentary film, Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman, will be shown alongside photographs of her mother and long-time muse, Sandra Bush. The film is an emotionally raw and loving portrait of Bush as she reflects on her life experiences, including her personal struggles and battle with chronic illness. Thomas will also re-create one of her tableau environments in the gallery, allowing viewers to fully immerse themselves in the artist’s world while watching the film.
Deborah Kass, Before and Happily Ever After, 1991, oil and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 in. (artwork © Deborah Kass)
Deborah Kass: Before and Happily Ever After
Andy Warhol Museum
117 Sandusky Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15212
October 27, 2012–January 6, 2012
Before and Happily Ever After is the first midcareer retrospective of Deborah Kass at the temple of the artist who unleashed her potent turn to pop culture in order to explore first her “absence” and then her “presence” in it as a lesbian Jewish woman, as she has recently said. Consisting of seventy-five works, the exhibition unites the abstraction of her early and most recent work, unravels the development of Kass’s audiovisual mining of art history and pop culture through breakthrough painting series (such as The Warhol Project, The Jewish Jackie, and her latest, feel good paintings for feel bad times), and offers an incredible opportunity to be marveled by the variety of politics—and pleasures—that underpin her affective yet multilayered dialogue with pop culture and the exploration of (her) identity through it. As Kass sheds her own light on Andy Warhol through her work, and as her work continues to defend the potent ways in which women artists have engaged pop culture, the show promises to pave the way for other dialogues between women (neo-Pop or Pop) artists with (American) Pop or Warhol at his museum.
Ann Hamilton: the event of a thread
Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10065
December 5, 2012–January 6, 2013
Ann Hamilton’s enchanting installation, the event of a thread, conducts a powerful, affective weaving of sounds, words, textures, and motions that shrouds the visitors with the intimacy of touch—the hand of cloth as the artist puts it—while translating the bodily intimacy of the “lap” and the daydream-like state of mind of “being read” into architectural scale and public experience. A multisensorial site-specific piece that is titled after a line from a definition of weaving by Anni Albers, the event of a thread is reminiscent of the artist’s childhood memories of daydreaming while being read in her grandma’s lap. Comprised of a field of swings, the installation is divided by an enormous silk glacial curtain whose motion is determined by the move of the swings and bracketed by a textile metaphorically being woven by the sonic threads of reading, writing, and live and recorded song. At the front of the installation two actors, covered with textured capes, read to caged birds, improvising combinations of Aristotelian excerpts that further elaborate on the role of touch in our self-awareness, weaving a tapestry of whispers that reach the visitors through separate speakers packaged in paper bags throughout the installation space. At the other end, rotating authors respond to the world outside and behind, weaving words into letters addressed to Far, to Near, to Time, to Sadness, and so on. In effect, the event of a thread reinstills belief in the viability and power of “relational” art as art literalizing its political claim to restoring the social bond by creating proximities through a strikingly intimate and poetic manner.
Caroline Burton: Prey
Accola Griefen Gallery
547 West 27th Street, No. 634, New York, NY 10001
December 7, 2012–January 12, 2013
In her first solo exhibition at Accola Griefen Gallery, Caroline Burton is exhibiting sculpture, painting, and drawing inspired by objects left behind or discarded. Her sculptural pillows in neutral tones allude to rest but render that impossible by the Hydrocal, wire, and canvas forms. Two rabbit’s feet cast in bronze hang on one wall and refer to the exhibition title. The exhibition also includes oil paintings on canvas, which depict discarded papers and rags.
Doing What You Want: Marie-Louise Ekman Accompanied by Sister Corita Kent, Mladen Stilinovic, and Martha Wilson
Tensta Konsthall
Taxingegränd 10, Box 4001, 163 04 Spånga, Stockholm, Sweden
October 18, 2012–January 13, 2013
Maria Lind, director of Tensta Konsthall, has interestingly used the work of a variety of artists, including Corita Kent and Martha Wilson, to flesh out the rebellious politics and feminist strategies of the work of Marie Louise Ekman, a fascinating and at times controversial figure of the Swedish art scene since the 1960s. Though a prominent artist who has worked in various media, celebrated in her home country mostly for her films, Ekman has not yet received the attention she deserves for her multifarious work that bridges Pop art and feminism from an idiosyncratic and often absurdist “girlie” point of view, radically exploring feminine identity and attacking bourgeois conventions. The exhibition focuses on her work from the 1960s to the 1980s, bringing together her transgressive objects that range from environments of Disney dolls and doll-occupied canvases, sewn silk, and pink fur objects to paintings on silk that straddle a variety of themes with her characteristic childish cartoony style.
Brooke Moyse, Mount, 2011, oil on canvas, 72 x 80 in. (artwork © Brooke Moyse; photograph by Jason Mandella)
To Be a Lady: Forty-Five Women in the Arts
1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery
1285 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019
September 24, 2012–January 18, 2013
Curated by Jason Andrew and organized by Norte Maar, this cross-disciplinary, cross-generational exhibition includes work by forty-five artists born over the last century “who happen to be women.” Those included are: Alma Thomas, Charmion von Wiegand, Louise Nevelson, Alice Neel, Barbara Morgan, Irene Rice Pereira, Janice Biala, May Wilson, Lenore Tawney, Louise Bourgeois, Edith Schloss, Grace Hartigan, Ruth Asawa, Betye Saar, Pat Passlof, Jay DeFeo, Susan Weil, Lee Bontecou, Viola Frey, Judy Dolnick, Kathleen Fraser, Hermine Ford, Mimi Gross, Nancy Grossman, Elizabeth Murray, Judy Pfaff, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Mira Schor, Mary Judge, Nancy Bowen, Lindsay Walt, Michelle Jaffé, Elisabeth Condon, Tamara Gonzales, Jessica Stockholder, Brece Honeycutt, Ellie Murphy, Julia K. Gleich, Austin Thomas, Ellen Letcher, Rachel Beach, Vanessa German, Kirsten Jensen, Brooke Moyse, and Nathlie Provosty.
Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002
October 24, 2012–January 20, 2013
Curated by Lynne Cooke, A Cosmos is a truly remarkable exhibition, both as a survey of Rosemarie Trockel’s work and as a combination of different curatorial and museum-display models that pertinently structure, interweave, and contextualize the artist’s signature themes and media, illuminating her multifarious work in a productive and enchanting way.
Kate Davis: Not Just the Perfect Moments
Drawing Room
Tannery Arts, 12 Rich Estate, Crimscott Street, London SE1 5TE, United Kingdom
December 4, 2012–February 2, 2013
Kate Davis, a New Zealand–born artist based in Glasgow, has produced a new body of commissioned work for her solo exhibition at Drawing Room. Questioning how to bear witness to the complexities of the past, her artwork is an attempt to reconsider, reclaim, and reinvent what certain histories could look, sound, and feel like. This has often involved responding to the aesthetic and political ambiguities of historical artworks and their reception. Working across a range of media, Davis has kept drawing at the critical core of her visual vocabulary, and this exhibition is the first time she addresses her relationship to the medium, its activity, and its history so directly. Focusing on ideologies perpetuated through certain approaches to the teaching of drawing, Not Just the Perfect Moments will attempt to stand alongside the late artist, Jo Spence, to reexamine and unpick some of the ways in which a representational practice, such as drawing, has constructed perceptions of the individual. Spence’s groundbreaking photographic works often asked who owns images—especially images of the body. In this exhibition, as with much of Davis’s practice, photography and drawing are brought into close relation and questioned as techniques for challenging, and caring for, a past and future.
The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum
118–128 North Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102
November 17, 2012–April 7, 2013
With great treasures and many surprises, The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World consists of works from the museum’s recently acquired Linda Lee Adler Collection of Art by Women, which boasts close to five hundred works of art (including paintings, photographs, drawings, watercolors, pastels, collage, prints, fabric pieces, ceramics, bronze, wood, and sculpture in other media) by over 150 artists. The gift includes works by artists not previously represented in the museum, such as Louise Bourgeois, Joan Brown, Viola Frey, Ana Mendieta, Christina Ramberg, Kiki Smith, and Beatrice Wood, as well as complementary works by artists already in the collection, including Gertrude Abercrombie, Edna Andrade, Diane Burko, Sue Coe, Janet Fish, Sarah McEneaney, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, Gladys Nilsson, Elizabeth Osborne, Betye Saar, and Nancy Spero. A fully illustrated catalogue, with contributions from Glenn Adamson, Anna C. Chave, Robert Cozzolino, Joanna Gardner-Huggett, Melanie Herzog, Janine Mileaf, Mey-Yen Moriuchi, Jodi Throckmorton, and Michele Wallace, is something to covet.
Cultural Recovery Center to Open in Brooklyn
posted Dec 07, 2012
A temporary facility to provide volunteer assistance and work space to museums, libraries, archives, historic sites, galleries, collectors, and artists will open in Brooklyn, New York, during the week of December 10, 2012.
The Center for Cultural Recovery will be operated by the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (FAIC), in cooperation with a consortium of the following organizations: the Alliance for Response New York City; the American Museum of Natural History; Heritage Preservation; Materials for the Arts; the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; the New York Regional Association for Conservation; Industry City at Bush Terminal; and the Smithsonian Institution.
Funding for the center has been provided by a leadership gift to FAIC from Sotheby’s. The Smithsonian Institution and a grant to Heritage Preservation from the New York Community Trust, as well as support from TALAS, have enabled the purchase of supplies. The center has also been outfitted with supplies donated by Materials for the Arts, a program of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Additional donations to FAIC have come from PINTA, the Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art Show; Tru Vue; members of the American Institute for Conservation; and others.
FAIC and its partners have been offering crucial disaster response assistance to cultural organizations and artists in need in the wake of Superstorm Sandy. In the first ten days after the storm struck, FAIC’s Collection Emergency Response Team’s (AIC-CERT) twenty-four-hour hotline (202-661-8068) fielded over fifty-five calls from collectors, artists, and museums. AIC-CERT and New York area volunteers are working with approximately 120 small collections, galleries, and artists in New York and New Jersey to recover collections. In addition, AIC member conservators in private practices throughout the New York region are helping owners preserve their collections.
Access to some collections, including those of individual artists, is only now becoming possible. Even artwork that has been dried still may need rinsing and cleaning to remove residues and mold spores. The Cultural Recovery Center will offer space and expertise to help owners stabilize their collections.
Read more about AIC-CERT’s volunteer services. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has also published Hurricane Sandy Conservation Resources for owners of cultural materials.