CAA News Today
Grants, Awards, and Honors
posted Oct 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.
October 2012
Fred C. Albertson, associate professor in the Department of Art at the University of Memphis in Tennessee, has been named a 2012–13 Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Albertson will be in residence at the Getty Villa in Malibu, working on a project titled “Palmyrene Sculpture in North American Museums.”
Ronni Baer, the William and Ann Elfers Senior Curator of Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has been named a Museum Guest Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Baer will be in residence from January to March 2013.
Martina Bagnoli, curator of medieval art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, will be a scholar in residence at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Bagnoli will use her residency to research “The Five Senses and Medieval Art.”
Susanna Berger, a graduate student at the University of Cambridge in England, has been awarded a 2011–13 Samuel H. Kress Fellowship via the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The title of Berger’s research project is “The Art of Philosophy: Early Modern Illustrated Thesis Prints, Broadsides, and Student Notebooks.”
Kathryn BrownKathryn Brown, assistant professor of art history at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, has been awarded a funded visiting fellowship at the Humanities Centre of the Australian National University in Canberra for July and August 2013. Her project is titled “Global Art and the Networked City.”
Kaira Marie CabañasKaira Marie Cabañas, a lecturer and director of the MA Program in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in New York, has been named a 2012–13 Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. She will spend her residency on “Expressive Restraint: Geometric Abstraction and the History of Madness in Brazil.”
Matthew P. Canepa, assistant professor of art history at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, will be a Getty Scholar in residence at the Getty Villa in Malibu, California. Canepa, a specialist in the art and archeology of ancient Iran and the Mediterranean, will be working on a project, “Royal Glory, Divine Fortune: Contesting the Global Idea of Iranian Kingship in the Hellenized and Iranian Near East, Central and South Asia (330 BCE–642 CE).”
Tiziana D’Angelo, a doctoral candidate in the Department of the Classics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been awarded a predoctoral fellowship from the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. D’Angelo’s residency will be devoted to a research project, titled “Travelling Colors: Artistic Models and Cultural Transfers in South Italian Funerary Wall Painting (IV–II BCE).”
Thierry de Duve, emeritus professor at the Charles de Gaulle Université Lille 3 in Villaneuve, France, has been awarded a William C. Seitz Senior Fellowship at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, DC. His research project is called “Manet’s Testament, Duchamp’s Message, Broodthaers’ Lesson.”
Jessica Feldman, an intermedia artist based in New York, has earned an emerging artist fellowship from Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, New York. An exhibition of outdoor work by the fifteen fellowship recipients will be on view from September 9, 2012, to March 31, 2013.
Ksenya GurshteinKsenya Gurshtein, a recent PhD graduate of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has been named a 2011–13 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Cynthia Hahn, professor of art history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, has been named an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Hahn will use the fellowship to work on her project, “Reliquaries: Objects, Action, Response.”
Marius Bratsberg Hauknes, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, has been awarded a twenty-four-month Chester Dale Fellowship. The 2011–13 fellowship is administered by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Hauknes’s dissertation is titled “Imago, Figura, Scientia: The Image of the World in Thirteenth-Century Rome.”
Jessica L. HortonJessica L. Horton, a PhD candidate in the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, has been named a 2011–13 Wyeth Fellow through the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. She will use her fellowship, from the International Dissertation Research Fellowship Program, to conduct research on “Places to Stand: Native Art beyond the Nation.”
Mark Jamra, a typographic designer and associate professor at the Maine College of Art in Portland, has won a Stonington Residency at the Stephen Pace House in Stonington, Maine. The residency provides studio space and living accommodations and is open only to college alumni, faculty, and staff members.
Paul B. JaskotPaul B. Jaskot, professor of the history of art and architecture at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, has been named Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Jaskot will use his fellowship to work on a project, titled “Cultural Fantasies, Ideological Goals, and Political Economic Realities: The Built Environment at Auschwitz.”
Nathaniel B. JonesNathaniel B. Jones, a doctoral student in art history at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has received the David E. Finley Fellowship via the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. He intends to conduct research on his dissertation, “Nobilibus pinacothecae sunt faciundae: The Inception of the Roman Fictive Picture Gallery,” in Europe for two years, spending the third year of the fellowship in residence at CASVA.
Jennifer Josten, assistant professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, has been named a Getty Postdoctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Josten’s project is titled “Mathias Goeritz’s Arquitectura Emocional: Shades of the New Monumentality in Midcentury Mexico.”
Subhashini Kaligotla, a poet and a doctoral student in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in New York, has been named an Ittleson Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Her fellowship, which spans from 2012 to 2014, will be devoted to her dissertation, “Shiva’s Waterfront Temples: Reimagining the Sacred Architecture of India’s Deccan Region.”
Cindy Kang, a PhD candidate in the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, has been named a Getty predoctoral fellow for 2012–13. Kang will be in residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California, working on her dissertation, “Wallflowers: Tapestry and the Nabis in the Fin-de-siècle France.”
Jinah Kim has been named a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Kim, a recent PhD graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, will devote her fellowship to “Visions and the Visual: Color in Esoteric Buddhist Visual Practices in Medieval South Asia.”
Stuart Lingo, associate professor of art at the University of Washington’s School of Art in Seattle, has been named a Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Lingo will use his fellowship to work on a project titled “Bronzino’s Bodies: Fortunes of the Ideal Nude in an Age of Reform.”
Beili Liu, a multidisciplinary artist and associate professor of art at the University of Texas at Austin, received the Distinction Award at the 2011 Kaunas Biennial in Lithuania. Liu’s art uses elemental materials, such as wood, paper, salt, metal, and incense, to transform gallery spaces into meditative installations.
David S. Mather, who recently earned his PhD in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego, has received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Mather will use his residency at the Getty Center to further develop “‘The Wild Joy of Color’: Boccioni and the European Avant-Garde,” a chapter from his dissertation.
Jennifer Nelson, a graduate student in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has been awarded a Robert H. and Clarice Smith Fellowship for 2012–13 from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Nelson will use the award to work on “Image beyond Likeness: The Chimerism of Early Protestant Visuality, 1517–1565.”
Joshua O’Driscoll, a doctoral candidate in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been named a 2011–14 Paul Mellon Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. O’Driscoll will spend time on “Picti Imaginativo: Image and Inscription in Ottonian Manuscripts from Cologne.”
Ann E. PatnaudeAnn E. Patnaude, a PhD student in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago in Illinois, has received a twelve-month Chester Dale Fellowship for 2012–13, administered by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Her dissertation is called “Locating Identity: Mixed Inscriptions in Archaic and Classical Greek Pottery and Stone, ca. 675–336 BCE.”
Gabriel Huquier, after François Boucher, Chinese Man and Woman Fishing at the Fish-Pond, ca. 1738–45, etching and engraving, 11⅞ x 9 5/16 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (artwork in the public domain)David Pullins, a doctoral candidate the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been named a David E. Finley Fellow for 2012–15. The fellowship, which comes from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, will allow him to work on his dissertation, “Cut and Paste: The Mobile Image from Watteau to Pillement.”
William W. Robinson, the Maida and George Abrams Curator of Drawings in the Fogg Museum’s Division of European and American Art at Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been named a Museum Guest Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Robinson will be in residence at the Getty from July to September 2013.
Sophia Ronan Rochmes, a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has received a predoctoral fellowship from the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Rochmes will work on “Shades of Gray: Functions of Color and Colorlessness in Grisaille Manuscripts.”
Jennifer Margaret Simmons Stager, who earned her PhD from the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, has received a fellowship to study at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. She will be in residence at the Getty Villa in Malibu, researching “The Embodiment of Color in Ancient Mediterranean Art.”
Roberto TejadaRoberto Tejada, the Distinguished Endowed Chair in Art History in the Meadows School of Art at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, has been named the 2012–13 recipient of the Fulbright-FAAP Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts. The award from the Fulbright US Scholar Program will enable Tejada to engage in scholarship with faculty and students at the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP) in São Paulo, Brazil.
Krista ThompsonKrista Thompson, associate professor of art history at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has received an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship for her project, “Photography, Screen, and Spectacle in Contemporary African Diasporic Cultures.”
Ming Tiampo, associate professor of art history at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, has received an honorable mention from the Dedalus Foundation’s Robert Motherwell Book Award for Gutai: Decentering Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Noa Turel has been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Turel, who recently received her PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, will be in residence from September 2012 to June 2013, working on “Living Color: The Animation Paradigm of Pictorial Realism 1350–1550.”
Susan M. Wager, a PhD student in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in New York, has been named a Samuel H. Kress Fellow for 2012–14 from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Wager, whose specialty is eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French visual culture, will research her dissertation, titled “Boucher’s Bijoux: Luxury Reproductions in the Age of Enlightenment.”
Gennifer Weisenfeld, associate professor in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, has been awarded a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for her book, Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
Stephen Hart Whiteman has been awarded a 2012–14 A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. His project is titled “Vocabularies of Culture: The Landscape of Multiethnic Emperorship in the Early Qing Dynasty (1661–1722).”
Jeff Williams, an artist and assistant professor in studio art at the University of Texas at Austin, has won the 2012 Texas Prize, a $30,000 triennial award sponsored by the Austin Museum of Art/Arthouse. The prize, given to an emerging artist based in Texas, is juried by an international group of artists, scholars, and curators.
Marie Yasunaga, a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature and Culture at the University of Tokyo in Japan, has received a predoctoral fellowship from the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Yasunaga will be a resident from September 2012 to June 2013; her project is titled “Color Theories in Museum Spaces: Installation Experiments by Karl Ernst Osthaus and Karl With. From German Kunstgewerbe-Reformbewegung through Symbolism and Expressionism to the Era of the White Cube.”
Mantha Zarmakoupi, a Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow in the Archäologisches Institut at the Universität zu Köln in Germany, has been named a 2012–13 Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Zarmakoupi specializes in classical art and archeology, which she will explore during her residency in a project titled “The Idea of Landscape in Roman Luxury Villas.”
Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members
posted Oct 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.
October 2012
Reni Gower. Heated Exchange. Upstairs Artspace, Tryon, North Carolina, September 21–November 17, 2012.
Martha Jackson Jarvis, Ancestors’ Bones #4, 2010–11, mixed-media drawing with black walnut ink, watercolor, oil, wax, raw pigment, collage, and photo transfer, 20 x 26¼ in. (photograph provided by Martha Jackson Jarvis Studio)Julie L. McGee. Martha Jackson Jarvis: Ancestors’ Bones. Mechanical Hall Gallery, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware, September 5–December 9, 2012.
Gustave Courbet, Apples, Pears, and Primroses on a Table, 1871–72, oil on canvas, 23½ x 28¾ in. Norton Simon Art Foundation (artwork in the public domain)Gloria Williams Sander. Significant Objects: The Spell of Still Life. Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena, California, July 20, 2012–January 21, 2013.
Cortney Lane Stell. Something about the State of Being. Philip J. Steele Gallery, Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, Denver, Colorado, August 31–October 13, 2012.
Books Published by CAA Members
posted Oct 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.
October 2012
Laura Auricchio, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, and Giulia Pacini, eds. Invaluable Trees: Cultures of Nature, 1660–1830 (Oxford, UK: Voltaire Foundation, 2012).
Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin, eds. The Fertile Crescent: Gender, Art, and Society (New Brunswick, NJ: Institute for Women and Art, Rutgers University, 2012).
Kathryn Brown. Women Readers in French Painting 1870–1890: A Space for the Imagination (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012).
Frances S. Connelly. The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung, eds. Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
Lauren Hackworth Petersen and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell, eds. Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012).
Ming Tiampo. Gutai: Decentering Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Gennifer Weisenfeld. Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
caa.reviews Seeks 2012 Doctoral Dissertations
posted Oct 15, 2012
Dissertation titles in art history and visual studies from American and Canadian institutions, both completed and in progress, are published annually in caa.reviews, making them available through web searches. PhD-granting institutions may send a list of their doctoral students’ dissertation titles for 2012 to dissertations@collegeart.org. The complete Dissertation Submission Guidelines regarding the format of listings are now available. CAA does not accept listings from individuals. Improperly formatted lists will be returned to sender. For more information, please write to the above email address or visit the guidelines page. Deadline: January 16, 2013.
Register for the 2013 Annual Conference
posted Oct 11, 2012
Registration is now open for the 101st Annual Conference, taking place February 13–16, 2013, in New York. Register before the early deadline, December 14, 2012, to ensure the lowest rate and your place in the online Directory of Attendees.
Registration includes access to all conference sessions and to the Book and Trade Fair. Each registrant will receive a copy of the Conference Program and access to the online Directory of Attendees, along with online access to Abstracts 2013 and free admission to selected museums and galleries throughout greater New York during the conference.
Those interested in Career Services should sign up now to secure a place in several high-demand activities. Register for a variety of Professional Development Workshops covering topics ranging from grant writing to tenure issues. Sign up for Mentoring Sessions that include the Artists’ Portfolio Review and Career Development Mentoring.
Making travel plans and hotel reservations? Check out the special discounts available to conference attendees. Students can take advantage of further reductions on accommodations at select conference hotels.
You may also purchase tickets for a variety of Events taking place in the New York area, including:
- Opening Night Reception at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
- Chelsea Gallery District Walking Tour
- Montclair Art Museum Tour and Reception
Space is limited, so please register early.
CAA will regularly update the conference website over the next few months, with additional details on the program, awards, tours, and more. A list of session names and chairs has been posted, with the names of all speakers and the titles of their presentations coming in November.
The CAA Annual Conference is the world’s largest international forum for professionals in the visual arts, offering more than two hundred stimulating sessions, panel discussions, roundtables, and meetings. CAA anticipates more than six thousand artists, art historians, students, curators, critics, educators, art administrators, and museum professionals to attend the meeting, which brings CAA’s Centennial year to a close.
Appraisers Association of America Presents “On and Off the Road,” an Evening with America’s Most Popular Appraisers
posted Oct 04, 2012
The Appraisers Association of America, an affiliated society, invites CAA members to attend “On and Off the Road,” an evening with America’s most popular appraisers, to be held at the Grolier Club in New York on Tuesday, October 16, 2012. Experts from television’s Antiques Roadshow—Lee Dunbar, Kathleen Harwood, Daile Kaplan, Leigh Keno, Betty Krulik, Kevin Zavian, and Alasdair Nichol—will share their experiences on and off camera. Attendees will have the rare opportunity to hear some of the country’s leading appraisers discuss the process of evaluating everything from fine art to memorabilia. You also have the chance for private appraisal consultation to find out if you own a hidden gem. Meet and speak with some of the most trusted experts in the business.
Tickets are $85 for individuals and $75 for CAA members, staff, and guests ; $200 for patrons and $175 CAA members, staff, and guests; and $350 for a patron duo and $300 CAA members, staff, and guests. Tickets are tax deductible, with the proceeds benefiting the association’s Appraisal Institute to support educational programs on connoisseurship, assessment, and valuation.
Doors open at 6:00 PM. The panel discussion begins at 6:30 PM, followed by a reception at 7:30 PM. Free appraisal consultations are offered to those with patron tickets; please RSVP by October 9 by calling 212-889-5404, ext. 11., or writing to programs@appraisersassoc.org .
The Grolier Club is located at 47 East 60th Street , New York, NY 10065 (map). For the Appraisal Consultation Guidelines, and for information about the Appraisers Association of America, please visit www.appraisersassociation.org or call 212-889-5404, ext. 11.
Kress Foundation Awards CAA Grant for Fair Use in the Visual Arts
posted Oct 03, 2012
The Samuel H. Kress Foundation has awarded CAA a start-up grant to support the development of a Code of Best Practices for Fair Use of Copyrighted Images in the Creation and Curation of Artworks and Scholarly Publishing in the Visual Arts. The project will address all areas of the visual arts and involve participants from the fields of art history, studio art, print and online publishing, art museums and related areas.
CAA’s Board of Directors recognized the need for the development of a Code of Best Practices by establishing a Task Force on Fair Use at the May 7, 2012 meeting. The rationale for this undertaking is to address what amounts to a crisis in the visual arts field. At this time, there is significant evidence that concerns around the implications of copyright—and especially uncertainty surrounding the fair use doctrine (currently codified under section 107 of the Copyright Act)—is substantially inhibiting the ability of scholars and artists to develop new work requiring the use of images and other third-party copyrighted works. The visual arts field needs the opportunity to explore and better understand copyright and fair use law, come to a consensus on best practices in the use of third-party images, and adhere to a code that is within the law and practicable for visual arts scholarly publications and creative work.
This fall, with the support of the Kress Foundation, CAA will establish a research plan and administrative framework for developing a comprehensive Code of Best Practices for Fair Use. CAA’s newly-created Task Force on Fair Use will begin work with two recognized authorities on the subject: Peter Jaszi, Professor of Law, Washington School of Law, American University and Pat Aufderheide, Director, Center for Media Studies, American University. Jaszi and Aufderheide, the authors of Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back into Copyright (Chicago University Press, 2011) have worked with numerous disciplines—including documentary film makers, dance archivists, research librarians, and journalists—to develop best practices in fair use. CAA’s Task Force will be co-chaired by Jeffrey P. Cunard (CAA Counsel and Partner, Debevoise & Plimpton) and Gretchen Wagner (CAA Committee on Intellectual Property and ARTstor General Counsel); its other members include Anne Collins Goodyear (CAA President and Associate Curator, Prints and Drawings, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institute); Linda Downs (CAA Executive Director and CEO); Suzanne Blier (CAA Board Member and Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University); DeWitt Godfrey (CAA Vice President for Committees and Director, Institute for Creative and Performing Arts, Colgate University); Randall C. Griffin (ex-officio as CAA Vice President for Publications, Professor, Division of Art History, Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University); Paul Jaskot (CAA Past President and Professor of History of Art and Architecture, DePaul University); Patricia McDonnell (CAA Vice President for External Affairs and Director, Wichita Art Museum); Charles Wright (CAA Board Member and Chair, Department of Art, Western Illinois University). Throughout the project, CAA will involve its members and the larger visual arts community in building a comprehensive Code designed to serve all members of its constituency. CAA’s Committee on Intellectual Property will address CAA’s work on Fair Use at its upcoming public session at the Annual Meeting in February 2013 (Saturday, February 16, at 12:30 pm).
Interviews with Mira Schor and Janine Antoni at the 2013 Annual Conference
posted Oct 03, 2012
The painter and writer Mira Schor and the sculptor and multimedia artist Janine Antoni will participate in the Annual Artists’ Interviews, taking place in ARTspace during the 2013 Annual Conference in New York. This session will be the thirteenth installment of the popular series, which features two major practicing artists in back-to-back interviews. The talks will be held on Friday, February 15, 2013, from 2:30 to 5:00 PM at the Hilton in New York. Stuart Horodner, artistic director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in Georgia, will interview Schor. Klaus Ottmann, director of the Center for the Study of Modern Art and curator at large at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, will interview Antoni.
Mira Schor is a painter, writer, and educator who was born in 1950 into a family of artists in Manhattan. Entering her fifth decade as an artist, she has used the medium of painting to address a wide range of issues: language, corporal materiality, feminist politics, art history, and critical theory. She has also worked in artist’s books and sculpture and has a longstanding engagement with works on paper.
As an art writer and editor, Schor works in the belletristic tradition of John Berger and Virginia Woolf, with her essays combining the candor of a village storyteller with the rigor of a critical approach and maverick fearlessness. Her latest book is A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life (2009), and she writes regularly about the intersection of art and life for her blog A Year of Positive Thinking.
Schor is based in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts. Read CAA’s full profile of the artist, which includes more images of her work.
Janine Antoni’s work is an amalgam of shamanistic ritual, quotidian task, and daredevil action. Her performances include using her dye-soaked hair to mop a gallery floor; sleeping in a bed set up in a gallery and then weaving a blanket based on the pattern of her rapid eye movements; and walking across a tightrope of hand-plied hemp that she made herself, suspended eight feet above the ground. The arduous process of the performance is often combined into installations with sculpture, photography, and video. It is Antoni’s desire that her artwork be understood as a felt experience, one that combines emotional content and intellectual engagement. In each piece, no matter the medium or image, a conveyed physicality speaks directly to the viewer’s body.
In a conversation published in 2011 in the Brooklyn Rail, she elaborates on the importance of this imagined relationship with her work’s audience: “When I’m making work I spend a lot of time fantasizing about what the viewer will do and think; I enter their body, and imagine them walking up to my sculpture. My work is a way for me to feel connected and to feel present in the world. I try to make work that elicits empathy. I’ve been known for chewing 600 pounds of chocolate, being dumped in tubs of lard, and mopping the floor with my hair. I do these extreme acts because I feel like it puts the viewer in a very emphatic relationship to my sculpture.”
Antoni lives and works in New York. She participated in the 2011 Annual Conference, speaking on the popular Centennial session “Parallel Practices: When the Mind Isn’t Focused on Art.” Read CAA’s full profile of the artist, with several photographs of her work.
Images
Top: Mira Schor, The Dreams of All of Us, 2012, ink, rabbit skin glue, oil, and gesso on linen, 24 x 28 in. (artwork © Mira Schor; photograph provided by the artist)
Bottom: Janine Antoni, Lick and Lather, 1993, two self-portrait busts: one chocolate and one soap, 24 x 16 x 13 in. (artwork © Janine Antoni; photograph provided by the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York)
MIRA SCHOR AT THE 2013 ANNUAL ARTISTS’ INTERVIEWS
posted Oct 03, 2012
Mira Schor, a painter and writer based in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts, will participate in CAA’s next Annual Artists’ Interviews, hosted by ARTspace during the 2013 Annual Conference in New York. This session will be the thirteenth installment of the popular series, which features two major practicing artists in back-to-back interviews. The other artist who will be interviewed is Janine Antoni. The talks will be held on Friday, February 15, 2013, from 2:30 to 5:00 PM at the Hilton in New York. Stuart Horodner, artistic director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, will interview Schor.
Mira Schor
Mira Schor (photograph © 2012 Mary Jones)
Mira Schor is a painter, writer, and educator who was born in 1950 into a family of artists in Manhattan. Entering her fifth decade as an artist, she has used the medium of painting to address a wide range of issues: language, corporal materiality, feminist politics, art history, and critical theory. She has also worked in artist’s books and sculpture and has a longstanding engagement with works on paper.
As an art writer and editor, Schor works in the belletristic tradition of John Berger and Virginia Woolf, with her essays combining the candor of a village storyteller with the rigor of a critical approach and maverick fearlessness. Schor’s first decade of writing on contemporary art and culture is collected in Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). Composed during the Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s, the book addresses the work of David Salle, Ida Applebroog, Mary Kelly, and the Guerrilla Girls. In the often-cited essay “Figure/Ground,” Schor’s distinctly feminist voice, seeped in the history of modernism, discusses the perseverance of painting in light of contemporary aesthetic debates. Her latest book is A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), and she writes regularly about the intersection of art and life for her blog A Year of Positive Thinking, for which she received support from the Arts Writers Grant Program in 2009. Entries include “You Put a Spell on Me,” about the relationship of African art and Renaissance portraiture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; “Youthfulness in Old Age,” about the late paintings of Joan Mitchell and Roberto Matta; and “Books Are Like People,” an exegesis on the life and destruction of the free library at Occupy Wall Street.
Schor maintains a dialectical understanding of the relationship between politics and aesthetics. In a 2011 conversation with Bradley Rubenstein for Culture Catch, she explained, “I speak of two ‘politics,’ what is happening in the world, and art politics, examining which definitions of art are hosts for different types of power. My identity as a painter has always been caught, in a generative way, between the traditions of painting and the proclamations of the death of painting, of the object, of the individual artist, of private studio practice—everything that has become the doxa of contemporary art.”
Mira Schor, Silence….speech, noise, 2010, ink, oil, and gesso on linen, 18 x 30 in. (artwork © Mira Schor; photograph provided by the artist)
Her most recent solo exhibition, Voice and Speech, was held at Marvelli Gallery in New York in spring 2012. A recurring motif in the show was a pensive, schematically sketched figure, what Schor has called an “avatar of self.” In each painting, handwriting, sometimes contained in thought-balloon rectangles, conveys a sense of cartoonish yet poetic immediacy. In a review of the show, the New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote, “Mira Schor’s small, sharp, quirky paintings have been thorns in the side of the medium for more than three decades now…. Abjuring largeness and portentous brushwork as before, these works tackle more directly the immense subject of creativity itself and diagram it in ways both pointedly humorous and expansive.” The paintings, all modestly scaled, convey a sense of private urgency, like torn-out pages from a notebook. In a 2002 interview with the painter Joan Waltemath, published in the Brooklyn Rail, Schor discusses the specificity of painted language, and how her visual art relates to her writing: “the direction of my painting and writing are intimately linked in a constant interplay between practice and theory—I find it hard to place one before the other as I speak: I paint writing and in some cases I paint the (critical/theoretical) writing that I’m writing. I certainly never gave up on visual pleasure. On the contrary I am interested in embedding verbal writing as image into the rich materiality of painting so that the two cannot be disentwined.”
Mira Schor, Slit of Paint, 1994, oil on canvas, 12 x 16 in. (artwork © Mira Schor; photograph provided by the artist)
Schor earned an MFA in 1973 from the newly formed California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. At CalArts she came into contact with Fluxus art tactics from artist professors such as Alison Knowles and the poet Emmett Williams. Schor was actively involved in the Feminist Art Program, one of the first of its kind in the country, started by Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro. Schor fondly recalls the “goofy spirit” of the school, comparing it to the television show created by her fellow student, Paul Reubens’s Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. The atmosphere was “subversive but in a sweet, slightly anarchic rather than nihilistic manner.”
Teaching studio art and art history to several generations of artists has been an important component of Schor’s life as an artist. She has been an associate teaching professor of fine art at New York’s Parsons the New School for Design since 1989. Recently, she has served as a guest lecturer at the School of Visual Art’s MFA in art criticism program and a resident artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Over the years she has taught at many schools, including the Rhode Island School of Design—where Janine Antoni, the second CAA interviewee, was her student—Sarah Lawrence College, Vermont College, and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
Schor’s solo exhibitions include Painting in the Space Where Painting Used to Be at Some Walls in Oakland in 2011, Mira Schor: Paintings from the Nineties to Now at CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles in 2010, and Suddenly: New Paintings by Mira Schor at Momenta Art in Brooklyn in 2009. With Susan Bee, she founded and led the art journal M/E/A/N/I/N/G/, which was active in print between 1986 and 1996; it continues as an online publication (a twenty-fifth anniversary edition was published in late 2011). A collection of texts from this publication, titled M/E/A/N/I/N/G/: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism, was published in 2000. Schor is also the editor of The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
Schor has received awards in painting from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. In 1999, CAA recognized her writing with its Frank Jewett Mather Award. She is currently represented by CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles and by Marvelli Gallery in New York.
Stuart Horodner
Stuart Horodner is artistic director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in Georgia. He has held positions as visual arts curator at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Oregon and director of the Bucknell University Art Gallery in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He was also a coowner of the Horodner Romley Gallery in New York. Horodner has curated numerous solo and group exhibitions and has worked with artists including Leon Golub, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Judy Linn, Melanie Manchot, William Pope.L, Kay Rosen, Joe Sola, Jessica Stockholder, and Jack Whitten.
His criticism has appeared in journals and magazines, including Art Issues, Art Lies, Art on Paper, Bomb Magazine, and Sculpture. Horodner’s new book, The Art Life: On Creativity and Career (Atlanta: Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, 2012), collects statements and texts by visual artists, writers, filmmakers, and performers that address the Sisyphean task of sustaining a lifelong career in the arts. (Read an interview with Horodner about The Art Life in ArtsATL, published in March 2012.) He has served in an advisory capacity to organizations, including Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue, Creative Capital, the Ford Family Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony.
JANINE ANTONI AT THE 2013 ANNUAL ARTISTS’ INTERVIEWS
posted Oct 03, 2012
Janine Antoni, an artist based in New York, will participate in CAA’s next Annual Artists’ Interviews, hosted by ARTspace during the 2013 Annual Conference in New York. This session will be the thirteenth installment of the popular series, which features two major practicing artists in back-to-back interviews. The other artist who will be interviewed is the painter and writer Mira Schor. The talks will be held on Friday, February 15, 2013, from 2:30 to 5:00 PM at the Hilton in New York. Klaus Ottmann, director of the Center for the Study of Modern Art and a curator at large at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, will interview Antoni.
Janine Antoni
Janine Antoni, Loving Care, 1992, performance with Loving Care hair dye Natural Black, dimensions variable (artwork © Janine Antoni; photograph provided by the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York, and taken by Prudence Cumming Associates at Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, 1993)
Janine Antoni’s work is an amalgam of shamanistic ritual, quotidian task, and daredevil action. Her performances include using her dye-soaked hair to mop a gallery floor; sleeping in a bed set up in a gallery and then weaving a blanket based on the pattern of her rapid eye movements; and walking across a tightrope of hand-plied hemp that she made herself, suspended eight feet above the ground. The arduous process of the performance is often combined into installations with sculpture, photography, and video. It is Antoni’s desire that her artwork be understood as a felt experience, one that combines emotional content and intellectual engagement. In each piece, no matter the medium or image, a conveyed physicality speaks directly to the viewer’s body.
In a conversation published in 2011 in the Brooklyn Rail, she elaborates on the importance of this imagined relationship with her work’s audience: “When I’m making work I spend a lot of time fantasizing about what the viewer will do and think; I enter their body, and imagine them walking up to my sculpture. My work is a way for me to feel connected and to feel present in the world. I try to make work that elicits empathy. I’ve been known for chewing 600 pounds of chocolate, being dumped in tubs of lard, and mopping the floor with my hair. I do these extreme acts because I feel like it puts the viewer in a very emphatic relationship to my sculpture.”
In Antoni’s work, a charged relationship between the symbolic nature of her preferred materials (chocolate, lard, soap, hemp) and the artist’s given task to transform raw material, results in a highly personal, metaphysical evocation. For the installation Gnaw (1992), Antoni wanted to use her own body as a tool to redefine what a figurative sculpture could be. She chewed on a block of chocolate and a block of lard, spitting out pieces of each to be melted down and respectively repackaged as heart-shaped chocolates and lipstick. In Lick & Lather (1993), she sculpted two self-portrait busts out of chocolate and soap, generating a nearly tangible sensation of taste and touch.
Janine Antoni, Gnaw, 1992, 600 lbs. of chocolate, gnawed by the artist, 24 x 24 x 24 in.; 600 lbs. of lard, gnawed by the artist, 24 x 24 x 24 in.; 45 heart-shaped packages for chocolate made from chewed chocolate removed from the chocolate cube; 400 lipsticks made with pigment, beeswax, and chewed lard removed from the lard cube displayed in glass case (artwork © Janine Antoni; photograph provided by the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York)
Another recurring theme in Antoni’s art is the lasting enigma of the family. She has staged photographs of her parents dressed in drag as each other, which results in a comical yet strangely moving portrait of a couple. In 2008 she photographed her toddler daughter attempting to feed her mother through her bellybutton. The doublings and life cycles in both series transcend mere performance or enactment to become lasting meditations on human relationships. In a 2009 interview in Art in America, she states, “My work occupies the territory between object, performance and relic. For each piece, I ask myself what the piece needs, how much I should tell and how much I should leave to the viewer’s imagination. With earlier projects, I spoke through the work in a very direct way, and I thought that was a generous gesture. Now, I’m more interested in leaving a space for the viewer’s imagination.” This new, more open-ended approach to her practice is evident in Tear (2008), an installation that pairs a video projection of a close-up of Antoni’s eye blinking in unison to a thudding sound. The video is screened in a room which contains a visibly scarred, lead wrecking ball that had been used in the demolition of a building. The artwork implies a triangulated relationship among all three components; tension and mystery are built from the unseen elements in the narrative.
Antoni was born in 1964 in Freeport, Bahamas. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 1986 and an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1989. Mira Schor was an influential professor for Antoni in graduate school, introducing the younger woman to the work of three feminist artists from the 1970s whose physical bodies were integral to their art practice: Ana Mendieta, Hannah Wilke, and Carolee Schneeman.
Janine Antoni, Slumber, 1993, performance with loom, yarn, bed, nightgown, PSG machine, and artist’s REM reading, dimensions variable (artwork © Janine Antoni; photograph provided by the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York)
Antoni has shown her work in more than twenty-five solo exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Her most recent was Touch (2011) at the Museum Kunst der Westküste in Alkersum/Föhr, Germany. She has participated in international biennials in Venice, Johannesburg, Istanbul, and Kwangju and domestically in the Whitney Biennial in New York, SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico, and Prospect.1 in New Orleans. The artist has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Larry Aldrich Foundation Award, a Joan Mitchell Painting and Sculpture Award, a Creative Capital Grant, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. She is represented by Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York.
Antoni lives and works in New York. She participated in the 2011 Annual Conference, speaking on the popular Centennial session “Parallel Practices: When the Mind Isn’t Focused on Art.”
Klaus Ottmann
Klaus Ottmann is director of the Center for the Study of Modern Art and curator at large at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. He is the author of Yves Klein by Himself: His Life and Thought (Paris: Éditions Dilecta, 2010), The Genius Decision: The Extraordinary and the Postmodern Condition (New York: Spring Publications, 2004), and The Essential Mark Rothko (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003). In 2006 he translated and edited Yves Klein’s complete writings for the book Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, published by Spring Publications.
Ottmann has curated more than forty international exhibitions, including Per Kirkeby: Paintings and Sculpture; Still Points of the Turning World: SITE Santa Fe’s Sixth International Biennial; Life, Love, and Death: The Work of James Lee Byars; Wolfgang Laib: A Retrospective; Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings, 1972–2008; and Fairfield Porter Raw: The Creative Process of an American Master.