Polly Apfelbaum, image credit: Nicole Eisenman, Apfelbaum, 2019, Paper pulp drawing, Paper dimensions: 30 1/2 x 22 1/2 in, Courtesy the artist and Anton Kern Gallery.
David Pagel.

We are excited to announce that one of this year’s Artists’ Interviews will feature Polly Apfelbaum, interviewed by David Pagel.  

Beginning in 1997, the Annual Artists’ Interviews were established to provide the opportunity for esteemed artists to have one-on-one conversations with colleagues at the Annual Conference.  

Each year, the Services to Artists Committee identifies two distinguished artists to participate. The interviews, held as part of the Services to Artists Program, provide a unique opportunity for members to hear insights from artists in dialogue with the interviewer.  Access to this program content requires free registration for “Free and Open Sessions” and is included in paid registration. This year’s Artists’ Interviews are supported by a generous grant from the NEA.

Speaker Biographies

New York-based artist Polly Apfelbaum’s (b.1955) work has situated itself as a hybrid of painting, sculpture, and installation over a career spanning 30-plus years. Exploring the intricacies of color, Apfelbaum weaves her way, both literally and conceptually, through ideas of Minimalism, Pop aesthetics, and Color Field painting to blur the lines between two-and three-dimensional art making. Apfelbaum graduated from the Tyler School of Art, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. She has exhibited consistently since her first solo show in 1986. Her work has recently been recognized with a Pew Center for Arts Grant, a Creative Capital Award, and the 2012 Rome Prize at the American Academy. She has also received a Joan Mitchell Grant, The Diebenkorn Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, an Anonymous Was a Woman Grant, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. 

Recent solo exhibitions include: “Waiting For the UFO’s (a space between a landscape and a bunch of flowers)” at the Kemper Museum, Kansas City, and the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK (2019); “Haystack Hands” at Haystack Mountain School of Craft, Deer Isle, ME; “Happiness Runs” at Belvedere 21, in Vienna, Austria (2018); “Dubuffet’s Feet, My Hands” at Frith Gallery, London, UK (2017); “The Potential of Women” at Alexander Gray Associates, New York, NY (2017); “Face (Geometry)(Naked) Eyes,” Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA (2016); and “Deep Purple, Red Shoes,” Be-Part, Waregem, Belgium (2015). She is represented in numerous collections including: Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.  

David Pagel is an art critic who lives in Los Angeles and regularly contributes to the Los Angeles Times. He is a professor of art theory and history at Claremont Graduate University and an adjunct curator at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, NY, where he has organized “Telling Stories: Changing the Narratives” (2020) and “Unfinished Business: Paintings from the 1970s and 1980s by Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl and David Salle” (2016).  

Recent publications include “Jim Shaw” (Lund Humphries, 2019) and “Talking Beauty: A Conversation Between Joseph Raffael and David Pagel About Art, Love, Death, and Creativity” (Zero+, 2019). An avid cyclist, he is a seven-time winner of the California Triple Crown.   

Apfelbaum and Pagel’s pre-recorded conversation will be available starting on February 5, 2021. They will host a live online Q&A on Friday, February 12 at 5:30pm EST. 

Alan Michelson, photo: Karolina Sobel. David Joselit, photo: Mary Ellen Carroll.

We are pleased to announce that one of this year’s Artists’ Interviews will feature Alan Michelson, interviewed by David Joselit. 

Beginning in 1997, the Annual Artists’ Interviews were established to provide the opportunity for esteemed artists to have one-on-one conversations with colleagues at the Annual Conference.  

Each year, the Services to Artists Committee identifies two distinguished artists to participate. The interviews, held as part of the Services to Artists Program, provide a unique opportunity for members to hear insights from artists in dialogue with the interviewer. Access to this program content requires free registration for “Free and Open Sessions” and is included in paid registration. This year’s Artists’ Interviews are supported by a generous grant from the NEA.

Speaker Biographies

Alan Michelson is an internationally recognized New York-based artist, curator, writer, lecturer and Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River.

For over thirty years, he has been a leading practitioner of a socially engaged, critically aware, site-specific art grounded in local context and informed by the retrieval of repressed histories. Recent exhibitions include Alan Michelson: Wolf Nation, Whitney Museum of American Art, Volume 0, Zuecca Projects, Venice, and Citizenship: A Practice of Society, MCA Denver.

His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Canada, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and the Art Gallery of Ontario.  His essays have recently appeared in Frieze and October.

Public art is also part of his diverse practice, and Mantle, his large-scale monument honoring Virginia’s Indian nations was dedicated at the capitol in Richmond in 2018.

Michelson is co-founder and co-curator, with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, of the groundbreaking Indigenous New York series.

David Joselit is Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard.  Joselit is author of Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (MIT, 1998), American Art Since 1945 (Thames and Hudson, 2003), Feedback: Television Against Democracy (MIT, 2007), and After Art (Princeton University Press, 2012). He co-organized the exhibition, “Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age,” which opened at the Brandhorst Museum in Munich in 2015.  

Joselit is an editor of the journal OCTOBER and writes regularly on contemporary art and culture. His most recent book is Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (MIT Press 2020). 

Michelson and Joselit’s pre-recorded conversation will be available starting on February 5, 2021. They will host a live online Q&A on Friday, February 12 at 4:30 pm EST. 

College Art Association
Notice of 109^th Annual Business Meeting
Friday, February 12, 2021
2:00 p.m. EST

The 109th Annual Business Meeting of the members of the College Art Association will be called to order at 2:00 p.m. EST on Friday, February 12th at the 2021 Annual Conference. Access to this meeting requires free registration for “Free and Open Sessions” and is included in paid registration. Once you have registered, please log into the online conference portal to attend the meeting.

CAA President, N. Elizabeth Schlatter will preside.  

AGENDA

1. Welcome / Call to Order – N. Elizabeth Schlatter, CAA President
2. Executive Director’s Report – Meme Omogbai

• Approval of Minutes of 108th Annual Business Meeting, held in two parts, February 12 and February 14, 2020  [ACTION ITEM]  See CAA 108th Annual Business Meeting Minutes.

1. Financial Report: Robert Tofolo, Chief Financial Officer
2. Old Business
3. New Business

• Results of Election of New Directors – N. Elizabeth Schlatter, CAA President
• Adjournment

Proxies

If you are unable to attend the Annual Business Meeting, kindly complete a proxy online to appoint the individuals named thereon to (i) vote, as directed by you, for directors, and, at their discretion, on such other matters as may properly come before the Annual Business Meeting; and (ii) vote on any and all adjournments thereof. CAA Members will be notified when the proxy for casting votes becomes available — online in late December 2020. A proxy, with your vote for directors, must be received no later than 6:00 p.m. EST Thursday, February 11^th, 2021.

Next Meeting – 2022

The 110th Annual Business Meeting of the College Art Association will be held in Chicago in 2022, precise date to be announced.  

Colin Blakely, Secretary

College Art Association

December 10, 2020

We’re delighted to announce the Distinguished Scholar session at the 109th CAA Annual Conference will honor Salah M. Hassan.

Salah M. Hassan. Photo: Jason Koski, Cornell University Photography (UREL)

Salah M. Hassan is the Goldwin Smith Professor of African and African Diaspora Art History and Visual Culture in the Department of Africana Studies and Research Center, as well as in the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies, and also serves as Director of the Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University, Ithaca, USA. Hassan is also the Director of The Africa Institute, Sharjah, UAE. Hassan served as Professor of History of Art in African and African American Studies and Fine Art at Brandeis University, where he previously awarded the Madeleine Haas Russell Professorship in the Departments of African and Afro-American Studies and Fine Arts (2016-2017).

Hassan is a founding-editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (Duke University Press). He currently serves as a member of the editorial advisory board of Atlantica, Journal of Curatorial Studies, and international Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, and served as consulting editor for African Arts. Hassan has contributed numerous essays to journals, anthologies, and exhibition catalogues of contemporary art, and has guest edited a special issue of SAQ: South Atlantic Quarterly, entitled African Modernism (2010). He has authored, edited, and co-edited several books, including Ibrahim El Salahi: A Visionary Modernist (2013); Darfur and the Crisis of Governance: A Critical Reader (2009); Diaspora, Memory, Place (2008); Unpacking Europe (2001); Authentic/Ex-Centric (2001; Gendered Visions: The Art of Contemporary Africana Women Artists (1997); and Art and Islamic Literacy among the Hausa of Northern Nigeria (1992), among others. Most recently, Hassan edited and introduced Ibrahim El-Salahi: Prison Notebook (MoMA and Sharjah Art Foundation Publications, 2018), and the forthcoming Ahmed Morsi: A Dialogic Imagination (Sharjah Art Foundation, 2020).

Hassan has curated a number of international exhibitions in museums and at major Biennales such as Venice and Dak’Art, including Authentic/Ex-Centric (49th Venice Biennale, 2001), Unpacking Europe (Rotterdam, 2001-02), and 3×3: Three Artists/Three: David Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Pamela Z (Dak’Art, 2004), among others. He curated Ibrahim El Salahi: A Visionary Modernist was published in 2012 held at The Tate Modern in London (2013) after premiering at the Sharjah Art Museum in Sharjah, UAE (2013). In addition, he also co-curated The Khartoum School: The Making of the Modern Art Movement in Sudan, 1945-2016 (2016-2017) and When Art Becomes Liberty: The Egyptian Surrealists (1938–1965) (2016) funded by the Sharjah Art Foundation.

He is the recipient of fellowships including the J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship as well as major grants from Sharjah Art Foundation, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Afrique en Créations, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Prince Claus Fund.

This session will highlight his career and provide an opportunity for dialogue between and among colleagues. The panel will include Dr. Hassan as well as the following: Chika Okeke-Agulu (Princeton University); Elizabeth Giorgis (University of Addis Ababa); and Iftikhar Dadi (Cornell University).

The live online Q&A will be held Thursday, February 11, 2021, 10:30-11:15 am EST.