CAA News Today
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for January 2011
posted Jan 10, 2011
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following symposium, conference sessions, and exhibitions 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.
January 2011
Women and the Word: Muslim Women Artists Explore Spirit, Form, and Text
Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California
1433 Madison Street, Oakland CA 94612
January 3–March 30, 2011
The art gallery of the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California is the first San Francisco Bay Area space to specialize in Muslim artists and Islamic art. From January to March 2011, the gallery will mount three one-woman shows of work by local artists who explore the Islamic tradition of calligraphy and abstract forms. The artists’s names and dates of presentations are: Rubina Kaz, January 3–February 2; Rabea Chaudhry, February 4–March 2; and Salma Arastu, March 4–30.
!Women Art Revolution
New Frontier at the Sundance Film Festival
Historic Miners Hospital, 1354 Park Avenue, Park City, UT 84060; and Salt Lake Art Center, 20 South West Temple, Salt Lake City, UT 84101
January 20–30, 2011
!Women Art Revolution is a documentary film exploring the feminist art movement in the United States from 1968 to the present. The filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson includes interviews with artists, innovators, art historians, and critics taken over a forty-year period, asking why so many female artists are little known and why museums fill their walls with the works of men. Accompanying the film is RAW/WAR, an interactive, community-curated video collection that allows users to access archival footage about the achievements and practices of women artists and to share their own stories through text, images, video clips, and links.
Hand, Voice & Vision: Artists’ Books from Women’s Studio Workshop
Grollier Club
47 East 60th Street, New York, NY 10022
December 8, 2010–February 5, 2011
Curated by Kathleen Walkup, Hand, Voice & Vision: Artists’ Books from Women’s Studio Workshop features forty books by thirty-six artists created over a thirty-year period. The four artists who founded the workshop—Ann Kalmbach, Tatana Kellner, Anita Wetzel, and Barbara Leoff Burge—wanted to operate and maintain a workspace that would encourage the visions of individual women artists, provide professional opportunities for them, and promote programs designed to stimulate public involvement with and support for the visual arts.
The Grollier Club also presents two tandem events. On Tuesday, January 25, three of the exhibition’s artists (Clarissa Sligh, Susan Mills, and Emily Speed) will talk about their work from 2:00 to 4:00 PM. Jae Jennifer Rossman, assistant director for special collections at Yale University, will moderate the panel. On the following day, Walkup will speak on “Women Making Art: Artists’ Books from Women’s Studio Workshop” from 2:00 to 3:00 PM.
Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women
Cartoon Art Museum
655 Mission Street, San Francisco CA 94105
October 1, 2010–January 30, 2011
The history of women in comics is well documented, and the Jewish contribution to the art form is widely acknowledged. Curated by Michael Kaminer and Sarah Lightman, Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women is the first museum exhibition to combine both groups in a single exhibition. Many of the original artworks on display have never before been shown in public. Among the eighteen American, European, and Israeli artists are Sharon Rudahl of Wimmen’s Comix and Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Diane Noomin of Twisted Sisters—all pioneers from the 1970s and 1980s—alongside younger artists. The exhibition catalogue was designed and published as an eight-page newspaper broadsheet.
Affiliated Society News for January 2011
posted Jan 09, 2011
American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works
The American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC) has appointed two new members to its board of directors. Beginning three-years terms are Ingrid Bogel, executive director of the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Jeanne Drewes, chief of binding and collections care in the Preservation Directorate at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Bogel and Drewes will help the board to implement a new three-year strategic plan that includes expanding and strengthening the organization’s core educational purposes, building awareness and advancing support of the conservation profession, and strengthening AIC’s organization and structure.
Art Historians Interested in Pedagogy and Technology
Art Historians Interested in Pedagogy and Technology (AHPT) has announced two new officers: Marjorie Och, professor of art history at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, has become president; and Sarah Scott, assistant professor of art history at Wagner College in Staten Island, New York, is secretary.
The AHPT business meeting will take place at the CAA Annual Conference on Wednesday, February 9, 7:30–9:00 AM in Gibson Room, 2nd Floor, Hilton New York. Immediately following the meeting is the AHPT-sponsored session, “Technology and Collaboration in the Art History Classroom,” chaired by Och and featuring Susan Healy, Frances Altvater, Janice Lynn Robertson, and Eva J. Allen.
AHPT has recently become an affiliated society of the Southeastern College Art Conference and plans to sponsor sessions at that organization’s annual meeting in addition to those at the CAA conference.
Arts Council of the African Studies Association
Trevor H. J. Marchand’s The Masons of Djenné won the Herskovits Award from the African Studies Association
A book on African expressive culture, Trevor H. J. Marchand’s The Masons of Djenné (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), shared the 2010 Melville J. Herskovits Award, given by the African Studies Association for an outstanding original scholarly work on Africa. A member of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA), Marchand is senior lecturer in social anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. (The cowinner is Adeline Masquelier, Women and Islamic Revival in a West African Town.) Last year’s Herskovits Award was given to Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie for Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008).
Association for Textual Scholarship in Art History
The Association for Textual Scholarship in Art History (ATSAH) will sponsor a session, called “Symbolism, Its Origins, and Its Consequences II,” at CAA’s upcoming Annual Conference and under the umbrella of Art, Literature, and Music in Symbolism and Decadence, a newly formed society. Taking place on Thursday, February 10, 12:30–2:00 PM, in Sutton Parlor North, Hilton New York, the session seeks to foster a dialogue among scholars on the origins and consequences of the Symbolist movement in art, literature, and music following an international conference, “The Symbolist Movement: Its Origins and Its Consequences,” held at the University of Illinois’ Allerton Park and Retreat Center in Monticello in April 2009. The CAA papers address topics that span the fifteenth through the twentieth century and cross a number of disciplines such as the visual arts, music, literature, and philosophy, with a particular focus on the different ways in which artists associated with Symbolism have engaged with artistic tradition and referred to other forms of expression in their quest to develop new forms and to illuminate the many facets of aesthetic experience. Chaired by Rosina Neginsky and Deborah H. Cibelli, the session features papers by Brendan Cole, Cassandra Sciortino, Leslie Steward Curtis, and Davide Lacagnina. Please see the Conference Program for full details.
Also at the CAA conference, ATSAH will hold its business meeting on Friday, February 11, 12:30–2:00 PM at the Hilton New York, Gramercy A, 2nd Floor. All members are welcome to attend the discussion.
Association of Historians of American Art
The Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA) has announced a new board cochair: Jenny Carson, assistant professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She assumes the role at the upcoming CAA Annual Conference.
Jeffrey Weidman, senior librarian in the Spencer Art Reference Library at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, has provided a set of useful, extensive links, called Web Resources for American Art, which covers work up to 1945. In August, 2010, Choice magazine gave the compilation a three-star rating, highly recommending it.
AHAA is sponsoring two sessions at the CAA Annual Conference in New York. Chaired by Melanie Herzog and Frances Pohl, the first, “(Re)Collecting Memory: Oral History as Testimony of Lived Experience,” takes place on Thursday, February 10, 2011, 12:30–2:00 PM, Hilton New York, Gibson Room, 2nd Floor. Participants are Avis Berman, Theresa Leininger-Miller, Margo Machida, and Liza Kirwin. The second session, “Color and Nineteenth-Century American Painting,” chaired by Peter John Brownlee, is scheduled for Friday, February 11, 2011, 2:30–5:00 PM, Hilton New York, Madison Suite, 2nd Floor. Speakers are Lance Mayer, Gay Myers, Adrienne Baxter Bell, Michael Rossi, Matthew Bailey, and Maggie M. Cao; serving as the discussant is David Bjelajac.
Just before the second session is the AHAA business meeting, taking place on Friday, February 11, 2011, 12:30–2:00 PM, Hilton New York, Regent Parlor, 2nd Floor. Light refreshments will be served. All members and interested parties are invited to attend the meeting and two sessions.
Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art
The annual business meeting for the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) will take place at the CAA Annual Conference in New York on Thursday, February 10, 5:30–7:00 PM at the Hilton New York, Regent Parlor, 2nd Floor. Elections will be held for president, program coordinator, and members-at-large.
Also at the CAA conference, AHNCA members are also invited to take part in a private visit to the New York Public Library Prints and Photographs Study Room on Wednesday, February 9, 2011, 11:00 AM–12:30 PM. The curators Stephen Pinson and David Christie will introduce highlights and rarely exhibited holdings in the library’s extensive collection of prints and photographs. Among other things, Christie plans to show prints related to the 1853 World’s Fair in New York as well as works by both well-known and not-so-famous “heroes of print.” There is no cost for AHNCA members, but space is limited. Please contact Elizabeth Mansfield before January 15 to reserve your place.
AHNCA now publishes its membership directory online as a searchable PDF. The Newsletter is also sent electronically. Members who do not have email will continue to receive a hardcopy by post.
Foundations in Art: Theory and Education
Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE) and the Mid-America College Art Association, another CAA affiliated society, will present a joint conference, called “ON STREAM,” at the Ball Park Hilton in St. Louis, Missouri. Taking place March 30–April 2, 2011, the conference will explore how artists and teachers develop and foster creativity in the second decade of the third millennium. For more details, visit the FATE website or contact Jeff Boshart, conference coordinator.
Historians of British Art
The Historians of British Art (HBA) will host a special panel of “Young Scholars, Works in Progress” during the HBA business meeting at the CAA Annual Conference on Friday, February 11, 7:30–9:00 AM. The meeting will be held at the Hilton New York, Bryant Suite, 2nd Floor. Informal audience discussion will follow three fifteen-minute presentations: Amanda Lahikainen, “‘British Asignats’: Satirical Representation and the Politicization of Paper Currency in 1797”; Keren Hammerschlag, “Artistic Scientists and Scientific Artists at the British Royal Academy 1860–1900”; and Emily Davis, “British Literary Periodicals Transform the Female Form in Turn-of-the-Century Glasgow.” All are welcome to attend.
Historians of Islamic Art Association
The Historians of Islamic Art Association (HIAA) has announced the election of Sheila Canby, Patti Cadby Birch Curator in Charge of the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as president-elect.
The annual majlis, or meeting, takes place at Hunter College in New York on February 12, 2011, 1:00–5:30 PM in the Lang Auditorium, North Building. Details of the program are published online. The HIAA business meeting and reception follow the presentations.
International Association of Word and Image Studies
The International Association of Word and Image Studies (IAWIS) recently sponsored an international conference devoted to the emerging theme of architecture and fiction, called “Once upon a Place: Haunted Houses and Imaginary Cities,” that took place October 12–14, 2010, in Lisbon, Portugal. The conference tackled the reciprocal influences between architecture and fiction, whether they appear under literary forms or other means related to visual narratives and popular culture. Questions that were addressed included: What kinds of stories do spaces and buildings tell us? What insights into architectural knowledge and experience can literary forms convey? Are designs, buildings, and cities a fabrication on the world? Does form follows fiction? Can fiction foresee architecture and urban futures? The program gathered over thirty papers by architects, scholars, and artists. Among the presenters were Alberto Manguel, Colin Fournier, Kazys Varnelis, Ângela Ferreira, Gonçalo M. Tavares, Jane Rendell, François Schuiten, and Benoît Peeters. An associated event of the 2010 Lisbon Architecture Triennale, the IAWIS conference was a joint initiative of CIAUD/Faculty of Architecture Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, with the collaboration of CUC-Centro Cultura Urbana Contemporânea and the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
The next IAWIS conference, “Imaginary/L’imaginaire,” will take place in Montreal, Quebec, this summer: August 22–26, 2011.
Leonardo Education and Art Forum
As part of its collaboration with the conferences Media Art History and SIGGRAPH, Leonardo Education and Art Forum (LEAF) seeks participants for “Media Art History 2011: Rewire,” the fourth international conference on the histories of media art, science, and technology. The event will be held in Liverpool, England, from September 28 to October 1, 2011. The call for papers is now open. Deadline: January 31, 2011.
LEAF also encourages the submission of papers and/or digitally mediated art for SIGGRAPH in Vancouver, British Columbia. In addition, selected works will be published in a special issue of Leonardo: Journal of the International Society of the Arts, Sciences and Technology. Deadline: January 14, 2011.
National Council of Arts Administrators
Jim Hopfensperger of the Gwen Frostic School of Art at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo was elected president of the board of directors at the recent annual conference of the National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA), held November 17–20, 2010, in Austin, Texas. In addition, Kim Russo of the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, and Sergio Soave from the Department of Art at Ohio State University in Columbus, were elected to three-year terms as board members.
At the upcoming CAA Annual Conference in New York, NCAA will present a session, called “‘Will You Friend Me?’ Social Media Possibilities, Responsibilities, and Challenges in Art Administration and Teaching,” on Friday, February 11, 5:30–7:30 PM. The four participants—Cora Lynn Deibler, Andrea Eis, Kim Russo, and Georgia Strange—will present a panel on the uses and abuses of social media and cloud computing in the academic environment.
Also at the CAA conference, join NCAA for its annual reception on Thursday, February 10, 5:30–7:30 PM, for networking and dialogue. See the Conference Program for the exact location of the reception in the Hilton New York. NCAA welcomes current members, new members, and innocent bystanders to all events.
Public Art Dialogue
Anne Pasternak has received Public Art Dialogue’s annual award (photograph by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and provided by Creative Time)
Public Art Dialogue (PAD) is pleased to announce the recipient of its 2011 Award for Achievement in the Field of Public Art: Anne Pasternak, president and artistic director of Creative Time, based in New York. PAD will honor her immediately after a brief business meeting to be held at the CAA Annual Conference, on Friday, February 11, 5:30–7:00 PM in Gramercy A, 2nd Floor, Hilton New York. On receipt of the award, Pasternak will discuss the ongoing need for activist art in the public realm. Her talk will be followed by a brief conversation with Harriet F. Senie, PAD cochair, about Senie’s favorite projects. After the discussion, audience members may join the dialogue. This meeting and award presentation are free and open to the public. PAD gives the annual award to an individual whose contributions have had profound influence on the field, and its winners receive honorary lifetime PAD membership. The artist Suzanne Lacy was the inaugural award winner, in 2009. Last year, PAD recognized the achievements of the curator Mary Jane Jacob.
The latest newsletter for Public Art Dialogue (PAD) newsletter has been published online. This issue contains information about the upcoming launch of the journal Public Art Dialogue, edited by Cher Krause Knight and Harriet F. Senie, which will be available in early 2011. Subscription to Public Art Dialogue—at a discounted rate—is a benefit of organizational membership. The newsletter also details the inaugural PAD Portfolio Reviews, to be held during the CAA conference in New York. For further information, please write to Juilee Decker, PAD membership coordinator.
Radical Art Caucus
Celebrate the tenth birthday of the Radical Art Caucus (RAC) with a slice of cake at the annual reception, held at the CAA Annual Conference on Friday, February 11, 5:30–7:00 PM; see the Conference Program for the exact location. RAC will also discuss questions of unions and academic labor and make strategic plans for CAA’s 2012 and 2013 meetings. Don’t miss the RAC-sponsored sessions: “Video Art as Mass Medium,” chaired by Benj Gerdes and Nate Harrison; and “Environmental Sustainability in Art History, Theory, and Practice,” organized by Travis Nygard, RAC copresident. Look out for updates on the RAC Facebook page or contact Joanna Gardner-Huggett, RAC secretary, if you have any additional questions or news to share.
Society for Photographic Education
The Society for Photographic Education (SPE) forty-eighth national conference, called “Science, Poetry, and the Photographic Image,” will examine the confluence of the ideologies of scientists and poets in the context of photography. To be held March 10–13, 2011, at the Sheraton Atlanta Hotel in Georgia, the conference will feature presentations from artists, educators, historians, and curators, as well as one-on-one portfolio critiques and informal portfolio sharing, a print raffle and silent auction, and film screenings, exhibitions, tours, and receptions. Speakers include Abelardo Morell, Catherine Wagner, Carolyn Guertin, Justine Cooper, and more. Student volunteers receive discounted admission.
Society of North American Goldsmiths
Registration opened on January 11, 2011, for the Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG) conference, “FLUX,” taking place May 26–29, 2011, in Seattle, Washington. Hosted by the Seattle Metals Guild and sponsored by Rio Grande, the conference includes two important programs with conference registration: the Education Dialogue, a three-hour session that gives educators a place to discuss the current issues they are facing in academia; and the Professional Development Seminar, a three-hour event providing concrete information that will change the way you approach your work and the way you do business. Review the full conference schedule, available as a PDF. Register now for the Demo Days preconference workshops produced by the Seattle Metals Guild; only eighty tickets will be sold. Student, educator, and guild registration grants and discounts are available. For more information, please write to SNAG.
Visual Resources Association
The Visual Resources Association (VRA) and the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) will hold their second annual joint conference March 24–28, 2011, in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. With the theme “Collaboration: Building Bridges in the 21st Century,” the conference will provide a two-in-one opportunity for attendees to obtain cutting-edge information about current trends in the book and image realms. In addition to pertinent sessions, exhibitions, and workshops, the full schedule includes several exciting events that are planned throughout the culturally vibrant Twin Cities. Experience an Italian Renaissance architectural gem by attending the fundraising “Founders’ Fête” at the historic Gale Mansion. Afterward, the Minneapolis Institute of Art will open its doors for attendees to view the exhibition, Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting: Masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland. The welcome party, called “The Icebreaker,” will take place at the Walker Art Center. Conference attendees can also experience artists’ collaboratives focused on book arts, printmaking, and ceramics or take architectural tours.
Women’s Caucus for Art
Join the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) for its 2011 annual conference, “LIVE SPACE: women + art + activism,” with events running concurrently with the CAA Annual Conference in New York. For a morning of networking, sharing work, performances, videos, and panels, please visit the WCA Live Space Confab on Thursday morning, February 10, 2011, 8:00 AM–NOON at the Hilton New York, New York Suite, 4th Floor.
Later that day (5:30–7:00 PM), head uptown for the artists’ reception for Sanctuaries in Time, an exhibition of the Jewish Women Artist Network (a WCA caucus) at Columbia/Barnard Hillel, Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life, 606 West 115th Street. The show is on view January 21–March 1. Also on Thursday, the Young Women’s Caucus will present What Young Women Artists Want at Raandesk Gallery of Art, 16 West 23rd Street, 4th Floor (7:00–9:00 PM). This event will showcase independent films from members and allies of the Young Women’s Caucus, a moving canvas of theater pieces in a collaborative gallery setting, and outdoor flash mob art performances. From 6:00 to 9:00 PM, a reception for Control, a traveling exhibition from WCA’s South Bay and Peninsula chapters, will be held at Ceres Gallery, 547 West 27th Street, Suite 201.
On Friday, February 11, New Century Artists will host a reception for Hidden Cities, the WCA national juried exhibition, that will take place 7:00–9:00 PM at the gallery at 530 West 25th Street. Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, juried the exhibition.
New Book on the History of CAA: The Eye, the Hand, the Mind
posted Jan 07, 2011
Edited by Susan Ball, executive director emerita, The Eye, the Hand, the Mind: 100 Years of the College Art Association surveys the impressive history of the organization from 1911 to the present. The 330-page hardcover book, published jointly by CAA and Rutgers University Press, can be ordered now ($29.95); it will also be available at the upcoming Annual Conference in New York—just in time for CAA’s Centennial Kickoff.
CAA was founded with a single stated purpose: “to promote art interests in all divisions of American colleges and universities.” From this humble yet ambitious origin, Ball has organized her book thematically instead of chronologically, with sixteen “purposes” from the CAA By-laws that are covered in twelve chapters. Written by artists and scholars who have worked closely with the organization over the last few decades, The Eye, the Hand, the Mind offers not a comprehensive history but rather a presentation of memorable highlights that tells the complex, contentious story of a venerable organization.
The Eye, the Hand, the Mind reviews familiar aspects of CAA. Craig Houser negotiates the long history of CAA’s dynamic publications program, which began in 1913 with the first issue of The Art Bulletin, and Julia A. Sienkewicz chronicles the evolution of the celebrated Annual Conference. Less known is CAA’s traveling-exhibition program in the 1930s, uncovered by Cristin Tierney. More recently, Ellen K. Levy explores how CAA has similarly supported presentations of artwork by its members, both students and professionals. Other authors investigate myriad other topics: developments in pedagogy and curriculum; political involvements and advocacy work; visual resources, libraries, and issues of copyright; professional support and career development; partnerships with museums and their associations; relationships to other learned societies in the humanities; governance structure and diversity matters; and much more. In the conclusion, Paul B. Jaskot anticipates the future of the organization as it enters its next one hundred years.
Ball, who served as CAA executive director from 1986 to 2006, is now director of programs at the New York Foundation for the Arts. In addition to organizing the book project, she wrote the introduction and contributed a chapter on the founding of CAA, administrative and financial matters, and the organization’s larger role in the visual arts.
The renowned artist Faith Ringgold has generously allowed the use of her lithograph, The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles (1996), for the book’s cover. She created the work, published by the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper (now the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions), as a benefit print to support CAA’s Professional Development Fellowship Program. Ringgold will be honored this year with CAA’s Distinguished Feminist Award.
Events at the Annual Conference
At the Annual Conference, CAA and Rutgers University Press are planning several events to promote The Eye, the Hand, the Mind. Judith K. Brodsky will operate a table outside Convocation, to be held at the Hilton New York on Wednesday evening, February 9, 2011, in the East Ballroom, Third Floor. Book signings with many of the contributors will take place in CAA’s Book and Trade Fair, also at the Hilton, on Thursday and Friday afternoons, February 10–11. Please check back later this month for more details on these events and more.
Table of Contents
Below is a list of the fifteen authors and their chapter titles:
- Susan Ball, “Introduction”
- Steven C. Wheatley, “The Learned Society Enterprise”
- Susan Ball, “The Beginnings: “Art for higher education, and higher education for Artists”
- Cristin Tierney, “A Stimulating Prospect: CAA’s Traveling Exhibition Program, 1929–1937”
- Barry Pritzker, “Cooperative Relationships with Museums”
- Craig Houser, “The Changing Face of Scholarly Publishing: CAA’s Publications Program”
- Julia A. Sienkewicz, “United the Arts and the Academy: A History of the CAA Annual Conference”
- Ofelia Garcia, “Mentoring the Profession: Career Development and Support”
- Ellen K. Levy, “Art in an Academic Setting: Contemporary CAA Exhibitions”
- Matthew Israel, “CAA, Pedagogy, and Curriculum: A Historical Effect, An Unparalleled Wealth of Ideas”
- Christine L. Sundt, “Visual Resources for the Arts”
- Judith K. Brodsky, Mary D. Garrard, and Ferris Olin, “Governance and Diversity”
- Karen J. Leader, “CAA Advocacy: The Nexus of Art and Politics”
- Paul B. Jaskot, “Conclusion: The Next 100 Years”
The book also includes four appendices that list CAA’s sixteen purposes, past presidents of the Board of Directors, volunteer and staff administrators, and the editors from the publications program.
CAA Announces the Recipients of the 2011 Awards for Distinction
posted Jan 05, 2011
CAA has announced the recipients of the 2011 Awards for Distinction, which honor the outstanding achievements and accomplishments of individual artists, art historians, authors, conservators, curators, and critics whose efforts transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large.
CAA will formally recognize the honorees at a special ceremony to be held during the 99th Annual Conference in New York, on Thursday evening, February 10, 2011, 6:00–7:30 PM, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Led by Barbara Nesin, president of the CAA Board of Directors, the ceremony will take place in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium (use the 83rd Street entrance) and precede the Centennial Reception in the museum’s Great Hall and Temple of Dendur (7:30–9:00 PM). In connection with CAA’s one-hundredth anniversary, past recipients of each award will introduce the winners of the same award, bringing past and present together. The awards ceremony is free and open to the public; tickets for the reception are $35. RSVP to the event on Facebook.
In addition, Nesin, will formally introduce the five recipients of CAA’s 2010–11 Professional-Development Fellowships in the Visual Arts: Alma Leiva, Sheryl Oring, Brittany Ransom, Mina T. Son, and Amanda Valdez. This fellowship program awards grants to outstanding MFA students who are nearing graduation. She will also has also recognized five additional artists who have received honorable mentions: Maria Antelman, Caetlynn Booth, Gregory Hayes, Ashley Lyon, and Georgia Wall.
The 2011 Annual Conference—presenting scholarly sessions, panel discussions, career-development workshops, art exhibitions, a Book and Trade Fair, and more—is the largest gathering of artists, art historians, students, and arts professionals in the United States.
Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Lynda Benglis
For more than forty years, Lynda Benglis has challenged prevailing views about the nature and function of art, producing sculpture, painting, video, photography, and installation that demonstrate extraordinary breadth and invention. She models the life of an artist lived according to the rhythm of her own creativity and curiosity, rather than to the beat of fashion or the market and its enormous but inconstant rewards. Benglis’s career inspires younger artists, not because she was a star as a young artist, or because she has now begun to be recognized as a major artist at a later date. Her work has been and continues to be an ever-shifting monument to the body in motion, as she herself continues to change and grow as an artist. Her retrospective exhibition, Lynda Benglis, opens at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York on February 9.
Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work
John Baldessari
Few artists of the postwar era are so influential—or so elusive of definition—as John Baldessari, who has made extraordinary contributions in such wide-ranging registers as Conceptualism, appropriation, and art education. This seeming paradox—in which the artist at once towers over contemporary art and often slips through its cracks (while also prompting his students to seek new alternatives)—no doubt arises, at least in part, from his subtle wit. This year’s retrospective exhibition, John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, which opened at Tate Modern in London, appeared at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and ends its tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (on January 9), firmly establishes his preeminence over the course of five decades of artistic production.
Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Mieke Bal
The protean career of Mieke Bal, Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences Professor at the University of Amsterdam, has traversed many fields in the humanities. Emerging as a brilliant biblical scholar with path-breaking books that explored the gendered nature of Old Testament narratives, Bal became a star in literary criticism with the English translation of her 1977 book Narratology (1985). Ever curious and creative, her interests then migrated to art history, where she rapidly challenged established methodological conventions with Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word Image Opposition (1991) and Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (1999)—not to mention her well-known essay “Semiotics and Art History,” coauthored with Norman Bryson and published in The Art Bulletin (1991). Applying philosophical principles to an enterprise too often obsessed with empirical “evidence,” Bal provocatively rethinks the status of artistic authorship, the nature of the text/image relationship, the structure of text/context relationships, and the character of historical time.
Frank Jewett Mather Award
Luis Camnitzer
Luis Camnitzer has translated his tricultural perspective—born in Germany, raised and educated in Uruguay, and a participant in the New York art world—into a tripled practice. As an artist, teacher, and critic, he has lucidly addressed the aesthetic, social, and political conundrums of our times with firm but low-key authority. His latest collection of writings, On Art, Artists, Latin America, and Other Utopias (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), speaks incisively to issues of cultural displacement, transnational aesthetics, and the peripheral condition of contemporary art. Written originally for international art journals, exhibition catalogues, and academic conferences, the essays, which date from 1969 to 2007, assume a universal address, and Camnitzer’s intricate perception, laced with humor and irony but not dependent on them, allows him reasoned closeness to, and passionate distance from, his myriad topics.
Distinguished Feminist Award
Faith Ringgold
Faith Ringgold has been a forceful voice for feminism, successfully and gracefully encapsulating crucial issues of race despite the often-contentious relationship between gender and race in enfranchisement movements over the last four decades. Her work not only captures the strength of black women in fighting slavery, oppression, and sexual exploitation, but it also chronicles the dreams of black women who sought to transcend circumstance and find a brighter future. Ringgold’s American People paintings (1963–67) and Black Light series (begun in 1967) sought to examine how traditional color values could be modified for black subjects. From there she explored traditions of “women’s work” in fabric, first in collaboration with her late mother and then in her Story Quilts, which have become her signature statement. As a committed activist, Ringgold was a founder of Women, Students, and Artists for Black Liberation and a cofounder and member of Where We At, a collaborative of black women artists in the 1970s and 1980s.
Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
William Itter
William Itter’s gifted teaching approach, dedication to the instruction of freshman students, and curricular innovations in foundations have had a momentous, immeasurable impact on art pedagogy for more than fifty years. During his tenure as director of the Fundamentals Studio Program at Indiana University in Bloomington, which he joined in 1969, Itter has mentored several generations of graduate students with insight and commitment, turning them into great artists and teachers from a time when the MFA degree was in its infancy to the present day. In a unique pedagogical approach, he has regularly and generously shared his museum-quality collection of ceramics, textiles, baskets, and sculpture with his students as pedagogical tools to help them understand how visual languages have manifested across cultures and times. Now professor emeritus of fine arts, Itter continues to exhibit his own painting and drawing in prestigious venues nationwide.
Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
Patricia Hills
An active, gifted teacher, faithful mentor, and valued colleague, Patricia Hills has maintained a prodigious career, producing scholarship that has profoundly shaped the history of American art and visual culture. Her textbook Modern Art in the USA: Issues and Controversies of the Twentieth Century (2001) has become standard reading in the field, and her work on Jacob Lawrence, Alice Neel, Stuart Davis, John Singer Sargent, and Eastman Johnson is highly esteemed. As professor of art history at Boston University, she is a creative, active, and engaged classroom leader who has developed an innovative style of teaching that emphasizes intellectual role-playing and demonstrates striking methodological openness. Hills’s admirable commitment to the time-demanding aspects of pedagogy, such as her rigorous attention to student writing and her ability to combine that investment with a remarkable publication record, are a model for students and teachers across the discipline.
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Molly Emma Aitken
Informed by history, connoisseurship, and contemporary artistic practice, Molly Emma Aitken’s The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) is an original contribution to the history of South Asian art. Aitken’s closely argued yet accessible account overturns long-held assumptions regarding the conservatism of Rajasthani miniatures, revealing the subtle yet powerful dynamism that animates this tradition. She acknowledges that the “enormous red-tipped eyes, narrow skulls, and squat or strangely arching bodies” of the figures depicted in these works can seem formulaic or alienating, but these images cannot be understood as mere repetitions of moribund conventions. Instead, Aitken shows that these court paintings were intended to elicit emotional states from the viewer, a conclusion she reaches through an innovative application of formal analysis and social history.
CAA announced the shortlist on December 15, 2010.
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award
Darielle Mason, ed.
Darielle Mason’s Kantha: The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection and the Stella Kramrisch Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2009) constitutes a model of how to make a catalogue about specific collections that far outreaches the task of honoring the collectors in question. Offering acute insights into an important region and an understudied medium, the book not only celebrates a lively vernacular textile tradition but also accords, for the first time, a comprehensive, sensitive treatment to this form of women’s domestic, creative, and social expression. In a series of richly grounded, engagingly written essays, Mason and her collaborators—Pika Ghosh, Katherine Hacker, Anne Peranteau, and Niaz Zaman—locate Kantha in wider sociocultural, historical, political, economic, and religious currents while tackling issues sometimes avoided in such studies, such as matters surrounding the quiltmakers’ agency.
CAA announced the shortlist on December 15, 2010.
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, and Collections
Yasufumi Nakamori
Yasufumi Nakamori’s Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture; Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2010) revisits a book of photographs of an elegant imperial villa in Kyoto, a seventeenth-century structure that interestingly foreshadows Western modernist design. While this errand may sound obscurantist to some, the author has a profoundly fascinating story to tell. It emerges that the architect Tange Kenzō (with Walter Gropius, who authored the original Herbert Bayer–designed book from 1960) extensively altered the vision of Ishimoto, a fledgling photographer, by drastically cropping the images to better align them with Bauhaus aesthetics, and to reinforce his own position in postwar Japanese debates on the relation of the modern to tradition. In this astutely, impeccably produced catalogue, Nakamori importantly rehabilitates Ishimoto’s initial vision of Katsura, reproducing his original, perfectly stunning photographs.
Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Ross Barrett
In “Rioting Refigured: George Henry Hall and the Picturing of American Political Violence,” published in the September 2010 issue of The Art Bulletin, Ross Barrett recovers the history of the artist and a landmark painting of an American laborer. Rooting his analysis in close observation, the author enlivens a work that could easily be dismissed as little more than an academic study of a male model. Calling attention to the title Hall gave his 1858 painting (The Dead Rabbit, a term New Yorkers applied to a street rowdy), to bruises on the man’s torso, and to the brick clutched in his right hand, Barrett identifies the figure as a working class, Irish immigrant. Barrett calls on an arsenal of resources—history, biography, iconography, pedagogical practices in the academy, reports and illustrations in the popular press, theories of the body and spectatorship, and ancillary images of the male athlete in mid-nineteenth-century America—to build a clear and convincing case for reading class conflict and civil disorder in this material body.
Art Journal Award
Kirsten Swenson, Janet Kraynak, Paul Monty Paret, and Emily Eliza Scott
Organized by Kirsten Swenson for the forthcoming Winter 2010 issue of Art Journal, “Land Use in Contemporary Art” is an impressive, useful, and theoretically significant series of articles on a new genre of aesthetic practices. Presented with relevant introductions and histories, the contributions address social, economic, and conceptual issues on Land Use, which has attributes related to but occasionally outside what is usually considered art. Especially impressive are the differences among the texts, particularly in the authors’ descriptions of their values and approaches, which range from self-conscious nonjudgementalism to explicit activism. (CAA members will receive the Winter 2010 Art Journal later this month.)
CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
Joyce Hill Stoner
Based at the University of Delaware’s Art Conservation Department, Joyce Hill Stoner is a highly respected scholar, a dynamic, beloved professor, and a meticulous conservator of paintings. As director of the doctoral program in preservation studies, which developed from the first art-conversation program in the United States that she founded at her school in 1990, she has developed an interdisciplinary focus on art history and conservation. In the words of one nominator: “Three decades ago the prospect of conservation as a scholarly discipline was, at best, nascent if not merely notional. Since that time conservation scholarship has come to embody inquiries that include the investigation of an artist’s materials and techniques, the documentation of a contemporary artist’s ideas and intentions, the history of conservation, and the development of new techniques in the conservation of art, to name but a few. Stoner has contributed essential research in each of these areas and has thereby fundamentally shaped the discipline.”
Contact
For more information on the 2011 Awards for Distinction, please contact Emmanuel Lemakis, CAA director of programs. Visit the Awards section of the CAA website to read about past recipients. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is located at 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028.
Updated on January 27 and February 3, 2011.
January Deaths in the Arts
posted Jan 04, 2011
CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, architects, museum directors, collectors, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. Of special note is a text on the art historian Angela Rosenthal, written by her colleague David Bindman for CAA.
- David Becker, curator of prints and drawings at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and professor of art history at several schools across New England, died on November 26, 2010. He was 63
- Frederick S. Beckman, professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame who taught industrial and graphic design for more than fifty years, died on October 31, 2010. He was 93
- H. Allen Brooks, a professor of architecture at the University of Toronto for nearly thirty years, died on August 8, 2010, at the age of 84. An authority on Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, he was a past president of the Society of Architectural Historians
- Laura Cohen, cofounder of Krafti-Kit, an online fiber-arts kit store, who studied art history at the University of California in Santa Barbara, died on September 22, 2010. She was 42
- William Cumming, a painter of the Northwest School whose contemporaries included Mark Tobey and Morris Graves, died on November 22, 2010, at the age of 93. He also taught at the Burnley School of Professional Art (now the Art Institute of Seattle) and Cornish College of the Arts
- Nassos Daphnis, a Greek-born painter based in New York who showed his colorful, precise geometric abstractions at Leo Castelli Gallery, died on November 23, 2010, at age 96. He was also a noted horticulturist who grew hybrid tree peonies
- Diane Darst, the founder and director of Learning to Look, an art-education program for children, and the author of two textbooks, Western Civilization to 1648 and Learning to Look: A Complete Art History and Art Appreciation Program for Grades K–8, died on June 22, 2010. She was 62
- John Diebboll, an architect who worked for Michael Graves and who, as an artist, transformed pianos into sculptural objects, died on November 23, 2010, at age 54. He also founded his own firm, Diebboll Architects, in 2007
- Denis Dutton, scholar, cultural commentator, author of The Art Instinct, and founder and editor of the website Arts & Letters Daily, died on December 28, 2010. He was 66
- Robert Joseph Forsyth, professor emeritus of art history at Colorado State University who began his career at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in the 1950s, died on June 19, 2010, at the age of 88
- Sally D. Garen, professor of art history at the Corcoran College of Art and Design and Marymount University, among other schools around Washington, DC, died on November 29, 2010. She was 63
- Kay Gaskill-Jaeger, an artist, quilter, and urban planner for the Texas State Parks Department who studied art history at the University of Texas at Austin, died on November 27, 2010, at the age of 61
- Jane Tiley Griffin, an art historian who taught at the University of Maryland, George Washington University, and Howard University for more than thirty years, died on November 18, 2010, at the age of 84. She also organized tours to Southeast Asia
- Garry Gross, a fashion photographer who took the infamous photograph of a nude Brooke Shields that was later appropriated by the artist Richard Prince, died on November 30, 2010. He was 73
- Varnette P. Honeywood, an artist and teacher whose colorful works appeared in The Cosby Show during the 1980s, died on September 12, 2010, at the age of 59
- Stephen Irwin, an artist based in Louisville, Kentucky, who was a member of a collective called Zephyr Gallery, died on December 27, 2010. He was 51
- Theodore W. Kheel, a labor negotiator who was collected modern and contemporary art, especially works by Robert Rauschenberg, died on November 12, 2010. He was 96
- Peter C. Marzio, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston since 1982 who oversaw a rapid growth in the permanent collection, died on December 9, 2010. He was 67
- Roy R. Neuberger, the founder of the investment firm Neuberger Berman whose private collection comprises the core of a museum that bears his name at Purchase College, State University of New York, died on December 24, 2010. He was 107
- Angela Rosenthal, an associate professor of art history at Dartmouth College and a scholar of eighteenth-century European art, died on November 11, 2010. David Bindman has contributed an obituary for CAA
- Matthew Selsor, a curator and the director of the Anderson Gallery at Drake University, died on July 11, 2010, at the age of 27
- Elizabeth C. Shepherd, a professor of art history at the University of Pittsburgh and the former head of the Frick Fine Arts Library at her school, died on April 6, 2010, at the age of 95
- Andrzej Stanislaw Tomaszewski, a former director of the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, died on October 25, 2010. Born in 1934, he had been a professor of conservation at numerous universities in Poland and Germany
- John Warhola, a brother of Andy Warhol and founding member of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, where he served as vice president for twenty years, died on December 24, 2010. He was 85
- Peter J. Worth, an artist, art historian, and former chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, died on May 3, 2010. He was 93
Read all past obituaries in the arts on the CAA website.
Angela Rosenthal: In Memoriam
posted Jan 04, 2011
David Bindman is emeritus professor of the history of art at University College London.
Angela Rosenthal
Angela Rosenthal, associate professor of art history at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, died on November 11, 2010. She was an exceptional scholar whose boundless energy, intellectual fecundity, and charismatic personality endeared her to her colleagues, students, and friends.
Born in Trier, Germany, Rosenthal attended university there, receiving her PhD magna cum laude in 1994. She had previously studied in England—at University College London, the Courtauld Institute of Art, and Westfield College—between 1986 and 1989. After working as curator of contemporary art at the Stadtgalerie in Saarbrücken (1994–95), she moved to the United States to become Andrew Mellon Assistant Professor of Art History at Northwestern University (1995–97). She came to Dartmouth in 1997 as an assistant professor.
Unusually wide ranging in the field of early modern visual culture, Rosenthal’s work embraced a global perspective, with an emphasis on cultural history, gender studies, and postcolonialism. Although her focus was on eighteenth-century British art, she wrote eloquently in recent years on images of slavery and whiteness, and on contemporary art of the African diaspora. Her most important publication was the magisterial Angelica Kauffman: Art and Sensibility (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), which she developed from her Trier University thesis on this Neoclassical painter. She was also working on a second major book, The White of Enlightenment: Racializing Bodies in Eighteenth-Century British Visual Culture, at the time of her death.
Angela Rosenthal’s Angelica Kauffman: Art and Sensibility
An energetic force in the academic tradition of essay compilations, Rosenthal partnered with Bernadette Fort to edit The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), which won the 2002 Historians of British Art Book Award for the best multiauthor volume of the year. In addition, she compiled the forthcoming volume Invisible Subjects? Slave Portraiture in the Circum-Atlantic World, 1630–1890 (University of Chicago Press) with Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and was working on another collection, No Laughing Matter: Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality, and Ethnicity, that was based on the proceedings of a Humanities Institute she organized at Dartmouth in 2007.
Rosenthal also produced many articles in English and German on eighteenth-century art and contemporary subjects, some of which have become widely influential. Although it is difficult to pick just one from the many, her essay on “Visceral Culture: Blushing and the Legibility of Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century British Portraiture,” published in Deborah Cherry’s Art: History: Visual: Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), has become particularly seminal.
Rosenthal’s death at such an early stage of her career is an incalculable loss, but she will live on in the remarkable work she had already produced, and in the fond memories of all who had been touched by her vitality and warmth. She is survived by her husband, Adrian Randolph, Leon E. Williams Professor of Art History at Dartmouth College; her sister, Felicia Rosenthal, chief executive officer of CellGenix Technologie Transfer; and her parents, Peter and Anne Rosenthal.
Solo Exhibitions by Artist Members
posted Dec 22, 2010
See when and where CAA members are exhibiting their art, and view images of their work.
To learn more about submitting a listing, please see the instructions on the main Member News page.
December 2010
Abroad
Melissa Potter, Swinging Little Lamb, circa 1974 (feminine traits from Gender Assignment), 2010, print-on-demand book (artwork © Melissa Potter)Melissa Potter. Zvono Gallery, Belgrade, Serbia, November 15–27, 2010. New Works by Melissa Potter. Painting, photography, video, and print-on-demand book.
Mid-Atlantic
Dahlia Elsayed, And Then Some, 2010, acrylic on paper, 14 x 11 in. (artwork © Dahlia Elsayed)Dahlia Elsayed. Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, New Jersey, October 28, 2010–January 8, 2011. … And Then Some. Painting.
Dennis Farber, The Album Project, 2010, collage, cabinet cards, and inkjet print (artwork © Dennis Farber; photograph provided by the Maryland Institute College of Art)Dennis Farber. Pinkard Gallery, Bunting Center, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, Maryland, January 28–March 13, 2011. Mixed media.
Joseph Lewis III, I Can Still Win, 2008, digital print on Stonehenge 300 gram paper, 38 x 47½ in. (artwork © Joseph Lewis III; photograph provided by the Maryland Institute College of Art)Joseph Lewis III. Meyerhoff Gallery, Fox Building, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, Maryland, December 9, 2010–January 9, 2011. THE WORD. Digital prints.
Kathleen Vaccaro, Thanksgiving, 2009, oil on canvas, 42 x 75 in. (artwork © Kathleen Vaccaro)Kathleen Vaccaro. Draw the Line Gallery, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, November 5–29, 2010. Winter Nostalgia. Painting.
Midwest
Rachel Epp Buller, Swirling Stories, 2010, monoprint, 22 x 30 in. (artwork © Rachel Epp Buller)Rachel Epp Buller. Balcony Gallery, CityArts, Wichita, Kansas, December 5–30, 2010. Stories: Monoprints and More. Monoprints, woodblock prints, and handmade books.
Alison Crocetta, production photograph of Lift, 2004 (artwork © Alison Crocetta; photograph by David Pardoe and provided by the Weston Art Gallery)Alison Crocetta. Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery, Aronoff Center for the Arts, Cincinnati, Ohio, June 17–August 28, 2010. Moving Images by Alison Crocetta. Film and video.
Marcia Freedman, Cluttered, 2009, oil on canvas, 36 x 42 in. (artwork © Marcia Freedman)Marcia Freedman. Western Illinois University Art Gallery, Macomb, Illinois, October 26–November 18, 2010. Marcia Freedman: Inside/Outside. Painting and drawing.
Megan Geckler. Wexner Center for the Arts, University of Ohio, Columbus, Ohio. November 9, 2010–January 2, 2011. Spread the ashes of the colors. Environmental sculpture.
Jennifer Palmer, In My Secret, 2007, mixed media on poplar, 3 x 5 in. (artwork © Jennifer Palmer)Jennifer Palmer. Foundry Art Centre, St. Charles, Missouri, December 10, 2010–January 14, 2011. Asleep and Dreaming. Painting and drawing.
Northeast
Joy Garnett, Roil, 2010, oil on canvas, 54 x 60 in. (artwork © Joy Garnett)Joy Garnett. Winkleman Gallery, New York, October 15–November 13, 2010. Boom & Bust. Painting.
Pamela Pecchio, On Longing, Distance and Heavy Metal #1, 2010, archival pigment print from large-format negative, 30 x 40 in. (artwork © Pamela Pecchio)Pamela Pecchio. Daniel Cooney Fine Art Gallery, New York, January 6–February 12, 2011. On Longing, Distance and Heavy Metal. Photography.
Mary Ting, Insomnia, 2009–10, watercolor and collage, 24 x 18 in. (artwork © Mary Ting)Mary Ting. Lambent Foundation, New York. October 10–December 23, 2010. Insomnia and Other Stories. Drawing, printmaking, photography, video, and sculptural installation.
South
Sharon Lee Hart, Aries, Resident of Catskill Farm Animal Sanctuary, 2010, archival inkjet print, 40 x 40 inches (artwork © Sharon Lee Hart)Sharon Lee Hart. Tinney Contemporary Gallery, Nashville, Tennessee, December 4–23, 2010. Sanctuary. Photography.
Marcus Kenney, KicKitic, 2010, reclaimed taxidermy, fabric, gar, felt, turtle shell, beads, twine, buttons, plastic, and miscellaneous objects, 36 x 38 x 25 in. (artwork © Marcus Kenney)Marcus Kenney. Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia, November 18, 2010–January 1, 2011. Romance 2020. Mixed-media painting and sculpture.
Marcus Kenney, Defend Boundaries (Establish Validity), 2007, mixed media on canvas, 48 x 48 in. (artwork © Marcus Kenney)Marcus Kenney. Masur Museum of Art, Monroe, Louisiana, November 4, 2010–January 22, 2011. Marcus Kenney: Almanac 2020. Mixed-media painting and sculpture.
Conrad Ross, Chinese Landscape #1, oil, digital prints, and sand on canvas (artwork © Conrad Ross)Conrad Ross. Tennessee Valley Museum of Art, Tuscumbia, Alabama, September 12–November 12, 2010. China on My Mind. Mixed-media painting, intaglio, woodcut, relief, and collé.
Linda Stein, Defender 696, 2010, leather, metal, and mixed media, 38 x 22 x 14 in. (artwork © Linda Stein)Linda Stein. Neil Britton Art Gallery, Virginia Wesleyan College, Norfolk, Virginia, January 5–February 16, 2011. The Fluidity of Gender: Sculpture by Linda Stein. Sculpture.
CAA VISITS ART SCHOOLS AND ART-HISTORY DEPARTMENTS IN NEW YORK AND PHILADELPHIA
posted Dec 22, 2010
Andrea Kirsh, an independent scholar and curator, is CAA vice president for external affairs. In summer 2010, she and Linda Downs, CAA executive director, held meetings with leaders from art schools and departments in New York and Philadelphia.
Linda Downs and I had a great opportunity to learn more about the membership and its needs by talking with a number of department chairs and deans in New York this summer, despite the 95-degree heat, and then during torrential storms in Philadelphia (my home) in the fall. We wanted to let them know about the upcoming Centennial conference and, in particular, the opportunities for students. Such prospects include free Wi-Fi at the Students and Emerging Professionals Lounge, which will be open throughout the conference and doesn’t require a badge. If students can’t afford the $120 discounted fee to register for the entire conference, they can attend on a session pass and participate in numerous free events, such as Convocation, sessions planned especially for the Centennial, and all ARTspace events, including the Annual Artists’ Interviews. They can volunteer as room monitors in exchange for conference registration.
Mostly we visited with colleagues to listen. We asked what they thought CAA has been doing right, and how we might better serve their needs. We learned a lot. What struck me was the range of comments and the variety of useful suggestions. Nancy Barton, chair of the Art and Art Education Department at New York University (NYU), told us about her school’s program in Ghana, which made us realize that CAA’s revived International Committee should include artists as well as art historians. Downs and I then met with Pepe Karmel and Kathryn Smith, the outgoing and incoming chairs of NYU’s Art History Department. They teach undergraduates only, so we discussed ways the CAA conference might give their students taste of graduate school and professional life, as well as a chance to network.
David Rhodes, president of School of Visual Arts, opened our visit by vigorously accusing CAA of favoring art historians over artists on the issue of orphan works and opposing droit moral for artists. We let him know that CAA doesn’t favor either side on orphan works: the organization supports potential users making a serious search for copyright holders and, failing that, publishing the works and then paying copyright holders if they turn up. And we’ve never opposed droit moral. Rhodes’s major request of CAA was help in organizing foundations courses, which always receive the lowest ratings. We’ll bring the issue to the Education Committee, which regularly presents conference sessions on pedagogy, and will also consider it as a subject for the practical publications that CAA hopes to produce.
The issue of advocacy came up again during our visit with Patricia Rubin, director of NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts; the topic was the cost of reproduction rights. Rubin came to the institute from England, where several major museums recently eliminated charges for scholarly use of images. Downs told her that she regularly attends the American Association of Museum Directors’ meetings and works the crowd on the issue, but it could use help from a more concerted group of organizations.
In Philadelphia we began at the University of Pennsylvania, whose faculty has been very involved with CAA. Holly Pittman, chair of the Department of the History of Art, was pleased that I’d be addressing Penn graduate students about the upcoming conference during a departmental colloquium. At University of the Arts, Joe Girandola, director of the MFA programs in ceramics, painting, and sculpture, was enthusiastic about the value of CAA conferences and suggested that his school organize a group to attend the New York meeting in February. His colleague, Susan Viguers, director of the MFA program in book arts, thought CAA didn’t do enough for artists; however she hadn’t attended recent conferences and had no idea about ARTspace activities. She also didn’t realize that this year all of CAA’s Professional-Development Fellowships were targeted at artists because of their greater funding needs.
Stephen Levine, chair of art history at Bryn Mawr College, told us about calling CAA in the past to request demographic information about the field to use in hiring discussions. He said more such information would be useful, and also hoped CAA might help schools reach minority candidates whose work spans fields (archaeology, anthropology, history, and area studies) and who might not be alert to possibilities in art history. He further expressed the desire that CAA develop standards so that schools do not require letters of recommendation before candidates are shortlisted.
Timothy Rubb, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was emphatic that the most important thing CAA could do for museums was to circulate the word that art-history departments are not turning out sufficient students in areas such as East Asian and ancient Near Eastern art to fill curatorial positions. He also hoped CAA might address guidelines for museum-studies programs, as his institution finds that graduates of current programs have neither useful skills nor realistic expectations.
Gerald Silk, chair of the Art History Department at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, gave us a tour of his school’s new facilities and showed us a number of studios. We were able to talk with artists and art historians who work together successfully, asking them to suggest ways CAA might build on the presence of both groups at the Annual Conference. They suggested that art historians might want to join artists in participating in critiques. Hester Stinnett, printmaker and a Tyler vice dean, thought we should consider themed conferences, so that one meeting was distinguished from another. We liked the idea and said that the upcoming Centennial conference in New York was built around a series of interdisciplinary sessions chaired by pairs of scholars from different fields, and that the Los Angeles conference in 2012 was addressing art of the Pacific Rim. Stinnett also suggested, based on her experience with a recent graphics conference, that students preferred informal events away from the conference center to the usual formal sessions. While CAA always offers many offsite events at conferences, it will be a challenge to organize a conference for five thousand attendees if that cohort continues to prefer dispersed events.
Cast Your Vote in the 2011–15 Board of Directors Election
posted Dec 20, 2010
The election of members to serve on the CAA Board of Directors for the 2011–15 term has begun. To participate in the election, all you need is your member number and password. Visit the main board election page or click the candidates’ names below to read their statements and biographies—and to watch their video presentations—before casting your vote:
- Leslie Bellavance, Alfred University
- Brian Bishop, Framingham State University
- dele jegede, Miami University
- Denise Mullen, Oregon College of Art and Craft
- Saul L. Ostrow, Cleveland Institute of Art
- Georgia K. Strange, University of Georgia
How to Vote
Log into your CAA account with your User ID# and password. Then click the Vote Now image at the center of the screen to begin the process. If you are already logged in, click the Home link at left, and then the Vote Now image.
You may vote for up to four candidates, including one write-in candidate, who will serve four-year terms on the board. Ballots that indicate more than four candidates will be void. The election ends at 5:30 PM (EST) on Friday, February 11, 2011.
Send a Proxy
CAA encourages you to attend the Annual Members’ Business Meeting at the 2011 Annual Conference in New York. If you cannot, please check the box appointing a proxy. By doing so, you appoint the CAA board officers named thereon—Barbara Nesin, Andrea Kirsh, Maria Ann Conelli, Sue Gollifer, Anne Goodyear, and DeWitt Godfrey—to vote, in their discretion, on such matters as may properly come before such a meeting.
A quorum of one hundred members is needed to hold the meeting; therefore CAA requests your proxy to ensure that it can take place. Please send your proxy by 5:30 PM (EST) on Friday, February 11, 2011.
Mac Users
If you use a non-Intel Mac that runs Tiger OS X 10.4, you will not see a Submit or Save button at the bottom of the voting form. To vote, please log into your CAA account on an Intel Mac or a PC.
People in the News
posted Dec 17, 2010
People in the News lists new hires, positions, and promotions in three sections: Academe, Museums and Galleries, and Organizations and Publications.
To learn more about submitting a listing, please see the the instructions on main Member News page.
December 2010
Academe
Anthony Cutler at work in the Cappella Palatina at Palermo, SicilyAnthony Cutler, the Evan Pugh Professor of Art History at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, has been selected by the University of Oxford in England to hold the Slade Professorship of Fine Art for 2011–12, in association with All Souls College. Cutler will present eight lectures and four seminars during Oxford’s Hilary Term, January to March 2012.
Beauvais LyonsBeauvais Lyons, professor of art at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, has been awarded a James R. Cox Professorship from 2010 to 2013. The Cox professorships honor faculty members who are outstanding teachers, who dedicate their service to the University, community, and their profession, and who model excellence in scholarship.
Bissera Pentcheva has been promoted to associate professor with tenure in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
Museums and Galleries
Aram Moshayedi, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has been appointed assistant curator at the Gallery at REDCAT, also in Los Angeles.
Klaus OttmannKlaus Ottmann, formerly Robert Lehman Curator at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York, has become the first curator at large at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. He will manage the Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art.
Organizations and Publications
Sandra SiderSandra Sider, an independent curator and critic based in New York, has been appointed president of Studio Art Quilt Associates, an international arts organization with headquarters in Storrs, Connecticut. She will serve in this capacity until 2013.