CAA News Today
Art In America is CAA’s Featured Member Partner for July
posted by CAA — Jul 04, 2016
As one of the most venerable American art publications for collectors, artists, art dealers, and art professionals, Art in America is CAA’s featured membership partner for July.
Since 1913, Art in America has been instrumental in defining the many art movements that coalesced over the course of a dynamic century. The magazine works with the finest critics, scholars and reporters, identifying trends and creating a record of key developments in the world of art. Having earned a reputation for the highest journalistic and critical standards, Art in America has helped shape the sensibilities and standards of generations of curators, artists, collectors and dealers.
Each month Art in America, the world’s premiere art magazine, provides in-depth coverage of the global, and often controversial, art scene. Every issue contains articles on both respected and rising talents, and reviews of current exhibitions around the world. Each subscription to Art in America includes the “Guide to Museums, Galleries & Artists,” published in August.
CAA members can receive a special discount (CAA members $24.95; regular $45) on a one-year subscription to Art in America. Simply log into your CAA member page to unlock the special discount code and apply it to checkout on the Art in America subscription page.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for March 2016
posted by CAA — Mar 10, 2016
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
March 2016
Lise Haller Baggesen: Mothernism
Contemporary Art Museum for Austin
Laguna Gloria, 3809 West 35th Street, Austin, TX
February 13–Mary 22, 2016
The Gatehouse Gallery at the Betty and Edward Marcus Sculpture Park at Laguna Gloria presents Mothernism by Lise Haller Baggesen, a large-scale installation with a “nod to the bright pop of midcentury Danish interior designer Verner Panton as well as snoezelenrooms, a Dutch therapy technique from the 1970s.” The bright, cozy interior, with disco balls and plush purple carpet, regularly calls back visions from disco culture.
Baggesen describes the work as “a nomadic tent camp audio installation … dedicated to staking out and making speakable the ‘mother-shaped hole in contemporary art discourse.’” Published as a book in 2014, the installation previously came to life an audio-visual presentation in which Baggesen read essays as her alter ego, Queen Leeba, “an amalgam of Donna Summer and a proto-feminist, Scandinavian love goddess.” In this iteration, Mothernism is more like entering a painting, “inviting the viewer into her painting-as-installation, a figure/ground relationship so upended as to become participatory, or relational.”
The exhibition in Austin also contains newly commissioned work, The Mothernist’s Audio Guide to Laguna Gloria, celebrating the history of the Driscoll Villa at Laguna Gloria and the original designer and owner, Clara Driscoll, all through Baggesen’s artistic style, incorporating her knowledge of art history, pop culture, politics, and music.
Tip of Her Tongue: Xandra Ibarra: Nude Laughing, Cassils: The Powers That Be, Shirin Neshat: Possessed
The Broad
221 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA
April 2, 2016
8:30 PM
Downtown Los Angeles’s new art venue, the Broad, features Tip of Her Tongue, a three-part exhibition by the feminist artists Shirin Neshat, Xandra Ibarra, and Cassils, focusing on language and embodiment. Curated by Jennifer Doyle, professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, and a member of Human Resources Los Angeles, a collectively run art space dedicated to supporting performance and interdisciplinary modes of expression, the program contains a thirteen-minute video, Possessed (2001) by Neshat, and two live performances, Nude Laughing by Ibarra and The Powers That Be by Cassils.
Neshat’s video presents a woman roaming the streets of an Iranian city without her cador. The woman, played by Shohreh Aghdashloo, is ignored until she takes a public platform, where her “private suffering becomes public and political.” In Nude Laughing by Ibarra, the Oakland-based artist’s “engages the skin and skein of race.” Drawing inspiration from John Currin’s painting Laughing Nude, Ibarra herself is nude and encased in a nylon skin cocoon along with “white lady accoutrements … negotiating the simultaneous joys and pains of subjections, abjection, and personhood.” Rounding out the performances, the national premiere of The Powers That Be by Cassils is a collaborative effort with the fight choreographer Mark Steger. In the two-person fight, Cassils is left to spar alone with an invisible force. The performance will be lit by car headlights and performed in the Broad’s parking garage to a score by Kadet Kuhne, played across car stereos.
Tickets to the performances can be purchased on the Broad’s website.
Lecture: Julia Bryan-Wilson on Ruth Asawa and Louise Bourgeois
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
2155 Center Street, Berkeley, CA
April 1, 2016
12:15 PM
Julia Bryan-Wilson, associate professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of the forthcoming book Art in the Making: From the Studio to Crowdsourcing (with Glenn Adamson), will present a lunchtime talk on Ruth Asawa and Louis Bourgeois, two artists currently on exhibition in Architecture of Life at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Bryan-Wilson’s research interests include feminist and queer art, textile handicraft, and questions of materiality—all germane to different aspects of Asawa’s and Bourgeois’s work.
Architecture of Life, on view through May 29, is the inaugural exhibition in the museum’s new building. “It explores the ways that architecture—as concept, metaphor, and practice—illuminates various aspects of life experience: the nature of the self and psyche, the fundamental structures of reality, and the power of the imagination to reshape our world.” The exhibition has over two hundred works of art in various media, including scientific illustrations and architectural drawings.
Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez: Travelers and Settlers
Museum of Nebraska Art
2401 Central Avenue, Kearney, NE
January 9–April 3, 2016
The Museum of Nebraska Art presents Travelers and Settlers, a solo exhibition by the Colombian-born artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez. Curated by Teliza Rodriguez, this engaging and introspective installation is the artist’s exploration of the experience of identity, memory, and gender.
Friedemann-Sánchez’s installation comprises paintings, sculptures, and objects—a mixed-media environment inhabited by family heirlooms alongside carved wooden boats and black mirrorlike panels that hold pearled sconces. Here the artist creates a visual novel narrated in different voices interweaved through a synchronicity of dialogues, passages, punctuations, and silences about hybrid culture and ownership, narratives that portray spiritual and physical transit.
In her project statement the artistwrites, “Anchored in feminism, my art is infused by American and Colombian cultural forms that are dominant or subordinate.” Born in Colombia and having immigrated to the United States as a grown-up, she developed her bilingual art naturally. Travelers and Settlers unfolds in this way: her multinarrative on cultural memory, migration, and the pursuit of the American dream, a bicultural and transcultural experience speaks of difference and opposites.
As Robert Mahoney states in his extensive essay about Friedemann-Sánchez’s project: “As a whole, Travelers & Settlers read as an elegiac litany to sacred space reclaimed from the pushes and pulls of modern history, with the artist acting as guider of souls, urging us to gain a deeper appreciation of the unspoken realities of cultural translation, and, beyond all that, arrive safely again at our common humanity.”
Dafna Maimon: Modern Lives
Lilith Performance Studio
Bragegatan 15, Malmö, Sweden
March 10–12 and 17–19, 2016
Lilith Performance Studio in Malmö presents Modern Lives, a new performance by the Finnish/Israeli artist Dafna Maimon (b. 1982), who lives and works in Berlin. Her work, which includes performance, short film, video, texts, and sculpture, explores and engages with human narratives that challenge stereotypical constructions. Questioning the unclear limits of identity, the self, and the body, her performances expose the economy of affect-based ties, community, and collaboration on a grassroots level.
Modern Lives draws its starting point from the life of Ulrica Maimon, the artist’s mother, who created an alter ego for herself in the early 2000s: Mrs. Gyllendaal Af Berntas. Mrs. Gyllendaal, a 1860s goldsmith’s widow moved into Maimon’s apartment, which has been furnished in the corresponding period style. Throughout the years, Gyllendaal’s biography developed, along with her wardrobe and everyday tasks, inviting family and friends to participate in the roleplay.
For Modern Lives at Lilith Performance Studio, Maimon has built up a full-sized domestic arena for the widow. This performative space becomes a construction site where the “self” can be seen as a multilayered entity, an emotional landscape in motion, a surreal and melancholic world in which its inhabitants echo themselves as prisoners of their own condition. Throughout this piece, the artist fuses her mother’s playful inner fantasies with her own absurdist expression, choreographing and representing several different bodies as one.
Modern Lives is presented as an ongoing a repetitive structure during which audience members are encouraged to visit and stay for as long as they wish.
Maud Sulter: Syrcas
Autograph ABP
Rivington Place, London, EC2A 3BA
January 15–April 2, 2016
Autograph ABP proudly presents Syrcas,an installation of sixteen original photomontages, curated by Mark Sealy, of a seminal body of work created by Maud Sulter (1960–2008). Born in Glasgow of Scots and Ghanaian descent, Sulter was an active feminist in London communities in the early 1980s. She had worked with a women’s education group to program Check It, a groundbreaking two-week show at the Drill Hall that showcased black women’s creativity. Along her influential practice, Sulter continuously explored the presence of Africa in Europe in a variety of media: text, photography, sound, and performance. Her work as artist, writer, and curator questions the lack of representation of black women in the histories of art and photography and critically investigates the complex experiences of the African diaspora in European history and culture over the past six hundred years.
Created during the early 1990s, Syrcas is Sulter’s most intricate and layered body of work. Through the technique of photomontage, this series aims to revive the forgotten history of the genocide of black Europeans during the Holocaust. The installation includes a reproduction of Sulter’s poem “Blood Money.” Written in 1994, the poem was inspired by the German photographer August Sanders’s series of images of Circus Workers (1926–32) and represents a tormenting tale of a young African woman and her family caught up in war, dealing with the constant threat of discrimination, violence, and persecution.
The 2015 Conference of the Argentinian Center for Art Researchers and a Call for Papers for 2016
posted by Georgina Gluzman, post-doctoral fellow, Universidad de San Andrés (Argentina), and 2015 Participant in the CAA-Getty International Program — Feb 17, 2016
The sixteenth conference of the Centro Argentino de Investigadores de Arte (CAIA) took place in Buenos Aires from October 1 to 3, 2015. The CAIA was founded in 1989 by art historians working in the University of Buenos Aires. Its purpose is to encourage debates in art history through its conferences and editorial program, which publishes anthologies and the conference proceedings. In 2013, the CAIA started another project: a peer-reviewed online journal, Caiana.
The 2015 conference was devoted to the relationship between images and desire. More than twenty art historians from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Uruguay gathered in the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires to discuss the multilayered connection between art, pleasure, devotion, and reception in a series of panels, a roundtable, and two lectures.
The opening lecture was Laura Malosetti Costa’s “Cartografías del deseo,” in which she addressed nineteenth-century iconographies of desire and sexuality, as well as their fin-de-siècle reception in Buenos Aires. The closing lecture was María Angélica Melendi’s “La canción de las locas. Una historia sudamericana,” which was devoted to a rereading of Pedro Lemebel and the Yeguas del Apocalipsis work in Chile. These two activities framed three days of debates with nine panels dealing with different aspects of the conference theme. The topics ranged from the representation of desire to art collecting, including the cult of images and the allure of publicity. Although most of the delivered papers engaged with the visual arts, some addressed other media, such as cinema and dance.
The roundtable, organized by Viviana Usubiaga, called attention to the work of two remarkable artists: the writer Néstor Perlongher and the visual artist Liliana Maresca. This event, which attracted a wide audience, featured scholars and journalists discussing the legacies of Perlongher and Maresca. Daniel Molina, a noted art critic, offered insights into the lives and works of these two individuals through a personal recollection of the troubled decades of the 1970s and 1980s.
Traditionally, the CAIA has organized one conference every two years. These conferences are aimed at both emerging and established scholars, but the CAIA board hopes to engage undergraduate and young graduate students as well. For this reason, on even years the CAIA organizes a smaller conference for researchers who are just beginning their own projects. The call for papers for this event, which will take place from October 12 to 14, 2016, is open until May 30. The conference is open to art historians from around the world, and submissions are accepted in Spanish, Portuguese, and English For more information, please write to jornadascaia@gmail.com or visit the CAIA’s website (http://www.caia.org.ar/).
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for June 2015
posted by CAA — Jul 10, 2015
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
July 2015
Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell: I’m Not Myself At All
Agnes Etherington Art Centre
Queen’s University, 36 University Avenue, Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6
May 2–August 9, 2015
In I’m Not Myself At All, the artists Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell present an “exuberant revision of sexual identity and domesticity.” The multimedia body of work on exhibit at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University contains a multitude of forms and mediums, such as soft-sculpture dolls, wallpaper, crochet spider webs, needlepoint drawings, and papier–mâché.
Referring to the dolls in the exhibition catalogue, the theorist Heather Love writes, “the female body will not be cleaned up in this queer future—it will arrive trailing its effluvia: bodily fluids, odours, patches of fur, cellulite, granny panties, shag, that sucking sound.”
The artists present an oversized self-representation through amplification of the dolls genitalia, blown-up needlepoint patterned wallpaper, and a gigantic papier–mâché pink highlighter against a backdrop of feminist texts, “raising what curator Sarah E. K. Smith identifies as ‘potentiality, belonging and representation,’” via discarded feminist pasts.
Mitchell and Logue run the Feminist Art Gallery (FAG) in Toronto, which Mitchell describes on her website as “a response, a process, a site, a protest, an outcry, an exhibition, a performance, an economy, a conceptual framework, a place and an opportunity.”
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
5216 Montrose Boulevard, Houston, TX 77006
April 18–August 2, 2015
Marilyn Minter’s exhibition Pretty/Dirty at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston “vividly manifest[s] our culture’s complex and contradictory emotions around the feminine body and beauty.” The exhibition spans Minter’s career from earlier works such as Coral Ridge Towers, of her “drug-addled mother,” to her 2014 video Smash, with “large female feet in bejeweled high-heeled shoes … dancing, sliding across the floor and smashing glass—all in Minter’s signature silver liquid.”
As a painter, photographer, and video artist, Minter offers a counterdialogue to the fashion industry, whose hypersearch for perfection and beauty are revealed in the artist’s own search for the all too human physical imperfections. “It is way too easy to criticize the fashion industry,” Minter said in her artist talk.
“Minter offers a smart woman’s critical look at issues that are otherwise presented by men for female consumption,” states the exhibition press release. “Minter shows the dual nature and slight imperfections of herself and her fellow woman, finding that true allure comes from the sensuality of imperfections.” But while Minter’s work sometimes calls attention to imperfection, there is a “pleasure rubric” in the exhibition, as Bill Arning calls his discussion with Minter. “I know pleasure exists,” Minter says, “I have it too when I look at these images.”
On view through August 2, 2015, are over twenty-five paintings from 1976 through 2013, three video works, and photographs exploring her development as an artist. The exhibition was organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. An artist’s talk with Minter, along with Arning, Elissa Auther, and Linda Yablonsky, is available online.
Installation view of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s exhibition Verses After Dusk at the Serpentine Gallery (June 2–September 13, 2015) in London (artwork © Lynette Yiadom-Boakye; photograph © readsreads.info)
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Verses After Dusk
Serpentine Galleries
Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA
June 2–September 13, 2015
The Serpentine Galleries present Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Verses After Dusk, the first major solo exhibition by the London-born artist. Yiadom-Boakye, born in 1977 from Ghanaian parents, was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2013. Her paintings explore figures that appear to exist outside a specific time and place. These subjects are all fictitious and drawn from memory or scrapbooks. The artist presents her “suggestions of people,” as she once put it, absent of background, or landscapes, or objects, freeing them from the restrictions of definite time, location, age, and even gender. Her characters may be presented in absence of context, but they are accompanied with enigmatic titles that encourages viewers to construct their own narratives and search a dialogue with the artist’s “poetic secrecy.”
Verses After Dusk is a survey of the artist’ recent work, presenting a comprehensive range of painterly techniques in a series that raises timeless questions of identity as well as representation in art, bringing awareness to the failings of such matters throughout art history. While the artist plays with the influence and references to eighteenth and nineteenth century masters such as Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, and Éduoard Manet, she deconstructs them and reconstructs the meaning, challenging the representation of black portraiture in the canon of art history. The display features exclusively black figures, pointing out the absence of references in the representation of black history in the canon of Western art.
Between the works on display, Yes Officer, No Officer (2008) unravels Manet’s famous avant-garde painting Olympia (1863). But in this case, Yiadom-Boakye substitutes the reclining nude female prostitute with a black man and completely deletes the black female servant from the background. Along an impressive collection of expressive paintings, the exhibition includes ten new etchings and introduces the artist’s less-known writings, published in occasion of the exhibition.
Zanele Muholi: Isibonelo / Evidence
Brooklyn Museum
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Fourth Floor, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238-6052
May 1–November 1, 2015
Hosted at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the Brooklyn Museum presents Zanele Muholi: Isibonelo / Evidence. The exhibition is the most comprehensive museum presentation by the artist to date, in which the artist interlocks photography, video, and installation with human-rights activism.
Isibonelo/Evidence features several of the artist’s ongoing projects about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) communities, both in her home country of South Africa and abroad. The display includes eighty-seven works created between 2006 and 2014, including Muholi’s celebrated Faces and Phases portrait series, which uses firsthand accounts to speak to the experience of living in a country that constitutionally protects the rights of LGBTI people but often fails to defend them from targeted violence. In this series, and in an attempt to archive an “invisible” community, Muholi photographed around three hundred South African lesbians against plain or patterned backgrounds. Her compelling and undeniably powerful black-and-white portraits have infinite depth that allows the translation of haunting stories through a single look. The exhibition also includes the new series Weddings and the video Being Scene, which focus on love, intimacy, and daily life within the artist’s own community.
Muholi, born in 1972 in Durban at the height of apartheid, has developed for more than a decade a visual record of black lesbians in her home country, bringing visibility to communities who, although same-sex marriage has been legalized in 2006, continue to undergo hate crimes, stigma, and remain victims of “curative rape.” Through a work that claims her full citizenship as a South African female photographer who identifies as black, and also as a lesbian, the artist express her search of the deserved recognition, respect, and validation that mark and trace our existence.
Cover the issue 8 of Shotgun Seamstress
Osa Atoe: Shotgun Seamstress
Online and Print Zine
“I’m a punk and a feminist,” Osa Atoe declares on Shotgun Seamstress, her blog and fanzine the tagline describes as “old maximum rocknroll columns + new black punk rock thoughts.” In her blog post of March 24, 2015, “I Will Resist With Every Inch and Every Breath: Punk and the Art of Feminism” (which was also the name of a panel Atoe was invited to speak on at the Elizabeth A. Sackler for Feminist Art on March 12, 2015), she explains her roots in feminism and punk as well as the birth of Shotgun Seamstress in 2006. “I had a head full of feminist theory that I had acquired on my own, through my community and from school—including the very useful concept of intersecting identities … and I felt that any art I made should also be political.”
“The intersection of punk and radical politics felt natural to me,” Atoe says. Inspired by Riot Grrrl, Cometbus, and especially the zine Evolution of a Race Riot, Atoe says she set out to celebrate black punk identity within a predominantly white punk scene “that was constantly, but awkwardly attempting to address its own racism.” Atoe’s zine is not about critique, however. As she explains of her first issue, “I didn’t really talk about feminism so much, it just was feminist in its approach” (emphasis by Atoe).
You can see the full panel discussion “I Will Resist With Every Inch and Every Breath: Punk and the Art of Feminism” with Atoe and other panelists online. Printed copies of Shotgun Seamstress are available from Mend My Dress Press.
Agnes Gund: Fame, Fortune, and the Female Artist
Five Points Gallery, 33 Main Street, Torrington, CT
July 10 at 7:00 PM
Five Points Gallery is pleased to announce an upcoming lecture by Agnes Gund, a renowned philanthropist, civic leader, and devoted supporter of women’s issues. Gund, a president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art and chair of its International Council, will speak on “Fame, Fortune, and the Female Artist.” The talk will be free and open to the public on a first-come first-served basis. Five Points Gallery is a nonprofit fine art gallery showcasing professional regional and national visual artists in order to foster an understanding and appreciation of contemporary art in the community.
House, Work, Artwork: Feminism and Art History’s New Domesticities
University of Birmingham, UK
July 3–4, 2015
This conference is motivated by the premise that it is appropriate for feminist art history to revisit and newly configure theoretical, methodological, and political debate around modernist, postmodernist, and contemporary artistic practice in relation to the domestic. The debate is particularly timely in the light of art and art history’s “new” domesticities. These include queer art history’s turn toward the domestic as a site for imagining, making, and inhabiting space within or without the heteronormative, and recent art-historical and curatorial projects focusing on modern and contemporary art practice and the home—but in which the question of feminism is downplayed in favor of more generalized concepts of subversion, labor, and belonging. The keynote speakers are: Mignon Nixon from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and Julia Bryan-Wilson of the University of California, Berkeley. For further information, contact Francesca Berry, Department of Art History, Film, and Visual Studies, University of Birmingham; and Jo Applin, Department of History of Art, University of York.
Committee on Women in the Arts Picks for May 2015
posted by CAA — May 10, 2015
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
May 2015
Natalie Frank: The Brothers Grimm
Drawing Center
35 Wooster Street, New York, NY 10013
April 10–June 28, 2015
The Drawing Center presents Natalie Frank, The Brothers Grimm, in which Frank explores “eccentric narratives alive with sexuality and violence; stories in which the female characters in particular undergo vast emotional, physical, and intellectual transformations.” Presented in twenty-nine drawings made in gouache and pastel, Frank dissects the fairytales of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm by focusing attention on the roles of women, recasting the complex feminist protagonists.
Frank, who began drawing from life at thirteen years old, began to quickly explore her own narrative in her drawing, exploring perversity, fetish, playacting, women, and the body, among other themes. Through the Grimm drawings, Frank said she was captivated by the politics of sexuality and magic. “They inspire a refreshing and new way for me to approach making a picture,” she commented in an interview with Bomb Magazine. “I want my paintings to take a lesson from my drawings: not to be illustrative, but to be more formally transgressive.” Each subject is cast in a surreal landscape, “engaging the intersection between body and mind, reality and fiction, the series can be seen as a contemporary feminist reimagining of a symbolist legacy.”
Installation view of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit at the Detroit Institute of Arts
Frida Kahlo: Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit
Detroit Institute of Arts
5200 Woodward Avenue, Detroit, MI 48202
March 15–July 12, 2015
Presenting work by artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, the Detroit Institute of Arts celebrates the connections between the city and two iconic Mexican painters, as well as the museum’s new ownership of the work after a tumultuous refinancing by the City of Detroit. Kahlo, in Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit, takes on a much smaller but no less intense presence in the exhibition. On view is Henry Ford Hospital, painted after her miscarriage in July 1932, in which she depicts herself laying in a pool of blood on a floating bed, “disturbing symbols float above like surrealist balloons connected to umbilical cords,” including a fetus, two spinal columns, a snail, machinery, and a woman’s torso.
The year in Detroit was a turning point in the career of Kahlo as she matured into her artistic identity, creating a fierce personal style. The twenty-three pieces on view by Kahlo expose her work at the forefront of self-expression, focusing on her own life and her experiences—expressions that had never been painted before by any artists. “Frida began work on a series of masterpieces which had no precedent in the history of art—paintings which exalted the feminine qualities of endurance of truth, reality, cruelty, and suffering,” Rivera wrote later. “Never before had a woman put such agonized poetry on canvas as Frida did at this time in Detroit.”
Also among the works by Kahlo on view is Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States, in which the artist paints herself with a Mexican flag in one hand and a cigarette in the other at the divide between and industrialized scene from Detroit and symbols of her homeland.
Fouzia Najar: Semiotics of Islam: A Primer for Kuffar
Online Video
Run time: 7:07
Inspired by Martha Rosler’s film Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), Fouzia Najar presents Semiotics of Islam, using letters of the alphabet to present objects and terms from Muslim culture. The short, experimental film begins by projecting onto the body of the poet and actor, Adeeba Rana, news broadcasts highlighting the representation of Muslim culture through mainstream media. The film then proceeds from the letter A to demonstrate articles of clothing worn by Muslim women. As she reaches the letter H for “Hijab” Najar again projects political pundints onto Rana’s body as they discuss jihad in raised, frantic voices. In relationship to Rosler’s film, “the oppressive force on the woman in my piece is the media,” Najar explains in an interview with Apogee Journal.
In contrast to the news media’s frenetic use of the word jihad, when Najar reaches J for jihad, which she defines in a parenthetical subtitle as struggle, she films Rana quite calmly struggling to open a jar of olives.
“One of the biggest misconceptions with second-wave feminists, but also the mainstream media and the world think that Muslim women need to be saved. The problem is that they’re not giving Muslim women the agency to do it themselves,” Najar says in the interview. While her film is aimed at all audiences, she does leave references only for the initiated. For example, at the end of the film, as she thanks her mother, the text flashes three times in homage to the Prophet. Najar is ultimately not concerned with communicating everything to all audiences but allowing the audience to hear the divide between the mainstream understanding and hers when it comes to the semiotics of language.
Björk
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019
March 8–June 7, 2015
The Museum of Modern Art presents an immersive sonic and visual landscape of the multifaceted work of Björk. This retrospective exhibition of the Icelandic artist chronicles more than twenty years of a creative journey of sound, film, visuals, instruments, objects, and costumes that reflect her creative uniqueness and her collaborative style.
As an introduction, four instruments created to be used by Björk in Biophilia (2011) are scattered in the museum’s lobby. A gameleste, a pipe organ, a gravity harp, and a Tesla coil play songs at different points throughout the day. Perhaps the most impressive—installed in front of the Museum Sculpture Garden’s glass windows that enhances its appreciation—is a Gravity Harp that use the natural motion of four pendulums with eleven-string cylindrical harps on the ends.
On the Marron Atrium located in the museum’s second floor, two spaces have been constructed to house the artist’s videos. The first one is dedicated to Black Lake, a new sound and video installation, commissioned by MoMA, for a song from her new album Vulnicura (2015). After Black Lake, there is a black box, perhaps where the “soul” of the exhibition lies. Here viewers can feel immersed where the artist exposes her core in its most extreme and complete form: a loop screening of a retrospective in music videos, from Debut (1993) to Biophilia.
For the Songlines section, located in the third floor of the exhibition, a first come, first served booking is requested. Here each character unfolds through sound, objects, images, and fictional biographical narratives that unveil personal and poetic narratives, that draw on recurrent themes throughout Björk oeuvre, such as a feminist approach to the rural and urban landscape, nature, and technology. Bridging the experimental and the popular, the organic and the technological, the personal and the universal, Björk reminds us that these are all connected and essential in the journey of being an artist, the journey of being human.
As the project curator Klaus Biesenbach mentioned: “The ‘90s, my (and Björk’s) generation was all about relational aesthetics, it’s all about collaboration.” Tracing Björk’s seemingly instinctive and experimental journey for two decades, it become evident the sensitivity of a unique vision, a vision that reflects the confidence and trust exposed along her creative process.
Installation view of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings 1974–2014 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (photograph by David Heald and © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation)
Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128
March 13–June 3, 2015
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings 1974–2014, the first museum solo exhibition by the Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian in the United States. The exhibition examines the artist’s creative practice during four decades, including many projects from Monir’s personal collection, and works that have not been displayed publicly since the 1970s.
Born in Qazvin, Iran, in 1924, Farmanfarmaian has spent her formative years (1945–57) and her exile during the Islamic Revolution (1979) in New York. In 2004, she returned to Iran, where she reestablished her studio and resumed working with some of the same craftsmen she had collaborated with there in the 1970s. Farmanfarmaian has been making art for seventy years and is still very much a practitioner. Her work combine the heritage of traditional Iranian craft, particularly that of architectural Islamic decoration, with the Western philosophies of Minimalism and abstraction that informed her contemporaries, artists friends like Frank Stella and Robert Morris.
Infinite Possibility includes works on paper, plaster and mirror reliefs, and large-scale mirror sculptures, installations that the artist refers to as “geometric families.” Her practice is characterized by a merging of visual and spatial experience along with the aesthetics of Islamic architecture and decoration. The artist stated that her work is largely based on geometry, a geometry that allows “infinite possibilities.” The exhibition also reflects Farmanfarmaian’s geometric vision in a domestic context, as the exhibition closes with an installation of double doors of frosted glass that she originally fashioned for her New York apartment in the 1980s.
As with many artists of her time, her life and creative process has been influenced by Iran’s political circumstances. In fact, her works on paper were originally born while the artist was deprived of her Tehran studio for a decade after leaving once again for New York when the revolution broke out. Farmanfarmaian, the most celebrated contemporary artist working in mirror mosaic, was and remains a pioneer abstract artist both as an Iranian and as a woman.
Helena Almeida: Inhabited Drawings
Richard Saltoun Gallery
111 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 6RY United Kingdom
March 27–May 22, 2015
Richard Saltoun Gallery presents Inhabited Drawings, the first London solo exhibition dedicated to the acclaimed and influential Portuguese artist, Helena Almeida. Born in Lisbon in 1934, Almeida was one of the leading women artists working in Europe during the 1970s and 1980s. This exhibition presents a selection of works from her most iconic series from the period.
Inspired by the neo-concrete movement gathering momentum in Brazil under the charismatic leadership of Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, and following their desire to liberate color into three-dimensional space, Almeida began experimenting with ways of breaking with the boundaries of a canvas. The artist, who represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale in 1982 and 2005, has continuously questioned traditional media, exploring ways in which to interact with the pictorial bidimensionality by placing her body as the subject of her work. By “inhabiting” them, as the title of this exhibition suggests, Almeida performs sensitively choreographed movements in dialogue with simple, everyday objects. Using photographs—taken by her husband and collaborator, the architect Artur Rosa—as backdrops for pieces, the artist reflects on the perception and perennial nature of performance.
Almeida is not a photographer, and yet the majority of her work takes exhibiting form in black-and-white photography. She does not refer of her oeuvre as self-portraits, but virtually all of her artworks depict the artist over her forty-year career. She uses a particular shade of blue, a blue that is very similar to that of Yves Klein. For Study for Inner Improvement (1977), Almeida created a sequence of photographs in which she appears as if eating blue paint. Since the artist had in the past protested at Klein’s use of women as objects in his artworks, chewing up of Klein’s “dominated” blue, appears as a liberating act for women and artists everywhere. Furthermore, having grown up in Portugal under the right-wing regime of Antonio Salazar, Almeida has created artworks that were not just about physical liberation, but psychological emancipation as well.
Thanks to 2015 Career Services Mentors and Workshop Leaders
posted by Emmanuel Lemakis — Mar 02, 2015
CAA wishes to thank the artists, scholars, curators, critics, educators, and other professionals in the visual arts who generously served as Career Services mentors—for the Artists’ Portfolio Review, Career Development Mentoring, the Mock Interviews, and the Professional Development Roundtables—during the 2015 Annual Conference in New York. CAA also appreciates the work of leaders of the Professional-Development Workshops and speakers at Orientation.
Orientation
Susan Altman, Middlesex County College; Michael Aurbach, Vanderbilt University; and Jo-Ann Morgan, Western Illinois University.
Artists’ Portfolio Review
Virginia Fabbri Butera, College of Saint Elizabeth; Michael Bzdak, Johnson & Johnson; Susan Canning, College of New Rochelle; Brian Curtis, University of Miami; Peter Kaniaris, Anderson University; Jason Lahr, University of Notre Dame; Matthew LaRose, Park University; Preston B. Lawing, Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota; Suzanne Lemakis; Sharon Lippman, Art Without Walls; Craig Lloyd, College of Mount St. Joseph; Judith Pratt, Judith Pratt Studio; Habibur Rahman, Claflin University; Steve Teczar, Maryville University of St. Louis; and David Voros, University of South Carolina.
Career Development Mentoring
Susan Altman, Middlesex County College; Frances Altvater, University of Hartford; Michael Aurbach, Vanderbilt University; Brian Bishop, Framingham State University; Colin Blakeley, Eastern Michigan University; Karen Carter, Kendall College of Art and Design, Ferris State University; Leda Cempellin, South Dakota State University; Jaia Chen, Shelton State Community College; Kevin Concannon, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; Anne D’Alleva, University of Connecticut; Rebecca DeRoo, Rochester Institute of Technology; James Farmer, Virginia Commonwealth University; Joan Giroux, Columbia College Chicago; Reni Gower, Virginia Commonwealth University; Jim Hopfensperger, Western Michigan University; Dennis Ichiyama, Purdue University; Carol Krinsky, New York University; Elisabeth Leach; Heather McPherson, University of Alabama, Birmingham; Jo-Ann Morgan, Western Illinois University; Jeff Nathanson, Arts Council of Princeton; Niki Nolin, Columbia College Chicago; Mark O’Grady, Pratt Institute; Christopher Olszewski, Savannah College of Art and Design; Morgan Paine, Florida Gulf Coast University; Doralynn Pines, Metropolitan Museum of Art, retired; Judith Pratt, Judith Pratt Studio; David Raizman, Drexel University; Jack Risley, University of Texas at Austin; Dinah Ryan, the Principia; Paul Ryan, Mary Baldwin College; Gerald Silk, Tyler School of Art, Temple University; Andrew Jay Svedlow, University of Northern Colorado; Joe A. Thomas, Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw State University; Larry Thompson, Samford University; Ann Tsubota, Raritan Valley Community College; Philip Van Keuren, Southern Methodist University; and Barbara Yontz, St. Thomas Aquinas College.
Professional Development Roundtables
Michael Aurbach, Vanderbilt University; Brian Curtis, University of Miami; Dennis Ichiyama, Purdue University; Peter Kaniaris, Anderson University; and Leo Morrissey, Georgian Court University.
Mock Interview Sessions
Dina Bandel, Virginia Commonwealth University, Qatar; Colin Blakely, Eastern Michigan University; Maria Ann Conelli, Brooklyn College, City University of New York; Jacqueline Coutré, Queens University; Stephanie Dickey, Queens University; Adam Fung, Texas Christian University; Carol Garmon, University of Mary Washington; Joann Giroux, Columbia College Chicago; Bertha Gutman, Delware County Community College; Kim Hartswick, Brooklyn College, City University of New York; Rebecca Harvey, Ohio State University; Richard Heipp, University of Florida; Heidi Hogden, University of South Dakota; David Howarth, Zayed University; Eldred Hudson, University of North Carolina, Charlotte; Dennis Ichiyama, Purdue University; Matt King, Virginia Commonwealth University; Andrea Kirsch, Rutgers University; David LaPolambara, Ohio University; Brittany Lockard, Wichita State University; Carolyn Martin; Tamryn McDermott; Jo-Ann Morgan, Western Illinois University; Thomas Post, Kendall College of Art and Design; Lauren Puzier, Sotheby’s Institute of Art; David Yager, University of California, Santa Cruz; and Megan Koza Young, Prospect New Orleans.
Brown Bag Lunches/Sessions
Leda Campellin, South Dakota State University; Maria Ann Conelli, Brooklyn College, City University of New York; Jacqueline Coutré, Queens University; Lauren Grace Kilroy-Ewbank, Brooklyn College, City University of New York; Brittany Lockard, Wichita State University; Carolyn Martin; Tamryn McDermott; Lauren Puzier, Sotheby’s Institute of Art; Georgia Strange, University of Georgia; and Megan Koza Young, Prospect New Orleans.
Professional Development Workshops
Susan Altman, Middlesex County College; Michael Aurbach, Vanderbilt University; Barbara Bernstein, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and University of Virginia; Steven Bleicher, Coastal Carolina University; Mika Cho, California State University, Los Angeles; Curtis Fletcher, University of Southern California; Amanda French, George Mason University; Gigi Rosenberg; and Blaise Tobia, Drexel University.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Oct 22, 2014
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
AIA Statement on the Recent Sale of Artifacts by the St. Louis Society
The Archaeological Institute of America has learned with grave concern that the AIA St. Louis Society has sold a collection of Egyptian artifacts entrusted to its care. These objects were intended to benefit the citizens of St. Louis by helping them to understand the record of past human achievement. The decision to sell these objects after a century of custodianship contravenes this expectation. (Read more from the Archaeological Institute of America.)
Publishers Win Reversal of Court Ruling That Favored “E-Reserves” at Georgia State University
How much copyrighted material can professors make available to students in online course reserves before they exceed the boundaries of educational fair use? That’s the essential question at the heart of a long-running copyright-infringement lawsuit that has pitted three academic publishers against Georgia State University. Last week, in a setback for the university, a federal appeals court reversed a May 2012 ruling that mostly favored Georgia State. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Nurturing Talent
Design education leaves designers lacking in business skills—it’s hard enough to learn to be a designer, but there needs to be a next step for the business side that caters to the entrepreneur. Who wants to spend two years getting an MBA if you’ve got a hot idea? We need a place where smart, talented designers can get an on-demand education about how to start a business, which includes everything from financial planning and costing to how to stay out of trouble. (Read more from Metropolis.)
“Looking” at Art in the Smartphone Age
“Beyoncé and Jay-Z Take Selfie with Mona Lisa!” headlines all over the internet blared. And it’s true, the first couple of American pop culture did take a photo of themselves in front of one of the masterpieces of European art history. But in the instantly iconic image, the two musicians aren’t even looking at the famous work of art that they knowingly appropriate. In fact, they have their backs turned to it, with the Mona Lisa’s face poking out over their shoulders like a photobomb across the centuries. (Read more from Pacific Standard.)
Soft Fabrics Have Solid Appeal
Once dismissed as utilitarian, homespun, and intellectually flimsy, textiles are gaining international stature in art museums. The artist Richard Tuttle just unveiled a vast installation in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, called I Don’t Know, or the Weave of Textile Language, while new and older works are on view in his retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London. Meanwhile, there are shows on fiber art, weaving, and embroidery at the Drawing Center in New York and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Hanging a Tapestry in the Met Is a Lot More Complicated Than You Think
The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently opened a new exhibition: Grand Design, a collection featuring nineteen massive tapestries by the Renaissance master Pieter Coecke van Aelst. The tapestries are epic, intricate pieces, spanning up to thirty feet in length and weighing an average of one hundred pounds—which begs the question of how, exactly, the museum hangs them. (Read more from Slate.)
The Confidence Gap in Academic Writing
As a writing workshop instructor, I’ve become familiar with the garden-variety problems that graduate students face in writing a dissertation. Often those difficulties boil down to an avoidance of the daily grind of writing itself. Sometimes students lack any concrete feedback on their drafts or receive comments that are too general to be of much help in the revision process. Many students are unfamiliar with the tricks and tools of the writing trade itself—things like reverse outlines, free writing, or “storyboarding.” (Read more from Vitae.)
Managing Your Academic Career
In my ten years of interviewing and/or observing approximately one hundred faculty members at various types of institutions, I have learned a great deal about how to shape and manage academic work in ways that promote meaningful, balanced, and satisfying careers. To prepare for a presentation at new faculty orientation at Saint Joseph’s University, I reviewed the field notes, interview transcripts, and publications from my past studies with one question in mind: What strategies might best help new faculty members manage their academic careers during a time of rising expectations, decreasing resources, and diminishing boundaries between work and life? (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Sam Hunter: In Memoriam
posted by CAA — Jul 30, 2014
David E. Nathan is the author of this obituary.
Sam Hunter, the founding director of the Rose Art Museum, whose keen insights into the art of his day allowed him to build the museum’s acclaimed collection of modern and contemporary art, died on July 27, 2014, in Princeton, New Jersey. He was 91.
Financed by a $50,000 gift from Leon Mnuchin and his wife, Harriet Gevirtz-Mnuchin, Hunter made acquisitions in the early 1960s that established the Rose as a major force in the art world. The works he collected, masterpieces by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and other leading artists, form the core of the Rose’s beloved collection and continue to set the tone for the museum’s collecting and exhibition practices.
“Sam Hunter played an integral role in the early days of the Rose Art Museum, and his prescient purchases propelled the museum into the consciousness of the art world just a few years after its founding,” said Frederick M. Lawrence, president of Brandeis University. “The way in which he built the early collection, a discrete number of outstanding acquisitions, none for more than $5,000, is one of the iconic stories of the early years of Brandeis University. His impact on the Rose in particular and the university in general continues to this day.”
Hunter came to Brandeis in 1960 as director of the Poses Institute of Fine Arts, and shortly thereafter become the first director of the Rose. Organizers of the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle approached him about curating an exhibition for the Fine Arts Pavilion. The resulting collection of 114 works from 87 artists, including many by artists whose work he would later purchase for the Rose, was subsequently displayed at Brandeis.
In late 1962, Mnuchin called from New York to announce that he and his wife had inherited $50,000, which they wished to donate to the Rose to fund a contemporary art collection. Hunter and Mnuchin immediately began exploring the galleries of New York, often with Robert Scull, a friend of Mnuchin and a prominent collector of Pop art.
“The guiding principle of the selection was individual quality rather than tendency,” Hunter wrote for the brochure accompanying the collection’s exhibition. “As a matter of policy, the collection focused on younger artists with only a token representation of the older generation…. Abstract Expressionism is the collection’s point of departure, taken at a point of subtle but significant transition.”
Although Hunter and Mnuchin set a limit of $5,000 per painting, they managed to gather early and important works by Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Tom Wesselmann, James Rosenquist, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Marisol, Morris Louis, Johns, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Warhol, and many others.
“It is very difficult to imagine a more significant founding director than Sam Hunter has proved to be,” said Christopher Bedford, the Henry and Lois Foster Director of the Rose. “Just as Brandeis established its academic reputation with incredible rapidity, so Sam made sure the same happened to the Rose through the acquisitions he made and the exhibitions he organized. The status we enjoy today is in large part due to his vision in the 1960s.”
Bedford also pointed out that Hunter was a towering figure in both curatorial and academic spheres. “He had one foot in the world of museums and one foot in the world of scholarship, a model for how the Rose thinks of itself today,” he said. “He was as much a director/curator as he was a scholar, and that dual commitment continues to represent the Rose in the work we do today.”
Upon learning of Hunter’s death, Bedford decided to name the Rose’s newly established emerging artists fund in his memory. “The fund lacked a name,” Bedford said, “and today it became very apparent what the name of the fund should be. It seems incongruous to apply this term today, but the Gevirtz-Mnuchin fund was an emerging artists fund in the early 1960s: Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, and Ellsworth Kelly were the emerging artists of their day. It’s only just that we would perpetuate Hunter’s legacy with a fund that boasts his name.”
A native of Springfield, Massachusetts, Hunter graduated from Williams College in 1943. He served in the United States Navy from 1943 to 1946, rising to the rank of lieutenant junior grade and receiving five battle stars.
Hunter began his professional art career in 1947, when he joined the New York Times as an art critic for a two-year stint. He studied at the University of Florence through the Hubbard Hutchinson Fellowship, earning a certificate of studies in 1951. He spent a year as an editor with art publisher Harry N. Abrams before serving as editor of Arts magazine.
In 1955, Hunter was appointed associate professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, but left in 1956 to become curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Two years later, he moved to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts as chief curator and acting director.
After leaving Brandeis in 1965, he was appointed director of the Jewish Museum and lectured as a visiting professor at Cornell University. In 1969, he became professor of art history at Princeton University and curator of modern art at the university’s art museum. He retired from Princeton as professor emeritus in 1991.
Hunter is survived by his wife, Maïa; their son, Harry; two daughters, Emmy and Alexa, from his previous marriage to Edys Merrill; and one grandchild, Isabella. A funeral service was scheduled for July 30 in the Princeton University Chapel.
Grigorii Iurevich Sternin: In Memoriam
posted by CAA — Jul 11, 2014
Alison Hilton is Wright Family Professor of Art History and director of the MA program in art and museum studies at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and Irina Karasik works at the State Russian Museum.
Grigorii Iurevich Sternin, a distinguished scholar of Russian nineteenth and early twentieth century art, chief scientific officer and senior researcher at the Institute of Art History of the Ministry of Culture, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Arts, died in Moscow on November 23, 2013. He was 86.
Sternin was among the most influential art historians of his generation, those who began their academic careers just after World War II, during the Cold War. Born in 1927, Sternin studied art history at Moscow State University, graduating in 1950, and continued his postgraduate work in the Department of Russian Art under the eminent professor A. A. Fedorov-Davydov. After defending his candidate’s dissertation on Russian book illustration of the 1840s in 1953, Sternin worked at one of Moscow’s leading art-history publishing houses, Iskusstvo (Art). He became a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR in 1957.
Sternin’s career is most closely connected with the Institute of Art History of the Ministry of Culture in Moscow, where he worked until the end of his life. He served as research scholar and head of the Sector on Fine Arts and Architecture of the Peoples of the USSR between 1962 and 1975, a difficult period marked by signs of liberalization that were not sustained, when artists, writers, and administrators of arts institutions faced obstacles that are hard to appreciate today. Perhaps as a way of finding a perspective on his own times, Sternin became interested in what made artistic innovation happen in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and this was the subject of his doctoral dissertation. “Artistic Life in Russia at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries” explored the many elements, some crucial and some tangential, that made up “artistic culture” in a period of complex political and social change. Sternin earned his doctorate in 1973 (in Russia this signifies substantial scholarly achievement beyond the first, candidate’s degree; it is roughly equivalent to full professorship).
Much of Sternin’s research continued to probe the interrelationships among the arts and other aspects of Russian culture. His publications, more than two hundred books and articles, are noted for their breadth of conception and their scrupulous attention to detail; many include chronicles of events with citations from artists’ writings and contemporary periodicals. Among his major works are: Khudozhestvennaia Zhizn’ Rossii na rubezhe XIX – XX vekov (Artistic Life in Russia at the Turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, 1970); Khudozhestvennaia zhizn’ Rossii nachala XX veka (Artistic Life in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, 1976); Vzaimosviaz’ iskusstv v khudozhestvennom razvitii vtoroi poloviny XIX veka; ideinye printsipy, strukturnye osobennosti (Interconnections of the arts in the artistic evolution of the second half of the 19th century; conceptual principles, structural peculiarities, edited volume, 1982); Russkaia khudozhestvennaia kul’tura vtoroi poloviny XIX – nachala XX veka (Russian Artistic Culture of the second half of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, 1984); Ilia Repin (with Elena Kirillina and others, 1985, 2011); Russkii modern (Russian Art Nouveau, with Elena Borisova, 1988); Khudozestvennaia Zhizn’ Rossii 1900-1910-kh godov (Artistic Life in Russia 1900–1910s, 1991); Khudozhestvennaia Zhizn’ Rossii vtoroi poloviny XIХ veka, 70-80-e gody (Artistic life in Russia in the second half of the 19th century: the 1870s-80s, 1997); Obrazy i liudi Serebrianogo veka (Images and People of the Silver Age, coauthored with L. S. Aleshina, 2002); Khudozhestvennaia Zhizn Rossii 30-40-kh godov 19-ogo veka (Artistic Life in Russia in the 1830s–40s, 2005), Dva veka: Ocherki russkoi khudozhestvennoi kul’tury (Two Centuries: Sketches of Russian Artistic Culture, 2007), Ot Repina do Grigor’eva (From Repin to Grigoriev, 2009). Sternin was an author and editor of the authoritative Istoriia Russkogo Iskusstva (History of Russian Art published by the Academy of Sciences, 1952–1964), specifically volume 10 on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; he was closely involved in the conception, editing, and writing of a new History of Russian Art (22 volumes planned) and was the editor of volume 14 on the first third of the nineteenth century, published in 2011.
The Russian scholarly community recognized Sternin’s contributions. He was named an Honored Artist of Russia in 1994, elected a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1997, and designated a Laureate of the State Prize of the Russian Federation in 2004. At the memorial service at the Institute of Art History in November 2013, colleagues and former students recalled his constant attention to human relationships, both as part of his approach to art history and in his daily life as a teacher and mentor. Generous in providing books, articles, and advice to his students and even to visiting researchers, he was also an astute critic. He could identify problems of interpretation and actively seek ways of finding solutions, without ever dictating or imposing his views. Sternin’s empathetic responsiveness to colleagues and students will be missed as much as his brilliance as a scholar.
He is survived by his wife, the art historian Liliia Stepanovna Aleshina.
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — May 14, 2013
In its regular roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, architects, photographers, filmmakers, publishers, and others whose work has significantly influenced the visual arts.
- Les Blank, a documentary filmmaker whose Burden of Dreams (1982) chronicled the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, died on April 7, 2013. He was 77 years old. Blank also directed films on the musicians Lightning Hopkins, Dizzy Gillespie, and Clifton Chenier
- Ellen Cantor, an artist and filmmaker known for her ongoing work Pinochet Porn, passed away on April 21, 2013. She was 51 years old
- Bernard Cheese, a British painter, printmaker, and educator, died on March 15, 2013, at the age of 88. Cheese taught at Saint Martins School of Art (1950–68), Goldsmiths College (1970–78), and Central School of Art and Design, London (1980–89)
- Les Coleman, a London-based artist, writer of aphorisms, and “all-around rare bird,” died on January 17, 2013. He was 67
- Edward de Grazia, an American lawyer who fought censorship of Tropic of Cancer, Lysistrata, and The Naked Lunch, died on April 11, 2013, at age 86. De Grazia taught at Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York for thirty years and was the author of Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius (1991)
- Dominic Elliott, the personal assistant of the artist David Hockney, died on March 17, 2013. He was 23 years old
- Nigel Glendinning, a scholar of Spanish art who was an expert on Francisco de Goya, passed away on February 23, 2013. He was 83 years old. Glendinning held various professorships and fellowships across the United Kingdom and Ireland
- Sidney Goodman, a figurative painter and emeritus professor of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, passed away on April 11, 2013. He was 77
- Regina Granne, an artist based in New York whose drawings demonstrated creative interpretations of feminism, war, and politics, died on January 26, 2013. She was teaching most recently at Parsons the New School for Design
- Jene Highstein, a Postminimalist sculptor whose work was shown internationally, passed away on April 27, 2013, at the age of 70. Highstein was involved in the fabled exhibition space 112 Greene Street in the 1970s
- Jack Jaeger, a Dutch artist and curator known for coediting eight issues of ZAAP, a quarterly VHS video-art magazine, from 1994 to 1996, died on March 15, 2013. Born in 1937, he also worked as a cameraman, producer, director, and editor of television commercials and films
- L. Brent Kington, a professor of metalsmithing at Southern Illinois University Carbondale from 1961 to 1997 and former chairperson of its School of Art and Design, died on February 7, 2013, at age 78. A retrospective of his career, L. Brent Kington, Mythic Metalsmith, toured the United States from 2007 to 2011
- Martyl Langsdorf, the artist who created the Doomsday Clock image that symbolized the dangers of nuclear power during the Cold War, died on March 26, 2013. She was 96 years old
- Bert Long, a former chef who left the kitchen to become an artist, passed away on February 1, 2013, at age 72. The Houston-based Long, considered an outsider artist by some, won an NEA grant in 1987 and the Prix de Rome in 1990
- Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, a Russian artist and gay-rights icon, died in March 2013 at the age of 43. Known for his impersonations of Marilyn Monroe, Mamyshev-Monroe emerged as a performing and video artist in Saint Petersburg in the late 1980s
- Rick Mather, an American architect based in London who designed extensions to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Dulwich Picture Gallery, and Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, among other institutions, died on April 20, 2013, at age 75
- Walter Pierce, an American architect who designed the modernist houses of Peacock Farm, a subdivision in Lexington, Massachusetts, passed away on February 27, 2013. He was 93 years old
- Joe N. Prince, director of education for the National Endowment for the Arts from 1977 to 1985, died on February 23, 2013, at age 75. He also served as special assistant to the agency’s chairman for two years
- Ganesh Pyne, an Indian artist who was called the “painter of darkness” for his fantastical imagery in watercolor, gouache, and tempera, died on March 12, 2013, at age 76. Among his his influences ranged from the Bengal school of art (a forerunner to Indian modernism) to his personal experience as a child witnessing the Kolkata riots
- Daniel Reich, an unconventional art dealer based in New York, died on December 25, 2012. He was 39 years old
- Martin Rogers, a British printer, sculptor, and publisher who founded the Small Publishers Fair in London, has died. He was 61 years old
- Dorothy Sanders, a philanthropist who founded the Milwaukee Art Museum’s African-American Art Acquisition Committee, passed away on February 13, 2013. She was 96
- James Schell, an Atlanta artist and illustrator whose works were published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Sunday magazine, died on January 6, 2013, at age 94. He was the art director for Kirkland White and Schell Advertising, which he helped establish
- Shozo Shimamoto, a Japanese artist who was a member of the Gutai group, died on January 25, 2013, at the age of 85
- Merton D. Simpson, a painter, collector, and dealer in African art, died on March 9, 2013, at the age of 84. Simpson founded his gallery of African and tribal art in 1954, and his artwork became politicized in the early 1960s after joining the Spiral group, which counted Romare Bearden and Hale Woodruff among its members
- Paolo Soleri, the innovative architect of an ecologically minded city in the Arizona desert called Arcosanti, passed away on April 9, 2013. He was 93
- Jack Stokes, the animation director of the Beatles’ film Yellow Submarine, died on March 20, 2013. He was 92. Stokes also worked on titles and inserts for Magical Mystery Tour
- Clinton Darlington Swingle, who oversaw the purchase, preservation, and restoration of the Fabric Workshop and Museum’s building in Philadelphia, died on January 27, 2013. He was 84
- Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, a Mexican architect who combined modern and Precolumbian forms, died on April 16, 2013, at age 94. His best-known buildings are the Basilica of Guadalupe, National Museum of Anthropology, and Azteca Stadium
- William Wilson, a former critic for the Los Angeles Times, died on April 20, 2013, at the age of 78. He began writing for the paper in 1965, contributing exhibition reviews through 2001
- Zao Wou-Ki, a Chinese artist whose work combined the traditional landscape painting of his country with European abstraction, died on April 9, 2013, age 92. He had lived and worked in Paris from 1948 to 2011
Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries, or your completed texts, to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the next list.