CAA News Today
New Podcasts for Artists on Budgeting, Administrating, Fundraising, and Mentorship
posted by Michael Fahlund — Jan 17, 2013
CAA has added four new podcasts to its growing series of audio recordings devoted to professional-development topics for artists.
In “Artistic Budgeting,” Elaine Grogan Luttrull, a certified public accountant and the founding owner of Minerva Financial Arts, outlines five basics steps to help individual artists with managing their finances. She also provides a PDF of an example budget for reference as you listen to the podcast.
“The Artist as Administrator,” presented by Thomas Berding, associate professor of studio art at Michigan State University, explores various issues artists may consider when pondering and operating within administrative roles, including how administrative assignments can both borrow from and complement one’s studio activity.
Edwin Torres, associate director for the Rockefeller Foundation’s New York City Opportunities Fund, talks about “Innovations in Fundraising,” sharing fresh models that artists have developed to create new works.
Finally, the artist and professor Amy Broderick presents “The Importance of Mentorship and Advocacy,” a podcast on how mentoring and advocacy can enhance the career of professionals in the visual arts.
Evolving from the National Professional-Development Workshops and now produced in tandem with them, the podcast series is ongoing, with new audio added on a regular basis. While the initial focus is on artists, CAA hopes to develop podcasts for art historians, curators, nonprofit art professionals, and other constituencies in the future.
MIRA SCHOR AT THE 2013 ANNUAL ARTISTS’ INTERVIEWS
posted by Christopher Howard — Oct 03, 2012
Mira Schor, a painter and writer based in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts, will participate in CAA’s next Annual Artists’ Interviews, hosted by ARTspace during the 2013 Annual Conference in New York. This session will be the thirteenth installment of the popular series, which features two major practicing artists in back-to-back interviews. The other artist who will be interviewed is Janine Antoni. The talks will be held on Friday, February 15, 2013, from 2:30 to 5:00 PM at the Hilton in New York. Stuart Horodner, artistic director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, will interview Schor.
Mira Schor
Mira Schor (photograph © 2012 Mary Jones)
Mira Schor is a painter, writer, and educator who was born in 1950 into a family of artists in Manhattan. Entering her fifth decade as an artist, she has used the medium of painting to address a wide range of issues: language, corporal materiality, feminist politics, art history, and critical theory. She has also worked in artist’s books and sculpture and has a longstanding engagement with works on paper.
As an art writer and editor, Schor works in the belletristic tradition of John Berger and Virginia Woolf, with her essays combining the candor of a village storyteller with the rigor of a critical approach and maverick fearlessness. Schor’s first decade of writing on contemporary art and culture is collected in Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). Composed during the Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s, the book addresses the work of David Salle, Ida Applebroog, Mary Kelly, and the Guerrilla Girls. In the often-cited essay “Figure/Ground,” Schor’s distinctly feminist voice, seeped in the history of modernism, discusses the perseverance of painting in light of contemporary aesthetic debates. Her latest book is A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), and she writes regularly about the intersection of art and life for her blog A Year of Positive Thinking, for which she received support from the Arts Writers Grant Program in 2009. Entries include “You Put a Spell on Me,” about the relationship of African art and Renaissance portraiture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; “Youthfulness in Old Age,” about the late paintings of Joan Mitchell and Roberto Matta; and “Books Are Like People,” an exegesis on the life and destruction of the free library at Occupy Wall Street.
Schor maintains a dialectical understanding of the relationship between politics and aesthetics. In a 2011 conversation with Bradley Rubenstein for Culture Catch, she explained, “I speak of two ‘politics,’ what is happening in the world, and art politics, examining which definitions of art are hosts for different types of power. My identity as a painter has always been caught, in a generative way, between the traditions of painting and the proclamations of the death of painting, of the object, of the individual artist, of private studio practice—everything that has become the doxa of contemporary art.”
Mira Schor, Silence….speech, noise, 2010, ink, oil, and gesso on linen, 18 x 30 in. (artwork © Mira Schor; photograph provided by the artist)
Her most recent solo exhibition, Voice and Speech, was held at Marvelli Gallery in New York in spring 2012. A recurring motif in the show was a pensive, schematically sketched figure, what Schor has called an “avatar of self.” In each painting, handwriting, sometimes contained in thought-balloon rectangles, conveys a sense of cartoonish yet poetic immediacy. In a review of the show, the New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote, “Mira Schor’s small, sharp, quirky paintings have been thorns in the side of the medium for more than three decades now…. Abjuring largeness and portentous brushwork as before, these works tackle more directly the immense subject of creativity itself and diagram it in ways both pointedly humorous and expansive.” The paintings, all modestly scaled, convey a sense of private urgency, like torn-out pages from a notebook. In a 2002 interview with the painter Joan Waltemath, published in the Brooklyn Rail, Schor discusses the specificity of painted language, and how her visual art relates to her writing: “the direction of my painting and writing are intimately linked in a constant interplay between practice and theory—I find it hard to place one before the other as I speak: I paint writing and in some cases I paint the (critical/theoretical) writing that I’m writing. I certainly never gave up on visual pleasure. On the contrary I am interested in embedding verbal writing as image into the rich materiality of painting so that the two cannot be disentwined.”
Mira Schor, Slit of Paint, 1994, oil on canvas, 12 x 16 in. (artwork © Mira Schor; photograph provided by the artist)
Schor earned an MFA in 1973 from the newly formed California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. At CalArts she came into contact with Fluxus art tactics from artist professors such as Alison Knowles and the poet Emmett Williams. Schor was actively involved in the Feminist Art Program, one of the first of its kind in the country, started by Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro. Schor fondly recalls the “goofy spirit” of the school, comparing it to the television show created by her fellow student, Paul Reubens’s Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. The atmosphere was “subversive but in a sweet, slightly anarchic rather than nihilistic manner.”
Teaching studio art and art history to several generations of artists has been an important component of Schor’s life as an artist. She has been an associate teaching professor of fine art at New York’s Parsons the New School for Design since 1989. Recently, she has served as a guest lecturer at the School of Visual Art’s MFA in art criticism program and a resident artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Over the years she has taught at many schools, including the Rhode Island School of Design—where Janine Antoni, the second CAA interviewee, was her student—Sarah Lawrence College, Vermont College, and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
Schor’s solo exhibitions include Painting in the Space Where Painting Used to Be at Some Walls in Oakland in 2011, Mira Schor: Paintings from the Nineties to Now at CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles in 2010, and Suddenly: New Paintings by Mira Schor at Momenta Art in Brooklyn in 2009. With Susan Bee, she founded and led the art journal M/E/A/N/I/N/G/, which was active in print between 1986 and 1996; it continues as an online publication (a twenty-fifth anniversary edition was published in late 2011). A collection of texts from this publication, titled M/E/A/N/I/N/G/: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism, was published in 2000. Schor is also the editor of The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
Schor has received awards in painting from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. In 1999, CAA recognized her writing with its Frank Jewett Mather Award. She is currently represented by CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles and by Marvelli Gallery in New York.
Stuart Horodner
Stuart Horodner is artistic director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in Georgia. He has held positions as visual arts curator at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Oregon and director of the Bucknell University Art Gallery in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He was also a coowner of the Horodner Romley Gallery in New York. Horodner has curated numerous solo and group exhibitions and has worked with artists including Leon Golub, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Judy Linn, Melanie Manchot, William Pope.L, Kay Rosen, Joe Sola, Jessica Stockholder, and Jack Whitten.
His criticism has appeared in journals and magazines, including Art Issues, Art Lies, Art on Paper, Bomb Magazine, and Sculpture. Horodner’s new book, The Art Life: On Creativity and Career (Atlanta: Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, 2012), collects statements and texts by visual artists, writers, filmmakers, and performers that address the Sisyphean task of sustaining a lifelong career in the arts. (Read an interview with Horodner about The Art Life in ArtsATL, published in March 2012.) He has served in an advisory capacity to organizations, including Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue, Creative Capital, the Ford Family Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony.
JANINE ANTONI AT THE 2013 ANNUAL ARTISTS’ INTERVIEWS
posted by Christopher Howard — Oct 03, 2012
Janine Antoni, an artist based in New York, will participate in CAA’s next Annual Artists’ Interviews, hosted by ARTspace during the 2013 Annual Conference in New York. This session will be the thirteenth installment of the popular series, which features two major practicing artists in back-to-back interviews. The other artist who will be interviewed is the painter and writer Mira Schor. The talks will be held on Friday, February 15, 2013, from 2:30 to 5:00 PM at the Hilton in New York. Klaus Ottmann, director of the Center for the Study of Modern Art and a curator at large at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, will interview Antoni.
Janine Antoni
Janine Antoni, Loving Care, 1992, performance with Loving Care hair dye Natural Black, dimensions variable (artwork © Janine Antoni; photograph provided by the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York, and taken by Prudence Cumming Associates at Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, 1993)
Janine Antoni’s work is an amalgam of shamanistic ritual, quotidian task, and daredevil action. Her performances include using her dye-soaked hair to mop a gallery floor; sleeping in a bed set up in a gallery and then weaving a blanket based on the pattern of her rapid eye movements; and walking across a tightrope of hand-plied hemp that she made herself, suspended eight feet above the ground. The arduous process of the performance is often combined into installations with sculpture, photography, and video. It is Antoni’s desire that her artwork be understood as a felt experience, one that combines emotional content and intellectual engagement. In each piece, no matter the medium or image, a conveyed physicality speaks directly to the viewer’s body.
In a conversation published in 2011 in the Brooklyn Rail, she elaborates on the importance of this imagined relationship with her work’s audience: “When I’m making work I spend a lot of time fantasizing about what the viewer will do and think; I enter their body, and imagine them walking up to my sculpture. My work is a way for me to feel connected and to feel present in the world. I try to make work that elicits empathy. I’ve been known for chewing 600 pounds of chocolate, being dumped in tubs of lard, and mopping the floor with my hair. I do these extreme acts because I feel like it puts the viewer in a very emphatic relationship to my sculpture.”
In Antoni’s work, a charged relationship between the symbolic nature of her preferred materials (chocolate, lard, soap, hemp) and the artist’s given task to transform raw material, results in a highly personal, metaphysical evocation. For the installation Gnaw (1992), Antoni wanted to use her own body as a tool to redefine what a figurative sculpture could be. She chewed on a block of chocolate and a block of lard, spitting out pieces of each to be melted down and respectively repackaged as heart-shaped chocolates and lipstick. In Lick & Lather (1993), she sculpted two self-portrait busts out of chocolate and soap, generating a nearly tangible sensation of taste and touch.
Janine Antoni, Gnaw, 1992, 600 lbs. of chocolate, gnawed by the artist, 24 x 24 x 24 in.; 600 lbs. of lard, gnawed by the artist, 24 x 24 x 24 in.; 45 heart-shaped packages for chocolate made from chewed chocolate removed from the chocolate cube; 400 lipsticks made with pigment, beeswax, and chewed lard removed from the lard cube displayed in glass case (artwork © Janine Antoni; photograph provided by the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York)
Another recurring theme in Antoni’s art is the lasting enigma of the family. She has staged photographs of her parents dressed in drag as each other, which results in a comical yet strangely moving portrait of a couple. In 2008 she photographed her toddler daughter attempting to feed her mother through her bellybutton. The doublings and life cycles in both series transcend mere performance or enactment to become lasting meditations on human relationships. In a 2009 interview in Art in America, she states, “My work occupies the territory between object, performance and relic. For each piece, I ask myself what the piece needs, how much I should tell and how much I should leave to the viewer’s imagination. With earlier projects, I spoke through the work in a very direct way, and I thought that was a generous gesture. Now, I’m more interested in leaving a space for the viewer’s imagination.” This new, more open-ended approach to her practice is evident in Tear (2008), an installation that pairs a video projection of a close-up of Antoni’s eye blinking in unison to a thudding sound. The video is screened in a room which contains a visibly scarred, lead wrecking ball that had been used in the demolition of a building. The artwork implies a triangulated relationship among all three components; tension and mystery are built from the unseen elements in the narrative.
Antoni was born in 1964 in Freeport, Bahamas. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 1986 and an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1989. Mira Schor was an influential professor for Antoni in graduate school, introducing the younger woman to the work of three feminist artists from the 1970s whose physical bodies were integral to their art practice: Ana Mendieta, Hannah Wilke, and Carolee Schneeman.
Janine Antoni, Slumber, 1993, performance with loom, yarn, bed, nightgown, PSG machine, and artist’s REM reading, dimensions variable (artwork © Janine Antoni; photograph provided by the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York)
Antoni has shown her work in more than twenty-five solo exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Her most recent was Touch (2011) at the Museum Kunst der Westküste in Alkersum/Föhr, Germany. She has participated in international biennials in Venice, Johannesburg, Istanbul, and Kwangju and domestically in the Whitney Biennial in New York, SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico, and Prospect.1 in New Orleans. The artist has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Larry Aldrich Foundation Award, a Joan Mitchell Painting and Sculpture Award, a Creative Capital Grant, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. She is represented by Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York.
Antoni lives and works in New York. She participated in the 2011 Annual Conference, speaking on the popular Centennial session “Parallel Practices: When the Mind Isn’t Focused on Art.”
Klaus Ottmann
Klaus Ottmann is director of the Center for the Study of Modern Art and curator at large at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. He is the author of Yves Klein by Himself: His Life and Thought (Paris: Éditions Dilecta, 2010), The Genius Decision: The Extraordinary and the Postmodern Condition (New York: Spring Publications, 2004), and The Essential Mark Rothko (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003). In 2006 he translated and edited Yves Klein’s complete writings for the book Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, published by Spring Publications.
Ottmann has curated more than forty international exhibitions, including Per Kirkeby: Paintings and Sculpture; Still Points of the Turning World: SITE Santa Fe’s Sixth International Biennial; Life, Love, and Death: The Work of James Lee Byars; Wolfgang Laib: A Retrospective; Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings, 1972–2008; and Fairfield Porter Raw: The Creative Process of an American Master.
Take NAMTA’s Triennial Artists & Art Materials Survey
posted by Christopher Howard — Feb 28, 2012
The International Art Materials Association (NAMTA), an organization of more than 550 professional art-materials businesses, conducts a study of artists and art materials every three years and is asking all artists, art students, and art instructors to contribute by completing an online survey by Monday, April 2, 2012. The survey is open to American and Canadian artists, over the age of 18, working in any medium. CAA especially encourages art students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels to participate.
Prizes
For individuals: Two lucky survey participants are eligible to win $200 each in gift certificates to an art-supply store.
For schools: A gift box of art supplies will be awarded to the top five colleges that have the most students complete the survey. The gift box includes: Strathmore drawing pads, Golden and Liquitex acrylic paint sets, Winsor and Newton oil paint sets and brushes, a $100 gift certificate to Art Supply Warehouse, the Artist’s Magazine, and a book, Rethinking Acrylic.
Participants must register to receive the executive summary and to enter the drawing by clicking on the link on the thank-you page after submitting their completed survey. The drawing and executive summary sign-up is separate from the survey to keep the survey anonymous. All survey responses are anonymous and will only be reported as part of summary figures like totals or averages. Visit the website of Hart Business Research, which is administering the survey, to learn more about how to enter the drawing and competition.
NAMTA is donating $1 for each completed survey (for the first five hundred completed) to scholarships through the NAMTA Foundation for the Visual Arts.
About the Survey
The survey is the first phase of a larger study, titled Artists & Art Materials 2012, which will also include a questionnaire for retailers of art supplies. In the study’s second phase, Hart Business Research will analyze this survey data as well as data from the National Endowment for the Arts, various artist nonprofits, the United States Census, and individual artists’ websites to build a comprehensive picture of artists’ evolving activities. The report will be announced in summer 2012, accompanied by an executive summary that will be made available to all survey participants.
CAA Advocacy for Artists, Art Historians, and Art Museums
posted by Christopher Howard — May 23, 2011
CAA is the principal national and international voice of the academic and professional community in the visual arts; the organization was founded on the principle of advocating the visual arts and actively continues that engagement today (see The Eye, The Hand, The Mind: 100 Years of the College Art Association, edited by Susan Ball). The principal goal of CAA advocacy is to address issues of critical importance in the visual arts that benefit artists, art historians, and museum workers and to inform the public.
CAA specifically advocates change and improvements in these areas:
- Government funding for the arts and humanities
- Freedom of expression and against censorship
- Intellectual-property rights
- Preservation of the artistic integrity of public spaces
- Higher education and technologies to facilitate distance learning
- Philanthropy for the arts and humanities
- Tax policy as it applies to CAA members
- Conditions in universities, museums, and other workplace environments of CAA members
CAA cosponsors and regularly sends representatives to the annual Arts, Humanities, and Museum Advocacy Days in Washington, DC. Email petitions are requested of CAA members throughout the year when legislation is being considered in Congress related to specific issues. This year’s advocacy message to Capitol Hill focused on maintaining the funding levels of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Recent issues related to freedom of expression and censorship on which CAA has taken a public position include:
- Incarceration of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei
- Removal of David Wojnarowicz’s video from the Hide/Seek exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery
- Proposed removal of the John T. Biggers mural at Texas Southern University
- Removal of the Department of Labor mural in Augusta, Maine
- Adrian Piper’s placement on the Transportation Security Administration Watch List
- Supreme Court amicus brief in support of petition for review regarding artists whose vehicular artwork was removed by the City of San Marcos, Texas
- Supreme Court amicus brief asserting the unconstitutionality of a federal law criminalizing the depiction of animal cruelty in United States v. Stevens
In addition, CAA has been involved in intellectual-property rights, as described below.
Orphan Works
CAA participated actively in US Copyright Office proceedings to study orphan works and, thereafter, actively supported legislation—yet to be passed by Congress—that would require users to conduct work-by-work, due-diligence searches to identify and find the copyright holder. If that search failed to identify or find the copyright holder, the work could be used without the threat of injunctive relief or statutory damages. If the copyright holder emerges after the work has been researched and used, he or she could still sue the user for copyright infringement, but a losing defendant would only be required to pay the normal license fee; the proposed legislation includes a safe harbor for museums that removed works expeditiously. It is unclear if any orphan-works legislation will be reintroduced in this or subsequent Congresses. After the March 2011 decision of Judge Denny Chin of the US Court of Appeals Second Circuit rejecting the settlement of the Google Books litigation, CAA’s counsel was approached by Public Knowledge (“a D.C. public interest group working to defend citizen’s rights in the emerging digital culture”) asking if CAA remained interested in orphan-works legislation and, if so, to sign a letter to Congress requesting that orphan-works legislation be reintroduced.
Cost for Reproducing Images of Artwork in Museum Collections
In recent member surveys, one of the most critical issues articulated was the high cost of reproduction rights of works in museum collections that are not under copyright. CAA has requested formal attention to this issue from the Association of Art Museum Directors.
Fair Use
CAA’s Committee on Intellectual Property, chaired by Doralyn Pines and Christine Sundt, is reviewing and proposing revisions to the Intellectual Property in the Arts section of the CAA website. The committee will also review a draft set of fair-use guidelines being prepared by the Art Law Committee of the New York Bar Association and the Visual Resources Association; after such review, the CAA Board of Directors may be asked to endorse the updated guidelines.
Extension of Copyright Term
CAA signed a Supreme Court amicus brief regarding the retroactive application of the extension of copyright term in Eldred v. Ashcroft. The Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 was challenged with the original complaint filed on January 11, 1999. CAA was an amicus when the case was brought to the Supreme Court, which held on January 15, 2003, that the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 was constitutional (see the March 2003 CAA News).
Artist-Museum Partnership Act
CAA actively supports the Artist-Museum Partnership Act, which establishes fair-market-value tax deductions for works given by artists instead of the current limitation to cost of materials. Information on the progress of the Artist-Museum Partnership Act is published in the weekly CAA News email, posted in the Advocacy section of the website, and communicated to the Services to Artists Committee. If and when a bill is subject to a vote in Congress, CAA will urge all members, affiliated societies, and committees to contact their representatives.
Coalition on the Academic Workforce
CAA is a member of the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, which recently prepared a survey of contingent faculty. Over 30,000 individuals completed the questionnaire—many were CAA members—and the results will be tabulated this spring. Information on all aspect of working conditions is included in this survey and will assist in informing future standards and practices. CAA’s Professional Practices Committee and Education Committee are kept informed of the survey and its tabulation and will analyze the results and determine action to take that will benefit CAA members. Contingent faculty is currently responsible for 76 percent of teachers in American colleges and universities. CAA supports equitable hiring, representation, and benefits for this growing segment of the faculty.
How It Works
How does advocacy work at CAA? CAA both monitors advocacy issues and is approached by universities, colleges, organizations, and individuals who raise issues via CAA’s counsel, officers and members of the board, executive director, deputy director, affiliated societies, or other partner organizations such as the National Coalition Against Censorship, the Association of Art Museum Directors, or the associations of the American Council of Learned Societies. If an issue warrants action and is consistent with the advocacy policy, CAA will prepare a response. Depending on the importance and complexity of the issue, CAA will prepare an email, letter of support, or statement; cosign a letter with other organizations; or, in exceptional circumstances when legal action is required, prepare an amicus brief or support proposed legislation. All advocacy issues brought to CAA’s attention are reviewed by the counsel and the executive director. Consistent with the organization’s Advocacy Policy, the Executive Committee and, if necessary, partner organizations also review the issues. Important matters where legal action is involved will be brought to the board.
At the February 2011 board meeting, Andrea Kirsh, then vice president for external affairs, volunteered to work as CAA’s advocacy coordinator. She has since actively assisted in carrying out research and drafting letters and statements. CAA members who would like to be informed of the organization’s advocacy efforts—and spread the word—can send an email to nyoffice@collegeart.org.
Artists Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison Will Speak at Convocation at the 2011 Centennial Conference
posted by CAA — Jul 23, 2010
Dear colleagues,
It is with great pleasure that I announce the keynote speakers for Convocation at CAA’s Centennial Conference in New York: the artists Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison. This event, free and open to the public, will take place in February 2011.
The Harrisons are interdisciplinary, collaborative, multimedia, environmental, educational, activist, visionary, ethical, and humane. They exemplify many aspects of contemporary artistic practice and speak to numerous concerns of the CAA membership.
I first met Newton in the early 1990s: he was a visiting artist when I was a graduate student in Indiana. (I also met Helen years later at a gallery reception in Colorado.) He left a tremendous impression on me as someone with a truly perceptive mind, possessing the foresight, talent, and determination to create visually compelling art on a scale that makes a positive difference in life on our planet. The Harrisons have been doing this for over forty years. His and Helen’s concept of the individual contributing to the elevation of a collective “conversational drift” resonates today more than ever.
For more information on the Harrisons and their work, please visit their website. Other great sources include the New York Art World, Ronald Feldman Gallery, which represents the artists, Left Matrix, and the Community Arts Network, which republishes an essay on the artists by Arlene Raven.
I’d like to thank Sue Gollifer, CAA vice president for Annual Conference, for her thoughtful consultation with me about potential speakers, and Emmanuel Lemakis, CAA director of programs, for his assistance with confirming and making arrangements for our honored guests.
Please join me in welcoming the Harrisons and spreading the word about our good fortune to have them address CAA as keynote speakers for our 2011 Convocation.
Sincerely,
Barbara Nesin, MFA
President, College Art Association
Department Chair of Art Foundations, Art Institute of Atlanta
Batya Tamar Studio at the Arts Exchange
Artists’ Projects Launch New Editor’s First Issue of Art Journal
posted by Christopher Howard — May 11, 2010
The Spring–Summer 2010 issue of Art Journal marks the first issue produced by the art historian and critic Katy Siegel, who began work as editor-in-chief in July 2009. Special artists’ projects by Sharon Lockhart and Kerry James Marshall are highlights of this issue, and the magazine also features never-before-published photographs of a project by the cult artist Jack Smith and his collaborator, the renowned avant-garde actress Kate Manheim. Completing the mix are feature essays by Hannah Higgins, Cary Levine, and Martin Patrick, and an interview with the London-based artist Goshka Macuga by Achim Borchardt-Hume.
Katy Siegel, a professor of art history at Hunter College in New York, a contributing editor to Artforum, and author of the forthcoming “Since ’45”: America and the Making of Contemporary Art (Reaktion, 2010), will serve as editor-in-chief of Art Journal for three years. She says of this first issue, “While preserving its integrity as an academic journal, I want to make sure that every issue of Art Journal also represents the vitality and vicissitudes of the real life of art and artists.”
Readers immediately encounter four pages of Kerry James Marshall’s comic Dailies: On the Stroll, placed in the inside front and back covers. Marshall’s bold black-and-white graphics weave together racial politics in the larger society with those of the art world in the first episode of a frankly polemical serial.
Sharon Lockhart’s Lunch Break Times previews a publication the artist will launch later this year. Working with blue-collar workers throughout the state of Maine, Lockhart conveys the visual aspects of the industrial workplace by means of intriguing objects she has found there: antique postcards and photos, a coffee-cart sign emblazoned on a state map, a labor activist’s painting hanging in the union hall, and more.
Kate Manheim is best known for several decades of performances as the lead actor in Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater. Jack Smith (1932–1989) blazed through the underground art and film scenes in lower Manhattan in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, creating films and performances with his coterie of Flaming Creatures. Smith and Manheim collaborated on a project exploring marriage, melodrama, and the Hollywood star Maria Montez. A selection of their atmospheric and amusing photographs is published for the first time ever in the pages of Art Journal, introduced by a beautiful personal essay by the film historian P. Adams Sitney.
The art historian Hannah Higgins has contributed a clear-eyed and moving account of the intertwined careers of her parents, the Fluxus artists Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins, and her relationship to them as both daughter and historian. Martin Patrick considers the present-day implications of the work of another important Fluxus artist, Robert Filliou. Cary Levine reflects on a somewhat sinister body of work by the West Coast artist Mike Kelley, which draws on the themes and techniques of do-it-yourself crafts. And the curator of London’s Whitechapel Gallery, Achim Borchardt-Hume, interviews Goshka Macuga about her yearlong installation at Whitechapel that was based on Picasso’s tapestry version of Guernica, presented here with documentation of the artist’s project. This is the first installation of a new feature, “Before and After,” which will expand Art Journal’s engagement with the making of art as well as its social afterlife.
The quarterly Art Journal, published since 1929, is available by subscription to CAA members. Single copies may be purchased by calling 212-691-1051, ext. 204, or by writing to nyoffice@collegeart.org. Art Journal is made possible by a generous grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, CAA membership support, and contributions from individuals and institutions. To make a contribution, please contact Sara Hines at 212-691-1051, ext. 216; or visit www.collegeart.org/support.
New Industry Report by NAMTA on Artists and Art Materials
posted by Christopher Howard — Nov 03, 2009
A recent study on artists and their materials has been published by the International Art Materials Trade Association (known as NAMTA) and American Artist magazine, in conjunction with Hart Business Research. Based on a spring 2009 survey of artists, students, and the retailers and suppliers of art materials, “Artists & Art Materials USA 2009” is the first report published in over a decade that analyzes industry size and trends, business practices, and artist needs.
The most groundbreaking finds published in this report include an increased use of mixed media and digital media, the importance of arts education for both children and practicing artists, and the continued use of magazines and books as a primary source of learning. The results of the survey show that artists are purchasing larger amounts of “nontraditional” art materials such as fabrics, glass, and beads, using more digital products, and incorporating scavenged materials. In 2008, the percentage of artists spending for nontraditional art supplies was almost equal to that for paints.
Unsurprisingly, the study found that artists are increasingly using computers either to create digital art or to assist them in producing nondigital art. However, many artists favor printed materials such as art magazines to their website counterparts as a source for education. Eighty-seven percent of survey participants said they read art-related magazines, making these publications the top source for learning, followed closely by books. Early exposure to art is crucial: well over half of the professional artists who participated in the survey responded that art was a major part of their lives by age 12. The report urges for the support of elementary school art teachers in order to expose children to art at a young age.
The 4.4 million active artists in the United States—professionals, students, and hobbyists—are spending over $4 billion per year on art materials and services. While 28 percent of artists buy their supplies online, almost twice as much shopping (54 percent) occurs at brick-and-mortar businesses. Also, while stores are meeting artists’ need for drawing and painting supplies, an increasing number of practitioners are spending more for classes and workshops, an area underserved by retailers and suppliers.
A free download of the eight-page executive summary is available from NAMTA.
Take the Artists and the Economic Recession Survey
posted by Christopher Howard — Aug 21, 2009
The creators of the Artists and the Economic Recession Survey invite artists to share their experiences with the conditions they face in the current economic climate. The online survey, which is live through September 4, 2009, is conducted by Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC), a ten-year national initiative to improve conditions for artists, and supervised by Princeton Survey Research Associates International. Completing the survey takes about fifteen minutes, and all responses are anonymous.
LINC has been working with organizations around the country to distribute the survey in order to reach the widest range of artist voices possible, especially those who may not be part of formal organizational networks like CAA. Reaching as many artists as possible improves the quality of this important research and better equips everyone who advocates for artists and the arts.
In addition to completing it yourself, the organizers request that you forward the survey, which is offered in English and Spanish, to your friends and colleagues. LINC has created a simple widget that you can post on your website, newsletter, Facebook page, or blog to let others know about the survey. Each week the image will update automatically to reflect a new statistic from responses to the survey. You won’t have to worry about making changes on your end: the image will remain the same and the text at the top will be updated automatically.
Your participation is completely voluntary. If you have any questions about this survey, please contact techsupport@psra.com.
Survey for Artists on Art Materials
posted by Christopher Howard — Apr 28, 2009
The International Art Materials Trade Association (NAMTA) and American Artist magazine have begun a new industry study and are asking all artists and users of art supplies in the United States to contribute by completing an online survey.
About the Survey
The consumer survey is the first phase of a larger study, entitled “Artists & Art Materials USA 2009,” which will also consist of surveys of art-supply retailers and art-materials suppliers. In the study’s second phase, Hart Business Research will analyze this survey data plus government statistics and company financial reports to build a comprehensive picture of artists’ evolving activities. The report will be announced in fall 2009, accompanied by an executive summary that will be made available to all survey participants.
As the first large-scale survey of industry size and trends, business best practices, and artists’ needs and preferences in more than a decade, “Artists & Art Materials USA 2009” is independently researched and written by Hart Business Research and cosponsored by NAMTA, an organization of more than 550 professional art-materials businesses, and American Artist, a primary resource for artists since 1937.
How to Participate
The consumer survey is open to artists working in all areas, including oil and acrylic paintings; watercolors; pastels; pencil, ink, or marker drawings; mixed media or collage; murals or wall art; handmade books, cards, or scrapbooks; functional art; three-dimensional art; conceptual or installation art; communication art or graphic design; digital art; quilting arts; fiber arts; and more.
Survey participants are eligible to win one of five $100 gift certificates to an art-materials store. Participants must register to receive the executive summary and to enter the sweepstakes by clicking on the link on the thank-you page after submitting their completed survey. The sweepstakes and executive summary sign-up is separate from the survey to keep the survey anonymous. All survey responses are anonymous and confidential to Hart Business Research and will only be reported as part of totals or averages.
NAMTA is also donating $1 for every completed survey (for the first 2,000 completed) to visual-arts scholarships through the NAMTA Foundation for the Visual Arts.