CAA News Today
NEA Report on Unemployment Rates for Artists
posted by Christopher Howard — Mar 09, 2009
Unemployment rates are up among working artists and the artist workforce has contracted, according to new research from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Artists in a Year of Recession: Impact on Jobs in 2008 examines how the economic slowdown has affected the nation’s working artists. The study looks at artist employment patterns during two spikes in the current recession—the fourth quarters of 2007 and 2008. Not unexpectedly, this downturn reflects larger economic declines across the nation: a Commerce Department report from late February noted a 6.2 percent decrease in the gross domestic product in the last quarter of 2008. The ten-page publication can be downloaded as a PDF.
Among the findings:
- Artists are unemployed at twice the rate of professional workers, a category in which artists are grouped because of their high levels of education. The artist unemployment rate grew to 6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, compared with 3 percent for all professionals. A total of 129,000 artists were unemployed in the fourth quarter of 2008, an increase of 50,000 (63 percent) from one year earlier. The unemployment rate for artists is comparable to that for the overall workforce (6.1 percent)
- Unemployment rates for artists have risen more rapidly than for US workers as a whole. The unemployment rate for artists climbed 2.4 percentage points between the fourth quarters of 2007 and 2008, compared to a one-point increase for professional workers as a whole, and a 1.9 point increase for the overall workforce
- Artist unemployment rates would be even higher if not for the large number of artists leaving the workforce. The US labor force grew by 800,000 people from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2008. In contrast, the artist workforce shrank by 74,000 workers. Some of this decline may be attributed to artists’ discouragement over job prospects
- Unemployment rose for most types of artist occupations. Artist jobs with higher unemployment rates are performing artists (8.4 percent), fine artists, art directors, and animators (7.1 percent), writers and authors (6.6 percent), and photographers (6.0 percent)
- The job market for artists is unlikely to improve until long after the US economy starts to recover. Unemployment is generally a lagging economic indicator, or a measure of how an economy has performed in the past few months. During the prior recession (2001), artist unemployment did not reach its peak of 6.1 percent until 2003—two years after economic recovery began nationwide.
As an example of how arts jobs intersect with the larger economy, consider the construction industry. Industry-wide declines, which began in 2006, have contributed to the shrinking job market for architects. While this group usually has the lowest unemployment rates among all artist occupations and all professionals, architect unemployment rates doubled, from 1.8 percent in fourth quarter 2007, to 3.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008. Unemployment in the designer category also doubled, from 2.3 percent to 4.7 percent. This broad category includes interior, commercial, and industrial designers whose work is closely associated with the construction industry. Eighty-three thousand designers left the artist labor market during that time period.
The contraction of the arts workforce has implications for the overall economy. A May 2008 NEA study revealed there are two million full-time artists representing 1.4 percent of the US labor force, only slightly smaller than the number of active-duty and reserve personnel in the military (2.2 million). More recently, a National Governors Association report recognized that the arts directly benefit states and communities through job creation, tax revenues, attracting investments, invigorating local economies, and enhancing quality of life. There are 100,000 nonprofit arts organizations that support 5.7 million jobs and return nearly $30 billion in government revenue every year, according to a study by Americans for the Arts.
The NEA Office of Research and Analysis produced Artists in a Year of Recession: Impact on Jobs in 2008 using published and unpublished data from the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. The research note measures unemployment rates among workers who self-reported an artist job as occupying their greatest number of working hours per week, whether the employment was full-time or part-time.
NEA REPORT ON UNEMPLOYMENT RATES FOR ARTISTS
posted by Christopher Howard — Mar 09, 2009
Unemployment rates are up among working artists and the artist workforce has contracted, according to new research from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Artists in a Year of Recession: Impact on Jobs in 2008 examines how the economic slowdown has affected the nation’s working artists. The study looks at artist employment patterns during two spikes in the current recession—the fourth quarters of 2007 and 2008. Not unexpectedly, this downturn reflects larger economic declines across the nation: a Commerce Department report from late February noted a 6.2 percent decrease in the gross domestic product in the last quarter of 2008. The ten-page publication can be downloaded as a PDF.
Among the findings:
- Artists are unemployed at twice the rate of professional workers, a category in which artists are grouped because of their high levels of education. The artist unemployment rate grew to 6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, compared with 3 percent for all professionals. A total of 129,000 artists were unemployed in the fourth quarter of 2008, an increase of 50,000 (63 percent) from one year earlier. The unemployment rate for artists is comparable to that for the overall workforce (6.1 percent)
- Unemployment rates for artists have risen more rapidly than for US workers as a whole. The unemployment rate for artists climbed 2.4 percentage points between the fourth quarters of 2007 and 2008, compared to a one-point increase for professional workers as a whole, and a 1.9 point increase for the overall workforce
- Artist unemployment rates would be even higher if not for the large number of artists leaving the workforce. The US labor force grew by 800,000 people from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2008. In contrast, the artist workforce shrank by 74,000 workers. Some of this decline may be attributed to artists’ discouragement over job prospects
- Unemployment rose for most types of artist occupations. Artist jobs with higher unemployment rates are performing artists (8.4 percent), fine artists, art directors, and animators (7.1 percent), writers and authors (6.6 percent), and photographers (6.0 percent)
- The job market for artists is unlikely to improve until long after the US economy starts to recover. Unemployment is generally a lagging economic indicator, or a measure of how an economy has performed in the past few months. During the prior recession (2001), artist unemployment did not reach its peak of 6.1 percent until 2003—two years after economic recovery began nationwide.
As an example of how arts jobs intersect with the larger economy, consider the construction industry. Industry-wide declines, which began in 2006, have contributed to the shrinking job market for architects. While this group usually has the lowest unemployment rates among all artist occupations and all professionals, architect unemployment rates doubled, from 1.8 percent in fourth quarter 2007, to 3.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008. Unemployment in the designer category also doubled, from 2.3 percent to 4.7 percent. This broad category includes interior, commercial, and industrial designers whose work is closely associated with the construction industry. Eighty-three thousand designers left the artist labor market during that time period.
The contraction of the arts workforce has implications for the overall economy. A May 2008 NEA study revealed there are two million full-time artists representing 1.4 percent of the US labor force, only slightly smaller than the number of active-duty and reserve personnel in the military (2.2 million). More recently, a National Governors Association report recognized that the arts directly benefit states and communities through job creation, tax revenues, attracting investments, invigorating local economies, and enhancing quality of life. There are 100,000 nonprofit arts organizations that support 5.7 million jobs and return nearly $30 billion in government revenue every year, according to a study by Americans for the Arts.
The NEA Office of Research and Analysis produced Artists in a Year of Recession: Impact on Jobs in 2008 using published and unpublished data from the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. The research note measures unemployment rates among workers who self-reported an artist job as occupying their greatest number of working hours per week, whether the employment was full-time or part-time.
NEA Releases Report on Women Artists
posted by Christopher Howard — Dec 02, 2008
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has released a new study in its Research Note series that shows women are making gains in traditionally male artist occupations, but still earn less than male artists. Women Artists: 1990–2005 takes a closer look at female artist employment trends that were previously mentioned in the NEA report Artists in the Workforce: 1990–2005, published in May 2008.
Totaling almost 919,000 artists in 2005, women represented 46 percent of the artist labor force, comparable to their percentage of all civilian workers. The note reveals significant patterns in pay disparity, demographic, and educational trends, and women’s advancement in various art fields over the past fifteen years. This note draws on data from the US Census Bureau’s 2003–5 American Community Surveys, along with the 1990 and 2000 population censuses.
Among the key findings:
Female artists earn less than male artists. Women artists who work full-year, full-time earn $0.75 for every dollar made by men artists. Women workers in general earn $0.77 for every dollar earned by men.
- Women’s pay disparity increases with age. In 2003–5, women artists aged 18 to 24 earned $0.95 for every $1 made by young men artists. This ratio fell to $0.67 for 45-to-54-year-olds. Similar pay gaps by age are found in the overall labor market
- Pay gaps vary by occupation. Men and women had closer earnings parity in lower-paying performing arts occupations (such as musicians and dancers), where women earned an average of $0.92 for every dollar earned by men. The gap tended to be larger in nonperforming art occupations (such as designers and art directors), where women earned 72 percent of what men earn
- Pay gaps vary by state. The pay disparity was smaller in ten states, such as New York and Arizona, where women made 80 percent or more of what men made. Women made less than 75 percent of what men made in twenty-seven states, including Virginia, Michigan, and North Dakota
Women make up just under half of all artists nationwide (46 percent), yet they are underrepresented in many artist professions. In 2003–5, nearly eight out of ten announcers and architects were men.
Women have achieved a greater presence in some artist occupations. By 2003–5, women made up 43 percent of all photographers and 22 percent of all architects—representing gains of 11 and 7 percent, respectively, since 1990.
Women artists are as likely to be married as female workers in general, but they are less likely to have children. In 2003–5, more than half of all women artists and all women workers were married. Yet only 29 percent of women artists had children under 18, almost six percentage points lower than for women workers in general.
Female artists cluster in low-population states. Women made up more than 55 percent of the artist labor force in Iowa, Alaska, New Hampshire, and Mississippi in 2003–5. They represent well below half of all artists in New York (45.8 percent) and in California (42.6 percent).
NEA Releases Report on Women Artists
posted by Christopher Howard — Dec 02, 2008
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has released a new study in its Research Note series that shows women are making gains in traditionally male artist occupations, but still earn less than male artists. Women Artists: 1990–2005 takes a closer look at female artist employment trends that were previously mentioned in the NEA report Artists in the Workforce: 1990–2005, published in May 2008.
Totaling almost 919,000 artists in 2005, women represented 46 percent of the artist labor force, comparable to their percentage of all civilian workers. The note reveals significant patterns in pay disparity, demographic, and educational trends, and women’s advancement in various art fields over the past fifteen years. This note draws on data from the US Census Bureau’s 2003–5 American Community Surveys, along with the 1990 and 2000 population censuses.
Among the key findings:
Female artists earn less than male artists. Women artists who work full-year, full-time earn $0.75 for every dollar made by men artists. Women workers in general earn $0.77 for every dollar earned by men.
- Women’s pay disparity increases with age. In 2003–5, women artists aged 18 to 24 earned $0.95 for every $1 made by young men artists. This ratio fell to $0.67 for 45-to-54-year-olds. Similar pay gaps by age are found in the overall labor market
- Pay gaps vary by occupation. Men and women had closer earnings parity in lower-paying performing arts occupations (such as musicians and dancers), where women earned an average of $0.92 for every dollar earned by men. The gap tended to be larger in nonperforming art occupations (such as designers and art directors), where women earned 72 percent of what men earn
- Pay gaps vary by state. The pay disparity was smaller in ten states, such as New York and Arizona, where women made 80 percent or more of what men made. Women made less than 75 percent of what men made in twenty-seven states, including Virginia, Michigan, and North Dakota
Women make up just under half of all artists nationwide (46 percent), yet they are underrepresented in many artist professions. In 2003–5, nearly eight out of ten announcers and architects were men.
Women have achieved a greater presence in some artist occupations. By 2003–5, women made up 43 percent of all photographers and 22 percent of all architects—representing gains of 11 and 7 percent, respectively, since 1990.
Women artists are as likely to be married as female workers in general, but they are less likely to have children. In 2003–5, more than half of all women artists and all women workers were married. Yet only 29 percent of women artists had children under 18, almost six percentage points lower than for women workers in general.
Female artists cluster in low-population states. Women made up more than 55 percent of the artist labor force in Iowa, Alaska, New Hampshire, and Mississippi in 2003–5. They represent well below half of all artists in New York (45.8 percent) and in California (42.6 percent).
New Charity Awards $50,000 Artists’ Grants
posted by CAA — Nov 16, 2006
A new charity, United States Artists, has announced a plan to provide support to US artists. Fifty artists working in a wide variety of disciplines and at various career stages will receive $50,000 each, no strings attached. The first recipients will be announced December 4.
Call for Nominations: Jury Members for CAA Grants and Awards (2024–2027)
posted by CAA — Apr 03, 2024
CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for individuals with relevant expertise to serve on our juries for Awards for Distinction, Publication Grants, Travel Grants, and Fellowships. Jury service is one of the most impactful volunteer positions at CAA; help select our next awardees and grantees!
To apply, send an e-mail to Cali Buckley, CAA Manager of Grants and Awards & Director of CAA-Getty International Program, with the following:
- Statement of interest outlining qualifications and experience of nominee (150 words maximum)
- CV (two pages maximum)
Three-year terms begin in July. Current CAA Committee and Editorial Board members are not eligible to apply.
Deadline: June 1, 2024
CURRENT JURY OPENINGS
- Art Journal Award
- Charles Rufus Morey Book Award for Non-catalogue Books in the History of Art
- Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize for Art Bulletin articles
- The CAA/American Institute for Conservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
- Jury for the Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work, Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement, and Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
- Distinguished Feminist Awards for Scholars and Artists
- Millard Meiss Publication Fund for Books in Art History
- Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant
- Art History Fund for Travel to Special Exhibitions
- Professional Development Fellowship in Visual Art
- Michael Aurbach Fellowship for Excellence in Visual Art
Art Journal / AJO Editorial Board seeks new members!
posted by CAA — Mar 15, 2024
CAA invites nominations and self-nominations to fill two seats on the Art Journal / AJO Editorial Board for a four-year term: July 1, 2024–June 30, 2028. Candidates may be artists, art historians, art critics, art educators, curators, or other art professionals; institutional affiliation is not required. Art Journal, published quarterly by CAA, is devoted to twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and visual culture. AJO is an online forum for the visual arts that presents artists’ projects, conversations and interviews, scholarly essays, and other forms of original content. Committed to fostering new intellectual exchanges in the fields of modern and contemporary art, AJO prioritizes material that makes meaningful use of the web and publishes on a rolling basis.
The editorial board advises the Art Journal and AJO editors-in-chief and assists them in identifying authors, articles, artists’ projects, and other content for the journal; performs peer review and recommends peer reviewers; guides the journals’ editorial programs and may propose new initiatives for them; promotes and advocates for both journals; and may support fundraising efforts on their behalf. Members also assist the editors-in-chief to keep abreast of trends and issues in the field by attending and reporting on sessions at the CAA Annual Conference and other academic conferences, symposia, exhibitions, and events.
The Art Journal / AJO Editorial Board meets three times a year, with meetings in the spring and fall plus one at the CAA Annual Conference in February. The fall and spring meetings are currently held remotely. Members are expected to pay travel and lodging expenses to attend the conference in February. Members of all editorial boards volunteer their services to CAA without compensation.
Candidates must be current CAA members in good standing and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Members may not publish their own work in the journals during the term of service. CAA encourages applications from colleagues who will contribute to the diversity of perspectives on the Art Journal / AJO Editorial Board and who will engage actively with conversations about the discipline’s engagements with differences of culture, religion, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, and access. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name; self-nominations are also welcome. Please email a letter of interest and a CV as a single PDF to Eugenia Bell, Editorial Director.
Deadline: April 15
CWA Picks: Spring 2024
posted by CAA — Mar 13, 2024
Rosana Paulino, Garça Branca from the Mangrove-Women series, 2023
The exhibitions, screenings, projects, and talks selected for CWA’s Spring Picks hint at the fleeting, ephemeral nature of memory and intimacy. The creatives highlighted here have left their mark, interpreting and imbuing their materials with meaning, often leaving behind evidence of their process.
UNITED STATES
Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures
Through April 28
Art on Hulfish Gallery, Princeton, NJ
Princeton University Art Museum’s Art on Hulfish presents a survey of work by Christina Fernandez, a Los Angeles–based artist who has spent more than thirty years conducting a rich exploration of migration, labor, gender, and her Mexican American identity through photography. Whether staged or candid, Fernandez’s photographs record touch and mark making, engaging the medium’s distinct ability to convey surfaces—the surfaces of bodies, architecture, and the images themselves. Multiple Exposures traces the development of the artist’s work from the late 1980s to now.
April 4–August 4
MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA
Since 2015, the Zagreb-born Miletić has worked almost exclusively with hand-produced textiles across several ongoing series.
Her Materials series is comprised of works hand woven on a 1970s loom. As an extension of her formal training as a photographer, their idiosyncratic shapes and color-schemes are based on Miletić’s snapshots of temporary repairs to buildings and objects in urban public spaces. Though never exhibited, her photographs of responsive, ad-hoc constructions become templates for seemingly abstract textile pieces. Her meticulous and time-consuming use of hand work to document the ephemeral repairs reproduces this ethos of care and provides a slowness and material intimacy that Miletić found lacking in photography. Across her various series, Miletić also calls attention to the gendered associations of textile craft, subtly relating forms of historically undervalued labor, like the “women’s work” of weaving, to other narratives of social and economic struggle and the larger political forces that give shape to them.
Through June 15
Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, Logan
Jane Catlin’s career as an artist and teacher has lasted more than forty years. During that time she has produced figural paintings to semi-abstract images of biological forms and processes. Throughout her career, Catlin’s style and content have shifted due to the profound influence of her travels through Japan, Korea, Africa, and Canada. This overview reveals her fascination with biology, ecology, and the environment. The mysterious imagery that results from her visual meditations evokes our mutating world and serves as a reminder of both the beauty and fragility of nature. This exhibition offers a unique opportunity to see some of her most significant works presented together for the first time.
Joan Jonas: Good Night, Good Morning
March 17–July 6
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Joan Jonas creates meditations on bodies, space, time, and nature. As she has explained, “The performer sees herself as a medium: information passes through.” The most comprehensive retrospective of Jonas’s work in the United States, this exhibition provides new insights into the artist’s process, unprecedented access to archival materials, and fresh historical perspectives on Jonas’s work. Drawings, photographs, notebooks, oral histories, film screenings, performances, and a selection of the artist’s installations, drawn from MoMA’s collection and institutions around the world, will trace the development of Jonas’s career, from works made in the 1960s and 1970s exploring the confluence of technology and ritual to more recent ones dealing with ecology and the landscape.
Joyce J. Scott: Walk a Mile in My Dreams
March 24–July 14
Baltimore Museum of Art
This fifty-year career retrospective celebrates one of the most significant artists of our time. Best known for her virtuosic use of beads and glass, Scott’s work across varying media beguiles viewers with beauty and humor while confronting racism, sexism, ecological devastation, and complex family dynamics. The exhibition includes more than 120 objects ranging from woven tapestries and soft sculpture from the 1970s and audacious performances and wearable art in the 1980s to sculptures of astonishing formal ingenuity and social force from the late 1970s to the present moment.
On April 11, 6:30–8:30 p.m. Joyce J. Scott will appear with longtime collaborator Kay Lawal-Muhammad, in a conversation moderated by Tracey Beale, BMA Director of Public Programs.
May 3–August 11
The Power Plant, Toronto
June Clark: Witness is the first survey in Canada of the Toronto-based artist June Clark, who, since the late 1960s, has developed a unique and groundbreaking practice spanning photo-based work, text, collage, installation, and sculptural assemblages. In this deeply personal exhibition, she explores how history, memory, and identity—both individual and collective—have established the familial and artistic lineages that shape her work.
Witness brings together four significant bodies of work that stretch from the 1990s to the present, many of them seen here for the first time. These include her iconic installations Family Secrets (1992) and Harlem Quilt (1997); a series of photo-based works from 2004 titled 42 Thursdays in Paris; Perseverance Suite (a new project); and Homage, a collection of sculptural assemblages that, in Clark’s words, “gave me permission to be the artist I am today.”
June Clark: Witness will be presented in tandem with another solo exhibition of the artist’s work at the Art Gallery of Ontario titled June Clark: Unrequited Love.
Thorugh July 21
Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA
LaToya M. Hobbs: It’s Time presents the series Carving Out Time (2020–21), a life-size suite of woodcuts by the Arkansas-born, Baltimore-based artist. Unfolding over five scenes, the work depicts a day in Hobbs’s life with her husband and children. Hobbs shares the labor and intimacy of her private life in these prints, centering the negotiations she brokers daily to balance her manifold responsibilities—as a wife, mother, educator, and artist. The series is also a powerful statement about her influences and self-fashioning as an artist: references to paintings, sculptures, and prints by prominent artists such as Elizabeth Catlett, Alma Thomas, Valerie Maynard, and Kerry James Marshall appear throughout. Carving Out Time is a part of Hobbs’s ongoing Salt of the Earth project, which she characterizes as “the personification of Black women as salt in relation to their role as preservers of family, culture and community.”
Lauren Lee McCarthy: Bodily Autonomy
Through May 25
Mandeville Art Gallery, University of California San Diego, La Jolla
Bodily Autonomy is Lauren Lee McCarthy’s largest US solo exhibition to date. For the past fifteen years, McCarthy has worked in performance, video, installation, software, artificial intelligence, and other media to address how an algorithmically determined world impacts human relationships and social life. The show brings together two major series of works—Surrogate and Saliva—to examine the current state of bio-surveillance in times of rapid technological development and increased corporate and government surveillance.
Loie Hollowell: Dilation Stage
Through April 20
Pace Gallery, New York
Hollowell will present ten new pastel drawings that document the dilation stage of labor. Displayed sequentially on a rounded wall, these drawings feature depictions of Hollowell’s own pregnant abdomen, rendered to scale. Below each belly is a circle the exact size of the effaced cervix as it expands. The cervical “circles” at the bottom of each drawing seem to pulse as the series progresses, culminating in a blazing cadmium red.
In addition to these drawings, the exhibition will include a unique birthing bench that Hollowell created collaboratively with her husband, sculptor Brian Caverly. The birthing chair has been used by women in labor throughout millennia and the rendition here, which visitors are invited to sit on, is created not just for the birther, but also for the partner, midwife, doula, doctor, or any other witness to the transcendent journey of birth.
Dilation Stage will coincide with Hollowell’s first museum survey, on view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, through August 11.
Modern Art for an Old Tale: Fuku Akino’s Illustrations for “The Dwarf Pine Tree”
Through July 31
Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
This exhibition presents more than twenty illustrations for The Dwarf Pine Tree by Fuku Akino (1908–2001), a Kyoto-based painter and teacher who was one of Japan’s most prominent woman artists during her lifetime. Published in 1963, The Dwarf Pine Tree is a modern retelling of a Japanese folk tale whose main character is a pine tree, an important symbol in Japanese culture representing love and endurance. The book is one of several collaborations between Akino, the author Betty Jean Lifton, and the editor Jean Karl, who promoted her vision to publish complex and culturally diverse stories for young American readers such as those written by Lifton, an American resident of Japan, and illustrated by Akino.
Through July 7
Brooklyn Museum, New York
“What does a Black person look like today in those places where Africans were once sold, a century and a half ago?” asks artist Nona Faustine (b. 1977). Using her own body, she interrogates this question in her photographic series White Shoes. Forty-two self-portraits show Faustine standing in sites across New York City, from Harlem to Wall Street to Prospect Park and beyond, that are built upon legacies of enslavement in New York—one of the last Northern states to abolish slavery. On her feet are a pair of sensible white pumps, which speak to the oppressions of colonialism and assimilation imposed on Black and Indigenous peoples locally, nationally, and globally. Otherwise nude, partially covered, or holding props, Faustine is at once vulnerable and commanding, standing in solidarity with ancestors whose bodies and memory form an archive in the land beneath her shoes. White Shoes is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition and the first complete installation of this consequential series.
April 11–September 22
Madison Square Park and Inwood Hill Park, New York
Seed explores the personal and collective experiences that have influenced artist Rose B. Simpson’s life and work with a series of new large-scale sculptures appearing in two major public parks in Manhattan. In Madison Square Park, Simpson assembles seven monumental androgynous sentinel figures fabricated in steel with bronze adornments around a central sculpture of a young female figure emerging from the earth. In addition, two life-size bronze sentinels stand watch in Inwood Hill Park, a contested space in Native American history as the site where Dutch colonial governor Peter Minuit “purchased” Manhattan Island from the Lenape in 1626. This marks Madison Square Park Conservancy’s first collaboration with another New York City public park.
Sarah Maldour: Tricontinental Cinema
Through April 28
Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus
Tricontinental Cinema explores Maldoror’s five-decade career as a maker of revolutionary cinema, tracing her involvement with Black liberation movements in France, Africa, and the Caribbean. Through an immersive, multisensory landscape of films, photographs, poetry, and letters, the exhibition invites you to experience the full scope of Maldoror’s radical practice.
A legendary filmmaker, Maldoror completed more than forty-five shorts, documentaries, and feature films before her death in 2020. Many of these works rewrite the rules of films focusing on resistance and rebellion, casting women as protagonists in movements dominated by men.
The exhibition includes several large-scale works by contemporary artists, including a monumental fiber sculpture by renowned Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga. It also features a newly commissioned mural, painted on-site, from Paris-based artist Maya Mihindou. Framing Maldoror’s films and archives, these works form a constellation of Black and Afro-Surrealist practices while amplifying the continued resonance of her work today.
Through August 18
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas
Always attuned to the built environment, Sze’s new site-specific installations across three gallery spaces integrate painting, sculpture, images, sound, and video with the surrounding architecture to create intimate systems that reference the rapidly changing world. This extraordinary new exhibition will blur the boundaries between making and showing, process and product, digital and material ultimately to question how objects acquire their meaning.
Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art: The 6000 Circle Project
Through April 6
Arc Project Gallery, San Francisco
In collaboration with The Calling (artists Yasmin Lambie-Simpson, Chantelle Goldthwaite, and Sheila Metcalf-Tobin) and the Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art (NCWCA) chapter of the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA), anyone interested in participating in this international art initiative is welcome! The 6000 Circle Project focuses on the circle as a symbol of balance and unity, a never-ending container of feminine energy and light. The Calling envisions 6000 circles created by a multitude of artists from around the globe. The 6000 Circle Project opens with more than 300 circles on the walls at Arc. Through the course of the exhibition, the public will be invited to make circles to add to the walls.
March 15, 6 –9 p.m.
MIT Bartos Theater, Cambridge, MA
Renowned Inuit lawyer Aaju Peter has led a lifelong fight for the rights of her people. But while launching an effort to establish an Indigenous forum at the European Union, Aaju finds herself facing a difficult, personal journey to mend her own wounds after the unexpected passing of her son. In this “powerful exploration of cultural trauma” (The Film Stage), director Lin Alluna follows alongside Aaju Peter as she strives to reclaim her language and identity after a lifetime of whitewashing and forced assimilation.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A discussion. Free and open to the public. Doors open at 5:30 p.m.
Panel: Vision is a Battlefield: Histories of Race and Media
March 26, 6:30 p.m.
Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, New York
How is our basic perception of the world influenced by concepts of racial identity? Join moderator Claire Bishop, professor of art history at the CUNY Graduate Center, for an illuminating discussion with the authors of four recent books exploring the intertwined histories of photography, media, and race. The panel features Brooke Belisle, associate professor of art at Stony Brook University, speaking on computational imagery and AI; Emilie Boone, assistant professor of art history at New York University, on Harlem Renaissance photographer James Van Der Zee; Monica Huerta, assistant professor of English and American studies at Princeton University, on the aesthetics of racial capitalism; and Nicholas Mirzoeff, professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University, on the visual politics of whiteness.
April 18, 6:30 p.m.
Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, New York
Natalie Dykstra’s Chasing Beauty is the vivid and masterful biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner—creator of one of America’s most stunning museums and a true American original. A wealthy Boston socialite at the turn of the twentieth century, Gardner was misunderstood for her eccentric lifestyle, but found her niche as a patron and friend to artists, including John Singer Sargent, who painted her portrait. Dykstra illuminates how the museum and its holdings can be seen as a kind of memoir created with objects, displayed per Gardner’s wishes, including not only masterwork paintings but tapestries, rare books, prints, porcelains, and fine furniture. Dykstra speaks about the new book with Rachel Cohen, author of A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists.
MEXICO
War and Peace: A Poetics of Gesture
Through June 30
Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City
Beatriz González is one of the most renowned living Latin American painters and one of the key references of her country’s culture. War and Peace: A Poetics of Gesture is a new review of Beatriz González’s work. This is the first monographic exhibition of the painter’s work to be held in Mexico: it will offer both an overview of her work and an original investigation of her approach to the figure and gestures as a vehicle for emotional communication.
CANADA
un/tangling, un/covering, un/doing
Through March 17
Surrey Art Gallery, British Columbia
From the moment of birth, hair takes on multifaceted meanings. Rooted within storytelling by families and communities, the politics of hair have been both intimately personal and profoundly social.
Artists from across Canada—including Audie Murray, Becky Bair, Wally Dion, Clare Yow, Sharon Norwood, Sarindar Dhaliwal, Karin Jones, Baljit Singh, Kiranjot Kaur, and Natasha Kianipour—offer reflections on how hair embodies the importance of culture. In this exhibition, artists employ compelling storytelling that express connections intertwined with familial teachings and their own informed experiences.
SOUTH AMERICA
March 22–June 10
Fundación Malba Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires
This is the first comprehensive exhibition to be held outside Brazil of the work of Rosana Paulino (b. 1967). It includes works made between 1994 and 2024, and approaches her oeuvre from the concept of “Amefricana” as proposed by the Brazilian philosopher Lélia Gonzáles.
Paulino’s poetic interventions reinscribe the archives of the African diaspora in South America. They do so through constant dialogue between personal and historical archives, reconceptualizations of Brazilian art, interrogations of the matrixes of Western science, and through an approach to the circumstances of black women in Brazilian and Latin American societies. The exhibition includes five large installations, displayed together with drawings, engravings, and video organized into four conceptual hubs that are not separate zones, but rather axes of meaning that run through almost all of Paulino’s works.
ASIA
Jorinde Voigt and Xiyadie: 2.0
Through May 4
Gallery P21, Seoul
In 2.0 paper transcends its two-dimensional origins to become a silent narrator telling tales of delicacy, rebellion, and existence. The title of the show is tri-fold: the exhibition is the first in the gallery’s new “2.0” space; the show comprises the work of two artists; and the binary symbolism behind the numbers: 2, which represents existence and material, and 0, which represents absence or the subconscious. The overlap of these artists’ practices is predominantly material, but presenting them alongside one another brings out conceptual overlap, allowing alternate readings of each artist’s works. For both artists the fragility of each cut or fold becomes a poetic marker of time, capturing moments in the evolution of the artwork. Both artists, through their engagement with paper, participate in a form of archiving, be it of cultural narratives or conceptual explorations.
EUROPE & UK
May 17–August 11
Kunsthalle Basel
For her first institutional exhibition in Switzerland, the Swedish artist Ghislaine Leung (b. 1980) presents a new, site-specific project. Leung’s artistic practice is characterized by a rigorous, conceptual approach that often traces physical and economic circuits as much as institutional and societal mechanisms. The result are artworks—which she considers “events”—that emerge from her interest in the various structures underlying commodities, sites, and human relations.
Leung’s work is also on view in the Turner Prize 2023 Shortlist Exhibition at Towner Eastbourne, UK, and in a solo show at the Renaissance Society, Chicago, both through April 14.
March 20–June 9
Städel Museum, Frankfurt
Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) chose prints and drawings as her essential media, finding in them an independent visual language of great immediacy. This exhibition presents more than 110 works on paper, sculptures, and early paintings by the artist from the collection as well as from leading museums and Kollwitz collections. Surprising, unconventional works and selected sculptures will be presented together with loans from around Germany to highlight her independent pictorial language that was distinguished by an incisive immediacy to respond to the essential questions of humanity and address troubling topics.
A major Kollwitz retrospective exhibition will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art, March 31 – July 20.
Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior
April 20–October 20
Venice Biennale
Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior is the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work to date, bringing together more than thirty works made over the past thirty-five years, including new site-specific drawings and glasswork created for this exhibition.
Collective Behavior traces Sikander’s ever-evolving explorations of gender, race, and colonial histories. The exhibition includes her breakthrough work The Scroll (1989–90), which established her position at the vanguard of the neo-miniature movement. Collective Behavior also debuts new works by Sikander that respond to the architecture and history of the Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel, the city of Venice, and global histories of trade and artistic exchange.
Vanessa Bell: A Pioneer of Modern Art
May 15–October 6
The Courtauld Project Space, London
Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) was one of the leading artists associated with the Bloomsbury Group, the avant-garde assembly of artists, writers, and philosophers who pioneered literary and artistic modernism in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century. This focused display will be the first devoted to the Courtauld’s significant collection of Bell’s work. It will include paintings such as her masterpiece A Conversation, as well as the bold, abstract textile designs she produced for the Omega Workshops, led by influential artist and critic Roger Fry in London, which aimed to abolish the boundaries between the fine and decorative arts and bring the arts into everyday life. The exhibition will highlight one of the most cutting-edge artists working in Britain in the early twentieth century.
MIDDLE EAST & NORTH AFRICA
Ana Mzzei: How to Disappear
Through April 20
Green Art Gallery, Dubai
How to Disappear marks the conclusion of Ana Mazzei’s ongoing project Love Scene Crime Scene, a three-part exhibition series centered around the fictional disappearance of a ballerina. In this latest installment presented by Green Art Gallery in Dubai, the Brazilian artist deepens the enigma by introducing a collection of bronze sculptures and oil paintings that leave the spectator wanting to play the role of investigator. Her sculptures, featuring half human, half animal creatures placed on raw concrete plinths, take center stage against an entire wall displaying approximately fifty paintings. The selection of paintings is divided into six themes: stage, vases, landscape, cages, beings, and the joker. Together, they form a vocabulary or alphabet of symbols put together in an attempt to illustrate how to disappear, if we ever wanted to.
Through December 6
Gulf Photo Plus Gallery, Dubai
Lara Chahine and Reem Falaknaz subvert a common documentary landscape in Swallow This! with works in photography and digital media. The exhibition explores the rampant pathologization of women’s bodies, where the politically absurd, visually surreal, and humorous converge. Drawing on the uncanny collective experience of womanhood, Chahine and Falaknaz veer into a kind of performance art, becoming the subjects of their own work at times.
Swallow This! weaves narratives where the clinical or scientific, the grotesque or bodily, the divine or occult coexist as contemporary reflections on a post-internet, Arab feminism. Both photographers seek to unpack “erotic capital,” where the strange is made familiar, and the familiar, strange.
OCEANIA
Through April 20
Michael Lett Gallery, Auckland
Material, action, trace. In myriad ways and with a diverse body of tools, Judy Millar applies and removes paint in order to explore embodied acts of making and how these enact particular forms of consciousness. With a palette made up of unexpected combinations of color, Millar often plays with the tension between background and foreground. Millar’s works are often large-scale, dwarfing those who encounter them, acting as a reminder that people belong to gestures and that painting can be a shift away from the self.
caa.reviews Seeks Two Editorial Board Members and Field Editors in Seven Areas
posted by CAA — Feb 08, 2024
caa.reviews seeks two new Editorial Board Members to each serve a four-year term, July 1, 2024–June 30, 2028.
CAA encourages applications from candidates with a strong record of scholarship who are committed to the imaginative development of caa.reviews. An online, open-access journal, caa.reviews is devoted to the peer review of recent books, museum exhibitions, and projects relevant to the fields of art history, visual studies, and the arts.
The Editorial Board advises the Editor-in-Chief, guides Field Editors in their process of identifying books, exhibitions, and review authors suitable for the journal, and proposes new initiatives for the journal’s editorial programs. Editorial Board Members stay abreast of trends and issues in the field by attending and reporting on sessions at the CAA Annual Conference, as well as other academic conferences, symposia, and events in their fields.
The caa.reviews Editorial Board meets three times a year, twice in the spring and fall and once at the Annual Conference each February. Meetings in the spring and fall are currently held by videoconference, while the February meeting typically occurs in person. Members of all editorial boards at CAA volunteer their services without compensation or financial support for travel to and accommodations at the Annual Conference
Candidates must be current CAA members and should not currently serve on the editorial board of a competing journal or another CAA editorial board or committee. Nominations and self-nominations are welcome. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a letter of nomination. Please email a letter of nomination or self-nomination, describing your nominee’s interest in and qualifications for appointment, the nominee’s CV, and contact information to Eugenia Bell, Editorial Director, ebell@collegeart.org. Please include the subject line caa.reviews Editorial Board Member.
Deadline: Monday, May 6.
CAA is also inviting nominations and self-nominations for individuals to join the caa.reviews Council of Field Editors for a three-year term July 1, 2024–June 30, 2027 (renewable once). An online, open-access journal, caa.reviews is devoted to the peer review of new books, museum exhibitions, and projects relevant to art history, visual studies, and the arts. Candidates may be artists, art historians, art critics, art educators, curators, or other art professionals with stature in the field and with experience writing or editing books and/or exhibition reviews; institutional affiliation is not required.
CAA is searching for Field Editors in the following fields:
- Art of the Ancient Mediterranean, Europe, and West Asia
- Latin American Art
- Photography
- Art of the Ancient Americas
- Exhibitions: Southeast
- Exhibitions: Southwest
- African Art
Working with the caa.reviews Editor-in-Chief, the caa.reviews Editorial Board, and CAA’s staff editor, each Field Editor selects content to be reviewed, commissions reviewers, and considers manuscripts for publication. Field Editors for books are expected to keep abreast of newly published and important books and related media in their fields of expertise, and those for exhibitions should be aware of current and upcoming exhibitions (and other related projects) in their geographic regions.
The Council of Field Editors meets once a year in February at the CAA Annual Conference. Members of all CAA committees and editorial boards volunteer their services without compensation or financial support for travel to and accommodations at the Annual Conference.
Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competing journal or another CAA editorial board or committee. Nominations and self-nominations are welcome. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a letter of nomination. Please email a letter of nomination or self-nomination describing your nominee’s interest in and qualifications for appointment, the nominee’s CV, and contact information to Eugenia Bell, Editorial Director, ebell@collegeart.org. Please include the subject line caa.reviews Field Editor.
Deadline: Monday, May 6.
CAA 2023 Professional Development Fellows Announced
posted by CAA — Feb 05, 2024
Congratulations to our 2023 Professional Development fellows, Zoe Weldon-Yochim, University of California, Santa Cruz (Art History) and Kelly Tapia-Chuning, Cranbrook Academy of Art (Visual Art)!
Honorable Mentions: Jocelyn E. Marshall, Emerson College (Art History); Breanna Reiss, University of New Mexico (Art History); Jessica Monette, Stanford University (Visual Art).
Zoe Weldon-Yochim is a PhD Candidate in Visual Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, whose areas of specialization include the art and visual culture of the United States, global contemporary art, and the theories and methods associated with ecocriticism. Her research involves attending to how various artists grapple with the difficulties of visuality and environmental injustices, particularly the long-term and often invisible slow violence of US militarism, nuclear toxicities, and extraction. Her dissertation, “Atomic Afterlives: Visualizing Nuclear Toxicity in Art of the United States, 1979–2011,” focuses on a selection of underrepresented American artists whose work, stemming from genealogies of research-based conceptual art and documentary practices, brings nuclear histories and concerns into aesthetic form in singular, conflictual, and shared ways. In this project, Weldon-Yochim examines how diverse visual approaches—such as installation, photography, print media, and painting—mediate, represent, and give agency to the nuclear and its atomic afterlives. Her research illuminates burgeoning artistic conceptualizations of the intersection of militarism and environmentalism during and beyond the last decade of the Cold War, where particular women, Indigenous, and Asian American artists mobilized varying visual grammar to consider the interconnectedness of environmental injustices and an ever-expanding US military system. Weldon-Yochim’s work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Henry Luce Foundation, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and numerous university grants.
Kelly Tapia-Chuning is a mixed-race Chicana artist of Indigenous descent from southern Utah who is currently based in Detroit. Tapia-Chuning’s work forms as a response to her family’s histories of assimilation, questioning power dynamics attached to representation, racial identity, and language. Tapia-Chuning utilizes research, textile deconstruction, and needle-felting to convey the dichotomy of being nepantla, born in-between spaces and cultures.
In 2020, she received a BFA in Studio Arts from Southern Utah University and is pursuing an MFA in Fiber at Cranbrook Academy of Art, where she was awarded a Gilbert Fellowship. Tapia-Chuning’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, GAVLAK (Los Angeles), Onna House (East Hampton, NY), The Border Project Space (NY), and solo exhibitions with Red Arrow Gallery (Nashville, TN) and Harsh Collective (NY). She has been an artist in residence at Stove Works (Chattanooga, TN), and Zion National Park, in Utah. Tapia-Chuning’s work is in numerous public and private collections across the US.
Jocelyn E. Marshall is faculty in the Departments of Visual & Media Arts and Writing, Literature, & Publishing at Emerson College. She previously was a Dissertation Scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center. Their interdisciplinary projects focus on contemporary US-based diasporic women and LGBTQ+ artists and writers, researching relationships between historical trauma and queer and feminist activism. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of American Culture, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Public Art Dialogue, and elsewhere. In 2022, they co-edited Trauma-Informed Pedagogy: Addressing Gender-Based Violence in the Classroom, and in 2023 edited a multimedia issue of Rutgers University’s Rejoinder journal, themed Textual-Sexual-Spiritual: Artistic Practice and Other Rituals as Queer Becoming and Beyond. She also curates contemporary art exhibitions, including Being In-Between | In-Between Being (2020–21) and Creativity in the Time of Covid-19 (2023). She currently co-chairs the Gender & Feminisms Caucus at the Society for Cinema & Media Studies and is a contributing editor at Art Journal Open for the Feminist Interview Project.
Dr. Marshall’s research has been supported by, among other institutions, the Mark Diamond Research Foundation, J. Burton Harter Foundation, and New York Public Library. Her first book project draws from interviews and archival research to connect select US-based Asian and Latinx diasporic women artists as an underexamined cohort in feminist art history, contextualizing their aesthetic and poetic interventions as coterminous with shifts in US trauma studies and feminist theory. A portion of this project received Honorable Mention for the 2022 National Women’s Studies Association-Feminist Formations Paper Award.
Breanna Reiss is a PhD candidate at the University of New Mexico who studies pre-Hispanic ceramics, primarily from coastal Ecuador and northern Peru, with a focus on their iconography and elements of their composition. She also received her MA from UNM where, in partnership with the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, she examined the chemical composition of rare blue and blue-green post-fire ceramic figurine colorants from Ecuador. Her dissertation explores ancient Moche plant motifs, relating them to identifiable species and exploring their contextual relationships to narrative scenes. This plantcentric approach has identified several biomes and ecological indicators important to Moche culture. Along with teaching introductory art history courses, she has received numerous fellowships with UNM’s Center for Southwest Research and the Digital Initiatives and Scholarly Communication Department, and currently works for Georgia Tech Research Institute.
Jessica Monette is an interdisciplinary artist living in the Bay Area whose creative endeavors span the diverse realms of painting, sculpture, installation, and collage. Materiality forms the core of Monette’s artistic expression, each chosen element serving as a deliberate conduit for context and personal narrative. Her repertoire includes a wide array of materials—from house paint, plaster, and thin-set mortar to found and fabricated objects, site-specific soil, rope, nails, cotton, railroad spikes, water from the Mississippi River, and clothing collected from various family members. To New Orleans–born Monette, these materials aren’t just art components, her materials are agents for rebuilding and storytelling. The cataclysmic events of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 undergird her work and serve as a potent visual metaphor for contemporary colonial sediment, encapsulating a temporal lens that reveals the nuances of systemic oppressions. Economic inequality, gentrification, unequal aid distribution, environmental racism, forced migration, and the erosion of cultural heritage—Katrina becomes a concentrated manifestation of these issues.
Monette’s reconstruction of her familial archive, challenges systems of oppression that are created to perpetuate silence. The threads of her narrative, woven together through materials and thematic exploration, contribute to a powerful dialogue that invites viewers to reexamine the need for persistence of cultural memory and the tenacity of the human spirit.
Learn more about CAA Professional Development Fellowships here.