CAA News Today
New in caa.reviews
posted Dec 07, 2018
Mark Duerksen reviews Architecture and Politics in Nigeria: The Study of a Late Twentieth-Century Enlightenment-Inspired Modernism at Abuja, 1900–2016 by Nnamdi Elleh. Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Holly Shaffer writes about Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930–1990 by Sonal Khullar. Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Kristoffer Neville discusses The Chiaroscuro Woodcut in Renaissance Italy by Naoko Takahatake. Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Announcing Milette Gaifman and Lillian Lan-ying Tseng as Coeditors of The Art Bulletin
posted Dec 06, 2018
Lillian Lan-ying Tseng
Milette Gaifman
We’re pleased to announce the appointment of Lillian Lan-ying Tseng and Milette Gaifman as the new coeditors of The Art Bulletin. The appointment marks the first joint editorship in the 105-year history of the journal. The Art Bulletin is the flagship journal of art history, covering prehistoric to 21st-century art. Previous editors of The Art Bulletin have included H. W. Janson, George Kubler, Millard Meiss, and John Shapley, among many others. The Art Bulletin editorship rotates every three years.
“CAA believes in interdisciplinary practice and collaboration in all programs and publications. The Art Bulletin’s rich and long history as the journal of record for the art history field will only benefit from this new coeditor approach,” said Hunter O’Hanian, executive director of CAA. “Professors Tseng and Gaifman are highly respected in the field and will bring to the journal diverse experiences and expertise that will be reflected in The Art Bulletin over the years of their editorship.”
Lillian Lan-ying Tseng is associate professor of East Asian art and archaeology at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University and specializes in Chinese art and archaeology. The mediums she investigates are diverse, including city planning, architecture, sculpture, painting, calligraphy, textile, and bronze objects. The timeframes of her publications cluster in early imperial China, later imperial China, and the twentieth century. The issues she explores concern not only art objects but also broader contexts in which they are situated, such as how artisans appropriated scientific knowledge for religious purposes, how memory facilitated the creation, circulation, and reception of artifacts, and how political intentions or situations stimulated the development of visual and material cultures. She is the author of Picturing Heaven in Early China (Harvard University Press, 2011). She is currently at work on two book projects: one looks into the reception of antiquity and its impact on visual production in 18th-century China, while the other examines frontiers and visual imaginations in Han China.
“Art and visual culture are central elements in the study of ancient civilizations, as they are of all periods of history,” said Alexander Jones, Leon Levy Director and Professor of the Exact Sciences in Antiquity, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU. “The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World is proud and delighted on the occasion of Lillian Tseng’s appointment as coeditor of The Art Bulletin.”
Milette Gaifman is associate professor of classics and history of art at Yale University. She is a scholar of ancient art and archaeology, focusing primarily on Greek art of the Archaic and Classical periods. At Yale, she is jointly appointed in the departments of Classics and History of Art. Her research interests include the interaction between visual culture and religion, the variety of forms in the arts of antiquity, the interactive traits of various artistic media, and the reception of Greek art in later periods. In addition, her scholarship explores the historiography of the academic disciplines of art history and archaeology. She is the author of Aniconism in Greek Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2012), and The Art of Libation in Classical Athens (Yale University Press, 2018); and coeditor of “Exploring Aniconism,” a thematic issue of Religion (2017), and “The Embodied Object in Classical Art,” a special issue of Art History (June 2018).
“It is a significant honor for Yale and for the field of Classical Greek Art that Milette Gaifman has been appointed co-editor of The Art Bulletin. Successor in this role to such hallowed Yale luminaries as Creighton Gilbert and Walter Cahn, Milette will bring the same dynamism and intellectual energy to the position that can be seen in her publications and her hugely successful teaching in our Department,” said Timothy Barringer, Chair and Paul Mellon Professor in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University. “Author of two path-breaking books, Milette is a scholar of wide-ranging tastes and interests, who insists on methodological rigor but also enjoys crossing scholarly borders and dismantling the shibboleths of orthodox thinking. Working with our respected former colleague, Lillian Tseng, she will doubtless bring a new, iconoclastic and perhaps occasionally irreverent spirit to an august journal.”
Lynne Allen
posted Dec 06, 2018
STATEMENT
As a member of CAA since 1987 and attending the conference nearly every year, I feel I understand and grow the continuing mission of the organization. I am a visual artist and have always found the annual conference to be influential for not only my own practice, but my teaching. The mission to “cultivate the ongoing understanding of art as a fundamental form of human expression” is necessary today more than ever. As scholars, reinforcing how art addresses human dignity and empathy is our greatest challenge.
What used to be 5-year strategic plans in higher education have grown to 20- 40-year strategic plans. Things change, and they change fast. Students change and we have to educate ourselves to their new natures. The workplace changes, and we have to educate ourselves to understand a changing higher administration. The country is changing faster than we thought possible, and the world itself is not the same as it was even five years ago. There are those that believe higher education has “peaked” and we are on the downward slide. Adam Harris in the Atlantic says, “we are living through the greatest time in history to be a learner, with the availability of so many high-quality free materials online. But at the same time, the institutions most affiliated with knowledge and learning are facing crisis.” That includes budget cuts, declining enrollments, student debt, declining research dollars, loss of faculty lines, etc. etc. None of this is new to any of us. Some programs take a proactive approach and innovate their way out of these problems, going on-line and increasing continuing education, building a wider audience. Will these approaches last? Are they the answer?
The basic issues that drives us, as art educators, have not changed. We value the arts and the humanity that comes with it. We feel they are more important now than they ever have been. The argument that you cannot get a job over-rides real data, which proves that there are more jobs out there for creative thinkers than ever before. The empathy we feel for our society turns out to be the major solution for our survival.
Yes, we can tackle some of the nuts and bolt issues, but our main goal is to tackle the perception that the arts don’t matter. This is where CAA comes in. We work not only in higher ed, but in communities in urban and rural areas, we partner, and we touch people. We don’t all come from the same place, yet we have everything in common.
Nearly 30 years in academia has shown me that hurtles can be surmounted, that compromise can take place, and we can retool education for the world our students live in. Working in both private and public universities has offered different kinds of experiences so the constraints we all feel are not new to me. It would be an honor to work alongside other scholars, artists, critics, and curators as a CAA board member.
Greg Watts
posted Dec 06, 2018
STATEMENT
I have been an active member of the College Art Association for more than twenty years and I truly respect and appreciate the forum the association provides for us to refine our collective wisdom through advocacy, engagement and vision.
As a member of the CAA Board of Directors I will endeavor to advance the inclusivity, breadth, and depth of our membership, and encourage greater reciprocity with our peer organizations. With such intent, I currently serve as a member of the Executive Committee and as the Chair of the Commission on Accreditation for the National Association of Art and Design (NASAD). Through this work, as well as past and present work with other organizations, I support active participation that I believe strengthens our prospects for a richly collaborative future. The creative economy, broader advocacy for the arts, greater student involvement, and emergent technologies as methods of building community are examples of areas that I believe are worthy of ongoing consideration for the future of the association – all of which must be on an increasingly global stage.
The heart of my own purpose, within the visual arts in higher education, is to always encourage professional success in concert with personal fulfillment. I believe that we must nurture creativity in both our students and our colleagues; engage in bold conversations about grand ideas; and compel purpose and establish identity through our shared endeavors.
As a member of the CAA Board of Directors I will offer you leadership derived from the breadth of my international experience in concert with an extensive academic background. As an artist, educator, and administrator functioning across complex organizations, I relish the opportunity to give back to our CAA community through my service to the board. I would appreciate your vote! Thank you.
Niku Kashef
posted Dec 06, 2018
STATEMENT
Hello, I’m Niku Kashef, a Los Angeles based artist, educator, and independent curator. I also maintain a commercial photography practice. I have both taught and exhibited work at the local and international levels and produced arts programming for more than a decade. I came to academia after a long time away working in various other areas in the arts, namely: Los Angeles theater; design and video production; technology; building professional resources for creatives in commercial and fine-art; co-developing one of the first online portfolio hosting resources for artists and working in the commercial arts.
I question how non-constituents can become further involved, and how we can more broadly reach and bring the standards set by CAA to contingent faculty, non-academic artists, and those balancing other arts careers like the commercial-arts/design professionals. I excited by the focus of CAA’s Strategic plan to extend the dialogue we have with each other once a year in more dynamic ways beyond the February conference to include regional meetings, outreach, networking opportunities and for our members to find new ways to share scholarship and advocacy work in underrepresented areas.
I am also interested in bringing diversity and representation to the Board from my roles as a part-time lecturer of art, a full-time interdisciplinary artist, a full-time single mother, a part-time commercial artist, a past Director for the National Women’s Caucus for Art, a two-time Past-President of the Southern California Women’s Caucus for Art, an independent curator, and an Angelino. My practice in all these areas begins with non-hierarchical feminist values of equity and agency for diverse perspectives. I believe these varied experiences allow me to identify with many of our CAA members, and engage the larger community who balance their practice by wearing multiple-hats.
My interest to serving on the CAA Board stems from the desire to offer more resources for individuals like myself while fostering closer relationships with the non-academic art community, art historians, curators, and arts administrators. I was first introduced to CAA in 2007 during graduate school. While a member of CAA, I have served on two committees: Student and Emerging Professionals (SEPC) for three years and Services to Artists (SAC) for four years, the latter of which I have additionally served on as Chair for an additional three years. The SAC produces content for ARTspace and MediaLounge as well as the Distinguished Artist interviews and ARTexchange.
The participation in production of conference offerings, sharing time, space and ideas with like-minded peers, as well as a desire to be of service to young artists’ professional development was the powerful draw that brought me to join the SEPC. On that committee I helped create the mock interviews and what would later become the informal “discussions” now named the brown bag lunch.
During my time with SAC, I helped create a series of panels about artists in non-traditional career paths, parent-artist and family collaborations, and balancing family/personal life and practice; I have continued this series of artist-as-parent offerings yearly since it’s inception. I have also helped lead the development of a new dynamic conference offering “Open Source: Artist Resource Roundtables” bringing local and National organizations to a dynamic roundtable format.
If elected to the Board, I feel my background can support the concerns of the full spectrum of CAA’s membership as well as speak to ways we can consider how to expand our advocacy in underrepresented areas in our arts community.
Jennifer Rissler
posted Dec 06, 2018
STATEMENT
I have dedicated my 20-year professional career to educate, to support, and to advance artists and cultural production in the visual arts at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), where I serve currently as Vice President and Dean of Academic Affairs. A small, independent fine arts college founded in 1871, SFAI is one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious schools of higher education in contemporary art. SFAI’s core philosophy is one of fostering creativity and critical thinking in an open, experimental, and interdisciplinary environment. This mission statement informs my approach to and work within the visual arts generally, and I believe CAA shares a similar ethos, one that should be advanced to ensure its organizational longevity and relevancy for its members. That, in brief, is my main motivation for joining the Board of Directors.
As reflected on my CV, I serve this professional and personal mission through many board positions with non-profit organizations –including the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, ME and Oakwood Arts/P35 in Richmond, VA. Both organizations, although distinct from one another in several ways, exist and were founded to advance creativity and artists’ roles in our society. Both are sustained by a shared belief in this value proposition, which places education at the fore. Higher education, specifically liberal and visual arts education, is increasingly under attack by a dangerous national rhetoric which aims to assault intellectualism, critical and creative thinking. Our roles – as arts administrators, scholars, and practitioners — therefore is exceedingly important against such a cultural context. Advocacy, which is a platform I believe CAA can steward in a more impactful manner, becomes even more urgent.
Currently, it is my desire to return serving a membership organization. As President Emerita of ArtTable, Inc., a non-profit membership organization dedicated to advancing women’s leadership in the visual arts, I’m familiar with the challenges inherent in stewarding organizational initiatives toward member responsiveness. I am excited by the prospect of serving a member-based organization dedicated to advancing scholarship of and advocacy for art and design. Toward that end, I believe unequivocally in Executive Director Hunter O’Hanian’s recent statement, “We must be a leader in the national conversation about the future of art history and studio arts education; indeed, we can work to strengthen all humanities departments in colleges and universities.” Organizations as august as CAA must be responsive to its membership base, cognizant of the ever-shifting landscape of higher education, while balancing the tensions of its founding mission and ethos with the pressure to remain relevant. I have a proven track record of stewarding initiatives in response to a diverse membership base, as my tenure with ArtTable demonstrates. Specifically, I led a strategic planning process that gave more autonomy to its members outside of the tri-state area (ArtTable’s offices are in midtown Manhattan), enhanced programming that addressed prescient issues facing women leaders in the visual arts, and expanded our mentoring initiatives to support emerging leaders in the field. I deduce from many conversations with members of CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts (which I chair currently) a shared desire to expand CAA programming along similar vectors. That is a task I am ready for, and I would welcome the opportunity to serve CAA members.
Janet Bellotto
posted Dec 06, 2018
STATEMENT
My primary goal if elected to the Board will be to advocate for growing the international presence and global engagement of CAA. As a practicing artist, seasoned educator, and project initiator based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for more than a decade, the unique asset I bring to the Board is my extensive experience as an active participant within international art worlds. This has included building connections between people and places—which have fostered cross-cultural explorations within an international context. This is evident in the many projects I have organized over twenty years of my professional practice as well as in my academic and administrative positions in the UAE. My most recent and monumental accomplishment as a facilitator of building international relationships for both individual artists and international institutions was as Artistic Director of the International Symposium on Electronic Art organized in Dubai (ISEA2014) on the theme of Location: Where Art, Science and Technology Come Together. Over ten days, more than 250 participants travelled to Dubai where exhibitions, installations and an academic conference were held at the major universities in the UAE as well as in more than thirty non-profit and institutional spaces. All the participating artists and institutions grew lasting international connections through that one event. Perhaps there are ways to similarly engage wider international participation in CAA’s conference and other activities. This certainly is a way I would like to foster an international network of peers comprising academics, artists, designers, architects, and industry specialists, along with important community stakeholders, who also could contribute to innovative strategizing with the CAA.
Another position I would promote on the Board is art as advocacy. I believe my experience as a practicing artist and my use of multidisciplinary approaches in art practices demonstrates my passionately held commitment to various media as well as to art that addresses pressing contemporary issues – including rising sea levels and their possible effect on the evolving ecosystems of islands which my own art practice engages. As a Board Member, I would explore ways for CAA to more proactively encourage and display art that incorporates advocacy at our annual conference, as well as online. This could become an annual event or competition which would again attract international attention and participation.
As Professor and Associate Dean at the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises of Zayed University in Dubai, as well as being Canadian, I am in a unique position to represent international concerns and opportunities to the Board. Throughout more than a decade in the UAE, as an academic and administrator I have contributed to the dynamic development of the arts community here, including teaching successive cohorts of women, many who subsequently became leading Emirati artists, even representing the UAE at the Venice Biennale and in other international exhibitions. In the UAE I have engaged the opportunity to build, imagine and support a vision where artists and their art from different countries and cultures can build bridges of understanding between communities. Believing that cultural understanding should be an integral component in the teaching of art and design, I will support CAA programs that promote connections between artists and institutions internationally. This also can contribute to growing CAA’s membership.
CAA has continued to develop and improve its organizational structure and its communications. In particular, in the last year CAA made a bold move with new branding while also promoting the diverse nature of its membership. I certainly will support these ongoing Board initiatives. I have been a member of CAA since 1999 and most recently have been a member of CAA’s International Committee. I envision CAA playing a larger role internationally to achieve its vision of supporting all visual arts professionals, including in the areas of design and architecture, while strengthening a diverse membership of art historians. I would also promote the growing online presence of CAA. Engaging with new technologies is essential for building an international profile. This engages emerging professionals, strengthens communication and publications throughout the year, and promotes those artists and designers who are CAA members.
Through team efforts across all aspects of CAA’s activities, I look forward to the possibility of promoting cultural and intellectual exchanges between our community of designers, architects, and art historians with international cohorts. It is a future CAA integrated internationally that I look forward to.
International Review: Gordon Walters: New Vision by Leonard Bell
posted Dec 06, 2018
The following article was written in response to a call for submissions by CAA’s International Committee. It is by Leonard Bell, professor of art history, University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Exhibition and catalogue review: Gordon Walters: New Vision, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 11 November 2017- 8 April 2018, and Auckland Art Gallery, 7 July – 4 November 2018.
Marti Friedlander, Portrait of Gordon Walters in His Studio, 1978, Marti Friedlander Archive, EH McCormick Research Library, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Courtesy Gerrard and Marti Friedlander Charitable Trust.
The much-lauded work of Gordon Walters (1919-1995), one of New Zealand’s first geometric abstract painters, has also generated controversy. A retrospective show traveled the country in 1983, but the present exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of Walters’s complete oeuvre from the late 1930s until his last painting in 1995. A wonderful show, curated by Lucy Hammonds, Laurence Simmons, and Julia Waite, it clearly establishes Walters’s greatness as a painter. Walters’s art was informed and sustained by an extensive knowledge and sophisticated understanding of Euro-American—Piet Mondrian (principally), Sophie Tauber-Arp, Joseph Albers, Auguste Herbin and John McLaughlin, for instance—and Oceanic art, in particular the koru motif of Maori kowhaiwhai (painting, on rafters and paddles, for example) and moko (tattoo). Add to those his early, unusual-in-New Zealand interest in Surrealism and the idiosyncratic sketches of a mentally ill man, Rolf Hattaway. Walters learned about these from a close friend, émigré Dutch artist Theo Schoon, an ardent advocate of Bauhaus practices and Maori visual arts, especially “primitive” rock art.
The resultant body of work constitutes an imaginative and distinctive interweaving of elements from diverse societies and cultures. Formally and technically rigorous, visually refined, conceptually deep, Walters’s paintings are both still and tense. While pulling in different directions, his best known work, the so-called koru paintings, somehow betoken their place, a cluster of islands in the southwest Pacific. Their imprint extends far beyond the art world, to the New Zealand Film Commission’s logo, for instance. Yet, to present Walters’s art only in terms of these koru paintings would skew the overall picture and leave it incomplete. The exhibition rightly gives as much attention to his many other different paintings.
Sydney Parkinson, painted Maori paddle, 1769, Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Cambridge, UK.
Since Walters’s breakthrough shows at Auckland’s New Vision Gallery in 1966 and 1968 (his first since an early exhibition in 1949), writings about his art have proliferated. His abstractions attracted the keen attention not only of New Zealand art historians, critics, and philosophers, but also the eminent British critic Robert Melville (Architectural Review, 1968), who regarded Walters’s paintings as the best he encountered in New Zealand, polymathic Ernst Gombrich (The Sense of Order, 1979), as well as Australian art historians Rex Butler and A. D. S. Donaldson, and American Thomas Crow (in the present catalogue). The handsome publication reproduces a rich feast of Walters’s works. Nine writers produced eight essays exploring various aspects of Walters’s art and career. Several essays (notably by Peter Brunt and the Australians) offer new details and connections between Walters and other artists.
The trajectory of his career, his primary inspirational sources, his paintings’s formal qualities and conceptual substance, though, have already been intensively excavated, especially by Michael Dunn in the 1970s and 1980s, and Francis Pound from the mid-1980s until his death in 2017.
Gordon Walters, Untitled, 1989, Collection James Wallace Arts Trust, gift of the Rutherford Trust.
In an exhibition review in Art News New Zealand (Summer, 2017), David Eggleton observed, “Curiously, Pound is an absent if also an insistent presence in the catalogue of the show. Although not included as a contributor, many of the ideas and notions first proposed by him appear in the text, subsumed into the writings of others.” And a festschrift in 1989 to mark his 70th birthday, Gordon Walters: Order and Intuition, edited by James Ross and Laurence Simmons, had ten scholarly essays, including (disclosure) my “Walters and Maori Art: the nature of the relationship?”
Transformation of his inspirational sources characterizes Walters’s art. His first investigations of the Maori koru motif, small studies in ink and gouache, appeared in the mid-1950s. They were close to the source; the motif’s organic quality was semi-retained.
In the mid-1960s Walters geometricized the form. Except for circular shapes terminating the crisply delineated bars, curves were straightened out. The reshaped element provided a means, in league with Mondrian et al, for studies in formal relationships using a “deliberately limited range of forms” (Walters, 1966).
These were not intended to draw on the Maori motif’s symbolic values, though Walters’s use of Maori terms for many titles was an acknowledgement of the inspirational importance of Maori art as he had experienced it.
From the mid-1980s, most forcefully in the 1990s, possibly triggered by critiques leveled at the Museum of Modern Art’s 1984-1985 exhibition, Primitivism: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, Walters was accused of exploitative appropriation of Maori art by several critics, both Maori and Pakeha (European New Zealander).
Gordon Walters, Gouache, 1957-8, Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hākena.
Others, including Maori and Pakeha artists, also defended Walters. The catalogue touches on this sometimes acrimonious argument, though the exhibition’s wall texts and captions bypass it. Deidre Brown’s catalogue essay, “Pitau, Primitivism and Provocation: Gordon Walters’ Appropriation of Maori Iconography,” steers a near-neutral path between the antagonists, culminating with the claim that they moved onto other concerns: “the appropriation debate faded away from academic art history.” Several reviewers, though, questioned whether the contentious issue was satisfactorily addressed by the show.
Most of Walters’s detractors and advocates assumed a straightforward relationship between his work and Maori art: cause = koru motif and effect = the forms in Walters’s koru paintings. The detractors appeared to subscribe to a Manichean structure of polarities in which modernist borrowings are, ipso facto, “bad.” In this system a single component in the works becomes the only or dominant one. If the same paintings are seen within wider cultural and historical contexts, though, an interplay of multiple elements and global connections, in which no single one is dominant, becomes manifest. A complex of factors also mediates how Walters’s koru paintings have functioned. Depending on the kinds of knowledge and cultural baggage individual viewers bring to the encounter, they are clearly perceived very differently. Indeed, one could well wonder whether viewers with opposing perspectives are talking about the same pictures. The diverse opinions resist resolution; the conflicting perspectives are incommensurable. Just as creationists are unlikely to accept a logical refutation of the existence of “God,” so Walters’s critics are not likely to see his art in any other way than their own.
Gordon Walters, Painting No. 1, 1965, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Purchase 1965.
Take another slant. In 1910 the New Zealand Herald reported a “curious discovery” by Mme Boeufvre, wife of New Zealand’s French consul. Seeing the Book of Kells (c. 800 CE) in Dublin, she “was much struck by the similarity of Celtic ornaments to Maori conventional designs…how very closely the Maori patterns resembled those of the ancient artists of Ireland.” Since the nineteenth century parallels were frequently drawn between curvilinearities in Maori artifacts and those in the art and ornament of other societies, including such varied cultures and aesthetics as Egyptian, Greek, South East Asian, Victorian, and Art Nouveau, in addition to Celtic. For instance, renowned Austrian art historian Alois Riegl (‘Neuseelandische Ornamentik’, 1891, and Stilfragen, 1896) matched Maori and Egyptian spiraling forms. He noted that they could not possibly have had the same origin. Like many other forms, that of the swastika, for example, the form of the Maori koru motif is found all over the world. There is no singular point of invention.
Universal and local collide in Walters’s painting. Was Walters indigenizing the modern or modernizing the indigenous—or both, or neither? Can we look through several lenses simultaneously? Compelling art certainly can emerge from socio-cultural dissonance—Walters’s paintings continue to energize the spaces they inhabit. They have a contemporary urgency, informing the work of contemporary artists of both Pakeha and Maori descent, such as Darren George and Chris Heaphy. (The latter worked with Walters in his last years.) For others tension between Maori and Euro-American aesthetics and practices remains. Walters’s painterly synthesis of Maori, Oceanic, European, and American elements and ideas was virtually unique among Pakeha artists in his time. He trod a solitary path. In retrospect, though, his oeuvre constitutes a crucial watershed, in which the possibilities of bicultural coexistence of things Maori and Pakeha were explored, celebrated and contested.
Gordon Walters, Untitled, 1972, Dunedin Public Art Gallery Loan Collection, Courtesy of the Gordon Walters Estate.
Meet the 2018 CAA Campus Ambassadors
posted Dec 05, 2018
Launched this fall, the CAA Ambassador Program is now in full swing. CAA Ambassadors are representing the organization in New York and Chicago and giving presentations to their fellow classmates and students in nearby schools. Meet the inaugural class of ambassadors below.
Interested in becoming a future CAA Ambassador? Learn more here.
Rikki Byrd
Rikki Byrd is a writer, educator and scholar, with research interests in Black studies, visual culture, fashion history and cultural studies. Her research has appeared at Art Basel: Miami and has been published or is forthcoming in various academic journals and books. She has also written for Teen Vogue, Art.sy, and Hyperallergic, among several other media outlets. She has lectured and participated in panel discussions with Google and The Council of Fashion Designers of America, Parsons School of Design, Junior High! in Los Angeles and Saint Louis Art Museum. Most recently, Rikki was a faculty member at Washington University in St. Louis in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and the African and African American Studies department. She is currently a PhD student in African American Studies at Northwestern University.
J. English Cook
J. English Cook is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, where she specializes in intersections between architecture, cinema, and urban theory. Her dissertation examines the impact of cinema on the postwar spread of phenomenology, particularly as expressed in architects’ re-articulation of notions of spatial experience. She previously received an MA with distinction from the Institute of Fine Arts and a BA with highest honors from Williams College. A native of Atlanta, Georgia, she is currently the Graduate Curatorial Assistant at the Grey Art Gallery, NYU, and has worked as a Curatorial Assistant in Modern and Contemporary Art at the High Museum, Atlanta, and as the Commissioner’s Assistant for the US Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale. She has produced performances at Momentum Worldwide, a time-based media gallery in Berlin, and has interned in curatorial departments at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Williams College Museum of Art.
Rebecca Pollack
Rebecca Pollack is a doctoral candidate in art history at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation “Contextualizing British Holocaust Memorials and Museums: Form, Content, Politics,” examines the publicly funded Holocaust commemorative projects in Britain. She currently holds fellowships from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Jewish Studies Center at the CUNY Graduate Center, and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art.
Mia Rubin
Mia Rubin is a recent Parsons School of Design graduate. Mia is the Events and Conference Programming Intern at CAA and one of CAA’s newest ambassadors. She will assist with planning the Annual Conference. Mia will help organize pre-conference workshops, key conversation panels, events for students, and museum tours. She will research and help develop workshops and programs throughout the year.
Urooj Shakeel
Urooj Shakeel is a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Master of Arts in Arts Administration & Policy program. She is also the Leadership Investment and Communications Field Fellow at The Field Foundation of Illinois. Currently, Urooj is working on her thesis project and is designing a library exchange box in the shape of a Pakistani truck that is painted in the traditional art form known as Truck Art. This project examines activating public space for educative functions on Chicago’s Devon Avenue for preadolescents. As a leader, Urooj also serves on the SAIC Graduate Advisory Panel, working closely with the Graduate Dean’s Office to bring attention to graduate student interests through information sharing and problem solving. She earned her BS in Marketing and BA in Art History from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted Dec 05, 2018
Want articles like these in your inbox? Sign up: collegeart.org/newsletter
Betty Tompkins, Apologia (Artemisia Gentileschi #3), 2018. Courtesy of Betty Tompkins and P.P.O.W, New York, via Artsy
A Whitney Museum Vice Chairman Owns a Manufacturer Supplying Tear Gas at the Border
“I figured Safariland officials probably had connections elsewhere.” (Hyperallergic)
Protesters Rally Against UNC Chapel Hill’s Decision to Reinstate Confederate Statue
Protesters at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill rallied against the university board’s decision to reinstate Silent Sam, the Confederate monument that was toppled in August. (Artforum)
Betty Tompkins Gives Art History a #MeToo Overhaul
How to dismantle art history, literally and figuratively. (Artsy)
Ambitious VR Experience Restores 7,000 Roman Buildings, Monuments to Their Former Glory
A team of 50 academics and computer experts built the environment over a 22-year period. (Smithsonian Magazine)
Graduate School Can Have Terrible Effects on People’s Mental Health
Graduate students cite the combination of financial and professional pressures as a significant challenge. (The Atlantic)