CAA News Today
CAA Signs ACLS Statement on Proposed Cuts at West Virginia University
posted by CAA — September 14, 2023
CAA has signed on to the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) statement, Fighting for an Ambitious Vision of Public Higher Education in America, in response to proposed cuts at West Virginia University. CAA stands with ACLS in the belief that the stewards of the university are “duty-bound to protect the creation and circulation of knowledge for the public good in all its diverse aspects, across disciplines and interdisciplinary areas.”
“By proposing major cuts in its undergraduate and graduate programs, including engineering, environmental planning, languages other than English, law, linguistics, mathematics, music, public administration, and theater, the university is denying its students and the people of West Virginia access to the wide range of knowledge necessary to fulfill that mission. The path WVU is treading is unprecedented for a public flagship and dangerous for American higher education and society.”
Other learned societies and higher education institutions who have signed the ACLS statement:
American Academy of Religion
American Folklore Society
American Historical Association
American Society for Environmental History
Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Association of University Presses
College Art Association
Dance Studies Association
Linguistic Society of America
Medieval Academy of America
North American Conference on British Studies
Rhetoric Society of America
Society for Cinema and Media Studies
Society for Ethnomusicology
Society for Music Theory
Apply for CAA Committee Service!
posted by CAA — July 07, 2023
Join one of CAA’s twelve Professional Committees, the Annual Conference Committee, or the Publications Committee as an at-large member! Each committee works from a charge that is established by the Board of Directors. For many CAA members, committee service fosters professional relationships, community, and facilitates impactful contributions to pressing issues in the visual arts.
Important Committee Service Information:
- Committee members serve a three-year term. Service for this committee cycle begins in February 2024 at the CAA 112th Annual Conference and concludes in February 2027 at the 115th Annual Conference.
- All applications are reviewed by current committee members as well as CAA leadership.
- Appointments will be announced by November 1, 2023. New members will be introduced to their committees during their respective business meetings at the 112th Annual Conference in Chicago.
- If appointed, applicants are expected to attend committee meetings, participate actively in the work of the committee, and contribute expertise to defining the current and future work of the committee.
- Appointees must be current CAA members before the start of their committee service.
- All committee members volunteer their service without compensation.
Click the links below to review the mission of each committee as well as the current roster of committee leadership and members:
CAA ANNUAL CONFERENCE COMMITTEE
The Annual Conference Committee is responsible for shaping the program of the Annual Conference, ensuring that the program reflects CAA’s goals: to make the conference an effective place for intellectual, aesthetic, and professional learning and exchange; to reflect the diverse interests of the membership; and to provide opportunities for participation that are fair, equal, and balanced
CAA PROFESSIONAL COMMITTEES
CAA’s twelve Professional Committees represent the constituent interests of the organization by addressing standards, practices, and guidelines in the professions of our individual and institutional members.
- Committee on Design
- Committee on Diversity Practices
- Committee on Intellectual Property
- Committee on Research and Scholarship
- Committee on Women in the Arts
- Education Committee
- International Committee
- Museum Committee
- Professional Practices Committee
- Services to Artists Committee
- Services to Historians of the Visual Arts Committee
- Student and Emerging Professionals Committee
CAA PUBLICATIONS COMMITTEE
The Publications Committee oversees CAA’s publishing activities and supervises the editorial boards of The Art Bulletin, Art Journal/AJO, and caa.reviews.
Please Note: At-large members of the Publications Committee represent the voice of our membership, and perform the role of committee secretary, taking minutes at three Publications Committee meetings per year in February, May, and October.
How to Apply for Committee Service
If you are interested in applying to serve on a CAA committee, please click the APPLY TO SERVE button below to fill out the application form and upload your CV as well as a brief personal statement describing your interest and experience.
Contact Maeghan Donohue, CAA Chief of Staff and Director of Strategic Planning, Diversity & Governance with any questions.
Deadline: September 15, 2023.
SCOTUS Ruling on Affirmative Action: CAA ED Response
posted by CAA — June 30, 2023
The US Supreme Court ruling invalidating race-conscious admissions considerations at colleges and universities is antithetical to CAA’s mission, specifically our commitment to the diversity of practices and practitioners in the visual arts and academia. This is another in a series of blows to the field, the reverberations of which will be felt for generations to come.
Justice Clarence Thomas dismissing affirmative action policies at universities as “rudderless, raced-based preferences” demonstrates a deliberate suppression of the entire history of institutional racism in this country, which by design actively obstructs opportunity and access for so many.
Now more than ever, we must come together as an organization and develop alternative strategies for ensuring equity and representation in a meaningful way, without performativity or tokenism. Even with affirmative action policies in place, many important voices were relegated to the margins; this ruling will only serve to repress them further. We have a responsibility to continue fighting to center and amplify such voices.
Despite this current era of national regression in the realm of human rights, I still have faith we can have an impact, learn from a problematic past, and reshape the future of the field. Join me in continuing to transform pain into purpose.
Meme Omogbai
Executive Director & CEO
CAA | Advancing Art and Design
Join the CAA Board of Directors!
posted by CAA — May 01, 2023
CAA seeks nominations of individuals passionate about shaping the future of the organization by serving on the Board of Directors for the 2024–2028 term. The board is responsible for all financial and policy matters related to CAA, promoting excellence in scholarship, and encouraging creativity and technical skills in design and art practice. CAA’s board is also charged with representing the membership regarding current issues affecting the visual arts and humanities.
Nominations and/or self-nominations must include the following:
- Résumé/CV
- Brief statement of interest (250 words maximum)
- Nominee’s name, affiliation, and e-mail address
- Name, affiliation, and e-mail address of nominator (if different from nominee)
Please send all information and/or any questions via e-mail to Maeghan Donohue, CAA Chief of Staff & Director of Strategic Planning, Diversity, and Governance, with the subject line: Board of Directors Nomination.
Deadline: July 10, 2023.
Meet the 2022 Professional Development Fellows
posted by CAA — February 07, 2023
CAA is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2022 Professional Development Fellowships. The recipient of the $10,000 fellowship in art history is Mechella Yezernitskaya, Bryn Mawr College, and the recipient of the $10,000 fellowship in visual art is Boone Nguyen, California State University, Los Angeles.
The honorable mentions in art history were awarded to Jack Crawford, City University of New York, and Astrid Tvetenstrand, Boston University. The honorable mentions in visual art are awarded to Jenna Carlie, California Institute of the Arts, and Alberto Lozano Ruvalcaba, Mendocino College.
2022 PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWSHIP IN ART HISTORY
Mechella Yezernitskaya, Bryn Mawr College
Mechella Yezernitskaya is a Ukrainian American art historian, writer, and curator. She is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College where she specializes in modern and contemporary art. Mechella received her M.A. from Bryn Mawr College and B.A. with honors in Art History from Fordham University. Her dissertation examines representations of temporal rupturing in the wartime visual, literary, and film culture of the avant-gardes of the late Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union. She examines war-related imagery in the work of artists of Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian origin across media including illustrated books, poetry, collage painting, performance, and film. By drawing upon theories from trauma and disability studies, Mechella explores the roles of the civilian and combatant, the temporal boundaries of wartime and peacetime, the consequences of imperialism, the rise of nationalism, and the affective experiences of war.
Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Association of University Women, the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), the Pittsburgh Foundation, the Malevich Society, the New York Public Library, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Bryn Mawr College. She has published in ARTMargins Online, Baltic Worlds, post: notes on art in a global context, Slavic & East European Information Resources, and in the edited volume Artistic Expressions and the Great War, A Hundred Years On (Peter Lang Publishing, 2020). She has presented her research at Södertörn University, Stockholm; Karazin University, Kharkiv; Hofstra University, New York; Temple University, Philadelphia; The Museum of Russian Art, Minneapolis; and ASEEES. She has also held guest curatorial positions and fellowships at The Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Brooklyn Museum.
HONORABLE MENTIONS IN ART HISTORY
Jack Crawford, City University of New York
Jack Crawford is a teaching artist and art historian. She is currently a Lecturer at Vanderbilt University and University of Tennessee, Knoxville and has previously taught at the New York City College of Technology. She holds a BA from Barnard College and is currently completing her PhD in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research, for which she received a 2021–2022 ACLS/Luce Dissertation Fellowship in American Art and a dissertation award from the CUNY Committee on Globalization and Social Change, focuses on appropriation and aesthetics of abundance in queer performance in the postwar period.
Astrid Tvetenstrand, Boston University
Astrid studies the history of American painting, decorative arts, and architecture. She explores these fields through practices of collection, economic development, and the consumption of American property. Her dissertation traces the connections between American art patronage, second homeownership, and landscape painting at the end of the nineteenth century. She argues that the process of collecting art and land was an effort made by affluent Americans to “buy a view.” By recognizing landscape paintings as investments and monetary goods, Astrid sheds new light on Gilded Age consumerism, aesthetics, and taste. She also localizes art market exchanges within a larger conversation about the privatization of public space.
Astrid’s work is encouraged by positions and fellowships held at the New York Public Library, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts Historical Society, Nichols House Museum, Bundy Museum of History and Art, Peabody Essex Museum, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Decorative Arts Trust, and Winter Antiques Show.
2022 PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWSHIP IN VISUAL ARTS
Boone Nguyen, California State University, Los Angeles
Boone Nguyen is an artist of the Southeast Asian diaspora. When he was a child, his family left Saigon and resettled as refugees in South Philadelphia. His experience as a refugee in the metropole informs his work through the themes of displacement and place-building, landscape and historical memory, leaving and returning, loss and transformation. His immersive moving image installations are thus fueled by a continuing search for a distant yet familiar homeplace, where the intimacies of life and death and the dialectic of subjection and resistance serve as a living archive of critical memory that is both personal and collective. He has exhibited his work in Philadelphia, Honolulu, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Tokyo.
Boone Nguyen has served in curatorial and management positions in community arts organizations, including Asian Arts Initiative, Frameline, and Scribe Video Center. He holds a BA in American Studies (minor in Asian American Studies) from Yale University. As a Cota-Robles Fellow, he earned an MA in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He was a recipient of a 2018/19 MCAD–Jerome Foundation Fellowships for Early Career Artists, administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and funded by the Jerome Foundation. Nguyen is currently in his final semester of the MFA program at California State University, Los Angeles where he also lectures in the Asian and Asian American Studies Department.
Jenna Carlie, California Institute of the Arts
Jenna studied photography at Speos Institute of Photography in Paris, France and went on to study at Rhode Island School of Design. During the time at RISD, Jenna worked under Annie Leibovitz, Mark Katzman, and Dusty Kessler. In 2016, Jenna graduated with a BFA in photography from Rhode Island School of Design. Jenna moved to Los Angeles and in 2017 worked for Lauren Greenfield, in 2018 worked for Alexa Meade, and by the end of 2018 Jenna Carlie Photography and Design was opened for business. Between 2018 and 2020 Jenna worked on various photographic series for different private collections in the Midwest. In 2020, the Saint Louis Art Museum hired Jenna as their travel contract photographer and later as their in-house photographer, where Jenna is still employed. Jenna is currently getting an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and is expected to graduate in 2024.
Alberto Lozano Ruvalcaba, Mendocino College
I was born in Tijuana, Baja California in 1993. My family lived in Rosarito next to the beach on a street called Niño Artillero (artillery child). My school was named after Emiliano Zapata, a leader of the Mexican revolution. My parents moved us to the USA when I was eight years old. We left everything behind except for each other and the memories that persist of our home and of the natural landscape around it. They brought us to this country for my siblings and I to have a better future than what was available back home. Thanks to my parents and siblings and my own perseverance, I am now the first person in my family to pursue a master’s degree from a university. I am now a permanent resident of the USA and a candidate for an MFA degree.
ABOUT THE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWSHIP
CAA’s Professional Development Fellowship program supports promising artists and art historians who are enrolled in MFA and PhD programs nationwide. Awards are intended to help them with various aspects of their work, whether for job-search expenses or purchasing materials for the studio. CAA believes a grant of this kind, without contingencies, can best facilitate the transition between graduate studies and professional careers. The program is open to all eligible graduate students in the visual arts and art history. Learn more.
Meet the 2022 Wyeth Award Winners
posted by CAA — November 30, 2022
Anton Refregier, History of San Francisco, 1941-1948, mural, panel 2: “Indians by the Golden Gate,” Rincon Center, San Francisco, California, public domain
Since 2005, the Wyeth Foundation for American Art has supported the publication of books on American art through the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, administered by CAA. The 2022 grantees are:
- Siobhan Angus, Camera Geologica: Temporality, Materiality, and Mining in Climate Breakdown, Duke University Press
- Julia Bailey, Painting and Paranoia: The Specter of Communist Art in Cold War USA, University of Illinois Press
- Janet Berlo, Not Native American Art? Fakes, Replicas, and Invented Traditions, University of Washington Press
- Stephanie Buhmann, Frederick Kiesler: Galaxies, The Green Box, Berlin
- Colby Chamberlain, Fluxus Administration: George Maciunas and the Art of Paperwork, University of Chicago Press
- Jessica L. Horton, Earth Diplomacy: Indigenous American Art and Reciprocity, 1953–1973, Duke University Press
- Darren Newbury, American Perspectives in Africa: Photographic Diplomacy and the Cold War Imagination, Penn State University Press
- Louise Siddons, Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon: Laura Gilpin and Navajo Sovereignty, University of Minnesota Press
The list of all recipients of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant from 2005 to the present can be found here.
Meet the Fall 2022 Millard Meiss Publication Fund Grant Recipients
posted by CAA — November 28, 2022
George Stubbs, A Lion Attacking a Horse, Oil on canvas, 1762, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
MEET THE GRANTEES
Twice a year, CAA awards grants through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund to support book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of art, visual studies, and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits, but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy.
Thanks to the generous bequest of the late Prof. Millard Meiss, CAA began awarding these publishing grants in 1975.
FALL 2022 GRANTEES
Paloma Checa-Gismero, The Early Biennial Boom and the Making of Global Contemporary Art, Duke University Press
Denva Gallant, Illustrating the Vitae patrum: The Rise of the Eremitic Ideal in Fourteenth Century Italy, Penn State University Press
Katie Hornstein, Myth and Menagerie: Seeing Lions in Nineteenth-Century France, Yale University Press
Sujatha Meegama, Temples to the Buddha and the Gods: The Transnational Drāviḍa Tradition of Architecture in Sri Lanka, University of Hawaii Press
Morgan Ng, The Stratified City: Military Architecture and Urban Experience in Renaissance Italy, Yale University Press
Naomi Pitamber, Byzantium and Landscapes of Loss: The Recreation of Constantinople in the Laskarid and Palaiologan Eras, Cambridge University Press
Announcing the Terra Foundation for American Art Research Travel Grant Recipients for 2022
posted by CAA — May 09, 2022
We’re delighted to announce that twenty-four scholars have been awarded Terra Foundation for American Art Research Travel Grants in 2022.
These grants provide support to doctoral, postdoctoral, and senior scholars from both the US and outside the US for research topics dedicated to the art and visual culture of the United States prior to 1980.
The Terra Foundation prioritizes projects that interrogate and broaden definitions of American art and lends support for projects engaged in transforming or complicating how the story of American art is told. To expand histories of American art, we encourage projects that reflect a commitment to inclusive and equitable research and museum practice; generate new scholarship and interpretive frameworks; employ critical methodologies and innovative models; and/or engage diverse partners and audiences.
INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH TRAVEL GRANTS FOR US-BASED SCHOLARS
Doctoral Scholars
Manon Gaudet, Yale University, “Beyond Landscape: Property and the Contested Ground of North American Visual Culture, 1900-1945”
Michaela Haffner, Yale University, “The Visual Culture of Naturopathic Cures & the Fashioning of White Wellness”
Annie Ochmanek, Columbia University, “Conceptualism and the Connexionist World: The Art of Eduardo Costa, Hannah Weiner, Christine Kozlov, and Stanley Brouwn”
Constanza Robles, Boston University, “Visualizing Alliances through Art and Architecture: Pan Americanism, Hispanismo and Latin Americanism in World Fairs, 1901-1929”
Lea Stephenson, University of Delaware, “’Wonderful Things’: Egyptomania, Empire, and the Senses, 1870-1922”
Postdoctoral & Senior Scholars
Maria Elena Buszek, University of Colorado, Denver, “Art of Noise: Feminist Art and Popular Music
John J. Curley, Wake Forest University, “Critical Distance: Black American Artists in Europe 1957-1968”
Emily Voelker & Erin Hyde Nolan, UNC Greensboro and Maine College of Art, “Reading Native American Portraits in Ottoman: Global Economies of Nineteenth-century Survey Photograph”
INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH TRAVEL GRANTS TO THE UNITED STATES
Doctoral Scholars
Marion Belouard, University of Limoges, “Painting nature, exchanging knowledge. John James Audubon (1785-1851), a rare bird in Atlantic history?”
Cora Chalaby, University College London, “Control Systems: Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Alma Thomas, and Howardena Pindell’s Orderly Abstractions”
Clara Johanna Lauffer, Central Institute for Art History, Munich, “Rewriting the ‘pictures generation’: the production of white masculinity in appropriation art”
Mylène Palluel, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, “The ‘Longue durée’ paradigm in 1960s American art and social sciences. Case studies in Minimal Art, Conceptual Art and Land Art”
Mona Schubert, University of Cologne, “Photographic Media at documenta in the 1970s and the US-American Art Scene”
Clara Royer, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, “Slow-Scan: the (geo)political turn of media arts (1960-1990)”
Yana Shtilman, Université de Paris, “Public image, private lives: Creating the image of the “New Negro” woman in the Harlem Renaissance (1920-1943)”
Achang Su, China Academy of Art, “The Identity Issues and Abstract Transformation in the works of Modern Chinese-American Artist George Chann from 1950s to 1960s”
Postdoctoral & Senior Scholars
Alice Butler, Courtauld Institute of Art, “The Perversions of Textile in Feminist Art”
Anne-Claire Faucquez, Université Paris 8, “The narrativization of colonial slavery in American museums: arts and representations” (collaborating with Androula Michael)
Roula Matar, École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Versailles, “James Johnson Sweeney’s Contribution to a Critical and Didactical Approach to Exhibition Installation”
Androula Michael, Université de Picardie Jules Verne – UFR des arts, “The narrativization of colonial slavery in American museums: arts and representations” (collaborating with Anne-Claire Faucquez)
Yvonne Schweizer, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, “Linking Mediatization and Mediation. Art Institutions as Media Producers since 1970”
Harry Weeks, Newcastle University, “The Artist’s Second Shift”
Andrew Witt, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, “Exile Modernism: Photography c. 1940”
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE TERRA FOUNDATION RESEARCH TRAVEL GRANTS
Nominations Open for CAA Juries
posted by CAA — April 21, 2022
CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for individuals to serve on our Awards for Distinction, Publication Grant, Fellowship, and Travel and Support Grant juries. Terms begin July 2022.
Candidates must possess expertise appropriate to the jury’s work and be current CAA members. They should not hold a position on a CAA committee or editorial board beyond May 31, 2022. CAA’s president and vice president for committees appoint jury members for service. Materials are due to CAA by June 1, 2022.
Amanda Williams speaks at Convocation at CAA’s 108th Annual Conference in Chicago
AWARDS FOR DISTINCTION JURIES
CAA has vacancies in the following juries for the annual Awards for Distinction for three years (2022–2025). Terms begin in July 2022.
- The Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award/Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions for museum scholarship (3 vacancies)
- Charles Rufus Morey Book Award for non-catalogue books in the history of art (2 vacancies)
- Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism (1 vacancy)
- Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize for Art Bulletin articles (2 vacancies)
- The CAA/American Institute for Conservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation (2 vacancies)
- Jury for the Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work, Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement, and Distinguished Teaching of Art Award (1 vacancy)
- Jury for the Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award and the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art (3 vacancies)
- Distinguished Feminist Awards for Scholars and Artists (1 vacancy)
PUBLICATION GRANT JURIES
CAA has vacancies on our Publication Grant juries for three years (2022–2025). Terms begin in July 2022.
- Millard Meiss Publication Fund (2 vacancies)
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWSHIP JURIES
CAA has vacancies on our Professional Development Fellowship juries for three years (2022–2025). Terms begin in July 2022.
- Professional Development Fellowship in Art History (2 vacancies)
TRAVEL/SUPPORT GRANT JURIES
CAA has vacancies on our jury for three years (2022–2025). Terms begin in July 2022.
- CAA Support Grant in Memory of Archibald Cason Edwards, Senior, and Sarah Stanley Gordon Edwards (2 vacancies)
- Art History Fund for Travel to Special Exhibitions (2 vacancies)
HOW TO APPLY
Nominations and self-nominations should include a brief statement (no more than 150 words) outlining the individual’s qualifications and experience and a CV (an abbreviated CV no more than two pages may be submitted). Please send all materials by email to Cali Buckley: cbuckley@collegeart.org. Nominations must be sent as a Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF attachment.
For questions about jury service and responsibilities, contact info@collegeart.org.
Deadline: June 1, 2022
Meet the 2021 Professional Development Fellows
posted by CAA — February 18, 2022
CAA is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2021 Professional Development Fellowships. The recipient of the $10,000 fellowship in visual arts is Christine Lee, California Institute of the Arts and the recipient of the $10,000 fellowship in art history is Jenny Tang, Yale University. An honorable mention in visual arts goes to Malene Barnett, Temple University and an honorable mention in art history goes to Maia Nichols, University of California, San Diego. All fellows and honorable mentions receive a complimentary one-year CAA membership and registration for the 2022 Annual Conference.
2021 PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWSHIP IN VISUAL ARTS
Christine Lee, California Institute of the Arts
Christine Yerie Lee is a visual artist primarily working in video, installation and sculpture. Raised in the American South by immigrant parents from South Korea, her practice explores performativity and identity-formation, often using the body to articulate ideas concerning resistance to hegemonic power structures in hopes to create a future yet to be imagined or narrativized. By engaging with folklore, history, and pop culture, her work addresses personal and collective memory, hybridity, and authenticity. Her material explorations reflect the poetics informed by these notions and are often activated in her digital works. Through intersectional inquiry and worldbuilding, she aims to illuminate the distinct and parallel threads of the human experience to provide pathways for connection. Lee received a BFA in Apparel Design from Rhode Island School of Design in 2010 and worked as a fashion designer for a decade prior to graduate school. She currently resides in Los Angeles and will complete her MFA in Art at California Institute of the Arts in May 2021.
HONORABLE MENTION IN VISUAL ARTS
Malene Barnett, Temple University
Malene Barnett is a multi-disciplinary artist, entrepreneur, and authority on the cultural traditions and practices of art in the African diaspora and how it translates into her vision of the modern black experience. From her sculptural ceramic tiles and vessels to mixed media paintings to handwoven rugs, Barnett continues to evolve her craft and share her African heritage with a global audience. Using archival materials like glass, fiber and clay, she uncovers a deeper language of her legacy and an authentic understanding of her cultural identity. A passionate connector and expert ambassador, her mission is to use art as a tool to create community impact and open doors for the next generation of black artists and expand the conversation around marginalization in the arts and create greater opportunities for inclusion.
As the founder of the Black Artists + Designers Guild, a global platform and curated collective of independent black makers, she constantly seeks new ways to define the Black narrative and experience for a new generation while bringing awareness to inequality. Her work has been praised in Interior Design Magazine, New York Magazine, Traditional Home, Elle Decor, HGTV Magazine, Luxe + Design Magazine, and House Beautiful. She was also on the cover of Brownstoner Magazine and Wendy Goodman’s Designer Lives video series with New York Magazine’s The Cut. Her entrepreneurial spirit was captured in the NY Times bestselling book “In the Company of Women ” and Home by Hygge & West. She has appeared as a guest speaker on Morning Joe, MSNBC Your Business, and TEDx. Malene’s works have been exhibited at Museum of Science and Industry, Dallas African American Museum, Jane Hartsook Gallery, Mindy Solomon Gallery, Baltimore Clayworks, DAAP Galleries, and The Clay Studio.
2021 PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWSHIP IN ART HISTORY
Jenny Tang is a doctoral candidate in History of Art and Film & Media Studies at Yale University, where she specializes in modern and contemporary art, media, and visual culture of the Atlantic world. Tang’s dissertation combines original archival research and a feminist postcolonial perspective to show how layered twentieth-century regimes of race and citizenship in the United States shaped modernist imaginations of the body across the Atlantic. From photomontage and abstraction to security and confinement, this work recasts the history of modernism through the lens of Asian American and African American racial formation. In addition to her scholarly practice, Tang writes criticism on the cultural politics of art, film, and music. She has also contributed to exhibitions and programs at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Museum of Modern Art, where she was a 2020-21 Mellon-Marron Research Fellow in the Department of Painting and Sculpture. At Yale, she co-organized the group exhibition New Genealogies with photographer John Edmonds at the Yale School of Art. Tang currently teaches foundational topics in art history in the Department of Art History and the Rose Hill Honors Program at Fordham University.
HONORABLE MENTION IN ART HISTORY
Maia Nichols, University of California, San Diego
Maia Nichols is a Lebanese American-Canadian doctoral candidate in art history, criticism and theory at University of California San Diego specializing in 20th century French and North African visual and material culture, postcolonial theory, and the history of social psychiatry. She holds degrees in psychology and visual art from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and a masters in aesthetics and politics from the California Institute of the Arts. She additionally engages in art practice and has taught studio art drawing at UC San Diego. Her work has been exhibited internationally. Her art criticism has been published in venues such as Flash Art International, Hyperallergic, and Diagram. Her dissertation, researched in France with support from a four-year Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship, engages art historical visual and material culture methods and theories to consider the institutional history of French colonial North Africa’s progression to independence during the social psychiatry movement, drawing on a range of archival evidence of material culture and experience.
ABOUT THE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWSHIP
CAA’s Professional Development Fellowship program supports promising artists and art historians who are enrolled in MFA and PhD programs nationwide. Awards are intended to help them with various aspects of their work, whether for job-search expenses or purchasing materials for the studio. CAA believes a grant of this kind, without contingencies, can best facilitate the transition between graduate studies and professional careers. The program is open to all eligible graduate students in the visual arts and art history. Applications for the 2022 fellowship cycle will be due December 15, 2022. Learn more.