CAA News Today

Mira Schor, a painter and writer based in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts, will participate in CAA’s next Annual Artists’ Interviews, hosted by ARTspace during the 2013 Annual Conference in New York. This session will be the thirteenth installment of the popular series, which features two major practicing artists in back-to-back interviews. The other artist who will be interviewed is Janine Antoni. The talks will be held on Friday, February 15, 2013, from 2:30 to 5:00 PM at the Hilton in New York. Stuart Horodner, artistic director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, will interview Schor.

Mira Schor

Mira Schor (photograph © 2012 Mary Jones)

Mira Schor is a painter, writer, and educator who was born in 1950 into a family of artists in Manhattan. Entering her fifth decade as an artist, she has used the medium of painting to address a wide range of issues: language, corporal materiality, feminist politics, art history, and critical theory. She has also worked in artist’s books and sculpture and has a longstanding engagement with works on paper.

As an art writer and editor, Schor works in the belletristic tradition of John Berger and Virginia Woolf, with her essays combining the candor of a village storyteller with the rigor of a critical approach and maverick fearlessness. Schor’s first decade of writing on contemporary art and culture is collected in Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). Composed during the Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s, the book addresses the work of David Salle, Ida Applebroog, Mary Kelly, and the Guerrilla Girls. In the often-cited essay “Figure/Ground,” Schor’s distinctly feminist voice, seeped in the history of modernism, discusses the perseverance of painting in light of contemporary aesthetic debates. Her latest book is A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), and she writes regularly about the intersection of art and life for her blog A Year of Positive Thinking, for which she received support from the Arts Writers Grant Program in 2009. Entries include “You Put a Spell on Me,” about the relationship of African art and Renaissance portraiture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; “Youthfulness in Old Age,” about the late paintings of Joan Mitchell and Roberto Matta; and “Books Are Like People,” an exegesis on the life and destruction of the free library at Occupy Wall Street.

Schor maintains a dialectical understanding of the relationship between politics and aesthetics. In a 2011 conversation with Bradley Rubenstein for Culture Catch, she explained, “I speak of two ‘politics,’ what is happening in the world, and art politics, examining which definitions of art are hosts for different types of power. My identity as a painter has always been caught, in a generative way, between the traditions of painting and the proclamations of the death of painting, of the object, of the individual artist, of private studio practice—everything that has become the doxa of contemporary art.”

Mira Schor, Silence….speech, noise, 2010, ink, oil, and gesso on linen, 18 x 30 in. (artwork © Mira Schor; photograph provided by the artist)

Her most recent solo exhibition, Voice and Speech, was held at Marvelli Gallery in New York in spring 2012. A recurring motif in the show was a pensive, schematically sketched figure, what Schor has called an “avatar of self.” In each painting, handwriting, sometimes contained in thought-balloon rectangles, conveys a sense of cartoonish yet poetic immediacy. In a review of the show, the New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote, “Mira Schor’s small, sharp, quirky paintings have been thorns in the side of the medium for more than three decades now…. Abjuring largeness and portentous brushwork as before, these works tackle more directly the immense subject of creativity itself and diagram it in ways both pointedly humorous and expansive.” The paintings, all modestly scaled, convey a sense of private urgency, like torn-out pages from a notebook. In a 2002 interview with the painter Joan Waltemath, published in the Brooklyn Rail, Schor discusses the specificity of painted language, and how her visual art relates to her writing: “the direction of my painting and writing are intimately linked in a constant interplay between practice and theory—I find it hard to place one before the other as I speak: I paint writing and in some cases I paint the (critical/theoretical) writing that I’m writing. I certainly never gave up on visual pleasure. On the contrary I am interested in embedding verbal writing as image into the rich materiality of painting so that the two cannot be disentwined.”

Mira Schor, Slit of Paint, 1994, oil on canvas, 12 x 16 in. (artwork © Mira Schor; photograph provided by the artist)

Schor earned an MFA in 1973 from the newly formed California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. At CalArts she came into contact with Fluxus art tactics from artist professors such as Alison Knowles and the poet Emmett Williams. Schor was actively involved in the Feminist Art Program, one of the first of its kind in the country, started by Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro. Schor fondly recalls the “goofy spirit” of the school, comparing it to the television show created by her fellow student, Paul Reubens’s Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. The atmosphere was “subversive but in a sweet, slightly anarchic rather than nihilistic manner.”

Teaching studio art and art history to several generations of artists has been an important component of Schor’s life as an artist. She has been an associate teaching professor of fine art at New York’s Parsons the New School for Design since 1989. Recently, she has served as a guest lecturer at the School of Visual Art’s MFA in art criticism program and a resident artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Over the years she has taught at many schools, including the Rhode Island School of Design—where Janine Antoni, the second CAA interviewee, was her student—Sarah Lawrence College, Vermont College, and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

Schor’s solo exhibitions include Painting in the Space Where Painting Used to Be at Some Walls in Oakland in 2011, Mira Schor: Paintings from the Nineties to Now at CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles in 2010, and Suddenly: New Paintings by Mira Schor at Momenta Art in Brooklyn in 2009. With Susan Bee, she founded and led the art journal M/E/A/N/I/N/G/, which was active in print between 1986 and 1996; it continues as an online publication (a twenty-fifth anniversary edition was published in late 2011). A collection of texts from this publication, titled M/E/A/N/I/N/G/: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism, was published in 2000. Schor is also the editor of The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

Schor has received awards in painting from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. In 1999, CAA recognized her writing with its Frank Jewett Mather Award. She is currently represented by CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles and by Marvelli Gallery in New York.

Stuart Horodner

Stuart Horodner is artistic director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in Georgia. He has held positions as visual arts curator at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Oregon and director of the Bucknell University Art Gallery in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He was also a coowner of the Horodner Romley Gallery in New York. Horodner has curated numerous solo and group exhibitions and has worked with artists including Leon Golub, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Judy Linn, Melanie Manchot, William Pope.L, Kay Rosen, Joe Sola, Jessica Stockholder, and Jack Whitten.

His criticism has appeared in journals and magazines, including Art Issues, Art Lies, Art on Paper, Bomb Magazine, and Sculpture. Horodner’s new book, The Art Life: On Creativity and Career (Atlanta: Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, 2012), collects statements and texts by visual artists, writers, filmmakers, and performers that address the Sisyphean task of sustaining a lifelong career in the arts. (Read an interview with Horodner about The Art Life in ArtsATL, published in March 2012.) He has served in an advisory capacity to organizations, including Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue, Creative Capital, the Ford Family Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony.

Janine Antoni, an artist based in New York, will participate in CAA’s next Annual Artists’ Interviews, hosted by ARTspace during the 2013 Annual Conference in New York. This session will be the thirteenth installment of the popular series, which features two major practicing artists in back-to-back interviews. The other artist who will be interviewed is the painter and writer Mira Schor. The talks will be held on Friday, February 15, 2013, from 2:30 to 5:00 PM at the Hilton in New York. Klaus Ottmann, director of the Center for the Study of Modern Art and a curator at large at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, will interview Antoni.

Janine Antoni

Janine Antoni, Loving Care, 1992, performance with Loving Care hair dye Natural Black, dimensions variable (artwork © Janine Antoni; photograph provided by the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York, and taken by Prudence Cumming Associates at Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, 1993)

Janine Antoni’s work is an amalgam of shamanistic ritual, quotidian task, and daredevil action. Her performances include using her dye-soaked hair to mop a gallery floor; sleeping in a bed set up in a gallery and then weaving a blanket based on the pattern of her rapid eye movements; and walking across a tightrope of hand-plied hemp that she made herself, suspended eight feet above the ground. The arduous process of the performance is often combined into installations with sculpture, photography, and video. It is Antoni’s desire that her artwork be understood as a felt experience, one that combines emotional content and intellectual engagement. In each piece, no matter the medium or image, a conveyed physicality speaks directly to the viewer’s body.

In a conversation published in 2011 in the Brooklyn Rail, she elaborates on the importance of this imagined relationship with her work’s audience: “When I’m making work I spend a lot of time fantasizing about what the viewer will do and think; I enter their body, and imagine them walking up to my sculpture. My work is a way for me to feel connected and to feel present in the world. I try to make work that elicits empathy. I’ve been known for chewing 600 pounds of chocolate, being dumped in tubs of lard, and mopping the floor with my hair. I do these extreme acts because I feel like it puts the viewer in a very emphatic relationship to my sculpture.”

In Antoni’s work, a charged relationship between the symbolic nature of her preferred materials (chocolate, lard, soap, hemp) and the artist’s given task to transform raw material, results in a highly personal, metaphysical evocation. For the installation Gnaw (1992), Antoni wanted to use her own body as a tool to redefine what a figurative sculpture could be. She chewed on a block of chocolate and a block of lard, spitting out pieces of each to be melted down and respectively repackaged as heart-shaped chocolates and lipstick. In Lick & Lather (1993), she sculpted two self-portrait busts out of chocolate and soap, generating a nearly tangible sensation of taste and touch.

Janine Antoni, Gnaw, 1992, 600 lbs. of chocolate, gnawed by the artist, 24 x 24 x 24 in.; 600 lbs. of lard, gnawed by the artist, 24 x 24 x 24 in.; 45 heart-shaped packages for chocolate made from chewed chocolate removed from the chocolate cube; 400 lipsticks made with pigment, beeswax, and chewed lard removed from the lard cube displayed in glass case (artwork © Janine Antoni; photograph provided by the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York)

Another recurring theme in Antoni’s art is the lasting enigma of the family. She has staged photographs of her parents dressed in drag as each other, which results in a comical yet strangely moving portrait of a couple. In 2008 she photographed her toddler daughter attempting to feed her mother through her bellybutton. The doublings and life cycles in both series transcend mere performance or enactment to become lasting meditations on human relationships. In a 2009 interview in Art in America, she states, “My work occupies the territory between object, performance and relic. For each piece, I ask myself what the piece needs, how much I should tell and how much I should leave to the viewer’s imagination. With earlier projects, I spoke through the work in a very direct way, and I thought that was a generous gesture. Now, I’m more interested in leaving a space for the viewer’s imagination.” This new, more open-ended approach to her practice is evident in Tear (2008), an installation that pairs a video projection of a close-up of Antoni’s eye blinking in unison to a thudding sound. The video is screened in a room which contains a visibly scarred, lead wrecking ball that had been used in the demolition of a building. The artwork implies a triangulated relationship among all three components; tension and mystery are built from the unseen elements in the narrative.

Antoni was born in 1964 in Freeport, Bahamas. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 1986 and an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1989. Mira Schor was an influential professor for Antoni in graduate school, introducing the younger woman to the work of three feminist artists from the 1970s whose physical bodies were integral to their art practice: Ana Mendieta, Hannah Wilke, and Carolee Schneeman.

Janine Antoni, Slumber, 1993, performance with loom, yarn, bed, nightgown, PSG machine, and artist’s REM reading, dimensions variable (artwork © Janine Antoni; photograph provided by the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York)

Antoni has shown her work in more than twenty-five solo exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Her most recent was Touch (2011) at the Museum Kunst der Westküste in Alkersum/Föhr, Germany. She has participated in international biennials in Venice, Johannesburg, Istanbul, and Kwangju and domestically in the Whitney Biennial in New York, SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico, and Prospect.1 in New Orleans. The artist has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Larry Aldrich Foundation Award, a Joan Mitchell Painting and Sculpture Award, a Creative Capital Grant, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. She is represented by Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York.

Antoni lives and works in New York. She participated in the 2011 Annual Conference, speaking on the popular Centennial session “Parallel Practices: When the Mind Isn’t Focused on Art.”

Klaus Ottmann

Klaus Ottmann is director of the Center for the Study of Modern Art and curator at large at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. He is the author of Yves Klein by Himself: His Life and Thought (Paris: Éditions Dilecta, 2010), The Genius Decision: The Extraordinary and the Postmodern Condition (New York: Spring Publications, 2004), and The Essential Mark Rothko (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003). In 2006 he translated and edited Yves Klein’s complete writings for the book Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, published by Spring Publications.

Ottmann has curated more than forty international exhibitions, including Per Kirkeby: Paintings and Sculpture; Still Points of the Turning World: SITE Santa Fe’s Sixth International Biennial; Life, Love, and Death: The Work of James Lee Byars; Wolfgang Laib: A Retrospective; Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings, 1972–2008; and Fairfield Porter Raw: The Creative Process of an American Master.

Michael Corris (2013–16)

Michael Corris, incoming Art Journal reviews editor

Michael Corris, professor of art and chair of the Division of Art in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, has been appointed reviews editor of Art Journal. He will serve one year as reviews editor designate, taking over from Howard Singerman of the University of Virginia in July 2013.

As both an artist and an author of many works on postwar and contemporary art and theory, Corris is looking forward to bringing new voices and perspectives into the conversation that surrounds the literature of art. For Corris this means a thorough investigation into myriad ways in which scholars and artists are reading art history today, both inside the classroom and in the larger art world. He writes, “I’d like to know what artists are reading and why; what goes into the construction of a bibliography for students at all levels; and how technology and social media alter the way we reflect critically on art and culture. In short, how the dialogue on art is authorized, shaped, and sustained through all sorts of textual means.” The social reality of art making and writing about art has always been present in Corris’s work. In his new role as reviews editor he is committed to seeking out non-Western art practices and those that merge with political activism.

With a comparative perspective on studio-art and art-history programs from his substantial teaching record in the United States and England, Corris sees both countries as “facing a crisis in higher education” and laments the fact that programs in art education and art history “are constantly under threat to justify their existence in purely economic terms.” However, the academic intensity of art schools in England holds a great appeal for Corris: “The British higher-education system places great emphasis on individual and small-group tutorials; it also demands a great deal more of students in terms of written output. Studio-art undergraduates are generally required to produce a research paper of up to 10,000 words; master’s level students may have to produce a research paper of up to 20,000 words. This is all in addition to their artwork.”

As a visual artist who slips easily into the role of critic, and as a critic who is equally at home in academia, Corris is long familiar with the fluidity of all three roles. He also recognizes the importance of a playful attitude as a way to explore new spaces of thought production. “It’s no longer surprising to find an artist who writes, a writer who draws, or a studio-art professor who curates art. The challenge here is to find ways to destabilize all these terms: visual artist, editor, writer, and educator. I turned my office at Southern Methodist University into the Free Museum of Dallas to offset the drudgery and power of academic bureaucracy. I’m constantly seeking ways to collectivize the various activities that I engage in or fall into. When it comes to my role as educator, my current concern is trying to figure out the precise shape of this Faustian bargain called tenure and my limits of tolerance to the trend to subject the arts and humanities to a corporate logic. My great joy is that the students remain engaged and delightfully open.”

Concurrent with his position at Art Journal, Corris will remain an editor at Transmission Annual, a peer-reviewed journal of contemporary art and culture, cofounded in 2008 with Sharon Kivland and Jaspar Joseph-Lester, both professors at Sheffield Hallam University in England. “We came up with the idea to publish an annual collection of essays, structured correspondence, and artist’s projects that revisited the themes of the school’s weekly artist and theorist lecture series, while allowing academics the luxury to experiment with forms of exposition. Our first issue was based on the theme of hospitality, the second on the theme of provocation, and the third on the theme of catastrophe. We anticipate a fourth issue on the theme of agency, so you see there is a glimmer of reality amongst the poetry.” Corris hopes his Transmission Annual experience will inspire new formats for Art Journal devoted to the critical review of literature on art.

Corris received a BA from Brooklyn College, City University of New York, in 1970. Two years later he earned an MFA in painting and media from the Hoffberger School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, and later was awarded a scholarship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. In 1971 he began participating in the Conceptual-art collective Art & Language (whose transatlantic members included Terry Atkinson, Joseph Kosuth, Mel Ramsden, and Charles Harrison) and contributed to the group’s journal, Art-Language. As a member of the collective, and as a solo artist, Corris has exhibited his artwork in galleries and museums across the United States and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Michael Corris, ed., Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)

The relationship of writing and language to the visual arts has been a paramount concern of Corris’s throughout his career. His editorial experience began with cofounding the artist-run journals The Fox in 1975 and Red-Herring in 1977. The move from art making into publishing was a natural extension of his essayistic art practice. For Corris, and for the other Art & Language artists, these journals served as “sites of artistic production and were intentionally set in opposition to the values and institutions that sustained a managerial culture of art.” His early essays, such as “The Organization of Culture under Monopoly Capitalism,” published in The Fox in 1976, and “Frameworks and Phantoms,” written with Mel Ramsden for Art-Language in 1973, reflect this radical ethos. Since then Corris has written essays and reviews for Artforum, Art History, and Art Monthly that cover a wide spectrum of artists working today, from Jeff Koons to Alfredo Jaar and Tracey Emin.

Corris’s PhD dissertation, completed in 1996 at University College London, formed the basis for a monograph, Ad Reinhardt, published by Reaktion Books in 2008. A 2006 winner of the first CAA Publication Grant, the book recontextualizes an overlooked aspect of Reinhardt’s art practice: the political cartoons and illustrations that were published in the 1930s through the 1950s in New Masses and Soviet Russia Today. Corris’s lifelong commitment to the intersection of art and politics is evident in Ad Reinhardt, as well as in two forthcoming books: The Artist Out of Work: Selected Writings on Art (Les Presses du Reel/JRP Ringier) and What Do Artists Know? Art’s Encounter with Philosophy (Reaktion). Corris is also the author of a volume on the painter David Diao, published by TimeZone8 Books in 2005, and coauthor, with John Dixon Hunt and David Lomas, of Art, Word, and Image: 2,000 Years of Visual/Textual Interaction, published by Reaktion in 2010.

A selection of Corris’s academic appointments include visiting lecturer in history of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London (1999–2001); head of the Department of Art and Photography at the University of Wales, Newport (2003–7); visiting professor of art theory at the Bergen National Academy of Art in Norway (2005–7); and professor of fine art at Art and Design Research Center, Sheffield Hallam University (2007–9).

Doralynn Pines is an independent scholar and consultant based in New York and a member of the CAA Board of Directors. She served as associate director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and was chief librarian of the museum’s central research library.

The Digital World Meets Art History at Princeton University

On July 12, 2012, the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University in New Jersey sponsored a one-day conference that covered topics of digital archiving, research, and technical innovation in art history. Entitled “The Digital World of Art History: Databases, Initiatives, Policies, and Practices,” the conference was attended by almost one hundred art historians, art librarians, and museum and visual-resources curators. The year 2012 marks the ninety-fifth anniversary of the index, which was founded in 1917 by Charles Rufus Morey. The anniversary also celebrates the fact that the index’s information, held in library reserves for decades, has evolved into a growing digital database for use by scholars all over the world.

Organized by Colum Hourihane, director of the index, the conference featured eighteen invited speakers who discussed topics as varied as the future of art bibliography (Carole Ann Fabian, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University), copyright, scholarship, and fair use in the fine arts (Gretchen Wagner, ARTstor), art-historical research (Gwen David, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Queens College, City University of New York), and a database of performances of medieval narratives (Evelyn [Timmie] Birge Vitz and Marilyn Lawrence, both from New York University). Melitte Buchman, also of NYU, spoke about current best digital practices. The Morgan Library and Museum was represented by curators and librarians (Maria Oldal, Elizabeth O’Keefe, William Voelkle), who described their recently completed collaboration with the index. Approximately 58,000 images from over nine hundred Western medieval and Renaissance manuscripts will soon be available through the Morgan Library’s website and through the index.

Several talks outlined exciting new digital projects currently underway at Princeton, including databases and new initiatives at the index (Judith Golden, Jessica Savage, Beatrice Radden Keefe, Jon Niola, Henry Schilb), in the Visual Resources Collection (Trudy Jacoby), and in the Digital Humanities Initiative (David Mimno). Sandra Ludig Brooke, a librarian at the Marquand Library of Art and Archeology, spoke about the Blue Mountain Project, a team effort of scholars and librarians to catalogue, and make freely available, digital editions of avant-garde arts journals produced in Europe and North America between 1848 and 1923. The project is off to a running start with a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

To wrap up the conference, Eleanor Fink of the World Bank Group presented “Art Clouds: Reminiscences and Prospects for the Future,” a look back at the well-known projects she oversaw during her tenure at the Getty Information Institute, including the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN), the Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN), and the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA). She also noted how far the field had come, with collaborative and cross-platform efforts being the norm. In looking to future prospects for seamless access to art information, Fink pointed to Linked Open Data and some recent projects that have begun to use it.

Hourihane has just announced the online publication of the papers on the Index of Christian Art website.

Nora Griffin is an artist and CAA assistant editor.

Kirk Ambrose (2013–16)

Kirk Ambrose

Kirk Ambrose, associate professor of medieval art history and chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado in Boulder, will become editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin. His three-year term begins on July 1, 2013, after he concludes a year as editor designate. Ambrose will succeed Karen Lang of the University of Warwick in England, who has led the journal since 2010.

As incoming editor, Ambrose plans to build on the legacies of two previous Art Bulletin editors, Karen Lang and Nancy Troy, and to develop alternative forums for debate within the journal, such as the recently inaugurated special features “Regarding Art and Art History” and “Notes from the Field.” Like Lang, he is also inspired by the journal’s approaching centennial, in 2013, and sees The Art Bulletin’s current moment as intellectually parallel to the “speculative and creative” art history that was being practiced in its pages in the early twentieth century. The recent decision of the German government to fund “clusters of excellence” has resulted in new structures at universities and has spurred Ambrose into dialogue with a group of international scholars from Brazil, France, India, and Turkey, to better understand the nuances of how “art-historical research and pedagogy is now conceived.” This international perspective on art history will be thoroughly addressed in a new series of short essays for The Art Bulletin, tentatively titled “Whither History?” in which invited scholars will “reflect upon how trends toward globalization in the humanities have had an impact on the ways we conceive art history.”

In 1999, Ambrose earned his PhD in the history of art from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with a dissertation on “Romanesque Vézelay: the Art of Monastic Contemplation,” completed under the guidance of Ilene Forsyth and Elizabeth Sears. Ambrose’s education also includes a BA from Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1990 and additional study at the Goethe Institut in Düsseldorf, Germany, and McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

A faculty member at the University of Colorado since 1999, Ambrose has taught a range of courses on topics of medieval art history and methodology at the undergraduate and graduate level and has served as an MA and PhD thesis advisor for many students. A specialist in Romanesque sculpture, Ambrose is dedicated to the idea of art history as a global discipline and to this end has worked to diversify his department at Colorado. He recently worked with the administration to create a tenure-track position for an art historian specializing in colonial Latin America.

Within Ambrose’s own field of interest, he has consistently chosen topics and methodologies of inquiry that enlarge the scope of medieval studies. His book Monsters in Twelfth-Century European Sculpture, is forthcoming from Boydell and Brewer, and he received a Samuel H. Kress Foundation grant for the volume The Nave Sculpture of Vézelay: The Art of Monastic Viewing (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2006). Recent book chapters include “Male Nudes and Embodied Spirituality in Romanesque Sculpture,” published in Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), edited by Sherry Lindquist. A 2011 essay, “Viollet-le-Duc’s Judith at Vézelay: Romanesque Sculpture Restoration as (National) Art,” published in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, discusses the restoration of a medieval monument in nineteenth-century France as it relates to the country’s republican politics. He recently contributed to The Art Bulletin a review of Friedrich Kittler’s Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, translated by Anthony Enns, that was published in the March 2011 issue, and a short piece on appropriation and medieval art in the multiauthored section “Notes from the Field” in June 2012.

Ambrose’s practice of a socially and culturally mindful art history has led to opportunities beyond the classroom. With colleagues Davide Stimilli and Lisa Tamiris-Becker, he is currently planning a 2014 exhibition at the University of Colorado Art Museum, tentatively titled Aby Warburg and the Beginning of Cultural Studies in the American Southwest. Ambrose states, “Warburg’s 1895–86 expedition to the Southwest is well known, but this journey looks very different when viewed from an American, rather than European, perspective. Much of Warburg’s vision appears indebted to a network of mostly Jewish merchants across the Southwest, who sold photographs of Indian rituals as well as ceramics and other objects that Warburg collected.” For Ambrose the exhibition is a means to explore the multifariousness of art-historical vision, and how “art practices can serve as vehicles of knowledge” for scholars at the turn of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Ann Albritton is a professor of modern and contemporary art history at Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, and chair of CAA’s International Committee.

Judy Peter, a scholar at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, speaks at a meeting of CAA International Travel Grant recipients at the 2012 Annual Conference in Los Angeles (photograph by Bradley Marks)

A short time before the 2012 CAA Annual Conference in Los Angeles, Judy Peter and I began sending occasional emails back and forth from Johannesburg, South Africa, to Sarasota, Florida. As incoming chair of the International Committee, I had been assigned to Peter, one of twenty recipients of the CAA International Travel Grant Program, generously funded by the Getty Foundation. We had been paired based on a shared academic pursuit: teaching contemporary issues in art. Her short biography describing her as head of the Department of Jewellery Design and Manufacture at the University of Johannesburg gave me a brief introduction that made me curious to meet her. We met face-to-face early on the first morning of the conference and went with several other grant recipients and their hosts to a large roundtable breakfast at the Hotel Figueroa. It was there that I began getting to know her as a fellow art historian and theorist who was delighted to be at the conference and determined to make the most of the experience.

Peter is a dedicated scholar who has the distinction of being the first black person in South Africa to complete a PhD in visual studies: she earned her degree in 2011 at the University of Pretoria. Even though her country has been a democracy for eighteen years, many blacks and women in academia must still confront, and break through, the proverbial glass ceiling. Peter describes her research as a “critical reading of the politics of gender and identity issues in a new South Africa.” She is currently studying the work of thirteen female South African artists, looking at myriad geographical and historical influences that have affected their art practice. Each artist she has chosen to write on is working with identity, place, and displacement.

Between visits to the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Peter attended sessions she felt were useful to her, including the CAA International Committee panel, “Internationalizing the Field: A Discussion of Global Networks for Art Historians,” and others, such as “Black Venus: They Called Her Hottentot.” These sessions, she writes, “allowed me to compare teaching and learning practices between institutions in the United States and in South Africa.” In addition, Peter attended two of CAA’s Professional Development Workshops: “Advice for New Instructors” and “The Syllabus: Mapping Out Your Semester.” At the latter she made a connection with a workshop presenter, Steven Bleicher, a professor of visual arts at Coastal University in South Carolina. Since the conference, the two have been in communication regarding opportunities for scholars at the University of Johannesburg to contribute to Bleicher’s new book.

For the international scholars, networking within their diverse group was among the most important benefits of being a travel-grant recipient. Discovering common areas of research, exploring conflicting views, and sharing divergent teaching practices made for dynamic discussions and brought various groupings of scholars together. Isolation remains a common problem for many of the grantees, and the conference provided immediate and long-range opportunities for them to build new communities. In fact, many of them have continued these conversations online; several are making concrete plans for future collaborations.

Like even the most seasoned of CAA conference goers, Peter and the other international scholars attended a whirlwind of workshops, sessions, panels, meetings, and museums without much time for reflection. Directly following the event in Los Angeles, however, most travel-grant recipients flew across the country to spend a few days at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. At the Clark they were able to relax and get to know each other in a less formal environment, and to start to lay the groundwork for future work together.

I look forward to keeping in touch with Judy Peter in order to keep learning about the vastly different social and political landscape that artists and art historians inhabit in South Africa. I’m especially interested in her research on female artists active from 1994 to 2004. We’ll continue to exchange ideas, share our writing with one another, and possibly collaborate on a project.

Read about another travel-grant recipient, Dóra Sallay from Hungary, and review a report on all activities from the 2012 CAA International Travel Grant Program.

The CAA Board of Directors met in New York on Sunday, May 6, 2012, for its spring meeting. One day before, the Executive Committee convened to hear presentations from invited guests. The following report summarizes the contents of these two meetings.

Executive Committee

The Executive Committee meeting featured two invited speakers. The first, Raym Crow of the Chain Bridge Group, presented the first phase of the Publications Analysis, a report that is exploring the online development of CAA’s two print journals. He announced the results from a survey of individual CAA members to determine their interest in receiving online and/or print journals. The majority of members, Crow disclosed, prefer both options. He also offered findings from a thorough financial risk analysis, should institutional online subscriptions cannibalize individual memberships. In the analysis’s next phase, Crow will assess the production costs of The Art Bulletin and Art Journal and compare CAA’s business model to others in academic publishing. The resulting baseline figures will be used to determine the future direction of journal publications. Crow anticipates that it will take about six to eight months to complete this stage.

The second presenter, Gretchen Wagner, general counsel of ARTstor and a member of CAA’s Committee on Intellectual Property, discussed the current state of guidelines for fair use of copyrighted materials in the arts and humanities, including two documents recently created by the Visual Resources Association and the Association of Research Libraries that were endorsed by CAA in February 2012. She described how many academic and professional organizations for library science, video, poetry, and dance have developed fair-use guidelines for their fields; she also talked about OpenCourseWare. Some have noted that US courts increasingly rely on best practices from professional organizations to interpret cases related to fair use. Therefore CAA, which represents key stakeholders—artists, art historians, museum curators, conservators, and art administrators—is uniquely positioned to develop effective guidelines for fair use of copyrighted works of art and other visual material in scholarship, art making, and related activities. (See below for more on this topic.)

Board of Directors

CAA’s incoming board president, Anne Collins Goodyear of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, warmly welcomed four recently elected board members: Suzanne Preston Blier, Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and Professor of African American Studies, Harvard University; Stephanie D’Alessandro, Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago; Gail Feigenbaum, Getty Research Institute; and Charles A. Wright, Professor and Chair, Department of Art, Western Illinois University. The board also accepted the resignation of Jean Miller of the University of North Texas and elected Doralynn Pines, a New York–based independent art historian and consultant to museums and libraries, to fill the remaining two years of Miller’s term. The board also appointed Roger Crum of the University of Dayton (and a CAA board member) to the Nominating Committee.

Teresa Lopez, CAA chief financial officer, presented a balanced operating budget at $4.79 million for fiscal year 2013 (July 1, 2013–June 30, 2014), which the board discussed and approved. She also distributed the organization’s IRS Form 990 for 2011. The board then approved resolution to amend CAA’s statement of investment policy and guidelines to comply with the investment standards for nonprofit corporations under the New York Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act.

Randall C. Griffin, CAA vice president for publications, presented a resolution to revise the Statement of Conflict of Interest and Confidentiality that addresses proper relationships for CAA jurors and journal editors. The board approved the resolution and adopted the revised statement.

In response to Wagner’s discussion on intellectual property at the Executive Committee meeting, Goodyear presented a resolution to establish a Task Force to Develop Fair-Use Guidelines, which the board reviewed, discussed, and approved. As the resolution states, “CAA believes that it would be appropriate to establish a set of guidelines that would document current fair-use practices in the visual arts with respect to the activities of scholarly publishing, the creation of works of art, and the curation and exhibition of works that include another’s copyrighted works.” The board anticipates that it will take the task force eighteen months to two years to develop the guidelines, using focus groups of CAA members, a community advisory group, and a legal advisory group.

Michael Fahlund, CAA deputy director, and Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs and archivist, presented an Archives Policy Statement, which the board approved. Over the past two years, Stark has led the establishment of an archive of CAA records, which is available to scholars.

For further information, or if you have questions or have advocacy issues you would like to bring to the board’s attention, please contact Anne Collins Goodyear, board president, and Linda Downs, executive director and chief executive officer, at info@collegeart.org.

Geraldine A. Johnson is a university lecturer in history of art and associate head of the Humanities Division at Oxford University.

The Hungarian curator and scholar Dóra Sallay (left) with Anne Helmreich, senior program officer at the Getty Foundation (photograph by Bradley Marks)

Rice congee, miso soup, and nori are not usually on the breakfast menu for most Hungarian museum curators. But when I met Dóra Sallay at the crack of dawn at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles during the 2012 CAA Annual Conference, the truly global offerings of the lavish breakfast buffet were a sign of things to come. As Sallay herself observed, “It made me realize just how international the conference was likely to be.”

Sallay, curator of early Italian painting at the Szépmüvészeti Múzeum, Budapest’s Museum of Fine Arts, was one of twenty international scholars awarded travel grants to attend this year’s conference through a new program administered by CAA and funded by the Getty Foundation. Hosts for each grant recipient were selected from CAA’s International Committee, led by its outgoing committee chair, Jennifer Milam, and from the National Committee for the History of Art, led by Frederick M. Asher. The trip to Los Angeles was Sallay’s first experience not only of the annual meeting, but also of California. Both proved to be eye-opening encounters for a curator who had previously only been to small, specialized art-history conferences. “This was the first time,” Sallay said, “that I was able to hear talks on such a wide range of subjects, including new methodological approaches and innovative research tools.”

Among the many sessions she attended, Sallay gave special praise to the Getty Research Institute’s presentation of its Digital Art History Texts project. She described it as a “cozy, relaxed, and genuinely interactive event, where I felt I really had a chance to influence how a major new research tool was being developed. As a curator working in a small country with limited financial resources, such digitalization projects are absolutely crucial.”

Sallay was also able to hear about the latest research being done in her field of specialization, Italian Renaissance art. She particularly enjoyed Max Grossman’s talk, “Brick Architecture and Political Strategy in Early Modern Siena,” and while at the Book and Trade Fair she saw publications not yet available in Budapest, such as Anne Leader’s 2011 book, The Badia of Florence: Art and Observance in a Renaissance Monastery. Unsurprisingly, Sallay’s suitcases were noticeably heavier upon her return to Hungary, filled with many such coveted finds, as well as new discoveries.

Giovanni di Paolo, Branchini Madonna, 1427, tempera and gold leaf on panel, 72 x 39 in. (182.9 x 99.1 cm). Norton Simon Foundation. F.1978.01.P (artwork in the public domain; photograph © 2012 Norton Simon Foundation)

Sallay was very enthusiastic about the opportunities she and her fellow travel-grant recipients had to take in some of southern California’s world-famous art collections, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art during the CAA Centennial Reception to the J. Paul Getty Museum on a trip arranged by the International Committee, now led by its new chair, Ann Albritton. A visit to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena was particularly significant for Sallay’s research as she was able to view Giovanni di Paolo’s panel painting, the Branchini Madonna (1427), which she had known only through reproductions. The museum’s chief curator, Carol Togneri, “was absolutely wonderful,” according to Sallay. “Not only did she show me all the files on the painting, but she even arranged for me to look at the work outside normal museum hours and provided a ladder for some productive close-up viewing.”

The social aspect of the conference was particularly important for the international scholars. Sallay praised the extensive program of activities that CAA provided for travel-grant recipients and enthused about making “fantastic connections with scholars and curators from all over the world: South Africa, India, Pakistan. We discussed problems of common interest such as, when curating exhibitions, how to find the right balance between the needs of the general public and the demands of academics.” She also noted, somewhat ironically, that she met a number of fellow researchers from Central and Eastern Europe, such as Daniel Premerl from Croatia’s Institute of Art History, for the first time in Los Angeles.

Getting to know members of the International Committee, who served as hosts to the travel-grant recipients, was also a terrific way to forge valuable new links across continents. Indeed, as Sallay’s official host, I am pleased to report that, thanks to email, we have continued the conversation we began over the breakfast table in Los Angeles—although the next time we meet in person, rice congee is much less likely to be on the menu!

Read about another travel-grant recipient, Judy Peter from South Africa, and review a report on all activities from the 2012 CAA International Travel Grant Program.

2012 Annual Conference

Art in Odd Places and Performance Exchange sponsored performances outside the Los Angeles Convention Center as part of ARTspace’s Art in the Public Realm, a daylong event at the 2012 Annual Conference (photograph by Bradley Marks)

The 100th CAA Annual Conference in Los Angeles, held February 22–25, 2012, was a great success with over five thousand attendees, two hundred sessions addressing topics from ancient art to contemporary criticism, a sold-out Book and Trade Fair with more than 120 exhibitors, and a plethora of exciting events throughout southern California. The timing of the conference happily coincided with Pacific Standard Time, a large group of exhibitions and programs focused on modern and contemporary art made in the region, sponsored by the Getty Foundation and involving sixty public institutions and many commercial galleries. California Design, 1930–1965: “Living in a Modern Way” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was an eye-opener to place so many familiar modern designs in their original West Coast context.

The atmosphere throughout the conference was collegial and extremely positive. Maybe it was the delicious LA sunshine, or perhaps it was due in part to the presence of over ten thousand new citizens who appeared on Wednesday at the Los Angeles Convention Center for a naturalization ceremony at the start of CAA’s conference. Citizenship, something many of us take for granted, was visibly cherished on their proud faces.

Graduate Public Practice from the Otis College of Art and Design presented “Re/Locating Learning: Public Practices as Art” (photograph by Christopher Howard)

Special Centennial Sessions were organized by a committee under the chairmanship of Ruth Weisberg, an artist and former CAA board president and former dean of the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California. One of the highlights of these sessions was “Re/Locating Learning: Public Practices in Art,” presented by Suzanne Lacy, an artist and chair of public practice at Otis College of Art and Design, in which members discussed new approaches to academic teaching and ways to engage the public over the conference’s full four days.

A new presentation technique debuted in “Hot Problems/Cool Solutions in Arts Leadership,” a session organized by the National Council of Arts Administrators in which twelve panelists—in extremely short presentations—proposed solutions ranging from administrative issues such as how to write ninety letters of recommendation in one semester (don’t do it unless they are serious job candidates) or how to be kind in academic interactions for productive and cooperative faculty outcomes.

Rocco Landesman, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, spoke at the 2012 Centennial Convocation (photograph by Bradley Marks)

The conference featured two excellent keynote addresses. Rocco Landesman, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, spoke at Convocation. Stating that only two newspapers in the United States employ full-time art critics, Landesman presented a new grassroots initiative entitled Knight/NEA Community Arts Journalism Challenge that is fostering art criticism in four cities. This new program provides unique partnerships to expand arts journalism that both informs and engages audiences. April Greiman, a prominent international designer, presented her work at the Annual Members’ Business Meeting, including a gigantic mural in Koreatown in Los Angeles and the design of Miracle Manor Retreat, an intimate hot-springs motel on the edge of Joshua Tree National Park.

The Service to Artists Committee, chaired by Jackie Apple, professor of art at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, organized a vast number of programs through ARTspace, including the Media Lounge, ARTexchange, and performance pieces that engaged attendees and the general public alike.

Some of the most packed sessions included the Distinguished Scholar Session, in which Rosalind Krauss’s work was both lauded and critiqued; the Annual Artists’ Interviews with Mary Kelly and Martin Kersels; “‘Your Labels Make Me Feel Stupid’: Museum Labels as Art Historical Practice,” organized by the Association of Art Museum Curators; the performance works inside and outside the convention center; and sessions devoted to the fortieth anniversary of the beginning of feminism.

The art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh participated in the 2012 Distinguished Scholar Session honoring Rosalind Krauss (photograph by Bradley Marks)

CAA’s Committee on Intellectual Property presented critical information on copyright and fair use in its session. The group has also reviewed intellectual-property information on the CAA website and will soon publicly post the revised pages.

New publishing platforms and online resources were presented at a session organized by the artist Tara McPherson, called “Art History Meets the Digital Age,” in which new multimedia platforms for publishing were presented following a hands-on workshop that introduced thirty CAA members to the Scalar platform. CAA will use Scalar in demonstration projects in the coming months developed by The Art Bulletin and caa.reviews.

Celebrating the conclusion of CAA’s Centennial year, Susan Ball, former CAA executive director and interim director of programs at the New York Foundation for the Arts, led a panel of five of the fourteen authors who contributed to the recent book on CAA’s history, The Eye, The Hand, The Mind: 100 Years of the College Art Association (New York: College Art Association; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011). The group discussed their revelations about watershed moments and movements in the history of the organization, including characterizations of the differing cultures of the journals and the historical ups and downs of the association. In the former category, the development of visual resources for teaching, advocacy, and the influence of feminism on the structure of the conference were cited. The latter category includes the unfortunate split between CAA and the Society of Architectural Historians in 1940.

CAA gained insights into issues that are of critical importance to members at the two speak-out sessions organized by Anne Collins Goodyear, incoming president of the Board of Directors, and the town-hall meeting organized by Margaret Lazzari, a professor in the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California. A separate article will be devoted to the topics raised at these sessions. A predominant theme was contingent faculty concerns—from course loads to the need to teach a wide breadth of courses.

Three recipients of the Getty Foundation International Travel Grant: Shao-Chien Tseng from National Central University in Taiwan; Didier Houenoude of the Université d’Abomey-Calavi in Benin; and Jean Celestin Ky from the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso (photograph by Bradley Marks)

The Getty Foundation awarded CAA a generous grant to organize the CAA International Travel Grant Program, which supported the selection of twenty international art historians from eighteen countries to attend the conference. The grantees were hosted by experienced members of CAA’s International Committee and by representatives from the National Committee for the History of Art. For all but two recipients, the conference was their first introduction to CAA apart from reading the journals. The grant recipients attended sessions, were introduced to fellow CAA members by their hosts, explored the museums and collections in the Los Angeles area, and also carried out independent research. As a result, CAA’s membership now represents almost seventy countries. This program is part of an ongoing effort to provide a wider network of international members, to assess their needs and interests, and to provide an integrated network for the exchange of ideas, research, and creative projects.

Governance

The artist and designer April Greiman spoke at the Annual Members’ Business Meeting (photograph by Bradley Marks)

At the Annual Members’ Business Meeting, Barbara Nesin, the current board president, announced the new board members: Suzanne Preston Blier, Harvard University; Stephanie D’Alessandro, Art Institute of Chicago; Gail Feigenbaum, Getty Research Institute; and Charles A. Wright, Western Illinois University. Teresa López, CAA chief financial officer, then presented a balanced budget. Anyone interested in receiving a copy of CAA’s fiscal year 2011 audit may email López. Nesin reiterated her aspirations for the organization to have greater inclusivity and responsiveness to its members. She also mentioned her commitment to sustainability and communication.

The full Board of Directors met on Sunday, February 26. The most significant action items included the results of a review of three of the nine Professional Interests, Practices, and Standards Committees: the International Committee, the Services to Artists Committee, and the Committee on Women in the Arts. The board commended all three groups for their outstanding work this year.

The election of officers to the board included Patricia McDonnell for a second term as vice president for external affairs; Jacqueline Francis as vice president for Annual Conference; Randall C. Griffin for a second term as vice president for publications; DeWitt Godfrey as the new vice president for committees; and Maria Ann Conelli as secretary.

The board then passed a resolution to revise the Procedures for Task Forces. The revision added the step of the Executive Committee’s review and prioritization of all proposals for task forces before presentation and adoption by the board. Nesin extended thanks to two members who are rotating off the board after four years of dedicated service: Jay Coogan, president of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design; and Judith Thorpe, professor of art and head of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Connecticut.

Chris Sundt, a former board member, the editor of the journal Visual Resources, and current cochair of the Committee on Intellectual Property, presented the newly drafted Visual Resources Association: Statement on the Fair Use of Images for Teaching, Research, and Study. She presented the history of CAA’s involvement in fair-use issues and explained how the Visual Resources Association statement can clarify how best to use visual resources in the classroom. The board also reviewed the Association of Research Libraries’ newly drafted Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries, which addresses fair use of visual resources in libraries. The board unanimously adopted both statements.

Looking Forward

Three dedicated leaders who have served as president of the CAA Board of Directors: Paul B. Jaskot, Barbara Nesin, and Nicola M. Courtright (photograph by Bradley Marks)

This Centennial year was a time of reflection for CAA. Hundreds of members participated in delving into the organization’s history and evaluating its present state and possible future. Please see the Centennial Case Statement for the projects and publications that resulted from these investigations.

CAA has changed enormously since its founding in 1911, from a handful of art professors who saw the need to advocate for visual-arts curricula in higher education to its current 14,000 members from over seventy countries. CAA has held to its mission and focus of advocacy, providing a platform for new research and creative expression, job placement, best practices, standards and guidelines, and a place to network with like-minded and not-so-like-minded professionals in the field.

The future for CAA holds a greater use of technology for conferences, publications, and member networking. Under the leadership of Goodyear, incoming board president, the Task Force on Annual Conference Technology will explore ways of extending the conference and increasing member interaction. A consultant from Chain Bridge Group, Raym Crow, has been hired to work with the board, the Publications Committee, and CAA staff to analyze the risk and rewards of developing online versions of The Art Bulletin and Art Journal. Also under consideration is the challenge to find a business model for open access to caa.reviews and an investigation in developing a business model for practical publications. And various networking systems are being explored for future use.

CAA will also have a greater focus on advocacy for the visual arts in the academic and public spheres. As James Leach, chairman of the National Endowment of the Humanities, stated in his Convocation address at the 2011 Annual Conference in New York, it is essential to address not only the intrinsic value of the visual arts, but also its importance to American business and national security. Knowledge and exchange of creative ideas, international cultures, languages, and history are essential to international understanding and security. He addressed the decades-long trend in higher education on the concept of profit-centers and focusing on only those majors that return profits by satisfying the “customer” (student). He warned us of the problems of using reasonable math to determine curriculum instead of emphasizing the intrinsic educational value of the subject. It is time to build defenses of the arts and humanities in universities as well as in the public sphere.

CAA’s Centennial year has deepened the knowledge of our field by reflecting on its history, the current status of the visual arts, and the need to put even more effort into advocating for art and art history in academia and in the public sector. Thank you to the hundreds of members who researched CAA’s history and analyzed its many facets, and who continue to lend their expertise to the future of the field.

The fall meeting of the CAA Board of Directors took place on Sunday, October 23, 2011, in New York. Twenty-two board members were joined by eight staff members and one guest.

Anne Collins Goodyear was elected by the board as president-elect. Her term of office begins in May 2012 and will conclude at the end of April 2014. Goodyear is associate curator of prints and drawings at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC. She has served on the CAA board since 2006 as vice president for external affairs and vice president for publications and is currently vice president for Annual Conference. As vice president for publications, Goodyear headed a task force that reviewed all editorial safeguards and procedures for CAA’s three journals. She is an art historian who has contributed to the field through major exhibitions, including Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture in 2009. She is only the second art museum curator to lead CAA in thirty years (the first being Joshua C. Taylor, director of the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC, in 1981). Before stepping into the presidency, Goodyear will lead a task force on the Annual Conference to explore future web-based extensions.

The Professional Practices Committee, chaired by Charles Wright of Western Illinois University, worked with subcommittees over the past several years and updated five existing but outdated standards and added one new document to CAA’s Standards and Guidelines. Maria Ann Conelli, vice president for committees, presented these standards to the board for approval. The board adopted these standards and commended the subcommittees and the Professional Practices Committee for their outstanding work in providing the field with this critical information. The new standards reflect and correspond to the guidelines of the National Association of Schools of Art and Design and regional accreditation commissions where applicable.

Beauvais Lyons of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, chaired the task force to update Professional Practices for Artists, first published in 1977. Extensive changes were made in sections pertaining to the code of ethics, copyright, safe use of materials and equipment, and exhibition and sales. The task-force members were: Charles Wright, Western Illinois University, Chair of the Professional Practices Committee; Brian Bishop, Framingham State University; Margaret Lazzari, University of Southern California; and James Hopfensperger, Western Michigan University.

Judith Thorpe of the University of Connecticut chaired the task force to update Standards for the Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Fine Arts Degrees in Studio Art. A section on multidisciplinary curricula was added, and extensive changes were made to sections on the BFA and studio curriculum and on faculty and staff. The task force comprised: Denise Mullen, Oregon College of Art and Crafts and CAA board; Sergio Soave, Ohio State University; Frederick Cartwright, University of Saint Francis; and Cora Lynn Deibler, University of Connecticut.

Susan Waller of the University of Missouri, Saint Louis and John Klein of Washington University in Saint Louis made up the task force that revised Peer Review in CAA Publications from 2004. The task force consulted the current editors-in-chief and editors-designate of The Art Bulletin and Art Journal as well as members of the Publications Committee that oversees the editorial boards of CAA’s three journals. The standards included a definition of peer review and addressed works submitted to the journals by artists.

Jim Hopfensperger of Western Michigan University chaired the task force on Standards for the Retention and Tenure of Art and Design Faculty, whose members were: Carolyn Cardenas, Utah State University; Dana Clancy, Boston University; Andrea Eis, Oakland University; Amy Hauft, Virginia Commonwealth University; Janet Hethorn, University of Delaware; Robert Hower, University of Texas at Arlington; Patricia Olynyk, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth; Sergio Soave, Ohio State University; Adrian Tio, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth; and Star Varner, Southwestern University. The revised standards recommend transparency in matters of renewal, retention, promotion, and tenure; specified contact hours; and added the categories of collaborative artworks, situated artworks, online work, commissions, consultations, and/or curatorial work to documentation to be considered for retention and promotion review.

A new document, Standards for the Associate of Fine Arts Degree in Studio Art, was developed to recognize that 50 percent of all college students in the United States attend institutions offering two-year degree programs. Bertha Gutman, Delaware County Community College, chaired the task force, whose members were: Carmina L. Cianciulli, Tyler School of Art, Temple University; Sandra Esslinger, Mt. San Antonio College; Martina Hesser, Mesa College; David Koffman, Georgia Perimeter College; and Christina McNearney, Pima Community College.

CAA’s deputy director, Michael Fahlund, announced that CAA had received 168 applications for the Professional-Development Fellowship in Visual Art and 19 for the Professional- Development in Art History. The juries will meet in December to select three visual-art fellows and two art-history fellows with awards of $5,000 each. The awardees will be honored at the Annual Conference in Los Angeles.

Patricia McDonnell, vice president for external affairs, presented the first of three reports on membership development to the board. She thanked Nia Page, director of membership, development and marketing, for the work that she and her staff carried out to identify all national and international sources of future CAA members. The board has requested a plan to increase membership revenue over the next three years, and this comprehensive first-phase report was reviewed and accepted by the board. It was also announced that two new full-time staff members have been hired: Hannah O’Reilly Malyn, development associate, and Nancy Nguyen, institutional membership assistant.

The board approved new guidelines for board liaisons to the Professional Interests, Practices, and Standards Committees. The new guidelines include acting in an advisory (without vote) capacity by attending their assigned committee meetings and reporting back to the vice president of committees, thereby bringing issues of critical importance to the vice president and the board and back to the committees from the board.

Paul Jaskot of DePaul University chaired the Task Force on the Use of Human and Animal Subjects in Art and presented its recommendations to the board. Members of the task force included Wayne Enstice, University of Cincinnati; Michael Golec, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Ellen Levy, independent artist; Marlena Novak, independent artist; Bernard Rollin, University of Colorado; and Kristine Stiles, Duke University. The task force researched and presented existing guidelines for the use of animals and humans in experiments and performance; sampled existing practices in the art world; prepared and sent a survey to members regarding attitudes about the use of animals in art; and compiled a short bibliography of ethical and artistic debate on these subjects. The task force produced a set of principles and questions that artists and other professionals in the visual arts can consult when using animals and human subjects in art. The task force suggested that another task force be established to develop formal guidelines on the use of animals in art and to develop a page on the CAA website for related resources in the future. The board accepted the recommendations of the task force, commended Paul and the task-force members for their work on this difficult subject, and decided to postpone the formation of another task force, since five new task forces were being presented at the meeting and needed prioritization by the executive director.

A resolution to establish a Task Force on the Annual Conference was presented to the board by Goodyear. The task force, approved by the board, will address electronic extensions of the conference in order to reach a larger, international membership. The vice president announced that the 2013 Annual Conference Committee has reviewed the 279 session proposals that were submitted and selected 111 for the New York conference. In addition to the 111 peer-reviewed sessions there will be 23 affiliated-society sessions, 3 committee sessions, 20 contemporary issues/studio art sessions, 8 educational and professional practices sessions, 53 historical studies sessions, and 4 Open Forms sessions.

Goodyear also announced that 150 people have applied for the Getty Foundation International Travel Grant Program. The jury will meet in November to select twenty awardees, who will receive a free CAA membership for a year, free registration, and free travel and hotel to the 2012 conference in Los Angeles. The program is intended to acclimate art historians or artists teaching art history in developing college art departments to become acquainted with the session proposal submission process, to assist them in networking with colleagues, and to address common professional issues. The project is supported by a grant from the Getty Foundation. The CAA project manager is Janet Landay.

A resolution was presented by a board member, Jean Miller of the University of North Texas, and approved by the board to establish a Task Force on Design. This group will conduct research on design programs in order to attract more designers to CAA membership. A resolution was presented by another board member, Judith Thorpe, to increase participation in CAA by its affiliated societies. The resolutions were approved with the proviso that the formation of the task forces be delayed until Downs determines when the staff support will be available to assist the task forces.

The Executive Committee approved affiliated-society status for the Diasporic Asian Art Network (DAAN).

The annual audit was presented by EisnerAmper, Accountants and Advisors. There were no recommendations, and the chief financial officer, Teresa López, was commended for her work. Copies of the audit will be made available at the Annual Members’ Business Meeting, taking place on Friday, February 24, 2012, at the CAA Annual Conference in Los Angeles; it can also be obtained directly from López. The treasurer, John Hyland Jr., presented a balanced budget. CAA’s investment manager, Domenic Colasecco from Boston Trust, presented a thorough report on the investment portfolio.

At the request of the board, Downs presented a comprehensive report on funding sources at CAA including membership (representing 42 percent of all revenue); earned revenue including grants (45 percent); private contributions (.5 percent); and investment drawdown (9.4 percent). The board will set a specific date to discuss ideas on increasing private contributions to CAA funds.

Downs commended the CAA staff for a successful move to the new office at 50 Broadway and especially thanked Fahlund, who coordinated the move; López, who managed the move’s financial aspects; and Michael Goodman, director of information technology, who oversaw the installation of the new phone system and all the office computers, copiers, and machines, and also helped make necessary changes to the website. The move will assist in a budget reduction because of a five-year lease reduction rebate provided by the City of New York through the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.

Open House

Open House at the CAA office, from left: Minerva Navarrete, Michael Fahlund, and Sydelle Zemering

As part of the meetings taking place that weekend for the three journals’ editorial boards, the Annual Conference Committee, and the full Board of Directors, the CAA staff organized an Open House for members at the organization’s new office on Saturday, October 22, 2011. Close to fifty members visited the office and met board and staff members. Two delightful visitors were Minerva Navarrete and Sydelle Zemering, former CAA staff members who regaled us with stories of their experiences at CAA during the 1950s, when the office was in a Madison Avenue townhouse. One board member, Roger Crum of the University of Dayton, introduced several members to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum and the World Trade Center construction site from the vantage point of the twentieth floor of the Club Quarters, World Trade Center hotel. (CAA belongs to the Club Quarters network in major cities around the world, and members receive discounts on room reservations.) This particular Club Quarters is on the southern edge of the World Trade Center site and has extraordinary views of the construction of the towers and the memorial’s fountains. Crum made a presentation on the concept of memorializing September 11 and the skyscraper engineering and safeguards going into the seven towers. After the Open House, several members also visited Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park, just a few blocks north. CAA’s new neighborhood is very lively, with many tourists, commemorators, construction crews, and demonstrators.