Originally released in 1973, Painters Painting is considered by some to be the definitive documentary on the New York School of painters, 1940-1970.  Director Emile de Antonio (Point of Order and Millhouse) interviews artists in their studios about their art from the periods of Abstract Expressionism, through Color Field painting to Pop Art.  Among the artists featured are Robert Rauschnberg, William de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Helen Frankenthaler, Frank Stella, Barnett Newman, Hans Hoffman, Jules Olitski, Philip Pavia, Larry Poons, Robert Motherwell, and Kenneth Noland.

The SCAH working groups for the 2013 – 2014 academic year will borrow the model of the New York Collective of Radical Educators’ Inquiry to Action Groups (ITAGs). These groups meet every week for 8 weeks and center their discussions around the attainment of a specific product, action, or goal. They are meant to be short-term, intensive, and action-oriented. During the academic year, the groups will also convene in order to present the work they have been doing and to share resources with each other.

However, the working groups are not limited to this structure. Some, such as a childcare share network, will need to be organized differently in order to accommodate the group’s needs. The groups are meant to be flexible and self-sustaining according to the desires of the participants, and will naturally fluctuate over time.

Groups will begin meeting in Fall 2013. We will soon add a contact person for each group. In the mean time, please contact us at scahgrad@gmail.com to join up with any of the following Boston-area groups:

1) Feminism and the art history survey course

This group would consider the intersection between feminism and the modern/contemporary art history survey course (or whichever course the group would like to consider). It will think about the implications of feminism for pedagogy, and will consider how feminism and feminist-oriented art practices can be integrated into the course, perhaps coming up with a model syllabus.

2) Graduate school and professional advancement

This group would research how different universities approach and accommodate life events such as childbirth among graduate students. The group would research and give visibility to the question of how these issues affect graduate students, their work timelines, their pay structures (and vise versa).

3) SCAHGrad survey

This group would find a way to visualize and disseminate the data gathered by the SCAH Quality of Life survey, which was distributed during the 2012 – 2013 academic year. The group might create infographics or other types of visual data models, or write an article to inform graduate students about aspects of the program which are not usually discussed during the application and decision process.

4) Childcare sharing

This group would be longer-term and would set up a network for sharing childcare responsibilities.

5) Work/life divide and the Humanities

This group will research the elusive problem of “work/life balance” in the academy, keeping in mind the implicit connection of this problem to the gendered distinction between public and private. It will identify the peculiar challenges in this arena faced by students and professionals in the humanities and consider how these might be addressed.

6) Work, stipends, and debt

This group would be invested in looking at the problem of debt among art history graduate students. It might examine the debt breakdown of students at various universities. It might also explore the loan and employment options available to graduate students.

7) Artists and labor

Participants in this group would educate themselves on how contemporary artists, collectives (such as Casco in Sweden) and artist organizations (such as W.A.G.E. and OWS Arts & Labor in NYC) are dealing with the intertwined issues of gender and labor, with an eye to inviting artists to speak or even initiating collaborations with artists who have similar question to ours.

8) Negotiation skills / public speaking classes

This group would research how gender informs approaches to public speaking and address and determine ways to develop skills in these area. It would create opportunities for its members and others to learn and practice public speaking or negotiation skills.

In Spring 2013, Boston-area members of the Graduate Student Advocacy Committee kicked off a project to research, discuss, and take action on issues of gender in our profession. We began in March, by leading a workshop with 21 graduate students, curators, and artists from local institutions. (Download information about the event and the questions we discussed here.) As of May 2013, we have expanded our efforts by beginning to form working groups in the Boston area around specific areas of inquiry, on which the groups will conduct research and, eventually, take action. (Read about the 2013-14 working groups and how to get involved here.)

Stay tuned for: a proposal for summer reading, and announcements about Fall events.

For more information about the syllabus-sharing project, please contact Shana Cooperstein

To get connected with either reading group, or to start your own reading group, please write scahgrad@gmail.com

Saturday, May 25, 3 p.m.
Journalist David Rieff, author of books on immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism, will detail the proposed solutions to the world food crisis, and the serious difficulties with each. Tickets are available for this session.

Sunday, May 26, 3 p.m.
Rivka Galchen’s first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, was awarded the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Norman Rush is the author of three novels, including Mating, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1991. They will discuss commonalities between literature, OCD, fortunetelling, lucid dreaming, and weather reports. Tickets are available for this session.

Monday, May 27, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Marie Lorenz is an artist whose project The Tide and Current Taxi ferries passengers through the waterways of New York. Drawing on the alien “Zone” in the Russian sci-fi film Stalker and novel Roadside Picnic, she will describe how to experience the future in the trash of the present.

Thursday, May 30, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
In 2009, Mary Mattingly launched the Waterpod project, a sustainable art-and-technology habitat. She will talk about a future where people rely on community-based networks for resource sharing, from islands made of boats and barges to flock houses to floating spheres.

Friday, May 31, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Ellen Ullman is author of Close to the Machine and The Bug, which draw on her experience as a software engineer, and the novel By Blood. She will describe a near future in which each person, place, and thing will have a unique identifier and will broadcast its own promotional message.

Saturday, June 1, 3 p.m.
Chris Csikszentmihalyi is an artist working on technologies that rebalance power between citizens, governments, and corporations. Mary “Missy” Cummings is one of the Navy’s first female fighter pilots and director of the MIT Humans and Automation Lab. Thomas Keenan is director of the Bard Human Rights Project. They will debate the future of drones. Tickets are available for this session.

Sunday, June 2, 3 p.m.
Taryn Simon draws on many disciplines to explore the limits and possibilities of photographic representation. She will discuss her projects Picture Collection and Image Atlas (with Aaron Swartz), and how they envision the history and future of the image archive. Tickets are available for this session.

CAA Annual Conference, Chicago, February 12 – 15, 2014
Deadline: May 6, 2013

“Abstraction and Anthropomorphism in Postwar and Contemporary Sculpture”

Session at the College Art Association Conference, Chicago
Chairs: Lisa Lee, University of Chicago; and Kate Nesin, Art Institute of Chicago

This panel explores the persistence of the body in abstract sculpture, whether as compositional allusion, as the phenomenological viewer, or as the indexical trace or actual presence of the artist. It also considers the ongoing revaluation of figuration and anthropomorphism in the discourse surrounding sculpture since the postwar period. Compelled by a surge in contemporary sculptural work that engages these issues, we wish to ask questions such as: Has the figural been subsumed by or instead sublimated into emphases on materiality and process? Is there room for a sculptural “body” within current discussions of objecthood and thingness, given the anthropomorphic language of agency and animation available to both? Might abstraction help artists not just to interrogate but possibly to recover the “statue” as a category of advanced sculptural practice in the present day? We welcome papers that take up ontological, perceptual, historical, and formal arguments.

Abstract, cover letter, a recent CV, and the CAA conference application form should be emailed by May 6, 2013, to lisalee1@uchicago.edu and/or katenesin@gmail.com.

CAA Call for Participation, with submission guidelines: http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2014CallforParticipation.pdf

BYO (Bring Your Own: Voices of the Contemporary at the Carpenter Center) fosters discussion and debate about pressing issues in contemporary culture across Harvard and Boston area communities by bringing to campus emerging figures in contemporary art for informal evening conversations.

The Remains of Photography,
Panel at SECAC 2013, Greensboro NC

October 30-November 2, 2013
Paper proposals deadline: April 20, 2013. Midnight, EDT

SECAC membership required at the time of acceptance. Registration fee required of all.
Full conference CFP and more information available here: http://www.secollegeart.org/

The Remains of Photography

As the traditional materials and processes of photography, including celluloid film and chemical darkroom printing, continue to be overshadowed by developments in digital photographic technology, what are we to do with the first, analog, age of the photograph? Contemporary artists have embraced digital technologies and new distribution techniques, the results of which produce both challenges to the medium’s conventions and expanded possibilities for photographic practice. Yet, innovation comes at a cost. Something of what photography was must be jettisoned, its remains strewn alongside the trail of history. This panel seeks to investigate how analog photography, now acutely visible to us in the age of its decline, can remain relevant to artists and art historians in the contemporary digital age. What lessons can we learn from it, what is worth the effort to salvage and sustain? Can established theoretical models be modified and applied to new artistic productions? Can aging technologies and techniques continue to provide platforms of artistic expression and critique? What ghosts from photography’s analog age haunt contemporary digital work? Proposals for papers from scholars and artists that address these and other topics concerning the legacy of the age of analog photography are welcome.

BYO ((Bring Your Own: Voices of the Contemporary at the Carpenter Center) fosters discussion and debate about pressing issues in contemporary culture across Harvard and Boston area communities by bringing to campus emerging figures in contemporary art for informal evening conversations.

BYO (Bring Your Own: Voices of the Contemporary at the Carpenter) fosters discussion and debate about pressing issues in contemporary culture across Harvard and Boston area communities by bringing to campus emerging figures in contemporary art for informal evening conversations.

“La Querelle des dispositifs: Raymond Bellour and Laura Mulvey on Cinema and Contemporary Art”
Thursday, March 14
4 pm
Carpenter Center Room B-04

Laura Mulvey and Raymond Bellour are two of the most prominent thinkers to ever have approached the question of cinema. In this co-presentation, each will recapitulate their positions on the cinematic medium and attend to its place in a shifting media landscape, one in which celluloid has become digital video, cinematic projection abandons the theatre for the museum, and individual spectatorial architectures change ever more rapidly. One could ask, where is cinema? By bringing the arguments that Mulvey puts forth in Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006) and Bellour in La Querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma – installations, expositions (2012) into conjunction and opposition with one another, the pair will offer, critique, and expand their individual understanding of this starkly changing medium, and perhaps bring us that much closer to an answer.

Laura Mulvey has been writing about film and film theory since the mid-1970s. She has published Visual and Other Pleasures (1989, new updated edition 2009), Fetishism and Curiosity (1996 new edition forthcoming), Citizen Kane (1996 new edition 2012), Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, she co-directed six films with Peter Wollen including Riddles of the Sphinx (1978) and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1980).  In 1994, she co-directed with artist/filmmaker Mark Lewis Disgraced Monuments (Channel 4). She is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London and Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image.

Raymond Bellour is Director of research emeritus at C.N.R.S., Paris. Bellour is interested on one side by romantic literature (the Brontës, Ecrits de jeunesse, 1972; Alexandre Dumas, Mademoiselle Guillotine, 1990), and contemporary (Henri Michaux, 1965, edition of his complete works in “La Pléïade”, vol. I, 1998, vol. II,  2001, vol. III, 2004, Lire Michaux, 2011). He is interested on the other side by cinema (Le Western, 1966, L’Analyse du film, 1979, Le Corps du cinéma. Hypnoses, émotions, animalités, 2009). The  mixtures, the passages, the mixed states of images – painting, photography, cinema, video, virtual images – as well as by the relations between words and images – capture his interest as well (the exhibition Passages de l’image, 1989 ; the volumes L’Entre-Images. Photo, cinéma, vidéo, 1990, Jean-Luc Godard: Son+Image, 1992; L’Entre-Images 2. Mots, images, 1999, La Querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma – installations, expositions, 2012 ; the exhibitions States of Images : Instants and Intervals, 2005, Thierry Kuntzel, Lumières du temps, 2006, Thierry Kunztel-Bill Viola. Deux éternités proches, 2010). Since its inception in 1991, Bellour has worked with Serge Daney to produce Trafic, the influential “revue de cinema.”

Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
Harvard University
24 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
617.495.3251

To join our mailing list, and receive info about meeting locations, please write scahgrad@gmail.com

TUESDAY, March 12 @ 8pm: After Art
Location: contact us

We’ll read and discuss David Joselit’s new book, After Art.

Note: This session is Tuesday to avoid conflicting with the Silvia Kolbowski lecture at Brandeis on Wednesday, 3/13, which members might like to attend together.

WEDNESDAY, April 17 @ 8pm: What Was Contemporary Art?
Location: contact us

We’ll read and discuss Richard Meyer’s new book, What Was Contemporary Art?

WEDNESDAY, May 15 @ 8pm: Research Workshop: “The Objects of Pedagogy” / PARTY
Location: contact us

We’ve chosen “The Objects of Pedagogy” as the theme or lens for an experimental workshop format that we hope will enable us to share, but also generate new, research.  Each participant will be asked to give a short presentation on an object (or objects) relating to their current work/research that was designed or used for teaching. Participants are encouraged to use this workshop as it will be generative to their own work. Together, we’ll consider how these objects work as objects for teaching- their functions, their ontologies, their lifespans. More info to come as we draw nearer.

Then we’ll drink to the end of another fantastic year of SCAHRG.

We hope you’ll join us. Faces new and old are always welcome!

Tessa Paneth-Pollak & Ruth Erickson,
SCAHRG Boston co-pilots

In March of 2013, Boston-area members of the Graduate Student Advocacy Committee organized a workshop with 21 grad students, curators, and artists from local institutions. You can find and download information about the event and the questions we discussed here.

Our events are designed to be replicated by other students in other places. We encourage you to use these, and all other event materials, to initiate a similar conversation(s) in your area.

If you do replicate one of our events, we would love to hear how it went. E-mail us at scahgrad@gmail.com

In Fall of 2012, Boston-area members of the Graduate Student Advocacy Committee organized a small-group conversation among ourselves and two female faculty members on women in academic careers. You can find and download information about the event and the questions we discussed here.

Our events are designed to be replicated by other students in other places. We encourage you to use these, and all our event materials, to initiate a similar conversation(s) in your area.

If you do replicate one of our events, we would love to hear how it went. E-mail us at scahgrad@gmail.com

Summer Institute in Technical Art History for Doctoral Students
The Conservation Center at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York
Course Topic: Theoretical Subjectivities and The Critical Eye
June 10-21, 2013
Applications due March 25, 2013

Technical methodologies and material analyses are becoming increasingly prevalent in the scholarship of Modern and Contemporary art. Theoretical Subjectivities is a two-week, intensive seminar that examines how technical art history might simultaneously clarify and complicate established Post-war art historical narratives. Under the direction of distinguished conservators, scholars and technical art historians, participants will consider specific artworks as case studies, examine materiality and process, and receive an introduction to imaging and analytical techniques. Participants will ascertain how these methodologies materially and theoretically inform their own diverse research interests.  This seminar will provide a forum to develop critical skills in the interpretation of object-based analyses related to the scholarship of Post-war art.

For more information and to apply, see the website.

Part of Boston University’s Institute for Philosophy & Religion 2012-2013 Lecture Series, “Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical and Theological Construals of Art”

” Art’s Abject Other? Or the New Cool?
Rethinking the Art/Craft Dichotomy ”
Larry Shiner (University of Illinois at Springfield)

Wednesday, November 28, 5 p.m.
Boston University School of Law Barristers Hall
765 Commonwealth Avenue First Floor
Campus map and directions: http://www.bu.edu/maps/?id=239

Supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities.

This event is free and open to the public.

In 2002, the American Craft Museum dropped “craft” from its name to call itself a museum of “Arts and Design,” saying craft would never escape its connection with the trivialities shown at craft fairs, but just a year later Britain’s prestigious Turner Prize for contemporary art went to the potter, Grayson Perry and recently a University of London art professor called craft “the new cool.”  During this same decade, the philosopher Dennis Dutton argued that art and craft belong to “entirely different domains” whereas Arthur Danto has claimed that thanks to the art world’s post-disciplinary pluralism the line between art and craft has been erased and that there is no longer any basis for “an invidious distinction.”  Are these people actually talking about the same thing when they use the word “craft?”  This lecture will sort out some of the different meanings and conceptual burdens borne by the idea of craft in both the studio crafts and a post-studio art world.

Dr. Shiner is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, History and Visual Arts, and has taught philosophy and cultural history at UIS since 1971.

The Boston University Department of History of Art & Architecture presents

A lecture by Dr. Stephen Little (Curator and Head of the Chinese and Korean Art Department, Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

The Strange Tale of the Richard Lane Collection

Thursday, November 29, 5:30 PM
725 Commonwealth Avenue, room 303A
Refreshments will be served!
This event is co-sponsored by the Boston University Center for the Study of Asia

This lecture introduces the enormous and largely unknown art collection of Dr. Richard Lane, the great late scholar of Ukiyo-e literature and art, who passed away in Kyoto in 2002. In 2003 the Lane Collection was acquired by the the Honolulu Academy of Arts (now re-named the Honolulu Museum of Art). Between 2003 and 2009, an international team began cataloguing the collection while it was stored in Kyoto, prior to its shipment to Honolulu in 2010. The lecture explores Lane’s history as a collector in Japan between 1952-2002, the bizarre and eclectic mix of works in the collection (roughly 10,000 scroll paintings and over 8,000 rare woodblock-illustrated books), and the collection’s eventual acquisition by the museum in Honolulu when Little was its director. While the Lane Collection comprises primarily Edo period paintings (of many schools, including Kanô, Maruyama-Shijô, Nanga, Nagasaki, Ukiyo-e, and a large number of shunga) and printed books, it also includes Chinese (Yuan through Qing) and Korean paintings, and an enormous trove of Meiji-era paintings and books.

The Great Bare Mat & Exchange is a specially commissioned program of conversations at the Gardner Museum. The program consists of a set of four ‘exchanges’ in Calderwood Hall, each involving four speakers, with Raqs Media Collective as moderators. 

Saturday the four corners of the carpet will be taken by: Cuauhtemoc Medina, Art Historian, Julie Nelson, Department Chair, Professor of Economics, College of Liberal Arts, University of Massachusetts, Boston, Bhrigupati Singh, Postdoctoral Scholar in International Studies and Anthropology, Brown University, and Henri Zerner, Professor of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University.

Tickets $5 (includes admission to the museum)

FRAMING AMERICAN ART

Reflecting on some of the unintended consequences of the successful campaign to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Belkin notes that the strategies he pursued required him to glorify both the military and American foreign policy more broadly, thus adding to the ever-increasing militarization of American culture and politics. Bring Me Men is his effort to have a countervailing effect. In it he exposes the complex contradictory masculinities required by the American military, their profound effects on American culture, and their links to empire.

Time: 12:00 – 2:00pm, for a Brown Bag Lunch

Place: Room 2115 Campus Center, UMass Boston

Space is limited, so an RSVP is REQUIRED, by 10/28 at: rsvpconsortiumevent@umb.edu

Aaron Belkin is a Associate Professor of Political Science, San Francisco State University, and Director of the Palm Center,a think-tank committed to commissioning and disseminating research in the areas of gender, sexuality, and the military.

Belkin, a scholar with more than a decade of hands-on experience in the repeal campaign, shares an insider’s perspective on the strategies that he and others used to foster the changes of mind — and heart – that led to Congressional repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” The implications of Belkin’s tactics extend far beyond DADT, and the lessons that emerge could help progressives persuade the public about the merits of other big, liberal ideas, including the benefits of higher taxes and the dangers of an excessively strong military.

Time: 4:00 – 6:00pm

Place: Ballroom A, 3rd Floor, Campus Center, UMass Boston