CAA publications, programs and grants
CAA publishes several academic journals, including The Art Bulletin, one of the foremost journals for art historians in English, and Art Journal , a quarterly journal devoted to twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and visual culture. The association also publishes two digital publications, caa.reviews, which is devoted to the peer review of new books and exhibitions relevant to the fields of art, art history, and architecture, and Art Journal Open, a forum for the visual arts that presents artists’ projects, conversations and interviews, and scholarly essays from across the cultural field.
CAA runs several programs to support and address issues in the visual arts field. These include the CAA-Getty International Program, [10] Fair Use, [11] CAA Conversations Podcast series, [12] and RAAMP, Resources for Academic Art Museum Professionals. [13]
CAA offers several grants to professionals in the field:
- CAA Getty International Program [10]
- Millard Meiss Publication Fund [14]
- Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant [15]
- Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant [16]
- Art History Special Exhibition Travel Fund [17]
- CAA Travel Grant in Memory of Archibald Cason Edwards, Senior, and Sarah Stanley Gordon Edwards [18]
- Graduate Student Conference Travel Grants [19]
- International Member Conference Travel Grants [20]
- Samuel H. Kress Foundation CAA Conference Travel Fellowship for International Scholars [21]
- CAA Professional Development Fellowships for Graduate Students [22]
The CAA Annual Conference
CAA holds its Annual Conference in February every year. The conference moves to different cities each year, returning to New York every other year. Cities that have hosted the CAA Annual Conference include, Houston, Seattle, Boston, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago, and other major American cities. Between four and six thousand members attend each year, depending on the location. The convention is the largest and most important of the year for makers and interpreters of visual art and visual culture. The conference typically includes more than 300 panels and sessions examining a wide array of topics and issues in the art world. The conference often offers free admission and behind the scenes tours of local cultural institutions and museums and several parties and receptions for attendees. [23] [24]
Highlights of the Annual Conference are the keynote address and Convocation Ceremony, which features the presentation of the Awards for Distinction. [25] Previous keynote address speakers have included Charles Gaines, Mary Miller, Tania Bruguera, Dave Hickey, Jessica Stockholder, Robert Storr, Rocco Landesman, and many other noted academics, artists, curators, and art critics.
Each year, CAA honors a scholar in the field with the Distinguished Scholar Session. Previous awardees have included Wu Hung, Kaja Silverman, Richard J. Powell, Robert Farris Thompson, Rosalind Krauss, Linda Nochlin, James Cahill, and others. [26]
The Annual Conference also features the Annual Distinguished Artist Interviews. The Annual Distinguished Artist Interviews comprise two back to back conversations between artists and an individual familiar with their work. Recent Artist Interviews have included Kellie Jones, [8] Catherine Opie with Helen Molesworth, Judy Baca with Anna Indych-López, Coco Fusco with Steven Nelson, Katherine Bradford with Judith Bernstein, Joyce Scott with George Ciscle, and Rick Lowe with LaToya Ruby Frazier, among many others. [27]
Lowery Stokes Sims is an American art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art known for her expertise in the work of African, African American, Latinx, Native and Asian American artists such as Wifredo Lam, Fritz Scholder, Romare Bearden, Joyce J. Scott and others. She served on the curatorial staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museum of Arts and Design. She has frequently served as a guest curator, lectured internationally and published extensively, and has received many public appointments. Sims was featured in the 2010 documentary film !Women Art Revolution.
Donald Kuspit is an American art critic and poet, known for his practice of psychoanalytic art criticism. He has published on the subjects of avant-garde aesthetics, postmodernism, modern art, and conceptual art.
Samella Sanders Lewis was an American visual artist and art historian. She worked primarily as a printmaker and painter. She has been called the "Godmother of African American Art". She received Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association (CAA) in 2021.
“Art is not a luxury as many people think – it is a necessity. It documents history – it helps educate people and stores knowledge for generations to come.” – Dr. Samella Lewis
Ursula von Rydingsvard is a sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for creating large-scale works influenced by nature, primarily using cedar and other forms of timber.
Lucy Rowland Lippard is an American writer, art critic, activist, and curator. Lippard was among the first writers to argue for the "dematerialization" at work in conceptual art and was an early champion of feminist art. She is the author of 26 books on contemporary art and has received numerous awards and accolades from literary critics and art associations.
The Visual Resources Association is an international organization for image media professionals.
Art Journal, established in New York City in 1941, is a publication of the College Art Association of America. As a peer-reviewed, professionally moderated scholarly journal, its concentrations include: art practice, art production, art making, art history, visual studies, art theory, and art criticism. The main contributors are artists, scholars, critics, art historians, and other writers in the arts. It is both national and international in scope, and in recent years focusing on 20th- and 21st-century art, although for its first decades it concentrated more on earlier time periods in art history.
The American Federation of Arts (AFA) is a nonprofit organization that creates art exhibitions for presentation in museums around the world, publishes exhibition catalogues, and develops education programs. The organization’s founding in 1909 was endorsed by Theodore Roosevelt and spearheaded by Secretary of State Elihu Root and eminent art patrons and artists of the day. The AFA’s mission is to enrich the public’s experience and understanding of the visual arts, and this is accomplished through its exhibitions, catalogues, and public programs. To date, the AFA has organized or circulated approximately 3,000 exhibitions that have been viewed by more than 10 million people in museums in every state, as well as in Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Elaine A. King is a curator, critic, professor, and editor.
Suzanne Preston Blier is an American art historian who currently serves as Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University with appointments in both the History of Art and Architecture department and the department of African and African American studies. She is also a member of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and a faculty associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Her work focuses primarily on African art, architecture, and culture.
Ray L. Burggraf is an artist, color theorist, and Emeritus Professor of Fine Arts at Florida State University. According to Roald Nasgaard, Burggraf's paintings exhibit "visual excitation...pulsating patterns, vibrating after-images, weird illusionistic spaces, multifocal opticality, executed with knife-edge precision...crisp and elegant and radiant with light." From a historical perspective, Burggraf's work is "nature evocative...reach[ing] back to the modernist landscape tradition of the Impressionists and of Neo-impressionists like Seurat, who, in the late-nineteenth century immersed themselves in the color theories of Chevreul and Rood".
Christopher Knight is an American art critic for the Los Angeles Times. He was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, after being a three-time finalist. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Art Journalism from the Dorothy and Leo Rabkin Foundation in 2020, and the 1997 Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism from the College Art Association, the first journalist to win the award in more than 25 years.
Jacki Apple (1941-2022) was an American artist, writer, composer, producer and educator based in New York and Los Angeles. She worked in multiple disciplines such as performance art and installation art. As well as art making, Apple was also a writer, penning around 200 reviews and critical essays on topics such as performance art, media arts, installation art and dance. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Performing Arts Journal, Public Art Review and The Drama Review.
Carol Armstrong is an American professor, art historian, art critic, and photographer. Armstrong teaches and writes about 19th-century French art, the history of photography, the history and practice of art criticism, feminist theory and women and gender representation in visual culture.
Richard Carlyon (1930–2006) was an American artist who lived in Richmond, Virginia and taught at Virginia Commonwealth University's School of the Arts, where he became a professor emeritus.
Robert Swain is an American artist working in the field of Color Sensation.
Marjorie Elizabeth Cropper is a British-born art historian with a special interest in Italian and French Renaissance and Baroque art and art literature. Dean of the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) since December 2000, she previously held positions as Professor of Art History at Johns Hopkins University and director of the university’s Charles S. Singleton Center for Italian Studies at Villa Spelman in Florence.
Carol C. Mattusch is the Mathay Professor of Art History at George Mason University. She is a specialist in Greek, Roman and 18th century art.
Helen Hills is a British art historian and academic. She was appointed Anniversary Reader of Art History at the University of York in 2005 and promoted to Professor of History of Art in 2008, making her the first woman professor of Art History there.
Nicole R. Fleetwood is an American academic, curator, police abolitionist, prison abolitionist, and author. She is the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Previously, Fleetwood was Professor of American Studies and Art History at Rutgers University.
