Justine Price, associate professor of art history at Canisius College, died unexpectedly of natural causes on October 24, 2011 in Buffalo, New York. She recently had been tenured and named director of the college’s art history program. Price’s knowledge and love of art were limitless, and her professional accomplishments extended beyond academia to the worlds of publishing and museums.

Beginning her art history studies at Bryn Mawr College (B.A.’92), Price earned a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. Her dissertation, supervised by Richard Shiff, was titled, “Abstraction, Expression, Kitsch: American Painting in a Critical Context, 1936-1951.” Her work on American artists was published in edited volumes and catalogues. New scholarly directions focused on contemporary Polish photography, including recent collaborations with the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and a 2009 exhibition of Polish contemporary photography at Canisius College.

Before joining the faculty at Canisius College in 2005, Price had been engaged in curatorial and publishing pursuits. From 2001 to 2008, Price was a tireless researcher for the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in New York, contributing to the catalogue raisonné under the direction of Jack Cowart, director of the Foundation. She also contributed to an exhibition on Roy Lichtenstein’s American Indian Paintings, and worked as an editor and director of photography for Bill Smith Studio in New York.

Price’s death at such an early stage in her career is an incalculable loss. A much beloved teacher at Canisius College, Price supervised dozens of undergraduate theses and internships. Students flocked to her classes and her reputation as a teacher led many on the college’s ice hockey team, the Golden Griffins, to enroll in her courses. She, in turn, found time to attend their games as one of their most devoted fans. At her memorial service at Canisius College, one of the team’s members remarked that since Price had not known much about hockey and the hockey team had not known much about art, “it proved to be a good relationship.” In the summer of 2011, Price led a group of Canisius students on a service mission to an orphanage in Zmiaca, Poland, where she made many new friends among the children.

Price leaves behind her mother, father, stepmother and younger sister as well as friends around the world who were nourished by her vitality, humor, and warmth. She also leaves a legacy and a challenge: a life well lived, in service to the things and people we love.

To wit, “Does the grammatical gender of nouns in an artist’s native language enable us to predict how those artists will personify things in their art?” co-host Mike Vuolo asks psychologist Lera Boroditsky:

Boroditsky [and Edward Segel] identified works by Italian, French, German and Spanish artists, all grammatically gendered languages, from around 1200 AD up to today. Artworks that depicted a personification of an abstract entity, things like justice, time, fame, peace, truth. Their sample size was about 800 [drawn from ARTstor] and they found that 78% of the time the gender in the artwork matched the grammatical gender of the word being personified in the artist’s native language. In other words, if in your native language death is feminine you’re far more likely to personify death as a woman.

Art and “The War on Terror”: Ten Years On
August Jordan Davis, Winchester School of Art, A.J.Davis@soton.ac.uk
March 2013 marks the tenth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (collectively identified by the Bush administration’s rubric of “the war on terror”) featured in myriad ways (both explicitly and tacitly) within contemporary art production, exhibitions, and criticism of the 2000s. This session offers a forum for a timely review of this decade of art and war (and their interpenetration). The session consists of a roundtable of artists, art historians, and critics, including Martha Rosler, Jonathan Har- ris, and Nicholas Mirzoeff, followed by papers. Papers might address the art and activism of Artists Against the War; pertinent curato- rial projects of this period (e.g., the Whitney Biennial of 2006: Day for Night); the work of “embedded” artists; popular culture’s role in shaping narratives of the wars (e.g., films including World Trade Center, Lions for Lambs, Rendition, Stop-Loss); or consider what the legacy of this recent past might mean for art today.

The “New Connoisseurship”: A Conversation among Scholars, Curators, and Conservators
Gail Feigenbaum, Getty Research Institute; and Perry Chapman, University of Delaware
A conversation on the past, present, and future of the “new connoisseurship” brings together leading figures from the academy, mu- seum, and laboratory to consider what matters about the material objects we study. The aim is to go beyond stocktaking to recuperating and repositioning the material object as subject for art-historical research. What lessons can we learn from the ever “new” and serially “scientific” connoisseurship, from Morelli’s forensics to Berenson’s reliance on photographic evidence, to today’s “technical art history”? Given the fate of the Rembrandt Research Project, as well as what scholarship has revealed about artistic practice in the workshop, can or should we aspire to establish a corpus of “authentic” or “autograph” works, or is this a chimera, the wrong question to ask? At this moment can we look squarely and constructively at connoisseurship, a word that has come to be spoken with disdain by so many schol- ars, redolent of an outmoded practice? “Close looking,” so fetishized and admired and freighted a concept, neither accounts for what is below the visible surface, nor recognizes the interventions and transformations of appearance of that surface resulting from the vicissi- tudes of time and restoration. What can be gained from research and rethinking the historical record as it becomes increasingly available in conservation archives? How can we ask better questions and benefit from our varied categories of knowledge going forward? What can or should art historians do to take advantage of—and to train a generation of “new connoisseurs” conversant in—new developments in conservation and technical studies?

The Changing Complexion of Theory
Ian Verstegen, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, ianverstegen@yahoo.com
This panel is devoted to registering the fundamentally chang- ing nature of contemporary theory. For many years, theory was influenced by post-structuralism, and the theories of Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault were largely language-based and devoted to forms of nominalism. More recently, with the sociological determinist approach of Pierre Bourdieu, the materialism of Slavoj Zizek, the realism of Jacques Deleuze (at least as imputed by Manuel de Landa), and Alain Badiou has disrupted this status quo. Today, we are more likely to take for granted the relevance of biology and the natural sciences, while the return of Marx has been more serious than countenanced by Derrida or Foucault. This panel not only seeks to trace the influence of such newer ideas but also raise the very question of theory in the humanities. Papers are sought that go beyond the exegesis of
recent theorists and discuss the relation of theory and the func- tion of relativism and objectivism in the academy.

“Psychotropic drugs and yayoi kusama. Great transnational fluxus panel.”

” ‘Aztec rulers were cool and hot’ – Emily Umberger”

“Seriously, Kincaid its only secondary to Rockwell because nostalgia? #caa2012 me thinks not!”

“Love the idea of 4-dimensional calendars integrated into the Olmec landscape.”

“So far a good first day at #CAA2012 with solid papers. But oh do I tire of academic, “This is a comment / mini-lecture, not a question” Q&As”

“At the Job Hunt 101 session. Looks like its going to be pretty packed.”

[Craven] died Saturday from an apparent heart attack while playing tennis, his family said. Craven became a professor at UNM in 1993 and was the fine arts department chair for two years. He published 10 books and more than 150 articles in scholarly journals … Craven received his distinguished professor title in 2007 while at UNM. He was fluent in four languages and traveled the world giving speeches at more than 100 universities.

Chika Okeke-Agulu writes:

I just got this news of the transition of David Craven, one of the scholars whose work I really, really admired; a pioneer Latin American art historian in many ways. He contributed immensely to the development of rigorous approaches to the art history of modernism outside of Europe. And who will forget his tour-de-force essay, “Latin American Origins of Alternative Modernism“? Any student of modernism who ignores it does so at his own intellectual peril! But come to think of it; does anyone know of any invention more stupid than Death?

the sudden and entirely unexpected death yesterday, at the age of 66, of John House, Emeritus Professor of the Institute. One of the pre-eminent scholars of nineteenth-century French art of his generation, John served The Courtauld with great distinction from his appointment in 1980 up until his retirement as the Walter H. Annenberg Professor in 2010.

This book offers an alternative to the view that Renaissance art struggled to break away from the confines and superstitions of medieval religion, but at the same time it ranges itself against the more recent tendency to let the art fall back into a long Middle Ages of ongoing religious devotion, civic ritual, and institutionally driven art. Many characteristics that we now recognize as typical of a modern conception of art–the taste for aesthetic refinement beyond the value of the materials or even the degree of technical master; the ability to see and choose from an array of styles, and the interest in correlating styles to geographical areas and historical eras; an art modeled on literature not only in the sense that it takes literary material as its content but also in the sense that it demands to be “read” using the interpretative faculties traditionally demanded by literature–seemed to many like excellent tools with which to reform religious art … For several decades, the most experimental strains in art-making joined forces with the most advanced religious thought …

Nagel’s book is ambitious. His synoptic treatment of historical and theological contexts proves forbidding for this non-specialist. But his close-up descriptions of individual works are often accessible and sometimes stunning, reminiscent of Michael Fried at his best. For example, Here is Nagel on Jan van Eyck’s “Stigmatization of Saint Francis“:

We do have the powerful sense that the sun-flushed figure of Francis is a portrait of an actual person. The effect is strange, and not simple. On the one hand, the portrait quality is of a piece with the carefully observed rocks and cityscape, or details such as the furrowing skin on Brother Leo’s temple, pushed up by his hand as his head becomes heavier with sleep. These descriptive effects offer a kind of visual traction, insisting that we have broken through any iconographic convention of the “story” of the Stigmatization, that we have somehow been transported to the actual place and are eyewitness to the event. At the same time, there is something unsettling about all this description. The figure’s head, with those full cheeks and that incipient double chin, attracts inordinate attention. It is not just a recognizably human face, someone we could know, an effect made more pointed by the fact that his hair, mussed as it is, is cut in a style fashionable in the Netherlands in the 1430s. All of this produces an effect of doubleness and dislocation, the sense that someone is “playing” Saint Francis.

(We’ll continue our reviews of the nominees shortly.)