Dear Fellow HGSCEANs,
It has been a long time since I’ve written. It’s time for an update.
We had a great conference in Chicago last February. Our sponsored session, chaired by Marsha Morton and Pat Berman, was well-attended and offered listeners a set of four excellent and provocative papers on health, illness, and the art of medicine in the early twentieth century by Amanda Brian, Katerina Korola, Kathryn Carney, and Jonathan Odden. Jay Clarke, curator of prints and drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, hosted a special event that gave members the opportunity to examine and to discuss some of the German, Scandinavian, and Central European works on paper there. Finally, we hosted another delightful members’ dinner at Bistronomic, where I announced the winners of the annual Emerging Scholars Publication Prize. After long and lively deliberations necessitated by the quality of the large pool of submissions, the Board decided to name co-winners. The first was Tamara Golan, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, for her article, “Mit dem Kreidestift und Farben: Revolutionizing Grünewald in the German Democratic Republic,” which appeared in the Oxford Art Journal. The second was David W. Norman, a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Wisconson-Madison, for his article “A Monochrome at Ukkusissaq: Pia Arke’s Home-Rule Earthworks,” which was published by October. Finally, an honorable mention was awarded to Michelle Oing, for her article “Carnival’s unstable objects: masks as human-sculpture hybrids in Nuremberg’s Schembartlauf,” in Sculpture Journal. Even if very belatedly, I want once again publicly to congratulate all the winners of that competition, and thank everyone who submitted their work to the Board. It is always exciting to read the outstanding scholarship of our members. I am looking forward, as always, to this year’s competition!
CAA has traditionally been the main focal point of the organization’s activity, but there is no reason now for the annual conference to be the exclusive site of our activity. While we all have been happy, I think, to lessen the amount of time we need to spend on Zoom or Teams since the most dangerous months of the pandemic, we want to continue to utilize those platforms in order periodically to offer accessible events for all of our members, wherever they may live and work. This past May, for instance, Freyda Spira and Joseph Henry, curator and curator fellow at the Yale University Art Gallery, offered HGSCEA members a special online presentation of the exhibition “Munch and Kirchner: Anxiety and Expression,” which was on display there until late June. Freyda and Joseph spent well over an hour with the members who were logged in. They talked about the scholarly insights the exhibition had yielded with slides that focused on particular works in the exhibition. They gave a sense of the spatial and conceptual organization of the show with installation views. They engaged in a vigorous Q&A at the end. I want to thank them both very much for their willingness to share their work with HGSCEAns who were unable to visit the exhibition in person, and to Alison Morehead, a contributor to the exhibition’s catalogue and member of the HGSCEA Board, who initially proposed the idea for this very enjoyable event. Another exciting online curatorial talk, scheduled for late next month, is in the final stages of planning. Be on the lookout for the announcement this coming week!
So much for the year in review. Looking forward, I want to remind viewers of a few upcoming dates. The first is 15 November, which is the deadline for eligible members who are presenting papers in any session at the CAA annual conference to apply for travel stipends (https://hgscea.org/trave-stipend/). Second is the deadline for submissions to the Emerging Scholar Publication Prize. We haven’t yet determined that exact date, but it typically is in mid-December. I’ll send out more information later this fall.
I am looking forward to seeing many of you from afar at the upcoming online special event, and also at CAA’s annual conference in New York in February 2025! Our sponsored session, “The Visual Culture of Festivals in Germany, Scandinavia, and Central Europe,” is being chaired by Michelle Oing. You can see the call for papers on the CAA website (https://caa.confex.com/caa/2025/webprogrampreliminary/Session14130.html), and I encourage interested members to submit proposals by the deadline of 29 August! In addition to the session, we are at the initial stages of planning for the next members’ dinner as well as a few exciting special in-person events during the conference. Stay tuned!
That’s it for now. Please let us know about ideas for special remote and in-person events or ways that you think HGSCEA can better serve you. The Board would love to hear from you!
All best,
Jim van Dyke
HGSCEA President