The Northern California Art Historians (NCAH) is a College Art Association (CAA) affiliated society. As an NCAH member, you will be able to:
Our members represent a wide range of specialties within the field of Art History. We are actively recruiting members from the rich Northern California pool of university and community college faculty and instructors, curators and museum professionals, recent Masters and Ph.D. graduates, and members of the community at large who have a passion for the arts. Membership is open to all Northern California residents with an interest in the history of art, and members are encouraged to hold CAA memberships for full participation in NCAH activities.
Membership dues are $10 per year.
Northern California Art Historians (NCAH) Affiliate Society Special Sessions
College Art Association Conference, Washington, D.C., February 3-6, 2018
Katherine Lam, California College of the Arts
Pearlie Rose S. Baluyut, State University of New York Oneonta
Local and Global Career Detours: Negotiating and Navigating the Arts through Precarious Times
When it comes to diversifying one’s professional portfolio, Giorgio Vasari — painter, architect, writer, and historian — embodies a model of a vibrant career in a time of abundance. In the late twentieth century, university career centers listed a plethora of positions available to new art graduates that utilized their skills from attention to details to writing. Those with terminal degrees follow a narrower, albeit privileged path of practice: making and/or teaching art. With the popularity of museum studies programs, curators fill positions in the art education, management, or social media departments at institutions from auction houses to arboretums. Yet the recession of the last decade, creating fierce competition and a growing contingent labor market, proves that the creative must get creative, even entrepreneurial, particularly for people of color and women in America. Moving in and out of the specialty/field, institution/enterprise, or even geography has its advantages and disadvantages. If professional biographies can serve as an analytical tool, they will reveal a variety of undertakings not dissimilar from Vasari’s, albeit without the support of the Medici. The operative word here is change, and we solicit contributions from art historians, visual artists, designers, and curators whose professional experience thus far involved major career detours, negotiating and navigating the arts through uncertain times locally and globally. The session’s focus on first-person narratives aims to empower others in such predicaments.
Contact us at ncalarthistorians@gmail.com