5,000 Art Group Members to Convene in Chicago : Conference: The 80-year-old College Art Assn. is no longer a small, narrowly defined society. It has doubled in size and is multicultural.

All across the country, members of the College Art Assn. are packing their bags and heading for Chicago, where the world’s largest visual art forum will convene this week. About 5,000 art historians, artists, critics and curators are expected to attend CAA’s annual meeting, Wednesday through Saturday, at the Chicago Hilton and Towers.

Part scholarly assembly, part job market, part social gathering, part city cultural tour, the annual conference is an 80-year-old institution, but it has changed dramatically in recent years. “CAA has moved from being a small, learned society that defined itself narrowly to a much larger and more inclusive organization,” association president Ruth Weisberg said. A Los Angeles-based artist and USC professor, Weisberg will end her two-year tenure this week.

Doubling its membership--to 11,500--in the last five years and gaining a multicultural complexion, CAA has also heightened its social conscience and sharpened its political edge. Annual meetings reflect that change by addressing volatile subjects and timely issues, along with fine points of art history.

“It has been fascinating for me to see everybody, including people whom one thinks of as very Establishment, become more activist,” Weisberg said in an interview in her Venice studio. “Despite our different constituencies, there’s much common ground on such issues as freedom of expression, tax laws, copyrights and artistic property around the world.”

Change was already in process four years ago, when Weisberg became vice president of the organization, but she has presided over a period of profound transformation.

“The task that I took on, was to help the organization respond to the needs of the diverse membership. We’ve made it more representative--in terms of ethnicity and geography, so that it includes the whole United States rather than just the Eastern Seaboard. The power structure had been incredibly concentrated.

“It’s been an enormous amount of work to make the association more inclusive and responsive--by changing the governance, reaching out to young members and involving more people on committees, for example--but it’s been really satisfying. I can see change, and people have let me know they feel empowered by it,” she said. “More and more people see the organization as relevant to their professional lives.”

Participants at the Chicago meeting will be offered a placement service, exhibits of teaching materials and tours of Chicago museums and architecture. A vast array of scholarly programs and panels on controversial subjects are gathered under the theme, “Encounters: Confrontations and Interchanges.”

“This is the first conference that has had an articulated theme,” Weisberg said. “We wanted to acknowledge 1492 in a way that took in very diverse viewpoints.” The cultural encounter that occurred in Columbus’ day serves as a touchstone for examining a wide variety of cultural clashes, she noted.

Art history sessions will address such topics as “New World Surrealism: The Encounter With Europe” and “Encounter or Culture Shock? Latin American Artist and the United States.” Studio sessions, primarily geared for artists, will tackle such subjects as “Asian-American Identities in Art” and “Redefining the Mainstream: Multicultural Arts Criticism.” When artists and historians get together in joint programs, they will consider “Artistic Voices of Latin America: The Aesthetics of Anti-Colonialism” and “Cultural Imperatives in the Ecological Age” among other topics.

“The program reflects a real sea change in art history,” Weisberg said. “There’s new art history and there’s old art history. Some of it is attached to personalities, some to changes in methodology. It’s actually quite exciting, but it certainly hasn’t resolved itself totally. How an organization that always divided things into periods and fields is going to address art history that’s much more involved with methodology, contextualization and all these other aspects, remains to be seen. But it’s really fascinating to try to develop a program that satisfies all these constituencies.”

Making every member feel a part of the huge organization is an ongoing challenge. But Weisberg takes special pride in one achievement: transforming CAA’s traditional convocation from a dry awards ceremony to a lively communal event. Her recipe includes addressing current issues, honoring colleagues for achievements and being unafraid to blend “the personal with the professional,” she said.

Artist James Luna, a Luiseno Indian from the La Jolla Indian Reservation in Valley Center who is known for speaking out on American Indian issues, will deliver the keynote address on Friday night at this year’s convocation. A Valentine’s Day dinner dance, featuring a performance by art-world superstar Laurie Anderson, will follow.

“We suddenly have a new tradition and it’s great,” Weisberg said. “We have created a national community, which is something we didn’t have before.”