Artists Kick Conference Off With Honors

About 5,000 members of the College Art Assn. are convening at the Los Angeles Convention Center this week for their annual conference, billed as “the only national forum for the visual arts and art history.”

But before participants began presenting research papers, speaking on panels, interviewing for jobs, perusing exhibits of art books and visiting the city’s cultural attractions, they honored a few of their colleagues. Ten teachers, writers, art historians and artists were cited for distinguished achievements late Wednesday afternoon at the opening convocation of the four-day meeting.

Ruth Weisberg, an artist who is dean of the School of Fine Arts at USC and a past president of the College Art Assn., won the Distinguished Teaching of Art Award. She was praised as “a catalytic force in the lives of countless young women and men” and “an active mentor and inspirational source” to her students long after their graduation.

Clifton Olds, cited as a spellbinding lecturer on an extraordinary range of subjects at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, was presented with the association’s Award for Distinguished Teaching of Art History.

The Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism went to Mira Schor, an artist, teacher and writer who served as an essayist and editor of the New York-based journal M/E/A/N/I/N/G, published from 1986 to 1996. Known as a feminist critic, Shor was honored for shaping “a crucial counter-discourse” in the magazine and for “focusing a decisive critical eye on the contradictions and exclusions within and outside of the feminist art movement.”

Three awards were presented for published writings by art historians. Marvin Trachtenberg, who teaches at New York University’s Institute of the Arts, won the Charles Rufus Morey Award for his book “Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early Modern Florence,” which examines the influence of Florence’s major city squares on urban designers.

Helen Ibbitson Jessup and Thierry Zephir received the Alfred J. Barr Jr. Award for Museum Scholarship, for editing a collaborative project, “Sculpture of Angkor and Ancient Cambodia, Millennium of Glory.” Published in English and French, the book is said to be the most comprehensive text on Cambodian sculpture in a Western language.

The Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize for a Distinguished Article in the Art Bulletin by a Beginning Scholar in Art History went to Alfred Acres, a professor of art history at the University of Oregon. His essay, “The Columba Altarpiece and the Time of the World,” examines a painting by 15th century Flemish artist Rogier van de Weyden.

Three artists, whose awards were announced before the association’s conference, also were honored. Nam June Paik, a New York-based artist known for massive installations of television sets, won the Award for a Distinguished Body of Work. Los Angeles-based conceptualist John Baldessari received the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement. Art historian Samella Lewis, also based in Los Angeles, was given a special award by the association’s Committee on Women in the Arts.