CAA Conversations

In the first episode of this two-part conversation, Camara Holloway and Samantha Rowe discuss the development of The Romare Bearden Catalogue Raisonné Project which was launched online in June 2025. The conversation is moderated by Diedra Harris-Kelley, co-director of the Romare Bearden Foundation. In 2020, the artist-endowed foundation formed a partnership the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, which is devoted to facilitating access to archival materials and publishing digital catalogues raisonnés. The project leveraged art historical, technological, and archival resources, including the Romare Bearden Papers. Working without the benefit of an artist inventory, Harris-Kelley, Holloway, and Rowe pooled their diverse backgrounds and expertise to recover vital information about the artist.

In this episode of the CAA Conversations, Amanda Douberley, Clarissa J. Ceglio, and Alison Paul discuss the William Benton Museum of Art at the University of Connecticut, which brings student perspectives into its galleries and fosters belonging through innovative curricular partnerships. Three recent projects undertaken by classes in UConn’s School of Fine Arts produced student-centered interpretive materials for the Benton’s exhibitions. Each interactive project connected the museum with the campus community in a different way and cultivated a sense of belonging for both students enrolled in partner courses and student visitors to the Benton. Clarissa J. Ceglio, PhD, is Associate Professor of Digital Humanities, Associate Director of Research, for Greenhouse Studios, and Associate Director of Collaborative Research for UConn’s Humanities Institute. Her research focuses on the ways in which museums, past and present, engage diverse communities in issues relevant to individual and civic thriving. She looks, too, at the affective and rhetorical uses of material, visual, and digital artifacts in constructing national and social imaginaries. Through her teaching and research, Ceglio also collaborates with museums, libraries, and communities on interdisciplinary public-facing and grant-funded projects that engage diverse audiences in topics of contemporary concern. Amanda Douberley is Curator & Academic Liaison at the William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, Storrs. She is responsible for connecting Benton’s collections and exhibitions with teaching in departments across the university. She has curated numerous exhibitions at the museum, often in collaboration with faculty and other campus partners. Douberley holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin with a focus on 20th-century American sculpture and public art. Before coming to UConn in 2018, she taught in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Alison Paul is an Associate Professor of Art and Area Coordinator for the Illustration/Animation concentration in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Connecticut. Paul creates illustrations and stop-motion animations using cut paper collage. Her work is fundamentally about storytelling to a variety of audiences. Paul’s animations have been shown in film festivals internationally, and her children’s books have received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. She has curated exhibitions at the William Benton Museum of Art in Storrs and the Roots Reading Room in Providence, RI. Professor Paul has taught at UConn since 2011.

This episode of CAA Conversations reprises themes from "Acts of Care," a CAA 112th Annual Conference panel (2024) sponsored by the Women's Caucus for Art. Moderated by Rachel Epp Buller, the discussion brings together four artists and art historians to consider how caring gestures and labors take shape across activist, academic, curatorial, and performance contexts. Rachel Epp Buller is an artist, art historian, professor, and gallery director at Bethel College. Her books include Reconciling Art and Mothering and Inappropriate Bodies: Art, Design, and Maternity (edited with Charles Reeve). Her current research addresses listening as an artistic method. She is a two-time Fulbright Scholar and the CAA liaison to the Women's Caucus for Art. Mya Dosch is Associate Professor of Art of the Americas at California State University, Sacramento. Their research focuses on art and urban space in Mexico City, from monuments to protest interventions, with a secondary research interest in art history pedagogy. Their work has appeared in Future Anterior, Sculpture Journal, and the edited volumes Teachable Monuments and Imágenes en colectivo. Elena Marchevska is Professor of Performance Studies at London South Bank University. Elena is a practitioner-researcher writing on issues of belonging, displacement, the border, and intergenerational trauma. Her artistic work explores borders and stories that emerge from living in transition. Gloria Dai is an independent curator, art critic, and graduate student in the Arts Management and Art History programs at George Mason University. Her professional work at GMU focuses on building the community through arts and culture activities and organizing educational programs. Recently, she curated the exhibit A Path to Healing & Transformation at the National Veterans Art Museum and co-curated RE(FORM)ER at Fenwick Gallery, George Mason University. Deirdre Donoghue is a visual and performance artist, practicing birth doula, and Research Associate at the Faculty of Arts at KU Leuven University in Antwerp, Belgium. Her work centers on issues of relationality and the aesthetics of care from feminist, decolonial, and posthumanist perspectives. In her artistic practice, she works across disciplines to design encounters that facilitate the production of new knowledge systems.

In episode two of this two-part conversation, interdisciplinary scholars Miranda Belarde-Lewis and Temi Odumosu continue to delve into the possibilities that emerge when arts pedagogy is integrated within the STEM-oriented setting of an information school. Belarde-Lewis and Odumosu describe their practices of teaching, curation, and research while discussing insights, methods, and core skills they have developed along the way. Together, they highlight why it's important to move beyond the siloed nature of traditional disciplinary boundaries to seek truly polyvocal contexts and collaborations. The conversation is moderated by David Strand. Miranda Belarde-Lewis (Zuni/Tlingit) is an associate professor of North American Indigenous Knowledge at the iSchool and an independent curator. Indigenous knowledge systems are central to her work as she examines the role of social media and the arts in protecting, documenting and perpetuating Native information and knowledge. Her work highlights and celebrates Native artists, their processes, and the exquisite pieces they create. She has worked with tribal, city, state and federal museums to create Native-focused educational programming, publications and art exhibitions. Belarde-Lewis holds a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Arizona, an M.A. in Museology and Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Washington. Temi Odumosu is assistant professor at the UW Information School and an independent curator and cultural heritage consultant. Drawing on her training in art history and international teaching experience in media, visual communication, and cultural studies, she takes a creative approach to mentoring information professionals. For over two decades she has been interrogating the visual politics and legacies of colonialism, activating collections as sites of memory and conscience, and collaborating with contemporary artists, designers, and curators to communicate unfinished histories more sensitively. Her current research and curatorial work centers wellbeing, considers the ethics of digitization in the age of AI and big data, and engages Black archival histories and possible futures. Odumosu is author of the award-winning book Africans in English Caricature 1769-1819: Black Jokes White Humour (2017). She holds both a Ph.D. and MPhil in Art History from the University of Cambridge (King’s College). David Strand is an editor, curator, and emerging informational professional pursuing his M.A. in Library & Information Science at the University of Washington. He currently works as the graduate research assistant for the Center for Advances in Libraries, Museums, and Archives (CALMA) at the University of Washington Information School. Strand has over a decade of experience working in the arts and museums. He previously worked at the Frye Art Museum as associate curator and prior to that as the manager of exhibitions and publications. Strand holds a B.A. in Visual Art and English-Creative Writing from Seattle University.

The Museum Worker is a subseries of CAA Conversations about pathways to careers in museums, featuring candid conversations with professionals in the field. Museum workers share how they got where they are today, what they do, and the role of diversity, equity, access, and inclusion in day-to-day work, as well as hopes for the future of the field. In this episode, Cynthia Cao, Matt Isble, and Leticia Pardo discuss the challenges facing those working in museum exhibition design and installation as well as their dedication to making museums more accessible. Cynthia Cao is an artist and freelance art installer in San Jose, California. Matt Isble is an exhibition Designer and Chief Preparator at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California as well as the founder of museumtrade.org. Leticia Pardo is the Creative Director of Exhibition Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. Samantha Hull is a member of the CAA Museum Committee and the Museum Engagement and Operations Coordinator at the de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University in California.

In this conversation, Alison McNulty and Steve Rossi touch on topics of site responsiveness, site-specificity, performance, and environmental ethics, as they relate to foundations and studio art pedagogy, as well as connections with these topics in each of their creative practices. Born into a family of makers, Steve Rossi developed an intense appreciation and respect for artistic craft and physical labor through growing up around family members making quilts, knitting blankets, repairing houses, and arranging flowers. He received his BFA from Pratt Institute and his MFA from the State University of New York at New Paltz. His work has been exhibited at the Maguire Museum, the John Michael Kohler Art Center, the Jules Collins Smith Museum of Fine Arts, the Wassaic Project, and the public art festival Art in Odd Places among many others. He has participated in artist residencies with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Vermont Studio Center, and was awarded the Sustainable Arts Foundation fellowship at Gallery Aferro. He is currently an Assistant Professor and Sculpture Program Head at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Alison McNulty is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and curator based in the Hudson Valley of New York. She is a Part-Time Assistant Professor at Parsons School of Design at the New School where she’s taught in the First Year Program since 2015, and is currently the Director of Ann Street Gallery, a contemporary art space in Newburgh, NY, a program of Safe Harbors of the Hudson, a nonprofit organization that combines supportive housing and arts. Her practice as an artist explores the layered histories and poetics of ordinary reclaimed materials, precarity in sites, species, and ecological entanglements. Her work has been presented at museums, galleries, conferences, and unconventional spaces throughout the US, Europe, and Columbia. In 2023 McNulty was awarded an Arts Mid-Hudson Individual Artist Commission and a Saltonstall Foundation Residency Fellowship. She received the 2022 Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Award and an Empowered Artist Award from Arts Mid-Hudson in support of her work with the Artist in Vacancy initiative of the Newburgh Community Landbank.

The Museum Worker is a subseries of CAA Conversations about pathways to careers in museums, featuring candid conversations with professionals in the field. Museum workers share how they got where they are today, what they do, and the role of diversity, equity, access, and inclusion in day-to-day work, as well as hopes for the future of the field. In this episode, Lisa Abia-Smith, Erica Hubbard, and Nenette Luarca-Shoaf discuss challenges facing those working in museum education, engagement, and outreach, as well as their dedication to making museums more accessible. Lisa Abia-Smith is the Director of Education at the University of Oregon's Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and Senior Instructor in the College of Design (School of Planning, Public Policy, and Management). Erica Hubbard is the Director of Chicago Programs at the Obama Foundation in Chicago. Nenette Luarca-Shoaf is the Managing Director for Learning and Engagement at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. Erica Warren is a member of CAA’s Museum Committee, former curator and currently assistant instructional professor in the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago.

Starting from a shared need to decolonize their curricula, ceramic educators Anne Drew Potter, Brendan Tang and Tasha Lewis discuss essential changes to the classroom which can help mitigate systemic concerns. They describe how acknowledging personal and historical bias can help jumpstart an ongoing conversation with students, centering student contributions to the class discourse and increasing student investment. Lewis also shares her experience employing rubric-based self-assessment in order to further these aims. Anne Drew Potter has coalesced a fascination with, adoration of, and abhorrence for the human condition into a unique sculptural language. Raised in Berkeley, California, potter has lived throughout the US and in Mexico, Germany, and Canada. She earned MFA degrees from the New York Academy of Art and Indiana University. Brendan Lee Satish Tang is a visual artist who is widely known for his ceramic work. He earned an MFA from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and he is the recipient of numerous awards and accolades, both nationally and internationally. Tasha Lewis is a sculptor of many materials. She holds a Master of Fine Art from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and a Bachelor of Arts from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Her academic study has consistently woven literature, theory and art history with her materially expansive visual art practice.