College Art Assn. Turns to Social Issues : Art: Racism, feminism, censorship and AIDS are on the agenda of the once-staid organization’s convention in New York.

About 5,000 artists, art historians, curators, critics and other visual arts professionals from the United States and 12 foreign countries will convene this week in New York at the 78th annual conference of the College Art Assn. (CAA). Participants will bring their scholarly expertise and artistic experience to a meeting billed as “the only national forum for artists and art historians.”

What will they discuss? Obscure footnotes to the great moments of art history? The latest movements in contemporary art? To be sure. But the annual meeting has changed its tone so radically in the last few years that the 1990 event sounds more like a political-action forum than the relatively staid CAA gatherings of 10 or 20 years ago.

This year’s conference sessions, today through Saturday at the New York Hilton, will address such social and political subjects as racism, feminism, censorship and AIDS. As in the past, scholars will present research papers to their fellow art historians in darkened lecture halls, but much of the program falls squarely under the glare of current events. The portion of the program planned for artist members is called “The Millenium Approaches: Decadence or Divergence.” Panels include “The Latino Boom: Recent Concern With Latino Artists in the U.S.,” “De Facto Racism in the Visual Arts,” “The Thought Police Are Out There: Art, Censorship and the First Amendment” and “Mousetown: The Disney Effect.”

“The College Art Assn. used to be a learned society. It’s still a learned society, but it has quite a different attitude now. It has taken a position of advocacy and activism,” said Ruth Weisberg, a Los Angeles artist and USC professor who will begin a two-year term as president of the organization on Thursday. She is the fifth female president of the CAA and the third from the West Coast.

The socially oriented focus of this year’s program may appear to be an abrupt turnabout, but it has actually evolved over the past five years or more, according to CAA executive director Susan Ball. She credited UC Berkeley art historian Harvey Stahl with lobbying successfully for change at the 1985 meeting, which was held in Los Angeles. “He argued for a more inclusive approach to ensure that minority views and social concerns would be addressed, and the program really opened up,” Ball said. The association’s programs reflect recent developments in college curricula that have “broadened the net of art history beyond Western culture,” she said.

Weisberg concurred, adding that other factors also have precipitated change. “Artists became more socially conscious in the ‘70s and joined the organization in increasing numbers. At the same time, feminism raised questions about taking power over our own lives and those issues broadened to include everyone,” Weisberg said. The association’s publications also began to address social issues. One article that had a strong impact, according to Weisberg, was a paper by artist June Wayne portraying artists as classical victims.

Wayne, who lives in Los Angeles and founded the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, will be the keynote speaker at a Friday night convocation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Weisberg characterized Wayne’s upcoming speech as “a call to arms” particularly on issues of censorship and government funding of the arts.

A press release announcing Wayne’s appearance says that she will contrast Sen. Jesse Helms’ attack on the national endowments for the arts and the humanities with his support of the tobacco industry and offers a sample quote: “Compare the combined budgets of the endowments--around $325 million--to the $65-billion annual cost to the taxpayers for the medical care and loss of productivity of Americans with cigarette-related diseases. What art form kills even one person, let alone 390,000 Americans in 1988, dead from cigarette-related disease, a toll expected to be equaled or surpassed in ’89 and ‘90? Now that’s obscene.”

In addition to Wayne’s talk, the convocation will feature eight achievement awards for artists and art historians. Names of awardees are kept secret until the convocation, but art-world rumors suggest that the achievements honored this year will have a decidedly social slant.

The association currently has a membership of about 10,000 individuals and 2,000 institutions. According to a concise history released by the New York-based organization, the CAA has been “responsive to cultural and professional diversity” since it was founded in 1911, but its focus has shifted over the years.

As early as 1913, about half the members were women. In the early ‘30s, the association began supporting minority art and joined forces with the New York Federal Art Projects. But toward the end of that decade, the focus narrowed to artists and art historians engaged in college-level teaching. During the ‘50s and early ‘60s, the CAA ran a conservative program largely directed by white males “from certain prestigious, mostly Northeastern universities” and “art historians far outnumbered artists,” the history says.

Agitation for change started in the late ‘60s and began to take effect in the ‘70s. A women’s caucus was formed in 1972, a Marxist caucus was active in the late ‘70s, and a lesbian and gay caucus now schedules programs at the annual meetings, which alternate between New York and other cities across the country.

Ball and Weisberg said there has been little resistance to broadening the CAA’s constituency largely because the organization has not abandoned its insistence on serious scholarship. That scholarship currently takes a broad view of art history, however, and often looks at the interchange of art and life. This year’s art-history sessions, for example, include such topics as “Modern Art and Popular Entertainment,” “Politics and Public Art” and “The World Wars and 20th-Century Art.”

Transformation of the CAA is profound but far from final, according to the organization’s leaders. The closing line of the CAA history says, “Additional change is both inevitable and essential given our changing fields and society.”