Awards

2007 Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award

Wanda M. Corn, Stanford University; and Alan Wallach, College of William and Mary

Wanda M. Corn (photograph by Brigitte Carnochan)

CAA is pleased to honor two esteemed specialists in American art, Wanda M. Corn and Alan Wallach, with the 2007 Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award. The coincidence of their nominations provides an opportunity for CAA to celebrate the breadth and depth of teaching in this still-young field. As Corn observed in her oft-cited survey of the state of American art history (The Art Bulletin, June 1988), she and Wallach belong to only the second generation of academically trained Americanists. Each has played a pivotal role in inspiring the next generations.

Wanda Corn is Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor of Art History at Stanford University, where she arrived in 1980 (after an early curatorial career) as the university’s first appointment in American art. Her major study, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–35, published by the University of California Press in 1999, explores the workings of cultural nationalism within trans-Atlantic modernism. Awarded the 2000 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art, the book was one of the most anticipated publications in the field and has provided a model for the teaching and scholarship of others. Even her brief essays, such as the catalogue for the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum’s exhibition, The Color of Mood: American Tonalism, 1880–1910 (1972), remain canonical pieces decades after they were produced.

Much of Corn’s career has been devoted to community building, including the transformation of Stanford into a center for the study and teaching of American art and material culture. A dynamic lecturer, she has mentored numerous undergraduate and graduate students who have gone on to successful careers as professors and curators. Her former students, working on topics as varied as Abstract Expressionism, colonial portraiture, Native American textiles, and performance art, hold tenured and tenure-track positions at, among other institutions, Barnard College, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California, Irvine, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Texas at Austin. To one of her students, “what makes Wanda Corn one of the most popular teachers at Stanford is more than her knowledge alone, and it’s even more than her outstanding lectures; it’s her ability to transform her knowledge into dialogue with and among students.” To create and sustain community through her teaching is Corn’s abiding gift.

Allan Wallach (photograph by Phyllis Rosenzweig)

Alan Wallach has been Ralph H. Wark Professor of Art and Art History and American Studies at the College of William and Mary since 1989. His career has focused equally on undergraduate and graduate education, beginning with his appointments at Rutgers University in 1967–70 and 1971–73; Kean College (now Kean University) of New Jersey in 1974–88; and the University of Michigan in 1989. Like Corn, Wallach brings the classroom clearly and unswervingly into his scholarship. An early advocate of the New Art History and critical museum studies, he is the coauthor, with Carol Duncan, of the groundbreaking essays “The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis” (Marxist Perspectives, 1978) and “The Universal Survey Museum” ( Art History, 1980), and the author of the much discussed, assigned, and anthologized “Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke” (1990). This last essay is exemplary both for its revisionist treatment of a canonical work (Thomas Cole’s Oxbow) and, like all his scholarship, as a paradigm-setting statement of methodology.

Wallach’s teaching is eloquent and passionate, rigorous and critical. His students have hailed from varied backgrounds and, as scholars, populate academic and curatorial programs in English, art history, American studies, museum studies, and visual culture. Described by all as an exceptionally generous teacher, Wallach has served as mentor or outside advisor to many students at institutions where there was no Americanist. In the classroom his approach says, “Let me show you something fascinating,” and his material and manner fulfill that promise. A teacher of high and exacting standards, Wallach inspired one former student to observe, “Part of his pedagogical charm is that he does not suffer fools, but remains patient with the naïve. He admonishes the former and gently coaxes the latter; in my case, both were necessary and appreciated.” In striking this balance, Wallach extends, insists on, and assures the opportunity for learning.

Corn and Wallach have revolutionized the teaching of American art and museum studies as they have opened these fields to new areas of inquiry through dazzling blends of social history, anthropology, and formal visual analysis. Their contributions in the classroom and through scholarship are everything our profession values in the best of welcoming, advanced, probing, and influential pedagogy.

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