Awards
2010 Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
Richard Shiff, University of Texas at Austin
Richard Shiff (photograph by Bradley Marks)
In 2010 CAA is pleased to honor Richard Shiff with the Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award. Shiff holds the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art and directs the Center for the Study of Modernism at the University of Texas at Austin. His research and scholarship ranges from theory and criticism to the field of modern art from the early nineteenth century to contemporary art. Schiff received his BA from Harvard University in 1965 and his MA and PhD from Yale University, finishing in 1973. He has since received numerous grants and fellowships, including a Getty Senior Research Grant (1996–97), a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship (1985–86), a National Humanities Center fellowship (1986), and a Mellon fellowship in the humanities at the University of Pennsylvania (1979–80). His extensive publications demonstrate the breadth of his scholarship, covering topics in critical theory, modernism, and contemporary art.
Shiff’s impact on the field of art history comes not only through his many scholarly contributions to the field, but also through his extraordinary forty years of active teaching and mentorship. Students and colleagues alike praise him, describing how he teaches art history within many contexts, weaving together elements of formal analysis, connoisseurship, and theory within the larger web of human history and experience. His students are unafraid of other disciplines and learn to respect scholarship in other fields for guidance, aware that art is about society, people, their world, and all its many activities. Mature scholars who were introduced to graduate studies through his instruction resolutely testify that many of his lessons still resonate in their lives. They commend his generosity, humility, and commitment to his many students past and present. All recount stories of his considerable, even spectacular knowledge, and praise his teaching as devoid of pretentiousness or affectation of any kind. All share a passion for deep reading and critical assessment, having learned to question the contemporary assumptions that inform what they see in a picture or read in a text. Those who have witnessed his teaching extol his ability to tease ideas from a question, often, as one phrased it, to a “hilariously logical end.” This talent for merging the sometimes-uncomfortable process of learning with playfulness and adventure instills a love of discovery and thought in all who have experienced his charisma, no matter their chosen life path.
The wide range of interests of his former students reveals his intellectual generosity and scholarly achievement. Shiff has taught a diverse group that includes scholars, curators, artists, and critics, and those former students have established a striking number of careers, disciplinary fields, and approaches. His former students frequently describe his teaching as extraordinarily inspiring and giving, often characterizing his pedagogy as ongoing and occurring often outside classrooms. The conversational, playful, respectful nature of his teaching leads his students to talk about his pedagogy as a process that also extends beyond enrollment in graduate programs. Shiff modeled the pleasures of risk-taking, one writer commented, that is at the heart of teaching, scholarship, and artistic practice, and letter writers agreed on the continuously motivating example of his teaching in their own pedagogic practice. Quoting Jasper Johns on Marcel Duchamp, one writer stated, “He has changed the condition of being here.” The dossier for this award revealed a deep and significant contribution to the thinking, research, and teaching of many across the disciplines represented by CAA, and Shiff has clearly earned this honor through the substantial witness in the teaching and work of his students and colleagues.
Jury: Aimée Bessire, Maine College of Art, chair; Laurinda Dixon, Syracuse University; and Glenn Peers, University of Texas at Austin.
