Awards
2007 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
Teresa A. Carbone with Barbara Dayer Gallati and Linda S. Ferber, American Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum: Artists Born by 1876
Teresa A. Carbone with Barbara Dayer Gallati and Linda S. Ferber, American Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum: Artists Born by 1876 (2006)
The Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for 2007 goes to American Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum: Artists Born by 1876 (New York: Brooklyn Museum, in association with D. Giles, 2006), by Teresa A. Carbone with Barbara Dayer Gallati and Linda S. Ferber. Destined to become a classic reference work, this beautifully produced two-volume set represents a permanent record of a portion of the Brooklyn Museum’s rich holdings in American art. The result of twenty years’ labor carried out by a team of three curators, American Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum includes a detailed history of the museum and its American art collection as well as a catalogue comprising 340 artists and nearly seven hundred paintings. The catalogue’s exhaustively researched biographical entries are broadly conceived and of general interest to scholars and students, while the painting entries effectively balance social and cultural history, art history, knowledge about related works, and technical observations.
At a time when museums are increasingly putting resources into splashy blockbuster exhibitions, American Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum serves as a powerful reminder of the centrality of the permanent collection to the museum’s mission and of the need for rigorous and necessarily time-consuming research to deepen public and scholarly understanding of its collections. Our congratulations go to Carbone, Gallati, and Ferber, and to the Brooklyn Museum and D. Giles Limited, for their exemplary contribution to art-historical scholarship.
Jury: Alan Wallach, College of William and Mary, chair; Elizabeth Childs, Washington University in St. Louis; Beth Holman, Center for Medieval Studies, Fordham University; Susan Huntington, Ohio State University.