Awards
2010 Distinguished Feminist Award
Griselda Pollock
Griselda Pollock (photograph by Hester Bloom and © 2008)
Since the 1970s, Griselda Pollock has earned a reputation as a highly influential scholar of modern and contemporary art and interdisciplinary scholarship. Additionally, she is an important pioneer working in the realm of feminist art, scholarship, and criticism, and her writings have had a major influence on feminist theory, feminist art history, and gender studies.
Pollock studied modern history at Oxford University and the history of European art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she received her doctorate in 1980. She has taught at Leeds University since 1977. In 1990 she was appointed Personal Chair in Social and Critical Histories of Art and since 2001 has served as director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory, and History. She earned international recognition with the publication of her groundbreaking 1980 monograph on Mary Cassatt and the pioneering 1981 volume Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology, which she coauthored with Roszika Parker. Pollock recently reflected in Artforum on the transformative feminist arguments for art history laid out in the book: “You have to rewrite history and expand the way you look at art—and not just search for a new Picasso. You can’t include women under the old criteria.” Throughout the last three decades Pollock has continuously examined new criteria and expanded her own thinking on the activist potential of feminist art history.
Pollock continues to be an effective and influential educator whose influence extends far beyond her classroom. Her promotion and dissemination of feminist thought has influenced and effected artists, critics, scholars, and curators of all backgrounds and practices. She has also been an effective and dedicated mentor to many emergent thinkers in the field—even those whose own work departs from, or even actively challenges, her own—as the frontiers of feminist thought continue to expand.
Jury: Lowery Stokes Sims, Museum of Arts and Design, chair; Diane Burko, professor emerita, Philadelphia Community College; and Moira Roth, Mills College.
