Awards
2011 Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Ross Barrett, “Rioting Refigured: George Henry Hall and the Picturing of American Political Violence” (September 2010)
Ross Barrett (photograph by Bradley Marks)
In “Rioting Refigured: George Henry Hall and the Picturing of American Political Violence,” published in the September 2010 issue of The Art Bulletin, Ross Barrett recovers the history of the artist and a landmark painting of an American laborer. Rooting his analysis in close observation, Barrett enlivens a work that could easily be dismissed as little more than an academic study of a male model. Calling attention to the title George Henry Hall gave his 1858 painting (The Dead Rabbit, a term New Yorkers applied to a street rowdy), to bruises on the man’s torso, and to the brick clutched in his right hand, Barrett identifies the figure as a working-class Irish immigrant. Barrett calls on an arsenal of resources—history, biography, iconography, pedagogical practices in the academy, reports and illustrations in the popular press, theories of the body and spectatorship, and ancillary images of the male athlete in mid-nineteenth-century America—to build a clear and convincing case for reading class conflict and civil disorder in this material body. This is social art history at its best.
Jury: Catherine Asher, University of Minnesota, chair; Wanda Corn, Stanford University; and Sarah Blake McHam, Rutgers University.
