Awards
2011 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Mieke Bal
Mieke Bal, A Mieke Bal Reader (2006)
The protean career of Mieke Bal, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Professor at the University of Amsterdam, has traversed many fields in the humanities. Emerging as a brilliant biblical scholar with path-breaking books that explored the gendered nature of Old Testament narratives, Bal became a star in literary criticism with the English translation of her 1977 book Narratology (1985). Ever curious and creative, she migrated her interests to art history, where she rapidly challenged established methodological conventions with Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (1991) and Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (1999)—not to mention with her well-known essay “Semiotics and Art History,” coauthored with Norman Bryson and published in The Art Bulletin (1991). Applying philosophical principles to an enterprise too often obsessed with empirical “evidence,” Bal provocatively rethinks the status of artistic authorship, the nature of the text/image relationships, the structure of text/context relationships, and the character of historical time.
A committed feminist, Bal has given voice to what art history has tended to elide and, in doing so, transformed the landscape in which contemporary art history takes place. In recent years she has again metamorphosed—this time into a filmmaker. Writing screenplays and directing, Bal has addressed such issues as the global migration of labor (in Un Trabajo Limpio in 2007, with Gary Ward) and the ever-shifting distinction between the sane and the mad (in Mère Folle in 2010, with Michelle Williams Gamaker).
The 2011 jury awards this prize to Bal not only in recognition of her intellectual and literary achievements, but also for the boundless enthusiasm, energy, warmth, and generosity that mark her engagement with scores of colleagues and students over several generations.
Jury: Keith Moxey, Barnard College, Columbia University, chair; Lane Relyea, Northwestern University; and Catherine Soussloff, University of British Columbia.
