CAA News
Winners of the 2008 Awards For Distinction
CAA is pleased to announce the recipients of its eleven Awards for Distinction for 2008. These annual awards honor outstanding member achievements and reaffirm CAA’s mission to encourage the highest standards of scholarship, practice, and teaching in the arts.
CAA President Nicola M. Courtright will formally recognize the honorees and present the awards at Convocation, to be held during CAA’s 96th Annual Conference on Thursday, February 21, 2008, at the Adam’s Mark Hotel in Dallas, Texas. The Annual Conference—which hosts scholarly sessions, panel discussions, career-development workshops, art exhibitions, and more—is the largest gathering of artists, art historians, students, and arts professionals in the United States.
With these awards, CAA honors the accomplishments of individual artists, art historians, authors, conservators, curators, and critics whose efforts transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large. The 2008 winners are:
Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Robert L. Herbert, Mount Holyoke College
Noted for his original readings of Impressionist painting, the deep social contextualization of art production, and a series of monographic studies of Millet, Monet, Renoir, and Seurat, Robert L. Herbert embraces the full spectrum of art history, from the cultural to the technical, from criticism to connoisseurship, from the broad to the focused, and from the decorative arts to the individual masterpiece. Herbert, who is Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Mount Holyoke, is also the honoree of the 2008 Distinguished Scholar Session at the CAA Annual Conference.
Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Sylvia Sleigh, artist
Sylvia Sleigh trained as a realist painter in Sussex, England, before emigrating to the United States in 1961. She has written of her own work: “I feel that my paintings stress the equality of men & women (women & men). To me, women were often portrayed as sex objects in humiliating poses. I wanted to give my perspective. I liked to portray both man and woman as intelligent and thoughtful people with dignity and humanism that emphasized love and joy.”
Distinguished Body of Work Award
Yoko Ono, artist
Confounding simple categorization, Yoko Ono’s work spans diverse genres and media, including conceptual art, poetry, music, and performance, and affirms the role of the imagination, encouraging viewers to use her suggestive poetry as a point of departure to envision their own versions of reality. Ultimately her body of work conveys a spirit of hopefulness and belief in the transformative power of thought for both individuals and society at large. In addition to this award, Ono will also be interviewed during the Annual Artists’ Interviews at the 2008 CAA Annual Conference.
CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
Elizabeth S. Bolman, Tyler School of Art, Temple University
Elizabeth S. Bolman is celebrated for her work on the conservation of the wall paintings in the Red Monastery, a late-antique basilica near Sohag, Egypt. She has published two scholarly articles on the results and succeeded in placing the site on the World Monuments Fund endangered list. Thanks to Bolman’s work, the ensemble of figural wall paintings and associated decorations give us a full sense of the wall painting common to late-antique churches that were obscured or lost until now.
Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
Wu Hung, University of Chicago
Wu Hung’s combination of rigorous, generous, and innovative teaching and prolific and exemplary scholarship has inspired a high-achieving generation of younger scholars, transforming the study of East Asian art. Teaching large undergraduate courses as well as graduate seminars, Wu mentors as many as fifteen graduate students at a time, efforts that earned him the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching at his university in 2007.
Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
Ronald Leax, Washington University in St. Louis
Ronald Leax is a sculptor whose teaching philosophy, creative production, work ethic, and wisdom has dramatically influenced an army of former students and colleagues. Leax sees his students as fellow artists, countering the traditional teacher/student relationship. A role model to many, he has maintained a consistent exhibition record of his own while also serving as a teacher, director of graduate studies, associate dean, and faculty chair.
Art Journal Award
Simon Leung, University of California, Irvine, for the article “The Look of Law”
Simon Leung’s interests lie in the intersections between ethics and aesthetics, critical theory, politics of sexuality and postcolonialism, public space, and theories of modernism and postmodernism. His article, which appeared in the Fall 2007 issue, is an account of a project, consisting of an exhibition, a film and video program, and a conference, that put into dialogue several contemporary art practices that address the direct and residual effects of the power of the state in relation to the force of law.
Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Fabio Barry, University of St. Andrews, for The Art Bulletin article “Walking on Water: Cosmic Floors in Antiquity and the Middle Ages”
Published in the December 2007 issue, Fabio Barry’s article is a beautifully written, at times even poetic, text with a wide cross-cultural and cross-chronological range. Approaching the marble floors of the Hagia Sophia and other churches, east and west, in their historical context, through the philological, geologic, and cosmogonic associations of their materiality, Barry helps us see the floors in an entirely new manner. This in turn enhances our understanding of these buildings as a whole and the culture that produced them.
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Elizabeth C. Mansfield, University of the South, for Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth, and Mimesis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007)
Elizabeth C. Mansfield traces development and change in the concept of beauty as outlined by Cicero in the famous and ever-provocative story of Zeuxis painting a picture of a perfect beauty by choosing the five most beautiful virgins and combining their best features into a single work. Her highly original analysis of this subject is intellectually stimulating to readers at all levels with interests ranging from archaeology to art history, from philosophy to literature, and from art criticism to gender studies.
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award
Sarah Greenough and Diane Waggoner, National Gallery of Art, for the exhibition catalogue The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, in association with Princeton University Press, 2007)
As primary authors of this volume, exhibition curators Sarah Greenough and Diane Waggoner endow these anonymous, vernacular photographs—ubiquitous and familiar personal documents—with new meaning and significance within a larger historical and aesthetic context that promises to reframe issues in the history of photography. Sarah Kennel and Matthew S. Witkovsky also contributed essays to the book. The exhibition is on view at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth during the 2008 CAA Annual Conference.
Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism
Chris Kraus, writer, filmmaker, and editor
Chris Kraus participates in discussions on contemporary art and the expansion of its terms with such books as Torpor (2006); LA Artland: Contemporary Art from Los Angeles, cowritten with Jan Tumlir and Jane McFadden (2005); and Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness (2004), as well as with numerous occasional writings, both in print and online, for such publications as Index, Artext, cmagazine, and Art in America.
Book Award Finalists
The Charles Rufus Morey Book Award Jury would like to recognize the following authors and books as finalists for the 2008 award:
- Todd Porterfield and Susan L. Siegfried, Staging Empire: Napoleon, Ingres, and David (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006)
- Ann Terry and Henry Maguire, Dynamic Splendor: The Wall Mosaics in the Cathedral of Eurfrasius at Porec (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007)
- Eric Jan Sluijter, Rembrandt and the Female Nude (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007)
The Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award Jury would like to recognize the following authors and books as finalists for the 2008 award:
- Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Dugganne, eds., Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (Williamstown: Williams College Museum of Art, in association with University of Chicago Press, 2007)
- John Oliver Hand, Catherine A. Metzger, and Ron Spronk, Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2006)
- Joseph J. Rishel, with Suzanne L. Stratton-Pruitt, The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2006)
About the Awards
The Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art is CAA’s newest award, established in 2003. It celebrates the career of an author of art criticism, art history, art biography, and/or art theory. The award is presented to an author who has demonstrated particular commitment to his or her work throughout a long career and has had an impact, nationally and internationally, on the field.
The Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement, dating from 1988, celebrates the career of an artist who has demonstrated particular commitment to his or her work through a long career and has had an impact nationally and internationally on the field.
The Distinguished Body of Work Award, first presented in 1988, is given to a living artist of national or international stature for exceptional work through recent exhibitions, presentations, or performances.
The CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation honors outstanding contributions by one or more persons who, individually or jointly, have enhanced understanding of art through the application of knowledge and experience in conservation, art history, and art. The award was inaugurated in 1990.
The Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award is presented to an individual who has been actively engaged in teaching art history for most of his or her career. Established in 1977, this award celebrates an individual who provides inspiration to a broad range of students, sets rigorous intellectual standards, and contributes to the advancement of knowledge and methodology in the discipline.
The Distinguished Teaching of Art Award, established in 1972, is presented to an individual who has been actively engaged in teaching art for most of his or her career, who has developed a distinct philosophy or technique of instruction, and has encouraged his or her students to develop their own individual abilities.
The Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism, first presented in 1963 for art journalism, is awarded to an author of art criticism that has appeared in whole or in part in North American publications.
The Art Journal Award, established in 2000, is given to the author of the most distinguished contribution (article, interview, conversation, portfolio, review, or any other text or visual project) published in CAA’s Art Journal.
The Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize, established in 1957 in memory of a founding CAA member and one of the first American art historians, is awarded for a distinguished article published in The Art Bulletin, CAA’s preeminent journal, by a scholar of any nationality who is under the age of thirty-five or who has received the doctorate no more than ten years before the acceptance of the article for publication.
About CAA
The College Art Association supports all practitioners and interpreters of visual art and culture, including artists and scholars, who join together to cultivate the ongoing understanding of art as a fundamental form of human expression. Representing the professional needs of its 16,000 individual and institutional members, CAA is committed to the highest professional and ethical standards of scholarship, creativity, connoisseurship, criticism, and teaching.
For further information on the awards, please contact Emmanuel Lemakis, CAA director of programs.