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Programs » Publication Grants

MEISS/MELLON AUTHOR’S BOOK AWARD

Background

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded two grants to CAA fund the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award in 2013 and 2015. The award was a temporary measure to provide financial relief to scholars in art history and visual studies who are responsible for funding the image programs in their publications. Through this grant CAA provided awards to emerging scholars for their first publication to help defray the high costs of image licensing and reproduction for monographs in art history and visual studies. Awardees were selected on the basis of the quality and demonstrated financial need of their project.

A similar award (SAH-Mellon Author Awards) for scholars publishing their first monograph on the history of the built environment is administered by the Society for Architectural Historians. For more information, please contact Beth Eifrig, SAH assistant director of programs, at beifrig@sah.org or 312-573-1365. Both the CAA and SAH awards provide leading authors with the financial resources to acquire images for scholarly publications.

The Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award supported publication of scholarly monographs, which continue to be the most highly valued demonstration of scholarly competence. Unfortunately, many authors today must provide both a fully realized text and the financial resources for its image program. The cost for image rights and licensing, especially for digital publications, can be prohibitively high.

In order to capitalize on CAA’s expertise in the funding of art publications, the guidelines, jury processes, and award procedures for the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award were similar to those currently in place for CAA’s Millard Meiss Publication Fund grant. The jury comprised distinguished mid-career or senior scholars who are members of CAA and whose specializations cover a broad range of art scholarship. The jury had discretion over the number of awardees and the size of the grants awarded to each. The grants were made directly to authors to defray the costs of image acquisitions.

Past Awardees

Below is a list of all past recipients of the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award. The grant was a temporary measure to provide financial relief to scholars in art history and visual studies who are responsible for funding the image programs in their publications.

Fall 2015

Anastasia Aukeman, Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Conner and the Rat Bastard Protective Association (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016)

Mari Dumett, Corporate Imaginations: Fluxus Strategies for Living (Oakland: University of California Press)

Namiko Kunimoto, The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017)

Miya Lippit, Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017)

Allison Morehead, Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017)

Summer 2015

Elise Archias, The Concrete Body—Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016)

Molly Brunson, Russian Realisms: Literature and Painting, 1840–1890 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016)

Jeehee Hong, Theater of the Dead: A Social Turn in Chinese Funerary Art, 1000–1400 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016)

Susan Rosenberg, Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art (1962–1987) (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2016)

Christina Bryan Rosenberger, Drawing the Line: The Early Works of Agnes Martin (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016)

Fall 2014

Amy R. Bloch, Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise: Humanism, History, and Artistic Philosophy in the Italian Renaissance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016)

Susan Cahan, Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016)

Maggie Popkin, The Architecture of the Roman Triumph: Monuments, Memory, and Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016)

Akiko Walley, Constructing the Dharma King: Hōryūji Shaka Triad and the Birth of the Prince Shōtoku Cult (Leiden: Brill, 2015)

Spring 2014

Sonal Khullar, Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930–1990 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015)

Pepper Stetler, Stop Reading! Look!: Modern Vision and the Weimar Photographic Book (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015)

Fall 2013

Sarah Hamill, David Smith in Two Dimensions: Photography and the Matter of Sculpture (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015)

Ara H. Merjian, Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Modernism, Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013)

Spring 2013

Claudia Brittenham, The Murals of Cacaxtla: The Power of Painting in Ancient Central Mexican City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015)

Chelsea Foxwell, Modern Making Japanese-Style Painting: Kano Hogai and the Search for Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015)

Jesse Locker, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Language of Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015)

Megan R. Luke, Kurt Schwitters: Space, Image, Exile (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014)

Karl Whittington, Body-Worlds: Opicinus de Canistris and the Medieval Cartographic Imagination (Toronto: Press of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2013)