CAA News Today

Honorees this year include Howardena Pindell, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Anna C. Chave, Senga Nengudi, Nancy S. Steinhardt, Edward Sullivan, Molly Nesbit, and many other scholars, artists, authors, and teachers

CAA Annual Conference, New York City, February 13-16, 2019

CAA is pleased to announce the recipients and finalists of the 2019 Awards for Distinction. Awardees this year were chosen from a pool of scholars, artists, teachers, and authors who are constantly pushing our understanding of the visual arts. The CAA Awards for Distinction are presented during Convocation at the CAA Annual Conference on Wednesday, February 13 at 6:00 PM at the New York Hilton Midtown. The CAA Annual Conference runs from February 13-16, 2019.

Among the winners this year is Howardena Pindell, recipient of the 2019 Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement. Pindell studied painting at Boston University and received her MFA from Yale University. Since 1979, she has been a professor of painting and conceptual drawing at SUNY Stony Brook University. Pindell is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant, and a Studio Museum in Harlem Artist Award. In 1990, CAA awarded her the Most Distinguished Body of Work or Performance Award. Pindell’s work is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, among many others.

Ursula von Rydingsvard is the winner of the 2019 Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work. Von Rydingsvard is best known for her unmistakable towering sculptures with mountainous topographic surfaces created from carved cedar wood. She has also explored other mediums in her work, such as bronze, paper, and resin. Over an artistic career spanning more than forty years, Von Rydingsvard’s work has been in solo exhibitions at Galerie Lelong, SCAD Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Dieu Donné. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions and is in the permanent collections of more than thirty museums. She is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center, the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant, and an Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other awards and recognitions. A major exhibition of her work, Ursula von Rydingsvard: The Contour of Feeling, was presented at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia (April 27 – August 26, 2018) and will travel to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in March 2019.

The Award for Excellence in Diversity recognizes the work of an individual or organization in the visual arts whose commitment to inclusion in scholarship or practice stands out as groundbreaking and unifying. The winner of the Award for Excellence in Diversity for 2019 is the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA. The work of the center entails five distinct areas: a library, an academic press, collaborative research projects, public programs and community partnerships, and a grant and fellowship program.

Each year, CAA awards two Distinguished Feminist Awards, one to a visual artist and one to a scholar. The two winners for 2019 are Senga Nengudi for visual artist, and Anna C. Chave for scholar.

The full list of 2019 CAA Awards for Distinction Recipients

Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work

Ursula von Rydingsvard

Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement

Howardena Pindell

Distinguished Teaching of Art Award

Susanne Slavick

Distinguished Feminist Award—Visual Artist

Senga Nengudi

Distinguished Feminist Award—Scholar

Anna C. Chave

Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award

Nancy S. Steinhardt

Edward Sullivan

Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art

Molly Nesbit

Award for Excellence in Diversity

Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC)

Charles Rufus Morey Book Award

Zeynep Çelik Alexander
Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design
University of Chicago Press, 2017

Finalists

Olga Bush
Reframing the Alhambra: Architecture, Poetry, Textiles and Court Ceremonial 
Edinburgh University Press, 2018

Linda Kim
Race Experts: Sculpture, Anthropology, and the American Public in Malvina Hoffman’s Races of Mankind
University of Nebraska Press, 2018

Carolyn Yerkes
Drawing after Architecture
Princeton University Press, 2017

Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award

Wendy Kaplan
Design in California and Mexico 1915–1985: Found in Translation
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2017

Finalists

Jeffrey Spier and Timothy Potts
Beyond the Nile: Egypt and the Classical World
J. Paul Getty Trust, 2018

Christophe Cherix
Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions 1965–2016
Museum of Modern Art, 2018

Naoko Takahatake and Jonathan Bober
The Chiaroscuro Woodcut in Renaissance Italy
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2018

Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Andrea Giunta, and Rodrigo Alonso
Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985
Hammer Museum, University of California, 2017

Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions

Andrew C. Weislogel and Andaleeb Badiee Banta
Lines of Inquiry: Learning from Rembrandt’s Etchings
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 2017

Finalists

Patrick A. Polk, Roberto Conduru, Sabrina Gledhill, and Randal Johnson
Axé Bahia: The Power of Art in an Afro-Brazilian Metropolis
Fowler Museum at UCLA, 2018

Antonio Sergio Bessa and Jessamyn Fiore
Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect
Bronx Museum of Art, 2017

Mark Sloan
Fahamu Pecou: Visible Man
Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, 2016

Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism

Julia Bryan-Wilson
Fray: Art + Textile Politics
University of Chicago Press, 2017

Rebecca M. Schreiber
The Undocumented Everyday: Migrant Lives and the Politics of Visibility
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

Art Journal Award

Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra
“Beyond Evil: Politics, Ethics, and Religion in Léon Ferrari’s Illustrated Nunca más”
Art Journal, Fall 2018

Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize

Nathan T. Arrington
“Touch and Remembrance in Greek Funerary Art”
The Art Bulletin, September 2018

CAA/AIC Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation

Karl D. Buchberg

Jodi Hauptman

Learn about the juries that select the recipients of the CAA Awards for Distinction.

Contacts

Nick Obourn, Director of Communications, Marketing, and Membership
nobourn@collegeart.org, 212-392-4401

Joelle Te Paske, Media and Content Manager
jtepaske@collegeart.org, 212-392-4426

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