CAA announced its 2022 Awards for Distinction this week.  Two Department of Art & Archaeology alumni earned awards for their publications and one of our faculty contributed an essay to a publication that won a prize.

Kaira Cabañas *07’s book, Immanent Vitalities: Meaning and Materiality in Modern and Contemporary Art, was honored with the Frank Jewitt Mather Award. A Barr Ferree fund recipient, Immanent Vitalities was published as part of the University of California Press’s Studies in Latin American Art series. Her book examines the shift in conceptions of art’s materiality and how contemporary art is now experienced less as an autonomous, inanimate form and more as an active material agent. It describes how such “immanent vitalities” expand the discourse of new materialisms, charting how artists distance themselves from dualisms such as mind-matter, culture-nature, human-nonhuman, and even Western–non-Western. 

Marius Hauknes *14 was awarded the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize for his article in The Art Bulletin, vol 103, no 1 (February 21): 7–36. "Painting against Time: Spectatorship and Visual Entanglement in the Anagni Crypt" examines the multisensory viewing of frescoes in the crypt of Anagni Cathedral. The mural represents medical, astrological, and cosmological theory, stressing the connectedness of all things.

Department Chair and Christopher Binyon Sarofim '86 Professor in American Art and Faculty in American Studies, Rachael DeLue contributed an essay, “‘Things Not Tangible’: Portraits, Sitters, and the Supernatural,” on portraits by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, to the catalogue for the exhibition Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art (Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2021), organized by Robert Cozzolino at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and traveling to the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio and the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. The CAA awarded the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award to Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art.