The College Art Association (CAA) has awarded Professor Monica Bravo the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize for her “Mineral Analogs: Carleton Watkins’s Photographs and the Gold Standard,” which appeared in The Art Bulletin, Fall 2024.

From the abstract: “A close reading of Carleton Watkins’s photograph Nugget of Gold—attending to its subject matter, production, display at a world’s fair, reproduction and circulation, and especially its minerality—reveals a profound identification in late nineteenth-century society in the United States between photography and mining. Representing a fusion of nature and culture, photography has been likened to currency almost from its inception. Yet the material and, specifically, the mineral limitations of this economy have been overlooked, though they establish a direct parallel with another gold-dependent commodity: money. Both were historically restricted by their analog quality; their proliferation, and hence their value, was limited by extractive labor and material substance.”

Bravo delivered the A&A Reunions Lecture on this topic in 2024.

Each year at the Annual Conference, CAA honors outstanding achievements in visual arts and art scholarship during Convocation by announcing the annual Awards for Distinction recipients. 

The Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize was established in 1957, in memory of a founding member of the CAA and one of the first American scholars of the discipline. This award seeks to encourage high scholarly standards among younger members of the profession. The prize is awarded for a distinguished article published in The Art Bulletin during the previous year by a scholar who is under the age of thirty-five or who has received the doctorate not more than ten years before acceptance of the article for publication.