2015 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center Book Prize
One of the pleasures of my position here at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum is to present awards or fellowships to deserving individuals. We’ve offered over 80 academic and museum studies fellowships to individuals, as well as two Book Prizes. I hope that you will join us on May 17th, 2016 at 6:00 p.m. in the Education Annex to see Marcia Brennan receive her award for the 2015 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center Book Prize. The award is for her publication, Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, c2001). Marcia is the 3rd recipient of the Book Prize, which is given every three years, to an innovative publication that stands the test of time and influences and impacts scholarship in the years that follow.
At the awards ceremony, Marcia will receive her prize and a commemorative monotype by the New Mexico artist Neal Ambrose-Smith. Neal will be in attendance that evening to personally give her this artwork. Neal is a painter, sculptor, printmaker and educator living in New Mexico. His work is included in many collections including the New York Public Library, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and Hongik University in Seoul, Korea. We are so pleased that he take part in the awards ceremony and that Marcia will be receiving this special work of art.
Afterwards, Marcia will be in conversation with Kathleen Pyne and discuss the book which explores how Alfred Stieglitz and the critics from the 1920s created an ideological identity for the “Stieglitz Circle” group of artists. Marcia will reflect on her book and some of the larger questions and issues it has raised. Audience members will be in for a treat as she has drafted a short, original essay for this occasion which she will share with us. Marcia utilized correspondence in her research, including the papers of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, Henry McBride, Charles Demuth, Paul Rosenfeld, Arthur Dove, Waldo Frank, and Marsden Hartley.
Marcia combines art and cultural history with gender studies to discuss modernist criticism. Her book was chosen by a jury of distinguished and noted art historians – Patricia Hill, Kathleen Pyne, and Sylvia Yount – who spent the summer of 2015 reading and evaluating the books nominated for the 2015 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Book Prize. They chose Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics as the winner for its outstanding research and impact on the field.
Marcia Brennan is Professor of Art History and Religious Studies at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Art and Architecture from Brown University. Her research engages modern and contemporary art history and museum studies; mysticism and comparative religion; and the medical humanities. Since early 2009, Brennan has served as an Artist-In-Residence in the Department of Palliative Medicine at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Her experiences in this clinical setting represent the subject of her books The Heart of the Hereafter: Love Stories from the End of Life (John Hunt Books, U.K., 2014), Words Beyond Words: Finding Language at the End of Life (forthcoming from Intellect Books, U.K., 2016), and her current book project A Rose From Two Gardens: Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and Images of the End of Life (forthcoming from the University of California Medical Humanities Press).
For more information about the prize, please select this link. See you on Tuesday, May 17th at 6:00 p.m. at the awards ceremony and conversation!
This post was written by Eumie Imm Stroukoff, Emily Fisher Landau Director of the Research Center.
Featured image: Neal Ambrose-Smith, “Laid on with a Trowel,” Monotype, acrylic, 2016, 30 x 22 in.
