2019 Dedalus Foundation Graduate Research Essay Prize at the Archives of American Art
Miriam Grotte-Jacobs, a doctoral candidate in the history of art at Johns Hopkins University, has been awarded the 2019 Dedalus Foundation Graduate Research Essay Prize at the Archives of American Art. The prize recognizes original research by a graduate student that engages with the holdings of the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art and focuses on studies related to painting, sculpture, and the allied arts from 1940 to the present day.
Grotte-Jacobs's essay, "Centers of Collaboration and the Rise of the Washington Color School," probes the Archives' collections to reconstruct a largely unknown history of two Washington, DC-based postwar arts organizations: the Washington Workshop for the Arts, and the Washington Institute of Contemporary Arts. Utilizing oral histories, exhibition checklists and catalogues, promotional materials, photographs, institutional records, and contemporary criticism, the author offers readers a more complex picture of the art scene in the nation's captial at midcentury.
The winner receives a $1,000 cash prize and a one-year subscription to the Archives of American Art Journal, and her essay has been forwarded to the journal's executive editor for review and possible publication.
Please send questions about the prize to AAAprize@si.edu.
From 2012-2018, this award was called the Archives of American Art Graduate Research Essay Prize and funded by the Dedalus Foundation.
Past Winners
2018
Oil Field Art and Alexandre Hogue's Land Ethic (forthcoming in fall 2020 issue of Archives of American Art Journal, vol. 59, no. 1)
By Michaela Rife, PhD candidate in art history, University of Toronto
2016
Triptychs at War: Violet Oakley’s Victory (published in spring 2018 issue of Archives of American Art Journal, vol. 57, no. 1)
By Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, PhD candidate in art history, University of Delaware
2015
“Draw a Straight Line and Follow It (Repeat)”: Walter De Maria’s Cricket Music and Ocean Music, 1964–1968
By Amanda Dalla Villa Adams, PhD candidate in art history, Virginia Commonwealth University
2014
By Christina Weyl, PhD candidate in art history, Rutgers University
2013
By Katherine Jentleson, PhD candidate in art history, Duke University
2012
By Meredith A. Brown, PhD candidate in art history, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London
By Jennifer Stettler Parsons, PhD candidate in art history, University of Virginia