Skip to content

The College Art Association has revealed the winners of its 2019 awards for distinction, with Howardena Pindell being named the 2019 Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement. Pindell, who is known best for her colorful abstractions made using a hole punch and who was profiled by ARTnews in 2018, is currently the subject of a traveling retrospective due to make a stop next month at the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Ursula von Rydingsvard was listed as the winner of this year’s Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work by the organization. A 30-work exhibition of von Rydingsvard’s sculptures, which often take the form of flowy-looking masses carefully constructed from carved cedar beams, will go on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., this March.

The organization’s Distinguished Feminist Awards this year went to artist Senga Nengudi, whose sculptures made using pantyhose allude to bodily forms, and to City University of New York art history professor Anna C. Chave, whose essays have addressed a range of topics, from early works by Pablo Picasso to Minimalism and power aesthetics.

CAA’s Award for Excellence in Diversity for 2019 went to UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center, which oversees a grant and fellowship program, a library, research endeavors, and more.

A full list of CAA’s 2019 awards for distinction follows below.

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 of Mankind(Edinburgh University Press, 2018)
Linda Kim, Race Experts: Sculpture, Anthropology, and the American Public in Malvina Hoffman’s Races(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 S. Buchberg
Jodi Hauptman

– Alex Greenberger

Back To Top