The Smithsonian American Art Museum is pleased to announce that Cécile Whiting will receive the 2009 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art for her book “Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s” (University of California Press, 2006). Whiting’s book is being recognized for its “impeccable yet adventurous research, which invites a reconceptualization of pop art and opens a discussion about a region and a period that has needed further exploration.”

 

The three jurors who awarded the $3,000 prize were Patricia Hills, acting chair of the department of art history and professor of American art at Boston University; Joy Kasson, professor of American studies and English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and Margaretta M. Lovell, the Jay D. McEvoy Professor of the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley.

 

The jurors wrote, “Through Whiting’s analysis of the city of Los Angeles and its artists, the reader is persuaded that Los Angeles was a natural birthplace of pop art in the United States. To artists and newly arrived immigrants, Los Angeles represented the essence of the popular: movies, sun, surf, car and motorcycle culture, endless freeways and urban sprawl, billboard advertising everywhere and a relaxed lifestyle. Whiting provocatively suggests that ‘during the 1960s . . . the conception of the city pioneered by pop artists in Los Angeles began to spread, eventually characterizing cities and cultural life throughout the United States.’”

 

Whiting is chair of the department of art history and a member of the faculty in the graduate program in visual studies at the University of California, Irvine. She has written several books about American art in the mid-20th century, including “Antifascism in American Art” (1989) and “A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender and Consumer Culture” (1997), as well as numerous articles, including most recently “It’s Only a Paper Moon: The Cyborg Eye of Vija Celmins” for the spring issue of the journal American Art. Currently she is working on a project about the trans-Atlantic exchange between Los Angeles and London in the mid-20th century and another about the way in which artists, writers and filmmakers revisited World War II during the 1960s.

 

On Thursday, Dec. 3, at 4 p.m., Professor Whiting will present the annual Eldredge Prize lecture in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium in Washington D.C. Her topic will be “California War Babies: Picturing World War II in the 1960s.”

 

The Eldredge Prize, named in honor of the former director of the museum (1982-1988), is sponsored by the American Art Forum, a patrons’ support organization. This annual award, initiated in 1989, seeks to recognize originality and thoroughness of research, excellence of writing and clarity of method. Single-author, book-length publications in the field of American art history appearing within the three previous calendar years are eligible. December 1 is the deadline for 2010 nominations. For a list of past winners and more information about the prize, please visit www.americanart.si.edu/research/awards.