The Smithsonian American Art Museum announces the recipients of the Museum’s annual scholarly prizes: 

Kristina Wilson is the winner of the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art for her book The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA and the Art of Exhibition, 1925-1934 (Yale University Press, 2009).  Wilson is Associate Professor of Art History at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and her book was singled out as “a new and excellent interpretation of the success of modern art in America.”

Patricia Junker, the Ann M. Barwick Curator of American Art at the Seattle Art Museum, is recipient of the Patricia and Phillip Frost Essay Award for her article “Childe Hassam, Marsden Hartley, and the Spirit of 1916,” which appeared in the fall 2010 issue (Vol. 24, no. 3) of American Art.  The article presents a close contextual study and comparative analysis of Hassam’s impressionist paintings of American flags with Hartley’s abstractions of German military motifs exhibited in the spring of 1916 when American sentiment about World War I had reached a fever pitch.

Alex J. Taylor, a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford, England, has been awarded the 2011 Terra Foundation for American Art International Essay Prize. Taylor is being honored for his essay “Unstable Motives: Propaganda, Politics and the Late Work of Alexander Calder.”  Taylor, who is an Australian citizen, is the second winner of the prize, which recognizes excellent research and writing by a scholar in the field of American art history who is based outside the United States.

Full press releases, additional information on each of these awards and a complete list of past publication award winners can be found at americanart.si.edu/research/awards.