The Smithsonian American Art Museum has awarded the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art to Wendy Bellion, associate professor of American art and material culture at the University of Delaware, for her book Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (The University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2011). This groundbreaking study focuses on the work of the Peale family of artists and their Philadelphia Museum, exploring the production and reception of a range of pictorial and optical illusions encountered in public spaces. Citizen Spectator is recognized by the jurors as “an engrossing study, both for what it tells us about the history of American picturing and for its capacity to fascinate and delight its readers, who plunge along with Bellion into an image-obsessed world uncannily similar to our own.”

 

The three jurors who awarded the $3,000 prize were Julia Bryan-Wilson, associate professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of California, Berkeley; Rachael DeLue, associate professor of American art at Princeton University; and Erica Hirshler, Croll Senior Curator of American Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

 

Of the book, the jurors wrote, “A truly interdisciplinary study, drawing on history, art history, the history of science, media studies, philosophy, popular taste and political science, among other fields of inquiry, Bellion’s book serves as a model of writing about American art and visual culture that takes equally seriously problems of representation and problems of citizenship and the body politic. It thus reveals an important and prevalent aspect of Early National culture and formulates a model methodology for understanding entanglements of high and low, art and popular entertainment, for this (or any) period.”

 

Bellion will give the annual Eldredge Prize lecture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum on September 18^th, 2014. For more information about the prize, and to see a list of past winners, please visit: http://www.americanart.si.edu/research/awards/eldredge/.

 

 

Marie Ladino

Program Assistant

Research and Scholars Center

Smithsonian American Art Museum

MRC 970

PO Box 37012

Washington, DC  20013-7012

(202) 633-8337