Cécile Whiting Is Awarded the 21st Annual Eldredge Prize for "Pop Art in Los Angeles" |
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| Written by rubin |
| Monday, 25 May 2009 05:03 |
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 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.’” “Cécile Whiting has written a compelling book about the development of pop art in Los Angeles that contributes an important new perspective to the scholarship about American art in the mid-20th century,” said Elizabeth Broun, The Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. 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 earned a doctorate degree from Stanford University in 1986. Whiting has written several books about American art in the mid-20th century, such as “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 museum’s 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. Recent Eldredge Prize recipients include JoAnne M. Mancini (2008) for “Pre-Modernism: Art-World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory Show” (Princeton University Press, 2005) and Rebecca Zurier (2007) for “Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School” (University of California, 2006). The museum’s research programs include fellowships for pre- and postdoctoral scholars, extensive photographic collections documenting American art and artists, and unparalleled art research databases. An active publications program of books, catalogs and the journal American Art complements the museum’s exhibitions and educational programs. Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~ |
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