The Smithsonian American Art Museum has awarded the 2018 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art to Susan Rather for her book The American School: Artists and Status in the Late Colonial and Early National Era (New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2016). Rather is a professor of art history and serves as an associate chair for the department of art and art history at the University of Texas at Austin. The jurors wrote in a joint statement: “The depth of her knowledge is evident on every page, as she explores artists’ complex negotiations of their place and purpose in the context of shifting conceptions of artistic labor.”

 

The three jurors who awarded the prize were Jennifer Greenhill, associate professor of art history at the University of Southern California; Janet Headley, professor of fine arts at Loyola University Maryland; and Akela Reason, associate professor of history at the University of Georgia. The jurors continued: “Examining the lives and experiences of canonical masters such as Benjamin West alongside understudied but important painters like William Williams, Rather establishes new fields of relation between them, offering compelling and persuasive interpretations of their works along the way. Rather’s story is, in broader terms, that of American art’s emergence.”

 

Rather will present the annual Eldredge Prize Lecture at the museum on October 9, 2018. 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

Managing Editor, American Art

Research and Scholars Center

Smithsonian American Art Museum