We’re excited to share that three titles distributed or co-published by Princeton University Press are included on shortlists for the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award and the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, both given by the College Art Association (CAA).
Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer, edited by Diana Seave Greenwald and with contributions by Makeda Best and Stephanie Sparling Williams, is a finalist for the Barr Award, which recognizes the “author or authors of an especially distinguished catalogue in the history of art.” Distributed by Princeton University Press for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer accompanied a 2023 exhibition of the same name and offers a richly illustrated exploration of the role global travel has played in Saar’s creative practice. The catalogue includes original interviews with the artist as well as a wealth of previously unpublished material—including almost thirty travel sketchbooks and two dozen finished assemblages—and has been praised as “beautiful … a covetable object in its own right (Art Newspaper).”
Barbara Chase-Riboud Monumentale: The Bronzes, published by Princeton University Press in association with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, is a finalist for the Barr Award for Smaller Museums. Edited by Christophe Cherix, Courtney J. Martin, Akili Tommasino, and Stephanie Weissberg, with contributions by Barbara Chase-Riboud, Erin Jenoa Gilbert, and Reginald Jackson, the catalogue followed a 2022-2023 retrospective of the pioneering artist at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. The catalogue charts Chase-Riboud’s career from the 1950s to the present, providing the most comprehensive account of her important body of work to date, and includes never-before-seen artworks that highlight Chase-Riboud’s groundbreaking contributions to contemporary sculpture. Also presented are nearly twenty works on paper, a selection of Chase-Riboud’s poetry, and excerpts from an interview with the artist.
The Everyday Life of Memorials by Andrew M. Shanken, published by Zone Books and distributed by Princeton University Press, is a finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, which honors “an especially distinguished book in the history of art.” The Everyday Life of Memorials is a “startling meditation on the ways monuments defy the everyday and succumb to it (Kirk Savage),” that draws from Shanken’s close historical readings to explore how memorials are created, seen or ignored, and are drawn into commemorations and political maelstroms that their original sponsors could never have imagined.
The 2024 shortlists mark the fourth year in a row that PUP published, co-published, or distributed books have been recognized by the CAA. Most recently, Sylvia Houghtling’s The Art of Cloth in Mughal India won the 2023 Morey Book Award and A Site of Struggle: American Art against Anti-Black Violence, edited by Janet Dees and co-published with the Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, was a finalist for the 2023 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award. Other finalists include: The Album of the World Emperor: Cross-Cultural Collecting and Album Making in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul by Emine Fetvaci; The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur’s Painted Lands and India’s Eighteenth Century by Deepti Khera —both shortlisted for the Morey Award—¡Printing the Revolution!: The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now, edited by E. Carmen Ramos, and Eleanor Jones Harvey’s Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture, both published in association with the Smithsonian American Art Museum and shortlisted for the Barr Award.
PUP extends our congratulations to the authors and editors whose work is celebrated with inclusion on this year’s CAA awards shortlists. We likewise extend our gratitude to our publishing partners at Zone Books, the Pulitzer Foundation, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The 2024 Award winners will be announced in January, with awards presented during the Convocation in conjunction with CAA’s annual conference in February.