Ross Barrett awarded CAA Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize | Department of Art and Art History

Ross Barrett, Assistant Professor and David G. Frey Fellow in American Art, has been awarded the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize for his article “Rioting Refigured: George Henry Hall and the Picturing of American Political Violence” (The Art Bulletin, September 2010) by the College Art Association. The prize honors a distinguished article published in The Art Bulletin during the previous calendar year by a scholar of any nationality who is under the age of thirty-five or who has received the doctorate not more than ten years before acceptance of the article for publication.

According to the CAA, “Ross Barrett recovers the history of the artist and a landmark painting of an American laborer. Rooting his analysis in close observation, the author enlivens a work that could easily be dismissed as little more than an academic study of a male model. Calling attention to the title Hall gave his 1858 painting (The Dead Rabbit, a term New Yorkers applied to a street rowdy), to bruises on the man’s torso, and to the brick clutched in his right hand, Barrett identifies the figure as a working class, Irish immigrant. Barrett calls on an arsenal of resources—history, biography, iconography, pedagogical practices in the academy, reports and illustrations in the popular press, theories of the body and spectatorship, and ancillary images of the male athlete in mid-nineteenth-century America—to build a clear and convincing case for reading class conflict and civil disorder in this material body.”

Congratulations to Ross for receiving this prestigious award!

More information at: CAA News