October 26, 2022
The ICAA is pleased to announce the winners of the 2022 competition for the Peter C. Marzio Award for Outstanding Research in Latin American and Latino Art. Named for the late, longtime director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), who supported the establishment of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA) in 2001, the award recognizes emerging scholarship that makes innovative use of primary source materials and critical documents in the ICAA Digital Archive. The two winning essays, one graduate-level and one undergraduate-level, will be published in a 2023 issue of Working Papers.
This year’s Graduate Prize was awarded to Oscar Antonio Acosta Torres (El Colegio de México)’s for the essay “David Alfaro Siqueiros y la Confederación de Trabajadores Intelectuales de Uruguay. Redes intelectuales, militancia y publicaciones, 1933-1934.” The award committee called Acosta Torres’s text an “outstanding example of a type of art history that has been particularly valued in studies of 20th-century Latin American and European art: a reception history carried out via analysis of texts, images, and their circulation in print and the postal service, to chart the impacts of artists whose practices were themselves characterized by mobility.” The committee added that the essay made exceptional use of the ICAA Digital Archive’s holdings related to Siqueiros’s international reach: “While the literature on Siqueiros is relatively vast, the author convincingly argues that the artist’s time in Uruguay (Montevideo, 1933) has been notably understudied, and addresses this gap effectively via an effective analysis of ICAA documents from Mexico, Argentina, and Uruguay. The ICAA Digital Archive makes it possible for the author to triangulate between sources in the three countries.”
The Undergraduate Prize was given to Ana Sofía Camacho Sentmat (Tulane University) for the essay “‘Les sud-américains ont pris Paris’: Kinetic Art and South American Artistic Presence in France in the 1950s-70s.” Camacho Sentmat’s essay is an excerpt from a senior honors thesis, which the committee considered an excellent piece of undergraduate writing that undertakes “a sophisticated analysis of two ICAA documents—a 1965 newspaper article by Marta Traba, and one of Alejandro Otero’s published responses—to shed light on the question of Latin American, local, national identities in the Caracas art world ca. 1965.”
This year the award committee also singled out two essays in the graduate essay category for their “considerable promise—particularly in their implications for innovative disciplinary methodologies” and awarded them Honorable Mentions:
Ayelen Pagnanelli (Universidad Nacional de San Martín), “Silvia Torras’s Anger Dolls: A Feminist Critique of Arte Destructivo,” which “carries out a close reading of Argentine newspaper clippings from the ICAA Digital Archive to argue for Torras’s systematic omission from histories of Arte Destructivo on the basis of her gender.”
Juan Carlos Buenrostro García (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)’s essay “Tuxamee: Historia de un cuerpo a fragmentos,” was acknowledged for its creative and innovative writing style and for modeling “how ICAA documents offer scholars a robust open-access trove of the key historical and theoretical texts of Chicana/o art; this provides the foundation for an analysis of the intermedia practice of a contemporary artist from León, Guanajuato.”
Congratulations to the winners!
