September 27, 2024
The ICAA is pleased to announce this year’s winners of the Peter C. Marzio Prize for Outstanding Scholarship in Latin American and Latino Art:
Graduate Essay Prize: Nolan Boomer (Harvard University), “Against Maritime Industry: Two Utopian Visions for Las Cruces, Chile”
Boomer’s essay examines the convergence of architectural programs and urban planning schemes in early 20th century Chilean balnearios (beach towns). Their essay compares the fantastical paper architecture of the “proto avant-garde” collective Los Diez (Pedro Prado and Julio Bertrand Vidal) to Josué Smith Solar’s mostly unrealized (anti)urban plan, both for the Las Cruces balneario. Boomer argues that both schemes, though distinct, paradoxically envisioned preindustrial utopias, despite the fact that the balneario’s very existence was tied to the railway industry. Although architecture has not historically constituted a main focus of materials in the Documents Project archive, the committee states that Boomer’s creative triangulation of primary sources (largely culled from the “Critical Documents of Chilean Art” project) makes this study a compelling examination of some of lesser known subjects and themes in early 20th century Latin American art and architectural history.
Undergraduate Essay Prize: Hailey Gates (Loyola University of Chicago), “The Hands of Humanity: Marxism, Activism, and Indigenismo in the Art of Oswaldo Guayasamín”
The committee selected Gates’s essay for its rigorous engagement with Oswaldo Guayasamín’s work and the sophisticated analysis of the artist’s positionality and political commitments. Gates applies a Marxist interpretation to symbolic imagery of workers’ hands in Guayasamín’s works, including a drawing in the MFAH collection, which she examines alongside keys sources related to indigenismo by José Carlos Mariátegui in the digital archive. The committee maintained that the essay successfully achieved a difficult task: to render in a new light the work of a “canonical” artist.
These essays will be published in the 2025 issue of Working Papers, the ICAA’s forum for emerging scholarship. Congratulations to Nolan and Hailey!
