November 8, 2023
The ICAA is pleased to announce the winners of the 2023 Competition for the Peter C. Marzio Award for Outstanding Research and Latin American and Latino Art. The two graduate-level winning essays will be published in a 2024 issue of Working Papers.
This year’s Graduate Essay Prize was awarded to Raquel Parrine (University of Michigan) for “Leonilson’s Queer Intimacy and Politics in the Democratic Transition (1983-1993).” The committee unanimously selected Parrine’s essay for its:
(…) “contribution to the field by countering previous interpretations of Leonilson’s practice that position his work as apolitical and its queerness as merely biographical. In contrast, this paper argues that against the backdrop of Brazil’s transition from a dictatorship to a neoliberal democracy and the context of the AIDS epidemic, the queer intimacy and desire present in Leonilson’s work critically contests hegemonic discourses such as the state’s heteronormative and patriarchal moralities through its representations of queer desire, fissure, and destabilizing “queer thinking.” The paper is complex and nuanced, while also well written and well-structured, engaging deeply with a substantial number of ICAA sources.”
The jury also elected to award an Honorable Mention to Ginevra Bria (Rice University)’s, “Against Modernist Primitivism: Cildo Meireles’s Cruzeiro do Sul (1969-70) and the ‘The Savage Slot’” for its theoretically rich analysis of a single work by Cildo Meireles and for its creative engagement with a transhistorical range of ICAA archival documents. Bria’s essay will be published alongside Parrine’s essay in Working Papers.
This year’s Undergraduate Essay Prize was awarded to Gabriela Correa Sandoval (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana-Cali)’s “América Latina volátil y violenta: un acercamiento entre Cildo Meireles y Débora Arango” for its bold and suggestive comparison of two dissimilar artistic practices that nonetheless both compellingly engaged frameworks that critiqued colonial violence in Latin American history.
Congratulations to the winners!
