2019
Eugenia Afinoguénova
Winner

The Prado: Spanish Culture and Leisure, 1819-1939
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018
The Prado takes an unconventional look at Spain’s most iconic art museum. Focusing on the Prado as a space of urban leisure, Eugenia Afinoguénova highlights the political history of the museum’s relation to the monarchy, the church, and the liberal nation-state, as well as its role as an extension of Madrid’s social center, the Prado Promenade.
Rather than assume that visitors agreed about how to interpret the museum, Afinoguénova approaches the history of the Prado as a debate about culture and leisure. Just like those crossing the museum’s threshold, who did not always trace a firm line between what they could see or do inside the building and outside on the Paseo del Prado, the participants in this debate—journalists, politicians, museum directors, art critics—considered museum-going to be part of a broader discussion concerning citizenship and voting rights, the rise of Madrid to the status of a modern capital, and the growing gap between town and country.
Based on extensive archival research on the museum’s displays and policies as well as the attitudes of visitors and city-dwellers, The Prado unfolds the museum’s many political and propagandistic roles and examines its complicated history as a monument to the tension between culture and leisure. Art historians and scholars of museum studies and visual and leisure culture will find this foundational study of the Prado invaluable.
Olga Bush
Honorable mention

Reframing the Alhambra: Architecture, Poetry, Textiles and Court Ceremonial
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018
An interdisciplinary study of one of the most important monuments in Islamic art.
The Nasrid builders of the Alhambra —the best-preserved medieval Muslim palatial city— were so exacting that some of their work could not be fully explained until the invention of fractal geometry. Their design principles have been obscured, however, by the loss of all archival material.
This book resolves that impasse by investigating the neglected, interdisciplinary contexts of medieval poetics and optics and through comparative study of Islamic court ceremonials. This reframing enables the reconstruction of the underlying, integrated aesthetic, focusing on the harmonious interrelationship between diverse artistic media —architecture, poetry and textiles— in the experience of the beholder, resulting in a new understanding of the Alhambra.
Mey-Yen Moriuchi
Honorable mention

Mexican Costumbrismo: Race, Society, and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Art
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018
The years following Mexican independence in 1821 were critical to the development of social, racial, and national identities. The visual arts played a decisive role in this process of self-definition. Mexican Costumbrismo reorients current understanding of this key period in the history of Mexican art by focusing on a distinctive genre of painting that emerged between 1821 and 1890: costumbrismo.
In contrast to the neoclassical work favored by the Mexican academy, costumbrista artists portrayed the quotidian lives of the lower to middle classes, their clothes, food, dwellings, and occupations. Based on observations of similitude and difference, costumbrista imagery constructed stereotypes of behavioral and biological traits associated with distinct racial and social classes. In doing so, Mey-Yen Moriuchi argues, these works engaged with notions of universality and difference, contributed to the documentation and reification of social and racial types, and transformed the way Mexicans saw themselves, as well as how other nations saw them, during a time of rapid change for all aspects of national identity.