2023
Claudia Hopkins, ed., with essays by Matilde Mateo and Andrew Ginger
Winner
Romantic Spain: David Roberts and Genaro Pérez Villaamil
Exh. cat., Madrid: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 2021
The Scottish David Roberts (1796–1864) and the Galician artist Genaro Pérez Villaamil (1807–1854) were giants in topographical art in the Romantic era. Between them, they generated several hundred views of Spanish landscapes and monuments —castles, cathedrals, convents, palaces— often with a flavor of local traditional culture.
Fully versed in the aesthetic conventions of the Picturesque and the Sublime, Roberts and Pérez Villaamil helped form a Romantic image of Spain in the nineteenth century, one that still colors the perception of the country today.
Rosario I. Granados, ed.
Honorable mention
Painted Cloth: Fashion and Ritual in Colonial Latin America
Exh. cat., Austin: Blanton Museum of Art, 2022
This exhibition addresses the social roles of textiles and their visual representations in different media produced in Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela during the 1600s and 1700s. Beyond emphasizing how aesthetic traditions of European and Indigenous origin were woven together during this period, it showcases the production, use, and meaning of garments as well as the ways they were experienced both in civil and religious settings.