Terry Smith named winner of Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Book Prize
Photo courtesy of Terry Smith
Terry Smith, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory, Department of History of Art and Architecture, is the inaugural winner of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center Book Prize for his book Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (University of Chicago Press, 1993). The announcement came from the Georgia O'Keefe Museum.
The prize, which is awarded every three years to the author of an outstanding book published within the last twenty-five years on some aspect of American modernism. Smith’s book was selected from a field that included over 60 titles submitted for consideration.
“I am absolutely delighted that my book has been awarded this prize,” Smith said. “It is a great honor to be recognized in this way by my peers on the committee, and by an institution that has become the center for the study of modernism in the United States.”
Smith’s book, which addresses the period 1910 to 1940, remains the most comprehensive study of the impact of mass production and mass consumption on the whole range of American visual culture, from factory architecture through photography and art to industrial design. It includes chapters on the Ford plants in Detroit, the Farm Security Administration photographers during the Depression, Life magazine, Mexican visitors Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and the New York World’s Fair of 1939/40.
The committee of jurors for the book prize said they chose Smith’s book because of its “excellence of writing and scholarship, its originality and its outstanding and multi-faceted exploration of the emergence and flourishing of modernism as a phenomenon in American art and culture.” Smith’s book “explores this fascinating development in new and thought-provoking ways, which greatly contribute to our understanding of American modernism,” said Barbara Buhler Lynes, the Emily Fisher Landau Director of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.