NEW YORK.-CAA is pleased to announce the recipients of its eleven Awards for Distinction for 2008. These annual awards honor outstanding member achievements and reaffirm CAA’s mission to encourage the highest standards of scholarship, practice, and teaching in the arts.

CAA President Nicola M. Courtright will formally recognize the honorees and present the awards at Convocation, to be held during CAA’s 96th Annual Conference on Thursday, February 21, 2008, at the Adam’s Mark Hotel in Dallas, Texas. The Annual Conference—which hosts scholarly sessions, panel discussions, career-development workshops, art exhibitions, and more—is the largest gathering of artists, art historians, students, and arts professionals in the United States.

With these awards, CAA honors the accomplishments of individual artists, art historians, authors, conservators, curators, and critics whose efforts transcend their individual disciplines and contribute to the profession as a whole and to the world at large. The 2008 winners are:

Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art - Robert L. Herbert, Mount Holyoke College. Noted for his original readings of Impressionist painting, the deep social contextualization of art production, and a series of monographic studies of Millet, Monet, Renoir, and Seurat, Robert L. Herbert embraces the full spectrum of art history, from the cultural to the technical, from criticism to connoisseurship, from the broad to the focused, and from the decorative arts to the individual masterpiece. Herbert, who is Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Mount Holyoke, is also the honoree of the 2008 Distinguished Scholar Session at the CAA Annual Conference.

Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement - Sylvia Sleigh, artist. Sylvia Sleigh trained as a realist painter in Sussex, England, before emigrating to the United States in 1961. She has written of her own work: “I feel that my paintings stress the equality of men & women (women & men). To me, women were often portrayed as sex objects in humiliating poses. I wanted to give my perspective. I liked to portray both man and woman as intelligent and thoughtful people with dignity and humanism that emphasized love and joy.”

Distinguished Body of Work Award - Yoko Ono, artist - Confounding simple categorization, Yoko Ono’s work spans diverse genres and media, including conceptual art, poetry, music, and performance, and affirms the role of the imagination, encouraging viewers to use her suggestive poetry as a point of departure to envision their own versions of reality. Ultimately her body of work conveys a spirit of hopefulness and belief in the transformative power of thought for both individuals and society at large. In addition to this award, Ono will also be interviewed during the Annual Artists’ Interviews at the 2008 CAA Annual Conference.

CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation - Elizabeth S. Bolman, Tyler School of Art, Temple University - Elizabeth S. Bolman is celebrated for her work on the conservation of the wall paintings in the Red Monastery, a late-antique basilica near Sohag, Egypt. She has published two scholarly articles on the results and succeeded in placing the site on the World Monuments Fund endangered list. Thanks to Bolman’s work, the ensemble of figural wall paintings and associated decorations give us a full sense of the wall painting common to late-antique churches that were obscured or lost until now.

Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award - Wu Hung, University of Chicago - Wu Hung’s combination of rigorous, generous, and innovative teaching and prolific and exemplary scholarship has inspired a high-achieving generation of younger scholars, transforming the study of East Asian art. Teaching large undergraduate courses as well as graduate seminars, Wu mentors as many as fifteen graduate students at a time, efforts that earned him the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching at his university in 2007.

Distinguished Teaching of Art Award - Ronald Leax, Washington University in St. Louis - Ronald Leax is a sculptor whose teaching philosophy, creative production, work ethic, and wisdom has dramatically influenced an army of former students and colleagues. Leax sees his students as fellow artists, countering the traditional teacher/student relationship. A role model to many, he has maintained a consistent exhibition record of his own while also serving as a teacher, director of graduate studies, associate dean, and faculty chair.

Art Journal Award - Simon Leung, University of California, Irvine, for the article “The Look of Law” - Simon Leung’s interests lie in the intersections between ethics and aesthetics, critical theory, politics of sexuality and postcolonialism, public space, and theories of modernism and postmodernism. His article, which appeared in the Fall 2007 issue, is an account of a project, consisting of an exhibition, a film and video program, and a conference, that put into dialogue several contemporary art practices that address the direct and residual effects of the power of the state in relation to the force of law.

Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize - Fabio Barry, University of St. Andrews, for The Art Bulletin article “Walking on Water: Cosmic Floors in Antiquity and the Middle Ages” - Published in the December 2007 issue, Fabio Barry’s article is a beautifully written, at times even poetic, text with a wide cross-cultural and cross-chronological range. Approaching the marble floors of the Hagia Sophia and other churches, east and west, in their historical context, through the philological, geologic, and cosmogonic associations of their materiality, Barry helps us see the floors in an entirely new manner. This in turn enhances our understanding of these buildings as a whole and the culture that produced it.

Charles Rufus Morey Book Award - Elizabeth C. Mansfield, University of the South, for Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth, and Mimesis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) - Elizabeth C. Mansfield traces development and change in the concept of beauty as outlined by Cicero in the famous and ever-provocative story of Zeuxis painting a picture of a perfect beauty by choosing the five most beautiful virgins and combining their best features into a single work. Her highly original analysis of this subject is intellectually stimulating to readers at all levels with interests ranging from archaeology to art history, from philosophy to literature, and from art criticism to gender studies.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award - Sarah Greenough and Diane Waggoner, National Gallery of Art, for the exhibition catalogue The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, in association with Princeton University Press, 2007) - As primary authors of this volume, exhibition curators Sarah Greenough and Diane Waggoner endow these anonymous, vernacular photographs—ubiquitous and familiar personal documents—with new meaning and significance within a larger historical and aesthetic context that promises to reframe issues in the history of photography. Sarah Kennel and Matthew S. Witkovsky also contributed essays to the book. The exhibition is on view at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth during the 2008 CAA Annual Conference.

Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism - Chris Kraus, writer, filmmaker, and editor - Chris Kraus participates in discussions on contemporary art and the expansion of its terms with such books as Torpor (2006); LA Artland: Contemporary Art from Los Angeles, cowritten with Jan Tumlir and Jane McFadden (2005); and Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness (2004), as well as with numerous occasional writings, both in print and online, for such publications as Index, Artext, cmagazine, and Art in America.