The Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2024 Mervat Zahid Cultural Foundation Prize, of the Dahesh Museum of Art, given for a distinguished presentation at the Twenty-first Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Nineteenth-Century Art, held on March 16–17, 2024. Each recipient will receive $1000 for their doctoral research.
Kiki Barnes, City University of New York, presented “‘Fiercely the red sun descending’: Thomas Moran and The Song of Hiawatha.” She analyzed the American painter Thomas Moran’s attempt to produce an illustrated edition of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Ojibwe-inspired epic poem The Song of Hiawatha (1855). Unique in the context of his career, Moran’s extant illustrations help reexamine the perception of Indigeneity around the 1876 U.S. Centennial. Kiki Barnes is a doctoral candidate completing her dissertation at the City University of New York on landscapes of the Americas and their connections to popular literature, 1865–1900. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She has been a Curatorial Intern at the American Federation of Art and Mellon Curatorial Fellow in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Colton Klein, Yale University, presented “Material Reconstruction: Ecologies of Metal in an 1887 Photograph of Disabled Union Veterans.” In 1887, eighteen disabled Union veterans of the American Civil War posed for a photograph wearing badges—composed of copper forged by enslaved metalworkers—recast from Confederate cannons implicated in their disabilities. Klein applied ecologies of metal to mine the photograph’s shadow histories of extraction, race, violence, and disability. Colton Klein is a doctoral student at Yale University where he is a Whitney Humanities Center Fellow in the Environmental Humanities. His dissertation studies intersectional ecologies of materials and environmental histories in the United States in the visual culture of the nineteenth-century United States. He holds a BA from Washington and Lee University and an MA from Columbia University. He has been a curatorial intern at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he was also a curatorial assistant in prewar art.
Samantha Small, City University of New York, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, presented “Fremdkörper: Franz von Stuck and Blackness in Wilhelmine Germany.” Small interrogated Bavarian Symbolist artist Franz von Stuck’s Black figures in light of contemporaneous perceptions of race in Wilhelmine Germany (1890–1918). Examined here for the first time, these figures are positioned amidst social and artistic trends, including Germany’s belated colonialism, and visual spectacles such as advertisements and “Human Zoos” (Völkerschauen). Samantha Small is a doctoral candidate at the City University of New York, where she is completing her dissertation “Franz von Stuck, Painter Provocateur.” She holds a BA from George Washington University and an MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her dissertation has been supported by the Fulbright Program and a Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Venetian Research Grant. She has held positions in the curatorial departments of the Guggenheim Museum and the Blanton Museum, and is currently Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow in the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.