Orange Alert

Graduate Prizes

Laurinda Dixon Prize

The Laurinda Dixon Prize for the best graduate student symposium paper is awarded annually and carries a cash prize. The award is named for Laurinda S. Dixon, Professor Emerita of Art History at Syracuse University. Professor Dixon taught in the Department of Art and Music Histories for thirty-five years and served many of them as Director of Graduate Studies.

Laurinda Dixon

Professor Dixon is an innovative scholar whose work considers the intersection of early modern art and science, particularly alchemy, herbalism, medicine, astrology, and music. She is the author of many articles, book chapters, and ten books, including The Dark Side of Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art, ca. 1500-1700 (2013), Bosch (2003), and Perilous Chastity: Women and Illness in Pre-Enlightenment Art and Medicine(1995). Professor Dixon continues to publish and lecture widely and has expanded her interest into the nineteenth century.

As a dedicated teacher, students at Syracuse University benefited from Professor Dixon's scholarly rigor and high expectations. She designed the Symposium Paper process for our master's program and believed deeply in engaging students through conversation and humor. Her teaching excellence was recognized when she was named "William P. Tolley Distinguished Teaching Professor" (2003 to 2005), the most prestigious teaching honor awarded by the university.

2022 Willow Gritzmaker

Phantom Indians on Unceded Land: Cyrus Dallin’s A Signal of Peace and Chicago’s Contested Monuments

2021 Tyler Marie Valera

Edward W. Redfield: Landscape Painting, Water, and Environmentalism in the Delaware River Valley

2020 Co-Recipients

Julia Jessen

Making History, Justifying Conquest: Images of First Contact in American Book Company Textbooks

Mónica Quiñones-Rivera

Queen Elizabeth I: Vestal Virgin of England

2019 Natalie McGrath

Twisted Tales: Kiki Smith and Feminist Revisions of the Beastly

2018 Elizabeth Bryson

Performative Spaces: Subject and Spectator in Walker Evans's Message from the Interior (1966)

Elizabeth Gilmore Holt Prize

The Holt Prize for the best graduate student symposium paper was awarded annually until 2017 and carried a cash prize. The award was named for Elizabeth Gilmore Holt (1905-1987), who is known for her important series of books, Sources and Documents in the History of Art. She was among the first art historians to investigate art in relationship to documentary evidence, in the process re-shaping the very way that art history is studied. Thanks to Holt's pioneering methodology, we now interpret works of art in the context of history and ideas. Elizabeth Holt was a great friend of the Department of Art and Music Histories at Syracuse University. She received an honorary doctorate from S.U., and Syracuse University Press published a book of essays, The Documented Image:  Visions in Art History, in her honor in 1987. The Holt Prize has been supplanted by the Laurinda Dixon Prize.

Recipients

2017 Irene Garcia

Painting Disenchantment? The Baquiné and the Shadow of Colonialism in Francisco Oller's "The Wake" (1893)

2016 Kathleen Brousseau

Eero Saarinen's Dulles International Airport: A Jet-Age Monument to the Cold War

2015 Stefanie Chappell

The Power of Place: Amos Doolittle's Engravings of the Battle of Lexington and Concord

2013 Alysson Biermaier

Panel of Plague: Mantegna's Saint Sebastian

2011 Heather Paroubek

Karl Blechen's Ruins of a Gothic Church

2010 Sarah Grzymala

Frans Snyders: Animals as Food to Consume and Creatures to Respect

2009 Caitlin Sweeney

Matteo di Giovanni's Massacre of the Innocents and Civic Maternity in Quattrocento Siena

2008 Darin J. Stine

Re-identifying a Sheet of Michelangelo's Marble Blocks

2007 Carol Huston

Winged Machines: Airplane Imagery in Eduardo Paolozzi's Collages and Prints, 1946-1983

2005 Stephanie Stockbridge

Gassed: An Artist's Vision of Blindness

2003 Stephanie Kuhlman

E de K and the Modern Woman Discourse

2002 Emily Gaines Buchler

Artemisia Gentileschi's Three Paintings of Cleopatra: A Conventional Response to an Age-Old Theme

2001 Eric Ramirez-Weaver

Victorious Times: the Triumph over Vice in a Zodiac from the Utrecht Psalter

2000 Rahel Elmer Reger

19th-Century Realism and its 17th-Century Dutch Influences

1996 Betsy Purvis

Niccolo Dell'Arca's Lamentation and the Confraternity of Santa Maria della Vita

1995 M. Elen Deming

Frank Lloyd Wright, Japonism, and the Modern Landscape: America in Search of the Universal Aesthetic of Nature

1994 Maureen Quigley

The Vespucci Bacchanals: Be a Busy Bee – or Get Stung

1993 Suzy Spencer

Dulle Griet

1992 Lawrie H. Merz

Lady Digby as Prudence by Anthony Van Dyck as a Reflection of Court Culture of Seventeenth-Century England

1991 John Melczer

The Man from Montreuil

1990 Genine Plunkett

Personal Sources for Durer's Contemplative Scholar/Saint: The Late Images of St. Jerome

1989 Penni Billett

Her Soul Selects Her Own Society: The Secrets of Lady Butler

1988 Erick Wilberding

Liturgical Gestures in the Portinari Altarpiece

1987 Kirsty Mills

The Effect of the Sack of Rome on the Art of Rosso Fiorentino

1986 Matthew Cohen

Giotto's Skyscraper: The Innovative Use of the Gothic Style in Giotto's Original Design for the Campanile of Florence

n.b. prior to 2015, the Holt Prize was awarded to the best graduate paper of the previous calendar year; it is now awarded to the best graduate symposium paper presented each spring