Cécile Whiting, UCI Chancellor's Professor of art history, earns NEH grant and CASVA fellowship to complete book on WWII landscape artists
Department: Art History
Post Date: April 11, 2018News Details
Cécile Whiting, Chancellor’s Professor of art history at the University of California, Irvine, has been awarded a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and a fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art.
The NEH summer stipend supports the completion of Whiting's book, Global War and the New American Landscape, 1939–48. Whiting’s book project explores landscape artists’ experiences and depictions of World War II, from bucolic and patriotic state-sponsored renditions to grim depictions of the reality of war. Whiting’s project is one of less than 200 to be funded by the NEH.
“I am thrilled to receive an NEH grant in support of my research. It will enable me to complete archival and photographic research in Washington D.C. at the Archives of American Art, the National Archives, and Library of Congress as well as to view paintings collected in the U.S. Army Center of Military History,” said Whiting.
Named the Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow at CASVA, Whiting will be in residence at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. this summer. The Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellowship supports faculty research in the history, theory, and criticism of the visual arts (painting, sculpture, architecture, landscape architecture, urbanism, prints and drawings, film, photography, decorative arts, industrial design, and other arts) of any geographical area and of any period.
“Being in residence at CASVA will enable me to be part of a wonderful community of scholars and to exchange ideas with faculty, graduate students, and curators,” Whiting said.
Recognizing her lifetime of achievement in American art history, Whiting will accept the Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History from the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, at their gala in New York this October. The award was established in 1998 by Archives Trustee Barbara G. Fleischman as a tribute to her late husband, who founded the Archives in 1954.
“At UCI, we've long known and admired Cécile Whiting's work as the premier scholar of modern American art writing today, so it is very gratifying indeed to see her receive the recognition she deserves in the form of the eminently prestigious Fleischman Award as well as winning highly competitive grants from NEH and the National Gallery,” said Georges Van Den Abbeele, dean of the UCI School of Humanities.
Whiting’s research centers primarily on American art of the mid-twentieth century. She is the author of Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s (University of California Press, 2006), which earned the 21st Annual Charles Eldredge Prize for Outstanding Scholarship in American Art; A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Antifascism in American Art (Yale University Press, 1989).