The Historians of British Art Book Prize Committee is pleased to announce the Book Award winners for publications produced in the 2023 calendar year. The winners were chosen from a nominating list of fifty-three books from twenty-three different presses. Awards were granted in six categories.
The award for a single-authored book with a subject before 1600 goes Brian Sprakes, The Medieval Stained Glass of West Yorkshire, published by Oxford University Press.
The award for a single-authored book with a subject between 1600–1800 goes to Andrea Pappas, Embroidering the Landscape: Women, Art and the Environment in British North America, 1740–1770, published by Lund Humphries.
The award for a single-authored book with a subject between 1800–1960 goes to Swati Chattopadhyay, Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire, published by Bloomsbury.
The award for a single-authored book with a contemporary subject goes to Richard Birkett, Donald Rodney: Autoicon, published by Afterall.
The multi-authored book prize goes to Griselda Pollock, Adrian Rifkin, and Rachel Dickson, Woman in Art: Helen Rosenau’s ‘Little Book’ of 1944, published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art / Yale University Press.
And the prize for exhibition catalogue goes to Linsey Young, ed., Women In Revolt!, published by the Tate.
The HBA would like to offer congratulations to the winning authors and the publishing teams at Afterall, Bloomsbury, Lund Humphries, Oxford University Press, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art / Yale University Press, and the Tate.
This year’s committee of readers consisted of Alison Syme (Chair), Julian Luxford, Lizzie Robles, and Matthew Hunter.
HBA Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period before 1600
| Brian Sprakes, The Medieval Stained Glass of West Yorkshire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. ISBN: 9780197267097 |
This handsome account of pre-1700 stained glass in West Yorkshire is the fruit of over twenty years’ work. Brian Sprakes has conducted an exhaustive search of the surviving material and documentary evidence to produce a resource that will guide the researcher, conservationist, and art-lover for decades to come. The volume opens with an authoritative survey of the history, style, and imagery of its subject. Then comes a detailed catalogue of the surviving stained glass at twenty-nine churches and museums, plus a series of appendixes. Everything is lavishly illustrated in colour, in a way that evokes of a lost world of coloured, sun-struck windows, as well as the beauty of what survives. Books like this make a major contribution to the preservation of England’s threatened artistic heritage. The Medieval Stained Glass of West Yorkshire is the latest addition to the library of the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi.
Brian Sprakes has retired from teaching. His last appointment was in the Department of Continuing Education at Sheffield University, where he lectured on local history and Medieval and Renaissance art and architecture. His first book, The Medieval Stained Glass of South Yorkshire, for the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (Great Britain) was published by the British Academy in 2003. The Medieval Stained Glass of West Yorkshire is the second by him and part of an ongoing series by CVMA-appointed authors. A third volume on Nottinghamshire is now in progress. Other projects include updating his research on the North German glass-painter Baernard Dininckhoff, who was active in the north of England 1571–c.1625. Brian was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 2003, and until retirement was the stained glass adviser to the Bishop and Diocese of Sheffield.
HBA Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period between 1600-1800
| Andrea Pappas, Embroidering the Landscape: Women, Art and the Environment in British North America, 1740–1770, London: Lund Humphries, 2023. ISBN: 9781848226241 |
Andrea Pappas’s Embroidering the Landscape is a work of serious intellectual ambition. Not content to foreground embroidered needlework as subject of intensive art-historical inquiry, Pappas excavates women’s contributions to an expanded vision of pictorial art. Written with lucid, critical acuity, Embroidering the Landscape troubles received views in which embroidered landscapes embody “naïve” visions. Instead, the book demonstrates how these understudied works were made by worldly women actively combining representational systems and spatial projections encountered in European precedents, Asian export ware, and first-hand experience. Working up from the archive to theorize scalar hierarchies and the “telescopic perspective” incorporated into embroidered pictorial logics, Pappas places needleworks and their makers in an Atlantic world of imperial inequality, land spoliation, and colonialism’s devastating ecological consequences. Embroidering the Landscape is a timely contribution that will find readership in environmental history, women’s studies, and histories of science, among other fields.
Andrea Pappas, Professor of Art History at Santa Clara University, has published on a wide variety of topics in American art, including Jewish American visual culture, women art dealers, and 20th century U.S. art. Her work has twice been supported by the NEH. A new essay, “Tragedy and Timeliness: Finding a Path to a New Art” in Revisiting the Rothko Chapel, edited by Aaron Rosen and Annie Cohen-Solal, is forthcoming in 2025. Awards for her scholarship include the Leo Wasserman Foundation Best Article Prize for “The Picture at Menorah Journal: Making ‘Jewish Art’” published in the Journal of American Jewish History in 2002; the 2016 Robert C. Smith Award from The Decorative Arts Society for “‘Each Wise Nymph that Angles for a Heart’: The Politics of Courtship in the Boston ‘Fishing Lady’ Pictures,” which appeared in Winterthur Portfolio; and the 2024 Charles F. Montgomery Award, also from the Decorative Arts Society, for her recent book, Embroidering the Landscape: Art, Women and the Environment in British North America, 1740–1770.
HBA Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period between 1800-1960
| Swati Chattopadhyay, Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire, London: Bloomsbury, 2023. ISBN: 9781350288201 |
In this fascinating, engaging, and experimental book, Swati Chattopadhyay examines a variety of small spaces and objects produced by empire—from the bottlekhana to the verandah, potted plants to homeopathic medicine chests—and the way they proliferated modes of engagement with the world. Chattopadhyay draws on an eclectic array of archival documents including recipe books, trade reports, servant lists, memoirs, and visual artifacts to read the microdynamics of such seemingly insignificant locales in practical and poetic terms, recasting them as sites of emergence in which power, community, and solidarity were negotiated. Her genre-bending mode of narration unfolds a world in which minor places and things fostered habitation, imagination, resistance, and creativity, and while her focus is on British India, she compellingly makes the case for the significance of small spaces and their challenge to master spaces and master narratives in other contexts.
Swati Chattopadhyay is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture with an affiliated appointment in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. An architect and architectural historian, she specializes in modern architecture and urbanism, and the cultural landscape of the British empire. She is the author of Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (2012); Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (2005), and the co-editor with Jeremy White of City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space (2014), and Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture (2019). Her current book project, Nature’s Infrastructure: The British Empire and the Making of the Gangetic Plains, 1760-1880, is supported by the Guggenheim Foundation. A Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians, and former editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, she a founding editor of PLATFORM.
HBA Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Contemporary Period
| Richard Birkett, Donald Rodney: Autoicon, London: Afterall, 2023. ISBN: 9781846382574 |
In Donald Rodney: Autoicon, Richard Birkett offers an incisive and detailed look at the specificities of the singular and complex eponymous work: Donald Rodney’s Autoicon. Initiated shortly before the artist’s death in 1998 and first launched in 2000 as a web-based work hosted by London’s Institute for International Visual Arts (Iniva) before a slightly later release on CD-ROM, the work plays across the lines of interactivity, simulation, and prescription; the self and the ‘live’ digital ‘body’; audience, artist, and interlocutor. Like much digital and net-based art produced in the mid- to late 1990s, the work is largely inaccessible and requires now-historical hardware and software to run. In this wonderful forensic engagement with the work, Birkett provides a critical record of Autoicon and, crucially, indexes it to the broader entanglements of the “objects, events, people, ideas, behaviours and properties” from which it is constituted, from an expansive engagement with Rodney’s practice to the promising vistas of late-1990s concepts of ‘digital diaspora’.
Richard Birkett is a curator and writer based in Glasgow, UK. He is the current Festival Director of Glasgow International and was previously Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London from 2017–2020 and Curator at Artists Space in New York from 2010–2016. He has worked with artists, writers, filmmakers and performers including Terry Atkinson, Julie Ault, Julie Becker, Bernadette Corporation, Andrea Büttner, Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien, Chto Delat?, Forensic Architecture, Em Hedditch, Chris Kraus, Sam Lewitt, Taylor Le Melle, Laura Poitras, Cameron Rowland, Hito Steyerl, Cosey Fanni Tutti and The Wooster Group. He has co-edited and contributed to publications including Cosey Complex (König Books, 2012); Bernadette Corporation: 2000 Wasted Years (Artists Space, New York & König Books, 2013); and Materials and Money and Crisis, (mumok, Vienna & König Books, 2014) and Tell It To My Heart – Collected by Julie Ault, Volume 2 (Hatje Cantz, 2015). He is the author of the book Donald Rodney: Autoicon (Afterall Books, 2022).
HBA Book Award for an Exemplary Multi-authored Book
| Griselda Pollock, Adrian Rifkin, and Rachel Dickinson, Woman in Art: Helen Rosenau’s ‘Little Book’ of 1944, London: Paul Mellon Centre / Yale, 2023. ISBN: 9781913107413 |
Bringing together a reproduction of Jewish refugee art historian Helen Rosenau’s 1944 book Woman in Art, an affecting memoir by her student Adrian Rifkin, a useful documentary biography compiled by Rachel Dickson, and brilliant framing essays by Griselda Pollock that contextualise and analyse Rosenau’s text, Woman in Art: Helen Rosenau’s ‘Little Book’ is critically important reading. Contrasting Rosenau’s work to Gombrich’s gender-exclusionary art history, Pollock situates Woman in Art and its author’s intellectual formation in terms of contemporary art historical, anthropological, and sociological discourses and concerns as well as traumatic geopolitical events and the author’s migration and institutional challenges. Pollock’s compelling close readings plumb Rosenau’s long overlooked, politically resonant ideas, making this beautifully produced volume’s challenge to “the violence of decades of continuing silencing, effacing, willed ignorance, and blatant sexist indifference that have distorted the histories of art and the character of the discipline of Art History” as absurdly needful as ever.
Griselda Pollock is a feminist, postcolonial and social art historian, cultural theorist and curator. Professor emerita of Social and Critical Histories of Art at the University of Leeds where she founded and directed the transdisciplinary Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (2001-21), she is the recipient of the 2010 CAA Distinguished Feminist Award for Promoting Equality in Art, the 2020 Holberg Prize, the 2023 CAA Life-time Achievement Award for Writing on Art and the 2024 Nessim Habif World Prize (Geneva). Classic texts include Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology with Rozsika Parker (1981; 4th edition: 2022 Bloomsbury, trans. into French and Spanish, 2023) and Vision and Difference (1988/2021). Recent publications Charlotte Salomon in the Theatre of Memory (Yale University Press, 2018), Killing Men & Dying Women: Imagining Difference in 1950s New York Painting (Manchester University Press, 2022), WOMAN IN ART: Helen Rosenau’s ‘Little Book’ of 1944 (Yale University Press, 2023), and Medium & Memory (HackelBury Fine Art, 2023).
Adrian Rifkin is in his final year as a visiting professor at Central Saint Martins School, UAL, and retired from the post of Professor of Art Writing at Goldsmiths in 2012. In recent years he has written on contemporary and modern artists from Robert Smithson to Anne Talkentire, and published a memoir, Future Imperfect: Time between my fingers, with Ma Bibliothèque in 2021.
Rachel Dickson is Consulting Editor, Ben Uri Research Unit, formerly Head of Curatorial Services, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London (2011–2020). Her research focusses on Jewish émigré artists and designers in 20th-21st century Britain, particularly those who fled Nazi-occupied Europe. A committee member for the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, School of Advanced Studies, University of London, Rachel co-edited Volume 19 on the applied arts. Recent publications include a chapter on mother/daughter artists, Helga Michie and Ruth Rix in Yearbook Volume 23, The Second and Third Generation: The Legacy of Forced Migration from Nazi Europe (2024) and ‘From Berlin to the Bodley Head: Renate Meyer (1930–2014): The Rediscovery of a Neglected Children’s Book Author, Illustrator and Artist’ in Innocence and Experience: Childhood and the Refugees from Nazism in Britain (Exile Studies, Vol. 22, Peter Lang, 2024). In 2022 she was appointed honorary editorial board member for the Polish journal, The Archives of Emigration, University of Toruń.
HBA Book Award for an Exemplary Exhibition Catalogue
| Linsey Young, ed., Women in Revolt!: Art and Activism in the UK 1970–1990, London: Tate Publishing, 2023. ISBN: 9781849768627 |
In Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970–1990, curator and editor Linsey Young brings together a rich account of the intersections of art, activism, and second wave feminisms. Like its namesake major exhibition, the catalogue draws its power precisely from its insistence on multivalence and polyvocality, from, as Young writes in her introduction, an interest in “rolling with the messy.” Here, there is an emphasis on communities, networks, collectives, and solidarities not only as central components to this complex art historical period—as outlined in chapters by Amy Tobin, Stella Dadzie, and Alice Correia—but also as key curatorial and editorial modes, exemplified by an illuminating ‘note’ from the project’s advisors Althea Greenan, Griselda Pollock, and Marlene Smith. This richly illustrated catalogue opens up the complicated messiness, the strident politics, and the joy that weave through this important chapter of British cultural and political history and invites the reader to conceive of the threads that bind the questions of the past to the urgencies of the present.
Linsey Young is a curator and writer. From 2016 to 2024 she held the position of Curator of British Contemporary Art at Tate. In this role she delivered major exhibitions and commissions with artists such as Pablo Bronstein, Rachel Whiteread, and Anthea Hamilton. Young was lead curator of the Turner Prize in 2016, 2018, and 2024, and in 2019, during a sabbatical from Tate, she commissioned and curated Charlie Prodger’s solo exhibition SaF05 at the 58th Venice Biennale. In 2023 she curated the major exhibition and publication project Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970–1990 at Tate (touring to the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh until January 2025 and The Whitworth Manchester March–June 2025). The first of its kind in mainstream institutions, the exhibition is a wide-ranging exploration of feminist art by over 100 women artists working in the UK. Young began a LAHP-funded PhD at the Royal College of Art focused on British feminist art practice in September 2024 and is a member of New Curators external faculty 24/25.
The book prize committee would also like to recognize the excellent scholarship of the finalists in these categories:
Exemplary Scholarship on the Period between 1600–1800
Steven Brindle, Architecture in Britain and Ireland 1530–1830, London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art / Yale University Press, 2023.
Rebecca Whiteley, Birth Figures: Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023.
Exemplary Scholarship on the Period between 1800–1960
Kristy Sinclair Dootson, The Rainbow’s Gravity: Colour, Materiality and British Modernity, London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art / Yale University Press, 2023.
Tom Young, Unmasking the East India Company: British Art and Political Reform in Colonial India, c. 1813–1858, London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art / Yale University Press, 2023.
Exemplary Multi-authored Book
Wing Chan and David Morris, eds., Precarious Solidarities: Artists for Democracy 1974–77, London: Afterall, 2023.
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, ed. Tupaia, Captain Cook and the Voyage of the Endeavour: A Material History, London: Bloomsbury, 2023.
Exemplary Exhibition Catalogue
Esther da Costa Meyer and Claudia J. Nahson, The Sassoons, New York: Jewish Museum / Yale University Press, 2023.
Isabella Maidment, ed., Isaac Julien, London: Tate, 2023.