Art History Student Art Awards

The Newcomb Art Department is pleased to announce the 2020 Art History Student Art Awards.

The Marilyn Brown Award for Outstanding Art History Major  Carly LaCoste
Carly LaCoste has been an exceptional student and citizen for her entire career at Tulane. Her thesis for the 4 plus 1 MA program on images of the Last Judgement in French medieval manuscripts promises to be thoughtful, original, and impactful. Carly's scholarship is all of her courses is outstanding; she writes clear papers and is highly motivated and self-directed. Her professors consistently remark that her work in seminars is already on par with graduate student work. She will make a wonderful contribution to the field of art history.


Nell Pomeroy O'Brien Award for a Sophomore or Junior in Art History   Kamryn Pigg
Kamryn is an exemplary art history student.  She has an exceptional ability to synthesize key ideas from lectures, discussions, and readings, and her visual analysis skills are truly impressive.  Her written work and contributions to class discussions consistently reflect the sophistication of her engagement with the course material and her deep curiosity about art history.  It has been a true pleasure having her in class.”


Henry Stern Prize Paper in Art History Rachel Cline
'She Lives in Vice’: Depreciation of Aztec Cultural Practices Through Images of the Auiani and Noblewomen in the Florentine Codex
 “‘She Lives in Vice’: Depreciation of Aztec Cultural Practices Through Images of the Auiani and Noblewomen in the Florentine Codex,” was written for Prof. Elizabeth Boone’s seminar on Mexican Manuscript Painting in fall 2019.  Rachel’s outstanding paper investigates the visual and textual descriptions of Aztec women found in the monumental encyclopedia of Bernardino de Sahagún, revealing how Sahagún’s artists framed female identities by drawing on imagery from both the indigenous and European traditions.  Moreover, she successfully argues that these artists and scribes employed many of the same visual and text tropes for Aztec noblewomen that they used to describe auiani (“pleasure women”), creating a paradox that effectively undercut the honor of Aztec noblewomen.  Rachel dug deep into the specialist literature with keen insight and crafted a well-supported argument that raises our understanding of the cultural mediation between Aztecs and Europeans in early colonial Mexico.


Marilyn Brown Senior Honor Scholar Award   Kate Moranski
Kate’s senior honor thesis, “Visual Activism in the Photography of Carrie Mae Weems,” examines two of the artist’s photographic series from the perspective of the artist as political activist. Kate argues that Weems’ work combines text with appropriated imagery to create photographs that encourage her viewers to consider the ways representation can shift the politics of race, gender and class. Although Carrie Mae Weems’ work receives a fresh “rethink” in the thesis, Kate also outlines the ways in which contemporary artists in general can and do work toward the realization of visual activism.