The Phillips Collection and University of Maryland Announce Book Prize Winner
Hunter College Professor’s Work Honored for Important Contribution to the Scholarship of Mexican Art History
WASHINGTON, DC and COLLEGE PARK, MD—The University of Maryland Center for Art and Knowledge at The Phillips Collection has awarded its 2016 University of Maryland-Phillips Collection Book Prize to the manuscript The Noisemakers: Estridentismo, Vanguardism, and Social Action in Postrevolutionary Mexico (1921-1927) by Lynda Klich, Assistant Professor in the Department of Art & Art History at Hunter College, City University of New York. This is the eighth book prize awarded by The Phillips Collection since 2008 and the inaugural prize jointly awarded with the University of Maryland.
The University of Maryland-Phillips Collection Book Prize supports publication of a first book by an emerging scholar presenting new research in modern or contemporary art from 1780 to the present. The book prize is awarded by The University of Maryland Center for Art and Knowledge at The Phillips Collection, an expansion of the Center for the Study of Modern Art—the museum’s nexus for academic work, scholarly exchange, and innovative interdisciplinary collaborations. The Center is part of a larger partnership between the two institutions with a vision of dramatically transforming scholarship and innovation in the arts.
The winning books are published by the University of California Press, in collaboration with the University of Maryland and The Phillips Collection. The winning author also receives a $5,000 cash prize.
“I am extremely honored that the University of Maryland-Phillips Collection committee has recognized my work and placed it alongside that of scholars who have expanded the understanding of global modernisms,” said Klich. “I am particularly pleased that, through my book, Mexico will enter this dialogue as part of the UMD-Phillips series at the University of California Press.”
The Noisemakers examines one of Mexico’s earliest modernist movements, Estridentismo, which spurred lively and fruitful collaborations among poets, journalists, artists, and musicians during the key decade following the country’s devastating civil war. The study sheds light on Estridentismo’s cultivation of experimental visual practices and crucial contributions to the development of Mexican modernism, and examines interactions between Estridentista art and literature.
“I am pleased that the University of Maryland-Phillips Collection Book Prize recognizes such an important area of Latin-American scholarship,” said Dr. Klaus Ottmann, Deputy Director for Curatorial and Academic Affairs, The Phillips Collection. “Lynda Klich’s book The Noisemakers will insert one of Mexico’s earliest modernist movements into the burgeoning dialogue of international modernisms.”
“We are pleased to recognize Dr. Klich’s insightful and informative work with this award,” said MaryAnn Rankin, UMD’s senior vice president and provost. “The University of Maryland-Phillips Collection Book Prize is one of the many joint projects that make up our transformational partnership with The Phillips Collection. Dr. Klich’s powerful work on post-revolutionary art in Mexico is a wonderful example of the kind of innovative scholarship we seek to promote through this partnership.”
Klich’s scholarship on Estridentismo has also appeared in the exhibition catalogue Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910–1950 (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2016) and the anthologies Sighting Technology in Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art (ed. María Fernández, forthcoming) andTechnology and Culture in Twentieth-Century Mexico (ed. Araceli Tinajero and J. Brian Freeman, 2013). She guest-edited, and contributed an essay on Estridentismo to the Mexico-themed issue of the Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts (2010). Klich is also Curator of the Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Collection and has published several texts on that medium.