Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship

The Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowships in American Art are awarded to graduate students in any stage of Ph.D. dissertation research or writing, for scholarship on a topic in the history of the visual arts of the United States. One of this year's Fellowship winners is Laura Lake Smith, a doctoral candidate in art history in the Lamar Dodd School of Art for her work, Imaging the In-between: The Serial Art of Richard Tuttle:

Since 1964, the American artist Richard Tuttle (b. 1941) has made approximately 300 discrete series in the mediums of drawing, sculpture, printmaking, and painting. Although Tuttle’s commitment to serial art is unrivaled within the postwar period, his art has yet to be interpreted in conjunction with seriality, perhaps because it so deliberately confounds our expectations of the series. Unlike most serial art, Tuttle’s series neither repeat nor progress in any discernible way. Instead, they appear incoherent, unfinished, and unresolved. As the first study of Tuttle’s serial art, this dissertation examines the artist’s subversive reliance on serial modes of production, arguing that Tuttle uses seriality in order to challenge conceptions of art as a solution by imaging a process that is always in-between a question and its answer.

This is an extraordinary honor but also a $25,000 stipend plus another $2,000 for travel to support Smith's scholarship. Congratulations to Smith on a wonderful way to begin a professional career, and to the art history faculty in the Dodd, who share in the recognition of this promising work. Well done.