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OBERLIN ART PROFESSOR WINS COVETED AWARD
APRIL 18, 2003--The ongoing debate surrounding how Americans memorialize our combat dead is the focus of an essay that has just earned Oberlin faculty member Andrew M. Shanken one of the most coveted awards in the field of art history: the 2003 Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize.
The prize, established in 1957, is awarded by the College Art Association (CAA) to a distinguished article published in The Art Bulletin by a scholar who is under the age of 35 or has received the doctorate not more than 10 years before acceptance of the article for publication. "The Art Bulletin is among the most prestigious international venues for art-historical scholarship," says Oberlin's Mildred C. Jay Professor of Art William Hood.
"Americans have a memorial problem, a typological quandary that points to a deep discomfort," says Shanken, Oberlin assistant professor of art, in the essay, published in the March 2002 issue of the Art Bulletin, and titled "Planning Memory: Living Memorials in the United States during World War II."
Shanken, "in a strikingly clear and lucid presentation," says the CAA citation, "examines the debate surrounding the appropriate material form for memorializing combat dead in the U.S. during the first half of the twentieth century" and "traces the emergence of a movement for 'living memorials'--useful community facilities and municipal improvements--as an alternative to traditional monumental forms such as statues, arches, and obelisks."
The writer "demonstrates the degree to which this concept provoked both advocacy and controversy among architects, sculptors, and urban planners. Shanken is attentive to the larger implications of the memorial debate--representational practice, attitudes toward urbanism, and evolving views of death--while remaining sensitive to the specific issues surrounding selected projects in the 1940s and after.
"The article holds interest not only for its vivid and penetrating historical analysis, but also its relevance to current approaches to memorialization and memorial practice," the CAA emphasizes. "His study articulates the degree to which public aims and perceptions necessarily articulate the shaping of space, form, and function.
"This essay will be read profitably in undergraduate and graduate courses as a demonstration of how deeply monuments are enmeshed in cultural notions of self and society."
Shanken, who currently is working on 194X, a study of wartime architectural culture in the United States, joined the Oberlin faculty in 2000. He has also taught at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Bryn Mawr. He earned the B.A. degree from Haverford College and the M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University.
His brother, also an art historian, accepted the award on his behalf at the Convocation last month of CAA's 91st Annual Conference in New York. Shanken is co-directing Oberlin's London Program with Michael Henle this semester.
Media Contact: Betty Gabrielli
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