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Awards

The Universities Art Association recognizes excellence through the honours and awards programs which also serve to acknowledge the work of its members.

Members can submit nominations using the online form. Nominations are received and reviewed by the Board of Directors and winners will be presented at the UAAC-AAUC annual conference each fall:

Award Eligibility and Process

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Graduate Student Essay Award

Graduate students who presented papers at the current annual UAAC-AAUC conference can submit complete versions of their essays, in English or French, for consideration by the UAAC-AAUC Board for the Annual Graduate Student Essay Award. The winning essay will be awarded a $250 prize and will be published in the subsequent spring issue of RACAR.

Year Recipient Essay
2022 Georgia Phillips-Amos A Threatening Presence: Regina José Galindo’s Aparición
2021 Erika Kindsfather From Activism to Artistic Practice: (Re)imagining Indigenous Women’s Labour Activism in Contemporary Art
2020 Marie Ferron-Desautels Satire et sociabilité au cœur de la pratique caricaturale de Lady Dalhousie (1786–1839) : vers une histoire des femmes caricaturistes britanniques
2019 Sarah Carter India and the Antiquarian Image: Richard Payne Knight’s A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus
2018 Caitlin E. Ryan Eli Lotar and Jacques-André Boiffard aboard the Exir Dallen
2017 Vanessa Bateman Ursus Horribilis: Seth Kinman’s Grizzly Chair at the World’s Columbian Exposition
2016 Elysia H. French Transformations of Oil: Visibility, Scale, and Climate in Warren Cariou’s Petrography
2015 Elizabeth Anne Cavaliere Onward! Canadian Expansionist Outlooks and the Photographs that Serve Them
2014 Kathryn Desplanque Repeat Offenders: Reprinting Visual Satire Across France’s Long Eighteenth Century
2013 Jennifer Orpana Turning the World Inside Out: Situating JR’s Wish within Cultures of Participation
2012 Erin McLeod By a Wing and a Tale: Authenticating the Archive in Mohamad Said Baalbaki’s Al Buraq | The Prophet’s Human-Headed Mount

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Recognition Award

Established in 2010, the UAAC-AAUC Recognition Award acknowledges members who have demonstrated their unselfish and devoted service to our association and their commitment to our profession’s ideals. These individuals have shown leadership and have made significant contributions to the organization. To honour the UAAC-AAUC conference’s 50th anniversary in 2017, the board decided that, henceforth, a lifetime membership in the association will accompany this award.

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2023 UAAC-AAUC Recognition Award: Ersy Contogouris

Ersy is a scholar who works on the history of 18th- and 19th-century art, the history of caricature and graphic satire, and feminist and queer approaches in art history. Her long association with the UAAC began in 2012, when she took on the role of managing editor of the association’s journal RACAR, a position she held until 2017. Working closely with RACAR’s then editor-in-chief Annie Gérin and its editorial team, Ersy not only completed all the English and French copy-editing and managerial tasks required of the position with great composure and efficiency, but also helped bring the journal into the twenty-first century by seriously upgrading RACAR’s website and being closely involved in a new design for the journal. After stepping down as managing editor when she was hired as assistant professor of art history at the Université de Montréal, she then took on the role of French reviews editor at RACAR, which she held from 2018 to 2023. Ersy has also contributed her scholarship to RACAR. She co-edited the fall, 2019 issue with Mélanie Boucher: “Stay Still: Past, Present, and Practice of the Tableau Vivant.” She also published in the journal two peer-reviewed articles, a book review, and a dossier in a polemics section on the precarious working conditions of contract instructors in the fields of art and art history in Canadian universities.
Ersy is a regular contributor to UAAC conferences. Over the past decade, she has delivered five papers on topics as varied as 18th-century caricature and art publishing in Canada, and chaired six sessions (many double), including one for the Association of Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture. She also importantly co-organized the 2019 UAAC conference held in Quebec City.
Between 2020 and 2023, Ersy served on the UAAC Board as the Quebec representative. During this time, she volunteered as a member of the UAAC search committee for a new administrator and the committee to select the 2021 UAAC Graduate Student Essay Award.
Given Ersy’s devotion to our association, it is clear why she is the recipient of this year’s UAAC recognition award. Over the years, we have worked with her at RACAR and on the UAAC board, and we have seen first-hand her devotion to the field, her collegiality, her scholarly acumen, and her witty sense of humour. We cannot think of a more deserving recipient for this award.

Year Recipient
2023 Ersy Contogouris
2022 Joan Coutu
2021 Anne Whitelaw
2020 Martha Langford
2019 Annie Gérin
2018 Lynda Jessup and Sally Hickson
2017 Lora Senechal Carney
2016 Nicole Dubreuil
2015 Joyce Zemans
2014 David McTavish
2013 Brian Foss
2012 Barbara Winters
2011 Mary and Alan Hughes
2010 Catherine Harding and Allister Neher

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Lifetime Achievement Award

The UAAC-AAUC Lifetime Achievement Award is presented to a past or present member of UAAC who has made an outstanding contribution to the profession over the whole of a career either through leadership, creation, education, curatorial projects, service, or publications.

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2023 UAAC-AAUC Lifetime Achievement Award: Dr. Gerald McMaster

The 2023 UAAC Lifetime Achievement Award has been presented to Dr. Gerald McMaster. Learn more about Gerald.

As an artist, his work has been widely exhibited both nationally and internationally; but it is as a curator and educator that he has arguably had his greatest impact, from his development of the Native Art program in the late 1970s at Saskatchewan Indian Federated College (now the First Nation University of Canada), then as curator of Contemporary Indigenous Art at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (from 1981-2000); curator of the Canadian pavilion at the 1995 Venice Biennale (where he was the first to spotlight an Indigenous artist, Edward Poitras); Director’s Special Assistant for Museum Exhibitions from 2000-2004 at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC; curator of Canadian Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario from 2005-2012; Artistic Director of the 2012 Sydney Biennale in Australia; curator for the 2018 Venice Architectural Biennale; and from 2014-2022 professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair of Indigenous Visual Culture and Curatorial Practice at OCAD University in Toronto, where he established the Wapatah Centre for Indigenous Visual Knowledge, which featured in his 2021 keynote address at the UAAC conference.

Gerald’s art practice, his curatorial work, his pedagogy, and his writings — including, most recently, Iljuwas Bill Reid: Life & Work for the Art Canada Institute — all work to center Indigenous epistemologies, creative work, and what he calls “the vitality of Indigenous voice” within our contemporary global contexts and crises.

Year Recipient
2023 Gerald McMaster
2022 Ruth Phillips
2021 Sherry Farrell-Racette
2020 John O’Brian
2019 Sandra Alfoldy

 

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Award for the advancement of equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility

The UAAC-AAUC Award (established in 2022) for the Advancement of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility is intended to recognize and celebrate the achievements of those whose work in our fields foster change and build an equitable, diverse, inclusive, and accessible community in Canada. The outputs of such work may look like many things, such as: building a more inclusive, equitable, diverse, and accessible practices and working environments; increasing diverse representation; promoting research and insights relating to Equity, Diversity, Inclusivity and Accessibility; leadership and engagement in addressing systemic inequality.

UAAC-AAUC Award for the advancement of equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility, recognizes and celebrates the achievements of those whose work in our fields foster change and build an equitable, diverse, inclusive, and accessible community in Canada.
Eligibility: This award recognizes and celebrates the achievements of those whose work in our fields, foster change and build an equitable, diverse, inclusive, and accessible community in Canada.

UAAC member at any career stage with a demonstrated contribution to: 

  • building a more inclusive, equitable, diverse, and accessible practice / working environment
  • increasing diverse representation
  • promoting research and insights relating to Equity, Diversity, Inclusivity and Accessibility
  • leadership and engagement in addressing systemic inequality

Prize: UAAC Life Membership + $1000 prize + 1 year of RACAR

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Year Recipient
2023 Anthea Black
2022 Dr. Alice Ming Wai Jim

 

The 2023 recipient is Anthea Black, Associate Professor of Print Media at the California College of the Arts in Oakland, California. It would hardly paint a complete picture of the significance and impact to simply enumerate Anthea’s outward-facing outputs, although numerous; modestly stated on their website, their writing on contemporary art, craft, and performance has appeared in numerous publications. They are the co-editor of two books, The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design (Bloomsbury Press, 2020, with Nicole Burisch), HANDBOOK: Supporting Queer and Trans Students in Art and Design Education (Queer Publishing Project/OCAD U Publications, 2018, with Shamina Chherawala) and designer and co-publisher of The HIV Howler: Transmitting Art and Activism with Jessica Whitbread. Their writing is included in The Craft Reader (Bloomsbury, ed. Glenn Adamson) and Extra/ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (Duke University Press, ed. Maria Elena Buszek). 

To properly understand the significance of these publications requires digging deeper to draw out the political, queer, and affective dimensions of these endeavours, and the inextricability, to my mind, of Anthea’s on-paper scholarship from their pedagogical, curatorial, artistic, and community commitments, keenly, and urgently, focused on trans, queer, and HIV activism: through teaching, writing, publishing, printmaking, exhibition-making, art-making, and/as community-building, Anthea has worked to centre the voices and experiences of queer and trans students, notably culminating in the 2018 publication HANDBOOK: Supporting Queer and Trans Students in Art and Design Education. The book has become an indispensable resource for education in art and design institutions. 

A versatile print-maker, Anthea has shown the enduring power of print media, and the print periodical, for social movement organizing. Their work as co-publisher and designer of The HIV Howler: Transmitting Art and Activism has extended the strategies of early AIDS activist print and design strategies, working in community to bring to, and keep in, the fore historical and emergent visual and cultural activist strategies and community mobilization around the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic; The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art, and Design (2020), brought emphasis to the historical and present-day politics of craft, evincing the political and activist ends to which craft practices have been deployed.

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✍️Book Prize

The UAAC-AAUC Book Award (established 2023) is intended to recognize and celebrate the scholarly achievements of our members. Monographs, edited anthologies, and exhibition catalogues published in English or French between January 1 and December 31 prior to the award year, are eligible. (For the 2023 award, books must have been published in 2022). Works published posthumously are ineligible.

Nominations must be submitted via our online form listing the nominator, title of the work, author, press, year, and nominee’s contact information. Authors or presses will be responsible for providing 3 copies (paper or digital) to the awards jury. 

Eligibility: The prize is open to 

  • Monographs, edited anthologies, and exhibition catalogues
  • published in English or French between January 1 and December 31 prior to the award year
  • regardless of subject-matter, written by a UAAC member in good standing who is employed or studying at a Canadian institution; 
  • or any book on a Canadian topic (broadly conceived) by a UAAC member in good standing who is not at a Canadian institution. 

 Prize: 1-year UAAC Membership + 1-year subscription to RACAR

Nominate Now

 

Year Recipient
2023 Best monograph: Stephanie Springgay, Feltness: Research-Creation, Socially Engaged Art, and Affective Pedagogies. Duke UP, 2022
2023 Best edited collection: Marcus Milwright and Evanthia Baboula, eds. Made for the Eye of One Who Sees: Canadian Contributions to the Study of Islamic Art and Archaeology. McGill-Queen’s University Press and the Royal Ontario Museum, 2022
2023 Best exhibition catalogue: Esther Trépanier, Scott, Brandtner, Eveleigh, Webber: Revisiting Montreal Abstraction of the 1940s. Translated by Judith Terry. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022

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