Horowitz Book Prize

Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America: Material Culture in Motion, c. 1780–1980. Photo by Bruce M.

Each year, Bard Graduate Center awards the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Book Prize to a book that demonstrates scholarly excellence and commitment to cross-disciplinary conversation in decorative arts, design history, or material culture of the Americas.

In fall 2022, BGC announced that Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America: Material Culture in Motion, c. 1780–1980, edited by Beverly Lemire, Laura Peers, and Anne Whitelaw (McGill-Queens University Press), had won the award for books published in 2021.

The publication resulted from a research process involving Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors and explores how close, collaborative looking can discern the traces of contact, exchange, and movement of objects and give them a life and political power in complex cross-cultural histories.

In making the award, the members of the selection committee for the Horowitz Book Prize wrote, “The volume’s editors . . . and authors bring diverse disciplinary and community knowledges to the material culture of northern North America to draw out complex, dynamic histories of Indigeneity and settler colonialism. Through their creative and provocative research into the North, its authors contribute to restoring appreciation of the arts, technologies, and agencies of peoples indigenous to a region long characterized through imperial eyes as barren and empty.”