The American Philosophical Association (APA) and the American Society for Aesthetics (ASA) are pleased to announce that Professor Sarah Elizabeth Lewis (Harvard University) has been selected as the winner of the 2022 Arthur Danto/American Society for Aesthetics Prize for her paper, “Groundwork: Race and Aesthetics in the Era of Stand Your Ground Law.” It was published in Art Journal 79:4 (2020) 92–113.
The competition this year included 15 papers, and the selection committee also awarded Honorable Mention to Michel-Antoine Xhignesse for “What Makes a Kind an Art-Kind?” Xhignesse teaches at Capilano University in Canada.
The Danto/ASA Prize, in the amount of $1,000, is awarded to a member of the APA and the ASA for the best paper in the field of aesthetics, broadly understood. In addition, a symposium in Professor Lewis’s honor will be held at the 2022 APA Eastern Division meeting in Baltimore, MD. This prize is in honor of the late Arthur Danto, a past president of the APA Eastern Division.
Amie Thomasson (Dartmouth College), the chair of the selection committee, said, “Sarah Lewis’s paper ‘Groundwork: Race and Aesthetics in the era of Stand Your Ground Law’ is a beautifully written, original, and penetrating paper that reflects on the concept of ‘grounding’ as it considers a range of works of art that address racialized life in the US. It is important work that insightfully bridges philosophy and art criticism, in a way that fits in perfectly with the legacy of Arthur Danto’s own work.”
Sarah Elizabeth Lewis is an associate professor of history of art and architecture and African and African American studies at Harvard University, and the founder of the award-winning Vision & Justice Project. Her research focuses on the intersection of African American and Black Atlantic visual representation, racial justice, and representational democracy in the United States from the nineteenth century through the present. She is the author of The Rise (Simon & Schuster, 2014), the co-editor of an anthology on the work of Carrie Mae Weems (MIT Press, 2021), and the guest editor of the landmark “Vision & Justice” issue of Aperture magazine, which received the 2017 Infinity Award for Critical Writing and Research from the International Center of Photography. In 2019, she became the inaugural recipient of the Freedom Scholar Award, presented by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. The award honors Lewis for her body of work and its “direct positive impact on the life of African-Americans.” Her forthcoming publications include Caucasian War: How Race Changed Sight in America (Harvard University Press, 2022), The Vision and Justice Project (One World/Random House), and a manuscript on the groundwork of contemporary arts in the Stand Your Ground Law Era.
The next prize will be awarded in 2024, with a submission deadline of January 20, 2023. Please visit the Danto/ASA Prize page for guidelines.
