Department of Studio Art Bulletins

Ohio Arts Council Awards Three Members of the Studio Art Department

The Ohio Arts Council has bestowed Individual Excellence Awards to R. Kauff (Visual Arts 2D), Jacob Koestler (Media Arts), and Myles Dunigan(Visual Arts 2D) of the Oberlin College Studio Art Department.

The program recognizes outstanding accomplishments by artists in a variety of disciplines. Awards give artists the resources to experiment and explore their art forms, develop skills and advance their careers, and receive affirmation and acknowledgment for outstanding work.

Funding recommendations for IEA are made through an anonymous, open panel review process focused on the exceptional merit of past artistic work.

During this funding cycle, nearly 600 applications were received from artists from across the state. Applications in crafts, design, interdisciplinary, media arts, photography, visual arts 2D, and visual arts 3D were accepted. Each approved artist will receive a $5,000 award.

Congratulations!

Professor Matthew Rarey Awarded Charles Rufus Morey Book Award

Associate Professor of African and Black Atlantic Art History Matthew Rarey has won the College Art Association’s prestigious Charles Rufus Morey Book Award for his first book, Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2023). The award honors "an especially distinguished book in the history of art, published in the English language," and is among the highest recognitions for scholarship in art history. Prof. Rarey's book traces the history of the African-associated amulets made and carried as tools of survival by enslaved people from the 17th to the 19th centuries.

Matthew Rarey has also been named the winner of the 2024 Afro Latin American/Afro-Latinx Scholarship Prize for his essay “Leave No Mark: Blackness and Inscription in the Inquisitorial Archive,” published in Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World (National Gallery of Art, 2023). The award honors an outstanding scholarly essay on Afro Latin American and Afro-Latinx art, and is awarded jointly by the Association of Latin American Art and the Visual Culture Section of the Latin American Studies Association.