2009 MAHS Graduate Student Presentation Award

The Midwest Art History Society's Graduate Student Presentation Award is granted to the best paper presented by a graduate student at the MAHS annual conference. Candidates are nominated by their panel chairs and the winning paper is selected by a committee of MAHS board members. The prize this year consisted of two parts: an electronic gift card to amazon.com for the winner to purchase a book of his or her choice, and a year‘s membership in MAHS.

The 2009 award was presented to Lourdes Ramirez, a first-year graduate student at Case Western Reserve University, for her paper, "Francisco de Zurbaran: Nazareth in the New World"

Ramirez‘s paper discussed the painter‘s financial dependence on emerging art markets for his religious pictures in the New World. Using the subject of Christ and the Virgin in the House at Nazareth as an example, she traced the sale of this picture to the Americas and then documented as many as ten variations and copies of the work produced in Latin America. Using financial data from documents of the time, Ramirez concluded that Zurbaran‘s targeting of New World markets was short-lived because of declining trade revenues. As a result, Zurbaran redirected his efforts to cater to new and established patrons in Spain during the later part of his career. Mr. Ramirez‘s paper summarized a well-documented research project, bringing to light new information about one of Spain‘s most important seventeenth century artists.