Art history chair Miwon Kwon has received the highest book award from the leading professional organization in her field for "Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974" (Prestel Publishing), a book she co-authored with Philipp Kaiser, director of Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany.
Kwon will split the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award, given by the College Art Association (CAA) with Kaiser, then-senior curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). Their survey of Earthworks, or Land Art, was developed as the catalogue for a critically acclaimed exhibition celebrating artists who used the natural environment of remote and often physically daunting landscapes to create their artwork. Kwon co-curated "Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974," which ran last year at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary exhibition space.
The annual award for museum scholarship recognizes the author or authors of "an especially distinguished catalogue in the history of art" published in the English language under the auspices of a museum, library, or collection, according to the CAA, a group of 12,000 artists, art historians, scholars, curators, critics, collectors, educators, publishers and other professionals in the visual arts.
The CAA lauded "Ends of the Earth" for presenting a "stimulating, long-overdue, scholarly assessment of this international phenomenon. Wresting the history of Land art from its ossified foundations and courageously bringing an unruly topic into clear focus, the curator Philipp Kaiser and the scholar Miwon Kwon join forces to produce this appropriately expansive, decidedly revelatory, and eminently readable publication."
A native of South Korea, Kwon originally trained in architecture and holds a MA in photography and received extensive curatorial experience during a tenure at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the early 1990s. She earned a Ph.D. in architectural history and theory at Princeton University in 1998 and joined UCLA’s faculty the same year.
