Art history professor receives Smithsonian Institution award

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery has announced Laura Katzman, professor of art history at James Madison University, as the winner of its 2024 Director’s Essay Prize. Her essay, “Lorenzo Homar’s Cine Alba: An Intimate Portrait of North American Artists in Nineteen- Fifties Puerto Rico,” was chosen for its interdisciplinary contributions to the fields of American art, biography, history and cultural identity. The text was published in the book La mirada en construcción: Ensayos sobre cultura visual (2022), which was edited by José Orlando Sued and René Rodríguez-Ramírez.

Founded in 2019, the Director’s Essay Prize fosters leading research in the field of visual biography and American portraiture. The 2024 prize was juried by PORTAL, the Portrait Gallery’s scholarly center. Its advisors include Martha S. Jones, the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, professor of history and a professor at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and Julio Capó, associate professor of history at Florida International University.

“Laura Katzman’s original essay is a deeply researched article that explores Puerto Rican artist Lorenzo Homar’s 1952 work Cine Alba, a fascinating portrait of five distinct North American artists,” Capó said. “In mining numerous public and private archives, Katzman unveils new understandings and an astute analysis of the work, the artist and his subjects and their lives. In so doing, she offers a nuanced reading of the work and demonstrates how it reflects key social, political and cultural moments in Puerto Rican history and, especially, its place in cultural nationalism. Katzman’s engaging, beautifully written essay is a masterwork in interdisciplinary research and analysis, and the text will serve as an excellent model for future works on portraiture.”

Katzman was the Terra Foundation Visiting Professor at the Freie Universität Berlin from 2018 to 2019 and served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Research and Scholars Center. An internationally recognized scholar of 20th-century documentary photography on the U.S. continent and in Puerto Rico, she curated the widely acclaimed retrospective “Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity” for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (2023–2024). She is the editor of The Museum of the Old Colony: An Art Installation by Pablo Delano, principal author of Re-viewing Documentary: The Photographic Life of Louise Rosskam, and co-author of the award- winning Ben Shahn’s New York: The Photography of Modern Times. Katzman’s current research examines a post-World War II photographic archive that U.S. artists created for the Puerto Rican government at a time of profound industrial transformation in the Caribbean nation and in the context of its complex colonial relations with the United States.

“It is a great honor to be recognized by the National Portrait Gallery for my contribution to the growing body of interdisciplinary research on portraiture, revealing the genre’s capacity to deepen our understanding of complex matters such as U.S. imperial ambitions and the enduring impact of those ambitions on other cultures,” Katzman said. “The Director’s Essay Prize offers the exciting opportunity to bring wider attention to the extraordinary work of Lorenzo Homar and his collaborations with North American artists at a critical period in Cold War history—a fateful moment for Puerto Rico’s ambiguous political status, distinct cultural identities and long-standing struggles for self-determination.”

Katzman will deliver a lecture on her prize-winning essay, “Lorenzo Homar’s Cine Alba: An Intimate Portrait of North American Artists in Nineteen-Fifties Puerto Rico” Tuesday, Oct. 15, at 5:30
p.m. in the Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium at the National Portrait Gallery, Eighth and G Streets N.W., Washington, D.C.

The Director’s Essay Prize complements the Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, a triennial juried contemporary art exhibition established in 2006. The prize is specifically dedicated to supporting the next wave of written scholarship on portraiture.

National Portrait Gallery
The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery tells the multifaceted story of the United States through the individuals who have shaped American culture. Spanning the visual arts, performing arts and new media, the Portrait Gallery portrays poets and presidents, visionaries and villains, actors and activists whose lives tell the nation’s story.

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