Charles C. Eldredge Prize Lecture with Caitlin Meehye Beach

Art historian Caitlin Meehye Beach presents her lecture “Sculpted Bodies and the Matter of Racial Capitalism.” She is the 2023 recipient of the Eldredge Prize for her book “Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery.” The award annually recognizes originality and thoroughness of research and excellence in writing. Beach explores the intersections between the economic wealth generated by enslavement and the materials, production and circulation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sculpture. She also highlights the artists’ role in reproducing anti-Blackness even as they professed anti-slavery politics. In her lecture, she uses her book as a starting point to discuss sculpture's relationship to ideas about race and the human body in nineteenth-century art and material culture. This lecture was presented in-person and online at the Smithsonian American Art Museum on Thursday, March 21, 2024.
Beach is an assistant professor of art history and affiliated faculty in African American Studies at Fordham University, and for the academic year 2023-24, she is co-director of Fordham’s newly established program in Asian American studies. She received a doctorate in 2018 from Columbia University. To read more about her visit americanart.si.edu/press/2023...