ALAA-Arvey Foundation Book Award*

Award submissions are currently closed. Awards will be announced in February 2026. The next cycle of award submissions will open in Spring 2026.

Competition for the 2026 ALAA-Arvey Foundation Book Award (now closed):

The Association for Latin American Art is pleased to sponsor the Annual ALAA-Arvey Foundation Book Award for an especially distinguished scholarly book published on the art of Latin America from antiquity to the present. The award is generously funded by the Arvey Foundation and consists of a citation and a $1,000 honorarium. We will present the award at the annual meeting of the College Art Association. The name of the recipient will appear in the newsletters of both ALAA and CAA.

For the 2026 Award, we will evaluate books on Latin American Art from any period, antiquity to the present, that meet the following criteria:

•      Publication date between July 31, 2024 and August 1, 2025

•      Books may be written in English, Spanish, or Portuguese

•      Books may have one or more authors

•      The book award committee does not consider exhibition catalogues. Please submit all inquiries regarding exhibition catalogues to the exhibition catalogue award chair Rosario Inés Granados (rosario.granados@blantonmuseum.org).

The books will be evaluated by a three-person committee of accomplished art historians, each with wide expertise in the field of Latin American art history.

Please contact committee chair Andrew James Hamilton at ahamil5@artic.edu by May 31, 2025, to verify whether a prospective entry is eligible for the competition according to the above criteria. If the book is eligible, mailing addresses for the three committee members will be provided.

Hard copies of books are to be sent directly to each committee member and must be postmarked no later than August 1, 2025.

Book Award Committee

Andrew James Hamilton, Chair, ahamil5@artic.edu
Cristina Gonzalez, cg87607@usc.edu
Adele Nelson, adele.nelson@austin.utexas.edu

*Authors may not submit the same material for two award categories. If, for example, a major essay from an exhibition catalogue is submitted for the Article Award, the catalogue itself may not be submitted for the Exhibition Catalogue Award or vice versa. It is the responsibility of the author to determine which category best fits the submission.

2025 WINNER

ALAA-Arvey Foundation Book Award

Juliet Wiersema, The History of a Periphery: Spanish Colonial Cartography from Colombia’s Pacific Lowlands (University of Texas Press, 2024).

2024 Honorable Mentions