"I appreciate this recognition," Coffey said. "I am surprised and happy and speechless."
The Morey Award, which was established in 1953, is named for one of the CAA's founding members and first teachers of art history in the United States.
The award celebrates a "major scholarly work produced during the time period," Director of Programs of the CAA Emmanuel Lemakis said in an email to the Dartmouth.
Coffey's book was announced as a finalist in November 2012 and proceeded to surpass the other three contenders upon the jury's final review. Coffey will receive her award at the 101st Annual CAA conference in New York City next month.
"[Coffey's] book is not only intellectually provocative, but also beautifully produced," art history professor and department chair Ada Cohen said. "It was wonderful news for [our] department to find out that she actually won."
The book discusses the evolution of mural art in Latin America since the Mexican Revolution in the 1920s. She focuses on three prominent public museums in Mexico City and the role they played in institutionalizing this art form.
These murals were originally viewed as a radical political movement, but have since been accepted as a more nationalist representation of the Mexican state.
Coffey explained that following the Revolution, the new Mexican government commissioned the country's best artists including Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco, whose "Epic of American Civilization" series is displayed in Baker Library to paint murals around the city. These murals were intended to unify the country by depicting events from Mexico's indigenous history. Since the murals generally promoted socialist ideals, they were initially received with immense skepticism.
However, over time the public began to embrace these murals as illustrative of the Mexican identity, Coffey said. Murals became a distinctively "Mexican" form of art, and were able to reflect authentically the history, traditions and values of the culture.
"Although the murals were official art, they spoke the language of the country," Coffey said. "They conveyed the culture's uniqueness."
Coffey revealed that she first developed a passion for Latin American art upon seeing "Art of the Fantastic: 1920-1987," an exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art that coincided with the Pan-American Games. There she was exposed to the works of well-known Latin artists such as Frida Kahlo.
While interning at an art museum in Washington D.C. during college, Coffey said she became fascinated by the politics of museum exhibitions and the controversies these shows could elicit. In graduate school, Coffey merged this interest with her love of Latin American art and chose to specialize in the study of murals, a form of public art imbued with political connotations and cultural significance.
Over the next ten years, Coffey commenced work on a book about Mexican murals. She spent a significant amount of time in art museums in Mexico City, including the National History Museum, the Palace of Fine Arts and the National Anthropology Museum. There she performed mainly archival research, reading and collecting documents and newspaper articles highlighting the history of these murals and the controversies surrounding their institution. Once Coffey began teaching at the College in 2004, she revised and sent her manuscript to other professors for feedback.
Coffey is the first full-time faculty member at Dartmouth to offer courses dedicated to Latin American art, according to Cohen.
"The curriculum is much richer as a result of Coffey's multifaceted approach to the study of the Americas," Cohen said. "[Her classes] offer students a wider perspective on what American art and culture are about."
Coffey said she loves exploring the intricacies of art, and the extent to which such factors as history, race and gender can influence a piece's content. She ultimately chose to become a teacher because she enjoys engaging in conversation about these themes with students, and contends that this dialogue informs her own research.
"One of the things I admire most about Professor Coffey is her ability to navigate and explain complicated theories and the intricacies of an inherently interdisciplinary subject without dumbing it down," art history major and Hood museum curatorial intern Karysa Norris '12 said.
When Coffey finished writing her book this past year, she was not initially confident that it would fit into the category of art history because it focuses not only on aesthetics, but also on politics and anthropology.
When she first began writing, this discipline tended to be more conservative, and she felt more comfortable submitting her work to cultural studies journals as opposed to art history publications. However, Coffey said that art history has since evolved to become increasingly interdisciplinary, and she regards her award as a testament to this kind of diversification.
"How wonderful to be in Coffey's position," Cohen said. "[To] find out that indeed the field accepts you and that perhaps you now are the field."
After she is presented with the Morey Award, Coffey will continue working on her forthcoming book about the exhibition of Mexican folk art in Mexico and the United States.
