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Prof. Julia Andrews awarded Guggenheim Fellowship

April 26, 2016

Prof. Julia Andrews awarded Guggenheim Fellowship

Prof. Julia Andrews

Reprinted from the College of Arts and Sciences website:

Julia F. Andrews, professor, history of art, is in very good company. Since their creation in 1925 by former U.S. Sen. Simon Guggenheim and his wife, Guggenheim Fellowships have been awarded to an impressive list of scholars, artists and researchers. Andrews joins 28 other Ohio State faculty members on that list — all from the College of Arts and Sciences — from all areas.  

Characterized as “midcareer” awards, winners of the annual competitions are those who have a proven record of exceptional scholarship, innovative research and/or creative ability. After a rigorous review of the 3,500-4,000 applications it receives each year, the foundation awards approximately 200 fellowships nationwide.

Andrews, a specialist in Chinese art, was one of the first American art historians to conduct research in China after formal reestablishment of U.S.-China relations in 1979.

An acclaimed scholar, Andrews’ first book, Painters and Politics in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1979 (published in 1994), won the Joseph Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) for the best book of the year on modern China. Her book Art of Modern China (co-authored with Kuiyi Shen), published in 2012, received the biennial Humanities Book Prize of the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) in 2013.

During her Guggenheim Fellowship year, Andrews plans to finish a new manuscript, “China Roar: Painting Societies and the Creation of Modern Chinese Art, 1919-1949,” centered on the privately organized painting societies that proliferated in China’s cities between 1919 and 1949.

Serving as alternative centers of cultural power, sometimes in the absence of a well-functioning government or effective structures of institutional support, these groups of artists, gathering as individuals but conscious of a global artistic community, left a powerful intellectual, artistic and pedagogical legacy that formed the core on which China’s modern art world and discourse of artistic modernity was built.

“I am delighted to have received this grant,” Andrews said. “I plan to make a few essential fact-checking trips to China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, but the opportunity to spend uninterrupted time to complete my writing is perhaps most important. I am very grateful to the Guggenheim Foundation for offering such an opportunity."

Andrews teaches and mentors graduate students in the areas of Chinese painting and modern Chinese art, teaches undergraduate courses on East Asian art history and has led several study abroad programs in China. She was founding director of the Institute for Chinese Studies at Ohio State.

In addition to teaching and writing, Andrews has curated exhibitions, such as the Guggenheim Museum's groundbreaking 1998 exhibition A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth Century China, shown in New York and Bilbao.

Andrews received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984 and began her career at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She came to Ohio State in 1987.

In June 2015, Ohio State’s Board of Trustees recognized Andrews by conferring on her the university’s highest honor, the permanent title of Distinguished University Professor. In 2013, the university’s Office of Academic Affairs named Andrews a Distinguished Scholar.