Announcing the 2022 Winners of the ARLIS/NA Student Advancement Awards
The Student Awards Subcommittee of ARLIS/NA is pleased to announce the recipients of this year’s awards: Sam Regal has been chosen to receive the Gerd Muehsam Award, and Joana Stillwell was selected for the Wolfgang M. Freitag Internship Award.
Sam is a librarian, writer, and artist living in Los Angeles. She is currently enrolled in the Library and Information Science Master’s program at the University of California, Los Angeles, and will be graduating in the spring of 2022. She was chosen as the recipient of the Muehsam award for her paper, Preserving [Spectral] Knowledge: Indigeneity, Haunting, and Performing the Embodied Archive, which was written for Drs. Miwon Kwonn and Glenn Wharton’s class on Issues in Contemporary Art, in the spring of 2021. She serves as the Project Manager of California Rare Book School (CalRBS) and is presently the Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) Southern California Chapter and the ArLiSNAP Student Liaison. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Hunter College, and her poems, plays, and stories have been published internationally. Her piece “Aria” is included in the Rebecca Walker-edited anthology Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo (Simon & Schuster, 2022), and her translation of Macanese poet Yao Feng’s One Love Only Until Death was published in 2017 by Vagabond Press. Her collaborative performance and visual artwork has been staged at MoMA PS1, Le Poisson Rouge, the University of Georgia, and elsewhere.
The Gerd Muehsam Award is given annually to recognize excellence in a graduate student paper or project on a topic relevant to art librarianship. This award was established to honor the memory of Gerd Muehsam (1913-1979), a distinguished scholar, teacher, and art bibliographer, whose support of and dedication to ARLIS/NA was an inspiration to her colleagues and students.
Joana Stillwell is an audiovisual archivist and artist currently based in Washington, D.C. She is a recent graduate of the University of Maryland, College Park’s Master of Library and Information Science program, with a specialization in archives and digital curation. She simultaneously received a graduate certificate in museum scholarship and material culture. She has previously worked with digitizing rare books and materials at the University of Maryland Libraries, and recently contributed to an online exhibition for the Filipino American Community Archive. She currently works at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archive (MARMIA) where she helps preserve and makes accessible local television, artist, community, and personal archives. Joana will focus her internship on library exhibitions at the American Art and Portrait Gallery Library, and further her research on the differences between library and museum exhibitions.
The Wolfgang M. Freitag Internship Award is given in honor of Freitag (1924-2012), who was a librarian and senior lecturer in the Fine Arts Department at Harvard University. Freitag wrote extensively on art librarianship, was a charter member of ARLIS/NA, a recipient of the ARLIS/NA Distinguished Service Award, and a former president of ARLIS/NA. This award provides support for students preparing for careers in art or architecture librarianship or visual resources curatorship with a grant to support a 150-hour internship in an art- or architecture-related setting, such as a library, archive, or visual resources collection.
Members of the ARLIS/NA Student Award committee were: Jessica Craig, Gwen Mayhew (chair), Giana Ricci, Debra Riley-Huff, Abigail Sebaly, Heather Saunders, and Virginia Seymour