Lucy Quezada Yáñez granted inaugural Driskell Award for Creative Excellence

Lucy Quezada Yáñez, a CLAVIS doctoral candidate, has been awarded the inaugural David C. and Thelma G. Driskell Award for Creative Excellence, offered by the University of Maryland’s David C. Driskell Center for the Study of Visual Arts & Culture of African Americans & the African Diaspora. Lucy will conduct archival research on Afro-Brazilian art in the Center’s collections for her dissertation, “The Official Field: Visual Arts and Cultural Policy During the Military Dictatorships of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile.”

The David C. and Thelma G. Driskell Award for Creative Excellence is designed to provide emerging scholars and artists with access to the center’s collections in order to conduct new research or create new artistic work that furthers the center’s mission of expanding and deepening the field of African diasporic studies in the visual arts.

Committed to preserving the rich heritage of African American visual art and culture, the David C. Driskell Center was established in 2001 to provide an intellectual home for artists, museum professionals, art administrators and scholars who are working to expand and deepen the field of African diasporic studies in the visual arts. Housing artistic collections, archival papers and a research library, the center is a major repository for the study of African American visual culture.