2018 Rhonda Saad Prize for Best Paper in Modern & Contemporary Art
AMCA congratulates Sarah C. Johnson for her winning submission, “Impure Time: Archaeology, Hafidh Druby (1914-1991), and the persistence of representational art in mid-twentieth century Iraq (1940-1980).” Combining Arabic and English archival sources with visual analysis, the paper looks at the way the process of archaeology encouraged Iraqi artists, such as Hafidh Druby (1914- 1991), to create representational narrative artworks and how archaeology legitimized representational painting as a valid form of modern art.
Sarah C. Johnson is a doctoral candidate at the Freie Universität in Berlin, where she is completing a dissertation on the Iraqi modern artist Hafidh Druby (1914-1991). Previously she was a curator of Islamic Collections at the British Museum in London and a researcher at the Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington, DC. She completed her master’s degree in Islamic art and archaeology at the University of Oxford in 2014 and her undergraduate degree in art and archaeology at Princeton University in 2010. She is currently based in Beirut as a Doctoral Fellow at the Orient Institut.