High Museum picks winner of Driskell Prize for Black art

Art scholar and curator Adrienne L. Childs will receive $50,000 prize.

Renowned curator and art scholar Adrienne L. Childs has been named the 2022 David C. Driskell Prize winner by the High Museum of Art for her contribution to Black art.

The prize, named after the late David C. Driskell, the 20th century’s preeminent Black art scholar, carries a $50,000 award. Childs, an adjunct curator at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., will be honored at the 17th annual Driskell Prize Dinner on April 29.

“As an art historian and curator, Dr. Childs consistently celebrates and amplifies the work of African American artists and produces thought-provoking scholarship examining Black representation throughout artistic traditions,” said Rand Suffolk, director of the High. “We are honored to support her important work and recognize her considerable achievements with this year’s Driskell Prize.”

Childs, who is also an associate

of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, has spent a career documenting the ways race is represented in American and European fine art as well as decorative art. Her forthcoming book, “Ornamental Blackness: The Black Figure in European Decorative Arts,” will be published by Yale University Press. She also is co-curating the exhibition “The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sex and the Uncanny in Victorian Sculpture,” which opens in Leeds, England, in November.

The Driskell Prize is given to an early or midcareer scholar or artist whose work makes a significant contribution to the field and study of Black art. Past winners have included former Spelman College museum curator Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, Michelle Obama portraitist and Columbus native Amy Sherald and curator Valerie Cassel Oliver.

Prizewinner Adrienne L. Childs is an adjunct curator at the Phillips Collection in Washington.