Current Art History undergrads Kallie Eller and Antonio Arizmendi received Emerging Scholar in Object Based Learning Awards from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston on October 16, 2025. Only two undergraduate students are awarded each year, and this year both come from Art and Art History!
Eller's paper was titled "Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione's Madonna and Child in Glory with an Angel." It discussed the issues of classification in Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione's Madonna and Child in Glory with an Angel, particularly about the work's status as a painting or drawing, and its status as finished or unfinished. Eller proposed that the work was left intentionally unfinished, following the non-finito stylization that became popular among living artists in the 16th century.
Arizmendi's paper was titled "Re-Negotiating the Mixed Native Self in James Luna’s 'Half Indian/Half Mexican' (2011)." Drawing from racialized colonial images, histories of cultural contact, and notions of photographic "authenticity," the paper explores how James Luna plays with stereotype, perception, and embodiment of a mixed-race Native American identity.