The American Historical Print Collectors Society Announces 2025 Publication Awards and December 1, 2025, deadline for new submissions 

For more than thirty years, the American Historical Print Collectors Society (AHPCS) has recognized significant scholarship in the field of American historical prints with its Ewell L. Newman Book Award. In 2023 the AHPCS added two new awards to recognize shorter works published in journals and edited volumes, including exhibition catalogues and digital formats. The Essay award is named in honor of Lois W. Newman, a founding member of the Society, who continued as a generous supporter of the publication awards after her husband’s death.

Each annual cycle typically results in one book award in the amount of $2,000 and two essay or article awards in the amount of $750 each. One of the essay awards will be designated for the best article published in the AHPCS journal Imprint, as selected by the Newman Award Committee. Awards are not necessarily presented each year but are determined by the quality of available submissions. Occasionally, there may be multiple winners in an individual year.

A list of all Newman Book Award winners to date can be found at https://ahpcs.org/newman-award-winners/. Essay winners are listed at: https://ahpcs.org/essay-award-winners/ 

2025 Ewell L. Newman Book Award 

Tatiana Reinoza, Reclaiming the Americas: Latinx Art and the Politics of Territory (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2023)

This important study is centered around the production, iconography, and social role of prints by Latinx artists in North America from the 1960s into the 21st century. Tatiana Reinoza’s Reclaiming the Americas focuses on Latinx printmakers whose contemporary works challenge the past practices represented in maps, charts, and views created since the sixteenth century. The author addresses printmaking’s historical role and complicity in European colonialization. In this new narrative, specific historical maps and prints have become points of departure for new graphic works that reconfigure the older images. The author explores how Latinx artists have worked since the 1960s to restore graphic media and the lands once illustrated by Europeans to “the Indigenous, migrant, mestiza/o, and Afro-descendant people of the Americas.”

Each of the book’s four main chapters presents a case study focused on one of four workshops–based in Los Angeles, New York City, Arizona, and Texas–and their most prominent artists, printers, and bodies of work. Each chapter addresses different themes as well, including settler mythologies, mapping, borderlands and immigrants, and a water-based view. The author’s careful and insightful analysis of individual prints is a marked strength of the book. This visual analysis is grounded in a series of contextual frameworks that are shared across separate chapters, including individual artists’ experiences and backgrounds, and the circumstances of production, the collaboration made possible by a studio or workshop.

The book is at once a history of American printmaking since the late 1960s as well as a corrective that brings a fresh eye. These provocative works convey multiple meanings and demonstrate how prints can visualize major cultural changes. Latinx workshops are largely absent from mainstream histories of post-WWII printmaking, an oversight this book remedies. The book presents important original research and fresh assessments of American printmaking during the last fifty-plus years, and it also focuses on the relationship between contemporary Latinx printmaking and American prints over the centuries since the first contact with the Americas.

 

2025 Lois W. Newman Essay Award

Marina Wells, “Printing Whaling Masculinity in A Shoal of Sperm Whale,” The New England Quarterly (2024) Vol. 97, No. 4, pp. 551-576.

The committee selected Marina Wells, “Printing Whaling Masculinity in A Shoal of Sperm Whale,” an article published in the December 2024 issue of The New England Quarterly, a special issue which explores the region’s oceanic history and culture from variety of perspectives. Marina Wells’s contribution is centered on prints of the whaling industry. She discusses two nineteenth-century prints depicting whaling scenes produced from designs by Cornelius B. Hulsart, a former whaleman. Capturing a Sperm Whale (1835) is an aquatint that was engraved, printed, and colored by John Hill after William Page’s rendering from Hulsart’s original sketch. A Shoal of Sperm Whale. Off the Island of Hawai’i … (1838) is also an aquatint engraved, printed, and colored by John Hill after Thomas Birch’s painting from another of Hulsart’s sketches.

Wells observes how the prints intersected with Hulsart’s own life experiences, and she offers a solid theoretical framework to analyze both their imagery and context. Significantly, she argues that his designs were not rooted in his own traumatic experience as a whaleman (he lost an arm), but instead drew on established conventions found in popular images of naval battles. She offers a deep and thoughtful analysis of the imagery in relation to gender, whaling, disability (to some degree), other images and texts, and the spread of such images. The article’s strong focus on the visual culture of 19th-century whaling makes a convincing argument about artistic conventions, experiences of violence, and white American masculinity. Hulsart’s prints, held in the Mabel Brady Garvan Collection at the Yale University Art Gallery, are thought to be the first whaling prints sold in the U.S. by an American artist. As such, they established the standard iconography for whaling scenes, serving as a kind of template for later printmakers. In defining gendered aspects of both artist(s) and subject, the author also identifies contributing masculine interests as consumers and patrons of both whaling and these images.

Submissions – Deadline December 1, 2025

The purpose of the book and essay awards is to recognize and encourage outstanding scholarship in the field, as defined in our mission statement: prints depicting or reflecting North American history and culture, made either in America or elsewhere. Original research, fresh assessments, and the fluent synthesis of known material will be taken into account. The emphasis is on quality and on making an outstanding contribution to the subject.

Essays between 3,000 and 10,000 words will be considered. Works should be submitted in published form as a hard copy or digital attachment. The Society’s Newman Award Committee will serve as the jury to evaluate both books and article submissions. Jurors are all AHPCS members and include collectors, curators, and scholars of American prints. 

Publications remain eligible from the year of publication through the following year, a period of approximately two years. Once a work has been reviewed by the jury, it will not be considered in a subsequent cycle except in a substantially revised edition. Submissions received by December 1st will be considered for the award announced the following spring. 

Contact information

To submit material to the committee for consideration, please mail a copy to:

Helena E. Wright, 4628 49th Street NW, Washington, DC 20016

For additional information, please contact the Committee chair at:

wrighthelena16@gmail.com

Publishers and authors, please note: if it is possible to provide multiple copies, it would facilitate distribution of the publications among the Committee and speed their work. Please contact the Committee chair for individual addresses. Thank you.

The AHPCS is a non-profit corporation that encourages the collection, preservation, study, and exhibition of prints depicting or reflecting North American history and culture, made either in America or elsewhere. For further information about the Society, please visit the website at https://ahpcs.org.