Smithsonian American Art Museum
SAAM Announces Faye Raquel Gleisser as Winner of the 2025 Eldredge Prize
The Smithsonian American Art Museum is delighted to announce that Dr. Faye Raquel Gleisser, associate professor at Indiana University, has been awarded the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for her book Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967–1987 (University of Chicago Press, 2023).
The annual Eldredge Prize, named in honor of the museum’s former director (1982–1988), recognizes originality and thoroughness of research, excellence of writing, and clarity of method. Single-author, book-length publications in the field of American art history appearing within the previous three calendar years are eligible.
This year’s jurors were Karen Mary Davalos of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; Richard Meyer of Stanford University; and Amy M. Mooney of Columbia College Chicago.
The jury described Risk Work as a “gamechanger” noting that “through the lens of ‘punitive literacy’ and with bold pairings of well-known and understudied artists, Gleisser presents an original rethinking of the relational, embodied, and situated knowledge that informed artistic and performative practice in the United States from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. This turbulent period, marked by social and political revolutions, the advent of for-profit carceral institutions, and advances in surveillance technology, resulted in a profound expansion of policing and prosecution. Gleisser persuasively argues that the police state is a structural field that shapes artists’ creative decisions and that the artist’s race, class and gender inform their punitive literacy, which in turn shapes their art.” The trio also commended Gleisser’s interdisciplinary approach that “draws together art history, performance studies, black feminism, queer of color critique, legal studies, and carceral studies, to show how guerilla art between 1967 and 1987 requires attention to punitive literacy.”
Shortlisted for the 2025 prize were: Katie Anania, Out of Paper: Drawing, Environment, and the Body in 1960s America (Yale University Press, 2024); Emilie Boone, A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography (Duke University Press, 2023); Lisa Gail Collins, Stitching Love and Loss: A Gee’s Bend Quilt (University of Washington Press, 2023); and Tatiana Reinoza, Reclaiming the Americas: Latinx Art and the Politics of Territory (University of Texas Press, 2023).
In conjunction with the award, Gleisser will present the Eldredge Prize virtual lecture on Thursday, December 11, 2025. Please register for it at events.blackthorn.io/5f4ZMUx7/5a2bVR21ScD.
December 18, 2025
