Stitching Love and Loss: A Gee’s Bend Quilt (U. of Washington Press, 2023; paperback, 2025) by Lisa Gail Collins, Professor of Art and Director of American Studies on the Sarah Gibson Blanding Chair, won the Horowitz Book Prize from Bard Graduate Center. Awarded annually, the prize honors scholarly excellence and commitment to cross-disciplinary conversation in books about the material culture of the Americas.

Lisa’s study on a quilt made in mourning and the memory of its making also won the James A. Porter and David C. Driskell Award in African American Art History from the Driskell Center at the University of Maryland. Stitching Love and Loss was also named a finalist for the Sterling Stuckey Book Prize by the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora and shortlisted for the Charles C. Eldredge Prize awarded by the Smithsonian American Art Museum for outstanding scholarship in the field of American art.

“Where tenderness is possible”—an open letter to the students in Lisa’s course on art, urgency, and everyday life—was chosen to serve as the lead essay for ART & Histories (DC: National Gallery of Art, 2025), the inaugural volume of a new book series launched by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the research institute of the National Gallery of Art, which will be published this fall. Featuring artwork by Zola Simone Sullivan ’25 (studio art/philosophy) and Lisa’s neighbor Erika deVries, this letter shares some of what she’s learned and unlearned from the compassionate, creative, and courageous students in her midst during this impossible time of relentless wars, acute inequalities, forced migrations and deportations, pandemics, climate disasters, and attacks on life-affirming dissent.

Lisa is also the recipient of a new fellowship award from the Getty Center in Los Angeles. In fall 2025, on earth that was recently ablaze and in close community with scholars from around the world engaged in the work of “Art and Repair,” Lisa will deepen her new book project “tending towards” as a residential research scholar at the Getty.