UW Art Professor Receives Wyeth Foundation Grant

A University of Wyoming art historian is among seven recipients of Wyeth Foundation grants that support publication of book-length manuscripts in the history of American art.

Rachel Sailor, an assistant professor in the UW Department of Art, received a Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant. Administered by the College Art Association, the grants support works of “high scholarly and intellectual merit.” The grant is for Sailor’s manuscript “Meaningful Places: Local Landscape Photography in the 19th Century American West and Its Legacy,” published by University of New Mexico Press.

“The book explores the under-recognized importance of 19th-century ‘settler’ photographers for the development of the American West,” Sailor says. “Through a series of case studies, this book demonstrates how images of landscape were particularly important to communities all over the West as they sought to define and understand their new locales.”

Sailor teaches 19th- and 20th-century European art, American art and photography, and a variety of courses on contemporary art. She has published a number of articles and book reviews on the history of photography in the American West.