The Bob Lancaster Award: This award is given in the spring semester to the outstanding graduating majors in studio art and art history. It was established in memory of the late Robert L. Lancaster, sculptor and chair of the Art Department in the Sarofim School of Fine Arts. Selection of the recipients of the award is made for studio art on the basis of a portfolio and general performances as judged by the studio art faculty, and for art history on the basis of general performance and special projects as judged by the art history faculty. As a merit-based award, it is given only to those students who have met the departmental standards and, therefore, may not be awarded in some years.

Honors Convocation presentation by Dr. Patrick Hajovsky, Assistant Professor of Art History:

“Rachel Baker exemplifies the kind of interdisciplinary study that is achievable through a liberal arts education. She is a double major in art history and biology, and is planning to enter a medical program in Texas. I hear she has more than one option for graduate studies. She wants to work as a doctor and hopes to find an international organization with which she can fulfill her personal career goals and passion for learning about different cultural perspectives of medicine. She added the art history to her major, I think, because of her love for visual cultural expression.

I have known Rachel as long as I have been here. She joined my two pre-Columbian surveys as a First Year Student. These classes cover a wide range of unfamiliar objects and cultures, and she always excelled with inventive and intuitive interpretations of objects. Last year Rachel took my Art of Spain class, in which she produced an enlightening comparative analysis of medieval Islamic and Christian images of the female body. Her capstone project, which she completed last semester, similarly focused on representations of women, but in the modern work of Paula Modherson-Becker.

I present to Rachel the “Art Pin”, which is a gold replica of the door plate from the Glassell School of Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The door plate was designed by Charles Rennie Macintosh, who was a pioneer of 20th-century architecture, emphasizing the role of function and simple geometric manipulation of space in architecture and design.