Congratulations to HART Ph.D. candidate, Aja Martin, for being awarded the Lodieska Stockbridge Vaughn Fellowship!
The Vaughn Fellowship is given annually by the Rice Graduate Council to students who display evidence of outstanding achievement and promise. The selection process is highly competitive and by nomination only. Only five awards are presented each year, one in social sciences, one in humanities and three in any discipline.
Aja's dissertation, “Dark Matters: Lucio Fontana’s Grotesque World,” calls attention to the conspicuous presence of shadows and voids that appear across Fontana’s oeuvre and enact a dynamic balance with the aspects of light and space for which the artist is more widely known. She has curated large-scale contemporary art exhibitions and served in curatorial departments and on selection boards across Texas. Aja’s prior research into constructed public and private spaces also involves technology, vision, and being—areas Aja continues to pursue in the work of Lucio Fontana.