Professor Dawn Ades from the School of Philosophy and Art History at Essex has received a CBE for services to higher education and art history in the New Year’s Honours List.
Founding director of the University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art (UECLAA), now the Essex Collection of Art from Latin America (ESCALA), Professor Ades is one of the UK's most influential art historians and curators.
She said: "I am very pleased to receive the CBE. I regard the award also as recognition of the wider achievements of Art History at the University, and the success of ESCALA."
Professor Ades has been responsible for some of the most important exhibitions in London and overseas over the past thirty years, including Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, Art in Latin America: the modern era 1820-1980, Undercover Surrealism and The Colour of my Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art and Francis Bacon.
She also organised the highly successful exhibition to celebrate the centenary of Salvador Dali’s birth. The exhibition was shown in Venice and Philadelphia in 2004.
A Fellow of the British Academy, Professor Ades was a trustee of Tate for a decade until 2005 and remains a member of Tate Modern Council. Among her many other roles she is also a trustee of The Henry Moore Foundation.
Her publications include definitive texts on photomontage, Dada, Surrealism, women artists and Mexican muralists.
Professor Ades has played a vital role in developing the focus on Latin American art at Essex. After joining the then Department of Art History and Theory in 1968, she pioneered the research and teaching of art from Latin America in the UK, creating the country’s first specialised undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in this field, including modules in pre-contact and colonial art from Latin America.
Professor Ades’ research led, in 1989, to the groundbreaking exhibition Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820 to 1980, at the Hayward Gallery in London.
um + um = dois? (1967), Antonio Henrique Amaral. Donated to ESCALA by the artist. Find out more about the artwork on the ESCALA website.
This exhibition also led, in 1993, to the founding of UECLAA, now ESCALA, following the donation by Charles Cosac of a painting by Siron Franco to the University.
ESCALA remains the only public collection in Europe dedicated to modern and contemporary Latin American art and. In 2011, it began to exhibit at firstsite, a new contemporary art venue in Colchester, designed by Rafael Viñoly Architects.
Professor Ades’ publications include Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (1978), Salvador Dalí (1982), Photomontage (1986), Art in Latin America (1989), André Masson (1994), Siron Franco (1995), Surrealist Art (1997), Marcel Duchamp (with Professor Neil Cox and David Hopkins, 1999), Close-Up: Proximity and Defamiliarisation in Art, Film and Photography (with Simon Baker, 2008).