May 2, 2019 

Congratulations to Eric Friendly, a senior Art History major and continuing Art History graduate student in the School of Visual Art and Design, for being awarded the first-place Undergraduate Research Award by the University of South Carolina. The University Libraries Award for Undergraduate Research recognizes and rewards excellence in scholarly and creative projects that incorporate the use of University Libraries collections, resources and services. Faculty advisor Dr. Susan Felleman, Professor of Art History, describes Eric’s research and nomination for the award:

“Eric’s paper on Raphael Soyer’s Entering the Studio (ca. 1935) was part of a semester-long research project in which students investigated a work in the Columbia Museum of Art, seeking and applying relevant methodologies to its analysis. The paper was well-researched, well-written, historically insightful, and sensitive to issues of representation and style. Eric’s research was wide-ranging and certainly depended on library materials, resources, and library-dependent access to other institutions. He employed primary and secondary sources and familiarized himself with the familial, cultural, and political currents that informed Soyer’s work, as well as the feminism and leftism that were relevant to an analysis and interpretation of the simple yet poignant composition, in which a solemn, modern young woman (the artist’s wife) enters a room, standing on the threshold, ‘coming from darkness into light.’”