Barrett, Chiarenza win Fairchild Award

A ward-winning author Andrea Barrett and Carl Chiarenza, Fanny Knapp Allen Professor Emeritus of Art History and artist-in-residence at the College, have been named the recipients of the Lillian Fairchild Award given by the University.

Barrett was honored for her most recent book, The Voyage of the Narwhal. The work, which was selected as a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998, combines fact and fiction in telling the story of a 19th-century scholar/naturalist on an Arctic expedition. Critics praised the book for its evocative descriptive passages, character insights, and scientific observations.

Her other novels are Lucid Stars, Secret Harmonies, The Middle Kingdom, and The Forms of Water. She also is the author of Ship Fever, a collection of short fiction, which won the 1996 National Book Award.

Chiarenza is a renowned photographer and art historian. His black-and-white photographs of abstract collages have been exhibited across the United States and in Europe, earning him wide acclaim.

Chiarenza was cited by the award committee for an exhibit of large-scale photographs that were displayed at Niagara University and Hobart and William Smith Colleges. His works transform everyday materials--scrap paper, packing material, bits of metal--into dramatic landscape-like images. By controlling the light during the printing process, he creates engaging tones and textures.

His work was the subject of a major monograph published in 1988, "Chiarenza: Landscapes of the Mind," and is found in numerous private and public collections. His photographs and articles have been reviewed and reproduced in more than 150 publications.

The Fairchild Award is customarily given annually to a Rochester-area resident who has produced the best visual, literary, or musical work of art. It was established by Herman Fairchild of the University's Department of Geology in memory of his daughter, Lillian, an accomplished designer who died of tuberculosis at age 32.