The Claire Martin Fairman Prize
A bequest from the Estate of Claire Martin Fairman and the gifts of the Fairman family establish the Claire Martin Fairman History of Art and Architecture Undergraduate Thesis Prize in memory of Claire Martin Fairman, AB 1954. The Fairman Prize will be awarded to that thesis which is found, by faculty vote, to be most worthy, and of a topic focusing on modern art, which was of great interest to Mrs. Fairman. Mrs. Fairman was a 1954 graduate of Radcliffe College and past President of the Harvard-Radcliffe Club of Long Island she received Radcliffe's Distinguished Service Award in 2004 on the occasion of her class' 50th reunion, of which she was co-chair. A devoted community volunteer, she served at various times on the Boards of Planting Fields Foundation, Locust Valley Library, Doubleday-Babcock Senior Center, Save the Children Long Island, and the New York Virtuosi Chamber Symphony. She co-founded the Hutton House Lectures at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University and retired as Development Officer at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. She was a Fine Arts concentrator and wrote her thesis on Henry Moore. She was a lifelong lover and supporter of the arts.
Comprehensive list of winners of the Claire Martin Fairman Thesis Prize
2026
Catherine Mignone - "Sources Are Forgotten: Diamonds and Ethnic Solidarity"
2025
Bristol Fales-Hill - "Children in Focus: Gordon Parks and the Politics of Black Childhood in American Photography"
2024
Ryan Durando - "Monumental Expressions of Classicized Identity in Contemporary Art: Jean-Michel Basquiat's Visualized Counter-Classicism"
2023
Zoë Hopkins - “Photo-Poetic Intimacy: The Production and Exchange of African American Real Photo Postcards in the Early Twentieth Century”
2022
Kelsey Chen - "Things Adrift: A Vital Materialist Account of Trinh Mai’s Bone of My Bone as Feminist Refuge-Making Craft"
2021
Kaitlin Hao - "'I Want to Disappear in My Art': Story-Tinkering in the Practice of Lam Tung Pang"
Alden Fossett - "'On Three Counts I Am an Outsider': Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s Photographic Imaginary Through the Photographer’s Lens"
2019
Qianqian Yang - “Fragmenting the Female Body: The Postwar Photomontages of Toshiko Okanoue (1950-1957)”
2018
Samuel Shapiro - “Michael Asher’s Museology”
2017
Sophia Feng - “Agency and Ideology: The Depiction of Model Women in Chinese Propaganda Posters, circa 1953”
2016
Angie Jo - “How a Civic Building Means: The Languages of Boston City Hall”
2015
Isaac Dayno - “’The Last Children of Men’: Women, Family, and the World in Shaker Visionary Images, 1839-1859”
Marina Molarsky-Beck - “Picturing The Self: Berthe Morisot’s Self-Portraiture”
2014
Connie Fu - “Choreographing the Body, Performing Line: Edgar Degas’s Representation of 19th Century Ballet”