The award ceremony will take place Thursday, Dec. 14 at 10:30 a.m. in the Freer Gallery of Art's Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Auditorium.

The Prize
The Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies, Kyoto, and the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. award the Shimada Prize bienieally for the oustanding publication on the history of East Asian Art. The $10,000 prize was established in 1992 to honor Professor Shimada Shujiro.

2006 Winner
This year's eighth biennial prize is awarded for Andrew M. Watsky's book "Chikubushima: Deploying the Sacred Arts in Momoyama Japan" published by the University of Washington Press (2004). This book represents one of the most significant monographs concerning the art of the Momoyama period (1568–1615) published to date in any language. Its carefully argued main thesis is that the sponsorship of sacred arts by the Toyotomi, one of the warrior-class houses of 16th–century Japan, served in various ways to define family identity after the death of the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1598. The book provides a new framework within which to understand a wide range of cultural production during the latter half of the Momoyama period.

Watsky constructs his argument through a rigorous, textured study of the Tsukubusuma Shrine on the sacred island of Chikubushima, located in Shiga Prefecture, north of the ancient capital of Kyoto. Dedicated to the deity Benzaiten, this profusely decorated monument, as the author demonstrates, is in fact a composite made up of an outer structure dating to the 1560s and a central core, formerly a Buddhist memorial to Sutemaru, the prematurely lost son of the warlord Hideyoshi. Eschewing conventions in Japanese art history that tend to treat media in isolation from one another, Watsky analyzes the architecture, painting, lacquerware, relief wood carving, metalwork and architectural coloring in an integrated fashion to understand the true nature of this palimpsest-like structure.

Meticulously researched, elegantly structured and beautifully written, Watsky's book exemplifies the ideals upon which the Shimada Prize was founded. The translated documentation in the appendix and 150 reproductions (more than 60 in color) reflect the author's commitment to his subject and discipline and ensure that this study will serve for years to come as a veritable textbook for the art and cultural history of one of the most dynamic eras in premodern Japan.

Andrew M. Watsky
Watsky received his bachelor's degree from Oberlin College and his master's degree and doctorate from Princeton University. His book "Chikubushima: Deploying the Sacred Arts in Momoyama Japan" also was awarded the Association for Asian Studies' John Whitney Hall Book Prize in 2006. Professor Watsky is associate professor of Japanese and Chinese art history at Vassar College.

Past Recipients