COURTESY NGA
The art historian and curator Carmen C. Bambach has won the $100,000 Vilcek Prize for Excellence, which is “bestowed to an immigrant who has had a significant impact on American society and world culture,” in the words of the organization that was founded in 2000 by philanthropists Jan and Marica Vilcek, who are immigrants from Czechoslovakia.
Bambach, who came to the U.S. from Chile in the 1970s, is the curator of Italian and Spanish drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and she organized the museum’s 2017–18 blockbuster “Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer.” This summer, Yale University Press will publish Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, a four-volume, 2,200-page treatise on the master by Bambach.
“The contributions of both immigrants and curators often goes unheralded and unappreciated,” Marica Vilcek said in a statement to press. “With the Vilcek Prize for Excellence, we are afforded the unique opportunity to bring them into the limelight to be recognized and celebrated.”