A BIG congratulations to recent graduate AJ Meyer, recipient of the 2025 ALAA Dissertation Award: The committee chose Anthony J. Meyer’s dissertation “The Givers of Things: Tlamacazqueh and the Art of Religious Making in the Mexica and Early Transatlantic Worlds” to receive the award. Anthony Meyer’s groundbreaking dissertation situates the tlamacazqueh, a group of religious leaders whose Nahuatl name means “the givers of things,” as fundamental to our understanding of Mexica ceremony and the importance of the act of making within it. Meyer attends to everything from the spaces in which these individuals trained, through the materials that they harvested and prepared, to the animatory practices in which they deployed their made works. Not only does Meyer’s research have major ramifications for those of us interested in ecological approaches to art history, the material turn, the obfuscations of historiography, and colonial histories, but it also serves as a model of carefully crafted, meticulously studied, and elegantly approachable scholarly writing.” For more details, visit: https://associationlatinamericanart.org/…/dissertation…/
