WASHINGTON, D.C.- Alex J. Taylor has been awarded the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s 2011 Terra Foundation for American Art International Essay Prize. Taylor’s winning essay “Unstable Motives: Propaganda, Politics and the Late Work of Alexander Calder” focuses on Calder’s late-career mobiles and stabiles, made from the 1950s until his death in 1976, and explores the contradictory ideologies that Calder’s abstraction could serve. The essay will be published in the Spring 2012 issue of the museum’s journal American Art (vol. 26, no. 1). Taylor is the second winner of the $500 prize, which recognizes excellent research and writing by a scholar in the field of American art history based outside the United States. The annual award, established in 2009, supports essays that advance the understanding of historical American art a