Dr. Sara Blaylock's book, Parallel Public: Experimental Art in Late East Germany (MIT Press) has been awarded the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize for first books published in 2022. The prize is decided by a group of five scholars from universities in Canada, the UK, and the United States.
Dr. Blaylock is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Jurors felt that her lively and accessible study "makes a unique and significant contribution to our understanding of the role of (experimental) art in the GDR." A provocative and exciting book that should - and will - be read by many, Parallel Public "strikes out into new explanatory ground," and by so doing "provides a very important corrective to the popular memory of the GDR" and as such serves "as a means for articulating memory and identity."