Exhibition: Samplers at Boston’s MFA
From the MFA website:
Embroideries of Colonial Boston: Samplers
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 20 November 2010 — 13 March 2011
The embroideries of colonial Boston girls and women have long been treasured family possessions and are now much sought after by collectors. The charm and craftsmanship of the Adam and Eve samplers, pastoral pictures with leaping stags and galloping hunters, as well as crewelwork bed hangings and delicately embroidered baby caps bring to mind a warm domesticity; however, as a group they also reveal much about the lives of Boston women and their role within colonial society.
The first of three exhibitions in the Edward and Nancy Roberts Family Gallery in the new wing for Art of the Americas, “Embroideries of Colonial Boston: Samplers” demonstrates the role these schoolgirl exercises played in educating Boston’s genteel young women. The use of samplers was common in Europe, and when the first colonists to New England arrived they brought their samplers with them to help educate their children.
The exhibition will feature a pair of 17th-century samplers brought to Boston as well as two 17th-century American examples clearly illustrating the connection between Great Britain and the colonies. During the 18th century, samplers evolved from their original format as collections of embroidery stitches and designs into more pictorial works that could be proudly hung in the family home. Distinctive sampler styles developed throughout Boston that can be associated with specific neighborhoods. The exhibition will feature many of these styles, including Boston’s most famous samplers—those including the depiction of Adam and Eve at the bottom that were woven by girls from the North End of the city.
Call for Papers: Eighteenth-C Scottish Studies Society (ECSSS)
Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society Conference: The Arts & Sciences of Progress
University of Aberdeen, 7-10 July 2011
Proposals due by 1 December 2010
ECSSS invites proposals from ASECS members for its annual conference, to be held from 7 to 10 July 2011 at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Hosted by the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, the conference will focus attention on the notion of “progress” – and its limitations – in society, literature, science, politics, and the arts. Proposals are welcome on this theme, as well as on relations between Ireland and Scotland, Jacobitism, Highland culture, Scottish Episcopalianism, 18th-century Aberdeen, and any other aspects of 18th-century Scottish thought and culture.
In addition, this conference will commemorate the 250th anniversary of the birth of James Macpherson’s Ossianic poetry in the early 1760s, and papers relating to that theme will be particularly welcome. David Hume’s 300th birthday will also be duly noted, although we will leave the main celebration of that event to the Hume Society/IASH conference in Edinburgh one week afterwards. Plenary lectures will be presented by Professor Colin Kidd of Glasgow University: “Hypocrisy and Dissimulation in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Case of the Rev. Alexander Fergusson of Kilwinning” and Professor Fiona Stafford of Oxford University: “Everything Unreconciled? The Place of Macpherson’s Ossian.”
Please email or fax a title and one-page description of your proposed panel or proposed 20-minute paper, along with a one-page cv containing your contact information (deadline: 1 December 2010) to: Professor Cairns Craig, Director – Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, Humanity Manse, 19 College Bounds, Aberdeen AB24 3UG, Scotland, UK. Fax: (0)1224 273677; email: cairns.craig@abdn.ac.uk.
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