New Book | Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon
From Princeton UP:
Cheryl Finley, Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-0691136844, $50 / £40.
How an eighteenth-century engraving of a slave ship became a cultural icon of black resistance, identity, and remembrance
One of the most iconic images of slavery is a schematic wood engraving depicting the human cargo hold of a slave ship. First published by British abolitionists in 1788, it exposed this widespread commercial practice for what it really was—shocking, immoral, barbaric, unimaginable. Printed as handbills and broadsides, the image Cheryl Finley has termed the ‘slave ship icon’ was easily reproduced, and by the end of the eighteenth century it was circulating by the tens of thousands around the Atlantic rim. Committed to Memory provides the first in-depth look at how this artifact of the fight against slavery became an enduring symbol of black resistance, identity, and remembrance.
Finley traces how the slave ship icon became a powerful tool in the hands of British and American abolitionists, and how its radical potential was rediscovered in the twentieth century by black artists, activists, writers, filmmakers, and curators. Finley offers provocative new insights into the works of Amiri Baraka, Romare Bearden, Betye Saar, and many others. She demonstrates how the icon was transformed into poetry, literature, visual art, sculpture, performance, and film—and became a medium through which diasporic Africans have reasserted their common identity and memorialized their ancestors.
Beautifully illustrated, Committed to Memory features works from around the world, taking readers from the United States and England to West Africa and the Caribbean. It shows how contemporary black artists and their allies have used this iconic eighteenth-century engraving to reflect on the trauma of slavery and come to terms with its legacy.
Cheryl Finley is associate professor of art history at Cornell University. She is the coauthor of Harlem: A Century in Images and the coeditor of Diaspora, Memory, Place: David Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Pamela Z.
Installation | Brian Tolle’s Eureka
Press release, via ArtDaily (30 June 2018). . .
Brian Tolle’s Eureka
Federal Hall National Memorial, Wall Street, New York, 27 June — 8 September 2018
The National Parks of New York Harbor Conservancy, in partnership with the National Park Service, announces the presentation of Brian Tolle’s Eureka, on view from June 27 until September 8, 2018, in Federal Hall, the iconic memorial to democracy on Wall Street. Eureka is part of a new art initiative, curated by Bonnie Levinson, inviting contemporary artists to investigate themes that resonate with the history and legacy of Federal Hall, melding the past and present, to serve as a catalyst toward the reinvigoration of civic life and a platform for free expression.
For this presentation of Eureka, Tolle has chosen to exhibit his work alongside a rare viewing of the Flushing Remonstrance, the 1657 New Netherland petition for “liberty of conscience” that served as the precursor to religious freedom, as cemented in the First Amendment written at Federal Hall over a century later. Not seen in Manhattan in over 30 years, the Remonstrance shares a room with the Bible from President Washington’s 1789 inauguration at Federal Hall.
Tolle’s 40-foot tall sculpture, reflecting a rippling and distorted facade of a 17th-century Dutch canal house, pays homage to the legacy of 40 years of Dutch rule in New York. Originally created for Jan Hoet’s city-wide exhibition, Over the Edges, 2000, in Ghent, Belgium, its re-presentation in Federal Hall blurs the site’s architectural and political history with the contemporary in the conceptual artwork.
Brian Tolle describes the work: “Eureka is a sculptural play with illusion—a facade of a facade. Its Dutch-inspired form points to New York’s early history and its fluid, but troubled, transformation from a Dutch seat of power to British colony, to an American platform for diversity and democracy. The sculpture is an apparition, a mirage of a building that has been displaced and no longer exists. Like the Dutch buildings of lower Manhattan and the canal that was once Broad Street—erased with only the street names lingering as a reminder of their existence—Eureka serves as a marker of Federal Hall’s complex history. Its thin veil floats upwards, into the neoclassical dome of Federal Hall, evoking the strife between form and object, as well as the tension between political volley and social action.”
The artwork’s title is inspired by the brilliant Greek polymath Archimedes’s exploration of displacement. After finding the upward pressure on a submerged object created buoyant force, Archimedes ran through the streets of Syracuse, Sicily, shouting, “Eureka! Eureka!” or “I found it! I found it!” Tolle envisioned Eureka as a metaphor for Archimedes’s principle of leverage. With the right tools, Archimedes believed all was possible. “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to stand,” he said, “and I shall move the world.”
The nation’s Founders leveraged principles as powerful as Archimedes’s when they codified the historic events that occurred at Federal Hall, including: the acquittal in 1735 of the newspaper publisher John Peter Zenger for libel, after he exposed government corruption, which established the foundation for freedom of the press; the 1765 Stamp Act Congress, which protested taxation of then British colonies without representation, and sowed the seeds for the union to come; and the passing of the first amendments to the Constitution, which cemented in perpetuity individual rights.
“The National Park Service is honored to host Tolle’s magnificent edifice Eureka and the Flushing Remonstrance, a transformational document to establishing the governing principles of the United States,” said Shirley McKinney, Superintendent for Federal Hall National Memorial. “As the site where George Washington took the oath of office as our first President and the site of the first Congress, Supreme Court, and Executive Branch offices, Federal Hall is the appropriate venue to bring the two together to spark conversations about history through a contemporary lens.”
“As we embark on a new day for Federal Hall, this installation highlights this historic site’s potential as an ever-evolving arena for public discourse through the arts,” said Marie Salerno, President of the Harbor Conservancy. “Federal Hall must be steeped, but not stuck in the past. This will be a place where artists with diverse perspectives will be invited to interpret the ideas, ideals and flaws of our democracy forged here.
Brian Tolle’s sculptures and installations emphasize a formal and iconographic dialog with history and context. Using a variety of media, his work draws from the scale and experience of its surroundings, provoking a rereading by cross-wiring reality and fiction. Drawing ideas from a broad-based conceptual analysis, Tolle blurs the border between the contemporary and the historical. His approach involves in-depth research, which is then distilled and directed creating an intuitive personal response.
Tolle is acclaimed for his major permanent public artworks including the Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park City, New York; Miss Brooklyn and Miss Manhattan at the entrance of the Manhattan Bridge, Flatbush, Brooklyn; and his recent appointment as the lead artist of the East Midtown Waterfront Project, an esplanade between East 53rd and East 59th Streets along New York City’s East River. Tolle’s works have been exhibited in the Whitney Biennial; the Tate Modern; the S.M.A.K.; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Queens Museum of Art, New York; and the Invitational Exhibition at the American Academy of Arts. The artist is currently represented by C24 Gallery.
Lecture | David Saunders on Museum Lighting
From the Eventbrite page:
David Saunders | A Clearer View: New Thinking on Lighting in Museums and Galleries
21st Annual Plenderleith Memorial Lecture, Icon Scotland Group
Dundee, 29 November 2018
Lighting in museums and galleries has long been a contentious subject. Too much light can cause damage to artworks, too little creates a poor visitor experience. In the forty years since The Museum Environment by Garry Thomson was first published, much has changed in the field of museum lighting. David Saunders will discuss how our understanding of the effects of light on collections and the lighting needs of our visitors have changed. He will explore how new approaches and developments in museum lighting affect practices and strategies for both display and conservation. The talk will be followed by a drinks reception and preceeded by the Icon Scotland Group Annual General Meeting between 5.00 and 5.45pm to which Icon members are invited to attend.
Dr. Saunders was recently Keeper of Conservation, Science and Documentation at the British Museum (and previously, Principle Scientist the Scientific Department of the National Gallery, London). He is presently writing a major work on lighting in museums and galleries which is expected to be published in 2018.
Exhibition | Storytelling: French Art from the Horvitz Collection
Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre, Pan and Syrinx, 1746, oil on canvas, 90 × 141 cm
(Boston: The Horvitz Collection, P-F-57).
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Now on view at the Cummer Museum:
Storytelling: French Art from the Horvitz Collection
Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, Jacksonville, Florida, 25 May — 29 July 2018
John and Marble Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida, 9 September — 2 December 2018
Fairfield University Art Museum, Fairfield, Connecticut, 25 January — 29 March 2019
Curated by Alvin Clark
Storytelling: French Art from the Horvitz Collection combines two exhibitions: Imaging Text: Drawings for French Book Illustration and Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Paintings, from one of the world’s finest private collections of French art. Created between the 16th and 19th centuries, and ranging from mythological and biblical studies to more playful imagery, the 80 works included in the exhibition vary in terms of style, genre, and period. Captured in crisp and swift pen strokes, finely modulated chalk, or brilliant colors, these captivating compositions were produced by some of the most prominent artists of their time, such as Charles Le Brun (1619–1690), Charles-Nicolas Cochin, the younger (1715–1790), and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806).
The exhibition is curated by Alvin L. Clark, Jr, Curator, The Horvitz Collection, Department of Drawings, Division of European and American Art, Harvard Art Museums.
Alvin Clark and Elizabeth M. Rudy, Imaging Text: French Drawings for Book Illustration from The Horvitz Collection (Boston: The Horvitz Collection, 2018), 76 pages, ISBN: 978-0991262533, $15.
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Note (added 10 January 2018) — The posting was updated to included Fairfield University Art Museum.
Colonial Williamsburg Acquires Portrait by William Dering
Press release (2 July 2018) from Colonial Williamsburg:
William Dering, Portrait of Joyce Armistead Booth (Mrs. Mordecai Booth), oil on canvas, ca. 1745 (Colonial Williamsburg, Gift of Julia Miles Brock, Edward Taliaferro Miles and Georginana Serpell Miles in memory of their mother, Alice Taliaferro Miles, 2018-165, A&B).
In the first half of the 18th century, William Dering was a well-connected dancing master and artist who lived and worked in Williamsburg, Virginia. Today, only six of Dering’s paintings are known to survive; four, including the artist’s only known signed and dated portrait, are in Colonial Williamsburg’s collection, the largest assemblage of his work. Now, through a generous gift from the sitter’s descendants, Joyce Armistead Booth (Mrs. Mordecai Booth), ca. 1745, a large-scale, oil on canvas, joins Dering’s other works at Colonial Williamsburg, including the well-known portrait of the subject’s son, George Booth. Until now, the painting of Mrs. Booth, which is in remarkable condition and survives in its original frame, has descended through the Booth family.
“Rare early works by local artists such as William Dering expand the depth and breadth of our collections and better enable us to share America’s enduring story,” said Mitchell Reiss, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s president and CEO. “We are particularly grateful for gifts such as this since they allow us to teach history in a very human and personal way.”
“Executed in saturated, well-preserved reds, blues, and golds, and measuring more than four feet in height, this likeness of Joyce Armistead Booth is visually arresting,” said Ronald Hurst, the foundation’s Carlisle H. Humelsine chief curator and vice president for collections, conservation and museums. “The portrait commands the viewer’s attention, and in so doing, provides a window into the goals and aspirations of early Virginia’s planter aristocracy.”
This Dering portrait is significant to ongoing research that Colonial Williamsburg’s experts are undertaking. Laura Barry, Juli Grainger curator of paintings, drawings and sculpture, and Shelley Svoboda, senior conservator of paintings, are at work on a comprehensive study of the artist and his work from both historical and technical perspectives. The portrait of Joyce Armistead Booth, especially due to its pristine condition, informs this research and will help the experts to better understand the nuances in Dering’s other canvases.
“This generous gift gives us an extraordinary opportunity to reunite two family portraits, more fully tell the story of this important Virginia artist and to better understand the context of William Dering’s body of work,” said Ms. Barry. Along with the additional works by this artist in the collection, including the portrait of Elizabeth Buckner Stith (an oil on canvas dating from 1745–49, the only signed and dated Dering example and for years was the only means by which to measure his work), Ms. Barry and Ms. Svoboda are able to study the individual qualities of each painting as well as to examine them together as a group.
Little is known about William Dering in his early years, but he arrived in Williamsburg from Philadelphia in 1737. He advertised in the Virginia Gazette that same year, the first of several occasions he did so, to announce the opening of a dancing school at the College of William and Mary. By 1744 his success enabled him to purchase two lots and move into the Thomas Everard House on Palace Green. The following year, Dering advertised twice to promote “an assembly at the Capitol… during the Court,” a ball held when the capital city was busy with visiting elected representatives from across the colony. During his time in Williamsburg, Dering also befriended William Byrd II, a Virginia planter and Renaissance man who owned one of the largest art collections in the American colonies. During his many visits to Byrd’s James River estate, Dering painted his daughter Anne Byrd Carter. (Her portrait is also in the Colonial Williamsburg collection.) The artist’s extravagant lifestyle led to debt, however, and he was twice forced to mortgage his property. Ultimately, Dering departed Williamsburg for Charleston, South Carolina, leaving his wife and son behind for a year to handle the public sale of his possessions. Little is known about Dering or his family after 1750.
The portrait of Joyce Armistead Booth is a gift from Julia Miles Brock, Edward Taliaferro Miles and Georginana Serpell Miles in memory of their mother, Alice Taliaferro Miles. It will be included in a future exhibition of the artist’s portraits to be held at the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg.
“The painting of Joyce Armistead Booth, my five-times great-grandmother, has been a part of my life for all 74 years, but Miss Joyce (as we were taught to call her) is nearly 300 years old,” said Julia Miles Brock of Virginia. “My brother, sister, and I decided it was time she was in a museum with its attendant care, proper storage, and an appreciative audience.”
Call for Papers | Reading the Country House
From the CFP:
Reading the Country House
Manchester Metropolitan University, 16–17 November 2018
Proposals due by 31 August 2018
County houses were made to be read—as symbols of power, political allegiance, taste and wealth. This places emphasis on the legibility of their architecture and decorative schemes, and the paintings, collections and even the furniture they contained. It also draws our attention to the skills required to decode—to read—these signs and symbols. The messages and processes of reading were carried further by the growing number of images of country houses produced through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: in private sketchbooks and journals and as engravings published as collections or incorporated into written guidebooks. These allowed the country house to be read in very different ways, as did its appearance in the pages of novels, sometimes as the backdrop or stage for the action, but also symbolic of social structures and relations. This conference seeks to explore all of these perspectives on reading the country house and links them to how the country house is read today, by house managers and visitors and by viewers of period dramas.
We invite papers on any aspect of reading the country house, but we especially welcome papers which examine:
• The country house and the novel
• The presentation of country houses guidebooks and gazetteers
• Visitors perceptions and readings of the country house, both historic and present day
• Processes of reading the architecture and aesthetics of the country house
• Engravings and paintings, both as representations of the country house and as collections in the country house
We are particularly keen to encourage contributions that take a comparative approach: national, international and across time.
Keynote Speakers
Prof. Phillip Lindley (Loughborough) and Prof. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford)
If you would like to present a paper, then please send a title and 200-word abstract together with a very brief biography to Prof. Jon Stobart: j.stobart@mmu.ac.uk by 31 August 2018.
Exhibition | 18th-Century Baltic Faience
Dish, eighteenth century, faience, Rörstrand
(Stockholm: Nationalmuseum)
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On view this summer in Sweden:
Colour and Form: 18th-Century Baltic Faience
Färg och form: Östersjöfajanser från 1700-talet
Läckö Castle, Lidköping, 10 June — 26 August 2018
Curated by Micael Ernstell
Eighteenth-century pieces of faience from the Baltic region seduced the market with their rich decoration and fine design. This exhibition presents faience artefacts from Nationalmuseum’s amazing collection of ceramics from the 18th century that were manufactured in the countries around the Baltic Sea.
The items in the exhibition, which Nationalmuseum is presenting in partnership with the Läckö Castle Foundation, have a vibrancy and joy that combine with the manufacturers’ ambitions for good design, both aesthetically and technically. The colour palette used by the pattern painters was a rich one, and it seduced the market for much of the 18th century. There has been strong interest among collectors since then.
Bowl, so called ‘Bispebolle’, unknown Danish artist active during the 18th century, faience (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum).
The exhibition is dominated by Swedish faience, with the Rörstrand and Marieberg factories as the most important actors. The factories had their own designers, who created many inspirational models and patterns. Production resulted in many examples of international influences. There was also movement of labour between the factories. This saw patterns and designs moving between the competitors.
The manufacturing of faience in Sweden during the 18th century was one element of the national leadership’s desire to develop the nation’s economy and avoid expensive imports. Tax rules and other privileges created the economic preconditions for Swedish faience. Another major factor in helping the Swedish factories was the Manufactory Office (Manufakturkontoret), which aimed to provide manufacturers with both economic and artistic guidance.
“We’re delighted about the long-term and rewarding partnership with the Nationalmuseum. The fact that artefacts from Rörstrand are included feels especially pleasing for Lidköping. One of the financiers of the Rörstrand faience factory was Carl-Gustaf Tessin, the owner of Läckö from 1752 until 1770,” says Magnus Lönnroth, CEO of the Läckö Castle Foundation.
There were almost 40 faience factories around the Baltic Sea in the 18th century. Although production reached a high level, the factories were mostly unprofitable. This meant that many factories only existed for a few years. The ones that started up first were the factories of Store Kongensgade in Copenhagen and Rörstrand in Stockholm. They started in the 1720s, both with a dream of being able to produce the same kind of porcelain as in China or at the Meissen factory in Dresden.
Apart from examples of Swedish manufacturing, the exhibition features artefacts from ten or so factories around the Baltic. There are examples from the Store Kongensgade factory in Copenhagen, which was founded in 1722 and is the oldest faience factory in the Nordic region. Johan Wolff came from that factory to Stockholm and founded the Rörstrand factory in 1726. Norway is also represented, as that was part of Denmark at the time.
“It’s wonderful that we can also use the exhibition to highlight the 100th anniversary of the Baltic States as independent nations with colourful pieces of faience from the factory in Reval, the modern-day Tallinn in Estonia,” says Micael Ernstell, curator of the exhibition and director of the National Museum.
Call for Papers | Built Environments and Performances of Power
From H-ArtHist:
Built Environments and Performances of Power
44th Annual Cleveland Symposium
Cleveland Museum of Art, 26 October 2018
Proposals due by 15 July 2018
The Art History Department at Case Western Reserve University invites graduate students to submit abstracts for its 2018 Annual Symposium Built Environments and Performances of Power. We welcome innovative research papers that engage with the concept of built environments and their performative spaces, both within and without.
Architecture creates narratives, while simultaneously shaping the identities of builders and users. Monumental architecture conveys stability, which allows its patrons to emphasize authority. At the same time, occupants transform spaces through their physical presence and social dynamics. How do we engage with architectural locations and the objects found within them? How do patronage, artistic intent, and pre-existing power structures complicate the ways in which audiences connect with their environments? How does social performance vary within constructed spaces? How can architecture—and the spatial distribution of artifacts within it—complicate ideas of centrality and periphery?
Presentations may explore aspects of this theme across any time period, medium, or geographical region. Potential topics may include, but are not limited to:
• Social performance and movement within built environments
• Material spatiality
• Constructed spaces and ideas of comportment
• Interactions between loci memoriae, geography, and architecture
• Space as experienced by architects, engineers, institutions, and audiences
• Viewership, liminal spaces, or construction of memory within museums
• Reconstruction of space through (re)moveable objects and their functions
• Reception within a built environment
• Theatricality and performance
Current graduate students and recent graduates in art history and related disciplines are invited to submit a 350-word abstract and a CV for consideration to clevelandsymposium@gmail.com by the extended deadline of July 15, 2018. Selected participants will be notified by the end of July. Paper presentations will be 20 minutes in length. Please direct all questions to Angelica Verduci and Jacob Emmett at clevelandsymposium@gmail.com. The three most successful papers will be awarded prizes.
Exhibition | Pastels at the Louvre
Now on view at the Louvre:
Pastels in the Musée du Louvre: The 17th and 18th Centuries
Musée du Louvre, Paris, 7 June — 10 September 2018
Curated by Xavier Salmon
The Louvre holds an unrivaled collection of European pastels from the 17th and 18th centuries. Mostly dating from the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI, these extremely fragile works, created with a colored powder that has often been compared to that of a butterfly’s wings, introduce us to Enlightenment society and illustrate the genius of its most celebrated artists: Rosalba Carriera, Maurice Quentin de La Tour, Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, Jean Étienne Liotard, Jean-Marc Nattier, and Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, together with lesser known artists such as Marie-Suzanne Giroust, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Joseph Boze, and Joseph Ducreux.
These pastels illustrate the genius of the artists who produced them as artworks in their own right rather than preparatory studies enhanced with color. Many of them still have their original frame, and sometimes their original glass.
Thanks to the support of American Friends of the Louvre and Joan and Mike Kahn, the more than 150 works in the collection were systematically conserved and remounted to protect them from dust—a long-term project which provided an opportunity for new research on the collection. The results are included in a comprehensive annotated inventory, published in French and English with the support of the Joan Kahn Family Trust.
The exhibition takes a new look at masterpieces such as Maurice Quentin de La Tour’s Portrait of the Marquise de Pompadour and features new acquisitions such as Simon Bernard Lenoir’s portrait of the actor Lekain. It is also an opportunity to compare these works by French artists with others by eminent international pastel artists such as Rosalba Carriera in Venice, Jean-Étienne Liotard in Geneva, and John Russell in London.
The exhibition is curated by Xavier Salmon, director of the Départment des Arts Graphiques and general heritage curator at the Musée du Louvre.
The catalogue, in French and English editions, is published by Hazan and distributed by Yale UP:
Xavier Salmon, Pastels du musée du Louvre, XVIIe XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Hazan, 2018), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-2754114547 (French) / ISBN: 978-0300238631 (English), €59 / $75.
Call for Papers | Painting Childhood
From H-ArtHist:
Painting Childhood
Compton Verney Art Gallery & Park, 29 March 2019
Proposals due by 29 October 2018
Children have long fascinated artists and have been captured in images ranging from formal portraits to humorous genre scenes and intensely personal family sketches. These diverse works will be the subject of two exhibitions at Compton Verney from 16 March until 16 June 2019. Painting Childhood: Hans Holbein to Lucian Freud will present a survey of some of the most iconic paintings of children produced over the past 500 years, with sections devoted to the royal portrait, play and learning, and the fantasy and reality of children’s lives. Childhood Now will explore contemporary representations of children in the work of the painters Chantal Joffe, Matthew Krishanu, and Mark Fairnington.
To coincide with these exhibitions we invite proposals for an interdisciplinary study day on the subject of childhood from 1500 to today. The study day will enable us to interrogate the key themes and issues of the exhibitions in more detail, contributing to the field of childhood studies through fruitful cross-disciplinary discussions. Painting Childhood will include select examples of children’s costumes, toys, and schoolbooks. As such we welcome contributions from speakers with a range of disciplinary backgrounds and research perspectives (History, Literature, Sociology, Anthropology, and History of Art). To facilitate meaningful debate papers will be grouped thematically and may address, but are not limited to, the following topics: Intimacy and family ties; dynasty, duty and privilege; play, fantasy and children’s worlds; the material culture of childhood; the appropriation and commercialisation of childhood; memories and memorials; childhood today and the future of childhood.
Keynote speaker: Dr Martin Postle
Please send a 300-word abstract for a 20-minute paper to art@comptonverney.org.uk by Monday 29 October 2018. We welcome applications from emerging and established scholars. Please include a short professional biography. Travel bursaries will be available for speakers covering reasonable expenses incurred within the UK.
Organising committee: Amy Orrock (Compton Verney), Emily Knight (V&A), and Penelope Sexton (Compton Verney)
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