Enfilade

Alfred Joseph Woolmer, Interior of the British Institution (Old Master Exhibition, Summer 1832), 1833, Oil on canvas (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection).

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From The Courtauld:

Art Institutions and Race in the Atlantic World, 1750–1850
The Centre for American Art at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London 24–25 May 2019

Organized by Nika Elder and Catherine Roach

The long eighteenth century gave rise to a host of art institutions throughout the Atlantic world, including the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City, and the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro. Vibrant markets for paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, and prints developed alongside and beyond these established institutions, creating networks of cross-cultural exchange that mirrored the economic ties among Great Britain, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas during this period. These cultural developments were inextricably linked with the profits and the cultural logics of colonialism and slavery. Building on important recent work on the visual culture of slavery and abolition, this conference examines the reciprocal relationship between the fine arts and racial ideologies during the apogee and decline of the transatlantic slave trade. The talks will consider sites of artistic production from throughout the Atlantic world, including Brazil, Britain, Jamaica, Massachusetts, and Mexico, and cover a wide variety of topics, including museum collections, artists’ models, the hierarchy of genres, print culture, and exhibitions of images and human beings. In sum, this two-day gathering examines how theories of race informed the production, circulation, collection, and display of art, and how those processes in turn solidified and promulgated understandings of race.

Booking information is available here»

F R I D A Y ,  2 4  M A Y  2 0 1 9

10:00  Opening remarks

10:30  Panel 1
• Ray Hernández-Durán (Associate Professor of Early Modern Ibero-American Colonial Arts and Architecture, University of New Mexico), From Novohispanic Castas to Mexican Citizens: Colonialism, Race, and the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City
• Geoffrey Quilley (Professor of Art History, University of Sussex), India in the City: The Ambiguous Place of East India House and the India Museum

11:45  Coffee

12:00  Panel 2
• Esther Chadwick (Lecturer in Early Modern Art History, The Courtauld Institute of Art), ‘This she looking black, this Molly dressed thing of a man’: Mai and Thayendanegea at the Royal Academy in 1776
• Sadiah Qureshi (Senior Lecturer in Modern History, University of Birmingham), ‘A Peep at the Natives’: Exhibitions, Empire, and the Natural History of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain

1:15  Lunch

3:00  Event for the Speakers: British Museum Print Study

S A T U R D A Y ,  2 5  M A Y  2 0 1 9

10:00  Panel 3
• Nika Elder (Assistant Professor of Art History, American University), Fugitive Pigments: Painting and Race in the British Atlantic
• Cheryl Finley (Associate Professor of Art History, Cornell University), Mapping the Slave Trade

11:15  Coffee

11:30  Panel 4
• Rachel Grace Newman (A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts), Framing the Plantation: The Plantocracy, Artists, and Image Production of the Early Nineteenth Century
• Sarah Thomas (Lecturer in Museum Studies and History of Art, Birkbeck College, University of London), Slavery, Patronage and the Love of Art: Slave-ownership and the Politics of Collecting in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain

12:45  Lunch

1:45  Panel 5
• Catherine Roach (Associate Professor of Art History, Virginia Commonwealth University), Hybrid Exhibits: Race, Empire, and Genre at the British Institution in 1806
• Nicholas Robbins (Doctoral Candidate, History of Art, Yale University), Constable’s Whiteness

3:00  Coffee

3:15  Panel 6
• Caitlin Beach (Assistant Professor of Art History, Fordham University), Ira Aldridge and the Performed Persona
• Daryle Williams (Associate Professor of History and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, College of Arts and Humanities, University of Maryland), The Brazilian Imperial Academy of Fine Arts and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

4:30  Closing Discussion