Enfilade

From ArtHist.net:

Veiling the Body: Cloth, Skin, Membrane, Paper
The John Rylands Research Institute, University of Manchester, 11–12 June 2020

Proposals due by 20 January 2020

The word ‘veil’ most commonly connotes a piece of cloth worn on the body not primarily for warmth or protection, but as a symbol, usually of modesty or withdrawing from a public realm. In many cultures, veils have held a contradictory status of concealing the (most often female) body and of heightening the significance of exposure. In Europe, the word ‘veil’ and its cognates have also variously connoted: human skin and bodily membranes; draperies and curtains in religious and secular spaces; relics; and the separations between material and spiritual realms. In all contexts, the word points to secrecy and hiddenness, inflected with the potential for exposure and display.

Veiling the Body will bring together these themes in a cross-disciplinary workshop to explore the themes of secrecy and exposure, as well as the interrelations between the skin and membranes of our bodies, the cloths that cover them, and the materials with which we represent both. We welcome proposals on themes including, but not limited to:
• Religious veils and relics
• Anatomical and medical images of unveiling
• Spiritual or ethereal veils
• The resonances between skin and cloth
• Clothing, veiling and exposure of the body
• Images that veil, or work in unique ways to represent veils
• The material culture of veils, skin and membranes

With this workshop, we aim to make connections across disciplines, time periods and locations. We invite proposals for 20-minute papers from scholars across the arts and humanities, museum staff, and artists working on the themes of veils and bodies from any place and time. Proposals of no more than 250 words, along with a short bio, should be sent to veilingthebody2020@gmail.com by 20th January 2020. Travel and accommodation will be provided for speakers, and conference fee waivers will be available for attendees who do not have research budgets.

In addition to conference-style paper sessions, the workshop will include collections encounters with historic and contemporary material. The workshop will be held in the Historic Reading Room of the John Rylands Library in Manchester.

From ArtHist.net:

Color Charts as Trading Zones between Science and Art, 1500–1800
9th International Conference of the European Society for the History of Science
Bologna, 31 August — 3 September 2020

Proposals due by 5 December 2019

This is a call for abstracts for a symposium proposal to be submitted to the 9th International Conference of the European Society for the History of Science (ESHS) that will be held in 2020 in Bologna.

The seminal role played by color in the progress of science, technology, industry, and commerce during the early modern period and enlightenment has never been thoroughly analyzed from a broad perspective. Today we tend to compartmentalize the historical investigation of color science, artisanal technology, and commercial endeavors as separate fields. However, historically, coloring substances represent a clear-cut intersection between these three worlds. The opening of communication channels between artisanal and academic worlds has been defined by Pamela O. Long as a “trading zone” (Long 2011). From the early modern period, the growing interest of natural philosophers in the processes of manufacturing pigments and dyestuffs and the ability to control their use with systematic and scientific approaches were fundamental factors in the technological and commercial advancements that are usually associated with the period. The tacit color knowledge of artisans was gradually traded to the sciences and popularized in dictionaries, encyclopedias, and academic journals.

Besides the publication of color recipes and mixing instructions as handbooks, this specific trading zone allowed the production of (colored) visual tools, like color charts, painting palettes, sample cards and pattern books, relating to color technology, color teaching, and color selling. These visual tools have been generally regarded as painters’ instruments and teaching aids for amateur painters, and only in few recent studies linked to the sciences (Lowengard 2006; Kuehni and Schwarz 2008; Bushart and Steinle 2015; Karliczek and Schwarz 2016). We propose a symposium which will focus on intersectional aspects of trading color-related information and knowledge, from chemistry through commerce to art, with a specific focus on color charts.

We invite historians of science and from other disciplines to submit cross-disciplinary papers discussing topics like:
• Color charts and raw materials relating to botany, zoology, mineralogy, pharmacy
• Color charts and experimenting and developing colors for dyeing, porcelain, enamel, watercolors, oil painting, glass manufacturing
• Color charts and scientific illustrations (cartography, petrography, zoology, botany, mineralogy)
• Color charts and color selling (color samplers, color cakes, color cases, color price and relating fraud)
• Color charts and teaching (paintings, printing, dyeing)

Please send your abstracts (300 words) with a cv (150 words) to Giulia Simonini (giulia.simonini@tu-berlin.de) by December 5, 2019.

Cited Literature
• Pamela O. Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600 (Corvallis, 2011).
• Sarah Lowengard, The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Gutenberg-e, 2006).
• Rolf G. Kuehni and Andreas Schwarz, Color Ordered: A Survey of Color Order Systems from Antiquity to the Present (New York, 2008).
• Magdalena Bushart and Friedrich Steinle, eds., Colour Histories: Science, Art, and Technology in the 17th and 18th Centuries (De Gruyter, 2015).