Mei Mei Rado Named Costume & Textile Curator at LACMA
Starting this month at LACMA:
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has appointed Mei Mei Rado as the new Associate Curator of Costume and Textiles. Dr. Rado received her M.A. from the University of Chicago and her Ph.D. from the Bard Graduate Center in New York. She specializes in the history of both Western and Eastern Asian textiles and dress from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, with a focus on intercultural exchanges. She is currently working on her book manuscript The Empire’s New Cloth: Western Textiles at the Eighteenth-Century Qing Court, which was supported by a postdoctoral grant from the American Council of Learned Societies.
Dr. Rado was awarded the J. S. Lee Memorial Fellowship for Chinese Art at The Palace Museum in Beijing, a Predoctoral Fellowship at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Freer/Sackler Galleries (now the National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution). Her contributions to exhibitions and exhibition catalogues include Interwoven Globe: Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800, and China: Through the Looking Glass (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); Shanghai Glamour: New Women, 1910s–40s (Museum of Chinese in America, New York); Performing Images: Opera in Chinese Visual Culture (The Smart Museum, The University of Chicago); The 1930s: Elegance in an Age of Crisis (Museum of Fashion Institute of Technology, New York); and Far-Reaching Elegance: Magnificent Chinese Export Silk (China National Silk Museum, Hangzhou). From 2017 to 2019, she taught at The School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons School of Design in New York.
A selection of Dr. Rado’s publications can be found on her Academia site. Her forthcoming article “Fabric of Light, Surface of Displacement: Lamé and Its Shine in Early Twentieth-Century Fashion” will appear in an edited volume Materials, Practices and Politics of Shine in Modern Art and Popular Culture (Bloomsbury).
Exhibition | In Pursuit of the Picturesque
Samuel Daniell, Scene in Sitsikamma, Elephants with Herons at a Pool, color lithograph from African Scenery and Animals, 1804
(Princeton University Library, Promised Gift from the Collection of Leonard L. Milberg)
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Press release for the exhibition now on view at Princeton’s Firestone Library:
In Pursuit of the Picturesque
Firestone Library, Princeton University, 22 January — 1 March 2020
Curated by Stephen Ferguson, Jennifer Meyer, and Emma Sarconi
In Pursuit of the Picturesque, an exhibition featuring British color plate books published between 1776 and 1868, is on view at the Ellen and Leonard Milberg Gallery, located in the Firestone Library lobby, from January 22 until 1 March 2020. Showcasing selected items from the collection of Leonard L. Milberg (Princeton University Class of 1953), the exhibition includes nearly 40 large books with colorful, detailed imagery from the British Empire at the turn of the 19th century. This selection from Milberg’s collection of 115 color plate books portrays an expanding global empire at the advent of lithographic printing, which captured color and imagery with more beauty and ease than ever before.
Milberg has collected color plate books since the 1980s, though his love of art began in the 1950s. During his Army days in Alaska, he devoted his time to reading American art books. Milberg started collecting American prints, then discovered American printmakers who were English emigres, which led to his interest in British color plates. “They tell a wonderful story through pictures,” said Milberg. “If you take a book in your hands, you can hold Edward Lear’s parrots and hear the crackling of the old paper. It’s much different from a painting, which is only a visual experience.”
Princeton University Library’s Emma Sarconi, reference professional for Special Collections, who co-curated the exhibition with Stephen Ferguson, associate university librarian for external engagement, and Jennifer Meyer, curatorial assistant for Special Collections, said topics range from history to horticulture, from martial achievements to topographical scenery. “These color plates were not just beautiful objects,” explained Sarconi. “They also created a vision of empire that could be exotic, romantic, and picturesque.” To Milberg, “it satisfies traveling because the color plates cover all over the world, from the Mexican Yucatán, to the South Seas, from Sicily to South Africa.”
Beyond their beauty, the color plate illustrations were scientific, political, and historical knowledge during a period of British expansion. “Very often, the books reflect expeditions like Captain Cook’s voyages,” said Milberg, “with the naturalist historian, Sir Joseph Banks, reporting back to England’s Royal Society.” From the comfort of their homes, the British public could be transported to faraway lands through these lavish, vibrant prints, kindling national pride and patriotism. Meyer commented, “Love of the monarchy and British homeland, as well as pride of a powerful military and expanding global empire, are on full display in these volumes.” Moreover, the illustrations began to normalize far off places and the people who lived there, envoking a sense of enchantment and exocitism.
According to Sarconi, “At the same time that these images inspired the viewer, they did so by silencing the horrific aspects of colonial expansion, composed without signs of the struggle, strife, and subjugation that made the empire possible.”
In a gesture of great generosity, Milberg has promised to give his collection of color plate books to Princeton University Library. The promised gift will add greatly to the Library’s holdings of British art of this period and will be a new resource for students and scholars in art, cultural, and other fields of history.
Milberg declared in his 30th reunion book entry, “I have belatedly, but passionately discovered books, prints, and the Princeton University Rare Book Library.”
During the past 37 years, he has shared the fruits of this passion with our community, said Ferguson. Milberg’s gifts (13,000 items plus) range from 19th-century American prints and drawings to several book collections: American poetry, Irish poetry, prose, and theatre as well as two Judaica collections.
Research Lunch | Rebecca Tropp on the Picturesque and Country Houses
This spring at the Mellon Centre:
Rebecca Tropp, Accommodating the Picturesque: The Country Houses of James Wyatt, John Nash, and Sir John Soane, 1793–1815
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 20 March 2020
James Wyatt, Ashridge House, commissioned by the 7th Earl of Bridgewater.
Whilst much has been written about the development of Picturesque theory at the end of the eighteenth century, regarding both the landscape itself and prescriptions for the siting of buildings within it, these discussions have generally been limited to two-dimensional snapshots, such as those represented in Humphry Repton’s Red Books. This paper, based upon ongoing research for my doctoral dissertation, seeks to push beyond the visual to investigate some of the physical implications and repercussions of the Picturesque ideal—the intersection between the visual two-dimensional picture-plane and the practical three-dimensional architectural response—on the design and construction of country houses at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Focusing on the work of James Wyatt (1746–1813), John Nash (1752–1835), and Sir John Soane (1753–1837), and limiting my investigation to those country houses designed during the pivotal period from 1793 to 1815, I investigate two specific implications related to the lowering of the principal floor from piano nobile to ground level, as part of a general repositioning of the house within the landscape. First is the use of level changes within the ground floor—the inclusion of a few steps up or down in entrance halls or between rooms, as distinct from staircases between floors—considering some possible reasons for their incorporation and the purposes they served. Second, and sometimes connected to these level changes, is an increase in permeability between interior and exterior, through the use of full-length windows, loggias and attached conservatories—social/botanical spaces that were first incorporated into the design of the house during this period. Taken together, these developments furthered the evolving relationship between house and landscape and, as a result, the experience of moving through and between those spaces.
Research Lunches are a series of free lunchtime research talks. All are welcome, but please book a ticket in advance. 1:00–2:00pm, Seminar Room, Paul Mellon Centre.
Rebecca Tropp is a fourth-year PhD student in History of Art at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, working under the supervision of Dr Frank Salmon. She completed her MPhil in History of Art and Architecture at Cambridge in 2015, investigating recurring spatial arrangements and patterns of movement in the country houses of John Nash. Prior to commencing postgraduate studies in the UK, she received her bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in New York, where she majored in the History and Theory of Architecture.
Call for Papers | Cultivating Science in the Early Modern Garden
From the Call for Papers:
Cultivating Science in the Early Modern Garden, 16th–18th Centuries
National Library of Portugal, Lisbon, 20–21 July 2020
Organized by Denis Ribouillault and Ana Duarte Rodrigues
Proposals due by 30 April 2020
“[The knowledge of the Royal Society derived ] not onely by the hands of the Learned and profess’d philosophers; but from the Shops of Mechanicks; from the Voyages of Merchants; from the ploughs of Husbandmen; from the Sports, the Fishponds, the Parks, the Gardens of the Gentlemen.”
–Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (London: J. Martyn and J. Allestry, 1667), p. 72.
Although the history of early modern gardens has benefited in recent decades from an increasingly wide range of methodologies, the role played by these spaces in the development of science has been the subject of a relatively small number of inquiries. A majority of them concentrates on botanical gardens and the history of botany (Baldassari 2017), though it is now recognized that mathematics, pneumatics or astronomy found in gardens a priviledge ground for experimentation and display (Fischer et al. 2016; Ferdinand 2016).
A primary aim of this workshop is to interrogate and document what we could call (anachronistically) ‘scientific practice’ in early modern European gardens. How were gardens used to advance scientific knowledge? Examples range from the growing of medicinal plants, astronomical observation, physical experiments and so forth. Gardens were also privileged places for teaching and for debates and discussion pertaining to the various branches of natural philosophy. Furthermore, we encourage scholars to pay attention to how this function of gardens as ‘academies’, as platforms for the production and display of knowledge, as stages of scientific sociability and as pedagogical tools, affected the gardens from a formal, artistic, iconographic and hermeneutic point of view. It is not just a matter of documenting and reconstructing what happened in gardens. More precisely, it is a question of showing how what happened in gardens can lead us to a renewed understanding of the physical appearance (at a given moment) of the gardens themselves. This calls for a fruitful—yet difficult-to-achieve—intermingling of the methodologies of the history of science and of the history of art under the aegis of garden history.
• Fabrizio Baldassarri and Oana Matei, eds., Gardens as Laboratories: A History of Botanical Sciences, Journal of Early Modern Studies 6.1 (Spring 2017).
• Juliette Ferdinand, From Art to Science: Experiencing Nature in the European Garden, 1500–1700 (Treviso: Zel Edizioni, 2016).
• Hubertus Fischer, Volker R. Remmert, and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, eds., Gardens, Knowledge and the Sciences in the Early Modern Period (Basel, Birkhäuser, 2016).
Papers should be about 25 minutes long. Q&A and intensive discussion will follow each presentation. We intend to publish the proceedings of the workshop. Contributors’ travel and accommodation costs will be covered. Please send a proposal of 550 words max. with a title and a short bio to denis.ribouillault@umontreal.ca before April 30, 2020.
This event is sponsored by the research project led by Denis Ribouillault, Before the ‘Great Divide’: The Shared Language(s) of Art and Science in the Early Modern Period, funded by a SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) Insight Grant (2019–2024) and the Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e Tecnologia, University of Lisbon. The workshop will take place during the exhibition at the National Library Jardins Históricos em Portugal, organized by the Associação de Jardins Históricos and the landscape architect Teresa Andersen, with the collaboration of Ana Duarte Rodrigues, as part of the programme Lisboa Verde 2020. Visits of the exhibition and of relevant gardens and monuments are planned for the workshop participants.
Organizers : Denis Ribouillault (University of Montréal, Department of Art History) and Ana Duarte Rodrigues (University of Lisbon, Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e Tecnologia).
Antwerp Summer School in Digital Humanities, 2020
From the University of Antwerp:
Antwerp Summer School in Digital Humanities: Making a Digital Edition, Basic Skills and Technologies
University of Antwerp, 29 June — 3 July 2020
Applications due by 16 March (early bird) or 6 April 2020
From 29 June to 3 July 2020, the University of Antwerp’s Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC) is organising its third annual Summer School in Digital Humanities. The summer school will exist of an intensive 5-day entry level hands-on course on making digital scholarly editions. Over the course of the week, participants will gradually learn how to transcribe and describe textual cultural heritage documents in TEI-compliant XML, process their transcriptions using related X-technologies (Xpath and XSLT), and prepare them for the web. Specifically, participants will set up a Local Area Network of Raspberry Pi minicomputers to develop an eXist-db XML database for hosting and sharing their materials in the form of a digital scholarly edition.
As students will be introduced to these technologies step by step, the course requires no prior skills or knowledge – other than to complete a minor autodidactic exercise to make sure everyone has a basic understanding of some of the core technologies the course will build on (HTML, CSS, Command Line).
The organizers are happy to announce that the summer school’s keynote lecture will be presented by Dr. Elena Pierazzo, Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Tours, at the Centre d’Études Superieures de la Renaissance where she directs the MA program in Digital Humanities and approaches to the digitisation of cultural heritage materials (Intelligence des Patronises). Professor Pierazzo has been the Chair of the Text Encoding Initiative for two mandates, and has served for two mandates in the TEI Technical Council and was involved in the TEI user-community, with a special interest in the transcription, edition and cataloguing of modern and medieval manuscripts. She was co-chairs the working group on digital editions of the European Network NeDiMAH and one of the scientist in chief for DiXiT a Marie Curie ITN devoted to the training of doctoral students to the practice of digital scholarly editing. And in 2019, she was invited by the ADHO (Alliance of the Digital Humanities Organisation) as the co-Chair of the Program Committee of the DH2019 in Utrecht. Although this lecture is part of the summer school’s official programme, the keynote will be organised in the context of the University of Antwerp’s platform{DH} Lecture Series, and opened up to the larger public.
Registration for the summer starts from €150 (early bird) and closes on Monday 6 April (regular). For more information on the application procedure, please visit our registration page.
As a training event, the summer school is organised in conjunction with CLARIAH-VL – a collaborative infrastructure project across Flemish universities to which ACDC and the platform{DH} are affiliated. We look forward to welcoming you in Antwerp this summer!
Public Lecture Course | Ceramics in Britain
This spring at the Mellon Centre:
Public Lecture Course, Ceramics in Britain, 1750 to Now
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, Thursdays, 5 March — 2 April 2020
Registration opens 3 February 2020
While the story of ceramics is a global one, Britain has played a leading role in the last three centuries, a period in which British invention has shaped developments and brought constant renewal to the industry. This course, delivered by experts in the subject, will explore five key influential developments in the history of British ceramics since the mid-eighteenth century, examining the multiple ways in which innovators, entrepreneurs and artists have reinvigorated the field. No prior art historical knowledge is necessary. There will be a brief drinks reception from 6:30 to 7:00pm. The lectures will begin promptly at 7:00pm.
Registration will open on 3 February at 10:00am on the Paul Mellon Centre website. Please note you will need to sign up for each week individually and in order to ensure consistency attendance, we overbook. If you find you can no longer attend after signing up, please let us know so your place can be offered to someone else. On the night, admission will be made on a first-come, first-served basis.
Thursday, 5 March
Patricia Ferguson (Project Curator, British Museum), Pots with Attitude: British Satire on Ceramics, 1750–1820
Thursday, 12 March
Catrin Jones (Chief Curator, Wedgwood Museum), Josiah Wedgwood: Experimentation and Innovation
Thursday, 19 March
Rebecca Wallis (Curator, National Trust, London and South East), ‘Blue China’: A Nineteenth-Century British Obsession
Thursday, 26 March
Simon Olding (Director of the Crafts Study Centre, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham), ‘Beyond East and West’: The Founding of British Studio Ceramics
Thursday, 2 April
Neil Brownsword (Artist and Professor of Ceramics, Staffordshire University), Obsolescence and Renewal: Reimagining North Staffordshire’s Ceramic Heritage
New Book | Built in Chelsea
Distributed in the USA and Canada by The University of Chicago Press:
Dan Cruickshank, Built in Chelsea: Three Centuries of Living Architecture and Townscape (London: Unicorn Publishing, 2020), 128 pages, ISBN: 978-1911604969, $30.
Among the myriad London districts, Chelsea has always held a special charm for residents and visitors alike. Spacious and gracious, with the River Thames as its dramatic background, it has played host to a unique history of artists, bohemians, and related civil causes.
Over the course of twelve chapters, Built in Chelsea: Three Centuries of Living Architecture and Townscape offers readers an opportunity to learn about key episodes of the area’s history. By using the region’s buildings and structures to mark the stages of change, it connects what can be physically seen on the street with the more hidden histories of the architects, patrons, and people who have made their lives in the area.
Author and architectural historian Dan Cruickshank points to the most crucial Chelsea locales—ranging from churches to military establishments, theaters to restaurants, and housing and shops—allowing readers to feel virtually at home. Cruickshank also notes how the spaces between buildings can be just as important as the buildings themselves. He shows how in recent years some exemplary regeneration projects have taken shape because Chelsea has had the benefit of landowners with long-term interests. Due to their unobtrusive management, Chelsea’s proprietors have improved the experiences of both residents and visitors, creating a model for districts elsewhere in London and beyond.
Dan Cruickshank is an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. The author of many books on British architecture, he has also made numerous well-received programs for the BBC, including Around the World in 80 Treasures, Adventures in Architecture, Britain’s Best Buildings, The Country House Revealed: The Intimate Histories of Britain’s Private Palaces, and Bridges That Built London.
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