Enfilade

This fall at Historic Deerfield:

Reawakening Materials: American Art, Empire, and Material Histories in Historic Deerfield’s Collection
Historic Deerfield, Deerfield, Massachusetts, 7–8 November 2024

Historic Deerfield announces Reawakening Materials: American Art, Empire, and Material Histories in Historic Deerfield’s Collection, a public colloquium focused on the institutions’ collection of paintings, works on paper, and decorative arts from Thursday, 7 November to Friday, 8 November 2024. Questions of ’empire’ emerged from an interest in scholars rethinking the American experience from the lens of global European empires (England, Spain, France, The Netherlands, etc.) and U.S. imperialism. Historic Deerfield’s collection focuses on 18th-and 19th-century American art and material culture, and it is based in a landscape tied to Indigenous communities, histories of enslaved people and free people of African descent, and settler colonialism.

The colloquium will explore relationships between empire, materials of objects, and settler colonialism in the collection, specifically asking how these art historical topics can be generative for recontextualizing Historic Deerfield’s place in the study of New England history, art, and culture. Speakers will investigate materials that reveal new ideas of empire, including: pastels, lacquer, birch, engravings on paper, and linen. The program will also workshop methods for telling these narratives through historic interiors, including objects tied to violence and absence, and opportunities to bring in stories of joy and survivance.

Keynote speaker
• Charmaine Nelson, Provost Professor, Black Diasporic Art & Visual Culture, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Additional speakers
• Megan Baker, PhD Candidate in Art History, University of Delaware and 2024–25 Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery
• Mary Amanda McNeil, Assistant Professor, Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora, Tufts University
• Lan Morgan, Associate Curator, Peabody Essex Museum
• Joseph Litts, PhD Candidate in Art History, Princeton University
• Jonathan Square, Assistant Professor of Black Visual Culture, Parsons School of Design
• Morgan Freeman, PhD Candidate in American Studies, Yale University
• Michael Hartman, Jonathan Little Cohen Associate Curator of American Art and PhD Candidate in Art History, University of Delaware
• Anthony Trujillo, PhD Candidate in American Studies, Harvard University

Online registration will be posted shortly. Please send questions to Ian Hamilton, ihamilton@historic-deerfield.org.