Enfilade

From ArtHist.net:

Impressions of Empire: Works on Paper as

Agents of Intermedial Translation and Cultural Exchange

Online and in-person, Colnaghi Gallery, London, 25–26 September 2025

The Colnaghi Foundation and Athena Art Foundation in London are delighted to host this symposium exploring how works on paper were used to construct meaning and identity, and engendered the intermediary exchange of artistic ideas during the period of global empire and colonisation. The symposium will be hosted both online and in the Colnaghi Gallery in London.

t h u r s d a y ,  2 5  s e p t e m b e r , online and in-person

12.30  Arrival

13.00  Welcome

13.15  Session One
• Chloé Glass (Research Associate, Prints and Drawings, Art Institute of Chicago) — Decoding Stefano della Bella’s Etchings
• Eunice Yu (DPhil Candidate, University of Oxford) — Collecting and Constructing National Identity in Print: Translations of Empire from the Black Sea to the Adriatic

14:20  Coffee and Tea Break

14.45  Session Two
• Emily Cadger (PhD candidate, University of British Columbia and Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Western Washington) — Political Poppies and Beautiful Books: Illustrated Floral-hybrids as Interpreters of Empire in the Fin-de-siècle Children’s Books of Walter Crane
• Vivian Tong (Lecturer in Chinese Art History at the Hong Kong Baptist University) — Images of Nature in a Global Horticultural Expansion: Sketching a Story of Sino-European Commerce, Cultural Exchange, and Colonial Expansion with Chinese Export Watercolours in the 18th and 19th Centuries
• Joseph Litts (PhD Candidate, Department of Art & Archeology, Princeton University) — The Plantation Landscapes of Anna Atkins and Anne Dixon, online presentation

16.15  Break

16.30  Session Three
• Linda Mueller (Post-doctoral Researcher, University of Zurich) — Drawing the Contract: Visualizing Obligation in the Early Modern Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds
• Gonzalo Munoz-Vera (Assistant Professor, Virginia Tech School of Architecture) — Rediscovering Latin America: Robert Burford’s Panorama of Lima (1834) through the Eyes of Lieutenant William Smyth, online presentation

17:45  Drinks

f r i d a y ,  2 6  s e p t e m b e r , online only

11.00  Welcome

11.10  Session One
• Victoria Adams (PhD, the University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau) — The Art of the Empire in the ‘Britain of the South’: Works on Paper in the British Art Section of the 1906–1907 New Zealand International Exhibition
• Chandni Jeswani (Art and Architectural Historian) — Mapping Kashi: Pilgrimage Cartographies and Colonial Translations on Paper

12.15  Break

12.45  Session Two
• Michael Hartman (Jonathan Little Cohen Associate Curator of American Art, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth) — Collecting Portraits to Control Land in 18th-Century British North America
• Catherine Dossin (Associate Professor of Art History, Purdue University) — Harbors of Power: Maritime Identity and Colonial Ambition in 18th-Century French Prints

14.00  Break

14.30  Session Three
• Annemarie Iker (Lecturer in Writing, Princeton University) — Cuba and Catalan Modernisme
• Ashar (Usher) Mobeen (PhD Candidate, Western University) — Palimpsests of the Heavens: Empire, Epistemicide, and the Papered Sky

15.15  Closing Remarks