Enfilade

I’ve highlighted here only a selection of CAA panels related to the eighteenth century; so, please consult the Call for Papers for additional possibilities. –CH

115th Annual Conference of the College Art Association

Hilton Midtown, 3–6 February 2027

Proposals due by 31 August 2026

All at Sea: Art and Open Water in the (Long) Eighteenth Century (ASECS)
Chairs: Elisabeth Rivard (University of Virginia) and Dani Rebecca Ezor (SUNY New Paltz)

This panel takes inspiration from what literary scholar Steve Mentz has termed the ‘blue humanities’, or human engagement with the world’s oceans. The challenge is for scholars to center the seas as a dynamic force rather than a passive surface between land or nation-based borders. Historically, the long eighteenth century was marked by efforts to survive or even control the open oceans. ‘All at sea’ meant leaving the sight of land and entering open water. The vast waterways of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans provoked numerous responses from artists and writers, ranging from wonder, indifference, terror, fascination, and opportunism. These sensibilities linger in the second quarter of the 21st century, as the majority of ocean environments remain unmapped and unexplored.

Here, we turn our attention to human-centric attempts to engage with the open seas and oceans, in any dimension or media in visual culture of the long eighteenth century. Papers are invited to explore real or imagined confrontations with the ‘high seas’ and ‘deep water’, whether close to or far removed from the coasts in either direction. Topics may include but are not limited to movements of people and objects, depictions of oceans, and marine material culture. We encourage submissions that consider or contrast Euro-American-centric perspectives with timelines, knowledge, and practices from global cultures and welcome all papers that broadly address visual and/or material culture in the long eighteenth century.

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Assessing Cause, Assigning Responsibility: Responses to Human and Natural Disaster before 1800
Chairs: Sofia Hernandez (Princeton University) and Ashton Fancy (Princeton University)

From earthquakes to sieges, structural collapse to flooding, disasters—whether natural or human-engineered—reshape the built environment. Recent scholarship in disaster studies has expanded our understanding of how catastrophe was experienced in the pre and early modern worlds. This panel builds on such work to ask how natural and human-made disasters might differently transform architecture and urbanism? Foregrounding the relationship between causation and reconstruction, we ask how the origin of destruction—seismic, environmental, military, or technological—shapes the material and spatial responses that follow. What forms of repair, adaptation, or redesign emerge from these distinctions? Post-disaster interventions are never neutral: they are shaped by material limitations, local knowledge, and competing political priorities, and often encode judgments about responsibility and blame. Natural disasters may be framed as acts of God or environmental inevitabilities, while warfare or infrastructural failure more readily invite attribution and accountability. Such distinctions may leave materially legible traces.

Bringing together cases before 1800, this panel examines how societies have historically responded to—and differentiated between—forms of destruction. By foregrounding architecture as a practice shaped by instability and constraint, this session also speaks to the renewed urgency of building amid ongoing environmental risk and uncertainty. We welcome contributions that address: architectural survival or collapse during disasters; comparative approaches to the impact of manmade and natural disasters on material culture; approaches to reconstruction, urban redesign, and their cultural or political significance; disastrous interactions between natural forces and built environments; comparative perspectives across different periods or regions.

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British Art In and Out of Fashion (Historians of British Art)
Chairs: Lindsay Wells (UCLA) and Courtney Tanner Wilder (Vanderbilt University Museum of Art)

British art production, as well as its study within the field of art history, has been subject to sporadic periods of fashionability. At present, British art—or the idea of it, in any case—is having a pop culture moment, from the reimagined Georgian society of Bridgerton to the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic of Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl. Yet British art itself has just as frequently fallen out of fashion, both in popular media and academic scholarship. This panel invites papers that propose new ways of engaging with the waxing and waning of British art’s fashionability, broadly conceived. What insights can an emphasis on fashions bring to our current understanding of British art, and what might such a focus obscure? How have fashions across the arts shaped the representation of Britain’s national and imperial identity? What roles have trends, crazes, tastemakers, and revivals played in the production of British art and its critical reception? How have fashions in dress and design historically intersected with those in the fine arts? Why are Britain’s colonial entanglements essential to understanding the fashionability of British art in different contexts? Papers might also examine moments during which British art contributed prominently to the development of art history as a discipline or, alternatively, moments when British art was notably unfashionable in the academy. Other potential subjects include the reception of British art in popular culture, film, and contemporary art. Abstracts for 15-minute papers on these or related topics are warmly welcomed.

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Napoleon’s Suppression of the Venetian Scuole: Their Historic and Artistic Legacy
Chair: Diana Gisolfi (Pratt Institute, Pratt in Venice)

Napoleon’s decree of 1806 suppressed the ‘scuole’ or confraternities of Venice, large and small. Combined guild, charity and devotional society, the scuole were central to the life and economy of the Republic. Their membership comprised virtually all workers. Carpenters, goldsmiths, butchers, shoemakers, silk-weavers, merchants etc, each of over 200 scuole had statutes and a site for devotion. Sites ranged from one altar to a building with boardroom and two large halls. The scuole grandi had formed in the Middle Ages for devotion and had grown in wealth. Scuole members participated in processions on feast days; processional banners depicted patron saints.

Napoleon’s decree disrupted Venetian society. Confraternities’ property, from altarpieces to buildings, was confiscated, movable items sent to Paris or sold on the art market, a few select objects reserved for the new Accademia. Venetian regret for this loss of patrimony engenders ongoing efforts for recovery. Two scuole buildings were exempt and survived with decorations intact: Scuola Grande di San Rocco and Scuola Dalmata. Some others’ sites have been revived, with changed decorations or virtual installations. Some remaining sites of scuole are identified and purloined works traced.

This session invites papers that study Venice’s confraternities, their histories, their patronage, their displaced patrimony, and their roles in the world of Venice. Papers might attempt to identify works from a particular scuola, or study the specific charitable role of a confraternity in relation to surviving descriptions of an iconographic program.

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Painted Statuary and Statue Paintings in the Global Iberian World (Society for Iberian Global Art)
Chairs: Jessica Weiss (Metropolitan State Univ of Denver) and Ilenia Colón Mendoza (Univ of Central Florida)

In the global Iberian world (1400–1800), painted statuary and statue paintings functioned as sophisticated tools of devotion, illusion, and aura transfer. This not only included polychromed three-dimensional objects but also grisaille, trompe l’oeil, and polychrome techniques that were used to represent painted statues in two-dimensional images. From fresco cycles to altarpieces, sculptures were clearly chosen as a communicative device, but to what end? Was it to showcase the skill of the painter or did it convey a deeper meaning? For example, statue paintings that depicted miraculous images of sculptures with great attention to detail could, by extension, become miraculous images themselves. In this case sanctity becomes transferable. This panel seeks to explore this topic further by asking considering the function of painted statuary within the context of ‘traditional’ painting. Were there overlaps in artistic techniques between creating two-dimensional images of sculpture and sculptural polychromy? How are the statues presented with regard to the picture plane? And what does evidence reveal about their use? Was it possible for paintings, which were transported to distant territories, to provide sculptural substitutes? Ultimately, the relationship between sculpture and painting is at the forefront of the discussion of painted statuary as we seek answers to these questions. This panel invites scholarship on painted statuary and statue paintings created in the global Iberian world from 1400 to 1800.

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Proxy Nature: Specimens, Images, and the Mediation of the Nonhuman
Chairs: Benjamin Pollitt (University of Queensland) and Shing-Kwan Chan (Princeton University)

At the heart of this panel is a deceptively simple question: what is the relationship between a specimen and its image, its trace, or its reproduction? As scholars have long noted, specimens—whether fossils, preserved plants, or taxidermy—are not only scientific objects, but forms that invite imaginative reconstruction. They require interpretation and speculation, even as they remain profoundly artificial. In this sense, the notion of the ‘proxy specimen’ may be something of a tautology: the specimen itself is already a proxy, a mediated form that stands in for a once-living organism that can no longer be fully present. If this is the case, then the images and objects that follow the specimen are not secondary or derivative, but part of the same representational process. Drawings, prints, photographs, and cabinets of natural history do not simply mirror nature, they extend, translate, and transform it, shaping how it is understood, classified, circulated, and valued. What might it mean, then, to bring the tools of art history to bear on the specimen itself?

With particular attention to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a period of intensified collecting and imperial expansion—the panel situates specimens and their proxies within networks of extraction, circulation, and labour. It considers how these forms shaped aesthetic and epistemic categories such as beauty, vitality, and classification. By repositioning the proxy as fundamental rather than secondary, this panel reframes natural history as a visual and material practice in which life is not simply preserved, but actively reconstituted.

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Shine, Shimmer, and Sheen: Surface Effects and Material Thinking in the Early Modern World (HECAA)
Chairs: Carole Nataf (CASVA, National Gallery of Art) and Cynthia Kok (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

What did it mean for early modern objects to catch the eye? Art history has long privileged line and color as categories of artistic analysis, yet the visual impact of artworks often depended just as much on surface effects. From the shine of silver and gold and the shimmer of silk and tapestries to the gloss of lacquer, the brilliance of porcelain, and the iridescence of mother-of-pearl—or the opacity of earthenware and wool—reflective effects shaped how art, objects, and people were seen, valued, and understood. These qualities were produced not only through finishing techniques such as polishing or glazing, but also through the manipulation of pigments, dyes, binders, and other materials across media.

How did makers manipulate and conceptualize reflective effects such as shine, shimmer, sheen, translucency, iridescence, or brilliance across media? What cultural or symbolic meanings did these reflective effects impart to objects? How might attending to surface effects reframe canonical art historical narratives? What roles did pigments, dyes, and surface treatments play in producing reflective effects?

We welcome papers addressing the social, gendered, and racial stakes of surface. Shine could signify luxury, splendor, and conspicuous consumption, but it also raises questions of ephemerality, artifice, and race. Materials such as porcelain, lacquer, or silver participated in circuits of global trade, colonial exchange, and racialized values of whiteness and blackness. Panelists are encouraged to reflect upon the politics of surface and visibility. As Krista Thompson has shown, shine can be understood as the art of being socially seen.

Metropolitan Museum Journal 62 (2027)

Submissions due by 15 September 2026

The Metropolitan Museum Journal publishes articles and research notes that contain original research on works of art in The Met’s collection. Works from The Met collection should be central to the discussion. Articles contribute extensive and thoroughly argued scholarship—art historical, technical, and scientific—whereas research notes are narrower in scope, focusing on a specific aspect of new research or presenting a significant finding from technical analysis, for example. The maximum length for articles is 8,000 words (including endnotes) and 10–12 images, and for research notes 4,000 words (including endnotes) and 4–6 images.

The process of peer review is double-anonymous. Manuscripts are reviewed by the Journal Editorial Board, composed of members of the curatorial, conserva­tion, and scientific departments, as well as scholars from the broader academic community.

Articles and research notes in the Journal appear in print and online, and are accessible in JStor on the University of Chicago Press website. The deadline for submissions for Volume 62 (published in December 2027) is 15 September 2026. Submission guidelines are available here.  Please send materials, as well as questions, to journalsubmissions@metmuseum.org.

From the ArtHist.net:

Practices of Drawing in Goethe / Praktiken des Zeichnens bei Goethe

Goethe-Nationalmuseum, Weimar, 10–12 March 2027

Organized by Christoph Orth and Mira Claire Zadrozny

Proposals due by 23 August 2026

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) bequeathed not only a remarkable literary and scientific oeuvre, but also a comprehensive collection of his own drawings. He drew throughout his entire life—during his upbringing in Frankfurt am Main, his studies in Leipzig, and later in Weimar. Likewise, Goethe was well known to sketch while travelling, whether in the Thuringian Forest or during his Italian journey. More than 2,500 of Goethe’s drawings have been preserved, most of them held in the collections of the museums of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar. Their sheer number alone suggests that drawing was by no means a subsidiary matter for Goethe but rather integral to his intellectual pursuits and conduct.

The practice of drawing permeates his work and interweaves with his other areas of interest. For him, it seems, the act of drawing was a way of comprehending the world. A re-evaluation of Goethe’s graphic oeuvre therefore promises to be highly productive, particularly if, instead of focusing primarily on aesthetic and biographical questions, attention is directed towards the recurring practices associated with the act of drawing. The conference hence proposes a praxeological approach as it has recently been derived from the social sciences to be successfully applied to art history and visual studies. The potential of a practice-oriented approach is particularly evident in conjunction with the aesthetics of production and reception as well as questions of materiality and mediality.

For Goethe’s drawings, three aspects seem particularly relevant. First, the epistemic practice of drawing, which becomes especially apparent when viewed in relation to Goethe’s scientific work in the fields of botany, geology and optics. Secondly, the social practice of drawing, which is not only reflected in sketches found in the margins of letters, but also provided an inherently different way of communication, evident in e.g. the artistic practices of teaching and collaborating that Goethe shared with contemporaries such as Christoph Heinrich Kniep, Carl Wilhelm Lieber or Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein. And thirdly, the notion of Goethe, the literatus, as a graphic artist who combines writing and visual art, thus developing complex entanglements of image and text.

The conference Practices of Drawing in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe invites participants to explore these key questions in 15– to 20-minute paper presentations that situate an object-oriented approach within the proposed theoretical framework. Speakers are welcome to address the following or other topics:
• Drawing as an epistemological practice of perception and comprehension
• Social interactions in the medium of drawing (letters, portraits, presents)
• Drawing instruction and art theory
• Practices of image production and questions of materiality
• Socio-critical perspectives and drawing as an elitist practice
• The reception of Goethe’s drawings and its constitution through curatorial practices
• Formation and reproduction of an art-historical canon

In addition to the paper presentation, a significant part of the conference will be dedicated to the in-person study of the drawings, providing an opportunity to go beyond questions of form and motif, to observe the drawings’ material conditions, their methods of production, and traces of handling. The conference will be held in German and English. Applications from early-career scholars and curators are especially welcome. Travel and accommodation costs will be covered. A subsequent publication of the conference findings is intended. To apply, please send an abstract (c. 300 words) together with a short biography to graphische.sammlungen@klassik-stiftung.de by 23 August 2026.

The conference is being organised as part of the research project Corpus of Goethe’s Drawings, carried out by the Direktion Museen of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar and funded by the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung and the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung.

From ArtHist.net:

Baroque Portraiture in Silesia and its Neighbouring Lands: New Perspectives

The Ossoliński National Institute, Wrocław, 26–27 November 2026

Organized by Emilia Kłoda and Marek Kwaśny

Proposals due by 31 July 2026

Following the end of the Thirty Years’ War and the signing of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Silesia, as a land belonging to the Bohemian Crown, became the arena of fundamental political and social transformations. In place of the local Protestant nobility, new cosmopolitan aristocratic families of the Catholic faith emerged, loyal to the imperial authority. The confessional character of the Habsburg state fostered the renewal of religious life and increased the influence of ecclesiastical institutions on politics, culture, and society.

These changes manifested themselves in numerous and magnificent artistic foundations. Noble and episcopal palaces, monasteries, and academies filled with art, with portraiture occupying a particularly prominent place. Alongside images of the ruler and his family—expressions of political loyalty—noble portrait galleries comprised likenesses of contemporary family members and their most illustrious ancestors. Thus created, the ancestor halls were intended as an artistic manifestation of high status, aspirations, and proof of noble lineage. Bishops’ palaces were adorned with portraits of successive church hierarchs, while the representative halls of monasteries were filled with extensive portrait cycles depicting subsequent abbots and abbesses. These often included imaginative representations of semi-legendary early superiors, reaching many centuries back, thereby underscoring institutional continuity and sanctioning the communities’ exceptional social position.

On the other hand, despite a more difficult political and religious situation, numerous portrait commissions also came from the numerically dominant Protestant inhabitants of Silesia: wealthy burghers, councillors, scholars, humanists, and Lutheran clergy, equally eager to emphasise their significance as prosperous and educated representatives of society. It must of course be remembered that the portrait in this period served various functions: from the most fundamental one of „making the absent present,” through representative, ritual, propagandistic, and commemorative roles, to finally serving as a tool of self-creation and manifestation of identity (social, political, and religious).

Thanks to extensive field research conducted in recent years, we know of over 800 surviving Baroque portraits of various types located in Silesian museums, palaces, monasteries, and public institutions. Despite such a rich heritage, many aspects of this artistic activity still await new, interdisciplinary approaches. Suffice it to say that over forty years have passed since the last exhibition on early modern portraiture in Silesia, organized by the National Museum in Wrocław, and since then no comprehensive, overarching study has been dedicated to this subject, leaving it on the margins of other art-historical inquiries.

Therefore, the Institute of Art History of the University of Wrocław and the Ossoliński National Institute invite you to participate in an international academic conference devoted to early modern portraiture in Silesia and its neighbouring lands. The artistic phenomena observable in Silesia were similar in other lands of the Bohemian Crown, while the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had extraordinary patrons of portraiture among its magnates and high-ranking clergy. We invite you to jointly reflect on the place of the portrait in the visual culture of Central Europe, on its functions, meanings, and transformations over the centuries. We are open to new methodological perspectives and various interdisciplinary approaches that take into account the socio-economic conditions of the epoch and region. We welcome not only scholars interested in painted portraiture but also in sculptural, graphic, and drawn portraits.

We encourage the submission of papers addressing, among others, the following topics:
• The portrait and its function: representation of power, propaganda, commemoration, self-creation, the portrait as an object of exchange
• Historicising portraiture and sacred identification portraits
• The portrait and the sitter’s identity: confession, estate, nationality, gender
• Portraitists and their place in the art market: the artistic activity of portrait painters and guild structures with their constraints, secular and ecclesiastical servitorate, artist mobility and earnings
• The portrait and its display: residential ancestor galleries, monastic portrait cycles of abbots and abbesses, collections of portraits of famous figures, scholars and professors, bourgeois interiors, images in public spaces, epitaphs and tombstones
• The portrait in sculpture, numismatics, graphic arts, and decorative arts
• The turbulent fate of portraits: translocations, destruction, thefts, restitution
The thematic scope remains flexible. We will gladly consider proposals that extend beyond the aforementioned areas.

Speaking time: 20 minutes
Conference languages: English
Please send your proposals by 31 July 2026 to marek.kwasny2@uwr.edu.pl.

Submissions should include:
Full name, academic title/degree, affiliation
Paper title
Abstract (max. 200 words)
Short biographical note

Notification of acceptance will be sent by 31 August 2026.

We plan to publish a peer-reviewed post-conference monograph in English with a high-scoring academic publisher.

Conference Fee: 450 PLN / 100 EUR
The fee includes: conference materials, coffee breaks, lunches, and a gala dinner. Please note that the organizers do not cover travel or accommodation expenses. However, we are happy to assist with hotel reservations where possible.

Scientific Committee
Katarína Kolbiarz Chmelinová, PhD., Comenius University Bratislava
Andrzej Kozieł, University of Wrocław, University of Ostrava
Zuzana Macurová, Ph.D., Palacký University Olomouc
Jacek Tylicki, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń

Organising Committee
Emilia Kłoda, The Ossoliński National Institute in Wrocław
Marek Kwaśny, Institute of Art History, University of Wrocław

From ASECS:

2027 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference

Portland, Oregon, 1–3 April 2027

Sessions Proposals due by 18 July 2026

Paper Proposals will be due by 18 September 2026

The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) is pleased to announce our Call For Papers for the 57th Annual Meeting,  to be held 1–3 April 2027 in Portland, Oregon. The Society, established in 1969, is the foremost learned society in the United States for the study of all aspects of the long eighteenth century, the period from the later seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. In their 57th edition, ASECS is co-hosting its Annual Meeting along with the Western Society of Eighteenth American Studies, and collaborating with the Society for French Historical Studies.

ASECS is committed to fostering an inclusive and welcoming conference environment in which all members participate fully in the exchange of knowledge and ideas. The society welcomes scholars pursuing all aspects of eighteenth-century studies and in all careers and career stages: in graduate studies; in tenured, tenure track, or non-tenure track academic positions; in part-time or temporary positions in the academy; and colleagues in contexts beyond the academy including libraries, museums, publishing, and teaching, as well as independent scholars.

The Annual Meeting has four rounds for submissions:

Round 1 | 22 May — 22 June 2026
Call for guaranteed sessions (panels, roundtables, poster sessions, and special sessions) submitted by caucuses and affiliate society chairs. Submissions must have session title, session description, email, chair/co-chair. Submissions for these sessions must be from caucuses or affiliate members in good standing. Caucuses can have up to two sessions, affiliates can have one.

Round 2 | 22 June — 18 July 2026
Open call for session proposals by chairs (panels, roundtables, project sessions, special sessions). Submission must have session title, session description, email, and chair/co-chairs.
Important: Before submitting, please review the guaranteed caucus and affiliate sessions that were submitted in Round 1 to avoid duplication.

Round 3 | 31 July — 18 September 2026
Open call for individual paper abstracts to proposed chairs’ sessions. Submissions must have presenter’s name, paper title, email, and paper abstract.

Round 4 | 10–18 October 2026
Open call for individual paper abstracts. Submissions must have presenter name, paper title, and paper abstract Individual paper abstracts that were not selected in Round 3 can become part of Round 4 or ASECS created sessions, that are organized by the Program Committee.

Please direct any questions to ASECS Meeting Planner, Devon Binder, at programs@asecs.org.

Program Committee
Monica Hahn
David Diamond
Soren Hammerschmidt
Sal Nicolazzo
Marisol Barbón
Leigh Mercer

From the Call for Papers:

Many (More) Antwerp Hands: Collaborations across Media, 1500–1750

Rubenshuis, Antwerp, 22–23 April 2027

Proposals due by 31 July 2026

In early modern Antwerp, making was rarely a solitary act. Artists and artisans participated in complex processes of production that relied on an array of specialists, materials, techniques, and areas of knowledge. Collaboration as a dominant organizing principle of artistic creation in Antwerp was critically foregrounded in a 2018 Rubenianum conference, which explored how artists pooled their skills, divided their labor, and forged creative partnerships in one of early modern Europe’s most productive artistic centers. An edited volume with its origins in the conference, Many Antwerp Hands: Collaborations in Netherlandish Art, 1400–1750 (Harvey Miller Publishers), was published in 2021. Both the conference and the book positioned painting, and to a lesser extent printmaking, as its primary media.

In the years since, scholarship on early modern Netherlandish art has increasingly turned its attention to media beyond painting and the graphic arts, while also asking new questions about how those media relate to one another. In particular, sculpture and the decorative arts (metalwork, textiles, and glass, among others) have attracted renewed interest. With this interest, there is also a sharper awareness of how these objects rarely emerged from a single hand, discipline, workshop, or material. Instead, artistic production in Antwerp relied on wide networks of contributors whose roles were integral to the conception, execution, and reception of works of art. Collaboration can thus be read across media, among a variety of specialists, and traversing the boundaries imposed by institutional structures and art historical categories.

It is within this context that the Rubenshuis will return to the subject of collaboration in 2027 for the second chapter of Many Antwerp Hands, broadening the conversation to include the full range of media, materials, intermedial exchanges, and actors that shaped artistic life in early modern Antwerp. This conference will take place in the year of the 450th anniversary of Rubens’s birth and look ahead to the planned reopening of the Rubenshuis in 2030, embracing that moment of renewal as an opportunity to imagine a materially diverse and interconnected future for the study of early modern Netherlandish art.

We invite proposals that engage with collaboration across a broad range of media, practices, and perspectives, with early modern Antwerp as their center of gravity. Contributions might address the collaborative making of individual objects, the structures that enabled or constrained collaboration, the movement of designs and materials locally and globally, and the individual actors who shaped Antwerp’s culture of making. Papers may also call into question the spatial or institutional boundaries of artistic collaboration in Antwerp, as well as reconsider the categories through which artistic labor has traditionally been defined and valued. We welcome perspectives from beyond the visual arts, exploring how artisans collaborated with practitioners of the performing and literary arts, or with those working in natural philosophy and the emerging sciences. Finally, we encourage scholarship that sheds light on the contributions of women and underrepresented racial and religious groups connected to Antwerp’s artistic economy.

Papers might address, but are not limited to:

Formal Networks
Guilds, academies, and societies as sites where collaboration is facilitated or constrained

Informal Networks
Collaborations between women and through kinship networks (families, marriages, friendships)

The Workshop
Internal organization, division of labor, and collaborative production

Paper as Catalyst
The role of drawing and design in activating collaborative processes

Travel and Exchange
Antwerp artists collaborating across distances and borders; economic networks as channels for collaboration (trade, supply chains)

Conceptual Collaboration
Shared ideas, programs, and intellectual exchange between makers

Material Transformations
How materials change hands, forms, and meanings across media

Interspherical Collaborations
Exchanges between the visual arts and other spheres of making (i.e. natural philosophy, emerging sciences, performing and literary arts)

Paintings as Objects
The painted surface as a material thing that travels, is reworked, and participates in larger collaborative chains (i.e. frame and panel makers, pigment sourcing and making)

Animal Materials
Substances of animal origin and the collaborative networks their use implies

Gender
Formal and informal roles of women in collaborative artistic production, including in workshops, religious settings, or the domestic sphere

Underrepresented Spaces and Actors
Environments and participants not traditionally recognized as sites of art making

Abstracts of no more than 400 words, accompanied by a short academic bio and up to 2 images (if applicable), should be submitted to manyantwerphands2027@gmail.com by 31 July 2026. Abstracts should clearly articulate the research question addressed, the object(s), artist(s), or material(s) under consideration, and the methodological approaches used to examine them. Speakers can expect to be notified by September 2026. Those whose proposals are accepted will be asked to submit a draft of their paper approximately six weeks before the conference. Papers should be in English and 20 minutes in length. For any questions about the conference or its call for papers, please email manyantwerphands2027@gmail.com.

Organized by the Rubenshuis, Antwerp, with visiting researchers:
• Emily Hirsch (Brown University, United States)
• Hanne Schonkeren (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)
• Margot Steurbaut (Rice University, United States)
• Annelies Verellen (McGill University, Canada)

From ArtHist.net:

The Art of Failure: Hybridity, Risk and the Limits of Artistic Projects, 1450–1900

Die Kunst des Scheiterns: Hybridität, Risiko und die Grenzen des

künstlerischen Handelns, 1450–1900

9th Philipp Hainhofer Colloquium, Augsburg, 19–21 March 2027

Proposals due by 30 September 2026

The Augsburg art entrepreneur Philipp Hainhofer (1578–1647) designed highly elaborate display furniture, most of which contained numerous, equally masterfully crafted fittings and ranked among the most complex works of art of his time. Whilst the Pomeranian Art Cabinet (1611–1617), the earliest of these grand pieces of furniture, was created as a commissioned artwork, Hainhofer had his later major projects produced only for the open market. These works combined artistic and iconographic conception, the organisation of a collaborative working process that brought together a wide variety of arts, the marketing of the finished product, and, not least, logistics, transport and conservation. His late pieces of furniture reached such a degree of complexity and scale that, whilst exceptionally artistic, they were virtually impossible to sell due to their high prices and the difficulty of handling them. In other words: Hainhofer deliberately pursued an artistic concept, even though it was fraught with a high risk of failure.

For this reason, the 9th Philipp Hainhofer Colloquium has chosen the issue of failure in the arts and sciences as its starting point. As is known, Hainhofer was not only an art agent; he also acted as a mediator of knowledge and political information. Consequently, the focus will be on projects and works in the visual arts as well as those in the field of knowledge dissemination, spanning from the late Middle Ages to the period around 1900. The aim is to take a comparative approach to examine specific projects in art and book production against the backdrop of the risk of failure and to identify the critical factors involved.

A variety of aspects may play a role here. First, the general conditions must be addressed, such as material and technical problems during production or innovation processes leading to new, experimental, yet untested methods. Furthermore, the discrepancy between the artistic or publishing ambitions of producers on the one hand, and market pressures and the expectations of audiences and clients on the other, can be identified as a key reason projects might fail. Ambitions and strategies of competition can escalate to such an extent during the creative process that, from a certain point onwards, projects become unmanageable and resources—both in terms of time and funding—are stretched to breaking point. Furthermore, such projects may become difficult to communicate to the public or remain incomprehensible due to a lack of comparability, a consideration that applies not only to art but also, in a similar vein, to publishing ventures. Likewise, the aspect of functionality must be taken into account, particularly in projects involving architecture and the applied arts, but also in sculpture (for example, in the case of funerary monuments).

The planned conference will therefore focus primarily on the inherent momentum of artistic and scientific working processes, under the key concepts of ‘hybridisation’, ‘complexity’ and ‘scale’. The scope is intended to encompass all genres of art and book production, ranging from projects such as Hainhofer’s art cabinets to the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk in the late 19th century.

Researchers from all academic disciplines are therefore invited to submit proposals for an interdisciplinary exchange on the conference theme. Please send your proposal (max. 2000 characters) together with a CV (including details of relevant publications, if applicable) by 30 September 2026 to: Hainhofer-Kolloquium-9@t-online.de
Travel and accommodation costs for speakers (in the case of tandem teams, usually for one person only) will be covered by the organiser. If you are traveling from abroad, we will also try to cover the costs, but we may only be able to cover a portion of the travel costs. The conference languages are German and English. PhD students and postdoctoral researchers are strongly encouraged to apply.

Accepted papers will be published in an edited volume by Andreas Tacke, Michael Wenzel, and Marika Keblusek, in the Hainhoferiana series by Michael Imhof Verlag (Petersberg) in March 2028; the deadline for submission of all manuscripts is 3 October 2027.

Organised and funded by the DFG long-term project (HAB, Wolfenbüttel and the LEUCOREA Foundation, Lutherstadt Wittenberg) for the annotated digital edition of Philipp Hainhofer’s travel and collection accounts (namely Prof. Dr. Dr. Andreas Tacke) and the Institute for European Cultural History (IEK) at the University of Augsburg (namely Prof. Dr. Günther Kronenbitter and Prof. Dr. Ulrich Niggemann) in cooperation with Dr. Michael Wenzel (Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel) and Dr. Marika Keblusek (Associate Professor at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society).

From ArtHist.net:

Just Beautiful and Charming? Gender-theoretical Perspectives on

Production, Reception, and Representation in Miniature Painting, 1600–1900

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, 9–10 July 2026

Organized by Mirja Beck and Ulrike Kern

Registration due by 6 July 2026

Towards the end of the eighteenth century both women artists and miniature painting became increasingly important in public art, but the interrelation between the two has barely been explored to date. A systematic study is still lacking, despite the fact that the proportion of women miniature artists was considerably higher than in other visible art forms. Following Linda Nochlin, we want to discuss: Why have there been so many great women miniature artists (and why do we know so little about them)?

The conference addresses a two-fold desideratum: first, female and queer positions have often been neglected in art history until recently. Secondly, miniature painting, as a particular form between decorative artisanal production, cultural-historical object of daily use and masterful art in small format, is still regarded as less relevant than, for example, large-scale painting. Within a larger art-sociological context, our intention is to shed light on artistically relevant but little-noticed actors in a genre that is underrepresented in research. In doing so, we aim to subject the status of miniature painting to an art historical re-evaluation and expand the research on the topic, which often does not go beyond questions of collecting, style and biography, by social, gender-theoretical and intersectional levels.

The objective of the conference is to discuss miniature painting as an art form which enabled female artists and other members of historically and socially marginalised groups to be active as artists. We aim to open the discourse for new research positions on miniature painting such as gender and queer studies, or the field of material culture. Central to our discussion are aspects of production of miniatures, forms of representation and circumstances of their reception between 1600 and 1900. For information and registration, please contact m.beck@kunst.uni-frankfurt.de or kern@kunst.uni-frankfurt.de.

t h u r s d a y ,  9  j u l y

10.00  Welcome and Introduction by Ulrike Kern and Mirja Beck

10.30  Panel 1 | Accessibility of a Medium
• Caroline Gould (Sheffield/London) — Rethinking the Miniaturist: Defining Mary Ann Flaxman’s Practice
• Pavla Mikešová and Olga Trmalová (Prague) — Hedwig Höna-Senft (1855–1923): An Unknown Representative of the Prague Miniature School of the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries
• Dorian Greenbaum (Boston) and Ulrike Kern (Frankfurt am Main) — Portraits in Circles: Ethel Webling and Her Career as a Miniature Painter in London
• Mirja Beck (Frankfurt am Main) — ‘… un genre qui laisse immaculés les habits et les mains’: Miniature and Femininity

12.30  Lunch break

16.00  Panel 2 | A Market for Miniatures
• Anna Pratley (York) — Women Miniature Copyists as Quasi-professional Suppliers of the Familial Art Market in England, 1650–1750
• Anna Vallugera Fuster (Barcelona) — A ‘Portable Museum’ for Sale: Translation Copies, Art Market, and Female Agency in a Series of Enamel Miniatures by Giuseppe Macpherson

f r i d a y ,  1 0  j u l y

10.00  Panel 3 | Medium and Agency
• Lisa Hecht (Marburg) — (Un)conventional: Giovanna Garzoni’s Zaga Christ (1635)
• Julia Saviello (Frankfurt am Main) — Gaia’s Fruits in Giovanna Garzoni’s Art
• Marianne Koos (Wien) — Bravura in Small Size. Skin, Colour, and Touch(es) in the Miniatures of Marie-Anne(?) Fragonard

12.45  Lunch break

14.15  Panel 4 | Miniature and Memory
• Laura Kromer (Konstanz) — Media Traces: Mutual Refinement in Miniature Format
• Ines Kelly (Karlsruhe) — The Heads of the Revolution: American Miniatures of the Revolutionary Era

16.15  Closing Remarks

From the Call for Papers:

Drawing as Knowledge: Practice, Theory, and History

Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 16–17 September 2026

Proposals due by 13 July 2026

Later this year, the Paul Mellon Centre will be able to announce the completion of the cataloguing of the archive of Deanna Petherbridge (1939–2024). Petherbridge was an artist, writer, curator, and educator, known above all for her artistic practice in and writing on drawing. To mark this moment, the Centre will also be showing a display of materials from her archive, accompanied by a number of Petherbridge’s artworks from private collections (29 July to 30 October 2026).

This follows closely on the heels of the publication in 2026 of the new Thames & Hudson edition of her landmark book, The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice (first published in 2010). Petherbridge completed the revised edition as an Associate Fellow at the Warburg Institute, which also holds her celebrated ink-drawn triptych, The Destruction of Palmyra (2017).

Held in collaboration with the Warburg Institute, this conference will explore Petherbridge’s concept of “drawing as visual thinking” within the context of British art history. We are seeking proposals for 20-minute papers that engage with British drawing, in any period, and in its most diverse and international contexts.

We invite proposals on any topic, but are particularly interested in the following themes:
• the purposes and functions of drawing practice
• the significations of line, particularly, but also tone and colour
• issues of power and control in drawing as a means of knowledge formation. This could include the colonial gaze, for example, or the dynamics of the life class
• drawing as a means of knowing the human body
• the role of drawing in understanding people, including the drawing of portraits within social gatherings, for example, or caricature and satire
• the role of drawing in understanding and interpreting the natural world, from the molecular to the celestial
• drawing as a prominent technology in interpreting landscapes, through topographical practice
• drawing as a means of knowing the built environment
• the role of drawing in understanding the imagination, creativity and expression

We welcome contributions from across disciplines and professional fields, as long as the proposal is focused on drawing within artistic practice, as a means of knowledge formation.

Please submit the following to events@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk with the subject line “CFP Drawing as Knowledge”:
• An abstract (450 word maximum) describing your proposed contribution
• A 250-word biography
Please combine your abstract and biography into a single Word document and send it as an email attachment before Monday, 13 July 2026, 11.59pm (BST). Incomplete or late submissions will not be considered. Successful contributors will receive a speaker’s fee of £200, and reasonable travel and accommodation costs will be covered. If you have any access requirements, please let us know.

Jean-Baptiste Lestiboudois, Botanical and Medicinal Chart, detail, 1774, engraving with watercolor
(Paris, MNHN, Central Library; source: archive.org, 2016)

◊    ◊    ◊    ◊    ◊

From the Call for Papers:

Journal18, Issue #24 (Fall 2027) — Data

Issue edited by Yuthika Sharma and Clara Drummond

Proposals due by 15 September 2026; finished articles will be due by 2 April 2027

How does the notion of ‘data’ shape our understanding of the eighteenth century?

This issue of J18 queries the role of data in relation to art, visual, and material histories of the eighteenth century: for example, maps as an encapsulation of land-based statistics, the recording of flora and fauna, lists of people and occupations, the making of pattern books, logs of plantation produce, the quantification of goods traded, building/describing archives, the catalogues of collections, taxonomies, census taking, or even journals of voyages and touristic activities in the context of Europe’s maritime expansion into Asia, Americas, and the Pacific. From trade ships carrying porcelain as ballast (that was cataloged diligently) to personal cabinets of curiosity (that are examples of selective data mining), the scale and scope of data building varied. To what extent was the creation of ‘big data’ foundational to the process of empire building? And what sort of products (maps, albums, logs, gazetteers, almanacs) were the result of this information gathering? To what extent can complex, high volume datasets, such as those generated from maritime exploration, account for modes of colonial expansion? What was the nature of intangibles that resisted typification and classification?

The theme of ‘data’ takes a historical view of a phenomenon that is now driving the creation of large data centers and a quest for infinite data, and what critics have described as ‘data colonialism’ and dispossession. This issue seeks to query the idea of humanistic data as something emerging from specific cultural and historical contexts and representations of lives and ideas that were subjective and personal but that nonetheless drove larger conceptual and economic shifts in the context of empire building in the eighteenth century. This issue also encourages papers that bring together ideas from the digital humanities and collection-as-data theory and practice in order to reflect on the eighteenth century.

Proposals for issue #24 Data are now being accepted. The deadline for proposals is 15 September 2026. To submit a proposal, send an abstract (250 words) and a brief biography to the following email addresses: editor@journal18.org, yuthika.sharma@northwestern.edu, and cdrummond@northwestern.edu. Articles should not exceed 4000 words (including footnotes) and will be due for submission by 2 April 2027. For further details on submission and Journal18 house style, see Information for Authors.

Issue Editors
Yuthika Sharma, Northwestern University
Clara Drummond, McCormick Library, Northwestern University