Exhibition | Sketching Splendor: American Natural History, 1750–1850
Titian Ramsay Peale, Sunset on Missouri, July 1819
(Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, NH121 TRP, MSS.B.P31.15d)
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Now on view at the American Philosophical Society Museum:
Sketching Splendor: American Natural History, 1750–1850
American Philosophical Society Museum, Philadelphia, 12 April — 29 December 2024
Sketching Splendor: American Natural History, 1750–1850 explores how William Bartram, Titian Ramsay Peale, and John James Audubon made sense of nature’s complexities through their writings, drawings, and watercolors. It highlights their approaches to capturing the natural world during a time of rapid intellectual, social, and political change.
Bartram, Peale, and Audubon relied on natural knowledge established by European, Euro-American, and Native American experts while balancing changing ideas of how reason and emotion impacted science. As both artists and naturalists, they freely expressed their ideas using science, art, and literature. Through a potent mix of scientific ideas, shifting worldviews, and professional freedom, their works embodied both experimentation and certainty. However, their interpretation of the natural world has also raised questions of national importance. Their world was not just one of intellectual excitement, but one of systematic injustice and a complex national history become visible as we peel back the layers. Sketching Splendor draws on the APS’s extensive holdings. Highlights of the exhibition include William Bartram’s map of the Alachua Savanna, Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s Rattlesnake Skeleton, Titian Ramsay Peale’s watercolors from the Long Expedition, and one volume of John James Audubon’s original Birds of America.
Anna Majeski and Michelle Craig McDonald, Sketching Splendor: American Natural History, 1750–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), 112 pages, ISBN: 978-1606180402, $30.
Anna Majeski received a PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2022, where she completed a doctoral dissertation on a remarkable series of astrological fresco cycles completed in Padua between 1300 and 1440. Her research focuses on the intersections of art and science, image and knowledge in the early modern world, and has been supported by pre- and postdoctoral fellowships from the American Academy in Rome and the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti. She joined the American Philosophical Society, Library & Museum, as Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Natural History Exhibition Research Fellow in October 2022.
Michelle Craig McDonald is the Librarian/Director of the Library and Museum at the American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743 and the oldest learned society in North America. The APS has more than 14 million pages of manuscripts and 300,000 printed volumes, with particular strengths in early American history, the history of science, and Native American and Indigenous cultures. McDonald earned her PhD in history from the University of Michigan where she focused on business relationships and consumer behavior between North America and the Caribbean during the 18th and 19th centuries. She is the co-author of Public Drinking in the Early Modern World: Voices from the Tavern (Pickering & Chatto/Routledge Press, 2011), and her current monograph, Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States, will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in spring 2025.
Exhibition | Buckland and Palladio: A Legacy of Design
Hammond-Harwood House in Annapolis, Maryland, designed by William Buckland in 1774. Buckland was inspired by Palladio’s Villa Pisani, Montagnana, as published in The Four Books of Architecture.
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Now on view:
Buckland and Palladio: A Legacy of Design
Hammond-Harwood House Museum, Annapolis, Maryland, 1 April — 30 December 2024
When William Buckland designed the Hammond-Harwood House in 1774, he was inspired by the designs of 16th-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio. The Hammond-Harwood House celebrates its 250th anniversary with an exhibition of early documents, paintings, and artifacts that provide context for Matthias Hammond’s house—including Buckland’s indenture papers and a drawing by Thomas Jefferson.
When the Hammond-Harwood House was designed for Matthias Hammond in 1774, Annapolis was in its Golden Age. There were 14 major houses either already built or underway for the politically active leaders of the Revolution: John Brice, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, William Paca, John Ridout, and Upton Scott. Hammond, a wealthy 25-year-old tobacco planter and delegate to the Maryland General Assembly, had a handsome inheritance and a keen business sense to purchase four acres in Annapolis to build his own “town house.”
Hammond hired the joiner, carpenter, and architect William Buckland to design his city home. Buckland had been indentured to George Mason since his arrival in Virginia in 1755 to complete Mason’s plantation home, Gunston Hall. Buckland left Mason with high recommendations and bought a farm in Virginia, set up a workshop, and worked on other estates, including Mount Airy, the Tayloe family plantation.
Buckland moved to Annapolis most likely at the urging of Tayloe’s son-in-law Edward Lloyd. Lloyd, a wealthy merchant and planter, had purchased a half-finished brick house in Annapolis begun by Samuel Chase, now known as the Chase-Lloyd House. Buckland agreed to complete its construction and devise the impressive interior that showcased his skill inspired by the designs of the 16th-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio (1508–1580).
Palladio was an Italian Renaissance architect who was influenced by Greek and Roman architecture and is considered to be, even today, one of the most influential figures in the history of architecture. His treatise, I quattro libri dell’architettura (The Four Books of Architecture), was first printed in Italian in 1570, followed by several reprints and a full English version published in London by Giacomo Leoni in 1715–1720.
In Buckland’s design for Hammond’s city house, he adapted the plans of the Villa Pisani at Montagnana from Palladio’s Four Books. The five-part plan house, composed of a central block with wings on each side and connected by a passage, was well-suited to the tastes and climates of the southern colonies. By 1760, the manor houses of the Chesapeake and Tidewater plantation owners were primarily of the five-part Palladian plan—essentially a Palladian country villa.
Although Buckland is thought to have designed many interiors in Virginia and Maryland, including Tulip Hill, Whitehall, and Ringgold House, little documentation exists. The Hammond-Harwood House is the only known commission for a full building design and attests to Buckland’s knowledge of English Palladianism and the current fashion in decoration.
The Burlington Magazine, October 2024
The long 18th century in the October issue of The Burlington:
The Burlington Magazine 166 (October 2024)
e d i t o r i a l
• “Restoring the ‘belle époque’,” pp. 995–96.
The Musee Jacquemart-André is a treasure house that graces the Haussmann boulevards in Paris and is perhaps not nearly as well-known as it should be. The recent re-opening of the museum on 6th September, following a period of closure for conservation, therefore provides a welcome opportunity to draw fresh attention to this most romantic and beguiling of collections and the elegant building that houses it.
a r t i c l e s
• Jacob Willer, “Annibale Carracci and the Forgotten Magdalene,” pp. 1028–35.
A painting the collection of the National Trust at Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire, is published here as a work of Annibale Carracci’s maturity. Related to comparable compositions which derive from it, in collections in Rome and Cambridge, it was acquired in Florence in 1758 for the 1st Baron Scarsdale.
• Samantha Happé, “Portable Diplomacy: Louis XIV’s ‘boîtes à portrait’,” pp. 1036–43.
Louix XIV’s ambitious and carefully orchestrated diplomatic programme included gifts of jewelled miniature portraits known as ‘boîtes à portrait’. Using the ‘Présents du Roi’, the circumstances around the commissioning and creation of these precious objects can be explored and a possible recipient suggested for a well-preserved example now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris.
r e v i e w s
• Alexander Collins, Review of the exhibition André Charles Boulle (Musée Condé, Château de Chantilly, 2024), pp. 1056–59.
• Claudia Tobin, Review of the exhibition The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain (Pallant House Gallery, 2024), pp. 1067–69.
Helen Hillyard, Review of of the recently renovated galleries of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, pp. 1077–79.
• Colin Thom, Review of Steven Brindle, Architecture in Britain and Ireland, 1530–1830 (Paul Mellon Centre, 2024), pp. 1080–81.
• Christopher Baker, Review of Bruce Boucher, John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities: Reflections on an Architect and His Collection (Yale University Press, 2024), pp. 1087–88.
o b i t u a r y
• Christopher Rowell, Obituary for Alastair David Laing (1944–2024), pp. 1094–96.
Although renowned in particular for his expertise on the art of François Boucher, Alastair Laing had very wide-ranging art historical taste and knowledge, which he shared with great generosity of spirit. He curated some important exhibitions and brought scholarly rigour to his inspired custodianship of the art collections of the National Trust.
Exhibition | Furniture by Jean-Pierre Latz at the Dresden Court
Pedestal detail, signed and dated: Jean-Pierre Latz, Paris, 1739 (Dresden, Inv. No. 37616-2).
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Now on view in Dresden:
Made in Paris: Furniture Creations by Jean-Pierre Latz at the Dresden Court
Fait à Paris: Die Kunstmöbel des Jean-Pierre Latz am Dresdner Hof
Royal Palace, Dresden, 19 October 2024 — 2 February 2025
In the impressive staterooms of the Dresden Residenzschloss (Royal Palace) the collection of Latz furniture shall be presented for the first time in its full extent at the special exhibition of the Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Decorative Arts). This exhibition is the conclusion of the twelve years of comprehensive research and conservation project that the furniture has undergone.
Pendulum clock on pedestal, attributed to Jean-Pierre Latz, Paris, ca. 1739 (Dresden, Inv. No. 37679-1).
The Museum of Decorative Arts Dresden holds the largest and most important collection worldwide of magnificent furniture of the renowned Parisian cabinetmaker Jean-Pierre Latz (1691–1754). The collection contains approximately twenty object ensembles, consisting of thirty individual items. They demonstrate with striking effect the magnificence and representation at the Polish-Saxon court of King Augustus III (1696–1763) and of his prime minister, Count von Brühl (1700–1763).
The Second World War and its aftermath deeply affected the furniture collection of the museum when, apart from destruction, it suffered damages caused by evacuation and transportation. For many years, the necessary conservation and restorations could not be achieved because of a lack of resources; the furniture had to be put into storage and thus lapsed into oblivion. That is until now! For the first time since their wartime storage, eighty years ago, and after years of careful and thoughtful conservation and restoration, the highly important Dresden Latz collection will be shown in the splendour of the staterooms—the very stage where they once enhanced the representation of the Saxon monarchs.
Born in the Electorate of Cologne, an ecclesiastical principality of the Holy Roman Empire, Jean-Pierre Latz followed in the footsteps of many German cabinetmakers and went to Paris in 1719. Latz´s works are striking for a very distinct individual artistic signature and boast opulent, sculpturally conceived corpus forms, technically superb craftsmanship and great sculptural skill in the fashioning of bronze mounts, as well as consummate marquetry work. These high-quality technical aspects were combined in designs that reflect the exquisite taste of the royal and aristocratic customers and patrons in France and abroad. Impressive, elegant and playful as well, his furniture combines mythological themes from the antiquity with their symbolic connotations of the 18th century: monumental, playful and superb, they impressed with their costly materials. Sought after by the royalty in France and abroad, Latz´s furniture is among others still to be found in the former palaces of Augustus III (King of Poland & Elector of Saxony), Frederick the Great (King of Prussia; 1712–1786) and the presidential Quirinal Palace in Rome—originating from the former royal court in Parma.
Important loans from the former royal palaces in Potsdam and from the Palazzo Quirinale in Rom, combined with the splendid collection of Latz furniture of the State Art Collections Dresden, will enable us to present an unprecedented and probably one-time concerted show of outstanding masterpieces by Jean-Pierre Latz. The exhibition will be completed withhighlights from the State Art Collections to throw light on the official representation and demonstration of power at the Saxon Court through the vehicle of French luxury products.
Old artisanship always brings up fascinating issues for today´s museum public: how many different materials and techniques come together as a unity in Latz´s creations? The exhibition will use computer techniques to show how the furniture as a work of art can be digitally disassembled directly before the visitor´s very eyes, so that all its secrets can be penetrated and understood.
Exhibition | Stan Douglas: The Enemy of All Mankind
Stan Douglas, Act II, Scene XII: In which Polly Convinces Pirates Laguerre and Capstern to Release their Captive, Prince Cawwawkee, for a Prize Rather than go to War Against His People with Morano, 2024, inkjet print mounted on Dibond aluminum, 150 × 200 cm, edition of 5.
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From the press release for the show, which was covered by Walker Mimms for The New York Times (17 October 2024). . .
Stan Douglas | The Enemy of All Mankind: Nine Scenes from John Gay’s Polly
David Zwirner, New York, 12 September — 26 October 2024
David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition by Stan Douglas, on view at the gallery’s 525 West 19th Street location in New York. Featuring a new photographic series, The Enemy of All Mankind: Nine Scenes from John Gay’s Polly, this will be the artist’s eighteenth solo exhibition with the gallery. In this stand-alone group of nine images, Douglas stages scenes from the eighteenth-century comic opera Polly, written by English dramatist John Gay (1685–1732), using the narrative as a vehicle through which to engage a wide range of themes that remain highly relevant today, including race, class, gender, and media. One work from the series debuted in David Zwirner: 30 Years, on view in summer 2024 in Los Angeles, and this will mark the first presentation of the body of work in its entirety.
Since the 1980s, Douglas has created films, photographs, and other multidisciplinary projects that investigate the parameters of their respective mediums. His ongoing inquiry into technology’s role in image making, and how those mediations infiltrate and shape collective memory, has resulted in works that are at once specific in their historical and cultural references and broadly accessible. Since the beginning of his career, photography has been a central focus of Douglas’s practice, used at first as a means of preparing for his films and eventually as a powerful pictorial tool in its own right. The artist is influenced in particular by media theorist Vilém Flusser’s notion of the photographic image as an encoded language that is determined by a specific set of technological, social, cultural, and political circumstances.
Stan Douglas, Overture: In which Convicted Brigand Captain Macheath is Transported to the West Indies Where He will be Impressed into Indentured Labour, 2024, inkjet print mounted on Dibond aluminum, 150 × 200 cm, edition of 5.
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A sequel to Gay’s well-known The Beggar’s Opera (which was later adapted as The Threepenny Opera), Polly was censored by the British government for its embedded satire and critique, particularly of policies around the parceling out of land; as a result, it was never produced during Gay’s lifetime. Douglas further notes that Polly was ahead of its time, as it “satirizes imperial patriarchal hierarchies of race and class—as well as gender norms, which it depicts as performative” (Douglas, in correspondence with the gallery, March 2024).
Gay’s stage play follows the eponymous Polly Peachum, who travels to the West Indies to search out her estranged husband, Captain Macheath, who has disguised himself as a Black man known as Morano and adopted the life of a pirate. Upon her arrival on the island, Polly is, unbeknownst to her, sold to a wealthy plantation owner as a courtesan. After eventually securing her freedom, she is advised to disguise herself as a young man to ward off unwanted male attention, and as a result becomes entangled in a series of skirmishes between the colonial settlers, the native population, and the pirates.
To create the photographs—which were shot in Jamaica using Hollywood-level production effects—Douglas enlisted a cast of actors to read from a loose script that he adapted for the chosen scenes, modifying certain characters and elements to bring the themes in line with the present day. For example, in Douglas’s version, Captain Macheath was a Black man passing as white in London who, once in the West Indies, drops the disguise and lets his hair grow out. Rather than posing the players, he photographed them continuously as they acted out and improvised the dialogue, then selected as the final images those that best embodied the ideas put forth in the narrative. The resulting large-scale photographs are dynamically realized, taking the form of sweeping tableaux where dramatis personae and setting collide in vivid color. Retaining Gay’s sense of comedic folly and satire as well as the underlying pathos of the story, the images bear traces of the various forms of media through which they have been filtered, employing formal elements drawn from theatrical, cinematic, and photographic conventions alike. Accordingly, Douglas positions the viewer as a spectator—a voyeuristic witness to the various narrative turns and apparent absurdities in which relationships are transactional and enemies expendable.
Stan Douglas, Act II, Scene VI: In which the Wife of Pirate Captain Morano, Jenny Diver, Attempts to Seduce Polly, who is Disguised as a Man to Avoid Molestation, detail, 2024, inkjet print mounted on Dibond aluminum, 150 × 150 cm, edition of 5.
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Douglas’s use of Polly as the basis for this project arose out of his long-standing interest in maroon societies, large groups of enslaved persons who banded together to run away and start new, proto-democratic societies. Contrary to their depiction in popular media, pirate ships occasionally functioned as collaborative maroon societies in their own right. The title of the series, The Enemy of All Mankind, is taken from a doctrine of eighteenth-century maritime law (in Latin, hostis humani generis) under which pirates could be attacked by anyone since they fell outside the protection of any nation, but its core notion of defining certain groups as enemies or outsiders resonates broadly today. In Polly, the pirates—in contrast to the settlers and indigenous people—are meant to embody immorality and evil, yet in pulling out specific strands of the narrative, Douglas points to a more nuanced understanding of such sweeping generalities.
Stan Douglas (b. 1960) was born in Vancouver and studied at Emily Carr College of Art in Vancouver in the early 1980s. Douglas was one of the earliest artists to be represented by David Zwirner, where he had his first American solo exhibition in 1993—the second show in the gallery’s history.
Douglas’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide since the 1980s. In 2022, the artist represented his native Canada at the Venice Biennale, where he debuted a major video installation, ISDN (2022)—now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York—and a related body of photographs. Subsequently, the exhibition Stan Douglas: 2011 ≠ 1848 traveled around Canada with stops at The Polygon Gallery, Vancouver (fall 2022); Remai Modern, Saskatoon (February–April 2023); and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (September 2023–October 2024). A solo exhibition also titled 2011 ≠ 1848 was subsequently staged in 2023 at De Pont Museum, Tilburg, the Netherlands. In 2023, this body of work inaugurated David Zwirner’s new Los Angeles location, and it is currently on view at the Parque de Serralves in Porto, Portugal, through 12 January 2025.
Douglas has been the recipient of notable awards, including the Audain Prize for Visual Art (2019); the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (2016); the third annual Scotiabank Photography Award (2013); and the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, New York (2012). In 2021, Douglas was knighted as a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, and in 2023 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Simon Fraser University, Greater Vancouver. Work by the artist is held in major museum collections worldwide.
Exhibition | French Neoclassical Paintings from the Horvitz Collection
Claude-Joseph Vernet, After the Storm, 1788.
(Wilmington: Horvitz Collection)
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Now on view at the AIC:
French Neoclassical Paintings from the Horvitz Collection
Art Institute of Chicago, 19 October 2024 — 6 January 2025
Curated by Emerson Bowyer and Andrea Morgan
This exhibition showcases 25 paintings from the preeminent private collection of French 18th-century art in the United States: the Horvitz Collection. The selection of works focuses on Neoclassicism, an artistic style that emerged in the later 1700s and flourished through the 1820s, a period of tremendous political and social upheaval in France. This time was also the heyday of ‘history painting’, a genre of painting characterized by large-scale compositions portraying scenes from history, mythology, and religion. Neoclassical painters looked to the art, architecture, and literature of ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration, often as a lens through which to depict and comment upon contemporary events, and several works included in the exhibition were displayed to a broad public at the annual Paris Salons.
While these works were created more than 200 years ago and often depict ancient or mythological events, they also reference social and political challenges that remain relevant today, from the overthrow of an absolutist government during the French Revolution—which saw the groundwork laid for modern democracies—through to Napoleon’s Empire and the eventual restoration of Bourbon monarchy. This period also coincided with the rise of Enlightenment ideals, the democratization of knowledge, the spread of printed materials, and the origins of industrialization and increased urbanization.
French Neoclassical Paintings from The Horvitz Collection is curated by Emerson Bowyer, Searle Curator, Painting and Sculpture of Europe and Andrea Morgan, research associate. The exhibition complements a major survey of drawings from the same period, Revolution to Restoration: French Drawings from The Horvitz Collection.
Exhibition | French Drawings from the Horvitz Collection
Étienne Barthélémy Garnier, Banquet of Tereus
(Wilmington: Horvitz Collection)
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Opening soon at the AIC:
Revolution to Restoration: French Drawings from the Horvitz Collection
Art Institute of Chicago, 26 October 2024 — 6 January 2025
Curated by Kevin Salatino and Emily Ziemba
The exhibition features approximately 90 drawings made from the 1770s through the 1850s, one of the most turbulent periods in French history. During this time, France abolished the monarchy, established a republic, terrorized perceived political enemies, waged war across the continent, imposed an empire, and eventually reinstated the monarchy—and these are only a handful of the tumultuous episodes that occurred across this 80-year period. Despite this profound instability, the country’s cultural environment flourished, spurring a significant stylistic shift in artistic production. Influenced by the rationalist ideas and moral seriousness of such Enlightenment thinkers as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and inspired by important archaeological discoveries that radically altered contemporary ideas about the ancient Greco-Roman past, artists turned away from the playful, decadent Rococo style of the mid-18th century. In its place they adopted a more restrained and disciplined style, now known as Neoclassicism, a term invented only in the 19th century.
Henriette Lorimier, Female Nude, 1796, Black chalk, charcoal, and white crayon (Wilmington: Horvitz Collection).
Featuring works by the most accomplished and influential artists of the time, including Jacques-Louis David, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, and Théodore Géricault, the exhibition explores the impact of ancient Greek and Roman art, history, and mythology on artistic production, as well as the role of the Academy, changing social norms, and convulsive contemporary events.
The selected drawings showcase a variety of media—pen and ink, watercolor, chalk, and pastel—and highlight how artists of the period demonstrated a surprisingly modern combination of intellectual curiosity, political commitment, and graphic virtuosity. The presentation demonstrates the expressive versatility and powerful immediacy of drawing as a medium of persuasion, propaganda, and, above all, aesthetic stimulation.
Revolution to Restoration: French Drawings from The Horvitz Collection is curated by Kevin Salatino, Chair and Anne Vogt Fuller and Marion Titus Searle Curator, Prints and Drawings, and Emily Ziemba, director of curatorial administration and research curator, Prints and Drawings. The exhibition complements French Neoclassical Paintings from The Horvitz Collection in Gallery 223.
Exhibition | Drawn to Blue: Artists’ Use of Blue Paper
Now on view at The Courtauld:
Drawn to Blue: Artists’ Use of Blue Paper
The Courtauld Gallery, London, 4 October 2024 — 26 January 2025
Jonathan Richardson, the Elder (1665–1745), Self-Portrait (London: The Courtauld).
This display presents a selection of drawings on blue paper from The Courtauld’s collection, ranging from works by the Venetian Renaissance artist Jacopo Tintoretto to a watercolour by famed English artist Joseph Mallord William Turner.
Made from fibres derived from blue rags, blue paper first appeared in Northern Italy in the 14th century. It became a popular drawing support for artists, and its use spread across Western Europe by the late 16th century; it was widely used in England and France in the 18th century. Blue paper provided a nuanced mid-tone which allowed the creation of strong light and dark contrasts, an effect much sought after by draughtsmen. This exhibition project brought together a team of curators and paper conservators at The Courtauld and the J. Paul Getty Museum to explore the technical aspects and artistic richness of the use of blue paper.
New Book | Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories
The exhibition was on view at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania this time last year (September 2023 – January 2024); the catalogue is still available from Penn Press:
Joe Baker and Laura Igoe, eds., Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), 96 pages, ISBN: 978-1879636163, $30.
Through a focus on Lenape art, culture, and history and a critical examination of historical visualizations of Native and European American relationships, Never Broken explores the ways in which art can create, challenge, and rewrite history. This richly illustrated volume features contemporary work by Lenape artists in dialogue with historic Lenape ceramics, beadwork, and other cultural objects as well as re-creations of Benjamin West’s painting Penn’s Treaty with the Indians by European American artists. Published in conjunction with the first exhibition in Pennsylvania of contemporary Lenape artists who can trace their families back to the time of William Penn, Never Broken includes essays by Laura Turner Igoe, Joel Whitney, and Joe Baker. Igoe argues that the plethora of prints, paintings, and decorative arts that incorporated imagery from West’s iconic painting over a century after the depicted event attempted to replace the fraught history of Native and Anglo-American conflict with a myth of peaceful coexistence and succession. Whitney’s essay provides an overview of the culture of the Lenape and their forced removal out of Pennsylvania and the northeast to Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario. Finally, Baker highlights how he and the other contemporary Lenape artists featured in the exhibition, including Ahchipaptunhe (Delaware Tribe of Indians and Cherokee), Holly Wilson (Delaware Nation and Cherokee), and Nathan Young (Delaware Tribe of Indians, Pawnee, and Kiowa), tell their own stories rooted in memory, ancestry, oral history. Their work underscores the continuing legacy and evolution of Lenape visual expression and cross-cultural exchange, reasserts the agency of their Lenape ancestors, and establishes that the Lenape’s ties to the area were—unlike Penn’s Treaty—never broken.
Joe Baker is an artist, educator, curator, and culture bearer who has been working in the field of Native Arts for the past thirty years. He is an enrolled member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma and co-founder and executive director of the Lenape Center in Manhattan. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and numerous other museums and collections in the United States and Canada, including the American Museum of Art and Design.
Laura Turner Igoe is the Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest Chief Curator at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. At the Michener, she curated Impressionism to Modernism: The Lenfest Collection of American Art (2019), Rising Tides: Contemporary Art and the Ecology of Water (2020), and she co-curated Through the Lens: Modern Photography in the Delaware Valley (2021) and Daring Design: The Impact of Three Women on Wharton Esherick’s Craft (2021–22).
c o n t e n t s
Foreword and Acknowledgements — Vail Garvin
Introduction — Joe Baker and Laura Turner Igoe
Penn’s Treaty with the Indians: Myth-Making across Media — Laura Turner Igoe
Violence and the Forced Removals of the Lenape — Joel Whitney
Nèk Elànkumàchi Maehëleyok: The Relatives Gathered — Joe Baker
Plates
Contributors
Exhibition | Colonial Crossings: The Spanish Americas
Unidentified workshop, Cuzco, Peru, Our Lady of the Rosary of Chiquinquirá with Female Donor, late 17th–early 18th century, oil and gold on canvas (Collection of Carl & Marilynn Thoma, 2013.046; photo by Jamie Stukenberg).
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Now on view at Cornell’s Johnson Museum of Art:
Colonial Crossings: Art, Identity, and Belief in the Spanish Americas
Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 20 July 2024 — 15 December 2024
Curated by Andrew Weislogel and Ananda Cohen-Aponte, with students in the course Colonial Connectivities: Curating the Arts of the Spanish Americas
The artworks featured in this exhibition span more than three hundred years of history, five thousand miles of territory, and two oceans, introducing the rich artistic traditions of Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines during the period of Spanish colonial rule (approximately 1492–1830).
This first exhibition of colonial Latin American art at Cornell considers the profound impact of colonization, evangelization, and the transatlantic slave trade in the visual culture of the Spanish empire, while also manifesting the creative agency and resilience of Indigenous, Black, and mixed-race artists during a tumultuous historical period bookended by conquest and revolution.
At first glance, these religious images, portraits, and luxury goods might seem to uphold colonial structures that suggest a one-way flow of power from Europe to the Americas. Yet closer consideration of these artists’ identities, materials, techniques, and subjects reveals compelling stories about the global crossings of people, commodities, and ideas in the creation of new visual languages in the Spanish Americas. These artworks testify to entangled cultural landscapes—from paintings of the Virgin Mary with ties to sacred sites of her apparition, to lacquer furniture bearing the visual stamp of trade with East Asia, they embody a plurality of cultural, material, and religious meanings.
Unidentified workshop, Peru, Our Lady of Cocharcas, 1751, oiil and gold on canvas (Collection of Carl & Marilynn Thoma, 2011.040; photo by Jamie Stukenberg).
Colonial Crossings was curated by Dr. Andrew C. Weislogel, Seymour R. Askin, Jr. ’47 Curator of Earlier European and American Art at the Museum, and Dr. Ananda Cohen-Aponte, Associate Professor of the History of Art & Visual Studies, and the students in Colonial Connectivities: Curating the Arts of the Spanish Americas (ARTH 4166/6166):
Osiel Aldaba ’26
Miguel Barrera ’24
Daniel Dixon ’24
Juliana Fagua Arias, PhD student
Miche Flores, PhD student
Isa Goico ’24
Sara Handerhan ’24
Emily Hernandez ’25
Ashley Koca ’25
Maximilian Leston ’26
Maria Mendoza Blanco ’26
Lena Sow, PhD student
Nicholas Vega ’26
We are grateful to lenders Carl and Marilynn Thoma, the Denver Museum of Art, the Hispanic Society of America, and the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library; and to David Ni ’24, the 2023 Nancy Horton Bartels ’48 Scholar for Collections, for organizational support.
Unidentified artist, Quito, Ecuador, Noah’s Ark, detail, late 18th century, oil on canvas (Collection of Carl & Marilynn Thoma, 2000.004).
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The Johnson Museum will also present this symposium:
Symposium | Reimagining the Américas: New Perspectives on Spanish Colonial Art
Online and in-person, Saturday, 9 November 2024
At this free symposium, presented in conjunction with the exhibition, established scholars whose work encompasses a variety of regions and approaches to colonial Latin American art history will offer new methodologies, seeking to expand the boundaries of this visual culture. Presentations will explore the exhibition’s thematic emphases on materiality and sacredness, hybridity and cross-cultural exchange, colonial constructions of race, and recovering art histories marked by silence and erasure.
• Time-Warping the Museum: Temporal Juxtapositions in Displays of Spanish Colonial Art — Lucia Abramovich, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Framing Miracles for a New World: The Oval — Jennifer Baez, University of Washington
• Trent as Compass: Directions, Circuits, and Crossings of the Visual and Canonical in Spanish America — Cristina Cruz González, Oklahoma State University
• Splendor and Iridescence: Pearls in the Art of the Spanish Americas — Mónica Dominguez Torres, University of Delaware
• ‘Your Plenteous Grandeur Resides in You’: Asian Luxury in Spanish American Domestic Interiors — Juliana Fagua Arias, Cornell University
• Supplicant Africans: From Baptizands to Emblems of Abolition —Elena FitzPatrick Sifford, Muhlenberg College
• Voices of Influence: Exploring Power Dynamics in the Conservation of Musical Heritage in Colonial Latin America — Patricia García Gil, Cornell University
• Invisible Soldiers and Constant Servants: The Pre-Hispanic Roots of the Andean Cult of Angels — Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, University of Florida
A schedule will be posted soon. Please email eas8@cornell.edu to register in advance for in-person attendance. Click here to join the webinar.
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