Enfilade

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From Birkbeck:

Re-evaluating the Status of Prints at the British Library
AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Studentship, The British Library and Birkbeck, University of London

Applications due by 29 April 2024

Birkbeck, University of London, and the British Library are pleased to announce the availability of a fully funded Collaborative Doctoral Studentship from 1 October 2024 under the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Scheme. The focus of this project is on identifying, researching, and analysing the provenance, changing status, and visibility of about 500 books of prints in the British Library’s collection, using an 1812 unpublished finding list as a starting point. This project will be jointly supervised by Kate Retford at Birkbeck (Professor of History of Art, School of Historical Studies) and Felicity Myrone at the British Library (Lead Curator, Western Prints and Drawings). The student will spend time with both Birkbeck and the British Library and will become part of the wider cohort of AHRC CDP funded PhD students across the UK.

More information and directions for applying are available here»

Image: Giovanni Piranesi, Illustration of an aviary, from Le Antichità romane, opera di Giambatista Piranesi, etc. (London: British Library, c13091-59; shelfmark: 744.f.2 26).

Stacey Sloboda and Meredith Gamer | Drawing in 18th-C. London: Academies and Entrepreneurs
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, Friday, 19 April 2024, 10.00–4.00

Applications due by 1 March 2024

Thomas Gainsborough, A Boy with a Book and a Spade, 1748, graphite with smudging on laid paper; squared for transfer with a numbered grid, 189 × 143mm (New York: The Morgan Library & Museum, III, 59b).

Drawing was at the center of a range of artistic developments in the eighteenth-century London art world. It flourished with the development of drawing academies that culminated in the establishment of the Royal Academy in 1768. It also played a key role in the careers of entrepreneurs such as John Vanderbank, William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, and Thomas Chippendale as the commercial market for printed images increased dramatically in this period. New opportunities for graphic expression encouraged artists and amateurs alike to pursue drawing as a polite and learned activity, and sketching became an increasingly innovative artistic practice. The Morgan Library & Museum has substantive holdings of drawings by British artists from this period, and this seminar offers a chance to study them as a group. Participants in this graduate seminar will engage in lively sessions addressing topics such as drawing academy practice and the use of models, the function of drawings in the studio and workshop, the role of prints, sketching as an artistic practice, and the art market and private patronage.

Stacey Sloboda is the Paul H. Tucker Professor of Art History at UMass, Boston.
Meredith Gamer is Assistant Professor of Art History and Archeology at Columbia University.

This seminar is open to graduate students of the history of art and the conservation of works on paper. Interested participants are kindly invited to submit a one paragraph statement which should include the following:
• Name and email
• Academic institution
• Class year
• Field of study
• Interest in British eighteenth-century drawings and relevance of the seminar to your research

Applications should be submitted electronically with the subject header ‘British Drawings Seminar’ to drawinginstitute@themorgan.org. Participants will be notified by 15 March 2024.

From ArtHist.net, where the posting includes the German description:

Doctoral Scholarship | The Representation of Black People in European Art and Material Culture Using the Example of the Tucher Family Coat of Arms
Argelander Professorship for Critical Museum and Heritage Studies, University of Bonn, and Tucher Kulturstiftung

Applications due by 31 January 2023

Since 1345, the central motif of the Tucher family coat of arms has been the head of a Person of Colour in profile. While in the early modern period the depiction was interpreted as a portrait of St Maurice and a symbol of Christian defence and virtue, depictions from the colonial period tend to suggest stereotypical, racialising ideas of Black people. As part of the doctoral scholarship The Representation of Black People in European Art and Material Culture Using the Example of the Tucher Family Coat of Arms (Die Darstellung von Schwarzen Menschen in europäischer Kunst und materieller Kultur am Beispiel des Tucher Familienwappens), some of the diverse questions raised by the family coat of arms will be explored. What can the changing depiction of Black people / BIPoC / people of the global majority in the coat of arms over the centuries tell us about the perception of people from Africa and the African diaspora in Europe? How did the presence of Black people in Europe shape the representations? What role did upheavals in the history of ideas and political economy—such as the Enlightenment in Europe, the transatlantic trade in enslaved people, and the colonisation of non-European territories—play in the different forms of representation? What purposes did the identification of a white patrician family with a Black person serve in these different eras? And to what extent did the changing materiality of European art and craftsmanship influence the forms of depiction of the family coat of arms? The doctoral candidate selected is invited to set their own research priorities according to their expertise (epochs, materialities) and to contribute comparative examples to the research. A critical examination of the tipping points of self-perception and external attribution expressed by the changing family coat of arms is desired. Reference to approaches from Postcolonial and Critical Whiteness Studies is also expressly encouraged.

Tasks
• Independent research on the topic The Representation of Black People in European Art and Material Culture Using the Example of the Tucher Family Coat of Arms
• Annual research reports
• Conclusion of a supervisory relationship at the University of Bonn at the start of the fellowship

Applicant Profile
• Completed Master’s degree in social and cultural anthropology, history, art history, cultural studies, museum studies, material culture studies, postcolonial studies, or related subjects
• Experience with historical German scripts
• Experience with historical material culture

1700€ / month doctoral scholarship; 1500€ / year travel and material costs

To apply, please send a cover letter, a description of the proposed research project (1–2 pages), a writing sample, and a CV in one PDF file to Nana Tsiklauri, ntsiklau@uni-bonn.de. The scholarship should be started as soon as possible. The deadline for applications is 31 January 2024. For details, please refer to the official call for applications at this link. If you have any questions, please contact Jun.-Prof. Dr. Julia Binter, julia.binter@uni-bonn.de.

From the Call for Applications:

Making Her Mark: Exhibition Study Day
Baltimore Museum of Art, 23 October 2023

Applications due by 6 September 2023

The Baltimore Museum of Art and the Art Gallery of Ontario are delighted to be co-organizing the exhibition Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400–1800, scheduled to run from 1 October 2023 to 7 January 2024 in Baltimore and from 30 March until 1 July of 2024 in Toronto. Curated by Andaleeb Badiee Banta, BMA Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs, and Alexa Greist, AGO Associate Curator and R. Fraser Elliott Chair, Prints & Drawings, this exhibition presents a feminist revision of early modern European art. An invitational study day will be held in the exhibition galleries at the BMA, where scholars and the exhibition curators will facilitate discussions around the themes and objects on display. Advanced graduate students and early career professionals from diverse humanistic disciplines are invited to apply to participate. Up to 10 selected participants will receive a $250 travel stipend, made possible by a generous grant from the Kress Foundation, to offset travel costs.

As the first North American exhibition in over forty years to stage such an expansive woman artist-centered approach to Renaissance, Baroque, and 18th-century European art, Making Her Mark will be unique in its presentation of a wide range of materials, media, and scale, foregrounding quality works made by women, many of whom remain largely unfamiliar to general and specialist audiences. Exemplary works by well-known artistic ‘heroines’ such as Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Leyster, Luisa Roldán, Rosalba Carriera, and Rachel Ruysch will join exceptional products of women-led workshops, female artisanal collectives, and talented amateurs who operated outside of the male-dominated professional arena. Expanding beyond the traditional focus on the ‘major arts’ of large-scale painting and sculpture, Making Her Mark aims to be a bold corrective to the historical assumption that women artists and makers of this period were rare and relatively untalented. This presentation will consider the entire European continent and seeks to subvert the typical monographic format, identifying it as an inherently sexist critical apparatus that encouraged the classification of women artists as anomalous.

The exhibition’s scope is purposefully broad, both temporally and geographically, in order to allow for differences in individual social circumstances, power dynamics, and cultural context, and to address the careers of women artists who had transnational reputations and relationships. Bringing together such varied objects will present them through a wider lens, one that includes creative production by female practitioners who did not or could not subscribe to male-determined criteria for what constituted important or legitimate art. Thematic groupings on the themes of power, faith, interiority, scientific documentation, empire, professional pathways, and entrepreneurship guide visitors through a wide variety of media exploring women’s contributions to the early history of botany, zoology, and epistemology; book arts; religious and history subjects; print culture; textile production; ceramics; wax modeling; metalwork; and courtly and private portraiture. A diverse presentation of works brilliantly illuminates the fact that women were involved with all manner of artistic production and contributed to nearly every aspect of early modern visual culture, even if their names were not recorded for posterity.

We invite applications from advanced graduate students as well as early career scholars who are no more than five years out from degree conferral. The ideal applicant will be engaged with the study of early modern women and materiality. We welcome applications from scholars working in disciplines outside of art history. In order to minimize the cost of attendance, we are pleased to offer accepted applicants free entrance to the exhibition and a $250 travel stipend, generously provided by the Kress Foundation.

To be considered for participation and the travel grant, please submit a one-page CV. Additionally, please provide a brief summary (not to exceed 250 words) of your interest and how this experience in the exhibition will benefit your current work. Application materials should be sent to Theresa Kutasz Christensen at TChristensen@artbma.org. We cannot consider applications received after Wednesday, September 6th. Selected applicants will be notified of their acceptance by September 22nd.