Lecture | Ana Lucia Araujo on the Work of Black Artists in the Americas
From The Institute of Fine Arts:
Ana Lucia Araujo | The Power of Art: The World Black Artists Made in the Americas
Daniel H. Silberberg Lecture Series
Online and in-person, The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 30 March 2026, 6pm
Iron crown, 34 × 45 cm, Real Fábrica de Ferro São João do Ipanema (Museu Paulista, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil).
Throughout human history, men and women have used artistic expression to overcome the most horrible atrocities. Africans and their descendants also embraced artistic creation to survive the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas, and to soothe their physical and spiritual wounds. Drawing on written and visual primary sources, artifacts, and artworks housed in archives and museums in the United States, Brazil, the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands, my book The Power of Art: The World Black Artists Made in the Americas combines history, art history, and art to tell the story of enslaved artists and examine the works they created in the Americas during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I argue that Black creators drew on the long and powerful heritage of African arts and knowledge, which they combined with European and Native American artistic traditions, to design artworks and objects that asserted a defying world of their own.
Many enslaved and freed artists modeled clay objects, forged magnificent iron pieces, wove textiles, mats, and baskets, carved wood and stone sculptures. These artists embraced the knowledge transmitted to them by their African ancestors, while also introducing innovations learned from European and indigenous creators. Drawing on these rich economic and cultural exchanges, African artists and their descendants in the Americas adapted and developed new techniques and combinations of forms and colors. When creating new artworks, these artists also embraced new materials to which they assigned new uses and meanings. I contend that artistic creation offered bondspeople relief and hope, and sometimes also opened to them a path to emancipation. Ultimately, by shedding new light on the works of enslaved Africans and their descendants, which still remain largely invisible in most museum collections, The Power of Art illuminates their long-lasting contributions to the development of visual arts in the Americas.
Registration is available here»
Ana Lucia Araujo is a historian of slavery, the transatlantic slave trade and the global African diaspora. Trained as a historian and as an art historian, she has explored the legacies of slavery, including the history of calls for reparations, memory, heritage, material, and visual culture of slavery. Her recent books are Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery (University of Chicago Press, 2024), The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History (Bloomsbury, 2017, 2023). A John Solomon Guggenheim Fellow (2025), her work has also been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Getty Research Institute, the Institute of Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ), the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at Universität Bonn (Germany), the Clark Art Institute, and the American Philosophical Society.
Seminar | Douglas Fordham on Joseph Wright and Metaphysical Images
Joseph Wright of Derby, The Old Man and Death, 1773, oil on canvas
(Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum)
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This Newberry seminar is hosted by Alicia Caticha, with Meredith Gamer providing a response:
Douglas Fordham | Joseph Wright of Derby and the Metaphysical Image
Eighteenth-Century Studies Seminar
The Newberry Library, Chicago, Friday, 20 February 2026, 3–5pm
In a recent monograph on Joseph Wright of Derby, Matthew Craske locates the artist in a genteel Midlands culture where he cultivated a melancholic temperament and a preference for seclusion. Craske describes Wright as a “painter of darkness” who sought to “stimulate sympathetic emotions” and produce a pleasurable discomfort in viewers through sublime contrasts of light and shade. Drawing on Craske’s insights, this talk raises metaphysical questions about Wright’s representation of life, death, and afterlife. Was it possible in Georgian England for painting to serve as “a catalyst of focused attention and a source of open-ended reflection”? That is how Thomas Pfau defines the metaphysical image, and we will consider just how fitting that phrase may be in relation to Wright. Were Wright’s paintings able, and were Georgian viewers willing, to grasp a radical alterity separate from oneself?
Douglas Fordham is a historian of British art and the chair of the Art Department at the University of Virginia. He co-edited Art and the British Empire (2007), which helped to place empire at the center of the study of British art. His first monograph, British Art and the Seven Years’ War: Allegiance and Autonomy (2010) examined the relationship between imperial politics and artistic organization in eighteenth-century London. His second monograph, Aquatint Worlds: Travel, Print, and Empire (2019) considered how the newly discovered medium of aquatint printmaking conditioned the representation of cultures beyond Europe. Douglas is currently working on a book about metaphysics and Georgian painting.
This event is free, but all participants must register in advance. Space is limited, so please do not request a paper unless you plan to attend. Register and request paper»
The Eighteenth-Century Seminar is designed to foster research and inquiry across the scholarly disciplines in eighteenth-century studies. It aims to provide a methodologically diverse forum for work that engages ongoing discussions and debates along this historical and critical terrain. Each year the seminar sponsors one public lecture followed by questions and discussion, and two works-in-progress sessions featuring pre-circulated papers.
Online Conversation | Architecture’s Archive, 1400–1800
From the Society of Architectural Historians:
Architecture’s Archive: Paperwork in Early Modern Practice, 1400–1800
With Christine Casey, Farshid Emami, Eleonora Pistis, and Saundra Weddle
Online, An SAH Connects Session, Friday, 20 March 2026, noon EST
From drawings and invoices to maps, inventories, and account books, early modern architectural practice abounded with paperwork. These documents emerged from a historical moment beginning around 1400 that witnessed the rise of new technologies and regimes for the management of information. While essential to historical scholarship, documents have long been taken for granted merely as sources to mine for data. Towards a fuller view of paperwork, this SAH Connects event invites a reframing of documents as spatial objects whose form, use, content, and production merit critical consideration.
Documents call attention to questions of process but also, more generally, the material realities of building in the early modern world. Panelists will speak about the historiographic and methodological stakes of a document that has animated their scholarship. Among the questions to be considered are: What do documents clarify or obscure? How did documents serve institutions, particular those that oversaw building activity? How did architectural documents circulate? What new possibilities do documents provide for uncovering non-elite figures or extra-architectural actors who shaped the built environment? Who is absent from documents? What temporal, material, or scalar slippages exist between documents and buildings? How do we wrestle with fragmentary or compromised documentary evidence? While anchored in the early modern world, this conversation will invite broad critical reflection on the documentary sources that underpin architectural history.
With the goal of highlighting new work, we have invited authors whose recently published books engage with a variety of building cultures at a range of scales from across the early modern world. Speaking from their books, each participant will discuss a single historical document that was central to their analysis of the actors, systems and processes that shaped the built environment.
• Christine Casey, Trinity College Dublin | Architecture and Artifice: The Crafted Surface in Eighteenth-Century Building Practice (Yale University Press, 2025).
• Farshid Emami, Rice University | Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran (Penn State Press, 2024).
• Eleonora Pistis, Columbia University | Architecture of Knowledge: Hawksmoor and Oxford (Harvey Miller, 2024).
• Saundra Weddle, Drury University | The Brothel and Beyond: An Urban History of the Sex Trade in Early Modern Venice (Penn State Press, 2026).
The session will be moderated by Matthew Gin (University of North Carolina, Charlotte), Ann C. Huppert (University of Washington), and Kristin Triff (Trinity College).
Registration is available here»
SAH CONNECTS, a year-round series of virtual programs related to the history of the built environment, provides a platform for the SAH community to collaborate, share their work, engage in timely discussions, and reach worldwide audiences.
Cambridge Material Culture Workshop, Lent 2026
The Material Culture Workshop schedule for the current term:
Cambridge Material Culture Workshop, Lent 2026
We’re delighted to share our Lent 2026 term card. Each of the four sessions will meet online and in-person at St. John’s, Cambridge, starting at 5pm. For more information, please contact Tomas Brown (tbnb2@cam.ac.uk) or Sophia Feist (stcf2@cam.ac.uk). In addition to our talks this term, the Material Culture Workshop is hosting an exhibition tour of Tudor Contemporary at the Heong Gallery, Downing College, on Friday, 13 March, led by curator Dr. Christina Faraday and artist and academic Dr. Jane Partner. This is sign-up only, so send us an email if you’d like to attend.
Monday, 9 February
• Jordan Mitchell-King (De Montfort), The Significance of Getting Dressed for Elite Women in the 18th Century
• Charlotte Stobart (Cambridge), Technological Embodiment: Examining Experiences of Calliper Usage among British Polio-disabled Individuals, 1950–2025
Friday, 20 February
• Laura Granda-Mateu (Edge Hill), Binding Worlds: Women’s Albums and Transnational Material Practices
• Ella Gaskell (York), Sanctified Materiality and the Dormition Icon in Post-Iconoclastic Byzantium
Monday, 9 March
• Joe Clarke (Cambridge), Sa(l)vage Anthropology: Wynfrid Duckworth and the Lost Cambridge Anatomy Museum
• Charlotte Wood (Cambridge), Natural Objects of Affection: Emotion, Materiality, and the Care of Museum Specimens in the Making of Wildlife Conservation Mentalities in Colonial East Africa
Friday, 20 March
• Cecilia Eure (Cambridge), Alternative Means of Decorating in Poor and Labouring-Class British Homes, 1600–1800
• Emma Piercy-Wright (Exeter), Small Trifles, Big Ideas: Mother-of-Pearl Trinkets as Enlightenment Transcripts
Lecture | Laura Beltrán-Rubio on Fashion in the Colonial Andes
In March at BGC:
Laura Beltrán-Rubio | Indigenizing Fashion in the Colonial Andes
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 25 March 2026, 6.00pm
Unidentified artist from Cusco, The Virgin with Tailors, ca. 1750, oil and gold on canvas, 58 × 40 inches (Lima: Museo Pedro de Osma).
Textiles have been central to the material culture of the Andes since time immemorial. With the Spanish colonization of the Americas, the textile primacy of the Andes adapted: rather than a straightforward imposition of European trends, Indigenous fashion and textile practices have undergone complex processes of ‘cultural authentication’ and ‘survivance’. This lecture unravels evidence from archival and pictorial sources from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century to recenter the Indigenous agents, materialities, techniques, technologies, and systems of knowledge that have shaped Indigenous fashion practices in the Andes. It thus offers a reevaluation of the history of fashion and textiles in the colonial Andes to demonstrate that Native American and Euro-American histories of fashion and textiles are inevitably intertwined, complex, and mutually influential.
Registration is available here»
Laura Beltrán-Rubio is a researcher, curator, and educator, specializing in the history of art and fashion. Her research explores the construction and performance of identities through artistic expression, with a broad interest in Native American and Indigenous fashion and textiles. Her first book, Empire of Fashion: Luxury, Consumption and Identity in the Viceroyalty of New Granada, is under contract with the University of Texas Press. Beltrán-Rubio completed her PhD at the College of William and Mary (Williamsburg, VA) and holds an MA in Fashion Studies from Parsons School of Design (New York). She has previously taught at Parsons, William and Mary, Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia), and De Montfort University (Leicester, UK). She is senior researcher and managing editor at the Fashion and Race Database and hosts the podcast Redressing Fashion. As a public-facing scholar, her mission is to expand the narratives of fashion to create more diverse, equitable, and socially just societies.
Online Conversation | Reflecting on Turner in 2025
Registration for this HECAA Great Conversation (open to non-HECAA members) is available here:
Turner in 2025: Reflecting on the Anniversary Year’s Exhibitions
With Chloe Wigston Smith, Richard Johns, Lucinda Lax, and Melissa Gustin
Online, 23 January 2026, 12.30 EST / 5.30 GMT
J.M.W. Turner, The Wreck Buoy, first exhibited in 1849, oil on canvas, canvas: 93 × 123 cm (Liverpool: Walker Art Gallery).
Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in 1775. To mark 250 years since his birth, a number of anniversary exhibitions were organized across the United Kingdom and the United States in 2025. Some contextualized Turner with other notable contemporaries; others focused on specific aspects of his career or mined collection holdings. This roundtable will bring together four curators of three Turner anniversary exhibitions to ask them to reflect on their exhibitions and ponder together what it means to exhibit Turner today.
• Melissa Gustin is Curator of British Art at the National Museums Liverpool, and curator of Turner: Always Contemporary at the Walker Art Gallery.
• Lucinda Lax is Interim Head of the Curatorial Division and Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art, and curator of J.M.W. Turner: Romance and Reality.
• Richard Johns is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History of Art at the University of York. Along with Smith, he was a co-curator of Austen and Turner at Harewood House.
• Chloe Wigston Smith is Professor in the Department of English at the University of York and Director of its Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Along with Johns, she was a co-curator of Austen and Turner at Harewood House.
Join us on Friday, 23 January 2026 at 12.30pm EST / 5.30pm GMT for this HECAA Great (Zoom) Conversation. The event is open to current and prospective HECAA members; so please share widely in your networks.
Online Talks | Patricia Ferguson, Ivan Day, Neil Buttery, and Paul Crane
From the Museum of Royal Worcester:
Museum of Royal Worcester | Online Winter Talk Series, 2025–26
The Museum of Royal Worcester is thrilled to present another season of fascinating online talks to keep the winter blues at bay. Curl up with a warm drink and join us as we explore art, food, and history with three brilliant speakers.
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Ivan Day | Frozen Delights: A History of Porcelain and Ice Cream
Wednesday, 21 January 2026, 6pm
Ice Pail, 1776, William Davis Factory (Museum of Royal Worcester).
During the eighteenth century, ice cream became the ultimate show-off luxury for adorning a fashionable dinner table. As a result, new items for serving this novelty dish started to appear on the market. The challenge was to produce an attractive container which could be displayed centre stage on the sideboard or table, but which was also capable of preventing the ice cream from melting. These specialised three-part vessels first appeared in France in 1720s, where they were called seaux à glace—ice cream coolers. They employed a mixture of ice and salt to refrigerate their contents. By the 1770s the fashion for these beautiful vessels became an aristocratic craze, and nearly every European manufactory was producing them. In England, the Worcester factory played a leading role in developing some of the finest of these vessels. Ivan Day will guide us through the development of ice cream coolers and ice cream cups, with a focus on the marvellous examples produced at Worcester. Book here»
Ivan Day is one of the UK’s most celebrated food historians, broadcasters, writers, and curators, specialising in the reconstruction of period kitchens and historic table displays. His work has been exhibited in many institutions worldwide, including the Museum of London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Getty Research Institute. His publications include Cooking in Europe, 1650–1850 and Ice Cream: A History.
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Neil Buttery and Paul Crane | Sugar, Slavery and Empire / The Evolution of Worcester Sucriers
Wednesday, 4 March 2026, 6pm
A rare early Dr Wall Worcester Sucrier and Cover with Flame finial, ca. 1753. A unique example retaining its cover, the shape derived from silver. Ex Rous Lench collection Worcestershire.
Join food historian Neil Buttery and ceramics expert Paul Crane in a presentation discussing the role of sugar and the associated enslavement of African peoples in the growth and development of the British Empire and Worcester Porcelain in the eighteenth century. Neil will explore how the reach of the ‘sugar-slave complex’ was all-pervading, influencing the sale and evolution of fancy goods, especially those associated with the tea table, which, of course, included porcelain. As a case study, Paul will focus on the evolution of the sucrier in the first fifty years of Worcester Porcelain. Book here»
Neil Buttery is a multi award-winning food historian, author, podcaster, and chef. He hosts The British Food History Podcast and co-hosts A is for Apple: An Encyclopaedia of Food & Drink. His publications include A Dark History of Sugar, Before Mrs Beeton: Elizabeth Raffald, England’s Most Influential Housekeeper, Knead to Know: A History of Baking, and The Philosophy of Puddings. Dr. Buttery has recently collaborated with the Museum of Royal Worcester on projects to deliver narratives on the history of food and porcelain to wider communities. His permanent display “Dr. Wall’s Dinner” at MoRW recently won the Food on Display Award at the British Library Food Season Awards in 2025.
Paul Crane is an independent historian and consultant to the Brian Haughton Gallery, London. He is a descendant of Dr. John Wall (1708–1776), who founded the Worcester Porcelain Manufactory in 1751. Paul presently sits as a Trustee of the Museum of Royal Worcester, formerly the Dyson Perrins Museum in the city of Worcester. He also is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, an independent historian and researcher, and a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Art Scholars.
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Patricia Ferguson | Exploring the Rococo through Chelsea’s Gold Anchor Vases
Tuesday, 2 December 2025, 6pm — A recording is available here»
Vase (one of a pair), Chelsea Porcelain Factory, ca. 1762 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum, 1970.313.2a, b).
Of all design styles, Rococo was perhaps the most rebellious—ornate, theatrical, and a true ‘style without rules’. Emerging in France in the 1720s–30s, it featured curved, asymmetrical motifs drawn from nature, especially the acanthus leaf, and marine-inspired forms that gave rise to its name, from rocaille (‘rock’ or ‘shell’). Its greatest achievements appeared in the decorative arts—furniture, silver, and ceramics. By the 1750s–60s, English porcelain factories like Worcester and Chelsea embraced Rococo, even as taste was shifting toward Classical order. Worcester adapted Rococo silver shapes for tablewares, but Chelsea—under Flemish silversmith Nicholas Sprimont—produced some of the boldest Rococo porcelain in Europe, rivaling Meissen and Sèvres. This talk explores Chelsea’s gold anchor period (ca. 1758–64), its spectacular vases, its rivals, and its enduring legacy.
Patricia F. Ferguson is a ceramic researcher, a former curatorial consultant at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum, she is an advisor on ceramics for the National Trust and other heritage organizations. Her publications include Pots, Prints, and Politics: Ceramics with an Agenda, from the 14th to the 20th Century (2021); Ceramics: 400 years of British Collecting in 100 Masterpieces (2017); and Garnitures: Vase Sets from National Trust Houses (2017).
Lecture | James Stourton and Hannah Kaye, The British Love for Venice
Moor Park, Hertfordshire, England. The estate has housed the Moor Park Golf Club since the 1920s. The 17th-century house was remodelled in the 1720s (with South Sea wealth) to designs by James Thornhill. Jacopo Amigoni was subsequently commissioned to paint the four pictures in the Great Hall. Shown here is Jupiter and Io with Cupid and Attendant Putti.
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From the Venice in Peril Fund:
James Stourton and Hannah Kaye | The British Love Affair with Venice:
Four Centuries of Collecting and Connoisseurship
The Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House, London, 16 March 2026
James Stourton joins Hannah Kaye for a lively conversation exploring the enduring British fascination with Venice and its profound impact on taste and culture. From King Charles I to the present day, they will examine how British connoisseurs, collectors and architects have both shaped—and been shaped by—Venetian art, uncovering the themes and ideas that define this centuries-long cultural exchange.
James Stourton is the award-winning author of thirteen books including Rogues and Scholars, The British as Art Collectors, and Kenneth Clark. He is a Senior Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research of London University and currently a visiting fellow at Oxford University. He started his career as an Old Master paintings specialist with Sotheby’s and rose to become UK Chairman until he stepped down in 2012. He writes regularly on art and architecture for national newspapers and has served on government heritage committees. His first visit abroad was to Venice. Hannah Kaye is a freelance producer and one of the founding creators of Intelligence Squared, the leading forum for agenda-setting debates and discussions around the world. She is a trustee of the World Monument Fund Britain.
Monday, 16 March 2026, 6.30pm. Tickets, £30 / lecture recording, £10. All proceeds will go directly towards the vital conservation work of Venice in Peril Fund.
Lecture | Jane Glover on Mozart in Venice
From the Venice in Peril Fund:
Jane Glover | Mozart in Venice: A Crucial Encounter
The Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House, London, 9 February 2026
Pietro Longhi, A Fortune Teller at Venice, ca. 1756, oil on canvas, 59 × 49 cm (London: National Gallery, NG1334).
In December 1769, the 13-year-old Mozart and his father set out on their first journey to Italy. Over the next fifteen months they would visit all the main cities in the peninsula, absorbing Italian culture and garnering unprecedented attention and accolades. Their final stop, in the spring of 1771, was Venice. And although they came away with little immediate or evident reward, the impact of the city on the now 15-year-old boy was profound and extraordinarily consequential. In this talk, Jane Glover, acclaimed conductor and musician, explores this brief but crucial encounter between a unique prodigy and a unique city.
Jane Glover is currently enjoying her 50th season as a conductor, having made her professional debut at the Wexford Festival in 1975. She has since performed opera and concerts all over the world, including at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice. A Mozart specialist, she has been Music Director of Glyndebourne Touring Opera, Artistic Director of the London Mozart Players, Director of Opera at the Royal Academy of Music, and, since 2002, Music Director of Chicago’s Music of the Baroque. She is the author of Mozart’s Women, Handel in London, and Mozart in Italy.
Monday, 9 February 2026, 6.30pm. Tickets, £30 / lecture recording, £10. All proceeds will go directly towards the vital conservation work of Venice in Peril Fund.
Lecture | Frédéric Ogée on Hogarth and the English Enlightenment
Presented by the Lewis Walpole Library:
Frédéric Ogée | Art and Truth: William Hogarth and the English Enlightenment
28th Lewis Walpole Library Lecture
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, 12 February 2026
William Hogarth, Self-Portrait, ca. 1735, oil on canvas (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1981.25.360).
William Hogarth was a pioneering painter and engraver of 18th-century Britain and is often considered as one of the most important figures in the rise of an English school of art. His art engaged in an unprecedented manner with the ideas, debates, and values of the English Enlightenment, translating them into accessible visual narratives, encouraging the development of active critical thinking. As such his art reflected and nourished the English Enlightenment’s empiricist agenda—the idea that knowledge comes from observation and experience—to which he gave accessible visibility by bringing art into the realm of popular culture and public discourse, and putting the distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art under serious stress. His major contribution to the promotion of a ‘modern’ (and English) conception of art is the unflinching priority he always gave to truth over beauty in his representations, a feature, remarkably, that has remained characteristic of British art ever since.
Frédéric Ogée is Emeritus Professor of British Literature and Art History at Université Paris Cité and École du Louvre. His main period of research is the long eighteenth century, and his publications include two collections of essays on William Hogarth, as well as ‘Better in France?’ The Circulation of Ideas across the Channel in the Eighteenth Century (Lewisburg, 2005), Diderot and European Culture (Oxford, 2006; repr.2009), and J.M.W. Turner, Les paysages absolus (Paris, 2010). He also co-edited Jardins et civilisations (Valenciennes, 2019) following a conference at the European Institute for Gardens and Landscapes in Caen. In 2006–07, he curated the first-ever exhibition of Hogarth for the Louvre Museum. He is currently working on a series of four large monographs in French on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British artists. The first one, Thomas Lawrence: Le génie du portrait anglais was published in December 2022. The second one, on the landscape artist J.M.W. Turner, will be published early in 2026.
Thursday, 12 February 2026, 5.30pm
Yale University Art Gallery Auditorium
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