Exhibition | Crafting Freedom: Thomas W. Commeraw
Thomas W. Commeraw, Jug, detail, ca. 1797–1819, salt-glazed stoneware, cobalt oxide, 12 inches (30 cm) high
(New-York Historical Society, purchased from Elie Nadelman, 1937.820).
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From the press release (6 October 2022) for the exhibition:
Crafting Freedom: The Life and Legacy of Free Black Potter Thomas W. Commeraw
New-York Historical Society, 27 January — 28 May 2023
Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York, 24 June — 24 September 2023
Curated by Margi Hofer, Mark Shapiro, and Allison Robinson, with Leslie M. Harris
The New-York Historical Society presents Crafting Freedom: The Life and Legacy of Free Black Potter Thomas W. Commeraw, the first exhibition to bring overdue attention to Thomas W. Commeraw, a successful Black craftsman who was long assumed to be white. Formerly enslaved, Commeraw rose to prominence as a free Black entrepreneur, owning and operating a successful pottery in the city. Over a period of two decades, he amassed property, engaged in debates over state and national politics, and participated in New York City’s free Black community. The exhibition explores Commeraw’s multi-faceted history as a craftsman, business owner, family man, and citizen through approximately 40 pieces of stoneware produced by Commeraw and his competitors between the late 1790s and 1819, in the largest presentation of his work to date. Alongside these pieces are the primary documents that enabled historians to reconstruct the arc of his professional career and personal life, and through them convey a deeper understanding of free Black society in New York in the years between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.
Thomas W. Commeraw, Jug, ca. 1797–1819, salt-glazed stoneware, cobalt oxide, 12 inches (30 cm) high, (New-York Historical Society, purchased from Elie Nadelman, 1937.820).
“Crafting Freedom continues the tradition at New-York Historical of presenting groundbreaking exhibitions that reveal the complex dimensions of race in the early years of New York City and our nation,” said Dr. Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of New-York Historical. “Through this exhibition of Thomas W. Commeraw and his work, we gain an in-depth understanding of a Black artisan’s life in New York, while also seeing how our understanding of history continues to evolve to give us greater insight into issues that affect our society today. This exhibition will transform our visitors’ perspective on New York’s free Black community, challenging long-held myths about post-revolutionary race relations in northern states.”
“This exhibition illuminates the story of a man who was emancipated as a child, went on to own and operate his own business, and advocated for the rights of full citizenship for his fellow Black Americans,” said Margi Hofer, New-York Historical’s vice president and museum director, who co-curated the exhibition. “While Commeraw’s distinctive pottery has been admired and collected for over a century, his true story has been obscured for far too long. It is incredibly meaningful that we are able to bring to light a true portrait of the man, both as a citizen and as a craftsman.”
The New York City directories first list Thomas “Commerau” working as a potter in 1795, living near Pot Baker’s Hill in the vicinity of today’s City Hall. By 1797, he had established his own workshop at Corlears Hook on the East River. There, he produced vessels in the local tradition, often decorated with distinctive flourishes of swags, tassels, and bowknot motifs filled with vivid cobalt. Stoneware vessels were essential kitchenware in that era and stored everything from milk, butter, salted meat, and preserves, to molasses, cider, and beer. Commeraw also manufactured oyster jars for the city’s oystermen, who were predominantly from the free Black community. His crocks and jugs traveled on ships to ports along the eastern seaboard and as far afield as Guyana and Norway. Most of the Commeraw vessels that survive today are boldly stamped with his name and the location of his pottery at Manhattan’s Corlears Hook. In addition to signaling pride in his work, Commeraw’s prominent branding helped him attract and retain customers.
In addition to revealing Commeraw’s successes and struggles as a pottery owner in a city riven by racism, the exhibition explores his commitment to securing a better future for the Black community through his work with abolitionist, political, religious, and mutual aid organizations. In 1790, the majority of Black New Yorkers were enslaved. By 1810, 6 out of 7 were free. Businessmen like Commeraw faced daunting challenges, not just raising capital but building civic and religious organizations to support the Black community. Free Black men had voted in New York since the Revolution, but in 1811, the state legislature passed a law to suppress Black voters, requiring them to submit a Certificate of Freedom that included a sworn statement from a third party attesting to the voter’s free status and residency and to pay a filing fee. A highlight of the exhibition is the 1813 Certificate of Freedom held by New-York Historical’s Patricia D. Klingenstein Library that bears Commeraw’s confident signature as witness. It is the only confirmed manuscript in his hand. The exhibition also examines how Black New Yorkers responded to economic and political oppression by developing a lively cultural and artistic community.
The final chapter in Commeraw’s story concerns his effort to promote the emigration of Black settlers to Sierra Leone, as the prospect of full citizenship for Black New Yorkers dimmed. Commeraw traveled there with his extended family in 1820 on the first voyage of the American Colonization Society. He arrived full of optimism and plans to found a Black republic; instead, he experienced unimaginable hardship and tragedy. What began as a venture for political rights ended as a struggle for survival. Many of the settlers died of malaria, including Commeraw’s wife and niece. He returned to the U.S. in 1822 and died the following year in Baltimore. The exhibition closes with a coda that describes future generations of the Commeraw family carrying forward the potter’s entrepreneurial energy and political engagement.
Additionally, Queens-based ceramic artist and activist Sana Musasama has created a new work that reflects on Commeraw’s life as a New York potter, his transatlantic odyssey of two centuries ago, and her own artistic journey. Passages will be installed in New-York Historical’s grand lobby, the Robert H. and Clarice Smith Gallery, to introduce the exhibition and encourage visitors to contemplate how Commeraw’s story continues to resonate today.
Crafting Freedom is co-curated by New-York Historical’s Vice President and Museum Director Margi Hofer, potter and Commeraw researcher Mark Shapiro, and Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s History and Public History Allison Robinson. Leslie M. Harris, professor of history and African American studies at Northwestern University, served as scholarly advisor. The exhibition next travels to the Fenimore Art Museum, where it will be on view from June 24 until September 24, 2023.
Major support for Crafting Freedom: The Life and Legacy of Free Black Potter Thomas W. Commeraw is provided by the Decorative Arts Trust and Emily and James Satloff.
Leslie Harris in Conversation with David Rubenstein, The Shadow of Slavery and the History of African Americans in New York City, from the Settling of New Amsterdam to the Civil War
New-York Historical Society, 10 April 2023
“Test of Patriotism,” Commercial Advertister (20 August 1814)
(Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New York Historical Society)
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A. Brandt Zipp, Commeraw’s Stoneware: The Life and Work of the First African-American Pottery Owner (Sparks, Maryland: Crocker Farm, 2022), 311 pages, ISBN: 979-8218002909, $95.
Presented here for the first time in two centuries is the lost story of New York City potter Thomas W. Commeraw, a key early African American figure whose identity slipped through the fingers of history. Rediscovered by the author in the first years of this century, Commeraw stands as one of the most fascinating of all historic American decorative artists: an abolitionist, activist, highly influential craftsman and, ultimately, the hopeful founder of a new African republic. Topics include: Commeraw’s fascinating life story, from childhood to death; a comprehensive discussion and illustration of Commeraw’s pottery, made from the mid-1790s to late 1810s; Commeraw’s abolitionism, political activism, and role as an important local free black figure; a thorough history of New York City stoneware; an in-depth breakdown of the work of other New York City stoneware manufacturers including Clarkson Crolius Sr., John Remmey III, and David Morgan; and Commeraw’s harrowing experiences on the west coast of Africa.
Brandt Zipp is a founding partner of Crocker Farm, Inc., the nation’s premier auction house specializing in historic American utilitarian ceramics. A graduate of Johns Hopkins University, Brandt’s research regularly breaks important new ground, no greater example being his serendipitous discovery of Thomas Commeraw’s heritage. Commeraw’s Stoneware represents the culmination of almost two decades of research, writing, and lecturing.
Lecture Series | Catholic Chapels in N. England / Adam and Chippendale
Upcoming lectures from the York Georgian Society:
Jan Graffius | From Borneo to York: The 18th-Century Chapels at Stonyhurst and the Bar Convent
York Medical Society, Saturday, 11 February 2023, 2.30pm
Bar Convent Chapel, completed in 1769. Established in 1686, the Convent of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin at Micklegate Bar in York is the oldest surviving convent in England.
This talk will examine the history and contents of two extraordinary 18th-century chapels in the North of England. Both chapels were hidden from view, but both reflected very different aspects of English Catholicism. The 1713 Stonyhurst Shireburn inventory lists luxury artefacts from China along with those of the European baroque, salvaged medieval material culture, and the latest English Georgian fashions, all demonstrating a confident seigneurial Catholicism in a deeply rural setting. The flamboyant but hidden 1769 Bar Convent chapel of Mother Ann Aspinal and its associated 16th- and 17th-century relics and vestments speaks of a different community—religious sisters and recusant schoolgirls—navigating the political challenges associated with an all-female community in a volatile urban setting.
Jan Graffius is Curator of Collections and Historic Libraries at Stonyhurst College.
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Kerry Bristol | Robert Adam and Thomas Chippendale at Nostell: A Matter of Equals?
York Medical Society, Saturday, 11 March 2023, 2.30pm
Unknown British artist, A Cabinet Maker’s Office, ca. 1770, oil on canvas, 53 × 70 cm (London: V&A, P.1-1961).
Nostell, the ancestral home of the Winn family near Wakefield, has long been recognised as an important commission for both Robert Adam and Thomas Chippendale, one indicative of a close friendship between architect and patron and suggestive of a special relationship between the Otley-born cabinetmaker and a family who reputedly promoted his interests early in his career. Based on a fresh reading of the Nostell archive, this lecture will investigate the nature of the business relationship between Adam and Chippendale and query how and where they worked together at Nostell and when they worked independently of each other. Did the late 18th-century architect always have the upper hand, or could those who furnished a house exert more control?
Kerry Bristol is Senior Lecturer in the School of Fine Art at the University of Leeds.
Handling Session | Hausmaler at the V&A
Saucer, made at the Meissen Porcelain Manufactory, ca. 1720–25 and then painted by an unknown ‘hausmaler’ painter, ca. 1720–30
(London: Victoria and Albert Museum, C.218A-1938)
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A good reason to join The French Porcelain Society:
Hausmaler at the V&A
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 23 February 2023
The French Porcelain Society’s handling session examining German Hausmalerei—faïence and porcelain painted in small workshops outside their factories (Hausmaler, ‘home painter’)—from the V&A collection will take place on Thursday, 23 February, in the morning. The session will be led by Simon Spier, Curator of Ceramics and Glass 1600–1800, and Errol Manners. Numbers will be limited, and the cost is £25, with a reduced rate available for emerging scholars. If interested, please contact FPS administrator Kelsey Weeks, FPSmailing@gmail.com.
Online Salon | Promenades on Paper: 18th-C. French Drawings
From AHNCA:
Virtual Salon on The Clark’s Exhibition of Eighteenth-Century French Drawings from the BnF
Online, Wednesday, 1 February 2023, 7pm ET
The Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art and the Dahesh Museum join with the Clark Art Institute for a Virtual Salon on the Clark’s current exhibition Promenades on Paper: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings from the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Focusing on select drawings from the exhibition, curators Esther Bell, Anne Leonard, and Sarah Grandin will offer a varied and lively picture of artistic practices in the years leading up to and just after the French Revolution. This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Please register here.
Esther Bell is Deputy Director and Robert and Martha Berman Lipp Chief Curator at the Clark Art Institute. Prior to joining the Clark, Bell was the curator in charge of European paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Bell has published essays and organized exhibitions on a range of subjects, from seventeenth-century genre painting to eighteenth-century theater to nineteenth-century millinery.
Anne Leonard is Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Clark Art Institute. In addition to curating numerous exhibitions of works on paper, she is co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture (2014) and author/editor of Arabesque without End: Across Music and the Arts, from Faust to Shahrazad (2022).
Sarah Grandin is Clark-Getty Paper Project Curatorial Fellow at the Clark Art Institute. She specializes in French works on paper and the material culture of the ancien régime. She has published essays on typography, drawing, and Savonnerie carpets, and is preparing a monograph on issues of scale in the graphic and decorative arts under Louis XIV.
Research Lunch | Dominic Bate on Pythagorean Visions
From the Mellon Centre:
Dominic Bate, Pythagorean Visions: Picturing Harmony in British Art, 1719–1753
Online only, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 10 February 2023, 1pm
In the early eighteenth century, an eclectic group of artists and architects working primarily in London believed that they could improve the arts by placing their working practices on an unassailable mathematical footing. In this endeavour they were inspired by a concept of universal harmony, which held that the entire cosmos was organised by God according to the rules of arithmetic and geometry. This concept had ancient roots, being associated with the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, among others, but it assumed a new significance in Hanoverian Britain thanks to the work of antiquarians and natural philosophers such as Isaac Newton, whose scientific discoveries were hailed in terms of the recovery of lost knowledge.
The first part of this talk introduces some of the artistic initiatives that were inspired by the highly acclaimed work of Newton and his followers, and argues that these initiatives can be understood with reference to the early modern phenomenon of ‘projecting’, defined in this instance as the contrivance of speculative schemes that sought to marry public benefit and private profit by harnessing the power of mathematics and natural knowledge.
The second part of the talk deepens and complicates the first by focusing on the career of the talented draftsman Giles Hussey (1710–1788), who developed a mathematical approach to portraiture during the 1730s and 1740s. At the heart of Hussey’s method was the geometry of the equilateral triangle and the proportional relationships that it encompassed, including the ratios of musical consonances such as the octave (2:1), the perfect fourth (4:3), and the perfect fifth (3:2). Hussey’s work shows how the pursuit of mathematical approaches to artmaking could be productive while also entailing serious practical and theoretical difficulties, thereby shedding light on the role played by eighteenth-century artists (rather than ‘disinterested’ philosophers) as solvers of aesthetic problems.
Book tickets here»
Dominic Bate is a PhD candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he is writing a dissertation that examines the relationship between art and aesthetics, natural theology and practical mathematics in eighteenth-century Britain. Before coming to Brown, Dominic worked in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, where he was involved in cataloguing the collection of portrait prints and British book illustrations. Dominic has BA and MA degrees in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and in the spring of 2022 he was a visiting student in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. His research has been supported by the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown and the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art.
Online Talk | Malcolm Baker on Canova’s Three Graces at the V&A
Antonio Canova, The Three Graces (detail), 1814–17 (London: V&A Museum, no. A.4-1994).
This evening (London time), from the V&A:
Malcolm Baker with Kira d’Alburquerque | Canova’s Three Graces and the V&A
Online and in-person, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 19 January 2023, 7pm
Malcolm Baker joins V&A curator Kira d’Alburquerque for a look at Antonio Canova’s The Three Graces (1814–17) and the campaign to save the celebrated group in the early 1990s. Baker played a significant role in the acquisition of the work for the V&A nearly three decades ago. He joins Kira d’Alburquerque to discuss the campaign to “Save the Three Graces” and how attitudes toward Canova’s sculpture have changed. The talk will be held in-person and on Zoom. Online tickets are £5. If, as a ticket-holder, you have not received a link by noon on the day, contact membershipevents@vam.ac.uk.
Lecture | Matthew Keagle on Military Material Culture
From BGC:
Matthew Keagle, Military Material Culture
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 1 February 2023, 6.00pm
James Byers, Howitzer, Philadelphia, 1777 (Fort Ticonderoga Museum Collections; photo by Gavin Ashworth).
Military history and its related material culture elicit strong opinions. The objects of war shape the technologies, aesthetics, and ideologies of everyday life and reveal their own historiography. In this Alumni Spotlight Lecture, Fort Ticonderoga curator Matthew Keagle shares his experiences working in military material culture and the challenges and distinct opportunities this field offers for scholars and amateur historians.
Matthew Keagle has been involved in curation, exhibitions, research, and interpretation for historic sites and museums in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Delaware, Virginia, and North and South Carolina. He holds a BA from Cornell University, an MA in American material culture from the Winterthur Museum, and a PhD from Bard Graduate Center. Since joining Fort Ticonderoga in 2014, he has been developing exhibits, conducting research, and delivering programs that explore the eighteenth-century military experience. He has researched and lectured at collections and archives across the US, Canada, and Europe, with a particular focus on military dress in the eighteenth century.
Registration is available here»
Seminar | Holly Shaffer and Sussan Babaie on Food and the Senses
Painting attributed to Muzaffar ‘Ali, from The Coronation of the Infant Shapur II, Folio 538r from the Shahnama (Book of Kings) of Shah Tahmasp by Abu’l Qasim Firdausi, ca. 1525–30, opaque watercolour, ink, silver, and gold on paper.
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From the PMC:
Holly Shaffer and Sussan Babaie on Food and the Senses
In-person and online, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 11 January 2023, 5pm
Part of the series In Conversation: New Directions in Art History, which will explore the changing modes and methodologies of approaching visual and material worlds. Running from January to March 2023.
Holly Shaffer | Plants, Gardens, Markets, Delicacies: Food and Art in 18th- and 19th-Century India
Food is ephemeral. Produce can last at most months, while cooked foods remain for a few hours or, with conservation, a few years. Yet artists, cooks, and writers have developed methods of preservation—from documenting the cultivation of plants to transcribing recipes—that acknowledge continuity through memory and repetition as well as change through colonial and environmental factors, artistic ingenuity and loss. In this paper, I will align botanical, ethnographic and narrative manuscript paintings, recipe books, and vessels produced by artists and chefs in north India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with oral histories taken primarily in Lucknow in the twenty-first century. How does thinking through a framework of ephemerality allow multiple items to co-exist and perishable objects to survive? Does art history as a discipline offer a method to study ephemeral arts such as cultivation or cuisine? What might the intersection of food and art—and their different temporalities—offer us as art historians?
Holly Shaffer is Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University with a specialisation in British and South Asian Art and their intersections. Her book, Grafted Arts: Art Making and Taking in the Struggle for Western India, 1760–1910, published by the Paul Mellon Centre with Yale University Press in 2022, won the AIIS Edward C. Dimock, Jr. Book Prize in the Indian Humanities. She has published essays in The Art Bulletin, Art History, Journal 18, Modern Philology, and Third Text, and has edited volume 51 of Ars Orientalis (2021) on the movement of graphic arts across Asia and Europe. Currently, she is co-curating an exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art on Artists and the British East India Company, and is developing a book project on food and art.
Sussan Babaie | ‘Adorning the Delicious Food Is To Say Grace for the Blessings’: Persian Art and Cookery in the 16th and 17th Centuries
This talk is about rice. The history of rice and its adaptation from a staple food in East Asia to a culinary canvas for innovative recipes, objects, and ceremonies is, I claim, an altogether Iranian story. Thanks largely to the Mongol rule in West Asia, rice was made a widespread agricultural product, just as Persian spread across West, Central, and South Asia as the language of literary high culture, and being a shah, and not a caliph, gained ascendency as the legitimate mode of rulership. Rice, however, does not command its central role as a marker of Iranian cuisine and a source of effect in food—a style nowadays called ‘fine dining’—until the early modern period and especially in Persianate Asia. From the late fifteenth century onwards cookbooks, written by chefs not chroniclers, indicate a form of professionalisation in the cookery crafts. Vessels, amongst which the large, wide, shallow platters are distinctive products of the ceramic arts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Safavid (1501–1722) Iran, indicate a specialised function, namely for serving rice dishes in a particularly ‘artistic’ manner. The cooks write on how to arrange food in a dish and the dishes carry epigraphic sayings about specific functions of the vessels and the food they were to serve. These—the recipes, the objects for food, and the visual representations of foodways—act as mediators marking the food and the dish as a multisensory experience of rice as art.
Sussan Babaie is Professor of Islamic and Iranian Art History at the Courtauld, University of London. She has curated exhibitions on Persian and Islamic arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at Harvard, Smith College and Michigan University museums, and at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. She is the author of the award-winning Isfahan and Its Palaces and co-author of Persian Kingship and Architecture; Shirin Neshat, Honar: The Afkhami Collection of Modern and Contemporary Iranian Art; and Geometry and Art: In the Modern Middle East. Sussan is currently working on a co-curated exhibition about arts of the Great Mongol State for The Royal Academy, London, and on a book about Persian art and food.
Panel Discussion | Revisiting Kubler’s The Shape of Time
From the BGC:
Reading The Shape of Time, 60 Years Later
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 30 November 2022, 6pm
Four perspectives on the seminal text by George Kubler from BGC faculty Meredith Linn, François Louis, Aaron Glass, and Drew Thompson, moderated by Joshua Massey and Jeffrey Collins.
In 1962, Yale University art historian George Kubler published The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, a book that challenged traditional notions of style and period in art history. Now, 60 years later, we bring together a historian, an anthropologist, an archaeologist, and an art historian—all members of the BGC faculty—to explore The Shape of Time across geographical and disciplinary boundaries and to rediscover the prescient insights it offers for material culture and object-oriented scholarship.
$15 General | $12 Seniors | Free for people with a college or museum ID, people with disabilities and caregivers, and BGC members.
Meredith B. Linn is assistant professor of historical archaeology at Bard Graduate Center. She holds a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University, an MA in the social sciences from the University of Chicago, and a BA in art history from Swarthmore College. Her work focuses on nineteenth-century New York City, particularly upon the health-related experiences and strategies of Irish immigrants and upon Seneca Village, the predominantly African American community whose land was taken by the City of New York to construct Central Park. She has published articles about both projects and is currently working on a book about each.
François Louis is professor of Chinese art and material culture at Bard Graduate Center. From 2002 to 2008 he also served as editor-in-chief of the journal Artibus Asiae. He obtained his doctorate from the University of Zurich and has published widely on the visual and material culture of medieval China. Recent publications include Design by the Book: Chinese Ritual Objects and the Sanli Tu and the co-edited volumes Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500–1800 (2012) and Perspectives on the Liao (2013). He is currently working on a history of Liao-dynasty archaeological finds.
Aaron Glass is an associate professor of cultural anthropology at Bard Graduate Center. His research focuses on Indigenous visual art, material culture, media, and performance on the northwest coast of North America, as well as the history of anthropology, museums, and ethnographic representation. Glass’s books include The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History (2010); Objects of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (2011); Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwaka’wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema (2014); and Writing the Hamat’sa: Ethnography, Colonialism, and the Cannibal Dance (2021).
Drew Thompson is associate professor of Black studies and visual culture at Bard Graduate Center, where he researches and teaches in the areas of African and Black diaspora visual and material culture. Curating exhibitions is a fundamental part of his teaching and scholarship. He recently co-curated Benjamin Wigfall & Communications Village, the first posthumous survey of the Black American artist Benjamin Wigfall, which opened in September 2022 at the Dorsky Museum before traveling to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He is also at work on an exhibition about African metalwork for the BGC Gallery, scheduled for fall 2023. He authored Filtering Histories: The Photographic Bureaucracy in Mozambique, 1960 to Recent Times (University of Michigan Press, 2021) and numerous publications about the history of photography and contemporary art in Southern Africa.
Joshua Massey is a student at Bard Graduate Center, where he studies American material culture and the ways in which objects are transformed into art through critical and creative interventions. His essay, “The World According to Aldwyth,” appears in the exhibition catalogue for This is Not! Aldwyth in Retrospect (2023–24), and he is the editor of Wordsmithing: The Spoken Art of Lonnie Holley, a forthcoming collection written in collaboration with Bernard Herman and Holley himself. In his spare time, Massey writes poetry, practices film photography, and shops for books he has no time to read.
Jeffrey L. Collins is professor of art history and material culture at Bard Graduate Center, where he specializes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and its sphere of influence overseas. He is the author of Papacy and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Rome: Pius VI and the Arts (Cambridge, 2004) and a principal contributor to Pedro Friedeberg (Mexico City, 2009) and History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material Culture, 1400–2000 (New Haven and London, 2013). A fellow of the American Academy in Rome, he has published widely on architecture, urbanism, painting, sculpture, book illustration, museology, metalwork, furniture, and film.
Online Talk | Adrian Johns and Jason Dean on Historia Coelestis (1712)
From the series website:
Adrian Johns and Jason Dean, After Hours with Historia Coelestis (1712)
Zoom, Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering, and Technology, Kansas City, Missouri, 10 November 2022
On Thursday, November 10, at 7.00pm (CT), the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering, and Technology will host the fourth installment of its 2022 After Hours series. The program places Library staff in dialogue with outside scholars, collectors, and other cultural heritage professionals to create wide-ranging conversations about books in the collection.
In the upcoming program, Adrian Johns and Jason Dean will unpack the remarkable story of the 1712 Historiae Coelestis Libri Duo through the material evidence found in the Library’s copy of the 1712 edition, as well as the later, authorized, 1725 edition. Their presentation will also draw on the in-progress work of Emma Louise Hill as she works toward a census of the approximately 15 remaining copies of the 1712 edition. As per usual, the program will be recorded and posted online.
In the spring of 1716, the Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, built a pyre on Greenwich Hill near the Royal Observatory. From a safe vantage point, he watched with satisfaction as pages from a book he wrote went up in flames, calling them a good “sacrifice to TRUTH.” This was not done in a fit of frustration with his research, but rather to take back control of work that he felt had been stolen from him. The 1712 edition of Historiae Coelestis, though large, expensive, and beautifully printed, went to press prematurely against Flamsteed’s wishes. The series of events that led to Flamsteed’s furious burning of sections of that edition involved some of the most powerful members of the early Royal Society, including Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley, all embroiled in professional jealousy, intellectual theft, and clandestine printing.
Adrian Johns is Allan Grant Maclear Professor of History at the University of Chicago. Originally educated at Cambridge, he taught at the University of Kent, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of California, San Diego, before arriving in Chicago in 2001. He is the author of The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (1998), Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (2009), and Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age (2010), as well as dozens of papers on the histories of science, information, and the book. His latest book is The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. He has been the recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the ACLS, the Mellon Foundation, and other bodies, and is currently at work on a history of the policing of information since the Middle Ages.
Jason W. Dean is Vice President for Special Collections at the Linda Hall Library. Prior to coming to the Library, Jason was Director of Special Collections & Archives at Southwestern University. He has previously held positions at the University of Arkansas and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. He earned an undergraduate degree in history from Hardin-Simmons University and his MS in Library and Information Science from Syracuse University. He is a member of the Grolier Club, and a past Institute of Library and Museum Services-Rare Book School fellow.
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