Symposium | Opus Architectonicum
From ArtHist.net:
Opus Architectonicum: A Symposium Honoring Joseph Connors
Online and in-person, Notre Dame Rome, Roma, 12 May 2025
Organized by Silvia Dall’Olio and Susan Klaiber
This international symposium marks the eightieth birthday of the distinguished architectural historian Joseph Connors and his retirement from active teaching. Currently the Michael C. Duda Visiting Professor at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, Connors has shaped the study of Baroque art, architecture, and urbanism—particularly of Borromini and the city of Rome—as a scholar, teacher, and mentor for half a century. In his role as a visionary institutional leader, Connors has fostered innovative work in early modern Italian studies, the wider humanities, and the visual and performing arts.
The symposium gathers European colleagues and former students to celebrate this cherished friend. Presentations will explore issues in the history of art and architecture, their methodologies, and historiography, all using Joe’s personal ‘Opus Architectonicum’ as a point of departure. Attendance is free, but registration required at this link. The symposium will also be live streamed; those interested in following the symposium online should register at the same link on the symposium webpage, checking the box for the video link rather than in-person attendance.
p r o g r a m
9.00 Welcome — Silvia Dall’Olio (Director, Notre Dame Rome), David Mayernik (Notre Dame Architecture), and Susan Klaiber (co-organizer)
9.20 Session 1 | Celebrating Joseph Connors
Chair: Susan Klaiber (independent, Switzerland)
• Ingrid D. Rowland (University of Notre Dame) — Laudatio
• Barbara Jatta (Musei Vaticani) — Lievin Cruyl and the Rome of Alexander VII
10.30 Coffee
11.00 Session 2 | The Rome of Borromini
Chair: Sabina de Cavi (Universidade Nova, Lisboa)
• Augusto Roca De Amicis (Università di Roma La Sapienza) —Rivedendo i Santi Luca e Martina: Architettura come sintassi
• Alberto Bianco (Archivio della Congregazione dell’Oratorio di San Filippo Neri) — Virgilio Spada: Il progetto della Casa dei Filippini e l’identità oratoriana
• Fabio Barry (Warburg Institute) — St. Teresa in Ecstasy: Sacred or Profane Love?
12.45 Lunch break
14.00 Session 3 | Encounters with Joe and Borromini
Chair: Heather Hyde Minor (University of Notre Dame)
• Helen Hills (University of York) — Meeting Joe, via video
• Susan Klaiber (independent, Switzerland) — Borromini and Guarini: Master and Pupil?
• Sabina de Cavi (Universidade Nova, Lisboa) — ‘Borrominismi’ a Lisbona: Osservazioni preliminari sull’impatto dell’Opus Architectonicum in Portogallo
15.45 Break
16.15 Session 4 | Oltre Borromini
Chair: Fabio Barry (Warburg Institute)
• Elisabeth Kieven (Bibliotheca Hertziana) — About a Drawing by Carlo Marchionni: Delight and Despair
• Heather Hyde Minor (University of Notre Dame) — Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons
• Susanna Pasquali (Università di Roma La Sapienza) — Qualche domanda intorno a un caffè preso nel bar nel Cortile della Biblioteca, Palazzo del Belvedere Vaticano
18.00 Reception
Conference | Sculpture between Britain and Italy, 1728–1854
Left: Joseph Wilton, Dr Antonio Cocchi, 1755 (London: V&A: A.9‐1966). Right: Raffaele Monti, The Sleep of Sorrow and the Dream of Joy, 1861 (London: V&A: A.3-1964).
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From the conference programme:
Academy, Market, Industry
Sculptural Models, Themes, and Genres between Britain and Italy, 1728–1854
Online and in-person, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 16–17 May 2025
Organized by Adriano Aymonino, Kira d’Alburquerque, Albertina Ciani Sciolla, and Andrea Bacchi
This two‐day interdisciplinary conference, organised by the University of Buckingham, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Fondazione Federico Zeri, investigates the role played by British‐Italian artistic exchanges in shaping sculptural models, themes, and genres between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The conference adopts a longue durée approach, focusing on the century when these exchanges were most intense: from 1728, when the anglicised Flemish sculptors Laurent Delvaux and Peter Scheemakers travelled to Italy “to form and improve their studies,” to the 1854 opening of the Crystal Palace in Sydenham, whose sculptural decoration was directed by the Milanese Raffaele Monti. Throughout this period, the two traditions became interdependent, developing an artistic dialogue that influenced sculptural models, themes, and genres not only in Italy and Britain but also across Europe and the territories of the expanding British Empire, from the Indian subcontinent to the Americas.
This conference adopts a typological approach, analysing how academic frameworks and patronage networks influenced the diffusion of sculptural models, themes, and genres, and how market dynamics—along with the industrial production of new materials—either reinforced or challenged these aspects. Papers will explore the evolution of established genres such as busts, ideal sculptures, funerary and public monuments, copies and adaptations after the Antique, as well as the diffusion of models and themes in decorative figurative sculpture, including reliefs, medallions, chimneypieces, and in smaller artworks such as gems, cameos, impressions, ivories, or in objects produced in porcelain, earthenware, and various new artificial ‘stones’. While concentrating on sculpture, the conference embraces an interdisciplinary approach to evaluate how the development of new models, themes, and genres reflected or shaped cultural and national identities, social values, evolving canons, and shifting audiences in the different contexts of Italy and the Anglophone world. Recent years have witnessed a surge in monographic publications and PhD dissertations by art historians, social historians, and scholars focused on material culture, examining individual artists and themes connected to this trans‐national movement. This conference aims to assess the current state of research and explore future directions in the discipline.
The conference is part of a series of events organised to celebrate the launch of a new edition of Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny’s Taste and the Antique in December 2024. A further conference focused on the “Future of the Antique” will take place at the Warburg Institute and Institute of Classical Studies on 10–12 December 2025 (see the call for papers here).
Registration for online attendance is available here»
Registration for in-person attendance is available here»
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10.00 Registration
10.30 Welcome and Introduction — Adriano Aymonino, Kira d’Alburquerque, and Albertina Ciani Sciolla
10.45 Session 1 | New Approaches to Old Genres and Themes
Moderator: Andrea Bacchi (Fondazione Federico Zeri‐Università di Bologna)
• Italy, By Way of Flanders: John Michael Rysbrack and Peter Scheemakers the Younger in England, ca. 1720–1750 — Emily Hirsch (Brown University)
• The Impact of British Collecting on Italian Artistic Trends: The Case of Filippo della Valle (1698–1768) — Camilla Parisi (Università Roma Tre)
• Antonio Cocchi and Joseph Wilton: The Charm of Antiquity and the ‘True Catholic Air’ — Mattia Ciani (Università degli Studi di Siena)
• ‘The insolence of this puppy!’: Evidence for the Complexities of Commissioning Models between England and Rome in the Mid-Eighteenth Century — Susan Jenkins (Westminster Abbey)
• Christopher Hewetson and the Evolution of the Portrait Bust in Late Eighteenth‐Century Rome — Matteo Maggiolo (Independent Scholar)
13.15 Lunch
14.45 Session 2 | Models, Themes, Genres, and Media Transfer
Moderator: Malcolm Baker (University of California, Riverside)
• Media Transfers and Transnational Exchange in Edme Bouchardon’s Roman Portraits, 1727–1732 — Karl Brose (University of Virginia)
• Giles Hussey and the Revival of Gem Engraving in Georgian Britain — Dominic Bate (Brown University)
• Antiquity in Dialogue: Eleanor Coade’s Artificial Stone and Global Exchanges — Miriam Al Jamil (Independent Scholar)
• Flaxman Models and Wedgwood Design Process — Catrin Jones (V&A Wedgwood Collection)
16.55 Session 3 | Book Presentations
• Introducing the New Edition of Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique (Brepols/Harvey Miller, 3 vols, December 2024) — Adriano Aymonino
• Introducing the European Sculpture in the Collection of His Majesty The King (Modern Art Press and Royal Collection Trust, 4 vols, Autumn 2025) — Jonathan Marsden
17.15 Closing Remarks
s a t u r d a y , 1 7 m a y
10.00 Registration
10.30 Welcome and Introduction — Adriano Aymonino, Kira d’Alburquerque, and Albertina Ciani Sciolla
10.45 Session 4 | New Genres, New Subjects
Moderator: Anne‐Lise Desmas (The J. Paul Getty Museum)
• Cockerell’s ‘Progetto’ and the Transformation of the Sculpted Pediment — Max Bryant (Minneapolis Institute of Art)
• Outside Mythology: Religious and Historical Themes in Anglo‐Roman Sculpture (Late Eighteenth to Early Nineteenth Century) — Tiziano Casola (Independent Scholar)
• The Wounded Ideal: New Iconographies in Roman Sculpture around 1848 — Anna Frasca‐Rath (Universität Wien)
• Between Art and Industry: Raffaele Monti’s ‘Veiled Women’ — Albertina Ciani Sciolla (University of Buckingham)
13.00 Lunch
14.30 Session 5 | Patronage, Industry, and the Dissemination of Renaissance and Modern Models
Moderator: Alison Yarrington (Loughborough University)
• The British Glory of Thorvaldsen and His School — Alessio Costarelli (Università degli Studi di Messina)
• The Sutherlands’ Patronage and Copies of ‘Renaissance’ Statues in Britain: from Florence to Trentham Hall and Sydenham — Giuseppe Rizzo (Gallerie degli Uffizi)
• Exhibiting Italian Neo‐Renaissance Sculpture in Great Britain: The Commissions of the 3rd Marquess of Londonderry to Lorenzo Bartolini — Francesco Zagnoni (Università di Bologna)
• Genoese Casts from ‘Professor Varny’: Sculptural Exchanges between Genoa and England through the Work of Santo Varni — Matteo Salomone (Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata)
16.30 Closing Remarks — Nicholas Penny (former Director, National Gallery, London)
Online Talk | Karen Jensen on Cataloging Rare Maps
From the registration page:
Karen Jensen | An Introduction to Cataloging Rare Maps
Online, 30 April 2025, 3pm (Eastern Time)
The Bibliographic Standards Committee (BSC) of the ACRL Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) invites you to the webinar, “An Introduction to Cataloging Rare Maps.” The session will introduce rare map cataloging with the original RDA Toolkit; it will include discussion of DCRM(C)—Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Cartographic)— highlighting the distinctive aspects of cataloging pre-twentieth century maps. The aim is to assist those who rarely work with maps. Participants will become familiar with searching for cataloging records in WorldCat and selecting the best record for the map in hand. They will be able to decide when a new record is justified and be able to add an original cataloging record. The webinar will also briefly review map subject analysis and Library of Congress call numbers.
Karen Jensen is Head of Cataloguing and Collection Maintenance at Concordia University Library in Montreal.
Representing nearly 8,500 individuals and libraries, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), the largest division of the American Library Association, develops programs, products, and services to help those working in academic and research libraries learn, innovate, and lead within the academic community. Founded in 1940, ACRL is committed to advancing learning, transforming scholarship, and creating diverse and inclusive communities.
Online Talk | Michael Ohajuru on the Black Presence in European Art
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This evening from YCBA:
Michael Ohajuru | From Subjects of Capital to Makers of Culture
The Black Presence in Western European Art
Online and in-person, Norma Lytton Lecture, Yale Center for British Art, 10 April 2025, 5.30pm (ET)
Michael Ohajuru explores how Black figures, once positioned as exotic, subservient, or symbolic, have moved toward the center of artistic representation—sometimes through shifts in artistic intention, sometimes through reinterpretation by contemporary audiences. Through this lens, Ohajuru questions historical silences and considers how the Black presence in art speaks to the evolving relationship between Black and white identities in the Western world.
Join the livestream here»
Michael Ohajuru is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. He blogs, writes, and speaks regularly on identifying, understanding, and interpreting the Black African presence in Renaissance art. He is founder of the Image of the Black in London Galleries, a series of gallery tours that highlight the overt and covert Black presences to be found in the national art collections of London. Ohajuru is the project director of the John Blanke Project, a contemporary art and archive project celebrating John Blanke, the Black trumpeter to the Tudor courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII. He is also a founding member of the Black Presence in British Portraiture network, managing their podcast The BP2 Podcast.
Generous support for this program has been provided by the Norma Lytton Fund for Docent Education, established in memory of Norma Lytton by her family. Lytton was an active docent at the YCBA for more than twenty years and subsequently spent a decade engaged in research for the museum’s Department of Paintings and Sculpture.
Banner images from left to right (all details): Francis Harwood, Bust of a Man, ca. 1758, black limestone on a yellow marble socle (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection); Sir Joshua Reynolds, Charles Stanhope, Third Earl of Harrington and Marcus Richard Fitzroy Thomas, 1782, oil on canvas (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection); Joanna Mary Wells (née Boyce), Fanny Eaton (née Antwistle or Entwistle), 1861, oil on paper laid to linen (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund); and Kehinde Wiley, Portrait of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Jacob Morland of Capplethwaite, detail, 2017, oil on canvas (Yale University Art Gallery and Yale Center for British Art, purchased with a gift from Mary and Sean Kelly in honor of Courtney J. Martin and with the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund and Friends of British Art Fund. © Kehinde Wiley. Courtesy of Sean Kelly, New York).
Call for Papers | Material Culture Pre-1850 Workshop, Lifecycles
From the announcement:
Lifecycles | Material Culture Pre-1850 Workshop, University of Cambridge
Hybrid format, alternate Monday evenings, Easter Term 2025
Proposals due by 28 April 2025
The Material Culture pre-1850 Workshop at the University of Cambridge invites submissions for 20-minute papers. Our theme for Easter term is Lifecycles, which we frame as encompassing the ways in which objects endure their afterlives; the manners in which they are transferred, rarefied, treasured, rearranged, commodified, used up, mended and destroyed. Papers may wish to respond to this concept particularly in terms of object biography.
The workshop is a forum for researchers at all career stages to discuss the material culture of the medieval period, early modernity, and the long eighteenth century. We welcome submissions from all disciplines. The workshop will meet in a hybrid format on alternate Monday evenings from 5 to 7pm GMT.
Submissions must include a title, abstract (250 words), and brief academic bio, to be sent to Sophia Feist (stcf2@cam.ac.uk) and Tomas Brown (tbnb2@cam.ac.uk) by 28 April 2025. Submissions with potentially distressing content should include a warning, excluded from the word count.
Symposium | Balkan and Aegean Artistic Identities in the 18th Century
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From ArtHist.net and the conference programme:
Balkan and Aegean Artistic Identities in the 18th Century: Between East and West
Online and in-person, Athens, 8–9 April 2025
Organized by Maria Georgopoulou and Alper Metin
This symposium aims to shed light on the intricate artistic and cultural identities that flourished in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Balkans and Aegean, regions positioned at the confluence of ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ historiographical conventions. The event encourages scholars to engage in a comprehensive examination of artistic production, architectural development, and socio-political dynamics during this transformative period.
Central to the symposium is the reassessment of the historiographical terms post-Byzantine art and Ottoman Baroque. Are these designations still relevant? If post-Byzantine art predominantly refers to religious works, how should we classify secular creations, such as the richly decorated interiors of Balkan and Anatolian mansions? How authentically Baroque was the so-called Ottoman Baroque, and does this term effectively convey the unique synthesis embodied in Ottoman architecture? Furthermore, how should we approach the non-Baroque elements within this period—features rooted in Byzantine, Western medieval, and Renaissance traditions—that complicate the conventional understanding of the Ottoman Baroque? The aim is to explore how these varied influences merged into hybrid forms that challenge conventional categorization.
The symposium will address the following themes:
1 The impact of political and cultural rivalries between the Ottomans and Venice in the Aegean and the Habsburgs in the Balkans, which not only redefined power structures but also shaped cross-cultural artistic and architectural identities. The manifestation of these rivalries in the built environment and material culture, such as building that bear testimony to shifts of power, conflict, and transformation.
2 The rich network of technical expertise of itinerant artists, architects, master builders, naval builders and artisans that fostered the exchange of knowledge and artistry. The fusion of local traditions in crafts (woodcarving, silverwork, textiles etc.) in areas such as Mount Athos and the Peloponnese. The influential interactions between the Archipelago and the coastal cities of mainland Greece and Anatolia, including Constantinople/Istanbul.
3 The interactions between Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim communities in centers such as Crete, Chios, Constantinople/Istanbul, and Smyrna/Izmir, that shaped and transformed urban and architectural spaces.
4 The role of Orthodox merchants, whose economic influence and cultural mediation bridged the Ottoman Empire and Western Europe, fostering significant cross-cultural exchanges.
5 The mediation of Greek communities between the Venetian and Ottoman realms. The dual status of Greeks, as subjects of Venice and the Porte, in shaping of the artistic and architectural heritage they cultivated, with its broader implications for the region’s cultural fabric.
t u e s d a y , 8 a p r i l
16.00 Registration and coffee
16.15 Introduction — Maria Georgopoulou (Director of the Gennadius Library) and Alper Metin (University of Bologna and 2024–25 Cotsen Traveling Fellow at the Gennadius Library)
16.30 Session 1 | Mapping Architectural Connections
• Nikos Magouliotis (Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zurich) — The Printed Page and the Painted Column: An Architectural Microhistory of a Church in Ottoman Thessaly, ca. 1800
• Alper Metin (Department of the Arts, University of Bologna) — Warming Up to Change: Heating Appliances in the Gradual Transformation of Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Interiors
• Deniz Türker (Department of Art History, Rutgers University) — ‘Carvers of Chios’: Imperial Patrons, Ottoman Greek Kalfas, and Nimble Building in the Eighteenth Century
18.00 Coffee break
18.15 Session 2 | Domestic Spaces: History and Conservation
• Theocharis Tsampouras (Ephorate of Antiquities of Kozani, Hellenic Ministry of Culture) — The Political Character of Eighteenth-Century Christian Orthodox Art in the Ottoman Balkans
• Amalia Gkimourtzina (Ephorate of Antiquities of Kastoria, Hellenic Ministry of Culture) — The Secular Decoration in the Eighteenth-Century Mansions of Western Macedonia: The Example of the Conservation Works Carried Out in Tsiatsiapa Mansion in Kastoria
• Omniya Abdel Barr (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) — Eighteenth-Century Painted Ceilings in Cairo: Bayt al-Razzaz in the Context of Ottoman Architectural Networks
20.00 Reception
w e d n e s d a y , 9 a p r i l
9.30 Session 3 | ‘Post-Byzantine’ Sculpture, Textiles, Material Culture
• Anna Ballian (Benaki Museum, Athens) — From Art of the Empire to Art in the Empire: The Case of Ottoman and ‘Post-Byzantine’ Art
• Nikolaos Vryzidis (School of Applied Arts and Culture, University of West Attica) — Networks of Pluriversality: Trade, Diasporas, and ‘Baroque’ Textile Culture in Ottoman Greece
• Dimitrios Liakos (Ephorate of Antiquities of Chalkidike and Mount Athos, Hellenic Ministry of Culture) — Observations on Eighteenth-Century Sculpture in Mainland Greece: The Cases of Thessaly and Mount Athos
11.15 Coffee break
11.30 Sessions 4 | Relations with Antiquity
• Elizabeth Key Fowden (Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge) — Pharos, Tower, Temple and Tent: Visualizing the Horologion in Eighteenth-Century Athens
• Paolo Girardelli (Department of History, Boğaziçi University) — A ‘Rotunda’ on the Aegean Shores: The Franciscan Church of Santa Maria in Bornova, 1797–1831
Symposium | Turner Today
J.M.W. Turner, Inverary Pier, Loch Fyne: Morning, detail, ca. 1845, oil on canvas
(New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)
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Upcoming at YCBA:
Turner Today
Online and in-person, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 9 May 2025
The dramatic landscapes of J. M. W. Turner continue to enthrall audiences across the globe, more than two centuries after the artist’s birth. Organized in conjunction with the Yale Center for British Art’s exhibition J. M. W. Turner: Romance and Reality, this symposium invites scholars and curators from Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom to explore the multiple ways that Turner’s oeuvre speaks to our present moment, from its relationship to contemporary visual art to its role in framing conversations about climate change and resource extraction. What exciting and new possibilities exist for interpreting and sharing Turner’s work in 2025?
The symposium is free and open to the public. It will be held in the Lecture Hall at the Yale Center for British Art and will be livestreamed. Registration is recommended but not required for this event.
s c h e d u l e
10.15 Welcome and opening remarks by Martina Droth (Paul Mellon Director, YCBA)
10.30 Panel One | Transatlantic Turner: Reputation and Reception
Moderator: Tim Barringer (Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale University)
Turner established a significant reputation in North America in his lifetime and still draws considerable attention from American museums. This panel brings together curators from the Frick Collection, J. Paul Getty Museum, and Metropolitan Museum of Art to explore Turner’s transatlantic appeal in the past and present. How has Turner been introduced to, and understood by, American audiences? What factors cemented Turner’s reputation in the United States and how does his storied reputation affect the way we present and represent his work today?
• Julian Brooks (Senior Curator and Head of the Department of Drawings, J. Paul Getty Museum)
• Alison Hokanson (Curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art)
• Aimee Ng (John Updike Curator, Frick Collection)
11.30 Break
11.45 Panel Two | Turner’s Atmospheric Topography
Chair: Lucinda Lax (Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, YCBA)
How are Turner’s paintings being reinterpreted amid current ecological crises? This panel situates Turner’s interest in particular locations, and the specifics of place, within the broader sociopolitical and environmental context of industrialization and natural resource extraction. Curators based in the United States and United Kingdom will discuss how exhibitions of Turner’s work can address contemporary environmental issues and consider how museums can put contemporary works with environmental themes in dialogue with Turner’s paintings.
• John Chu (Senior Curator of Pictures and Sculpture / Senior Curator for Midlands, National Trust)
• Lizzie Jacklin (Keeper of Art, Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums)
• Jennifer Tonkovich (Eugene and Clare Thaw Curator of Drawings and Prints, Morgan Library and Museum)
12.45 Lunch
2.00 Panel Three | Turner, Tradition, and Modern Painting
Chair: Martin Myrone (Head of Research Support and Pathways, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and Convenor, British Art Network)
This panel considers a paradox: Turner is often portrayed as a harbinger of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Impressionism and abstraction, yet he made constant and overt reference in his art to major artists of the past. How is Turner being embraced and interpreted as an artist who both self-consciously worked within a longstanding tradition and broke radically with traditional painting practices? How are curators engaging with Turner’s elusive relationship to modernity and tradition? What is Turner’s relevance to contemporary artistic practice?
• Amy Concannon (Manton Senior Curator of Historic British Art, Tate)
• Anni Pullagura (Margaret and Terry Stent Associate Curator of American Art, High Museum of Art)
• Nicholas Bell (President and CEO, Glenbow)
3.00 Closing Remarks and Reflections on J. M. W. Turner: Romance and Reality
• Lucinda Lax (Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, YCBA)
• Tim Barringer (Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale University)
Symposium | Art, Museum, Nation
Canaletto, Westminster Bridge, with the Lord Mayor’s Procession on the Thames, 1747, oil on canvas
(New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection).
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From YCBA:
Art, Museum, Nation
Online and in-person, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 25 April 2025
What does it mean to display art through the lens of national identity and history? To mark its reopening, the Yale Center for British Art convenes Art, Museum, Nation, a symposium to critically interrogate the concept of nationhood in contemporary practices of art exhibition, interpretation, and acquisition. In roundtable discussions, leading art historians, curators, and directors from the Art Gallery of Ontario, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and National Gallery, London, among others, will explore how art museums can revise, think beyond, and reinvigorate national frameworks. Among many questions, the symposium will ask: How have expressions of national identity influenced the civic and public role of art museums in both explicit and implicit ways? How might art museums contend with the fluidity of borders and foreground ideas of migration and diaspora? What can art museums do to better acknowledge the traces of colonialism and empire embedded in national collections?
The symposium is free and open to the public. It will be held in the Lecture Hall at the Yale Center for British Art and will be livestreamed. Registration is recommended but not required for this event.
The Yale Center for British Art is pleased to offer a travel stipend for curators and museum professionals who wish to attend this symposium in person and are traveling from within the Boston–New York rail corridor or an equivalent driving distance (approximately 125 miles). If you are facing particular financial barriers to participating and wish to take advantage of this funding, please email your name, position, and travel details to ycba.research@yale.edu before Monday, April 21. Funding is limited and applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, so apply early!
s c h e d u l e
9.30 Welcome — Rachel Chatalbash (Deputy Director for Academic Affairs, Education, and Research, YCBA)
9.35 Introduction: Reopening the Yale Center for British Art — Martina Droth (Paul Mellon Director, YCBA)
9.45 Keynote Conversation | Art, Museum, Nation: Building Collections Today
Moderator: Lucinda Lax (Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, YCBA)
How can museums serve the needs of both local and international constituents? What does it mean to present a global collection in a national context? Conversely, what should the mission of a national museum be in a globalized world? YCBA curator Lucinda Lax leads a discussion on building and stewarding heritage art collections in the twenty-first century.
• Andrea Bayer (Deputy Director for Collections and Administration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
• Christine Riding (Director of Collections and Research at the National Gallery, London)
10.45 Break
11.00 Session 1 | Art, Museum, Nation in Exhibitions and Display
Moderator: Tim Barringer (Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale University)
Curators based in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States reflect on the potential of exhibitions to advance inclusive and critical definitions of national artistic canons. How are curators using museum display to alter or challenge established ideas of Canadian, British, and American art?
• Patricia Allerston (Deputy Director and Chief Curator, National Galleries of Scotland)
• Horace Ballard (Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Curator of American Art, Harvard Art Museums)
• Julie Crooks, Curator (Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora, Art Gallery of Ontario)
12.00 Lunch Break
1.30 Session 2 | Art, Museum, Nation in the History of Art and Museums
Moderator: Sria Chatterjee (Head of Research Initiatives, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art)
This conversation looks to the past, addressing how Enlightenment-era ideas of progress and race shaped the construction of public museums in North America and Europe. Discussants will consider the impact of imperialism and scientific racism on modern museum practice and ask what institutions can do to acknowledge and combat these forces.
• Nana Adusei-Poku (Assistant Professor of History of Art and African American Studies, Yale University)
• Andrew McClellan (Professor of History of Art and Architecture, Tufts University)
• Marina Tyquiengco (Ellyn McColgan Associate Curator of Native American Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
2.30 Break
2.45 Session 3 | Art, Museum, Nation: New Futures
Moderator: Anni Pullagura (Margaret and Terry Stent Associate Curator of American Art, High Museum of Art)
Building on the previous session, the symposium’s closing discussion looks to the future of ‘the nation’ in the art museum. How can the lenses of national identity and history be mobilized toward new and productive ends? What other interpretive frameworks can museums use to complement and complicate ideas of nationality and nationhood?
• Mark Mitchell (Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, Yale University Art Gallery)
• Stephanie Sparling Williams (Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art, Brooklyn Museum)
• Linsey Young (Independent Curator and PhD Candidate, Royal College of Art)
3.45 Closing Remarks — Kishwar Rizvi (Robert Lehman Professor in the History of Art, Islamic Art and Architecture, Yale University)
4.00 Reception
Anna Jameson Lecture by Paris Spies-Gans
This evening at The National Gallery (the lecture is fully booked, but it will be live-streamed) . . .
Paris Spies-Gans | ‘The Spirit of a Particular Age’
Women Artists and the Challenges of an Integrated Art History
Online and in-person, The National Gallery, London, 13 March 2025, 6pm GMT
Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Self Portrait in a Straw Hat, 1782 (London: The National Gallery).
Women artists are having a moment—featuring in exhibitions, headlines, and auctions. Art historians have, however, long known of their existence. Why do we continue to treat these creators as rare, exciting discoveries? This lecture will consider the complicated legacies surrounding women artists and notions of historical truth. Taking Anna Jameson’s concept of the ‘Spirit of a Particular Age’ as a jumping-off point, it will explore the tensions that often accompany studies of women in their own places and times and suggest a path towards a more integrated—and hopefully lasting—narrative of art: one that includes women as the prominent historical players they regularly were. Sometimes this entails uncomfortable work, such as questioning canonical narratives about women and art. However, embracing such complexities can ultimately lead to a deeper, fuller understanding of the cultural and gender dynamics that shaped the past—and continue to influence the present.
The lecture will also be live-streamed; please book tickets here»
Paris A. Spies-Gans holds a PhD in History from Princeton University, an MA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and a BA from Harvard University. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Harvard Society of Fellows and the J. Paul Getty Trust, among other institutions. Her first book, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830 (PMC/YUP 2022), has won several prizes in the fields of British art history and 18th-century studies and was named one of the top art books of 2022 by The Art Newspaper and The Conversation. She is currently working on her second book, A New Story of Art (US/Doubleday and UK/Viking).
Online Talks | Tempus Fugit / Time Flies
I’m sorry to have missed the first half of the series; the last two talks take place in March and April. –CH
Tempus Fugit / Time Flies: Measuring, Perceiving, and Living Time in Early America
Online, Historic Deerfield, Sundays: 26 January, 23 February, 30 March, 27 April 2025
Tall Clock, detail, by Aaron Willard of Boston for Asa Stebbins of Deerfield, Massachusetts, ca. 1799 (Historic Deerfield).
Early New Englanders frequently invoked the passage of time in religious terms, but the ‘horological revolution’ of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced technological developments in timepieces that complemented older cultural views of time. These developments went on to play an important role in the standardization of timekeeping, the rise of market economies, and industrialization. Sundials, mechanical clocks, and pocket watches were not only scientific marvels but also style-bearing objects that displayed refinement. Such objects provide suggestive windows into everyday life, especially when we broaden our sense of the many different objects and practices that marked the passage of time for diverse early Americans. This series features speakers who will address both the abstract and material nature of time found not only in clocks but also in other objects and processes central to life in early New England such as brewing, needlework, husbandry, farming, and cooking. Together the presentations will complicate our sense of what the passage of time meant for early New Englanders who had more than one way to ‘keep’ and ‘spend’ time. All lectures are free of charge and will be presented virtually via Zoom webinar. Registration required.
January 26, 2pm
Bob Frishman | Edward Duffield and Colonial American Clockmaking
Bob Frishman has professionally repaired nearly 8,000 timepieces and sold more than 1,700 vintage clocks and watches. In recent years, he has reduced his clock-repair activities and now devotes his time to research, writing, and lecturing. He has organized horology-related conferences at the Winterthur Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Henry Ford Museum, the Museum of the American Revolution, and the Horological Society of New York; he was also an organizer of the 2019 Time Made in Germany symposium in Nuremberg. Along with more than 100 articles and reviews, his recent book on the Philadelphia clockmaker Edward Duffield was published by the American Philosophical Society Press in 2024.
February 23, 2pm
Alexandra Macdonald | ‘Regard Not Time, but This Sign’: Recipes and Embodied Knowledge
Alexandra M. Macdonald is an historian of labour and the body with a particular interest in embodied knowledge and practices of making in the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century. As part of her research, she is interested in using period specific ingredients and methods to recreate historical craft and culinary recipes, for example indigo vats and preserved food. Alexandra has received a number of fellowships to support her research, including a fellowship from the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium which brought her to Deerfield. Most recently she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library where she worked closely with conservation scientists to analyze a canvaswork embroidery made in Connecticut in the mid-eighteenth century. She is currently the Social Science and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at Brock University where she is working on a book length study of indigo in the Atlantic world.
March 30, 2pm
Sara Schechner | Marking Time during the American Revolutionary Period: Sundials and Clocks
Sara J. Schechner is the David P. Wheatland Curator of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University.
April 27, 2pm
Elizabeth Bacon Eager | Mastering Time: Slavery, Self-Sovereignty, and the 18th-C. Clockmaker
Elizabeth Bacon Eager is an assistant professor of art history at Southern Methodist University, where she teaches courses on early American art, architecture, and material culture. Exploring intersections between art, science, and technology of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic World, she is particularly interested in questions of materiality and process and fascinated by the reconstruction of historical tools and techniques. Her current research examines the material culture of time in early America, with a particular focus on objects and images produced by Black, Indigenous, and female makers. Dr. Eager’s work has been published in The Art Bulletin, Journal18, and Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art.
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