New Book | Kant: A Revolution in Thinking
From Harvard UP:
Marcus Willaschek, Kant: A Revolution in Thinking, translated by Peter Lewis (Cambridge: Balknap Press, 2025), 416 pages, ISBN: 978-0674296107, $30.
Immanuel Kant is undoubtedly the most important philosopher of the modern era. His Critique of Pure Reason, “categorical imperative,” and conception of perpetual peace in the global order decisively influenced both intellectual history and twentieth-century politics, shaping everything from the German Constitution to the United Nations Charter.
Renowned philosopher Marcus Willaschek explains why, three centuries after Kant’s birth, his reflections on democracy, beauty, nature, morality, and the limits of human knowledge remain so profoundly relevant. Weaving biographical and historical context together with exposition of key ideas, Willaschek emphasizes three central features of Kant’s theory and method. First, Kant combines seemingly incompatible positions to show how their insights can be reconciled. Second, he demonstrates that it is not only human thinking that must adjust to the realities of the world; the world must also be fitted to the structures of our thinking. Finally, he overcomes the traditional opposition between thought and action by putting theory at the service of practice.
In Kant: A Revolution in Thinking, even readers having no prior acquaintance with Kant’s ideas or with philosophy generally will find an adroit introduction to the Prussian polymath’s oeuvre, beginning with his political arguments, expanding to his moral theory, and finally moving to his more abstract considerations of natural science, epistemology, and metaphysics. Along the way, Kant himself emerges from beneath his famed works, revealing a magnetic personality, a clever ironist, and a man deeply engaged with his contemporary world.
Marcus Willaschek is Professor of Philosophy at Goethe University, Frankfurt, and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science, where he is responsible for the German standard edition of Kant’s works. The author of four books, he is also coeditor of the three-volume Kant-Lexikon.
Exhibition | Stan Douglas: Tales of Empire
From the press release for the exhibition:
Stan Douglas: Tales of Empire
McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario, 5 December 2025 — 22 March 2026
Curated by Sarah Milroy
This winter, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection presents Stan Douglas: Tales of Empire, a landmark exhibition surveying three decades of work by internationally acclaimed Vancouver-based artist Stan Douglas. The exhibition brings together five major photographic series that explore the histories, legacies, and enduring reverberations of colonialism across continents and centuries. Curated by Frances & Tim Price Executive Director and Chief Curator Sarah Milroy, Tales of Empire investigates the power structures, mythologies, and lived realities shaped by imperialism through Douglas’s technically masterful and conceptually incisive lens.
Stan Douglas, Act I, Scene V: In which Polly Peachum is Greeted at the Ducat Estate by Family Friend Diana Trapes, who Will Ultimately Betray Her, 2024, inkjet print on Dibond aluminum, 150 × 150 cm (courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner).
• The Nootka Series (1996) — Created on the northwest coast of Vancouver Island, this series traces the enduring presence of Indigenous communities and moments of early contact with European settlers. At the McMichael, these photographs are being shown in dialogue with historical paintings by A.Y. Jackson, opening a compelling conversation between Douglas’s contemporary vision and the Group of Seven’s early twentieth century perspective.
• The Cuba Series (2005) — Capturing the complex architectural and political landscape of Havana and other Cuban towns, these images illuminate how centuries of Spanish, American, and Soviet influence have shaped the city’s identity and visual fabric.
• The Western Series (2006) — Set in British Columbia’s interior, this series examines landscapes marked by resource extraction, revealing how settler-driven development has altered the environment and reshaped the region.
• The Klatsassin Series (2006) — A cinematic re-imagining of a violent episode of Indigenous resistance in nineteenth-century British Columbia. Douglas invents a cast of characters associated with the event, blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction while probing how stories of colonial conflict are constructed and remembered.
• The Enemy of All Mankind (2024) — Douglas’s most recent project draws inspiration from Polly (1729), the satirical sequel to John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. Featuring a costumed ensemble, the series restages scenes of decadence, intrigue, and misadventure in the Caribbean, using Enlightenment-era satire to critique the moral bankruptcy of colonialism for a contemporary audience.
Across these bodies of work, Douglas dissects and dramatizes the machinery of empire—its spectacle, its systems, and its violence—while inviting viewers to reconsider how histories are recorded, contested, and retold.
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Stan Douglas (b. 1960, Vancouver) is an internationally renowned artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans photography, film, video, installation, and theatre. Since the 1980s, he has created technically ambitious works that explore the complexities of history, collective memory, and the lasting imprint of colonialism. Through innovative uses of both analog and digital media, Douglas restages pivotal historical moments—often at cultural, political, or social tipping points—blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction, cinema, and visual art.
Douglas has been featured at the Venice Biennale five times, most recently in 2022 with the acclaimed video installation ISDN. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions at major institutions worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou, MoMA, and the National Gallery of Canada and is held in leading museum collections across North America and Europe. Recent projects include a permanent public commission at New York’s Moynihan Train Hall (2021) and the recent survey Stan Douglas: Ghostlight at Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art in 2025. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Audain Prize for Visual Art (2019); the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (2016); the third annual Scotiabank Photography Award (2013); and the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, New York (2012). In 2021, Douglas was knighted as a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, and in 2023 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Simon Fraser University, Greater Vancouver. Douglas lives and works in Vancouver.
Stan Douglas: Tales of Empire (Kleinburg: McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 2025), 128 pages, $35 CAD. Introduction by Sarah Milroy, an interview with the artist, and an essay by André Alexis.
New Book | Race and the Scottish Enlightenment
From Yale UP:
Linda Andersson Burnett and Bruce Buchan, Race and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Colonial History, 1750–1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-0300264388, $65. Series: The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History.
In the decades after 1750, an increasing number of former medical students from the University of Edinburgh construed humanity as a subject of both intellectual curiosity and colonial interest. They drew on a shared educational background, blending medicine with natural history and moral philosophy, in a range of encounters with non-European and Indigenous peoples across the globe whom they began to classify as races. Focusing on a surprising number of these understudied students, this book reveals the gradual predominance of race in Scottish Enlightenment thought.
Teaching provided a toolbox of concepts and theories for students who went on to careers as military and naval surgeons, colonial administrators, and natural historians. While some, such as Mungo Park—who traveled in Africa—are well known, many others such as the long-term residents in the Russian Empire, Matthew Guthrie and his wife, Maria Guthrie, or the Caribbean botanist Alexander Anderson are less remembered. Among this group were those such as the Pacific traveler Archibald Menzies and the circumnavigator of Australia, Robert Brown, who are known primarily as botanists rather than as ethnographers. Together they formed a global network of colonial travelers and natural historians sharing a common educational background and a growing interest in race.
Linda Andersson Burnett is a senior lecturer in the Department of History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University, Sweden. Bruce Buchan is a professor in the School of Humanities, Languages, and Social Science at Griffith University, Australia.
New Book | Slaves in Paris
From Harvard UP:
Miranda Spieler, Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2025), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-0674986541, $40.
A pioneering biographical study of enslaved people and their struggle for freedom in prerevolutionary Paris, by an award-winning historian of France and the French Empire.
In the decades leading up to the French Revolution, when Paris was celebrated as an oasis of liberty, slaves fled there, hoping to be freed. They pictured Paris as a refuge from France’s notorious slave-trading ports.
The French were late to the slave trade, but they dominated the global market in enslaved people by the late 1780s. This explosive growth transformed Paris, the cultural capital of the Enlightenment, into a dangerous place for people in bondage. Those seeking freedom in Paris faced manhunts, arrest, and deportation. Some put their faith in lawyers, believing the city’s courts would free them. Examining the lives of those whose dashed hopes and creative persistence capture the spirit of the era, Miranda Spieler brings to light a hidden story of slavery and the struggle for freedom.
Fugitive slaves collided with spying networks, nosy neighbors, and overlapping judicial authorities. Their clandestine lives left a paper trail. In a feat of historical detective work, Spieler retraces their steps and brings to light the new racialized legal culture that permeated every aspect of everyday life. She pieces together vivid, granular portraits of men, women, and children who came from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean. We learn of their strategies and hiding places, their family histories and relationships to well-known Enlightenment figures. Slaves in Paris is a history of hunted people. It is also a tribute to their resilience.
Miranda Spieler is the author of Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana. She is Professor of History and Politics at the American University of Paris.
New Book | Turner and the Slave Trade
Distributed by Yale UP:
Sam Smiles, Turner and the Slave Trade (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2025), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1913107512, £30 / $40.
While J. M. W. Turner’s iconic painting The Slave Ship (1840) is celebrated as a powerful denunciation of the transatlantic trade in enslaved people, his personal and professional ties to slavery tell a more nuanced story. This book provides the first detailed analysis of Turner’s evolving responses to slavery over his lifetime, from his financial investment in a Jamaican property worked by enslaved labourers to his later denunciation of the trade in his art. Drawing on extensive archival research, Turner and the Slave Trade traces the artist’s interactions with patrons tied to the plantation economy and examines the impact of abolitionist discourse on his work. Key chapters investigate The Slave Ship, its inspiration, and its contested interpretations, while situating Turner within broader debates about art, slavery and shifting public sentiment. Offering a nuanced understanding of how art engages with history’s most urgent issues, this important new study presents Turner as an exceptional yet complex figure, whose legacy is intertwined with the institution of slavery and its eventual abolition.
Sam Smiles is honorary professor at the University of Exeter, and the author of The Late Works of J. M. W. Turner: The Artist and his Critics (2020).
Completing the Turner Cataloguing Project
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In 2012, updates on the Turner Bequest cataloging project described the effort as a 30-year initiative with a completion date of 2014. A decade later, this short film marks the close of the project’s final phase.
“Completing the Turner Cataloguing Project | What Can Turner’s Sketchbooks Tell Us? New Discoveries,” 11 minutes, produced by Storya, 2025. Featuring Matthew Imms, Hayley Flynn, Hannah Kaspar, and Vanessa Otim.
Marking 250 years since the birth of J.M.W. Turner, this short documentary explores the closing chapter of a decades-long cataloguing project that has transformed how we see one of Britain’s greatest artists. Commissioned by the Paul Mellon Centre in collaboration with Tate, the film captures the final phase of cataloguing Turner’s 37,000 drawings, sketchbooks, and watercolours—the largest holding of preparatory works by a single artist in the world.
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The catalogue is available here»
David Blayney Brown, ed., J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings, and Watercolours (London: Tate Research Publication, 2012).
Landscape and history painter, master draughtsman and watercolourist, tireless traveller, poet and teacher, J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) exemplifies the energy, imagination and enquiring spirit of his time. For his admirer John Ruskin he was “the greatest of the age.” Explore the world’s largest collection of Turner’s sketchbooks, drawings and watercolours and its unique insights into the artist’s mind and creative process. Follow him as he toured Britain and Europe, discovered new subjects, styles and techniques, and developed his pictures, poetry and prints.
J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours is a growing catalogue of the many thousands of original works on paper in Tate’s collection, drawn mainly from Turner’s bequest of his collection to the nation. Divided into five sections covering different phases in Turner’s career, the catalogue consists of thematic groupings of works, arranged chronologically and by subject. Entries on the groupings and individual works provide detailed commentaries, exhibition and publication histories, and information about the media and materials used.
Research Leads
Martha Barratt — Senior Research Editor
Amy Concannon — Manton Senior Curator, Historic British Art
Project Editors
David Blayney Brown — Curator British Art, 1790–1850
Matthew Imms — Senior Cataloguer
Jennifer Mundy — Head of Art Historical Research
The full contributor list is available here»
Research Project | Generation Landscape
Francis Danby, The Avon Gorge, Looking toward Clifton, ca. 1820
(New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)
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From the Paul Mellon Centre:
With the completion of the online catalogue of the Turner Bequest at Tate, supported by the PMC and launched with a major international conference, Turner 250 at Tate, this is a watershed moment for the study and understanding of the contribution of English landscape painting within the wider contexts of European and world culture. Generation Landscape will bring art historians, curators, academic researchers, and creative voices together to think afresh about this significant moment in art history, when a generation of emerging artists created paintings and graphic works offering bold and often experimental new visions of nature, the landscape and the purpose of art itself—and why these images continue to carry such imaginative force today.
Sarah Turner, Director of the PMC, said: “Collaborating to support a vibrant infrastructure of research is at the heart of the PMC’s approach. Through our funding, we are really delighted to bring together the convening potential and academic expertise offered by the Courtauld’s new Manton Centre with our partners at museums and galleries in Ipswich, Bristol, and Margate. This partnership is going to build on the foundations of the extraordinary body of scholarship that already exists on artists such as Turner and Constable and will support a new generation of curators, researchers, and artists to engage with it and shape different and original responses for audiences today. “
Steve Edwards, Director of the Manton Centre at The Courtauld, said: “Sir Edwin Manton built an art collection centred around the important generation of English landscape painters: Constable, Gainsborough, Girtin, Turner, and others. This collaboration between the Manton Centre and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art establishes a dialogue with the artists at the heart of his interests to consider the meanings and values that have shaped Britain. Generation Landscape will support and promote new scholarship and curatorial work concerned with landscape and nature, providing an exciting opportunity to place contemporary research in conversation with a moment when both British art and British society were undergoing profound change.”
Generation Landscape is a three-year programme of research and events organised by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Manton Centre at The Courtauld.
With additional information here:
This research project is founded upon the simple fact that a stellar collection of British landscape artists—including J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, Thomas Girtin, and John Sell Cotman—were born within just a few years of each other (1775 in the case of the earliest, Girtin and Turner, and 1782 in the case of the latest, Cotman). Generation Landscape is intended to look afresh at the kinds of landscape imagery produced by these individual artists and their contemporaries. It will do so from a variety of art-historical perspectives, including those that are being newly developed in response to our current environmental crisis.
Generation Landscape encompasses and complements detailed new research on a number of the individual practitioners listed above. This activity includes the production of a new online catalogue of Thomas Girtin’s works, written by Dr. Greg Smith, published in 2022. Research undertaken as part of the project fed into the major 2025 Tate Britain exhibition Turner and Constable: Rivals & Originals. More broadly, Generation Landscape aims to chart the trajectories of this distinctive cohort of landscape artists in relation to a shared set of interests, experiences, and circumstances. It will look at how these practitioners and their works interacted with, and differed from, each other, and responded in both comparable and contradictory ways to the challenges—artistic, cultural, political, and environmental—thrown up by their era.
Generation Landscape was initiated in 2021 by Mark Hallett, former Director of the Paul Mellon Centre.
Exhibition | Art around 1800
Now on view at the Hamburger Kunsthalle:
Art around 1800: An Exhibition about Exhibitions
Kunst um 1800: Eine Ausstellung über Ausstellungen
Hamburger Kunsthalle, 5 December 2026 — 29 March 2026
Curated by Petra Lange-Berndt and Dietmar Rübel
Jean-Baptiste Regnault, Liberty or Death, 1794, oil on canvas, 60 × 49 cm (Hamburger Kunsthalle; photo by Elke Walford).
Art around 1800 revisits the legendary exhibition cycle of that name on view at the Hamburger Kunsthalle some fifty years ago. Presented in nine parts from 1974 to 1981, the series examined the impact of art in the ‘Age of Revolutions’, launching seminal debates on the social relevance of art that continue to resonate today. The effect was to write a new history of European art by focusing on themes and artists that broke with the conventions of their time: Ossian, Caspar David Friedrich, Johann Heinrich Füssli, William Blake, Johan Tobias Sergel, William Turner, Philipp Otto Runge, John Flaxman, and Francisco Goya. The current exhibition will comment on the historical displays created under the aegis of then director Werner Hofmann and update their approach from a contemporary perspective. For this purpose, over 50 paintings, books, and works on paper from the Kunsthalle’s collection from around 1800 will be brought together with selected loans and works by contemporary artists.
Arranged in ten chapters, Art around 1800 examines themes such as dreams, political landscapes, and revolutionary energies from the viewpoint of the present day. Emphasis will also be placed on aspects that were missing from the shows of the 1970s, or which only came to light to some extent, yet are relevant for the period around 1800: feminism, Jewish culture, and people of colour. Like the original series of shows, the current exhibition is presented in the domed hall on the upper floor of the new museum wing inaugurated in 1919. In the 1970s, this area served as a central ‘space for contemplation’ and for curatorial experiments. Sculptor Marten Schech from Berlin has designed the exhibition architecture as a sculptural intervention.
Guest Curators
Petra Lange-Berndt (University of Hamburg)
Dietmar Rübel (Academy of Fine Arts Munich)
Petra Lange-Berndt and Dietmar Rübel, eds., Kunst um 1800, Kuratieren als wissenschaftliche Praxis: Die Hamburger Kunsthalle in den 1970er Jahren (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2024), 440 pages, ISBN: 978-3775756174, €48. With contributions by David Bindman, Johannes Grave, Charlotte Klonk, Petra Lange-Berndt, Jenny Nachtigall, Dietmar Rubel, Richard Taws, Monika Wagner, et al.
Conference | Legacies: Why Museum Histories Matter
From ArtHist.net and the conference website (which includes abstracts) . . .
Legacies: Why Museum Histories Matter
Leiden, 13–15 January 2026
Organized by Laurie Kalb Cosmo, Marika Keblusek, Susanne Boersma, Raphaël Gerssen, and Margot Stoppels
In January 2026, Leiden University’s Museum Lab will host the international conference Legacies: Why Museum Histories Matter. The conference reflects on museums with significant founding histories, broadly defined by their buildings, collections, commemorative functions, collectors or founders, that are currently engaged in some manner of institutional introspection, by way of exhibitions, acquisitions, restitutions, or renovations. International researchers and museum professionals from a range of institutions present their research and museum practices tied to museum legacies.
The three-day programme consists of twelve panels and four keynote speeches by Dr. Carole Paul (University of California, Santa Barbara), Monsignor Dr. Timothy Verdon (Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence), Prof. Dr. Emile Schrijver (Jewish Cultural Quarter and National Holocaust Museum, Amsterdam), and Prof. Dr. Andrew McClellan (Tufts University, Boston).
Registration is available here»
t u e s d a y, 1 3 j a n u a r y
9.00 Registration
9.30 Welcome and Introduction
• Welcome — Stijn Bussels (Academic Director, Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society)
• Introduction — Laurie Kalb Cosmo (University Lecturer and Project Director, Museum Lab, Leiden University)
9:50 Keynote
• Reflections on the History of the Public Art Museum — Carole Paul (Director of Museum Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara)
10.30 Coffee Break
11.00 Panel 1 | Monumental Legacies
Chair: Pieter ter Keurs (Emeritus, Leiden University)
• The Glyptotheque as a Site of Memory, Monumentality, and Transformation: Historical Identity and Contemporary Reflection of a Museum Institution in Croatia — Magdalena Getaldić (Glyptotheque of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts)
• Obelisks and Totems: On Reframing Ethnographic Museums and Why Artistic Practice Matters — Irene Quarantini (Sapienza University, Rome)
• The Palatine Gallery: How Residents of the Pitti Palace Shaped Today’s Museum — Ilya Markov (Leiden University)
12.20 Lunch break
13.20 Panel 2 | Reshaping Legacies: Italian Museums
Chair: Irene Baldriga (Sapienza University)
• Reshaping the Oldest Italian National Museum — Paola D’Agostino, (Musei Reali Torino)
• Legacies Now: The Renewal of Institutional Inheritances at Five Museums in Rome — Laurie Kalb Cosmo (Leiden University)
• Two Centuries of Legacy, One Decade of Inclusion. Political Backlash and Strategic Reframing of Outreach at the Museo Egizio — Costanza Paolillo (New York University)
14.40 Panel 3 | Founders’ Legacies
Chair: Susanne Boersma (Leiden University)
• The Long Shadow of the Founder. Hero-Worship and the Construction of Continuity for a ‘National Museum’ — Joachim Berger and Darja Jesse (Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg)
• National Gallery in Prague throughout the 20th Century: The Case of the Morawetz Collection — Lucie Němečková (Documentation Centre for Property Transfers of the Cultural Assets of WWII Victims, Prague)
• Leache & Wood: Rediscovering the Chrysler Museum’s Lost Founders — Mia Laufer and Drew Lusher (Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk)
16.00 Tea Break
16.30 Panel 4 | Unseen Legacies: Belgian Museum Buildings
Chair: Annemarie de Wildt (Former Curator at the Amsterdam Museum, Board Member of CAMOC, ICOM)
• Inherited Workspaces: Rethinking Creative Practice at the Constantin Meunier Museum — Ulrike Müller (University of Antwerp/Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels)
• Haunted Halls: Reclaiming Hidden Histories of the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels — Gerrit Verhoeven (University of Antwerp/Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels)
• Between Immersion and Reflection. Old Antwerp and Museum Mayer van den Bergh Performing the Past — Stijn Bussels (Leiden University) and Bram van Oostveldt (Ghent University)
17.50 Day Closing — Laurie Kalb Cosmo
w e d n e s d a y , 1 4 j a n u a r y
9.00 Introduction — Laurie Kalb Cosmo
9.10 Keynote
• Legacies: Gifts of Love, Sacred Trusts, Investments — Timothy Verdon (Director of the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo/Museum of the Workshop of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence)
9.50 Keynote
• Developing and Opening Amsterdam’s National Holocaust Museum in a Politicized Era: Curatorial Challenges and Critical Choices — Emile Schrijver (Director of the Jewish Cultural Quarter and National Holocaust Museum, Amsterdam)
10.30 Coffee Break
11.00 Panel 5 | Revealing Histories and Reclaiming Heritage
Chair: Laurie Kalb Cosmo
• ‘My Heritage, Your Heritage?!’ Places of Jewish Heritage in Germany — Christiane Dätsch (Merseburg University of Applied Sciences
• POLIN Museum i Warsaw: A Place Where Memory Meets Responsibility — Joanna Fikus (POLIN, Warsaw)
• How to Celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the Museum Rietberg? Reflections on Researching and Curating the Institution’s History — Esther Tisa Francini (Museum Rietberg, Zurich)
12.20 Lunch break
13.20 Panel 6 | Eastern Europe: War and Recuperation
Chair: Seraina Renz (Leiden University)
• UNESCO and Museum Diplomacy: Geographies and Balances of Cultural Policy during the Cold War — Irene Baldriga (Sapienza University, Rome)
• Cultural Losses of Museums: The Polish Respond to World War II —Bartłomiej Sierzputowski and Elżbieta Przyłuska (Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, Warsaw)
14.40 Panel 7 | Eastern Europe: (Post-)socialist Museums
Chair: Seraina Renz
• Shaping the Contemporary Art Museum Identity through its Complex Heritage. The Example of the Museum of Fine Arts in Split, Croatia —Jasminka Babić (Museum of Fine Arts, Split) and Dalibor Prančević (University of Split)
• Collecting to Forget: The Legacy of the Museum of Atheism in Vilnius — Karolina Bukovskytė (Lithuanian Culture Research Institute/National Museum of Lithuania, Vilnius)
• Whose Ethnography? Ethnographic Collections and Museums in Central Europe — Marika Keblusek (Leiden University)
16.00 Tea Break
16.30 Panel 8 | Revisiting Institutional Narratives
Chair: Wonu Veys, Leiden University/Wereldmuseum
• The Imperial Gaze Materialised: The Ten Thousand Chinese Things Museum as Archive — Yuansheng Luo (KU Leuven)
• Museum Histories in a Postcolonial Age: Collecting and Curating Netherlandish Art Legacies in the Global South — Laia Anguix-Vilches (Utrecht University)
• ‘You’re usually wrong’: Looking Back at the Anti-racism of the Past at One Museum — Deirdre Madeleine Smith (University of Pittsburgh/Carnegie Museum of Natural History)
17.50 Day Closing — Susanne Boersma
t h u r s d a y , 1 5 j a n u a r y
9.00 Panel 9 | Modernist Legacies in the Americas
Chair: Stephanie Noach (Leiden University)
• Lourival Gomes Machado and the Legacy of a Certain Brazilian Modernism at MAM-SP — Ana Avelar (University of Brasília)
• Legitimating Modernism: Art History and the Formation of Museum Authority in the United States — Laura Braden (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
• (Re)Making the San Francisco Museum of Art Modern — Berit Potter (California State Polytechnic University Humboldt, Arcata)
10.20 Coffee Break
10.50 Panel 10 | Crafts and Material Legacies
Chair: Lieske Huits (Leiden University)
• Donating Lace and Knowledge: Women and Early 20th-Century Historic Lace Acquisitions in the Belgian Royal Museums for Art and History — Julie Landuyt (Ghent University/Free University of Brussels)
• Crafts’ Networks and the National Museum of Capodimonte in Naples — Francesco Montuori (European University Institute, Florence)
• Preserving Heritage through Museums: The Case of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq — Chang Farhan Tahir (University of Duhok)
12.10 Lunch break
13.30 Panel 11 | Colonial Legacies
Chair: Wonu Veys (Leiden University/Wereldmuseum)
• Founding Myths and Colonial Entanglements: The Japan Folk Crafts Museum and the Politics of Mingei — Anna Stewart-Yates (University of Oxford)
• A Forgotten History: The Former Colonial Collection of the Royal Museums of Art and History, Belgium — Anke Hellebuyck (University of Antwerp)
• Rethinking Narratives: The ‘Animals of Africa’ in Bern — Sarah Csernay (Nordamerica Native Museum, Zurich)
14.50 Panel 12 | Prominent Figures and Entangled Histories
Chair: Susanne Boersma
• A Contested Museum History: Scenography and the Placement of the Islamic Collection at the Berlin Museums — Zehra Tonbul (Ozyegin University, Istanbul)
• Entangled Objects and Memory Sites in the Museum: Re-imagining the ‘Modern’ Collection — Juliet Simpson (Coventry University)
• The Museum as a Battleground: Political Art at the Israel Museum, 1967–1977 — Meital Raz (University of Amsterdam)
16.10 Tea Break
16.40 Keynote
• The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1909: Towards a Machine for Looking — Andrew McClellan (Tufts University, Boston)
17.25 Closing Remarks — Marika Keblusek (Leiden University)
The Clark Names Lara Yeager-Crasselt as Tavitian Curator
From the press release (5 November 2025) . . .
The Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, announced today that Lara Yeager-Crasselt has been appointed to serve as the first Aso O. Tavitian Curator of Early Modern European Painting and Sculpture.
Dr. Yeager-Crasselt is currently the Curator and Department Head of European Painting and Sculpture at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where she oversees the museum’s collection of fifteenth- through eighteenth-century painting and sculpture, including its research, exhibition, loans, acquisitions, and publication. Prior to her current role, she held prestigious curatorial and research positions at The Leiden Collection in New York and at KU Leuven, Belgium, among others. From 2015 until 2017, Yeager-Crasselt served as the Clark’s Interim Curator of Painting and Sculpture.
“We are delighted to welcome Lara Yeager-Crasselt back to the Clark and we feel incredibly fortunate to be able to entrust the Aso O. Tavitian Collection to her stewardship,” said Olivier Meslay, Hardymon Director of the Clark. “She is an ideal person to manage this collection, and we feel confident that Lara will play a major role in shaping the many ways in which we share these remarkable works of art with our visitors in the years ahead.”
Yeager-Crasselt’s curatorial experience includes a rich array of international exhibitions including Watershed: Transforming the Landscape in Early Modern Dutch Art (Baltimore Museum of Art); Exchanging Words: Women and Letters in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting (Timken Museum of Art, San Diego); Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Dutch Golden Age: Masterpieces of The Leiden Collection and the Musée du Louvre (Louvre Abu Dhabi); The Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer: Masterpieces of The Leiden Collection (Pushkin Museum, Moscow and The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia), and Splendor, Myth, and Vision: Nudes from the Prado at the Clark.
“Lara is an exceptional scholar and curator and is well-regarded for her expertise in early modern painting and sculpture,” said Esther Bell, the Clark’s Deputy Director and Robert and Martha Berman Lipp Chief Curator. “Her deep knowledge and curatorial acumen will be a phenomenal addition to our team and will be so important to her research on the Tavitian Collection. Lara will also work with the Clark’s full collection of fifteenth- through eighteenth-century paintings and sculpture, and I know that her prior experience with our existing collection will be particularly important as she integrates this transformative gift and develops the plan for its installation in the new Aso O. Tavitian Wing. I look forward to collaborating with Lara on our summer 2026 exhibition An Exquisite Eye: Introducing the Tavitian Collection, which will provide the first opportunity for our visitors to see some of the magnificent treasures in the Tavitian Collection.”
An Exquisite Eye opens on 13 June 2026 and will showcase works by many of the most acclaimed artists of the early modern era—Jan van Eyck, Andrea della Robbia, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Peter Paul Rubens, Jean-Antoine Watteau, and Jacques Louis David, among others. The exhibition will remain on view at the Clark through 21 February 2027.
The Aso O. Tavitian Collection was gifted to the Clark in 2024 from the foundation of the late collector, philanthropist, and connoisseur, Aso O. Tavitian. Between 2004 and 2020, Mr. Tavitian assembled the most significant private collection of European art assembled in North America in the twenty-first century. Representing one of the largest gifts in the Clark’s history, the Tavitian gift includes 331 works of art from Mr. Tavitian’s personal collection and more than $45 million to endow two new positions on the Clark’s curatorial staff to oversee the collection; provide necessary support for its long-term care; and fund construction of the Aso O. Tavitian Wing at the Clark, which is slated to open in 2028. The gift of art includes 132 paintings, 130 sculptures, thirty-nine drawings, and thirty decorative arts objects, creating an important addition to the Clark’s holdings and more than doubling the size of its sculpture collection.
“It is a tremendous honor to represent Aso O. Tavitian’s collection and his legacy at the Clark, as well as a great privilege and joy to be able to care for these extraordinary objects in my new role,” Yeager-Crasselt said. “I am truly thrilled to be returning to the Clark after these many years, and eager to join the team there in realizing the new Tavitian Wing and the first presentation of the collection this summer.”
In addition to her curatorial activity, Yeager-Crasselt has published widely on the art of the Netherlands, particularly its cross-cultural and artistic exchange with Italy, among which are studies on Michael Sweerts and François Duquesnoy. She is also a dedicated teacher, having taught art history to students at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore; Vassar College; George Washington University, Washington, D.C., the University of Maryland, College Park; and The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Maryland and a bachelor of arts degree in History from Vassar College.
Yeager-Crasselt will begin work at the Clark in December 2025 and will immediately join the Institute’s cross-departmental team planning the construction of the Tavitian Wing. Designed by Selldorf Architects, New York City, the building project will get underway in early 2027 and will provide a permanent home for the Tavitian Collection.
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