session descriptions

Chairs: Megan Baker, University of Delaware, and Joseph Litts, Princeton University

Location: Bartos Auditorium, List Visual Arts Center, MIT

Temporal questions beleaguered eighteenth-century cultures, politics, and art. The change from Old Style to New Style dates and the associated English Calendar Riots as well as the short-lived calendrier révolutionnaire français formed backgrounds for settler colonists encountering circular temporalities of Indigenous cosmologies; enslaved people experiencing dislocated time-space during the Middle Passage; and fossil discoveries problematizing Christian histories of Creation. Monuments and timepieces fostered artistic innovation, while natural history and archaeological specimens offered stylistic inspiration, perhaps culminating in Neoclassicism. Some artists even artificially aged their works, calling attention to art’s inherent ephemerality and the circumstances of viewership. These possibilities of dislocated time persist through the American Colonial Revival, which deliberately de-temporalizes the eighteenth century.

How did diverse temporal understandings impact eighteenth-century artistic (re)production, and how do they shape understandings of historical objects and their circulation? What does it mean to give something as abstract as time visual or material form (e.g., “Father Time”)? How do we acknowledge the ways objects sought to disrupt histories and futures? This panel seeks to undermine notions of stable, linear time—and in doing so, it seeks to undermine the assumption that colonialism is inevitable. The four papers to be presented at this panel consider the aesthetics of deep time and natural history, slavery and clocks, contingency, and white supremacy within eighteenth-century revivals. As conveners, we aim to facilitate a broader conversation on the ways artists manufactured time to historicize and naturalize colonialism and recognize the ways artists could deploy alternative temporalities to resist.

Carole Nataf, Courtauld Institute of Art

Shell Grottos and the Aesthetics of Deep Time in Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon’s Theories of the Earth

Elizabeth Bacon Eager, Southern Methodist University

Peter Hill’s Regulator: Considering the Materiality of Time in the Context of American Slavery

Daniella Berman, Independent Scholar

Mismatched and Out of Time: Aesthetics of Contingency in 1800

Lea C. Stephenson, University of Delaware

Reviving the Alabaster Portrait: J.P. Morgan’s Eighteenth-Century Collection and Whiteness

Chairs: Karen Lipsedge, University of Kingston, and Victoria Barnett-Woods, Washington College

Location: Bartos Auditorium, List Visual Arts Center, MIT

The eighteenth-century home, in terms of its structure, design, function, and furnishing, was a site of transformation- of spaces, identities and practices. Home has a myriad of meanings, and although the eighteenth century in the common imagination is often associated with taking tea on polished mahogany tables, a far wider world of experience remains to be introduced and examined in greater detail. One area that tends to be overlooked is how concepts of the home and domesticity can shed light on readings of gender, race, bodily autonomy, and the cartographies of domestic space in the long eighteenth century. The HECAA@30’s conference theme of Environments, Materials, and Futures of the Eighteenth Century, provides the participants in our two roundtable panels with a timely opportunity to address this oversight by asking what’s race got to do with domestic space, gender, and bodily autonomy in the eighteenth century?

Although the work of eighteenth-century historians of art and architecture has begun to consider the intersection of social class and gender in expansive and creative ways that broaden a Western European perspective, in each roundtable panel participants will build on and extend this work by considering how the social gatekeeping of men’s and women’s upward mobility privileges notions of whiteness. In light of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe versus Wade in June 2022, in each roundtable panel will also consider whether and how heteronormative notions of race and social class impact on bodily autonomy.

Although the discussions at each panel will focus on eighteenth-century art and architecture, the ways in which the panellists consider and examine how these issues were expressed and shaped architecturally and visually, will be slightly different at each roundtable panel. In the first roundtable panel, participants will draw on domestic space, cultural objects, and material culture, to interrogate racialized hierarchies in the private sphere. The home will also be a feature in the second roundtable panel.  Yet, due this roundtable panel’s location in the Royall House and Slave Quarters, there will be a greater emphasis on race, gender, and how the cultural legacies of colonialism, racism, and social injustice in the eighteenth century (as well as today) shape our discussions of art and architecture.

As organisers of these roundtables, we see the opportunities for dialogue and conversation not only between panellists but also conference participants, is central to each roundtable panel. Therefore, each panel will start with a 7-10 minute position paper from each member, before opening out to a wider, more organic discussion and questions.

Part I

Stephen Hague, Rowan University 

The Long S-Shaped Shadow of the Long Eighteenth Century

Lisa Vandenbossche, University of Michigan

Oceans of (In)stability: Race and Gender from Shore to Sea

Chloe Wigston Smith, University of York

Race, Material Culture, and Women’s Work

Adrienne L. Childs, Independent Scholar

Ornamental Blackness: What, Why, So What?

Laura Keim, Stenton Historic House

A New Place for Dinah: Interpreting Race and Slavery at Stenton across Time

Part II @ The Royall House and Slave Quarters 

Nuno Grancho, Centre for Privacy Studies, Copenhagen

Domestic Space, Race and Gender in the Eighteenth-Century Danish Colonial Home

Laura Engel, Duquesne University

The Paradox of Pearls: Gender, Race, Embodiment, and Domestic Space

Caroline Fowler, Williams College, The Clark Art Institute

Privacy

Sarah Lund, Harvard University

Republican Motherhood and Republican Equality: Female Engravers and the ‘Ideals’ of the French Revolution

Tori Champion, University of St. Andrews

Race, Liminality, and the Floral Garland in Eighteenth-Century French Portraiture

Chairs: Iris Brahms, Universität Tübingen, and Valerie Kobi, Université de Neuchâtel 

Location: Harvard Art Museums, Art Study Center

In the eighteenth century, pastel painting emerged as a brand-new technique, not least because of the time’s ever-expanding global trade networks and the production of synthetic pigments. The trade networks of pigments used for manufactured pastel sticks span several continents and, since pastel painting relied on the much earlier invention of paper in Asia, this resource’s mobility has always linked local memories with global trade. Memory is at the same time the aim of the portraits, which is the main subject of pastel painting. What results from this is a close intertwining between material and content, between regional and global exchange, and between present and past. These synergies, that is our hypothesis, radiate into the future, making pastel painting a highly innovative as well as critical medium, with the potential to shape our collective future. Additionally, debates about various modes of pastel painting were developing out of vital networks within different disciplines that encompassed both scientific issues, such as optics, and the political representation of courtiers as well as citizens at the threshold of democracy. In this sense, the panel will introduce new historical and methodological approaches to pastel painting and especially address these concepts against the background of social injustices.

This session will discuss the pastel portrait by Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin in the collection – that has long delighted and vexed viewers –  from three different angles, as well as provide further insight into the collection of pastel paintings in the Harvard Art Museums.

Heather McPherson, University of Alabama at Birmingham

“Pastel Crayons as Paintbrushes”: Chardin’s Portrait of a Man (1773)

Isabelle Masse, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec

Chardin’s Pastel Materials: A Hypothesis

Joachim Homann, Harvard Art Museums

Identity and Interiority: Constituting the Subject in the Chardin Pastel Portrait at the Harvard Art Museums

Tour with: Sara J. Schechner, David P. Wheatland Curator of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments

Location: Harvard Historical Scientific Instruments Collection

When establishing Harvard in 1636, the governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony sought to create a college on the classical model they had known in England.  Harvard’s earliest curriculum was comprised of lectures and recitations that familiarized students with Aristotelian cosmology. Mathematics, physics, and astronomy were imparted by referring to instruments such as the astrolabe, armillary sphere, and globes.   By the mid-seventeenth century, tutors introduced the new ideas of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes.

The economy and defense of the fast-growing Colony was dependent especially on the mathematical arts of navigation and surveying. Without navigation in coastal and trans-Atlantic waters, the colony could not export timber, salted fish, rum, or ships in exchange for finished goods.  Surveying was needed to map the wilderness, establish boundaries between colonies, build forts, and lay out plots of land.  Records from the time show Harvard students were taught how to use the instruments of surveying and navigation, to make sundials, and perform complex calculations. Graduates were thereby well suited to take part in the commercial, political, and social life of the eventual Commonwealth.

Tour with: John Overholt, Curator, The Donald and Mary Hyde Collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson/Early Books & Manuscripts, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Elizabeth Rudy, Harvard Art Museums; Kristel Smentek, MIT

Location: Houghton Library, Harvard University

This tour highlights eighteenth-century European and Chinese works on paper that either featured in, or were formative for our thinking when developing the exhibition, Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment (Harvard Art Museums Sept. 2022-Jan. 2023) and its accompanying catalog.

Debates over what the Enlightenment was and what it means have continued since the late eighteenth century; they persist because because conceptions of the Enlightenment are intimately bound up with the ideals and failures of western modernity. Our show focused on the agency of printed and drawn images in shaping and communicating the historical Enlightenment’s ideals and blindspots. We look forward to continuing to explore these themes while viewing innovative eighteenth-century illustrated almanachs, architectural works like Fischer von Erlach’s Entwurff einer historisichen architectur (1721) and Piranesi’s Il Campo Marzio(1762), Chinese copperplate engravings by the Manchu artist Ilantai, and samples of paper made with experimental materials in the 1760s. 

Eighteenth-century highlights in MIT’s Distinctive Collections.

Items on view will include the plate volumes and the first print volume of MIT’s complete run of the first folio edition, in its original bindings, of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (28 vols, 1751-1772), a copy of Taschenbuch für die neuste Geschichte, vol. 3 (1796), a small format book addressing  episodes of the French revolution with foldout plates documenting ballooning and the optical telegraph, a tiny eighteenth-century Scottish edition of Anacreon printed in Greek on colored silk, and more. (open from 1pm-3pm).

Disrupt the View: Arlene Schechet  and permanent collection galleries at the Harvard Art Museums. Free admission for conference attendees with a conference badge.

Resetting the Table: Food and Our Changing Tastes and the Blaschka Glass Models of Plants, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology @ Harvard. $15 general admission, no special discount for conference attendees.

Chairs: Sarah Grandin, Clark Art Institute, and Catherine Girard, St. Francis Xavier University

Location: Bartos Auditorium, List Visual Arts Center, MIT

Do animals introduce a material difference? Should art historians work differently with objects that include animal remains? The long eighteenth century abounds with objects crafted with fur, quills, feathers, sinew, vellum, whale teeth, and bones, yet the role of animal bodies in artistic production, exchange, and extraction remains only marginally acknowledged. The papers of this panel consider how shifting understandings of human and non-human animal relations can inform art history’s engagement with material culture. Can the discipline give voice to the material memories embedded in objects made from animals? Might art historians envision future ethical practices that will restitute the place and plentitude of animals? Presenters will reflect on these questions as they examine the afterlives of animals, with particular attention to the effects of spatial, temporal, and cross-cultural mobility on materiality at any stage of the material afterlives of animals, from the deep ecological knowledge of those who sourced them, to the transformation brought about by artisans and artists, to the recontextualization of artistic objects through their global circulation. As a whole, this panel aims to interrogate how anthropocentrism and colonialism have shaped art history’s disciplinary practices, and to envision alternative methods to understanding the archive.

Dani Ezor, Kenyon College

Tortoiseshell: From Sea Turtle to Snuffbox 

Kaitlin Grimes, Auburn University

The Elephant and the Lathe: The Intimate Materiality of Monarchical Ivory Portraits in Early Modern Denmark-Norway 

Sylvia Houghteling, Bryn Mawr

The Silk and the Worm: Writing Sericulture into the History of South Asian Textiles 

Cynthia Kok, Yale University

Thinking into Early Modern Mother-of-Pearl, Materiality and Liveliness 

Organizers: HECAA DEI Committee

Drawing inspiration from quilts, and collaborative creative practices, this workshop invites the HECAA@30 participants to reflect, exchange and experiment on the question of an equitable, inclusive, and expansive scholarship of eighteenth-century art and architecture. Participants will be divided in groups, each of which will work - or, “stitch” - resources and ideas, around a predetermined topic for one hour. 

In small, moderated group discussions, participants will discuss one of six broad themes that have been compiled by the DEI committee. Overlap between these themes of professional and scholarly activity are encouraged; we expect that participants can learn from conversations about research, teaching, and curation in different contexts. 

As part of your conference registration, please sign-up to participate in one of the following discussions (sample topics have been provided below each theme): 

Labor 

Collaborations, past and present; Ethical practices of joint teaching; Navigating co-authorship and joint publishing

Race and the State of the Field
#ECSsowhite: Brainstorming Material and Structural Strategies for Diversifying Our Field; Diaspora and Indigeneity; Practices of care and multivocal approaches to histories of racialization

Making Space / Space and Geography
Fieldwork as Research l Sites of eighteenth-century research: what implicit power dynamics surround where we study the eighteenth century?

The Archive

Archival (In)justices: Prejudices, Gaps, and Obstacles in Archival Records and Process; Dissenting Practices at the Archives: The Warps and the Wefts of Resistance

Gender 

Eighteenth-century engagement and projections in contemporary artistic praxis

Sexuality 

Queering the archive

Chair: Daniella Berman, Independent Scholar

Location: Voss Seminar Room, MFA

This panel takes as its points of departure the various discourses on materials and materiality in scholarship on the eighteenth-century to ask how we might define “technical art history” – a term that is so often used to describe projects that attend closely to the medium of the artwork. But is not close consideration of the object simply–somewhat glibly–responsible art history? How do we integrate period knowledge of materials or the writings of artists and artisans on such questions? How can technical analysis augment or challenge our scholarship? How do art historians collaborate with conservators and scientists, or integrate their observations? On the other hand, how do we attend to artworks in cases where the objects of our study are no longer extant or have altered considerably? The session will include both close study examinations of

objects from the MFA’s collection and presentations on collaborative projects in the US and Europe. We invite interested participants to join an interdisciplinary discussion about the remit of the object-focused art historian and the myriad definitions of technical art history–and their usefulness. This session will consider the potential of scientific investigations and close looking to map a future for eighteenth-century studies that centers the artwork and integrates new disciplines and methodologies that may change the ways in which we pay attention to the objects we study.

Josephina de Fouw, Rijksmuseum

The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of its Parts: Research Into the Rijksmuseum Collection of Dutch Eighteenth-Century Decorative Interior Paintings

Courtney Books & Amy Torbert, St Louis Art Museum

Bridging the Apparent Divide: Thoughts from the Field on “Responsible Art History” and “Technical Art History”

Heidi Strobel, University of North Texas

Picking at Threads: A Material Analysis of an Embroidered Picture

Andy Schulz, University of Arizona

The Collaborative Creation of Meaning in a Hand-Colored Set of Goya’s Caprichos

Chairs: Katherine Fein, Columbia University, and Deepthi Murali, George Mason University  

Location: MFA Center for Netherlandish Art Seminar Room

In the eighteenth century, imperial expansion and technological advances led to an unprecedented global trade in ivory, including African and Asian elephant tusks, Arctic walrus tusks, and sperm whale teeth. Art historical scholarship about ivory objects has recently begun to center these animals, drawing out intertwined human and nonhuman histories. Looking across geographic contexts, this session investigates how ivory materialized fraught connections among species and cultures in a time of colonialism, enslavement, and ecological change. How did ivory objects bring human and nonhuman bodies into proximity, and to what ends? How did ivory’s meanings change as it traversed continents and cultures? In what ways do ivory objects register or obscure their origins? How does—and how should—contemporary awareness of extinction and environmental crisis inform approaches to studying, displaying, and caring for historical ivory? This session will include four presentations followed by close examination and discussion of ivory objects in the Museum of Fine Arts collection.

Katherine Fein, Columbia University and Deepthi Murali, George Mason University

Introduction | Ivory: Animal Body and Artistic Material

Erika Riccobon, Leiden University

Folding Fans in Translation: Ivory as Painting Medium and Site of Crosscultural Design in the Early Phase of the Canton Trade

Maggie Keenan, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Disembodied Eyes: The Fragility of Flesh and Ivory Appeal

Marina Wells, Boston University

Incisions into the Gendered History of American Marine Ivory

Kristine Korzow Richter, Harvard University

Ivory as a biomineral: Relationships between Biomechanical Structure, Interspecies Life Histories, and Tool Functionality

Chair: Ruth Ezra, University of Saint Andrews 

Location: MFA Morse Study Room

In the long eighteenth century, the foliaceous mineral muscovite (white mica) assumed a remarkable salience across the intellectual, material, and visual cultures of Europe. Transparent leaves of the mineral lent protective glazes to stumpwork cabinets while also providing robust, heat-resistant panes for lanterns and see-through covers for natural history preparations. This object study session considers mica across and beyond Europe, arguing for the mineral’s use in the decorative and graphic arts cultures of the eighteenth century as a global phenomenon. Held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the session will take the form of an interactive discussion centered around objects including lorgnette fans with mica windows; textiles with mirror-work (shisha) embroidery; and sconces with glittering flora. Together we will map the sourcing and trade of the mineral during the long eighteenth century as we compare its various applications in both powder and leaf form. Scholars, conservators, and curators with expertise in print cultures, textiles, furniture, and ceramics are particularly welcome to join us for an open, wide-ranging conversation about the aesthetic and functional possibilities of mica -- and, so too, those of its visual cognates (e.g. selenite, glass). It is envisioned that the session will double as an informal workshop for an exhibition on mica in early planning by the organizer.  

Margaret Masselli, Brown University

A Glittering Ghagra: Women's Clothing, Shisha Embroidery, and Mica Mining in Eighteenth-century India

Katherine A. P. Iselin, Emporia State University

Materiality and Image on Eighteenth-Century Folding Fans 

Ruth Ezra, University of St Andrews

Brilliant Boxes

Chair: Dawn Odell, Lewis & Clark College and Nancy Berliner, MFA Boston

Location: Gallery 178

Nancy Berliner, the MFA’s Wu Tung Senior Curator of Chinese Art, will lead a tour of the Museum’s eighteenth-century Chinese collections, which include outstanding examples of porcelain, landscape painting, lacquerware, and calligraphy. The tour will also visit “Art Rocks,” an exhibition celebrating Wan-go H. C. Weng (1918-2020), whose recent gift of Chinese paintings and calligraphy is the largest in the institution’s history, comprising more than 390 objects acquired and passed down through six generations of his family. Rocks were integral to the Weng family’s collection, as subjects of paintings and as art objects themselves. This exhibition features 25 works from the gift as well as the MFA’s collections to explore how rock aesthetics have permeated architecture, landscape design, and painting styles in China for a millennium. In the minds of serious connoisseurs, who acquired and competed for rocks with the same passion they afforded great works of painting and calligraphy, rocks, as microcosms of mountains—or even the entire universe—were meditations on life itself. 

Chair: Michael Yonan, University of California, Davis

Location: MFA Gallery 142

Five scholars will present their research on iconic works in the European Porcelain and Decorative Arts galleries at the MFA.

Amy Freund, Southern Methodist University 

Sinceny Manufactory, France, Tray with chinoiserie (?) hunting scene, c. 1750 

Maura Gleeson, Independent Scholar 

Meissen Manufactory, Germany, modeled by Johann Joachim Kändler, Macaw, c. 1732 

Thomas Michie, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 

Alcora Manufactory, Spain, Console table, c. 1761–1763 

Sarah Williams, Millsaps College 

Nicolas Lancret, Le Déjeuner de jambon, 1735 

Michael Yonan, University of California, Davis 

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, A Hypochondriac, c. 1775–1780 

Chair: Courtney Harris, Museum of Fine Arts Boston 

Location: MFA Rabb Gallery

This session will take place in the temporary exhibition Tiny Treasures: The Magic of Miniatures (running July 1, 2023 to February 18, 2024). Organized by MFA curator Courtney Harris and accompanied by a related catalogue, the exhibition brings together around 90 miniature objects, paintings, and works on paper to explore the ways in which artists and craftspeople have made miniatures across time, culture, media, and place. Spanning nearly 4,000 years of production, the works in the exhibition invite close looking at technique, materials, and artistic impulse. While many of the works are from the Anglo-American traditions from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, other cultures and periods represented include ancient Egypt, twentieth-century Native American, Edo period and twentieth-century Japan, and others. The exhibition, and this object session, seeks to answer the question: Why work in miniature? Participants in this session will discuss miniatures on view in the exhibition or other miniature forms and formats. 

Gerri Strickler, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Nevers Glass

Lauren DiSalvo, Virginia Tech

Miniaturizing the Picturesque Landscape through Micromosaic Souvenirs

Damiet Schneeweisz, The Courtauld Institute of Art

Rethinking the Potency of the Early Modern Miniature in the Americas

Chair: Simona Di Nepi, Museum of Fine Arts Boston 

Location: MFA Galleries. Meet at Sharf Visitor Center

The Museum of Fine Arts’ collections have been enriched in recent years by a number of splendid eighteenth-century silver Jewish ceremonial items. These include, for example, Hanukkah lamps and Torah finials. The premise of the Judaica displays at the MFA, showing objects in different galleries according to their origin and period of production, lends itself to an “integrated” look at Judaica in dialogue with non-Jewish objects. This approach will offer participants in this session an opportunity to explore a number of important questions, such as: what is the relationship of Judaica ritual silver with Christian and domestic objects from the same region? What are the stylistic and iconographic parallels, and what are their points of divergence? How did Christian European silversmiths approach the creation of ritual objects which were not part of their own cultural heritage? 

Chair: Dani Ezor, Kenyon College

Location: MFA Gallery 141A

Taking place in the French Salon at the MFA, the “New Perspectives on Silver” panel discussion will address innovative approaches to studying silver and promote dialogue on refreshing the study of silver in the museum, in academia, and for popular audiences. Such approaches will include discussions of silver as a material of transformation, women silversmiths, the exchange of technical knowledge of silversmithing, and the role of silver in colonialism.  Panel members will focus their initial remarks on an individual object or set of objects on display in the MFA’s French Salon before we move to a wider conversation prompted by these talks. Attendees can expect exciting discussions on race, gender, colonialism, religion, the environment, and even pirates. Following Journal18’s fall 2022 edition on silver, this panel hopes to continue the recent invigoration of scholarship on the study of silver within eighteenth-century decorative arts and material culture.

Dani Ezor, Kenyon College

Agnieszka A. Ficek, Meadows Museum, SMU

Brittany Luberda, Baltimore Museum of Art

Chairs: Elizabeth Bacon Eager, Southern Methodist University, and Jennifer Chuong, Harvard University

Location: MFA Alfond Auditorium

Like people, things have histories. Materials are sourced, transported, transformed, circulated, and recycled. As evidenced by the widely-studied phenomenon of the so-called “it-narrative,” this lifecycle was as fascinating to eighteenth-century subjects as it is to the contemporary historian. In art history’s material turn, we have seen a privileging of the “it” in these narratives, a critical return to the agency and significance of the object itself. Even as this turn has transformed and energized the field, however, its politics have been questioned: things are often an easy substitute for marginalized human subjects, allowing scholars to sidestep the fraught dynamics of eighteenth-century artistic and cultural production. In the end, however, things are not people.  

This roundtable will reflect on the politics of materiality in the eighteenth century and in the writing of that history today. What does it mean to focus on artworks as physical things? How do we understand the possibilities and limits of thing theory, actor-network-theory, and vibrant materialism in 2023? What have been our subfield’s successes, and where do we still have work to do? Recent art-historical interest in the symbolic affordances of artist’s materials—the “hemp-ness” of linen canvas; the mineral, plant, and animal bases of pigments; the mahogany of mahogany (so to speak)—has enriched our understanding of art’s cultural, social, and ecological entanglements. But how can we use these insights to fuel a more radical re-envisioning of what art is and who makes it? Among other questions we hope to consider are the following: What are the implications of placing human intervention (techne) within a continuum of material transformation that also involves non-human actors like animals, air, etc.? How do current conversations around material intelligence ask us to rethink assumptions about artistic skill, creativity, and agency? How might a material history of or beyond the object decenter Eurocentric notions of fine art production, embracing an expansive definition of artistic and artisanal practices in a global history of art?

Sarah Cohen, University at Albany, SUNY

Edward S. Cooke, Jr., Yale University 

Kathryn Desplanque, UNC Chapel Hill

Kailani Polzak, UC Santa Cruz

Jennifer Van Horn, University of Delaware  

Chair: Emily Everhart, Art Academy of Cincinnati

Location: Brown University, List Art Center, Room 120

The papers of this session investigate ways in which eighteenth-century gardens mediated geographical, cultural, and/or historical encounters to construct sacred spaces. European landscape gardens evoked pagan temples of European antiquity, the exoticized Orient, and medieval Christianity through their fabriques. Spanish aristocrats in colonial Mexico evoked the Garden of Eden through Moorish and Indigenous garden plans, structures, and practices. European, Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal garden plans and pictures represented intercultural exchanges between Islamic and European traditions. Such encounters point towards new understandings of eighteenth-century European knowledge formation and the establishment of new political identities while fundamentally engaging the sacred. How might we understand garden spaces as sites of spiritual cultural exchange and identity construction, as representations of historicity and generators of alternative types of historical or scientific knowledge bound up with the sacred? 

Lalaine Bangilan Little, Misericordia University

Firstfruits of the Land: Vegetal Motifs in Art and Architecture of the Spanish Philippines

Susan Taylor-Leduc, Independent Scholar 

Mesdames at Bellevue: Collecting Plants, Sacralizing the French Picturesque, 1775-1792

Chair: Douglas Fordham, University of Virginia 

Location: Brown University, List Art Center, Room 120

Indigenous Studies is more than an inter- or cross-disciplinary field. It is a methodological framework that grounds research in the protocols of place acknowledgement and researcher positionality. As Robert Warrior has stated, “Where are we?” is the most fundamental question asked in Indigenous Studies.

In the History of Art, printmaking constitutes an art form that often transcends local space. Produced in multiples to circulate widely, printed images share significant material and conceptual overlap with paper currencies, as both offer abstract articulations of power and possession. The eighteenth-century witnessed the dramatic expansion of print culture alongside the exploration, conquest, and documentation of indigenous cultures.

The papers in this panel explore the intersection of printmaking and indigeneity. They interrogate how printed images contributed to early modern conceptions of indigeneity. They examine how printmaking by contemporary indigenous artists, such as Judy Watson and James Lavadour, invite us to think differently about 18th-century print culture. And finally, they raise questions about the archive, and how we choose to use prints as historical evidence.

Monica Anke Hahn, Community College of Philadelphia

Reproducing ᎤᏍᏔᎾᏆ (Otacite Ostenaco), 1762-2023

Eleanore Neumann, University of Virginia

Living Proof: Retrospective Agency in Judy Watson’s “experimental beds” (2012)

Laura M. Golobish, Ball State University 

James Lavadour’s Lithographic Geologies and Stewardship of the Land

Kimberly Toney and Pedro Germano Leal, John Carter Brown Library and John Hay Library, Brown University 

The John Carter Brown's Americana Platform: A Digital Tool for Researching the History and Culture of the Early Americas

Chairs: Amelia Rauser, Franklin and Marshall College and Laurie Brewer, RISD Museum

Location: RISD Museum, Danforth Hall and Costume and Textiles Study Room

This panel will investigate the intersection of fashionable dress, race, and systems of economic and political domination in the eighteenth century. Textiles formed the material culture of both enslavement and industrialization during this period, driving colonialist exchange, human exploitation and capitalist development. The material histories of certain textiles–cotton muslin, linen osnaburg, woolen worsted, silk jacquard– clung to them even as they were transformed into garments with new meanings of their own. As garments, these objects both constructed and masked identities, providing sites of contest, yearning, fantasy, and transformation. Panelists may thus intervene in any of the three avenues– environments, materials, or futures– at the heart of the conference's theme.

Priscilla Sonnier, University College, Dublin

Flax, Fashion, and Free-Trade: Manufacturing Gendered Patriotism in Ascendancy Ireland

Emma Pearce, University of Edinburgh

Plaided Products: Checked Cloth in Caribbean Textile Markets in the Eighteenth Century

Marina Kliger, Harvard Art Museums 

“Cut into Pieces”: The Politics of the “Robe de Cachemire” and the Fashions of the Franco-Persian Alliance in Paris, 1808-1815

Chair: Tara Zanardi, Hunter College, CUNY, and Elizabeth Williams, RISD Museum 

Location: RISD Museum, “Trading Earth: Ceramics, Commodities, and Commerce” Exhibition Gallery

The histories of chocolate and sugar became closely intertwined in the early modern period as the addition of sugar tempered the bitter taste of chocolate to accommodate myriad palates across the globe. Enslaved laborers toiled under harsh conditions and imperial rule on cacao and sugar plantations, located primarily in the Caribbean and Brazil. As chocolate and sugar became accessible to a broader audience and as cacao became a subject for medical, gastronomic, and natural history discussion, many sought to make this ‘exotic’ libation more ‘civilized’ with specialized dessert services, the creation of new recipes, and the opening of public spaces for taking chocolate. While novel customs for preparing and serving chocolate (and sugar) were established throughout the world, Mesoamerican practices, including the use of cacao beans as currency and offering chocolate as part of diplomatic alliances were integrated into eighteenth-century society. Taking place in the gallery of the RISD Museum exhibition, “Trading Earth: Ceramics, Commodities, and Commerce”, the papers of this session explore the complexities, imperial entanglements, and interdependence of eighteenth-century cacao and sugar cultivation, commerce, and consumption around the globe by considering sites of production, export, and import; mercantile networks; the actors of sugar and cacao trade, cultivation, consumption, experimentation, and study; and the material goods that artists created or appropriated to contain, prepare, and serve sugar and chocolate.

Alicia Caticha, Northwestern University

Rethinking a Wedgwood Creamware Basket or, the Secret History of Sugar Sculpture

Nina Dubin, University of Illinois Chicago, and Meredith Martin, New York University

Gods of the Indies

Katherine Calvin, Kenyon College

The Cape Coast Castle Platter: Currency and Consumption across the Atlantic

Chairs: Wai Yee Chiong, RISD Museum; Mohadeseh Salari Sardari, Brown University 

Location: RISD Museum, Prints, Drawings, and Photographs Classroom

Chair: Dominic Bate, Brown University 

Location: Hay Library Special Collections, Brown University

The long eighteenth century was a period of endless conflict. In the 1750s, rivalry between European states with competing imperial agendas led to the first global war, which had monumental and long-lasting consequences, especially for the inhabitants of North America and South Asia. Eighteenth-century militarism also generated a rich and eclectic visual record, especially in the realm of print, which was a medium with a worldwide reach. Two major centers for the production and consumption of images of war and soldiering were Paris and London. This object session explores works on paper associated with both of these metropoles from Brown University’s Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection. How did British and French artists and publishers represent the military and colonial ambitions of warring countries, as well as the lived experience of armed conflict, which was also often an experience of foreign peoples and places? Who was pictured in representations of war, who was not, and why? And what lessons might studying the visual culture of war hold for historians of eighteenth-century art and architecture more generally? These are just some of the questions that this gallery session addresses.

Chloe Northrop, Tarrant County College

“Rodney Triumphant”: James Gillray and 1782 Satirical Prints of the American War for Independence

Remi Poindexter, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Cooper Willyams’ “A Scene at St. Pierre” and the French Revolution in Martinique

Rebecca Szantyr, The New York Public Library

Keeping Tabs on the British Empire

Heather Belnap, Brigham Young University

“Les Amours Prussiens” and Other Narratives of Sexual Politics in Allied-Occupied Paris

Enrique Ramirez, Taubman College, University of Michigan

Airs Apparent: Chemistry and Aeronautics on the Brink of War

Chair: Kimberly Toney, John Carter Brown Library

Location: Reading Room, John Carter Brown Library

The John Carter Brown (JCB) Library houses a collection of more than 50,000 rare books, manuscripts and maps encompassing more than two hundred languages and spanning over three centuries of history in the early Americas. The JCB’s collections support an array of research topics in Native and Indigenous history from the period of first contact through the 1820s, across the places that came to be called North America, Central America and South America. 

This object session will explore print and graphic material in the collections relative to the early histories of settler colonialism in the Americas. We will examine maps, Indigenous language documents and missionary texts attributed to European settlers and the Native and Indigenous knowledge and labor that produced them. We will round out the session with discussions of the individual contributions and legacies of Indigenous writers, scholars and printers who contributed to the vast and complex world of early print culture across the Western Hemisphere.

Tour led by: John Brown House Docents

Location: John Brown House, 52 Power Street, Providence

The John Brown House is a significant example of early Federal domestic architecture in New England. Built by the amateur architect Joseph Brown for his brother, John Brown, merchant, statesman, and slave trader. The exhibition on view at the house focuses on social and material histories of mahogany.

Tour led by: Providence Preservation Society

Location: Meet at the List Art Center Lobby

Providence's Benefit Street is home to an impressive concentration of well-preserved eighteenth and nineteenth-century houses, churches, and institutional buildings. This walking tour will highlight the rich architectural history of eighteenth-century Providence.

Chairs: Emily Casey, University of Kansas, and Matthew Gin, University of North Carolina at Charlotte 

Location: Brown University, List Art Center, Room 120

The term “in-between” broadly conjures up states of ambiguity, transit, and transformation. The global turn within the disciplines of art history and eighteenth-century studies has prompted a growing body of scholarship investigating ideas, objects, and peoples that existed “in between” places and cultures. While scholarship has emphasized in-betweenness as it relates to issues of circulation, what has not been more fully considered is in-betweenness as a methodology rather than just a momentary temporal or spatial gap. This roundtable addresses in-betweenness in its many meanings and forms: How might in-betweenness as a lens offer art history a tool for better observing processes of appropriation, experimentation, and marginalization? What new perspectives does a critical engagement with the in-between bring into view? What emerges when scholars approach the period and its objects through the paradigm of contradiction, contingency, and chaos? How is HECAA itself an in-between space? For this roundtable, contributors will provide a brief reflection on a site or object emerging from the “in-between” of the eighteenth century. These examples will provide a point of departure for a broader discussion about the potential and pitfalls of in-betweenness as a methodological ontological framework in eighteenth-century art and architecture with the ultimate goal of fostering more expansive scholarship. The roundtable is open in terms of its temporal, geographic, and material scope and engages with scholars whose work considers cultures and geographies beyond Europe.

Bart Pushaw, University of Copenhagen
A Queer Qulleq and Inuit Art History between Rhetoric and Reality

Joseph D. Litts, Princeton University
Capsized Aesthetics: Risk Management, Shipwrecks, and Vernet

Caitlin Meehye Beach, Fordham University
Yamqua, In Between