Historians of Netherlandish Art Conference (HNA Boston, MA, July 14-17, 2027)
Session: Curating for Impact: Presenting Boundary-Crossing Objects in Museums
Chair: Dr. Jessie Park, Yale University Art Gallery

During the early modern period, the aggressive commercial and colonial expansion of European powers – driven by entities like the Dutch East and West India Companies – fueled an unprecedented global influx of materials and commodities. Against the backdrop of oft-perilous movement and unspeakable exploitation of peoples from Africa, Asia, and the Americas, newly introduced materials inspired artists and artisans in Europe to innovate and push aesthetic and technical boundaries. With a comparable degree of rigor, imported or transformed goods that elicit wonder and curiosity were obsessively collected and consumed by elites, scholars, and wealthy merchants. Many of these sought-after objects and commodities – from tortoiseshell-veneered kasten and mother-of-pearl objects to lacquerware from Japan and China and tobacco from the Americas – embody intertwined valences of contact and conflict, invention and appropriation, and consumption and extraction on a global scale. Under the scepter of Eurocentric chronological, categorical, and geographical taxonomies, the complex stories such works carry are all too frequently obscured in museum collections and displays. This session invites proposals that showcase experimental, unconventional approaches to curating “boundary-crossing” objects. We seek case studies that move beyond formalist art history to amplify underrepresented narratives that challenge traditional presentations of European art in museums.

The session organizers particularly welcome papers that address:

• Integrating complex colonial histories into permanent gallery narratives.
• Decentering the Dutch Republic by highlighting regional agencies in the Americas, Africa, and Asia through multidirectional exchange.
• Prioritizing provenance of production over European consumption, centering artisans and enslaved laborers at the points of origin.
• Interpreting itinerant objects that traversed polycentric trade routes before—or instead of—arriving in the Dutch Republic.
• Utilizing counter-mapping to challenge Eurocentric conceptions of geography.
• Re-evaluating the “Global Gaze” as a series of reciprocal, yet asymmetrical, entanglements between Europeans and the cultures they encountered.

This 90-minute session will allow for three 20-minute papers and time for discussion. Please send paper proposals (max. 500 words), along with a single-page CV, to the session organizers.

Organizers:

• Dr. Verónica Muñoz-Nájar Luque (Thoma Foundation), veronica@thomafoundation.org
• Dr. Jessie Park (Yale University Art Gallery), jessie.park@yale.edu
• Dr. Lauryn Smith (The Frick Pittsburgh), lsmith@thefrickpittsburgh.org

Deadline: 31 August 2026. Applicants will be notified by the session organizers no later than 20 September 2026.

Visit the HNA website to view the full list of calls for papers for this conference.