Historians of Netherlandish Art Conference (HNA Boston, MA, July 14-17, 2027)
Workshop: New Approaches to Landscape Drawings – Towards a Unified Discourse
Co-chairs: Alec Aldrich, Stanley H. Durwood Foundation Curatorial Fellow, Harvard Art Museums, 2026-28, and Susan Anderson, Curatorial Research Associate for Dutch and Flemish Drawings, Harvard Art Museums

This workshop intends to address the flourishing of landscape studies in recent years and the resulting mosaic of approaches in need of a unified discourse. In addition to a concerted shift toward eco-critical, anti-colonial, and material approaches to landscape, new vocabularies have emerged in the context of exhibitions, special journal issues, ongoing working groups, and new dissertations—including, but by no means limited to, the “resource landscape,” the “project,” and “makeability”—to historicize a pragmatic outlook on the environment characterized by the intentional transformation and instrumentalization of nature. These scholarly trends have thus greatly complicated well-established methods of engaging the landscape genre, such as the literary categories of the Pastoral and the Georgic, in addition to the stridently visual principles of representation “naer het leven” and Svetlana Alper’s “mapping impulse.” The present workshop will consider how these new approaches can productively intersect with object- based study and curation through the significant holdings of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish landscape drawings at the Harvard Art Museums. The workshop will be held on-site in the Art Study Center of the Harvard Art Museums.

We seek participants who aim to unite careful study of landscape drawings as objects with these emerging critical frameworks, to both reframe and challenge our understanding of landscape draftsmanship in the institutional space of the museum and its predominant methods of interpretation based in connoisseurship and histories of style. Participants will be asked to each select one or two drawings from this area of the collection, which will be on view and on hand in the Harvard Art Museums’ Art Study Center, and come prepared to present their selection with the goal of integrating their work into a wider landscape discourse. Discussion and the opportunity for direct study of the selected drawings will be a crucial component of the session.

Objects available for use may be found at the website for the Museums, the printed publications by William W. Robinson, Seventeenth-Century Dutch Drawings: A Selection from the Maida and George Abrams Collection (1991) and From Bruegel to Rembrandt: Dutch and Flemish Drawings from the Maida and George Abrams Collection (2002), and Crossroads: Drawing the Dutch Landscape, edited by Joanna Sheers Seidenstein and Susan Anderson (2022).

Participation limited to ten. Potential participants shall submit a one-page CV and 250-word statement of interest and intent, describing relevant past and current projects, methodological interests, and potential contribution to the workshop, along with a maximum of two images. We encourage approaches that address the topics and intersections outlined above. Please send applications to Susan Anderson and Alec Aldrich at susan_anderson@harvard.edu and aldrichalec@gmail.com by 15 September 2026.

Applicants will be notified by 15 October 15 2026.