CODART, Dutch and Flemish art in museums worldwide

Challenging Eurocentrism: Reimagining Paradigms of Presentation of Dutch and Flemish Art

Online event: 8 January 2021

Two webinars focusing on expanding DEAI (diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion) values within the museum are organized by Inclusivity in Dutch and Flemish Art (IDFA) and the Center for Netherlandish Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

IDFA, an organization of 30-40 curators of Dutch and Flemish art in the United States, was started by a group of American CODART members who meet monthly to explore key DEAI themes within our museum collections.  Their goal is to deepen the understanding of the values of diversity, equity, access, and inclusion, and brainstorm actionable responses together.

The webinar sessions are free and open to the public, and will be recorded and posted to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston YouTube channel.

Challenging Eurocentrism

The second webinar, Challenging Eurocentrism: Reimagining Paradigms of Presentation of Dutch and Flemish Art takes place on 8 January 2021 from 1:30-2:45pm EST (19:30 – 20:45 CET). This panel discussion offers the perspectives of four curators on decentering Europe and restoring the narratives of historically underrepresented people through exhibitions and permanent collection installations. For the first webinar, see this page.

Panelists

Andrea Myers Achi is Assistant Curator in the Department of Medieval Art and the Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She specializes in late antique and Byzantine art, manuscript studies, and late Roman ceramics. At the Met, she has co-curated the exhibitions Arts and Peoples of Kharga Oasis (2017-present) and Crossroads: Power and Piety (2020-present). Her current projects include writing on the monastic economy in medieval Egypt, exploring translations of Byzantine art and culture by local and foreign artists working in Africa from the fourth through fifteenth centuries, and curating medieval northeast African art through the lens of critical race theory.

Kathleen Bickford Berzock is Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, where she provides artistic leadership of the museum’s exhibition, publication, and collection programs in support of the museum’s cross-cultural and interdisciplinary mission. She is curator of the exhibition Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa—which was seen at the Block Museum, the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art—and the editor of its companion publication (2018).

Tom van der Molen is Curator at the Amsterdam Museum. Trained as an art historian specializing in 17th-century Dutch painting, he conducts research on the history of Amsterdam and the city’s relationship with its colonial past, as well as the history of Dutch professional football club, AFC Ajax. He co-curated the exhibitions, Portrait Gallery of the 17th Century (2014-present), and Ferdinand Bol and Govert Flinck: Rembrandt’s Master Pupils (2017), a subject of his dissertation-in-progress. He also spearheaded an effort to discontinue the usage of the term “Golden Age” at the Amsterdam Museum as a synonym for the seventeenth century in the history of the Netherlands.

Stephanie Schrader is Curator in the Department of Drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, specializing in sixteenth to eighteenth-century Dutch and Flemish art. Her interest in cross-cultural exchanges include exhibitions, publications, lectures, and classes on artists such as Jan Gossart, Maria Sibylla Merian, Peter Paul Rubens, and Rembrandt van Rijn. Dedicated to bringing diverse audiences to the Getty Museum, her innovative exhibitions engage the public in new and unexpected ways. She is the editor of Looking East: Rubens’s Encounter with Asia (2013), Rembrandt and the Inspiration of India (2018), and True Grit: American Prints from 1900 to 1950 (2019).

This panel will be moderated by Jessie Park, the Nina and Lee Griggs Assistant Curator of European Art at the Yale University Art Gallery.

To register, please click on this link.