CODART, Dutch and Flemish art in museums worldwide

Early Modern Global Political Art

Symposium: 20 October - 21 October 2022

Featuring emerging scholarship on the art of this period against the backdrop of the exhibition Fake News & Lying Pictures: Political Prints in the Dutch Republic, Krannert Art Museum hosts a symposium on Early Modern Global Political Art.

In the early modern period, nations, nobles, corporations, religious groups, and others found dynamic and innovative ways to use the visual arts for a wide range of political purposes.  Nations dispatched elaborate diplomatic gifts to initiate and consolidate alliances. Aristocratic powers and individual collectors alike amassed collections to convey and enhance their political and economic power.  Courts and cities produced ephemeral decorations to assert and display ideal political relations between nobility and their subjects, and between regional and outside authorities. Broadsheets addressing factional conflicts within and among institutions proliferated with the expansion of affordable print media.

This symposium will investigate visual media that communicated political ideas, arguments, positions, and forms of resistance in the early modern period. It will be hybrid, blending in person presentations with online presentations via zoom to facilitate greater accessibility and international participation.

Registration

Registration is required for virtual and in-person components of the symposium.

Accessibility

Krannert Art Museum endeavors to be accessible to all. This event will be hybrid, with in person and virtual elements. All virtual components will be live captioned in English via Zoom.

Keynotes and Symposium Schedule

Keynote Speakers

Dawn Odell, Lewis & Clark

Odell studies artistic exchange between China and northern Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.  She is currently writing a book on Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest: an eighteenth-century Dutch immigrant to the newly formed United States whose travelogues and Chinese porcelain collection were leveraged for social and political power.

Liza Oliver, Wellesley

Oliver ’s research focuses on 18th- and 19th-century India, Europe, and the West Indies.  Her current projects include the book Empire of Hunger: Representing Famine, Land and Labor in Colonial India and work about British prints about abolition and the Haitian Revolution.

Symposium Schedule

Thursday Oct 20, 2022 – Remote presentations with in-person viewing on the lower level of the School of Art & Design, room 15; schedule in central daylight time (gmt-5)

Catholic Rulership Around the World, Part One, 9 – 10:15 am

  • Moyun Zhou, Phd. Candidate, University of Hong Kong, China
    “Can You Feel Me? The Global Space of St. Paul’s in Macao, 1592-1644”
  • Maria Vittoria Spissu, Senior Assistant Professor, University of Bologna, Italy and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow
    “Bonds and Tenets in the Wider Iberian Catholic Universe. Fostering Political Unanimity by Means of Early Modern Altarpieces and Books”
  • Małgorzata Biłozór-Salwa, Curator of Old Master Drawings, Univ. of Warsaw Library, Poland
    “Let’s Make A Crusade! Power of Images Under Louis XIII”

Fashion, Part One, 10:20 – 11:10 am

  • Isabel Escalera, Phd. Candidate, University of Valladolid, Spain
    “Jewelry as A Political Instrument. Renaissance Women and the Transmission of Their Power”
  • Diana Lucía Gómez-Chacón Faculty, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
    “Fashion as A Political Art: Gender, Monarchy, and Spectacle in Early Modern Castile”

Negotiating Political Power in Republics, 11:15 – 12:05 pm

  • Răzvan-Iulian Rusu, Graduate Student, Utrecht University, Netherlands
    “Global Gifts of Johan Maurits: Patronage, Image-Formation, Art & Material Culture”
  • Laura Blom, Postdoctoral Fellow, Dutch University Institute for Art History, Florence, Italy
    “Death as Dissent: The Macabre and the Medici in Renaissance Florence”

Break

Keynote by Liza Oliver, Associate Professor of Art, Wellesley College: 5:30 pm on the lower level of  Krannert Art Museum, Auditorium/KAM 62
“An Economy of Sentiment: The Shared Language of Abolitionists and the West India Interest in Late Eighteenth-Century British Print Culture”

Friday, October 21

In person presentations: Siebel Center for Design, Classroom 1002; schedule in central time (gmt-5)

Check in: 9:30 am, Siebel Center for Design, level one gallery

Coffee, light refreshments

Catholic Rulership Around the World, Part Two, 10 – 10:55 am

  • Rachel Wise, 2020 Ph.d. in Art History, University of Pennsylvania
    “A Royal Devotion: Printed Habsburg Propaganda and the 80 Years’ War”
  • Angela Ho, Associate Professor, George Madison University
    “Risks and Payoffs: Ferdinand Verbiest’s World Map for Kangxi in Political Context”

Fashion, Part Two 11 – 11:55 am

  • Heather Hughes, Curator of Prints, Philadelphia Museum of Art
    “Recognizing the Enemy: The Spaniard in Dutch and Flemish Costume Prints”
  • Nancy Karrels, 2022 Ph.d. in Art History, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
    “Women for Bonaparte: Political Prints & Female Self-Fashioning in France’s Cultural Conquests”

Lunch Break 12 -1:30 pm

Keynote by Dawn Odell, Associate Professor of Art History, Lewis & Clark, 1:30 pm, SCD Classroom 1002
“The Politics of Personhood in A.E. Van Braam Houckgeest’s China Memoir”

Tour of “Fake News and Lying Pictures: Political Prints in the Dutch Republic”, 3 – 4 pm  in the East Gallery, Krannert Art Museum
Led by Maureen Warren, exhibition curator and KAM Curator of European and American Art

See the KAM website for more information and to register.

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