Global Encounters in Dutch and Flemish Art

In the last decade or so, a global approach to Dutch and Flemish art has gained pace in museums. Curators are increasingly paying attention to the ways in which Dutch and Flemish artworks, artists, patrons, and collectors were shaped by contact with non-European peoples and cultures — and, conversely, how European expansion affected communities and cultural practices far beyond the Low Countries. Many of these encounters were not simply exchanges: they were often entangled with colonialism, exploitation, and violence, and their legacies continue to shape our collections, institutions, societies and communities today.

While the significance of the so-called ‘global turn’ is now widely acknowledged, its implications for art history, and for museum curators more specifically, are not always immediately evident. What constitutes the global, and how do we understand it in relation to the art produced in the Low Countries in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period?

In 2016, the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek proposed “an exploration of how Netherlandish artworks and artists were historically connected to different regions in a global context.” As the contributors noted, the global can be understood both as a subject within art history and as a lens through which to examine exchanges between cultures. They also observed that, in comparison to political and economic history, art history has been relatively slow to adopt global perspectives. While this may be true in the field of painting, sustained attention has long been paid to non-European influences in areas such as the decorative arts, prints and the history of collecting.

Academic approaches to global art often foreground the political and economic contexts in which artworks were produced, traded, appropriated, or obtained through conquest and extraction. For curators working with collections of Dutch and Flemish art, a central challenge lies in how to articulate these broader contexts — including those only partially recoverable through archival and material evidence — in gallery texts, catalogues, and displays. This means grappling not only with what objects can tell us, but also with what may be absent, fragmented, or difficult to reconstruct from the historical record.

The conference is particularly interested in how global perspectives can reshape our engagement with collections, and in how curators navigate the relationship between scholarly research, institutional context, and public responsibility. This may include drawing on perspectives and methods from outside the art-historical discipline — including anthropology, oral history, and postcolonial studies — and asking what new approaches become possible when curators work across disciplinary boundaries.

This work takes place in a broader context of renewed attention to the histories of colonialism and their continuing impact in the present, as well as to the ways museum collections and curatorial traditions have been shaped over time. Museums are not isolated from these histories, and the questions we ask of objects are shaped by changing scholarly, institutional, and social contexts.

In what ways do collections of medieval and early modern art from the Low Countries lend themselves to a global approach? And how can museums address histories of colonial extraction, forced labor, and cultural dispossession that are embedded in — or sometimes absent from — the works they hold? What responsibilities do curators have when evidence is fragmentary, when perspectives are missing from the archive, or when past curatorial practices have shaped the ways objects and people have been represented? And how do we understand the relationship between historical objects and communities for whom these histories remain part of lived experience today?