Call for Papers

WIDER WORLDS:
ART AND AUDIENCE UNDER THE SPANISH CROWN

Symposium
The Frick Collection, New York

The Frick Collection is pleased to invite submissions for “Wider Worlds: Art and Audience under the Spanish Crown,” a public symposium inspired by the special exhibition Zurbarán: Jacob and His Twelve Sons, Paintings from Auckland Castle (January 31 to April 22, 2018). Co-organized with the Meadows Museum, in Dallas, where the paintings are currently on view, this exhibition marks the first time that Francisco de Zurbarán’s set of thirteen monumental canvases depicting the family of the biblical prophet Jacob will be displayed in the Americas.

Zurbarán’s paintings were probably commissioned in the 1640s for a monastery in colonial Spanish Peru, where the popularity of this particular iconography drew on histories positing the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas as “lost descendants” of the twelve tribes of Israel. The works traveled to England and, in 1756, entered the collection of the bishop Richard Trevor, an advocate for the rights of Jewish people. This history, as well as the apocryphal story of the paintings’ seizure by pirates, prompts us to think seriously about the afterlives of objects, anticipated versus accidental receptions, and art’s capacity for generating multivalent, sometimes competing, interpretations. For Jacob and His Twelve Sons, those interpretations range from justifying the enterprises of one colonial empire to serving as symbols of religious tolerance in another.

We welcome proposals for twenty-minute papers on the status of the art object and the circulation of objects and ideas in the early modern Hispanic world. Please send a C.V. and 250-word abstract by Tuesday, December 12, 2017, to academicfrick.org. Submissions from emerging scholars, including early career university and museum professionals and advanced doctoral students, are particularly encouraged. Possible lines of inquiry include:

• How artists, patrons, and audiences dealt with anxieties around distance, delay, and the conveyance of meaning in the diverse and multilingual early modern Hispanic world;
• Re-signification and/or halted trajectories in the biographies of objects, especially in a global context;
• The imaging of origin myths and master narratives;
• How Iberia’s Jewish and Islamic pasts were interrogated and reinterpreted in Catholic image practices;
• The issue of workshops, masters, and authorship and their relationship to global markets;
• The global and material turns in art-historical scholarship.

“Wider Worlds: Art and Audience under the Spanish Crown” is convened by Caitlin Henningsen (The Frick Collection) and Adam Jasienski (Southern Methodist University). Susan Grace Galassi (Senior Curator, The Frick Collection) will preside.