The Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture are delighted to announce that registration for “HECAA30: Environments, Materials, and Futures in the Eighteenth Century” is now available. Please visit the conference website: https://sites.google.com/umb.edu/hecaa30 for information about the schedule, travel and transportation, and registration. Registration is open until September 15, 2023.

This in-person conference will take place in Boston, Cambridge, and Providence from October 12-14, 2023, with morning plenary sessions followed by gallery sessions, tours, and architectural site visits each afternoon.

On the land of the Massachusett and neighboring Wampanoag and Nipmuc peoples, Boston developed in the eighteenth century as a major colonized and colonizing site. Its status today as a cultural and intellectual hub is shaped by that context, making it a critical location to trace the cultural legacies of racism and social injustice between the eighteenth century and today. For whom is “eighteenth-century art and architecture” a useful category? What eighteenth-century materials, spaces, and images offer tools or concepts for shaping our collective futures?

In considering these questions, the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA) aim to be deliberate about expanding the group's traditional focus on Western European art and architecture and specifically encourage proposals from scholars working on Asia, Africa and the African diaspora, Indigenous cultures, and the Islamic world. This conference marks our 30th year as a scholarly society dedicated to facilitating communication and collaboration among scholars of eighteenth-century art to expand and promote knowledge of all aspects of the period’s visual culture.

For questions regarding the conference, please contact Stacey Sloboda, Conference Chair (stacey.slobodaumb.edu) or Elizabeth Saari Browne, Conference Administrator (elizabeth.saari.brownegmail.com).

HECAA30 Program

Thursday, October 12, 2023
9:00am Introduction

9:15am Panel. “Timing Aesthetics and the Aesthetics of Time”
Chairs: Megan Baker, University of Delaware
Joseph Litts, Princeton University

Carole Nataf, Courtauld Institute of Art
Shell Grottos and the Aesthetics of Deep Time in Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon’s Theories of the Earth

Elizabeth Bacon Eager, Southern Methodist University
Peter Hill’s Regulator: Considering the Materiality of Time in the Context of American Slavery

Daniella Berman, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Mismatched and Out of Time: Aesthetics of Contingency in 1800

Lea C. Stephenson, University of Delaware
Reviving the Alabaster Portrait: J.P. Morgan’s Eighteenth-Century Collection and Whiteness

10:30am Coffee Break
List Visual Arts Center

11:00am Roundtable. “What’s Race Got to Do with It? Interrogating the Norms of
Domestic Space, Race, and Gender in the Eighteenth-Century Home.”
Chair: Karen Lipsedge, University of Kingston
Respondent: Victoria Barnett-Woods, Washington College

Stephen Hague, Rowan University
A Long S-Shaped Shadow from in the Long Eighteenth Century

Lisa Vandenbossche, University of Michigan
Oceans of (In)stability: Race and Gender from Shore to Sea

Chloe Wigston Smith, University of York
Race, Material Culture, and Women’s Work

Adrienne L. Childs, Independent Scholar
Ornamental Blackness: What, Why, So What?

Laura Keim, Stenton Historic House
Granting Her Requests: Dinah’s Freedom, Dinah’s Family, Dinah’s Place

12:30pm Lunch Break

1:30pm Travel for Collections and Site Sessions

2:30pm Collection and Site Sessions (Attendees choose one)

Royall House & Slave Quarters. “Roundtable: What’s Race Got to Do with It?, Part II”
Chair: Karen Lipsedge, University of Kingston
Respondent: Kyera Singleton, Executive Director of the Royall House

Nuno Grancho, Centre for Privacy Studies, Copenhagen
Domestic Space, Race and Gender in the Eighteenth-Century Danish Colonial Home

Laura Engel, Duquesne University
The Paradox of Pearls: Gender, Race, Embodiment, and Domestic Space

Caroline Fowler, Williams College, The Clark Art Institute
Privacy

Sarah Lund, Harvard University
Republican Motherhood and Republican Equality: Female Engravers and the ‘Ideals’ of the French Revolution

Tori Champion, University of St. Andrews
Race, Liminality, and the Floral Garland in Eighteenth-Century French Portraiture

Harvard Art Museums. “For a Better Future: Networks of Pastel”
Chairs: Iris Brahms, Universität Hamburg
Valérie Kobi, Université de Neuchâtel

Alexa McCarthy, University of Southern Maine
Blue on Blue: The Tonality of Skin and Eighteenth-Century Pastel

Heather McPherson, University of Alabama at Birmingham
“Pastel Crayons as Paintbrushes”: Chardin’s Portrait of a Man (1773)

Isabelle Masse, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec
Chardin’s Pastel Materials: A Hypothesis

Harvard Historical Scientific Instruments Collection, “Time, Life, and Matter: Colonial Science”
Tour with: Sara J. Schechner, David P. Wheatland Curator of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments

Houghton Library, Harvard University. “Legacies of Enlightenment”
Tour with: John Overholt, Curator, The Donald and Mary Hyde Collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson/Early Books & Manuscripts, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Elizabeth Rudy, Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints, Harvard Art Museums; Kristel Smentek, MIT

Recommendations for self-guided visits:
Eighteenth-century highlights in MIT’s Distinctive Collections. Free Admission.
Items on view will include the plate volumes and the first print volume of MIT’s complete run of the first folio edition, in its original bindings, of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (28 vols, 1751-1772), a copy of Taschenbuch für die neuste Geschichte, vol. 3 (1796), a small format book addressing episodes of the French revolution with foldout plates documenting ballooning and the optical telegraph, a tiny eighteenth-century Scottish edition of Anacreon printed in Greek on colored silk, and more

Disrupt the View: Arlene Schechet and Eighteenth-Century European and American Galleries at the Harvard Art Museums. Free admission for conference attendees with badge

Resetting the Table: Food and Our Changing Tastes and the Blaschka Glass Models of Plants, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology @ Harvard. $15 general admission, no special discount for conference attendees.

5:30 pm Reception at the Boston Athenaeum, including highlights from the Atheneum’s 18th Century Collections

Friday, October 13, 2023
9:00am Introduction

9:15am Panel. “Rethinking the Material Afterlives of Animals.”
Chairs: Sarah Grandin, Clark Art Institute
Catherine Girard, St. Francis Xavier University

Dani Ezor, Southern Methodist University
Tortoiseshell: From Sea Turtle to Snuffbox

Kaitlin Grimes, Auburn University
The Elephant and the Lathe: The Intimate Materiality of Monarchical Ivory Portraits in Early Modern Denmark-Norway

Sylvia Houghteling, Bryn Mawr
The Silk and the Worm: Writing Sericulture into the History of South Asian Textiles

Cynthia Kok, Yale University
Thinking into Early Modern Mother-of-Pearl, Materiality and Liveliness

10:30am Coffee Break
List Visual Arts Center

11:00am DEI Workshop. “Quilt! Inclusivity in Eighteenth-Century Studies”
Chair: HECAA DEI Committee

12:30pm Lunch Break
List Visual Arts Center

1:30pm Travel to MFA

2:30pm MFA Sessions I
“Paying Attention: Materials, Materiality, and the Definitions of Technical Art History.”
Chair: Daniella Berman, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU
MFA Conservation Center, Voss Seminar Room

Josephina de Fouw, Rijksmuseum
The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of its Parts: Research Into the Rijksmuseum Collection of Dutch Eighteenth-Century Decorative Interior Paintings

Courtney Books & Amy Torbert, St Louis Art Museum
Bridging the Apparent Divide: Thoughts from the Field on “Responsible Art History” and “Technical Art History”

Heidi Strobel, University of North Texas
Picking at Threads: A Material Analysis of an Embroidered Picture

Andy Schulz, University of Arizona
The Collaborative Creation of Meaning in a Hand-Colored Set of Goya’s Caprichos

“Ivory: Animal Body and Artistic Material.”
Chairs: Katherine Fein, Columbia University and Deepthi Murali, George Mason University
Center for Netherlandish Art Seminar Room

Katherine Fein, Columbia University and Deepthi Murali, George Mason University
Introduction | Ivory: Animal Body and Artistic Material

Erika Riccobon, Leiden University
Folding Fans in Translation: Ivory as Painting Medium and Site of Crosscultural Design in the Early Phase of the Canton Trade

Maggie Keenan, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Disembodied Eyes: The Fragility of Flesh and Ivory Appeal

Marina Wells, Boston University
Incisions into the Gendered History of American Marine Ivory
Kristine Korzow Richter, Harvard University
Ivory as a biomineral: Relationships between Biomechanical Structure, Interspecies Life Histories, and Tool Functionality
“Mining for Mica at the MFA.”
Chair: Ruth Ezra, St. Andrews
Morse Print Study Room

Margaret Masselli, Brown University
A Glittering Ghagra: Women's Clothing, Shisha Embroidery, and Mica Mining in Eighteenth-century India

Katherine A. P. Iselin, Emporia State University
Materiality and Image on Eighteenth-Century Folding Fans

Ruth Ezra, University of St Andrews
Brilliant Boxes

“European Porcelain and Decorative Arts in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston”
Chair: Michael Yonan, University of California, Davis
Gallery 142

Amy Freund, Southern Methodist University
Sinceny Manufactory, France, Tray with chinoiserie (?) hunting scene, c. 1750

Maura Gleeson, Independent Scholar
Meissen Manufactory, Germany, modeled by Johann Joachim Kändler, Macaw, c. 1732

Thomas Michie, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Alcora Manufactory, Spain, Console table, c. 1761–1763

Sarah Williams, Millsaps College
Nicolas Lancret, Le Déjeuner de jambon, 1735

Michael Yonan, University of California, Davis
Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, A Hypochondriac, c. 1775–1780

“American Art at the MFA”
Chair: Ethan Lasser, MFA Boston
Art of the Americas First Floor Galleries

Michele Navakas, Miami University of Ohio
Coral, Women, Labor: Joseph Blackburn’s Isaac Winslow and His Family

Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware
Benjamin West’s King Lear

Matthew Gin, UNC, Charlotte
Uncanny Encounters in Cindy Sherman’s Madame de Pompadour (née Poisson) Tea Service

Gallery Tour: "Jewish Ritual Silver in 18th-century Europe and America"
Chair: Simona Di Nepi
Galleries: Meet at Sharf Visitor Center

3:30 pm MFA Sessions II

Gallery Tour: “Porcelain, Painting, and Scholar Rocks of the Qing Dynasty”
Chairs: Dawn Odell, Lewis and Clark College
Nancy Berliner, MFA Boston
Chinese Art Galleries

“Miniatures Through the Ages”
Chair: Courtney Harris, MFA, Boston
MFA Rabb Gallery (Gallery 155)

Gerri Strickler, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Nevers Glass

Lauren DiSalvo, Utah Tech
Miniaturizing the Picturesque Landscape through Micromosaic Souvenirs

Damiet Schneeweisz, The Courtauld Institute of Art
Rethinking the Potency of the Early Modern Miniature in the Americas

“New Approaches to Silver”
Chair: Dani Ezor
Gallery 141A

Dani Ezor, Southern Methodist University
Agnieszka A. Ficek, CUNY Graduate Center
Brittany Luberda, Baltimore Museum of Art
Ben Miller, S.J. Shrubsole

4:30pm Roundtable. “The Politics of Materiality.”
Chairs: Elizabeth Bacon Eager, Southern Methodist University
Jennifer Chuong, Universität zu Berlin
Alfond Auditorium, MFA

Sarah Cohen, University at Albany, SUNY
Edward S. Cooke, Jr., Yale University
Kathryn Desplanque, UNC Chapel Hill
María Carrillo Marquina, Tulane University
Kailani Polzak, UC Santa Cruz
Jennifer Van Horn, University of Delaware

Saturday, October 14, 2023

8:30am Travel to Providence, Brown University

10:00am Panel. “Global Sacred Garden Encounters.”
Chair: Emily Everhart, Art Academy of Cincinnati

Lelaine Bangilan Little, Misericordia University
Firstfruits of the Land: Vegetal Motifs in Art and Architecture of the Spanish Philippines

Susan Taylor-Leduc, Independent Scholar
Mesdames at Bellevue: Collecting Plants, Sacralizing the French Picturesque, 1775-1792

Emily Thompson, Washington University, St Louis
Sacred Translations: Giambologna’s Samson and Its European Encounters

11:30 am Coffee

12:00pm Panel. “Indigenous Imprints”
Chair: Douglas Fordham, University of Virginia

Monica Anke Hahn, Community College of Philadelphia
Reproducing ᎤᏍᏔᎾᏆ (Otacite Ostenaco), 1762-2023

Eleanore Neumann, University of Virginia
Living Proof: Retrospective Agency in Judy Watson’s “experimental beds” (2012)

Laura M. Golobish, Ball State University
James Lavadour’s Lithographic Geologies and Stewardship of the Land

Kimberly Toney and Pedro Germano Leal, John Carter Brown Library and John Hay Library, Brown University
The John Carter Brown's Americana Platform: A Digital Tool for Researching the History and Culture of the Early Americas

1:15pm Lunch Break
Brown University
2:30pm Providence Gallery Sessions (Attendees choose one)

RISD Museum, Classroom and Study Center, “Fashion, Race, and Power in the 18th Century.”
Chair: Amelia Rauser, Franklin and Marshall College

Priscilla Sonnier, University College, Dublin
Flax, Fashion, and Free-Trade: Manufacturing Gendered Patriotism in Ascendancy Ireland

Emma Pearce, University of Edinburgh
Plaided Products: Checked Cloth in Caribbean Textile Markets in the Eighteenth Century

Marina Kliger, Harvard Art Museums
“Cut into Pieces”: The Politics of the “Robe de Cachemire” and the Fashions of the Franco-Persian Alliance in Paris, 1808-1815

RISD Museum, “Indulging the Self, Stimulating the Globe: Chocolate, Sugar, Empire, Enslavement.”
Chair: Tara Zanardi, CUNY and Elizabeth Williams, RISD Museum

Alicia Caticha, Northwestern University
Rethinking a Wedgwood Creamware Basket or, the Secret History of Sugar Sculpture

Nina Dubin, University of Illinois Chicago
Gods of the Indies

Katherine Calvin, Kenyon College
The Cape Coast Castle Platter: Currency and Consumption across the Atlantic

RISD Museum, East and South East Asian Works on Paper
Chair: Wai Yee Chiong

Hay Library Special Collections, “Visual Cultures of War in the Global Eighteenth Century.”
Chair: Dominic Bate, Brown University

Chloe Northrop, Tarrant County College
“Rodney Triumphant”: James Gillray and 1782 Satirical Prints of the American War for Independence

Remi Poindexter, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Cooper Willyams’ “A Scene at St. Pierre” and the French Revolution in Martinique

Rebecca Szantyr, The New York Public Library
Keeping Tabs on the British Empire

Heather Belnap, Brigham Young University
“Les Amours Prussiens” and Other Narratives of Sexual Politics in Allied-Occupied Paris

Enrique Ramirez, Taubman College, University of Michigan
Airs Apparent: Chemistry and Aeronautics on the Brink of War

Hay Library Special Collections, “Teaching with Ephemera in Special Collections.”
Chair: Heather Cole, Brown University

Native American Collections, Reading Room, John Hay Library
Chair: Kimberley Toney, Brown University

Architectural Tour: John Brown House
Architectural Walking Tour of Colonial Providence, Benefit Street

4:00pm Roundtable. “The Interstitial Eighteenth Century: Objects, Actors, and Ideas ‘In-Between’”
Chairs: Emily Casey, University of Kansas
Matthew Gin, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Bart Pushaw, University of Copenhagen
A Queer Qulleq and Inuit Art History between Rhetoric and Reality

Joseph D. Litts, Princeton University
Capsized Aesthetics: Risk Management, Shipwrecks, and Vernet

Lauren R. Cannady, University of Maryland, College Park
Green Infrastructure: An Extramural Garden as Case Study

Caitlin Meehye Beach, Fordham University
Yamqua, In Between

5:45pm Reception. Brown University

7:00pm Depart Brown University/Return to Cambridge