Virtual Symposium.

In conjunction with two upcoming exhibitions that explore images of women’s labor during the 19th century – Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism (Cleveland Museum of Art, October 8, 2023-January 14, 2024) and Mary Cassatt at Work (Philadelphia Museum of Art, May 18-September 8, 2024) – this virtual symposium features an international range of topics related to the visual culture of working women.

PROGRAMME

Thursday, November 16, 2023
1:30–2:00 p.m. Welcome / Opening Remarks

2:00–3:15 p.m. Panel 1: Visualizing Invisible Labor
The Lumière Sisters: Rethinking Female Labor in the 19th Century through Photography and Early Film
Kristina Köhler, University of Cologne

Women Leaving the Shoe Factory: Frances Benjamin Johnston’s Photographs of Shoemakers
Isabelle Lynch, University of Pennsylvania

Enmeshed: Lace and Women’s Labor in 19th-Century Photographs
Beth Saunders, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Troubled Domesticities
Elizabeth Carmel Hamilton, Fort Valley State University
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3:15–3:30 p.m. Break
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3:30–4:45 p.m. Panel 2: Depicting Laundry and the Textile Trade The Seamstress: A Working Woman for the Middle Classes
Alice J. Walkiewicz, Pratt Institute

Imperlaperle e merlettaie: Women Workers at the Point of the Needle in Late 19th-Century Venice
Anna Dumont, Northwestern University

Women at Work: Laundresses and Potable Water in the Entorno of 19th-Century Mexico City
Stacie G. Widdifield, University of Arizona

The Air That They Breathed: Thinking Ecocritically about Degas’s Laundresses
Marni Reva Kessler, University of Kansas
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Friday, November 17, 2023
1:30–2:45 p.m. Panel 3: Labor and the Colonial Gaze
Imperialist Imagery of Chinese Weaving Women in Great Britain: Thomas Allom and the Reworking of the Pictures of Weaving Genre
Roslyn Lee Hammers, University of Hong Kong

Wringing Out the “Laundry Problem” in East Asian Modern Art
Stephanie Seung Eun Lee, Northwestern University

Black Women Workers and the Art of US Occupation in Haiti, 1915–1934
Shelby M. Sinclair, Dartmouth College

Portraying Working Women in the Visual Culture of 19th-Century India
Divya Gauri, Jawaharlal Nehru University
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2:45–3:45 p.m. Panel 4: Representing Marketing and Selling
Female Street Vendors, Manhattan to Montevideo: Local Market / Global Trade
Katherine Manthorne, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Chic Parisienne: The Department Store Saleswoman and Class in 19th-Century Paris
Justine De Young, Fashion Institute of Technology (SUNY)

Seeing and Sewing: The Family Business
Francesca Berry, University of Birmingham
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3:45–5:00 p.m. Keynote Address and Final Discussion
Demystifying the Immodest Modiste in 19th-Century Paris
Susan Hiner, Professor of French and Francophone Studies and Director of Research Development on the John Guy Vassar Chair, Vassar College

https://www.clevelandart.org/events/lectures/picturing-women-work-nineteenth-century-virtual-symposium

Organized by Britany Salsbury, Cleveland Museum of Art; Laurel Garber, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Nicole Georgopulos, University of British Columbia; Jillian Kruse, Case Western Reserve University

Thursday, November 16, 1:30–4:45 p.m.; Friday, November 17, 1:30—5:00 p.m.
Free
ticket required: https://engage.clevelandart.org/9688/10841