Call For Papers: Stradanus at Cooper Hewitt.

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is pleased to announce the forthcoming symposium Stradanus at Cooper Hewitt taking place on November 6-7, 2025.

Cooper Hewitt is home to 143 sheets of drawings and inscriptions by the Netherlandish artist Johannes Stradanus (Jan van der Straet, 1523–1605). With support from the Getty’s Paper Project Initiative and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Collections Program, Cooper Hewitt embarked on The Stradanus Project, an effort to conserve, research, and digitize Stradanus’s drawings, which served as preparatory designs for his engravings. At some point in their history, the drawings were bound together to form several sketchbooks that were later disassembled. The leaves were separated and cut apart, and the sheets were laid down on secondary and tertiary supports—perhaps as part of an album that was then again cut apart.

From 2021 to 2022, Cooper Hewitt conducted a conservation survey of all of its Stradanus sketches. Based on this information, the team selected 38 sheets for lining removal and treatment, which was completed in 2024. As a result of conservation work and research, drawings and inscriptions that have been obscured for more than a century have been newly revealed.

To share the discoveries, Cooper Hewitt has launched a website with high-resolution images of the treated drawings and reconstructed sketchbook sheets, an updated catalogue raisonné of the museum’s Stradanus holdings, transcriptions and translations of the newly revealed inscriptions, and detailed information about the conservation process:

The Stradanus Project
https://www.cooperhewitt.org/the-stradanus-project

We invite symposium submissions on Stradanus that draw from this new information and Cooper Hewitt’s holdings. Potential topics could include, but are not limited to:

Stradanus’s international artistic, publishing, and trade networks
Stradanus’s working methods and processes
The role of materiality and Stradanus’s use of paper
The afterlife of Stradanus’s drawings

High-resolution images of the treated sheets can be consulted on The Stradanus Project website. Images of all sheets in Cooper Hewitt’s collection can be found through the Cooper Hewitt’s Collections Highlights (https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/highlights/2318812519/) or the Smithsonian Collections website (https://collections.si.edu/search/results.htm?q=stradanus&fq=data_source%3A%22Cooper+Hewitt%2C+Smithsonian+Design+Museum%22&fq=object_type%3A%22Drawings%22&fq=-place%3A%22Netherlands%22&view=masonry&start=0).

Submission guidelines:
Please submit a 150–200-word abstract, along with CV and affiliation to stradanus_symposiumsi.edu by June 15, 2025.

Participants will be notified by July 18, 2025. Honoraria will be provided for speakers.

The symposium will be free and open to the public. General registration will open in early September through Cooper Hewitt’s The Stradanus Project website.

The Stradanus Project is made possible with support from the Getty Foundation through The Paper Project initiative; and received Federal support from the Smithsonian Collections Care Initiative, administered by the National Collections Program.